The Shadow Men, page 11
For awhile he walked feverishly along quiet shady streets. Here in the residential area quiet cozy houses were set well back in their flower and shrub gardens. Children played in most of the yards. At different times he saw both men and women working among the shrubs. Not once did he see a Shadow.
It was a role and a state they must assume for time travel and when danger threatened. Tensely Cargill wondered how quickly they could put on their protective cloaks of darkness.
And minute after minute he looked on the name plates for the name Grannis. As the morning lengthened towards emerged from his daze. This was it
midday the virtual impossibility of his search being successful penetrated deeper. A man who was not even listed in the directory would not be locatable by a hasty street-to-street search in a city of more than a hundred thousand people.
He admitted defeat abruptly and hurried back toward his apartment. "I’ll stay inside,” he thought. "I won’t answer the door. I won’t answer the phone. That way no one can give me the cue.”
He had the empty feeling that he had made a mistake leaving the place at all. As he approached the square building his watch—which he had set by the clock in the apartment—pointed at twenty minutes to twelve. Cargill began to perspire.
He was surprised to notice that several hundred people were gathered in front of an entrance to one of the great round buildings. Cargill asked one of them, "What’s going on?”
The stranger glanced at him with a good-natured smile. "We’re waiting for the announcement,” he said. “We received notice from the future that the results of an election held several years from now would be announced today and go into effect immediately. It—” Cargill hurried on. So they had elections, did they? He felt immensely cynical and critical until he thought, "From the future—but that’s ridiculous! And —why, that would mean this danger was overcome.” He recalled that he had been told it was impossible for a person to go into his own future without assistance. He’d have to ask questions about that.
He reached his apartment at last. As he entered the door a voice from the phone alcove said to him mechanically, "You are to report at once to Office One, Building C. Grannis requests that you report to Office One, Building C. You are to report to Office—”
"Oh, my word!” thought Cargill. Grannis had located himself.
Swiftly after his first shock Cargill
“I’ll practise being a Shadow,” he thought grimly. “I’ll superimpose the spitgun tube and then—”
It seemed to him that he couldn’t escape the necessity, in spite of somebody coming from the future to hold an election. Everything that had happened so far he had forced by his own actions. Even knowing of the paradox did not . relieve him of responsibility until he personally had done what was required.
As of now only he knew of the imminent catastrophe, personal as well as national. Across the land Tweener and Planiacs must be tensing for their desperate roles.
Cargill walked forward, shut off the automatic repeating device on the phone and left his apartment. Outside he asked a passerby which was Building C. A few minutes later he was at his destination.
The man in Office One of Building C was a large pleasant looking individual with a touch of gray in his hair. He seemed about sixty years of age. He did not ask Cargill to sit down. He stood up.
"I’m getting old,” he said to Cargill. “In spite of all my shuttling around, in spite of having lived altogether about a thousand years, old age has finally caught up with me. I used to think that would never happen.”
He chuckled. “I've been Grannis now for eighty-seven years, so I’m rather glad that someone has been selected to replace me. It’s unusual for a newcomer to be chosen but the choice was made by the people of the future and they will have good and sufficient reasons for it. And so”—he waved at the large room— "here it is.”
He became businesslike. "It won’t take you long to learn your duties. Protector of the State—that’s easy. To do that properly you’ve got to live periodically among the Tweeners. They’re the ones that have to be watched.
“What I did was to marry a Tweener girl—that’s In addition to my Shadow wife—but she died four years ago for the last time.” He didn’t explain that but went on, ”1 haven’t been near the
Tweeners since then, so I suggest you take a look at what they’re up to sometime soon.”
He finished, “Then of course you sign documents authorizing therapies. You have no veto power on that but”—he smiled—“you’ll get onto it.”
He held out his hand, “And now, before I go, any questions?”
CHAPTER XVII The Therapy
GRANNIS!” said Cargill at that ® point. His mind had been a receptive blank. Now there was thunder.
The old man was amused. “As a newcomer,” he said, “you won’t know about our history. We started as a legal secret society with all the ritual, including resounding titles. Our leader was called The Grandest Guy. For short we addressed him satirically as Grandest, which, since it meant nothing to us, we eventually slurred down to Grannis.” “Grannis!” Cargill repeated. He had a blinding vision of the truth, a mental picture of one man using the time energy, first to save his own life, then to prevent an unnecessary war, finally to establish himself in the twenty-fourth century as the Grannis of the Shadows.
He said tautly, “Will you tell me a little bit more about my duties?”
As he listened his mind soared so swiftly that only a part of the meaning came through. His body was warm with excitement. His thoughts were vague and roseate and at first he had no desire to establish any logical connection with reality.
He was Grannis, who would now plan the Planiac attack on the Tweeners and the Tweener attack on the Shadows. He would do that not because of any traitorous scheme but because it was the way things had already happened.
