[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction December 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Changing the world is simple; the trick is
to do it before you have a chance to undo it!
It was a good job and Max Alben knew whom he had to thank for it--his
great-grandfather.
"Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered as he hurried into the
laboratory slightly ahead of the escorting technicians, all of them,
despite the excitement of the moment, remembering to bob their heads
deferentially at the half-dozen full-fleshed and hard-faced men
lolling on the couches that had been set up around the time machine.
He shrugged rapidly out of his rags, as he had been instructed in the
anteroom, and stepped into the housing of the enormous mechanism.
This was the first time he had seen it, since he had been taught
how to operate it on a dummy model, and now he stared at the great
transparent coils and the susurrating energy bubble with much respect.
This machine, the pride and the hope of 2089, was something almost
outside his powers of comprehension. But Max Alben knew how to run it,
and he knew, roughly, what it was supposed to accomplish. He knew also
that this was the first backward journey of any great duration and,
being scientifically unpredictable, might well be the death of him.
"Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered again affectionately.
If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest
time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even
before the Blight, it would never have been discovered that he and his
seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout.
And if that had not been discovered, the ruling powers of Earth, more
than a century later, would never have plucked Max Alben out of an
obscure civil-service job as a relief guard at the North American
Chicken Reservation to his present heroic and remunerative eminence.
He would still be patrolling the barbed wire that surrounded the three
white leghorn hens and two roosters--about one-sixth of the known
livestock wealth of the Western Hemisphere--thoroughly content with
the half-pail of dried apricots he received each and every payday.
No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique
capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Max Alben would
not now be shifting from foot to foot in a physics laboratory,
facing the black market kings of the world and awaiting their final
instructions with an uncertain and submissive grin.
* * * * *
Men like O'Hara, who controlled mushrooms, Levney, the blackberry
tycoon, Sorgasso, the packaged-worm monopolist--would black marketeers
of their tremendous stature so much as waste a glance on someone like
Alben ordinarily, let alone confer a lifetime pension on his wife and
five children of a full spoonful each of non-synthetic sugar a day?
Even if he didn't come back, his family was provided for like almost no
other family on Earth. This was a damn good job and he was lucky.
Alben noticed that Abd Sadha had risen from the straight chair at
the far side of the room and was approaching him with a sealed metal
cylinder in one hand.
"We've decided to add a further precaution at the last moment," the old
man said. "That is, the scientists have suggested it and I have--er--I
have given my approval."
The last remark was added with a slight questioning note as the
Secretary-General of the United Nations looked back rapidly at the
black market princes on the couches behind him. Since they stared back
stonily, but offered no objection, he coughed in relief and returned to
Alben.
"I am sure, young man, that I don't have to go into the details of your
instructions once more. You enter the time machine and go back the
duration for which it has been preset, a hundred and thirteen years, to
the moment after the Guided Missile of 1976 was launched. It _is_ 1976,
isn't it?" he asked, suddenly uncertain.
"Yes, sir," one of the technicians standing by the time machine said
respectfully. "The experiment with an atomic warhead guided missile
that resulted in the Blight was conducted on this site on April 18,
1976." He glanced proudly at the unemotional men on the couches, very
much like a small boy after completing a recitation before visiting
dignitaries from the Board of Education.
"Just so." Abd Sadha nodded. "April 18, 1976. And on this site. You
see, young man, you will materialize at the very moment and on the
very spot where the remote-control station handling the missile
was--er--handling the missile. You will be in a superb position, a
superb position, to deflect the missile in its downward course and
alter human history for the better. Very much for the better. Yes."
He paused, having evidently stumbled out of his thought sequence.
"And he pulls the red switch toward him," Gomez, the dandelion-root
magnate, reminded him sharply, impatiently.
"Ah, yes, the red switch. He pulls the little red switch toward him.
Thank you, Mr. Gomez, thank you very much, sir. He pulls the little
red switch on the green instrument panel toward him, thus preventing
the error that caused the missile to explode in the Brazilian jungle
and causing it, instead, to explode somewhere in the mid-Pacific, as
originally planned."
The Secretary-General of the United Nations beamed. "Thus preventing
the Blight, making it nonexistent, as it were, producing a present-day
world in which the Blight never occurred. That is correct, is it not,
gentlemen?" he asked, turning anxiously again.
* * * * *
None of the half-dozen men on couches deigned to answer him. And
Alben kept his eyes deferentially in their direction, too, as he had
throughout this period of last-minute instruction.
He knew who ruled his world--these stolid, well-fed men in clean
garments with a minimum of patches, and where patches occurred, at
least they were the color of the surrounding cloth.
