The Time Axis Read online

  I sighed heavily. I hoped he was. Things were entirely out of my hands now. I watched Paynter take a black helmet out of the smaller box before him, plug in its cord to the larger box, hold the headpiece out to me.

  "Here," he said briskly. "You and I could ask one another questions until doomsday and not come nearer any understanding. This will put us in a mental rapport – fast and complete."

  I looked at the thing skeptically, feeling dubious. It was all very well for De Kalb in my mind to urge compliance. How did I know what his real interests were? What Paynter's were? Certainly not the same as mine.

  "Let me think this over a minute," I said doubtfully. "I don't understand – "

  "The control is set for certain basic problems." Paynter said in an impatient voice. "Well open our minds to each other, that's all. There's automatic screening to eliminate trivialities but everything centering around the basic of time-travel will be revealed in three seconds, much more clearly than you could possibly convey it in words. In return, I'll understand all you need to know, so that you can talk to me intelligently and won't have to stop for questions every third word. Put it on, man, put it on!"

  I lifted the helmet dubiously. For a moment I hesitated. Then the memory of the dead man so near us flashed vividly through my mind and I knew I had no time to lose. It might happen again. I was afraid of what Paynter might discover – but how could I refuse now? How much had he noticed when the killer struck? Perhaps it would be better if he knew the whole story.

  The helmet slipped easily on my head and seemed to adjust itself automatically. Paynter was saying something about projection.

  "You had books in your time. In a good one there's projection – you felt the way the author wanted you to feel. This is simply a further development. You may relive the experiences of historical persons, if the screening works out that way. I'll get certain knowledge from you, you from me – and we draw on the projection library as a supplement, a concordance, if necessary."

  His fingers were busy adjusting controls. I had time enough to think, "This is the forerunning of the Record, of course. One of the steps toward something more complex."

  Then a bar of spinning light sprang up from the larger box, whirling so rapidly that atoms of light seemed to spiral out from it. And – then I was somebody else.

  I was a guy named Bannister who'd been born after Hiroshima. I was standing in a room a mile underground. The General was sitting at his desk playing with a pistol. We were temporarily safe here, though it wasn't really safe anywhere. Still, there was a half mile of valves, Geigers and filters – the atomic absorption stacks – between us and the surface, so not much radiation could get in.

  "Let's have it," the General said,

  This was one war that hadn't gone by the rules. This time the top men were getting killed – the ones who'd always died in bed before. So they were beginning to grope frantically around in Pandora's box muttering, "Where'd Hope get to?"

  They were beginning to find out they should have stood in bed.

  The Second Atomic War. I – whoever I was – never thought about it. I'd lived it for some years. I guess I was one of the early mental mutations, part of the social mutation that had to take place after the world began to rock like a gyroscope slowing down. I knew already I didn't think in quite the same way the older men did. Sometimes I wondered if the change, after all, meant only a keener ruthlessness.

  The General said, "Well? Where's the report?"

  "He's done it, sir," I said.

  The General put the pistol down on his desk and showed his teeth. "Is is practical? That's the point."

  "It's practical sir," I said. "Inanimate matter only, so far. But such matter can be transported for a thousand-mile radius. A receiver must be spotted first, though. It means interplanetary colonization one of these days – because the first space-ship can take a receiver with it and open up a pipeline for supplies. This is only the start."

  "A matter-transmitter," the General said and suddenly crumpled the papers on his desk. "Armistice? We'll forget that now. GHQ will change its tune now we've got this new weapon."

  "The inventor wants to use the device for peaceful purposes, sir," I said. "I heard rumors the war was over."

  He looked at me. "They all do. Yes, the war was over yesterday. But well start it again."

  Then I knew that I was a mutation after all – mentally. The General and I just didn't think the same way. We didn't have the same values and we never would. He hadn't matured in an atomic world.

  I had. I picked up the pistol from the General's desk. His brain was obsolescent anyway.

  Then I was somebody else.

  "Cities?" I said to my visitor. "No, we'll never rebuild them. We won't need to."

  "But the world is in ruins."

  "Technology is the answer."

  "You mean machines can build where men cannot?"

  "Aren't they doing it?"

  They were – yes. Old as I was, over a hundred – whoever I was – I could not remember a time when the planet had not been radiotoxic. Not all of it, of course. The men that were left, the survivors, gathered in the islands relatively free from the poison. Travel, even by plane, would have been too dangerous, but we had the matter-transmitters. So we were not insular. There were the colonized planets.

  Still, Earth was the home. With the halftime of the radio-dust, it would be a long time before most of the planet would become habitable. Yet Earth could be rebuilt, in preparation, by machines.

  "I will show you my plan," I said. "Come with me. I'll be dead long before there's a use for my Mechandroids, but that day will surely come."

  He followed me along the corridor. He was a powerful man, one of the most powerful in the world, but he followed me like a young student.

  "It's hard to know the best plan," he said, half to himself.

  "We have a Galaxy to colonize. Human minds can't cope with that. Nor can machines. The machines must fail because they're emotionless and inhuman. What you need is a human machine or a mechanical human. A perfect blend. A synthesis. Like my Mechandroids."

