The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Time Armada, by Fox B. Holden This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Time Armada Author: Fox B. Holden Release Date: April 13, 2021 [eBook #65072] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIME ARMADA *** THE TIME ARMADA By Fox B. Holden Politics and science don't mix—except that Congressman Blair had once been a physicist. This was The Beginning—but The End was worlds away.... [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy October and November 1953 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] 5:20 P. M., April 17, 1958 Congressman Douglas Blair shivered a little, turned up his coat collar against the gray drizzle that had been falling like a finely-sifted fog all day. His head ached, his nose felt stuffy, and he was tired. It was good of Grayson to pick him up. The front seat of the dark blue sedan was soft and reassuring, and the warm current of air from the heater beneath it felt good. He let his spare, barely six-foot body slump like a bag of wet wash and pushed his hat back with the half-formed thought that it might ease the dull pressure behind his eyes. "Rough going today, eh, Congressman?" Grayson twisted the blue sedan into outbound Washington traffic, turned the windshield wipers to a faster pace. Click- click, click-click, and Blair wished someone would invent windshield wipers for the brain, to be worn like a radio head- set, maybe with a hole in the top of the head. "Hey, buddy! Republicans got your tongue?" "No, sorry, Carl. Just tired. It's that damned McKenny bill." "Off the record?" "I'm afraid so for now, Carl. He can get the thing through—he's so damn clever he should've been a woman. Got the steel men eating out of his hand. Made no bones about telling the rest of us today that what the hell, the people never had anything to say about it, anyway. The work of government is up to the professionals. The sooner the people get their nose out of it, the better off they'll be. He said that, Carl, right in front of everybody. And nobody so much as blinked." The drizzle started to develop into a dark blue rain as they headed toward the suburbs. "What's going to happen, Carl?" Blair said after awhile. "If I knew, believe me, I wouldn't be sitting here! I don't know, Doug. We'll all cook in Hell together I guess. Here, have a cigarette." "Thanks. No, dammit. That's just it—if they'd take this going to Hell business and forget about it—sink it, scuttle it. Nobody goes to Hell, he makes his own if that's the way he lives, or he makes his own personal Heaven or Paradise or whatever you call it if that's the way he lives. Most of us are in between someplace, a little scared, mostly indifferent, and too mixed up to see the simple fact that the way of living we've got in this country isn't so bad but what just plain honesty and a little intelligence couldn't run it right side up." "Sure, sure, I know and you're right, Doug. But take it easy.... Things aren't always as bad as they look." Blair inhaled on the cigarette, laughed a little and felt better. Sometimes he knew he sounded like a college kid trying to tell his father what was wrong with the world, but that was why he liked Carl. Carl let him talk, knew it was his way of blowing off the pent-up steam. "You know what, chum?" They were running smoothly along the highway now, the engine a reassuring hum of power, the interior of the sedan warm and relaxing. The rain was letting up a little, but dirty banks of fog had started gathering at the roadside like ghosts of all the work of the day, tenuous, without substance. "What, Carl?" "You should've stuck with the M.I.T. degree after all. Hell with your brain you'd've made that try for the Moon a success last month instead of another near-miss." "Maybe you're right. Those boys know what they're doing though. I'll stick to puttering." "Puttering the man calls it. 'He hath a lean and hungry look—such men are dangerous....' Myself, I think that gadget you 'putter' with in that cellar of yours is some kind of a gismo to hypnotize all the states-righters into doing something intelligent like dropping dead without being told!" "With ingenuity such as yours, my friend, I think I could really accomplish something in that cellar of mine at that! That's the trouble. You writers and newsmen have all the good ideas—slide-rules don't think worth a damn! Instead of a wonderful creation such as you suggest, what have I got? A pile of junk that may, if it works in any degree at all, turn out to be a fairly good television set...." "You wouldn't kid an old friend. That martini you were putting away the other night said that it was an experiment with something called tired light." "Exactly. Television." "Look, the quality of curiosity is not strained, it droppeth as a gentle ten-ton truck from twenty stories up! You said—or the martini said anyway—that if this little gimcrack of yours works, it'd be able to bring back pictures of things that happened in the past. You're guilty until proven innocent, Galileo. Start talking." "Off the record—" "I should broadcast it and get dunked in a witch's chair." "Well—the martini had it a little balled up, but the essential idea's there I guess. Anyway, it isn't everybody who has a space-warp for a household pet." "Or Einstein for a hobby." "Blah, this is strictly Blair. That's why it won't work, and I'd be only sensationally nuts if I ever thought it would. But some men take Scotch for their nerves, and I take Scotch with electronics. More of a jolt that way." "Yuk, yuk." That was why it was good to have Carl for a friend. No matter how sorry you got to feeling for yourself, he could usually snap you out of it one way or another. Right now, Doug thought, Carl was diligently at work with that peculiar brand of psychology that all newspapermen strive ceaselessly to acquire that makes people blab when they ought to keep quiet. But why not—Carl wouldn't know what the hell it was all about and he wouldn't care, if he thought it would take some of the pressure off. "Well, listen then. Ever look through an observatory telescope and have