“You just stand about and say nothing!” The king’s voice snapped him out of thoughts. “We asked you a question.”
“I beg Your Majesty’s pardon.”
“What exactly is going to happen?” demanded the king peevishly. “Explain it again, step by step.”
“Certainly, Your Majesty. Our guards are in control of all of the timeline which is accessible to us and are closely observing the particular area around the palace. There is absolutely no action. That is, as Your Majesty already knows, apart from the doll . . .”
“Nonsense! Always this damned doll! How often do I have to hear that ridiculous story? What am I paying you for? Always repeating the same foolishness!”
“A small mechanical figure appears,” continued Collins, unmoved, “a sort of miniature robot, with which Your Majesty deigns to play.”
“Rubbish! How often must I repeat it? What on earth would I be doing with a doll? Have you ever seen me play with dolls? This is utterly absurd!”
“But by Your Majesty’s leave, according to the reports of the guards, Your Majesty seems to be quite taken with this small mechanical object.”
“But that is just what I don’t understand! What am I to do with a doll? Am I a child? Once and for all, enough of this doll! It is beginning to get on my nerves.”
The minister shrugged his shoulders and looked at his watch. “I am reporting nothing but the facts when I say that Your Majesty takes pleasure in playing with this figure, actually lays his weapon aside and gives the impression of being relieved of a burden and in extreme good humor, not to say . . .”
“Not to say what?”
“Not to say, well – like a new man.”
The king leaned back with a sigh, then shook his head in annoyance and slid nervously forward again to the edge of the throne. “Doll, doll, what the devil does this doll mean?” he brooded. Then, turning and launching into Collins, “For weeks now we have heard nothing from you but reports about dolls and other such nonsense. Collins, you have failed. As Minister for the Personal Security of Our Person you have failed miserably. That can cost you your head; you are well aware of that?”
“By Your Majesty’s leave, we have done everything within our means to get hold of the producer of this doll and to find and destroy the doll itself. The research has cost hundreds of years of work by our best specialists in ancient history, time manipulation, and causal coordination. Let me assure Your Majesty without exaggeration that we have done everything, absolutely everything within our power.”
“You had orders to cause a fracture in order to avoid this dreadful moment, and what did you do? Nothing! You had orders to find this man in the seventeenth century and to have him disposed of, and was this corrective measure taken? No! And you babble on about your specialists and their hundreds of years of work! It does not interest us in the slightest. Did you hear? Not in the slightest! You have failed!” The king trembled with anger; his fingers tightened around the handle of his weapon. It was aimed at Collins.
“I – I most humbly beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness, but as I said, we have done everything within our power.”
“Did you have the doll destroyed? Yes or no! If you did, why does it keep reappearing?”
“We did destroy it – at least we destroyed one doll, but an infinite number of such dolls could exist.”
“Don’t talk nonsense! This simple craftsman can’t have made an infinite number of dolls.”
“Of course not, Your Majesty, but perhaps two or three of this type.”
“And why haven’t they been destroyed? Because you failed!”
“As Your Majesty already knows, and as I have allowed myself to emphasize repeatedly, this is in all probability – and in my own humble opinion – not at all where the basic problem lies. This question of the doll is certainly peculiar, but it is clearly just as unimportant as is the craftsman in the seventeenth century. We are dealing with an intervention by WHITE in which this man in the distant past plays either no part or a very subordinate one, in which his function is to lure us onto the wrong track. Your Majesty knows that I have never considered this a very promising lead. How much of a chance could a man in the pretechnical age have had? I personally am convinced that at that time man did not even have electrical energy; they were still experimenting with frogs’ legs.”
“One can build mechanical automats, Collins, which if they are preserved in museums or private collections can survive several thousand years. But we have other grounds to find this man dangerous. You should have had him eliminated. You had explicit instructions to do so.”
“WHITE prevented it,” answered Collins with a shrug of his shoulders.
“WHITE, WHITE, WHITE! Let WHITE be damned!”
They were silent. Time was slipping by.
The guards came and went. They now registered every second.
“How long is this to continue, Collins?”
“Exactly eleven minutes and thirty seconds, Your Majesty,” answered the minister. He now held his watch in the palm of his hand. After this period the time mirror would blank out and be impenetrable to the patrol for a span of ten seconds.
“What is the purpose of this seal, Collins? Can you explain why WHITE had the seal placed here? What is hidden behind it? Something is happening behind it, but what?”
The king’s voice trembled. The tension in the room grew.
“We don’t know, Your Majesty,” said the minister. “Perhaps it is just a ruse – we will know soon. But Your Majesty need have no fears, there will be no change.”
“That is what your guards say. They are dolts,” said the king. He coughed and gasped for breath and tugged at the collar of his black cape as if it was too tight. The handkerchief with which he wiped his brow was soaked with perspiration.
“Have you given all the orders? Is everything sealed off?”
