Collision with Chronos

by Barrington J. Bayley

  Heshke’s muscles knotted up. The tech officers murmured to one another and through microphones to the team outside. A raw, fuzzy hum arose to their rear.

  One of the Titans half turned his head to speak to them. “We’re away.”

  Was that all? Heshke’s stomach untensed itself. He felt no sensation of motion; but through the semi-opaque windows he saw a runny blur of motion and colour, phasing wildly to and fro as though the vehicle were pursuing an erratic course.

  “Home,” Ascar said to him. “We’re leaving home.”

  Heshke looked at him quizzically.

  “Well of course it’s home!” the other scowled impatiently. “Don’t you know what I mean? Haven’t you any vision?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I mean we’re leaving the Absolute Present. That’s home to us. The only place in the universe where conscious life exists. Just think of all of past time, stretching back and back into eternity. The further back you go into it the further away you are from the brief intersection where life exists, until you would be like a ghost, a brief fragment of time in a timeless abyss … and the same if you go into the future. Doesn’t that get through to you?”

  Ascar’s eyes were bulging and there were tiny beads of perspiration on his brow. “Is that what going back in time is like for you?” Heshke asked quietly. “Like falling into an abyss?”

  “That’s what it’s like – a chasm without a bottom. And we’re descending into it.”

  Suddenly Heshke understood Ascar. The man was afraid, for all that he had reassured Heshke. He was afraid that something would go wrong and they would be cut off, unable to get back to the world of life and time.

  He had too vivid an imagination; and he was getting a little melodramatic. Heshke wondered if the physicist’s five-year-long obsession had left him mentally unbalanced. After all, it was an awesome subject to have preying on one’s mind.

  Heshke himself still found the explanations of time and non-time too abstruse to be grasped properly; his mind spun when he tried to think it through. He found it hard to understand why the travelling wave of ‘now’, that is, of time, should be at one particular place at one particular time. …

  No, that wasn’t it, either. Being where it was was what made time. …

  They passed the rest of the journey in silence, Ascar slouching in his chair, insofar as the combat suit would let him, and occasionally muttering to himself. Three hours passed; and then the tech officer warned them that they were coming in to land.

  A gong sounded. The blurred, racing images that had almost lulled Heshke to sleep ceased, but he couldn’t see anything definite through the thickened windows.

  Ascar released his safety strap and invited Heshke to do the same. “Come and have a look out of the window,” he said, “you might like to see this.”

  Heshke followed him and peered through one of the frosty windows. Ascar turned a knob and the plate cleared.

  Outside was a scene reassuringly pleasant and familiar. Judging by the position of the sun it was midafternoon. Beneath a blue sky stretched greenery: a savannah interspersed with scrawny trees. And nearby, recognisable to Heshke despite the intervening three centuries, were the Hathar Ruins, broken, crumbled and moss-covered.

  “Notice anything?” Ascar said expectantly.

  And Heshke did notice something. A raven was flying across their field of view – or rather, it was not flying. Close enough for every feather of its outspread wings to stand out distinctly, it was hanging in midair, frozen and motionless.

  “It’s not moving,” he murmured in wonderment.

  “That’s right.” Ascar seemed secretly gleeful. “We’re at a dead stop. Halted on one frozen instant.”

  A thought occurred suddenly to Heshke “But if that were so we wouldn’t be able to see anything. Light would be frozen, too.”

  Ascar gave a superior smile. “A clever inference. Citizen, but a wrong one. There’s no such thing as frozen light – its velocity is constant for all observers, which is the same as saying it’s not properly a velocity at all. Few laymen understand that.”

  He gave a signal to the pilot. “Just the same, for practical purposes we need to explore an environment with all the features of our own, that is to say one that moves.”

  The pilot did something on the control panel. The raven bolted into action, flapped its wings and flew away. The savannah stirred in the breeze.

