H. L. Gold (ed), page 77
Mazurin, directly in the line of fire, automatically threw himself flat, but he was still unused to his new condition and the motion sent him in a lazy parabola five feet over the crowd’s heads.
The guns fired in unison, but a peculiar thing happened. From three-quarters of them leaped streaks of fire; from the other quarter issued something else entirely. At the end of each barrel, a dark blue bubble appeared. The bubbles swelled rapidly, more and more of them extruding, until they became ovoids three feet long and two feet wide, dotted with stumpy tentacles. Then they dropped out of Mazurin’s vision, but he could judge their activity by the way the crowd scattered.
Mazurin leaped nimbly and watched the square empty itself beneath him. The uniformed men broke ranks and fled, some dropping their guns. The crowd was spreading out as quickly as those in the center could force the others back. In the cleared space, the blue ovoids were leaping like frogs, pausing and leaping again. At each pause, a toothless mouth gaped, and Mazurin could almost hear the bass “Urk!” they emitted.
Nobody was left on the speaker’s platform except the speaker himself, who had misjudged his vault over the railing and got himself tangled in the large black-and-red flag which draped it. While Mazurin watched, one of the blue ovoids bounded onto the speaker’s back, settled down and began contentedly munching his jacket.
As he floated down, Mazurin took a notebook from his pocket and wrote: Tweedledums: probably pineapple-flavored; very unripe and active; emerged without damper controls and broke up large religious gathering, frightening approx. 500 persons.
II
Mazurin sat alone in the sun-washed and empty square, letting the full enormity of the scene he had just witnessed seep into him. After a while he took out his notebook again and tried to calculate the probable number of surviving descendants, in his own world, of the five hundred people who had just been introduced to tweedledums. He had got up to five generations, and reached the utterly discouraging figure of 20,420, when he gave up.
He shuddered. He was not a devout man by nature, but he had had the usual training as a child, and the idea of so much as being disrespectful to ancestors—much less confronting them unexpectedly with a troop of tweedledums/—made him cringe as if he had touched something unclean.
And the other things had still to be accounted for: the rozzers, the collapsed flooring, the argo paste, the—
No. It was better not to think of that.
He got morosely to his feet and watched as the first of a long line of archaic ground-vehicles zoomed into the square and skidded to a stop. Green-uniformed men got out and ran off in all directions, till the square and the surrounding streets were covered with them. Presently a group of them came running back to the cars, carrying a tweedledum which was struggling furiously to escape. After a while they captured another one.
hope they get them all, span>Mazurin thought; but he doubted that they would. Free of the projected energy that ordinarily kept them quiescent, a live tweedledum was the most active and elusive artificial food product ever invented. They had been one of Mazurin’s favorite dishes; but he suspected now, with a sliding lurch in his stomach, that he would never, never eat one again.
Something else seemed to be going on at the far side of the square. Resignedly, he propelled himself that way. A large knot of the green-uniformed men had collected near a doorway to one, of the square buildings and was slowly moving back toward the cars. Mazurin leaped onto the heads of the crowd for a better view, and, approaching the center of the group, found that the quarry was not tweedledums this time, but people. A young man and a girl, to be exact. They were staggering along with their heads down, pushed and dragged by many hands. As Mazurin watched, someone reached over someone else’s arm and struck the girl in the face.
Mazurin’s first reaction was horror; his second was bewilderment. He saw now that what his superior had described as an “interesting” era could only be painful to any person of normal sensibilities; for all of these people, without exception, were ancestors in one sense or another!
And why were these officials, who were possibly ancestors, maltreating two young possible ancestors in this manner, instead of running down tweedledums as they had evidently been sent to do? Could it be that the boy and the girl were suspected of being responsible for the catastrophe?
It was absurd, but the only explanation he could think of. He followed, soaring over the rooftops, as the car containing the two zoomed off again.
He managed to keep in sight of the car, though it moved much too fast for him, and saw the two captives half-dragged, half-carried up the steps of a large, cubical black building.
Once inside the building, however, he was lost in a maze of corridors full of hurrying, worried-looking people. The place was three stories tall above the ground, and ten stories below, and there were hundreds of separate offices and suites. It was not till a full hour later that he found them, in a brilliantly lit cell facing a white-enameled corridor, in the lowest level of all.
If it weren’t for the bruises and cuts on their faces, Mazurin thought, they would have been a handsome couple. The boy was tall and lean, with a dark, thoughtful face; the girl was neatly rounded and had a charming head of almost-platinum hair.
They were sitting side by side on a hard, narrow bench that ran from wall to wall of their five-by-five cubicle. The harsh glare that illuminated them was hard on Mazurin’s eyes; he put his polarized goggles on. They themselves had shut their eyes tight against the fierce light, and their heads were close together, their hands clasped.
Mazurin watched their lips. The girl was saying, “We must be guilty, of course. I mean guilty of something.”
“Or they never would have arrested us,” the young man finished after a pause.
“Yes,” said the girl. “They are always right. Always. So we must be guilty. And yet it’s hard to see—”
“Hush, dear. It isn’t for us to question what they do. Perhaps we have committed some crime without even being aware of it. Or maybe—”
“Yes?”
