Time Waits for Winthrop

by William Tenn

  “Ollie, old boy, I may not pay a whopping income tax, but I’ve been trained to use my mind. I’d like nothing better than to find out what a thoroughly rational approach to this problem could do for us. One thing I know—it can’t possibly come up with less than all this hysteria and emotional hoopla, this executive-type strutting have managed to date.”

  “Listen, a difference it makes?” Mrs. Brucks held her wrist out and pointed to the tiny goldplated watch strapped around it. “Only forty-five minutes left before six o’clock. So what can we do in forty-five minutes? A miracle maybe we can manufacture on short notice? Magic we can turn out to order? Go fight City Hall. My Sammy I know I won’t see again.”

  The thin young man turned on her angrily. “I’m not talking of magic and miracles. I’m talking of logic. Logic and the proper evaluation of data. These people not only have a historical record available to them that extends back to and includes our own time, but they are in regular touch with the future—their future. That means there are also historical records that extend back to and include their time.”

  Mrs. Brucks cheered up perceptibly. She liked listening to education. “So?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Those five people who exchanged with us must have known in advance that Winthrop was going to be stubborn. It stands to reason they wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their lives in what is for them a pretty raw and uncivilized environment—unless they had known of a way out. It’s up to us to find that way.”

  “Maybe,” Mary Ann Carthington suggested, bravely biting the end off a sniffle, “maybe the next future kept it a secret from them. Or maybe all five of them were suffering from what they call here a bad case of individual eccentric impulse.”

  “That’s not how the concept of individual eccentric impulse works. I don’t want to go into it now, but believe me, that’s not how it works! And I don’t think the Temporal Embassies keep this kind of secret from the people in the period to which they’re accredited. No, I tell you the solution is right here, if we can only see it.”

  Oliver T. Mead had been sitting with an intent expression on his face, as if he were trying to locate a fact hidden at the other end of a long tunnel of unhappiness. He straightened up suddenly and said: “Storku mentioned the Temporal Embassy! But he didn’t think it was a good idea to approach them—they were too involved with long-range historical problems to be of any use to us. But something else he said—something else we could resort to. What was it now?”

  They all waited anxiously while he thought. Dave Pollock had just begun a remark about “high-surtax memories” when the rotund executive smacked his thigh resoundingly.

  “I remember! He said we could ask the Oracle Machine! We might have some difficulty interpreting the answer, according to him, but at this point that’s the least of our worries. We’re in a desperate emergency and beggars can’t be choosers. If we get any kind of answer, any kind of answer at all—”

  Mary Ann Carthington looked away from the little cosmetics laboratory she was using to repair the shiny damage caused by tears. “Now that you bring it up, Mr. Mead, the temporal supervisor made some such remark to me, too. About the Oracle Machine, I mean.”

  “He did? Good! That firms it up nicely. We may still have a chance. Well, then, as to who shall do it—I am certain I don’t have to draw a diagram when it comes to selecting the one of us most capable of dealing with a complex piece of futuristic machinery.”

  They all stared at Dave Pollock, who swallowed hard and inquired hoarsely, “You mean me?”

  “Certainly I mean you!” Mr.

  Mead said. “You’re the longhaired scientific expert around here.”

  “I’m a teacher, that’s all, a high-school science teacher. And you know how I feel about having anything to do with the Oracle Machine. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the one aspect of this civilization that’s most decadent. Why, I’d rather—”

  “My stomach didn’t turn over when I had to go in and have an argument with that crazy Mr. Winthrop?” Mrs. Brucks broke in. “I liked watching one minute a pair rompers, the next minute I don’t know what, an evening gown he starts wearing? And that crazy talk—smell this from a Mars, taste this from a Venus—you think maybe, Mr. Pollock, I enjoyed myself? But somebody had to do, so I did. All we’re asking you is a try. A try you can make.”

