Caltraps of Time

by David I. Masson

  ‘We can detect you under that growth. Who are you? Can we help you? ... Who are you? Are you Roydon Greenback? Please come out from under. Please come out from under. We would like to help you.’ There was something peculiarly vulgar and sprawling about the accents of the speaker, and his vowels were difficult to recognize.

  Roydon clambered out and waved. After a moment he called out, ‘Yes, I am Roydon Greenback. Who are you? Where am I?’

  The helicopter descended some way and a rope ladder was lowered. ‘Please climb in.’

  ‘I am looking for my wife.’

  ‘We don’t know where she is, but perhaps we can help you. Will you come with us first?’

  Silently, Roydon climbed up the ladder, which was at once extraordinarily smooth and very easy to hold on to. As he went up there was a sort of blink, and looking down by the helicopter hatch he was astonished to see that the landscape was once more deserted and green, indeed rather lush, except that the glassy strip and a few of the shrub-banks up to a little past where he had sat down were still there below him. A big gloved hand hauled him in.

  ‘Roydon Greenback. Well. You are something of a legend to us, the man who entered the poikilochronistic jungle to search for the woman he loved. Well, well. As luck would have it, you got into a domain that started at plus-sixty-one years and has been running a cog-slipper static ever since. So you levelled up with our time. You are sixty-one years behind us in source. We shall take you to our world of sixty-one years ahead.’

  The voice was no longer sprawling, but the same slipshod quality seemed to slur its vowels, and what with this and the unfamiliar vocabulary Roydon could hardly comprehend two words in three. He looked at its owner, a tall red-headed man of middle age with shaggy locks and a long beard. His clothes, like those of his companions, seemed to consist of a translucent skin-diving suit with pockets, but without mask or oxygen, and, encasing the hands and upper arms, long translucent gloves. There were half a dozen persons in the cabin, two of them women.

  ‘I am Paul Sattern, chronismologist in chief. This is Fenn Vaughan, chronismologist-maturator; Mary Scarrick, entomologist; Richard Metcalfe, chronistic metrologist; Elizabeth Raine, air chemist; Morris Ekwall, transitional diathesiologist; Zen Haddock, botanist, who also takes soil samples for the podologists; and at the controls, Peter Datch.’

  The correct response to an introduction seemed to be a nod. It appeared that Morris Ekwall was concerned, in some esoteric way, with the violent local changes in mood-weather that accompanied the area’s time-shifts, while Richard Metcalfe spent most of his time dumping gadgets on the terrain and reading their messages on instruments in the helicopter. What Vaughan and Sattern actually did Roydon never discovered, but the others were concerned with the insects, plants, soil and atmosphere itself. At intervals one or more of them would go down the ladder and come up again rather swiftly.

  ‘Teams of chronismologists,’ Sattern told Roydon, ‘are engaged in mapping the poikilochronism and its changes; the domains are constantly altering.’

  ‘How do you mean? Do they change their time-level?’

  ‘Usually a domain divides into several quite independent domains, especially if it’s a big one; or a whole set of bounds and domains is replaced by new unrelated ones, in one part of the poik. There’s not always much visible sign — you have to instrumentate to discern.’

  ‘And Richard here,’ said Vaughan, ‘is trying just now to catch them at it. He thinks they don’t just go click, they go whoosh — eh Richard?’ and he sang, softly:

  ‘Micro, nano, pico, femto,

  it’s all the same to metro Met;

  No matter what he pegs down there,

  he hasn’t snapped them switching yet.’

  Richard looked pained.

  ‘Are we free of it now?’ asked Roydon.

  ‘Free?’ said Sattern. ‘You mean, beyond the poik? No. It’s much bigger than in your day. It’s growing about three hectares a year now. Swallowed many square kilometres of our normal-density regions in the last ten years — but slowly. We had to reallocate the population. Devil of a lot of economic and social problems. Lost some strays, too -- like you.’

  Sattern broke off and gave a terse account of their discovery of Roydon into a microphone.

  Roydon, looking over the side some minutes later, saw the hated green, already peppered with odd glassy lumps and bumps, cease abruptly. Beyond was a tangle of curved highways crawling with moving specks. Helicopters seemed now to jostle them on all sides, and above them a dense crowd of swift jetcraft littered the sky. Soon an endless forest of multi-storeyed buildings, glassy in texture, gawky oblongs, jetting into the air, thrust all round them and in every direction. Here and there great banks of flowers or butterfly-powdered shrubs glowed at the buildings’ feet, but much of the ground was a close-cropped grey-green herbage. The helicopter dropped onto a squat cube of a building, and Roydon was escorted down into the Chronismatic Centre.

