by Tom Boardman
“I needn’t point out the colossal significance of this discovery,” General Carpenter pointed out. “Think what it would mean to the war if we could send an army back in time a week or a month or a year. We could win the war before it started. We could protect our Dream… Poetry and Beauty and the Culture of America… from barbarism without ever endangering it.”
The staff tried to grapple with the problem of winning battles before they started.
“The situation is complicated by the fact that these men mu! women of Ward T are non compos. They may or may not know how they do what they do, but in any case they’re incapable of communicating with the experts who could reduce this miracle to method. It’s for us to find the key. They can’t help us.”
The hardened and sharpened specialists looked around uncertainly.
“We’ll need experts,” General Carpenter said.
The staff relaxed. They were on familiar ground again.
“Well need a Cerebral Mechanist, a Cyberneticist, a Psychiatrist, an Anatomist, an Archaeologist, and a first-rate Historian. They’ll go into that world and they won’t come out until their job is done. They must learn the technique of time travel.”
The first five experts were easy to draft from other war departments. All America was a tool chest of hardened and sharpened specialists. But there was trouble locating a first-class Historian until the Federal Penitentiary cooperated with the army and released Dr Bradley Scrim from his twenty years at hard labour. Dr Scrim was add and jagged. He had held the chair of Philosophic History at a Western university until he spoke his mind about the war for the American Dream. That got him the twenty years hard.
Scrim was still intransigent, but induced to play ball by the intriguing problem of Ward T.
“But I’m not an expert,” he snapped. “In this benighted nation of experts, I’m the, last singing grasshopper in the ant heap.”
Carpenter snapped up the intercom. “Get me an Entomologist,” he said.
“Don’t bother,” Scrim said, “I’ll translate. You’re a nest of ants… all working and toiling and specializing. For what?”
“To preserve the American Dream,” Carpenter answered hotly, “We’re fighting for Poetry and Culture and Education and the Finer Things in Life.”
“Which means you’re fighting to preserve me,” Scrim said. “That’s what I’ve devoted my life to. And what do you do with me? Put me in jail.”
“You were convicted of enemy sympathizing and fellow-travelling,” Carpenter said.
“I was convicted of believing in my American Dream,” Scrim said. “Which is another way of saying I was jailed for having a mind of my own.”
Scrim was also intransigent in Ward T. He stayed one night, enjoyed three good meals, read the reports, threw them down and began hollering to be let out.
“There’s a job for everyone and everyone must be on the job,” Colonel Dimmock told him. “You don’t come out until you’ve got the secret of time travel.”
“There’s no secret I can get,” Scrim said.
“Do they travel in time?”
“Yes and no.”
“The answer has to be one or the other. Not both. You’re evading the—”
“Look,” Scrim interrupted wearily. “What are you an expert in?”
“Psychotherapy.”
“Then how the hell can you understand what I’m talking about? This Is a philosophic concept. I tell you there’s no secret here that the army can use. There’s no secret any group can use. It’s a secret for individuals only.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I didn’t think you would. Take me to Carpenter.”
They took Scrim to Carpenter’s office where he grinned at the general malignantly, looking for all the world like a redheaded, underfed devil.
“I’ll need ten minutes,” Scrim said. “Can you spare them out of your tool box?”
Carpenter nodded.
“Now listen carefully. I’m going to give you the clues to something so vast and so strange that it will need all your fine edge to cut into it.”
Carpenter looked expectant.
“Nathan Riley goes back in time to the early twentieth century. There he lives the life of Ms fondest dreams. He’s a big-time gambler, the friend of Diamond Jim Brady and others. He wins money betting on events because he always knows the outcome in advance. He won money betting on Eisenhower to win an election. He won money betting on a prize fighter named Marciano to beat another prize fighter named La Starza. He made money investing in an automobile company owned by Henry Ford. There are the dues. They mean anything to you?”
“Not without a Sociological Analyst,” Carpenter answered. He reached for the intercom.
