Desolation Road (15 page)

or a night and a day Dr. Alimantando filled the walls of his weatherroom with chronodynamic symbols. The stream of logic had started three years before in the bottom left-hand corner of his kitchen, wound through parlour, dining room and hall, up the stairs, taking small disgres-sionary detours into number one and number two bedrooms, through the bathroom, across the toilet walls, up another flight of stairs and into the weatherroom, where it wound round the walls, round and round and up and up until only a blank area about the size of a dollar bill was left in the centre of the ceiling.

Beneath this spot sat Dr. Alimantando with his head buried in his hands. His shoulders shook. It was not tears that shook them but rage, monumental rage at the mocking universe which, like a painted rumbo dancer in a Belladonna opium hell, casts off successive layers of concealment only for the lights to black out at the moment of ultimate revelation.

He had told his people he was going to save their town.

And he couldn't do it.

He couldn't find the missing inversion.

He couldn't find the algebraic formula that would balance out fifteen years of wall-filling in Desolation Road and Jingjangsoreng and the Universuum of Lyx and reduce it all to zero. He knew it must exist. The wheel must turn, the serpent swallow its own tail. He suspected it must be simple, but he could not find it.

He had failed himself. He had failed science. He had failed his people. That was the most crushing of all failures. He had come to care deeply for his people; that was how he saw them, his people, the children he had thought he'd never desire. When they had not needed saving, he had saved them. Now that they must be saved, he could not.

The realization brought Dr. Alimantando a great release of tension. Like the animal that fights and fights and fights and then in the jaws of inevitability surrenders to death, his anger drained out of him, down through his house, down through the sinkholes in the rocks out into the Great Desert.

It was six minutes of six in the morning of Monday sixteenth. The gas lamps were popping and the insects beating themselves against the glass. From the east window he saw Rael Mandella going about his solitary six-o'clock-1n-the-morning labours. They were not necessary now. He would come down from the mountain and tell his people to go. He did not want their forgiveness, though they would give it. All he wanted was their understanding. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt a great peace blow out of the desert, a wave of serenity breaking over him, through him. The morning mist carried an aroma of things growing in wet, rich earth, black as chocolate, rich as King Solomon. A sound like tinkling wind-chimes caused him to look away from the windows.

He should have been shocked, or stunned, or some variety of the human emotion of surprise, but the presence of the greenperson sitting on the edge of his table seemed quite the most natural thing.

"Good morning," said the greenperson. "I must have missed you at that next camp ... five years is it?"

"Are you a figment of my imagination?" said Dr. Alimantando. "I think you are something of that ilk: an archetype, a corstruction of my mind while under stress: hallucination, that's what you are-a symbol."

"Come now, would you like to think of yourself as the kind of man visited by hallucinations?"

"I would not like to think of myself as the kind of man visited by animated leftover vegetables."

"Touche. Which way will this convince you, then?" The greenperson stood up on the table. It produced a stick of red chalk out of somewhere unseen and wrote a short equation in symbolic logic in the dollar-bill-sized space in the centre of the ceiling. "I think that's what you're looking for." The greenperson swallowed the stick of red chalk. "The nutrients are very useful, you know." Dr. Alimantando climbed onto the table and peered at the equation.

"Yes," he muttered, "yes ... yes ..." He traced the spiral of black char coal equations outward across the ceiling, around the walls, round round and round, across the floor on hands and knees, all the while muttering, "Yes ... , yes ... yes" down the stairs, round the toilet, through the bathroom, detoured into number two and number one bedrooms, down more stairs, across the hall, the dining room and the parlour, into the kitchen. Up in the weatherroom the greenperson sat on the table with a very smug smile on its face.

A great cry of triumph came up from the depths of Dr. Alimantando's house. He had followed the trail of reason to its source in the bottom left corner of his kitchen.

"Yeehah! It fits! It fits! Zero! Pure, beautiful, round, absolute zero!" By the time he reached the weatherroom the greenperson was gone. A few dry leaves lay scattered on the table.

he Mark One Alimantando time winder looked like a small sewingmachine tangled up in a spider's web. It sat on Dr. Alimantando's breakfast table awaiting the approval of its designer.

"One hell of a job to build," said Ed Gallacelli.

"Half the time we really didn't know what we were doing," said Rajandra Das. "But there it is."

"It's basically two synchronized unified field generators working in tandem but with variable phase control," said Mr. Jericho, "thus creating a temporal difference between the two unphased fields."

"I know how it works," said Dr. Alimantando. "I designed it, didn't l?" He studied the time machine with growing delight. "It does look the job, though. Can't wait to try it out."

"You mean you're going to use that thing on yourself?" said Rajandra Das. "Could I really ask anyone else? Of course, and as soon as possible. After lunch, I think."

