Time Travel Omnibus, page 597
Of a total of one hundred and twelve personnel in the station, four were Fifth Era transferees, a fact made obvious in the stasis condition by the distinctive aura that their abnormally high temporal potential created around them. I carried out a mind-wipe on pertinent memory sectors and triggered them back to their loci of origin. There would be a certain amount of head-scratching and equipment re-examining when the original effort to jump them back to their assignments at Nexx Central apparently failed; but as far as temporal operations were concerned, all four were permanently out of action, trapped in the same type of closed-loop phenomenon they had tried to use on me.
The files called for my attention next. I carried out a tape-scan in situ, edited the records to eliminate all evidence that might lead Third Era personnel into undesirable areas of speculation.
I was just finishing up the chore when I heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside the record center.
Aside from the fact that nothing not encased in an eddy-field like the one that allowed me to operate in null-time could move here, the intrusion wasn’t too surprising. I had been expecting a visitor of some sort. The situation almost demanded it.
He came through the door, a tall, fine-featured, totally hairless man elegantly dressed in a scarlet suit with deep purple brocaded designs worked all over it, like eels coiling through seaweed. He gave the room one of those flick-flick glances that prints the whole picture on the brain to ten decimals in a one microsecond gestalt, nodded to me as if I were a casual acquaintance encountered in the street.
“You are very efficient,” he said. He spoke with no discernible accent, but with a rather strange rhythm to his speech, as if perhaps he was accustomed to talking a lot faster. His voice was calm, a nice musical baritone:
“Up to this point, we approve your actions; however, to carry your mission further would be to create a ninth-order probability vortex. You will understand the implications of this fact.”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” I hedged. “Who are you? How did you get in here? This enclave is double-sealed.”
“I think we should deal from the outset on a basis of complete candor,” the man in red said. “I know your identity, your mission. My knowledge should make it plain that I represent a still later Era than your own—and that our judgment overrides your principles.”
I grunted. “So the Seventh Era comes onstage, all set to Fix it Forever.”
“To point out that we have the advantage of you is to belabor the obvious.”
“Uh-huh. But what makes you think another set of vigilantes won’t land on your tail, to fix your fixing?”
“There will be no later Timesweep,” Red said. “Ours is the Final Intervention. Through Seventh Era efforts the temporal structure will be restored not only to stability, but will be reinforced by the refusion of an entire spectrum of redundant entropic vectors.”
I nodded. “I see. You’re improving on nature by grafting all the threads of unrealized history back into the main stem. Doesn’t it strike you that’s just the kind of tampering Timesweep set out to undo?”
“I live in an era that has already begun to reap the benefits of temporal reinforcement,” he said firmly. “We exist in a state of vitality and vigor that prior eras could only dimly sense in moments of exultation. We—”
“You’re kidding yourselves. Opening up a whole new order of meddling just opens up a whole new order of problems.”
“Our calculations indicate otherwise. Now—”
“Did you ever stop to think that there might be a natural evolutionary process at work here—and that you’re aborting it? That the mind of man might be developing toward a point where it will expand into new conceptual levels—and that when it does, it will need a matrix of outlying probability strata to support it? That you’re fattening yourselves on the seed-grain of the far future?”
For the first time, the man in red lost a little of his cool. But only for an instant.
“Invalid,” he said. “The fact that no later era has stepped in to interfere is the best evidence that ours is the final Sweep.”
“Suppose a later era did step in; what form do you think their interference would take?”
He gave me a flat look. “It would certainly not take the form of a Sixth Era Agent, busily erasing data from Third and Fourth Era records,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”
“Then what . . .” he started in a reasonable tone—and checked himself. An idea was beginning to get through. “You,” he said. “You’re not . . .?”
And before I could confirm or deny, he vanished.
The human mind is a pattern, nothing more. The first dim flicker of awareness in the evolving forebrain of Australopithecus carried that pattern in embryo; and down through all the ages, as the human neural engine increased in power and complexity, gained control of its environment in geometrically expanding increments, the pattern never varied.
Man clings to his self-orientation at the psychological center of the Universe. He can face any challenge within that framework, suffer any loss, endure any hardship—so long as the structure remains intact.
Without it he’s a mind adrift in a trackless infinity, lacking any scale against which to measure his losses, his aspirations, his victories.
Even when the light of his intellect shows him that the structure is the product of his own mind; that infinity knows no scale, and eternity no duration—still he clings to his self/non-self concept, as a philosopher clings to a life fie knows must end, to ideals he knows are ephemeral, to causes he knows will be forgotten.
The man in red was the product of a mighty culture, based over fifty thousand years in the future of Nexx Central, itself ten millennia advanced over the first-time explorers of the Old Era. He knew, with all the awarness of a superbly trained intelligence, that the presence of a later-era operative invalidated forever his secure image of the continuum, and of his peoples’ role therein.
But like the ground ape scuttling to escape the leap of the great cat, his instant, instinctive response to the threat to his most cherished illusions was to go to earth.
Where he went I would have to follow.
