THE TIME ARMADA
By Fox B. Holden
Politics and science don't mix--except that
Congressman Blair had once been a physicist. This
was The Beginning--but The End was worlds away....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October and November 1953
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_5:20 P. M., April 17, 1958_
Congressman Douglas Blair shivered a little, turned up his coat collar
against the gray drizzle that had been falling like a finely-sifted fog
all day. His head ached, his nose felt stuffy, and he was tired. It was
good of Grayson to pick him up.
The front seat of the dark blue sedan was soft and reassuring, and the
warm current of air from the heater beneath it felt good. He let his
spare, barely six-foot body slump like a bag of wet wash and pushed
his hat back with the half-formed thought that it might ease the dull
pressure behind his eyes.
"Rough going today, eh, Congressman?"
Grayson twisted the blue sedan into outbound Washington traffic, turned
the windshield wipers to a faster pace. Click-click, click-click, and
Blair wished someone would invent windshield wipers for the brain, to
be worn like a radio head-set, maybe with a hole in the top of the head.
"Hey, buddy! Republicans got your tongue?"
"No, sorry, Carl. Just tired. It's that damned McKenny bill."
"Off the record?"
"I'm afraid so for now, Carl. He can get the thing through--he's so
damn clever he should've been a woman. Got the steel men eating out of
his hand. Made no bones about telling the rest of us today that what
the hell, the people never had anything to say about it, anyway. The
work of government is up to the professionals. The sooner the people
get their nose out of it, the better off they'll be. He said that,
Carl, right in front of everybody. And nobody so much as blinked."
The drizzle started to develop into a dark blue rain as they headed
toward the suburbs.
"What's going to happen, Carl?" Blair said after awhile.
"If I knew, believe me, I wouldn't be sitting here! I don't know, Doug.
We'll all cook in Hell together I guess. Here, have a cigarette."
"Thanks. No, dammit. That's just it--if they'd take this going to Hell
business and forget about it--sink it, scuttle it. Nobody goes to
Hell, he makes his own if that's the way he lives, or he makes his own
personal Heaven or Paradise or whatever you call it if that's the way
he lives. Most of us are in between someplace, a little scared, mostly
indifferent, and too mixed up to see the simple fact that the way of
living we've got in this country isn't so bad but what just plain
honesty and a little intelligence couldn't run it right side up."
"Sure, sure, I know and you're right, Doug. But take it easy.... Things
aren't always as bad as they look."
* * * * *
Blair inhaled on the cigarette, laughed a little and felt better.
Sometimes he knew he sounded like a college kid trying to tell his
father what was wrong with the world, but that was why he liked Carl.
Carl let him talk, knew it was his way of blowing off the pent-up steam.
"You know what, chum?" They were running smoothly along the highway
now, the engine a reassuring hum of power, the interior of the sedan
warm and relaxing. The rain was letting up a little, but dirty banks
of fog had started gathering at the roadside like ghosts of all the
work of the day, tenuous, without substance.
"What, Carl?"
"You should've stuck with the M.I.T. degree after all. Hell with your
brain you'd've made that try for the Moon a success last month instead
of another near-miss."
"Maybe you're right. Those boys know what they're doing though. I'll
stick to puttering."
"Puttering the man calls it. 'He hath a lean and hungry look--such
men are dangerous....' Myself, I think that gadget you 'putter' with
in that cellar of yours is some kind of a gismo to hypnotize all the
states-righters into doing something intelligent like dropping dead
without being told!"
"With ingenuity such as yours, my friend, I think I could really
accomplish something in that cellar of mine at that! That's the
trouble. You writers and newsmen have all the good ideas--slide-rules
don't think worth a damn! Instead of a wonderful creation such as you
suggest, what have I got? A pile of junk that may, if it works in any
degree at all, turn out to be a fairly good television set...."
"You wouldn't kid an old friend. That martini you were putting away
the other night said that it was an experiment with something called
tired light."
