It isnt the same thing,I said.The individual has to die sooner or later, yes. But the family goes on, the nation goes on, the world goes on. Each one of us does his part in the time thats allotted. What other choice do we have?
And if you knewyou absolutely knewthat the world itself would perish on the day of your own death? Would you give up all striving because it seemed futile, wizard? Or would you continue to work and plan?
His argument seemed wrong to me.But this isnt a matter of the whole world being destroyed! Its a matter of one island being struck by catastrophe, and its people having advance warning of the fact, and being unwilling to move to a safer place despite everything they know. That makes no sense to me.
Only the kings know of the doom that is coming. Not any other soul.
Even so. If the kings know, its their duty to save their people.
And shall the king then thwart the will of the gods?Ram asked.We must take what comes. And fully learn the lesson the gods wish to teach.
That was where I gave up. I understood, then: these people really are alien. Their minds dont work like ours. They seethe steamroller coming, and they refuse to get out of the way. Its the will of the gods, they say. And for them thats all there is to it. Pure fatalism. A philosophy like that isnt easy for me to comprehend. But after all Im only a visitor here.
And my visits almost over. I feel the bond weakening; I feel Home Era starting to pull me back. In a little while Ill be up front there, giving my report, confessing my blatant errors of judgment, surrendering myself to the judgment thats waiting for me. If Im lucky theyll go easy on me. I understand that Im not the first time-traveler to give in to the temptation to help his host avoid serious trouble. Were only human, after all.
And what will happen here, I wonder?
Well, Atlantis will be destroyed. That was a given fact from the start. Perhaps itll happen when Ram is king, perhaps in the reign of some grandchild of hisbut it will happen. No question of it. Fire and brimstone will fall, and the sea will rise, and the island will be swallowed up. In that moment the empire will end.
But a few ships are going to escape. Im certain of that.
Where will they go? Egypt? Mesopotamia?
Will they live to build still another civilization, which will eventually perish also, but manage to pass a few fragments onward, until our world, the world that we call modern, has taken form? Somewhere in our own world today are the descendants of these Athilantans. Of that Im certain too. These perpetual wanderers, these many-times refugeessurely they endure, surely they still dwell among us. By now theyve forgotten their own history, I suspect. They dont know that their ancestors came from another world to live among us Dirt People, and once built the greatest empire that ever was, of which not a trace remains. Its all forever lost, back here in the distant buried corridors of time.
But thats not important. Time devours everything. Entire histories vanish. What matters is endurance. The spirit survives and goes onward when the palaces crumble and the kings are forgotten.
And if Ive learned anything from this fantastic journey in time, Lora, thats it. You too, out there among the mammoth-hunters in their houses of bone, have seen what its like to struggle against hostile nature and prevail. I, here in glittering Athilan, have also discovered a thing or two about how harsh a place the universe can be, and how stubborn we mortals can be in fighting back.
Ram knows Im leaving soon, disappearing into a distant-future time thats not even a dream to him. I wonder if hell miss his demon, his wizard. I suspect he will.
I know Im going to miss him. Hes the most noble guy Ive ever known. And I think hes going to be the greatest Grand Darionis that the Empire of Athilan has ever had.
And thats the whole story. Its just about time to go now, love. Ill be seeing you in a little while, only twenty thousand years from here. I hope they have a pizza waiting for us when we get there.
PROJECT PENDULUM
1. Eric -5 minutes
Displacement hit him like a punch in the gut. He had to fight to keep from doubling up, coughing and puking. He was dizzy, too, and his legs kept trying to float up toward the ceiling. But the sensation lasted only a fraction of a second, and then he felt fine.
He was still in the laboratory, standing right in front of himself. In front of Sean, too. Twin and twin. Sean and the other version of himself were sitting side by side on the shunt platform in their strange little three-legged metal chairs, waiting for it all to begin.
Five minutes from now the singularity coupling would come to life and the displacement force would take hold of them. And they would be shuttled at infinite speed between the black hole and the white hole until they were thrust out through the time gate. But right now they were staring in wonder and amazement at himat the extra Eric, Eric2, the one who had been conjured up out of the mysterious well of time. Who had been pulled five minutes out of the future to stand before them now.
Weird to be looking at yourself like this, Eric thought. Seeing yourself from the outside.
In a sense, of course, he had had a way of seeing himself-from the outside all his life. He just needed to glance at his twin brother, Sean. Looking at Seans eyes was almost like looking into a mirror. The same color, the same glinting alertness. The same quick motions, taking everything in.
