His hands idled over her flowing red hair. “You’ve got the wrong expert for that, milady. All I remember, with the interest of any red-blooded American boy, is the way knees came and went and breasts came and stayed. You know, I’ve thought of the first point in favor of Stasis: a man could never catch hell for not noticing his girl’s new dress.”
“But why?” Krasna insisted. “Why doed they change—styles?” He nodded. “—change styles so often?”
“Well, the theory—not that I ever quite believed it—was to appeal to men.”
“And I always wear the same dress—well, not same, because I always put on clean one every morning and sometimes in evening too—but it always looks same, and every time you see me it will be same and—” She broke off suddenly and pressed her face against his knee.
Gently he tilted her head back and grinned down at her moist eyes. “Look,” he said. “I said I never believed it. If you’ve got the right girl, it doesn’t matter what she wears.”
He drew her up to him. She was small and warm and soft and completely unstatic. He was at home with himself and with life for the first time in five hundred years.
The machine was not repaired the next day, nor the next. Alex kept making plausible, if not quite intelligible, technical excuses. Martha kept to her room and fretted, but Brent rather welcomed the delay. There was no hurry; leaving this time several days later had no effect on when they reached 2473. But he had some difficulty making that point clear to the matron.
This delay gave him an opportunity to see something of the State in action, anci any information acquired was apt to be useful when the time came. With various members of Stephens informal and illicit group he covered the city. He visited a Church of Cosmos and heard the official doctrine on the failure of the Barrier—the Stasis of Cosmos did not permit time travel, so that even an attempt to prohibit it by recognizing its existence affronted Cosmos. He visited libraries and found only those works which had established or upheld the Stasis, all bound in the same uniform format which the Cosmic Bibliological Committee of 2407 had ordained as ideal and static. He visited scientific laboratories and found brilliant young dullards plodding away endlessly at what had already been established; imaginative research was manifestly perilous.
He heard arid stretches of intolerable music composed according to the strict Farinelli system, which forbade, among other things, any alteration of key or time for the duration of a composition. He went to a solly, which turned out to be a deceptively solid three-dimensional motion picture, projected into an apparently screenless arena {Memo: ask Alex how?) giving something the effect of what Little Theater groups in his day called Theater in the Round. But only the images were roundly three-dimensional. The story was a strictly one-dimensional exposition of the glories of Stasis, which made the releases of Ufa or Artkino seem relatively free from propaganda. Brent, however, suspected the author of being an Undergrounder. The villain, even though triumphantly bested by the Stappers in the end, had all the most plausible and best written speeches, some of them ingenious and strong enough to sow doubts in the audience.
If, Brent thought disgustedly, anything could sow doubts in this smug herd of cattle. For the people of the State seemed to take the deepest and most loving pride in everything pertaining to the State and to the Stasis of Cosmos. The churches, the libraries, the laboratories, the music, the sollies, all represented humanity at its highest peak. We have attained perfection, have we not? Then all this bees perfect, and we love it.
“What we need,” he expostulated to Alex and Stephen one night, “is more of me. Lots more. Scads of us pouring in from all ages to light firecrackers under these dopes. Every art and every science has degenerated far worse than anything did in the Dark Ages. Man cannot be man without striving, and all striving is abolished. God, I think if I lived in this age and believed in the Stasis, I’d become a Stapper. Better their arrogant cruelty than the inhuman indifference of everybody else.”
“I have brother who bees Stapper,” said Stephen. “I do not recommend it. To descend to level of cows and oxes bees one thing. To become jackals bees another.”
“I’ve gathered that those rods paralyze the nerve centers, right? But what happens to you after that?”
“It bees not good. First you be treated according to expert psychoanalytic and psychometric methods so as to alter your concepts and adjust you to Stasis. If that fails, you be carefully reduced to harmless idiocy. Sometimes they find mind that bees too strong for treatment. He bees killed, but Stappers play with him first.”
“It’ll never happen to me,” Alex said earnestly. “I be prepared. You see this?” He indicated a minute plastic box suspended around his neck. “It contains tiny amount of radioactive matter sensitized to wave length of Stappers’ rods. They will never change my mind.”
“It explodes?”
Alex grinned. “Stay away from me if rods start waving.”
“It seems,” Brent mused, “as though cruelty were the only human vice left. Games are lost, drinking is prohibited—and that most splendid of vices, imaginative speculation, is unheard of. I tell you, you need lots of me.”
Stephen frowned. “Before failure of Barrier, we often wondered why we never seed time travelers. We doubted Charnwood’s Law and yet— We decided there beed only two explanations. Either time travel bees impossible, or time travelers cannot be seed or intervene in time they visit. Now, we can see that Barrier stopped all from future, and perhaps you be only one from past. And still—”
“Exactly,” said Alex. “And still. If other travelers came from future, why beed they not also stopped by Barrier? One of our friends searched Stapper records since breakdown of Barrier. No report
