Collision with Chronos

by Barrington J. Bayley

  “I wonder if Hwen Wu’s scheme extends to rescuing the dev cultures, too,” he mused, dropping his futile attempt to make Ascar feel ashamed of himself. “Did you know there’s an organised underground on Earth, opposed to the Titans and trying to help the devs?”

  Ascar grimaced. “Yeah, I know of them. The Panhumanic League. A bunch of nuts.”

  “Well, I suppose the devs are pretty well beyond any kind of help now, anyway.” He put down the ice and wiped his brow with a towel. “Tell me, Leard, what do you think of our hosts?”

  “What do I think of them? Why, they’re brilliant, of course!”

  “I’m not sure I like them. There’s something cold about them. Something too logical, too sophisticated. They’re effete, over-cultured … without any real compassion.”

  Ascar grunted. “You sound like a Titan education tape.”

  “Perhaps. But have you learned how their social system works? How they give up their children to be brought up as workers and technicians?” Heshke could remember the horror and revulsion he had felt when the system had first been explained to him. The two retorts were phased differently in time. The children of the Leisure Retort, taken from their parents at birth, were passed back twenty-five years in time. They grew up and usually, at the age of about twenty-five years, had children of their own … which were passed to the Leisure Retort. People gave up their babies and on the same day received a baby in return … their grandchild.

  “I think it’s fascinating,” Ascar said, a rare smile coming to his features. “They play all kinds of tricks with time. They oscillate the Production Retort through phases, sending it on cycles not just forward and backward but sideways in some way, in other dimensions.… You know what this means? Here in the Leisure Retort you can order something that takes six months to make, and it’s delivered five minutes later. Shiu Kung-Chien does it all the time. Beautiful!”

  “Beautiful if you’re Shiu Kung-Chien!” Heshke said angrily. “What if you’re the man who has to spend his life satisfying these people’s whims?” It all made the Titans’ plans for humanity – True Man, anyway – seem just and compassionate, he thought. At least the Titans believed in a kind of rough democracy. And they believed in culture – even for the workers.

  “Oh, they do all right,” Ascar said vaguely. “They’re looked after, they’re happy. And anyway we’re not down there, so what are you worried about?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Heshke said wearily, defeated by the man’s single-minded narrowness, “I’d like to get some sleep. We’re starting early in the morning.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Ascar backed out of the room. He didn’t bother to say good-bye.

  11

  Outside the big room’s windows the murmur of traffic rose up from the busy street below.

  By the general standard of Titan appointments the room – Limnich’s own private office – was not luxurious, almost drab. The Planetary Leader was renowned for his modest life-style, his retiring habits. His office was not even situated in Bupolbloc, but in a two-hundred-year-old building outside the newly-built administrative sector of the city. Here he kept his collection of skulls, his library of racist lore, and his other collections and paraphernalia.

  In the past few days the office had been the scene of an unaccustomed surge of activity, disturbing the contemplative silences of its dark, varnished wood and its soft-piled carpets. Limnich himself confessed to being shaken to the core; there was no time for a dignified convention at the great castle. Everything had to be done now, on the spot. His office had become the nerve centre of the planet as he reorganised the Titanium Legions for the unprecedented struggle ahead.

  Many of the old generals had gone, either retired or shunted to administrative roles requiring less initiative. Limnich had replaced them with younger men who had fresh, brilliant minds and newly-minted fervour – men like Colonel Brask (until the onset of the emergency he had been Captain Brask) who had been associated with the time project from the beginning. These were the type who now worked at the centre of things, preparing a colossal Armageddon in time.

  Brask was with him now. On a wall screen behind Limnich’s desk he taped a time map that had been drawn up to show the advance of the alien time-system on their own. The map was a moving one, dramatically demonstrating the speed of approach and the estimated point of impact.

  Limnich’s bones felt chill as he looked with awe upon that advancing wall of time. “So we have nearly two centuries?” he said.

  “To total impact, yes,” Brask told him. “But the effects will be felt far before then. Our knowledge at this stage is still incomplete, but we estimate that the interference effects will become noticeable in about fifty years. After a hundred years, we aren’t sure what our operational status will be. Perhaps zero.”

  “Thank God we discovered the truth in time!”

  He turned from the screen toward Brask. In the room’s grey light the younger man’s oddly deformed eyelid looked almost grotesque. In a less talented man that eyelid would have excluded him from the Titanium Legions altogether, but the exhaustive genealogical investigation every applicant underwent had shown the defect to have no genetic origin, and Limnich had let it pass.

  In spite of his own fanaticism in that area, he did sometimes exercise leniency if there was an advantage in it. There was actually an officer in the new Command Team – a Colonel Yedrasch – who was part Lorene. But he was a ferocious fighter for True Man, even more so, it seemed, because of his knowledge of his mixed nature, and his services to the race were of such a high order that Limnich had decided (and the World President agreed with him) that he couldn’t be dispensed with. Thus, instead of liquidation, Yedrasch had merely undergone a vasectomy to ensure that he could not defile the future blood of True Man.