  Here he found a small quiet crowd gathered, all clothed like the helicopter party. One wall of the huge room converted itself silently into a coloured vision screen, and for the next hour he was subjected to a merciless interview from the reporters in that screen, with their unfamiliar flat accents and phraseology. After that a series of interchanges took place between the helicopter party, some of the crowd and the screen reporters, who seemed to be in London, with occasional shunts to New York, Moscow and Beijing. The exchanges were largely lost on Roydon, whose nerves seemed to be dancing a jig all over his body. A girl with darkish red hair and green eyes, whom he took for Sattern’s secretary, led him off for a meal and a sleeping potion.

  He woke on a couch and the purgatory began again. Housed in the building, occasionally treated to visitape recordings of his interview, interviewed anew by scientists and reporters, invited to appear in feature programmes, put through tests of blood-pressure, skin-potential, electro-encephalogram, blood-fluid makeup, olfactronic signature and many others, he collapsed at the end of a week and was kept under deep narcosis for ten days.

  He came to to find the red-haired girl, whose name was Sal, contemplating him. ‘Someone is asking to see you,’ she said. ‘Prepare yourself for a shock.’ She looked serious.

  ‘Who is it? Are they here?’

  ‘No, of course not. On the screen. It’s someone from your family. Think now who could be alive after sixty-one years?’

  ‘It’s not — it’s not May?’

  ‘It’s your daughter. She was called May. Now remember, she has lived all her life in ordinary time. How old was she when you last saw her?’

  Even so, Roydon could not believe for a long time that the rather bowed though well-preserved old lady in grey slacks and tunic could be his own daughter. He was unspeakably embarrassed when after a minute of awkward speech a slow tear or two rolled down the face on the screen. ‘You are just like your photo,’ she whispered brokenly, then broke down completely and sobbed. ‘You never came back — you never came back!’

  Gradually he pieced out her history. Brought up for the rest of her growing years with her uncle’s children, she had adjusted to the situation but had always mourned her parents, especially Roydon. An unhappy marriage at twenty had lasted four years. Another at thirty with an older man had terminated with his death seven years before. Her two children — she held up their stereophotograph — were grown up. She brought out stereo-photographs of five grandchildren. Four minutes’ link-up with her son and three with her daughter followed. She herself was living in the section of normal-density Britain still known as Aberdeen, where her husband’s folk were. Roydon offered to go and see her but it seemed that no ordinary person travelled much today. ‘Surface and even air travel are too crowded, and stratocruising is only for long distance,’ said Sal, who had come back in after half an hour. May assured him she was content with the screen, and they agreed he should contact her once a week.

  Sal, it began to appear, was a liaison office
r for the Centre with other institutions. But she took Roydon under her particular care and few minutes of a day went by without her turning up with provender, conversation or means of entertainment. She got him to fix himself up with one of the translucent suits by means of some sort of long-distance measurement recorder. She explained many ways and words that he could not understand. Her green eyes fixing his, she would speak slowly in her husky voice. She kept a sharp eye on his reaction to the mood-weather if he were outside, and produced the antidote.

  ‘The mood-climate’s not what it was,’ Sattern complained to Sal and Roydon one day, looking in from a conference with the chiefs of other helicopter-parties. ‘Spring used to be hopeful, summer serene, autumn regretful, winter gloomy. Now it’s all mixed up. You never know what to expect.’

  ‘You’re getting more vulnerable in your old age, Paul,’ said Sal, grinning.

  ‘Something in what you say, actually. The inocs are wearing off. I must get some boosters.’

  ‘How do you make out here with mood-weather?’ asked Roydon.

  ‘It doesn’t worry us much,’ said Sal. ‘We inoculate during childhood; only the most violent mood-storms touch us. Your age hadn’t got inocs for that; we’ll have to cross-dope you pretty carefully for outside. But the endocrine typometer gave us enough data on you to give you a reasonable safeguard.’

  A week or two later Sal told Roydon that Paul Sattern’s team would like him to accompany them on trips, hoping he could set them right on some points about the past. He was given unlimited credit for purchase, and the official position of Historical Adviser. Chronismologists were in great demand, as the poikilochronism was regarded as a public danger, and were highly paid, partly because of the risks they ran. QUALIFIED CHRONISMOLOGIST, Roydon read on an old-fashioned plastic news-sheet’s advertisement page: ‘Vacancies for chronismologists. Higher Sc. degrees essential. Starting credit equivalent £50,000 to £60,000 pa rising by £5,000 pa Minimum service one year.’

