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

by William Tenn

  "What is it?" the other man asked. Despite his age, he had the quick gestures of a highly nervous sparrow. "What are you brooding about? You must tell me all your adventures, both of you."

  So they did. All through dinner.

  "I'm sorry. Truly sorry." Professor Gray had his hands shoved deeply into his pockets. "I had no idea—no idea at all—that my little experiment would be dragging fellow humans into such misery. My deepest apologies to both of you, especially the young lady," he asserted self-consciously. "And I certainly didn't intend to present Mrs. Danner with the equivalent of a lifetime pension."

  "What little experiment?" Percy asked curiously.

  "You mean to tell us that you were the first one through?" Ann asked, her eyes very wide.

  "I'm afraid I mean just that." The little man walked bouncingly up and down the length of the small hut. "You see, when I retired as Head of the Classics Department at the University, I rented that apartment as a sort of laboratory. I felt it was the place where I might try some experiments with my theories of subjective time-travel, theories based more upon the ancient Greek philosophers than on our modern mathematicians. There, I thought I'd be alone, safe at least from ridicule. The only thing I didn't anticipate quite so early was my success! Simply because it is a period about which little is known by our archaeologists, I fixed my psyche during the experiment upon the time of the older heroes, so called. For the purpose, I used a poem by Pindar, written nine centuries after the period in which I was interested. I copied an English translation of the poem on a piece of sheepskin, to create greater subjective verisimilitude. I didn't have any warning, either, the day I sat down to try just another experiment in mental control of time."

  He grinned at them, gestured with both palms. "Much to my surprise, I—well, I fell in! I was more fortunate than either of you, in that I had a plentiful supply of silver and copper coins when I arrived in the southern, less densely populated half of the island. It was inevitable that I should arrive in Seriphos, by the way, because of the poem celebrating Perseus's return here after he had acquired the Gorgon's head that I had used as a psychic time-travel tie. I was able to develop a reputation as a kind of beneficent local wizard through my knowledge of the people and the time. And I've done fairly well for a scholar, most of whose adult life has been spent in other places than the press and scramble of business: I own this hut and a substantial tract of productive land. By the standards of this community, I am quite a wealthy man.

  "But there is my greatest compensation here—the close, on-the-spot study of a period which has always fascinated me. I place it, by the way, somewhere between the end of the Mycenaean and the beginning of the Achaean eras of Greek history. Roughly 1400 BC. It was a remarkable time in that, while superstition flourished, religion—important both before and after this period—was almost nonexistent. Some scholars even claim—"

  "Pardon me, sir," Percy broke in, "but how did we come to follow you?"

  "I think the answer is obvious. The parchment, containing the English translation of the poem which served me as a kind of target, was still in the apartment. So, therefore, was my subjective aura. And there had also been created what might be called a psycho-chronological hole in the place through which I had fallen. You young people were unfortunate enough to read the poem under these conditions and therefore followed me, arriving more or less in my neighborhood, depending on personality differences in relation to the psycho-chronological hole. I think the apartment should be fairly safe now, since Percy had the parchment in his hand when he arrived and dropped it in the Aegean Sea."

  "And here we are," Percy mused, "in the world of Greek mythology."

  Professor Gray shook his head emphatically. "I beg your pardon, but we most definitely are not. There never was such a place! It's entirely a world in Man's imagination. You are in a time that is to give rise to what we call Greek mythology. The actual events in this era will be the religion and mythos of the next. What form exactly they will take, I cannot say, since this is not our world nor our universe."

  "What do you mean?" Percy's question was fringed with sudden panic.

  "I mean that you aren't in the past at all. You are in the future, uncountable eons in the future! This is the formative period of Greek mythology on another Earth, in a space-time universe which came into being only after our own grew senile and died. Much the same things are happening to it and on it as happened to our own planet, but since it is not the same Earth, the results tend to be more and more different."

