The Past Through Tomorrow Read online

  “The Benison should pass by this point in three minutes, John. Tell them to proceed dead slow, come along starboard side, and pick us up. Tell Penoyer I am shifting my flag.”

  We made the transfer without mishap, Huxley, myself, the psychoperator, and his sensitives. One sensitive was dead, killed by a flying splinter. One went into a deep trance and we could not rouse her. We left her in the disabled battlewagon; she was as safe there as she could be.

  I had torn the current plot from my tracker and brought it along. It had the time-predicted plots for Formation E. We would have to struggle along with those, as the tracker could not be moved and was probably beyond casual repair in any case. Huxley studied the chart.

  “Shift to full communication mesh, John. I plan to assault shortly.”

  I helped the psychoperator get his circuits straightened out. By dropping the Martyr out entirely and by using “Pass down the line” on Penoyer’s auxiliaries, we made up for the loss of two sensitives. All carried four circuits now, except the boy who had five, and the girl with the cough, who was managing six. The psychoperator was worried but there was nothing to do about it.

  I turned back to General Huxley. He had seated himself and at first I thought he was in deep thought; then I saw that he was unconscious. It was not until I tried to rouse him and failed that I saw the blood seeping down the support column of his chair and wetting the floor plates. I moved him gently and found, sticking out from between his ribs near his spine, a steel splinter.

  I felt a touch at my elbow, it was the psychoperator. “Penoyer reports that he will be within assault radius in four minutes. Requests permission to change formation and asks time of execution.”

  Huxley was out. Dead or wounded, he would fight no more this battle. By all rules, command devolved on Penoyer, and I should tell him so at once. But rime was pressing hard, it would involve a drastic change of set-up, and we had been forced to send Penoyer into battle with only three sensitives. It was a physical impossibility.

  What should I do? Turn the flag over to the skipper of the Benison? I knew the man, stolid, unimaginative, a gunner by disposition. He was not even in his conning tower but had been fighting his ship from the fire control station in the turret. If I called him down here, he would take many minutes to comprehend the situation—and then give the wrong orders.

  With Huxley out I had not an ounce of real authority. I was a brevet short-tailed colonel, only days up from major and a legate by rights; I was what I was as Huxley’s flunky. Should I turn command over to Penoyer—and lose the battle with proper military protocol? What would Huxley have me do, if he could make the decision?

  It seemed to me that I worried that problem for an hour. The chronograph showed thirteen seconds between reception of Penoyer’s despatch and my answer:

  “Change formation at will. Stand by for execution signal in six minutes.” The order given, I sent word to the forward dressing station to attend to the General.

  I shifted the right wing to assault echelon, then called the transport Sweet Chariot: “Sub-plan D; leave formation and proceed on duty assigned.” The psychoperator eyed me but transmitted my orders. Sub-plan D called for five hundred light infantry to enter the Palace through the basement of the department store that was connected with the lodge room. From the lodge room they would split into squads and proceed on assigned tasks. All of our shock troops had all the plans of the Palace graven into their brains; these five hundred had had additional drill as to just where they were to go, what they were to do.

  Most of them would be killed, but they should be able to create confusion during the assault. Zeb had trained them and now commanded them.

  We were ready. “All units, stand by to assault. Right wing, outer flank of right bastion; left wing, outer flank of left bastion. Zigzag emergency full speed until within assault distance. Deploy for full concentration fire, one salvo, and assault. Stand by to execute. Acknowledge.”

  The acknowledgments were coming in and I was watching my chronometer preparatory to giving the command of execution when the boy sensitive broke off in the middle of a report and shook himself. The technician grabbed the kid’s wrist and felt for his pulse; the boy shook him off.

  “Somebody new,” he said. “I don’t quite get it.” Then he commenced in a sing-song, “To commanding general from Lodge Master Peter van Eyck: assault center bastion with full force. I will create a diversion.”

  “Why the center?” I asked.

  “It is much more damaged.”

  If this were authentic, it was crucially important. But I was suspicious. If Master Peter had been detected, it was a trap. And I didn’t see how he, in his position, had been able to set up a sensitive circuit in the midst of battle.

  “Give me the word,” I said.

  “Nay, you give me.”

  “Nay, I will not.”

  “I will spell it, or halve it.”

  “Spell it, then.”

  We did so. I was satisfied. “Cancel last signal. Heavy cruisers assault center bastion, left wing to left flank, right wing to right flank. Odd numbered auxiliaries make diversion assaults on right and left bastions. Even numbers remain with transports. Acknowledge.”

  Nineteen seconds later I gave the command to execute, then we were off. It was like riding a rocket plane with a dirty, over-heated firing chamber. We crashed through walls of masonry, lurched sickeningly on turns, almost overturned when we crashed into the basement of some large demolished building and lumbered out again. It was out of my hands now, up to each skipper.

  As we slewed into firing position, I saw the psychoperator peeling back the boy’s eyelids. “I’m afraid he’s gone,” he said tonelessly. “I had to over-load him too much on that last hook-up.” Two more of the women had collapsed.

