“—the same place on a gravel plain.”
Kaehler shrugged. “In this universe, perhaps not,” she said. “We’re accessing the past through the Dirac Sea. The normal universe is only a film on the—”
She shrugged again. It was the closest to a display of emotion Dresser had seen from her.
“—surface. Time isn’t a dimension outside the normal universe.”
“Kaehler!” Captain Bailey shouted. “Stop talking to that taxi driver and begin the search sequence. We’ve got a job to do, woman!”
The target pole hazed slightly in Dresser’s vision, though the holographic image remained as sharp as the diamond-edged cutting bar on the scout’s harness.
* * *
“I wanted to learn what it did,” Dresser said in the direction of the image on the admiral’s wall display. “I don’t like to be around hardware and not know what it does. That’s dangerous.”
Admiral Horwarth glanced over her shoulder to see if anything in particular was holding the scout’s attention. The Ichton rubbed its upper limbs across its wedge-shaped head as though cleaning its eyes. It raised one of its middle pair of legs and scrubbed with it also.
Horwarth looked around again. “Captain Bailey was able to find the correct time horizon, then?” she prompted.
“Not at first,” Dresser said in his husky, emotionless voice. “You said five thousand years.”
“The source believed the event occurred five thousand standard years ago,” the admiral corrected. “But there were many variables.”
“Kaehler went back more than ten thousand,” Dresser said, “before she found anything but a gravel wasteland . . .”
* * *
“There,” Kaehler said. Bailey, watching the monitor in the support module, bellowed, “Stop! I’ve got it!”
Dresser was watching the display when it happened. He might not have been. The search had gone on for three watches without a break, and mantra’s own long twilight was beginning to fall.
The pulsing, colored static of the huge hologram shrank suddenly into outlines as the equipment came into focus with another time. The score of previous attempts displayed a landscape which differed from that of the present only because the target pole was not yet a part of it. This time—this Time—the view was of smooth, synthetic walls in swirls of orange and yellow.
Kaehler rocked a vernier. The images blurred, then dollied back to provide a panorama instead of the initial extreme close-up. Slimly conical buildings stood kilometers high. They were decorated with all the hues of the rainbow as well as grays that might be shades beyond those of the human optical spectrum. Roadways linked the structures to one another and to the ground, like the rigging of sailing ships. Moving vehicles glinted in the sunlight.
“Not that!” Bailey shouted. “Bring it in close so that we can see what they look like.”
Kaehler manipulated controls with either index finger simultaneously. She rolled them—balls inset into the surface of her console—off the tips and down the shafts of her fingers. The scale of the image shrank while the apparent point of view slid groundward again.
Dresser, proud of the way he could grease a scout boat in manually if he had to, marvelled at the scientist’s smooth skill.
“Get me a close-up, dammit!” Bailey ordered.
The huge image quivered under Kaehler’s control before it resumed its slant downward. “We’re calibrating the equipment,” she said in little more than a whisper. “We’re not in a race . . .”
Pedestrians walked in long lines on the ground among the buildings. Vehicles zipped around them like balls caroming from billiard cushions instead of curving as they would have done if guided by humans.
The locals, the Mantrans, were low-slung and exoskeletal. They had at least a dozen body segments with two pairs of legs on each. They carried the upper several segments off the ground. A battery of simple eyes was set directly into the chitin of the head.
Kaehler manually panned her point of view, then touched a switch so that the AI would continue following the Mantran she had chosen. The alien was about two meters long. Its chitinous body was gray, except for a segment striped with blue and green paint.
“They have hard shells too,” Kaehler commented. “You’d think the Ichtons might treat them better.”