Anderson, Poul - SS Read online

  TIME HEALS

  BY POUL ANDERSON

  It’s a safe bet that, eventually, men will find a cure for all diseases; if only a sick man could wait long enough, time would, indeed, heal. But it can also hurt—

  Illustrated by Brush

  Hart followed the doctor down a long corridor where they were the only two in sight and their footsteps had a hollow echo. The fluorescent lights were almost pitilessly bright, and the hall was silent. Silent and empty as—death? No, as the Crypt at its end, as timelessness.

  Hart’s lips were dry, his throat felt tight and his heart beat with a rapid violence that dinned faintly in his ears. He was frightened. Why not admit it? The feeling was utterly illogical, but he was scared silly.

  He asked inanely, as if he and all the rest of the world didn’t know: "There won’t be any sensation at all ?”

  "None,” replied the doctor with a patience suggesting he had led many down this hallway. “You’ll stand on a plate between the field coils, I’ll throw the main switch, and—as far as you’re concerned—you’ll be in the future. Time simply does not exist, as a ‘flow’ at any rate, in a level entropy field.”

  Hart licked his lips. "It’s like dying,” he said.

  The doctor nodded. “In a way, it is death,” he replied. “You’ll be leaving everything behind you— family, friends, the whole world in which you have lived. You can’t go back. When you’re released from the field—ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years hence maybe—you’ll be irrevocably in the future.” He shrugged. “But, of course, you’ll live, whereas your only choice in this era is death.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Hart. “I’m nervous, sure, but I’m not scared. I have every confidence in your machine. It’s just that I never did understand the principles of it, and of course one is naturally skittish in the face of the unknown.”

  “It’s very simple,” said the doctor. “The newspapers have, as usual, made a horrible mess of trying to explain it to the public, and all the legal and moral argument it’s stirred up have further confused the issue. But the scientific basis is very simple indeed.” He adopted a lecturing tone: “Time, of course, is a fourth dimension in a more or less rigid continuum—that’s putting it very crudely, of course, but it shows that simple relativity gives no reason why time should flow, or, if it flows, why it should do so in one direction only. That difficulty was resolved by suggesting that the increase of time was the general increase of entropy throughout the universe with respect to the ‘rigid’ time dimension. Again, that’s a clumsy way of putting it, but you get my general idea. I don’t pretend to understand the details of it myself.

  “Anyway, just a couple of years ago, in 1950 I believe, Seaton found an effect, a field, in which entropy was held level. An object in such a field could not experience any time flow—for it, time would not exist. The generation of such a field turned out to be fairly simple once the basic principles were discovered, so that before long we had—the Crypt.”

  Hart nodded—although he didn’t understand it even now. Science had bored him, he regarded himself as a natural born aesthete and observer of man, a pursuit which a mediumsized independent income made possible. He wrote a little, painted a little, played the piano a little, went to all the exhibitions and concerts, chose his friends and occasional mistresses primarily on a basis of conversational ability, and in general had a pretty good time.

  The fundamental idea of the Crypt was hardly new to him. He had read the old legends—the Seven Sleepers, the tales of Herla, Frederik Barbarossa and Holger Danske—of men for whom time had stopped until the remote future date when they awoke. Only last night, his last night in this world, he had played the whole “Tannhauser” in an orgy of sentimentality.

  There was always a catch. But he had very little to lose. A cancer which had metastasized to the lymph glands meant a short and unpleasant life, perhaps prolonged by operations hopelessly carving away more and more of his flesh—better to take some poison and go out like a gentleman.

  Or, better yet, go into the future when they would have worked out some sure and easy cure for his sickness. And perhaps, he thought, a cure for the political cancers which ate at his own society, a cure for war and poverty and misery. Utopia was not inherently unattainable, to a close approximation anyway— For a moment he was almost looking forward to the adventure, but the tightness and the heavy pulse wouldn’t leave him. He liked his present existence and the future would have to be pretty good to make up for his present.