“Well, maybe they are just testing us, or—or something.”
The girl’s eyes opened for a second. “Oh, Rob, do you suppose that’s it?”
“It might be. Certainly we didn’t cause any disturbance at the patriotic meeting that we know of.”
“But it’s not for us to judge.”
“No.”
For some time, while he watched this conversation, Mazurin had been increasingly aware that the two young people were doing something rather odd. It had to do with their hands. He stopped watching their lips altogether and concentrated on the hands.
They were clasped loosely together on the bench between the two, half covered by the drape of the girl’s flowered skirt. Between the boy’s palms and the girl’s, Mazurin could see a constant flicker of motion, fingers flashing back and forth, first hers, then his.
Now this, thought Mazurin, was extremely interesting. Beyond a doubt, the two prisoners were communicating by means of some ancient form of the finger-code he had learned as a raw cadet in the Internal Security Commission. If he could only get closer, he was almost sure, he could read it …
Cadenced footsteps came down the corridor. It was a white-robed attendant, flanked by two of the green-clad officials, each with a drawn missile gun. The attendant was carrying something in a white enamel tray, and in his other hand he had something that looked like the key to an old-fashioned mechanical lock.
Clearly, they were going to open the young people’s cell, to feed them, most probably. If he could slip in while they did it … Caution urged him back, curiosity drew him forward. There was no danger, he told himself. If the cell was opened once, it would be opened again, and he could get out. He made up his mind.
The two guards stepped back, guns ready, as the attendant opened the door and stepped inside, depositing the tray—which did, indeed, contain food of some sort—on a shelf. As he stepped out again, Mazurin, lithe as a rozzer, squeezed in past him. Simultaneously, two things happened.
The door shut with a clang.
Mazurin toppled to the metal floor under a totally unexpected access of weight.
The two prisoners, the attendant, and the guard turned to stare at him with saucer eyes.
While he sat there, feeling as if someone had slugged him from behind, the three men outside exploded into activity. The attendant fled with hoarse cries down the corridor, and the two guards threw themselves flat, aiming their curious weapons at Mazurin. The two people in the cell with him, he was vaguely aware, had moved as far away as they could get and were sitting in stricken silence.
Mazurin said weakly, “Kamerad. Tovarich. Ami.” Then it occurred to him that these men spoke English and, anyway, they apparently didn’t intend to shoot. Not as long as he didn’t move, at any rate. He shut up and tried to think. What the Blodgett had happened to him?
The metal floor of the cell was hard and cold under his palms. He was here, all right, and not on the end of any pencil of temporal energy. It had happened when the cell door shut behind him.
He looked at the door. It was a grid of stout chrome-plated bars, with an interval between the bars of about three centimeters. A nonsense phrase came into his mind, “Eve and Agrid,” which meant nothing. It wasn’t Eve and Agrid; it was Eve and Adam. Eve and Agrid. Eve and Agrid. Evean-dagrid—
Even a grid.
Mazurin shut his eyes and groaned. He opened them again when one of the guards made a warning sort of noise, and stared miserably at the limited vista before him. “Above all,” one of the technicians had said, “don’t get yourself completely surrounded by metal, even a grid. It will break the temporal beam and you’ll be marooned there… .”
Marooned. Stuck with a lot of irrational people in a barbaric century. In a cell, at that. Under suspicious circumstances.
He thought about it gloomily for a few minutes before, being a naturally cheerful young man, he tried to find the brighter side of it. Even then, the best he could do was, Well, things can’t get any worse, and Blodgett himself is alive right at this moment.
Running footsteps approached down the corridor, and a squadron of the green-uniformed men hove into view. Two of them had a thing on a wheeled tripod that looked as if it were capable of blowing out the side of a building. The rest spread out with drawn hand-guns. The two on the floor got up, saluted and joined the semi-circle.
“Stand up!” said one who seemed to be in command. Mazurin obeyed with alacrity.
“Remove that mask! Put your hands behind your head! Face the wall!”
When he had done all that, the cell door opened, someone took two swift strides inside, and then colored lights detonated inside Mazurin’s head.
He couldn’t have been entirely out, because when he came to he was already thinking, Very efficient police methods. They didn’t take any chances. Just the way an ISC man would have handled it… .
His head ached abominably, and his hands and feet seemed swollen. Green-trousered legs were scissoring back and forth in front of his eyes, and the gray concrete floor was moving rapidly backward under him. He was, he realized, trussed up like a rozzer, being dragged down the corridor.
His head cleared a little and he glanced to either side. The boy and the girl were in the party, in approximately the same condition as himself.
They reached an elevator, and Mazurin got a view of its scuffed metal floor before they carried him out of it again. More corridor, black-tiled this time. Several turns. Then a doorway with an ebony sill, followed by flooring of some brown composition, probably a primitive pressed fiber.
Finally he was set upright against a slender metal post and manacled there. The boy and girl were similarly disposed of to his right.
A round man in the green uniform stalked quickly in and stared at Mazurin. His little blue eyes darted quickly from Mazurin’s cloth-of-platinum robe to his face, then to the equipment hung at his belt.
