Initially the machine’s departure from the present was assisted by a second, even larger apparatus from whose maw it currently projected like a tongue, but once dispatched it flew under its own power and had no contact with the home base. This fact was nagging at Heshke’s consciousness as he tried to fight down his fears and allowed himself to be helped into the stiff combat armour the Titans had insisted he wear.
“Are you comfortable?” the young com-tech asked.
He nodded, though he was far from comfortable since the leather-like suit restricted all his movements.
For some minutes the Dispatch Room had been filled with a loud whine as the launcher was warmed up. Ascar was already in his suit, as were the two technical officers who were to pilot the time traveller. Ascar beckoned him forward.
“All set? Your gear all ready?”
“It’s on board.” Not that he anticipated using much; he didn’t really know what he would do when he reached the ruins.
“Then let’s take our places.”
He followed Ascar into the time traveller. The cabin was comparatively large, about nine feet by nine. He sat down beside the physicist, strapping himself in. The tech officers came in, wearing their combat suits with more grace and style, and settled into the pilots’ seats in the front of the cabin. The whine from the Dispatch Room was cut off as the door slid shut: the time traveller was soundproof.
Heshke’s muscles knotted up. The tech officers murmured to one another and through microphones to the team outside. A raw, fuzzy hum arose to their rear.
One of the Titans half turned his head to speak to them. “We’re away.”
Was that all? Heshke’s stomach untensed itself. He felt no sensation of motion; but through the semi-opaque windows he saw a runny blur of motion and colour, phasing wildly to and fro as though the vehicle were pursuing an erratic course.
“Home,” Ascar said to him. “We’re leaving home.”
Heshke looked at him quizzically.
“Well of course it’s home!” the other scowled impatiently. “Don’t you know what I mean? Haven’t you any vision?”
“I guess not.”
“I mean we’re leaving the Absolute Present. That’s home to us. The only place in the universe where conscious life exists. Just think of all of past time, stretching back and back into eternity. The further back you go into it the further away you are from the brief intersection where life exists, until you would be like a ghost, a brief fragment of time in a timeless abyss… and the same if you go into the future. Doesn’t that get through to you?”
Ascar’s eyes were bulging and there were tiny beads of perspiration on his brow. “Is that what going back in time is like for you?” Heshke asked quietly. “Like falling into an abyss?”
“That’s what it’s like – a chasm without a bottom. And we’re descending into it.”
Suddenly Heshke understood Ascar. The man was afraid, for all that he had reassured Heshke. He was afraid that something would go wrong and they would be cut off, unable to get back to the world of life and time.
He had too vivid an imagination; and he was getting a little melodramatic. Heshke wondered if the physicist’s five-year-long obsession had left him mentally unbalanced. After all, it was an awesome subject to have preying on one’s mind.
Heshke himself still found the explanations of time and non-time too abstruse to be grasped properly; his mind spun when he tried to think it through. He found it hard to understand why the travelling wave of ‘now’, that is, of time, should be at one particular place at one particular time.…
No, that wasn’t it, either. Being where it was was what made time.…
They passed the rest of the journey in silence, Ascar slouching in his chair, insofar as the combat suit would let him, and occasionally muttering to himself. Three hours passed; and then the tech officer warned them that they were coming in to land.
A gong sounded. The blurred, racing images that had almost lulled Heshke to sleep ceased, but he couldn’t see anything definite through the thickened windows.
Ascar released his safety strap and invited Heshke to do the same. “Come and have a look out of the window,” he said, “you might like to see this.”
Heshke followed him and peered through one of the frosty windows. Ascar turned a knob and the plate cleared.
Outside was a scene reassuringly pleasant and familiar. Judging by the position of the sun it was midafternoon. Beneath a blue sky stretched greenery: a savannah interspersed with scrawny trees. And nearby, recognisable to Heshke despite the intervening three centuries, were the Hathar Ruins, broken, crumbled and moss-covered.
“Notice anything?” Ascar said expectantly.
And Heshke did notice something. A raven was flying across their field of view – or rather, it was not flying. Close enough for every feather of its outspread wings to stand out distinctly, it was hanging in midair, frozen and motionless.
“It’s not moving,” he murmured in wonderment.
“That’s right.” Ascar seemed secretly gleeful. “We’re at a dead stop. Halted on one frozen instant.”
A thought occurred suddenly to Heshke “But if that were so we wouldn’t be able to see anything. Light would be frozen, too.”
Ascar gave a superior smile. “A clever inference, Citizen, but a wrong one. There’s no such thing as frozen light – its velocity is constant for all observers, which is the same as saying it’s not properly a velocity at all. Few laymen understand that.”
He gave a signal to the pilot. “Just the same, for practical purposes we need to explore an environment with all the features of our own, that is to say one that moves.”
The pilot did something on the control panel. The raven bolted into action, flapped its wings and flew away. The savannah stirred in the breeze.
“Now we are travelling futureward at the rate of one second per second: the normal rate of time we are used to. This rate will persist automatically. We can go outside now.”
The door hissed open, allowing fresh air into the cabin. Heshke moved to the rear of the cabin, picked up a movie vidcamera, a satchel of tools and a specimen bag. Then he followed Ascar into the open air.
There could be little doubt of it. The photographs dug up in Jejos weren’t faked; there was no coincidence, nothing that could account for them in accidental terms. They were pictures of the actual ruins he and Ascar stood in the midst of now.
Beyond them, on a grassy knoll, stood the time traveller, guarded by one of the Titan technical officers. The other officer had taken up a nearer position just outside the ruins and was scanning the landscape for signs of danger. God knew what kind of danger there could be here in the middle of nowhere, three hundred years back in limbo, but there he stood in the textbook standoff position.
It was hard to believe it: hard to believe that they were three hundred years into non-time. The air brought to Heshke’s nostrils all the freshness of summer, the sun shone down, and everything looked peacefully normal.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Ascar asked.
“Absolutely. I know these ruins like the back of my hand. I’ve been studying them for years. These are the Hathar Ruins, as I would expect them to be three centuries after our time. We must be in the future.”