by Damon Knight
“It’s put of the question,” Naismith said flatly. “Teach me the ordinary way, if it’s so damned important. Start with the language. Give me books, records, whatever there is. I happen to be quick at languages. Even if I weren’t, you’ve got plenty of time.”
Churan shook his head. “Books and records could be falsi-fied, Mr. Naismith.”
“So could that thing.”
“No, it could not,” Churan said hoarsely, blinking with anger. “When you experience it, you will know. That is why no other method will serve. It’s not just a question of time, Mr. Naismith. You must be convinced, beyond any possible doubt, that what we are going to tell you is true.”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment.
“Why?” Naismith asked bluntly.
The two aliens glanced at each other with resigned expressions. Churan sat down, holding the helmet and the control unit on his lap.
“Mr. Naismith,” Lall said after a pause, “what if you knew that the ruling class of your own people had deliberately thrown you back in time, to the year 1980, believing you would be killed?”
“Why should they do that?”
Her fingers stretched into claws, then relaxed. “Because they are selfish and cowardly. After they had made up their minds to create the Barrier, they felt the Shefthi would be more a danger than a—”
“Wait,” said Naismith with an impatient gesture. “The Barrier… tell me about that.”
“In our own time, the ruling caste found a way to make a Time Barrier that would pass only the Lenlu Din into the future. It would be tuned to their mind patterns, you see; in that way, on the far side there would be no more Zugs, and also no more Lenlu Om. Just Lenlu Din, all by themselves, safe and contented. You understand? But it is not going to work. We know, because they are sending back messages through the Barrier. There is one Zug up there, still alive. And they are very frightened.” He grinned unpleasantly.
“If none of this has happened yet, what makes you so sure it’s going to happen?”
The woman sighed. “These are only ways of speaking. Surely you understand that by now, Mr. Naismith. From your point of view in 1980, all this ‘has not happened yet.’ But here we are.
As for the Barrier, we know it exists in the future. We know it is going to work, except that one Zug will be left alive. As Gunda has just told you, we know all this because we have received messages from beyond the Barrier.”
Naismith sat back. “The future can communicate with the past?” he asked disbelievingly.
“Haven’t you seen that it can? Didn’t we go back to the twentieth century, and scoop you up like a fish in a net?” Lall’s amber eyes were brilliant, her fingers tense.
“Then why don’t they simply tell their earlier selves to do things differently, and eliminate the trouble?”
“They can’t find the trouble,” said Lall, her eyes shining. “It is impossible for a Zug to pass through the Barrier alive. But their detectors show that there is one, and that’s why they are so frantic. When we learned that, we saw our opportunity.”
She leaned forward, intent, lips moist. “We searched the main stem as far back as the twentieth century. Every anomaly above a certain value had to be investigated. It took years, subjective time. It was only the most incredible luck that we found you at all. Then we had to prepare this place; then go back to 1980
and learn the language, customs, everything, from the beginning. And now it all comes together. Because you see they are desperate. If you return, with some story of having built your own time generator, they will believe you—they have to, you are the last Shefth, and they need you.” Both aliens were breathing heavily, staring at Naismith across the low table.
“Then a Shefth can go through the Barrier?” asked Naismith.
“The Shefthi are Lenlu Din,” Churan answered. “If they had let well enough alone, all the Shefthi would be on the other side of the Barrier, and there would be no problem with the Zug. But they didn’t want any warriors in their safe future, without Zugs, without Lenlu Om. They would have killed you, but they were afraid. So they invented a story about an expedi-tion to kill Zugs in the past, and threw you all back. At random, without destination. Without protection. The shock of landing was to kill you all. Even if it did not, without equipment, you could never get back to bother them. That was their plan.”
“I see,” said Naismith.
“What is your reaction to this, Mr. Naismith?” Churan’s voice was strained.
