by Anthology
“It was a tragedy,” Albright said with vehemence. “His suicide created one of the most powerful martyrs in history.”
Darwin turned to him with a perplexed look, but continued, “I feel compelled to set down the arguments pro and con my theory, in the hope that others of his religious rigidity might be dissuaded from this unfortunate act. The Church must not be used as an impediment to thinking!”
“And yet such an intended act of mercy will have such terrible consequences,” murmured Albright.
“Indeed? My book?”
“Absolutely. That book started a chain of events that became a crusade against science throughout Europe and the Americas that continues even today, some three hundred years later.”
“Three hundred years—”
Albright waved away his objections, plunged on. “Imagine, sir, that it is 1884, and your book—the book you are going to write—has just been published. As they did for the Origin, your old supporters, Huxley and Hooker, defended you most ably. And by then there were others convinced by your arguments and evidence.”
“Most gratifying.”
“Yes, but more importantly, the Church hierarchy took the criticism very badly. The bishops accused you of setting man’s ingenuity against God’s word. Worse, the public supported them, especially in the face of the very unpopular Neanderthal fossils from Germany. People did not want to believe they were descended from apes and barbarous tribes of men.”
“Indeed, it is perhaps an unpopular idea, but inescapable. Man is not exempted from the rest of the animal kingdom in this regard.”
“I agree, but it fueled the flames of the rebellion. Many men like FitzRoy joined together in a campaign to expunge what they termed the ‘heresy of evolution’. They called themselves the Fitzrovians, and demanded a literal interpretation of the events set forth in Genesis.”
“And who spoke against them?”
“Nobody, there’s the tragedy. Men of science thought it would pass, and that they could safely ignore what they saw to be religious zealots. But those ideas started to snowball, and what ensued was a great resurgence of fundamentalist religion, and a suppression of science. Schools were forbidden to teach about evolution and natural selection; then it spread to the other sciences. For over two centuries, men of science have had to labor secretly, in great peril.”
“I cannot believe that account, Mr Albright. Rational thought and scientific endeavor are seen as honorable professions in Europe and have for some three hundred years. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were great astronomers in the sixteenth century, well respected and rewarded by the Danish crown.”
Thwack!
Clink.
Albright was sure those two sounds would be indelibly burned into his memory no matter what happened. That, and the sounds of the birds.
“Yes, but Kepler’s mother was tried as a witch in Germany, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for insisting that the Earth circles the sun, and well into the seventeenth century, Galileo was forced to recant that same doctrine.”
Darwin looked at him sharply. “You know your history well, for a man from so far in the future.”
“We have learned the whole history of suppression these long years. Oh, we are desperate to be free! Believe this if nothing else.” In anguish Albright tore open his shirt to reveal an elaborate, garishly colored tattoo of a cross.
“I am an acolyte of the Holy Order of Scientism, for over two centuries the only way for a few to keep alive the flame of learning untainted by religious dogma. We seek to know the world the way it is, not the way it is ordained to be by the Hierarchy of Fitzrovians. Only now are we beginning to move out from the shadow of the Church. But we have lost so much time, and it may be too late.”
Darwin was visibly taken aback, and stammered, “Is that . . . adornment real?”
“The tattoo? Yes, and another like it on my back. I’ll take them with me to the grave.”
“But . . . why? Of what use is such . . . adornment?”
“Fealty, for some. For others such as myself, disguise. Although it is true that the hold of the Church is gradually loosening, we have lost over two centuries of scientific understanding. Two centuries! Our climate is changing and we don’t know why, the world’s population is soaring, the forests were cut or burned, the deserts advance, the air is brown, the waters are poisoned and the people sicken.”
“Surely, the leaders—”
“Either the Hierarchy doesn’t care or they are unable to manage the crisis. Whichever it is, there is little expectation that we can cure the world with our present state of knowledge anyway. It was a desperate hope, but perhaps by changing the past we can recapture that lost time.”
“You speak of lost time, yet you claim to be from the future, therefore you have the ability to travel through time. Surely that is remarkably advanced science.”
“The time travel device was an accidental discovery. We don’t know how it works, but it does, at least for short trips. If I am able to change our past, by dissuading you from publishing that book, we don’t know what will happen. We hope it will change the future for the better. But maybe it cannot be changed. Our philosophers have debated long and deeply about this: maybe I exist only because the events in my past unfurled as they have. Perhaps in another—” He stopped short as a wave of dizziness hit him.
Wha—? Oh no, not yet. He peeled back his sleeve to look at his watch. It’s not time yet!
Darwin was looking at him sharply. “Are you ill, sir?”
“No, just . . . dizzy. Perhaps the temporal travel device has affected me.”
“Young man, your tale is most persuasive, although I can scarcely believe one book of mine could be so pivotal in history.”
Albright recovered himself. “All our historical research indicates just that, sir. What we know of causality tells us that the form the future takes has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Even a seemingly minor event can have great consequences. And, for a man of your renown, that new book was not a minor event.”
Darwin stared at him intently. “Just how did you plan to dissuade me?”
