Sideslip

by Ted White

  “No?”

  “No. How did I get here?” I gestured with an outflung arm, and he shrank back a bit at the suddenness of my movement. “This damned world—these Angel types—the whole schtick! You know what I’m talking about—Joey talked to you people after he realized who I was.” That’s why he doped me with that happy stuff, I told myself under my breath.

  “Since I arrived here,” I said, “I’ve been chased, hunted, sought after by you people. Why?”

  “Not by us alone, of course,” Dupree said elliptically. “We’re by no means the only interested parties. However—” he held up his hand against my mounting impatience, “however, as I said, we are responsible. We brought you here.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Let me explain a bit,” Dupree said, holding up his hand.

  “As I’ve told you, ours is a scientific underground— we found ourselves forced literally underground in order to continue our researches.

  “While we took on an organizational name and structure—the Technocrats—from a political group which many of us were members of back in the thirties, we represent a diverse group of scientists from all over the world. And we have established secret research headquarters in a number of areas.

  “Basically our function breaks down into two areas. First, we engage in pure scientific research. This is not as futile nor as foolish as it may seem. Humanity now finds itself in roughly the same position as did the African natives when Europe began colonizing their continent. We are, by analogy, useful only for crude labor. All but the most restricted lines of applied industrial research have been denied us—the Angels simply hand out whatever products of their own science they feel will be of practical benefit here. And, when I speak of practical benefit, I mean for them, not for us.

  “You and I are men, and we can understand quite easily that this is a position of subservience which is galling. The Angels either don’t understand, or don’t care. At any rate, we have gone underground, and done our best to continue with our different lines of pure and applied research. And some of these lines have been far more productive than I think the Angels suspect.

  “Now then—that is the first thing we do. The second area is political. We inherited that along with our name.

  One of our political leaders is Hugo Gernsback, who helped popularize the movement in the early thirties, and who returned to active political leadership when he was forced to suspend his scientific magazines by the Angels. Through his Technocrat NEWSLETTER, we not only publish our finding for each other, but plan for the eventual day when we can spark a revolution and throw off the Angels.

  “Now your importance to us is primarily political— but you are a direct result of one of the most important research programs we have underway.

  “Dr. Einstein and Dr. Buschmiller were—”

  Suddenly I felt my ears pop. The room seemed to shake, and the picture fell from the opposite wall.

  Dupree leaped to his feet, his chjair toppling over.

  “An attack! I never thought they’d—”

  The door blasted open, and a stronger concussion hit me like a pile driver. Explosions underground in confined tunnels can be deadly things, even when one is at some remove from them.

  I glanced up at a ventilator grill. “Hey—Dupree! Is that stuff—?”

  Dupree dropped the phone he’d been trying to use. “Dead!”. he shouted. We were both shouting now. He looked up. “Nerve gas!” It was greenish and vile looking.

  I started for the door. The lights down the hall were flickering, and curiously muted in green tones. I felt something touch the back of my neck, something indefinitely cold, like a brush of alcohol on cotton, and then the room started to fade, and I was staring down a long tunnel. Someone had turned off the TV, and the picture was growing smaller and smaller and smaller. . . .

  “You’re a rather fortunate man, Mr. Archer,” a reassuring voice said in my ear.

  It came as I was struggling helplessly on a vast sheet of flypaper; my hands and feet were all stuck to the paper and the other end of the flypaper was held by the Archangel Gabriel. A swarm of gnatlike cherubs were buzzing around my head and jeering at me. It upset my stomach to think about them.

  I had awakened enough to comprehend the meaning of what the voice in my ear had said, but I could not think of any reason for it to say a thing like that. I tried to speak, but I managed only an appalling half-idiotic noise. I shook my head, and immediately a wave of pure green nausea swept over me. I choked out a gutteral oath, and was thoroughly sick.

  That seemed to clear my system somewhat, and I found myself piecing together again memories.

  Memories . . .

  An alien world—a New York which wasn’t New York —the bum in the park who wasn’t a bum after all— the chase—the refuge—the Technocrats.

  Memories flooded back over me, and the sharpest, most recent: the distant rumbling sound of an explosion, followed by a stronger concussion in those trapped underground ways—a concussion which knocked in the door to the room where I had been talking with Henry Dupree. And, following upon its heels, a thick, green smoke that billowed into the room not only through the shattered door, but also through the ventilation system. A thick, green smoke which stunned as it touched me, working through my pores, to throw me down into a bottomless black pit.

  Nerve gas of some kind. The place had been raided. Where was I now?

  “A few more minutes and the sleep will be entirely worn off,” said the voice at my ear again. “The loss of vocal and physical coordination is quite temporary, I assure you.”

  It occurred to me then to try and open my eyes. It was a success: the room shifted blurrily in and out of focus for a few moments, and then settled into comprehensibility.

  I was lying on a couch, and for a moment I thought I had only passed out where I’d been sitting. But I could see the door, and not only was it in the wrong place, it was quite whole and unscarred.

  The room itself was anonymous—it could’ve been anywhere. I might still be underground, or, for all I knew, back in my own world, where I belonged. But the appearance of the three men in the room belied that happy thought.'

