by Damon Knight
She was so evidently nervous, anxious about his reply…
Naismith considered her narrowly, and said, “I found out that the time vehicle is not a part of this era’s technology.”
Her body visibly relaxed. She laughed. “I could have told you that much, Mr. Naismith. No, if you are going to build your own time vehicle, you cannot do it here. For that we must take you many centuries forward.”
“How far?”
She shook her head. “When the time comes, Mr. Naismith.”
Churan came in, carrying the machine under one arm and an oblong gray case in the other. He set the gray case down on the table, with a curt “Here,” and crossed the room to deposit the other machine in the wall cabinet.
Lall was removing the cover from the oblong box, revealing a smooth gray-metal base with two protrusions—one a dull pinkish-gray ovoid, the other a more complex shape, some-what like a misshapen mushroom.
“This is an ordinary lie detector, Mr. Naismith,” Lall said, pushing it toward him. She moved her chair quickly, stood up and stepped back. Churan was at the farther wall, watching intently. The gun on its tripod pointed steadily at him.
“Try it,” said Lall. “Pick up a dish in one hand, take the grip of the machine in the other…. Now say, ‘I am not holding the dish.’”
Naismith followed directions. Nothing happened.
“Now say, ‘I am holding the dish.’”
Naismith repeated it after her. The oval bulb flared into pink, hot brightness.
“Now, this is all you have to do,” Lall said breathlessly.
“Put your hand on that grip and say to me, ‘I hate the Lenlu Din.’”
Churan moved his hand slightly: in it was the control box of the automatic gun.
Naismith stiffened, aware that he had let the crisis find him unready. If he refused, he would be shot. If he took the test, and failed—
Once more the images of those bright, bloated people drifted up to the surface of his mind. He examined his own feelings dispassionately. He neither hated nor loved them. To part of his mind they were utterly strange; to another part, they were familiar and almost commonplace….
“Now, Mr. Naismith,” said Lall sharply.
Naismith put his hand on the rounded mushroom-top of the grip. It was a shape that smoothly fitted his palm. He tensed his muscles, without hope—he knew he could not move fast enough to escape the gun. Because he could think of nothing else to do, he said, “I hate the Lenlu Din.”
The oval bulb burned fiercely for a long moment, then slowly faded, glimmered, went out. Naismith heard Lall’s and Churan’s intake of breath, saw them relax and begin to move toward the table.
He stared blankly at the detector, thinking, But that’s impossible!
The staggering thing was that the aliens themselves showed no suspicion. As far as they were concerned, the detector test was obviously conclusive. Lall said briskly, “One more day here will be enough. You will put on the educator headband once more—without tricks, this time, Mr. Naismith. Then it will take you some twelve hours to absorb all you have learned
… the process is sometimes fatiguing, and it is important that you rest during that period. After that,” she finished, “you will be ready to begin building your time vehicle.”
Naismith looked at her sharply, but there was no humor in her expression. “Do you mean that literally?” he demanded.
“I thought—”
“How else can we get you into the City?” she countered.
“You may be positive they will check whatever story you tell.
If you say you materialized in the factory city of Ul in the fifth century before the Founding, they will go there in their own time vehicle to see. Therefore, you must not only tell the story, you must actually be there, building that vehicle, when they come to look. It will take you a little over ten years.”
“Ten years” said Naismith, stunned by the matter-of-factness in her tone.
“Understand this,” she said harshly, leaning toward him.
“It’s that or nothing. Make up your mind.”
Her glance was sullen. Churan, across the room, was looking at him with the same expression, his eyes hooded and dull.
Naismith shrugged. “What choice do I have?” He held out his hand. “Give me the headband.”
… Afterwards, he lay back in a soft chair, his mind a cloudy confusion of new thoughts and images, while the three aliens prepared a meal and ate it.
“We are going to bed now,” Lall said dully to Naismith.
“Your room is there. Till the morning, then.”
They went into their room and closed the door. Naismith sat where he was for a while, then went to the room Lall had pointed out, examined the door controls. There was nothing unusual about them as far as he could determine; the door closed and opened again easily.
He went inside and lay down on the bed, half aware of his surroundings as the stream of memories, voices, faces came and went in his mind. When an hour had passed, he sat up.
He rose, opened the door and listened. There was no sound from the aliens’ room. He closed the door behind him and moved quietly across the lounge. Outside, he followed the red trail, heading directly for the place where Churan had found him a few hours ago.
He passed through the natatorium again, into the gymnasium… and stared with speculative interest at the pieces of equipment lying on the polished floor. Something had been prepared for him here: but what?
He moved closer, bent to examine the black case with the transparencies and dials. It was evidently the control box; three of the dials were calibrated and set. A fourth had only two positions, marked by a red dot and a white one. The pointer lay on the white dot.
Caution held him back, but Naismith had a sense that there were too many things still hidden in the background. Events were sweeping him on, and ignorance was still his most dangerous weakness. Certain risks had to be accepted.
He made up his mind. Kneeling, he turned the dial from white to red, then got to his feet and stepped back.
Not quickly enough.
