The Edge of the Knife
Page 6
free of reporters, at least, and when it was over he hurried tothe Library, going to the faculty reading-room in the rear, where hecould smoke. There was nobody there but old Max Pottgeiter, smoking acigar, his head bent over a book. The Medieval History professorlooked up.
"Oh, hello, Chalmers. What the deuce is going on around here? Haseverybody gone suddenly crazy?" he asked.
"Well, they seem to think I have," he said bitterly.
"They do? Stupid of them. What's all this about some Arab being shot?I didn't know there were any Arabs around here."
"Not here. At Basra." He told Pottgeiter what had happened.
"Well! I'm sorry to hear about that," the old man said. "I have afriend at Southern California, Bellingham, who knew Khalid very well.Was in the Middle East doing some research on the Byzantine Empire;Khalid was most helpful. Bellingham was quite impressed by him; saidhe was a wonderful man, and a fine scholar. Why would anybody want tokill a man like that?"
He explained in general terms. Pottgeiter nodded understandingly:assassination was a familiar feature of the medieval politicallandscape, too. Chalmers went on to elaborate. It was a relief to talkto somebody like Pottgeiter, who wasn't bothered by the presentmoment, but simply boycotted it. Eventually, the period-bell rang.Pottgeiter looked at his watch, as from conditioned reflex, and thenrose, saying that he had a class and excusing himself. He would havecarried his cigar with him if Chalmers hadn't taken it away from him.
After Pottgeiter had gone Chalmers opened a book--he didn't noticewhat it was--and sat staring unseeing at the pages. So the movingknife-edge had come down on the end of Khalid ib'n Hussein's life;what were the events in the next segment of time, and the segments tofollow? There would be bloody fighting all over the Middle East--withconsternation, he remembered that he had been talking about that toPottgeiter. The Turkish army would move in and try to restore order.There would be more trouble in northern Iran, the Indian Communistswould invade Eastern Pakistan, and then the general war, so longdreaded, would come. How far in the future that was he could not"remember," nor how the nuclear-weapons stalemate that had so farprevented it would be broken. He knew that today, and for yearsbefore, nobody had dared start an all-out atomic war. Wars, now, weremarginal skirmishes, like the one in Indonesia, or the steadyunderground conflict of subversion and sabotage that had come to becalled the Subwar. And with the United States already in possession ofa powerful Lunar base.... He wished he could "remember" how eventsbetween the murder of Khalid and the Thirty Day's War had been spacedchronologically. Something of that had come to him, after the incidentin Modern History IV, and he had driven it from his consciousness.
* * * * *
He didn't dare go home where the reporters would be sure to find him.He simply left the college, at the end of the school-day, and walkedwithout conscious direction until darkness gathered. This morning,when he had seen the paper, he had said, and had actually believed,that the news of the murder in Basra would put an end to the troublethat had started a month ago in the Modern History class. It hadn't:the trouble, it seemed, was only beginning. And with the newspapers,and Whitburn, and Fitch, it could go on forever....
It was fully dark, now; his shadow fell ahead of him on the sidewalk,lengthening as he passed under and beyond a street-light, vanishing ashe entered the stronger light of the one ahead. The windows of a cheapcafe reminded him that he was hungry, and he entered, going to a tableand ordering something absently. There was a television screen overthe combination bar and lunch-counter. Some kind of a comedyprogramme, at which an invisible studio-audience was laughingimmoderately and without apparent cause. The roughly dressed customersalong the counter didn't seem to see any more humor in it than he did.Then his food arrived on the table and he began to eat without reallytasting it.
After a while, an alteration in the noises from the televisionpenetrated his consciousness; a news-program had come on, and heraised his head. The screen showed a square in an Eastern city; thevoice was saying:
"... Basra, where Khalid ib'n Hussein was assassinated early thismorning--early afternoon, local time. This is the scene of the crime;the body of the murderer has been removed, but you can still see thestones with which he was pelted to death by the mob...."
