Hunted Head

Illustrations by Jonathan and Lisa Hunt

Sandy had known for weeks that it was probably coming, so the feeling of sickness that struck her on reading the formal notice that her grant was not to be renewed was unexpected. It was also unfair. She was working on the situation; taking steps. There were still a couple of foundations which had not so far sent a form letter regretting that this year’s cash was all committed. And there were several laboratories with the kind of facilities she needed, to which she had not yet had time to apply. She was a damn good technician and had the references to prove it; she was willing to take minimal wages if she could have a couple of yards of bench space and access to a steriliser. It was a bargain for any lab with microorganisms to be looked after. She’d make them see that, if she could just get an interview…

So this was not a catastrophe. Just one more rotten thing in a day that had started with a split fingernail, followed by the sight—no, spectacle of Danny in the cafeteria, sitting between a blonde and a brunette, with a redhead opposite; all three no doubt hanging on his every slurp (anyone who expected words before he had drunk at least two cups of coffee would be out of luck, so early in the day).

One of them at least was said to be rather bright… Well, they were all pretty, they’d have learned their way around; whatever happened would be purely recreational on both sides. It took a Plain Brain who’d never dated anybody but nerds to—

Why the hell had she let him get away with it? Well, Danny wasn’t stupid—not where his own interests were seriously involved. He had got at her through a weak point she hadn’t seen the need to guard: professional pride. To be humbly consulted by The Hunk about his problems in getting mutant Rhabditis to breed, because everybody knew she was a whizz at culturing micro-critters, was irresistible.

Come to that, why should she have resisted, at that point? Fellow scientists ought to help one another, within reason. That was where she slipped up. It was reasonable to list things he should check on—pH of the nutrient gel, possible contaminants. But she shouldn’t on any account have offered to make up a new batch, even if she could do it about ten times as fast as he could. And most emphatically, when he started beefing about the difficulty of using a micro-pipette, she should have shown him how to use it once, and then stood by and criticised; not taken pity on the clumsy lunk and picked out the necessary number of males and unfertilised females from the wriggling mass of transparent worms herself. That had not only cost hours she didn’t have to spare, it had set a really bad precedent…

And, of course, once he had a sufficient biomass of the hybrids to do the fashionable part of the work, the DNA analysis, he’d dumped her.

She should have followed the advice of the chairman of her dissertation committee; concentrated on raising bacteria-free cultures of just two species of protozoa and compared their DNA. Even with the present squeeze on postgraduate grants, projects involving DNA were mostly getting by. Instead, she’d allowed herself to get fascinated by the astonishing variety of things that could be achieved within a single cell, and gone all out to cultivate as many as she could. She had successfully raised fifty-three species of ciliates in bacteria-free media during the first year, and had planned to spend the second relating the differences to success or otherwise in various environments. What, for instance, was the evolutionary advantage of being unable to synthesise an essential component of nucleotides?

Interesting, the chairman had said; but grants committees these days were not impressed by natural history. But that was what she was good at; getting micros to live and reproduce under conditions that were wholly unnatural for them. She had thought she was proving the chairman wrong when her proposal was accepted. Then had come a 10 percent cut in the cash available for postgraduate studies…

But if only the old fuddy-duddy had had the strength of mind to insist that she followed his advice—

No, she was not going to start thinking like that. She had always insisted on doing things her way, ever since she got out of the orphanage, so any troubles she had were nobody’s fault but her own.

But now she had been reminded of another bit of lousiness to come; a meeting with her chairman. No doubt he would express his regrets and refrain, very obviously, from pointing out that he had told her so. Give him his due, he might be a has-been who had published only hackwork since he got tenure, but he was always ready to listen. Not like some…

Better take another look in her pigeonhole, though; had she ever had a session with him that hadn’t been canceled at least once? But this time there were no message slips with her name, in the pigeonhole marked J. No excuse for not getting it over with—

“Miss Jennings?”

Sandy’s heart gave a jolt. She spun round and stared up—and up—

Of course it wasn’t him, how could it be? This man was bigger, and stronger looking, and so much more threatening—

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I startled you.”

“Yea, I—It doesn’t matter. I have to go.”

She slid sideways with her back to the pigeonholes, to avoid going past him, and hurried away. She was headed in the wrong direction, and going round three sides of the campus meant she was going to be late, and this was all bloody stupid. It was not even as though he was a stranger—just that fellow who turned up sometimes at seminars and so on, supposed to be doing research on the literature. But she’d never heard him speak before; he had the same faint accent, and it brought it all back—

If the chairman noticed that she was sweating and out of breath he was too polite to comment, and his expression of regret was mercifully short. Sandy was getting set to leave when it appeared that he had something else to say.

“Er… Miss Jennings, Dr. Marius was enquiring about you.”

“Who?”

“Ma-ri-us. You haven’t met him? He spends a certain amount of time on campus, mostly in the library. A tall man—”

“Hey! Built like a bruiser and dresses like a banker? Dark hair—?” “Um. Yes. Yes, I should say that described him rather neatly… He… er… well, he has a number of contacts in the University administration, and the recent cuts in postgraduate funding are not precisely secret—”

“He knows I’m getting the push,” said Sandy impatiendy. How many other people knew, she wondered. Had Danny heard yet?

“That is not exactly—well, I suppose, from your point of view—The fact is, Miss Jennings, that Marius has—er—been instrumental in obtaining posts for several postgraduate students who, for one reason and another, have had their studies disrupted, and it seems—er—”

“He hands out research grants?” Hell, she thought, and I acted as though—

“No, not exacdy. He has connections with some firm or other that carries out a certain amount of research —on pharmaceuticals, I believe.”

Sandy said, “Oh.”

Pharmaceuticals research meant tests on animals—rats, mice, rabbits, even monkeys. No, thanks.

“I could be wrong about that. It might be worth your while to see if he can help you at all.”

It might, of course. Pharmaceutical labs were likely to have the sort of equipment she needed—

Firmly, Sandy shook her head.

“Ah.” Surprisingly, he seemed rather relieved. “Well, I thought I should—er—mention it, you know. Under the circumstances.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong? With Marius? Well, nothing—that I know of…”

Sandy looked at him, and waited. “As I said, he has helped several of our students who were in difficulties. For instance, Elizabeth Wong.”

