“He might,” the stout man suggested, “have been afraid of running into a radioactive area.”
Dowland shook his head. “No, sir. He had an instrument which would have warned him if he was approaching one. It would have made much more sense to carry the suit, and slip into it again if it became necessary. I didn’t give the matter much thought at the time. But then the third thing happened. I did not put that in the report because it was a completely subjective impression. I couldn’t prove now that it actually occurred.”
Camhorn leaned forward. “Go ahead.”
“It was just before the time periods separated and the creature that was approaching Miss Trelawney and myself seemed to drop through the top of the mesa—I suppose it fell back into the other period. I’ve described it. It was like a fifty-foot gray slug moving along on its tail and there were those two rows of something like short arms. It wasn’t at all an attractive creature. I was frightened to death. But I was holding a gun—the same gun with which I had stopped another of those things when it chased me during the night. And the trouble was that this time I wasn’t going to shoot.”
“You weren’t going to shoot?” Camhorn repeated.
“No, sir. I had every reason to try to blow it to pieces as soon as I saw it. The other one didn’t follow up its attack on me, so it probably was pretty badly injured. But while I knew that, I was also simply convinced that it would be useless to pull the trigger. That’s as well as I can explain what happened. . . .
“I think these aliens can control the minds of other beings, but can’t control them through the interference set up by something like our AR fields. Paul Trelawney appeared in the other time period almost in their laps. He had a rifle strapped over his back, but presumably they caught him before he had a chance to use it. They would have examined him and the equipment he was carrying, and when they took off his radiation suit, they would have discovered he belonged to a race which they could control mentally. After that, there would have been no reason for them to guard him too closely. He was helpless.
“I think Trelawney realized this, and used a moment when his actions were not being controlled to slip back into the suit. Then he was free to act again. When they discovered he had escaped, some of them were detailed to search for him, and two of those pursuers came out here in our time on the mesa.
“As for Miss Trelawney—well, obviously she wasn’t trying to get away from me. Apparently, she wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. She was simply obeying physically the orders her mind began to receive as soon as she stepped out of the radiation suit. They would have been to come to the thing, wherever it was at the moment—somewhere up to the north of the ranch area, judging from the direction in which she headed.”
There was silence for some seconds. Then Camhorn’s companion observed, “There’s one thing that doesn’t quite fit in with your theory, lieutenant.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Your report states that you switched off your AR field at the same time you advised Miss Trelawney to get out of her suit. You should have been equally subject to the alien’s mental instructions.”
“Well,” Dowland said, “I can attempt to explain that, sir, though again there is no way to prove what I think. But it might be that these creatures can control only one mind at a time. The alien may not have realized that I had . . . well . . . knocked Miss Trelawney unconscious and that she was unable to obey its orders, until it came to the spot and saw us. My assumption is that it wasn’t till that moment that it switched its mental attack to me.”
* * *
The stout man—his name was Laillard White, and he was one of Research’s ace trouble-shooters in areas more or less loosely related to psychology—appeared morosely reflective as he and Camhorn left Solar Police Authority Headquarters, and turned toward the adjoining Overgovernment Bureau.
“I gather from your expression,” Camhorn remarked, “that our lieutenant was telling the truth.”
White grunted. “Of course, he was—as he saw it.”
“And he’s sane?”
“Quite sane,” White agreed absently.
Camhorn grinned. “Then what’s the matter, Lolly? Don’t you like the idea of time-travel?”
“Naturally not. It’s an absurdity.”
“You’re blunt, Lolly. And rash. A number of great minds differ with you about that.”
Laillard White said something rude about great minds in general. He went on, “Was the machine these Trelawneys built found intact?”
Camhorn nodded. “In perfect condition. I found an opportunity to look it over when it and the others the Freeholders had concealed on Terra were brought in.”
“And these machines are designed to make it possible to move through time?”
“No question about that. They function in Riemann space, and are very soundly constructed. A most creditable piece of work, in fact. It’s only regrettable that the Trelawney brothers were wasted on it. We might have put their talents to better use. Though as it turned out . . .” He shrugged.
White glanced over at him. “What are you talking about?” he asked suspiciously.
“They didn’t accomplish time-travel,” Camhorn said, “though in theory they should have. I know it because we have several machines based on the same principles. The earliest was built almost eighty years ago. Two are now designed to utilize the YM thrust. The Trelawney machine is considerably more advanced in a number of details than its Overgovernment counterparts, but it still doesn’t make it possible to move in time.”
“Why not?”
“I’d like to know,” Camhorn said. “The appearance of it is that the reality we live in takes the same dim view of time-travel that you do. Time-travel remains a theoretical possibility. But in practice—when, for example, the YM thrust is applied for that purpose—the thrust is diverted.”
White looked bewildered. “But if Paul Trelawney didn’t move through time, what did he do?”
“What’s left?” Camhorn asked. “He moved through space, of course.”
“Where?”
Camhorn shrugged. “They penetrated Riemann space,” he said, “after harnessing their machine to roughly nineteen thousand times the power that was available to us before the Ymir series of elements dropped into our hands. In theory, Lolly, they might have gone anywhere in the universe. If we’d had the unreasonable nerve to play around with multi-kilograms of YM—knowing what happened when fractional quantities of a gram were employed—we might have had a very similar experience.”
“I’m still just a little in the dark, you know,” Laillard White observed drily, “as to what the experience consisted of.”
“Oh, Lieutenant Dowland’s theory wasn’t at all far off in that respect. It’s an ironic fact that we have much to thank the Trelawneys for. There’s almost no question at all now that the race of beings they encountered were responsible for the troubles that have plagued us in the use of YM. They’re not the best of neighbors—neighbors in Riemann space terms, that is. If they’d known where to look for us, things might have become rather hot. They had a chance to win the first round when the Trelawneys lit that sixty-eight kilogram beacon for them. But they made a few mistakes, and lost us again. It’s a draw so far. Except that we now know about as much about them as they’ve ever learned about us. I expect we’ll take the second round handily a few years from now.”
White still looked doubtful. “Was it one of their planets the Trelawneys contacted?”
“Oh, no. At least, it would have been an extremely improbable coincidence. No, the machine was searching for Terra as Terra is known to have been in the latter part of the Pleistocene period. The Trelawneys had provided something like a thousand very specific factors to direct and confine that search. Time is impenetrable, so the machine had to find that particular pattern of factors in space, and did. The aliens—again as Lieutenant Dowland theorized—then moved through Riemann space to the planet where the YM thrust was manifesting itself so violently. But once there, they still had no way of determining where in the universe the thrust had originated—even though they were, in one sense, within shouting distance of Terra, and two of them were actually on its surface for a time. It must have been an extremely frustrating experience all around for our friends.”
Laillard White said, “Hm-m,” and frowned.
Camhorn laughed. “Let it go, Lolly,” he said. “That isn’t your field, after all. Let’s turn to what is. What do you make of the fact that Dowland appears to have been temporarily immune to the mental commands these creatures can put out?”