Alternating Currents (19 page)

Girty’s oration broke off: ‘- but that’s the way Mudgins always - Hey. Say, excuse me, but -
Hey.’

Rafferty froze. From the corner of his eye he saw John Girty ponderously pushing himself up on one flabby arm, staring at him with doubt in the wrinkled little eyes. Near-sighted Girty - but he had recognized Rafferty!

It was the moment of the knife. Quite slowly Rafferty lowered his legs to the floor. ‘Dirty cow,’ he said soundlessly. He felt the knife, keen and ruthless in his hand. Eight slim inches to kill with. ‘Dirty, dirty, dirty,’ he chanted - but it was not soundlessly. ‘Dirty, dirty, I’ll kill you, Girty.’ It was loud now, his own voice.

Oh, they tried to stop him. He could have laughed at that, if he had remembered how. Try to stop Rafferty, with an eight-inch killing knife! They were all shrieking and yowling and running about at once, and they grabbed at him, but he brushed them off like the staining soot of the air. And they got in his way, but it cost them. He hacked and stabbed and sliced and slew.

He was a Spartacus, and a Lizzie Borden, swordsman and butcher. He stabbed every one of them to the heart and ripped them up and down, and for the first time in longer than he could know, Rafferty was Rafferty,
Mister
Rafferty, a man who had once been a human being and, God save the mark, an artist, and not a mere flesh ersatz for a bookkeeping machine. Kill and slice and tear! They overturned furniture, squealing and thundering, like a trapped horse kicking at the flaming, booming walls of its stall. But he killed them all, many times, this Rafferty who was Spartacus and Lizzie Borden -

And, at last, a warrior of the Samurai as well.

When he had killed them enough to slake the fever, he killed himself. Into the pit of the stomach and up. He felt the blade slide and slice, too sharp to tear, a warrior’s weapon. The eight-inch steel made cat’s meat of his bowels and heart and lungs. Rafferty felt himself dying, but it was worth it, it was worth it, it was worth everything in the world . . .

After he committed suicide, he sat there and watched his victims running about. It was several seconds before he noticed that he wasn’t dead.

~ * ~

Girty’s friend demanded: ‘Do you still think the machine treatments are good ?’

Girty said: ‘Ow. The ugly son beat me black and blue.’ He rubbed his bruised pink paunch, staring at the door where they had carried Rafferty out, weeping.

‘You’re lucky,’ said Girty’s friend. ‘Suppose he really had a knife, instead of that old cigar butt he picked up. Suppose somebody else on your Project cracks up, only this one gets a gun somewhere.’

Girty said petulantly, ’Where would anybody get a gun these days ?’ He was getting his breath back, and his nerve.

‘Suppose he did,’ his friend insisted.

Girty said truculently: ‘Watch yourself. I don’t stand for anti-New Way talk. So Rafferty cracked up. I knew he was a weak one. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and what’s it to me if somebody like Rafferty gets broken ?’

He measured his words carefully. ‘People like Rafferty are troublemakers, they don’t want to work, they don’t want full employment. They liked the soft, rotting life under the Old Way and the Machine. If you don’t give them treatments, they’ll make trouble now. Sure, some of them crack up - like sometimes you put a casting in the press and it cracks, because it’s brittle. Worthless. Mudgins knows what to do with the worthless ones. Make them fit, or break them.’

‘But I don’t like Mudgins and his treatments.’ Girty’s friend said violently ... but not out loud. He sat up, wonderingly. He wasn’t in the habit of talking to himself and he wondered if other people ever talked like that to themselves.

Girty, unhearing, was brooding: ‘You’d think even a piece of trash like Rafferty would want to
be part
of something. Why wouldn’t he? But no, he has to work up some crazy resentment - try to kill me. Why ? What reason could he have ?’

Girty’s friend could not give him the answer, though he might have had suspicions. Mudgins could have answered him, and a few others around Mudgins or elsewhere. A few in high places who didn’t need even touch-up courses under the machines, could have told him Rafferty’s reasons. But only a few. The others, the many, many millions, they could never say what the reasons were; because some of them had never known them, and some had had to forget.

