Collected Short Fiction, page 856
“Dear Hack!” She had a radiant smile. “I’m so glad you can join us!”
Her face looked pinched and pale, and I asked how she was.
“Never better!” Yet I caught an anxious quiver in her voice. “I’ll live a thousand years.”
“Not quite true.” Thor shook his head at her and turned very solemnly to me. “The doctors have found a malignant tumor they won’t touch.”
“But I won’t die!” She tried to smile at me. “Thor has a plan.”
“A desperate gamble.” He shrugged. “But the only hope I see.”
“Tell, Thor!” she begged him. “Tell him what it is.”
“That’s not easy. Let’s not scare him off.” He swung to me with a grave, bearlike grace. “Come on in. The project can wait till after dinner. Are you ready for a steak?
With only a candy bar since that leftover piazza slab, I did. He had the grill heating. Mildred had made a salad. We sat at the old oak table in the kitchen I remembered, and he opened a bottle of wine.
“To Thor and his plan!” She lifted her glass. “It will save my life.”
“Perhaps.” He shrugged. “If we’re lucky.”
She took only a sip of her wine. The steak was great, but she had barely touched it. He finished his, reminded her to take her pills, and sat frowning thoughtfully at nothing until she begged him again to tell me about the plan.
“It may turn you off.” He gave me piercing look. “What do you know about quantum mechanics?”
“I heard your lecture on it, back at the university. I don’t remember anything.”
“No wonder, Quantum science can be hard to take.”
“Please, Thor,” Mildred begged him. “Make it simple. Just tell him what it does.”
“It isn’t simple.” He scanned my face again. “Einstein refused to believe it. He said God doesn’t play dice. It does run counter to common sense. Every particle is also a wave, every wave also a particle. If you know where a particle is, you can’t know where it’s moving. Einstein himself discovered that what one observer experiences as time, another would see as space.
“Nothing is absolutely certain. Zero isn’t always zero. The universe is ruled by the laws of probability. Even the highest vacuum is never really empty. Electrons and positrons hop into it out of nowhere, cancel each other, vanish back into nowhere. But not quite always. Unlikely events do happen. Some fourteen billion years ago, one odd particle failed to disappear. Instead it drained enormous energy out of no where and grew until it exploded into the Big Bang that created space and time.”
He gave me a sharp look.
“Do you get it?”
“Maybe.”
Her face drawn with strain, Mildred was fiddling nervously with her glass. I wondered what the Big Bang had to do with her.
“Good!” Thor’s voice boomed, his blue eyes blazing. “Fascinating research! I used to imagine the future as a straight line of cause and effect, impossible to change as the past. It isn’t. The quantum universe doesn’t exist until it freezes out of a chaos of statistical uncertainty. It’s like Schrodinger’s cat in the box, which is neither dead nor alive until you lift the lid.”
He paused to frown at me.
“Thor!” Mildred looked up to scold him. “Don’t try to amaze him. Just tell him about the plan.”
“Okay, dear.” His eyes lingered fondly on her face before he looked back at me. “If you’re ready, here it is. I’m working on a new math that gives me a strictly limited control of quantum probability. I can freeze atomic forces, stop all atomic action, though only in a very small volume of space. In that narrow space, time is suspended.”
“We can skip a thousand years!” she cried brightly. “Till doctors know more and medicine is better. I won’t have to die.”
“We can try.” Frowning, he refilled his glass and mine “I wrote a paper for Science. The peer reviewers turned it down. One of them couldn’t get the math. The other faulted my experimental evidence. I’ve got better results since, but Millie’s health was failing before I could publish. We have to be our own guinea pigs.”
“A time machine?” I asked.
“No machine. Time flows only one way, as eternal as gravity. We can hope to find a higher civilization and better doctors, but nothing is predictable. We can’t be sure of any miracles. And there’s no way back.” He leaned across the table, eyes narrowed to see my reaction. “If you go, you’re gone forever. It’s good-by to everything you’ve ever known.”
“If you can.” Mildred whispered. “Thor won’t go without you.”
