Time Travel Omnibus, page 519
The remaining three split and cut away, realizing they might be thinking, might be giving themselves away. That was the horror of being just a dog-soldier, not a special telepath behind the lines. Out here all the options totaled nothing but death.
A doggie-mine slithered across the ground, entwined itself in the legs of one soldier, and blew his legs out from under him. He lay there clutching the shredded stumps, feeling the blood soaking into the mud, and then unconsciousness seeped into his brain. He died shortly thereafter.
Of the two left, one leaped a barbwall and blasted out a thirty-eight thread emplacement of twelve men, at the cost of the top of his head. He was left alive, and curiously, as though the war had stopped, he felt the top of himself, and his fingers pressed lightly against convoluted, slick matter for a second before he dropped to the ground.
His braincase was open, glowed strangely in the night, but no one saw it.
The last soldier dove under a beam that zzzzzzzed through the night and landed on his elbows. He rolled with the tumble, felt the edge of a leech-bomb crater, and dove in headfirst. The beam split up his passage, and he escaped charring by an inch. He lay in the hole, feeling the cold of the battlefield seeping around him, and drew his cloak closer.
The soldier was Qarlo . . .
He finished talking, and sat down on the platform . . .
The audience was silent . . .
Sims shrugged into his coat, fished around in the pocket for the cold pipe. The dottle had fallen out of the bowl, and he felt the dark grains at the bottom of the pocket. The audience was filing out slowly, hardly anyone speaking, but each staring at others around him. As though they were suddenly realizing what had happened to them, as though they were looking for a solution.
Sims passed such a solution. The petitions were there, tacked up alongside the big sign—duplicate of the ones up allover the city. He caught the heavy black type on them as he passed through the auditorium’s vestibule:
SIGN THIS PETITION! PREVENT WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD TONIGHT!
People were flocking around the petitions, but Sims knew it was only a token gesture at this point: the legislation had gone through that morning. No more war . . . under any conditions. And intelligence reported the long playing records, the piped broadcasts, the p.a. trucks, had all done their jobs. Similar legislation was going through allover the world.
It looked as though Qarlo had done it, single-handed.
Sims stopped to refill his pipe, and stared up at the big black-lined poster near the door.
HEAR QARLO, THE SOLDIER FROM THE FUTURE!
SEE THE MAN FROM TOMORROW,
AND HEAR HIS STORIES
OF THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE FUTURE!
FREE! NO OBLIGATIONS! HURRY!
The advertising had been effective, and it was a fine campaign.
Qarlo had been more valuable just telling about his Wars, about how men died in that day in the future, than he could ever have been as a strategist.
It took a real soldier, who hated war, to talk of it, to show people that it was ugly, and unglamorous. And there was a certain sense of foul defeat, of hopelessness, in knowing the future was the way Qarlo described it. It made you want to stop the flow of Time, say, “No. The future will not be like this! We will abolish war!”
Certainly enough steps in the right direction had been taken. The legislation was there, and those who had held back, who had tried to keep animosity alive, were being disposed of every day.
Qarlo had done his work well.
There was just one thing bothering special advisor Lyle Sims. The soldier had come back in time, so he was here. That much they knew for certain.
But a nagging worry ate at Sims’s mind, made him say prayers he had thought himself incapable of inventing. Made him fight to get Qarlo heard by everyone . . .
Could the future be changed?
Or was it inevitable?
Would the world Qarlo left inevitably appear?
Would all their work be for nothing?
It couldn’t be! It dare not be!
He walked back inside, got in line to sign the petitions again, though it was his fiftieth time.
ARISTOTLE AND THE GUN
L. Sprague de Camp
It would, obviously, be of immense advantage to modern people, if Science had just gotten started a thousand or so years earlier. Obviously. . . .
FROM:
Sherman Weaver, Librarian
The Palace
Paumanok, Sewanhaki
Sachimate of Lenape
Flower Moon 3, 3097
To: Messire Markos Koukidas
Consulate of the Balkan Commonwealth
Kataapa, Muskhogian Federation
My dear Consul:
You have no doubt heard of our glorious victory at Ptaksit, when our noble Sachim destroyed the armored chivalry of the Mengwe by the brilliant use of pikemen and archery. (I suggested it to him years ago, but never mind.) Sagoyewatha and most of his Senecas fell, and the Oneidas broke before our countercharge. The envoys from the Grand Council of the Long House arrive tomorrow for a peace-pauwau. The roads to the south are open again, so I send you my long-promised account of the events that brought me from my own world into this one.
If you could have stayed longer on your last visit, I think I could have made the matter clear, despite the language-difficulty and my hardness of hearing. But perhaps if I give you a simple narrative, in the order in which things happened to me, truth will transpire.
Know, then, that I was born into a world that looks like this one on the map, but is very different as regards human affairs. I tried to tell you of some of the triumphs of our natural philosophers, of our machines and discoveries. No doubt you thought me a first-class liar, though you were too polite to say so.
