by Damon Knight
And here he was. Most incredibly, what had seemed so true was true: by that effort of tranced will, he had transferred himself to another time rate, another relationship of t to T—a variable relationship, like a huge merry-go-round that whirled, and paused, and whirled again.
He had got on; how was he going to get off?
And—most terrifying question—where was the merry-go-round going? Whirling headlong to extinction and cold death, where the universe ended—or around the wheel again, to give him a second chance?
The blur exploded into white light. Stunned but safe inside his portable anomaly, Rossi watched the flaming earth cool, saw the emerging continents furred over with green, saw a kaleidoscope whirl of rainstorm and volcanic fury, pelting ice, earthquake, tsunami, fire!
Then he was in a forest, watching the branches sway as some great shape passed.
He was in a clearing, watching as a man in leather breeches killed a copper-skinned man with an axe.
He was in a log-walled room, watching a man in a wide collar stand up, toppling table and crockery, his eyes like onions.
He was in a church, and an old man behind the pulpit flung a book at him.
The church again, at evening, and two lonely women saw him and screamed.
He was in a bare, narrow room reeking of pitch. Somewhere outside, a dog set up a frenzied barking. A door opened and a wild, whiskery face popped in; a hand flung a blazing stick and flame leaped up…
He was on a broad green lawn, alone with a small boy and a frantic white duck. “Good morrow, sir. Will you help me catch this pesky…”
He was in a little pavilion. A grey-bearded man at a desk turned, snatching up a silver cross, whispering fiercely to the young man at his side, “Didn’t I tell you!” He pointed the cross, quivering. “Quick, then! Will New York continue to grow?”
Rossi was off guard. “Sure. This is going to be the biggest city…
The pavilion was gone; he was in a little perfumed nook, facing a long room across a railing. A red-haired youth, dozing in front of the fire, sat up with a guilty start. He gulped. “Who… who’s going to win the election?”
“What election?” said Rossi, “I don’t—”
“Who’s going to win?” The youth came forward, pale-faced. “Hoover or Roosevelt? Who?”
“Oh, that election. Roosevelt.”
“Uh, will the country…”
The same room. A bell was ringing; white lights dazzled his eyes. The bell stopped. An amplified voice said, “When will Germany surrender?”
“Uh, 1945,” said Rossi, squinting. “May, 1945. Look, whoever you are—”
“When will Japan surrender?”
“Same year. September. Look, whoever you are…”
A tousle-headed man emerged from the glare, blinking, wrapping a robe around his bulging middle. He stared at Rossi while the mechanical voice spoke behind him.
“Please name the largest new industry in the next ten years.”
“Uh, television, I guess. Listen, you right there, can’t you…”
The same room, the same bell ringing. This was all wrong, Rossi realized irritably. Nineteen thirty-two, 1944 (?)—the next ought to be at least close to where he had started.
There was supposed to be a row of cheap rooming houses—his room, here…
”… election, Stevenson or Eisenhower?”
“Stevenson. I mean, Eisenhower. Now look, doesn’t anybody—”
“When will there be an armistice in Korea?”
“Last year. Next year. You’re mixing me up. Will you turn off that—”
“When and where will atomic bombs next be used in—”
“Listen!” Rossi shouted. “I’m getting mad! If you want me to answer questions, let me ask some! Get me some help! Get me—”
“What place in the United States will be safest when—”
“Einstein!” shouted Rossi.
But the little grey man with the bloodhound eyes couldn’t help him, nor the bald moustachioed one who was there the next time. The walls were inlaid now with intricate tracings of white metal. The voice began asking him questions he couldn’t answer.
The second time it happened, there was a puff and a massive rotten stench rolled into his nostrils. Rossi choked. “Stop that!”
“Answer!” blared the voice. “What’s the meaning of those signals from space?”
“I don’t know!” Puff. Furiously: “But there isn’t any New York past here! It’s all gone—nothing left but…”
Puff!
Then he was standing on the lake of glassy obsidian, just like the first time.
