The Shadow Men, page 12
Cargill sighed. The task of establishing oneself in the future was an intricate one, involving many details.
But he carried these out, one by one —and afterwards headed for the therapy room in Shadow City for his second death experience.
* * * * *
The blackness ended. When he opened his eyes Shadows were bending over him. The two technicians straightened and he saw that he was in a large laboratory. A machine floated in the air above him.
It was alive with lights, thousands of tiny lights that waxed and waned as if reacting to infinitesimal pressures from some invisible source. One of the Shadows walked away. The other gazed down at Cargill for a moment with inscrutable glittering eyes and then ms do an unmistakable gesture.
Sit up!"
He realized the difference within himself, as he obeyed. He felt refreshed and energized, wonderfully alert and alive. And they must have used the million-tube on him also to educate him as to the why of what had happened. For he knew with a sharper understanding that he had been relaxed and that Betty Lane had had the equivalent of a cathartic experience.
Old, old was that pattern. Punishment is known among animals and when there is none neurosis strikes as deeply into the mind of the beast as any comparable situation in man. A bull elephant, nursing along his females, is attacked by a larger bull and is driven into the jungle. The injustice of it tears him to pieces, and after a time a dangerous rogue elephant roams the forests.
There was a hell before heaven was thought of. Once people were hanged for stealing a shilling—until twenty-five cents ceased to be an important sum. Morality changes, of course. The crime of one generation is common practise in the next and so a thousand easements come automatically to the tensed descendants of people who did not have the satisfaction of catharsis.
But there are eternal verities. Murder will be paid for by someone. Gross obscenities leave their impress on the blood stream. Revolutions and wars conducted without regard for the humanities—ah, but how they will be paid for. Disaster shocks the universe and the impulse goes on and on.
The shock waves of the collapse of vanished empires go on for ages.
The victim gains catharsis when the thief is captured and imprisoned. The prisoner, his guilt expiated by his imprisonment, also gains easement. There was only one thing wrong with that. As Cargill sat up, relaxed and free, he realized for the first time that there was still another thing he must do.
This “prisoner” had not yet committed the crime which would make it possible for Morton Cargill to come to the twenty-fourth century.
It was 1943. A Shadow moved along a war-darkened street of Los Angeles. It took a little while to locate the exact cocktail bar. He couldn’t remember clearly where he had been that night at the beginning of things.
Suddenly, however, he saw the unlighted sign that jarred his memory—
ELBOW ROOM.
A glance through the wall showed Morton Cargill inside.
There was no sign of Marie Chanette.
That puzzled Cargill. He stepped back into the darkness of a doorway across the street from the bar and for the first time seriously considered what he was about to do. He realized it had been in the back of his mind all these weeks and that he had deliberately forgotten it.
Somehow he had known that sooner or later he would have to come to the twentieth century and make sure that everything happened—as it had happened. He had to be certain that Marie Chanette did indeed die.
Cargill thought shakily, “Am I really going to let her be killed, knowing that I can stop it at any time up to the actual moment of the accident?”
Having put the question so sharply he had a sense of a desperate crisis.
It had to be done, he argued with himself. If he faltered now everything might be disarranged. He had been warned about trying to alter events. Only experts could do that and they only under special conditions.
He was still undecided when the drunken Lieutenant Cargill in the bar staggered to his feet and came out into the darkness.
But where was the girl?
The Shadow Grannis-Cargill had a sudden flash of insight. In abrupt excitement he projected himself over to the scene of the accident. He saw the wrecked car against a tree almost immediately. Inside was Marie Chanette. He examined her. She had been dead nearly an hour, judging by her condition.
Relieved, the Shadow hastened back to where Lieutenant Cargill was standing, swaying. The blur-minded Cargill was unaware of the being who hovered behind him, directing the power of a million-tube on him. Without his being aware of it, the belief was impressed on his mind that at this moment he was meeting Marie Chanette.
The hallucination firmly established, the Shadow was about to transport Cargill to the wreck when he thought, “All
I've got to do is go back about an hour in time and I can save Marie Chanette’s life.”
Cargill said aloud, “No!”
It was not really a rejection, he realized wretchedly. He tried to argue with himself. “If I once get started on a thing like this, I could spend the rest of my life just preventing accidents.”'
Even the Shadows didn’t consider that a solution to the psychological problems with which they dealt.
“Besides,” he told himself, “she did it herself. I’m not responsible in any way.” Abruptly he realized he was not convincing himself. General truths simply did not apply. Marie Chanette was one woman in the vast universe, one bewildered human being on the drift of time. In the moment before her death she must have cried out in sudden agonized awareness of her fate.
Cargill made his choice—life for Marie Chanette. He stood grimly a few minutes later, watching her car come towards the scene of the accident. It would be dangerous for her if he got in beside her.
So he noted the direction from which she was coming, went back in time and space—and so by jumps traced her to the point where she came out of a night club accompanied by a soldier. The two were quarreling bitterly in drunken fashion. Cargill decided not to wait till he got disgusted. Before the girl could get into her car he transported her to her bedroom.
He returned to what would normally have been the scene of the accident. “I'll wait here till the time for it is past.”
The moment arrived when—earlier— Marie Chanette would have died.
In space-time, an energy thread “broke.” No words can describe the intricacy of that “break.” But the fabric of the universe “shifted” slightly. And that “shift” too cannot be described, cannot be thought or imagined.
A combination of forces concentrated on the “break” area. Cargill was snatched and flung a billion years into the future. He stood for a moment on a desolate hill overlooking a lake that glittered at him with radioactive fluorescence. The lake was in communication with another being on a remote star and, briefly, he was in the path of that abnormal telepathy. He learned something about reality in that instant which nearly wrecked his brain.
Then he was sinking. The time impulse yielded to the pressure of his presence—a new factor for it—and another thread “broke.” The sudden threat of imminent chaos alarmed a group of associated cities a quadrillion years away in space and time. The great beings of that universe went to sleep as of one accord, thinking, “We mustn't interfere in that war.”
Their thought touched Cargill, and he said aloud into fathomless night, “War? But it’s not a war. It’s a struggle between Balance and Variation, between Order and Change, between—” He could not name the final synonymic graduations. They had no name. They were process and unspeakable.
In that moment of awful revelation he knew who he was. He thought in anguish: “I've got to fight. I've got to get back.”
The broken energy threads re-fused. Marie Chanette shook her head blurrily and climbed into her car. What puzzled her was the momentary conviction that she had been in her own bedroom. She was so intent on the thought that she forgot the soldier and drove away even as he was stumbling around to the other side to get in.
Grimly Cargill waited for the crash. When it was over he transported the earlier Cargill to the wrecked car and put him into it beside Marie Chanette. He took the pictures that would “later” —in 1946—shock Captain Cargill.
He waited there, then, until the terrible tensions in him let up, waited till he could think, “I've broken through the barriers of life and death. Th* whole sidereal universe is open to ms now that I know the truth."
Satisfied, he returned to Shadow City. The cycle was complete.
Unknown Author, The Shadow Men