Sandy knew that story all right. Elizabeth Wong had been the star student in biology, about five years back. Orphaned, no money, existing on scholarships and holiday jobs—like Sandy herself. She had been working for her doctorate—on DNA, what else? and had been promised a post at some other university as soon as her doctorate came through. Then she had made the mistake of describing her work too thoroughly to a visiting professor from the department concerned.

The need for outside work held up the writing of her thesis. She was still working on it when a paper was published, more or less duplicating her results. The author was a former student of the professor in whom she had unwisely confided…

She might still have got her doctorate—there was no doubt that she had done the work. However, without waiting to find out, Elizabeth Wong had left the University, and nobody knew where she had gone.

Except, apparently, Sandy’s chairman—and Marius, of course.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” said the chairman hurriedly. “I—well, a couple of years later, finding myself in that area, I went to visit her…” He sighed. “I don’t think I was altogether welcome, though she was perfectly polite—no doubt the visit reminded her of things she preferred to forget. But she appeared to be… um… settled, happily enough.”

“So what’s wrong?” enquired Sandy bluntly.

“Nothing, of course. Except that… well, Elizabeth has never published anything. Of course, pharmaceutical work… trade secrets… His voice trailed off.

“How about the others?”

“They were not in this department. I believe, though, that they were all people with no family or close friends. I’m told letters have been received from them, occasionally… but again, no published work. It seems… well, a waste… But it would do no harm to hear what he has to say.”

It would harm my nerves, anyway. Sandy thought as she walked away. Hearing Marius was exactly what she did not want to do, ever again. It probably was not his fault that he sounded exactly like the man who had visited her in nightmares, regularly, for years—still did, once in a while…

She had worked out, many years later, that it must have happened when she was four years old. She and Mom and Da had all been together downstairs, though it was long after her bedtime… and Mom kept asking Da whether he had locked the door. Da said he had. but all the same the big man got in and took him away…

That was all she remembered. Some time after that she and Mom were in what in retrospect must have been a Greyhound bus, and she got tired and went to sleep… It must have been after the end of the journey that she got left at the orphanage, though who took her there she could not remember; anyway she never saw Mom again, or Da either.

No way to find out, when she got old enough to try, whether the big man was a member of the Mafia or a plainclothes cop… The horror of the dream had been pretty well worn out by the time she got to high school. She had forgotten how the big man sounded until she heard that accent again…

Well, whoever she might have been born, she was now Sandy Jennings, B.Sc and halfway to Ph.D. What mattered now was getting the other half. The big problem was to keep her cultures alive and uncontaminated until she could afford another year’s research. Keeping herself alive was less of a problem; she had been working part-time for a small firm which supplied cultures of various organisms for teaching and research, and they would be glad to take her on full-time. She could have had bench-space there, but there were no facilities for sterile working.

Sandy found that she had somehow gravitated to her cubicle in the lab. There was nothing she needed to do there—none of the cultures would need fresh medium for another three days. No point in starting any of her planned experiments; she would have to clear out before any of them were complete—

“Miss Jennings? I wonder—”

The voice—

Sandy gave a yell of fright, whirled, and in the same movement backed away. She came up against the wall of the cubicle—and it gave way like so much tissue paper, so that she fell backwards through it and went sprawling on the floor.

On a floor. The lab floor was of bare hardwood. This felt… padded. And the ceiling was far too close. And it shone. And what she could see of the walls—

“Are you hurt?”

That voice again. Sandy shuddered. Then, because lying on her back felt vulnerable and undignified, she sat up… and stared.

Marius was standing a few feet away. Directly behind him was a solid, unbroken wall. Not only that, it was plastered with high-tech stuff—switches, dials, digital readouts and other items so way-out she had no idea what they could be.

“Are you hurt, Miss Jennings?” Marius kept his hands rather ostentatiously at his sides. “I would offer a hand, but since I appear to alarm you—”

“I’m all right,” Sandy said, and scrambled to her feet.

She was standing inside a twelve-foot cube. No furniture; but the walls to the left and right were loaded, like the one behind, with switches, indicators, matte black oblongs that could be some kind of VDU. The style of even the simplest items was somehow unfamiliar. The opposite wall had a door in the middle—slightly recessed, as though it slid rather than swung. On one side was another door, narrower; on the other a tier of smaller panels—locker doors?

The floor looked like marble, despite its softness. The ceiling, devoid of light fittings, diffused a soft glow.

One thing was certain; this didn’t belong on the other side of her cubicle wall. Or in any other part of the laboratory.

She said, “What the hell is this place?”

Marius sighed.

“That is not easy to explain. I had intended to talk to you before bringing you here, but—”

“Bringing me? What for? How?”

“For convenience I had virtual interfaces set up at a number of points. One was in the wall of your cubicle. Again for convenience, the activator is built into this ring.” He lifted his hand. Turned towards his palm was a flat black stone. “When you… er… fell back against the partition I put out my hand automatically, and apparently touched the sensor-point.” Regretfully, Marius shook his head. “An unlikely accident; finding the point takes several seconds, as a rule. The interface opened and you fell through.”

“Interface with what, forgodssake?”

“This universe…

Presently Sandy realised that her mouth was hanging open. With an effort she pulled it shut. Universe? The place was weird, all right—but it was a human sort of weirdness, not—not—

Marius was speaking again.

“Miss Jennings, we can go on forever like this. You ask a question, I answer, you do not know what to believe. Since you are here, I suggest two possibilities. Either you come with me and I show you something of this place, which will answer many questions in a way that leaves no room for doubt; or I will re-activate the interface for you to return.”

“You mean—you’d let me go? Just like that?”

“Of course. Go, if you wish; and I will never trouble you again.”

Sandy opened her mouth to ask another question; then realised that she knew the answer. Telling people would be like claiming to have been carried off in a flying saucer. Marius knew he was safe on that score…

She said, “Right. Open it.”

Marius turned to the wall behind him—the one through which she had fallen, now a solid mass of gadgetry —made a few adjustments, and depressed a switch.

Part of the wall was replaced by an oblong of grey nothingness, high and wide enough for a man to go through.

Marius stepped aside. Sandy approached and peered at the greyness. This was uninformative. She extended her hand and poked it cautiously. No sensation resulted, but the end of her finger disappeared.

