TIME CYCLE [ss], Saul Snatsky

Time is a watchspring. Coiled and winding around the mists and stars that swim the sea of eternity. It ticks and moves, changing potential into kinetic energy: to power the universe, to assign destinies.

And in this blue time-fog drifts a small lifeboat, enclosing a cylindrical plasm, having appendages and a protuberance at one end - called a head. In this head a mind; it thinks in analog waves pulsed once a second by a feeble pump in its chest. Its name: Jack Haavik (Government Serial Number 7798480X).

Restrained by belts and padding, he watched a greenish video screen from the easy-chair pilot's seat. When the scene below the craft changed from water to shoreline and then into beach, he flipped switch ABLE to STANDBY, and guided the ship lower with the control stick in front of him.

Dry land. This would be called a beach, but there was neither sand, nor bathers, nor sailboats. The place: an unnamed shore on Earth. The time: three billion (or so) B.C.

Jack set switches BAKER and CHARLIE to HOLD, and thus the ship balanced upon flamepoint above the land. As the craft - about the size and shape of two Volkswagen buses welded belly-to-bellysettled, black chips on the granite surface took refuge in the rocky crevices. Kklinkk. Skkraatch. Popp! The vessel had landed and the flame was extinguished.

Haavik, who was a youngish-looking man for his three and a half decades, unstrapped his seat belts and ran the preliminary tests needed for debarkation. True, this was Mother Earth, but at this age she was an energetic tomboy, able to vomit rock and lava from her volcanoes into her poisonous atmosphere: methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide and dioxide. Temperature: forty degrees Centigrade (hot enough!). Radiation: One-half Rem per hour (lead longjohns advised if one lives here). And gravity: one, of course.

Looking from the pilot's view-port, he saw granite monuments to Earth's violent birth, standing guard over the barren shoreline. From this distance of about one kilometer he could almost see the ocean through the fog vapor, which hung low over the water and extended partly up the beach.

The rocks were that good granite and quartz variety that would last for ages - even up to Jack Haavik's time. Of course, there was no vegetation or animal life, and the sea was not only sterile, but even potable, since a few billion years need pass to wash more salts into it. Time is cheap to the unliving.

As he brushed a string of black hair from his thin cream-colored face, he felt that this wide, rocky panorama was more like a theater than a beach. He had always wanted to be an actor. However - and that was a major "however" -

"... the Government sees that you are most fit to be a Biohistorian." He recollected those words well. They had given him another choice, but it was, stripped of all verbal embellishments, a position equivalent to a dog catcher. Jack never did get along with dogs very well.

He picked up one four-hour oxygen bottle and some sample containers - like those little urine specimen things they hand you, but with hermetic seals - and turned from the pilot's chamber to the upright portal of the air lock/sterile room. He subverbalized: "Might say that I'm at liberty, time-hopping for the experience." And he opened the hatch - "undogged," as he reminded himself that in his age naval jargon was still in vogue, even for space-time ships - with a certain flair innate in his repressed dramatic nature.

Once inside the air lock, he donned a sterile, white, self-contained life-support suit with a fishbowl helmet for his head. He could well have been ready to operate, for outside this ship there was no life; Jack Haavik and the parasitic microbes within his body were the only living things on the Earth. And the sterile chamber and suit were intended to keep it that way.

Before undogging the outer hatch, he activated the ultraviolet, infrared, super what-not sterilizer as a final precaution. A shower nozzle device protruded from the overhead at the pressing of a button, and Jack was transfigured into a purple space monster with one blue bubble eye by the ionizing radiation. Click. Again Jack Haavik - less microbes on his suit surface. The air was also sterile now, and could be dumped from the air lock chamber to the waiting Earth.

Jack glanced at his watch: 1810 hours. Since that was relative to his own time, and the days were much shorter in this epoch, it would just serve as a time reference for his air supply. He intended to stay eight hours, and would need another oxygen bottle when this one expired.

On the top rung of the ladder above the hard basaltic rock below, Jack tried to remember the words of Neil Armstrong, who in the last century had first walked the lunar surface. "One step is a giant ...; One foot forward ..." but was unable to complete the phrase. He did think that this scene was not greatly dissimilar from the undeveloped areas of the Moon, except for the atmosphere, water and high gravity.

