The problems all began with the Guided Missile Experiment of 1976, he read. There had been a number of such experiments, but it was the one of 1976 that finally did the damage the biologists had been warning about. The missile with its deadly warhead exploded in the Brazilian jungle through some absolutely unforgivable error in the remote-control station, the officer in charge of the station was reprimanded and the men under him court-martialed, and the Brazilian government was paid a handsome compensation for the damage.

  BUT there had been more damage than anyone knew at the time. A plant virus, similar to the tobacco mosaic, had mutated under the impact of radioactivity. Five years later, it burst out of the jungle and completely wiped out every last rice plant on Earth. Japan and a large part of Asia became semi-deserts inhabited by a few struggling nomads.

  Then the virus adjusted to wheat and corn—and famine howled in every street of the planet. All attempts by botanists to control the Blight failed because of the swiftness of its onslaught. And after it had fed, it hit again at a new plant and another and another.

  Most of the world’s non-human mammals had been slaughtered for food long before they could starve to death. Many insects, too, before they became extinct at the loss of their edible plants, served to assuage hunger to some small extent.

  But the nutritive potential of Earth was steadily diminishing in a horrifying geometric progression. Recently, it had been observed, plankton—the tiny organism on which most of the sea’s ecology was based—had started to disappear, and with its diminution, dead fish had begun to pile up on the beaches.

  Mankind had lunged out desperately in all directions in an effort to survive, but nothing had worked for any length of time. Even the other planets of the Solar System, which had been reached and explored at a tremendous cost in remaining resources, had yielded no edible vegetation. Synthetics had failed to fill the prodigious gap.

  In the midst of the sharply increasing hunger, social controls had pretty much dissolved. Pathetic attempts at rationing still continued, but black markets became the only markets, and black marketeers the barons of life. Starvation took the hindmost, and only the most agile economically lived in comparative comfort. Law and order were had only by those who could afford to pay for them and children of impoverished families were sold on the open market for a bit of food.

  But the Blight was still adjusting to new plants and the food supply kept shrinking. In another century. . . .

  That was why the planet’s powerful individuals had been persuaded to pool their wealth in a desperate attempt to alter the past. This kind of world was manifestly impossible.

  Mac Albin finished the document and sighed. What a magnificent world! What an exciting place to live!

  He dropped his hand on the side levers and began the process of materializing at the crucial moment on April 18, 1976.

  flick!

  AS THE equipment of the remote-control station began to take on a blurred reality all around him, Max Alben felt a bit of fear at what he was doing. The technicians, he remembered, the Secretary-General, even the black market kings, had all warned him not to go ahead with his instructions if anything unusual turned up. That was an awful lot of power to disobey: he knew he should return with this new information and let better minds work on it.

  They with their easy lives, what did they know what existence had been like for such as he? Hunger, always hunger, scrabbling, servility, and more hunger. Every time things got really tight, you and your wife looking sideways at your kids and wondering which of them would bring the best price. Buying security for them, as he was now, at the risk of his life.

  But in this other world, this other 2089, there was a state that took care of you and that treasured your children. A man like himself, with five children—why, he’d be a big man, maybe the biggest man on Earth! And he’d have robots to work for him and lots of food. Above all, lots and lots of food.

  He’d even be a scientist—everyone was a scientist there, weren’t they?—and he’d have a big laboratory all to himself. This other world had its troubles, but it was a lot nicer place than where he’d come from. He wouldn’t return. He’d go through with it.

  The fear left him and, for the first time in his life, Max Alben felt the sensation of power.

  He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, sweating a bit at the sight of the roomful of military figures, despite the technicians’ reassurances that all this would be happening too fast to be visible. He saw the single red switch pointing upward on the instrument panel. The switch that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway decent world!

  Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him.

  flick!

  AS THE equipment of the remote-control station began to oscillate into reality all around him, Mac Albin felt a bit of shame at what he was doing. He’d promised Bob and Hugo to drop the experiment at any stage if a new factor showed up. He knew he should go back with this new information and have all three of them kick it around.

  But what would they be able to tell him, they with their blissful adjustment to their thoroughly blueprinted lives? They, at least, had been ordered to marry women they could live with; he’d drawn a female with whom he was completely incompatible in any but a genetic sense. Genetics! He was tired of genetics and the sanctity of human life, tired to the tip of his uncalloused fingers, tired to the recesses of his unused muscles. He was tired of having to undertake a simple adventure like a thief in the night.