“Take your time.” He raised his hand. “Think it over. We can’t do it atone, but I want to be frank about the risks. I can’t choose our destination, and Millie isn’t very able. It may be madness. We’ve got nobody else to ask.”
“Think about it, Hack!” She wiped at a tear and I heard a tremor in her voice. “Think how much can happen in a thousand years. I dream about the wonders we could find. It ought to be a better world.”
I needed only half a minute to think about it. My parents were gone. I’d been the only child. I’d left my closest friends when I took the Caprock job. With no real ties to break, I pushed the glass away and told them I’d had enough of now.
That night I slept in the little room that had been mine on those long-past summers when Mildred and I were children here. Next morning Thor laid out what we would be taking.
“It’s hard to guess what we’ll need. Today, this is an isolated spot where we shouldn’t trouble anybody. A thousand years ahead, and we may fall into the middle of a city. An earthquake. A battlefield. A new ice age.”
He had bedrolls, a tiny nylon tent, canned water, a backpack stuffed with food, an aid kit, a tiny pocket telescope, a battery radio. He asked if I could shoot and gave me a police revolver. To answer possible questions about our own time, he had a high school history of the world, maps, a book of photos.
Maybe too much.” He gave me a philosophic shrug. “Maybe nothing we’ll need.”
His lab was a battered van. He loaded the gear and drove through the brush-grown sand dunes south. We stopped on a little grassy fiat a thousand miles from nowhere, with only the barren dunes around us. His equipment looked simple: only a square black box he mounted on a tripod. Silver-colored antennas jutted out of it ill three directions.
“It’s a quantum interference effect,” he said. “Opposed forces cancel out. Time is stopped until the effect collapses. To show you how it works, I’ll repeat the experiment that was finally successful.”
He stepped back, holding the end of a wire attached to the tripod.
“Would you note the time on your watch and lay it on the box?”
My watch read 9:16. I laid it on the box. He stepped farther away and clicked a switch at the end of a wire. I heard no sound, but the top of the tripod was suddenly surrounded with a mirror globe that reflected our distorted images.
“The bubble of suspended time.” He nodded at it. “Feel it.”
Gingerly, I touched it. It was smooth and slick, neither hot nor cold.
“Push it.”
I pushed, gently at first, then with all my strength. It felt solidly unyielding as a brick wall.
“It’s set for fifteen minutes.” He looked at his own watch. “Nothing enters the pod. Nothing happens in it. Nothing leaves it.”
We stood there for a long quarter-hour, his eyes on his own watch, till he nodded.
“Nine-thirty.”
I counted seconds. At fifty-nine the globe winked silently away. The tripod looked unchanged. My watch still read 9:16 when I picked it up, but the second hand was jumping normally from mark to mark.
“Okay?” Mildred’s anxious eyes were fixed on me. “You’ll come?”
My pulse was jumping faster than the second hand, but I caught my breath and said I would.
“Take your last look.” Thor waved his arm. “We won’t be back.”
I glanced around us at the endless waste of low gray dunes and a lone hawk cruising high in a cloudless sky. Thor stacked our gear under the tripod. We stood close around it, and he touched his switch again. My ears clicked. The sun was gone, the sky a sullen overcast. The sand crumbled under our feet. Mildred swayed unsteadily and Thor caught her in his arms.
“What—” she gasped. “What—”
“We made it!” Thor was elated. “We’ve jumped a thousand years!”
When I looked down, we were standing on a square platform raised a foot or so above the ground. A high tangle of twisted metal beams fenced us in. Close overhead was a great silver balloon, perhaps twenty feet thick.
“The time pod!” Thor stumbled back, his elation gone to troubled wonder. “It should have collapsed when it dropped us here.” He blinked at me. “It can’t be real!”
I reached to touch the mirror-bright surface and found it smooth and slick and solid as the bubble around the tripod head had been. Thor stood there a long time, frowning at it, shaking his head. “If it’s still here, how did we get out?”
He saw no answer, and I turned to look farther around us. Beyond the piles of old metal, I saw a flat landscape, as arid and gray and desolate, hardly changed in all the centuries since we left it.
