Time and Again

XXIV

The ship was real — strange, but very real. And it was the only thing that was. All the rest of the situation had a vague, unrealistic, almost faerie character about it, as if it might be a bad dream and one would wake up any moment and for an agonizing second try to distinguish between drama and reality.

"That map over there," said Pringle, "puzzles you, no doubt. And there is every reason that it should. For it is a time map."

He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head with a beefy hand.

"Tell the truth, I don't understand the thing myself. But Case does. Case is a military man and I'm just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly. But a military man does. A military man has to know or someday he'll get behind an eight-ball and his life may depend on knowing."

So that was it, thought Sutton. That was the thing that had bothered him. That was the clue that had slipped his mind. The thing he couldn't place about Case, the thing that he had told himself would explain Case, tell who he was and what he was and why he was here on this asteroid.

A military man.

I should have guessed, said Sutton to himself. But I was thinking in the present…not the past or future. And there are no military men, as such, in the world today. Although there were military men before my time and apparently there will be military men in ages yet to come.

He said to Case, "War in four dimensions must be slightly complicated."

And he didn't say it because he was interested at the moment in war, whether in three or four dimensions, but because he felt that it was his turn to talk, his turn to keep this Mad Hare tea chatter at its proper pace.

For that was what it was, he told himself…an utterly illogical situation, a madcap, slightly psychopathic interlude that might have its purpose, but a hidden, tangled purpose.

Case smiled when he spoke to him, a tight, hard, clipped, military smile.

"Primarily," Case said, "it is a matter of charts and graphs and very special knowledge and some superguessing. You figure out where the enemy may be and what he may be thinking and you get there first."

Sutton shrugged. "Basically that always was the principle," he said. "You get there fustest…"

"Ah," said Pringle, "but there are now so many more places where the enemy may go."

"You work with thought graphs and attitude charts and historic reports," said Case, almost as if he had not been interrupted. "You trace back certain happenings and then you go back and try to change some of those happenings…just a little, you understand, for you must not change them much. Just enough so the end result is slightly different, just a little less favorable to the enemy. One change here and another there and you have him on the run."

"It drives you nuts," said Pringle, confidentially. "Because you must be sure, you see. You pick out a nice juicy historic trend and you figure it out to the finest detail and you pick a key point where change is indicated, so you go back and change it…"

"And, then," said Case, "it kicks you in the face."

"Because, you understand," said Pringle, "the historian was wrong. Some of his material was wrong or his method was clumsy or his reasoning was off…"

"Somewhere along the line," said Case, "he missed a lick."

"That's right," said Pringle, "somewhere he missed a lick and you find, after you have changed it, that it affects your side more than it does your enemy's."

"Now, Mr. Bones," said Sutton, "I wonder if you could tell me why a chicken runs across the road."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Interlocutor," said Pringle. "Because it wants to get on the other side."

Mutt and Jeff, thought Sutton. A scene jerked raw and bleeding from a Krazy Kat cartoon.

But clever. Pringle was a propagandist and he was no fool. He knew semantics and he knew psychology and he even knew about the ancient minstrel shows. He knew all there was to know about the human race, so far as that knowledge could serve him in the human past.

A man had landed in the bluff pasture one morning six thousand years before and John H. Sutton, Esq., had come ambling down the hill, swinging a stick, for he was the sort of man who would have carried a stick, a stout, strong hickory stick, no doubt, cut and trimmed with his own jackknife. And the man had talked with him and had used the same kind of mental tactics on John H. Sutton as Pringle now was trying to use on Sutton's far descendant.

Go ahead, said Sutton silently. Talk yourself hoarse in the throat and squeaky in the tongue. For I am on to you and you're the one who knows it. And pretty soon we'll get down to business.

As if he had read Sutton's thoughts, Case said to Pringle:

"Jake, it isn't working out."

"No, I guess it ain't," said Pringle.

"Let's sit down," said Case.

Sutton felt a flood of relief. Now, he told himself, he would find out what the others wanted, might get some clue to what was going on.

He sat down in a chair and from where he sat he could see the front end of the cabin, a tiny living space that shrieked efficiency. The control board canted in front of the pilot's chair, but there were few controls. A row of buttons, a lever or two, a panel of toggles that probably controlled lights and ports and such…and that was all. Efficient and simple…no foolishness, a minimum of manual controls. The ship, Sutton thought, must almost fly itself.

Case slid down into a chair and crossed his long legs, stretching them out in front of him, sitting on his backbone. Pringle perched on a chair's edge, leaning forward, rubbing hairy hands.

"Sutton," asked Case, "what is it that you want?"

"For one thing," said Sutton, "this time business…"

"You don't know?" asked Case. "Why, it was a man in your own time. A man who is living at this very moment…"

"Case," said Pringle, "this is 7990. Michaelson really did very little with it until 8003."

