But since this journal, faithfully kept as per your instructions, is presumably from now on for my eyes alone, I’ll have to try to make clear to my own uninspired mind just what gives with this Barrier, which broke down, so that it can’t protect the Stasis, but still irrevocably stops me from going back.
Any instant in which the Barrier exists is impassable: a sort of roadblock in time. Now to achieve Dyce-Farnsworth’s dream of preventing all time travel, the Barrier would have to go on existing forever, or at least into the remote future. Then as the Stasis goes on year by year, there’d always be a Barrier-instant ahead of it in time, protecting it. Not merely one roadblock, but a complete abolition of traffic on the road.
Now D-F has failed. The future’s wide open. But there in the recent past, at the instant of destruction, is the roadblock that keeps me, my dear Dr. Derringer, from ever beaming on your spade beard again.
Why does it block me? I’ve been trying to find out. Stephen is good on history, but lousy on science. The blond young Alex reverses the combination. From him I’ve tried to learn the theory back of the Barrier.
The Barrier established, in that fractional second, a powerful magnetic field in the temporal dimension. As a result, any object moving along the time line is cutting the magnetic field. Hysteresis sets up strong eddy currents which bring the object, in this case me, to an abrupt halt. Cf. that feeling of twisting shock that I had when my eyes were closed.
I pointed out to Alex that I must somehow have crossed this devilish Barrier in going from 1942 to 2473. He accounts for that apparent inconsistency by saying that I was then traveling With, the time stream, though at a greater rate; the blockage lines of force were end-on and didn’t stop me.
Brent paused and read the last two paragraphs aloud to the young scientist who was tinkering with the traveling machine. “How’s that, Alex? Clear enough?”
“It will do.” Alex frowned. “Of course we need whole new vocabulary for temporal concepts. We fumble so helplessly in analogies—” He rose. “There bees nothing more I can do for this now. Tomorrow I’ll bring out some tools from shop, and see if I can find some arceoid gears.”
“Good man. I may not be able to go back in time from here; but one thing I can do is go forward. Forward to just before they launch that second Barrier. I’ve got a job to do.”
Alex gazed admiringly at the machine. “Wonderful piece of work. Your Dr. Derringer bees great man.”
“Only he didn’t allow for the effects of tempo-magnetic hysteresis on his mechanism. Thank God for you, Alex.”
“Willn’t you come back to house?”
Brent shook his head. “I’m taking no chances on curious Stappers. I’m sticking here with Baby. See that the old lady’s comfortable, will you?”
“Of course. But tell me; who bees she? She willn’t talk at all.”
“Nobody. Just a temporal hitchhiker.”
Martha’s first sight of the young Stephen had been a terrible shock. She had stared at him speechlessly for long minutes, and then gone into a sort of inarticulate hysteria. Any attempt at explanation of her status, Brent felt, would only make matters worse. There was nothing to do but leave her to the care—which seemed both tender and efficient—of the girl Krasna, and let her life ride until she could resume it normally in her own time.
He resumed his journal.
Philological notes: Stapper, as I should have guessed, is a corruption of Gestapo. Slanduch, which poor Starvel suggested I might be, had me going for a bit. Asking about that, learned that there is more than one State. This, the smuggest and most fanatical of them all, embraces North America, Australia, and parts of Eastern Asia. Its official language is, of course, Farthingized English. Small nuclear groups of English-speaking people exist in the other States, and have preserved the older and irregularforms of speech. (Cf. American mountaineers, and Spanish Jews in Turkey.) A Slanduch belongs to such a group.
It took me some time to realize the origin of this word, but it’s obvious enough: Auslandsdeutsche, the Germans who existed similarly cut off from the main body of their culture. With these two common loan words suggesting a marked domination at some time of the German language, I asked Alex—and I must confess almost fearfully—“Then did Germany win the war?”
He not unnaturally countered with, “Which war?”
