They headed across the field, Mazurin in the lead. He felt a little sick. In his own time, he tried to tell himself, he’d seen men killed often enough for exactly similar reasons. But this wasn’t his own time; this time he belonged to his Sacred Ancestors, some of them were being left to die in argo paste. He felt a wave of resentment against the two youngsters behind him, and then recoiled from that, too. They could be his ancestors. Now just what in the name of Blodgett could a man do in a situation like this?
They pushed through a tangle of saplings and undergrowth for what seemed like several hours, until they reached a little stream. Eve sat down, gasping, and the other two followed suit.
“It’s getting too late to go much farther, anyway,” said Charlie. He inspected his shoeless feet glumly, then turned to Mazurin. “All right,” he said, “let’s have your story, improbable or not.”
Mazurin told them, from the beginning. They listened in discouraging silence. Finally, “Is that all?” Charlie asked.
“That’s all,” said Mazurin. “What happens next I don’t know, except that we’ll probably run into the rozzers committing a nuisance in City Hall, or somebody triggering a section of collapsed flooring and getting knocked into the next canton, or—”
“What makes you think you’re going to see any city hall?” asked Charlie ominously.
“No reason, except that defiling a public building is one of the few supreme crimes I haven’t been responsible for yet.”
“How’s that again?” said Charlie, confused.
“Don’t you remember what he said about ancestor worship?” asked Eve. “It makes sense. He feels directly responsible for all these things that have been happening to people who, for all he knows, may be his own ancestors.” She frowned at Mazurin, opened her mouth to speak again. “How—”
“Now wait a minute,” Charlie burst out. “You’re not assuming that he’s telling the truth, are you ?”
“You wait,” she told him. Then, to Mazurin, “See if I’ve got this right. You come from about four centuries from now, and in your time the World State is an established fact. There never was any successful attempt to overthrow it. Is that right?”
Mazurin nodded.
Charlie snorted. “Well, if we fell for that, we’d simply knuckle under and let Blodgett’s hoodlums have it all their own way.”
“Hoodlums?” Mazurin echoed, touching his forelock. “Our most Sacred of Ancestors!”
Charlie peered at Mazurin puzzledly. “Is that what you’re for, to convince us we can’t win? It seems a little too simple-minded to deserve all this buildup.”
Mazurin shook his head. “You don’t quite understand,” he said. “This is a different time-line from the one I came from. It’s different because I’m in it, here. Anything can happen now.”
Charlie looked more baffled than ever.
“Listen,” said Eve, “just suppose he is telling the plain truth. And as you said a minute ago, if the Worstas had all that new stuff—materializing him in our cell, and those green things in the Square—why would they waste it on a silly trick like this?”
“All right,” said Charlie. “What then?”
“Then he might be able to help us win,” said Eve.
“Just for the theoretical interest of it—suppose you could help us overthrow the Worstas, Mazurin, would you do it?”
“The who?”
“The Worstas—the World Staters. Blodgett and his gang. You’ve seen the kind of tyrannical crew they are. All right, would you help us if you could?”
“Well, no,” said Mazurin honestly.
“Why not?”
“Because, for one thing, if I help you I hurt them, and vice versa. I couldn’t help either side. It would be irreligious.”
Charlie stared at him contemptuously, and Mazurin felt his ears getting red. It did sound stuffy, at that. Why couldn’t they have let him stay in his own environment, where a man could take his religion on sacred days and forget about it the rest of the time?
“There’s another good reason,” he said defensively. “You seem to forget that I come from the world that grew out of this one. Well, it’s a pretty good world. It’s peaceful; there hasn’t been a war in more than three centuries. Nobody has to work hard, as a general rule. No more race or nationality problems—everybody’s interbred so much, as a result of the lowering of national barriers, that there’s only one kind of people. Why should I want to change all that?”
“No reason, maybe,” said the girl, “but you can see why we want to change our world, can’t you?”
Mazurin thought about it. “No. It would change the fine world of my time—the world that Blodgett—”
He touched his forelock—“created by the might of his giant intellect.”
“Well, look,” said the girl. “Ten years ago there was a world war, the ninth in sixty years. There was a worldwide organization that was fighting the war, had been fighting against war since about nineteen-sixty. They had a lot of followers, on paper, but they weren’t strong enough to do anything until the people finally got fed up. After all, it had got to the point where you’d have two or three months of peace after the armistice was signed, and then the whole bloody mess would start all over again.
“Civilization was going straight downhill. That had been happening for a long time, but now it was happening so fast that you could see it happening. There was a spontaneous wave of revolt all through South America, where the fighting was going on at that time. It started with a French regiment that turned around and shot its officers. Then the Canadian regiment they were fighting did the same thing, and after that it spread too fast to figure out how the idea got around.
“All the armies in South America sent delegates to a conference—the conference of Acapulco—and the Worstas put over their program. Then all the armies went home, kicked out their governments, held general elections, and ten months later we had the World State.”
“Well,” said Mazurin, “what’s wrong with—”
“Wait. For five months everything went fine. All the important nations were in, and it was a sure thing that the others—the ones that hadn’t been in this particular fighting—would come in later. We had a swell Constitution and we were disarming like fury. Then there was a coup d'etat. Blodgett and his gang moved in, kidnaped Provisional President Carres, drugged him and made him sign orders appointing Blodgett’s gang to key positons.
"It was logical enough; Blodgett himself was the number two man in the Worstas movement to begin with. By the time anybody found out what was going on, they were so firmly entrenched that they’ve been able to stamp out every rising against them ever since. They’ve got the best propaganda line since Stalin, and the people as a whole won’t move because there’s peace, and they’re sick of war. So all we’ve wound up with is just another damned dictatorship. Now do you see?”
“Wait a minute,” said Mazurin. He had been listening with growing horror to Eve’s use of the Sacred Name. “This Blodgett you’re talking about—that can’t possibly be Ernest Elwood Vernon Crawford Blodgett, can it?”
“His name is Ernest, and his mother’s name was Crawford,” said Eve. “Where you got those other handles from, I don’t know.”
“It’s the way we name ourselves,” Mazurin explained. “Your own given name, given names of two prominent ancestors, one from each line, then mother’s and father’s line names. Anyway, if that’s the Blodgett you’re talking about, you must have your facts all wrong. Blodgett—” he touched his forelock— “was the founder and first President of the World State. Kids learn about him in the first course. The Father of the World and so forth. He wasn’t any dictator and there wasn’t any president before him.”