“You suvvabih!” Mimi yelled and started to rise.
“State thanks you, madam, for making up my mind. I will demonstrate on you. Watch this, Brent, and realize what chance you have against me.” He pointed the rod firmly at Mimi.
“Do something!” Martha screamed.
It all happened at once, but Brent seemed to see it in slow motion even as he moved. Mimi lunged forward furiously and recklessly. Kruj dived for her feet and brought her to the floor out of the line of fire. At the same time Brent threw himself forward just as Bokor moved, so that the rod now pointed directly at Brent. He couldn’t arrest his momentum. He was headed straight at Bokors new instrument of death. And then the rod moved to Bokors own head.
There was no noise, no flash. But Bokors body was lying on the floor, and the head was nowhere.
“That beed hard,” said Martha’s voice. “I haved to stay in his mind long enough to actuate rod, but get out before death. Matter of fractions of seconds.”
“Nice work, sir-madam,” Brent grunted. He looked down at the corpse. “But that was only one of him.”
Brent quoted in his journal: Love, but a day, and the world has changed! A week, to be more exact, but the change is nonetheless sudden and impressive.
Our nameless visitant from the future—they seem to need titles as little as sexes in that time—whom I have for convenience labeled Sirdam, has organized our plans about the central idea of interfering as little as possible—forcing the inhabitants of the Stasis to work out their own salvation. The travelers do not appear openly in this great change. We work through Stephens associates.
There are some 40 of us (I guess I count as a traveler; I’m not too sure what the hell my status is by now), which means each of us can take on five or ten of Stephens boys (andgirls), picking the ones whose interests lie closest to his own specialfields. That means a working force of Undergrounders running somewhere above 200 and under 500 . . . fluctuating constantly as people come under or escape from Stapper observation, as new recruits come in, or (as will damnably happen despite every precaution) as one of our solid old-timers gets his mind changed and decides Stasis bees perfect after all.
The best single example to show the results we obtain is the episode of Professor Harrington, whose special department of so-called learning is the preservation of the Nakamura Law of Spatial Acceleration, which had so conclusively proved to the founders of the Stasis the impossibility of interplanetary travel.
This fell obviously within Nikobat’s field. A young scientist affiliated with the Underground—a nephew, I have since learned, of Alex’s—expounded the Nakamura doctrine as he had learned and re-proved it. It took the Venusian less than five minutes to put his finger on the basic flaw in the statement—the absolute omission, in all calculations, of any consideration of galactic drift. Once this correction was applied to the Nakamura formulas, they stood revealed as the pure nonsense which, indeed, Nikobat’s very presence proved them.
It was not Nikobat but the young man who placed this evidence before Professor Harrington. The scene must have been classic. “I saw, ’’the young man later told us—they are all trying desperately to unlearn Farthing-ized English—“his mouth fall open and gap spread across his face as wide as gap he suddenly finded in universe. ”
For the professor was not stupid. He was simply so conditioned from childhood to the acceptance of the Stasis of Cosmos that he had never questioned it. Besides, he had doubtless had friends whose minds were changed when they speculated too far.
Harrinton’s eyes lit up after the first shock. He grabbed pencil and paper and furiously checked through the revised equations again and again. He then called in a half dozen of his best students and set them to what was apparently a routine exercise—interpolating variations for galactic drift in the Nakamura formulas.
They ended as astonished as their instructor. The first one done stared incredulously at his results and gasped, “Nakamura beed wrong!”
That was typical. The sheep are ready to be roused, each in his individual way. Kruj has been training men to associate with the writers of the Stasis. The man’s knowledge of literature of all periods, and especially of his beloved Elizabethan Age, is phenomenal and his memory something superhuman. And four writers out of five who hear his disciples discourse on the joys of creative language and quote from the Elizabethan dramatists and the King James Bible will never be content again to write Stasis propaganda for the sollies or the identically bound books of the State libraries.
I have myself been contributing a fair amount to the seduction of the world by teaching cooks. I was never in my own time acknowledged as better than a fair-to-middling non-professional, but here I might be Escoffer or Brillat-Savarin. We steal plants and animals from the scientific laboratories, and in our hands they become vegetables and meat; and many a man in the street, who doesn’t give a damn if his science is false and his arts synthetic, has suddenly realized that he owes the State a grudge for feeding him on concentrates.
The focus of everything is Stephen. It’s hard to analyze why. Each of us travelers has found among the Undergrounders someone far more able in his own special field, yet all of us, travelers and Undergrounders alike, unquestioningly acknowledge Stephen as our leader. It may be the sheer quiet kindliness and goodness of his nature. It may be that he and Alex, in their organization of this undercover group of instinctive rebels, were the first openly to admit that the Stasis was inhuman and to do something about it. But from whatever cause, we all
