14. Sean + 5×106minutes
He guessed he must be somewhere out to the east of Pasadena, at least twenty-five miles, maybe more around Azusa, Glendora, Claremont, one of those towns. Definitely east: he could see big mountains off to the north, and he was pretty sure that that was Mount Baldy over there. Certainly there werent any mountains that size west of Pasadena. And the air had that hot, dry inland quality to it.
Sean wasnt surprised to find himself this far from the laboratory. A time displacement of nine and a half years was bound to move him a sizable distance in space. But going east puzzled him. After all, his last jump had been a backs hunt and it had brought him out west of the laboratory. It stood to reason that shunting in the opposite direction in time ought to move him in the opposite direction spatially, too. But maybe not. Expecting anything about time travel to stand to reason was probably dumb.
For a moment he wondered whether he had actually gone backward in time, not forward, on this shunt. Which might explain the eastward displacement.
No. Impossible. Dumb dumb dumb. The one thing that did make sense in all this shunting was the mathematics of reciprocity. Everything had to balance. You swung back, then you swung forward, while your brother at the opposite end of the seesaw made an equal and opposite journey. The last place Sean had been was the minus-5×105-minutes level. Now he had to be at the plus-5×106-minutes level. There were no two ways about that. Beyond any doubt, he must have gone forward. His location in time right now, he knew, had to be late November of the year 2025.
In any case he didnt need a computer to tell him that he had moved into the future. One quick look at his surroundings was all that it took.
This place was strange.
A lot of it looked like any Southern California town of the early twenty-first century, of course. But there were a good many new high-rise buildings too, twenty or thirty stories high. Sean didnt remember high rises being so common out here. And they were buildings of an astonishing weirdness of design.
One had twin curving spikes on its roof, like gigantic horns. Another had a strip of mirrors a yard wide running down its front from top to bottom. A number of buildings had large eye-shaped glass ovals above their entrances, and some had additional eyes higher up on the facade.
Decorations? Or mysterious electronic devices? And the architects had apparently hated straight lines. All of the buildings had odd wriggling edges, sinuous and fluted and swirly. Sean couldnt look for long at any one of them without feeling that he was being pulled around the corner into some other dimension.
The newer cars in the streets had the same twisting,looping lines. They were low and long and somehow sinister-looking, with single bands of grillwork across their fronts where headlights should be, and peculiar arching ornamentsor antennas?rising in startling curves from their roofs. Some were carrying hornlike spikes similar to those on the building down the street. So a whole new kind of design would come into fashion in the years just ahead. He couldnt say that he admired it much.
The strangest thing of all was that there was no one in the streets.
No one. No one at all. He was all alone. He might have been the only human being in the whole world. He stood in the middle of the wide street under a warm midday sun, looking this way and that. No people in sight. No cars moved, no horns honked. Not a sound anywhere.
What had happened here?
Where was everybody?
This was starting to feel creepy. Frowning, Sean began to walk toward the building with the mirrored facade.
Looking up, he saw his own image, broken and refracted a dozen times over. The entrance of the building was a wall of glass three times as tall as he was, decorated only by a jutting blue sphere that he assumed was some kind of doorknob. Hesitantly he put his hand to it.
The moment he touched it, music filled the air.
It came from everywhere at once, a hundred electronic brass bands blaring a hundred marching tunes. He whirled around, astonished, and saw lights suddenly blazing in every building, dazzling fireworks exploding overhead fireworks in daytime!banners unfolding from gravity rotor platforms that had come spinning out from invisible hiding places.
He stared in amazement, trying to read all the banners at once.
WELCOME, SEAN!
THE CITY OF GLENDORA GREETS THE MAN FROM TIME!
GREATER LOS ANGELES CHAMBER OF COMMERCE SAYS
HELLO, SEAN!
THE YEAR2025IS GLAD TO SEE YOU!
SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIAS GREATEST,
IS ALL YOURS!
