Absolutely Inflexible

be sure.

“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought the young man’s voice over deeply and resonantly. “Your name is Mahler, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Mahler conceded.

“To go all these years—and find you. Talk about wild improbabilities!”

Mahler ignored him, declining to take up the challenge. He had found it to be good practice never to let a captured jumper get the upper hand in conversation. His standard procedure was firmly to explain to the jumper just why it was imperative for him to be sent to the Moon, and then to summon the guards as quickly as possible.

“You say this is a two-way time rig?” Mahler asked, holding up the flimsy-looking piece of equipment.

“That’s right,” the other agreed. “It works both ways. If you pressed the button you’d go straight back to the year two thousand, three hundred and sixty, or thereabouts.”

“Did you build it? ”

“Me? No, hardly,” said the jumper. “I found it. It’s a long story and I don’t have time to tell it now. In fact, if I tried to tell it I’d only make things ten times worse than they are. No. Let’s get this over with as quickly as we can, shall we? I know I don’t stand much of a chance with you, and I’d just as soon make it quick.”

“You know, of course, that this is a world without disease—” Mahler began sonorously.

“And that you think I’m carrying enough germs of different sorts to wipe out the whole world. And therefore you have to be absolutely inflexible with me. All right. I won’t try to argue with you. Which way is the Moon?”

Absolutely inflexible. The phrase Mahler had used so many times, the phrase that summed him up so neatly! He chuckled to himself. Some of the younger technicians must have tipped off the jumper about the usual procedure, and the jumper had resigned himself to going peacefully, without bothering to plead. It was just as well.

Absolutely inflexible. Yes, Mahler thought, the words fitted him well. He was becoming a stereotype in the Bureau. Perhaps he was the only Bureau Chief who had never relented, and let a jumper go. Probably all of the others, bowed under the weight of hordes of curious men flooding in from the past, had finally cracked and taken the risk.

But not Mahler—not Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. He took pride in the deep responsibility that rode on his shoulders, and had no intention of evading a sacred trust. His job was to find the jumpers and get them off Earth as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Every single one. It was a task that required relentless inflexibility.

“This makes my job much easier,” Mahler said. “I’m glad I won’t have to convince you that I am simply doing my duty.”

“Not at all,” the other said. “I understand. I won’t even waste my breath. The task you must carry out is understandable, and I cannot hope to make you change your mind.” He turned to the guards. “I’m ready. Take me away.”

Mahler gestured to them, and they led the jumper away. Amazed, Mahler watched the retreating figure, studying him until he could no longer be seen.

If they were all like that, Mahler thought. I could have gotten to like that one. He was a sensible man—one of the few. He knew he was beaten, and he didn’t try to argue in the face of absolute necessity. It’s too bad he had to go. He’s the kind of man I’d like to find more often these days. But I mustn’t feel sympathy. That would be unwise.

Mahler had succeeded as an administrator only because he had managed to suppress any sympathy for the unfortunates he had been compelled to condemn. Had there been any other place to send them—back to their own time, preferably—he would have been the first to urge abolition of the Moon prison. But, with only one course of action open to him, he performed his job efficiently and automatically.

He picked up the jumper’s time rig and examined it. A two-way rig would be the solution, of course. As soon as the jumper arrived, a new and better policy would be in force, turning him around and sending him back. They’d get the idea quickly enough. Mahler found himself wishing it could be so; he often wondered what the jumpers stranded on the Moon must think of him.

A two-way rig would change the world so completely that its implications would be staggering. With men able to move at will backward and forward in time the past, present, and future would blend into one broad and shining highway. It was impossible to conceive of the world as it might be, with free passage in either direction.

But even as Mahler fondled the confiscated time rig he realized that something was wrong. In the six centuries since the attainment of time travel, no one had yet developed a known two-way rig. And an unknown rig was pretty well ruled out. There were no documented reports of visitors from the future and presumably, if such a rig existed, such visitors would have been as numerous as were the jumpers from the past.

So the young man had been lying, Mahler thought with regret. The two-way rig was an utter impossibility. The youth had merely been playing a game with his captors. There couldn’t be a two-way rig, because the past had never been in any way influenced by the future.

Mahler examined the rig. There were two dials on it—the conventional forward dial and another indicating backward travel. Whoever had prepared the incredible hoax had gone to considerable trouble to document it. Why?

Could it be that the jumper had been telling the truth? Mahler wished that he could somehow test the rig immediately. There was always the one slim chance that it might actually work, and that he would no longer have to be a rigid dispenser of justice. Absolutely Inflexible Mahler!

He looked at it. As a time machine, it was fairly crude. It made use of the standard distorter pattern, but the dial was the clumsy wide-range 24th-Century one. The vernier system, Mahler reflected, had not been introduced until the 25th Century.

Mahler peered closer to read the instruction label. PLACE LEFT HAND HERE. it said. He studied it carefully. The ghost of a thought wandered into his mind. He pushed it aside in horror, but it recurred. It would be so simple. What if he should—

No.

But—

PLACE LEFT HAND HERE.

He reached out tentatively with his left hand.

Be careful now. No sense in being reckless—

PLACE LEFT HAND HERE.

PRESS DIAL.

He placed his left hand lightly on the indicated place. There was a little crackle of electricity. He let go, quickly and started to replace the time rig when the desk abruptly faded out from under him.

The air was foul and grimy. Mahler wondered what had happened to the Conditioner. Then he looked around. Huge, grotesque, ugly buildings blocked out most of the sky. There were dark oppressive clouds of smoke overhead, and the harsh screech of an industrial society assailed his ears.

He was in the middle of an immense city, and streams of people were rushing past him at a furious pace. They were all small, stunted creatures, their faces harried and neurotic. They all had the same despairing, frightened look. It was an expression Mahler had seen many times on the faces of jumpers escaping from an unendurable nightmare world to a more congenial future.

He stared down at the time rig clutched in his hand, and knew what had happened. The two-way rig!

It meant the end of the Moon prisons. It meant a complete revolution in civilization. But he had no desire to remain in so oppressive and horrible an age a minute longer than was necessary. He reached down to activate the time rig.