Don't Live in the Past

I

Bernard François Piet Fu-tze Vargas had a clear and sustained feeling that there ought not to be days like this. Four of his wife’s cousins from Callisto had descended upon him that morning at the ungodly hour of ten o’clock (they required special diets and were obscenely fat); he had been seated below a sub-assistant minister of finance at the High Commissioner’s dinner last night, a manifest insult; the power beam had failed twice on his way into the office, over Sancisco and over the California Garbage Conversion Area; and he had a splitting headache.

Vargas was a youngish man with large, ruddy features now contorted into a heavy scowl. He sat half leaning across his desk, chin on his fist, moodily thrusting folded sheets of metal fiber into the automatic letteropener.

Abruptly the ceiling light dimmed and something swatted him on the rump three times in machine-gun tempo, jarring him all the way up his spine. Vargas found himself canted across his desk with his head in an overturned flower vase. The lights flickered again, went out altogether; and in the brief interval before they went on again a fourth shock, more violent than the others, lifted Vargas all the way across his desk and onto the thick body-temperature carpet.

He sat up slowly, inarticulate with rage. It was at this moment that his assistant, Knut Everett Roku LaSalle Choong, chose to burst into the room. Choong was just as disheveled as his superior. He tripped over the doorsill, lurched wildly and brought up against Vargas’ totem post, saving himself by clutching a white silk banner which carried the names and honors of two hundred and fifty-nine of Vargas’ most distinguished ancestors.

Hanging dramatically from the banner, Choong bleated, “Chief! The pipelines have busted!”

Vargas’ face, which had been flushed a moment before, took on a blotchy appearance. “What, all of them?” he whispered hoarsely.

“All,” said Choong tragically. “We’re right over a fault, you know. The quake must have snapped the pipelines like—like pipestems.”

Vargas scrambled up and clutched the other man by the slack of his sunflower-colored robe. “Did they cut transmission?” he demanded.

“Yes, but—”

“How long before the flow stopped?”

“About two seconds, chief. Possibly a little more. I didn’t stop to get the meter readings—”

“Don’t interrupt me!” said Vargas in a restrained shout. He took a firmer grip and brought his pop-eyed face close to Choong. “What was being transmitted?"

“Flangs,” said the assistant in a barely audible voice. He gulped. “Tweedledums. Collapsed flooring. Argo paste. Rozzers. And—and—”

Vargas had been puffing heavily. Now he held his breath for an instant. “Well?”

“And mangels,” said Choong in terror. “Three pipes of mangels.”

Vargas collapsed on the floor and looked at Choong through his fingers. “Oh, Great Blodgett, no!”

“Yes.”

“Mangels!”

Bedlam was growing in the outer offices. There were running footsteps, shouts, shrieks of dismay.

“Tweedledums are bad enough,” said Vargas. “But mangels! We’ll be excommunicated. They’ll hang our totems upside down.”

A red-faced man appeared in the doorway. His expression was not pleasant. Vargas scrambled to his feet and both he and Choong stood at attention.

“Two and five-sevenths seconds,” the red-faced man remarked. “Not a very good response for trained monitors, is it? Too much Rhine beer the night before, perhaps? Or reading a tape—composing poetry? Catching a little nap? Or was it—?” He stopped, wincing, and looked at a white-metal doughnut strapped to his right wrist, above his ruffled sleeve. A tiny voice spoke at some length; Vargas could only catch the words “jackass” and "cretin.”

“Yes, sir,” said the red-faced man, whose name, for the record, was Wallace Hyacinth Manuel Chiang Llewellyn. He barked at Vargas, “Turn on the tri-D!”

Vargas stumbled over to his desk and obeyed. A five-foot disc set into a low platform on his right glowed faintly, sparked and then spat a vertical stream of color. The image steadied and became the all too convincing three-dimensional replica of a portly man with a bulbous nose and long gray hair.

"Enlarge your image!” it said sharply.

Vargas jumped a foot and tremblingly adjusted the controls on his desk. The portly man frowned at them and said, “I happen to be Representative John Hsi Bright-Feather Wilson Woodcock, Chairman of the Committee to Investigate the San Juaquin Disaster, which was formed in emergency session five months ago. Now, are you all of the scoundrels who were immediately responsible for this outrageous dereliction of duty? If not, get the rest of ’em in here. We’ll get to the bottom of this if it’s the last—"

The Chief Executive, His Honor Ibrahim L. Btandu Eriksson Dickey, frowned an executive frown. “Now let me get this straight,” he said. “The goods are put into one end of the tube and they are turned into some kind of temporal flow?”

“That’s it approximately, Your Honor.” Representative Rowland Mokai Dejonge Baruch Schemkov, Chairman of the Plenary Committee which had replaced Representative Woodcock’s Emergency Committee (Woodcock having been impeached) glanced at a few notes in his palm. He had briefed himself thoroughly.

“In transit, Your Honor, the goods are in a special state of matter, in which they are partially out of our frame of spacio-temporal reference, and are carried along by the universal drift, thus apparently bypassing the laws of inertia and conservation of energy. We apply no force once they enter the tube; that’s why tube transport is so cheap.

“Moreover, the size and shape of the goods to be transported make no difference, since the spacial coordinates are not fixed with reference to normal space. You might say that the net result is the same as if you had melted everything down to a kind of thin mush. This, of course, is done before the shipment is fed into the pipelines. I would not insult Your Honor’s intelligence by explaining the method by which the shipments are moved out of our space-time, for it is too well known to need explaining.

“There is just enough contact between the two matter states so that the material being transported will not go through a solid of any thickness. In other words, we can lead the shipments anywhere in the world through a tube, even a very small one—the tubes we use are three-eighths inches in width. At the end of the tube, the expansion of the material releases it from the special state and it comes out in its original form, ready to be processed, stored, consumed or whatever.”

“I see,” commented the Chief. “That’s all very well, Representative, but what I want to know is this. Just why were we caught with our robes up in this situation?”

Schemkov cleared his throat. “There appears,” he admitted, “to have been some theoretical possibility of this happening all along. I have several abstracts, which I will turn over to your office, of articles and scientific papers in which reference is made to the possibility. It—”

The chief looked down his long nose in a manner which suggested that the Representative was not quite human. He said slowly and earnestly, “And this possibility was given no consideration when the transport tubes were built? Is that it?”

Representative Schemkov had been a member of the Subcommittee to Pass on Recommendations for the Erection of Chang-Wiley Transport Tubes, and he quaked in his sandals. “No safeguard was possible, Your Honor. What occurred was that the rupture in the lines took place at exactly the instant when that section of the planet was revolving directly opposite the line of universal drift—an event which astronomers assure me is very rare—and, in addition, I understand that the temporal displacement at that moment was exceptionally great. Under these conditions, the material released from the end of the tube did not re-form normally, but was carried some distance back along the temporal line—”

“How far back? I mean exactly, not a guess.”

“The mathematicians are still working on that, Your Honor, and the best they can say now is that it was probably somewhere between the mid-Twentieth Century and the late Twenty-First. However, there is a strong possibility that none of the material reached any enclosed space which would attract it, and that it may all have been dissipated harmlessly in the form of incongruent molecules.”

“But those materials,” said the Chief grimly, “included what?”

“Flangs," said Representative Schemkov, “and tweedledums, and collapsed flooring, and argo paste—”

“And mangels," added the Chief. “Isn’t that correct?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And you tell me that there is a possibility that these things did not suddenly appear in the homes and business places of persons of Blodgett’s own time—" he touched his forelock, and Schemkov automatically did the same—“causing Blodgett knows how many neuroses, how many psychoses, how many lost contracts, how many broken homes—”

“But, Your Honor—”

“—and do you realize that if these things do appear in that era, the total course of our civilization might be altered? That we might today become a world of many warring nations instead of one? Of many races instead of one blended humanity? That the great man to whom we owe all this, Blodgett himself, might be—” he lowered his voice in horror— “destroyed by your carelessness? Do you realize that, Representative?”

Even the Chief was stunned by his own frightening suggestion, while Schemkov felt terror climbing his spine.

“No Blodgett?” Schemkov whispered. “You’re—you’re just saying that to scare me. It isn’t—possible.”

The Chief’s face was rigid with fear. “It is. Blodgett was the greatest of our Sacred Ancestors, but he was superhuman in a human way, not supernatural. With all those ghastly things loose in his era, and—and mangels, especially . . .”

Destroying any of our other Sacred Ancestors would be unthinkable enough,” said Schemkov. “But Blodgett himself—!”

