The Fury Out of Time (20 page)

“The possibility was barely considered, for a number of reasons. Well, the U.O. arrived, U.O.-
₁
, complete with Bribun’s emissary and also with one butterfly that helped to convince me that the thing came from the future. Bribun’s emissary was in no condition to tell us anything. The butterfly was unharmed. This is another paradox, and we should have given more thought to it. How did the butterfly survive when the pressure was sufficient to smash a man?”

“Was the butterfly inside the sphere?”

“No. No, it couldn’t have been inside, because it was flying about before the hatch was opened.”

“Perhaps the movement of the sphere creates a vortex of normal temporal pressure, which could suck in and hold an insect without damage.”

“Something like that, I suppose. Anyway, the U.O. arrived, and I witnessed the arrival. There was substantial damage to persons and property. I joined the scientists who were studying the U.O., and one night when I was checking what seemed to be a brilliant idea my assistant moved a control he shouldn’t have touched, and the U.O. vanished. With him in it, naturally. Exit U.O.-
₂
.”

The Overseer waited silently.

“The second arrival occurred on the other side of the ocean. A very small city was wholly destroyed. This time the U.O.’s passenger was a nonhuman. An unhuman being.”

“Unhuman being,” the Overseer mused. “That is a difficult concept to grasp. An animal with intelligence?”

“I wouldn’t refer to it as an animal, except in the way that humans are animals. I didn’t see it myself, and naturally it wasn’t in the best condition to be studied properly, but the scientists did learn some striking things about it. It had no separate head. The scheme of its skeletal structure was entirely different from that of any vertebrate life known to my time. It had incipient or vestigial wings. The brain was enormous, filling the central part of its body. And so on. The thing was utterly unrelated to any life on Earth.”

“Indeed. And what conclusions did you draw concerning the possible origin of this unhuman being?”

“The scientists didn’t commit themselves. Even after they studied it some of them didn’t want to believe it. I thought the thing could have originated in the distant future, like Bribun’s emissary, because by then man would have reached other worlds and possibly made contact with such a life form. Have you?”

“Let us postpone that question for the moment. Continue, please.”

“Messages in forty languages were put into U.O.-
₂
, and it was returned to you.”

“I object to the use of the word ‘returned,’ since that was its first arrival here, but let us not quibble over terms. I assume that the U.O.-
₂
was given the same instrument settings you had previously given to the U.O.-
₁
?”

“It was. Next U.O.-
₁
arrived again, fortunately in a wasteland, with Bribun’s second emissary. More messages were prepared, a protective device was designed for a passenger, and here I am.”

“They were very impressive messages,” the Overseer said.

“How did you manage to read them?”

“I placed them in a linguistic analyzer, and it had no difficulty in deciphering them. I do not know if that was because the machine actually has records of such ancient languages, or simply because it was given so many versions of the same message to work from.”

“I’m glad to know that written language hasn’t entirely disappeared.”

“Only on Earth,” the Overseer said. “The people of Earth have forgotten many things. Sometimes I think they are the happier for it.”

Karvel nodded absently. He was attempting to sort out the complicated interweaving of U.O. arrivals and departures, and he said finally, “The unhuman being would seem to be the significant clue.”

“I agree,” the Overseer said immediately. “The unhuman being’s arrival is the only one for which we do not, between us, provide a departure. Is this also your conclusion?”

“Yes. And once that fact is established, if follows inevitably that the U.O. with the unhuman being—U.O.-
₂
—was the first to reach us. And yet it arrived a month after U.O.-
₁
! My difficulty is that I’ve been trying to reason the thing out chronologically, and obviously this is impossible. Time travel renders temporal chronology meaningless. So U.O.-
₂
reached us first, even though it was second by thirty days.”

“What are thirty Earth-days when an enormous span of time is traversed? It amazes me that the sphere managed consistently to strike the same year.”

“Agreed. Even if the U.O.’s controls measure time in days, a microscopic error might produce a difference of many days at a distant point in time. Anyway, U.O.-
₂
reached us first, and once that is understood it is immediately obvious that there was only one U.O.”

“This I have believed from the beginning.”

“You didn’t have a paradox of chronology to confuse you, and the Bribs operated without any scientific experts to confuse them. There was only one U.O. The one we called U.O.-
₂
, which reached us second, did not have the marks our scientists put on U.O.-
₁
. It couldn’t have had them until it had been sent to the future and returned again—thirty days earlier. If you can follow that.”

“Not precisely, but I agree with the conclusion. Where does such a conclusion take us?”

“To another question. Where did the unhuman being come from? I guessed the future, because I felt certain that man would eventually encounter intelligent life forms on other planets.”

“That depends on what you mean by
intelligent,”
the Overseer said. “Man has explored far into the galaxy, but to my knowledge he has yet to find humanlike intelligence, with a civilization and a technology. I would not be so rash as to claim that he never will, but thus far he has not. The galaxy is a vast expanse of frightening distances, and its distances are not the most frightening thing about it. Man has not even explored half, little is known of much that he has explored, and no one man has mastered all of that. The reference center of such a minor planet is limited in its resources, but I will make inquiry about your unhuman being. I will also ask my headquarters to institute a search, though that will not help us immediately. Tell me, please, all that you can remember of this creature.”

