The Time Axis

by Henry Kuttner

  10. MUSEUM

  She smiled dazzlingly. And for one flash of an instant I knew who she was. I knew why my eyes had been drawn back in puzzled surprise to Letta Essen lying with curious unexpected grace on the cavern floor.

  I met this girl's shining gaze and for that one instant knew I was looking straight into the keen gray eyes of Letta Essen.

  The moment of certainty passed in a flash. The girl's eyes shifted from gray to luminous blue, the long lashes fell and the unmistakable identity of a woman I knew vanished. But the likeness remained. The familiarity remained. This girl was Letta Essen.

  My mind, groping for similes, seized at first on the theory that in some fantastic way Dr. Essen herself stood here before me masked by some science of beauty beyond the sciences I knew, in a shell of youth and loveliness through which only her keen gaze showed.

  It was all a trick, I thought – this is Letta Essen who did wake before me, somehow leaving her simulacrum there in the cave, as I had. This is Letta Essen in some amazingly lovely disguise for purposes of her own and she'll speak in a moment and confess. But it couldn't have been a disguise. This soft young loveliness was no mask. It was the girl herself. And her features were the features Letta Essen might have had twenty years ago if she had lived a wholly different life, a life as dedicated to beauty as Dr. Essen's had been to science.

  Then I caught a bewildering gray flash again and I knew it was Letta Essen – no disguise, no variation on the features such as kinship or remote descent might account for. The mind is individual and unique. There are no duplications of the personality. I knew I was looking into the eyes of Letta Essen herself, no matter how impossible it seemed.

  "Dr. Essen?" I said softly. "Dr. Essen?"

  She laughed. "You're still dreaming," she said. "Do you feel better now? Lord Paynter – the old fool – is waiting for us. We should hurry."

  I only gaped at her. What could I say? If she wasn't ready to explain how could I force her to speak? And yet I knew.

  "I'm here to welcome you, of course," she said lightly, speaking exactly as if I were some stranger to whom she must be polite, but who was of no real interest to her. "I was trained for work like this – to make people feel at ease. All this is a great mystery but – well, Lord Paynter will have to explain. I'm only an entertainer. But a very good one. Oh, very good.

  "Lord Paynter sent for me when he knew you would awaken. He thought his own ugly face might put you into such a mood you'd never answer any questions." She giggled. "At least, I hope he thought so." She paused, regarding me with exactly the cool keen speculative stare I had so often met when the woman before me was Letta Essen. Then she shrugged.

  "He'll tell you as much as you ought to know, I suppose. It's all much too mystifying for me." Her glance shifted to the cavern where the sleepers lay motionless and I thought there was bewilderment in her eyes as she looked uneasily from face to sleeping face. Again she shrugged.

  "Well, we should go. If we're late Lord Paynter will have me beaten." She seemed very unconcerned about the prospect. "And please don't ask questions," she added, "for I'm not allowed to answer. Even if I knew the answers. Even if I cared."

  I was watching her with such urgent attention that my eyes ached with the effort of trying to be more than eyes, trying to pierce through her unconcern and see into the depths of the mind which I was certain was Letta Essen's. She smiled carelessly at me and turned away.

  "Come along," she said.

  There was nothing for me to do but obey. Clearly I was expected to play the same game her actions indicated. With some irony I said, "You can tell me your name, can't you?"

  "I am Topaz – this week," she said. "Next week, perhaps – something else. But you may think of me until then as Topaz."

  "Thanks," I said dryly. "And what year are you Topaz in? What country? Where am I, anyhow?"

  "The Lord Paynter will tell you that. I don't care to be beaten."

  "But you speak English. I can't be very far from home."

  "Oh, everyone who matters knows English. It's the court language of the Mother Planet, you see. The whole galaxy operates on an English basic. There has to be some common language. I – oh dear, I will be beaten! Come along."

