Damon Knight: Beyond the Barrier

In a dead-end passage, he found the door marked “C30.” A plastic card gummed to the door read “Lall.”

Naismith paused, listening. There was no sound from beyond the door, and he had a sudden conviction that the apartment was empty. He pressed the buzzer.

The door clicked, swung wide.

In the opening stood Miss Lall, dressed as he had seen her that morning. Behind her he glimpsed a disordered, green-walled room. Cigarette smoke swirled up through the cone of yellow light projected by a lamp.

“Come in, Mr. Naismith,” the creature said, and moved aside.

Naismith’s back muscles tightened. He stepped to the room, then paused.

Beyond a table, watching him with cold amber eyes, sat a brown-skinned man with a beard. After a moment, his resemblance to Lall was obvious.

Naismith walked forward. “You are Churan,” he said.

“I am.”

Naismith said grimly, “You sent me the machine. And you sent that lawyer to get me out of jail.”

“Thank me for that, at least,” the man said, narrowing his eyes. The table before him was littered with food and crumpled plastic. He picked up a chicken leg, gnawed it, spat out a piece of gristle. Scraps dribbled into his beard. He gazed up at Naismith with insolent eyes.

Lall came around and sat on the arm of a chair. Together, Naismith thought, they looked more inhuman than either alone. They were like two gigantic frogs, painted and dressed in human clothing.

A stir of revulsion went through him. “Exactly what do you want from me?” he demanded.

“To begin with, why not sit down and talk reasonably together? What can be lost?”

Naismith hesitated, then sat in a leather chair facing the table. The room, he saw now, was cluttered with an astonishing number and variety of things. Books and papers were stacked unevenly on the floor, piled on tables. Naismith saw an icon, a bronze Chinese dragon, a plastic windup toy, a string of cheap green beads, a can of soup. Balls of paper and plastic had been tossed carelessly into corners. There were scraps of food on the floor. Dust was thick everywhere.

“What can we offer you in return for your cooperation, Mr.

Naismith?” Churan asked. He picked up an orange, began to tear the skin off with his greasy fingers. “Money?”

Naismith did not reply.

“Knowledge?” Churan said delicately. Both aliens smiled.

Naismith leaned forward. “Very well. You claim to know all about me. Let me hear some proof of that—give me details.”

Churan shook his head. “Payment in advance, Mr. Naismith? Not a very good method of dealing.” He made a face, spoke a few guttural words to Lall.

“Doing business,” she said.

“Yes—doing business. We will not tell you everything now, Mr. Naismith. You have already learned something—that you are a Shefth, that the Lenlu Din sent you back—”

Lall interrupted him with a hissed word. He shrugged. “Well, it does not matter. There is still much for you to learn.” He stuffed a segment of orange into his mouth and began to chew, blinking at Naismith in time with the motion of his jaw.

Naismith felt an unreasonable anger. He said, “You’re asking me to go into this blindly. Why should I trust you?”

Churan spat out a seed, stuffed another segment of orange in. With his mouth full, he asked, “What other choice do you have?”

“I can refuse,” Naismith said. “I can stay here, live out my life.”

“You are already under suspicion of murder,” Churan commented. “You will lose your job—”

Naismith stood up.

“I am only stating facts, Mr. Naismith,” Churan said, staring up at him. “If necessary, you will be convicted of murder and will receive a long prison sentence. We can even arrange for painful accidents to happen to you while in prison.”

Lall spoke to him warningly. He shrugged, and said, “Only facts. Be realistic, Mr. Naismith—if you do not agree now, you will later.”

Naismith felt choked with anger. His voice was low. “What if I kill you instead?”

Churan flinched. “You will not,” he said hastily. “But if you did, who would answer your questions?”

Naismith was silent. Churan’s blunt forefinger stirred the papers on the table. “Meanwhile, if you want proofs, I will give you some proofs. Look at this, Mr. Naismith.”

Naismith glanced down. Churan’s fingers were spreading out a mare’s nest of amateur-looking color photographs.

Naismith recognized a dim picture of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a shot of the Neumann Obelisk in downtown Los Angeles, a grinning closeup of Churan himself. Then something different came into view.

It was an oblong of what seemed to be clear plastic. In it were three tiny figures against a shadowy background.

The illusion of depth was so perfect that the figures seemed to be sunken beneath the surface of the table. Two were shorter than the other; and Naismith recognized Lall and Churan by their stance, even before he leaned near enough to make out the features. The third—

He stiffened incredulously. The third man was himself.

There was no mistake. Back in his apartment, Naismith took the photograph out of his pocket again and examined it for the third tune. He had stared at it on the tube car going home, until the glances of other passengers had made him feel conspicuous.

There he was, embedded in the clear plastic, looking almost as if he might move or speak. Beside him, the two aliens gazed out with self-satisfied smiles.

“Where was this taken?” he had asked Churan. The alien had grinned up at him. “Not was—will be, Mr. Naismith. You are going with us into the future, and this picture will be taken there. So you see, there is no point in argument.” He giggled, and after a moment Lall joined in. Their hoarse, grunting laughter was so unpleasant to Naismith that he pocketed the photograph and fled.

Now, staring at it again, he was compelled to believe. The background showed a room like none he had ever seen before.

The walls were paneled in magenta and ivory strips of some substance that looked hazy and blurred at the edges, although the rest of the picture was in sharp focus. There were chairs, tables of unfamiliar shapes.

He knew in his bones that the room was not of this place and time. Either he and the aliens had been together in the past, in that blank period that was the first thirty-one years of his life… or else Churan had been telling the literal truth: this was a picture of something yet to happen—a snapshot from the future.

If the aliens themselves could come back from the future into present time—if the gun he had seen in his room could be projected back—why not a photograph?

But if that were so, how could he possibly escape?

He ate a solitary dinner, went to a movie, but discovered after half an hour that he had no idea what he had been watching.

That night, he dreamed.

In the dream, he wakened to a sense of danger.

He struggled, gasping as he straightened his limbs. A thin mechanical voice was shrilling, “Attack! Attack in the Fifth Sector! Guardians, awake! Attack! Attack!”

All around him in the big globular chamber, his comrades were rousing from sleep, squirming in the air, reaching for weapons. The automatic guns and other protective devices, floating at the outskirts of the chamber, ceaselessly revolved, their red lenses glowing.

The vision was so clear that Naismith accepted it without question. He had never really been Naismith; that was a dream. He was Dar of the Entertainer caste, and he was trying to get his wits about him. He had been on a thirty-hour patrol in the Eightieth Sector, and had barely fallen asleep, it seemed, before the robot alarm had wakened him.