Time Travel Omnibus, page 302
“But only on Earth,” Joan reminded him. “We could observe that reversal only by moving away from Earth in the direction of motion faster than light. And we could move about and grow older while watching it if we were traveling in a time machine. Our motion would not be relative in relation to the machine. That seems sort of tautological, but you get what I mean.”
“I get what you mean,” Temple said. “And without realizing it you’ve put your finger on the crux of our predicament. We don’t know what reality would be like in a higher dimension than we can perceive with our limited endowments of sight, touch and hearing, but it seems unlikely that a time machine would just move away from Earth with the speed of light.
“If it did that, it would be merely a space traveler. It could only rope in space time by exceeding the speed of light, and even then a reversal of entropy would not throw us back into our own pasts on Earth. We’d just be in limbo somewhere in the rind of the continuum, or, if you prefer, outside the Universe of Stars.”
“What are you driving at, Ralph?”
“Simply this. I believe Morrison was merely speaking figuratively when he talked about traveling with the speed of light. I believe that we are in limbo as far as the physical universe is concerned, but following along a fifth, or possibly sixth dimensional time track which takes in practically everything.
“I think we’re in it up to our necks. I think it includes all the time-frames produced in the physical universe by motion in space, and a lot of other frames as well.
“I think we’re inside the Universe of Stars, and outside it, and back with ourselves yesterday, and catching up with ourselves tomorrow. I think we’re in a topsy-turvy world where anything could happen.”
“Ralph!”
“Well, I was in two places at the same time, and I climbed up and looked at the changing stars over a stairway that comes and goes. And although Ned is back in the past, it’s an abnormal past in half a dozen respects. In the first place, it’s unraveling in the direction of the future, which is the way it wouldn’t unravel if we were traveling away from it in the direction of motion. In the second place, something has interfered with the molecular flow of the water outside the boat, and I saw something that looked like a pterodactyl come flapping out of the rain forest.
“In the third place, although I can move back where Ned is I don’t grow younger when I move back, and I can remember things which he has forgotten. In the fourth place, we can talk to one another across time, and if you know anything about acoustics I don’t need to point out that you can’t do that ordinarily. In the fifth place, the thing that came in just now from outside, flaked away when I clasped it, and couldn’t have been—”
Temple leaped back with a choking gasp. Another shape was coming toward him through the darkness, a faintly luminous shape which bore a terrifying resemblance to a magnified body louse.
“How would you like to have twenty toes instead of ten?” Temple asked. “How would you like to turn around and meet yourself—yesterday?”
“Huh?” the old man muttered, stroking his thin beard. “What say, youngster?”
“Grandpop, I’m not a youngster. I will be forty-four come midsummer. But I was a youngster, a green kid of twenty-two, when I picked up this scar.”
As he spoke, Temple opened his hand, and exposed a palm which was all knots and livid creases.
“Aye, I was young myself once, son,” the old man said, and there was a dignity in his gaze which had not been there a moment before.
Temple elevated his fishing rod, and leaned forward on the black wharf. He hoped they’d catch something. The flats were supposed to be running. Up and down the wharf other fishermen were pulling them in, but he hadn’t had a bite for hours.
The blue sunlight seemed to deepen about him as he parried the old man’s stare. “There was too much life on that planet, grandpop,” he said. “It filled the hollows and windy places, and dripped down into the sea.”
The old man nodded, his bleary gaze traveling to an orange-red bobber far out on the flaking tide. “The third planet from the Sun, you say, in a system with nine planets?”
“That’s right, grandpop. Nine planets—one very small, four a little larger, or a little smaller than Kamith, three quite huge, and one larger than all the rest put together. One of the huge ones was encircled by a series of wide, flat rings—two luminous and one smoky, with dark bands separating them.”
“There is a planet like that in the Rugol System,” the old man said.
“I know. But this system was close to the center of the known universe, and had a quite ordinary sun. In density, size and luminosity quite ordinary.”
“Hm-m-m.”
“But that third planet was not ordinary, grandpop. It was more remarkable in some respects than the ringed planet. It was as though—well, you know what happens when you overfertilize a garden plot?”
The old man nodded. “I have loved flowers all my life,” he said.
“We think we know what parasitism is, but we don’t. We don’t at all. On Kamith we have a few plants which suck the juices from other plants, a few animals which prey on other animals. But on that planet—ugh.”
He leaned forward and spat into the flaking tide. “There was too much life on that planet, grandpop, but there was also something else. Courage outlasting the vehicle that gave it birth, human thought surviving the brain from which it came.”
Temple scrutinized the horizon somberly for an instant, his fingers tightening on the cork handle of his fishing rod.
“Grandpop, I think we must accept the theory that life evolves along parallel lines everywhere in the Universe of Stars,” he said. “Before we invented space-time machines we thought our sun with its five planets was a stellar anomaly, but we know now that there are other planetary systems scattered throughout space, other cool worlds capable of supporting life.