“This wonderful civilization he constructed entirely by the might of his incredible mind,” the Chief added bitterly. “Gone.”

“I’d have myself ritually beheaded,” said Schemkov, “rather than live in any civilization Blodgett did not create.”

“Representative, the men responsible for this catastrophe are going to be sorry they were ever born into the public service. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, and when we do—”

“Here’s what it boils down to,” said the square man in the gray diamond-dusted robe with a non-objective dragon. He made a triangle with his hands on the desk-top. “The kick went all the way upstairs and now it’s come all the way down again. Everybody in fifteen echelons has a sore tail, the blame has been passed around, and now you’re it. That’s all.”

Ronald Mae Jean-Jacques von Hochbein Mazurin wore a slightly stunned expression on his normally cheerful, pug-nosed face. The face, up to now, had been his fortune; it bore a slight but perceptible resemblance to that of Blodgett, the Father of the World, as he appeared in early prints and paintings. Mazurin had learned to emphasize the resemblance by assuming a soulful look, once he discovered that it usually earned him the juicier and less messy jobs in the Bureau.

He said, “Now wait a minute. How do they know they can get me to the right time line with this new gimmick of theirs? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? If I’m in it, that’s a new line, isn’t it? I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” said the square man. “Every displacement moves the observer to a new time line. But remember, you’re not required to do anything once, you get there; all you have to do is see what happened. As I understand it, you won’t be attached to that time line at all; you’ll just be partially in it, the same way stuff in a transport tube is partially in this line. You can’t possibly affect anything that happens there. Therefore, from a mathematical point of view, you’re not in it at all. You’ll be able to see, because light quanta have binding extensions on either side of the plenum-line proper, but you can’t influence anything that happens there.”

Mazurin was feeling uncomfortable. “How do I get back?”

“Don’t worry,” said the square man impatiently. “You’ll get back all right. You’ll be at the end of a pencil of temporal energy all the time. That’s what will be holding you in the partly there state. After a few days, they’ll send an impulse along it to bring you back. You’ll have enough time to do the job properly, because if any of that stuff did come out where it would menace our Sacred Ancestors, it wouldn’t have come out all at the same time or the same place. A difference of micro-seconds here could mean hours or days there.”

“Then that’s why nothing happened to our civilization yet,” Mazurin said. “The things probably haven’t landed.”

“It could be,” the square man agreed worriedly. “Or it might not happen on this time line at all—the results of any change in the past could leave this one alone and affect only alternate futures.”

“Do you really think it might?” asked Mazurin hopefully.

“No. Or maybe. How in hell would I know? All I’m supposed to discuss with you is sending you back to the past, to the time of Blodgett”— they touched their forelocks reverently—“at the end of a pencil of temporal energy, and that it’ll bring you back okay in a few days.”

"Sounds like deep-sea diving at the end of a piece of string,” said Mazurin. “What happens if the power fails, or the contact is broken some other way?”

“Then I suppose you’d be stuck in that line—which would, of course, immediately become another line. Not that it matters. But you wouldn’t be too badly off if that did happen, I’d say. That was a pretty interesting period, not too uncivilized, and you’d see a lot of action.”

“Umm,” said Mazurin. He rapidly calculated his chances of getting another job if he were discharged and blacklisted by the ICS Intelligence Bureau—zero. “All right, I’m your boy.”

The square man came around the desk and patted his shoulder with a hand like a jeweled bunch of sausages. “Good man,” he said emotionally. “I knew you’d come through, the Bureau knows how to pick ’em. Get your affairs wound up and report to the Physics Bureau at twelve o’clock tomorrow.”

Mazurin turned up in the white-tiled laboratory ten minute late, with traces of lipstick still adhering to his right ear and exuding an enviable odor of good rice wine. In the interests of truth, it must be stated that he did not entirely absorb all the briefing he received before he was thrust unceremoniously into the temporal projection machine.

He retained a definite impression of the machine itself, which was of an unpleasant hollow-cube shape and emitted a disquieting hum, together with a sharp smell of ozone. He recollected that, once arrived at his destination, he would be able to walk about on any available surface, but unable to move any solid object or enter into any sort of communication with the inhabitants.

The breathing apparatus strapped over his mouth and nose was reminder enough that he was dependent upon his own air supply. He recalled being asked if he had been checked out in lip reading and Twentieth Century English, and of replying, with hurt dignity, that he most certainly had. Then there was some more talk, during which he had been distracted by a tendency of his knees to swivel sharply, and then he had been grasped by the nape of the neck and his heels and slung into the machine.

It was a Lysenko-begotten silly business, altogether. He seemed to be sitting now on nothing in particular, in the middle of a bright-blue sky with clouds in it, while an obviously spurious landscape (flat, with antique square houses and a lot of palm trees, the whole being tilted at a forty-five degree angle) gently rose toward him. He watched this.process with growing disapproval until the scene grew to full size and he bumped gently against a sidewalk which felt like sponge rubber.

He stood up and soared some twenty feet into the air, coming down in an approximately upright position. He looked around him, breathing heavily. His head was clearing, and he didn’t like it. What had seemed idle nonsense a few moments ago was now assuming the aspect of an incredible reality. The buildings around him were angular and massive, with an appalling quantity of extremely ugly embellishments in the way of glass bricks, chromium statues, walls of enormous windows. The people were all either walking or driving antique four-wheeled vehicles, and most of them were dressed in garments constructed on a curious cylinder principle, also with a great deal of angular detail work.

This period, he recalled, had been addicted to what its denizens termed “the functional” in design. Not a curved line anywhere.

Culturally, this was a dismal era, yet being in it gave Mazurin a holy thrill. There was practically no doubt about it—Blodgett himself was alive at this actual moment!

Directly in front of Mazurin, the street widened into a sort of village square, in the center of which a wooden platform was erected. A man in black stood on this platform, evidently making a speech to a small crowd assembled around him. Mazurin saw several instruments which were evidently crude vision cameras. He watched the speaker’s lips, and made out a few phrases: “. . . the principles of loyalty and obedience to which we are all dedicated . . . one world, one people, one leader, one glorious ideal . . .”

Interested, he walked closer. A gentleman approaching the crowd on a tangential course strode into him before he had time to get out of the way, and Mazurin found himself violently propelled several yards away, to bounce from still another moving spectator and come to rest finally sprawled on the pavement.

He got up determinedly, soaring as before, and this time leaped squarely into the thick of the crowd before any other outriders could get at him. The crowd was close-packed, and he stood with very little difficulty on their heads. Now he was near enough to read the speaker’s lips easily, and he followed the speech with attention.

“On this, our youngest but not least hallowed day, we must dedicate ourselves in our hearts to the eternal principles for which so many brave men and women died. For if we do, those men and women are not ten years dead, but gloriously living in the eternal atmosphere of our truth. If we do this, the world did not end for them on that terrible day, August the seventeenth, nineteen eighty-one. The world will never end for them and for ourselves!”

The speaker paused. “Citizens of the world, a salute to the heroes of the World State!”

A man to the right of the speaker’s platform, dressed in an exceedingly ugly green uniform, raised a brass instrument to his lips and blew mightily on it. Mazurin leaped nimbly as the citizens on whom he stood took off their hats and bowed their heads. The musician got through with whatever sounds he had been producing, and a row of similarly dressed men behind him raised antique rapid-fire rifles to their shoulders, aiming diagonally upward.

Mazurin, directly in the line of fire, automatically threw himself flat, but he was still unused to his new condition and the motion sent him in a lazy parabola five feet over the crowd’s heads.

The guns fired in unison, but a peculiar thing happened. From three-quarters of them leaped streaks of fire; from the other quarter issued something else entirely. At the end of each barrel, a dark blue bubble appeared. The bubbles swelled rapidly, more and more of them extruding, until they became ovoids three feet long and two feet wide, dotted with stumpy tentacles. Then they dropped out of Mazurin’s vision, but he could judge their activity by the way the crowd scattered.

Mazurin leaped nimbly and watched the square empty itself beneath him. The uniformed men broke ranks and fled, some dropping their guns. The crowd was spreading out as quickly as those in the center could force the others back. In the cleared space, the blue ovoids were leaping like frogs, pausing and leaping again. At each pause, a toothless mouth gaped, and Mazurin could almost hear the bass “Urk!” they emitted.

Nobody was left on the speaker’s platform except the speaker himself, who had misjudged his vault over the railing and got himself tangled in the large black-and-red flag which draped it. While Mazurin watched, one of the blue ovoids bounded onto the speaker’s back, settled down and began contentedly munching his jacket.

