Absolutely Inflexible

The detector over in one corner of Mahler’s little office gleamed a soft red. He indicated it with a weary gesture of his hand to the sad-eyed time jumper who sat slouched glumly across the desk from him, looking cramped and uncomfortable in the bulky spacesuit he was compelled to wear.

“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”

“And not one has been set free,” the time jumper said. “Every time-traveler who’s come here has been packed off to the Moon immediately. Every one.”

“Every one,” Mahler said. He peered through the thick shielding, trying to see what sort of man was hidden inside the spacesuit. Mahler often wondered about the men he condemned so easily to the Moon. This one was small of stature, with wispy locks of white hair pasted to his high forehead by perspiration. Evidently he had been a scientist, a respected man of his time, perhaps a happy father (although very few of the time jumpers were family men). Perhaps he possessed some bit of scientific knowledge that would be invaluable to the twenty-eighth century; perhaps not. It did not matter. Like all the rest, he would have to be sent to the Moon, to live out his remaining days under the grueling, primitive conditions of the Dome.

“Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?” the other asked. “I came here with no malice, no intent to harm whatsoever. I’m simply a scientific observer from the past. Driven by curiosity, I took the Jump. I never expected that I’d be walking into life imprisonment.”

“I’m sorry,” Mahler said, getting up. He decided to end the interview; he had to get rid of this jumper because there was another coming right up. Some days they came thick and fast, and this looked like one of them. But the efficient mechanical tracers never missed one.

“But can’t I live on Earth and stay in this spacesuit?” the time-jumper asked, panicky now that he saw his interview with Mahler was coming to an end. “That way I’d be sealed off from contact at all times.”

“Please don’t make this any harder for me,” Mahler said. “I’ve explained to you why we must be absolutely inflexible about this. There cannot—must not—be any exceptions. It’s two centuries since last there was any occurrence of disease on Earth. In all this time we’ve lost most of the resistance acquired over the previous countless generations of disease. I’m risking my life coming so close to you, even with the spacesuit sealing you off.”

Mahler signaled to the tall, powerful guards waiting in the corridor, grim in the casings that protected them from infection. This was always the worst moment.

“Look,” Mahler said, frowning with impatience. “You’re a walking death-trap. You probably carry enough disease germs to kill half the world. Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.”

“But I’d—”

“I know. You’d swear by all that’s holy to you or to me that you’d never leave the confines of the spacesuit. Sorry. The word of the most honorable man doesn’t carry any weight against the safety of the lives of Earth’s billions. We can’t take the slightest risk by letting you stay on Earth. It’s unfair, it’s cruel, it’s everything else. You had no idea you would walk into something like this. Well, it’s too bad for you. But you knew you were going on a one-way trip to the future, and you’re subject to whatever that future wants to do with you, since there’s no way of getting back.”

Mahler began to tidy up the papers on his desk in a way that signaled finality. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll just have to see our way of thinking about it. We’re frightened to death at your very presence here. We can’t allow you to roam Earth, even in a spacesuit. No; there’s nothing for you but the Moon. I have to be absolutely inflexible. Take him away,” he said, gesturing to the guards. They advanced on the little man and began gently to ease him out of Mahler’s office.

Mahler sank gratefully into the pneumochair and sprayed his throat with laryngogel. These long speeches always left him feeling exhausted, his throat feeling raw and scraped. Someday I’ll get throat cancer from all this talking, Mahler thought. And that’ll mean the nuisance of an operation. But if I don’t do this job, someone else will have to.

Mahler heard the protesting screams of the time jumper impassively. In the beginning he had been ready to resign when he first witnessed the inevitable frenzied reaction of jumper after jumper as the guards dragged them away, but eight years had hardened him.

