Collision with Chronos

2

Squat conical towers.

Throughout the world these were the features of alien architecture to survive more than any other, probably by reason of being the most difficult for time or man to dismantle. The ruins Heshke and his team were studying sported plenty of them.

He arrived back at the site at sunset. The Hathar Ruins, as the site was called, was one of the most important of outworlder remains, and one of the best preserved. More typical were the expanses of fused glass where cities and settlements had been destroyed by nuclear bombardment. The Hathar Ruins had not sustained an atomic hit, but they had suffered extensive damage from less powerful weapons; nevertheless they still exuded a rich aura of a bygone race. Crumbled walls, curiously curved and rounded, wavered toward the sky. The short conical towers seemed to sprout everywhere and at all levels. It was hard to believe that the aliens had been on Earth for a comparatively short time – which had to be the case if history made any sense at all. This settlement, and even more so the larger settlements dotted around the world, were clearly built to last.

The team was just finishing its day’s work of carefully sifting earth. Heshke hurried over to the finds tent, hoping to see some new artifact, perhaps even a document in the cryptic alien script that no one, so far, had deciphered. As usual, he was disappointed. In the North Sector, in the large building popularly known as the Cathedral, someone had uncovered a glass object of which there were already scores of samples. It was believed to be a common domestic article used for squashing fruit.

That, in essence, was most of what they had. Simple articles of common use, elementary tools, some furniture. From skeletons they had a fair idea of the aliens’ physical appearance. But the advanced technology, the machines, equipment, records – virtually the whole apparatus of a tremendously advanced species – had all gone in the frenzy of annihilation in which the men of the past had torn through everything alien, burning and pulverising. A few rusted, mangled machines had been found, but not enough to reconstruct even approximately what the outworld technology had been like.

Heshke did not blame the men who had carried out this destruction – they had seen their planet despoiled, their society wrecked – but in retrospect it was an unintelligent move.

He could not wait to see the functional artifact that Brourne had promised.

He was watching a young teamster clean the fruit-squasher, when there was a movement behind him. He turned to see Blare Oblomot, his chief assistant.

“Well, Rond,” Blare said breezily, “what did the Titans want?”

Heshke coughed, looking nervously at the teamster. He took it for granted that someone on his team was a Titan “watcher”, and it made him feel uncomfortable. He jerked his head toward the exit.

“How about a drink in your place?” he said once they were outside. As they walked toward Blare’s quarters he noticed that the camp seemed abnormally quiet and even Blare seemed slightly uneasy. That was odd: the tousle-haired, raffish archaeologist usually had an unshakable confidence.

Blare lifted the flap to his tent for Heshke to enter. Seated at the small wooden table, he poured them both glasses of wine.

“The Titans have been here today,” he announced. “Asking questions. Practically interrogating everyone, in fact.”

Heshke started. “What kind of questions?”

“Political, what else?” Blare shrugged, looking away. “You know, I think I feel the cold wind of a purge coming on. They wanted to know a lot about you, too.”

Heshke put down his glass, feeling suddenly numb. So far he had managed to keep Titan influence at the site minimal. He had seen what happened when the Titans put in their own teams to work alongside civilian diggers: they soon dominated the entire project; scientific objectivity was the first casualty. He didn’t want that here.

At the same time the calculating coolness of it struck him. The Titans had wanted to investigate the project while he, its leader, was absent. Why?

“What did they ask about me?” he demanded.

“They seemed to want to find out whether you are… on their side, for lack of another way of putting it. Are you, Rond? What’s going on, anyway? Are we being taken over?”

Slowly Heshke shook his head. “No… it’s something else.” He was silent for a few moments. “My God, it must be something big,” he muttered wonderingly.

“What, Rond?” Blare looked at him curiously, the light of the lamp playing over his sharp features. “Well, you know my views. I don’t mind telling you I had a fright today. I think I’ll have to get out.”

