Time Travel Omnibus, page 626
So I got down to business. I shoveled away some dirt from around the logs, drove the pick between the logs and heaved. The bottom log came loose with less effort than I had expected, and I grabbed it with my hands and hauled it out. With the bottom log gone, the one on top of it was easily removed. Underneath the second log I could see another, but there was no need to bother with it, for with the two logs out, the way into the cave was open.
I shined the flashlight down into the cavity and saw that the floor was only about three feet down.
All the time that I had been working, the ticking had been going on, but I had paid little attention to it. I suppose I was getting somewhat accustomed to it. Or maybe I was consciously trying not to pay attention to it. Coming out of the dark maw of the cave, it was a spooky sound.
I let the shovel and the pick down into the cave, then, holding the flashlight, slid in myself. Once I hit the floor, I flashed the light into the cave’s interior and was surprised to see it was rather small—ten feet wide or so and half again as deep, with the roof some three feet above my head. It was dry—there was very little overlay above it, and the slope was so steep that most of the water ran off without a chance to seep down into the cave.
I directed the light at the back of it and could see where the miners, more than a century ago, had done some digging. There were a couple of heaps of broken rock lying against the back wall of the cave, rocks that had been pried out of the rather thin-layered structure of the Platteville limestone.
The ticking came from the back of the cave. I stalked it step by cautious step. I could feel the short hairs at the back of my neck prickling, but I kept on.
I found it at the very back of the cave, protruding from one of the strata that had been broken by the miners. And, having found it, I sat flat upon my seat, keeping the light trained directly on it. Sitting there, with all the wind of courage drained out of me, I stared at it.
It really wasn’t anything to be afraid of. It was not alive. It was, by rough definition, the mechanism I had told myself I’d find. It was cemented in the rock, only a part of it revealed.
It chittered at me and I said nothing back. If you’d paid me a million, I could have said nothing back.
Its end was a blunted point and seemed to be attached to some sort of cylinder. The cylinder, I estimated, was four inches or so in diameter. Above and all around it I could see the rough edges of the break that must have been made when the miners had worried off the forepart of the stone in which it was embedded.
And that was the hell of it—embedded!
The blunt end of the cylinder ticked at me.
“Oh, shut up,” I said. For not only was I frightened, I was exasperated. It was, I told myself, impossible. Someone, I thought, was pulling my leg, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure who it might be or how they could have done it.
A rattle of falling rock and earth brought me around to face the entrance of the cave. I saw that someone stood there, but for a moment I couldn’t make out who it was.
“What the hell do you mean,” I asked, “sneaking up on me?”
Tm sorry that I startled you,” the intruder said. “Please believe me, I did not intend to do so. But it seems that you have found what we’ve been looking for.”
I thought I recognized the voice and now I saw who it was—the man who had come from the Lodge to get the woman he had called Angela.
“Oh, it’s you,” I said. I didn’t try to conceal my dislike of him.
“Thornton,” he said, “we have to make a deal. We must have what you have found.”
He came across the cave and stood above me. The cylinder made a few excited clicks, then fell silent.
He squatted down beside me. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
When I turned I had moved the flashlight. Now I brought it back to shine on the blunted nose of the cylinder.
“Have you got a name?” I asked.
“Sure. My name is Charles.”
“O.K., Charles,” I said. “You say you want this thing. As a start, perhaps, you can tell me what it is. And be damn careful what you tell me. For my part, I can tell you that it’s embedded in the stone. See how the stone comes up close against it. No hole was ever bored to insert it. The limestone’s wrapped around it. Do you have any idea what that means?”
He gulped, but didn’t answer.
“I can tell you,” I said, “and you won’t believe it. This is Platteville limestone. It was formed at the bottom of an Ordovician sea at least four hundred million years ago, which means this thing is an artifact from at least as long ago. It fell into the sea, and when the limestone formed it was embedded in it. Now speak up and tell me what it is.”
He didn’t answer me. He took a different tack. “You know what we are,” he said.
“I have a good idea.”
“And you’re not about to talk of it.”
I think it most unlikely,” I said. “To begin with, no one would believe me.”
“So there’s no use in my pretending.”
“I rather doubt there is,” I said. “You see, I have the saddle and Neville has the Marathon photograph.”
“The what kind of photograph?”
“The Marathon photograph. Marathon was a battle fought two and a half millennia ago. It fell from Stefan’s pocket. Neville found it when he found the body.”
“So that is it,” he said.
“That is it,” I said. “And if you think you can come in here and demand this thing that I have found—”
“It’s not a matter of demanding,” he assured me, “nor of taking. We are beyond all demanding and all taking. We are civilized, you see.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Civilized.”
“Look,” he said, almost pleading, “there is no reason not to tell you. There were a people—you say four hundred million years ago, so I suppose it could have been that long ago . . .”
