Downtiming the Night Side

by Jack L. Chalker

  Standing near him was a white-clad woman who was rather tall and dark-complected, sort of Polynesian in appearance, with dark brown eyes and jet black hair cut very short. The two others with her were both men: one was dressed in a camouflage uniform and appeared almost too large to fit through any known door; the other, a light-skinned black man with strong Negroid features, was dressed in a one-piece outfit of black leather-like material. Even so, he looked like everybody’s vision of a military drill instructor.

  The white-clad woman saw that he was awake, turned to him, and smiled down at him. She had a very nice smile. “Glad to have you back among the living. I am Kahwalini, generally known to everyone as Doc. That way they don’t have to remember how the name is pronounced.” She had excellent command of English, but her accent was strange, like no other he had ever heard before.

  “Ron Moosic,” he croaked. “I take it I’m not dead?”

  She laughed. “No, you’re not dead, although it was a very close thing. Minutes, perhaps.”

  He realized with a start that he was Ron Moosic—real and in the flesh. But, somewhere in his mind, he also knew that he was a little bit of Alfie Jenkins, and Holger Neumann, and Sister Nobody, and, yes, Marcus Josephus as well. He could still feel the pain of the nails and the agony of the cross, and a little part of him, certainly the Sister, seemed to take some perverse satisfaction in that.

  “Where—when—am I?” he managed, and tried to sit up. He felt instantly weak and dizzy and settled back down.

  “Don’t try to move for a little bit yet,” the doctor warned him. “You have had a great shock, and it will take some small time to convince your body that it is not the one which suffered. As to where you are, we call it simply Home Base, although it has many names. As to when— well, that is something even we aren’t certain about. Some period after the age of dinosaurs but before the domination of mammals, although mammals there are around this place.”

  In the prehistoric past, even before the appearance of apelike beings, he thought wonderingly.

  “The very large gentleman over there is Commander Chung Lind,” Doc told him. “The other just calls himself Herb.”

  “Herbert Axton Wethers,” Herb added, “for all the good that does now. Me and a hundred other folks.” His accent was as strange as Kahwalini’s, but totally different.

  “You don’t have a tall, rough-looking blond fellow with you, do you?” Moosic asked hesitantly.

  Chung Lind laughed. “Hardly. That’d be Eric. Him and we don’t get along very well.” A third accent, equally odd, equally unique. Now that he thought of it, the woman in London and Blondie had both had such accents as well.

  “What about a short, chubby woman with short black hair?”

  Kahwalini’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Yes, she’s here. You’ll meet her and the others soon. Right now you need sleep most of all. You two—get out of here! I’m going to let him rest.”

  “But I don’t want—” Moosic started, but he saw he’d been too slow to win this battle. It wasn’t exactly a needle, but it hissed slightly against his arm and stung for just a second, and he began feeling very groggy in a matter of seconds.

  It was a deep and apparently dreamless sleep, and when he awoke, he felt much, much better. He looked to see if he was attached to anything—IV tubes or the like—and, finding nothing, he sat up. He was still a little dizzy, but otherwise he felt pretty good.

  The door slid aside with a hissing sound and Kahwalini entered, this time dressed in the basic black outfit that seemed the standard around here—wherever “here” really was.

  “Glad to see you’re looking good,” she said cheerily. “How do you feel?”

  “A little dizzy, and hungry enough to eat a horse.”

  “Excellent! The dizziness, I think, will pass, and will be helped by a meal.” She opened a small cabinet and took out a package, then unwrapped something and offered it to him. “Here—eat this. It’s a sort of candy-and-cake roll, lots of sugar and not much else, but it should help until I’ve finished my examination and we can get you some real food.”

  The examination seemed like a normal general exam— stethoscope on the chest, a look at the throat, eyes, ears, and such—but it also included placing two small instruments on him, one on his forehead, then another on his back. She checked both and nodded to herself. “Looking good,” she told him. “I think you’re fit enough to join the rest of the human race, such as it is in this day and time.”

  The confection had helped a lot, although he was still thirsty and starved for more food. She got him a black suit of their standard issue, and he was surprised to find how well it fit when he put it on. It was, in fact, a two-piece affair, top and bottom, but he discovered that when he ran his index finger along the seam, it essentially vanished. “Good trick,” he told her.

  “There’s a fly like that in yours, too,” she told him. “To open, simply press where you want the slit to start and continue down, keeping your finger on the material until it is open enough. Reverse the process to close.”

  “This is not exactly one-million-B.C. technology,” he noted.

  The boots were less impressive, being almost exactly the same as the pairs he’d worn in the Air Force. They were, however, without laces, and he found that you sealed them like you did the suit. Finally, she gave him a black belt with a small, and empty, leather-like pouch on it. The buckle, of flat black metal, was disappointing—it was a simple clasp type with no special features.

  “You’ll find the pouch useful, since you have no pockets,” she told him.

  “No underwear, either,” he noted, seeing every shapely part of her anatomy. He looked down and found that it worked both ways.

  “We wear whatever is needed, no more. Most of so-called Western civilization overdressed to death, even in the tropics.”

