THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY Read online

“Have you any water?” he asked, and pantomimed drinking. The man nodded, and gave him a flask from a side pocket in his coverall; the movement stretched the fabric and revealed the outline of a short cylinder lumping the man’s side.

  Red drank deeply and returned the flask with a word of thanks. After that, he just sat silently, watching the business of the valley go ahead; the machines were building an addition to the existing installation, that much was clear, but he could not guess how or why.

  The aircraft buzzed quietly and with amazing swiftness overhead, coming to rest on the opposite slope. Red could just make out that it disembarked two people—presumably Burma and Chantal—before it returned to where he sat.

  The stout woman got to the ground and looked Red over with interest. “Burma told me what happened,” she said. “We thank you much. Brings important information. Wish you please to come with me.”

  Tiredly, Red got up. Burma made a promise, he thought. I hope to hell he does something about it soon.

  He noticed the woman’s eyes on his curiously as he got stiffly through the door into the cabin of the aircraft; it was no larger than that of twentieth-century planes, though he could see no controls except a glowing plate set below the forward windscreen. The woman followed.

  Without noise or vibration, they rose smoothly and flew across the valley, landed, got out, and crossed a patch of scraped ground to enter a metal building shaped like an enormous penny—a hundred feet across but barely eight high. Inside the entrance, the woman spoke sharply to a waiting man, and the door shut behind them.

  A few yards along a softly lit corridor, and they came into a room where Chantal sat with a calm-faced girl beside her. She looked pale and apprehensive, but someone had already dressed the cut on her temple and her hands were covered with some flexible transparent material, protecting the grazes.

  “I am Maelor,” said the stout woman, suddenly relaxing. She pronounced it with a drop of a quarter tone on the second syllable. “I know you are called Red because Burma said to me. Please sit, Red, and be comfortable. You limp. Are you hurt?”

  Red nodded a little, and the calm-faced girl took a box of what must be medical equipment and knelt before him as he sat down in a plump chair. She made to remove the shoe on his metal foot.

  Red half-stopped her, and then leant back with a grim expression. What the hell was the use of trying to hide it here and now? This was no concern of his; in a little while they would be away from here, and able to forget it.

  The girl’s face changed startlingly when she found the prosthetic limb, but she recovered at once and carefully rolled up his trouser leg to remove it. Something soothing went on the stump and quieted the fiery pain.

  Red looked across at Chantal. “Are you all right?” he said. Under the impact of what had happened, a need for friendship had asserted itself. Chantal, after all, was a stranger like himself in this fantastic world.

  She nodded and stirred a little. “They have some wonderful things here, Red,” she said. “I know that medicine in our time could never have done this for us. It’s hard to believe that we’ve really come three thousand years, but that convinces me.”

  Red felt startled. He had not seriously questioned the fact himself. He had merely accepted it as something to resent. In a way, it was wonderful—

  Abstract art, he found himself thinking. Did it live? What have three thousand years done to the work of people I know? Three thousand years!

  Why—it was as if a Minoan or an Etruscan had walked into one of the logging camps around his home. But such a creature could not have found anyone to understand him…

  So they speak a little English—well, in Elizabethan England educated people spoke fluent Latin, and the Roman Empire was a thousand years dead. But it’s not talking that matters—it’s thinking.

  Looking down at the girl intent on dressing his sores, he felt a chilly void open between them, and he was suddenly very lonely. We’re outcasts—

  He turned to Maelor, still standing nearby. “How soon are you going to send us home?” he said harshly.

  Maelor hesitated oddly. “It will take a little time,” she said reluctantly. “Is your leg all right now?”

  “Yes, thank you. Burma told us that as soon as possible we would be sent home. How soon is that?”

  “Perhaps longer than Burma hoped,” admitted Maelor reluctantly. Red scented the dullness of obstinacy in her sing-song voice, and reached for his leg.

  “All right,” he said, strapping it on. “I think Chantal and I might like to look around for a bit and enjoy the sun while we’re waiting. After all,” he continued with bitter irony, “we don’t often get a summer holiday in midwinter. Coming, Chantal?”

  She seemed completely overwhelmed; nodding, she got to her feet and approached him. Together they started for the door, only to find Maelor in front of it.

  “I’m sorry,” said the stout woman. “It’s impossible at the moment.” Then, reading rebellion in Red’s eyes, she put her hand on a switch set in the wall. “You wish proof, then. Prepare for a shock, please.”

  Part of the wall folded away.

  It took Red’s eyes a long time to adjust to what he saw. At first he could make out only blackness; then a flash of sun-like brilliance took his point of focus out beyond the window—for that was what it was—and he was abruptly staring into infinity.

  He gasped, and clutched at Chantal, who opened her mouth, said nothing, and turned away.

  He rounded on Maelor, standing impassively by. “Where are you taking us?” he insisted.

  “To Centre. That is in space. We are not on Earth. I do not know what you know of the universe from your time—”

  “Enough,” Red told her harshly. “What’s the idea of all this?”

  “Earth is—not very safe. Burma said, I think, we are at war, against species from another star. They have often attacked Earth, so we—I think I know how to say it—Earth has been evacuated.”

