The pull was getting stronger.
So long, triceratops. So long, pterodactyls. So long, whatever-you-are with the spikes on your back. I’m moving along. But Eric’s coming to take my place. He’s okay, Ricky is. You and he will get along pretty well.
Going away, now. Moving up and out. Heading for the downswing, starting the journey back, everything running in reverse.
Until at last it all came winding down to the starting point, and he and Eric would step off the shunt platform in the very moment of their departures. Or so it would seem to everyone else. But the strangeness wouldn’t end there. Five minutes later, Sean2, would materialize in that lab, and Eric2 also. And again, eight hours after that. And again in three days. And again and again and again, throughout all the rest of their lives and far beyond. He and Ricky were destined to appear like comets, he knew, showing up at fixed intervals across the 95 million years that followed Time Zero. While at the same time they would be trying to live their ordinary lives through to their normal spans, doing whatever it was that they were destined to do until the time came to grow old and die. With 95 million years of life still waiting for them.
That was going to be really strange. To know in 2025 that yourself of nine and a half years earlier was going to show up out of time. And then ninety-five years later to have it happen again, if they were lucky enough to live to that kind of an age—and probably many people would, by then—
Going away now. Time to be starting for home, by way of the year A.D. 95 million.
Sean saw the dinosaurs fade and grow misty.
Time seemed to stand still for a billion billion years. The pendulum had reached the balance point.
And he saw Ricky.
His twin brother hovered in the air just in front of him, shimmering like a vision. Sean realized that he was probably shimmering just the same way. This was the moment of turnaround, when all the forces were equaling out, and it was like no other moment in the trip.
“Ricky?” he said. “Ricky, can you hear me?”
Sean saw his brother’s lips move. He was saying something, asking something. But he was unable to hear Ricky’s voice. They were still cut off from each other by the barrier of time. And yet not really cut off, for he could look straight into his brother’s eyes. He knew now that Ricky had come through everything okay. And that they were going to make it back to the starting point at Time Zero, too.
And he saw the look of wonder shining in Ricky’s eyes.
He has seen miracles, Sean thought. Different miracles from the ones I’ve seen, but miracles all the same. The ones that I’m heading for now.
“Ricky?” Sean said again. “Hey, Ricky. Look! Here come your dinosaurs, man! Here come your dinosaurs at last!”
He waved and smiled. And Eric smiled and waved back at him.
“See you back at Time Zero!” Sean called. “And watch out for that oversized monkey!” But he knew that the ape wasn’t going to be a problem. Ricky would see the message in the garden on the moon. Ricky would be quick on the draw with the anesthetic darts. His shimmering presence here left Sean with no doubts that the experiment was going to go successfully right to the end.
Eric was vanishing now. Growing faint, growing insubstantial.
No, Sean thought. I’m the one who’s vanishing. He’s coming, I’m going. So long, dinosaurs! Here I go!
The moment at the balance point was over. The pendulum-was moving again. Carrying him off into the mists of time to come.
Sean didn’t want the voyage ever to end, not really. But at the same time he knew that he did. So that he could get back to Time Zero, and Eric. To tell him about everything he had seen. And to hear about what had happened to him. He needed to share every detail of the voyage, and he knew that Ricky did, too. No one else could possibly understand.
They were going to have plenty to tell each other, Sean knew. Enough to last them for the rest of their lives.
THE TIME HOPPERS
One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers.
—W. H. Auden, Infernal Science
That Time should be a length travelled over is, all said and done, a rather elaborate conception; yet that this is the way we do habitually think of Time is agreed to by everyone, both educated and—which is much more curious—uneducated . . . How did we arrive at this remarkable piece of knowledge?
—J. W. Dunne,An Experiment with Time
1.
There was a beauty in the crowded world, so they said. The crystalline city towers in serried ranks assembled, the patterned rhythms of a surging mob at a quickboat ramp, the dance of sunlight on a million iridescent tunics in one of the great plazas—in such things, the esthetes said, was the abode of beauty.
Quellen was no esthete. He was a minor bureaucrat, a humble civil servant of decent intelligence and normal proclivities. He looked at the world as it presented itself in A.D.2490, and found it hellish. Quellen was unable to perform the intricate inner dance by which hideous overcrowding could be written off as modern beauty. He hated it. If he had been Class One or even Class Two, Quellen might have been in a better position to appreciate the new esthetics, because he would not have been required to live right in the middle of them. But Quellen was Class Seven. The world does not look quite the same to a man in Class Seven as it does to a man in Class Two.
And yet, all things considered, Quellen was not too badly off. He had his comforts. Illegal comforts, true, obtained by bribery and cajolery. Strictly speaking, what Quellen had done was shameful, for he had taken possession of that to which he was not entitled. He had pocketed a private corner of the world, just as though he were a member of the High Government—that is to say, Class One or Class Two. Since Quellen had none of the responsibilities of the High Government, he deserved none of the privileges.
He had taken those privileges though. It was wrong, criminal, a betrayal of integrity. But a man is entitled to a fatal flaw of character somewhere. Like everyone else, Quellen had begun with high dreams of rectitude. Like nearly everyone else, he had learned to abandon them.
Pong.
That was the warning bell. Someone wanted him, back in the miserable warrens of Appalachia. Quellen left the bell alone. He was in a tranquil mood, and he didn’t care to puncture it simply to answer the bell.
Pong. Pong. Pong.
It was not an insistent sound, merely an obtrusive one, low and mellow, the sound of a bronze dish struck with a felt-covered hammer. Quellen, ignoring the sound, continued to rock uneasily back and forth in his pneumochair, watching the sleepy crocodiles paddling gently through the murky waters of the stream that ran below his porch.Pong. Pong. After a while the bell stopped ringing. He sat there, joyously passive, sensing about him the warm smell of green growing things and the buzzing insect noises in the air.
That was the only part of Eden that Quellen did not like, the constant hum of the ugly insects that whizzed through the calm, muggy air. In a way they represented an invasion; they were symbols to him of the life he had led before moving up to Class Seven. The noise in the air then had been the steady buzz of people, people swarming around in a vast hive of a city, and Quellen detested that. There were no real insects in Appalachia, of course. Merely that symbolic buzz.