The Star Diaries (21 page)

I was so startled, I ruined the eggs; they flopped out, bacon fat and all, right into the flame—while I, cursing everything under and above the sun, rushed upstairs three steps at a time.

Not a single book was left on the shelves; the remainder lay in a huge heap, from under which he clambered out, dragging the chronocycle after him with difficulty, for he had fallen on top of it.

“And what is
this
supposed to mean?!” I shouted, livid.

“I’ll explain in a minute … wait…” he mumbled, pulling the chronocycle over to the lamp. He inspected it, preoccupied, not even bothering to offer an excuse for this second intrusion. This was really too much.

“You could at least apologize!!” I yelled, beside myself.

He smiled. He set aside the chronocycle, that is, propped it against the wall, found the pipe, filled it with my tobacco, lit it, crossing his legs, until I saw red.

“Of all the nerve!!” I screamed. So far I hadn’t budged, but swore he’d be black-and-blue before I was through with him. Playing practical jokes on me, and in my own home!

“Oh come now,” he said, and yawned. It was plain he didn’t feel at fault. And yet he had just dumped the rest of my books all over the floor!

“That was unintentional,” he observed, puffing away. “The chronocycle skidded again…”

“But why did you return?”

“I had to.”

“Had to??”

“We are, my dear boy, in a
circle
of time,” he calmly said. “Presently I’ll be urging you to accept the position of general director. If you refuse, I’ll take my leave, be back before long, and the whole thing will start from the beginning…”

“That’s impossible! We’re in a
closed
curve in time?”

“Precisely.”

“I don’t believe you! If that were true, everything we say and do would have to be an exact, word-for-word and blow-by-blow repetition, and what I’m saying now, and what you’re saying, is no longer completely the same as the first time!!”

“There are all sorts of old wives’ tales told about traveling in time,” he said, “and the one you’ve mentioned is among the most ridiculous. In a time circle everything must follow a
similar
course, but not at all the
same,
since closure in time, much as closure in space, does not by any means rule out freedom of action, it only limits it severely! If you accept the offer and depart for the year 2661, the
circle
will thereby be transformed into an open loop. But should you refuse and kick me out again, I’ll only return and … well, you know what the result will be!”

“So I have no alternative?!” I said, boiling. “Yes, from the very first something told me there was double-dealing at the bottom of this! Out of my house! Out of my sight!!”

“Don’t be an ass,” he replied coldly. “What happens depends entirely on you now, not on me, or to put it more accurately, Rosenbeisser’s people have shut the loop—locked it—on the both of us, and we'll stay stuck in here until you agree to be director!”

“Some ‘offer,’ this!” I shouted. “And what if I just whop the living daylights out of you?”

“You’d only have the same dished out to you when the time came. It’s your choice—turn down the offer, and we can amuse ourselves like this for the rest of our natural lives…”

“Is that so! I’ll lock you in the cellar and go where I damn well please!”

“Like as not, I’d be doing the locking, since I’m stronger!”

“Oh?”

“You should only know. The food they serve in the year 2661 is a great deal more nourishing than here—than now—you wouldn’t last a minute with me.”

“We’ll see about that…” I growled, rising from the chair. He didn’t budge.

“I know furjoto,” he casually remarked.

“What’s that?”

“A form of perfected judo from the year 2661. I’d put you out of action in a second.”

I was infuriated, but my many experiences in life had taught me to control even the most violent passions. And so, having talked to him—that is, to myself—I reached the conclusion that there really was no way out of it. Besides, this historic mission waiting in the future, it accorded with my views as well as with my personality. The coercion was the only thing that I resented, however I realized it was not with him—a pawn—that I ought to deal, but with those whom he represented.

He showed me how to operate the chronocycle, gave me a few pointers, so I climbed into the saddle and was going to tell him to clean up after himself and also call the carpenter to fix the bookshelves, but didn’t have time, for he pushed the starter. Then he, the light of the lamp, the entire room, everything disappeared, as if blown out. Beneath me the machine, that metal rod with its widened, funnel-like exhaust in the back, shook, at times jumping so violently I had to grip the handlebars with all my strength to keep from falling off; I couldn’t see a thing, but only had the sensation as though someone were rubbing my face and body with a wire brush; when it seemed that my headlong rush into time was growing excessive, I pulled the brake, whereupon shadowy shapes emerged from out of the swirling blackness.

These were enormous buildings of some sort, now bulging, now slender, and I flew right through them like the wind through a picket fence. Each such passage seemed to threaten collision with a wall, I instinctively shut my eyes and turned up the speed again—that is, the tempo. A couple of times the machine kicked so much that my head jerked and teeth rattled. At one point I experienced a change, difficult to describe, it was like being in some thick, syrupy medium, in glue that was hardening; the thought occurred to me that I was now passing through a barrier which might eventually become my grave, and that I and the chronocycle would be trapped, both frozen in concrete like some strange insect in amber. But again there was a lurch forward, the chronocycle quivered, and I landed on something elastic, which yielded and swayed. The machine slipped out from under me, a burst of white light hit me in the eyes; I had to close them, blinded.

When I opened them again, a hum of voices surrounded me. I was lying in the middle of a large disk of foam plastic that was painted with concentric circles like a target; the overturned chronocycle was resting nearby, and all around stood men, several dozen of them, in glittering jumpsuits. A short, balding towhead stepped onto the mattress of the disk, helped me up and shook my hand repeatedly while saying:

“Glad to have you aboard! Rosenbeisser.”

“Tichy,” I automatically replied. I looked around. We were standing in a hall as big as a city, windowless, with a sky-blue ceiling hung high overhead; spread out in a row, one after the other, were disks, exactly like the one on which I had landed, some empty, some bustling with activity; I won’t deny that I had a few biting remarks prepared for the benefit of Rosenbeisser and the other creators of that temporal net they’d used to haul me from my home, but I said nothing, for suddenly I realized just what this vast hall reminded me of. It was like being in a gigantic Hollywood studio! Three men in armor filed by; the first had a peacock plume on his helmet, a gilded buckler, laboratory assistants adjusted the jewel-encrusted medallion on his chest, a doctor administered an injection in the knight’s uncovered forearm, someone else quickly fastened the cuirass straps, he was given a two-handed sword and a wide cloak emblazoned with griffins; the other two, clad in simple steel, squires probably, were already seated on the saddles of their chronocycle at the center of the target, while a voice from a loudspeaker boomed: “Attention please … twenty, nineteen, eighteen…”

“What’s this?” I asked, bewildered, for at the same time—about thirty feet away—there was a procession of emaciated dervishes in enormous white turbans; they were getting injections too, and a technician was arguing with one of them, it seems the traveler had been caught with a small pistol concealed beneath his burnoose; I saw Indians in war paint wielding freshly sharpened tomahawks, laboratory assistants frantically straightening their feather headdresses, and on a small wooden cart an attendant in a white apron was pushing towards another disk a dreadfully filthy, tattered beggar without legs, who bore a striking resemblance to those monstrous cripples out of Breughel.

“Zero!” announced the loudspeaker. The three in armor on their chronocycle vanished in a faint flash which left a whitish vapor hanging in the air, not unlike the smoke from burnt magnesium: I was already familiar with that effect.

“These are our poll-takers,” Rosenbeisser explained. “They study public opinion in various centuries, all statistical stuff you understand, strictly information gathering; so far no corrective steps have been initiated, we’ve been waiting for you!”

He showed me the way with his hand and followed after; I heard voices counting down, there was a flash here, a flash there, wisps of pale smoke drifting up, more and more exploring parties disappeared, new ones took their place, all exactly as in some huge movie studio during the filming of one of those awful history spectaculars. I soon realized that it was forbidden to take any anachronistic objects along with one into the past, the pollsters however kept trying to smuggle them through, either out of perversity or else for their own convenience; well, I thought, we’d put a stop to that soon enough, there would be some changes made, but I asked only:

“And how long does such information gathering take? When will that knight with the squires return?”