HERES TO YOUTHE FIRST AND FINEST
TIME-TRAVELER!
He glanced up the wide street and saw the marchers advancing toward him now. What seemed like thousands of people, stretching off into the distance as far as he could see.
Of course. This was probably the biggest day in the history of this little town. And they had had better than nine years to prepare for it.
Good God, Sean murmured. Im famous! And here comes the parade!
15. Eric + 5×107minutes
It was hot and steamy here, a dense, lush, tropical heat. Just drawing a breath was hard work. The humid air wrapped itself around him like a heavy cloak. The thick sweet perfume of a billion flowers lay upon the air. The sky had a curious greenish color, beautiful in its way, but strange and oddly troubling.
This time, Eric thought, the spatial displacement must have moved him clear out to Hawaii, or one of the South Pacific isles.
But something didnt seem right. Tropical isles were always warm but never this hot. The temperature must be well over a hundred here. Well over. He had sometimes experienced heat like this, or almost like this, on field trips out in the desert. But that had been dry heat, torrid yet bearable. This stuff was something else, like being in a steam room. Or worse. Not even the desert got this hot very often.
Where am I, he wondered?
He looked around. There was a wide beach in front of him, crowded with sunbathers. It didnt have the exotic look of a tropical beachcrystalline water, white powdery sand. It looked very much like a California beach. Turning, he could see a town or small city a little way inland, and, behind the town, a steeply rising wall of rugged, heavily forested mountains.
It all seemed very familiar.
It definitely had the look of the California coastup by Santa Barbara, say, where the mountains come down close to the shore. Though these mountains seemed a little closer to the shore than he remembered from his last visit to Santa Barbara.
But what about this sweltering tropical heat? You almost never got temperatures like this along the California coast. And this stifling humidity? Never. Where were the cooling sea breezes? Puzzled, he walked up toward the promenade separating the beach from the town. Here the vegetation seemed wrong. The slim, graceful palm trees that were growing everywhere didnt look like the ones he had known all his life. They were some kind of more tropical species, most likelycoconut palms or royal palms or something else, something too tender to grow in Californias mild but sometimes chilly climate. And these vines, these creepers, these odd ferns, these riotously blossoming shrubs with glistening leavesno, no, Eric thought, none of this is California stuff. California is dry all summer long. These plants must come from some moist jungle.
He paused to catch his breath. Moving around was a real struggle in this greenhouse environment.
Where am I? he wondered again.
He had to be fifty million minutes in the futurea little more than ninety-five years. So this was the summer of the year 2111. If he was still alive in this year, hed be 118 years old. Stretching his luck a little, maybe.
So he knew when he was. But wherewhere?
And suddenly he knew.This greenhouse environment. That was what he had called it a moment ago. He trembled with fear and shock as full understanding hit him. He was in California, all right. But a California that had been utterly transformedin a world that had undergone what must have been a colossal calamity
You savah, mister? asked someone at his elbow.
A girl, about thirteen, fourteen. She was wearing only the tiniest of bathing suits and she had a small metallic pack strapped to her back. A flexible tube ran from the backpack to her mouth. A tall boy stood behind her. He had a similar backpack on.
Savah? Eric repeated. I dont understand.
Are you savah? she said again. Are you all right? Are you okay? She said okay as if it were a word from some foreign language. You dont have your breather on.
No, he said. I dont have one.
You lose it? You look bad mal, savvy? Tray mal.
She was speaking a sort of French, he realized. French and English, mixed. He leaned on the railing of the promenade. She was telling him that he looked sick. And he felt sick.
The air, he said. So thickso humid here, so hot
Not the heat, said the girl. Its the see-oh. Itll plonk you in a quick.
See-oh. C-O, he thought. CO2. Carbon dioxide.
Lend him your breather, Slowjoe, the girl said impatiently, gesturing at her companion. Cant you see hes going to plonk?
