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Needle in a Timestack

Page 12

by Robert Silverberg


  Skein has seen this series of images hundreds of times. “How do you feel?” the skull-faced man asks.

  “Strange. Good. My head seems clear!”

  “You had communion down there?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I think I’m healed,” Skein says in wonder. “My strength is back. Before, you know, I felt cut down to the bone, a minimum version of myself. And now. And now.” He lets a tendril of consciousness slip forth. It meets the mind of the skull-faced man. Skein is aware of a glassy interface; he can touch the other mind, but he cannot enter it. “Are you a Communicator too?” Skein asks, awed.

  “In a sense. I feel you touching me. You’re better, aren’t you?”

  “Much. Much. Much.”

  “As I told you. Now you have your second chance, Skein. Your gift has been restored. Courtesy of our friend in the pit. They love being helpful.”

  “What shall I do now? Where shall I go?”

  “Anything. Anywhere. Anywhen. You’re free to move along the timeline as you please. In a state of controlled, directed fugue, so to speak. After all, if time is random, if there is no rigid sequence of events—”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why not choose the sequence that appeals to you? Why stick to the set of abstractions your former self has handed you? You’re a free man, Skein. Go. Enjoy. Undo your past. Edit it. Improve on it. It isn’t your past, any more than this is your present. It’s all one, Skein, all one. Pick the segment you prefer.”

  He tests the truth of the skull-faced man’s words. Cautiously Skein steps three minutes into the past and sees himself struggling up out of the pit. He slides four minutes into the future and sees the skull-faced man, alone, trudging northward along the shore. Everything flows. All is fluidity. He is free. He is free.

  “You see, Skein?”

  “Now I do,” Skein says. He is out of entropy’s jaws. He is time’s master, which is to say he is his own master. He can move at will. He can defy the imaginary forces of determinism. Suddenly he realizes what he must do now. He will assert his free will; he will challenge entropy on its home ground. Skein smiles. He cuts free of the timeline and floats easily into what others would call the past.

  “Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.

  Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

  “No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

  “And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

  “He will.”

  “And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?” Coustakis asks.

  “He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

  The desk reports that Nissenson, half the world away in São Paulo, is ready. Quickly Skein throws Coustakis into the receptive condition, and swings around to face the brilliant lights of his data-access units. Here is the moment when he can halt the transaction. Turn again, Skein. Face Coustakis, smile sadly, inform him that the communion will be impossible. Give him back his money, send him off to break some other Communicator’s mind. And live on, whole and happy, ever after. It was at this point, visiting this scene endlessly in his fugues, that Skein silently and hopelessly cried out to himself to stop. Now it is within his power, for this is no fugue, no illusion of time-shift. He has shifted. He is here, carrying with him the knowledge of all that is to come, and he is the only Skein on the scene, the operative Skein. Get up, now. Refuse the contract.

  He does not. Thus he defies entropy. Thus he breaks the chain.

  He peers into the sparkling, shifting little blazes until they kindle his gift, jabbing at the electrical rhythms of his brain until he is lifted into the energy level that permits the opening of a communion. He starts to go up. He reaches forth one tendril of his mind and engages Nissenson. With another tendril he snares Coustakis. Steadily, now, he draws the two tendrils together. He is aware of the risks, but believes he can surmount them.

  The tendrils meet.

  Out of Coustakis’s mind flows a description of the matter transmitter and a clear statement of the beam-spread problem; Skein shoves it along to Nissenson, who begins to work on a solution. The combined strength of the two minds is great, but Skein deftly lets the excess charge bleed away and maintains the communion with no particular effort, holding Coustakis and Nissenson together while they deal with their technical matters. Skein pays little attention as their excited minds rush toward answers. If you. Yes, and then. But if. I see, yes. I could. And. However, maybe I should. I like that. It leads to. Of course. The inevitable result. Is it feasible, though? I think so. You might have to. I could. Yes. I could. I could.

  “I thank you a million times,” Coustakis says to Skein. “It was all so simple, once we saw how we ought to look at it. I don’t begrudge your fee at all. Not at all.”

  Coustakis leaves, glowing with delight. Skein, relieved, tells his desk, “I’m going to allow myself a three-day holiday. Fix the schedule to move everybody up accordingly.”

  He smiles. He strides across his office, turning up the amplifiers, treating himself to the magnificent view. The nightmare undone. The past revised. The burnout avoided. All it took was confidence. Enlightenment. A proper understanding of the processes involved.

  He feels the sudden swooping sensations of incipient temporal fugue. Before he can intervene to regain control, he swings off into darkness and arrives instantaneously on a planet of purple sand and blue-leaved trees. Orange waves lap at the shore. He stands a few meters from a deep conical pit. Peering into it, he sees an amoebalike creature lying beside a human figure; strands of the alien’s jellylike substance are wound around the man’s body. He recognizes the man to be John Skein. The communion in the pit ends; the man begins to clamber from the pit. The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Patiently he watches his younger self struggling up from the pit. Now he understands. The circuit is closed; the knot is tied; the identity loop is complete. He is destined to spend many years on Abbondanza VI, growing ancient and withered. He is the skull-faced man.

