Highway of Eternity

  He waited on the wall until Corcoran finally came up to him.

  Boone patted the wall beside him. “Sit down, Jay,” he said. “Tell me what you found.”

  For Corcoran, he knew, had not gone walking without purpose; he had been seeking something.

  “I found the edge of the bubble,” Corcoran told him. “I am sure I did, although it was very hazy, and I would not take an oath on it.”

  “I hunted for it myself,” said Boone. “I walked a straight line and ended up where I had started out. I did not find the wall, but you have different eyes.”

  “That’s it, I suppose. I do have different eyes. But also I have a witness. Henry, go ahead and tell him.”

  “Henry? Jay, you’re stark raving. There is no one with you. You came up the slope alone.”

  “I met a friend along the way. I forgot that you can’t see him in the sun. Henry, move over into the shadow of that tree so my friend can see you.”

  He made a thumb toward a small tree growing beside the wall. “You can see him in the shade.”

  Boone looked at the tree. There was nothing there—and then he saw a hazy flickering, dancing in the air like dust motes dancing in a narrow sunbeam coming through the slats of a window blind.

  A soundless voice addressed him out of the shadow of the tree, the unspoken words impinging on his brain.

  I am glad to meet you, sir. I am Henry, although at times Horace calls me Ghost, much to the uneasiness and wrath of other members of the family. Ghost I do not mind at all. Ghost might even be the proper name for such as I. For, after all, who is there to say what is and what is not a ghost. Although, if I am a ghost, I am not a ghost out of the past, as I suspect most other ghosts would be, but a ghost from the future.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Boone, “And yet, in light of other things, you’re almost commonplace. Earlier in the day there was mention of you by the family. By the way, I’m Boone. Tom Boone. Jay and I are friends from long ago.”

  What your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in Boone’s mind. I know he saw it, although imperfectly. Your friend is most unusual. So far as I know, no other human actually can see it, although there are ways of detecting time. I tried to show him a sniffler. There are a number of snifflers, trying to sniff out the bubble. They know there’s something strange, but don’t know what it is.

  “Did you see the sniffler?” Boone asked Corcoran.

  “I saw something. A rather small thing. No larger than an ordinary dog. But I did not see it well. All I knew was that there was something there.”

  I know not what the snifflers are, said Henry. But in our situation we must be at least marginally concerned with anything that transpires beyond the ordinary.

  “How are things going at the house?” Corcoran asked Boone.

  “When I left they were talking. Not shouting at one another. Horace and Enid were off to one side, arguing about where they would bury Gahan. But the rest were talking, discussing things.”

  “I think it was wise for both of us to leave,” said Corcoran. “Give them a chance to talk among themselves without outsiders being present.”

  Boone agreed. “This is their show. It should be up to them to make their own decisions.”

  “Back there, when you jumped up on the table, you damn well made it your show.”

  “It wasn’t that,” said Boone. “I wasn’t trying to horn in. But they weren’t getting anywhere. They were yelling at one another, that was all. They could have kept it up all day. They needed someone to knock some common sense into them.”

  You think ill of them because of their bad behavior, said Henry. I readily admit that it is bad, but you must understand the stake they have in all of this. They fled the future a century and a half or so of your years ago. They fled for their lives, of course, but they also fled so that men and women might not live as bodiless abstractions, so that the race might be more than theoretical or hypothetical thought processes. Look upon me. I was halfway to being the nothing that all humans would be if the Infinites had their way. With me it did not take. The procedure stuttered and I was spat out and was free; in my present form, I can not be snared again. I am beyond everything except, perhaps, some extraordinary harm of which I am not yet aware. And having escaped, I came back to the family, and with them I fled. By reason of my unorthodox form, I was able to be of some assistance to them. And out of their recognition of me as still a member of the family, the family flies to my defense when Horace, whose only family association is that he cowed and persuaded my sister Emma to marry him, pays me less respect than is due a member.

  “Your tale is fascinating,” said Corcoran, “and adds to our comprehension of the situation that we find here. You must be aware how difficult it is for us to grasp all the nuances of what has happened a million years beyond our time.”

  Indeed I do, said Henry, and I must admit I am amazed at how well and solidly you have accepted what you have learned of us in the last few hours. You have not been bowled over by our revelations.

  “It is because we are too numb to be bowled over,” said Boone.

  I think it is not that at all. You have betrayed no numbness. Your reactions have led me to believe that basically our race is far more rational than we might have expected to find so deep in our ancestral roots.

  “I’m curious,” said Corcoran, “how you could have performed significant services for your family in their flight.”

  I acted as a scout, said Henry. I am admirably fitted to act as such. Who would suspect a flittering moonbeam or a slight glitter in the sunlight? Even seeing this, any reasonable man would lay it to a momentary aberration of his visual faculty. So I went into the past, all by myself. Unlike the others, I need no traveler; space and time are open roads to me. I went as an advance agent, a feeler-outer. The others made arrangements and waited on my word. But before I could get back, they were forced to flee precipitously, with no direction and no plan. I finally found them in the depths of the so-called Dark Ages, when large areas of Europe were deserted, dank and desolate. A perfect place to hide, perhaps, but most disagreeable.

