A World Out of Time

by Larry Niven

Thirty stories of windows and empty frames dropped away beneath his toes. He saw much taller buildings around him. There, to the right, a masonry behemoth had fallen, taking buildings and pieces of buildings with it. Beyond that gap, beyond the mist and rain, he thought he could trace a gray-on-gray outline: a cube, impossibly large, whose walls had a slight outward curve.

  “Peerssa, did the State ever have any kind of instant transportation? Like a telephone booth, but you dial and you’re there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, these people did. I should have guessed. Me, of all people! That house wasn’t a house, it was only part of a house. I’ve found the office. It’s in the city. There ought to be a bathroom and a dining room and maybe a game room, God knows where. What we broke into was the bedroom.”

  “It’s likely that the machinery has not been tended for a long time. Bear that in mind.”

  “Yeah.” Corbell stepped back into the cubicle. Where next? He pushed the third down in the row of unmarked buttons.

  A light flared to life in the ceiling. The extra buttons had vanished. Corbell stepped out, and smiled. Definitely, this was the bathroom.

  The outside temperature register at his chin was dropping.

  “I think this place is air-conditioned,” he said.

  “You have traveled three point one miles west by southwest and have lost six hundred feet of altitude.”

  “Okay.” Corbell opened his faceplate. Just for a moment, he’d close it fast if—But the air was cool and fresh.

  It came to him, as he let the heavy backpack section fall, that he was exhausted. He pulled himself out of the rest of his armor and crouched at the edge of a bathtub almost big enough to be called a pool.

  He couldn’t read the markings on the water spigot. He turned it all the way in one direction and pushed it on. Hot water splashed into the tub. He turned it the other way. Boiling water spurted out, spitting steam. He recoiled. If he’d been in the tub…

  Okay, the “cold” water was hot, but it wasn’t too hot to stand. It flooded out and around him as he lolled on the curved bottom.

  A tiny voice called, “Corbell, answer.”

  He reached and pulled the helmet to the edge. “I’m taking a rest break. Check back in an hour. And send me a dancing girl.”

  IV

  A tiny voice peeped, “—can. Repeating. Corbell, answer if you can. Repeating. Corbell—”

  Corbell opened his eyes.

  Every texture was strange to his sight and his touch. He was nowhere aboard Don Juan. Then where—?

  Ah. He’d found two projections at the edge of the sunken tub, soft mounds like a pair of falsies, just right to rest his head between. His neck was still between the pillows. Lukewarm water enveloped him. He’d gone to sleep in the tub.

  “—if you can. Repeat—”

  Corbell pulled the pressure-suit helmet to him. “Here.”

  “Your hour’s gone, and another hour and six minutes. Are you sick?”

  “No, just sleepy. Hang on.” He pulled the spigot on. Hot water spurted through cool water and mixed. Corbell stirred with his foot. “I’m still on a rest break. Anything new at your end?”

  “Something’s watching me. I sense radar and gravity radiation.”

  “Gravity?”

  “Gravity waves going through my mass sensor, yes. I’m being probed by advanced instruments which must have learned a great deal about me. They could be automatic.”

  “They could also be from whoever sent the messages. Where is all this action coming from?”

  “From what would be Tasmania, if this were Earth. The probing has stopped. I can’t detect the source.”

  “If it starts throwing missiles at you you’ll have to pull out fast.”

  “Yes. I’ll have to change my orbit. I didn’t want to use the fuel, but my orbit does not take me over Antarctica.”

  “Do that.” Corbell stood up (his legs ached) and waded dripping from the warm water. A line of thick dust against the base of a wall might have been the remains of towels. He stopped before a picture window.

  The day had darkened. He looked down across a shallow slope of beach sand, downhill into haze that thickened to opaque mist. Was that a…fish skeleton down there, glimmering white through haze? It looked far distant—and big.

  Lightning flared, waited, flared again.