Summoning all her nerve, she leaned forward and pushed her face into the nothingness. This time she felt the faintest possible resistance; then she was looking into the laboratory.

How shabby the place was—stains; chips; comers picked out with indurated grime… Footsteps sounded from beyond the partition. She drew back hurriedly.

In front of her, the mass of gadgetry reappeared.

“The interface was set for one passage only,” Marius observed. “Now you have used it you will not be able to go through unless I activate it again. I will do so if you wish it.”

That, Sandy thought, was not an offer; it was a threat.

If there was one thing she hated, it was being manipulated… Moreover, she was damned sure the switching on of the “interface” through which she had fallen had been no accident. He had just seen a chance to get her here without a lot of discussion, and jumped at it.

On the other hand if she walked out now she would never know what this was all about, and the itch of unsatisfied curiosity would be worse than letting him get away with it…

Just how stupid a risk would she be taking, if she stayed? Or, to put it another way, what did Marius want from her?

Between her ninth and twelfth years, Sandy had been fostered by a family whose eldest son was addicted to fantasy. During most meals he read steadily the second-hand paperback of the moment; but once in a while he would recite the plot of the latest one, instead. Like the rest of the family Sandy tended to tune out after a minute or two, but she had grasped that the protagonist of about half these epics got lured/seduced/kidnapped/accidentally transported into some other universe, where his/her task was to save civilisation/locate some talisman/rescue, restore or replace the local ruler; on account of special skills/experience/bloodlines/ availability.

None of these seemed to fit. However it was a good bet that Marius did want her to do something here. The alternative, that she had been chosen as a victim of unspeakable rites or a guinea-pig in unspeakable experiments, didn’t make sense. She might not have any family, but that didn’t mean she could be whisked away and no questions asked. Plenty of people would be looking for her in the next few days, to collect her lab and locker keys and check the inventory of equipment issued to her and get her signature on various documents and asked if she had any textbooks to sell. The chairman knew Marius had been looking for her, and already mistrusted him. Elizabeth Wong apparently hadn’t suffered at his hands, unless failure to publish meant suffering…

“Don’t bother,” she said.

Nothing showed on Marius’s face, but he gave a tiny nod, as though some calculation had been proved correct.

“Outside this room, we shall wear isolation suits.” He pressed a button beside the narrower of the doors. It opened and an arm slid out, two one-piece garments hung limply from it. They were made of what looked like plastic, opaque and white except for a transparent part at the top. There was a long slit down the middle of each of them; the thickened edges curled back in a way Sandy found unpleasant.

“They can be worn over clothes,” Marius murmured, “but they are more comfortable without.” He took down the smaller of the suits and gave it to Sandy; then he pressed another button and a screen whirred out of the wall, cutting the space in two.

Sandy examined it suspiciously. It seemed to be quite opaque, but suppose it was transparent from the other side, so that Marius could watch her undressing—?

On the other hand, why should he bother? She dragged off her sweater and jeans; hesitated for a moment about her underclothes, then removed those also.

She climbed into the suit with a certain amount of reluctance, but it felt much better than it looked, like silk rather than polythene. The transparent part at the top was stiffened and stayed away from her face; there was a thickened inset just opposite her mouth, which appeared to be a microphone—she whispered and felt it vibrate.

“The central opening will close if you smooth it together,” said Marius from the other side of the screen.

Sandy stroked the edges of the slit together and wondered, a moment later, how she was going to breathe.

“The fabric is permeable to air molecules,” Marius mentioned. “Also to sweat. Are you—ready?”

“I’m decent, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good.” The screen slid away into the wall.

Marius looked bigger than ever. Sandy’s suit hung around her in baggy folds, but his, apart from some kind of built-in athletic protector, fitted him like skin.

“Excuse me,” he said, and laid his hands on her shoulders. The fabric of her suit shrank inwards and settled gently against her flesh. Involuntarily Sandy sucked in her stomach and wished she had kept her bra on.

“The suit will adapt itself to give support, if you stroke it in the appropriate places.” Tactfully, Marius turned his back and fiddled with things on one of the high-tech walls. Sandy experimented and found that it was true. Where did you get stuff like this? J. C. Penney’s didn’t stock it, that was certain. She had a hunch Bonwit Teller’s didn’t, either—or Nieman Marcus, come to that.

“Are you ready?” said Marius. Sandy nodded. He pressed something, and the door in the opposite wall slid aside. She looked.

Sandy realized she had been thinking of the room they had left as though it belonged somewhere inside the University. No way could this place have been fitted in… She was standing on the edge of a central space, from which broad hallways—or highways, except that they had ceilings—stretched in four directions, more or less forever. Or on second thoughts, one pair went on until perspective narrowed them to vanishing point; the other pair were only about ten times the length of the campus, and ended blindly.

All four were flanked by a series of bays; from the nearest of these (and no doubt from the others, but she couldn’t see that far) passages and doors opened off, indicating other spaces beyond.

The floor had a funny feel to it. Trying to identify it, Sandy shifted from one foot to the other. Nothing she could define—

Marius had come through while she was not looking. Damn. She had meant to watch… She turned to him, or on him.

“Where the hell are we now?”

Marius said firmly, “You will understand more easily when you have seen more of it.”

He held out a small gadget. It clicked. A moment later a spidery vehicle with two seats perched among its four wheels rolled out of a nearby bay and came to a halt in front of them. Marius handed her into a seat and heaved himself into the one beside her.

His manner reminded Sandy of somebody. After a minute or so she chased down the memory; first day at college, she and a dozen others had been shown round by an administrative assistant who obviously knew every possible question and intended to deal with them in the order and the way that long experience had shown to be most rapidly understood. But she was not a fresher any longer; she had been a stranger in enough different surroundings not to be bemused even here.

She said abruptly, “This is the future. Isn’t it?”

Marius pressed something on his gadget and the car began to roll down one of the longer hallways.

“No, Miss Jennings. This is here and now.”

“Damn it, you know what I mean. What’s the date?”

“Look there.”

He pointed to a sign glowing blue on the wall of the bay they were passing. Sandy remembered seeing something of the sort in the bays they had passed. It read, HOUR 10.23 DAY 73, YEAR 147.

