The Time Axis Read online

  "Well, I believe there is movement but along still another dimension, beyond this theoretical fourth which is time – or supertime. Call it a fifth. This much I'm sure of – if you could stay in the time axis indefinitely the ultra-time drift would carry you into another era, through era beyond era, wherever other ages intersect the time axis." He shook his head.

  "I admit I don't understand it too clearly. It's a science beyond ours. However, I think I can explain the presence of the Record box now. I believe the people of the Face sent it back in a direction parallel to the time-axis – which, remember, intersects the same area in space always, at any given moment. They sent it very far back, millennia into our past – as you say, like people tossing a message in a bottle into the stream of time.

  "Look." He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger touching at the tips. "Two times – my finger and thumb. But they touch at one point only. There you can cross. From the time of the Face to, let us say, some thousands of years B.C. This is vague again, and it is something I don't understand.

  "The extension is along still another dimension, possibly the ultra-sphere, this figurative fifth. But it's logical to suppose there would be such a limitation. There is in space. You can step spatially only into areas spatially adjoining yours. And in time – well, it may apply there too."

  "All right," I said. "Okay up to now. I'll accept it. Now let's have the kicker. What was it you saw in your cave?"

  De Kalb leaned back in his chair, regarding me with a grin.

  "I saw you, Mr. Cortland."

  I gaped at him.

  His grin broadened.

  "Yes, I saw you, lying alseep on the floor of the – the egg. I saw myself there too, asleep. I saw Dr. Essen. And lastly I saw Colonel Harrison Murray."

  He looked at me with obscure triumph, his grin very wide.

  "You're crazy," I said bluntly.

  "You're thinking you've never been in a cavern under a Laurentian mountain, I suppose. Very likely. Nor has Dr. Essen. Nor, I imagine, Murray. But you will be, my friend. So will we all." The grin faded. Now the deep voice was graver. "And we are all changed, there in the egg. You understand that?

  "We are older, by a little, not temporally, but in experience. You can see that on our faces. We have all passed through strange experiences – good, bad, awe-inspiring, perhaps. And the men look – tired, older. But Dr. Essen looks strangely younger." He shrugged heavily. "I don't attempt to explain it. I can only report what I saw," He smiled at me.

  "Well, so much for that. Don't look so stunned, Mr. Cortland! I assure you it was yourself. Which means that you will go with us when we take our great leap into the future, into the world of the Face. I believe we will all stand together in the living flesh before that great Face we have seen only in our minds, today.

  "Believe? I know it. Those people lying asleep in the time-axis, with instruments on the floor around them to regulate their slumbers, will go forward in time – have gone forward. And they will return in the end to here and now.

  "They will go as the box went. From the here and now, forward through the time-axis to the world of the Face. But there is no backward flow along that axis. No one can risk meeting himself in his own past, even if such a thing were possible. So when we return, we must come as the box did, along a path which is parallel to the axis, to that continuous point in time which may be millennia B.C., where the box originally emerged.

  "In effect, one goes forward with the flow along the time axis and back around the circumference of the sphere which is time. And there we enter the time-axis chamber again, and are carried forward along the flow to our own present time." He smiled.

  "Do you see what that means? It means that one day those four in the Laurentian cavern will waken. And as they wake, as they step out, three men and a woman will enter the chamber and begin their journey into time!"

  I gave my head a quick shake. Images were whirling in it like sparks from a Fourth-of-July pinwheel. None of them made sense to me, or perhaps only one. But that one was definite.

  "Oh no they won't," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "I will quote you a vulgarism," I said meticulously. "There may be flies on some of you guys, but there ain't no flies on me. I'm not going. I know when I'm well off. Jerry Cortland is staying right here with both feet firm upon his own temporal axis. I will write you the best story you ever saw about yourself, Mr. De Kalb, but I won't climb on any merry-go-rounds with you. Is that clear?"

  He chuckled deeply.