Eric was feeling dizzier and dizzier. Vaguely he was aware of the boy unstrapping the device from his back and handing it to him. The girl put the tube in his mouth and told him to breathe deeply. Almost at once his head began to clear. Oxygen? They were watching him worriedly. Nice kids, he thought. Lucky for me.
Savah? she asked. Better now?
Much, he said.
Bien. Go on. Put it on your back.
But I cant let him give me his breather.
Hell go and get another one. Five minutes without wont mort him. Were used to this stuff, you know.
Eric nodded.This stuff. So it had really happened, he thought. The greenhouse effect that the environmental scientists had worried about all those years. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through the centuries of industrial development, until a thick mantle of heat-retaining gas surrounded the Earth and temperatures everywhere started to climb. And the polar ice caps melted, and the seas rose, and the air turned into chemical soup, and the temperate lands turned into steaming tropics, and God only knew what had become of the places that had been tropical before.
Now Sean understood why the mountains here seemed closer to the shore than he thought they ought to be. The mountains hadnt moved. The rising seas had come up onto the land. If sea levels have risen twenty-five or fifty feet, he thought, what has become of Santa Monica? Of New York? The hills of San Francisco must be islands now.
Whats the name of this town? he asked the girl.
Santa Barbara, she said.
Santa Barbara, California?
No, Santa Barbara on the moon. And she laughed. Where do you think you are?
I thought it might be Santa Barbara, he said. But everythings so different from what I He paused.
Go on, she said. Different from what you remember, right?
You know who I am?
Youre a voyageur, yes? A time traveler? You come from the cool years, right?
The cool years, yes. From the year 2016, matter of fact.
The girl smiled. She didnt seem notably startled by what he had just said. Time-travelers must be commonplace items by now, he thought. People dropping in from the past all the time. I knew it toot sweet, right away. You talk like the vieux-time people. You must have been one of the first, no?
The first, he said. The very first.
No blague! she said admiringly. Imagine that! But she still didnt sound enormously impressed. Well, enjoy yourself here. If you can. Dont forget to use your breather. Youll plonk real fast without it, you know.Real fast.
16. Sean -5×107minutes
Well, here comes the parade, finally, said the short red-faced man just to Seans left.
What, again? The parade was over. Was time backing up on him? Had the pendulum slipped a cog? Yes, he could hear the sounds of parade music all over again. Had he somehow been taken a shunt within a shunt, going back to the start of his stay in 2025 to live through an experience he had already had?
Yes, sir, thats what I call a parade! the red-faced man said.
Sean stared. It was a parade, all right, but not the one he had just been in. He could see the prancing drum major now, far down the street. The half-built, dinky-looking, antiquated street. And he could hear the music. Not electronic sounds, no, but an old-fashioned brass band making a joyous blaring uproar. A real bass drum sending out vast booming sounds.
This wasnt Glendora in the year 2025. And this wasnt any parade in honor of Sean Gabrielson, the visitor from out of time. Not at all.
He was in a small town, but it was a much older one. There werent any futuristic high-rise buildings with horns and eyes on them. There werent any high-rises at all, just little wooden or stucco one- and two-story buildings with scrawny young palm trees standing in front of them. And the sign on the street corneran old-fashioned sign, white letters on blue metal, no infoglow, no shimmerglasssaid that this was Wilshire Boulevard.
So the name of this small town was Los Angeles. There wasnt much to it, back here in this year that he realized now must be 1921. The hills to the north were bare. The lofty roadbeds of the freeways were nowhere to be seen. The street was paved, but it looked like a country lane, hardly fit for heavy traffic. Everything had a raw, new look to it.
Boomboomboom
The red-faced man pointed, waved, clapped his hands in glee. He didnt seem to be bothered by the fact that Sean had just materialized out of nowhere beside him. Or that Sean was dressed in the strange clothes of another era, an era yet unborn. Well, this was Hollywood, after all. The man probably thought that Sean was in costume for some science-fiction movie and had just stepped out of the studio to see the parade.