He slammed the outer door shut, causing a muffled clank, and thought of the nightmare scene of the early Moon explorers, where one would "lose the key" to the craft, and with no possible rescue ship, would slowly die. He didn't worry about a key, and the door was virtually jam-proof, but still there was no rescue ship for him, and for the same reason implicitly given to the Moon men: too darned expensive! But what could go wrong? There were no hostile beasts, and the time-drive was perfect.

Small chunks of pumice crunched under his white boots, grinding some of them into black soot. And the sample bottles went tinkle-tinkle in the carrying case slung over his back. Tinkle, crunch, tinkle, tinkle, crunch, tinkle, crunch. The man walked to the ocean.

Jack hadn't seen it from his viewport, but on the surface of the rocks were small puddles of water. "Probably rained here last night," he told his faceplate. "Funny, rained last night in my time, too." This was another reason that a man was sent instead of just a machine. A man would always be subjective to those things that a machine would just compile as statistical data. He turned down the air temperature control in his suit, as the heat of young Sol burned through.

Although Jack was not the first biohistorian, nor was this his first trip, it was the farthest "back" anyone had ever gone. He was not at all thrilled about it.

The unmarked path to the sea was a hopscotch across large, flat boulders, punctuated here and there by upright and semi-reclining monoliths several meters high.

Rather than a stroll to the beach across soft sand, it was the hopping of a flea across a chessboard, from square to square, avoiding the stone chessmen set in its path. The entire walk was slightly downhill from the ship, and the last few meters plunged sharply down, then leveled out at the maw of the sea.

The little bottles gave a louder tinkle in the sample bag as he jumped the last meter down to the ocean. For an ocean, it seemed unusually calm. More like the manmade Amazon Lake in South America; hardly any tide, but very warm. Jack tested the water on his thermometer, gathered samples into the bottles, and realized that this must be low tide. He thought that it was strange to have assumed it to be high tide when he had first landed.

Although the mist blotted out most of the horizon and ocean as well, he saw a white-cliffed island in the far background. "Didn't notice that when I came down either," he mumbled to himself. "But then the fog and the excitement of going back to three thousand mil lion years before Christ!" he continued with false enthusiasm.

He wondered what ocean this could be, but knew full well that it was both no ocean and every ocean that would be. For in each age the oceans have different boundaries as the land plates shift and slide over the Earth's surface. But even without knowing its name, he felt melodramatic, and addressed it: "Behold, nameless sea, I have come to conquer thee!"

Jack thought that this would be a great ocean to bathe in, since it was so warm and calm. But, of course, swimming was impossible due to the atmospheric conditions, and he would contaminate it with his body germs. Then again, more foolishly he thought, there's no sand, no snack bars, no people either.

He had gathered half of the samples that were required, needing only to get some air and soil to complete the job. No need to hurry, since he had several hours left. If he got back too soon they might think he hadn't done a good job, and would send him back on an even more worthless mission - or maybe even dangerous. He had hoped that he could advance through the ranks of biohistorians, and in a few years would have a director's job in an office. "Dinosaurs! Never again!" he shuddered, thinking of the three trips he'd made into that one-hundred-million-year age of man-eating lizards.

The uphill jaunt back to the timeship was slightly more difficult than he had expected. When he got there, he threw the sample bag into the air lock, repressurized, removed his suit, then collapsed into the spongy pilot's seat. Time for lunch.

He found several food units, not unlike the K-rations of a bygone age, but more concentrated. He chomped into the food bar (Gov. Spec. #9662573 it said on the wrapper), and noted that it tasted like chocolate bacon grease, but then it was only for that day.

"Odd, thinking of this as lunch," he confided to the food unit. Like the "Lunch Bag Theory of Life" story that went around at Bio-HQ. Some guys from another world landed here before there was any life, but were careless, and left the garbage from their lunch. Then it rotted and evolved into higher organisms, and so on. But that begged the question. Like where did the guys with the lunch bag come from? And if they came from a ... ad infinitum. Russell showed at the beginning of the last century that that was circular logic: it violated the rules of grammar in Logic. 'The statement on the other side of this card is true: The statement on the other side of this card is false.' The paradox of statements that were true intrinsically, but contradicted themselves if each was on opposite sides of a card. The rules of Logic didn't come engraved upon a tablet either, but one had to start somewhere.

