by Larry Niven
“Like Werner Von Braun!” Willy said.
“Whatever. And now you think you can talk an insular and defensive agency of an ancient government into doing your will? And still compete with any other branch that might want their funding?”
Willy Gorky didn’t answer.
“Willy, it’s just a fantasy.”
“I know that, Ra Chen. We’ll still have the stars. The past is dead. I’ll build from here. From now.”
THE REFERENCE DIRECTOR SPEAKS:
The humanoids and green giants and their cultures, guns and swords and negative-gravity dirigibles, all derive from Edgar Rice Burroughs, except for the houses and stoves, which belong to Ray Bradbury, and those slender towers that probably belong to Robert Heinlein more than anyone. The crabs, and the headless near-humanoid servants that carry them, are also from Burroughs.
Schiapareli and Lowell and a host of other astronomers of the early twentieth century saw and described the canals.
The flightless bird (Tweel) is from Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey.” So is the pyramid builder.
Of the C. S. Lewis Martians, Fishers and High Folk (observers, called High Folk because they live on the heights, turf nobody else wants) and Smiths, only the Smiths left Mars for the tree. They liked the challenge. Yellow-faced, hairless, pointed, shabby-looking, built like a frog.
Lewis’ eldils are missing, and so are Heinlein’s Martians and many others, because they were more powerful than the author.
The sailcar came from Flash Gordon Sunday comics.
The Hangtree or Beanstalk, in its earliest form, was the creation of a schoolteacher who served the Czar. A host of fine minds have elaborated the original concept of an orbital tether.
The tentacled astronomers derive (loosely) from H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. One appeared as an astronomer in “Old Faithful,” by Gallun. Their lens-shaped craft were a familiar sight over the Midwest in the 1950s.
The Tanker module—which carries a nuclear reactor and six tonnes of liquid hydrogen, to make ninety-six tonnes of methane and liquid oxygen from the martian atmosphere, was evolved from plans outlined in Mars Direct, by Robert Zubrin.
Ole Romer, Danish astronomer, was brought to France by Christiaen Huygens. He invented the transit instrument. He measured the speed of light using eclipses of Jupiter and the timing of Jovian lunar orbits. On the Hangtree time line, he’d have had a telescope and an excellent view of Yggdrasil.
SVETZ’S TIME LINE
The first story of Svetz of the ITR is set in + 1100 Atomic Era (AE) and –750 AE. Horse was intended for the SecGen’s twenty-eighth birthday.
The picture book of animals dates, from 10 AE = 1955.
1108 AE June: death of the Secretary-General, Waldemar the Tenth.
+ 1108 AE November: back in time to
–550 AE = + 1395 AD: missiles to Mars carrying probes. Interrupt takes them to
–545 AE: retrieve data, return to
+ 1108 AE November. Process data. First sight of the Mars Beanstalk. Mount the second expedition to
–545AE= + 1400 AD: send new orders to the Mars probes. Interrupt takes the X-cage to
–543AE= + 1402 AD: Collect the results. Return to
+ 1108 AE November. Involve the SecGen. Mount third expedition.
–543 AE= + 1402 AD: the rescue aspect is abandoned in the search for skyhook tree seeds.
Ten months pass in the present, and the Coronation takes place without announcements regarding Mars, while Minim spacecraft and support systems are prepared and Zeera is trained as pilot. Subsequent talker contact is with
+ 1109 AE September.
–541 AE= + 1404 AD: arrival at Mars using Fast Forward. Exploration of Mars and the Beanstalk/ Hangtree ends with the Minim moored to the Mars Beanstalk in flight. Engage Fast Forward …
–375 AE= + 1570 AD: the Mars Beanstalk settles into Earth orbit. The Minim lands in northern Brazil.
–375 to –374 AE: Svetz and company witness the Portuguese encroachment in jumps, using the FFD. Everything subsequent is seen in longer jumps.
