“That’ll hold,” she said, "if you don’t wave your arms around. Remember, you’ve got your hands clasped in meditation, and you keep your eyes down. What about those sandals, Charlie?”
“Half the crackpots in California wear them,” he said. “And that long hair of his looks natural in this getup. Let’s move along.”
Mazurin did as he was told. His head ached miserably, and it seemed to him that his situation was getting worse by the minute. From the time that he had been captured by the Worstas, he’d had no power of decision whatever; and even worse, he still had no idea what he could do if he were free to do it.
Mazurin walked forward mechanically, still only half attentive. Just suppose he were to settle down in this century—providing he could get out of this present mess alive. Suppose he married and had progeny. That would obviously make him an ancestor, from the viewpoint of his own time. Then it would be just as important to save his own neck as anybody else's! . . .
Wait a minute, there was something funny about that line of reasoning. Everybody, theoretically, could continue his own line. So when was an ancestor an object of veneration and when was he just a person? It couldn’t be merely a matter of elapsed time, could it? Because elapsed time was subjective, an abstraction, a point of view. From where he was now, the world he came from didn’t even exist; it was just a remote future possibility. But—
It was too much. Mazurin thought he saw the glimmer of a final answer, but he couldn’t pursue it. It made him feel dizzy when he tried.
They clambered cautiously up to the top of the ridge, reconnoitered, and went down the other side to where a dusty road showed through the trees. Directly ahead of them, when they reached the road, were the outskirts of a small, weatherbeaten town. They waited for twenty minutes before a squad of soldiers hanging around in front of a warehouse decided to go elsewhere. Twice they heard distant shots, and once a confused sound of yelling.
Mazurin sighed with relief when they finally reached a fairly well-populated street. Mingling with the crowd, Charlie in front, then Mazurin, and Eve bringing up the rear, they weren’t conspicuous, but as a group they had been decidedly peculiar. And if they looked nervous, he decided, it was in character; so did most of the people he saw around him. Every block or so they passed a patrol of green-uniformed men, hands on the straps of their slung missile weapons, looking alertly to each side as they walked.
The three bunched momentarily as they waited for a traffic light to change, and Charlie murmured, “Two blocks more, then half a block to the right. It’s the place called ‘Hi-Tone Tailors.’ Go straight to the back and down the stairs.”
He stopped talking as a green-uniformed officer paused nearby and glanced at them. The light changed and they started across the street. Mazurin kept his eyes down, as directed, even when a loud whirring noise approached him from behind and hovered over him. Immediately thereafter, something mushy hit him on the head and slithered down his face, blinding him momentarily.
He heard startled cries around him. The next instant, the mushy something had reached his nose and was trying to crawl up it. Strangling, Mazurin unwarily opened his mouth, and the stuff crawled into that, too. He swallowed as much as he could—it was lemon-flavored—and spat the rest.
He looked up just in time to see another glob hurtling toward him. He flung up his hands instinctively, and heard the popping threads as Eve’s hasty stitching gave way.
Above him the flangs were raining down. The whirring noise, he found, proceeded from the blades of a helicopter that was hovering over the intersection. Two green-uniformed men in its cab were leaning out to peer in amazement and horror at the four loudspeaker horns fixed to its underside. From these, in an apparently endless flow, issued the flangs. They were piling up underfoot now, climbing up people’s trouser legs, squirming in a custardy wave toward the comparative darkness of doorways.
Desperately, Mazurin warded off another yellow blob, leaped the writhing form of a fat citizen who had flangs in his pants, and then lost his own footing, skidding half the width of the street and fetching up against a green-uniformed soldier. He saw the soldier’s eyes widen as he caught sight of the wristcuffs. Then there was a shout and a whirl of motion, and something hard struck him solidly on the back of the head.
Light brought him to: blinding, hot yellow light that shone through his closed lids and made his eyes water fiercely. He tried instinctively to turn his head aside, and found he couldn’t. For a moment he couldn’t orient himself; he was being put to the question, that was obvious, but what for? He hadn’t done anything—or had he ? How had he made out on that time mission ? He had a dim recollection of something unpleasant. . .
The rest of the memories came back then, and Mazurin groaned. He was in the hands of the Worstas again, those peculiarly unpleasant ancestors who were incredibly the founders of his own state; and some of the police methods in this century were crude, he remembered.
They’d got the other two, undoubtedly. They’d all been close together when the flangs started falling, and the soldiers would have rounded up everybody in sight after they caught him. Now it was going to be bad. Now it was going to be very bad.
He heard a sudden “Ouch!” and then a stifled shriek. A moment later he understood the reason; something needle-sharp was jabbed an inch into his left buttock. He added his outcry to the others, whereupon a voice said, “They’re ready, Mr. President.”
“Proceed,” said a slightly lisping voice. “Begin with the girl.”
“Your name is Gertrude Meyer?” said the other.
Mazurin heard the girl gasp. She said, “Yes.”
“You are a member of the underground society of wreckers and assassins known as the Freedom Party, and you are known to your co-conspira-tors as Eve?”
Again the gasp, and again, “Yes.”
“You are aware of a plot to assassinate the President?”
The gasp, a pause, then another gasp. “Yes!”
“What is the nature of this plot?”
This time Eve sobbed. “Oh, don’t do that—oh!"
“What is the nature of this plot?”
“Oh! I don’t know—” She shrieked and then Mazurin heard her weeping. “I’ll never tell you—oh!—anything. Oh!"
Mazurin found himself struggling like a wild man against his shackles. He had an idea he knew what they were doing to Eve; it was a traditional method of interrogating females, so they’d probably had it even this early. It was very nearly infallible, and very unpleasant to think about.
Eve's cries grew louder and more frequent. Finally she screamed and there was silence for a while. Then the interrogation began again. After twenty minutes, Eve began telling all she knew.
It was a primitive plot, and it seemed to Mazurin that it could have had only a slender chance of success even in so barbaric an era as this one. In his own time, nothing whatever would be gained by assassinating the Chief Executive; the next eligible member of the Executive Families would simply take over. What you had to watch out for was thought subversion and heresy.
Here, apparently, the critical area was at the top. Blodgett was so obsessed by the idea that someone in his hierarchy might kick him out, as he’d done to Carres, that he’d made sure that the whole structure would collapse without him.
The Freedom Party knew this, or guessed it, according to Eve. They didn’t know exactly what would happen if they killed Blodgett, but they were pretty sure it would be fatal to the present dictatorial group. In any case, they’d be rid of Blodgett and would, at worst, take their chances on his successor being less brutal.