When it seemed safe to open them again, there was no sign of the starfish creatures. Had they stepped right through the corridor wall?
Puzzled, he backtracked and studied the wall. It looked no different from any other section of the wall. After a moment’s hesitation he touched it with the palm of his hand. Nothing happened. No blinding blue glow, nothing.
He went onward.
He slept a little while. He nibbled a couple of food tablets.
He came to another place where the tunnel forked once more, branching into seventeen passages this time. He chose the rightmost branch. The tunnel was the same as before, smooth, glossy, bright with that inexplicable inner radiance.
More beings appeared, seemingly floating in the air. They were elongated transparent creatures filled with churning misty organs. They looked like the sort of things you might see under the microscope in a drop of water, blown up to giant size—huge protozoa, a tribe of colossal paramecia.
“Hello?” he ventured. “Does anybody here know what a human being is? Or was?”
The giant protozoa didn’t seem to be interested in conversation, either.
Nor were the next creatures that he met, nor the next, nor the ones after those. Branch after branch, tunnel after tunnel, and it was always the same: silence, gleaming walls stretching far out before him, occasional bands of grotesque beings traversing the infinite corridors bound on unimaginable mysterious migrations. Sometimes they seemed to disappear into the corridor walls, as the starfish had done.Sometimes they seemed to emerge from the walls just as mysteriously.
Eric might just as well have been invisible.
What had begun as an eerily fascinating experience was becoming maddening and frustrating. He found himself wondering how long it was going to be before the displacement force seized him and carried him out of here to his next shunt, 95,000 years deep in the past. At least the past was a place that he felt he understood.
Then, late on the third day, two beings that might almost have been human stepped suddenly out of the corridor wall no more than twenty feet in front of him.
Eric realized after the first startled moment that they weren’t human, not at all. Their bodies were impossibly long and narrow and their arms and legs were thin as whips, with elbows every twelve inches. Their hands had more than five fingers. Their lips were nothing but slits, their bare waxy-looking skins were greenish-yellow, and their golden eyes seemed to be set on end, much longer than they were broad.
There might have been some evolutionary changes in the human race since his own time, but a mere ninety-five centuries could never have produced a transformation like this. They had to be some sort of aliens.
Strange as they were, they were humanoid, at any rate. Not giant paramecia or walking starfish or great shambling blue-and-orange monsters. And, unlike all the others, they hadn’t simply walked past him without a glance and kept on going. They had actually stopped and were studying him with some interest. That gave him hope.
“Please,” he said. “I’m lost. I don’t have any idea where I am. Won’t you help me?”
The two eerie humanoids exchanged a quick glance. Another positive sign. It was the first reaction he had managed to get from any of the beings he had encountered in these corridors. But they remained silent.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Somehow. There’s got to be a way that you can communicate with me. I know there is.”
For a moment more they remained motionless. Then one of them made a gesture with its many fingers. In Eric’s own time that gesture meant come closer. He had no notion what it might mean here. He decided to risk it.
When he was just a few paces from them they reached their long ropy arms toward him and touched their soft cool fingers to his. It was like touching an electric socket. A sudden tingling shock burst through him.
“No—wait—”
He tried to pull back, but he was unable to break the contact.
And then, amazingly, he felt intelligible words taking form in his mind.
There is no reason for you to fear us. Why would we want to harm you?
“I didn’t know what was happening to me. Or what to expect. I—I—” He took a deep breath. “I’m Eric Gabrielson. I come from the twenty-first century. There’s been this experiment, you see, in time displacement, and—”
We know that. We are the anterstrin thelerimane.
They said it as though that explained everything.
“Oh,” he said. “And this is Earth, isn’t it? In the year A.D.11529?”
This is Earth, yes. You are in the quarantine section.
“Quarantine?”
All new arrivals are placed in quarantine until their clearances come through. It is the law. Visitors from time must undergo clearance just as visitors from space do. Once you are cleared you will be permitted to visit Upper Earth.
“I see,” Eric said. “And how long does it take to get a clearance?”
The anterstrin thelerimane said, In some cases, no more than ten or twenty days. In others, perhaps fifty to a hundred years, or even longer. Centuries, sometimes.
Eric thought of the displacement force, gathering its irresistible momentum now, almost ready perhaps to sweep him away from this place.
“Can’t it ever be done faster?” he asked.
There is much that must be determined before strangers can be released into Upper Earth. We ourselves have been here sixteen years, and our case is by no means settled. You may have to wait just as long.
“But I can’t,” Eric protested. “I’m shunting in time on pendulum swings. Do you understand what I’m saying? The next swing could carry me away in an hour, or a minute, or a day. And then I’d never get to see what Earth is like in this era.”
Oh, no,the quiet mental voice of the anterstrin thelerimane.You will not be suddenly carried away, we assure you. The rules are never broken. No one leaves quarantine until the galithismon permits it. You will stay here until your clearance comes. We promise you that. Even if you must remain in the quarantine tunnels for five hundred years.
20. Sean -5×109minutes
It was almost noon by the time Sean came to the eastern rim of the broad mesa that he had been crossing since dawn. He peered over the edge and what he beheld in the dark valley below made him gasp with wonder.
Bison. Thousands of them, maybe millions, great shaggy brown beasts with their heavy heads down close to the ground.
They were ripping fiercely at the thick lush grass of the valley as if trying to turn the place into a barren desert in a single day. The vast herd filled the valley as far as Sean could see. The cold, biting wind out of the east carried their odor to him, rank and musky and sharp.
At last. After three days of solitary wandering in this cool wet land that was supposed to be Arizona, seeing nothing bigger than a ground squirrel and feeling tension rising within him as silent emptiness gave way only to more emptiness, he was staring at more animals than he had ever seen in one place in his life. Giant animals. What he saw out there was probably one of the last of the great big-gameherds that had survived from the Ice Age and still roamed the Southwest here in the paleolithic past.
“Hey!” he called. “Hey, all you bison! You’re extinct, do you know that? You hear what I’m telling you? Lie down and roll over! You’re extinct!”
Sean didn’t expect the bison to pay any attention to him, and they didn’t. They went right on grazing, tearing out enormous clumps of grass, shaking their huge heads almost angrily from side to side as they fed. He had simply needed to hear the sound of his own voice again.