Hugo awards the short st.., p.32
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 32
Fermi glanced about as though he had heard a faint sound.
"Repeating Marie Curie's work, dottore?" Hassel roared.
Fermi looked at him strangely, "where you from, amico?"
"State."
"State Department?"
"Just State. It's true, isn't it, dottore, that Marie Curie discovered nuclear fission back in nineteen ought ought?"
"No! No! No!" Fermi cried. "We are the first, and we are not there yet. Police! Police! Spy!"
"This time I'll go on record," Hassel growled. He pulled out his trusty .45, emptied it into Dr. Fermi's chest, and awaited arrest and immolation in newspaper files. To his amazement, Dr. Fermi did not collapse. Dr. Fermi merely explored his chest tenderly and, to the men who answered his cry, said, "It is nothing. I felt in my within a sudden sensation of burn which may be a neuralgia of the cardiac nerve, but is most likely gas."
Hassel was too agitated to wait for the automatic recall of the time machine. Instead he returned at once to Unknown University under his own power. This should have given him a clue, but he was too possessed to notice. It was at this time that I (1913-1975) first saw him—a dim figure tramping through parked cars, closed doors and brick walls, with the light of lunatic determination on his face.
He oozed into the library, prepared for an exhaustive discus- , sion, but could not make himself felt or heard by the catalogues. He ' went to the Malpractice Laboratory, where Sam, the Simplex-and-Multiplex Computer, has installations sensitive up to 10,700 angstroms. Sam could not see Henry, but managed to hear him through a sort of wave-interference phenomenon.
"Sam," Hassel said. "I've made one hell of a discovery." "You're always making discoveries, Henry," Sam complained. "Your data allocation is filled. Do I have to start another tape for you?"
"But I need advice. Who's the leading authority on time, reference to succession of, travel in?"
"That would be Israel Lennox, spatial mechanics, professor of,
Yale."
"How do I get in touch with him?"
"You don't, Henry. He's dead. Died in '75."
"What authority have you got on time, travel in, living?"
"Wiley Murphy."
"Murphy? From our own Trauma Department? That's a break. Where is he now?"
"As a matter of fact, Henry, he went over to your house to ask
you something."
Hassel went home without walking, searched through his laboratory and study without finding anyone, and at last floated into the living room, where his redheaded wife was still in the arms of another man. (All this, you understand, had taken place within the space of a few moments after the construction of the time machine; such is the nature of time and travel.) Hassel cleared his throat once or twice and tried to tap his wife on the shoulder. His fingers went through her.
"Excuse me, darling," he said. "Has Wiley Murphy been in to see me?"
Then he looked closer and saw that the man embracing his wife was Murphy himself.
"Murphy!" Hassel exclaimed. "The very man I'm looking for. I've had the most extraordinary experience." Hassel at once launched into a lucid description of his extraordinary experience, which went something like this: "Murphy, u — v = (u'/2 — v'A) (ua + u" + vy) but when George Washington F (xjy+ dx and Enrico Fermi F (u'/2) dxdt one half of Marie Curie, then what about Christopher Columbus times the square root of minus one?"
Murphy ignored Hassel, as did Mrs. Hassel. I jotted down Has-sel's equations on the hood of a passing taxi.
"Do listen to me, Murphy," Hassel said. "Greta dear, would you mind leaving us for a moment? I— For heaven's sake, will you two stop that nonsense? This is serious."
Hassel tried to separate the couple. He could no more touch them than make them hear him. His face turned red again and he became quite choleric as he beat at Mrs. Hassel and Murphy. It was like beating an Ideal Gas. I thought it best to interfere.
"Hassel!"
"Who's that?"
"Come outside a moment. I want to talk to you."
He shot through the wall. "Where are you?"
"Over here."
"You're sort of dim."
"So are you."
"Who are you?"
"My name's Lennox, Israel Lennox."
"Israel Lennox, spatial mechanics, professor of, Yale?"
"The same."
