Collected Short Fiction, page 857
“I’d hoped for help.” Forlornly, she shook her head. “I don’t think they care.”
On the eighth day I heard thunder. A robot came to turn the outside wall transparent. Looking out across the flat hilltop, I saw a tall bright metal rocket sinking down on a tail of flame. When the smoke and dust had cleared away, a ramp slid out of it and men in orange jumpsuits came down to meet the waiting robots.
An hour later, one of them was escorted into our room. He had changed from the jumpsuit to a transparent plastic coverall. He wore white gloves and a white mask over his nose and mouth. He stopped at the door, searching us with narrowed eyes. We moved to meet him, but the robots waved us back.
He looked entirely human, in his middle years, with short gray hair and an alert hawk-nosed face. He scanned each of us for a long minute before he turned to the next, speaking to the robots in their brittle dialect. They brought him another flat tablet, one wider than those on the table, and held it to show him a flicker of images somewhat like the anatomical drawings I used to see hanging in doctors’ offices.
At last he took the mask off his face, had the robots strip the plastic off a neat white tunic he wore beneath it, and waved them aside. Seeming to relax, he smiled and came on to speak to us.
“Dr, Thor Hansen? Mrs. Mildred Hansen? Mr. Hack Harrison? If I have your names correctly?”
The accent was odd, but now at last I heard words I understood.
“Perfectly.” Thor grinned in relief. “We’re happy you know who we are.”
“Rather narrow quarters for you.” He turned to inspect the room. “Have the mechs made you comfortable?”
“Good enough.” Thor blinked and shook his head. “If we knew—knew a little more.”
“A thousand years!” He chucked sympathetically. “It’s hard to imagine how you feel about it. Your time bubble has been a wonder to us. You should be great informants on the history of your time.” He looked inquiringly at Mildred. “Mrs. Hansen, how are you feeling?”
“Better.” She gave him an anxious smile. “Since we’ve met you.”
He turned to smile at Thor and offer his hand. “Dr. Hansen, I am Zorath D. A linguist and historian. My fields of study are the Age of Invention and Old English literature. How is my accent?”
“Excellent,” Thor said. “And we have questions.”
“So do I.” He glanced at the bare table. “Do you enjoy alcohol?”
“We used to,” Thor grinned. “In moderation.”
“So do I. In moderation.” I caught a flash of humor in his smile. “Shall we sit?”
He held a chair for Mildred, and we sat at the table.
“You amaze me,” Thor was saying. “Your voice and your manner. You might be from our own time.”
“Thank you.” He shrugged in ironic pleasure. “Libraries survived. Your literature preserved a golden age of civilization. The Victorian novel is my hobby. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray.”
He dapped his hands. A gold-skinned robot glided in with a bottle of wine and glasses on a tray.
“Our recreation of a Victorian dry sherry.” He filled our glasses. “I’d like your judgments.”
I’m no judge of wines. Thor called it excellent and asked for a history lesson.
“If you can update us on all the years we’ve missed.”
Zorath sipped his sherry, settled into his chair, and frowned at us as he considered how to start.
“In my own opinion, Queen Victoria presided over the crest of Terran civilization. Your twentieth century saw an explosion of science and technology. Welcome at the time, but disastrous in the long run. Einstein’s laws and nuclear engineering. Molecular biology and genetic engineering. Computer science and information engineering. Rocket propulsion and travel in space.”
“Disastrous?”
The smile gone, he set his glass aside.
“Unfortunately, progress can limit itself. The new technologies were allowed to run out of control Medical advances multiplied populations. Teeming billions exhausted resources and poisoned the planet. Forests were cut, soils eroded, oil fields drained. Pollution heated the air, thawed the Ice caps, lifted the dying seas. There were floods, famines, wars, pandemics.
“Needless misfortunes. The information engineers might have educated citizens for a united world. The nuclear engineers might have generated limitless power. The genetic engineers might have ended disease and recreated humankind.”
With a solemn shrug, he shook his head.
“All such utopian visions were allowed to fail. The nuclear engineers manufactured ballistic missiles. The genetic engineers transformed the Black Flu virus into a weapon for the missiles to carry. The last great war almost depopulated the earth. The sole survivors were isolated groups the virus never reached. Their technologies gone, cultures lost, they reverted to the scattered nomadic tribes you have seen.”
He sighed and paused to refill our glasses.
“In space, we’ve done better. The Black Flu never reached the experimental outposts on the Moon and Mars. Those were never friendly worlds; we live now in free space habitats, rotating to replicate natural gravity. Cut off from support on Earth, we had difficult centuries, but progress did continue, stimulated but controlled by a severe environment. We’ve moved beyond you, at least in technology, though I often wish I’d had been born in your Victorian Age.”
Listening, Mildred had forgotten her sherry and dropped her glass. It rattled on the floor and a golden mech glided to pick it up. Zorath filled another for her, but she sat motionless, gazing anxiously into his face.
“My wife is not well,” Thor said. “Do you think—”
“No matter to us.” He shrugged. “You bring us no danger, though, medical progress has cost us most of our own natural immunities. Mrs. Hansen’s condition did alert the mechs. They examined you all and found no threat to us.”
“Her condition? Can it be treated?”
“Very probably.” Thoughtfully, he nodded. “If you want to come out to Benching. That’s my own habitat, named for a space pioneer.”
“If we can,” Thor said. “Please!”
“Thank you!” Mildred whispered. “Thank you.”
“Mr. Harrison.” He turned with a very curious expression. “I wish I could ask you to come with us. You’d have been a most welcome guest, and a valuable informant on the culture, of your age.”
I blinked at him. “Did the mechs find something wrong with me?”