It was a fine spring day. The air was fresh and clean. They havent even invented smog yet, Sean thought in astonishment.
It all looked so peculiar here. And yet not as peculiar as he had expected. In a way he was surprised to see that 1921 was in actual living color, not in black and white, and that the people moved at a normal pace, not in some herkyjerk frenzy. He had seen ancient movies and he realized that he really had imagined that everything in reality would look the way it did in those movies. Quaint, musty, unreal. Well, it was quaint and musty, yes. But not unreal.
Sean turned to the red-faced man. He was wearing a stiff, uncomfortable dark suit, a necktie, a vest. On a warm spring day like this. But everybody else nearby along the parade route was dressed the same way. So formal, so elaborate. Neckties! Vests! The women all had hats on. And gloves. They were the ones who seemed to be in movie costumes, not he. But this was no movie, for these people. This was the real world of 1921; and in that world, this was how people dressed.
Whats the parade all about? Sean asked.
The man frowned at him. Why, in honor of the President!
The President, Sean said. Ahis the President here?
The Presidents in Washington, getting sworn in. Dont you know that? But even if were three thousand miles away, we can celebrate. Yes, sirree! Were having a parade to honor the new President. Cant you see the banners?
Sean turned and looked. The main float was passing by right now. Real orange trees, laden with fruit, atop a horse-drawn platform. And banners, painted on canvas:
WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING, PRESIDENT OF THE
UNITED STATES
CALVIN COOLIDGE, VICE PRESIDENT
INAUGURATION DAY MARCH4, 1921
Three cheers for President Harding! the red-faced man shouted, waving his hat in the air. Hes my man! America first! No more wars! Back to normal! Harding! Harding! Harding! He nudged Sean in the ribs. Whats the matter, are you a Democrat? Lets hear you cheer!
Sean nodded. Why not?
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in 1921, give a cheer for the new President, if thats what everybody all around you is doing.
Harding! he yelled. Harding! Harding! Three cheers for President Harding!
17. Eric -5×108minutes
Eric felt a rush of cool sweet air, almost dizzying. After the dank, moist, thick soup that was the air of Santa Barbara in the year 2111, this was like fresh new wine. He was in a forest of towering redwood trees so tall their tops were lost in the mist high overhead. He reached up to take the breathing device from his mouth.
But the breather was gone. Of course. It was impossible to carry any physical object from one shunt to the next except the things he had had with him when the trip began. The laws of conservation of energy were very strict about that. Whatever gear he had set out with from Time Zero would stay with him throughout the journey, but nothing that he picked up along the way could be transported. There wasnt any possibility of returning from the past with a lost painting of Leonardo da Vinci under your arm, or coming back from the future with some fantastic device that would change the whole world.
Well, he didnt need any gadgets to help him breathe here. This air was the purest he had ever known. He couldnt even imagine how air could be cleaner or fresher than this.
He checked his instruments. Longitude 121 degrees W. He was still in California, then. Latitude a little more than 36 degrees N. That would put him a bit north of the midway line between Los Angeles and San Franciscosomewhere around Monterey, Eric guessed. A pretty hefty spatial displacement this time. But he was 500 million minutes in the past, now. That was 951.3 years. By his best calculation this was a mild, misty January morning in the year A.D.1065.
The forest was beautiful. He had never seen a lovelier place than this.
The mighty chocolate-red redwood trunks were like the columns of a vast cathedral. Far above him, nearly four hundred feet up, the treetops met in a roof of foliage. A pearly twilight glow was all that broke through to brighten the forest floor. The stillness was fantastic. He could hear no sound except the gentle patter of the droplets of condensed fog that fell to the soft needle-carpeted floor, and the distant murmur of a brook. The fronds of huge glistening ferns were everywhere about him.
The year 1065! In Europe now, the man who would be called William the Conqueror was laying his plans for the invasion of England. The Crusades would soon be beginning. There were great native American empires in Mexico and Peru. And at this moment, who knew what was happening in the palaces of China, Africa, the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights?