“Where are we?” Mildred stared at it. “I thought there would be people. Great cities. Strange machines. I hoped for doctors.” She looked uneasily at Thor. “And we can’t go back?”
“Don’t give up yet.” He gave her a hopeful grin. “We knew it was a gamble. Let’s wait for the cards to fall. Earth’s a big planet, after all, with more to see.”
But I saw no roads, no buildings, no sign of any people, no way to get anywhere else. We huddled close together under a great bright balloon. A cold wind gust whipped dust around us.
“Nobody.” Thor shook his head, frowning at the ruined ironwork around us. “Nobody’s been here,” he muttered. “Not lately. Look at the drifted sand.”
I saw banks of it piled against the rusted beams.
“Once, I think, we might have met a warmer welcome.” He gestured at the ruin. “Maybe with a mob here to greet us. This has the look of a theater. If you can imagine those beams covered with seats—”
He stopped and pointed. “There!”
I found a man walking into the gap that would have been the entrance, a hundred yards away. He froze for a moment when he saw us, hands raised in surprise, and fell to his knees. His voice lifted in strange, quavery chant.
Thor yelled, “Hello!”
He sprang to his feet, stared back for a moment, and fled in terror. I followed out into the open and saw him running until he was gone beyond the crest of a barren dune.
“. . . a possible scenario,” Thor was saying, when I got back to him and Mildred. “I left a farewell note at the ranch house. We never got back. People knew what we planned. A thousand years gone by, while—” He shrugged, with a somber face. “While I guess civilization collapsed.”
“And no hope left,” Mildred whispered. “No hope for anything.” She looked crushed, but in a moment she gathered herself to give him a small pale smile. “No matter, dear. You did your best.”
“I don’t know.” He stood there staring into the jungle of broken and eroded metal around us, and shrugged at last, with a bitter little grin. “People must have expected us, but they didn’t know when. Fact must have been forgotten, memory turned to myth. They could have hoped for us to bring the history and culture they’d lost. I think they worshipped us. We’re standing on an altar.”
He nodded at our feet. I saw the bones of some small animal in a little pile of ashes on one corner of the platform, something drying in a clay pot on the other.
“The man we saw could have been a priest, keeping a vigil for our arrival. He could be gone to take the news.”
Exploring the site, I found a little adobe hut outside the tangle of ancient metal, empty except for some brown liquid in a pottery jar and a few tattered blankets. I climbed the ruin as high as I could and swept the dusty horizon with the pocket telescope. The semi-desert we left had gone to actual desert. Wind-carved dunes scattered with clumps of cactus stretched out to the far-off shimmer of heat. There was nothing moving except a high-sailing bird, nothing I remembered.
Mildred had no strength for walking far, and we saw nowhere else to go. We waited there all day, with no idea what we might expect. The wind died and the sun blazed hot. We kept in the shadow off the motionless balloon and made small meals out of what we had. Night fell. We rolled our beds out on the ancient altar.
Next morning we were still alone. Climbing the old metal again, I found a far-off cloud of yellow dust. It disappeared and rose again above a nearer dune, a little file of horsemen riding under it. I watched until they dismounted a quarter mile away, Some twenty-odd men and women, brown-skinned, no different from those of our own time. A few wore long white robes, the rest beaded or painted buckskin. Some carried bows or lances; I saw” no guns.
Smoke rose from a fire. They knelt around it. I heard a rhythmic chant. They rose again and. a few came on afoot, three white-robed men ahead. Inside the old arena they stopped near the altar where we waited. Thor called greetings to them in several languages. They knelt, and answered with a chant that must have been a ritual prayer.
They rose when that was over, and three young women came to kneel at the edge of the altar, offering each of us a pottery bowl and a wooden spoon. The bowls held a hot meat stew. Mildred ate little of hers; Thor and I scraped our bowls clean. When we had finished, the leader spoke words we didn’t understand and finally gestured to let us know they wanted to take us away.
Uneasily, Mildred asked where.
“I’ve no notion.” Thor shrugged. “So long as we’re alive, we can hope for the best.”