As he floated down, Mazurin took a notebook from his pocket and wrote: Tweedledums: probably pineapple-flavored; very unripe and active; emerged without damper controls and broke up large religious gathering, frightening approx. 500 persons.

II

Mazurin sat alone in the sun-washed and empty square, letting the full enormity of the scene he had just witnessed seep into him. After a while he took out his notebook again and tried to calculate the probable number of surviving descendants, in his own world, of the five hundred people who had just been introduced to tweedledums. He had got up to five generations, and reached the utterly discouraging figure of 20,420, when he gave up.

He shuddered. He was not a devout man by nature, but he had had the usual training as a child, and the idea of so much as being disrespectful to ancestors—much less confronting them unexpectedly with a troop of tweedledums!—made him cringe as if he had touched something unclean.

And the other things had still to be accounted for: the rozzers, the collapsed flooring, the argo paste, the—

No. It was better not to think of that.

He got morosely to his feet and watched as the first of a long line of archaic ground-vehicles zoomed into the square and skidded to a stop. Green-uniformed men got out and ran off in all directions, till the square and the surrounding streets were covered with them. Presently a group of them came running back to the cars, carrying a tweedledum which was struggling furiously to escape. After a while they captured another one.

I hope they get them all, Mazurin thought; but he doubted that they would. Free of the projected energy that ordinarily kept them quiescent, a live tweedledum was the most active and elusive artificial food product ever invented. They had been one of Mazurin’s favorite dishes; but he suspected now, with a sliding lurch in his stomach, that he would never, never eat one again.

Something else seemed to be going on at the far side of the square. Resignedly, he propelled himself that way. A large knot of the green-uniformed men had collected near a doorway to one, of the square buildings and was slowly moving back toward the cars. Mazurin leaped onto the heads of the crowd for a better view, and, approaching the center of the group, found that the quarry was not tweedledums this time, but people. A young man and a girl, to be exact. They were staggering along with their heads down, pushed and dragged by many hands. As Mazurin watched, someone reached over someone else’s arm and struck the girl in the face.

Mazurin’s first reaction was horror; his second was bewilderment. He saw now that what his superior had described as an “interesting” era could only be painful to any person of normal sensibilities; for all of these people, without exception, were ancestors in one sense or another!

And why were these officials, who were possibly ancestors, maltreating two young possible ancestors in this manner, instead of running down tweedledums as they had evidently been sent to do? Could it be that the boy and the girl were suspected of being responsible for the catastrophe?

It was absurd, but the only explanation he could think of. He followed, soaring over the rooftops, as the car containing the two zoomed off again.

He managed to keep in sight of the car, though it moved much too fast for him, and saw the two captives half-dragged, half-carried up the steps of a large, cubical black building.

Once inside the building, however, he was lost in a maze of corridors full of hurrying, worried-looking people. The place was three stories tall above the ground, and ten stories below, and there were hundreds of separate offices and suites. It was not till a full hour later that he found them, in a brilliantly lit cell facing a white-enameled corridor, in the lowest level of all.

If it weren’t for the bruises and cuts on their faces, Mazurin thought, they would have been a handsome couple. The boy was tall and lean, with a dark, thoughtful face; the girl was neatly rounded and had a charming head of almost-platinum hair.

They were sitting side by side on a hard, narrow bench that ran from wall to wall of their five-by-five cubicle. The harsh glare that illuminated them was hard on Mazurin’s eyes; he put his polarized goggles on. They themselves had shut their eyes tight against the fierce light, and their heads were close together, their hands clasped.

Mazurin watched their lips. The girl was saying, “We must be guilty, of course. I mean guilty of something.”

“Or they never would have arrested us,” the young man finished after a pause.

“Yes,” said the girl. “They are always right. Always. So we must be guilty. And yet it’s hard to see—”

“Hush, dear. It isn’t for us to question what they do. Perhaps we have committed some crime without even being aware of it. Or maybe—”

“Yes?”

“Well, maybe they are just testing us, or—or something.”

The girl’s eyes opened for a second. “Oh, Rob, do you suppose that’s it?”

“It might be. Certainly we didn’t cause any disturbance at the patriotic meeting that we know of.”

“But it’s not for us to judge.”

“No.”

For some time, while he watched this conversation, Mazurin had been increasingly aware that the two young people were doing something rather odd. It had to do with their hands. He stopped watching their lips altogether and concentrated on the hands.

They were clasped loosely together on the bench between the two, half covered by the drape of the girl’s flowered skirt. Between the boy’s palms and the girl’s, Mazurin could see a constant flicker of motion, fingers flashing back and forth, first hers, then his.

Now this, thought Mazurin, was extremely interesting. Beyond a doubt, the two prisoners were communicating by means of some ancient form of the finger-code he had learned as a raw cadet in the Internal Security Commission. If he could only get closer, he was almost sure, he could read it . . .

Cadenced footsteps came down the corridor. It was a white-robed attendant, flanked by two of the green-clad officials, each with a drawn missile gun. The attendant was carrying something in a white enamel tray, and in his other hand he had something that looked like the key to an old-fashioned mechanical lock.

Clearly, they were going to open the young people’s cell, to feed them, most probably. If he could slip in while they did it . . . Caution urged him back, curiosity drew him forward. There was no dinger, he told himself. If the cell was opened once, it would be opened again, and he could get out. He made up his mind.

The two guards stepped back, guns ready, as the attendant opened the door and stepped inside, depositing the tray—which did, indeed, contain food of some sort—on a shelf. As he stepped out again, Mazurin, lithe as a rozzer, squeezed in past him. Simultaneously, two things happened.

The door shut with a clang.

Mazurin toppled to the metal floor under a totally unexpected access of weight.

The two prisoners, the attendant, and the guard turned to stare at him with saucer eyes.

While he sat there, feeling as if someone had slugged him from behind, the three men outside exploded into activity. The attendant fled with hoarse cries down the corridor, and the two guards threw themselves flat, aiming their curious weapons at Mazurin. The two people in the cell with him, he was vaguely aware, had moved as far away as they could get and were sitting in stricken silence.

Mazurin said weakly, “Kamerad. Tovarich. Ami.” Then it occurred to him that these men spoke English and, anyway, they apparently didn’t intend to shoot. Not as long as he didn’t move, at any rate. He shut up and tried to think. What the Blodgett had happened to him?

The metal floor of the cell was hard and cold under his palms. He was here, all right, and not on the end of any pencil of temporal energy. It had happened when the cell door shut behind him.

He looked at the door. It was a grid of stout chrome-plated bars, with an interval between the bars of about three centimeters. A nonsense phrase came into his mind, “Eve and Agrid,” which meant nothing. It wasn’t Eve and Agrid; it was Eve and Adam. Eve and Agrid. Eve and Agrid. Evean-dagrid—

Even a grid.

Mazurin shut his eyes and groaned. He opened them again when one of the guards made a warning sort of noise, and stared miserably at the limited vista before him. “Above all,” one of the technicians had said, “don’t get yourself completely surrounded by metal, even a grid. It will break the temporal beam and you’ll be marooned there. . . .”

Marooned. Stuck with a lot of irrational people in a barbaric century. In a cell, at that. Under suspicious circumstances.

He thought about it gloomily for a few minutes before, being a naturally cheerful young man, he tried to find the brighter side of it. Even then, the best he could do was, Well, things cant get any worse, and Blodgett himself is alive right at this moment.

Running footsteps approached down the corridor, and a squadron of the green-uniformed men hove into view. Two of them had a thing on a wheeled tripod that looked as if it were capable of blowing out the side of a building. The rest spread out with drawn hand-guns. The two on the floor got up, saluted and joined the semi-circle.

“Stand up!” said one who seemed to be in command.

Mazurin obeyed with alacrity.

“Remove that mask! Put your hands behind your head! Face the wall!” When he had done all that, the cell door opened, someone took two swift strides inside, and then colored lights detonated inside Mazurin’s head.

He couldn’t have been entirely out, because when he came to he was already thinking, Very efficient police methods. They didn’t take any chances. Just the way an ISC man would have handled it. . . .

His head ached abominably, and his hands and feet seemed swollen. Green-trousered legs were scissoring back and forth in front of his eyes, and the gray concrete floor was moving rapidly backward under him. He was, he realized, trussed up like a rozzer, being dragged down the corridor.