“The blue sun that warms Kamith is not the only life-giver. The giant red suns on the rim of space have their Kamiths, too, their inhospitable outer planets, and there are suns no larger than planets, with satellites so small that—”
“In fifteen minutes I’ve got to wind up my reel,” the old man prodded. “My daughter goes off the handle when I’m late for supper.”
“Well, we were there in one of those backward-forward jobs which set your teeth on edge when you’re deep in the continuum, and make you wish that time-space machines had never been invented,” Temple said. “We had come out on the bleak, northern plains of a continent shaped like a swollen question mark.
“We set electrostatic surveyors to work the instant we emerged, and blocked in the outlines of the entire land mass on our geodesic screen. A little to the southeast of us there was a long, straight river opening into a shallow bay, and a little to the northwest were five large lakes which looked on the screen like sausages strung on a wire.
“But of course small, cool, inner planets are pretty much the same the universe over, and in general the topography didn’t differ much from . . . well, from back there.”
He twisted his shoulders about and gestured toward the rolling farm country behind him.
“How many were in the party with you?” asked the old man.
“There were fifteen of us, grandpop. We were there on an assignment which took in nearly every branch of natural science.”
“Interstellar Survey, eh?”
“That’s right, grandpop. The Survey has been limping along without me for thirteen years now, but I was a promising youngster in those days, and knew more about field theory than my chief.”
“I cornered the market once,” the old man said. “Now they don’t even remember me down on the Street.”
“The Survey remembers me, all right,” Temple said. “But I inherited fifty thousand a few years ago, and decided to become a gentleman of leisure. Right after the crash I tried to get back, but, hell—there were six thousand young upstarts lined up ahead of me.”
“With a little foresight, a man can live on very little,” the other said.
Temple nodded. “I’ve learned how to economize. But to get back to this little, inner planet. Everything was covered over with an oozy coating of life. It was like jelly, and it took different shapes—”
“Could you maybe describe it without adjectives, son? My daughter gets on a high horse when I’m late for—”
“Well, think of a china cabinet filled with bric-a-brac. The cabinet is the skeleton of some animal dead a hundred thousand years. The bric-a-brac is the slime building up into cubes, octahedrons, icosahedrons, stellated dodecahedrons, and so on. We even encountered a few snub cubes.
“In case you don’t know, a snub cube is a thirty-eight-faced figure having at each corner four triangles, and one square. Six faces belong to the cube proper, eight to the coaxial octahedron, and the remaining twenty-four to no regular solid.”
“Ouch, son. I’ve never had no regular schooling in mathematics.”
“What I’m trying to say, grandpop, is that this slimy, primitive life seemed to conform to the laws of crystallization. We found crystallographic axes of reference when we studied the stuff, but of course the more complicated polyhedrons would have baffled a crystallographer. About the most complicated example of crystalline growth is a scalenohedron built up of rhombohedra.”
“That’s what I’ll be eating for supper tonight, boy, if you don’t get on with it.”
“Well, I’m convinced that the stuff was alive in a protoplasmic sense, for there was a dumbbell shape that traveled around like a rhizopod as well as long ribbons of slime which feasted on the polyhedrons and dripped and drooled all over the landscape. Most of the polyhedrons had an eaten-away look, and of course kept dissolving back into structureless slime.
“If it wasn’t for your daughter, I could ramble on for hours, because it was the strangest kind of life imaginable. It was life which sustained itself by preying on the more complicated aspects of itself, if you get what I mean.”
“You mean it built itself up into something, got tired of being eaten alive by itself, and dissolved back into slime.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Temple said.
“But, son, why didn’t it eat itself altogether up?”
Temple shrugged. “Perhaps it reproduced by absorbing solar radiations as well as feasting on itself,” he said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“You were saying, son—”
“Well, when we stumbled on the huge, corrugated cylinder we thought at first it was just the skeleton of one of the old backboned animal forms that had roamed that planet once—another china cabinet. Joan was so sure it was a china cabinet that she started scraping off the jellylike coating of polyhedrons with a stick, and—”
“Joan?” the old man wanted to know.
“She was our geologist. A silly little thing. A strawberry-blond geologist.”
“When I was twenty,” the old man said, “I liked blondes, brunettes and redheads. How could she be on the Survey if she wasn’t bright?”
“Oh, she was bright enough when she forgot that she was a woman. But when she accidentally remembered, her I. Q. of one hundred fifty went into eclipse—”
“You were saying—”
“When Joan scraped off the polyhedrons and exposed a corrugated expanse of gleaming metal she leaped back into my arms and held on tight to me.
“I was plenty startled myself. The cylinder was about one fourth the size of our backward-forward jeep, and there was a little, projecting knob at one end. At first glance it looked large enough to hold five or six people, if you packed them in tight.
“Actually, it was large enough to hold a round dozen standing about in groups. It’s hard to realize how much room there is inside a really large cylinder unless you shut your eyes and run an imaginary line parallel to itself through the circumference of a curve. I mean, you have to sort of construct another cylinder in your mind’s eye.”
“Son, my daughter—”
Temple nodded. “You’ve asked me to hurry this along, so I’ll skip over how we felt inside ourselves and concentrate on what happened inside the cylinder.”
