Part 1

Tickets to Paradise

by D. L. JAMES

_The ice stone was a time warp, a pathway through 500,000 years!_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet December 40. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It all started at Bandar Shahpur. You see, I'm a railroad construction man. Our job was finished, and the whole outfit was waiting at Bandar Shahpur, which is on the inlet Khor Musa of the Persian Gulf, for a boat to take us back to America.

And there, out of nowhere, this Dr. Champ Chadwick showed up. He seemed to be starving for a little good old U.S.A. palaver, and I guess that's why we struck up an acquaintance.

"I've been doing a little digging over in Iraq," he said offhand. "But things quieted down there. So now I'm bound for the desert and mountains to the north of here. This railroad has opened things up. It's difficult to get an expedition financed, you know, and transportation is sometimes the chief item."

I began to catch on that he was one of those guys who dig up ruins and things, and read a country's whole past from what they find. Then he went on to tell that he'd been sent out by a university in Pennsylvania, but that this present trip was just a sudden idea of his own.

And as he talked I began to like Dr. Chadwick. He was a serious-faced, rawboned little guy--not half my size--with steady eyes, a firm chin, and black hair plastered down slick on his head. By and by he got around to mention that he was looking for a strong-backed man to take along with him.

"I intend to strike out from Qum, the holy city," he said. "I'll try to get hold of a motor-truck there--and one of these desert men to drive it. They're rotten drivers though," he added, "and next to a dead loss on a trip like this." Then he sighed. "But I'm getting used to 'em."

"What do you expect to find up there?" I asked.

"The usual thing," he answered, as if that ought to explain everything. "This country is full of ruins. It's so old, in fact, that sometimes I think that everything that can happen has already happened here, at one time or another. Take Qum, for instance. A few years back there were twenty thousand ruined and deserted buildings still standing. These walled towns are like coral islands, surrounded and upheld by the dust and decay of their own past. But I'm looking for something farther back--much farther back."

He paused, then suddenly his eyes brightened. "There's one thing, though. I may have a try at finding the Ice Stone."

"The Ice Stone?" I echoed. "And what's that?"

"Perhaps just a legend. It isn't likely you would ever have heard of it. It's supposed to be a black stone, a huge, square block, set in the side of a mountain. If a man touches it, his hand sinks in, and he can get loose only by amputating. The queer part is, there seems to be some basis for the legend. All down through Iran's history there are disconnected references. The thing keeps cropping up. Vague reports from wandering tribes, with one or more cripples, minus an arm or leg, to verify the yarn. So, I may take a shot at locating the Ice Stone."

Queer stories like that are quite common in Iran. Ordinarily I'd have laughed and forgotten it. But as I say, I'd taken a sort of liking to this serious-faced little Dr. Champ Chadwick. And when you like a man you're bound to think twice before discrediting what he believes in.

"So you'll be taking a ride over this crazy railroad," I remarked thoughtfully, somewhat later.

He nodded. "What makes you call it crazy?"

Well, I told him. Of course he already knew quite a lot about Iran's new railroad--the many-million dollar toy of the "Brother of the Moon and Stars," as the fancy-tongued Iranians like to call their shah. This road writhes and twists and climbs through eight hundred miles of queer, mountainous country--a country of mud and rocks and salt-swamps--and carefully avoids all the important towns. You see, the "King of Kings"--another pet name for Shah Pahlavi--is afraid some of his neighbors might get control of the road and use it against him. These same neighbors sneeringly refer to it as the road that leads from "nowhere to nowhere."

Perhaps they aren't far wrong. But this road was the reason for my meeting up with Dr. Champ Chadwick.

The last spike, a gold one, had just been hammered into its tie by the "Most Lofty of Living Men" himself. That put our outfit out of a job temporarily. You see, I'd been working for McKardin-Malroy, an American contracting company, to whom the Shah had let out part of the constructional works on his railroad.

So, in the end, I of course took the job this Chadwick had sort of dangled under my nose. The pay wasn't anything worth mentioning; but, as I found out later, he himself was supplying the cash for this trip out of his own pocket. He didn't have much, and so expenses had to be cut to the limit.

