Collected Short Fiction, page 30
“Craziest thing I ever heard,” Nibro peGanz said. “Dumping Edris into my lake. Might as well lie down and let the hugl eat me, too.”
“Patience, friend,” Kiv said. “The Council has decided.”
“And therefore I accept,” the farmer responded reluctantly.
“Right. I’ll be back to check on your farm in six days.” Kiv mounted his deest and trotted on down to the next farm.
The six days passed slowly, and then Kiv revisited the farms in the test areas.
The few hugl that had made their appearance didn’t even constitute a swarm, much less a menace.
“It’s all over,” he said, throwing open the door of Jones’ office with an assurance he had never known before. The Earthman was waiting inside, with Narla.
“What happened?” Narla asked anxiously.
“As expected,” Kiv said. “Perfectly as expected. Hardly a hugl to be found.”
Narla sighed in relief, and Jones’ face creased in a broad smile.
“Congratulations,” Jones said. “That makes you a celebrity, I suppose. The Man Who Saved the World.”
“It was your doing, Jones. You showed me how.”
Jones shook his head. “Ah, no! It was your doing. I’m merely here as a guide. My aim is eventually to bring you and your people to the Great Light, Kiv. But actually I will only help you to bring yourselves. When you guide a deest, it is still the deest, not you, who is doing the real work.”
Kiv frowned. “I don’t care much for your analogy.”
“Don’t let him upset you,” Narla said. “He’s only teasing again.” She drew close to him. “I’m tremendously proud of you,” she said.
Jones rubbed his beard with a forefinger. “In a way, Kiv, I am, too. I can’t help but think of how much you’ve learned since you came to Bel-rogas. You’ve really made progress.”
“Do you think he should become a priest? And maybe someday become an Elder?” Narla asked.
“Why, I think they ought to put him on the Council right now,” Jones replied. “After all, if he could walk right in there and tell the Council how to run Nidor—”
Jones paused and looked at Kiv, and Kiv met his glance with difficulty. There was something strange in the Earthman’s blue eyes.
“Let’s go outside,” Kiv said. “The air in here’s none too fresh.” At the suggestion, Narla and Jones arose. The three of them filed out of Jones’ office.
As they slowly proceeded down the stairs, Kiv considered what Jones had just said. After all, if be could walk right in there and tell the Council how to run Nidor—
But they were Elders, and he was only Kiv peGanz Brajjyd, an insignificant student. And he had told them what to do. And they had accepted it.
The thought suddenly cut into him. Since the beginning of time, young men had sat quietly and listened to the counsels of the Elders. Now, a bare thirty years after the Earthmen had descended from the sky, the age-old pattern had begun to break. Was this the way the Earthmen were leading them toward the Light? The enormity of what he had done struck him, and then the even greater enormity that no one had questioned his action. No one. The Earthmen were having their effects on Nidor, all right.
They reached the foot of the stairs.
Absently, he turned to enter the little room where his laboratory was. He opened the door and saw the rows and rows of cabinets, each with their specimens of hugl, and right in the center of the room was the larva tank.
“Where are you going, Kiv?” Jones called. “I thought you wanted some fresh air.”
Jones started to walk out the front door, followed by Narla. Kiv hastened to catch up with them.
“What’s on your mind, Kiv?” Jones asked as Kiv reached the door.
“Nothing, Jones, nothing.” But he was certain the Earthman knew exactly what was on his mind.
He stepped out of the building onto the front lawn of the Bel-rogas campus. He looked up, and the Great Light illumined the cloudladen sky. Suddenly he thought again of the quotation from the Fourteenth Section—and Tor some reason, his head began to hurt.
THE END
Absolutely Inflexible
It’s never really safe to go skating on the quicksands of Time. But Mahler was determined to execute a complete letter Y.
We have never been seriously disturbed by the paradox of the man who went back into the past and killed his own grandfather, thus making time-travel as inconceivable as a journey to the South Pole on the back of a whale. Robert Silverberg will have no truck with such nonsense and when we read this story we could understand why. A real time-traveler just wouldn’t have a grandfather. He’d come out of nowhere and end up—his own worst enemy!
THE DETECTOR over in one corner of Mahler’s little office gleamed a soft red. He indicated it with a weary gesture of his hand to the sad-eyed time jumper who sat slouched glumly across the desk from him, looking cramped and uncomfortable in the bulky spacesuit he was compelled to wear.
“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”
“And not one has been set free,” the time jumper said. “Every time-traveler who’s come here has been packed off to the Moon immediately. Every one.”
“Every one,” Mahler said. He peered through the thick shielding, trying to see what sort of man was hidden inside the spacesuit. Mahler often wondered about the men he condemned so easily to the Moon. This one was small of stature, with wispy locks of white hair pasted to his high forehead by perspiration. Evidently he had been a scientist, a respected man of his time, perhaps a happy father (although very few of the time jumpers were family men). Perhaps he possessed some bit of scientific knowledge that would be invaluable to the twenty-eighth century; perhaps not. It did not matter. Like all the rest, he would have to be sent to the Moon, to live out his remaining days under the grueling, primitive conditions of the Dome.
“Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?” the other asked. “I came here with no malice, no intent to harm whatsoever. I’m simply a scientific observer from the past. Driven by curiosity, I took the Jump. I never expected that I’d be walking into life imprisonment.”
“I’m sorry,” Mahler said, getting up. He decided to end the interview; he had to get rid of this jumper because there was another coming right up. Some days they came thick and fast, and this looked like one of them. But the efficient mechanical tracers never missed one.
“But can’t I live on Earth and stay in this spacesuit?” the time-jumper asked, panicky now that he saw his interview with Mahler was coming to an end. “That way I’d be sealed off from contact at all times.”
“Please don’t make this any harder for me,” Mahler said. “I’ve explained to you why we must be absolutely inflexible about this. There cannot—must not—be any exceptions. It’s two centuries since last there was any occurrence of disease on Earth. In all this time we’ve lost most of the resistance acquired over the previous countless generations of disease. I’m risking my life coming so close to you, even with the spacesuit sealing you off.”
Mahler signaled to the tall, powerful guards waiting in the corridor, grim in the casings that protected them from infection. This was always the worst moment.
“Look,” Mahler said, frowning with impatience. “You’re a walking death-trap. You probably carry enough disease germs to kill half the world. Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.”
“But I’d—”
“I know. You’d swear by all that’s holy to you or to me that you’d never leave the confines of the spacesuit. Sorry. The word of the most honorable man doesn’t carry any weight against the safety of the lives of Earth’s billions. We can’t take the slightest risk by letting you stay on Earth. It’s unfair, it’s cruel, it’s everything else. You had no idea you would walk into something like this. Well, it’s too bad for you. But you knew you were going on a one-way trip to the future, and you’re subject to whatever that future wants to do with you, since there’s no way of getting back.”
Mahler began to tidy up the papers on his desk in a way that signaled finality. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll just have to see our way of thinking about it. We’re frightened to death at your very presence here. We can’t allow you to roam Earth, even in a spacesuit. No; there’s nothing for you but the Moon. I have to be absolutely inflexible. Take him away,” he said, gesturing to the guards. They advanced on the little man and began gently to ease him out of Mahler’s office.
Mahler sank gratefully into the pneumochair and sprayed his throat with laryngogel. These long speeches always left him feeling exhausted, his throat feeling raw and scraped. Someday I’ll get throat cancer from all this talking, Mahler thought. And that’ll mean the nuisance of an operation. But if I don’t do this job, someone else will have to.
Mahler heard the protesting screams of the time jumper impassively. In the beginning he had been ready to resign when he first witnessed the inevitable frenzied reaction of jumper after jumper as the guards dragged them away, but eight years had hardened him.
They had given him the job because he was hard, in the first place. It was a job that called for a hard man. Condrin, his predecessor, had not been the same sort of man Mahler was, and for that reason Condrin was now himself on the Moon. He had weakened after heading the Bureau for a year and had let a jumper go; the jumper had promised to secrete himself at the tip of Antarctica, and Condrin, thinking that Antarctica was as safe as the Moon, had foolishly released him. That was when they called Mahler in. In eight years Mahler had sent four thousand men to the Moon. (The first was the runaway jumper, intercepted in Buenos Aires after he had left a trail of disease down the hemisphere from Appalachia to Argentine Protectorate. The second was Condrin.)
It was getting to be a tiresome job, Mahler thought. But he was proud to hold it. It took a strong man to do what he was doing. He leaned back and awaited the arrival of the next jumper.
The door slid smoothly open as the burly body of Dr Fournet, the Bureau’s chief medical man, broke the photo-electronic beam. Mahler glanced up. Fournet carried a time-rig dangling from one hand.
“Took this away from our latest customer,” Fournet said. “He told the medic who examined him that it was a two-way rig, and I thought I’d bring it to show you.”
Mahler came to full attention quickly. A two-way rig? Unlikely, he thought. But it would mean the end of the dreary jumper prison on the Moon if it were true. Only how could a two-way rig exist?
He reached out and took it from Fournet. “It seems to be a conventional twenty-fourth century type,” he said.
“But notice the extra dial here,” Fournet said, pointing. Mahler peered and nodded.
“Yes. It seems to be a two-way rig. But how can we test it? And it’s not really very probable,” Mahler said. “Why should a two-way rig suddenly show up from the twenty-fourth century when no other traveler’s had one? We don’t even have two-way time-travel ourselves, and our scientists don’t think it’s possible. Still,” he mused, “it’s a nice thing to dream about. We’ll have to study this a little more closely. But I don’t seriously think it’ll work. Bring him in, will you?”
As Fournet turned to signal the guards, Mahler asked him, “What’s his medical report, by the way?”
