They left the foundry and trudged across the broad concrete of a landing field to where the fat needle of the auxiliary ship lay. They mounted the ramp to the side port and entered the ship. Inside, the engineer called: "It's happened again, boys. Let's go!"
The port swung shut behind them. Spacemen drifted up from the surrounding corridors and rooms. They were rangy and tough-looking and the snub-nosed paralyzers glinted casually in their hands as though they'd been cleaning them and merely happened to bring them along. The foundryman looked around for a long time. At last he said: "So it's this way?"
"Yes, it's this way. Sorry."
"I'd like you to meet some of my friends, some day—"
"Perhaps we will."
"They'll have an easier time with you than you're gonna have with me!" He clenched fists and poised himself to spring.
The engineer said: "Hey—wait a minute. Don't lose your head. You did me a good turn back there. I'd like to return the favor. I've got more credit than I know what to do with."
The foundryman gave him a perplexed glance. He relaxed and began to rub his chin dubiously.
He said: "Damn if this isn't a sociable ship. I feel friendlier already—"
The engineer grinned.
I called, "That's enough. Cut it," and the scene vanished.
"Well?" Yarr asked eagerly.
I said: "We're really in the groove now. Let's check back and locate the Stabilization debates on Rule 930." I turned to the C-S. "What's the latest rule number, sir?"
Groating said: "Seven fifteen."
The controller had already been figuring. He said: "Figuring the same law-production rate that would put Rule 930 about six hundred years from now. Is that right, Mr. Groating?"
The old man nodded and Yarr went back to his keyboard. I'm not going to bother you with what we all went through because a lot of it was very dull. For the benefit of the hermit from the Moon I'll just mention that we hung around the Stability Library until we located the year S. R. 930 was passed. Then we shifted to Stability headquarters and quick-timed through from January 1st until we picked up the debates on the rule.
The reasons for the rule were slightly bewildering on the one hand, and quite understandable on the other. It seems that in the one hundred and fifty years preceding, almost every Earthwide university had been blown up in the course of an atomic-energy experiment. The blowups were bewildering—the rule understandable. I'd like to tell you about that debate because—well, because things happened that touched me.
The Integrator selected a cool, smooth foyer in the Administration Building at Washington. It had a marble floor like milky ice flecked with gold. One side was broken by a vast square window studded with a thousand round-bottle panes that refracted the afternoon sunlight into showers of warm color. In the background were two enormous doors of synthetic oak. Before those doors stood a couple in earnest conversation—a nice-looking boy with a portfolio under his arm, and a stunning girl. The kind with sleek-shingled head and one of those clean-cut faces that look fresh and wind-washed.
The controller said: "Why, that's the foyer to the Seminar Room. They haven't changed it at all in six hundred years."
Groating said: "Stability!" and chuckled.
Yarr said: "The debate is going on inside. I'll shift scene—"
"No-wait," I said. "Let's watch this for a while." I don't know why I wanted to—except that the girl made my pulse run a little faster and I felt like looking at her for a couple of years.
She was half crying. She said: "Then, if for no other reason for my sake."
"For yours!" The boy looked harassed.
She nodded. "You'll sweep away his life work with a few words and a few sheets of paper."
"My own work, too."
"Oh, but won't you understand? You're young. I'm young. Youth loves to shatter the old idols. It feasts on the broken shards of destruction. It destroys the old ideas to make way for its own. But he's not young like us. He has only his past work to live on. If you shatter that, he'll have nothing left but a futile resentment. I'll be pent up with a broken old man who'll destroy me along with himself. Darling, I'm not saying you're wrong—I'm only asking you to wait a little."
She was crying openly now. The boy took her by the arm and led her to the crusted window. She turned her face away from the light—away from him. The boy said: "He was my teacher. I worship him. What I'm doing now may seem like treachery, but it's only treachery to his old age. I'm keeping faith with what he was thirty years ago—with the man who would have done the same thing to his teacher."