But this was different. Sean was like a mirror image of him, and your mirror image is never what you are. Eric didnt feel he looked as much like Sean as everyone else seemed to think, anyway. But now he was looking at himself, not Sean. Seeing neither his twin brother nor his own mirror image, but seeing himself unreflected, as others saw him all the time.
Strange. His nosethe nose of the other Ericdidnt seem right and his smile turned the wrong way at the corners of his mouth. His eyebrows were reversed, with the one on the right side pointing up. His whole face looked out of balance.
Eric wandered around the lab like some sort of disembodied spirit, prowling here and there. Someone aimed a camera at him and he made faces into it, putting his hands to his ears and wiggling them.
Dr. Ludwig said, Five minutes exactly. Perfect displacement. Perfect visibility.
Paradox number one, Dr. White chimed in. The duplication. The overlap of identity.
And paradox number two, also. The cumulative and self-modifying aspects of the time-stream correction.
Say that again? Eric asked.
Ludwig didnt trouble to reply. He glowered and scowled and vanished into the flow of his own intricate thoughts. It seemed to bother him that Eric had spoken at all. As if Eric were nothing more than an irritating distraction at this very complicated moment.
All around the room, technicians were throwing switches and tapping commands into terminals. Everybody was tense. To all these people Time Zero, the moment of the initial shunt, was still four and a half minutes away. The final delicate calibrations and balances had to be made.
Some of the staff people were staring at him the way they might stare at a ghost. That puzzled him for a moment. They should be used to backward-going time travelers by now. After all, Sean had already come this way on the minus-fifty-minute shunt, hadnt he? And Eric would be doing the minus-five-hundred-minute one himself a few hours ago. Even though he hadnt experienced it yet, they had. Or should have.
But then Eric recalled what they had told him about these past-changing paradoxes. Each swing of the pendulum retroactively corrected everybodys memories and perceptions. That was how it had been in the earlier experiments with robots and animals and they expected it to work the same this time. Nobody remembered Seans minus-fifty minutes appearance, or any of the earlier ones, because they hadnt happened yet. But as the pendulum kept swinging, those appearances would happen, at times earlier than this, and the corrections would be made, and everyone would begin to remember a past that right now didnt yet exist. Or something like that. It made no sense if you tried to think of it in the old straight-line way. Now that time travel was a fact, no one could think that way ever again.
Warning lights were lit up on all the instrument panels now. Critical displacement momentum was nearly attained. Sean and that other Eric would be on their way in another few instants. And hed be moving along, too. He couldnt stay here much longer. Any minute now the next Eric2 would be making the journey from Time Zero back to minus-five-minutes, the journey that he himself had just taken. The mathematics of time wouldnt allow him still to be here when the loop began all over again. You could have an Eric and an Eric2 in the same place at the same time, but not more than one Eric2. He would have to be up and out, swinging toward his second stop, the plus-fifty-minute level.
He could feel the force pulling at him now.
Eric waved jauntily at the Eric and Sean on the platform. When shall we three meet again, he asked himself? Probably never. Hed see Sean again at the end of the experiment, sure. If all went well. But there was no reason why he should ever come face-to-face with himself a second time.
Which was just as well, he decided. Theres something creepy about looking yourself in the eye.
Have a good trip, guys! he called out to them. And the force seized him and swept him away into the time-stream.
2. Sean + 5 minutes
And then at long last they threw the final switch, the one that would send him spinning off into the vast distant reaches of time, and nothing happened. At least that was how it felt to Sean at first. No blinding flashes of light, no strangely glowing haloes, no sinister humming sounds, no sense of turbulent upheaval. Nothing. An odd calmness, even a numbness, seemed to envelop him. So far as he could tell, nothing had changed at all. He was still sitting right where he had been, on the left-hand focal point of the singularity coupling.
Maybe it was too soon. Only an instant had passed, after all. Maybe the displacement cone was still building up energy, still gathering the momentum it would need to hurl him across the centuries.
A moment later Sean started finding out how wrong he was.
That first moment of calm began to fade as bits of data came flooding into his mind: scattered and trivial bits at first, adding up very quickly into something overwhelming.Subtle wrongnesses became apparent, little ones that quickly grew bigger and bigger in his mind:
Dr. Ludwig, who had been over by Erics side of the singularity coupling when the last switch was thrown, had moved to his left, barely outside the event horizon of the shunt field.
Dr. White, who had been all the way across the big room in front of the bank of monitor screens frantically fidgeting with her thick curling hair, now was leaning against the frame of the lab door with her arms folded calmly.
The computer printers, which had been standing silent in the moment before the throwing of the switch, were spewing copy like crazy. The frontmost one had an inch thick stack of pages in its hopper.
