Henry Kuttner by The Time Axis

Author:The Time Axis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-08-25T23:06:10+00:00

XV

CRUMBLING FLESH

THE four silent figures lay deep in their age-old slumber in the chamber under the mountain. I saw them there again. I could feel the weight of the helmet on my head and I was this time fully aware of the Swan Garden around me and the sound of Paynter's breathing at my side. But I was seeing the projection of a three-dimensional film. I was looking into the chamber as a camera's eye had looked.

"This is the official record we made when we opened the cave," Paynter said invisibly at my elbow. "Now watch carefully what happens. No one knows this but you and myself and the few technicians who were on the spot. We've kept it quiet. It's so—so—well, watch and you'll see."

Nothing moved in the cave. Nothing had moved, I suppose, for a thousand years or more, not since all motion ceased when we sank into our long slumber. But now lights began to flash from beyond the gray egg of nothingness that walled us in. Paynter's technicians were at work, trying to break that shell, trying to hatch out—what? Something terrifying. I knew that by the tone of Paynter's voice. '

The lights flashed and faded, glowed again, paled. Now the camera drew back and I could see Paynter himself, standing beside a group of workers and a battery of machines. All were intent upon the egg of time that held the sleepers.

It was curious to hear Paynter speak then—the Paynter of the cavern, speaking in the film, not the Paynter who sat beside me. Duplication piled upon duplication.

"What are the chances?" I heard him ask. "Are they going to wake?"

Murmurs answered him. After awhile, during which his eyes were very thoughtful upon the sleepers and upon the woman among the sleepers in particular, I heard him say in a musing voice, "We should have one of the entertainers here. If this is actually a time involvement, as you say, then these people will have been asleep a long while and they'll feel bewildered when they wake.

"We need someone like—like—yes, Topaz—to speed their adjustment." (I knew why he had thought of Topaz. I knew he had seen, without realizing it, the face of Topaz implicit in Dr. Essen's sleeping face.)

"Send for Topaz," he said firmly, his voice echoing in the cavern as ours had echoed once, a thousand years or many thousand of years before.

(Now perhaps this is as good a place as any for a word about the language he was speaking. It was certainly English but not as familiar a language as I write down. Any living tongue rapidly accumulates new words and phrases, drops old ones, assigns new meanings to words already in use, so that the colloquialisms of one generation are gibberish to the generation before it.

(The English we were speaking was changed, not a living language. Matter-transmission had spread civilization over a vast area and some common tongue was a necessity, but it couldn't be a tongue that changed or it would soon cease to be a common language.

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