McAllister nodded in a perfunctory manner. He was no longer genuinely impressed by the new machines. Here were the end-products of the machine age; science and invention so advanced that men made scarcely a move that did not affect, or was not affected by, a machine. A heavy-faced man near him said: “We have gathered here because it is obvious that the source of the new energy is the great building just outside this shop—”
He motioned toward the wall which had been a mirror and then the window through which McAllister had gazed at the monstrous structure in question. The speaker went on: “We’ve known, ever since the building was completed five years ago, that it was a power building aimed against us; and now from it new energy has flown out to engulf the world, immensely potent energy so strong that it broke the very tensions of time, fortunately only at this nearest gunshop. Apparently, it weakens when transmitted over distance.”
“Look, Dresley,” came a curt interruption from a small, thin man, “what good is all this preamble? You have been examining the various plans put forward by regional groups. Is there, or isn’t there, a decent one among them?”
Dresley hesitated. To McAllister’s surprise, the man’s eyes fixed doubtfully on him, his heavy face worked for a moment, then hardened. “Yes, there is a method, but it depends on compelling our friend from the past to take a great risk. You all know what I am referring to. It will gain us the time we need.”
“Eh?” said McAllister, and stood stunned as all eyes turned to stare at him.
IV
It struck McAllister that what he needed again was the mirror to prove to himself that his body was putting up a good front. His gaze flicked over the faces of the men. The gunmakers made a confusing pattern in the way they sat, or stood, or leaned against glass cases of shining guns; and there seemed to be fewer than he had previously counted. One, two—twenty-eight, including the girl. He could have sworn there had been thirty-two. His eyes moved on, just in time to see the door of the back room closing. Four of the men had gone to whatever lay beyond that door.
He shook his head, puzzled. And then, consciously drawing his attention back, stared thoughtfully at the faces before him. He said: “I can’t understand how any one of you could even think of compulsion. According to you, I’m loaded with energy. I may be wrong, but if any of you should-try to thrust me back down the chute of time, or even touch me, that energy in me would do devastating things—”
“You’re damned right!” chimed in a young man. He barked irritably at Dresley: “How the devil did you ever come to make such a psychological blunder? You know that McAllister will have to do as we want to save himself; and he’ll have to do it fast!”
Drelsey grunted. “Hell,” he said, “the truth is that we have no time to waste in explanation and I just figured that he might scare easily. I see, however, that we’re dealing with an intelligent man.”
McAllister’s eyes narrowed over the group. This was phony. He said sharply, “And don’t give me any soft soap about being intelligent. You fellows are sweating blood. You’d shoot your own grandmothers and trick me into the bargain, because the world you think right is at stake. What’s this plan of yours that you were going to compel me to participate in?”
It was the young man who replied. “You are to be given insulated clothes and send back to your own time—”
He paused. McAllister said: “That sounds okay so far. What’s the catch?”
“There is no catch!”
McAllister stared. “Now, look here,” he began, “doesn’t give me any of that. If it’s as simple as that, how the devil am I going to be helping you against the Isher energy?”
The young man scowled blackly at Dresley. “You see,” he said, “you’ve made him suspicious with that talk of yours about compulsion.” He faced McAllister. “What we have in mind is an application of a sort of an energy lever and fulcrum principle. You are to be the weight at the long end of a kind of energy ‘crowbar’, which lifts the greater weight at the short end. You will go back five thousand years in time; the machine in the great building, to which your body is tuned and which has caused all this trouble, will move ahead in time several months.”
“In that way,” interrupted another man before McAllister could speak, “we should have time to find another counter agent. There must be a solution, else our enemies would not have acted so secretly. Well, what do you think?”
McAllister walked slowly over to the chair that he had occupied previously. His mind was turning at furious speed, but he knew with a grim foreboding that he hadn’t the technical knowledge necessary to safeguard himself. He said slowly:
“As I see it, this is supposed to work something like a pump handle. The lever principle, the old idea that if you had a lever long enough, and a suitable fulcrum, you could move the Earth out of its orbit.”
“Exactly!” It was the heavy-faced Dresley who spoke. “Only this works in time. You go five thousand years, the building goes . . .”
His voice faded, his eagerness drained from him as he caught the expression in McAllister’s face.
“Look!” said McAllister. “There’s nothing more pitiful than a bunch of honest men engaged in an act of dishonesty. You’re strong men, the intellectual type, who’ve spent your lives enforcing an idealistic conception. You’ve always told yourselves that if the occasion should ever require it, you would not hesitate to make drastic sacrifices. But you’re not fooling anybody. What’s the catch?”
V
It was startling to have the suit thrust at him. He had noticed the men emerge from the back room; and it came as a shock to realize that they had gone for the insulated clothes before they could have known that he would use. them. McAllister stared grimly at Peter Cadron, who held the dull, grayish, limp tiling toward him, and said in a tight voice:
“Get into this, and get going! It’s a matter of minutes, man! When those guns out there start spraying energy, you won’t be alive to argue about our honesty.”