“Exactly as Your Majesty commanded. The entire palace has been thoroughly inspected several times, the throne room especially carefully of course. There is not a single square inch that hasn’t been meticulously checked. All dolls, toys, and similar objects which we were able to seize in the vicinity of this time-space point have been destroyed. The palace is locked and bolted inside and out. Nothing can penetrate this room unnoticed. Any particle, even a speck of dust, would immediately disintegrate in the energy fields. The doll must either come through the mirror or materialize in a manner unknown us; it is not in the palace now, unless it has taken on a form of energy of which we have no knowledge.”
The king looked about suspiciously, as if he could discover some clue that had escaped the attention of the minister’s guards, but his weapon found no target. The room was bare, there were only His Majesty upon the throne, the minister, the mirror, and the stream of guards who formed the observation chain.
“I cannot bear to see these faces any longer, Collins.”
“Your Majesty has given explicit orders . . .”
“Yes, yes, I know. Are these men absolutely reliable?”
“Absolutely.”
“What do you know about this dollmaker?”
“It is an odd story, Your Majesty. A relatively large part of his life seems to contain important historical facts which WHITE does not wish to have changed. As Your Majesty knows, he appears in the year 1623 in a small city in what was then Europe – now our Operations Base 7 – buys a house and apparently earns a living as a simple craftsman, makes few demands on others, mingles little with the townspeople but is respected by all. On August 17, 1629, the period suddenly becomes inaccessible, closed off by a seal which severely handicaps our operations. This seal extends as far as February 2, 1655, covering almost three decades. Nevertheless, we set several of our best specialists to the task of living through the time behind the seal. Your Majesty can hardly conceive of what this meant for those men. But in spite of all our efforts the venture failed; the men were never heard of again. We could find them in neither the fifth nor the sixth decade of that century.
Times then were particularly hard, wars were raging, and morale was very low. In short, by the time we could operate again we discovered that our craftsman was dead. We questioned people who knew him. Naturally we cannot examine the validity of the information they gave us, as there are no written records, but this is what we were told: One night he went into a fit of raving madness, and from that moment on he was like a different person. Formerly he had been a respected man whose advice was sought by all, but after this attack he let himself go, fell into the habit of swearing, jabbered incoherently, neglected his work, took to drink, picked quarrels, and proved himself to be generally arrogant and overbearing. For instance, he demanded that his neighbors address him as His Majesty, for which the fellows soundly thrashed him. He had apparently gone mad. He went from bad to worse, living on alms and on what he could occasionally beg or steal. One day he was found hanging by a rope in a barn, where he had apparently been for several weeks. He himself had put an end to his miserable existence. He must have been hastily buried somewhere, for we could not find his grave. We were told that this is commonly done to victims of suicide. We can fix the date of his death with relative certainly to the autumn of the year 1650. As Your Majesty can see, it is all in all nothing remarkable, perhaps not a daily occurrence in those centuries, but by no means an unusual one.”
“But this doll, Collins. What about the doll?”
“We succeeded in destroying one doll. Our men blasted it and it exploded. We were not able to reconstruct it completely, hut the parts that we were able to gather up in our haste in the dark give evidence of an extremely simple spring-driven mechanism, such as one finds in the clocks and music boxes of that time. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about the doll either.”
“Did you find anything in the following centuries?”
“We have inspected innumerable mechanical toys, only sporadically, to be sure, from the mid-twentieth century on, as there are such vast quantities of them, but we never came across anything unusual. Occasionally we found in literature evidences of more highly developed mechanisms such as we were searching for, but all our attempts to test the validity of these allusions failed. The mechanical doll was a well-loved fiction at that time, a sort of fairy-tale figure, the forerunner of the robot, I surmise. But the technical basis necessary to develop it is lacking.”
“Nothing! Absolutely nothing!”
The minister shrugged his shoulders regretfully.
“How many minutes, Collins?”
“Five, Your Majesty.”
“It is enough to drive one mad! Can’t a stop be put to this running about?”
“I am sorry, Your Majesty, but it is Your Majesty’s own command that the room be under constant supervision. This supervision cannot be countermanded without causing delicate fractures which might have dire consequences for Your Majesty’s safety.”
The minister kept his eye on his watch and compared the time with the temporal strips in his hand. In four minutes and thirty seconds the stream of dots indicating the guards’ positions would cease for a brief period.
“Collins, have you absolutely no idea what is going to happen in the next four minutes?”
“I am afraid we know nothing for certain, Your Majesty, but . . .”
“But what?”
“But, by Your Majesty’s leave, I have my suspicions.”
“It is your damned duty to give thought to the situation and to express your thoughts. So go on and express them!”
“Let us assume that Your Majesty himself, on the basis of experience which Your Majesty will have gained in the future and on the basis of further development of time-travel technique, makes certain points and periods of the time-line which seem important to Your Majesty inaccessible by means of this seal.”
“We see. Collins, why did you not mention such an important aspect earlier? That is a very plausible possibility; one can hardly consider it seriously enough.” The king smiled in relief. He clung to this thought as to a straw. The idea that he himself could be WHITE clearly flattered him. He snapped his fingers energetically and feverishly concentrated upon the thought. Then his face clouded over again.
“But we would at least have transmitted some kind of explanatory message to ourselves in order to make this horrid situation more bearable.”