Half a dozen technicians who had been scattered here and there around the room were gathered in a tight cluster just beyond the gleaming nickel-jacketed hood of the field shield. They were staring in at Sean as though he had sprouted a second heador had lost the one he used to have.
And more. The pattern of lights on the instrument panels was different. Someone had restrung the tangle of drooping gray cables on the back wall. And the video camera dolly had been pushed about halfway down the track in his direction. It had been in front of Eric before. At least a dozen tiny changes of that sort had been made.
It was, he thought, very much like one of those before and after blackout tests they give you when youre a kid, when they want to measure your I.Q. They show you the image of a room, and then the screen goes dark, and a moment later it lights up and everythings been moved around. You have to note down as many of the changes as you can pick out, within thirty seconds or so. That was what had happened here. In the twinkling of an eye, before had turned into after. Five minutes after.
So he really had taken a leap through time.
After all the months and months of planning and training and doubting and hoping, he had finally embarked on this fantastic voyage into the remote past and the far-off unknown future, a voyage that would unfold in a series of jumps. Small jumps at first, and then unimaginably vast.
Jump number one. He was five minutes in his own future. All the little changes around the room told him that.
And now he noticed the biggest change of all, the one he had somehow managed to keep blocked from his awareness until this moment.
Eric wasnt there anymore.
Erics three-legged aluminum chair was still there, to the right of the singularity coupling. But Eric himself was gone.
Sean felt dazed. A thick oily fog was trying to wrap itself around his brain. It was like a delayed reaction coming on, the whole crushing weight of the knowledge that he had actually been ripped out of space and time and then had been thrust back into place somewhere else.
How do you feel, Sean? Dr. Ludwig asked.
The words were like rolling thunder in Seans ears. He had to work hard to wring some sense from the blurred, booming sounds.
Not bad, he said automatically. Not bad at all.
He kept staring at the empty chair to his right, beyond the cone of the displacement torus. Eric wasnt there. Eric wasnt there. That was the only thought in his mind. Suddenly it had driven even the fact of the time voyage itself from the center of his consciousness.
For the entire twenty-three years of Seans life, Eric had always been there. Somewhere. Maybe not close at hand but always in some way there. They could be on opposite sides of the continent and yet they always remained aware of each others presence in some mysterious, indefinable way that neither of them tried to understand or explain. It had been like that for them all the way back to the beginning, to that time when they had shared the same womb, Eric lying beside him, jostling for space, poking his little arms and legs where they didnt belong.
Sean had never been alone like this before.
He had understood that the experiment was going to separate them in time, sending Eric one way, him another. But there is understanding and there is understanding. There are things you understand in your mind, and there are things you understand in your bones. Now that the contact between them had actually been severed, he was coming fully to realize what it meant to be separated from his twin by an enormous and uncrossable gulf of time. That was different. That was terrifying.
Sean? Dr. Ludwig said again, rumbling and strange as before. I asked you how you were feeling.
Not bad, I told you. He turned, stared, worked hard at focusing his eyes. He was getting some odd visual effects now. Streaks of colored lights, reds and blues and greens. Everything seemed too long and narrow. And there was some double vision. He was dimly aware that Dr. Ludwig was still talking to him. And Dr. White, too. Their words came to him from a million miles away. How are you feeling, how are you feeling, how are you feeling. What did that mean? Oh. It means how are you feeling, he thought. Is that any of their business? He was so terribly confused.
Sean
Im all right! he snapped. He didnt want them to think he couldnt take it.
They looked at him blankly. He tried to explain things, but he had the feeling his words were ricocheting around them like bullets. They turned to each other in bewilderment.
What did he say?
What did he say?
What did he say?
Sean? Try to speak more slowly. Youre all hypered up.
Am I? You sound all slowed down.
It was getting worse. He felt that his own chair was melting and flowing beneath him. And he was starting to melt with it. A sense of chill and a sense of burning at the same time. A strangeness in his stomach. A rising and a falling in his chest. That first calm moment when nothing seemed to have changed seemed like a million years ago. Everything was changing now. Everything. He wondered if Eric was feeling anything like this. Wherever Eric was right now. Whenever Eric was.
Maybe my voice will be easier for you to make out, Sean.
That was Dr. White. Speaking gently, softly, carefully. Her voice sounded deeper than it should have been, but not as strange as Dr. Ludwigs.
Sean tried to force himself to relax.
He said, making an effort to be understood, What was the span of the jump, Dr. White?
Five minutes precisely. Right on target.
And how long has it been since I got here?
Fifteen, twenty seconds.
That was all? It felt like half an hour. His mind was feeding him distorted information. Was this how it was going to be, on and on through time, everything blurred and confused? Like a nightmare. Stumbling across millions of years in a dopey fog, understanding nothing.
