The Brooder shrugged. 'We perish-or find some means other than physical to combat them.'
'Exactly. Rashin said that if Time moves too swiftly for a man to accomplish what he desires he accepts the fact passively.
Rashin thought that with re-education Man might rid himself of his reconception and take as easily to adjusting Time to his requirements as he adjusts nature. A non-physical means you see.'
'I think I understand a little of what you mean,' said the Scar-faced Brooder. ' But why is it necessary, I wonder?' The question was rhetorical, but the Wanderer chose to answer.
'On this world,' he said, ' we must admit it, Man is an anachronism. He has adapted to a degree but not sufficiently to the point where he could sustain himself without artifice.
The planet has never been particularly suitable for him, of course, but it has never been so inhospitable as now.
'The Chronarchy, as I have said, is a conscious experiment.
Time and Matter are both ideas. Matter makes a more immediate impression on Man, but Time's effects are longer lasting. Therefore the Chronarchy, down the ages, has sought to educate its people into thinking of Time in a similar way as they think of Matter. In this way it has been possible to produce a science of time, like the science of physics. But it has only been possible to study time until now - not manipulate it.
'We may soon master Time as we once mastered the atom.
And our mastery will give us far greater freedom than did our nuclear science. Time may be explored as our ancestors explored space. Your descendants, Scar-faced Brooder, shall be heir to continents of time as we have continents of space. They shall travel about in time, the old view of Past, Present and Future abolished. Even now you regard these in an entirely different light-merely as convenient classifications for the study of Time.'
'That is true," he nodded, ' I had never considered them anything else. But now I am unsure what to do, for I fled to Barbart originally to settle and forget Lanjis Liho where I went unhonoured.'
The Wanderer smiled a little. ' I do not think you will go unhonoured now, my friend,' he said.
The Brooder saw the point and smiled also. ' Perhaps not,' he agreed.
The Wanderer sipped his wine. ' Your journeyings in space are all but ended, anyway. For space is becoming increasingly hostile to Man and will soon refuse to sustain him, however much he adapts physically. You and your like must enter the new dimensions you've discovered and dwell there. Go back to Lanjis Liho of your birth and tell the Chronarch what you did In Barbart, show him what you did and he will welcome you. Your reason for leaving no longer exists. You are the first of the Time Dwellers and I salute you as the salvation of mankind.' The Wanderer drained his glass.
Somewhat overwhelmed by this speech, the Brooder bade the Wanderer farewell and thick blood, left the tent and climbed upon the back of Urge.
The Wanderer stood beside the tent, smiling at him. ' One day you must tell me how you did it,' he said.
'It is such a simple thing - you just live through the same period of time instead of different ones. Perhaps this is just the start and soon I will be able to explore further abroad -or is the word "a-time"? But now I will be off for I'm impatient to tell my news to the Chronarch!'
The Wanderer watched him ride away, feeling a trifle like the last dinosaur must have felt so many millions of years before.
Once again, the Scar-faced Brooder rode along the seashore, staring over the sluggish waves at the brown sky beyond.
Salt shone everywhere across the land, perhaps heralding an age where crystalline life-forms would develop in conditions absolutely unsuitable for animal life as he knew it.
Yes, the period when Man must change his environment radically had come, if Man were to survive at all.
The Earth would cease to support him soon, the sun cease to warm him. He had the choice of living for a while in artificial conditions such as the Moonites already did, or of completely changing his environment - from a physical one to a temporal one!Definitely, the latter was the better choice. As the sky darkened over the sea, he took out his torch, depressed the handle and sent a great blaze of light spreading across the inhospitable Earth.
The first of the Time Dwellers goaded his seal-beast into a faster pace, impatient to tell the Chronarch his welcome news, impatient to begin the exploration of a new environment.
ESCAPE FROM EVENING
ON MOON it was white like ice. An endless series of blocks and spikes, like an ancient cubist painting. But white; glaring, though the sun was almost dead, a red featureless disc in the dark sky.
In his artificial cavern, full of synthetic, meaningless things that contained no mythology or mood, Pepin Hunchback bent over his book so that the tears from his eyes fell upon the plastic pages and lay there glistening.
Of all the things that the glass cavern contained - pumps and pipes and flinching dials-only Pepin had warmth. His twisted body was a-throb with life and large emotions. His imagination was alive and active as each word in the book sparked off great chords of yearning within him. His narrow face, utterly pale save for the bright black eyes, was intense.
His clumsy hands moved to turn the pages. He was dressed, as were all his fellow Moonites, in cloth-of-metal which, with a helmet fitted to its hauberk, protected his life from an impossibility - the threat of the System collapsing.
The System was Moon's imitation of life. It aped an older Earth than that which now existed far away, barely visible in space. It aped its plants and its animals and its elements-for the System was Moon's artificial ecology. Moon was a planet of goodish size-had been for centuries since it had ceased to be Earth's satellite and had drifted into the asteroids and attracted many of them to itself.
And Pepin hated the System for what it was. Pepin was a throw-back, unsuited to his present Time or Space. Pepin's life was not the System, for with just that he would have died.
It was his imagination, his sorrow and his ambition, fed by his few old books.
He read the familiar pages and realized again that the intellect had triumphed over the spirit, and both had conquered emotion. The men of Moon, at least, had become as barren as their accident of a planet.
Pepin knew much of Earth as his people's traders had described it. Knew that it was changing and was no longer as it was when his books were written. Yet still he yearned to go there and see if he could find some trace of what he needed though he would only know what he needed when he found it.
For some time he had planned to visit Earth and his people were willing that he should go, if he did not return, for he discomfited them. His name-his true name-was on the list, close to the top. Soon a ship would be ready for him. His true name was P Karr.
Now he thought of the ship and decided to go to the list. He went to the list infrequently for in his atavism he was superstitious and believed completely that the more he looked at it, the less chance there would be of his name being at the top.