Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine

by Robert Silverberg

If life is to be worth living at all, we have to have at least the illusion that we are capable of making sweeping changes in the world we live in. I say at least the illusion. Real ability to effect change would obviously be preferable, but not all of us can get to that level, and even the illusion of power offers hope, and hope sustains life. The point is not to be a puppet, not to be a passive plaything of karma. I think you’ll agree that sweeping changes in society have to be made. Who will make them, if not you and me? If we tell ourselves that we’re helpless, that meaningful reform is impossible, that the status quo is here for keeps, then we might as well not bother going on living, don’t you think? I mean, if the bus is breaking down and the driver is freaking out on junk and all the doors are jammed, it’s cooler to take the cyanide than to wait around for the inevitable messy smashup. But naturally we don’t want to let ourselves believe that we’re helpless. We want to think that we can grab the wheel and get the bus back on course and steer it safely to the repair shop. Right? Right. That’s what we want to think. Even if it’s only an illusion. Because sometimes—who knows?—you can firm up an illusion and make it real.

The cast of characters. Thomas C—, our chief protagonist, age twenty. As we first encounter him he lies asleep with strands of his own long brown hair casually wrapped across his mouth. Tie-dyed jeans and an ECOLOGY NOW! sweat shirt are crumpled at the foot of the bed. He was raised in Elephant Mound, Wisconsin, and this is his third year at the university. He appears to be sleeping peacefully, but through his dreaming mind flit disturbing phantoms: Lee Harvey Oswald, George Lincoln Rockwell, Neil Armstrong, Arthur Bremer, Sirhan Sirhan, Hubert Humphrey, Mao Tse-tung, Lieutenant William Calley, John Lennon. Each in turn announces himself, does a light-footed little dance expressive of his character, vanishes and reappears elsewhere in Thomas’s cerebral cortex. On the wall of Thomas’s room are various contemporary totems: a giant photograph of Spiro Agnew playing golf, a gaudy VOTE FOR MCGOVERN sticker, and banners that variously proclaim FREE ANGELA, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PIG FORCE, POWER TO THE PEOPLE, and CHE LIVES! Thomas has an extremely contemporary sensibility, circa 1970-72. By 1997 he will feel terribly nostalgic for the causes and artefacts of his youth, as his grandfather now is for raccoon coats, bathtub gin, and flagpole sitters. He will say things like “Try it, you’ll like it” or “Sock it to me” and no one under forty will laugh.

Asleep next to him is Katherine F—, blonde, nineteen years old. Ordinarily she wears steel-rimmed glasses, green hip-hugger bells, a silken purple poncho, and a macramé shawl, but she wears none of these things now. Katherine is not dreaming, but her next REM cycle is due shortly. She comes from Moose Valley, Minnesota, and lost her virginity at the age of fourteen while watching a Mastroianni-Loren flick at the North Star Drive-In. During her seduction she never took her eyes from the screen for a period longer than thirty seconds. Nowadays she’s much more heavily into the responsiveness thing, but back then she was trying hard to be cool. Four hours ago she and Thomas performed an act of mutual oral-genital stimulation that is illegal in seventeen states and the Republic of Vietnam (South), although there is hope of changing that before long.

On the floor by the side of the bed is Thomas’s dog Fidel, part beagle, part terrier. He is asleep too. Attached to Fidel’s collar is a day-glo streamer that reads THREE WOOFS FOR PET LIB.

Without God, said one of the Karamazov boys, everything is possible. I suppose that’s true enough, if you conceive of God as the force that holds things together, that keeps water from flowing uphill and the sun from rising in the west. But what a limited concept of God that is! Au contraire, Fyodor: with God everything is possible. And I would like to be God for a little while.

Q. What did you do?

A. I yelled at Sergeant Bacon and told him to go and start searching hooches and get your people moving right on—not the hooches but the bunkers—and I started over to Mitchell’s location. I came back out. Meadlo was still standing there with a group of Vietnamese, and I yelled at Meadlo and asked him—I told him if he couldn’t move all those people, to get rid of them.

