THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY Read online

  “I’ll do anything you want,” he said, and was content.

  When they had taken Red and Chantal away, Magwareet remained silent for a while, to let Burma and Artesha talk as they wanted. When they had spoken together, he raised his head.

  “Artesha, why are these two so important?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Artesha frankly. “But—I don’t think I could explain it even to you Magwareet. I’ve been part of Centre now for almost fourteen years, and I’m so absorbed in it now that I’m becoming able to put together information. You might say I get hunches, that’s all. And even aside from the obvious point that those two represent the first anachronistic exchange with our own ‘now,’ I believe they are going to play an important part in events.”

  Magwareet accepted that. “Burma, I’ve only heard sketchily from Artesha what happened.”

  Burma gave a quick summary, ending, “But from back there, Magwareet, the time map looked as if it was on fire! The surge which threw me up in 1957 wasn’t the furthest back by several hundred years. I suspect that there are surges running possibly as far back as the creation of the world.”

  “What caused the sudden violence of yours, though?”

  “I can’t tell you. The only man who could would be Wymarin. Is there any news of him?”

  “No,” said Artesha after a fractional pause to search her gigantic memory. “What was he doing?”

  “I believe it was some of his work which stimulated the Being. Not the destruction of the Enemy raiders. You see what that means?”

  “If he can stimulate the Being deliberately, he’s half way to controlling it,” said Magwareet flatly.

  “Exactly. And so we shall have to find him or one of his aides. We haven’t a hope of tracing the computer memory he was using to record his data—the temporal surge will have wiped it clean with overlaid energy.”

  “But how could we find him, if he’s been thrown anything like as far back as you were? If he was in a position to operate his time map, he’d be back. His is anchored to the same now as yours, surely.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Burma answered. “Beloved, have we any data on co-existence within a temporal surge?”

  “You mean—could you use the same temporal surge again?” Magwareet suggested. Burma nodded.

  Artesha answered slowly. “No one has ever tried it. But you could go back to the moment when it struck with no difficulty. Short-range displacement is simple. It would be risky—”

  “It’s my job, Burma,” said Magwareet, “and not yours. You’re needed here and now with an anchor team. You’re a specialist. Agreed, Artesha?”

  Artesha did not reply for a second. Then she said with relief, “Agreed. Magwareet, it won’t be so risky after all. That surge has four secondary peaks—two at each end. One of them is due to come up in empty space in about four hours from now. You’ll only—”

  Another pause. “They’ve stepped up the power of a map past the safety limit, and it seems that there’s been anachronistic exchange between several of the peaks in the far past.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Probably. Magwareet, get up a team quickly and go look for Wymarin. Burma, take over what you think is the most promising remaining anchor team and try to duplicate his work, in case we don’t find him.”

  “Are you saying that to keep me out of harm?” said Burma.

  “I love you,” said Artesha. Sincerity formed the words. “But I could not do anything which I thought was not the best course for the human race.”

  Burma bowed his head and went out, leaving Magwareet to look thoughtful.

  “How about this specimen of the Enemy?” he said. “It worries me—”

  “Kepthin is coming up to see us now,” Artesha reported, and almost as she spoke the little biologist entered.

  “We’ve got our Enemy alive,” he said proudly. “His metabolism is oxygen-using, fortunately, so he didn’t stifle when his spacesuit was punctured. We think we’ve figured out how he got into the city—when the pilot reported he had outflown the Enemy scouts, someone checked back and noticed that one of them was somewhere missing.

  “Vantchuk had been over the information, and he thinks that the Enemy abandoned his scout, boarded the city through the sheath holding its foundations, and made his way up to the control centre to destroy the communication equipment. Unfortunately for him, someone realised what was happening and sent the city deliberately out of control. The Enemy seems to have lost his temper at that, and killed the survivors.”

  “What did he hope to gain?” asked Magwareet.

  “We haven’t begun to communicate with him yet. Vantchuk points out, though, that he could have turned on the star-drive and crashed billions of tons of matter either into the atmosphere of Earth or even, possibly, into the sun. And that much might—possibly—have unstabled the nova balance. If you hadn’t spotted that its mass was too great, Magwareet.”

  “This presupposes that they’re capable of suicide to gain an advantage,” Magwareet pointed out. “Artesha, how does that tie in with our theory of their psychology?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Artesha bluntly. “It’s either all wrong, or there was another reason for the Enemy’s action. As we have it figured, the Enemy is capable of desperate action only out of desperation.” She sounded cheerful.

  “And that,” supplied Magwareet, “implies that we are doing them more damage than we believed!”

  The relief was amazing. He set his shoulders back. “All right, Artesha. I’ll go assemble my team—I’ll be taking Red and Chantal, of course—and we’ll ride that same temporal surge that Burma was thrown out on. Wymarin must have surfaced at one of the secondary peaks, surely.”

  “If his time map isn’t operating, you’re going to have to find him by using only trace instability. Admitted, it will be strong if he’s been thrown three thousand years—but there’ll be a lot of interference from your instruments, after they’ve done the same distance.”

