Camberton said: “I'll try to explain in words, Senator. They're inadequate, but a fuller explanation will come later."
And he launched into the story of the two-decade search of Paul Wendell.
* * * *
CODA-ANDANTINO
"Telepathy? Time travel?” After three hours of listening, the ex-President was still not sure he understood.
"Think of it this way,” Camberton said. “Think of the mind at any given instant as being surrounded by a shield-a shield of privacy-a shield which you, yourself have erected, though unconsciously. It's a perfect insulator against telepathic prying by others. You feel you have to have it in order to retain your privacy-your sense of identity, even. But here's the kicker: even though no one else can get in, you can't get out!
"You can call this shield ‘self-consciousness'-perhaps shame is a better word. Everyone has it, to some degree; no telepathic thought can break through it. Occasionally, some people will relax it for a fraction of a second, but the instant they receive something, the barrier goes up again."
"Then how is telepathy possible? How can you go through it?” The Senator looked puzzled as he thoughtfully tamped tobacco into his briar.
"You don't go through it; you go around it."
* * * *
"Now wait a minute; that sounds like some of those fourth dimension stories I've read. I recall that when I was younger, I read a murder mystery-something about a morgue, I think. At any rate, the murder was committed inside a locked room; no one could possibly have gotten in or out. One of the characters suggested that the murderer traveled through the fourth dimension in order to get at the victim. He didn't go through the walls; he went around them.” The Senator puffed a match flame into the bowl of his pipe, his eyes on the younger man. “Is that what you're driving at?"
"Exactly,” agreed Camberton. “The fourth dimension. Time. You must go back in time to an instant when that wall did not exist. An infant has no shame, no modesty, no shield against the world. You must travel back down your own four-dimensional tube of memory in order to get outside it, and to do that, you have to know your own mind completely, and you must be sure you know it.
"For only if you know your own mind can you communicate with another mind. Because, at the ‘instant’ of contact, you become that person; you must enter his own memory at the beginning and go up the hyper-tube. You will have all his memories, his hopes, his fears, his sense of identity. Unless you know-beyond any trace of doubt-who you are, the result is insanity."
* * * *
The Senator puffed his pipe for a moment, then shook his head. “It sounds like Oriental mysticism to me. If you can travel in time, you'd be able to change the past."
"Not at all,” Camberton said; “that's like saying that if you read a book, the author's words will change.
"Time isn't like that. Look, suppose you had a long trough filled with supercooled water. At one end, you drop in a piece of ice. Immediately the water begins to freeze; the crystallization front moves toward the other end of the trough. Behind that front, there is ice-frozen, immovable, unchangeable. Ahead of it there is water-fluid, mobile, changeable.
"The instant we call ‘the present’ is like that crystallization front. The past is unchangeable; the future is flexible. But they both exist."
"I see-at least, I think I do. And you can do all this?"
"Not yet,” said Camberton; “not completely. My mind isn't as strong as Wendell's, nor as capable. I'm not the-shall we say-the superman he is; perhaps I never will be. But I'm learning-I'm learning. After all, it took Paul twenty years to do the trick under the most favorable circumstances imaginable."
"I see.” The Senator smoked his pipe in silence for a long time. Camberton lit a cigaret and said nothing. After a time, the Senator took the briar from his mouth and began to tap the bowl gently on the heel of his palm. “Mr. Camberton, why do you tell me all this? I still have influence with the Senate; the present President is a protege of mine. It wouldn't be too difficult to get you men-ah-put away again. I have no desire to see our society ruined, our world destroyed. Why do you tell me?"
* * * *
Camberton smiled apologetically. “I'm afraid you might find it a little difficult to put us away again, sir; but that's not the point. You see, we need you. We have no desire to destroy our present culture until we have designed a better one to replace it.
"You are one of the greatest living statesmen, Senator; you have a wealth of knowledge and ability that can never be replaced; knowledge and ability that will help us to design a culture and a civilization that will be as far above this one as this one is above the wolf pack. We want you to come in with us, help us; we want you to be one of us."
"I? I'm an old man, Mr. Camberton. I will be dead before this civilization falls; how can I help build a new one? And how could I, at my age, be expected to learn this technique?"
"Paul Wendell says you can. He says you have one of the strongest minds now existing."
The Senator put his pipe in his jacket pocket. “You know, Camberton, you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought you said he was dead."
Again Camberton gave him the odd smile. “I didn't say that, Senator; I said they buried his body. That's quite a different thing. You see, before the poor, useless hulk that held his blasted brain died, Paul gave the eight of us his memories; he gave us himself. The mind is not the brain, Senator; we don't know what it is yet, but we do know what it isn't. Paul's poor, damaged brain is dead, but his memories, his thought processes, the very essence of all that was Paul Wendell is still very much with us.
"Do you begin to see now why we want you to come in with us? There are nine of us now, but we need the tenth-you. Will you come?"
