He wondered how far underground he was.
He wondered whether any life, human or otherwise, still existed on Earth’s surface, here in the 116th century A.D.
He wondered if he was still on Earth at all.
This was his third day in the tunnels now. At least that was what the chronometer said. But his mind and body both were hopelessly confused down here, where there was no day, no night, only the unending onyx walls lit by some mysterious radiance deep within the stone. He felt almost no need for sleep. When he did, he simply slouched up against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes for half an hour or so. He ate just as sparsely. Now and then he remembered to consume one of the food tablets from his utility belt. Most of the time he was content to coast along on the slow-release nutrient additives that the Project Pendulum medics had pumped into his bloodstream a few hours before Time Zero.
It had been a fantastic experience at first, roaming this mystifying underground world of the far future. None of his previous shunts had shown him anything remotely as strange as this. But the fascination was beginning to wear thin for him.
He had arrived in a glow of dense emerald light. It was all around, engulfing everything, so that he could almost believe he was at the bottom of the sea. The light was so deep and so strong that it was impossible for him to make out any features whatever of his surroundings.
Then the light vanished as though a hood had been thrown over his head, and he found himself in a zone of the deepest blackness he had ever known. For a long while after that nothing happened. He stood in complete silence, mystified, uncertain.
“Hello?” he said. “Anybody there?”
Nothing. No one. Silence.
He took a step. Another. Another. He was unable to see a thing. For all he knew, there was a pit a mile deep right in front of him. But he couldn’t just stand here forever, waiting for things to happen. He went on, step by uneasy step.
There was a sweetness in the air, and something else, a touch of lemon, perhaps, or sage, or both at once. He wasn’t surprised. Each era he had visited so far had had a distinct and characteristic flavor. He hadn’t expected that, that every time would smell different from all other times. This is the smell of the 116th century, he thought. It was a likable odor, but unreal, synthetic.
Perhaps they make their own air in the year A.D., 11529, he thought. He imagined giant air-making machines on the borders of every city, releasing flavors of every desired sort into the atmosphere. Maybe that was how they had coped with the buildup of carbon dioxide that had turned the whole world into a giant greenhouse in the twenty-second century. Just thinking about the time he had spent in that sweltering tropical world made him feel sweaty and weak. The air is a lot better here, he thought. Of course the greenhouse-effect problems were ancient history to the people of this era. Nine thousand years in the past, in fact.
That was before he realized that he wasn’t breathing surface air at all. He was underground.
He put out his hand and touched smoothness to his left: highly polished stone. The moment he touched it, it lit up, and he saw that he was in a long cavern or corridor that stretched far in front of him, disappearing into dimness hundreds of yards away. The walls curved gently up to meet the rounded arch of the ceiling. He recognized the glossy brown stone as onyx, though it was astonishing to think of a corridor this size wholly lined with that rare and beautiful mineral. Synthetic onyx, maybe, he thought. This is the 116th century. They can do anything. There was pale light pulsing within the walls, an inexplicable inner radiance, cool and beautiful.
In awe and wonder he walked onward. After a little while he saw figures moving slowly toward him and he halted, narrowing his eyes to peer into the distance. He felt curiously unafraid. This was too much like a dream to seem real. And in any case he was confident that the beings of this future age would be too civilized to offer him any harm.
They came closer, within the range of his vision now. They weren’t human.
They were cone-shaped beings eight or nine feet high, with brilliant orange eyes the size of platters and rubbery blue bodies. Clusters of scarlet tentacles dangled like nests of snakes from their shoulders. They walked in an odd gliding, lurching way on suction pads that made a peculiar slurping sound as they clamped down and pulled free again.
No way could evolution have transformed the human race into creatures like this, Eric thought. Not in 9500 years, not ever. These had to be aliens of some sort. There were half a dozen of them moving in a solemn procession along the opposite side of the corridor wall. He stared up at them. They were gigantic looming presences, massive, menacing.
He felt the first pricklings of fear. Being a traveler out of time gave him no invulnerability, only the illusion of it. This might be dreamlike but it was no dream, and those creatures were twice his size. Would they try to harm him? He stood poised on the balls of his feet, ready to bolt and dart past them at the first hostile sign.
But they paid no attention to him. Like a procession of mourners they shuffled toward him and past him, not giving him so much as a glance. They seemed completely preoccupied with their own ponderous thoughts.
Eric stared at them in amazement.
Was he so insignificant to them? No more important than a squirrel by the side of the road? Had he come 9500 years to be totally ignored?
Sudden crazy fury blossomed in him.
“Hey!” he called. “Wait! Aren’t you even going to stop and ask the time of day? Don’t you wonder what I am?”
They kept on going without looking back at him.
Eric shook his head. Anger gave way to bewilderment.
“I sure as hell wonder what you are,” he muttered lamely.
The huge creatures continued to shuffle onward down the corridor. They dwindled in the dimness until he could barely see them, far down the way. And then, at a place where the corridor seemed to curve slightly to the right, all at once they disappeared, vanishing like soap bubbles in the air.
Frowning, Eric struggled to understand. Had they found some passage?
Maybe they had never been there at all. Maybe they had simply been hallucinations. Maybe this all was a dream.
He ran back after them.
When he came to the place where the giant creatures had disappeared he could find no trace of doorways or side passages. The walls of the corridor were as smooth and unbroken here as they had been from the start.
He shrugged, turned back in the other direction, and marched on.
After what seemed like hours more of plodding along the same empty hallway Eric reached a place where the corridor swelled and split into nine apparently identical tunnels. At random he entered the third tunnel from the left. It too seemed to be empty. But then once again he saw a procession of strange beings coming toward him.
These looked like giant purple starfish with rough pebblyskins. Each had a globe of brilliant white flame glowing at the center of its body and fifteen or twenty rigid tentacles radiating stiffly outward. The way that they moved was to roll along with weird grace on the tips of their tentacles, like acrobats turning cartwheels.
“Excuse, me,” Eric said at once. “I’m Eric Gabrielson. I’m a time-traveler from the twenty-first century A.D.,and—”
No use. They weren’t any more interested in him than the suction-footed giants had been.
He watched in dismay as the starfish went rolling onward and beyond. When they were a hundred yards or so past him they all abruptly turned to the left and pressed themselves against the corridor wall, which emitted a painful blue glow the moment they touched it. Eric covered his eyes.