Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “I’ll get him moving before nightfall,” Kettelman said. Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey! Fuel for his tanks? That’s what Detringer wanted all along.”

  “The court is disinterested in what the prisoner may or may not have wanted,” Macmillan said. “His desires are not germane to the judgment of this court.”

  Kettelman said, “But damn it, man, can’t you see that you’re letting him go?”

  “I am making him go,” Macmillan said. “It is quite a different thing.”

  “We’ll see what they say about this back on Earth,” Kettelman said ominously.

  Detringer bowed to show acquiescence. Then, managing to keep a straight face, he left the Earth ship.

  AT NIGHTFALL Detringer blasted off. The faithful Ichor was with him—now more faithful than ever, since he had discharged his compulsion. Soon they were in the depths of space and Ichor asked, “Master, where are we going?”

  “To some marvelous new world,” Detringer said.

  “Or perhaps to our deaths?”

  “Perhaps,” Detringer said. “But with full fuel tanks I refuse to worry.”

  They were silent for a while. Then Ichor said, “I hope that Captain Macmillan doesn’t get into trouble over this.”

  “He seemed quite capable of taking care of himself,” Detringer said.

  BACK on Earth, Captain Macmillan’s action was the cause of much controversy. Before any official decision could be reached about it, however, a second, official contact was made between Ferlang and Earth. The Detringer case came up inevitably, was found too intricate to allow of any quick decision. The matter was turned over to a panel of jurists from the two civilizations.

  The case provided full-time employment for five hundred and six Ferlang and Earth lawyers. Arguments pro and con were still being heard years later, by which time Detringer had found a safe refuge and respected position among the Oumenke Peoples of the rim-star civilization.

  1974

  THE SLAVES OF TIME

  Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One:

  Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn’t invented it right because it didn’t work. His machine was about the size of a white plastic shoe box. Its surfaces were covered with dials and switches and levers and buttons. It made funny noises when Charlie turned it on, and its glow bulbs flashed purple and green, and it made his skin tingle. But nothing else. Charlie’s machine was a very good tingler and flasher and noisemaker, but it was not a good time machine.

  It didn’t become that until later, after Charlie had gained enough insight from the future so that he could adjust the machine to work properly in the present. (There is a paradox involved in that, of course. Time travel is full of paradoxes. The universe runs on paradox-power.)

  So there was Charlie on a beautiful September afternoon in his basement laboratory on Apple Street in the unincorporated township of Harvest Falls, Indiana, tinkering with his machine and talking out loud to himself, saying things like, “Oscillation deployment factor . . . beat phase regeneration . . . infinite recycling amplitudes . . . second force reflection coefficient . . .” This is the veritable language in which genius communicates with itself, and Charlie was definitely a genius, even though Myra’s father thought he was “a mite loco.” Myra’s father was the leading banker in Harvest Falls and a keen amateur psychometrician. Myra was Charlie’s fiancée. Just now she was out for a drive with Carter Littlejohn, once the finest tailback in Hoosier history, now a locomotive salesman and the future father of Myra’s illegitimate daughter, Hilda. Gleister’s parents lived in a condominium in Jupiter, Florida, played Bingo every Friday night and wrote to Charlie on the first of every month. These people play no part in the story. Gleister also had an Uncle Max who lived in Key West and was known locally as the Pinocle King of the Conches. He also plays no part in the story. Nobody plays any real part in this story except Charlie Gleister, who plays entirely too large a part, or too many parts. But that’s what happens when you begin to jump time tracks, as Charlie Gleister is about to do.

  In the meantime, however, he was seated at his workbench putting tiny components together and taking them apart again and getting grease on his white shirt and cursing mildly and waiting for a gestalt to form or an insight to occur or something to happen.

  And then something did happen. A voice behind him said, “Er, excuse me.”

  Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Plus Two:

  The hairs on the back of Gleister’s neck stood erect. He knew that he had bolted the lab door. His hand closed idiotically on the handle of a micrometer weighing perhaps thirty grams. He turned slowly.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” the man behind him said, “but there was no other way. I’ve come about a very important matter.”

  Charlie relaxed his grip on the deadly micrometer. The man did not seem to be a dope-inflamed mugger. He was a tall lanky man of about Charlie’s own age, with a long, homely, good-natured face. He was holding a white plastic box covered with dials and switches and levers and buttons. There was something familiar about him.

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” Charlie asked.

  The stranger grinned and didn’t answer. Charlie looked at him, taking in the white shirt stained with grease, the khaki slacks, the Thorn McCann ripple sole shoes . . .

  “Oh my God,” Charlie said, “you look just like me.”

  “I am you,” the stranger said. “Or you are me. Or, more accurately, we’re both Charlie Gleister occupying different time tracks.”

  “How can that be?” Gleister asked.

  “That’s a silly question for you to ask,” the other Gleister said, “seeing as how you have just invented the world’s first time machine and are therefore the world’s leading expert on the nature of time.”