What it all boiled down to was that spontaneous evolution was the more reasonable answer. "So send some nut back through time with some sampling tools to find out what's in that primal liquor. Be nice to see what's in it right now, but I'd guess that it's almost pure water, from the looks of it.

"Then send another guy back to another point in the time spiral to take another sample. Eventually, by interpolation, we'll find out exactly - within a few thousand years - when and under what conditions life spontaneously - presumably - arose from Mother Nature's soup. Using this as a basis, we'll have a better understanding of life, and will know under which conditions to expect life to evolve on other planets in the galaxy, if any.

"It all sounds easy and, in fact, isn't too bad. But still a man has to go along. And we could send a guy back to the moment of the 'Big Bang' - at the center of the spiral. The major problem standing in the way is, as one might suspect, money.

"Money seems to be one of the Fundamental Laws, and even more basic than the other laws of science. Take the sound barrier - when your aircraft is going as fast as the air molecules and they can't get out of the way fast enough. So you give somebody enough money, and he'll either build a machine that overcomes the problem by brute force, or will find a new law of physics that cancels the old. That's how the sound barrier, the light barrier, then the ion, and finally now the time barrier were broken. Just time, research, and money and someone will find a way. Should be something pure and pristine - not like money - for such a basic rule. And that's the one barrier that will probably never be broken.

"So we send somebody back to ten billion B.C., it's about three times as far back as this is, but costs about one hundred times as much. That's about the fourth power in money of the multiple in time. Can just see it, like a carnival barker: 'Step right up folks. See the Cre-eee-a-tion! Be there at the Beee-gin-ing! Only one thin three-hundred-billion-bucks!' The trip's gotta be worthwhile, or at least the trade-off between being not too worthwhile and the cost has to be reasonable. Probably the category that this little trip is in."

Jack paused from his ruminations to look at his watch: 2005 hours. He eased out of the seat as though he'd eaten a great meal, grabbed his helmet in one hand, and continued munching on a food unit as he entered the sterile air lock chamber.

After securing the door behind him, he realized that he really shouldn't have brought the food bar into the chamber, but had done so absently, as he had on his dinosaur tracking expeditions, where contamination was no problem, and the air even breathable, so he could remove the air-conditioned bubble helmet to chomp on a bar. In those times he even took a few with him, just in case something happened and he was stuck outside the ship for an extended period. So he didn't feel guilty when he stuffed a half-eaten bar into a contamination proof pocket on his suit.

This excursion was for air samples and picture-taking, and he knew that most of it could be done from the ship. But Jack liked the beach - even with no sand or hot-dogs. He walked and jumped his way to the shore again.

He noticed that there was a trail made of wet pumice clinging to the rocks. It seemed that another creature might have made this path, but Jack knew that was not only impossible, but highly unwelcome.

He began to follow the other tracks, thinking of the paradox in time involving himself. Simultaneously he was the First Man on Earth and the Last Man on Earth. Somewhat contradictory, but it would seem that way only to a person with tunnel vision through time. He remembered the long, boring sessions in the Theory of Time Travel. Although he had almost flunked the mathematical portion of the class, one phrase remained from the oral explanation: "There can be no contradictions caused by time travel; everything makes sense to at least the next observer in the time serial."

Realizing that he never did ask the instructor whether it was impossible for him to cross paths with himself in time, or, if so, it would somehow be "O.K." with the universe, he thought he saw a lengthening shadow move as he jumped past a granite slab. "What the hell would I say to myself, if I met myself'?" he asked reflexively. "And he would be looking for me, not vice versa."

Jack was nearing the water again, and the late afternoon blaze of virile Sol lifted more of the poisonous cloak from the land and ocean. The view across the sea was clear now for several kilometers.

Kicking a dark rock, he wished that the time spiral would bend at more recent history: the Soviet revolution, Caesar at the Rubicon, or just a first-nighter by Euripides. By some irony of fate, there were more time crossing points farther back in history - when little was happening that interested him. He stopped to see the stone dive into the water.

Click. A photo. Tri-D and in every wavelength from audio to gamma ray. Pssst. An air sample, Scrape, scrape. A rock sample.