Q. Did you fire into that group of people?

A. No, sir, I did not.

Q. After that incident, what did you do?

A. Well, I told my men to get on across the ditch and to get into position after I had fired into the ditch.

Q. Now, did you have a chance to look and observe what was in the ditch?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. And what did you see?

A. Dead people, sir.

Q. Did you see any appearance of anybody being alive in there?

A. No, sir.

This is Thomas talking. Listen to me. Just listen. Suppose you had a machine that would enable you to fix everything that’s wrong in the world. Let’s say that it draws on all the resources of modern technology, not to mention the powers of a rich, well-stocked imagination and a highly developed ethical sense. The machine can do anything. It makes you invisible; it gives you a way of slipping backward and forward in time; it provides telepathic access to the minds of others; it lets you reach into those minds and c-h-a-n-g-e them. And so forth. Call this machine whatever you want. Call it Everybody’s Fantasy Actualizer. Call it a Time Machine Mark Nine. Call it a God Box. Call it a magic wand, if you like. Okay. I give you a magic wand. And you give me a magic wand too, because reader and writer have to be allies, co-conspirators. You and me, with our magic wands. What will you do with yours? What will I do with mine? Let’s go.

The Revenge of the Indians. On the plains ten miles west of Grand Otter Falls, Nebraska, the tribes assemble. By pickup truck, camper, Chevrolet, bicycle, and microbus they arrive from every corner of the nation, the delegations of angry redskins. Here are the Onondagas, the Oglallas, the Hunkpapas, the Jicarillas, the Punxsatawneys, the Kickapoos, the Gros Ventres, the Nez Percés, the Lenni Lenapes, the Wepawaugs, the Pamunkeys, the Penobscots, and all that crowd. They are clad in the regalia that the white man expects them to wear: feather bonnets, buckskin leggings, painted faces, tomahawks. See the great bonfire burn! See the leaping seat-shiny braves dance the scalping dance! Listen to their weird barbaric cries! What terror these savages must inspire in the plump suburbanites who watch them on Channel Four!

Now the council meeting begins. The pipe passes. Grunts of approval are heard. The mighty Navaho chieftain, Hosteen Dollars, is the main orator. He speaks for the strongest of the tribes, for the puissant Navahos own motels, gift shops, oil wells, banks, coal mines, and supermarkets. They hold the lucrative national distributorships for the superb pottery of their Hopi and Pueblo neighbours. Quietly they have accumulated vast wealth and power, which they have surreptitiously devoted to the welfare of their less fortunate kinsmen of other tribes. Now the arsenal is fully stocked: the tanks, the flamethrowers, the automatic rifles, the halftracks, the crop-dusters primed with napalm. Only the Big Bang is missing. But that lack, Hosteen Dollars declares, has now been remedied through miraculous intervention. “This is our moment!” he cries. “Hiawatha! Hiawatha!” Solemnly I descend from the skies, drifting in a slow downward spiral, landing lithely on my feet. I am naked but for a fringed breechclout. My coppery skin gleams glossily. Cradled in my arms is a hydrogen bomb, armed and ready. “The Big Bang!” I cry. “Here, brothers! Here!” By nightfall Washington is a heap of radioactive ash. At dawn the Acting President capitulates. Hosteen Dollars goes on national television to explain the new system of reservations, and the roundup of palefaces commences.

Marin County District Attorney Bruce Bales, who disqualified himself as Angela Davis’s prosecutor, said yesterday he was “shocked beyond belief” at her acquittal.

In a bitter reaction, Bales said, “I think the jury fell for the very emotional pitch offered by the defense. She didn’t even take the stand to deny her guilt. Despite what has happened, I still maintain she was as responsible for the death of Judge Haley and the crippling of my assistant, Gary Thomas, as Jonathan Jackson. Undoubtedly more so, because of her age, experience, and intelligence.”

Governor Ronald Reagan, a spokesman at the capital said, was not available for comment on the verdict.

The day we trashed the Pentagon was simply beautiful, a landmark in the history of the Movement. It took years of planning and a tremendous cooperative effort, but the results were worth the heroic struggle and then some.

