Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

  His Excellency, the Ambassador from 2219 AD—the sole occupant of that office—was a man of relaxed bearing and a wonderfully calm face. His eyes transmitted the unvarying message that all things were essentially simple—and could be further simplified. It was, therefore, quite remarkable how that cry from the grounds below made him look suddenly uncertain.

  He rose and moved to the window with unaccustomed haste. A tall, bearded man, whose clothes were torn and whose body was badly bruised, had just leaped onto the Embassy lawn from the surrounding high fence. The bearded man pointed the forefingers of both hands at the third-floor office of the Ambassador from 2219 AD and shrieked again:

  "Sanctuary!"

  There was an answering shriek from the mob cascading down the street toward him. The bearded man looked over his shoulder once, then dashed forward across the lawn. His feet could be heard pounding up the steps of the Embassy. Downstairs, a heavy door slammed behind him.

  The Ambassador from 2219 AD bit his lip. Well, the fellow had made it. Now his problems began.

  He turned a dial on his wrist communicator. "All Embassy personnel," he said. "Attention! This is the Ambassador speaking. Bolt and barricade all street doors immediately! Barricade all windows on the street level that are not protected by bars. All female personnel and the fugitive who has just entered will be sent up to the second floor. Havemeyer, take charge of the first floor. Bruce, take charge of the second floor—and keep the fugitive under careful guard. Dodson, report to me."

  He turned the dial another notch. "Police Department? This is the Ambassador from 2219 AD. A fugitive has just entered the building, requesting sanctuary. From the looks of the mob behind him, I'd say that your normal detail down here will be inadequate to protect us. You will have to send reinforcements."

  The policeman's snort was as much anger as surprise. "You're giving sanctuary to Henry Groppus and you want us to protect you? Listen, I live in this time! It's as much as my life is worth to—"

  "It's as much as your job is worth if a riot detail isn't down here in two minutes. Two minutes, I said. It is now precisely twenty-seven minutes past six o'clock."

  "But listen!" The voice from the dial seemed almost hysterical. "That's Henry Groppus you have in there. Do you know what he did?"

  "At the moment, that's not relevant. If his request for asylum isn't honored, he will be returned to the proper authorities. I am asking protection for the Embassy from 2219 AD, for its property and personnel, which, like all Embassies and their staffs, enjoy extraterritorial status and immunity. It's your responsibility to see that we get it."

  The Ambassador clicked off and drew a deep breath. His calm was returning and once more his eyes announced that all complex matters could be refined down to simple ones—and handled.

  As he turned to the window again, Dodson, his First Secretary, came in and stood respectfully at his shoulder.

  Together, they stared down at the mob, the relaxed, observant older man and the slender, alert young one who split his gaze between the scene below and his chief.

  As far as the eye could see, in all directions, the street was the color of the yelling mob. It had pushed right up against the fence, so hard and so tight that those in front were unable to climb it as they had intended, but were jammed, screaming their agony, into the iron bars.

  "The police detail on duty, sir," Dodson said in a low voice. "They weren't able to hold them back for more than a few seconds. But they gave us time we needed. Everything downstairs should be secure, sir."

  The Ambassador grunted.

  Now the fence was giving way. It bent slowly, steadily inward, like a black flower closing. And then it was down here and the mob spilled over it, down there and a thick wave of mob washed across the lawn, down everywhere, mob over it everywhere, mob rushing toward the building in which they stood, mob maddened and swirling all about them and breaking thunderously against the walls.

  For just a moment, Dodson was looking contemptuously down through the window. "2119 AD!"

  The Ambassador grunted again. The grunt could be taken any one of several ways.

  The frenzied, directionless noise from below abruptly changed in quality. It became steady, rhythmical. At the peak of each pulsation, there was an enormous thump. After a while, the thumps were followed by a ripping sound.

  "Sir!" Havemeyer's voice came in suddenly on the wrist communicator. "The front door's beginning to give way. All right if we move up to the second floor?"

