John Brent gaped. “I . . . I’ve got to go see the old lady,” he stammered.
From the window of the gray-haired Martha-Krasna he could see the red-headed Krasna-Martha outside. He held on to a solid and reassuring chair and said, “Well, madam, I have news. We’re going back today.”
“Oh, thank Cosmos!”
“But I’ve got to find out something from you. What was the date set for the launching of the second Barrier?”
“Let me see— I know it beed holiday. Yes, it beed May 1.”
“My, my! May Day a holiday now? Workers of the World Unite, or simply Gathering Nuts in May?”
“I don’t understand you. It bees Dyce-Farnsworth’s birthday, of course. But then I never understand . . .”
In his mind he heard the same plaint coming from fresh young lips. “I . . . I understand now, madam,” he said clumsily. “Our meeting—I can see why you—” Damn it, what was there to say?
“Please,” she said. There was, paradoxically, a sort of pathetic dignity about her. “I do not understand. Then at littlest let me forget.”
He turned away respectfully. “Warehouse in half an hour!” he called over his shoulder.
The young Krasna-Martha was alone in the warehouse when Brent got there. He looked at her carefully, trying to see in her youthful features the worn ones of the woman he had just left. It made sense.
“I corned first,” she said, “because I wanted to say good-by without others.”
“Good-by, milady,” Brent murmured into her fine red hair. “In a way I’m not leaving you because I’m taking you with me and still I’ll never see you again. And you don’t understand that, and I’m not sure you’ve ever understood anything I’ve said, but you’ve been very sweet.”
“And you will destroy Barrier? For me?”
“For you, milady. And a few billion others. And here come our friends.”
Alex carried a small box which he tucked under one of the seats. “Dial and mechanism beed repaired days ago,” he grinned. “I’ve beed working on this for you, in lab while I was supposed to be re-proving Tsvetov’s hypothesis. Temporal demagnetizer—guaranteed. Bring this near Barrier and field will be breaked. Your problem bees to get near Barrier.”
Martha, the matron, climbed into the machine. Martha, the girl, turned away to hide watering eyes. Brent set the dial to 2473 and adjusted the vernier to April 24, which gave him a week’s grace. “Well, friends,” he faltered. “My best gratitude—and I’ll be seeing you in fifty years.”
Stephen started to speak, and then suddenly stopped to listen. “Quick, Krasna, Alex. Behind those cases. Turn switch quickly, John.”
Brent turned the switch, and nothing happened. Stephen and Krasna were still there, moving toward the cases. Alex darted to the machine. “Cosmos blast me! I maked disconnection to prevent anyone’s tampering by accident. And now—”
“Hurry, Alex,” Stephen called in a whisper.
“Moment—” Alex opened the panel and made a rapid adjustment. “There, John. Good-by.”
In the instant before Brent turned the switch, he saw Stephen and Krasna reach a safe hiding place. He saw a Stapper appear in the doorway. He saw the flicker of a rod. The last thing he saw in 2423 was the explosion that lifted Alex’s head off his shoulders.
The spattered blood was still warm in 2473.
Stephen, the seventy-year-old Stephen with the long and parti-colored beard, was waiting for them. Martha dived from the machine into his arms and burst into dry sobbing.
“She met herself,” Brent explained. “I think she found it pretty confusing.” Stephen barked: “I can imagine. It bees only now that I have realized who that woman beed who corned with you and so much resembled our mother. But you be so late. I have beed waiting here since I evaded Stappers.”
“Alex—” Brent began.
“I know. Alex haves gived you magnetic disruptor and losed his life. He beed not man to die so young. He beed good friend . . . And my sister haves gived and losed too, I think.” He gently stroked the gray hair that had once been red. “But these be fifty-year-old sorrows. I have lived with my unweeped tears for Alex; they be friends by now too. And Martha haves weeped her tears for . . .” He paused then: “Why have you beed so long?”
“I didn’t want to get here too long before May Day—might get into trouble. So I allowed a week, but I’ll admit I might be a day or so off. What date is it?”
