What, in a sense, he had done already....
He turned to the old woman standing beside him. "When did I first come
here?" he asked.
"Fifty-two years ago."
"And how old was I when I died?"
"You were eighty-three."
"Why did I become a saint?"
"You never told me, Nathaniel Drake."
Gently, he touched her cheek. She raised her eyes then, and this time
he saw into them--saw the years and the love and the laughter, the
sorrow and the pain. "Were we happy together?" he asked.
"Yes, my darling--thanks to you."
He bent and kissed her upon the forehead. "Good by, Mary Legs," he
said, and turned and walked down the hill.
"_Glory, glory hallelujah_," the Polysirians sang, as his ship rose up
into the sky. "_Glory, glory, hallelujah. Glory, glory, hallelujah, his
truth is marching on._"
* * * * *
To what may a warp seepage be likened?
It may be likened to a leak in the roof of a twentieth-century
dwelling. The roofs of twentieth-century dwellings were supported
by rafters, and whenever a leak occurred, the water ran along these
rafters and seeped through the ceiling in unexpected places. While the
"rafters" of man-made spacewarps are of a far more complex nature than
the rafters of such simple dwellings, the basic analogy still holds
true: the spatio-temporal elements that escape from spacewarps such as
the Suez Canal never emerge in the immediate vicinity of the rift.
Even in Nathaniel Drake's day, the Suez Canal techs knew this, but
what they did not know was that such seepages do not pose a threat
to the continuum, but only to whoever or whatever comes into contact
with their foci. Neither did the Suez Canal techs--or anyone else, for
that matter--know that the effect of these foci varies in ratio to the
directness of the contact, and that in the case of partial contact,
the effect upon a human being or an object is seemingly similar to the
hypothetical preliminary effect of a Lambda-Xi bombardment. Hence it is
not surprising that no one, including Drake himself, had tumbled to the
true cause of his "ghosthood": i.e., _that he and the major part of his
ship, in coming into partial contact with a focus, had been partially
transmitted into the past_. Simultaneously, the rest of the ship--and
Annabelle Leigh--had come into direct contact with the focus and had
been totally transmitted into the past.
Here then was the situation when Drake left Iago Iago:
Part of himself and part of his ship and all of Saint Annabelle Leigh
were suspended in a past moment whose temporal location he knew to
be somewhere in the year 3614 but whose location, although he knew
it to be within displacement-drive range of Iago Iago, he could only
guess at, while the preponderance of himself and the preponderance of
his ship hurtled toward the region of space that was responsible for
his "ghosthood" and whose co-ordinates he had jotted down in the _Fly
by Night's_ log over three months ago. In the light of the knowledge
with which his visit to Iago Iago had endowed him, he quite naturally
assumed that once he and the ship made direct contact with the force
that had partially transmitted them, the rest of the transmission would
automatically take place--as in a sense it already had. But what Drake
did not know, and had no way of knowing, was that spatio-temporal
inconsistencies must be balanced before they can be eliminated, and
that before total transmission could be effected, his three months-plus
sojourn in the future had to be compensated for by a corresponding
sojourn in the past, the length of said sojourn to be in inverse ratio
to the spatio-temporal distance he would be catapulted. Consequently he
was shocked when, following the _Fly by Night's_ coincidence with the
focus, he emerged, not in the spatio-temporal moment he was prepared
for, but in the war-torn skies of a planet of another era and another
system.
At the instant of emergence, every warning light on the ship began
blinking an angry red, and the scintillometric siren began wailing like
an _enfant terrible_. Drake's conditioned reflexes superseded his
shock to the extent that he had the anti-fission field activated before
the automatic pilot had finished processing the incoming sensoria.
Although he did not know it at the time, the shield that the ship threw
out cleansed nearly an entire hemisphere of radioactivity and engulfed
half an ocean and a whole continent. All of which brings up another
aspect of time that was undreamed of in Drake's day: Expansion.
