I found I was breathing hard. The Mechandroid said we'd have to hurry. "We transported several cubic yards of air with us but that won't last long. Here, let me – "
I watched my hands move deftly on the corroded dials.
I had one dizzying moment in which I thought of the terrible deeps of space all around us, the dead ship circling an alien star-group while our last air seeped out around us into the infinities of the dark.
Fortunately for my own sanity, I had very little time in my turbulent hours in this middle future to pause and think. I had been catapulted into a culture so different from my own that my mind could not, I think, have endured the concept of those vast spaces which everyone here took as a commonplace. It was only in the small, unchanging superficialities of the culture that I could conceive bf it at all.
The walls shimmered, blurred – were translucent metal through which I could see a circle of bright green grass and a ring of low-roofed houses whose eaves turned up like Chinese roofs. The only living things in sight were a pigeon, flying low and trailing a red ribbon in its beak, and a dog who ran below, jumping to catch the ribbon now and then. I could hear it barking.
"Hurry," Belem said and my hands found the dials on the clouded transparency of the wall. These dials were set in rings of colored tile but they worked like any other dials. I turned them, the room blurred ...
I had had no idea there could be such a variety of transmitter-receiver rooms. Few of them had transparent walls, so that I had to guess what lay outside, but the rooms themselves ranged from functional steel boxes to padded lounges. Several times they swam with the perfume of exotic unknowns who must just have stepped out after a trip from – who could begin to guess where?
And once two wilting flowers the size of dinner-plates and colored a deep plushy crimson lay on a glass floor where some traveler had dropped them, stepping out. They went with us through four transitions and we left them at the fifth when Belem said at last, "Here we'll get out. It's another concourse. I think we'll be safe now if we take a long jump to my base laboratory. Open the door."
Like the other concourse it reminded me vividly, of the Times Square shuttle. Crowds hurried across vast open spaces, vanished into cubicles and poured from other cubicles in an intricate mesh of movement that linked a whole galaxy together.
"See that row of doors with the blue lights over them?" Belem said. "Try to find an empty booth. I think the third from the end – "
A door opened as he indicated – with my own hand – which one he meant and a fat man in a long furred cloak upon which snow lay in still unmelted crystals came bustling importantly out, beating his cloak as he came.
I stepped in, closed the door, avoiding the puddles of melting snow which the fat man had tracked in from some world I couldn't imagine. Perhaps Earth.
"These rooms would be a fine way to spread disease, wouldn't they?" I asked Belem as I reached for the dial. "No telling where this snow-water came from, but it'll go along with us, I suppose, and we'll track your laboratory with melted water from Neptune or Canopus or – "
"It is most unlikely," Belem began pedantically in my mind, "that you would find snow – "
"Okay, okay. Forget it." I had just uncovered a disturbing thought. I was a carrier of disease myself. Had I been sowing the nekronic death on a dozen worlds already, leaving the virus in transmitters for those who came after me to carry still farther abroad?
"There is no way of knowing that yet," Belem said. "Turn the dials." I did.
It seemed to me that this time the vibration of the transmission was a little longer and more violent than before. I wondered if we were going an unusually long distance. Then the room steadied again and I pushed open the door.
I expected the laboratory, enormously braced, enmeshed with catwalks and, sparkling far across the room, the bright neural, webbing that meant the dangerous man-machine was in the making. Perhaps Belem's motionless figure would stand there waiting beside the door.
I looked out into the seething concourse we had just left. The fat man in the snowy cloak was only a dozen paces away in the crowd. We had not stirred from this station.
"Try again," Belem said in my mind, after what seemed a very long pause, full of strain.
I tried. The room shook and blurred, steadied. I opened the door.
The concourse was till there. This time the fat man had almost vanished in the crowd though I could still see his fur cloak swing out as he dodged to avoid a group of adolescents with bright knapsacks on their shoulders, bound for – what resort world in what distant corner of the galaxy?
"Shut the door," Belem said. I got a feeling of tight-reined control from his mind superimposed upon mine. He was frightened, trying to keep panic down. "This is very simple," he said, perhaps as much to himself as to me. "The receiver in our laboratory is no longer working.
"It can mean only one thing – Paynter must have known all along where we were. Or he had access to those who did know. However he found us he must already have sent the weapon ahead." He didn't name the weapon, but I caught his mental picture of the golden marble in the glass box.
"All right," I said. "That lets me out, then. We're finished."
"Not at all." Belem's thought was sharp. "We must find the nearest receiver to the laboratory that works. It will be somewhere in the city. Then we must walk. There are secret entrances the government can't possibly have found yet. After all there hasn't been time for much to happen. But I must get back to my body and you'll be safer with us than with the government."
"It looks more to me as if we'd be safe in jail together," I said.
"Try the dials again," was all Belem replied.
Someone was knocking impatiently on the door of the cubicle as the walls shimmered again and the long stretches of infinite space drew out between this world and the nameless place of the laboratory. I suppose the particles of my body dispersed along that path and reassembled again. I never did know much about how it worked. But when my head cleared I was in another room, smaller, square, smelling of machine oil. I opened the door.
