The Coils of Time Read online

  The Coils of Time

  BY

  A. Bertram Chandler

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  For Susan, as ever.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  Also Available

  Copyright

  I

  THERE WAS a scorching gale blowing, as usual, and the poisonous air was thick with the fine, abrasive dust. Christopher Wilkinson, struggling through the deep drifts in his borrowed Venus-suit, cursed at the dimness of his vision through the faceplate of his helmet.

  Then he grinned sourly to himself; after all, the state of the helmet, as long as it did not leak, was of no real importance. Even had the armor glass been as clear as when the suit had left the hands of the maker, it would still have been impossible for him to see for more than a couple of feet through the swirling dust clouds. The fantastically expensive, radar-equipped, powered suits — spaceships in miniature, they had been called — were reserved for the top brass of Science City; lesser mortals and mere transients such as Wilkinson had to be content with gear that was little better than that used by Commodore Keel and his men on the occasion of the First Landing, almost a century in the past.

  So Wilkinson struggled the relatively short distance between the Spaceport and the low huddle of domes that housed the Advanced Physics Laboratory, sweating profusely in spite of the suit’s air-conditioning unit, keeping one hand in its armored glove firmly on the guide wire. He realised now that he should have waited for the promised dust-sled, and regretted his insistence that the exercise of the walk would do him good. This, he told himself firmly, would be the last time that he would let the spacemanlike desire for healthy exertion on a planetary surface get the better of him.

  The dust clouds thinned and he saw before him the first of the domes, its curving wall gleaming dully in the diffused yellow glare from the perpetual overcast. He stumbled towards it, gratefully watched the circular outer valve of the airlock swing open. Then he was in the chamber and the door was shut behind him, and he was hearing the whine of the pumps as they evacuated the noxious atmosphere, and the hissing of the antiseptic spray that played over every square millimeter of the surface of his suit.

  Then, with the air pressure in the chamber restored, the inner door opened. Wilkinson stood passively while two white-smocked girls stripped his armor from him. He inhaled deeply and appreciatively. The atmosphere of the dome had an artificial quality, held the taint of hot oil and metal, of chemicals, of electrical discharges — but it was deliciously cool and satisfying after the stale air that he had been breathing.

  He was a tall man, slender in his well-fitting uniform of black and gold that, in spite of the cramped confinement of the Venus-suit, was still neat and sharply creased. His thick, sandy hair, rumpled and uncontrollable as always, took the curse off his uniform’s tailored appearance. Under the heavy brows his pale eyes, grey rather than blue, looked about him curiously. A faint smile softened the hard lines of his face.

  He said, “So this is the A. P. Store, Science City branch…. What are today’s specials? A cheap line in contra-terrene matter, in giant, economy-sized cartons? And what are mesons selling at today?”

  “That’s not very funny, Mr. Wilkinson,” said one of the girls sharply.

  “I suppose not,” he half apologized. “But I’m disappointed. Where are the super-cyclotrons? Where are the Mad Scientists?”

  The other girl giggled as the first one said coldly, “Dr. Henshaw is waiting for you now.” She added humorlessly, “This is only the vestibule. There is no apparatus here, of course.”

  “Of course,” agreed Wilkinson.

  He followed the tall, competent brunette through a doorway and then along a featureless passageway. At the far end of this there was a door that opened as they approached, and beyond the door could be seen a mess of equipment that looked more like something cooked up by a Hollywood special-effects man than by a working physicist.

  • • •

  Henshaw was a little man, ruddy, rotund, and almost bald. He fussily pushed an accumulation of books and papers from a chair to the already littered floor, cleared a space on a table with a sweep of his forearm, and produced bottle and glasses from a filing cabinet. “Wilkinson, isn’t it?” he barked. “Must be, in that fancy dress. Welcome aboard, Admiral. Sit down, man, sit down.” Then, to the girl, “Don’t you dare touch those papers, Olga. I’ve my own filing system. I can always find anything I want, but I can’t if you start tidying up. Damn it all, woman, I’ve told you enough times. And that’s all — unless you want a drink.”

  “No thank you, Dr. Henshaw,” she told him severely. “I never drink in working hours.”

  “All the more for those that do,” chuckled the scientist.

  Wilkinson seated himself. Henshaw cleared a chair on the other side of the table of its debris, sat down facing the spaceman. He splashed amber liquid into the two glasses, neither of which was very clean. Wilkinson looked at his dubiously. “Go on, drink up,” urged the other. “A drop of good Scotch won’t kill you.”

  Wilkinson sipped. It was excellent liquor.

  Henshaw gulped the contents of his own tumbler. He said abruptly, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you to come and see me. This is the way of it, Wilkinson. Everybody in Science City has his own pet project, and nobody has much time to spare to help anybody else. So, when I heard that there was a ship’s officer, who’d been landed sick from Venus Queen, staying at the Spaceport Hostel, and when I heard that this same officer had made a good recovery and was getting very bored while waiting for a ship….” A grin flickered over his broad face. “I said to myself, ‘Henshaw, here’s your made-to-order guinea pig.’ ”

  “Thank you,” said Wilkinson drily. “But I’ll make my position quite clear. I’m not taking part in any medical experiments. My one session with the Purple Rot has given me a healthy respect for your local viruses.” He added, more to himself than to the scientist, “I should have stayed on the Earth-Mars run. Mars, outside the domes, is a dead world, but this hell-hole is a damn’ sight deader and has the viruses to make it worse.”

