Beyond The Barrier Part 8

Naismith sat back. "The future can communicate with the past?" he asked disbelievingly.

"Haven't you seen that it can? Didn't we go back to the twentieth century, and scoop you up like a fish in a net?" Lall's amber eyes were brilliant, her fingers tense.

"Then why don't they simply tell their earlier selves to do things differently, and eliminate the trouble?"

"They can't find the trouble," said Lall, her eyes shining. "It is impossible for a Zug to pa.s.s through the Barrier alive. But their detectors show that there is one, and that's why they are so frantic. When we learned that, we saw our opportunity."

She leaned forward, intent, lips moist. "We searched the main stem as far back as the twentieth century. Every anomaly above a certain value had to be investigated. It took years, subjective time. It was only the most incredible luck that we found you at all. Then we had to prepare this place; then go back to 1980 and learn the language, customs, everything, from the begin- ning. And now it all comes together. Because you see they are desperate. If you return, with some story of having built your own time generator, they will believe you-they have to, you are the last Shefth, and they need you." Both aliens were breathing heavily, staring at Naismith across the low table."Then a Shefth can go through the Barrier?" asked Nai- smith.

"The Shefthi are Lenlu Din," Churan answered. "If they had let well enough alone, all the Shefthi would be on the other side of the Barrier, and there would be no problem with the Zug. But they didn't want any warriors in their safe future, without Zugs, without Lenlu Om. They would have killed you, but they were afraid. So they invented a story about an expedi- tion to kill Zugs in the past, and threw you all back. At random, without destination. Without protection. The shock of landing was to kill you all. Even if it did not, without equipment, you could never get back to bother them. That was their plan."

"I see," said Naismith.

"What is your reaction to this, Mr. Naismith?" Churan's voice was strained.

"If it's true, I'm . . . very interested," said Naismith. "Now one more point. What's this about the Lenlu Om? You said the Barrier was to keep them out too. Who are they, or what are they?"

"We are Lenlu Om," said Churan quietly. "The name means 'the Ugly People.' We are their servants. They brought us from another place, centuries ago. We are not considered to be human."

Naismith glanced up: the faces of all three aliens had turned hard and expressionless. He put the cylinder down carefully and stood up slowly, feeling their eyes on him. "And all this,"

he said, "in more detail, you would have taught me with that thing." He nodded toward the device in Churan's lap.

"As well as many other things. The language. We can teach you to speak it perfectly in less than two hours. And you must speak it perfectly. Then the City itself-the castes-forms of courtesy-a thousand and one things you must know, Mr.

Naismith. You can learn it all by primitive methods, of course, but believe me, it is not worth the effort."

"But you used so-called primitive methods to learn English."

Churan hesitated. "Yes and no. We employed the educator -we recorded disks from the thoughts of natives whom we captured and drugged. But that is not the same as having an edited subject disk all prepared. It was tedious, it took time.

Then we also had to spend time establishing ident.i.ties for our- selves. We took, I don't know, perhaps six months, subjective time. Without the educator, it would have taken years."

Something that had been bothering Naismith came abruptly into focus, and he swung around, with one foot up on the bench, facing Churan. "Tell me this," he said. "Why not simply go back, learn what you need to know-then put it all on one disk-meet yourselves arriving, and cut out all the trouble?"

Churan sighed. "As I told you before, it would pinch out the loop. You cannot use time in that way."

Chapter Eight

After a moment Lall and Churan yawned together like two frogs, showing the dark greenish roofs of their mouths: the effect was grotesquely unpleasant. "We are tired," Lall said.

"It is late." She rose, followed by Churan, and led the way to the room opening off the far end of the lounge, opposite the one she and Churan had used. The child trailed after them, dragging its doll by one arm.

The door was closed, but opened at Lall's touch. She stood aside. "This will be your sleeping room, Mr. Naismith. I think you will find all you need."

The three stood waiting. Naismith glanced in; there was a low bed, a footstool, some ambiguous half-real draperies on the wall. He made no move to. enter. "Thank you," he said.

"You will sleep here?" Lall asked plaintively.

"When I am ready. Good night."

