by C. L. Moore
The scanner showed Ridgeley trudging on, his eyes blazing with the joy of conflict that was his reason for being, while around him the materialized madness of variable truths raged unceasingly.
To render Ridgeley en rapport with Billy Van Ness—that was the plan. If it could be done—
Finally:
"Ready, DuBrose?"
"Ready."
-
This was the lance that could pierce his armor. He saw it coming. In that single moment while Ridgeley saw and understood what weapon they were using against him, he analyzed the chances, made his decision, and acted.
He used the counterequation.
Around him the turmoil died. The wheat fields lay placid under the afternoon sun. A hundred feet away was the grove of trees that shielded the copter.
He was armored now. The equation could not harm him. But his enemies had forced him to reveal the nature of the counterequation. Very well. He could still fly to the Falangists—
Luckily he had protected himself before there had been full rapport with that mutant. Even the brief glimpse he had had was disturbing, a small, latent seed buried deep in his brain.
A seed?
Latent?
But what was this thing that grew, that uncoiled, that spiraled out and out through his consciousness as though a spark had ignited the whole heap of gunpowder? One cell in his brain, one thought—but from that thought the contagion leaped faster than light, giving Ridgeley the extra-temporal preception that had come from an alien race of the ultimate future.
Delayed reaction. Time-bomb. The brain-colloid had to adjust itself to ETP—
The grove of trees was in violent movement. No, that was illusionary. There were hundreds, thousands of trees, superimposed in space but conjoining in time, and the line of their duration stretched like a network, with offshoots of germination that ended in other trees—
Masonry loomed before Ridgeley.
Tepees stood there.
Future and past—
Limited spatially to this area, but without temporal limits. Everything that had been or was to be, Ridgeley perceived in a shifting, monstrous kaleidoscope that became clearer as his perception sharpened. It was not merely sight. ETP is something else, a consciousness of the objective that goes beyond vision and sound and hearing.
Spatially the manifestation was limited to a small area immediately surrounding Ridgeley, but he was oddly certain that he could expand the range at will. He made no effort to do that. He stood motionless, his head sunk between his heavy shoulders, veins throbbing on his forehead.
Suddenly he closed his eyes.
The disorientation grew worse. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand material objects occupied the same space in which he existed. An illusion. But he knew that two objects cannot concomitantly occupy the same space-time.
In the past and future, at this spot, there had been catastrophes. The land-surface of the earth is not large. And, in all time, there had been opportunity for lightning to strike near here, for quakes to rock the ground and for trees to crash down on the spot where Ridgeley stood.
The veins throbbed faster on his forehead. Teeth clenched, he bowed his head as though fighting a storm of sleet, while the ETP natural to a nonhuman race channeled through his brain, opening unimaginable doors.
Van Ness and the other mutants had learned to perceive duration—and they had gone mad. Disorientation was terribly inevitable. Only by retreating into insanity had they been able to survive at all, in a world of complete flux, of utter incoherence to any mind that instinctively expected a logical pattern. This was not even variable truth. It was fairy chess with a board extended to the end and the beginning of time, and on that incalculably vast chessboard the innumerable pieces were moving ...
A player can see the board and the pieces and comprehend the pattern. But if a pawn—or, in fairy chess, a nightrider—could see the board from the viewpoint of a player—what would be his reaction?
Ridgeley drew in upon himself, tighter and tighter. The impingement was becoming unendurable.
His legs bent. He sank down.
Keeping his eyes squeezed shut, he drew up his knees, crossed his clenched fists, and bent his head forward. He remained motionless in the foetal position.
He was not dead. He breathed.
But that was all.
-
A month later Cameron sat at his desk and stared defeat in the face. Not national defeat. Victory was three weeks old already, but how ephemeral a victory only Cameron knew.
The long, routine years had been merely preparation; the attack, invasion and conquest of the Falangists had been blitz. The counterequation was a sword that nothing could turn. Or rather, a shield the enemy did not possess. Under Eli Wood's direction the disorganization of the Falangists had progressed with unbelievable speed.
And here was peace.
Everywhere but in this room, this head, this foreboding mind. The counterequation was simple to apply, and Cameron still kept its effect in use around him. He had a reason. He was still shaky from his long ordeal, but no variable-truths could penetrate the armor of the counterequation even if any fugitive Falangists were still able to operate from hiding. Cameron was safe from that.
From himself he was not safe. He sat quite still, his back to the door, and a conversation from a few days past drifted through his mind. He did not want to remember it, but the sentences beat inexorably in his ears.
DuBrose: "Here's some indoctrination stuff for the Falangists. Needs your O.K., chief."
Cameron: "I'll tend to it. How do you feel, Ben? Want a furlough?"
DuBrose: "Lord, no. The work's too fascinating. Even Ridgeley—though, of course, he's incurable. And a good thing."
Cameron: "Good? Well, necessary. But not just, Ben."
DuBrose: "Not just? For my money, it was a beautiful case of applied justice. He started this mess through time-traveling, and ETP smashed him."
