Highway of Eternity

by Clifford D. Simak

  “It can’t be. We’re still in the Everest.”

  “Not any longer,” said Boone. “We’re in that box you saw. We stepped around a corner.”

  “What the hell!” cried Corcoran. “You mean to say …”

  “It took a crisis, Jay. I should have realized that. I can do it only at the last moment, at the crisis point, when there is no hope.”

  Corcoran looked at Boone accusingly. “You played a dirty trick on me. You didn’t warn me.”

  “I didn’t know, myself. This freakness of mine is a survival trait. It doesn’t work until there is a threat. That’s the way it always happened. It’s an instinctive response.”

  “But always before you apparently were gone only for a while. You came back again. Will we be coming back …?”

  Boone shook his head. “I don’t think so. I only came back when it was safe. Here we’ll be hanging in the air with a building falling underneath us. If we step back around the corner, we’ll be falling, too. And before, I had no real place to go. Every time before, I stepped into a sort of limbo—a gray, flat world of some kind of fog, with no real features. But this time, we stepped into a real place—this box. I can’t be entirely sure, but I think I’m right.”

  “So this is it,” Corcoran said. “We are in Martin’s hideout. What do we do now?”

  “That’s up to you,” Boone replied. “You wanted me to step around a corner. I did and took you with me. You are the one with all the questions. So start hunting for the answers.”

  He looked around the room in which they found themselves. The furniture was strange—familiar as to form and function, but very oddly structured. Against the farther wall stood what could have been a fireplace, but which, he told himself, probably wasn’t one. Above it hung a rather massive rectangular form that could have been a painting. But it was so far beyond even the wildest, most twisted works of the latest artists he had known that he fought against the thought that it could be a piece of art.

  The room seemed to be on a steady keel; it did not sag or shift. And how could that be? It had been somehow attached to the building that now was in the process of crumbling into an unsightly, shattered pile. Yet seemingly it held in place. Without the support of the blasted building, it still kept position, some hundred feet or more above the street.

  Boone moved swiftly to a window and looked out. In the faint light of the street, a billowing cloud of mortar and plaster dust swirled above the surface of the pavement, while broken bricks, splintered wood, and shattered marble skittered along the sidewalks. There was no doubt that the old hotel had fallen or was in the process of falling.

  The room in which he stood lurched suddenly, one end dropping, then regained its steadiness, while a shiver ran through it. Boone spun back from the window, holding his breath.

  The lurch had unhinged the painting or whatever it might be, and it was swinging back to uncover a black panel set into the wall. The face of the panel was filled with gleaming instruments. In the center of it, a red light was flashing on and off.

  Corcoran stood spraddle-legged, staring at the panel. The red light kept on blinking.

  A voice came out of the panel, speaking gibberish. It kept on speaking gibberish. It spoke fast and angrily.

  “Speak English!” Corcoran roared at it. “Speak English. Don’t you know the language?”

  The red light ceased its blinking and the voice said in English, a rather strangely accented English, “Of course, we know the tongue. But why speak in English? This is Martin, is it not? Where have you been? Why have you not answered us?”

  “This is not Martin,” Corcoran said. “Martin is not here.”

  “If you are not Martin, then who are you? What business have you answering? How come you are in Martin’s place?”

  “Friend, whoever you may be,” said Corcoran, “the story is a long one and there is no time to tell you. The hotel has been razed, and here we hang in Martin’s place, suspended in thin air and about to crash at any moment.”

  The speaker from the panel drew his breath in sharply. Then he said, “Don’t get excited. We can set things right.”

  “I am not excited,” Corcoran said, “but I think we may need a bit of help.”

  “We’ll help. Listen carefully.”

  “I am listening carefully.”

  “You see a panel. You must see it. It’s activated when the screening cover is unhinged. It must be unhinged.”

  “Damn it, it is unhinged. Cease this kindergarten silliness and tell me what to do. The panel’s here. What does it do? How does it operate?”

  “On the lower left-hand corner there is an array of—I suppose you could call them buttons. On the bottom row, starting from the right, count three and push the third button.”

  “It’s pushed.”

  “Now count two up from that third button and push the second button.”

  “It’s pushed,” said Corcoran.

  “Now—but don’t do this until I tell you. Count upward at an angle to your right the space of three buttons. Do you understand?”

  “I understand. I have my finger on the designated button.”

  “Don’t push it yet. I have to know when you are about to push it. When you do push it, you give over control to me and I’ll get you out of there.”

  “You mean you’ll take control of this place we are in and move it elsewhere?”

  “That’s what I mean. Do you object to it?”

  “I don’t like it,” Corcoran said. “But we’re in no position to do much quibbling.”

  “You keep saying we. Are there more of you?”

  “Two of us.”

  “Are you armed? Do you carry weapons?”

  “No, of course not. Why should we have weapons?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Perhaps …”

  “You’re wasting time,” shouted Corcoran. “We could crash at any time.”

  “You have the proper button?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Then push it.”

  He pushed it. Darkness clamped in on them, a darkness that brought instant disorientation—as if they had been divorced from all reality. There was no sense of movement—no sense of anything.

