Lafferty, R A - Past Master

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VHE THREE big men were met together in a
private building of one of them. There was a clattering thunder in the street outside, but the sun
was shining. It was the clashing thunder of the mechanical killers, ravening and raging. They
shook the building and were on the verge of pulling it down. They required the life and the blood
of one of the three men and they required it immediately, now, within the hour, within the minute.
The three men gathered in the building were large physically, they were important and
powerful, they were intelligent and interesting. There was a peculiar linkage between them: each
believed that he controlled the other two, that he was the puppeteer and they were the puppets.
And each was partly right in this belief. It made them an interlocking nexus, taut and resilient,
the most intricate on Astrobe.
Cosmos Kingmaker, who was too rich. The Heraldic Lion.
Peter Proctor, who was too lucky. The Sleek Fox.
Fabian Foreman, who was too smart. The Worried Hawk.
"This is Mankind's third chance," said Kingmaker. "Ah, they're breaking the doors down
again. How can we talk with it all going on?"
He took the speaking tube. "Colonel," he called out. "You have sufficient human guards. It
is imperative that you disperse the riot. It is absolutely forbidden that they murder this man at
this time and place. He is with us and is one of us as he has always been."
"The colonel is dead," a voice came back. "I am Captain John Chezem the Third, next in
command."
"You be Colonel Chezem now," Kingmaker said. "Call out what reinforcements you need and
prevent this thing."
"Foreman," said Peter Proctor softly within the room. "Whatever you are thinking this day,
do not think it so strongly. I've never seen the things so avid for your life."
"It is Mankind's third chance we have been throwing away here," Kingmaker intoned to the
other two in the room, speaking with great serenity considering the siege they were under. Even
when he spoke quietly, Kingmaker was imposing. He had the head that should be on gold coins or on
Great Seals. They called him the lion, but there were no lions on Astrobe except as statuary. He
was a carven lion, cut out of the Golden Travertine, the fine yellow marble of Astrobe. He had a
voice of such depth that it set up echoes even when he whispered. It was part of the aura of power
that he set up about himself.
"Mankind's first chance was the Old World of Old Earth," Kingmaker said. "What went -wrong
there, what continues to go wrong there, has been imperfectly analyzed. Earth is still a vital
thing, and yet we must speak of it and think of it as something in the past. It didn't make it
before in that Old World, and it isn't going to make it now. It has shriveled."
Thunder and bedevilment! They were howling and quaking worse than ever. They'd take the
building apart stone by stone to get their prey, and they wouldn't be long about it. The
mechanical killers were relentless when they came near their kill, and Fabian Foreman was their
intended kill.
"Mankind's second chance was America, the New World of Old Earth," Kingmaker continued.
"In one sense it was the First New World, a sort of childhood of ourselves. And Mankind
experienced its second failure there. That was
8
AT THE TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR
really the end of Old Earth. She lives in our shadow now; has done so since we were big enough to
cast a shadow."
Thunder, thumping thunder outsidel The screaming of maniac machinesl
"Astrobe is Mankind's third chance," continued the regal Kingmaker. "If we fail here we
may not be given another opportunity. There is something of number and balance that tells us we
cannot survive another loss. If we fail here we fail forever. And we are failing. Our luck has run
out."
Howling, undermining, and a section o f one o f the outside walls beginning to slidel
"Our luck will never run out," Proctor stated. "We've oceans of luck still untapped. We
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are doing quite well."
"Those cases on Old Earth did not end in total failure," Foreman stated in a somewhat
shaky voice, "though they did end in total death. And it is not a one, two, three thing. It is
cyclic and it has happened many times."
It was veritable explosions outside when Foreman spoke. It was his life that the
mechanical killers demanded right now. Hereafter all the conversation was a little digicult,
almost submerged in the ocean of noise and violence.
"Oh my bleeding earsl They were black enough failures," Kingmaker cut back in, "but that
blackness was shot full of lightning. True, there were many failures, Fabian, but I make three the
magic number. The clock stood at the twentyfifth hour so often that the very survival of man
through it all appears a miracle."
"Let's drag it back to daylight," Proctor growled softly above the noise that indicated
that the killers had already broken into some of the upper rooms of the building. "Only ourselves
are here and we are not impressed by each others' eloquence. We are here to select a candidate. We
are not here to stay the crack of doom."
"Wrong, Proctor," Kingmaker rumbled like buried thunder, and Kingmaker was always
impressed by his own eloquence. "We are here to stay the crack of doom. It has fallen to us three,
the inner circle of the Masters, to do exactly that thing."
"Doom's been cracking for a long time, Cosmos," Proctor jibed. He was a sleek and pleasant
man even when he took
exception. His voice was a sort of mechanical purr, or was that of a fox that has been eating
honey.