"Exactly. Television."
"Look, the quality of curiosity is not strained, it droppeth as a
gentle ten-ton truck from twenty stories up! You said--or the martini
said anyway--that if this little gimcrack of yours works, it'd be able
to bring back pictures of things that happened in the past. You're
guilty until proven innocent, Galileo. Start talking."
"Off the record--"
"I should broadcast it and get dunked in a witch's chair."
"Well--the martini had it a little balled up, but the essential idea's
there I guess. Anyway, it isn't everybody who has a space-warp for a
household pet."
"Or Einstein for a hobby."
"Blah, this is strictly Blair. That's why it won't work, and I'd be
only sensationally nuts if I ever thought it would. But some men take
Scotch for their nerves, and I take Scotch with electronics. More of a
jolt that way."
"Yuk, yuk."
* * * * *
That was why it was good to have Carl for a friend. No matter how sorry
you got to feeling for yourself, he could usually snap you out of it
one way or another. Right now, Doug thought, Carl was diligently at
work with that peculiar brand of psychology that all newspapermen
strive ceaselessly to acquire that makes people blab when they ought to
keep quiet. But why not--Carl wouldn't know what the hell it was all
about and he wouldn't care, if he thought it would take some of the
pressure off.
"Well, listen then. Ever look through an observatory telescope and
have somebody tell you you were focused on some star or other a couple
of thousand light years away? Maybe it was in the process of blowing
up and becoming a nova or something like that. Anyhow, it would be
explained to you that you were seeing that star as it was two thousand
years ago. You were seeing, for instance, an explosion that happened
twenty centuries in the past. Reason, of course, is that it took the
light that long to get from the star to you. More simply, the light
that strikes your back porch in the morning left the sun about nine
minutes before."
"Very clear. Only how come, if the universe is a closed form of
infinity like it says in all the new books, this light never doubles
back on itself--gives you two or even a million images of the same
star?"
"That's where the tired light comes in. After a certain length of
time--unthinkable aeons of it--it, like all other forms of energy,
peters out. Runs down. Quits. Kaput. They call it entropy. It
constitutes, actually, a gradual running down, growing old of the
universe. As far as anyone knows, this happens before it 'doubles back'
on itself, as you put it. You can't catch it coming around the second
time to see what you looked like umpteenillion ages ago. So, if you
want a second look at yourself, you've got to go out and catch the
light which you reflected in the past--"
"Oh brother. You mean anybody on a planet, say, forty light years from
Earth with a supertelescope looking at us would be watching the battle
of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood! A hundred and eighty light years
away he'd see us slugging it out against King George III at Saratoga
and Valley Forge!"
"You've got it. In other words, the light reflected from Earth then is
somewhere deep in Space now. If you could haul it in on some kind of a
receiver, you could see everything all over again--you could watch the
land masses of Earth as they shifted to form the continents as we know
them today."
"You'd need something faster than light to trap the light itself--and
I thought that was against Fitzgerald or somebody."
"If you followed the same space warps the light did, it would be. But
if it were possible to operate your receiver _through_ the fabric of
space-time, instead of _along_ it--a kind of short-cut--you might turn
up with what you're after."
"I am sorry I got into this."
Blair smiled tiredly. "Me too. Hell, I'm fooling around with things
I don't pretend to know anything about. Just enough to putter. Just
enough to keep my mind off all-day-long. God knows what I'll get when I
turn the damn thing on. Probably not even snow so I'm not worried. Turn
left at the next stop-light--they've got that new cut-off finished." He
started buttoning his coat. Grayson turned left as ordered.
"But suppose it works?"
"Wow. Then the steam-fitters would envy me."
"Well it sure oughtta do something. You've been tinkering with it
for--how long? Couple years?"
"About four I guess, off and on. Sometimes I get to wondering what
it'll do if it does do anything."
"Show us Lillian Russell, maybe, or Little Egypt!"
