Collision with Chronos

Gann remained silent until they were once more walking down an empty corridor. “Don’t you know who these people are?” he said, his voice rising slightly. “No, perhaps you wouldn’t … but I had plenty of instruction in race identification in training college.”

“No,” Heshke said, “I don’t know who they are.”

“They’re Chinks,” Gann told him. “The last group of them was supposed to have been exterminated five hundred years ago. Quite an interesting strain, as devs go. Tradition has it that their cunning was almost superhuman.”

“Superhuman?” repeated Heshke wonderingly. “And yet you deny them intellectual ability?”

“It’s more of an animal cleverness raised to a high degree. In devs the intellectual faculty is always perverted in some way, producing bizarre sciences and practices, yet it can involve extreme subtlety – in fact there used to be a saying: ‘the fiendishly clever Chink.’”

Heshke found the phrase amusing and smiled, at which Gann shot him a sharp glance.

“It’s no laughing matter. And you wouldn’t think so if you fell foul of a Chink puzzle.”

“A Chink puzzle? What’s that?”

“One of their weapons, capable of incapacitating the nervous system. Just some kind of ingenious contraption made of wire or bits of metal, apparently. But whoever it’s given to is instantly confronted with insuperable problems and riddles of such a nature that the mind is totally paralysed. The worst of it is that he can’t be released until the puzzle is solved, which only a Chink can do.”

With a deep sigh, Heshke decided that perhaps his amusement had been too facetious, after all.

“As you can see,” Gann concluded, “these people are natural candidates for alliance with the aliens. Perhaps they were allied with them all along.”

“Well, what are we going to do now?”

“Our duty is somehow to seize this ship if we can and take it back to Earth – and to the Absolute Present.”

“But how?” said Heshke, overawed at such audacity.

“I don’t know yet. I haven’t finished reconnoitring. But there doesn’t seem to be a very large crew.”

“But even if we did take control – which doesn’t seem possible to me – how would we fly it?”

“I can pilot a time traveller, and the alien version is basically the same as our own. We can manage it with Ascar’s help, even if I have to kick co-operation out of him.”

The Titan stopped abruptly. They were in a broad passage – a sort of gallery – one side of which was covered with silk screens adorned with delicate, trace-like figures, of men, women and willow trees. The brushstrokes were sparse, economical but expansively eloquent.

“Well, that’s the picture,” Gann said. “We may as well get back to our rooms now. I haven’t eaten yet and I’m hungry.”

“Didn’t they give you any food?” Heshke asked him in surprise.

“They left food of some kind. But I discovered the door was unlocked and decided action was more important. I’ve been all over the ship.”

So that was why the Titan was so much ahead of him, Heshke thought. The man’s devotion to duty was total.

“I don’t think I can find my way,” he said.

“I’ll show you. Or else you can come back with me. It’s probably not safe to talk in our rooms, though.”

Heshke allowed the Titan to guide him through the corridors and to explain the general layout of the ship, which Gann had grasped in remarkably short order. Just before they parted, Heshke turned to face him, raising his finger as though bringing up a point of debate.

“You speak of Chink puzzles. I’m still wondering why they’re content to let us wander around like this to plot and scheme. How do we know we’re not on the inside of one of those puzzles, being manipulated?”

And the bleak, stubborn look on the face of the Titan showed that, he, too, had entertained this thought.

It was hard to tell time on the Chink ship. The meals did not arrive regularly; they arrived as ordered. One had only to press one of the studs on the grey-screened pedestal and in a very short time a cheerful, smiling Chink would arrive, bearing a tray piled with the strangely spiced food.

Lieutenant Gann ate but sparsely and devoted all his time to finding a way to seize the ship, a project in which Heshke, none too willingly, was embroiled. They soon abandoned, however, the ban on discussions in their rooms. Heshke had grown tired of charging through corridors with the indefatigable Titan – and besides, he pointed out, the Chinks on the ship appeared to understand very little Earth Language. Probably the rooms weren’t bugged at all.

Experimentally they tried stating some outrageously violent intentions, but their captors failed to come charging in as Gann had expected.

Both Gann and Heshke made efforts to talk to Leard Ascar. But the physicist seemed to have retreated even further into himself and barely acknowledged them. He ate vast quantities of the Chink food, calling for one dish after another, and seemed to relish Gann’s disgust for his exotic tastes.

“Your ideas are all screwy,” he growled when Heshke tried to talk some reason into him. “And so are your theories.”