by Earl
After the off-and-on blink of my movement west and south, the time-ship hung suspended over a country home. A brick building at the rear housed a laboratory. My iridium-sponge brain had been brought to life here, by Dr. Charles Link.
CHAPTER II
A Search Through Time
“IT worked, Adam!” Eve said.
“You’re wonderful!”
Eve is so much like a human girl at times, proud of her man’s doings.
“Bosh,” I returned. “You know it was as simple as ABC.” But even though my phonic voice was flat, I experienced a real thrill. No human had ever traveled the highroad of time.
“It looks hazy below,” Eve commented, looking down through the bottom window. “Why is that?”
It puzzled me. “We’ll go closer,” I announced.
It took careful manipulation of the controls to set the ship down just beside the brick laboratory. A misstep and I might crash through its walls, or into the ground. But after the usual blink, we found ourselves hovering a foot off the ground, and directly in line with the open door of the laboratory.
I looked within. My heart skipped a beat, to use the idiom.
There stood my creator alive again—Dr. Link. The man who had labored for twenty years to achieve the iridium-sponge brain. And who had brought to life a being he named Adam Link and called his son. I looked over his white hair, stooped shoulders, thin kind face—and knew that I loved him.
I opened the time-ship’s door.
“Dr. Link!” I called. “It’s I—Adam Link!”
He didn’t turn. Didn’t seem to hear. My voice was curiously muffled. Eagerly, I stepped from the door—or tried to. Some invisible force seemed to hold me back. Impatiently I exerted my full machine-powers, till gears whined. But I couldn’t move an inch beyond the hatchway.
“Look, Adam!”
I looked, at Eve’s cry. Dr. Link had been working over an inert metal form stretched across his workbench. My metal form! This was the day he had sent the life-giving current of electricity through my metal brain and brought it to life.
I watched, fascinated.
My “birth” was about to be reenacted, before my own eyes. Bizarre experience! I saw Dr. Link’s fingers depress a key, as he watched my unmoving form on the bench. Nothing happened. No sign of life. Again and again he closed the key, shooting powerful currents through the iridium-sponge that should now awake to sentient life.
But it didn’t.
Dr. Link turned away finally. Bitterness rested in his face. The bitterness of a man who had tried this same thing countless times and had always failed. Suddenly his kindly old face turned savage. He picked up a wrench, swinging it.
I gasped in horror. He was about to smash it down on the inert robot’s iridium-sponge brain. The brain lay exposed, with no skull-plates protecting it. One blow and the sensitive organ would be destroyed forever.
“Dr. Link—don’t!” I yelled. Even then, my thoughts wondered how this could be—myself trying to save myself!
As before, Dr. Link could not hear. And as before, some strange force held me back when I tried to leap from the time-ship. I could only watch, my mind reeling. If that wrench descended, would I blink out? Cease to exist? Had I somehow thrown the normal course of events awry terribly, by coming here?
The paradoxes of time-travel! I had ignored them till now. What blunder had I committed?
Eve and I watched, clutching hands.
THE wrench descended. The delicate iridium-sponge brain of Adam Link spattered under the blow like broken glass. Dr. Link flung the wrench to the floor and slumped into a chair, weeping. Twenty years of labor had culminated in utter failure. The intelligent robot had not come to life. The living brain of metal was an impossible achievement, after all!
Dr. Link sat there, shoulders heaving.
“Adam!” Eve whispered. “What does it all mean? This is your creation scene. But it’s different! It ended not with your coming to life, but with your destruction!”
“And yet I’m alive!” I murmured. “I didn’t blink out when the wrench smashed that metal brain. According to this scene, I was never brought to life. Yet here I am!”
Profound, stunning mystery of time! My thoughts clicked swiftly. I had the answer in a moment.
“This is not my creation scene, Eve,” I said. “Time is an entropy-zone. Events move haphazardly through it. They rebound from one another. Some one way, some another. What we’ve witnessed is a different ‘rebound’ of the creation-event.”
Eve stared.
I tried to explain another way.