“Don’t order one, I’ll explain later. Let’s try some more clues. Lela Machan, for example. She escapes into the Roman Empire where she lives the life of her dreams as a femme fatale. Every man loves her. Julius Caesar, Savonarola, the entire Twentieth Legion, a man named Ben Hur. Do you see the fallacy?”
“No.”
“She also smokes cigarettes.”
“Well?” Carpenter asked after a pause.
“I continue,” Scrim said. “George Hanmer escapes into England of the nineteenth century where he’s a member of Parliament and the friend of Gladstone, Winston Churchill, and Disraeli, who takes him riding in his Rolls-Royce. Do you know what a Rolls-Royce is?”
“No.”
“It was the name of an automobile.”
“So?”
“You don’t understand yet?”
“No.”
Scrim paced the floor in exaltation. “Carpenter, this is a bigger discovery than teleportation or time travel. This can be the salvation of man. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Those two dozen shock victims in Ward T have been H-Bombed into something so gigantic that it’s no wonder your specialists and experts can’t understand it.”
“What the hell’s bigger than time travel, Scrim?”
“Listen to this, Carpenter. Eisenhower did not run for office until the middle of the twentieth century. Nathan Riley could not have been a friend of Diamond Jim Brady’s and bet on Eisenhower to win an election… not simultaneously. Brady was dead a quarter of a century before Ike was President. Marciano defeated La Starza fifty years after Henry Ford started his automobile company. Nathan Riley’s time travelling is full of similar anachronisms.”
Carpenter looked puzzled.
“Lela Machan could not have had Ben Hur for a lover. Ben Hur never existed in Rome. He never existed at all. He was a character in a novel. She couldn’t have smoked. They didn’t have tobacco then. You see? More anachronisms. Disraeli could never have taken George Hanmer for a ride in a Rolls-Royce because automobiles weren’t invented until long after Disraeli’s death.”
“The hell you say,” Carpenter exclaimed. “You mean they’re all lying?”
“No. Don’t forget, they don’t need sleep. They don’t need food. They’re not lying. They’re going back in time all right. They’re eating and sleeping back there.”
“But you just said their stories don’t stand up. They’re full of anachronisms.”
“Because they travel back into a time of their own imagination. Nathan Riley has his own picture of what America was like in the early twentieth century. It’s faulty and anachronistic because he’s no scholar, but it’s real for him. He can live there. The same is true for the others.”
Carpenter goggled.
“The concept is almost beyond understanding. These people have discovered how to turn dreams into reality. They know how to enter their dream realities. They can stay there, live there, perhaps forever. My God, Carpenter, this is your American dream. It’s miracle-working, immortality, Godlike creation, mind over matter… It must be explored. It must be studied. It must be given to the world.”
“Can you do it, Scrim?”
“No, I cannot. I’m a historian. I’m non-creative, so it’s beyond me. You need a poet…
an artist who understands the creation of dreams. From creating dreams on paper it oughtn’t to be too difficult to take the step to creating dreams in actuality.”
“A poet? Are you serious?”
“Certainly I’m serious. Don’t you know what a poet is? You’ve been telling us for five years that this war is being fought to save the poets.”
“Don’t be facetious, Scrim, I—”
“Send a poet into Ward T. He’ll learn how they do it. He’s the only man who can. A poet is half doing it anyway. Once be learns, he can teach your psychologists and anatomists. Then they can teach us; but the poet is the only man who can interpret between those shock cases and your experts.”
“I believe you’re right, Scrim.”
“Then don’t delay, Carpenter. Those patients are returning to this world less and less frequently. We’ve got to get at that secret before they disappear forever. Send a poet to Ward T.”
Carpenter snapped up his intercom. “Send me a poet,” he said.
He waited, and waited… and waited… while America sorted feverishly through its two hundred and ninety millions of hardened and sharpened experts, its specialized tools to defend the American Dream of Beauty and Poetry and the Better Things in Life. He waited for them to find a poet, not understanding the endless delay, the fruitless search; not understanding why Bradley Scrim laughed and laughed and laughed at this final, fatal disappearance.