None the less, my tale is true, though for reasons that will appear I cannot prove it. I was one of those natural philosophers. I commanded a group of younger philosophers, engaged in a task called a project, at a center of learning named Brookhaven, on the south shore of Sewanhaki twenty parasangs east of Paumanok. Paumanok itself was known as Brooklyn, and formed part of an even larger city called New York.
My project had to do with the study of space-time. (Never mind what that means but read on.) At this center we had learned to get vast amounts of power from sea water by what we called a fusion process. By this process we could concentrate so much power in a small space that we could warp the entity called space-time and cause things to travel in time as our other machines traveled in space.
When our calculations showed that we could theoretically hurl an object back in time, we began to build a machine for testing this hypothesis. First we built a small pilot model. In this we sent small objects back in time for short periods. We began with inanimate objects, and then found that a rabbit or rat could also be projected without harm. The time-translation would not be permanent; rather it acted like one of these rubber balls the Hesperians play games with. The object would stay in the desired time for a period determined by the power used to project it and its own mass, and would then return spontaneously to the time and place from which it started.
We had reported our progress regularly, but my chief had other matters on his mind and did not read our reports for many months. When he got a report saying that we were completing a machine to hurl human beings back in time, however, he awoke to what was going on, read our previous reports, and called me in.
“Sherm,” he said, “I’ve been discussing this project with Washington, and I’m afraid they take a dim view of it.”
“Why?” said I, astonished.
“Two reasons. For one thing, they think you’ve gone off the reservation. They’re much more interested in the Antarctic Reclamation Project and want to concentrate all our appropriations and brain power on it.
“For another, they’re frankly scared of this time machine of yours. Suppose you went back, say, to the time of Alexander the Great and shot Alexander before he got started? That would change all later history, and we’d go out like candles.”
“Ridiculous,” I said.
“Well, what would happen?”
“Our equations are not conclusive, but there are several possibilities. As you will see if you read Report No. 9, it depends on whether space-time has a positive or negative curvature. If positive, any disturbance in the past tends to be ironed out in subsequent history, so that things become more and more nearly identical with what they would have been anyway. If negative, then events will diverge more and more from their original pattern with time.
“Now, as I showed in this report, the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of a positive curvature. However, we intend to take every precaution and make our first tests for short periods, with a minimum—”
“That’s enough,” said my superior, holding up a hand. “It’s very interesting, but the decision has already been made.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Project A-257 is to be closed down and a final report written at once. The machines are to be dismantled, and the group will be put to work on another project.”
“What?” I shouted. “But you can’t stop us just when we’re on the verge—”
“I’m sorry, Sherm, but I can. That’s what the AEC decided at yesterday’s meeting. It hasn’t been officially announced, but they gave me positive orders to kill the project as soon as I got back here.”
“Of all the lousy, arbitrary, benighted—”
“I know how you feel, but I have no choice.”
I lost my temper and defied him, threatening to go ahead with the project anyway. It was ridiculous, because he could easily dismiss me for insubordination. However, I knew he valued my ability and counted on his wanting to keep me for that reason. But he was clever enough to have his cake and eat it.
“If that’s how you feel,” he said, “the section is abolished here and now. Your group will be broken up and assigned to other projects. You’ll be kept on at your present rating with the title of consultant. Then when you’re willing to talk sense, perhaps we can find you a suitable job.”
I stamped out of his office and went home to brood. I ought now to tell you something of myself. I am old enough to be objective, I hope, and as I have but a few years left there is no point in pretense.
I have always been a solitary, misanthropic man. I had little interest in or liking of my fellow man, who naturally paid me back to the same coin. I was awkward and ill at ease in company. I had a genius for saying the wrong thing and making a fool of myself. I never understood people. Even when I watched and planned my own actions with the greatest care, I never could tell how others would react to them. To me men were and are an unpredictable, irrational, and dangerous species of hairless ape. While I could avoid some of my worst gaffes by keeping my own counsel and watching my every word, they did not like that either. They considered me a cold, stiff, unfriendly sort of person when I was only trying to be polite and avoid offending them.
I never married, and at the time of which I speak I was verging on middle age without a single close friend and no more acquaintances than my professional work required. I could justify my attitude by telling about the vices and follies of mankind, but I will not because you are, I think, familiar enough with these things already.
My only interest outside my work was a hobby of the history of science. Unlike most of my fellow-philosophers, I was historically-minded, with a good smattering of a Classical education. I belonged to the History of Science Society and wrote papers on the history of science for the periodical Isis.
I went back to my little rented house, feeling like Galileo. He was a scientist persecuted for his astronomical theories by the religious authorities of my world several centuries before my time, as Georg Schwartzhorn was a few years ago in this world’s Europe.
I felt I had been born too soon. If only the world were scientifically more advanced, my genius would be appreciated and my personal difficulties solved.
