H. L. Gold (ed), page 80
He ate another grape, smiling, pushed the bowl aside and leaned confidently over the desk.
“If you had prophesied disaster, Mr. Mazurin,” he said, “I should never in the world have believed you. Do you know why?” The pause was rhetorical. “Because I belong to the ages. I know it. I have felt it since I was a young man. I was born to rule the world. Would you believe that I have known that since I was twenty ? And my rule is destined to endure; I knew that.
“Why? Because I started with what every other conqueror tried in vain to achieve—a world dominion. It is all the world or none, Mr. Mazurin. Napoleon knew that. Hitler knew that. Stalin knew that. And that was the inexorable law that humbled each in his turn. They tried to achieve peace through war—fatal, fatal. They had to try, of course. They were born to rule, too, but the wrong time.”
He talked on interminably, his face growing flushed and his eyes glistening. He gestured, he smiled, he frowned. Didactic, he stood up and leaned earnestly over the table. Self-satisfied, he sat back and popped grapes into his mouth. Mystical, he stared at the ceiling.
It was during the latter phase that Mazurin—like the other two, half-stunned by oratory—suddenly came awake. From the muzzle of the squat weapon on Blodgett’s desk, a tiny green bubble bulged. As Mazurin watched, the bubble grew to half an inch dropped to the desk and rolled until the edge of the fruit-bowl stopped it.
Mazurin felt suddenly cold all over. He darted a glance to his right. Eve was looking at the floor and had seen nothing; but Charlie was looking at him with one eyebrow raised, an expression that said plainly, If hat is itf
Mazurin looked back at the President. Blodgett brought a rolling period to a close, smiled soulfully, sighed, and became stern.
“As for you, sir,” he said, “your destiny is allied with mine. To this favor you must submit. I do not ask, I give, I give you a living god, as you have yourself justly described me, to worship and follow faithfully all of your life. And I give you what is immeasurably more precious than the schoolboys’ history you give me—I give you a place beside me in all the history that’s yet to be written!”
For an instant, that idea captured Mazurin’s imagination. What a fantastic end to his assignment that would be—the Chief Executive, and the ISC Intelligence chief, and everybody, worshipping every holy day at his shrine!
Even while that thought raced through his mind, Mazurin watched the tiny green globule in utter fascination. If Blodgett reached for that globule, thinking it a grape, then for the first time in this whole misbegotten affair Mazurin would have reached a point of decision. And to save himself he couldn’t tell whether he wanted that or not. He knew what he wanted to do, well enough, but he felt the first premonitory stirrings of a guilt that he knew would plague him for years after the act. What right had he to interfere with the lives of millions of still unborn?
Mazurin, he told himself, you’re an ancestor! He glanced at Eve’s pale, drawn face. I’ll see to it that you are, he added.
Blodgett’s open palm came down on the desk, sideswiping the fruit bowl. The bowl wobbled elliptically around the desktop, spilling grapes. But the nearest to Blodgett’s hand was still the globe that was not a grape.
“How say you, sir?” demanded Blodgett. “Destiny or death?”
His hand hovered, as ready for one gesture as another. He glared at Mazurin.
Mazurin took a deep breath, “I choose destiny, Your Honor.”
Blodgett’s features relaxed. His hand dropped gently on the table, the pudgy fingers curling. Gently they closed on the green sphere. Smiling benignly, Blodgett popped it into his mouth.
He stayed that way, without changing posture or expression, for three long seconds. Then his eyes bulged. A shout formed itself on his lips, but no sound came out. He—withered somehow, shrank indescribably in his uniform. There was a look of horror and of passionate appeal in his eyes. And then, suddenly, Blodgett was not there any longer.
To the others, it looked as if he had simply vanished out of the world of men. But Mazurin, shuddering, knew that his fate had not been that simple—or that pleasant.
Eve gasped, “What was it? That grape he ate—”
Mazurin felt sick. “A mangel.”
