Up the Line, Page 3

  “It’s an interesting place to visit. I wouldn’t want to live here.”

  “You feel dizzy? Sick? Revolted?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re allowed. You always feel a little temporal shock on your first look at the past. It somehow seems smellier and more chaotic than you expect. Some applicants cave in the moment they get into a decently distant shunt up the line.”

  “I’m not caving.”

  “Good boy.”

  I studied the scene, the women with their breasts and rumps encased in tight exoskeletons under their clothing, the men with their strangled, florid faces, the squalling children. Be objective, I told myself. You are a student of other times, other cultures.

  Someone pointed at us and screamed, “Hey, looka the beatniks!”

  “Onward,” Sam said. “They’ve noticed us.”

  He adjusted my timer. We jumped.

  Same city. A century earlier. Same buildings, genteel and timeless in their pastels. No traffic lights, no drills, no street lights. Instead of automobiles zooming along the streets that bordered the old quarter, there were buggies.

  “We can’t stay,” said Sam. “It’s 1858. Our clothes are too weird, and I don’t feel like pretending I’m a slave. Onward.”

  We shunted.

  The city vanished. We stood in a kind of swamp. Mists rose in the south. Spanish moss clung to graceful trees. A flight of birds darkened the sky.

  “The year is 1382,” said the guru. “Those are passenger pigeons overhead. Columbus’ grandfather is still a virgin.”

  Back and back we hopped. 897. 441. 97. Very little changed. A couple of naked Indians wandered by at one point. Sam bowed in a courteous way. They nodded affably to us, scratched their genitals, and sauntered on. Visitors from the future did not excite them greatly. We shunted. “This is the year A.D. 1,” said Sam. We shunted. “We have gone back an additional twelve months and are now in 1 B.C. The possibilities for arithmetical confusion are great. But if you think of the year as 2059 B.P., and the coming year as 2058 B.P., you won’t get into any trouble.”

  He took me back to 5800 B.P. I observed minor changes in climate; things were drier at some points than at others, drier and cooler. Then we came forward, hopping in easy stages, five hundred years at a time. He apologized for the unvarying nature of the environment; things are more exciting, he promised me, when you go up the line in the Old World. We reached 2058 and made our way to the Time Service building. Entering Hershkowitz’ empty office, we halted for a moment while Sam made a final adjustment on our timers.

  “This has to be done carefully,” he explained. “I want us to land in Hershkowitz’ office thirty seconds after we left it. If I’m off even a little, we’ll meet our departing selves and I’ll be in real trouble.”

  “Why not play it safe and set the dial to bring us back five minutes later, then?”

  “Professional pride,” Sam said.

  We shunted down the line from an empty Hershkowitz office to one in which Hershkowitz sat behind his desk, peering forward at the place where we had been—for him—thirty seconds earlier.

  “Well?” he said.

  Sam beamed. “The kid has balls. I say hire him.”

  8.

  And so they took me on as a novice Time Serviceman, in the Time Courier division. The pay wasn’t bad; the opportunities were limitless. First, though, I had to undergo my training. They don’t let novices schlep tourists around the past just like that.

  For a week nothing much happened. Sam went back to work at the sniffer palace and I lounged around. Then I was called down to the Time Service headquarters to begin taking instruction.

  There were eight in my class, all of us novices. We made a pretty disreputable crew. In age we ranged from early twenties to—I think—late seventies; in sex we ranged from male to female with every possible gradation between; in mental outlook we were all something on the rapacious side. Our instructor, Najeeb Dajani, wasn’t much better. He was a Syrian whose family had converted to Judaism after the Israeli conquest, for business reasons, and he wore a glittering, conspicuous Star of David as an insignia of his faith; but in moments of abstraction or stress he was known to evoke Allah or swear by the Prophet’s beard, and I don’t know if I’d really trust him on the board of directors of my synagogue, if I had a synagogue. Dajani looked like a stage Arab, swarthy and sinister, with dark sunglasses at all times, an array of massive gold rings on twelve or thirteen of his fingers, and a quick, amiable smile that showed several rows of very white teeth. I later found out that he had been taken off the lucrative Crucifixion run and demoted to this instructorship for a period of six months, by orders of the Time Patrol, by way of punishment. It seems he had been conducting a side business in fragments of the True Cross, peddling them all up and down the time lines. The rules don’t allow a Courier to take advantage of his position for private profit. What the Patrol especially objected to was not that Dajani was selling fake relics, but that he was selling authentic ones.

