Robert Silverberg: Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine

If life is to be worth living at all, we have to have at least the illusion that we are capable of making sweeping changes in the world we live in. I say at least the illusion . Real ability to effect change would obviously be preferable, but not all of us can get to that level, and even the illusion of power offers hope, and hope sustains life. The point is not to be a puppet, not to be a passive plaything of karma. I think you’ll agree that sweeping changes in society have to be made. Who will make them, if not you and me? If we tell ourselves that we’re helpless, that meaningful reform is impossible, that the status quo is here for keeps, then we might as well not bother going on living, don’t you think? I mean, if the bus is breaking down and the driver is freaking out on junk and all the doors are jammed, it’s cooler to take the cyanide than to wait around for the inevitable messy smashup. But naturally we don’t want to let ourselves believe that we’re helpless. We want to think that we can grab the wheel and get the bus back on course and steer it safely to the repair shop. Right? Right. That’s what we want to think. Even if it’s only an illusion. Because sometimes—who knows?—you can firm up an illusion and make it real.

The cast of characters. Thomas C—, our chief protagonist, age twenty. As we first encounter him he lies asleep with strands of his own long brown hair casually wrapped across his mouth. Tie-dyed jeans and an ECOLOGY NOW! sweat shirt are crumpled at the foot of the bed. He was raised in Elephant Mound, Wisconsin, and this is his third year at the university. He appears to be sleeping peacefully, but through his dreaming mind flit disturbing phantoms: Lee Harvey Oswald, George Lincoln Rockwell, Neil Armstrong, Arthur Bremer, Sirhan Sirhan, Hubert Humphrey, Mao Tse-tung, Lieutenant William Calley, John Lennon. Each in turn announces himself, does a light-footed little dance expressive of his character, vanishes and reappears elsewhere in Thomas’s cerebral cortex. On the wall of Thomas’s room are various contemporary totems: a giant photograph of Spiro Agnew playing golf, a gaudy VOTE FOR MCGOVERN sticker, and banners that variously proclaim FREE ANGELA, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PIG FORCE, POWER TO THE PEOPLE, and CHE LIVES! Thomas has an extremely contemporary sensibility, circa 1970-72. By 1997 he will feel terribly nostalgic for the causes and artefacts of his youth, as his grandfather now is for raccoon coats, bathtub gin, and flagpole sitters. He will say things like “Try it, you’ll like it” or “Sock it to me” and no one under forty will laugh.

Asleep next to him is Katherine F—, blonde, nineteen years old. Ordinarily she wears steel-rimmed glasses, green hip-hugger bells, a silken purple poncho, and a macramé shawl, but she wears none of these things now. Katherine is not dreaming, but her next REM cycle is due shortly. She comes from Moose Valley, Minnesota, and lost her virginity at the age of fourteen while watching a Mastroianni-Loren flick at the North Star Drive-In. During her seduction she never took her eyes from the screen for a period longer than thirty seconds. Nowadays she’s much more heavily into the responsiveness thing, but back then she was trying hard to be cool. Four hours ago she and Thomas performed an act of mutual oral-genital stimulation that is illegal in seventeen states and the Republic of Vietnam (South), although there is hope of changing that before long.

On the floor by the side of the bed is Thomas’s dog Fidel, part beagle, part terrier. He is asleep too. Attached to Fidel’s collar is a day-glo streamer that reads THREE WOOFS FOR PET LIB.

Without God, said one of the Karamazov boys, everything is possible. I suppose that’s true enough, if you conceive of God as the force that holds things together, that keeps water from flowing uphill and the sun from rising in the west. But what a limited concept of God that is! Au contraire , Fyodor: with God everything is possible. And I would like to be God for a little while.

Q. What did you do?

A. I yelled at Sergeant Bacon and told him to go and start searching hooches and get your people moving right on—not the hooches but the bunkers—and I started over to Mitchell’s location. I came back out. Meadlo was still standing there with a group of Vietnamese, and I yelled at Meadlo and asked him—I told him if he couldn’t move all those people, to get rid of them.

Q. Did you fire into that group of people?

A. No, sir, I did not.

Q. After that incident, what did you do?

A. Well, I told my men to get on across the ditch and to get into position after I had fired into the ditch.

Q. Now, did you have a chance to look and observe what was in the ditch?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. And what did you see?

A. Dead people, sir.

Q. Did you see any appearance of anybody being alive in there?

A. No, sir.

This is Thomas talking. Listen to me. Just listen. Suppose you had a machine that would enable you to fix everything that’s wrong in the world. Let’s say that it draws on all the resources of modern technology, not to mention the powers of a rich, well-stocked imagination and a highly developed ethical sense. The machine can do anything. It makes you invisible; it gives you a way of slipping backward and forward in time; it provides telepathic access to the minds of others; it lets you reach into those minds and c-h-a-n-g-e them. And so forth. Call this machine whatever you want. Call it Everybody’s Fantasy Actualizer. Call it a Time Machine Mark Nine. Call it a God Box. Call it a magic wand, if you like. Okay. I give you a magic wand. And you give me a magic wand too, because reader and writer have to be allies, co-conspirators. You and me, with our magic wands. What will you do with yours? What will I do with mine? Let’s go.

The Revenge of the Indians. On the plains ten miles west of Grand Otter Falls, Nebraska, the tribes assemble. By pickup truck, camper, Chevrolet, bicycle, and microbus they arrive from every corner of the nation, the delegations of angry redskins. Here are the Onondagas, the Oglallas, the Hunkpapas, the Jicarillas, the Punxsatawneys, the Kickapoos, the Gros Ventres, the Nez Percés, the Lenni Lenapes, the Wepawaugs, the Pamunkeys, the Penobscots, and all that crowd. They are clad in the regalia that the white man expects them to wear: feather bonnets, buckskin leggings, painted faces, tomahawks. See the great bonfire burn! See the leaping seat-shiny braves dance the scalping dance! Listen to their weird barbaric cries! What terror these savages must inspire in the plump suburbanites who watch them on Channel Four!

Now the council meeting begins. The pipe passes. Grunts of approval are heard. The mighty Navaho chieftain, Hosteen Dollars, is the main orator. He speaks for the strongest of the tribes, for the puissant Navahos own motels, gift shops, oil wells, banks, coal mines, and supermarkets. They hold the lucrative national distributorships for the superb pottery of their Hopi and Pueblo neighbours. Quietly they have accumulated vast wealth and power, which they have surreptitiously devoted to the welfare of their less fortunate kinsmen of other tribes. Now the arsenal is fully stocked: the tanks, the flamethrowers, the automatic rifles, the halftracks, the crop-dusters primed with napalm. Only the Big Bang is missing. But that lack, Hosteen Dollars declares, has now been remedied through miraculous intervention. “This is our moment!” he cries. “Hiawatha! Hiawatha!” Solemnly I descend from the skies, drifting in a slow downward spiral, landing lithely on my feet. I am naked but for a fringed breechclout. My coppery skin gleams glossily. Cradled in my arms is a hydrogen bomb, armed and ready. “The Big Bang!” I cry. “Here, brothers! Here!” By nightfall Washington is a heap of radioactive ash. At dawn the Acting President capitulates. Hosteen Dollars goes on national television to explain the new system of reservations, and the roundup of palefaces commences.