FLIGHT FROM TIME
By ALFRED COPPEL
The meteor-smashed clock at first meant nothing. Malenson had all the time in the cosmos. Too late, he discovered there can be such a thing as too much time.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A long career of cutting corners had taught Malenson the importance of timing. Time, he had long ago concluded, was the fabric from which were cut the garments of poverty or greatness. And since Malenson had no love for the simple life, it naturally followed that he should turn his talents toward the amassing of wealth with the least possible waste of the precious commodity ... time.
He didn't bother to conceal his crime. He only timed it well. And following his carefully thought out plans further, he boarded his ship at the proper instant and vanished into the interstellar fastnesses with five million irridium dollars in coin and government certificates.
A galaxy, he reflected, would make a perfect hiding place. One would have only to look at the girdle of the Milky Way on a clear night to see the logic of his choice. Among a billion billion stars separated by light years of brooding emptiness, one man in a small ship would be a fantastically difficult thing to find. Easier by far it would be to find one particular grain of sand on the seashore, than to locate Malenson within the vast limbo of the galaxy.
Only if he made a planetfall on one of the colonized worlds could he be found, and Malenson was no fool. His ship was fueled and provisioned for twelve years in space. With care and a strict system of rationing, he could stretch it out to fifteen years. And at the end of that time he could return safely with his millions, for an enlightened penal system had long ago assigned statutes of limitation to all felonies.
Nor would exile be an unbearable thing. The three hundred foot ship was packed with reading tapes, classical and popular recordings, all manner of occupational therapy devices, and old fashioned books.
Only human companionship was missing, and to Malenson that meant nothing. He had lived a lonely life, isolated from his fellows by a profound sense of his own superiority. He had no love for humanity.
So Malenson and his treasure ship fled from the world of men. Up from the spaceport and into the void he went. As soon as he had cleared the atmosphere, he cut in the second order drive and lifted clear of the ecliptic plane at better than light speed.
Malenson was no navigator, but his spacecraft was fool-proof, and relying on that fact he drove upward and outward from Earth toward the celestial pole. Leisurely, he settled himself for the first short leg of his long voyage. He was completely at ease, for pursuit in second order flight was impossible.
Exactly seventy hours elapsed before he cut the drive for a look around him. The ship was in a moderately starred region of the galaxy. He could still make out most of the familiar constellations. Ursa Major lay ahead and to the right; Cygnus, a trifle distorted lay overhead. And the beacon stars Rigel, Altair and Sirius were easily recognizable. Sol had dwindled to a yellow star of the third magnitude.
Malenson smiled with satisfaction and pointed the ship's nose at the bright vee of Taurus. The red eye of Aldebaran would make an excellent check point, and his trajectory would be well above Sol and the regular shipping lanes. Then he cut in the drive again and went to bed.
Six hours later he awoke. Food, automatically prepared in the galley awaited him. He ate and made his way to the control room. He checked the operation of the automatic controls and settled down before the forward ports to watch the sky. Travelling above light speed played strange tricks on his vision. Looking out into the galactic night, it seemed that all the stars were grouped in a distorted mass directly in front of the plunging ship. It was illusion, Malenson knew, but the weird spectacle vaguely disturbed him. He quite illogically felt constrained to cut the drive and check his position. He knew, of course that he was nowhere near Aldebaran yet, but he could not control the sudden urge to see the stars in their proper places.
He cut the drive.
Malenson realized his mistake immediately, for the ship was in the middle of a small meteor swarm. In second order flight it was inviolate, but primary flight slowed it to a point where meteor danger was a real consideration.
Alarm bells jangled and the screen went to work. The bells would have meant an immediate shift back into second order flight to any really experienced spaceman, but Malenson was new to interstellar navigating. He sat and stared stupidly at the danger signals on the panel.
Still, the ship was an almost perfect machine. Certainly it saved Malenson's life. Only one small meteor penetrated the deflectors and crashed through the hull. Malenson flung himself to the deck instinctively as the tiny missile streaked hotly through the oxygen rich air of the control room. Immediately the self sealing insulation stopped all loss of pressure in the ship, and a repair unit set to work mending the break in the hull plates. But the meteor itself careened through the control room and ripped into the center panel with a smashing of glass and tearing of metal.
Malenson picked himself up and ran to the panel, panic-stricken. He inspected the damage carefully and heaved a sigh of relief. Nothing vital was destroyed. Only the master-chronometer and some lesser indicators were hit.
Then Malenson frowned. Without the master timepiece no clock on board would run, since they were all only terminals of the master system. He hurried to his stateroom and checked the wall clock. It smelled of burnt insulation. He pried the face loose and peered at its vitals. They were a mess of fused cogs and wires. A quick check throughout the ship showed that every clock was in the same useless condition. Even if he had been mechanic enough to repair them ... which he was not ... they were each and every one a hopeless tangle of burnt out innards. The meteor had short circuited the entire timekeeping system of the ship.
The master-chronometer was a mess of fused cogs and wires.
He returned to the control room with some misgivings. The loss of the clocks was no death blow to his kind of trial and error navigation. But it did promise to be a serious inconvenience in the regulation of his life in the timelessness of deep space. He still had his wristwatch, of course, but it was a very delicate ornamental sort of thing, not intended for hard usage.
Still, he reflected brightening somewhat, since his exile was to be measured in years and not minutes and hours, the wristwatch would serve. The star-charts and stellar analyzers that could identify any star would do for navigation. He might become misplaced, but to lose himself completely was impossible. He relied mightily on the fact that his ship was, in fact, fool-proof.
He kept the nose pointed at Taurus and cut in the second order drive again. The rest of the day, he spent in the library, laying out the reading he planned to do for the next few months.
A week later, the ship had passed through Taurus, skirted the Hyades, and was heading outward toward the galactic periphery. It was there that Malenson entertained a slight hope of finding a habitable uncolonized world. And there he could wander for years without the remotest chance of running into any representatives of the Galactic Confederation.
Two weeks later, his wristwatch stopped.
Cursing disgustedly, Malenson shook the recalcitrant bit of jewelry. It ticked fitfully once or twice and stopped. He decided that it must be in need of cleaning. He realized full well that he was not qualified to attempt such a delicate operation, but he also recognized the fact that there was little he could do about it. He needed the watch, and clean it he must; even though he hadn't the vaguest notion of how the thing was done.
Arming himself with alcohol, lens tissue, pliers and a tiny screwdriver, he set to work. Soon all the intestines of the tiny machine lay on the table before him. With great care he cleaned each part and reassembled them. But when he had finished, the watch would not run. The close work and the lack of success began to wear on him. Malenson did not take kindly to failure. A second time he dismantled the watch and a second time assembled it. The watch stubbornly refused to tick. With a disgusted curse Malenson repeated the process. Still no success. By now his hands were trembling hopelessly, and he knew he should let the job go for a few hours before attempting it again. But Malenson was a stubborn man. A fourth time the watch was dismembered and reassembled. And a fifth time. By now he could not hold the tiny wheels steady enough to mount them on the almost microscopic shafts. His fingers felt like thumbs. When finally the watch was closed up for the sixth time and still would not run, a sudden surge of illogical rage shook him and he slammed the watch furiously against the wall. It dissolved into a miniature shambles of thread-fine springs and tiny wheels. Still raging, he ground the remains to bits under his heel and strode angrily into the galley for a long pull at the brandy bottle....
An indeterminate time later, Malenson staggered up the long companionway and into his stateroom. Drugged with liquor, he sank down on his bunk and dropped into fitful, uneasy, slumber.
