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_Just as medicine is not a science, but rather an
art--a device, practised in a scientific manner, in
its best manifestations--time-travel stories are not
science fiction. Time-travel, however, has become
acceptable to science fiction readers as a traditional
device in stories than are otherwise admissible in the
genre. Here, Frederik Pohl employs it to portray the
amusingly catastrophic meeting of three societies._
THE DAY
OF THE
BOOMER
DUKES
by Frederik Pohl
_Illustrated by EMSH_
[Illustration: There was a silvery aura around the kid ... the cops'
guns hit him ... but he didn't notice....]
I
Foraminifera 9
Paptaste udderly, semped sempsemp dezhavoo, qued schmerz--Excuse me. I
mean to say that it was like an endless diet of days, boring,
tedious....
No, it loses too much in the translation. Explete my reasons, I say. Do
my reasons matter? No, not to you, for you are troglodytes, knowing
nothing of causes, understanding only acts. Acts and facts, I will give
you acts and facts.
First you must know how I am called. My "name" is Foraminifera 9-Hart
Bailey's Beam, and I am of adequate age and size. (If you doubt this, I
am prepared to fight.) Once the--the tediety of life, as you might say,
had made itself clear to me, there were, of course, only two
alternatives. I do not like to die, so that possibility was out; and the
remaining alternative was flight.
Naturally, the necessary machinery was available to me. I arrogated a
small viewing machine, and scanned the centuries of the past in the hope
that a sanctuary might reveal itself to my aching eyes. Kwel tediety
that was! Back, back I went through the ages. Back to the Century of the
Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than
my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The
Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass
of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth--wherever I looked, tediety was
what I found.
* * * * *
I snapped off the machine and considered. Put the problem thus: Was
there in all of the pages of history no age in which a 9-Hart Bailey's
Beam might find adventure and excitement? There had to be! It was not
possible, I told myself, despairing, that from the dawn of the dreaming
primates until my own time there was no era at all in which I could
be--happy? Yes, I suppose happiness is what I was looking for. But where
was it? In my viewer, I had fifty centuries or more to look back upon.
And that was, I decreed, the trouble; I could spend my life staring into
the viewer, and yet never discover the time that was right for me. There
were simply too many eras to choose from. It was like an enormous
library in which there must, there had to be, contained the one fact I
was looking for--that, lacking an index, I might wear my life away and
never find.
"_Index!_"
I said the word aloud! For, to be sure, it was the answer. I had the
freedom of the Learning Lodge, and the index in the reading room could
easily find for me just what I wanted.
Splendid, splendid! I almost felt cheerful. I quickly returned the
viewer I had been using to the keeper, and received my deposit back. I
hurried to the Learning Lodge and fed my specifications into the index,
as follows, that is to say: Find me a time in recent past where there is
adventure and excitement, where there is a secret, colorful band of
desperadoes with whom I can ally myself. I then added two
specifications--second, that it should be before the time of the high
radiation levels; and first, that it should be after the discovery of
anesthesia, in case of accident--and retired to a desk in the reading
room to await results.
It took only a few moments, which I occupied in making a list of the
gear I wished to take with me. Then there was a hiss and a crackle, and
in the receiver of the desk a book appeared. I unzipped the case, took
it out, and opened it to the pages marked on the attached reading tape.