  Then there was a slight bump. The darkness fled and there was sunlight pouring through the windows and from the widening edges of a door, or port, that was opening downward, pivoting on its lower edge.

  “I suppose,” said Boone, “this is where we get off.”

  He stepped to the door. Beyond the port that had become an inclined exit he saw a lawn. Up the lawn was a house—an old house of considerable extent, built of weathered fieldstone that showed, here and there, a growth of moss.

  A man who wore a hunting coat was coming down the lawn toward them. Over a crooked arm he carried a shotgun. He was flanked, on his right side, by a happy dog, a beautiful golden setter, and on his left by a globular monstrosity that stood almost as high as he did. The monstrosity was rolling sedately along beside him, matching its pace to his. Over all its surface, it was studded with extremely sharp-pointed spikes, gleaming and flashing in the sun. But the spikes, despite their sharpness, did not sink into the turf. For an instant, Boone had the strange feeling that it was walking on tiptoes, which was replaced almost immediately by the realization that it was floating, revolving slowly as it floated.

  Boone walked down the slope until he reached the end of it and stepped down on the lawn. Behind him, Corcoran had halted and was staring at the scene, moving his head from side to side to take in all of it.

  Up the lawn, several other people had come out of the house and were standing on the broad stone steps, watching what was going on.

  The man with the shotgun, still flanked by the happy dog and the monstrosity, halted a dozen paces away and said, “Welcome to Hopkins Acre.”

  “So this is Hopkins Acre?”

  “You have heard of it?”

  “Just recently,” said Boone. “Just the other day.”

 
“What was said of it?”

  Boone shrugged. “Not much. Nothing actually. Simply that someone had developed a sudden interest in it.”

  “My name is David,” said the man. “This grotesque alien is Spike. I am happy that you made it. Horace is not the sort of technician into whose hands I would want to place my life. He is fumble-fingered.”

  “Horace is the one we spoke with?”

  David nodded. “He has been trying for months to get in touch with Martin. When our panel alerted us this morning, he thought Martin was trying to reach him.”

  Corcoran came down the incline to stand beside Boone. “My name is Corcoran. My companion is named Boone. We are both immensely curious about what has happened to us. I wonder if you could explain it.”

  “You are no whit more curious than we,” said David. “Let’s all go up to the house and talk. I think Nora will be serving lunch soon. Perhaps a drink or two before we gather at the board.”

  “That would be excellent,” Boone told him.

  4

  Shropshire: 1745

  “The one important thing for you to realize,” Horace told them, “is that you can never leave this place. If there were any possibility of your leaving, we would have been forced to kill you.”

  “Horace is so dour,” said Enid. “He has no sense of grace. He is like a hammer. He hammers everything. He could have said that he was sorry you could never leave, but assure you we are glad you’re here.”

  “I’m not sure I am glad they are here,” said Horace. “It is only another indication the situation is getting out of hand. Martin and Stella disappearing into thin air and no trace of them and the story that Ghost …”

  “Henry!” Enid said. “Henry, not Ghost.”

  “… The story that Henry told us last night about something snooping all around the Acre, sensing a certain strangeness and trying to sniff out the strangeness. I tell you, they are closing in on us. Now here come these two from New York, with a not entirely satisfactory explanation of how they gained entrance to Martin’s traveler and knowing, of all things, about Hopkins Acre.”

  “We’ve been here too long,” Emma complained. “We should have broken the trail by going someplace else. No one should stay in one place for a century and a half.”

  “Moving to some other place would have involved some danger in itself,” said Horace. “We’d have had to make arrangements for a team of technicians who could handle such an operation. We would, first of all, have had to scout another place to go. We could have done the scouting for ourselves, but we could not, unaided, have made the move to another place. We do not have the skill by half.”

  “I was under the impression,” said David, rather nastily, “that you, unaided, can handle any sort of job.”

  Horace hunched his shoulders like an angry bull.

  “Stop it,” said Timothy, in his gentle way. “Stop it, the both of you. Instead of arguing among ourselves, we should be seeking to explain, as best we can, the situation these visitors have stumbled into as our guests.”

  “I sincerely wish you would,” said Corcoran. “You tell us we can never leave, and yet David—it is David, is it not?”

  “Yes,” said David. “I am David and I leave occasionally. London and Paris mostly. Once to New York.”

  “And you mentioned that someone would be coming in from Athens. So there are comings and goings.”

  “The comings and goings, as you call them,” said Timothy, “are by means of vehicles we call travelers. The traveler Martin lived in brought you here from New York, but that’s not the entire story.”

  “I pushed buttons,” said Corcoran.

  “You could have gone on pushing buttons and still the traveler would not have stirred. What you did was push certain buttons that tuned in the traveler with the control panel in this house. Once that was done, Horace could operate Martin’s traveler.”

  “You mean only certain people can operate the travelers?”

  “The point is,” said Horace, “that you’re inside a time bubble—a simplistic term, of course—through which no one can pass, not even us. The only way to get through it is by traveler.”

  They all sat silent for a moment.