Things moved fast after that. I'd always had an idea that such trips were planned carefully, months in advance, detail by detail. But this Doc Champ, as I got to calling him, didn't seem to plan anything--he just acted.

The next day Doc and I rode back over that crazy railroad I'd helped build--a road that winds through a maze of tunnels, one a grotesque spiral affair, over high bridges and gorge viaducts. We passed through Dizful, famed city of rats; Sultanabad, city of rugs; and on to the holy city of Qum.

Two days later, with Doc's whole scant outfit stored in the truck he'd managed to purchase, we were grinding out through squalid towns of ancient, one-story huts toward the salt swamp of Kavir and the lonely stretch of mountains to the north.

"Notice the way the dew lies there on the grass?" he said to me one morning, just as the sun was rising and we were breaking camp. "We slept right over the foundation walls of what was once part of an ancient city."

I squinted at where he was pointing, and, sure enough, I could see the grass was all marked out in big squares--showing up only in the way the dew sparkled, or didn't sparkle, in the slanting sunlight.

"Difference in heat and moisture conductivity," explained Doc. "Those walls are probably only a little way beneath the surface."

"You want to dig here?" I asked him.

He shook his head. Since that time when he told me about the Ice Stone, he'd never mentioned it again. But I had noticed him squinting at all the mountains we passed, and sometimes I'd see a queer expression on his face, like a man who catches himself doing something that hasn't got good sense back of it.

In fact, by the end of the week, I had about decided that he didn't have any better idea as to why we'd come out here than I did.

I think it was on the seventh day that we came upon a queer-looking country--isolated masses of rock, like big blocks, sticking up out of the ground. Beyond these was a range of low mountains, or big hills, whichever way you look at it.

"We'll camp here for a day," said Doc. "How's the water?"

"About gone," I told him.

"Good," he nodded. "We'll run the truck up to the foot of those big hills and find some."

I headed that old bus for a sort of fold in the hills ahead, and when the ground began to get pretty rough we stopped and went on afoot, each carrying a couple of empty water buckets. It wasn't long before we found a shallow stream.

"There may be a spring farther up," said Doc.

He started splashing along the creek bed, for it was bordered by dense thickets of "jangal"--birch and box--through which you could scarcely squeeze.

I followed him. Pretty soon I smelled smoke.

"Hey, Doc!" I called, "something's burning."

He stopped and turned around. There was a queer look in his eyes, almost like he wasn't all there--dopey.

"Yes," he said, not seeming surprised at all. Then he pointed ahead. "Smoke--I saw it some time back."

He started on again. The whole thing wasn't natural. For almost a week we had seen no living human being. And now, smoke--a wood fire, as I could tell by the scent--seemed to mean that we were getting near where someone lived. And yet, Doc hadn't thought it worth mentioning!

Well, I followed him on for a hundred yards. Then we turned a bend in the creek. The jangal opened up, and there, under the spread of a huge plane-tree, was the fire.

It was a small fire. Over it, roasting to a turn, were three dangling fowls; and near by stood a strange human figure--a man.

He beckoned to us. And as we approached he stood with folded arms, facing us.

"I am Rog Tanlu," he said in stiff but absolutely correct English. "I called you, and you came."

Doc Champ, ahead of me, straightened with a start. It was almost as though he had just realized the queerness of all this.

"Good Lord!" I heard him gasp softly.

Then we both stood there, staring at that chap who called himself Rog Tanlu. He was dressed in a glove-fitting garment that appeared to be made of fawn-colored silk--which was odd enough. But the man himself looked still stranger. He was no Iranian--no Kurd, Kashgais nor Bakhtiaris. I could have sworn to that.

He was very light skinned--lighter than any Persian--with a kind of pallor, although not an unhealthy look, as though he'd spent all his life indoors.

"Do not be alarmed," he said, smiling at us, and with a friendly look in his light blue eyes. "I can well understand your surprise at finding me here. But I shall explain everything. Meanwhile, I have prepared food, thinking you might be hungry. Will you join me?"

He started dishing out those broiled fowls--black partridges, or "durraj," I judged them to be--with the air of a man enjoying his first outdoor picnic and getting a big kick out of it.

