From the Ocean from teh Stars (52 page)

approached until their fields merged and they were no longer separated
by an impassable gulf of silence. "I hope you're satisfied," he said. "How
did you move the stuff so quickly?"

She touched the bracelet around her own wrist and gave a wan smile.
"We have many other powers besides this."

"Then why did you need my help?"

"There were technical reasons. It was necessary to remove the objects
we required from the presence of other matter. In this way, we could
gather only what we needed and not waste our limited—what shall I call
them?—transporting facilities. Now may I have the bracelet back?"

Ashton slowly handed over the one he was carrying, but made no
effort to unfasten his own. There might be danger in what he was doing,
but he intended to retreat at the first sign of it.

"I'm prepared to reduce my fee," he said. "In fact I'll waive all pay
ment—in exchange for this." He touched his wrist, where the intricate
metal band gleamed in the sunlight.

She was watching him with an expression as fathomless as the
Gioconda smile. (Had
that,
Ashton wondered, gone to join the treasure
he had gathered? How much had they taken from the Louvre?)

"I would not call that reducing your fee. All the money in the world
could not purchase one of those bracelets."

"Or the things I have given you."

"You are greedy, Mr. Ashton. You know that with an accelerator the
entire world would be yours."

"What of that? Do you have any further interest in our planet, now you
have taken what you need?"

There was a pause. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. "So you have
guessed I do not belong to your world."

"Yes. And I know that you have other agents besides myself. Do you
come from Mars, or won't you tell me?"

"I am quite willing to tell you. But you may not thank me if I do."

Ashton looked at her warily. What did she mean by that? Unconscious
of his action, he put his wrist behind his back, protecting the bracelet.

"Now, I am not from Mars, or any planet of which you have ever
heard. You would not understand
what
I am. Yet I will tell you this. I am
from the Future."

"The Future! That's ridiculous!"

"Indeed? I should be interested to know why."

"If that sort of thing were possible, our past history would be full of
time travelers. Besides, it would involve a
reductio ad absurdum.
Going
into the past could change the present and produce all sorts of paradoxes."

"Those are good points, though not perhaps as original as you suppose. But they only refute the possibility of time travel in general, not in the very special case which concerns us now."

"What is peculiar about it?" he asked.

"On very rare occasions, and by the release of an enormous amount of energy, it is possible to produce a—
singularity
—in time. During the fraction of a second when that singularity occurs, the past becomes accessible to the future, though only in a restricted way. We can send our minds back to you, but not our bodies."

"You mean," said Ashton, "that you are
borrowing
the body I see?"

"Oh, I have paid for it, as I am paying you. The owner has agreed to the terms. We are very conscientious in these matters."

Ashton was thinking swiftly. If this story was true, it gave him a definite advantage.

"You mean," he continued, "that you have no direct control over matter, and must work through human agents?"

"Yes. Even those bracelets were made here, under our mental control."

She was explaining too much too readily, revealing all her weaknesses. A warning signal was flashing in the back of Ashton's mind, but he had committed himself too deeply to retreat.

"Then it seems to me," he said slowly, "that you cannot force me to hand this bracelet back."

"That is perfectly true."

"That's all I want to know."

She was smiling at him now, and there was something in that smile that chilled him to the marrow.

"We are not vindictive or unkind, Mr. Ashton," she said quietly. "What I am going to do now appeals to my sense of justice. You have asked for that bracelet; you can keep it. Now I shall tell you just how useful it will be."

For a moment Ashton had a wild impulse to hand back the accelerator. She must have guessed his thoughts.

"No, it's too late. I insist that you keep it. And I can reassure you on one point. It won't wear out. It will last you"—again that enigmatic smile —"the rest of your life.

"Do you mind if we go for a walk, Mr. Ashton? I have done my work here, and would like to have a last glimpse of your world before I leave it forever."

She turned toward the iron gates, and did not wait for a reply. Consumed by curiosity, Ashton followed.

They walked in silence until they were standing among the frozen
traffic of Tottenham Court Road. For a while she stood staring at the busy
yet motionless crowds; then she sighed.

"I cannot help feeling sorry for them, and for you. I wonder what you
would have made of yourselves."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just now, Mr. Ashton, you implied that the future cannot reach back
into the past, because that would alter history. A shrewd remark, but, I
am afraid, irrelevant. You see,
your
world has no more history to alter."

She pointed across the road, and Ashton turned swiftly on his heels.
There was nothing there except a newsboy crouching over his pile of
papers. A placard formed an impossible curve in the breeze that was
blowing through this motionless world. Ashton read the crudely lettered
words with difficulty:

SUPER-BOMB TEST TODAY

The voice in his ears seemed to come from a very long way off.

"I told you that time travel, even in this restricted form, requires an
enormous release of energy—far more than a single bomb can liberate,
Mr. Ashton. But that bomb is only a trigger—"

She pointed to the solid ground beneath their feet. "Do you know
anything about your own planet? Probably not; your race has learned so little. But even your scientists have discovered that, two thousand miles
down, the Earth has a dense, liquid core. That core is made of compressed
matter, and it can exist in either of two stable states. Given a certain stim
ulus, it can change from one of those states to another, just as a seesaw
can tip over at the touch of a finger. But that change, Mr. Ashton, will
liberate as much energy as all the earthquakes since the beginning of
your world. The oceans and continents will fly into space; the sun will
have a second asteroid belt.