  But in this other world, this other 2089, someone like himself would be a monarch of the black market, a suzerain of chaos, making his own rules, taking his own women. So what if the weaklings, those unfit to carry on the race, went to the wall? His kind wouldn’t.

  He’d formed a pretty good idea of the kind of men who ruled that other world, from the document in the sealed metal cylinder. The black marketeers had not even read it. Why, the fools had obviously been duped by the technicians into permitting the experiment; they had not grasped the idea that an alternate time track would mean their own non-existence.

  This other world had its troubles, but it was certainly a livelier place than where he’d come from. It deserved a chance. Yes, that was how he felt: his world was drowsily moribund; this alternate was starving but managing to flail away at destiny. It deserved a chance.

  Albin decided that he was experiencing renunciation and felt proud.

  He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, disregarding the roomful of military figures since he knew they could not see him. The single red switch pointed downward on the instrument panel. That was the gimmick that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world!

  Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him.

  flick!

  Now! Now to make a halfway decent world!

  Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him.

  flick!

  Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world!

  Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him.

  flick!

  . . . pulled the little red switch toward him.

  flick!

  . . . pushed the little red switch from him.

  flick!

  . . . toward him.

  flick!

  . . . from him.

  flick!

  1957

  Time Waits for Winthrop

  Winthrop was literally the most stubborn and selfish man in five hundred years—how could they convince him not to strand them in this society of Shriek Fields and Panic Stadiums?

  THAT was the trouble right there—Winthrop was stubborn.

  Mrs. Brucks stared wildly at her three fellow-visitors from the twentieth century. “But he’s got to think of us, too! He can’t leave us stuck in this crazy world!”

  Dave Pollock shrugged the shoulders of the conservative gray suit that clashed so mightily with the decor of the twenty-fifth-century room. He was a thin, nervous young man whose hands had a tendency to perspire.

  “He says we should be grateful. But whether we are or aren’t grateful isn’t important to him. He’s staying.”

  “That means we have to stay,” Mrs. Brucks said. “Doesn’t he understand that?”

  Pollock spread his moist palms helplessly. “What difference does it make? He likes the twenty-fifth century. I argued with him for two hours and I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I can’t budge him.”

  “Why don’t you talk to him, Mrs. Brucks?” Mary Ann Carthington suggested. “He’s been nice to you. Maybe you could make him act sensible.”

  “Hm.” Mrs. Brucks patted her hairdo which, after two weeks in the future, was beginning to get straggly. “You think so? Mr. Mead, you think it’s a good idea?” The fourth person in the oval room, a stoutish middle-aged man, considered the matter for a moment. “Can’t do any harm. Might work. And we’ve got to do something.”

  “All right. So I’ll try.”

  MRS. BRUCKS sniffled deep within her grandmotherly soul. To the others, Winthrop and she were the “old folks”—both over fifty. Therefore they should be able to communicate more easily. The fact that Winthrop was ten years her senior meant little to Mr. Mead’s forty-six years, less to Dave Pollock’s thirty-four and in all probability was completely meaningless to Mary Ann Carthington’s twenty. One of the “old folks” should be able to talk sense to the other, they were thinking.

  What could they see, from the bubbling distance of youth, of the chasms that separated Winthrop from Mrs. Brucks even more finally than the others? It was unimportant to them that he was a tight and unemotional old bachelor, while she was the warm and gossipy mother of six children, the grandmother of two, with her silver wedding anniversary proudly behind her. She and Winthrop had barely exchanged a dozen sentences with each other since they’d arrived in the future; they had disliked each other from the moment they had met in Washington at the time-travel finals.

  But—Winthrop was stubborn. That fact remained. Mr. Mead had roared his best executive-type roars at him. Mary Ann Carthington had tried to jog his senility with her lush, young figure and most fluttery voice. Even Dave Pollock, an educated man, a high school science teacher, had talked his heart out to him and been unable to make him budge.

  Someone had to change Winthrop’s mind or they’d all be stuck in the future, here in this horrible twenty-fifth century.

  Even if she hated it more than anything she’d had to face in a lifetime of troubles, it was up to Mrs. Brucks.

  She rose and shook out the wrinkles in the expensive black dress her proud husband had purchased in Lord & Taylor’s the day before the group had left.