  "But you did, Mr. Cortland – you did!"

  6. THE MILITARY MIND

  Colonel Harrison Murray, at sixty, still had a fine military figure and was proud of it. You could see him remember to throw his shoulders back and pull in his waist about once every ten minutes. Then age and the subject at hand would gradually divert him and he would sag slowly – until he remembered again.

  He had a discontented drooping mouth, a face all flat slab-shaped planes and an incongruously high thin voice that got higher when he was angry, which was most of the time. He was angry now.

  "A man can't help it if he was born a fool, De Kalb," he said. "But luckily we're not all fools. You're going to drop this idiotic sideline of yours, whatever it is, and go back to work on our current job. You agreed to assist the War Department – " He gave me a quick, wary glance. "You agreed to do a certain job."

  "I've done it," De Kalb told him. I've set up the Bureau and laid out all the plans. Oh, it's no secret – we're not the only ones who've been experimenting along this line. I'll be willing to bet Mr. Cortland knows more than you think about this top-secret Bureau of ours. How about that?"

  He was looking at me. I said, "Well, I've heard rumors on the grapevine. Hypnotism, isn't it?"

  Murray swore softly. De Kalb chuckled.

  "Subliminal hypnosis," he said. "It doesn't matter, Colonel. The important secrets are the specialized techniques that have been worked out and they're still under cover – I hope. The Bureau is operating efficiently now. I've set up the plan. Now there are competent researchers doing quite as much as I could do. If I stayed on now it would simply be as a figurehead. My usefulness was over when I explained my theories to the technicians and psychologists who were able to apply them."

  "Allow me to decide that," Murray said angrily and there was a pause.

  Quietly, from her chair by the window, Dr. Essen spoke. "Ira, perhaps if Colonel Murray saw the Record – "

  "Of course," De Kalb said. "No use squabbling any further. Cortland, will you do the honors this time?"

  I opened the cupboard door. I took down the wrapped bundle which was the box. I set it on the table between De Kalb and Murray. The Colonel looked suspiciously at it.

  "If this is some childish joke – " he began.

  "I assure you, sir, it's no joke. It is something the like of which you've never seen before, but there's nothing humorous about it. I think when you've looked into this – this package – you'll have no further objections to the problem I'm working on."

  De Kalb undid the wrappings. The stained and battered box, blue-white, imperishable as the time-currents upon which it had drifted so long, lay there before us, the universe and the destiny of man locked inside it.

  De Kalb's fingers moved upon its surface. There was a faint, distant ringing as if the hinges moved to a sound of music and the box unfolded like a flower.

  I didn't watch. I knew I'd get nothing further from it now until my mind had rested a little. I looked at the ceiling instead, where the lights from the unfolded leaves and facets of the Record moved in intricate patterns on the white plaster. Even that was hypnotic.

  It was very quiet in the room. The silence of the end of the world seemed to flow out of the box in waves, engulfing all sound except for De Kalb's heavy breathing and the quick rasping breath that came and went as Murray sat motionless, staring at the flicker of lights that had been lit at the world's end and sent back to us along the circumference of time.

/>   I found that I was holding myself tense in that silence. I was waiting – waiting for the nova to burst again inside me, perhaps. Waiting for another killing, perhaps somewhere in my sight this time, perhaps someone in this room. And I was waiting for one thing more – the first spreading coldness that might hint to me that my own flesh, like the stone of the studio hearth, had given root to the nekron.

  The box closed. The lights vanished from the ceiling.

  Murray very slowly sat upright in his chair ...

  De Kalb leaned back heavily, his curiously dull eyes full on Murray's face.

  "And that's the whole story," he said.

  It had taken over an hour of quick, incisive questions and painstaking answers to present Murray with a complete picture of the situation in which he himself played so curious a part. We all watched his face, searching, I think, for some sign of the tremendous intellectual and emotional experience through which everyone must go who opened that box.

