Time Travel Omnibus, page 548
MY OBJECT ALL SUBLIME . . .
Poul Anderson
He was living so circumspectly and successfully—why would he fear crime and punishment so?
WE MET in line of business. Michaels’ firm wanted to start a subdivision on the far side of Evanston and discovered that I held title to some of the most promising acreage. They made me a good offer, but I was stubborn; they raised it and I stayed stubborn; finally the boss himself looked me up. He wasn’t entirely what I’d expected. Aggressive, of course, but in so polite a way that it didn’t offend, his manners so urbane you rarely noticed his lack of formal education. Which lack he was remedying quite fast, anyhow, via night classes and extension courses as well as omnivorous reading.
We went out for a drink while we talked the matter over. He led me to a bar that had little of Chicago about it: quiet, shabby, no jukebox, no television, a bookshelf and several chess sets, but none of the freaks and phonies who usually infest such places. Besides ourselves, there were only half a dozen customers—a professor-emeritus type among the books, some people arguing politics with a degree of factual relevancy, a young man debating with the bartender whether Bartok was more original than Schoenberg or vice versa. Michaels and I found a corner table and some Danish beer.
I explained that I didn’t care about money one way or another, but objected to bulldozing some rather good-looking countryside in order to erect still another chrome-plated slum. Michaels stuffed his pipe before answering. He was a lean, erect man, long-chinned and Romannosed, his hair grizzled, his eyes dark and luminous. “Didn’t my representative explain?” he said. “We aren’t planning a row of identical split-level sties. We have six basic designs in mind, with variations, to be located in a pattern . . . so.”
HE TOOK out pencil and paper and began to sketch. As he talked, his accent thickened, but the fluency remained. And he made his own case better than anyone had done for him. Like it or not, he said, this was the middle twentieth century and mass production was here to stay. A community need not be less attractive for being ready-made, could in fact gain an artistic unity. He proceeded to show me how.
He didn’t press me too hard, and conversation wandered.
“Delightful spot, this,” I remarked. “How’d you find it?” He shrugged. “I often prowl about, especially at night. Exploring.”
“Isn’t that rather dangerous?”
“Not in comparison,” he said with a touch of grimness.
“Uh . . . I gather you weren’t born over here?”
“No. I didn’t arrive in the United States until 1946. What they called a DP, a displaced person. I became Thad Michaels because I got tired of spelling out Tadeusz Michalowski. Nor did I want any part of old-country sentimentalism; I’m a zealous assimilationist.”
Otherwise he seldom talked much about himself. Later I got some details of his early rise in business, from admiring and envious competitors. Some of them didn’t yet believe it was possible to sell a house with radiant heating for less than twenty thousand dollars and show a profit. Michaels had found ways to make it possible. Not bad for a penniless immigrant.
I checked up and found he’d been admitted on a special visa, in consideration of services rendered the U. S. Army in the last stages of the European war. Those services had taken nerve as well as quick-wittedness.
Meanwhile our acquaintance developed. I sold him the land he wanted, but we continued to see each other, sometimes in the tavern, sometimes at my bachelor apartment, most often in his lakeshore penthouse. He had a stunning blonde wife and a couple of bright, well-mannered boys. Nonetheless he was a lonely man, and I fulfilled his need for friendship.
A year or so after we first met, he told me the story.
I’D BEEN invited over for Thanksgiving dinner. Afterward we sat around and talked. And talked. And talked. When we had ranged from the chances of an upset in the next city election to the chances of other planets following the same general course of history as our own, Amalie excused herself and went to bed. This was long past midnight. Michaels and I kept on talking. I had not seen him so excited before. It was as if that last subject, or some particular word, had opened a door for him. Finally he got up, refilled our whisky glasses with a motion not altogether steady, and walked across the living room (noiseless on that deep green carpet) to the picture window.
