Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

The Professor hopped into the machine and began preparing it for another trip. "Now as to what happened to me. Once you—You I again—prevented You II from moving that rock, you immediately precipitated—not so much a change as an unchange—in my personal situation. The rock had not been shifted—therefore, I had not been married, was not married, and, let us hope, will never be married. I was also no longer bald. But, by the very fact of the presence of the two You's in the past, by virtue of some microscopic form of life you killed with your breath, let us say, or some sand you impressed with your feet, sufficient alterations were made right through to the present so that my name was (and always had been!) Roodles and your name—"

  "Is probably MacTavish by now," McCarthy yelled. "Look, Prof, are you through with the machine?"

  "Yes, it's all ready." The Professor grimaced thoughtfully. "The only thing I can't place is what happened to that camera you said I took from you. Now if You I in the personification of You II—"

  McCarthy planted his right foot in the small of the little man's back and shoved. "I'm gonna get this thing settled and come back and never, never, never go near one of these dinguses again!"

  He yanked at the chronotransit. The last he saw of the Professor was a confused picture of broken glassware, tangled electrical equipment, and indignantly waving white hair.

  —|—

  This time he materialized at the very edge of the beach. "Gettin' closer all the time," he mumbled as he stepped out of the housing. "Now to hand over the note, then—"

  Then—

  "Great sufferin', two-tailed, explodin' catfish!"

  There were two men fighting near a red rock. They wore identical clothes; they had identical features and physical construction, including the same lanky forms and long, stringy necks. They fought in a weird pattern of mirror-imagery—each man swinging the same blows as his opponent, right arm crossing right, left crossing left. The man with his back to the rock had an expensive miniature camera suspended from his neck; the other one hadn't.

  Suddenly, they both feinted with their lefts in perfect preparation for what hundreds of small-town law officials had come to curse as "the Gooseneck McCarthy One-Two." Both men ignored the feint, both came up with their right hands and—

  They knocked each other out.

  They came down heavily on their butts, about a yard apart, shaking their heads.

  "You are the stubbornest cuss I ever saw," one of them began. "Where—"

  "—did you learn my punch?" McCarthy finished, stepping forward.

  They both sprang to their feet, stared at him. "Hey," said the man with the camera. "You two guys are twins!"

  "Wait a minute." McCarthy stepped between them before their angry glances at each other could be translated into action. "We're all twins. I mean triplets. I mean—Sit down. I got somethin' to tell you."

  They all squatted slowly, suspiciously.

  Four chaws of tobacco later, there was a little circle of dark nicotine juice all around them. McCarthy was breathing hard, all three of him. "So it's like I'm McCarthy I because I've seen this thing through up to where I stop McCarthy II from going back to get the note that McCarthy III wants from Ruddle."

  The man with the camera rose and the other followed, "The only thing I don't get," he said finally, "is that I'm McCarthy III. Seems to me it's more like I'm McCarthy I, he's McCarthy II—that part's right—and you're McCarthy III."

  "Uh-uh," McCarthy II objected. "You got it all wrong. The way I look at it—now see if'n this doesn't sound right—is that I'm McCarthy I, you're—"

  "Hold it! Hold it!" The two men who had been fighting turned to McCarthy I. "I know I'm McCarthy I!"

  "How do you know?" they demanded.

  "Because that's the way Professor Ruddle explained it to me. He didn't explain it to you, did he? I'm McCarthy I, all right. You two are the stubbornest hooligans I've seen and I've seen them all. Now let's get back."

  "Wait a minute. How do I know I still ain't supposed to move this rock? Just because you say so?"

  "Because I say so and because Professor Ruddle says so in that note I showed you. And because there are two of us who don't want to move it and we can knock you silly if'n you try."

  At McCarthy II's nod of approval, McCarthy III glanced around reluctantly for a weapon. Seeing none, he started back to the time machines. McCarthys I and II hurried abreast.

  "Let's go in mine. It's closest." They all turned and entered the machine of McCarthy I.

  "What about the checks? Why should you have three checks and McCarthy II have two while I only got one? Do I get my cut?"

  "Wait'll we get back to the Professor. He'll settle it. Can't you think of anythin' else but money?" McCarthy I asked wearily.

  "No, we can't," McCarthy II told him. "I want my share of that third check. I got a right to it. More'n this dopey guy has, see?"

  "OK, OK. Wait'll we get back to the lab." McCarthy I pushed down on the chronotransit. The island and the bright sunlight disappeared. They waited.

  —|—

  Darkness! "Hey!" McCarthy II shouted. "Where's the lab? Where's Professor Ruddle?"

  McCarthy I tugged at the chronotransit. It wouldn't move. The other two came over and pulled at it too.

  The chronotransit remained solidly in place.

  "You must've pushed down too hard," McCarthy III yelled. "You busted it!"

  "Yeah," from McCarthy II. "Who ever told you that you could run a time machine? You busted it and now we're stranded!"

