Stephen smiled. “You remember our bond, eh? And not many places in State you’ll find it. Even fewer than before.” He crossed to a cabinet and returned with three glasses of colorless liquid.
Brent seized his eagerly and downed it. A drink might help the swirling. It might—
The drink had gone down smoothly and tastelessly. Now, however, some imp began dissecting atoms in his stomach and shooting off a bombardment stream of particles that zoomed up through his throat into his brain, where they set off a charge of explosive of hitherto unknown power. Brent let out a strangled yelp.
Stephen barked again. “Good bond, eh, John?”
Brent managed to focus his host through the blurring lens of his tears. “Sure,” he nodded feebly. “Swell. And now let me try to explain—”
The woman looked sadly at her brother. “He denies us, Stephen. He sayes that he haves never seed me before. He forgets all that he ever sweared about Barrier.”
A curious look of speculation came into Stephen’s brown eyes. “Bees this true, John? You have never seed us before in your life?”
“But, Stephen, you know—”
“Hush, Martha. I sayed in his life. Bees it true, John?”
“It bees. God knows it bees. I have never seen ... seed either of you in my life.”
“But Stephen-”
“I understand now, Martha. Remember when he telled us of Barrier and his resolve?”
“Can I forget?”
“How doed he know of Barrier? Tell me that.”
“I don’t know,” Martha confessed. “I have wondered—”
“He knowed of Barrier then because he bees here now. He telled me then just what we must now tell him.”
“Then for Heaven’s sake,” Brent groaned, “tell me.”
“Your pardon, John. My sister bees not so quick to grasp source of these temporal confusions. More bond?” He had the bottle in his hand when he suddenly stopped, thrust it back in the cabinet, and murmured, “Go into bedroom.”
Brent obeyed. This was no time for displaying initiative. And no sooner had the bedroom door closed behind him than he heard the voice of the Stapper. (The mental notebook recorded that apartment buildings must be large, if it had taken this long for the search to reach here.)
“No,” Stephen was saying. “My sister and I have beed here for past half-hour. We seed no one.”
“State thanks you,” the Stapper muttered, so casually that the phrase must have been an official formula. His steps sounded receding. Then they stopped, and there was the noise of loud sniffs.
“Dear God,” thought Brent, “have they crossed the bulls with bloodhounds?”
“Bond,” the Stapper announced.
“Dear me,” came Martha’s voice. “Who haves beed in here today, Stephen?”
“I’m homeopath,” said the Stapper. “Like cures like. A little bond might make me forget I smelled it.”
There was a bark from Stephen and a clink of glasses. No noise from either of them as they downed the liquor. Those, sir, were men. (Memo: Find out why such unbelievable rotgut is called bond, of all things.)
“State thanks you,” said the Stapper, and laughed. “You know George Starvel, don’t you?”
A slightly hesitant “Yes” from Stephen.
“When you see him again, I think you’ll find he haves changed his mind. About many things.”
There was silence. Then Stephen opened the bedroom door and beckoned Brent back into the living room. He handed him a glass of bond and said, “I will be brief.”
Brent, now forewarned, sipped at the liquor and found it cheerfully warming as he assimilated the new facts.
In the middle of the twenty-fourth century, he learned, civilization had reached a high point of comfort, satisfaction, achievement—and stagnation. The combination of atomic power and De Bainville’s revolutionary formulation of the principles of labor and finance had seemed to solve all economic problems. The astounding development of synthetics had destroyed the urgent need for raw materials and colonies and abolished the distinction between haves and have-nots among nations. Schwarzwalder’s Compendium had achieved the dream of the early Encyclopedists—the complete systematization of human knowledge. Farthing had regularized the English language, an achievement paralleled by the work of Zinsmeister, Timofeov, and Tamayo y Sárate in their respective tongues. (These four languages now dominated the earth. French and Italian had become corrupt dialects of German, and the Oriental languages occupied in their own countries something the position of Greek and Latin in nineteenth-century Europe, doomed soon to the complete oblivion which swallowed up those classic tongues in the twenty-first.)
There was nothing more to be achieved. All was known, all was accomplished. Nakamura’s Law of Spatial Acceleration had proved interplanetary travel to be impossible for all time. Charnwood’s Law of Temporal Metabolism had done the same for time travel. And the Schwarzwalder Compendium, which everyone admired and no one had read, established such a satisfactory and flawless picture of knowledge that it was obviously impossible that anything remained to be discovered.
It was then that Dyce-Farnsworth proclaimed the Stasis of Cosmos. A member of the Anglo-Physical Church, product of the long contemplation by English physicists of the metaphysical aspects of science, he came as the prophet needed to pander to the self-satisfaction of the age.
He was curiously aided by Farthing’s laws of regularity. The article, direct or indirect, Farthing had proved to be completely unnecessary—had not languages as world-dominant as Latin in the first centuries and Russian in the twenty-first found no need for it?—and semantically misleading. “Article,” he had said in his final and comprehensive study This Bees Speech, “bees prime corruptor of human thinking.”
And thus the statement so beloved in the twentieth century by metaphysical-minded scientists and physical-minded divines, “God is the cosmos,” became with Dyce-Farnsworth, “God bees cosmos,” and hence, easily and inevitably, “God bees Cosmos,” so that the utter scientific impersonality became a personification of Science. Cosmos replaced Jehovah, Baal and Odin.
The love of Cosmos was not man nor his works, but Stasis. Man was tolerated by Cosmos that he might achieve Stasis. All the millennia of human struggle had been aimed at this supreme moment when all was achieved, all was known, and all was perfect. Therefore this supernal Stasis must at all costs be maintained. Since Now was perfect, any alteration must be imperfect and taboo.
From this theory logically evolved the State, whose duty was to maintain the perfect Stasis of Cosmos. No totalitarian government had ever striven so strongly to iron out all doubt and dissension. No religious bigotry had ever found heresy so damnable and worthy of destruction. The Stasis must be maintained.
It was, ironically, the aged Dyce-Farnsworth himself who, in a moment of quasi-mystical intuition, discovered the flaw in Charnwood’s Law of Temporal Metabolism. And it was clear to him what must be done.
Since the Stasis of Cosmos did not practice time travel, any earlier or later civilization that did so must be imperfect. Its emissaries would sow imperfection. There must be a Barrier.
The mystic went no further than that dictum, but the scientists of the State put his demand into practical terms. “Do not ask how at this moment,” Stephen added. “I be not man to explain that. But you will learn.” The first Barrier was a failure. It destroyed itself and to no apparent result. But now, fifty years later, the fears of time travel had grown. The original idea of the imperfection of emissaries had been lost. Now time travel was in itself imperfect and evil. Any action taken against it would be praise to Cosmos. And the new Barrier was being erected.