The night was clear and sharp. We overlooked the city, streaks and webs and coils of glittering color, ruby, amethyst, emerald, topaz, and the dark sheet of Lake Michigan; almost it seemed we could glimpse endless white plains beyond. But overhead arched the sky, crystal black, where the Great Bear stood on his tail and Orion went striding along the Milky Way. I had not often seen so big and frosty a view.
“After all,” he said, “I know what I’m talking about.”
I stirred, deep in my armchair. The fire on the hearth spat tiny blue flames. Besides this, only one shaded lamp lit the room, so that the star swarms had also been visible to me when I passed by the window earlier. I gibed a little. “Personally?”
He glanced back toward me.
His face was stiff. “What would you say if I answered yes?”
I sipped my drink. King’s Ransom is a noble and comforting brew, most especially when the Earth itself seems to tone with a deepening chill. “I’d suppose you had your reasons and wait to see what they were.” He grinned one-sidedly. “Oh, well, I’m from this planet too,” he said. “And yet—yet the sky is so wide and strange, don’t you think the strangeness would affect men who went there? Wouldn’t it seep into them, so they carried it back in their bones, and Earth was never quite the same afterward?”
“Go on. You know I like fantasies.”
He stared outward, and then back again, and suddenly he tossed off his drink. The violent gesture was unlike him. But so had his hesitation been.
He said in a harsh tone, with all the former accent: “Okay, then, I shall tell you a fantasy. It is a story for winter, though, a cold story, that you are best advised not to take so serious.”
I drew on the excellent cigar he had given me and waited in the silence he needed.
HE PACED a few times back and forth before the window, eyes to the floor, until he filled his glass anew and sat down near me. He didn’t look at me but at a picture on the wall, a somber, unintelligible thing which no one else liked. He seemed to get strength from it, for he began talking, fast and softly.
“Once upon a time, a very, very long time in the future, there was a civilization. I shall not describe it to you, for that would not be possible. Could you go back to the time of the Egyptian pyramid builders and tell them about this city below us? I don’t mean they wouldn’t believe you; of course they wouldn’t, but that hardly matters. I mean they would not understand. Nothing you said could make sense to them. And the way people work and think and believe would be less comprehensible than those lights and towers and machines. Not so? If I spoke to you of people in the future living among great blinding energies, and of genetic changelings, and imaginary wars, and talking stones, and a certain blind hunter, you might feel anything at all, but you would not understand.
“So I ask you only to imagine how many thousands of times this planet has circled the sun, how deeply buried and forgotten we are; and then also to imagine that this other civilization thinks in patterns so foreign that it has ignored every limitation of logic and natural law, to discover means of traveling in time. So, while the ordinary dweller in that age (I can’t exactly call him a citizen, or anything else for which we have a word, because it would be too misleading)—the average educated dweller knows in a vague, uninterested way that millennia ago some semi-savages were the first to split the atom—only one or two men have actually been here, walked among us, studied and mapped us and returned with a file of information for the central brain, if I may call it by such a name. No one else is concerned with us, any more than you are concerned with early Mesopotamian archeology. You see?”
He dropped his gaze to the tumbler in his hand and held it there, as if the whisky were an oracular pool. The silence grew. At last I said, “Very well. For the sake of the story, I’ll accept the premise. I imagine time travelers would be unnoticeable. They’d have techniques of disguise and so on. Wouldn’t want to change their own past.”
“Oh, no danger of that,” he said. “It’s only that they couldn’t learn much if they went around insisting they were from the future. Just imagine.”
I chuckled.
MICHAELS gave me a shadowed look. “Apart from the scientific,” he said, “can you guess what use there might be for time travel?”
“Well,” I suggested, “trade in objects of art or natural resources. Go back to the dinosaur age and dig up iron before man appeared to strip the richest mines.”
He shook his head. “Think again. They’d only want a limited number of Minoan statuettes, Ming vases, or Third World Hegemony dwarfs, chiefly for their museums. If ‘museum’ isn’t too inaccurate a word. I tell you, they are not like us. As for natural resources, they’re beyond the point of needing any; they make their own.”
He paused, as if before a final plunge. Then: “What was this penal colony the French abandoned?”
