Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

“What of me?” Erissa inquired.

Uldin’s look told his opinion of putting a woman on sentry-go. He walked from the illumination and studied the heavens. “Not my sky,” he said. “I can name you the northerly stars, but something’s queer about them. Well, Duncan, do you see that bright one low in the east? Call me when it’s this high:’ He doubtless had no idea of geometry, but his arm lifted to an accurate sixty-degree angle. With his awkward gait, he sought the spot where his horse was tethered, lay down, and slumbered immediately.

Oleg knelt. removed his coif, and crossed himself before saying a prayer in his Old Russian. He had no trouble finding rest either.

I envy them that, Reid thought. Intelligence—no, don’t be snobbish—the habit of verbalizing has its drawbacks.

Weariness filled his body with stones and his head with sand. Most of Uldin’s kumiss had gone to wash down the jerky they had had for supper; what was left must be hoarded; Reid’s mouth felt drier than deadwood. His skin was flushed from the day’s exposure, yet the cold gnawed into him. A brisk walk, several times around the camp, might help.

“I leave, Duncan, soon to return,” Erissa said. “Don’t go far,” he warned.

“No. Never from you.”

He waited till she had vanished in the night before he started on his round, so he could watch her. Not that he felt enamored—under these circumstances?—but what a woman she was, and what a mystery.

The castaways had had slim chance to talk. The shock of arrival and of Sahir’s appearance and death, the stress of heat, thirst, and language transfer, had overtaxed them.

They were lucky to complete what they did before sunset.

Reid had followed the pilot’s advice. Because her bronze knife and her frank wonder at iron equipment fairly well proved she was from the earliest date and therefore from this general period, he made Erissa the linguistic source. She went along with the process as readily as with any-thing he wanted. He found that assimilating a language through the inentaten— was in truth rough: a churning of his mind, bringing on a condition similar to the unpleasant terminal stage of extreme drunkenness, plus exhausting, involuntary muscle contractions. No doubt it went far more slowly and gently in Sahir’s home milieu: and obviously this brutal cramming had hastened the pilot’s end. But there was no choice and Reid recovered after a drowsy rest.

Oleg and Uldin refused, wouldn’t come near the apparatus, until the Russian saw Erissa and the American talking freely. Then he put a helmet on his own pate. Uldin followed suit, maybe just to show that he had equal manhood.

The swift desert dark upon them and their vitality drained, they had no time thereafter for aught but the briefest, most general exchanges of information.

Reid started pacing. The crunch of his footfalls and the remote bestial yelps were his sole hearing, the stars and the cold his sole attendants. He doubted there would be any danger before morning. Still, Uldin was right about posting a guard. Heavy though Reid’s brain was, it lurched into motion.

Where are we? When are we?

Sahir’s expedition left Hawaii in ... sometime in the future, Reid thought. Say a thousand years in my future. Their machine skimmed the land and water surface of the planet while moving backward in time.

Why skim? Well, let’s assume you need the surface for a reference frame. Earth moves through space, and space has no absolute coordinates. Let’s assume you dare not rise lest you lose your contact (gravitation?) and come out in the emptiness between yonder stars.

My term paper—x millennia hence, a couple of decades ago along my now doubled-back world line, a million years ago in my interior time of this night of despair—proved that,travel into the past is impossible for a number of reasons, including the fact that more, than infinite energy would be required. Evidently I was wrong. Evidently sufficient energy—a huge concentration of it in a small volume and short timespan—nevertheless, a finite amount—evidently that will, somehow, affect the parameters of the continuum, and this vehicle here can be thrown

. across the world and backward or forward through the ages.

Traveling, the vehicle must be charged with monstrous forces. Sahir spoke of “insulation.” I think he might better have said “control” or “restraint.” Probably .the forces themselves are the only ones strong enough to generate their own containment.

This trip, there was an imperfection. A leakage. The vehicle flew through space-time surrounded by a ... field .. that snatched along whatever animal was encountered.

Why just animals—higher animals—plus whatever was intimately attached to them such as clothes? Why not trees, rocks, water, air, soil? M-m, yes, Sahir did speak of the reason. It wasn’t important for me to know, he was half out of his mind and babbling, but as long as he did mention it—yes. The technology of,his age, or at least of its space-time vehicles, relies on mental control. Telepathy, including telepathic robots, if you believe in that kind of fable. Myself, I’m inclined to speculate about amplified neural currents. Whatever the explanation may be, the fact is that the drive field only interacts with matter which is, itself, permeated by brain waves.

It might be done that way as a precaution. Then in case of force leakage, the machine will not find itself buried under tons of stuff when it halts. Higher animals aren’t too plentiful, ever. One of them would have to be at precisely the point in space, precisely the instant in time, where—when the vehicle passes by.... Hm. We may have collected various mice and birds and what-not, which hurried out of our sight before we got a chance to notice them. They’d be the commonest victims. An accident involving humans must be rare. Maybe unique.

(Why did it have to happen to me? The eternal question, I suppose, that everybody must sooner or later ask himself.)

Sahir said the trouble registered on instruments and his team started braking. Because of ... inertia ... they couldn’t stop at the point where they’d picked me up. They flew on, acquiring Oleg, Uldin, and Erissa.

As ill luck would have it, when their flight was nearly ended, when they were nearly ready to halt in space and start moving normally forward again in time—another power concentration hit them. Ordinarily they could have passed it by in safety: but given the faulty containment, those cataclysmic forces (or more accurately, I guess. the space-time warping produced by those cataclysmic forces) interacted with the drive field. Energy was released in the form of a lethal blast of X-rays through the hull.

There’s the crazy coincidence, that a time carrier in trouble should happen to pass by a catastrophe.

Uh-uh. Wait. Probably not a coincidence. Probably the chrononauts, or rather their computers and autopilots, always set their courses to pass near events like that if it’s feasible. Given a vessel that’s working properly, I imagine they get an extra boost from the H-bomb explosion or giant meteorite impact or whatever the event happens to be. Makes the launch cheaper, and so makes more time voyages possible than would otherwise be the case.

Did Sahir and his friend know they were headed into their doom, try to veer, and fail? Or did they forget, in the wild scramble of those few moments? (I have the impression that transit time, experienced within the hull, is short.

Certainly we who were, carried along outside knew a bare minute’s darkness, noise, and whirling.)

So. We’re stranded, unless we can find some other futurians. Or they us. I suppose if we can stay here, eventually a search party will come by.

Will it? How closely can they position their spacetime hops, when each requires building a generator that doubtless destroys itself by sheer heat radiation when it’s used?