somebody tell you you were focused on some star or other a couple of thousand light years away? Maybe it was in the process of blowing up and becoming a nova or something like that. Anyhow, it would be explained to you that you were seeing that star as it was two thousand years ago. You were seeing, for instance, an explosion that happened twenty centuries in the past. Reason, of course, is that it took the light that long to get from the star to you. More simply, the light that strikes your back porch in the morning left the sun about nine minutes before." "Very clear. Only how come, if the universe is a closed form of infinity like it says in all the new books, this light never doubles back on itself—gives you two or even a million images of the same star?" "That's where the tired light comes in. After a certain length of time—unthinkable aeons of it—it, like all other forms of energy, peters out. Runs down. Quits. Kaput. They call it entropy. It constitutes, actually, a gradual running down, growing old of the universe. As far as anyone knows, this happens before it 'doubles back' on itself, as you put it. You can't catch it coming around the second time to see what you looked like umpteenillion ages ago. So, if you want a second look at yourself, you've got to go out and catch the light which you reflected in the past—" "Oh brother. You mean anybody on a planet, say, forty light years from Earth with a supertelescope looking at us would be watching the battle of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood! A hundred and eighty light years away he'd see us slugging it out against King George III at Saratoga and Valley Forge!" "You've got it. In other words, the light reflected from Earth then is somewhere deep in Space now. If you could haul it in on some kind of a receiver, you could see everything all over again—you could watch the land masses of Earth as they shifted to form the continents as we know them today." "You'd need something faster than light to trap the light itself—and I thought that was against Fitzgerald or somebody." "If you followed the same space warps the light did, it would be. But if it were possible to operate your receiver through the fabric of space-time, instead of along it—a kind of short-cut—you might turn up with what you're after." "I am sorry I got into this." Blair smiled tiredly. "Me too. Hell, I'm fooling around with things I don't pretend to know anything about. Just enough to putter. Just enough to keep my mind off all-day-long. God knows what I'll get when I turn the damn thing on. Probably not even snow so I'm not worried. Turn left at the next stop-light—they've got that new cut-off finished." He started buttoning his coat. Grayson turned left as ordered. "But suppose it works?" "Wow. Then the steam-fitters would envy me." "Well it sure oughtta do something. You've been tinkering with it for—how long? Couple years?" "About four I guess, off and on. Sometimes I get to wondering what it'll do if it does do anything." "Show us Lillian Russell, maybe, or Little Egypt!" "There's a million possible results when you go fooling around with the structure of the universe, Carl. I guess that's what fascinates me. A little learning is a dangerous thing, they say. Dot's afraid I'll blow us up." "Well—she could have something there!" "The thing probably won't even toast a piece of bread. But I'd rather fool with it than collect buttons or play bridge or some other damfool thing, so...." The blue sedan sloshed up the puddled drive-way to the new nine-room bungalow and at the porch Doug Blair got out. A wind had sprung up and the dampness suddenly grasped his body, clung, as though he were naked. "Time for a drink, supper?" "No, thanks, Doug—gotta see a man. Now take it easy—let the state of the nation go bury its head for tonight and you have some fun blowing fuses!" "Yeah, yeah! O.K. and thanks." The blue sedan sloshed its way back to the highway, and Doug went into the house. Douglas Blair kissed his wife and, as he did every time he kissed her, wondered how he'd been so lucky. He preferred to think as seldom as memory would permit of how close he'd come on a couple of occasions to marrying a country club, a bridge deck, a women's society, an Emily Post book. And when Dot had given him Terry and Mike, she'd topped off the miracle of herself with the added one of two healthy young minds that had already learned to say "prove it!" Some of the tiredness left him, a lot of the aching discouragement was brushed away. "Tired, Doug?" "I was." There was a sudden thundering which grew quickly into the crashing noises often made by wild elephants getting exercise in a native village. "The patter of little feet," Dorothy said. "Oh. For a minute I thought it was termites. Hi, fellas! What kind of trouble did we almost keep out of today?" "Hi, dad! Hey, Mike says you aren't ever going to try it out. You are, aren't you?" "I didn't say not ever. I said maybe not ever. Things like the Contraption take years to develop, don't they, dad?" "Well," Doug said, doing what he could to stem the onslaught and still stay on his feet, "what's the source of all this wisdom, Mr. Scientist?" "Some day I'll be a scientist. Mommy said so, didn't you, mom?" Every so often Doug wondered where they got that solid healthy look, and if either of them would ever faintly resemble the Cassius after whom even Carl thought he should have been named. The red hair of course was Dorothy's. The blue eyes were Dorothy's. Even the brains were, he sometimes suspected, all Dorothy's. But the dormant challenge that grew, not yet quite fully awakened, somewhere behind the freckled, ten-year-old faces—that, if it matured well, would be his. "If," Doug said then, "you three will let a hungry man eat his supper, he'll let you in on a little surprise before hand. That is, if anybody's interested—" "Tell us!" "Is it, Doug?" "Your brilliant father has exactly three connections to solder on the Contraption, and then—well, after supper, we'll all see together." He laughed. Terry and Mike hooted. Dorothy looked a little worried, and told the boys to wash up. It covered