Time Travel Omnibus, page 645
Between them, strung in a gentle curve, were all the others. The black-clad, hooded figures from the gem-doored ellipsoid, the men and the women who had arrived by time-gas and by time-drug, by time-quake, and by time-slip, those who had arrived by machine, those who had arrived by mind, one who had risen naked and weeping from a great glass coffin of cushions and of blossoms, and one who had struggled wild-eyed and screaming from a barrow beneath the black cindery beach itself, the indigo-robed seer from the city of towers, and the winged godling from the sky above the water.
There was a hush as they all stared at the black disk upon the red disk, the stripes of color reflecting from them across the face of the oily sea to the edge of the black cindery beach. Then a voice broke the silence. How will we know him, the voice asked.
By his face, one replied. By his haggard face, his bruised face, his face of despair.
By his clothing another said. By his quaint clothing, his rough cloth trousers and oddly buttoned jacket and the strange cloth cap he wears on his head and the stranger cloth streamer that he ties about his throat.
By his machine, a third claimed. By his strange, squat, ugly machine that looks all askew with its ivory bars and its brass railings, its shining rod of quartz and its odd ugly saddle.
And how will he know us, the seer from the city of towers asked to know.
We will call him by name. We will call him Nebogipfel.
Nebogipfel.
It was as if the name had summoned the man from out of time’s grasp. In the center of their half-circle he appeared. The time traveler and the time machine. The machine was truly squat and ugly and askew. The traveler bore his face of despair.
He rose from the saddle of his machine, slid the starting level carefully into a notched position and locked it there. He stepped onto the crunching gravel, stared at the black disk that stood before the sun’s blood-red demicircle for a little while, then wheeled slowly, gazing at the face of each of the many who had waited to greet him.
He shook his head sadly.
Is this—? He gestured with both hands, holding them as far apart as his feet were spread on the black cinders. The palms were turned toward each other.
Is this—all? Is this—the end? The end of it all?
He pointed at the red, dying sun with the round black blemish now rolling slowly past its center, toward the edge where the dim glare faded into the blackness of the sky. He moved his hand so that the eye that followed was led across the oily surface of the sea, where only the occasional furious eruption of predator and prey broke the red-trimmed mourning field.
All striving, all dreaming, all thought and suffering bring us to—this?
He gave a shrug of hopelessness. A rictus tugged his face into momentary hideous grin.
But we had greatness, one of the others challenged. In my time—in my time men built cities that towered above the tallest trees, filled their halls with philosophers and actors, musicians and tumblers, and living, naked tableaux. Our glories were recorded on parchment and canvas, in marble and in granite. The world he beheld us and—
Trembled? Nebogipfel supplied.
No, the other shook his head. No one trembled before us. The world smiled in joy, traded its goods for our art, sang the praises of our creators. We were beloved of the whole world. This was our greatness.
And now? Nebogipfel asked. And now? What is there now of your greatness?
The other was silent.
In my day, a different voice spoke; in my day, we marched! The voice was harsh, strong, confident. All who stood before us, we slew! The rest we made slaves! In my day none could resist! We were the bravest, we were the strongest, we were the hardest! We were never beaten! Never! Never! Never!
Well, said Nebogipfel. I bow to your splendor. I am dazzled by your might! Your empire stretches before me and I cringe in awe. He swept an arm, encompassing black cinders, blood-red waters, black sky.
In my day, another claimed, we saw these limits. Yes, we had our time on the earth. We dug and we learned and we saw that we had not been the first, and we knew that we would not be the last, either, unless we burned the world and left behind only a dead stone. So we built. Not cities! No! Not fortresses! We built argosies to other worlds, ships to sail to other stars, bolts to carry our seed from the loins of this world to the wombs of a million waiting mothers scattered across God’s whole realm! Down into the dust for us, down into the dust, but our children live! Yes, they live yet on a million stars in every direction!