His head cleared a little and he glanced to either side. The boy and the girl were in the party, in approximately the same condition as himself.

They reached an elevator, and Mazurin got a view of its scuffed metal floor before they carried him out of it again. More corridor, black-tiled this time. Several turns. Then a doorway with an ebony sill, followed by flooring of some brown composition, probably a primitive pressed fiber.

Finally he was set upright against a slender metal post and manacled there. The boy and girl were similarly disposed of to his right.

A round man in the green uniform stalked quickly in and stared at Mazurin. His little blue eyes darted quickly from Mazurin’s cloth-of-platinum robe to his face, then to the equipment hung at his belt.

“All right,” the round man said, “who are you ?”

Mazurin opened his mouth, then shut it again. Tell the truth? Oh, no.

His training as a law officer told him exactly what would happen to him if he did. But what lie could he invent that would save him the pain of being questioned? For he had no doubt that being questioned in this era would be painful, despite the rudimentary methods.

The best thing, he decided, was to say nothing. He tried it.

The round man nodded decisively. “We’ll see,” he said. He turned as a second and a third officer strode in. All three stared at Mazurin, then turned and went to the far end of the room. Mazurin could read their lips easily.

“We knew they were cooking up something, but we had no reports that even hinted at anything like this.”

“I don’t like the smell of it. Why would they materialize him in that cell and then let us capture him? Better get him out of the city as fast as possible.”

The round man got in the way at that point and Mazurin missed some of it. Then all of them turned to come back, and he caught one more sentence: “Put them all in one cell, and we may learn something.”

The three of them were detached from the pillars, efficiently trussed up again, and hurried outside to the waiting maw of a long black paddywagon.

It was a long ride and an uncomfortable one. Not being able to talk under the eyes of the guards, Mazurin had plenty of time to think, and, by the time half an hour had gone by, he was shoulder-deep in gloom.

He was roused out of himself when the car suddenly leaped six inches off the road, came down and leaped again. Looking back through the barred window, Mazurin could see that they had left the smooth concrete highway and were rushing down a cowpath of some kind. He and the two young people, all with their wrists manacled around a horizontal bar, bounced like popcorn. The two guards crooked their free arms around stanchions.

Glancing down, Mazurin noted that the two kids were at it again with the fingers. He looked away miserably, then peeked back. It was his damned curiosity that had put him there; he might as well satisfy it while he could—if he could.

The code was the same, all right: five standard positions for each of the five fingers gave you twenty-five letters, and a clenched fist was “X” if you needed it. After a moment, he could read what the boy was saying without difficulty.

“. . . in my shoe. If they give me a chance . . .”

“Charlie, I’m scared!”

“Only way. They’ll get it all out of us otherwise. They know how to. Would have done it before now if he hadn’t turned up."

“Think he’s one of ours?”

“Can’t be; we haven’t anything like that. Don’t understand it, but can’t take any chances. He might be a spy.”

They meant him, Mazurin surmised. An interesting century, indeed.

The girl again: “Okay. I guess it’s worth it.”

It occurred to Mazurin, with an ineffable shock, that it must be poison Charlie had in his shoe, of all unsanitary places. . . . They were going to kill themselves, to keep the authorities from putting them to question. Evidently, either a large and fanatical fraternal society, or else a revolutionary group; all kinds of secrets. But he couldn’t let them commit suicide! Such a thing would be an ineradicable blot on the totems of their thousands of descendants. Even worse, he didn’t know their surnames; they might be his own great-great-great-great grandparents.

Worst of all, he suddenly realized, their suicide might blot more than totems—himself, for example, right out of existence!

He could alert the guards, of course, but the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. Questioning, this far back in history, would be sure not to be subtle. From one point of view it was perfectly sensible of them to prefer poison. Bump! If only the car would stop bouncing for a minute so he could think. . . .

The car abruptly outdid itself. Mazurin found himself whirling around the horizontal bar like a demented acrobat, while two green blurs that were the guards soared airily to the forward end of the compartment. Something struck Mazurin a dizzying blow on the head, the car bounced twice more and came to rest, while the echoes of a thunderous explosion died away in his ears.

Ill

The car was canted, half in a ditch. The guards, piled up against the forward wall, were not moving. Charlie and the girl were half stunned but conscious. Mazurin pulled futilely at his wristcuffs; they were too tight even for his trained hands to slip.

Acrid fumes drifted into the car through a burst seam in the rear. Mazurin sniffed, and felt a cold dew break out on his forehead.

“Oh, what is it?” asked the girl faintly.

“Argo paste,” said Mazurin, jittering. “It must have started coming out of the exhaust or the jet tube—whatever these vehicles use. Oh, sacred name . . .”

“What’s argo paste?” demanded the youth groggily. “I never heard of the stuff.”

“I know you haven’t,” Mazurin said. He groaned. “They use it to burn through metal. It’s supposed to come out in glazed vats. If only it’s stopped—"

The fumes grew thicker. Mazurin looked out the barred rear window.

“We’re in a pool of it,” he said. He turned. “Can you reach those two?” he asked the boy, nodding toward the two unconscious guards.

The boy shook his head. “They haven’t got our keys, anyhow. The guard up front with the driver has them. And he’s knocked out, or he’d have been back here by now.”

The car lurched and settled. A section of the floor began smoking and dripped away, leaving a puckered gap through which they could see a slowly heaving pool of gray paste.

“Can you get your shoe off?” Mazurin asked suddenly.

Charlie gave him a look full of suspicion.

“Your shoe,” Mazurin repeated with agonized patience. “Either one, it doesn’t matter.” He slipped his left foot out of his own elastic-topped sandal, grasped it between his toes and held it up. “Mine’s no good, you see? Too thin. Yours is made of thick leather. Can you take it off?”

“I don’t get it,” said Charlie, baffled. A heavier drift of choking fog came up through the vanishing floor. “But—” He grunted, raising and twisting his leg until his manacled hands could reach the laces. “Here.” He dropped the shoe and kicked it along to Mazurin.

The car settled again. The pool of gray slime was now only a foot below them. Mazurin grasped the shoe with his toes, shifting his grip till it was as firm as he could manage. Then he held on like grim death and lowered the shoe through the gap in the floor, into the gray pool underneath. He brought it up quickly.

There was a good gob of the stuff in the heel end of the shoe, about two inches from his own bare foot, but it was smoking furiously. In another second, the leather would be eaten through.

He brought the shoe up, under the horizontal bar, over it again—and dumped the paste on the bar just as the leather gave way. The metal smoked acridly and melted.

Mazurin jettisoned the shoe, jammed his foot back into his own sandal, and peered at the bar through watering eyes. There was a hearty bite out of it, but a slender tongue of metal still united the two sections.

“Now!” said Mazurin. “Pull!”

He braced his back and shoved at the bar till his muscles cracked, while Charlie, his face white with strain, pulled from his side. The car lurched once more, and the gray surface beneath leaped up to the level of the floorboards. Mazurin got his feet up on the bar and gave one last desperate shove. The metal gave a ping and moved a fraction of an inch. Through the smoke, Mazurin saw that the narrow part had snapped. He pushed some more, until the bar reluctantly bent a full three inches out of its original line.

Kneeling on the bench, Mazurin held his wrists carefully away from the smoldering ends of the bar and slipped his arms free.

“Nice work so far,” said Charlie, “but what about the door?”

He slid down to the end of the bench and moved his own arms free of the bar. The car tilted again as the girl moved to follow him.

“Get back!” said Mazurin urgently. He motioned Charlie to the forward end of the car. “Balance the weight while she gets loose.” He looked at the door that still barred their way to freedom. The lock, naturally, was about halfway up, better than two feet from the level of the argo paste. “Other shoe,” he told Charlie. “Can’t be helped.”

Charlie took it off and handed it down to him. The girl had got her arms free now and was leaning forward with the wristcuffs spread, evidently intending to touch the connecting piece to the smoking end of the bar.

“No!” yelled Mazurin, and she started back. “Horrible stuff—get a drop of it on your flesh, no way to stop it. Get back with Charlie, please.”

Squatting on the bench, he leaned forward precariously and dipped the Second shoe into the seething gray mass. He got a bigger quantity this time, and he could control it better. He brought it up swiftly and carefully poured it over the lock, peering through the haze to make sure he had the right place.

Smoke gushed out, and he couldn’t see what was happening; but he pushed the door outward, and it gave. He stood up, put one foot on the opposite bench, and got the other wedged into the barred opening of the door. A push and a twist, and he was precariously balanced outside, directly over the center of the viscous, smoking pool.

The car settled again under his weight. He scrambled to get both feet on top of the door, lunged and sprawled across the smooth top of the car. Panting, he got his feet under him again and flung himself forward, feeling the car tilt slightly under him as he moved.

“All right,” he called, “come out quickly!”

He saw a motion beneath him, and turned as the door of the cab opened and a head thrust itself out. The head shook itself, dazedly. Mazurin, flat on his stomach, leaned out and slammed his manacled wrists apologetically under the man’s ear.

“Sorry, Sacred Ancestor,” he said regretfully. “One must take sides, it would seem.”

The guard dived slowly and gracefully out of the open door and sprawled on the grass outside. Mazurin, overbalanced by the blow, felt himself slipping, grabbed for a hand-hold, then let himself go. He landed on his shoulders, rolled quickly and stood up, poised to leap into the cab. But the second uniformed man was still hunched over with his flattened face pressed against the windshield. A trickle of blood trailed from his ear.

Mazurin looked up as Charlie appeared on top of the car, followed by the girl. “All secure here,” he said. “You two all right?”

“We’re just fine,” said Charlie grimly, "and we’re certainly grateful to you for saving our lives. But would you mind giving us a hint of what this is all about?” He and the girl jumped down beside Mazurin, and Charlie gestured toward the dwindling rear end of the car. “Argo paste,” he said. “And those things back in Welfare Square.”

“Tweedledums,” Mazurin supplied helpfully. “Pineapple-flavored, I think.”

“Tweedledums,” repeated the boy. “And you. What are you, the Mad Hatter? If so, what are you going to pull out of your hat next?”

“There’s lots more,” Mazurin said gloomily. “We haven’t seen the flangs yet, or the collapsed flooring, or the rozzers, or—”

“Wait a minute,” Charlie interrupted. “Just one minute. One thing at a time. What are flangs?”

Mazurin searched his mind for the archaic word. Castards? Something like that. Ces, cis, cos—“Custards,” he said. “From the French flan, although I believe there was some influence dating from the Early Hollywood Era. They’re mobile, but not as much as the tweedledums. They only creep around, and they like to crawl into any dark enclosed space they find. So you just leave them with a bunch of open pastry shells, and—”

Charlie interrupted again. “All right, I knew it was going to be something like that. I won’t ask you what rozzers are.”

“Like a very slender pig,” said Mazurin promptly. “Fast as lightning. Some people like to race them.”

“And eat them.”

“Eat rozzers?” Mazurin exclaimed in disgust. “We’d sooner starve!”

Charlie looked at him, breathing heavily. “All I want to know,” he said, “is where all these things that nobody ever heard of came from, and that includes you.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mazurin reluctantly, “but I have a feeling you won’t believe me.”

He squatted and began going through the pockets of the guard who lay on the greensward at their feet.

“No,” said Charlie, and gave him a push that sent him sprawling. Charlie knelt quickly and removed the guard’s hand-gun from its holster. Backing up, he handed the gun to the girl and then went back to the guard. “Sorry, but I don’t see how we can trust you.”

He found the guard’s keys, stood up and held the gun trained on Mazurin while the girl unlocked his wristcuffs; then they traded while he unlocked hers. It seemed, Mazurin thought ruefully, that they had no present intention of unlocking his.

“Can I get up now?” he asked mildly.

“Yes,” said Charlie. He gestured with the gun to their left, across an open field that ended at a wooded ridge. “We’ve got to get under cover.” He glanced at the gun in his hand, then back at the smoking rear of the paddy-wagon. “What do you think, Eve?”

“It would bq nice to have it,” the girl said regretfully, “but it’s a sure tipoff.”

“Right,” said Charlie, and he returned the gun to the guard’s holster. Then he pulled the keys out of his pocket and replaced them as well.

“Hey,” objected Mazurin, “when do I get out of these things?”

“Later—maybe,” said Charlie. “By the time anybody finds the car, there’s a good chance that the whole rear end will be gone, and they’ll figure we went with it. But not if we take anything from this guy.”

“They’ll die if we leave them unconscious in this pool of argo paste!” Mazurin said, horrified.

“What of it?” Charlie wanted to know. “You don’t think they’d let us live long, do you?”

Mazurin paused. “They wouldn’t?”

“Certainly not,” said Eve. “That’s how they stay in power—kill off the opposition.”

“But I’m not the opposition,” Mazurin denied.

“Oh, no?” Charlie demanded threateningly, and Mazurin decided abruptly that he was. Charlie said, “You don’t know how close you came to joining these stinkers.”

Eve started walking. “Let’s go. Someone may come along and ask why we’re not helping our gallant lads out of danger.”

They headed across the field, Mazurin in the lead. He felt a little sick. In his own time, he tried to tell himself, he’d seen men killed often enough for exactly similar reasons. But this wasn’t his own time; this time he belonged to his Sacred Ancestors, some of them were being left to die in argo paste. He felt a wave of resentment against the two youngsters behind him, and then recoiled from that, too. They could be his ancestors. Now just what in the name of Blodgett could a man do in a situation like this?

They pushed through a tangle of saplings and undergrowth for what seemed like several hours, until they reached a little stream. Eve sat down, gasping, and the other two followed suit.

“It’s getting too late to go much farther, anyway,” said Charlie. He inspected his shoeless feet glumly, then turned to Mazurin. “All right,” he said, “let’s have your story, improbable or not.”

Mazurin told them, from the beginning. They listened in discouraging silence. Finally, “Is that all?” Charlie asked.

“That’s all,” said Mazurin. “What happens next I don’t know, except that we’ll probably run into the rozzers committing a nuisance in City Hall, or somebody triggering a section of collapsed flooring and getting knocked into the next canton, or—”

“What makes you think you’re going to see any city hall?” asked Charlie ominously.

“No reason, except that defiling a public building is one of the few supreme crimes I haven’t been responsible for yet.”

“How’s that again?” said Charlie, confused.

“Don’t you remember what he said about ancestor worship?” asked Eve. “It makes sense. He feels directly responsible for all these things that have been happening to people who, for all he knows, may be his own ancestors.” She frowned at Mazurin, opened her mouth to speak again. “How—”

“Now wait a minute,” Charlie burst out. “You’re not assuming that he’s telling the truth, are you ?”

“You wait,” she told him. Then, to Mazurin, “See if I’ve got this right. You come from about four centuries from now, and in your time the World State is an established fact. There never was any successful attempt to overthrow it. Is that right?”

Mazurin nodded.

Charlie snorted. “Well, if we fell for that, we’d simply knuckle under and let Blodgett’s hoodlums have it all their own way.”

“Hoodlums?” Mazurin echoed, touching his forelock. “Our most Sacred of Ancestors!”

Charlie peered at Mazurin puzzledly. “Is that what you’re for, to convince us we can’t win? It seems a little too simple-minded to deserve all this buildup.”

Mazurin shook his head. “You don’t quite understand,” he said. “This is a different time-line from the one I came from. It’s different because I’m in it, here. Anything can happen now.”

Charlie looked more baffled than ever.

“Listen,” said Eve, “just suppose he is telling the plain truth. And as you said a minute ago, if the Worstas had all that new stuff—materializing him in our cell, and those green things in the Square—why would they waste it on a silly trick like this?”

“All right,” said Charlie. “What then?”

“Then he might be able to help us win,” said Eve.

“Just for the theoretical interest of it—suppose you could help us overthrow the Worstas, Mazurin, would you do it?”

“The who?”

“The Worstas—the World Staters. Blodgett and his gang. You’ve seen the kind of tyrannical crew they are. All right, would you help us if you could?”

“Well, no,” said Mazurin honestly.

“Why not?”

“Because, for one thing, if I help you I hurt them, and vice versa. I couldn’t help either side. It would be irreligious.”

Charlie stared at him contemptuously, and Mazurin felt his ears getting red. It did sound stuffy, at that. Why couldn’t they have let him stay in his own environment, where a man could take his religion on sacred days and forget about it the rest of the time?

“There’s another good reason,” he said defensively. “You seem to forget that I come from the world that grew out of this one. Well, it’s a pretty good world. It’s peaceful; there hasn’t been a war in more than three centuries. Nobody has to work hard, as a general rule. No more race or nationality problems—everybody’s interbred so much, as a result of the lowering of national barriers, that there’s only one kind of people. Why should I want to change all that?”

“No reason, maybe,” said the girl, “but you can see why we want to change our world, can’t you?”

Mazurin thought about it. “No. It would change the fine world of my time—the world that Blodgett—”

He touched his forelock—“created by the might of his giant intellect.”

“Well, look,” said the girl. “Ten years ago there was a world war, the ninth in sixty years. There was a worldwide organization that was fighting the war, had been fighting against war since about nineteen-sixty. They had a lot of followers, on paper, but they weren’t strong enough to do anything until the people finally got fed up. After all, it had got to the point where you’d have two or three months of peace after the armistice was signed, and then the whole bloody mess would start all over again.

“Civilization was going straight downhill. That had been happening for a long time, but now it was happening so fast that you could see it happening. There was a spontaneous wave of revolt all through South America, where the fighting was going on at that time. It started with a French regiment that turned around and shot its officers. Then the Canadian regiment they were fighting did the same thing, and after that it spread too fast to figure out how the idea got around.

“All the armies in South America sent delegates to a conference—the conference of Acapulco—and the Worstas put over their program. Then all the armies went home, kicked out their governments, held general elections, and ten months later we had the World State.”

“Well,” said Mazurin, “what’s wrong with—”

“Wait. For five months everything went fine. All the important nations were in, and it was a sure thing that the others—the ones that hadn’t been in this particular fighting—would come in later. We had a swell Constitution and we were disarming like fury. Then there was a coup d'etat. Blodgett and his gang moved in, kidnaped Provisional President Carres, drugged him and made him sign orders appointing Blodgett’s gang to key positons.

"It was logical enough; Blodgett himself was the number two man in the Worstas movement to begin with. By the time anybody found out what was going on, they were so firmly entrenched that they’ve been able to stamp out every rising against them ever since. They’ve got the best propaganda line since Stalin, and the people as a whole won’t move because there’s peace, and they’re sick of war. So all we’ve wound up with is just another damned dictatorship. Now do you see?”

“Wait a minute,” said Mazurin. He had been listening with growing horror to Eve’s use of the Sacred Name. “This Blodgett you’re talking about—that can’t possibly be Ernest Elwood Vernon Crawford Blodgett, can it?”

“His name is Ernest, and his mother’s name was Crawford,” said Eve. “Where you got those other handles from, I don’t know.”

“It’s the way we name ourselves,” Mazurin explained. “Your own given name, given names of two prominent ancestors, one from each line, then mother’s and father’s line names. Anyway, if that’s the Blodgett you’re talking about, you must have your facts all wrong. Blodgett—” he touched his forelock— “was the founder and first President of the World State. Kids learn about him in the first course. The Father of the World and so forth. He wasn’t any dictator and there wasn’t any president before him.”

“Blodgett is busy revising the histories right now,” said Eve grimly. “I’ll bet the big ham hasn’t got buck teeth in the pictures you’ve seen, either.”

“Of course not,” said Mazurin. “Have you ever seen him in person?” he demanded.

Eve reddened. “No. But I’ve seen smuggled pictures of him before he got his dentures—”

“Then,” said Mazurin triumphantly, “how do you know the pictures you saw weren’t faked?”

They kept it up for another hour, ruffling tempers all around, until Charlie told them both to pipe down and get some sleep.

IV

Mazurin awoke feeling as if he had spent the night hanging by his thumbs. His hands were completely numb, and the rest of his body was so stiff and painful that it took him ten minutes to stand up.

The other two had made out a little better, but they were all cold, hungry and short-tempered. They drank water from the stream, ate some wild berries they found after an hour’s search, stuffed leaves into Charlie’s socks, and then started off again through the woods. Charlie, when Mazurin asked him where they were going, politely requested him to keep his geographically described questions to his precisely defined self.

An hour or so later, when the sun was higher and exercise had loosened their muscles, they were feeling a little better. They had struck a path of sorts under some kind of fragrant trees that were unfamiliar to Mazurin. The branches made a comfortable pattern against the deep-blue sky, and there were birds calling pleasantries back and forth. Mazurin moved up beside Eve and walked with her for a while in silence.

“I suppose I was kidding myself last night when I thought you might be able to help us,” she said finally. “We’ve got a fair chance as it is, but it’s awfully risky. It would be nice to know that the Marines were going to ride up at the last moment.”

Mazurin made sympathetic noises, feeling a little embarrassed.

“How do you feel about being cut off from your own time?” she asked suddenly. “You’re in a pretty tough spot, too.”

Mazurin realized that he hadn’t had time to wonder how he did feel about it. He imagined the technicians back at the Physics Bureau searching through the time-lines, finding him by some improbable chance, and yanking him back. He had a clear vision of the expression on the face of his square-jawed superior when that worthy read his report.

He shuddered.

“What’s the matter?”

“If I got back now,” said Mazurin, “they’d give me one year in the Black House and then turn my totem upside down and demote me to the Cleanliness Inspection Squad.”

“Why? Because your mission wasn’t successful?”

“Well, that isn’t exactly the way my chief would put it. He’d say I was a disgusting ghoul with the moral fiber of a cuckoo, who would pick his teeth with a splinter from his uncle’s coffin.”

“But you did all you could, didn’t you?”

Mazurin conscientiously reviewed his activities of the day before. “I guess I did, but that doesn’t matter. They go by results.”

“H’m,” said Eve. “So does Buck-tooth Blodgett. How did you happen to go to work for the—what is it?”

“Internal Security Commission,” said Mazurin.

“It would be. Fancy name for secret police, isn’t it? Well, how did you happen to join up?”

“Why,” said Mazurin in astonishment, “I was selected. When I was fifteen. Those decisions can’t be left to individuals.”

She stopped and stared at him, wide-eyed. “And you think that’s the best of all possible worlds? Even Blodgett hasn’t pulled anything quite as rank as that yet. But he will, I can see.”

She moved on, and Mazurin followed her, puzzled. “How else would you do it?” he inquired.

“Free choice,” she said curtly. “Government does its best to provide equal opportunities for everybody, and you choose what you want to be.”

“Ah,” said Mazurin shrewdly, having swiftly found the illogicality, “but who would want to go into the ISC?”

"Yes,” she agreed, “who?”

Mazurin mulled that over for a while.

“It wouldn’t work,” he said finally. “You could never get people to agree to it, in my time. It goes directly contrary to the teachings of our ancestors.”

“Exactly,” she said.

Half an hour later, Mazurin was still thinking about the implications of that remark.

They stopped when they got to another small stream that Charlie and Eve seemed to recognize. Charlie washed his face and hands, swore because he had no razor, and looked suspiciously at Mazurin’s pinkly beardless chin.

“Depilatory cream,” Mazurin told him. “Stuns the follicles for a month. Invented about 2050, I think.”

Charlie grunted, but looked half-convinced.

“Let me have those sandals,” he said. He put them on and climbed along to the top of the next ridge. He looked cautiously over, then waved to Eve and disappeared over the top.

“What now?” asked Mazurin.

“We wait here,” said Eve shortly. “There’s a town up ahead where one of our contacts lives. Charlie’s going in to see if it’s safe.”

He was back in half an hour, wearing shoes and carrying Mazurin’s sandals wrapped in a bundle. He looked worried. “There’s hell to pay,” he told Eve, then turned to Mazurin. “I guess you’re on the level, all right. Those cockeyed things of yours—the tweedledums and so forth—have been popping up all over this area for the last twenty-four hours. The Worstas are going crazy. They can’t figure it out, and it scares them. The place is swarming with troops and no-goods.”

“National Guardsmen,” Eve explained to Mazurin, seeing his puzzled look. “N. G.—no good. They’re a bunch of picked stinkers, probably about like your ICS. Anybody ever call your crowd the leks, by the way?”

Charlie made an impatient gesture, cutting off Mazurin’s reply. “Here’s what we’re up against,” he said. “Bauernfeind got through to H.Q. all right, and they’ll send a ’copter in time to get us to rendezvous. But the woods are full of patrols—we’re lucky we haven’t been picked up before now. The only place we’ll be safe is in Bauernfeind’s sub-cellar."

He stared at Mazurin’s outlandish costume. “You and I probably can get through all right, one at a time,” he said to Eve, “but he’s a problem. I was ready to ditch him if we had to, but Bauernfeind says we’ve got to take him along; the Central Council wants him. We couldn’t figure out any way to take those cuffs off, without bringing a machine shop out here. Best we could think of was this.”