half the ten-foot workbench, its large screen a huge, lens-like square eye as it glinted beneath the glare of the cold-cathode lights that lined the ceiling of the laboratory-like cellar. Doug put the cooling soldering-iron back in its place. Dorothy had her Christmas camera mounted on a tripod a few feet back, "Just in case," she said, "it does something before it blows up." Terry and Mike were silent, eyes wide, not quite behind their mother. "We shall now," Doug said, "see if we can get a look at Hopalong Cassidy the way he looked when I was a boy. Better yet, maybe Jack Benny when he was 39 ... and Valentino...." He closed the switch, and the cathode lights flickered, went out. There was a humming sound that seemed to come from all sides of the cellar rather than from the Contraption, and the bluish glow emanated from the square convex eye. Directly before it, they watched. The light shimmered, gave the illusion that the Contraption itself was shimmering, fading. The work bench became indistinct. "Doug—" And then the workbench and the Contraption were gone, the overhead cathode tubes were gone, and daylight was filtering through a cellar window that had moved about four feet along the wall—which was now made of glass brick instead of concrete. Doug and his wife stood rooted. Terry and Mike were gone, too. CHAPTER II She was clad in superbly tailored cream-colored slacks of a material that was glass-like in sheen, an equally well-fitted blouse of forest green hardly a shadow less than opaque, and sandals of a soft, flexible texture slightly raised at the heel. The wide cummerbund of silken flame that circled her slender waist was her only ornamentation. Doug's pastel shirt felt like a feather; it lay open at the throat and clung comfortably about his chest and shoulders, then tapered leisurely to his waist. The trousers were of the same weight and of a darker hue somewhere between the blue of midnight and cobalt; the sandals were like hers. He did not understand. "You—I know you are not—" Her face was not the same; her hair was the deeper red of mahogany, her eyes as large, but of green, not blue. Dorothy's mouth was wider, her cheeks not quite so shadowed. Yet now her face was drawn in the look of bewilderment that he felt on his own. "Doug?" "Dot! For God's sake!" "Your voice is the same—but you don't look like—" "Don't get scared, take it easy. It's me. You're different too—all but your voice. I've got to figure it out. Everything's all wrong. Wrong as hell—" He found a chair of light metal that felt like foam rubber when he sat on it. Dorothy—and he knew somehow that it must be Dorothy—was looking around her with quick, nervous glances. "Doug, the boys—where are the boys?" "Terry! Mike!" He called again, stood up. "Oh, God—" "They were just behind me, Doug, they couldn't have run—" "No I think—I think they must've stayed with—with the Contraption. We were in the blur light. It wasn't. They must've been just beyond its effective range. That must be it. It just got us." "Got us—you mean we're—" "No, no of course not. Alive as we'll ever be. But where—" "Wherever we are, I don't want to be here, Doug. I want to be back...." "Easy, honey." He put his arm about her, drew her to him, and he could feel her taut muscles relax a little. "I'd like to say it's a dream, but two people don't dream the same dream at once. And I'm not the type to think up clothes like these all by myself.... Somehow, the Contraption did it. I was monkeying with a theorem I got interested in once in space-time mechanics. But it was all on paper—just something to fool with. It was impossible for the Contraption to really do anything." He sat down again. "Impossible." "Like flying, my mother used to say. What do we do, Doug?" "That's my gal...." He got up a second time, forced a smile. "Let's go upstairs and see if anybody's around." There were stairs. Wide and gently curving and constructed of a light, lusterless steel. Architecturally, the house was little different from many of the expensive-looking California-type affairs he had seen in the women's magazines that Dot bought every so often. Yet there was something about its interior, a certain grace combined with a subtle simplicity that made it a work of art as a good painting or sculptural piece is art. There was rebellion in it—a gentle rebellion against the eye-aching extremes of artificial modernity, yet at the same time a freedom of execution that made the confines of formalized pattern seem childish. The pastel carpeting was of a deep, soft substance that Doug recognized as a masterpiece in plastic; the furniture was simple, casual, but not stark and starved-looking. The rooms themselves were ample and were as bright in the far corners as in those nearest the wide, sashless windows. They were not separated by partitions, but divided instead by a fragile-appearing tracery of lattice-work in which a decorative motif was woven with an almost fairy-like geometrical magic. The air was cool and fresh. "Now I know I'm dreaming," Dot said in a low voice. They walked quietly, from room to room, listening, half-waiting. "I expect any minute to find three bowls of porridge somewhere," Dot said. "I wonder ..." Doug said. "What's here is—I think its ours. I think we live here." "Doug look—through the window!" He saw a broad lawn of carefully trimmed yet almost ankle-deep grass, inset at the edges with a running garden. And the street beyond was wide, and there were other houses at its far side that looked much as he knew this one must appear. Roofs of tinted tiling, walls of delicately-toned glass brick, wide, gently-curving windows. These Doug saw in the first instant, and then there were the soundless vehicles in the street. "Like smooth, transparent walnut shells," Doug said. "Cooling louvres in the back—engines in the rear. They know their engineering, too. Wonder if the body is some sort of transparent steel—" "The people in them, Doug! Did you see them? Just like—" "Like us, of course. Still expecting the three bears?" He laughed a little. They were like children in some new fairyland, half afraid, half unbelieving. "Wherever