<>

~ * ~

Target One

Perhaps we could have managed, some way or another, to blow up Oak Ridge or the Hanford installation. Certainly we could have tried, and I suppose that with effort we should have found the way to do it. But it wouldn’t have been enough. Not nearly enough: The enemy wasn’t the Bomb any more, but e = mc
²
itself. As long as the seed was there, the fruit was bound to come.

We had to destroy the seed.

Marin was on the machine while Lee fed slugs of the fuel metal into the reactor. Marin was a capable man and so I was able to relieve the tension of the last few minutes before the trial by strolling out on the deck of the barge.

It was a beautiful day, the wind from out at sea keeping fallout from the mainland at a minimum. Before me was the Staten Island shore, trees and sheer bare heights at the water’s edge; to my left was the shattered stalagmitic bed of New York. Even after all the decades, there was nothing green there. The rains that had washed the isotopes from Staten Island and watered its new growth of forest had hissed into steam on the island of Manhattan. It would be many decades before grass grew in its streets.

One of the workers in the Staten Island stockpile waved to me, a quarter of a mile across the water, and I waved back. They wished us well, there on the island. All three of us had spent the previous evening ashore with them and the conversation had been loud and long.

If we could succeed!

If we could reverse the clock!

So we drank our long, bitter toasts to success, and every man, woman and child in all the world toasted our efforts with us, all hundred and fifty thousand and more of them, for we all grew up in the ruins and the tradition of greatness and we knew what success would mean.

‘Jom!’ Lee called from behind me. ‘Jom, we’re ready!’

~ * ~

I hurried into the workdeck. Lee was standing at the door, but without a word he went back to his station at the reactor, not daring to leave it too long. His job, in some ways, was the most important of all. The reactor was tricky and dangerous and the K-mesons that powered the trial came only from a complicated fission-and-fusion reaction, hard to handle, deadly if it got out of control.

Marin was already setting up his co-ordinates. I looked over his shoulder at the whirling colours on the screen; it was nothing you could recognize. Not yet.

‘I have the time now,’ Marin said absently, cracking a vernier a hair from its null position. ‘But the tri-di readings are hard. If we could have started out from Switzerland in the first place -’

‘What Switzerland ?’ I asked. The slag-heap on the Alps would not be fit to move around in for centuries.

He said excitedly, ‘It’s coming, Jom!’ He froze one setting at Lausanne’s elevation and dropped his hand to the range and deflection controls. Slowly the whirling began to make sense. We were watching a blur, and the blur smoothed out to become a racing mountainscape. We were flying over it, towards a city just appearing at the horizon. Marin kicked a floor switch and a translucent city map of Lausanne lighted up on the wall before him.

The screen seemed to drive across a lake, through a flickering thicket of buildings, and jerked to a halt inside an auditorium.

Marin cried, ‘I can’t get it clear! The view field -’

‘The view field is all right, Marin!’

‘But it’s so dark!’

I fought back a hysterical laugh. ‘It’s dark because the lights are out, man! Your time adjustment is a little off, that’s all. Scan backward and forward.’

He threw a quick, shamefaced grin at me over his shoulder and carefully fingered the fourth dial. The screen held its shadowy tableau for a moment; then the lights went on. Doll-like figures walked backward into the auditorium as the stage’s curtain went up on actors taking bows. Marin was evidently scanning backward through time.

‘Not too far,’ I cautioned him.

He nodded and delicately twisted the dial backward, then forward. A dozen times the screen lighted and each time it was a pageant, or a rehearsal, or a musical performance.

Then Marin caught his breath and instinctively I clutched his shoulder. He locked the controls and we were silent for a moment, looking at what, back in those earliest twentieth-century days, had been a Swiss ceremony of graduation.

Marin’s eyes were quicker than mine. He said steadily, ‘In the second row, third . . . no, fourth from the right. Is that him?’