"Aye, how it cracks!" said Kingmaker. "If you have an ear for history, Peter, you will
notice that it cracks louder every time. In many ways we are a meaner people this time around.
Would we three be at the top of the heap in any of the earlier orders?"
"I repeat that the earlier testings of man were not total failures," Foreman said, "and
perhaps they were not failures at all. They were deaths. It is not the same thing."
The floors were being undermined. You could hear the hate-roaring o f the things underfoot
now.
"There has always been a web of desperate and quite incredible triumph," Foreman
continued. "The indomitableness of man has so far been the most amazing thing about him. I hate to
see it going out of us." Foreman's voice did have a little of the hawk's cry in it, but also a
jingle of old laughter. He was tall and graying and lined. He seemed older than the other two, and
he wasn't. "We've lost so much! Every time we die we lose something. So much could have been done,
so much became livid with rottenness, that we belittle what was done. So for one not quite total
failure in the Old World of Old Earth we were given another life something over one thousand years
ago. We were given the American thing."
"And failed even worse," Proctor purred with a sort of cheerful bitterness.
"No, we did not," Kingmaker protested. "We failed even better. It's an ascending spiral-
till it breaks."
"That's true," Foreman said. "Our American failure was less nearly total. With a New World
to work in, and with unlimited prospects, we limited them shamefully. There was no error of the
Old World that we did not commit -again in the New World on a vaster plane. But there was another
side to it. There were times when we almost balanced the loaded scales, when we reanimated both
the Old and New Worlds. There were times when we won hands down when we didn't have a chance. We
enlarged ourselves, the two hemispheres of us, and we set to tasks that before could not have been
conceived.
"Oh, our failures were abysmal enough to sicken a scavenger, but we did come near to
appreciating just how high F~ the challenge is. That world died, though history does notx record
the event. So for that death, which was not quite a
total failure, we were given yet another life."
"On Astrobel" said Proctor with smiling contempt.
"Yes, here on Golden Astrobe," said Kingmaker with af-: fection. "Foreman says the other
worlds all died, and in a sense he is right. This is the world that must not die. We: are-and I do
mean to be flowery-the third and possibly, last chance of mankind. Foreman uses another count
than: mine and I am never sure that we mean the same thing, but` I know what I mean. Another
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failure will finish us. If we: die here, that is the end of everything. Our contrivances the
machines, which say that they will succeed us, can save neither themselves nor us. We have walked
the fine line too',long and it almost disappears.
"How have we failed? For five hundred years everything: went right. We had success safe in
our two hands."
"And dropped it," said Foreman. "In twenty years everything has come apart."
They were all cool, considering the howling menace out-.` side, and now perhaps within.
But they had to pause for a: moment when the noise completely overwhelmed them wi
its waves.
"I'm puzzled," Kingmaker said when it was possible to be. heard again. "For days at a time
the killers don't bother about you Foreman. And then they go wild to get at you, as now. I believe
they'll have your life this time."
"For days at a time I am not clear in my own thinking," Foreman stated. "Today I am, and
they sense what it is. But they're mistaken in my motives. Nobody has the welfare of Astrobe so
much at heart as myself."
"We've had the sensor machines run a few logs on you,,. Foreman," Kingmaker said heavily.
"It's certain that you'll= be murdered. Today, I believe. Your logs say within th
next several months at the most. You will be literally torn topieces, Foreman, your body
dismembered. What fury but that of the mechanical killers could tear you apart as your logs
indicate?"
"I suspect another such fury building up, Kingmaker. It will upset all my personal plans
severely if I'm murdered today. I'll need the several months that my logs give me as possible."
"Why did' you have us meet you here, Fabian?" Proctor asked. "There are many stronger
places where you could be better protected."
"Thus building has some curiosities of design that I had put in twenty years ago. It's my
own building, and I know a way out."
"You belong to the Circle of the Masters the same as Kingmaker and I do," Proctor said.
"You have as much to do with the programming as does anyone, and you understand it better than
either of us. If something is wrong with the programming of the mechanical killers, then fix it.
Certainly they should not attempt to kill you. They're programmed only to kill those who would
interfere with the Astrobe dream."
"And by definition all members of the Circle of Masters are utterly devoted to the
Astrobean dream, and are all of one mind. But even we three aren't of one mind. Kingmaker wants to
continue the living death of Astrobe at all cost. You, Proctor, do not believe that there is
anything very wrong with Astrobe; but I believe there is something very wrong with you. You are
both attached in your own way to the present sickness. I want a death and resurrection of the
thing, and the mechanical killers do not understand this."
Rending and screaming o f metal/ A crash deep beneath them that echoed through the floor.
