“Impossible,” Corson said.
“Oh, there are drugs that increase human reaction time by a factor of ten. I imagine you’ve heard about them. They’re sometimes used during space battles.”
“But they’re dangerous,” Corson said.
“I’m not asking you to take any.”
Veran made to replace the bits of shell in his bag; then he thought better of it.
“It would be safer still to bleach this and leave it in place of the substitute. You never know…”
He carried out some more tests, and finally dusted an aerosol over the fragments. They turned to the color of ivory in a few seconds.
“Back in your saddle,” he said with satisfaction.
Once again they dived into the river of time. It was not long before they located a room where dozens of empty shells were lying around. Veran synched the pegasone, inspected various fragments, and finally selected a whole shell of the proper size. It turned a perfect blue under the jet of the aerosol spray and took the bleached shell’s place in his bag. Then he produced a pill and swallowed it.
‘The accelerator will take effect in about three minutes. It’ll give me about ten seconds of superspeed, more than a minute and a half of subjective time. That’s as much as I need.”
He turned to Corson with a smile. “The beauty of this, you know, is that if anything happens to me you won’t know how to get away. I wonder what the Urians would think if they found two men in their incubation room, one dead and one alive. Not to mention a tame pegasone, when all they know about are the wild ones. Oh, you’d have to spin them a pretty yam.”
“We’d disappear at once,” Corson said. “There would be a major timequake. The whole history of this part of the galaxy would be affected.”
“It seems you learn quickly when it suits you,” Veran said good-humoredly. “Yes, the real trick is going to be getting back the instant after our departure. I have no wish to meet myself going the other way. And above all I don’t want to break the Law of Non-regressive Information.”
Corson didn’t react.
“In any case,” Veran went on, “the pegasone wouldn’t like it either. It’s going to be hard to get it to pass itself. It hates that.”
Nonetheless I seem to have done it, Corson thought. Or rather I shall do it. Like all natural laws, the Law of Non-regressive Information must be relative. Someone who understands it perfectly can work out how to break it. That means that one day I shall understand the machinery of time. I’ll get out of here. Peace will return and I’ll find Antonella again…
It all happened so swiftly that Corson retained only a blurred memory: Veran’s kaleidoscopic shadow moving so fast that it seemed to define a solid volume of space, the blue gleam of the broken shell, the cells full of cheeping baby Urians, the door opening with a creak, a sudden smell of chlorine even though he knew the air of the chamber could not enter his suit, a sideslip across time, Veran’s voice uttering words so quickly he could barely catch them, a caracole in space, nausea, the sense of being scattered to the corners of the cosmos…
“End of stage two!” cried Veran triumphantly.
The trap was primed. Two hundred, perhaps two hundred and fifty years would have to wear away before it would pitch Ngal R’nda, last Prince of Uria, the last warlord hatched from a blue egg, to meet his doom.
Time, Corson thought as rough hands freed him from his harness, is the most patient god of all.
Chapter 29
The Monster was sleeping like a little child. Buried five hundred meters under the surface of the planet, gorged with enough reserve energy to fell a mountain, all it wanted was to rest. It was almost totally preoccupied with producing the eighteen thousand spores which would generate its young, and because of that it was vulnerable. Accordingly it had slithered across the sedimentary strata right to this layer of basalt where it had made its nest. The rock was slightly radioactive, and provided a little extra energy.
The Monster was dreaming. In its dreams, it remembered a planet it had never known but which was the cradle of its race. There, life had been simple and good. Although the planet had disappeared more than half a billion years ago—not that the kind of years which Earthmen measured by meant anything to the Monster—an almost flawless recollection of scenes viewed by its far-off ancestors had been transmitted to it by its genes. Now that it was about to breed, the increasing activity of its chromosomal chains heightened the colors and sharpened the details.
The Monster preserved the image of the race which had created its species, more or less in its own likeness, to play the part of a domestic pet, useless but affectionate. If Corson’s original contemporaries had been able to explore the Monster’s dreams during its brief captivity, they would have found the key to many mysteries.
They had never understood how the Monster, which except on rare occasions avoided the company of its kind, could have developed any semblance of culture, let alone the rudiments of language. They knew of asocial or presocial animals with intelligence comparable to the human, like the dolphins on Earth. But none had developed a genuinely articulate language. According to then-current theory, which had never before been found wanting, civilization and language demanded certain preconditions: the creation of organized tribes or bands, vulnerability (for no invulnerable being would be tempted to change itself to suit the world it lived on, or vice versa), and the discovery of how to put inanimate objects to practical use (for any being whose natural appendages were ideal tools for use in its environment was bound to stagnate).
The Monster broke all three of these rules. It lived in isolation. It was as nearly invulnerable as any creature humans had run across. And its ignorance of the use of any tool, even the simplest, was total. Not because it was stupid. One could induce it to operate fairly complex machines. But it had no need of them. Its claws and tendrils were quite good enough for its requirements. Yet the Monster was capable of talking after its fashion, and even—some researchers claimed—of inscribing symbols.
The origin of Monsters posed another apparently insoluble problem. At the time of Corson’s first life, exobiology had progressed far enough for comparative evolution to become an exact science. It was theoretically possible by examining a single creature to work out with fair accuracy the whole phylum it belonged to. But the Monster combined traits from a dozen different phyla. No environment that the ecologists could conceive of ought to have produced such a paradoxical beast. That was among the reasons why it was called by no name more precise than Monster. In the view of a biologist who had given up in despair a decade before Corson was born, Monsters were the sole known proof of the existence of God, or at any rate of a god.
A long finger of energy brushed the Monster for a nanosecond or so. Stirring in its sleep, it greedily drank in the sustenance offered to it, heedless of where it came from. The second contact, light as a feather touch, half roused it. The third made it alarmed. It knew how to recognize most natural sources of energy. This was artificial. Someone, or something, was trying to locate it.