  "The—the future?" Ann shook her head as if to clear it of accumulating webs. "Another space-time universe?"

  "Is it really so hard to understand or believe? It isn't possible to travel backwards in time, only ahead of one's era. The past, having died, is dead forever: only the future is constantly unrolling. Since I buried myself into this particular period which, being in the past, had ceased to exist, I inevitably materialized in a parallel period in the succeeding cosmos. The ancient philosopher Anaximander of Miletus was one of the first to discuss the concept of an Indefinite-Infinite from which all things were drawn, including primordial atoms and planetary systems, super-galaxies and even time-streams. There is birth and death in all things, said Anaximander, and they perish into those from which they have been born. Thus there were Earths in space-time universes which existed long before our own, and barring unexpected developments in Anaximander's Indefinite-Infinite, there will be Earths in many, many succeeding space-time universes."

  "And in each one," Percy muttered slowly as he began to understand, "in each one, another Perseus."

  "Right!" Professor Gray beamed. "Except that he does not necessarily do the same things in the same way each time. But enough of this metaphysics! You young people are exhausted: suppose I show you to your beds. You begin a training program tomorrow, Percy—you, especially, will need your sleep."

  He led Ann up a ladder into a narrow bedroom in the loft which, after her recent accommodations, she found magnificent. Percy and he bedded down near the fireplace on a soft pile of skins.

  "Look, professor," Percy asked as the older man extinguished the torch, "if this isn't a world of actual mythology, then those babies aren't really gods and monsters. Yet, I saw a monster in the arena which I'd like to forget for the sake of my dreams, and I can remember other things which are even harder to explain."

  "Of course. And if that thing—it was a scylla, by the way—had caught you—But while they are real, painfully so, they don't come from our universe at all."

  "How's that?"

  "There are universes which adjoin ours in the plenum. Every possible type of universe exists parallel with ours. Many of them have Earth-type planets and Sol-type suns positioned in their space to correspond with ours. Well, it happens that the subspatial fabric separating these universes from each other is understandably weak in their youth and grows progressively stronger as the ages pass. At one time, there was probably a constant exchange and pilgrimage of individuals taking place from one universe's 'Earth' to another. Right now, it is down in all probability to the barest of trickles as the subspatial fabric has solidified and lets little through in any place. In a little while, it will have closed or clotted completely, and all that will be left will be the memories of strange unearthly creatures to generate beautiful legends and peculiar superstitions."

  —|—

  Percy grunted as he chewed into the strange texture of this information. "Then the gods aren't gods at all, I guess, but what I heard one of the men who captured me call them: Olympian monsters."

  "Well, yes. Monsters, in the sense that they are nonhuman intrinsically, since they evolved on a different world. But, Percy, they are very like us in so many ways! They are much more advanced scientifically at this point than is our race, and they can't be as confusingly horrible in their thought processes—no matter how bad they might get!—as—well, the Gorgon race for example. These creatures are humanoid: they therefore must come from a world and
universe whose natural laws are very much like our own, and they are very much interested in helping humanity advance to their level. The people of this time call them Olympian monsters, by the way, because in our world they originate upon Mount Olympus in Northern Thessaly.

  "I owe the one called Hermes a good deal: if it hadn't been for his help, I wouldn't have nearly a third of the wealth and knowledge I do. He sought me out shortly after I arrived and insisted on doing all sorts of useful little favors. I'll admit to feeling the same sort of distrust for a while which, I can see, you are experiencing. But believe me, it will be washed away by the fellow's ubiquitous friendliness! I just can't understand why later myths gave him the character of a mischievous schemer! Of course, it's entirely possible that the myths which will evolve in this world will be greatly different from the ones in our own." He nodded to himself gravely, with his head cocked at an angle, as if he were enviously imagining the kind of Greek myth with which some future Professor of Classics should have to deal.

  "The Gorgon race is pretty bad in comparison, huh? If I'm going to chase over to—to—"

  "Crete. Their headquarters is on the island of Crete."

