"I'll be damned," he said.
He hadn't heard spontaneous singing in over two years. He hadn't seen a carefree smile in over three years. He felt like a color-blind man who was seeing the full spectrum for the first time. It was uncanny. It was also a little blasphemous.
"Don't those people know there's a war on?" he asked himself.
And a little later: "They looked too healthy. Why aren't they in uniform?"
And last of all: "Who were they anyway?"
That night Addyer's fantasy was confused.
Can you spare price of one cup coffee, kindly sir? I am estrangered and jointly from hungering.
The next morning Addyer arose early, hired a car at an exorbitant fee, found he could not buy any fuel at any price, and ultimately settled for a lame horse. He was allergic to horse dander and suffered asthmatic tortures as he began his house-to-house canvass. He was discouraged when he returned to the Lyonesse Hotel that afternoon. He was just in time to witness the departure of the O.K. Bus Co.
Once again a horde of happy people appeared and boarded the bus. Once again the bus hirpled off down the broken road. Once again the joyous singing broke out.
"I will be damned," Addyer wheezed.
He dropped into the County Surveyor's Office for a large scale map of Finney County. It was his intent to plot the midwife coverage in accepted statistical manner. There was a little difficulty with the Surveyor who was deaf, blind in one eye, and spectacle-less in the other. He could not read Addyer's credentials with any faculty or facility. As Addyer finally departed with the map, he said to himself: "I think the old idiot thought I was a spy."
And later he muttered: "Spies?"
And just before bedtime: "Holy Moses! Maybe that's the answer to them."
That night he was Lincoln's secret agent, anticipating Lee's every move, outwitting Jackson, Johnston and Beauregard, foiling John Wilkes Booth, and being elected President of the United States by 1868.
The next day the O.K. Bus Co. carried off yet another load of happy people.
And the next.
And the next.
"Four hundred tourists in five days," Addyer computed. "The country's filled with espionage."
He began loafing around the streets trying to investigate these joyous travellers. It was difficult. They were elusive before the bus arrived. They had a friendly way of refusing to pass the time. The locals of Lyonesse knew nothing about them and were not interested. Nobody was interested in much more than painful survival these days. That was what made the singing obscene.
After seven days of cloak-and-dagger and seven days of counting, Addyer suddenly did the big take. "It adds up," he said. "Eighty people a day leaving Lyonesse. Five hundred a week. Twenty-five thousand a year. Maybe that's the answer to the population increase." He spent fifty-five dollars on a telegram to Grande with no more than a hope of delivery. The Telegram read: "EUREKA. I HAVE FOUND (IT)."
Can you spare price of lone cup coffee, honorable madam? I am not tramp-handler but destitute life-form.
Addyer's opportunity came the next day. The O.K. Bus Co. pulled in as usual. Another crowd assembled to board the bus, but this time there were too many. Three people were refused passage. They weren't in the least annoyed. They stepped back, waved energetically as the bus started, shouted instructions for future reunions and then quietly turned and started off down the street.
Addyer was out of his hotel room like a shot. He followed the trio down the main street, turned left after them onto Fourth Avenue, passed the ruined school-house, passed the demolished telephone building, passed the gutted library, railroad station, Protestant Church, Catholic Church . . . and finally reached the outskirts of Lyonesse and then open country.
Here he had to be more cautious. It was difficult stalking the spies with so much of the dusky road illuminated by warning lights. He wasn't suicidal enough to think of hiding in radiation pits. He hung back in an agony of indecision and was at last relieved to see them turn off the broken road and enter the old Baker farmhouse.
"Ah-ha!" said Addyer.
He sat down at the edge of the road on the remnants of a missile and asked himself: "Ah-ha what?" He could not answer, but he knew where to find the answer. He waited until dusk deepened to darkness and then slowly wormed his way forward toward the farmhouse.
