Barrington Bayley - Collision with Chronos

“Thank God we discovered the truth in time!”

He turned from the screen toward Brask. In the room’s grey light the younger man’s oddly deformed eyelid looked almost grotesque. In a less talented man that eyelid would have excluded him from the Titanium Legions altogether, but the exhaustive genealogical investigation every applicant underwent had shown the defect to have no genetic origin, and Limnich had let it pass.

In spite of his own fanaticism in that area, he did sometimes exercise leniency if there was an advantage in it. There was actually an officer in the new Command Team – a Colonel Yedrasch – who was part Lorene. But he was a ferocious fighter for True Man, even more so, it seemed, because of his knowledge of his mixed nature, and his services to the race were of such a high order that Limnich had decided (and the World President agreed with him) that he couldn’t be dispensed with. Thus, instead of liquidation, Yedrasch had merely undergone a vasectomy to ensure that he could not defile the future blood of True Man.

An oak-panelled door opened. “Colonel Hutt is here, Leader,” Limnich’s secretary told him.

Limnich nodded curtly. Titan-Colonel Hutt entered. Both men gave the hooked-arm salute, then Limnich sat down.

“About the question of public information, Leader.…”

Limnich nodded again. “I’ve made a decision. The average man’s intelligence is too limited to be able to comprehend the whole truth all at once. The public announcements are to give a more restricted idea of the nature of time: they will speak of an attack from the future, where the alien interventionists have established their second attempt to settle the Earth.”

“In other words, the public is to understand the matter as we ourselves did until recently,” Brask added. “Later, when they’ve been further educated, the full facts can be made clear.”

“I understand,” Titan-Colonel Hutt said.

“There’s one other point,” Limnich resumed. “The emergency, the greatest that has ever faced mankind, will entail a big political crisis. All political work must be intensified. Dissident groups must be totally nullified. To this end, I order you to apprise the Panhumanic League of all the facts at our disposal, through our secret contacts.”

“ All the facts, Leader?” Hutt echoed in dismay. “But why?”

“What better way could there be of pulling the ground from under their feet?” Limnich said, his face fish-cold and unsmiling. “It’s a certain bet that the larger part of the League will defect and come over to us, once they know the truth.”

A look of dawning realisation came over the other’s face. “Correct, Leader. That is so.” He was reassured to see that the old fox had not lost his grip, that Limnich’s sense of manoeuvre was as subtle as ever.

Limnich, for his part, fought to snatch his mind back from the edge of madness. His brain filled yet again with a dreadful, incomprehensible vision of two onrushing time-systems encountering one another. He hadn’t even begun to think how this looked from the aspect of the Earth Mother, a deity in whom he believed without question. He didn’t even want to think about it.

“Thank God we discovered the truth in time!” he repeated in a low voice. But had that done any good? Could anything save them?

The Approach to the future-Earth aliens was necessarily more incautious than that planned for the Titans. The task before Wang Yat-Sen and Li Li-San, the two young philosophers selected for it by the Prime Minister, was a delicate one.

Firstly they had to convince the lemur-like creatures that they were not from the civilisation that was threatening them. This was no easy matter, since the aliens were, naturally, insensitive to fine differences of physique. But already the previous expedition had decoded the aliens’ language (in fact, several languages) from electromagnetic transmissions and had prepared language-course tapes. Consequently Wang Yat-Sen and Li Li-San were fairly competent in the hesitant, chittering tongue, though their pronunciation brought them barely within the bounds of intelligibility.

Eventually the aliens were, it seemed, persuaded, and the two young men were taken from the prison-hospital (actually a biological research station) where they had been kept with the other human prisoners (and what they had seen being done to those prisoners was most distasteful).

Now they sat in a conically shaped room of bare stone. The aliens seemed to go in for bare stone, as well as for conical shapes in building, and all the doors were triangular, too low for a man to go through without bending. The furnishings of the room were sparse, made of square-cut unpolished timber and board. The aliens’ technological achievements were not matched by any interest in interior decoration.

But the two individuals who faced the young men across the rough plank table were among the highest authorities in their society. Wang Yat-Sen gazed at them calmly, fascinated as usual by their nervous sensitivity. Anything was enough to set their fragile bodies to quivering, and their fine nose-whiskers to twitching and vibrating.

“And why should you make us this offer?” chittered one. “Why should you go to such lengths to help us? How are we to know that this is not some devious trick?”

“To take your points one at a time,” Li Li-San answered, “our readiness to give assistance merely demonstrates the good regard of one intelligent species for another. Your second point: guarantees of good faith can be arranged. Our offer applies also to the other, human civilisation. If you both agree, then you’ll be cooperating with one another instead of fighting.”

“We will, if you wish, take your ambassadors to our ISS,” Wang Yat-Sen put in equably. “Then they’ll see for themselves.”

The lemur-creature ignored this last. “You expect us to retreat from the enemy? To abandon our planet?” he said, his vowel-sounds indicating considerable passion. His limbs were trembling visibly, like those of a mortally wounded animal. “It’s our planet, ours since the beginning of time. We’ll defend it to the last.”

The other lemur-creature joined in. “Never do we retreat from an enemy. A few days ago they – your biological cousins – launched an attack upon two of our large cities, using weapons, which, judging by the intensity of the energy produced, relied upon the fusion of light atomic nuclei. Our cities were utterly destroyed and there is radioactive waste for distances all around. But we’ll strike back! We’ll strike back!”

Both men from Retort City, brought up to regard everything in a detached and clinical manner, were puzzled. “But surely you realise that your emotional attitude toward your historical habitat is inappropriate in the current situation,” Wang Yat-Sen put forward. “Your ‘enemy’, as you put it, is merely reacting in the same manner, and to attacks you’ve made on him. Evacuation is the only hope for either of you.”

“We don’t accept that it’s the only hope,” chittered the lemur-leader shrilly. “We know that enemy life-forms lie in our future, and that if they continue to exist, we’ll perish. Therefore – we’ll deal with it!”

“But how?” Li Li-San asked simply.

“We’re developing viruses destructive to all life in the enemy biota, ” the lemur said. “We’ll sow these viruses on a massive scale. By the time our time-system reaches the projected collision point, all trace of life in the enemy biosphere will be gone. There’ll be nothing to obstruct the passage of our own time-wave.”

Glancing at one another, Wang Yat-Sen and Li Li-San saw from each other’s expressions that they both concluded that their mission had failed. They stood up.