Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  “You are not!” snapped his uncle indignantly. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. You kids have the streets to yourself three days a week as it is. If you think you’re going to be allowed to throw lead around while your elders are on their way to church, you’ve got another think coming!”

  “I don’t think the producers will mind,” said Alan softly. He made a quick mental calculation and took one step backwards. When his hand came out of his worn grenade case, it wasn’t empty.

  There has been two little black boxes.

  MR. Flugnet had been right, the new concussion grenade did have a beautifully defined blast area. Aside from a slight ringing in his ears, Alan felt fine as he walked out of the house. For the first time in his life during a consumption period, he didn’t dive into the communication trench that led to the street. Instead he walked slowly across the lawn. When he got to the sidewalk he sat down on the curb and waited. There was a brief staccato rattle of a burp gun from across the way and a moment later the Higgens kid came out of his house.

  “Over here,” yelled Alan. “The rest will be along in a minute.”

  From houses all up and down the street began to come sharp crashing explosions.

  “Those new hand grenades are sure something,” said the Higgens kid.

  “They sure are,” said Alan. He sighed comfortably and cupped his chin in his hands. “But tomorrow we’ll have to start collecting all the ones that are left over. You leave stuff like that laying around and somebody might get hurt.”

  THE END

  MEDDLER’S WORLD

  They reached into yesterday to change tomorrow—and were gone with a world that never was. And in their place was—a world that might have been!

  PART ONE: Tomorrow

  “WHILE IN the Denver salient our forces evacuated Boulder in accordance with the General Staff’s plan for a strategic rectification of our lines. Thirty-Seven of the enemy’s robot tanks were destroyed while attempting a sortie designed to take advantage of our orderly withdrawal. Losses to our troops were negligible.”

  As the speaker set in the ceiling of the underground laboratory went silent, there was a snort of disgust from the lanky, tired-eyed major, in the uniform of the Midwestern Protectorate, who was lounging on the old studio couch that stood against the far wall. The slender girl, who was checking the control board of the complex bank of equipment that occupied the entire other end of the laboratory, ran her fingers absently through her short-cropped, copper colored hair and turned toward him. “Did you say something?”

  “Nope, but did you catch that?”

  “What?”

  He jerked his thumb toward the speaker.

  She shook her head. “It makes noises twenty-four hours a day. I never listen to it. Did something special just come over?”

  “Yeah. Our Sunday punch has fanned air. We just got thrown out of Boulder. With the canyon unstopped, the Rocky Mountain Republic will have its tanks in Denver in a week. By the time the General has finished rectifying his lines, we’ll be back where we started from six months ago—unless you can come up with the improved antitank homing rocket you promised for production two weeks ago, that is.”

  She gave an indifferent shrug. “I’ve been so busy tinkering with the Monster that I haven’t had any time left for toy making. If things check out the way they should, I may have time to whip up something for him next week. All he needs is an automatic antiscrambling device that can be used on our present models.”

  “Listen, baby,” said the major grimly, “you keep playing around the way you have been, and you’re going to have Security on your neck: “The General gave you this lab to develop new weapons for the Midwestern Protectorate. If he ever finds out that you’ve been using his precious materials to try and develop a family-sized time machine, you’re going to be in the soup—but proper.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and turned back to the instrument panel. The major pulled a battered pipe from the pocket of his old leather flying jacket, lit it, and then blew a long jet of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Even if. you do get in trouble, at least you’ve had a chance to do the kind of work you’re trained for,” he said at last. A note of bitterness crept into his voice as he continued. “That’s more than I’ve got. There’s no place for flyers any more, and it’s getting worse. I’ve been up exactly once in the last six months. The rest of the time I’ve been parked in a soft chair five hundred feet underground, watching a telescreen and twisting a knob once in a while. A man can’t even ride in one of the big boys any longer. Too many G’s.” He sighed. “Oh well, maybe someday . . . What’s new with the Monster?”

  She didn’t look up from her work when she answered. “I think maybe I’ve got it whipped.”

  “What’s it?”

  “The phase control problem. So far I’ve been able to get a warp set up at the space-time intersect at which I want to establish a portal, but a microsecond after I get it positioned, the field goes out of control and blam! goes another generator.”

  “And now?”

  She ran her tongue over her lower lip and unconsciously lowered her voice. “I’ve got a field damper worked out that looks as if it might do the trick.”

  “And if it does?”

  “I’ll be able to open a little door into any spot in the past that I want to.”

  “How big a door?”

  “Four or five inches. The theoretical maximum is six. Why?”

  “I was just wondering what you were going to use it for if you did get it working.”

  THERE WAS a strange hard note in his voice that caused her to turn toward him in surprise. “Why . . . why I’m not going to use it for anything. Building a working model was the only way to test the theoretical formulation I worked out.”

  “You’re going to turn it over to the General, then?”

  “Why, I suppose so; I’ve got to explain all those special requisitions somehow. Don’t you think I should?” The major looked at her oddly for a moment and then said, “Before you do, it might be a good idea to spend a little time thinking what he might do with it.”

  “But he couldn’t do anything with it,” she said, a confused expression on her face. “The portal is too small for anybody to go through.”

  “But not too small for somebody to reach through,” retorted the other gruffly. “This gadget of yours is a natural for a little quiet assassination. Look! The General is losing his war with the Rocky Mountain Republic because of the robot tanks that Norman DeWitt developed for them. So our intelligence checks back and finds that when DeWitt was only three years old he had a severe bout with pneumonia, and was in an oxygen tent for seven days. What would be simpler—if it turns out that the Monster can be used to open a time warp—than to open a portal into the kid’s hospital room some night when the nurse is out, reach through, and turn off the oxygen? Presto, no adult DeWitt. No adult DeWitt, no robot tanks. No robot tanks and the General can mop up the Rocky Mountain Republic just like he did the Northern Federation and the Free State of Columbia.”

  He tapped the ash out of his pipe, stuffed the bowl full of poorly cured shreds of black tobacco, and then lit it with an old fashioned kitchen match. The girl looked thoughtfully from him to the machine and then back again.

  “Why the sudden concern?” she said. “You spend your days tossing guided missiles at people for the greater glory of the Protectorate. If you don’t want the General to come out on top, why do you work for him?”

  “For the same reason you do, I guess,” he said slowly. “You get a chance to do lab work, and I—well, at least I’m controlling something that’s flying. But that doesn’t mean that I’d welcome the thought of turning what’s left of the world over the tender mercies of a homocidal psycho like the General. And with your widget to use against the opposition, it wouldn’t be long until he was top dog. You’ve got to scrap the Monster before he finds out about it.”

  She started to protest and then stopped. “You’re right, of cour
se; I guest; that I just haven’t got a practical mind. But I’m not going to junk baby until I find out whether that field damper works or not.” She paused and then gave a throaty chuckle. “Why don’t we make our test run on the General? Think what a break it would have been for the country if he had been strangled at birth.”

  “Lovely idea,” said the officer, “but eliminating him really wouldn’t help much, you know. He’s a consequence, not a cause. He didn’t start World War III; he was just like a couple of hundred like him who turned warlord in the chaos that followed the final breakup and set up their own governments. If you wanted to stop things you’d have to go farther back than the General.” He stared thoughtfully at the little spiral of smoke that was curling up from his pipe bowl. “I wonder how far back you would have to go to get the world back on the right track?”

  “How about blocking the discovery of atomic energy? If it weren’t for the alphabet bombs we’d still have a few skylines left.”

  HE THOUGHT for a moment and then shook his head. “That wouldn’t do it, either. What about the mass bombings of World War II? I’m no military historian but I’ve always had a hunch that where we got off the track and started to go to hell in a hanging basket was all the way back in the late eighteenth century. To France, to be exact; that’s where the development of the modern mass army started.”

  The girl cleared a space for herself on top of a work table and settled down on it, legs crossed like a small Buddha. “Go ahead,” she said, “this sounds interesting.”

  “I may be wrong,” he continued earnestly, “but look! Back when fighting forces were limited to small professional armies, the poor civilians weren’t getting slapped around all the time. What troops there were, were mercenaries; and when they fought, they fought with each other, not with innocent bystanders. A nice level spot would be selected for a battle, and army A and army B would bang away at each other. If the home team lost, the towns in the vicinity would pay their taxes to somebody else for a while, and that took care of that.”

  “You’re making it sound too good,” protested the girl. “Haven’t you ever read any accounts of what went on when a city was sacked?”

  “Sure. A few women got raped—or at least they claimed they did after it was all over—and a few protesting husbands and boy friends got clonked on the head. But when the invaders pulled out a few days later, there was still a town there. Can you say the same for Pittsburg?”

  She shrugged. “All right, so things were better then. But why blame everything on the poor French?”

  “Because they saved their revolution from the interventionists by introducing conscription and building the first mass army. After that, peoples warred on peoples rather than professionals on professionals. Without the mass army you wouldn’t have total war; and without total war you wouldn’t have this!” He threw out his arms and made a circle that included the whole of the battered world.

  The girl still looked dubious. “But we don’t have mass armies any longer. Most of the population is kept busy in the war plants. The actual fighting is handled by a few thousand technicians, like yourself, who sit underground and direct the armor and the guided missiles by remote control.”

  “Nonsense!” snorted the major. “Factory workers are under the same military discipline as we are, and so are all the rest. There just aren’t any real civilians left any longer. And the whole idea started with the conscript army. Before that, the governments hired professionals to do their fighting for them and the people were pretty much allowed to go on with their own lives.”

  He stopped suddenly, looked quickly over at the complex machine that stood at the other end of the laboratory, and then with a smothered exclamation, drove one hard fist into the palm of his other hand. “Of course!”

  “Of course, what?”

  “It just occurred to me that there might be some point to all this talking!” He jumped to his feet and began to stride nervously up and down the floor. “Look!” he snapped. “How much longer do you think the world can go on the way it has been?”

  “Twenty years . . . maybe thirty. The tools that make the tools are wearing out, and they aren’t being replaced.”

