Hal brought the Cruiser to a stop in the centre of the module. The white walls, floor and ceiling were revealed to be broad, flat tiles of a material not unlike glass, but thicker and more durable. As the portal behind us slid closed, the tiles became more defined, with black lines surrounding each one, so that the module’s interior resembled a large chess board, but of all white squares.
“The module has pressurized to one atmosphere. The air is breathable without a life-support unit.” Hal paused, seemingly uncertain. “This can be interpreted as an invitation to disembark”.
Hal lowered the Phoenix’s ramp, which slid out from the side of the vessel until it reached the floor. I stretched, took a few deep, calming breaths, and headed down to the floor of the docking bay. The room felt larger than I had expected and had a pronounced echo; my footsteps resonated for many seconds. Then, in the far corner, one of the white tiles appeared to tilt inward on itself, revealing a brighter area beyond.
Hal was in my earpiece. “I am surprised at the lack of official welcome”, he offered. “Takanli protocol has been broken in a number of ways already”. It was true. There was no escort vessel to guide us in, although I knew a relatively small craft such as Larssen might not have shuttles. Our guests could have chosen any welcoming colour scheme they wanted, but instead settled for this rather sterile white. They were small matters, but they added to a sense of discomfort. Besides, if Hal was nervous, I probably also had reason to be.
I walked toward the opening formed by the rotated tile and peered into the hallway beyond. Whether already formed this way before my arrival, or whether hurriedly changed as I crossed the floor of the module, I could not tell, but the hallway was revealed to be a conventional 21st Century office block corridor with three doors on each side, small paintings on the walls, and a potted plant in the far corner.
What the fuck is going on?
The silence was intimidating. I offered a ‘hello?’ but there was no reply. I walked toward the first door, but found it locked. This just gets weirder. The second door opened to reveal a conference room with a oval, glass table surrounded by chairs, but there was no-one to be seen. Two of the other doors were locked. The fifth was a storage cupboard with paper, printer toner, pens and pencils.
“Hal, are you getting anything out of their ship’s computer yet?”
“Not a thing. This isn’t right.”
I glanced around, hoping for the appearance of a friendly face. “I’ll try the sixth door”.
I turned the silver handle and the door swung smoothly open. This room was different from the others, much larger and with another door in the opposite wall. It appeared to be the office of a senior executive. There was a large desk, tidy but topped by a few of the items you’d expect; there was even a rolodex. A sofa and several chairs occupied one corner. There were no windows. A large whiteboard, empty and spotlessly clean, hung on one wall, while framed diplomas and photos adorned the other.
I approached the pictures. This could have been any CEO in the world; there he was fly-fishing, knee-deep in a stream amid the mountains. Another had him with his arm around a buddy, grinning together for the camera. I was about to examine the diplomas when I heard a noise.
The door in the far corner had opened. A tall man in a business suit walked in.
“I’m getting a reading.” This was all I heard Hal say before communications were cut off. My earpiece went completely silent, for the first time ever.
The man was perhaps six foot five and reminded me, odd that it may seem, of a young Penn Jillette from the magic duo Penn & Teller. He might have been forty. He did not smile, or speak.
As a rule, I don’t panic, but my response to losing Hal’s guidance brought me pretty close. For the first time in a long time, I was in truly uncharted territory. A flutter of fear made its way through my gut.
“Welcome to earth orbit”, I tried.
The man did not reply, but brought out the brown leather office chair from its position against the desk, and elegantly sat down. He leaned forward, steepled his hands, and looked straight at me. He was silent and seemingly calm.
“I understand that you have had a lengthy journey. Are all the crew in good health?”
He just stared at me. I was increasingly unnerved, fearing some giant misunderstanding. Surely, they couldn’t have knowingly cut me off from Hal? It must have been some unpredictable interference; I listened acutely for any whisper in my earpiece, but none came. Seconds passed.
I kept trying. “I appear to have lost voice contact with my ship’s computer. Are you able to assist in restoring communications?”
He gazed at me for another ten seconds or so, and then did the most extraordinary thing. Unfolding his hands, he reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a large, fat cigar. He held it tenderly under his nose, inhaled with obvious pleasure, and then reached into a desk drawer for a lighter.
Stunned, I tried, “looks like it might be a Cuban?”
He ignored me while he laboriously lit the cigar, puffing steadily and rotating the brown cylinder to ensure it ignited evenly. The smoke, at once sweet and oddly repugnant, filled the room. Another strange thought crept into my troubled mind; I’m going to have to launder my shirt after this. A small fraction of my mind also began to wonder whether I had gone completely fucking insane, and was imagining this whole bizarre scene.
Where was Falik? The Boffin? Garlidan, Bassar and Cyto? What of the assurances that I was known to members of the science team? Where the fuck was everybody?
I continued to try to get through. “I’m afraid there might have been a misunderstanding. I had expected to meet a delegation from Takanli”.
Finally, he spoke. He had the voice of a BBC newsreader, precisely enunciated British English, and a steady, authoritative manner of delivery. All of which combined to make me extremely nervous.