Cameron: "You think Ridgeley started it? He didn't. His psychological pattern was set long before his birth, before his conception. He acted in the only way he possibly could have acted. You can't hold a man responsible for the things that happened before he was born. The real culprits were the ones who made Ridgeley's indoctrination along those lines necessary—and possible. Do you know who those culprits were, Ben?"
DuBrose had looked bewildered. "Who?"
Cameron tapped the papers on his desk. "What's this stuff? Indoctrination plans. We've got to use them. We've got to train our own men along supervised military lines or the Falangists may start another war. Preparedness is necessary. A vital survival-factor. But in the end—Ben, the end of it will be Ridgeley. Ridgeley's civilization. The seeds of that culture are right here, in these papers, in us, and what led to us out of our own past. We're the culprits, Ben."
"Casuistry," DuBrose had said.
"Yes, maybe. Anyhow, it's got to be done."
"Don't think about it," DuBrose advised. "That's one responsibility you can't change. You aren't responsible for what happened in your past any more than Ridgeley was for his. Forget it."
"Yes, but you see, I know. The men who evolved our work for us and taught us didn't know. They hadn't seen what I've seen—the ultimate end. But when you know, and can't do anything but go right on with a thing whose end you've seen already—when you see a war fought and men going mad and men dying and Ridgeley punished as he was punished for a thing that can be traced straight back to me—that responsibility's hard to take, Ben."
He had struck his desk a hard blow, and had time for a brief flash of irrelevant pleasure in the knowledge that it must remain a solid desk now the counterequation was on. Not a surface that would ripple under the blow, or open a wet mouth to engulf his fist.
DuBrose had said, "You need a furlough worse than I do. I'm going to see you get one."
-
Cameron went to a window port, opened it and watched the red gloom of the thundering Spaces outside. There was no esca
pe. Every other nation was a potential enemy. From California to the Eastern Seaboard the nation had to remain a perfect war machine, ready to move into action at a second's notice. In such a machine, men are important cogs. And they must be cast of the right alloy, shaped to the right measure with precision skill, polished and tooled until they were—
Till they were men like Ridgeley.
And Cameron dared not change that process. He dared not even try, for fear of succeeding. What could he say? "Disarm, Seek peace. Hammer your swords into ploughshares."
And suppose they did? The enemy would strike again—and succeed, against an unprepared nation.
The thundering Spaces were before him, but all he saw was a race of circling thoughts made all but visible in the limbo of his mind.
"Forget it," he said aloud.
But there must be an answer.
"Forget it."
No problem is insoluble. There must be an answer.
"I've tried to find it for weeks. There is no answer. Forget it."
There must be an answer. You're responsible. You created Ridgeley.
"Not I alone."
But you have the knowledge the others don't have. You're responsible.
"Forget it."
Tell them? Don't tell them? There must be an answer.
"This has been going on for weeks. The war's over—"
This war. You're responsible.
"Forget it. I'm going home. I'm going to take a furlough. I'm going to take Nela. We'll go up into the woods and relax."
There must be an answer.
"So there'll be future wars. I ... I'm no idealist. What can I do? Ridgeley's civilization—it's not pleasant. It may end in extinction, or a race of semirobots. Or the race may achieve peace finally."
But you're responsible. You can't dodge that. You made Ridgeley. What can you do?
"I ... there must be an answer."
There must be an answer.
"There must be an answer."
There must be an answer!
THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER!
THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST BE—
-
DuBrose got into the pneumocar, adjusted the straps, and waited for the blankout. After it had passed, he settled back to fifteen minutes of idleness as the vehicle rushed toward Low Chicago. But his mind was active.
The past month had changed Ben DuBrose. He looked older than his thirty years now, perhaps because his blue eyes had acquired a new look of competence and his mouth was firmer. Seth Pell's death had left him as potential successor to the job of Director of Psychometrics, and a crown prince is usually conscious of his responsibilities. Always before, DuBrose had known that Cameron and Pell were, in effect, buffers. He was Number Three—not quite a third leg, but certainly a spare tire. Now, however, Pell was dead, and Cameron had shown that he was not infallible. Some day the big job would devolve upon DuBrose, and he would be ready for it. Far more ready than he had been a month ago.
He had changed. His horizons had expanded. Eli Wood's conversation had done a good deal in that direction, and so had the very concept of variable logic. He was older, abler, and even wiser. He could see, for example, why the war-time precautions had not been relaxed. The Falangists were defeated, but the location of Low Chicago and the other war-cities was still in the realm of military secrecy.
Preparedness was necessary, of course. Yet DuBrose thought that there would not be another war. He thought of the stars. And he thought of the mutant Van Ness, and of Ridgeley.
In Daniel Ridgeley's time there had been no interplanetary travel. There had been only global conflict that stretched back for unknown years, back along a time-track of conquest and defeat and deadlock, wars of attrition and red triumph and ash-tray failure, back to the war between America and the Falangists, and even before that. It was one road, the road that led to Ridgeley and his tremendous, futile culture.
One road out of many. No wonder, DuBrose pondered, that Ridgeley had chosen the wrong side when he came back through time. Had he thought that the Falangists were the ultimate victors? Or had he—not known?
