Time Travel Omnibus, page 760
The air was sweet but thick, thick. He had to fight to breathe it in. It was hardly worth the struggle.
He was still hightiming, more so than he had thought anybody could with an exposed body. He looked down and saw his beard tremble as it grew. He felt the stab of fingernails growing against his palms; there should have been an automatic cut-off but time was going too fast. Clenching his hand, he broke off the nails roughly. His boots had apparently broken off his toenails, and although his feet were uncomfortable the pressure was bearable. Anyway there was nothing he could do about it.
His immense tiredness warned him that the automatic nutrient system was not keeping up with his bodily time. With effort he fitted his claw to his belt and twisted until the supplementary food vial was released. He felt the needle pierce the skin of his belly; he twisted again until the hot surge of nourishment told him that the food-injector had reached a vein. Almost immediately his strength began to rise.
He watched the blur of buildings flashing into instantaneous shape around him, standing a moment, and then melting slowly away. Now he could see a little more of his surroundings. He seemed to be standing in the mouth of a cave or in a great doorway. It was curious, that, about the buildings. All the other buildings he had seen in time had worked the other way. First the slow upthrust as they were built, then the greying evenness of age, then the flash of removal. But, he reminded himself tiredly, he was backtiming and he thought it probable that no other human being had ever backtimed so hard and fast or for so long a time.
He seemed now to be rapidly decelerating. A building appeared around him, then he was outside of it, then back in again. Suddenly a great light shone in front of him.
Now he was inside a large palace. He seemed to be placed on a pedestal, high up at the center of things. Shimmering masses began to take form around him at rhythmic intervals: people? There was something wrong about the way they moved; why did they move with that strange awkwardness?
As the light persisted and this building seemed solid, he made an effort to squint to try to see more. His eyeballs were the only part of his anatomy that seemed to move freely. His breaking growing breaking fingernails and toenails and the growing beard reminded him to break off another food needle in his vein. His skin itched intolerably. As he realized the increasing immobility of his arms he felt panic and while there was still time pushed the continuous-flow button on the supplementary nutrients. Despite the food, enough to keep him alive in the cold of space, he could no longer move his hands and fingers. And still, it seemed only minutes since he had left the ship. (Dita, Dita, are you out of the Knot? Did you manage it in time? If only I calculated the weight load right . . .)
The building continued stable around him. He rolled his eyes to try to see where he was, when he was.
I’m still alive, he thought. Nobody else ever got out of anachron. That’s something. Nobody else ever stepped out of time to be seen again.
Deceleration continued. The bright light before him remained even and he found he could see better. In front of him was a sort of picture, high and large. What was it? Panels, a series of panels, paintings from some remote past.
He peered harder and recognized that the panel at the top left was himself, Tasco Magnon. There he was: shimmering space suit, marble armrests, pedestal below him. But they had given him wings like the wings of angels of the Old Strong Religion. Great white wings. And they had put a halo around his head. The next panel showed him as he felt: suit shimmering but his face old and tired.
The panels on the lower level were equally curious. The first showed a bed of grass or moss with luminescence glowing above it. The second showed a skeleton standing in a frame.
His tired mind sought to make sense of the panels.
People became plainer in the blur around him. Sometimes he could almost see individuals. The colors of the paintings brightened, brightened, until they flashed gay and bold, then disappeared.
Disappeared completely, flatly.
His brain, so old and tired now, struggled with immense effort to reach the truth. Physiological time was utterly deranged. Each minute seemed years. His thoughts became old memories while he thought them. But the truth came through to him:
He was still backtiming.
He had passed the time of his arrival and resurrection in this world. The resurrection was wisely prophesied by the beings who built the palace, painted the wings and halo around him.
He would die soon, in the remote past of this civilization.
Long afterwards, centuries before his own death, his alien remains would fade into the system of this time-space locus; and in fading, they would seem to glow and to assemble. They must have been untouchable and beyond manipulation. The people who had built the palace and their forefathers had watched dust turn to skeleton, skeleton heave upright, skeleton become mummy, mummy become corpse, corpse become old man, old man become young—himself as he had left the spaceship. He had landed in his own tomb, his own temple.