  The rain fell like an avalanche.

  Corbell turned away. He put on his undersuit, then his pressure suit, feeling the weight and the chafe spots. The bath had been good. He would have to come back here when he got the chance. There was even a sauna, not that he’d need—

  Yeah, a sauna. This place was old. If it had been built after the Earth grew hot, the sauna would have been a door to the outside!

  He stood in the booth, dithered, and decided not to push the bottom button. Peerssa was right. The machinery had been untended for a long time. So: bedroom or office? He knew those circuits still worked.

  Bedroom.

  He stepped out. Next to his chin the temperature readout rose in blinking numerals. He stepped around to the headboard, confirmed a memory: He had seen a television screen, and controls.

  He turned it on. The screen lit, first gray-white, then—

  It was a fuzzy view of the ruined bed, showing his own armored legs.

  He tried switches until he found the playback. The scene ran backward. Suddenly the bed was whole and four figures writhed on it at flickering speed. The scene jumped to a different foursome or to the same foursome differently dressed, before he found a way to freeze it.

  “Corbell, I have tried to signal the source of the probes, to no effect.”

  “Okay. Listen, if you have to run, just do it. We’ll both be safer if you don’t stop to call me about it.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I’m watching home movies.” Corbell chortled. “This place is like the Playboy Mansion. There’s an invisible video camera focused on the bed.”

  “A degenerate civilization, then. Small wonder they could not save themselves. You should not degrade yourself by watching.”

  “What are you—? What about the loving bunks in the dormitory in Selerdor? That wasn’t degenerate?”

  “It was not thought polite to watch the loving bunks.”

  Corbell swallowed his annoyance. “I want to know if they’re still human.”

  “Are they?”

  “The tape’s faded. And they’re wearing clothes, loose suits with lots of openings in them, in pastels. If they aren’t human I can’t see the differences…but they’re thin. And they don’t seem to carry themselves right.” He paused to watch. “And they’re very limber. The situation isn’t quite what I thought.”

  “In what way?”

  “I thought it was an orgy for four. It isn’t. It’s like in ancient China: Two of them are servants. They’re helping the other pair get into those advanced sexual positions. Maybe they’re not servants; maybe they’re trainers, or teachers.” He watched some more. “Or even…they’re as limber as dancers. Maybe that’s what they are. I wish I had a view of the couch. There might be spectators.”

  “Corbell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah. I may have to use that fourth button.”

  “I wouldn’t bother. If a thousand-year-old kitchen is your only food source, you’ll die quickly. Your suit will only recycle air for another seventy-one hours. Your food-syrup reserve is trivial. I suggest you try to reach the South Pole. I am over it now. I see a large continental mass, and forest.”

  “Well, fine.” Corbell switched off the stag movie and made for the booth.

  The second button down created a panel of eight buttons beside the smaller panel.

  He studied it. The symbols on those eight buttons might be letters or numbers. He reached, then drew back. “I’m afraid of it.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of this panel in the office. See, there are four white buttons
in all the booths. I think that’s an intercom, a closed circuit; you couldn’t get into it except from the office, or by breaking in the way we did. But there are eight buttons with squiggles on them here in the office. I think they must be more like a telephone dial, and there’s a private number that lets you into the office.”

  “Reasonable.”

  “Well, what happens when you dial a phone number at random?”

  “In my time there was a recorded voice to tell you you had made a mistake.”

  “Yeah, we had that too. But in this instant transportation setup you might be sent nowhere! Poof!”

  “That would be poor design. Can you find a telephone directory?”

  There was nothing like that in the booth. Corbell opened the door.

  Rain and howling wind were blowing into the office. Fat drops plated themselves across his faceplate. He walked around the desk, waited a minute for the water to run off the glass, then began pulling at desk drawers. They didn’t want to open. He pried one open and found it half full of gray-green mold. An abandoned apple?