“This is not our ‘world’ at all, Eve. That is why we couldn’t enter it, from our ship—because we don’t have any real existence in it. There are different Dr. Links, and Adam Links. Perhaps, in all the greater universe, an infinity of them. And all have experienced totally different results.”
Eve’s mind is quick. She nodded.
“I see. It’s the basic theory of coexisting worlds, side by side, separated by different courses through time. Or simply different rebounds in the entropy-zone. But Adam, how did we happen to strike the wrong course?”
I thought that out in three long seconds.
“Because we took a haphazard route back in time. The only way to keep in our world is by plotting a definite course. Like a mariner guiding his ship across a great ocean without seeing the land he must arrive at. I’ll begin plotting now—”
AN hour later, I threw down my pencil and shook my head wearily. “Impossible,” I said. “There are an infinity of courses and rebounds. We might wander forever among them, and never strike our particular world.”
“Too bad,” Eve murmured. “We’ll have to give up our quest for Thor, then.”
I hated to do that. A burning resolve rested in me to penetrate back to that remote past—of our certain time-world—and find another robot like myself named Thor. I had spent six months building the time-ship. I could not give up this easily.
An hour later, after intense thought, I jumped up and set the time-dial. Eve gasped, as she read off the figure.
“One hundred million years ago! Adam, what’s the use of going to that remote past? Thor wouldn’t be there.”
“No, but our world will be,” I retorted. “There must have been fewer rebounds that long ago, when the universe was younger. Fewer other-worlds. We have more chance of locating ours there. We’ll know when we can step out of our ship physically, that we’ve hit our world. Then I can retrace our world’s course forward in time quite easily. I’m determined to find Thor. If need be, I’ll go back to the beginning of time, when all things started.”
I was that set to finish my venture through time.
One hundred million years blinked by just as quickly as three years had, when I pulled the lever. Our ship had dropped like a stone down into the entropy-depths of the greater cosmos.
One second the scene of a Dr. Link weeping bitterly over his smashed robot-brain was before our eyes. The next second the towering forest of a steamy, carboniferous world engulfed the view outside our windows. Giant dinosaurs lumbered nearby. Pterodactyls soared like great aircraft overhead. A brighter sun shone down with pitiless intensity. This was the world before man.
But it was hazy, almost ghost-like.
When I tried to step from the ship, my body refused to move. The time-warp around the. craft held me with bonds of steel. These would not loosen unless the time-warp dissolved and coalesced with its own particular entropy-world.
“We’ll try the next other-world,” I said grimly. “And the next, and next . . .”
WE DID NOT count the numberless worlds that blinked into being before us. Most were dinosaur-worlds, of varying detail. Some, however, were vastly strange. Barren worlds, where some blight-event had wiped out all life. Dark worlds, where the sun had mysteriously burned dim. A cracking world, reeling back from the impact of a dark body from space.
And so on—infinitum.
Your human minds might
have staggered to realize how many different other-worlds were drifting through the unknown. Even our sturdy robot minds were dazed. Yet they meant nothing, these other-worlds. They are as remote and unattainable to any of us—humans and robots alike—as the world of an atom. They register to us only as light-impressions which pervade all the ether. Eve and I could never “land” on them, in any slightest way.
No world could be real to us except the one which had given us being—physical being. All the other Earths were chimeras, fantasies, non-existent wraiths.
How long must we search? Eons perhaps, hopelessly?
CHAPTER III
One Hundred Million B.C.
“ADAM!”
It was a sharp cry from Eve. We had just warped into another dinosaur-type world.
“Adam, it’s clear and distinct outside. Maybe this is it!”
It was. When we opened the door and moved out, no force opposed us. This was our own Earth, of 100 million B.C. The Earth which had spawned our human race, and our Dr. Link—and us.
We stepped clear of the ship and viewed the past world as never seen by human eyes. Giant ferns, steamy air, choked pools of swarming life, endless jungle. We saw a ratlike mammal scurry by. It was perhaps the ancestral mammal-form from which would evolve all the later mammals, and apes, and man.
