Balmer was still alive, and I made him dig out the plans and specifications he had drawn up when he made Grandfather’s shuttle. I got hold of the notes the experts had made when they tore the machine apart after his death, and they checked. And then I had Balmer set me up just the same kind of old gray cube out of which Walter Toynbee had stumbled that day, with the blue knife in his dusty old ditty bag.
It was bigger, of course—I had to have room for the kind of equipment a field man considered necessary in my day. I’d never had any training or experience with the kind of work old Walter did with his own two hands, a camera, and a trowel. The profession had been mechanized, and it was silly not to use the best I could lay my hands on. The time field, though, was the same, and it should carry me just as far as it had carried its originator thirteen years before.
It did. Malecewicz, by stretching his original model, had been able to get fifteen years out of it. Grandfather’s huge old vault of a machine lofted him nearly twenty times as far into the future of our race—and of our town. As I had suspected from the specifications of the machine, it dropped me somewhere near the middle of that interregnum which followed the Hemispheric Wars, when half the cities of America had been reduced to rubble, disease and famine had put the population of the planet back into a hunting-fishing, food-gathering economy, and all that remained of civilization was a memory which would some day be revived, restored, and started off again.
I am not saying that in thirteen years of trying nobody had hit upon this particular period in the future. It is true that having hit it they let common sense scare them off. It was obvious that that level of culture could never produce so sophisticated a scientific marvel as the knife. There was no evidence in the ruins they found to show that our own culture, up to and during the time of the Wars, had done so. Ergo: onward and upward. Try another thousand years. Try a million.
I had a slightly different point of view on the matter. I knew grandfather. He would go as far as his machine could take him. I had duplicated that. He would look around him for a promising site, get out his tools, and pitch in. Well, I could do that, too.
There is enough uncertainty—backlash, if you want to call it that—in the operation of any time shuttle so that you can never be certain that you will hit any specific moment or even any specific day or week in the future. Put that down to mechanical imperfections, if you like—I know some do—but I consider it a matter of the inexactitude of the physical universe, and I doubt that there is ever anything that we can do about it. You can approximate—hopping back and forth across the time you want until you get reasonably close—but that is a makeshift solution, borrowed from practical mathematics. I didn’t try.
If you’ve read your history of the next five hundred years, you’ll know that the gas attacks toward the end of the war had stripped the Atlantic coastal regions of vegetation and every other living thing. I got out of the shuttle in a dusty landscape where the bare bones of the planet stuck up in shattered stumps in a wind-swept desert of gullied clay. I might be ahead of my grandfather’s time—in which case I saw a paradox brewing—or I might be following him. As it turned out, it was the latter.
I knew from what others had learned that there was no life in this coastal strip until much later. Gradually vegetation worked its way into the arid strip, insects and mammals followed, men followed them—but this is no essay on the future. There was no point in hunting for survivors; Grandfather certainly hadn’t. For on all sides stretched the wreckage of our own city—or its counterpart of three centuries from now—and I knew that he would have stood just as I was standing, looking it over with an appraising eye, wondering where to begin.
One mass of fallen masonry, half submerged in a drift of sand, towered higher than the rest. It would provide a vantage point from which to size up the situation. As I plodded toward it through the soft sand I found myself watching for his footprints, so certain was I that this must be the place and the time. It was nonsense, of course; my own tracks were filling in as the wind curled sand into them.
Then I saw it—and that day thirteen years before came rushing back to me. Of course there would be traces! Walter Toynbee would never in his life have abandoned a dig as promising as this—a dig where surface-scratching had yielded him a relic like the knife. But for his sickness and death he would have been planning a return expedition—a camp—a full-scale attack. Not half the equipment he had taken with him was in the shuttle when he returned. And there, at the eastern base of the mound, the tatters of a red bandanna whipping in the wind, a short-handled shovel was driven into a crack in the masonry.
I fingered the shreds of red cloth. It was his. He always had one stuffed in the pocket of his jeans. Duster—sun shield—lashing—he had a score of uses for them. Any field worker had in those days, before there was a tool for every purpose.
The crevice into which the shovel had been wedged widened as it went down. Sand had drifted into it, filling it to within a few feet of the top. By all the tenets of civilized archeology I should first prepare my aerial plan of the entire complex of ruins, erect the light tower with its instrument board to establish a zero reference plane for the solidograph, and assemble the scanner. When a grid had been projected on the screen of the excavator, it would be time enough to think of beginning the actual investigation.
Do you believe in ghosts? As I stood there, with those shreds of faded red cloth in my hand, stroking the sand-polished handle of the shovel, I suddenly realized that so far as time itself went he might have been standing here only hours, or even minutes before me. It was as though he had turned his back for a moment, and I had stepped into his tracks there in the sand. I was a child again, tagging after him as he strode around the big laboratory with his giant’s strides, pulling down a book here, running through a file of negatives there, gathering his tools around him before he set to work to unravel some perplexing situation in his digging. A thin cloud passed across the sun, and it was as though his shadow had fallen on me.