"There's a million possible results when you go fooling around with the
structure of the universe, Carl. I guess that's what fascinates me. A
little learning is a dangerous thing, they say. Dot's afraid I'll blow
us up."
"Well--she could have something there!"
"The thing probably won't even toast a piece of bread. But I'd rather
fool with it than collect buttons or play bridge or some other damfool
thing, so...."
The blue sedan sloshed up the puddled drive-way to the new nine-room
bungalow and at the porch Doug Blair got out. A wind had sprung up and
the dampness suddenly grasped his body, clung, as though he were naked.
"Time for a drink, supper?"
"No, thanks, Doug--gotta see a man. Now take it easy--let the state of
the nation go bury its head for tonight and you have some fun blowing
fuses!"
"Yeah, yeah! O.K. and thanks."
The blue sedan sloshed its way back to the highway, and Doug went into
the house.
* * * * *
Douglas Blair kissed his wife and, as he did every time he kissed her,
wondered how he'd been so lucky. He preferred to think as seldom as
memory would permit of how close he'd come on a couple of occasions to
marrying a country club, a bridge deck, a women's society, an Emily
Post book. And when Dot had given him Terry and Mike, she'd topped off
the miracle of herself with the added one of two healthy young minds
that had already learned to say "prove it!" Some of the tiredness left
him, a lot of the aching discouragement was brushed away.
"Tired, Doug?"
"I was."
There was a sudden thundering which grew quickly into the crashing
noises often made by wild elephants getting exercise in a native
village.
"The patter of little feet," Dorothy said.
"Oh. For a minute I thought it was termites. Hi, fellas! What kind of
trouble did we almost keep out of today?"
"Hi, dad! Hey, Mike says you aren't ever going to try it out. You are,
aren't you?"
"I didn't say not ever. I said _maybe_ not ever. Things like the
Contraption take years to develop, don't they, dad?"
"Well," Doug said, doing what he could to stem the onslaught and still
stay on his feet, "what's the source of all this wisdom, Mr. Scientist?"
"Some day I'll be a scientist. Mommy said so, didn't you, mom?"
Every so often Doug wondered where they got that solid healthy look,
and if either of them would ever faintly resemble the Cassius after
whom even Carl thought he should have been named. The red hair of
course was Dorothy's. The blue eyes were Dorothy's. Even the brains
were, he sometimes suspected, all Dorothy's. But the dormant challenge
that grew, not yet quite fully awakened, somewhere behind the freckled,
ten-year-old faces--that, if it matured well, would be his.
"If," Doug said then, "you three will let a hungry man eat his supper,
he'll let you in on a little surprise before hand. That is, if
anybody's interested--"
"Tell us!"
"Is it, Doug?"
"Your brilliant father has exactly three connections to solder on the
Contraption, and then--well, after supper, we'll all see together." He
laughed. Terry and Mike hooted. Dorothy looked a little worried, and
told the boys to wash up.
* * * * *
It covered half the ten-foot workbench, its large screen a huge,
lens-like square eye as it glinted beneath the glare of the
cold-cathode lights that lined the ceiling of the laboratory-like
cellar.
Doug put the cooling soldering-iron back in its place. Dorothy had her
Christmas camera mounted on a tripod a few feet back, "Just in case,"
she said, "it does something before it blows up."
Terry and Mike were silent, eyes wide, not quite behind their mother.
"We shall now," Doug said, "see if we can get a look at Hopalong
Cassidy the way he looked when I was a boy. Better yet, maybe Jack
Benny when he was 39 ... and Valentino...."
He closed the switch, and the cathode lights flickered, went out. There
was a humming sound that seemed to come from all sides of the cellar
rather than from the Contraption, and the bluish glow emanated from the
square convex eye. Directly before it, they watched.
The light shimmered, gave the illusion that the Contraption itself was
shimmering, fading. The work bench became indistinct.
"Doug--"
And then the workbench and the Contraption were gone, the overhead
cathode tubes were gone, and daylight was filtering through a cellar
window that had moved about four feet along the wall--which was now
made of glass brick instead of concrete.
Doug and his wife stood rooted. Terry and Mike were gone, too.
CHAPTER II
She was clad in superbly tailored cream-colored slacks of a material
that was glass-like in sheen, an equally well-fitted blouse of forest
green hardly a shadow less than opaque, and sandals of a soft, flexible
texture slightly raised at the heel. The wide cummerbund of silken
flame that circled her slender waist was her only ornamentation.
Doug's pastel shirt felt like a feather; it lay open at the throat and
clung comfortably about his chest and shoulders, then tapered leisurely
to his waist. The trousers were of the same weight and of a darker hue
somewhere between the blue of midnight and cobalt; the sandals were
like hers.
He did not understand.
"You--I know you are not--"
Her face was not the same; her hair was the deeper red of mahogany, her
eyes as large, but of green, not blue. Dorothy's mouth was wider, her
cheeks not quite so shadowed. Yet now her face was drawn in the look of
bewilderment that he felt on his own.
"Doug?"
"Dot! For God's sake!"
"Your voice is the same--but you don't look like--"
"Don't get scared, take it easy. It's me. You're different too--all
but your voice. I've got to figure it out. Everything's all wrong.
Wrong as hell--"
He found a chair of light metal that felt like foam rubber when he
sat on it. Dorothy--and he knew somehow that it must be Dorothy--was
looking around her with quick, nervous glances.
"Doug, the boys--where are the boys?"
"Terry! Mike!" He called again, stood up. "Oh, God--"
"They were just behind me, Doug, they couldn't have run--"
"No I think--I think they must've stayed with--with the Contraption. We
were in the blur light. It wasn't. They must've been just beyond its
effective range. That must be it. It just got _us_."
"Got us--you mean we're--"
"No, no of course not. Alive as we'll ever be. But where--"
"Wherever we are, I don't want to be here, Doug. I want to be back...."
"Easy, honey." He put his arm about her, drew her to him, and he could
feel her taut muscles relax a little. "I'd like to say it's a dream,
but two people don't dream the same dream at once. And I'm not the
type to think up clothes like these all by myself.... Somehow, the
Contraption did it. I was monkeying with a theorem I got interested in
once in space-time mechanics. But it was all on paper--just something
to fool with. It was impossible for the Contraption to really do
anything." He sat down again. "Impossible."
"Like flying, my mother used to say. What do we do, Doug?"
"That's my gal...." He got up a second time, forced a smile. "Let's go
upstairs and see if anybody's around."
There were stairs. Wide and gently curving and constructed of a light,
lusterless steel.
Architecturally, the house was little different from many of the
expensive-looking California-type affairs he had seen in the women's
magazines that Dot bought every so often. Yet there was something about
its interior, a certain grace combined with a subtle simplicity that
made it a work of art as a good painting or sculptural piece is art.
There was rebellion in it--a gentle rebellion against the eye-aching
extremes of artificial modernity, yet at the same time a freedom of
execution that made the confines of formalized pattern seem childish.
The pastel carpeting was of a deep, soft substance that Doug recognized
as a masterpiece in plastic; the furniture was simple, casual, but not
stark and starved-looking. The rooms themselves were ample and were
as bright in the far corners as in those nearest the wide, sashless
windows. They were not separated by partitions, but divided instead by
a fragile-appearing tracery of lattice-work in which a decorative motif
was woven with an almost fairy-like geometrical magic. The air was cool
and fresh.
"Now I know I'm dreaming," Dot said in a low voice. They walked
quietly, from room to room, listening, half-waiting. "I expect any
minute to find three bowls of porridge somewhere," Dot said.
"I wonder ..." Doug said. "What's here is--I think its ours. I think we
live here."
"Doug look--through the window!"