“This bees May 1, and Barrier will be launched within hour. We must hurry.”
“My God—” Brent glared at the dial. “It can’t be that far off. But come on. Get your sister home and we’ll plunge on to do our damnedest.”
Martha roused herself. “I be coming with you.”
“No, dear,” said Stephen. “We can do better alone.”
Her lips set stubbornly. “I be coming. I don’t understand anything that happens, but you be Stephen and you be John, and I belong with you.”
The streets were brightly decorated with banners bearing the double loop of infinity, the sacred symbol of Cosmos that had replaced crescent, swastika, and cross. But there was hardly a soul in sight. What few people they saw were all hurrying in the same direction.
“Everyone will be at dedication,” Stephen explained. “Tribute to Cosmos. Those who stay at home must beware Stappers.”
“And if there’s hundreds of thousands thronging the dedication, how do we get close to Barrier to disrupt it?”
“It bees all arranged. Our group bees far more powerful than when you knowed it fifty years ago. Slowly we be honeycombing system of State. With bribery and force when necessary, with persuasion when possible, we can do much. And we have arranged this.”
“How?”
“You be delegate from European Slanduch. You speak German?”
“Well enough.’”
“Remember that haves beed regularized, too. But I doubt if you need to speak any. Making you Slanduch will account for irregular slips in English. You come from powerful Slanduch group. You will be gladly welcomed here. You will occupy post of honor. I have even accounted for box you carry. It bees tribute you have bringed to Cosmos. Here be your papers and identity plaque.”
“Thanks.” Brent’s shorter legs managed to keep up with the long strides of Stephen, who doubled the rate of the moving sidewalk by his own motion. Martha panted along resolutely. “But can you account for why I’m so late? I set my indicator for April 24, and here we are rushing to make a date on May 1.”
Stephen strode along in thought, then suddenly slapped his leg and barked. “How many months in 1942?”
“Twelve, of course.”
“Ha! Yes, it beed only two hundred years ago that thirteen-month calendar beed adopted. Even months of twenty-eight days each, plus Year Day, which belongs to no month. Order, you see. Now invaluable part of Stasis—” He concentrated frowningly on mental arithmetic. “Yes, your indicator worked exactly. May 1 of our calendar bees April 24 of yours.”
Chalk up one slip against Derringer—an unthinking confidence in the durability of the calendar. And chalk up one, for Brent’s money, against the logic of the Stasis; back in the twentieth century, he had been an advocate of calendar reform, but a stanch upholder of the four-quarter theory against the awkward thirteen months.
They were nearing now the vast amphitheater where the machinery of the Barrier had been erected. Stappers were stopping the few other travelers and forcing them off the moving sidewalk into the densely packed crowds, faces aglow with the smug ecstasy of the Stasis, but Brent’s Slanduch credentials passed the three through.
The representative of the German Slanduch pushed his way into the crowd of eminent dignitaries just as Dyce-Farnsworth’s grandson pressed the button. The magnificent mass of tubes and wires shuddered and glowed as the current pulsed through it. Then the glow became weird and arctic. There was a shaking, a groaning, and then, within the space of a second, a cataclysmic roar and a blinding glare. Something heavy and metallic p
ressed Brent to the ground.
The roar blended into the excited terror of human voices. The splendid Barrier was a mass of twisted wreckage. It was more wreckage that weighted Brent down, but this was different. It looked strangely like a variant of his own machine. And staring down at him from a warped seat was the huge-eyed head of a naked man.
A woman in a metallic costume equally strange to this age and to Brent’s own straddled the body of Dyce-Farnsworth’s grandson, who had met his ancestor’s martyrdom. And wherever Brent’s eyes moved he saw another strange and outlandish— no, out-time-ish—figure.
He heard Martha’s voice. “It bees clear that Time Barrier haves been erected and destroyed by outside force. But it haves existed and created impenetrable instant of time. These be travelers from all future.”
Brent gasped. Even the sudden appearance of these astounding figures was topped by Martha’s speaking perfect logical sense.
