Collision with Chronos

“Chiefly, the plain fact that the alien interventionist ruins are ageing backward in time. If we take that at face value, then their source lies in the future, and we’re going to track it down.”

His words were interrupted by the sounding of the gong. The Absolute Present register began to glow, for the second time this trip.

“There she blows!” crowed Ascar.

The Titan’s jaw dropped. He stared at the register as though unable to believe his eyes.

“But we’re four centuries away from Absolute Present!”

“Four centuries from our Absolute Present.”

“There is only one,” the Titan insisted emptily. “Your own equations say so … you to whom we owe the secret of the time-drive …”

“Well, I can’t be right all the time,” Ascar said, rather bleakly. “What do you think I was doing for three hours while we made the journey back – just sitting there with a blank mind?” He snorted. “Oh no, I was going over those very equations you seem to regard as sacrosanct … and it occurred to me that I might not know as much about time as I had thought, and that the equations could be wrong. So I began to imagine a number of other possibilities. What if the Absolute Present isn’t unique, as I had formerly assumed it to be? Perhaps there are other waves of time, separated from our own by millions of years, by millennia – or only by centuries. Perhaps there is a regular series of them, forming the nodes of a cosmic wave frequency vibrating through the universe. Whatever the truth, I discovered that if I amended the equations to make room for any of these possibilities then the basic principle that makes the time-drive work remains unchanged … so the theoretical structure had to give way … even if the Great Earth Mother has to give way too. …”

While he spoke Ascar had been deftly flying the time traveller, dividing his attention between the instruments and his two hijacked passengers. His gun was never more than an inch or two away from his right hand.

He continued ramblingly. “And what if one of those other time waves was travelling in the opposite direction to our own? Not proceeding from the past into the future, as we understand time, but from the future into the past? The very words past and future tend to lose their meaning in such a context. … Whatever lies behind one’s direction of motion is the past and whatever lies in front of it is the future. … There it is!”

His last words were a shout, an excited squawk. The Absolute Present register had zeroed in and stood slightly on the other side of zero.

Ascar turned a knob, tuning the windows to transparency. “Take a look,” he said. “We’re at time-stop.”

Slowly Heshke rose and approached one of the windows.

It was Earth, but it was not Earth. The sky was blue, with white clouds hanging majestically in it. The sun was of a familiar size, colour and radiance. But there the resemblance ended. True, there was grass – green grass … but it was an olive green shot through with mother-of-pearl colours, and all the other vegetation was distinctly non-Terran; the trees – twisted, writhing things – bore no resemblance to any Earth tree that had ever existed as far as Heshke knew.

These trees, growing on the slope of a grassy eminence where Ascar had set them down, did not detain his attention for long. Briefly he noted an unrecognisable flying thing, frozen in midair as had been the raven, and then he flooded his vision with the incredible scene that was set out below.

The Hathar Ruins: but not the ruins that Heshke had studied for so many years, and not those still further back down the centuries. This was the Hathar site as it had been in its prime: an intact, inhabited settlement. He drank in the clean-cut, sparkling conical towers, the large buildings, the Cathedral (whose purpose he still did not know), the tenement-like masses of smaller rooms, the plazas, the roads. …

It was all as he had constructed it in his imagination so many times. Alien, but alive. A bustling, living habitation of a nonhuman people.

And those people thronged Hathar. Furry, sharp-snouted, standing in triangular doorways and walking the streets and squares. But they were caught in mid-motion like a stereo still photograph: the traveller was not moving in any direction in time.

“The alien interventionists!” breathed the Titan officer. Both he and Heshke had forgotten their tacit agreement to jump Ascar.

“Correct. But they are not interventionists, though they are alien in a sense.”

The Titan clenched his fists. “So we have been mistaken all along. The enemy is attacking from the future. That must be where he made his landings on Earth.”

“No, no,” said Ascar, adopting a tone of uncharacteristic patience. “Watch this: I’m putting us in motion again at the biological rate of one second per second.”

He made an adjustment. The scene came to life. The clouds sailed across the sky, the trees moved, the aliens walked through streets and squares.