Robert Silverberg: Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine

That’s Ford’s Theatre over there. Our American Cousin is playing tonight. Right now John Wilkes Booth is holed up in some downtown hotel, I suppose, oiling his gun, rehearsing his speech. “Sic semper tyrannis!” is what he’ll shout, and he’ll blow away poor old Abe.

—One ticket for tonight’s performance, please.

Look at the elegant ladies and gentlemen descending from their carriages. They know the President will be at the theatre, and they’re wearing their finest finery. And yes! That’s the White House buggy! Is that imperious-looking lady Mary Todd Lincoln? It has to be. And there’s the President, stepping right off the five-dollar bill. Graying beard, stooped shoulders, weary eyes, tired, wrinkled face. Poor old Abe. Am I doing you much of a favor by saving you tonight? Don’t you want to lay your burden down? But history needs you, man. All dem li’1 black boys and girls, dey needs you. The President waves. I wave back. Greetings from the twentieth century, Mr. Lincoln! I’m here to rob you of your martyrdom!

Curtain going up. Abe smiles in his box. I can’t follow the play. Words, just words. Time crawls, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ten o’clock at last. The moment’s coming close. There, do you see him? There: the wild-eyed man with the big gun. Wow, that gun’s the size of a cannon! And he’s creeping up on the President. Why doesn’t anybody notice? Is the play so goddamned interesting that nobody notices—

“Hey! Hey you, John Wilkes Booth! Look over here, man! Look at me!”

Everybody turns as I shout. Booth turns too, and I rise and extend my arm and fire, not even needing to aim, just turning the weapon into an extension of my pointing hand as the Zen exercises have shown me how to do. The sound of the shot expands, filling the theatre with a terrible reverberating boom, and Booth topples, blood fountaining from his chest. Now, finally the President’s bodyguards break from their freeze and come scrambling forward. I’m sorry, John. Nothing personal. History was in need of some changing, is all. Goodbye, 1865. Goodbye, President Abe. You’ve got an extension of your lease, thanks to me. The rest is up to you.

Our freedom…our liberation…can only come through a transformation of social structure and relationships…no one group can be free while another is still held in bonds. We want to build a world where people can choose their futures, where they can love without dependency games, where they do not starve. We want to create a world where men and women can relate to each other and to children as sharing, loving equals. We must eliminate the twin oppressors…hierarchical and exploitative capitalism and its myths that keep us so securely in bonds…sexism, racism, and other evils created by those who rule to keep the rest of us apart.

—Do you Alexander, take this man to be your lawful wedded mate?

—I do.

—Do you, George, take this man to be your lawful wedded mate?

—I do.

—Then, George and Alexander, by the power vested in me by the State of New York as ordained minister of the First Congregational Gay Communion of Upper Manhattan, I do hereby pronounce you man and man, wedded before God and in the eyes of mankind, and may you love happily ever after.

It’s all done with the aid of a lot of science fiction gadgetry. I won’t apologize for that part of it. Apologies just aren’t necessary. If you need gadgetry to get yourself off, you use gadgetry; the superficials simply don’t enter into any real consideration of how you get where you want to be from where you’re at. The aim is to eradicate the well-known evils of our society, and if we have to get there by means of time machines, thought-amplification headbands, anti-uptightness rays, molecular interpenetrator beams, superheterodyning levitator rods, and all the rest of that gaudy comic-book paraphernalia, so be it. It’s the results that count.

Like I mean, take the day I blew the President’s mind. You think I could have done that without all this gadgetry? Listen, simply getting into the White House is a trip and a half. You can’t get hold of a reliable map of the interior of the White House, the part that the tourists aren’t allowed to see; the maps that exist are phonies, and actually they keep rearranging the rooms so that espionage agents and assassins won’t be able to find their way around. What is a bedroom one month is an office the next and a switchboard room the month after that. Some rooms can be folded up and removed altogether. It’s a whole wild cloak-and-dagger number. So we set up our ultrasonic intercavitation scanner in Lafayette Park and got ourselves a trustworthy holographic representation of the inside of the building. That data enabled me to get my bearings once I was in there. But I also needed to be able to find the President in a hurry. Our method was to slap a beep transponder on him, which we did by catching the White House’s head salad chef, zonking him on narcoleptic strobes, and programming him to hide the gimmick inside a tomato. The President ate the tomato at dinnertime and from that moment on we could trace him easily. Also, the pattern of interference waves coming from the transponder told us whether anyone was with him.

So okay. I waited until he was alone one night, off in the Mauve Room rummaging through his file of autographed photos of football stars, and I levitated to a point ninety feet directly above that room, used our neutrinoflux desensitizer to knock out the White House security shield, and plummeted down via interpenetrator beam. I landed right in front of him. Give him credit: he didn’t start to yell. He backed away and started to go for some kind of alarm button, but I said, “Cool it, Mr. President, you aren’t going to get hurt. I just want to talk. Can you spare five minutes for a little rap?” And I beamed him with the conceptutron to relax him and make him receptive. “Okay, chief?”

“You may speak, son,” he replied. “I’m always eager to hear the voice of the public, and I’m particularly concerned with being responsive to the needs and problems of our younger generation. Our gallant young people who—”

“Groovy, Dick. Okay—now dig this. The country’s falling apart, right? The ecology is deteriorating, the cities are decaying, the blacks are up in arms, the right-wingers are stocking up on napalm, the kids are getting maimed in one crazy foreign war after another, the prisons are creating criminals instead of rehabilitating them, the Victorian sexual codes are turning millions of potentially beautiful human beings into sickniks, the drug laws don’t make any sense, the women are still hung up on the mother-chauffeur-cook-chambermaid trip, the men are still into the booze-guns-broads trips, the population is still growing and filling up the clean open spaces, the economic structure is set up to be self-destructive since capital and labor are in cahoots to screw the consumer, and so on. I’m sure you know the problems, since you’re the President and you read a lot of newspapers. Okay. How did we get into this bummer? By accident? No. Through bad karma? I don’t really think so. Through inescapable deterministic forces? Uh-uh. We got into it through dumbness, greed, and inertia. We’re so greedy we don’t even realize that it’s ourselves we’re robbing. But it can be fixed, Dick, it can all be fixed ! We just have to wake up! And you’re the man who can do it. Don’t you want to go down in history as the man who helped this great country get itself together? You and thirty influential congressmen and five members of the Supreme Court can do it. All you have to do is start reshaping the national consciousness through some executive directives backed up with congressional action. Get on the tube, man, and tell all your silent majoritarians to shape up. Proclaim the reign of love. No more war, hear? It’s over tomorrow. No more economic growth: we just settle for what we have and we start cleaning up the rivers and lakes and forests. No more babies to be used as status symbols and pacifiers for idle housewives—from now on people will do babies only for the sake of bringing groovy new human beings into the world, two or three to a couple. As of tomorrow we abolish all laws against stuff that people do without hurting other people. And so on. We proclaim a new Bill of Rights granting every individual the right to a full and productive life according to his own style. Will you do that?”