"But at least you will inspect the room, to see if everything is to your liking?" Churan demanded.

Lall turned her head and said something to him in their own hissing, guttural speech. She turned back. "Just as you wish, then, Mr. Naismith. We will talk again in the morning."

The three aliens crossed the lounge and entered their own room. The door slid shut after them.

Naismith paused a moment, listening: he could hear Lall and Churan moving about in their room, talking sleepily together, with occasional bursts of acrimony. There was no point in waiting any longer. Naismith moved noiselessly out into the corridor. The drifting red trail guided his feet; at the first turning, he deliberately left it. He went down a flight of stairs, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found himself in darkness relieved only by spectral, phosph.o.r.escent glows from the outlines of machinery here and there. He kept moving down the narrow aisle, under a low ceiling, not pausing to examine any of the machines he pa.s.sed. For the moment all he wanted was to put distance between himself and the three aliens.

After a quarter of an hour, even the phosph.o.r.escent mark- ings thinned out and ceased. He was groping in total darkness, thoroughly lost in the interior of the great ship.

Satisfied that he was secure for the moment, Naismith sat down in the darkness and considered his position. In spite of its immense, almost overwhelming implications, the problem was basically that of buyer against seller. Each party had something the other wanted, and each was determined to give as little as possible. Naismith's first objective was to keep the aliens from coercing him: that was now accomplished, since he was out of their reach. His next objective must be to im-prove his bargaining position. That meant, above all, increasing his knowledge: for it was knowledge that Lall and Churan held out as bait, and knowledge again that gave them a tactical superiority. His course, therefore, was clear. He must begin by exploring the ship, no matter how many weeks or even months- The thought broke off. A breath of danger was pa.s.sing down the narrow corridor, making his skin p.r.i.c.kle and his nostrils widen. He stared blindly into the darkness: was the shadow- egg, invisible and intangible, pa.s.sing there?

Whatever it was, in a moment it was gone. Naismith rose and once more began feeling his way down the corridor.

Hours later, he found a narrow pa.s.sage leading off at right angles, and crossed the waist of the ship, emerging finally in a huge deserted salon. Here the moving overhead lights fol- lowed him again, but there were no red trails on the floor, and he guessed that Lall and Churan had never been in this area.

In the days that followed, Naismith prowled the empty ship alone. Its gigantic scale never ceased to oppress and astonish him: it was impossible to imagine what kind of people could have built a vessel like this, equipped it so ma.s.sively and elaborately, and then left it to be mounded over on the Colorado plain.

Wherever he went, the lights winked on ahead, winked off behind. There must be some way of illuminating whole rooms at once, but Naismith had not found it. He moved in a moving circle of pale light, while all around him was green silence.

There were cyclopean galleries and choirs, around which he crawled like a fly; there were baths, gymnasia, theaters, game rooms, machine rooms, all empty with an inexpressible empti- ness, hollow, not-quite-echoing....

Never once did he catch a glimpse of the aliens or their shadow-egg, although he felt sure they were trying to find him.

Everywhere he went, there were enigmatic, silent machines, including some that he guessed were television instruments, but he could not make them function. Here and there he saw symbols printed on the walls; they were in an alphabet resem- bling the Cyrillic, but with many added characters. Nowhere could he find a deck plan of the ship, a directory, a travel booklet, anything that would give him the least clue to the object of his search.

At last, on the fourth day, entirely by accident, he found it.

He was in a room filled with the omnipresent balloon-like armchairs and with tall, angular devices, chest high, on which square greenish plates of metal were arranged in two slanting, overlapping rows, forming an inverted V. They might have been magazine racks, with the thick metal plates subst.i.tuting for magazines. As the thought came, Naismith put his hand casually on one of them, and the thing flapped open with a clatter. Crouched, ready to fight or run, he stared at it.The rank of overlapping plates had opened, exposing the whole face of one of the plates: and where a blank square of greenish metal should have been, he saw a moving, brilliantly colored picture.

Naismith's breathing quickened. He hardly heard the voice which spoke casually and incomprehensibly from the machine.