“And before you ask,” continued Marius softly, “I cannot give you a terrestrial equivalent. We are no longer in that universe—the one that contains Earth, and the Milky Way, and nebulae and pulsars and all the rest of it. The dimensions here are completely independent of the ones you know.”

He had said before, “This Universe.” Sandy had not forgotten; she just had not assimilated what it implied.

“But… the gravity’s just the same —Oh. This is an alternate Earth—”

“No, this universe is not an alternative. It is artificial. We are inside an asteroid known as Donander; roughly a cylinder a couple of miles long. The gravity is artificial also. You may have felt a kind of disorientation for a minute or two. That is because the gravity is generated from a flat surface some distance below us, rather than being directed towards the centre of a sphere.”

“Artificial? But—”

“Donander was separated off from the Main Continuum—from the Universe with which you are familiar—a hundred and forty-seven years and seventy-three days ago.

“How—”

“The technology used was developed some centuries after I was born. How it works, I have not the slightest idea. All the inhabitants have been recruited from Earth, from between 1900 and 2800 a.d. Now stop asking questions, and come and see.”

The wheeled spider had turned suddenly at a right angle and rolled through a bay, then along a broad passage; halting finally in front of a formidably constructed, formidably fastened door. This bore a large notice in red characters and a language Sandy did not recognise.

Marius got down and approached the door. He took off his ring and pressed the black stone into a small cavity at the side of the door, which slid ponderously but quietly aside.

He withdrew the ring when there was space for one person to go through, and the door stopped moving. He beckoned Sandy to follow. Once through the door, he pressed a lever and it closed behind them.

More high-tech stuff on the walls—the place they had started from paled by comparison, if only because this was a much larger room. There was another door, heavy but smaller, in the far wall, and a padded bench beside it. Marius waved Sandy toward this and became engrossed in manipulating various controls, stopping frequently to consult one of the digital displays.

Finally satisfied, he beckoned Sandy up and opened the far door. Behind it was yet another grey blank. She went through it this time without hesitation and found herself in a glass-walled structure, rather like the viewing gallery in a wild-fowl sanctuary she had visited once. It looked out on a somewhat similar view, wet and marshy, with open water in the middle and trees on the far side.

Marius sat her down by one of the windows and pressed a pair of binoculars into her hand.

“The far side of the bayou. Over by that tall tree with the scaly trunk—next to the fallen log. No, the large fallen log, not that branch!—Now to the left of it. You see?”

Sandy had never been much of a bird-watcher. It took her some time to adjust the glasses to the width of her eyes, and longer to get them focused on the right spot. At least, she supposed it was the right spot. There was a fair-sized boulder there, basically brown in colour but greened over with what looked like algal slime. A triangular slab at the far end extended on to the bank, and… that must be what she was to look for… something like an outsize dragonfly, blundering from one clump of reeds to another—

The triangular slab moved. Slowly it reared up at an angle to the rest of the boulder. The dragonfly, which seemed not to be very well in control of itself, wavered towards it and disappeared beneath the overhang.

The slab dropped. Somewhere towards the mid-line Sandy caught, momentarily, the glint of an eye.

The paleontology course had been compulsory. She had taken it without much enthusiasm, but some of the more bizarre fossils had made an impression on her; such as a vast, flat, triangular skull with eye-sockets close together in the middle… She regained her breath, which seemed to have got mislaid, and yelled “It’s a labyrinthodont!”

“Certainly.”

“But, but—they were on Earth!”

“From the Late Devonian until the end of the Triassic, I believe.”

“But you said we weren’t in the same Universe as Earth!”

“When I said it, that was the case. We have just passed through an interface between Donander and a Carboniferous swamp. Donander maintains a contact with the main continuum—Earth’s Universe, that is—via the time-point at which it was twisted out, and this enables interfaces to be set up between the two. Once again, I have no idea why, or how; but as you have seen, it works.”

“Then, then—” Sandy was just catching up with the implications, “that’s what this place is for? You’re studying prehistoric life—?”

“No. Or rather, we are, but not for its own sake. Come along, I want to show you something else.”

This involved a journey to another room, at first sight identical to the one they had just quitted, where once again Sandy sat and watched Marius fiddling with controls. This time, however, what he wanted finally appeared in the middle of the room. It was a three-dimensional projection of some sort, far more solid-looking than any hologram Sandy had ever seen; although the great door was dimly visible at the top of it, behind the sky. The lower part consisted of wet black rocks under assault by an angry sea. Pools lay in the hollows, and the air was full of spray. Sandy ducked automatically, then realised that the waves were frozen in mid-surge and the spray hung unmoving in the air.

Marius did something else and the brightness of the ceiling receded to a thin line around the edge. The projection filled the room without competition. There was nothing to indicate its scale, except the apparent height of the waves in comparison with their evident force; on this basis, it was probably about half life-size.

“Do you see the meter?” Marius inquired.

It stood on the rocks at the front of the projection; if it had been as solid as it looked Sandy could have leaned forward and touched it. A squat pillar, with an oblong display in its upper part that read:

Marius let her look for thirty seconds. Then the projection darkened. The shape of the rocks did not alter, but the white edge of \the waves was farther away. Above, the sky was full of stars, in unfamiliar patterns. There were also two small crescents, one only a curving line, the other fatter and brighter, on opposite sides of the sky.

Marius heard her gasp.

“Good,” he said. “You have seen them.” He returned to the controls.

Presently it was daylight. The tide was out. The outline of the rocks had changed somewhat and the pools were placed differently. One, towards the edge was covered with a thick green scum.

The meter was still there. This time it read:

Sandy drew a deep breath and tried to keep her voice steady.

“That’s another planet,” she said. “Not Earth. Not in the Solar System. You’re terraforming it.”

“Exactly right,” said Marius gravely.

“How long did it take? I mean, how long between the first picture and the second one?”

“About—” Marius glanced at the control board “—fifteen thousand years… But progress is exponential; after another thousand years the oxygen content is up to 4 percent, and there are lichens on rocks inland. Do you want to see?”

“Doesn’t sound very dramatic. How about the stage after that?”

“Ah. Well. The next stage was to try to establish the growth of mosses. Unfortunately it was not a success. At present the botanists are collecting fresh stocks with which to try again.”