The far end of the gymnasium darkened suddenly. Out of that blackness, like a vault opening where the far wall should have been, something stirred.
Fear entered the room. It came like a cold wind out of that darkness. Naismith’s fingers were cold; his skin prickled.
Straining his eyes, he could make out a glint of light here, another there, as something impossibly huge came toward him in the blackness. It was the monster of his dream! Two little red eyes stared at him, and there was a faint rattle of bony plates.
The head of the thing began to emerge into the light…
Naismith forced himself to remain still as that immense body came fully into view. It was a shape of tremendous animal power, armored and clawed, many-limbed… but the most frightening thing about it was the look of intelligence, of merciless, ancient wisdom in its eyes….
With a bone-chilling roar, the thing sprang. In spite of himself, Naismith flinched back. The gigantic body swelled, filled the universe… and was gone. The darkness winked out. The gymnasium wall reappeared.
Naismith found himself trembling and covered with sweat.
The far wall darkened again. With a sense of panic, Naismith realized that the experience was beginning once more.
Again the stirring in the darkness, again the red eyes, the emergence: but this time the beast sprang more quickly. The lights came up; after a moment, the darkness fell a third time.
Grimly, Naismith watched the same terrifying bulk appear even more quickly, spring with less delay. A fourth time, and a fifth, he watched, before the lights came on and stayed on: the cycle was over.
And that, he thought bleakly, was probably only the beginning. The beast itself must move incomparably faster than that…
He left the gymnasium and went into the corridor where Churan had found him before. Almost absent-mindedly, he glanced around. His attention sharpened, as he tho
ught again of the anomaly of Churan’s finding him just here. Why not in the gymnasium itself? Why in the corridor outside?
A little farther down the corridor there was an open doorway. Naismith remembered glancing in before, and finding only a small, uninteresting room. He went over to it, looked in again. It was as he recalled it, a tiny green room, hardly larger than a closet.
He stood in the doorway, frowning. There was a small bare desk, the same green as the walls, a simple-looking vision instrument over it, and an array of green and white panels on the wall behind.
The little room might have been a storeroom of some kind: but it was the wrong size. Either it should have been much bigger, Naismith thought, or else there should have been no desk, no vision apparatus. In sudden excitement, he rounded the desk, began to fumble at the control strips of the panels.
This might, just might, be the purser’s office, with all the records of the voyage…
But it was not. It was the dispensary.
The wall panels held rack on rack of drugs in cylindrical bottles, each elaborately labeled. Probably most of them were worthless by now. Naismith examined a few, put them back.
He tried another section of the wall.
Inside were gleaming, ranked strips of metal, each labeled with a name and a date. Naismith touched one experimentally, and it tilted out into his hand, a metal-bound sheaf of papers.
It was the case-history of a passenger aboard the ship: the others were the same.
In five minutes the whole story lay under his hands. A virus carried by the green skinned people had mutated; the new form attacked homo sapiens. The symptoms were fever, nausea and intense feelings of anxiety, followed by collapse and coma, then a slow recovery. Death ensued in only a small percentage of cases: but every recovered victim had suffered severe and irreparable brain damage. There were stereo pictures, from which Naismith averted his eyes: vacant faces, dull eyes, jaws hanging….
The epidemic had broken out on the same day the ship left Earth. In the end, it must have been only the greenskins, immune to their own infection, who had been able to bring the ship back and land it safely with its cargo of mindless human beings. All over the Earth, the same tragedy…
Naismith could imagine the shambling aments who had been the luxury ship’s passengers, wandering out onto the plain by ones and twos… out into a land where nothing waited for them but death by exposure arid starvation…
Naismith closed the book slowly and put it back in its place.
He understood now why this was a so-called “dead period.”
Only a handful of immune human beings must have survived, along with the greenskins, to rebuild civilization slowly and painfully over the course of centuries. Yes, that explained many things….
Chapter Ten
In the morning, both aliens were sullen and heavy-eyed; they spoke to each other in monosyllables, and to Naismith not at all. The child, Yegga, alternately screamed and whined.
After they had breakfasted, Lall and Churan seemed to come sluggishly to life. The woman began to dress in the same short robe she had worn yesterday, saying over her shoulder to Naismith, “Today you will train in the gymnasium there is some equipment there which will prepare you to hunt Zug.”
“I know. I found it there.”
She turned to look at him expressionlessly, then went on with her dressing. “Very well, that will save us time. You saw the Zug, then? What did you think of it?”
“Very impressive, but I don’t see why it was necessary.”
“You are to play the role of a Zug hunter,” she said, fastening the robe around her waist. “If you should see one without preparation, you would betray yourself immediately.”
“I see.” Remembering the vision that had come to him that night in his Beverly Hills apartment, Naismith asked, “And the gun? What was that for?”
She turned with a questioning expression. Churan, who had just entered the lounge carrying the time vehicle, paused to listen. “Gun?” asked Lall.
“Yes, certainly,” Naismith answered with a touch of impatience. “That night, in my bedroom. Tell me, just what would have happened if I had accepted that gun?”