  “But I haven’t invented it yet, not so that it works.”

  “Sure you have. Or you will very soon, which comes to the same thing.”

  “Are you certain about that? I seem to be doing something wrong. Could you give me a hint?”

  “Of course,” the other Gleister said. “Just remember that reality is positional and that nothing happens for the first time.”

  “Thanks,” Gleister said doubtfully. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m going to get my time machine working soon, go into the future, then come back and meet myself just before I invent the time machine.”

  The other Gleister nodded.

  “That’s sort of weird, isn’t it?” Charlie asked.

  “Not at all,” the other Gleister said. “You come back to now in order to urge yourself not to invent the time machine.”

  “Not to invent it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Just a minute,” Gleister said. “Let’s start all over. I invent a time machine and go into the future and then come back to now and tell myself not to invent a time machine. Is that what I’m going to do?”

  “That’s it. But you don’t have to keep on referring to us both as T. We are both Charlie Gleister, of course, but we are also separate individuals since we occupy different time tracks and are/were/will undergo different experiences at different moments in subjective time. So even though we’re the same people, that makes us different, since reality is positional.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Gleister said. “Or my word for it . . . I think I’m getting a little hysterical . . . Why shouldn’t I invent the time machine I invented?”

  “Because it will be used for evil purposes.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Just take my word for it. I have to get out of here now: you and I talking together in the past constitutes a regressive temporal paradox, which can be maintained for only a few minutes and then is self-cancelling. Progressive temporal paradoxes are another matter, of course; but you’ll learn all of this yourself. Just believe me, do yourself a favor, don’t invent that time machine.”

  The other Gleister began to shimmer fain
tly. Charlie called out, “Hey, wait! There’s a couple things—”

  “Sorry, I’m smack out of duration,” the other Gleister said. The shimmering intensified and his figure grew transparent. “How do you like this for an exit?” the other Gleister asked, grinning self-consciously. “See you around.”

  The other Gleister disappeared.

  Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One:

  After the other Gleister had gone, Charlie needed only a moment to decide not to not invent the time machine. He didn’t like taking orders, not even from someone who called himself himself: which was arguable anyhow, since reality is positional. If it was so important not to invent a time machine, let the other Gleister not invent it.

  Charlie went to work immediately, and, knowing that the thing was possible, needed only two hours to get his time machine working properly. Nothing happens for the first time, especially if what you’re trying to do is to invent something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Of course, if nothing happens for the first time, that leaves the apparent problem of how anything happens at all. But the difficulty is entirely semantic: in the eternal recurrence of subatomic configurations of which our world is a simulacrum, there is no question of beginnings or endings. There are only middles, continuations, repetitions. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

  So there was Charlie with his fully operational time machine neatly encased in a white plastic box, and now he is going on a journey into the future. But how? Consider—time and space are potentially equivalent quantities. They can be transformed into each other via the deus ex machina of a time machine. Take a simple analogy. You have five oranges and three apples. You want to add them together. To do so, you must first convert apples into oranges or oranges into apples or both into something else. The formula for converting apples into oranges is Taste divided by Flavor plus the square root of Cotor multiplied by seeds squared. You handle space-time transpositions in the same way, but using the appropriate formula. A time machine is no more than a realtime space-into-time converter operating on recycling interface energy residues. The practical application is a little more complicated than that, of course, and only Charlie Gleister was ever able to make it work. That may seem to be a violation of the law of Eternal Recurrence; but Exceptionality is also subject to repetition, as will be seen.

  Gleister set the machine’s controls for the limit of its forward ability—a matter of some millions of years of human time, or several hours from the viewpoint of a star, or a googol of chilicosms from the outlook of a Paramecium. He pushed the button. Something happened.

  At Gleister’s level of awareness, he seemed to be traveling on a straight line extending between past and future; a line capable of countless branchings as chance or circumstance arose. But seen from a higher level of magnitude, a time track is a fixed orbit around some unimaginable center, and what feels like a deviation is mere perturbation in an inevitable circle. Only the macrocosmic outlook permits the fiction of straight lines and novelty; the microcosm is the realm of circularity and repetition. The interface between these different realities is coincidence. Rate of coincidence is a function of rate of speed. Travel fast enough and far enough and long enough and you get to see the cosmic scenery—the haunted landscapes of eternal recurrences.

  Gleister experienced a brief moment of vertigo (Quaes-tura Effect) and then, there he was, the world’s first time-traveler, standing in the unimaginably far-distant future. Tremulously he looked around him.

  The first thing he noticed were the policemen.

  Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Variation A:

  . . . determined to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut. One of the first things I notice is the accommodation effect which regularizes my experience. (Inseparability of subject and object, constancy of sense-ratios.) It is all so familiar! I suppose that an electron, traveling from one atom to another, also expects to enter a realm of unimaginable novelty.