  "Well, can you give me some idea of what they're like?"

  Professor Gray sat up, supporting his chin on his knees with his cupped hands. "I can, but please remember that what I know is a combination of archaeo-anthropological data and what I have learned about present conditions from Hermes. Almost all the more disgusting monsters, he has explained, are properly speaking members of the Gorgon race, who are themselves, however, basically reptile. The Gorgons derive from a universe or universes so different from our own even in the laws of biology and chemistry as to be virtually beyond our comprehension. Their chieftainess, for example, has a human body and a head covered with writhing snakes. Which jibes, of course, with the description of Medusa in almost all the texts.

  "The only thing," he said, his delicate old face wrinkling suddenly, "that bothers me a little is the exact relationship of Medusa to the cult of the Snake-Goddess or All-Mother of ancient, matriarchal Crete. In fact, by middle Mycenaean times—just before the present era—the religion of the Triple Goddess, as she was then called, was being practiced over almost the entire Mediterranean by priestesses who not only dominated the community but had control of all agriculture and most of local industry. In the records of our world, this religion disappeared suddenly, to be replaced by the Olympic pantheon. Yet, here, in a parallel transitional period, some two centuries before the Homeric heroes, there is no sign of either religion. Very strange. Possibly neither has developed as yet; although I would give a good deal to see what conditions are like on Crete. Hermes tells me that since the Gorgons have been crowding in, the island is far too dangerous to visit on a purely social basis. Yet—Yet—

  "And then there's the question of the Gorgons' reptilian form. Among the majority of ancient peoples, the serpent was the symbol of wisdom and fertility. Not until the Genesis of our Bible do we find a less flattering picture of the snake and, even then, he is still incredibly shrewd and cunning, though no longer friendly to Man. Is it possible, now—"

  Percy, exhausted by his first two days in pre-Achaean Greece, fell asleep at this point, to dream that he was back in his own time and a clever, fast-talking salesman named Lucifer Beelzebub Hermes had talked him into buying a very expensive restaurant which, upon his assuming ownership, turned out to have a clientele composed exclusively of rattlesnakes who insisted on charging their meals. When he approached one of them with a suggestion that a part of the long-standing bill be paid, the creature lunged at him with an enormous and rapidly-growing set of triple poison fangs.

  He was rather bitter when he woke up, even though Ann had prepared a tasty breakfast out of some local bread and cheese and five eggs from as many different types of birds. Also, Professor Gray had laid out some fairly good garments for them.

  The fact remained that whatever Medusa was, however dangerous the Gorgons were, he, Percy Sactrist Yuss, was committed to ridding the world of them and would probably, in the process, rid the world of himself.

  "Some people," he told Ann morosely, "have lots of different talents. I have only one—being a sucker. But I'm the best sucker, the most complete sucker, that this world—or the one before it—has ever seen. I'm actually a genius at it."

  "The trouble with you," she said, surveying him judiciously over an extremely well designed water jug, "is that you think about yourself too much."

  "Well, it's a good idea while there's still enough of me left around to make it worthwhile."

  Professor Gray trotted in and insisted on Percy's coming out to test the weapons which Hermes had been bringing for the encounter with the Gorgon. Reluctantly, Percy followed him outside into the still, strong brightness of a morning in the Eastern Mediterranean.

  "This is the cap of darkness or invisibility," the little man said, handing him a collection of curved metal plates welded in a rough hemisphere and decorated with many wires and incredibly tiny transformers. "The switch is just under the brim—here!—but you'll have to be very careful about practicing with it since Hermes tells me its power supply is very low and there is little possibility of refueling for a long while. Don't gape like that, Percy, it really does work! I told you that their science was far ahead of ours."

  He reached into the large wicker basket for a black object shaped like an overnight zipper bag. It had a long looping handle. Where the zipper should have been, however, there was instead a thin and hazy line that shut the bag so completely as to make it seem like one continuous piece.