Sandy scratched her neck thoughtfully. “Yes, but can’t they take a look and see which species are going to take hold?”

“No!”

It was almost a shout. Sandy looked up, startled.

“I beg your pardon.” That was hardly more than a mutter. “It is the strictest rule: we never, under any circumstances, try to examine the results of a step before the work is complete.”

“I would have thought—”

“No. What you see on the other side of the interface is not probability or possibility, but fact. Suppose, before the moss was put in place, we had turned the viewer on to the areas in which it was to be planted, a thousand years after that was to be done. Suppose, then, we saw that the rocks everywhere were still bare. Would we go ahead and plant it? Where would be the point?

“But then, how could there be moss growing, if it had never been planted? Knowledge, absolute and definite knowledge of the future as it affects yourself, is never any use. Whether it is bad or good, you cannot do anything that will change it. It simply takes away your power to decide… The moss was planted, and a thousand years later it had not spread, but vanished. Therefore, next time, the thing must be done differently—other species of moss, other areas for the trial, the ground prepared in different ways. And we will check it sooner.

“Of course, when it was being planted, it was checked often—at the beginning, every day. Some of the patches appeared to take well, and to spread. After five years it was judged time to jump ahead and see whether things were ripe for the next phase. Now, naturally, there are people trying to pinpoint the time when the moss disappeared, and when they find it they will be able to investigate the reasons—cautiously, in case they should kill it all off by some mistake of their own.”

“Wow,” said Sandy. “Complicated.”

“It is the power to go from one time to another without traversing all the times between that makes terra-forming a feasible project; but it has its own dangers, and our rules are designed to avoid them.”

“Yes, but—Look, how long is it since you’ve known that the moss failed?”

“It was discovered four days ago.”

“Oh. I see.”

“On that world we have unlimited time, but in Donander there is none to waste. In ten days at the most we should know what went wrong, and can think about replanting.”

“Yea, but you said this place had been going a hundred and forty-seven years. How come the terraforming’s only got to stage three, or is it four?”

“It took the best part of a hundred years to locate planets fit for terra-forming, and to establish interfaces. That is not easy outside the Solar System. The planet you were viewing orbits a star a hundred and thirteen light-years from Sol—when contact was established, that is. The shortest distance we had to reach was thirty-four light-years—”

“There’s more than one planet being terraformed, then?”

“At present there are five of them. That one was the most advanced. Three had a very deep corrosive atmosphere, like Venus, and time had to be spent on blowing part of it away. The other was found quite recently. None of them has got beyond the second stage.”

Sandy sat back on the bench, aware suddenly of delayed shock. Reaching out over light-years, blowing away the atmosphere of planets, jumping forwards a thousand years to see how an experiment was getting on… A chill ran up her backbone. The bench she was sitting on, the floor underfoot seemed solid enough, but—She took a fold of skin on the back of her left hand between her fingernails and bore down. It hurt.

Looking up, she caught Marius watching her with a faint smile. It vanished at once.

“It is all quite real, Miss Jennings. Difficult to believe, I know. Everybody finds that.”

“Yea, but what sort of people do this kind of thing? Are they…” Sandy waved her hands in desperation. Were they gods? Ridiculous. Immortals? Disembodied intelligences, like the whatsisnames in that book she read once?

“They are scientists, like you. Very human. Argumentative. Touchy. In a hurry. All the time tearing their hair over the things that have gone wrong. Or the other kind, the patient ones, who do not talk about their problems, and sometimes spend all their lives looking for a way through a cul-de-sac, and sometimes stand up one day and talk quietly of what they have done, and set off a great new wave of understanding—”

“Yes, but where are they? I haven’t seen a soul except you.”

This time Marius did not tell her to come and see. He simply bustled her into her seat and caused the spider-car to swivel round and barrel back along the way that they had come. Sandy wondered whether she had insulted him somehow. Very soon, however, the car was going at such a speed that she was afraid to distract him by asking questions. For the first time it was making a noise—a faint whine, like a distant mosquito—and, looking down, she had the disquieting impression that the spinning wheels were not actually touching the ground… They shot into the crossroads from which the journey had started, and she wondered whether she had failed some test or other and was about to be returned ignominiously to her own Universe. However the car twiddled through a right-angle, in a way that would surely have made any ordinary vehicle turn over, shot past a couple of bays, and halted in one with no passages opening from it, only a single door.

It was a door high enough for giants, and wide enough for ten very fat men to walk abreast. There were two main valves, each divided into a series of hinged panels, and as Marius led her towards it the two. innermost panels slid away, leaving room for the two of them to go through it side by side.

Sandy hadn’t expected it; but maybe she should have done. Once again Marius had preferred demonstration to answering. This was where the scientists were… about five hundred of them, anyway, at a quick guess; in pairs and larger groups, sitting around small tables in an enormous room and drinking coffee together. Or, judging by the variety of different cups in sight, and the various urns and other containers on the serving tables, any other beverage they chose. She could smell peppermint, and something vegetative that might be mate, but the overriding aroma was that of coffee. Good coffee.

“Sit there.” Marius indicated a table for two, unoccupied. “I will fetch coffee.”

He set off towards the far end of the room. There were filter cups and an urn on a counter. Oh. How did you drink through the mask of an isolation suit?

Answer to one problem; why Marius had driven so fast. The gathering was breaking up, group after group removing their cups to a counter and departing. Another five minutes and the room might have been empty.

Sandy tried to get some idea of what the nearest groups were discussing, but apart from the occasional technical term they all appeared to be using a language that she could not even identify.

One group consisted of about a dozen people, so mixed in age, race, sex, and styles of clothing that a statistician might have selected them to represent adult humanity. They were discussing something with great animation, young and old interrupting each other freely.

One man drew her eyes by his quietness. He was also notable for a bald head, crossed by a few wisps of hair, and by an expression of serene and gentle detachment. He spoke only once while she was watching, quite briefly; nobody interrupted him. A minute or so later he stood up, whereat everybody else followed suit and they all left together, the doors dilating to let them through.

“Marius!”

Sandy looked round. Marius was threading his way between tables, carrying something in each hand. He was intercepted by a thickset, untidy looking man who rose hurriedly from a nearby table, glanced round and began speaking rapidly. This time she recognised and understood the language; German.

