Time Travel Omnibus, page 423
“I don’t know about any guardians,” said Wia Rustum, “but I had a special World Government Council scholarship right through school, and the famous Harduk Bal, who excavated this very site in 4016, gave me my final instructions only a week ago.”
“In 4016!” McElroy exclaimed. “And what year is it now, in your time?”
“Why, 4042, of course.”
“And in yours?” he asked, turning to Gord.
“This is Year 117 GM—of the Great Migration—or, according to your calendar, I suppose it would be 5917.”
V
McELROY gaped at them. He seemed overwhelmed. In a dazed tone he said to Wia: “And you say time-travel was discovered only in your own lifetime?”
“The first short trips were made in 4020.”
“I see. So any earlier—tell me, has either of you any message for me, from a time earlier than your own? Probably you, young lady—good heavens, I haven’t asked either of you your name!”
“I am Wia Rustum. You may call me Wia. James. Yes, I was told to say—but maybe Gord has a message too.”
“Gord 20977F8EN,” the young man introduced himself belatedly. “Call me just Gord. Yes, I was given a message also, but I was told it would be unnecessary if any traveler from an earlier era should be at the meeting. Was yours about somebody named Mark Iverson?” he asked Wia.
“Yes, it must be the same.”
“You give it, then.”
With the air of one repeating a lesson learned by rote, the girl recited:
“In 2150, a committee of the IAAS, in charge of tearing down the old buildings and erecting new ones, discovered the tape-recording and followed instructions. Mark Iverson was born the following February. Means of travel into the past had not yet been discovered, and so it was merely added to the record that this child was born but that he died at the age of five when a Moon-plane on which he was a passenger was destroyed in a collision with a meteor.”
James McElroy closed his eyes for a moment. His face was white.
“Another!” he muttered. “Little Jim—and Adela—and now this child.”
He took a deep breath.
“Tell me,” he asked Wia, “did your message say if the child’s mother was with him—and who she was?”
“How would anyone know that?” Gord interrupted. “Oh, yes, of course—in that age—”
“No,” said Wia, “that is all I was taught to say, and I haven’t the slightest idea what it means. Did you have more than that in your message, Gord?”
“It was just the same. But I do remember once asking Kel what tape-recording they were referring to, and he said it was one he found in the old World Government Center in London, here on Earth, and that it was now safe in the archives of the Interplanetary Congress on Skyro.”
“At this moment, it is in the vaults under the IAAS buildings, right here,” said McElroy. The color was coming back to his face. “I wonder how much it has wandered, up to your time, Gord—and where it will wander afterwards!
“So now three vials are accounted for, and the other two must have been lost or useless, or else I would either have more visitors today than you two, or your message would be longer.
“I know I’m trying your patience. None of this can make sense to you. Please bear with me just a little longer, and then. I’ll explain as well as I can. I don’t suppose,” he added wistfully, “that either of you could tell me anything in detail about life as you know it in your respective times? No, don’t bother to answer. I told my colleagues only last month why that would logically be quite impossible.
“But perhaps you can satisfy me on one point. I noticed, Wia, when you gave your message, that you spoke of ‘travel into the past.’ Does that mean that time-travel is all one-directional? Can’t you go forward into the future?”
Wia looked at Gord. “We can’t,” she said. “Can you?”
“No, and I doubt if men ever will. I could tell you why—it’s elementary mathematics. But unless you’re familiar with the Moitier Concept discovered in your Year 3845—”
“And the Gregi Correlary of 3907,” Wia added.
McElroy smiled.
“I’m not a mathematician,” he said, “and even if I were—” He shrugged.
“Well, that question was for the benefit of my colleagues, particularly of my friend Wycliffe. I imagine I’d get the same kind of answer if I queried you about Moro’s specialty, or Schultz’s, or Wong’s, or Kemet Ali’s, or any of the others. We can’t change history by altering the past, though I do wonder why there was so long a gap between Mark Iverson’s birth and yours, Wia.”
“Well, of course the Second Dark Age came in between—”
“Better not, Wia,” Gord warned her. “I know what the Interplanetary Congress would do to me if I tried to scramble up history by leaking it into the past.”
Wia looked frightened.
“Don’t worry, Wia,” McElroy said reassuringly. “You haven’t said anything that could do any harm. We in 1970 have been prepared for a quarter of a century for the onset of some such interregnum. In fact, we’ve expected it much sooner than, apparently, it will arrive. And plenty of us also have the faith that civilization will revive and go on to greater heights. You and Gord are both evidence of that—in more ways than you know.
“Now if I may ask you both just a few more questions, I’ll solve the whole riddle for you. You, Gord. Can you tell me about your mother?”
“MY MOTHER?” Gord knit his brows. “How would I know about that? I’m just like everybody else. I was produced in my local Genitorium and reared in my local Pedenid. How would I know which particular ovum gestated me, any more than I would know which particular sperm-cell activated it? All I know is that I must have a bit of native Martian heredity, since I have superexpansible lungs, and the Martian stigmata on my spine.”
