Collision with Chronos

“Absolutely. I know these ruins like the back of my hand. I’ve been studying them for years. These are the Hathar Ruins, as I would expect them to be three centuries after our time. We must be in the future.”

“No, we’re in the past.” Ascar was frowning, a scowling frown of great agitation.

“Well. …” Heshke put his hand on a weathered alien wall, feeling the almost subconscious thrill he had noted so often. “Then we’re up against a paradox that would seem to support the Titan theory: that the past and the future have got mixed up somehow and nothing we see is real. But I have to say that personally I feel forced to reject even that theory. These remains are too perfect, too solid and incontrovertible in every detail. They have suffered three centuries of physical decay from the ruins of my time, and they have decayed exactly as I would expect.”

“But we are in the past,” Ascar insisted.

Heshke shouldered his vidcamera and shook his head sadly. “Come over here,” he invited.

Clambering over the massy stones, the physicist followed him into a grid-pattern of low walls which had the appearance of once having been a set of rooms. The archaeologist crouched down beside a wall where he had earlier pulled away a patch of moss.

“This clinches it,” he said, looking up at Ascar. “See these grooves?”

Ascar stooped. The sharp sunlight glinted on little fronds of moss, on dirt and sparkling stone, and made shadows in a number of short trenches cut in three blocks of stone, surrounding a third.

“Yes.”

“I myself helped to cut those grooves. We suspected there was an aumbry behind here – a cupboard cut in the wall. And we were right. Afterwards we replaced the sealing stone. Here, give me a hand.”

He took a couple of jemmies out of his tool satchel. Ascar helped him to lever away the slab. It came after a little effort, being not as thick or as solidly entrenched as it looked. Heshke shone a little light into the cavity thus revealed and moved aside so that Ascar could look.

“I’ll bet a year’s pay there’s some writing in there. See if you can find it.”

Ascar poked his head into the entrance. The recess was larger than its door suggested and smelled damp, but it was free of dust. On the opposite wall were some large letters, neatly cut with a powered stone inscriber.

“Skeleton thirty-one,” he read slowly. “Glass vessel four hundred eighty-nine.”

Heshke chuckled. “That’s right. I inscribed that message myself. It was to record what we had found in there and their catalogue numbers.”

Ascar stood up and took a deep breath.

“Well, there’s your proof,” Heshke told him. “Right now we are standing after our time, not before.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” Ascar said amiably. “I can’t argue with that.”

The time traveller surged forward, and Heshke relaxed, idly watching the flurry of shapes and colours through the windows and listening to the fuzzy hum of the time-drive. For the first part of the journey back to the research centre he had tried to talk to Leard Ascar; but the physicist had retreated into himself and now sat staring with glazed eyes at the floor, either stupefied or engaged in deep meditation.

He had asked the pilots that he be allowed to release the safety straps, since they appeared to be superfluous and made the journey even more tedious, but they had refused, explaining that the machine was liable to a sudden lurch if a rapid change in direction was called for.

He wondered how his report would be received by the Titan controllers of the research centre. Already he had communicated his findings to the pilots. They were well-trained and understood the implications. But with typical Titan superciliousness they’d made no comment.

Half resentfully, he stared at their broad, uniformed backs. These Titans had killed his friend Blare Oblomot, he reminded himself. He realised now that he had gone around anaesthetised since that event, as if in a dream … it was a happening he just hadn’t been able to take in properly. But then Blare, by his own admission, had been a traitor; inexplicably, a traitor. …

A gong rang out, in a different tone from that which had heralded the approach of their outgoing destination. The pilot spoke up for the passengers’ benefit.

“We’re approaching Absolute Present.”

Ascar jerked his gaze up from the floor. Just then the co-pilot murmured something to his colleague, who glanced down at the other’s section of the instrument panel.

“Citizen Ascar, we appear to have a malfunction on the Absolute Present register,” the pilot announced in a puzzled tone.

“Eh?” Ascar released himself from his straps and bounded forward to peer closely at the designated instrument. From where he was sitting Heshke could see it: a large strip-dial that had commenced to flash as the gong sounded. A marker moved steadily across it in a count-down toward zero: the travelling wave of time.