Operation Time Search By Andre Norton
“ATLANTIS? A fairy tale!” The man by the window half turned. “You can’t be serious-” He began that protest confidently, but that confidence ebbed when there was no change in the expression on his companion’s face. “You saw the films of the first three runs. Did those look like the product of someone’s imagination? You have inspected all the security measures devised to make sure they were not. A fairy tale, you say.” The quiet gray-haired man leaned a little farther back in his seat. “I wonder what does lie buried at the roots of some of our traditional tales. Norse sagas, once dismissed as fiction, have long since been proven to be chronicles of historic voyages. Much of our folklore is distorted clan, tribal, or national record. Dragons-now- Our planet did have an age in which armored dragons marched the earth-” “But not in the memory of mankind!” Hargreaves came away from the window, his hands resting on his hips, his chin outthrust as if he welcomed battle, verbal at least. “Don’t you ever wonder why certain tales have persisted, why they continue to linger over centuries, told again and again? The man-devouring dragon-” Hargreaves smiled. “I always heard it that the proper dragon preferred a diet of tender young maidens-until some doughty knight changed his mind for him with sword or lance.” Fordham laughed. “But dragons, in spite of their dietary habits, are firmly fixed in folklore around the world. And their like did once roam the earth-” “At a time, I repeat, which far antedated the arrival of our most primitive ancestor.” “As far as we know,” Fordham corrected. “What I say is that there is a persistence of certain types of fairy stories. When we set up this project-and you know the reason for it–we had to have a starting point. Atlantis is one of the most lasting of our legends. It has become so much a part of our heritage that I think it is generally accepted as fact-” .
“And all founded on a few sentences that were used by Plato to hang some of his arguments on-”
“But suppose that Atlantis did once exist.” Fordham picked up a pencil, turned it end to end on the pad before him, but made no markings. “Not in this world-”
“Where then? On Mars-? They blew themselves up, I suppose, and left that pocking of desert craters-”
“Oddly enough, according to legend the Atlanteans did eventually blow themselves up, or the equivalent. No, right here on this planet. You have heard of the alternate history theory-that from each major historical decision two alternate worlds come into being.”
“Fantastic-” Hargreaves interrupted.
“Is it? Suppose that it is fact, that on one of those alternate time lines Atlantis did exist, just as on another dragons overlapped mankind.”
“Even if that were so, how would we know about it?”
“True. We could be separated from those lines by whole networks of major choices and decisions. Yet, suppose when we were close together, there was a kind of seepage-perhaps individuals even crossed. We have well-authenticated stories of strange and unexplainable disappearances from our own world, and one or two odd people have turned up here under very peculiar circumstances. And Atlantis is so vivid a story, has so seized upon the imagination of generations, that we used it for our checkpoint.”
“Just how?”
“We fed-into the Ibby every known scrap of material on the subject that is known by the modern worldfrom the reports of geologists sounding the sea bottoms for possible ridges of a sunken continent to `revelations’ of cultists. And Ibby gave us an equation in return.”
“You mean you set up the probe-beam on that?”
“Exactly. And you have seen the resulting test films. Those came from Ibby’s calculations. And you’ll admit they bear no resemblance to the here and now.”
“Yes, I’ll say that much. And they were taken?”
“Right out there, over the landscape you’ve been viewing. We’re set today for a ten-minute run, the longest we have dared to try. We use the mound for a checkpoint.”
“Still having trouble over that?”
Fordham frowned. “We gave out the story that we are clearing to build an addition to the labs. This Wilson who is making all the fuss is chronically opposed to government authority. He’s built up this `Save our historic mound’ crusade mainly to get himself space in the city papers and to harass the project. Started a rumor last year that we were dabbling in some weird new experiment that would blow the whole county off the map. He was warmed then by the security people. But he believes this mound thing is safe. However, `Save our historic mound’ isn’t as good for arousing interest as `Look out, the eggheads are going to blow us up.’ His campaign is already running down.
“However, the mound makes a good checkpoint because it is older than any other surviving man-made landmark hereabouts.”
“What if you turn up mound builders instead of Atlanteans?”
“Well, then we’d have a better set of films than those we already possess to rivet attention on the project, though those we do have are more to our real purpose.”
“Yes,” agreed Hargreaves. “And if this does work-if we can get through ourselves-”
“We can tap natural resources, riches such as we cannot imagine in this era. We’ve plundered and wasted and used up most of the living treasures of our world. So now we have to try to pillage somewhere else. Well, shall we go to see-Atlantis?”
Hargreaves laughed. “Seeing is believing; one picture is worth a volume of words. Give me a good film to take back to Washington, and I may be able to up your current appropriation. All right-show me Atlantis.”
The weather for early December was surprisingly mild. Ray Osborne opened the collar of his leather jacket. His ex-paratrooper boots flattened ragged clumps of last season’s grass. The shadow of the Indian mound enclosed him now. Early Sunday morning-Wilson had been right in his suggestion about the time. The fence had had a gap just as he had promised. There was only one building in sight, the tower part of the hush-hush installation. And on this side of the mound, he was safely out of sight, even if anyone was on duty there.
What were they planning to build anyway-clearing it flat with bulldozers? What would people do when there was no more open country at all? Ray turned to face the mound, readying his camera for the shots he had been sent to take. His finger pressed
And, as if that had thumbed the red switch of final doom, the world went mad. Ray staggered back, aware only of intolerable pain in his head, pain associated with violet flashes that blinded him. Silence-He rubbed at his watering eyes. Mist faded, and he stood, swaying drunkenly, staring about him in stunned disbelief.
The raw wound of the clearing, the distant earthmoving machinery, and even the mound were gone! He was in the shadow, not of mounded earth, but of a towering giant tree, with another and another beyond!
Ray put out a shaking hand. He could feel rough bark-it was real! Then he began to run down a moss carpeted corridor between trees whose girth was that of monsters. “Get back!” shouted something inside his head. “Back?” asked another part of his dazed mind. Where was back?
Minutes later he burst from the dimness of that incredible forest into a grass-grown plain. A withered root protruded from the earth to send him sprawling, and he lay drawing air into his lungs with panting gasps. Soon he became aware that a hot sun beat down
upon him, far too warm for winter. He pulled up to his knees to look about him.
Ahead no break in that plain, behind him the forest—nothing he had ever seen before. Where was he? Shivering, though the earth under him was warm, Ray forced himself to sit quietly. He was Ray Osborne. He had gone out to the project on Sunday morning as a favor to Les Wilson, to take some good shots of the mound to go with the article Les was writing. Shots—his hands were empty! The camera? He must have lost it back there when it happened. What had happened?
Ray dropped his head between his hands. He fought a battle with primitive panic and tried to think logically. But how can one think logically about something such as this? One minute standing in a sane, ordinary world-the next being here. And where was here?
Slowly he got to his feet, thrusting his twitching hands into the pockets of his jacket. Go back. He half turned to face that silent density of forest and knew that he could not go in there again, not yet. His heart began to thump heavily when he thought of it. Somehow this open land seemed the lesser of two evils. So he trudged on, to find a little later a break in the plain. Below was a narrow gully that housed a stream, and around that grew tall brush and saplings.