  But perhaps the scenery in every part of the universe is roughly similar; since one sees in accordance with who one is rather than with what is there.

  Linguistic accommodation as well. Are they speaking my language or am I speaking theirs? I can never know: the transaction cannot watch itself being transacted.

  I am in the town of Mingusville 32 S. There are at least four different sets of uniformed police on the streets—municipal, political, secret and special police. I am posing as a Nepa-lese sociology student writing a thesis entitled “The Ecstacy of Conformity.” (This theme is acceptable to officialdom of any time period and explains away my chi-chi accent and lack of present-day knowledge.)

  Mingusville 32 S is a ramshackle place containing some interesting technological retrogressions: steam-operated vehicles burning dried cow dung, for example, as well as many horse-drawn vehicles (and mules, oxen and even a few camels). Is this due to depletion of fossil fuels? And whatever happened to atomic power?

  Mingusville has a rudimentary communication system, but only officials have individual telephones. Electricity is scarce and expensive, and equipment maintenance is haphazard. I estimate that two-thirds of the homes use kerosene lighting. No structure is higher than three stories: cinder-block construction sometimes faced with brick or tile. Center of town is dominated by large open-air market facing gigantic police barracks. My impression is that the people around here lead uneventful, slothful, unchallenging lives. This is reflected in their willingness to drop whatever they’re doing and talk for hours with a stranger such as myself.

  I learn that various diseases are endemic here: equivalents of trachoma, encephalitis, tick fever, and others. (Cholera and bubonic plague devastated this region six years ago.) There are many beggars in the streets, although this is forbidden by the Emperor. Blacks and whites are present in roughly equal quantities. I am unable to detect any appreciable difference in social status on a racial basis: everybody here seems to be equally deprived.

  Government is the only interesting game in town. One man rules the world—the Emperor Mingus. He maintains a standard police state. Mingus is your typical paranoid fascist, has everybody watching everybody else. There are cameras and recorders everywhere, miles of film and tape, legions of people monitoring all of this, other people monitoring the monitors, and so on and so on until you get to the Emperor, the ultimate monitor. I wouldn’t have believed you could control a world in this way, but Mingus is giving it a pretty good try.

  He is aided in all this by a secret weapon. It seems that Mingus possesses a time machine. When something goes wrong, he can (subject to certain natural restrictions) go back in time and correct it. It’s a hell of a good way to take out underground leaders: don’t bother combing a city or countryside for them, just go back to before they went underground—to when they were children, say—and kill them then.

  The main restriction on all this is physical. Mingus has to do it all himself. He can’t entrust the time machine to anyone else/because then that person could go back and kill Mingus and become Emperor himself.

  Even with this limit, the machine gives him absolute and uncanny powers. Yet in spite of it, there is a resistance movement. Not everybody can be located via time machine. The vulnerable ones have been weeded out already. Mingus’s entire creaky organization is devoted to finding and destroying those enemies that Mingus cannot personally destroy.

  People tell me that the time machine looks like a shoe box. It is made of white plastic. People nightly curse Gleister, the fiend who invented the thing. The word “gleister” has entered all languages. “I’ll gleister you” is the ultimate threat; “you damned gleister” is the ultimate insult.

  There is a great deal more to learn about this place, but it’ll have to wait. I’ve just learned that I am an absolute and unmitigated gleister and that I have gleistered the human race but good. I must do something about it.

  Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Variation A Continuation 12 plus Gleister Main Line Sequenc
e Time Track 5 plus Gleister Minor Sequence 32.

  Gleister sat down on a bench in Mingus Memorial Park to think things over. What should he do? The first thing that occurred to him was to go back to just before he invented the time machine, and not invent it. But that could not be done, to judge by the experience of the other Gleister. Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can’t step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything. There was no niche in the past waiting for him to come back and occupy it. Nature will tolerate a paradox, but she abhors a vacuum.

  There seemed to be no point in trying to go back and convince another Gleister not to invent the time machine. (Again!) There wasn’t one Gleister to convince, anyhow; there were a multiplicity of potential Gleisters, each of them identical to him up to the moment of contact, and each of them different from him from that moment on. That too was inevitable: like the universe, the mind is a plenum constantly cycling its contents. A novel input redistributed the contents and changed their cycling rate. Gleister could remain himself only if he didn’t interfere with himself.

  But the situation he had presented to the world was intolerable. He was determined to do something about it. But what should he do?

  He sat and thought, uncomfortably aware that at least one other Gleister had done the same thing. How many more Gleisters would sit on this spot and consider the alternatives?

  But that was defeatist thinking. From one viewpoint there were (potentially) a multiplicity of Gleisters; but from another viewpoint there was only one, and he was that one. After all, it didn’t matter what these other people called themselves or where they came from; he was only the person he was here and now, the person whom he experienced. Reality is positional, ego is relational, and nature doesn’t deal in abstractions.