“The knob opened it up, eh?”
“The instant we tugged at it. There was a humming sound, and the end of the cylinder swung inward, revealing a patch of inky blackness divided into sections by hanging ribbons of slime.
“In other words, the slime had seeped into the cylinder and we could hear it dripping all about us in the darkness. I walked in first, and Joan came tagging after.
“I advanced eight or ten feet over a floor that seemed to keep slipping out from under me, and then put a hand out to one side. Under my palm the wall seemed to crawl, and I wanted to turn around, and get out the instant the slime started coiling around my wrist. But for an instant I couldn’t seem to move. I heard Joan cry out, but I couldn’t move a muscle.
“Up above me a dull, spreading radiance was coming into sight. It seemed to flow down toward me over something that looked a little like the keyboard of a piano which someone had designed without calipers to avoid offending a forty-foot giant.
“As I stared up some chill thing brushed me, and the light grew brighter.
“My head began to spin, and for a minute I felt as though all the breath were being squeezed from my lungs. I fell to my knees and started climbing up toward the light. Although the surface beneath me felt a little like an ascending flight of stairs it could have been simply a corrugated metal ramp covered over with a thin coating of slime.
“For a long time I kept climbing. The higher I climbed the brighter the light became, and suddenly it was blazing all about me, and I was no longer alone.
“She was sitting on a high wooden stool clasping a rag doll, grandpop—a little girl not more than six years of age, with curly auburn hair and dimples in both cheeks. She seemed to be in a sort of day nursery. Behind her was a wall with animals on it, and above her was a pale-green skylight, and she was digging her knuckles into her eyes, and sobbing as though her heart would break.
“Grandpop, I recognized her despite the dazzling light, and the dimples, and the fact that her feet scarcely touched the floor. She was our strawberry-blond geologist, the girl who had leaped back into my arms not five minutes before.
“She had Joan’s hair, and lips and eyes, and when she stopped crying and looked straight at me there was a glint of dawning recognition in her gaze which chilled my heart like ice.
“Grandpop, nothing could much surprise me after that, but it was terrifying all the same to find myself suddenly in another place, surrounded by utterly blank walls and under a green light that streamed down upon me from a sort of inverted funnel set in an overhead that had a mirrorlike sheen and kept moving erratically about.
“When I looked down at my feet I got another jolt. I had four feet, two pointing ahead, and two pointing straight back. Worst of all, my shoes had become completely transparent, and I could see all twenty of my toes.
“I started wriggling them, first on one set of feet, then on the other, my heart going drippety-drop. I was still at it when the light went out and a long, gleaming panel studded with little knobby protuberances came into sight.”
There was a brief instant of stillness while Temple cleared his throat.
“Grandpop, that panel looked exactly like the control panel of Morrison’s dimension-dissolving jeep—the big, unfinished question mark of a machine which stood in the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences a quarter of a century ago.”
“But, son, how could that be?” the old man gasped.
“Grandpop, I don’t know, unless—well, you remember what I said about life evolving along parallel lines everywhere in the Universe of Stars?”
The old man hunched his eyebrows. “Life perhaps, son. But certainly not the products of human civilization, not complicated inventions.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you why not, son. Primitive human societies don’t become complex and give rise to a flood of mechanical gadgets by natural selection. But even if they did, the chances of exact parallels occurring on any two planets, let alone a million planets, could only be expressed by a figure trailing off into more zeros than there are light corpuscles in the Universe of Stars.”
“Grandpop, I’ve a feeling you’re wrong. There seems to be a dynamic chopping block at work everywhere in the Universe which lops off most of those zeros. You can call it the Law of Eliminative Recurrences or anything you like so long as you broaden it to include not only biological evolution, but the whole vital scheme of things from protein molecules to—well, to backward-forward jeeps and Museums of Industrial Arts and Sciences.”
“I don’t quite—”
“Well, perhaps an equation will help you to see what I’m driving at. A cluster of protein molecules from the warm, primordial seas of any cool inner planet plus a billion years of time equals a Morrison dimension-dissolving jeep in a Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences.”
The old man’s jaw gapped. “But, son, that’s just another way of saying that the makings of life anywhere in the Universe would turn into you and me sitting here.”
“Given time, yes.”
“Just a minute, son. Before you say another word, there’s something I want to get straightened out. What’s your name?”
“Huh?”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Ralph Temple.”
“All right. Mine’s Ned Cummings. You mean to say there are a million Ned Cummings and Ralph Temples, all exactly alike, on a million inhabited worlds?”
“Well, I said that the panel inside that cylinder was exactly like the panel of Morrison’s machine. But I had an odd feeling that the spacing between the plug-ins was a hairbreadth wider here, narrower there; the color of the metal a shade darker—”
“How could you tell, son? Did you see Morrison’s machine?”
“I did, grandpop. I spent an entire afternoon in the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences a quarter of a century ago. Grandpop, Morrison was a man of genius. Had he lived to complete that jeep we might now be breaking down time tracks right up to the sixth dimension.”
