The Wrong End Of Time

  The Wrong End Of Time

  John Brunner

  John Brunner

  The Wrong End of Time

  Absolute calm, though not absolute stillness. The sea shifted lazily against the sandy beach, its motion indexed not by the white crests of ripples-the water was too oily for waves to break-but by the pale spots of imperishable plastic rubbish.

  Tangled greenery grew down to within a short distance of the tide-mark.

  Night. The sky was almost clear of cloud. There was no natural moon, but as though Phobos and Deimos had been transported from Mars-two small man-made moons arced between the stars.

  Silence. Only branches rustling and the sound of the sea.

  Less than a mile off-shore, a smear of white obtruded on the glassy water. It could have been due to a partly submerged rock. It was not. It lasted two minutes and disappeared.

  Something fractionally blacker than the black ocean began to approach the land.

  A shadow among shadows, Danty Ward crept through the underbrush. He felt his footing at each step so that he did not break the night-quiet; nonetheless he managed to move rather swiftly. He wore a dark jersey and dark pants, and he had paused by a puddle to smear mud on the highlights of his cheekbones and forehead. Gilding the lily in reverse. He was not following a trodden path, but he was keeping parallel to and a few yards from a dirt road that few people traveled. Indeed, hardly anyone came to this stretch of shore at all. It was most inadvisable to try. There were complex alarms and boobytraps, not to mention an electronic fence. Beyond these, hidden among trees and thickets, were highly efficient radar antennae. There were also silos in which were sunk short-range missiles with nuclear warheads of about quarter-megaton capacity. Back near the superway he had passed posters that showed a clenched fist hammering a city into ruins. Underneath captions said: PART OF THE WORLD'S MOST PERFECT DEFENSIVE SYSTEM. He had taken the precaution of turning everything off.

  Somewhere nearby came the scrunching sound of a foot moving in gravel. Danty halted stock-still to feel the world, then stealthily made towards the road he had been avoiding. Parting the fronds of a flowering bush he saw a car on the other side of the track. about twelve feet away. A man leaned against it, his left wrist held close to his face as if he were trying to read his watch in the thin before dawn light.

  With a little nod of satisfaction Danty slipped back into nowhere.

  He passed on now towards the beach. coming soon to the point at which the greenery thinned and left only tough dune grasses. courtesy of the Federal Erosion Commission. "Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea . . . "

  Like living on a melting iceberg.

  A few yards farther on. a boulder stuck its blunt snout up from the sand. Danty looked both ways along the beach, then darted into shelter beside the rock. His back against it, he relaxed, invisible until daylight.

  If he was right. though. he would be gone by then.

  He stared seaward. Straining his eyes. he discerned something more coherent than a chance assembly of weed or garbage being carried inshore. Matt-dark but a little shiny because it was wet. Purposively shaped. A man in a survival suit.

  Danty allowed himself a grunt of self-approbation, and concentrated on making his relaxation still more complete.

  Vassily Sheklov, on the other hand, was tense. He had no qualms about the suit he was wearing-it was a very advanced model, and he would cheerfully have bet on it to carry him through hell-fire. It could not, however, protect him from the oppressive weight of knowledge about his situation, which bore down on his skull as though the dome of the night sky were leaning its entire burden on his head. He had unwisely allowed the submarine captain to press a last glass of vodka on him, by way of a toast to the success of his mission. The liquor-and his careful

  yoga exercises-had sustained him during the nerve-racking period while they were inching towards the coast, sometimes within a meter of grounding on the bottom; to duck beneath the sweep-pattern of the radar they knew to be located hereabouts. they had to break surface not more than a kilometer from the beach. where the water was ridiculously shallow for such a big vessel. But now he was out here on his own he was horribly aware of what the slug of alcohol might have done to the speed of his reflexes.