"The building is going down," Kingmaker said. "We have only minutes. We must agree on our
candidate for World President."
"We don't necessarily want a great man or even a good man," Proctor said. "We want a man
who can serve as a catchy symbol, a man who can be manipulated by us."
"1 want a good man," Kingmaker insisted.
"I want a great man," Foreman cried, "and we've come to
believe that great men are nothing but myths. Let's get one
anyhowl A myth-man will satisfy Proctor, and it will do no
harm if hi 's a good man also:"
"Here is my list of possibilities," Kingmaker said, and began to read. "Wendt? Esposito?
Chu? Foxx? Doane?" He paused and looked at the other two after each name, and they avoided his
eyes. "Chezem? Byerly? Treva? Pottscamp?"
"We're not sure that Pottscamp belongs to the Center Party," Foreman objected. "We're not
even sure that he's a man. With most of them you can tell, but he's like quicksilver."
"Emmanuel? Carby? Haddad? Dobowski? Lee?" Kingmaker continued. "Do you not think that one
of them by some possibility-? No, I see that you don't. Are these really the best men in the
party? The best men on Astrobe?"
"I'm afraid they are, Cosmos," Foreman said. "We're stuck fast."
There was a rending crash rising above the ocean of noise, and one of the mechanical
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killers splintered the upper part o f an interior door to the room and came through it, head and
thorax. It contorted its ogre face and gathered to heave itself through. Then came something
almost too swift to follow.
With a blindingly swift flick o f a hand knife Proctor struck the killer where the thorax
emerges from the loriea. He killed it or demobilized it.
Proctor often showed this incredible speed of motion which seemed beyond the human. The
mechanical killer dangled there, the upper part of him through the broken door. The thing had a
purplish nightmarish ogre appearance designed to aright.
Kingmaker and Foreman were both shaking, but Proctor remained cool.
"He was alone," Proctor said. "They go in patrols of nine, and the other eight of his
group are still howling in the hallway above. I can keep track of the things. Two other patrols
have now entered the building, but they blunder around. All deliberate speed nowl We can't have
more than two minutes left with all possible luck. Back to our businessl
"We know the next step. By recent decree all Earth Citizens are also Citizens of Astrobe.
That doesn't necessarily make them better, but there's a psychological advantage in
reaching out for a man. It's true that Earth has shrunken in importance-but shrinking produces an
unevenness; it thrusts up mountains the while it creates low places. There are new outstanding men
on Earth even though the level has fallen dismally. How about Hunaker? Rain? Oberg? Yes, I know
they sound almost as dismal as do the leaders of Astrobe. Quillian? Paris? Fine?"
"We're in a blind maze of midget men," Kingmaker said. "There are no real leaders. It's
become all automatic. Let's go the whole way, then. The Programmed Persons propose once more that
they manufacture the perfect candidate and that all parties endorse him. I'm tempted to go with
them."
"We've been there before," Foreman protested. "It didn't work then, and it won't work now.
The old-recension humans simply aren't ready to accept a mechanical man as world president.
Remember, that's how Northprophet had his being. They fabricated him, some years ago, to be the
perfect leader. And so he would have been-from their viewpoint. And, according to rumor, that is
the origin of Pottscamp also. No, it's a human leader that we need. We must keep the balance of a
human for president and a mechanical for surrogate president. A mechanical man can't stop the doom
clock from striking on us. He's part of the clock."
"There's one other field of search," Kingmaker came in as if on cue. If he hadn't, Foreman
would have had to suggest it himself ,and that would have taken the edge off it. "We need not
limit ourselves to men now living. Chronometanastasis has been a working thing for a dozen years.
Find a dead man who once led well. Let him lead again. It will catch the fancy of the people,
especially if they guess it themselves and are not told it outright. There's a bit of mystery
attached to a man who has been dead.
"But the dead of Astrobe will not do. A man doesn't get hoary enough in five hundred
years. Let's go back to Earth for a really big man, or one who can be presented as really big. How
about Plato?"
"Too cold, too placid," said Foreman. "He was the first and greatest of them, but actually
he was a programmed person himself-no matter that he designed the program. He wrote once that a
just man can never be unhappy. I want
a man who can be unhappy over an unjust situation) Have you suggestions for dead Earth-men,
Proctor?"
"For the sake of formality, yes. King Yu. Mung K'o. Chandragupta. Stilicho. Charles the
Great. Cosimo I. Macchiavelli. Edward Coke. Gustavas Vasa. Lincoln. Inigo Jones. They'd make an
interesting bunch and I'd like to meet every one of them. And yet, for our purpose, there is a
little something lacking in each."
