Black-jacket shook his head. “You first, Gregory,” he said. “Tell him how he got here, and then I’ll tell him why.”
“I believe,” Gregory began, “that in your period, fiction writers made some use of the subject of time-travel. It was not, however, given serious consideration, largely because of certain alleged paradoxes involved, and because of an elementalistic and objectifying attitude toward the whole subject of time. I won’t go into the mathematics and symbolic logic involved, but we have disposed of the objections; more, we have succeeded in constructing a time machine, if you want to call it that. We prefer to call it a temporal-spatial displacement field generator.”
“It’s really very simple,” the woman called Paula interrupted. “If the universe is expanding, time is a widening spiral; if contracting, a diminishing spiral; if static, a uniform spiral. The possibility of pulsation was our only worry. …”
“That’s no worry,” Gregory reproved her. “I showed you that the rate was too slow to have an effect on. …”
“Oh, nonsense; you can measure something which exists within a microsecond, but where is the instrument to measure a temporal pulsation that may require years. … ? You haven’t come to that yet.”
“Be quiet, both of you!” the man with the black coat and the white bands commanded. “While you argue about vanities, thousands are being converted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands of his dupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!”
“All right, you invented a time machine,” Benson said. “In civvies, I was only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniors the difference between H2O and H2SO4, but the theory of time-travel is wasted on me. … Suppose you just let me ask the questions; then I’ll be sure of finding out what I don’t know. For instance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me and brought me here? The Commies?”
“No, the United Nations,” Anthony told him. “At least, they were the least exhausted when both sides decided to quit.”
“Then what’s this dictatorship. … The Guide? Extreme Rightist?”
“Walter, you’d better tell him,” Gregory said.
“We damn near lost the war,” the man in the black jacket and striped trousers said, “but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc was broken up—India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, all the Satellite States. Most of them turned into little dictatorships, like the Latin American countries after the liberation from Spain, but they were personal, non-ideological, generally benevolent, dictatorships, the kind that can grow into democracies, if they’re given time.”
“Capitalistic dictatorships, he means,” the cadaverous man in the blue jacket explained.
“Be quiet, Carl,” Anthony told him. “Let’s not confuse this with any class-struggle stuff.”
“Actually, the United Nations rules the world,” Walter continued. “What goes on in the Ukraine or Latvia or Manchuria is about analogous to what went on under the old United States government in, let’s say, Tammany-ruled New York. But here’s the catch. The U.N. is ruled absolutely by one man.”
“How could that happen? In my time, the U.N. had its functions so subdivided and compartmented that it couldn’t even run a war properly. Our army commanders were making war by systematic disobedience.”
“The charter was changed shortly after … er, that is, after. …” Walter was fumbling for words.
“After my death.” Benson finished politely. “Go on. Even with a changed charter, how did one man get all the powers into his hands?”
“By sorcery!” black-coat-and-white-bands fairly shouted. “By the help of his master, Satan!”
“You know, there are times when some such theory tempts me,” Paula said.
“He was a big moneybags,” Carl said. “He bribed his way in, New York was bombed flat. Where the old U.N. buildings were, it’s still hot. So The Guide donated a big tract of land outside St. Louis, built these buildings—we’re in the basement of one of them, right now, if you want a good laugh—and before long, he had the whole organization eating out of his hand. They just voted him into power, and the world into slavery.”
Benson looked around at the others, who were nodding in varying degrees of agreement.
“Substantially, that’s it. He managed to convince everybody of his altruism, integrity and wisdom,” Walter said. “It was almost blasphemous to say anything against him. I really don’t understand how it happened. …”
“Well, what’s he been doing with his power?” Benson asked. “Wise things, or stupid ones?”
“I could be general, and say that he has deprived all of us of our political and other liberties. It is best to be specific,” Anthony said. “Gregory?”
“My own field—dimensional physics—hasn’t been interfered with much, yet. It’s different in other fields. For instance, all research in sonics has been arbitrarily stopped. So has a great deal of work in organic and synthetic chemistry. Psychology is a madhouse of … what was the old word, licentiousness? No, lysenkoism. Medicine and surgery—well, there’s a huge program of compulsory sterilization, and another one of eugenic marriage-control. And infants who don’t conform to certain physical standards don’t survive. Neither do people who have disfiguring accidents beyond the power of plastic surgery.”
Paula spoke next. “My field is child welfare. Well, I’m going to show you an audiovisual of an interesting ceremony in a Hindu village, derived from the ancient custom of the sati. It is the Hindu method of conforming to The Guide’s demand that only beautiful children be allowed to grow to maturity.”
The film was mercifully brief. Even in spite of the drums and gongs, and the chanting of the crowd, Benson found out how loudly a newborn infant can scream in a fire. The others looked as though they were going to be sick; he doubted if he looked much better.
“Of course, we are a more practical and mechanical-minded people, here and in Europe,” Paula added, holding down her gorge by main strength. “We have lethal-gas chambers that even Hitler would have envied.”
“I am a musician,” Anthony said. “A composer. If Gregory thinks that the sciences are controlled, he should try to