  "By all means. And as soon as you're up there, you and Bruce see to it that the doors, front and rear, are barricaded. Then I want you to stand by the destructive fuses on the Embassy files. If the mob breaks into the second floor, see to it that the files go."

  "Right, sir."

  "Do you think, sir, that there's any chance—" Dodson had begun, when the sound of a dozen sirens made them look up.

  The riot squad was coming down from the sky on flying platforms, two men to a platform. Soupy yellow stuff flowed out of the nozzles of the canisters each policeman carried, flowed out and bubbled into the mob.

  The Ambassador looked at his watch. "One minute and fifty seconds," he said comfortably. Then he went back to his desk.

  Dodson stood at the window, watching the mob stumble back across the Embassy lawn in chokes and gasps. Above all, he was fascinated by the number of individuals who, in the midst of their choking, stopped and turned and shook their fists at the building behind them.

  When he could tear himself away, he described them to his chief.

  "They evidently feel pretty strongly, sir," he suggested. "This is no ordinary mob."

  "No, it's no ordinary mob. And Groppus is no ordinary criminal. Send him in. Tell Havemeyer and Bruce to start straightening up the place. I want an itemized statement on all damage to be forwarded to the Secretary of State before five o'clock."

  "Yes, sir." Dodson paused near the door. "You know, sir, the staff received him inside as something of a hero."

  The Ambassador looked up, his calm eyes slightly intent. "Of course they did. How did you feel about him, Dodson—criminal or hero?"

  The secretary's face went immediately blank as his burgeoning diplomat's mind tried to blunt the question. "Well, of course, sir, he's both—both criminal and hero."

  "Yes, but which is he chiefly? Take a stand, Dodson. How did you feel about him? Off the record, naturally."

  "Well, sir," the young man began, then hesitated. "I think the dictum that applies here is When in Rome... We are, in effect, in Rome. Therefore, Henry Groppus should undoubtedly be considered a criminal."

  "Yes," the Ambassador said thoughtfully. "In Rome. All right, send him in, send him in."

  Dodson left. The Ambassador sat back and stared at the ceiling—calmly. Then he got up and paced back and forth across the office—calmly. Then he went back to his desk, opened a heavy, gray-bound book, skimmed through a few pages in it and finally leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the polished desktop—calmly, very calmly.

  His wrist communicator buzzed. He flipped it on.

  "Your Excellency, this is the Secretary of State," said a formal, moistureless voice.

  "Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador, with equal formality. "What can I do for you?"

  "Your Excellency, according to information just received by my office, a certain Henry Hancock Groppus has escaped from the jail cell in which he was awaiting execution and taken shelter in your Embassy. I must ask you if this is true."

  "That is true, Mr. Secretary, except for one small detail. At the time he entered the Embassy, he was not being pursued by lawfully constituted authority, but by an unlawful and ungoverned mob."

  The voice in the communicator coughed an extremely dry cough. "I cannot regard this detail as being relevant, Your Excellency. In the name of the government of the United States of America of 2119 AD—to which government you are accredited and whose laws you are bound to respect—I must ask you to surrender the person of Henr
y Hancock Groppus, convicted felon, to the justice of his country and his time."

  "And I, Mr. Secretary," the Ambassador replied with equal dry urbanity, "as a representative and servant of United Earth of 2219 AD, must respectfully decline until I have had time to study the situation."

  "In that case, Your Excellency, I regret to have to inform you of the extreme displeasure of my government and our determination to take whatever steps are necessary to secure the person of Henry Hancock Groppus."

  "Noted, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador.

  There was a silence. "May I speak to you on the private channel, Your Excellency?"

  "You may, Mr. Secretary. One moment, please."

  The Ambassador from 2219 AD pressed a button on his desk which locked his door and lit a Do Not Disturb indicator. Then he swung around and switched on the big screen behind his desk.

  A heavy-set balding man appeared on it. "Hi, Don," he said. "This is one big stink we're in."

  "I know, Cleve," the Ambassador sighed. "A bigamy case. Capital offense."