“By doing what I just did, telling you what is going to happen if you do publish it.”
“What if I refuse, or am not convinced? I admit that it irks me greatly that certain bishops are so opposed to my ideas.” He looked at Albright sharply. “Are you prepared to accept failure?”
Albright hesitated, suddenly aware of the heavy lump in his overcoat pocket. “Mr Darwin, sir, I . . . we wish you no harm, but we are determined not to fail our world.”
“I see. You will stop me by force if necessary.” Darwin looked at him as if appraising what means Albright would use.
Albright nodded slightly. I’m losing him, he thought unhappily. “If I can persuade you that there is independent proof of your theory, would you be satisfied?”
Darwin drew himself up. “Proof? Young man, I have labored for decades on my theory of Natural Selection. I truly believe that I have amassed an overwhelming body of evidence—”
“Someone has found the mechanism for inheritance.”
Darwin stopped short. “The mechanism? What do you mean?”
“Well, not the actual . . . ah . . .” He fought back another wave of dizziness. “Well, you understand, not the actual, uh, bodies in the cell, but the mathematics of inheritance.”
Darwin stared uncomprehendingly.
Albright rushed on. “There’s a book, just published, by Gregor Mendel, about experiments he did with garden pea plants. He has established that there is a unit of heredity, some . . . factor passed from parent to offspring, in a regular and repeatable way. Some of these factors are transmitted visibly, and are called dominant. Others become, ah, latent in the process and are called recessive. With the correct crosses, Mendel could make them reappear in later generations, so he knew they were still there, albeit hidden.”
A look of awe slowly washed over the older man’s face and hi
s mouth worked as he silently wrestled with the implications.
“So you see,” continued Albright, “if an organism exhibits an unfavorable factor and dies because of it, and this happens to all the other individuals with the same factor, it will be eliminated from the population.” Bright sparks flashed across his eyes. He reached into his coat and clutched the weapon. “It’s the mechanism for nashural s’lection!”
“The mechanism for natural selection. Yes. It could very well be. I will need to see that book! Tell me again who is the author?”
“M . . . M . . . Mendel,” he slurred. “G . . . G . . . Gregor Mendel, a m . . . m . . . monk, an Augush . . . tini . . . tian.”
“What did you say? I couldn’t understand. Speak up, please!”
Albright stared fuzzily. The scene around him was becoming grainy. Still time. In desperation he yanked his arm out of his pocket, aimed the antique pistol at Darwin. God help me. He squeezed the trigger as greyness descended.
The crackling noise awakened her. Solange started up, feeling woozy and a bit unclear. She absentmindedly put her hand up to her hair to tuck a stray red curl into . . . nothing.
“Rats, must’ve dozed off.”
The screen in front of her was full of diagonal lines.
“That does it. I can’t do any assignment if the freaking Viewer conks out on me.”
Electronics never worked for her. This morning already her chronometer had failed to network with her wakeup implant. She’d almost missed her session with the TVS. She’d rushed to the library in the nick of time, shouldered her way past the waiting students and jammed her ID thumbprint down just as the robo-librarian was about to give her slot away. As it was she’d lost fifteen minutes.
Someone pounded on the door. “Two minutes!”
She checked the big chronometer.
“Hell, my session’s over! What’d I see anyway?”
The vidrecorder was still running. She shut it off and removed the spool.
The door opened suddenly. The librarian rolled in. “Time’s up,” it rumbled. “Please relinquish the Temporal ViewScreen.”
“Okay, okay, keep your treads on,” she muttered. “I’m leaving.”
Her eye fell on the assignment sheet. “Observation of Charles Darwin during writing of The Origin of Species, 1858.”
It was clearly marked “Easy”. Hell, she hadn’t even been able to tune the freaking gizmo to that date. It’d stuck on 1866. Well, she’d done something different. But what? She felt for the spool in her pocket.
Whatever I see, I’ll just be creative with my interpretation, she thought. After all, what difference could it make what some old guy was thinking three hundred years ago?
She hurried out into the bright new morning in search of coffee.
DAY OF THE HUNTERS
Isaac Asimov
It began the same night it ended. It wasn’t much. It just bothered me; it still bothers me.
You see, Joe Bloch, Ray Manning, and I were squatting around our favorite table in the corner bar with an evening on our hands and a mess of chatter to throw it away with. That’s the beginning.
Joe Bloch started it by talking about the atomic bomb, and what he thought ought to be done with it, and how who would have thought it five years ago. And I said lots of guys thought it five years ago and wrote stories about it and it was going to be tough on them trying to keep ahead of the newspapers now. Which led to a general palaver on how lots of screwy things might come true and a lot of for-instances were thrown about.
Ray said he heard from somebody that some big-shot scientist had sent a block of lead back in time for about two seconds or two minutes or two thousandths of a second—he didn’t know which. He said the scientist wasn’t saying anything to anybody because he didn’t think anyone would believe him.
So I asked, pretty sarcastic, how he came to know about it. Ray may have lots of friends but I have the same lot and none of them know any big-shot scientists. But he said never mind how he heard, take it or leave it.
