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"The human mind," Paley said, "is straight. Thought travels to infinity. The cosmos is curved."
Swenson turned away from the billowing mounds of tape, saw that the five-manual console was flicking lights smoothly and happily, then went over to an instrument panel whose levers called for muscle, for the blacksmith rather than the organist. "Starboard," he said. "15.8. Now we play with gravities." He pulled hard. The monitor screen showed band after band of turquoise light, moving steadily upwards. "This, I think, should be -" He twirled a couple of corrective dials on a shoulder-high panel about the levers. "Now," he said. "Free fall."
"So," Paley said, "we're being pulled by -"
"Exactly." And then: "I trust the situation has been presented to you in its perilous entirety. The dangers, you know, are considerable."
"Scholarship," Paley smiled patiently. "My reputation."
"Reputation," Swenson snorted. Then, looking towards the monitors, he said: "Ah. Something coming through."
Mist, cloudswirl, a solid shape peeping intermittently out of vapour porridge. Paley came over to look. "It's the Earth," he said in wonder.
"It's their Earth."
"The same as ours. America, Africa -"
"The configuration's slightly different, see, down there at the southern tip of -"
" Madagascar 's a good deal smaller. And, see, no Falklands."
"The cloud's come over again." Paley looked and looked. It was unbelievable.
"Think," Swenson said kindly, "how many absolutely incomputable systems there have to be before you can see the pattern of creation starting all over again. This seems wonderful to you because you just can't conceive how many myriads upon myriads of other worlds are not like our own."
"And the stars," Paley said, a thought striking him. "I mean, the stars they can actually see from there, from their London, say – are they the same stars as ours?"
Swenson shrugged at that. "Roughly," he said. "There's a rough kinship. But," he explained, "we don't properly know yet. Yours is only the tenth or eleventh trip, remember. To be exact about it all, you're the first to go to B303 England. What is it, when all's said and done, but the past? Why go to the past when you can go to the future?" His nostrils widened with complacency. "G91," he said. "I"ve done that trip a few times. It's pleasant to know one can look forward to another thirty years of life. I saw it there, quite clearly, a little plaque set up in Rostron Place: To the memory of G. F. Swenson, 1963-2094."
"We have to check up on history," Paley said, mumbling a little. His own quest seemed piddling: all this machinery, organization, expertise in the service of a rather mean inquiry. "I have to know whether William Shakespeare really wrote those plays."
Swenson, as Paley expected, snorted. "A nice sort of thing to want to find out," he said. "He's been dead six hundred and fifty years, is it, and you want to prove that there's nothing to celebrate. Not," he added, "that that sort of thing is much in my line. I've never had much time for poetry. Aaaah." He interposed his own head between Paley's and the screen, peering. The pages of the atlas had been turned; now Europe alone swam towards them. "Now," Swenson said, "I must set the exactest course of all." He worked at dials, frowning but humming happily, then beetled at Paley, saying: "Oughtn't you to be getting ready?"
Paley blushed that, with so huge a swathe of the cosmos spent in near idleness, he should have to rush things as they approached their port. He took off his single boilersuit of a garment and drew from the locker his Elizabethan fancy dress. Shirt, trunks, codpiece, doublet, feathered French hat, slashed shoes – clothes of synthetic cloth that was an exact simulacrum of old-time weaving, the shoes of good leather handmade. And then there was the scrip with its false bottom: hidden therein was a tiny two-way signaller. Not that, if he got into difficulties, it would be of much use: Swenson was (and these were strict orders) to come back for him in a year's time. The signaller was to show where he was and that he was still there, a guest of the past, really a stowaway. Swenson had to move on yet farther into timespace: Professor Shimmins had to be picked up in FH78, Dr Guan Moh Chan in G210, Paley collected on the way back. Paley tested the signaller, then checked the open and honest contents of his scrip: chief among these was a collection of the works of William Shakespeare. The plays had been copied from a facsimile of the First Folio in fairly accurate Elizabethan script; the paper too was an acid-free imitation of the coarse stuff Elizabethan dramatists had been said to use. For the rest, Paley had powdered prophylactics in little bags and, most important, gold – angels firenew, the odd portague, écus.
"Well," Swenson said with the faintest tinge of excitement, " England, here we come." Paley looked down on familiar river shapes – Tees, Humber, Thames. He gulped, ru
Zero. Paley zeroed out of the mothership, suddenly calm, then elated. It was moonlight, the green countryside slept. The river was a glory of silver. His course had been preset by Swenson; the control available to him was limited, but he came down smoothly on the water. What he had to do now was ease himself to the shore. The little engine purred as he steered in moonlight. The river was broad here, so that he seemed to be in a world all water and sky. The moon was odd, bigger than it should by rights have been, with straight markings like fabled Martian canals. The shore neared – it was all trees, sedge, thicket; there was no sign of habitation, not even of another craft. What would another craft have thought, sighting him?
He had no fears about that: with its wings folded, the little airboat looked, from a distance, like some nondescript barge, so well had it been camouflaged. And now, to be safe, he had to hide it, cover it with elmboughs and sedge greenery. But first, before disembarking, he must set the timeswitch that would, when he was safe ashore, render the metal of the fuselage high-charged, lethally repellent of all would-be boarders. It was a pity, but there it was. It would switch off automatically in a year's time, in twelve months to a day. Meanwhile, what myths, what madness would the curious examiner, the chance finder generate, tales uncredited by sophisticated London.
Launched on his night's walk upriver, Paley found the going easy enough. The moon lighted fieldpaths, stiles. Here and there a small farmhouse slept. Once he thought he heard a distant whistled tune. Once he thought he heard a distant town clock strike. He had no idea of the month or day or time of the night, but he guessed that it was late spring and some three hours or so off dawn. The year 1595 was certain, according to Swenson. Time functioned here as on true Earth, and two years before Swenson had taken a man to Muscovy, where they computed according to the Christian calendar, and the year had been 1593. That man had never come back, eaten by bears or something. Paley, walking, found the air gave good rich breathing, but from time to time he was made uneasy by the unfamiliar configurations of the heavens. There was Cassiopeia's Chair, Shakespeare's first name's drunken initial, but there were constellations he had not seen before. Could the stars, as the Elizabethans themselves believed, modify history? Could this Elizabethan London, because it looked up at stars unknown on true Earth, be identical with that other one which was known only from books? Well, he would soon know.