  Machines were set into the desktop. Telephone, picturephone, computer link, what? No telling now. Time and rain had destroyed them.

  “I’ll have to try pushing buttons at random,” he told Peerssa.

  “Good luck.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “To be polite.”

  Corbell examined the array of eight buttons by the light from his helmet. The booth could kill him so fast he’d never know it. Punch at random? He could do better than that. He chose a button—the fifth, counting across and down, whose symbol looked like an upside-down L.A. gallows. He pushed it once, pause, twice, pause, thrice—

  Four did it. Suddenly there was indirect lighting around the rim of the ceiling.

  The door wouldn’t open.

  Annoyed, he chose another button, an hourglass on its side and compressed from both ends: 4-4-4-4.

  “You have changed position twice,” Peerssa informed him.

  This time the door opened.

  There were disintegrating skeletons in identical…uniforms? Loose garments, short pants, sleeveless shirts with rolls of fabric at the shoulders. Under the dust the garments looked new, in bright scarlet with black markings. The bones inside were crumbled with age, but they could not have been big men. Five feet tall or thereabouts. Corbell moved among them looking for bullet wounds. No holes in the garments or the skulls…but from the way they sprawled they seemed to have died in a firefight, and they seemed to be human.

  He found desks and what looked like computer terminals. A thick sliding door had been melted out of the wall. Beyond it were cells. Their gridwork doors were decoratively lacy, and different on each cell; but they were locked, and there were more skeletons in the cells.

  “Police station,” he reported to Peerssa. “I was trying for a restaurant. I pushed the same button four times.” He heard irritation in his voice. Getting tired? “See, what I didn’t want was a number that went nowhere. The numbers the restaurants fight for are the ones that are easiest to remember. At least they used to be.”

  “The State restricts those numbers to important municipal functions: police stations, hospitals, ombudsmen—”

  Corbell stepped through another, larger melted door. Doors beyond retracted before him, and he stepped into a waterfall of rain. He’d finally made it outside. He couldn’t see much. A city street…and occasional heaps of clothing peeking through the mud, skimpy one-piece shorts-and-undershirt garments in every pattern and color save scarlet.

  “I’ll have to try the other repeating numbers,” he said without moving.

  “I think it is safe. If you find a number not in use, you will not go nowhere.”

  “You’re willing to risk that, huh?” He still hadn’t moved. The rain ran down his faceplate and drummed on his helmet.

  “There is an alternative. I have probed the city with my senses. There is hollow space, a system of tunnels underground, leading away in many directions. I can lead you to the underground space where they converge.”

  “What’s the point of…? You think it’s a subway system? They’d have stopped using it when they invented the booths.”

  “If they no longer used the subway cars, they may have kept the buildings as a transportation nexus. Economy.”

  V

  He walked through pelting rain on packed dirt covered by thin mud. It sucked at his boots. He couldn’t afford the energy that cost him. He was already too tired…

  The streets and buildings were largely intact. He found no more scenes of mass death.

  There was a bubble, half glass and half metal, like a Christmas-tree ornament twelve feet across. It had smashed against the side of a building and was half full of rainwater. Corbell looked inside. He found spongy upholstery, and a pair of seats. One was occupied. Mud with lumps of bone in it oozed from within a yellow shorts-and-undershirt garment. Corbell forced himself to search the big patch pockets. What he found, he stowed in his tool pouch. He could examine it later.

  He walked on.

  Later there was an intact bubble, abandoned. It looked intact; the brightwork in the interior gleamed. He tried to start it, but nothing he tried seemed to work. He gave up and went on.

  Now there was a tremendous empty lot to one side, with wind-weathered stumps of trees and traces of curving paths. A park? To his other side was a wall that went up and up, curving away from view. It curved away from before and behind him too, so that he had no idea how high it was or how wide.

  In the mists beyond the office picture window he had thought to trace the outlines of a cube bigger than belief. So: It had been real.