  “And I can assure you,” Mary Ann Carthington put in swiftly, “that Gygyo Rablin is absolutely and completely the last person on Earth I would go to for a favor. It’s a personal matter and I’d rather not discuss it now, if you don’t mind, but I would die, positively die, rather than go through that again. I did it, though, because there was the teensiest chance it would help us all get home again. I don’t think we’re asking too much of you. I don’t think so one little bit.”

  Mr. Mead nodded. “I agree with you, young lady. Storku is a man I haven’t seen eye to eye with since we’ve arrived and I’ve gone out of my way to avoid him, but to have to get involved in that unholy Shriek Field madness in the bargain—” He brooded for a while over some indigestible mental fragment, then, as his cleated golf shoes began wriggling about lovingly on his feet, shook himself determinedly and went on. “It’s time you stopped shooting off your mouth, Pollock, and got down to plain brass tacks. Einstein’s theory of relativity isn’t going to get us back to good old 1958 and neither is your Ph.D. or M.A. or whatever. What we need now is action, action with a capital A and no ifs, no ands, no buts.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll do it.”

  “And another thing.” Mr. Mead rolled a wicked little thought pleasurably to and fro in his mind for a moment or two before letting it out. “You take the jumper. You said yourself we don’t have the time to do any walking and that’s doubly true right now, when we’re right up against the dead line. I don’t want to hear any whining and any whimpering about the jumper making you sick. If Miss Carthington and I could take it, so can you.”

  Dave Pollock rallied. “You think I won’t? I’ve done most of my traveling here by jumper. I’m not afraid of mechanical progress—just so long as it’s genuine progress. Of course I’ll take the jumper.”

  He signaled for one with a microscopic return of his old swagger. When it appeared, he walked under it with shoulders squared. Let them all watch how a rational, science-minded man goes about things. And anyway, using the jumper wasn’t nearly as upsetting to him as it seemed to be to the others. He could take jumpers in stride.

  That was infinitely more than he could say for the Oracle Machine.

  For that reason, he had himself deposited outside the building which housed the machine. A bit of a walk and he might be able to get his thoughts in order. The only trouble was, the sidewalk had other ideas. Silently, obsequiously, but nonetheless firmly. It began to move under his feet as he started walking around the squat, slightly quivering structure. It rippled him ahead at a pace somewhat faster than the one he set, changing its direction as soon as he changed his.

  Pollock looked around at the empty streets and shrugged with resignation. The sentient, eager-to-serve sidewalks didn’t bother him, either. He had expected something like that in the future, that and the enormously alert servitor houses, the clothes which changed their color and cut at the wearer’s caprice—all more or less, in one form or another, to be anticipated by a knowledgeable man as human progress.

  Even the development in food—from the wiggling please-eat-me-and-enjoy-me stuff all the way up to the more complex culinary compositions on which an interstellarly famous chef might have worked for a year or more—was logical, if you considered how bizarre, to an early American colonist, would be the fantastic, cosmopolitan variety of potables and packaged meals in any twentieth-century supermarket.

  These things, the impedimenta of daily life, all change and modify in time. But certain things should not.

  When the telegram had arrived in Houston, Texas, informing him that—of all the people in the United States of America—he was most
similar to one of the prospective visitors from 2458 A.D., he had gone almost mad with joy. The celebrity he suddenly enjoyed in the faculty lunchroom was unimportant, as were the page-one stories in local newspapers under the heading: LONE STAR SON GALLOPING FUTURE-WARD.

  First and foremost, it was reprieve—reprieve and another chance. Family responsibilities—a dying father and a sick younger sister—had prevented him from getting the advanced academic degrees necessary for a university teaching position, with all its accompanying prestige, higher income to and opportunities for research. Then, when they had come to an end and he had gone back to school, a sudden infatuation and too-hasty marriage had thrown him back onto the same treadmill.