  I pulled back a curtain and showed him the young strong body in the glass coffin. The machines clicked and hummed from all around. The wires quivered slightly.

  "This is one of my Mechandroids," I said. "They cannot reproduce; they do not breed true. But they can be manufactured. It's as though a machine had given birth to a human."

  "He looks thoroughly normal."

  "I chose his parents. I needed the right heredity. I selected the chromosomes most suited to my needs – and I tried time after time before I succeeded. But then this Mechandroid was born. Almost since birth he has been trained – hypnogenically – educated, indoctrinated, by the thinking-machines.

  "He has been taught to think as accurately as a machine. The human brain is theoretically capable of such discipline but the experiment has never been tried before to this extent. Mechandroids, I believe, can solve all human problems, and solve them correctly."

  "Machine-trained?" he said doubtfully. "Machines must serve men. They must free men, so that the capacity of the human brain may be fulfilled. These Mechandroids will smooth the path, so that man may follow the highest science – that of thought."

  "There's no danger?" he asked, looking at the silent Mechandroid.

  "There's no danger," I said.

  14. VEGA-BORN

  Then I was somebody else.

  Saturn blazed in the sky above me, blotting out half the firmament, as I fled down the twisting street from the Mechandroid. I had to find somebody who knew what to do. But nobody seemed alive in the city. Nobody but the silent striding creature that was pursuing me.

  Homecoming, eh? I was Vega-born. I was sixteen. I'd taken the great jump across interstellar space in the matter-transmitter with my Age Group – nine of them – for the Earth tour and, because all Solar tours start with the outer planets, we'd stepped out of the matter-receiver in Titan.

  Then eve
rything happened at once, too fast for me to follow. The Mechandroid came running toward us – and we began to fall, one by one. So we scattered. With my usual bad luck, I managed to blunder right into a group of the Mechandroids who were working at something.

  They were in a big room, gathered around a table where a body lay. Above the table was a shining web – a neural matrix, hooked up to a matter-transmitter. I knew enough about basic physics to get some idea of what was happening and I stopped right there, like a statue, watching.

  The Mechandroids were making a super-Mechandroid – if that's the term. People had talked about the possibility. Everybody, I guess, was a little afraid, because the Mechandroids were plenty smart and if they worked out a collateral mutation – they're individually sterile – why, then, a super-Mechandroid would be horribly powerful and dangerous.

  For the Mechandroids can be controlled, but a super-Mechandroid couldn't.

  They said, not long ago, that they weren't capable of solving certain galactic problems and they wanted to go ahead and build what they called a second-stage Mechandroid. Of course they were forbidden.

  But the body on the table before me, under the shining neural web, was a super-Mechandroid in the making. If a thing like that – with all its potential intelligence and lack of emotion – came alive it would be too dangerous to think about.

  I turned around and started running again. I kept on running. Once I heard a scream, pretty far away.

  If the only way the Mechandroids could build their second-stage Mechandroid was to destroy every human in the Titan city – why, that was the logical solution. So that's what they'd done. I passed an Exploratory Station and took a minute to go in and grab a vacuum suit. Carrying it, I headed for a gate in the great dome that covered the city.

  Two hours later I was sitting on a mountainside half a mile away, looking down on the dome and wondering how long my air would last. I felt pretty lonesome with Saturn dropping toward the horizon and only the dark and the stars around me.

  After awhile I saw the ships come. You don't see many ships these days but I knew what they were. Half a dozen of them came down silently out of the blackness and hovered above the city and a moment later there wasn't any city – just a big burst of light and sound and energy.

  I sent up my SOS rockets and got picked up. On the trip back I heard a lot of talk about how we were going to get the Mechandroids under tight control and keep them there. Supervision for every one of the creatures. No chance to get together and make a super-Mechandroid.

  I guess I didn't enjoy Earth as much as I'd thought. It had been rebuilt and most of the radioactivity was gone. There was just one machine-city left – a museum these days. But the planet seemed small.

  Of course we started out from Earth in the beginning. But now we've got the Galaxy.

  Then I was somebody else.

  I was Job Paynter.

  Every individual is expendable, but the race is not. I am not, but not unnecessarily. My value to the solar community is high. And why not? I am competent in my work – general integration, Seventh Galactic Sector, Earth-based. (I am competent, or was until we opened that cavern under the mountain on Earth, and found Job Paynter asleep there. No, I am competent still. Puzzled but able to find an answer when all the returns are in. Meanwhile I must think objectively about this mystery. I must think objectively.)

  The Mechandroid Belem's desertion should have been reported to me immediately. There is no excuse for incompetence in a world where specialized training begins before birth and where reorientation treatment can be had as often as necessary.

  When I investigated Belem's disappearance I was much disturbed to learn how many other Mechandroids had vanished at the same time. I immediately assigned an all-out search, Galaxywide. But I was not too hopeful.

  The race moves on. It has its human limitations. The tools we make have no limitations at all. When we educate ourselves to learn to handle those tools most efficiently we can go on to the next step, whatever it may be. Meanwhile there must be check and balance – rigid control.

