Time to Come

by August Derleth (ed)

  One of the soldiers laughed. “Put them away. Don’t you know the war’s over?”

  “Over?”

  The soldiers relaxed. Their leader, a big man with a red face, wiped sweat from his forehead and pushed his way up to Ryan. His uniform was ragged and dirty. He wore boots, split and caked with ash. “The war’s been over for a week. Come on! There’s a lot to do. We’ll take you on back.”

  ' “Back?”

  “We’re rounding up all the outposts. You were cut off? No communications?”

  “No,” Ryan said.

  “Be months before everyone knows the war’s over. Come along. No time to stand here jawing.”

  Ryan shifted. “Tell me. You say the war is really over? But—”

  “Good thing, too. We couldn’t have lasted much longer.” The officer tapped his belt. “You don’t by any chance have a cigarette, do you?”

  Ryan brought out his pack slowly. He took the cigarettes from it and handed them to the officer, crumpling the pack carefully and restoring it to his pocket.

  “Thanks.” The officer passed the cigarettes around to his men. They lit up. “Yes, it’s a good thing. We were almost finished.”

  Kastner’s mouth opened. “The claws. What about the claws?”

  The officer scowled. “What?”

  “Why did the war end so—so suddenly?” “Counter-revolution in the Soviet Union. We had been dropping agents and materials for months. Never thought anything would come of it, though. They were a lot weaker than anyone realized.”

  “Then the war’s really ended?”

  “Of course.” The officer grabbed Ryan by the arm. “Let’s go. We have work to do. We’re trying to clear this god damn ash away and get things planted.” .

  “Planted? Crops?” .

  “Of course. What would you plant?”

  Ryan pulled away. “Let me- get this straight. The war is over. No more fighting. And you know nothing about any claws? Any kind of weapon called claws?”

  The officer’s face wrinkled. “What do you mean?” “Mechanical killers. Robots. As a weapon.”

  The circle of soldiers drew back a little. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “You better explain,” the officer said, his face suddenly hard. “What’s this about claws?”

  “No weapon was ever developed along those lines?” Kastner asked.

  There was silence. Finally one of the soldiers grunted. “I think I know what he means. He means Dowling’s mine.” Ryan turned. “What?”

  “An English physicist. He’s been experimenting with artificial mines, self-governing. Robot mines. But the mines couldn’t repair themselves. So the Government abandoned the project and increased its propaganda work instead.” “That’s why the war’s over,” the officer said. He started off. “Let’s go.”

  The soldiers trailed after him, down the side of the ridge. “Coming?” The officer halted, looking back at Ryan and Kastner.

  “We’ll be along later,” Ryan said. “We have to get our equipment together.”

  “All right. The camp is down the road about half a mile. There’s a settlement there. People coming back from the moon.”

  “From the moon?”

  “We had started moving units to Luna, but now there isn’t any need. Maybe it’s a good thing. Who the hell wants to leave Terra?"

  “Thanks for the cigarettes,” one of the soldiers called back. The soldiers piled in the back of the truck. The officer slid behind the wheel. The truck started up and continued on its way, rumbling along the road.

  Ryan and Kastner watched it go.

  “Then Schonerman’s death was never balanced,” Ryan murmured. “A whole new past—”

  “I wonder how far the change carries. I wonder if it carries up to our own time.”

  “There’s only one way to find out”

  Kastner nodded. “I want to know right away. The sooner the better. Let’s get started.”

  Ryan nodded, deep in thought “The sooner the better.” They entered the time ship. Kastner sat down with his briefcase. Ryan adjusted the controls. Outside the port the scene winked out of existence. They were in the time flow again, moving toward the present.

  Ryan’s face was grim. “I can’t believe it. The whole structure of the past changed. An entire new chain set in motion. Expanding through every continuum. Altering more and more of the stream.”

  “Then it won’t be our present, when we get back. There's no telling how different it will be. All stemming from Schonerman’s death. A whole new history set in motion from one incident”

  “Not from Schonerman’s death,” Ryan corrected.