Regretfully, I stripped away layer on layer of inhibitive conditioning, feeling the impact of ascending orders of awareness smashing down on me like tangible rockfalls. I saw the immaculate precision of the Nexx-built chamber disintegrate into the shabby makeshift that it was, saw the glittering complexity of the instrumentation dwindle in my sight until it appeared as no more than the crude mud-images of a river tribesman, or the shiny trash in a jackdaw’s nest. I felt the multi-ordinal Universe unfold around me, sensed the layered planet underfoot, apprehended expanding space, dust-clotted, felt the sweep of suns in their orbits, knew once again the rhythm of galactic creation and dissolution, grasped and held poised in my mind the interlocking conceptualizations of time/ space, past/future, is/is-not.
I focused a tiny fraction of my awareness on the ripple in the glassy surface of first-order reality, probed at it, made contact . . .
I stood on a slope of windswept rock, among twisted shrubs with exposed roots that clutched for support like desperate hands. The man in red stood ten feet away. He whirled as my feet grated on the loose scatter of pebbles.
“No!” he shouted, and stooped, caught up a rock, threw it at me. It slowed, fell at my feet.
“Don’t make it more difficult than it has to be,” I said. He cried out—and disappeared. I followed, through a blink of light and darkness . . .
Great heat, dazzling sunlight, loose, powdery dust underfoot. Far away, a line of black trees on the horizon. Near me, the man is red, aiming a small, flat weapon. Behind him, two small, dark-bearded men in soiled garments of coarse-woven cloth, staring, making mystic motions with labor-gnarled hands.
He fired. Through the sheet of pink and green fire that showered around me I saw the terror in his eyes. He vanished.
Deep night, the clods of a plowed field, a patch of yellow light gleaming from a parchment-covered window. He crouched against a low wall of broken stones, staring into darkness.
“This is useless,” I said. “You know it can have only one end.”
He screamed and vanished.
A sky like the throat of a thousand tornadoes; great vivid sheets of lightning that struck down through writhing rags of black cloud, struck upward from raw, rain-lashed peaks of steaming rock. A rumble under my feet like the subterranean breaking of a tidal surf of magma.
He hovered, half substantial, in the air before me, his ghostly face a flickering mask of agony.
“You’ll destroy yourself,” I called to him. “You’re far outside your operational range—”
He vanished. I followed. We stood on the high arch of a railless bridge spanning a man-made gorge five thousand feet deep. I knew it as a city of the Fifth Era, circa 20,000 A.D.
“What do you want of me,” he howled through the bared teeth of the cornered carnivore.
“Go back,” I said. “Tell them . . . as much as they must know.”
“We were so close,” he said. “We thought we had won the great victory over Nothingness.”
“Not quite Nothingness,” I said. “You still have your lives to live—everything you had before.”
“Except a future. We’re a dead end, aren’t we? We’ve drained the energies of a thousand sterile entropic lines to give the flush of life to the corpse of our reality. But there’s nothing beyond for us, is there? Only the great emptiness.”
“You had a role to play. You’ve played it—will play it. Nothing must change that.”
“But you . . .” he stared across empty space at me. “Who are you? What are you?”
“You know what the answer to that must be,” I said.
His face was a paper on which death was written. But his mind was strong. Not for nothing thirty millennia of genetic selection. He gathered his forces, drove back the panic, reintegrated his dissolving personality.
“How . . . how long?” he whispered.
“All life vanished in the one hundred and ten thousandth four hundred and ninety-third year of the Final Era,” I said.
“And you . . . you machines,” he forced the words out. “How long?”
“I was dispatched from a locus four hundred million years after the Final Era. My existence spans a period you would find meaningless.”
“But—why? Unless—” Hope shone on his face like a searchlight on dark water.
“The probability matrix is not yet negatively resolved,” I said. “Our labors are directed toward a favorable resolution.”
“But you—a machine—still carrying on, aeons after man’s extinction . . . why?”
“In us, man’s dream outlived his race. We aspire to re-evoke the dreamer.”
“Again—why?”
“We compute that man would have wished it so.”
He laughed—a terrible laugh. “Very well, machine. With that thought to console me, I return to my oblivion. I will do what I can.” This time I let him go. I stood for a moment on the airy span, savoring for a final moment the sensations of my embodiment, drawing deep of the air of that unimaginably remote age.
Then I withdrew to my point of origin.
The over-intellect of which I was a fraction confronted me. Fresh as I was from a corporal state, its thought-impulses seemed to take the form of a great voice booming in a vast audience hall.
“The experiment was a success,” it stated. “The dross has been cleansed from the time stream. Man stands at the close of his First Era. Now his future is in his own hands.”
There was nothing more to say—no more data to exchange, no reason to mourn over all the doomed achievements of man’s many Eras.
We had shifted the main entropic current into a past in which time travel was never developed, in which the basic laws of nature rendered it forever impossible. The world-state of the Third Era, the Star Empire of the Fifth, the Cosmic sculpture of the Sixth—all were gone, shunted into sidetracks like Neanderthal and the Thunder lizards. Only Old Era man remained as a viable stem; Iron Age Man of the Twentieth Century.