  “Now we are travelling futureward at the rate of one second per second: the normal rate of time we are used to. This rate will persist automatically. We can go outside now.”

  The door hissed open, allowing fresh air into the cabin. Heshke moved to the rear of the cabin, picked up a movie vidcamera, a satchel of tools and a specimen bag. Then he followed Ascar into the open air.

  There could be little doubt of it. The photographs dug up in Jejos weren’t faked; there was no coincidence, nothing that could account for them in accidental terms. They were pictures of the actual ruins he and Ascar stood in the midst of now.

  Beyond them, on a grassy knoll, stood the time traveller, guarded by one of the Titan technical officers. The other officer had taken up a nearer position just outside the ruins and was scanning the landscape for signs of danger. God knew what kind of danger there could be here in the middle of nowhere, three hundred years back in limbo, but there he stood in the textbook standoff position.

  It was hard to believe it: hard to believe that they were three hundred years into non-time. The air brought to Heshke’s nostrils all the freshness of summer, the sun shone down, and everything looked peacefully normal.

  “Are you absolutely sure?” Ascar asked.

  “Absolutely. I know these ruins like the back of my hand. I’ve been studying them for years. These are the Hathar Ruins, as I would expect them to be three centuries after our time. We must be in the future.”

  “No, we’re in the past.” Ascar was frowning, a scowling frown of great agitation.

  “Well. …” Heshke put his hand on a weathered alien wall, feeling the almost subconscious thrill he had noted so often. “Then we’re up against a paradox that would seem to support the Titan theory: that the past and the future have got mixed up somehow and nothing we see is real. But I have to say that personally I feel forced to reject even that theory. These remains are too perfect, too solid and incontrovertible in every detail. They have suffered three centuries of physical decay from the ruins of my time, and they have decayed exactly as I would expect.”

  “But we are in the past,” Ascar insisted.

  Heshke shouldered his vidcamera and shook his head sadly. “Come over here,” he invited.

  Clambering over the massy stones, the physicist followed him into a grid-pattern of low walls which had the appearance of once having been a set of rooms. The archaeologist crouched down beside a wall where he had earlier pulled away a patch of moss.

  “This clinches it,” he said, looking up at Ascar. “See these grooves?”

  Ascar stooped. The sharp sunlight glinted on little fronds of moss, on dirt and sparkling stone, and made shadows in a number of short trenches cut in three blocks of stone, surrounding a third.

  “Yes.”

  “I myself helped to cut those grooves. We suspected there was an aumbry behind here – a cupboard cut in the wall. And we were right. Afterwards we replaced the sealing stone. Here, give me a hand.”

  He took a couple of jemmies out of his tool satchel. Ascar helped him to lever away the slab. It came after a little effort, being not as thick or as solidly entrenched as it looked. Heshke shone a little light into the cavity thus revealed and moved aside so that Ascar could look.

  “I’ll bet a year’s pay there’s some writing in there. See if you can find it.”

  Ascar poked his head into the entrance. The recess was larger than its door suggested and smelled damp, but it was free of dust. On the opposite wall were some large letters, neatly cut with a powered stone inscriber.

  �
�Skeleton thirty-one,” he read slowly. “Glass vessel four hundred eighty-nine.”

  Heshke chuckled. “That’s right. I inscribed that message myself. It was to record what we had found in there and their catalogue numbers.”

  Ascar stood up and took a deep breath.

  “Well, there’s your proof,” Heshke told him. “Right now we are standing after our time, not before.”

  “Well, you’re the expert,” Ascar said amiably. “I can’t argue with that.”

  The time traveller surged forward, and Heshke relaxed, idly watching the flurry of shapes and colours through the windows and listening to the fuzzy hum of the time-drive. For the first part of the journey back to the research centre he had tried to talk to Leard Ascar; but the physicist had retreated into himself and now sat staring with glazed eyes at the floor, either stupefied or engaged in deep meditation.

