Time Travel Omnibus, page 566
File’s gaze lingered on these craft. They contrasted oddly with the plainly nomadic living quarters below, cured animal hides with weak fires flickering among them.
A meal had just been prepared. File’s time machine was taken to an empty tent and he was invited to eat with the chief. As he entered the largest tent of the settlement and saw the nobility of this small tribe gathered round a vegetable stew-pot with their weapons beside them, he knew what it was they reminded him of.
Lizards.
They began to eat from glass bowls. It seemed these people knew how to work the silicates of the desert as well as build flying ships—if they had not stolen them from some more advanced people.
In the course of the meal, File also discovered that the machine the warrior had trained on him in the desert was one hundred per cent efficient. He had been completely re-educated to talk and think in another language, even though he could, if he chose detach himself slightly, hear the strangeness of the sounds which came from both his mouth and those of the Yulk.
The chief’s name was Gzerhtcak, an almost impossible sound to European ears. As they ate, he answered File’s questions in unemotional tones.
From what he was told, he imagined that this was an Earth in old age, an Earth millions, perhaps billions of years ahead of his own time, and it was nearly all desert. There were about eight tribes living within a radius of a few hundred miles, and when they were not squabbling among themselves they were fighting a never-ending struggle for existence both with the ailing conditions of a dying world, and with the Raxa, creatures who were not organic life at all but consisted of mineral crystals conglomerated into geometrical forms, and, in some mysterious way, endowed both with sentience and the property of mobility.
“Fifty generations ago,” the Yulk chief told him, “the Raxa had no existence in the world; then they began to grow. They thrive in the dead desert, which is all food for them, while we steadily die. There is nothing we can do, but fight.”
Furthermore, the atmosphere of the Earth was becoming unbreathable. Little fresh oxygen was being produced, since there was no vegetation except at the plantations. Beside this, noxious vapours were being manufactured by a chemical-geological action in the ground, and by slow volcanic processes which drifted through the sand from far below. Only in a few places, such as this region where the tribes lived, was the atmosphere still suitable for respiration, and that only because of the relative stillness of the atmosphere, which discouraged the separate gases from mixing.
It was a despairing picture of courage and hopelessness which gradually unfolded to File. Was this the final result of man’s inability to control events, or was the collapse of the European Economic Community an insignificant happening which had been swallowed up by a vaster history? He tended to think that this was so; for he felt sure that the creatures who sat and ate with him were not even descended from human stock.
Lizards. The old order of the world of life had died away. Men had gone. Only these fragments remained, lizards elevated to a manlike state, attempting to retain a foothold in a world which had changed its mind. Probably the other tribes the Yulk spoke of were also humanoids who had evolved from various lower animals.
“Tomorrow is the great battle,” the Yulk chief said. “We throw all our resources against the Raxa, who advance steadily to destroy the last plantations on which we depend. After tomorrow, we shall know in our hearts how long we have to live.”
Max File clenched his hands impotently. His fate was sealed. Eventually he too would take his place alongside the Yulk warriors in the last stand against humanity’s enemy.
Appeltoft spread his hands impassively and looked at Strasser. What could he do? He had done all he could.
“What happened?” said the Prime Minister.
“We tracked him ten years into the future. We got him on the start of his journey back, and then quite suddenly—gone. Nothing. I told you we lost thirty-three per cent of our experimental animals in the same way. I warned you of the risk.”
“I know—but have you tried everything? You know what it will mean if he doesn’t return . . .”
“We have been trying, of course. We are searching now, trying to pick him up, but outside the Earth’s time-track all is chaotic to our instruments—some defect in our understanding of time. We can probe out—but really, a needle in a haystack is nothing compared . . .”
“Well, keep trying. Because if you don’t get him back soon we shall be forced to allow the Untermeyer people to go ahead in Bavaria and we have no means of predicting the result.”
Appeltoft sighed wearily and returned to his laboratory.
When he had left the chamber, Standon said: “Poor devil.”
“There’s a time and a place for sentimentality, Standon,” Strasser said guiltily.
The Earth still rotated in the same period, and after a sleep of about eight hours File left his tent and stretched his limbs in the thin air, aroused by the sound of clinking metal. It was just after dawn, and the fighting males of the tribe were setting out to battle. The females and children, shivering, watched as their menfolk went off in procession into the desert. A few rode reptile-like horses, precious cossetted animals all of whom had been harnessed for the battle. Twenty feet above their heads the five aircraft floated patiently following the direction given by the chief below.
File hung around the camp, apprehensive and edgy. About an hour after sunset, the remnants of the forces returned.
It was defeat. A third of the men had survived. None of the aircraft returned, and File had learned the night before that although the tribe retained the knowledge and skill to build more, it was an undertaking that strained their resources to the utmost and the construction of another would almost certainly never begin.
Humanity’s strength was depleted beyond revival point. The mineral intelligences called the Raxa would continue their implacable advance with little to stop them.
