“If you know the code you’ll realize that these symbols can only fit one situation. But I’ll stretch a point: you may look at this warrant, but don’t touch it.”
The other two closed in. Arison saw that they had their quickguns trained on him. The leader pulled out a broad screed. Arison, as well as the dancing characters would let him, resolved them in the light of the leader’s torch into an order to collect him, Arison, by today at such and such a time, local Time, if possible immediately on his leaving his place of work (specified); and below, that one man be detailed to call Mihányo by opsiphone simultaneously, and another to call the president of the organization. The Remployee and escort to join the military rocktrain to Veruam (which was leaving within about fifteen minutes). The Remployee to be taken as expeditiously as possible to the bunker (VV) and thence to the higher bunker (from which he had come some twenty years before, but only about ten minutes in the Time of that bunker, it flashed through Arison’s brain—apart from six or seven minutes corresponding to his journey south).
“How do they know if I’m fit enough for this job after all these years?”
“They’ve kept checks on you, no doubt.”
Arison thought of tripping one and slugging two and doing a bolt, but the quickguns of the two were certainly trained upon him. Besides, what would that gain him? A few hours’ start, with unnecessary pain, disgrace and ruin on Mihányo, his children and himself, for he was sure to be caught.
“The automob,” he said ridiculously.
“A small matter. Your firm will deal with that.”
“How can I settle my children’s future?”
“Come on, no use arguing. You are coming now, alive or dead, fit or unfit.”
Speechless, Arison let himself be marched off to a light military vehicle.
In five minutes he was in the rocktrain, an armored affair with strong windows. In ten more minutes, with the train moving off, he was stripped of his civilian clothes and possessions (to be returned later to his wife, he learnt), had his identity disc extracted and checked and its Relief tagend removed, and a medical checkup was begun on him. Apparently this was satisfactory to the military authorities. He was given military clothing.
He spent a sleepless night in the train trying to work out what he had done with this, what would be made of that, who Mihányo could call upon in need, who would be likely to help her, how she would manage with the children, what (as nearly as he could work it out) they would get from a pension which he was led to understand would be forthcoming from his firm, how far they could carry on with their expected future.
A gray pre-dawn saw the train’s arrival at Veruam. Food-less (he had been unable to eat any of the rations) and without sleep, he gazed vacantly at the marshaling-yards. The body of men traveling on the train (apparently only a few were Remployees) were got into closed trucks and the long convoy set out for Emmel.
At this moment Hadolaris’ brain began to re-register the conceleration situation. About half a minute must have passed since his departure from Oluluetang, he supposed, in the Time of his top bunker. The journey to Emmel might take up another two minutes. The route from Emmel to that bunker might take a further two and a half minutes there, as far as one could work out the calculus. Add the twenty-years’ (and southward journey’s) sixteen to seventeen minutes, and he would find himself in that bunker not more than some twenty-two minutes after he had left it. (Mihan, Deres and the other two would all be nearly ten years older and the children would have begun to forget him.) The blitz was unprecedentedly intense when he had left, and he could recall (indeed it had figured in several nightmares since) his prophecy to XN 1 that a breakthrough might be expected within the hour. If he survived the blitz, he was unlikely to survive a breakthrough; and a breakthrough of what? No one had ever seen the Enemy, this Enemy that for Time immemorial had been striving to get across the Frontier. If It got right over, the twilight of the race was at hand. No horror, it was believed at the Front, could equal the horror of that moment. After a hundred miles or so he slept, from pure exhaustion, sitting up in a cramped position, wedged against the next man. Stops and starts and swerves woke him at intervals. The convoy was driving at maximum speeds.
At Emmel he stumbled out to find a storm lashing down. The river was in spate. The column was marched to the depot. Hadolar was separated out and taken in to the terminal building where he was given inoculations, issued with “walker,” quickgun, em-kit, prot-suit and other impedimenta, and in a quarter of an hour (perhaps seven or eight seconds up at the top bunker) found himself entering a polyheli with thirty other men. This had barely topped the first rise and into sunlight when explosions and flarings were visible on all sides. The machine forged on, the sight-curtains gradually closing up behind and retreating grudgingly before it. The old Northern vertigo and somnambulism re-engulfed Had. To think of Kar and their offspring now was to tap the agony of a ghost who shared his brain and body. After twenty-five minutes they landed close to the foot of a rocktrain line. The top-bunker lapse of “twenty-two minutes” was going, Had saw, to be something less. He was the third to be bundled into the rocktrain compartments, and one hundred ninety seconds saw him emerging at the top and heading for bunker W. XN 1 greeted his salute merely with a curt command to proceed by rocket to the top bunker. A few moments more and he was facing XN 2.
“Ah, here you are. Your Relief was killed so we sent back for you. You’d only left a few seconds.” A ragged hole in the bunker wall testified to the incident. The relief’s cadaver, stripped, was being carted off to the disposal machine.
“XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells—I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”
Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him? Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy?
“XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”
“XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface—our tunnel is destroyed —at 15° 40’ East—you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit—with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”
The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his “walker,” into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable super-crescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope.
Time can run backwards; the future is as real as the past; and the same event can be in one man’s future and another man’s past.
Using or proving these propositions, scientists groped along the boundaries between physics and philosophy at the American Physical Society meeting here today.