He knew now what had happened to him in that vortex of darkness, and it seemed to him that a cold voice repeated a certain warning inscription in tones of distant thunder.
“The Quiru are lords of space and time— of time— OF TIME!”
Carse, staring out over the green hills and the milky ocean, made a terrible effort to grapple with the incredible.
“ I have come into the past of Mars. All my life I have studied and dreamed of that past. Now I am in it. I, Matthew Carse, archaeologist, renegade, looter of tombs.
“ The Quiru for their own reasons built a way and I came through it. Time is to us the unknown dimension but the Quiru knew it!”
Carse had studied science. You had to know the elements of a half-dozen sciences to be a planetary archaeologist. He frantically ransacked memory now for an explanation.
Had his first guess about that bubble of darkness been right? Was it really a hole in the continuum of the universe? If that were so he could dimly understand what had happened to him.
For the space-time continuum of the universe was finite, limited. Einstein and Riemann had proved that long ago. And he had fallen clear out of that continuum and then back into it again—but into a different time-frame from his own.
What was it that Kaufman had once written? “The Past is the Present-that-exists-at-a-distance.” He had come back into that other distant Present, that was all. There was no reason to be afraid.
But he was afraid. The horror of that nightmare transition to this green and smiling Mars of long ago wrenched a gusty cry from his lips.