Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (55 page)

The dolik on which I bad been working, you see, was the so-called Thumtse Dilemna—a thoroughly fascinating business. Most of my colleagues inclined toward Gurkheyser's statement of the problem when he discovered it at Thumtse over fifty years ago. Gurkheyser declared that it couldn't be dolik because of the lack of flirg-pattern; and it couldn't be spindfar because of the presence of flirg in minute quantities; therefore it was a consciously created paradox and, as such, had to be classified as punforg. But, by definition, punforg could not exist at Thumtse...

—|—

I wander. Once more I forget the reactions of my audience to this subject. If only this were not so, if only on this one point—In any case, I was still considering the Thumtse Dilemna when I stepped out of the benscope into Banderling's lab. I was not at all prepared psychologically to make the obvious deductions from his nervousness. Even if I had, who could have imagined such psychotic behavior from an Associate Investigator?

"Thanks, Terton," he nodded, his necklace jangling with the gadgetry that physicists seem to find necessary at all times. "Would you hold that long bar away from the turntable and press into the grid with your back? Right." He sucked at the knuckles of his right hand; with his left, he flipped a toggle and clicked a relay shut. He turned a small knob past several calibrations, frowned doubtfully and moved it back to an earlier mark.

The turntable before me—a wheel-like affair whose spokes were resistor coils and whose hub was an immense mesotronic tube—began to glow and whirl softly. Behind me, the grid was vibrating gently against my shoulder blades.

"There's—uh, nothing dangerous in what I'm doing?" I asked, moistening my lips at the roomful of fully operating equipment.

Banderling's little black beard shot up scornfully and the very hairs on his chest seemed to quiver. "What could be dangerous?"

Since I didn't know, I decided to feel reassured. I longed for Banderling's help in the process, but he was moving about rapidly now, sneering impatiently at meters and slapping at switches.

I had almost forgotten my uncomfortable position and the bar I was holding, and was considering the middle passage of my paper—the section where I intended to prove that the influence of Gll was fully as great as Tkes upon later Pegis—when Banderling's booming voice thrust a question into my consciousness.

"Terton, don't you often feel unhappy that you live in an intermediate civilization?"

He had stopped in front of the turntable and put his overlong hands truculently upon his hips.

"What do you mean—the Temporal Embassy?" I asked. I'd heard of Banderling's views.

"Exactly. The Temporal Embassy. How can science live and breathe with such a modifier? It's a thousand times worse than any of those ancient repressions like the Inquisition, military control, or university trusteeship. You can't do this—it will be done first a century later; you can't do that—the sociological impact of such an invention upon your period will be too great for its present capacity; you should do this—nothing may come of it now, but somebody in an allied field a flock of years from now will be able to integrate your errors into a useful theory. And what do all these prohibitions and restrictions accomplish; whose ends do they serve?"

"The greatest good of the greatest number in the greatest period of time," I quoted firmly from the Institute prospectus. "That humanity may continually improve itself by reshaping the past on the basis of its own historical judgment and the advice of the future."

He nodded a sneer at me. "How do we know? What is the master plan of those ultimate humans in that ultimate future where there is no temporal embassy from a still later period? Would we approve of it, would we—"

"But Banderling, we wouldn't even understand it! Humans with minds compared to which ours would look like elementary neural responses—how could we grasp and appreciate their projects? Besides, there seems to be no such ultimate future, merely temporal embassy after temporal embassy sent by each age into the preceding one, the advice of each embassy based on the best historical hindsight of the period from which it came. Temporal embassies extending always into the past from the improving future, temporal embassies without end." I paused, out of breath.

"Except here. Except in an intermediate civilization like ours. They may go out to infinity as far as the future is concerned, Terton, but they stop in our time. We send nobody into the past; we receive orders, but give none of our own."