  I assigned to the Mechandroid Belem a problem involving the opening of the Betelgeuse system. I had worked with Belem before. While Mechandroid knowledge and experience goes into a common pool Belem's reactions would be a shade quicker since he had once opened a similar system before, so I asked him. At that time I was on the Antares base. When I checked later on Belem he had vanished.

  We went through the automatic routine. We studied the records and traced Belem's movements up to the moment of his disappearance. We learned several interesting things. Obviously Belem had thought it necessary to disappear in order to solve his assigned problem. So we checked on the problem. The Andromeda system was involved and we discovered that there was something odd, hitherto undiscovered, about the Andromeda sector.

  First of all there was a potential nova involved. Secondly, a new type of matter existed on one of the planets revolving about the star that was preparing to explode. It seemed to be a neutral matter, in absolute stasis. We quarantined the system immediately, pending farther investigation.

  You never know into what queer bypaths a Mechandroid's investigation will lead. The creatures see factors involved that no human mind would bother with. They're never content with ten decimals but always work down to the absolute quantity. It didn't surprise me a great deal to find recording-tapes in Belem's laboratory which described and localized a terrestrial time-axis.

  We went to the point charted. Belem had already worked out a system for displacing the special atomic structure involved and waking the subjects. What subjects? I learned that soon enough.

  At the time-axis, which existed not far from the ancient bed of the St. Lawrence River, we found a shell of matter. R-type radiations showed us there were four living beings within that shell. They were in drugged hypnotic sleep. One of them was the Mechandroid Belem. The second was myself. The others were an unknown man and woman.

  My Director discussed the situation with me.

  "Belem has been located?" I asked.

  "We thought so," the Director said, "but you're in the time-axis chamber too. You're apparently in two places at once – so Belem may be as well. You know how dangerous a Mechandroid on an unorthodox problem can be. Don't forget what happened to Titan twenty years ago. Well, obviously four people have, in the past, used drags and hypnosis to free their minds from time-consciousness as their bodies were freed by the atomic displacement their device has set up around them."

  "And I'm with them, it seems."

  "You have no memory of it? But they came out of the past – all three of them."

  "Circular time? Spiral time?"

  "I don't know," the Director said. "It's theoretical so far. The empirical method obviously is to waken these four and find out what happened to them. How they came to be in this time-axis. Certainly a Mechandroid loose in time is too dangerous to be permitted. As for you – "

  We had no answer to that, either of us. I was standing here, solid and real. But my double, my other self, was in the time-axis.

  "Waken them," the Director said.

  That was obviously the next step. The only possible step.

  "Very well," I said. It was my job. A job must be completed at any cost. Men are expendable. Mankind is not.

  Then I was Jeremy Cortland again.

  We were in the Swan Garden, Paynter and I, looking at each other across far distances. The shadows of a dozen other selves faded and wavered through my mind – and simultaneously I felt a strange sort of mental withdrawal. With the dying remnant of Paynter's memory, I knew the reason. As I had been reading – living in – other minds, so he had been reading my own.

  But he did not know that the Mechandroid Belem – De Kalb – was spying through my brain. I felt certain of that, as certain as though – De Kalb – Belem had told me in so many words. No, Paynter might have stripped my mind clean of its memories, but there was one memory of the Mechandroid's curious powers had kep
t from his grasp – the brief adventure I had had, via matter-transmitter, on another planet among Mechandroids.

  Abruptly full realization came to me. I remembered the "autopsy" I had glimpsed – the Mechandroids clustered about a long table on which a body lay and above which a shining web quivered. Once, twenty years ago, a boy had seen a similar sight on Titan – the creation of a super-Mechandroid, the experiment utterly forbidden through all the Galaxy. A city had been blasted into dust to stop that danger. I remembered, strangely, with another man's memory.

  Now it was happening again. A second stage man-machine was being constructed somewhere on some far planet – and Paynter did not know that, and I could not tell him. The post-hypnotic command was too strong for me. I could not betray the secret to Paynter even if I tried.

  Which reminded me that Paynter now had my memories. His face was grayish as he watched me.

  "That new type of matter we've just found in the Andromeda system," he said. "I know what it is now. You called it the nekron."

  Then he must know as well that I was infected with the – the thing, that I was a carrier, a culture for that swift, slaying thing that no grip could hold.

  But he did not mention it. Instead, in a troubled way, he began to talk about Belem.

  "Belem was set the problem of opening the Betelgeuse system. Which is simple enough. But the Mechandroids are thorough. I suspect that Belem checked all the possible influential factors, and saw that nekronic matter exists in Andromeda on a planet of a sun ready to become a nova. "When that happens the violent explosion will carry the nekronic atoms, on light radiations, far into interstellar space – far enough to reach and infect Betelgeuse. For some reason I don't know yet Belem decided the time-axis should be – " He paused, scowling. "Did he leave those notes purposely? Did he want us to open the time-axis chamber, Cortland?"

  "How should I know?" I asked. "You've got all my memories now, haven't you?"

  "I think he did. But where is Belem now?" I knew that – but I couldn't tell him.