Well, I thought, why is the world not scientifically more advanced? I reviewed the early growth of science. Why had not your fellow-countrymen, when they made a start towards a scientific age two thousand to twenty-five hundred years ago, kept at it until they made science the self-supporting, self-accelerating thing it at last became—in my world, that is.
I knew the answer that historians of science had worked out. One was the effect of slavery, which made work disgraceful to a free man and therefore made experiment and invention unattractive because they looked like work. Another was the primitive state of the mechanical arts: things like making clear glass and accurate measuring devices. Another was the Hellenes’ fondness for spinning cosmic theories without enough facts to go on, the result of which was that most of their theories were wildly wrong.
Well, thought I, could a man go back to this period and, by applying a stimulus at the right time and place, give the necessary push to set the whole trend rolling off in the right direction?
People had written fantastic stories about a man’s going back in time and overawing the natives by a display of the discoveries of his own later era. More often than not, such a time-traveling hero came to a bad end. The people of the earlier time killed him as a witch, or he met with an accident, or something happened to keep him from changing history. But, knowing these dangers, I could forestall them by careful planning.
It would do little or no good to take back some major invention, like a printing press or an automobile, and turn it over to the ancients in the hope of grafting it on their culture. I could not teach them to work it in a reasonable time, and if it broke down or ran out of supplies there would be no way to get it running again.
What I had to do was to find a key mind and implant in it an appreciation of sound scientific method. He would have to be somebody who would have been important in any event, or I could not count on his influence spreading far and wide.
After study of Sarton and other historians of science, I picked Aristotle. You have heard of him, have you not? He existed in your world just as he did in mine. In fact, up to Aristotle’s time our worlds were one and the same.
Aristotle was one of the greatest minds of all time. In my world, he was the first encyclopedist; the first man who tried to know everything, write down everything, and explain everything. He did much good original scientific work, too, mostly in biology.
However, Aristotle tried to cover so much ground, and accepted so many fables as facts, that he did much harm to science as well as good. For, when a man of such colossal intellect goes wrong, he carries with him whole generations of weaker minds who cite him as an infallible authority. Like his colleagues, Aristotle never appreciated the need for constant verification. Thus, though he was married twice, he said that men have more teeth than women. He never thought to ask either of his wives to open her mouth for a count. He never grasped the need for invention and experiment.
Now, if I could catch Aristotle at the right period of his career, perhaps I could give him a push in the right direction.
When would that be? Normally, one would take him as a young man. But Aristotle’s entire youth, from seventeen to thirty-seven, was spent in Athens listening to Plato’s lectures. I did not wish to compete with Plato, an overpowering personality who could argue rings around anybody. His viewpoint was mystical and antiscientific, the very thing I wanted to steer Aristotle away from. Many of Aristotle’s intellectual vicescan be traced back to Plato’s influence.
I did not think it wise to present myself in Athens either during Aristotle’s early period, when he was a student under Plato, or later, when he headed his own school. I could not pass myself off as a Hellene, and the Hellenes of that time had a contempt for all non-Hellenes, whom they called “barbarians.” Aristotle was one of the worst offenders in this respect. Of course this is a universal human failing, but it was particularly virulent among Athenian intellectuals. In his later Athenian period, too, Aristotle’s ideas would probably be too set with age to change.
I concluded that my best chance would be to catch Aristotle while he was tutoring young Alexander the Great at the court of Philip the Second of Macedon. He would have regarded Macedon as a backward country, even though the court spoke Attic Greek. Perhaps he would be bored with bluff Macedonian stag-hunting squires and lonesome for intellectual company. As he would regard the Macedonians as the next thing to barbaroi, another barbarian would not appear at such a disadvantage there as at Athens.
Of course, whatever I accomplished with Aristotle, the results would depend on the curvature of space-time. I had not been wholly frank with my superior. While the equations tended to favor the hypothesis of a positive curvature, the probability was not overwhelming. Perhaps my efforts would have little effect on history, or perhaps the effect would grow and widen like ripples in a pool. In the latter case the existing world would, as my superior said, be snuffed out.
Well, at that moment I hated the existing world and would not give a snap of my fingers for its destruction. I was going to create a much better one and come back from ancient times to enjoy it.
Our previous experiments showed that I could project myself back to ancient Macedon with an accuracy of about two months temporally and a half-parasang spatially. The machine included controls for positioning the time-traveler anywhere on the globe, and safety devices for locating him above the surface of the earth, not in a place already occupied by a solid object. The equations showed that I should stay in Macedon about nine weeks before being snapped back to the present.
Once I had made up my mind, I worked as fast as I could. I telephoned my superior—you remember what a telephone is?—and made my peace. I said:
“I know I was a hotheaded fool, Fred, but this thing was my baby; my one chance to be a great and famous scientist. I might have got a Nobel prize out of it.”
“Sure, I know, Sherm,” he said. “When are you coming back to the lab?”
