The sheriff said, «And he didn’t tell you what he was till this evening?»
«That’s right.»
«Your sister heard him say it? She’ll back you up?»
«I… I guess she will. She’s upset now, like I said, kind of hysterical. Screams that she’s going to leave me and the farm. But she heard him say it, Sheriff. He must of had a strong hold on her, or she wouldn’t be acting the way she is.»
«Not that I doubt your word, boy, about a thing like that, but it’d be better if she heard it too. How’d it come up?»
«I got to asking him some questions about things in his time and after a while I asked him how they got along on race problems and he acted puzzled and then said he remembered something about races from history he’d studied, but that there weren’t any races then.
«He said that by his time—starting after the war of something-or-other, I forget its name—all the races had blended into one. That the whites and the yellows had mostly killed one another off and that Africa had dominated the world for a while, and then all the races had begun to blend into one by colonization and intermarriage and that by his time the process was complete. I just stared at him and asked him, ‘You mean you got nigger blood in you?’ and he said, just like it didn’t mean anything, ‘At least one-fourth.’»
«Well, boy, you did just what you had to do,» the sheriff told him earnestly, «no doubt about it.»
«I just saw red. He’d married Sis; he was sleeping with her. I was so crazy-mad I don’t even remember getting my gun.»
«Well, don’t worry about it, boy. You did right.»
«But I feel like hell about it. He didn’t know.»
«Now that’s a matter of opinion, boy. Maybe you swallowed a little too much of this hogwash. Coming from the future—huh! These niggers’ll think up the damnedest tricks to pass themselves off as white. What kind of proof for his story is that mark on the ground? Hogwash, boy. Ain’t nobody coming from the future or going there neither. We can just quiet this up so it won’t never be heard of nowhere. It’ll be like it never happened.»
ENTITY TRAP
Listing from the World Biographical Dictionary, 1990 edition: DIX, John, b. Louisville, Ky., U.S.A., Feb. 1, 1960; son Harvey R. (saloonkeeper) and Elizabeth (Bailey); student Louisville public schools 1966-1974; ran away from home at 14, worked as pin boy, bell hop; sentenced 6 mos. Birmingham, Ala., 1978, charge: procuring; enlisted U.S. Army, 1979, fought as private in Sino-American War, 1979–1981; reported missing in Battle of Panamints, 1981; led Revolution of 1982, became President of United States Aug. 5, 1982, Dictator of North America Apr. 10, 1983; died at age of 23 yrs. June 14, 1983.
The concrete of the pillbox was still moist. As Johnny Dix peered out of the slit, over the sights of his machine gun, he touched it with his finger and hoped it had hardened enough to stop the bullets of the yellow men.
A heavy pall of dense smoke hung over the foothills of the Panamints. From the slope behind the pillbox the roar of the American artillery was thunderous. Ahead, less than a mile away, the mobile guns of the Chinese thundered back.
Johnny Dix was too close to the war to be able to see it or to know that this was the turning point, the farthest penetration of the abortive Chinese invasion of California—made after the ICBM’s had reduced most major cities of both countries to rubble, but had still proved undecisive—and that from here the Chinese would be driven back into the sea and the war would end.
«They’re coming,» Johnny Dix threw back over his shoulder. His companion’s ear was only inches away but Johnny had to yell to make himself heard. «Get the next belt ready. Gotta hold them.»
Got to hold them. It ran through his mind like a refrain. This was the last fully prepared line of defense. Behind it was Death Valley; it would live up to its name if they were shoved back into those open, arid wastelands. Out in the open there they would be mowed down like wheat.
But for three days now, the Panamint line had held. Hammered by steel from the air and steel from the ground, it had held. And the momentum of the attack had been blunted; it had even been thrown back a few hundred yards. This pillbox was one of a new line of outposts, hastily thrown up the night before under cover of darkness.
Something black and ugly, the nose of a huge tank, pushed through the smoke and haze. Johnny Dix let go the hot handgrips of the chatter-gun, useless against the coming monster, and nudged his companion. He yelled, «Tank about to cross the mine. Throw the switch quick! Now!»
The ground under their prone bodies shook with the terrific concussion of the exploding mine. Deafened and temporarily almost blinded by the blast that turned the monster tank into scrap iron, they did not hear the screaming dive of the plane.
The bomb it released struck a scant yard from their pillbox. And the pillbox wasn’t there any more.
They should both have been killed instantly, but only one of them was. Life can be tenacious. The thing that had been Johnny Dix wriggled and rolled over. One arm—the other was gone—flailed about, the fingers clutching as though searching for the grip of the machine gun that lay yards away. One eye stared upward unseeingly above a bloody gaping hole where once had been a nose. Helmet had been blown away and with it most of the hair and scalp.
The mangled thing, no longer living but not yet dead, twisted again and began to crawl.
Back swooped the plane. Explosive bullets from its prop gun plowed a furrow of destruction that crossed the crawling thing above the knees, cutting off the legs. Dying fingers clutched spasmodically at the ground and then relaxed.
Johnny Dix was dead, but accident had timed with hair-trigger precision the instant of his death. His mangled body lived. This is the part of the story not known to the compilers of the World Biographical Dictionary when they made their listing for John Dix, Dictator of North America for eight months before his death at twenty-three years of age.
The nameless entity whom we shall call the Stranger paused in his interplanar swing. He had perceived something that should not have been.
He went back a plane. Not there. Another. Yes, this was it. A plane of matter, and yet he perceived emanations of consciousness. It was a paradox, a sheer contradiction. There were the planes of consciousness and there were the planes of physical matter—but never the two together.
The Stranger—a nonmaterial point in space, a focus of consciousness, an entity—paused amid the whirling stars of the matter-plane. These were familiar to him, common to all the matter-planes. But here there was something different. Consciousness, where there should be no consciousness. A foreign kind of consciousness. His perception seemed to tell him that it was allied with matter, but that was a complete contradiction in concepts. Matter was matter; consciousness was consciousness. The two could not be as one.
The emanations were faint. Then he found that by decreasing his time-motion he could make them stronger. He continued the decrease until he had passed the point of maximum strength and then went back to it. They were clear now, but the stars no longer whirled. Almost motionless they hung against the curved curtain of infinity.
The Stranger now began to move—to shift the focus of his thought—toward the star from which the ambiguous emanations came, toward the point which he now perceived to be the third planet of that star.
He neared it and found himself outside the gaseous envelope that surrounded the planet. Here again he paused, bewildered, to analyze and try to understand the amazing thing his perceptions told him lay below.
There were entities there below him, millions, even billions, of them. More in number on this tiny sphere than in the entire plane from which he had come. But these beings were each imprisoned in a finite bit of matter.