Charlie demanded, “What’s a mangel? What did it do to him?”
Mazurin said shakily, “You could torture me in the subtlest or crudest ways and I would not tell you. This primitive civilization is not ready to know anything at all about mangels. Nothing!”
He put his head in his hands. One part of him knew that Blodgett was a stinker; the other part was simply saying, You let him eat a mangel. You killed him. The most sacred ancestor of all, the Father of the World.
He heard the other two talking in low, tense voices. Eve said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Blodgett had already started making himself up to look like his propaganda pictures.”
“Yes. We could put it over, Charlie. They’d have no choice. It’s either agreement or total collapse.”
“Gone,” Mazurin moaned. “Blodgett. The beautiful society he built with his giant intellect—”
“No,” said Charlie. “None of it’s lost. Except the worst part of your civilization.”
“And certainly not the most sacred ancestor,” Eve added. “Not the Father of the World.”
Mazurin, lost in misery, looked up, “But the mangel got him. Blodgett is gone.” He touched his forelock absently.
“You’re here,” said Eve. “You know what the future is supposed to be like. You’ll build Blodgett’s world—with a few important changes.”
“Oh,” Mazurin said, suddenly realizing. “You’ll put one of your men in Blodgett’s place and I’ll advise him on what I remember.”
Charlie leaned over his chair. “One of our men-—one of everybody’s.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Eve, squeezing Mazurin’s arm. “The Father of the World, the most sacred ancestor, will be a descendant.”
“He doesn’t get it,” Charlie said.
“You,” Eve stated, “will be Blodgett.”
Mazurin started to touch his forelock. “Me?” he asked dazedly, then finished the reverent gesture.
He was an ancestor, after all.
DUDLEY DELL
The Biography Project
There was something tremendously exciting about the opening of the Biofilm Institute. Even a hardened Sunday supplement writer like Wellman Zatz felt it.
Arlington Prescott, a wiper in a contact-eyeglass factory, while searching for a time machine, had invented the Biotime Camera, a standard movie camera—minus sound, of course—that projected a temporal beam, reac-cumulated it, and focused it on a temporal-light-sensitized film. When he discovered that he had to be satisfied with merely photographing the past, not physically visiting it, Prescott had quit doing research and become principal of a nursery school..
But, Zatz explained, dictating his notes by persfone to a vox-typer in the telenews office, the Biofilm Institute was based on Prescott’s repudiated invention. A huge, massive building, mostly below ground, in the 23rd
Century style, and equipped with 1,000 Biotime Cameras, it was the gift of Humboldt Maxwell, wealthy manufacturer of Snack Capsules. There were 1,000 teams of biographers, military analysts, historians, etc., to begin recording history as it actually happened—with special attention, according to Maxwell’s grant, to past leaders of industry, politics, science, and the arts, in the order named.
Going through the Biofilm Institute, Wellman Zatz gained mostly curt or snarled interviews with the Bioteams; fishing through time for incidents or persons was a nervous job, and they resented interruptions.
He settled finally on a team that seemed slightly friendlier. They were watching what looked like a scene from Elizabethan England on the monitor screen.
“Sir Isaac Newton,” Kelvin Burns, the science biographer, grunted in reply to Zatz’s question. “Great man. We want to find out why he went off the beam.”
Zatz knew about that, of course. Sunday feature articles for centuries had used the case of Sir Isaac to support arguments for psychic phenomena. After making all his astonishing discoveries by the age of 25, the great 17th Century scientist had spent the rest of his long life in a hunt for precognition, the philosopher’s stone, and other such paraphernalia of mysticism.
“My guess,” said Mowbray Glass, the psychiatrist, “is paranoia caused by feelings of rejection in childhood.”
But the screen showed a happy boy in what seemed to be a normal 17th Century home and school environment. Glass grew puzzled as Sir Isaac eventually produced his binomial theorem, differential and integral calculus, and went to work on gravity—all without evidencing any symptoms of emotional imbalance.