This was it. I remembered the strange, pale daylight, the bands of thin borealic light across the black sky, the double sun swinging far off and not very bright above the time-ruined city.
But it was a very busy city this time. Men in uniform were hurrying through the streets in low square cars that floated without wheels, quite fast. Groups of them flickered and materialized and groups flickered and were gone at the transmission-centers which were this city's transportation system. Far off over the rusty roofs a cone of blue-white light, blinding in that dark daylight, seemed to clamp down over something at the city's edge – I could guess what.
"Hurry," Belem said in my mind. "Out here, around the next corner and step on the black disc in the pavement. If you move fast I don't think anyone will recognize you, though a cordon must be out for you by now. They'll expect us."
"Me, not us," I said, dodging through the doorway. "I wouldn't be surprised if Paynter let me go and then trailed me with the idea I might lead him to you. He'll have a lot of explaining to do now that I'm missing. But he can't have guessed you were there – more or less – all the time. Here's the disc. Now what?"
"Step on it," Belem said. "The dark half."
The circle was six feet across, half dark, half palish.
The pale half was unmarked, but the dark half had an arrow inlaid in it which was pointing right.
I stepped gingerly on the arrow.
I was standing on the pale half of a large disc. But not the same one. The buildings were different around me. A carload of soldiers drifted rapidly past toward one of the bigger discs, floated over it, centered and vanished.
"At the next corner," Belem urged me. "Take the dark half again. Hurry!"
Leap by miraculous leap I traversed the dark clear air of that curious city. And as I went it seemed to me I began to get a glimmer of the decoration which had once made it spectacular in its heyday, somethi
ng one couldn't see from a single standpoint but grasped bit by bit as one went through great arcs and vistas of its streets.
One bit at a time showed nothing but each leap through space, each glimpse from a different point, built up a little more of the plan in the memory, so that eventually a strange concept of the art emerged, a step farther than the architecture of my own day, when solids and surfaces were used. Here movement and distance were of equal importance. Like a moving picture, except that it was the city which stood still and the watcher who moved.
Presently Belem halted me. We had come out near a fenced enclosure full of hunks of junked machinery, floating cars that still hovered motionless just off the ground, all their ribs showing, small lifeboats from beached spaceships, odds and ends of jetsam wholly nameless to me.
"Over there, the little ship under the girders," Belem said. "Make sure nobody's watching, then climb into it."
I did, wondering who had last sat in the tattered leather bucket-seat before the instrument panel, what he had seen through the glass, what wrecked liner and whirling stars. Belem interrupted the fancies impatiently. Under his orders I pushed the seat aside and pulled up a trap in the floor. A ladder went down.
Nobody had discovered this passage yet, though I expected to find at any corner that somebody was waiting for me with a paralyzer that puffed rubber lips in and out. At the end I tapped a signal on a metal door and after awhile someone pulled it creaking open.
The gigantically braced laboratory was blue with smoke and bluer with the blinding light of the cone that hung above it, glaring through the broad windows.
Belem's motionless figure waited where he had left it.
19. THE MARBLE
It was curious to look into his face and find it alien, he who had been so intimate a part of my mind. The emotionless features, the strange, quicksilver eyes belonged to De Kalb but the voice was – as I pointed out to him – the voice of Esau.
He wasn't amused. He seemed to find his own body rather strange for a moment or two, for after he had left me he tried it out stiffly, moving to and fro with short steps.
"You look like De Kalb," I said, watching him. "You move like De Kalb. Belem, were is De Kalb now?"
He gave me a swift, strange, emotionless look. "I told you I was beginning to understand," he said. "I was. But I haven't the full answer yet and – look, Cortland."
I followed his gesture. The enormous room, braced with its monstrous girders, lay before us. There was orderly activity all through the vast place, centering around a control panel that might be the device creating the dome of light that shielded this area, a white wall curtaining off everything outside the windows. Sometimes coruscating flashes sparkled here and there along the curtain. Attacks – failing? So little time had elapsed, really, since we left Paynter. This siege must be less than half an hour old and its full violence yet to come.
Under a web of shimmering fire at the far side of the room the table still stood with a body stretched out on it. Here most of the figures were at work on their second-stage Mechandroid, waiting for it to come alive.
"That's the most important thing that's happening here now," Belem said gravely. "I'm needed. I have no time nor mental energy to spare to solve your puzzles for you. Later, if we live, I'll try."
He turned swiftly away from me and crossed the big room toward the table. I followed in silence.
The second-stage Mechandroid lay quiet on its table, its eyes closed, the face serene and not quite human. There was, I thought, a remote familiarity about it too. Belem? I glanced at him, recognizing a likeness but not enough to explain the feeling that I had seen this man before. Man? Machine? Both and either.
"Is he alive yet?" I asked.