For her, they had a chair that two men carried on long poles. They’d brought horses for Thor and me. We traveled all day, I tried to talk to some of the men, but I heard no words I knew, and they seemed too much in awe to try to learn from us.
Before sunset we stopped at a solitary cluster of trees around a well. The men turned a windlass to pull a big wooden bucket out of the well, with water for the horses and us. A hunter came to join us, with the carcass of a deer on a horse he led. The women grilled the venison and made little com cakes rather like tortillas.
Next morning we came out of the dunes to flat grassland. A few miles farther, we reached a narrow black pavement that lay straight to the vacant horizon in both directions as far as I could see. We waited there till an odd vehicle came along and slid to a silent stop. An open car that had no wheels, it floated a few inches off the pavement. Cheered to see it, Thor grinned and called to Mildred:
“Took at this! High-tech civiliza—” He stopped to goggle at the passengers climbing out of the car. Totally grotesque, they looked half human, half machine. They walked on two legs each. They had heads and arms. Their eyes were bright enormous lenses, their skins some tight bright gold stuff molded to show the knobs and levers of machine parts under it.
They spoke to us and seemed to listen, but their metallic clicks and drones were gibberish to us, but the men understood. They loaded the tripod and the rest of our possessions on the car, beckoned us into it. Mildred shrank away from one that tried to help her.
“They’re robots,” Thor told her. “Advanced beyond any we ever had. They seem friendly. We may find doctors yet.”
“I hope.” She tried to smile at me. Tack, I’m sorry we got you here. I wanted to keep you safe.
The men knelt again and began another chant as the car took us away, gliding east across what once had been the high plains of the Texas Panhandle. Country that had been prosperous farmland, it looked desolate now. All I recalled was gone. Good soil had eroded to deep gullies and bare red clay. The pavement wound through new arroyos, and finally climbed to a flat plateau.
The robots stopped the car in a little cluster of bright silver domes, and barked until we knew we’d reached our destination. Three more came to carry our duffel and take us into a room they had ready for us. Clean but very plain, it held three narrow cots, three chairs, and a table that was bare except for three flat black tablets.
One of them caught my arm and guided me very firmly into a white-walled bathroom. Its yellow metal claws surprisingly nimble, it stripped my clothing off, took me into the shower, washed me very thoroughly with a pine-scented soap, toweled me dry, dressed me in a long white gown.
Mildred and Thor were gone when it took me back to the larger room and seated me at the table. Another golden robot came in with a tray of strange instruments. I could only guess at most of what they were doing, but they took my temperature and blood pressure. They drew blood. They caught my breath in a plastic bag. Their huge lenses peered at tiny images of my internal organs, sharper than X-rays.
Finally, they left me alone. Hoping for anything I could understand, I picked up one of the little black tablets. It was something like an e-book, with a row of red buttons along the edge. When I touched one, the tablet chimed softly. I pressed again, and a page of print appeared. Many of the symbols looked like letters of the alphabet, but they made no words I knew.
I tried another button. The tablet chimed a different note and lit with living pictures, I heard human voices, saw human figures, most of them in space suits against strange backgrounds. Black skies flecked with stars. Silver domes on landscapes cratered like the moon. A rocket ship descending to a shapeless asteroid on a cushion of fire.
I was still frowning at the tablet when another robot brought Thor back, dressed I was in a long white robe.
“Interesting.” He shook his head when I showed him the tablet. “Could be we’ve found the high-tech world we hoped for. Or is it just a comic book?”
The robots brought Mildred in, robed as we were.
She let one of them help her to a chair and turned uneasily to Thor. “What do you think they’re doing with us?”
He shrugged. “They don’t worship us, but they haven’t hurt us either. We’ll have to wait and see.”
They kept us there in the dome, bringing us small bland meals that often had an odd medicinal taste. We walked the floor for exercise. We tried to question the robots and learned nothing at all. We spent hours over the tablets, but the texts were unreadable, the pictures riddles. They took Mildred away for another examination. She came back weak and pale from something they had done.