“We keep on schedule,” said Rosenbeisser with a satisfied smile. “Those three got
in yesterday.”

I said nothing, but thought to myself that it wouldn’t be easy getting accustomed to life in a chronomotive society. The laboratory electrocar that was supposed to take us to the administration building broke down, so Rosenbeisser ordered a couple of pollsters off their camels—they were Bedouins—and in this improvised fashion we made it to our destination.

My office was enormous, and done up in the modern style, in other words transparent—which is an understatement, since most of the chairs were altogether invisible, and when I sat at my desk only the piles of paper indicated where the top was; yet because, in leaning over as I worked, I kept seeing my own legs in their striped trousers—and the sight of those stripes made it difficult to concentrate—I finally had all the furniture given a coat of paint, to make it opaque to the eye. But then it turned out that the chairs and tables possessed the most idiotic shapes, inasmuch as they hadn’t been designed for viewing; eventually they were all replaced with a set of antiques from the second half of the 23rd century—only then did I feel at home. I may be getting ahead of myself by mentioning such trivialities, yet they do give some idea of the inefficiency of the whole Project. Granted, my life as a director would have been paradise if all I had had to worry about was interior decorating.

It would take an encyclopedia to relate everything the Project did under my supervision. Therefore I shall, as briefly as I can, sketch out only the major stages of our work. The organizational structure was symmetrical. I had under me TICK (the Time Interferometry and Calendrical Kinetics division), with sections in quantum field and dispersion temporology, and then there was the historical division, containing the faculties of Human and Inhuman. The head of the technologists was Dr. Rob Boskowitz, while Prof. Pat Lado was in charge of the history-makers. Beyond that I had at my personal disposal squads of historicommandos and chronochutists (horotroopers, time jumpers), with a brigade for emergency dethronement as well as a surveillance force. This stand-by corps, a sort of fire department for any unforeseen and dangerous turn of events, bore the acronym MOIRA (Mobile Inspection and Rescue Auxiliaries). At the time of my arrival the technologists-temporalists were ready to begin full-scale telechronic operations, while in the province of Human affairs (run by Harris S. Doddle, an assistant professor) the experts had worked out hundreds of EDENS (Educational Engrams). Similarly the department for Inhuman studies (Obadiah Goody, spheres engineer) had drafted up alternate proposals for improving the solar system, i.e. the planets with Earth at the head, also the course of Biological Evolution, anthropogenesis, etc. All these abovementioned subordinates of mine I later had to get rid of, one by one; each of them is connected, in my memory, with a different crisis within the Project. I shall deal with these at the proper time, to let the human race know to whom it owes its present predicament.

In the beginning I was full of high hopes. Having taken a rush course in the elements of telechronics and chronoscopic permutation, and having mastered too the administrative intricacies (the delegation of authority, division of labor, and so on), during which—even then—I came into conflict with the Head Accountant (Eustace C. Liddy), I saw how monumental was the task that had been thrust upon me. The science of the 27th century provided me with many different technologies for operating in time, and as if that wasn’t enough, there were
hundreds
of different plans to renovate history all waiting for my signature. Behind each stood the weight and wisdom of world famous experts—and I was supposed to pick and choose among this embarrassment of riches! For so far there was no agreement, neither about
which method
we would use to improve upon the past, nor from which point to begin, nor even
how much
intervention there ought to be.

The first phase of our activity was marked with great optimism; we decided not to touch the history of man just yet, but instead put in order all the epochs, eras and eons that preceded it; this grand design provided for—among other things—the devulcanization of the planets, the straightening of the Earth’s axis, the creation on Mars and Venus of conditions favorable for their future colonization, while the Moon was to serve as a kind of embarkation platform or way station for the emigration flights which would take place three to four billion years later. With visions of a Better Yesterday in my head I gave the order to launch the Generators for the Establishment of Isochronalities (GENESIS). Three models went into action—BREKEKE, KEX and KOAX. I no longer recall what exactly those abbreviations stood for; the first had something to do with kilowatts and kinematic effects, the second was either K-meson Excitation or Kenogenetical Exobiometry.