  We began with a history lesson.

  “Commercial time-travel,” Dajani said, “has been functioning about twenty years now. Of course, research into the Benchley Effect began toward the end of the last century, but you understand that the government could not permit private citizens to venture into temponautics until it was ruled to be perfectly safe. In this way the government benevolently oversees the welfare of all.”

  Dajani emitted a broad wink, visible through the dark glasses as a corrugation of his brow.

  Miss Dalessandro in the front row belched in contempt.

  “You disagree?” Dajani asked.

  Miss Dalessandro, who was a plump but curiously small-breasted woman with black hair, distinct Sapphic urges, and a degree in the history of the industrial revolution, began to reply, but Dajani smoothly cut her off and continued, “The Time Service, in one of whose divisions you have enrolled, performs several important functions. To us is entrusted the care and maintenance of all Benchley Effect devices. Also, our research division constantly endeavors to improve the technological substructure of time transport, and in fact the timer now in use was introduced only four years ago. To our own division—the Time Couriers—is assigned the task of escorting citizens into the past.” He folded his hands complacently over his paunch and studied the interlocking patterns of his gold rings. “Much of our activity is concerned with the tourist trade. This provides our economic basis. For large fees, we take groups of eight or ten sightseers on carefully conducted trips to the past, usually accompanied by one Courier, although two may be sent in unusually complex situations. At any given moment in now-time, there may be a hundred thousand tourists scattered over the previous millennia, observing the Crucifixion, the signing of the Magna Carta, the assassination of Lincoln, and such events. Because of the paradoxes inherent in creating a cumulative audience for an event located at a fixed position in the time stream, we are faced with an increasingly difficult task, and limit our tours accordingly.”

  “Would you explain that, sir?” said Miss Dalessandro.

  “At a later meeting,” Dajani replied. He went on, “Naturally, we must not confine time travel exclusively to tourists. Historians must have access to all significant events of the past, since it is necessary to revise all existing views of history in the light of the revelation of the real story. We set aside out of the profits of our tourist business a certain number of scholarships for qualified historians, enabling them to visit periods of their research without cost. These tours, too, are conducted by Courier. However, you will not be concerned with this aspect of our work. We anticipate assigning all of you who qualify as Couriers to the tourist division.

  “The other division of the Time Service is the Time Patrol, whose task it is to prevent abuses of Benchley Effect devices and to guard against the emergence of paradoxes. At our next lesson we will consider in detail the nature of these paradoxes and how they may be avoided. Dismissed.”

 
We had a small social session after Dajani left the room. Miss Dalessandro, moving in a determined whirl of hairy armpits, closed in on blonde, delicate Miss Chambers, who promptly fled toward Mr. Chudnik, a brawny, towering gentleman with the vaguely noble look of a Roman bronze. Mr. Chudnik, however, was in the process of trying to reach an accommodation with Mr. Burlingame, a dapper young man who could not possibly have been as homosexual as he looked and acted. And so, seeking some other shelter from the predatory Miss Dalessandro, Miss Chambers turned to me and invited me to take her home. I accepted. It developed that Miss Chambers was a student of later Roman imperial history, which meant that her field of interest dovetailed with mine. We sexed in a perfunctory and mechanical way, since she was not really very interested in sex but was just doing it out of politeness, and then we talked about the conversion of Constantine to Christianity until the early hours of the morning. I think she fell in love with me. I gave her no encouragement, though, and it didn’t last. I admired her scholarship but her pale little body was quite a bore.

