Keith Laumer - The Other Side of Time

Then the day came when the general came down and watched for half an hour while Lind tried to throw me on my ear; but I got lucky and threw him instead.

“You’re ready,” Roosevelt said. “We’ll leave at midnight.”

The shuttle terminus was a huge bright-lit room with a polished white floor marked off in orange lines, with shuttles ranked between the lines. There were little one-man scouts and big twenty-man passenger transports, some bare, functional boxes, some fancy VIP jobs, some armored, some fitted up to look like moving vans or delivery trucks. There was a steady, high-pitched whine, and a constant booming and buffeting from air displacement as shuttles came and went. I’d never seen any of it before, but it was all familiar from the sessions under the hypnotaper.

Technicians in white coveralls worked over machines, standing at little desks that were spaced along the aisles. Across the room I saw a party of men in costumes like Spanish conquistadores, and another group in Puritan black.

“Protective coloration,” Roosevelt said. “Our agents always try to blend with the background. In our case, no disguises are necessary. As far as I know, there’s no human life left where we’re going.”

The technicians fitted us into our suits—old-fashioned flyers’ outfits with lightweight diving helmets. They checked us over with a minimum of formality, and we strapped in and closed the hatch. Roosevelt looked sideways at me and gave me the thumbs-up sign. “Ready?”

“It’s your show. General,” I said. He nodded and threw in the drive control. The whining hum started up; the light outside faded. The walls and roof quivered and disappeared, and we were perched two feet above a vacant lot full of weeds and blown dust under the open sky.

We didn’t talk much, crossing the Blight, following the beep-beep\ of the tracer tuned to our target. I watched the blasted landscape flow past while Roosevelt monitored fifty dial faces at once and corrected the control settings from time to time for no reason I could make out. For a while we skimmed above a plain of shattered rock, where smoke boiled up from fumaroles and volcanic cones that threw a red glow across the sky. Then there was an ocean of oily, scummed fluid that broke in sluggish foamy waves. And then land again: cinder-black, with pale flames licking over it until it coalesced into a sea of lava, dull-red and bubble-pocked. All the while, the clouds over the moon never moved.

The lava darkened, hardened, turned to a dusty plain. Green appeared, and strange, scabbed trees shot up in clumps of two or three. Vines spread, and ruins poked up among them. A slab of rock came into view, tilted up by the roots of a fifty-foot dandelion with hooks all along the stem, “We’re close,” Roosevelt said. “That’s the highway leading into the city of Fontrevrault.”

He corrected course to bring us in over the old road leading off through the nightmare jungle, between fallen walls and rusted steel frameworks that were trellises now for ropes of flesh entwined with warty vines with leaves like rotted canvas curving over clusters of oversized, blind rodent-heads like bunches of fruit. They had no eyes, but there were plenty of teeth showing, set in the husks of the plants that nourished them.

The forest opened out, thinned. Tall ochre and rust buildings loomed up on both sides, like jungle temples in Yucatan. Fungus grew on the granite and marble, and the bronze statues of gods and goddesses were overgrown with cancerous-looking corrosion. The forest retreated to expose a paved plaza, and a mountain of marble chips and tiles and glass behind a set of hundred-foot columns tangled in vines.

Some of the discolored blotches faded from the marble; the wide sweep of the plaza smoothed minutely. A fountain at the center that had been scattered slid back into shape, all but the head of the mermaid at the center. Then there was a sharp be-beep! and the amber light went on on the panel. We had arrived in the eye of the probability storm.

Roosevelt slung an instrument pack over his shoulder and checked the dials on it.

“You and I will be the first men ever knowingly to set foot in the Blight,” he said. “And if we do anything wrong—make the slightest error—we’ll be the last. One mistake here could send our entire cosmos tumbling.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Just one question: How do we know what might be a mistake?”

“Follow your instinct, Mr. Curlon,” Roosevelt said and gave me a smile that seemed to be loaded with obscure significance. Then he opened up and we stepped out into a nightmare fantasy.

All around, tall buildings reared up against a sky of broken clouds over a yellow moon. The nearest was made of polished crimson stone, carved into patterns where huge vines clung, casting black shadows. From it, white marble steps led down to a walk lined with giant oaks on which green orchids grew. Vivid-colored birds sang in branches that arched across the tiled avenue. And behind this island of comparative order, the jungle loomed like a besieging army.

“Amazing,” Roosevelt said in a low voice. “It’s almost intact, Curlon—almost as it was in the days of its glory! There is the Summer Palace—and there the Cathedral—and the Académie des Artes—still standing, in the midst of carnage!”

“Hard to believe we’re in the center of a storm,” I said. “It’s as peaceful as a graveyard.”

“A mighty empire died here,” Roosevelt said. “Where we stand, triumphal armies marched, with kings at their heads. The fairest women in any universe rode their carriages along these avenues. Here art and culture rose to their highest peak—to be dashed to the lowest depths. Grieve for it, Curlon; for magnificence, lost forever.”

“For now I’ll settle for finding what we came for.”

“Quite right,” Roosevelt said in a suddenly brisk tone. He checked the dials strapped to his wrist, then tilted back his helmet.

“The air is all right,” he said. I tried it. It was hot, steamy, like a greenhouse at night. There was a steady surf-roar of sound: the rustle and scrape of leaves, the rasp and creak of stems bending in the breeze, the cluck and groan and hiss and whine and bleat of animal voices, as if we were in the middle of the world’s biggest zoo, and all the inmates were having bad dreams. The tiled pavement under our feet was chipped and shattered, but navigable. Lichenous vines as big as your wrist snaked across it, and the moonlight glinted on spines like poinards that bristled along them.

“To protect the shuttle, I’m putting it on an oscillatory circuit that will prevent it from phasing into identity with any A-line,” Roosevelt said. “When we’re ready to leave, I can recall it with a remote signaler.”

I watched as it winked out of sight with a boom of imploding air. As we started off, something moved among the greenery; a thing like a hairy snake dragged its length over a fallen tree-trunk, gaping a dog’s head at us. At first I thought there were no legs, but then I saw them—dozens of them, all sizes, growing out of the ten-loot body at random angles. A vine hissed and struck at it, and the jaws snapped and another ten feet of body Hopped into view, with more heads, all biting at once. The vine took a few more loops around the wormlike body and squeezed. Somewhere a cat yowled, and underbrush crashed and the yowl became a scream.

“Don’t use your gun except in extremity,” Roosevelt warned. “To take life here—any life—is to interfere with the probability equation. Even the slightest realignment could interfere with the shuttle recall signal.”

There was an archway across the avenue ahead almost lost under its load of washtub-sized toadstools, but across the top carved figures and flowers were still visible. Roosevelt consulted his dials again.