"It should take about four days more," one of the workers answered in English, speaking with mechanical precision. He sounded as if he had learned the language from records, so accurately that he reproduced even the buzz and click of the recording machine.
"He is beginning to think and be alive already, but he will not be finished for four days. Before then our defenses will have gone down, I think. We haven't enough power to maintain the blocking screens for long."
"Couldn't we all go out the way I came in?" I asked. "We could not take him along."
"No, it's impossible. All we can do is defend ourselves as long as we can and hope to finish in time. I doubt if we will," he added casually.
"The other time a second-stage Mechandroid was attempted," I said rather tactlessly, "they blew up the whole city, didn't they? Why don't they do it now?"
"That was recognized as an error at the time," Belem told me. "They have improved siege weapons now and they will be curious about our devices. We must do the blowing up ourselves to prevent them when the time comes."
"But you'll go right on working until – "
"Naturally." Belem sounded surprised. "There is a demonstrable mathematical chance that we may succeed. It would be foolish to throw such a chance away. I was set a problem, you see, and I must work to solve it as long as I am able to move and think. This is part of the solution – this second-stage Mechandroid."
"I should think," I said with even less tact, "that you'd have a sort of built-in block against making anything really dangerous to civilization."
"So we have, within limits. This creation will not be basically destructive. Paynter is wrong. Human thinkers are very often wrong. The Man-Machine will endanger only obsolete things that should be destroyed. Humans ignore the obvious fact that machines can evolve exactly as men can. They have evolved.
"What is a city but a machine? Sooner or later it would have been necessary to create a second-stage Mechandroid anyhow. The coming problems will be too complex for solution by either humans or Mechandroids."
Belem looked down impassively at the serene sleeping face. Then he turned and walked away with a purposeful stride. I trailed him curiously. We ducked under girders and circled groups of workers who ignored us, reaching at last a rusty wall that opened under Belem's touch. I looked into the time-worn room of matter-transmission from which I had first glimpsed this scene.
On the rusted floor a silver marble lay. That was all.
"It was gold before," I said stupidly.
"Simple transmutation. It's a tricky pattern of radio-elements."
"It's so small," I said.
"Pick it up."
I tried. I could easily slip my fingers around it but it wouldn't budge. It might have been riveted to the floor.
"Nothing – no known force – has power enough to move a negatively-charged activated matrix of this type," Belem said.
"The well-known immovable body."
"Eh?"
"You know that paradox. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body?"
"But the existence of one automatically negates – "
"That's just my compensatory humor," I said. "I'm scared to death, so I'm joking." He didn't seem entirely satisfied. Well, neither was I.
I kicked at the thing and hurt my toes.
I can't describe that battle because I didn't understand what was going on. It was probably an epic. I couldn't tell. Outside the windows the shining wall occasionally sparkled and sometimes bells would ring and the needles on gauges would jump wildly. From outside our protective shell it was probably a more spectacular scene.
Inside there wasn't even a feeling of tension because the Mechandroids went calmly about their duties and showed no sign of nervousness. Belem got busy on tasks of his own. I wandered around and watched, trying to make myself believe I was a war correspondent. Sometimes I went back and looked into the matter-transmitter at the silver marble. It just lay there.
That was the strange, yet obvious point about this future – I didn't understand the simplest basic things. I got glimpses of the Galaxy in operation, but I didn't know why it worked that way. A Neanderthaler legman on the Piltdown Chronicle might have had some similar difficulty in writing a feature story about Oak Ridg
e so his hairy readers could understand it.
Well, with matter-transmission, you could live on a planet named South Nowhere, right on the edge of the Galaxy at the jumping-off-place, and yet be able to reach out your hand and pick up a California orange, practically fresh off the tree.
Space didn't mean anything any more, so concepts of thinking based on familiar spatial frames of reference had to change. Except, perhaps, as far as initial exploration went. The first matter-transmitter had to be taken bodily to its destination. After that you could step into a transmitter on earth and step out on South Nowhere.
So, in a war in this time, the trick was to immobilize your opponent. Nail him down – as we were nailed down. After that, just keep pounding.
What we needed was a claw-hammer to pull up that nail.
I had seen enough of this future to begin thinking galactically. Stray thoughts crossed my mind – random concepts involving yanking Centaurus II out of its orbit, clamping on a tractor-beam – what the devil was a tractor-beam? – and letting Centaurus pull up the silver marble, as a tractor pulls a mired car out of the ditch. I mentioned this idea to Belem. He said it was a striking bit of fantasy but not very practical – and what was a tractor-beam?
Discouraged, I sat down and thought some more.
"What makes you think the second-stage Mechandroid can destroy the nekron?" I asked Belem.
He kept working on a cryptic device composed chiefly of vari-colored lenses. His placid face never changed.
"I can only hope so," he said. "He was designed expressly to solve that problem and he will have a fifty-five-power brain, compared to my twenty-power one. He'll be a tool – an extension of the social mechanism."
"With free will?"
The Time Axis Page 11