  Professor Gray tapped it importantly. "The kibisis. The satchel in which you are to place the Gorgon's head after you've cut it off. This is probably the most important single item—except for the boots—that you will be given. You see, according to legend, even after her head has been severed, Medusa still has the power to turn men into stone with a glance. Furthermore, according to Hermes, she is so unlike life as we know it that, merely with her head, she will still be capable of blasting open an ordinary container. This bag can only be opened from the outside. You are to place her head in the kibisis and keep it there until you hand it over to Hermes. And now for the major item: how are you to get her head in the first place? Well, we have a sword for you, the famous harpe."

  He was, Percy noted with disgust, speaking with all the patronizing familiarity of a sports enthusiast or a fight manager explaining the virtues of a new defensive crouch to a young championship contender.

  "This is big stuff to you, isn't it, professor? Being able to crowd yourself into a story you used to lecture about?"

  "Crowd myself? But I am already in the legend! Professor Gray is as much a part of the original story as Percy S. Yuss is Perseus and Ann Drummond is Andromeda. Hesiod refers to the Graiae Sisters who have been gray since birth and who are largely responsible for the equipping of Perseus on his mission to Medusa. Well, there's only one of me and none of it is female, but it's still close enough to the real myth. As, for example, your rescue of yourself and Ann from the scylla, which is classically a monster of whirlpool and shipwreck, tallies with the original tale which has Perseus saving Andromeda from a sea-beast, though only after he's killed the Gorgon. The fact that you did arrive at Seriphos in a bathtub and as an adult contradicts Pherecydes's version in which the infant Perseus, shut inside a chest with his mother Danae, is rescued from the sea by the fisherman Dictys, brother of King Polydectes. And yet, it was Dictys's net that pulled you out of the Mediterranean...

  "You see, it goes on and on agreeing with the legend here, altering it slightly there. That's the fascinating thing about myth," the old academician went on. "There's fact in it somewhere, the trick is to find that little nugget of solidity and be able to recognize it when you do. The truth might be that there was originally a Professor Gray in the actual story as it took place on our world—and his name, sex and... quantity were altered by later writers; or, possibly the truth is that the
re is a repeating myth in every space-time universe, a myth which has several broad generalizations which must be satisfied, but whose particulars may be filled in from almost any palette."

  "You mean," Percy asked slowly, reluctantly unclasping a precious hope he had let nobody know about, "that this time Perseus might be killed by the Gorgon instead of vice versa?"

  Professor Gray nodded with brain-curdling enthusiasm. "Now you're beginning to understand! Exactly. Don't you see it was always possible, just as it's possible that you aren't the right Perseus any more than I'm the right Gray—or Graiae? That's what makes this whole thing so infernally exciting!"

  His pupil started to smile. Unfortunately, since he had great difficulty in lifting the corners of his mouth from under his chin, the attempt was no great success as smiles go. "Yeah," he said. "I'm beginning to see that."

  "Here. Try your sword," the professor suggested, his eyes almost popping under the weight of the enormous mass of metal he was holding out to Percy with both straining arms.

  Percy took it and, by tearing his back muscles slightly, was able to lay it on the ground before it fell out of his hand.

  "Don't tell me I'm supposed to go fence a duel with that girder!"

  "Oh, you'll get used to it, you'll get used to it! Notice that it's made of iron, not bronze? Nothing's too good for Perseus!"

  "Thanks, pal, from the bottom of my—"

  "Of course, on the later vases," the professor had backed into archaeology again, "especially the red-figure ones, the harpe of Perseus is represented in the shape of a sickle. But the earliest kind, the black-figure vases, show it as a straight sword. And a straight sword it must have been, because that's how Hermes brought it here to be held against the time when a Perseus arrived."

  "Speaking of arrivals," Ann commented from the doorway of the hut, "the 8:45 is coming in on Runway One. Better move back!"