This was it; he had found it: this was the library, The picture he was watching showed a woman in an oddly cut red garment, posturing before a background of vaguely Oriental domes that gleamed in bright sunshine. The picture changed; now he was looking at a pa.s.sageway between earth- colored buildings, down which men in white robes walked with heads bowed. It might almost have been a street scene in ancient Turkey or Egypt, except that the men were leading bright blue, hairless beasts of burden....

The picture changed again. Now, under a gigantic orange sun, stick-thin brown creatures with many legs were building a scaffold of wooden rods. Naismith understood that he was being shown an interstellar travelogue: ports of call at which this very ship had touched, perhaps . . . He watched until the pictures stopped, then closed the machine, opened it at a different place.

A new picture sprang into being: this time he saw two men, with thin, bearded faces, demonstrating some sort of physical apparatus. There was a thing that looked a little like a Crookes tube, and what might have been a series of acc.u.mulators. He could not understand a word of the spoken commentary, though the language sounded hauntingly familiar. The subject, at least, was apparently unrelated to the previous one. The arrangement, then, was either random or alphabetical, with a strong probability of the latter ... all he had to do was to find the key to it.

That took him two more days. Then his progress was rapid.

The written language was a much modified English, phoneti- cized, with a simplified grammar and many vocabulary changes.

The spoken language was more difficult to follow, slurred and elided that it was almost impossible to follow, but Naismith found he could neglect it by concentrating on reference codes which produced displays of printed books, page by page. By the end of his fourth day in the library, he had an accurate conception of the world these star-travelers had inhabited.

He had found out two things of importance, and another of possible significance. First, the entries under "Time Energy" in the library showed that the state of the art had not advanced since his own era; in fact, the temporal energy generator was regarded as a toy. There was no possibility, therefore, of his discovering another shadow-egg aboard the ship or being able to construct one: that invention was still to come.

Second, the Lenlu Om-Lall's people-were natives of a planet of 82 Eridani, and had been introduced into the Solar System in about the year 11,000. They were not called by that name, but the characteristics of those shown in the pictureswere unmistakable.

Third, the framed pictures Naismith found on the walls, in places where Lall and Churan had apparently never been, were paintings and stereographs of Terrestrial scenes, including a number of portraits. The people represented, like those in the library machines, were ordinary native Terrestrials, in no way remarkable to Naismith's eye except for their costumes.

As far as Naismith could tell, pictures were missing from their frames wherever the aliens had gone. It was conceivable that this was simply the result of looting, but Naismith did not think it likely. The aliens seemed indifferent to all the other articles of value around them in the ship, and had apparently taken nothing from the world of 1980. It was Naismith's tentative opinion that something in the pictures was distasteful to Lall and Churan-that they had taken them down, and very likely destroyed them, in order to be rid of an unpleasant reminder.

Naismith sat up in bed. The room lights slowly came on as he did so, showing the unfamiliar walls paneled in magenta and apple green. As usual, he had worked in the library until he felt it unwise any longer to ignore his increasing fatigue; then he had chosen a new suite of rooms-there were hun- dreds, in this section of the ship alone, and he never used the same one twice-prepared and eaten his dinner, and gone to bed. But the thought that had come to him was so radical, so breathtaking- In all the time he had spent aboard the ship, although he had many times wondered what had become of its pa.s.sengers and crew, it had never once occurred to him to look for any per- sonal possessions they might have left behind. The spotless, orderly appearance of everything in the ship had made him a.s.sume unconsciously that the rooms had been cleaned out and set in order when its pa.s.sengers left.

And yet he knew that this ship cleaned and tidied itself. Dust deposited anywhere in a room slowly crept toward the nearest baseboard gutter, where it ran into channels-Naismith had traced them in the narrow pa.s.sages behind the walls-leading to storage bins and, Naismith guessed, eventually to conversion chambers. Clothing taken from a closet and dropped on the floor would slowly, over the course of a few hours, creep back to its proper place, shedding its dirt in the process. Even the trails of sticky pigment Lall and Churan had left to guide them around the ship must have to be renewed every few days. And therefore- Naismith swung himself out of bed in mounting excitement.