  Landing in a spot that was as thick with nuclear missiles as a porcupine's back with spines! He had to keep . reminding himself that the paradoxical advice had come ., from Turpin, who ought to be reliable if anyone was. Ac– -. cording to him a reserved area was the safest choice pro– vided the submarine didn't trigger the automatic firing . mechanisms, because Americans were almost superstitious about such places and nobody would be within miles.

  Thus far the advice had proved sound. Sheklov noted the fact in the tidy mental card-index of data about Turpin that he was compiling.

  His knees touched bottom. He found his footing, and abruptly the buoyancy of his suit converted into weight: Not a great weight. He stood up with sea around his legs and looked the scene over.

  Nothing moved except branches and man-made litter bobbing on the wavelets.

  He went up the sand looking for the tidemark, and found that the full tide. due soon after dawn, would erase all but a few of his footprints. When he gained the protection of the first bushes, he opened his suit and peeled it off. Underneath he wore authentic American leisure clothing, smuggled via Mexico or Canada.

  He laid the suit down in a wind-sculpted hollow and hit the destruct switch on its shoulder. Faint smoke drifted up, and the plastic began to deliquesce.

  Waiting for the process to go to completion, he used a fronded branch to scuff over the three footprints he had left above the high-water mark. On his return to the suit: he found only a puddle of jelly, already beginning to soak into the sand. He shoveled more sand over it with a bit, of jetsam and tossed miscellaneous garbage on top of the' little pile. Then, with a final glance out to sea to confirm that the submarine had vanished, he headed inland.

  Danty rose from his boulder and faded into the undergrowth again. He kept pace, discreetly.

  Sheklov found the dirt road easily. The captain had been laudably precise in his navigation. He walked by its edge-carefully, because it had rained here within the past few hours and the ground was soft-until he came within sight of a car: an expensive make that he recognized from his briefing. Waiting beside it, a man raised his arm in hesitant greeting.

  Continuing at a neutral pace, Sheklov studied him. He wore a dark jacket and pants, by Russian standards rather old-fashioned. He was about fifty, above medium height, plump-cheeked. paunchy, sweating a little-from nervousness, presumably, because the night was cool. . . Yes, this was Turpin okay. Either that, or someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a duplicate.

  Now the man spoke in a wheezy whisper, saying, “Holtzer?”

  Sheklov nodded. For the time being, he was indeed Holtzer.

  Turpin let go a gusty sigh and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Sorry,” he said, the word muffled by its folds. “The strain of waiting was beginning to get to me. Uh-did you have a good trip?”

  “Well, the water was pretty dirty,” Sheklov said, and tensed for the answer. It was conceivable something had gone wrong, at the receiving if not at the delivering end. But Turpin's response was word-perfect.

  “Still, the air around here isn't too bad.”

  Sheklov let a thought form in his mind.

  t made it!

  The realization hit him with almost physical violence, so that he did not immediately react when Turpin opened the car door and motioned for him to get in. Belatedly he complied, noting the decadent luxury of the vehicle's interior . . . and then the sullen inertia of the do
or as he closed it.

  Armored, of course. The thing must weigh six or seven tons. And in plain sight next to the radiation-counter: a gun, its muzzle snugly inserted into a socket on the dash, its butt convenient for the driver's right hand.

  Well, he was going to have to get used to that kind of thing.

  “What about tracks?” he said, thinking of how deeply so much weight could drive tires into the ground as soft as he had just been walking on. Turpin started the car and bean to turn it around. It was equipped with manual con– trols. naturally. He'd had it dinned into him that over here people liked to gamble with each other's lives on the roads.

  “Sonic projectors in the wheel-arches.” Turpin answered. “They homogenize dust and mud. If someone comes by before the next rain he might realize a car has been this way, but he won't have a hope in hell of identifying a tread-pattern. But don't talk until we're out of the reserved area, please. I shall have to use some pretty tricky gadgets to get us through the perimeter alarms. As soon as we hit the superway, through, we can relax.”

  The third time he sawed the car back and forth, it was facing in the direction he wanted, and he sent it silently down the track, back to the superway, back to the real America.

