“We change the lives of others to improve our own but we produce nothing, build nothing, discover nothing. We live in a sterile age. Personally I think that’s why we’re approaching Cell Four. We sidetracked ourselves long ago and extinction is the only answer now.”
“You could go to some other age.”
“Not on the main branch. And it doesn’t work, anyway. Something goes wrong with a man. I don’t know what it is but there’s a difference. A man withers and dries up. I’ve seen them come here. You’re not the first, you know.
“You think you could live here. You think you could marry Rena and live among us — “
“I didn’t — ” George interrupted in confusion.
“Don’t you think we could tell?” Bradwell said. “We sense emotions as easily as spoken words. The wonders of genetics!”
George could not tell whether it was in bitterness or mere cynicism. George felt naked.
He glanced about him, felt the eyes of the others upon him. There was nothing he could hide. Why had Rena even warned him not to betray their marriage plans? Surely she had known they would sense his feelings towards her.
“It wouldn’t work at all,” said Bradwell. “You could never keep up with Rena. She’s ten thousand years ahead of you right now. You think you could learn but you couldn’t.
“And it’s the same with us when we go to another time and another people. We can visit but we can’t live there. It’s every man to his own time and people. That’s why I don’t use the alternator any more. I don’t want the contamination of other cultures. I want to produce what I might produce of my own will and ability.”
George looked into his eyes and almost shrank before the passionate bitter fires in the man’s eyes.
“It’s the same for you,” Bradwell said fiercely. “In your own time you can build and create. You can be an entity in your own right. That you can never be here. You’d better go back.
“As for Rena—you will not lose her. You never had her.”
George backed away, his glance slowly covering the room. They were standing still and silent in groups as if talking to each other but they were not talking. They were waiting, waiting for his answer. It hadn’t been just Bradwell who had spoken to him. It had been all of them. Like a wolfpack they waited for his capitulation.
And they were right, he thought. So damned right. He had known it since that moment when Rena grudgingly admitted her superior faculties. Marriage between them would be only miscegenation.
“Yes—I’d better go back,” he said to Bradwell. “Can you help me? I wouldn’t want Rena to know. Tell her—just tell her I’m too much of a savage for her.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bradwell. “They should never have come to you. I’ll help you get away if you like.”
It didn’t occur to George that he should say anything to the rest of them. They watched him follow Bradwell out and they knew what was happening. Blindly he urged the scientist on. They came to Rena’s room. Bradwell seemed to have no expectation of meeting her.
He led George to the machine. “I’m going to block this after you’re gone. That will mean there will be no further possibility of your coming here. This is your own decision—be sure it’s the one you want to make.”
George nodded dumbly. “Go ahead. I don’t want to come back. Rena will not remember for long, I’m sure.”
There was the rising sound of commotion in the hallway beyond the room, the sound of running feet and a cry, “George!”
“We’d better hurry,” suggested Bradwell. He opened the door of the machine. The grayness swirled before George.
“Yeah—we’d better hurry.” He walked into the fog, the sound of Rena’s voice still in his ears.
CHAPTER V: The Block
She burst into the room as Bradwell made a swift movement. His hands jabbed at the panel of controls on the wall. A darting red glow splashed through the gray fog and then it was gone. The door opened only to a shallow chamber lined with polished metal.
“Brad!” she screamed. “Brad!”
She rushed to the panel and looked at what he had done. Her body seemed suddenly without life. She moved, unmoving, scarcely breathing.
Footsteps sounded behind her on the soft carpeting of the floor. Her father’s hands touched her shoulders. “Rena.”
She turned slowly, the life gone out of her eyes. “You were all in on it, weren’t you?”
“We couldn’t permit you to do what you planned,” said Cramer.
“My life is my own. What gives you the right to destroy my plans and hopes?”
“You are all that I have to give to the future,” said Cramer pleadingly. “Five centuries of gene selection—you are the best that a thousand ancestors have to offer the future.”
“Am I their prisoner?”
“You are obligated.”
“You blocked him,” she murmured. “Blocked a hundred years before and after. I can never see him again—never as long as I live.”
“You wouldn’t have come back from Cell Four and left him there,” said Dr. Harkase. “We couldn’t take the risk of your not coming back merely because you want to stay with him. We would have gained nothing by the experiment and would have lost you. As it is, we are quite sure of your return.”
“You have lost me anyway!” She faced them with a sudden fury that made them recoil. “I hate you all. And I will never forgive you.”
Bradwell moved impulsively toward her. “Rena — “
“Get out now. Get out and leave me alone.”
They turned and moved toward the door without speaking. Her father’s shoulders sagged but Rena felt no pity for him.
The door opaqued behind them and she pressed a stud on the wall that locked her in. Only then did she fling herself on the bed and let the sobbing cry escape from her throat.
* * * *
George Brooks shook his head and raised slowly on his elbows. There was grass under his face and a shrill singing in his ears. Hard gray morning light showed the landscape about him. He was lying in a park.