“From here to here,” Fournet said sombrely. “You name it, he’s carrying it. Better get him shipped off to the Moon as soon as possible. I won’t feel safe until he’s off this planet.” The big medic waved to the guards.
Mahler smiled. Fournet’s overcautiousness was proverbial in the Bureau. Even if a jumper were to show up completely free from disease, Fournet would probably insist that he was carrying everything from asthma to leprosy.
The guards brought the jumper into Mahler’s office. He was fairly tall, Mahler saw, and young. It was difficult to see his face clearly through the dim plate of the protective spacesuit all jumpers were compelled to wear, but Mahler could tell that the young time-jumper’s face had much of the lean, hard look of Mahler’s own. It seemed that the jumper’s eyes had widened in surprise as he entered the office, but Mahler was not sure.
“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly. “Your name is Mahler, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Mahler agreed.
“To go all these years—and find you. Talk about improbabilities!”
Mahler ignored him, declining to take up the gambit. He had found it was good practice never to let a captured jumper get the upper hand in conversation. His standard procedure was firmly to explain to the jumper the reasons why it was imperative that he be sent to the Moon, and then send him, as quickly as possible.
“You say this is a two-way time-rig?” Mahler asked, holding up the flimsy-looking piece of equipment.
“That’s right,” the other agreed. “Works both ways. If you pressed the button, you’d go straight back to 2360 or thereabouts.”
“Did you build it?”
“Me? No, hardly,” said the jumper. “I found it. It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. In fact, if I tried to tell it, I’d only make things ten times worse than they are, if that’s possible. No. Let’s get this over with, shall we? I know I don’t stand much of a chance with you, and I’d just as soon make it quick.”
“You know, of course, that this is a world without disease—” Mahler began sonorously.
“And that you think I’m carrying enough germs of different sorts to wipe out the whole world. And therefore you have to be absolutely inflexible with me. I won’t try to argue with you. Which way is the Moon?”
Absolutely inflexible. The phrase Mahler had used so many times, the phrase that summed him up so neatly. He chuckled to himself; some of the younger technicians must have tipped the jumper off about the usual procedure, and the jumper was resigned to going peacefully, without bothering to plead. It was just as well.
Absolutely inflexible.
Yes, Mahler thought, the words fit him well. He was becoming a stereotype in the Bureau. Perhaps he was the only Bureau chief who had never relented and let a jumper go. Probably all the others, bowed under the weight of the hordes of curious men flooding in from the past, had finally cracked and taken the risk. But not Mahler; not Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. He knew the deep responsibility that rode on his shoulders, and he had no intention of failing what amounted to a sacred trust. His job was to find the jumpers and get them off Earth as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Every one. It was a task that required unsoftening inflexibility.
“This makes my job much easier,” Mahler said. “I’m glad I won’t have to convince you of the necessity of my duty.”
“Not at all,” the other agreed. “I understand. I won’t even waste my breath. You have good reasons for what you’re doing, and nothing I say can alter them.” He turned to the guards. “I’m ready. Take me away.”
Mahler gestured to them, and they led the jumper away. Amazed, Mahler watched the retreating figure, studying him until he could no longer be seen.
If they were all like that, Mahler thought.
I could have got to like that one. That was a sensible man—one of the few. He knew he was beaten, and he didn’t try to argue in the face of absolute necessity. It’s too bad he had to go; he’s the kind of man I’d like to find more often these days.
But I mustn’t feel sympathy, Mahler told himself.
He had performed his job so well so long because he had managed to suppress any sympathy for the unfortunates he had to condemn. Had there been someplace else to send them—back to their own time, preferably—he would have been the first to urge abolition of the Moon prison. But, with no place else to send them, he performed this job efficiently and automatically.
He picked up the jumper’s time-rig and examined it. A two-way rig would be the solution, of course. As soon as the jumper arrives, turn him around and send him back. They’d get the idea soon enough. Mahler found himself wishing it were so; he often wondered what the jumpers stranded on the Moon must think of him.
A two-way rig could change the world completely; its implications were staggering. With men able to move with ease backward and forward in time, past, present, and future would blend into one mind-numbing new entity. It was impossible to conceive of the world as it would be, with free passage in either direction.
But even as Mahler fondled the confiscated time-rig he realized something was wrong. In the six centuries since the development of time-travel, no one had yet developed a known two-way rig. And, more important, there were no documented reports of visitors from the future. Presumably, if a two-way rig existed, such visitors would be commonplace.
So the jumper had been lying, Mahler thought with regret. The two-way rig was an impossibility. He had merely been playing a game with his captors. This couldn’t be a two-way rig, because the past held no record of anyone’s going back.
Mahler examined the rig. There were two dials on it, one the conventional forward dial and the other indicating backward travel. Whoever had prepared this hoax had gone to considerable extent to document it. Why?
Could it be that the jumper had told the truth? Mahler wished he could somehow test the rig in his hands; there was always that one chance that it might actually work, that he would no longer have to be the rigid dispenser of justice, Absolutely Inflexible Mahler.
