In Deep (19 page)

There was pain and contrition in the Beachcomber’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. He helped Maxwell to sit up. “I don’t often forget myself that way. Will you forgive me?”

Maxwell’s chest was still numb; it was hard to breathe. “Don’t know,” he said with difficulty. “What did you do it for?”

Sunlight gleamed dazzlingly on the Beachcomber’s bare head. His eyes were in deep shadow, and shadows sketched the bold outline of his nose, marked the firm, bitter lines of his mouth. He said, “I’ve offended you.” He paused. “I’ll explain, Vernon, but there’s one condition—don’t tell anybody else, ever.”

He put his big hand on Maxwell’s wrist and Maxwell felt the power that flowed from him. “All right?”

“All right,” said Maxwell. A curious complex of emotions boiled inside him—anger and petulance, curiosity, and something else, deeper down: a vague, objectless fear. “Go ahead.”

The Beachcomber talked. After a few minutes he seemed almost to forget Maxwell; he stared out across the silver sea, and Maxwell, half hypnotised by the deep, resonant voice, watched his hawklike profile in silence.

Dimly, he saw the universe the Beachcomber spoke of: a universe of men set free. Over that inconceivable gap of time that stretched between Maxwell’s time and theirs, they had purged themselves of all their frailties. Maxwell saw them striding among the stars, as much at home in the pitiless void as on the verdant planets they loved. He saw them tall and faultless and strong, handsome men and beautiful women, all with the power that glowed in the Beachcomber, but without a hint of his sadness. If they were angels, he was Lucifer.

He tried to imagine what the daily life of those people must be like, and couldn’t; it was three million years beyond his comprehension. But when he looked at the Beachcomber’s face, he knew that the last men were human beings like himself, capable of love, hate, joy and despair.

“We had mating customs that would seem peculiar to you,” said the Beachcomber after a while. “Like elephants—because we were so long-lived, you know. We—married—late, and it was for life. My marriage was about to take place when we found the enemy.”

“The enemy?” said Maxwell. “But—didn’t you say you were the only dominant life form in the whole universe?”

“That’s right.” The Beachcomber outlined an egg-shaped figure with a motion of his cupped hands, caressingly. “The universe; all of it. Everything that existed in this space. It was all ours. But the enemy didn’t come from this universe.”

“Another dimension?” Maxwell asked.

The Beachcomber looked puzzled. “Another—” he said, and stopped. “I thought I could say it better than that in English, but I can’t. Dimension isn’t right—call it another timeline; that’s a little closer.”

“Another universe like ours, co-existent with this one, anyhow,” said Maxwell.

“No—not the same as ours, at all. Different laws, different—” He stopped again.

“Well, can you describe the enemy?”

“Ugly,” said the Beachcomber promptly. “We’d been searching other—dimensions, if you want to use that word—for thousands of years, and this was the first intelligent race we found. We hated them on sight.” He paused. “If I drew you a picture, it would look like a little spiny cylinder. But a picture wouldn’t convey it. I can’t explain.” His mouth contracted with distaste.

“Go on,” said Maxwell. “What happened? They invaded you?”

“No. We tried to destroy them. We broke up the crystal spiderwebs they built between their worlds; we smashed their suns. But more than a quarter of them survived our first attack, and then we knew we were beaten. They were as powerful as we were, more so in some ways—”

“Wait, I don’t get it,” said Maxwell unbelievingly. “You attacked them—without provocation? Wiped out three-quarters of them, simply because—”

“There was no possible peace between us and them,” said the Beachcomber. “And it was only a matter of time before they discovered US; it was simply a chance that we made the contact first.”

What would an unspoiled South Sea Islander have made of the first atomic war? Maxwell wondered. Morals of one society didn’t apply to another, he knew. Still—was it possible that the Beachcomber’s people, Maxwell’s own descendants, still had a taint of the old Adam? And was it accident that they were the only dominant life form in the entire universe, or had they eliminated all other contenders?

Not for him to judge, he decided; but he didn’t like it. He said, “Then what? They counterattacked?”

“Yes. We had time to prepare, and we knew what they were going to do. The trouble was, there simply was no defense against it.” He noticed Maxwell’s wry smile. “Not like the planet busters; there is a defense against those, you just haven’t found it yet. But there actually was no defense whatever against their weapon. They were going to destroy our universe, down to the last quantum—wipe it right out of the series, make a blank where it had been.”

“And?” said Maxwell. He was beginning to understand why the Beachcomber had never told this story to anyone else; why the public at large must never know it. There was a feeling of doom in it that would color everything men did. It was possible, he supposed, to live with the knowledge that the end of it all was death, but fatalism was the mark of a dying culture.

“And there was just one thing we could do,” said the Beachcomber. “Not a defense, but a trick. At the instant before their weapon was due to take effect, we planned to bring our universe back three million years along its own time-line. It would vanish, just as if it had been destroyed. Then, if it worked, we’d be able to return, but on a different time-line—because, obviously, on our own line nothing like this doubling back had already happened. Changing the past changes the future; you know the theory.”

“Yeah. So—you were too late, is that it? You got away, but all the rest were destroyed.”

“The timing was perfect,” said the Beachcomber. “All the calculations were perfect. There’s a natural limit to the distance in time any mass can travel, and we managed to meet it exactly. Three million years. I wish we hadn’t. If we hadn’t, I could go back again—” He stopped, and his jaw hardened.

“There isn’t much more to tell,” he said. “I happened to be chosen to execute the plan. It was a great honor, but not an easy one to accept. Remember, I was about to be married. If anything went wrong it meant that we’d be separated forever… We couldn’t even die together. But I accepted. I had one day with her—one day; and then I set up the fields and waited for the attack. Just one microsecond before it would have reached us, I released the energy that was channeled through me—and the next instant, I was falling into the ocean out there.”

He turned a tormented face to Maxwell. “It was the worst possible luck!” he said. “You can see for yourself, there was less chance of my landing anywhere near a planet than of finding one given pebble on all the beaches of this planet.”

Maxwell felt as if he had missed the point of a joke. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “You say you landed—but what about the universe? Where did it—”

The Beachcomber made an impatient gesture. “You don’t think we could bring it back into a space it already occupied, do you? It was in stasis, all but a fraction out of this time-line. Just a miniature left, so that it could be controlled. A model of the universe, so big.” He spread his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Just a pebble.”

Maxwell’s jaw dropped open. He stared at the giant. “You don’t mean—you—”

“Oh, yes,” said the Beachcomber. “I landed about twenty miles out from shore—five years ago.” He stared out across the sea, while his fingers groped nervously among the pebbles at his feet.

“And when I hit the water,” he said, “I dropped it.”