  The memory of that gigantic thunderclap and the flash which had drowned the sunlight leapt to Red’s mind, and he felt a sudden terrifying awe at the picture of so much power. The fear disgusted him, but he could not lose it; he had to mask it with rage.

  “I want to see Burma!” he said. The size of the job! Evacuating—how many? Thousands of millions of people—? “Bring him here! We want a few explanations. You have no right to drag us away like this—”

  Into the middle of a conflict that might crush us…

  “Burma is busy,” began Maelor, and Red cut her short.

  “Get him here!”

  Maelor gave a little sigh. She pressed the switch which shut out the stars, and Red and Chantal felt a load off their minds. Then she went out.

  “Don’t worry,” said Red grimly. “I’ll soon fix this guy Burma when he shows up.”

  He wondered as the minutes passed whether he was going to appear after all, but after interminable waiting the door opened again, and Burma stood expressionlessly in the entrance. Red strode forward.

  “Now listen to me—” he began.

  “I dare not spare you more than a few minutes,” said Burma flatly. “You’ll get more benefit out of it if you let me speak.”

  Red stumbletongued; Burma continued in the hiatus.

  “I’m afraid I hadn’t realised how big a job it would be to return you to your own period. Listen: when I was hurled back to 1957 I went a thousand years further into the past than anyone has ever been before. We do not possess the equipment—we do not have the sheer power—to repeat it.” He hesitated, as if making a calculation, and finished, “It would take the whole output of the sun for over a year to achieve it.”

  Shaken, Red said slowly, “Then—how was it you—?”

  “It was not our doing. But Maelor can spare the time to make it clear to you.”

  “Where are we going?” demanded Chantal, and Red shook his head.

  “It would mean very little to you if I explained. We are going to Centre, but Centre i
s all over the Solar System. You will be taken to a woman call Artesha”—a softening of his voice accompanied the name—“who knows what we may be able to do.”

  He turned to Maelor and uttered a brief command in his own language before starting towards the door. “I’m sorry,” he said with a hint of a sad smile as he left, “but we are desperately short of time.”

  “Who is that man?” said Chantal as soon as he had gone. Maelor frowned.

  “It is hard to tell you,” she began, and Red cut her short.

  “We aren’t complete savages,” he said bitterly.

  “I know. Well then, he is expert in putting together knowledge about the thing which moved him far in time. He is chief of anchor team, trying to stop temporal surges.”

  “And what are they?”

  Haltingly, Maelor tried to explain. Gradually the picture of the age to which they had come built up in their minds, bringing with it a sense of reality and immediacy which frightened them. The immensity of the job—!

  But afterwards Maelor started to question them in turn, and Red was startled.

  “You speak English—it’s common among you,” he pointed out. “Don’t you have the history of our time?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Maelor soberly. “You see, there was a war.”

  They thought that over in silence.

  “Our language is based on English, though,” Maelor went on. “It is compressed, and more complex, but by slowing down and, thinking all the time about what to say, most of us can make ourselves understood to you.”

  “After three thousand years?” said Chantal.

  “There has been world-wide communication since only a century after your time. When everyone could hear everyone else speak—even people of the past, recorded—the language changed very slowly compared to before.”

  “This war—” Chantal pressed.

  Maelor shook her head. “How much I can tell you I do not know. I cannot let you know something you could use on your return.”

  Somehow the prospect of return didn’t excite Red quite so much this time—but what place was there for him or Chantal in a world like this?

  VI

  Centre—speaking, to all units: Emergency. Enemy found to have penetrated defence.

  Washington, DC, Friday: The President announced today that radioactive measurements revealed the explosion of a bomb of… This gives the lie to Soviet pretensions of peacefulness…

  Conyul, Astrologer Imperial to the Court of the Croceraunian Empire: (incomprehensible).

  Tired, dirty and hungry, Magwareet hauled himself out of the lock at the entrance to the city. The rescue teams drew aside to let him pass, without wasting their attention on him—and that was as it should be.

  Now what kind of a mess is the human race in?

  The oxygen salvage vessels suckled up like gigantic leeches and sucked the air out of the plastic sheath as soon as the survivors were safe; before Magwareet had finished his report to Artesha they had begun to break the city up for invaluable scrap.

  Hanging in space, he watched the job, wondering what Burma would have to say when he got in.

  At length they brought up a gigantic bundle of girders from the heart of the city, strapped a drive unit on the tail end and launched it into space. Magwareet thumbed the forward stud on his suit and swung down to face the man making up the package.

  “Where’s it for?” he said.

  The man told him, and Magwareet clamped himself on. “Okay, I’ll take it,” he said, and without another word his gauntlet jammed the drive control over to full.

  Space was crowded with things like this. From inside Mercury’s orbit clear to the frigid path of Pluto the human race had stored what might be useful one day—and always was: stacks and bundles of metal, organics, synthetics, chained with a spiral deformation of space which could be generated as a by-product of the spacedrive without wasting more precious material, and driven at maximum speed to be hung up, another planetoid, until wanted.

  And if you wanted some of it—you asked Artesha. It was as impossibly simple as that.