we are, it's populated by humans—if it weren't, we may not have come out this way...." "Doug, do you know?" She turned, faced him, and there was still fear deep in her eyes. Not the stark fear of terror, but the bewildered, uncomprehending fear of disbelief. "No I don't. But these clothes aren't ours—even our faces, our bodies aren't. Just our actual selves came through unaltered. Our egos—personalities—whatever you want to call it that gives a human being his identity. The rest we've —moved into, I think. Anyway, it's a theory to go on. I wonder what our names are—" "Doug, don't." "I wish I were trying to be funny. But don't you see?" "Whatever happened to us—couldn't that have changed us? Our—our atomic structure, couldn't that have been changed or altered somehow? It's all so crazy—" "It's easy to see, m'girl, that you don't spend your time at a bridge table all those hours I'm slaving away on Madhouse Hill! But if that had happened ... I don't know. It's the clothes. Too completely different—not just out of shape, or an altered shape, but of a fundamentally different shape. We got—we got transplanted." "But then what of—" "Thinking the same thing. Suppose the Contraption, whatever it's done—suppose it works two ways? A swap, a trade?" "But Doug that's—" He smiled. Dot was suddenly silent with the knowledge that whether she liked it or not, she could no longer refuse to accept the facts as they were, could no longer cross off their implications for want of bolder imagination. "Are we—is it the ... the future?" "Maybe. You could even ask 'is this Earth?' and I couldn't tell you. I wonder what they think where they are ... I wonder if they know." "Doug, would they—do anything? To Terry and Mike, I mean?" "I sure hope not—and I don't think so. The boys will be all right—they know their way around back home—whomever it is we've replaced is in the same boat we are. They'd think more than twice before rashly committing themselves to trouble. They're probably trying to communicate with the kids—if the kids stuck around that long. I'm wondering more about the Contraption. If they start fooling with it...." "Then we'd go back?" "Maybe. Maybe not. I think though that they'd leave it alone, on the theory that whoever invented it knows its use, knows how to handle it safely. They'd be wrong, but I think that's how they'd figure it. I don't think any one'll dare touch it, simply out of sheer fear of what might happen next." "I'm scared, Doug. Awful scared." "I guess that makes two of us. Somehow we've got to dig up the parts for another Contraption. And then—" He let the sentence drift into silence. "And then, Doug?" "Well maybe with the exact same set-up—same everything, I could do it again. I don't know. But if they so much as try to turn the other one off, try to change anything, we'll lose this point of reference in space-time for good." Slowly, Dot nodded understanding. "The parts," she said then. "Can we find the things you need?" "I'll give it the old college try, sweetheart." "How long—" He shrugged. "A few days maybe. Depends." They were silent for a moment, looking through the wide window, watching the beautiful vehicles as they slid silently past, re-examining what they could see of the colorful world beyond the rolling lawn. Doug felt an aching in his jaws, a tightness through his lips. God, it was so silly—standing there, trying to explain, when he didn't even know what had happened, where they were or—or when they were. He'd been after travelling light to bring back pictures of the past— every home should have one. Nuts. The future—no, it wasn't supposed to be that way. Unless you accepted past, present and future as the components of one great unit, and progression from one to the other nothing more than illusion, like the illusion of movement given by the hundreds of still frames on a film-strip. If time was like such a film- strip, and you found a way to jump forward along it, bypassing the frames that were in immediate succession— But then what about the possibility-probability pattern theory, in which time was supposed to exist as an infinite number of possibility and probability paths, intersecting, paralleling, diverging, splitting with each new decision, each new action —Lord it was getting insane. "Hell I'm all mixed up," he said. Dot put her arm through his. He nodded toward what was beyond the window. "We might as well have a look for ourselves. If anybody says anything to us we'll suddenly see something interesting in the other direction. Game?" "I—I guess so...." "Damn, I wish I had a cigarette!" They went to the front door, swung it open. The streets were long and incredibly wide and straight, bearing their traffic smoothly and with hardly a hint of the inevitable jamming that was so familiar. The sidewalks were immaculately kept, yet surprisingly free of pedestrians; a few passed, bowed slightly and smiled, continued on. "Polite bunch," Doug murmured. "They bow like good Republicans...." "And all smiling—as if they didn't have a worry in the world." "Democrats, then!" They laughed, and for a moment the anxiety was gone, and the street could have been any fine street in the world from which they'd come. "We'd better try to find the center of town," Doug said then. "We've got to do a lot more than ogle if we want to locate the stuff we're after. Sshh...." This time two women passed. They smiled, bowed, went on. "Maybe you're the mayor of this town or something—at least an alderman." "They wouldn't smile, honey! Anyway, there are three things we'd better figure. How to get money, how to get food, how to get the equipment. Any ideas?" "We should've searched the house for a wallet or something. Or maybe these people don't believe in money—maybe they use a different system altogether." "It's possible, of course, and—good night!" Doug was staring suddenly upward. There had been a low rumbling sound which within seconds had ascended the decibel scale to a throbbing roar. A great, tapering thing of silvery metal with no hint of wing-surfaces was bolting skyward, and Doug knew somehow that the sky was not its limit. The roar and scream of