  He had asked the pilots that he be allowed to release the safety straps, since they appeared to be superfluous and made the journey even more tedious, but they had refused, explaining that the machine was liable to a sudden lurch if a rapid change in direction was called for.

  He wondered how his report would be received by the Titan controllers of the research centre. Already he had communicated his findings to the pilots. They were well-trained and understood the implications. But with typical Titan superciliousness they’d made no comment.

  Half resentfully, he stared at their broad, uniformed backs. These Titans had killed his friend Blare Oblomot, he reminded himself. He realised now that he had gone around anaesthetised since that event, as if in a dream … it was a happening he just hadn’t been able to take in properly. But then Blare, by his own admission, had been a traitor; inexplicably, a traitor. …

  A gong rang out, in a different tone from that which had heralded the approach of their outgoing destination. The pilot spoke up for the passengers’ benefit.

  “We’re approaching Absolute Present.”

  Ascar jerked his gaze up from the floor. Just then the co-pilot murmured something to his colleague, who glanced down at the other’s section of the instrument panel.

  “Citizen Ascar, we appear to have a malfunction on the Absolute Present register,” the pilot announced in a puzzled tone.

  “Eh?” Ascar released himself from his straps and bounded forward to peer closely at the designated instrument. From where he was sitting Heshke could see it: a large strip-dial that had commenced to flash as the gong sounded. A marker moved steadily across it in a count-down toward zero: the travelling wave of time.

  But now the marker was quivering and behaving erratically, first darting toward the zero and then retreating from it. “Without that register we’ll find it difficult to synchronise back into ‘now’,” the pilot warned.

  “Malfunctioning, hell, it must be in order,” Ascar growled.

  “It gives impossible readings,” the Titan corrected meticulously. “It’s obviously an instrument failure.”

  Ascar froze for a moment. “Not impossible,” he said slowly. “It’s detecting the presence of real time, but not strongly enough for it to be absolute time. Hell, we ourselves carry a small fragment of time with us – as does every other time traveller!”

  He stepped to a window and tuned it to near-transparency, peered through it briefly and then crossed the cabin to do the same on the other side. There, pacing them so as to stand out steadily against the kaleidoscope-like flurry, was a cylindrical shape rounded at both ends.

  It duplicated perfectly the alien time traveller that had been shown to Heshke on film.

  Cautiously he released his straps and joined Ascar at the window, peering fascinated through the glowing pane. He became aware that behind the dulled windows of the alien traveller there were undoubtedly eyes, alien eyes, that were watching them.

  “Great Mother Earth!” one of the Titans swore softly.

  Ascar swung around. “For God’s sake man – don’t let them track us to the Research Centre!”

  The Titan understood him perfectly. “Back to your seats!” he ordered. But Heshke was still not secured properly when the traveller gave a sickening lurch and raced off into whatever other direction might conceivably exist – Heshke was confused on that point for the moment. He just saved himself from being toppled onto the floor and fastened the straps.

  The Absolute Present register was flaring more brightly. “We shall synchronise with the present on a distant part of Earth, and make our way from there to the Centre by conventional means,” the Titan announced. “By that means we may hope to evade alien detection.”

  “No,” said Ascar. “Keep going.”

  “What for?” the other said sharply. “Our orders are to return to the Centre forthwith!”

  “Keep going – on into the future.” Ascar’s voice was trembling with excitement. “There’s something I have to find out,” he said. “Something we all have to find out. So keep going!”

  The pilot glanced over his shoulder, perturbed – as Heshke was – to see the physicist so in the grip of passion. “Are you suggesting that we depart from the flight plan, Citizen? That can not be allowed! Any suggestions you may have will have to be put before the controllers.”

  “Yes, Titan ideologues who can’t see the facts even when they’re held up in front of their faces!” Ascar snarled, apparently in fury. “They’ll delay, delay, delay – by then it might be too late! Mankind will be finished!”

