Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

The time machine?

Nonsense. A bilgeful of crap. Physical, mathematical, logical impossibility. I proved it once, for a term paper in the philosophy of science.

I, who recall well how it felt to, be that confidently analytical twenty-year-old, now know how it feels to be marooned without warning in a grisly desert, nearing a machine like none I had imagined, at my back a medieval Russian and a Hun from before Attila and a woman from no place or age bespoken in any of the books I read when I might have been being kind to Pamela.

Abruptly the iridescence whirled, became a maelstrom, focused its shiningness upon a single point of the metal thing. That point grew outward, opened as a circle, gave onto a dusk-purple space within where twinkled starry sparks of light. A man came forth.

Reid had an instant to see him. He was small, compactly built, mahogany in hue, hair a cap of black velvet, features broad but finely molded. He wore a prismatic white robe and transparent boots. In his hands he bore twin two-foot hemispheres of bright metal upon which were several tiny studs, plates, and switches.

He walked uncertainly, he looked very ill, and his garb was discolored by vomit stains.

Reid halted. “Sir—” he began, making the sign of peace.

The man reeled and fell. Blood ran from his mouth and nostrils. The dust quickly drank it. Behind him, the portal closed.

“My God! If the pilot’s dead!” Down on his knees, Reid felt across the still body. The rib cage moved, though with unhealthy rapidity and shallowness. The skin was hotter than the desert beneath.

Erissa joined him. Her face had gone utterly intent. Murmuring to herself what sounded like an invocation, she examined the dark man with unmistakable skill: peeling back a lid to study the pupil, timing his pulse against her rhythmic chant, pulling the robe around his shoulders and cutting off the form-fitting undergarment to check for broken bones or flesh injuries. The hale men waited anxiously. She rose, glanced about, pointed toward a ravine.

“Yeah, get him out of the sun,” Reid interpreted. “Us too.” He remembered he was not among English speakers. But they caught the idea. Oleg gave Erissa his ax, took the pilot, and bore him easily off. She pulled an amulet from below her tunic, a gold miniature suspended on a thong around her neck, and touched it to the weapon before carrying that with some reverence after the Russian.

Reid tried to study the cylindroid. At a distance of a few feet, where the nacreous flickering began, he was stopped. It was like walking into an invisible rubber sheet, that yielded at first but increased resistance inch by inch. Protective force field, he thought. Not an overwhelming surprise in the present context. Better stay clear—possible radiation hazard m-m, probably not, since the pilot—but how do we get in?

We don’t, without him.

Reid collected the hemispheres. Their hollow interiors were more elaborate than the exterior shells. The only comprehensible features were triads of crisscrossing bands, suggestive of helmet liner suspensions. Were these, then, communication devices to be worn on the head? He carried them along to the gulch. On the way, he noticed the Pipe that had fallen from his mouth and retrieved it. Even on doomsday, you find trivia to take care of.

Steep-sided, the ravine gave shelter from the wind and a few patches of shade. Oleg had stretched the pilot—as Reid thought of the unconscious man—in the largest of these. It was inadequate. Reid and Erissa worked together, cutting sticks and propping them erect to support an awning made of his topcoat. Oleg shed armor and pads, heaving a gigantic sigh of relief. Uldin took the harness off his horse, tethered it to a grass tuft above the gulch, and covered the beast as well as he could with the unfolded saddle blanket. He brought bag and bottle down and shared the contents. Nobody had appetite for the dried meat in the first; but sour and alcoholic though it was, the Milky liquid in the second proved a lifesaver.

Then they could do ,nothing but squat in their separate bits of shadow and endure. Erissa went often to check on the pilot. Oleg and Uldin climbed the crumbly bank by turns, peered through a full circle, and returned shaking their heads. Reid sat amidst thoughts that he never quite recalled later except for his awareness of Erissa’s eyes dwelling on him.

Whatever was happening, he could no longer pretend he’d soon awaken from it.

The sun trudged westward. Shadows in the ravine stretched and flowed together. The four who waited lifted faces streaked with dust and sweat-salt, reddened eyes and cracked gummy lips, toward the first faint balm of coolness.

The pilot stirred and called out. They ran to him.

He threshed his limbs and struggled to sit. Erissa tried to make him lie down. He would not. “ mentator.” he kept gasping, and more words in a language that sounded faintly Hispanic but was softer. He retched. His nosebleed broke out afresh. Erissa stanched it with a piece torn off a handkerchief Reid had given her. She signed Oleg to uphold him in a reclining posture and herself helped him drink a little of the stuff Uldin called kumiss.

“Wait a minute.” Reid trotted back to where he had huddled and fetched the hemispheres. The pilot nodded with a weak vehemence that made Erissa frown, and reached shakily for them. When Reid hunkered to assist him, she stepped aside, clearly setting the American’s judgment above her own.

Damn if I know whether I’m doing right, he thought. This guy looks barely alive, on fire with fever, shouldn’t be put to any strain. But if he can’t get back into his machine, we may all be finished.

The pilot made fumbling adjustments to the devices. He put one on his. head. The shining metal curve turned his sunken-eyed, blood-crusted, dirt-smudged countenance doubly ghastly. He leaned back on Oleg’s breast and signed Reid to don the second helmet. The American obeyed. The pilot had barely strength to reach and press a stud on his.

It was the most prominent, directly over his brow. The hand fell into his lap; but fingers fluttered at Reid.

The architect rallied what guts he had left. Be ready for anything, he told himself, and tough it out, son, tough it out. He pushed the control.

A humming grew. The noise must be inside his skull, for none of the others heard; and somehow it didn’t feel physical, not like anything carried along the nerves. He grew dizzy and sat down. But that might be only from tension. on top of these past dreadful hours.

The pilot was in worse case. He twitched, whimpered, closed his eyes and sagged bonelessly. It was as if his machine were a vampire draining his last life. Erissa ventured to kneel by him, though not to interrupt.

After what Reid’s watch said was about five minutes, the humming faded out. The depressed studs popped up. The giddiness passed away. Presumably the helmets had finished their job. The pilot lay half conscious. When Reid took off his headpiece, Erissa removed that of her patient and laid him flat. She stayed beside him, listened to the struggling breath and watched the uncertain pulse in his throat.

Finally he opened his eyes. He whispered. Erissa brought her ear close, frowned, and waved at Reid. He didn’t know what he could do, but joined her anyway. The pilot’s dim glance fell upon him and remained there.

“Who ... are you?” rattled from the parched mouth. “Where, when ... are you from?”

American English!

“Quick,” pleaded the voice. “Haven’t ... got long. For your sake too. You know ... mentator? This device?”

“No,” Reid answered in awe. “Language teacher?”

“Right. Scan speech center. In the brain. Brain’s a data bank. The scanner ... retrieves language information ... feeds it into the receiver brain. Harmless, except it’s ... kind of stressful ... being the receiver ... seeing as how then the data patterns aren’t just scanned, they’re imposed.”