THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY Read online

  Vyko turned mutely appealing eyes to him, and Red replied firmly that they would stay. Hectic minutes of preparation passed; then everything was set for the great experiment.

  Licking lips that had suddenly gone dry, Burma gave one final glance around his complex equipment, smiled forcedly at his anxious-looking team, and pressed the switch to initiate the signal.

  Vyko gave a scream of pure terror and slid to the floor unconscious. A glass-encased indicator light burst and showered the opposite panel of dials with broken glass. The dials themselves wavered back and forth, and then stood still exactly like a human being torn between two courses of action.

  This much Red took in before Burma indicated a livid green time map before him, and said, “This is it, my friends—we’re headed for the beginning of Time.”

  XVII

  Extract from paper read to the British Society, Physical Division, June 3rd, 1974: “It has now become abundantly clear—too clear, I regret to say, for some of the less flexible academic minds among us (cries of ‘Shame!’ and loud applause), that we have for far too long been attempting to describe the universe in terms of petty-minded preconceptions as bad as the idealistic tenets of the earliest Greek philosophers. In many ways we have never succeeded in freeing ourselves from bondage to Aristotle! We have spent as much time explaining away as we have explaining.”

  Charles Fort, the apostle of doubt, on the same subject many years earlier: “A superstition is a hypothesis which has been discarded; a hypothesis is a superstition which has not yet been discarded.”

  The instant it happened, Artesha’s fantastic mind began to balance her ledger. The reports that were streaming in did not make reassuring reading.

  Net loss: hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable men and women—skilled technicians, scientists, experts in the fields most desperately needed by the human race; material by the millions of tons, including precious records inscribed in the memory banks of Centre (that was the first loss Artesha became aware of—it was as if she had lost part of her own memory); ships by the score, both civilian and military.

  Net gain: one piece of information about the Being.

  It was not enough.

  The temporal surge had cut a swathe right through the defences of the Solar System. A gap yawned towards Polaris which the already extended lines of patrolling vessels could never hope to fill. A few asteroids had gone along with the rest, and a gigantic volume of dust.

  Magwareet was the first person to demand whether there would be any change in her previous directives in view of the disaster. She answered briefly that he was too far involved with the problem of the going-doubles to back out now. What she was frantically trying to decide even as she spoke was how much and what had gone from her memory; that could never be replaced, because the energies of the temporal surge would have wiped every trace clean away.

  As big, but not so immediately important, a void had been left in her whole life, moreover: in that cartwheeling ship, headed this time for the Being alone knew where—and when—was Burma, whom she loved.

  She contacted Wymarin for the newest data on the chaos boiling through the continuum, and the little scientist gave her a grim summary.

  “We can’t track this surge, Artesha. It goes beyond the furthest range of our instruments, and it’s still gaining momentum when it disappears. We can’t begin to guess where they’ll wind up. Some of them may witness the formation of the Earth, or starve to death in a Carboniferous forest, or even fetch up with a crash against the wall of the Beginning of Everything.

  “Whether the instruments they carry will enable them to find their way back into the surge after they are thrown out at the other end is problematical. I’d say it was highly unlikely. But I’m not the expert on temporal surges—only on the Being. And I can tell you nothing more than this about the effects of that experiment: we probably did succeed in getting through to it when we tried the test for the first time, and I got thrown back to the seventeenth century. But maybe we—sensitised it in that respect. At any rate, the violent result we got when we repeated it suggests something like that.”

  “Boil down your data—whatever you have—and let me have it as soon as possible,” directed Artesha. “There may be something in it—anything—which will give us a clue.”

  That was a slender hope, she reflected sadly as she broke the circuit on Wymarin’s acknowledgment. There were a dozen people clamouring for her attention. Selecting one at random, she found it was Kepthin, the biologist supervising the study of the captured Enemy.

  “I’ve got good news,” he opened enthusiastically, and Artesha cut him short.

  “Have you been affected by this temporal surge?” she asked brusquely. “If not, get out of circuit—there are people with troubles waiting.”

  Kepthin sounded blank. “What surge? I haven’t been near a time map for days. I’m sorry if you’re in a hurry, but what I have to say won’t detain you long. We can communicate with the Enemy—talk to it.”

  Artesha’s spirits rose a fraction. “What have you got out of it so far?”

  “Oh, nothing yet. We’re breaking its language by analysing it from basics. But we can duplicate all its speech elements, and in just a little while we’ll be able to talk to it fluently.”

  “Let me know when you do,” ordered Artesha, and cut off. She immediately regretted being so short with him—after all, he had brought her the first really constructive achievement in far too long—but she had no time for that.

  Kepthin was turning away from the communicator, wondering with half his mind what could have put Artesha in such a panic, and worrying about it, and using the other half to review progress on a slightly-less-than-conscious level, when the doors of the hall opened and Magwareet’s team, still cold from space, came in.

  The co-ordinator approached him and nodded a curt greeting. “Have you had any going-doubles show up in here?” was the next thing he said.