He felt a moment of something very like regret at finding-himself in this place.
If the spatial displacement had been greater, this shunt might have dropped him down in the hectic midst of historyin Rome, say, or Constantinople, or Venice, or perhaps one of the stone cities of the Mayas. But herehere in this peaceful redwood forest on the California coastEric was as alone as though this were the dawn of time. There was no trace here of whatever sparse and scattered Indian population California had at this time. All was silence. All was peace.
That pang of regret vanished as suddenly as it had come.
To be allowed to see such beauty as this was a privilege beyond measure. How could he yearn for some other place?
Quietly, struck by wonder, Eric wandered through the stupendous groves of trees. He thought of the California he had left behind, the roar of the freeways, the droning of the planes overhead, the immense sprawl of the cities. They had saved a few little redwood forests, sure, somewhere far up north of San Francisco. Like museum exhibits. But everywhere else the hand of man had left its mark.
And this was how it all had looked before we came, he thought.
Here, in this awesome solitude, in this place where perhaps no human being had walked before, he felt himself suddenly swept by an emotion that was completely new to him. He wanted to drop to his knees and give thanksto whom, to what, he wasnt really certainfor the beauty he beheld. He had never done such a thing before. Even now he hesitated, embarrassed, self-conscious.
Go on, he thought. Nobodys watching. And even if somebody were, so what?
But it was too late. The moment had passed. It would be forced, artificial, unreal, for him to do it now. Instead he stood quietly, resting his hand lightly on the giant trunk of a tree by the edge of the little stream.
He felt the strength of it, the immensity. This tree, he thought, had made a great voyage through time, of a sort, itself. It must have been living when Jesus was born. Or even earlier. And on and on through the centuries to this year of 1065, and on beyond. Probably it would still be here in 1865 or 1875 or 1885 or whenever it was that men would come along with their saws and hatchets to cut it down. It might have lived on into the twenty-first century, the twenty-second, even the thirty-second, if it had been left to finish its long journey undisturbed.
After a while he walked onward. He had no regret now that the shunt had brought him here, instead of to some busy capital of the medieval world. This moment out of time, this quiet interlude in the strange fantastic journey that the swinging pendulum had launched him on, was worth a thousand Constantinoples.
He smiled. And then he dropped to his knees after all, and bowed his head, and gave thanks and praise, not knowing to whom, to what. For this beauty, for this moment of peace: thanks and praise. Thanks and praise.
18. Sean + 5×108minutes
Alt! No podo pasari! Todos tempuus vorbudt aqui!
Are you speaking to me? Sean asked the huge mechanical creature that loomed before him.
Anglic! the great gleaming robot cried. Du spikke Anglic! Yis u no?
Yis, Sean said, bluffing for all he was worth. Ik spikke Anglic. Yis.
The thing was at least nine feet high, and it was all eyes and mouth. Half a dozen huge sparkling eyes ran around its upper end, some kind of band of sensors that flickered restlessly up and down the whole spectrum and probably beyond it into the infrared and the ultraviolet. And an ugly gaping slot of a mouth, big as the top of a garbage can, in its belly. The better to swallow you with, my little timetraveler. Du spikke Anglic? Answer yis u no, or Ill gobble you up!
Sean looked around uneasily. He was standing on some rubbery catwalk suspended about twenty feet above what might have been a street. The street looked rubbery too,with purple pumpkin-shaped growths sprouting from it at intervals of eight or ten feet. To his right was what looked like a wall of ice, a smooth glacial face rising to an enormous height. He could see people moving around freely within the ice. So it wasnt ice and not a glacier, but a building of some sort. On the other side of him the street was lined with giant metallic needles the size of telephone poles. They were glowing pale purple and giving off soft twanging sounds.
So this is the yearA.D.2967, Sean thought. Well, it sure looks like the year A.D.2967.
