Collision with Chronos

The young Chink turned and saw him, apparently noticing the stricken look on his face. Lieutenant Gann hove into view on the other side, a tall, comparatively sinister figure. He surreptitiously motioned to Heshke to get on with it; Heshke took a step forward.

And then, impatient with Heshke’s hesitancy, Gann sprang. He hooked an arm around the Chink’s neck, forcing his head back to expose his throat to the knife. Heshke’s eyes bulged; he couldn’t look, he couldn’t turn away.

But just as the worst was about to happen something, a sliver of light, darted from the ceiling and struck Gann in the back. Scarcely any change of expression came over the Titan’s face; his body went limp, collapsing to the floor and nearly dragging the Chink with it.

The Chink recovered his balance and stared down at the body, his eyes wide with consternation. Then he flung open the swing doors and shouted something in a high-pitched, singsong voice. More Chinks came running from the control room, looking first at Gann and then at Heshke and chattering to him, their faces expressing commiseration, concern, regret.

One of them took Heshke by the arm and led him into the control room. He gazed blankly around at it, at the curved control panels sweeping by on either side, at the flickering screens whose rapidly changing images meant nothing to him.

His guide stepped up to one of the panels and began punching something out on a keyboard. After a pause words appeared on a screen over the Chink’s head.

Ship programmed protect itself. Very sad friend die. Should have warned. So sorry.

Heshke nodded dismally, turned and walked back into the demilune, where a small crowd was still collected. For some reason Ascar arrived. He stood looking down at the dead Lieutenant, his expression unreadable. Then he suddenly gave the Titan hooked-arm salute.

“Salute to a brave officer,” he said wryly.

“He was a brave officer,” Heshke answered.

“Yes, I know.”

Heshke felt unutterably weary.

He returned to his room and remained there for the rest of the voyage. He felt defeated, but oddly the death of Gann did not affect him as much as he might have imagined.

And neither did he kill himself. He had come to the conclusion that Ascar was right: Gann had been too presumptuous concerning the people who had rescued them from non-time. There was nothing substantial to indicate that they were hostile at all.

He slept, ate and slept, ate and slept until he felt rested. Eventually a Chink came and took him to the control room again. Ascar was already there; he gave Heshke a glance and a nod. He seemed to be familiar with the control room, as if he had made himself at home there.

The Chink pointed to a screen, and Heshke suddenly understood. He was being shown their destination. He stared entranced at the glittering shape, like an elongated hourglass, that hung suspended against ebon space, backed by hard, shining stars. A touch of the old apprehension came over him. Was this some alien stronghold, or—

Or what was it?

8

Watching through the transparent wall of his spatio-temporal observatory, Shiu Kung-Chien saw the ship return from Earth and dock in the nearby sphincter. He could pretend no enthusiasm for the event; the ship’s drive interfered with his apparatus and until the docking was completed he was obliged to suspend his current experiment.

He spent the time sitting patiently, drinking green tea and contemplating the dark, star-clouded universe all around him. He derived a satisfying feeling of insignificance from regarding it thus; a feeling that, as an organic, thinking being, he was a stranger in it. For it was an infinite expanse of non-time, a universe that had been made, in the first instance, without any time at all. Here and there localised processes of time had started themselves up, mostly weak, some quite powerful, proceeding in all directions, at all angles to one another. Occasionally they even met. They were accidental, small-order phenomena of limited period, but because of them life was able to exist.

On Earth, the most unhappy circumstance that could happen in the whole of existence had arisen: two distinct time-streams associated with the same planet. What was more, they were on a direct, head-on collision course.

Not that events of this nature were impossibly rare, especially in galaxies where the forces of yin and yang were so much out of balance as to cause numerous time-systems to arise. It was one good reason, in fact, for living in interstellar space, away from the traffic, as it were. Even so, Retort City itself had suffered a near-miss some centuries ago – a glancing blow by some entity travelling obliquely to its own time-direction. Shiu Kung-Chien still maintained contact with this entity: actually it was the object of his current experiments.