"Here, Dr. Chadwick," he said, handing Doc one of those birds on a big leaf for a dish. "And here's one for you, Mr. Lavin."

Well, I took that broiled fowl and looked for a place to sit down. You see my name is Lavin, Curt Lavin, but how he'd found it out was a puzzler. I looked at Doc Champ. He was staring at this Rog Tanlu as if seeing a ghost, or a man from Mars.

That kind of knocked me out. I put a lot of dependence on Doc's knowledge of human tribes and such. But evidently he couldn't tag on our host any more than I could.

I started to sit down on a flat rock near the fire. And then I saw something standing on that rock--a thing like a tubular flashlight, eight inches tall, with a globe of silvered glass at the upper end.

"You are wondering at the way I speak your language," I heard this Rog Tanlu saying to Doc Champ. "I have been learning it during the last few days, but as yet am very lacking in fluency."

"You--you've been learning English?" Doc Champ kind of gulped.

Rog Tanlu waved the bird-leg he was nibbling on.

"With the audio-visiscope," he explained.

He reached over and did something to that flashlight thing on the rock near me. Right away it started talking--like a radio. But I knew it wasn't a radio. The speaker was someone cussing the King of Kings' order forbidding veils for Iranian women. And then I saw that what I had thought was a reflection in that silvered globe was moving. It wasn't a reflection; it was a robed, turbaned mullah, and he went on telling someone how unjust it was for a mullah to have to carry a license.

"Television," I heard Doc Champ mutter.

I'll say it was, with a bang! And yet, not just that either. For you may depend on it that no station was sending out such stuff.

Rog Tanlu shut the thing off, and the silver of that globe became dead black. I started eating. There was nothing but coarse salt to go along with the bird--the kind you can scrape off rocks near those mud-salt swamps--but the meat tasted okay. The others sat down and we finished the three birds in no time.

"How'd you bag 'em?" I asked Rog Tanlu, for I hadn't seen anything of a gun, and black pheasants aren't easy to knock over with a stone.

Rog Tanlu smiled and wiped his hands on that knit-silk outfit he was wearing. All the time during that meal he'd been smiling, squinting up at the sky and breathing deep--for all the world as though he'd never been on an outdoor party before.

"With this," he said, in answer to my question, picking up something from the rock near where he was sitting--something that looked like a black fountain-pen--for there didn't seem to be any pockets in his clothing. Again he squinted up at the sky.

Just then a buzzard came flying along slowlike, pretty high over our heads. Rog Tanlu pointed that pen affair up at the bird. A thin little ray of light flashed up--another and another. They wavered around for a second, getting centered. And suddenly that buzzard started tumbling out of the sky and crashed into the bushes near us.

Doc Champ and I looked dumbly at each other. And then we stared at Rog Tanlu. Grinning like a magician who has just pulled a fancy trick, he held that ray-gun out for us to look at.

"What did you mean when you said you had called us?" asked Doc Champ, in that quiet way of his.

"I had to get in communication with someone in this Age--someone who could understand," said Rog Tanlu. "I chose you" (he was, of course, speaking to Doc Champ) "because of your training and comprehension of the Past. So I called you with the psycho-coil on the audio-visiscope, by which means mental suggestions may be conveyed."

Doc Champ swallowed hard. "What country are you from?"

"Iralnard," said Rog Tanlu. "A nation which does not exist on earth today, but which was contemporary with the beginning of the last Ice Age. At that time my people occupied this very land. I am, as you might say, a refugee from the Ice Age--the first to come through. But I believe that others will follow. A number of my people. This possible migration cannot help but result in discord with the present holders of the land, unless some friendly agreement can be established. So I called you."

By this time I was up to my ears. I grabbed Doc Champ's arm.

"Doc," I groaned, "are we awake? Is this guy joking? Or what's the answer?"

Doc pushed me away.

"I shall make everything clear," said Rog Tanlu.

"Let's get this straight," insisted Doc Champ. "You say you are a refugee from the Ice Age? But that was some five hundred thousand years ago. And you are in possession of at least two instruments of advanced science. It doesn't match up."

