Collision with Chronos

“You’ll appreciate that we had no intention of risking our only time machine in reckless jaunts. We’ve spent five years of hard work trying to grasp the operation of the time traveller so that we could duplicate it. Finally we completed our own operational traveller – so we thought – and have made some trips in it. But the results are such that we need your expert advice; we’re no longer sure that our traveller works properly.”

Heshke didn’t understand what he meant. The Titan turned to the screen, reached for the control box and eliminated the image of the dead alien pilots. “Watch carefully. I’m going to show you some pictures our men took.”

A flurry appeared on the screen, then an impression of racing motion as if some colourful scene were swinging wildly to and fro and passing by too swiftly to be grasped properly. After some moments Heshke discerned that the only stable element in the picture was a sort of rim on the upper and lower edges; he realised that this was the rim of another screen or window through which the camera was taking the sequence.

He found it hard to believe that all this was really happening. Here he was seeing pictures from the past while an efficient, intelligent Titan officer calmly explained something he would have thought to be impossible. It made even the death of Blare Oblomot seem a shadowy, dream-like event.

Suddenly the picture stilled. They looked out over an even landscape, the sun high in the sky. In the middle ground stood clumps of ruins stretching for several miles. Though so corroded and overgrown as nearly to have blended into nature, to Heshke’s trained eye they clearly showed their alien origin.

“The Verichi Ruins, approximately nine hundred years ago,” Vardanian said quietly. “Not what you would expect, is it?”

No, thought Heshke, it certainly wasn’t. Nine centuries ago the Verichi Ruins – ruins in the present century, that is – should have been in their prime: an inhabited, bustling city. He watched an armoured figure stumbling about some heaps of stones. “It’s more like what they’ll be nine centuries in the future,” he agreed. “Maybe you were headed in the wrong direction?”

“Our conclusion also, at first,” Vardanian told him. “Initially we made five stops, all inside a bracket covering two centuries. We failed to find any living aliens at all, merely ruins such as you see here. However, it didn’t take long to ascertain that the wars of collapse – the death-throes of classical civilisation – were in progress simultaneously with the existence of these ruins. So we were in the past after all.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Heshke objected, frowning.

“Agreed. According to everything we know there was a large alien presence at the time of the wars of collapse. Could we be wrong? Could the alien presence have been much earlier? That would explain the dilapidated condition of the ruins – but it would not explain their much fresher condition today. Frankly, none of the historical explanations make much sense. So we were forced to draw other, more disappointing conclusions: that the time traveller was playing tricks on us, that we weren’t travelling through time at all.”

“You’re beginning to lose me. Where were you going?”

Vardanian gestured vaguely, as though searching for words to express thoughts he only understood as abstract symbols. “There are some peculiarities about the time-drive that suggest other possibilities. In order to work at all it has to be in the presence of a wakened consciousness; an unmanned, automatic time traveller simply wouldn’t move. So a living pilot is one of the essential components. Bearing this in mind, we were able to formulate a theory that the traveller – the one we have built, at any rate, even if not the alien one – fails to move through objective time. It enters some region of ‘fictitious time’, and presents to the consciousness of the observer elements from both the past and the future blended together, probably drawing them from the subconscious imaginations of the pilot and passengers.”

“It’s all an illusion, you mean?”

The other nodded doubtfully. “Roughly speaking, yes. Though the time traveller obviously does go somewhere, because it disappears from the laboratory.”

Heshke noticed that throughout the latter part of this explanation Leard Ascar scowled and muttered under his breath. Vardanian glanced at him pointedly. “That, with one dissenting vote, was the explanation we had adopted until yesterday.”

“And then you showed us those photographs,” Brask put in. “That upset things somewhat.”

Yes, the photographs. The pictures that showed the Hathar Ruins three centuries ago, and showed them in worse condition than they are today. The pictures that obviously – perfectly, clearly, obviously – were faked. The pictures that could not possibly be true.