  Though I’m lucky, he thought. I have no really close ties, none who’ll really miss me or whom I can’t live without. And, I have a high l.Q. and adaptability, I can get along with almost anybody. I won’t suffer.

  He asked : “Are there any people besides those with diseases at present incurable going into the Crypt?”

  “No,” answered the doctor, “except, of course, husbands and wives who wish to accompany their sick spouses, and a few other special cases like that. We just don’t have room for any more.

  “Naturally,” he went on, “we’re swamped with applications from people who want to escape the tribulations of the present for a presumably happier future. But those we ignore. There’s been talk of developing level-entropy units which can be used for everyday purposes like preserving food or other perishables, or even in the household. Imagine cooking a chicken dinner, putting it in the field, and taking it out piping hot whenever needed, maybe twenty years hence! But the manufacturers are very careful about releasing stasis generators, precisely because too many people would try to take a one-way ride into tomorrow. What would become of the present—and would the future want our neurotic escapists ?

  “Several state legislatures have already tried to regulate the use of the Seaton effect, and Congress is arguing about a Federal law. Meanwhile, the Crypt staff uses it simply to save lives which are lost to the present anyway.”

  “If you can be sure they are saved—” murmured Hart.

  “Of course, we can give no hundred-percent guarantee,” said the doctor with elaborate patience, “but I think it’s a very safe bet. The Crypt is in an underground vault well away from any area which might be presumable atomic-bomb targets. Not that even an atom bomb could penetrate a stasis field. Once the fields are set up, they’re self-maintaining until neutralized from outside. Information about the Crypt is diffused throughout the world by now, even if something should happen to the permanent staff, which is unlikely. Whenever a cure for a specific disease is found, we will consult our records and release those suffering from it.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Hart. “But what kind of future—”

  “Who knows?” The doctor shrugged. “But I don’t think it will be too hard to adjust. I rather imagine that a smart Roman or Elizabethan Englishman, say, could do very well for himself in the present. Besides, at the rate medical science is advancing, I don’t think anyone will be in here longer than fifty or a hundred years.”

  “And making a living—”

  “You invested all your money as safely as possible before coming here, didn’t you? You’ll still have it when you awake, then, or the equivalent of it if they change the fiscal system. The Crypt staff will see to that if it isn’t taken care of automatically. You’ll also have quite a bit of accumulated interest.”

  Hart nodded his sleek dark head. “It seems as sound a proposition as human ingenuity can make it,” he said. He added wryly, “Anyway, there’s no point in quibbling, not when the old man with the scythe is so close.”

  “Quite so,” said the doctor.

  They came to the end of the passage, where a great vault door sealed off the Crypt itself. The doctor worked the multiple combination lock, remarking idly, “Even if t
his whole place should be destroyed, the sleepers would be safe. Literally nothing from outside except a neutralizing field can penetrate the stasis. You could be buried under ten tons of earth without its making any difference—till they dug you out and opened your field.”

  “There are things worse than death,” muttered Hart, and then added quickly: “But hardly worse than death by cancer.”

  “Quite.” The doctor started the little motor which opened the huge door. “In a way,” he said, “I envy you. You’ll wake up rich, in a society which is better than ours—it must be, it couldn’t be much worse— and has all the great new adventures we’re just beginning to glimpse—the planets, the stars—” He shrugged. “I may see you again, of course. They’re working hard on the cancer problem right now. But I’ll be a pretty old man then.”

  Hart nodded. “Benjamin Franklin once said he wished that, after he was dead, somebody would wake him every hundred years and tell him what had happened. I see his point.” They entered the Crypt. The room was a huge one, cold in steel and concrete and the white fluorescent lighting. There was little about to suggest the sensation it was arousing in the outer world. It looked much like a burial vault—a sinister thought, that, and one which Hart did his best to abolish—with its long row on row of steel caskets sliding into the walls. Each box, Hart noticed, had a complete case history engraved on its end.

