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sweating slightly in the last of the day’s heat. The sweat stung several long cat scratches on his hands and arms. He found the weather, like everything else, vaguely disquieting. There should have been a softening by now into autumn. The rhythm was wrong somewhere. . . . He rubbed absently at his sore arms, and sat down.
He hooked a worm and cast it out across the pale water. He didn’t mind, perhaps hadn’t noticed, that there were no fish, had been none for weeks. His float settled. The stones he sat on were hard. There were smells of sea-weed and, from behind him, grass. The world was all right. He wrapped himself nicely in its continuity.
Continuous also was Hie presence of Edwin Solomons,
David Silberstein, Daniel Jefferies, Liza Simmons, somebody sitting on the quay beside him. They seldom left him alone. Talking to him. Not making sense, but making this week just like last week and the week before.
“Caught anything?”
They always began with that. Roses sniffed and kicked his heels against the side of the quay.
“I was just passing. You don’t mind if I sit here a bit?”
“It’s a free world.”
“You think so? You really think so?”
It had been one of his father’s phrases. He shifted again, this time because he had been made to feel uncomfortable.
“After this afternoon, you really think so?” It was David Silberstein. Not one of the others. David Silberstein. “Free to do what? Free to destroy itself? Is that what you mean?”
There was a long pause, during which Roses hummed his three notes, waiting for the other to go away. They didn’t usually go on at him, not in the evenings.
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“I’ve done this all wrong, Roses. I came to talk to you because I wanted to say I was sorry. Then you . . . sidetracked me.”
“Sorry? What for, sorry?”
“For this afternoon. For bringing you out in front of all those people.”
“Oh. That.... Wadn’ nothing.”
“But it was. You must see it, Roses. You must see the way I took advantage of you.”
Roses rubbed his sore arm. “Bloody cat,” he said. “Roses, I took advantage of you because . . . Roses, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t sex with Liza. No reason at all.”
“Gone crazy, I reckon.” He heard nothing, thought about nothing but the cat. “Leapin’ all over the place. Wouldn’ let I anywhere near ’ee.”
“Roses, you must listen to me. Liza and you have every right to—”
“Best be pushing.” He began to reel in his line. He wouldn’t sit there, not to be gone on at. “I’d of thought him an’ me was good friends. Shows you never can tell.” “Roses, what are you talking about?”
“Old black tom, that’s what. Can’t do nothing with ’ee. Reckon he’m gone crazy. Look at them gouges.”
He showed his forearms briefly, then gathered his line in against the rod, picked up his jar of worms and hurried away. He wouldn’t sit there, not a moment longer, not to be gone on at.
David Silberstein stared after him. His sin against Roses could be faced far more readily than the shapeless fears he had been left by Sir Edwin. His sin against Roses had limits. Even so, was it not perverse to revive a humiliation, simply in order to apologize for it? And to try to exorcize a jealousy that was un-
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exorcizable? The man had no right to sex with Liza; none at all.
He had not seen Liza since she had come out of the hospital, out of the shared hospital room. He did not want to see her. His mind gloated: two nights, two nights together between clean sheets. He watched Roses disappear through the laboratory gate, the breadth of his shoulders crushing Liza beneath him, his hips pounding her. He watched the place against the dry-stone wall where Roses had been, and heard the thick, drawn-out cry of Liza’s ecstasy. He could torture himself with Liza, with Liza and Roses, for as long as he lived. . . . He dragged his eyes away and forced himself to hear the Village, laughter, a distant murmuring from someone’s TV, the buzz of a hedge clipper.
He would be nice to Roses, as nice as he knew how. It was good for one to be nice to the people one hated. He rose slowly, joint by joint, from his seat on the edge of the quay, and went slowly home to Mrs. Berman.
That night there were two more raids on the Village, both of them far less funny than the afternoon’s idiocy. The raiders came in over the fence, shorting it out crudely, making no attempt to avoid the hidden sensors. They were local lads, afraid, the reasons for their resentment so painfully clear. The first group of attackers was tranquilized with beamed gas sprays some three hundred yards inside the Village boundaries. Then they were disinfected and carried with reasonable care back up the hill to the road at the top. The second group came better prepared, in gas masks and protective clothing.
They were cornered by security men and treated with low intensity heat foam which clung to their protective clothing. They caught hysteria from one another,
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their screams echoing unpleasantly about the valley. They blundered about in the dark, tearing off their suits, mistakenly convinced that they would be burned alive. Their panic was noisy and distasteful. They were easily captured, medicated, and made ready for their return to St. Kinnow. Too easily for anybody’s self-respect.
The screaming had awakened Manny Littlejohn, safe in his hospital room. He rang David Silberstein at once, to discover what was happening. Satisfied that things were under control, he lay back quietly on the bed. But the screams continued, dying down too slowly for his comfort. He rang the O.S. again, to complain: sleep was difficult for him—now that he was awake he might well stay awake till morning. The O.S. said he was very sorry to hear it.
Manny Littlejohn rang off, punched his sleeping wife in the back with his elbow. Her peace, the firm roundness of her young body, taunted him.
“You snore, Margot. While men are burned to death, you snore. You should care more. It would be a way of not getting so fat.”
“Burned to death?” She sat up, listening. The screams had ceased minutes before, and the night was silent Perhaps the whole thing was one of his jokes. Or a prelude to sex. She lay down again. “Do I really snore?” she said.
“Like a sow.” She never snored. He did, however, so that sometimes the top of his throat was sore with it “Mostly I like it. It stops me being alone. And I count the snores as some men count sheep. It helps me to sleep.”
“You’re a funny man.” -
She stroked his arm, more fond of him than he would ever care to admit. She pretended to have married him
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for his money: it was what he seemed to expect. “Then what did you wake me for?” she said.
“I told you, girl. Because of the men screaming.”
Margot thought about this. It might still be one of his jokes, or else a bad dream. She moved closer to him, put her arm around his ancient ribs. His heart was beating against the sagged skin between two of them, and she •shifted her arm till she couldn’t feel it. He presented life unprettied, its mechanism immoderately on show, pitifully vulnerable. She was too fond of him to want to be reminded.
“I wish we hadn’t ever come here,” she said, needing something to blame.
“On the contrary, we should have come here sooner. Kravchensky needs prodding. This place is strong, but very vulnerable to air attack. Once they get organized it will only be a matter of days before we’re overrun.”
“They, Emmanuel? Who are they?”
“The sufferers, Margot. The dying. The frightened and the hopeless, the vicious and the vulgar. The foolish. I’ve been on the run from them for eighty-four years, and they may get me yet.”
Margot didn’t like it when he got all morbid. She moved her hand down his creased belly. “Never
mind,” she said, “Margot will look after him. And where’s his little pinkie, then?”
Even when found, however, Manny Littlejohn’s pinkie remained unresponsive. Manny Littlejohn had his mind on other, lower things—on men screaming, threatening in the night. He was old and clever and powerful and afraid. Which clinched, if it had ever needed clinching, the poor look-out for Roses.
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EIGHT
After his second consecutive disturbed night, David Silberstein allowed himself the luxury of sleeping nearly two hours later than usual. Usually he would leap out of bed immediately on waking, telling himself that each new day brought new opportunities, new joys to be savored, and often singing a little optimistic song. This morning, however, even when he was finally awakened by the sun, clear above the hills, searing through his curtains, he stayed where he was, the taste of tiredness in his mouth, of depression, of sterility.
This morning there were no new joys, no new opportunities. There was Liza, belonging (outmoded thought) to Roses. There was the Founder, so soon to be let loose on him from the comparative isolation of the hospital. There was Sir Edwin. And there were the terrible things Sir Edwin had said. Was the whole research program, and the structure of hope built upon it, really a delusion? Of course not. Sir Edwin was an old fool.
David tried hard to find reasons for getting up. He stared at the ceiling, flowered by sunlight through bright floral curtains. Science was above mere muddled philosophizing. All down the ages science had astonished the philosophers. It would do so, was in the process of doing so, again.
And yet...
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And yet it was bloody difficult to see how a man could exist in his own past. Could an event that had happened possibly be made not to have happened? Could a discovery be de-discovered? Could an invention be de-invented? In the future that the chrononauts went to their subsequent decisions (if they returned) would already have happened. No doubt these decisions would already be documented in some history book—what they were about to do there in black and white for them to read. Was this really very probable?
David pulled the sheet up around his ears. The more he thought, the more muddled—and depressed—he became. It seemed likely that he would soon be able to move forward in time. But forward to what? The future he went to might contain anything. Or worse, nothing. And he wasn’t a gambling man. . . . The telephone by his bed began to ring. He hunched down, hauling the bedclothes right up over his head, trying to shut it out. Trying to shut everything out.
In the laboratory Liza and Professor Kravchensky were already at work—impersonally, as befitted scientific colleagues. As befitted also a man old beyond his lusts and a woman who had recently brought about her own rape. They were performing a series of experiments to confirm the superiority of nucleic over peripheral timing. Their subjects now were dogs rather than cats. (The claws were blunter and the biting ends could more readily be muzzled.) Repeatedly the nucleic timing was proved to be accurate, while peripheral mechanisms resulted in huge errors. Indeed, one peripherally-timed dog, a cheerful little terrier, failed to reappear altogether. (As a matter of fact, it returned from chronomic unity in excellent health nineteen months later, by which time, however, its case history was barely relevant.)
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“I still don’t like it,” Liza said. “I don’t like what we may be doing to the cell nuclei.”
“Fuss, fuss, fuss. What could we be doing, child?” Professor Kravchensky looked up from his computer keyboard and indicated the groups of dogs that had been subjected to the two different pacing techniques. “See for yourself. See how they flourish. They flourish equally. See for yourself.”
“But . . .” What could she say? It was a matter of intuition, quite beyond anything the professor would understand. “I’d much rather concentrate on the peripheral technique,” she said. “It seems far safer. And I’m sure it could be improved if we worked on it”
“If we worked on it. . . . Liza my dear, the Founder is expecting results today. Not next week or next month, but today.”
"We are scientists. We have responsibilities. The Founder can go sex himself.”
Liza trembled, waiting for the professor to blast her for such a heresy. Surprisingly, he didn’t. He finished the series he was transferring onto the computer keyboard, then pushed his chair slowly back and turned to her.
“You are committed to stay here, child. You must remember that most of us are not. Last night we were attacked. And the night before. We heard men screaming. These things will worsen, for we live in an ugly time. Remember that. If my methods shock you, remember that. We live in an ugly time, and ugliness rubs off, even on the least ugly.”
The suggestion that she might be acting from self-in terest was so crass that for a moment she had nothing to say. It was true that she was pledged to stay on—without her work in the coming months and years the chrononauts’ return, on which the Village depended,
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would never be even technically possible. But she had
known this from the very beginning, had undertaken it gladly. Others would stay with her; the Village would not be inadequately protected. And now, here was this old man, frightened, suggesting that . . . Frightened. He was frightened. And fear was ugly.
“I’ll ring the Founder,” she said. “We need his authorization before we can indent for a chrononaut as subject.”
The Founder had just finished a long series of unsuccessful telephone calls following an urgent message from his O.S. He had called three government ministries (now that the national emergency was officially recognized the communications blackout had ended) and seven influential, influenceable people, ranging from the P.M.’s permanent under-mistress to the Archbishop of Canterbury. For once none of these could help him. In matters of national morale—of creating the impression that something useful was being done—the Minister of Moral Responsibility was supreme. And over her, over Mrs. Lampton, the Founder had no hold. She was new to politics, she had never been in business or the Church, her indiscretions had had no time in which to build up.
Manny Littlejohn sat motionless in his hospital room, pale beneath his careful electric tan, not even snapping at his wife, more angry than he could possibly do justice to. The O.S. had told him that Mrs. Lampton, that woman, that unspeakable, domineering, self-righteous bitch, had ordered the closing of every single research center in the entire United Kingdom. And there was nothing that he, Manny Littlejohn OBE, could do to stop her. They were to be closed immediately, and their personnel dispersed. . . . Dispersed to what? To die of the fever? To suffer the ignorant vengeance of their compatriots? To have their whole life’s work set at noth
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ing? To leave poor, rich Manny Littlejohn at the mercy of those he had always feared most? It was intolerable. When the telephone rang yet again—some bloody bureaucrat calling to inform him of the schedule for his unit’s disbandment, no doubt—he switched it on so violently that he broke the toggle.
"You can go to hell,” he said, despising himself: futile gestures should be beneath him. “If you want us out you’d better send the army. Two large divisions—if you have that many left”
“Mr. Littlejohn?” Liza let herself be surprised by nothing the Founder said or did. “Penheniot laboratory here. We require your authority, sir, before indenting for a chrononaut.”
Her meaning was clear, even through the self-despising jargon in which she cloaked it.
“A chrononaut, Miss Simmons? When is the experiment to take place?”
“Fifteen hundred hours, sir.” A typical lack of concern for safeguards. Simply anxiety lest he should not be in at the . . . at the kill. “The professor has planned it for an hour after the end of your quarantine period, sir. You will of course wish to be present.”
“Of course, girl. Of cours
e. I’ll send over the necessary authorization at once.” Her words had been so formal he had a moment’s unease. She wasn’t normally like that—he hoped to God he wasn’t going to have trouble with her, with her conscience, at'this eleventh hour. “And well done, Miss Simmons. Well done. . . . All of us here in the Village owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. Your dedication over the last weeks has been magnificent.” He wondered if that was enough. She wasn’t exactly an unsubtle person. It was so easy to overdo things with these intellectuals. “Put the professor on
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the line now, will you? I want to congratulate him too. A wonderful achievement. Wonderful. ...”
The authority, signed by Manny Littlejohn, countersigned by David Silberstein and Professor Kravchensky, was read aloud to the assembled chrononauts by the late Sir Edwin’s deputy, VilL Psych. Where his late superior would have supplied a sense of occasion by instinct, Vill. Psych did so as a matter of psychological advisability. It was, after all, the culmination of two years’ intensive preparation, and deserved a bang rather than a whimper. The chrononauts received the news with a small cheer, with genuine, tempered, well-trained enthusiasm. They filed into the crew room for the drawing of lots.
There was a machine, hitherto sealed, specially for this purpose. When the handle was pulled it spat out a little gold watch with the date and the puller’s name embossed on the side. Such a suitable memorial, one of the Founder’s favorite conceits. And such a pity he couldn’t be there to witness it. When every chrononaut had a watch, and not before, the backs of the watches were opened. Inside one of them, chosen at scientific random, was an inscription bestowing on its owner the privilege of being the first (second, third, fourth, up to twelfth) human being to enter chronomic unity. It was drawn by a female chrononaut, Rachel Moser.
The others gathered around her, displaying the expected comradeship, under which lay the expected jealousy, and even further down perhaps a not so expected relief. Her cosexualists were the best dissemblers.
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