‘On very rare occasions, and by the release of an enormous amount of energy, it is possible to produce a – singularity – in time. During the fraction of a second when that singularity occurs, the past becomes accessible to the future, though only in a restricted way. We can send our minds back to you, but not our bodies.’
‘You mean,’ said Ashton, ‘that you are borrowing the body I see?’
‘Oh, I have paid for it, as I am paying you. The owner has agreed to the terms. We are very conscientious in these matters.’
Ashton was thinking swiftly. If this story was true, it gave him a definite advantage.
‘You mean,’ he continued, ‘that you have no direct control over matter, and must work through human agents?’
‘Yes. Even those bracelets were made here, under our mental control.’
She was explaining too much too readily, revealing all her weaknesses. A warning signal was flashing in the back of Ashton’s mind, but he had committed himself too deeply to retreat.
‘Then it seems to me,’ he said slowly, ‘that you cannot force me to hand this bracelet back.’
‘That is perfectly true.’
‘That’s all I want to know.’
She was smiling at him now, and there was something in that smile that chilled him to the marrow.
‘We are not vindictive or unkind, Mr Ashton,’ she said quietly. ‘What I am going to do now appeals to my sense of justice. You have asked for that bracelet; you can keep it. Now I shall tell you just how useful it will be.’
For a moment Ashton had a wild impulse to hand back the accelerator. She must have guessed his thoughts.
‘No, it’s too late. I insist that you keep it. And I can reassure you on one point. It won’t wear out. It will last you’ – again that enigmatic smile – ‘the rest of your life.
‘Do you mind if we go for a walk, Mr Ashton? I have done my work here, and would like to have a last glimpse of your world before I leave it forever.’
She turned toward the iron gates, and did not wait for a reply. Consumed by curiosity, Ashton followed.
They walked in silence until they were standing among the frozen traffic of Tottenham Court Road. For a while she stood staring at the busy yet motionless crowds; then she sighed.
‘I cannot help feeling sorry for them, and for you. I wonder what you would have made of yourselves.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Just now, Mr Ashton, you implied that the future cannot reach back into the past, because that would alter history. A shrewd remark, but, I am afraid, irrelevant. You see, your world has no more history to alter.’
She pointed across the road, and Ashton turned swiftly on his heels. There was nothing there except a newsboy crouching over his pile of papers. A placard formed an impossible curve in the breeze that was blowing through this motionless world. Ashton read the crudely lettered words with difficulty:
SUPER-BOMB TEST TODAY
The voice in his ears seemed to come from a very long way off.
‘I told you that time travel, even in this restricted form, requires an enormous release of energy – far more than a single bomb can liberate, Mr Ashton. But that bomb is only a trigger—’
She pointed to the solid ground beneath their feet. ‘Do you know anything about your own planet? Probably not; your race has learned so little. But even your scientists have discovered that, two thousand miles down, the Earth has a dense, liquid core. That core is made of compressed matter, and it can exist in either of two stable states. Given a certain stimulus, it can change from one of those states to another, just as a seesaw can tip over at the touch of a finger. But that change, Mr Ashton, will liberate as much energy as all the earthquakes since the beginning of your world. The oceans and continents will fly into space; the sun will have a second asteroid belt.
‘That cataclysm will send its echoes down the ages, and will open up to us a fraction of a second in your time. During that instant, we are trying to save what we can of your world’s treasures. It is all that we can do; even if your motives were purely selfish and completely dishonest, you have done your race a service you never intended.
‘And now I must return to our ship, where it waits by the ruins of Earth almost a hundred thousand years from now. You can keep the bracelet.’
The withdrawal was instantaneous. The woman suddenly froze and became one with the other statues in the silent street. He was alone.
Alone! Ashton held the gleaming bracelet before his eyes, hypnotised by its intricate workmanship and by the powers it concealed. He had made a bargain, and he must keep it. He could live out the full span of his life – at the cost of an isolation no other man had ever known. If he switched off the field, the last seconds of history would tick inexorably away.
Seconds? Indeed, there was less time than that. For he knew that the bomb must already have exploded.
He sat down on the edge of the pavement and began to think. There was no need to panic; he must take things calmly, without hysteria. After all, he had plenty of time.
All the time in the world.
Cosmic Casanova
First published in Venture, May 1958
Collected in The Other Side of the Sky
This time I was five weeks out from Base Planet before the symptoms became acute. On the last trip it had taken only a month; I was not certain whether the difference was due to advancing age or to something the dietitians had put into my food capsules. Or it could merely have been that I was busier; the arm of the galaxy I was scouting was heavily populated, with stars only a couple of light-years apart, so I had little time to brood over the girls I’d left behind me. As soon as one star had been classified, and the automatic search for planets had been completed, it was time to head for the next sun. And when, as happened in about one case out of ten, planets did turn up, I’d be furiously busy for several days seeing that Max, the ship’s electronic computer, got all the information down on his tapes.