And yet we just begin! A million stars? What did your age know of the universe, Nebogipfel? How many worlds did you visage? Seven? Seventy? Seventy thousand?
A billion worlds, Nebogipfel, a billion worlds in one cinder!
The speaker bent and lifted a blackened pebble from beneath his feet.
What are a billion of these Nebogipfel?
He hurled the cinder at the tweed-suited time traveler in the center of the ring. The cinder struck Nebogipfel on the cheek, split the skin above the bone and fell, clattering onto the beach. A narrow trickle of blood dribbled down the time traveler’s face and soaked into his soft shirt collar.
The time traveler smiled.
A billion suns? Nebogipfel asked. What are ten billion billion suns? How long will they burn? Ten billion billion years? And then—what?
He threw out an arm, gesturing across the sea.
This?
The black disk had transited the half-set redness; a little warmth returned to the tired, musty air.
And after this? In another hundred thousand years, or another hundred million, even this ends.
He pulled his soft cloth cap from his head. Straw-colored hair stuck up in all directions. The time traveler drew the cap across his face so the smooth silken lining covered his eyes. He bowed his head, face still covered, shoulders slumped, the image of a mourner to his own inevitable end.
But our children! The other exclaimed.
Nebogipfel did not move.
The other stared, stricken, at the dying sun. Around him the ranks of the assembled time travelers stood silent and motionless.
Then our grandchildren! Our great-grandchildren!
Nebogipfel did not move.
The travelers remained in silence.
One of the two pipestem-legged travelers advanced across the black cinders, unsteady limbs quavering with every step. The figure halted, facing Nebogipfel, staring up at Nebogipfel, who stood twice the height of the other.
The taller figure lowered the cap from before his eyes and stood, holding it in his hand, looking downward into the great, solemn, squinting-eyed countenance. An involuntary grin worked its way across Nebogipfel’s features.
Yes?
We knew you were coming here today, Nebogipfel. Why do you think this assemblage awaited you? Do you think that these travelers from so many eras, so may races, so many civilizations, all happened to arrive here on this beach, today, by chance?
The tiny mouth drew back in a wry expression.
Nebogipfel tugged his cloth cap back onto his straw-colored head. I suppose there was a plan of some sort, then, he said. He drew himself up to his full height so he towered more than ever over the tiny figure. This is the end of my journey, Nebogipfel said. I miss the London of my era. I lost my Weena. I hate the world of AD 802,701, and every later age I ever visited only made me more laden with gloom, more burdened with hopelessness.
All I want is to go back to my home. Here—
He slapped a hand on the saddle of his time machine, setting the whole thing to quivering and tipping as if it were about to tumble into the black cinders or the blood-red water.
That is precisely what you must not do, the tiny figure piped.
I shall board again with Mrs. Watchett, Nebogipfel said. I shall contribute another seventeen papers on physical optics to the Philosophical Review. I shall become the most ordinary of men among ordinary men. No more shall I see the white sphinx.
There you are wrong! the little being piped. Officiously, he gestured and men and women moved forward from the semicircle that stood surrounding Nebogipfel. Strong arms seized the original time traveler. Cords appeared and he was bound and placed on the saddle of his machine.
We are all time travelers, Nebogipfel, the little being said. But you are the prototype, you are the ideal of whom we are all faint reflections. You say that you despair of the ultimate end of life. What would you call it? Some would say, the ultimate entropy. Some would say, the heat death of the universe. Some would say, the cosmic nirvana.
But your own philosophy says, there is no forever. There is nothing that endures unending. When the universe reaches its end, Nebogipfel, what lies beyond the end? What lies beyond the end?
Again the little being gestured. A hand moved an ivory bar on Nebogipfel’s time machine. Another turned the glittering quartz rod.
Nebogipfel shouted. No! Send me back! Send me back!
But the other said, Yes! You must go on, Nebogipfel! Once you have tasted of futurity, there is no returning! You must go onward, not back! What lies beyond the end, Nebogipfel? What lies beyond the end?
