Alternating Currents

  He said impatiently, ‘What kind of power ? Electric ? Don’t try to kid me, fellow; you’d never cross the Atlantic with electric power.’

  I shook my head. ‘The engines are gasoline, of course. But the-’

  ‘Gasoline!’ The man’s look was suddenly intent. He wore a rather shabby blue uniform. I don’t think he made a move, but at that exact moment I realized he had a gun in a side holster. ‘Let’s see the registration papers,’ he repeated. ‘Quick!’

  ‘We don’t have any.’ I was getting exasperated. ‘We don’t come from your time at all - that is, it’s the same time, but a different probability line. Don’t you understand? We ...’

  There was something about his expression. I stopped suddenly and thought for a second. Then I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry if I’m confusing. Take my word for it, this is something important and I can’t explain it to you. Can you put me in touch with a physicist ?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A physicist, preferably one with a speciality in nucleonics. Or any scientist, for that matter.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘You don’t have a mooring permit, do you ?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘I see.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, and clambered back down the side. I looked rather sternly around at my crew, fully aware that I had made a mess of our first contact with the world we had sired. But they were not acting very critical.

  Marin still looked scared. Lee was at the rail on the other side of the barge; he was pitching coins into the water, and the youths from the dinghy - in fact, people from half a dozen little boats, and not all of them youths - were diving after them, with a good deal of squabbling.

  The man in the blue uniform was back in a moment with another man, this one in a brown uniform, equally shabby.

  ‘- case for the Feds, not us,’ Blue Uniform was saying as they approached. ‘Possession of gasoline, no papers, claims they came from abroad.’

  Brown Uniform nodded and said crisply to me, ’You’ll have to come with us.’

  Blue Uniform asked sharply, ‘Where ?’

  ‘New York City Hall, of course. This is a New York police launch and -’

  ‘And a two-state harbour patrol, mac! Don’t forget it! We’ll take him to Jersey City. None of your crummy slum families are going to settle on this barge. We need housing space as much as you do!’

  ‘What about the gasoline?’ Brown Uniform yelled. ‘New York’s got a sixty per cent quota drag! We’re entitled to every drop that comes into the harbour until it’s made up and you can take -’

  Blue Uniform suddenly shrugged. ‘Forget it,’ he said in a different tone. ‘We could have worked something out. Well, never mind, mac. Here come the Feds, so we’re both out of luck.’

  ~ * ~

  The Feds were as shabbily uniformed as the others, but they wore sharp-visored caps, and they took us neither to New York nor to New Jersey, but to the floating colossus beyond the Narrows, which turned out to be a sort of moored hulk doubling as a fort and administrative headquarters. It wasn’t an unpleasant trip, except that the water was sludge-grey in colour and stank as it sprayed over the wales. Since we weren’t going very fast, not much sprayed, which was a blessing.

  I said gratefully to the officer in charge of the boat, ‘Thanks for getting rid of those two. They didn’t seem able to understand what I was trying to say. If you can put me in touch with some sort of scientist, I’m sure I can explain things to him. You see, we’ve been doing research in parachronon penetration. Very important research. It is no exaggeration to say that every man alive today owes his life to us! Do you understand ? It’s as if-’

  He interrupted me. ’How much gasoline have you got ?’

  It was a clear waste of time to talk to this one, so I merely sat in silence until we arrived at the floating headquarters. They had refused to allow me to leave either Lee or Marin on the barge and I was feeling nervous about what the boarding party might be doing to our reactor. When I said something to Lee, though, he reassured me.

  ‘Not enough power in it now to hurt a kitten,’ he said positively. ‘We drained it dry on the bolt.’

  ‘Suppose they recharge the reactor ?’ I argued.

  ‘With what ? We stockpiled all the reserve fuel. We couldn’t keep it in close proximity to the reactor, after all. No, don’t worry, Jom; they might mess up the instruments a little, but there won’t be any nuclear explosions, believe me. Relax. Look around and enjoy yourself. This is it, Jom, the world we’ve dreamed of! It isn’t an atomic wreck any more. It’s free, unspoiled, untainted.’

  I looked at him sharply, but there was no hint of mockery in his voice or his eyes. And, getting a grip on myself, I began to see that he was right. True, things were not exactly as I had always dreamed them in this new world. I hadn’t quite counted on the hordes of people, certainly more even than the history books told of, or the evident shortage of resources and raw materials. But there were no ray scars on New York City in this world and if Target One had never been blasted, surely the rest of the world escaped!

  I followed Lee’s advice: I relaxed.

  Until they did as I asked and, after irritable wrangling, put me in touch with a scientist whose speciality was nucleonics.

  ~ * ~

  ‘So!’ he hissed, eyes angry through the thick glasses, the silver insignia of rank on his collar glittering and dancing as he swallowed. ‘So you admit you have classified material on your barge!’

  I said wearily, ‘I tell you there’s nothing classified about it.’