For this was the Reptile Age.
We saw their mighty forms here and there in the distance. Their deep roars shook the ground. They were the lords of Earth.
An ear-splitting roar sounded abruptly, just back of us. Eve shrieked, turning. A mammoth two-legged Tyrannosaurus Rex—king of them all—thundered down on us. Anything was its prey, in its dim-seeing, vicious little eyes. Its great rows of sharp teeth could crunch through anything.
Anything except metal, luckily.
It had caught up Eve like a doll with its foreclaws, and tossed her into its cavernous jaws. The grind of its teeth against Eve’s metal form shivered the air. Amazed, it tried again, bellowing angrily.
Eve struggled, but her arms were pinned between ridges of teeth. If the monster kept crunching away, with stubborn ferocity, he might eventually damage Eve.
I think the roar I gave, from my mechanical larynx, was louder than any from a dinosaur. Eve, my mental mate, was in danger! I was probably as savage at that moment as any of the creatures around.
I leaped up twenty feet, to the creature’s jaws, grasping the lower one. The combined weight of Eve and myself dragged its head down. I then braced my shoulders against the upper jaw and heaved upward, to release Eve.
I am a robot. I have machine-strength. But it took every watt of my energy-system to force those mighty jaws apart.
“Jump out, Eve!” I yelled. “And then keep away. This monster won’t leave us alone, so I’ll have to finish him.”
When Eve had scrabbled to safety, I put my hands under the upper jaw and heaved again. I strained every muscle-cable in a furious effort. I forced the jaws wider, wider, wider—and there was a sudden crack as the lower jawbone snapped. Thank heaven it had not been some part of me!
The behemoth let out a squeal of pain that very nearly ruptured my tympanums. I leaped back. Its pain-maddened eyes glared at me as though contemplating another attack. It still had great foreclaws with which to rend, and a mighty tail with which to batter. But it drew back from me. Tyrannosaurus Rex, perhaps the most formidable monster in all evolution—fled.
“Are you all right, Eve? Let’s get back in the ship—”
I broke off.
A great pterodactyl swooped down from over the trees, claws extended to grasp me. I smote it with my fist, on the side of the head. It let out a squawk of dismay, tried to rise, but fell a dozen yards away, completely stunned.
I laughed. The dinosaurs ruled all Earth—except this little patch on which I stood. I might have held it forever against them. Foolish thoughts. I pulled Eve into the ship, setting the time-dial.
ALREADY, since our arrival in our own time-world of the past, I had figured out the course up through the entropy-levels toward the future. If you wish to see the formula I used . . . but no use to set it down. I’m afraid no human scientist would understand. Eve spoke before we started.
“We changed the past, Adam, in some small degree! We’ve come to the past and entered into its course of events. What will it mean to the future?”
I shook my head on its swivel, noticing it grated, and making a mental note to oil it the first chance I had.
“We haven’t changed our world’s past. We’ve only started off another other-world. Since we’re here, we’ve definitely been in our Earth’s past. That’s immutable. The other-world caused by us is the one that goes on as if we hadn’t come. It will be a world that never knew Adam Link!”
I will not go further into such paradoxes. You would have to understand time as I do to perceive the grand scope of it.
I pulled the time-lever, annihilating 100 million years. We blinked into 50,000 B.C.
We looked out over the Paleolithic world. I sent the ship to north Europe, in a blink of rotation-time. Thor and the Norse gods, if based on fact, would have lived in the north country. Cruising forward a hundred feet high, we looked down.
We saw sub-men[1] roaming the forests and plains.
But no sign of “gods.”
“They must have been more civilized beings,” I reasoned. “Fables are vague about time, but Thor and the Norse gods must have existed somewhere between 50,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. We’ll go forward to 40,000.”
Again sub-men. But surprisingly, the beginnings of civilization, too. Villages of Cro-Magnon—crude boats, spears, pottery. I jumped to 30,000. Cities had sprung up, in that ten thousand years, humming with activity. Aircraft, steamships, cross-country powerlines were in evidence.
