H. L. Gold (ed), page 78
“I don’t get it,” said Charlie, baffled. A heavier drift of choking fog came up through the vanishing floor. “But—” He grunted, raising and twisting his leg until his manacled hands could reach the laces. “Here.” He dropped the shoe and kicked it along to Mazurin.
The car settled again. The pool of gray slime was now only a foot below them. Mazurin grasped the shoe with his toes, shifting his grip till it was as firm as he could manage. Then he held on like grim death and lowered the shoe through the gap in the floor, into the gray pool underneath. He brought it up quickly.
There was a good gob of the stuff in the heel end of the shoe, about two inches from his own bare foot, but it was smoking furiously. In another second, the leather would be eaten through.
He brought the shoe up, under the horizontal bar, over it again—and dumped the paste on the bar just as the leather gave way. The metal smoked acridly and melted.
Mazurin jettisoned the shoe, jammed his foot back into his own sandal, and peered at the bar through watering eyes. There was a hearty bite out of it, but a slender tongue of metal still united the two sections.
“Now!” said Mazurin. “Pull!”
He braced his back and shoved at the bar till his muscles cracked, while Charlie, his face white with strain, pulled from his side. The car lurched once more, and the gray surface beneath leaped up to the level of the floorboards. Mazurin got his feet up on the bar and gave one last desperate shove. The metal gave a ping and moved a fraction of an inch. Through the smoke, Mazurin saw that the narrow part had snapped. He pushed some more, until the bar reluctantly bent a full three inches out of its original line.
Kneeling on the bench, Mazurin held his wrists carefully away from the smoldering ends of the bar and slipped his arms free.
“Nice work so far,” said Charlie, “but what about the door?”
He slid down to the end of the bench and moved his own arms free of the bar. The car tilted again as the girl moved to follow him.
“Get back!” said Mazurin urgently. He motioned Charlie to the forward end of the car. “Balance the weight while she gets loose.” He looked at the door that still barred their way to freedom. The lock, naturally, was about halfway up, better than two feet from the level of the argo paste. “Other shoe,” he told Charlie. “Can’t be helped.”
Charlie took it off and handed it down to him. The girl had got her arms free now and was leaning forward with the wristcuffs spread, evidently intending to touch the connecting piece to the smoking end of the bar.
“No!” yelled Mazurin, and she started back. “Horrible stuff—get a drop of it on your flesh, no way to stop it. Get back with Charlie, please.”
Squatting on the bench, he leaned forward precariously and dipped the second shoe into the seething gray mass. He got a bigger quantity this time, and he could control it better. He brought it up swiftly and carefully poured it over the lock, peering through the haze to make sure he had the right place.
Smoke gushed out, and he couldn’t see what was happening; but he pushed the door outward, and it gave. He stood up, put one foot on the opposite bench, and got the other wedged into the barred opening of the door. A push and a twist, and he was precariously balanced outside, directly over the center of the viscous, smoking pool.
The car settled again under his weight. He scrambled to get both feet on top of the door, lunged and sprawled across the smooth top of the car. Panting, he got his feet under him again and flung himself forward, feeling the car tilt slightly under him as he moved.
“All right,” he called, “come out quickly!”
He saw a motion beneath him, and turned as the door of the cab opened and a head thrust itself out. The head shook itself, dazedly. Mazurin, flat on his stomach, leaned out and slammed his manacled wrists apologetically under the man’s ear.
“Sorry, Sacred Ancestor,” he said regretfully. “One must take sides, it would seem.”
The guard dived slowly and gracefully out of the open door and sprawled on the grass outside. Mazurin, overbalanced by the blow, felt himself slipping, grabbed for a hand-hold, then let himself go. He landed on his shoulders, rolled quickly and stood up, poised to leap into the cab. But the second uniformed man was still hunched over with his flattened face pressed against the windshield. A trickle of blood trailed from his ear.
Mazurin looked up as Charlie appeared on top of the car, followed by the girl. “All secure here,” he said. “You two all right?”