She cried: "But are you keeping faith with me? You, who will have all the joy of destroying and none of the tedious sweeping away the pieces. What of my life and all the weary years to come when I must coddle him and soothe him and lead him through the madness of forgetting what you've done to him?"
"You'll spend your life with me. I break no faith with you, Barbara."
She laughed bitterly. "How easily you evade reality. I shall spend my life with you—and in that short sentence, poof!"—she flicked her hand—"you dismiss everything. Where will he live? Alone? With us? Where?"
"That can be arranged."
"You're so stubborn, so pig-headed in your smug, righteous truth-seeking. Steven—for the very last time—please. Wait until he's gone. A few years, that's all. Leave him in peace. Leave us in peace."
He shook his head and started toward the oaken doors. "A few years waiting to salvage the pride of an old man, a few more catastrophes, a few more thousand lives lost—it doesn't add up."
She sagged against the window, silhouetted before the riot of color, and watched him cross to the doors. All the tears seemed drained out of her. She was so limp I thought she would fall to the floor at any instant. And then, as I watched her, I saw her stiffen and I realized that another figure had entered the foyer and was rushing toward the boy. It was an oldish man, bald and with an ageless face of carved ivory. He was tall and terribly thin. His eyes were little pits of embers.
He called: "Steven!"
The boy stopped and turned.
"Steven, I want to talk to you."
"It's no use, sir!"
"You're headstrong, Steven. You pit a few years research against my work of a lifetime. Once I respected you. I thought you would carry on for me as I've carried on for the generations that came before me."
"I am, sir."
"You are not." The old man clutched at the boy's tunic and spoke intensely. "You betray all of us. You will cut short a line of research that promises the salvation of humanity. In five minutes you will wipe out five centuries of work. You owe it to those who slaved before us not to let their sweat go in vain."
The boy said: "I have a debt also to those who may die."
"You think too much of death, too little of life. What if a thousand more are killed—ten thousand—in the end it will be worth it."
"It will never be worth it. There will never be an end. The theory has always been wrong, faultily premised."
"You fool!" the old man cried. "You damned, blasted young fool. You can't go in there!"
"I'm going, sir. Let go."
"I won't let you go in."
The boy pulled his arm free and reached for the doorknob. The old man seized him again and yanked him off balance. The boy muttered angrily, set himself and thrust the old man back. There was a flailing blur of motion and a cry from the girl. She left the window, ran across the room and thrust herself between the two. And in that instant she screamed again and stepped back. The boy sagged gently to the floor, his mouth opened to an O of astonishment. He tried to speak and then relaxed. The girl dropped to her knees alongside him and tried to get his head on her lap. Then she stopped.
That was all. No shot or anything. I caught a glimpse of a metallic barrel in the old man's hand as he hovered frantically over the dead boy. He cried: "I only meant to—I—" and kept on whimpering.
After a while the girl turned her head as though i
t weighed a ton, and looked up. Her face was suddenly frostbitten. In dull tones she said: "Go away, father."
The old man said: "I only—" His lips continued to twitch, but he made no sound.
The girl picked up the portfolio and got to her feet. Without glancing again at her father, she opened the doors, stepped in and closed them behind her with a soft click. The debating voices broke off at the sight of her. She walked to the head of the table, set the portfolio down, opened it and took out a sheaf of typescript. Then she looked at the amazed men who were seated around the table gaping at her.
She said: "I regret to inform the stabilizers that Mr. Steven Wilder has been unavoidably detained. As his fiancee and coworker, however, I have been delegated to carry on his mission and present his evidence to the committee—" She paused and went rigid, fighting for control.
One of the stabilizers said: "Thank you. Will you give your evidence, Miss . . . Miss?"
"Barbara Leeds."
"Thank you, Miss Leeds. Will you continue?"
With the gray ashes of a voice she went on: "We are heartily in favor of S. R. 930 prohibiting any further experimentation in atomic energy dynamics. All such experiments have been based on—almost inspired by the FitzJohn axioms and mathematics. The catastrophic detonations which have resulted must invariably result since the basic premises are incorrect. We shall prove that the backbone of FitzJohn's equations is entirely in error. I speak of i=(b/a) ∏ i e/μ . . ."