“An estimated five feet tall when standing,” Karvel said. “It had a thick, barrel-like body, with an enormous brain located in the upper central part of it. There was no separate head. There were incipient or vestigial wings, the scientists thought vestigial. There was something strange about the blood—a question as to whether it really was blood, in the sense that we have blood. There were six limbs, but the scientists refused to designate them either arms or legs. They terminated in something that didn’t resemble hands or feet. There was disagreement as to its visual capabilities, probably due to the fact that its eyes were no longer recognizable as such. They couldn’t find any mouth, either, or figure out how it breathed. It did have a lung of some kind. I’m sorry I can’t remember more, but the report was handed to me as I was leaving, and I only glanced at it.”

“Surely that should be sufficient,” the Overseer said. “If you will excuse me, please, I shall make the inquiry.”

Karvel leaned back and attempted to concentrate on the serenely glowing planet Earth. A six-limbed, scantily winged, headless vision marched across it, and he damned Haskins for neglecting to show him the report until the last minute. If he’d had the opportunity to study it properly, perhaps his recollection of it would have sounded less like a secondhand description of a hallucination.

The Overseer returned to his lounge, and said gravely, “Your unhuman being is unknown to our reference center. I have addressed an inquiry to headquarters, but I very much doubt that it will help us. If such a creature existed, surely it would be important enough to merit description in any reference center.”

Karvel nodded, keeping his eyes fixed meditatively on the sky.

“I greatly fear that the problem is unsolvable,” the

Overseer went on. “With the galaxy as vast as it is, it would be difficult enough to locate this creature in space. If we must also search for it in time, the situation becomes impossible.”

“The fact that man hasn’t made contact with such a life form doesn’t mean that he won’t,” Karvel protested. “And since it reaches us out of time—”

“The unhuman being may come from an uncertain future. Possibly, but that is not really helpful to us. How would we begin to search for it? And before we began to search, we would have to ask ourselves if we really wanted to find it!”

“Your time, and mine, have been sending the U.O. back and forth through the simple expedient of reversing the instrument settings,” Karvel said. “That couldn’t possibly have worked with U.O.-
₂
, because U.O.-
₂
didn’t come from you. It just occurred to me that I don’t know where the instruments were set when the unhuman being arrived, and, I doubt if the scientists knew. They said U.O.-
₂
had been handled carelessly; probably the instruments were tampered with before they saw them. The instrument settings may have been meaningless anyway, because U.O.-
₂
arrived with an empty fuel tank. What if it arrived where it did merely because it ran out of fuel?”

“That would indeed be a paradox,” the Overseer admitted.

“That’s only the beginning. U.O.-
₂
’s empty fuel tank was refilled with fuel we made after we analyzed the fuel it contained on its second arrival, which came first. I think I’m getting a headache. If the future—you—hadn’t returned the U.O. to us so as to arrive before we sent it to you, we wouldn’t have been able to send it to you in the first place. Rather, in the second place. We wouldn’t have known what instrument setting to use, and we wouldn’t have been able to refuel it. Do you follow me?”

“I do,” the Overseer said with a smile, “but I’m not certain that I want to. Was there no residue of fuel in the tank that could have been analyzed?”

“I simply don’t know. I’m reasonably certain that it wasn’t analyzed, because that had already been done. Did the Bribs have any difficulty with the fuel?”

“There we have another paradox, or at least a puzzle. The fuel used by the U.O. is identical to the fuel we use to maintain our cities and operate our machines. It brought you to the moon, and it has taken man far into the galaxy. Our scientists call it the perfect fuel. That your people could have evolved an extensive technology without it is more bewildering to me than your time paradoxes.”

“Not to me,” Karvel said dryly.

“My instinct demands that both time and the events it controls should be immutable, so I say that the earlier return of the sphere did not change events, but merely facilitated them. I say that, but I am not wholly satisfied with it.”

“Neither am I. Because I’m convinced that man acquired the perfect fuel only because an unhuman being traveled in time.”

“The instrument setting on the U.O.-
₂
must have in some way confirmed the conclusions you had already reached. Is it possible that the instruments were set twice as far?”

“And the U.O. was ‘returned’ by halving the settings? No, I don’t think that could be possible.”

“I agree, and I think that it eliminates the possibility that the unhuman being reached you from an even more remote future. Supposing the setting was identical with the one you had already used?”

“Identical,” Karvel mused. “And if the French were handling the U.O. carelessly, they didn’t photograph the instruments on arrival. Later they saw our photographs, and heard about our using an opposite instrument setting, and by that time the instruments had been fussed with and changed and they’d forgotten the original settings. Or perhaps they thought someone had already changed them to the settings we used.” He paused. “The spiral! When U.O.-2 arrived, Force X spiraled clockwise instead of counterclockwise, which could mean that it arrived
from the opposite direction.
But in that case—”

“You say it, my friend.”

“In that case—” Karvel’s voice broke. He could not meet the Overseer’s eyes, and his own whispered words rang thunderously in his ears. “In that case, the U.O. did not originate anywhere in the future. It came from the past.”

Chapter 6

A man compelled to climb mountains did his most exhausting work at night; and when the dead of Galdu forced him into perspiring wakefulness with their screaming concert, and when Lieutenant Ostrander’s head jerked back through the U.O.’s hatch to vanish once again into the crush of time (what
should
he have said to him?) Karvel lay gazing at the dimly glowing ceiling, and climbed.

And climbed.

When he had quite convinced himself that the summit was hopelessly beyond his reach, he left his quarters and walked.