  “Who said anything about medical experiments?” countered Henshaw. “I’m a physicist, not a physician. And I want a man of action, somebody who’s used to danger, physical danger. Even if any of my esteemed colleagues were willing to volunteer, very few of them are qualified. And, as you may have noticed, there’s any amount of useless popsies infesting this dump; but what I want you for is no job for a woman.”

  “Go on,” said Wilkinson.

  Henshaw absentmindedly refilled his own glass, and took a hearty gulp from it. He chuckled. “I am going on. As you should know, being a spaceman, Venus is the most valueless hunk of real estate in the Solar System. But — it’s an ideal site for Science City. You must know what the respectable research workers — the ones with laboratories on Earth and the Moon and the Space Stations — call us …”

  “I do,” said Wilkinson. “The Mad Scientists.”

  Henshaw chuckled again. “Yes. That’s us. We’re all of us engaged on lines of research that could be extremely dangerous if anything went wrong. But as long as we’re here we’re safe enough — from the viewpoint of Central Government, that
is. If we blow ourselves up, that’s all that we do blow up.”

  “There might be a ship at the Spaceport,” said Wilkinson.

  “What of it? You people are paid to take risks. Not that there’s any real risk. The very worst that we could ever do would be to initiate some sort of chain reaction that would cause the sun to go nova. After all, we’re only a stone’s throw from Sol here.”

  “You could always move out to Pluto,” suggested the spaceman.

  “I suppose we could — but it’s a long way out, and too bloody cold.” He replenished his glass and this time, as an afterthought, did the same for Wilkinson.

  Wilkinson sipped slowly and appreciatively, allowing his gaze to wander around the cluttered laboratory. There was, he thought, some justification for the “Mad Scientist” label. His attention was caught and held by the complex piece of apparatus that occupied the full length of one wall. There were brightly gleaming wheels; there was something that resembled a metallic Moebius Strip mounted on a shaft; there were oddly twisted antennae, and convolution upon convolution of glass tubing. It reminded him vaguely of a mobile home that he had seen in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, during his last vacation on Earth.

  But this was not mobile.

  “Yes,” said Henshaw. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?” demanded Wilkinson.

  “It!” snapped the physicist. “I haven’t a name for it yet, because the only possible name has been done to death by incompetent hacks writing pseudo-scientific fiction over the last two or three centuries. But it works. I’ve sent Rufus, the laboratory cat, through it, and got him back unharmed. And there were the white rats that I … er … borrowed from Titov in Biology. It wasn’t that apparatus that killed them; it was Rufus. But I want to send something — sorry, somebody — who’ll be able to tell me what he sees and experiences.”

  “Send somebody where?” demanded the spaceman.

  “Not where,” corrected Henshaw. “Not where — but when. Young man, you are looking at the first Time Machine ever to exist outside the pages of sensational fiction.”

  “Count me out,” said Wilkinson firmly.

  And the little voice at the back of his mind was whispering, but what if this charlatan can bring back yesterday?

  Yesterday, and Vanessa Raymond, and the happy days with her that had flown by during each long stopover at the Marsala Spaceport on Mars, and the bright future that had stretched before them, the dream that had died, shockingly and tragically, when the liner Martian Maid, in which she had been traveling to Earth, had been utterly destroyed by a reactor explosion.

  He had left the Martian Mail run when he had been told of the disaster, had applied for a transfer to the Venusian trade. He had run away from his memories.

  But now the memories were back, and with them there was the first faint flicker of an impossible hope.

  He said quietly, “I was a little hasty, Dr. Henshaw. I just might be interested.”

  II

  “You KNOW the principles of the gyroscope?” demanded Henshaw.

  “I should,” Wilkinson told him. “After all, I do hold a Master Astronaut’s Certificate.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “Rigidity in space. Precession.”

  “Very good. Now define precession.”

  “A freely mounted gyroscope,” said Wilkinson, “will precess at right angles to an applied force, in the direction of rotation.”

  “So they do teach you something at the Woomera Space Academy,” chuckled the scientist. “And now I’ll show you how my gyroscopes precess.”

  He got unsteadily to his feet, and walked to the switchboard a little to one side of the main mass of apparatus. The spaceman watched him as he pressed buttons, turned knobs — watched him carefully and listened to the song of the spinning wheels, low-pitched at first and then rising higher and higher to an almost painful shrillness, to a thin, keening near-inaudibility. And a lambent flame was flickering through the intricate convolutions of the glass tubing, and the gleaming rottors were spinning in a luminescent haze, were spinning and fading, spinning and precessing, tumbling down some formless infinity, fading and vanishing and yet never completely invisible….

  “Watch!” Henshaw was calling. “Watch!”