A close-up of the square, still littered with torn-up paving-stones. ACaliphate army officer, displaying the weapon--it was an old M3, allright; Chalmers had used one of those things, himself, thirty yearsbefore, and he and his contemporaries had called it a "grease-gun."There were some recent pictures of Khalid, including one taken as heleft the plane on his return from Ankara. He watched, absorbed; itwas all exactly as he had "remembered" a month ago. It gratified himto see that his future "memories" were reliable in detail as well asgenerality.
"But the most amazing part of the story comes, not from Basra, butfrom Blanley College, in California," the commentator was saying,"where, it is revealed, the murder of Khalid was foretold, withuncanny accuracy, a month ago, by a history professor, Doctor EdwardChalmers...."
There was a picture of himself, in hat and overcoat, perfectlymotionless, as though a brief moving glimpse were being prolonged. Aglance at the background told him when and where it had been taken--ayear and a half ago, at a convention at Harvard. These telecast peoplemust save up every inch of old news-film they ever took. There wereviews of Blanley campus, and interviews with some of the ModernHistory IV boys, including Dacre and Kendrick. That was one of thethings they'd been doing with that jeep-mounted sound-camera, thisafternoon, then. The boys, some brashly, some embarrassedly, weresubstantiating the fact that he had, a month ago, describedyesterday's event in detail. There was an interview with LeonardFitch; the psychology professor was trying to explain the phenomenonof precognition in layman's terms, and making heavy going of it. Andthere was the mobbing of Whitburn in front of Administration Center.The college president was shouting denials of every question askedhim, and as he turned and fled, the guffaws of the reporters wereplainly audible.
An argument broke out along the counter.
"I don't believe it! How could anybody know all that about somethingbefore it happened?"
"Well, you heard that-there professor, what was his name. An' youheard all them boys...."
"Ah, college-boys; they'll do anything for a joke!"
"After refusing to be interviewed for telecast, the president ofBlanley College finally consented to hold a press conference in hisoffice, from which telecast cameras were barred. He denied the wholestory categorically and stated that the boys in Professor Chalmers'class had concocted the whole thing as a hoax...."
"There! See what I told you!"
"... stating that Professor Chalmers is mentally unsound, and thathe has been trying for years to oust him from his position on theBlanley faculty but has been unable to do so because of the provisionsof the Faculty Tenure Act of 1963. Most of his remarks were in thenature of a polemic against this law, generally regarded as thecollege professors' bill of rights. It is to be stated here that othermembers of the Blanley faculty have unconditionally confirmed the factthat Doctor Chalmers did make the statements attributed to him a monthago, long before the death of Khalid ib'n Hussein...."
"Yah! How about _that_, now? How'ya gonna get around _that_?"
Beckoning the waitress, he paid his check and hurried out. Before hereached the door, he heard a voice, almost stuttering with excitement:
"Hey! Look! That's _him_!"
He began to run. He was two blocks from the cafe before he slowed to awalk again.
That night, he needed three shots of whiskey before he could get tosleep.
* * * * *
A delegation from the American Institute of Psionics andParapsychology reached Blanley that morning, having taken astrato-plane from the East Coast. They had academic titles and degreesthat even Lloyd Whitburn couldn't ignore. They talked with LeonardFitch, and with the students from Modern History IV, and tookstatements. It wasn't until after
General European History II thatthey caught up with Chalmers--an elderly man, with white hair and aruddy face; a young man who looked like a heavy-weight boxer; amiddle-aged man in tweeds who smoked a pipe and looked as though heought to be more interested in grouse-shooting and flower-gardeningthan in clairvoyance and telepathy. The names of the first two meantnothing to Chalmers. They were important names in their own field, butit was not his field. The name of the third, who listened silently, hedid not catch.
"You understand, gentlemen, that I'm having some difficulties with thecollege administration about this," he told them. "President Whitburnhas even gone so far as to challenge my fitness to hold a positionhere."
"We've talked to him," the