The two aliens looked at each other. Churan opened his mouth to speak, but Lall said sharply, “Be still!” She turned to Naismith, fumbling in the pocket of her robe, and produced a black cylinder. She pushed bowls and plates aside, and rapidly sketched a pistol recognizable as the one Naismith had seen, with its flowing lines and massive grip. Churan came to watch over her shoulder; there was something strained in his silent attention.
“Was it a gun like this?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
She turned away indifferently, putting the cylinder back in her pocket. “It would have given you a compulsion to kill Zug,” she said. “Only a precaution.”
Churan was staring at her silently. “Well, are you ready?”
she snapped at him. “Why do we have to wait—why can’t we go?”
Churan shrugged, held up the machine in both hands. He touched the controls; the shadow-egg sprang into being around him. With a last quick glance to left and right, Lall herded the child inside, stood back for Naismith to enter, stepped in herself.
It was more crowded than ever in the shadow-egg, and the scent of the aliens’ bodies was oppressively heavy. By their tense attitudes and their sidelong glances at him, Naismith could tell that his presence made them equally uneasy. Seated on the stool, Churan touched the controls, and they drifted up from the floor, across the lounge and into the corridor.
Once more they followed the red line; blackness swallowed them as they passed through the mound, then they were in dazzling sunlight.
Suddenly, the contrast between the unpleasant closeness of the shadow-egg and that clean brightness outside was more than Naismith could stand.
“Wait,” he said. “I want to get out.”
“What?” Lall and Churan stared at him.
“Set me down there, on top of the mound,” he said, pointing.
“I want to breathe the fresh air for a minute.”
Churan said impatiently, “We have no time to waste—you can breathe where you are.” He put his hands on the controls, but Lall stopped him.
“After all, you want to practice using the ejector,” she muttered. “What harm can it do? Set him down.”
Churan grumbled, but in a moment the shadow-egg swung up along the steep slope, rose to the summit and hovered there, a few inches above the grasstops.
Churan stared down at the machine in his lap, rubbing his squat fingers together and grunting. At last he said, “Miko, move back a little—take the child. Mr. Naismith, you stay where you are.”
The woman and child crowded back beside Churan. Naismith waited tensely. Churan’s fingers touched the controls again, and abruptly Naismith felt himself picked up, swung out away from the aliens. The shadow-egg had bulged out-ward; now it was like two eggs, connected by a narrow tube of shadow. Then, without warning, the bulge vanished. Naismith was falling….
He landed with a jar, arms out for balance. When he looked up, the shadow-egg was drifting off on a long slant down toward the base of the mound.
He stood looking around him, breathing thankfully deep.
The greenish-yellow plain rolled away unbroken to the horizon.
It was early, the sun low in the east, and the thick grasses around his legs were beaded with dew. The sun was warm, but the air had a bracing coolness. Naismith filled his lungs again and again; earth smells, green smells, scents of spring flowers.
He sat down and watched the great wrinkled sheet of cloud drift slowly toward the west. Down below, the shadow-egg still hovered over the plain, a hundred yards or so away. He could just make out Lall’s and Churan’s faces: they seemed close in conversation. Farther out, a flock of birds arose from the grass and settled again. Still farther away, Naismith saw a larger body moving through the grassy hummocks—a quad-ruped, too large for a deer; per
haps an elk. But there were no men. Not a thread of smoke; not a cloud of dust.
From this height, he could see the immense buried shape of the ship more plainly. The world around him was peaceful and empty, as if waiting for another Creation.
Naismith thought of the blank thirty-one years of his life, and of his four years in California, now seen as futile and mis-understood; then of the tremendous distance he had traveled in the shadow-egg with Lall and Churan—-over nine thousand years; and the Earth was still here with its seasons.… He thought of the distance he had yet to go—“twenty thousand years, Mr. Naismith,” Churan had said. And it seemed to him, as it had from the beginning, that there was a monstrous meaning hidden in all this. It was all around him, in the slow drift of the clouds across the sky, in the sense of the buried giant under his feet. For the first time, he felt less as if he were fighting a battle than as if he were engaged in a quest for knowledge.
He stood up again. Who am I? he thought; and unexpectedly, his body began to tremble. Images floated up into awareness: he could see the corridors of the City, and the colorful, floating throngs of Lenlu Din—all clear but distant, like figures in a peepshow. He knew who the Shefthi were, and could even conjure up some of their faces… but there was no image of himself. Who and what was he?… that was what he had to find out.
He stared down at the shadow-egg. The two aliens were still talking together, but in a moment they glanced up. Naismith gestured. Churan raised his hand; then the shadow-egg began to drift nearer, growing larger as it swept up the side of the mound. There was something incongruous about the egg’s absolute internal stillness as it moved—as if the egg itself were really fixed, in some transcendent dimension, while the world swam under it.
The thought ended as the shadow-egg came to rest, near enough to touch. The orifice opened. “Get in!” said Lall.
… Then he was inside, in the suffocating closeness of the shadow-egg, while the landscape receded beneath. They were rising, moving more and more swiftly northeastward; and Naismith saw that time outside was at a standstill: there was no movement of wind in the tall grasses below, and the clouds overhead were as solid and motionless as if painted on the sky.