The Chronocide Mission

3. EGARN (2)

The Old Med remained the central figure in Egarn’s life as long as he lived, and they came to love each other dearly. The gift to Egarn of one of the Med’s names actually signified a type of informal adoption. The Old Med would have gladly bestowed both of his names on him, but the society’s rigid class distinctions made that impossible. No one but a born aristocrat could bear two names.

Time passed, and Egarn learned to live and survive in a primitive society where technology and scientific thought had reverted to their medieval infancies—with one puzzling exception. The Old Med’s knowledge of optics vastly exceeded the college physics Egarn had mastered. Lenses, which were called len, singular, and lens, plural, were ground with a skill far beyond anything Egarn had imagined. Lant’s prentice len grinders had to invest years of hard work to master the rudiments and much longer to become expert.

The most important len was called the Honsun Len. It had a wavy surface that required consummate grinding skill to produce, and it had peculiar scientific properties that were beyond the scope of Egarn’s undergraduate knowledge of physics to describe. This len was the principal component in the odd contraption that had sucked Vladislav Kuznetsov out of the park.

The Old Med had been experimenting with the Honsun Len for years, grinding different shapes and sizes of len on the Honsun Len principle and putting them together in combinations that produced very strange effects indeed, and he conducted experiment after experiment for no other reason than to find out what would happen. One arrangement of lens started fires that almost destroyed his workroom. Another shattered fragile objects. Light flickered from one when it was suspended in darkness—an illumination as fleeting as the flash of a firefly but far more mysterious. The Old Med kept trying different combinations until finally one of them made small objects disappear.

He repeated that experiment numerous times over a period of sikes, but he failed utterly in his attempts to find out where the things went. As he increased the size of his apparatus, he could make larger and larger objects disappear. Then it occurred to him to reverse the lens. This time the opposite happened. Things began to appear out of nowhere—ordinary things, such as rocks and debris, and utterly strange things the med had never seen before. Once an unusual bird materialized before his astonished eyes. It flew about the laboratory until a server accidentally let it escape.

That gave him the idea for the great experiment of his life. He decided to make something vanish and then bring it back. First he tried a young porkley. It vanished, but when the lens were reversed, nothing happened. The Old Med deduced that it had run off when it got to wherever the lens sent it. He tried the experiment again and tied the porkley’s legs together.

This was the pig that landed in Vladislav Kuznetsov’s lap. It also ran off—because Kuznetsov released it—and when the lens were reversed, the strange power they controlled snatched Kuznetsov.

As Egarn, Kuznetsov helped the Old Med continue these experiments. One day he inadvertently brought a mongrel dog out of the unknown. When he attempted to send it back, it died in agony—confirmation he hadn’t really needed that he was marooned where he was. But where was he?

Down the relentless procession of sikes, Egarn and the Old Med worked together on two questions that tantilized them. Egarn was obsessed with finding out where he was; the Old Med, a truly scientific personality in a barbarous age, was equally engrossed with the problem of where Egarn had come from. They finally accepted the incredible truth only because they had eliminated everything else—at which point they began trying to determine when Egarn was and when he had come from, because he had traveled through time. Apparently the len focused temporal energy. This primitive Peerdom of Lant existed in Vladislov Kuznetsov’s future—but exactly where in his future? The two of them were determined to find out.

In the Old Med’s youth he had accumulated a large collection of antique books, ransacking ruins and even traveling to neighboring peerdoms in search of them. Egarn examined that library diligently. Some of the books were in English, and their dates, scattered through the first four decades of the 21st century, offered further proof that he had traveled through time.

He next became an archeologist and began to study artifacts that had been accidently discovered in Lant and its neighboring peerdoms. Two shattering truths forced themselves on him: He had traveled at least two hundred years into the future and probably more than three hundred; and some horrendous catastrophe had struck the planet Earth in the first half of the twenty-first century. None of the books had been published after the year 2039.

While he worked, and studied, and experimented, he paid little attention to the Peerdom of Lant and its people. Their lives had nothing whatsoever to do with his, which centered on the Old Med and the workroom. Egarn’s admiration and affection for the old scientist continued to grow.

Then the Prince of Lant, the peer’s eldest daughter and heir, a spiteful young lady of sixteen whom Egarn had quickly learned to avoid, inexplicably decided she was in love with him. She chose him as her consort in the casual kind of marriage that peeragers affected. In the Peerdom of Lant, only a recklessly headstrong prince would have insisted on mating with an unknown commoner; only a ruthless one could have gotten away with it.

The Old Med advised Egarn to consent. “If you refuse, you will make a permanent enemy,” he said. “A stranger like yourself can’t afford to offend the future peer. Accept her, treat her kindly, and indulge all of her whims. It won’t last long. If you can make her your friend, you will have an invaluable patron.”