Heshke blinked. “Don’t be ridiculous, Blare. There’s nothing to worry about. They’re checking up, that’s all. They’ve made an important find, and they want me to help them.… I shouldn’t really tell you anything, but hang it all, I don’t really know any more than you do. They’ve found an alien artifact and I gather they’re excited about it. Anyway, it entails a field trip. I don’t know where to, except that it’s probably somewhere in a dev reservation.”

Blare was frowning. “Really? Why only probably?”

“Well, there’s some danger involved. That’s all they would tell me.”

Blare grunted. “Dev reservations are pretty quiet places these days, you know, except for when the Titans go storming in. You may not be going to one.”

“Well, perhaps not. I just wanted to reassure you that there’s no purge coming, that’s all.”

“Thanks for your concern, Rond, but… I still think I’d better go. I got the impression this afternoon that something more is brewing. I don’t feel safe here any more.”

Heshke stared at him. “What on Earth are you talking about, Blare?”

The other moved uneasily and took a gulp of wine. The movements of his head cast grotesque shadows on the canvas of the tent, the lamp being set on the table beside them.

“I’d better be frank – hang it, I feel I can trust you, if no one else. You know my sympathies – you know there’s a political opposition. I think the Titans are on to me, and if so you know what the outlook will be if I hang around much longer.”

“On to you?” Heshke echoed uncomprehendingly. “But of course there’s a political opposition – there always is! It’s hardly a crime to belong to it. Not unless you mean…”

His voice trailed off. He had known Blare Oblomot for years. Like Heshke himself, he was one of the foremost experts in his field, though younger and less experienced. Heshke also knew of his contempt for the Titans, of his somewhat anarchistic-liberal views. But he had always put that down to a kind of freakish waywardness – no, not freakish, he corrected himself hastily; freakish was an unfortunate word – to a kind of charming and frivolous individuality. But not as a serious defiance of…

His thoughts, like his voice, trailed off.

Blare was speaking wryly. “There’s always a point where opposition becomes incompatible with good citizenship. What is legitimate, even if disapproved of, in peacetime becomes treasonable in a state of war. Figuratively speaking we’re still in a state of war. So there comes a time when one has to make a hard and cut decision. I made mine some time ago.” Blare rubbed the side of his face. Heshke noticed the fatigue in his eyes – did the Titans have that effect on him, too?

“Blare – you’re not telling me that you’re one of… them.”

Oblomot nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid so. I was pushed into it step by step, really, by the Titans themselves. Their grip has tightened, not relaxed, since the Deviant Wars. Their ideas have taken an even more intransigent form, so that even some thoughts would infringe the legal code today, if there was some way to monitor thoughts. So when you belong to a secret organisation pledged to fight the Titans by any means whatsoever and which believes the so-called deviants should be allowed a place in the world—”

“Blare! What are you saying!”

Oblomot shrugged again. “You see? Even you can’t approach a thought like that. And yet you like the Titans scarcely any more than I do.”

Heshke’s shoulders sagged. Here was his old friend Blare Oblomot confessing that he was a race traitor; that he was secretly a member of the despised underground that during the last war had actually helped the Amhraks. It just didn’t bear thinking about; his bewilderment was complete.

He forced himself to speak mildly, calmly. “One can make many criticisms of them, of course,” he said, “but the Titans aren’t the source of their ideology – they are merely its chief instrument. And that instrument is necessary, Blare. Earth has to be defended; so does the correct evolutionary lineage – I’m astounded if you can’t see that.”

“Defending Earth against an alien invader is one thing,” Oblomot rejoindered. “We haven’t had to do that – this civilisation hasn’t had to do that. It all happened centuries ago. As for the rest—” He shook his head sadly.

Although he felt he had had enough of arguing for one day, Heshke could hardly allow such wild contentions to pass unchallenged. “But it’s all part of the same thing!” he protested. “The blood that flows in the veins of the Titanium Legions is the same blood that flowed in the men who flung back the invader. The threat is the same, the task is the same – to have and to hold the planet Earth!”

He was, he knew, spouting Titan slogans, but that didn’t worry him. This was part of the creed he would never seriously have doubted.