  Skein reaches the rim of the pit and lies there, breathing hard. He helps Skein get up.

  “How do you feel?” he asks.

  Absolutely Inflexible

  Despite the rigors of college work, I wrote short stories steadily throughout 1954—one in April, two in May, three in June, two in October after the summer break. And I eventually sold them all, too. But progress was slow and often discouraging, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1955 that there was any pattern of consistent sales.

  I had finished my third year of college by then, and—though I intended to return for the final year and collect my degree—I was already beginning to believe that I might actually be able to earn a modest living of some sort as a professional science-fiction writer. The evidence in favor of that, so far, was pretty slim: “Gorgon Planet,” “The Silent Colony,” the book Revolt on Alpha C, and then a couple of stories, “The Martian” and “Yokel with Portfolio,” that were bought by a minor magazine called Imagination in February and May of 1955. My total income from all of that was $352.60 spread over a year and a half, not a great deal even in those days. But I was finding it easier and easier to construct short stories that—to me—seemed at least as good as most of those that the innumerable sf magazines of the day were publishing, and I was getting encouraging response from my agent about the new pieces I sent him once or twice a month. What I didn’t know was that most of the boom-era magazines that had begun publication in 1953 were on their last legs by the early months of 1955, and that my agent’s e
nthusiasm didn’t mean much, because it was his usual practice to send a cheery note (ghostwritten by one of his employees) about any story that stood half a chance of being published by someone, somewhere, eventually. So I stepped up my pace of production as the college year came to its close, and by June of 1955 I was writing a story a week.

  “Absolutely Inflexible” was among them—one of my first successful tries at the time-paradox theme. I suppose it’s more than a little indebted to Robert A. Heinlein’s classic “By His Bootstraps,” but what time-paradox story isn’t? And it has some strength of its own, enough to have seen it through an assortment of anthology appearances over the years, and even, for a while, to be a bestseller for one of the pioneering on-line publishers of the 1990s. It was bought, after making the rounds for about six months, by the veteran editor-publisher Leo Margulies, who ran it in the July 1956 issue of the underrated magazine he had founded and edited, Fantastic Universe.

  The detector over in one corner of Mahler’s little office gleamed a soft red. He indicated it with a weary gesture of his hand to the sad-eyed time jumper who sat slouched glumly across the desk from him, looking cramped and uncomfortable in the bulky spacesuit he was compelled to wear.

  “You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”

  “And not one has been set free,” the time jumper said. “Every time-traveler who’s come here has been packed off to the Moon immediately. Every one.”

  “Every one,” Mahler said. He peered through the thick shielding, trying to see what sort of man was hidden inside the spacesuit. Mahler often wondered about the men he condemned so easily to the Moon. This one was small of stature, with wispy locks of white hair pasted to his high forehead by perspiration. Evidently he had been a scientist, a respected man of his time, perhaps a happy father (although very few of the time jumpers were family men). Perhaps he possessed some bit of scientific knowledge that would be invaluable to the twenty-eighth century; perhaps not. It did not matter. Like all the rest, he would have to be sent to the Moon, to live out his remaining days under the grueling, primitive conditions of the Dome.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?” the other asked. “I came here with no malice, no intent to harm whatsoever. I’m simply a scientific observer from the past. Driven by curiosity, I took the Jump. I never expected that I’d be walking into life imprisonment.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mahler said, getting up. He decided to end the interview; he had to get rid of this jumper because there was another coming right up. Some days they came thick and fast, and this looked like one of them. But the efficient mechanical tracers never missed one.

  “But can’t I live on Earth and stay in this spacesuit?” the time-jumper asked, panicky now that he saw his interview with Mahler was coming to an end. “That way I’d be sealed off from contact at all times.”

  “Please don’t make this any harder for me,” Mahler said. “I’ve explained to you why we must be absolutely inflexible about this. There cannot—must not—be any exceptions. It’s two centuries since last there was any occurrence of disease on Earth. In all this time we’ve lost most of the resistance acquired over the previous countless generations of disease. I’m risking my life coming so close to you, even with the spacesuit sealing you off.”

  Mahler signaled to the tall, powerful guards waiting in the corridor, grim in the casings that protected them from infection. This was always the worst moment.

  “Look,” Mahler said, frowning with impatience. “You’re a walking death-trap. You probably carry enough disease germs to kill half the world. Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.”

  “But I’d—”

  “I know. You’d swear by all that’s holy to you or to me that you’d never leave the confines of the spacesuit. Sorry. The word of the most honorable man doesn’t carry any weight against the safety of the lives of Earth’s billions. We can’t take the slightest risk by letting you stay on Earth. It’s unfair, it’s cruel, it’s everything else. You had no idea you would walk into something like this. Well, it’s too bad for you. But you knew you were going on a one-way trip to the future, and you’re subject to whatever that future wants to do with you, since there’s no way of getting back.”

