A World Out of Time

He stepped out, round what once must have been a floating desk but was now only knee-high. Screens and pushbutton panels set into the desk made it look like the control board in the Womb Room; but they were ruined. It must have rained here for hundreds of years.

There was a rug like half-melted cotton candy, deep as his ankles. It squished beneath his boots, and tore, and stuck to his suit fabric. He stepped to the edge of an empty picture window frame and looked out and down.

Thirty stories of windows and empty frames dropped away beneath his toes. He saw much taller buildings around him. There, to the right, a masonry behemoth had fallen, taking buildings and pieces of buildings with it. Beyond that gap, beyond the mist and rain, he thought he could trace a gray-on-gray outline: a cube, impossibly large, whose walls had a slight outward curve.

"Peerssa, did the State ever have any kind of instant transportation? Like a telephone booth, but you dial and you're there?"

"Well, these people did. I should have guessed. Me, of all people! That house wasn't a house, it was only part of a house. I've found the office. It's in the city. There ought to be a bathroom and a dining room and maybe a game room, God knows where. What we broke into was the bedroom."

"It's likely that the machinery has not been tended for a long time. Bear that in mind."

"Yeah." Corbell stepped back into the cubicle. Where next? He pushed the third down in the row of unmarked buttons.

A light flared to life in the ceiling. The extra buttons had vanished. Corbell stepped out, and smiled. Definitely, this was the bathroom.

The outside temperature register at his chin was dropping.

"I think this place is air-conditioned," he said.

"You have traveled three point one miles west by southwest and have lost six hundred feet of altitude."

"Okay." Corbell opened his faceplate. Just for a moment, he'd close it fast if- But the air was cool and fresh.

It came to him, as he let the heavy backpack section fall, that he was exhausted. He pulled himself out of the rest of his armor and crouched at the edge of a bathtub almost big enough to be called a pool.

He couldn't read the markings on the water spigot. He turned it all the way in one direction and pushed it on. Hot water splashed into the tub. He turned it the other way. Boiling water spurted out, spitting steam. He recoiled. If he'd been in the tub...

Okay, the "cold" water was hot, but it wasn't too hot to stand. It flooded out and around him as he lolled on the curved bottom.

A tiny voice called, "Corbell, answer."

He reached and pulled the helmet to the edge. "I'm taking a rest break. Check back in an hour. And send me a dancing girl."

IV

A tiny voice peeped, "-can. Repeating. Corbell, answer if you can. Repeating. Corbell-"

Corbell opened his eyes.

Every texture was strange to his sight and his touch. He was nowhere aboard Don Juan. Then where-?

Ah. He'd found two projections at the edge of the sunken tub, soft mounds like a pair of falsies, just right to rest his head between. His neck was still between the pillows. Lukewarm water enveloped him. He'd gone to sleep in the tub.

"-if you can. Repeat-"

Corbell pulled the pressure-suit helmet to him. "Here."

"Your hour's gone, and another hour and six minutes. Are you sick?"

"No, just sleepy. Hang on." He pulled the spigot on. Hot water spurted through cool water and mixed. Corbell stirred with his foot. "I'm still on a rest break. Anything new at your end?"

"Something's watching me. I sense radar and gravity radiation."

"Gravity?"

"Gravity waves going through my mass sensor, yes. I'm being probed by advanced instruments which must have learned a great deal about me. They could be automatic."

"They could also be from whoever sent the messages. Where is all this action coming from?"

"From what would be Tasmania, if this were Earth. The probing has stopped. I can't detect the source."

"If it starts throwing missiles at you you'll have to pull out fast."

"Yes. I'll have to change my orbit. I didn't want to use the fuel, but my orbit does not take me over Antarctica."

"Do that." Corbell stood up (his legs ached) and waded dripping from the warm water. A line of thick dust against the base of a wall might have been the remains of towels. He stopped before a picture window.

The day had darkened. He looked down across a shallow slope of beach sand, downhill into haze that thickened to opaque mist. Was that a... fish skeleton down there, glimmering white through haze? It looked far distant-and big.

Lightning flared, waited, flared again.

The rain fell like an avalanche.

Corbell turned away. He put on his undersuit, then his pressure suit piece by piece, feeling the weight and the chafe spots. The bath had been good. He would have to come back here when he got the chance. There was even a sauna, not that he'd need- Yeah, a sauna. This place was old. If it had been built after the Earth grew hot, the sauna would have been a door to the outside!

He stood in the booth, dithered, and decided not to push the bottom button. Peerssa was right. The machinery had been untended for a long time. So: bedroom or office? He knew those circuits still worked.

Bedroom.

He stepped out. Next to his chin the temperature readout rose in blinking numerals. He stepped around to the headboard, confirmed a memory: He had seen a television screen, and controls.

He turned it on. The screen lit, first gray-white, then- It was a fuzzy view of the ruined bed, showing his own armored legs.

He tried switches until he found the playback. The scene ran backward. Suddenly the bed was whole and four figures writhed on it at flickering speed. The scene jumped to a different foursome or to the same foursome differently dressed, before he found a way to freeze it.

"Corbell, I have tried to signal the source of the probes, to no effect."

"Okay. Listen, if you have to run, just do it. We'll both be safer if you don't stop to call me about it."

"What will you do now?"

"I'm watching home movies." Corbell chortled. "This place is like the Playboy Mansion. There's an invisible video camera focused on the bed."

"A degenerate civilization, then. Small wonder they could not save themselves. You should not degrade yourself by watching."

"What are you-? What about the loving bunks in the dormitory in Selerdor? That wasn't degenerate?"

"It was not thought polite to watch the loving bunks."

Corbell swallowed his a

"Are they?"

"The tape's faded. And they're wearing clothes, loose suits with lots of openings in them, in pastels. If they aren't human I can't see the differences... but they're thin. And they don't seem to carry themselves right." He paused to watch. "And they're very limber. The situation isn't quite what I thought."

"In what way?"

"I thought it was an orgy for four. It isn't. It's like in ancient China: Two of them are servants. They're helping the other pair get into those advanced sexual positions. Maybe they're not servants; maybe they're trainers, or teachers." He watched some more. "Or even... they're as limber as dancers. Maybe that's what they are. I wish I had a view of the couch. There might be spectators."

"Corbell."

"Yeah?"

"Are you hungry?"

"Yeah. I may have to use that fourth button."

"I wouldn't bother. If a thousand-year-old kitchen is your only food source, you'll die quickly. Your suit will only recycle air for another seventy-one hours. Your food-syrup reserve is trivial. I suggest you try to reach the South Pole. I am over it now. I see a large continental mass, and forest."