  He couldn’t argue with that.

  They assigned him a small, comfortable apartment in the complex and got him a good meal—the meat was apparently synthetic, but tasted very good, while all the rest was organically grown on the base—and then took him down to meet the others, answer questions, and show off the base.

  There were a total of twelve members in the squad, which was all they ever called themselves. They were, in fact, the only humans on the base or, as far as they knew, in the time frame, except for himself, although the place could accommodate about a hundred people, if pressed.

  “The whole place is automated,” Doc told him. “In fact, much of the complex is a large, totally sealed computer. It’s the computer that keeps watch on the time stream, charting its phases and changes, and dispatches some or all of us.”

  He nodded. “But why back this far in time? I would have thought that you would put this in your present.”

  “Our—oh. I should explain. None of us are from the time of the builders. We’re all just like you—nightsiders originally from the other times. You are the earliest, I think, but we recruit from those who go nightside. The amount of power required for time travel is enormous. To do it the way we do, the power complex here could power your world for a year all by itself.”

  He was shocked. “You mean you have never seen who you work for?”

  She shook her head negatively. “None of us. Oh, as nightsiders, we could travel all the way to the leading edge, but that wouldn’t do us any good.” Several others joined in the conversation, and at last he was given a picture of just what was going on.

  The leading edge was a little well over two hundred years in the future of his time. On the main line, atomic war was averted in a most terrible way, when two small countries went at each other with nuclear weapons. The results were a glaring case study of what a nuclear war would really be like, and the climatic changes caused by even the limited exchange were dramatic for many years. The larger nations did not rush to disarm, but they were clearly frightened. Together, they took steps to stamp out nuclear weapons and control such materials, no matter what the cost to smaller countries.<
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  Seeing the results but still not convinced an all-out holocaust could be avoided, both East and West turned their energies to space, both as a diversion and because, both sides felt, the establishment of a true human permanence in space would guarantee the survival of humanity in the future. This, in fact, was the case, but the results were not at all what they expected.

  Terraforming Mars, for example, was very possible, but also very lengthy—the time involved being at least several centuries. Other places in space that would be self-sufficient and require no Earth support were even less hospitable. So, instead of risking the time that it would take to radically change those places, they changed the people themselves. There was no shortage of volunteers, which surprised them, but between those who felt it was the only salvation of the human race and the romantics, the dreamers, the scientists, and, indeed, the down-and-out looking for a new start, it was irresistible.

  By the time of the leading edge, colonies had been established not only on Mars but also on some of the distant moons of the gas giants and on asteroids. Expensive terraforming was done, but it was bargain-basement by comparison and short- rather than long-term oriented. The people, by a process they didn’t know, were altered to fit what the engineers could create.

  The dividends were enormous beyond the salvation of humanity. New ways to find and use energy, and new sources of it, were discovered and even created by those who became known collectively as the Outworlders. They also bred new generations true to their mutated forms, and those new generations made new discoveries. But there was a great push on Earth now for large masses of people who wanted to undergo the processes and live as Outworlders. Many who were sent were political dissidents or criminals; other places used the new colonies, which had fragile ecosystems able to support only limited numbers, as population control valves.

  Ultimately, the Outworlders faced the historic choice that all colonies eventually face. They could continue to supply the rapidly resource-depleted Earth with all it needed, while getting little in return, and continue to absorb new groups of people, many of them undesirables, until finally their ecosystems would collapse, unable to support the vast bulk of people and Earth’s requirements—or they could quit.

  Soviet, Chinese, Japanese, European, and American the Outworlders had been, and culturally they continued for a while as these groups. But transport interdependence and their alienness from Earth’s race which had spawned them drove them ever closer together, no longer as echoes of Earth nations but as Outworlders. Political control was difficult anyway, since even the controllers had to become Outworlders.

  Eventually there was a revolt. The Confederation of Outworlders was proclaimed, an association of free and independent races with a common military force. They took many of the spaceships of Earth, and revealed that they had many more of their own.

  Earth did not take it easily, for they’d come to depend on the Outworlds for much of their resources and technology. For the first time, countries always hostile to one another put aside their differences and pooled their resources to mount a fleet to wrest control from the still weak Outworlders while they still could.

  The Outworlders struck quickly, destroying the vulnerable orbital power stations and spaceship relays, where transfers were made from Earth to Orbit shuttles to deep space vessels. The installations on the moon were overrun or destroyed.

  In the political backwash of this action, and as the standard of living for Earth’s vast population dropped like a stone from this cutoff, governments fell and the semi-combined military forces stepped in. The Earth came quickly under a ruthless worldwide military dictatorship formed from the officers of the multinational force. There was no nuclear war, for the very people on both sides who would have to ultimately fire the warheads refused to act—except against those who refused their rule.

  The military men may not have liked each other, but they understood that the future of Earth depended on retaking the Outworlds at all costs. National and even ideological disputes could wait, for they were of no consquence.

