Hunter Patrol, Page 2

for later, Paula," he barked. "I'd be very much interested inyour theories about why memories are unimpaired when you time-jumpforward and lost when you reverse the process, but let's stick tobusiness. We have what we wanted; now let's use what we have."

  "I never liked the way you made your money," a dark-faced, cadaverousman said, "but when you talk, it makes sense. Let's get on with it."

  Benson used the brief silence which followed to study the six. With theexception of the two who had just spoken, there was the indefinable markof the fanatic upon all of them--people fanatical about differentthings, united for different reasons in a single purpose. It remindedhim sharply of some teachers' committee about to beard a school-boardwith an unpopular and expensive recommendation.

  Anthony--the oldest of the lot, in a knee-length tunic--turned toGregory.

  "I believe you had better...." he began.

  "As to who we are, we'll explain that, partially, later. As for yourquestion, 'Where am I?' that will have to be rephrased. If you ask,'When and where am I?' I can furnish a rational answer. In the temporaldimension, you are fifty years futureward of the day of your death;spatially, you are about eight thousand miles from the place of yourdeath, in what is now the World Capitol, St. Louis."

  Nothing in the answer made sense but the name of the city. Bensonchuckled.

  "What happened; the Cardinals conquer the world? I knew they had a goodteam, but I didn't think it was that good."

  "No, no," Gregory told him earnestly. "The government isn't a theocracy.At least not yet. But if The Guide keeps on insisting that onlybeautiful things are good and that he is uniquely qualified to definebeauty, watch his rule change into just that."

  "I've been detecting symptoms of religious paranoia, messianicdelusions, about his public statements...." the woman began.

  "Idolatry!" another member of the group, who wore a black coat fastenedto the neck, and white neck-bands, rasped. "Idolatry in deed, as well asin spirit!"

  * * * * *

  The sense of unreality, partially dispelled, began to return. Bensondropped to the floor and stood beside the table, getting a cigarette outof his pocket and lighting it.

  "I made a joke," he said, putting his lighter away. "The fact that noneof you got it has done more to prove that I am fifty years in the futurethan anything any of you could say." He went on to explain who the St.Louis Cardinals were.

  "Yes; I remember! Baseball!" Anthony exclaimed. "There is no baseball,now. The Guide will not allow competitive sports; he says that theyfoster the spirit of violence...."

  The cadaverous man in the blue jacket turned to the man in the blackgarment of similar cut.

  "You probably know more history than any of us," he said, getting acigar out of his pocket and lighting it. He lighted it by rubbing theend on the sole of his shoe. "Suppose you tell him what the score is."He turned to Benson. "You can rely on his dates and happenings; hisinterpretation's strictly capitalist, of course," he said.

  Black-jacket shook his head. "You first, Gregory," he said. "Tell himhow he got here, and then I'll tell him why."

  "I believe," Gregory began, "that in your period, fiction writers madesome use of the subject of time-travel. It was not, however, givenserious consideration, largely because of certain alleged paradoxesinvolved, and because of an elementalistic and objectifying attitudetoward the whole subject of time. I won't go into the mathematics andsymbolic logic involved, but we have disposed of the objections; more,we have succeeded in constructing a time-machine, if you want to call itthat. We prefer to call it a temporal-spatial displacement fieldgenerator."

  "It's really very simple," the woman called Paula interrupted. "If theuniverse is expanding, time is a widening spiral; if contracting, adiminishing spiral; if static, a uniform spiral. The possibility ofpulsation was our only worry...."

  "That's no worry," Gregory reproved her. "I showed you that the rate wastoo slow to have an effect on...."

  "Oh, nonsense; you can measure something which exists within amicrosecond, but where is the instrument to measure a temporal pulsationthat may require years...? You haven't come to that yet."

  "Be quiet, both of you!" the man with the black coat and the white bandscommanded. "While you argue about vanities, thousands are beingconverted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands of hisdupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!"

  "All right, you invented a time-machine," Benson said. "In civvies, Iwas only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniorsthe difference between H_{2}O and H_{2}SO_{4}, but the theory oftime-travel is wasted on me.... Suppose you just let me ask thequestions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. Forinstance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me andbrought me here? The Commies?"

  "No, the United Nations," Anthony told him. "At least, they were theleast 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 stripedtrousers said, "but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc wasbroken up--India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, allthe Satellite States. Most of them turned into little dictatorships,like the Latin American countries after the liberation from Spain, butthey were personal, non-ideological, generally benevolent,dictatorships, the kind that can grow into democracies, if they're giventime."

  "Capitalistic dictatorships, he means," the cadaverous man in the bluejacket explained.

  "Be quiet, Carl," Anthony told him. "Let's not confuse this with anyclass-struggle stuff."

  "Actually, the United Nations rules the world," Walter continued. "Whatgoes on in the Ukraine or Latvia or Manchuria is about analogous to whatwent on under the old United States government in, let's say,Tammany-ruled New York. But here's the catch. The UN is ruled absolutelyby one man."

  "How could that happen? In my time, the UN had its functions sosubdivided 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 changedcharter, how did one man get all the powers into his hands?"

  "By sorcery!" black-coat-and-white-bands fairly shouted. "By the help ofhis 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. See, NewYork was bombed flat. Where the old UN buildings were, it's still hot.So The Guide donated a big tract of land outside St. Louis, built thesebuildings--we're in the basement of one of them, right now, if you wanta good laugh--and before long, he had the whole organization eating outof his hand. They just voted him into power, and the world intoslavery."

  Benson looked around at the others, who were nodding in varying degreesof agreement.

  "Substantially, that's it. He managed to convince everybody of hisaltruism, integrity and wisdom," Walter said. "It was almostblasphemous to say anything against him. I really don't understand howit 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 ourpolitical 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 insonics has been arbitrarily stopped. So has a great deal of work inorganic and synthetic chemistry. Psychology is a madhouse of ... whatwas the old word, licentiousness? No, lysenkoism. Medicine andsurgery--well, there's a huge program of compulsory sterilization, andanother one of eugenic marriage-control. And infants who don't conformto
certain physical standards don't survive. Neither do people who havedisfiguring accidents beyond the power of plastic surgery."

  * * * * *

  Paula spoke next. "My field is child welfare. Well, I'm going to showyou an audio-visual of an interesting ceremony in a Hindu village,derived from the ancient custom of the suttee. It is the Hindu method ofconforming to The Guide's demand that only beautiful