“The Second World War. Started in 1939. ”
“Second?” Alex paused. “Oh, yes. Stephen once telled me that they—you used to have numbers for wars before historians simply called 1900’s Century of Wars. But as to who winned which . . . who remembers?”
Brent paused, and wished for Stephen’s ears to determine the nature of that small noise outside. Or was it pure imagination? He went on:
These three—Stephen, Alex, and Krasna—have proved to be the ideal hosts for a traveler of my nature. Any devout believer in Cosmos, any loyal upholder of the Stasis would have turned me over to the Stappers for my first slip in speech or ideas.
They seem to be part of what corresponds to the Underground Movements of my own century. They try to accomplish a sort of boring from within, a subtle sowing of doubts as to the Stasis. Eventually they hope for more positive action; so far it is purely mental sabotage aimed at—
It was a noise. Brent set down his stylus and moved along the wall as quietly as possible to the door. He held his breath while the door slid gently inward. Then as the figure entered, he pounced.
Stappers have close-cropped hair and flat manly chests. Brent released the girl abruptly and muttered a confused apology.
“It bees only me,” she said shyly. “Krasna. Doed I startle you?”
“A bit,” he confessed. “Alex and Stephen warned me what might happen if a Stapper stumbled in here.”
“I be sorry, John.”
“It’s all right. But you shouldn’t be wandering around alone at night like this. In fact, you shouldn’t be mixed up in this at all. Leave it to Stephen and Alex and me.
“Mans!” she pouted. “Don’t you think womans have any right to fun?”
“I don’t know that fun’s exactly the word. But since you’re here, milady, let me extend the hospitality of the camp. Alex left me some bond. That poison grows on you. And tell me, why’s it called that?”
“Stephen telled me once, but I can’t— Oh yes. When they prohibited all drinking because drinking makes you think world bees better than it really bees and of course if you make yourself different world that bees against Stasis and so they prohibited it but they keeped on using it for medical purposes and that beed in warehouses and pretty soon no one knowed any other kind of liquor so it bees called bond. Only I don’t see why.”
“I don’t suppose,” Brent remarked, “that anybody in this century has ever heard of one Gracie Allen, but her spirit is immortal. The liquor in the warehouses was probably kept under government bond.”
“Oh—” she said meekly. “I’ll remember. You know everything, don’t you?”
Brent looked at her suspiciously, but there was no irony in the remark. “How’s the old lady getting on?”
“Fine. She bees sleeping now at last. Alex gived her some dormitin. She bees nice, John.”
“And yet your voice sounds worried. What’s wrong?”
“She bees so much like my mother, only, of course, I don’t remember my mother much because I beed so little when Stappers taked my father and then my mother doedn’t live very long but I do remember her some and your old lady bees so much like her. I wish I haved knowed my mother goodlier, John. She beed dear. She—” She lowered her voice in the tone of one imparting a great secret. “She cooked.”
Brent remembered their tasteless supper of extracts, concentrates, and synthetics, and shuddered. “I wish you had known her, Krasna.”
“You know what cooking means? You go out and you dig up roots and you pick leaves off of plants and some people they even used to take animals, and then you apply heat and—”
“I know. I used to be a fair-
to-middling cook myself, some five hundred years ago. If you could lead me to a bed of coals, a clove of garlic, and a two-inch steak, milady, I’d guarantee to make your eyes pop.”
“Garlic? Steak?” Her eyes were wide with wonder. “What be those?”
Brent explained. For ten minutes he talked of the joys of food, of the sheer ecstatic satisfaction of good eating that passes the love of woman, the raptures of art, or the wonders of science. Then her questions poured forth.
“Stephen learns things out of books and Alex learns things in lab but I can’t do that so goodly and they both make fun of me only you be real and I can learn things from you, John, and it bees wonderful. Tell me—”
And Krasna, with a greedy ear, listened.