Still he hesitated. The room seemed insufferably hot. Perspiration streaked down his cheeks and he felt sick with uncertainty. Somewhere in the background a man was saying:
“Our first purpose must be to gain time, then we must establish new shops in communities where they cannot be easily attacked. Simultaneously, we must contact every Imperial potential who can help us directly or indirectly, and finally we must—”
The voice went on, but McAllister heard no more. His frantic gaze fell on the girl, standing silent and subdued near the front door. He strode toward her; and either his glare or presence was frightening, for she cringed and turned white.
“Look!” he said. “I’m in this as deep as hell. What’s the risk in this thing? I’ve got to feel that I have some chance. Tell, me, what’s the catch?”
The girl was gray now, almost as gray and dead looking as the suit Peter Cadron was holding. “It’s the friction,” she mumbled finally, “you may not get all the way back to 1951. You see, you’ll be a sort of ‘weight’ and—”
McAllister whirled away from her. He climbed into the soft almost flimsy suit, crowding the overall-like shape over his neatly pressed clothes. “It comes tight over the head, doesn’t it?”
“Yes!” It was Lystra’s father who answered. “As soon as you pull that zipper shut, the suit will become completely invisible. To outsiders, it will seem just as if you have your ordinary clothes on. The suit is fully equipped. You could live on the moon inside it.”
“What I don’t get,” complained McAllister, “is way I have to wear it. I got here all right without it.” He frowned. His words had been automatic, but abruptly a thought came. “Just a minute,” he said, “what becomes of die energy with which I’m charged when I’m bottled up in this insulation?”
He saw by the stiffening expressions of those around him that he had touched on a vast subject.
“So that’s it!” he snapped. “The insulation is to prevent me losing any of that energy. That’s how it can make a ‘weight.�
�� I have no doubt there is a connection from this, suit to that other machine. Well, it’s not too late.”
With a desperate twist, he tried to jerk aside, to evade the clutching hands of the four men who leaped at him. But they had him instantly, and their grips on him were strong beyond his power to break. The fingers of Peter Cadron jerked the zipper tight, and Peter Cadron said:
“Sorry, but when we went into that back room, we also dressed in insulated clothing. That’s why you couldn’t hurt us. And remember this: There’s no certainty that you are being sacrificed. The fact that there is no crater in our Earth proves that you did not explode in the past, and that you solved the problem in some other way. Now, somebody open the door, quick!”
Irresistibly, he was carried forward. And then—
“Wait!”
It was the girl. Her eyes glittered like dark jewels and in her fingers was the tiny, mirror-bright gun she had pointed in the beginning at McAllister. The little group hustling McAllister stopped as if they had been struck. He was scarcely aware. For him there was only the girl, and the way the her lips were working and the way her voice suddenly cried: “This is utter outrage. Are we such cowards—is it possible that the spirit of liberty can survive only through a shoddy act of murder and gross defiance of the rights of the individual? I say no! Mr. McAllister must have the protection of the hypnotism treatment; surely so brief a delay will not be fatal.”
“Lystra!” It was her father; and McAllister realized by his swift movement how quickly the older man grasped every aspect of the situation. He stepped forward and took the gun from his daughter’s fingers—the only man in the room, McAllister thought, who could dare approach her in that moment with the certainty she would not fire. For hysteria was in every line of her face; and the tears that followed showed how dangerous her stand might have been against the others.
Strangely, not for a moment had hope come. The entire action seemed divorced “from his life and his thought; there was only the observation of it. He stood there for a seeming eternity, and, when emotion finally came, it was surprise that he was not being hustled to his doom. With the surprise came awareness that Peter Cadron had let go of his arm, and stepped clear of him.
The man’s eyes were calm, his head held proudly erect. He said, “Your daughter is right, sir. At this point we rise above our fears, and we say to this unhappy young man: ‘Have courage! You will not be forgotten. We can guarantee nothing, cannot even state exactly what will happen to you. But we say, if it lies in our power to help you, that help you shall have.’ And now—we must protect you from the devastating psychological pressures that would otherwise destroy you, simply but effectively.”
Too late, McAllister noticed that the others had turned their faces away from that extraordinary wall—the wall that had already displayed so vast a versatility. He did not even see who pressed the activating button for what followed.
There was a flash of dazzling light. For an instant he felt as if his mind had been laid bare; and against that nakedness the voice of Peter Cadron pressed like some engraving stamp: “To retain your self-control and your sanity—this is your hope; this you will do in spite of everything! And, for your own sake, speak of your experience only to scientists or to those in authority whom you feel will understand and help. Good luck!”
So strong remained the effect of that brief flaring light that he felt only vaguely the touch of their hands on him, propelling him.
He felt himself falling.
CHAPTER ONE
THE VILLAGE AT NIGHT made a curiously timeless picture. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City, and made what the telestats called—he remembered the phrase vividly—“a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.”
Fara believed that utterly. The street before him with its weedless, automatically tended gardens, its shops set well back among the flowers, its perpetually hard, grassy sidewalks, and its street lamps that glowed from every pore of their structure—this was a restful paradise where time had stood still.