He unfolded his bundle and produced a long-sleeved robe, a pair of scissors, needles and thread. “There are two or three, different sects in the hills around here,” he explained. “This isn’t quite the color any of ’em wear—Bauernfeind got it from a theatrical costumer’s—but he thinks it will pass. We’ll have to cut it open, so he can get his arms into the sleeves, and then sew him into it.” He picked up the scissors and spread the robe out over his knees.

“No, not that way,” said Eve, and took the scissors from him. “Underneath, where it won’t show.” She rapidly snipped the robe apart, starting in the middle of. the chest, upward to the end of each sleeve.

The result looked like nothing that would ever serve as a garment again, but she slipped it over Mazurin’s head, brought the dangling top part over his shoulders and, working swiftly, sewed it into shape again.

“That’ll hold,” she said, "if you don’t wave your arms around. Remember, you’ve got your hands clasped in meditation, and you keep your eyes down. What about those sandals, Charlie?”

“Half the crackpots in California wear them,” he said. “And that long hair of his looks natural in this getup. Let’s move along.”

Mazurin did as he was told. His head ached miserably, and it seemed to him that his situation was getting worse by the minute. From the time that he had been captured by the Worstas, he’d had no power of decision whatever; and even worse, he still had no idea what he could do if he were free to do it.

Mazurin walked forward mechanically, still only half attentive. Just suppose he were to settle down in this century—providing he could get out of this present mess alive. Suppose he married and had progeny. That would obviously make him an ancestor, from the viewpoint of his own time. Then it would be just as important to save his own neck as anybody else's! . . .

Wait a minute, there was something funny about that line of reasoning. Everybody, theoretically, could continue his own line. So when was an ancestor an object of veneration and when was he just a person? It couldn’t be merely a matter of elapsed time, could it? Because elapsed time was subjective, an abstraction, a point of view. From where he was now, the world he came from didn’t even exist; it was just a remote future possibility. But—

It was too much. Mazurin thought he saw the glimmer of a final answer, but he couldn’t pursue it. It made him feel dizzy when he tried.

They clambered cautiously up to the top of the ridge, reconnoitered, and went down the other side to where a dusty road showed through the trees. Directly ahead of them, when they reached the road, were the outskirts of a small, weatherbeaten town. They waited for twenty minutes before a squad of soldiers hanging around in front of a warehouse decided to go elsewhere. Twice they heard distant shots, and once a confused sound of yelling.

Mazurin sighed with relief when they finally reached a fairly well-populated street. Mingling with the crowd, Charlie in front, then Mazurin, and Eve bringing up the rear, they weren’t conspicuous, but as a group they had been decidedly peculiar. And if they looked nervous, he decided, it was in character; so did most of the people he saw around him. Every block or so they passed a patrol of green-uniformed men, hands on the straps of their slung missile weapons, looking alertly to each side as they walked.

The three bunched momentarily as they waited for a traffic light to change, and Charlie murmured, “Two blocks more, then half a block to the right. It’s the place called ‘Hi-Tone Tailors.’ Go straight to the back and down the stairs.”

He stopped talking as a green-uniformed officer paused nearby and glanced at them. The light changed and they started across the street. Mazurin kept his eyes down, as directed, even when a loud whirring noise approached him from behind and hovered over him. Immediately thereafter, something mushy hit him on the head and slithered down his face, blinding him momentarily.

He heard startled cries around him. The next instant, the mushy something had reached his nose and was trying to crawl up it. Strangling, Mazurin unwarily opened his mouth, and the stuff crawled into that, too. He swallowed as much as he could—it was lemon-flavored—and spat the rest.

He looked up just in time to see another glob hurtling toward him. He flung up his hands instinctively, and heard the popping threads as Eve’s hasty stitching gave way.

Above him the flangs were raining down. The whirring noise, he found, proceeded from the blades of a helicopter that was hovering over the intersection. Two green-uniformed men in its cab were leaning out to peer in amazement and horror at the four loudspeaker horns fixed to its underside. From these, in an apparently endless flow, issued the flangs. They were piling up underfoot now, climbing up people’s trouser legs, squirming in a custardy wave toward the comparative darkness of doorways.

Desperately, Mazurin warded off another yellow blob, leaped the writhing form of a fat citizen who had flangs in his pants, and then lost his own footing, skidding half the width of the street and fetching up against a green-uniformed soldier. He saw the soldier’s eyes widen as he caught sight of the wristcuffs. Then there was a shout and a whirl of motion, and something hard struck him solidly on the back of the head.

Light brought him to: blinding, hot yellow light that shone through his closed lids and made his eyes water fiercely. He tried instinctively to turn his head aside, and found he couldn’t. For a moment he couldn’t orient himself; he was being put to the question, that was obvious, but what for? He hadn’t done anything—or had he ? How had he made out on that time mission ? He had a dim recollection of something unpleasant. . .

The rest of the memories came back then, and Mazurin groaned. He was in the hands of the Worstas again, those peculiarly unpleasant ancestors who were incredibly the founders of his own state; and some of the police methods in this century were crude, he remembered.

They’d got the other two, undoubtedly. They’d all been close together when the flangs started falling, and the soldiers would have rounded up everybody in sight after they caught him. Now it was going to be bad. Now it was going to be very bad.

He heard a sudden “Ouch!” and then a stifled shriek. A moment later he understood the reason; something needle-sharp was jabbed an inch into his left buttock. He added his outcry to the others, whereupon a voice said, “They’re ready, Mr. President.”

“Proceed,” said a slightly lisping voice. “Begin with the girl.”

“Your name is Gertrude Meyer?” said the other.

Mazurin heard the girl gasp. She said, “Yes.”

“You are a member of the underground society of wreckers and assassins known as the Freedom Party, and you are known to your co-conspira-tors as Eve?”

Again the gasp, and again, “Yes.”

“You are aware of a plot to assassinate the President?”

The gasp, a pause, then another gasp. “Yes!”

“What is the nature of this plot?”

This time Eve sobbed. “Oh, don’t do that—oh!"

“What is the nature of this plot?”

“Oh! I don’t know—” She shrieked and then Mazurin heard her weeping. “I’ll never tell you—oh!—anything. Oh!"

Mazurin found himself struggling like a wild man against his shackles. He had an idea he knew what they were doing to Eve; it was a traditional method of interrogating females, so they’d probably had it even this early. It was very nearly infallible, and very unpleasant to think about.

Eve's cries grew louder and more frequent. Finally she screamed and there was silence for a while. Then the interrogation began again. After twenty minutes, Eve began telling all she knew.

It was a primitive plot, and it seemed to Mazurin that it could have had only a slender chance of success even in so barbaric an era as this one. In his own time, nothing whatever would be gained by assassinating the Chief Executive; the next eligible member of the Executive Families would simply take over. What you had to watch out for was thought subversion and heresy.

Here, apparently, the critical area was at the top. Blodgett was so obsessed by the idea that someone in his hierarchy might kick him out, as he’d done to Carres, that he’d made sure that the whole structure would collapse without him.

The Freedom Party knew this, or guessed it, according to Eve. They didn’t know exactly what would happen if they killed Blodgett, but they were pretty sure it would be fatal to the present dictatorial group. In any case, they’d be rid of Blodgett and would, at worst, take their chances on his successor being less brutal.

The time they’d picked was an annual celebration at which Blodgett traditionally showed himself. It was always held in a big outdoor arena, and there would be thousands of spectators. Blodgett would be well guarded, of course, but they couldn’t possibly screen everybody who got into the arena. All the revolutionists needed was an inconspicuous weapon, and it seemed that the underground’s scientists had perfected one about eight months ago and had been turning them out in quantity in a hidden factory. Eve didn’t know where the factory was. She and Charlie were the liaison agents, who were to pick up the completed weapons from other agents and take them to distribution points.

The weapon was a miniature bazooka. Only two inches long, it could be concealed so well that only the most rigorous search would find it, and its range was more than adequate for the job they wanted to do. Accuracy would have been too much to ask for, but they had intended to concentrate the fire of several hundred weapons on the rostrum, and hope that Blodgett would be killed.

The questioners took Eve through the whole story again, then started on Charlie. He held out for a few minutes, but he talked. He knew no more than Eve.

Then it was Mazurin’s turn.

The first question was: “What is your name?” and it was followed instantly by the touch of warm metal on the back of his hand.

Only a reminder, Mazurin guessed. They thought he was valuable and wanted to be very careful not to injure him seriously; but if he didn’t answer satisfactorily, the iron would get hotter. And many things, Mazurin knew, could be done with iron not hot enough to burn.