  When the car had gone, Danty stepped out from the bushes and began to walk unconcernedly in its wake. He was a mile or so from the superway. He would reach it a few minutes before dawn.

  He didn't bother to turn the site back on. • ,(r)

  The mud on Danty's face had dried. Rubbing at it as he walked, he reduced it to a grayish smear. That would have to do until he reached soap and water.

  Emerging on to the hard shoulder of the superway between two billboards advertising insurance against juvenile leukemia and KOENIG'S INTIMATE INSULATION, he gazed towards the oncoming traffic. He ignored the long-distance freight-trucks, which had schedules to keep, and concentrated on the last of the night-riders, the lamps of their cars dimming as they headed home for a day's sleep. These were the people who seemed to feel oppressed by the isolation of their continent, even though it was three thousand miles wide, and needed to relieve their tension by simply going, regardless of whether there was any place to go to.

  It was the third car that stopped: a red-and-gold Banshee. The dead weight of its Armour made it almost nosedive into the concrete as it responded to its compulsorily excellent brakes. The man at the wheel wore a snug hat and tailored fatigues, and also-as he stared at Dantyan expression of surprise.

  Not at what he saw. Danty was ordinary enough to look at, apart from the mud on his face: young, thin, midbrown complexion, sharp chin, dark eyes above which his brows formed a shallow V. But at the notion of stopping for him in a state where hitch-hiking had been illegal for decades.

  Before he could recover his presence of mind, however, Danty had sauntered over and leaned on his door. Rashly, the man was driving with its window open.

  “Going to Lakonia?” he inquired.

  “Uh . . .” The driver licked his lips; hand hovering close to his dashboard gun. “Now look here! I didn't stop to give you a ride! I-”

  And broke off in consternation. The question had just occurred to him: Then why in hell did I stop?

  He could see no other reason than Danty, who went on looking at him levelly.

  “Ali. shit” the driver said at last. “Okay, get in. Yes, I am heading for Lakonia.”

  “Thanks,” Danty said, and went around to the passenger's door.

  Before his unwelcome companion had fastened his safety-harness, the driver stamped on the accelerator and shot back into the center of the road, watching his mirror anxiously-not so much for following cars, as for a patrolman who might have witnessed that entirely unlawful pickup. The speedo needle reached the limit mark and stopped climbing, never the less their speed increased perceptibly afterwards. Danty concealed a grin. Another reason for the driver to feel worried. Plainly he'd eased the control on the governor. Everybody did that, but you were still liable to arrest if you were caught.

  Relaxing after a mile or two without incident, the driver reached for the cigarette dispenser.

  “Want one?” he asked reluctantly.

  “Thanks.” Danty shook his bead. “Don't use them.”

  The driver took his. ready-lit, and sucked on it twice before speaking again, this time with the petty bravado of a man defying the law and trying not to let the fact bother him.

  “Now don't you get the idea I go around the country free-lifting all the time!”

  “Of course not,” Danty said equably.

  “So you'd better be a friend of mine, hm? Just in case My name's Rollins, George Rollins. What's yours and where are you from?”

  “Danty. And it says CowvMe in my redbook.”

  Rollins betrayed obvious relief. Cowville was right next door to Lakonia; in fact it was the nucleus from which Lakonia had spread like a stump of wild-rose root with a gorgeous over-blown double floribunda grafted on it. Taking a man back to his home city wasn't too bad. Danty let the idea curdle.

  Then he added mildly, “But mostly I'm from all over.”

  “You make a habit of traveling this way?” Rollins curled his lip. It was probably in his mind to add: Because if you do, you must be a lousy rebl Everybody knows they shave and cut their hair nowadays!

  “No, this is kind of a special case.”

  “Glad to hear it!” Rollins snapped, and fell silent. After a moment he reached for the radio buttons and snapped on an early-morning music program. Soothed by the sound of the current chart-toppers, the Male Organs, Danty dozed.