“I see,” said James McElroy slowly, gazing at the young man with a sort of baffled wonder. “So in your time all children are laboratory products, are they? No haphazard breeding—the geneticist’s dream come true! Don’t you have any sex life at all?”
Gord reddened angrily.
“Naturally I have,” he said in an offended tone. “I’m twenty-five years old today. I’m a perfectly normal human being. I’ve belonged to a sex group since I was eighteen, like any other man. But you can’t mix up sex and reproduction. It isn’t civilized!”
“We do,” McElroy answered dryly. “And you, Wia. Did you come out of a test-tube too?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” said Wia, looking surprised. “How did you know? I mean, my mother was one of those selected for controlled eugenic maternity by the Biogenetics Laboratory. But naturally I know who she is—in fact she reared me until I formed my first love-union, and I never was sent to a nursery. I live near her now, and I see her often; I said goodbye to her just before I left on this time-journey.
“But I do agree with Gord on one thing. I don’t want to be rude, but it does seem terribly dangerous and rather disgusting to let just any woman have a child by any man. We don’t do that even in direct parentage. How do you know they have the right kind of heredity?”
“We don’t,” said McElroy mildly. “I’m a geneticist myself, Wia, of an antique variety. I’m not denying that our science and our culture are far behind yours. As far, perhaps”—a bit of malice spiced his tone—“as yours may be behind Gord’s here. But let’s not wrangle over our comparative social mores. Tell me about your mother. What is her descent? For instance, of what nationality is she?”
It was Wia’s turn to flush in anger. Her dark eyes flashed.
“If you’re implying.” she retorted, “that I’m a monogene, it’s an outrageous lie. If you’re any kind of geneticist, James McElroy, you know perfectly well that one can’t parcel out the chromosomes like so many building-blocks. I may display more of the characteristics of one of the ancient races—the one they called white, I suppose, to which you seem to belong—than of the others; but I can assure you that, whoever my father may have been—and that, of course, I can’t know—my mother has her Class A certificate attesting that her ancestry includes every one of the civilized types of mankind!”
“Didn’t they teach you about this age we’re in now, Wia?” Gord intervened sarcastically. “In this era they favored monogenes. You were penalized if you had even a trace of interracial heredity. I can’t imagine what they would have done about my trace of Martian—except that they hadn’t even reached Mars yet!”
“No, the Moon’s as far as we’ve attained to,” said McElroy placatingly. “And please believe me, Wia, I didn’t mean my question in a derogatory way. I’m—I’d like to know a lot about your mother—I’d like to know about Gord’s, if he could tell me, because—
“Oh, Lord, let me try to tell this in the simplest way I can.
“In August, 1952, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—there were still separate national associations then, instead of one International, as now—a Dr. Parkes reported on a new method of freezing germ-cells, by the use of glycerol. The cells were quick-frozen to minus 79° Centigrade, and though crystals formed, the glycerol crystals did not crush the cells, as those of other freezing media had done. In consequence, less than ten per cent of the cells died, and the rest retained vitality and fertility for an indefinite time, so long as they were kept at the same temperature. Do you follow me?”
“Of course,” answered Wia. “We employ a more refined technique of the same sort. It is used to preserve the sperm of superior and distinguished men, to be used as sires for eugenic maternity. In fact,” she added with an embarrassed laugh, “I have always dreamed that I myself—”
McElroy looked embarrassed too.
“And you, Gord?” he asked.
“We have a much better method, but naturally I understand what you mean.”
“Well, we too began to employ this method experimentally soon after it was announced, and it worked. But we had used it only for short-time experiments, and mostly with animals.”
VI
GORD glanced inquiringly at Wia. “Don’t you remember?” she whispered. “In this time, they still had all kinds of living animals besides man—natural ones, not synthetics.”
“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten,” he said. McElroy went on.
“Where I differed from the others was in the fact that I believed firmly in the ultimate discovery of time-travel. Without that, naturally there was not much point in conducting experiments which would extend beyond the probable span of the lives of the experimenters. I don’t know exactly what your life-expectancy is—”
“About a hundred years,” said Wia.
“Somewhere around 150,” said Gord.
“Ours today is in the late seventies.
“But, I reasoned, if the cells could be kept frozen for hundreds or even thousands of years, and if meanwhile time-travel into the past could be discovered, then it would be possible to prove the practical immortality of the human race. There were other important scientific correlaries too, but this alone justified trying it.”
“But how could you keep up a temperature of minus 79° Centigrade—we don’t use that scale but I gather that it is very cold—long after the people who first prepared the cells were dead and gone?” Gord asked.
“In the Antarctic Continent. The IAAS had a concession there, where vials of sperm could be deeply buried and the site marked. It will be countless centuries before that ice will begin to melt. I made a tape-recording, with full instructions, and placed it in our vaults here. If it were found before time-travel, then the results of the experiment were simply to be added to the recording. My idea was that eventually, as the ages passed, these buildings would fall into ruins, and some day the vaults would be found and opened.