They had given him the job because he was hard, in the first place. It was a job that called for a hard man. Condrin, his predecessor, had not been the same sort of man Mahler was, and for that reason Condrin was now himself on the Moon. He had weakened after heading the Bureau for a year and had let a jumper go; the jumper had promised to secrete himself at the tip of Antarctica, and Condrin, thinking that Antarctica was as safe as the Moon, had foolishly released him. That was when they called Mahler in. In eight years Mahler had sent four thousand men to the Moon. (The first was the runaway jumper, intercepted in Buenos Aires after he had left a trail of disease down the hemisphere from Appalachia to Argentine Protectorate. The second was Condrin.)

It was getting to be a tiresome job, Mahler thought. But he was proud to hold it. It took a strong man to do what he was doing. He leaned back and awaited the arrival of the next jumper.

The door slid smoothly open as the burly body of Dr. Fournet, the Bureau’s chief medical man, broke the photo-electronic beam. Mahler glanced up. Fournet carried a time-rig dangling from one hand.

“Took this away from our latest customer,” Fournet said. “He told the medic who examined him that it was a two-way rig, and I thought I’d bring it to show you.”

Mahler came to full attention quickly. A two-way rig? Unlikely, he thought. But it would mean the end of the dreary jumper prison on the Moon if it were true. Only how could a two-way rig exist?

He reached out and took it from Fournet. “It seems to be a conventional twenty-fourth century type,” he said.

“But notice the extra dial here,” Fournet said, pointing. Mahler peered and nodded.

“Yes. It seems to be a two-way rig. But how can we test it? And it’s not really very probable,” Mahler said. “Why should a two-way rig suddenly show up from the twenty-fourth century when no other traveler’s had one? We don’t even have two-way time-travel ourselves, and our scientists don’t think it’s possible. Still,” he mused, “it’s a nice thing to dream about. We’ll have to study this a little more closely. But I don’t seriously think it’ll work. Bring him in, will you?”

As Fournet turned to signal the guards, Mahler asked him, “What’s his medical report, by the way?”

“From here to here,” Fournet said sombrely. “You name it, he’s carrying it. Better get him shipped off to the Moon as soon as possible. I won’t feel safe until he’s off this planet.” The big medic waved to the guards.

Mahler smiled. Fournet’s overcautiousness was proverbial in the Bureau. Even if a jumper were to show up completely free from disease, Fournet would probably insist that he was carrying everything from asthma to leprosy.

The guards brought the jumper into Mahler’s office. He was fairly tall, Mahler saw, and young. It was difficult to see his face clearly through the dim plate of the protective spacesuit all jumpers were compelled to wear, but Mahler could tell that the young time-jumper’s face had much of the lean, hard look of Mahler’s own. It seemed that the jumper’s eyes had widened in surprise as he entered the office, but Mahler was not sure.

“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly. “Your name is Mahler, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Mahler agreed.

“To go all these years—and find you. Talk about improbabilities!”

Mahler ignored him, declining to take up the gambit. He had found it was good practice never to let a captured jumper get the upper hand in conversation. His standard procedure was firmly to explain to the jumper the reasons why it was imperative that he be sent to the Moon, and then send him, as quickly as possible.

“You say this is a two-way time-rig?” Mahler asked, holding up the flimsy-looking piece of equipment.

“That’s right,” the other agreed. “Works both ways. If you pressed the button, you’d go straight back to 2360 or thereabouts.”

“Did you build it?”

“Me? No, hardly,” said the jumper. “I found it. It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. In fact, if I tried to tell it, I’d only make things ten times worse than they are, if that’s possible. No. Let’s get this over with, shall we? I know I don’t stand much of a chance with you, and I’d just as soon make it quick.”

“You know, of course, that this is a world without disease—” Mahler began sonorously.

“And that you think I’m carrying enough germs of different sorts to wipe out the whole world. And therefore you have to be absolutely inflexible with me. I won’t try to argue with you. Which way is the Moon?”

Absolutely inflexible. The phrase Mahler had used so many times, the phrase that summed him up so neatly. He chuckled to himself; some of the younger technicians must have tipped the jumper off about the usual procedure, and the jumper was resigned to going peacefully, without bothering to plead. It was just as well.