Unsteadily, he halted the wilder gyrations of his thoughts. Tensely he recalled the way he had been taken back to the therapy room here in Shadow City and so on to the Tweener capital. Why had that been necessary? How did that fit?
Why live over again a period of this age-—when all he had to do was come to the terminal center, enter Shadow-City and be on hand for the only kind of election where the electorate could decide on an officeholder’s capacity after his term?
There was, of course, the fact that Grannis had merely tried to control, under great difficulties, plots that were already in the making. As Grannis he would be forced to act according to Morton Cargill’s knowledge of what had happened. As Cargill he had acted according to Grannis’ interference.
He paused, astounded. “Just a moment,” he thought. “That doesn’t make sense. We can’t both act according to what the other did. That would make it a closed circle—”
The older man interrupted him as he reached that point in his logical progression. “Well, I see it’s half past twelve. I’ll leave you to familiarize yourself with the office. You’ve got assistants in the outer office. Don’t hesitate to use them.”
Once more he held out his hand. This time Cargill shook it. After the man had gone he stood for awhile stolidly and then he thought, “Did he say halfpast twelve?”
A clock on the wall indicated that it was now thirty-seven and a half minutes after high noon. Cargill stared at it shakily. He should have known that they wouldn’t give him the cue so quickly after his arrival.
He remembered what the voice had told him when he first found himself in the therapy room after being transported from the cocktail bar in Los Angeles, 1946—that the body reacted with final positivity only to the impact of real events. Here was a real event. The cue to disconnect the pyramid switch had not been given him. He had approximately twenty-four hours to prevent it from ever being given.
Confidence surged through him. In his mind’s eye he could see exactly what he must do. But first there was one little item—how had the Shadow therapists reacted to the disappearance of Morton Cargill from their therapy room two months ago now? There must be a record of the incident. It would be here in one of the files of the Grannis.
He found the record almost at once. With a pale face Cargill read the notation under his name.
Morton Cargill, 1946. Recommended therapy:
"To be killed in the presence of Betty Lane.”
Disposition: “Therapy executed at 9:40 A.M.
Comments: “Subject seemed unusually calm
at time of death.”
That was all there was. Apparently, the process was so automatic that the everyday details were left out. Only the bare facts were permanently recorded. And they were simple.
Morton Cargill, despite all his frantic maneuverings, had somehow landed back in the therapy room—and, without the Shadows even being aware of his wanderings, had at his proper time been given the prescribed treatment.
There was no mention of what had been done with the body.
Cargill emerged slowly from his profound depression. “I don’t believe it,” he told himself. “Surely, as Grannis, I could have faked that report.”
He read it again and saw that it was signed by two names in addition to his own and stamped with an official seal. That shook him a little but stubbornly he held to his conviction.
Besides, for all he knew, the death scene might be a thousand years in his future. These Shadows, with their tremendous understanding of life processes, had created the environment for just such a paradox.
The possibility definitely cheered him. He looked around the spacious office. He walked over and glanced out of a window that overlooked the lovely mountain city. For a moment then he was dazzled. He was the Grannis of the Shadow people. He could move through all the past ages of man at will.
“And all I’ve got to do,” he thought, “is make sure that everything happens as I know it happened.”
Hastily he prepared for the paradox. First he changed himself into a Shadow and back again several times. He stood finally as a Shadow, thinking, “I want to go back to—” He named the destination mentally. He waited but nothing happened. That was startling but he refused to accept the defeat.
“I must be using the wrong technique,” he told himself. The trouble was —what could be the right one? He remembered what the Shadow instructor had said about vibration and visualization.
He changed from the Shadow shape and thought, “What basic vibration can I use as a measure?” The only one he could remember was middle C on the musical scale. He hummed the C softly as he figured out on paper how many middle C vibrations there were in a day.
He changed back to the Shadow shape, visualized his destination again. Then he hummed middle C—and thought the number of vibrations.
He felt a tingle—indescribable.
So, two hours before the volor-powered floater with Morton Cargill aboard left the Tweener capital for Shadow City, another Morton Cargill contacted Withrow. As a result, half an hour after the first Cargill was on his way and before any real counter-action could take effect, the Tweener revolution was launched.
The complete surprise achieved a virtually bloodless victory nearly ten hours ahead of schedule. The cue words, which were to have been sent to him to disconnect the pyramid switch, would never be uttered.
The Shadow Grannis-Cargill headed back to the floater on which Lela Bouvy and another Morton Cargill were trapped. The moment he was inside the floater he transferred the “earlier” Cargill to the glass-walled therapy room in Shadow City, where—presently— Ann Reece would rescue him for the second time.