“If it’s true, I’m… very interested,” said Naismith. “Now one more point. What’s this about the Lenlu Om? You said the Barrier was to keep them out too. Who are they, or what are they?”
“We are Lenlu Om,” said Churan quietly. “The name means
‘the Ugly People.’ We are their servants. They brought us from another place, centuries ago. We are not considered to be human.”
Naismith glanced up: the faces of all three aliens had turned hard and expressionless. He put the cylinder down carefully and stood up slowly, feeling their eyes on him. “And all this,”
he said, “in more detail, you would have taught me with that thing.” He nodded toward the device in Churan’s lap.
“As well as many other things. The language. We can teach you to speak it perfectly in less than two hours. And you must speak it perfectly. Then the City itself—the castes—forms of courtesy—a thousand and one things you must know, Mr.
Naismith. You can learn it all by primitive methods, of course, but believe me, it is not worth the effort.”
“But you used so-called primitive methods to learn English.”
Churan hesitated. “Yes and no. We employed the educator
—we recorded disks from the thoughts of natives whom we captured and drugged. But that is not the same as having an edited subject disk all prepared. It was tedious, it took time.
Then we also had to spend time establishing identities for ourselves. We took, I don’t know, perhaps six months, subjective time. Without the educator, it would have taken years.”
Something that had been bothering Naismith came abruptly into focus, and he swung around, with one foot up on the bench, facing Churan. “Tell me this,” he said. “Why not simply go back, learn what you need to know—then put it all on one disk—meet yourselves arriving, and cut out all the trouble?”
Churan sighed. “As I told you before, it would pinch out the loop. You cannot use time in that way.”
Chapter Eight
After a moment Lall and Churan yawned together like two frogs, showing the dark greenish roofs of their mouths: the effect was grotesquely unpleasant. “We are tired,” Lall said.
“It is late.” She rose, followed by Churan, and led the way to the room opening off the far end of the lounge, opposite the one she and Churan had used. The child trailed after them, dragging its doll by one arm.
The door was closed, but opened at Lall’s touch. She stood aside. “This will be your sleeping room, Mr. Naismith. I think you will find all you need.”
The three stood waiting. Naismith glanced in; there was a low bed, a footstool, some ambiguous half-real draperies on the wall. He made no move to. enter. “Thank you,” he said.
“You will sleep here?” Lall asked plaintively.
“When I am ready. Good night.”
“But at least you will inspect the room, to see if everything is to your liking?” Churan demanded.
Lall turned her head and said something to him in their own hissing, guttural speech. She turned back. “Just as you wish, then, Mr. Naismith. We will talk again in the morning.”
The three aliens crossed the lounge and entered their own room. The door slid shut after them.
Naismith paused a moment, listening: he could hear Lall and Churan moving about in their room, talking sleepily together, with occasional bursts of acrimony. There was no point in waiting any longer. Naismith moved noiselessly out into the corridor. The drifting red trail guided his feet; at the first turning,
he deliberately left it. He went down a flight of stairs, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found himself in darkness relieved only by spectral, phosphorescent glows from the outlines of machinery here and there. He kept moving down the narrow aisle, under a low ceiling, not pausing to examine any of the machines he passed. For the moment all he wanted was to put distance between himself and the three aliens.
After a quarter of an hour, even the phosphorescent markings thinned out and ceased. He was groping in total darkness, thoroughly lost in the interior of the great ship.
Satisfied that he was secure for the moment, Naismith sat down in the darkness and considered his position. In spite of its immense, almost overwhelming implications, the problem was basically that of buyer against seller. Each party had something the other wanted, and each was determined to give as little as possible. Naismith’s first objective was to keep the aliens from coercing him: that was now accomplished, since he was out of their reach. His next objective must be to im-prove his bargaining position. That meant, above all, increasing his knowledge: for it was knowledge that Lall and Churan held out as bait, and knowledge again that gave them a tactical superiority. His course, therefore, was clear. He must begin by exploring the ship, no matter how many weeks or even months—
The thought broke off. A breath of danger was passing down the narrow corridor, making his skin prickle and his nostrils widen. He stared blindly into the darkness: was the shadow-egg, invisible and intangible, passing there?