“The most unbelievable demonstrative and deductive powers I’ve encountered,” said Pinero Schmidt, the science integrator. “I can’t believe such a man could go mystical.”
“But he did,” Glass said, and tensed. “Look!”
Alone in a dark, cumbersomely furnished study, the man on the screen, wearing a satin coat, stock and breeches, glanced up sharply. He looked directly into the temporal beam for a moment, and then stared into the shadows of the room. He grabbed up a silver candlestick and searched the corners, holding the heavy candlestick like a weapon.
“He’s mumbling something,” reported Gonzalez Carson, the lip-reader. “Spies. He thinks somebody’s after his discoveries.”
Burns looked puzzled. “That’s the first sign we’ve seen of breakdown. But what caused it ?”
“I’m damned if I know,” admitted Glass.
“Heredity?” Zatz suggested.
“No,” Glass said positively. “It’s been checked.”
The Bioteam spent hours prying further. When the scientist was in his thirties, he developed a continuing habit of looking up and smiling secretly. On his deathbed, forty years later, he moved his lips happily, without fear.
” ‘My guardian angel,’ ” Carson interpreted for them. ” ‘You’ve watched over me all my life. I am content to meet you now.’ “
Glass started. He went to one Bioteam after another, asking a brief question of each. When he came back, he was trembling.
“What’s the answer, Doc?” Zatz asked eagerly.
“We can’t use the Biotime Camera any more,” Glass said, looking sick. “My colleagues have been investigating the psychoses of Robert Schumann, Marcel Proust and others, who all eventually developed delusions of persecution.”
“Yeah, but why?” Zatz persisted.
“Because they thought they were being spied upon. And they were, of course. By us!”
MACK REYNOLDS and FREDRIC BROWN
Sheriff Ben Rand’s eyes were grave. He said, “Okay, boy. You feel kind of jittery; that’s natural. But if your story’s straight, don’t worry. Don’t worry about nothing. Everything’ll be all right, boy.”
“It was three hours ago, Sheriff,” Allenby said. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get into town and that I had to wake you up. But Sis was hysterical a while. I had to try and quiet her down, and then I had trouble starting the jalopy.”
“Don’t worry about waking me up, boy. Being sheriff’s a full-time job. And it ain’t late, anyway; I just happened to turn in early tonight. Now let me get a few things straight. You say your name’s Lou Allenby. That’s a good name in these parts, Allenby. You kin of Ranee Allenby, used to run the feed business over in Cooperville? I went to school with Ranee… . Now about the fella who said he come from the future . . .”
The Presidor of the Historical Research Department was skeptical to the last. He argued, “I am still of the opinion that the project is not feasible. There are paradoxes involved which present insurmountable—”
Doctor Matthe, the noted physicist, interrupted politely, “Undoubtedly, sir, you are familiar with the Dichotomy?”
The presidor wasn’t, so he remained silent to indicate that he wanted an explanation.
“Zeno propounded the Dichotomy. He was a Greek philosopher of roughly five hundred years before the ancient prophet whose birth was used by the primitives to mark the beginning of their calendar. The Dichotomy states that it is impossible to cover any given distance. The argument: First, half the distance must be traversed, then half of the remaining distance, then again half of what remains, and so on. It follows that some portion of the distance to be covered always remains, and therefore motion is impossible.”
“Not analogous,” the presidor objected. “In the first place, your Greek assumed that any totality composed of an infinite number of parts must, itself, be infinite, whereas we know that an infinite number of elements make up a finite total. Besides—”
Matthe smiled gently and held up a hand. “Please, sir, don’t misunderstand me. I do not deny that today we understand Zeno’s paradox. But believe me, for long centuries the best minds the human race could produce could not explain it.”
The presidor said tactfully, “I fail to see your point, Doctor Matthe. Please forgive my inadequacy. What possible connection has this Dichotomy of Zeno’s with your projected expedition into the past?”