  Acceleration jamming him against the back of his suit, Magwareet watched the skeleton of the city vanish. He had never flown one of these bundles before, but he had to make the trip and he dared not waste the time it involved.

  Time! he thought. So little of it—and yet it stretched for aeons back and forward, every instant of it a riddle. Why have we men so little of it to play with—when the Being has Eternity?

  He cast off from the bundle of girders and left it to circle for days, months, or years, and made the last few miles to the nearest part of Centre on his suit power.

  Exactly where he was, he didn’t know. It mattered not at all. Every part of Centre—distributed across millions of miles in thousands of sections—was exactly the same distance from all the others in what was important: time. He stepped through the lock, stripped off and hung up his suit, and walked through a door.

  It led into Artesha’s presence.

  For a few moments he stood under her calm, unvarying gaze. Then he inquired, “How about this Enemy, Artesha?”

  “I’ll know when Kepthin has his team together. I’ve had to pull off half a dozen of the top remaining men on the anchor teams—the chance of finding a weakness in the Enemy is worth risking losing more personnel to a temporal surge. Just worth it.”

  Magwareet had never heard so much despondency in Artesha’s tone—not even at that moment, so long ago, when she thought the end was approaching, before she became what she was.

  “But that’s being attended to,” Artesha went on; the words should have been accompanied by a wave of her hand. “Magwareet, we’re facing trouble from the Being, too.”

  Unconsciously, Magwareet looked about him, wondering if the Being could hear and understand with whatever part of it co-existed with them in this time and space. He said, “I know Burma went further than ever before—”

  “That much we could cope with—just. He brought two Twentieth Century people back with him. They were in the field of his time map when it operated. Also he needed help. He was ill.”

  “Which means—?”

  “The structure of the continuum has been weakened along their worldlines. There have been anachronistic exchanges before—but this has opened the way for them to happen now.” Artesha paused to absorb and comment on incoming information. “I’m having them brought here now. I wanted you because you’re about the best co-ordinator the race has got other than myself, and I’m unique. Maybe you’ll see something.”

  There was a click from the door through which Magwareet had previously come, and he turned to look at the visitors from the past.

  Red did not know what he expected to see when Burma nodded at him to pass through the doorway. A larger room, certainly; this was only fifteen feet by twenty, lit with softly glowing panels like the one he had seen in the aircraft back on Earth.

  Back on Earth—

  He thrust it out of his mind and watched Burma. Chantal likewise waited, although he could see she had begun to ask something. Burma’s attitude had changed subtly, and he walked forward with the air of a lover towards his loved one. Yet there was no one in sight except a tall, rather ugly man in blue.

  Red had a brief shock from that, but when Burma spoke he was answered not by the man in blue, but by a voice from all around them. He guessed at a radio link.

  After a moment Burma turned towards them, smiling. “I want you to meet friends of mine,” he said. “This is Magwareet, who is a co-ordinator—a director of work. He will be supervising the control of the new temporal project.”

  The man in blue nodded stiffly, and Red fancied he saw superiority over these barbarians from the past mirrored in his eyes. He said sharply, “Tell him we’d be glad if you’d hurry up!”

  Magwareet asked a question of Burma in their language. The answer came as an interruption in the same unlocalised voice as before. Burma nodded as if at an order, and went on, “And
this—is Artesha…”

  “What—where—?” Red looked around him, and Chantal shook her head in puzzlement.

  “Here,” said Artesha. “All around you.”

  “Not a machine,” said Magwareet suddenly in a resonant voice. “Artesha was badly injured in an Enemy attack—so badly, that we could not rebuild her body. But because she was very important, we made a record of her mind. We can do that. After that, people gave her a home in the circuits of Centre. Now she runs it.”

  He looked for understanding on Red’s face; this senseless antagonism had to be overcome. The girl Chantal was not permanently warped as he was—only shocked and shaken. But Red’s mind bore a deformation as real as his artificial leg.

  “Is it working?” he demanded of Artesha.

  “I think so.”

  Indeed, the pride which was plain in Burma’s face had struck Red forcibly. “And—you, Burma?” he asked with difficulty.

  “I’m her husband,” said Burma, without a flicker.

  To have lost not a leg, but a body—! The thought terrified Red; it had figured in nightmares since he was a child—imagination had painted the picture of him losing the rest of his leg, his other leg, his arms: being cased forever in metal and unable to die.

  “Now,” said Artesha levelly, and Burma leaned forward.

  “Red, we need knowledge of your time which only you can give us. We need your help.”

  “It’s no business of mine!” Red answered savagely. “I should have been three thousand years dead—not here, in this crazy world.”

  “So you won’t help us?”

  “No!” Red felt sweat crawl on his forehead.

  “Not even if we give you back your leg?”

  There was a moment of almost complete silence. Then Chantal gave a little cry.

  “You—can do—that?” said Red in a strangled voice.

  “I do assure you—we can do that,” said Burma.

  In an instant the conflict in Red’s mind had resolved. Blind chance had taken away his leg, but it was people who were going to give it back. His barrier against mankind broke down, and he was suddenly conscious of his oneness with even these inhabitants of a distant age.