She glanced at the notes, hesitated for an instant and then continued: "FitzJohn's errors are most easily pointed out if we consider the Leeds Derivations involving transfinite cardinals—"
The tragic voice droned on.
I said: "C-cut."
There was silence.
We sat there feeling bleak and cold, and for no reason at all, the icy sea-green opening bars of Debussy's "La Mer" ran through my head. I thought: "I'm proud to be a human—not because I think or I am, but because I can feel. Because humanity can reach out to us across centuries, from the past or future, from facts or imagination, and touch us—move us."
At last I said: "We're moving along real nice now."
No answer.
I tried again: "Evidently that secret experiment that destroyed existence was based on this FitzJohn's erroneous theory, eh?"
The C-S stirred and said: "What? Oh—Yes, Carmichael, quite right."
In low tones the controller said: "I wish it hadn't happened. He was a nice-looking youngster, that Wilder—promising."
I said: "In the name of heaven, sir, it's not going to happen if we pull ourselves together. If we can locate the very beginning and change it he'll probably marry the girl and live happily ever after."
"Of course—" The controller was confused. "I hadn't realized."
I said: "We've got to hunt back a lot more and locate this FitzJohn. He seems to be the key man in this puzzle."
And how we searched. Boys, it was like working a four-dimensional jig saw, the fourth dimension in this case being time. We located a hundred universities that maintained chairs and departments exclusively devoted to FitzJohn's mathematics and theories. We slipped back a hundred years toward the present and found only fifty and in those fifty were studying the men whose pupils were to fill the chairs a century later.
Another century back and there were only a dozen universities that followed the FitzJohn theories. They filled the scientific literature with trenchant, belligerent articles on FitzJohn, and fought gory battles with his opponents. How we went through the libraries. How many shoulders we looked over. How many pages of equations we snap-photographed from the whirling octahedron for future reference. And finally we worked our way back to Bowdoin College, where FitzJohn himself had taught, where he worked out his revolutionary theories and where he made his first converts. We were on the home stretch.
FitzJohn was a fascinating man. Medium height, medium color, medium build—his body had the rare trick of perfect balance. No matter what he was doing, standing, sitting, walking, he was always exquisitely poised. He was like the sculptor's idealization of the perfect man. FitzJohn never smiled. His face was cut and chiseled as though from a roughish sandstone; it had the noble dignity of an Egyptian carving. His voice was deep, unimpressive in quality, yet unforgettable for the queer, intense stresses it laid on his words. Altogether he was an enigmatic creature.
He was enigmatic for another reason, too, for although we traced his career at Bowdoin backward and forward for all its forty years, although we watched him teach the scores and scores of disciples who afterward went out into the scholastic world to take up the fight for him-we could never trace FitzJohn back into his youth. It was impossible to pick him up at any point earlier than his first appearance on the physics staff of the college. It seemed as though he were deliberately concealing his identity.
Yarr raged with impotent fury. He said: "It's absolutely aggravating. Here we follow the chain back to less than a half century from today and we're blocked—" He picked up a small desk phone and called upstairs to the data floors. "Hullo, Cullen? Get me all available date on the name FitzJohn. FitzJOHN. What's the matter, you deaf? F-I-T-Z . . . That's right. Be quick about it."
I said: "Seems as if FitzJohn didn't want people to know where he came from."
"Well," Yarr said pettishly, "that's impossible. I'll trace him backward, second by second, if I have to!"
I said: "That would take a little time, wouldn't it?"
"Yes."
"Maybe a couple of years?"
"What of it; You said we had a thousand."
"I didn't mean you to take me seriously, Dr. Yarr."
The small pneumatic at Yarr's desk whirred and clicked. Out popped a cartridge. Yarr opened it and withdrew a list of figures, and they were appalling. Something like two hundred thousand FitzJohns on the Earth alone. It would take a decade to check the entire series through the Integrator. Yarr threw the figures to the floor in disgust and swiveled around to face us.
"Well?" he asked.
