Ambition by William L. Bade (books for new readers .txt) 📖

the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?"

She shook her head. "There are no more Afrikanders."

"Rebellion?"

"No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves."

They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. "Let us not talk about them any more."

"Robot factories and farms," Maitland mused. "What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?"

"Inter-what?"

"Have men visited the stars?"

She shook her head, bewildered.

"I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack," he agreed. "But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?"

He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. "I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?"

After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. "Surely you have space travel?"

She frowned and shook her head. "What does that mean—space travel?"

He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. "A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!"

"A ship? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter. Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?"

He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. "Let's get this perfectly clear," he said, more harshly than he realized. "So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?"

She nodded apprehensively. "I have never heard of it being done."

He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, "You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will."

The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. "I just don't understand," he said. "It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it."

Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. "I've got to understand. I've got to know why. What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?"

"Honestly," she said, "I did not know they ever had." She hesitated. "Maybe you are asking the wrong question."

He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her.

"I mean," she explained, "maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit."

Maitland felt his face become hot. "Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough."

"But why?"

Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. "Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem...."

"We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that."

"Birth control," Maitland scoffed. "How do you make it work—secret police?"

"No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce...."

She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. "You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them."

"Even," he said, "granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars—just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?" His hands were trembling as he stopped.

She shrugged her shapely shoulders. "Go into the past—yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why."

"Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what?"

She smiled. "In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob." She laid a hand on his arm. "You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines—machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of—what is the word?—gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them.

"Because this is the Age of Man. We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets."

Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel....

Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. "I think I'd like to be alone for a while," he said.

In the morning, Maitland was tired, though not particularly depressed. He hadn't slept much, but he had come to a decision. When Ingrid woke him, he gave her a cavalier smile and a cheery "Good morning" and sat down to the eggs and ham she had brought. Then, before she could leave, he asked, "Last night when we were talking about spaceships, you mentioned some kind of vessel or vehicle. What was it?"

She thought. "Vliegvlotter? Was that it?"

He nodded emphatically. "Tell me about them."

"Well, they are—cars, you might say, with wheels that go into the body when you take off. They can do, oh, 5,000 miles an hour in the ionosphere, 50 miles up."

"Fifty miles," Maitland mused. "Then they're sealed tight, so the air doesn't leak out?" Ingrid nodded. "How do they work? Rocket drive?"

"No." She plucked at her lower lip. "I do not understand it very well. You could picture something that hooks into a gravity field, and pulls. A long way from the Earth if would not work very well, because the field is so thin there.... I guess I just cannot explain it very well to you."

"That's all I need." Maitland licked his lips and frowned. "On that point, anyway. Another thing—Swarts told me I'd be here for about a week. Is there any set procedure involved in that? Have other persons been brought to this period from the past?"

She laughed. "Thousands. Swarts has published nearly a hundred case studies himself, and spent time adding up to years in the 19th and 20th centuries."

Maitland interrupted incredulously. "How on Earth could he ever manage to keep that many disappearances quiet? Some of those people would be bound to talk."

She shook her head definitely. "The technique was designed to avoid just that. There is a method of 'fading' the memories people have of their stay here. The episode is always accepted as a period of amnesia, in the absence of a better explanation."

"Still, in thousands of cases...."

"Spread out over centuries in a total population of billions."

He laughed. "You're right. But will that be done to me?"

"I suppose so. I can't imagine Swarts letting you take your memories back with you."

Maitland looked out the window at the green horizon. "We'll see," he said.

Maitland removed his three-day beard with an effective depilatory cream he discovered in the bathroom, and settled down to wait. When Swarts arrived, the engineer said quietly, "Sit down, please. I have to talk with you."

Swarts gave him the look of a man with a piece of equipment that just won't function right, and remained standing. "What is it now?"

"Look," Maitland said, "Ingrid has told me that men never reached the planets. You ought to know how I feel about space flight. It's my whole life. Knowing that my work on rockets is going to pay off only in the delivery of bombs, I don't want to go back to the 20th Century. I want to stay here."

Swarts said slowly, "That's impossible."

"Now, look, if you want me to cooperate...."

The big man made an impatient gesture. "Not impossible because of me. Physically impossible. Impossible because of the way time travel works."

Maitland stared at him suspiciously.

"To displace a mass from its proper time takes energy," Swarts explained, "and it's one of the oldest general physical principles that higher energy states are unstable with respect to lower ones. Are you familiar with elementary quantum theory? As an analogy, you might regard yourself, displaced from your proper time, as an atom in an excited state. The system is bound to drop back to ground state. In the atomic case, the time which elapses before that transition occurs is a matter of probabilities. In the case of time travel, it just depends on the amount of mass and the number of years the mass is displaced.

"In short, the laws of nature will insist on your returning to 1950 in just a few days."

Maitland looked at the floor for a while, and his shoulders sagged. "Your memories of this will be faded," Swarts said. "You'll forget about what Ingrid has told you—forget you were ever here, and take up your life where you left off. You were happy working on rockets, weren't you?"

"But—" Maitland shook his head despairingly. Then he had an idea. "Will you let me do one thing, before I go back? I realize now that our time is limited, and you have a lot of tests to give me, but I'm willing to help speed things up. I want to see the stars, just once, from deep space. I know you'll make me forget it ever happened, but once in my life.... You have vessels—vliegvlotter, Ingrid called them—that can go into space. If you'd give me just a couple days to go out there, maybe circle the Moon...?" There was a pleading note in his voice, but he didn't care.

Swarts regarded him dispassionately for a moment, then nodded. "Sure," he said. "Now let's get to work."

"The Earth doesn't change much," Maitland mused. Sitting on the cot, his arm around Ingrid's yielding waist, he was wearing the new blue trunks she had given him to replace his rumpled pajamas. The room was full of evening sunlight, and in that illumination she was more beautiful than any other woman he could remember. This had been the last day of tests; tomorrow, Swarts had promised, he would begin his heart-breakingly brief argosy to the Moon, with Ingrid as pilot.

Over the past four days, he had been with the girl a lot. In the beginning, he realized, she had been drawn to him as a symbol of an era she longed, but was unable, to visit. Now she understood him better, knew more about him—and Maitland felt that now she liked him for himself.

She had told him of her childhood in backward Aresund and of loneliness here at the school in Nebraska. "Here," she had said, "parents spend most of their time raising their children; at home, they just let us grow. Every time one of these people looks at me I feel inferior."

She had confided her dream of visiting far times and places, then had finished, "I doubt that Swarts will ever let me go back. He thinks I am too irresponsible. Probably he is