  She turned away, tugging me by the arm. There was a button on the opposite wall and the way she walked beside me toward it, the way she reached to touch the button, followed so definite a pattern of graceful motion that it seemed like dancing.

  In the wall a shutter widened. Topaz turned. "This is the City," she told me.

  I had seen the beginnings of such places in my own time. In the second level under Chicago, by the canal – at Hoover Dam – in the great bridges and the subways of Manhattan. Those had been the rudiments, ugly, crude, harsh. This was a city of machines, a city of metal with blood of invisible energy.

  Ugly? No. But frightening – yes.

  Topaz led me across a strip of pavement to a cushioned car like a big cup and we sat down in it and the car started, whether or not on wheels I can't say. It moved in three dimensions, rising sharply in the air sometimes to avoid collisions, to thread its intricate pattern through that singing city.

  The sound was, perhaps, the strangest part. I kept watching and listening with the automatic attention of the reporter, senselessly making mental notes for articles I would never write. A single note hummed through the city, clear and loud as a trumpet, sliding up and down the scale. Not music, for there was no pattern, but much like a clarinet, varied every changing second.

  I asked Topaz about it. She gave me a glance from Letta

  Essen's eyes and said, "Oh, that's to make the noise bearable. You can't get rid of the noise, you know, without sacrificing the effect but you can transform it into harmonious sound that does convey the proper things. There's – what do you call it – frequency modulation. I think that's it.

  "All the noises of the City every second add up to one key vibration, a non-harmonic, and that's simply augmented by a machine so the audible result isn't so unpleasant. The only alternative would be to blanket it completely and that would mean sacrificing a good part of the total effect, you know."

  "I don't know," I said. "What do you mean, effect?"

  She turned in the car to look at me. Suddenly she dimpled.

  "No, I see you don't understand. Well, I won't explain. I'll save it for a surprise."

  I didn't argue with her. I was too busy staring around me at the City. I can't describe it. I won't try and I don't need to. You've read about such places, maybe pictured them for yourself. Precision, perfect functionalism, all one mighty machine made up of machines.

  There were no humans, no life, except for us under the dome of steel sky. The light was gray, clear, oddly compact, and through that steel-colored air the city trumpeted its wailing cry of a world that was not my world, a time that was yet to come.

  Where was the red twilight of the world's end? Where was the Face of Ea, from which the call for help had come.

  Or did that world lie somewhere just outside the city? Something had gone strangely wrong in the time-axis – that much was certain. If I let myself think about it I'd probably start gibbering. Things had been taken out of my control and all I could do was ride along.

  We drew up before a towering steel and plastic building. Topaz jumped briskly out of the car, took my hand confidently and led me into the low door before us. We had stepped straight into an elevator apparently, for a panel sighed shut behind us and I felt the familiar pressure underfoot and the displaced air that means a rapid rising up a shaft.

  The panel opened. We stepped out into a small room similar to the one in which I had awakened.

  "Now," Topaz said with relief. "We're here. You were very good and didn't ask too many questions, so before we go I'll show you something."

  She touched another button in the wall, and a plate of metal slid downward out of sight. There was thick glass behind it. Topaz fingered the button again and the glass slid down in turn. A
gust of sweet-smelling air blew in upon us. I caught my breath and leaned forward to stare.

  We were very high up in the city but we were looking out over a blossoming countryside, bright in the season of late spring. I saw meadows deep in grass and yellow flowers, far below. Streams winked in the bright, clear sunlight, here and there fruit-trees were in blossom. Bird-song rose and fell in the sunshine.

  "This of course," Topaz said, "is the world we live in. There's only one museum."

  "Museum?" I echoed almost absently, "What museum?"

  "The City. There's only one. All machines and robots. Isn't it horrible? They built like that, you know, back in barbarous times. We keep it in operation to show what it was like. That's why they can't blanket the noises altogether, it would spoil the effect. But no one lives here. Only students come sometimes. Our world is out there."

