THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY

by John Brunner

  Table of Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  EPILOGUE

  THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY

  John Brunner

  I

  Tonight the sky was velvet black, and a ripe white moon hung over the hill. Red Hawkins hesitated a moment in the doorway, and then limped down the path towards the gate, glancing at the lawn which he had populated with fantastic birds in metal and stone.

  With him went the noise which he could never get away from—the tiny, almost imperceptible click of the joints in his aluminium leg.

  It stopped when he halted at the gate, and he listened to the silence. The road, which ran from Orris Peak on his right to Three Waters on his left, lay still and cold in the pale moonlight. There was no sign of a movement as far as he could see.

  Just as he was turning to go back, it happened.

  There was a sudden dazzling flash of light, which hit him like a blow. Instinctively he flung up his hands, but it was over before he could cover his eyes. Stumbling blindly back, he lost his footing and sprawled on the soft grass.

  The after-image burned painfully blue and red on his retinae. It was somehow localised, as if a tiny sun had winked into existence on the road, but it was long seconds before he could bear to look round.

  When he did, he saw that the yellow tongue of light which had licked down the garden after him from the open door had disappeared.

  He started to get up, feeling annoyed, but something made him freeze in incredulous bewilderment. From no more than a few yards away, he heard a girl’s voice speak loudly and with a hint of anger.

  “Merde! De quoi s’agit-il, alors?”

  But that was impossible. Barely seconds ago he had seen that there was no one on the road for half a mile either way.

  Cursing the patch which had now shaded to green behind his eyes, he got to his feet and called out uncertainly, “Hello! Is someone there?”

  “Hello,” the girl’s voice came back tremulously. “What happened to the lights?” She had a marked French accent.

  Lights he damned, thought Red; where did you spring from? Without answering, he went to the gate and made out her shape moving dimly on the roadway.

  “Power failure, I guess,” he said after a long pause. Now that he paid attention, he could no longer hear the hum from the small electricity generator behind the house.

  “Oh no! This fog is bad enough without—” The girl’s foot touched something lying in the shadow cast by a tree, and she broke off to look at it. Fog? Red repeated under his breath. Where does she think she is? Los Angeles?

  Then her voice came again, full of horror. “There’s a man lying here! He’s hurt!”

  Red pushed the gate open and swiftly covered the ten paces separating them. As he came up, the girl spoke in a crisp tone. “A light, quick. He must have been run over.”

  Feeling as if he was having a nightmare, Red cupped his hand round the small flame of his lighter. Run over? No car has been past in four hours…

  But sure enough, there was a man here: his right arm twisted and outflung, a thin line of blood creeping over his brown, almost Oriental face.

  The girl took the stranger’s wrist with competent fingers and went on without looking up. “Go and tell the hospital, will you? He needs immediate attention.”

  “There isn’t a hospital nearer than Walton,” said Red sharply. “That’s twenty-five miles away. Are you crazy?”

  The girl turned to face him. She was extremely pretty; she had short brown hair, dark shining eyes and a tip-tilted nose. With forced patience she answered, “The hospital is just round the corner—I should know. I work there.”

  “God damn it, woman!” Red spoke more bluntly than he had intended. “There’s nothing round the corner. There isn’t a corner. There isn’t even a doctor nearer than Three Waters.”

  As if she was taking stock of her surroundings for the first time, the girl slowly looked around. Her eyes widened in terror and her mouth opened to shape a scream. Red made to catch her, thinking she might faint, but she recovered herself and shook her head.

  “I’m all right,” she said with an effort. “I—I—Where is this place?”

  “You’re about six miles from Three Waters,” Red told her. She still looked blank. “Pulman County, Northwest California.”

  “But I can’t be!” she burst out. “I’m in London! I— Oh, seigneur Dieu!”

  Red waited patiently while she struggled to get a grip on herself. “All right,” she said after a pause. “If you say so, it must be right. Is that your house over there? I think we ought to get this man off the road.”

  Silently, Red watched her feel the stranger’s injured arm and lay it carefully on his chest. Then she ran her hands over his body, searching for other damage. Finding none, she got up and took his legs. Between them, they carried him awkwardly up the path and into the front room.

  When they had laid him on a couch, Red crossed to the light switch and flicked it, knowing it was useless. He found candles and lit one with the last flame of his lighter.

  As if she was trying to drive something else out of her head, the girl eased the stranger’s arm out of his sleeve. He wore a coverall of unusual design, with nothing under it but a pair of shorts. The cloth of which both were made was very fine.

  Red brought bandages, hot water a clean towel and some disinfectant, together with a piece of board to serve as a splint for the man’s arm. Then, seeing that the girl appeared competent to handle things, he went out to the shed behind the house to see if he could find the trouble in his generator.

  The air was foul with scorched rubber. A single glance informed him that it would take a mechanic to repair the set—it looked as if lightning had struck it. Something impelled him to look at the motor of the car garaged alongside, and he found he had to pinch out smouldering insulation there, too.