  ' “What do you mean?”

  “Not from his death but from the loss of his papers. Because Schonerman died the Government didn’t obtain a successful methodology by which they could build an artificial brain. Therefore the claws never came into existence.” “If s the same thing.” .

  “Is it?”

  Kastner looked up quickly. “Explain.”

  “Schonerman’s death is of no importance. The loss of his papers to the Government is the determining factor.” Ryan pointed at Kastner’s briefcase. “Where are the papers? In there. We have them.”

  Kastner nodded. “That’s true.”

  “We can restore the situation by moving back into the past and delivering the papers to some agency of the Government Schonerman is unimportant. It’s his papers that matter.” Ryan’s hand moved toward the power switch.

  “Wait!” Kastner said. “Don’t we want to see the present? We should see what changes carry down to our own time.” Ryan hesitated. ‘True.”

  “Then we can decide what we want to do. Whether we want to restore the papers.”

  “All right. We’ll continue to the present and then make up our minds.”

  The fingers crossing the time map had returned almost to their original positions. Ryan studied them for a long time, his hand on the power switch. Kastner held on tightly to the briefcase, his arms wrapped around it, the heavy leather bundle resting in his lap.

  “We’re almost there,” Ryan said.

  “To our own time?”

  “In another few moments.” Ryan stood up, gripping the switch. “I wonder what we’ll see.”

  “Probably very little we’ll recognize.”

  Ryan took a deep breath, fueling the cold metal under his fingers. How different would their world be? Would they recognize anything? Had they swept everything familiar out of existence?

  A vast chain had been started in motion. A tidal wave moving through time, altering each continuum, echoing down through all the ages to come. The second part of the war had never happened. Before the claws could be invented the war had ended. The concept of the artificial brain had never been transformed into workable practice. The most potent engine of war had never come into existence. Human energies had turned from war to the rebuilding of the planet. Around Ryan the meters and dials vibrated. In a few seconds they would be back. What would Terra be like? Would anything be the same?

  The Fifty Cities. Probably they would not exist. Jon, his son, sitting quietly in his room reading. USIC. The Government. The League and its labs and offices, its buildings and roof fields and guards. The whole complicated social structure. Would it all be gone without a trace? Probably.

  And what would he find instead?

  “We’ll know in a minute,” Ryan murmured.

  “It won’t be long.” Kastner got To his feet and moved to the port “I want to see it It should be a very unfamiliar world.”

  Ryan threw the power switch. The ship jerked, pulling out of the time flow. Outside the port something drifted and turned, as the ship righted itself. Automatic gravity controls slipped into place. The ship was rushing above the surface of the ground.

  Kastner gasped.

  "What do you see?” Ryan demanded, adjusting the velocity of the ship. “What’s out there?”

  Kastner said nothing.

  “What do
you see?”

  After a long time Kastner turned away from the port “Very interesting. Look for yourself.”

  “What’s out there?”

  Kastner sat down slowly, picking up his briefcase. “This opens up a whole new line of thought.”

  Ryan made his way to the port and gazed out Below the ship lay Terra. But not the Terra they had left

  Fields, endless yellow fields. And parks. Parks and yellow fields. Squares of green among the yellow, as far as the eye could see. Nothing else.

  “No cities,” Ryan said thickly.

  “No. Don’t you remember? The people are all out in the fields. Or walking in the parks. Discussing the nature of the universe.” i

  “This is what Jon saw.”

  “Your son was extremely accurate.”

  Ryan moved back to the controls, his face blank. His mind was numb. He sat down and adjusted the landing grapples. The ship sank lower and lower until it was coasting over the flat fields. 'Men and women glanced up at the ship, startled. Men and women in robes.

  They passed over a park. A herd of animals rushed frantically away. Some kind of deer.

  This was the world his son had seen. This was the vision. Fields and parks and men and women in long flowing robes. Walking along the paths. Discussing the problems of the universe.

