Beyond the Barrier

Chapter Six

With the sound of the mob in his ears, Naismith ducked into the tube entrance and went down the stairs three at a time. He had one chance in a thousand. If there should be a train just pulling out.

The station was empty.

He saw that in one instant. In the next, at the edge of his vision, he saw a door open. He whirled. It was the door to a maintenance room; as it swung open, he saw it was blank except for ventilation louvers, and a number painted in white.

Inside the room, dark in a shimmer of faint colors, stood Miss Lall with Churan behind her. She held out her hand.

“Come in!”

He sprang toward the doorway, aware as he did so that there was something abnormal about the walls of the room. They were curved and insubstantial, with a soap-bubble shimmer about them; they were partly transparent. Beyond them, he could dimly make out the real walls of the room, with clothing hanging on hooks, a mop leaning against one corner.

Then he was inside. Lall sidled past him and closed the door.

Churan remained seated. The three of them looked at each other. They were enclosed and huddled together by an oval shell of transparent, streaming color. The light was strange; it was like being inside an egg made of rushing shadows.

Outside, an instant later, the rattle of footsteps and a frantic baying of voices poured down the stairs, onto the platform.

Naismith took a deep breath, let it go, relaxed deliberately with his hands at his sides. “All according to plan?” he asked ironically.

“According to plan, Mr. Naismith,” said Churan. He was seated on a stool which appeared to be part of the substance of the shadow-egg. The dancing prismatic colors streamed out from the base of this stool and disappeared at the apex of the shell over their heads.

Churan’s stubby, short-fingered hands lay casually upon the blued-steel object in his lap. With a shock, Naismith recognized the machine that had disappeared from the closet of his Beverly Hills apartment.

Churan’s eyes flickered. “We have saved your life, Mr.

Naismith,” he said hoarsely.

“All right, let’s say you did. You must have done it for some reason. Here I am. Just what is it you want?”

Lall, her eyes shining, said something swift and emphatic in a language that sounded tantalizingly familiar to Naismith—a curious combination of liquids and deep gutturals. Churan nodded, wet his lips nervously. “We want you to come with us,” he said. “A long journey, Mr. Naismith—twenty thousand years. Does that interest you?”

“What if I say no?”

Churan’s amber eyes glinted briefly. “We want you to come willingly, Mr. Naismith.”

Naismith gave a mirthless bark of laughter. “Is that why you did all this—killed Ramsdell and Mrs. Becker?”

The woman bent toward him slightly. “I’m not sure you understand, Mr. Naismith. The machine killed Mr. Ramsdell and Mrs. Becker. It is tuned to our mind patterns—yours, his and mine. You see, for anyone else, it is not safe to touch. A precaution against theft.”

Naismith felt his anger growing in spite of himself. “Are you saying that two people died just for nothing—just because you wanted to get that machine into my hands?”

“No, on the contrary,” said Churan. “Sending the machine to you was merely a device to kill Mr. Ramsdell, so that you would be suspected of murder. Our aim was to weaken your associations here. You were too well convinced that you were really Gordon Naismith.”

Outside, the noise of the crowd was dwindling; Naismith could hear isolated querulous voices calling from one end of the platform to the other. From time to time, someone would approach the maintenance room, try the knob, find it locked, and go away again.

Defeated, he made his decision. “All right, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Lall and Churan exchanged a quick glance. Then the man’s stubby fingers moved on the surface of the machine.

Naismith watched in fascination as the inlays, which had resisted all his efforts, depressed and moved under Churan’s fingertips. As they did so, although there was no sense of motion, the walls of the maintenance room, hanging garments, mop and all, gently receded. In the act of turning, Naismith felt a psychic shock as the closed, shadowy door drifted through his own body.

Then they were moving across the station, a foot or two higher than the young men who stood in postures of arrested motion, scattered here and there about the platform. There was no sound. Every form was still, although some were caught in mid-stride. Faces were contorted, eyes glared blindly.

