It was a Lysenko-begotten silly business, altogether. He seemed to be sitting now on nothing in particular, in the middle of a bright-blue sky with clouds in it, while an obviously spurious landscape (flat, with antique square houses and a lot of palm trees, the whole being tilted at a forty-five degree angle) gently rose toward him. He watched this.process with growing disapproval until the scene grew to full size and he bumped gently against a sidewalk which felt like sponge rubber.
He stood up and soared some twenty feet into the air, coming down in an approximately upright position. He looked around him, breathing heavily. His head was clearing, and he didn’t like it. What had seemed idle nonsense a few moments ago was now assuming the aspect of an incredible reality. The buildings around him were angular and massive, with an appalling quantity of extremely ugly embellishments in the way of glass bricks, chromium statues, walls of enormous windows. The people were all either walking or driving antique four-wheeled vehicles, and most of them were dressed in garments constructed on a curious cylinder principle, also with a great deal of angular detail work.
This period, he recalled, had been addicted to what its denizens termed “the functional” in design. Not a curved line anywhere.
Culturally, this was a dismal era, yet being in it gave Mazurin a holy thrill. There was practically no doubt about it—Blodgett himself was alive at this actual moment!
Directly in front of Mazurin, the street widened into a sort of village square, in the center of which a wooden platform was erected. A man in black stood on this platform, evidently making a speech to a small crowd assembled around him. Mazurin saw several instruments which were evidently crude vision cameras. He watched the speaker’s lips, and made out a few phrases: “. . . the principles of loyalty and obedience to which we are all dedicated . . . one world, one people, one leader, one glorious ideal . . .”
Interested, he walked closer. A gentleman approaching the crowd on a tangential course strode into him before he had time to get out of the way, and Mazurin found himself violently propelled several yards away, to bounce from still another moving spectator and come to rest finally sprawled on the pavement.
He got up determinedly, soaring as before, and this time leaped squarely into the thick of the crowd before any other outriders could get at him. The crowd was close-packed, and he stood with very little difficulty on their heads. Now he was near enough to read the speaker’s lips easily, and he followed the speech with attention.
“On this, our youngest but not least hallowed day, we must dedicate ourselves in our hearts to the eternal principles for which so many brave men and women died. For if we do, those men and women are not ten years dead, but gloriously living in the eternal atmosphere of our truth. If we do this, the world did not end for them on that terrible day, August the seventeenth, nineteen eighty-one. The world will never end for them and for ourselves!”
The speaker paused. “Citizens of the world, a salute to the heroes of the World State!”
A man to the right of the speaker’s platform, dressed in an exceedingly ugly green uniform, raised a brass instrument to his lips and blew mightily on it. Mazurin leaped nimbly as the citizens on whom he stood took off their hats and bowed their heads. The musician got through with whatever sounds he had been producing, and a row of similarly dressed men behind him raised antique rapid-fire rifles to their shoulders, aiming diagonally upward.
Mazurin, directly in the line of fire, automatically threw himself flat, but he was still unused to his new condition and the motion sent him in a lazy parabola five feet over the crowd’s heads.
The guns fired in unison, but a peculiar thing happened. From three-quarters of them leaped streaks of fire; from the other quarter issued something else entirely. At the end of each barrel, a dark blue bubble appeared. The bubbles swelled rapidly, more and more of them extruding, until they became ovoids three feet long and two feet wide, dotted with stumpy tentacles. Then they dropped out of Mazurin’s vision, but he could judge their activity by the way the crowd scattered.
Mazurin leaped nimbly and watched the square empty itself beneath him. The uniformed men broke ranks and fled, some dropping their guns. The crowd was spreading out as quickly as those in the center could force the others back. In the cleared space, the blue ovoids were leaping like frogs, pausing and leaping again. At each pause, a toothless mouth gaped, and Mazurin could almost hear the bass “Urk!” they emitted.
Nobody was left on the speaker’s platform except the speaker himself, who had misjudged his vault over the railing and got himself tangled in the large black-and-red flag which draped it. While Mazurin watched, one of the blue ovoids bounded onto the speaker’s back, settled down and began contentedly munching his jacket.
As he floated down, Mazurin took a notebook from his pocket and wrote: Tweedledums: probably pineapple-flavored; very unripe and active; emerged without damper controls and broke up large religious gathering, frightening approx. 500 persons.
II
Mazurin sat alone in the sun-washed and empty square, letting the full enormity of the scene he had just witnessed seep into him. After a while he took out his notebook again and tried to calculate the probable number of surviving descendants, in his own world, of the five hundred people who had just been introduced to tweedledums. He had got up to five generations, and reached the utterly discouraging figure of 20,420, when he gave up.
He shuddered. He was not a devout man by nature, but he had had the usual training as a child, and the idea of so much as being disrespectful to ancestors—much less confronting them unexpectedly with a troop of tweedledums!—made him cringe as if he had touched something unclean.
And the other things had still to be accounted for: the rozzers, the collapsed flooring, the argo paste, the—
No. It was better not to think of that.
He got morosely to his feet and watched as the first of a long line of archaic ground-vehicles zoomed into the square and skidded to a stop. Green-uniformed men got out and ran off in all directions, till the square and the surrounding streets were covered with them. Presently a group of them came running back to the cars, carrying a tweedledum which was struggling furiously to escape. After a while they captured another one.
I hope they get them all, Mazurin thought; but he doubted that they would. Free of the projected energy that ordinarily kept them quiescent, a live tweedledum was the most active and elusive artificial food product ever invented. They had been one of Mazurin’s favorite dishes; but he suspected now, with a sliding lurch in his stomach, that he would never, never eat one again.
Something else seemed to be going on at the far side of the square. Resignedly, he propelled himself that way. A large knot of the green-uniformed men had collected near a doorway to one, of the square buildings and was slowly moving back toward the cars. Mazurin leaped onto the heads of the crowd for a better view, and, approaching the center of the group, found that the quarry was not tweedledums this time, but people. A young man and a girl, to be exact. They were staggering along with their heads down, pushed and dragged by many hands. As Mazurin watched, someone reached over someone else’s arm and struck the girl in the face.