I counted off. There was no need to look back to the picture, torn from an old magazine, that we had pinned to the wall. It was a young, lean man in a curiously uncomfortable uniform and round pillbox hat. His eyes were abstracted, staring right through the audience in the hall into far reaches of remote thought. There was no pipe, no violin, no bushy white hair.

There never would be any.

~ * ~

It took nearly half an hour, once we had vectored in, for Lee to bring his reactor up to full charge. Lee was absorbed over his rods and slugs. Marin hovered close by his screen, though the controls were locked and he wasn’t really needed. But I had nothing to do and I stamped about the barge like an expectant father with a five-generation history of gene-damage.

When I went back into the workdeck, Marin said at once, ‘Jom, I can’t do it!’

Lee went steadily on with his work. If he heard, he never showed it.

I said angrily, ‘Don’t be an idiot!’ Perhaps I was angriest because I was beginning to have my own doubts. We had all been brought up to hold human life as the most precious thing on Earth.

Marin was trembling. I cursed myself for leaving him alone so long at this point, long enough to work himself into a state.

‘If we could travel in time -’ he began.

‘Time travel is impossible. Forget it!’

‘But we can’t just murder a man!’

‘Why not?’

He exploded, ‘The greatest genius in theoretical physics who ever lived! A harmless, peaceful human being who never harmed a soul!’

I said as forcefully as I could: ‘Two billion dead, Marin! Three continents wiped out! And every man alive mutating. How many brothers and sisters did you have, Marin?’

He winced. ‘None that survived,’ he admitted. ‘But Einstein himself had nothing to do with it. The bombs were built by others.’

‘After he showed them the way. No, Marin! The world knew what was coming. Look through the books that survive, see how many frightening predictions there were of the horrors that would follow an atomic war. Right, weren’t they ? And yet, once the theory was known, there was no way of preventing the war. There are always wars, Marin, but they don’t matter if they only kill off a fraction of the population. Only when they annihilate whole countries,
then
they matter!’

Lee called, as calmly as though he had been back at the University, ‘ Ready now, Jom!’

We looked at each other for a moment and I could read the revulsion in Marin’s eyes.

‘Well?’ I demanded.

~ * ~

It had to be Marin at the controls; he had been the one who’d practiced, the one who’d designed the controls and knew how they worked. I might have found Lausanne easily enough myself, but I never could have focused the working leads of the time binder to that tiny area inside a human skull where we could do what had to be done.

If time travel were possible - yes, Marin was right - then we could have gone to the young man, perhaps reasoned with him, perhaps bribed him, perhaps, if nothing else worked, abducted him from the past. But time travel was impossible by definition; matter cannot leave its locus in the chronon.

But the K-mesons, those half-understood, hardly material particles-that-were-waves - they were not bound by the laws that ruled crude matter. And though we could not move in time, we could direct a flow of K-mesons that would burn and destroy. . . .

Marin’s voice was harsh. ‘All right, Jom,’ he said.

I heard him at the controls, and when the whispering crackle of mesons lashed out and struck, I also heard that, but I did not watch the screen. Murder comes hard to me, too, whatever duty may force me to do. I had no stomach to watch the little figure in the screen jerk upright and slump over, no desire to see the abstracted light die out of those far-seeing eyes.

And besides, I didn’t need to look at the screen to see what happened at the moment when the K-meson flow leaped out to destroy a brain. I had a window before me and I saw what happened there.

‘Good Lord,’ cried Lee, ‘look at all the boats!’

That was all we could do for a moment, just look. Inside the K-meson field, we were invulnerable and untouchable.

But the world was changing around us.

Wrecked Manhattan sprang back to life. The harsh, familiar dust-cloud sky gave way to a curious blue, with white, fluffy clouds, such a sky as I had seen described in books, but had never thought to observe with my own eyes. And the harbour, the broad, slag-washed harbour of New York - which had seemed crowded when there were as many as three vessels in it at once - teemed with boats, big ones and small ones, motored vessels of all sizes and anchored barges and a floating giant, barely visible through the Narrows, that seemed the size of a city.