But Oblomot merely looked sardonic. “The blood in the veins of the deviant species is the same, too. We’re all descended from Classical Man.”

“Yes, but —”

“I know what you’re going to say. That we alone carry the unchanged line of Classical Man and hence constitute True Man – the others are aberrations leading away from the ‘natural’ line of evolutionary development. Well, it is true that we’re closest to Classical Man, in physical characteristics, anyway. And probably in mental characteristics too, I grant you that.”

“Then there you are. That is what I’m saying.”

“Yes, but what does it mean? Just because we resemble an old type doesn’t mean that newer types are somehow wrong. I and my friends aren’t opposed to evolution, Rond. We’re trying to save evolution from being stopped, from being cut short – because that’s what the Titans are doing. Nature’s method is diversity – always to be radiating out into new forms. The Titans are destroying all new forms and imposing a rigid uniformity. Believe me, we’ll all be victims in the end.”

Heshke found these new ideas frightening. “The Titans believe the deviants were caused by an alien weapon that affected mankind’s genes,” he said.

“Yes, I’ve heard that type of theory before. Perhaps it’s true. Or perhaps it was one of our own weapons. But so what? All these mutation-inducing influences can do is speed up evolution, compressing into centuries what otherwise would have taken tens of millennia or longer. The subspecies we’ve been dutifully annihilating would have developed sooner or later anyway.”

There was an awkward silence. Heshke shook his head, sighing deeply.

“I still say only one race can occupy the Earth,” he said sombrely. “For heaven’s sake, how do you expect us to react to an all-out attack by the Lorenes?”

Oblomot nodded slowly. “In that particular case, I agree with you. The Lorenes were an even more aggressive species than we are; they had to be wiped out – they were a strain this planet just couldn’t afford. But we didn’t stop there, we went on to all the others. The Lorenes were a danger, yes – but the Amhraks?” He smiled. “No, Rond. And as for the Urukuri, they were scarcely able to put up a fight. As a matter of fact I think it’s stretching a point to call them a subspecies at all. They merely have exaggerated negroid characteristics and an exceptionally placid disposition.”

“Think of the dangers of miscegenation. Of our blood becoming contaminated with Urukuri or Amhrak blood.” Heshke shuddered slightly. “Imagine your daughter being raped by one. They have raped our women, you know.”

Oblomot rummaged for a fresh bottle in a nearby cabinet. It was as if he were pretending not to hear Heshke.

At last he said heavily: “Have another drink, Rond. I don’t blame you for thinking like that, because Titan propaganda is very good and everybody is infected by it. To your mind it even appears perfectly rational, that’s how good it is. But it’s wrong.”

Sipping the newly filled glass, Heshke said with a note of petulance: “Well, why are you unburdening your soul to me? Aren’t you afraid I’ll report you?”

“No, I trust you. Basically you’re just not the Titan type. I wanted you to know why I’m leaving. When things get bad – which they may – I want you to understand that there is an alternative, that Titan thinking isn’t the only option for our species.”

He raised his glass as though offering Heshke a toast. “To the future.”

“Where will you go?” Heshke asked idly.

“In hiding for a bit. I have friends.” Oblomot drained his glass. “Sorry to make a ‘race traitor’ of you, old man.”

“That’s all right,” mumbled Heshke, waving his hand in embarrassment. “You know I could never bring myself to inform on you, Blare.”

Lacking the energy to meet Oblomot’s arguments, he left after a few more drinks and made his way to his own tent. It was night now; the full moon was out, casting a cold, eerie radiance over the ruins. He glanced up at the shining satellite, thinking briefly of the Titan outposts there, lonely sentinels guarding the approaches to Earth, watching the outskirts of the solar system for the return of the invader.

Then for the millionth time he turned his full attention to the ruins themselves. Even without moonlight there had always been something ghostly, unearthly, about them – he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he had always put it down to the fact that they were, after all, of alien origin. On the short stroll to his tent he placed his hand on a time-worn wall. It was chill – yet, in his imagination, the phrase living rock came to him. The stone did indeed seem to carry the ghost of life, as if redolent of the beings who had shaped it. He reminded himself of the inexplicable photographs and shook his head in despair. Towers and walls reconstructing themselves over the centuries. What incredible hoax had the faker tried to perpetrate?