  The doctor followed his eye. “Those supplement our other records, in case they get lost,” he said. “The future physicians can read directly what is the matter with each patient. And just in case something should happen to the Crypt itself, everyone takes another case history into stasis with him, like the one you’re carrying now. So if it should become necessary, if nothing else survived, you could always be ‘wakened’ for the sole purpose of reexamination. But all those precautions are more for the benefit of worriers than because we think they’ll ever be needed.”

  “The patients are actually in those . . . coffins?”

  “Yes. The Seaton generator throws an almost cubical field about the subject. You’ve seen pictures or movies of it—a totally reflecting region, six or seven feet on a side. This field is, as I said, inherently self- maintaining. I heard Seaton himself lecture once, and he said something like the field requiring finite time in which to break down—only there is no time in it. Anyway, we find it most convenient to store those, uh, blocks of frozen time in the vaults you see.”

  Hart licked his lips again. He had always had a touch of necrophobia, and his hands were damp and cold now. To be frozen in time like a fish in a chunk of ice, and stowed away in a steel box for no one knew how long— He had a morbid desire to see his own coffin, but did not indulge it. That would not have fitted the picture he had of himself, which was somewhere between Epicure and Stoic.

  They came into a smaller room at the end of the Crypt. It was crowded with apparatus which was meaningless to Hart. A couple of technicians stood by, smoking and talking and most infernally casual about it all.

  “Well,” said the doctor, a little awkwardly, “I guess this is it. Are you sure you don’t want to leave any farewell messages or—?”

  “No,” said Hart. “I hate goodbyes. I’ve said mine, and don’t want that railway-platform waiting at the end. Let’s get it over with.”

  “O.K. Mount that plate over there, please, between those four big coils. And—good luck.” The doctor extended his hand and Hart shook it, thinking to himself that it was a wholly unnecessary gesture. Maybe they’d have better taste in the future.

  He climbed up onto the silvery disk and stood looking out between coils that were taller than he was. His knees were a little weak—almost, he was temped to shout, to call a halt— But that would be silly, of course.

  The technicians busied themselves about the generator with that casual competence he had always found irritating in their breed. He heard the list of instrument readings called out, someone else said, “Check,” and he thought briefly and wildly, Maybe it’s also mate. A switch slammed down and a blue glow hovered over the coils. He heard a low, rising hum.

  It faded. “Alri, no,” said the doctor. “Du can downstep no.”

  Hart had a moment where his mind wobbled, where he thought wildly that it hadn’t worked after all. Great Heaven, he was still in the world, still at home—

  What had happened to the doctor? Where were the technicians? These weren’t the same men they had been an instant ago!

  An instant—no, an age. There was no time-flow in the stasis field— he was in the future.

  He had thought himself mentally prepared. But it was too sudden. The shock was too blurringly great, shattering, devastating shock of suddenly alien men, alien speech, alien world. He staggered a little, and the doctor stepped up on the platform to support him.

  “Taak it aisy no,” said the stranger soothingly. “Are shock, I knuw. But du are mung towarishes no.” Hart leaned on the man’s arm—a big, solid fellow, which was somehow reassuring—and let the soft, lilting words slide over the surface of his mind. Almost, they were familiar. For a moment he couldn’t follow the speech at all, then he caught words and recognized the changes in accent. Except for the foreign terms and the slang, he could follow the language. Certainly he could get the drift of it.

  Only—how long would it take to modify the tongue so much?

  He almost croaked the question. The doctor said slowly, “Dis are yaar 2837, du would say. But bay chronomizing nos, are yaar 2841.”

  “What on earth—” The sheer incongruity of it jerked Hart from his daze. He might have accepted a wholly different chronology, but four years’ difference! “How the hell did that ever happen?”