“I am not, I think you know, from Takanli”. He took a chain of puffs on the cigar.
I waited for further information, but none came. “Then, if I may ask, where are you from? Have you come from Holdrian, as the message claimed?”
He put down the cigar on a large, crystal ashtray. “I have visited Holdrian, yes. It was my last port of call, in fact. A most illuminating visit.”
I was beginning to lose patience. I don’t do this often, but the weirdness of the situation, and my own burgeoning nervousness, did nothing for my manners. “Then perhaps you carry word for me, from the Holdrian scientists?”
“I do not”.
“Or from my friends on Takanli?”
“I do not know your friends.”
Exasperation was setting in, and it showed in my tone of voice. “Then who exactly are you? Why did you send messages which, I now see, are untrue?”
He fixed me with an icy glare. I should not have accused him of lying. Play it cool. He rose, stepped around the desk, and motioned to the sofa in the corner. I walked over and sat down on the high-quality leather. He stood in the centre of the room, cigar in hand, eyes still locked on me.
“I am aware of your crimes”.
I nearly stood, I was so taken aback and angry. “I have committed no crimes. Indeed, my only recent work has been to further humanity’s security and ensure its safe continuation”.
He intoned this next sentence especially slowly. “That is precisely your crime”.
“How is that a crime? I recognized that the planet was soon to become unsustainably crowded and riddled with environmental degradation and conflict. It was only what anyone would have done.”
He walked toward me and sat opposite me in a large, leather armchair. “You are unschooled and sadly ignorant”. Fuck you, buddy. “There is much I will have to explain. You have been labouring under the unfortunate misapprehension that single-handedly altering the course of human history is a noble act.”
“Surely, if it saves billions of lives, nothing could be more noble”.
He laughed. I will never forget the sound. It came from his liver
, like the rumbling, sadistic chuckle of some fat autocrat. “Noble?” He chuckled again, apparently genuinely amused. “Noble, you say?”
“I assert the right of humanity to enjoy a future free of unnecessary calamity”.
His ugly laughter ceased and his face contorted into a grimace of distaste. “Humanity will suffer the fate it has itself created. Nothing can change that.”
“But for many years, humankind was unaware of the damage it was inflicting on itself. Assumptions were made as to the healing properties of the natural environment...”
He held up a hand. “I am not here to judge humanity. I am simply here to enforce the Law.” He said it just as if it needed to be capitalized; the Law. “And the Law applies to all, in all places, at all times.”
I was becoming confused. Nerves made it worse. This was fucked. “Whose law? What law? And how have I broken it?”
He closed his eyes, shook his head. It was as if a schoolboy had given an answer so woefully incomplete as to be scarcely believable. “There is only one Law. And it is this Law that you have transgressed, as grievously as anyone ever could. And now you are to be held accountable.”
I stared at him. What was I being accused of? Had I offended some unknown alien power? Who the fuck was this guy?
“Held accountable under whose authority? Whose law do you mean?”
He grimaced again, uglier and more unnervingly than before. “The Law of God”.
Oh, shit.
“I do not recognize such a law”.
I immediately realized that this was far and away the worst thing I could have said. The man stood, threw his cigar at the wall so hard that it shattered in a burst of fiery sparks, and roared like a giant warrior in battle. It was deafening, enough to make me cower in my seat, and went on far longer than the lungs of a human could support. He stood, like an enraged King Kong, until the noise tailed off and seemed to disappear back into his chest. Then he yelled at me.
“Your punishment shall be infinite”, he bellowed. “Your disobedience will be purged from the fabric of time.”
I stood to protest but he unleashed another roar so loud that I shrank back into my seat. He continued.
“I am Julius. I am a servant of God. His Law is my work, and my bond.” I almost expected flames to shoot from his mouth, the noise was so intense. I was scared shitless.
“But how did I break...”
“Meddling with time is a sin against His Law”, he yelled. “Time meddlers are a stain on the perfection of His works.”
I began to understand. Julius was here to punish me for travelling through time. I was to be excoriated for changing history. He was a zealot, and a powerful one. I began to feel an utter terror leaking into my bones. I am undone.
He wheeled around and paced briskly back to the door in the far wall. Before leaving, his voice still raised to a disgusted growl, he turned and said, “your puny machine will help you understand. Look upon the agent of God, and despair.”
He left, slamming the door so hard I wondered if the room would collapse.
“Hal?”
The quantum computer was freaked out as never I’d seen him before. “Get out, get back to the Phoenix.”
I dashed out of the room, hurtled down the corridor and, within moments, was steering the Cruiser back out through the docking portal and away from the Larssen.
“Talk to me Hal... He said you could explain it.”
If a computer could be in tears, that’s how Hal sounded. “He’s going to prevent your first encounter. He’s going to destroy the science vessel which found you, so that you can never learn the Holdrian time-travel methods.”
Oh, no. No, not that. All of this... is to be made unreal. My journey, my work, all extinguished. The spectre of the end of the world will return. And no-one will be able to stop it.