It was while he was creeping between the deadly radiation glows and only occasionally butting his head against gravemarkers that he first became aware of two figures in the night. They were in the barnyard of the Baker place and were performing most peculiarly. One was tall and thin. A man. He stood stockstill, like a lighhouse. Upon occasion he took a slow, stately step with infinite caution and waved an arm in slow motion to the other figure. The second was also a man. He was stocky, and trotted jerkily back and forth.
As Addyer approached, he heard the tall man say: "Rooo booo fooo mooo hwaaa looo fooo."
Whereupon the trotter chattered: "Wd-nk-kd-ik-md-pd-ld-nk."
Then they both laughed; the tall man like a locomotive, the trotter like a chipmunk. They turned. The trotter rocketed into the house. The tall man drifted in. And that was amazingly that.
"Oh-ho," said Addyer.
At that moment a pair of hands seized him and lifted him from the ground. Addyer's heart constricted. He had time for one convulsive spasm before something vague was pressed against his face. As he lost consciousness his last idiotic thought was of telescopes.
Can you spare price of solitary coffee for no-loafing unfortunate, honorable sir? Charity will blessings.
When Addyer awoke he was lying on a couch in a small whitewashed room. A gray-haired gentlemen with heavy features was seated at a desk alongside the couch, busily ciphering on bits of paper. The desk was cluttered with what appeared to be intricate time-tables. There was a small radio perched on one side.
"L-Listen . . ." Addyer began faintly.
"Just a minute, Mr. Addyer," the gentleman said pleasantly. He fiddled with the radio. A glow germinated in the middle of the room over a circular copper plate and coalesced into a girl. She was extremely nude and extremely attractive. She scurried to the desk, patted the gentleman's head with the speed of a pneumatic hammer. She laughed and chattered: "Wd-nk-tk-ik-lt-nk."
The gray-haired man smiled and pointed to the door. "Go outside and walk it off," he said. She turned and streaked through the door.
"It has something to do with temporal rates," the gentleman said to Addyer. "I don't understand it. When they come forward they've got accumulated momentum." He began ciphering again. "Why in the world did you have to come snooping, Mr. Addyer?"
"You're spies," Addyer said. "She was talking Chinese."
"Hardly. I'd say it was French. Early French. Middle fifteenth century."
"Middle fifteenth century!" Addyer exclaimed.
"That's what I'd say. You begin to acquire an ear for those stepped-up tempos. Just a minute, please."
He switched the radio on again. Another glow appeared and solidified into a nude man. He was stout, hairy and lugubrious. With exasperating slowness he said: "Mooo fooo blooo wawww hawww pooo."
The gray-haired man pointed to the door. The stout man departed in slow motion.
"The way I see it," the gray-haired man continued conversationally, "when they come back they're swimming against the time current. That slows 'em down. When they come forward, they're swimming with the current. That speeds 'em up. Of course, in any case it doesn't last longer than a few minutes. It wears off."
"What?" Addyer said. "Time travel?"
"Yes. Of course."
"That thing . . ." Addyer pointed to the radio. "A time machine?"
"That's the idea. Roughly."
"But it's too small."
The gray-haired man laughed.
"What is this place anyway? What are you up to?"
"It's a funny thing," the gray-haired man said. "Everybody used to speculate about time-travel. How it would be used for exploration, archaeology,
historical and social research and so on. Nobody ever guessed what the real use would be. ... Therapy."
"Therapy? You mean medical therapy?"
"That's right. Psychological therapy for the misfits who won't respond to any other cure. We let them emigrate Escape. We've set up stations every quarter century. Stations like this."
"I don't understand."
"This is an immigration office."
"Oh my God!" Addyer shot up from the couch. "Then you're the answer to the population increase. Yes? That's how I happened to notice it. Mortality's up so high and birth's down so low these days that your time-addition becomes significant. Yes?"
"Yes, Mr. Addyer."
"Thousands of you coming here. From where?"
"From the future, of course. Time travel wasn't developed until C/H 127. That's ... oh say, 2505 a.d. your chronology. We didn't set up our chain of stations until C/H 189."