The marriage lasted two years, which was far longer than peeragers’ matings usually endured. There was one child, a daughter, who died young. They parted amicably, and when Egarn returned to the Old Med’s workrooms, he had made a lifelong friend.

So involved did he and the Old Med become with problems of history and with their Honsun Len experiments that Egarn gave no further thought to social or political matters until the old med died at an advanced age. Then the prince, who now was the peer, appointed him Med of Lant. This was more astonishing than her choice of him as consort. The med was the peerdom’s public health officer with responsibilities Egarn knew nothing about despite his long association with the Old Med. The appointment carried with it the lofty rank of Warden of the Peerdom, and only a peerager, a nobleman, could hold the position. But the Old Med had recommended him, and the peer appointed him, and no one dared object.

Egarn suddenly found himself administrator of a governmental bureaucracy that was, next to the army, the peerdom’s largest. He had a complexity of duties and a huge staff of med servers to perform them for him. Since Egarn’s arrival, the Old Med had ignored those duties. Many expected Egarn to do the same, but he wrenched himself away from his studies and doggedly set to work. He had long been the accidental guest of these people of Lant. They had treated him generously and given him high honors, and he had ignored them and their problems completely even though he knew from the beginning that his life was linked with theirs until death. Now he undertook to become a conscientious and competent Med of Lant.

What he learned on his first day in office horrified him.

This primitive society of the future was made up of rigid social classes, as he already knew. There were the peeragers, the age’s aristocrats. They had two names, in which they took overweening pride, and they guarded their class lineage with vehemence. Even as consort to the prince and father of a daughter who would have become peer if she had lived, Egarn, a one-namer, was not allowed to acquire a second name.

The one-namers were the peerdom’s crafters and skilled workers. They operated the mills, they wove, they baked, they engineered the roads, they built, they repaired, they kept the civilization functioning and its pathetically scant learning alive. As servers to those peeragers who headed the various governmental departments, they formed a type of civil service and actually ran the government. They also worked as personal servants to the peeragers and looked after their households. The few things they had no connection with were agriculture, any form of rough, heavy labor, and the military.

Rough labor was the responsibility of the work-humans, the no-namers, mentally deficient brutes who performed the most rigorous and exhausting labor under the lash without whimpering.

The no-namers’ supervisors were called lashers. They, too, were no-namers, but at least they were given numbers. No-name males who had slightly more mental capacity than others of their kind became lashers, and forever afterward their cruelly flicking whips peeled flesh from the backs of their fathers and brothers and cousins—and, ultimately, sons. The military drafted its soldiers from the ranks of the lashers.

Egarn watched the brutal way the lashers drove the no-name laborers and felt revolted. He was even more horrified when he discovered the abominable basis for these class distinctions.

The Honsun Len.

And he, as Med of Lant, was responsible for its use.

Not only was the Honsun Len the foundation of the grossly superstitious medicine practiced in this civilization, but it also was used to numb the minds of no-namers and lashers and keep them subjugated. The treatments started in infancy. All babies born to no-name females received their first Honsun Len exposure shortly after birth. The mothers trustingly took their newborn babies to the med servers for what they thought were beneficial medical treatments—if the mentally impaired no-name females were able to think at all. The babies’ still unformed minds were partially destroyed by rays from the Honsun Len, which focused energy out of nowhere. Such treatments were repeated throughout the no-namers’ lives. As a result, a class of mindless humans was condemned to a lifetime of uncomplaining, totally submissive, slave labor.

The lashers received a different course of treatments. Their minds were left more alert but still sadly impaired. This probably had nothing to do with their revolting characters. The fact that their entire lives were devoted to inflicting pain on others hardened them into unfeeling monsters.

The system had originated in the aftermath of the holocaust, Egarn reasoned. One petty state managed to subjugate another and then, with fiendish cleverness, used the len on its people, thus eliminating any possibility of revolt and at the same time originating the most loathsome form of slavery ever devised. From babyhood, the minds of the slaves were bound in shackles that could never be loosened.

As the system became entrenched, work-humans were bred to achieve the stature best suited to a human draft animal. The system had functioned so efficiently that human slaves now were far less costly to breed and maintain than horses would have been.

A baby’s schedule of treatments was predetermined by its alertness and stature. No-name females were left with sufficient mentality to enable them to rear children. Husky, more aggressive males became sub-moronic lashers and soldiers. The remaining no-name males were condemned to a lifetime of incessant labor that ended only when work or sickness killed them.

This shambles of a civilization was totally dependent on the system of slavery brought into being and maintained by the Honsun Len. But where had the Honsun Len come from? Egarn returned to his studies and eventually pieced isolated scraps of information into a staggering discovery. The Honsun Len had been invented at the end of the twentieth century by a man named Johnson, who had lived in Rochester, New York. Probably he had been a specialist in optics who worked in the photographic industry there. During his lifetime, the peculiar properties of his len made it an innocent curiosity, and only a few uses were found for it in children’s toys or household gadgets. It was not a subject of serious scientific research until certain military applications were discovered.