Jack thought that it was a shorter trip to the water than last time. Wasn't that the ledge he'd jumped off? The tide must be rising, he thought. Water was splashing over the edge of the rocks.

"Here I am, big actor," he spoke to the sea through his helmet (Ser. #5695I69). The rocks were his stage, the lapping of the water at, his feet was applause, and the white island in the distance was a spotlight. It competed with the setting sun to illuminate him. Then as the fog curtain parted more, the island covered more of the horizon than Jack had realized. In fact the island was rising, but not from out of the water.

"Island? Island! That's the Moon!" he said in a loud aside to his audience. "Right, sure. At this time it'd be much closer to Earth; it moves away all right, and slowly, but given three billion years ..." He took a photo.

He realized that he didn't see it from his ship as he came to this time period because he just dropped in from the time stream into the Earth's atmosphere on this side of the globe, while the Moon was barely coming around from the other side. A few more photos. He really felt satisfied with himself for the first time since joining the biohistorians. It was beautiful and unexpected. He hardly minded the warm water splashing over his waterproof boots.

Among those undefinables that are called forces, gravity is a seeming paradox. Weaker by scores of negative powers of ten over the pi-meson proton glue in the atomic nucleus, and much more feeble than the relatively limp electromagnetic force holding electrons in orbit, it has infinite range and never gives up. Thus it grapples the galaxies, binds the speeding stars in its spider web, and works equally well between lesser sovereigns of the cosmos: the Earth and her sister, the Moon.

They spoke as two girls yet unmarried: "Sister Moon, have you had a fair journey through my night?" said Earth.

"Oh, dear sister, as I have told you since we broke our common umbilicus, that I too can make night and day. Furthermore, I will have children who will feed from my breast, and will erect monuments to glorify me," Moon replied.

"But since our cleavage your air becomes stale, your countenance pock-marked, and you have not even water to wash the mask of death sleep from it."

"Then forevermore I shall remind the creatures of your skin that I was once part of the soil they stand upon. The waters shall arise and fall with regularity as I pass. The small and the large will stand in awe of the lunar tide. Unrelentingly and mercilessly it will wash history upon your shores."

Although the sight of this stone behemoth did not frighten Jack, he did sense an aura of morbid magnetism toward the dead planet; as though its gravity were singularly pulling him from all the bumps and rubble on Earth. More to the point however, it was pulling the ocean up, causing the tide to rise. He noticed the speed at which it moved, and realized that the tides at this time must be more violent than the ones he'd known in his own time, since the Moon was closer to the Earth. He started to walk back.

Each successive wave seemed to cover twice the distance of the preceding one, making it impossible for him to get fully out of the water. And adding this to the slippery, wet and unfriendly rocks made the kilometer back seem impossibly distant.

Crawling, falling, stepping, stumbling and dog-paddling in the warm tide he barely made any progress, as each meter gained was often penalized by one lost in the undertow.

The waves were splashing the shore with greater regularity; some with such impatience that they didn't wait for their predecessors to retreat. An aquatic rat race.

By now the sun was setting, and it became dusk, so that the Moon was even more bright and threatening. And in that light it might have looked like a night football game - with one player running for his life away from the overpowering strength of the other team. The low rock-stubbled hills around that beach wash were cheering stands of spectators, and the hard granite was covered with black glass pebbles, upon which stood here and there tough, immobile obstacles to block his path. The tide continued the offensive.

From behind, a wave tackled him, and like an octopus with a rubber arm whiplashed him against a granite stanchion. With just enough strength not to fumble he clung to the rock like a four-armed starfish as the water crashed over his head, baptizing him in the sterile liquor.

Of all his troubles his least concern was that of tearing his SuperTuffknit life-support suit, or that of drowning. But the soft little body inside the suit was sensitive to the concussions.

When the sea receded momentarily it exposed his globe helmet to the glint of yellow moonfire, and he turned to look for his timeship. The waves had reached halfway up the beach toward it. Then with a quick push from his rock he paddled a few meters to another fortress against the aqueous assault.

Even with his brain below the waterline, it functioned in self-criticism-pity. "Of all the idiotic things! I could have imagined volcanoes, earthquakes, or radiation storms. But this!"