For the lack of any better idea, Hal put us on course back to Tsiolkovski crater on the moon. He lit the engines, firing us quickly away from our orbital rendezvous. Behind us, two of the Larssen’s modules had detached.
“He’s going to create a time vortex far smaller and more easily manipulated than the wormholes used at Holdrian”, Hal informed me, sadness and panic mixing in his voice. “He’ll go back, leave a space-mine to destroy the incoming Takanli science ship, and then continue on his journey.”
I was slumped in the pilot’s seat, hardly able to move. “What journey, Hal?”
My friend laid out this dreadful news. “He believes himself a servant of God. He’s a fundamentalist, a nutcase. Any example, anywhere in the universe, of time travel and the alteration of the past, must be extinguished.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Julius believes that God’s creations are all perfect, even those which result in massed death and disaster. The original flow of time and events is the only one he will accept, the only one with the seal of God’s own approval. Any other is a stain, an unwelcome blemish on the perfection of God’s single reality, and it must be destroyed.”
“But how is he able to do all this?”
“He’s a fucking hypocrite”, said Hal, bitterness flooding through every word. “He’s stolen light-speed and time-travel technology from every scientist in the galaxy. He claims all of it will be destroyed once the universe is returned to its pristine, Godly state. Until then, he’ll use it to hunt down examples of time-travel and prevent them ever from happening.”
“But how did he know about what I did?”, I asked, panicking and confused. “We’re in a backwater here, and the effects were merely local.”
Hal was almost too sad to say it. But he did. “Gemma told him”.
My heart might actually have stopped for a few seconds. “What?”
He could barely stand to tell me. “Gemma was an agent of Julius. She was sent to gather information on you, and our plan. Once Julius was able to pinpoint the time and place of your abduction, he would be in a position to go back and prevent it. She led him to you.”
I was too stunned to speak. My mind whirled in a panic. The moon grew quickly in the front windows as we fled the scene at 0.7% lightspeed.
It was all going to unravel. Mankind was once more to be doomed by its own hand. Twenty years of work would now simply fall out of existence, denied its place in reality. There would be no Takanlian technology. No meeting with Falik. No negotiations in the Outer Rim. No brain implants, no health nanobots, no cancer cure. I thought of Chris, and Evelyn, and Liz. I thought of the billions whose potential would be consigned to an early doom.
“Hal, how long until his time vortex is ready?”
The computer analyzed the events back in earth orbit. “Perhaps an hour. He has to inject a gigantic amount of energy into the vortex before it achieves...”
“Take us back.”
He didn’t argue. “OK.”
The ship slowed, turned, and headed back towards the bright green-blue globe of my home. Hal punched the engines.
“I’m confirming the data now. He’ll have a workable vortex in fifty-three minutes.”
Phoenix swept across space, heading directly for the Larssen. “How do we stop him, Hal?”
Missiles would be useless, I knew. Even nuclear warheads. If Hal could figure out how to protect Dvalin from an ICBM strike, surely the mad Julius had acquired sufficient technology to defend himself.
“Can we fly right into the vortex and disrupt it?”
“NO!” Hal yelled. “The entry point for time-travel has to be precise to the tiniest degree. We’d be either shot through time, in which case he’d simply redraft his plan and disrupt your works another way, or we’d be atomized by the energy of the vortex.”
I was thinking quickly, desperately. “Can we collide with the Larssen? Screw up their entry interface?”
Hal knew, once more, that it wouldn’t work. “He’d just deflect us from our path, or send us spinning into the sun. He could crush us like an insect”.
I could see the Larssen ahead now, and the growing blue-yellow st
orm of light in space ahead of it. The vortex was drawing energy from a module which hung in orbit and radiated out a purple light.
“It’s just an unbelievable energy source”, gasped Hal. “He must have gone forward in time and stolen it from the far future.”
I watched, horrified, as the vortex expanded until it measured miles across. The Larssen was drifting closer, on a carefully-planned, pre-arranged course which would see it meet a millimetre-perfect point in space at just the moment when the energy of the vortex peaked. The storm of light ahead of the ship continued to grow, fed by the purple radiation streaming from the energy module.
“Hal, are we fucked?”
The computer was silent.
“HAL?”
He’s given up. He knows the writing is on the wall, that we’re done for. He’s letting us all die. We’ve come so far, but even a supercomputer gets scared.
“HAL? PLEASE!”
Maybe just wants to die in piece. Without my arrival at Takanli and my journeys there, there would be no reason for his original construction. He’s going to fall out of existence, just like I am. Maybe he can’t bring himself to say goodbye. Maybe he just can’t believe, as I can’t, that it’s going to end like this.
Then Hal spoke. The sound was level and calm. He was back in control. “Hey, Paul?”
My heart’s pounding and racing eased as I recognized the familiar tones of my friend’s voice. “What is it, Hal?” I replied quietly.
“I think I’ve got an idea.”
*****
Author’s Note
Hal made me do it.
He has come to appreciate, through his contact with human literature, the value of anticipation. So, a second volume of our narrative is in preparation, and will be available soon.
Voyage Page 58