Absolutely inflexible.

Yes, Mahler thought, the words fit him well. He was becoming a stereotype in the Bureau. Perhaps he was the only Bureau chief who had never relented and let a jumper go. Probably all the others, bowed under the weight of the hordes of curious men flooding in from the past, had finally cracked and taken the risk. But not Mahler; not Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. He knew the deep responsibility that rode on his shoulders, and he had no intention of failing what amounted to a sacred trust. His job was to find the jumpers and get them off Earth as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Every one. It was a task that required unsoftening inflexibility.

“This makes my job much easier,” Mahler said. “I’m glad I won’t have to convince you of the necessity of my duty.”

“Not at all,” the other agreed. “I understand. I won’t even waste my breath. You have good reasons for what you’re doing, and nothing I say can alter them.” He turned to the guards. “I’m ready. Take me away.”

Mahler gestured to them, and they led the jumper away. Amazed, Mahler watched the retreating figure, studying him until he could no longer be seen.

If they were all like that, Mahler thought.

I could have got to like that one. That was a sensible man—one of the few. He knew he was beaten, and he didn’t try to argue in the face of absolute necessity. It’s too bad he had to go; he’s the kind of man I’d like to find more often these days.

But I mustn’t feel sympathy, Mahler told himself.

He had performed his job so well so long because he had managed to suppress any sympathy for the unfortunates he had to condemn. Had there been someplace else to send them—back to their own time, preferably—he would have been the first to urge abolition of the Moon prison. But, with no place else to send them, he performed this job efficiently and automatically.

He picked up the jumper’s time-rig and examined it. A two-way rig would be the solution, of course. As soon as the jumper arrives, turn him around and send him back. They’d get the idea soon enough. Mahler found himself wishing it were so; he often wondered what the jumpers stranded on the Moon must think of him.

A two-way rig could change the world completely; its implications were staggering. With men able to move with ease backward and forward in time, past, present, and future would blend into one mind-numbing new entity. It was impossible to conceive of the world as it would be, with free passage in either direction.

But even as Mahler fondled the confiscated time-rig he realized something was wrong. In the six centuries since the development of time-travel, no one had yet developed a known two-way rig. And, more important, there were no documented reports of visitors from the future. Presumably, if a two-way rig existed, such visitors would be commonplace.

So the jumper had been lying, Mahler thought with regret. The two-way rig was an impossibility. He had merely been playing a game with his captors. This couldn’t be a two-way rig, because the past held no record of anyone’s going back.

Mahler examined the rig. There were two dials on it, one the conventional forward dial and the other indicating backward travel. Whoever had prepared this hoax had gone to considerable extent to document it. Why?

Could it be that the jumper had told the truth? Mahler wished he could somehow test the rig in his hands; there was always that one chance that it might actually work, that he would no longer have to be the rigid dispenser of justice, Absolutely Inflexible Mahler.

He looked at it. As a time machine, it was fairly crude. It made use of the standard distorter pattern, but the dial was the clumsy wide-range twenty-fourth-century one; the vernier system, Mahler reflected, had not been introduced until the twenty-fifth.

Mahler peered closer to read the instruction label. PLACE LEFT HAND HERE, it said. He studied it carefully. The ghost of a thought wandered into his mind; he pushed it aside in horror, but it recurred. It would be so simple. What if—?

No.

But—

PLACE LEFT HAND HERE.

He reached out tentatively with his left hand.

Just a bit—

No.

PLACE LEFT HAND HERE.

He touched his hand gingerly to the indicated place. There was a little crackle of electricity. He let go, quickly, and started to replace the time-rig on his desk when the desk abruptly faded out from under him.

* * *

The air was foul and grimy. Mahler wondered what had happened to the conditioner. Then he looked around.