  Our big gun cut loose for the final salvo; we waited for an interminable period—all of ten seconds. Then we were moving, gathering speed as we rolled. The Benison hit the Palace wall with a blow that I thought would wreck her, but she did not mount. But the pilot had his forward hydraulic jacks down as soon as we hit; her bow reared slowly up. We reached an angle so steep that it seemed she must turn turtle, then the treads took hold, we ground forward and slid through the breach in the wall.

  Our gun spoke again, at point-blank range, right into the inner Palace. A thought flashed through my head—this was the exact spot where I had first laid eyes on Judith. I had come full circle.

  The Benison was rampaging around, destroying by her very weight. I waited until the last cruiser had had time to enter, then gave the order, “Transports, assault.” That done, I called Penoyer, informed him that Huxley was wounded and that he was now in command.

  I was all through. I did not even have a job, a battle station. The battle surged around me, but I was not part of it—I, who two minutes ago had been in usurped full command.

  I stopped to light a cigarette and wondered what to do with myself. I put it out after one soul-satisfying drag and scrambled up into the fire control tower of the turret and peered out the after slits. A breeze had come up and the smoke was clearing; the transport Jacob’s Ladder I could see just pulling out of the breach. Her sides fell away and ranks of infantry sprang out, blasters ready. A sporadic fire met them; some fell but most returned the fire and charged the inner Palace. The Jacob’s Ladder cleared the breach and the Ark took her place.

  The troops commander in the Ark had orders to take the Prophet alive. I hurried down ladders from the turret, ran down the passageway between the engine rooms, and located the escape hatch in the floor plates, clear at the stern of the Benison. Somehow I got it undamped, swung up the hatch cover, and stuck my head down. I could see men running, out beyond the treads. I drew my blaster, dropped to the ground, and tried to catch up with them, running out the stern between the big treads.

  They were men from the Ark, right enough. I attached myself to a platoon and trotted along with them. We swarmed into the inner Palace.

  But the
battle was over; we encountered no organized resistance. We went on down and down and down and found the Prophet’s bombproof. The door was open and he was there.

  But we did not arrest him. The Virgins had gotten to him first; he no longer looked imperious. They had left him barely something to identify at an inquest.

  Coventry

  “HAVE YOU ANYTHING to say before sentence is pronounced on you?” The mild eyes of the Senior Judge studied the face of the accused. His question was answered by a sullen silence.

  “Very well—the jury has determined that you have violated a basic custom agreed to under the Covenant, and that through this act did damage another free citizen. It is the opinion of the jury and of the court that you did so knowingly, and aware of the probability of damage to a free citizen. Therefore, you are sentenced to choose between the Two Alternatives.”

  A trained observer might have detected a trace of dismay breaking through the mask of indifference with which the young man had faced his trial. Dismay was unreasonable; in view of his offence, the sentence was inevitable—but reasonable men do not receive the sentence.

  After waiting a decent interval, the judge turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”

  The prisoner stood up suddenly, knocking over his chair. He glared wildly around at the company assembled and burst into speech.

  “Hold on!” he yelled. “I’ve got something to say first!” In spite of his rough manner there was about him the noble dignity of a wild animal at bay. He stared at those around him, breathing heavily, as if they were dogs waiting to drag him down.

  “Well?” he demanded, “Well? Do I get to talk, or don’t I? It ‘ud be the best joke of this whole comedy, if a condemned man couldn’t speak his mind at the last!”

  “You may speak,” the Senior Judge told him, in the same unhurried tones with which he had pronounced sentence, “David MacKinnon, as long as you like, and in any manner that you like. There is no limit to that freedom, even for those who have broken the Covenant. Please speak into the recorder.”

  MacKinnon glanced with distaste at the microphone near his face. The knowledge that any word he spoke would be recorded and analyzed inhibited him. “I don’t ask for records,” he snapped.

  “But we must have them,” the judge replied patiently, “in order that others may determine whether, or not, we have dealt with you fairly, and according to the Covenant. Oblige us, please.”

  “Oh—very well!” He ungraciously conceded the requirement and directed his voice toward the instrument. “There’s no sense in me talking at all—but, just the same, I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen… You talk about your precious ‘Covenant’ as if it were something holy. I don’t agree to it and I don’t accept it. You act as if it had been sent down from Heaven in a burst of light. My grandfathers fought in the Second Revolution—but they fought to abolish superstition… not to let sheep-minded fools set up new ones.

  “There were men in those days!” He looked contemptuously around him. “What is there left today? Cautious, compromising ‘safe’ weaklings with water in their veins. You’ve planned your whole world so carefully that you’ve planned the fun and zest right out of it. Nobody is ever hungry, nobody ever gets hurt. Your ships can’t crack up and your crops can’t fail. You even have the weather tamed so it rains politely—after midnight. Why wait till midnight, I don’t know… you all go to bed at nine o’clock!

  “If one of you safe little people should have an unpleasant emotion—perish the thought!—you’d trot right over to the nearest psychodynamics clinic and get your soft little minds readjusted. Thank God I never succumbed to that dope habit. I’ll keep my own feelings, thanks, no matter how bad they taste.