"I-I'll have to think it over,” the old statesman said in a voice that had a faint quaver. “I'll have to think it over."
But they both knew what his answer would be.
THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH BENEDICT BREADFRUIT
# 8
The peculiar religio-sexual practices of the inhabitants of Hoogaht VIII are known throughout the Galaxy. One day a group of Hoogahtu called upon Benedict Breadfruit.
"We are,” said their spokesman, “planning to build an old-fashioned Earth-type house for our group. The living quarters for the males and females will be on the first and second floors. The Temple of Love, as we call it, will occupy the top floor, just under the roof. Knowing your abilities with language, we would like for you to give us a name for our Temple."
"Orgiastic top floor, eh?” asked Breadfruit.
"That's right?"
"A hot-pants attic, as it were?” said Breadfruit.
"If you insist, yes,” said the spokesman.
"A libidinous area just under the roof, one might say."
"That's what we said,” agreed the Hoogahtu.
"In other words, a lewd loft?” persisted Breadfruit.
"Most emphatically,” said the Hoogahtu spokesman.
Benedict Breadfruit shook his head, baffled for the first time in his life. “Gee, fellas, I just can't think of a damn thing."
VIEWPOINT
A fearsome thing is a thing you're afraid of-and it has nothing whatever to do with whether others are afraid, nor with whether it is in fact dangerous. It's your view of the matter that counts!
There was a dizzy, sickening whirl of mental blackness-not true blackness, but a mind-enveloping darkness that was filled with the multi-colored little sparks of thoughts and memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing-each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind.
Memories were shattered into their component data bits in that maelstrom of not-quite-darkness, and scattered throughout infinity and eternity. Then the pseudo-dark stopped its violent motion and became still, no longer scattering the fleeing me
mories, but merely blanketing them. And slowly-ever so slowly-the powerful cohesive forces that existed between the data-bits began pulling them back together again as the not-blackness faded. The associative powers of the mind began putting the frightened little things together as they drifted back in from vast distances, trying to fit them together again in an ordered whole. Like a vast jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions, little clots and patches formed as the bits were snuggled into place here and there.
The process was far from complete when Broom regained consciousness.
* * * *
Broom sat up abruptly and looked around him. The room was totally unfamiliar. For a moment, that seemed perfectly understandable. Why shouldn't the room look odd, after he had gone through—
What?
He rubbed his head and looked around more carefully. It was not just that the room itself was unfamiliar as a whole; the effect was greater than that. It was not the first time in his life he had regained consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings, but always before he had been aware that only the pattern was different, not the details.
He sat there on the floor and took stock of himself and his surroundings.
He was a big man-six feet tall when he stood up, and proportionately heavy, a big-boned frame covered with hard, well-trained muscles. His hair and beard were a dark blond, and rather shaggy because of the time he'd spent in prison.
Prison!
Yes, he'd been in prison. The rough clothing he was wearing was certainly nothing like the type of dress he was used to.
He tried to force his memory to give him the information he was looking for, but it wouldn't come. A face flickered in his mind for a moment, and a name. Contarini. He seemed to remember a startled look on the Italian's face, but he could neither remember the reason for it nor when it had been. But it would come back; he was sure of that.
Meanwhile, where the devil was he?
From where he was sitting, he could see that the room was fairly large, but not extraordinarily so. A door in one wall led into another room of about the same size. But they were like no other rooms he had ever seen before. He looked down at the floor. It was soft, almost as soft as a bed, covered with a thick, even, resilient layer of fine material of some kind. It was some sort of carpeting that covered the floor from wall to wall, but no carpet had ever felt like this.
He lifted himself gingerly to his feet. He wasn't hurt, at least. He felt fine, except for the gaps in his memory.
The room was well lit. The illumination came from the ceiling, which seemed to be made of some glowing, semitranslucent metal that cast a shadowless glow over everything. There was a large, bulky table near the wall away from the door; it looked almost normal, except that the objects on it were like nothing that had ever existed. Their purposes were unknown, and their shapes meaningless.
He jerked his head away, not wanting to look at the things on the table.
The walls, at least, looked familiar. They seemed to be paneled in some fine wood. He walked over and touched it.
And knew immediately that, no matter what it looked like, it wasn't wood. The illusion was there to the eye, but no wood ever had such a hard, smooth, glasslike surface as this. He jerked his fingertips away.
He recognized, then, the emotion that had made him turn away from the objects on the table and pull his hand away from the unnatural wall. It was fear.
Fear? Nonsense! He put his hand out suddenly and slapped the wall with his palm and held it there. There was nothing to be afraid of!
He laughed at himself softly. He'd faced death a hundred times during the war without showing fear; this was no time to start. What would his men think of him if they saw him getting shaky over the mere touch of a woodlike wall?
The memories were coming back. This time, he didn't try to probe for them; he just let them flow.
