Atomic lighting and straw beds. A crude sort of vivisection was going on – and the subjects were human beings. A snow shower of static blurred the image. Then we were peering from the outpost across the dreary gulches of Venus. A chain of human beings passed the window in single file. They were poorly clad and wore no space suits; a close-up showed us, sickeningly, why. They could breathe the unbreathable Venusian air. An operation had been performed; their nostrils were blocked with living flesh, and a complex, multi-flanged nose was grafted into their windpipes.
‘So were first, smots created,’ said the commentator. ‘Dey never returned. Dey multiplied in hidden recesses o’ planet. Some o’ dem cross-bred with true Venusians and formed smoofs. Smot and smoof greatest menace …’
We were shown pithily just what a menace they were. They started as a new race without background or tradition, loathing the planet that was now their home, but with the knowledge of hate and of the weapons of science, to which they speedily added a few kinks of their own. In five generations they had space travel and in seven they had split the space-time band and were able, in space, to travel for some distance back and forward in time. Our commentator barked an explanation of all this that seemed to consist mainly of formulae, but it was obvious that humanity had been unable to duplicate the discovery of the semi-human race. Fortunately, the smot and smoof were able to time travel only from space, which meant that their big, rickety spaceships moved a century back and then released a scout which could blast down and land, wreaking what havoc it could, and later rejoin its parent ship; but the warp effect involved was only operative in free space and by the enormous nuclear directors that needed a giant vessel to carry them. So the police forces of Earth, spread out in grim fortresses over the whole barbarous ring of inner planets, were given sitting targets – provided the targets would sit in the present.
Under a state of affairs where your yesterday might hourly be cut from under you or your future be already shattered, humanity and its concerns suffered a staggering blow. Ethics, logic, the sane comforts of a continuous memory, were now swept away. Rigid martial law was universally declared, air, army and space forces turned into an ubiquitous police force.
Harry and I sat helpless before this glimpse into chaos, where tomorrow flickered helplessly to keep up with the brutal revision of yesterday. It was by these stab-in-the-back methods that Bristol or Brussels was demolished, and other centres followed the same fate. The forces of the smoof seemed to be spreading destruction everywhere; the only hope for man was that the semi-humans seemed to have run into another race in their future who possessed weapons the smoof could not withstand.
We saw a smoof ship captured by Earth’s police, and its crew, with one exception, massacred without mercy on the spot, the exception, a smoof of some importance, being taken to Eros station. He was the subject of our criminal file; his wan, noseless features slid across the screen. There was an interval – an explosion – the station crumbled into ruin – smoofs appeared from a giant ship visible through a gaping hole – the hole disappeared, the station re-integrated – the smoofs vanished – reappeared – were shot down – vanished. Timesliding – an earthquake in human metabolism. The scene blurred and trembled, filmed crazily from a high angle on automatic; Hollywood’s patient art of focus and composition has been lost in this dizzy totalitarian future. Abruptly, there was nothing.
‘Time lines crossed?’ Harry asked from a wrinkled face.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It comes on again in a minute.’
It did. It was quite different. Still squalor, still Eros, but all changed. Other men carried on the hunt. High Space-Dick Hagger had a good nose but freckles and a bald head. The very symbols on his uniform had changed.
‘Der smoof was rescued. Gone into der past – noo machines carrying them further back than ever,’ the commentator grunted. ‘Record revideoed 2/xii/12/309 – we hope.’
There it ended. It had only taken about twenty minutes, but in that time I suppose we had both lost something of our souls – the same something those unhappy descendants of ours had long forgotten amid kaleidoscoping events. And in the last seconds of vision a detail I had not noticed before: across that dreary new instrument room a man walked, near enough to the recording eye for us to see his face clearly. It was Harry Crossway.
And that changed the whole meaning of the whole affair. It meant that my finding the record was not an accident, but something planned by beings with a knowledge of our future; it meant the smoofs were pressing even further back in time for – what? – technicians like Harry and me? And it gave, above all, a ghastly sense of predestination: and predestination is something you can’t level a gun at. Harry at least was going to be – was it certain? – kidnapped into that Frankenstein world; the videofile proved that.
And me? I can only guess, and it gives me the shakes.
Now it is five minutes to nine. I have phoned the unbelieving police, more in anger than hope. One lurks downstairs, one in the bathroom – neither is armed. Harry, a man with a fear on his back, crouches behind the curtain that screens off my bed. He is nursing his revolver. I scrawl this down – it may help, somehow.
Outside, dear old Cambridge is silent. No, a car pulls round the corner. It draws up outside. A man climbs out, a man with a light scarf round his throat – no, no, it’s not a man! His nose –
I reckon we haven’t got a chance.
The two men fought almost soundlessly in the twilit hall. Mating fights traditionally took place in the Outflanks, where the great machines finished. Wilms was slightly the taller, being seven foot one, but Grant was the younger. They fought without weapons or rules. It was a knee in Grant’s stomach that finished the battle.
The younger man lay gasping in the deep dust. Wilms attempted to stand over him and then, too exhausted, sank down beside his late opponent.
‘Now Osa is mine,’ he said.
Grant nodded, too breathless and bitter to speak. His ingrained pessimism did little to mitigate the defeat; expecting a beating is a sensation in a different category to receiving one.
‘She’ll be a handful,’ Wilms admitted, as if to console the other. Silence. He gazed up at the ceiling, which sagged ominously above them.
‘The sky will fall here soon,’ he commented irrelevantly.
‘Osa says it is not sky,’ Grant said from the ground.
‘I know what Osa says,’ Wilms said roughly, standing up. ‘You might have made her a good mate, Grant, but you don’t do enough for her. She’s – she’s too big for this world. She needs a doer like me, not a dreamer like you.’
Spitting crossly into the dirt, Grant got up.
‘No more need for talk between us, Wilms,’ he snarled. ‘Whatever we have been together in the past is ended. For all I care the Fliers can get you!’
He turned back in the gloom. Wilms bit his lip and hesitated, thinking of the years of emptiness that Grant’s friendship had filled.
Then he hurried after the younger man and touched his arm.
‘Grant – ’ he began, but when he saw the other’s hostile eyes he stopped and dropped his hand. Grant was allowed to wander off in Hallways direction. His late friend stood with the shadows on his face, feeling far from
