“I’ve heard of such things,” Dowland said drily.
It wouldn’t, however, be done that way. It was the kind of thing told a man already as good as dead, to keep him from making a desperate attempt to save himself. The Freeholders really wouldn’t have much choice. Something had loused up their plans here, and if Dowland either disappeared or was found suffering from a sudden bout of amnesia, the IPA would turn its full attention on Terra at once. If he died, his death could be plausibly arranged to look like an accident or a killing for personal motives. These people were quite capable of sacrificing one of their group to back such a story up. And it would pass. Terra was under no more immediate suspicion than any other world. Dowland had been on a routine assignment.
* * *
There were a few brief preparations. Paul Trelawney checked the batteries in the radiation suits he and Jill were wearing, then exchanged his set for that of the spare suit. Dowland left his own AR field off for the moment. It was at least as adequate as the one developed by the Trelawneys’ suits, and in some respects a much more practical device. But the suit batteries had an effective life of twenty-four hours, expending them automatically while the suits were worn. His field would maintain itself for a minimum of an hour and a half, a maximum of two hours. In this situation, Dowland wasn’t sure how long he would have to depend on the field. A few more minutes of assured protection might make a difference.
He saw Trelawney studying the mountaineering rig on the floor; then he picked up the harness and brought it over to him.
“Here, put it on,” he said.
“What for?” Dowland asked, surprised.
Trelawney grinned. “We may have a use for it. You’ll find out in a minute or two.”
They left the house by a back entrance. Clouds were banked low on the eastern horizon now; the first sunlight gleamed pale gold beneath them. In the west the sky was brown with swirling dust. Jill stopped twenty yards from the laboratory building and stood on the slope, rifle in hand, watching the men go on. At the door, Dowland switched on his AR field. Trelawney tossed the disk-shaped key over to him.
“Know how to use it?”
Dowland nodded.
“All right. After you’ve snapped it in and it releases again, throw it back to me. It may be the last one around, and we’re not taking it into the laboratory this time. When the door starts moving down, step back to the right of it. We’ll see what the lab is like before we go in.” Trelawney indicated a thimble-sized instrument on his suit. “This’ll tell whether the place is hot at the moment, and approximately how hot.” He waved the IPA gun in Dowland’s direction. “All right, go ahead.”
Dowland fitted the key into the central depression in the door, pressed down, felt the key snap into position with a sharp twisting motion of its own, released his pressure on it. An instant later, the key popped back out into his hand. He tossed it back to Trelawney, who caught it left-handed and threw it over his head in Jill’s direction. The disk thudded heavily into the grass ten feet from her. The girl walked over, picked it up, and slid it into one of her suit pockets.
The slab of metasteel which made up the laboratory door began moving vertically downward. The motion stopped when the door’s top rim was still several inches above the level of the sill.
A low droning came from the little instrument on Trelawney’s suit. It rose and fell irregularly like the buzz of a circling wasp. Mingled with it was something that might have been the hiss of escaping steam. That was Dowland’s detector confirming. The lab reeked with radiation.
He glanced over at Trelawney.
“Hot enough,” the Freeholder said. “We’ll go inside. But stay near the door for a moment. There’s something else I want to find out about. . . .
* * *
Inside, the laboratory was unpartitioned and largely empty, a great shell of a building. Only the section to the left of the entrance appeared to have been used. That section was lighted. The light arose evenly from the surfaces of the raised machine platform halfway over to the opposite wall. The platform was square, perhaps twenty feet along its sides. Dowland recognized the apparatus on it from Trelawney’s diagrams. The central piece was an egg-shaped casing which appeared to be metasteel. Near its blunt end, partly concealed, stood the long, narrow instrument console. Behind the other end of the casing, an extension ramp jutted out above the platform. At the end of the ramp was a six-foot disk that might have been quartz, rimless, brightly iridescent. It was tilted to the left, facing the bank of instruments.
“A rather expensive bit of equipment over there, Dowland,” Trelawney said. “My brother developed the concept, very nearly in complete detail, almost twenty-five years ago. But a great deal of time and thought and work came then before the concept turned into the operating reality on that platform.”
He nodded to the left. “That’s Miguel’s coat on the floor. I wasn’t sure it would still be here. The atomic key you were searching for so industriously last night is in one of its pockets. Miguel was standing just there, with the coat folded over his arm, when I saw him last—perhaps two or three seconds before I was surprised to discover I was no longer looking at the instrument controls in our laboratory.”
“Where were you?” Dowland asked. “Six hundred thousand years in the past?”
“The instruments showed a fix on that point in time,” Trelawney said. “But this was, you understand, a preliminary operation. We intended to make a number of observations. We had not planned a personal transfer for several more weeks. But in case the test turned out to be successful beyond our expectations, I was equipped to make the transfer. That bit of optimistic foresight is why I’m still alive.”
What was the man waiting for? Dowland asked, “What actually happened?”
“A good question, I’d like to know the whole answer myself. What happened in part was that I suddenly found myself in the air, falling toward a river. It was night and cloudy, but there was light enough to show it was a thoroughly inhospitable river. . . . And now I believe”—his voice slowed thoughtfully—”I believe I understand why my brother was found outside the closed door of this building. Over there, Dowland. What does that look like to you?”
Near the far left of the building, beyond the immediate range of the light that streamed from the machine stand, a big packing crate appeared to have been violently—and rather oddly—torn apart. The larger section of the crate lay near the wall, the smaller one approximately twenty feet closer to the machine platform. Assorted items with which it had been packed had spilled out from either section. But the floor between the two points of wreckage was bare and unlittered. Except for that, one might have thought the crate had exploded.
* * *
“It wasn’t an explosion,” Trelawney agreed when Dowland said as much. He was silent a moment, went on, “In this immediate area, two space-time frames have become very nearly superimposed. There is a constant play of stresses now as the two frames attempt to adjust their dissimilarities. Surrounding our machine we have a spherical concentration of those stresses, and there are moments when space here is literally wrenched apart. If one were caught at such an instant—ah!”
To Dowland it seemed that a crack of bright color had showed briefly in the floor of the building, between the door and the machine platform. It flickered, vanished, reappeared at another angle before his ears had fully registered the fact that it was accompanied by a curiously chopped-off roar of sound. Like a play of lightning. But this was . . . .
The air opened out before him, raggedly framing a bright-lit three-dimensional picture. He was staring down across a foaming river to the rim of a towering green and yellow forest. The crash of the river filled the building. Something bulky and black at the far left . . . but the scene was gone—
The interior of the laboratory building lay quiet and unchanged before them again. Dowland said hoarsely, “How did you know what was going to happen?”
“I was in a position to spend several hours observing it,” Trelawney said, “from the other side. You see now, I think, that we can put your mountaineer’s kit to some very practical use here.”
Dowland glanced across the building. “The walls . . .”
“Metasteel,” Trelawney said, “and thank God for that. The building’s sound; the stresses haven’t affected it. We’ll have some anchor points. A clamp piton against that wall, six feet above the console walk and in line with it, another one against the doorframe here, and we can rope across.”