I pulled the shovel out of the crack in which he had wedged it. It was in good condition—perfectly usable. In my time we did not work with shovels or picks, but any fool could handle the thing. I dug it into the sand—scratched at the base of the crack. It would take only a few moments to deepen it enough so that I could crawl inside.
There was a kind of satisfaction to the work. I exercise in the public gymnasia—all young men of my age have to, to keep fit—but there was a difference. Using this primitive tool brought with it a feeling of accomplishment—of purpose—that I never found in mere exercise. I was strong, and it gratified me to see the hole deepen and the drift of sand grow behind me. Soon I had a tunnel into which I could crawl without bumping my head. I went back to the shuttle for a glow lamp and a pocket scanner, and plunged into the darkness.
After the first few feet I had no use for the lamp. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and I saw that shafts and streaks of light broke through gaps in the ruin overhead. Presently I found a hard floor under my feet, and then I came out into a room which was like a wedge—the ceiling fallen in one mass which hung diagonally between the wall over my head and the floor about twenty feet before me. Sunlight seeped in through a crevice to the left, striking on the wall and filling the whole place with a kind of diffuse glow. In that glow I saw footprints in the thick dust which covered the floor, and the table to which they led.
They were his footprints, of course. On that table he had found the knife. I stepped out of the doorway where I had been standing, an odd feeling of familiarity growing in me. I crossed the floor to the table. It had been covered with heavy glass, which lay in shreds on the dusty bronze. I could see the marks of his fingers in the dust where he had moved the broken glass aside. And I could see the outline of the knife, as sharp in the unstirred dust as it was when he picked it up
in his gnarled old fingers thirteen years—or was it thirteen minutes?—before.
The crack of light was widening as the sun moved; the place grew brighter. I brushed the dust away from the table top. It was heavy bronze; it told me nothing. And then, turning, I saw the opposite wall and the frieze in low relief which ran above the door.
I don’t like the impossible. I don’t like paradox. I sit here, toiling over my correlations—they have promised a machine by spring which will perform them for us more quickly and in far more detail than we have ever attempted—and when I grow tired I let my head slip down on my hands, and I dream of a day when I was a child. I dream of an old man and a knife—and murder.
I had had my chance. Others, more experienced and possibly more capable than I, followed me. The entire ruin was excavated, with the most meticulous attention to technique, down to bedrock. And I … I was sent back to my correlations and my trait tables, to work up the data which other men would presently send me. Because strive as they will, they can find no other explanation than the one which—to me—seems obvious. The answer which is no answer.
You can go into the Toynbee Museum now, today, and see the knife in a guarded case, in the anteroom of the main exhibit hall. In the course of three hundred years that case will have been replaced by a bronze table and a cover of heavy glass. Bombs will fall, the building will crumble in ruins, and the knife will still be there. Dust will cover the ruins, and one day a gnarled old man in shabby clothes will shovel it away and creep inside. He will find the knife and carry it away. Later a younger man will come—and then others—many others, men and women both. And all the while, on the granite lintel above the door to the room where the knife is kept, will be the inscription:
WALTER TOYNBEE
1962-2035
My grandfather brought the knife back from the future. He died. It was placed in the museum named for him. It lay there for three hundred years, while the human race went mad trying to solve its secret—while all civilization was turned upside down in the search for something which never existed!
He found it in the museum where it had always been. He carried it back through time, and it was placed in that museum. It lay there until he came and found it, and carried it back through time.
It was a simple pattern—as simple as ever was. Must we think only in terms of a beginning and an end? Cannot a thing—even a person—exist in a closed cycle without beginning or end? Appearing to us now, at this level of our time thread, accompanying us down its extension into our future, then vanishing from our stream and circling back to the point where it appeared? Can’t you imagine that?
I thought I could. I thought it was a paradox—no more—as simple to explain as ever was. I was wrong, of course, and they are right.
The knife old Walter Toynbee brought back from the museum built in his honor, to house his knife, was perfect—worn, dirty, but perfect. A little notch was sawed in the back of its translucent blue blade—sawed with a diamond saw, to provide the chemist and the physicists with the samples they needed to test its properties. That notch is still in its blade as it lies out there in the museum case—it will be there for the next three hundred years, or until the raids come and the museum falls in ruins. Until an old man comes out of the past to find it.
The knife old Walter Toynbee will find there in our future will have that notch. The knife he brought back to me thirty years ago had no notch in it. Somewhere the circle must have a beginning. Somewhere it must have an end—but where, and how? How was this knife created, out of a strange blue metal, and a strange, black, indurated wood, when its existence has no beginning or end? How can the circle be broken? I wish I knew. I might not dream of murder then. I might find logic and purpose in the future instead of chaos—instead of impossible worlds that never were.