  “If necessary, we’ll land and make up fresh ones with native materials,” Magwareet answered. “Keep us posted if you can about the Enemy.”

  “Good luck,” said Artesha. Magwareet thought she sounded wistful, and wondered why.

  VII

  A few of the people who walked into history were famous, and came to be notorious. They were called Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin Bathurst, or—

  And there were others, of course: no one remembered them except their acquaintances and maybe the file clerk in the missing persons department of the local police force—if there was one.

  Contrariwise, there were people who seemed to have an odd knowledge of the future—that is to say, of the future as it existed when they made statements about it. If a person who knew a little about history, but had forgotten most of the detail he had learnt in school, had to put down a complete record of the past, it would strangely resemble the prophecies of—for example—Nostradamus.

  The organisation of his project presented Magwareet with small difficulty—except lack of resources. Fresh possibilities came to him even as he was issuing orders.

  Essentially, the plan was simple. The temporal surges tended to break—like waves—into two or more branches at either end of their millennium-long sweep. Anything absorbed at either end was transposed by a mechanism no one quite understood to the opposite one. Limited time travel had been one of the first by-products of the study of the Being, but it took tremendous power. They could afford enough to return Magwareet’s team to one of the peaks of the temporal surge which had tossed Burma and his team far into the past. They would break out at one of the other earlier peaks.

  And it was not so difficult to pick one stranded time-traveller out of Earth’s teeming millions, because any matter displaced in time acquired a certain characteristic surplus of energy which could be detected over a range of millions of miles, looking on a time map like a tiny whirlpool.

  Of course, the instruments with which this energy was
detected would be carrying a similar charge, but it was a peculiar aspect of the temporal surges that they affected organic matter more readily than inorganic, and even human beings more readily than animals. It was one of the million unanswered problems which had been shelved as not so urgent as others.

  It would take a while to make the expedition ready, and he would not have to supervise everything. In accordance with the precept that it was a co-ordinator’s business to know all he could, he went to see what was happening to the Enemy.

  They had placed him in what they estimated to be ideal conditions for him, in a large open room somewhere in Centre’s sprawling complex. Then they had collected every available spare man or woman who might contribute to the effort, and gone ahead studying the captive.

  When Magwareet entered, he was shaken to find the result so impressive. It’s fantastic how much the human race has learned! he reflected. Surely we don’t deserve to go under.

  The Enemy was large, he already knew, but stripped of his bulky spacesuit he appeared somehow more impressive. His five-limbed, pale golden bulk lay on a specially designed support; artificial feeding devices poured hastily synthesised nourishment into his body; people milling about him were studying the wound left by the blaster shot and carefully repairing it.

  But there were strong bands holding down those five thick limbs, and the edge of an orifice at the creature’s forward end (Magwareet presumed) writhed as if in rage.

  He mingled with the crowd and sought out Kepthin to ask about progress.

  “He’s unwilling to communicate, of course, but we’re working on something to relax the higher nervous centres. They’re trying hypnosis over there, you notice?”

  “How’s that possible?” said Magwareet, staring. “You don’t know that much about its brain yet, do you?”

  “Brain!” Kepthin chuckled. “This thing has a mixture of memory-devices that beats even Regulan life-forms! It’s not a matter of a brain; its cells handle their own memory and the whole thing is linked together by analogue exchange involving transfer of individual molecular signal-forms—that’s what we’re calling them; they’re like viruses—which are motile in themselves through a secondary circulatory system.”

  Magwareet looked puzzled. Kepthin amplified, “Instead of using electrochemical signals along nerves as we do, the Enemy has actual physical transfer of ‘printed’ molecules between all points of its body. It’s remarkably efficient, though you mightn’t think it.”

  “What is there to hypnotise, then?”

  “Hypnosis is only a way of confusing someone’s interpretation of external reality. If we can find characteristic rhythm in the Enemy’s metabolism, we can heterodyne them. Failing that, we’ll just have to synthesise the right kind of ‘printed’ molecules to make it obey our wishes.”

  Excusing himself, he hurried off, but his last remark sounded so confident and matter-of-fact that Magwareet remained gazing after him, observing to the air, “I wonder if the Enemy could have found out so much about us in so short a time if the situation had been reversed!”

  Red hardly dared to believe what he had been promised, but he went eagerly with a silent guide through corridors and into a clean, light place that could only be a hospital. Here a smiling young woman in blue came to meet them.

  “Welcome!” she said. “I hear you want your leg replaced.”

  That was enough to make it seem real.

  The woman informed them that her name was Teula, and that she ought to apologise for the fact that very few people were paying attention to them despite their uniqueness, but that nowadays almost literally nobody had any spare time at all—the race had organised its efforts so thoroughly. She expanded the apology with a flashing smile to include Chantal, who seemed to have been brought along merely because everyone associated Red and her in their minds.

  “Teula, how long has this war been going on?” she asked.