Huge, grotesque buildings raised to the sky. Black, despairing clouds of smoke overhead. The harsh screech of an industrial society.

He was in the middle of an immense city, with streams of people rushing past him on the street at a furious pace. They were all small, stunted creatures, angry-looking, their faces harried, neurotic. It was the same black, frightened expression Mahler had seen so many times on the faces of jumpers escaping to what they hoped might be a more congenial future.

He looked at the time-rig clutched in one hand, and knew what had happened.

The two-way rig.

It meant the end of the Moon prisons. It meant a complete revolution in civilization. But he had no further business back in this age of nightmare. He reached down to activate the time-rig.

Abruptly someone jolted him from behind. The current of the crowd swept him along, as he struggled to regain his control over himself. Suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed the back of his neck.

“Got a card, Hump?”

He whirled to face an ugly, squinting-eyed man in a dull-brown uniform with a row of metallic buttons.

“Hear me? Where’s your card, Hump? Talk up or you get Spotted.”

Mahler twisted out of the man’s grasp and started to jostle his way through the crowd, desiring nothing more than a moment to set the time-rig and get out of this disease-ridden squalid era. As he shoved people out of his way, they shouted angrily at him.

“There’s a Hump!” someone called. “Spot him!”

The cry became a roar. “Spot him! Spot him!”

Wherever—whenever—he was, it was no place to stay in long. He turned left and went pounding down a side street, and now it was a full-fledged mob that dashed after him, shouting wildly.

“Send for the Crimers!” a deep voice boomed. “They’ll Spot him!”

Someone caught up to him, and without looking Mahler reached behind and hit out, hard. He heard a dull grunt of pain, and continued running. The unaccustomed exercise was tiring him rapidly.

An open door beckoned. He stepped inside, finding himself inside a machine store of sorts, and slammed the door shut. They still had manual doors, a remote part of his mind observed coldly.

A salesman came towards him. “Can I help you, sir? The latest models, right here.”

“Just leave me alone,” Mahler panted, squinting at the time-rig. The salesman watched uncomprehendingly as Mahler fumbled with the little dial.

There was no vernier. He’d have to chance it and hope he hit the right year. The salesman suddenly screamed and came to life, for reasons Mahler would never understand. Mahler averted him and punched the stud viciously.

* * *

It was wonderful to step back into the serenity of twenty-eighth-century Appalachia. Small wonder so many time jumpers come here, Mahler reflected, as he waited for his overworked heart to calm down. Almost anything would be preferable to then.

He looked around the quiet street for a Convenience where he could repair the scratches and bruises he had acquired during his brief stay in the past. They would scarcely be able to recognize him at the Bureau in his present battered condition, with one eye nearly closed, a great livid welt on his cheek, and his clothing hanging in tatters.

He sighted a Convenience and started down the street, pausing at the sound of a familiar soft mechanical whining. He looked around to see one of the low-running mechanical tracers of the Bureau purring up the street towards him, closely followed by the two Bureau guards, clad in their protective casings.

Of course. He had arrived from the past, and the detectors had recorded his arrival, as they would that of any time-traveler. They never missed.

He turned and walked towards the guards. He failed to recognize either one, but this did not surprise him; the Bureau was a vast and wide-ranging organization, and he knew only a handful of the many guards who accompanied the tracers. It was a pleasant relief to see the tracer; the use of tracers had been instituted during his administration, so at least he knew he hadn’t returned too early along the time-stream.

“Good to see you,” he called to the approaching guards. “I had a little accident in the office.”

They ignored him and methodically unpacked a spacesuit from the storage trunk of the mechanical tracer. “Never mind talking,” one said. “Get into this.”

He paled. “But I’m no jumper,” he said. “Hold on a moment, fellows. This is all a mistake. I’m Mahler—head of the Bureau. Your boss.”

“Don’t play games with us, fellow,” the taller guard said, while the other forced the spacesuit down over Mahler. To his horror, Mahler saw that they did not recognize him at all.