He answered the question with his full name. The next was, “Where do you come from ?” He told the truth, not expecting to be believed, but unable to think of any lie that would be more credible.

There was a muttered consultation, then, “Do you maintain that you can tell us about events which are to us in the future, because your knowledge of what is to you history?”

Mazurin said, “Yes, only—”

Blodgett’s lisping voice interrupted him. “That’s enough. General, this information is restricted. Take him into my private office. I will continue the interrogation personally.”

The light clicked off, and Mazurin felt the shackles being loosened.

“Prisoner, have you given any of this information to these other two?” Mazurin hesitated, trying to figure out which was the dangerous answer, yes or no. The President’s voice said, “Never mind, General. I will assume that he has. Bring all three of them into my private office. Here, give me those manacle keys.”

Someone hauled Mazurin off the table on which he had been lying and locked his wrists together. He was able to open his smarting eyes after a moment, but he could see nothing except the after-image of the brilliant interrogation light. Hands turned him, pushed him, caught him when he staggered and kept him moving. He heard the shuffle of other feet. Eve was crying quietly.

A door was opened ahead of them. Mazurin was led forward a few steps and then shoved into a deep cushioned chair. Footsteps receded and the door shut again. Deep silence fell instantly, punctuated by their breathing and the President’s soft footsteps, then the slight creak of a swivel chair.

“Now,” said Blodgett’s voice, apparently from some little distance. “We are entirely private here; this room is soundproof and spyproof. Tell me all about the future of my regime, Mr. Mazurin—and, I warn you, tell me the truth.”

Mazurin's vision was clearing rapidly. Directly ahead of him, twenty feet away across a deep carpet and a huge polished desk, sat Blodgett. He didn’t look anything like the pictures in the histories. He was short and plump, and he looked crafty and nervous and worried. Mazurin glanced to his right. There was a row of chairs like his own, and in two of them, manacled like himself, were Eve and Charlie. Eve was bent over with her head in her hands; Charlie was rigid and stony-faced.

Perhaps the history books had idealized Blodgett’s appearance. It didn’t matter. Mazurin was in the Presence and he was awed.

“In case any of you are thinking of attempting violence against me,” remarked Blodgett, “don’t.” He showed them a heavy little machine-gun, mounted on a wheeled frame, that stood on his desk. “You are too far away, and those extremely comfortable chairs are ingenuously hard to get out of. Also, this room contains a minor arsenal. I could fight off a regiment here, if I had to. Now, Mr. Mazurin, talk. You needn’t be afraid of telling the truth, whether you think I’ll like it or not. You’re a mine of information, and I expect to be able to use you for a long time to come. So tell me the unvarnished truth.”

Mazurin told him.

Blodgett smiled at the end of it. “One thing more, Mr. Mazurin. At what age will I die?”

“I don’t remember exactly, Your Honor. About eighty, as I recall.”

“Good, good,” said Blodgett. “Surprisingly good.” He took a seedless grape from the bowl in front of him and popped it into his mouth. “You are sure, Mr. Mazurin, that you have not colored this tale to please my fancy? No, I can see that you are sincere; you have no reason to lie.”

He ate another grape, smiling, pushed the bowl aside and leaned confidently over the desk.

“If you had prophesied disaster, Mr. Mazurin,” he said, “I should never in the world have believed you. Do you know why?” The pause was rhetorical. “Because I belong to the ages. I know it. I have felt it since I was a young man. I was born to rule the world. Would you believe that I have known that since I was twenty ? And my rule is destined to endure; I knew that.

“Why? Because I started with what every other conqueror tried in vain to achieve—a world dominion. It is all the world or none, Mr. Mazurin. Napoleon knew that. Hitler knew that. Stalin knew that. And that was the inexorable law that humbled each in his turn. They tried to achieve peace through war—fatal, fatal. They had to try, of course. They were born to rule, too, but the wrong time.”

He talked on interminably, his face growing flushed and his eyes glistening. He gestured, he smiled, he frowned. Didactic, he stood up and leaned earnestly over the table. Self-satisfied, he sat back and popped grapes into his mouth. Mystical, he stared at the ceiling.

It was during the latter phase that Mazurin—like the other two, halfstunned by oratory—suddenly came awake. From the muzzle of the squat weapon on Blodgett’s desk, a tiny green bubble bulged. As Mazurin watched, the bubble grew to half an inch dropped to the desk and rolled until the edge of the fruit-bowl stopped it.

Mazurin felt suddenly cold all over. He darted a glance to his right. Eve was looking at the floor and had seen nothing; but Charlie was looking at him with one eyebrow raised, an expression that said plainly, What is it?

Mazurin looked back at the President. Blodgett brought a rolling period to a close, smiled soulfully, sighed, and became stern.

“As for you, sir,” he said, “your destiny is allied with mine. To this favor you must submit. I do not ask, I give, I give you a living god, as you have yourself justly described me, to worship and follow faithfully all of your life. And I give you what is immeasurably more precious than the schoolboys’ history you give me—I give you a place beside me in all the history that’s yet to be written!”

For an instant, that idea captured Mazurin’s imagination. What a fantastic end to his assignment that would be—the Chief Executive, and the ISC Intelligence chief, and everybody, worshipping every holy day at his shrine I

Even while that thought raced through his mind, Mazurin watched the tiny green globule in utter fascination. If Blodgett reached for that globule, thinking it a grape, then for the first time in this whole misbegotten affair Mazurin would have reached a point of decision. And to save himself he couldn’t tell whether he wanted that or not. He knew what he wanted to do, well enough, but he felt the first premonitory stirrings of a guilt that he knew would plague him for years after the act. What right had he to interfere with the lives of millions of still unborn?

Mazurin, he told himself, you’re an ancestor! He glanced at Eve’s pale, drawn face. I’ll see to it that you are, he added.

Blodgett’s open palm came down on the desk, sideswiping the fruit bowl. The bowl wobbled elliptically around the desktop, spilling grapes. But the nearest to Blodgett’s hand was still the globe that was not a grape.

“How say you, sir?” demanded Blodgett. “Destiny or death?”

His hand hovered, as ready for one gesture as another. He glared at Mazurin.

Mazurin took a deep breath, “I choose destiny, Your Honor.”

Blodgett’s features relaxed. His hand dropped gently on the table, the pudgy fingers curling. Gently they closed on the green sphere. Smiling benignly, Blodgett popped it into his mouth.

He stayed that way, without changing posture or expression, for three long seconds. Then his eyes bulged. A shout formed itself on his lips, but no sound came out. He—withered somehow, shrank indescribably in his uniform. There was a look of horror and of passionate appeal in his eyes. And then, suddenly, Blodgett was not there any longer.

To the others, it looked as if he had simply vanished out of the world of men. But Mazurin, shuddering, knew that his fate had not been that simple—or that pleasant.

Eve gasped, “What was it? That grape he ate—”

Mazurin felt sick. “A mangel.”

Charlie demanded, “What’s a mangel? What did it do to him?”

Mazurin said shakily, “You could torture me in the subtlest or crudest ways and I would not tell you. This primitive civilization is not ready to know anything at all about mangels. Nothing!”

He put his head in his hands. One part of him knew that Blodgett was a stinker; the other part was simply saying, You let him eat a mangel. You killed him. The most sacred ancestor of all, the Father of the World.

He heard the other two talking in low, tense voices. Eve said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Blodgett had already started making himself up to look like his propaganda pictures.”

“Yes. We could put it over, Charlie. They’d have no choice. It’s either agreement or total collapse.”

“Gone,” Mazurin moaned. “Blodgett. The beautiful society he built with his giant intellect—”

“No,” said Charlie. “None of it’s lost. Except the worst part of your civilization.”

“And certainly not the most sacred ancestor,” Eve added. “Not the Father of the World.”

Mazurin, lost in misery, looked up, “But the mangel got him. Blodgett is gone.” He touched his forelock absently.

“You’re here,” said Eve. “You know what the future is supposed to be like. You’ll build Blodgett’s world—with a few important changes.”

“Oh,” Mazurin said, suddenly realizing. “You’ll put one of your men in Blodgett’s place and I’ll advise him on what I remember.”

Charlie leaned over his chair. “One of our men-—one of everybody’s.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Eve, squeezing Mazurin’s arm. “The Father of the World, the most sacred ancestor, will be a descendant.”

“He doesn’t get it,” Charlie said.

“You,” Eve stated, “will be Blodgett.”

Mazurin started to touch his forelock. “Me?” he asked dazedly, then finished the reverent gesture.

He was an ancestor, after all.