  "Bigamy, hell! Polygamy, Don boy! That's what this joker's been convicted of, polygamy. Advocating, abetting and encompassing polygamy. You just don't go any lower."

  "In your time, you mean. In 2119."

  "In our time, yes. That's the time we're living in right now. The time that has to face the problem of one woman to every ten men because of the genetic imbalance created by the last world war. All right, so we haven't licked the Uterine Plague yet. We won't lick it for another fifty years, according to you, though you won't tell our medics how we finally will solve it."

  The Ambassador gestured wearily at the screen. "You know as well as I, Cleve, there are things that Temporal Embassies can do and there are things they can't do."

  "Okay. Good. No argument. You boys take your orders and have your problems. But we've got problems, too. Gigantic ones. We've got a social code that was designed in the days when there were equal numbers of men and women, and it's splitting at the seams everywhere. We've got to persuade hundreds of millions of normal men that it's right and proper for them to lead lives of the most maddening frustration if we want to keep civilization from dissolving into hand-to-hand battles. We've got them persuaded—about as well persuaded as a herd of rutting elephants. And along comes this Henry Groppus and his handful of crackpot Mendelists, making strange, sudden noises in the rear of the herd and—"

  "Slow down, Cleve. Take a deep breath. I know the kind of problems your time is facing, perhaps better than you. I know it from the history I studied in school, and, since I've arrived here in 2119 as Ambassador from the Next Century, I've seen it sharp and bloodily clear, at first hand. I know what an explosive danger the Mendelist philosophy is. I couldn't be more sympathetic, I assure you.

  "Nonetheless, Cleve, you're an important government official; you're not the man in the street. 2119 is grappling with the social effects of the Uterine Plague, and to 2119 it looks like the biggest thing that ever was. But 2119 is just a drop in the historical bucket. And so, for that matter," he added in all fairness, "is 2219, my own period. Be just to your position and your intellect; look at the thing in perspective."

  The Secretary of State made a sluicing motion at the top of his bald head. "What perspective? How perspective?"

  "Simply this, as an example. Take an Englishman of the upper middle class, a rich merchant, let us say. In the time of the Tudors, he'd be all for increasing the powers of the king, all for an absolute monarchy, all for a very strong central government—the things that would damage his superiors, the feudal nobility, the most. A century later, when the nobility had been pretty much reduced to so much court decoration, his great-great-grandson would be fighting the absolutism of the Stuarts tooth and nail, insisting that the people had a right to call their king to account and that any government which was dictatorial deserved to be overthrown.

  "And a hundred years or so after that, under the Hanoverian George III, his great-great-grandson, looking across the channel to France, observing that the very common people there in the course of taking the same drastic action with their king had completely bollixed up industry, banking and commerce—he would be exclaiming his pious horror over regicides and calling for laws that would strengthen the government and keep revolutionaries in their place."

  "The point being," said the Secretary of State, "that most social values are conditioned by the time, place and prevailing political climate. Is that what you mean by perspective?"

  "Exactly," the Ambassador said.

  The bald-headed man stared angrily out of the screen. "I wish I weren't so upset. It's my misfortune to forget every dirty word I know when I get really mad. And this calls for—Look, Don, I don't know very much about 2219, what's important, what's sacred, what's not to be touched. The rules of your outfit forbid you to give us a very clear picture of your time—and you're a close-mouthed character to begin with. But I'd give the goddam front lobe of my brain to see how you'd behave if some Henry Groppus of the twenty-third century did the future equivalent of polygamy in your neck of the woods.

  "You'd perspective him, you would. Now I'm not going to beat about the bush any more. Enough history, enough philosophy. Our government wouldn't last a week if we let Mendelists get away with preaching their vicious nonsense, let alone committing overt acts. I hate to have to put it this way, Don, but the man is the vilest of criminals. You're going to hand him over to us."

  Smiling calmly, the Ambassador from 2219 AD said, "I repeat: he's a criminal in your terms. Beyond that, I repeat: I have to study the situation. He had escaped from prison; he was being pursued by a lynch mob; he took asylum in our Embassy, which is legally an enclave of 2219 in the present-day United States, an extension of our time and government into yours. Don't talk to me as if I were your office boy's assistant, Cleve."