And it was like being a part of life that the great artist’s picture of this quiet, peaceful scene before him was now in the collection of the empress herself. She had praised it, and naturally the thrice-blest artist had immediately and humbly begged her to accept it. What a joy it must be to be able to offer personal homage to the glorious, the divine, the serenely gracious and lovely Innelda Isher, one hundred eightieth of her line.
As they walked, Fara half turned to his wife. In the dim light of the nearest street lamp, her kindly, still youthful face was almost lost in shadow. He murmured softly, instinctively muting his voice to harmonize with the pastel shades of night: “She said—our empress said—that our little village of Glay seemed to her to have in it all the wholesomness, the gentleness, that constitutes the finest qualities of her people. Wasn’t that a wonderful thought, Creel? She must be a marvelously understanding woman.”
They had come to a side street, and what he saw about a hundred and fifty feet along it stopped his words. “Look!” Fara said hoarsely.
He pointed with rigid arm and finger at a sign that glowed in the night, a sign that read:
FINE WEAPONS
THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS
IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE
Fara had a strange, empty feeling as he stared at the blazing sign. He saw that other villagers were gathering. He said finally, huskily, “I’ve heard of these shops. They’re places of infamy against which the government of the empress will act one of these days. They’re built in hidden factories and then transported whole to towns like ours and set up in gross defiance of property rights. That one wasn’t there an hour ago.” His face hardened. His voice had a harsh edge in it as he said, “Creel, go home.”
He was surprised when Creel did not move off at once. All their married life, she had had a pleasing habit of obedience that had made life a wonderful thing. He saw that she was looking at him wide-eyed, and that it was a timid alarm that held her there. She said, “Fara, what do you intend to do? You’re not thinking of—”
“Go home!” Her fear brought out all the determination in his nature. “We’re not going to let such a monstrous thing desecrate our village. Think of it—” his voice shivered before the appalling thought—“this fine, old-fashioned community, which we had resolved always to keep exactly as the empress has it in her picture gallery, debauched now, ruined by this . . . this thing—But we won’t have it; that’s all there is to it.”
Creel’s voice came softly out of the half-darkness of the street corner, the timidity gone from it. “Don’t do anything rash, Fara. Remember it is not the first new building to come into Glay—since the picture was painted.”
Fara was silent. This was a quality of his wife of which he did not approve, this reminding him unnecessarily of unpleasant facts. He knew exactly what she meant. The gigantic, multi-tentacled corporation, Automatic Atomic
Motor Repair Shops, Inc., had come in under the laws of the State with their flashy building, against the wishes of the village council, and had already taken half of Fara’s repair business.
‘That’s different!” Fara growled finally. “In the first place people will discover in good time that these new automatic repairers do a poor job. In the second place it’s fair competition. But this weapon shop is a defiance of all the decencies that make life under the House of Isher such a joy. Look at the hypocritical sign: “The right to buy weapons—’ Aaaaahh!” He broke off with, “Go home, Creel. We’ll see to it that they sell no weapons in this town.”
He watched the slender woman-shape move off into the shadows. She was halfway across the street when Fara called after her: “And if you see that son of ours hanging around some street corner, take him home. He’s got to learn to stop staying out so late at night.”
The shadowed figure of his wife did not
turn; and after watching her for a moment moving against the dim background of softly glowing street lights, Fara twisted on his heel and walked swiftly toward the shop. The crowd was growing larger every minute, and the night air pulsed with excited voices. Beyond doubt, here was the biggest thing that had ever happened to the village of Glay.
The sign of the weapon shop was, he saw, a normal-illusion affair. No matter what his angle of view, he was always looking straight at it. When he paused in front of the great display window, the words had pressed back against the store front, and were staring unwinkingly down at him. Fara sniffed once more at the meaning of the slogan, then turned to the sign in the window. It read:
THE FINEST ENERGY WEAPONS
IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE
A spark of interest struck fire inside Fara. He gazed at the brilliant display of guns, fascinated in spite of himself. The weapons were of every size, ranging from tiny little finger pistols to express rifles. They were made of every one of the light, hard, ornamental substances: glittering glassein, the colorful but opaque Ordine plastic, viridescent magnesitic beryllium. And others. It was the deadly extent of the destructive display that brought a chill to Fara. So many weapons for the little village of Glay, where not more than two people to his knowledge had guns, and those only for hunting. Why, the thing was absurd, fantastically mischievous, and threatening.
Somewhere behind Fara a man said: “It’s right on Lan Harris’ lot. Good joke on that old scoundrel. Will he raise a row!”
There was a titter from several men, that made an odd patch of sound on the warm, fresh air. And Fara saw that the man had spoken the truth. The weapon shop had a forty-foot frontage. And it occupied the center of the green, gardenlike lot of tight-fisted old Harris. Fara frowned. Clever, these weapon shop people, selecting the property of the most disliked man in town, giving everybody an agreeable titillation. But the cunning of it made it vital that the trick should not succeed. He was still scowling anxiously when he saw the plump figure of Mel Dale, the mayor. Fara edged toward him hurriedly, touched his hat respectfully, and said, “Where’s Jor?”
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