"But you died in '75."
"I disappeared in '75."
"What d'you mean?"
"I invented a time machine."
"By God! So did I," Hassel said. "This afternoon. The idea came to me in a flash—I don't know why—and I've had the most extraordinary experience. Lennox, time is not a continuum."
"No?"
"It's a series of discrete particles—like pearls on a string."
"Yes?"
"Each pearl is a 'Now.' Each 'Now' has its own past and future, but none of them relate to any others. You see? if a = a, + a2ji + ax (b,)-"
"Never mind the mathematics, Henry."
"It's a form of quantum transfer of energy. Time is emitted in discrete corpuscles or quanta. We can visit each individual quantum and make changes within it, but no change in any one corpuscle affects any other corpuscle. Right?"
"Wrong," I said sorrowfully.
"What d'you mean, 'Wrong'?" he said, angrily gesturing through the cleave of a passing coed. "You take the trochoid equations and—"
"Wrong," I repeated firmly. "Will you listen to me, Henry?"
"Oh, go ahead," he said.
"Have you noticed that you've become rather insubstantial? Dim? Specttal? Space and time no longer affect you?"
"Yes?"
"Henry, I had the misfortune to construct a time machine back in
'75."
"So you said. Listen, what about power input? I figure I'm using about 7.3 kilowatts per—"
"Never mind the power input, Henry. On my first trip into the past, I visited the Pleistocene. I was eager to photograph the mastodon, the giant ground sloth, and the saber-tooth tiger. While I was backing up to get a mastodon fully in the field of view at f/6.3 at I/100th of a second, or on the LVS scale—"
"Never mind the LVS scale," he said.
"While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene insect."
"Aha!" said Hassel.
"I was terrified by the incident. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed."
"Oho!" said Hassel.
"I became curious. I went back to the Pleistocene and killed the mastodon. Nothing was changed in 1975. I returned to the Pleistocene and slaughtered the wildlife—still with no effect. I ranged through time, killing and destroying, in an attempt to alter the' present."
"Then you did it just like me," Hassel exclaimed. "Odd we didn't run into each other."
"Not odd at all."
"I got Columbus."
"I got Marco Polo."
"I got Napoleon."
"I thought Einstein was more important."
"Mohammed didn't change things much—I expected more from him."
"I know. I got him too."
"What do you mean, you got him too?"-Hassel demanded.
"I killed him September 16, 599. Old Style."
"Why, I got Mohammed January 5, 598."
"I believe you."
"But how could you have killed him after I killed him?"
"We both killed him."
"That's impossible."
"My boy," I said, "time is entirely subjective. It's a private matter—a personal experience. There is no such thing as objective time, just as there is no such thing as objective love, or an objective soul."
"Do you mean to say that time travel is impossible? But we've done it."
"To be sure, and many others, for all I know. But we each travel into our own past, and no other person's. There is no universal continuum, Henry. There are only billions of individuals, each with his own continuum; and one continuum cannot affect the other. We're like millions of strands of spaghetti in the same pot. No time traveler can ever meet another time traveler in the past or future. Each of us must travel up and down his own strand alone."
"But we're meeting each other now."
"We're no longer time travelers, Henry. We've become the spaghetti sauce."
"Spaghetti sauce?"
"Yes. You and I can visit any strand we like, because we've destroyed ourselves."
"I don't understand."
"When a man changes the past he only affects his own past—no one else's. The past is like memory. When you erase a man's memory, you wipe him out, but you don't wipe out anybody else's. You and I have erased our past. The individual worlds of the others go on, but we have ceased to exist."
"What d'you mean, 'ceased to exist'?"
"With each act of destruction we dissolved a little. Now we're all gone. We've committed chronicide. We're ghosts. I hope Mrs. Has-sel will be very happy with Mr. Murphy. . . . Now let's go over to the Academic. Ampere is telling a great story about Ludwig Boltzmann."
