Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

‘Hevatar developed it, but I made the initial discovery.’ Rilke’s face softened, and he began to reminisce. ‘We were a team. Hevatar was the leader, Absol Humbart and myself were his chief assistants. There was a lot more equipment in here in those days. There were particle accelerators, high-energy plasma chambers, and so forth. But we weren’t even thinking of time-travel then. We never dreamed it was possible. We were investigating the nuclear binding force of baryons, that was all. One day I thought of a new way to isolate pi-mesons. When I set up the apparatus, by chance a surge gate malfunctioned and there was a sudden rush of power. Suddenly I found I had discovered a way to accelerate pi-mesons faster than light.’

The old man looked around the laboratory as if remembering. ‘It was an accident, a million-to-one shot. From then on, Hevatar took over. Naturally he grabbed something like that with both hands, and he explored it from all angles. Before long he had discovered the most important consequence of the effect I had produced: that it could be used to move mass through time. From then on there was no stopping him. He takes all the credit for it now, of course, but none of it would have happened if I hadn’t carried out that one experiment.’

‘You must feel proud.’

‘Do I? For a long time I did. But lately it frightens me. We get all the news here; we’re privileged in that respect. History is being ripped apart. It’s like seeing the end of the universe, but no one seems to realise that time itself can collapse and no one wants to stop it. I opened a real Pandora’s box when I made that experiment. And when you came this afternoon I realised that everything had gone too far.’

‘What happened to this other man – Absol Humbart? Is he dead?’

Rilke turned away and muttered something Aton could barely catch. ‘We’ve spoken of him already. Let’s not go into that.’

Aton reflected bitterly that of the only two people to share his view of the situation, one was too obsessed with his insane love for a corpse to care and the other was this weary old man.

‘I’m glad that you at least agree with me,’ he told Rilke. ‘But there seems little we can do.’

‘Isn’t there? There’s something I can do. Something I can try to do, at least. I can go back in time, prevent any of it from happening.’

‘You can do that?’

Rilke led him to a large dull-brown cabinet that at first Aton had taken to be a cupboard. ‘This is a functional time-machine. The very first, in fact.’ He opened the door. Inside Aton saw seats, a control panel.

‘You really think you stand a chance of influencing Hevatar’s – or your own – younger self?’

Rilke’s smile was wintry. ‘Hevatar has never been influenced by anybody. As for myself, I was an eager young pup and I certainly wouldn’t have passed up the chance to make a crucial discovery, not for anyone. Besides, there’s something you need to understand. We didn’t know the empire existed in those days. It’s strange, isn’t it? Time has changed such a lot. Past, present and future have all changed. But there’s one thing the empire and Church are very careful to see doesn’t change. They are careful to preserve the vital event that led to the creation of the empire. San Hevatar and myself were brought up under special conditions and weren’t allowed to know that there already was time-travel. We worked for the same company, Monolith Industries, that presumably we had worked for before anything had altered. But not until we had unearthed that one secret of how the time-drive works was the truth gradually revealed to us.’ He smiled. ‘It was like coming out of a dream. In a way we’d known all along; there was plenty of evidence for it if we had cared to piece it together. But we never had. The answer is, of course, that we were psychologically constrained in some way.

‘And that’s why,’ he finished briskly, ‘my younger self would never believe me if I went to him with such a wild tale.’

‘It’s logical,’ Aton commented. ‘The Historical Office would want to avoid paradoxes in anything as important as that. But you mentioned another assistant, Absol Humbart. Presumably he was put through this procedure too?’

‘Did I mention Absol Humbart? No, he wasn’t there,’ Rilke said vaguely. ‘Maybe he was in the earlier repetitions.’

The point didn’t seem worth pursuing. ‘So what do you propose to do?’ Aton asked.

The old man produced a heavy hand beamer from under his cloak. ‘Kill myself,’ he said simply. ‘It’s the only way. Kill the young Rilke before he makes that experiment in isolating pi-mesons, then none of this can happen. There’ll be no empire, no Chronotic wars. The world will be as it was before time-travel was invented.’

‘And how was that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody seems to know any more.’

‘Kill yourself,’ Aton said woodenly. ‘Are you really prepared to do that?’