And then the jungle, and he said automatically, “My name is Rossi. What year…” But it wasn’t the jungle, really. It had been cleared back, and there were neat rows of concrete houses, like an enormous tank trap, instead of grass-topped verandas showing through the trees.
Then came the savanna, and that was all different, too—there was a looming piled ugliness of a city rising half a mile away. Where were the nomads, the horsemen?
And next…
The beach: but it was dirty grey, not scarlet. One lone dark figure was hunched against the glare, staring out to sea; the golden people were gone.
Rossi felt lost. Whatever had happened to New York, back there—to the whole world, probably—something he had said or done had made it come out differently. Somehow they had saved out some of the old grimy, rushing civilization, and it had lasted just long enough to blight all the fresh new things that ought to have come after it.
The stick men were not waiting on their cold beach.
He caught his breath. He was in the enormous building again, the same tilted slab blazing with light, the same floating eggs bulging their eyes at him. That hadn’t changed, and perhaps nothing he could do would ever change it; for he knew well enough that that wasn’t a human building.
But then came the white desert, and after it the fog, and his glimpses of the night began to blur together, faster and faster…
That was all. There was nothing left now but the swift vertiginous spin to the end-and-beginning, and then the wheel slowing as he came around again.
Rossi began to seethe. This was worse than dishwashing—his nightmare, the worst job he knew. Standing here, like a second hand ticking around the face of Time, while men who flickered and vanished threaded him with questions: a thing, a tool, a gyrating information booth!
Stop, he thought, and pushed—a costive pressure inside his brain—but nothing happened. He was a small boy forgotten on a carousel, a bug trapped between window and screen, a moth circling a lamp…
It came to him what the trouble was. There had to be the yearning, that single candle-cone focus of the spirit: that was the moving force, and all the rest—the fasting, the quiet, the rhymes—was only to channel and guide.
He would have to get off at the one place in the whole endless sweep of time where he wanted to be. And that place, he knew now without surprise, was the scarlet beach.
Which no longer existed, anywhere in the universe.
While he hung suspended on that thought, the flickering stopped at the prehistoric jungle; and the clearing with its copper dead man; and the log room, empty; the church, empty, too.
And the fiery room, now so fiercely ablaze that the hair of his forearms puffed and curled.
And the cool lawn, where the small boy stood agape.
And the pavilion: the greybeard and the young man leaning together like blasted trees, livid-lipped.
There was the trouble: they had believed him, the first time around, and acting on what he told them, they had changed the world.
Only one thing to be done—destroy that belief, fuddle them, talk nonsense, like a ghost called up at a seance!
“Then you tell me to put all I have in land,” says greybeard, clutching the crucifix, “and wait for the increase!”
“Of course!” replied Rossi with instant cunning. “New York’s to be the biggest city—in the w
hole state of Maine!”
The pavilion vanished. Rossi saw with pleasure that the room that took its place was high-ceilinged and shabby, the obvious forerunner of his own roach-haunted cubbyhole in 1955. The long panelled room with its fireplace and the youth dozing before it were gone, snuffed out, a mighthave—been.
When a motherly looking woman lurched up out of a rocker, staring, he knew what to do.
He put his finger to his lips. “The lost candlestick is under the cellar stairs!” he hissed, and vanished.
The room was a little older, a little shabbier. A new partition had been added, bringing its dimensions down to those of the room Rossi knew, and there was a bed, and an old tin washbasin in the corner. A young woman was sprawled open-mouthed, fleshy and snoring, in the bed; Rossi looked away with faint prim disgust and waited.
The same room: his room, almost: a beefy stubbled man smoking in the armchair with his feet in a pan of water. The pipe dropped from his sprung jaw.
“I’m the family banshee,” Rossi remarked. “Beware, for a short man with a long knife is dogging your footsteps.” He squinted and bared his fangs; the man, standing up hurriedly, tipped the basin and stumbled half across the room before he recovered and whirled to the door, bellowing, leaving fat wet tracks and silence.