  He had just begun to realize—despite the undergraduate promise he had shown and none-too-minute achievement—how thoroughly he was trapped by the pleasant residential neighborhood and cleanly modern high school between which he shuttled daily, when the telegram arrived, announcing his selection as one of the group to be sent five hundred years ahead. How it was going to help him, what, precisely, he would do with the chance, he did not know—but it had lifted him out of the ruck of anonymity. Somehow, someway, it would enable him to become a striking individual at last.

  Dave Pollock had not realized the extent of his good fortune until he met the other four in Washington, D.C. He had heard, of course, how the finest minds in the country had bitterly jostled and elbowed each other in a frenzied attempt to get into the group and find out what was going to develop in their specialty half a millennium hence. But not until he had talked with his prospective fellow-tourists—an itinerant worker, a Bronx housewife, a pompous Midwestern business executive, a pretty but very ordinary San Francisco stenographer—did it come to him that he alone had any amount of scientific training.

  Only he would be capable of evaluating the amount of major technological advance! He would be the only one able to correlate all the bewildering mass of minor changes into something resembling coherence! And thus, above all, he would be the only one to appreciate the essential quality of the future, the basic threads that would run through it from its underlying social fabric to its starleaping fringes!

  He, who had wanted to devote his life to knowledge-seeking, would exist for two weeks, unique and intellectually alone, in a five-century-long extrapolation of every laboratory and library in his age!

  At first, it had been like that. Everywhere there was glory and excitement and discovery. Then little disagreeable things began to creep in. The food, the clothing, the houses—well, you either ignored them or made other arrangements. These people were extremely hospitable and quite ingenious: they didn’t at all mind providing you with more familiar meals when your stomach had revolted a couple of times. The women, with their glossy baldness and strange attitudes toward relations between the sexes—well, you had a brand-new wife at home and didn’t have to get involved.

  But Shriek Field and Panic Stadium—that was another matter. Dave Pollock was proud of being a thoroughly rational person. He had been proud of the future, when he first arrived, taking it almost as a personal vindication that the people in it should be so thoroughly, universally rational, too. His first acquaintance with Shriek Field had almost nauseated him. That the superb intellects he had come to know should willingly transform themselves into a frothing, hysterical pack of screaming animals and at regular, almost medically prescribed intervals…

  They had explained to him elaborately that they could not be such superb intellects, so thoroughly rational, unless they periodically released themselves in this fashion. It made sense, but still watching them do it was downright horrifying! He knew he would never be able to stand the sight of it.

  Yet one could make this acceptable in some corner of the brain. But the chess business?

  Since his college days, Dave Pollock had fancied himself as a chess player. He was just good enough to be able to tell himself that if ever he had time to really concentrate on the game, he’d be good enough to play in tournaments. He’d even subscribed to a chess magazine and followed all the championship matches with great attention. He’d wondered what chess would be like in the future—surely the royal game, having survived for so many centuries, would survive another five? What would it be like: a version of three-dimensional chess, or possibly another, even more complex evolution?

  The worst of it was that the game was practically identical with the one played in the twentieth century.

  Almost every human being in 2458 played it; almost every human being in 2458 enjoyed it. But there were no human champions. There were no human opponents. There were only the chess machines. And they could beat anybody.

  “What’s the sense,” he had complained, “of playing with a machine which has millions of ‘best moves and counter-moves’ built into its memory circuits? That has a selector mechanism able to examine and choose from every chess game ever recorded? A machine which has been designed never to be beaten? What’s the sense—where’s the excitement?”

  “We don’t play to win,” he had been told wonderingly. “We play to play. It’s the same with all our games: aggressions are gotten rid of in a Shriek or a Panic; games are just for mental or physical exercise. And so, when we play, we want to play against the best. Besides, every now and then, an outstandingly good player, once or twice in his lifetime, is able to hold the machine to a draw. Now that is an achievement. That merits excitement.”