What have you heard from my brother? Sean asked.
Your brothers fine. Dr. Ludwigs voice.
Youve heard from him?
We saw him. Five minutes before Time Zero.
Sean frowned and shook his head. Everything was so hard to follow.
Five minutes before the shunt? Well, yes, but what I meant was He paused. He didnt know what he meant. I know you saw my brother then. You saw both of us then, right here. But
We saw him and we saw you. The soft voice of Dr. White. But we saw an extra Eric also, Eric2, the one traveling backward from Time Zero. Dont you remember that?
An extra Eric. He felt so stupid.
Smiling at us. Winking. Happy and confident.
Traveling backward, Sean murmured, struggling to cut through the fog in his brain. An extra Eric.
So muddled, his mind. His fine mind, his outstanding mind. He wondered if hed ever be able to do physics again. Or even simply to think straight. He shook his head again, slowly, heavily, like a wounded bear.
They had seen Ricky traveling backward in time. Saw him arrive five minutes before Time Zero, before the start of the experiment. In this very room. Why cant I remember seeing him? Or do I? I think I do, yes. Sean closed his eyes a moment. He tried to imagine the scene.
That ghostly figure, hovering in front of them, looking so very cheerful. Ricky always looked cheerful, even at crazy times. So there had been one Eric Gabrielson sitting in the right-hand chair on the shunt platform and another one, Eric2, floating around the middle of the room. And that had been five minutes before Time Zerothe shunt that balanced this one that had carried him five minutes beyond Time Zero. The first swing of the giant pendulum that would cut across millions of years, carrying them backward and forward, backward and forward, backward and forward
He wasnt sure if he could remember seeing that other Ricky or not.
Sean struggled to understand. His mind still felt doped. It was temporal shock, the effect of the shunt plus the effect of the change that had just taken place in the very recent past with Rickys arrival there. The past would be constantly changing with each swing of the pendulum. The robot experiments had shown that. Each swing and theyd all have an entirely new set of memories, reaching back farther and farther, five minutes, fifty minutes, five hundred minutes, five thousand minutes
Something was glowing now on the far wall.
The temporal energy must be building up again, creating-displacement momentum for the next shunt. They had said the swings were going to be quick ones in the early stages of the journey, in and out of the past or the future in just a couple of minutes during the first few shunts, zip zip zip zip.
Dr. White said, Theres nothing to worry about, Sean. Its all going to work out all right.
Sean nodded and smiled. Suddenly his mind seemed to clear a little. He was beginning to feel like himself again. Sure it will, he said. I never doubted it. He became aware of strangeness beginning to enfold him. The field was taking him onward. Say hello to Ricky for me, he said, and waved at them as they grew blurry around him. Ill see you all a little later.
3. Eric + 50 minutes
He was falling. Like Alice going down the rabbit hole, except that when she fell it was in a slow, stately way, with plenty of time to look around. He was plummeting crazily, a wild juggernaut zooming through the center of the earth. Down through the geological strata, past the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, past the Permian, the Silurian, the Cambrian. Choking and gasping, tumbling end over end, arms and legs flailing, his hair flying in the hot breeze that came blasting up from below.
He thought he was going to fall forever.
He had never imagined it was possible to feel so sick and dizzy.
All the worst stuff comes right at the beginning, Sean had told him. And then its okay.
Had Sean really said that? Eric tried to remember. Yes. It was at the minus-fifty-minute level, just when he and Sean both were starting to get a little panicky about the crazy project they had committed themselves to. And then Sean2, had come whistling out of the future looking cocky and cheerful. Engaging in a whole bunch of incomprehensible babble with Dr. Ludwig about how past tense and future tense lose their meanings when you travel in time. And then, jaunty as can be, coming over to Eric and Sean1, to tell them not to worry about anything.
Its all going to be fine. Just let yourself go, and dont try to fight it.
Sure, Sean.
Down and down and down. Did you fall like this, Sean, when you made your first jump into the future? Down, down, down through the primordial rock of the earth into the bubbling volcanic magma at the core of the planet?
Eric wondered when it was going to stop. And what it was going to feel like when he hit bottom.
Then he realized that he was floating rather than dropping. And then that he wasnt even floating. He was still in the laboratory, not in some tunnel that passed through the bowels of the earth. That falling sensation had been just in his imagination, a side effect of the trip forward in time. In fact his feet were firmly planted on the floor of the shunt platform.
So he had arrived. He was fifty minutes in the future. Everything was a blur. Eric was so dizzy that he thought his head would spin free from his shoulders. And the nausea that he was feeling was real star-quality nausea. It was so intense that he wanted to applaud it. As soon as he felt a little better.