  He awoke to a prod in his ribs and the sound of the gas-gauge emitting a penetrating hum.

  “Got to pull in for gas,” Rollins told him unnecessarily. “Now you watch how you act, hear? Don't want some radiated gas-attendant to turn me in for free-lifting!”

  Danty touched the gritty mud on his face. He said, “Well, then I can get to a washroom and clean up.”

  “You do that! And watch yourself!” Rollins ordered.

  His imitation bravado leaked away as the car slowed. His lips moved as though he were rehearsing what he would say when they stopped.

  He was. Therefore it came out smoothly enough. “Fifty, please!” he called to the attendant in his overhead booth, watching the forecourt through armour-glass with his hands poised above the triggers for his guns.

  “Fifty it is,” the man answered, and began to haul on his waldoes. Angled, a fuel-pipe launched down from its high hook and sought the car's filler like a blind snake.

  So far, so good. As Danty left his seat, Rollins breathed easier. Hell, was anyone--even a gas-attendant, in a trade that encouraged paranoia-going to turn him in for a little free-lifting? Of course not!

  And then his stomach filled with ice-cubes. There was a cop rolling into the gas-station, masked and armored, like a mere extension of the single-seat racer that he rode.

  Patrolman Clough yawned hugely as he dismounted. That was a slow job, involving a thorough survey of the vicinity, then the folding back of four light-alloy bullet deflectors. But finally he freed himself, stood upright, and stretched and yawned again. The quick dash of midnight had worn off, and he was having to pull in more and more often to rest up. The endless concentration tired the brain. Police racers had no governors on them, only a red line at the hundred-fifty mark that the rider was forbidden to exceed except in emergency. Something to boast about in company-"they don't turn loose any but the picked best on the superway without a governor!"-but on the job, not so much fun.

  Only one car in the station. Banshee. Cheapjack make. Slick lines, sure, but inside-well, built-in obsolescence. of course. Trouble being they sometimes guessed wrong, the obsolescence progressed too quickly, and then he or someone was picking bits of people out of the wreckage.

  Not this one, though. A last-month's model, red and gold.

  Driver sort of nervy . . Wonder if he's disconnected his governor. Sort of thing the guy who buys a Banshee might do. Ea
sy to short the governor circuits on one of these. Not a bad idea to have him lift the hood, take a quick squint.

  He snapped back the visor of his helmet and strode towards the car.

  Rollins rubbed sweaty palms inconspicuously on the sides of his thighs. “Morning officer!” he exclaimed, and damned his voice for skating up towards the treble.

  The patrolman gave a neutral nod. Rollins told himself he couldn't possibly have seen the disreputable passenger, and whatever was bothering him with luck he'd guess wrong and be away before Danty emerged from the washroom. In fact it might be a good idea to get back on the road without Danty, if he could. What in the world could have possessed him to stop for a free-lifter? And a reb at that, more than likely!

  The gas-pipe withdrew to its hook. A cash-drawer shot out of the side of the pump within easy reach of him. But he was so intent on the patrolman that at first he didn't notice, and the attendant had to parp on his hooter.

  Damnation. Now the pig will know I'm rattled. He fumbled a credit card from his pocket and laid it in the tray. The patrolman followed every move, ,and when the drawer had clicked shut he said, “Mind lifting your hood, mister?”

  "Uh . . .° Well, there was no help for it. He flipped the release and the hood ascended three feet on lazy-tongs mountings. sighing. Look, officer, l have a clean license ten years old, everyone eases the governor control a bit, it's not as though 1'd been in an accident ….

  But the patrolman only glanced at the engine, nodded, and made to turn away. Rollins exhaled gratefully.

  Must have thought the governor was cut out completely. Who but a damned fool-? And Danty re-appeared.

  He'd washed, and wiped the stubble of beard from his chin with Depilide, but even so he didn't match a brand-new Banshee. And here he was opening the passenger door. You could almost hear the tumblers clicking in the pig's head, like a fruit machine.