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“The last time you had them,” said Rigg, “you hid one.”
“I was experimenting with timeflow,” said Umbo.
“Why not experiment with letting a grownup do a man’s job?” said Loaf.
“And where would we find a grownup?” said Umbo.
Loaf laughed at him. “Such a youthful thing to say. Very refreshing.” He turned to Vadesh. “Lead the way.”
“I’ll wait here for Param,” said Olivenko.
Umbo felt a pang of jealousy. Completely irrational, but the thought of leaving Param alone with this handsome young scholar-soldier bothered him. So Umbo defied his own feelings and simply turned his back and walked toward the door.
“Not that way,” said Vadesh. “It’s farther in.”
“But we’re far from any mountain,” said Umbo.
“We’re already on the shoulder of the mountain,” said Vadesh, “and not all roads are on the surface of the world.”
They walked through a door in the far end of the water room, and found themselves in a huge space filled with machines of inexplicable purpose. They all seemed to be made of the same kind of impervious metal that the outside walls were made of, that the surface of the Tower of O had been made of. Umbo knew that the Tower of O had been attacked in every possible way, not by warriors, but by researchers trying to understand what it was made of. Heat was one of the many things it didn’t respond to. So how could the metal—if it was metal—be poured into molds in order to be shaped into machine parts?
And what did the machines actually make? Huge moving parts were visible, but none of the things they actually worked to make. Umbo wanted to see it moving, partly because he wanted to watch them move, and partly to see what came out of the end of each machine.
Umbo knew he was lagging behind the others, but he could hear their footsteps and they were not far ahead. He would catch up. He just wanted to figure out how this one machine worked.
And then he was aware of someone standing beside him. He turned and saw himself.
The self he saw was bloody, his ear half torn away, his arm broken, his face contorted with pain. As soon as his vision-self saw that he was looking at him, he held up his good arm and whispered, “Stay here. Do nothing.”
And then he was gone.
Umbo’s first impulse was to shout after Rigg and Loaf to stop. But he couldn’t hear their footsteps now. He wasn’t sure where they were, or if they would hear him. His broken, bleeding future self had said to do nothing. The future self presumably cared as much about Loaf and Rigg as Umbo did right now, so if he said to do nothing it was presumably because there was nothing useful to be done. If Umbo couldn’t trust his own future judgment in such a matter, whom could he trust?
How much of nothing was he required to do? Could he go back to Olivenko and warn him? Warn them, if Param had come out of hiding and caught up?
Surely that didn’t count as “something”—he could surely go back.
Yet every instinct pushed him forward, to follow Rigg and Loaf and see what was about to happen to them.
But it might be that nothing would happen. It might be only Umbo himself who was in such danger. Stay here, do nothing. If a future self came back to warn him, Umbo had no choice but to obey.
He stayed in place. He did nothing.
A few minutes later, he heard footsteps. He saw Param coming through the factory, and then Olivenko following her.
“Where did they go?” demanded Param.
“I don’t know,” said Umbo.
“Why aren’t you with them?”
“Because I came back from the future to warn myself not to go on.”
Param paused a moment, blinking slowly while she processed the implications of his statement.
“Do you have any idea why?”
“I only know that I never come back and warn myself unless it’s really important that I do exactly what I tell myself to do,” said Umbo.