Having examined a few of the wall closets in these living suites and found them empty, he had lost interest in them. But some of the bedrooms-this one, for example-had clothing in their closets!

He cursed his own stupidity. If clothing were part of the rooms' standard equipment, as he had unthinkingly a.s.sumed, why would some rooms have it and not others? But if this room had been occupied at the time the ship made its finallanding, and if the occupant had left his clothing behind, then it was an almost foregone conclusion that he had left other possessions as well.

Naismith went straight to the largest wall panel, thumbed the control strip to open it, found it empty. He tried the smaller, cubical one on the adjoining wall.

At first it seemed equally empty; then he saw a sc.r.a.p of paper or foil on the bottom of the compartment. He drew it out.

Printed on the foil in luminous purple letters were the words, "GIGANTIC ALL-NIGHT GALA! Dancing! Sensorials!

Prizes! Y Section ballroom, beginning 23 hours 30, 12th day of Khair ..." followed by a date which Naismith translated as 11,050.

It was little enough in itself, but Naismith clutched it as if it were precious. He went on from one wall to another, search- ing out panels and opening them. But the results were dis- appointing: a plastic ident.i.ty card made out in the name of Isod Rentro, and bearing the stereo picture of a man's lean, foxy face; a bundle of metallo-plastic tokens strung on a wire; and a toy of some sort, a gray plastic box with a tiny view- screen.

Absently Naismith pressed the b.u.t.ton on the side of the box.

The viewscreen lighted up, and he was looking into the pale, lean face of the man on the ident.i.ty card. A voice began to speak-a nasal, negligent, cultured voice. Naismith caught a few words, recognized them as a date a few weeks earlier than the one on the "all-night gala" announcement.

He set the box down with reverent care. He had had an incredible piece of luck, and had almost failed to recognize it.

He was looking at the journal of Isod Rentro, a pa.s.senger aboard this ship in the year of our Lord 11,050.

Rentro was dressed in a loose-fitting blouse of metallic silver-white, with a violet scarf at his throat. His skin was pale and unhealthy-looking, very faintly freckled, as if it had seldom been exposed to the sun. His hands were thin. He gestured wearily with a long carved holder in which a green stick of something was smoldering.

The scene flickered, changed. Naismith was looking out at a vast s.p.a.ce in which crowds of colorfully dressed people moved, while Rentro's commentary continued. He was looking, Naismith realized, at the s.p.a.ceship's berth before the takeoff.

Another ship was visible in the distance, under the dome of a gigantic transparent roof. Music was playing; colored streamers were twisting through the air.

A chime sounded, and Naismith saw faces turn, hands begin to wave. Like an elevator dropping, the whole vast concourse slowly began to drift downward. Above, the transparent roof parted, opened out into two graceful wings. They, too, drifted downward and out of sight.

Naismith had a glimpse of a misty landscape, quickly andsilently shrinking. Clouds whipped past and were gone. The horizon grew round, then the earth a.s.sumed the shape of a bowl, a sphere, visibly dwindling. The sky grew purple, then black; stars appeared.

The screen flickered again. Rentro came into view once more, still sitting calmly in his cabin, with an expression of amused boredom. He spoke a few final words, gestured, and the screen went dark.

It lighted again immediately. Rentro appeared, dressed in a different costume, against a background Naismith recognized.

He caught his breath involuntarily. This was a place he knew -the great lounge at the end of this section, the one with the enormous central chandelier and the tiers of balconies.

Walls, furniture, everything was exactly the same: but the vast room was brilliantly lit, aswarm with people. It was like watching a corpse suddenly grow vividly, beautifully alive.

Rentro turned, faced the screen, spoke a few words. A young woman in a white gown came into view; her complexion was rosy, her eyes surrounded by startling blue rings of cosmetics.

Rentro took her casually by the arm, spoke her name-Izel Dormay-and added a few words which made them both smile. The view changed again....