  “It was you, then, who found this place, Hopkins Acre.”

  That is right. There were other locations that might have done as well or better, places that I liked much better. But this one was made to order for our taking over. The owner and all his family were absent on a tour of the Continent. Even before I went hunting for the others, I tracked down technicians in my own time who could secure this tract for us. So there it was, as you see it now, waiting for my family once I had found them in that noisome fen that was Dark Age Europe.

  “I can’t help but wonder about the Hopkins family,” said Corcoran. “They came back from vacation and their home was gone as if it had never been here. And the rest of the neighborhood—a house, a farm, an estate with all the people who lived on it, wiped out overnight—what was the neighborhood reaction?”

  I do not know, said Henry. None of us ever knew or thought of it. It was no concern of ours. All we took was property that we needed. Property is not sacred.

  David’s voice came from behind them. “I saw you sitting here,” he said, “and I came down to tell you the funeral is at sundown.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” asked Boone. “Help with the grave, perhaps?”

  David shook his head. “No need of help. Horace is a husky man and can move a lot of dirt. A little labor will do no harm to Timothy, much as he may loathe it. A few blisters on his soft and uncalloused hands would be a great education for our brother Timothy. Emma’s helping, too.”

  David climbed the wall and sat down with them.

  “Henry is here with us,” said Corcoran. “We’ve been talking with him. An enjoyable and instructive conversation.”

  “I thought he was,” said David. “I caught the sense of him. Henry, I am glad you’re here. All the family should be on hand for the burial. All of us now will be there, barring Spike. Do you
have an idea where he is? Could you go and find him?”

  I have no idea, David. No one can keep track of him. He could be anywhere. After all, it matters little. He is not exactly family.

  “By now he is,” said David.

  “One thing I am curious about,” said Corcoran. “Was any determination made of how Gahan died?”

  “Horace had a look at him. His chest was torn open, as if a great taloned claw had struck him and torn it all away. How he lived long enough to warn us, I do not comprehend. He was close to death when the traveler crashed.”

  “How long would it have taken? I mean the trip from Athens to here.”

  “It would have been almost instantaneous.”

  “That sounds right. On our trip from New York, there was a momentary darkness, then almost immediately the bump of landing.”

  “Horace, I suppose,” said David, “is the only one of us who would have thought to examine Gahan. Horace beats out his brains getting to the bottom of things, planning ahead. But he has no capacity for the long range. Right now he has all three travelers lined up on the lawn. Gahan’s traveler is operative. The landing in the flower bed damaged it not at all. So Horace has them all stocked with food and some of Timothy’s weapons.”

  “I take it, then, that you have decided to leave.”

  “Well, yes, I would suppose so, although not exactly when or where to. Horace has each of us assigned to specific travelers.”

  “And when you leave, are we going with you?”

  “Why, most assuredly. Our numbers are not large. Quite possibly, we will have need of you.”

  “I suppose we should be grateful.”

  “Grateful or not, you are going with us. The both of you.”

  “I don’t think I would enjoy staying here,” said Corcoran, “trapped on a few acres inside a displaced segment of time.”

  “It is strange how it has all worked out,” said David musingly, as if he might be talking to himself. “With the family, I mean. Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer, the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.”

  “There is one thing you said,” Boone told him. “Enid is the thinker. It seemed to me you put a special emphasis, almost a special meaning …”

  “In the time from which we came,” said David, “there was finally time to think. There was no need to break one’s back to make a living or to get ahead. We had made our progress and we had no great regard for it. So, given the time to do so, many turned to thought.”

  “Philosophy?”

  “No, just thinking for the sake of thinking. A way to kill one’s time. It was an activity held in very high regard. It brought about many great ideas, discussed most learnedly and politely, but never put to use. We were tired of putting things to use. The great thing about thinking is there’s never any end to it. You could spend a lifetime thinking, and many people did. Perhaps that was the reason so many of us could equate ourselves with the Infinites’ idea of turning ourselves into units of incorporeal intelligence, thinking entities unhampered by the grossness of a biological body.”

  “You come close to sounding as if you approved of the program pushed by the Infinites.”

  “Not at all,” said David. “I am only trying to tell you the situation as it applied to many of the race.”

  “But Enid …”

  “With her, it is slightly different. Look at it this way. Timothy is a student, studying mankind’s past in an attempt to find the basic, early flaws in the human culture, in the hope that the future remnant of the biological race can set up a way of life that has a better chance of reasonable survival. Enid is trying, by the exercise of deductive thought, to arrive at independent scenarios that may serve as guides for the new culture that must be established if any of our race are to survive as biological beings. Both Timothy and Enid are trying to lay out new paths for us. Give them time and they may come up with a new human pattern.”

