He had left his porters behind him at the last weatherstation, heeding their terrified pleading. And now had come sudden realization of the futility of carrying with him, as he had planned, the masses of observational equipment now discarded.
Ahead of him, the trail was unmarked and the snow new. Glimpsing high above him the sharp line of demarcation between snow and sky, he felt his body go cold. It must be the altitude, he thought. When he had dropped the porters, they had told him that the highlands ahead were almost unexplored. They thought that he would find an aboriginal village inhabited by natives of the continent. They thought, also, that these natives would give him food and shelter. But they were by no means sine. Once beyond the timberline, they were automatically lost, despite the marvelous maps and trek-charts that Maun had prepared for the journey.
He paused to look behind him for a moment, seeing his tracks in rotten snow, then mushed on. And at the peak of the pass he stopped short. Before him stretched so incredible an expanse of snowy tundra that his eyes ached at the effort of encompassing ail at one glance. Clumps of plain grass stretched before him, growing tiny in the vast distances of the snowy prairie.
Striker sat down in the snow, breathing deeply. He unshipped his pack and pulled out one of the trek-charts his scholarly friend had drawn for him. With a red pencil he marked a deliberate X in the very center of the pass indicated on the map. Underneath him, he knew, was a cairn buried by previous adventurers. They had gone about a hundred miles farther and turned back, broken in mind and body. Blame it on the weather, he thought. If the cool, dry wind kept up he was fairly safe; he might even make it to Bolama in two more days, using every glissading trick and braker he knew. And if one of the prairie blizzards swept down on him, it might take longer. Or he might never get there at all.
Wearily, Striker rose again and started down, his feet plunging deeply in the snow. He rubbed his eyes as specks on the bleak tundra swirled before him. Hastily, knowing from three Himalayan expeditions how swiftly and terribly snow-blindness could come, he fumbled for his dark glasses, snapped them on his head. But the spots were still there. They were too large to be men and moved too swiftly. Could they be mounted riders, he wondered. He had heard something of the sort about the aborigines of this land.
Deliberately, he sat in the snow to wait. The moving figures grew larger. He could see that they were riders: short, dark men on wry little canine-type animals. He lit one of the cigars to which he had become accustomed as the figures approached.
“Hello, friends!” he called out across the snow. They did not understand. Drawing rein they unshipped from their shoulders bows of laminated horn, raising them against him. With a start he whipped the air-gun from his belt. Three times the flat crash of the weapon sounded. He had aimed for their mounts; two bolted, bucking wildly, and the third dropped where it stood, its rider tumbling off.
With a cry the little man scrambled to his feet, drawing the powerful bow taut. Striker was about to send a fourth slug smacking into the man’s skull when the gun fell from his hands. His skin was tight and hot as though a sudden fever had come over him, and he was trembling in every fiber. The sun, low in the west, seemed suddenly eclipsed and Striker felt faint and weary. With half an eye he saw the barbarian with the bow had exploded into lumps of flesh scattered over the tundra.
Striker looked up and saw little, electric-blue balls of fire, each bearing a similar caricature of a face, clustering above him.
He found his tongue as two thinly shining rays of light enveloped him and he was lifted up into the cold air. “Lights,” the man from the past said thickly. “Lights in the sky.”
What happened to Striker then, happened at an inconceivable pace. He had no concept of his motion except that afforded by “persistence of vision.” Just as a lightning flash that seemed to last for a full second actually comes and goes in a millionth of that time so Striker saw beneath him the sweep of a whole continent, followed by a brief flash of blackness, as of space.
He thought he saw before him, hanging among the stars, a vast open hall of pure light and color. And the next thing he knew he was standing in that glowing hall. The small, blue spheres that had been carrying him floated before him, then split cleanly in half and, as they disappeared there floated from the spheres luminous points of white, surrounded by little tangles of viscera, glaring filaments and radiants.
Striker knew then what was about to happen to him; and with all the incredible stubbornness of a human mind he braced himself against the shock that was coming.
Then, in a colossal flash of enlightenment, it came over him. The tangle of guts floating before his eyes spoke in a deep, vibrant voice: “We aren’t gods. We can’t tell you the truth and not blow your brains out like an electric chair. But if you discover for yourself—”
Striker, abruptly, was disembodied and hurled into the past. Painless, soulless, he was there to see and remember. Very, very slowly the intelligence he had experienced began to take form. Slowly the matrix dissociated from its background and emerged aglow with meaning:
One million years into the past slid the ego of Striker and again he saw his own world, but as he had never seen it before. From the cold black of space he looked down with eyesight incredibly clear and at the same time heard and understood the strange babble of two billion tongues and followed the thread of two billion lives.
He discerned himself on the roof of the bleak, barnlike structure on Staten Island, the highest point of the Eastern Seaboard, stepping into the cubicle on which he had been laboring intermittently for the past eighteen years. Striker dispassionately saw himself as he had been—clear gray eyes staring fearlessly into the future. He well knew that the cluster of men about him, his assistants who operated the external controls of his time-catapult, were smaller of soul. Without hatred he clearly saw into the mind of his young assistant the festering thought: “… hope the old swine never comes back-risking his priceless reserves: time, money, me. …” And the thought trailed off into a rotten pocket of suppurating vileness.
