Centrus, which is smaller than Anchorage had been, a millennium and a half ago. My own life has adapted itself to the scale and pace of a village, so my first impression of Centrus is one of dizzying speed and neck-craning size. But I take a mental deep breath and remember New York and London, Paris and Genevanot to mention Skye and Atlantis, the fabulous pleasure cities that sucked away our money on Heaven. Centrus is a hick town that happens to be the biggest hick town within twenty light-years.
I held on to that thought when we came in to confer with Centrus administratorswhich is to say, the world'sabout our timetable for fixing up and crewing the Time Warp.
We'd hoped they could just rubber-stamp it. Fourteen of us had spent most of a week arguing over who was to do what, when. I could just see starting over and repeating the process, with the additional pressure of demands from Man.
We went all the way up to the tenth-floor penthouse office of the General Administration Building, and presented our plan to four Men, two male and two female, and a Tauran, who could have been any of three sexes. He turned out to be Antres 906, of course, the cultural attaché we had entertained at our house the night I earned my first entry on the police blotter.
The five of them read the three-page schedule in silence, while Marygay and I looked out over Centrus. There wasn't really too much to see. Beyond the dozen or so square blocks of downtown, the trees were higher than the buildings; I knew there was a good-sized town out there, but the dwellings and businesses were hidden by evergreens, all the way out to the shuttle pad on the horizon. The shuttles themselves weren't visible; both were inside the launching tubes that rose out of the horizon mist like smokestacks on an old-fashioned factory.
The one wall of this room that wasn't window featured ten paintings, five each of human and Tauran manufacture. The human ones were bland cityscapes in the various seasons. The Tauran things were skeins and splotches of colors that clashed so much they seemed to vibrate. I knew that some of them were pigmented with body fluids. They were evidently prettier if you could see into the ultraviolet.
At some subtle signal, they all set down their copies of the schedule in unison.
"We have no objection to this as far as it goes," said the leftmost Man. She betrayed her lack of telepathy by glancing down the row; the others nodded slightly, including the Tauran. "The days when you need both shuttles will be an inconvenience, but we can plan around them."
" ' … as far as it goes'?" Marygay said.
"We should have told you this earlier," she said, "but it must be obvious. We will require that you take two more passengers. A Man and a Tauran."
Of course. We'd known about the Man, and should have foreseen the Tauran. "The Man is not a big problem," I said. "He or she can eat our food. But ten years of rations for a Tauran?" I did a quick mental calculation. "That's an extra six or eight tonnes of cargo."
"No, it is not a problem," Antres 906 rasped. "My metabolism can be altered to survive on your food, with a few grams of supplement daily."
"You can see the value of this to us," the Man said.
"Now that I think of it, of course," I said. "Both of your species may change somewhat in forty thousand years. You want a pair of time travelers as baselines." Marygay shook her head slowly, biting her lower lip. "We'll have to change the makeup of the crew. No disrespect, Antres, but there are many veterans who could not tolerate your presence for ten hours, let alone ten years."
"And in any case, we can't guarantee your safety," I said. "Many of us were conditioned to kill your kind on sight."
"But they have all been de-conditioned," Man said.
I thought of Max, slated as assistant civil engineer. "With uneven success, I'm afraid."
"That is understood and forgiven," Antres said. "If that part of the experiment fails, then it fails." It
I held on to that thought when we came in to confer with Centrus administratorswhich is to say, the world'sabout our timetable for fixing up and crewing the Time Warp.
We'd hoped they could just rubber-stamp it. Fourteen of us had spent most of a week arguing over who was to do what, when. I could just see starting over and repeating the process, with the additional pressure of demands from Man.
We went all the way up to the tenth-floor penthouse office of the General Administration Building, and presented our plan to four Men, two male and two female, and a Tauran, who could have been any of three sexes. He turned out to be Antres 906, of course, the cultural attaché we had entertained at our house the night I earned my first entry on the police blotter.
The five of them read the three-page schedule in silence, while Marygay and I looked out over Centrus. There wasn't really too much to see. Beyond the dozen or so square blocks of downtown, the trees were higher than the buildings; I knew there was a good-sized town out there, but the dwellings and businesses were hidden by evergreens, all the way out to the shuttle pad on the horizon. The shuttles themselves weren't visible; both were inside the launching tubes that rose out of the horizon mist like smokestacks on an old-fashioned factory.
The one wall of this room that wasn't window featured ten paintings, five each of human and Tauran manufacture. The human ones were bland cityscapes in the various seasons. The Tauran things were skeins and splotches of colors that clashed so much they seemed to vibrate. I knew that some of them were pigmented with body fluids. They were evidently prettier if you could see into the ultraviolet.
At some subtle signal, they all set down their copies of the schedule in unison.
"We have no objection to this as far as it goes," said the leftmost Man. She betrayed her lack of telepathy by glancing down the row; the others nodded slightly, including the Tauran. "The days when you need both shuttles will be an inconvenience, but we can plan around them."
" ' … as far as it goes'?" Marygay said.
"We should have told you this earlier," she said, "but it must be obvious. We will require that you take two more passengers. A Man and a Tauran."
Of course. We'd known about the Man, and should have foreseen the Tauran. "The Man is not a big problem," I said. "He or she can eat our food. But ten years of rations for a Tauran?" I did a quick mental calculation. "That's an extra six or eight tonnes of cargo."
"No, it is not a problem," Antres 906 rasped. "My metabolism can be altered to survive on your food, with a few grams of supplement daily."
"You can see the value of this to us," the Man said.
"Now that I think of it, of course," I said. "Both of your species may change somewhat in forty thousand years. You want a pair of time travelers as baselines." Marygay shook her head slowly, biting her lower lip. "We'll have to change the makeup of the crew. No disrespect, Antres, but there are many veterans who could not tolerate your presence for ten hours, let alone ten years."
"And in any case, we can't guarantee your safety," I said. "Many of us were conditioned to kill your kind on sight."
"But they have all been de-conditioned," Man said.
I thought of Max, slated as assistant civil engineer. "With uneven success, I'm afraid."
"That is understood and forgiven," Antres said. "If that part of the experiment fails, then it fails." It
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