Read Highway of Eternity Page 4


  Corcoran looked at Boone. “Could it be that Athens chap?”

  “I suppose it could,” said Boone. “We had better go and see.”

  They halted on the kitchen stoop and stared at what was happening in the flower bed. A great gash had been plowed across the bed by a rectangular object, some twelve feet in length and half as wide, its nose buried at an angle in the soil. David, Horace, Enid, and Timothy were shoving and tugging at it. Emma stood to one side, loudly lamenting.

  “We should give them a hand,” said Corcoran.

  Boone and he loped across the lawn.

  “What do you want to do with it?” Boone asked a panting Horace.

  “Pull it free,” gasped Horace. “Get it right side up.”

  With the extra manpower, the craft was wrenched free from the soil and turned over.

  Horace and David attacked what seemed to be a panel set into the side of it. Slowly the panel yielded to their clawing fingers, then popped open. David threw himself into the opening, crawled for a ways, then began backing out.

  “Give me some help,” he yelled. “I have hold of Gahan.”

  Horace wedged in beside David, fumbling for a hold, then the two of them began backing out, hauling a limp human figure. They hauled it across the flower bed and laid it in the grass.

  Gahan lay upon his back. He was bleeding at the mouth. One arm hung limp; his chest was sopped with blood. Horace knelt beside him, lifting and cradling him. The eyes came open and the bloody mouth moved, but only gurgling came out.

  Enid rushed in and knelt beside him. “It’s all right, Gahan. You are safe. You are at the Acre.”

  “What happened?” Emma screeched.

  Words and blood came from the mouth. “It’s gone,” he said, then choked on the blood.

  “What is gone, Gahan? What is gone?”

  He struggled to speak and finally said, “Athens.” That was all.

  Timothy said, “We had better get him to the house. He is badly hurt.”

  “How could it have happened?” Emma shouted.

  “He crashed, damn it,” said David. “He was hurt and lost control.”

  The wounded man struggled, trying to speak. Horace raised him higher. Enid tried to wipe the blood off his mouth with a filmy handkerchief, only smearing it.

  “Athens,” came the blood-choked whisper. “Athens base gone. Destroyed.”

  He slumped more deeply into Horace’s arms.

  Boone pushed closer to Horace and laid his fingers on Gahan’s throat, feeling for a pulse. He took his hand away.

  “This man is dead,” he said.

  Reverently, Horace withdrew his arms and let Gahan slump onto the grass. He rose slowly to his feet and the silence of the group was deadly. They looked at one another, not quite understanding.

  Timothy said to Boone, “We shouldn’t leave him out here. Will you help me carry him?”

  “We’ll have to bury him,” said Emma. “We’ll have to dig a grave.”

  “We have to talk,” said Horace. “First, before anything, we will have to talk.”

  “Where do you want to put him?” Timothy asked Emma.

  “A bedroom,” said Emma. “Upstairs. The back bedroom to the right. We can’t put him in the drawing room. All that blood will spoil the furniture.”

  “How about the gun room? That would be easier. We wouldn’t have to haul him up the stairs. There’s a leather couch in there. We can wipe off the leather.”

  “All right, then. The gun room.”

  Boone and Timothy picked up the body, Boone by the shoulders, Timothy by the feet. They made their way across the kitchen and through the dining room, with David shoving aside the pushed-back chairs to clear room for them. At the far end of the drawing room, they reached the gun room door.

  “Over there,” said Timothy. “Over there against the wall.”

  They laid the dead man on the couch and Timothy stood looking down at him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to handle this. There has been no death in this house since first we came. It’s a new experience and we are not ready for it. We’re very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way.”

  “No, I hadn’t known,” said Boone.

  “Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.”

  Boone said nothing in reply.

  “This is bad,” said Timothy. “This is one of the crisis points that you run across in history. We must decide what we should do. Decision and no mistakes. That’s important—no mistakes. Come with me. The others will be talking.”

  The others were not talking. Gathered in the dining room, they were shouting and screaming at one another.

  “I knew it,” Emma screamed. “I knew it. I just knew it. We were getting along too well. We thought it would keep on that way forever. We should have been looking ahead, making plans …”

  “Making plans for what?” yelled David, drowning her out. “How could we know what to plan for? How could we know what might happen?”

  “Don’t you yell at my wife!” roared Horace. “Don’t you ever again use that tone of voice to your sister. She is right. We should have imagined all sorts of contingencies and worked out models for our reaction to them. We shouldn’t be standing here, like we are right now, caught unawares and trying to figure out the best course to follow.”

  “I think,” said Timothy, adding his voice to the squabble, “that what we had better do is just settle down and do some quiet thinking on it.”

  “We haven’t the time to do any quiet thinking on it,” yelled Horace. “Not the leisurely kind of thinking that you mean. I know you, Timothy. You just put things off. You won’t face up to anything. You never would face up to anything. I remember the time …”

  “I agree we should be doing something,” David shouted. “I think Timothy’s approach is wrong. It’s no time for sitting back and waiting for something to happen. Certainly there are measures we could take. But each of us can’t just keep shouting what he or she may think and …”

  “We’ve got to get away,” screamed Emma. “We have to get away from here.”