Although the sun had ducked behind the Earth during this part of its sixteen-hour cycle, the lunar light - partly eclipsed by Earth's shadow - still made it as bright as early morning. He checked his watch: 2100 hours. Only one more hour of air left in the suit tank - maybe less than that due to his prodigious oxidation rate in the struggle to survive. The inside of his face plate was fogged, even with air-conditioning to dehumidify his breath. It was only five hundred meters to the ship, but time was in favor of the other side.

The water averaged waist deep at that point, and in a brief pause from the defense, he stood up fully from a crouch to see that the sea had reached the base of his craft, but, as though the water didn't know he had called a time-out, it rushed him from behind, lifting his body like a cork in a mercury tank. Jack's last view before striking solid resistance was a wave battering the ship. Something gave a dull crack inside his chest, but he was too concerned with thoughts of the craft to notice. When the water receded again, he fully expected to see it being dragged to sea like a tinkertoy left in the sand by a careless child.

The ship was still there, and so was a sharp pain caused by the last tackle. He now had a cracked rib, which made breathing painful, but even with this debilitation he felt encouraged by the craft's resistance to the ocean.

Although the last few hundred meters to the ship were clear of large boulders, and thus he had no protection against the onslaught, an idea touched his brow.

The Moon was now completely above the horizon. A grand disk eyeing warm Earth with envy, trying to pull her life-giving sea to its parched skin. And like a fanatic, knowing that it could never attain its goal, it tried even harder.

Its craters were very prominent and clear against the ochre soil, and by careful inspection one could see the shadows cast by the deeper ones. And it was so close that a space pilot going there by conventional means would certainly have started his retro-rockets to avoid a crash. The scene was like that of the Last Man on Earth running for his spaceship to escape the consequences of a tragic chapter in some "When Worlds Collide" serial.

Jack buoyed himself up with a slow deep breath from his compressed-oxygen tank, and dove into the next wave that battered his island fortress. It carried him like a surfer to within a few meters of the timeship, then, realizing that it was unwittingly helping him, tried to pull him back to sea. But he clung to the crevices with rubber boots and gloved fingers. Then he lurched forward to the goal post marked by the ship's ladder.

It hurt to climb, but like a lame kangaroo he hobbled up, pried open the latch and stepped inside. The water mark had already passed the base of the door on its last rush, and before he could dog it shut again, the sea, as if in one final attempt to kill him, blasted its way in, filling the air lock. Earth wanted him to take home a good water sample. Thanks.

The ship was now a metal buoy cast into the shallow end of a swimming pool, tilting, scraping the rock, and making metallic noises, but wouldn't capsize, as it was half submerged and supported by water on all sides. But neither would the water drain back to sea. And it was rising.

Jack struggled to close the hatch without really thinking how much worse or better his situation would be after he had entombed himself. But this water-logged diving bell at least gave him a respite from the battle and a moment of nonpanic. He leaned against the steel bulkhead of this very private fish tank. Primary specimen: himself.

He panted painfully, still fogging his helmet, as three words assembled in his cerebrum: What to do? Answers: One - stay in the air lock until the next low tide, then open the outer hatch to let the water run out. Two - open the pilot's compartment, let the water fill it too.

The first choice was no good, he realized, because there was less than an hour's air in the suit tank. And even if he were able to reach the extra air tank in the pilot's room, that would only add up to five hours. Suppose the next low tide was a long way off? He remembered the wet rocks he'd seen upon landing and figured that with the heat of the sun it should have burned off in a short while. Probably high tide would last all night - about eight hours - then retreat again as quickly as it had advanced.

The second choice was equally bad, but it had a working chance. If the equipment in the control chamber got wet, it still might function. After all, he only needed a short burst of timedrive power to return home; and the rocket drive was unnecessary, although useful for maneuvering once he had broken through the time barrier. And this sea water was rather pure and non-conductive, unlike the very salty ocean of his time. But to calculate the odds and to roll the dice are not the same proposition.

"What I need to do is to pump the goddam water out!" he told himself, emphasizing the point by banging a plastic fist into the bulkhead. Returning shock waves crossed the radially one-meter chamber to ripple at his neck. "Pump the water out. Might work."

The unhappy white turtle splashed across his aquarium to snap the "AIR EXH" to "ON." He waited expectantly as the water started to gurgle out, and was ready to stand in the winner's circle just before the bubbling stopped. The water was still hip deep.

