A. van Vogt - The Empire of Isher

As Hedrock watched with pitying eyes both shadows moved. It was a movement that had no parallel in macrocosmic space—a movement so alien that the vision could not make an acceptable image. It was not a particularly swift process but, in spite of that, both shadows —withdrew? Where? Even the weapon shop scientists had never quite decided that. They withdrew and then slowly reappeared, but now their positions were reversed, with variations.

They were farther out. The large shadow, which had been wavering one month and three days from the center in the past, was suddenly a month and three days and a few hours in the future. The tiny speck, which had been 97 billion years in the future, reversed to about 106 billion years in the past.

The time distance was so colossal that Hedrock shrank in spite of himself and half turned to Cadron. “Have they figured out his energy potential?”

Cadron nodded wearily. “Enough to destroy the planet.” He groaned. “Where in the name of space are we going to release it?”

Hedrock tried to picture that. He had not been among those who talked to McAllister, the reporter from the twentieth century. His understanding of what had happened had been pieced together from fragmentary accounts. And one of his purposes in coming to this room now was to learn the details.

He drew Cadron aside and frankly asked for information. Cadron gazed at him with a wry smile. “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you. The truth is, all of us are ashamed of the way we acted.”

Hedrock said, “Then you feel that McAllister should not have been sacrificed?”

Cadron shook his head. “No, that isn’t exactly what I mean.” His frown deepened. “I guess the best method is to tell you the whole story—briefly, of course.”

He began. “The girl attendant of the Greenway shop heard someone come and went out to attend to him. The customer was a queer looking chap in outlandish clothes. It turned out that he was a newspaper reporter from the twentieth century A.D. He was so obviously disconcerted, so fascinated by the showcases with their energy guns. And he gave an account of a weapon shop having appeared in a street in a little city in which he lived. I can imagine the sensation it caused but the truth is that everybody thought it was an illusion of some kind.

“It seemed solid, of course. But when the police tried to open the door, naturally it wouldn’t open. McAllister, with a reporter’s curiosity, finally tried the door himself. For him, of course—he not being a police or government official—it opened immediately. He went inside.

“He admitted to the attendant experiencing a sense of tension as he crossed the threshold and, although he didn’t know it, it was at that moment that he picked up the first measure of time-energy, the equivalent of approximately seven thousand years—his weight being the other factor. When the attendant told her father—who was in charge of the shop—what had occurred, he realized immediately that something was wrong. In a few minutes he had verified that the shop was being subjected to titanic energy pressure. He discovered that the source of the energy was the huge government building on an adjacent street. He immediately called the weapon makers into council.

“By the time we arrived on the scene a swift decision was necessary. McAllister had enough time energy locked up in his body to destroy the entire city—that is if he ever stepped outside our insulated shop without himself being insulated. Meanwhile, the pressure from the government building against our shop continued unabated. At any moment it might succeed in precipitating the shop itself into the time stream, and there was reason to believe that other attacks would be made at any moment on our shops everywhere. No one could guess what the result would be. To cut a long story short, we saw a way to gain time by focusing the energy of the building upon McAllister and tossing him back into his own time. We could do this by putting him into an insulated space suit which would prevent him from exploding until we could develop a mechanism for that purpose.

“We knew that he would seesaw back and forth in time, shifting the government building and its energies out of this space-time area.”

Cadron shook his head gloomily. “I still don’t see what else we could have done. We were compelled to act swiftly in a field where no great knowledge is available, and the fact that we merely got out of the frying pan and into the fire was just our hard luck. But personally I feel very badly about the whole thing.”

“Do you think McAllister is still alive?” Hedrock asked.

“Oh yes. The suit into which we put him was one of our supers, complete with an eight ring food-making device, and there’s a cup in it that’s always full of water. The other facilities are equally automatic.”

He smiled a twisted smile. “We had an idea, completely false as it turned out, that we could save him at some later date.”

“I see,” said Hedrock. He felt depressed. It was unfortunate but all the decisions had been made before he had even heard of the danger.

The newsman was now the juggernaut of juggernauts. In all the universe there had never been anything like the power that was accumulating, swing by swing, in his body. Released, the explosion would rock the fabric of space. All time would sigh to its echoes and the energy tensions that created the illusion of matter might collapse before the strain.

“What’s the latest about the building?” Hedrock asked.

Cadron was more cheerful. “It’s still within its critical limits. We’ve got to make our decision before it reaches the danger stage.”

Hedrock was silent. The matter of what the decision should be was a sore point with him, who was obviously not going to be asked. He said finally. “What about the men who are working on the problem of slowing the swings and bringing the seesaw back this way?”

Another man answered that. “The research is abandoned. Science four thousand seven hundred and eighty-four has no answer. We’re lucky enough to have made one of our shops the fulcrum. We can set off the explosion anywhere in the past or future. But which? And when? Particularly when?”

The shadows on that cartograph made no movement, gave no sign. Their time of action was not yet.

The strain attendant on watching another swing faded. The men were turning away from the map, and there was a murmur of conversation. Somebody said something about using the opportunity to acquire all the possible data on time travel. Councilor Kendlon remarked that the body’s accumulation of energy was fairly convincing proof that time travel would never be popular.

It was Dresley, the precise, the orderly, who finally remarked, “Gentlemen, we are here as delegates of the Council to listen to Mr. Hedrock’s report of the counterattack against the empress. In his report some weeks ago he was able to give us administrative details. And you will recall that we found his organization set-up to be efficient in the extreme. Mr. Hedrock, will you now bring us up to date?”

Hedrock glanced from person to person thoughtfully. He saw that they were watching him, and that raised his necessity level. His problem, it seemed to him, was to make up his own mind about the seesaw, then carry out his decision without regard for the attitude of his nominal superiors. It would be difficult.

He began succinctly, “Since the first directive was given me, we have set up one thousand two hundred and forty-two new shops, primarily in small villages, and three thousand eight hundred and nine contacts have been established, however tenuous in some cases, with Imperial government personnel, both military and civil.”