Heshke glanced again at the two sets. “They don’t look much different to me.”
“Agreed. But perhaps there’s a difference the pictures don’t show. Now you know the Hathar Ruins better than anyone: they’re your speciality. We just want you to go back and make a study of them; see if you can throw any light on the mystery.”
“Those are pretty vague directives.”
Brask shrugged. “Quite so. But Leard will be going with you; perhaps you can work something out together.”
Heshke contemplated for a few moments. “This travel into a ‘fictitious past’: it would be like a descent into the subconscious mind, wouldn’t it?”
“Possibly so,” Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian said. But Leard Ascar gave vent to a derisive guffaw.
“Take no notice of all this nonsense, Heshke,” he said waspishly. “‘Fictitious past,’ my eye! The time-drive works!”
“Then the ruins…?” Heshke inquired delicately.
Ascar shrugged and then seemed to retreat into himself.
Heshke turned to Brask. “When do we go?”
“As soon as possible. If you feel up to it, today.”
“I’ll need recorders, and a few tools.”
The other nodded. “We’ve anticipated that. I think you’ll find we have everything you could require.”
“You mentioned danger.…”
“Only because the unit is relatively untested. That’s the only source of risk.”
“Apart from other aliens?” Heshke queried. “This business makes their technology look pretty formidable.”
“Yes, but not necessarily in all-area advance of our own,” Spawart replied. “After all, we were able to copy their time-drive. That would indicate that we have comparable ability.”
“That is, provided we have copied it,” Brask rejoindered, giving the other a sharp look.
“Of course we have!” snapped Ascar.
Heshke first inspected his equipment, and then was given a private room in which to rest. He slept for a couple of hours and then lay on the couch thinking over everything he had learned.
The expedition, he gathered, was to comprise four men in alclass="underline" himself, the physicist Leard Ascar, and two Titan technical officers to pilot the time traveller. Departure was timed for midafternoon, and as the day wore on his nerves began to fray.
Shortly after lunch had been brought to him he was visited by Leard Ascar, who had spent the morning working on the time apparatus.
“Hello, Heshke, feeling nervous?” the sour-faced physicist said.
Heshke nodded.
“No need to worry. It’s all quite safe and painless really. This is my third trip.”
“How long will the journey take?”
“We can manage a hundred years per hour. So say three hours there, three hours back.”
“We’re rather a long way from Hathar, aren’t we – in spatial terms, I mean?”
“No problem. While we’re travelling through time – strictly speaking we’re travelling through non-time – we can manoeuvre over the Earth’s surface at will. We’ll land slap on top of our target.”
“From here to Hathar in three hours,” Heshke mused. “That’s not bad at all. This time machine would make quite a good intercontinental transport, then?”
Ascar laughed shortly. “You’re quick on the uptake, but no, it wouldn’t. You have to trade space for time. To travel to the other side of the Earth you’d have to traverse about a hundred years. I suppose you could do it by moving back and forth until you matched destinations in space and time, but after you’d finished messing about you would have done better to go by rocket.”
Ascar fumbled in his pocket, brought out a crumpled tobacco roll and lit it, breathing aromatic smoke all around. Heshke noticed that his eyes bulged slightly. “Mind if I sit down? Been working on that damned time-drive all morning. I’m kind of tensed up myself.”
“Sure, be my guest.” Ascar took the room’s only chair and Heshke sat on his bed to face him. “I’m rather curious… how does the time traveller work?”
Ascar grinned. “By detaching ‘now’ from ‘now’ and moving it through ‘non-now’.”
Heshke shook his head with a sigh. “That means absolutely nothing to me.”
“It wouldn’t have to me, either, before we found the alien machine. And not even then for a long time. But I understand it now. That’s why I’m sure the Titans are wrong with this cockeyed notion of ‘subconscious time’ or whatever.” Ascar puffed on his roll as if tobacco were the staff of life. Heshke realised that the man was even more nervous than he was. “I’m sorry, Heshke, it’s just that I think this whole jaunt is a waste of time. The time traveller does what we intended it to do: to travel, objectively and in reality, back and forward through time. And I’m the one to ask because it was me, in the end, who cracked the problem. They’d still be fumbling.”
“What’s this, professional jealousy?” Heshke smiled.
The other waved his hand and looked annoyed. “Why should I be jealous? The Titan scientists are good at their work – on straightforward problems. Give them a premise and they’ll take it right through to its conclusion, very thoroughly. But where creative thinking is called for they tend to fall back on their ideology – and we all know what a lot of bull that is.”
Heshke looked around uneasily, wondering about hidden microphones. “I never thought I’d hear anyone talk like that in a Titan stronghold,” he said.
The physicist shrugged. “They tolerate me. I’ve been with this project from the start, five years ago. Things were more easygoing in the old days. I’m sick of it now, though.”
“Oh? Why?”
Ascar sneered. “I’ve built them their time traveller and they say it doesn’t work, just because they don’t like what they’ve discovered in the past. They’re disappointed that the aliens didn’t seem to have played any part in the wars of collapse, that’s what it all comes down to. And we’ve hardly even done any exploring yet. Maybe the aliens were around, somewhere or other.”
“You sound bitter.”
Ascar pulled on his roll. “Just tired. Five years spent trying to understand time has unhinged my mind. Take no notice of my grumbling, Citizen. It’s all part of my personality syndrome.”
“But the ruins,” Heshke reminded him. “If we were to take the evidence at face value they are growing newer as time passes, instead of older. That just can’t be, can it?”
Ascar shrugged. “How the hell would I know? Nothing looks impossible to me now I know that time’s mutable, that the individual’s ‘now’ can be detached from absolute ‘now’. There must be an explanation.” He smiled. “How about this? Thousands of years ago the aliens flew over here and planted some seeds – special kinds of seeds. Ever since they’ve been slowly growing, not into plants or vegetable matter but into structures of stone and metal. The ruins we see are like trees maturing over centuries into full-blown houses, cities, castles and whatever. When they are fully grown the aliens will come down and live in them.”
Heshke laughed, thinking over the idea. He was tickled by Ascar’s quick imagination, by his readiness to face impossible facts and draw daring inferences from them. “But there are skeletons, too,” he reminded. “The seeds wouldn’t grow those.”
“Why not? Maybe a few skeletons were included to fool future archaeologists.” But Heshke could see that the physicist wasn’t being serious.