Whatever it was, in a moment it was gone. Naismith rose and once more began feeling his way down the corridor.
Hours later, he found a narrow passage leading off at right angles, and crossed the waist of the ship, emerging finally in a huge deserted salon. Here the moving overhead lights followed him again, but there were no red trails on the floor, and he guessed that Lall and Churan had never been in this area.
In the days that followed, Naismith prowled the empty ship alone. Its gigantic scale never ceased to oppress and astonish him: it was impossible to imagine what kind of people could have built a vessel like this, equipped it so massively and elaborately, and then left it to be mounded over on the Colorado plain.
Wherever he went, the lights winked on ahead, winked off behind. There must be some way of illuminating whole rooms at once, but Naismith had not found it. He moved in a moving circle of pale light, while all around him was green silence.
There were cyclopean galleries and choirs, around which he crawled like a fly; there were baths, gymnasia, theaters, game rooms, machine rooms, all empty with an inexpressible emptiness, hollow, not-quite-echoing….
Never once did he catch a glimpse of the aliens or their shadow-egg, although he felt sure they were trying to find him.
Everywhere he went, there were enigmatic, silent machines, including some that he guessed were television instruments, but he could not make them function. Here and there he saw symbols printed on the walls; they were in an alphabet resembling the Cyrillic, but with many added characters. Nowhere could he find a deck plan of the ship, a directory, a travel booklet, anything that would give him the least clue to the object of his search.
At last, on the fourth day, entirely by accident, he found it.
He was in a room filled with the omnipresent balloon-like armchairs and with tall, angular devices, chest high, on which square greenish plates of metal were arranged in two slanting, overlapping rows, forming an inverted V. They might have been magazine racks, with the thick metal plates substituting for magazines. As the thought came, Naismith put his hand casually on one of them, and the thing flapped open with a clatter. Crouched, ready to fight or run, he stared at it.
The rank of overlapping plates had opened, exposing the whole face of one of the plates: and where a blank square of greenish metal should have been, he saw a moving, brilliantly colored picture.
Naismith’s breathing quickened. He hardly heard the voice which spoke casually and incomprehensibly from the machine.
This was it; he had found it: this was the library, The picture he was watching showed a woman in an oddly cut red garment, posturing before a background of vaguely Oriental domes that gleamed in bright sunshine. The picture changed; now he was looking at a passageway between earth-colored buildings, down which men in white robes walked with heads bowed. It might almost have been a street scene in ancient Turkey or Egypt, except that the men were leading bright blue, hairless beasts of burden….
The picture changed again. Now, under a gigantic orange sun, stick-thin brown creatures with many legs were building a scaffold of wooden rods. Naismith understood that he was being shown an interstellar travelogue: ports of call at which this very ship had touched, perhaps… He watched until the pictures stopped, then closed the machine, opened it at a different place.
A new picture sprang into being: this time he saw two men, with thin, bearded faces, demonstrating some sort of physical apparatus. There was a thing that looked a little like a Crookes tube, and what might have been a series of accumulators. He could not understand a word of the spoken commentary, though the language sounded hauntingly familiar. The subject, at least, was apparently unrelated to the previous one. The arrangement, then, was either random or alphabetical, with a strong probability of the latter… all he had to do was to find the key to it.
That took him two more days. Then his progress was rapid.
The written language was a much modified English, phoneti-cized, with a simplified grammar and many vocabulary changes.
The spoken language was more difficult to follow, slurred and elided that it was almost impossible to follow, but Naismith found he could neglect it by concentrating on reference codes which produced displays of printed books, page by page. By the end of his fourth day in the library, he had an accurate conception of the world these star-travelers had inhabited.