  Here comes Enid now, said Henry.

  The three sitting on the wall clambered off it and stood, waiting for her.

  “We are about to begin,” said Enid.

  “Henry’s here, with us,” said David.

  “Good,” she said. “Then all of us will be there. Even Spike is here. He came rolling in just a while ago.”

  They started up the slope toward the house, Corcoran and David walking ahead, Boone falling in beside Enid. She took his arm and spoke in a confidential voice.

  “There is no coffin,” she said. “No time to build one. We wrapped him well in a new white muslin sheet and Timothy found a length of canvas that Emma and I sewed into a shroud. It’s the best that we could do. Horace is in a dither. He thinks we should get away at once.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I suppose he’s right. We probably have to go. But I hate to leave this house. It’s been home for a long, long time. We are burying Gahan at the foot of an old oak tree back of the house.”

  “You have a fondness for trees?”

  “Yes. It’s not an unusual love. Many people love them. Would it surprise you if I told you trees will come after men? The trees will supersede us; they will take our place.”

  Boone laughed. “That’s as fine-honed a conceit as I have ever heard.”

  She did not answer and they went up the slope in silence. As they came up to the house, she gestured to her right. “There the travelers are,” she said. “All lined up and waiting.”

  And there they were on the lawn before the house—the two smaller ones the closest and the large one that had served Martin as living quarters a little distance off.

  “You and your friend will be going with us,” she said. “Had anyone thought to tell you that? I hope that you don’t mind. I am sorry that you got mixed up in this.”

  He said grimly, not entirely joking, “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  “Do you really mean that?” she asked.

  “I’m not quite sure,” he told her. “One thing I do know. When you leave, I’d rather go with you, wherever you may be going, than stay here in this place, unable to get out.”

  Corcoran and David had turned to the left to go around the house.

  “Right after the funeral,” said Enid, “we’ll get together and make a final decision what to do.”

  A high-pitched, ragged screech came from somewhere behind the house. It cut off for a moment, then took up again, a caterwaul of fright which kept on and on, its pitch going up and up.

  Boone started running toward the sound, sobbing as he ran, for suddenly the terror in the shrieking closed down all about him and seemed to grasp him by the throat.

  As he was about to round the corner of the house, something going fast and hard struck him in mid-stride and bowled him over, tumbling him across the grass until he brought up in a thicket of rosebushes, half in, half out of the thorny clump. He tipped forward into the soft earth that extended beyond the clump and landed nose down in the dirt.

  He pawed at his face to wipe away the clinging dirt, scrabbling with the other hand to claw himself free of the bushes, which was not an easy thing to do, for the sharp and solid thorns had snagged into his clothing and resisted all attempts to pull loose.

  With the dirt partially off his face, he saw Emma streaking for the Martin traveler, with some, perhaps all, of the others close behind her—all running as if the very devil were nipping at their heels. It was Emma, he thought, who ran into me.

  He lunged desperately to pull himself free of the bushes, but a clinging rose sprout with a grip still on his trouser leg tripped him so that he sat down solidly upon the ground, facing back along the left side of the house.

  Something was coming along the side of the house, a sort of thing he had never seen before nor would have believed possible. It was like a living spider web a good twelve feet or more across. It throbbed with pulses of e
nergy, or what he thought of as energy, running all across it, flickering and sparkling and flashing all along and across the tiny threads that made up the web. Behind the threads was a mirror, or a disk of some sort that might have been an eye. Through the flashing energy, Boone dimly saw what could have been mechanical appendages that were beginning to reach out and down toward him. There were other things immersed within the web, but what they could be he could not imagine.

  A voice shrieked at him. “Boone, you fool! Run! I’ll wait for you.”

  He lunged to his feet, jerking his trouser free of the bush, and spun about, beginning to run.

  There was only one of the smaller travelers left upon the lawn, standing with the port wide open and Enid beside it.

  “Run!” she shouted. “Run!”

  He ran as he had never run before. Enid leaped into the traveler. From the entrance, she beckoned at him desperately.

  He reached the traveler and sprang into the port, catching his toe on the edge of it and sprawling on top of Enid.

  “Get off me, you dunce!” she shouted, and he flung himself to one side. The port banged shut. As it closed, he glimpsed the web, almost on top of them. Enid was scrambling frantically toward a glowing instrument panel in the front of the traveler.

  Boone started to crawl forward, but there was a sudden shock that pinned him to the floor, and with the shock came darkness, the utter, unnerving darkness he had experienced when the Martin traveler had left New York.

  6

  Enid and Boone

  Light came back—blinking lights on the panel and faint sunlight from a small observation screen.

  Boone struggled to his knees, tried to rise to his feet. He bumped his head rather painfully on the ceiling.

  “These vehicles are cramped,” said Enid, speaking easily, unexcited. “You crawl on your hands and knees.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure where. I had no chance to pick a location or a time. I simply told it ‘go!’”