Frederik Pohl
The Wizards of Pung’s Corners
1
This is the way it happened in the old days. Pay attention now. I’m not going to repeat myself.
There was this old man. A wicked one. Coglan was his name, and he came into Pung’s Corners in a solid-lead car. He was six feet seven inches tall. He attracted a lot of attention.
Why? Why, because nobody had ever seen a solid-lead car before. Nobody much had ever seen a stranger. It wasn’t usual. That was how Pung’s Corners was in the old days, a little pocket in the middle of the desert, and nobody came there. There weren’t even planes overhead, or not for a long time; but there had been planes just before old man Coglan showed up. It made people nervous.
Old man Coglan had snapping black eyes and a loose and limber step. He got out of his car and slammed the door closed. It didn’t go tchik like a Volkswagen or perclack like a Buick. It went woomp. It was heavy, since, as I mentioned, it was solid lead.
“Boy!” he bellowed, standing in front of Pung’s Inn. “Come get my bags!”
Charley Frink was the bell-boy at that time—yes, the Senator. Of course, he was only fifteen years old then. He came out for Coglan’s bags and he had to make four trips. There was a lot of space in the back of that car, with its truck tyres and double-thick glass, and all of it was full of baggage.
While Charley was hustling the bags in, Coglan was parading back and forth on Front Street. He winked at Mrs Churchwood and ogled young Kathy Flint. He nodded to the boys in front of the barber shop. He was a character, making himself at home like that.
In front of Andy Grammis’s grocery store, Andy tipped his chair back. Considerately, he moved his feet so his yellow dog could get out the door, “He seems like a nice feller,” he said to Jack Tighe. (Yes, that Jack Tighe.)
Jack Tighe stood in the shelter of the door and he was frowning. He knew more than any of the rest of them, though it wasn’t time to say anything yet. But he said: “We don’t get any strangers.”
Andy shrugged. He leaned back in his chair. It was warm in the sun.
“Pshaw, Jack,” he said. “Maybe we ought to get a few more. Town’s going to sleep.” He yawned drowsily.
And Jack Tighe left him there, left him and started down the street for home, because he knew what he knew.
Anyway, Coglan didn’t hear them. If he had heard, he wouldn’t have cared. It was old man Coglan’s great talent that he didn’t care what people had to say about him, and the others like him. He couldn’t have been what he was if that hadn’t been so.
So he checked in at Pung’s Inn.“A suite,boy!” he boomed.“The best. A place where I can be comfortable, real comfortable.”
“Yes, sir, Mister—”
“Coglan, boy! Edsel T. Coglan. A proud name at both ends, and I’m proud to wear it!”
“Yes, sir, Mr Coglan. Right away. Now let’s see.” He pored over his room ledgers, although, except for the Willmans and Mr Carpenter when his wife got mad at him, there weren’t any guests, as he certainly knew. He pursed his lips. He said: “Ah, good! The bridal suite’s vacant, Mr Coglan. I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable there. Of course, it’s eight-fifty a day.”
“The bridal suite it is, boy!” Coglan chucked the pen into its holder with a fencer’s thrust. He grinned like a fine old Bengal tiger with white crew-cut hair.
And there was something to grin about, in a way, wasn’t there? The bridal suite. That was funny.
Hardly anybody ever took the bridal suite at Pung’s Inn, unless they had a bride. You only had to look at Coglan to know that he was a long way from taking a bride—a long way, and in the wrong direction. Tall as he was, snapping-eyed and straight-backed as he was, he was clearly on the far side of marrying. He was at least eighty. You could see it in his creepy skin and his gnarled hands.
The room clerk whistled for Charley Frink. “Glad to have you with us, Mr Coglan,” he said. “Charley’ll have your bags up in a jiffy. Will you be staying with us long?”
Coglan laughed out loud. It was the laugh of a relaxed and confident man. “Yes,” he said. “Quite long.”