“We’re just fine,” said Charlie grimly, “and we’re certainly grateful to you for saving our lives. But would you mind giving us a hint of what this is all about?” He and the girl jumped down beside Mazurin, and Charlie gestured toward the dwindling rear end of the car. “Argo paste,” he said. “And those things back in Welfare Square.”
“Tweedledums,” Mazurin supplied helpfully. “Pineapple-flavored, I think.”
“Tweedledums,” repeated the boy. “And you. What are you, the Mad Hatter? If so, what are you going to pull out of your hat next?”
“There’s lots more,” Mazurin said gloomily. “We haven’t seen the flangs yet, or the collapsed flooring, or the rozzers, or—”
“Wait a minute,” Charlie interrupted. “Just one minute. One thing at a time. What are flangs?”
Mazurin searched his mind for the archaic word. Castards ? Something like that. Ces, cis, cos—”Custards,” he said. “From the French flan, although I believe there was some influence dating from the Early Hollywood Era. They’re mobile, but not as much as the tweedledums. They only creep around, and they like to crawl into any dark enclosed space they find. So you just leave them with a bunch of open pastry shells, and—”
Charlie interrupted again. “All right, I knew it was going to be something like that. I won’t ask you what rozzers are.”
“Like a very slender pig,” said Mazurin promptly. “Fast as lightning. Some people like to race them.”
“And eat them.”
“Eat rozzers?” Mazurin exclaimed in disgust. “We’d sooner starve!”
Charlie looked at him, breathing heavily. “All I want to know,” he said, “is where all these things that nobody ever heard of came from, and that includes you.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mazurin reluctantly, “but I have a feeling you won’t believe me.”
He squatted and began going through the pockets of the guard who lay on the greensward at their feet.
“No,” said Charlie, and gave him a push that sent him sprawling. Charlie knelt quickly and removed the guard’s hand-gun from its holster. Backing up, he handed the gun to the girl and then went back to the guard. “Sorry, but I don’t see how we can trust you.”
He found the guard’s keys, stood up and held the gun trained on Mazurin while the girl unlocked his wristcuffs; then they traded while he unlocked hers. It seemed, Mazurin thought ruefully, that they had no present intention of unlocking his.
“Can I get up now?” he asked mildly.
“Yes,” said Charlie. He gestured with the gun to their left, across an open field that ended at a wooded ridge. “We’ve got to get under cover.” He glanced at the gun in his hand, then back at the smoking rear of the paddy-wagon. “What do you think, Eve?”
“It would bq nice to have it,” the girl said regretfully, “but it’s a sure tipoff.”
“Right,” said Charlie, and he returned the gun to the guard’s holster. Then he pulled the keys out of his pocket and replaced them as well.
“Hey,” objected Mazurin, “when do I get out of these things?”
“Later—maybe,” said Charlie. “By the time anybody finds the car, there’s a good chance that the whole rear end will be gone, and they’ll figure we went with it. But not if we take anything from this guy.”
“They’ll die if we leave them unconscious in this pool of argo paste!” Mazurin said, horrified.
“What of it?” Charlie wanted to know. “You don’t think they’d let us live long, do you?”
Mazurin paused. “They wouldn’t?”
“Certainly not,” said Eve. “That’s how they stay in power—kill off the opposition.”
“But I’m not the opposition,” Mazurin denied.
“Oh, no?” Charlie demanded threateningly, and Mazurin decided abruptly that he was. Charlie said, “You don’t know how close you came to joining these stinkers.”
Eve started walking. “Let’s go. Someone may come along and ask why we’re not helping our gallant lads out of danger.”
They headed across the field, Mazurin in the lead. He felt a little sick. In his own time, he tried to tell himself, he’d seen men killed often enough for exactly similar reasons. But this wasn’t his own time; this time he belonged to his Sacred Ancestors, some of them were being left to die in argo paste. He felt a wave of resentment against the two youngsters behind him, and then recoiled from that, too. They could be his ancestors. Now just what in the name of Blodgett could a man do in a situation like this?