When that happened, civilization was doomed. The Honsun Len, adapted to war, unleashed the primal energy of the universe on the planet Earth. It devastated a world and annihilated much of its population. Mounted in artificial satellites, huge Honsun Lens wiped out armies, destroyed cities, cut enormous chasms across plains, leveled hills, piled up new mountains. Coastlines and the courses of rivers were altered. The Honsun Len changed the face of the planet and almost obliterated it.

Now it was about to destroy civilization a second time— thanks, in part, to Egarn, who rediscovered the military potential of the len and unthinkingly gave a few copies of a weapon to the Peer of Lant when she convinced him her peerdom was threatened by its neighbors. In between, it had destroyed the minds of two thirds of the surviving human race.

“A great pity,” Egarn mused, “that the Johnson who inflicted this curse on humanity didn’t die young.”

It was then that the great idea took possession of him: He could save humanity by destroying it. He had once read a story that posed a similar problem: Is it possible to change the present by journeying through time and altering the past? In the story, the quest failed. Egarn went over his plan again and again, trying to analyze it with cold logic, and he convinced himself it could succeed.

If the Honsun Len had never been invented, the destruction of Earth in the twenty-first century could not have happened, and the hideous aftermath that produced this civilization of brain-damaged slaves would not have occurred. If Egarn could retroactively eliminate the len, what would replace it? Something better, surely. He couldn’t imagine anything worse. He had only to return to his own time, seek out this Johnson, and prevent him from inventing his insidious len or at least from giving it to the world. If it took murder to do that, so be it. It was the one way this barbaric future could be prevented: by destroying it before it happened.

He was the only person in the world who had the requisite knowledge to do that—to travel through time to a past where he knew the language, knew how to behave and function effectively, knew exactly how to commit a murder if there had to be one. He alone had sufficient knowledge, and he couldn’t use it. The mere attempt to return to the past would kill him.

He would have to train someone else to do it.

The technical problems were mind-twisting in their complexity. It was one thing to speak of sending someone into the past; it was quite another thing to send that someone to a precise year, month, day, and time of day, and even that would not be sufficient. He also would have to be sent to a precise place. If the emissary landed in New York’s Times Square at noon, his effectiveness would be severely impaired.

Egarn dedicated the remainder of his life to solving these problems. Metals were so scarce and so difficult to work that he had to fashion gears of wood, and for a long time no carver could make them with sufficient precision to produce the fine adjustments he required. He had been close to success, or so he thought, when the Peer of Lant came to him with her panicky story about Lant being invaded. Probably he had given her the weapon as much to keep his work from being interrupted as to save Lant. That error in judgment destroyed more than Lant’s neighbors. It also destroyed his last chance to save Earth—or so he had thought when he heard the Lantiff’s dogs on his trail.

Thanks to Bernal, fate had spun the wheel one more time, but where in this ghastly future could he find another time traveler, a martyr willing to immolate himself to save humanity? Because a trip through time was a one-way trip. Egarn’s own experience proved that. Not only would the emissary be marooned in what would seem like an appallingly complex civilization, but he might be imprisoned or executed for murder.

As Egarn’s delirium lessened, and the scouts came and went and worriedly discussed the intense search that was going on over their heads, he lay quietly on his bed of branches and thought about his great idea.

He not only had to find an emissary, but he had to give him a comprehensive survival course. He had to teach him what to say and do in every circumstance: instruct him about automobiles—driving one, buying one, insuring one, renting one; instruct him about auto repairs, anti-freeze, oil, lubricants; instruct him about traffic lights, pedestrian walkways, drivers’ licences; instruct him about IDs and credit cards; about tall buildings and elevators; about airplanes, trains, busses, and taxis; about fast food, motels, and self-service gas stations; about money, tipping, shopping, and supermarket checkouts; about newspapers, radio and TV; about libraries, city directories, and telephones; about advertising, shopping malls, salesmen, sizes of clothing and shoes. The emissary would have to know the rudiments of investigation—how to track down one Johnson among the hundreds to be found in any major city— and he had to know how to survive while he did it, perhaps for months. Merely understanding money wouldn’t be enough. He had to be able to acquire money when he needed it. He had to know about law and the police. He would even need coaching in breaking and entering.

The task of teaching someone from a primitive society about the complex wonders of the Twentieth Century was so enormous that Egarn hesitated even to make a beginning. He was much too old and much too tired. He had waited too long.

But he was the only man alive who could do it, and so he had to try. He would work while there was any life in him, and do his best, and pray that for once in his life he would be lucky.

“No,” he muttered. “I will need a lot more than that. Luck wouldn’t be enough. It will take a miracle.”