“A people?” I asked. “What people? Four hundred million years ago there weren’t any people.”
“Not here,” he said. “Not on Earth. On another planet.”
“How would you know?” I asked.
“Because we found the planet.”
“We? You talk of we. Just who are ‘we’ ?”
“Myself. Angela. Stefan. Others like us. What is left of the human race. Stefan was different, though. Stefan was a throwback, a mistake.”
“You’re jabbering,” I said. “You don’t make any sense. You’re from up ahead, in the future, is that it?”
It was all insane, I told myself. Insane to ask that question. Asking as if it were just an ordinary thing, not to be greatly wondered at.
“Yes,” he said. “A different world. You would not recognize it. Or the people in it.”
“I recognize you,” I said. “You seem like anybody else. You’re no different than anyone I know.”
He sighed, a patronizing sigh. “Think, Thornton,” he said. “If you were to go back to a barbarian age, would you wear a jacket and a pair of slacks? Would you talk twentieth-century English? Would you—”
“No, of course not. I would wear a wolfskin and I’d learn—so that is it,” I said. “Barbarian.”
“The term is relative,” he said. “If I’ve offended you—”
“Not in the least,” I said. I had to be fair about it. Depending on how far in time he had traveled, we might be barbarian. “You were telling me about a planet you had found.”
“Burned out,” he said. “The sun had novaed. All the water gone. The soil burned to powdered ash. You said half a billion years?”
“Almost that long,” I said.
“It could have been,” he said. “The star is a white dwarf now. That would have been time enough. The planet had been inhabited by an intelligence. We found—”
“You mean you, personally? You saw this planet . . .?”
He shook his head. “Not I. No one of my generation. Others. A thousand years ago.”
“In a thousand years,” I said, “a lot could happen. . .
“Yes, I know. Much is forgotten in a thousand years. But not this. We remember well; this is not a myth. You see, in all the time we’ve been out in space this is the first evidence of intelligence we found. There had been cities on that planet—well, maybe not cities, but structures. Nothing left, of course, but the stone that had been used in building them. It still was there, or most of it, stone on stone, much as it had been when it was laid. Some destruction, of course. Earthquakes, probably. No real weathering. Nothing left to cause weathering. All the water gone and the atmosphere as well. I forgot to say the atmosphere was gone.”
“Come to the point,” I said, rather brutally. “This is all wonderful, of course. And very entertaining . . .”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I can’t be sure,” I said. “But go on, anyhow.”
“You can imagine,” he said, “how avidly and thoroughly our people examined the ruins of the structures. The work was, after a time, discouraging, for the ruins could tell us very little. Then, finally, a graven stone was found . . .”
“A graven stone?”
A message stone. A slab of stone with a message carved upon it.” Don’t tell me that you found this stone and then, right off, you read the message.”
Not words,” he said. “Not symbols. Pictures. You have a word. Funny pictures.”
“Cartoons,” I said.
Cartoons. That is right. The cartoons told the story. The people of that planet knew their sun was about to nova. They had some space capability, but not enough to move a total population. What was worse, there was no planet they had ever found that could support their kind of life. I suspect it was much like our life, the same basis as our life. Oxygen and carbon. They didn’t look like us. They were bugs. Many-legged, many-armed. Perhaps, in many ways, a more efficient organism than ourselves. They knew they were finished. Perhaps not all of them. They might have hoped they still could find a planet where a few of them could live. That way the germ plasma could be preserved, if they were lucky. The plasma, but not the civilization, not their culture. Locating to another planet, having to come to grips with that planet and perhaps only a few of them to do it, they knew they would lose their culture, that it would be forgotten, that the few survivors could not maintain and preserve what they had achieved over many thousands of years. And it seemed to them important that at least the basics of their culture should be preserved, that it should not be lost to the rest of the galaxy. They were facing the prospect of cultural death. Do you have any idea of what the impact of cultural death might be like?”
“Like any other death,” I said. “Death is death. Someone turns out the light.”
“Not quite,” he said. “Not quite like any other death. No one likes the prospect of death. It may not be death itself, but the loss of identity we fear. The fear of being blotted out. Many men facing death are able to await it calmly because they feel they’ve made a good job out of life. They have done certain tasks or have stood for something they feel will cause them to be remembered. They are, you see, not losing identity entirely. They will be remembered, and that in itself is a matter of some identity. This is important for the individual; it is even more important for a race—a race proud of the culture it has built. Racial identity is even more important than individual identity. It is not too difficult for a man to accept the inevitability of his own death; it is almost impossible for him to accept the fact that some day there may be no humans, that the species will have disappeared.”
“I think I see,” I said. I had never thought of it before.
“So this race on the planet soon to be dead,” he said, “took steps to preserve their culture. They broke it down to its basic concepts and essentials and they recorded it and put it into capsules . . .”
