“Now, Cortland,” Paynter said, putting his hands on his knees and regarding me narrowly, “we have a lot of talking to do. I’ve heard the playback of your conversation with Topaz when you first woke. I assume you—ah—believe you’re from the first half of the twentieth century, right?”
“You know I was asleep in the cave,” I said. “You must have seen me.”
“I did. We analyzed the tissues and clothing of all the sleepers. Low radioactivity, so we know the sleep began before the atom wars. So that’s all right. It’s time-travel. We can’t very well doubt that. But you’ll have to tell us how the sleepers got there and how I came to be with them.” He shook his head rather dazedly.
I glanced around the little snow-veiled clearing where we sat. The two soldiers had finished their task and left us at a wave from—Paynter? Topaz was gone. We were quite alone, lying back comfortably on our rubber-foam boulders, the stream gurgling faintly past us through the rocks and the air.
“Maybe you can explain things now, Murray,” I said. He regarded me with a sort of fixed watchfulness, alert, waiting.
“Murray?” he said after a moment when I did not speak again. “Murray?”
“All right—Paynter,” I conceded. “But let’s have the explanation. Things are getting too far ahead of me.”
“I’ll be glad to explain everything I can to you, in a few minutes,” Paynter said, gesturing toward the gray boxes. “I don’t understand what it is you’re implying, though. I almost get the impression that you think you know me.”
“I knew a man named Murray who looked exactly like you—if you want to play it this way,” I said. “But it looks pretty obvious what happened. You and the others woke before me. You may have wakened months or years sooner. You went out into this world, whatever it is—whenever it is—and made places for yourselves. Now it seems to suit all of you to pretend I’m a poor relation you never heard of. That’s what I think happened. Maybe you’ve got a better story.”
He exhaled noisily, a heavy sigh that was partly of impatience.
“I think I see what you mean. That doubling of images confuses all of us. You really don’t know, then?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Obviously, I—or my image—was in that cavern with yours. There was also a woman there. I didn’t recognize her. The third man was Belem.” He paused and fixed me with that expectant look again.
“Belem,” I echoed. “Where I come from we pronounce it Ira De Kalb.”
“Belem,” he told me firmly, ignoring the feeble levity, “is a Mechandroid. He isn’t human. Did you know that?”
13. Lord Paynter’s Problem
Not human, I thought, remembering those eyes of cool metal. I sent an inward thought searching out the mind that crowded my own mind in the narrow confines of my head. Not human? I got no answer, for a moment. Then there was a whisper like a distant voice.
Watch and wait, it told me quietly.
“I don’t know what a Mechandroid is,” I said as calmly as I could. “I don’t seem to know much of anything about this place. One thing I’d like to get clear—where I’m not. Tell me, Paynter—Murray—whoever you are, whether you remember anything about the Face of Ea.”
He scowled thoughtfully. I was watching but I saw no flicker of recognition.
“I can have inquiries made,” he offered. “It means nothing to me, but we have colonies now on so many worlds—”
“Never mind,” I said rather dizzily. “Forget it.” Whether he knew or not he wasn’t going to give away anything in that connection. “All right, one more thing then. What century is this?”
He told me. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t the time of the world’s end. I was sure of that—or as sure as I could be of anything just then. Nowhere in the galaxy yet was that red twilight or the towering Face. Something had gone wrong during our journey. Something had broken it and roused us to wakefulness too soon. Perhaps millennia too soon. And I was the only one of us who remembered at all what mission we’d set out upon.
Remembered? A sudden idea struck me and I said quickly.
“How about this, Paynter—suppose you really are Murray with amnesia? You could have awakened and forgotten somehow. You might—”
“That’s impossible,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “I know my complete history. I was born Job Paynter, on Colchan Three, of Earth stock, fifty years ago, and I can remember a complete life. No intervals missing.”
“All right,” I said. “You suggest something.”
“I wish I could. We seem to be at a stalemate. We—”
His voice suddenly went thin and dim in my ears. I felt my breath rush inward with a shuddering gasp and—
Out of the past, into the secret recesses of my mind burst a familiar soundless roar of energy. Paynter and the garden behind him, were fading, insubstantial shadows. Nothing existed for a terrible blinding moment except this bursting light-speed gush of energy as—
As the thing made its kill.
The next thing I saw was Paynter’s face. He was watching me narrowly out of hard blue eyes and it seemed to me his cheeks were curiously flushed.
I don’t know how long a time had elapsed. Obviously it was time enough for a report to come through, for he was speaking into an instrument on his wrist. I didn’t understand the language he used. I sat there limply, too dazed still to move or think, while he watched me with that pale stare.
I struggled to regain my detachment in the face of a shock that had left me sweating with plain physical fear. Somehow I had lost touch with my human companions in the long journey but it was clear that there was one fellow-traveler whom I had not lost. The creature whose track was the nekron—the killing thing whose touch was an infection of matter itself.
Paynter lowered his wrist. “Cortland,” he said, “one of the men who helped set up this machine has been killed just now. Burned. It’s something no one seems to have seen before—burns of that type, I mean. You—ah—you seemed affected just now. Have you anything to tell me about this?”
I looked at him dumbly. Then there was a stirring in my mind and the metallic gaze of the dweller there seemed to glance out through mine.
That was very curious, the cold, watchful awareness that was De Kalb said calmly. Comply with Paynter now. Do as he suggests. I think I may be starting to understand.
I sighed heavily. I hoped he was. Things were entirely out of my hands now. I watched Paynter take a black helmet out of the smaller box before him, plug in its cord to the larger box, hold the headpiece out to me.
“Here,” he said briskly. “You and I could ask one another questions until doomsday and not come nearer any understanding. This will put us in a mental rapport—fast and complete.”
I looked at the thing skeptically, feeling dubious. It was all very well for De Kalb in my mind to urge compliance. How did I know what his real interests were? What Paynter’s were? Certainly not the same as mine.
“Let me think this over a minute,” I said doubtfully. “I don’t understand—”
“The control is set for certain basic problems.” Paynter said in an impatient voice. “Well open our minds to each other, that’s all. There’s automatic screening to eliminate trivialities but everything centering around the basic of time-travel will be revealed in three seconds, much more clearly than you could possibly convey it in words. In return, I’ll understand all you need to know, so that you can talk to me intelligently and won’t have to stop for questions every third word. Put it on, man, put it on!”