suddenly-split atmosphere subsided, and in moments, the vertically-climbing craft was out of sight. "They've done it here, Dot! I'd bet the bottom dollar I don't have that we've seen our first space-liner!" "Could I have been right, Doug? The future, I mean?" "I don't know, Dot.... I don't know." There were towering buildings less than a half-mile from them of a simplicity and beauty that left no time for talk. The city was suddenly before them—a sparkling thing, unmarred by eye-stumbling bits and pieces—a flawless, symmetrical sweep toward the heavens that momentarily stupefied credulity. Traffic ramps soared from street-level in gently-curving ribbons above spacious quiet parks; sound was muffled to near-inaudibility, and the illusion of a great fairy kingdom was unmarred by the confusion of advertising posters, marquees, store front lettering, or the raucous stampede of elbowing mobs.... "I wonder how they illuminate at night," Doug was saying. "I wonder what they—my God, Dot, look up—all over. Where is it?" Far above, the sky seemed gradually to darken into an ever-deepening shadow of blackness. But the sun—She couldn't find the sun! "It's a different planet, Doug!" "And the city—it is lit! There must be a sun but it's down—it's night, and they've found a way to illuminate an entire city as though daylight were perpetual!" And that was when it caught their eye. It was a small store, and she could see neatly-tiered rows of groceries inside— fruits and vegetables were easily recognizable even the street's width from them. But it was the little rack outside the store—the one that held the newspapers. Almost at a run they crossed the street, and Doug fought down the urge to reach out, grab one of the editions. The front pages of the newspapers were easily readable. Because they were printed in excellent English. The date beneath the masthead of one was April 17, 1958. The paper was the Washington Post. CHAPTER III It was light. Terry had been watching the darkness fade for about ten minutes, fascinated, because the diffused glow grew as though from nowhere, and he could not find the sun. At first he'd felt sort of scared, but nothing happened, so he'd kept watching, trying to find it. He was still in bed. It was when he became aware that it wasn't his own bed that he sat up straight, wondering, trying to remember. He was in a long, narrow place, and there were a lot of beds—bunks, like his own, lining each side, end to end. Across from him somebody else was sitting up. All the others were still asleep. "Hey!" Terry called. "Hey yourself! Who're you?" the other boy said. "Terry Blair. What in the heck is this place? What's your name?" He had a funny feeling in his stomach, and he was hot and sweaty. He wanted to hear the other boy's voice again. "Quit your kiddin'—Terry Blair's my brother!" "What're you talking about, anyway?" Terry said, wondering if the other boy was trying to pick a fight. "I'm Terry Blair all right, and I know my brother when I see him! He's Mike Blair, and he don't look anything like you." "Say who are you anyhow? Somebody tell you my name or something? You aren't awful funny." "Neither are you, tryin' to imitate the way Mike talks." There were stirrings in some of the other beds, and somebody mumbled "Pipe down!" Terry tried to be quiet getting out of the bunk. He stood up, felt a little light-headed, and walked over to the other's bed. He sat at its foot. The light feeling—and it seemed to be all over him now—wouldn't go away. "Come on, don't be wise. What is this place?" "Don't be wise yourself! How should I know? Maybe it's a hospital. I must've got sick down cellar or something when Dad turned on the Contraption—" "All that funny blue light," Terry said. "But how—" Then they looked at each other. Hard. "What d'you know about the blue light?" Mike asked. "How d'you know about Dad and the Contraption?" Terry countered. "You spying from someplace?" Terry was on his feet and had both small fists clenched. "You get up out of there!" "Wait up ... maybe it put us to sleep, so this is all a dream, like. Nobody looks the same in dreams." "You're crazy. They don't sound alike, and you're trying to sound like Mike...." "You sound like Terry, too. You could all right in a dream, just like you know the same things. I'll tell you the first two numbers in the address of our house. If you can give me the last two, then we will know. And if you can't smart guy—" "You don't even know the street we live on." "It's Delaware, so how do you like that? And here's the first two numbers—2, 6—" "8, 1—" "What'd I tell you? It sure is a dream. You're Terry all right I guess and I'm me—Mike—but in a dream everybody always looks funny. You got black hair, all straight and cut short." "You too. But guess you're Mike though, as long as it's a dream. Only I feel pretty real." "Sure, me too. Sometimes dreams are like that. Just like for real." "Well I hope we don't get into a nightmare. They make me sweat awful." "I'm all sweaty now—so're you. It's sure hot around here. Where in heck d'you suppose we are, anyway?" "You don't think Dad's thing killed us, and—and we're—" "Naw—they wouldn't have beds or anything. Anyhow, Dad told us all about that once. There's no such place. It's got something to do with state of mind, whatever that is." "Well we've been kinda bad every now and then just the same." "Dad says that hasn't got anything to do with it, don't you remember? Nobody keeps books on you, like a report card, or anything. It's up to you, and you know how you feel about it inside. That's what he said, and I believe Dad. Dad's smart, Terry." "Wish he was here too." "Grown-ups got dreams of their own to worry about. You're not scared, are you?" "Who me? Heck, no. Hey, have a look at the funny clothes hanging up at the side of our beds. Like riding pants, with wide black belts. Look, some belts got three little silver things in each side. And have a look at the boots! Hey, feel this one—light as anything." "Who ever heard of blue riding pants? Besides you don't know how to ride a horse any more than I do." "Bet I could though. Boy—" "Hey, have a look out this