Moving at the same even pace, they drifted into the wall of the station. Another moment of darkness, then they emerged, on a shallow upward slant, into the open air.

Naismith watched everything with intense concentration, trying to fathom the relationship between their movements and Churan’s handling of the machine.

“What I fail to understand,” he said abruptly, “is how the energies you are using can be contained in so small a space.”

“They are not, Mr. Naismith,” said Lall with a look of respect. “The forces we use are generated in the future. This machine that you see is only the control unit. We call it—” She uttered two throaty monosyllables. “In English, what would it be?” She paused, and said doubtfully, “Time sphere? No, because it is not a sphere. But the name means something that is lowered in time, as you lower a bathysphere in the ocean. How would you say—you ought to know this, Mr. Naismith—a temporo-…?”

Outside, the bright campus was like a color transparency: the two copters, the students on the lawn, all were caught in one frozen moment. Naismith stared in fascination as the shadow-egg drifted, now more rapidly, eastward across the lawns.

Buildings, flame trees and people receded in perspective—not like a photograph now, but like some incredibly detailed and lifelike miniature model.

“Temporoscaphe?” he suggested wryly, after a moment.

“Good, temporoscaphe. But it is a very ugly word…. You see, we can control our position in both space and time. Just now, we move in space while remaining fixed in time. Later on, the other way around.”

Below, the landscape was now flowing back more rapidly.

Sunlight glinted yellow off the tip of some building on the northern horizon. Rising on a slant, they were now passing over Burwash Park. Naismith could see the gravel walks, the pedestrians frozen in place like bright-colored dolls, the silvery lake and the handball courts. It flowed away and was gone; the densely packed buildings of metropolitan Los Angeles swam into view, all in the same unearthly silence.

Standing there in the confined space of the shadow-egg, Naismith was abruptly aware of something that had been at the edge of his consciousness: the smell. It was cheap perfume, with an undertone, almost masked, that he recognized: the same cold, musky odor that he had smelled in Churan’s office.

Looking at the two of them now with renewed attention, he realized again how quite astoundingly ugly they were when seen together. What might have been an accidental cast of features in Lall—the flat, wide-nostriled nose, the long amber eyes, the thin mouth—became, in this doubled image, the pure stuff of ugliness. They were like two painted frogs, there in the shadow-egg, both staring at him with unwinking amber eyes—

frogs, obscenely vivisected to stand erect and wear human clothing. And remembering the cold touch of Lall, Naismith shivered.

The foothills were sliding away beneath them now, yellow-brown and bare in the sunlight, then the mountains rose slowly into view. Naismith glimpsed sunlight winking from the win-dows of a canyon-perched house, tiny with distance. As they crossed the mountains, still gaining altitude, he could see the whole circle of the horizon, misty blue, with flecks of cirrus floating high in the pale vault. Something else caught his eye, a bright glint above the clouds, rapidly coming nearer. Now he could almost make it out; now it grew plain—a blue and silver Trans Am airliner. They were going to pass it almost on the same level. As it swelled nearer, brilliant and solid in the sunlight, Naismith flinched involuntarily; he could see every rivet in its polished skin. He could see, too, that it was hanging absolutely motionless in the air, as if embedded in gelatin.

Behind the windshield, the pilot and copilot were stiff wax dummies; faint spears of flame were frozen in the jets. It whipped past and dwindled behind them, still hanging immov-able.

The two aliens were watching him with intent, unreadable expressions. Naismith’s lips were dry. He said, more harshly than he had intended, “Where are we going?”

“Not so far now, Mr. Naismith,” said Churan. Below, the round world was rolling back at an incredible speed; there was a glint of silver that Naismith recognized as Boulder Dam; then the mighty scar of the Grand Canyon, filled with shadow, passed beneath. Then there were more mountains, and a threadlike river that must be the Colorado. Down on the plain beyond the mountains, Naismith caught sight of a city sprawled like a scattering of silver dominoes. It glittered in the parched land. “Denver,” he said.