  And the other world, his world, no longer existed. The League was gone. His whole life’s work destroyed. In this world it did not exist. Jon. His son. Snuffed out. He would never see him again. His work, his son, everything he had known had winked out of existence.

  “We have to go back,” Ryan said suddenly.

  Kastner blinked. “Beg pardon?”

  “We have to take the papers back to the continuum where they belong. We can’t recreate the situation exactly, hut we can place the papers in the Government’s hands. That will restore all the relevant factors.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Ryan stood-up unsteadily, moving toward Kastner. “Give me the papers. This is a very serious situation. We must work quickly. Things have to be put back in place.”

  Kastner stepped back, whipping out his blaster. Ryan lunged. His shoulder caught Kastner, bowling the little businessman over. The blaster skidded across the floor* of the ship, clattering against the wall. The papers fluttered in all directions.

  “You damn fool!” Ryan grabbed at the papers, dropping down to his knees.

  Kastner chased after the blaster. He scooped it up, his round face set with owlish determination. Ryan saw him out of the comer of his eye. For a moment the temptation to laugh almost overcame him. Kastner’s face was flushed, his cheeks burning Ted. He fumbled with the blaster, trying to aim it.

  “Kastner, for God’s sake—”

  The little businessman’s fingers tightened around the trigger. Abrupt fear chilled Ryan. He scrambled to his feet. The blaster roared, flame crackling across the time ship. Ryan leaped out of the way, singed by the trail of fire.

  Schonerman’s papers flared up, glowing where they lay scattered over the floor. For a brief second they burned. Then the glow died out, flickering into charred ash. The thin acrid smell of the blast drifted to Ryan, tickling his nose and making his eyes water.

  “Sorry,” Kastner murmured. He laid the blaster down on the control board. “Don’t you think you better get us down? We’re quite close to the surface.”

  Ryan moved mechanically to the control-board. After a moment he took his seat and began to adjust the controls, decreasing the velocity of the ship. He said nothing.

  “I’m beginning to understand about Jon,” Kastner murmured. “He must have had some kind of parallel time sense. Awareness of other possible futures. As work progressed on the time ship his visions increased, didn’t they? Every day his visions became more real. Every day the time ship became more actual.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “This opens up whole new lines of speculation. The mystical visions of medieval saints. Perhaps they were of other futures, other time flows. Visions of hell would be worse time flows. Visions of heaven would be better time flows. Ours must stand some place in the middle. And the vision of the eternal unchanging worked. Perhaps that’s an awareness of non-time. Not another world but this world, seen outside of time.-We’ll have to think more about that, too.”

  The time ship landed, coming to rest at the edge of one of the parks. Kastner crossed to the port and gazed out at the trees beyond the ship.

  “In the books my family saved there were some pictures of trees,” he said thoughtfully. “These trees here, by us; They’re pepper trees. Those over there are what they call evergreen trees. They stay that way all year around. That’s why the name.”

  Kastner picked up his briefcase, gripping it tightly. He moved toward the hatch.

  “Let’s go find some of the people. So we can begin, discussing things. Metaphysical things.” He grinned at Ryan. “I always did like metaphysical things.”

  THE WHITE PINNACLE

  Carl Jacobi

  Start Recording:

  It was in late January while coasting along the Asteroids’ rim that Kalhern got the idea of putting in at Renit-4. I was against it at once, but Kalhern was getting old—he was space-tired and anxious to set his feet on firm soil. Nevertheless Renit-4 was described in the Pilot as “Unexplored” with the warning to navigators, “Land at own risk.”

  We were six months out of New Chicago with a hold full of pagcite and other radioactive ore samples. We had satisfied the average requirements for a Galactic Mining exploratory cruise, and I could see no reason for risking our necks unnecessarily at this stage of the trip.

  Kalhern, however, had his mind made up.

  “The Pilot says traces of arquium might be found there,” he said.

  “We’ve got a quarter ton of arquium already.”

  “This may be higher grade.”