Now; now… It was night, and the sweaty unstirred heat of the city poured in around him. He was standing in the midst of the chalk marks he had scrawled a hundred billion years ago. The bare bulb was still lighted; around it flames were licking tentatively at the edges of the table, cooking the plastic cover up into lumpy hissing puffs.
Rossi the shipping clerk; Rossi the elevator man; Rossi the dishwasher!
He let it pass. The room kaleidoscope-flicked from brown to green; a young man at the washbasin was pouring something amber into a glass, gurgling and clinking.
“Boo!” said Rossi, flapping his arms.
The young man whirled in a spasm of limbs, a long arc of brown droplets hanging. The door banged him out, and Rossi was alone, watching the drinking glass roll, counting the seconds until…
The walls were brown again; a calendar across the room said 1965 MAY 1965. An old man, spidery on the edge of the bed, was fumbling spectacles over the rank crests of his ears. “You’re real,” he said.
“I’m not,” said Rossi indignantly. He added, “Radishes. Lemons. Grapes. Blahhh!”
“Don’t put me off,” said the old man. He was ragged and hollow-templed, like a birdskull, coloured like earth and milkweed floss, and his mouth was a drum over porcelain, but his oystery eyes were burning bright. “I knew the minute I saw you—you’re Rossi, the one that disappeared. If you can do that—” his teeth clacked—“you must know, you’ve got to tell me. Those ships that have landed on the moon—what are they building there? What do they want?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Please,” said the old man humbly. “You can’t be so cruel. 1 tried to warn people, but they’ve forgotten who I am. If you know: if you could just tell me…”
Rossi had a qualm, thinking of heat flashing down in that one intolerable blow that would leave the city squashed, glistening, as flat as the thin film of a bug. But remembering that, after all, the old man was not real, he said, “There isn’t anything. You made it up. You’re dreaming.”
And then, while the pure tension gathered and strained inside him, came the lake of obsidian.
And the jungle, just as it ought to be—the brown people carolling, “Hello, Mister Rossi, hello again, hello!”
And the savanna, the tall black-haired people reining in, breeze-blown, flash of teeth: “Hillo, Misser Rossi!”
And the beach.
The scarlet beach with its golden, laughing people:” Mista Rossi, Mista Rossi!” Heraldic glory under the clear sky, and out past the breakers the clear heart-stirring glint of sun on the sea: and the tension of the longing breaking free (stop), no need for symbols now (stop), a lifetime’s distillation of I wish… spurting, channeled, done.
There he stands where he longed to be, wearing the same pleased expression, for ever caught at the beginning of a hello—Rossi, the first man to travel in Time, and Rossi, the first man to Stop.
He’s not to be mocked or mourned. Rossi was born a stranger; there are thousands of him, unconsidered gritty particles in the gears of history: the ne” er-do-wells, the superfluous people, shaped for some world that has never yet been invented. The air-conditioned utopias have no place for them; they would have been bad slaves and worse masters in Athens. As for the tropic isles—the Marquesas of 1800, or the Manhattan of 3256—could Rossi swim a mile, dive six fathoms, climb a fifty-foot palm? If he had stepped alive onto that scarlet shore, would the young men have had him in their canoes, or the maidens in their bowers? But see him now, stonily immortal, the symbol of a wonderful thing that happened. The childlike golden people visit him every day, except when they forget. They drape his rock-hard flesh with garlands and lay little offerings at his feet; and when he lets it rain, they thump him.
CABIN BOY
The cabin boy’s name was unspeakable, and even its mean. ing would be difficult to convey in any human tongue. For convenience, we may as well call him Tommy Loy.
Please bear in mind that all these terms are approximations. Tommy was not exactly a cabin boy, and even the spaceship he served was not exactly a spaceship, nor was the Captain exactly a captain. But if you think of Tommy as a freckled, scowling, red-haired, wilful, prank-playing, thoroughly abhorrent brat, and of the Captain as a crusty, ponderous old man, you may be able to understand their relationship.