The Yulk chief was the last man in. Bruised, bleeding and scorched by near-misses from energy beams, he submitted to the medications of the women, and then called the nobles together as usual for their evening meal.
One by one, the wearied warriors took their leave and made their ways to their tents, until File was left alone with Gzerhtcak.
He looked directly into the old man’s eyes. “There is no hope,” he said bluntly.
“I know. But there is no need for you to remain.”
“I have no choice.” He sighed. “My machine has broken down. I must throw in my lot with you.”
“Perhaps we can repair your machine. But you will be plunging into the unknown . . .”
File made a gesture with his hands. “What could you possibly do to repair my machine!”
The chief rose and led the way to the tent where the machine lay. A brief command into the night produced a boy with a box of tools. The chief studied File’s machine, lifting a panel to see behind the instruments. Finally, he made adjustments, adding a device which took him about twenty minutes to make with glowing bits of wire. The time-potential meter began to lift above zero.
File stared in surprise.
“Our science is very ancient and very wise,” the chief said, “though these days we know it only by rote. Still, I, as father of the tribe, know enough so that when a man like yourself tells me that he has stranded himself in time, I know what the reason is.”
File was astounded by the turn of events. “When I get home—” he began.
“You will never get home. Neither will your scientists ever analyse time. Our ancient science has a maxim: No man understands time. Your machine travels under its own power now. If you leave here, you simply escape this place and take your chance elsewhere.”
“I must make the attempt,” File said. “I cannot remain here while there is a hope of getting back.”
But still he lingered.
The chief seemed to guess his thoughts. “Do not fear that you desert us,” he said. “Your position is clear—as is ours. There is no help for either of us.”
File nodded and stepped up to the chair of the machine. As he cleaned off the grime and dust with his shirt sleeves, it occurred to him to look at the date-register—he had not bothered to read the figures on his arrival. He did not expect it to make sense, for it had too few digits to account for the present antiquity of the Earth.
But when he read the dial he received a shock. 000008.324. 01.7954. Less than nine years after his departure from the Geneva Complex!
He seated himself on the time machine and pressed the switch.
Internal rotation clockwise . . . external rotation anticlockwise . . . then the forward rushing. He plunged into the continuum of Time.
Minutes passed, and no sign came that he would emerge automatically from his journey. Taking a chance, he pressed the switch to 4 stop.
With a residual turning of the translucent rods, the machine deposited itself into normal space-time orientation. About him, the landscape was more mind-shaking than anything he had ever dreamed.
Was it crystal? The final victory of the crystalline Raxa? For a moment the fantastic landscape, with its flashing, brilliant, mathematical overgrowth, deluded him into thinking it was so. But then he saw that it could not be—or if it was, the Raxa had evolved beyond their mineral heritage.
It was a world of geometrical form, but it was also a world of constant movement—or rather, since the movement was all so sudden as to be instantaneous, of constant transformation. Flashing extensions and withdrawals, all on the vertical and horizontal planes, dazzled his eyes. When he looked closer, he saw that in fact three-dimensional form was nowhere present. Everything consisted of two-dimensional shapes, which came together transitorily to give the illusion of form.
The colours, too . . . they underwent transformations and graduations which bespoke the action of regular mathematical principles—like the prismatic separation into the ideal spectrum. But here the manifestations were infinitely more subtle and inventive, just as subtle, tenuous music, using fifty instruments, can be made out of the seven tones of the diatonic scale.
File looked at the date register. It told him he was now fifteen years away from Appeltoft, anxiously awaiting his return in the Geneva Complex.
He tried again.
A lush world of lustrous vegetation swayed and rustled in a hot breeze. A troup of armadillo-like animals, but the size of horses, paraded through the clearing where File’s machine had come to rest. Without pausing, the leader swung its head to give him a docile, supercilious inspection, then turned to grunt something to the followers. They also gave him a cursory glance and then they had passed through a screen of wavy grass-trees. He heard their motions through the forest for some distance.
Again.
Barren rock. The sky hung with traceries of what were obviously dust-clouds. Here the ground was clean of even the slightest trace of dust, but a strong cold wind blew. Presumably it swept the dust into the atmosphere and prevented it from precipitating, scouring the rock to a sparkling, ragged surface. He could hardly believe that this scrubbed shining landscape was actually the surface of a planet. It was like an exhibit.
Again.
Now he was in space, protected by some field the time machine seemed to create around itself. Something huge as Jupiter hung where Earth should have been.
Again.
Space again. A scarlet sun pouring bloody light over him. On his left, a tiny, vivid star, like a burning magnesium flare, lanced at his eyes. An impossible three-planet triune rotated majestically above him, with no more distance between them than from the Earth to the Moon.
He looked at the date register again. Twenty-odd years from departure.
Where was the sequence? Where was the progression he had come to find? How was Appeltoft to make sense out of this?
How was he going to find Appeltoft?