This is how we did it:

With the help of our IBM 2020 multiphasic we plotted a ring of access points around the whole District of Columbia. Three sites were in Maryland—Hyattsville, Suitland, and Wheaton—and two were on the Virginia side, at McLean and Merrifield. At each access point we dropped a vertical shaft six hundred feet deep, using our Hughes fluid-intake rotary reamer coupled with a GM twin-core extractor unit. Every night we transported the excavation tailings by truck to Kentucky and Tennessee, dumping them as fill in strip-mining scars. When we reached the six-hundred-foot level we began laying down a thirty-six-inch pipeline route straight to the Pentagon from each of our five loci, employing an LTV molecular compactor to convert the soil castings into semi-liquid form. This slurry we pumped into five huge adjacent underground retaining pockets that we carved with our Gardner-Denver hemispherical subsurface backhoe. When the pipelines were laid we started to pump the stored slurry toward the Pentagon at a constant rate calculated for us by our little XDS computer and monitored at five-hundred-meter intervals along the route by our Control Data 106a sensor system. The pumps, of course, were heavy-duty Briggs and Stratton 580’s.

Over a period of eight months we succeeded in replacing the subsoil beneath the Pentagon’s foundation with an immense pool of slurry, taking care, however, to avoid causing any seismological disturbances that the Pentagon’s own equipment might detect. For this part of the operation we employed Bausch and Lomb spectrophotometers and Perkin-Elmer scanners, rigged in series with a Honeywell 990 vibration-damping integrator. Our timing was perfect. On the evening of July 3 we pierced the critical destruct threshold. The Pentagon was now floating on a lake of mud nearly a kilometre in diameter. A triple bank of Dow autonomic stabilizers maintained the building at its normal elevation; we used Ampex homeostasis equipment to regulate flotation pressures. At noon on the Fourth of July Katherine and I held a press conference on the steps of the Library of Congress, attended chiefly by representatives of the underground media although there were a few nonfreak reporters there too. I demanded an immediate end to all Amerikan overseas military adventures and gave the President one hour to reply. There was no response from the White House, of course, and at five minutes to one I activated the sluices by whistling three bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” into a pay telephone outside FBI headquarters. By doing so I initiated a slurry-removal process and by five after one the Pentagon was sinking. It went down slowly enough so that there was no loss of life: the evacuation was complete within two hours and the uppermost floor of the building didn’t go under the mud until five in the afternoon.

Two lions that killed a youth at the Portland Zoo Saturday night were dead today, victims of a night-time rifleman.

Roger Dean Adams, nineteen years old, of Portland, was the youth who was killed. The zoo was closed Saturday night when he and two companions entered the zoo by climbing a fence.

The companions said that the Adams youth first lowered himself over the side of the grizzly bear pit, clinging by his hands to the edge of the wall, then pulling himself up. He tried it again at the lions’ pit after first sitting on the edge.

Kenneth Franklin Bowers of Portland, one of young Adams’s companions, said the youth lowered himself over the edge and as he hung by his fingers he kicked at the lions. One slapped at him, hit his foot, and the youth fell to the floor of the pit, sixteen feet below the rim of the wall. The lions then mauled him and it appeared that he bled to death after an artery in his neck was slashed.

One of the lions, Caesar, a sixteen-year-old male, was killed last night by two bullets from a foreign-made rifle. Sis, an eleven-year-old female, was shot in the spine. She died this morning.

The police said they had few clues to the shootings.

Jack Marks, the zoo director, said the zoo would prosecute anyone charged with the shootings. “You’d have to be sick to shoot an animal that has done nothing wrong by its own standards,” Mr. Marks said. “No right-thinking person would go into the zoo in the middle of the night and shoot an animal in captivity.”

Do you want me to tell you who I really am? You may think I am a college student of the second half of the twentieth century but in fact I am a visitor from the far future, born in a year which by your system of reckoning would be called A.D. 2806. I can try to describe my native era to you, but there is little likelihood you would comprehend what I say. For instance, does it mean anything to you when I tell you that I have two womb-mothers, one ovarian and one uterine, and that my sperm-father in the somatic line was, strictly speaking, part dolphin and part ocelot? Or that I celebrated my fifth neurongate raising by taking part in an expedition to Proxy Nine, where I learned the eleven soul-diving drills and the seven contrary mantras? The trouble is that from your point of view we have moved beyond the technological into the incomprehensible. You could explain television to a man of the eleventh century in such a way that he would grasp the essential concept, if not the actual operative principles (“We have this box on which we are able to make pictures of faraway places appear, and we do this by taming the same power that makes lightning leap across the sky”), but how can I find even the basic words to help you visualize our simplest toys?