Naismith followed the record through the first few weeks of the voyage. Allowing for the difference in technology and in the incredible consumption-level of these people, it was very much like a luxury cruise of the twentieth century. The pas- sengers played games, watched the entertainment screens, ate, drank, strolled about. Once or twice a ship's officer appeared, spoke a few polite words into the screen. The crew and most of the pa.s.sengers were human, but Naismith occasionally glimpsed members of Lall's race.

Then there was a change. It happened so gradually that Naismith was not aware of it at first. The crowds in the lounges and game rooms grew less. Crew members in their gray and black uniforms were more in evidence, and moved more pur- posefully. Once Naismith saw a stumbling, slack-jawed man being helped out of a room by two crewmen: he looked drunken or perhaps drugged. Rentro's commentary was dis- dainfully cool, as usual, but Naismith caught a worried expres- sion on his face.

A day or so later, there was no mistaking the difference.

Few people were in the lounges or on the promenades. Rentro ventured out briefly, then went back to his cabin; his next entry in the journal was made there, and so were all those that followed. His expression grew daily more strained: he looked, Naismith thought, like a badly frightened man. Once he made a long speech into the machine, which Naismith would have given much to interpret, but he could only catch a word here and there, no matter how often he played it over-"carrying,"

"danger," "contagion."

A day later, the entry was brief, and Naismith was able tomake it out: "We are returning to Earth."

The rest of the journal consisted of brief entries, only the date and a few perfunctory words, with two exceptions. In the first, Rentro spoke at some length, seriously and soberly, from time to time consulting a tablet he held in his hand: it occurred to Naismith that he was making his will.

The second time, after announcing the date and repeating a phrase he had used several times before, Rentro suddenly and horrifyingly lost his composure. With a distorted, writhing face, he shouted something into the machine-four words, of which Naismith could make out only one. It was "Greenskins"- the contemporary name for Lall's people.

Two days after that, the journal stopped. It simply ended, without any clue to what had happened next.

Naismith searched the adjoining suites, then and on the following day, and found three more such personal journals.

When he had run them all off he was no wiser: all told essen- tially the same story, and all ended abruptly, at varying times, before the ship reached Earth.

For the time being, he gave it up. Naismith had been two weeks alone in the ship, enduring its green silences, and the solitude was beginning to wear on him. He began to think of going back to the aliens. He had explored the ship as thoroughly as he could, in the limits of the time he had spent, and without going near the red trails left by Lall and Churan.

It occurred to him for the first time that this precaution might have been unnecessary.

Suppose the aliens had begun to use the time machine to search for him as soon as they had found him missing. Almost certainly they would have begun by searching their own lounge and the corridor outside it, for a month or so into the future.

If they had done that, and found him, there would never have been any necessity to search elsewhere in the ship. Accordingly, if Naismith was in fact going to be found in the aliens' suite or near it, he could roam anywhere he pleased until that time, elsewhere in the ship, without any fear of discovery.

It was a curious sensation, following the fading red trail on the carpet. Here and there still fainter trails branched off.

Doubtless the aliens had first explored the ship at random, as he himself had done; these early trails led nowhere. But the strong red trail, recently renewed, meant that there were places in the ship the aliens wanted to revisit. What were they?

The path led through empty galleries and lounges, down a broad corridor, up a stair ... Naismith's own knowledge of the ship soon failed him; he no longer knew where he was except in a general sense.He pa.s.sed through an anteroom into a vast, echoing natatorium surrounded by balconies. Cushions and reclining chairs were strewn beside the pool; the tank itself was filled with clear water. There was no debris on the bottom, not a particle of dust visible on the surface. Remembering the color- ful crowds he had seen in Rentro's journal, Naismith was oppressed by the sense of their almost-living presence-as if they had only stepped into the next room for a moment....

Beyond the natatorium was a row of dressing rooms, and beyond that, unexpectedly, a small gymnasium. Here, for the first time, there was evidence of an alien presence. The parallel bars, horses, trampolines had been pushed aside, and three small black-metal boxes lay in the middle of the polished floor.

One had a line of transparencies and dials on its upper face.

Remembering the machine the aliens had used on him in their Los Angeles apartment, Naismith was careful not to approach them. He skirted the room cautiously, looking for a continua- tion of the red trail, but there was none: it ended here.