Poul Anderson: The Corridors of Time

At the end, she opened another turf trapdoor with her control tube and closed it again behind them. The concealment was perfect.

Lockridge didn’t notice. There was too much else.

The sun had still been well above the horizon when they entered the tunnel, and they couldn’t have been inside more than half an hour. But here was night, with a nearly full moon high in the sky. By that wan radiance he saw how the mound-side now covered the dolmen, up to the capstone, with a rude wooden door beneath. Around him, grasses nodded in a chill, moist breeze. No farmlands lay below; the knoll was surrounded by brush and young trees, a second-growth wilderness. To the south a ridge lifted that looked eerily familiar, but it was covered with forest. Old, those trees, incredibly, impossibly old, he had only seen oaks so big in the last untouched parts of America. Their tops were hoar in the moonlight, and shadows solid beneath.

An owl hooted. A wolf howled.

He raised his eyes again and saw this was not September. That sky belonged to the end of May.

“Yes, of course I lied to you,” Storm said.

The campfire guttered high, sparks showered, light danced dull on smoke and picked her strong-boned features out of darkness in Rembrandt hints. Beyond and around, the night crowded close. Lockridge shivered and held his hands toward the coalbed.

“You would not have believed the truth before you saw,” Storm went on. “Would you? At the very least, time would have been lost in explanation, and I had already been much too long in the twentieth century. Each hour multiplied my danger. If Brann had thought to guard that Danish gate—He must believe I was killed. There were several other women in my party, and some were mutilated beyond recognition in the fight with him. Nevertheless, he could have gotten wind of me.”

Exhausted by reaction, Lockridge said merely, “You are from the future, then?”

She smiled. “So are you, now.”

“My future, I mean. When?”

“About two thousand years after your era.” Her humour faded, she sighed and looked into the gloom that lay back of him. “Though I have been in so many ages, I am woven into so much history, I sometimes wonder if any of my spirit remains in the year I was born.”

“And—we’re still in the same place as we entered the corridor, aren’t we? But in the past. How far?”

“By your reckoning, the late spring of 1827 B.C. I checked the exact date on a calendar clock in the foreroom. Emergence cannot be precise, because the human body has a finite width equivalent to a couple of months. That was why we had to hold hands coming through—so we would not be separated by weeks.” Briskly: “If such should ever happen, go back into the corridor and wait. Duration occurs there too, but on a different plane, so that we can rendezvous.”

Nearly four thousand years, Lockridge thought. On this day Pharaoh sat the throne of Egypt, the sea king of Crete planned trade with Babylon, Mohenjodaro stood proud in the Indus valley, the General Grant Tree was a seedling. Bronze was known to the Mediterranean world but northern Europe was neolithic, and the dolmen of the knoll had been raised only a few generations ago by folk whose slash-and-burn agriculture exhausted the soil and forced them to move elsewhere. Eighteen hundred years before Christ, centuries before even Abraham, he sat camped in a Denmark which those people who called themselves Danes had yet to enter. The strangeness seeped through him like a physical cold. He fought back the sense and asked:

“What is that corridor, anyway? How does it work?”

“The physics would have no meaning to you,” Storm said. “Think of it as a tube of force, whose length has been rotated onto the time axis. Entropy still increases inside; there is temporal flow. But from the viewpoint of one within, cosmic time—outside time—is frozen. By choosing the appropriate gate, one can step out into any corresponding era. The conversion factor—” she frowned in concentration, “—in your measurements, would be roughly thirty-five days per foot. Every few centuries there is a portal, twenty-five years wide. The intervals cannot be less than about two hundred years, or the weakened force-field would collapse.”

“Does it go clear up to your century?”

“No. This one extends from circa 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2000. It is not feasible to build them much longer. There are many corridors of varying lengths throughout the space-time of this planet. The gates are made to overlap in time, so that by going from one passage to another a traveller can find any specific year he wishes. For example, to go further pastward than 4000 B.C., we could take corridors I know of in England or China, whose gates also cover this year. To go futureward beyond the limits of this one, we would have to seek out still other places.”

“When were they . . . invented?”

“A century or two before I was born. The struggle between Wardens and Rangers was already intense, so the original purpose of scientific research was largely shunted aside.”

Wolves gave voice in the night. A heavy body went crashing through underbrush and a savage, yelping chorus took up pursuit. “You see,” Storm said, “we cannot wage total war. That would cost us Earth, as it cost us Mars—a ring of radioactive fragments encircling the sun—I sometimes wonder if, at the last, engineers will not go back sixty million years and build great space fleets, for a battle that wiped out the dinosaurs and left eternal scars on the moon. . . .”

“You don’t know your own future, then?” Lockridge asked with a crawling along his nerves.

The dark head shook. “No. When the, the activator is turned on to make a new corridor, it drives a shaft equally far in both directions. We ventured ahead of our era. There were guardians who turned us back, with weapons we did not understand. We no longer try. It was too terrible.”

The knowledge of mysteries beyond mysteries was not to be endured. Lockridge fled to practicality.

“Okay,” he said. “I seem to’ve enlisted in a war on your side. Do you mind tellin’ me what the shootin’s for? Who are your enemies?” He paused. “Who are you?”

“Let me continue to use the name I chose in your century,” Storm said. “I believe it was a lucky one.” She sat brooding a while. “I do not think you could really grasp the issue of my age. Too much history lies between you and us. Could a man from your past really feel what the basic difference is that divides East and West in your time?”

“I reckon not,” Lockridge admitted. “In fact, quite a few of our own don’t seem to see it.”

“At that,” Storm said, “the issue is the same. Because there has really only been one throughout man’s existence—distorted, confused, hidden behind a thousand lesser motivations, and yet always in some fashion the clash between two philosophies, two ways of thought and life—of being —the question is forever: What is the nature of man?”

Lockridge waited. Storm brought her gaze back from the night, across the low fire to him, stabbingly intense.

“Life as it is imagined to be against life as it is,” she said. “Plan against organic development. Control against freedom. Overriding rationalism against animal wholeness. The machine against the living flesh. If man and man’s fate can be planned, organised, made to conform to some vision of ultimate perfection, is not man’s duty to enforce the vision upon his fellow man, at whatever cost? That sounds familiar to you, no?

“But your country’s great enemy is only one manifestation of a thing that was born before history: that spoke through the laws of Draco and Diocletian, the burning of the Confucian Willow Books, Torquemada, Calvin, Locke, Voltaire, Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Arguellas, the Jovian Manifesto, and on and on. Oh, not clearly, not simply—there was no tyranny in the hearts of some who believed in supreme reason; and there was in others, like Nietzsche, who did not. To me, your industrial civilization, even in the countries that call themselves free, comes near to an ultimate horror; yet I use machines more powerful and subtle than you have dreamed. But in what spirit? There is the issue of battle!”