  If humanity in the twentieth century had suddenly lost all use of electrical devices, all civilizations would have fallen and much of the world would have died as surely as it would by nuclear bomb. Their ancestors had gotten along without it, but they had grown up without it and in an economy and culture that had never had it. The knowledge of how to survive in a society without such power had essentially been lost.

  In the twenty-third century, this had been taken a step further. The economics and very survival of human civilization depended on what the Outworlds produced and managed. Without the orbital power satellites, without the minerals and miracles of space production, the basis of civilization could not stand. There could be merely a holding action.

  The Outworlds, too, understood this, but had expected to come to terms after presenting Earth with a fait accompli. They had not expected, however, to be dealing with a massive multinational military complex, but with the old political leaders they were accustomed to. They had struck too hard and too well.

  The military ruthlessly stamped out all opposition, killing millions in the process. Their technological base was dwindling, but hardly exhausted, and they used all they had in the single effort to get back out there at all costs. The Earth became effectively a slave labor camp dedicated to the one goal of retaking space.

  The Outworlds, stunned by this, realized that only a massive military defeat would insure their future. Ironically, they also found themselves fighting to free Earth from a form of oppression no past dictator had ever dreamed possible. They had the high ground, and could bombard the Earth almost at will, although the Earth had formidable defenses and took her toll. Still, Earth’s position was hopeless until some formerly Soviet generals happened on the American time-machine project.

  The project, in fact, had been shut down for years for lack of funds, but the great store of knowledge was intact, and many of the laws and limitations of time had been worked out. A theoretical plan for the defense of Earth from a possible time war was uncovered.

  It had been discovered through instrumentation and unmanned probes that beyond the dawn of human civilization time was far more tolerant. With sufficient power, a computer could be placed far back in time, perhaps to its origins, with no true link to the leading edge at all. With a supporting self-generating power supply, it could monitor time forward, with all its changes, and power at least a small force of time-traveling agents. If need be, much of its output could be diverted in the event of a complete collapse or nuclear war to take the leadership and selected others all the way back to the complex. A few hundred, no more, but it was another way to perhaps preserve humanity, which could then wait it out until enough relative time had elapsed, the leading edge advancing a few centuries, to return to a future Earth in the process of righting itself or finding a new balance.

  Such a computer had been sent back, in the golden days of limitless Outworlder power. It could be accessed.

  “Then this is that station,” Moosic said wonderingly. “And those things I called gargoyles—Outworlders?”

  They looked shocked. “Oh, no,” Lind responded. “This is the base the Outworlders built to counter the time threat. The gargoyles, as you call them, are the products of the same process that created the Outworlders, but changed to produce the perfect soldier—dumb, totally obedient, very tough and strong. This is the Outworlder base, and we’re the enemies of Earth.”

  A bit later in the afternoon, he met the woman again. She’d not been there for the initial bull session, and he’d been too curious to inquire, but now that she’d come in from wherever she’d been, he had the feeling she was avoiding direct contact. He dismissed that as crazy and went over to her.

  “Hi! I finally get the chance to say thanks for saving my life,” he said cheerfully, sitting down in a chair opposite hers. “How’s that for a good opening line?”

  She smiled, but there seemed to be a lot of thinking going
on behind those dark eyes. She seemed much younger than he’d remembered her, but, then, he’d been drugged and the light had been poor, and Alfie had a different perspective of what old meant. She sighed, and seemed to decide whatever it was that was troubling her, or at least she put it off for a time. “I’m sorry for not being a little more hospitable,” she responded. “I’m afraid I’ve got a load on my mind and a lot of hard decisions to make. I’ve just had a nasty personal shock.”

  “Try being crucified,” he suggested, surprised he could make light of it so soon.

  “I have. It’s not very nice. Not much has been nice lately.”

  He shrugged, a bit disconcerted by the answer, and made as if to leave. “I don’t want to intrude on what’s none of my business.”

  “No, no. Stay, please. I’m still a little new at this myself, and it’s pretty hard to get used to. As soon as you think you’ve found out everything, you find you don’t understand anything at all. This whole business of time is the craziest thing you can think of. Just think of this, for starters—neither of us is a real person.”

  “Huh? We both look pretty solid to me.”

  “Maybe. But we’re nightsiders. We have no existence outside of this base, outside of the Safe Zone—the time before people. Neither of us has a home to go to anymore.”

  He considered that a moment. “I imagine I still do—if I could ever get back to my own time.”

  She shook her head. “They haven’t told you yet. Go ask Doc or Herb. I think I understand it, but they’ll explain it better than me.”

  He excused himself and found Herb, who told him. Karl Marx had now been killed in 1841, at twenty-three years of age, before he’d even formed any of his ideas, let alone committed them to paper. Thus, the potential theoretician of the Communist movement had also been killed. Without him, competing theories dominated, particularly Bakunism, which is essentially anarchy. The theories of the left remained classical rather than radical. Because there was no Marx, there was no Marxism to inspire Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, they drifted into the more radical anarchy of Bakunin, and went nowhere. Because there was no Lenin and Trotsky there to take firm control, the Russians, when they overthrew the Czar, remained a weak social democracy.