Now, however, I was through this densely packed region of space, and it sometimes took as much as three days to get from sun to sun. That was time enough for Sex to come tiptoeing aboard the ship, and for the memories of my last leave to make the months ahead look very empty indeed.
Perhaps I had overdone it, back on Diadne V, while my ship was being reprovisioned and I was supposed to be resting between missions. But a survey scout spends eighty per cent of his time alone in space, and human nature being what it is, he must be expected to make up for lost time. I had not merely done that; I’d built up considerable credit for the future – though not, it seemed, enough to last me through this trip.
First, I recalled wistfully, there had been Helene. She was blonde, cuddly, and compliant, though rather unimaginative. We had a fine time together until her husband came back from his mission; he was extremely decent about it but pointed out, reasonably enough, that Helene would now have very little time for other engagements. Fortunately, I had already made contact with Iris, so the hiatus was negligible.
Now Iris was really something. Even now, it makes me squirm to think of her. When that affair broke up – for the simple reason that a man has to get a little sleep sometime – I swore off women for a whole week. Then I came across a touching poem by an old Earth writer named John Donne – he’s worth looking up, if you can read Primitive English – which reminded me that time lost could never be regained.
How true, I thought, so I put on my spaceman’s uniform and wandered down to the beach of Diadne V’s only sea. There was need to walk no more than a few hundred metres before I’d spotted a dozen possibilities, brushed off several volunteers, and signed up Natalie.
That worked out pretty well at first, until Natalie started objecting to Ruth (or was it Kay?). I can’t stand girls who think they own a man, so I blasted off after a rather difficult scene that was quite expensive in crockery. This left me at loose ends for a couple of days; then Cynthia came to the rescue and – but by now you’ll have gotten the general idea,
so I won’t bore you with details.
These, then, were the fond memories I started to work back through while one star dwindled behind me and the next flared up ahead. On this trip I’d deliberately left my pin-ups behind, having decided that they only made matters worse. This was a mistake; being quite a good artist in a rather specialised way, I started to draw my own, and it wasn’t long before I had a collection it would be hard to match on any respectable planet.
I would hate you to think that this preoccupation affected my efficiency as a unit of the Galactic Survey. It was only on the long, dull runs between the stars, when I had no one to talk to but the computer, that I found my glands getting the better of me. Max, my electronic colleague, was good enough company in the ordinary course of events, but there are some things that a machine can’t be expected to understand. I often hurt his feelings when I was in one of my irritable moods and lost my temper for no apparent reason. ‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ Max would say plaintively. ‘Surely you’re not mad at me because I beat you at chess again? Remember, I warned you I would.’
‘Oh, go to hell!’ I’d snarl back – and then I’d have an anxious five minutes while I straightened things out with the rather literal-minded Navigation Robot.
Two months out from Base, with thirty suns and four solar systems logged, something happened that wiped all my personal problems from my mind. The long-range monitor began to beep; a faint signal was coming from somewhere in the section of space ahead of me. I got the most accurate bearing that I could; the transmission was an unmodulated, very narrow band – clearly a beacon of some kind. Yet no ship of ours, to the best of my knowledge, had ever entered this remote neck of the universe; I was supposed to be scouting completely unexplored territory.
This, I told myself, is IT – my big moment, the payoff for all the lonely years I’d spent in space. At some unknown distance ahead of me was another civilisation – a race sufficiently advanced to possess hyper-radio.
I knew exactly what I had to do. As soon as Max had confirmed my readings and made his analysis, I launched a message carrier back to Base. If anything happened to me, the Survey would know where and could guess why. It was some consolation to think that if I didn’t come home on schedule, my friends would be out here in force to pick up the pieces.
Soon there was no doubt where the signal was coming from, and I changed course for the small yellow star that was dead in line with the beacon. No one, I told myself, would put out a wave this strong unless they had space travel themselves; I might be running into a culture as advanced as my own – with all that that implied.
I was still a long way off when I started calling, not very hopefully, with my own transmitter. To my surprise, there was a prompt reaction. The continuous wave immediately broke up into a string of pulses, repeated over and over again. Even Max couldn’t make anything of the message; it probably meant ‘Who the heck are you?’ – which was not a big enough sample for even the most intelligent of translating machines to get its teeth into.
Hour by hour the signal grew in strength; just to let them know I was still around and was reading them loud and clear, I occasionally shot the same message back along the way it had come. And then I had my second big surprise.
I had expected them – whoever or whatever they might be – to switch to speech transmission as soon as I was near enough for good reception. This was precisely what they did; what I had not expected was that their voices would be human, the language they spoke an unmistakable but to me unintelligible brand of English. I could identify about one word in ten; the others were either quite unknown or else distorted so badly that I could not recognise them.
When the first words came over the loud-speaker, I guessed the truth. This was no alien, nonhuman race, but something almost as exciting and perhaps a good deal safer as far as a solitary scout was concerned. I had established contact with one of the lost colonies of the First Empire – the pioneers who had set out from Earth in the early days of interstellar exploration, five thousand years ago. When the empire collapsed, most of these isolated groups had perished or had sunk back to barbarism. Here, it seemed, was one that had survived.