“If you’ll just come peacefully and let the Chief explain everything to you, without any trouble—” the short guard said.

“But I am the Chief,” Mahler protested. “I was examining a two-way time-rig in my office and accidentally sent myself back to the past. Take this thing off me and I’ll show you my identification card; that should convince you.”

“Look, fellow, we don’t want to be convinced of anything. Tell it to the Chief if you want. Now, are you coming, or do we bring you?”

There was no point, Mahler decided, in trying to prove his identity to the clean-faced young medic who examined him at the Bureau office. That would only add more complications, he realized. No; he would wait until he reached the office of the Chief.

He saw now what had happened: Apparently he had landed somewhere in his own future, shortly after his own death. Someone else had taken over the Bureau, and he, Mahler, was forgotten. (Mahler suddenly realized with a shock that at this very moment his ashes were probably reposing in an urn at the Appalachia Crematorium.)

When he got to the Chief of the Bureau, he would simply and calmly explain his identity and ask for permission to go back the ten or twenty or thirty years to the time in which he belonged, and where he could turn the two-way rig over to the proper authorities and resume his life from his point of departure. And when that happened, the jumpers would no longer be sent to the Moon, and there would be no further need for Absolutely Inflexible Mahler.

But, he realized, if I’ve already done this then why is there still a Bureau now? An uneasy fear began to grow in him.

“Hurry up and finish that report,” Mahler told the medic.

“I don’t know what the rush is,” the medic said. “Unless you like it on the Moon.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Mahler said confidently. “If I told you who I am, you’d think twice about—”

“Is this thing your time-rig?” the medic asked boredly, interrupting.

“Not really. I mean—yes, yes it is,” Mahler said. “And be careful with it. It’s the world’s only two-way rig.”

“Really, now?” said the medic. “Two ways, eh?”

“Yes. And if you’ll take me in to your Chief—”

“Just a minute. I’d like to show this to the Head Medic.”

In a few moments the medic returned. “All right, let’s go to the Chief now. I’d advise you not to bother arguing; you can’t win. You should have stayed where you came from.”

Two guards appeared and jostled Mahler down the familiar corridor to the brightly lit little office where he had spent eight years. Eight years on the other side of the fence.

As he approached the door of what had once been his office, he carefully planned what he would say to his successor. He would explain the accident, demonstrate his identity as Mahler, and request permission to use the two-way rig to return to his own time. The Chief would probably be belligerent at first, then curious, finally amused at the chain of events that had ensnarled Mahler. And, of course, he would let him go, after they had exchanged anecdotes about their job, the job they both held at the same time and across a gap of years. Mahler swore never again to touch a time machine, once he got back. He would let others undergo the huge job of transmitting the jumpers back to their own eras.

He moved forward and broke the photoelectronic beam. The door to the Bureau Chief’s office slid open. Behind the desk sat a tall, powerful-looking man, lean, hard.

Me.

Through the dim plate of the spacesuit into which he had been stuffed, Mahler saw the man behind the desk. Himself. Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. The man who had sent four thousand men to the Moon, without exception, in the unbending pursuit of his duty.

And if he’s Mahler—

Who am I?

Suddenly Mahler saw the insane circle complete. He recalled the jumper, the firm, deep-voiced, unafraid time jumper who had arrived claiming to have a two-way rig and who had marched off to the Moon without arguing. Now Mahler knew who that jumper was.

But how did the cycle start? Where did the two-way rig come from in the first place? He had gone to the past to bring it to the present to take it to the past to—

His head swam. There was no way out. He looked at the man behind the desk and began to walk towards him, feeling a wall of circumstance growing around him, while he, in frustration, tried impotently to beat his way out.

It was utterly pointless to argue. Not with Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. It would just be a waste of breath. The wheel had come full circle, and he was as good as on the Moon. He looked at the man behind the desk with a new, strange light in his eyes.

“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly.