Time Travel Omnibus, page 422
He had delayed too long in leaving. The sun was setting when he found his way to the open air again, his hands empty after all his search. The hungry coyotes had begun to gather. He fought hard, but they were too many, and there were no tribesmen near to hear his screams and hurry to his rescue.
III
IN THE summer of 4016 an archaeological expedition under the sponsorship of the University of Teheran began excavation in the buried ruins of the IAAS buildings. Very quickly they became aware that their speculations, based on philological study of the few remaining ancient microfilm records, were justified, and that this was the remains of some sort of center of twentieth century science. The whole civilized world followed their progress by telaudioview. News commentators in the international tongue assured fascinated watchers and listeners in Greenland and China, in Argentina and Africa—for these local names were still used to indicate natural divisions of the World Territory—that this was the greatest archaeological discovery of the age. When at last the innermost vault was uncovered and opened, with its priceless store of microfilm—and an unexplained human skeleton lying well preserved not far away—the commentators chattered like magpies.
But suddenly their descriptions stopped abruptly, and they turned to other aspects of the expedition.
WHEN Harduk Bal, the director-in-chief, came upon the tape-recording in its rustless alloy case, he sent for the head philologist to decipher the inscription. Then the recording was fitted to its primitive transmitter—it was totally unadaptable to a modern reproducer—and Harduk Bal had it translated by an expert in twentieth century English.
As soon as he had heard the translation, he got in teletouch with the Executive Council of World Government. The newly elected World President himself called Harduk Bal back after the Council’s consultation.
“All right, go ahead,” he told the archaeologist. “It’s worth trying, long as it has been even since that additional record in 2151. But we’d better not make it public till we see if it works. We don’t want to have your expedition made a laughing-stock if the experiment should be a failure, as it probably will be. Tell your publicity director to cut off further news till we’ve tried the thing out.”
“But the time-travel part, sir,” Harduk Bal objected. “I know the mathematicians keep reporting they have made progress—they’ve been saying that for fifty years at least—but actually we have no more time-travel now than they had in 2150—or in 1970.”
“Listen, Harduk Bal.” The president touched the button which made the conversation secret. “This is for your ears alone; we heard it only last week and the Council is not ready yet to make it public. I think I can say confidently that by the time it would be needed—about twenty-six years from now—time-travel will be a demonstrated thing.”
“Wonderful! Really, at last!”
“We hope so. We’re almost sure. But even if we’re wrong, and this new method is another failure, we could still do the rest of the experiment, and add our statement to the one made in 2150. There ought to be four vials left, and surely before the last one is used up, time-travel will be a commonplace mode of transportation, and future generations, if not we ourselves, can take advantage of it—that is, if the stuff is still any good.”
“Right, sir. I’ll see that the whole thing is kept quiet until the Council’s ready to release it. And you, I take it, will send somebody to that location in the Antarctic.”
“Immediately. Do you know, Harduk Bal, I envy the young man or woman, twenty-six years from now, who is going to make that journey back to 1970!”
“I do too. But I’m afraid nobody alive today is qualified!” chuckled the archaeologist. “By the way,” he added, “what do I do now with the original tape-recording?”
“You’d better send it to me. I’ll have it redeposited in the vaults of World Government headquarters in London. It doesn’t matter where it is, so long as it’s left for future excavators, a thousand or so years from now, of the site you’re exsite. And I imagine there won’t be much in a place that, some far-off day, will constitute an archaeological investigation cavating, by the time you get through with it.
“It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? Our most elaborate constructions some day will be ruins, just as that scientific center of yours is now.”
“But according to this thing,” answered Harduk Bal cheerfully, “our past will still be our future, even then, and good old mankind will still keep moving onward and upward! And perhaps they already knew that for sure, away back in 1970!”
In 5891, or 91 GM, Kel 87459X2ZA of the third generation after the Great Migration was a candidate for his doctorate in Terraarchaeology at Skyros Institute of Science. As a subject for his thesis, he proposed—as did every other budding Terraarchaeologist—a specimen excavation on the Parent Planet.
“I don’t know, Kel,” his department head frowned. “It’s too bad that a student as promising as you are didn’t get interested in a field with more possibilities—one that hasn’t been worked over until nearly all the good sites have been excavated long ago, in the nostalgic rush back to Earth after we’d left it permanently. There’s still an immense amount of work to be done on the ancient Martian remains, or on those puzzling buried structures on Planet 3 in Alpha Centauri. But there’s not much worthwhile left in the old home except in the dried-up ocean beds, and they’re more rewarding to a paleontologist than to an archaeologist.”
“There’s one site,” said Kel daringly. “The last World Government Center.”
The professor shook his hairless head.
“Now, my boy, you know that’s totally impossible. Didn’t you learn in elementary school that it was a strict injunction of the Migration Charter that the London Center should be left inviolate, as a symbol of the planetary origin of man?”
“Of course I learned it—and I’m not the only one who thinks it’s an idiotic superstition unworthy of civilized beings.