I talked back to them in the slowest and simplest English I could muster, but five thousand years is a long time in the life of any language and no real communication was possible. They were clearly excited at the contact – pleasurably, as far as I could judge. This is not always the case; some of the isolated cultures left over from the First Empire have become violently xenophobic and react almost with hysteria to the knowledge that they are not alone in space.
Our attempts to communicate were not making much progress, when a new factor appeared – one that changed my outlook abruptly. A woman’s voice started to come from the speaker.
It was the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard, and even without the lonely weeks in space that lay behind me I think I would have fallen in love with it at once. Very deep, yet still completely feminine, it had a warm, caressing quality that seemed to ravish all my senses. I was so stunned, in fact, that it was several minutes before I realised that I could understand what my invisible enchantress was saying. She was speaking English that was almost fifty per cent comprehensible.
To cut a short story shorter, it did not take me very long to learn that her name was Liala, and that she was the only philologist on her planet to specialise in Primitive English. As soon as contact had been made with my ship, she had been called in to do the translating. Luck, it seemed, was very much on my side; the interpreter could so easily have been some ancient, white-bearded fossil.
As the hours ticked away and her sun grew ever larger in the sky ahead of me, Liala and I became the best of friends. Because time was short, I had to operate faster than I’d ever done before. The fact that no one else could understand exactly what we were saying to each other insured our privacy. Indeed, Liala’s own knowledge of English was sufficiently imperfect for me to get away with some outrageous remarks; there’s no danger of going too far with a girl who’ll give you the benefit of the doubt by deciding you couldn’t possibly have meant what she thought you said …
Need I say that I felt very, very happy? It looked as if my official and personal interests were neatly coinciding. There was, however, just one slight worry. So far, I had not seen Liala. What if she turned out to be absolutely hideous?
My first chance of settling that important question came six hours from planet-fall. Now I was near enough to pick up video transmissions, and it took Max only a few seconds to analyse the incoming signals and adjust the ship’s receiver accordingly. At last I could have my first close-ups of the approaching planet – and of Liala.
She was almost as beautiful as her voice. I stared at the screen, unable to speak, for timeless seconds. Presently she broke the silence. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a girl before?’
I had to admit that I’d seen two or even three, but never one like her. It was a great relief to find that her reaction to me was quite favourable, so it seemed that nothing stood in the way of our future happiness – if we could evade the army of scientists and politicians who would surround me as soon as I landed. Our hopes of privacy were very slender; so much so, in fact, that I felt tempted to break one of my most ironclad rules. I’d even consider marrying Liala if that was the only way we could arrange matters. (Yes, that two months in space had really put a strain on my system …)
Five thousand years of history – ten thousand, if you count mine as well – can’t be condensed easily into a few hours. But with such a delightful tutor, I absorbed knowledge fast, and everything I missed, Max got down in his infallible memory circuits.
Arcady, as their planet was charmingly called, had been at the very frontier of interstellar colonisation; when the tide of empire had retreated, it had been left high and dry. In the struggle to survive, the Arcadians had lost much of their original scientific knowledge, including the secret of the Star Drive. They could n
ot escape from their own solar system, but they had little incentive to do so. Arcady was a fertile world and the low gravity – only a quarter of Earth’s – had given the colonists the physical strength they needed to make it live up to its name. Even allowing for any natural bias on Liala’s part, it sounded a very attractive place.
Arcady’s little yellow sun was already showing a visible disc when I had my brilliant idea. That reception committee had been worrying me, and I suddenly realised how I could keep it at bay. The plan would need Liala’s co-operation, but by this time that was assured. If I may say so without sounding too immodest, I have always had a way with women, and this was not my first courtship by TV.
So the Arcadians learned, about two hours before I was due to land, that survey scouts were very shy and suspicious creatures. Owing to previous sad experiences with unfriendly cultures, I politely refused to walk like a fly into their parlour. As there was only one of me, I preferred to meet only one of them, in some isolated spot to be mutually selected. If that meeting went well, I would then fly to the capital city; if not – I’d head back the way I came. I hoped that they would not think this behaviour discourteous, but I was a lonely traveller a long way from home, and as reasonable people, I was sure they’d see my point of view …
They did. The choice of the emissary was obvious, and Liala promply became a world heroine by bravely volunteering to meet the monster from space. She’d radio back, she told her anxious friends, within an hour of coming aboard my ship. I tried to make it two hours, but she said that might be overdoing it, and nasty-minded people might start to talk.
The ship was coming down through the Arcadian atmosphere when I suddenly remembered my compromising pin-ups, and had to make a rapid spring-cleaning. (Even so, one rather explicit masterpiece slipped down behind a chart rack and caused me acute embarrassment when it was discovered by the maintenance crew months later.) When I got back to the control room, the vision screen showed the empty, open plain at the very centre of which Liala was waiting for me; in two minutes, I would hold her in my arms, be able to drink the fragrance of her hair, feel her body yield in all the right places—