TRIGGERMAN
J. F. Bone
General Alastair French was probably the most important man in the Western Hemisphere from the hours of 0800 to 1600. Yet all he did was sit in a windowless room buried deeply underground, facing a desk that stood against a wall. The wall was studded with built-in mechanisms. A line of twenty-four-hour clocks was inset near the ceiling, showing the corresponding times in all time zones on Earth. Two huge TV screens below the clocks were flunked by loudspeaker systems. The desk was bare except for three telephones of different colors—red, blue, and white—and a polished plastic slab inset with a number of white buttons framing a larger one whose red surface was the color of fresh blood. A thick carpet, a chair of peculiar design with broad flat arms, and an ashtray completed the furnishings. Warmed and humidified air circulated through the room from concealed grilles at floor level. The walls of the room were painted a soft restful gray that softened the indirect lighting. The door was steel and equipped with a time lock.
The exact location of the room and the Center that served it was probably the best kept secret in the Western world. Ivan would probably give a good percentage of the Soviet tax take to know precisely where it was, just as the West would give a similar amount to know where Ivan's Center was located. Yet despite the fact that its location was remote, the man behind the desk was in intimate contact with every major military point in the Western Alliance. The red telephone was a direct connection to the White House. The blue was a line that reached to the headquarters of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to the emergency Capitol hidden in the hills of West Virginia. And the white telephone connected by priority lines with every military center and base in the world that was under Allied control.
General French was that awesome individual often joked about by TV comics who didn't know that he really existed. He was the man who could push the button that would start World War III!
French was aware of his responsibilities and took them seriously. By nature he was a serious man, but, after three years of living with ultimate responsibility, it was no longer the crushing burden that it had been at first when the Psychological Board selected him as one of the most inherently stable men on Earth. He was not ordinarily a happy man; his job, and the steadily deteriorating world situation precluded that, but this day was a bright exception. The winter morning had been extraordinarily beautiful, and he loved beauty with the passion of an artist. A flaming sunrise had lighted the whole eastern sky with golden glory, and the crisp cold air stimulated his senses to appreciate it. It was much too lovely for thoughts of war and death.
He opened the door of the room precisely at 0800, as he had done for three years, and watched a round, pink-cheeked man in a gray suit rise from the chair behind the desk. Kleinmeister, he thought, neither looked like a general nor like a potential executioner of half the world. He was a Santa Claus without a beard. But appearances were deceiving. Hans Kleinmeister could, without regret, kill half the world if he thought it was necessary. The two men shook hands, a ritual gesture that marked the changing of the guard, and French sank into the padded chair behind the desk.
"It's a beautiful day outside, Hans," he remarked as he settled his stocky, compact body into the automatically adjusting plastifoam. "I envy you the pleasure of it."
"I don't envy you, Al," Kleinmeister said. "I'm just glad it's all over for another twenty-four hours. This waiting gets on the nerves." Kleinmeister grinned as he left the room. The steel door thudded into place behind him and the time lock clicked. For the next eight hours French would be alone.
He sighed. It was too bad that he had to be confined indoors on a day like this one promised to be, but there was no help for it. He shifted luxuriously in the chair. It was the most comfortable seat that the mind and ingenuity of man could contrive. It had to be. The man who sat in it must have every comfort. He must want for nothing. And above all he must not be irritated or annoyed. His brain must be free to evaluate and decide—and nothing must distract the functioning of that brain. Physical comfort was a means to that end—and the chair provided it. French felt soothed in the gentle caress of the upholstery.
The familiar feeling of detachment swept over him as he checked the room. Nominally, he was responsible to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but practically he was responsible to no one. No hand but his could set in motion the forces of massive retaliation that had hung over aggression for the past twenty years. Without his sanction, no intercontinental or intermediate-range missile could leave its rack. He was the final authority, the ultimate judge, and the executioner if need be—a position thrust upon him after years of intensive tests and screening. In this room he was as close to being a god as any man had been since the beginning of time.