  9.

  At our next lesson we considered in detail the nature of the time-travel paradoxes and how they may be avoided.

  “Our greatest challenge,” Dajani began, “lies in maintaining the sanctity of now-time. The development of Benchley Effect devices has opened a Pandora’s Box of potential paradoxes. No longer is the past a fixed quantity, since we are free now to travel up the line to any given point and alter the so-called ‘real’ events. The results of such alteration would of course be catastrophic, creating a widening vector of disruption that, by the time it had reached our own era, might transform every aspect of society.” Dajani yawned politely. “Consider, if you will, the consequences of permitting a time-traveler to journey to the year 600 and assassinate the youthful Mohammed. The whole dynamic movement of Islam will thus be arrested at its starting point; there will be no Arab conquest of the Near East and southern Europe; the Crusades will not have taken place; millions who died as a result of the Islamic invasions will now not have died, and numerous lines of progeny that would not otherwise have existed at all will come into being, with incalculable effects. All this stems simply from the slaying of a certain young merchant of Mecca. And therefore—”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Miss Dalessandro, “there’s a Law of Conservation of History which would provide that if Mohammed didn’t happen, some other charismatic Arab would arise and play precisely the same role?”

  Dajani glowered at her.

  “We do not care to risk it,” he said. “We prefer to see to it that all ‘past’ events, as recorded in the annals of history as compiled prior to the era of time-travel, go untouched. For the past fifty years of now-time the entire previous span of history, thought to be fixed, has been potentially fluid; yet we struggle to keep it fixed. Thus we employ the Time Patrol to make certain that everything will happen in the past exactly as it did happen, no matter how unfortunate an event it might be. Disasters, assassinations, tragedies of all kinds must occur on schedule, for otherwise the future—our now-time—may be irreparably changed.”

  Miss Chambers said, “But isn’t the very fact of our presence in the past a changing of the past?”

  “I was about to reach that point,” said Dajani, displeased. “If we assume that the past and present form a single continuum, then obviously visitors from the twenty-first century were present at all the great events of the past, unobtrusively enough so that no mention of them found its way into the annals of the fixed-time era. So we take great care to camouflage everyone who goes up the line in the costume of the time being visited. One must watch the past without meddling, as a silent bystander, as inconspicuous as possible. This is a rule that the Time Patrol enforces with absolute inflexibility. I will discuss the nature of that enforcement shortly.

  “I spoke the other day of cumulative audience paradox. This is a severe philosophical problem which has not yet been resolved, and which I will present to you now purely as a theoretical exercise, to give you some insight into the complexities of our undertaking. Consider this: the first time-traveler to go up the line to view the Crucifixion of Jesus was the experimentalist Barney Navarre, in 2012. Over the succeeding two decades, another fifteen or twenty experimentalists made the same journey. Since the commencement of commercial excursions to Golgotha in 2041, approximately one tourist group a month—or 100 tourists a year—has viewed the scene. Thus about 1800 individuals of the twenty-first century, so far, have observed the Crucifixion. Now, then: each of these groups is leaving from a different month, but every one of them is converging on the same day! If tourists continue to go up the line at a rate of 100 a year to see the Crucifixion, the crowd at Golgotha will consist of at least 10,000 time-travelers by the middle of the twenty-second century, and—assuming no increase in the permissible tourist trade—by the early thirtieth century, some 100,000 time-travelers will have made the trip, all of them necessarily congregating simultaneously at the site of the Passion. Yet obviously no such crowds are present there now, only a few thousand Palestinians—when I say ‘now,’ I mean of course the time of the Crucifixion relative to now-time 2059—and just as obviously those crowds will continue to grow in the centuries of now-time. Taken to its ultimate, the cumulative audience paradox yields us the picture of an audience of billions of time-travelers piled up in the past to witness the Crucifixion, filling all the Holy Land and spreading out into Turkey, into Arabia, even to India and Iran. Similarly for every other significant event in human history: as commercial time-travel progresses, it must inevitably smother every event in a horde of spectators, yet at the original occurrence of those events, no such hordes were present! How is this paradox to be resolved?”