—|—

I puzzled over Banderling as he examined the greenly sparking mesotronic tube and made an adjustment among his controls which excited it still further. He had always been considered a bit of a rebel at the Institute—by no means bad enough for a Readjustment Course, however—but surely he knew that the organization of the Institute itself was the first suggestion made by the Temporal Embassy when our age durated into its time-fix? I decided that the present difficulty with his equipment had irritated him out of normal reasoning processes. My mind trotted back to important items like spindfar problems, and I began to wish that Banderling would relieve me of the long bar so that I could denecklace my flirgleflip.

Not that I believed the Thumtse Dilemna could conceivably be spindfar. But it was possible, I had suddenly realized, for flirg—

"I've been told to call off work on my radiation depressor." The physicist's morose voice sliced into my thoughts.

"This machine, you mean?" I inquired rather politely, concealing my annoyance both at his interruption and the sudden inexplicable increase of warmth in the room.

"Hum. Yes, this machine." He turned away for a moment and came back with a modified benscope projector which he placed in front of me. "The Temporal Embassy merely suggested that I stop, of course. They suggested it to the Institute administration, which put it in the form of an order. No reason given, none at all."

I clucked sympathetically and moved my perspiring hands to another position on the bar. The vibration of the grid had almost worn a checkerboard callus into my back; and the thought of being involved in an experiment with revoked equipment when I could be doing constructive investigation into dolik, spindfar, and even punforg made me almost pathologically unsocial with impatience.

"Why?" Banderling demanded dramatically, throwing opened palms up in the air. "What is there about this device which requires an ultimatum to stop its progress? I have been able to halve the speed of light, true; I may be able to reduce it even further in the tube, possibly to zero, eventually. Does such an increase of man's scientific powers seem dangerous to you, Terton?"

I pondered the question and was happy to be able to answer in all honesty that it didn't. "But," I reminded him, "there have been other direct revocations of projects. I had one. There was this dolik which was most curiously flirgled, evidently a product of Middle Rla at the peak of its culture. I had no more established the Rlaian origin when I was called to—"

"What have these infernal, incomprehensible thingumajigs to do with the speed of light?" he blasted at me. "I'll tell you why I was ordered to stop work on my radiation depressor, Terton, after eleven years of mind-breaking research. This machine is the key to time travel."

The offense I had decided to take was forgotten. I stared at him. "Time travel? You mean you've discovered it? We have reached the point where we are permitted to send a temporal embassy of our own into the past?"

"No. We have reached a point where journeying in time is possible, where a visit to the past may be made, where we are able to set up an embassy in a previous period. But we will not be allowed to do it! Instead, I drop my radiation depressor so that a century later, say, when the Embassy approves, some other physicist will build a machine using my notes and research—and be credited by history as the father of time travel."

"Are you sure that it's time travel? Possibly only a—"

"Of course I'm sure. Haven't I been measuring duration-gap since the first indication of electromagnetic dampening? Didn't I lose two mesotronic tubes before the reverse field had even approached optimum? And didn't I duplicate the experience of the tubes with over fifteen rabbits, none of which have reappeared? No, it's time travel, Terton, and I have to drop it. Officially, that is."

His tone confused me. "What do you mean, 'officially'?"

Banderling drew a universal necklace across the screen of the benscope until it began to pulsate. "Well, by officially—Terton, would you mind lifting the bar to your chest? A little higher. Fine. We'll be all set in a moment. Suppose someone from the present should be sent into the past as a result of a laboratory accident? Time travel would be an accomplished fact; the man who had built the machine that had accomplished it would be the accredited discoverer—the Temporal Embassy and all its plans notwithstanding. That would cause repercussions clear to the last dwindling curvature of time!"

I shivered, despite the extreme warmth of the lab at this point. "It would," I agreed. "If anyone were fool enough to try it. Seriously, though, do you really think your radiation depressor could send a man from our time into the past and bring him back?"

