boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

196 Anthony Boucher
“Do something!” Martha screamed.
It all happened at once, but Brent seemed to see it in slow motion even as he
moved. Mimi lunged forward furiously and recklessly. Kruj dived for her feet and
brought her to the floor out of the line of fire. At the same time Brent threw himself
forward just as Bokor moved, so that the rod now pointed directly at Brent. He
couldn’t arrest his momentum. He was headed straight at Bokor’s new instrument
of death. And then the rod moved to Bokor’s own head.
There was no noise, no flash. But Bokor’s body was lying on the floor, and the
head was nowhere.
“That beed hard,” said Martha’s voice. “I haved to stay in his mind long enough
to actuate rod, but get out before death. Matter of fractions of seconds.”
“Nice work, sir-madam,” Brent grunted. He looked down at the corpse. “But
that was only one of him.”
Brent quoted in his journal: Love, but a day, and the world has changed! A week, to be
more exact, but the change is nonetheless sudden and impressive.
Our nameless visitant from the future—they seem to need titles as little as sexes in
that time—whom I have for convenience labeled Sirdam, has organized our plans about
the central idea of interfering as little as possible—forcing the inhabitants of the Stasis
to work out their own salvation. The travelers do not appear openly in this great change.
We work through Stephen’s associates.
There are some 40 of us (I guess I count as a traveler; I’m not too sure what the hell
my status is by now), which means each of us can take on five or ten of Stephen’s boys
(and girls), picking the ones whose interests lie closest to his own special fields. That means
a working force of Undergrounders running somewhere above 200 and under 500 …
fluctuating constantly as people come under or escape from Stapper observation, as new
recruits come in, or (as will damnably happen despite every precaution) as one of our
solid old-timers gets his mind changed and decides Stasis bees perfect after all.
The best single example to show the results we obtain is the episode of Professor Harrington,
whose special department of so-called learning is the preservation of the Nakamura
Law of Spatial Acceleration, which had so conclusively proved to the founders of the Stasis
the impossibility of interplanetary travel.
This fell obviously within Nikobat’s field. A young scientist affiliated with the
Underground—a nephew, I have since learned, of Alex’s—expounded the Nakamura
doctrine as he had learned and re-proved it. It took the Venusian less than five minutes
to put his finger on the basic flaw in the statement—the absolute omission, in all calculations,
of any consideration of galactic drift. Once this correction was applied to the
Nakamura formulas, they stood revealed as the pure nonsense which, indeed, Nikobat’s
very presence proved them.
It was not Nikobat but the young man who placed this evidence before Professor Harrington.
The scene must have been classic. “I saw,” the young man later told us—they are
all trying desperately to unlearn Farthing-ized English—“his mouth fall open and gap
spread across his face as wide as gap he suddenly finded in universe.”
For the professor was not stupid. He was simply so conditioned from childhood to
the acceptance of the Stasis of Cosmos that he had never questioned it. Besides, he had
doubtless had friends whose minds were changed when they speculated too far.