"That cataclysm will send its echoes down the ages, and will open up
to us a fraction of a second in your time. During that instant, we are
trying to save what we can of your world's treasures. It is all that we can
do; even if your motives were purely selfish and completely dishonest,
you have done your race a service you never intended.

"And now I must return to our ship, where it waits by the ruins of
Earth almost a hundred thousand years from now. You can keep the
bracelet."

The withdrawal was instantaneous. The woman suddenly froze and
became one with the other statues in the silent street. He was alone.

Alone! Ashton held the gleaming bracelet before his eyes, hypnotized
by its intricate workmanship and by the powers it concealed. He had
made a bargain, and he must keep it. He could live out the full span of
his life—at the cost of an isolation no other man had ever known. If he switched off the field, the last seconds of history would tick inexorably
away.

Seconds?
Indeed, there was less time than that. For he knew that the bomb must already have exploded.

He sat down on the edge of the pavement and began to think. There
was no need to panic; he must take things calmly, without hysteria. After
all, he had plenty of time.

All the time in the world.

☆
COSMIC CASANOVA

This time I was five weeks out from Base Planet before the symptoms became acute. On the last trip it had taken only a
month; I was not certain whether the difference was due to advancing age
or to something the dietitians had put into my food capsules. Or it could
merely have been that I was busier; the arm of the galaxy I was scouting
was heavily populated, with stars only a couple of light-years apart, so
I had little time to brood over the girls I'd left behind me. As soon as one
star had been classified, and the automatic search for planets had been completed, it was time to head for the next sun. And when, as happened
in about one case out of ten, planets
did
turn up, I'd be furiously busy
for several days seeing that Max, the ship's electronic computer, got all
the information down on his tapes.

Now, however, I was through this densely packed region of space,
and it sometimes took as much as three days to get from sun to sun. That
was time enough for Sex to come tiptoeing aboard the ship, and for the
memories of my last leave to make the months ahead look very empty
indeed.

Perhaps I had overdone it, back on Diadne V, while my ship was
being reprovisioned and I was supposed to be resting between missions. But a survey scout spends eighty per cent of his time alone in space, and
human nature being what it is, he must be expected to make up for lost
time. I had not merely done that; I'd built up considerable credit for the
future—though not, it seemed, enough to last me through this trip.

First, I recalled wistfully, there had been Helene. She was blonde,
cuddly, and compliant, though rather unimaginative. We had a fine time
together until her husband came back from
his
mission; he was extremely
decent about it but pointed out, reasonably enough, that Helene would
now have very little time for other engagements. Fortunately, I had al
ready made contact with Iris, so the hiatus was negligible.

Now Iris was really something. Even now, it makes me squirm to think
of her. When that affair broke up—for the simple reason that a man has
to get a little sleep sometime—I swore off women for a whole week. Then
I came across a touching poem by an old Earth writer named John
Donne—he's worth looking up, if you can read Primitive English—which
reminded me that time lost could never be regained.

How true, I thought, so I put on my spaceman's uniform and wandered
down to the beach of Diadne V's only sea. There was need to walk no
more than a few hundred meters before I'd spotted a dozen possibilities,
brushed off several volunteers, and signed up Natalie.

That worked out pretty well at first, until Natalie started objecting to
Ruth (or was it Kay?). I can't
stand
girls who think they own a man, so
I blasted off after a rather difficult scene that was quite expensive in crock
ery. This left me at loose ends for a couple of days; then Cynthia came to
the rescue and—but by now you'll have gotten the general idea, so I won't
bore you with details.

These, then, were the fond memories I started to work back through
while one star dwindled behind me and the next flared up ahead. On this trip I'd deliberately left my pin-ups behind, having decided that they only
made matters worse. This was a mistake; being quite a good artist in a
rather specialized way, I started to draw my own, and it wasn't long before I had a collection it would be hard to match on any respectable planet.

I would hate you to think that this preoccupation affected my efficiency
as a unit of the Galactic Survey. It was only on the long, dull runs between
the stars, when I had no one to talk to but the computer, that I found my
glands getting the better of me. Max, my electronic colleague, was good
enough company in the ordinary course of events, but there are some
things that a machine can't be expected to understand. I often hurt his
feelings when I was in one of my irritable moods and lost my temper
for no apparent reason. "What's the matter, Joe?" Max would say plaintively. "Surely you're not mad at me because I beat you at chess again?
Remember, I warned you I would."

"Oh, go to hell!" I'd snarl back—and then I'd have an anxious five
minutes while I straightened things out with the rather literal-minded
Navigation Robot.

Two months out from Base, with thirty suns and four solar systems
logged, something happened that wiped all my personal problems from
my mind. The long-range monitor began to beep; a faint signal was
coming from somewhere in the section of space ahead of me. I got the most accurate bearing that I could; the transmission was unmodulated,
very narrow band—clearly a beacon of some kind. Yet no ship of ours, to