He turned around again and looked deliberately at the big, bulky table. There was a faint humming noise coming from it which had escaped his notice before. He walked over to it and looked at the queerly-shaped things that lay on its shining surface. He had already decided that the table was no more wood than the wall, and a touch of a finger to the surface verified the decision.
The only thing that looked at all familiar on the table was a sheaf of written material. He picked it up and glanced over the pages, noticing the neat characters, so unlike any that he knew. He couldn't read a word of it. He grinned and put the sheets back down on the smooth table top.
The humming appeared to be coming from a metal box on the other side of the table. He circled around and took a look at the thing. It had levers and knobs and other projections, but their functions were not immediately discernible. There were several rows of studs with various unrecognizable symbols on them.
This would certainly be something to tell in London-when and if he ever got back.
He reached out a tentative finger and touched one of the symbol-marked studs.
There was a loud click! in the stillness of the room, and he leaped back from the device. He watched it warily for a moment, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming. Still, he decided it might be best to let things alone. There was no point in messing with things that undoubtedly controlled forces beyond his ability to cope with, or understand. After all, such a long time—
He stopped, Time? Time?
What had Contarini said about time? Something about its being like a river that flowed rapidly-that much he remembered. Oh, yes-and that it was almost impossible to try to swim backwards against the current or ... something else. What?
He shook his head. The more he tried to remember what his fellow prisoner had told him, the more elusive it became.
He had traveled in time, that much was certain, but how far, and in which direction? Toward the future, obviously; Contarini had made it plain that going into the past was impossible. Then could he, Broom, get back to his own time, or was he destined to stay in this-place? Wherever and whenever it was.
Evidently movement through the time-river had a tendency to disorganize a man's memories. Well, wasn't that obvious anyway? Even normal movement through time, at the rate of a day per day, made some memories fade. And some were lost entirely, while others remained clear and bright. What would a sudden jump of centuries do?
His memory was improving, though. If he just let it alone, most of it would come back, and he could orient himself. Meanwhile, he might as well explore his surroundings a little more. He resolved to keep his hands off anything that wasn't readily identifiable.
* * * *
There was a single oddly-shaped chair by the bulky table, and behind the chair was a heavy curtain which apparently covered a window. He could see a gleam of light coming through the division in the curtains.
Broom decided he might as well get a good look at whatever was outside the building he was in. He stepped over, parted the curtains, and—And gasped!
It was night time outside, and the sky was clear. He recognized the familiar constellations up there. But they were dimmed by the light from the city that stretched below him.
And what a city! At first, it was difficult for his eyes to convey their impressions intelligently to his brain. What they were recording was so unfamiliar that his brain could not decode the messages they sent.
There were broad, well-lit streets that stretched on and on, as far as he could see, and beyond them, flittering fairy bridges rose into the air and arched into the distance. And the buildings towered over everything. He forced himself to look down, and it made him dizzy. The building he was in was so high that it would have projected through the clouds if there had been any clouds.
Broom backed away from the window and let the curtain close. He'd had all of that he could take for right now. The inside of the building, his immediate surroundings, looked almost homey after seeing that monstrous, endless city outside.
He skirted the table with its still-humming machine and walked toward the door that led to the other room. A picture hanging on a
nearby wall caught his eye, and he stopped. It was a portrait of a man in unfamiliar, outlandish clothing, but Broom had seen odder clothing in his travels. But the thing that had stopped him was the amazing reality of the picture. It was almost as if there were a mirror there, reflecting the face of a man who stood invisibly before it.
It wasn't, of course; it was only a painting. But the lifelike, somber eyes of the man were focused directly on him. Broom decided he didn't like the effect at all, and hurried into the next room.
There were several rows of the bulky tables in here, each with its own chair. Broom's footsteps sounded loud in the room, the echoes rebounding from the walls. He stopped and looked down. This floor wasn't covered with the soft carpeting; it had a square, mosaic pattern, as though it might be composed of tile of some kind. And yet, though it was harder than the carpet it had a kind of queer resiliency of its own.
The room itself was larger than the one he had just quitted, and not as well lit. For the first time, he thought of the possibility that there might be someone else here besides himself. He looked around, wishing that he had a weapon of some kind. Even a knife would have made him feel better.
But there had been no chance of that, of course. Prisoners of war are hardly allowed to carry weapons with them, so none had been available.
He wondered what sort of men lived in this fantastic city. So far, he had seen no one. The streets below had been filled with moving vehicles of some kind, but it had been difficult to tell whether there had been anyone walking down there from this height.
Contarini had said that it would be ... how had he said it? “Like sleeping for hundreds of years and waking up in a strange world."
Well, it was that, all right.
Did anyone know he was here? He had the uneasy feeling that hidden, unseen eyes were watching his every move, and yet he could detect nothing. There was no sound except the faint humming from the device in the room behind him, and a deeper, almost inaudible, rushing, rumbling sound that seemed to come from far below.
The Randall Garrett Omnibus: Eleven SF Classics Page 30