"It is quite necessary that you believe me." Rog Tanlu wasn't smiling now, but was speaking very seriously. "Perhaps you realize that it is a trait of the human mind to look upon the Past as uncultured. Such an attitude is greatly in error."

"You traveled here through Time?" asked Doc.

"Not exactly," said Rog Tanlu. "Time, as you know, is merely the illusion experienced by creatures endowed with memory living in a universe of random energy distribution. Time is movement, the rearrangement of matter--dependent upon the degree of entropy. I found it impossible to travel in Time. That's why I constructed the Ice Stone."

"The Ice Stone!" There was a kind of awe in Doc's voice. "_You_ built the Ice Stone?"

Rog Tanlu nodded. "Of course I didn't call it that. But I happened to overhear a conversation between you two, with the audio-visiscope, some days ago, and thereby learned the name you have for it. A very appropriate name! I also learned that neither of you had ever seen it. So now, if you will accompany me, I will take you to my laboratory--or rather to what still remains of my laboratory--and show you the Ice Stone. That should simplify things, and may help us to solve the problem of this impending migration--a problem which was forced on me due to certain interference, as I will later explain."

He picked up that flashlight thing and started off up the creek bank.

Doc Champ shot a glance at me as he wiped beads of perspiration from his face with his old felt hat. The shiny black locks plastered down on his head glinted as he stepped into the sunshine.

"Come along," he said to me. "We'll see this through."

We followed Rog Tanlu. Presently he turned off the bank of the creek, and the path he chose got rocky and wild as hell. I began to understand why it was that so few people had ever run across the Ice Stone by accident.

"Doc," I whispered, "what do you make of this guy? Did you ever hear such a crazy yarn?"

"You forget," muttered Doc, "that we saw some things, too."

I knew what he meant. You couldn't get around that buzzard tumbling out of the sky, nor the mullah's image and voice in that silver globe.

Rog Tanlu was walking a few yards ahead of us. Suddenly I saw a queer-looking object hanging in one of those scraggly trees that were having a hard time trying to grow there among the rocks. It looked like a heavy blanket or garment, the same fawn-color as Rog Tanlu's outfit.

He stopped just opposite the tree where the thing was hanging from a low branch.

"After emerging from the Ice Stone," he explained, "I had to discard my outer clothing. The sudden climatic change was almost shocking." Then he pointed upward and to the left along a broad ledge that seemed to zigzag down the rough face of a cliff, a hundred yards away.

I guess Doc Champ had already caught sight of the Ice Stone. But I hadn't; and now with my first glimpse of it, the thing did look exactly like ice. It was like a huge, square block, set flush with the face of the cliff, and with that ledge forming a pathway up to it.

"Queer," I heard Doc Champ muttering. "All the legends pertaining to the Ice Stone mention its black appearance. That stone doesn't look black--it looks transparent."

"Its color has recently changed," explained Rog Tanlu. "It isn't a stone, or any material substance. It is a peculiar kind of space--space with the third dimension, thickness in this instance, so twisted and curved as to allow the fourth dimension to emerge from nothingness into a certain hypostatic realness. Light has needed a long time to penetrate through it, and for that reason the cube has only recently assumed an apparent transparency. Now, if you will follow me, I will lead you to my laboratory."

He continued on around a shoulder of the cliff, so that we lost sight of the Ice Stone. Gigantic boulders all but blocked the way. However, our strange guide seemed to know where he was going and how to get there.

"All these rocks didn't used to be here," he said musingly. "They are evidently glacier débris carried down since--well, since my time. Ah! Here we are."

He wormed his way through a narrow crevice. Doc and I followed. We soon entered what at one time in the past must have been the wide mouth of an underground cavern.

For a moment we stood there, breathing the cold, moist air and staring into the darkness.

Suddenly a light flashed. I saw that Rog Tanlu was using that fountain-pen thing like a flashlight, but now it was sending out a blue-white radiance instead of those thin, death-dealing flashes.

"This was my laboratory," he said, holding the light at arm's length above his head. "There were big sliding doors that closed the place up tight and kept out the ice and the cold. I had some rather unique scientific apparatus here, but now it's all mouldering dust."