"They are men who are almost good enough," said Kingmaker. "We already have plenty of men
who are almost good enough. Have you a list, Foreman?"
"Yes." Foreman took a folded paper from his pocket. He made a great show of unfolding it
and smoothing it out; he cleared his throat.
"Thomas More," he read.
He folded the paper again and put it back in his pocket.
"That's right," he said. "Only one name on my list. He had one completely honest moment
right at the end. I can't think of anyone else who ever had one."
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"He did lose his head once in a time of crisis," Proctor jibed.
"I believe he can handle it," Foreman said. "All that's required is a mustard seed."
"Lay off it, you damned riddle maker," Kingmaker growled sharply. "We have to hurry. It's
your life they are after this day, Fabian. Yes, he'll make a nice novelty, and he'll be
presentable. I could say a dozen things against his selection. I could say twice as many against
any other candidate we might propose. Shall we?"
They all nodded together.
"Send for him!" Kingmaker smote his chair with finality. "Will you handle it, Foreman?"
"If I live through the next five minutes I will handle it. If not, then one of you do it.
Out now, you two! The killers will not touch you at all! And if I slip them this day they may not
bother me again for a week. The violence of their reaction to me comes and goes. Out with you! How
handy! The wall opens to give you way!"
The shattered wall did open. Kingmaker and Proctor were out, and the mechanical killers
were in with a surge. Foreman
PAST MASTER
.stood and trembled as the walls staggered and the whole undermined building collapsed. Then it
was so murky that neither eyes nor sensors could make it out. The second and third stories came
down on the first, the debris exploded inward, the killers, ten patrols of them, went through its
stones and beams gnashing for flesh, and they covered the place completely.
It was his own building, Foreman had said, and he knew a way out.
2. MY GRAVE, AND I IN IT
THE PILOT chosen by Fabian Foreman to bring Thomas More from Earth to Astrobe was named Paul. Paul
was two meters of walking irony, a long, strong, swift man, and short of speech. His voice was
much softer than would be expected from his appearance, and had only a slight rough edge to it.
What seemed to be a perpetual crooked grin was partly the scar of an old fight. He was a
compassionate man with a cruel ,and crooked face. From his height, his rough red hair and ruddy
face, and his glittering eyes he was sometimes called The Beacon.
For a record of irregular doings, classified as criminal, Paul had had his surname ,and
his citizenship taken away from him. Such a person loses all protection and sanction. He is at the
mercy of the Programmed Persons and their Killers, and mercy was never programmed into them.
The Programmed Killers are inhibited from killing a human citizen of Astrobe, though often
they do so by contrived accident. But an offender who has had his citizenship withdrawn is prey to
them. He has to be very smart to survive, and Paul had survived for a year. For that long he had
evaded the remorseless stiff-gaited Killers who follow their game relentlessly with their peculiar
stride. Paul had lived as a poor man in the Barrio, and in the ten thousand kilometers of alleys
in Cathead. He had been running and hiding for a year, and quite a bit of money had been bet on
him.
There is always interest in seeing how long these condemned can find a way to live under their
peculiar sentence, and Paul had lived with it longer than any of them could remember. And he was
ahead of those stiff killers. He had killed a dozen of them in their brushes, and not one of them
had ever killed him.
An ansel named Rimrock, an acquaintance of both of,. them, had got in touch .with Paul for
Fabian Foreman. And Paul arrived now, remarkably uncowed by his term as fugitive. He arrived quite
early in the morning, and he already had an idea from the ansel of what the mission was.
"You sent for me, Hawk-Face?" he asked Foreman. "I'm'~ an irregular man. Why should you
send me on a mission?
Send a qualified citizen pilot, and keep yourself clean."
"We want a man capable of irregular doings, Paul," Foreman said. "You've been hunted, and
you've become smart. There will be danger. There shouldn't be, since this was, decided on by the
Inner Circle of the Masters, but there will
be."
"What's in it for me?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all. You've been living in the meanest circumstances on the planet.
You are intelligent. You must have seen what is wrong with Astrobe."
"No, I don't know what is wrong with our world, Inner Circle Foreman, nor how to set it
right. I know that things are very wrong; and that those who use words to mean their opposites are
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delighted about the whole thing. You yourself are a great deal in the company of the subverters. I
don't trust you a lot. But you are hunted by the killers. You slipped them yesterday by a fox
trick that nobody understands, so you enter the legendary of the high hunted. There must be
something right about a man they hate so much."
"We are trying to find a new sort of leader who can slow, even reverse, the break-up,
Paul. We've selected .a man from the Earth Past, Thomas More. We will present him to the people
only as the Thomas, or perhaps, to be more fanciful, as the Past Master. You know of him?"