Desperately, he set the machine in motion again. His desperation seemed to have some effect: he picked up speed, rushing with insensate energy and now he was not just in limbo but could see something of the universe through which he was passing.
After a while he got the impression that he was still, that it was the machine that was static while time and space were not. The universe poured around him, a disordered tumult of forces and energies, lacking direction lacking purpose . . .
On he sped, hour after hour, as if he were trying to flee from some fact he could not face. But at last, he could hide from it no longer. As he observed the chaos around him, he knew.
Time had no sequence! It was not a continuous flowing. It had no positive direction: it went neither forwards, backwards, nor in a circle; neither did it stay still. It was totally random.
The universe was bereft of logic. It was nothing but chaos.
It had no purpose, no beginning, no end. It existed only as a random mass of gases, solids, liquids, fragmentary accidental patterns. Like a kaleidoscope, it occasionally formed itself into patterns, so that it seemed ordered, seemed to contain laws, seemed to have form and direction.
But, in fact, there was nothing but chaos, nothing but a constant state of flux—the only thing that was constant. There were no laws governing time! Appeltoft’s ambition was impossible!
The world from which he had come, or any other world for that matter, could dissipate into its component elements at any instant, or could have come into being at any previous instant, complete with everybody’s memories! Who would be the wiser? The whole of the European Economic Community might have existed only for the half-second which it had taken him to press the starting switch of the time machine. No wonder he couldn’t find it!
Chaos, flux, eternal death. All problems were without solution. As File realised these facts he howled with the horror of it. He could not bring himself to stop. In proportion to his despair and fear, his speed increased, faster and faster, until he was pouring madly through turmoil.
Faster, further—
The formless universe around him began to vanish as he went to an immense distance and beyond the limits of speed.
Matter was breaking up, disappearing. Still he rushed on in terror, until the time machine fell away beneath him, and the matter of his body disintegrated and vanished.
He was a bodiless intelligence, hurtling through the void. Then his emotions began to vanish. His thoughts. His identity. The sensation of movement dropped away. Max File was gone. Nothing to see, hear, feel or know.
He hung there, nothing but consciousness. He did not think: he no longer had any apparatus to think with. He had no name. He had no memories. No qualities, attributes or feelings. He was just there. Pure ego.
The same as nothing.
There was no time. A split second was the same as a billion ages.
So it would not have been possible for File, later, to assign any period to his interlude in unqualified void. He only became aware of anything when he began to emerge.
At first, there was only a vague feeling, like something misty. Then more qualities began to attach themselves to him. Motion began. Chaotic matter became distantly perceptible—disorganised particles, flowing energies and wavy lines.
A name impinged on his consciousness: Max File. Then the thought: That’s me.
Matter gradually congregated round him and soon he had a body again and a complete set of memories. He could accept the existence of an unorganised universe now. He sighed: at the same moment the time machine formed underneath him.
All he could do now was to try to return to Geneva, however remote the possibility. How strange, to think that the whole of Europe, with all its seriously-taken problems, was nothing more than a chance coming-together of random particles! But at least it was home—even if it only existed for a few seconds.
And if he could only rejoin those few seconds, he thought in agonised joyousness, he would be dissolved along with the rest of it and be released from this hideous extension of life he had escaped into.
And yet, he thought, how could he get back? Only by searching, only by searching . . .
He reckoned (though of course his calculations were liable to considerable error) that he spent several centuries searching through mindless turmoil. He grew no older; he felt no hunger or thirst: he did not breathe—how his heart kept beating without breath was a mystery to him, but it was on this, the centre of his sense of time, that he based his belief about the duration of the search. Occasionally he came upon other brief manifestations, other transient conglomerations of chaos. But now he was not interested in them, and he did not find Earth at the time of the E.E.C.
It was hopeless. He could search forever.
In despair, he began to withdraw again, to become a bodiless entity and find oblivion, escape from his torments in the living death. It was while he was about to dispense with the last vestige of identity, that he discovered his unsuspected power.
He happened to direct his mind to a grouping of jostling particles some distance away. Under the impact of his will—it moved!
Interested, he halted his withdrawal, but did not try to emerge back into his proper self—he had the feeling that as Max File he was impotent. As an almost unqualified ego—perhaps . . .
He allowed an image to form in his mind—it happened to be that of a woman—and directed it at the formless chaos. Instantly, against dark flux, lit by random flashes of light, a woman was formed out of chaotic matter. She moved, looked at him and gave a languorous smile.
There was no doubt about it. She was not just an image. She was alive, perfect and aware.
Amazed, he automatically let go of the mental image and transmitted a cancellation. The woman vanished, replaced by random particles and energies as before. The cloud lingered for a moment, then dispersed.
It was a new-found delight. He could make anything! For ages he experimented, creating everything he could think of. Once, a whole world formed beneath him, complete with civilisations, a tiny sun, and rocket-ships probing out.
He cancelled it at once. It was enough to know that his every intention, even his vaguest and grandest thought, was translated into detail.
