There is a great lot of psychic space debris, and when one enters its area on Hopp-Equation flight one experiences it. Every poignant thing that ever happened, every comic or horrifying or exalting episode that ever took place, is still drifting somewhere in space. One runs into fragments (and concentrations) of billions of minds there; it is never lost, it is only spread out thin.
The ansel was in many of the dreams. These creatures are psychically remarkable; they were in the human unconscious before they were found on Astrobe.
There were flashes, in and around Paul’s dreams, of his year of escapes, and of the most recent escape at spaceport. Paul was never terrified in moments of danger. His terror came later, in dream form, and a lot of it communicated itself on this passage. The several persons and mechanisms who had died in that last episode were in several of the dreams; persons who have just died are also psychically remarkable.
Paul had many dreams of a boy named Adam who died cavalierly in battle again and again, and so avoided the misfortune of really growing up. Dying was the only thing he was really good at. And he dreamed of Adam’s sister, a child-witch who decided to go to Hell before she died. But Paul was not sure whether he had known these two, and others previously; whether he knew them only in these dreams; or whether he was to know them in the future. And how was it that Adam died so many times? How did he come to life so many times? “No, no,” Adam explained. “It is death, it is death. I am not born again. I do not live again. It is always another of the same name.” Paul dreamed of the monster Ouden; and of his own death, when it should come, knowing that he was actually viewing it.
But it wasn’t all heavy vital stuff encountered in the Passage Dreams. Some of it was light and vital stuff. Also still drifting in deep space is every tall tale ever told.
Hey, here’s one. It was of an Earthman of a few hundred years before Paul’s time, John Sourwine, or Sour John. But now Paul became Sour John and he told and lived at the same time the outré tale.
Owing to the diet he had followed from his youth—alcohol, wormwood, green snails—one of Sour John’s kidneys had become vitrified, and in a peculiar manner. Not only had it turned into glass, but it had turned into glass of a fine jewel-like green. This he had seen himself on the fluoroscope.
It happened that he and some friends were at Ghazikhan in what was then India of Old Earth, and they looked at the great idol there. They were told that the center eye of the idol, an emerald nearly a foot in diameter, was worth eleven million dollars. Sour John went back to his ship and thought about it.
“Ghazikhan is not a sea-port,” Paul interrupted his dream, for he had acquired Old Earth information by psych-teacher machine long ago. “Either get on or get off,” said Sour John, Paul’s other self for the moment. “I say it is a sea-port.” Paul (Sour John) went back to his ship and thought about it. He had always meant to acquire expensive habits, and he could use eleven million dollars. He sharpened up an old harpoon, called the ship’s boy to help him, and in no time at all they had that kidney out. They trimmed it down a little, put it to a lathe and then a buffer and one thing and another, and soon they had it shined up to perfection. It was the most beautiful kidney in the world.
Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney. It fit perfectly. “I knew it would,” said Paul. Then he climbed down, a descent that not another man in the world would dare to make, and went back to his ship with the emerald. He sold it in Karachi for eleven million dollars, and he lived high for a while. But owing to his only having one kidney, Paul was now unable to drink water at all.
Three years later Paul (Sour John) was back in Ghazikhan. He was told that the center eye of the idol had been reappraised. By a miracle it had changed, the people said. It had become richer in color, finer in texture, of a deeper brilliance; and a grand new aroma came from it. And now it was worth thirteen million dollars. “I figure I lost two million dollars on the deal,” Paul said as he woke up.
Ninety seconds; how could that be? The climb up the idol had taken two hours at least. Somebody asks what sort of man was this Paul with the permanent crooked grin? He was the sort of man who was visited by a passage dream of a vitrified kidney.
Twenty thousand of such little dreams! Hey, here’s another one!
Paul was coursing at fantastic speed towards the area where the little twin stars Rhium and Antirhium revolved around each other. “Hurry,” were his instructions; “they seem of no consequence, but they are the governor of the universe. Somebody is tampering with them.” Paul continued at his impossible speed and arrived at the area. He saw something that nobody had ever seen before, for nobody had ever been so close to them. The two small stars that revolved around each other were joined together by a long steel chain. It was that which held them in their tight rapid orbits; it was that which made them the governor of the universe. Paul quickly located the trouble. There was a small green creature, with the body of a monkey and the head of a gargoyle, cutting the chain with a hack-saw, and he had it near cut in two. “Pray that I be not too late!” Paul prayed, and he believed he had made it when the sawyer broke a blade. But he quickly replaced it with another, stuck his green tongue out at Paul, took three more strokes with the hack-saw, and the chain broke. Then Rhium and Antirhium swung out of their tight orbits, and the whole universe was out of control with its governor broken. Fifty billion billion stars went nova, and then blacked out to nothing. The universe had eaten itself and was gone forever. “I told you to hurry!” the space captain told Paul furiously as he came barreling up. Then the space captain’s face melted like wax and he was gone. “I did hurry,” Paul said. Then his own face melted like wax and he was gone also.