  Try to tell Sam that it was pure luck that she had been chosen, just a matter of fitting the physical specifications in the message from the future! Sam wouldn’t listen: he’d probably boasted all over the shop, to all the other cutters with whom he worked, about his Wife—one of five people selected in the whole United States to make a trip five hundred years into the future. Would Sam still be boasting when the six o’clock deadline passed that night and she didn’t return?

  This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and reached her nose.

  Mary Ann Carthington crooned sympathetically, “Shall I call for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?”

  “I’m crazy?” Mrs. Brucks shot back angrily. “A little walk down the hall, I need that headache-maker? A little walk I can walk.”

  HE started for the door rapidly, before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing.

  But she paused and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she’d spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls: here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century.

  Then she swallowed hard and closed the door behind her. She walked hurriedly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side.

  At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in distaste, to the square. “Mr. Winthrop?”

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Mrs. Brucks!” the square boomed back at her. “Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks.”

  The patch of yellow showed a tiny hole in the center which dilated rapidly into a doorway. She stepped through gingerly, as if there might be a drop of several stories on the other side.

  The room was shaped like a long, narrow isosceles triangle. There was no furniture in it, and no other exits, except for what an occasional yellow square suggested. Streaks of color chased themselves fluently along the walls and ceilings and floors, shifting up and down the spectrum, from pinkish gray to a thick, dark ultramarine. And odors came and went with the colors, some of them unpleasant, some intriguing, but all of them touched with the unfamiliar and alien.

  From somewhere behind the walls and above the ceiling there was music, its tones softly echoing, gently reinforcing the colors and the odors. The music, too, was strange to twentieth-century ears: strings of dissonances would be followed by long or short silences, in the midst of which an almost inaudible melody might be heard like a harmonic island in an ocean of sonic strangeness.

  At the sharp apex of the triangle, an aged little man lay on a raised portion of the floor. Periodically, this would raise or lower part of itself, very much like a cow trying to find a comfortable position on the grass.

  The single garment that Winthrop wore similarly kept adjusting itself upon him. At one moment, it would be a striped red and white tunic, covering everything from his shoulders to his thighs; then it would slowly elongate into a green gown that trickled over his outstretched toes; and abruptly, it would contract into a pair of light brown shorts decorated with a complete pattern of brilliant blue seashells.

  MRS. BRUCKS observed all this with disapproval. A man was meant, she felt, to be dressed approximately the same way from one minute to the next.

  The shorts she didn’t mind, though her modest soul considered them a bit too skimpy for receiving lady callers. The green gown—well, if he wanted to wear what was essentially a dress, it was his business. Even the red and white tunic which reminded her nostalgically of her granddaughter Debbie’s sunsuit was something she was willing to be generous about. But at least stick to one of them!

  Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. “Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet,” he said jovially.

  Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host’s gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and uneasily sat. “How—how are you, Mr. Winthrop?”

  “Couldn’t be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look.”

  He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers.

  Mrs. Brucks, really interested, inspected the mouthful of white, shining teeth. “A good job,” she pronounced at last. “The dentists here made them for you so fast?”

  “Dentists!” He spread his bony arms in a vast and merry gesture. “They don’t have dentists in 2458 A.D. They grew these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks.”

  “Grew? How grew?”

  “How should I know how they did it? They’re smart, that’s all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It’s a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said ‘I want new teeth’ to the machine that they’ve got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three and bingo, there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?”

  She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. “Maybe—but I better wait until it’s perfected.”

  Winthrop laughed again. “You’re like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. I’m the oldest, but that doesn’t make any difference—I’m the only one with guts.”

  Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. “But you’re also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock’s just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We’d all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop.”

  “Mary Ann is engaged? I’d never have guessed it from the way she was playing up to that temporal supervisor fellow.”

  “Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she’s engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office, a fine, hard-working boy. And she wants to go back to him.”

  THE old man pulled up his back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulder-blades and scratched him gently. “Let her go back then. Who gives a damn?”

  Mrs. Brucks turned her hands palm up in front of her. “Remember what they told us when we arrived? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the Time Machine Building at six o’clock on the dot. If we aren’t all there on time, they can’t make the transfer, they said. So if one of us, if you, for an instance, don’t show up—”

  “Don’t tell me your troubles!” His face was flushed and his lips came back and exposed the brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner’s mood. The music changed to a vicious rumble. “Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?”