  “I forgot,” said Horace. “Ghost is the only one who can get through unaided and he is a special case.”

  “Henry,” Enid reminded him. “Henry. Not Ghost.”

  “It seems to me,” said Boone, “that we must accept as gracefully as we are able all that you have told us. We are here, you say, and we are not about to leave. I don’t understand much of what I’ve heard. There are a lot of questions, but I suppose there’ll be time later to voice all of them.”

  “I am pleased you see it that way,” said Timothy. “We ourselves are bound by certain restrictions we cannot ignore. We hope you will be able to live a pleasant life with us.”

  “There is one further question that seems to me too important to wait. Who are you?” Boone asked.

  “We are refugees,” said David. “Refugees cowering in the depths of time.”

  “Not so,” Horace shouted. “You keep babbling about us as refugees. We are revolutionaries, I tell you. Some day we’ll be going back.”

  Enid said to Boone, “Pay no attention to these two. They are always at one another’s throats. What you meant, I’m sure, is where we came from. We are people who once lived a million years from now. We are from your very distant future.”

  Nora spoke from the door that led into the dining room. “Lunch is on.”

  Lunch was civilized and pleasant with no bickering. David talked of the few days he had spent in twentieth-century New York and asked Boone and Corcoran about the city. Timothy talked about some of the reading he had been doing. Enid said little. Emma was sweetly silent. Horace sat hunched over, occupied with his own thoughts. Finally he was moved to speech. “I wonder what has happened to Gahan. He should be here by now.”

  “Gahan is from Athens,” said Emma. “He is bringing Timothy a new book.”

  “We always say Athens,” Timothy explained. “But they’re really not in Athens, although quite close to it.”

  “We also have a small group in the Pleistocene,” said David. “Southern France. The early days of the last glaciation.”

  “Neanderthals,” said Boone.

  “Yes, a few of them. Early Neanderthal.”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Horace, still tied up in worry, “is why Martin should have left so hurriedly. And Stella, too. Apparently he had a small traveler hidden in a warehouse and he used that to get away, alerting Stella so that she could join him. He should have used his residence traveler to get away. But he didn’t. He panicked. The damn fool panicked. He got scared and ran.”

  “He was afraid of being trapped at the hotel,” said Enid. “That seems quite clear to me. Perhaps he did not place complete trust in Mr. Corcoran.”

  “There was no reason that he should have,” said David. “According to Mr. Corcoran’s own admission, he had men watching Martin and Stella. They were watched at every move.”

  “He bought my trust and paid very well for it,” said Corcoran. “I’ll work for anyone wholeheartedly if he pays me for it. Never, in all my life, have I ever double-crossed a client.”

  “But you didn’t trust your client in this case,” said David.

  “I can’t say I did. He gave me no reason to. I watched him not to do him harm, but to be certain he did no harm to me. He was a curiously secretive man. He was a slippery character.”

  “He must have known the hotel was to be razed,” said Horace. “Surely the tenants would have been notified. To have left the resident traveler, knowing that, facing the possibility that its presence might have been revealed, is inexcusable.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know about the hotel,” said Corcoran. “The tenants were not notified until the last possible legal moment. And even then, there was no public announcement. It was one of those quiet deals. It was long after Martin left that I heard o
f it. And there is little rumor that I miss.”

  “Then,” said David, “perhaps he left on some quick errand, thinking he’d soon be back. That may be why he left the residence traveler.”

  Horace rumbled at Boone, “What you have not fully explained is how the two of you were able to get into the traveler. Not how you detected it; that I can understand. But how you got into it.”

  “I told you what I could,” said Boone. “I stepped around a corner. I can’t tell you more. I don’t understand myself how I do it. All I know is that it can be accomplished only under stress.”

  “That is no explanation,” said Horace. “Surely a man knows what he does.”

  “Sorry,” said Boone. “I can’t help you further.”

  “And since we are getting down to fine points,” said Corcoran, somewhat out of sorts, “tell me what all that gibberish meant when I first contacted you.”

  “On that point I can answer you,” said Timothy. “As you must perceive, we are very furtive folk. Perhaps at times too committed to a cloak and dagger ethic. We think our communications system cannot be tapped. But arrayed against us are forces that are powerful and most wondrously intelligent. We can’t be sure how safe we are; we never can be sure. So when we talk among ourselves on the communication system, we employ a very ancient language, the speech of a small and obscure group of humans. By this method, we hope that, even if our communications could be penetrated, there is little possibility that the listener could decipher what we’re saying.”

  “This,” said Boone, “is the most insane setup I have ever come across.”

  “You know not the half of it,” said Timothy. “You do not know the Infinites. If you knew the Infinites …”

  A shriek sounded from the kitchen. Timothy and Emma leaped to their feet. Nora, still shrieking, appeared in the kitchen door. Her cap was awry upon her head and her hands were twisting the apron that was tied about her waist.

  “Visitors!” she screamed. “There are visitors. And there is something wrong. The traveler landed in the flower bed and tipped over on its back.”

  Chairs screeched and everyone was charging for the kitchen, heading for the outside door.