I started in surprise. “You mean this?” I asked, gesturing at the cylinder enclosed within the stone.
“It is my hope,” he said, far too calmly, far too surely.
“You must be nuts,” I said. “First for believing all this . . .”
“There were many capsules,” he said. “There was a number indicated, but since we could not decipher their notation . . .”
“But they must have broadcast them. Simply flung them into space.”
He shook his head. “They aimed them at suns. Given the kind of technology they had, many would have reached their destinations. They were gambling that one of them would come to earth on some distant planet and be picked up by some intelligence with enough curiosity and enough ingenuity. . .
“They would have burned up when they entered the atmosphere.”
“Not necessarily. The technology . . .”
“Four hundred million years ago,” I said. “That long ago this precious planet of yours could have been across the galaxy from us.”
“We did not know, of course, how long ago,” he said, stubbornly, “but from our calculations our sun and their sun would never have been impossibly far apart. They have matched galactic orbits.”
I squatted there and tried to think, and all I had was a roaring in the brain. It was impossible to believe, but there was the cylinder, embedded in the stone, a cylinder that ticked industriously to call attention to itself.
“The ticking,” said Charles, as if he knew my thoughts, “is something we had never thought of. Perhaps it’s activated when anything fulfilling certain biological requirements comes within a certain distance of it. But, then, of course, we never expected to stumble upon one of the capsules.”
“What did you expect, then?” I asked. “From what you’ve said, you have been hunting for a capsule.”
“Not really hunting for one,” he told me. “Just hoping we’d find some evidence that some time in the past one had been found. Either found and destroyed or lost—maybe found and at least a portion of its message extracted from it, extracted perhaps, then lost again because it did not fit in with human thought. Always hoping, of course, that we might find one tucked away in some obscure hiding place, in a small museum, maybe, in an attic or a storeroom of an ancient house, in some old temple ruin.”
But why come back into the past, why come here? Surely in your own time—”
“You do not understand,” he said. “In our time there is very little left. Very little of the past. The past does not last forever—either materially or intellectually. The intellectual past is twisted and distorted; the material past, the records and the ruins of it, are destroyed or lost or decay away. And if by ‘here’ you mean in this particular place and time, we do few operations here. The Lodge—I understand that is what you call it—is what in your time you might term a rest and recreation area.”
“But the years you’ve spent at it,” I said. “All these years in a search that had so little chance.”
“There is more to it than that,” he said. “The finding of an alien capsule, how would you say it in the idiom of today? The finding of a capsule is the big prize on the board. It was something we were always on the lookout for, our investigative sense was always tuned to some hint that one might exist or at one time had existed. But we did not spend all our time—”
“Investigative? You said investigative. Just what the hell are you investigating?”
“History,” he said. “Human history. I thought there was no question that you would have guessed it.”
“I am stupid,” I said. “I didn’t guess it. You must have shelves of history. All you have to do is read it.”
“As I told you, there’s not much of the past left. When there are nuclear wars and a large part of the planet goes back to barbarism, the past goes down the drain. And what little there is left becomes very hard to find.”
“So there will be nuclear wars,” I said. “We had begun to hope that Earth might never have to face that. Could you tell me—”
“No,” said Charles, “I can’t.”
We hunkered there, the two of us, looking at the capsule.
“You want it?” I asked.
He nodded.
“If we can get it out undamaged,” I said.
The capsule clucked quietly at us, companionably.
I pulled the rock hammer out of my belt.
“Here,” I said, handing him the flashlight.
He took it and held it with its light trained on the capsule while I leaned close and studied the rock.
“We might be in luck,” I said. “There is a bedding plane, a seam, running just below the capsule. Limestone’s funny stuff. The layers can be either thick or thin. Sometimes it peels, sometimes it has to be broken.”
I tapped the bedding plane with the hammer. The stone flaked under the blows. Turning the hammer around to use the chisel end, I pecked away at the seam.
“Hand me the pick,” I said, and he handed it to me.
I had little room to work in, but I managed to drive the sharp end of the pick deep into the seam and a layer of the limestone peeled away and fell. The capsule was exposed along its lower side, and it took only a little more judicious chipping away of the rock to free it. It was some eighteen inches long and heavier than I had imagined it would be.
Charles put the flashlight down on the floor of the cave and reached out his hands for it.
“Not so fast,” I said. “We have a deal to make.”
“You can keep the saddle.”
“I already have it,” I said. “I intend to keep it.”
“We’ll repair it for you. Well even exchange a new one for it. We’ll teach you how to use it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m satisfied right here. I know how to get along right here. Seems to me a man could get into a lot of trouble taking off to other times. Now if you had some more photographs like the Marathon photograph. . . . Say a couple of hundred of them, of selected subjects.”
He put his hands up to his head in anguish.