A slam of sound and a flash of light and Striker saw that he had vanished from the cabinet. Watching from the black of space, he felt no pain or shock. What had happened to this other Striker had happened.
His attention focused sharply on other things of his day: hospitals, factory, shipyards. With the cruel dissecting eyes of a surgeon he probed into the lives of his people, keenly noting the action and interaction. “Practice enough,” he thought at last.
Then he cut sharply into a little cellar apartment, the incarnation of squalor and dank poverty. It was the contrast between his clean, brisk lab, this hell of stenches and fetor. It was a contrast too intolerable, almost, to be real. He probed the minds of the family that lived there—terror-ridden, hating, despising and despised.
Striker was shocked. His emotions were stirred, and that, he found abruptly, as he tried to shift his focus of attention, was very bad, because if he let his emotions enter into the matter he was stuck. And the fear that this realization engendered nearly undid him for good. With a coldly violent wrench he snapped himself into the next day. It would not do to observe too closely, he realized.
After a thorough inspection of the world of the 1950’s, he drifted on along the time-stream for a score of years, alternately contracting and expanding his ego, as it were. This seemed to give him some sort of purchase on the fabric of space; the mechanical analogy was peristalsis.
The North America of 1970 was not pretty to see. All hell had broken loose, and the fin du siècle mind had begun to assert itself. New York city was still the biggest town in the world, but it had regained the unwanted title of the most corrupt. To the customary sewer and sanitation grafts there had been added a few new ones; Striker saw into the minds of what was known as the “Powerhouse,” the dozen men who ran the lives of the dozen million New Yorkers.
Striker shifted to the West Coast and found things in better shape. There the factories were cleaner and better-lit;
there were anti-speedup laws enforced by a reform government. Hollywood, entertainment capital before television had granted that palm to high-up, centrally located Denver, was the world focus for plastics manufacture. Square miles of buildings turned out everything from buttons to houses, molded in one piece. Striker actually saw houses rolling three per minute from the assembly line.
Then Striker took a fairly long jump through time—fifty years—and landed smack in the middle of a second civil war, this time between the East and the West. And this time there was direct participation by the foreign nations. America was the battleground of the world. There wasn’t a square foot in the corn belt that hadn’t been poisoned, shelled or bombed by one side or the other. New Yorkers were living in their vast subway system on canned goods when Striker looked in. They were mentally in the same state of dumb terror that always grips the small man when he is crushed between two forces which he does not understand.
In Los Angeles things were worse, because the people there had no subways to protect themselves from the Asian bombers that were flying over nightly from the Land of the Rising Sun—on behalf of the Allegheny States—to lay their eggs. The wheels had stopped turning in Hollywood; by tuning in on some Army high-ups, Striker found out that production facilities were scattered over most of Arizona, under the sand.
He located one of these and projected his mind into an empty battle tank as it was being trucked out to a distribution point near ruined Tucson, blasted to powder years ago.
The tank was manned by a foul-mouthed youth, about seventeen, who ferried it to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it joined several thousand others. A more experienced hand took over. From the conversation Striker realized that they were going to try to get through to Springfield, Ohio, and to cut off the Easterners from the Great Lakes.
The monster division of tanks met opposition in some very solid forts, rolling over them at great cost in life and fire-power. For the next week they kept moving, slower and slower, harried by planes and infantry. When Striker’s tank was blown up he departed to his observation point in space, quite certain that the Westerners would not reach Springfield, Ohio—not this time.
He worked himself ahead exactly a century and looked down on a continent again peaceful. The war had been decided by a plague which had wiped out whole armies on both sides. Foreign powers had moved in to carve up the rich prize.
Another century passed and Striker saw another American Revolution, not by a landed, rum-smuggling aristocracy, but by the slavelike labor who ran the foreign-owned factories and mines. This time it was keeps; there were scenes of slaughter that made the watcher sick to his imaginary stomach. And he found that he was jammed again, unable to move in space or time. It took discipline to wrench himself away from the bloody scenes going on beneath him.
He did not observe very closely on his next jump. For the first thing he saw was a little arc of light spilling sparks from a port, shooting through space all the way to the Moon, where it crashed leaving no survivors. Striker’s feelings of pride and accomplishment were as dangerous as his disgust with needless slaughter.
Striker moved ahead five hundred years and watched from a distance, finding the void thick with darting jewels made by man. Rockets were everywhere, ferrying human beings and priceless commodities. Cautiously, he peered at Mars to find there a human population of a billion, and growing steadily, from all indications. Surprisingly, there were few great public works and dwellings. Man was living a natural life. There was a score of years devoted to schooling, then the usual human activities of working, breeding and finally dying. But it looked very attractive to Striker, for there was no more disease and the life-span had more than tripled. It was a superb exaggeration of a genus’ life history. And it was the same on nearly all the other planets.