“Is it quite finished?” came the voice of old hawk-face Fabian Foreman. “If it is quite finished, then perhaps we can begin to construct a new universe. It’s all right. It worked out well. I meant you to be too late.”
Ninety seconds long. Twenty thousand of them, each one so different.
Oddly, it is only the maladjusted who are able to stand the passages. The well-adjusted pilot cracks up on such a solo trip. That is why all Hopp-Equation pilots are of a peculiar breed.
Paul knew that some of the monsters he encountered in the passage dreams were real. They were the weird creatures who live in Hopp-Equation Space. Some of them were encountered by Paul only; but others were experienced by pilot after pilot in the same episode in the same part of space. It was delirium. Nearly five years of psychic experience must be crowded into one month. The psychic mass of experience is not foreshortened.
From Golden Astrobe to Blue Earth. Earth is always bluish to one coming from Astrobe. Astrobe always seems gold to one coming from Earth. It is that the whites of their two suns are not the same white. White is not an absolute. It is the composite of the colors where you live.
Paul made Earth-fall, taking it from the morning side, a beautiful experience that never gets old.
He came down in London and stabled his craft. He took with him a small but weighty instrument, and went to the London office of Cosmos Kingmaker. That richest man on Astrobe had vast interests on Earth also; and Paul knew his way around on both worlds.
Brooks was in charge of Kingmaker’s London office, and Brooks was immediately flustered by a visit from a man of Astrobe. Most Earthmen are flustered and inferior towards men of Astrobe, feeling themselves left behind and of less consequence. When most of the small but vital elite had gone from Earth to Astrobe four or five hundred years before, it had made a difference that was never erased. Earth really was inferior and of less consequence now.
Paul presented Brooks with credentials and directives from Kingmaker, and Brooks accepted them. Paul had forged them during the passage, though he could have gotten real ones from Kingmaker himself or through Foreman. Paul liked to
do things on his own.
“You do not give me much information, and I do not ask much,” Brooks said. “I have heard of you vaguely. I know that you have been in trouble on both worlds. Well, I respect the buccaneer in a man; it has almost gone out of us. My master Kingmaker has employed such men before, and it is not for me to question it. Here is the basic machine. I could calibrate an attachment for any period you wish, but you seem to have brought your own attachment.”
“Oh, there’s no great secrecy, Brooks. I’ve come for a man, and I’ll probably leave with him again tomorrow. It isn’t necessary that you know the exact calibration, though it would be no great harm if you guessed it.”
“Here’s coin of the period as my brief here requires me to supply to you. I wish you hadn’t requisitioned so much of it. It will strap me. It goes much further than you would imagine. The multiplier is something like fifty to one.”
And Paul was fingering the old gold coins around on a little table there.
“Here, I can use less than one in four of these,” he said. “I give the rest of them back to you, Brooks; they are minted a very few years too late for my purpose; they might embarrass me. The men where I am going would be suspicious of Tomorrow Coins. I know the multiplier, and the former and present value. The remaining sum will be about right.”
“Will you come out in Chelsea, messenger Paul?”
“In Chelsea you ask? You guess shrewdly, for an Earthman. No, I will go in here and come out here.”
“Chelsea at that time was not a part of London. It was some miles in the country.”
“The distance was the same then as now. I may find my man in London on business or I may find him at his home in Chelsea.”
Paul stepped through the tuned antenna-like loop, and to Brooks it was as though the man had disappeared into the crackling air. To Paul it was going through an unholy gray confusion that is deeper than darkness. And he was sick, as are all who follow the time travel.
Paul came out ankle-deep in mud. He was on the edge of a big sprawling wooden town. He went into a ramshackle public house, ordered and ate wood-cock, some very high beef, barley bread, and an onion the size of a child’s head; and he talked to the proprietor.
“Could you tell me whether Thomas More is in the city, or home in Chelsea?” he asked the man, being careful to give the old pronunciation of words as well as he could.
“Likely at home,” the man said. “He’s out of favor with the King now, you know. You are a solicitor?”
“Yes, I solicit,” Paul said.
“You’ve an odd sound to your talk,” the man told him. “You are from the North?”
“No, from the South,” Paul told him. That was true. Astrobe, from Earth viewpoint, was in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere.
“It’s dangerous to talk to strangers these days,” the man said, “but I was never one to be intimidated. The old things are passing away, and I hate to see them go. I don’t like the new things that are brewing. But I do like Thomas More, though doubting that he’ll be long in the land of the living. Mother of Christ, I hope someone can persuade him to leave the country before it’s too late! I believe that you are one of them from across the channel.”
“Yes, I’m from across the channel,” Paul said, “and I’ll take him out of the country if he’ll go with me. Do not mention our conversation, and I will not.”
“The King’s men are everywhere, friend. Walk in Christ.”
Paul went out again. It was a cold day. He knew the way, and he followed the road to Chelsea in Middlesex. He was pleased to discover that the English had not yet become “that most unhandsome of people.”