  Kepthin shook his head. “I heard something about them a little while ago, but we’ve had no cases reported from here.” He hesitated. “What exactly is going on?”

  Magwareet seemed to have his mind on something else, watching his team fan out discreetly and begin their thorough—though unobtrusive—sweep through the hall. He saw several of them stop and wait until one of the technicians came to a pause in his work, then ask a question.

  “That fits,” he mused half aloud. “If it is being directed from or by the Enemy, they’d try and draw attention away from the captive—I’m sorry,” he added at proper conversational level. “I was far away.” He gave the biologist a quick run-down on the appearance of the mysterious doubles.

  Struck by a sudden thought at the end of it, he gave Kepthin a slow glance. “I don’t suppose you’ve run into any creatures which have the power of—of disappearing, in your study of alien biology, have you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve established that these going-doubles, as Vyko named them, can beyond doubt disappear. Without moving, without hiding. They don’t do it when someone is watching them—but they’re careful to appear only in places where they will not immediately be suspected. Many of them have been observed to go into rooms with only one exit, and never come back; others have just melted into the air when the audience’s back was turned.”

  Kepthin was startled. “No! Nothing like that has been heard of. I suppose you’ve ruled out the obvious—chameleony, proteanism, transparency, elongation and so on? Those are all fairly common protective devices.”

  Magwareet looked interested. “Elaborate,” he requested.

  “Well, chameleony explains itself, I think—instantaneous response to a background in terms of colour match and surface texture. There’s a creature called Polyglossus Toshii which Hideko Toshi found on Tau Ceti II which can match virtually any colour scheme in the infrared range in less than half a second. Proteanism is less common—I can only think of two or three animals bigger than a mouse which use it to any ext
ent, and they’re all slow-moving beasts from high-gravity worlds. Transparency—more strictly matching the refractive index to that of the air—is a permanent property of the body substance, and only slightly variable. Pseudocynus ascopos from 129 Lyrae exhibits the phenomenon quite markedly. But it’s not something the creature can turn on and off—it just is transparent, and that’s all. Elongation—again that’s not known in any highly organised animals, but there are worms which can expand and contract up to five or six hundred per cent—far too thin to be visible when they’re at full length.”

  Magwareet shook his head at the end of the long recital. “Our checks would have revealed any tricks like that. No, I’m afraid it isn’t just a protective device—”

  One of his team called to him across the hall in a sibilant whisper. He excused himself to Kepthin, and, giving one final glance at the five-limbed bulk of the Enemy about which the controlled busy-ness of the gathering revolved, led his party to their next destination.

  He had been itching to get around to this one for some time, but he had been forced to wait while the data on the new temporal surge was evaluated. Now, at last, he was free to get at the man whose going-double had made the most spectacular exit of all: Wymarin.

  The scientist greeted him absently when he arrived, stood in a brown study for some minutes while he waited for the team to begin their search, and then burst out, “For all the good I’ve done here, I might as well have stayed behind in seventeenth-century Holland!”

  “What do you mean?” Magwareet said quietly.

  “Look at the result of our tests!” Wymarin indicated the broad sweep of a time map which shone green from rim to rim. “We’ve caused the biggest disaster we’ve yet suffered, and got no profit out of it.”

  Magwareet waited for him to relax a little; with an effort, Wymarin achieved calmness. “I’m sorry,” he went on. “But it’s completely disheartening. What can I do for you?”

  “What do you know about the appearance of your going-double?”

  “I know hardly anything about it. It showed up aboard the main ship of Burma’s anchor team, and I only got the barest details over the communicator.” He summarised them.

  At the end, Magwareet remarked thoughtfully, “Did you ask for details of the change your going-double recommended in the projected experiment?”

  “No! Why should I?” answered Wymarin, surprised. “I—oh, I see what you mean.” His change of expression might have been comic under other circumstances. “You mean I took it for granted that the recommendations were hostile and designed to cause damage, whereas I shouldn’t have done.”

  “Exactly,” said Magwareet, and there was a long pause.

  “As it happens,” Wymarin said eventually, “even careful planning couldn’t have produced anything more damaging than what we actually did… Is there a chance that this going-double of mine will turn up again, and perhaps give us the information?”

  “I don’t know. So far we haven’t had any cases of a reappearance—these duplicates have just shown up, whether for a purpose or not, and never been seen again. I’m inclined to feel that Vyko’s beliefs about them may have a grain of truth,” he added pessimistically.

  “What does he think?”

  “According to the legends of his time, to see one’s going-double is a sign of impending death.”

  “Have you any idea what they are?”

  “Not yet. There is one very suggestive point about them, though. Did you hear that mine had been seen somewhere?” he put in parenthetically. “That is that every one of the originals has been through time, either in a temporal surge or in one of our own ships making a hop.”

  “Very interesting,” said Wymarin. “Anything else?”

  “That they can disappear into thin air.”