"Yes, I know him as to time and place and reputation."
"Will you go and get him?"
"All right. I'll be back with him in two months," Paul said. And he started to leave the
room.
"Wait, you red-headed fool!" Foreman ordered sharply. "You are a man of intelligence? What
sort of oaf have I settled onto here? I haven't briefed you, I haven't given you any details at
all yet. How will you-?"
"Don't give it a thought, grand Foreman," Paul said. He had a crooked mean grin on his
face. How was Foreman to know that the grin was the scar of an old fight and that Paul's
expression could never change much? "I said I'd do it, Foreman. I'll do it."
"But what will you go in? How-?"
"I'll steal your own craft, of course. I nearly stole it once before. I'd rather have it
than Kingmaker's flying palace. There isn't a finer small craft to be had, and there isn't a man
I'd rather steal from than you. And I have to leave in such sudden fashion if I'm to leave alive."
"But I will have to set up contacts for you."
"I know your Earth contacts, and I know those of Cosmos Kingmaker. In fact, I have conned
several of them in the past in my record of irregular doings. I'm a competent pilot in both
mediums, time and space. I must leave at once or there will be some leak to it. I'm no good to
either of us dead."
"But I will have to get you off Astrobe alive. You're still a marked prey for the
Programmed Killers."
"I'd die of your kindness, Foreman. I'll get off alive in my own way."
"But you must have some questions I"
"None. I can find London on Old Earth. I can find A Thousand Years Ago. I can locate a
well-known man there. I can bring him back if he wants to come. And I can make him want to come."
Paul strolled out, leaped into Foreman's grasshopper which stood in the open entry hall,
and jammed the identification counterpart on it. Then he took flight. The grasshopper, of course,
emitted the Stolen signal as it flew, and all Foreman's keying of permission could not override
that signal.
"Why did I ever listen to an ansel and select a wild man
like that?" Foreman moaned to himself. "Ten seconds on the mission, and he's done everything
wrong. He'll have every guard at spaceport on him, and they'll kill him before I can explain. Why
did the ruddy fool jam the counterpart?"
Within seconds Paul came to spaceport in the grasshopper; and in the same short seconds,
three groups had gathered to deal with him variously. One group, however, had known of Paul's
sudden impulsive action some hours before.
Paul was thinking rapidly in this, but he also had a friend who was feeding things into
his mind. Paul knew that it is sometimes better to have two groups than one in pursuit of you. If
you can get the bears and the hounds to close in on you from opposite directions at the same time,
somebody is likely to get mauled. Luck holding, it may be the bears and the hounds.
Having a few bear-baiters and hound-baiters in ambush ready to take a hand may also help.
The bears were the spaceport guards, huge and lumbering, reacting to the Stolen signal of
the grasshopper. And the bears got there first, too fast, or the hounds were too slow. They
dragged Paul out of the grasshopper with their grapples, and he knew that they were about the
business of killing him. One of them shagged him a bloody swipe that took skin and deep flesh off
arm, shoulder, and left ribs. And one, but only one, clasped him to crush him to death. But the
primary aim of these bears, these mechanical guards, was to secure the stolen vehicle and clear
the status of it. Killing Paul was only a secondary aim.
"Timing not right," rattled through Paul's head in what seemed his last moment. "Other
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killers too late. Never was anything late about them before." He was crushed too tight to talk,
almost too tight to think. With the grip that the thing had on him, he would never breathe in
another breath. But he fought mightily with the iron bear, unwilling to give death an unearned
advantage.
The hounds were the Programmed Killers, the same who had been haunting Paul for a year.
Stiff and bristling, they now reacted to a frantic signal in their own sensing devices, the Escape
signal sent out by Paul's actions. Their programming told them that their prey, the Paul Person,
was at-
tempting an off-world escape from them, and that it was urgent. They closed in on Paul for the
kill blind to everything else; and the spaceport guards as blindly reacted to this sudden
intrusion into their own area of investigation.
The tangle, when it came, was of blinding speed and deafening fury. Here were two
different groups of mechanical killers: one programmed for patrol, defense and counterattack, the
Bears; the other programmed for stalking and direct assault, the Hounds or Hound-Cats. But a bear
was crushing Paul to death, however much the strong and slippery man struggled against it.
And yet the crusher was diverted in the churning confusion. Twice it had to stop to smash
gnashing metal hounds into mechanical death and disarray. Every device there had one or more
alarms or sirens or hooters going off inside him, and the signals did not make for clarity.
Then was the maddening clash and jangle as the third force entered. Paul felt it in his
brain, and both sorts of mechanicals felt it in their Bell-cells. And there was a direct command
in Paul's brain: "Breathe, dammit!" So he took one more great breath, having been loosened for the
meriest instant. He was too far gone to have known to breathe without being told.
