H. L. Gold (ed), page 76
Vargas was a youngish man with large, ruddy features now contorted into a heavy scowl. He sat half leaning across his desk, chin on his fist, moodily thrusting folded sheets of metal fiber into the automatic letter-opener.
Abruptly the ceiling light dimmed and something swatted him on the rump three times in machine-gun tempo, jarring him all the way up his spine. Vargas found himself canted across his desk with his head in an overturned flower vase. The lights flickered again, went out altogether; and in the brief interval before they went on again a fourth shock, more violent than the others, lifted Vargas all the way across his desk and onto the thick body-temperature carpet.
He sat up slowly, inarticulate with rage. It was at this moment that his assistant, Knut Everett Roku LaSalle Choong, chose to burst into the room. Choong was just as disheveled as his superior. He tripped over the doorsill, lurched wildly and brought up against Vargas’ totem post, saving himself by clutching a white silk banner which carried the names and honors of two hundred and fifty-nine of Vargas’ most distinguished ancestors.
Hanging dramatically from the banner, Choong bleated, “Chief! The pipelines have busted!”
Vargas’ face, which had been flushed a moment before, took on a blotchy appearance. “What, all of them?” he whispered hoarsely.
“All,” said Choong tragically. “We’re right over a fault, you know. The quake must have snapped the pipelines like—like pipestems.”
Vargas scrambled up and clutched the other man by the slack of his sunflower-colored robe. “Did they cut transmission?” he demanded. “Yes, but—”
“How long before the flow stopped?”
“About two seconds, chief. Possibly a little more. I didn’t stop to get the meter readings—”
“Don’t interrupt me!” said Vargas in a restrained shout. He took a firmer grip and brought his pop-eyed face close to Choong. “What was being transmitted?”
“Flangs,” said the assistant in a barely audible voice. He gulped. “Tweedledums. Collapsed flooring. Argo paste. Rozzers. And—and—”
Vargas had been puffing heavily. Now he held his breath for an instant. “Well?”
“And mangels,” said Choong in terror. “Three pipes of mangels.” Vargas collapsed on the floor and looked at Choong through his fingers. “Oh, Great Blodgett, no!” “Yes.” “Mangels!”
Bedlam was growing in the outer offices. There were running footsteps, shouts, shrieks of dismay.
“Tweedledums are bad enough,” said Vargas. “But mangels! We’ll be excommunicated. They’ll hang our totems upside down.”
A red-faced man appeared in the doorway. His expression was not pleasant. Vargas scrambled to his feet and both he and Choong stood at attention.
“Two and five-sevenths seconds,” the red-faced man remarked. “Not a very good response for trained monitors, is it? Too much Rhine beer the night before, perhaps? Or reading a tape—composing poetry? Catching a little nap? Or was it—?” He stopped, wincing, and looked at a white-metal doughnut strapped to his right wrist, above his ruffled sleeve. A tiny voice spoke at some length; Vargas could only catch the words “jackass” and “cretin.”
“Yes, sir,” said the red-faced man, whose name, for the record, was Wallace Hyacinth Manuel Chiang Llewellyn. He barked at Vargas, “Turn on the tri-D!”
Vargas stumbled over to his desk and obeyed. A five-foot disc set into a low platform on his right glowed faintly, sparked and then spat a vertical stream of color. The image steadied and became the all too convincing three-dimensional replica of a portly man with a bulbous nose and long gray hair.
“Enlarge your image!” it said sharply.
Vargas jumped a foot and tremblingly adjusted the controls on his desk. The portly man frowned at them and said, “I happen to be Representative John Hsi Bright-Feather Wilson Woodcock, Chairman of the Committee to Investigate the San Juaquin Disaster, which was formed in emergency session five months ago. Now, are you all of the scoundrels who were immediately responsible for this outrageous dereliction of duty? If not, get the rest of ‘em in here. We’ll get to the bottom of this if it’s the last—”
The Chief Executive, His Honor Ibrahim L. Btandu Eriksson Dickey, frowned an executive frown. “Now let me get this straight,” he said. “The goods are put into one end of the tube and they are turned into some kind of temporal flow?”