–48 AE = + 1897 AD: Svetz hits the interrupt because something massive buzzes him in the X-cage. He’s picked up some serious energy discharges: pods making hard landings, dropping from the tree: the H. G. Wells invasion.
∼+10 AE = ∼+1955 AD: Softfinger ships over the American Midwest.
+ 1109 AE October: HOME. Successful mission. But the tree is on the horizon, grown huge. Everybody is getting very thirsty, very desiccated. RETURN TO
—374 AE= + 1572 AD: Chop down the tree. Brave the havoc and go home to + 1109 AE.
THE FLIGHT OF THE HORSE
The year was 750AA (AnteAtomic) or 1200 AD (Anno Domini), approximately. Hanville Svetz stepped out of the extension cage and looked about him.
To Svetz the atomic bomb was eleven hundred years old and the horse was a thousand years dead. It was his first trip into the past. His training didn’t count; it had not included actual time travel, which cost several million commercials a shot. Svetz was groggy from the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. He was high on pre–Industrial Age air, and drunk on his own sense of destiny; while at the same time he was not really convinced that he had gone anywhere. Or anywhen. Trade joke.
He was not carrying the anaesthetic rifle. He had come to get a horse; he had not expected to meet one at the door. How big was a horse? Where were horses found? Consider what the Institute had had to go on: a few pictures in a salvaged children’s book, and an old legend, not to be trusted, that the horse had once been used as a kind of animated vehicle!
In an empty land beneath an overcast sky, Svetz braced himself with one hand on the curved flank of the extension cage. His head was spinning. It took him several seconds to realize that he was looking at a horse.
It stood fifteen yards away, regarding Svetz with large intelligent brown eyes. It was much larger than he had expected. Further, the horse in the picture book had had a glossy brown pelt with a short mane, while the beast now facing Svetz was pure white, with a mane that flowed like a woman’s long hair. There were other differences … but no matter, the beast matched the book too well to be anything but a horse.
To Svetz it seemed that the horse watched him, waited for him to realize what was happening. Then, while Svetz wasted more time wondering why he wasn’t holding a rifle, the horse laughed, turned, and departed. It disappeared with astonishing speed.
Svetz began to shiver. Nobody had warned him that the horse might have been sentient! Yet the beast’s mocking laugh had sounded far too human.
Now he knew. He was deep, deep in the past.
Not even the horse was as convincing as the emptiness the horse had left behind. No reaching apartment towers clawed the horizon. No contrails scratched the sky. The world was trees and flowers and rolling grassland, innocent of men.
The silence—It was as if Svetz had gone deaf. He had heard no sound since the laughter of the horse. In the year 1100 PostAtomic, such silence could have been found nowhere on Earth. Listening, Svetz knew at last that he had reached the British Isles before the coming of civilization. He had traveled in time.
* * *
The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the traveling. It had its own air supply, and needed it while being pushed through time. But not here. Not before civilization’s dawn; not when the air had never been polluted by fission wastes and the combustion of coal, hydrocarbons, tobaccos, wood, et al.
Now, retreating in panic from that world of the past to the world of the extension cage, Svetz nonetheless left the door open behind him.
He felt better inside the cage. Outside was an unexplored planet, made dangerous by ignorance. Inside the cage it was no different from a training mission. Svetz had spent hundreds of hours in a detailed mockup of this cage, with a computer running the dials. There had even been artificial gravity to simulate the peculiar side effects of motion in time.
By now the hor
se would have escaped. But he now knew its size, and he knew there were horses in the area. To business, then …
Svetz took the anaesthetic rifle from where it was clamped to the wall. He loaded it with what he guessed was the right size of soluble crystalline anaesthetic needle. The box held several different sizes, the smallest of which would knock a shrew harmlessly unconscious, the largest of which would do the same for an elephant. He slung the rifle and stood up.
The world turned gray. Svetz caught a wall clamp to stop himself from falling.
