The Universe Maker Page 14

  At last he reached his apartment. As he entered the door a voice from the phone alcove said to him mechanically, "You are to report at once to Office One, Building C. Grannis requests that you report to Office One, Building C. You are to report to Office .. ." Swiftly, after the first shock, Cargill emerged from his daze. "I'll practice being a Shadow," he thought grimly.

  "I'll superimpose the spit gun tube and then—"

  It seemed to him that he couldn't escape the necessity of killing Grannis, in spite of somebody coming from the future to hold an election. Everything that had happened so far he had forced by his own actions. Even knowing of the paradox did not relieve him of responsibility until he personally had done what was required. As of now only he knew of the imminent catastrophe, personal as well as national. Across the land Tweener and Planiacs must be now tensing for their desperate roles.

  Cargill walked forward, shut off the automatic repeating device on the phone and left his apartment. Outside he asked a passerby which was Building C. A few minutes later he was at his destination.

  The man in Office One of Building C was a large pleasant-looking individual with a touch of gray in his hair. He seemed about sixty years of age. He did not ask Cargill to sit down but instead stood up. "I'm getting old," he said to Cargill. "In spite of all my shuttling around, in spite of having lived altogether about a thousand years, old age has finally caught up with me. I used to think that would never happen."

  He chuckled. "I've been Grannis now for eighty-seven years, so I'm rather glad that someone has been selected to replace me. It's unusual for a newcomer to be chosen but the choice was made by the people of the future and they put your name up and urged an immediate election. And so"—he waved at the large room—"here it is."

  He became business-like. "It won't take you long to learn your duties. Protector of the State—that's easy. To do that properly you've got to live periodically among the Tweeners. They're the ones that have to be watched. What I did was to marry a Tweener girl—that's in addition to my Shadow wife, but she died four years ago for the last time."

  He didn't explain that but went on, "I suggest you take a look at what the Tweeners are up to sometime soon." He finished. "Then of course you sign documents authorizing therapies. You have no veto power on that but"— he smiled—"you'll get onto it."

  He held out his hand. "And now, before I go, any questions?"

  18

  "Grannis!" said Cargill at that point. His mind had been a receptive blank. Now he felt the intense flow of his own strength.

  The old man was amused. "As a newcomer," he said, "you won't know about our history. Our first leader, and discoverer of the Shadow principle, was named Grannis, and we carried on using his name as a synonym ,for leader."

  "Grannis!" Cargill repeated. He had a blinding vision of the truth, a mental picture of one man using the tune energy, first to save his own life, then to prevent unnecessary war, finally to establish himself in the twenty-fourth century as the Grannis of the Shadows. He said tautly, "Will you tell me a little bit more about my duties?"

  As he listened his mind soared so swiftly that only a part of the meaning came through. His body was warm with excitement. His thoughts were vague and roseate and at first he had no desire to establish any logical connection with reality. Now he was Grannis: it would be for him now to plan the Planiac attack on the Tweeners and the Tweener attack on the Shadows. He would do that not because of any traitorous scheme but because it was the way things had already happened.

  Unsteadily, he halted the wilder gyrations of his thoughts. Tensely, he recalled the way he had been taken back to the therapy room here in Shadow City and from there on to the Tweener capital. Why had that been necessary? How did that fit?

  Why live over again a period of this age? All he had to do was come to the terminal center, enter Shadow City and be on hand for the only kind of election where the electorate could decide on an officeholder's capacity after his term.

  There was, of course, the fact that Grannis had merely tried to control, under great difficulties, plots that were already in the making. As Grannis he would be forced to act according to Morton Cargill's knowledge of what had happened. As Cargill he had acted according to Grannis' interference. He paused, astounded. "Just a moment," he thought. "That doesn't make sense. We can't both act according to what the other did. That would make it a closed circle—"

  The older man interrupted him as he reached this thought in his logical progression. "Any more questions?" he asked.

  Cargill had to come back a long way, and he had at least one question. "How did the people of the future let you know that I should be selected?"

  The other smiled cheerfully. "Their representative, Lan Bruch, brought us a complete record of the voting, and introduced your name. After the vote today, a computer compared his transcript with the data on our voting machines, and when they matched name for name, we did not doubt that we had an accurate report from the future. Naturally, his introduction of your name produced a situation unique in our history. We are all rather interested to see what the results will be."

  Cargill was thinking: "Lan Bruch of unformed, incomplete Merlica is grimly righting to make himself real. But where does that leave the Shadows?" Not for the first time, it occurred to him that these Shadow supermen, despite their good will, didn't have more than a partial understanding of the energies they had tamed. Perhaps their concentration on the positive side of things would prove unwise. They were trying to live without boundaries, but perhaps that represented a fine balance between the positive and the negative, between right and wrong, between cause and effect, responsibility and no responsibility.

  Of one thing there seemed no doubt. In this affair they were being taken advantage of. His thought poised there. He had been so intent that he had not noticed that fantasy had become reality. "Lan Bruch?" he asked aloud. "Lan Bruch?"

