by Anthology
When he had doubled back on himself, the difference had become apparent, for the separation was now in space rather than in time, and he happened to be so equipped as to be able to see a space length, whereas he could only remember a time difference. Thinking back he could remember a great many different Bob Wilsons, baby, small child, adolescent, young man. They were all different—he knew that. The only thing that bound them together into a feeling of identity was continuity of memory.
And that was the same thing that bound together the three—no, four, Bob Wilsons on a certain crowded afternoon, a memory track that ran through all of them. The only thing about it that remained remarkable was time travel itself.
And a few other little items—the nature of “free will,” the problem of entropy, the law of the conservation of energy and mass. The last two, he now realized, needed to be extended or generalized to include the cases in which the Gate, or something like it, permitted a leak of mass, energy, or entropy from one neighborhood in the continuum to another. They were otherwise unchanged and valid. Free will was another matter. It could not be laughed off, because it could be directly experienced—yet his own free will had worked to create the same scene over and over again. Apparently human will must be considered as one of the factors which make up the processes in the continuum—“free” to the ego, mechanistic from the outside.
And yet his last act of evading Diktor had apparently changed the course of events. He was here and running the country, had been for many years, but Diktor had not showed up. Could it be that each act of “true” free will created a new and different future? Many philosophers had thought so.
This future appeared to have no such person as Diktor—the Diktor—in it, anywhere or anywhen.
As the end of his first ten years in the future approached, he became more and more nervous, less and less certain of his opinion. Damnation, he thought, if Diktor is going to show up it was high time that he did so. He was anxious to come to grips with him, establish which was to be boss.
He had agents posted throughout the country of the Forsaken Ones with instructions to arrest any man with hair on his face and fetch him forthwith to the Palace. The Hall of the Gate he watched himself.
He tried fishing the future for Diktor, but had no significant luck. He thrice located a shadow and tracked it down; each time it was himself. From tedium and partly from curiosity he attempted to see the other end of the process; he tried to relocate his original home, thirty thousand years in the past.
It was a long chore. The further the time button was displaced from the center, the poorer the control became. It took patient practice to be able to stop the image within a century or so of the period he wanted. It was in the course of this experimentation that he discovered what he had once looked for, a fractional control—a vernier, in effect. It was as simple as the primary control, but twist the bead instead of moving it directly.
He steadied down on the twentieth century, approximated the year by the models of automobiles, types of architecture, and other gross evidence, and stopped in what he believed to be 1942. Careful displacement of the space controls took him to the university town where he had started—after several false tries; the image did not enable him to read road signs.
He located his boardinghouse, brought the Gate into his own room. It was vacant, no furniture in it.
He panned away from the room, and tried again, a year earlier. Success—his own room, his own furniture, but empty. He ran rapidly back, looking for shadows.
There! He checked the swing of the image. There were three figures in the room, the image was too small, the light too poor for him to be sure whether or not one of them was himself. He leaned over and studied the scene.
He heard a dull thump outside the booth. He straightened up and looked over the side.
Sprawled on the floor was a limp human figure. Near it lay a crushed and battered hat.
He stood perfectly still for an uncounted time, staring at the two redundant figures, hat and man, while the winds of unreason swept through his mind and shook it. He did not need to examine the unconscious form to identify it. He knew . . . he knew—it was his younger self, knocked willy-nilly through the Time Gate.
It was not that fact in itself which shook him. He had not particularly expected it to happen, having come tentatively to the conclusion that he was living in a different, an alternative, future from the one in which he had originally transmitted the Time Gate. He had been aware that it might happen, nevertheless, that it did happen did not surprise him.
When it did happen, he himself had been the only spectator!
He was Diktor. He was the Diktor. He was the only Diktor!
He would never find Diktor, nor have it out with him. He need never fear his coming. There never had been, never would be, any other person called Diktor, because Diktor never had been nor ever would be anyone but himself.
In review, it seemed obvious that he must be Diktor; there were so many bits of evidence pointing to it. And yet it had not been obvious. Each point of similarity between himself and the Diktor, he recalled, had arisen from rational causes—usually from his desire to ape the gross characteristics of the “other” and thereby consolidate his own position of power and authority before the “other” Diktor showed up. For that reason he had established himself in the very apartments that “Diktor” had used—so that they would be “his” first.
To be sure his people called him Diktor, but he had thought nothing of that—they called anyone who ruled by that title, even the little subchieftains who were his local administrators.
He had grown a beard, such as Diktor had worn, partly in imitation of the “other” man’s precedent, but more to set him apart from the hairless males of the Forsaken Ones. It gave him prestige, increased his tabu. He fingered his bearded chin. Still, it seemed strange that he had not recalled that his own present appearance checked with the appearance of “Diktor.”
“Diktor” had been an older man. He himself was only thirty-two, ten here, twenty-two there.
Diktor he had judged to be about forty-five. Perhaps an unprejudiced witness would believe himself to be that age. His hair and beard were shot with gray—had been, ever since the year he had succeeded too well in spying on the High Ones. His face was lined. Uneasy lies the head and so forth. Running a country, even a peaceful Arcadia, will worry a man, keep him awake nights.
Not that he was complaining—it had been a good life, a grand life, and it beat anything the ancient past had to offer.
In any case, he had been looking for a man in his middle forties, whose face he remembered dimly after ten years and whose picture he did not have. It had never occurred to him to connect that blurred face with his present one. Naturally not.
But there were other little things. Arma, for example. He had selected a likely-looking lass some three years back and made her one of his household staff, renaming her Arma in sentimental memory of the girl he had once fancied. It was logically necessary that they were the same girl, not two Armas, but one.
But, as he recalled her, the “first” Arma had been much prettier.
Hm-m-m—it must be his own point of view that had changed. He admitted that he had had much more opportunity to become bored with exquisite female beauty than his young friend over there on the floor. He recalled with a chuckle how he had found it necessary to surround himself with an elaborate system of tabus to keep the nubile daughters of his subjects out of his hair—most of the time. He had caused a particular pool in the river adjacent to the Palace to be dedicated to his use in order that he might swim without getting tangled up in mermaids.
The man on the floor groaned, but did not open his eyes.
Wilson, the Diktor, bent over him but made no effort to revive him. That the man was not seriously injured he had reason to be certain. He did not wish him to wake up until he had had time to get his own thoughts entirely in order.
For he had work to do, work which must be done
meticulously, without mistake. Everyone, he thought with a wry smile, makes plans to provide for their future.
He was about to provide for his past.
There was the matter of the setting of the Time Gate when he got around to sending his early self back. When he had tuned in on the scene in his room a few minutes ago, he had picked up the action just before his early self had been knocked through. In sending him back he must make a slight readjustment in the time setting to an instant around two o’clock of that particular afternoon. That would be simple enough; he need only search a short sector until he found his early self alone and working at his desk.
But the Time Gate had appeared in that room at a later hour; he had just caused it to do so. He felt confused.
Wait a minute, now—if he changed the setting of the time control, the Gate would appear in his room at the earlier time, remain there, and simply blend into its “reappearance” an hour or so later. Yes, that was right. To a person in the room it would simply be as if the Time Gate had been there all along, from about two o’clock.
Which it had been. He would see to that.
Experienced as he was with the phenomena exhibited by the Time Gate, it nevertheless required a strong and subtle intellectual effort to think other than in durational terms, to take an eternal viewpoint.
And there was the hat. He picked it up and tried it on. It did not fit very well, no doubt because he was wearing his hair longer now. The hat must be placed where it would be found—Oh, yes, in the control booth. And the notebook, too.
The notebook, the notebook—Mm-m-m—Something funny, there. When the notebook he had stolen had become dog-eared and tattered almost to illegibility some four years back, he had carefully recopied its contents in a new notebook—to refresh his memory of English rather than from any need for it as a guide. The worn-out notebook he had destroyed; it was the new one he intended to obtain, and leave to be found.
In that case, there never had been two notebooks. The one he had now would become, after being taken through the Gate to a point ten years in the past, the notebook from which he had copied it. They were simply different segments of the same physical process, manipulated by means of the Gate to run concurrently, side by side, for a certain length of time.
As he had himself—one afternoon.
He wished that he had not thrown away the worn-out notebook. If he had it at hand, he could compare them and convince himself that they were identical save for the wear and tear of increasing entropy.
But when had he learned the language, in order that he might prepare such a vocabulary? To be sure, when he copied it he then knew the language—copying had not actually been necessary.
But he had copied it.
The physical process he had all straightened out in his mind, but the intellectual process it represented was completely circular. His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.
But where had it started?
Which comes first, the hen or the egg?
You feed the rats to the cats, skin the cats, and feed the carcasses of the cats to the rats who are in turn fed to the cats. The perpetual motion fur farm.
If God created the world, who created God?
Who wrote the notebook? Who started the chain?
He felt the intellectual desperation of any honest philosopher. He knew that he had about as much chance of understanding such problems as a collie has of understanding how dog food gets into cans. Applied psychology was more his size—which reminded him that there were certain books which his early self would find very useful in learning how to deal with the political affairs of the country he was to run. He made a mental note to make a list.
The man on the floor stirred again, sat up. Wilson knew that the time had come when he must insure his past. He was not worried; he felt the sure confidence of the gambler who is “hot,” who knows what the next roll of the dice will show.
He bent over his alter ego. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I guess so,” the younger man mumbled. He put his hand to his bloody face. “My head hurts.”
“I should think it would,” Wilson agreed. “You came through head over heels. I think you hit your head when you landed.”
His younger self did not appear fully to comprehend the words at first. He looked around dazedly, as if to get his bearings. Presently he said, “Came through? Came through what?”
“The Gate, of course,” Wilson told him. He nodded his head toward the Gate, feeling that the sight of it would orient the still groggy younger Bob.
Young Wilson looked over his shoulder in the direction indicated, sat up with a jerk, shuddered and closed his eyes. He opened them again after what seemed to be a short period of prayer, looked again, and said, “Did I come through that?”
“Yes,” Wilson assured him.
“Where am I?”
“In the Hall of the Gate in the High Palace of Norkaal. But what is more important,” Wilson added, “is when you are. You have gone forward a little more than thirty thousand years.”
The knowledge did not seem to reassure him. He got up and stumbled toward the Gate. Wilson put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Back!”
“Not so fast.” He did not dare let him go back yet, not until the Gate had been reset. Besides he was still drunk—his breath was staggering. “You will go back all right—I give you my word on that. But let me dress your wounds first. And you should rest. I have some explanations to make to you, and there is an errand you can do for me when you get back—to our mutual advantage. There is a great future in store for you and me, my boy—a great future!”
A great future!
BY HIS SACRIFICE
Daliso Chaponda
I
His toys were chosen by a group of twenty-seven physicists, paradoxologists and psychologists. Saul’s favourite was a copper slinky. This pleased them. His favourite book was Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon.” This pleased them too.
It was mostly positive signs for the first four years of his life. They watched him progress and patted each other on the back. “It was worth the sacrifice,” pronounced Angelica, the Project Leader. She had left behind a husband and twin daughters but that was not the sacrifice she spoke of.
Harrod, Saul’s head teacher, had the most trouble accepting what they had done. His hours with Saul were his only oasis of joy. The child was exuberant. Saul had soft mulatto skin, large brown eyes he’d inherited from his mother, and tiny fingers which clutched Harrod’s wrists tightly enough to reel him into the present. Often he felt he did not deserve the child’s love.
When Saul was tested on his fifth birthday, the results were disappointing. He performed worse on the test than an average child of his age. Naturally, the finger was pointed at Harrod. “You have been too distracted,” Angelica accused. “Your obsession with guilt is jeopardizing the project.”
“It is easy to blame me,” he replied. “But there are more rational explanations. Saul has grown up with no companionship of his own age. We have been obsessed with intelligence above all else. Creativity and passion are equally important. We have been bringing him up like a lab specimen. Of course he didn’t do well in the tests.”
Angelica recognized this as more than Harrod’s tendency to blame himself for everything. She passed on his words to the council.
Two weeks later, eighteen children were kidnapped.
II
The Esposito family woke up to find their daughter’s sleeping cot empty. Mrs. Esposito screamed and collapsed. “Where is she? Where is my baby?”
The Austrian authorities could not answer her question.
Fernando Esposito, the little girl’s uncle, was a detective in the Rio de Janeiro police force. He took a leave of absence and flew to Vienna. His sister had barely spoken since
the kidnapping. She sat in her daughter’s room daily, staring at the empty cot.
In a severe boarding school, Fernando had been taught that weeping was weak. The beatings had been more brutal for the ‘cry-babies’. He had learnt to bite back the tears and take the pain like a man. When he tried to speak to his sister and she stared at him blankly he felt the tears well up but he did not cry. Instead, he swore an oath to her that he would find her daughter.
If she understood his words, her face did not show it.
III
Gabriella remembered the sun. She stared up at the solar lamps that bathed the compound with light and thought of golden sunsets. And clouds. Clumps and columns of white fluff.
“What you mean you’ve never seen clouds?” She asked Saul, scrunching her nose.
“I’ve seen them on vid-screens.”
“That’s not the same,” Gabriella teased.
Saul said nothing. He did not say much else to her that break-time. He found her in the evening, after classes and asked her to tell him about clouds.
She did, even though telling him made her sad. “Cumulo . . . cumulo-something the big ones are called. They look like candy floss.”
“What’s candy floss?”
Gabriella’s sadness changed. She was no longer sad for the skies she would never see and the sun she would never feel. She was sad for the boy in front of her and she just wanted to give him a big hug or tell him a funny joke. She tried as hard as she could to find, in the few words she knew, the right ones to make Saul see clouds, taste wind and smell spring. She told him about the game she and her mother played where they pointed at the shapes in clouds and said, “Look a double headed elephant.”