  Streets. Why streets? And cars? Corbell began to suspect what he would find at the transportation nexus.

  “You are over the hollow space,” said Peerssa.

  “That’s good. I’m tired.” Corbell looked around him. Mummified park to the left, wall to the right. Ahead…the wall turned to glass.

  An entire wall of glass doors. He pushed through into gloom lit by his helmet lamp.

  The ceiling gave no sense of distance: only of random colors that changed with his position. The place was wide. His beam got lost in it. He glanced down at another, confusing light: the glow of dials at his chin.

  The temperature was down to 20° C.

  “Air-conditioned,” he said.

  “Good. Your suit batteries will last longer.”

  “There could be anything in this place,” he argued with himself. He opened his faceplate. No heat. Sniffed: a touch of staleness, that was all. “I’ve got to get out of this suit. I’m tired.”

  “Drink from the syrup nipple.”

  He laughed; he’d forgotten it was there. He sucked until his belly felt less empty. Peerssa was right: Half of his tiredness had been hunger.

  He pulled himself out of the rest of the suit.

  Stepping into the rug was a sudden, thrilling shock. It might be the same as the rotted rug in the office, but it was dry, intact, and ankle-deep. Like walking on a cloud. It felt damned expensive, but there must have been an acre of it here in the foyer of a public building.

  “Going to sleep,” he told the helmet. He sprawled out in the cloud of carpet and let it close around him.

  VI

  Gray dawn. He wriggled a little in the luxury of the rug. The ceiling was thousands of shades of color in what seemed to be whorl patterns; you could go crazy staring into it and never know how far away it was. He closed his eyes and dozed again.

  Came down to die, he thought. He said, “Peerssa, how do you expect me to die? Heart attack?”

  No answer. The helmet was out there by his fingertips. He pulled it close and repeated the question.

  “I think not,” said Peerssa.

  “Why? The State’s wonderful medicines?”

  “Yes, if one counts contraceptives as medicines. After the founding of the State, there was a generation in which no man or woman subject to inherited disea
ses might have children. The population fell by half. Famine ended—”

  “Heart patients?” His father had died of a coronary!

  “Certainly the children of heart patients were not allowed to have children. Your genes are those of a criminal, but a healthy one.”

  “You arrogant sons of bitches. What about my children?”

  “Their father was cancer-prone.”

  So they’d edited Corbell’s genes from the human race…and it was three million years too late to do anything about it. Corbell got up, stretched against stiff muscles, and looked about him.

  There were rings of couches around freely curved tables that still floated. The couches looked like humps in the rug.

  “Nuts,” said Corbell. “I could have slept on a couch.” He pushed down on a floating table, finally putting his full weight on both hands. He’d lowered the table an inch. When he released it it bobbed up again.

  Set within one wall was a row of booths. Corbell went to examine them. The rug-stuff flowed delightfully around his toes.

  In each booth were rows of pushbuttons marked with squiggles. A dozen buttons, with the eight marks he’d seen already and four new ones. He pushed a button larger than the others (OPERATOR?) and got no response. Then he noticed the slot.

  From the tool pouch of his empty pressure suit he spilled the items he had stolen from a smashed car. A seamless silver lipstick did nothing for him. Handkerchief: faint colors seemed to swirl in the material. Candy wrapper: the hard candy must have melted in untold years of rain; or it could have been drugs or medicine; or he could be wrong on every point. A hand-sized disk of clear plastic, its rim, also plastic, embedded with green ornamental squiggles.

  That looked about right.

  Which way was up? He tried it in one of the booths. It wouldn’t fit in the slot with the markings up. With the markings down, it did. He pushed the larger button and the screen lit up.

  Now what? The screens might be the phone books he needed. All he had to do was punch for INFORMATION, without reaching a nonexistent number, and read the answer, in squiggles.

  Corbell was sweating. He hadn’t thought this out. He lowered his hands and stepped out of the booth.