Say he had not known. Or, if he had, he might have felt that his technological gifts could swing the balance in the direction he chose.
But there was another answer. Ridgeley's movement through time and his subsequent actions had affected time itself. Had switched the pattern of the future into a new path. Variable futures—
Again DuBrose remembered the mutant, and what Van Ness had revealed about that tremendous world that was now never to exist. For it was a world founded upon war, upon centuries and ages of continual battle, while the seesaw of victory swayed back and forth between the nations. War brings about technological progress, but only in certain specialized directions. Rocket-fuel, solar mirrors in super-atmospheric orbits, antigravity may be perfected for use, somehow, against the enemy, but not for use against the stars.
In Eden, DuBrose thought, leaning back against the softly padded cushions—in Eden the trouble began. And even after that, Cain slew Abel. In every Paradise, there have been wars. But in the Polar cold, in the Sahara, in all inhospitable lands where men wrench a dangerous living from the hostile elements, there is comradeship and unity against the Enemy older than man, the universe in which he dwells.
And now? The earth was at peace, for a little while. The weapons, the fuels, the technological miracles the world had perfected for destruction lay idle—and such things could not remain unused. Not while the stars hung in the skies, and the planets held their secrets—no longer unreachably far away. During the war no interplanetary travel had been attempted. The all-out effort had prevented such frivolous experiments.
But now the tools lay ready. Nations geared to the highest pitch of efficiency could not remain idle, could not rust in a lethargy that would be psychologically unendurable. There would always be an Enemy.
Not the Falangists. The Enemy stood at the gates of the sky, with the silent challenge it had given since man first raised his eyes from the ground. There would be new ships, DuBrose thought, a singing, joyous excitement in his blood—new ships like this pneumocar, but not burrowing through the dirt like moles. Ships to reach the planets.
There was the Enemy. The hostile universe that had always made man band together in a common unity. There lay the future that would wipe out Ridgeley's futile, tragic culture—because the future would slip into a new track now, one that led to solar—galactic!—expansion rather than fatal interglobal conflict.
A thousand years might pass. Ten thousand. But even then, Ridgeley would never be born. The arid soil from which his culture sprang had been fertilized, enriched by a nutrient that would bring forth greater glories than Ridgeley had ever imagined.
For years man had had the bridge.
But now he could use it. Now he could reach the stars.
They were the Enemy. The hostile, distant, alluring, secret stars. And they, too, would be conquered. But that would be no sterile victory.
DuBrose thought: The old order changeth, giving place to new.
The pneumocar stopped. DuBrose stepped out into Low Chicago. "I must tell the chief," he thought, as he moved toward a Way, and then—"Oh, well. He's probably figured it out for himself already."
But the chief had not figured it out. He could not, now. For Robert Cameron had been fighting too long, and his battle had been waged with the resources of pure nerve. When tremendous tension is relaxed suddenly, the result is sometimes dangerous.
The chief was very vulnerable now.
Vulnerable to phantoms.
-
—THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST BE AN ANSWER THERE MUST—
Stop it.
-
He didn't want to stop. Even in that circling confusion was refuge of a sort, from this unbearable responsibility which was in itself a grim kind of justice. The guilty must be punished. He himself must be punished. He, Cameron, a war criminal beside whom Ridgeley was as
innocent as a tank or a plane. He must go on. Answer or no, he must go on. His duty was to the living, not the unborn future.
Was it? Was it? He had not asked for this responsibility. But ignorance of the law excuses no man. Justice ... Justice ... If thine eye offend thee—
If thine eye offend thee—
Yes, there was one answer. Not a good one, but an answer. He had only to turn around to accept it.
He decided to turn around.
Automatically his hand reached out to close the window port. It did not shrink away from his touch. The metal remained firm and cool, as metal should. The counterequation still held him cradled in an unbroken shell of protection from all enemies. He knew that. No variable-truths could reach him here even if any enemies survived to hurl them at him.
He was shut in here with the one inescapable enemy.
He knew what was behind him. He had felt it a little while ago when he reached unsuspectingly for the door. There had been a strange, soft fluttering against his palm as he touched the knob. He had not looked down then. He had jerked his hand away and gone back to the desk. Now he would face it. Now he would look, and know, and accept the answer that would mean his own personal release, a laying down of the burden he had not asked for and could no longer carry. Now he would face the door.
The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.
The End
THIS IS THE HOUSE
Astounding Science Fiction - February 1946
with Henry Kuttner
(as by Lawrence O'Donnell)
A house, it has been said, is a machine for living. The house they bought from its previous occupant had, very definitely, been made just that. But—not for human living!
-
Melton walked somberly into the living room and headed for the front windows, where he remained, brooding over some dark thought and twisting his hands idly behind him. His wife, Michaela, lifted her head and watched him, while the whirring of the sewing machine faded into silence. After a moment she said, "You're in my light, Bob."
"Am I? Sorry," Melton murmured, and moved aside. But he still kept his back to the room, and his fingers still moved nervously behind him. Michaela frowned, sent a slow, rather questioning glance around the room, and pushed back her chair.