"Oh, Christ!" he sputtered. "There's a vacuum above the water line, and no air pressure to push it out." It was like being at the base of a catsup bottle with the top end down and open. A little will run out if one pokes a finger into the neck, or bangs the bottle, but not fast. To make matters worse, the air exhaust pumps hadn't been designed as water syphons, but did an excellent job at evacuating air.

Not beaten yet, he reached for the "AIR INT" and set it to "ON" also. Unfortunately, the three exhaust vents in the ceiling were oblivious to the difficulties of their companions in the floor, and were pumping air out of the chamber as fast as the air intake system forced it in.

Jack reached up for the exhaust holes in the overhead, and plugged two of them, one with his left and the other with his right outstretched arm and index finger. The water went down another few centimeters, then stopped again.

What would Buzz Spaceman have done in such a situation? Jack visualized the oatmeal opera from childhood days:

Buzz takes out his Magic-Bubble Gum - that all good rocketmen chew - and plugs the hole to save the day and the beautiful girl from the spacemonster who intended to drown them in a watery torture chamber.

"I don't have any bubble gum or a knife to cut my suit for a plug ... can't cut it anyway ... the food unit!" he told the wall. A wave of visceral reinforcement gushed through his chest, then into his cortex to reverberate strength to his fingers. The humidity fell in his bubble helmet.

It was nearly raining in the cabin due to the warm water condensing on the ceiling. Rivulets like sweat ran down the walls into the miniature lake. And outside the ship the main battle line of waves fought the rocks for control of the beach several kilometers distant, having subdued and sunk this metal pillar into five fathoms of ocean.

He reached with slippery gloves into his suit pocket, unsealed it, and grabbed the bar, plastering the wrapper over the third exhaust vent with the food as a plug sealer. Then reaching painfully again for the other two outlets, he closed them with his fingers. As though it might help, he pressed his fingers into the holes with such force that they throbbed, and closed his eyes, leaning against the bulkhead.

Sssssss, ggguurgle, buuubbble. The water went home.

When the water level reached a few centimeters deep, he flicked the "AIR INT" to "NORM" and swished the remaining puddles through the deck vents with a clubfooted boot. He didn't notice that the food bar had fallen from its perch on the ceiling - due to the more equal pressure on both sides of it and the saturating moisture - until it clogged the floor drain.

As he picked up the wrapper and stuffed it into his vest again, he thought how much had depended upon such a small item. He felt sure that somehow he could have extricated himself from the difficulty by an alternate means, but it was silly to think about it now, since everything was O.K.

It was such a joy to be relatively safe again that he opened his face plate to breathe the ship's air. But the jab of his split rib triggered the realization that the "AIR EXH" was still "ON" and he quickly snapped it off.

Back inside the pilot's chamber, as he fingered the control switches, he thought about the food bar - ersatz glue - that had washed into the floor vent, and like some of his breath had probably discharged into the sterile sea. Faced with a fact, his mind could sort the pieces of the theoretical jigsaw of the classroom with greater facility.

He knew now what his instructor was expounding when he had lectured on the serial universe. Time travel was a momentary stepping into the next higher plane in the series of space-time boxes that enclosed each other. Anything that one did in the next level was sequential, with respect to the higher time base, to the events in the lower level. A time traveler could theoretically kill his own grandfather, and still himself live.

However, since time was also a spiral, one crossed it only at certain bends; killing one's grandfather could only be done by someone a billion years removed - at the present rate of time curvature - from the current human epoch. Thus the ancestor would not have been a grandfather, but a grandfather N-times removed, and history would simply adjust to the fact.

Jack enabled the "TIME RET" button with a stab of his finger, thinking that this hypothetical murderer would only be playing the role cast for him by a director in the next time level. The traveler's N-th predecessor would always have been killed in such a manner - if anyone bothered to keep records for a billion years.

He sat up straighter in the cockpit throne watching the instrument wink colorful signals that all systems were "GO" - even rocket power. As he activated the "TIME RET" switch, he felt like an ancient king, who, ruling by divine right, could do no wrong.

Kathudd! The craft stepped back into the time stream, and water rushed to take its place.

And in the sea microscopic plasms floated, and a speck of dark nutriment dissolved.