window. You can see all over. Gosh, this must be the same kind of place all the other long ones are." The buildings were long and narrow with rounded, Quonset-type roofs. They were built end to end in long, dull-blue rows, and the grass that grew between them was of an exactly matching shade, tall, and lush. At precise intervals, the rows of buildings were interrupted by uncurbed streets of hard-packed, dull black dirt, and at the end of the widest was a field-like expanse trimmed to a perfect circle. The massive, glittering building in its center was immense. Varicolored banners flew from a trio of spires rising antenna-like from a single point atop the highest, oddly flat-topped turret. In the geometric center of the squat structure's otherwise unbroken curving front was a balcony, molded deftly into the severe sweeping architectural lines of which it was an integral, although predominating part. Beyond were rolling hills, and close above them, a foggy, blue-white sky. Already waves of heat were beginning to shimmer from the triple turrets of the gold-hued colossus in the center of the great circle, and the banners above them were being whipped by stiff gusts that seemed to blow from several directions at once. Once or twice, there were flashes of lightning that split the low rolling bottom of the sky, but there were no gathering storm clouds, nor was there rain. "Gosh," Terry said. "It sure is funny grass—" A high, shrill sound suddenly pierced the stillness, and at its signal, youngsters, no older than themselves were stumbling from their narrow cots, yawning, standing. "They're putting on their pants and boots. We better—" Mike was saying. Wide-eyed, they watched the others, carefully imitated them. There were no shirts to cover the young, sweating torsos, and dressing was simple. Just the crisply-cut breeches, the light snug-fitting boots, and the black belts. "You guys been assigned to a quadrant yet?" Mike looked up. He was a taller boy, and looked a little older than the rest. He wore a gold star in his belt, and there were still-red scars across his chest and across one shoulder. "I guess not," Mike said. "What's that? Quadrant, I mean?" "How long have you been here, anyway? Thought you two came a couple of weeks ago. On the Mikol VI." The twins looked at each other, then back to the tall, blonde boy. "What's your name?" Terry asked. "I'm Jon Tayne. Son of Quadrate Larsen Tayne. Your father's a general officer just like mine—that's why we can talk together out here. Otherwise we couldn't—part of the training, you know. Teaches you the undesirability of class- consciousness. I've been here two years—they tossed me back. Insufficient conditioning. But it doesn't matter to me— maybe you'll get as big a kick out of it as I do. I like it here. Not many do, though." "It's sure different," Mike said, "but we haven't been here any two weeks, I don't think. Anyway it hasn't seemed like that long, has it Terry?" "Golly, I—" "Terry? Thought you two were Kurt and Ronal Blair? Washington, western hemisphere north?" "We live in Washington, that's for sure," Terry said. "But I'm—" "Hey I know, Terry. It's all like we said, and here that's us. You can be Kurt. I'm Ronal. But don't get mixed up." "Your father's Senior Quadrate Douglas Blair, isn't he?" the tall boy said. "He's the Douglas Blair part, anyway," Mike said. "Makes I guess over thirteen thousand dollars a year, too." "Say, you sure you're all right? I didn't think you were hit very hard in practice yesterday, but you talk as if you were. Thirteen thousand dollars is just about enough to buy a loaf of bread. Your father makes what mine does and what every other adult does—thirty billion dollars a year. Then after he contributes his dutiful share to the Prelatinate, he has a billion dollars left. Didn't you know that?" "Gosh no. Not exactly, I mean." "What's Prelatinate?" Terry asked. "What's—listen, fellows—any one of us, even a Quadrate's son, can be turned into the Director for saying a thing like that, even as a joke. Better watch it. If there's one thing you learn here, it's praise and respect for your government. They're pretty rough on sacrilege, I should think your father would have told you. My training was started when I was four, but you sound almost as though you haven't had any yet." "I don't even remember when I was four," Mike said. "That doesn't matter. When an adult tells you something—" The tall boy was interrupted then by a second sounding of the shrill signal, and at once, he hurried to the end of the building. The others fell in behind him in a column of threes. Mike and Terry took positions at the end of the column. "Where are we going?" "Breakfast, I hope!" Terry said. The tall boy pressed a stud in the wall, and the front door rolled back. Then he turned his head and bellowed "Section, tench-hut! Forward march!" And he sounded as though he enjoyed it. They marched out, and, to Terry's gratification, it was to a huge, diamond-shaped building in which they found breakfast waiting. It was during the rest period after the half-hour session of calisthenics that the Mikol VII landed. Terry and Mike had been laying prostrate on the thickly-matted, damp blue grass, a little out of breath but strangely enough, little more fatigued than had they just finished a short inning of sandlot baseball. They both had been watching the milky-blue sky, and had chosen a place to rest somewhat apart from the others. There were hundreds and hundreds of the others in formations of their own, Terry had noticed, and all together he could only guess at how many there were. There was one adult in charge of all of them, but they had not seen him closely yet nor heard his voice. Before the first sounds of thunder, Mike had been puzzling a lot of things at once. "Did you ever jump so high before?" "It really wasn't awful high. Higher, though I guess than ever before. Felt kind of funny, huh?" "Sure did. Is it hard for you to walk?" "We never played soldier much—you know how Dad felt about that. The other guys are pretty good at keeping the same step. We'll catch on, though." "I didn't mean that. I didn't