At any rate it was eye-festival time, and for my project I chose to live in the year 1972. This required a good deal of preparation. Certain physical alterations were necessary—synthesizing body hair, for example—but the really difficult part was creating the cultural camouflage. I had to pick up speech patterns, historical background, a whole sense of context. (I also had to create a convincing autobiography. The time-field effect provides travelers like myself with an instant retroactive existence in the past, an established background of schooling and parentage and whatnot stretching over any desired period prior to point of arrival, but only if the appropriate programming is done.) I drew on the services of our leading historians and archeologists, who supplied me with everything I needed, including an intensive training in late-twentieth-century youth culture. How glib I became! I can talk all your dialects: macrobiotics, ecology, hallucinogens, lib-sub-aleph, rock, astrology, yoga. Are you a sanpaku Capricorn? Are you plagued by sexism, bum trips, wobbly karma, malign planetary conjunctions? Ask me for advice. I know this stuff. I’m into everything that’s current. I’m with the Revolution all the way. Do you want to know something else? I think I may not be the only time traveler who’s here right now. I’m starting to form a theory that this entire generation may have come here from the future.

Belfast, Northern Ireland, May 28—Six people were killed early today in a big bomb explosion in Short Strand, a Roman Catholic section of Belfast.

Three of the dead, all men, were identified later as members of the Irish Republican Army. Security forces said they believed the bomb blew up accidentally while it was being taken to another part of the city.

One of the dead was identified as a well-known IRA explosives expert who had been high on the British Army’s wanted list for some time. The three other victims, two men and a woman, could not be identified immediately.

Seventeen persons, including several children, were injured by the explosion, and twenty houses in the narrow street were so badly damaged that they will have to be demolished.

One day I woke up and could not breathe. All that day and through the days after, in the green parks and in the rooms of friends and even beside the sea, I could not breathe. The air was used up. Each thing I saw that was ugly was ugly because of man—man-made or man-touched. And so I left my friends and lived alone.

Eugene, Ore. (UPI)—A retired chef and his dog were buried together recently as per the master’s wish.

Horace Lee Edwards, seventy-one years old, had lived alone with his dog for twenty-two years, since it was a pup. He expressed the wish that when he died the dog be buried with him.

Members of Mr. Edwards’s family put the dog to death after Mr. Edwards’s illness. It was placed at its master’s feet in his coffin.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.

A memo to the Actualizer.

Dear Machine:

We need more assassins. The system itself is fundamentally violent and we have tried to transform it through love. That didn’t work. We gave them flowers and they gave us bullets. All right. We’ve reached such a miserable point that the only way we can fight their violence is with violence of our own. The time has come to rip off the rippers-off. Therefore, old machine, your assignment for today is to turn out a corps of capable assassins, a cadre of convincing-looking artificial human beings who will serve the needs of the Movement. Killer androids, that’s what we want.

These are the specs:

AGE—between nineteen and twenty-five years old.

HEIGHT—from five feet to five feet nine.

WEIGHT—on the low side, or else very heavy.

RACE—white, more or less.

RELIGION—Former Christian, now agnostic or atheist. Ex-Fundamentalist will do nicely.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE—intense, weird, a loner, a loser. A bad sexual history: impotence, premature ejaculation, inability to find willing partners. A bad relationship with siblings (if any) and parents. Subject should be a hobbyist (stamp or coin collecting, trap-shooting, cross-country running, etc.) but not an “intellectual.” A touch of paranoia is desirable. Also free-floating ambitions impossible to fulfil.

POLITICAL CONVICTIONS—any. Preferably highly flexible. Willing to call himself a libertarian anarchist on Tuesday and a dedicated Marxist on Thursday if he thinks it’ll get him somewhere to make the switch. Willing to shoot with equal enthusiasm at presidential candidates, incumbent senators, baseball players, rock stars, traffic cops, or any other components of the mysterious “they” that hog the glory and keep him from attaining his true place in the universe.