French shrugged and touched one of the white buttons on the panel.
"Yes sir?" an inquiring voice came from one of the speakers. "A magazine and a cup of coffee," said General French. "What magazine, sir?"
"Something light—something with pictures. Use your judgment."
"Yes, sir."
French grinned. By now the word was going around Center that the Old Man was in a good humor today. A cup of coffee rose from a well in one of the board arms of the chair, and a magazine extruded from a slot in its side. French opened the magazine and sipped the coffee. General Craig, his relief, would be here in less than eight hours, which would leave him the enjoyment of the second-best part of the day if the dawn was any indication. He hoped the sunset would be worthy of its dawn. He looked at the center clock. The hands read 0817 ....
At Station 2 along the DEW Line the hands of the station clock read 1217. Although it was high noon it was dark outside, lightened only by a faint glow to the south where the winter sun strove vainly to appear above the horizon. The air was clear, and the stars shone out of the blue-black sky of the polar regions. A radarman bending over his scope stiffened. "Bogey!" he snapped. "Azimuth 0200, coming up fast!"
The bogey came in over the north polar cap, slanting downward through the tenuous wisps of upper atmosphere. The gases ripped at its metallic sides with friction and oxidation. Great gouts of flaming brilliance spurted from its incandescent outer surface, boiling away to leave a trail of sparkling scintillation in its wake. It came with enormous speed, whipping over the Station almost before the operator could hit the general alarm.
The tracking radar of the main line converged upon the target. Electronic computers analyzed its size, speed and flight path, passing the information to the batteries of interceptor missiles in the sector. "Locked on," a gunnery office announced in a bored tone. "Fire two." He smiled. Ivan was testing again. It was almost routine, this business of one side or the other sending over a pilot missile. It was the acid test. If the defense network couldn't get it, perhaps others would come over—perhaps not. It was all part of the cold war.
Miles away, two missiles leaped from their ramps, flashing skyward on flaming rockets. The gunnery officer waited a moment and then swore. "Missed, by damn! It looks like Ivan's got something new." He flipped a switch. "Reserve line, stand by," he said. "Bogey coming over. Course 0200."
"Got her," a voice came from the speaker of the command set. "All stations in range, fire four—salvo!"
"My God, what's in that thing! Warn Stateside! Execute!"
"All stations East Seaboard Outer Defense Area! Bogey coming over!"
"Red Alert, all areas!" a communications man said urgently into a microphone. "Ivan's got something this time! General evacuation plan Boston to Richmond Plan One! Execute!"
"Outer Perimeter Fire Pattern B!"
"Center! Emergency Priority! General, there's a bogey coming in. Eastseaboard sector. It's passed the outer lines, and nothing's touched it so far. It's the damnedest thing you ever saw! Too fast for interception. Estimated target area Boston-Richmond. For evaluation—!"
"Sector perimeter on target, sir!"
"Fire twenty, Pattern C!"
All along the flight path of the bogey, missile launchers hurled the cargoes of death into the sky. A moving pattern formed in front of the plunging object that now was flaming brightly enough to be seen in the cold northern daylight. Missiles struck, detonated, and were absorbed into the ravening flames around the object, but it came on with unabated speed, a hissing, roaring mass of destruction!
"God! It's still coming in!" an anguished voice wailed. "I told them we needed nuclear warheads for close-in defense!"
More missiles swept aloft, but the bogey was now so low that both human and electronic sensings were too slow. An instantaneous blast of searing heat flashed across the land in its wake, crisping anything flammable in its path. Hundreds of tiny fires broke out, most of which were quickly extinguished, but others burned violently. A gas refinery in Utica exploded. Other damage of a minor nature was done in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. The reports were mixed with military orders and the flare of missiles and the crack of artillery hurling box barrages into the sky. But it was futile. The target was moving almost too fast to be seen, and by the time the missiles and projectiles reached intercept point, the target was gone, drawing away from the fastest defense devices with almost contemptuous ease.