Blearily he looked around and struggled to his feet. He’d better move on if he didn’t want to be run in.
The granddaddy of all hangovers, he thought dully. It hurt just to move his head. Every bolt that held his gray matter in place seemed to have been sheared off at once.
He sat down heavily on a green bench and tried to think. Why in thunder had he gone out and got so drunk? Seemed as if he and Rena had had a date but he couldn’t remember where they’d gone. He couldn’t remember taking her to any bar or club. She wouldn’t drink anyway. She never touched the stuff. But what had happened to her? How had he got such a hangover?
He remembered then—the vague dream of Rena, an anachronistic Rena who had come from some distant age to take him to a far-off time.
A crazy kind of drunken dream.
Crazy. Like a surging blast of electrons realization flooded through his nerve channels, straining synapses, choking the involuntary functions of his body.
He crumpled on the bench and cried in rage. He remembered then the bland face of Bradwell, the mathematician, the predatory circle of civilized supermen attacking with their inhuman powers of mind.
How super-civilized they had been! Nothing so crude as “Throw the bum out!”
No—one by one, they had invaded his mind, planted a seed of suggestion. A suggestion of fear and retreat because he was a savage and they were supermen. He remembered Cramer sitting beside him. Now that it was over he could recall the sensation of their impressed thoughts even though he’d been unaware of them at the time—unaware that they weren’t his own thoughts.
And Bradwell. He knew the answer to that, too. The fellow hoped to marry Rena himself.
George’s fists clenched white with the yearning to smash into that smooth face. He groaned with the sickness of realization of what they had done to him.
Rena had seen him go, he thought. Those had been her footsteps and her voice he ha
d heard in the hall. What would she think? That he had deserted her? But she would come back. She knew him better than that. She would come for an explanation.
Bradwell’s block. No further possibility of returning, he had said. Never see Rena again —And then the one unsurpassable lie. “This is your own decision — “
They would not lie to him, Rena had said. They had merely forced their wills upon him and called the result his own. How little Rena knew of her own people.
“Have a little too much last night, Buddy? Maybe we’d better go down to the station and sleep it off.”
George took his hands away from his face to stare at the uniform trouser legs in front of him. He got up wearily, “I’m not drunk, officer. Just taking a walk before breakfast and got kind of sick. I’ll be all right.”
The policeman searched his face sharply. “Okay, Buddy. But take care of yourself. Better get a meal into you. You don’t look so good.”
He went on down the street, vaguely aware of his location. He walked for a long time and went in to a dirty lunch counter for something to eat. It made him feel little better.
There would be police investigations, he thought. They’d ask him questions—questions he couldn’t answer. They might accuse him of murdering her. He wondered if he ought to report her disappearance to the police.
His thoughts were snarled in foggy indecision but he decided against the falsity of reporting her missing. Let them come after him if they wanted to. It made little difference.
He walked in the clearing air again. He understood more thoroughly what had happened to him. The powerful interference that Rena’s people had poured into his brain had acted exactly like alcohol, taking over control of his senses momentarily and leaving his own blunted and helpless afterwards. That’s why he had all the symptoms of a hangover.
He tried to think of the future—a future without Rena. He could picture only gray blankness. There was no future for him without her. But somehow a man has to go on living. His bodily processes continue to function and he has to support them.
After an hour’s walking he remembered his car still parked by Rena’s apartment. He returned to get it and drove to his own rooms. He changed clothes then and called Sykes.
“Boss? This is George. I’m a little late this morning.”
“Is that news?”
“Rena and I agreed to disagree last night. I’ve got a head like a washtub this morning but I’ll be down by noon.”
“Lay off the bottle, you dope. Don’t you think anybody ever went through this before? It happens all the time. By the time the wedding’s over you’ll both be laughing at it. Why, I remember — “
“You don’t understand. She’s gone. Pulled out of town. Given up her job and everything. I don’t know where she’s gone.”
“You must have some idea where she could go.”
“I don’t. She said I’d never see her again. Forget about it, John, but I just wanted you to know. You might pass the word along the grapevine, so the guys will lay off a little bit. I don’t think I could take much ribbing today.”
“Okay. I’ll put the police on her trail for you. Don’t be such a dope.
I won’t tell the boys anything. Come on down and get to work. When the cops locate her, take her over your knee and let her know who’s going to wear the pants. You might as well get it settled before hand.”
“No, I don’t want you to call — “
But Sykes had left. George looked at the phone in his hand, then slowly placed it in the cradle. If he did not protest with excessive urgency it would look funny and Sykes would have to testify to that effect later.
He sank down on the bed, wishing he never had to move again.
Death, he could have understood. Men’s minds are made to find reconciliation with the death of loved ones. But in this unfathomable gulf of time—he could not do battle with despair on such ground. His mind retreated wildly before the thought that he would be dead and turned to dust for twenty-six long centuries before Rena ever came into existence.