They pushed through a tangle of saplings and undergrowth for what seemed like several hours, until they reached a little stream. Eve sat down, gasping, and the other two followed suit.
“It’s getting too late to go much farther, anyway,” said Charlie. He inspected his shoeless feet glumly, then turned to Mazurin. “All right,” he said, “let’s have your story, improbable or not.”
Mazurin told them, from the beginning. They listened in discouraging silence. Finally, “Is that all?” Charlie asked.
“That’s all,” said Mazurin. “What happens next I don’t know, except that we’ll probably run into the rozzers committing a nuisance in City Hall, or somebody triggering a section of collapsed flooring and getting knocked into the next canton, or—”
“What makes you think you’re going to see any city hall?” asked Charlie ominously.
“No reason, except that defiling a public building is one of the few supreme crimes I haven’t been responsible for yet.”
“How’s that again?” said Charlie, confused.
“Don’t you remember what he said about ancestor worship?” asked Eve. “It makes sense. He feels directly responsible for all these things that have been happening to people who, for all he knows, may be his own ancestors.” She frowned at Mazurin, opened her mouth to speak again. “How—”
“Now wait a minute,” Charlie burst out. “You’re not assuming that he’s telling the truth, are you ?”
“You wait,” she told him. Then, to Mazurin, “See if I’ve got this right. You come from about four centuries from now, and in your time the World State is an established fact. There never was any successful attempt to overthrow it. Is that right?”
Mazurin nodded.
Charlie snorted. “Well, if we fell for that, we’d simply knuckle under and let Blodgett’s hoodlums have it all their own way.”
“Hoodlums?” Mazurin echoed, touching his forelock. “Our most Sacred of Ancestors!”
Charlie peered at Mazurin puzzledly. “Is that what you’re for, to convince us we can’t win? It seems a little too simple-minded to deserve all this buildup.”
Mazurin shook his head. “You don’t quite understand,” he said. “This is a different time-line from the one I came from. It’s different because I’m in it, here. Anything can happen now.” Charlie looked more bafHed than ever.
“Listen,” said Eve, “just suppose he is telling the plain truth. And as you said a minute ago, if the Worstas had all that new stuff—materializing him in our cell, and those green things in the Square—why would they waste it on a silly trick like this?”
“All right,” said Charlie. “What then?”
“Then he might be able to help us win,” said Eve.
“Just for the theoretical interest of it—suppose you could help us overthrow the Worstas, Mazurin, would you do it?”
“The who?”
“The Worstas—the World Staters. Blodgett and his gang. You’ve seen the kind of tyrannical crew they are. All right, would you help us if you could?”
“Well, no,” said Mazurin honestly. “Why not?”
“Because, for one thing, if I help you I hurt them, and vice versa. I couldn’t help either side. It would be irreligious.”
Charlie stared at him contemptuously, and Mazurin felt his ears getting red. It did sound stuffy, at that. Why couldn’t they have let him stay in his own environment, where a man could take his religion on sacred days and forget about it the rest of the time?
“There’s another good reason,” he said defensively. “You seem to forget that I come from the world that grew out of this one. Well, it’s a pretty good world. It’s peaceful; there hasn’t been a war in more than three centuries. Nobody has to work hard, as a general rule. No more race or nationality problems—everybody’s interbred so much, as a result of the lowering of national barriers, that there’s only one kind of people. Why should I want to change all that?”
“No reason, maybe,” said the girl, “but you can see why we want to change our world, can’t you?”
Mazurin thought about it. “No. It would change the fine world of my time—the world that Blodgett—”
He touched his forelock—”created by the might of his giant intellect.”