  The older man said something which Cargill did not hear. He thought that if Lan Bruch had actually come from the future, then that part of his dream was real. It was the first verification, and therefore its importance could hardly be overestimated. In one jump what had happened became an incident, an event in space-time— well, somewhere. He had to remember that the space-tune continuum of Merlica did not yet exist. Merlica would not become finally possible until the Tweeners won in their attack.

  The realization chilled Cargill. For everything was moving in that direction, moving towards the achievement of that purpose. And yet it was still as true as ever that the destruction of Shadow City was intrinsically wrong. But the groundwork had been laid: at the critical moment in the history of the Shadow-Tweener age, Morton Cargill, hypnotized slave of the Tweeners, occupied a position in Shadow City from which he could sally forth unchallenged to perform his act of treachery. All that was needed was the signal.

  His predecessor was speaking: "I see it's half past twelve. I'll leave you to familiarize yourself with the office. You've got assistants in the outer room. Don't hesitate to use them."

  Once more he held out his hand. This time Cargill shook it, saying: "I may need further advice. Visit me some time, will you?"

  Because the older man was turning away, Cargill did not see the effect of his own words on him. "Visit me some time!"—the signal, that phrase that was to cue him to throw the pyramid switch. And he had given it to himself.

  After the other had gone, Cargill slumped into a chair. Presently he felt a grudging admiration: clever idea, having him give himself the cue. It couldn't fail that way. Tricky thing, the human mind. How cunningly he had worked the phrase into an ordinary conversation. Presently Cargill roused himself. "I've got just over eleven hours," he thought "The attack is obviously scheduled for midnight."

  He stood up, remembering what the voice had told him, when he had first been transported from the cocktail bar in Los Angeles, 1954: that the body reacted with final positivity only to the impact of real events. The cue to disengage the pyramid switch had been
given him. He knew his time limit. He knew the real event.

  There remained one item: how had the Shadow therapists reacted to the disappearance of Morton Cargill from the therapy room two months ago? There must be a record of the incident. It would be here in one of the files of the Grannis.

  He found the record almost at once. With a pale face Cargill read the notation under his name:

  Morton Cargill, 1954. Recommended therapy: "To be killed in the presence of Betty Lane." Disposition: "Therapy executed at 9:40 a.m." Comments: "Subject seemed unusually calm at time of death."

  That was all there was. Apparently, the process was so automatic that the" everyday details were left out Only the bare simple facts were permanently recorded.

  Morton Cargill, despite all his frantic maneuverings, had somehow landed back in the therapy room and, without the Shadows even being aware of his wanderings, had at his proper time been given the prescribed treatment. There was no mention of what had been done with the body.

  Cargill emerged slowly from his profound depression. "I don't believe it," he told himself. "Surely, as Grannis, I could have faked that report."

  He read it again. Seeing that it was signed by two "names in addition to his own and stamped with an official seal shook him a little, but stubbornly he held to his conviction. Besides, for all he knew, the death scene might be a thousand years in the future. These Shadows, with their tremendous understanding of life processes, had created the environment for just such a paradox.

  The possibility definitely cheered him. He looked around the spacious office. He walked over and glanced out of a window that overlooked the lovely mountain city. For a moment then he was dazzled. He was the Grannis of the Shadow people. He could move through all the past ages of man at will. "And all I've got to do," he thought, "is make sure that everything happens as I know it happened."

  Hastily he prepared for the paradox. First he changed himself into a Shadow and back again several times. Finally, as a Shadow he stood thinking, "I want to go back to—" He named the destination mentally. He waited but nothing happened. Startled, he refused to accept the defeat.

  "I must be using the wrong technique," he told himself. The trouble was, what could be the right one? He remembered what the Shadow instructor had said about vibration and visualization.

  He changed from the Shadow shape and thought, "What basic vibration can I use as a measure?" The ' only one he could remember was middle C on the musical scale. He hummed the C softly as he figured out on paper how many middle C vibrations there were in a day.

  He changed back to the Shadow shape, visualized his destination again. Then he hummed middle C— and thought the number of vibrations.

  He felt an indescribable tingle.

  So, two hours before the volor-powered floater with Morton Cargill aboard left the Tweener capital for Shadow City, another Morton Cargill contacted Withrow. As a result, half an hour after the first Cargill was on his way and before any real counter-action could take effect, the Tweener revolution was launched.

  The complete surprise achieved a virtually bloodless victory nearly ten hours ahead of schedule. The cue words, which were to have been sent to him to disconnect the pyramid switch, would never take effect.

  Then Shadow Grannis-Cargill headed back in time to the floater on which Lela Bouvy and another Morton Cargill were trapped. Once inside the floater he transferred the "earlier" Cargill to the glass-walled therapy room in Shadow City, where presently Ann Reece would rescue him for the second time. As Grannis he returned immediately to the floater. Ignoring the cringing Lela he walked through to the engine room. After the training he had received he needed only one glance at the drive tube to notice that the light-focusing lens had been jarred out of position. He reached in with Shadow fingers and adjusted it. The floater started to rise immediately as normal energy-flow was resumed.