Okay. You can supply the trimmings yourself, machine. Any color eyes so long as the eyes are a little bit on the glassy hyperthyroid side. Any color hair, although it will help if the hair is prematurely thinning and our man blames his lack of success with women in part on that. Any marital history (single, divorced, widowed, married) provided whatever liaison may have existed was unsatisfactory. The rest is up to you. Get with the job and use your creativity. Start stamping them out in quantity:

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Give us the men. We’ll find uses for them. And when they’ve done their filthy thing we’ll throw them back into the karmic hopper to be recycled, and God help us all.

Every day thousands of ships routinely stain the sea with oily wastes. When an oil tanker has discharged its cargo, it might add weight of some other kind to remain stable; this is usually done by filling some of the ship’s storage tanks with seawater. Before it can take on a new load of oil, the tanker must flush this watery ballast from its tanks; and as the water is pumped out, it takes with it the oily scum that had remained in the tanks when the last cargo was unloaded. Until 1964 each such flushing of an average 40,000-ton tanker sent eighty-three tons of oil into the sea. Improved flushing procedures have cut the usual oil discharge to about three tons. But there are so many tankers afloat—more than 4,000 of them—that they nevertheless release several million tons of oil a year in this fashion. The 44,000 passenger, cargo, military, and pleasure ships now in service add an equal amount of pollution by flushing oily wastes from their bilges. All told, according to one scientific estimate, man may be putting as much as ten million tons of oil a year into the sea. When the explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a 3,200-mile voyage from North Africa to the West Indies in a boat of papyrus reeds in the summer of 1970, he saw “a continuous stretch of at least 1,400 miles of open Atlantic polluted by floating lumps of solidified, asphalt-like oil.” French oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau estimates that forty percent of the world’s sea life has disappeared in the present century. The beaches near Boston Harbor have an average oil accumulation of 21.8 pounds of oil per mile, a figure that climbs to 1,750 pounds per mile on one stretch on Cape Cod. The Scientific Centre of Monaco reports: “On the Mediterranean seaboard practically all the beaches are soiled by the petroleum refineries, and the sea bottom, which serves as a food reserve for marine fauna, is rendered barren by the same factors.”

It’s a coolish spring day and here I am in Washington, DC. That’s the Capitol down there, and there’s the White House. I can’t see the Washington Monument, because they haven’t finished it yet, and of course there isn’t any Lincoln Memorial, because Honest Abe is alive and well on Pennsylvania Avenue. Today is Friday, April 14, 1865. And here I am. Far out!

—We hold the power to effect change. Very well, what shall we change? The whole ugly racial thing?

—That’s cool. But how do we go about it?

—Well, what about uprooting the entire institution of slavery by going back to the sixteenth century and blocking it at the outset?

—No, too many ramifications. We’d have to alter the dynamics of the entire imperialist-colonial thrust, and that’s just too big a job even for a bunch of gods. Omnipotent we may be, but not indefatigable. If we blocked that impulse there, it would only crop up somewhere else along the time-line; no force that powerful can be stifled altogether.

—What we need is a pinpoint way of reversing the racial mess. Let us find a single event that lies at a crucial nexus in the history of black-white relations in the United States and unhappen it. Any suggestions?

—Sure, Thomas. The Lincoln assassination.

—Far out! Run it through the machine; see what the consequences would be.

So we do the simulations and twenty times out of twenty they come out with a recommend that we de-assassinate Lincoln. Groovy. Any baboon with a rifle can do an assassination, but only we can do a de-assassination. Alors: Lincoln goes on to complete his second term. The weak, ineffectual Andrew Johnson remains Vice President, and the Radical Republican faction in Congress doesn’t succeed in enacting its “humble the proud traitors” screw-the-South policies. Under Lincoln’s even-handed guidance the South will be rebuilt sanely and welcomed back into the Union; there won’t be any vindictive Reconstruction era, and there won’t be the equally vindictive Jim Crow reaction against the carpetbaggers that led to all the lynchings and restrictive laws, and maybe we can blot out a century of racial bitterness. Maybe.