  “There is no good,” yelled David, “in simply running. Run, yes, if we have to, but we must have a plan.”

  “I will not run,” shouted Horace. “I’m not about to run. Running is for cowards and I will not have it said …”

  “But we have to run,” screamed Emma. “We have to get away. We can’t wait for whatever’s coming. We have to find a safe place.”

  “You won’t find a safe place running,” Horace bellowed. “We have to use our heads.”

  “I still think,” said Timothy, “that we are reacting too precipitously. A few days more or less will not make that much difference.”

  “In a few days you could be dead,” yelled Horace.

  “At least we have to give Gahan a decent burial,” protested Timothy.

  “Gahan doesn’t count,” yelled Horace. “Gahan’s dead. Nothing more can happen to him. We are still alive, and what happens does matter to us and …”

  Boone stepped on a chair and from the chair to the table, kicking china and glass aside.

  “Shut up, all of you!” he thundered. “Shut up and sit down!”

  All of them stopped yelling and turned to stare at him.

  “You have no place in this,” said Emma, tartly, “You’re not one of us.”

  “You made me and Corcoran part of your group,” said Boone, “when you told us we could never leave this place. We both have the right to speak. We’re in the same boat with you. So shut up, all of you, and sit down.”

  Startled, they all found chairs and sat down.

  Boone said to Corcoran, who still stood against a wall, “Jay, if anyone starts yelling, if anyone gets to his feet, will you shut him up?”

  “Quite willingly,” said Corcoran.

  “I understand,” said Boone, “that this is no more than a healthy family squabble and that
most of you didn’t mean half of what you said. But you were not about to get anywhere and I think you do have to make some plans. Whether you like it or not, I’ll serve as referee.”

  Horace stood up. Corcoran pushed himself away from the wall and started toward him. Horace sat down.

  “You had something you wanted to say?” Boone asked Horace.

  “What I was about to say is that you understand none of what is going on. You have not the background that is required of a referee.”

  “In that case,” said Boone, “perhaps you’ll fill me in.”

  “Horace won’t,” said Enid. “He’ll tell it as he sees it. He will shade the meaning …”

  Horace stood up. Corcoran pushed off the wall. Horace sat down again.

  “All right, Miss Enid,” said Boone. “Perhaps you’ll proceed with your unbiased version.” He said to Horace, “You’ll have your chance later on. But the rules are one at a time and no shouting and no shoving.”

  “We are a group of refugees,” said Enid. “We are …”

  “Not refugees!” yelled Horace.

  “You shut up,” said Boone. “Enid, please go on.”

  “As I told you earlier,” said Enid, “we are from a million years into your future. In that million years the human race has changed.”

  “Was encouraged to change,” said Horace, interrupting. “On its own, the race would not have changed.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” said David. “For example, there is Henry.”

  “I can be sure,” said Horace. “The Infinites …”

  Boone raised a hand to stop him. Horace stopped.

  “You used that word,” Boone said to Timothy. “I was about to ask you more about it and then the Athens traveler came. Tell me, what are these Infinites?”

  “The Infinites are another intelligence,” Timothy told him. “They are from somewhere in the galactic center. They are not biological. Maybe they were at one time and changed to what they are.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said David, “we know little about them.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” objected Horace. “We know, at least approximately, what they are.”

  “All right,” said Boone. “We have wandered from the point. Enid was about to tell us how the human race had changed in a million years.”

  “They changed,” said Enid, “from corporeal beings, from biological beings, to incorporeal beings, immaterial, pure intelligences. They now are ranged in huge communities on crystal lattices. They are …”

  Horace broke out, “The obscenity of it! The immorality …”

  “Shut up!” Boone roared at him.

  He turned to Enid. “But you are human beings. The people in the outpost near Athens were human beings. Biological and …”

  “There were some who rebelled,” said Enid. “Some who fled to escape incorporeality.”

  “The incorporeality was, to many of the human race, something akin to a new and exciting religion,” said Timothy. “There were, however, some who protested most violently against it. We number ourselves among those protestants. There are many other protestants hiding out in various time periods. We maintain small, widely separated groups. It is harder to find us that way. The protestants fled, and now the Infinites or their agents hunt us down. I think the belief that the incorporeality process was a religion was an entirely human idea. With the Infinites, I am convinced, it was not a religion, but a plan, a universal plan. The Infinites are convinced that one thing, and one thing only, can survive the death of the universe. That is intelligence. So the Infinites are busily at work creating a corpus of intelligence. Certainly not the human race alone, but including many other intelligences in the galaxy, perhaps in the universe. The Infinites in this galaxy may be no more than one primitive mission of many missions spread throughout the universe, working diligently with the benighted, heathen populations.”

  “It is mad!” yelled Horace. “I tell you, it is madness!”

  “You understand,” said Emma, “we never saw the Infinites. Some people did, I guess.”