  An oak-panelled door opened. “Colonel Hutt is here, Leader,” Limnich’s secretary told him.

  Limnich nodded curtly. Titan-Colonel Hutt entered. Both men gave the hooked-arm salute, then Limnich sat down.

  “About the question of public information, Leader. …”

  Limnich nodded again. “I’ve made a decision. The average man’s intelligence is too limited to be able to comprehend the whole truth all at once. The public announcements are to give a more restricted idea of the nature of time: they will speak of an attack from the future, where the alien interventionists have established their second attempt to settle the Earth.”

  “In other words, the public is to understand the matter as we ourselves did until recently,” Brask added. “Later, when they’ve been further educated, the full facts can be made clear.”

  “I understand,” Titan-Colonel Hutt said.

  “There’s one other point,” Limnich resumed. “The emergency, the greatest that has ever faced mankind, will entail a big political crisis. All political work must be intensified. Dissident groups must be totally nullified. To this end, I order you to apprise the Panhumanic League of all the facts at our disposal, through our secret contacts.”

  “All the facts, Leader?” Hutt echoed in dismay. “But why?”

  “What better way could there be of pulling the ground from under their feet?” Limnich said, his face fish-cold and unsmiling. “It’s a certain bet that the larger part of the League will defect and come over to us, once they know the truth.”

  A look of dawning realisation came over the other’s face. “Correct, Leader. That is so.” He was reassured to see that the old fox had not lost his grip, that Limnich’s sense of manoeuvre was as subtle as ever.

  Limnich, for his part, fought to snatch his mind back from the edge of madness. His brain filled yet again with a dreadful, incomprehensible vision of two onrushing time-systems encountering one another. He hadn’t even begun to think how this looked from the aspect of the Earth Mother, a deity in whom he believed without question. He didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Thank God we discovered the truth in time!” he repeated in a low vo
ice. But had that done any good? Could anything save them?

  The Approach to the future-Earth aliens was necessarily more incautious than that planned for the Titans. The task before Wang Yat-Sen and Li Li-San, the two young philosophers selected for it by the Prime Minister, was a delicate one.

  Firstly they had to convince the lemur-like creatures that they were not from the civilisation that was threatening them. This was no easy matter, since the aliens were, naturally, insensitive to fine differences of physique. But already the previous expedition had decoded the aliens’ language (in fact, several languages) from electromagnetic transmissions and had prepared language-course tapes. Consequently Wang Yat-Sen and Li Li-San were fairly competent in the hesitant, chittering tongue, though their pronunciation brought them barely within the bounds of intelligibility.

  Eventually the aliens were, it seemed, persuaded, and the two young men were taken from the prison-hospital (actually a biological research station) where they had been kept with the other human prisoners (and what they had seen being done to those prisoners was most distasteful).

  Now they sat in a conically shaped room of bare stone. The aliens seemed to go in for bare stone, as well as for conical shapes in building, and all the doors were triangular, too low for a man to go through without bending. The furnishings of the room were sparse, made of square-cut unpolished timber and board. The aliens’ technological achievements were not matched by any interest in interior decoration.

  But the two individuals who faced the young men across the rough plank table were among the highest authorities in their society. Wang Yat-Sen gazed at them calmly, fascinated as usual by their nervous sensitivity. Anything was enough to set their fragile bodies to quivering, and their fine nose-whiskers to twitching and vibrating.

  “And why should you make us this offer?” chittered one. “Why should you go to such lengths to help us? How are we to know that this is not some devious trick?”

  “To take your points one at a time,” Li Li-San answered, “our readiness to give assistance merely demonstrates the good regard of one intelligent species for another. Your second point: guarantees of good faith can be arranged. Our offer applies also to the other, human civilisation. If you both agree, then you’ll be cooperating with one another instead of fighting.”

  “We will, if you wish, take your ambassadors to our ISS,” Wang Yat-Sen put in equably. “Then they’ll see for themselves.”

  The lemur-creature ignored this last. “You expect us to retreat from the enemy? To abandon our planet?” he said, his vowel-sounds indicating considerable passion. His limbs were trembling visibly, like those of a mortally wounded animal. “It’s our planet, ours since the beginning of time. We’ll defend it to the last.”

  The other lemur-creature joined in. “Never do we retreat from an enemy. A few days ago they – your biological cousins – launched an attack upon two of our large cities, using weapons, which, judging by the intensity of the energy produced, relied upon the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Our cities were utterly destroyed and there is radioactive waste for distances all around. But we’ll strike back! We’ll strike back!”

  Both men from Retort City, brought up to regard everything in a detached and clinical manner, were puzzled. “But surely you realise that your emotional attitude toward your historical habitat is inappropriate in the current situation,” Wang Yat-Sen put forward. “Your ‘enemy’, as you put it, is merely reacting in the same manner, and to attacks you’ve made on him. Evacuation is the only hope for either of you.”

  “We don’t accept that it’s the only hope,” chittered the lemur-leader shrilly. “We know that enemy life-forms lie in our future, and that if they continue to exist, we’ll perish. Therefore – we’ll deal with it!”

  “But how?” Li Li-San asked simply.