Case clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oh, so it is," he said. "I keep forgetting."

"See," Pringle said to Sutton. "See what I mean?"

Sutton nodded, although for the life of him he didn't see what Pringle meant.

"But how?" asked Sutton.

"It's all a matter of the mind," said Pringle.

"Certainly," said Case. "If you'd just stop to think of it, you would know it was."

"Time is a mental concept," said Pringle. "They looked for time everywhere else before they located it in the human mind. They thought it was a fourth dimension. You remember Einstein…"

"Einstein didn't say it was a fourth dimension," said Case. "Not a dimension as you think of length or breadth or depth. He thought of it as duration…"

"That's a fourth dimension," said Pringle.

"No, it's not," said Case.

"Gentlemen," said Sutton. "Gentlemen."

"Well, anyhow," said Case, "this Michaelson of yours figured out it was a mental concept, that time was in the mind only, that it has no physical properties outside of Man's ability to comprehend and encompass it. He found that a man with a strong enough time sense…"

"There are men, you know," said Pringle, "who have what amounts to an exaggerated time sense. They can tell you ten minutes have passed since a certain event has transpired and ten minutes have gone past. They can count the seconds off as well and as accurately as any watch."

"So Michaelson built a time brain," said Case. "A brain with its time sense exaggerated many billionfold, and he found that such a time brain could control time within a certain area…that it could master time and move through time and carry along with it any objects which might be within the field of power."

"And that is what we use today," said Pringle. "A time brain. You just set the lever that tells the brain where you want to go…or rather, when you want to go…and the time brain does the rest."

He beamed at Sutton. "Simple, isn't it?"

"I have no doubt," said Sutton, "that it is very simple."

"And now, Mr. Sutton," said Case, "what else do you want?"

"Not a thing," said Sutton. "Not a single thing."

"But that's foolish," Pringle protested. "There must be something that you want."

"A little information, maybe."

"Like what?"

"Like what this is all about."

"You're going to write a book," said Case.

"Yes," said Sutton. "I intend to write a book."

"And you want to sell that book."

"I want to see it published."

"A book," Case pointed out, "is a commodity. It's a product of brain and muscle. It has a market value."

"I suppose," said Sutton, "that you are in the market."

"We are publishers," said Case, "looking for a book."

"A best seller," Pringle added.

Case uncrossed his legs, hitched himself higher in the chair.

"It's all quite simple," he said. "Just a business deal. We wish you would go ahead and set your price."

"Make it high," urged Pringle. "We are prepared to pay."

"I have no price in mind," said Sutton.

"We have discussed it," Case told him, "in a rather speculative manner, wondering how much you might want and how much we might be willing to give. We figured a planet might be attractive to you."

"We'd make it a dozen planets," Pringle said, "but that doesn't quite make sense. What would a man do with a dozen planets?"

"He might rent them out," said Sutton.

"You mean," asked Case, "that you might be interested in a dozen planets?"

"No, I don't," Sutton told him. "Pringle wondered what a man would do with a dozen planets and I was being helpful. I said…"

Pringle leaned so far forward in his chair that he almost fell on his face.

"Look," he said, "we aren't talking about one of the backwoods planets out at the tail end of nowhere. We're offering you a landscaped planet, free of all venomous and disgusting life, with a salubrious climate and tractable natives and all the customary living accommodations and improvements."

"And the money," said Case, "to keep it running for the rest of your life."

"Right spang in the middle of the galaxy," said Pringle. "It's an address you wouldn't be ashamed of."

"I'm not interested," said Sutton.

Case's temper cracked.

"Good Lord, man, what is it that you want?"

"I want information," Sutton said.

Case sighed. "All right, then. We'll give you information."

"Why do you want my book?"

"There are three parties interested in your book," said Case. "One of those parties would kill you to prevent your writing it. What is more to the point, they probably will if you don't throw in with us."

"And the other party, the third party?"

"The third party wants you to write the book, all right, but they won't pay you a dime for doing it. They'll do all they can to make it easy for you to write the book and they'll try to protect you from the ones that would like to kill you, but they're not offering any money."

"If I took you up," said Sutton, "I suppose you'd help me write the book. Editorial conferences and so forth."

"Naturally," said Case. "We'd have an interest in it. We'd want it done the best way possible."

"After all," said Pringle, "our interest would be as great as yours."

"I'm sorry," Sutton told them, "my book is not for sale."

"We'd boost the ante some," said Pringle.

"It still is not for sale."

"That's your final word?" asked Case. "Your considered opinion?"

Sutton nodded.

Case sighed. "Then," he said, "I guess we've got to kill you."

He took a gun out of his pocket.