“That’s it approximately, Your Honor.” Representative Rowland Mokai Dejonge Baruch Schemkov, Chairman of the Plenary Committee which had replaced Representative Woodcock’s Emergency Committee (Woodcock having been impeached) glanced at a few notes in his palm. He had briefed himself thoroughly.
“In transit, Your Honor, the goods are in a special state of matter, in which they are partially out of our frame of spacio-temporal reference, and are carried along by the universal drift, thus apparently bypassing the laws of inertia and conservation of energy. We apply no force once they enter the tube; that’s why tube transport is so cheap.
“Moreover, the size and shape of the goods to be transported make no difference, since the spacial coordinates are not fixed with reference to normal space. You might say that the net result is the same as if you had melted everything down to a kind of thin mush. This, of course, is done before the shipment is fed into the pipelines. I would not insult Your Honor’s intelligence by explaining the method by which the shipments are moved out of our space-time, for it is too well known to need explaining.
“There is just enough contact between the two matter states so that the material being transported will not go through a solid of any thickness. In other words, we can lead the shipments anywhere in the world through a tube, even a very small one—the tubes we use are three-eighths inches in width. At the end of the tube, the expansion of the material releases it from the special state and it comes out in its original form, ready to be processed, stored, consumed or whatever.”
“I see,” commented the Chief. “That’s all very well, Representative, but what I want to know is this. Just why were we caught with our robes up in this situation?”
Schemkov cleared his throat. “There appears,” he admitted, “to have been some theoretical possibility of this happening all along. I have several abstracts, which I will turn over to your office, of articles and scientific papers in which reference is made to the possibility. It—”
The chief looked down his long nose in a manner which suggested that the Representative was not quite human. He said slowly and earnestly, “And this possibility was given no consideration when the transport tubes were built? Is that it?”
Representative Schemkov had been a member of the Subcommittee to
Pass on Recommendations for the Erection of Chang-Wiley Transport Tubes, and he quaked in his sandals. “No safeguard was possible, Your Honor. What occurred was that the rupture in the lines took place at exactly the instant when that section of the planet was revolving directly opposite the line of universal drift—an event which astronomers assure me is very rare—and, in addition, I understand that the temporal displacement at that moment was exceptionally great. Under these conditions, the material released from the end of the tube did not re-form normally, but was carried some distance back along the temporal line—” “How far back? I mean exactly, not a guess.”
“The mathematicians are still working on that, Your Honor, and the best they can say now is that it was probably somewhere between the mid-Twentieth Century and the late Twenty-First. However, there is a strong possibility that none of the material reached any enclosed space which would attract it, and that it may all have been dissipated harmlessly in the form of incongruent molecules.”
“But those materials,” said the Chief grimly, “included what?”
“Flangs,” said Representative Schemkov, “and tweedledums, and collapsed flooring, and argo paste—”
“And mangels,” added the Chief. “Isn’t that correct?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“And you tell me that there is a possibility that these things did not suddenly appear in the homes and business places of persons of Blodgett’s own time—” he touched his forelock, and Schemkov automatically did the same—”causing Blodgett knows how many neuroses, how many psychoses, how many lost contracts, how many broken homes—”
“But, Your Honor—”
“—and do you realize that if these things do appear in that era, the total course of our civilization might be altered? That we might today become a world of many warring nations instead of one? Of many races instead of one blended humanity? That the great man to whom we owe all this, Blodgett himself, might be—” he lowered his voice in horror— “destroyed by your carelessness? Do you realize that, Representative?”
Even the Chief was stunned by his own frightening suggestion, while Schemkov felt terror climbing his spine.
“No Blodgett?” Schemkov whispered. “You’re—you’re just saying that to scare me. It isn’t—possible.”