He had yet to fulfil the things which these people had seen him do, and had recorded in the panels of his temple.
Across his fatigue he felt a thrill of weary remote pride: he knew that he was sure to fulfil the godhood which these people had so faithfully recorded. He knew he would become young and glorious, only to disappear. He’d done it, a few minutes or millennia ago.
The clash of time within his body tore at him with peculiar pain. The food needle seemed to have no further effect. His vitals felt dry.
The building glowed as it seemed to come nearer.
The ages thrust against him. He thought, “I am Tasco Magnon and have been a god. I will become one again.”
But his last conscious thought was nothing grandiose. A glimpse of moon-pale hair, a half-turned cheek. In the aching lost silence of his own mind he called,
Dita! Dita!
The twisted timeship took form at the Dateport of the Instrumentality. Officials and engineers rushed up, opened the door. The young woman who sat at the controls staring blindly was white-faced beyond all weeping. They tried to rouse her from her trance-like state but she clung desperately to the controls, repeating like a chant:
“He jumped out. Tasco jumped out. He jumped out. Alone, alone in anachron . . .”
Gravely and gently the officials lifted her from the controls so that they could remove the now-priceless instruments.
THERE AND THEN
Steven Utley
The wind had shifted, and the night was full of landsmells, estuarine smells, green slime, black mud, rotten eggs. The only sounds were ship and sea sounds; occasionally, there was also a murmur of conversation in the shadow beneath the eaves of the helicopter deck. Chamberlain’s two assistants were back there somewhere, tending equipment, their voices muffled as if by layers of flannel. The moon had vanished into a vast, dense cloud bank. The fantail was so dark that I could see little of Chamberlain except his glowing red eye and, intermittently, red-tinged highlights of his face and hands. He looked devilish in those moments. He held the glowing eye sometimes between his fingers and sometimes between his lips. Every so often, its glow would expire, and he’d fumble with his pockets, there’d be a sputter of flame, the thick smells coming off the land would momentarily mix with that of burning tobacco. I wonder again how he got his ancient and disagreeable vice past screening.
Chamberlain sat in his beat-up deck chair, surrounded by a mutant-toadstool growth of meteorological godknowswhat. I leaned against the rail. Hundreds of people lived and worked abroad, but late at night it was easy to get the feeling, and hard to get rid of it, that we were the only human beings in all the world. Actually, we represented a few tenths of a percent of present world population.
After a while, I said, “You should come.”
“Too much work to do here.”
“Oh, come on. We’ve both been cooped up here too long. We could both use some excitement.”
“Hm.” Hm was the sound Chamberlain made when he meant to laugh. “I hear they could use some excitement ashore, too. There’s none of the tumult and squawk you just naturally associate with prehistoric times.”
“You don’t think a live sex act with trilobites will be exciting? Come on. A walk on the beach’ll do you good.”
“This the beach I smell? Ew.”
“We’ll be on a different beach. What you smell is blowing off the estuary. We’ll be way around the coast from here.”
“Still.” The old deck chair squeaked unhappily as he shifted his weight. “I’m a meteorologist. Meteorologists aren’t supposed to have to smell bad smells.”
“Then don’t smoke.”
He called me a body Nazi and ignited a new cigarette off the old. “Sure smells like the honey pot got kicked over.”
“Gripe, gripe,” I said. “You have it made. The weather never does anything here. The only forecast you ever make is warm, east wind, possibility of showers. You sleep when you want, come out and play with your expensive toys when you want—”
“You’ve got no damn idea what my workload’s like. Anybody has it made on this boat, it’s you.”