feel—well, heavy enough, sort of. I kinda bounce when I try to walk." "Me too, but all dreams are funny. I suppose in a dream you could jump clear over the buildings back there if you wanted to. Boy, wait'll we tell Dad about dreaming we're in a military school. He'll have a fit!" "He sure will. Remember that time we asked him about it? I guess even Mom was surprised at how he flew up that way. He said if he hadn't thought he could teach us himself how to grow up good without putting us in uniforms to do it he'd never have had us. But it's kind of fun though. So far—" That was when they heard the thundering sound almost directly above them, but it was like no thunder they had ever heard before. There was a sudden swirling of the thick sky above them, and they jumped up, rooted, watching. The Mikol VII burst suddenly through the heavy clouds, its stern belching flame and rolling volumes of sound. The heavy air about them vibrated as they watched. It looked like a huge, shining artillery shell, dropping groundward as though held in the grip of some great, invisible hand that slowed it, held it in perfect balance as it descended wrong-end first, directly above the circular place at the end of the long, broad street. "Like a big V-2 going the wrong way!" Mike said. "It's a space-ship, that's what it is!" Terry yelled. "Comin' in to land. Just like in the movie we saw, Mike. Just like." "Look, it's almost down—c'mon up on this little hill here. You can see 'em driving big trucks or something out to meet it. What do you suppose it's got?" "Wonder where it's from? Mars, I bet." "Hi! Pretty sight, isn't it?" It was the tall boy who led their section. He had his thumbs hooked in his belt just behind where the gold stars were. "Sure is," Terry said, eyes glued to the towering craft which had just settled perfectly to the ground. "It's the Mikol VII, and it's the last shipment before the games. Guess there'll be another ten thousand or so guys, and then we can start getting all our equipment issued. They don't give us our stuff until everybody's here. That's to make it so that we all have an absolutely equal amount of training. Watch—they're starting to come out now. Just the way you guys did when you came." Mike and Terry weren't listening. They watched as a great opening suddenly appeared near the ship's blunt stern, to which an inclined ramp was being towed by a tiny surface-vehicle. Then they started coming out, five abreast, in seemingly unending numbers. "They're still wearing civvies," the tall boy said. "They'll get their game issue tonight, though, and their equipment, along with us. Trucks drop it off at each barracks, and then it's given out by each section leader. I guess there must be tons of the stuff." "Where they going now?" As the youngsters poured from the Mikol VII they were grouped into formations by adults who had come from the huge, golden building. "Why, to their barracks, just like everybody else does. They ate before they landed, and their barracks assignments were made at headquarters on Earth before they even took off." "On Earth?" "Sure, didn't you know that? Believe me, it has to be efficient. The Quadrates and their staffs work all year at headquarters getting things lined up for the games. They don't show up here until the day things start. The Director's here, but you only see him once, at the opening ceremonies. As far as the games are concerned, he ranks everybody— except the Prelate General, of course. He signs the orders that split us up into our quadrants." "Hey, Jon...." "You better call me lance-sergeant out here. Somebody could get the wrong idea." "Sure, sarge! Is that what the gold star means?" "Uh huh. You get 'em if you volunteer. Like I did, before I was ten. Sets a good example, you know." "Gee. Is everybody here our age?" "Nobody can be more than a month over ten. That's the law. That is except for volunteers, who are younger, and those who get tossed back for insufficient conditioning and have to stay for the games all over again, like me. I was twelve a couple months ago. I like it though." "But say, what'd you mean about Earth?" "Well, that's where all the plans and everything are made before you even leave. You didn't think all that stuff was done here on Venus, did you?" As Jon had said, the trucks came with the loads of equipment for each barracks that night after supper. They were large, long trucks and Terry wondered why they didn't make the awful racket that trucks always made. There wasn't the stink of burned Diesel fuel. The huge vehicle just rolled up outside soundlessly, and Terry watched for the driver to get out. None did. He tried to look into the front of the vehicle, but it was too dark to see what was on the other side of the long, narrow windows. "Nothing in there," Jon said. "Those are just for maintenance inspection. It'd be a mess if the robot-control ever went out of whack, believe me. Better start help unloading." The unloading took less than fifteen minutes, and then the truck moved on to the next barracks. The rude, wooden crates were heavy, but not large. There were three for each of the hundred bunks. When the last was placed at the foot of Jon's bunk, he stood on the largest one and told them what to do. "I'll distribute a chisel to each of you," he said, "and as you open each box, place its contents on your bunk, so that it can be inspected for fitness before use. "You will open the smallest box first. In it you will find your helmet and polishing kit. The helmet is to be kept shined at all times—if anybody's isn't it's ten demerits. Fifty, as you've all been told, and you get your records marked 'insufficient conditioning'. Your helmets may look heavy—on Earth they'd weigh about five pounds, but here they're just a little less than four. You'll get used to them. "In the second box—the flat one—you'll find all your personal maintenance equipment. You should have a whetstone, extra leather thongs, a set of files, and a small can of oil. They're to be kept in the condition which you find them, and will be worn at all times on the shoulder equipment sling which is in the third box. "In the third