  So that was that. We altered course and two days later, landed on Renit-4. Right away we ran into the trouble I had foreseen. Descending, one of our landing-gravitors failed, and the ship, out of thrust, caromed against a rocky perpendicular, shearing off two deflector auricles and opening a sizeable rent in the forward embayment. A good week of repair work confronted us.

  Kalhern, however, was not disturbed. “There’s an atmosphere here and vegetation,” he said. “By Godfrey, what more do we want?”

  I could have answered that, but I didn’t. Atmosphere there was, but the vegetation gave one a headache to look at it. Trees thirty meters tall, resembling giant cat-tails, growing in geometrically spaced clumps, and between them wide swales of violet-hued ipso grass that rippled like silk when the wind struck it. Eye-like flowers, replete with ochre iris and pink cornea that seemed to stare back at you even from a distance. Directly before the ship was a high escarpment, blood-red in color, and to the east, approximately a mile off, a white something probed the sky like a slender obelisk.

  I pointed this out to Kalhern, but he had already seen it.

  “A priathe outcropping probably. Might even be chalk. We’ll investigate it later.”

  We stayed pretty close to the ship that first day. Carson {Shores, our navigator, whose name always reminded me of a real estate development, made an examination of the ship’s damage, and then he, Stewart and three crewmen set about to make repairs. Hammond, silent and emotionless as always, got out his camera and began to take pictures. And McKay shuffled about, doing little or nothing.

  McKay was the giant of our outfit, a six-feet-five hulk of a man whose brain had not quite kept pace with his body. His great strength came in handy, handling the electrolic drills and pneumatic hammers our work required. But his interest lay in one field only.

  Perfume! That was McKay’s hobby. The big fellow nearly drove the rest of us mad with the bottles, philters, and vials he was always dragging out of his cabin and spreading over the mess table. Oddly, his experiments in the past had had some professional results. He had sold manufacturing rights to two scents: a spicy cologne
he had distilled from the root of the canal-flower of south-eastern Mars and a lingering musk-like aroma whose source was the dehydrated marsh-soil of central Venus.

  Now as I stood there, adjusting the bracket of the searchlight, I saw McKay suddenly turn and grow tense. His nostrils twitched and a gleam entered his eyes.

  A moment later I caught it too. Coming on the night wind; faint at first, but gradually growing stronger, was a cloying flower-like smell. A sickish sweet odor that crept down my lungs like smoke. It was an alien smell, a scent of death and it brought with it a feeling of unexplained terror.

  Kalhern emerged from the ship’s hatch and stopped short before me. A paroxysm of coughing seized him as the smell reached his nostrils.

  “In heaven’s name, what is it?” he said. His voice rose to a shout. “McKay, where are you going?”

  The big man seemed not to hear. Head erect, like a robot whose controls have jammed, he strode rapidly out across the ellipse of artificial light and disappeared into the wall of darkness. For a time we heard his heavy footsteps grating on the gravel. Then that sound died off and there was only silence ... and the smell.

  “McKay!” Kalhern called again. His fists clenched, “The fool! There’s no telling what he’ll run into out there.”

  As suddenly as it had come, the smell was gone. The paralysis of mind and body which had held me passed on, and in sixty seconds I had the searchlight mounted on the bracket and was turning it on the swivel. The two foot wide shaft of white radiance ate into the blackness, probed outward like a groping hand, etched every mound and rock into sharp relief but revealed no sign of McKay.

  Kalhern went into action at once. He roused Shores, Stewart, and Hammond from within the ship. He posted Shores at the searchlight, and then the three of us paced slowly to the extreme end of the aisle of light and moved with it as Shores arced it slowly from left to right. At intervals Kalhern cupped his hands and called McKay’s name. There was no response.

  “The damned fool!” he said again.' ‘I gave strict orders no one was to go twenty yards beyond the ship until we could get the Tester going.”

  Hammond fingered his gun quietly. “I’ll scout around and bring him back, if you say so.”