  “We’re developing viruses destructive to all life in the enemy biota,” the lemur said. “We’ll sow these viruses on a massive scale. By the time our time-system reaches the projected collision point, all trace of life in the enemy biosphere will be gone. There’ll be nothing to obstruct the passage of our own time-wave.”

  Glancing at one another, Wang Yat-Sen and Li Li-San saw from each other’s expressions that they both concluded that their mission had failed. They stood up.

  “Apparently your decisions are not guided by rationality and we take it that you reject our offer,” Wang Yat-Sen announced, still using the “friendly” mode of speech. “There is, then, noththing more to detain us. With your permission we’ll call down our space lighter and return to our people.”

  “Oh, no!” squeaked the lemur. “You’re not returning anywhere with information that can be used against us. You’re of the same race as our enemy – so back to the bio-research unit with you!”

  And so the two young men were transported back to the Biological Warfare Station, which they were never to leave.

  As soon as he entered the cellar complex, Sobrie Oblomot knew that something was extraordinarily wrong.

  This time the Council meeting was to have been in Sannan, Sobrie’s native city. These ancient cellars were completely unknown to the authorities; they had been sealed over during a rebuilding programme years ago. The hidden entrances were few, and known only to trusted League agents.

  A printing press was run down here and Sobrie was struck, first of all, by its silence: never before had he known it not to be clattering away. And yet the place was gripped by a sense of feverish excitement: the whitewashed brick walls almost visibly shone with it.

  Groups of people stood around, talking with agitation. A small thin man wormed his way between them and rushed up to Sobrie.

  “Oblomot! You’re here!”

  “What’s going on?” Sobrie said with deference.

  “If I were you,” the small man said in a low voice, “I’d get out – now. And take your girl friend with you. Because —”

  But he was interrupted by the convener, who appeared suddenly at Sobrie’s elbow. “So you made it, Oblomot. You’re late. We’d thought you might already have heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “The news is all over the networks. Right across the globe. It looks like the end.”

  To Sobrie’s bewildered demands for enlightenment he responded merely by guiding him across the floor and through a low archway. A door opened, closed again once Sobrie was through.

  The Panhumanic Council was sitting. Eyes turned to regard Sobrie sombrely. They weren’t all there, he realised; about a third were missing.

  With a start, he noticed that one of the faces was unfamiliar. It was the anonymous member, sitting for the first time without mask or voice modifier!

  What could have brought about such a change in policy? Curiously he studied the face. It was striking: a strong, clear face with much character, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired – it was such a perfect example of the Titan ideal that its owner just had to be a Titan. That was it: he was a high-ranking, famous Titan officer who also happened to be secretly a member of the Panhumanic League. Sobrie vaguely recalled seeing his face, now. He was one of the idolised heroes who appeared on the covers of glossy magazines, on vidcast pageants and the like.

  “Sit down, Oblomot,” the Chairman said, his voice heavy with strain.

  “Incredible!” was Sobrie’s reaction. “It’s just unbelievable.”

  “Unbelievable but true.”

  “Can we be sure? Suppose it’s just another Titan story? An invention?”

  “It’s true enough,” the once-anonymous member said. “It comes from two sources. The Titans have intentionally passed the information to the League, through contacts they have. But I’m able to confirm it independently, through my position in the Legions. The consternation among ourselves is nothing compared with what’s going on there, I assure you.”

  Without the voice modifier the Titan’s voice was strong and resonant, mature but somehow still youthful. “I don’t really understand all that scientific stuff you jus
t read out,” Sobrie said to the Chairman. “But is that literally true – that we’ll all be annihilated? By an alien … time-wave … from the future?”

  “Not only us, but all life on Earth. Unless we can find a way to stop it.”

  “And where does that leave us – the League?”

  “That’s what we were discussing before you came in,” the Chairman told him after a heavy pause. “It’s no good denying that what we thought was Titan paranoia has, in the event, been vindicated. We are threatened by an alien power, albeit in a form so weird and overwhelming that the Titans could never have foreseen it. Our own objectives now seem futile, not to say insignificant. …”

  “The League must disband itself voluntarily and go over to the Titans,” a voice said. “That will happen anyway, among the greater part of our membership.”

  “Those of us who failed to attend this meeting doubtless have already taken that step,” the Chairman added.

  Sobrie was shocked by this talk. To talk of joining forces with the hated Titans! To abandon the age-old goal of racial equality!

  “But we can’t do that!” he protested. “We have a sacred mission!”

  The Titan spoke. “As I see it, there is very little choice. It’s not a matter of saving threatened subspecies any more. It’s a matter of the survival of mankind. I, who have lived with the Titans all my life, and have always hated them, now see that only they can save us. They’re the only hope for humanity: from now on I’ll be a loyal Titan officer.”

  Sobrie’s wasn’t the only voice to express dismay at the way things were going. Two others broke in together, making angry denunciations of this betrayal of their ideals.

  Sobrie added his own accusations. “And what of the dev subspecies?” he flared. “The Amhraks, the Urukuri and the others? Are they to be abandoned?”