“All right,” the round man said, “who are you ?”
Mazurin opened his mouth, then shut it again. Tell the truth? Oh, no.
His training as a law officer told him exactly what would happen to him if he did. But what lie could he invent that would save him the pain of being questioned? For he had no doubt that being questioned in this era would be painful, despite the rudimentary methods.
The best thing, he decided, was to say nothing. He tried it.
The round man nodded decisively. “We’ll see,” he said. He turned as a second and a third officer strode in. All three stared at Mazurin, then turned and went to the far end of the room. Mazurin could read their lips easily.
“We knew they were cooking up something, but we had no reports that even hinted at anything like this.”
“I don’t like the smell of it. Why would they materialize him in that cell and then let us capture him? Better get him out of the city as fast as possible.”
The round man got in the way at that point and Mazurin missed some of it. Then all of them turned to come back, and he caught one more sentence: “Put them all in one cell, and we may learn something.”
The three of them were detached from the pillars, efficiently trussed up again, and hurried outside to the waiting maw of a long black paddy-wagon.
It was a long ride and an uncomfortable one. Not being able to talk under the eyes of the guards, Mazurin had plenty of time to think, and, by the time half an hour had gone by, he was shoulder-deep in gloom.
He was roused out of himself when the car suddenly leaped six inches off the road, came down and leaped again. Looking back through the barred window, Mazurin could see that they had left the smooth concrete highway and were rushing down a cowpath of some kind. He and the two young people, all with their wrists manacled around a horizontal bar, bounced like popcorn. The two guards crooked their free arms around stanchions.
Glancing down, Mazurin noted that the two kids were at it again with the fingers. He looked away miserably, then peeked back. It was his damned curiosity that had put him there; he might as, well satisfy it while he could—if he could.
The code was the same, all right: five standard positions for each of the five fingers gave you twenty-five letters, and a clenched fist was “X” if you needed it. After a moment, he could read what the boy was saying without difficulty.
“. . . in my shoe. If they give me a chance …”
“Charlie, I’m scared!”
“Only way. They’ll get it all out of us otherwise. They know how to. Would have done it before now if he hadn’t turned up.” “Think he’s one of ours?”
“Can’t be; we haven’t anything like that. Don’t understand it, but can’t take any chances. He might be a spy.”
They meant him, Mazurin surmised. An interesting century, indeed. The girl again: “Okay. I guess it’s worth it.”
It occurred to Mazurin, with an ineffable shock, that it must be poison Charlie had in his shoe, of all unsanitary places… . They were going to kill themselves, to keep the authorities from putting them to question. Evidently, either a large and fanatical fraternal society, or else a revolutionary group; all kinds of secrets. But he couldn’t let them commit suicide! Such a thing would be an ineradicable blot on the totems of their thousands of descendants. Even worse, he didn’t know their surnames; they might be his own great-great-great-great grandparents.
Worst of all, he suddenly realized, their suicide might blot more than totems—himself, for example, right out of existence!
He could alert the guards, of course, but the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. Questioning, this far back in history, would be sure not to be subtle. From one point of view it was perfectly sensible of them to prefer poison. Bump! If only the car would stop bouncing for a minute so he could think… .
The car abruptly outdid itself. Mazurin found himself whirling around the horizontal bar like a demented acrobat, while two green blurs that were the guards soared airily to the forward end of the compartment. Something struck Mazurin a dizzying blow on the head, the car bounced twice more and came to rest, while the echoes of a thunderous explosion died away in his ears.
Ill
The car was canted, half in a ditch. The guards, piled up against the forward wall, were not moving. Charlie and the girl were half stunned but conscious. Mazurin pulled futilely at his wristcuffs; they were too tight even for his trained hands to slip.
Acrid fumes drifted into the car through a burst seam in the rear. Mazurin sniffed, and felt a cold dew break out on his forehead.
“Oh, what is it?” asked the girl faintly.
“Argo paste,” said Mazurin, jittering. “It must have started coming out of the exhaust or the jet tube—whatever these vehicles use. Oh, sacred name …”
“What’s argo paste?” demanded the youth groggily. “I never heard of the stuff.”
“I know you haven’t,” Mazurin said. He groaned. “They use it to burn through metal. It’s supposed to come out in glazed vats. If only it’s stopped—”
The fumes grew thicker. Mazurin looked out the barred rear window.
“We’re in a pool of it,” he said. He turned. “Can you reach those two?” he asked the boy, nodding toward the two unconscious guards.
The boy shook his head. “They haven’t got our keys, anyhow. The guard up front with the driver has them. And he’s knocked out, or he’d have been back here by now.”
The car lurched and settled. A section of the floor began smoking and dripped away, leaving a puckered gap through which they could see a slowly heaving pool of gray paste.
“Can you get your shoe off?” Mazurin asked suddenly.
Charlie gave him a look full of suspicion.
“Your shoe,” Mazurin repeated with agonized patience. “Either one, it doesn’t matter.” He slipped his left foot out of his own elastic-topped sandal, grasped it between his toes and held it up. “Mine’s no good, you see? Too thin. Yours is made of thick leather. Can you take it off?”