"Wait a moment," said Mr. Jericho. "Are you going to do what I think you're going to do, that is ...

"Go into the past and change history? Of course." Dr. Alimantando fiddled with some knobs and fine settings and the time winder rewarded him with a potent hum. "It's only history, and when I change it, everything gets changed with it, so no one'll ever know. Certainly nobody in Desolation Road."

"My God." It was Ed Gallacelli who said that.

"That's sort of the effect I'm looking for," said Dr. Alimantando.

He had managed to surround the time winder in a glowing blue bubble. "Of course, there are some temporal paradoxes that have to be resolved, but I think I have that all taken care of. The main paradox is that if I succeed, then the purpose for my time travelling becomes nullified; you can see what I mean, the whole thing begins to loop around, but I think I should disappear from Desolation Road and stay disappeared; some other excuse for my disappearance will crop up, something to do with time travelling, as like as not. These things converge. Also, there'll be a lot of cross-temporal leakage; don't let it worry you, at the time of break there'll be a lot of time-echoes resonating around nodes of significance and you may find little bits of alternative histories, those old parallel universes, get superimposed on this one, so be prepared for the odd little miracle to happen. It tends to create a lot of fall-out, tinkering with history."

While he had been speaking, his deft fingers had discovered the setting on the time transfer controls he desired. He stood back from the time winder; it gave a sigh, a shudder, and vanished in a series of blurred afterimages.

"Where did it go?" asked Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli.

"Three hours into the future," said Dr. Alimantando. "I'll pick it up about lunchtime. Gentlemen, you have seen with your own eyes that time travel is a practical possibility, if you join me at thirteen twenty, you can help participate in the first manned trip in history."

Over his lunch of leeks and cheese Dr. Alimantando planned how he might change history. He thought he might start with the orph who had willed him the oasis. From there, well, all time and space was his to wander. He might spend a lifetime in one evening saving his town. It would be a lifetime well spent. He went to a special cupboard in his kitchen and opened it. Inside was piled his amateur time traveller's outfit. He had spent five years and a lot of his credit lodged in the Bank of Deuteronomy amassing it. At first it had been an idle fancy, the kind of hobby that men take up as proof of the ultimate fulfilment of their impossible dreams, then as the items began to arrive from the Meridian Mail Order companies, the fancy had dragged the dream after it until now here he was, preparing to travel to times and places in a way no one had ever travelled before. Dr. Alimantando smiled over each item as he laid them out: A folding one-man survival tent, military issue, with double-seal gaskets and integral groundsheet.

One sleeping bag, mummy-style: military issue.

One transparent plastic insulation suit, complete with bubble helmet and oxygen rebreather mask.

Two sets of clean underwear, one long for cold weather. Socks.

One complete change of clothes.

One military-issue camp kitchen, collapsible, adapted to run off his portable power supply. Compressed rations for desperation only.

Five hundred dollars in cash.

Sun hat and two tubes of sun-block cream.

Soap bag, sponge and towel.

Toothbrush and paste (spearmint).

First-aid kit, including antihistamines, morphine, and general antibiotics.

For use with above, one pewter hip flask Belladonna brandy.

One pair sunglasses, one pair sand goggles.

A pure silk scarf: blue paisley.

One pocket shortwave transceiver.

Compass, sextant, and inertial direction finder, together with Geological Survey maps to enable him to find his position on the planet's surface on emerging from the flux fields.

One small tool kit, glue, and vinyl patches for the pressure suit and tent.

One packet water-sterilizing tablets.

A camera, three lenses, and twelve rolls of assorted self-developing film.

Five leather-bound notebooks and one guaranteed everlasting ball-point pen.

One wrist ionization dosimeter.

Six bars of emergency chocolate.

One Defence Forces knife, with a blade for every day of the year, and a tin of dry matches.

Emergency flares.

One copy
The Collected Works of Watchman Ree.

One portable trans-stable muon power unit with multicharge syphon for re-energizing from any power source: homemade.

Running off the above, one homemade portable tachyon blaster, about the size and shape of a folding umbrella, with enough clout to vaporize a small skyscraper.

One large frame backpack, military issue, to hold everything.

Dr. Alimantando began to store his equipment. It all folded down remarkably small. Then he glanced at his watch. It was almost thirteen o'clock. He went to the kitchen table and counted the seconds off on the wall clock.

"Now." He pointed at The table. In a cascade of multiple imaging, the time winder arrived out of the past. He picked it up and added it to the time traveller's kit. Then he went and changed into his old much worn, much loved desert clothes and as he struggled into his long grey desert coat he invented eight hundred and six reasons why he should not go.

Eight hundred and six cons, and one pro. It was simply that he had to. He strapped on his bulky pack and fastened the control verniers around his wrist. Mr. Jericho, Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli entered, prompt as only Mr. Jericho could be prompt.