  Miss Dalessandro had no suggestions. For once, she was stumped. So were the rest of us. So was Dajani. So are the finest minds of our era.

  Meanwhile, the past fills up with time-traveling sightseers.

  Dajani tossed one final twister at us before he let us go. “I may add,” he said, “that I myself, as a Courier, have done the Crucifixion run twenty-two times, with twenty-two different groups. If you were to attend the Crucifixion yourselves tomorrow, you would find twenty-two Najeeb Dajanis at the hill of Golgotha simultaneously, each of me occupying a different position at the event explaining the happening to my clients. Is this multiplication of Dajanis not a fascinating thing to consider? Why are there not twenty-two Dajanis at loose in now-time? It stretches the intellect to revolve such thoughts. Dismissed, dear ladies and gentlemen, dismissed.”

  10.

  I was troubled about those twenty-one extra Dajanis, but the smart alecks in the class quickly figured out why they hadn’t all jammed up together here in now-time. It had to do with the fundamental limitations of the Benchley Effect in achieving down-the-line, or forward, travel.

  My classmate Mr. Burlingame explained it all to me after class. It was his quaint way of trying to seduce me. He didn’t score, but I learned a little time theory.

  When you go down the line, he told me, you can come forward only as far as you had previously jumped up the line, plus the amount of absolute time elapsed during your stay up the line. That is, if you jump from March 20, 2059, say, to the spring of 1801, and spend three months in 1801, you can come forward again as far as June 20, 2059. But you can’t jump down the line to August, 2059, nor can you jump to 2159 or 20590.

  There is no way at all to get into your own future.

  I don’t know why this is so. Mr. Burlingame placed his pale palm on my knee and gave me the theoretical substructure for it, but I was too busy fending him off to follow it.

  In fact, although Dajani later spent three sessions simply instructing us on the mechanics of the Benchley Effect, I still can’t say for sure how the whole thing works, or why, or even if. At times I suspect I’ve dreamed it all.

  Anyway, there aren’t twenty-two Dajanis in now-time because whenever Dajani made the Crucifixion run, he always jumped back to now-time at a point somewhat pri
or to his next departure for the past. He couldn’t help himself about that; if you go up the line in January, spend a couple of weeks in an earlier era, and come back, you’ve got to land in January or maybe February of the year you started from. And if your next jump isn’t scheduled until March, there’s no way you can overlap yourself.

  So the Dajani who escorted tourists to Golgotha was always the “same” one, from the point of view of people in now-time. At the other end of the jump, though, a couple dozen Dajanis have been piling up, since he keeps jumping from different points in now-time to the same point in then-time. The same happens to anybody who makes repeated jumps to one spot up the line. This is the Paradox of Temporal Accumulation. You can have it.

  When not wrestling with such paradoxes I passed my time pleasantly in pleasure, as usual. There were always plenty of willing girls hanging around Sam’s place.

  In those days I chased crotch quite a bit. Obsessively, even. The pursuit of cunt occupied all my idle hours; it seemed a night wasted if I hadn’t slid down that slippery slope at least once. It never occurred to me that it might be worthwhile for me to seek a relationship with a member of the opposite sex that was more than six inches deep. What they call “love.”

  Shallow, callow youth that I was, I wasn’t interested in “love.”

  On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t so shallow. For now I’ve tried “love” and I don’t see where I’m the happier for it. I’m a lot worse off than before, as a matter of fact.

  Of course, nobody told me to fall in love with someone who lived up the line.

  11.

  Lieutenant Bruce Sanderson of the Time Patrol came to our class one day to explain to us the perils of daring to meddle with the fixity of past time.