“That the latest recruit? Look, Marius, I’m spending three-quarters of my time on the sort of work that could be done by a half-trained junior, it’s a ridiculous waste. Can’t you arrange for her to be assigned to me—”

“Carl, you know that I have no power of that sort.”

“You headhunters can do just about anything if you choose—everybody knows that!”

“What everybody knows is usually wrong. Carl, for the simple jobs there are many kinds of automaton, and if you need help in programming them it is available—”

“Damn it, I don’t want a bloody robot, I want somebody who can listen and then do as they’re told!”

Someone at the table he had left called out to him. The man called Carl bellowed a reply, shook his head in a frustrated way, and stumbled back.

Marius reached the table and handed one of his burdens to Sandy. It was a plastic globe about the size of a tennis ball, with a three-inch spout projecting from it.

“Coffee,” he said. “Be careful. It’s hot.” He sat down and inserted the spout of his own globe into a small disc directly below the microphone of his mask.

Sandy copied him. The container had been only faintly warm to the touch, but he was right; the contents were as hot as she could drink. She sipped thoughtfully, then withdrew the spout.

“What was all that about assigning me to him?”

Marius sighed.

“You speak German? Oh, of course. One of your fosterers—”

“Uh-huh.” Well, of course he would have checked her out; he could have got that much from one of several computers, along with her arrival at the orphanage and the various events that had kept her shuttling from one foster-family to the next… She took another sip of coffee.

“Carl,” said Marius judiciously, “is an example of a man who is very clever at his own work and quite stupid over everything else. He remembered to check that there were no German-speakers within earshot; but, knowing that I am at present recruiting from an English-speaking area, it did not occur to him that you might speak German also. And so you are offended, and perhaps alarmed. It is a pity.”

Sandy glared at him. “For you, maybe. How about for me?”

That infinitesimal nod again; it was the reaction he expected. “For you, the danger of possibly acting on a false impression. Carl does not want to get it into his head, but here we have no hierarchy of senior and junior scientists, no underclass of technicians who can be assigned to take orders from him.”

“Then how the hell do you decide who does what?”

Marius took another swallow from his coffee-bulb before he replied.

“Naturally you think in terms of heads of department, professors, assistants, tenure; it is what you are used to. Sometimes it works well and sometimes not; a great deal depends on the man at the top. So it does here, but the top men are not appointed; they are selected by the rest. Did you notice a group over there, quite a large group, who left all together just before I returned?”

“With rather a nice old bald guy pulling the strings?”

Marius gave her a small approving nod.

“They are working together on the design and development of marine ecologies. That is their choice. Each of them when he arrived—or she—was assigned certain responsibilities—”

“Hold on. I thought you said there were no assignments in this place.”

Marius sighed patiently.

“I said that nobody was assigned to work under or for anyone else. When people first arrive, they are assigned responsibilities—on the basis of their qualifications and abilities, and of what needs to be done. Assigned not by any person or even a committee, but by a computer. Almost always the newcomer is assigned to work with another person, so that she can be—shown the ropes.”

“Sounds like a cop-out,” remarked Sandy suspiciously.

“The other person is also selected by the computer, on the basis of his or her record—for achievement in the appropriate fields, but also for willingness to help and guide those who do not yet know their way around. The newcomer is expected to keep these responsibilities—if you like, to work at this job, only we do not speak of jobs here—for at least one month. After that she can request a new assignment, or put up a proposal for work to be done alone. It is not always accepted—maybe the work has been done already, or more experienced workers have proposals to modify it—but in no circumstances is anyone assigned responsibilities that they do not agree to take.”

Sandy gave this suspicious attention.

“Yea, well, sounds good, but—”

“It is as good as we can make it… What else do you want to know?”

“For a start, how could I work here? I don’t know the language. I can’t even make out what it is.”

“Ah. We call it Standard. It was developed around 2600 A.D.”

Sandy stifled a gasp.

“I’m not that much of a linguist—”

“Standard can be imprinted directly to the brain. That is how I learned it myself; also English.”

“So that’s—” She suppressed the comment. “Well, there’s the usual stuff—pay. Conditions. Like that.”

“Pay…” Marius shrugged. “If you want money you can have it, but few people do. Food and accommodation are provided. Otherwise, just ask for what you want and it will be obtained.”

“What, anything?”

“Within reason. For your work, anything at all. Though if it is equipment that cannot be obtained without a great deal of trouble—for instance, a machine restricted to the laboratories of one of the more paranoid governments—the Purchasing Department may suggest alternatives. Often there will be an improved model on general sale in twenty years or so.

“For your personal use, or pleasure, anything that can be obtained through, one of our purchasing stations would be supplied without question. But other items…” He paused, thoughtfully. “A man asked for a Shakespeare First Folio once. It was available, of course, from the printers, in 1623; but the Purchasing Department decided that it would use up too many man-hours of an agent’s lifetime, and suggested he should go and buy it himself. They supplied the appropriate cash and clothes, but what with learning to wear them, acquiring the accent and vocabulary—from imprinting tapes, but he had to practice afterwards—and having to go through full-body decontamination when he returned, it took up the whole of his annual leave. He wanted to fit in some performances at the Globe, but—”

“Hold on,” said Sandy urgently. “Decontamination? ”

“Why do you think we are wearing these suits? Bacteria and viruses that are harmless in a period when people have acquired immunity, may be extremely troublesome here. If you agree to join us, you will have to go through decontamination. It takes a couple of days. It is done under electroanaesthesia, so there is no unpleasantness—except for a feeling like a very mild hangover, which lasts for an hour or so. I have taken it several times… but always for some serious purpose. Money is plentiful here, but we do not waste lifetime.”

“Where do you get your money from, anyway?”

“Access to past times,” said Marius patiently, “enables us to acquire goods quite legitimately, which can be sold for large sums in more recent place-times. For instance there is a source of very fine emeralds in Eocene Patagonia, in rocks subducted long before the appearance of the genus Homo. Works of art can be bought at source for a fair price, and sold centuries later for a thousand times as much. The money is then invested, and can be drawn on at need.”