* * * * *
Neanderthal man stood knee-high to a twentieth-century grasshopper,
and the woolly mammoth that he hunted was no longer than a
twentieth-century cicada. The universe expands on a temporal as well
as a spatial basis, and this expansion is cumulative. Over a period
of half a century, the results are negligible, but when millennia are
involved, the results are staggering. Look not to fossils to dispute
this seeming paradox, for fossils are an integral part of the planets
they are interred upon; and do not point with polemic fingers to such
seemingly insuperable obstacles as mass, gravity, and bone tissue, for
the cosmos is run on a co-operative basis, and all things both great
and small co-operate. Nor are there any discrepancies in the normal
order of events. A six-foot man of a past generation is the equivalent
of a six-foot man of a future generation: it is only when you lift
them from their respective eras and place them side by side that the
difference in relative size becomes manifest. Thus, in the eyes of the
inhabitants of the planet he was about to descend upon, Nathaniel Drake
would be a figure of heroic proportions, while his ship would loom in
the heavens like a small moon--
Or a small planet....
Beneath him lay the ruins of a once-magnificent structure. Not far away
from the ruins, a pale river ran, and across the river, a city burned
brightly in the night. Nathaniel Drake knew where he was then--and
when. Looking down upon the ruins, he had an inkling of his destiny.
What I do now, he thought, has already been done, and I cannot change
it one iota. Therefore, what I do I am destined to do, and I am here to
fulfill my destiny.
He still wore his anti-grav belt. He parked the _Fly by Night_ on
extended jacks, and drifted down to the ground.
Here, cherry trees grew, and the cherry trees were in blossom. Towering
above the pink explosions, Nathaniel Drake knew his heroic proportions.
He approached the ruins he had seen from above. The noble columns lay
broken; the stately roof had fallen in. The walls, blasphemed not long
ago by the hate-steeped scrawls of segregationists, were rivened. Was
that a marble hand protruding over there?
A hand. A marble arm. A shattered white-marble leg. Drake knew his
destiny then, and began to dig.
No one saw him, for men had become moles, and cowered in dark places.
Above him in the sky, missiles struck the anti-fission shield and
winked out like gutted glowworms. Interceptors blazed up, then blazed
back down again, and died. The flames of the burning capital painted
the Potomac blood-red.
He continued to dig.
A fallen column lay across the broken marble body. He rolled the column
aside. The noble head lay broken on the floor. He picked it up with
gentle hands and carried it out and laid it on the spring-damp ground.
Piece by piece, he carried the broken statue out, and when he was sure
that not a single fragment remained among the ruins, he brought his
ship down and loaded the pieces into the hold. Lifting, he set forth
for the sea.
* * * * *
Some distance inland from the shores of Chesapeake Bay, he left the
ship and drifted down to the bank of the river and began walking along
the river to the sea. Above him, the automatic pilot held the ship on
the course.
He felt like a giant, Nathaniel Drake did, walking down the Potomac to
the sea, and in this long-ago age a giant he was. But all the while he
walked, he knew that compared to the giant he was impersonating, he was
a pygmy two feet tall.
... _and if you cannot believe in the walking of His ghost upon the
land and in His ascension to the stars, then you are as one dead,
without hope, without love, without pity, without kindness, without
humanity, without humility, without sorrow, without pain, without
happiness, and without life_ ...
"Amen," said Nathaniel Drake.
He came to a village untouched by the destruction around it, and saw
people crawling out of underground shelters. Looking down upon them, he
proclaimed "Lo, I have arisen. Lo, I walk again! Look at Me, ye peoples
of the earth--I have come to emancipate you from your shackling fears,
and I have summoned the Planet of Peace from out of the immensities of
space and time to transport My ghost to the stars. Lo, I _force_ peace
upon you, ye peoples of the earth, and I command you to remember always
this terrible day when you drove Kindness from your doorsteps and
threw wide your portals to Perdition."
On the shore of Chesapeake Bay he halted, and when the automatic pilot
brought the ship down, he removed the fragments of the statue from the
hold and laid them gently on the beach.... _And the Planet of Peace
absorbed His ghost and bore it from the face of the earth._
A moment later, complete transmission occurred.
* * * * *
The cabin was a lonely place. He left it quickly and hurried down
the companionway to the starboard storeroom. The bulkheads no longer
shimmered, and the deck was solid beneath his feet. His translucence
was no more. He opened the storeroom lock and stepped across the
threshold. Mary Legs, nee Annabelle Leigh, was huddled on the floor.
She looked up when she heard his step, and in her eyes was the dumb and
hopeless misery of an animal that is cornered and does not know what to
do.
He raised her gently to her feet. "Next stop, Iago Iago," he said.