“I find from your message, Wia, that actually the first time the recording was reproduced was less than two hundred years from now—I hadn’t thought of our headquarters’ becoming obsolete and being rebuilt. But obviously, after that, somebody did find the recording in the ruins of those new buildings and you, Gord, said that in your day it was found in London and is now on some planet outside the Solar System.
“Are you beginning to understand?” Wia found her voice first.
“You mean we—”
“You two—and Mark Iverson.”
There was a stunned pause. Then Gord said tautly:
“Will you be so good, James McElroy, as to describe to us the men whose sperm-cells were in those vials?”
“There was only one man,” answered McElroy almost inaudibly.
“But then,” Wia exclaimed, “that must mean—Gord, you and I must be half-brother and sister! And that little boy back in the twenty-second century—he was our half-brother too!”
“Yes—you see, I—” McElroy began. Gord interrupted him, his face white with rage.
“How could you?” he cried hoarsely. “How could you upset our entire genetic pattern, on which our civilization and even our continuing existence are based? We don’t indulge in slapdash parenthood the way you people did back in your barbaric age. Our births are all carefully calculated to produce just the right number of each type of body-mind needed to maintain a balanced economy. With all the completely unknowable characteristics of a haphazard man of your era, how can the resulting child be sure of its abilities and potentialities?” His voice shook, and his face was a mask of fury and despair.
“YOU DID THAT to me! And my own people let it happen to me! My own guardians knew—they’ve always known—that I was a freak. For the sake of some frivolous bit of scientific knowledge, they let me be created a different being from anybody else in the world. They trained me for this idiotic journey back in time, so that I might hear from your own lips just what you had done to me!
“And now I am to go back home, my purpose fulfilled. And what is my life to be from now on? How is anyone ever to know what I am best fitted for, what my place is in society?
“I don’t know what your future will be like, Wia Rustum.” He turned savagely on the girl who stared at him wide-eyed, her dark face bloodless. “We aren’t concerned with brothers or sisters. For all I know, any girl in my sex group might be my sister, though it’s not likely—and what would it matter? None of us is ever born except from a regulated union of ova and sperm, and only the best of us are ever selected to contribute our own cells for reproduction.
“None of us but me!” he concluded bitterly. He jumped to his feet and glared at McElroy.
“But I—” McElroy began weakly. Gord snarled at him.
“I congratulate you on the success of your experiment! I can’t wait any longer to find out what plans my Chief Guardian has for me next!”
He put his hand in his pocket and pressed a trigger.
The next instant McElroy and Wia Rustum were alone in the room.
McElroy buried his face in his hands. A soft hand touched his shoulder. He looked up at Wia’s compassionate face.
“Don’t feel bad,” she murmured. “I know you didn’t mean any harm. They’ll calm him down. Surely, if their culture is so advanced, they wouldn’t have let him be produced only as a—”
“An experimental animal?” His tone was as bitter as Gord’s had been.
“I suppose so. They’ll fit him into the normal life of their time, I’m certain of it.”
McElroy shook his head.
“And what about you, Wia?”
“Don’t worry about me. They’ve always told me that after what they spoke of as my ‘twenty-fifth birthday project’ I could go on quietly with my own life and my own work. I have a very good job with the Council of World Government,” she said proudly.
“And aren’t you too horrified at the thought that your father is one of us twentieth century barbarians?”
“It is an upsetting thought,” she replied frankly. “But you’ve told us you are a geneticist, and primitive as genetics must be in your time, I’m confident you wouldn’t have used cells in your experiment that came from a defective man.”
Her voice grew coaxing.
“I don’t suppose you could tell me, could you? Really, we’re not nearly so fussy as Gord’s people seem to be. Naturally, we don’t let just anybody who wants to, have children. But lots of women have them by men they actually know—if they can get certificates on both sides, they often have them by their own love-partners.” Her face fell. “In fact, Tir and I were planning—well, now, of course, we’ll have to give that up; I see I could never be certified.”
“So I’ve ruined your life too by my rash experimentation, have I?”
“Nonsense,” said Wia stoutly. “I don’t live in a one-track world like my dear half-brother! I’ve got Tir, and my work, and plenty of other interests.
“But just the same, I wish you would tell me. I’d promise never to let my mother find out. Women who are chosen for eugenic maternity would always rather not know.”
“Tell you what, Wia?”
“Who my father was, of course!” McElroy’s face was a study. Before he could find words, Wia forestalled him.
“Oh, Great Radiation! How stupid of me! Of course! I see it all now. If only that silly Gord had waited till you could make him understand!”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you myself, my dear.”
“Certainly you do. You don’t need to pretend. I’m not always as dense as I must have seemed just now. Naturally, for a momentous project like that, there was only one thing you could have done.”
JAMES McELROY’S heart, which had ached for seven months, suddenly throbbed with joy. He smiled at his daughter, who, in this strange meeting, was of exactly his own age.
“Then you don’t mind, Wia?”
“Mind? I should have known I could trust you. The idea of Gord’s saying that you had made a freak of him! Did he think you picked out just anybody at random to become our father? It must have taken you months or years to decide on the man with the very finest mind and the best body alive in your time. Whom else could you have chosen, with the very lives of future beings at stake?