“Well, look,” said the girl. “Ten years ago there was a world war, the ninth in sixty years. There was a worldwide organization that was fighting the war, had been fighting against war since about nineteen-sixty. They had a lot of followers, on paper, but they weren’t strong enough to do anything until the people finally got fed up. After all, it had got to the point where you’d have two or three months of peace after the armistice was signed, and then the whole bloody mess would start all over again.
“Civilization was going straight downhill. That had been happening for a long time, but now it was happening so fast that you could see it happening. There was a spontaneous wave of revolt all through South America, where the fighting was going on at that time. It started with a French regiment that turned around and shot its officers. Then the Canadian regiment they were fighting did the same thing, and after that it spread too fast to figure out how the idea got around.
“All the armies in South America sent delegates to a conference—the conference of Acapulco—and the Worstas put over their program. Then all the armies went home, kicked out their governments, held general elections, and ten months later we had the World State.”
“Well,” said Mazurin, “what’s wrong with—”
“Wait. For five months everything went fine. All the important nations were in, and it was a sure thing that the others—the ones that hadn’t been in this particular fighting—would come in later. We had a swell Constitution and we were disarming like fury. Then there was a coup d’etat. Blodgett and his gang moved in, kidnaped Provisional President Carres, drugged him and made him sign orders appointing Blodgett’s gang to key positons.
“It was logical enough; Blodgett himself was the number two man in the Worstas movement to begin with. By the time anybody found out what was going on, they were so firmly entrenched that they’ve been able to stamp out every rising against them ever since. They’ve got the best propaganda line since Stalin, and the people as a whole won’t move because there’s peace, and they’re sick of war. So all we’ve wound up with is just another damned dictatorship. Now do you see?”
“Wait a minute,” said Mazurin. He had been listening with growing horror to Eve’s use of the Sacred Name. “This Blodgett you’re talking about—that can’t possibly be Ernest Elwood Vernon Crawford Blodgett, can it?”
“His name is Ernest, and his mother’s name was Crawford,” said Eve. “Where you got those other handles from, I don’t know.”
“It’s the way we name ourselves,” Mazurin explained. “Your own given name, given names of two prominent ancestors, one from each line, then mother’s and father’s line names. Anyway, if that’s the Blodgett you’re talking about, you must have your facts all wrong. Blodgett—” he touched his forelock— “was the founder and first President of the World State. Kids learn about him in the first course. The Father of the World and so forth. He wasn’t any dictator and there wasn’t any president before him.”
“Blodgett is busy revising the histories right now,” said Eve grimly. “I’ll bet the big ham hasn’t got buck teeth in the pictures you’ve seen, either.”
“Of course not,” said Mazurin. “Have you ever seen him in person?” he demanded.
Eve reddened. “No. But I’ve seen smuggled pictures of him before he got his dentures—”
“Then,” said Mazurin triumphantly, “how do you know the pictures you saw weren’t faked?”
They kept it up for another hour, ruffling tempers all around, until Charlie told them both to pipe down and get some sleep.
IV
Mazurin awoke feeling as if he had spent the night hanging by his thumbs. His hands were completely numb, and the rest of his body was so stiff and painful that it took him ten minutes to stand up.
The other two had made out a little better, but they were all cold, hungry and short-tempered. They drank water from the stream, ate some wild berries they found after an hour’s search, stuffed leaves into Charlie’s socks, and then started off again through the woods. Charlie, when Mazurin asked him where they were going, politely requested him to keep his geographically described questions to his precisely defined self.
An hour or so later, when the sun was higher and exercise had loosened their muscles, they were feeling a little better. They had struck a path of sorts under some kind of fragrant trees that were unfamiliar to Mazurin. The branches made a comfortable pattern against the deep-blue sky, and there were birds calling pleasantries back and forth. Mazurin moved up beside Eve and walked with her for a while in silence.
“I suppose I was kidding myself last night when I thought you might be able to help us,” she said finally. “We’ve got a fair chance as it is, but it’s awfully risky. It would be nice to know that the Marines were going to ride up at the last moment.”
Mazurin made sympathetic noises, feeling a little embarrassed.