Somebody grab me or Im going to fall, he managed to blurt.
They caught him just as he started to go over.
Easy, someone said. The disorientation lasts only a couple of moments. Going into the future seems to be more traumatic than going into the past.
So I notice, Eric murmured.
But they were right: you did come out of it pretty fast. He was able to stand unaided now. He could focus his eyes again. The digital elapsed-time counter on the rear wall confirmed that he was exactly fifty minutes into the experiment. Right on schedule.
Sean must already have materialized here ahead of him, making the plus-five-minutes shunt. Eric wondered whether Sean had gone through the same hellacious rabbit-hole sensation then. He wondered whether Sean
Sean
Suddenly Eric felt with full force the impact of his twin brothers absence. The strangeness, the aloneness, the separateness.
It came rushing in like a roaring tsunami: the knowledge that time stood between him and his brother like a sword. He hadnt felt it on his first time-jump, because that had been a backward one, and when he arrived he had seen Sean right there in the lab, getting ready to begin the experiment. But at this very moment Sean was a hundred minutes away, back at the minus-fifty-minute level. The balancing swing of the pendulum, the equal and opposite displacement.
From here to Time Ultimatethe end of the experiment, some 95 million years out from the starting pointthey were never going to be on the same side of the time-line again. One of them would always be in the minus-time level while the other one was an equal distance up ahead in plus-time.
Eric stepped down from the platform. Took a couple of uncertain steps.
How do you feel now? Dr. White asked.
He managed to smile at her. Better. It was a lie. Just a little wobbly. Just a little.
Its a jolt, isnt it?
He nodded. He wanted to ask Sean how he had felt on his first forward jump. But of course Sean wasnt here. It was weird, not having him nearby. Not feeling that odd, almost telepathic bond. The sensation that said,I am here, I am Sean, I am closer to you than anyone on this planet and always will be. Almost as if they were Siamese twins and not the ordinary kind. Eric had never talked about that with Sean. It had always seemed, well, embarrassingtelling him what he felt, asking him if he felt it, too. But he was pretty sure that Sean felt it, too.
And right now Eric was feeling the lack of it. Intensely.
Fifty minutes from Time Zero, he said. I dont suppose much can have changed in the world yet.
Dr. White chuckled. Not in fifty minutes. All the really interesting things are still ahead of you.
Ahead of me? Eric shook his head. No, youve got it upside down. The way I look at it, all the really interesting stuffs behind me.
She looked baffled by that.
You dont know what I mean? he said.
Well
No, you dont, do you. Im Eric, remember?
Yes, of course, but Her voice trailed off.
The twin whos the paleontologist. The one whos a lot more interested in the past than the future. He made a broad, sweeping gesture. I dont mind getting a peek at the future. But what Im really waiting for is at the other end of the pendulum. The Mesozoic, back there at the end of the whole circus. The dinosaurs! He felt heat rising in his cheeks. Excitement coursing through him, making his heart pound. Thats why I volunteered for this crazy ride, dont you know? To meet the dinosaurs, face-to-face. Its as simple as that. To walk up to a live dinosaur and say hello.
4. Sean -50 minutes
It was different this time, the second shunt. Sean didnt feel that initial sense of dead calmness that had tricked him before into thinking he hadnt gone anywhere. Nor was there a rush of confusion and bewilderment and dismay right afterward. Instead he felt only a second or two of mild dizziness, and then everything seemed fine.
Maybe its only the first shunt thats the bummer, he thought. Or maybe its easier because this time I went backward in time instead of forward.
He looked around the lab.
They were all running back and forth like a bunch of lunatics, getting all the last-minute stuff ready. The experiment would happen in less than an hour. So there they were, hooking things up, checking circuits, crunching numbers. There was Dr. Ludwig, face shiny with sweat, yelling into a pocket telephone. And Dr. White, who was usually so calm and gentle, practically tearing at her hair. Harrell, the math man, working at two computers at once. Other scientific types frenziedly doing other final-hour things. And the technicians zipping around the way people did in the ancient silent movies, going much too fast and moving in a silly jerky way.
The only people who looked calm were Ricky and Sean, those intrepid Gabrielson boys. They were standing off to one side with a numbed, zonked look on their faces, waiting to be told to mount the shunt platform and sit down on either side of the displacement torus.
It all looked terribly familiar. Sean had lived through this scene once, after all, less than an hour ago. Now here he was again. Only this time he wasnt waiting around to be told to sit down on the platform. That was those two fellows over there; he was somebody else, Sean2, the traveler in time, the man from fifty minutes in the future.