“Devil’s Island?”
“Yes, that was it. Can you imagine a better revenge on a condemned criminal than to maroon him in the past?”
“Why, I should think they’d be above any concept of revenge, or even of deterrence by horrible examples. Even in this century, we’re aware that that doesn’t work.”
“Are you sure?” he asked quietly. “Side by side with the growth of today’s enlightened penology, haven’t we a corresponding growth of crime itself? You were wondering, some time ago, how I dared walk the night streets alone. Furthermore, punishment is a catharsis of society as a whole. Up in the future they’d tell you that public hangings did reduce the crime rate, which would otherwise have been still higher. Somewhat more important, these spectacles made possible the eighteenth century birth of real humanitarianism.” He raised a sardonic brow. “Or so they claim in the future. It doesn’t matter whether they are right, or merely rationalizing a degraded element in their own civilization. All you need assume is that they do send their very worst criminals back into the past.”
“Rather rough on the past,” I said.
“No, not really. For a number of reasons, including the fact that everything they cause to happen has already happened . . . Damn! English isn’t built for talking about these paradoxes. Mainly, though, you must remember that they don’t waste all this effort on ordinary miscreants. One has to be a very rare criminal to deserve exile in time. And the worst crime in the world depends on the particular year of the world’s history. Murder, brigandage, treason, heresy, narcotics peddling, slaving, patriotism, the whole catalogue, all have rated capital punishment in some epochs, and been lightly regarded in others, and positively commended in still others. Think back and see if I’m not right.”
I REGARDED him for a while, observing how deep the lines were in his face and recalling that at his age he shouldn’t be so gray. “Very well,” I said. “Agreed. But would not a man from the future, possessing all its knowledge—”
He set his glass down with audible force. “What knowledge?” he rapped. “Use your brains! Imagine yourself left naked and alone in Babylon. How much Babylonian language or history do you know? Who’s the present king, how much longer will he reign, who’ll succeed him? What are the laws and customs you must obey? You remember that eventually the Assyrians or the Persians or someone will conquer Babylon and there’ll be hell to pay. But when? How? Is the current war a mere border skirmish or an all-out struggle? If the latter, is Babylon going to win? If not, what peace terms will be imposed? Why, there wouldn’t be twenty men today who could answer those questions without looking up the answers in a book.
And you’re not one of them; nor have you been given a book.”
“I think,” I said slowly, “I’d head for the nearest temple, once I’d picked up enough of the language. I’d tell the priest I could make . . . oh . . . fireworks—” He laughed, with small merriment. “How? You’re in Babylon, remember. Where do you find sulfur and saltpeter? If you can get across to the priest what you want, and somehow persuade him to obtain the stuff for you, how do you compound a powder that’ll actually go off instead of just fizzing? For your information, that’s quite an art. Hell, you couldn’t even get a berth as a deckhand. You’d be lucky if you ended up scrubbing floors. A slave in the fields is a likelier career. Isn’t it?”
The fire sank low.
“All right,” I conceded. “True.”
“They pick the era with care, you know.” He looked back toward the window. Seen from our chairs, reflection on the glass blotted out the stars, so that we were only aware of the night itself.
“When a man is sentenced to banishment,” he said, “all the experts confer, pointing out what the periods of their specialties would be like for this particular individual. You can see how a squeamish, intellectual type, dropped into Homeric Greece, would find it a living nightmare, whereas a rowdy type might get along fairly well—might even end up as a respected warrior. If the rowdy was not the blackest of criminals, they might actually leave him near the hall of Agamemnon, condemning him to no more than danger, discomfort, and homesickness.
“Oh, God,” he whispered. “The homesickness!”
SO MUCH darkness rose in him as he spoke that I sought to steady him with a dry remark: “They must immunize the convict to every ancient disease. Otherwise this’d only be an elaborate death sentence.”