  Nothing showed. It was the stranger because I knew Murray was almost a hysteric, psychologically. Perhaps he'd learned to control himself when he had to. Certainly he showed nothing of emotion as he shot his cold, watchful questions at De Kalb.

  "And you recognized me," he said now, narrowing his eyes at De Kalb. "I was in that – that underground room?"

  "You were."

  Murray regarded him quietly, his mouth pulled downward in a curve of determination and anger.

  "De Kalb," he said, "you tell a good story. But you're a grasshopper. You always have been. You lose interest in every project as soon as you think you've solved it. Now listen to me a minute. The indoctrination project you were working on with me is not yet fully solved. I know you think so. But it isn't. I see exactly what's happened. Hypnosis as an indoctrination method has led you off onto this wild scheme. You intend to use hypnosis on whatever guinea-pigs you can enlist and – "

  "It isn't true, Murray, It isn't true." De Kalb was not even indignant, only weary. "You saw the Record. You know."

  "All right," Murray admitted after a moment. "I saw the Record. Very well. Suppose you can go forward in time. Suppose you step out, back in the here and now, ten seconds after you step in. You say no time is lost. But what energy you'll lose, De Kalb! You'll be a different man, older, tired, full of experiences. Disinterested, maybe, in my project. I can't let you do it. I'll have to insist you finish that first and then do what you like on this Record deal of yours."

  "It can't be done, Murray," De Kalb said. "You can't get around it that way. I saw you in the time-chamber, remember. You did go."

  Murray put up an impatient hand. "Is this telephone connected with the exchange? Thanks. I can't argue with you, De Kalb. I have a job to do."

  We all sat quiet, watching him as he put a number through. He got his departmental headquarters. He got the man he wanted.

  "Murray speaking," he said .briskly. "I'm at De Kalb's in Connecticut. You know the place? I'm leaving immediately in my plane. I want you to check me in as soon as I get there, probably around three. I'm bringing a man named Cortland with me, newspaper fellow – you know his work? Good? Now listen, this is important." Murray took a deep breath and regarded me coldly over the telephone. Very distinctly he said into it.

  "Cortland is responsible for that series of murders he reported from Brazil. I'm bringing him in for questioning."

  7. OUT OF CONTROL

  I didn't like the way he flew his plane. His hands kept jiggling with the controls, his feet kept adjusting and readjusting the tail-flaps so that the ship was in constant, unnecessary side motion in the air, Murray was nervous.

  I looked down at the trees, the tilted mountain slopes, the roads shining in the sun, with little glittering black dots sliding along it that were cars.

  "You know you can't get away with this, Murray," I said. It was, I think, almost the first thing I had said to him since we took off half an hour ago. After all, there had been little to say. The situation was out of all our hands, as Murray had meant it to be, from the moment he spoke into the telephone.

  "I have got away with it, Cortland," he said, not looking at me.

  "De Kalb has connections as powerful as yours," I told him. "Besides, I think I can prove I'm not responsible for those deaths."

  "I think you are, Cortland. If there's any truth in what De Kalb was saying, I believe you're a carrier."

  "But you're not doing this because you think I'm guilty. You're doing it to stop De Kalb."

  "Certainly." He snapped his lips shut. I shrugged. That, of course, was obvious.

  We flew on in silence. Murray was uneasy, perhaps from the experience of the Record. I think now that he had entirely shut his mind to that. I think he was denying it had ever happened. But his hands and feet still jittered on the controls until I itched to take the plane away from him and fly it myself.

  It was a nice little ship, a six-passenger job that could have flown alone, almost, as any good plane can do in smooth air if the pilot will only let it. I would probably have said just then, if you'd asked me, that I was in plenty of trouble. My troubles hadn't started. They were about to.

  The first intimation was the sound Murray made – a sort of deep, startled, incredulous grunt. I stopped to turn toward him. And then – time stopped.

