THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY Page 2

  Chafing at the comparative slowness of the ship he was aboard, he watched the energy tankers close in on the city. The kinetic energy released when the billions of tons of matter were braked against the very fabric of space was too valuable to waste. The operation involved perhaps twenty thousand persons, directly or indirectly, and yet it was only an incident in the gigantic undertaking of mankind: survival…

  The dizzying whirl of the city was already visibly slowing when Magwareet told his pilot to match velocities. A possibility was irritating him as he watched the rescue ships line up nearby, and he called Artesha again.

  “Didn’t you say that the pilot outflew those enemy raiders? Yet there was no report of an accident or damage from him, was there? A man that good doesn’t just let things get out of control.”

  Artesha spoke soberly. “What are you getting at, Magwareet?”

  “I think we’d better hold off the rescue ships for a while. What’s the gravity at the rim down to now?”

  “About two and a half. It’ll take some time to kill it completely.”

  “Right,” said Magwareet, detaching himself from the frame of the ship. “I want a team of troubleshooters—about fifty—to come in with me ahead of the rescue party.”

  They did not question his decision. When he clawed at and caught the personnel ropes floating stiffly out from the nearest airlock in the globe enclosing the city, men were waiting.

  “Inassul, sir,” the commander of the detachment at this lock identified himself.

  “All right, Inassul. Let’s take a look.”

  Passing the lock, Magwareet came out on a small platform and steadied himself to get used to the high g, looking about him. He caught his breath at the sight.

  This city from another star was—fantastic. It sprouted like a forest of beautiful ferns into light bridges of synthetics and tall impossible buildings having nothing in common with Terrestrial architecture. Of course, its people had never been shackled by gravity; they had been able to build from the start with antigrav.

  And they had torn this city up by the roots; they had closed it in with a plastic sheath and mounted it on an interstellar drive. They had loaded it with four million people, of whom one perhaps might be indispensable. They had sunk thousands of man-hours and desperate energy into bringing it where its resources could be utilised—and at the moment of success, disaster awaited.

  Here and there the symmetrical beauty was marred by ugly gashes, showing where generators driven to the limit had failed to stand the force of the spin. Arches and walls had tumbled, not downwards towards what had been the ground, but outwards.

  What kind of disaster? The men in the troubleshooting team moved forward apprehensively. Staggering a little, Inassul made his way along the broad road facing the lock. Weapon ready for anything he might meet, he pushed at the door-switch of the nearest house and went inside.

  Moments later, he re-appeared. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke to Magwareet.

  “They’re—spread all over the walls,” he said. Looking at him, Magwareet saw that his right gauntlet, with which he must have steadied himself, was wet and red.

  “Shall I call the rescue party in?” Inassul went on. Magwareet cut him short.

  “No! We daren’t risk more personnel than are already here until we know what the trouble was. Follow me.”

  His order was relayed to the parties at the other locks of the city. As they moved together towards the control centre, in the middle of the city, he gave directions. “See if you can find signs of mechanical failure. They’ve put up the power lines and the drive generators in plain view. If you can spot any damage not due to the spin, let me know.”

  But no one reported any until the parties came together in the grand plaza of the city. Here the control room for their multi-lightyear flight had been dropped down like a child’s building block. Inassul stepped aside, waiting for Magwareet to go on, and he did.

  Inside the control room—a hall a hundred feet long—there were men and women lying dead: some at their places opposite panels of signal lamps which still flickered, and others dashed against the walls and roof. A gigantic gap loomed in the makeshift outer wall on the side opposite the entrance Magwareet had used.

  Sickly, he turned his eyes from the broken bodies, and studied the emergency signal system. It was one outdated on Earth, but other cities had been flown using it, and he knew it was reliable. It indicated only damage from the spin.

  Then facts fell together in Magwareet’s brain, and he whirled on the men who had joined him, interrupting their horrified staring at the carnage.

  “Why are these people dead?” he exploded. “We’re at the centre of the city! The acceleration should have been negligible here. Feel it! We came in under two and a half g, but here the pseudograv is still running, and we’re normal weight.”

  “An enemy shot—” began Inassul.

  “Use your head. How did it get through without breaking the plastic sheath and losing the city’s air? And look at that!”

  He threw up an arm and pointed to the gap torn in the wall facing them. Someone called out.

  “I saw some pavement torn up while we were coming in—and not far from here! There are several walls broken like that, too.”

  “That’s it,” said Magwareet. “Something deliberately killed these people—smashed them, threw them around.”

  He felt his words drop into a sudden chilly silence. He ended, “And it may—even now—be loose in the city!”

  III

  This year (said the Turkish Spy) there came to Paris a man by the name of Michoo Ader, claiming to be the Wandering Jew—condemned to walk the earth until the Second Coming because he would not let Jesus rest on his doorstep.

  The first sailors ever to see a sea-serpent and bring in proof (reported Reuters) were the crew of the Panamanian trader Hargreaves Halliday who docked at Capetown today with a strange animal found floating in the Indian Ocean. Scientists say it resembles a prehistoric dinosaur, but are at a loss to understand how an air-breathing creature in freshly killed condition…

  Los Angeles Mirror: Disappearance of well-known Angelo…

  Red waited for the moment of calmness to pass. It lasted only seconds. After that, reason insisted that this whole affair was stupid and he became resentful that a wild vision should break into his life and disrupt it. And yet—he could not convince himself.