His eyes focused on me again. “Yes,” he said. “And of course the longevity serum is still active in his veins. That’s all, however. He’s dropped in an unfrequented spot after dark, the machine vanishes, he’s cut off for the rest of his life. All he knows is that they’ve chosen an era for him with . . . such characteristics . . . that they expect the punishment will fit his crime.”
Stillness fell once more upon us, until the clock on the mantel became the loudest thing in the world, as if all other sound had frozen to death outside. I glanced at its dial. The night was old; soon the east would be turning pale.
When I looked back, he was still watching me, disconcertingly intent. “What was your crime?” I asked.
He didn’t seem taken aback, only said wearily, “What does it matter? I told you the crimes of one age are the heroisms of another. If my attempt had succeeded, the centuries to come would have adored my name. But I failed.”
“A lot of people must have got hurt,” I said. “A whole world must have hated you.”
“Well, yes,” he said. And after a minute: “This is a fantasy I’m telling you, of course. To pass the time.”
“I’m playing along with you,” I smiled.
His tension eased a trifle. He leaned back, his legs stretched across that glorious carpet. “So. Given as much of the fantasy as I’ve related, how did you deduce the extent of my alleged guilt?”
“Your past life. When and where were you left?”
He said, in as bleak a voice as I’ve ever heard, “Near Warsaw, in August, 1939.”
“I don’t imagine you care to talk about the war years.”
“No, I don’t.”
HOWEVER, he went on when enough defiance had accumulated: “My enemies blundered. The confusion following the German attack gave me a chance to escape from police custody before I could be stuck in a concentration camp. Gradually I learned what the situation was. Of course, I couldn’t predict anything. I still can’t; only specialists know, or care, what happened in the twentieth century. But by the time I’d become a Polish conscript in the German forces, I realized this was the losing side. So I slipped across to the Americans, told them what I’d observed, became a scout for them. Risky—but if I’d stopped a bullet, what the hell? I didn’t; and I ended up with plenty of sponsors to get me over here; and the rest of the story is conventional.”
My cigar had gone out. I relit it, for Michaels’ cigars were not to be taken casually. He had them especially flown from Amsterdam.
“The alien corn,” I said.
“What?”
“You know. Ruth in exile. She wasn’t badly treated, but she stood weeping for her homeland.”
“No, I don’t know that story.”
“It’s in the Bible.”
“Ah, yes. I really must read the Bible sometime.” His mood was changing by the moment, toward the assurance I had first encountered. He swallowed his whisky with a gesture almost debonair. His expression was alert and confident.
“Yes,” he said, “that aspect was pretty bad. Not so much the physical conditions of life. You’ve doubtless gone camping and noticed how soon you stop missing hot running water, electric lights, all the gadgets that their manufacturers assure us are absolute necessities. I’d be glad of a gravity reducer or a cell stimulater if I had one, but I get along fine without. The homesickness, though, that’s what eats you. Little things you never noticed, some particular food, they way people walk, the games played, the small-talk topics. Even the constellations. They’re different in the future. The sun has traveled that far in its galactic orbit.
“But, voluntary or forced, people have always been emigrating. We’re all descended from those who could stand the shock. I adapted.”
A scowl crossed his brows. “I wouldn’t go back now even if I were given a free pardon,” he said, “the way those traitors are running things.”
I FINISHED my own drink, tasting it with my whole tongue and palate, for it was a marvelous whisky, and listened to him with only half an ear. “You like it here?”
“Yes,” he said. “By now I do. I’m over the emotional hump. Being so busy the first few years just staying alive, and then so busy establishing myself after I came to this country, that helped. I never had much time for self-pity. Now my business interests! me more and more, a fascinating game, and pleasantly free of extreme penalties for wrong moves, I’ve discovered qualities here that the future has lost . . . I’ll bet you have no idea how exotic this city is. Think. At this moment, within five miles of us, there’s a soldier on guard at an atomic laboratory, a bum freezing in a doorway, an orgy in a millionaire’s apartment, a priest making ready for sunrise rites, a merchant from Araby, a spy from Muscovy, a ship from the Indies . . .”