And then there wasn’t anything to do but talk about time machines, and how supposing you went back and killed your own grandfather or why didn’t somebody from the future come back and tell us who was going to win the next war, or if there was going to be a next war, or if there’d be anywhere on Earth you could live after it, regardless of who wins.
Ray thought just knowing the winner in the seventh race while the sixth was being run would he something.
But Joe decided different. He said, “The trouble with you guys is you got wars and races on the mind. Me, I got curiosity. Know what I’d do if I had a time machine?”
So right away we wanted to know, all ready to give him the old snicker whatever it was.
He said, “If I had one, I’d go back in time about a couple or five or fifty million years and find out what happened to the dinosaurs.”
Which was too bad for Joe, because Ray and I both thought there was just about no sense to that at all. Ray said who cared about a lot of dinosaurs and I said the only thing they were good for was to make a mess of skeletons for guys who were dopy enough to wear out the floors in museums; and it was a good thing they did get out of the way to make room for human beings. Of course Joe said that with some human beings he knew, and he gives us a hard look, we should’ve stuck to dinosaurs, but we pay no attention to that.
“You dumb squirts can laugh and make like you know something, but that’s because you don’t ever have any imagination,” he says. “Those dinosaurs were big stuff. Millions of all kinds—big as houses, and dumb as houses, too—all over the place. And then, all of a sudden, like that,” and he snaps his fingers, “there aren’t any anymore.”
How come, we wanted to know.
But he was just finishing a beer and waving at Charlie for another with a coin to prove he wanted to pay for it and he just shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. That’s what I’d find out, though.”
That’s all. That would have finished it. I would’ve said something and Ray would’ve made a crack, and we all would’ve had another beer and maybe swapped some talk about the weather and the Brooklyn Dodgers and then said so long, and never think of dinosaurs again.
Only we didn’t, and now I never have anything on my mind but dinosaurs, and I feel sick.
Because the rummy at the next table looks up and hollers, “Hey!”
We hadn’t seen him. As a general rule, we don’t go around looking at rummies we don’t know in bars. I got plenty to do keeping track of the rummies I do know. This fellow had a bottle before him that was half empty, and a glass in his hand that was half full.
He said, “Hey,” and we all looked at him, and Ray said, “Ask him what he wants, Joe.”
Joe was nearest. He tipped his chair backward and said, “What do you want?”
The rummy said, “Did I hear you gentlemen mention dinosaurs?”
He was just a little weavy, and his eyes looked like they were bleeding, and you could only tell his shirt was once white by guessing, but it must’ve been the way he talked. It didn’t sound rummy, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, Joe sort of eased up and said, “Sure. Something you want to know?”
He sort of smiled at us. It was a funny smile; it started at the mouth and ended just before it touched the eyes. He said, “Did you want to build a time machine and go back to find out what happened to the dinosaurs?”
I could see Joe was figuring that some kind of confidence game was coming up. I was figuring the same thing. Joe said, “Why? You aiming to offer to build one for me?”
The rummy showed a mess of teeth and said. “No, sir. I could but I won’t. You know why? Because I built a time machine for myself a couple of years ago and went back to the Mesozoic Era and found out what happened to the dinosaurs.”
Later on, I looked up how to spell “Mesozoic,” which is why I got it right. in case you’re wondering, and I found nut that the Mesozoic Era is when a11 the dinosaurs were doing whatever din
osaurs do. Rut of course at the time this is just so much double-talk to me, and mostly I was thinking we had a lunatic talking to us. Joe claimed afterward that he knew about this Mesozoic thing, but he’ll have to talk lots longer and louder before Ray and I believe him.
But that did it just the same. We said to the rummy to come over to our table. I guess I figured we could listen to him for a while and maybe get some of the bottle, and the others must have figured the same. But he held his bottle tight in his right hand when he sat down and that’s where he kept it. it. [sic]
Ray said, “Where’d you build a time machine?”
“At Midwestern University. My daughter and I worked on it together.”
He sounded like a college guy at that.
I said, “Where is it now? In your pocket?”
He didn’t blink; he never jumped at us no matter how wise we cracked. Just kept talking to himself out loud, as if the whiskey had limbered up his tongue and he didn’t care if we stayed or not.
He said, “I broke it up. Didn’t want it. Had enough of it.”
We didn’t believe him. We didn’t believe him worth a darn. You better get that straight. It stands to reason, because if a guy invented a time machine, he could clean up millions—he could clean up all the money in the world, just knowing what would happen to the stock market and the races and elections. He wouldn’t throw a11 that away, I don’t care what reasons he had.—Besides, none of us were going to believe in time travel anyway, because what if you did kill your own grandfather.
Well, never mind.
Joe said, “Yeah, you broke it up. Sure you did. What’s your name?”
But he didn’t answer that one, ever. We asked him a few more times, and then we ended up calling him “Professor.”
He finished off his glass and filled it again very slow. He didn’t offer us any, and we all sucked at our beers.
So I said, “Well, go ahead. What happened to the dinosaurs?”
But he didn’t tell us right away. He stared right at the middle of the table and talked to it.