  “And after that?”

  “Back to the caves I guess—if there are any of us left to go back. Why?”

  He strode over to the machine the girl had constructed and slapped his hand harshly against the control panel. “Get this thing in operation. Maybe the clock can be turned back after all!”

  AT TWO O’CLOCK on the morning of March 17th, 1986, a major in the uniform of the Midwestern Protectorate slipped cautiously down a long underground corridor until he reached the end, and then tapped lightly on a heavy steel door. It swung open noiselessly and he slipped inside. When it was safely locked behind him he held out a bulging briefcase.

  “I think I’ve got our man,” he said, “but we’ve got to move fast. I’m afraid the General smells a rat.”

  “Who is he?” The girl’s face was white with fatigue, and there was a nervous tremor in her voice.

  “Lazare Carnot, the military genius who was chiefly responsible for the success of the armies of France in the French revolutionary wars. He was the one that rammed the plan for universal conscription through the Committee of Public Safety; that plan made it possible to raise fourteen new armies.” He hesitated. “But the idea doesn’t look as good to me now as it did when I first thought of it. I’m beginning to get my wind up about the possible consequences.”

  The girl took the briefcase from him and dumped its contents out on a table. Her close-cropped, red-gold hair was damp with perspiration and there were dark smudges under her tired eyes.

  “Me too,” she said, “but have you got an alternative?”

  “But what if we make things worse?”

  She gave a weary shrug. “I don’t see how they could be, but that’s a chance we’ll have to take.”

  He pulled out his battered pipe and loaded it. It took four of his old fashioned kitchen matches before he was able to get it going.

  “Nervous?”

  “If you think I’m jumpy, go take a look at yourself in a mirror,” he said. He licked suddenly dry lips, squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. “The field dampers. Are you sure they’re going to work?”

  “Nope. I know one way to find out, though.”

  With that she walked over to the time machine and began a final check of the damper unit she had just finished installing. He looked after her and then turned to the pile of notes that were spread out on the table. An hour later they were both ready. He got up and went over to her. “All set?”

  “I think so.”

  He put an arm around her and drew her to him. “If we are successful, what happens to us?”

  “The same thing that happens to the world as we know it.” She reached into the pocket of his jacket, took out a match, and lit it. She looked at the little flame somberly for a moment and then blew it out with an explosive puff of breath. “Poof!”

  She placed the charred match carefully in an ashtray and then slipped one little hand into his.

  “But maybe if the time track doesn’t get twisted up too much, you and I will still get born—maybe even meet and fall in love in a decent world where we’ll have a chance to do work that is closer to our hearts.”

  Her hand trembled slightly as she drew it out of his and reached for the controls of the machine that would open a portal into the eighteenth century.

  PART TWO: Yesterday

  THE CRUCIAL meeting of the Committee of Public Safety took place in Paris early in July of 1792. If Lazare Carnot had been there to ram through his plan for universal conscription, France would have been saved—for a little while, anyway.

  If Lazare Carnot had been there, the timidity of the professional politicians (conscription has never been popular with the masses) wouldn’t have won out—but Carnot wasn’t there. That morning he had been found dead in his bed. His features were calm. Death had obvio
usly come quickly and painlessly.

  His subordinates did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough. Carnot’s plan for conscripting a national army was tabled by the committee until it was too late. Six months later, the tough professional soldiers of Frederick of Saxe-Coburg marched into Paris, freed the young dauphin, and set him up on the throne of France as Louis XVII.

  During the mopping up of the revolutionary armies, a brilliant young officer named Napoleon Bonaparte was killed in action. Other things happened, too—a number of them. Without the spur of mass warfare, technology plodded ahead instead of spurting.

  PART THREE: The New Tomorrow

  AT TEN O’CLOCK on the morning of March 17th, 1986, Jack O’Hara was waiting for an interview with the personnel manager of Marshall and Smith, Inc. He could hear the office communicator from where he slumped easily in a soft chair. “My next appointment, Miss Grange,” it squawked. There was no one else in the anteroom, so he knocked the heel out of his pipe, put the worn briar into his flight jacket pocket, and came to his feet.

  “You can go in now, Mr. O’Henry.” There was a little something extra in Miss Grange’s voice, which indicated that if he wanted to stop and talk a bit when he came out, she wouldn’t object in the least.

  “Not O’Henry, O’Hara,” said Jack and went into the inner office.

  J. B. Roberts, the personnel director of Marshall and Smith, was a small, egg-shaped man who prided himself on his ability to put people immediately at ease. “Mr. O’Henry!” he exclaimed, registering honest pleasure as he rose to his feet and stretched out his hand. “Do sit down!”

  Jack pumped the perspiring palm twice and did.

  “Lovely weather, isn’t it?” continued Roberts, and without waiting for Jack to reply, launched into a long and involved commentary on the chances of New York’s jet polo team winning the World Series. Jack waited patiently until he was finished and then, just as the little man was about to launch into step three of establishing warm human relations with a prospective employee, an account of several bright sayings of his six year old, the flyer interrupted.