The cage had stopped moving twenty minutes ago. He shouldn’t still be dizzy!—But it had been a long trip. Never before had the Institute for Temporal Research pushed a cage beyond zero PA. A long trip and a strange one, with gravity pulling Svetz’s mass uniformly toward Svetz’s navel …
When his head cleared, he turned to where other equipment was clamped to a wall.
The flight stick was a lift field generator and power source built into five feet of pole, with a control ring at one end, a brush discharge at the other, and a bucket seat and seat belt in the middle. Compact even for Svetz’s age, the flight stick was a spinoff from the spaceflight industries.
But it still weighed thirty pounds with the motor off. Getting it out of the clamps took all his strength. Svetz felt queasy, very queasy.
He bent to pick up the flight stick, and abruptly realized that he was about to faint.
He hit the door button and fainted.
* * *
“We don’t know where on Earth you’ll wind up,” Ra Chen had told him. Ra Chen was the Director of the Institute for Temporal Research, a large round man with gross, exaggerated features and a permanent air of disapproval. “That’s because we can’t focus on a particular time of day—or on a particular year, for that matter. You won’t appear underground or inside anything because of energy considerations. If you come out a thousand feet in the air, the cage won’t fall; it’ll settle slowly, using up energy with a profligate disregard for our budget…”
And Svetz had dreamed that night, vividly. Over and over his extension cage appeared inside solid rock, exploded with a roar and a blinding flash.
“Officially the horse is for the Bureau of History,” Ra Chen had said. “In practice it’s for the Secretary-General, for his twenty-eight birthday. Mentally he’s about six years old, you know. The royal family’s getting a bit inbred these days. We managed to send him a picture book we picked up in 130 PA, and now the lad wants a horse…”
Svetz had seen himself being shot for treason, for the crime of listening to such talk.
“… Otherwise we’d never have gotten the appropriation for this trip. It’s in a good cause. We’ll do some cloning from the horse before we send the original to the UN. Then—well, genes are a code, and codes can be broken. Get us a male, and we’ll make all the horses anyone could want.”
But why would anyone want even one horse? Svetz had studied a computer duplicate of the child’s picture book that an agent had pulled from a ruined house a thousand years ago. The horse did not impress him.
Ra Chen, however, terrified him.
“We’ve never sent anyone this far back,” Ra Chen had told him the night before the mission, when it was too late to back out with honor. “Keep that in mind. If something goes wrong, don’t count on the rule book. Don’t count on your instruments. Use your head. Your head, Svetz. Gods know it’s little enough to depend on…”
Svetz had not slept in the hours before departure.
“You’re scared stiff,” Ra Chen had commented just before Svetz entered the extension cage. “And you can hide it, Svetz. I think I’m the only one who’s noticed. That’s why I picked you, because you can be terrified and go ahead anyway. Don’t come back without a horse…”
The Director’s voice grew louder. “Not without a horse, Svetz. Your head, Svetz, your HEAD…”
Svetz sat up convulsively. The air! Slow death if he didn’t close the door! But the door was closed, and Svetz was sitting on the floor holding his head, which hurt.
The air system had been transplanted intact, complete with dials, from a martian sandboat. The dials read normally, of course, since the cage was sealed.
Svetz nerved himself to open the door. As the sweet, rich air of twelfth-century Britain rushed in, Svetz held his breath and watched the dials change. Presently he closed the door and waited, sweating, while the air system replaced the heady poison with its own safe, breathable mixture.
* * *
When next he left the extension cage, carrying the flight stick, Svetz was wearing another spinoff from the interstellar exploration industries. It was a balloon, and he wore it over his head. It was also a selectively permeable membrane, intended to pass certain gasses in and others out, to make a breathing-air mixture inside.
It was nearly invisible except at the rim. There, where light was refracted most severely, the balloon showed as a narrow golden circle enclosing Svetz’s head. The effect was not unlike a halo as shown in medieval paintings. But Svetz didn’t know about medieval paintings.