“Not the city itself,” said Churan, glancing down at the machine in his lap. “We use it for a landmark.” Now his pudgy brown fingers were dancing over the machine, and Naismith saw the odd-shaped inlays depress one after another, glimpsed a shimmer of light that floated briefly over the machine. Then there was a spot of angry red light that pulsed slowly and regularly; then more rapidly as they crossed the city, slowing now, then more rapidly still as the shadow-egg drifted to a stop; and after a moment the red light shone steadily, with the faintest suggestion of a shimmering motion.

The shadow-egg came to rest.

“From Los Angeles to Denver,” said Naismith, “in—what?

Five minutes? Four?”

“In one sense, no time at all,” said Lall. “You realize, this is still the same instant as when we left the tube station. No time has elapsed.”

Churan grinned up at him, showing yellow stubs of teeth.

“Now we have reached the right position in space,” he said.

“Therefore we shall begin to move in time. Are you ready, Mr. Naismith?”

Without waiting for an answer, he touched the machine again, and as if in response, the whole vast landscape beneath them dimmed, went dark, glowed to light again. Looking up, Naismith was in time to see the sun arching overhead like a fireball. It plunged into the western horizon with a flicker of red; then all was dark again. Light! The sun sprang up in the east, hurled itself overhead, plunged, and the world was dark.

Light! Dark! Light! In the shadow-egg, Naismith saw the faces of Lall and Churan lit by the flickering alternation of days and nights. The landscape below, trembling in the swift waves of darkness and light, was tortured, changing, shaking itself into new forms. Naismith saw the city put out new tentacles, under-go writhing transformations, sprout taller buildings. It was like a grotesque animated film: the city had a rhythm of growth, rest, growth again.

Then, abruptly, there was a gigantic crater where the eastern half of the city had been. The growth cycle stopped. Naismith, rigid with fascination, saw areas of the city darken slowly, saw parts of it collapse into black ruin. “What year?” he asked hoarsely.

“Toward the end of the nineties, I think,” said Lall’s indifferent voice. “It’s not important.”

“Not important!” said Naismith automatically, but his voice died away as he watched the landscape below. The dead metropolis sank. It went down as if into quicksand; the earth visibly swallowed it. Then there was only a featureless plain, shimmering in the ghostly twilight. For what seemed like hours, there was no change.

Again Churan touched the machine. The flickering alternation of days and nights abruptly stopped. It was early evening, the clear sky darkening to a steely blue in which one or two stars were visible. The whole landscape, as Naismith looked around from his elevated position, was unearthly vacant and still. Not a roof, or a wall, or the trace of a road in the whole immense plain; not a light anywhere.

“What year?” he asked again.

No one answered. Churan touched the machine again, and the shadow-egg began to drift down in a long slant. They were skimming along at ground level now, through the knee-high grasses, toward a long, low mound that was just visible against the sky. The rest of the landscape was empty and dark.

As they drifted nearer, Naismith felt his body trembling with the shock of visceral realization: this was real—this earth and its wet grass, this dark sky overhead. He was here, physically and inescapably.

Back in Los Angeles, Klemperer was taking his classes; someone else would be living in his Beverly Hills apartment…

No: they were all dead, dead and forgotten. The thought gave Naismith an extraordinary feeling of release and pleasure.

Whatever was going to happen to him now, at least it would not be the safe, dull middle age he had looked forward to….

The mound they were approaching was both larger and nearer than it had appeared at first: perhaps thirty feet high, it was immensely long and straight, like one of the long barrows of Wiltshire. There were faint, earthy and woody smells in the cold air; but the black hulk of the mound hung silent and still.

It was covered with the grasses that grew on the plain; on the skyline, against the moonlit clouds, Naismith could make out an occasional small shrub or tree.

They drifted into the blackness of the mound, which closed like a stifling curtain about their heads: then, with shocking suddenness, they were dazzled by golden light.