The girl came in and placed several objects on the desk in front of him. She said, “Mr. Handriss, these just came up from LD. They took them out of the pockets of a man reported as wandering in the street in need of a lobe job.”
She had left the office door open. Cramer, deputy chief of LD, sauntered in and said, “The guy was really off. He was yammering about being from the past and not to destroy his mind.”
Roger Handriss poked the objects with a manicured finger. He said, “Small pocket change from the twentieth century, Cramer. Membership cards in professional organizations of that era. Ah, here’s a letter.”
As Cramer and the girl waited Roger Handriss read the letter through twice. He gave Cramer an uncomfortable smile and said, “This appears to be a letter from a technical publishing house telling Mr. — ah — Maddon that they intend to reprint his book, Suggestions on Time Focus in February of 1950. Miss Hart, get on the phone and see if you can raise anyone at the library who can look this up for us. I want to know if such a book was published.”
Miss Hart hastened out of the office.
As they waited Handriss motioned to a chair. Cramer sat down. Handriss said, “Imagine what it must have been like in those days, Al. They had the secrets but they didn’t begin to use them until — let me see — four years later. Aldous Huxley had already given them their clue with his literary invention of the Feelies. But they ignored him.
“All their energies went into wars and rumors of wars and random scientific advancement and sociological disruptions. Of course, with Video on the march at that time, they were beginning to get a little preview. Millions of people were beginning to sit in front of the Video screens, content even with that crude excuse for entertainment.”
Cramer suppressed a yawn. Handriss was known to go on like that for hours.
“Now,” Handriss continued, “all the efforts of a world society are channeled into World Senseways. There is no waste of effort changing a perfectly acceptable status quo. Every man can have Temp and if you save your money you can have Permanent, which they say, is as close to heaven as man can get. Uh — what was that, Miss Hart?”
“There is such a book, Mr. Handriss, and it was published at that time. A Dr. Rufus Maddon wrote it.”
Handriss sighed and clucked. “Well,” he said, “have Maddon brought up here.”
Maddon was brought into the office by an attendant. He wore a wide foolish smile and a tiny bandage on his temple. He walked with the clumsiness of an overgrown child.
“Blast it, Al,” Handriss said, “why couldn’t your people have been more careful! He looks as if he might have been intelligent.”
Al shrugged. “Do they come here from the past every couple of minutes? He didn’t look any different than any other lobey to me.”
“I suppose it couldn’t be helped,” Handriss said. “We’ve done this man a great wrong. We can wait and reeducate, I suppose. But that seems to be treating him rather shabbily.”
“We can’t send him back,” Al Cramer said.
Handriss stood up, his eyes glowing. “But it is within my authority to grant him one of the Perm setups given me. World Senseways knows that Regional Directors make mistakes. This will rectify any mistake to an individual.”
“Is it fair he should get it for free?” Cramer asked. “And besides, maybe the people who helped send him up here into the future would like to know what goes on.”
Handriss smiled shrewdly. “And if they knew, what would stop them from flooding in on us? Have Hookup install him immediately.”
The subterranean corridor had once been used for underground trains. But with the reduction in population it had ceased to pay its way and had been taken over by World Senseways to house the sixty-five thousand Perms.
Dr. Rufus Maddon was taken, in his new shambling walk, to the shining cubicle. His name and the date of installation were written on a card and inserted in the door slot. Handriss stood enviously aside and watched the process.
The bored technicians worked rapidly. They stripped the unprotesting Rufus Maddon, took him inside his cubicle, forced him down onto the foam couch. They rolled him over onto his side, made the usual incision at the back of his neck, carefully slit the main motor nerves, leaving the senses, the heart and lungs intact. They checked the air conditioning and plugged him into the feeding schedule for that bank of Perms.
Next they swung the handrods and the footplates into position, gave him injections of local anesthetic, expertly flayed the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, painted the raw flesh with the sticky nerve graft and held his hands closed around the rods, his feet against the plates until they adhered in the proper position.
Handriss glanced at his watch.
“Guess that’s all we can watch, Al. Come along.”
The two men walked back down the long corridor. Handriss said, “The lucky so and so. We have to work for it. I get my Perm in another year — right down here beside him. In the meantime we’ll have to content ourselves with the hand sets, holding onto those blasted knobs that don’t let enough through to hardly raise the hair on the back of your neck.”
Al sighed enviously. “Nothing to do for as long as he lives except twenty-four hours a day of being the hero of the most adventurous and glamorous and exciting stories that the race has been able to devise. No memories. I told them to dial him in on the Cowboy series. There’s seven years of that now. It’ll be more familiar to him. I’m electing Crime and Detection. Eleven years of that now, you know.”
Roger Handriss chuckled and jabbed Al with his elbow. “Be smart, Al. Pick the Harem series.”
Back in the cubicle the technicians were making the final adjustments. They inserted the sound buttons in Rufus Maddon’s ears, deftly removed his eyelids, moved his head into just the right position and then pulled down the deeply concave shining screen so that Rufus Maddon’s staring eyes looked directly into it.
The elder technician pulled the wall switch. He bent and peered into the screen. “Color okay, three dimensions okay. Come on, Joe, we got another to do before quitting.”
They left, closed the metal door, locked it.
Inside the cubicle Dr. Rufus Maddon was riding slowly down the steep trail from the mesa to the cattle town on the plains. He was trail-weary and sun-blackened. There was an old score to settle. Feeney was about to foreclose on Mary Ann’s spread and Buck Hoskie, Mary Ann’s crooked foreman, had threatened to shoot on sight.
Rufus Maddon wiped the sweat from his forehead on the back of a lean hard brown hero’s hand.
Half-Past Eternity
Originally published in Super Science Stories, July 1950.
Slowly he built an eternal empire with the seconds he stole from other men’s lives... but not all his art could aid him when his own span lay between dawn and dusk — the dusk before the endless night that he would never see!
Chapter One
Stolen Lives
The kid didn’t talk. Nat February talked. Which is what you might have expected.
The kid had a punch like the business end of a mule, sure, and he kept boring in, shuffling flat-footed, game all the way through. But everybody on the Beach knew that the kid, who, by the way, at thirty-one was a kid no longer, had suffered slow degeneration of the reflexes to the point where his Sunday punch floated in like a big balloon and he could be tagged at will.