Barrington Bayley - Collision with Chronos

YOU ARE EN ROUTE TO INTERSTELLAR SPACE. The characters were neat, but functionally inelegant. There followed a diagram consisting of dots, some heavily, some lightly scored, superimposed by a series of concentric circles. An arrow left the centre and stabbed slowly out, jerking several times toward empty space.

Heshke guessed it to be a star map, but he was no astronomer and it meant nothing to him.

For a minute or two he waited, but the screen offered no further information. Just the same, he felt overawed. The civilisation to which he belonged could not undertake intestellar travel, though all the planets as far out as Saturn had been fairly well explored. It came as a blow to his sense of racial superiority to find these devs so advanced. Automatically his mind began seeking some explanation, one which would permit the fatal flaws of intellectual or spiritual inferiority with which all dev races were supposed to be cursed.

Deep in thought he roamed the room. Absentmindedly he tried the door the dev had left by, pushing it and then pulling on a ledge set into the panel. To his surprise it slid open easily, vanishing into the wall.

He peered into an empty corridor, slatted with honey-coloured ribs as was his room, and hesitated. Had the dev mistakenly forgotten to lock him in? After a few moments he slipped out and proceeded along the corridor, feeling absurdly guilty and exposed, glancing all around him and expecting to be recaptured any second.

The corridor came to an end in a circular junction from which radiated other corridors. He hovered near the wall, peeping down each one in turn. Then he stiffened; a dev was striding out from a corridor to his right, unseen until this moment.

Heshke decided instantly not to put up any resistance and turned to face the dev, his arms hanging limply by his sides. The dev’s stride broke for a moment and he looked at Heshke, his face speculative, interested. Then he raised his hand in what appeared to be some kind of greeting, nodded curtly and strode on past him.

Heshke looked after his retreating back, astonished.

“Citizen Heshke!”

Startled, he turned. The voice was Lieutenant Gann’s. He came toward him down yet another corridor, at a near-run.

“Thank Earth I’ve found you,” the Titan said breathlessly. “I was afraid they’d done something with you.”

“You’re free too?”

The other nodded. “So’s Ascar. These fiends don’t seem to care; we have the run of the ship.”

“But why?”

“Who can say? A dev mind is bound to be devious, devilishly twisted. Probably they want to study us, catch us off our guard.” He glanced around them, at walls, floor and ceiling, evidently seeking out spying devices.

“Where’s Ascar?” Heshke asked.

“In his room. He’s gone into a sulk, just sits there and won’t co-operate.”

Heshke looked carefully into the Titan officer’s sharp face. He saw signs of nervous strain. Gann was intelligent, well-trained, but he was under pressure: in the very maw of hell, by his own doctrine.

“Let’s keep moving,” Gann said in a mutter, nudging his arm. “Probably they can’t pick us up very well while we’re on the move.”

He guided Heshke down another of the corridors, pacing swiftly and talking in a low, furtive mutter.

“Keep your voice down,” he warned. “Don’t give them any more help than you have to.”

“What have you found out?” Heshke asked.

“We’re heading into interstellar space. Presumably this ship is equipped both with time-drive and some kind of interstellar-drive – but we always knew the aliens must have something like that. This disproves Ascar’s theory, anyway: his theory that the alien interventionists are indigenous to Earth.”

“Aliens?” Heshke queried. “But…”

Gann shot him a glance. “Isn’t it obvious? These devs are working with the aliens. It would be just like them, too. They must be taking us back to one of the alien home bases.”

Yes, thought Heshke, to Gann it would make perfect sense. It would enable him to resurrect his belief in the Earth Mother; to clear her from the charge of infidelity, of having given birth to two legitimate sons.

Doctrine apart, it made a certain kind of sense to Heshke, too.

“How can we be sure?” he said doubtfully. “Couldn’t the devs themselves be responsible for all this?”

Gann didn’t answer for a moment but glanced around him, gesturing with his hand. “I don’t think so, Citizen. You’ve seen this ship, what a high cultural standard it has. I don’t believe devs could have produced it. Besides, they would have had to invent the time-drive all by themselves, and that requires genius. Degenerate races don’t have that kind of intellectual genius. Cunning, yes – but not genius. No, Citizen, the aliens are behind this.”

Again, the Titan tech’s reasoning sounded plausible. Heshke hurried to keep up with his swift strides. But, he thought, if Gann was right then that suggested that there was a conspiracy of cosmic proportions directed against True Man.…

Gann nudged him again, directing him down a side turning. They passed through a sort of foyer, or salon, where a number of devs stood before a large wall screen on which enigmatic schematics processed. They discussed quietly among themselves, and paused only momentarily to glance up as Gann and Heshke passed them by.

Gann remained silent until they were once more walking down an empty corridor. “Don’t you know who these people are?” he said, his voice rising slightly. “No, perhaps you wouldn’t… but I had plenty of instruction in race identification in training college.”

“No,” Heshke said, “I don’t know who they are.”

“They’re Chinks,” Gann told him. “The last group of them was supposed to have been exterminated five hundred years ago. Quite an interesting strain, as devs go. Tradition has it that their cunning was almost superhuman.”

“ Super human?” repeated Heshke wonderingly. “And yet you deny them intellectual ability?”

“It’s more of an animal cleverness raised to a high degree. In devs the intellectual faculty is always perverted in some way, producing bizarre sciences and practices, yet it can involve extreme subtlety – in fact there used to be a saying: ‘the fiendishly clever Chink.’”

Heshke found the phrase amusing and smiled, at which Gann shot him a sharp glance.

“It’s no laughing matter. And you wouldn’t think so if you fell foul of a Chink puzzle.”

“A Chink puzzle? What’s that?”

“One of their weapons, capable of incapacitating the nervous system. Just some kind of ingenious contraption made of wire or bits of metal, apparently. But whoever it’s given to is instantly confronted with insuperable problems and riddles of such a nature that the mind is totally paralysed. The worst of it is that he can’t be released until the puzzle is solved, which only a Chink can do.”

With a deep sigh, Heshke decided that perhaps his amusement had been too facetious, after all.

“As you can see,” Gann concluded, “these people are natural candidates for alliance with the aliens. Perhaps they were allied with them all along.”

“Well, what are we going to do now?”

“Our duty is somehow to seize this ship if we can and take it back to Earth – and to the Absolute Present.”

“But how?” said Heshke, overawed at such audacity.

“I don’t know yet. I haven’t finished reconnoitring. But there doesn’t seem to be a very large crew.”

“But even if we did take control – which doesn’t seem possible to me – how would we fly it?”

“I can pilot a time traveller, and the alien version is basically the same as our own. We can manage it with Ascar’s help, even if I have to kick co-operation out of him.”