  “I’ve heard about things like this,” said Chantal slowly. “But you never believe them. You class them with ghosts, and you never expect to find yourself involved—”

  “You’re damned right you don’t,” said Red, with sudden force. “I’m not going to accept this till I have to. Some explanation must exist—”

  He broke off. “Would you like some coffee?” he said rather ungraciously. Chantal nodded; he waited as she got together the things she had used to make the injured stranger comfortable and then led her into the kitchen.

  In the routine of brewing the coffee, he lost some of his tenseness. As he handed a cup to Chantal, he said, “And—him—the guy with the broken arm. What do you make of that?”

  “That he’d been hit by a car.” Chantal sipped from her cup, and Red noticed with a stir of repulsion that her lip left a red smear.

  “He wasn’t. No cars go past here. There’s a truck which goes up to the logging camp at Firhill Point with supplies and mail, but no one else lives this way at all. And I was watching when you—arrived. Both of you.”

  And I don’t really give a damn how, his mind ran on. I just wish you hadn’t.

  He felt suddenly certain that his careful defences were going to crumble. If his isolation could be disturbed by this fantastic intrusion, he could never feel safe again.

  He moved, and the joints of his artificial leg gave their inescapable tiny scarping sound.

  “Oh, hell!” he burst out, and Chantal’s eyes widened. “All right—it’s not your fault.”

  She put her cup down and turned to
face him. “What’s not my fault? I didn’t ask to be thrown halfway round the world! I don’t know how I came to be here, but I know this—I’d give anything to be back where I came from. I’m sorry if I’m in the way. If you like, I’ll start walking home!”

  They faced each other, meaningless tension mounting between them. A sound between a sob and a shout from the other room punctured it.

  After an instant’s hesitation, Chantal got up and ran through the door. Red limped after her, to find the man with the broken arm writhing on the couch where they had laid him. Sweat was streaming from his face, making it glisten like a fresh bronze, and Red wanted intensely to be able to capture those strange features some time.

  “Have you a thermometer?” Chantal asked, her anger vanishing. Red nodded, and brought one in a moment from the bathroom, but the girl’s attempt to set it under the man’s tongue failed because his jaw clenched and unclenched in agony.

  “Fever?” Red inquired in a low tone. She nodded, and took up a throw cover from a nearby armchair to spread across the trembling body. “I don’t know why. He seemed perfectly all right when I left him—” She bit her lip in anxiety.

  Suddenly the man uttered a short sing-song phrase, full of strange off-key arpeggio intervals. His voice appeared to cover the range from treble to baritone. What he—said? wondered Red, and immediately knew it had to be speech, because it had an air of deliberateness and careful articulation—what he said, then, bore no resemblance to anything in any language either of them had heard.

  He picked up the coverall again, hoping for some clue to the man’s nature from it, but all he found was the same impossibly heavy cylinder of metal which he had seen before. Chantal rested her fingers lightly on the unconscious man’s pulse, looking worried.

  After a while, the writhing was replaced by an even more frightening stillness. It was as if the man was visibly gathering his strength, disciplining his body into rest. Eyes closed, he licked his lips and said something musical and interrogative.

  “What can he mean?” Chantal asked helplessly, and at the words the man’s eyelids flickered open.

  He looked at them without expression, barely turning his head. Then he shifted his gaze to the Indian matting hung against the wall, and shut his eyes again.

  “Habla usted español?” he said in a flat tenor voice.

  “We speak English,” said Red slowly, and the brown-faced man used a four-letter word which startled him and made Chantal turn her face to hide a smile. “Never so far before!” He struggled to sit up, and found the injury to his arm. The sight of it seemed to dishearten him still further. He stared up, pleading.

  “It is broken? And you have used splinters to mend it?”

  That’s an odd mistake, Red realised suddenly. A simple foreigner would probably not know the word this man was trying to find—but equally probably, he would not know the one that had been substituted. Who—?

  Chantal nodded, trying to soothe him into lying back calmly, but the man continued with intense determination, “Tell me! Tell me when I am!”

  “Lie still,” said Chantal comfortingly. “You’ll be all right. You’ve been hurt, and—”

  It was then that the exact meaning of the question struck home.

  Not “Where am I?” Instead—

  “When am I?”

  Red felt the last of his protective barriers go down. His isolation was forever at an end. He was naked against the world, and his aluminium leg creaked. And squeaked.

  “You’re in nineteen fifty-seven,” he said, and his body began suddenly to tremble with terror.

  “Further than ever,” said the brown-faced man. “I—I feel ill. I am not immune to your diseases, sir and madam. Please, have you an illness?”

  Staring, Chantal shook her head. “N-no. We are quite well, I think.”

  The man put his hand up to his heart, and felt its pounding for a moment. Then he realised he was not wearing his coverall, and again struggled frantically to sit up.

  “Have I lost it? Did I not have anything with me?”

