“As you know, one of the fears entertained about travel to the past was that the most innocent-seeming acts would cause cataclysmic changes in the present. You are probably familiar with the fantasy in its most currently popular form—if Hitler had been killed in 1930, he would not have forced scientists in Germany and later occupied countries to emigrate, this nation might not have had the atomic bomb, thus no third atomic war, and Venezuela would still be part of the South American continent.
“The traitorous Shayson and his illegal federation extended this hypothesis to include much more detailed and minor acts such as shifting a molecule of hydrogen that in our past really was never shifted.
“At the time of the first experiment at the Coney Island Subproject, when the chronar was sent back for one-ninth of a second, a dozen different laboratories checked through every device imaginable, searched carefully for any conceivable change. There were none! Government officials concluded that the time stream was a rigid affair, past, present, and future, and nothing in it could be altered. But Shayson and his cohorts were not satisfied: they—”
I. Four billion years ago. The chronar floated in a cloudlet of silicon dioxide above the boiling Earth and languidly collected its data with automatically operating instruments. The vapor it had displaced condensed and fell in great, shining drops.
“—insisted that we should do no further experimenting until we had checked the mathematical aspects of the problem yet again. They went so far as to state that it was possible that if changes occurred we would not notice them, that no instruments imaginable could detect them. They claimed we would accept these changes as things that had always existed. Well! This at a time when our country—and theirs, ladies and gentlemen of the press, theirs, too—was in greater danger than ever. Can you—”
Words failed him. He walked up and down the booth, shaking his head. All the reporters on the long, wooden bench shook their heads with him in sympathy.
There was another gong. The two dull spheres appeared briefly, clanged against each other and ricocheted off into opposite chronological directions.
“There you are.” The government official waved his arms at the transparent laboratory floor above them. “The first oscillation has been completed; has anything changed? Isn’t everything the same? But the dissidents would maintain that alterations have occurred and we haven’t noticed them. With such faith-based, unscientific viewpoints, there can be no argument. People like these—”
II. Two billion years ago. The great ball clicked its photographs of the fiery, erupting ground below. Some red-hot crusts rattled off its sides. Five or six thousand complex molecules lost their basic structure as they impinged against it. A hundred didn’t.
“—will labor thirty hours a day out of thirty-three to convince you that black isn’t white, that we have seven moons instead of two. They are especially dangerous—”
A long, muted note as the apparatus collided with itself. The warm orange of the corner lights brightened as it started out again.
“—because of their learning, because they are sought for guidance in better ways of vegetation.” The government official was slithering up and down rapidly now, gesturing with all of his pseudopods. “We are faced with a very difficult problem, at present—”
III. One billion years ago. The primitive triple trilobite the machine had destroyed when it materialized began drifting down wetly.
“—a very difficult problem. The question before us: should we shllk or shouldn’t we shllk?” He was hardly speaking English now; in fact, for some time, he hadn’t been speaking at all. He had been stating his thoughts by slapping one pseudopod against the other—as he always had…
IV. A half-billion years ago. Many different kinds of bacteria died as the water changed temperature slightly.
“This, then, is no time for half measures. If we can reproduce well enough—”
V. Two hundred fifty million years ago. VI. A hundred twenty-five million years ago.
“—to satisfy the Five Who Spiral, we have—”
VII. Sixty-two million years. VIII. Thirty-one million. IX. Fifteen million. X. Seven and a half million.
“—spared all attainable virtue. Then—”
XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. Bong—bong—bong bongbong-bongongongngngngggg…
“—we are indeed ready for refraction. And that, I tell you, is good enough for those who billow and those who snap. But those who billow will be proven wrong as always, for in the snapping is the rolling and in the rolling is only truth. There need be no change merely because of a sodden cilium. The apparatus has rested at last in the fractional conveyance; shall we view it subtly?”
They all agreed, and their bloated purpled bodies dissolved into liquid and flowed up and around to the apparatus. When they reached its four square blocks, now no longer shrilling mechanically, they rose, solidified, and regained their slime-washed forms.
“See,” cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. “See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven’t changed.” He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. “Nothing has changed!”
Afterword
Nineteen forty-seven was the year of the first great science-fiction boom, following both the interest generated by the development of the atomic bomb and several highly successful science-fiction anthologies. The editor of one of these, Groff Conklin, was approached by moneyed people who offered to back him and Ted Sturgeon in a new magazine of which they were to be co-editors. This was a couple of years before Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were to get together to produce The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was a harbinger of the excitement that was to grip the science-fiction publishing field in the late ’40s and early ’50s.
Ted and Groff in their turn approached me and a number of other writers, offering a rate unheard up to that time—four and five cents a word—“for the very best stories of which you guys are capable, something genuinely distinguished.” (The going rate for science fiction at that time was one-half cent to a dazzling two cents a word. Only John W. Campbell of Astounding ever paid at the high rate—and only when a story knocked him off his chair.)
I had been thinking for a number of months about a new kind of story and one which had hitherto been inexplicably absent from the magazines we all wrote for: straight down-the-line and overt political satire. I say “inexplicably” because such satire had been very successful at novel length—Zamiatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World, to mention only the first two examples that came to mind—and because the science-fiction magazine would seem to be the natural, even ideal, vehicle for such stories.
And the America of 1947 seemed made for such satire. The Federation of Atomic Scientists, a group composed of the younger physicists and chemists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and been terrified of what they had accomplished, was under attack from many official and unofficial quarters as unpatriotic or—much worse in those days—demonstrating outright friendliness with the potential enemy. We were then, you might remember, in the earliest stages of what came to be known as the Cold War.