  “Hell—” For a moment, the doctor was puzzled, then his face cleared. “Oh, yes, medyaeval belief.” He smiled. “Skood du raaly ask huw de Heaven. See du, in su named Second Dark Ages Americas waar under rule of de Kyirk of de Second Coming. Dey waar religio fanatics whuw held dat chronomizing skood be set up four yaars since dey claimed Christ waar raaly horned in 4 B.C. bay uwld chronomizing. Bay time yoke of de Kyirk waar overthruwn, everybody waar used to new style.”

  Hart nodded, a little overwhelmed. “I . . . see-”

  It didn’t matter, though. It didn’t matter. The . . . the Church of the Second Coming was in the past now, the dusty buried past which had still been in the future—ten minutes ago!

  Almost nine hundred years. Nine hundred years!

  “Here.” The doctor gave him a little flask. “Drink du dis.”

  He gulped the liquid. It was tasteless, but it seemed to lay a great calm hand on him, his mind steadied and the trembling went out of his knees. He looked around him.

  The chamber was different. The Crypt was not nearly so full, and it bore signs of extensive repair work. Many must have been released, many— But lymphatic cancer was really a tough diesase, it would have taken time to work out the cure and if ages of barbarism had intervened—

  His eyes swung to the men. There were, as before, two technicians and a doctor. (And the three men of his time were dust these many centuries) . They were large, wellshaped fellows, with dark hair and skin, eyes with a hint of obliquity, high cheekbones—but, clearly, the Caucasoid strain still predominated however great an admixture there had been. They looked curiously alike, as if they were brothers, and were dressed almost identically— sandals, kilt, and tunic of some faintly iridescent material, with a curious involved pattern reminiscent of Scottish tartans on the left breast. There must have been immense folk wanderings during the dark ages, thought Hart vaguely, fantastic interbreeding and a rise of composite types of man.

  He said aloud, slowly: “You have a cure for my case?”

  “Of cuwrse, Tov Hart. De uwld records did not survive, but de Crypt and traditions abuwt it did. Su alsuw did de case histories engraved on de metal. We are ready for du no. De meditechnics have bee-an perfected 'uwnly in de last fifty yaars, and of cuwrse we wanted to be shoor we waar right before waking any of de ‘sleeper
s’.”

  “I seem to be one of the last.”

  “Indeed, Tov Hart, du are.. Case duurs proved more difficult dan had bee-an antsipated. But we have a quick and aisy treating no.”

  “Well—” It might only have been the stimulant, or maybe the words, but Hart felt immensely braced. He was going to live! And in a super-scientific world of friendly people, he should be able to make his way. His money would hardly have survived all the changes of history, hut—well, there must he some provision made for the “sleepers.”

  The world wasn’t such a bad place. Even in the far future, it wasn’t bad.

  “I’m afraid you have the better of me,” he said to the doctor. At his puzzled look, he added: “With regard to names, I mean.”

  “Oh. Pardon, Tov. We are all Rostoms here. I are Waldor Rostom Chang, here are Hallan Rostom Duwgal and Olwar Rostom Serwitch.”

  The three men bowed formally. Hart tried to return the gesture, but couldn’t quite imitate the slight knee bend and the position of hands and head. “Philip Bronson Hart,” he said. “But the middle name isn’t the family name, the last is.”

  “As wit us,” said the doctor,

  Waldor Chang. “Family name nos come last, group name in middle, gived name in front. But dey had not de groupings in time duurs, did dey?” He smiled. “Come du no, towarish, above ground. De clinic are quite neaar, and we will suwn have du well.”

  The landscape hadn’t changed much, there were still the same hills and trees, the far shining thread of a river and the wind cool and fresh on their faces. White clouds walked overhead through a sky of sunny blue, and a thrush was singing in a little thicket.

  But there were few signs of man. The little village which had once been visible down beside the river had long since moldered into the earth, and the buildings of the Crypt center were gone, replaced with a single-roomed frame hut over the vault itself. Above the trees Hart could see a structure of stone and sun-flashing glass which must be the clinic, but otherwise there was no trace of civilization.