Collision with Chronos

With a sonorous orchestral chord the screen went blank. Heshke was fascinated. Blood and soil, he thought again. There was much in the lecture that, paradoxically, was both appealing and repellent: the mysticism, the blatant Earth-worship, the belief in destiny. But who knows, he thought, there might be something in it. Perhaps evolution does work like that.

The audience rose and filed out silently. Brask nudged Heshke. “Now you can meet the people you’ll be working with.”

Three members of the audience stayed behind, going over to a small table at the back. Brask and Heshke joined them.

Two of the men had the armbands and precise bearing of Titans. The third was a civilian, standing out from the others by reason of his sloppy slouch. He had a habit of glancing furtively around him, as if wishing he were somewhere else, and his mouth was twisted into a permanent expression of sardonic bitterness.

Brask made introductions. “Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian, Titan-Lieutenant Spawart, Citizen Leard Ascar. Gentlemen, this is Citizen Rond Heshke.”

All made brief bows.

“Are you gentlemen archaeologists also?” Heshke asked as politely as he could, since he did not recognise their names.

“No, we are physicists,” Leard Ascar said shortly. His voice matched his face, ironical, mocking.

Brask motioned them to chairs. “It’s time to put you into the picture, Citizen,” he said to Heshke. “I hope you’re able to absorb strange facts at short notice, because you’ll need to.”

He flicked a switch on a small console on the table. The big screen lit up, but for the moment remained without a picture.

“We told you earlier that we had discovered an alien artifact in working order. You probably imagined it had been found in a dig or something of that sort. In point of fact it was discovered lying in the open on a grass field, quite accidentally, far from any known alien remains. Moreover it was obviously of very recent manufacture.”

He flashed a picture on the screen. The background was as he had described: a grassy meadow, with a line of trees in the distance. Lying in the foreground was a silvery cylinder, rounded at both ends and with dull, rather opaque-looking windows set fore and aft. A Titan stood by it for size comparison, revealing it to be about seven feet in diameter and about twelve in length.

“As you see, it’s a vehicle of some sort,” Brask continued. “Within were two aliens who appeared to have died shortly before of asphyxiation. As these were our first complete specimens they have increased our knowledge of the enemy to quite an extent.”

The screen blanked for a moment and then flicked to another picture. The cylinder had been opened. The two occupants, seen partially because of the awkwardness of handling the camera through the opening, were strapped side by side in narrow bucket seats. They were small furry creatures with pointed snouts and pink mole-like hands, being perhaps the size of young chimpanzees. After a few seconds the picture flickered and the same two corpses were shown more completely, pinned to a slab in a Titan laboratory.

Despite his excitement, Heshke found time to be pleased that the specimens resembled quite closely the reconstructions that had been attempted from skeletons.

“So it was a spaceship,” he said.

“That was naturally our conclusion, to begin with. But we were wrong. Only gradually, by experimenting with the vehicle’s drive unit, were we able to piece together what it did.”

Heshke noticed that the physicists were all looking at the floor, as though hearing the subject talked about embarrassed them.

“The equipment aboard the vessel used a principle completely unknown to us,” Brask went on. “Movement through space – through comparatively short distances of space, not interplanetary space – could in fact be achieved as a by-product, but that was not its main purpose. Its main purpose is to move through time. The artifact we had stumbled on was a time machine.”

The physicists continued looking at the floor. Heshke let the bombshell sink into his mind.

Time. A time machine. The archaeologist’s dream.

“So they’re from the past,” he said finally, staring at the picture of the alien time travellers.

Brask nodded. “That would be the assumption. Presumably they developed the means of time travel during the final stages of their sojourn on Earth, but too late to do them any good. We can only hope the secret is not known on their home world, but frankly I think we would have felt some effect from it if it was.”

“Yes, indeed,” Heshke muttered. “The whole thing is – frightening.”

“You’ve said it,” Brask responded.

Heshke coughed nervously. “This field trip I’m going on,” he said after a pause. “It’s a trip through time?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“I don’t understand.”

Brask looked at Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian. “Would you care to explain?”

The tall Titan physicist nodded and turned to Heshke.