  "A criminal is a criminal," the bald-headed man went on doggedly. "This criminal has got to be brought to justice. I've asked you for him on the record and off the record. Next step is formal extradition papers. And the step after that—well, I won't like to do it, but I will."

  "I wouldn't like you to do it, either," said the Ambassador calmly and softly.

  Their eyes locked. The Secretary of State spread his hands. "Well, there it is," he muttered, and he clicked off.

  Dodson and Groppus had been waiting patiently outside. When the Ambassador unlocked the door and nodded them in, he looked the bearded man over carefully.

  A thoroughly bewhiskered, messily eyebrowed and well-muscled person, perhaps a jot past middle age, he stood clumsily tall and stiffly erect in a manner slightly reminiscent of a military cadet who had arrived at the academy just the evening before.

  His eyes were mild and apologetic, not at all fanatic and intense. They had a tendency to blink if you stared at them too hard. His hands were the most vibrant part of him. Even in comparative repose, when he was listening or thinking, they kept going through the repertoire of the fluid, underlining gestures of the practiced sidewalk exhorter.

  "I suppose you know, Mr. Groppus, that you are already the subject of a rather acrimonious controversy between your government and my Embassy?" said the Ambassador.

  "Not my government. I don't recognize it as mine. I don't admit its jurisdiction over me."

  "Unfortunately, it feels differently. And it is larger, more powerful and more numerous than you. Please sit down."

  Henry Groppus lowered his head and shook it from side to side slowly, a negative gesture that could make its point the entire length of a meeting hall. "I prefer to stand, thank you. I always stand. Size, power, numbers—since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So far, they haven't succeeded."

  Nodding, the Ambassador murmured, "Very true. But, on the other hand, they do exceedingly well with life and death. Which, of course, brings us back to the present moment and you. As a convicted criminal under sentence of—"

  "I am not a criminal." />
  "You aren't? In that case, Mr. Groppus, we have all been misled. I really must beg your pardon. Suppose you tell me then: how, precisely, do you visualize your role?"

  "As a political refugee! I come here, persecuted and cast out, to my true home and nation. I claim spiritual citizenship in 2219."

  "Spiritual citizenship? That's hardly the best kind. But putting that complex question aside for the moment, let me ask you, Mr. Groppus: what has given you the impression that my era shares your beliefs? The first rule of all Temporal Embassies is to transmit no information about the technological status and social attitudes of their own time to the period in which they are accredited. I fail to see what basis you have for—"

  "I always suspected that the future would be Mendelist, but I couldn't be really sure. When the mob broke into the jail to lynch me and I got away from them, this was the only place I could think of hiding in. Now that I've been here for a while and seen you people—I know! The next century belongs to us!"

  The Ambassador looked completely startled and unbelieving, as if he'd stubbed an emotion on a projecting rock. He shot a quick, questioning glance at his First Secretary.

  "I'm sorry, sir," Dodson said in a low, rapid voice. "Bruce. It was his fault. He was so busy barricading the second floor against the mob that he neglected to take proper precautions. Some of the clerks came up to the prisoner during the excitement and got into conversation with him. By the time I reached him, the damage had been done."

  "Some of the clerks—" His Excellency fought with himself for a moment, then squirted out an immense, protective cloud of calm. He said, after a deep breath, "I was under the impression that my staff was composed of trained employees, regularly briefed as to their responsibilities. Well trained. Down to the very lowest echelons."

  "Yes, sir, but these were three youngsters on their first extratemporal assignment. I'm not trying to make excuses for them, but it's been very dull at the Embassy these last few months, especially for romantic kids who came out all hot and bothered at the idea of seeing history come alive and happen. And then, all of a sudden, there's a lynch mob and a siege of the Embassy. They find themselves standing next to an actual twenty-second-century Mendelist Martyr in the flesh. Well, you know how it is, sir. They started out by asking excited, admiring questions—and ended up answering them."