And Having Writ . . .

by Donald R. Bensen

  "Wells? Oxford?" Dark said. "What the hell are you doing here? We've only just got set to . . . in fact, somehow, I thought we had . . . and what are you wearing those funny clothes for?"

  "Good to see you again, fellows," the "Oxford" one said. "Why don't you stretch a bit and then get up? You might be a bit stiff after all this time."

  "You mean we've been in stasis already?" Dark demanded. "But then who are you, and how long has it been? What year is this, anyhow?"

  "Nineteen thirty-three," answered the "Wells" one—and then, of course, I realized that it was not, so to speak, a "Wells," but Wells himself!

  "That's nice," Dark said heavily. "Do you plan to bring us out of stasis every fifteen years to let us know the time? Kind of you, I'm sure, but we really don't need it. It's bad enough, to go into this sort of thing once, let alone over and over again."

  "You won't have to go back into stasis," Oxford explained. "Not unless your warp drive goes out on the way home, which I don't think it will, as we've had it checked over pretty thoroughly. The Wrights' people have made some changes in the atmosphere control surfaces which I think you'll find useful, too."

  If we were stiff after our period of stasis, I do not believe we were aware of it. In an instant we were on our feet, surrounding the two Earthmen and bombarding them with questions.

  Oxford and Wells soon made it clear to us that in spite of the absence of war during the entire fifteen-year period of our stasis, to say nothing of the years immediately preceding it, there had been a great worldwide flowering of science and technology, together with many social and political changes, and that this had resulted in the locating, raising, and refitting of Wanderer within the past few months.

  "Everybody pitched in, you see," Wells told us. "Scientists and technicians from all over the place came to help. We had some most valuable contributions from the new universities in Africa, and Einstein himself came in from Berlin to see that the calculations for the warp drive were done properly. Oh, it was an international effort, right enough."

  "Well, that was decent of them," Dark said. "But, look here, how come? I mean, before, well, we could hardly get anybody to pay attention to us. We just got sort of pushed aside, until there wasn't anything to do but put ourselves out of it for a bit. So how does it happen that there's this great rush to help us?"

  "And I should take it kindly," Ari continued with some asperity, "if you could make it clear to me in what way the principles of Metahistory have come to such grief in dealing with your planet. What you tell us is impossible by any Metahistorical precepts, and I'm not at all sure you're not giving us some fanciful story for purposes of your own."

  "Come on outside, fellows," Oxford said gently. We followed him and Wells from our chamber into the sunlight. At some distance, we could see the city of Washington in the clear air. I could recognize many of the buildings, but there were others, some of a shimmering white hue and graceful shape, others somewhat partaking of the qualities of a rainbow. A long ovoid sped through the sky high above us; somewhat nearer the ground, brightly colored winged machines, each with a visible passenger, darted and swooped silently in apparent play.

  "All right," Ari said after a moment. "It's there, I can see that. You have come a long way, then. But how? We tried so hard to . . ." He stopped, apparently a little embarrassed at recalling the method by which he had attempted to speed Earth's progress.

  "You did a lot, you know," Oxford said. "I don't know that anybody could ever trace everything, but you left quite a trail of surprises. I don't know what Metahistorical teaching's like, but doesn't it take into account things like what happens to a man when he's been a crippled megalomaniac all his life, and then all of a sudden he's not a cripple? Or a father who has the fear that his son's going to die any minute lifted from him? Metahistory doesn't consider that giving those fellows a whole new idea of what life can be like might have a little effect here and there?"

  "It is the nature of Metahistory to deal with probabilities of increasing refinement," Ari replied. "Thus the inescapable tendencies are clearly established."

  "Well, I guess your probabilities were pretty unrefined," Oxford retorted. "And if you really wanted that war, why on Earth did you go and tell the King and the Czar and the Kaiser what it'd be like? Couldn't you see they'd bust their crowns to avoid it?"

  "I was counting on their rationality," Ari said.

  Both Wells and Oxford threw their heads back and laughed. "Oh, my!" Wells exclaimed delightedly.

  "You mean," Valmis said slowly, "that what Ari did to change things worked just the wrong way? I knew there was a reason why we weren't supposed to meddle in other planets' affairs."

  "That was some of it," Oxford said. "But the main thing, I guess . . . the big effect you've had, was just the fact of you. Once we all knew that there were other worlds, that there were people pretty much like us some place else, why, when that sank in, it gave everyone here a whole new way of looking at things, you see. For ten thousand and some years, we've been free to consider our neighbors, the fellow next door or in the next country, as somebody else, a foreigner, and likely an enemy. This planet was all there was, and there was plenty of room for suspicion and jealousy and shooting people in the head on the off chance they might be a bother to you. But that doesn't hold up any more. It took a while, but when you fellows showed up, it kind of took the heart out of things like that. For the first time ever, people started getting a clear notion of what it was to be human and to live on a planet in space."

  "So we didn't need the wars to get on," Wells continued. "Within a few years after you went into that place"—he gestured at the dark chamber behind us—"there was a new age of science, literature and art, and advances in economics and social progress, like nothing there's ever been, and it's been buzzing along like mad ever since."

  "Well, I could have given you a start on that, only Edison told me to shut up about it," Dark said sullenly.

  "He was right, d'you see!" Wells exclaimed. "Right as rain. He finally saw that it was the idea that something could be done that counted, not getting the plans as a gift. He didn't invent electrodiffusion by dissecting that hearing-aid thing you gave him, Raf—he saw what was there, and then he worked out how electrodiffusion had to be done. And the same with the Wrights and the others—once they learned something about the sorts of things you had, once they knew there was something great to get at, why, then, they could go and do it. And, by God, haven't we just done it!"

  "So," Ari said after a moment, "it is in gratitude for our completely involuntary services—our blundering and our ignorance, not to mince matters—that we are being assisted on our way by a considerable number of your population. It is not an easy thought to accept."

  "If it gets me back behind the controls of Wanderer, I don't mind a bit if I'm made to look something of a fool," Dark declared.

  Valmis looked rather pale, and I wondered if he were still troubling himself about his so-called use of the Probability Displacer, ten—no, twenty-five—years before. If he persisted in clinging to that delusion, he would be bound to be somewhat shaken by Oxford's and Wells's description of the changes we had occasioned.

  We spent one more week on Earth, the greater part of it occupied with a tour of the planet, it being thought that we ought to see how it had got on in our absence.

  The first evening after our awakening, we dined with President Roosevelt—not our old acquaintance, who had perished tragically some eight years previously when an early moon rocket launch he was observing failed in a spectacular explosion, but a cousin of his—who insisted on taking us on an extensive tour of the White House and its grounds, walking at a pace that quite tired us. "Uncle Ted was right," he called back to us over his shoulder. "The strenuous life, that's the thing—in this job, you can go stale awfully quickly if you don't keep moving."

  The news of our revival had been kept secret until after its accomplishment and, in fact, until very nearly the time of our departure f
or Europe the next day. We thus avoided a crush of newsmen and electrodiffusion people, but were able to take with us on the sleek Wright flier that carried us over the ocean—hardly recognizable as a descendant of the electric-powered dragonflies that had darted over the Titanic—an armful of journals relating the event.

  These made interesting reading, as there were not only news stories, but what Oxford called "think pieces" and other sorts of literary effort presented.

  I was struck by one of these, a verse by a person named Seeger. Its opening lines:

  We have a rendezvous with Life

  At some still-distant planetfall

  seemed to suggest that Earth was setting about an endeavor in space which might bring our peoples into contact. I was not sure that this would be a good idea, and made a note to mention to the Explorer directorate when we arrived home that it would be well to keep an eye out for this unpredictable race.

  I retain few clear impressions of the world tour, as reception followed reception with dizzying swiftness. We were greeted in London by King Edward's recently crowned successor, George the Fifth, who had a remarkable resemblance to Czar Nicholas, and by the Poet Laureate, Sir Rupert Brooke, who composed a rather florid ode in our honor. I transcribed part of this as well, as I do not believe any residents of other planets have written verse about Explorers, and thought it worth preserving as a curiosity, especially as it seemed intended to represent a personification of the planet itself.

  Earth's Farewell to the Starmen

  And when you leave, think only this of me,

  That there's some planet of a foreign star

  That is for ever your world; there shall be

  On this rich Earth a heritage by far

  More splendid than we ever dared to hope. . . .

  It went on for some time in this vein.

  In St. Petersburg, Czar Alexei, now quite a strapping young fellow, received us handsomely; he had little recollection of Valmis's intervention in the matter of his health, but had been told of it often enough by his late father, he said.

  It was a melancholy thought that the passage of fifteen years had taken so many of those we had encountered only recently, as it seemed to us; we were pleased that Kaiser William himself, quite white-haired now, was present when we touched down in Berlin. We accompanied him through the streets of the city in an open vehicle that appeared to have no wheels; the Kaiser told us that it rested upon a cushion of air, which Dark found implausible. At one spot where the crowd was dense and our machine therefore slowed somewhat, a dark-haired man darted from the crowd, thrust an object into the Kaiser's hand, shouted something, and withdrew. "Ha!" the Kaiser commented. "Not bad. He said he wanted you to have it as a souvenir—it would be nice to think his name and work would travel to other worlds." He handed it over for us to examine. It was a detailed, if lifeless, portrait in colored inks of the four of us, apparently radiating from our heads a strong light which fell upon a representation of the planet placed in front of us.

  "I've seen his work," the Kaiser remarked. "He illustrates for some trashy magazines my grandsons read. Well, I daresay you'll be the only Explorers with a genuine Hitler drawing for your private gallery!"

