CRONOS:AN INTRODUCTIONby Robert Silverberg
The theme of travel in time has been central to me, both as reader and writer, throughout my lifelong involvement with science fiction. I first encountered it in H.G. Wells The Time Machine' when I was ten or eleven years old, more than half a century ago, and came away stunned by Wells visions of future eras, which culminates in this unforgettable depiction of the very end of time:
The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our livesall that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant,dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after another, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping toward me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black. . . .
Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood stick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoalthere was no mistake now that it was a moving thingagainst the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles railed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. . . .
Soon after, I encountered John Taines Before the Dawn, which provided a glimpse of that long-lost age when dinosaurs walked the earth, and H.P. Lovecrafts The Shadow Out of Time, which told me of the grotesque intelligences that would inhabit the world millions of years hence. And then I found Robert A. Heinleins dazzling story By His Bootstraps, which introduced me to the perplexing paradoxes that time travel engenders.
I was hookedforever, as it turned out. I knew that my own time on earth was finite; but here was a kind of fiction that pierced the veil of the future. Out of an aching curiosity to know what lies ahead, not merely seven months or eleven years or even two centuries ahead, but millennia, thousands upon thousands of millennia, I searched out all the science fiction I could find, looking in particular for tales of time voyages, wanting desperately to believe, at least for the nonce, in Wells argument that A civilized man . . . can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?
It was inevitable that when I began writing science fiction myself, just a few years later, I would turn my developing skills to time-travel stories almost from the first. The earliest I can recall was a piece called Vanguard of Tomorrow, pretty much a straight imitation of By His Bootstraps, which I wrote when I was fourteen,and which, I am relieved to say, never has seen publication. A rather more skillful job was Hopper, which I wrote when I was nineteen, and then the time-paradox story Absolutely Inflexible, a few months afterward. I sold both of these to magazines and they were published in 1956, Hopper appearing in the appropriately named Infinity and Absolutely Inflexible in Fantastic Universe.
Over the years I have returned again and again to the theme, eventually producing not simply imitations of classics by my betters, but original contributions to the literature of my own. Among these I would class Hawksbill Station of 1967 and the novel Up the Line of 1969, Son of Man of 1971, When We Went to See the End of the World of 1972, and Many Mansions of 1973; and I have continued writing time-travel stories ever since, with the most successful of them, perhaps, being Needle in a Timestack (1983), Sailing to Byzantium (1985) and Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another (1989).
The volume you now hold provides three examples of my fascinationobsession, if you want to call it thatwith time travel.The Time Hoppers,which I wrote in the spring of 1966, just as I was beginning to find my mature voice as a writer, was an expansion of my 1954 short story Hopper to book lengtha story that reflects the use of time travel not so much as a means of exploring other eras as of escaping from ones own. Project Pendulum, from 1986, was one more attempt at wrestling with the time-paradox concept, a book that involved me, somewhat to my own dismay, in a structure that could have easily been employed in a novel ten times the length of the one I actually wrote. It was a struggle to hold it to the dimensions I had intended, but I think that doing so increased the dizzying effect of the story. And Letters from Atlantis, which I wrote in 1988, is not only a time-travel story but also plays with another idea I have been poking at, on and off, for many years, my not very seriously proposed speculation that the legend of Atlantis is derived from memories of a lofty technology-based civilization that existed on earth in Neolithic or even Paleolithic times. Im pleased to have the opportunity to restore these three books to print in this new edition.
LETTERSFROM ATLANTIS
. . . it waits for that serene moment when the brain is just in the apt condition, and ready toswitch on the other memory,as one switches on the electric light with a turn of the switch. . . .
Kenneth Grahame
. . . now in the island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire, which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over part of the continent; and besides these, they subjected the parts of Libya within the Columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia .... But there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain the island of Atlantis disappeared, and was sunk beneath the sea.
Plato: Timaeus
1.
The prince is sleeping now. Dreaming, no doubt, of the green and golden island of Athilan, its marble palaces, its shining temples. All unknown to him, I have borrowed his bodyhis good strong right armto write this letter for me.
So:
From somewhere in what I think is Brittany or Normandy, on what I think and assume is Christmas Eve in the year 18,862 B.C.,greetings and merry Christmas, Lora!
(Will this ever reach you, out there in the frosty eastern land that will someday be Poland or Russia? Less than a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose, even though youre right here in the same prehistoric year I am. But a whole continent separates us. With transportation what it is here, its almost like being in different worlds.
Ill cause the Prince to slip it into the regular diplomatic pouch that leaves next week, and the royal Athilantan courier will take it with him when he sets out across the tundra to the trading post where youre supposed to bestationed. With any luck youll actually be there, and whoever youre riding in will be someone who routinely has access to the royal documents that the courier brings. Considering that Im writing this in English, he wont have the remotest notion of what its all about. But you will, looking at it through his eyes. And maybe youll even be able to write back to me. My God, that would be wonderful, getting a letter from you! Weve only been apart a little while and already it seems like forever.)