  "Wait a minute. Wait a minute." McCarthy I pushed them back. "I got an idea. You know what happened? The three of us tried to come back to—to the present, like Professor Ruddle says. But only one of us belongs in the present—see what I mean? So with the three of us inside, the machine just can't go anywhere."

  "Well, that's easy," said McCarthy III. "I'm the only real—"

  "Don't be crazy. I know I'm the real McCarthy; I feel it—"

  "Wait," McCarthy I told them. "This isn't gettin' us any place. The air's gettin' bad in here. Let's go back and argue it out." He pushed the lever down again.

  So they went back a hundred and ten million years to discuss the matter reasonably. And, when they arrived, what do you think they found? Yep—exactly. That's exactly what they found.

  AFTERWORD

  "Me, Myself, and I" is in a sense actually my first professional story, although the first one to be published was, of course, "Alexander the Bait."

  I wrote "Me, Myself, and I" in 1941 as one of my earliest attempts to break into magazine science fiction, shortly before I went into the army. The day I completed a satisfactory version of the piece on my typewriter, I picked up a copy of Street & Smith's Astounding and, to my chagrin and some degree of horror, read "By His Bootstraps" by Anson MacDonald.

  The chagrin had to do with the time-travel paradox of "By His Bootstraps"—very much the same as the one I had used in "Me, Myself, and I." I would look as if I were copying another writer. The horror? Well, for a couple of years now I had been trying to write publishable science fiction, only to find that every time I got a good idea, it immediately appeared in print (obviously written six months or more earlier), and in a better form, under the name of Robert Heinlein. I felt I had been trapped in the lag end of a telepathic hookup with one man, and now it seemed I was connected in much the same way with yet someone else, one Anson MacDonald.

  It would not have made me feel much better, I don't think, to have learned that they were actually the same person.

  Well, I flipped the story into a desk drawer and went off to World War II. Years later, when I told my first agent, Ted Sturgeon, about it, he told me I had been an idiot and asked to see the manuscript. He made a suggestion or two about buffing it, and sold it for me the very first time out. He did, however, continue to call me an idiot.

  Written 1941——Published 1947

  IT ENDS WITH A FLICKER

  It was a good job and Max Alben knew whom he had to thank for it—his gr
eat-grandfather.

  "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered as he hurried into the laboratory slightly ahead of the escorting technicians, all of them, despite the excitement of the moment, remembering to bob their heads deferentially at the half-dozen full-fleshed and hard-faced men lolling on the couches that had been set up around the time machine.

  He shrugged rapidly out of his rags, as he had been instructed in the anteroom, and stepped into the housing of the enormous mechanism. This was the first time he had seen it, since he had been taught how to operate it on a dummy model, and now he stared at the great transparent coils and the susurrating energy bubble with much respect.

  This machine, the pride and the hope of 2089, was something almost outside his powers of comprehension. But Max Alben knew how to run it, and he knew, roughly, what it was supposed to accomplish. He knew also that this was the first backward journey of any great duration and, being scientifically unpredictable, might well be the death of him.

  "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered again affectionately.

  If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Blight, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout.

  And if that had not been discovered, the ruling powers of Earth, more than a century later, would never have plucked Max Alben out of an obscure civil-service job as a relief guard at the North American Chicken Reservation to his present heroic and remunerative eminence. He would still be patrolling the barbed wire that surrounded the three white leghorn hens and two roosters—about one-sixth of the known livestock wealth of the Western Hemisphere—thoroughly content with the half-pail of dried apricots he received each and every payday.

  No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Max Alben would not now be shifting from foot to foot in a physics laboratory, facing the black market kings of the world and awaiting their final instructions with an uncertain and submissive grin.

  Men like O'Hara, who controlled mushrooms; Levney, the blackberry tycoon; Sorgasso, the packaged-worm monopolist—would black marketeers of their tremendous stature so much as waste a glance on someone like Alben ordinarily, let alone confer a lifetime pension on his wife and five children of a full spoonful each of non-synthetic sugar a day?

  Even if he didn't come back, his family was provided for like almost no other family on Earth. This was a damn good job and he was lucky.

  Alben noticed that Abd Sadha had risen from the straight chair at the far side of the room and was approaching him with a sealed metal cylinder in one hand.

  "We've decided to add a further precaution at the last moment," the old man said. "That is, the scientists have suggested it, and I have—er—I have given my approval."

  The last remark was added with a slight questioning note as the Secretary General of the United Nations looked about rapidly at the black market princes on the couches behind him. Since they stared back stonily, but offered no objection, he coughed in relief and returned to Alben.

  "I am sure, young man, that I don't have to go into the details of your instructions once more. You enter the time machine and go back the duration for which it has been preset, a hundred and thirteen years, to the moment after the Guided Missile of 1976 was launched. It is 1976, isn't it?" he asked, suddenly uncertain.

  "Yes, sir," one of the technicians standing by the time machine said respectfully. "The experiment with an atomic warhead guided missile that resulted in the Blight was conducted on this site on April 18, 1976." He glanced proudly at the unemotional men on the couches, very much like a small boy after completing a recitation before visiting dignitaries from the Board of Education.

  "Just so." Abd Sadha nodded. "April 18, 1976. And on this site. You see, young man, you will materialize at the very moment and on the very spot where the remote-control station handling the missile was—er—handling the missile. You will be in a superb position, a superb position, to deflect the missile in its downward course and alter human history for the better. Yes."

  He paused, having evidently stumbled out of his thought sequence.

  "And he pulls the red switch toward him," Gomez, the dandelion-root magnate, reminded him sharply, impatiently.

  "Ah, yes, the red switch. He pulls the little red switch toward him. Thank you, Mr. Gomez, thank you very much, sir. He pulls the little red switch on the green instrument panel toward him, thus preventing the error that caused the missile to explode in the Brazilian jungle and causing it, instead, to explode somewhere in the mid-Pacific, as originally planned."

  The Secretary General of the United Nations beamed. "Thus preventing the Blight, making it nonexistent, as it were, producing a present-day world in which the Blight never occurred. That is correct, is it not, gentlemen?" he asked, turning anxiously again.

  None of the half-dozen men on couches deigned to answer him. And Alben kept his eyes deferentially in their direction, too, as he had throughout this period of last-minute instruction.

  He knew who ruled his world—these stolid, well-fed men in clean garments with a minimum of patches, and where patches occurred, at least they were the color of the surrounding cloth.

  Sadha might be Secretary General of the United Nations, but that was still a civil-service job, only a few social notches higher than a chicken guard. His clothes were fully as ragged, fully as multicolored, as those that Alben had stepped out of. And the gnawing in his stomach was no doubt almost as great.

  "You understand, do you not, young man, that if anything goes wrong," Abd Sadha asked, his head nodding tremulously and anticipating the answer, "if anything unexpected, unprepared-for occurs, you are not to continue with the experiment but return immediately?"

  "He understands everything he has to understand," Gomez told him. "Let's get this thing moving."

  The old man smiled again. "Yes. Of course, Mr. Gomez." He came up to where Alben stood in the entrance of the time machine and handed the sealed metal cylinder to him. "This is the precaution the scientists have just added. When you arrive at your destination, just before materializing, you will release it into the surrounding temporal medium. Our purpose here, as you no doubt—"

  Levney sat up on his couch and snapped his fingers peremptorily. "I just heard Gomez tell you to get this thing moving, Sadha. And it isn't moving. We're busy men. We've wasted enough time."

  "I was just trying to explain a crucial final fact," the Secretary General apologized. "A fact which may be highly—"

  "You've explained enough facts." Levney turned to the man inside the time machine. "Hey, fella. You. Move!"

  Max Alben gulped and nodded violently. He darted to the rear of the machine and turned the dial which activated it.

  flick!

  —|—

  It was a good job and Mac Albin knew whom he had to thank for it—his great-grandfather.

  "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed as he looked at the morose faces of his two colleagues. Bob Skeat and Hugo Honek had done as much as he to build the tiny time machine in the secret lab under the helicopter garage, and they were fully as eager to go, but—unfortunately for them—they were not descended from the right ancestor.

  Leisurely, he unzipped the richly embroidered garment that, as the father of two children, he was privileged to wear, and wriggled into the housing of the complex little mechanism. This was hardly the first time he had seen it, since he'd been helping to build the device from the moment Honek had nodded and risen from the drafting board, and now he barely wasted a glance on the thumb-size translucent coils growing out of the almost microscopic energy bubbles which powered them.

  This machine was the last hope of 2089, even if the world of 2089, as a whole, did not know of its existence and would try to prevent its being put into operation. But it meant a lot more to Mac Albin than merely saving a world. It meant an
adventurous mission with the risk of death.

  "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed again happily.

  If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Epidemic, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout.

  And if that had not been discovered, the Albins would not have become physicists upon the passage of the United Nations law that everyone on Earth—absolutely without exception—had to choose a branch of research science in which to specialize. In the flabby, careful, life-guarding world the Earth had become, Mac Albin would never have been reluctantly selected by his two co-workers as the one to carry the forbidden banner of dangerous experiment.

  No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Mac Albin would probably be a biologist today like almost everyone else on Earth, laboriously working out dreary gene problems instead of embarking on the greatest adventure Man had known to date.

  Even if he didn't come back, he had at last found a socially useful escape from genetic responsibility to humanity in general and his own family in particular. This was a damn good job and he was lucky.

  "Wait a minute, Mac," Skeat said and crossed to the other side of the narrow laboratory.

  Albin and Honek watched him stuff several sheets of paper into a small metal box which he closed without locking.

  "You will take care of yourself, won't you, Mac?" Hugo Honek pleaded. "Any time you feel like taking an unnecessary risk, remember that Bob and I will have to stand trial if you don't come back. We might be sentenced to complete loss of professional status and spend the rest of our lives supervising robot factories."

  "Oh, it won't be that bad," Albin reassured him absentmindedly from where he lay contorted inside the time machine. He watched Skeat coming toward him with the box.