It’s worse—there may be important historical material there that we need and ought to have.
“What do you suppose has become of those buildings after nearly a hundred years of neglect? They’re probably a heap of weathered rubble by now. A fine symbol!”
“They’re not overgrown with vegetation, anyhow,” said the professor grimly, “considering that the reason we had to abandon Earth in the first place was the drying up of the surface water and the consequent death of all vegetation, after the collapse of the moon. No, perhaps a thousand years from now, when nobody is alive with even a tradition of Earth as our former home, Terrarchaeology will revive, and then no place on Earth may be considered too sacred to be delved into. But not today. The Interplanetary Congress would never give you a permit.”
“LOOK, I’m not going to injure their beautiful ruins. I’ve got a specific thing I want to look for. We took away loads and loads of records from the World Government Center when we left. But I’m certain there is more there, of infinitely greater importance.
“See here—listen to this: it’s a standard text you use in your own classes, the Compendium of World Surveys by Cort 27463Q5HW. ‘The original plans of the Center included underground, impregnable vaults, in which World Government’s most vital records could be stored in permanent safety. However, when the Great Migration occurred, searchers found no trace of these vaults under any Government building. This does not mean necessarily that they did not then or do not now exist; the required speed and enormous magnitude of the Migration operations made it impossible to make a complete and thorough investigation. Unfortunately, the setting aside of the Center as a Sacred Symbolical Area has prevented any further research.’
“The minute I read those words for the first time, professor, I decided to make Terrarchaeology my field, and to be the one to hunt for and discover the lost vaults of the World Government Center and recover whatever they contain. With the new Supra finders, which did not exist a hundred years ago, they can be located without harming or moving a stone of the upper buildings.
“I know you can’t authorize me to go ahead. But will you give me a strong recommendation of my ability, that I can take to the Interplanetary Congress? That’s all I want. The rest is up to me.”
The professor gave up.
“That much I can do for you, Kel, and will, very gladly. But I’ll have to add that I advised you against attempting the project.”
“Don’t worry about that professor.” Kel smiled impishly. “I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that this year’s chairman of the Congress happens to be Mora 84912M6RG, and that Mora 84912-M6RG happens to be my Chief Guardian? I’ll get a hearing, anyway, and if I have your backing I’m confident of making them see the light. It would be a pretty fine medal on the chest to be able to say that the year you were chairman, the hidden records of World Government were recovered, and that the person who made them available was your own ward!”
Six months later Kel landed his equipment near the gaunt, deserted Center. It was another month before the Supra finders located the vaults. There was richness there indeed to be stored in his Contragrav ship. And buried among the records, he found a queer, inexpressibly ancient-looking metal box. marked in difficult twentieth century English, “To be opened by any competent scientist.”
Kel, under the circumstances—fortunately, he even knew the language—deemed himself sufficiently competent not to wait till he got the box home to Skyro. What he heard as he listened to the recording sent him headlong to the ship, to telebeam first the professor and then the Congress. Before he returned home with his priceless plunder, he made a quick trip to the Antarctic, where the ice, though much thinner than in earlier days, still provided the only unevaporated water on the surface of the ravaged planet. Continuing deep freeze was easy in the Contragrav.
By Kel’s time, travel to the past was as commonplace as space-travel. He was strongly tempted to go back to April 25, 1970, himself, to take a look at the remarkable James McElroy—say an hour or so before McElroy’s appointed meeting with somebody yet unborn when Kel would have made his journey. But young and romantic as he was, Kel 87459X2ZA was also a responsible scientific worker. And so he handed over the tape-recording and the vial to the proper authorities, to let them conduct the experiment, while he buried himself in the other material he had found in the Center’s vaults, to prepare what eventually became the most famous thesis ever presented by a candidate for the degree of Ter.D.
The gray parched earth grew ever more desolate as the centuries rolled over it. The Antarctic ice dissolved inch by inch, then evaporated in the unoxygenated air. The two vials left lay finally on bare rock.
Soon, under the sun’s radiation, their contents died at last.
IV
GORD 20977F8EN stood for a moment at the entrance to the grounds of the IA AS Center. This was the right place and of course there could be no question as to the exact time. It was five minutes to three o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, April 25, 1970. Unaccustomed emotions swept him—puzzlement, curiosity, frustration, and a sense of anticlimax. In a way his entire twenty-five years of life had led up to this moment; when it was over and he was back again in his own time and place, he would have to begin some entirely new career, with his reason for living hitherto no longer in existence.
He was carefully dressed in the proper clothing for a young man of the twentieth century, and in the jacket he found a pocket into which he could insert the tiny apparatus that would insure his safe return home. He had been just as carefully schooled in the English of the period, in its American version. Except for the wig, to simulate twentieth century hair, he looked like any tall, handsome youth of 1970.