Brent wrote in his journal: The Stasis is at least an admirably functional organism. All hell broke loose therefor a minute, but almost automatically the Stappers went into action with their rods—odd how that bit of crook’s cant has become perfectly literal truth—and in no time had the situation well in hand.
They had their difficulties. Several of the time intruders were armed, and managed to account for a handful of Stappers before the nerve rays paralyzed them. One machine was a sort of time-traveling tank and contrived to withstand siege until a suicide squad of Stappers attacked it with a load of what Stephen tells me was detonite; we shall never know from what sort of a future the inhabitants of that tank came to spatter their shredded flesh about the amphitheater.
But these events were mere delaying action, token resistance. Ten minutes after the Barrier had exploded, the travelers present were all in the hands of the Stappers, and cruising Stapper bands were efficiently combing all surrounding territory.
(The interesting suggestion comes amazingly from Martha that while all time machines capable of physical movement were irresistibly attracted to the amphitheater by the tempo-magnetic field, only such pioneer and experimental machines as my Derringer, which can move only temporally, would be arrested in other locations. Whether or not this theory is correct, it seems justified by the facts. Only a few isolated reports have come in of sudden appearances elsewhere at the instant of the Barrier’s explosion; the focus of arrivals of the time travelers was the amphitheater.)
The Chief of Stappers mounted the dais where an infinity-bedecked banner now covered the martyred corpse of young Dyce-Farnsworth, and announced the official ruling of the Head of State: that these intruders and disrupters of the Stasis were to be detained—tested and examined and studied until it became apparent what the desire of Cosmos might be.
(The Head of State, Stephen explained, is a meaningless figurehead, part high priest and—I paraphrase—part Alexander Throttlebottom. The Stasis is supposedly so perfect and so self-sustaining that his powers are as nominal as those of the pilot of a ship in drydock, and all actual power is exercised by such subordinates as the Editor of State and the Chief of Stappers.)
Thanks to Stephen’s ingenuity, this rule for the treatment of time travelers does not touch me. I am simply a Slanduch envoy. Some Stapper search party has certainly by now found the Derringer machine in the warehouse, which I no longer dare approach.
With two Barriers now between me and 1942, it is obvious that I am keeping this journal only for myself lam stuck here—and so are all the other travelers, for this field, far stronger than the first, has wrecked their machines beyond the repairing efforts of a far greater talent than poor Alex. We are all here for good.
And it must be for good.
I still believe firmly what I said to Stephen and Alex: that this age needs hundreds of me to jolt it back in to humanity. We now have, if not hundreds, at least dozens, and I, so far as we yet know, am the only one not in the hands of the Stappers. It is my clearest duty to deliver those others, and with their aid to beat some sense into this Age of Smugness.
“But how?” Brent groaned rhetorically. “How am I going to break into the Stappers’ concentration camp?”
Martha wrinkled her brows. “I think I know. Let me work on problem while longer; I believe I see how we can at littlest make start.”
Brent stared at her. “What’s happened to you, madam? Always before you’ve shrunk away from every discussion Stephen and I have had. You’ve said we talk of things you know nothing about. And now, all of a sudden—boom!—you’re right in the middle of things and doing very nicely thank you. What’s got into you?”
“I think,” said Martha smiling, “you have hitted on right phrase, John.”
Brent’s puzzled expostulation was broken off by Stephen’s entrance. “And where have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been trying to work out plans, and I’ve got a weird feeling Martha’s going to beat me to it. What have you been up to?”
Stephen looked curiously at his sister. “I’ve beed out galping. Interesting results, too.”
“Galping?”
“You know. Going about among people, taking samples of opinion, using scientific methods to reduce carefully choosed samples to general trends.”
“Oh.” (Mr. Gallup, thought Brent, has joined Captain Boycott and M. Guillotin as a verb.) “And what did you learn?”
“People be confused by arrival of time travelers. If Stasis bees perfect, they argue, why be such arrivals allowed? Seeds of doubt be sowed, and we be carefully watering them. Head of State haves problem on his hands. I doubt if he can find any solution to satisfy people.”