His voice sounded flat, there with the weight of rocks around us, and sad somehow.

The floor of the cavern slanted stiffly upward. As we advanced, the air around us kept getting colder and colder. It was like a gale from the poles blowing in our faces.

"We'll soon be directly behind the Ice Stone," said Rog Tanlu.

A light began to appear ahead. I could see more of that cavern--even the rock-ribbed ceiling high overhead. I can't express just what I was thinking at that moment, but I saw Doc Champ kick at a mound of something underfoot. The mound crumbled; Doc stooped and picked up a round object, like a disk of rusted metal, and looked at it with a kind of stark wonder. Then he threw it away and we followed Rog Tanlu.

The light grew brighter, became a huge square of blustery, blue-white chaos. We were standing as if just within the maws of a Gargantuan doorway--an open doorway through which we could look out over a scene of inexpressible dreariness.

You've seen pictures of the Antarctic? Titanic masses and pinnacles of ice, frozen white barrens, a land without feeling or soul? It was like that.

"We are looking through the Ice Stone." Rog Tanlu's voice was all but snatched away by that glacial blast swishing in our faces. "I set it up like a door--a door leading from my laboratory to the outside. The light you see, and the wind, has taken half a million years to get through."

Doc Champ was tugging at the collar of his coat, and my own teeth were chattering. Rog Tanlu motioned us to one side, out of that freezing blast.

"You see what we were up against?" he smiled. "Our space explorations had killed the hope that some other planet in the system might offer a suitable refuge where humans could live under anything like natural conditions.

"Moreover, there were social troubles. Politicians, philosophers and sociologists all combined to control science. A scientist had to get a special permit before he could conduct any new line of inquiry.

"So I built this laboratory--ten miles from the vitro-domed city of Iralnard--partly to escape governmental interference and partly to keep from being spied upon by Darlu Marc, another experimentalist and personal enemy of mine. I worked here alone, except for one laboratory assistant--Eyoaoc Eiioiei, as I called him. And here we created the Ice Stone.

"As I have already explained, it is no material thing--merely a cube of specialized space, foreshortened, warped and curved to attain a specific result. Its action is very simple. It slows up a beam of light exactly as does a lens, but to an incomparably greater degree. And being composed of nothing tangible, it acts on any moving thing--particle, atom or electron--exactly as it does on light photons.

"Thus a man can walk through the Ice Stone without sensing any change. Yet every function of his being is retarded, including mental processes. And when he emerges from the other side, approximately half a million years have elapsed. But once having touched it, say with his hand, he must not try to withdraw, for his hand will then be within a separate and distinct macrocosm, uninfluenced by anything outside, and he must follow on through.

"My intentions were, of course, to provide an avenue of escape from the Ice Age we were entering, for I knew it wouldn't last indefinitely. But I needed some sort of proof as to what conditions would be like in half a million years before I could offer the Ice Stone as a possible refuge. With Eyoaoc Eiioiei's help I managed to obtain several chemically depicted approximations of the nearby landscape as it would be likely to appear after the Ice Age.

"These were very beautiful--or thus they seem to me--for you must remember that in my time no one had ever seen trees or grass or flowers growing naturally in the open.

"We had just completed all this when, as we were working one day here in the laboratory, my assistant sensed a snooper-ray on us. I myself am not sensitive to an audio-visiscope emanation--sometimes called the 'snooper-ray'--but Eyoaoc Eiioiei sensed it, and he warned me.

"However, the warning came too late. Darlu Marc, my enemy, was the spy. Within a few hours I was thrown in prison. Eyoaoc Eiioiei escaped. He was almost immune to the outside cold.

"Darlu Marc had inveigled himself in with certain politicians and, as a reward for reporting my misconduct, he received charge of my laboratory. But I knew that the Ice Stone was safe, being practically indestructible.

"Shortly thereafter, word came to me in prison that a company had been formed under Marc--a company that was selling tickets to the poorer class of Iralnard City, entitling the holder to emigrate through the Ice Stone. Their slogan was 'Tickets to Paradise.'