  Chantal reached for the garment and held it as the man rummaged in the pockets. Sinking back, he shook his head. “So it is lost. So they will not know.”

  “You want this?” said Red sourly, holding up the heavy metal cylinder, and the man seemed to go limp with relief.

  “Yes, that is it. Please, hold it up above me with your hands on the ends, and turn them oppositely. It is important.”

  Red hesitated, but Chantal appealed to him with her eyes. Feeling foolish, he extended his arms and did as the man had said. The hard metal felt as if it was running like water, and it suddenly began to grow, pushing his hands apart. With an oath, he let go in amazement, but the thing did not fall. It remained in position, stretching until it was three feet long, and the moment it stopped growing it began to glow.

  After a second, the whole room was alight with the luminance of brilliant green bands apparently within the substance of the cylinder.

  Chantal drew back. “What—?” Her voice held a sob.

  Seeming suddenly light-hearted, the man answered as he studied the shifting patterns of greenness. “It floats because it is not all here, so to say. It exists, after a fashion, for thousands of years both ways.” His voice was more certain and his English better now. “You could not understand how,” he added.

  “What made it so big?” Red demanded.

  “It was compressed.” The man seemed to hunt for words. “Solid is not really solid. Is mostly empty space. The matter of the map is pushed together—”

  “You mean the atoms are packed closer,” said Red sharply. He resented the stranger’s assumption that he knew nothing.

  Startled, the man glanced from the glowing cylinder to the candles burning round the room. “But you—” he began, and then seemed to see the electric lights. “Oh. You do know more than I had remembered at this time.”

  “What we want to know is who you are and where you came from!” said Red harshly. “And why!”

  The man closed his eyes wearily. “You could not pronounce my name. Your language has no tonal values. You could call me Burma, for that is where I was born, as you might call someone Frenchie or Tex.”

  He glanced up. “And who are you?”

  “Red Hawkins,” said Red sullenly. Chantal spoke her name also in answer to a piercing stare.

  “Please, then, Red,” Burma went on, “place your hands on the map, at the brightest of the green places.”

  Red turned away with finality. “I’ve had enough of this lunacy,” he muttered and Burma sighed.

  “You could not know, poor man.” He lifted his broken arm towards the cylinder, setting his teeth, but the pain and his fevered weakness overcame him. Slumping back, he spoke in a queer, rhythmic manner.

  “Red Hawkins! Do what I tell you.”

  Astonished, Red found himself turning and lifting his hands towards a patch of green on the cylinder that shone like a cold sun. Angrily, he fought back, and when his arms fell to his sides, his teeth were chattering.

  “Nearly,” said Burma with detachment, and repeated, “Do what I tell you!”

  This time, Red could not stop himself.

  There was chaos.

  But there was form in the chaos. There was a sense of slow ages unrolling as they existed in total silence and total darkness, and through and beyond it there was an awareness of Being.

  Then ground suddenly slammed Red under the soles of his feet, knocking him instantly upwards half an inch, and pitiless yellow sunlight was blazing out of a blue sky. They were on a bare hillside, between bare brown rocks. A few paces from him lay Burma, as if he had been twisted in falling and landed awkwardly, and behind him Chantal moved with a sound of shoes crunching in grey sand.

  When he turned his head, he saw that she had fallen forward, trying to crush the solidity and reality of stone into her hands. She whimpered a little.

  Red whirled on Burma. “God damn you, man! What is this insanity
? Are you satisfied with what you’ve done? Look at this poor woman!”

  Burma had his eyes shut against the glare. His good hand clutched the cylinder in its original closed form. He looked very ill.

  “You must not waste time,” he whispered. “A few miles from here you will find men working. Go and bring them here.”

  Red clenched his fist and bent so that he was able to strike Burma in the face with it. “Stop your babbling! Where are we? How did we come here?”

  “You’re in my time,” said Burma, more faintly still. “You have come three thousand years. Go quickly, Red. I have no resistance to the disease I caught in your era, and I need help.”

  “Get us back where we came from,” said Red passionately. “You’re no concern of mine. Attend to your damned business yourself.”

  Chantal came down the slope from behind him, very pale, and walking as if in pain. A little blood came from a cut on her temple, and her hands were filthy with sharp sand. She spoke quietly.

  “Burma is very sick, Red. He needs help, and we can’t give it to him.”

  “Be damned to that! Why didn’t he ask before? I don’t know how he made me do what he wanted, but he forced me, I know, and I won’t be ordered around. I didn’t ask to come here, and I don’t want to stay another minute.”

  He finished, “If you’re so eager to help him, go yourself.”

  “I—don’t think I could.” Chantal swayed. “But I’ll try, if he says so.” She put her hands to her head and brought them away bloodstained; she looked at the redness wonderingly.

  “Red,” said Burma very softly, “I could make you go—I don’t like to, but I can. And I am important to the human race, very important.”

  “And I’m not, I suppose!” exploded Red.

  “Oh, Red!” said Chantal pleadingly, and turned to Burma. “How far is it to where your friends are?”

  “About two miles,” said Burma weakly. “It is not far. I think Chantal is hurt, and cannot go.”