He was not sure how far ahead he moved on his next jump into futurity, but it must have been unthinkable centuries. Mars had been depopulated by some unspecified catastrophe, and the race was determined that that would not happen again. Tinkering with genes had produced a strain of men with homy plates covering their bodies and great safes surrounding their brains so that nothing less than a stick of dynamite in the mouth could harm them. But it proved to be a blind alley, for with the reversion to brutally strong body-formation, came a corresponding psychological atavism; over the course of the next thousand years crime reappeared and hate lust-murders were common.
Concerted action by the humans who had not the horn-plate genes wiped out the strain in quick order. Experiments began anew at an opposite pole, and man became slight in the next few generations.
The end result of this Striker did not see. At the end of one of his flights he landed off Saturn and probed down to the surface to see what he could. And what he saw! Pavements that glowed with inner fire, buildings that were little more than arcs of electricity between four terminals! It was when he saw the men that he feared for his sanity, for they were slight creatures, right enough. And many had pulpy little horns on their brows. Some glowed with enormously stimulated mitogenic rays.
The implication of this chilled Striker with horror; he tried to leave, to retreat into space for a while to think—and could not move. This was at last what he had dreaded, and the horror snowballed, gathering magnitude and intensity.
IV
STRIKER, fixed immovable, was jammed out there in space until seven years had passed. For the first three he assiduously courted madness by brooding on his plight. By the fourth year he had come to his senses and worked out a grueling system of mental control that would ultimately divorce his mind from any vestige of emotion and impulse, leaving him, for the length of his time traveling, a cold and passionless being, secure from any repetition of this event. After four years of controlling, his project succeeded and he was free again to wander.
He set his course for no less than fifteen thousand years, and back to Earth. He had seen enough of Saturn and its environments.
When he had assumed his customary observation point he looked down briefly. The Earth was again a jungle, abandoned by man and given over to reptiles and carnivores. Striker brought his super-acute vision to bear on a little column of smoke. It was neither volcano nor forest fire. And another crushing fact insinuated itself into his mind. With only the staggering semblance of control he tore as far away from the planet as he could go, finding himself, seconds later, off Proxima Centauri’s planetary system.
And there too were human beings—his people—now with bodies shriveled, blow-horns extended into luminous organs, some swinging clear of the ground as they moved. They lived wholly radiational lives, with customs and speech utterly beyond his conception. Had he not observed their evolution he would never have believed that they had started as the genus homo. They too were able to pass through time and space at will.
The watcher set his course for Earth again, ready to face facts that should not be denied.
Over the mother-planet Striker minutely observed a colony of apes who had learned the use of fire. There were no more than a few hundred of them left, but in a century they were chattering at each other in the crude beginnings of a language. It was their salvation that they were fairly large but not so large that they had no practical enemies. On account of their size they were forced to use what brains they had in the invention of devices to save their strength for work.
They were social creatures. As soon as the population increased they formed elaborate social tabus that nearly ended them, for their ritual made mating so elaborate an affair that the common-sense thing to do was to break the laws, seize a wife and become an outsider. A great reformer arose inevitably—for the will of the apes to end their fantastic restrictions had to find an outlet—and cut the Gordian knot. He lived to an extraordinary age, and for most of his life he ruled over the tribe. And under that rule, they prospered marvelously well.
A couple of centuries later they discovered agriculture, and then there was no checking them. It was no time at all before they reached th
e classical point of civilization when they realized that it was more worth their while to make their criminals and prisoners work for them than to eat them.
They colonized extensively, being remarkably fecund animals. Their people were spread over most of the world before they had given up cannibalism. The slave system endured for a long, long time—so long that Striker wondered if they would never advance—though, of course, he knew.
He found, although speeded up somewhat, the usual line of development. An industrial revolution occurred and slavery came to an end. Cities in the real sense grew like mushrooms, most of them wrought from the tangled steel that was the only token left that genus homo had once passed that way.
When great liners were plowing the sea, coming to berth in harbor cities. Striker knew with exhausted gratefulness that his incredible journey was near an end. He saw drifting past him three of the blue radiational spheres in which human beings traveled through space, and tried to contact them but there was no reply. The spheres were from Rigel whose population specialized in travel of space and time.
Very carefully, he observed one special harbor, where little steam-launches patrolled the waters day and night on the alert for smugglers. He saw, at last, a strangely dressed man, not at all like the ape people, appear out of nowhere and splash into the harbor’s waters. And he knew, with an abstract admiration, that the man was himself.
He watched this other Striker investigate the ways of the world of the millionth year, saw him sitting on the tundra where the ball lightning had been seen. He saw him taken up by the human beings from Rigel and transported to the hall they had built for him in space out of free electrons.
“—and have the toughness to resist panic and explore we shall give you that power,” Striker rubbed his eyes, found that he was in the hall in space. The organ notes of the human being from Rigel were still sounding in his ears. He had covered the million years in the blink of an eye.
Adventures in the Far Future Page 14