As Grannis he returned immediately to the floater. Ignoring the cringing
Lela he walked through to the engine room. After the training he had received he needed only one glance at the drive tube to notice that the light-focusing lens had been jarred out of position. He reached in with Shadow fingers and adjusted it. The floater started to rise immediately as normal energy-flow was resumed.
Lela safe, he visited Carmean on the night that Lela and Morton Cargill escaped in Carmean’s floater. By making casual references to previous meetings he found out from Carmean when and where they had taken place.
He began to keep a diary of his movements, then thought in an anguish of self-annoyance, “Why, of course, this very diary will be up there in the future. I'd have put it where it would be easy to find.”
He located it in the top drawer of Grannis’ desk. The list was there, complete with names, places and actions taken.
It seemed to him, gloomily, there was only one item missing from that comprehensive record of a man’s determination to do everything he had to do. The list contained no hint of any method to keep Morton Cargill from being given the therapy of death.
All through the weeks—in actual time lived—that followed he had the memory of that therapy nagging at the back of his mind. He rejoined Lela and pushed the Planiac rebellion. There was no doubt of its success after Carmean and the other bosses were captured. To the sullen prisoners he offered a choice. They must either take the Shadow training or be taken to Tweener land.
They chose the training, failed without exception and became Tweeners.
Cargill performed every action listed in. his diary, right down to meeting the obscure Lauer and receiving from him the transport instrument entrusted to that rebellious individual by Ann Reece.
The job done, he returned to Office One, Building C, Shadow City, one minute after his previous departure. The time was 1:01 P.M. Only a few hours had gone by in Shadow City since he had first arrived at terminal center.
At five minutes after one the phone rang. It was the instructor who had given him Shadow training.
“If you will come to cubicle eleven,” he instructed Cargill, “we will complete your training. There isn’t much but still it is a part of our pattern.”
Cargill walked over to the cubicle, thinking, “If only I could ask a question in such a way that I wouldn’t give myself away—about that death scene.” He had tried to imagine just how he might be present when the therapy was executed but he rejected the idea. There was such a thing as straining a paradox to the point where it wouldn’t work.
As soon as he had entered cubicle eleven the light went out and the disembodied voice spoke out of the air in front of him.
“Long ago, when we first discovered the processes involved, we decided that every Shadow must go through the experiences of death and of course revival. The reason for this is the universal fear of death. When a person actually goes through death and is brought back to life the associative terror is gone forever except in rare cases.
“The process of dying also has other effects on the system. Particularly it breaks forever certain types of tensions. For this latter reason we do not hesitate to recommend it as a therapy for people we bring out of the past in our inter-time psychological work—”
“What’s that?” Cargill said at that point. “What did you say?” But he did not utter the startled questions out loud.
The instructor continued, “We always revive the therapy patient after he and the complaining party are convinced on the action level that death has indeed taken place, though the complainant is never aware of the resurrection.
“Many of these latter are morally shocked by what has happened but we use the million tube to persuade them that justice has been done. And with that combination and that only the effect we want is achieved.”
Cargill said slowly, "This death experience—can the same person undergo it several times without being harmed ?” “Very few Shadows,” was the reply, “would live to be a thousand years old if that were not true. You cannot imagine the number of accidents that take place despite all precautions.”
He finished with a hint of irony in his tone, “We do not, however, recommend the death experience more than -a dozen times. The cells begin to remember the process."
Cargill hesitated. “There’s another thing that’s been bothering me. Can I go into my own future?”
“No. Only a pattern which has already occurred can be repeated by the body. For you to go into the future from here would require that somebody from the future pull you ‘up.’ The pattern would then be established, and you could operate from that particular future into the past.”
“I see," nodded Cargill. He paused again, then, “Are you going to give me
the death experience here?”
"Yes"
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Like this.”
Something bright flashed in his eyes. He died instantly.
CHAPTER XVIII The Ultimate Reality
HE awakened from that first death, feeling calm and rested. Certain tensions in his mind must have been relaxed for he remembered that he still had several things to do before he could be certain he was in this age to stay.
There was, for instance, that very first time when Ann Reece had brought Captain Morton Cargill, newly arrived from the twentieth century, to a marble room where he had had an opportunity to see and be seen by the Shadow Gran-nis. The reason for that had been obscure. Now, it was suddenly clear.
“Of course,” he thought, “it was important that Cargill see a Shadow. Besides that was the simplest way to get back the transport instrument that had to be loaned to Ann so that she could make the rescue.”
And there was the matter of the false notions the Tweeners and Planiacs had had about what the Shadows could and could not do. Some of that was due to their own ignorance of course but Grannis must have confirmed their ideas with deliberate intent to deceive.
And finally the fact that there had been previous getaways. It seemed incredible now that they had escaped by themselves. He must have helped them. Why? In order to establish among Planiacs the reality of the existence of such people, so that when Morton Cargill came along his identity as a getaway would be taken for granted.