“Nothing,” he said. “They removed any hazardous microorganism you may have carried You are an excellent specimen of early man.”
Bewildered, I could only stare at hum.
“What’s the problem?” Thor asked. “We couldn’t have come here without him.”
“A paradox. A paradox of the quantum universe.” He shook his head at me. “Something I regret, but we see no way around it.”
“What paradox?” Thor asked. “I don’t see it.”
“The two bubbles of suspended time.” He sat there a moment, frowning at me, before he went on. “They have always been there. Unique in the world. Objects of wonder and sometimes of worship. We had a history for the one that carried you.”
He turned to nod at Thor.
“Fragments of your research notes have survived. I’ve visited the site several times with a team of investigators, observing anything we could and grappling with the riddle of the second bubble. It has no history. Our team leader, Arundec E, has been able to repeat your own time experiments. He is undertaking one of his own. If it verifies his space-time concepts, It may open up the past. I may even be able to visit Victorian England. A possibility I never even dreamed of!”
He turned to look very sharply at me.
“His experiment Mr. Harrison, is an attempt to send you back to your own time, to the day after you left.”
That dazed me.
“Why?” Thor frowned at him. “I don’t get it.”
“Our observations baffled us until Arundec E found an explanation. He says the future can rule the past. In a symmetric universe, every force should have a counter-force. He thinks he has detected a counter-current in time, flowing from the future into the past and reversing the stream of cause and effect.”
He gave me a sympathetic glance, and stopped to refill, my glass.
“That’s the root of the paradox, Mr. Harrison. He thinks you are caught in an eddy between the streams. Your absence has left a space-time void that is drawing you back to where you were.”
I sat there, totally bewildered, stricken voiceless.
I’d left nothing I wanted in the past. I didn’t want to leave Mildred and Thor. I’d been eager to see Benching and all the wonders of another millennium.
“This guy never asked me.” I groped for my wits. “I’m not going back.”
“We’re sorry.” Zorath gave me an apologetic shrug. “Arundec expected you to object, but he says you have no choice.”
“How—how can that be?”
“That’s the nub of the paradox. Among Dr. Hansen’s existing papers there’s a copy of a letter from you, assuring Mrs. Hansen’s invalid sister that she is safe at last, in the hands of competent physicians who are confident of her recovery. The letter is dated ten days after you left the past.”
That was a staggering jolt. I looked at Thor and found him blinking, shaking his head.
“That’s it.” Zorath turned to Thor. “Arundec says Mr. Harrison must return to write the letter because he has already written it. In other words, his absence caused a fracture in space-time that is healing itself.”
I had no choice.
We met Arundec E next morning at a Victorian breakfast of crumpets and kippered herring that Zorath ordered from the mechs. He was an intense darkskinned man who spoke no Old English and explained nothing to me. When the meal was over, he escorted us out to the field where the spacecraft stood, a splendid silver tower in the morning sunlight.
The mechs carried our luggage up the ramp. Thor shook my hand and stood for half a minute, gripping it silently. Mildred hugged me and tried to stifle a sob. Zorath walked with them, up the ramp.
“Wait!” I tried to follow. “I want to go!”
I staggered after them for half a dozen steps. Sudden terror stopped me, a shock of fear I didn’t understand. I tried to take another step and couldn’t. My feet might have been nailed to the pavement. Paralyzed, chilled with a sweat, I could only stare as they climbed to the air lock and turned to wave a last farewell.
Two mechs walked me away from the rocket. I turned when they released my arms and stood watching it climb on a thundering tower of cloud. Arundec took me back across the field to an odd little aircraft. Aboard it, he flew us back over the badlands and the desert to those piles of ancient iron that had been a temple.
Motionless as a mountain, that huge bright globe still hung low over a charred ear of com in the ashes of another fire on the old stone altar. Arundec’s time device looked much like Thor’s: a little box with three projecting horns. He set it on a tripod close below the globe, had me stand beside it, and stepped away.
I felt a jolt like an electric shock and heard the click of an air pressure change, The sun had jumped far across the sky. That tangle of fallen ironwork was gone. Beyond where they had been I saw the low gray dunes I knew. I was back on that flat in Mildred’s uncle’s ranch, a cold west wind in my face.
Off balance for a moment, I stumbled into a shadow. Looking up, I saw the great silver globe that cast the shadow, another beside it. Two identical pods of suspended time, they shone gold and pink and crimson with the colors of the desert sunset.
Thor’s little laboratory van stood where we had left it, the keys still in it, but the sun was down before I found enough of myself to drive back to the ranch house. I found it empty, Thor’s farewell letter lying on the kitchen table. Calling Mildred’s uncle, I got only his answering machine. I spent the night there alone, with nightmare dreams of ghostly paradoxes come back from the future to haunt me.
Her uncle drove out next morning and called the county sheriff when he heard that Mildred and Thor were gone. A newspaper reporter followed the sheriff. The state police and a camera crew from an Albuquerque station were there before noon, all of them hammering me with questions about what had become of Thor and Mildred. They never understood anything I tried to say about the quantum universe, but the great mirror spheres were evidence enough to save me from any legal difficulties.
I live now in the old ranch house. The uncle has fenced the site and paved a road to it through the dunes. I conduct lecture tours to show the twin spheres to tourists who never quite believe I’m inside both of them. It’s a job that pays the rent and keeps me occupied.
Sometimes on lonely nights I dream of gold-skinned mechs and silver-bright rocket ships, and try to imagine what life might have been with Mildred and Thor inside those whirling worlds in the sky. I’ll never know. No other time pods are known, and I expect no guests from the next millennium.
Jack Williamson, Collected Short Fiction