  I had a confused awareness that something was moving through the ship, something dark and frighteningly swift. But this time there was a difference. The thing I had first encountered in a Rio alley had returned. The first pulse of that nova of blinding brilliance burst outward from the core and center of my body. But it did not rise to its climactic explosion of pure violence. The energy suddenly was shut off at the source. The plane was empty of that monstrous intruder.

  Beside me Murray hunched over the controls, slowly bending forward. I could not see his face. That instant of relief passed in a flashing time-beat.

  Again the pulse throbbed through me. And again it was shut off. There was something terribly wrong with gravity. The earth stood upright in a blurred line that bisected the sky and was slowly, slowly toppling over from left to right. The weight of Murray's body, slumped heavily forward, was throwing the ship out of control.

  I couldn't move – not while those erratic jumping shocks kept pounding at me.

  But I had to move. I had to get hold of the controls. And then, as I put forth all my strength, the explosion channeled into my brain – different, somehow incomplete. I could feel a swiftly-fading ebb-tide draining into the empty void.

  Then it was gone altogether.

  Another part of my mind must have taken over then. And it must have been efficient. Myself, I seemed to be floating somewhere in a troubled void with the image of Murray's lolling head and limp arms. Murray – dead. Dead? He must be dead. I knew that nekronic shock too well.

  In the mindless void where my awareness floated I knew that I was a bad spot temporally. Jerry Cortland was in a bad spot. Murray's headquarters must be expecting him in already with a murder suspect in tow. I was the murder suspect and murder had been done again. And Murray and I had been alone in mid-air when it happened.

  The efficient part of my mind knew what to do. I left it at that. I had no recollection whatever of fighting the plane out of its power dive or of turning in a long high circle as I got lost altitude back. But that must have happened. Time and distance meant nothing to the half of my mind that floated but the other half very efficiently flew the plane.

  "All right now?" De Kalb's voice inquired.

  I sat up shakily. The room was swimming around me but it was a familiar room, I could see Dr. Essen bending above a couch and I could see polished boots and a shoulder with something shiny on it. I must have brought Murray back. Murray – dead?

  "It was – it was the nekron," I said thickly.

  "I know, I know," De Kalb said. "You told us. Don't you remember?"

  "I don't remember anything except Murray."

  "I don't think we can save him," De Kalb said in a flat voice.r />
  "Then he's alive?"

  "Just."

  We both looked automatically toward the couch, where Dr. Essen lifted a worried face.

  "The adrenalin's helping," she said, "But there's no real improvement. He'll sink again as soon as the effect wears off."

  "Can't we get him to a hospital?" I asked.

  "I don't think medical treatment will help him," De Kalb said. "Dr. Essen has a medical degree, you know. She's already done everything the hospitals have tried on the other victims.

  "That creature strikes a place that scalpels and oxygen and adrenalin can't reach. I don't know what or where, but neither do the doctors." He moved his shoulders impatiently. "This is the first time the killer hasn't finished its job. You interrupted it, you know – somehow. Do you know how?"

  "It was intermittent," I said hesitantly. "It kept going away and coming back." I explained in as much detail as I could. It wasn't easy.

  "The plane was moving fast, eh?" De Kalb murmured. "So. Always before the victims have been practically immobilized. That might explain part of it. If the nekronic creature is vibrating through time it might need a fixed locus in space. And the plane was moving very fast in space. That could explain why the attack was incomplete – but complete enough, after all."

  I nodded. "This is going to be pretty hard to explain to Murray's headquarters," I said.

  "There's been one call already," De Kalb told me. "I didn't say anything. I had to think." He struck his fist into his palm impatiently and exclaimed: "I don't understand it! I saw Murray with us in that cave! I saw him!"

  "Has it occurred to you, Ira," Dr. Essen's gentle voice interrupted, "that what you may have seen in the time-chamber was Colonel Murray's dead body, not Colonel Murray asleep?"

  He turned to stare at her.