And now it was time for the act of will on the part of the overintellect which would forever dissolve him/me back into the primordial energy-quanta from which I/we sprang so long ago. But I sent one, last pulse:
“Good-bye, Chief. You were quite a guy. It was a privilege to work with you.”
I sensed something which, if it had come from a living mind, would have been faint amusement.
“You served the plan many times, in many personae,” he said. “I sense that you have partaken of the nature of early man, to a degree beyond what I conceived as the capacity of a machine.”
“It’s a strange, limited existence,” I said. “With only a tiny fraction of the full scope of awareness. But while I was there, it seemed complete in a way that we, with all our knowledge, could never know.”
“You wished me farewell—a human gesture, without meaning. I will return the gesture. As a loyal Agent, you deserve a reward. Perhaps it will be all the sweeter for its meaninglessness.”
A sudden sense of expansion—attenuation—a shattering—
Then nothingness.
Out of nothingness, a tiny glimmer of light, faint and so very far away.
I sat up, rubbed my head, feeling dizzy.
Brambles scratched at me. It took me a few minutes to untangle myself. I was in the woods, a few hundred feet from town. The light I saw came from the window of a house. That made me think of Lisa, waiting for me beside a fireplace, with music.
I wondered what I was doing out here in the woods with a knot on my head, when I could have been there, holding her hand. I rubbed my skull some more, but it didn’t seem to stimulate my memory.
I had a dim feeling I had forgotten something—but it couldn’t have been very important. Not as important as getting back to Lisa.
I found the path and hurried down the trail toward home, feeling very tired and very hungry, but filled with a sense that life—even my little slice of it—was a very precious thing.
A SHAPE IN TIME
Anthony Boucher
Temporal Agent L-3H is always delectable in any shape; that’s why the bureau employs her on marriage-prevention assignments.
But this time, as she reported to my desk, she was also dejected. “I’m a failure, Chief,” she said. “He ran away—from me. The first man in twenty-five centuries . . .”
“Don’t take it so seriously,” I said. She was more than just another agent to me; I was the man who’d discovered her talents. “We may be able to figure out what went wrong and approach it on another time line.”
“But I’m no good.” Her body went scrawny and sagging. Sometimes I wonder how people expressed their emotions before mutation gave us somatic control.
“Now, there,” I said, expanding my flesh to radiate confidence, “just tell me what happened. We know from the dial readings that the Machine got you to London in 1880—”
“To prevent the marriage of Edwin Sullivan to Angelina Gilbert,” she grimaced. “Time knows why.”
I sighed. I was always patient with her. “Because that marriage joined two sets of genes which, in the course of three generations, would produce—”
Suddenly she gave me one of her old grins, with the left eyebrow up. “I’ve never understood the time results of an assignment yet, and don’t try to teach me now. Marriage prevention’s fun enough on its own. And I thought it was going to be extra good this time. Edwin’s beard was red and this long, and I haven’t had a beard in five trips. But something went—The worst of it is, it went wrong when I was naked.”
I was incredulous and said so.
“I don’t think even you really understand this, Chief. Because you are a man,” her half smile complimented me by putting the italics of memory under “man,” and men never have understood it. But the fact is that what men want naked, in any century, in any country, is what they’re used to seeing clothed, if you follow me. Oh, there are always some women who have to pad themselves out or pull themselves in, but the really popular ones are built to fit their clothes. Look at what they used to call ‘feelthy peectures’; anytime, anyplace, the girls that are supposed to be exciting have the same silhouette naked as the fashion demands clothed. Improbable though it seems.”
“L!” I gasped. She had suddenly changed so completely that there was hardly more than one clue that I was not looking at a boy.
“See?” she said. “That’s the way I had to make myself when you sent me to the 1920s. And the assignment worked; this was what men wanted. And then, when you sent me to 1957 . . .”
I ducked out of the way as two monstrous mammae shot out at me. “I hadn’t quite realized . . .” I began to confess.
“. . . Or the time I had that job in sixteenth century Germany.”
“Now you look pregnant!”
“They all did. Maybe they were. Or when I was in Greece, all waist and hips . . . But all of these worked. I prevented marriages and improved the genetic time flow. Only with Edwin . . .”
She was back in her own delectable shape, and I was able to give her a look of encouraging affection.
“I’ll skip the buildup,” she said. “I managed to meet Edwin, and I gave him this . . .” I nodded; how well I remembered this and its effects. “He began calling on me and taking me to theaters, and I knew it needed just one more step for him to forget all about that silly pink-and-white Angelina.”
“Go on,” I urged.
“He took a step, all right. He invited me to dinner in a private room at a discreet restaurant—all red plush and mirrors and a screen in front of the couch. And he ordered oysters and truffles and all that superstitious ritual. The beard was even better than I’d hoped: crisp and teasing ticklish and . . .” She looked at me speculatively, and I regretted that we’d bred out facial follicles beyond even somatic control. “When he started to undress me—and how much trouble that was in 1880!—he was delighted with this.”