  Two sat in chairs. Both chairs were straight chairs, and one of the two men was leaning intently forward in his, sitting almost on the seat’s edge. He was thin, with the fixed look of a man whose single-mindedness has crossed the thin line of fanaticism. His complexion was sallow, his nose prominent, and his dark hair lank on his forehead.

  His companion, leaning back and tipping his chair against the close wall, had a similar look to him, but his actual appearance supplied no obvious clues. He was stockily built, his face meaty and raw, without obvious emotion. It was just the vacuity of his face which seemed to join him in intent and purpose with the other. In my mind I named them Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Dee was the thin, nervous one; Dum the placid, contemptuous one.

  But neither was the voice in my ear. I had to sit up and turn about to face him. He was sitting on the arm of the couch.

  “Feeling better now, are you?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said, clearing my mouth with the word. The taste of bile was still strong. Then: “So what’s the nature of my good fortune this time?”

  “Ahh, your memory is persistent. Good.” He nodded, pleased with himself. I tried to get a better look at him, and as if aware that he was crowding me a bit now, he eased off the arm and stood up, facing me. He was of medium height, and a typical Jack Armstrong—an All-American Boy type. He was certainly a different cut from the other two.

  He put out his hand, and as I started to rise, gestured with it and said, “No need to rise, Mr. Archer. You must still be quite weak from your ordeal with the gas. I’m Jack Morgan, and I’m pleased to say that you’re quite safe now. We were fortunate in getting you out of the hands of that neo-Nazi band of fanatic scientists.”

  “The Technocrats?”

  “Correct.”

  “But—” I started to contradict hi
m and then realized the truth. I had no idea of what sort the Technocrats might be. I knew only one thing about them: they had brought me into this world. Dupree had not had time to tell me much of their politics. As for my would-be rescuers—

  “And just who are you people?”

  Morgan chuckled, affably. “In one way you could say we are similar to the neo-Nazi groups like the Technocrats. The Angels did not change many things after their . . . Annunciation, but a certain percentage of us were put out of work. We, like the Technocrats, are a dissident group, but we recognize the extreme difficulty of effective anti-Angel action. We remain, however, totally anti-Fascist, and for this reason we saved you from making a great mistake, both for yourself—and for the world you came from!”

  I blinked at that, but I let it pass for the moment. “Out-of-work anti-Fascists, eh? Could that be another way of saying out-of-work Communists?”

  Jack Morgan didn’t insult easily; he chuckled again and said, “I can give you several proofs later that we are nothing like the Communists you must have known on your own world.”

  He leaned closer to me. His breath smelled of a disinfectant. “You see, Mr. Archer, you obviously knew nothing of the Angels, yet your world, apart from the Angels, is similar enough to ours for there to be no question of language differences, and you seem to know New York as well as any native. We conclude from this that your Earth veers off from our probability line at some period before—yet presumably not too far before—the invasion of the Angels in our world. We are well aware of the bloody plans of the Communist Movement of that time, and judging from your obvious distaste when you mentioned the word ‘communist’ they must have somehow carried through at least a certain number of those plans.

  “The Angels want only efficiency. They care nothing for ideologies, judging them only by whether they aid the Angels’ own causes or obstruct them. The Nazis, for instance, were removed from power almost immediately, though none of them were harmed in any way. Deprived of any power base, they have withered away greatly since then, except for certain areas such as the southern United States, where a curious blend of their racism and certain fundamentalist objections to the Angels’ aims and techniques has re-established them—though without any true political power, let me make that clear. The Communists, on the other hand, while they got a thorough shaking-up

  in the early years, were not strictly speaking ever really thrown out of power. What with the new medical techniques grudgingly granted us by the Angels—it’s estimated most human life expectancy in the civilized areas of the world has been increased by about twenty-five per cent—Stalin only relinquished his post as Party Secretary last year.”

  “So if you’re still in power, what’s the difference?” I thought I guessed the answer, but it was a good way to check up on whether I was really beginning to understand how this world functioned.

  “Quite simple. Those who were permitted to retain power in Russia did so because they were capable as administrators, not as Communists. The ideology, as such, has not had any particular influence on affairs in Russia for well over twenty years. Oh, the Party still exists, but the beliefs . . .” He chuckled. “The Nazis are an ideology without adherents. The Communists are adherents to an ideology that no longer exists, even to them. Communism is a word—a point to rally at. It’s not a force driving to ‘Change The World’ any more. The world can’t be changed—unless the Angels want it.”

  “I’ll accept what you say, as far as it goes. What does this have to do with ‘saving’ me from a group like the Technocrats? After all, they brought me here. They’re presumably the only ones who can send me back. So now what do I do? What do I care if they’re Nazis? Now I’m stranded!”

  “Not at all, Mr. Archer. You will be returned to your own world safely. And in a manner which will keep your world safe from the fascist menace.”

  “We’ve beaten the Nazis before,” I said, and then wondered if I should tell him anything at all about my world. How could I tell what use he might be able to make of it?

  “Ah, yes, I recall the world was getting ready for the possibility of another Great War. ... So you had one, eh? Then you have reason not to like Nazis, Mr. Archer. Perhaps there is a chance for me to convince you of how desperate the situation here is.”

  Jack Morgan offered me a cigarette, taking another for himself. I started to search for a match, when he lit his by flicking its end with a fingertip. I studied the end of my cigarette with curiosity, and finally flicked at it. It glowed into life and smoke arose from it.

  By this time I was sitting up on the couch, and one of the Happiness Twins began mixing drinks. It was Dee, the nervous one. “Best thing, actually, for cleaning sleep out of the system,” Jack said as he handed me one.

  “I don’t mean to spoil the pleasant harmony of this little gathering, but I find it hard to. believe what you’re so obviously trying to convince me of. You yourself said the Nazi party has lost practically all its membership. How can that be any menace to my world? Even allowing the possibility of their getting there.”

  “Oh, come, come, Mr. Archer. They brought you through, didn’t they? Do not fear that they will be unable to reverse the process for themselves. That was the whole purpose of their research.”

  It sounded plausible. Except there weren’t enough of them, according to Morgan. I figured what his answer would be, and it was, roughly.

  “As for their numbers,” he continued smoothly, “surely you can understand that, although the Angels have not been overly generous with Earth in the matter of passing out knowledge for nothing, still they have aided us at a number of points in technological matters, if only to increase the efficiency of the operation. The Nazis have taken advantage of this and have put together quite a little scientific underground elite. And we know of some particularly powerful devices they have developed.”

  “If they were so powerful, how could you have gotten me away from them so easily?”

  Morgan smiled contentedly. “We have a rather efficient organization, Mr. Archer. We have obtained most of these devices ourselves.” I recalled Dupree’s wistful smile, when he’d mentioned the difficulty in maintaining security. He’d been too right.

  “Fine. Why don’t you use them against the Angels?” He merely looked around at the other two. Tweedles Dum and Dee smiled back at him and shrugged. “Mr. Archer, you have absolutely no idea of the superiority of Angel technology and weaponry. They have done some work on radioactive elements that have resulted in weapons which mere human beings cannot face. Offensively, they can kill as many of us as they wish. Defensively, they have their cursed screen generators. They are, Mr. Archer, totally invulnerable.”

  “So you spend all your energy fighting other Earth-men, like a bunch of spoiled children whose toys have been taken away.”

  “Neither we nor the Technocrats are precisely children, Mr. Archer,” Morgan said with more grimness in his voice than he had previously allowed himself. “That handful of scum could invade your world, terrorize it effortlessly, conquer it, and rule it forever with what has been learned from the Angels. And if you do not help us, Mr. Archer, that is precisely what they are going to do. I hope you did not tell them much about your world. Perhaps you will be able to give us information of aid to us in working out a defense against their actions. Frankly, we have no idea what it would be, but—”

  He spoke with quiet conviction. He didn’t lay it on too thick, but he conveyed urgent danger and the feeling that I was the only one who could help. He was almost convincing.

  But I’d been thinking, while I listened to him, and while I couldn’t put my finger on any obvious loopholes in his story, it didn’t ring true with me.

  I’m not a red-baiter, a Commie-hater, but neither do I particularly approve of them. In my pragmatic life I’ve had too little time to fool around with doctrinaire thinking on either side of the fence. But there was something decidedly off key in this whole business.

  Okay, number one: I was
in another world, and one which had diverged pretty sharply from mine a good thirty years earlier. So I might expect the Commies of this world to be the Good Guys . . . but.

  Number two was that But. Lay it to Tweedles Dum and Dee. I didn’t like them. I wouldn’t like them if they were dressed in the stars-and-stripes and said the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed. I distrusted them, and because I distrusted them, I distrusted Morgan equally.

  On the other hand, they’d gone to some trouble to get their hands on me. I couldn’t see an armed raid with explosions like that happening very often. The Angels must’ve known about it—hell; everyone who lived anywhere near there must’ve felt it. So I must be pretty valuable to them. They weren’t about to turn me loose after an operation of that size.

  This left me with a pretty good picture of where I was at: I could play along with them, or I could be difficult.

  There’s an old Chinese proverb: “When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

  For the time being, I’d try stringing along with them and see what would happen.

  “I’m not saying you’ve convinced me. Probably you’d know I was lying anyway, if I said you had.”

  Morgan nodded at me pleasantly.

  “But I can see no reason not to try to tell you what it’s like, back where I came from. It’s not that different, after all, as you’ve guessed. We had no ‘annunciation’ of Angels; we did have a Second World War, which lasted till 1945—”

  “Ah, yes, the second Great War. We can probably learn a great deal from that. But continue.”

  “Mmm. After the war, with Germany and Japan crushed, and Europe exhausted, it was stalemate between Russia and the United States. Russia proceeded on the assumption that what was theirs was theirs and what was ours was negotiable. We tried to negotiate. There was a war in Korea which settled nothing; three years long, and by 1953 all it meant was both sides were willing to fight a limited war, under the right circumstances. Since then, stalemate. Africa is a chaos of twenty or thirty independent nations. Like I said, things are in a mess. Stalemate, but everybody’s still trying.”