I looked at the dials. Could they be wrong? This looked like 20th-century civilization—way back here in 30,000 B.C.! But one thing proved the veracity of my time-gauge—the presence of sub-men. Short, gnarly Neanderthal, and large, hulking Heidelberg still roamed the wilder regions, alongside this civilization of Cro-Magnon.
Cro-Magnon had also set up centers of civilization in a broad, rich valley south of the Norse-country. The future Mediterranean basin, at present dry land. And thirdly, on a large flowering island in the Atlantic.
Eve was excited.
“All legend come true, Adam! It’s the mythology we were reading before we left. Civilization in the-Norse country, later to be fabled as the Norse gods. Also in the Mediterranean basin, later to be remembered as the Greek gods. And Atlantis! And probably Mu, over in the Pacific. Civilization 20,000 years before the Egyptian!” She paused. “Yet all this vanished. Why?”
My thoughts leaped ahead. I knew the answer. I silently set the time-dial for 25,000 B.C.
In a wink of time, civilization had vanished. Or most of it. Great glaciers and sheets of ice lay over the temperature zones. The Norse cities were already ground to dust. Gibraltar had been born, or split, and the oceans poured into the Mediterranean basin, wiping out all but a remnant of the civilization there. Atlantis sank like a stone, leaving so little trace that to this day it is unremembered except as a name. The Norse and Mediterranean areas were at least commemorated in stories of mythology.
“The Ice Age!” Eve whispered sadly. “It wiped all that away. Civilization won’t rise again till modern times, in Egypt. Well, let’s go back before the Ice Age, Adam. We’ll find Thor preceding this catastrophe.”
“I wonder,” I mused. “The Norse heroes, and Greek gods, sound more like remnant people, rather than prosperous ones at the height of their glory. We’ll go ahead.”
WE went to 20,000 B.C. We cruised over the north-land. The ice-sheets had receded. The continent of Europe as known today lay fertile and forested. I scouted up and down the fjords of the Norwegian coast, looking for I knew not what exactly.
Something flashed in our eyes finally, like a rainbow.
I hovered over it. It was a bridge stretching from the ma
inland to a small island. A great and wonderful bridge of red copper, yellow gold, white silver, blue steel, and green-coated brass. It seemed made of gossamer-thin strands, delicate enough to be thrown over by the first breeze. But it was old—old. It had stood there for countless centuries, adamant, sturdy, supremely artistic. And built by master engineers.
Eve let out a cry suddenly.
“Rainbow colors! It’s the Rainbow Bridge, Adam! The Bifrost Bridge of the Norse legends!”
I knew that Eve was right. The island, then, was Asgard, the home of the “gods.” Or of the few survivors of the great, thriving civilization of the north before the terrible Ice Age. Freakishly, perhaps this island alone had escaped the grinding, obliterating forces of the ice-masses.
In legend, the Bifrost Bridge connected Asgard with Midgard, the home of common mortals—or the mainland of Norway. Here, in virgin forests, roamed Neanderthal, Heidelberg, and Cro-Magnon. They were still savages, sub-men. The next civilization would not emerge yet for 10,000 years. And it would be far south of here, in Egypt and Sumeria.
What kind of people were these Asgardians, survivors of a civilization at least as great as our 20th-century’s? There was only one way to find out. We descended. I hovered the ship, first, just over the island, to look the situation over.
A gigantic marble and metal castle stood below. Its ramparts and towers were as finely molded as the beautiful Rainbow Bridge. The weathering of the stone showed the passage of at least 5,000 years. It had survived the tempests, frigidity, and furious battering of the elements throughout the long, bitter Ice Age.
“How beautiful it is!” Eve murmured. “No wonder that even 20,000 years later, it is still remembered in fables, in the 20th century! How sad it is to think this must vanish . . .
We looked at each other a little startled.
In a way, we knew the “future.” We knew that long before the 20th century, this would be gone, somehow. And that, according to legend, all these people would be in limbo, too.