Collision with Chronos

Heshke got to his feet. The Titan officer was already peering out of the smoking hole in the side of the cabin. Heshke joined him and saw, in midair, a cylindrical shape half materialise, shimmering, and then fade away again. He shrank back momentarily; then, when the officer stepped cautiously to the ground, he followed him and stood staring around.

If death was the absence of life, then Heshke had never imagined such an expanse of death. The landscape stretched all around them in a grey, sterile tableland, featureless except for some hills in the west and some tumbled ruins to the north. There was not a blade of grass nor anything that moved. And dust, everywhere dust – Heshke had never conceived of so much dust, unless it was on the surface of the moon.

Ascar scrambled out of the cabin after them, his face gone ghastly pale. “The drive’s ruined!” he exclaimed in a strangled tone. “That bastard knew exactly where to aim for!”

His glance darted around helplessly. “You asked me about the future, Heshke – well, here it is. The future that time hasn’t reached yet. And we’re stranded in it!”

That was what he was afraid of, Heshke thought.

“We’ve failed,” said the Lieutenant in a stricken voice. “Our comrades will never hear our report now.”

“It doesn’t matter, you fool,” Ascar snarled. “Life on Earth has exactly two centuries to run – then everything’s finished.”

Blood and soil, Heshke thought. Blood and soil.

They all stood staring at the dead landscape.

5

Far from earth, the ISS – Interstellar Space Society – known to its inhabitants as Retort City floated as if transfixed in the blackness of space, approximately mid-way between Altair and Barnard’s Star – that is, as far from any celestial body as it could manage. It took its name from its appearance, which was that of a double retort, or hourglass, but long and elegantly shaped. Retort City was, in fact, a city in a bottle, its outer skin being transparent and having a glassy sheen. An observer watching from the void would have discerned within the glass envelope a sort of double spindle, this being the general plan of the city’s internal structure, and would have seen through a muted blaze of lights an intermittent movement as the internal transport facilities passed up and down.

The city had a history of about five thousand years, having lived it uneventfully for the most part. Probably, its rulers thought, there were other ISS establishments somewhere within a hundred light-year radius of Sol, all surviving fragments of long-vanished Earth civilisations, for at one time the idea of forsaking life on planetary bodies and taking to artificial cities in the interstellar void had been a fashionable one. But they did not know this for sure, and felt no urge to comb space for their lost cousins.

Colloquially the two halves of the ISS were known as the Lower Retort and the Upper Retort – terms with social, rather than spatial implications. Officially they were the Production Retort and Leisure Retort. And no one, except newborn babes, ever passed from one retort to the other.

Or almost no one.

Hueh Su-Mueng shut down his machine and stood for a few moments looking abstractedly around him at the work area: a large, spacious hall filled with rows of machines, some like his own, some different. The next shift was already beginning to wander in; some of the men stood around chatting, others looked over their spec sheets or started up their machines, already becoming absorbed in their work.

Most of Su-Mueng’s shift had already gone. He was about to follow them when a young man, a few years older than himself, stopped by with a smile.

“Hello, Su-Mueng. There’s nothing much doing in my section today. Got anything you’d like me to be getting on with?”

Su-Mueng hesitated. He had been finding his current job interesting and had intended returning tomorrow to continue it – had, in fact, been postponing the final stage of his other project so as to be able to complete it. He glanced down at the half finished assembly of finely-machined components: a new type of calibrator for some unguessable instrument wanted in the Upper Retort.

“Oh, all right. You can carry on with this,” he said resignedly. He pulled out the spec sheets and explained the details and where he’d got to. “There’s no hurry,” he added. “Deadline’s more than a month away.”

The other man nodded, looking eagerly over the work. “It’s always like that on these slow cycles. I hate it when we’re so slack.”

Su-Mueng walked away and discarded his work-gown in the locker room, washing his hands and face and using a refresher spray on himself. The hormone-laden mist settled on his skin and in his nostrils, making him feel fresher and brighter and washing away the weariness that comes from long hours of effort.