That’s Ford’s Theatre over there. Our American Cousin is playing tonight. Right now John Wilkes Booth is holed up in some downtown hotel, I suppose, oiling his gun, rehearsing his speech. “Sic semper tyrannis!” is what he’ll shout, and he’ll blow away poor old Abe.

—One ticket for tonight’s performance, please.

Look at the elegant ladies and gentlemen descending from their carriages. They know the President will be at the theatre, and they’re wearing their finest finery. And yes! That’s the White House buggy! Is that imperious-looking lady Mary Todd Lincoln? It has to be. And there’s the President, stepping right off the five-dollar bill. Graying beard, stooped shoulders, weary eyes, tired, wrinkled face. Poor old Abe. Am I doing you much of a favor by saving you tonight? Don’t you want to lay your burden down? But history needs you, man. All dem li’1 black boys and girls, dey needs you. The President waves. I wave back. Greetings from the twentieth century, Mr. Lincoln! I’m here to rob you of your martyrdom!

Curtain going up. Abe smiles in his box. I can’t follow the play. Words, just words. Time crawls, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ten o’clock at last. The moment’s coming close. There, do you see him? There: the wild-eyed man with the big gun. Wow, that gun’s the size of a cannon! And he’s creeping up on the President. Why doesn’t anybody notice? Is the play so goddamned interesting that nobody notices—

“Hey! Hey you, John Wilkes Booth! Look over here, man! Look at me!”

Everybody turns as I shout. Booth turns too, and I rise and extend my arm and fire, not even needing to aim, just turning the weapon into an extension of my pointing hand as the Zen exercises have shown me how to do. The sound of the shot expands, filling the theatre with a terrible reverberating boom, and Booth topples, blood fountaining from his chest. Now, finally the President’s bodyguards break from their freeze and come scrambling forward. I’m sorry, John. Nothing personal. History was in need of some changing, is all. Goodbye, 1865. Goodbye, President Abe. You’ve got an extension of your lease, thanks to me. The rest is up to you.

Our freedom…our liberation…can only come through a transformation of social structure and relationships…no one group can be free while another is still held in bonds. We want to build a world where people can choose their futures, where they can love without dependency games, where they do not starve. We want to create a world where men and women can relate to each other and to children as sharing, loving equals. We must eliminate the twin oppressors…hierarchical and exploitative capitalism and its myths that keep us so securely in bonds…sexism, racism, and other evils created by those who rule to keep the rest of us apart.

—Do you Alexander, take this man to be your lawful wedded mate?

—I do.

—Do you, George, take this man to be your lawful wedded mate?

—I do.

—Then, George and Alexander, by the power vested in me by the State of New York as ordained minister of the First Congregational Gay Communion of Upper Manhattan, I do hereby pronounce you man and man, wedded before God and in the eyes of mankind, and may you love happily ever after.

It’s all done with the aid of a lot of science fiction gadgetry. I won’t apologize for that part of it. Apologies just aren’t necessary. If you need gadgetry to get yourself off, you use gadgetry; the superficials simply don’t enter into any real consideration of how you get where you want to be from where you’re at. The aim is to eradicate the well-known evils of our society, and if we have to get there by means of time machines, thought-amplification headbands, anti-uptightness rays, molecular interpenetrator beams, superheterodyning levitator rods, and all the rest of that gaudy comic-book paraphernalia, so be it. It’s the results that count.

Like I mean, take the day I blew the President’s mind. You think I could have done that without all this gadgetry? Listen, simply getting into the White House is a trip and a half. You can’t get hold of a reliable map of the interior of the White House, the part that the tourists aren’t allowed to see; the maps that exist are phonies, and actually they keep rearranging the rooms so that espionage agents and assassins won’t be able to find their way around. What is a bedroom one month is an office the next and a switchboard room the month after that. Some rooms can be folded up and removed altogether. It’s a whole wild cloak-and-dagger number. So we set up our ultrasonic intercavitation scanner in Lafayette Park and got ourselves a trustworthy holographic representation of the inside of the building. That data enabled me to get my bearings once I was in there. But I also needed to be able to find the President in a hurry. Our method was to slap a beep transponder on him, which we did by catching the White House’s head salad chef, zonking him on narcoleptic strobes, and programming him to hide the gimmick inside a tomato. The President ate the tomato at dinnertime and from that moment on we could trace him easily. Also, the pattern of interference waves coming from the transponder told us whether anyone was with him.