* * * * *
He saw a broad lawn of carefully trimmed yet almost ankle-deep grass,
inset at the edges with a running garden. And the street beyond was
wide, and there were other houses at its far side that looked much
as he knew this one must appear. Roofs of tinted tiling, walls of
delicately-toned glass brick, wide, gently-curving windows.
These Doug saw in the first instant, and then there were the soundless
vehicles in the street.
"Like smooth, transparent walnut shells," Doug said. "Cooling louvres
in the back--engines in the rear. They know their engineering, too.
Wonder if the body is some sort of transparent steel--"
"The people in them, Doug! Did you see them? Just like--"
"Like us, of course. Still expecting the three bears?" He laughed a
little. They were like children in some new fairyland, half afraid,
half unbelieving. "Wherever we are, it's populated by humans--if it
weren't, we may not have come out this way...."
"Doug, do you know?" She turned, faced him, and there was still fear
deep in her eyes. Not the stark fear of terror, but the bewildered,
uncomprehending fear of disbelief.
"No I don't. But these clothes aren't ours--even our faces, our
bodies aren't. Just our actual selves came through unaltered. Our
egos--personalities--whatever you want to call it that gives a human
being his identity. The rest we've--moved into, I think. Anyway, it's a
theory to go on. I wonder what our names are--"
"Doug, don't."
"I wish I were trying to be funny. But don't you see?"
"Whatever happened to us--couldn't that have changed us? Our--our
atomic structure, couldn't that have been changed or altered somehow?
It's all so crazy--"
"It's easy to see, m'girl, that you don't spend your time at a bridge
table all those hours I'm slaving away on Madhouse Hill! But if that
had happened ... I don't know. It's the clothes. Too completely
different--not just out of shape, or an altered shape, but of a
fundamentally _different_ shape. We got--we got transplanted."
"But then what of--"
"Thinking the same thing. Suppose the Contraption, whatever it's
done--suppose it works _two_ ways? A swap, a trade?"
"But Doug that's--"
He smiled. Dot was suddenly silent with the knowledge that whether she
liked it or not, she could no longer refuse to accept the facts as they
were, could no longer cross off their implications for want of bolder
imagination.
"Are we--is it the ... the future?"
"Maybe. You could even ask 'is this Earth?' and I couldn't tell you. I
wonder what they think where _they_ are ... I wonder if _they_ know."
"Doug, would they--do anything? To Terry and Mike, I mean?"
"I sure hope not--and I don't think so. The boys will be all
right--they know their way around back home--whomever it is we've
replaced is in the same boat we are. They'd think more than twice
before rashly committing themselves to trouble. They're probably trying
to communicate with the kids--if the kids stuck around that long. I'm
wondering more about the Contraption. If they start fooling with it...."
"Then we'd go back?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. I think though that they'd leave it alone, on the
theory that whoever invented it knows its use, knows how to handle it
safely. They'd be wrong, but I think that's how they'd figure it. I
don't think any one'll dare touch it, simply out of sheer fear of what
might happen next."
"I'm scared, Doug. Awful scared."
"I guess that makes two of us. Somehow we've got to dig up the parts
for another Contraption. And then--" He let the sentence drift into
silence.
"And then, Doug?"
"Well maybe with the exact same set-up--same everything, I could do
it again. I don't know. But if they so much as try to turn the other
one off, try to change anything, we'll lose this point of reference in
space-time for good."
* * * * *
Slowly, Dot nodded understanding. "The parts," she said then. "Can we
find the things you need?"
"I'll give it the old college try, sweetheart."
"How long--"
He shrugged. "A few days maybe. Depends."
