The Time Axis

Because of—

Our eyes met. I think the knowledge came simultaneously into our minds in that meeting of glances. He had felt it too. The explosion of white energy had burst outward in his nerve centers in the same moment it burst in mine. Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t necessary.

After what seemed a long while I looked at Dr. Essen. That bright steel glance of hers met mine squarely but there was only bewilderment in it.

“What happened?” she asked.

The sound of her voice seemed to release us both from our speechlessness.

“You don’t know?” De Kalb swung around to look at her. “No, evidently you don’t. But Mr. Cortland and I—Cortland, how often have you—“ He groped for words.

“Since the first of the deaths in Rio,” I said flatly. “You?”

“Since the first of them here. And ever since, though, very faintly, when they happened in Rio.”

“What are you talking about?” Dr. Essen demanded.

Heavily, speaking with deliberation, De Kalb told her.

“For myself,” he finished, glancing at me, “it began when I first opened the Record.” He paused, looked at his hand with some surprise and, laying down orange and knife, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the bleeding cut. “I didn’t feel that at all,” he said, almost to himself.

And then, to me, “I opened the Record. I told you that—something—went by me very fast and vanished at the spot where that nekronic strain later came into existence.” He looked at me soberly, his eyes narrowed. “Mr. Cortland,” he said, “can you tell me that you did not experience any feeling of recognition when you first saw that stain on the hearth?”

I got up so suddenly that my chair almost tipped over. Violently I said, “De Kalb, somewhere a man has just died! Something killed him. Something is making you and me accessories to murder! We’ve got to put a stop to it! This isn’t an academic discussion—it’s murder! We—”

“Sit down, Mr. Cortland, sit down.” De Kalb’s voice was tired. “I know quite well it’s murder. We must and will discover the truth about it. But not by shouting at one another. The truth lies in that box on the table. It lies somewhere very far in the future.

“Also, the truth is a being that roams our world, murdering at will. I released it, Mr. Cortland. Unwittingly, but I released it. That was a Pandora’s box I opened. Trouble and death came out of it. We can only pray that there is hope in the bottom of it, as there was in Pandora’s box.”

“Look,” I said. “Tell me how I can help and I’ll do it. But let’s not have any more generalities. I’m too close to these deaths. I think I’m in personal danger. Maybe you are too. What can we do?”

“We are not in personal danger from the killer. From the law—perhaps—if this co

I told him.

“Very well,” he said. “We are in danger. Has it occurred to you yet that where it touched the hearthstone, the nekron took root?”

For a moment I didn’t see what he meant. Then the implication hit me and I went cold and empty inside. De Kalb, seeing the look on my face, laughed shortly.

“I see it has. Very well. So far I haven’t detected any sign of nekronic infection in myself. I assume you haven’t either. But that proves nothing.”

“Have you seen the creature?” I asked. He hesitated. “I can’t be sure. I think I have. Will you tell me exactly what happened to you, please? Every detail, even the irrelevant.”

And when I had finished, he exchanged troubled glances with Dr. Letta Essen. “Directive intelligence, then,” she said.

“The way it moved,” De Kalb murmured. “That’s highly significant. And the impossibility of getting a firm grip on the creature. So—Letta, do you agree?”

“Frictional burns?” she asked. “But it didn’t move fast enough to cause those. That is—not spatially.”

“Not in space, no,” De Kalb said. “But in time? Limited, of course. A few seconds’ leeway would be enough if you consider the energy expended and the tremendous velocities involved. It looks like a shadow—it seems to have mass without weight—and it has high velocity without spatial motion.

“And Mr. Cortland’s tightening his grip on the creature seemed to push it away. Time-movement, then! It vibrates—it has an oscillating period of existence, certainly limited within a range of a few seconds. A tuning-fork vibrates in space. Why not vibration through time—with an extremely narrow range?

“No wonder you couldn’t hold the creature! Could you hold a metal rod vibrating that rapidly? You would get frictional burns on your hands—since your own weight would prevent you from partaking of its motion. The being’s existence must be, to a limited degree, extra-temporal.

“Consequently, I suppose any weapon used against it would have to be keyed to its own temporal periodicity. That is, if we had a pistol oscillating in time, we might be able to shoot the creature. But the hand that squeezed the trigger might have to be oscillating too.”

“Trembling like a leaf,” I said. “I know mine would be.”

He brushed that away. “How intelligent is this killer? Is ego involved, or merely vampirism? If the creature read your mind—” He grimaced. “No. No! The missing factor is what the nekron itself is and its special qualities. And we don’t know that. We probably never will until we go to the Face of Ea.”

I sighed. I sat down. I’d had too many jolts in the past half hour to feel very sure of myself.

“So we travel in time,” I said wearily “Mr. De Kalb—you’re crazy.”

He had enough energy left to chuckle rather wanly.

“You’ll think me even crazier, sir, when I tell you what it was I saw down there under the mountain, in the cavern. But I must finish my demonstration before you’ll be able to understand.”

“Get on with it, then.”

He took up orange and knife again. He fitted the blade into the cut and finished the job of bisecting the fruit a little above its equator. The severed top half lay upon the blade as on a narrow plate. Below it he held the other half of the orange in place, so that it still maintained its unbroken sphere.

“Consider this blade Flatland,” he said. “A world of two dimensions, intersecting the three-dimensional sphere. Now if I revolve the lower half of the orange, you will please imagine that the upper half revolves with it. One fruit—you see? The axis remains immovable in relation to the plane in Flatland it intersects.

“Now. I cut this lower half again, straight through. The same axis intersects the same point on this Flatland. In other words, the spatial axis remains stable. You understand so far?”

“No,” I said. He gri

“It takes thinking,” he said. “Let me go on. Now time is also a sphere. Time revolves. And time has an axis—a single stable extension of a temporal point, drawn through past and future alike, intersecting them all, as that knife-blade touched the orange everywhere in the Flatland dimension. And that, Mr. Cortland, is what makes travel in time theoretically valid.

“The theory of time-travel usually ignores space. The traveler steps into some semi-magical machine, presses a button and emerges a thousand years in the future—but on earth!” He snorted. “In a thousand years, or a thousand days, or in one day, or one minute, this planet along with the whole solar system would have traveled far beyond its position at the moment the traveler entered his machine.

“But there is one point from which he could enter the machine, enter time itself and be sure always of emerging on earth. For each planet, I think, there is one single point. The spot in the Laurentians where I saw—what I saw was that point for our planet. It is the spot at which the axis of the time-sphere intersects our own three-dimensional world. If it were possible to follow the line of the particular axis you would move through time.