  “Well, I believe the first contacts with the Enemy were made about a hundred and fifty years ago, but it didn’t develop into a life-and-death struggle until less than a century back. I can’t give you the details, though—it was before I was born.”

  “Naturally,” Red started to say, and then caught himself. “How old are you, then?”

  “Sixty-four.” Teula seemed quite unconcerned that she appeared thirty or less. “That’s a by-product of the war. We had to keep our valuable people alive as long as possible, and then we found it was quite as easy to keep everybody alive. We used to think a life of a hundred-odd years was enough. I think we’re going to get used to living over a thousand, eventually.”

  All this talking had not prevented her from getting on with her job. She had deftly removed Red’s prosthetic leg—with an approving remark about its workmanship—cut away the end of the stump with a scalpel that did not hurt and apparently froze the blood before it could run, and then fitted a sealed box over the end. Into the box ran tubes carrying suspensions of organic material.

  Then she slipped his good leg into a long cylinder from which depended many cables explaining that an electronic brain would scan it and ensure that the replacement was an exact mirror image of it.

  “And that is all,” she stated, in less than half an hour. “But there is one further thing. You won’t get far if you don’t catch up on our language. English is all right—”

  “You speak it excellently,” said Red.

  “But I talk very fast—notice? I’m trying to talk at the speed I’m accustomed to. You’ll see what I mean when you learn Speech. That’s what we generally use.” She uttered three fluctuating phrases and added, “That was the whole of what I’ve just been saying in a quarter the time.”

  A quick step across the room, and she was bringing unrecognisable items from a cupboard. “If you’re expecting a teacher, by the way, or a recorded language course, you aren’t getting either. We can’t waste time like that nowadays. Chantal, would you lie down?” She indicated a flat soft surface built out from the wall.

  Chantal obeyed. Humming, Teula arranged her gadgets. “Your leg should take about eight hours, Red, and this course in Speech about six. I’ll wake you up together, though.”

  “Wake us up? What—?” began Red, but with a smile full of—mischief?—Teula shook her head.

  “Go to sleep!” she said in the odd sing-song way which had enabled Burma to command Red earlier. And they did.

  There was a sense of time having passed, but not of intervening awareness, when he woke. For a few moments he simply lay still, wondering what had happened in his head.

  “So you’re conscious,” said Teula’s voice from behind him.

  “What did you do to us?” asked Red, and was interrupted by a cry from Chantal.

  “Red! You’re talking Speech!”

  “So are you!” They gazed at each other in amazement for a moment, and then he turned to Teula. “Is it hypnosis?”

  “Partly.”

  “But—no, damn it, you can’t teach a language in six hours!”

  “True. But Speech is developed from English according to certain very flexible rules. You’ve been taught those rules so thoroughly that you automatically use Speech. It’s similar to the process involved in learning shorthand. A few weeks will be needed for you to acquire a full working vocabulary, just as you’d need to learn how best to combine the symbols of a shorthand system. But you can make yourselves understood anywhere from now on. Excuse me—I must notify Magwareet that you’re ready to see him.”

  She left them alone. Turning to Chantal, Red found himself at a loss for words.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at length. “I was very rude to you, and inconsiderate—”

  “I understand why,” Chantal answered softly, and it was astonishing how much more complete and precise her meaning was in this new tongue. “How’s your leg?”

  “Why—why, I—I’d forgotten about it…”

  Delightedly, Red swung his legs—for the first time since childhood he could think that—
to the floor, and walked up and down staring at a pair of living feet. After a moment, Chantal spoke again.

  “Red, I was scared for a while. I was afraid of what people might be like in this age. But if they could make you forget something which had obsessed you and blinded you for years—just like that—” She gained assurance and spoke up boldly. “I have never dreamed that anyone could be cured so swiftly!”

  And I was ill, thought Red. I was crippled more in my mind than in my body, and I wouldn’t admit it.

  Now, though, he could admit it without pain, and he was very glad.

  A panel slid back, and Magwareet appeared in the gap. He looked tired, but there was confidence in his bearing.

  “Congratulations on your new leg, Red,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to give it its first try-out on the way to the observation room. I don’t know if you’ve been told, but you’re already aboard the ship which is taking us back to your time.”

  Chantal blinked, and he chuckled. “No, we are not going to return you summarily! You are going to be useful, both of you.” He beckoned, and they followed him from the room.

  “We’re headed for the nearest peak of the same temporal surge which threw Burma into your time,” Magwareet explained as they went along. “There was a man working with the same team—called Wymarin—who had achieved the best results so far on understanding the nature of the Being. We’ve got to look for him—it may be futile, but it’s a chance, at least.”

  At that point they came into the observation room. It was small, but it had a view on to infinity.

  This time, they could enjoy looking at the stars.

  There was only one other person in the room—a young-looking man before a group of lighted control panels whom Magwareet presented as their pilot, Arafan. At the moment he was studying a plate which shone with the same green as the time map they had seen in Burma’s possession.