A word about Tommy will serve to explain why these approximations have to be made, and just how much they mean. Tommy, to a human being, would have looked like a six-foot egg made of greenish gelatin. Suspended in this were certain dark or radiant shapes which were Tommy’s nerve centres and digestive organs, and scattered about its surface were star-shaped and oval markings which were his sensory organs and gripping mechanisms—his” hands” . At the lesser end was an orifice which expelled a stream of glowing vapour—Tommy’s means of propulsion, It should be clear that if instead of saying, “Tommy ate his lunch”, or, “Tommy said to the Captain…” we reported what really happened, some pretty complicated explanations would have to be made.
Similarly, the term “cabin boy” is used because it is the closest in human meaning. Some vocations, like seafaring, are so demanding and so complex that they simply cannot be taught in classrooms; they have to be lived. A cabin boy is one who is learning such a vocation and paying for his instruction by performing certain menial, degrading, and unimportant tasks. _
That describes Tommy, with one more similarity—the cabin boy of the sailing vessel was traditionally occupied after each whipping with preparing the mischief, or the stupidity, that earned him the next one.
Tommy, at the moment, had a whipping coming to him and was fighting a delaying action. He knew he couldn’t escape eventual punishment, but he planned to hold it off as long as he could.
Floating alertly in one of the innumerable corridors of the ship, he watched as a dark wave sprang into being upon the glowing corridor wall and sped toward him. Instantly, Tommy was moving away from it, and at the same rate of speed.
The wave rumbled: “Tommy! Tommy Loy! Where is that obscenity boy?”
The wave moved on, rumbling wordlessly, and Tommy moved with it. Ahead of him was another wave, and another beyond that, and it was the same throughout all the corridors of the ship. Abruptly the waves reversed their direction. So did Tommy, barely in time. The waves not only carried the Captain’s orders but scanned every corridor and compartment of the ten-mile ship. But as long as Tommy kept between the waves, the Captain could not see him.
The trouble was that Tommy could not keep this up for ever, and he was being searched for by other lowly members of the crew. It took a long time to traverse all of those winding, interlaced passages, but it was a mathematical certainty that he would
be caught eventually.
Tommy shuddered, and at the same time he squirmed with delight. He had interrupted the Old Man’s sleep by a stench cJ a particularly noisome variety, one of which he had only lately found himself capable. The effect had been beautiful. In human terms, since Tommy’s race communicated by odours, it was equivalent to setting off a firecracker beside a sleeper’s ear.
Judging by the jerkiness of the scanning waves’ motion, the Old Man was still unnerved.
“Tommy!” the wave rumbled. “Come out, you little piece of filth, or I’ll smash you into a thousand separate stinks! By Spore, when I get hold of you—”
The corridor intersected another at this point, and Tommy seized his chance to duck into the new one. He had been working his way outward ever since his crime, knowing that the search parties would do the same. When he reached the outermost level of the ship, there would be a slight possibility of slipping back past the hunters—not much of a chance, but better than none.
He kept close to the wall. He was the smallest member of the crew—smaller than any of the other cabin boys, and less than half the size of an Ordinary; it was always possible that when he sighted one of the search party, he could get away before the crewman saw him. He was in a short connecting corridor now, but the scanning waves cycled endlessly, always turning back before he could escape into the next corridor. Tommy followed their movement patiently, while he listened to the torrent of abuse that poured from them. He snickered to himself. When the Old Man was angry, everybody suffered. The ship would be stinking from stem to stern by now.
Eventually the Captain forgot himself and the waves flowed on around the next intersection. Tommy moved on. He was getting close to his goal by now; he could see a faint gleam of starshine up at the end of the corridor.
The next turn took him into it—and what Tommy saw through the semi-transparent skin of the ship nearly made him falter and be caught. Not merely the fiery pinpoints of stars shone there, but a great, furious glow which could only mean that they were passing through a star system. It was the first time this had happened in Tommy’s life, but of course it was nothing to the Captain, or even to most of the Ordinaries. Trust them, Tommy thought resentfully, to say nothing to him about it!