They were silent for a moment, looking through the wide window,
watching the beautiful vehicles as they slid silently past,
re-examining what they could see of the colorful world beyond the
rolling lawn. Doug felt an aching in his jaws, a tightness through his
lips. God, it was so silly--standing there, trying to explain, when
he didn't even know what had happened, where they were or--or when
they were. He'd been after travelling light to bring back pictures of
the past--every home should have one. Nuts. The future--no, it wasn't
supposed to be that way. Unless you accepted past, present and future
as the components of one great unit, and progression from one to the
other nothing more than illusion, like the illusion of movement given
by the hundreds of still frames on a film-strip. If time was like such
a film-strip, and you found a way to jump forward along it, bypassing
the frames that were in immediate succession--
But then what about the possibility-probability pattern theory, in
which time was supposed to exist as an infinite number of possibility
and probability paths, intersecting, paralleling, diverging, splitting
with each new decision, each new action--Lord it was getting insane.
"Hell I'm all mixed up," he said. Dot put her arm through his. He
nodded toward what was beyond the window. "We might as well have a
look for ourselves. If anybody says anything to us we'll suddenly see
something interesting in the other direction. Game?"
"I--I guess so...."
"Damn, I wish I had a cigarette!"
They went to the front door, swung it open.
* * * * *
The streets were long and incredibly wide and straight, bearing their
traffic smoothly and with hardly a hint of the inevitable jamming that
was so familiar. The sidewalks were immaculately kept, yet surprisingly
free of pedestrians; a few passed, bowed slightly and smiled, continued
on.
"Polite bunch," Doug murmured. "They bow like good Republicans...."
"And all smiling--as if they didn't have a worry in the world."
"Democrats, then!" They laughed, and for a moment the anxiety was gone,
and the street could have been any fine street in the world from which
they'd come.
"We'd better try to find the center of town," Doug said then. "We've
got to do a lot more than ogle if we want to locate the stuff we're
after. Sshh...."
This time two women passed. They smiled, bowed, went on.
"Maybe you're the mayor of this town or something--at least an
alderman."
"They wouldn't smile, honey! Anyway, there are three things we'd better
figure. How to get money, how to get food, how to get the equipment.
Any ideas?"
"We should've searched the house for a wallet or something. Or maybe
these people don't believe in money--maybe they use a different system
altogether."
"It's possible, of course, and--good night!" Doug was staring suddenly
upward. There had been a low rumbling sound which within seconds had
ascended the decibel scale to a throbbing roar. A great, tapering thing
of silvery metal with no hint of wing-surfaces was bolting skyward,
and Doug knew somehow that the sky was not its limit. The roar and
scream of suddenly-split atmosphere subsided, and in moments, the
vertically-climbing craft was out of sight. "They've done it here,
Dot! I'd bet the bottom dollar I don't have that we've seen our first
space-liner!"
"Could I have been right, Doug? The future, I mean?"
"I don't know, Dot.... I don't know."
There were towering buildings less than a half-mile from them of
a simplicity and beauty that left no time for talk. The city was
suddenly before them--a sparkling thing, unmarred by eye-stumbling
bits and pieces--a flawless, symmetrical sweep toward the heavens that
momentarily stupefied credulity. Traffic ramps soared from street-level
in gently-curving ribbons above spacious quiet parks; sound was muffled
to near-inaudibility, and the illusion of a great fairy kingdom was
unmarred by the confusion of advertising posters, marquees, store front
lettering, or the raucous stampede of elbowing mobs....
"I wonder how they illuminate at night," Doug was saying. "I wonder
what they--my God, Dot, look up--all over. Where is it?"
Far above, the sky seemed gradually to darken into an ever-deepening
shadow of blackness. But the sun--She couldn't find the sun!
"It's a different planet, Doug!"
"And the city--it _is_ lit! There must be a sun but it's down--it's
night, and they've found a way to illuminate an entire city as though
daylight were perpetual!"
And that was when it caught their eye. It was a small store, and she
could see neatly-tiered rows of groceries inside--fruits and vegetables
were easily recognizable even the street's width from them. But it was
the little rack outside the store--the one that held the newspapers.
Almost at a run they crossed the street, and Doug fought down the urge
to reach out, grab one of the editions.
The front pages of the newspapers were easily readable. Because they
were printed in excellent English.
The date beneath the masthead of one was April 17, 1958. The paper was
the Washington Post.