A tiny hand gestured. A powerful hand reached, unlocked the starting lever of Nebogipfel’s time machine. The lever was thrown. Nebogipfel shouted. The machine and its rider flickered, faded, disappeared from the beach.
The tiny figure returned to its place at the edge of the pink foaming sea.
None of us will know, one of the people standing there said.
Nebogipfel knows, another said.
THE VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE
Ian Watson
(1990)
The Very Slow Time Machine—for convenience: the VSTM[*]—made its first appearance at exactly midday I December 1985 in an unoccupied space at the National Physical Laboratory. It signalled its arrival with a loud bang and a squall of expelled air. Dr. Kelvin, who happened to be looking in its direction, reported that the VSTM did not exactly spring into existence instantly, but rather expanded very rapidly from a point source, presumably explaining the absence of a more devastating explosion as the VSTM jostled with the air already present in the room. Later, Kelvin declared that what he had actually seen was the implosion of the VSTM. Doors were sucked shut by the rush of air, instead of bursting open, after all. However it was a most confused moment—and the confusion persisted, since the occupant of the VSTM (who alone could shed light on its nature) was not only time-reversed with regard to us, but also quite crazy.
One infuriating thing is that the occupant visibly grows saner and more presentable (in his reversed way) the more that time passes. We feel that all the hard work and thought devoted to the enigma of the VSTM is so much energy poured down the entropy sink—because the answer is going to come from him, from inside, not from us; so that we may as well just have bided our time until his condition improved (or, from his point of view, began to degenerate). And in the meantime his arrival distorted and perverted essential research at our laboratory from its course without providing any tangible return for it.
The VSTM was the size of a small station wagon; but it had the shape of a huge lead sulphide, or galena, crystal—which is, in crystallographer’s jargon, an octahedron-with-cube formation consisting of eight large hexagonal faces with six smaller square faces filling in the gaps. It perched precariously—but immovably—on the base square, the four lower hexagons bellying up and out towards its waist where four more squares (oblique, vertically) connected with the mirror-image upper hemisphere, rising to a square north pole. Indeed it looked like a kind of world globe, lopped and sheered into flat planes: and has remained very much a separate, private world to this day, along with its passenger.
All faces were blank metal except for one equatorial square facing southwards into the main body of the laboratory. This was a window—of glass as thick as that of a deep-ocean diving bell—which could apparently be opened from inside, and only from inside.
The passenger within looked as ragged and tattered as a tramp; as crazy, dirty, woe-begone and tangle-haired as any lunatic in an ancient Bedlam cell. He was apparently very old; or at any rate long solitary confinement in that cell made him seem so. He was pallid, crookbacked, skinny and rotten-toothed. He raved and mumbled soundlessly at our spotlights. Or maybe he only mouthed his ravings and mumbles, since we could hear nothing whatever through the thick glass. When we obtained the services of a lip-reader two days later the mad old man seemed to be mouthing mere garbage, a mishmash of sounds. Or was he? Obviously no one could be expected to lip-read backwards; already, from his actions and gestures, Dr. Yang had suggested that the man was time-reversed. So we video-taped the passenger’s mouthings and played the tapes backwards for our lip-reader. Well, it was still garbage. Backwards, or forwards, the unfortunate passenger had visibly cracked up. Indeed, one proof of his insanity was that he should be trying to talk to us at all at this late stage of his journey rather than communicate by holding up written messages—as he has now begun to do. (But more of these messages later; they only begin—or, from his point of view, cease as he descends further into madness—in the summer of 1989.)
Abandoning hope of enlightenment from him, we set out on the track of scientific explanations. (Fruitlessly. Ruining our other, more important work. Overturning our laboratory projects—and the whole of physics in the process.)