Now what did Coglan do when he was all alone in the bridal suite?
Well, first he paid off the bell-boy with a ten dollar bill. That surprised Charley Frink, all right. He wasn’t used to that kind of tipping. He went out and Coglan closed the door behind him in a very great good humour.
Coglan was happy.
So he peered around, grinning a wolfs grin. He looked at the bathroom, with its stall shower and bright white porcelain. “Quaint,” he murmured. He amused himself with the electric lights, switching them on and off. “Delicious,” he said. “So manual.” In the living-room of the suite, the main light was from an overhead six-point chandelier, best Grand Rapids glass. Two of the pendants were missing. “Ridiculous,” chuckled old Mr Coglan, “but very, very sweet.”
Of course, you know what he was thinking. He was thinking of the big caverns and the big machines. He was thinking of the design wobblators and the bomb-shielded power sources, the self-contained raw material lodes and the unitized distribution pipelines. But I’m getting ahead of the story. It isn’t time to talk about those things yet. So don’t ask.
Anyway, after old man Coglan had a good look around, he opened one of his bags.
He sat down in front of the desk.
He took a Kleenex out of his pocket and with a fastidious expression picked up the blotter with it, and dumped it on the floor.
He lifted the bag on to the bare desk top and propped it, open, against the wall.
You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear. Its back was a panel of pastel Incite with sparks embedded in it. It glittered. There was a cathode screen. There was a scanner, a microphone, a speaker. All those things and lots more. How do I know this? Why, it’s all written down in a book called My Eighteen Years at Pung’s Hall, by Senator C. T. Frink. Because Charley was in the room next door and there was a keyhole.
So then what happened was that a little tinkly chime sounded distantly within the speaker, and the cathode screen flickered and lit up.
“Coglan,” boomed the tall old man. “Reporting in. Let me speak to V. P. Maffity.”
2
Now you have to know what Pung’s Corners was like in those days.
Everybody knows what it is now, but then it was small. Very small. It sat on the bank of the Delaware River like a fat old lady on the edge of a spindly chair.
General “Retreating Johnnie” Estabrook wintered th
ere before the Battle of Monmouth and wrote pettishly to General Washington: “I can obtain no Provision here, as the inhabitants are so averse to our Cause, that I cannot get a Man to come near me.”
During the Civil War, a small draft riot took place in its main square, in which a recruiting colonel of the IXth Volunteer Pennsylvania Zouaves was chased out of town and the son of the town’s leading banker suffered superficial scalp wounds. (He fell off his horse. He was drunk.)
These were only little wars, you know. They had left only little scars.
Pung’s Corners missed all the big ones.
For instance, when the biggest of all got going, why, Pung’s Corners had a ticket on the fifty-yard line but never had to carry the ball.
The cobalt bomb that annihilated New Jersey stopped short at the bank of the Delaware, checked by a persistent easterly wind.
The radio-dust that demolished Philadelphia went forty-some miles up the river. Then the drone that was spreading It was rammed down by a suicide pilot in a shaky jet. (Pung’s Corners was one mile farther on.)
The H-bombs that scattered around the New York megalopolis bracketed Pung’s Corners, but it lay unscathed between.
You see how it was? They never laid a glove on us. But after the war, we were marooned.
Now that wasn’t a bad way to be, you know? Read some of the old books, you’ll see. The way Pung’s Corners felt, there was a lot to be said for being marooned. People in Pung’s Corners were genuinely sorry about the war, with so many people getting killed and all. (Although we won it. It was worse for the other side.) But every cloud has its silver lining and so on, and being surrounded at every point of the compass by badlands that no one could cross had a few compensating features.
There was a Nike battalion in Pung’s Corners, and they say they shot down the first couple of helicopters that tried to land because they thought they were the enemy. Maybe they did. But along about the fifth copter, they didn’t think that any more, I guarantee. And then the planes stopped coming. Outside, they had plenty to think about, I suppose. They stopped bothering with Pung’s Corners.