  You had to love chess as much as he did, Dave Pollock supposed, to realize what an obscenity the existence of these machines made of it. Even the other three in his group, who had become much more restive than he at twenty-fifth-century mechanisms and mores, only stared at him blankly when he raged over it. No, if you didn’t love something, you weren’t bothered overmuch when it was degraded. But surely they could see the abdication of human intellect, of human reason, that the chess machines implied?

  Of course, that was nothing compared to the way human reason had abdicated before the Oracle Machine. That was the last straw to a rational person.

  The Oracle Machine. He glanced at his watch. Only twenty-five minutes left. Better hurry. He took one last self-encouraging breath and climbed the cooperative steps of the building.

  “My name is Stilia,” a baldheaded, rather pleasant-faced young woman said as she came toward him in the spacious anteroom. “I’m the attendant of the machine for today. Can I help you?”

  “I suppose so.” He looked uncomfortably at a distant, throbbing wall. Behind the yellow square on that wall, he knew, was the inner brain of the Oracle Machine. How he’d love to kick a hole in that brain!

  Instead, he sat down on an upraised hummock of floor and wiped his perspiring hands carefully. He told her about the approaching deadline, about Winthrop’s stubbornness, about the decision to consult the Oracle Machine.

  “Oh, Winthrop—yes! He’s that delightful old man. I met him at a dream dispensary a week ago. What wonderful awareness he has! Such a total immersion in our culture! We’re very proud of Winthrop. We’d like to help him every way we possibly can.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Dave Pollock said morosely, “we’re the ones who need help. We’ve got to get back.”

  Stilia laughed. “Of course. We’d like to help everybody. But Winthrop is—special. He’s trying hardest. Now if you’ll just wait here, I’ll go in and put your problem before the Oracle Machine.”

  She flexed her right arm at him and walked toward the yellow square. Pollock watched it expand in front of her, then, as she went through the opening it made, contract behind her. In a few minutes, she returned.

  “I’ll tell you when to go in, Mr. Pollock. The machine is working on your problem. The answer you get will be the very best that can be made, given the facts available.”

  “Thanks.” He mused for a while. “Tell me something. Doesn’t it seem to take something vital out of life—out of your thinking life—to know that you can take absolutely any problem—personal problem, scientific problem or
work problem—to the Oracle Machine and it will solve it much better than you could?”

  Stilia looked puzzled. “Not at all. To begin with, problem-solving is a very small part of today’s thinking life. It would be as logical to say that it took something vital out of life to make a hole with an electric drill instead of a hand gouge. In your time, no doubt, there are people who feel just that way; they have the obvious privilege of not using electric drills. Those who use electric drills, however, have their physical energy freed for tasks they regard as more important.

  “The Oracle Machine is the major tool of our culture. It has been designed toward just one end—computing all the factors of a given problem and relating them to the totality of pertinent data that is in the possession of the human race. But even if people consult the Oracle Machine, they may not be able to understand and apply the answer. And if they do understand it, they may not choose to act on it.”

  “They may not choose to act on it?” Dave Pollock repeated incredulously. “Does that make sense? You said yourself the answers are the very best that can be made, given the facts available.”

  “Human activities don’t necessarily have to make sense,” she explained. “That is the prevailing and rather comfortable modern view, Mr. Pollock. There is always the individual eccentric impulse.”

  “Yeah, there’s always that,” he grumbled. “Resign your private personality by running with a howling mob at Shriek Field, lose all of yourself in an insane crowd—but don’t forget your individual eccentric impulse. Never, never forget your individual eccentric impulse!”

  She nodded soberly. “That really sums it up, in spite of your unmistakable sarcasm. Why do you find it so hard to accept? Man is both a herd animal and a highly individualistic animal—what we call a self-realizable animal. The herd instincts must be satisfied at whatever cost, and have been in the past through various forms of ingroup and outgroup activities. The need to resign one’s personality and immerse in something larger than self has been recognized since earliest times: Shriek Fields and Panic Stadiums everywhere on the planet provide for this need and expend it harmlessly.”