Sadha might be Secretary-General of the United Nations, but that
was still a civil-service job, only a few social notches higher
than a chicken guard. His clothes were fully as ragged, fully as
multi-colored, as those that Alben had stepped out of. And the gnawing
in his stomach was no doubt almost as great.
"You understand, do you not, young man, that if anything goes wrong,"
Abd Sadha asked, his head nodding tremulously and anticipating the
answer, "if anything unexpected, unprepared-for, occurs, you are not to
continue with the experiment but return immediately?"
"He understands everything he has to understand," Gomez told him.
"Let's get this thing moving."
The old man smiled again. "Yes. Of course, Mr. Gomez." He came up to
where Alben stood in the entrance of the time machine and handed the
sealed metal cylinder to him. "This is the precaution the scientists
have just added. When you arrive at your destination, just before
materializing, you will release it into the surrounding temporal
medium. Our purpose here, as you no doubt--"
Levney sat up on his couch and snapped his fingers peremptorily. "I
just heard Gomez tell you to get this thing moving, Sadha. And it isn't
moving. We're busy men. We've wasted enough time."
"I was just trying to explain a crucial final fact," the
Secretary-General apologized. "A fact which may be highly--"
"You've explained enough facts." Levney turned to the man inside the
time machine. "Hey, fella. You. _Move!_"
Max Alben gulped and nodded violently. He darted to the rear of the
machine and turned the dial which activated it.
_flick!_
* * * * *
It was a good job and Mac Albin knew whom he had to thank for it--his
great-grandfather.
"Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed as he looked at the morose faces
of his two colleagues. Bob Skeat and Hugo Honek had done as much as he
to build the tiny time machine in the secret lab under the helicopter
garage, and they were fully as eager to go, but--unfortunately for
them--they were not descended from the right ancestor.
Leisurely, he unzipped the richly embroidered garment that, as the
father of two children, he was privileged to wear, and wriggled into
the housing of the complex little mechanism. This was hardly the
first time he had seen it, since he'd been helping to build the device
from the moment Honek had nodded and risen from the drafting board,
and now he barely wasted a glance on the thumb-size translucent coils
growing out of the almost microscopic energy bubbles which powered them.
This machine was the last hope, of 2089, even if the world of 2089, as
a whole, did not know of its existence and would try to prevent its
being put into operation. But it meant a lot more to Mac Albin than
merely saving a world. It meant an adventurous mission with the risk of
death.
"Good old Giovanni Albeni," he laughed again happily.
If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest
time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even
before the Epidemic, it would never have been discovered that he and
his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout.
And if that had not been discovered, the Albins would not have become
physicists upon the passage of the United Nations law that everyone
on Earth--absolutely without exception--had to choose a branch of
research science in which to specialize. In the flabby, careful,
life-guarding world the Earth had become, Mac Albin would never have
been reluctantly selected by his two co-workers as the one to carry the
forbidden banner of dangerous experiment.
No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique
capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Mac Albin would
probably be a biologist today like almost everyone else on Earth,
laboriously working out dreary gene problems instead of embarking on
the greatest adventure Man had known to date.
Even if he didn't come back, he had at last found a socially useful
escape from genetic responsibility to humanity in general and his own
family in particular. This was a damn good job and he was lucky.
"Wait a minute, Mac," Skeat said and crossed to the other side of the
narrow laboratory.
* * * * *
Albin and Honek watched him stuff several sheets of paper into a small
metal box which he closed without locking.
"You will take care of yourself, won't you, Mac?" Hugo Honek pleaded.
"Any time you feel like taking an unnecessary risk, remember that Bob
and I will have to stand trial if you don't come back. We might be
sentenced to complete loss of professional status and spend the rest of
our lives supervising robot factories."
"Oh, it won't be that bad," Albin reassured him absent-mindedly from
where he lay contorted inside the time machine. He watched Skeat coming
toward him with the box.
Honek shrugged his shoulders. "It might be a lot worse than even that
and you know it. The disappearance of a two-time father is going to
leave an awful big vacancy in the world. One-timers, like Bob and
me, are all over the place; if either of us dropped out of sight, it
wouldn't cause nearly as much uproar."
"But Bob and you both tried to operate the machine," Albin reminded
him. "And you blacked out after a fifteen-second temporal displacement.
So I'm the only chance, the only way to stop the human race from
dwindling and dwindling till it hits absolute zero, like that fat old
Security Council seems willing for it to do."
"Take it easy, Mac," Bob Skeat said as he handed the metal box to
Albin. "The Security Council is just trying to solve the problem in
their way, the conservative way: a worldwide concentration on genetics
research coupled with the maximum preservation of existing human lives,
especially those that have a high reproductive potential. We three
disagree with them; we've been skulking down here nights to solve it
_our_ way, and ours is a radical approach and plenty risky. That's
the reason for the metal box--trying to cover one more explosive
possibility."