  "But where do people live?" I asked. "Not in – well, villages, communities?"

  "Oh no. Not any more. Not since the dark ages. We have transmission now, you see, so we don't need to live huddled up together."

  "Transmission?"

  "This is a transmitter." She waved at the room behind us. "That other place, where you woke, was a receiver."

  "Receiver of what? Transmitter of what?" I felt like Alice talking to the Caterpillar,

  "Of matter, naturally. Much easier than walking." She pressed the stud again and the glass and metal slid up to shut out that glowing springtime world. "Now," she said, "We'll go – wherever it is we're going. I don't know. Lord Paynter – "

  "I know – the old fool."

  Topaz giggled. "Lord Paynter's orders are already on record. In a moment we'll see." She did domething with the buttons on the wall. "Here we go," she said.

  Vertigo spun through my mind. The wailing of that ancient, wonderful, monstrous City died away.

  11. THIRTY SECOND INTERLUDE

  It was a little like going down fast in an elevator. I didn't lose consciousness but the physical sensations of transmission were so bewildering and so disorienting that I might as well have been unconscious for all the details I could give – then or later – about what happens between transmitter and receiver. All I know is that for a while the walls shimmered around me and gravity seemed to let go abruptly inside my body, so that I was briefly very dizzy.

  Then, without any perceptible spatial change at all, the walls suddenly steadied and were not translucent pale gray any more, but hard dull steel, with the rivets showing where plates overlapped and here and there a streak of rust. I was in a somewhat smaller room than before. And I was alone.

  "Topaz?" I said tentatively, looking around for her. "Topaz?" And then, more loudly, "Dr. Essen – where are you?"

  No answer, except for the echo of my voice from those dull rusty walls.

  This time it was harder to take, I don't know why. Maybe things like that are cumulative. It was the second time I'd taken a jump into the unknown, piloted by somebody who was supposed to know the angles, and come out at the far end alone and in the wrong place.

  I looked at the walls and fought down sheer panic at the possibility that this time I had really gone astray in the time-dimension and wakened here in the same room from which I'd set out in the City museum, a room now so aged that the wall surfaces had worn away and the exposed steel corroded and only I remained alive and imprisoned in a dead world.

  It was a bad moment.

  I had to do something to disprove the idea. Obviously the one possible action was to get out of there. I took a long step toward the nearest wall –

  And found myself staggering. Gravity had gone wrong again. I weighed too much. My knees were trying to buckle, as if the one step had put nearly double my weight upon them. I braced my legs and made it to the wall in wide, plodding steps, compensating in every muscle for that extraordinary downward pull.

  The moment my hand touched the wall there was a noise of badly oiled hinges and a door slid back in the steel.

  Now let me get this straight.

  Everything that happened happened extremely fast. It was only later that I realized it, because I had no sense of being hurried. But in the next thirty seconds the most important thing that was to occur in that world, so far as I was concerned, took place with great speed and precision.

  Through the opening came a cool dusty light and the sound of buzzing, soft and insistent. I guessed at anything and everything.

  I stood on the threshold of an enormous room. It was braced, tremendously braced, with rusted and pitted girders so heavy they made me think of Karnak and the tremendous architecture of the Egyptians. In an intricate series of webs and meshes metal girders ran through the great room, catwalks, but perhaps not for human beings, since some were level while others tilted dizzily and on a few one would have had to walk upside-down. I noticed, though, that while most of the catwalks were rusted those on which a man could walk without slipping off were scuffed shiny.

  There was a series of broad high windows all around the room. Through them I could see a city.

  Topaz had said there were no cities in her civilization except for the Museum. Well, perhaps there weren't. Perhaps I had plunged unknowingly into time again, and looked upon a city like that Museum, no longer preserved in dead perfection. This city was living and very old. An obsolete metropolis, perhaps a nekropolis in the sense De Kalb had used the term. Everywhere was decay, rust, broken buildings, dim lights.