  ‘Two other poiks have been detected,’ Sal told him, ‘one in Bonnium and one in Ceylon.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘and we think there are some in central Africa and one in Antarctica, only Antarctica is rather sparsely populated, and news from much of central Africa is nil — mood-climate closed chunks of it down. The whole world, including the oceans, might become one vast poik in a few millennia or even centuries, unless we can find out enough about these chronismatic processes to know how to stabilize or reverse them. It’s a race against time, in two senses.’

  ‘I had no idea how things were,’ said Roydon weakly.

  ‘Well, we have enough to do in our own little corner of ordinary time and space. Do you feel like coming with us tomorrow?’

  ‘I must see,’ Roydon thought, ‘if I can’t get a better clue to where she went. That rook — was it a rook? Can I trace the place? Will they take me there?’ Miriel’s dark hair and oval face swam up at him suddenly and he groped his way out of the room, muttering something. Paul Sattern looked after him and, turning to Sal with a bitter smile, shook his head ever so slightly. The girl flushed and, biting her lip, picked up a nest of tapes and walked out of the other door. She encountered Richard, the gadget-man, past the doorway. Richard, who had his eyes on her face, turned pale and said nothing, but came on into the room.

  ‘Well?’ said Paul.

  ‘Those linking atto-second counters — will they be ready?’ uttered Richard harshly, as though the technical sentence was code for something else.

  ‘Of course. You can peg them in a new line from LV3 to PN8 tomorrow. But I think the femto-counters may show something yet.’

  ‘Too slow,’ said Richard and began a brisk discussion, but his manner was distrait and he jumped when Sal came back in. Roydon, recovering next door, heard much of the discussion, but it might as well have been the conversation of rooks or starlings. Fenn Vaughan strolled in and past the trio, singing:

  ‘Where the femto-seconds pass

  Richard sits upon—’

  Paul kicked his shin. Fenn walked on whistling. The group broke up in silence.

  ~ * ~

  ‘What are all those things?’ said Roydon. The craft was slowly cruising over the greenery.

  ‘Those are future buildings,’ explained Sal, who had pressed Paul to take her along to keep an eye on Roydon. ‘We don’t know whether they’re some kind of plascrete or something new. The three-metre top bound stopped them existing above that at first, but they’re growing up now a centimetre a week by infection, and pushing up the top bound. One day they’ll be complete. That’s why they look like ruins. Dick says the time is plus-ninety-four years in that patch below. But of course it’s mostly the same with present and past buildings — if they’re new domains, the buildings can’t grow above the top bound at first. Look at all that lot to the west; they’re all sorts of dates, mostly present to past, but they grew up when there wasn’t any building there so they are still incomplete.’

  ‘But surely the whole world from one of these domains must look very queer — masses of foundations and nothing else?’

  ‘No, no, if you went down there you’d see complete buildings, probably a normal-density district, all around you; only the domain part itself would have these shells. Someone coming onto the domain from the world of that date would probably think it was a patch where demolition work had been going on. One reason why we don’t often see people near those shells.’

  ‘What’s that odd brown patch down there?’

  ‘Oh, that’s just the other way. It’s minus three hundred-odd years, Dick says. Most of the domains are minus a century or more round here — aren’t they, Paul? — which is why they’re still unbuilt-up.’

  ‘How big are the domains?’

  ‘Anything from a metre to a couple of kilometres across, and any shape. Dick says they may even start by growing quickly from a mere point, and changing time-level as they grow. That’s where his atto-second lines may pick up something.’

  Roydon’s eyes devoured the hated green. The craft sank and Richard went down the ladder with his first gadget. They proceeded methodically across country like a mathematically minded crane-fly ovipositing on a lawn.

  ‘Why, that — that looks very like the village! Is it part of the — the poik?’

  ‘Yes, been inside it for dozens of years. A lot of it is minus twenty-five years now.’

  ‘Is that why it’s got all those odd buildings among it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look, there are some people! How is it they don’t know they’re isolated?’

  ‘Don’t you realize?’ cried Paul. ‘The open domains can be entered. They’re mostly on the poik margins. But most of the inner domains, once entered, can only be left geographically. You can see men and animals crossing them and vanishing. Watch that nineteenth-century labourer on that ploughland. There — he’s gone! But he doesn’t know that. He’s in a complete nineteenth-century world. Once you’re down in a patch of, say, minus twenty-five years like the village, you’ve dropped through a hole twenty-five years deep, and have to walk about on that level for ever. That’s the risk we all run if we happen to cross a domain-bound without knowing it. We can’t get back. That’s what your wife must have done. You were lucky, what with the cog-slipper.’