* * * *
When he reached the plant during the noon hour it seemed like some strange and alien place. It didn’t seem possible that it had only been last night he had left it, looking forward to a date with Rena.
Most of the engineers were out. Only a couple were bent over their decks as he strolled in. He waved absently to them.
He sat down at his desk. Just twenty-four hours ago she was sitting across from him, he thought. He visualized her there, posing as a technical journal writer. She must have been amused by his designs that would seem so clumsy and elementary by the standards of her world. But she would not have laughed at him. She had respected what he had done with the knowledge he possessed, he thought. That would be her way.
He thought of her grimacing over his mathematical theories. It must have seemed so elementary, yet she had pretended it was difficult. He saw her writing, copying his work with that fantastic pen of hers —That pen.
He jerked open the middle desk drawer. Almost reverently he picked up the pen—the one undeniable assurance that he had really known her, that she was not some fantasy of his mind.
He held it gently in his hand. It was worth a fortune if he could find out its secret but he knew he’d never try. He could not risk the one precious testament that he had really known and loved that girl out of time.
Idly he held it in position and touched the point to a scratch pad. It seemed corpselike in motionless stance.
Suddenly his hand trembled almost uncontrollably. That point—it wasn’t motionless. Feebly it seemed to be wriggling with volition of its own, making a small circle of curlicues on the paper.
For a moment, George could not control the trembling of his hand sufficiently to move the pen. He laid it down and clenched his fist viciously, shaking it to restore some sense of voluntary control.
He grasped the pen again and moved it swiftly across the pad as he had seen Rena do. His breathing all but ceased.
—so tired, George. I’ve been sitting here, thinking constantly since the moment you left. I’ll have to rest. In an hour I’ll try again. Repeat through the rest of the day at hourly intervals.
I can’t know that you’re reading this but I pray that you have my pen and are watching it write. I can’t even be too sure that it’s crossing the block. We have no way of knowing whether it will do that or not. In another hour I’ll repeat everything. So tired, darling —The pen continued with only a wobbly line. He laid it down and slowly wiped the sweat from his face.
The implications of the intangible line of communication filled him with a bursting sensation. It was like a one-way line from a living tomb. All his life—as long as she tried to reach him—he could receive her thoughts.
But she would never know it. He could never reach her with his. Never could he let her know that he understood. He thought of the years to come in which each message from her would be like some opiate that would give him strength to go on until she called again. Even as he thought of it he knew that it would not go on forever. Like him she was sick now with the tragedy of their betrayal. But she had a life to live too, and one day she would forget to call to him.
He shook his head savagely and got up. He couldn’t just sit there, his emotions churning his insides to fury. He strode out of the lab, out of the building, into the sunlight, carrying the pen and pad with him.
He walked the whole hour, trying to keep from thinking. When the time was up he went out in front of the building and sat down against the sunlit brick wall beneath a dogwood tree. He touched the pen to paper.
Almost to the second, it resumed.
George, darling, for what must be the hundredth time, I am trying to get across to you. I can’t know if I’m crossing the block or not but it’s the only chance I have ever to see you again.
I know what they did to you. You must know too that they forced you to go back. It was a bitter, evil thing to do. I think Bradwell even tried to destroy you b
y shifting the spatial coordinates. But the alteration was so slight that I suppose you returned quite close to my apartment.
That is just as well, perhaps. No one but you knew I occupied the rooms so just stay away from there and no one will think anything is wrong by my absence. None of my belongings are left there.
I could bring them before our courts for what they did but it would not bring you back to me. Only one thing can do that.
His hand began shaking again almost beyond his control as he read that last sentence. He was almost afraid to go on if she were to raise false hopes of their seeing each other again through some wild scheme she must have devised.
You can never be reached by an alternator again, George. I can never reach you again. This is what the block does. But you could come to me.
They know you have the pen but they have no way of knowing that I am communicating with you by it. They cannot see you through the block—just as I can’t even be sure I’m reaching you.
If I am getting through to you, we are safe. And you can come to me but not here—or anywhere else they could reach us. We would never be free of their interference with our lives.
They are still going to let me go to Cell Four, however, according to the plans of the experiments for my graduate study. You can meet me there, darling, where they can never follow. Whatever it is, whatever kind of world it may hold, we can be together there for the rest of our lives.
He couldn’t understand. Couldn’t she realize that he had no way of getting to Cell Four or any other era besides his own? Had she so forgotten?
You are wondering how this can be done? I will teach you to build an historical alternator. It is a dangerous thing to do. I an breaking one of the strictest laws of my culture. They would penalize me for life if it were known. But it is a risk worth taking.
One advantage on our side is that you, as a closed cycle individual, cannot disclose the information or dispense the machine in any way that will upset the present probabilities.
Your danger lies in the fact that the machine cannot be properly checked and tested by an experienced alternator technician but I will try to give you instructions as completely as possible.
Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 4