  He had snatched a book from the desk that was below the control panel, had thrown it into the center of a circle marked in dirty paint on the plastic covered floor. He went back to the controls, and the metallic Moebius Strip turned slowly on its mount, turned until it seemed to be a misshapen lens focusing the emanation from the spinning, precessing rotors on the opened book. The leaves of it stirred and lifted, although there was no draft in the room. They stirred and lifted — and then the book was … gone.

  Henshaw, still at his controls, was muttering to himself. The light in the transparent convolutions flickered and flared, flickered and died. The song of the gyroscopes faltered, the thin, high whine subsided to a dying grumble and the gleaming wheels, as they slowed, resumed their solidity.

  And the book was back.

  Wilkinson tried to keep his voice calm and matter of fact. He asked, almost incuriously, “Where did it go?”

  “Not where. When!” scolded the physicist. He went on, “According to my calculations, according to the setting of the controls, that book should have been sent two hundred years into the past. But …” He walked slowly into the painted circle, picked up the volume, brought it to Wilkinson. “Look!” he said.

  The spaceman looked, not knowing what it was that he was supposed to see. But the mud, still fresh and wet on the plastic binding, was obvious enough, and it seemed to him that he caught the smell of moist earth and rotting vegetation. There was the mud — and there, on the open page, was a dirty thumbprint, a small one, a child’s. It could have been old — but Wilkinson knew, somehow, that it was fresh.

  “Look!” Henshaw said again. “Two hundred years ago there were no men on Venus. Two hundred years ago the art and science of rocketry was in its first infancy and the inertial drive had only been dreamed of. And the mud … on this arid dustbowl of a planet?”

  “You should send a camera,” suggested Wilkinson.

  “Do you think I haven’t tried? Give me a film that’s not hopelessly fogged by the temporal fields and I’ll try again — for the fourteenth time. But you see, now, why I want a human guinea pig.”

  “Yes,” said the spaceman. “I see.”

  He held the open book in his big hands. He stared at the thumbprint. He had seen it before. It was not so much the pattern of loops and whorls — after all, he was a space officer, not a criminologist. It was the little scar that ran diagonally across the print — the scar that Vanessa had told him had been there since she was a baby. Shakily, he put the book down on the table and then pulled his notecase from the inside pocket of his jacket. He took a photograph from the case, staring at the picture of the laughing, black-haired girl, the girl with the lustrous black hair and the golden skin and the eyes of so deep a blue as to seem violet.

  He turned it over, remembering the day that Vanessa had given it to him, remembering how she had said that she wanted to sign it with something more personal than a mere written signature. Her thumbprint was there still, black and clear on the white plastic. He compared it with the one on the open page of the book. It was larger, but …

  He demanded abruptly, “What do you make of this, Dr. Henshaw?”

  Puzzled, the scientist grumbled, “I’m a physicist, not a policeman.” But he found a magnifying lens on the cluttered table, and with it closely examined the two prints.

  There was a long silence.

  “Well?” asked Wilkinson sharply.

  “I … I don’t know….” faltered Henshaw.

  “And neither do I, but I’m going to find out.” He got to his feet, gripping Henshaw’s shoulders. “How soon? How soon can you send me through?”

  “Not so fast, young man,” expostulated the scientist. “This isn’t one of
your Dean-Kershaw Drive ships, where all you do is push a button and whiffle off to Pluto at half light speed.”

  Wilkinson laughed sardonically. “There’s more to navigating a ship than pushing buttons.” He let his hands fall from the other’s shoulders. “But I want to be your guinea pig, Doctor. You know that, I think-even though you don’t know why.”

  “I can guess,” murmured Henshaw, a note of sympathy in his voice. “I can guess.” Then, with envy overriding the sympathy, “Why do you think that I ever started playing around with this temporal precession effect? Why do you think that I got the idea of tinkering with Time? But some people, like you, are lucky, and some aren’t….”

  “Lucky?” whispered Wilkinson. “Yes, I did think that I was lucky — once. But that was before the Martian Maid disaster.” There was a note almost of pleading in his voice. “But one’s luck can change, can’t it? Can’t it?”

  “Sit down!” ordered the scientist. He splashed whisky into the two glasses, and pushed one of them towards Wilkinson. He gestured with his free hand towards the book, the photograph. “There’s something … odd here. This oddity has been apparent in all the experiments. The rats were sent back in sealed boxes, and there was mud on those boxes when they returned. Rufus was allowed more freedom. I got Titov to make him a little suit, with helmet and air supply. After all, if Venus is incapable of supporting our kind of life now, it must have been equally incapable of so doing a mere two centuries ago. Rufus returned in a spitting fury. He’d managed to tear his helmet off — it was only a light plastic — and his fur was smeared with mud, and it was obvious that he’d been in a fight with … something….”

  “Did you have the mud analysed?” asked Wilkinson.

  “Of course. And I was accused of having perpetrated an elaborate but pointless hoax. The mud, they said, was rich both in dead organic matter and in living micro-organisms, some of which approximated quite closely to the mutated strains that Mendelbaum, in Biology, is playing with. Then there were the shreds of flesh and fur under Rufus’s claws. Rat fur, I was told. Rat flesh. And as Rufus had got among those rats that I’d borrowed from Titov that, as far as Titov was concerned, was that.”