He wore also a simple white robe, undecorated, constricted at the waist, otherwise falling in loose folds. The Institute thought that such a garment was least likely to violate taboos of sex or custom. The trade kit dangled loose from his sash: a heat-and-pressure gadget, a pouch of corundum, small phials of additives for color.
Lastly he wore a hurt and baffled look. How was it that he could not breathe the clean air of his own past?
The air of the cage was the air of Svetz’s time, and was nearly four percent carbon dioxide. The air of 750 AnteAtomic held barely a tenth of that. Man was a rare animal here and now. He had breathed little air, he had destroyed few green forests, he had burnt scant fuel since the dawn of time.
But industrial civilization meant combustion. Combustion meant carbon dioxide thickening in the atmosphere many times faster than the green plants could turn it back to oxygen. Svetz was at the far end of two thousand years of adaptation to air rich in CO2.
It takes a concentration of carbon dioxide to trigger the autonomic nerves in the lymph glands in a man’s left armpit. Svetz had fainted because he wasn’t breathing.
So now he wore a balloon, and felt rejected.
He straddled the flight stick and twisted the control knob on the fore end. The stick lifted under him, and he wriggled into place on the bucket seat. He twisted the knob further.
He drifted upward like a toy balloon.
He floated over a lovely land, green and untenanted, beneath a pearl-gray sky empty of contrails. Presently he found a crumbling wall. He turned to follow it.
He would follow the wall until he found a settlement. If the old legend was true—and, Svetz reflected, the horse had certainly been big enough to drag a vehicle—then he would find horses wherever he found men.
Presently it became obvious that a road ran along the wall. There the dirt was flat and bare and consistently wide enough for a walking man; whereas elsewhere the land rose and dipped and tilted. Hard dirt did not a freeway make; but Svetz got the point.
He followed the road, floating at a height of ten meters.
There was a man in worn brown garments. Hooded and barefoot, he walked the road with patient exhaustion, propping himself with a staff. His back was to Svetz.
Svetz thought to dip toward him to ask concerning horses. He refrained. With no way to know where the cage would alight, he had learned no ancient languages at all.
He thought of the trade kit he carried, intended not for communication, but instead of communication. It had never been field-tested. In any case it was not for casual encounters. The pouch of corundum was too small.
Svetz heard a yell from below. He looked down in time to see the man in brown running like the wind, his staff forgotten, his fatigue likewise.
“Something scared him,” Svetz decided. But he could see nothing fearful. Something small but deadly, then.
The Institute estimated that man had exte
rminated more than a thousand species of mammal and bird and insect—some casually, some with malice—between now and the distant present. In this time and place there was no telling what might be a threat. Svetz shuddered. The brown man with the hairy face might well have run from a stinging thing destined to kill Hanville Svetz.
Impatiently Svetz upped the speed of his flight stick. The mission was taking far too long. Who would have guessed that centers of population would have been so far apart?
* * *
Half an hour later, shielded from the wind by a paraboloid force field, Svetz was streaking down the road at sixty miles per hour.
His luck had been incredibly bad. Wherever he had chanced across a human being, that person had been just leaving the vicinity. And he had found no centers of population.
Once he had noticed an unnatural stone outcropping high on a hill. No law of geology known to Svetz could have produced such an angular, flat-sided monstrosity. Curious, he had circled above it—and had abruptly realized that the thing was hollow, riddled with rectangular holes.
A dwelling for men? He didn’t want to believe it. Living within the hollows of such a thing would be like living underground. But men tend to build at right angles, and this thing was all right angles.
Below the hollowed stone structure were rounded, hairy-looking hummocks of dried grass, each with a man-sized door. Obviously they must be nests for very large insects. Svetz had left that place quickly.
The road rounded a swelling green hill ahead of him. Svetz followed, slowing.
A hilltop spring sent a stream bubbling downhill to break the road. Something large was drinking at the stream.
Svetz jerked to a stop in midair. Open water: deadly poison. He would have been hard put to say which had startled him more: the horse, or the fact that it had just committed suicide.
The horse looked up and saw him.