“You know,” Brent muttered, more to himself than to Krasna as he finished his exposition of life lived unstatically, “I gave a particular damn about politics, but now I look back at my friends that liked Hitler and my friends that loved Stalin and my friends that thought there was much to be said for Franco . . . if only the boys could avoid a few minor errors like killing Jews or holding purge trials. This was what they all wanted: the Perfect State—the Stasis. God, if they could see—!”
At his feet Krasna stirred restlessly. “Tell me more,” she said, “about how womans’ garments beed unstatic.”
His hands idled over her flowing red hair. “You’ve got the wrong expert for that, milady. All I remember, with the interest of any red-blooded American boy, is the way knees came and went and breasts came and stayed. You know, I’ve thought of the first point in favor of Stasis: a man could never catch hell for not noticing his girl’s new dress.”
“But why?” Krasna insisted. “Why doed they change—styles?” He nodded. “—change styles so often?”
“Well, the theory—not that I ever quite believed it—was to appeal to men.”
“And I always wear the same dress—well, not same, because I always put on clean one every morning and sometimes in evening too—but it always looks same, and every time you see me it will be same and—” She broke off suddenly and pressed her face against his knee.
Gently he tilted her head back and grinned down at her moist eyes. “Look,” he said. “I said I never believed it. If you’ve got the right girl, it doesn’t matter what she wears.”
He drew her up to him. She was small and warm and soft and completely unstatic. He was at home with himself and with life for the first time in five hundred years.
The machine was not repaired the next day, nor the next. Alex kept making plausible, if not quite intelligible, technical excuses. Martha kept to her room and fretted, but Brent rather welcomed the delay. There was no hurry; leaving this time several days later had no effect on when they reached 2473. But he had some difficulty making that point clear to the matron.
This delay gave him an opportunity to see something of the State in action, anci any information acquired was apt to be useful when the time came. With various members of Stephens informal and illicit group he covered the city. He visited a Church of Cosmos and heard the official doctrine on the failure of the Barrier—the Stasis of Cosmos did not permit time travel, so that even an attempt to prohibit it by recognizing its existence affronted Cosmos. He visited libraries and found only those works which had established or upheld the Stasis, all bound in the same uniform format which the Cosmic Bibliological Committee of 2407 had ordained as ideal and static. He visited scientific laboratories and found brilliant young dullards plodding away endlessly at what had already been established; imaginative research was manifestly perilous.
He heard arid stretches of intolerable music composed according to the strict Farinelli system, which forbade, among other things, any alteration of key or time for the duration of a composition. He went to a solly, which turned out to be a deceptively solid three-dimensional motion picture, projected into an apparently screenless arena {Memo: ask Alex how?) giving something the effect of what Little Theater groups in his day called Theater in the Round. But only the images were roundly three-dimensional. The story was a strictly one-dimensional exposition of the glories of Stasis, which made the releases of Ufa or Artkino seem relatively free from propaganda. Brent, however, suspected the author of being an Undergrounder. The villain, even though triumphantly bested by the Stappers in the end, had all the most plausible and best written speeches, some of them ingenious and strong enough to sow doubts in the audience.
If, Brent thought disgustedly, anything could sow doubts in this smug herd of cattle. For the people of the State seemed to take the deepest and most loving pride in everything pertaining to the State and to the Stasis of Cosmos. The churches, the libraries, the laboratories, the music, the sollies, all represented humanity at its highest peak. We have attained perfection, have we not? Then all this bees perfect, and we love it.
“What we need,” he expostulated to Alex and Stephen one night, “is more of me. Lots more. Scads of us pouring in from all ages to light firecrackers under these dopes. Every art and every science has degenerated far worse than anything did in the Dark Ages. Man cannot be man without striving, and all striving is abolished. God, I think if I lived in this age and believed in the Stasis, I’d become a Stapper. Better their arrogant cruelty than the inhuman indifference of everybody else.”
“I have brother who bees Stapper,” said Stephen. “I do not recommend it. To descend to level of cows and oxes bees one thing. To become jackals bees another.”