The Chief’s face was rigid with fear. “It is. Blodgett was the greatest of our Sacred Ancestors, but he was superhuman in a human way, not supernatural. With all those ghastly things loose in his era, and—and mangels, especially …”
“Destroying any of our other Sacred Ancestors would be unthinkable enough,” said Schemkov. “But Blodgett himself—!”
“This wonderful civilization he constructed entirely by the might of his incredible mind,” the Chief added bitterly. “Gone.”
“I’d have myself ritually beheaded,” said Schemkov, “rather than live in any civilization Blodgett did not create.”
“Representative, the men responsible for this catastrophe are going to be sorry they were ever born into the public service. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, and when we do—”
“Here’s what it boils down to,” said the square man in the gray diamond-dusted robe with a non-objective dragon. He made a triangle with his hands on the desktop. “The kick went all the way upstairs and now it’s come all the way down again. Everybody in fifteen echelons has a sore tail, the blame has been passed around, and now you’re it. That’s all.”
Ronald Mae Jean-Jacques von Hochbein Mazurin wore a slightly stunned expression on his normally cheerful, pug-nosed face. The face, up to now, had been his fortune; it bore a slight but perceptible resemblance to that of Blodgett, the Father of the World, as he appeared in early prints and paintings. Mazurin had learned to emphasize the resemblance by assuming a soulful look, once he discovered that it usually earned him the juicier and less messy jobs in the Bureau.
He said, “Now wait a minute. How do they know they can get me to the right time line with this new gimmick of theirs? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? If I’m in it, that’s a new line, isn’t it? I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” said the square man. “Every displacement moves the observer to a new time line. But remember, you’re not required to do anything once, you get there; all you have to do is see what happened. As I understand it, you won’t be attached to that time line at all; you’ll just be partially in it, the same way stuff in a transport tube is partially in this line. You can’t possibly affect anything that happens there. Therefore, from a mathematical point of view, you’re not in it at all. You’ll be able to see, because light quanta have binding extensions on either side of the plenum-line proper, but you can’t influence anything that happens there.”
Mazurin was feeling uncomfortable. “How do I get back?”
“Don’t worry,” said the square man impatiently. “You’ll get back all right. You’ll be at the end of a pencil of temporal energy all the time. That’s what will be holding you in the partly there state. After a few days, they’ll send an impulse along it to bring you back. You’ll have enough time to do the job properly, because if any of that stuff did come out where it would menace our Sacred Ancestors, it wouldn’t have come out all at the same time or the same place. A difference of microseconds here could mean hours or days there.”
“Then that’s why nothing happened to our civilization yet,” Mazurin said. “The things probably haven’t landed.”
“It could be,” the square man agreed worriedly. “Or it might not happen on this time line at all—the results of any change in the past could leave this one alone and affect only alternate futures.”
“Do you really think it might?” asked Mazurin hopefully.
“No. Or maybe. How in hell would I know? All I’m supposed to discuss with you is sending you back to the past, to the time of Blodgett”— they touched their forelocks reverently—”at the end of a pencil of temporal energy, and that it’ll bring you back okay in a few days.”
“Sounds like deepsea diving at the end of a piece of string,” said Mazurin. “What happens if the power fails, or the contact is broken some other way?”
“Then I suppose you’d be stuck in that line—which would, of course, immediately become another line. Not that it matters. But you wouldn’t be too badly off if that did happen, I’d say. That was a pretty interesting period, not too uncivilized, and you’d see a lot of action.”
“Umm,” said Mazurin. He rapidly calculated his chances of getting another job if he were discharged and blacklisted by the ICS Intelligence Bureau—zero. “All right, I’m your boy.”
The square man came around the desk and patted his shoulder with a hand like a jeweled bunch of sausages. “Good man,” he said emotionally. “I knew you’d come through, the Bureau knows how to pick ‘em. Get your affairs wound up and report to the Physics Bureau at twelve o’clock tomorrow.”