I suspect that the chances of my actually working out any sort of regular communication with you back hereor any communication at all, reallyare very very slim. But I can try, anyway. And at the very least, setting down these accounts of what Ive been experiencing here ought to provide me with a good way of bringing it all into clearer focus. Which should help me make better sense and order out of it when Im home again in our own era and undergoing debriefing.
This is the seventh day of the mission. So far everythings moving along pretty well.
First there was the time-hop trauma to deal with, of course. That was a stunner, though actually not as bad as I was expecting; but naturally I was expecting the worst. This is such a big jump weve madethe biggest jump either of us has ever done, by far. During the training period the most I ever did was something like ninety years. This is a jump of one hundred eighty centuries. So I figured Id come slamming into the Princes mind behind a head of steam strong enough to knock me cold for a week. And in fact it was pretty rough, let me tell you.
The tuning was perfect. Of course the purpose of all the preliminary time-search scouting work was to locate a member of the royal family for me to use as my host. And they managed to land me right in the mind of nobody less than the heir to the throne himself!
I wont ever forget the moment of landing, which felt to me the way Id expect to feel when hitting the water after a very clumsy dive made from a very high diving board. There was pain, real pain, a lot of it. It would have knocked the breath out of me if there had been any breath in me in the first place.
Then came the total strangeness of that wild moment when the minds are fusing, which you know all too well yourselfthat time when you cant really tell whether youre you any more or somebody elseand then I blanked out.
So did the Prince, evidently.
We were unconscious for perhaps a day and a half, possibly a little more. Thats why Im not sure whether this is really Christmas Eve. Once I came to, and had made enough linguistic connections to be able to understand what I was hearing, I tried to figure out how long the Prince and I had been under, going by some of the things that the courtiers were saying to him:
We rejoice, Highness, that the darkness has ended for you.
Two days and a night did we pray, Highness! Two days and a night you were gone from us!
But it hadnt been quite as long as that. As youve probably discovered yourself by now, their system of days and weeks isnt much like the one we use, what with a day being considered just the time between dawn and sunset, and the dark hours being called a night, and the next biggest unit being a group of ten days and nights together, which works out to a five-day week on our scale, unless I still have it wrong. And two Athilantan days and a night would be a day and a half. But I do think this really is Christmas Eve, counting from the day we set out from Home Year and figuring up the total time that I believe has elapsed since then.
(A question, Lora: Is it really proper to regard this day as Christmas Eve, considering that were currently living at a time thousands of years before Christs birth? I suppose it is. We did set out from an A.D. Home Year, after all. But still the idea strikes me as a little peculiar. Then again, everything about this venture seems a little peculiar, starting with the fact that you and I have been converted into nothing more than nets of electrical energy and have been hurled thousands of years into the past, leaving our bodies behind in deepsleep. But telling myself that this is Christmas Eve makes it feel just a little homier for me here. God knows I need to have things feel a little homier right now. So do you, I imagine, out there in the frozen wastelands of the mammoth-hunter people.)
I have a very good link with the Princes mind. I can read his every thought, I can understand the things he says and the things that are said to him, I can monitor his heartbeat and his respiratory rate and the hormonal output of his glandular system. I am able to anticipate the movements of his body even before he consciously knows hes going to make those movements. I pick up impulses traveling from his brain to his muscles, and I feel the muscles getting ready to react. I could, whenever I choose, override his own conscious commands and get his body to do whatever I felt like having it do. Not that Id do any such thingnot while hes awake and aware. I dont want him to start thinking that hes been possessed by a demon, even though thats essentially what has happened to him.
How does it feel, Lora, thinking of yourself as a demon? Not so good, eh? But thats what we really are. Thats the truth, isnt it?
The Prince doesnt have the slightest suspicion, Im sure, that hes been invaded this way, that an intruder from the distant future is inside him, wrapped around his entire nervous system like a blanket of undetectable mist.
I know that he felt me arriving. It wouldnt have been possible for him not to feel the impact of that. But he had no clear notion of what was actually happening.
The fingertip of a god has touched my soul, he told his companions. For a time I was thrown into darkness. The gods chose to touch me, and who can say why?
Some kind of stroke, in other words. And then a day and a night and a day of unconsciousness.
Well, the gods work in mysterious ways. So far as anyone-knows, the Prince has made a complete recovery from whatever it was that smote him. I remain hidden, crouching invisible within his mind, a mysterious web of electrical impulses safe from any Athilantan means of detection.
And now he sleeps. I cant read his dreams, of course that layer of his mind is much too deep to reachbut his body is at peace, very relaxed. Thats why I think hes dreaming of his homeland, the warm sweet isle of Athilan. Most likely he thinks hes lying in his own soft bed.
But he isnt.
A little while ago I picked him up and sleepwalked him over to his fine shining desk, made of rare and strange timber from the southern landssomething black that may be ebony inlaid with strips of several bright golden woodsand right now hes sitting upright, hard at work writing this letter for me. Taking dictation, so to speak. A royal prince, taking dictation. But how could he ever know that?