  Swearing, he returned to the house, pausing on his way to drape a wet cloth round the clay sculpture he had been working on. He would get no further work done tonight—the flow of inspiration was broken.

  He found the girl dabbing away blood from the wound on the stranger’s scalp from which the trickle had run across his face. “Shallow,” she muttered as he entered. “Could you call a doctor?”

  “No phone,” said Red shortly. “And my car’s wrecked. I just looked. Wiring’s burnt out—somehow.”

  He didn’t want to seem as displeased as he felt, so he added with an effort, “Doesn’t look as if he needs any more help than he’s getting. Are you a nurse?”

  The girl nodded, and applied band-aid to the scalp cut.

  Absently, Red picked up the coverall. He found something weighing down a small pocket on its chest, and took it out. It was a cylinder of dull metal, some five or six inches long, and astonishingly heavy for its size—too heavy even to be lead.

  He hefted it a second and put it back.

  Wiping her hands, the girl turned to him. “That’s all I can do for him,” she said. “Have you a cigarette, please?”

  He shook one from a pack and took one himself, then held a candle for her to light hers. The flame cast odd shadows across the body of the injured man. He was slender, but well muscled; erect, Red judged, he would have stood about five feet two, and his features were of an odd, unplaceable cast.

  The girl’s hand trembled so much
that she could hardly keep the cigarette in the flame, and the plume of smoke she breathed came in jerks, as though she was fighting to control herself.

  After the second drag, she dropped it incontinently and collapsed into a nearby chair, her shoulders heaving with sobs that racked her body.

  Embarrassed, Red retrieved the cigarette before it burnt into the carpet and waited, watching helplessly, while the fit passed off. Finally she raised her head, her cheeks tear-stained.

  “I’m sorry,” she said wanly. “It’s just—I think I must have amnésie—lost the memory. Until I found I was talking to you outside, I thought I was in London, where I have been working. How—how long have I been that way?”

  “It’s the fourteenth of March,” said Red slowly.

  “Oh no! A whole year?” the girl whispered.

  “It’s 1957—”

  “Mais—c’est ridicule, ça!” She sat up sharply and began to feel in a sling bag she carried on her shoulder. “Look! Look at these!”

  She brought out a pack of English cigarettes, a flimsy white paper bus ticket priced at tenpence, a booklet of stamps bearing the head of Queen Elizabeth II, and a couple of letters addressed to Mlle Chantal Vareze, St. Peter’s Hospital, London, W.1. With shaking fingers she indicated the postmark on the last—March 13th, 1957.

  “The fourteenth of March—that was yesterday! Not today!” she insisted.

  “What do you last remember before you found yourself here?” asked Red after a while.

  “I was coming off night duty. It was about—oh, half past seven. It was very cold. There was a lot of mist—not quite thick enough to call fog. The streets were very quiet. But it was March the fifteenth, I’m sure!”

  Red didn’t want to have to believe her. And yet he had seen for himself that she appeared from thin air on a bare, cold road…

  “You say it was half past seven in the morning of the fifteenth of March. That’s Greenwich time. About eight hours ahead of Pacific Standard. It’s now”—he glanced at his watch—“about five to midnight, March fourteenth. Here, that’s to say.”

  She watched with horrified eyes, waiting for him to go on, and—conscious of the grimness of the humour behind his remark—he did so.

  “In fact,” he finished deliberately, “it looks as if you have just covered about six thousand miles in literally less than no time.”

  II

  Defence fleet (co-ordinates 406513924)—speaking: Two enemy raiders detected and destroyed subject to 41% losses. Request reinforcements. (In passing: this one must have hurt! Look out for trouble).

  Anchor team (AD 4070)—speaking: triple red emergency: We’ve been shifted four years by this one and there’s more to come! Confirm anachronistic exchanges this peak, that at 4828.

  Centre to all units, triple red emergency: Prepare for violent temporal surge.

  Magwareet was in space less than a thousand miles from the milling lights which indicated the anchor team’s position, when the temporal surge hit.

  It was spectacular, and yet there was almost nothing to see. In fact, there was literally nothing to see. The lights of the anchor team were suddenly not there. That was all.

  But it threw Magwareet into instant action—not panicky, because controlled, but seeming random in its violence. He slapped open his time map to make sure that the anchor team, and not himself, had been struck, pushed open the lever controlling his defensive screen, and reversed his progress with a shuddering blast on the drive unit.

  After that, he had time to be afraid.

  When he came to himself again a few seconds later, he found he was mouthing curses, damning the sheer waste involved. There had been sixty men in that anchor team: each a brilliant, highly trained specialist. Now—if one could say such a thing—they were scattered across history, to recover—perhaps—and fight their way back to bring news of yet another peak of the temporal surge…

  He clamped a firm control on his mind. It was no good railing against the universe.

  Finding his voice, he spoke into his communication unit, asking for Artesha Wong. In a moment, her hard, familiar voice was in his ears.

  “Have you tracked that one?” he asked, and received a counter-question.

  “Have they really gone?”

  He remembered then that Burma had been with that team, and rage threatened to boil up in him again. Poor Artesha—that two people who meant so much to each other should be torn apart by insensate violence was shameful! He replied as calmly as he could.