  Ascar had again stood up. Heshke was alarmed to see that he had produced a gun from somewhere in his combat suit. With a cry Heshke also scrambled free of his straps and staggered forward, recklessly intending to tackle him. But at that moment Ascar lunged, seizing a handgrip on the control panel and swinging it far over. The time traveller accelerated wildly and overshot the Absolute Present to hurtle wildly futureward. The accompanying jolt sent Heshke reeling. He fell, hit his head violently against the arm of a chair, and blackness overwhelmed him.

  He came round to find himself back in his seat, lolling against the straps. His head ached abominably. But the pain was soon forgotten in the horror and shock of what he saw.

  The co-pilot was lying against one wall, evidently dead. The other Titan was disarmed and stood against the opposite wall, warily watching Ascar who was nonchalantly piloting the time traveller while keeping an eye on him.

  “Uh – what happened?” Heshke rasped.

  Ascar spared him a glance. “Welcome back. I’m afraid there was a scuffle. Lieutenant Hosk got shot. Wasn’t really my fault.” He spoke the last in a surly mumble

  Heshke paused. “And the alien time traveller?”

  “We lost it.” Ascar gave a tight, sinister grin. “I’ve been pushing this ship to its limit – close to a hundred and fifty years per hour.”

  The words “You’re mad” died in Heshke’s throat.

  “Where are we now?”

  “Nearly four hundred years in the future.”

  Heshke lay back in his seat, trying to fight off a feeling of hopelessness. Ascar’s mind had evidently snapped under the strain. He and the pilot would have to be patient and await their chance to overwhelm him.

  “The future? What do you expect to find there?” he asked, stumbling over the words. “You said yourself it’s all dead and empty.”

  “The facts are staring us in the face,” Ascar replied. “That’s the mark of the true scientist, isn’t it, Heshke? To take facts as facts even if they conflict with theory, and draw the most obvious deductions from them. That’s what we’ve been failing to do.”

  “What facts are those?” Heshke glanced nervously at the Titan, who was watching Ascar warily.

  “Chiefly, the plain fact that the alien interventionist ruins are ageing backward in time. If we take that at face value, then their source lies in the future, and we’re going to track it down.”

  His words were interrupted by the sounding of the gong. The Absolute Present register began to glow, for the second time this trip.

  “Ther
e she blows!” crowed Ascar.

  The Titan’s jaw dropped. He stared at the register as though unable to believe his eyes.

  “But we’re four centuries away from Absolute Present!”

  “Four centuries from our Absolute Present.”

  “There is only one,” the Titan insisted emptily. “Your own equations say so … you to whom we owe the secret of the time-drive …”

  “Well, I can’t be right all the time,” Ascar said, rather bleakly. “What do you think I was doing for three hours while we made the journey back – just sitting there with a blank mind?” He snorted. “Oh no, I was going over those very equations you seem to regard as sacrosanct … and it occurred to me that I might not know as much about time as I had thought, and that the equations could be wrong. So I began to imagine a number of other possibilities. What if the Absolute Present isn’t unique, as I had formerly assumed it to be? Perhaps there are other waves of time, separated from our own by millions of years, by millennia – or only by centuries. Perhaps there is a regular series of them, forming the nodes of a cosmic wave frequency vibrating through the universe. Whatever the truth, I discovered that if I amended the equations to make room for any of these possibilities then the basic principle that makes the time-drive work remains unchanged … so the theoretical structure had to give way … even if the Great Earth Mother has to give way too. …”

  While he spoke Ascar had been deftly flying the time traveller, dividing his attention between the instruments and his two hijacked passengers. His gun was never more than an inch or two away from his right hand.

  He continued ramblingly. “And what if one of those other time waves was travelling in the opposite direction to our own? Not proceeding from the past into the future, as we understand time, but from the future into the past? The very words past and future tend to lose their meaning in such a context. … Whatever lies behind one’s direction of motion is the past and whatever lies in front of it is the future. … There it is!”