"But those fast-moving ones. You said they came forward from the past."
"Oh yes, but they're all from the future originally. They just decided they went too far back."
"Too far?"
The gray-haired man nodded and reflected. "It's amusing, the mistakes people will make. They become unrealistic when they read history. Lose contact with facts. Chap I knew . . . wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than Elizabethan times. 'Shakespeare,' he said. 'Good Queen Bess. Spanish Armada. Drake and Hawkins and Raleigh. Most virile period in history. The Golden Age. That's for me, I couldn't talk sense into him, so we sent him back. Too bad."
"Well?" Addyer asked.
"Oh, he died in three weeks. Drank a glass of water. Typhoid."
"You didn't inoculate him? I mean, the army when it sends men overseas always—"
"Of course we did. Gave him all the immunization we could. But diseases evolve and change too. New strains develop. Old strains disappear. That's what causes pandemics. Evidently our shots wouldn't take against the Elizabethan typhoid. Excuse me . . ."
Again the glow appeared. Another nude man appeared, chattered briefly and then whipped through the door. He almost collided with the nude girl who poked her head in, smiled and called in a curious accent: "Ie vous prie de me pardonner. Quy estoit cette gentil-homme?"
"I was right," the gray-haired man said. "That's Medieval French. They haven't spoken like that since Rabelais." To the girl he said, "Middle English, please. The American dialect."
"Oh. I'm sorry, Mr. Jelling. I get so damned fouled up with my linguistics. Fouled? Is that right? Or do they say—"
"Hey!" Addyer cried in anguish.
"They say it, but only in private these years. Not before strangers."
"Oh yes. I remember. Who was that gentleman who just left?"
"Peters."
"From Athens?"
"That's right."
"Didn't like it, eh?"
"Not much. Seems the Peripatetics didn't have plumbing."
"Yes. You begin to hanker for a modern bathroom after a while. Where do I get some clothes ... or don't they wear clothes this century?"
"No, that's a hundred years forward. Go see my wife. She's in the outfitting room in the barn. That's the big red building."
The tall lighthouse-man Addyer had first seen in the farmyard suddenly manifested himself behind the girl. He was now dressed and moving at normal speed. He stared at the girl; she stared at him. "Splem!" they both cried. They embraced and kissed shoulders.
"St'u my rock-ribbering rib-rockery to heart the hearts two," the man said.
"Heart's too, argal, too heart," the girl laughed.
"Eh? Then you st'u too."
They embraced again and left.
"What was that? Future talk?" Addyer asked. "Shorthand?"
"Shorthand?" Jelling exclaimed in a surprised tone. "Don't you know rhetoric when you hear it? That was thirtieth century rhetoric, man. We don't talk anything else up there. Prosthesis, Diastole, Epergesis, Metabasis, Hendiadys . . . And we're all born scanning."
"You don't have to sound so stuck-up," Addyer muttered enviously. "I could scan too if I tried."
"You'd find it damned inconvenient trying at your time of life."
"What difference would that make?"
"It would make a big difference," Jelling said, "because you'd find that living is the sum of conveniences. You might think plumbing is pretty unimportant compared to ancient Greek philosophers. Lots of people do. But the fact is, we already know the philosophy. After a while you get tired of seeing the great men and listening to them expound the material you already know. You begin to miss the conveniences and familiar patterns you used to take for granted."
"That," said Addyer, "is a superficial attitude."
"You think so? Try living in the past by candlelight, without central heating, without refrigeration, canned foods, elementary drugs. . . . Or, future-wise, try living with Berganlicks, the Twenty-Two Commandments. Duodecimal calendars and currency, or try speaking in meter, planning and scanning each sentence before you talk . . . and damned for a contemptible illiterate if you forget yourself and speak spontaneously in your own tongue."