There wasn’t much trouble with the language back in this period—a few little tricks to remember, no more. An hour or two of crisp walking on the road, and Paul was to Chelsea. He asked but once, and then he spotted his man, walking in his frozen garden and wrapped up like a sheep.
How did Paul know him for sure? Well, he looked a little like the Thomas More of Holbein’s portrait which Paul had studied, but only a little. All portraits by Holbein look more like Holbein than like their subjects. But Thomas More was a man who would always be recognized.
“I am Paul,” said Paul as he walked up to him, “and after that I hardly know what to say.”
“Your name-saint also traveled far, Paul,” Thomas More said with easy friendliness. “Not so far as you have, of course, but perhaps to higher purposes. But I salute you, as a man coming through both mediums, which I do nowt understand.”
Paul had gone back a thousand years, and he and Thomas could understand each other. But Thomas couldn’t have understood his own great-grandfather. It goes by jumps, and it had changed much more in the hundred years just past than in the thousand years to follow. It is true that Thomas said nowt for not; that he pronounced of as though it were spelled of and not uv; that he sounded the plural s as though it were an s and not a z.
“I don’t understand it either,” Paul said. “But how could you know that I have come through both mediums?”
“You’ve the aspect of one of them,” Thomas said. “I’ve been visited through time before. I’m not a great man, but I’m one who has aroused curiosity in History. Where are you from, Paul?”
“From Astrobe, of which you have never heard.”
“Lay no bets on that, Paul. I’ve a number of past and future things in my head. Once I believed that travel through time was unnatural. But we all travel through time every moment of our lives. It is only that you have traveled at a different rate and in a different direction. Are all on your world as tall as you?”
Thomas had a touch of the things that would later be called the Irish brogue and the Scotch burr, but they were in the English of this time.
“No. The average is about a half a foot shorter than myself—about a half a foot taller than yourself,” Paul said. “To us you are a short and chunky man, and you have allowed yourself to appear old: I assume it is your natural appearance unmodified. But I’m more and more puzzled that you should guess me so accurately.”
“I didn’t get the name of being the best lawyer in Europe without being able to appraise a man,” Thomas said. “And you are not unique. I told you that I had been visited through time before. By a curiosity of History I am to have a certain fame. The circumstances of it bewilder me as they have been explained to me by another traveler. I do nowt at all understand what is to happen to me within the next year. Other men have been visited from the future, I’m sure; but they’re no more likely to publish the fact than I am. Incredulity is a fang that bites deep. I understand that I am to make, and only a few weeks from now, a decision so foolhardy on the surface of it as hardly to be believed. Visitors have come and asked me why I did it, and I can’t tell them at all. You see, I haven’t done it yet. The point for which I am to lose my head seems to me to be a trivial one, not worth the loss of a head, certainly not worth the loss of mine. Why have you visited me from Asternick, Paul?”
“From Astrobe. We are in trouble on Astrobe. They are looking for a candidate to lead them out of a hopeless tangle there. They have tried almost every other sort of man; now they want to try an honest man. They considered the Name Men, living and dead, of the two worlds. You were the only completely honest man they could discover—or the only man with one completely honest moment.”
“Oh, it was—will be—quite a showy act of honesty for which I will lose my head, Paul. But I can’t conceive of myself doing it. I haven’t been particularly honest up to this point of my life. Opportune rather. But if I were honest, or if I am to be so in the climax moment of my life, how will that help you on Astrobe in the future?”
“I’ve come to take you back to Astrobe with me.”
“You want to take me forward in time with you, Paul? That’s impossible, of course. We must live out our lives in our own times and places according to the fate lai
d out for us. We cannot tamper with the course of History.”
“A little of the shine flaked off you then, Thomas. It’s only a plating, is it, and not the deep thing? Thomas, that was a silly string of commonplace for an uncommon man to utter. And, as a Christian man, you can hardly accept fate.”
“You would make a fine lawyer yourself, Paul. No, I never paid obeisance to Fate. And I have just enough natural truculence in me to do it. But I hate to leave my family.”
“Thomas, Thomas, are you lacking in curiosity? In imagination? In daring? They have called you a forerunner, a man open to new ideas. And possibly you will not be leaving your family. History records that you died on a certain date, in an extreme manner, and in this realm.”
“Will there be two of me, then, Paul? But of course there are two of me, and more. Every man is a multitude; but I play with words. Why do you really need me?”
“I have told it. It is because our world is sick.”
“And you are looking for a gaudy cure? You are looking for a Doctor snatched from the Past? I have failed to cure a sick world here, Paul, and I have watched its sickness growing all my life. It was not even a successful doctor in his own time that you are come for. I was the High Chancellor Doctor; and the patient has thrown me out of the house.”
“Those who decide such things have decided that you are the man we need.”
“It isn’t that I haven’t studied the subject, Paul. I once wrote an account of as sick a world as I could imagine. You see, my second claim to fame is that I coined the word and the idea Utopia. I wrote in bitter and laughing irony of that sickest of all possible worlds, that into which my own world seems to be turning.
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