  “You won’t even make love without consulting a psychotechnician— Is her mind as flat and insipid as mine? Is there any emotional instability in her family? It’s enough to make a man gag. As for fighting over a woman— if any one had the guts to do that, he’d find a proctor at his elbow in two minutes, looking for the most convenient place to paralyze him, and inquiring with sickening humility, ‘May I do you a service, sir?’”

  The bailiff edged closer to MacKinnon. He turned on him. “Stand back, you. I’m not through yet.” He turned and added, “You’ve told me to choose between the Two Alternatives. Well, it’s no hard choice for me. Before I’d submit to treatment, before I’d enter one of your neat little, safe little, pleasant little reorientation homes and let my mind be pried into by a lot of soft-fingered doctors—before I did anything like that, I’d choose a nice, clean death. Oh, no—there is just one choice for me, not two. I take the choice of going to Coventry—and glad of it, too… I hope I never hear of the United States again!

  “But there is just one thing I want to ask you before I go—Why do you bother to live anyhow? I would think that anyone of you would welcome an end to your silly, futile lives just from sheer boredom. That’s all.” He turned back to the bailiff. “Come on, you.”

  “One moment, David MacKinnon.” The Senior Judge held up a restraining hand. “We have listened to you. Although custom does not compel it, I am minded to answer some of your statements. Will you listen?”

  Unwilling, but less willing to appear loutish in the face of a request so obviously reasonable, the younger man consented.

  The judge commenced to speak in gentle, scholarly words appropriate to a lecture room. “David MacKinnon, you have spoken in a fashion that doubtless seems wise to you. Nevertheless, your words were wild, and spoken in haste. I am moved to correct your obvious misstatements of fact. The Covenant is not a superstition, but a simple temporal contract entered into by those same revolutionists for pragmatic reasons. They wished to insure the maximum possible liberty for every person.

  “You yourself have enjoyed that liberty. No possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another. Even an act specifically prohibited by law could not be held against you, unless the state was able to prove that your particular act damaged, or caused evident danger of damage, to a particular individual.

  “Even if one should willfully and knowingly damage another—as you have done—the state does not attempt to sit in moral judgment, nor to punish. We have not the wisdom to do that, and the chain of injustices that have always followed such moralistic coercion endanger the liberty of all. Instead, the convicted is given the choice of submitting to psychological readjustment to correct his tendency to wish to damage others, or of having the state withdraw itself from him—of sending him to Coventry.

  “You complain that our way of living is dull and unromantic, and imply that we have deprived you of excitement to which you feel entitled. You are free to hold and express your esthetic opinion of our way of living, but you must not expect us to live to suit your tastes. You are free to seek danger and adventure if you wish—there is danger still in experimental laboratories; there is hardship in the mountains of the Moon, and death in the jungles of Venus—but you are not free to expose us to the violence of your nature.”

  “Why make so much of it?” MacKinnon protested contemptuously. “You talk as if I had committed a murder—I simply punched a man in the nose for offending me outrageously!”

  “I agree with your esthetic judgment of that individual,” the judge continued calmly, “and am personally rather gratified that you took a punch at him—but your psychometrical tests show that you believe yourself capable of judging morally your fellow citizens and feel justified in personally correcting and punishing their lapses. You are a dangerous individual, David MacKinnon, a danger to all of us, for we can not predict what damage you may do next. From a social standpoint, your delusion makes you as mad as the March Hare.

  “You refuse treatment—therefore we withdraw our society from you, we cast you out, we divorce you. To Coventry with you.” He turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”

  MacKinnon peered out of a forward port of the big transport helicopter with repressed excitement i
n his heart. There! That must be it—that black band in the distance. The helicopter drew closer, and he became certain that he was seeing the Barrier—the mysterious, impenetrable wall that divided the United States from the reservation known as Coventry.

  His guard looked up from the magazine he was reading and followed his gaze. “Nearly there, I see,” he said pleasantly. “Well, it won’t be long now.”

  “It can’t be any too soon for me!”

  The guard looked at him quizzically, but with tolerance. “Pretty anxious to get on with it, eh?”

  MacKinnon held his head high. “You’ve never brought a man to the Gateway who was more anxious to pass through!”

  “Mmm—maybe. They all say that, you know. Nobody goes through the Gate against his own will.”

  “I mean it!”

  “They all do. Some of them come back, just the same.”

  “Say—maybe you can give me some dope as to conditions inside?”

  “Sorry,” the guard said, shaking his head, “but that is no concern of the United States, nor of any of its employees. You’ll know soon enough.”

  MacKinnon frowned a little. “It seems strange—I tried inquiring, but found no one who would admit that they had any notion about the inside. And yet you say that some come out. Surely some of them must talk…”

  “That’s simple,” smiled the guard, “part of their reorientation is a subconscious compulsion not to discuss their experiences.”

  “That’s a pretty scabby trick. Why should the government deliberately conspire to prevent me, and people like me, from knowing what we are going up against?”

  “Listen, buddy,” the guard answered, with mild exasperation, “you’ve told the rest of us to go to the devil. You’ve told us that you could get along without us. You are being given plenty of living room in some of the best land on this continent, and you are being allowed to take with you everything that you own, or your credit could buy. What the deuce else do you expect?”