Sandy was beginning to feel lightheaded. There were more questions that ought to be asked—things any right-minded scientist would want to know about, like superannuation and holidays and medical services, and she couldn’t bring herself to give a damn… Well, Marius’s latest demonstration had answered at least one of them. Compare the crowd who had just walked out of here with the College faculty; plenty of oldsters, but they walked like forty-year-olds, not a creaking joint amongst them and not a pill-box in sight… And all those cups stacked on the serving tables had just quietly disappeared when she wasn’t looking, so no likelihood of finding herself on a washing-up rota…

She said “This decontamination thing—do we have to go through it every time we go outside this place?”

“To visit place-times in human history—if you feel an overpowering urge to visit your old neighbourhood, or watch some famous theatrical performance—yes, you must go through Decontamination on your return. It is not so bad, after all. But also, there are holiday places—resorts—in eras where human diseases have not yet evolved; winter sports in the Pleistocene, a ranch in the South American Pliocene, tropical islands in the Lias Sea… A month’s holiday in each lifetime year. Short breaks whenever you want them, since they need not interrupt your work.”

The Lia Sea. Ammonites, Ichthyosaurs. Plesiosaurs. Even for a specialist on microorganisms, unbelievably exciting.

Unbelievable. That was the word.

Sandy swallowed, hard, and sternly banished the vision of Jurassic rock-pools. She said, “Why me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With what you’re offering you could take your pick of all the biologists from Darwin on. Nobel prizewinners, the lot. I haven’t even got my Ph.D.”

“How could we recruit Darwin? He lived on Earth until he was seventy-four, when he died. We cannot change history; we do not try.”

“Yes, well—half the people in my year got better marks than me.”

Marius frowned.

“In the first place, whatever your marks may have been, you have a rare and extremely useful skill—you are a genius at keeping small organisms alive in the absence of bacteria. Many biological students are good at passing exams, but very few of them have your green fingers.”

Sandy’s eyes opened wide. Only strong disciplinary action prevented her mouth from following suit. Of course, terraformers would want to control the species of bacteria and so on that got into their brand new worlds. They wouldn’t want to bring in water-borne pathogens like typhoid bacteria, or soil-borne ones like Clostridium tetani and botulinum. Or spores of potato-blight or the eggs of parasitic worms or other agents of catastrophe to men, animals and crops. Of course that meant they couldn’t just import soil or pond-wa-ter, complete with all inhabitants…

“In the second place,” Marius went on, “most people are not available for recruitment. To come here is to cut one’s self off completely from previous contacts. There is no going home.”

“You mean people aren’t allowed—”

“Oh, if they really want to leave it is not prevented. I know of three instances—no, four. All of them people who had hoped to use Donander’s facilities for political ends, but found they could not. They were let out at the place and time they chose, with enough money for a year or so, and given help where possible—in finding employment, for instance—but as scientists, their careers were finished. What could they put on a CV? Now, we avoid recruiting people with strong attachments to causes, or personal ties to families or friends—”

“You’d rather have unpopular orphans,” said Sandy, with a touch of bitterness.

“There are people here whose families or friends were lost—in accidents, in massacres, in natural catastrophes. Others had their careers destroyed, or aborted, through racial or national or religious persecution. It would be stupid to try to recruit people who are happy, and have good prospects where they are. It is hard enough to leave behind everything you ever knew; even if you have not found very much in it to love. And it is a very considerable strain to have to adapt yourself to a wholly new situation, where any and all of your assumptions may turn out to be wrong.”

“Yea, sure. I’ve been a freshman, remember? And I’ve been switched from one fosterer to another three separate times.”

“You may well be better prepared than most. Even so, if you decide to come to Donander you may find that you have more regrets than you expect.”

“What the hell—are you trying to put me off?”

“No, but I do not wish you to say, at some time when you are finding things difficult, that I did not warn you how it would be.”

Sandy sniffed. “Don’t worry, I won’t —if I decide to come.”

When she stepped back through the interface into the laboratory, Sandy was clutching a legal-sized envelope containing a letter from the manager of a small pharmaceutical firm, offering her a job.

She had said irritably, “So you got the cover story ready. You must be pretty certain which way I’m going to decide!”

Marius shook his head. “Not at all. If you tried to give me your decision now, I would refuse to hear it. The job is genuine. If you decide in the end that Donander is not for you, the firm will be glad to have you. It is one of the investments I mentioned; profitable, and useful in many other ways.

“If you decide to come—well, when people remember Sandy Jennings, it should not be as someone who disappeared suddenly without saying goodbye, but as the girl who has taken a good job on the other side of the country. We do not leave people unaccounted for when they have been recruited. It is antisocial to make mysteries.”

So, whichever way it went, she was provided for.

Much experience of welfare workers had left Sandy with a strong distrust of other people’s plans. They always thought they knew what was best for you, and they never, ever asked what you thought…

Something—maybe just an association of ideas with the envelope in her hand—had taken her in the direction of the pigeonholes. By the time she noticed Danny, it was too late to draw back.

He gave her a serious, commiserating smile.

“Sandy. I heard about your grant. Too bad.”

She ignored him in favour of the stuff in the J pigeon-hole—plenty of increase since she last looked. Including a stamped envelope addressed to her. Good-quality paper. Another turndown from a Foundation, probably.

She took it round a comer and ripped it open.

Not a Foundation, some jerkwater college. She didn’t remember if she’d ever heard of it.

(Presumably she had heard of it, then. Or anyway, it was on the list of colleges where biology was taught.)

(DNA, of course; wouldn’t you know?)

She skimmed through the rest of it, barely noticing the proposed terms; grant barely enough to live on (well, she could always get a part-time job waitressing or something, or grading papers for the biology faculty); available facilities—pretty good, they must have some kind of medical or industrial tie-up; help in finding accommodations…

Sandy read the letter again. Then she folded it and put it back in the envelope.

It was nice that somebody really wanted her—or her fifty-three cultures. And it was the kind of setup she knew and understood. And getting her Ph.D had been her goal in life for as long as she could remember. If Donander gave doctorates they wouldn’t count—no accreditation…

None of which mattered a damn. There was nothing, really, to think about; the decision had been made, in effect, when she saw the scum of algae on those tidal pools, under two alien moons. If there was a biologist anywhere who could turn down a job bringing life to brand-new worlds, it was not Sandy Jennings. Especially when the job included opportunities to explore life on the old world, back when it was new—or much younger, at any rate.