  He stared at me. ‘Nothing classified about an atomic reactor ?’ he demanded. Only he spaced it out, each word with an angry emphasis of its own: Nothing. Classified. About. An. Atomic. Reactor?

  ‘Of course not! Not where we come from, I mean. I -’

  ‘Enough!’ he cut me off. ‘I mention to you two names: One is “V. S. Kretchwood”. And the other -’ He looked at me shrewdly through the glasses - ‘is “Brazil”. Am I correct?’

  ‘About what ?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Don’t try to make a fool out of me! You come from Brazil and your reactor is based on Kretchwood’s First Law. Don’t try to deny it!’

  I swallowed my anger and tried to placate him. ‘I have never been in Brazil in my life. I know where it is, yes. There is - there was, that is - a large population there, more than fifteen thousand. But this Kretchwood you talk of is absolutely new to me. Our reactor is based on Einstein’s equation, but I know you never heard of Einstein. That’s the whole point!’ And I went through the whole explanation again.

  He passed his hand over his forehead. ‘Almost, I begin to believe you. Silly of me, I know, but -’

  ‘No, it isn’t silly! It’s the absolute truth,’ I insisted. ‘I can prove it to you; just examine our workdeck. You who know nothing of atomic energy will find it hard to understand, but -’

  ‘We do.’

  - ‘but matter and energy are the same - You what?’

  ‘We do know about atomic energy,’ he said. ‘That’s Kretchwood’s First Law: “E is greater than e-sub-n plus e-sub-o”.’ He scribbled it on a pad of paper: E>en+eo. ‘That is, the total energy of an atom is more than the aggregate energy of its nuclear and orbital particles, which means that, by transmutation, energy can be released. V. S. Kretchwood, 1903-1986, if I remember correctly.’

  I stared blankly. They knew about binding energy; they knew about fission and fusion; they knew . . .

  ‘But you shouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I mean we’ve killed a man - No, excuse me; I’m a little upset. What you’re saying is that you are aware of the military and civilian implications of atomic energy.’

  ‘There’s a thorium pile going right under your feet,’ he said.

  ‘Uranium 235 -’

  ‘Would be better, of course,’ he nodded. ‘The problem of separation is being worked on.’

  ‘And you propose t
o make a bomb along the lines of the old Manhattan District?’

  ‘We call it Task Forty-four.’

  Lee and Marin and I exchanged glances. ‘So there will be atomic warfare, after all,’ I said dully. ‘But isn’t all this top secret ?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the angry little man with stars on his collar.

  ‘And yet you trust us ?’

  ‘Where you’re going, it makes no difference. We have special - reserve areas, let’s say, for persons in improper possession of information about atomic energy. You won’t spread anything you’ve learned.’

  ‘But there’s nothing improper about it! You said you believed us!’

  He leaned forward sharply. ‘I do,’ he said in thick, hate-filled tones. ‘I believe it’s your doing that the world didn’t have an atomic war two hundred years ago. And while you’re in the reserve areas, bear this in mind: I hope you rot there !’

  ~ * ~

  Sing a dirge for one hundred and fifty thousand children of atomic cataclysm. We killed a man from the past and wiped them out, all of them, with their shattered, festering planet.

  And for nothing.

  It isn’t bad here, in the reserve area, though it is a little crowded. Ours - they call it the Mojave Resettlement Project - is the worst of the lot, because there just isn’t anything in the way of natural resources here. The soil gets fertile enough, with the Los Angeles sludge piped in, but the only water that comes in is right along with the sludge. All the solids come out in the settling tanks and we kill the salts with ion exchange. The smell and the taste stay right in the water, though.

  But we wouldn’t complain, if it were going to stay this way. We wouldn’t complain about the taste of the water, or the restrictions on our freedom, or the congested state of the world. Fourteen billion people!

  They say that a century or so ago, there was a big campaign for birth control, back when there were only about five billion. But anyone can second-guess that: some segments of the population responded to the campaign and most did not. The only result of the effort was that the generations following were even less susceptible to such a campaign.

  But, as I say, we wouldn’t complain, if we couldn’t see on the horizon the flat silhouette of Task Forty-four’s new group of breeder piles. I give us about a year more, that’s all.

  Marin has the bunk above mine. I don’t sleep much, and all through the night, I hear him tossing and turning and muttering to himself. And if I listen closely, I can hear the words that are always the same:

  ‘Poor Dr Einstein,’ he says thickly, and then goes back to sleep.

  Poor Dr Einstein!

  Poor us!

  >

  ~ * ~

  Grandy Devil

  Mahlon begat Timothy, and Timothy begat Nathan, and Nathan begat Roger, and the days of their years were long on the Earth. But then Roger begat Orville, and Orville was a heller. He begat Augustus, Wayne, Walter, Benjamin and Carl, who was my father, and I guess that was going too far, because that was when Gideon Upshur stepped in to take a hand.