Anglic, the huge robot said. Du spikke Anglic. Something was rumbling in its interior, making a cement-mixer sound. The eye-band turned a blazing yellow, then slowly subsided into orange and red. Small portholes on the robots sides opened and swiveled. Projections like the feet of insects came poking out of them, waving and wriggling about.
It means to swallow me, Sean thought. As soon as it can figure out what I am. Im going to be a tin cans afternoon snack.
He wondered what would happen to him if he turned and tried to make a run for it. Probably a bad idea. He imagined jets of gluey liquid squirting from those portholes and lassoing him at fifty paces.
Anglic, said the robot again. You are a speaker of Anglic. Yes. Yes. Mode adjustment made. Comprendus? You are a tempuu and Anglic is your sprak. Comprendus? Comprendus? Rispondim! Do you comprendan?
You dont quite have it right yet, Sean said. But keep trying.
No comprendus?
No comprendus, right.
Correction mode. Correction mode. The robot began sputtering and mumbling to itself. Cautiously Sean started to back away, moving very slowly. Maybe it wont notice that Im leaving. The sounds from the metallic poles to his left grew higher in pitch. People were pointing at him through the glassy walls of the artificial glacier. You will cease departing, the robot said. Correction has been made. We use your mode now. You are Anglic-speaking time-traveler, unauthorized. You will us show your documentuus.
Documents, Sean said. Thats better Anglic. English, we call it. But I dont have any documents. Im too early for that. I come from the year
No documentuus! No documentuus! The robots eyeband flashed vivid scarlet. Illicitimu! Tempuu vorbudtu! No podo pasari! It was getting really excited. The enormous froglike mouth was opening and closing. Sean saw lights flashing inside, and gears moving about. It began to move toward him in a slow, ponderous way.
It is going to gobble me up, he thought. Because Im an unregistered time-traveler and I dont have the right passport. Or something.
He turned and started to run.
No! a voice cried behind him. Alt! No flikken! Is safe! Is okay! I to do, you will safe!
A girl, a womanhe couldnt tell which, he couldnt begin to guess her ageemerged out of nowhere. She was very slender and she was taller than he was. She had glistening silver hair and silver eyes too, and her skin was bright red, the color of a ripe apple. She looked strange, but she looked beautiful, too.
She might have been the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Darting swiftly around him, she ran right up to the giant robot and slapped the palm of her hand against itsmidsection. A panel opened at once. She reached in and pressed a key. Instantly the robots eye-band color shifted toward blue. Podo pasari, the robot muttered. Tempuu licitimu. Validimu. Propriu. And it moved off, still muttering to itself.
The woman smiled. Her silver eyes dazzled him.
You will forgive, she said. My Anglic. Is not big good. But you will safe now. Her voice was deep and rich and warm, with an odd little crack in it. It was like no voice he had ever heard, but very beautiful. Her hand reached toward his. They do not like tempuus, this year. Time-travelers. Too many come, too much confuse. But I will protect. My people will. How is your name?
Sean, he said. Sean Gabrielson. From the year 2016.
I bin Hepta-Noni-Acanta-Leela-Quintu-Quintu, she said.
Is all that your name?
I am to you Quintu-Leela, she said, and laughed. Her laughter was magical. From the humming telephone poles came an answering sound, delicate, eerie. Her hand tightened on his. Come with me. You will safe with me. I will show the world. Again the laugh. Everything. You and me, we bin amicuus. Friends, you say? Friends. We bin very warm friends. Comprendus?
Sean nodded. He felt as though an electric current were passing from her hand into his. Perhaps it was. Quintu-Leela, he thought. The sound of her voice was marvelously strange and strangely marvelous. And those silver eyes. He imagined her name and his entwined within a heart, blazing in purple fire in the sky.
Love at first sight, that was what it was.
He had heard about such things but he had never really believed they happened. Especially to him. Love at first sight! Was that too crazy? Quintu-Leela and Sean. Sean and Quintu-Leela. God, she was beautiful! And fascinating! That voice! Those eyes!