She should have given Marius her answer right away, whether he wanted it or not. What, after all, was she supposed to think about? There was nothing here that she needed, nothing for her to regret—

Except—

Her fingers tightened suddenly on the envelope.

Except—

No. She had the offer of a brand-new life, a clean break with the old one. The past didn’t matter any longer.

Except that it did.

There were white marks on her fingers where the stiff edge of the envelope had cut into them. She fumbled back the flap and searched through the papers inside. The card she wanted had gone to the bottom, naturally.

Marius had told her to call the number on the card, recite the number of the phone she was using to the answering machine, ring off, and stay where she was for two minutes; then, whichever universe he happened to be in, he would reply. She occupied the two minutes by trying to work out how it was done. On the deadline, the phone buzzed.

“This is Sandy. I have to talk to you.”

“Where?”

“The laboratory.” There was no one else around.

“Five minutes,” Marius said.

She was watching the wall, expecting him to come through it; but instead she heard the door open and brisk footsteps crossing the wooden floor. He pulled a stool from under a bench and sat down opposite her.

“Well, Sandy. What is wrong?”

“It’s not—that is, I—I wanted to know—”

Oh, damn. She should have spent the five minutes working out what she had to say, instead of just sitting here.

Sandy drew a deep breath and started again.

“You’ve got ways of finding things out, haven’t you? What happened in the past, I mean.”

Marius pursed his lips. “Some things, yes.”

“You found out about me. That I don’t know my own name or where I was born. That my mother abandoned me when I was four years old.”

“We have facilities for obtaining any information that is on record. What is it you want to know?”

“Why Mom ditched me that way. What happened to her and Da. That isn’t on record. I went to the police, when I was old enough. They looked the case up. Some officer’d tried to trace how I got to town. No dice. But you can—can go places in the past. So you could send me back—I know who to talk to—”

“No. Absolutely not.” Marius frowned heavily. “Obviously they were involved in something dangerous, and—no.” He chewed his lip in the first sign of indecision Sandy had seen him show. “But if you really wish to know—”

“Of course I do! Anybody would! I can’t just—Do you mean you know—”

Marius appeared to make up his mind.

“Yes. It is not true that the police failed to trace you, though whoever told you that may have believed it. The records would not be available to him. They had been classified.”

“What? But Mom and Da—they weren’t—”

“They had been—I think the expression is put into a relocation program. By the FBI. I found a coded cross-reference in the police report and was able to trace and access the file concerned.”

“Well, go on,” said Sandy, as he paused.

“It is not an agreeable story.”

“I never thought it would be. I just want to know.”

“Very well. Your father was a member of a criminal organisation. Not the Mafia; a smaller and more ephemeral group. He was arrested and charged with several crimes, some of them committed by other members of the organisation. He felt that he was being made a fall guy, and the FBI persuaded him to testify against those responsible.”

A detached part of Sandy’s mind registered that Marius’s slang was out of date.

“He was taken from custody to a safe house and an officer dispatched to collect your mother and you. It seems that your mother had no faith in the FBI’s promise of safety. She gave the officer a cup of coffee containing several sleeping pills, and left, with you, on a bus journey. The next part I imagine you know.”

“It said in the report I walked into the police station and said Mom told me to come and play. I don’t remember it.”

“Yes. I gather the officers were somewhat confused. Also, you recited your address. It took some time to establish that the street you named did not exist in that city. Meanwhile your mother made her getaway and took the next bus home. You were eventually taken to an orphanage, as a temporary measure. The police traced you the following day to your parents’ flat, but it was empty. The FBI, hearing that questions were being asked, got hold of the investigating officer and told him to drop the matter.”

“But—damn it—”

“They seem to have taken the view that you were probably safer where you were. Also, you were conspicuous. The police were able to trace your journey because the bus driver and several passengers remembered a small red-haired girl, very forward for her age, who kept asking questions. They felt that the relocation program would have a better chance of success if your parents were alone.”

Sandy swallowed something bitter. “That stinks!”

“Very likely your parents hoped that in a year or two, when the whole organisation was behind bars, it would be practicable to claim you—”

“Like hell. They never even tried!”

“That,” said Marius slowly, “was, I am sorry to say, because they were both dead. They were killed in a head-on collision, six months after your father appeared on the witness stand. It was recorded as a genuine accident—the other party in the collision was also killed.”

Sandy was silent for a long time. Then she said, “I suppose I knew it had to be something like that.”

Marius did not attempt to reply.

“When they arrested him—was that at home?”

“I don’t—yes. I think it was.”

“The man who did it—was he a big man?”

Marius blinked. “The report does not say.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t say whether he sounded like you.”

“Like me…?” For a moment Marius looked blank. “Ah. You mean my Hungarian accent, I suppose. I have been told that it still lingers… No, the report does not say. I noticed that the officer’s surname was a Hungarian one, though I can’t recall it more exactly. If he was a first-generation immigrant—but I don’t know that, either.”

“I reckon he was.”

She ought to be feeling grieved, Sandy supposed. Or at any rate feeling something. She was aware only of a kind of emptiness, as though something deep in her mind had been dug out and disposed of. It had all been a long time ago.

Marius said, “Is there anything else you need to know?”

“Guess not… When do I start?”

“When do you come to Donander?” He gestured toward the envelope. “Have you read the list of matters that have to be dealt with first? They will take four or five days at the very least. I suggest we make it a week from today. I will get in touch to arrange where we meet. Do you need money for anything?”

“No. Rent’s paid to the end of the month. There’s a bit of my grant left.”

“Let me know if you need more.”

He got to his feet, gave her a long, assessing look, and went away.

For some time Sandy continued to sit on her stool, letting thoughts drift in and out of her mind. She wondered whether her mother had really been concerned about her safety, or just that she might draw attention to her and Da. No way to tell, now; no way at all. Even if Marius had let her go back.

Well, she had learned a long time ago that it was no use brooding over things that were over and done with… Sandy straightened up and opened the envelope Marius had given her. Did his notes on Things To Be Done in the next five days include instructions for the safe transportation of fifty-three bacteria-free cultures of ciliates? She fished out the papers and began to read.