“If only,” Brent sighed, “there were some way of getting directly at the people. If we could see these travelers and learn what they know and want, then somehow establish contact between them and the people, the whole thing ought to be a pushover. ”
It was Martha who answered. “It bees very simple, John. You be linguist.”
“Yes. And how does that—”
“Stappers will need interpreters. You will be one. From there on you must develop your own plans, but that will at littlest put you in touch with travelers.”
“But the State must have its own linguists who—”
Stephen barked with pleasure and took up the explanation. Since Farthing’s regularization of English, the perfect immutability of language had become part of the Stasis. A linguist now was a man who knew Farthing’s works by heart, and that was all. Oh, he might also be well acquainted with Zinsmeister German, or Tamayo y Sarate Spanish; but he knew nothing of general linguistic principles, which are apt to run completely counter to the fine theories of these great synthesists, and he had never had occasion to learn adaptability to a new language. Faced by the strange and incomprehensible tongues of the future, the State linguist would be helpless.
It was common knowledge that only the Slanduch had any true linguistic aptitude. Brought up to speak three languages—Farthing-ized English, their own archaic dialect, and the language of the country in which they resided—their tongues were deft and adjustable. In ordinary times, this aptitude was looked on with suspicion, but now there would doubtless be a heavy demand for Slanduch interpreters, and a little cautious wire-pulling could land Brent the job.
“And after that,” said Stephen, “as Martha rightly observes, you be on your own.”
“Lead me to it,” grinned John Brent.
The rabbitty little State linguist received Brent effusively. “Ah, thank Cosmos!” he gasped. “Travelers be driving me mad! Such gibberish you have never heared! Such irregularities! Frightful! You be Slanduch?”
“I be. I have speaked several languages all my life. I can even speak pre-Zinsmeister German.” And he began to recite Die Lorelei. “Die Luft ist kiihl undes dunkelt, und ruhigfliesst der Rhein— ”
“Terrible! Ist! Such vile irregularity! And articles! But come, young man. We’ll see what you can do with these temporal barbarians!”
There were three travelers in the room Brent ente
red, with the shocked linguist and two rodded Stappers in attendance. One of the three was the woman he had noticed in that first cataclysmic instant of arrival, a strapping Amazonic blonde who looked as though she could break any two unarmed Stappers with her bare fingers. Another was a neat little man with a curly and minute forked beard and restless hands. The third—
The third was hell to describe. They were all dressed now in the conventional robes of the Stasis, but even in these familiar garments he was clearly not quite human. If man is a featherless biped, then this was a man; but men do not usually have greenish skin with vestigial scales and a trace of a gill-opening behind each ear.
“Ask each of them three things,” the linguist instructed Brent. “When he comes from, what his name bees, and what be his intentions.”
Brent picked Tiny Beard as the easiest-looking start. “O.K. You!” He pointed, and the man stepped forward. “What part of time do you come from?”
“A pox o’ thee, sirrah, and the goodyears take thee! An thou wouldst but hearken, thou might’st learn all.”
The State linguist moaned. “You hear, young man? How can one interpret such jargon?”
Brent smiled. “It bees O.K. This bees simply English as it beed speaked thousand years ago. This man must have beed aiming at earlier time and prepared himself. . . Thy pardon, sir. These kerns deem all speech barbaric save that which their own conceit hath evolved. Bear with me, and all will be well.”
“Spoken like a true knight!” the traveler exclaimed. “Forgive my rash words, sir.
Surely my good daemon hath led thee hither. Thou wouldst know—”
“Whence comest thou?”
“From many years hence. Thousands upon thousands of summers have yet to run their course ere I—”
“Forgive me, sir; but of that much we are aware. Let us be precise.”
“Why then, marry, sir, tis from the fifth century.”
Brent frowned. But to attempt to understand the gentleman’s system of dating would take too much time at the moment. “And thy name, sir?”
The Compleat Boucher Page 29