In his tent, he went straight to bed, his conversation with Oblomot tumbling over and over in his mind. Yes, he told himself, the Titans were masters of propaganda. But the propaganda was about real things, not about the fake things – not like those photographs. Its strength lay in its appeal to a primeval urge of nature. Blood and soil. It was a rare man who could resist it.

And he, too, was of that blood, and of that soil.

He was awakened just before dawn by the whine of hoverjets.

Blearily he rose from his camp bed and peered through the tent flap to see two hoverjets bearing Titan insignia settle squarely in the middle of the camp. Two others remained in the air, standing off just outside the ruins.

It was a frankly military style of approach. The airborne helijets were in a guard posture, and carried glaring searchlights which cast the scene in vivid relief.

Hurriedly Heshke dressed and went outside. A traversing searchlight beam hit him full in the face, transfixed him for a moment or two, then moved on. When his vision returned to normal he saw that two Titan noncoms were striding towards him.

“Are you Citizen Heshke?” one demanded. He nodded.

“Come with us, please.” They turned and strode off, leaving him to straggle after them.

The slim figure of Titan-Captain Brask stood by the nearer hoverjet. “Good morning, Heshke,” he said in a supercilious but not unfriendly voice. “We did warn you to be ready. Unfortunately it seems we need you somewhat sooner than we thought we would.”

Heshke said nothing, his brain still slow with sleep. “Is there anything you need to bring with you?” Brask asked politely. “Books, notes, charts? Well, we can supply anything you want, anyway.”

He turned. Blare Oblomot was approaching, walking slowly between Titan escorts. In the background Heshke saw some of his helpers emerging from their tents to stare curiously, white figures in pre-dawn darkness.

“Is my assistant Oblomot included in this project too?” he queried.

Brask gave a short, sharp laugh. “Oh, we know all about him. He’s got a different destination.”

As he came near, Oblomot gave Heshke a half pleading, half I-told-you-so look. Brask made a violent gesture with his arm.

“Take him to Major Brourne at Bupolbloc Two. Heshke comes with us.”

Heshke watched his friend being put aboard the second hoverjet, feeling sick inside. Bupolbloc Two, he thought. He hadn’t known there was a Number Two; hadn’t known that the building he had visited just yesterday was only Bupolbloc One.

Suddenly he reminded himself that his small personal belongings and toilet requisites were still in his tent, but he decided against returning to collect them. Brask looked impatient, and anyway the Titans were very efficient at providing details like that.

Numbly he climbed into the hoverjet. They surged upward and whined away to the north.

Suddenly there was a glare of light and the sound of an explosion from one of the other helijets, the one carrying Blare Oblomot. Heshke gasped with shock, and saw the flaring skeleton of the jet plummeting earthward in the darkness.

Brask jumped to his feet, cursing. “The fools! Didn’t they know enough to check him? He must have been carrying a suicide grenade!”

Heshke tore his gaze away from the blaze on the ground and gaped at him. Brask gave him a sidelong glance.

“You don’t know about these, do you? The underground has been using that trick quite a lot lately. Saves them from interrogation and takes a few of us with them.”

Unsuspected vistas seemed to be opening up to Heshke. “I… no, I hadn’t known.”

“Naturally, you wouldn’t. It’s not advertised on the media, and we have ways of discouraging rumour. Yes, there is an organised underground and your friend Oblomot was a member of it. You didn’t know that either – or did you?” Brask’s odd, quizzical gaze darted toward him.

“No, I hadn’t known – not until tonight,” Heshke murmured.

They hovered over the spot for a few minutes, watching the wrecked jet burn itself out. Finally one of the three remaining jets put down beside it. The other two continued the journey as the sun rose, whistling toward a destination that still had not been divulged to Heshke.