  “Yes, I’m afraid I saw them go. I’m sorry, Artesha—but out of all of them, at least, Burma is the most likely to find his way back. He’ll make it if he has to train the Being to bridle and saddle.”

  “You can’t train a creature maddened with pain,” said Artesha. Her voice was always flat—inevitably—but it seemed even more dispassionate than usual now. “I’ll have a ship out to pick you up in just a moment.”

  Switching off the communicator, Magwareet sighed and closed his eyes with a twinge of guilt. It was marvellous to be able to relax on the ultimate softness of space. Mostly, there was not enough time to relax.

  Not enough: the words burned into his brain. It was always not enough—not enough time to rest, or space to move around in. Most ironical of all, there was not enough of anything to make maximum use of the potential of the human race.

  He was turning slowly relative to the stars. Raising his head, he stared up at them, wondering which—if any—of those in sight had shone on the implacable enemy.

  “Do you realise you’re beating us?” he whispered into nowhere. “Do you know that you’re wearing us down? And yet it’s not you alone, damn it! If it was only you we had to face, we’d wipe the sky with you, and I’d lay bets on our chances. But we’re trying to carry a ton weight and fight at the same time. We’re doing our best, and it’s not good enough.”

  Where had Burma been tossed to? he wondered. Had he found himself alone, perhaps injured, in the vastness of space beyond Pluto? He was driftwood on a surge of—movement—that reached clear across the Solar System and a thousand, or a million, years through time. The agony of a living thing—that was what it must be, all it could be. And yet often it was hard to remember that. Then it became an impersonal cosmic phenomenon: a storm, a wheel of fortune spinning through eternity and playing diabolical games of chance with human beings as the stake.

  “Did they bring you? Are you a weapon of the enemy’s?” he whispered to the Being. He was inside it here. Throughout the Solar System he was inside it. And yet to it he was no more than the film of oil on one of his blood corpuscles to himself: broad in three dimensions and very short in time.

  But the Being was enormous in time. Literally and precisely, it had four dimensions. And it could suffer pain. Every time the defending fleet released its sunfuls of energy to destroy an invader, the Being suffered. Sometimes the anchor teams trying desperately to find a way of repairing its injuries and returning it whence it came failed to control its writhing—and the problem was doubled.

  Magwareet felt that he had been hunting a solution to it all his life, and he was infinitely tired. But he knew he could not rest—that no one dared to rest, or the human race was finished.

  He opened his communicator again as he noticed mass approaching on his proximity detectors. “Were those raiders just destroyed the ones that intercepted the city from 129 Lyrae? I didn’t hear what happened.”

  “Yes, they were the same,” Artesha informed him as if sparing him only a little attention. “They’d lost the city though—a long way out. Apparently whoever was piloting simply outflew them. I don’t know who he is, but he must be brilliant. Sounds as though he might be made for co-ordination.”

  “Is that the city coming in now?” Magwareet reeled off co-ordinates swiftly to identify what he was talking about.

  “That’s it,” agreed Artesha. “Your ship’s coming, Magwareet. I’ll see you back here at Centre.”

  Magwareet turned and saw the lights
of an unpressurised vessel heaving up towards him from the direction of Spica. The pilot, fastened into his control frame by magnets on his spacesuit, threw out a line and started back the way he had come before Magwareet had done more than catch hold.

  There remained a few minutes before he needed to fall again into his role of co-ordinator—one of the chosen few who formed a multiple brain for the concerted efforts of the entire race. He tried to use them to continue his brief rest, but it was no good. It was equally useless to feel angry that he should be a co-ordinator; he was qualified for the job the only way he could be—by doing it well.

  He looked down at his proximity detector again, and began to frown. “Artesha!” he said. “That city from 129 Lyrae—there’s something wrong with its mass!”

  A moment of checking; he waited. Then Artesha answered, alarm showing only in the speed of her words. “It’s carrying spin! Vantchuk—get in touch with them.”

  Straining his nerves, Magwareet listened. At this distance, it was useless to try and make out details of the flying city, but he could distinctly see it: yellow, where no star or planet ought to be visible. It was not one of the complex web of spaceships ringing Sol; he knew their pattern by heart. Vantchuk’s voice interrupted his thoughts; he knew that, too.

  “There’s no reply, Artesha. Something’s wrong.”

  “Turn towards it,” Magwareet directed his pilot, and the stars swirled giddily. Anxious voices continued in his communicator.

  “They’re spinning like a top. No answer from them. The rim of the city must be under about ten gravities, and it’s out of control.”

  “Magwareet!” said Artesha levelly, and his trained mind took over.

  “Kill that spin first,” he directed. “Their population is about four million, if I remember. We’ll need two hundred hospital craft—”

  Mechanically, he detailed the supplies they would need, the probable order in which they would use them, and the time it would take. At Centre, his orders were interpreted into concrete terms; equipment was loaded, men detailed to report, a computer programmed to double-check Magwareet’s proposals—but that was probably not necessary.