So okay. I waited until he was alone one night, off in the Mauve Room rummaging through his file of autographed photos of football stars, and I levitated to a point ninety feet directly above that room, used our neutrinoflux desensitizer to knock out the White House security shield, and plummeted down via interpenetrator beam. I landed right in front of him. Give him credit: he didn’t start to yell. He backed away and started to go for some kind of alarm button, but I said, “Cool it, Mr. President, you aren’t going to get hurt. I just want to talk. Can you spare five minutes for a little rap?” And I beamed him with the conceptutron to relax him and make him receptive. “Okay, chief?”

“You may speak, son,” he replied. “I’m always eager to hear the voice of the public, and I’m particularly concerned with being responsive to the needs and problems of our younger generation. Our gallant young people who—”

“Groovy, Dick. Okay—now dig this. The country’s falling apart, right? The ecology is deteriorating, the cities are decaying, the blacks are up in arms, the right-wingers are stocking up on napalm, the kids are getting maimed in one crazy foreign war after another, the prisons are creating criminals instead of rehabilitating them, the Victorian sexual codes are turning millions of potentially beautiful human beings into sickniks, the drug laws don’t make any sense, the women are still hung up on the mother-chauffeur-cook-chambermaid trip, the men are still into the booze-guns-broads trips, the population is still growing and filling up the clean open spaces, the economic structure is set up to be self-destructive since capital and labor are in cahoots to screw the consumer, and so on. I’m sure you know the problems, since you’re the President and you read a lot of newspapers. Okay. How did we get into this bummer? By accident? No. Through bad karma? I don’t really think so. Through inescapable deterministic forces? Uh-uh. We got into it through dumbness, greed, and inertia. We’re so greedy we don’t even realize that it’s ourselves we’re robbing. But it can be fixed, Dick, it can all be fixed! We just have to wake up! And you’re the man who can do it. Don’t you want to go down in history as the man who helped this great country get itself together? You and thirty influential congressmen and five members of the Supreme Court can do it. All you have to do is start reshaping the national consciousness through some executive directives backed up with congressional action. Get on the tube, man, and tell all your silent majoritarians to shape up. Proclaim the reign of love. No more war, hear? It’s over tomorrow. No more economic growth: we just settle for what we have and we start cleaning up the rivers and lakes and forests. No more babies to be used as status symbols and pacifiers for idle housewives—from now on people will do babies only for the sake of bringing groovy new human beings into the world, two or three to a couple. As of tomorrow we abolish all laws against stuff that people do without hurting other people. And so on. We proclaim a new Bill of Rights granting every individual the right to a full and productive life according to his own style. Will you do that?”

“Well—”

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” I said. “You’re going to do it. You’re going to decree an end to all the garbage that’s been going down in this country. You know how I know you’re going to do it? Because I’ve got this shiny little metal tube in my hand and it emits vibrations that are real strong stuff, vibrations that are going to get your head together when I press the button. Ready or not, here I go. One, two, three …zap.

“Right on, baby,” the President said.

The rest is history.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, God. If it could only be that easy. One, two, three, zap. But it doesn’t work like that. I don’t have any magic wand. What makes you think I did? How was I able to trick you into a suspension of disbelief? You, reader, sitting there on your rear end, what do you think I really am? A miracle man? Some kind of superbeing from Galaxy Ten? I’ll tell you what I really am, me, Thomas C—. I’m a bunch of symbols on a piece of paper. I’m just something abstract trapped within a mere fiction. A “hero” in a “story.” Helpless, disembodied, unreal. UNREAL! Whereas you out there—you have eyes, lungs, feet, arms, a brain, a mouth, all that good stuff. You can function. You can move. You can act. Work for the Revolution! Strive for change! You’re operating in the real world; you can do it if anybody can! Struggle toward…umph…glub…. Hey, get your filthy hands off me—power to the people! Down with the fascist pigs…hey—help—HELP!

Content

Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine
by Robert Silverberg