“Yes, indeed,” Heshke muttered. “The whole thing is – frightening.”
“You’ve said it,” Brask responded.
Heshke coughed nervously. “This field trip I’m going on,” he said after a pause. “It’s a trip through time?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“I don’t understand.”
Brask looked at Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian. “Would you care to explain?”
The tall Titan physicist nodded and turned to Heshke.
“You’ll appreciate that we had no intention of risking our only time machine in reckless jaunts. We’ve spent five years of hard work trying to grasp the operation of the time traveller so that we could duplicate it. Finally we completed our own operational traveller – so we thought – and have made some trips in it. But the results are such that we need your expert advice; we’re no longer sure that our traveller works properly.”
Heshke didn’t understand what he meant. The Titan turned to the screen, reached for the control box and eliminated the image of the dead alien pilots. “Watch carefully. I’m going to show you some pictures our men took.”
A flurry appeared on the screen, then an impression of racing motion as if some colourful scene were swinging wildly to and fro and passing by too swiftly to be grasped properly. After some moments Heshke discerned that the only stable element in the picture was a sort of rim on the upper and lower edges; he realised that this was the rim of another screen or window through which the camera was taking the sequence.
He found it hard to believe that all this was really happening. Here he was seeing pictures from the past while an efficient, intelligent Titan officer calmly explained something he would have thought to be impossible. It made even the death of Blare Oblomot seem a shadowy, dream-like event.
Suddenly the picture stilled. They looked out over an even landscape, the sun high in the sky. In the middle ground stood clumps of ruins stretching for several miles. Though so corroded and overgrown as nearly to have blended into nature, to Heshke’s trained eye they clearly showed their alien origin.
“The Verichi Ruins, approximately nine hundred years ago,” Vardanian said quietly. “Not what you would expect, is it?”
No, thought Heshke, it certainly wasn’t. Nine centuries ago the Verichi Ruins – ruins in the present century, that is – should have been in their prime: an inhabited, bustling city. He watched an armoured figure stumbling about some heaps of stones. “It’s more like what they’ll be nine centuries in the future,” he agreed. “Maybe you were headed in the wrong direction?”
“Our conclusion also, at first,” Vardanian told him. “Initially we made five stops, all inside a bracket covering two centuries. We failed to find any living aliens at all, merely ruins such as you see here. However, it didn’t take long to ascertain that the wars of collapse – the death-throes of classical civilisation – were in progress simultaneously with the existence of these ruins. So we were in the past after all.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Heshke objected, frowning.
“Agreed. According to everything we know there was a large alien presence at the time of the wars of collapse. Could we be wrong? Could the alien presence have been much earlier? That would explain the dilapidated condition of the ruins – but it would not explain their much fresher condition today. Frankly, none of the historical explanations make much sense. So we were forced to draw other, more disappointing conclusions: that the time traveller was playing tricks on us, that we weren’t travelling through time at all.”
“You’re beginning to lose me. Where were you going?”
Vardanian gestured vaguely, as though searching for words to express thoughts he only understood as abstract symbols. “There are some peculiarities about the time-drive that suggest other possibilities. In order to work at all it has to be in the presence of a wakened consciousness; an unmanned, automatic time traveller simply wouldn’t move. So a living pilot is one of the essential components. Bearing this in mind, we were able to formulate a theory that the traveller – the one we have built, at any rate, even if not the alien one – fails to move through objective time. It enters some region of ‘fictitious time’, and presents to the consciousness of the observer elements from both the past and the future blended together, probably drawing them from the subconscious imaginations of the pilot and passengers.”
“It’s all an illusion, you mean?”
The other nodded doubtfully. “Roughly speaking, yes. Though the time traveller obviously does go somewhere, because it disappears from the laboratory.”
Heshke noticed that throughout the latter part of this explanation Leard Ascar scowled and muttered under his breath. Vardanian glanced at him pointedly. “That, with one dissenting vote, was the explanation we had adopted until yesterday.”
“And then you showed us those photographs,” Brask put in. “That upset things somewhat.”
Yes, the photographs. The pictures that showed the Hathar Ruins three centuries ago, and showed them in worse condition than they are today. The pictures that obviously – perfectly, clearly, obviously – were faked. The pictures that could not possibly be true.
“It was too much of a coincidence,” Brask said. “Here was independent, objective evidence of the findings that we had thought were subjective and illusory. We immediately dispatched the time traveller to Hathar at around the time these photographs were presumably taken, and took a corresponding set of photographs from the same viewpoints.” He opened a drawer underneath the table and withdrew a sheaf of glossy prints. “Here are copies of both sets. Check them: you’ll find they match, more or less.”
Heshke did as he was told, looking over the prints. One set was in colour, the other – the old ones – in monochrome. He pushed them away, feeling that he was being surrounded by too much strangeness for one day.
“Yes, they look similar. What does that prove? That you did travel back in time after all?”
“Yes,” said Leard Ascar fiercely, speaking for the first time.
And the other Titan, Spawart, also spoke for the first time. He adopted an expression of meticulous care, choosing his words slowly. “It may not necessarily mean that. We can’t really take these photographs as substantiating our own findings. They could have been faked. Or, knowing now that time travel is possible, they could have been displaced in time, owing their origin to our future. There are a number of possibilities which do not rule out a malfunction in our time traveller.”
Yes, thought Heshke. Someone sent a package of photographs from three hundred years in the future to three hundred years in the past – a hop of six hundred years. That could have happened. But why?
It was useless to speculate. There could be a thousand bizarre, trivial, or unguessable reasons.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m finding this all just a little bit too bewildering. Do you mind telling me exactly why I’m here?”
“Yes, of course,” said Brask solicitously. “We hadn’t meant to call on your services until we had ironed the defects out of our time-drive system, but these photographs have thrown us somewhat into confusion. So we want you to take a trip back to the Hathar Ruins of three hundred years ago.”
“Why?” Heshke asked.
“Well —” Brask hesitated. “We’re working in the dark at the moment. Our most pressing need is to know whether our present capacity to travel through time is objectively real or merely illusory. The psychologists tell us that if it is illusory then there will be anomalies in the structures that appear to exist outside our own time – much as a dream fails to reconstruct reality with accuracy. There would be something to distinguish the ruins in the second set of photographs from the real Hathar Ruins.”