  Once Lela was safe, he moved back in time and visited Carmean on the night that Lela and Morton Cargill escaped in Carmean's floater. By making casual references to previous meetings he found from Carmean when and where they had taken place. He began to keep a diary of his movements, then thought hi an anguish of self-annoyance, "Why, of course, this very diary will be up there in the future. I'd have put it where it would be easy to find."

  Back in Shadow City, he located it in the top drawer of Grannis' desk. The list was there, complete with names, places and actions taken.

  The job done, he returned to Office One, Building C, Shadow City. It was one minute after his previous departure. The time was 1:01 p.m. Because of the time paradox, only a few hours had gone by in Shadow City ' since he had first arrived at the terminal center.

  At five minutes after one the phone rang. It was the instructor who had given him Shadow training. "If you will come to cubicle eleven," he instructed Cargill, "we will discuss further training. There isn't much but still it is a part of our pattern."

  Cargill walked over to the cubicle, thinking, "If only I could ask a question about that death scene in such a way that I wouldn't give myself away." He had tried to imagine just how he might be present when the therapy was executed but he rejected the idea. There might be such a thing as straining a paradox to the point where it wouldn't work.

  As soon as he had entered cubicle eleven the light went out and the disembodied voice spoke out of the air in front of him. "Long ago, when we first discovered the processes involved, we decided that every Shadow must go through the experiences of death and, of course, revival. The reason for this is the universal fear of death. When a person actually goes through death and is brought back to life the associative terror, except in rare cases, is gone forever. The process of dying also has other effects on the system. Particularly, it breaks forever certain types of tensions. For this latter reason we do not hesitate to recommend it as a therapy for people we bring out of the past in our inter-time psychological work—"

  "What's that?" Cargill thought at that point. "What did you say?" But he did not utter the startled questions out loud.

  The instructor continued, "We always revive the therapy patient after he and the complaining party are convinced on the action level that death has indeed taken place, though the complainant is never aware of the resurrection. Many" of these latter are morally shocked by what has happened, but we use the million tube to persuade them that justice has been done. And with that combination, and that only, the effect we want is achieved."

  Cargill said slowly, "This death experience—can the same person undergo it several times without being harmed?"

  "Very few Shadows," was the reply, "would live to be a thousand years old if that were not true. You cannot imagine the number of accidents that take place despite all precautions." He finished with a hint of irony in his tone, "We do not, however, recommend the death experience more than a dozen tunes. The cells begin to remember the process."

  Cargill hesitated. "There's another thing that's been bothering me. Can I go into my own future?"

  "No. Only a pattern which has already occurred can be repeated by the body. For you to go into the future from here would require that somebody from the future pull you 'up.' The pattern would then be established, and you could operate from that particular future into the past."

  Cargill didn't argue against the limitations. His reason for asking had to do with his experience with Lan Bruch. He was certain now that in some way Lan Bruch had drawn him into the future that was Merlica. The rest of the "happenings" seemed to be more in the nature of a stirring-up of long-buried memory.

  He didn't want anything like that to happen here, didn't want any random intrusion of extra-sensory phenomena to interfere with his Shadow training. The question was, however, how would he avoid it? If there were any kind of separation at death, then he, with his previous experiences, would be aware of it and would afterwards remember.

  Cargill said slowly: "When should I have this death experience?"

  "That's up to you. You can take it now or wait for an
accidental death. The point is you must decide."

  Cargill hesitated. The idea of dying right now startled him. And, besides, he could already think of several things he ought to accomplish first. It was also possible that he could disassociate his "death" from Betty Lane's therapy and instead consider it as part of his necessary training, and get it over with.

  "I'll wait," he said finally.

  "Very well," said the voice; "call me when you're ready."

  There was a click and the door unlocked.

  Cargill wasted no time. He had thought of several additional things he ought to do before he could be certain he was in this age to stay.

  There was, for instance, that very first time when Ann Reece had brought Captain Morton Cargill, newly arrived from the twentieth century, to a marble room where he had had an opportunity to see and be seen by the Shadow Grannis. The reason for contact had been obscure. Now, it was suddenly clear. "Of course," he thought, "it was important that Cargill see a Shadow. Besides that was the simplest way to get back the transport instrument that had to be loaned to Ann so that she could make the rescue."

  And there was the matter of the false notions the Tweeners and Planiacs had had about what the Shadows could and could not do. Some of that, of course, was due to their own ignorance, but Grannis must have confirmed their ideas with deliberate intent to deceive. And finally there was the fact that there had been previous getaways. It seemed incredible, now, that some Tweeners and Planiacs had escaped by themselves. Grannis must have helped them. Why? In order to establish among Planiacs the reality of the existence of such people, so that when Morton Cargill came along, his identity as a getaway would be taken for granted.

  Cargill sighed. The task of establishing oneself in the future was an intricate one, involving many details.

  But he carried these out, one by one. . . .

  Later, heading for the therapy room in Shadow City, he was willing at last to receive the treatment that had once seemed so incredible. Apparently, going through the act of dying would be a minor experience to go through. It was Betty Lane, the observer, who would have the shock; he anticipated none. Nevertheless, there was one question in Cargill's mind as he waited in his half of the double apartment for the executioner to come for him. The question concerned Lan Bruch, of far Merlica.