Q. U. R.
Anthony Boucher
Ordinarily, Mr. Anthony Boucher employs the resources of his keenly logical mind in constructing puzzles for his mystery novels. Now he turns from the “whodunit” to the world of the future and, still brilliantly logical, depicts humanity at that future date when it has become almost helpless without its robots. Dependent on automata, tomorrow’s world will be subjected to unusual economic stresses and strains. So, thinks Mr. Boucher, will the robots. Even more so. So much more so that the robots might go insane.
* * *
IT’S GOT so the young sprouts nowadays seem never to have heard of androids. Oh, they look at them in museums and they read the references to them in the literature of the time, but they never seem to realize how essential a part of life androids once were, how our whole civilization, in fact, depended on them. And when you say you got your start in life as trouble shooter for an android factory, they look at you as though you’d worked in two-dimensional shows way back before the sollies, as though you ought to be in a museum yourself.
Now I’ll admit I’m no infant. I’ll never see a hundred again. But I’m no antique either. And I think it’s a crying shame that the rising generation is so completely out of touch with the last century. Not that I ever intended to be writing my memoirs; I didn’t exactly construct my life to that end. But somebody’s got to tell the real story of what androids meant and how they ceased to mean it! And I’m the man to tell it, because I’m the man who discovered Dugg Quinby.
Yes, I said Quinby. Dugglesmarther H. Quinby, the Q in Q. U. R. The man who made your life run the way it does today. And I found him.
That summer was a hell of a season for a trouble shooter for androids. There was nothing but trouble. My five-hour day stretched to eight, and even ten and twelve while I dashed all over New Washington checking on one android after another that had cracked up. And maybe you know how hot the Metropolitan District gets in summer, even worse than the rest of Oklahoma.
Because my job wasn’t one that you could carry on comfortably in conditioned buildings and streets, it meant going outside and topside and everywhere that a robot might work. We called the androids robots then. We hadn’t conceived of any kind of robot that wasn’t an android or at least a naturoid of some sort.
And these breakdowns were striking everywhere, hitting robots in every line of activity. Even the Martoids and Veneroids that some ex-colonists fancied for servants. It would be an arm that went limp or a leg that crumpled up or a tentacle that collapsed. Sometimes mental trouble, too, slight indications of a tendency toward insubordination, even a sort of mania that wasn’t supposed to be in their make-up. And the thing kept spreading and getting worse. Any manifestation like this among living beings, and you’d think of an epidemic. But what germ could attack tempered duralite?
The worst of it was there was nothing wrong with them. Nothing that I could find, and to me that meant plain nothing. You don’t get to be head trouble shooter of Robinc if anything can get past you. And the second worst was that it was hitting my own staff. I had had six robots under me—plenty to cover the usual normal amount of trouble. Now I had two, and I needed forty.
So all in all I wasn’t happy that afternoon. It didn’t make me any happier to see a crowd in front of the Sunspot engaged in the merry pastime of Venusian-baiting. It was never safe for one of the little green fellows to venture out of the Venusian ghetto; this sport was way too common a spectacle.
They’d got his vapor inhalator away from him. That was all there was to the game, but that was enough. No extra-physical torment was needed. There the poor giller lay on the sidewalk, sprawled and gasping like a fish out of water, which he practically was. The men —factory executives mostly, and a few office foremen—made a circle around him and laughed. There was supposed to be something hilariously funny about the struggles of a giller drowning in air, though I never could see it myself.
Oh, they’d give him back his inhalator just in time. They never killed them off; the few Venusians around had their uses, partic
ularly for repair work on the Veneroid robots that were used under water. But meanwhile there’d be some fun.
Despite the heat of the day, I shuddered a little. Then I crossed to the other side of the street. I couldn’t watch the game. But I turned back when I heard one loud shout of fury.
That was when I found Dugg Quinby. That shout was the only sound he made. He was ragingly silent as he plowed through that mass of men, found the biggest of them, snatched the inhalator away from him, and restored it to its gasping owner. But there was noise enough from the others.
Ever try to take a bone from a dog? Or a cigar from a Martian mountaineer? Well, this was worse. Those boys objected to having their fun spoiled, and they expressed their objection forcibly.
I liked this young blond giant that had plowed in there. I liked him because his action had asked me what I was doing crossing over to the other side of the street, and I didn’t have an answer. The only way even to try to answer was to cross back.
Androids or Q. U. R., single-drive spaceships or modern multiples, one thing that doesn’t change much is a brawl, and this was a good one. I don’t know who delivered the right that met my chin as I waded in, and I don’t know who it was meant for, but it was just what I needed. Not straight enough to do more than daze me for a minute, but just hard enough to rouse my fighting spirit to the point of the hell with anything but finding targets for my knuckles. I avenged the Venusian, I avenged the blond youth, I avenged the heat of the day and the plague of the robots. I avenged my job and my corns and the hangover I had two weeks ago.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 62
