The Corridors of Time

16

Again he was.

First he was music, the most gentle and beautiful melody that ever had been, which with a drowsy delight he knew for Sheep May Safely Graze. Then he was also a scent of roses, a yielding firmness under his back, a body at peace with itself. He opened his eyes to sunlight.

“Good mornin’, Malcolm Lockridge,” said a man. “You are with friends,” said a woman. They spoke Kentucky English.

He sat up. They had laid him on a couch in a maple-panelled room. There was little decoration, except for a screen where colours played through soft strange shapes, but the proportions were so right that nothing else was needed. Beyond an unclosed doorway he saw a garden. Flowers grew along gravelled walks and willows shaded a lilypond from the heat of high summer. On the far side of a turf-green lane stood another house, small, bedecked with honeysuckle, simply and sweetly curved.

The man and woman stepped close. They were both tall, somewhat past their youth but still with backs erect and muscles hard. Their hair was bobbed below the ears and held by intricately ornamented bands. Otherwise they wore nothing except a pocketed band on the left wrist. Lockridge saw that he was equally nude. He felt for his own bracelet-purse. The woman smiled. “Yes, your diaglossas are there,” she said. I don’t believe you’ll want anything else.”

“Who are you?” Lockridge asked in wonder.

They grew grave. “You won’t be with us long, I’m sorry to say,” the man replied. “Call us John and Mary.”

“And this’ is . . . when?”

“A thousand years afterward.”

With a mother’s compassion, the woman said, “You’ve been through nightmare, we know. But we hadn’t any other way to turn back those devils, short o’ killin’ them. We healed you, soma and psyche, while you slept.”

“You’ll send me home?”

Pain crossed her tranquillity. “Yes.”

“Right away, in fact,” said John. “We have to.”

Lockridge got off the bed. “I didn’t mean my own home. Europe, in the time of the Wardens.”

“I know. Come.”

They walked out. Lockridge fumbled for understanding. “I can see why you don’t let anyone in from the past. So what am I to you?”

“Destiny,” said John. “The ghastliest word a man can speak.”

“What? You—I—my work’s not finished?”

“Not yet,” said Mary, and caught his hand.

“I must not tell you more,” said John. “For your own sake. The time war was the nadir of human degradation, and not least because it denied free will.”

Lockridge strained to hold onto the calm they had somehow instilled into him. “But time is fixed. Isn’t it?”

“From a divine view, perhaps,” John said. “Men, though, are not gods. Look into yourself. You know you make free choices. Don’t you? In the time war they rationalised every horrible thing they did by claimin’ it was bound to happen anyway. Yet they were themselves, directly, responsible for more tyranny, more death, more hate, more sufferin’ than I can stand ) count up. We today know better than to look into our own future, and we only go in secret, as observers, to the poor damned past.”

“Except for me,” Lockridge said with a flick of anger.

“I’m sorry. That’s a wrong we’ve got to do, to prevent a greater wrong.” John gave him a steady look. “I console myself by thinkin’ you’re man enough to take it.”

“Well—” Wryness touched Lockridge’s lips. “Okay. I certainly am glad you interfered there in the corridor.”

“We won’t do so again,” said Mary.

They came out onto the lane. This seemed a fair-sized town, homes stretching off among high trees. A machine tended one lawn. Folk were about, handsome people with unhurried gait. Some were nude, others evidently felt a light tunic was more comfortable in the warmth. A couple of adults passing near bowed with unservile respect to John.

“You must be an important man,” Lockridge remarked.

“A continental councillor.” Love and pride lay in Mary’s tone.

Several children whooped by. They shouted something which made John grin and wave.

“Uh . . . me bein’ here . . . you’ve kept that quiet?” Lockridge asked.

“Yes,” Mary answered. “The fact of your comin’ is known. We prepared ourselves. But the—call them the time wardens—never released details. For your own sake. Someone might’ve told you too much.” In haste: “Not necessarily awful. But a sense o’ destiny makes a slave.”

I’ve somethin’ crucial ahead o’ me, Lockridge thought. They don’t want me to know how I’m goin’ to die.

He wrenched free of that by seizing on a word. “Time wardens I Then my side did win.” With a look around, a breath of woodland odour, a sense of cool turf underfoot: “Sure. I should’a guessed. This is a good place.”

“I think,” said John, “you’d do well to remember what one of our philosophers wrote. All evil is a good become cancerous.”

Puzzled, Lockridge followed him in silence. They came after a while to an area walled off by a hedge. John touched a leaf and the branches parted. Behind lay a torpedo-shaped vehicle which the three of them entered. The forward cabin was a transparent bubble, with no controls visible. Aft, through a doorway, Lockridge saw—machines? shapes? Whatever they were they had no clearly understandable form, but seemed to follow impossible curves to infinite expansions and regressions.

John sat down. Silently, the carrier lifted. Earth fell away until Lockridge overlooked the eastern seaboard entire beneath a darkened sky. Mostly the land was green—how long had men needed to repair the work of the Rangers?—but southward a complex of buildings spread across miles. They were tasteful, the air was clean around them, and he identified parks. “I thought the Wardens didn’t build cities,” Lockridge said.

“They didn’t,” John replied shortly. “We do.”

“Man also needs the nearness of his fellows,” Mary explained.

Lockridge’s disturbance was interrupted by the sight of a silvery ovoid lifting over the horizon. He estimated distances and thought, Good Lord, that thing must be half a mile long! “What is it?”

“The Pleiades liner,” John said.

“But, but they couldn’t reach the stars . . . in Storm’s era.”

“No. They were too busy killin’ each other.”

The vehicle picked up speed. America vanished in the ocean’s unchangeable loneliness. Lockridge started to ask more questions. Mary shook her head. Tears blurred her eyes.

The time was short until Europe hove into view. In some fashion, as it moved down, the carrier did not batter its way through the air. Lockridge would have welcomed noise, to get his mind off his pastward future. He strained ahead. They were still so high that the coast unrolled like a map.

“Hey! You’re aimin’ for Denmark!”

“We must,” John said. “You can go overland to your destination.”

He stopped and hovered in sight of the Limfjord. The country was mainly woods and pasture. Lockridge saw a herd of graceful spotted beasts, were they from another planet? But near the head of the bay stood a town. It wasn’t like the one he had just left, and that gladdened him a little. He had never liked the idea of the world blanketed with dead uniformity. Red walls and copper spires reminded him of the Copenhagen he had known.

Okay, he told himself, whatever I’ve still got to do, I reckon it’ll be in a good cause.

“I wish we could show you more, Malcolm,” said Mary gently. “But here we leave you.”

“Huh? Where’s your corridor?”

“We’ve found a different means,” John said. “This machine’ll carry us.”

Fire crawled among the shapes aft. Blackness sealed the cabin. Lockridge took heart. He needn’t really be doomed. This couple might only feel sorry for him because he had some fighting left to do. At the least, he’d soon see Auri again. Not to mention Yuria and her cousins; what a party that would be! And afterward Storm. . . .

The transition ended. John’s countenance had tautened. “Get out quick,” he said. “We can’t risk bein’ spotted.” The machine fell to a shockless landing. He gripped his passenger’s hand. “Fare you well,” he said roughly.

“Oh, fare you well,” cried Mary to Lockridge, and kissed him.

The door slid back. He jumped out. The carrier rose and vanished.