But this third assault was a human one, more or less. The voice in Paul's brain was that
of Rimrock the ansel. Whether Rimrock could be called human or not, he was associated with humans.
Now Paul also heard the voice of Walter Copperhead, the necromancer who could spook the matrix out
of the mechanicals and confuse their programming completely. Paul heard other voices, and he was
able to get another breath.
Paul was not dead. He refused to die. His crushing iron bear had had to loose him
completely to smash down three of the mechanical hound-cats at once. And the sudden men were in it
now. Battersea was as tall a man as Paul and twice as thick. He swung a battleaxe that weighed as
much as an ordinary man, and he knew where were located the nexus and centers of every sort of
mechanical. He'd battered them to death before. Shanty was near as huge a man as Battersea, and
was faster. Copperhead's powers included
the power to disable and kill, and Rimrock the ansel, of that most gentle species, had
nevertheless slicers three feet long.
Others were there. There was Slider, but Slider had never been sure which side he was on.
And Paul himself was into the battle now. He had a long stabber up from a sheath at big loins; and
Paul also knew a little bit about how these contrivances were put together. On many of them, an
upthrust below the base of the third center plate will sever communications in the mechanical and
leave it helpless; and it was there that Paul thrust. He got it; his thrust severed communications
and life; it was a man and not a mechanical that he battled that time, and Paul killed him. A man
masquerading as a Programmed Killerl So there were, the more to confuse the event, human men on
both sides.
"The time is nowl" the voice of Rimrock the ansel shrilled in Paul's brains, and yet the
silent Rimrock was battling one of the iron bears and seemed not even aware of Paul's location.
But Rimrock was a devious fellow.
Paul, free again for a moment, bounded like a springbuck and was into Foreman's
spacecraft. Foreman had keyed permission, and the identification counterpart had not been jammed
on this. Paul was in sudden flight.
Well, it had been a curious and bitter battle, quite brief and quite deadly. At least two
humans had been killed, and half a dozen mechanicals. And the battle will have to explain itself
as it goes along, for it is not over. It is to be fought again and again in its variations.
But Paul was free and in flight-painfully swiped and giddy from loss of blood, but in
flight beyond pursuit. The Programmed Killers had Paul on their death list as an enemy of the
Astrobe Ideal; and yet he was now on mission for the three big men, the Inner Circle of the
Masters, who were supposed to be the mainstays of that ideal.
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Paul had been whistling happily, whenever he had the breath for it, during the whole
confused battle in which he had killed a man and demolished a Programmed Person. He was still
whistling happily when he was in flight in Foreman's spacecraft; and none of those in the melee
(except the ansel) had any idea what he was about. And he still whistled when he was in Hopp-
Equation Space.
It breaks here. It isn't like other space. And persons and things in it aren't the same
persons and things they were before.
Astrobe is about a parsec and a half from Earth. Going at light speed it would take more
than five years to make the trip. But by Hopp-Equation Travel, it could be made in one Astrobe
month, a little less than one Earth month, about seven hundred standard hours.
Paul's craft would disappear as it traversed the parsec and a half to Earth. But, to the
pilot who made the run, it was the rest of the universe that disappeared. To him there was no
motion, no worlds or stars-really no sense of duration, or of time in passage.
Odd things happened to pilots and passengers during Hopp-Equation travel. During the
period of cosmic disappearances, Paul always became left-handed. In addition, there was always an
absolutely fundamental reversal in him. He knew from the private jokes of other pilots that this
total reversal happened to them also. There was more sniggering about this than about anything
else in space lore, for Hopp Equation travel was very new. But it happened, it happened every
time: the total reversal of polarity in a person. Man, what a reversal in polarity!
"Oh well, it's the only way I could ever sing soprano," Paul would say; and he often did
so when in this state.
Paul would cat-nap on the trip, but his state of sleep would register on the craft's
instrumentation, and he was not permitted to sleep beyond ninety seconds at one time. He became
adept at this, however. Very intricate dreams can be experienced in ninety seconds.
Paul calculated that he had at least twenty thousand of these memorable dreams during the
passage. Each was gemlike, self-contained, perfectly timed, widely different from any other. Each
was a short life of its own, many of them with large sets of characters and multitudinous
happenings, some completely gentle, some nostalgic for things never known before but clearly
remembered, some sheer horror beyond the ride of any nightmare. The Law of Conservation of Psychic
Totality will not be abridged. There were four and a half years of psychic awareness to be
compressed into
one month, and it forced its compression into these intense and rapid dreams.
