Corson seized on the idea because it would explain so much, even though not without some residual confusion. For example, it accounted for the fact that—before Corson’s day—there had been wars in every period of human history, under no matter what type of government. Regularly, a group of people would undertake to abolish war and never achieve it. At most they would manage to damp it down, create an oasis of peace lasting a century or so, rarely a millennium, between conflagrations. And usually their followers undertook to enforce peace by means of war.
Why was that war raging between the Solar Powers and the Empire of Uria? For economic reasons? Because of the ambitions of the high command? Or the fear of the populace? All those reasons had some weight, but there had to be another to potentiate them. The Urian war had been a surrogate for one which threatened to break out between the human planets, whose origin could be traced back to treaties badly drafted long ago that in their turn were the outcome of still more ancient wars. Doubtless from there one could go back and back clear to the war which had laid Earth waste, millennia before Corson was born, and impelled men to the conquest of the stars by condemning them to temporary exile. And further back yet, to the first battle of all, when one pithecanthropus raised a rock to strike another.
And it had been the same in the history of other species. Or almost all of them. All those at any rate which were represented at Aergistal.
We’ve often wondered what we were fighting for, Corson thought. But never, or not often enough, why we were making war. History is diseased. We are ants struggling one against another for reasons which we imagine to be obvious but which mask a gigantic mystery, an absolute lack of knowledge. And Aergistal is a laboratory… or an array of culture dishes.
“The third purpose of Aergistal,” the voice said, “is to preserve war. War is one of the activities of life. It’s part of our heritage. It could be that we shall need its techniques. Something might emerge on the exterior of the universe. Aergistal is a frontier, and a rampart too.”
The voice had suddenly become strained, or perhaps touched with sadness. Corson tried to imagine the Outside, but that total abstraction defeated him. Utter blackness. Untime. Unspace. Nothing, yet perhaps something else. If I were a number, Corson thought, say, the number one, how could I imagine the number of numbers, the last number of all?
“To eliminate war,” the voice said. “To comprehend war. To preserve war. The choice will be granted you. You will be sent back to Uria to solve a problem. If you fail, you will come here again. If you succeed, you will be free. In your own time you will no longer be a war criminal. But above all you will have made a step forward.”
The air around Corson grew thick. Walls materialized on all sides of him. He found himself stretched out in a long box of metallic appearance. It resembled a coffin.
Or a tin can.
“Hey!” Corson shouted. “Give me weapons—give me something!”
“You have a brain,” the voice said with finality. “And you will get what help you need.”
“The Security Office—” Corson began.
“We have nothing to do with them,” the voice said. “All they deal with is the Epoch of the Triple Swarm, and what’s more in only a single galaxy.”
In sum, Corson said to himself before he sank into darkness, a pinch of dust…
Chapter 22
Minos, the fabled judge of the dead. A tribunal from which there was no appeal… Corson was dreaming, and dimly knew that he was doing so. He pondered what he had heard, and thought now and then of Antonella.
Damned pacifists from the end of time, unable to do their own dirty work. We’re pawns between their fingers, the tyrants! Motionless, I spin and tumble between the meshes of this web of lives, dropped from the palm of a god. Do what you like, the god has decreed, but stop your row, stop these wars which spoil my dreams.
The web was woven of human bodies. Every knot was a man and each held in his hands the ankles of two other men. And so on to infinity. And these men, naked, fought and shouted insults, tried to scratch or pull close enough to bite. From time to time one lost his grip and was at once swallowed up in the abyss. A hole appeared, soon filled in by an incomprehensible slipping of the mesh. And Corson passed between their outspread limbs like an unseen fish.
He dreamed that he woke up. He was wandering in a vast and splendid city. Its towers climbed to the sky, not like masts but more like trees, dividing and forking to comb the wind. Its streets, like lianas, were thrown out over emptiness.
He felt an anguish grip his heart which at first he could not account for. Then the reason for his presence came back to him. There was a box hanging against his chest on a sling, and that was a machine for traveling in time. On each wrist he had a sort of watch, and those were chronometers built with the uncommon precision required if he were to read and master time. On the crystal of each watch was painted, or maybe engraved, a thin red line radiating from the center and marking an exact hour, minute, second. From the position of the long hand he could tell that barely five minutes remained before it would reach the red line. And on the upper side of the time-travel device, figures were displayed one after another to tell him the same thing, counting minutes and seconds and fractions of a second. He knew the machine was set to throw him into the past—or the future—just before the hand reached the line.
Red. Something terrible was about to happen. Yet in the city all was quiet. No one there guessed what was in store. And as the cause of his anguish grew clearer, as he remembered more of the details, he wondered how he could await the moment of his deliverance without starting to scream.
All quiet in the city. The wind rocked the hanging roads, the tapering branches of the towers, slowly back and forth. A woman played with a polished pendant around her neck. In a garden an artist was carving space. Children were chanting as they tossed into the air colored balls which revolved around each other before falling lazily to the ground. To Corson the dreamer, the city resembled a sculpture, almost immobile overall yet composed of microscopic elements individually in motion.
In less than two minutes the city would be destroyed by nuclear missiles that were already on the way, bellowing in the stratosphere, leaving in their wake the complaint of the space tortured by their drive. The imminence of destruction seemed incredible to the dreamer, yet its exact instant was marked on the crystals of the two watches. He knew that he would escape the destruction and retain only the image of the city at peace. He would not witness the brightness of a thousand suns and the melting of the towers like warm candles and the eruption of lava from the bowels of the earth and the vaporization of bodies before they had time to catch fire and later—much later—the shriek of tortured air. He would know of its destruction only as a distant event, something historical and abstract.
And then he realized something which he did not remember, which his time machine was incapable of sparing him.
It happened abruptly. The city was tranquil. Then the woman started to scream. She tugged so violently at the chain around her neck that she broke it and flung the polished metal plate away from her. The children fled in panic, weeping. A cry that the very city seemed to utter assailed the stranger. It sprang from millions of throats, millions of mouths. It challenged the high pale towers. It sounded nothing like a human voice.
Corson heard the city shriek like a great beast tearing itself apart, bursting into a multitude of frightened cells that no longer shared anything except terror.
He wanted to put his hands over his ears, but could not. Now he remembered. The inhabitants of this city could foretell the future, sense just a few moments ahead, and they knew what was going to happen.