Make this assumption: that the relation of the machine to the normal physical universe was such that its gravitational interactions were reduced… that it fell, say, with half or a quarter the normal velocity.
He ran through the calculations quickly, with growing excitement. Substituting one-quarter g gave him a figure of eighty-five minutes, which was almost exactly right.
There was an apparent violation here either of the conserva-tion of energy or the principle of equivalence, but never mind that now… The consequence was that during his fall, he would tend to swing out away from the Sun, being less attracted to that body than the Earth was. The center of his orbit would be displaced a few miles, just enough to account for this rise….
The globe of the Earth was rushing toward him. Naismith watched it grimly, thinking that the next time he approached the surface it would be somewhere in the Pacific, about forty-two degrees west of Lake Michigan. Then eighty-four minutes back again; this time he would come out somewhere near the 63rd meridians, still in the Indian Ocean.
Now the dark surface was hurtling down at express-train speed. Naismith involuntarily braced himself, even though he knew there would be no sense of contact. He saw a whorl of bluish light just above him, expanding, rushing down. His eyes widened; he had just time to gasp, then something struck him a murderous blow.
The universe wheeled majectically around him; there was pain deep in his head. The stars slowly darkened and went out.
Chapter Twelve
He was aware of having been unconscious, of a pain in his head, and of a wordless anxiety that had driven him up out of sleep.
He opened his eyes.
He was looking up into a gulf of blue sky, dotted with clouds. Hardness pressed against his back; the air he breathed was cool and pure. Something dry and flexible brushed his cheek as he turned his head; vague yellowish rod-shapes moved across his vision. He sucked in a breath, rolled over and sat up.
He was on the ground, with grass shoulder-high all around him. A few feet away, on the trampled grass, lay a small blued-steel machine.
Naismith stared at it in frozen surprise for an instant, before he realized it was not the same one the aliens had used: the shape was similar, but not identical.
He reached for it, and found himself held back, although he could neither see nor feel any obstacle. Incredulous, he put out his full strength, straining until the blood roared in his ears; but he could not force his body an inch closer to the machine.
After a moment he gave it up, and cautiously got to his feet.
He felt no restraint, and was able to stand; but when he tried to take a step toward the machine, the same impalpable barrier held him back.
He straightened again, looking out over the sea of grass. At first he saw only the rolling yellow waves, with an occasional green treetop in the distance, and a line of misty hills along the horizon. Then he became aware of movement.
A few hundred yards away across the plain, a human form was moving slowly through the grass. It was a girl, the upper part of her body either nude or lightly clothed; her legs and hips were hidden by the grass. She was walking with leisurely grace, halting occasionally, with her face turned up to the sun.
He could not make out her features, but something in the lines and the motion of her body made him think she was young.
She had not noticed him. Naismith glanced again at the machine on the ground, then crouched out of sight and once more began a desperate effort to approach it. He found that he could walk in a circle around the machine, but could never come any nearer. He dug his feet in and pushed, with some idea of forcing the machine to move ahead of him, but did not succeed.
He stopped, gasping for breath, and looked over the tops of the grasses again. The girl was much closer. This time she saw him.
Naismith stood up and waited.
The girl walked unhurriedly toward him. Her skin was tanned, her hair coppery, shining in the light. She was dressed, or half dressed, in bits of contoured metal and fabric that clung to her body here and there, in a pattern more esthetic than functional. Her eyes were narrowed as she walked, as if she were aware of nothing but the caress of sun and air on her body.
She waited until she was only a few yards away before she spoke. “Awake already?” she said. The language she used was BoDen.
Naismith did not reply. Seen so near at hand, the girl had a startling, provocative beauty. Her skin was satiny, as if covered by an almost invisible sheer tissue—spiderweb-stuff that ended, without a visible border, at the edges of her lips and eyes. The red-violet of her lips might have been natural or artificial. Her eyes were pale green, fringed with dark lashes, startling against her brown face.
She was watching him with an amused expression. “Well, don’t stand there—back away.”
Naismith did not move. “Who are you—what is this place?”
“Earth, of course. Now back off so that I can get in.”
Naismith glanced down at the machine, then back at the girl. “What if I don’t?”
“I’ll leave you here until you get hungry.”
Naismith shrugged, backed off a few steps into the tall grass.
The girl waited, then darted forward to the machine. She sat down on the ground beside it, folding her legs neatly, and looked up at him with a mocking smile. “All right, you can come back.”
Naismith looked at her, then stared around at the grassy plain, peaceful and silent under the sky.
Absently he let his fingers trail through the dry, bearded grasses.
Far off, the tiny dot of a bird launched itself from one of the isolated treetops; he followed it across the sky until it alighted again.
“This is a beautiful spot,” he said.
Her laughter made him turn. “Like to see what it’s really like?” she said. She tossed something toward him. “Here.”
Naismith’s hand went up automatically to bat the thing away; at the last moment he changed his mind, plucked it out of the air.
It was a shaped blue grip of some smooth, waxy substance.
When his hand closed around it, a disk of dark color glowed into being just above it.
He stared at the thing in perplexity for a moment before he realized that he was looking through the disk, at a three-dimensional scene beyond. He turned the grip this way and that, swung it around, and discovered that the view through the disk corresponded with the landscape around him—
horizon, hills, the plain itself were all there, but all changed.
Grass and trees were gone; instead, there was raw earth and rock—blackened, cratered and barren under a starred purple sky. The sun blazed overhead—not the ordinary ball of light, but a monstrous thing with flames spreading high from either side. Naismith lowered the disk, puzzled.
“What is that—another time line?” he asked.
“I told you,” she said looking up at him serenely. “That is what is really here. Everything you see is only a clever illusion.” She indicated the landscape around them. “Earth is a dead planet now—destroyed by wars. You could not even breathe here, if you were not protected by this machine.”
Naismith frowned, and put out a hand to touch the nearest clump of grass. The dry stems, the bearded tips, were real to his fingers. He pulled up a few, wadded them in his palm, watched them fall.
“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly. “Who would do such a thing?”
“They say Zugs did it,” she answered indifferently. “The proof is that only human beings see any of this—a camera will not photograph it, and the illusion will not pass through that viewer. Give it back.”