There is a great lot of psychic space debris, and when one enters its area on Hopp-
Equation flight one experiences it. Every poignant thing that ever happened, every comic or
horrifying or exalting episode that ever took place, is still drifting somewhere in space. One
runs into fragments ( and concentrations) of billions of minds there; it is never lost, it is only
spread out thin.
The ansel was in many of the dreams. These creatures are psychically remarkable; they were
in the human unconscious before they were found on Astrobe.
There were flashes, in and around Paul's dreams, of his year of escapes, and of the most
recent escape at spaceport. Paul was never terrified in moments of danger. His terror came later,
in dream form, and a lot of it communicated itself on this passage. The several persons and
mechanisms who had died in that last episode were in several of the dreams; persons who have just
died are also psychically remarkable.
Paul had many dreams of a boy named Adam who died cavalierly in battle again and again,
and so avoided the misfortune of really growing up. Dying was the only thing he was really good
at. And he dreamed of Adam's sister, a childwitch who decided to go to Hell before she died. But
Paul was not sure whether he had known these two, and others previously; whether he knew them only
in these dreams; or whether he was to know them in the future. And how was it that Adam died so
many times? How did he come to life so many times? "No, no," Adam explained. "It is death, it is
death. I am not born again. I do not live again. It is always. another of the same name." Paul
dreamed of the monster Ouden; and of his own death, when it should come, knowing that he was
actually viewing it.
But it wasn't all heavy vital stuff encountered in the Passage Dreams. Some of it was
light and vital stuff. Also still drifting in deep space is every tall tale ever told.
Hey, here's one. It was of an Earthman of a few hundred years before Paul's time, John
Sourwine, or Sour John. But now Paul became Sour John and he told and lived at the same time the
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outre tale.
Owing to the diet he had followed from his youth-alcohol, wormwood, green snails-one of
Sour John's kidneys had become vitrified, and in a peculiar manner. Not only had it turned into
glass, but it had turned into glass of a fine jewel-like green. This he had seen himself on the
fluoroscope.
It happened that he and some friends were at Ghazikhan in what was then India of Old
Earth, and they looked at the great idol there. They were told that the center eye of the idol, an
emerald nearly a foot in diameter, was worth eleven million dollars. Sour John went back to his
ship and thought about it.
"Ghazikhan is not a sea-port," Paul interrupted his dream, for he had acquired Old Earth
information by psychteacher machine long ago. "Either get on or get off," said Sour John, Paul's
other self for the moment. "I say it is a sea-port." Paul (Sour John) went back to his ship and
thought about it. He had always meant to acquire expensive habits, and he could use eleven million
dollars. He sharpened up an old harpoon, called the ship's boy to help him, and in no time at all
they had that kidney out. They trimmed it down a little, put it to a lathe and then a buffer and
one thing and another, and soon they had it shined up to perfection. It was the most beautiful
kidney in the world.
Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet
high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney.
It fit perfectly. "I knew it would," said Paul. Then he climbed down, a descent that not another
man in the world would dare to make, and went back to his ship with the emerald. He sold it in
Karachi for eleven million dollars, and he lived high for a whlie. But owing to his only having
one kidney, Paul was now unable to drink water at all.
Three years later Paul (Sour John) was back in Ghazikhan. He was told that the center eye
of the idol had been reappraised. By a miracle it had changed, the people said. It had become
richer in color, finer in texture, of a deeper brilliance; and a grand new aroma came from it. And
now it
was worth thirteen million dollars. "I figure I lost two million dollars on the deal," Paul said
as he woke up.
Ninety seconds; how could that be? The climb up the idol had taken two hours at least.
Somebody asks what sort of man was this Paul with the permanent crooked grin? He was the sort of
man who was visited by a passage dream of a vitrified kidney.
Twenty thousand of such little dreamsl Hey, here's an
other one!
Paul was coursing at fantastic speed towards the area where the little twin stars Rhium
and Antirhium revolved around each other. "Hurry," were his instructions; "they seem of no
consequence, but they are the governor of the universe. Somebody is tampering with them." Paul
continued at his impossible speed and arrived at the area. He saw something that nobody had ever
seen before, for nobody had ever been so close to them. The two small stars that revolved around
each other were, joined together by a long steel chain. It was that which held them in their tight
rapid orbits; it was that which made them the governor of the universe. Paul quickly located the
trouble. There was a small green creature, with the body of .a monkey and the head of a gargoyle,
cutting the chain with a hack-saw, and he had it near cut in two. "Pray that I be not too late!"
