Henry Kuttner - The Time Axis

Henry Kuttner

The story of four adventurers from the 20th century who face a power of ultimate destruction at the end of time. It becomes a battle that rages through the core of time.

The whole thing never happened and I can prove itnow. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story.

So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space.

I dont know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs foreverforever and yet not forever, in space and out of spaceon the axis stretching through time from beginning to end.

From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.

I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor.

And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Eawhich I shall never be able to describe fully.

I saw it, though. I saw it, luminous in the reddish dusk, speaking to me silently above the winds that scour perpetually across the dead, empty lands of a day yet to come. I think it will stand there forever in an empty land on a dead planet, watching the endless night draw slowly on through days as long as years. The stars will stand and the Earth-nekropohs will stand and the Face will stand there forever. I was there. I saw it.

Was there? Will be? Maybe?I cant tell now. But of all stories in the world, this more than any needs a pattern.

Since the beginning is in the past, before men as such existed at all, the only starting place I know is a temporal and personal one, when I was drawn into the experiment. Now that I know a little more about the nature of time it seems clearer to me that past, present and future were all stepping stones, arranged out of sequence. The first step took place two months ago.

That was here in this time and space. Or in the time and space that existed two months ago.

Theres been a change.

Now this is the way it used to be.

For me, the Big Ride. You start when youre born. You climb on the toboggan and then youre off. But you can only have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-taker you want to go again.

They shovel you under at the end of the slope and theres a new lot of passengers waiting. Youve had your three-score and ten. And its over.

Id ridden the toboggan for thirty-five years. Jeremy Cortland, Jerry Cortland of the Denver

Post, the Frisco Call-Bulletin, PM, AP, Time, Collzers sometimes staff, sometimes roving assignments. I leaned out of the toboggan and plucked fruit from the orchards as I sped by. Strange fruit, sometimes. Generic term is News. And that covers a lot of territory.

There was a splinter in the toboggans seat. I had on red flannel underwear. I had a nervous tic. I couldnt sit still. I kept reaching out, grabbing. Years of it, of by-lines that said cabled by Jeremy Cortland.

Russia, China, war coverage, Piccards bathyscaphe, the supersonic and altostratosphere planes, the Russian earth-borer gadget, the Big Eye at Palomarthe coal strikes and the cracker lynchings and that dirt farmer in North Dakota who suddenly began to work miracles. (His patients didnt stay cured, you remember, and he disappeared.)

The Big Ride. In between I grabbed at other things. One marriage, one divorce, and more and more bulges. Long bouts, between assignments. I didnt give awell, you cant use that word in some papers. But it was all right. What did I expect, heaven?

The eyes arent quite as clear as they used to be. The skin under them is a little puffy. One chin begins to be not quite enough. But its still the Big Ride. With a splinter in the seat.

Dodging alimony payments, I skipped to Brazil, got in on a submarine exploration of the Amazon, wrote it up, sold it to AP as a feature. The first installment appeared on the same day as another little itemburied in the backthat said 85 and 87 had been made artificially.

Astatine and franciumthe missing link in the periodic tabletwo billion years ago you could have picked up all the astatine and francium you wanted, just by reaching down and grabbing. If youd been around at the time. Since then 85 and 87 have decayed into other elements. But Seaborg and Ghiorso at UC made them synthetically, with the big cyclotron and atomic oven transmutation, and the column on one side of that trivial item said SECOND BURN-DEATH VICTIM FOUND, and on the other there was a crossword puzzle.

I didnt care, either.

Those deaths, by an indefinable sort of burning, were just starting to confound the United States authorities at the time. They hadnt yet spread to South America.

There was another item in that same ParAr that concerned me though I didnt know it at the time seemed that Ira De Kalb was working with Military Intelligence on some sort of highly secret projectso secret you could read all about it as far south as Rio if you had the price of the paper.

I had my own current problem. And it was a very odd one.

The thing started six weeks before it began. Youll have to get used to paradoxwhich isnt paradox once you grasp the idea.

It started in an alley in Rio, a little cobbled tunnel opening off the Rua dOuvidor, and what I was doing there at three oclock of a summer morning in January Ill never be able to tell you. Id been drinking. Also Id been playing chemin de fer and there was a thick pad of banknotes in the inside pocket of my white jacket, another stuffed into the dark wine-colored cummerbund I was wearing.

Looking down, I could see the toes of my shoes twinkling in the moonlight as I walked. The sky twinkled too, and the lights up in the hills and out on the bay. The world was a shiny place, revolving gently around me.

I was rich. But this time it was going to last. This time Id cut out the binges and take a little house up in Petropolis, where its cool, and Id really get down to work on the analysis of news-coverage Id been planning for so long. Id made up my mind. I was drunk but Id be sober again and the resolution would stay behind when the liquor died.

I dont often get these fits of decision but when they come theyre valid enough and I knew this one was serious. That was a turning point in the career of Jerry Cortland, there in the moonlight on the checkered pavement.

What happened at the mouth of that alley Ill never really know. Fortunately for me I couldnt see or realize it clearly, being drunk.

It sprang from the deep shadow and put out two arms at me. That much Im sure of. Two arms that never touched me. They never meant to. They shot past my ears, and I heard a thin hissing noise and something seemed to turn over in my mind, leisurely, like a deep-buried thought stirring to life. I could all but feel it move.

I touched it.

I wish I hadnt. But I was thinking of my money. My hand closed on the thingon a part of it

no one will ever know on just what. I will only tell you it was smooth with a smoothness that burned my hand. Friction burned it, I think now. The sheer velocity of the thing, though it was not then moving perceptibly, took a neat thin layer of cuticle off my palm wherever it touched. I think it slid out of my grip on a thin lubrication of my own skin.