Don't Live in the Past
DAMON KNIGHT
I
Bernard François Piet Fu-tze Vargas had a clear and sustained feeling that there ought not to be days like this. Four of his wife’s cousins from Callisto had descended upon him that morning at the ungodly hour of ten o’clock (they required special diets and were obscenely fat); he had been seated below a sub-assistant minister of finance at the High Commissioner’s dinner last night, a manifest insult; the power beam had failed twice on his way into the office, over Sancisco and over the California Garbage Conversion Area; and he had a splitting headache.
Vargas was a youngish man with large, ruddy features now contorted into a heavy scowl. He sat half leaning across his desk, chin on his fist, moodily thrusting folded sheets of metal fiber into the automatic letteropener.
Abruptly the ceiling light dimmed and something swatted him on the rump three times in machine-gun tempo, jarring him all the way up his spine. Vargas found himself canted across his desk with his head in an overturned flower vase. The lights flickered again, went out altogether; and in the brief interval before they went on again a fourth shock, more violent than the others, lifted Vargas all the way across his desk and onto the thick body-temperature carpet.
He sat up slowly, inarticulate with rage. It was at this moment that his assistant, Knut Everett Roku LaSalle Choong, chose to burst into the room. Choong was just as disheveled as his superior. He tripped over the doorsill, lurched wildly and brought up against Vargas’ totem post, saving himself by clutching a white silk banner which carried the names and honors of two hundred and fifty-nine of Vargas’ most distinguished ancestors.
Hanging dramatically from the banner, Choong bleated, “Chief! The pipelines have busted!”
Vargas’ face, which had been flushed a moment before, took on a blotchy appearance. “What, all of them?” he whispered hoarsely.
“All,” said Choong tragically. “We’re right over a fault, you know. The quake must have snapped the pipelines like—like pipestems.”
Vargas scrambled up and clutched the other man by the slack of his sunflower-colored robe. “Did they cut transmission?” he demanded.
“Yes, but—”
“How long before the flow stopped?”
“About two seconds, chief. Possibly a little more. I didn’t stop to get the meter readings—”
“Don’t interrupt me!” said Vargas in a restrained shout. He took a firmer grip and brought his pop-eyed face close to Choong. “What was being transmitted?"
“Flangs,” said the assistant in a barely audible voice. He gulped. “Tweedledums. Collapsed flooring. Argo paste. Rozzers. And—and—”
Vargas had been puffing heavily. Now he held his breath for an instant. “Well?”
“And mangels,” said Choong in terror. “Three pipes of mangels.”
Vargas collapsed on the floor and looked at Choong through his fingers. “Oh, Great Blodgett, no!”
“Yes.”
“Mangels!”
Bedlam was growing in the outer offices. There were running footsteps, shouts, shrieks of dismay.
“Tweedledums are bad enough,” said Vargas. “But mangels! We’ll be excommunicated. They’ll hang our totems upside down.”
A red-faced man appeared in the doorway. His expression was not pleasant. Vargas scrambled to his feet and both he and Choong stood at attention.
“Two and five-sevenths seconds,” the red-faced man remarked. “Not a very good response for trained monitors, is it? Too much Rhine beer the night before, perhaps? Or reading a tape—composing poetry? Catching a little nap? Or was it—?” He stopped, wincing, and looked at a white-metal doughnut strapped to his right wrist, above his ruffled sleeve. A tiny voice spoke at some length; Vargas could only catch the words “jackass” and "cretin.”
“Yes, sir,” said the red-faced man, whose name, for the record, was Wallace Hyacinth Manuel Chiang Llewellyn. He barked at Vargas, “Turn on the tri-D!”
Vargas stumbled over to his desk and obeyed. A five-foot disc set into a low platform on his right glowed faintly, sparked and then spat a vertical stream of color. The image steadied and became the all too convincing three-dimensional replica of a portly man with a bulbous nose and long gray hair.
"Enlarge your image!” it said sharply.
Vargas jumped a foot and tremblingly adjusted the controls on his desk. The portly man frowned at them and said, “I happen to be Representative John Hsi Bright-Feather Wilson Woodcock, Chairman of the Committee to Investigate the San Juaquin Disaster, which was formed in emergency session five months ago. Now, are you all of the scoundrels who were immediately responsible for this outrageous dereliction of duty? If not, get the rest of ’em in here. We’ll get to the bottom of this if it’s the last—"
The Chief Executive, His Honor Ibrahim L. Btandu Eriksson Dickey, frowned an executive frown. “Now let me get this straight,” he said. “The goods are put into one end of the tube and they are turned into some kind of temporal flow?”
“That’s it approximately, Your Honor.” Representative Rowland Mokai Dejonge Baruch Schemkov, Chairman of the Plenary Committee which had replaced Representative Woodcock’s Emergency Committee (Woodcock having been impeached) glanced at a few notes in his palm. He had briefed himself thoroughly.
“In transit, Your Honor, the goods are in a special state of matter, in which they are partially out of our frame of spacio-temporal reference, and are carried along by the universal drift, thus apparently bypassing the laws of inertia and conservation of energy. We apply no force once they enter the tube; that’s why tube transport is so cheap.
“Moreover, the size and shape of the goods to be transported make no difference, since the spacial coordinates are not fixed with reference to normal space. You might say that the net result is the same as if you had melted everything down to a kind of thin mush. This, of course, is done before the shipment is fed into the pipelines. I would not insult Your Honor’s intelligence by explaining the method by which the shipments are moved out of our space-time, for it is too well known to need explaining.
“There is just enough contact between the two matter states so that the material being transported will not go through a solid of any thickness. In other words, we can lead the shipments anywhere in the world through a tube, even a very small one—the tubes we use are three-eighths inches in width. At the end of the tube, the expansion of the material releases it from the special state and it comes out in its original form, ready to be processed, stored, consumed or whatever.”
“I see,” commented the Chief. “That’s all very well, Representative, but what I want to know is this. Just why were we caught with our robes up in this situation?”
Schemkov cleared his throat. “There appears,” he admitted, “to have been some theoretical possibility of this happening all along. I have several abstracts, which I will turn over to your office, of articles and scientific papers in which reference is made to the possibility. It—”
The chief looked down his long nose in a manner which suggested that the Representative was not quite human. He said slowly and earnestly, “And this possibility was given no consideration when the transport tubes were built? Is that it?”
Representative Schemkov had been a member of the Subcommittee to Pass on Recommendations for the Erection of Chang-Wiley Transport Tubes, and he quaked in his sandals. “No safeguard was possible, Your Honor. What occurred was that the rupture in the lines took place at exactly the instant when that section of the planet was revolving directly opposite the line of universal drift—an event which astronomers assure me is very rare—and, in addition, I understand that the temporal displacement at that moment was exceptionally great. Under these conditions, the material released from the end of the tube did not re-form normally, but was carried some distance back along the temporal line—”