Stilclass="underline" we are in Gaxton Falls and must make the best of a bad time. "Come in, sir," a man with a moustache calls to us through the sparse crowd, "come in and meet the iconoclast, do," and before I can protest, Betsy is tugging me by the hand toward the barker's stand which fronts a rather drab set of burlap curtains. "Fascinating and educational," the barker says, "and not only do you have a chance to hear the iconoclast speak, you may also argue with him, take exception to his points, get into a fascinating discussion." Like all the barkers he has a precise command of the idiom of this period although his pronounciation is foul. Obviously this man like so many of the others was imported from Venus where the excessive labor pool produces thousands like him. "What do you say, sir?" he says when we near him. His eyes are faintly desperate, his skin has a greenish cast from lack of sunlight. Clearly a Venusian.
"Let's go in," Betsy says. Her ebullience is a cover for doubt and I feel a lurch of pity: better go along with her. I give the barker his asking price in scrip, two dollars and fifty cents for each of us, and still holding hands we duck within the curtains, feeling the threads of burlap coming out to caress us like fingernails and into the enclosure itself which, expectedly, is smaller and more odorous than the front would indicate. An enormous man sits behind a simple wooden table shaking his head. We are the only customers in the enclosure. As we enter he begins speaking in an empty, rehearsed drone.
"We must abandon the space program," he says in the old accent, much better than the barker, "because it is destroying our. cities, abandoning our underprivileged, leading people toward the delusion that the conquest of space will solve their problems and it is in the hands of technicians and politicians who care not at all for the mystery, the wonder, the intricacies of the human soul. Better we should solve our problems on Earth before we go to the Moon." He rams the table. "We won't be ready for space until we've cleaned up our own planet, understood our own problem."
"But don't you think," Betsy asks, entering into the spirit of this: an engaging girl, "that exploration is an important human need? We'll never solve our problems on Earth after all so we might as well voyage outward where the solutions might be." She squeezes my hand, pleased with herself. Indeed, her own mastery of the idiom is impressive although only guidebook deep.
"Certainly not," the iconoclast says, "that's a ridiculous argument." He does not really look at her; I wonder if he is machinery. Some of the exhibits are and some are not; it is hard to tell humans, and the more sophisticated androids are interchangeable anyway. "The era of exploration and discovery has shifted to the arena of inner space. We must know ourselves or die. To continue the space program would be madness. Happily it is being abandoned."
It is brief but I am already bored with this exhibit, which is rather predictable and limited. "That's nonsense," I point out. "You can't equate exploration with ignorance any more than your enemies could with knowledge."
"But of course I can!" the iconoclast booms. His eyes belie the energy however, they are dull and withdrawn; he is deep, then into a programmed series of replies, and we are not discussing the matter but merely exchanging positions. "The two are exactly the same when you consider that the space program has produced in its fifteen years not one single positive contribution to the common lives of most men. Or women."
"Not so!" says Betsy. "Think of lasers, life-support systems, advances in pacemaker technique, adaptation to weightlessness, psychological studies, rare alloys . . ."
"No," the iconoclast says loudly. He pushes himself back from the table, his body sagging. Enormous: the exhibit must weigh over four hundred pounds. "That is specious and entirely wrong."
"Enough," I say. Abruptly my boredom has turned into physical disgust and I want to leave. Caxton Falls is highly overrated and the iconoclast is typical of almost all its exhibits: cheap, programmatic, superficial. "We're going to leave."
"Jack," Betsy says, her head wrenching one way, her body another. "We may hurt his feelings."
"Don't be foolish," I say, using a double-lock on her wrist, "he's merely an exhibit, possibly an android, certainly hypnoprogrammed. He doesn't even know we're here; they wake up in a vat later. Anyway," I add, turning toward the iconoclast who has sat rigid through all of this, his face as bleak and empty as the sands which lie just to the rear of the Falls, stretching then into Paris, "besides you're a fool and you did not prevail. We returned to the Moon in 1980. We were on Mars by 1990. By 2050 we had established a scientific colony on Mars, a viable, self-supporting unit, had landed several times on Venus, were investing the rings of Saturn at close range and were preparing to drop the first ship on Ganymede. It was, in historical perspective, merely a sneeze, this mid-seventies interruption of the program. You did not prevail."
The iconoclast puts his palms flatly on the table, tries awkwardly to rise, falls back into his flesh, gasping. Respiration makes his arms billow, he seems excited. Have I broken the program? "Tot/ are the fool," he says. "The space program was abandoned for all time. The great riots of the 1980s destroyed all of the centers and equipment, leaving nothing. It will be thousands of years before men even think of going into space again.
I look at him and see that he is serious. Whether programmed or working out of the program the iconoclast really believes this and I am filled with pity but pity has nothing to do with it. The air is dense. I want desperately to leave the tent. I tug Betsy by the hand, she swings like a pendulum and comes against me. The shock of the impact unbalances and I scramble on my knees, Betsy awkwardly straddling me. We cannot seem to disentangle.
"You fools," the iconoclast says, "you poor fools, just look, look," and it is as if the tent falls away, the burlap turning to glass, then mist: the burlap opening toward an endless perspective of the dead landscape of Mars; in that landscape I see the fires, the fires of the 1980s which destroyed the center forever. They sear and rip away; it is momentarily more than I can take, I claw to ground desperately, knowing that when I open them again this will have gone away and I will see Gaxton Falls and its midway again, all of this a seizure, but when I do open them, see again after a long time it is not the midway I see but the flap of the tent opening and as I stare, two people enter, one of them Betsy, and look at me. The other looks familiar although I cannot quite place him. He seems to be a reasonable man, however, and I will do what I can to bring him around.
"We must abandon the space program," I say.
ROBERT SHECKLEY
Slaves of Time
Always dryly witty, always first class, Sheckley's works have changed through the years from phenomenalistic to philosophical, a change landmarked by his novel Dimension of Miracles. Today, from his home in the Balearic Islands, he is taking a longer, deeper look at reality, which produces the happy results of stories such as this one.
Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One: