From the other cot, the man chuckled. “Give him a chance, Sherry! The guy’s been through plenty—I know!”
She blushed, and dropped her eyes. Blake’s mind jerked at the archaic behavior. He studied her more carefully, waiting for hints from them. Obviously, they knew him as the person who had formerly inhabited this body. But beyond that, he had no clues.
Sherry was clothed in a dress that touched the floor and came high on her throat. Even the sleeves were fastened at her wrists. She blushed again, as he watched, and tried to pull the hem of the skirt—or rather, the floor-length, ballooning jodhpurs—down over a toe that was showing. “Jed!” she breathed indignantly. “Not here!”
The man chuckled again, not too nicely, and gave up trying to see the whole of the girl’s shoe. He came over to drop on the cot beside Blake, tossing the gun at him. “Here, Jed, you’ll need your statidyne. Lucky for you you’d had a light dose of mind-burning before; they really gave you the works that time. We thought there wasn’t a trace of a memory left in your head, but Mark swore the brain can’t be washed completely a second time. We put you under his restorer, on a chance—and here you are, good as new.”
“Not quite.” Blake knew he couldn’t stay silent for ever, and a little truth might help. “I’m not quite the same. I…”
“Blank spots!” Sherry moaned. “We had them with Herman, too…Rufe, can we put him back under the restorer?”
“Mark said he’d gone as far as he could,” Rufe told her. “Jed, what’s missing? The last few years? After you joined the movement, or before?”
“Not after, Jed,” Sherry begged. But Blake nodded slowly.
Rufe motioned Sherry out. “This is going to be rough,” he warned her. “No stuff for mixed company when we talk about him in a hurry. Even if you have been married three years.”
She kissed Blake quickly, while he absorbed the fact that he was now officially married, and then she slipped out after an elaborate examination through small cracks in a doorway. Rufe came closer, squatting down.
Rufe’s talk was a quick summary of why Blake had apparently joined a rebel movement against the dictator this world seemed to have. It was old stuff to anyone who had grown up in a world where Hitler and Mussolini had been daily fare in the papers, with only a personal element added. The Bigshot—obviously a swearword now—had taken over slowly, always with the velvet glove over the steel fist. He’d apparently had some sort of invincible weapon, since he’d united the whole world under his heel.
Then he’d begun reforming it. Criminals first—and then nonconformists had been treated to progressively more severe erasure of all memory and personality. The unfit had been sterilized. All labor had been handled through the State; profits were “equalized,” and the Iron Guard had grown up, using weapons that could not be overcome. Finally, the mind-burning and sterilization had gotten out of hand; complaints had added up until the rebels began to sprout under every tree—as Blake found he had rebelled after being pronounced unsafe, and receiving sterilization. Twice, they had tried to revolt, and twice they had been battered down. Now the third try was due, without any better chance against the invincible Bigshot.
But they had discovered from Mark, the spy in Sarnoff’s laboratory who had built their restorer, that there was less time than they thought. A new rejuvenation treatment had been found: in two weeks the eighty-year-old dictator would be restored to something like forty. From his meaningless gabble with Blake, in Sarnoff’s laboratory, Rufe was sure the man was now in his dotage; however, there wouldn’t be any chance against him after he was restored to his age of greatest vigor.
“Playing jokes like that,” Rufe finished, shaking his head. “Used to burn us quick, but now he’s making a big game of it, drat—no, by golly, darn him! You rest up a couple days, Jed. We’re going to need you.”
Blake didn’t try to press Rufe for more details; this was an old, familiar story in history, even though it seemed to be a burning new one to Rufe. But it puzzled Blake—here was exactly the events which he was hoping to end with his brother’s weapon. He protested weakly. “I’m not that important to you, Rufe.”
“You’re not! You don’t think they pulled a broad daylight rescue for me, do you? No sir! Another week, when we get that entrance blasted, you’re going to be the man of the hour—the man who can outshoot all of us, that’s who. We can’t go without our head executioner can we? Jed, when you get Mr. Bigshot Thomas Blake in your sights I’d… Hey what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Blake managed.
But Rufe was already leaving. “I talk too much when you need sleep. You rest up, Jed, and I’ll see you later.”
CHAPTER 4
Blake sat rigidly, trying to fit it into his knowledge, and finding it an indigestible lump. For minutes, he tried to convince himself he was suffering from delusions—but that explanation required such a degree of insanity that the question of “reality” wouldn’t matter at all; he rejected it.
Blake decided to see what sort of order he could make by accepting these events and objects at their face value.
There was a sort of pattern. Someone had taken the trouble to fish Tom Blake’s mind up through forty years, in the hope of eliminating it. That “someone” was Sarnoff, and Sarnoff was obviously working for—for the Bigshot: then the man behind what had happened to Tom Blake had to be Tom Blake himself, as he was in this later age—or, perhaps, someone near the throne who regarded the Blake of forty years ago a menace to the Blake of “now.” Then, because of this man Mark, he—the younger Blake—had been saved, simply because the body in which the younger Blake’s consciousness rested was the body of one of the rebels’ chief tools.
Blake remembered a phrase he’d often heard, “A is not A”; here was an example of it, and with a vengeance!
Somehow, on all sides, he—young Tom Blake as he now was beginning to think of himself—was supposed to be a menace to his later self. Tom Blake A was presently embroiled in a war—a “future” war—where his sole purpose was to kill off Tom Blake N—the product of forty years of Tom Blake A’s living.
He wanted to reject the proposition; he rebelled against it; every reaction shouted “I am I; I am Tom Blake; I won’t change!”
He put it into the back of his mind, as he had learned slowly to do with things that had no seeming answer, afraid to touch it further—consciously, at least. He picked up the gun Rufe had left him, and began examining it. A hinge on the top of the plastic case caught his eye, and a second later the case lay open.
It was the gun James Blake had invented—the gun that was supposed to end all strife, prevent war, and bring in eternal democracy!
Then Tom shook his head; this was only part of that gun. The original invention, which had taken years of work by “geniuses” under the “supergenius” leadership of James, was simply a selective stasis field. It surrounded a man with a bubble of force—or lack of force, depending on how you phrased it; that bubble was carefully adjusted on several levels, so that nothing material beyond a certain low speed, and no energy particle beyond a certain level of energy, could travel through it. The further from the limits, the greater the resistance, on an asymptotic curve. Light could pass; soft x-rays were slowed and worked down to safe limits; gamma radiation was bounced back. Or, while something traveling only a few miles an hour, up to about fifty, met almost no opposition, anything having the speed of a bullet, or that of a concussion wave from a bomb met an impregnable wall.
But all that was missing from this gun. There was only the offensive force—a simple means of projecting a beam of that static force at a variable speed, so that whatever it hit seemed to be moving toward it. At low speeds, it could knock over or stun; at light speed, it could blast a hole through a mountain, with absolutely no reaction against the user’s hand. Theoretically, its range was infinite, limited only by the fact it traveled in a straight line. Since it wasn’t a true force, it actually required almost no energy, and could run for years off a ti
ny dry cell.
On the back was stamped the serial number—a figure over forty billion—and the price—two dollars! Obviously, James’ weapon was being used generally, but not as it had been intended; apparently only the Iron Guard had the whole mechanism—if anyone had.
Damn the dictator who could pervert it to such use!
Tom Blake stopped, realizing he was damning himself; it made less sense than ever. All the rest of the indictment against the Bigshot had more sides; there was justification for erasing the brains of criminals and for sterilizing the unfit—and he had heard only one side, which might actually be a criminal side. The uniting of the world under one rule was something he had long dreamed of, and was certainly justified.
But such perversion of the weapon was another matter; it was something Blake felt he could never rationalize to himself, even if he lived to be a hundred.
And the morality bothered him. Obviously, prudery had been reintroduced, and carried to an extreme. He’d been puzzling over it, without too much success. For an absolute ruler, it might have its advantages; it would both serve to occupy a good deal of time and thought on the part of the masses, and impose limits on them, which the ruler would not necessarily be compelled to admit for himself. It would make them more subservient to authority. But it wasn’t the move of a man who wanted to improve the world.
Sherry came in, then, as if to prove his point. She drew a cot up beside him and lay down, fully clothed. He noticed that her garments were fastened with a great many buttons, and without a zipper anywhere. His own clothes, when he looked, were as intricately fastened.
“Jed,” she whispered. “Jed, I’m sorry I—I kissed you—in front of Rufe. I’m so ashamed!”
He reached out a reassuring hand, flame leaping up in his body again. There was something about her eyes and the way she avoided showing even a trace of her feet; and wrists…
She caught his hand, then jerked her own back. “Jed—not here. Someone might come in!”
Someone did, shortly after she fell asleep, while Blake was still twisting and turning in his own mind—if even his mind was still his own. He pretended sleep, when Rufe led the other up to him.
“You’re crazy, Mark,” the man whispered; “do you think Sherry wouldn’t know her own husband?”
Mark was a young man with a troubled face and eyes sunk in their sockets under scraggly brows. He looked like early pictures of Lincoln, except for the incongruity of a short, stubbed nose. Now he shook his head. “I don’t know, Rufe. I didn’t quite like his response when I got out to rebuild his brain patterns. Sarnoff’s switching minds—it’s the only answer I can get to all the machinery he’s using. And I think he may have been trying to run in a ringer on us.”
“A spy?”
“What else. Probably one of those other men was from the Guard, and they switched minds. But still…well, I can’t see Sherry sleeping beside anyone unless she was sure it was Jed! And I don’t see why a ringer wouldn’t pretend to remember everything, instead of admitting his mind is partly numbed—as it should be, after what hit Jed!”
“So what do we do?” Rufe asked.
“We don’t do anything. We can’t test him by having him shoot—that’s conditioned reflex, outside his mind. We take him along, making sure he doesn’t meet anyone else until we break in. Then he either shoots the Bigshot—”
“Shh, Mark! Sherry’s here.”
“Sorry. Slipped. He either shoots, or we shoot him. With the only opening we can find, that first shot has to be good all the way across the chamber, before the automatics cut on the screen around him! Jed’s got the only reflexes that can do it.”
They went out, leaving Blake to his thoughts—which weren’t pretty. He wasn’t going to enjoy shooting himself on the amount of evidence he had; and he liked the idea of being shot at his present age even less.
They didn’t sound like a criminal mob—nor even like one of the possible radical malcontent segments that might grow up in any government. They sounded, unfortunately, like honest citizens getting ready for another Lexington and Concord—the very type of citizen he had hoped to develop with his own ideas and James’ gun.
But Tom Blake still couldn’t picture himself as a monster. He’d spent a good many years under every sort of temptation he could imagine, and he’d grown steadily more convinced that the world belonged to the decent, normal folk in it—not to any Bigshot, including himself. He felt he should be able to trust himself more than he could trust anyone else in this cockeyed age.
The trouble was that it was cockeyed—and there was no reason for it. It should have been a utopia; why hadn’t the later Blake given the defensive part of the gun out?
Or was that one under the control of someone else—the old man who had been with Sarnoff, perhaps? The old man looked capable of anything, and he’d proved completely ruthless. If the real Thomas Blake of this period were simply a front, forced somehow to do the will of another…
But how could he be forced when no weapon would hurt him?
Blake got up in the morning with his eyes burning from lack of sleep, and no nearer the answer than before. Under Sherry’s urging, he began an hour of target practice, using the slowest “speed” of the gun; Mark had been right—his shooting was pure conditioned reflex, and hadn’t been hurt by the change.
He’d reached only one emotional and one logical conclusion, and he mulled them over at breakfast. Emotionally, he wanted to get back to his own age somehow, to his own body—as he had to do sometime if there was ever to be an elder Blake. Logically, he knew he couldn’t go, if he had the choice, until he found out the facts about what he had become.
But there were a number of questions that had come up as he lay tossing. He didn’t believe in variable time—the whole theory of the stasis gun demanded a fixed, absolute cause-and-effect time scheme in the universe, somehow; and the gun worked. That meant the elder Blake had been through all this before, and should know every move he would make. Why had he slipped through the fingers of the Sarnoff group? Also, if he did get back to his own time—as he had to, seemingly—how could he do anything about what he could become, even if the worst was true?
That night he was assigned permanent quarters—his old ones, apparently—with Sherry. There he found that some of her morality vanished, while some of his own got in his way, at first. And it didn’t make it any easier to feel that she belonged to a crowd of criminals or crackpots when his emotions began to become solidly entrenched in his head.
He was obviously falling in love with a girl who believed his highest mission in life was to shoot his older self!
CHAPTER 5
Blake—or rather Jed—was supposed to be a spatula man at the local yeast works, but he’d saved up three of his quarterly vacations to take a whole month off now. Sherry had done the same with her vacations at the fabric converter. As a result, they had time on their hands while the major part of the revolutionists were away at work; there were a number of places of entertainment, but Blake chose a newsreel theater.
He came away disgusted, and yet doubtful. All the old trappings of a dictator’s propaganda bureau were there, with the usual justifications and arbitrary associations of words that had no real meaning. There was brutality enough. A revolt in Moscow against the local office of the State had been put down by Iron Guards, who moved about in complete invulnerability, using their weapons to stun the roiling crowds. There was surprisingly little bloodshed, though. But the scene where the prisoners were released mercifully back to their parents and friends was far from a happy one. All had been put through the mind-burners, and were back to the first days of infancy, mentally.
Still, there was a regular shuttle running to the Moon, and Mars was being explored. China, on the other hand, was starving; and obviously no attempt was being made to alleviate the situation. Apparently the State believed in letting local suffering go—or perhaps had insufficient resources.
He guessed that the latter was the case, pa
rticularly when a new edict of sterilization was announced for Brazil, due to unchecked birth rate. The sterilization was painless enough, and didn’t impair sexuality, but such blanket use could only come from sheer necessity.
The State was loose at the seams; disease had been conquered, and while the rejuvenation process was new, secret—and obviously forbidden for general use—the progress in gerontology and geriatrics had been amazing. In making the whole world one State, the birth rate of one section had simply flooded another, leaving no natural controls. There were no wars. Progress in foods had been good, but it hadn’t equaled the birth rate; there were over ten billion inhabitants of Earth.
Perhaps the new morality had been an attempt to check the birth rate, but it had failed; public morals can be swayed—private hungers only break out more intensely. Then, apparently, had come an increasing use of sterilization against progressive feeble-mindedness, physical hereditary ills, alcoholism, subnormal intelligence, subversive tendencies, and so on up the list, until less than half the population could pass the tests. When India refused to use voluntary birth control, the first large use of the sterility process had been forced on her, leaving less than five percent of her people fertile. It hadn’t helped much; China had immediately begun to flow over the borders.
And, inevitably, people suffered. Housing was bad—single-room shacks were common, except in what could be called the modern slums, thrown up to house hordes in worse conditions. Food was mostly synthetic now. The people lived poorly, even though they were on a twenty-hour week, and free to buy surprising types of luxuries at small prices.
The newsreel had referred to this as “the Period of Transition,” but there was no sign of it getting anywhere.
Blake came out shaken, unable to justify the results or to condemn the ideas behind them, completely. Back in 1960, it had been a simple world, with a few minor troubles; now, he wondered. Most of the troubles here came from the relief of those simple troubles there—and it was questionable whether the dictatorship had much to do with it, beyond attempts to cure the ills so obvious then. He suspected that the brewing revolution had more connection with the bad food and inadequate housing than the more obvious high-handed State methods.
The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Page 66