To indicate the way in which we wasted our time, I might record that the first “clue” came from the shape of the VSTM which, as I said, was that of a lead sulphide or galena crystal. Yang emphasized that galena is used as a semiconductor in crystal rectifiers: devices for transforming alternating current into direct current. They set up a much higher resistance to an electric current flowing in one direction than another. Was there an analogy with the current of time? Could the geometry of the VSTM—or the geometry of energies circulating in its metal walls, presumably interlaid with printed circuits—effectively impede the forward flow of time, and reverse it? We had no way to break into the VSTM. Attempts to cut into it proved quite ineffective and were soon discontinued, while X-raying it was foiled, conceivably by lead alloyed in the walls. Sonic scanning provided rough pictures of internal shapes, but nothing as intricate as circuitry; so we had to rely on what we could see of the outward shape, or through the window—and on pure theory.
Yang also stressed that galena rectifiers operate in the same manner as diode valves. Besides transforming the flow of an electric current they can also demodulate. They separate information out from a modulated carrier wave—as in a radio or TV set. Were we witnessing, in the VSTM, a machine for separating out “information”—in the form of the physical vehicle itself, with its passenger—from a carrier wave stretching back through time? Was the VSTM a solid, tangible analogy of a three-dimensional TV picture, played backwards?
We made many models of VSTMs based on these ideas and tried to send them off into the past, or the future—or anywhere for that matter! They all stayed monotonously present in the laboratory, stubbornly locked to our space and time.
Kelvin, recalling his impression that the VSTM had seemed to expand outward from a point, remarked that this was how three-dimensional beings such as ourselves might well perceive a four-dimensional object first impinging on us. Thus a 4-D sphere would appear as a point and swell into a full sphere then contract again to a point. But a 4-D octahedron-and-cube? According to our maths this shape couldn’t have a regular analogue in 4-space, only a simple octahedron could. Besides, what would be the use of a 4-D time machine which shrank to a point at precisely the moment when the passenger needed to mount it? No, the VSTM wasn’t a genuine four-dimensional body; though we wasted many weeks running computer programs to describe it as one, and arguing that its passenger was a normal 3-space man imprisoned within a 4-space structure—the discrepancy of one dimension between him and his vehicle effectively isolating him from the rest of the universe so that he could travel hindwards.
That he was indeed travelling hindwards was by now absolutely clear from his feeding habits (i.e. he regurgitated), though his extreme furtiveness about bodily functions coupled with his filthy condition meant that it took several months before we were positive, on these grounds.
All this, in turn, raised another unanswerable question: if the VSTM was indeed travelling backwards through time, precisely where did it disappear to, in that instant of its arrival on 1 December 1985? The passenger was hardly on an archaeological jaunt, or he would have tried to climb out.
At long last, on midsummer day 1989, our passenger held up a notice printed on a big plastic eraser slate.
CRAWLING DOWNHILL, SLIDING UPHILL!
He held this up for ten minutes, against the window. The printing was spidery and ragged; so was he.
This could well have been his last lucid moment before the final descent into madness, in despair at the pointlessness of trying to communicate with is. Thereafter it would be downhill all the way, we interpreted. Seeing us with all our still eager, still baffled faces, he could only gibber incoherently thenceforth like an enraged monkey at our sheer stupidity.
He didn’t communicate for another three months.
When he held up his next (i.e. penultimate) sign, he looked slightly sprucer, a little less crazy (though only comparatively so, having regard to his final mumbling squalor).
THE LONELINESS! BUT LEAVE ME ALONE!
IGNORE ME TILL 1995!
We held up signs (to which, we soon realized, his sign was a response):
ARE YOU TRAVELLING BACK THROUGH TIME? HOW? WHY?
We would have also dearly loved to ask: WHERE DO YOU DISAPPEAR TO ON DECEMBER 1 1985? But we judged it unwise to ask this most pertinent of all questions in case his disappearance was some sort of disaster, so that we would in effect be foredooming him, accelerating his mental breakdown. Dr. Franklin insisted that this was nonsense; he broke down anyway. Still, if we had held up that sign, what remorse we would have felt: because we might have caused his breakdown and ruined some magnificent undertaking.