“—sit back and watch the sunset and drink till you nod off!” He made a rumbling noise deep inside himself. “You know as well as I do that nothing enhances a sunset better’n a drink. And nothing enhances a drink better’n a nap.” The glowing eye moved away from his face in the direction of his invisible assistants, Immelmanned, and went back to his face. When he spoke again, his voice was so quiet that I had to lean down into his nimbus of smoke to hear his words. “Those two wait till I’m asleep and then sneak away to fool around. If you know what I mean.”
“How simply, terribly shocking.”
“It’s true. Had my eye on ’em for a while.” The eye brightened for a moment, fell away in his hand. “Definitely something going on between ’em.”
“Well,” I said, “what could be more romantic than holding hands under a prehistoric moon? Ooh woo, what a little moonlight can do.”
“That from one of your damned old songs? Of course it is, got to be. I forgot, you’re one of them. Listen, it’s past the hand-holding stage with those two. They’re up to the bucking-and-grunting stage.”
I couldn’t recall having seen either of Chamberlain’s assistants in good light. Now, in my imagination, they appeared as shadows, rubbing against each other. I said, “Well, it’s still most people’s favorite way to pair-bond.”
“Fat lot of good pair-bonding ever did you, Kev. None of your ex-wives has spoken to you in years.”
“They’ve hardly been able to, under the circumstances.”
“Anyway, you think I want a couple of disgruntled ex-lovers on my team?” He made a disgusted sound. “When they fall out, this boat won’t be big enough for the two of ’em.”
“Ship. This is a ship, not a boat.”
“Ship, boat,” he said dismissively.
“Rain, dew,” I said, in the same tone. “If Captain Kelly ever hears you call his ship a boat, he’ll keelhaul you, hang you from the yardarm, and make you walk the plank all in the same afternoon.”
“He makes allowances for dotty scientists. Point is—”
“The point is, your young honeys are happy together right now. Maybe they’ll stay happy together. There’s always the possibility that things’ll work out, you know.”
“Hm. That what you told yourself along about the third time you got married?”
“Sure was.”
“You are such a dog with women,” he said, and extinguished his latest cigarette. A moment later, I heard a faint click in the darkness. “Want another drink?”
“Sure.”
He gave me another capful of brandy from his flask. Officially, it was a long walk from the Paleozoic to the nearest liquor store. In fact, there was probably enough booze on board to float us the thousand of kilometers to Caledonian Land-proto-Greenland, Kalaallitt Nunaat-to-be. Old hands know that when a body needs a drink, only a drink will do. Pleasantly abuzz, I peered off into the darkness toward the shore. Its smells were palpable, but it wasn’t even a glimmer in the night. The moon gave no sign of coming out of its cocoon of clouds. After a time, I realized that Chamberlain had fallen asleep. I left him snoring harshly in his deck chair, and his assistants to their alleged smooching, and went up to the helicopter deck.
The helicopters sat there like big metal sculptures of dragonflies lighted for Christmas. Mechanics tinkered with the motors while people wearing overalls loaded equipment and supplies. A shirtsleeved man stood by with the unmistakable air of a junior supervisor. He looked my way as I passed and seemed about to ask if I was authorized to be there, but then two of the mechanics said hello to me and I said hello back, and you could see the wheel turn behind the shirtsleeved man’s face: maybe I wasn’t a scruffy old stowaway, maybe I was somebody eccentric but important. I knew the mechanics and loaders but had no idea who he was. So many similar-looking people had arrived in the past few weeks that I didn’t know who a tenth of them were.
The ship’s engines throbbed suddenly as Captain Kelly got us under way. I put strangers out of my mind and strolled all the way forward and halfway back. Ours was in no way a lovely vessel. It had originally been designed and built during the Oughts to deliver Marines to beachheads and provide support with Missiles and helicopter gunships. Not a lot had been done, or could have been done, to tone down its brooding militariness. The missile launchers were gone now, and the gun turret rebuilt to house one of the astronomy team’s big telescopes, but the superstructure, helicopter deck, and boat bay had required no redesign. The forest of antennae, scanner, things, and stuff rising above the bridge looked formidably thorny. Except for human beings in helicopters, there wasn’t an airborne creature on Earth, but still the dishes turned and cocked and listened, as intently as if swarms of kamikaze aircraft lurked over the horizon.