He had found out two things of importance, and another of possible significance. First, the entries under “Time Energy” in the library showed that the state of the art had not advanced since his own era; in fact, the temporal energy generator was regarded as a toy. There was no possibility, therefore, of his discovering another shadow-egg aboard the ship or being able to construct one: that invention was still to come.
Second, the Lenlu Om—Lall’s people—were natives of a planet of 82 Eridani, and had been introduced into the Solar System in about the year 11,000. They were not called by that name, but the characteristics of those shown in the pictures were unmistakable.
Third, the framed pictures Naismith found on the walls, in places where Lall and Churan had apparently never been, were paintings and stereographs of Terrestrial scenes, including a number of portraits. The people represented, like those in the library machines, were ordinary native Terrestrials, in no way remarkable to Naismith’s eye except for their costumes.
As far as Naismith could tell, pictures were missing from their frames wherever the aliens had gone. It was conceivable that this was simply the result of looting, but Naismith did not think it likely. The aliens seemed indifferent to all the other articles of value around them in the ship, and had apparently taken nothing from the world of 1980. It was Naismith’s tentative opinion that something in the pictures was distasteful to Lall and Churan—that they had taken them down, and very likely destroyed them, in order to be rid of an unpleasant reminder.
Naismith sat up in bed. The room lights slowly came on as he did so, showing the unfamiliar walls paneled in magenta and apple green. As usual, he had worked in the library until he felt it unwise any longer to ignore his increasing fatigue; then he had chosen a new suite of rooms—there were hundreds, in this section of the ship alone, and he never used the same one twice—prepared and eaten his dinner, and gone to bed. But the thought that had come to him was so radical, so breathtaking—
In all the time he had spent aboard the ship, although he had many times wondered what had become of its passengers and crew, it had never once occurred to him to look for any personal pos
sessions they might have left behind. The spotless, orderly appearance of everything in the ship had made him assume unconsciously that the rooms had been cleaned out and set in order when its passengers left.
And yet he knew that this ship cleaned and tidied itself. Dust deposited anywhere in a room slowly crept toward the nearest baseboard gutter, where it ran into channels—Naismith had traced them in the narrow passages behind the walls—leading to storage bins and, Naismith guessed, eventually to conversion chambers. Clothing taken from a closet and dropped on the floor would slowly, over the course of a few hours, creep back to its proper place, shedding its dirt in the process. Even the trails of sticky pigment Lall and Churan had left to guide them around the ship must have to be renewed every few days. And therefore—
Naismith swung himself out of bed in mounting excitement.
Having examined a few of the wall closets in these living suites and found them empty, he had lost interest in them. But some of the bedrooms—this one, for example—had clothing in their closets!
He cursed his own stupidity. If clothing were part of the rooms’ standard equipment, as he had unthinkingly assumed, why would some rooms have it and not others? But if this room had been occupied at the time the ship made its final landing, and if the occupant had left his clothing behind, then it was an almost foregone conclusion that he had left other possessions as well.
Naismith went straight to the largest wall panel, thumbed the control strip to open it, found it empty. He tried the smaller, cubical one on the adjoining wall.
At first it seemed equally empty; then he saw a scrap of paper or foil on the bottom of the compartment. He drew it out.
Printed on the foil in luminous purple letters were the words,
“GIGANTIC ALL-NIGHT GALA! Dancing! Sensorials!
Prizes! Y Section ballroom, beginning 23 hours 30, 12th day of Khair…” followed by a date which Naismith translated as 11,050.
It was little enough in itself, but Naismith clutched it as if it were precious. He went on from one wall to another, searching out panels and opening them. But the results were dis-appointing: a plastic identity card made out in the name of Isod Rentro, and bearing the stereo picture of a man’s lean, foxy face; a bundle of metallo-plastic tokens strung on a wire; and a toy of some sort, a gray plastic box with a tiny viewscreen.