Collision with Chronos

Heshke started. “What kind of questions?”

“Political, what else?” Blare shrugged, looking away. “You know, I think I feel the cold wind of a purge coming on. They wanted to know a lot about you, too.”

Heshke put down his glass, feeling suddenly numb. So far he had managed to keep Titan influence at the site minimal. He had seen what happened when the Titans put in their own teams to work alongside civilian diggers: they soon dominated the entire project; scientific objectivity was the first casualty. He didn’t want that here.

At the same time the calculating coolness of it struck him. The Titans had wanted to investigate the project while he, its leader, was absent. Why?

“What did they ask about me?” he demanded.

“They seemed to want to find out whether you are … on their side, for lack of another way of putting it. Are you, Rond? What’s going on, anyway? Are we being taken over?”

Slowly Heshke shook his head. “No … it’s something else.” He was silent for a few moments. “My God, it must be something big,” he muttered wonderingly.

“What, Rond?” Blare looked at him curiously, the light of the lamp playing over his sharp features. “Well, you know my views. I don’t mind telling you I had a fright today. I think I’ll have to get out.”

Heshke blinked. “Don’t be ridiculous, Blare. There’s nothing to worry about. They’re checking up, that’s all. They’ve made an important find, and they want me to help them. … I shouldn’t really tell you anything, but hang it all, I don’t really know any more than you do. They’ve found an alien artifact and I gather they’re excited about it. Anyway, it entails a field trip. I don’t know where to, except that it’s probably somewhere in a dev reservation.”

Blare was frowning. “Really? Why only probably?”

“Well, there’s some danger involved. That’s all they would tell me.”

Blare grunted. “Dev reservations are pretty quiet places these days, you know, except for when the Titans go storming in. You may not be going to one.”

“Well, perhaps not. I just wanted to reassure you that there’s no purge coming, that’s all.”

“Thanks for your concern, Rond, but … I still think I’d better go. I got the impression this afternoon that something more is brewing. I don’t feel safe here any more.”

Heshke stared at him. “What on Earth are you talking about, Blare?”

The other moved uneasily and took a gulp of wine. The movements of his head cast grotesque shadows on the canvas of the tent, the lamp being set on the table beside them.

“I’d better be frank – hang it, I feel I can trust you, if no one else. You know my sympathies – you know there’s a political opposition. I think the Titans are on to me, and if so you know what the outlook will be if I hang around much longer.”

“On to you?” Heshke echoed uncomprehendingly. “But of course there’s a political opposition – there always is! It’s hardly a crime to belong to it. Not unless you mean …”

His voice trailed off. He had known Blare Oblomot for years. Like Heshke himself, he was one of the foremost experts in his field, though younger and less experienced. Heshke also knew of his contempt for the Titans, of his somewhat anarchistic-liberal views. But he had always put that down to a kind of freakish waywardness – no, not freakish, he corrected himself hastily; freakish was an unfortunate word – to a kind of charming and frivolous individuality. But not as a serious defiance of …

His thoughts, like his voice, trailed off.

Blare was speaking wryly. “There’s always a point where opposition becomes incompatible with good citizenship. What is legitimate, even if disapproved of, in peacetime becomes treasonable in a state of war. Figuratively speaking we’re still in a state of war. So there comes a time when one has to make a hard and cut decision. I made mine some time ago.” Blare rubbed the side of his face. Heshke noticed the fatigue in his eyes – did the Titans have that effect on him, too?

“Blare – you’re not telling me that you’re one of … them.”

Oblomot nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid so. I was pushed into it step by step, really, by the Titans themselves. Their grip has tightened, not relaxed, since the Deviant Wars. Their ideas have taken an even more intransigent form, so that even some thoughts would infringe the legal code today, if there was some way to monitor thoughts. So when you belong to a secret organisation pledged to fight the Titans by any means whatsoever and which believes the so-called deviants should be allowed a place in the world—”

“Blare! What are you saying!”

Oblomot shrugged again. “You see? Even you can’t approach a thought like that. And yet you like the Titans scarcely any more than I do.”

Heshke’s shoulders sagged. Here was his old friend Blare Oblomot confessing that he was a race traitor; that he was secretly a member of the despised underground that during the last war had actually helped the Amhraks. It just didn’t bear thinking about; his bewilderment was complete.