What interested him more than this James McElroy to whom he had been dispatched, more even than the solution of all the vague hints and allusions he had heard since childhood, was the landscape around him. At home there were no great bodies of untamed water like this. There were hills, far higher than this one on whose summit he stood now, but they were not planted with grass and trees; indeed, he suspected, from the proximity of the site to the ocean below him, that all this verdure had been cultivated by man, and that the natural aspect of the hill would be that of a sand dune. He knew, of course, the geography of his location. He was on a flat-topped hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in a portion of Earth once known interchangeably, it seemed, as the United States of America and California.
As he tore his gaze reluctantly away from the view—who knew how much time he would have for sightseeing when he left, and it might well be dark then as well—and prepared to turn it in at the gate in the massive brick wall, he saw a girl walking slowly up the path, trundling some kind of machine. As he watched, she paused at a thick clump of bushes and pushed the machine inside, arranging twigs and branches elaborately so as to conceal it from any passer-by. Cord’s eyes lighted up with interest; in the second before she hid the thing, he had recognized it as a primitive time-travel equipment, such as he had seen in museums at home. Deliberately he waited until the girl caught up with him.
“Excuse me,” she said in twentieth century English that had exactly the same slight stiffness as his own, “but is this the headquarters of the International Association for the Advancement of Science?”
Gord smiled.
“What is your century?” he asked. She jumped, and stared at him with long, heavily fringed dark eyes.
“The—the forty-first,” she stammered. “How did you know? Are you—”
“I am from long after you—almost as long as you are after the time we find ourselves in now. I take it that you too have been sent to see a man named James McElroy?”
“Why, yes. All my life—”
“All mine too. Let’s go in together.”
“What’s it all about, do you know?”
“No more than you. Perhaps we shall find out now. What is your own language?”
“Interlingua. And yours?”
“A modified Interlingua too, but I doubt if you’d understand mine or I yours. Let’s stick to this one, since we’ve both learned it well.”
“My name is Wia Rustum.” She held out her hand, but Gord did not take it; people of his time seldom touched one another casually. He noticed, however, that the little finger was complete—doubtless her little toes too—not rudimentary as his were. That, he had been taught, was the only physical change in mankind in the past four thousand years, unless one counted the loss of head-hair before adolescence, or the increasing number of babies born without a vermiform appendix.
“Call me Gord,” he said. “The rest of it is just for official identification.”
He noticed with approval that her perceptions were sensitive; she had withdrawn her hand swiftly the instant she received no answering gesture from him. She did not seem pretty to Gord, despite her chiseled features and her smooth light-bronze skin through which the warm blood showed; her lustrous black hair, arranged in some strange fashion which he presumed must be that of women of the time they were visiting, repelled him. Obviously she was of pure Earth descent; there was no trace in her of any off-planetary mixture.
They had reached the group of white stone buildings. “This one in the middle is probably the main structure,” Gord remarked. “We can go in there and ask for this James McElroy.”
A small door in an L-shaped wing opened abruptly, and a young man of about their own age stood framed in the doorway. He peered out at them anxiously.
“WE ARE looking for a man named W James McElroy,” Wia Rustum told him.
“I am McElroy.” The man’s voice shook with excitement. “Are you—?”
“Yes,” said Gord gravely. “It seems that we have both been sent to visit you.”
“Come in! Come in!”
He beckoned them into a room that reminded Wia of reconstructions of primitive architecture she had seen—a sort of ancient office, with a desk and filing cabinets and chairs, to which McElroy waved them fussily. They sat down gingerly, but the chairs were more comfortable, in spite of their odd shape, than either of them had expected.
“You won’t mind, will you,” said McElroy, “if I make a record of our conversation?”
“Of course not,” Wia answered politely. Gord only nodded, perplexed; in his experience, records were always kept of all conversations, however trivial, though he wondered how the primitive machine standing against an inner wall was expected to work.
Their host sat down at his desk. He seemed hardly to know how to begin.
“Are you all that are coming?” he blurted.
“All?” Gord echoed. “I know only that I myself was sent to you. I met this young woman just outside here, and it appears that she too has been sent.”
“Then you’re not both from the same approximate time?”
Gord laughed.
“Hardly. I am as far from her in time as she is from you. You should see the obsolete object she traveled here on, and has hidden in your grounds. It’s a wonder to me that she could travel ten years back in that thing.”
Wia Rustum flushed.
“It’s a very fine traveler,” she said defensively. “Why, it’s an enormous improvement on the first ones, only twenty-odd years ago.”
Gord felt the pocket-sized traveler in his jacket and concealed his smile.
McElroy was watching them intently. His hands were shaking, in some almost unbearable agitation, but he was getting better control of his voice.
“You must both be utterly bewildered,” he said. “Unless you have been told all about this?”
They both shook their heads.
“All I know,” said Wia, “is that ever since! can remember I have been told that on my twenty-fifth birthday I was to make a journey back to 1970 to see a man named James McElroy, at the International Association for the Advancement of Science.”
“I also—at these headquarters, on Earth,” Gord agreed. “The guardians said that was why I had to learn to speak twentieth century American English, and study your history and geography and customs, though I was not in training to be a Terrarchaeologist. I had lessons with Kel 87459X2ZA himself,” he added proudly.