"You're exaggerating," Addyer said. "I'll bet there are times where I could be very happy. I've thought about it for years, and I—"
"Tcha!" Jelling snorted. "The great illusion. Name one."
"The American Revolution."
"Pfui! No sanitation. No medicine. Cholera in Philadelphia. Malaria in New York. No anesthesia. The death penalty for hundreds of small crimes and petty infractions. None of the books and music you like best. None of the jobs or professions for which you've been trained. Try again."
"The Victorian Age."
"How are your teeth and eyes? In good shape? They'd better be. We can't send your inlays and spectacles back with you. How are your ethics? In bad shape? They'd better be or you'd starve in that cutthroat era. How do you feel about class distinctions? They were pretty strong in those days. What's your religion? You'd better not be a Jew or Catholic or Quaker or Moravian or any minority. What's your politics? If you're a reactionary today the same opinions would make you a dangerous radical a hundred years ago. I don't think you'd be happy."
"I'd be safe."
"Not unless you were rich; and we can't send money back. Only the flesh. No, Addyer, the poor died at the average age of forty in those days . . . worked out, worn out. Only the privileged survived and you wouldn't be one of the privileged."
"Not with my superior knowledge?"
Jelling nodded wearily. "I knew that would come up sooner or later. What superior knowledge? Your hazy recollection of science and invention? Don't be a damned fool, Addyer. You enjoy your technology without the faintest idea of how it works."
"It wouldn't have to be hazy recollection. I could prepare."
"What, for instance?"
"Oh . . . say, the radio. I could make a fortune inventing the radio."
Jelling smiled. "You couldn't invent radio until you'd first invented the hundred allied technical discoveries that went into it. You'd have to create an entire new industrial world. You'd have to discover the vacuum rectifier and create an industry to manufacture it; the self-heterodyne circuit, the nonradiating neutrodyne receiver and so forth. You'd have to develop electric power production and transmission and alternating current. You'd have to—but why belabor the obvious? Could you invent internal combustion before the development of fuel oils?"
"My God!" Addyer groaned.
"And another thing," Jelling went on grimly. "I've been talking about technological tools, but language is a tool too; the tool of communication. Did you ever realize that all the studying you might do could never teach you how a language was really used centuries ago? Do you know how the Romans pronounced Latin? Do you know the Greek dialects? Could you learn to speak and think in Gaelic, seventeenth century Flemish, Old Low German? Never. You'd be a deaf-mute."
"I never thought about it that way," Addyer said slowly.
"Escapists never do. All they're looking
for is a vague excuse to run away."
"What about books? I could memorize a great book and—"
"And what? Go back far enough into the past to anticipate the real author? You'd be anticipating the public too. A book doesn't become great until the public's ready to understand it. It doesn't become profitable until the public's ready to buy it."
"What about going forward into the future?" Addyer asked.
"I've already told you. It's the same problem only in reverse. Could a medieval man survive in the twentieth century? Could he stay alive in street traffic? Drive cars? Speak the language? Think in the language? Adapt to the tempo, ideas and coordinations you take for granted? Never. Could someone from the twenty-fifth century adapt to the thirtieth? Never."
"Well then," Addyer said angrily, "if the past and future are so uncomfortable, what are those people travelling around for?"
"They're not travelling," Jelling said. "They're running,"
"From what?"
"Their own time."
"Why?"
"They don't like it."
"Why not?"
"Do you like yours? Does any neurotic?"
"Where are they going?"
"Any place but where they belong. They keep looking for the Golden Age. Tramps! Time-stiffs! Never satisfied. Always searching, shifting . . . bumming through the centuries. Pfui! Half the panhandlers you meet are probably time-bums stuck in the wrong century."
"And those people coming here . . . they think this is a Golden Age?"
"They do."
"They're crazy," Addyer protested. "Have they seen the ruins? The radiation? The war? The anxiety? The hysteria?"
"Sure. That's what appeals to them. Don't ask me why. Think of it this way: You like the American Colonial period, yes?"
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