  I was kissing Lucille in the parlour when the doorbell rang and she didn’t take kindly to the interruption. He was a big old man with a burned-brown face. He stamped the snow off his feet and stared at me out of crackling blue eyes and demanded, ‘Orvie?’

  I said, ‘My name is George.’

  ‘Wipe the lipstick off your face, George,’ he said, and walked right in.

  Lucille sat up in a hurry and began tucking the ends of her hair in place. He looked at her once and calmly took off his coat and hung it over the back of a chair by the fire and sat down.

  ‘My name is Upshur,’ he said. ‘Gideon Upshur. Where’s Orville Dexter?’

  I had been thinking about throwing him out up until then, but that made me stop thinking about it. It was the first time anybody had come around looking for Orville Dexter in almost a year and we had just begun breathing easily again.

  I said, ‘That’s my grandfather, Mr Upshur. What’s he done now?’

  He looked at me. ‘You’re his grandson? And you ask me what he’s done ?’ He shook his head. ’Where is he ?’

  I told him the truth: ‘We haven’t seen Grandy Orville in five years.’

  ‘And you don’t know where he is ?’

  ‘No, I don’t, Mr Upshur. He never tells anybody where he’s going. Sometimes he doesn’t even tell us after he comes back.’

  The old man pursed his lips. He leaned forward, across Lucille, and poured himself a drink from the Scotch on the side table.

  ‘I swear,’ he said, in a high, shrill, old voice, ‘these Dexters are a caution. Go home.’

  He was talking to Lucille. She looked at him sulkily and opened her mouth, but I cut in.

  ‘This is my fiancée,’ I said.

  ‘Hah,’ he said. ‘No doubt. Well, there’s nothing to do but have it out with Orvie. Is the bed made up in the guestroom ?’

  I protested, ‘Mr Upshur, it isn’t that we aren’t glad to see any friend of Grandy’s, but Lord knows when he’ll be home. It might be tomorrow, it might be six months from now or years.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he said over his shoulder, climbing the stairs.

  ~ * ~

  Having him there wasn’t so bad after the first couple of weeks. I phoned Uncle Wayne about it, and he sounded quite excited.

  ‘Tall, heavy-set old man?’ he asked. ‘Very dark complexion ?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ I said. ‘He seemed to know his way around the house pretty well, too.’

  ‘Well, why wouldn’t he ?’ Uncle Wayne didn’t say anything for a second. ‘Tell you what, George. You get your brothers together and -’

  ‘I can’t, Uncle Wayne,’ I said. ‘Harold’s in the Army. I don’t know where William’s got to.’

  He didn’t say anything for another second. ‘Well, don’t worry. I’ll give you a call as soon as I get back.’

  ‘Are you going somewhere, Uncle Wayne?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘I certainly am, George,’ he said, and hung up.

  So there I was, alone in the house with Mr Upshur. That’s the trouble with being the youngest.

  Lucille wouldn’t come to the house any more, either. I went out to her place a couple of times, but it was too cold to drive the Jaguar and William had taken the big sedan with him when he left, and Lucille refused to go anywhere with me in the jeep. So all we could do was sit in her parlour, and her mother sat right there with us, knitting and making little remarks about Grandy Orvie and that girl in Eatontown.

  ~ * ~

  So, all in all, I was pretty glad when the kitchen door opened and Grandy Orvie walked in.

  ‘Grandy!’ I cried. ‘I’m glad to see you! There’s a man -’

  ‘Hush, George,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Upstairs. He usually takes a nap after I bring him his dinner on a tray.’

  ‘You take his dinner up ? What’s the matter with the servants ?’

  I coughed. ‘Well, Grandy, after that trouble in Eatontown, they -’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said hastily. ‘Go ahead with what you’re doing.’

  I finished scraping the dishes into the garbage-disposer and stacked them in the washer, while he sat there in his overcoat watching me.

  ‘George,’ he said at last, ‘I’m an old man. A very old man.’

  ‘Yes, Grandy,’ I answered.

  ‘My grandfather’s older than I am. And his grandfather is older than that.’

  ‘Well, sure,’ I said reasonably. ‘I never met them, did I, Grandy?’

  ‘No, George. At least, I don’t believe they’ve been home much these last few years. Grandy Timothy was here in ‘86, but I don’t believe you were born yet. Come to think of it, even your dad wasn’t born by then.’

  ‘Dad’s sixty,’ I told him. ‘I’m twenty-one.’

  ‘Certainly you are, George. And your dad thinks a lot of you. He mentio
ned you just a couple of months ago. He said that you were getting to an age where you ought to be told about us Dexters.’

  ‘Told what, Grandy Orville?’ I asked.

  ‘Confound it, George, that’s what I’m coming to! Can’t you see that I’m trying to tell you something? It’s hard to put into words, that’s all.’

  ‘Can I help ?’ said Gideon Upshur from the door.

  Grandy Orville stood up straight and frosty. ‘I’ll thank you, Gideon Upshur, to stay the be-dickens out of a family discussion!‘