  The sky was black. But it was day outside, a strange, pallid day lit by bands of thin light that lay like a borealis across the dark heavens. Far off, bright but not blinding, a double sun turned in the blackness.

  But there were people on the streets. My confidence came back a little at the sight of them, until I realized that something curious was taking place all through the city as I watched a strange, phantom-like flitting of figures – men flashing into sight and out again like apparitions in folklore. I stared, bewildered, for an instant, before I realized the answer.

  Perhaps in a city of the future like this one I had expected vehicles or moving ways of endless belts. Now I saw that at intervals along the street were discs of dull metal set in the pavement. A man would step on one – and vanish. Another man would suddenly appear on another, step off and hurry toward a third disc.

  It was matter-transmission, applied to the thoroughly practical use of quick transportation.

  I saw other things in that one quick look about the city. I won't detail them. The fact of the city itself is all that was important about that phase of my thirty seconds' experience there.

  There were two other important things. One was the activity going on in the enormous room itself. And the third was waiting almost at my elbow. But I'm taking these in the reverse order of their urgency.

  Something was happening on the far side of the room. It wasn't easy to see, because of the distance and because a number of men in dark close-fitting garments clustered around it. I thought it might be an autopsy.

  There was a table as high as an operating table and a man or a body lay stretched out on it. Above the table hung a web of thin, shining, tenuous matter that might have been lights or wires. It made me think, for no clear reason, of a complex chart of the neural system.

  At the lower edge the bright lines appeared to connect with the object on the table. At the top they vanished into a maze of ceiling connections I couldn't follow. Some of the wires, or lights, were brilliantly colored, others were silvery. Light and color flowed along them, coalesced at intersections, glowed dazzlingly and flowed on along diverse channels downward.

  That was the thing of secondary importance which I saw there. The thing of primary importance stood about six feet away from me, waiting.

  Now this is the difficult part. I must get it as clear as I can.

  A tall man stood facing me. He had been standing there when the door opened. Obviously he expected me. He wore tight-fitting dark clothes like the others. He was well-made, even handsome, with the emotionless face of a Greek s
tatue or a Buddha.

  He was Ira De Kalb.

  I had a moment of horrible internal vertigo, as if the bottom had dropped wholly out of my reason. It couldn't be happening. For this was De Kalb and it wasn't, exactly as Topaz had been Dr. Essen – and not Dr. Essen. In this case, at any rate, there was almost no physical difference. This man before me was the man I had last seen asleep in the cavern of the time-axis, no younger, no older, not changed at all except for one small thing.

  The Ira De Kalb I had known possessed strange veiled eyes, filmed like a bird's, grayed with light blue dullness. But this De Kalb, who regarded me with unrecognizing coldness, as if he had never seen me before in his life, looked out of curiously changed eyes.

  His eyes were made of metal.

  It was living metal, like burnished steel with depth behind it, yet not real steel – some alloy unknown to me, some bright unstable thing like quicksilver. I could see my own face reflected in the eyes, very small and vivid, and as my reflection moved, the eyes moved too.

  I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to speak his name.

  But I did not make a sound. There wasn't time. He had been standing there with an immobility that was not human. An image of metal would stand like that, not seeming to breathe, no tiniest random motion stirring it. And I had an instant's uncanny recollection that the De Kalb I knew had moved with curious clumsiness, like an automaton.

  Then the metal eyes moved.

  No, I moved.

  It was a fall, in a way. But no fall I could accurately describe. It was motion of abnormal motor impulses, fantastic simply because they were without precedent. One walks, actually, in a succession of forward-falling movements, the legs automatically swinging forward to save one from collapse toward the center of gravity.

  This was reaction to a sort of warped gravitational pull that drew me toward De Kalb. It was the opposite of paralysis – a new gravitation had appeared and I was falling toward it. It was like rushing down a steep slope, unable to halt oneself.