The Time Axis

She was bending over me, the tips of her scented ringlets brushing my shoulder. Her voice was inhumanly sweet, and so soft with warmth and reassurance that all my bewilderment melted away. It didn’t matter where I was or what had happened, so long as that lovely voice and that lovely face were near—which was exactly the effect she had meant to make and exactly the reason why she was there. I knew her face.

At that moment I was not even trying to reason things out. My tongue felt thick and my mind was lightly furred all over with the effects of what? Sleep? Some drug they might have given me while I lay there helpless? I didn’t know. I accepted all that was happening with a mindless acquiescence. Later I would wonder. Now I only stared up at the lovely, familiar face and listened to the lovely, familiar face and listened to the lovely, remotely familiar voice.

“You’re all right now,” she was murmuring, her changing eyes on mine. “Quite all right. Don’t be worried. Do you feel strong enough yet to sit up? I have something I want you to see.”

I got an elbow under me and levered myself slowly up, the girl helping. I looked around.

I was dressed in unfamiliar dark garments and I was sitting on a low couch apparently composed of a solid block of some hard yet resilient substance. We were alone together in a smallish room whose walls looked like the couch, hard yet faintly translucent, just a little yielding to the touch. Everything had the same color, a soft graylike mist or—I thought dimly—sleep itself, the color of sleep.

The girl was the color of—sunlight, perhaps. Her smooth skin had an apricot glow and her gown was of thin, thin silky stuff, pale yellow, like layers of veiling that floated when she moved. There were still a few fading sparkles in her curls. Her eyes just now were a clear bright blue that darkened as I met them to something close to violet.

“Look,” she said. “Over there, behind you, on the wall.”

I turned on the couch and looked. The far wall had a circular opening in it. Beyond the opening I could see rough rock walls, a grayish glow of light, four figures lying motionless on the dusty floor. For a moment it meant nothing to me. My mind was still dim with sleep. Then—

“The cave!” I said suddenly. And of course, it was. That little glittering tree which was the last thing I had seen before sleep overtook me stood there, motionless now. Beside it lay De Kalb.

Dr. Essen slumbered beyond him, the flat metal sheet with the bars of wire still leaning against her knee. She lay on her side, the tired, gentle face half hidden by her bent arm, the gray curls on the dusty floor. There was a rather unexpected gracefulness to her angular body as she lay there, utterly relaxed in a sleep that was already—how many thousands of years long?

My eyes lingered for an instant on her face, moved on to Murray’s motionless body, moved back again to search the woman’s half-hidden features for a disturbing something I could not quite identify. It was—it was—

The figure beyond Murray’s caught my attention suddenly and for an instant my mind went blank with amazement. The puzzle of Dr. Essen’s face vanished in this larger surprise, the incredible identity of that fourth person asleep in the dusty cave. I gaped, speechless and without thought.

Up to that instant I suppose I had been assuming simply that all of us were being awakened, slowly and with difficulty, and that I had awakened first. But the fourth person asleep on the cavern floor was Jeremy Cortland. Jerry Cortland—me.

I got to my feet unsteadily, finding after a moment or two that I was in fairly good control of all my faculties. The girl twittered in concern.

“I’m all right,” I said. “But I’m still there!”

Then I paused. “That means the others may have wakened too. De Kalb—Dr. Essen—have they—?”

She hesitated. “Only you are awake,” she said at last.

I walked on slightly uncertain feet across the floor and peered into the cave. There was no cave.

I knew it when I was close to the wall. I could see the light reflected slightly on the texture of the surface. The cave was only another reflection, television perhaps, or something more obscure, but with startlingly convincing depth and clarity.

And if that scene was separated from me in space it might be distant in time as well—I might be seeing a picture of something hours or weeks old. It was an unpleasant moment, that. So long as I thought myself near to that last familiar link with my own world I had maintained a certain confidence that broke abruptly now. I looked around a little wildly at the girl.

“I’m not in that cave now—they’re not there now either, are they? This was just a picture that was taken before any of us woke. Did you wake first, then?” It was no good. I knew that. I rubbed my hand across my face and said, “Sorry. What did happen?”

10. Museum

She smiled dazzlingly. And for one flash of an instant I knew who she was. I knew why my eyes had been drawn back in puzzled surprise to Letta Essen lying with curious unexpected grace on the cavern floor.

I met this girl’s shining gaze and for that one instant knew I was looking straight into the keen gray eyes of Letta Essen.

The moment of certainty passed in a flash. The girl’s eyes shifted from gray to luminous blue, the long lashes fell and the unmistakable identity of a woman I knew vanished. But the likeness remained. The familiarity remained. This girl was Letta Essen.

My mind, groping for similes, seized at first on the theory that in some fantastic way Dr. Essen herself stood here before me masked by some science of beauty beyond the sciences I knew, in a shell of youth and loveliness through which only her keen gaze showed.

It was all a trick, I thought—this is Letta Essen who did wake before me, somehow leaving her simulacrum there in the cave, as I had. This is Letta Essen in some amazingly lovely disguise for purposes of her own and she’ll speak in a moment and confess. But it couldn’t have been a disguise. This soft young loveliness was no mask. It was the girl herself. And her features were the features Letta Essen might have had twenty years ago if she had lived a wholly different life, a life as dedicated to beauty as Dr. Essen’s had been to science.

Then I caught a bewildering gray flash again and I knew it was Letta Essen—no disguise, no variation on the features such as kinship or remote descent might account for. The mind is individual and unique. There are no duplications of the personality. I knew I was looking into the eyes of Letta Essen herself, no matter how impossible it seemed.

“Dr. Essen?” I said softly. “Dr. Essen?”

She laughed. “You’re still dreaming,” she said. “Do you feel better now? Lord Paynter—the old fool—is waiting for us. We should hurry.”

I only gaped at her. What could I say? If she wasn’t ready to explain how could I force her to speak? And yet I knew.

“I’m here to welcome you, of course,” she said lightly, speaking exactly as if I were some stranger to whom she must be polite, but who was of no real interest to her. “I was trained for work like this—to make people feel at ease. All this is a great mystery but—well, Lord Paynter will have to explain. I’m only an entertainer. But a very good one. Oh, very good.

“Lord Paynter sent for me when he knew you would awaken. He thought his own ugly face might put you into such a mood you’d never answer any questions.” She giggled. “At least, I hope he thought so.” She paused, regarding me with exactly the cool keen speculative stare I had so often met when the woman before me was Letta Essen. Then she shrugged.

“He’ll tell you as much as you ought to know, I suppose. It’s all much too mystifying for me.” Her glance shifted to the cavern where the sleepers lay motionless and I thought there was bewilderment in her eyes as she looked uneasily from face to sleeping face. Again she shrugged.