The task of renaming the vessel had fallen to a group of more or less prominent scientists, who duly voted to rechristen it the H.G. Wells. Some nasty hustling little demagogue in Congress scotched that on the grounds of Wells having been, besides a lousy stinking Brit—this, of course, was well after the end of the Special Relationship between the countries—a communist, or some closely related species of one-worlder. The story goes that, told to submit something “more patriotic and appropriate,” most of the scientists next agreed that the vessel should be renamed after one or another of certain late-twentieth century-and-early-twenty-first-century presidents, because the ship, too, would move boldly into the past. “This kind of reckless sarcasm,” a dissenter warned, “will backfire on us,” and sure enough, it did. Most of us since neglected to call the ship anything except “here” when we were aboard and “the ship” when we weren’t. And we did keep a big framed portrait of Bertie Wells hanging in the rec room, over his alleged epitaph: Dammit, I told you so!
The brandy and the stroll conspired to fill me with a luxurious sense of peace and belonging. When my pocketphone buzzed, I murmured absently into the mouthpiece.
“Kevo,” said Ruth Lott, “you’re up.”
Peace and belonging fled. Ruth had the mellifluous Georgia-accented voice I hated to hear. I said, “Ruth, all decent people are asleep at this hour.”
“That’s how I knew you’d be up.”
“Okay, I’m up. I just hope you’re calling about something really interesting, like maybe an out-of-clothes experience you personally have had.”
The phone barely did her great sweet laugh justice. “I have a little job for you.” She always had a little job for me. “Come see me, I’ll tell you all about it.”
I knew and she knew that she had me, but even a rabbit struggles in a lion’s grip. I said, “It really is kind of late.”
“Won’t take but a minute.” When I hesitated long enough to make her impatient, she said, “Oh, and before I forget—” her voice was as dulcet-toned as before, but I wasn’t fooled “—note on your calendar, extension review next month.”
“Now that’s low!”
“Why, whatever do you mean?”
“It’s blackmail!”
“No, actually, Kevo, it’s extortion. Bye.”
“Go ahead,” I said into a suddenly dead phone, “hang up on me, see what it gets you.”
Then, having no choice, I did as I was told.
Ruth was a Junoesque fiftyish woman with the world’s sliest smile. She trained it on me when I appeared in her hatchway. She said, “Are those the best clothes you have?”
“I was—I am going ashore when we get to Number Four camp.”
“Please see if you can’t make yourself just a teensy bit more presentable. I want you to meet a party at the jump station in a little while.”
“Since when am I the official greeter? You break your legs off above the knee?”
“These are media types. You should get along.”
“There’s got to be someone else on this bucket who’s—what am I supposed to do? It’s not like these people will arrive in any condition to listen to me give a welcome speech.”
“All you have to do is say hello, show them around when they’re up to it, whatever. I’m making them your responsibility.”
“But why me?”
“Because you are not snowed under with work, you bum. How often do you actually touch your wordboard?”
I gave her my most pained look. “Writing isn’t just a matter of touching a wordboard. You’d know that if you’d ever had specialized training in the putting together of subjects and verbs so that they agree. The real work’s mental.”
“You’re mental,” and she laughed her laugh again. “How is the book coming along? Think you’ll have it finished by the Mesozoic? Listen to me, and believe me when I tell you this, I’m doing you a favor. Once we’re privatized—don’t give me that look, we both know it’s a done deal—once we’re privatized, the new bosses will be looking very carefully at their assets and liabilities here. These include,” and she ticked them off on her fingers, “one converted assault ship with some el strange-o scientists embarked, and some hired help, and you. You’ve been hanging on here for too long. It’s time you had visible means of support. You need to be seen earning your keep. This little job won’t take too much of a bite out of your life. Just till these newcomers get acclimated. Just make sure they have a good time.”