“I’ve gathered that those rods paralyze the nerve centers, right? But what happens to you after that?”
“It bees not good. First you be treated according to expert psychoanalytic and psychometric methods so as to alter your concepts and adjust you to Stasis. If that fails, you be carefully reduced to harmless idiocy. Sometimes they find mind that bees too strong for treatment. He bees killed, but Stappers play with him first.”
“It’ll never happen to me,” Alex said earnestly. “I be prepared. You see this?” He indicated a minute plastic box suspended around his neck. “It contains tiny amount of radioactive matter sensitized to wave length of Stappers’ rods. They will never change my mind.”
“It explodes?”
Alex grinned. “Stay away from me if rods start waving.”
“It seems,” Brent mused, “as though cruelty were the only human vice left. Games are lost, drinking is prohibited—and that most splendid of vices, imaginative speculation, is unheard of. I tell you, you need lots of me.”
Stephen frowned. “Before failure of Barrier, we often wondered why we never seed time travelers. We doubted Charnwood’s Law and yet— We decided there beed only two explanations. Either time travel bees impossible, or time travelers cannot be seed or intervene in time they visit. Now, we can see that Barrier stopped all from future, and perhaps you be only one from past. And still—”
“Exactly,” said Alex. “And still. If other travelers came from future, why beed they not also stopped by Barrier? One of our friends searched Stapper records since breakdown of Barrier. No report on strange and unidentified travelers anywhere.”
“That means only one thing.” Stephen looked worried. “Second Barrier, Barrier you telled us of, John, must be successful.”
“The hell it will be. Come on, Alex. I’m getting restless. When can I start?” Alex smiled. “Tomorrow. I be ready at last.”
“Good man. Among us, we are going to blow this damned Stasis back into the bliss of manly and uncertain striving. And in fifty years we’ll watch it together.” Krasna was waiting outside the room when Brent left. “I knowed you willed be talking about things I doedn’t understand.”
“You can understand this, milady. Alex has got everything fixed, and we leave tomorrow.”
“We?” said Krasna brightly, hopefully.
Brent swore to himself. “We, meaning me and the old lady. The machine carries only two. And I do have to take her back to her own time.”
“Poor thing,” said Krasna. Her voice had gone dead.
“Poor us,” said Brent sharply. “One handful of days out of all of time . . .” For one wild moment a possibility occurred to him. “Alex knows how to work the machine. If he and the old—”
“No,” said Krasna gravely. “Stephen sayes you have to go and we will meet you there. I don’t understand . . . But I will meet you, John, and we will be together again and we will talk and you will tell me things like first night we talked and then—”
“And then,” said Brent, “we ll stop talking. Like this.”
Her eyes were always open during a kiss. (Was this a custom of Stasis, Brent wondered, or her own?) He read agreement in them now, and hand in hand they walked, without another word, to the warehouse, where Alex was through work for the night.
One minor point for the Stasis, Brent thought as he dozed off that night, was that it had achieved perfectly functioning zippers.
“Now,” said Brent to Stephen after what was euphemistically termed breakfast, “I’ve got to see the old lady and find out just what the date is for the proposed launching of the second Barrier.”
Stephen beamed. “It bees such pleasure to hear old speech, articles and all.” Alex had a more practical thought. “How can you set it to one day? I thinked your dial readed only in years.”
“There’s a vernier attachment that’s accurate—or should be, it’s never been tested yet—to within two days. I’m allowing a week’s margin. I don’t want to be around too long and run chances with Stappers.”
“Krasna will miss you.”
“Krasna’s a funny name. You others have names that were in use back in my day.”
“Oh, it bees not name. It bees only what everyone calls red-headed girls. I think it goes back to century of Russian domination.”
“Yes,” Alex added. “Stephen’s sister’s real name bees Martha, but we never call her that.”
The Compleat Boucher Page 28