  The Sultan of Turkey, the President of India, the Emperor of China . . . these dignitaries, their lands and their cities, are all a blur to me now. We came, were greeted and displayed to the crowds, and we went on, day after day.

  I remember asking Wells, who was also showing the strain of the journey, how it was that in the face of the changes he had described in the world, so many of the old political entities remained unaltered.

  "There wasn't any need to alter them," he told me. "When everybody got to working together and understanding that we all had to fit on the same planet, why, it just sort of bypassed the old business about revolutions and independence and such. Since governments are responsive to the needs of the people, the forms and the boundaries don't much matter now, and the people're perfectly content to leave matters of that sort as they are and get on with things that really interest them."

  The last leg of our journey was over the same body of water that Wanderer had traversed in its final descent; it was with a thrill that I saw the coastal features of San Francisco emerging ahead. Then, as the aircraft circled before landing, I could see below us a familiar gleaming shape.

  "That's Wanderer down there!" Dark bellowed. "By God, there she is, sleek as ever and ready to take us home!"

  And so she was. There was no official ceremony, just a hasty farewell from Wells and Oxford. "It's been quite a time, fellows," Oxford said. "I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But . . . you're not planning on coming back, are you?"

  We assured him that we had no such intention.

  "Good," he remarked, stepping back to allow us to enter Wanderer. "I kind of think once was enough. So long."

  With this last cryptic example of Earthly conversation, we took our departure.

  When the globe was dwindling behind us, sparkling blue and white against the darkness of space, I observed that Valmis and Ari were looking back at it, as I was, their expressions ambiguous. Dark was peering ahead as well as from side to side; he muttered gloomily, "If they've been up to all that they said, no telling what we might run into without expecting it before we can get into warp."

  "Raf," Ari asked, his eyes still on Earth, "have you started composing your Survey Report?"

  "In a sense, yes," I replied. "I've got down pretty well all that happened, at any rate. But . . ."

  "Precisely," Ari said. "Though Recording is your province and none of us would presume to suggest how you ought to handle it, there is still the fact that a total Recording would present certain problems for all members of this team. There is much that happened during our extended sojourn there which, considered by overworked bureaucrats in the Directorate, would have an aspect that would not be conducive to the most tempered—"

  I was beginning to wonder whether Ari had embarked on a sentence to which there was no possible ending and which might therefore go on until he wore out, but Dark interrupted him:

  "You mean we're in the soup if we let it get out that you tried to start a war and kept one of their rulers alive past his time, and that I put that Kaiser man's arm straight and did what I could to turn their technology on its head, and that Valmis laid 'em in the aisles with his Patterns patter number, right? Well, we don't tell them, see? It's that simple."

  "I imagine," I said, "that the normal process of editorial compression would—"

  "You'll fudge it, then? Good," Dark said. "Whoo! That was a damned big something that just went by, and no mistake! Lights flashing all over it. My word, these chaps have been up to something while we were out of the swim."

  "My own opinion," Ari remarked, "is that Mr. Oxford's and Mr. Wells's remarks were, though well-intentioned and appreciative, wide of the mark, and reflected a certain primitive bias typical of Level Four cultures—though they do seem to have got to Level Seven rather quickly. Therefore, any moderate infractions of the directives which we may have fallen into must be seen as actually having no effect on the planetary culture, and therefore are hardly worthy of being brought to the attention of—"

  "Of what?" Valmis asked, turning away from the ever-smaller globe visible in the rear viewport. "Don't you see, it's not the Directorate we're going back to, but another one. One that didn't exist until I used the Displacer twenty-five years ago. Maybe none of us can tell the difference, and maybe they can't, but it's there all the same. I did that to save our lives, and at least we're here to worry about it. . . ."

  Dark, Ari and I did not normally find ourselves in accord on any given question, but the looks of disapproval, boredom and long-suffering patience which we turned toward Valmis bore a substantial resemblance to one another.

  "Back there, twenty-five years back," Valmis said, "I made a cowardly choice. I kept us from crashing into that place you found out about, Dark—Siberia, was it? And we landed, and we met al
l those people and did all those things, and I wrote that rather nice song—though I don't suppose I'll ever see any royalties on it. And . . . things turned out as we saw, and the people back there don't seem too badly off, I suppose. But, you know, there would have been a world, almost like that, in which a spaceship hit the Tunguska region in 1908, and probably blew up like a meteorite, and so no Explorers talking to Roosevelt and Oxford and Wells and mending the Kaiser and the Czar's son and all that. They'd have been left to find their own way, don't you see? And it almost tears me apart to think about it. My using the Displacer, and all those other things we did . . . we shouldn't have, you know. Because they had the right to their destiny; we can only have diminished them by our meddling! For the rest of my life I'll be haunted by wondering . . ."

  He cast a glance backward at the last blue-white glint in the encompassing darkness.

  "What might they not have become without us?"