“I was merely drawing a parallel, sir. Zeno conceived the paradox proving that it was impossible to cover any distance, nor were the ancients able to explain it. But did that prevent them from covering distances? Obviously not. Today, my assistants and I have devised a method to send our young friend here, Jan Obreen, into the distant past. The paradox is immediately pointed out—suppose he should kill an ancestor or otherwise change history? I do not claim to be able to explain how this apparent paradox is overcome in time travel; all I know is that time travel is possible. Undoubtedly, better minds than mine will one day resolve the paradox, but until then we shall continue to utilize time travel, paradox or not.”
Jan Obreen had been sitting, nervously quiet, listening to his distinguished superiors. Now he cleared his throat and said, “I believe the hour has arrived for the experiment.”
The presidor shrugged his continued disapproval, but dropped the conversation. He let his eyes scan doubtfully the equipment that stood in the corner of the laboratory.
Matthe shot a quick glance at the time piece, then hurried last-minute instructions to his student.
“We’ve been all over this before, Jan, but to sum it up—You should appear approximately in the middle of the so-called Twentieth Century; exactly where, we don’t know. The language will be Amer-English, which you have studied thoroughly; on that count you should have little difficulty. You will appear in the United States of North America, one of the ancient nations—as they were called—a political division of whose purpose we are not quite sure. One of the designs of your expedition will be to determine why the human race at that time split itself into scores of states, rather than having but one government.
“You will have to adapt yourself to the conditions you find, Jan. Our histories are so vague that we can help you but little in information on what to expect.”
The presidor put in, “I am extremely pessimistic about this, Obreen, yet you have volunteered and I have no right to interfere. Your most important task is to leave a message that will come down to us; if you are successful, other attempts will be made to still other periods in history. If you fail—”
“He won’t fail,” Matthe said.
The presidor shook his head and grasped Obreen’s hand in farewell.
Jan Obreen stepped to the equipment and mounted the small platform. He clutched the metal grips on the instrument panel somewhat desperately, hiding to the best of his ability the shrinking inside himself.
#
The sheriff said, “Well, this fella—you say he told you he came from the future?”
Lou Allenby nodded. “About four thousand years ahead. He said it was the year thirty-two hundred and something, but that it was about four thousand years from now; they’d changed the numbering system meanwhile.”
“And you didn’t figure it was hogwash, boy? From the way you talked, I got the idea that you kind of believed him.”
The other wet his lips. “I kind of believed him,” he said doggedly. “There was something about him; he was different. I don’t mean physically, that he couldn’t pass for being born now, but there was … something different. Kind of, well, like he was at peace with himself; gave the impression that where he came from everybody was. And he was smart, smart as a whip. And he wasn’t crazy, either.”
“And what was he doing back here, boy?” The sheriff’s voice was gently caustic.
“He was—some kind of student. Seems from what he said that almost everybody in his time was a student. They’d solved all the problems of production and distribution, nobody had to worry about security; in fact, they didn’t seem to worry about any of the things we do now.” There was a trace of wistfulness in Lou Allenby’s voice. He took a deep breath and went on. “He’d come back to do research in our time. They didn’t know much about it, it seems. Something had happened in between—there was a bad period of several hundred years—and most books and records had been lost. They had a few, but not many. So they didn’t know much about us and they wanted to fill in what they didn’t know.”
“You believed all that, boy? Did he have any proof?”
#
It was the dangerous point; this was where the prime risk lay. They had had, for all practical purposes, no knowledge of the exact contours of the land, forty centuries back, nor knowledge of the presence of trees or buildings. If he appeared at the wrong spot, it might well mean instant death.
Jan Obreen was fortunate; he didn’t hit anything. It was, in fact, the other way around. He came out ten feet in the air over a plowed field. The fall was nasty enough, but the soft earth protected him; one ankle seemed sprained, but not too badly. He came painfully to his feet and looked around.