I said: "Seems hopeless to check FitzJohn back second by second. At that rate we might just as well go through all the names on the list."
"What else is there to do?"
I said: "Look, the Prognosticator flirted twice with something interesting when we were conning FitzJohn's career. It was something mentioned all through the future, too."
"I don't recall—" the C-S began.
"It was a lecture, sir," I explained. FitzJohn's first big lecture when he set out to refute criticism. I think we ought to pick that up and go through it with a fine comb. Something is bound to come out of it."
"Very well."
Images blurred across the spinning crystal as Yarr hunted for the scene. I caught fuzzy fragments of a demolished Manhattan City with giant crablike creatures mashing helpless humans, their scarlet chiton glittering. Then an even blurrier series of images. A city of a single stupendous building towering like Babel into the heavens; a catastrophic fire roaring along the Atlantic seaboard; then a sylvan civilization of odd, naked creatures flitting from one giant flower to another. But they were all so far off focus they made my eyes ache. The sound was even worse.
Groating leaned toward me and whispered: "Merely vague possibilities—"
I nodded and then riveted my attention to the crystal, for it held a clear scene. Before us lay an amphitheater. It was modeled on the ancient Greek form, a horseshoe of gleaming whitestone terraces descending to a small square white rostrum. Behind the rostrum and surrounding the uppermost tiers of seats was a simple colonnade. The lovely and yet noble dignity was impressive.
The controller said: "Hel-lo, I don't recognize this."
"Plans are in the architectural offices," Groating said. "It isn't due for construction for another thirty years. We intend placing it at the north end of Central Park—"
It was difficult to hear them. The room was filled with the bellow and roar of shouting from the amphitheater. It was packed from pit to gallery wi
th quick-jerking figures. They climbed across the terraces; they fought up and down the broad aisles; they stood on their seats and waved. Most of all they opened their mouths into gaping black blots and shouted. The hoarse sound rolled like slow, thunderous waves, and there was a faint rhythm struggling to emerge from the chaos.
A figure appeared from behind the columns, walked calmly up to the platform and began arranging cards on the small table. It was FitzJohn, icy and self-possessed, statuesque in his white tunic. He stood alongside the table, carefully sorting his notes, utterly oblivious of the redoubled roar that went up at his appearance. Out of that turmoil came the accented beats of a doggerel rhyme:
Neon
Crypton
Ammoniated
FitzJohn
Neon
Crypton
Ammoniated
FitzJohn
When he was finished, FitzJohn straightened and, resting the fingertips of his right hand lightly on top of the table, he gazed out at the rioting—unsmiling, motionless. The pandemonium was reaching unprecedented heights. As the chanting continued, costumed figures appeared on the terrace tops and began fighting down the aisles toward the platform. There were men wearing metal-tubed frameworks representing geometric figures. Cubes, spheres, rbomboids and tesseracts. They hopped and danced outlandishly.
Two young boys began unreeling a long streamer from a drum concealed behind the colonnade. It was of white silk and an endless equation was printed on it that read:
eia=l+ia-a2!+a3!-a4!. . . .
and so on, yard after yard after yard. It didn't exactly make sense, but I understood it to be some kind of cutting reference to FitzJohn's equations.
There were hundreds of others, some surprising and many obscure. Lithe contortionists, made up to represent Möbius Strips, grasped ankles with their hands and went rolling down the aisles. A dozen girls appeared from nowhere, clad only in black net, representing giant Aleph-Nulls, and began an elaborate ballet. Great gas-filled balloons, shaped into weird topological manifolds were dragged in and bounced around.
It was utter insanity and utterly degrading to see how these mad college kids were turning FitzJolhn's lecture into a Mardi Gras. They were college kids, of course, crazy youngsters who probably couldn't explain the binomial theorem, but nevertheless were giving their own form of expression to their teachers' antagonism to FitzJohn. I thought vaguely of the days centuries back when a thousand Harvard undergraduates did a very similar thing when Oscar Wilde came to lecture. Undergraduates whose entire reading probably consisted of the Police Gazette.