The physicist put the necklace aside as the benscope achieved optimum pulsation. "I couldn't effect the return with my equipment. But the Temporal Embassy would take care of that. Why, even they have only emissaries operating in the pre-intermediate civilizations—highly trained operatives working secretly and under great difficulties to make the necessary alterations in cultural evolution without the dislocation that would be caused by a Temporal Revelation to primitives. Anyone from our time who wandered into a previous period would be brought back in a hurry. And since the Temporal Embassy permits itself only advisory functions in an intermediate civilization like ours, he'd be brought back alive with a suggestion to Administration that he be shut up somehow. But no matter what happened after that, the secret would be out, the mission would be accomplished. Administration would probably shrug its bureaucratic shoulders and decide to accept the existence of time travel with its attendant Advanced Civilization status. Administration wouldn't object to that at all, once the thing was done. And the temporal embassies would ricochet irritation ahead for a couple of million years; but they'd have to revise their plans. Their grip on history would be broken."

I saw it. Fascinating! Imagine solving once for all the Thumtse Dilemna by watching its creation! And what fantastic new knowledge of the flirglers themselves? We knew so little. I would be particularly interested in the relationship of punforg to—

Unfortunately, the dream was only that. Banderling's radiation depressor had been revoked. He would work on it no more after tonight. Time travel was for another age. I slumped unhappily against the grid.

"That's it, Terton!" the physicist yelled delightedly. "It's passing optimum!" He picked up the universal necklace and held it over the screen of the benscope.

"I'm glad it's working again," I told him. "This grid has been punishing my back. Banderling, I have research of my own to do."

"Don't forget your training," he warned me. "Keep your eyes open and make careful mental notes of everything you see until you're picked up. Think how many investigators in your wing of the Institute would scramble to be in your place, Terton!"

"My place? Helping you? Well, I don't know—"

Then the turntable canted toward me in a flash of oozing green light; the bar seemed to melt into my chest and the grid to flow down my rigid back. Banderling's face tilted out of recognizable perspective through shimmering heat waves. A great goblet of ear-piercing sound poured over my head and numbed my mind. Something enormous, irresistible, punched at me hard and snapped the bubble of consciousness. Nothing was left but a memory of Banderling's grin.

And I was cold. I was very cold.

I stood on a ridiculously stony thoroughfare, looking at a scene from Mark Twain, Washington Irving or Ernest Hemingway—one of the authors of
that
period, in any case. Brick buildings were scattered carelessly over the landscape like a newly discovered trove of spindfar; metal vehicles crawled noisily past on both sides of me; people walked on the raised stone sections near the ugly little buildings with leather clogs laced tightly to their feet and bandages of various fabrics wrapping their bodies.

But above all, it was cold. Why, the city wasn't even air-conditioned! I found myself shivering violently. I remembered some drawing I had seen of an urchin shivering in just such a scene. Medieval New York. 1650 to 1980, I believe.

Abruptly I remembered the last moments in the lab. And understood.

I raised my fists to my face. "Banderling!" I shrieked at them. "Banderling, you are a fathead!"

This, so far as I can remember, was the first time I used a remark which was to become a cliché with me. Let me repeat it nonetheless, out of a full heart and an aching body—fathead! Fathead!

Somewhere, a woman screamed. I turned and saw her looking at me. Other people were laughing and pointing. I gestured impatiently at them, sank my head on my chest and tried to return to consideration of my predicament.

Then I remembered.

I didn't know exactly when I was, but one thing all of these pre-intermediate civilizations had in common: a clothes fetish with severe penalties for those who disregarded it.

Naturally, there were reasons. I wasn't certain which of them was most important here. For example, there was evidently no thermostatic control of the atmosphere in this area, and the season was the cooling third of the four ancient natural ones.

A gesticulating group had congregated on the raised cement surface facing me. A burly figure in blue, primitive weapons dangling from his belt, shouldered his way out of the crowd and started rapidly in my direction.

"Hey, character," he said (approximately). "Whadaya think this is? Free show? Huh? C'mere!"

As I said, I approximate. I found I was terribly afraid of this savage.