Gordon Eklund Falling Toward Forever

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

often to consider the next move. Waller watched surreptitiously from
one eye, while focusing the remainder of his attention upon the screen.
Suddenly, the picture cleared. Waller sucked in his breath. He was seeing
himself and Ahmad, too shortly after his own arrival in this world. He
lay passed out upon the cold slopes of the hill. The foul gray mist
swirled around him. Ahmad came rushing forward. Bending quickly down, he
scooped up Waller's unconscious form and carried him back down the
hill. The picture followed them part way, then clicked abruptly off.
They turned to find Ahmad grinning. "An example," he said, "though I'm
afraid it's about all I'm capable of showing." He motioned them back
to their seats. "But there could be more. All of Earth's history, from
creation to this very moment of Now.
Any moment of past time, any place on Earth this machine can reach it and
reveal it."
"Just pictures?" asked Waller. "Or is travel also possible?"
"Obviously, it is. How do you think we got here?" He nodded toward the control
panel. "There's your answer right there."
"Then we can " Sondra began, a smile of hope clinging desperately to
her face. None of them suffered any difficulty completing the
sentence for her. It was the question they all wished to ask.
Ahmad interrupted: "It is possible. At least I tend to believe it must be. But
he won't tell me." For the first time, his frustration clearly showed.
Waller now found the worst of his fears confirmed: they were stuck here
forever, exiled to tomorrow. "I
figured out this much " he indicated the machines " only from a few hints he
accidentally let drop."
"Then I'll kill him," said Waller, half-rising from his seat. The force and
fervor of his own words shocked him.
Page 81
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"No, you won't," Sondra said. "Then we'd really be in a fix."
"I doubt it could be greatly worse than the fix we are presently enjoying,"
said Ahmad. "For two days and nights, I have been threatening,
cajoling, berating that old man. He's weak and worn and tired. But he won't
budge. I told you he greatly fears death. I
have dis-covered there is one thing he fears even more: allowing us to return
unharmed to our own times."
"But why?" said Sondra. "What is it we've done that's so dreadful?
I'm no monster, no fiend, all those things he called us."
"I'm sure none of us feels any differently but Barone the old man asserts
otherwise. I'm afraid the crucial situation concerns only Waller, Sondra, and
me. And especially one of us he won't tell me which. It seems that
someone either Sondra or Waller or me was removed from time because Barone
wished to save the world."
"You mean one of us destroyed the world?" asked Sondra. She laughed hollowly
at the idea of it.
"Barone apparently feels one of us had a hand in it. But first you must
understand his very personal point of view on this.
Some ten thousand years ago, the final great wave of humanity deserted the
Earth. It shouldn't be difficult to understand why.
The sun is entering its old age. The Earth itself is a mere
shriveled husk of its once majestic self. Evolution has turned
puzzling corners. New species have been born. Old, familiar creatures
are long extinct. The ape has achieved measure of intelligence.
Mankind no longer felt truly at home on this world;
the galaxy had been conquered long since. So they left they went
elsewhere. Don't ask me what they were like, these last men. If we
saw them, I doubt that we'd recognize much of ourselves in what
they are. Barone is no good example. His ancestors, along with a
tiny handful of others, did not depart with the others. I received the
distinct impression that they were rejected as unfit. In any event, those few
who stayed eventually bore children but not many. Barone is the last of
these, the very last man on Earth."
"And he invented all of this?" Waller said. "The time traveling equipment?"
"Oh, no. He inherited it. Time was conquered many centuries ago. In fact,
it was this discovery that allowed the laws of relativity to be
violated and men to migrate to the farthest stars.
Barone happened to come across this outpost and, entering, found it
still functional. The use he made of these devices was something
totally new. Although always a theoretical possibility, no one had ever
previously considered tampering with time in this fashion. It would
seem that, in the thousands of years separating us from these
inventors, that mankind managed to learn at last to suppress the worst
aspects of his own inherent curiosity."
"And his experiments with the klaptu? What was that all about?"
"He won't tell me. I believe he was trying to send them through
time but whether he succeeded or failed is another of his secrets."
"But if he could send them, he could also send us?"
"Exactly. But did he? I should go on."
"Yes," Waller agreed.
"Barone was different more like us than his own contemporaries. A
throwback who held a grudge. Not against us so much as against them those
who had left the Earth and deserted his ancestors. Why? he kept
asking himself. Why did they go and leave us to rot and die? With his new
found ability to witness all of history unfolding, he set out to
answer this question. And that's when he found us. You or me or Sondra. The
Page 82
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
answer its earliest beginning happened to lie within one of us.
We caused them to leave."
"But how?" asked Sondra.
Ahmad shook his head. "He refuses to say. Something one of us did later. A
thing that, like a pebble dropped from a height into the center of a
still lake, set off a slow, patient wave that would eventually reach
shore and culminate in this final migration."
"Then we aren't monsters," Sondra said. "What we've done isn't
wrong it's right."
"I warned you his point of view was peculiar."
"But wait," said Waller. "Something's wrong. We've been removed from
our own time. Whatever it was one of us did has been wiped from the slate of
history. But nothing has changed, has it? The human race hasn't come
racing back to Earth. So
Barone failed time can't be changed. He ought to be willing to let us go now."
"No, it's working. It's changing. Not in an instant all at once.
The wave takes a long while to reach the shore, but it is coming. I
cannot guess how far it has traveled or how much has been changed as a
result. But eventually it will sweep past everything all of time and
Barone is more than willing to wait until then."
"But couldn't he let the rest of us go?" Waller said. "If there's only one of
us, there's no need to punish the others."
"I tried that on him. He refused. We're all dangerous, he said.
We cannot be trusted."
"Including Norgo and Coulton?"
"Oh, yes."
"But why did he bring us here? I don't understand that part.
Didn't he realize how dangerous it was?"
"I'm sure he did, but it was a final resort." Ahmad smiled at the thought.
"You see, we kept messing up his best laid plans.
Originally, he thought he would simply remove us from our own time and stick
us down someplace where we could cause no conceivable harm. He chose
Norgo's devastated time. So what did we go and do? We arrived and
immediately set about changing everything. We taught Norgo's people a whole
new way of life and set them on the road to eventual maturity. He had to get
us out of there fast before the damage was made permanent.
He also had to bring Norgo along, too, because she had been [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Archiwum