“Perhaps that is impossible for reasons of security,” interjected Collins.
The king shook his head. “But this doll. Where does this confounded doll fit into the picture?”
“Perhaps it is supposed to bring Your Majesty some important piece of information.”
“And the dollmaker? No, no, it doesn’t fit in.”
“Perhaps he has nothing to do with the whole affair, perhaps he is just a secondary figure; but, on the other hand, perhaps he is the source of information.”
“Perhaps, perhaps! Is that all you have to say? What do you think you are here for – to reel off vague suspicions? We can do that ourselves. You are responsible for our security. Is that clear? Such nonsense! A primitive tinsmith from twelve thousand years ago has information for us, the ruler of four planet systems and all their moons – how ridiculous! Just empty speculation and foolish twaddle!”
The king was provoked. The barrel of his weapon roamed back and forth, and Collins tried to keep out of firing range.
“Then it was a blind alley, by Your Majesty’s leave, which our best forces have wasted centuries in exploring.”
The king stamped his foot. “Time doesn’t interest us! We want information. We want absolute security for our person, even if your people need thousands of years to guarantee it. If you go down blind alleys, it’s your problem, Collins, not ours! You are a miserable failure! We are holding you responsible for the consequences. You understand what that means.”
“At Your Majesty’s command.”
“Our command was: bring information and more information about the present sphere of time and everything connected with it; and you dare to enter this room with your suspicions! You can go to the devil with your crazy notions! We want facts and nothing but facts.”
“Very well, Your Majesty, but don’t forget the seal on Operations Base 7, an intervention by WHITE which made our work extremely difficult and thwarted our action in the decisive years.”
“That may very well be. Perhaps there was at that moment a historical event of great importance. As you said, there was a war at the time. Perhaps our intervention would have endangered a politician or scientist of top-ranking future valence, or the great-grandfather of a politician or scientist, or heaven knows who. But that is all irrelevant. What is going to happen here and now in a few seconds? That is the only thing that matters.”
Time was slipping by.
The guards came and went, came and went, dots on the temporal strip.
The king leaned back, breathing heavily. He was as white as chalk and dripped with sweat.
“Thirty more seconds, Your Majesty.”
“Collins!” The king’s eyes were fixed upon him beseechingly; they were filled with tears. “Collins! Keep your eyes on me! Do you hear? Don’t lose sight of me for a single moment! Take note of everything, everything!”
He was leaning far forward, and his eyes swept panic-stricken across the room. He began to see dolls everywhere. They crept out from beneath his throne, came out of the walls, slipped down from the ceiling on threads. Everywhere he saw dangling limbs, expressionless plastic faces, beady glass eyes that glared maliciously at him, tiny fists that brandished daggers as big as needles or aimed minute laser pistols at him.
The king trembled and gnawed incessantly at his lower lip. Fear had complete mastery over him now. It was suffocating him. He felt as if he must either crawl off into a hole somewhere or else scream and shoot about him in blind rage.
The minister gave him a worried look.
“I can’t bear this any longer, Collins!” shrieked His Majesty. “Don’t just stand idly about – do something!”
His shrill v
oice burst into thousands of tiny splinter-sharp fragments.
Collins followed the second hand of his watch as it ticked nearer and nearer to the critical moment.
“Now.”
The mirror went blank.
The minister looked carefully about the room, then fixed his gaze upon the king. The king suddenly leaned back, crossed his legs, and put aside his pistol so that both hands were free to straighten out the clothing of a small plain doll which he was holding.
The minister blinked and shook his head to dispel the optical illusion, but the doll was still there. It hadn’t been there before and now it was there. He tried without success to cope with this new situation. The brain refused to accept what the eyes clearly saw. His Majesty was sitting comfortably on the throne, smoothing out the dress of this small mechanical figure, and smiling delightedly.
“Come, Collins, why are you staring so aghast at us? Have you never seen a doll before? A pretty little toy, don’t you think? A dollmaker’s masterpiece.”
The ten seconds were over. The mirror glowed once again and the first guard stepped out into the room.
“Hello, how are you? Have a nice trip?” the king asked him in good humor.
“He-hello,” stammered the bewildered man, and fled back into the mirror.
“Good morning,” the king greeted the next guard who appeared.
“G-good morning, Your Majesty,” he managed to stutter, and stumbled over his feet in his haste to find the mirror and disappear into it.
“This is quite an amazing doll, Collins. Go ahead and take a closer look at it.”
The minister approached hesitantly.
“Would Your Majesty deign . . . an explanation . . . the rapid transformation I mean, I beg Your Majesty’s pardon, but I find it incomprehensible that all of a sudden Your Majesty is . . .”
“. . . Like a new man, you wanted to say?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“You will get your explanation soon enough, in a half hour or so, when this spying finally stops.” He pointed to the mirror.
“But, Your Majesty, time is running out. Your Majesty’s only chance is to explain the whole situation to me immediately, so that we can undertake a fracture and take all other necessary measures, so that all may still turn out for the best. I beseech Your Majesty, this is possible for only a few minutes longer.”
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 24