box—the long, flat one, are your most important pieces of equipment. I'll show you how they attach to your arm belt. Needless to say, they must be kept thoroughly polished—and sharpened—at all times. Now I'll give out the chisels, and you can open the boxes." They did. Terry and Mike helped each other when they got their chisels. They followed Jon's directions perfectly. First the helmet and the polishing kit. Then the whetstone, extra leather thongs, the set of files, the can of oil, and the shoulder equipment sling. Then the eight-inch dagger, the two-foot spiked mace, and the double-edged broadsword.... CHAPTER IV The price of the paper was $3,000. "Doug—do we dare—" "No. We've only got a second or so, as though we were just interested passersby, looking at the headlines. Got to be careful." PRELATINATE OKs MORE FUNDS FOR SCHOOLS the eight-column streamer read. Doug scanned the two- column lead quickly. "Washington, April, 17—(WP)—Prelate General Wendel announced through his press headquarters here tonight that both houses of the Prelatinate have unanimously voted to grant the request of the Council of Education, 27th Department, for seven trillion dollars in additional funds for school building. The funds will be used for the replacement of 34 outmoded buildings in the Department, the newest of which, it was said, is more than 12 years old. The Council's original request for five trillion dollars was increased by the Prelatinate to seven trillion in recognition of—" Good Lord, he thought, good Lord.... City Cabinet Praises Mayor On Budget Expansion.... Area Industries Vote Shorter Work Week.... Liberals, Conservatives In Accord On Labor Issue.... S-Council Reports Second Arrest In Four Years.... Veteran Civic Leader Admits Wisdom Of Youth Group's Plan.... "Doug—oh Doug, none of this can be real...." "We'd better go. Back to the house. And take it easy, lady...." He managed to grin a little. No one passed them on the walk back, but Dot clung close to him as they walked, as though the mature years since college had never been, as though simple happiness were again all that mattered. The mature years.... Doug wondered. Somewhere, he had always known, there was the place between resigned acceptance of things as they were and perpetual refusal to recognize a condition for what it was. Somewhere, happiness was a simple, honest thing, uncomplicated by the devious machinations of sadistic moral codes that would make a struggle of that right. Somewhere there was meaning to action, and the hypocrite was at last fallen from the mocking pedestal of lip-service righteousness. Somewhere, perhaps long ago, a man had said "I question" even as, at the same time, another had said "I condemn" and another had said "I follow". Thus far, had they travelled the same road, but here, the road was forked. One was a wide path. One an aimless twisting thing that had no destination. The other, narrow, and ever narrower as it progressed. And there would be other forks, other paths, that split and re-split as they tracked the infinite reaches of time itself.... He remembered the first thing he'd learned in his first plunge into space-mechanics research. Space cannot exist without time; time cannot exist without space. Space-time, then, is the fabric of the Universe. So the threads were real. As real as the fact that one day in his life, he had decided to study law rather than to continue as a physicist. There had suddenly been a new split in the thread, and he chose, and had become an attorney, and then a man of politics. What had Carl said? "... you'd've made that try for the moon a success last month instead of another near-miss ..." And how many other might-have-beens could there be? We conceive of Time, as it is integral with the structure of Space, an infinite ... The second thing he had learned. And therefore—therefore each thread of might-have-been, unto itself, was. Somewhere, there was a Congressman named Douglas Blair. Somewhere, there was an astro-physicist, an artist, a sculptor, a writer, a cab-driver, a general, a sailor, a doctor, a thief, perhaps even a corpse named Douglas Blair.... "I know," he said to the woman at his side then. "Dorothy, I think I know." They entered the beautiful house set far back from a wide, beautiful highway on a lush, beautiful lawn. And he tried to explain, until he thought she understood. He was tired, then. She located food in the house, and he found money in a wallet in which the identification card said simply Douglas Blair, Senior Quadrate of Games. But everything was changed—everything. Not just himself, not just Dorothy. A whole world. All on another thread, that had started back somewhere, much further back. Through history, there had been so many ifs.... In a little while she lay beside him, and they slept. They had intended to begin the search for materials to build another contraption, but before he was fully dressed, from somewhere, there was a soft tinkling sound. It was repeated, signal-like, from a far corner of the room. It came from what could only have been an extremely simplified, compact version of the telephone, installed integrally with the ample arm of a lounging chair. "Shall I?" he hesitated. "Be careful...." Doug lifted the slender receiver. "Blair," he said. "Quadrate Blair, sorry, sir, that the liberty was taken to disturb you at your home. However, because of the urgency of this morning's conference at your offices, it was considered wise to remind you of the time it is planned to convene, as per Instruction 43-A. May you be expected at 1100 hours, sir?" He dared not hesitate. "Yes, yes of course." The voice he answered was a woman's. "Will you wish the 'copter as usual, sir?" "Why—yes of course, as usual. Thank you...." He hung up quickly. Dot was looking at him with the question held at her lips. "I'm expected at some sort of high-powered pow-wow in—" he glanced at a delicate clock inset in the chair's opposite arm, "—less than a half-hour. They're sending a 'copter for me. God knows what will happen if I don't show up." And, he observed to himself, only God knew what would happen when he did. CHAPTER...