  “What Emma means,” said Horace, “is that none of us, here in this room, saw them. Other humans did and became convinced that the entire human race should allow itself to be turned into pure mind entities. This belief of theirs became an insane article of faith. Those who rebelled against it became outlaws.”

  “What you must realize,” said Timothy, speaking softly, “is that our race was ripe for such a development. Even before the Infinites put in their appearance, the human race had changed. By that period from which we fled, viewpoints and philosophical concepts had been vastly altered. The race had gotten tired, was bored. It had made too much progress, had accomplished too much. Progress no longer meant a great deal. Dilettantism was, by and large, the norm.”

  “But you?” asked Boone.

  “Not we,” said Timothy. “Not we and certain others. We did not fall into the trap. We were the outlanders, the backwoods rednecks, residing far beyond the fringe of the shining society which humanity had become. We wanted to stay human. We distrusted the new ways. That is why we were outlawed.”

  “But the time travelers?”

  “We stole the time concept from the Infinites,” said Horace. “We still were human enough to do anything necessary to protect ourselves. The Infinites do not lie or steal. They are great and noble.”

  “And stupid,” said David.

  “Yes, that is right,” said Horace. “And stupid. But now they have found us out and we must get away again.”

  “I can’t leave,” said Timothy. “I have decided that I will not go. I will not leave my books or my notes, the work that I have done.”

  “What Timothy is trying to do,” Enid explained to Boone, “is get an inkling of where, and how, the human race went wrong, how it could have gotten itself into the situation that convinced the people of a million years from now to go along with the scheme of the Infinites. Timothy thinks that back here, close to the roots of our civilization, he may find a clue through a close study of history and philosophy.”

  “I am close to it,” said Timothy. “I am convinced I am. But I can’t carry on my work without my books and notes.”

  “There won’t be room,” said Horace, “to take along all your notes, let alone your books. Our traveler capacity is limited. We have Martin’s resident traveler and I am glad we have it. We have our own small traveler and Gahan’s traveler, if it still operates …”

  “I doubt there is much wrong with it, if anything,” said David. “Gahan lost control of it, that’s all. It made a fairly soft landing in the flower bed.”

  “We’ll have a look at it,” said Horace.

  “Now we are beginning to make some progress,” said Boone. “But there are decisions that have to be made. If you are convinced that we have to go, has anyone any idea where we should go?”

  “We could join the group in the Pleistocene,” said Emma.

  Horace shook his head. “Not that. Athens is destroyed and Henry says something is sniffing all around us. The possibility is good the Pleistocene people have been located as well. If they have not been, our going there could lead whoever is looking for us to them. My suggestion would be to go back deeper into time, beyond the Pleistocene.”

  “It seems to me we should go into the future,” said David, “and try to find out what is going on.”

  “Back into the hornet’s nest,” said Emma.

  “If that is what it takes,” said David. “There probably are some people like us still up there, those who did not leave, who are skulking around, toughing it out, making out as best they can.”

  “Martin might know something about what is going on,” said Horace, “but where the hell is Martin?”

  “We need some time to think it out a bit,” said David. “We can’t make decisions on the run.”

  “Two days, then,” said Horace. “Two days and we’re gone.”

  “I hope you understand,” said Timothy, speaking
slowly and decisively, “that I intend to go nowhere. I am staying here.”

  5

  The Monster

  Boone sat on a low stone fence that ran between a pasture and a field. In the field, two setters ran in happy frolic, chasing one another, giving chase to the birds their gamboling flushed from the stubble. The late afternoon sun was warm, and the cloudless sky arched like a great blue dome.

  For a couple of hours, Boone had prowled the Acre, accompanied by the happy dogs. He first had set out with a solid determination to find the time bubble, to locate the wall of differentiating time that somewhere must come down to earth. He had tried to walk a straight line, stopping every now and then to realign the landmarks he had set up to insure his going straight. But after an hour or more of walking his straight line, he had found, with some astonishment, that he had come back approximately to that point where he had started out.

  The walk, however, had not been entirely pointless nor a complete failure. During the hour or more, the countryside through which he walked had seeped into him. It had been a long time since he had gone for a walk in any countryside, and the walk had brought back memories of other walks in other years and in other lands. He had come upon a flock of complacent sheep that stood and watched him with mild question in their eyes, then trotted off a ways, but stopped and stood to watch him as he ambled past them. He had stepped across small, swiftly flowing brooks with water that had a crystal look; he had walked through small, neat groves of trees; he had noted with deep satisfaction the autumn wild flowers that grew along the brooks, nodding above the mirror of the water and along the hedges.

  And now he sat upon the low stone wall, not far from where he had clambered over it to begin the walk. Behind him was the road that ran up, between the rows of dying poplars, to reach the house; the sweep of stubbled field before him. And sitting, he thought with muted wonder of what he and Corcoran had been told by the people of the house. It was so fantastic and so beyond all imagination that he had found much difficulty in bringing it to grips. He could find no starting point to begin a logical consideration of it. Far down the field, at the edge of a grove of trees, he caught the flicker of something moving. Watching it, he finally made out that it was a man, and a short time later recognized Corcoran. As he watched, Corcoran came striding up the slope toward him.