  “Well—” Wymarin seemed to be fastening on a new string of ideas to get the memory of the crisis he had caused out of his head. “Well, that isn’t unexpected, if they’re a by-product of temporal co-existence… Can you narrow it down still further—to people who have co-existed with themselves in a temporal surge or otherwise? It strikes me as feasible that on returning to one’s own time after having been two ways through the same temporal surge, duplicates might emerge.”

  “That’s the sort of thing Burma is wanted for,” Magwareet commented. “All right, I’ll try and establish that. All clues are helpful at the moment. But what has that to do with disappearing—?”

  “Look at it this way. Suppose that our interferences with the past have actually caused divergencies in the main time-flow. That’s to say, in a fifth-dimensional continuum there exist several parallel presents each dependent on a change effected in the past. Now if a great enough degree of correspondence existed between a place in one of those other presents and our own present, it is possible that people might take—unknowingly—a turning in a direction which leans through the fifth dimension.

  “Assume that the universe has a strong tendency to remain Unified. Our original researches into four dimensional existence suggested that probability. Then my going-double might have been firmly under the impression that he had remained in his own present and was giving information to the Burma of his own present. However, if that information had been acted upon, it would have ironed out one of the distinctions between the two time streams. Follow me?”

  “I do indeed,” said Magwareet with rising enthusiasm. “You imply that all the appearances of going-doubles may be the result of this unificatory tendency?”

  “Exactly. Now suppose you investigate the idea that a going-double, on vanishing, returns ‘through’ the barrier between parallel presents. We’ve got equipment that could detect the space-time stresses I imagine as resulting from that.”

  “Give me details and I’ll get it in hand at once.”

  The wall communicators suddenly crackled into life, and Artesha’s familiar voice came to them. “Attention all units!” she said. “Triple red—this is a major policy factor. I have had a report from Kepthin, head of the team studying the captured specimen of the Enemy. He reports that his technicians have succeeded in establishing communication with it. I have carefully examined his results, and agree with him that there is no reason to doubt our complete failure in attempting to understand the motives of the Enemy in their war with us.

  “Their attacks on the human race are a purely secondary consideration. Their real and only objective is the final destruction of the Being!”

  XVIII

  An analysis of the opinions of the human race regarding that imponderable, Time, is illuminating.

  It is not (which is interesting!) an innate item of experience. The Zunnis, so we are informed, have no concept of direction or length of time. Or hadn’t, until contact with more sophisticated world-pictures.

  The most widespread image of it is that of the river, bearing us, as driftwood, heading to the sea, past objects on the bank we recognise as events.

  The dream of freedom from it finds expression in the ideas of Eternity, and Nirvana.

  It obsesses scientists, philosophers and mystics alike. Dunne suggested that it might be possible to “remember” events which had “not yet” happened; Eddington, with his streak of mysticism blending into his scientific background, defined time as “an arrow which points the way in which entropy is proceeding.”

  It is of importance to note: (a) that entropy is the tendency of the cosmos to develop towards a state of ever greater randomness; and (b) that you, like all other living organisms—the term “organism” itself has that implication—are a localised reversal of that universal phenomenon.

  “Somewhere out there,” said Burma in a voice that carried through the room, “suns are being born, planets created… Somewhere out there, if we could only watch and understand, we could find the answer to every question that has ever puzzled the human race.”

  His words opened up in the imagination of his listeners a vista of incredible knowledge. It was as if their consciousness was suddenly no l
onger bounded by the walls of the hull; they could feel themselves on the verge of seeing the things he spoke of.

  Like a cinema film run backwards, Red thought. The whole universe, tracking steadily and faithfully backwards towards its beginning—and they could not see it.

  A little stiffly, Chantal went forward and bent to attend to Vyko, lying on the floor. The movement broke the spell, and the crewmen and women turned to seek some task they might use to occupy their minds.

  “What has happened?” Red inquired of Burma. The slight, brown-skinned man answered while studying the green-vivid time maps.

  “Somehow, we hit the Being on a sore spot. This is a convulsion beside which the one that threw me back into your time was a mere twitch! Any sign of abatement?” he called out, and one of the technicians replied.

  “If anything, the surge is building up!”

  “On Earth now,” said Burma sombrely, “men are eking out their existence in caves and shelters made of branches. In a little while, there will be only apes, and before that again the reptiles will rule the planet…”

  A curious feeling of inversion came over Red as he heard that; somehow, the way Burma had used will in speaking of the past seemed significant, but he could not trap the elusive concept, and Chantal interrupted the train of thought.

  “Burma, there’s something I don’t quite understand. Why are we experiencing normal time even though we’re being thrown backwards? It makes it almost impossible to accept the fact!”

  “Are we?” Burma said pointedly. “Has it never struck you that if time were to go backwards, it would make no difference at all? At any given moment, you would still recall what you thought of as the past; your awareness would be identical in every single ‘now,’ no matter which way time was flowing. There is no instrument at all by which one can decide the answer.”