  Mahler began to tidy up the papers on his desk in a way that signaled finality. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll just have to see our way of thinking about it. We’re frightened to death at your very presence here. We can’t allow you to roam Earth, even in a spacesuit. No; there’s nothing for you but the Moon. I have to be absolutely inflexible. Take him away,” he said, gesturing to the guards. They advanced on the little man and began gently to ease him out of Mahler’s office.

  Mahler sank gratefully into the pneumochair and sprayed his throat with laryngogel. These long speeches always left him feeling exhausted, his throat feeling raw and scraped. Someday I’ll get throat cancer from all this talking, Mahler thought. And that’ll mean the nuisance of an operation. But if I don’t do this job, someone else will have to.

  Mahler heard the protesting screams of the time jumper impassively. In the beginning he had been ready to resign when he first witnessed the inevitable frenzied reaction of jumper after jumper as the guards dragged them away, but eight years had hardened him.

  They had given him the job because he was hard, in the first place. It was a job that called for a hard man. Condrin, his predecessor, had not been the same sort of man Mahler was, and for that reason Condrin was now himself on the Moon. He had weakened after heading the Bureau for a year and had let a jumper go; the jumper had promised to secrete himself at the tip of Antarctica, and Condrin, thinking that Antarctica was as safe as the Moon, had foolishly released him. That was when they called Mahler in. In eight years Mahler had sent four thousand men to the Moon. (The first was the runaway jumper, intercepted in Buenos Aires after he had left a trail of disease down the hemisphere from Appalachia to Argentine Protectorate. The second was Condrin.)

  It was getting to be a tiresome job, Mahler thought. But he was proud to hold it. It took a strong man to do what he was doing. He leaned back and awaited the arrival of the next jumper.

  The door slid smoothly open as the burly body of Dr. Fournet, the Bureau’s chief medical man, broke the photo-electronic beam. Mahler glanced up. Fournet carried a time-rig dangling from one hand.

  “Took this away from our latest customer,” Fournet said. “He told the medic who examined him that it was a two-way rig, and I thought I’d bring it to show you.”

  Mahler came to full attention quickly. A two-way rig? Unlikely, he thought. But it would mean the end of the dreary jumper prison on the Moon if it were true. Only how could a two-way rig exist?

  He reached out and took it from Fournet. “It seems to be a conventional twenty-fourth century type,” he said.

  “But notice the extra dial here,” Fournet said, pointing. Mahler peered and nodded.

  “Yes. It seems to be a two-way rig. But how can we test it? And it’s not really very probable,” Mahler said. “Why should a two-way rig suddenly show up from the twenty-fourth century when no other traveler’s had one? We don’t even have two-way time-travel ourselves, and our scientists don’t think it’s possible. Still,” he mused, “it’s a nice thing to dream about. We’ll have to study this a little more closely. But I don’t seriously think it’ll work. Bring him in, w
ill you?”

  As Fournet turned to signal the guards, Mahler asked him, “What’s his medical report, by the way?”

  “From here to here,” Fournet said sombrely. “You name it, he’s carrying it. Better get him shipped off to the Moon as soon as possible. I won’t feel safe until he’s off this planet.” The big medic waved to the guards.

  Mahler smiled. Fournet’s overcautiousness was proverbial in the Bureau. Even if a jumper were to show up completely free from disease, Fournet would probably insist that he was carrying everything from asthma to leprosy.

  The guards brought the jumper into Mahler’s office. He was fairly tall, Mahler saw, and young. It was difficult to see his face clearly through the dim plate of the protective spacesuit all jumpers were compelled to wear, but Mahler could tell that the young time-jumper’s face had much of the lean, hard look of Mahler’s own. It seemed that the jumper’s eyes had widened in surprise as he entered the office, but Mahler was not sure.

  “I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly. “Your name is Mahler, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Mahler agreed.

  “To go all these years—and find you. Talk about improbabilities!”

  Mahler ignored him, declining to take up the gambit. He had found it was good practice never to let a captured jumper get the upper hand in conversation. His standard procedure was firmly to explain to the jumper the reasons why it was imperative that he be sent to the Moon, and then send him, as quickly as possible.

  “You say this is a two-way time-rig?” Mahler asked, holding up the flimsy-looking piece of equipment.

  “That’s right,” the other agreed. “Works both ways. If you pressed the button, you’d go straight back to 2360 or thereabouts.”

  “Did you build it?”

  “Me? No, hardly,” said the jumper. “I found it. It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. In fact, if I tried to tell it, I’d only make things ten times worse than they are, if that’s possible. No. Let’s get this over with, shall we? I know I don’t stand much of a chance with you, and I’d just as soon make it quick.”

 

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