Paul prayed, and he believed he had made it when the sawyer- broke a blade. But he quickly
replaced it with another, stuck his green tongue out at Paul, took three more strokes with the
hack-saw, and the chain broke. Then Rhium and Antirhium swung out of their tight orbits, and the
whole universe was out of control with its governor broken. Fifty billion billion stars went nova,
and then blacked out to nothing. The universe had eaten itself and was gone forever. "I told you
to hurry!" the space captain told Paul furiously as he came barreling up. Then the space captain's
face melted like wax and he was gone. "I did hurry," Paul said. Then his own face melted like wax
and he was gone also.
"Is it quite finished?" came the voice of old hawk-face Fabian Foreman. "If it is quite
finished, then perhaps we can begin to construct a new universe. It's all right. It worked out
well. I meant you to be too late."
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Ninety seconds long, Twenty thousand of them, each one so different.
Oddly, it is only the maladjusted who are able to stand the passages. The well-adjusted
pilot cracks up on such a solo trip. That is why all Hopp-Equation pilots are of a peculiar breed.
Paul knew that some of the monsters he encountered in the passage dreams were real. They
were the weird creatures who live in Hopp-Equation space. Some of them were encountered by Paul
only; but others were experienced by pilot after pilot in the same episode in the same part of
space. It was delinim. Nearly five years of psychic experience must be crowded into one month. The
psychic mass of experience is not foreshortened.
From Golden Astrobe to Blue Earth. Earth is always bluish to one coming from Astrobe.
Astrobe always seems gold to one coming from Earth. It is that the whites of their two suns are
not the same white. White is not an absolute. It is the composite of the colors where you live.
Paul made Earth-fall, taking it from the morning side, a beautiful experience that never
gets old.
He came down in London and stabled his craft. He took with him a small but weighty
instrument, and went to the London office of Cosmos Kingmaker. That richest man on Astrobe had
vast interests on Earth also; and Paul knew his way around on both worlds.
Brooks was in charge of Kingmaker's London office, and Brooks was immediately flustered by
a visit from a man of Astrobe. Most Earthmen are flustered and inferior towards men of Astrobe,
feeling themselves left behind and of less consequence. When most of the small but vital elite had
gone from Earth to Astrobe four or five hundred years before, it had made a difference that was
never erased. Earth really was inferior and of less consequence. now.
Paul presented Brooks with credentials and directives from Kingmaker, and Brooks accepted
them. Paul had forged them during the passage, though he could have gotten real ones from
Kingmaker himself or through Foreman. Paul liked to do things on his own.
"You do not give me much information, and I do not ask much," Brooks said. "I have heard
of you vaguely. I know that you have been in trouble on both worlds. Well, I respect the buccaneer
in a man; it has almost gone out of us. My master Kingmaker has employed such men before, and it
is not for me to question it. Here is the basic machine. I could calibrate an attachment for any
period you wish, but you seem to have brought your own attachment."
"Oh, there's no great secrecy, Brooks. I've come for a man, and I'll probably leave with
him again tomorrow. It isn't necessary that you know the exact calibration, though it would be no
great harm if you guessed it."
"Here's coin of the period as my brief here requires me to supply to you. I wish you
hadn't requisitioned so much of it. It will strap me. It goes much further than you would imagine.
The multiplier is something like fifty to one."
And Paul was fingering the old gold coins around on a little table there.
"Here, I can use less than one in four of these," he said. "I give the rest of them back
to you, Brooks; they are minted a very few years too late for my purpose; they might embarrass me.
The men where I am going would be suspicious of Tomorrow Coins. I know the multiplier, and the
former and present value. The remaining sum will be about right."
"Will you come out in Chelsea, messenger Paul?"
"In Chelsea you ask? You guess shrewdly, for an Earthman. No, I will go in here and come
out here."
"Chelsea at that time was not a part of London. It was some miles in the country."
"The distance was the same then as now. I may find my man in London on business or I may
find him at his home in Chelsea."
Paul stepped through the tuned antenna-like loop, and to Brooks it was as though the man
had disappeared into the crackling air. To Paul it was going through an unholy gray confusion that
is deeper than darkness. And he was sick, as are all who follow the time ravel.
Paul came out ankle-deep in mud. He was on the edge of a big sprawling wooden town. He
went into a ramshackle public house, ordered and ate wood-cock, some very high
beef, barley bread, and an onion the size of a child's head; and he talked to the proprietor.
"Could you tell me whether Thomas More is in the city, or home in Chelsea?" he asked the
man, being careful to give the old pronunciation of words as well as he could.
"Likely at home," the man said. "He's out of favor with the King now, you know. You are a
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/R.%20A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Past%20Master.txtVHETHREEbigmenweremettogetherinaprivatebuildingofoneofthem.Therewasaclatteringthunderinthes reetoutside,butthesunwasshining.Itwastheclashingthunderofthemechanicalkillers,rave ingandraging.Theyshookthebuildingandwe...

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