Mazurin turned up in the white-tiled laboratory ten minute late, with traces of lipstick still adhering to his right ear and exuding an enviable odor of good rice wine. In the interests of truth, it must be stated that he did not entirely absorb all the briefing he received before he was thrust unceremoniously into the temporal projection machine.
He retained a definite impression of the machine itself, which was of an unpleasant hollow-cube shape and emitted a disquieting hum, together with a sharp smell of ozone. He recollected that, once arrived at his destination, he would be able to walk about on any available surface, but unable to move any solid object or enter into any sort of communication with the inhabitants.
The breathing apparatus strapped over his mouth and nose was reminder enough that he was dependent upon his own air supply. He recalled being asked if he had been checked out in lip reading and Twentieth Century English, and of replying, with hurt dignity, that he most certainly had. Then there was some more talk, during which he had been distracted by a tendency of his knees to swivel sharply, and then he had been grasped by the nape of the neck and his heels and slung into the machine.
It was a Lysenko-begotten silly business, altogether. He seemed to be sitting now on nothing in particular, in the middle of a bright-blue sky with clouds in it, while an obviously spurious landscape (flat, with antique square houses and a lot of palm trees, the whole being tilted at a forty-five degree angle) gently rose toward him. He watched this.process with growing disapproval until the scene grew to full size and he bumped gently against a sidewalk which felt like sponge rubber.
He stood up and soared some twenty feet into the air, coming down in an approximately upright position. He looked around him, breathing heavily. His head was clearing, and he didn’t like it. What had seemed idle nonsense a few moments ago was now assuming the aspect of an incredible reality. The buildings around him were angular and massive, with an appalling quantity of extremely ugly embellishments in the way of glass bricks, chromium statues, walls of enormous windows. The people were all either walking or driving antique four-wheeled vehicles, and most of them were dressed in garments constructed on a curious cylinder principle, also with a great deal of angular detail work.
This period, he recalled, had been addicted to what its denizens termed “the functional” in design. Not a curved line anywhere.
Culturally, this was a dismal era, yet being in it gave Mazurin a holy thrill. There was practically no doubt about it—Blodgett himself was alive at this actual moment!
Directly in front of Mazurin, the street widened into a sort of village square, in the center of which a wooden platform was erected. A man in black stood on this platform, evidently making a speech to a small crowd assembled around him. Mazurin saw several instruments which were evidently crude vision cameras. He watched the speaker’s lips, and made out a few phrases: “… the principles of loyalty and obedience to which we are all dedicated … one world, one people, one leader, one glorious ideal…”
Interested, he walked closer. A gentleman approaching the crowd on a tangential course strode into him before he had time to get out of the way, and Mazurin found himself violently propelled several yards away, to bounce from still another moving spectator and come to rest finally sprawled on the pavement.
He got up determinedly, soaring as before, and this time leaped squarely into the thick of the crowd before any other outriders could get at him. The crowd was close-packed, and he stood with very little difficulty on their heads. Now he was near enough to read the speaker’s lips easily, and he followed the speech with attention.
“On this, our youngest but not least hallowed day, we must dedicate ourselves in our hearts to the eternal principles for which so many brave men and women died. For if we do, those men and women are not ten years dead, but gloriously living in the eternal atmosphere of our truth. If we do this, the world did not end for them on that terrible day, August the seventeenth, nineteen eighty-one. The world will never end for them and for ourselves!”
The speaker paused. “Citizens of the world, a salute to the heroes of the World State!”
A man to the right of the speaker’s platform, dressed in an exceedingly ugly green uniform, raised a brass instrument to his lips and blew mightily on it. Mazurin leaped nimbly as the citizens on whom he stood took off their hats and bowed their heads. The musician got through with whatever sounds he had been producing, and a row of similarly dressed men behind him raised antique rapid-fire rifles to their shoulders, aiming diagonally upward.
