Up the Line Read online

  The lieutenant looked his part. He was the tallest man I had ever seen, with the widest shoulders and the squarest jaw. Most of the girls in the class had instant orgasms when he entered, as did Mr. Chudnik and Mr. Burlingame. He took a spread-legged stance, back to the wall, ready for trouble. His uniform was gray. His hair was red and cut very short. His eyes were a soulless blue.

  Dajani, himself guilty of transgressing, himself a victim of the Time Patrol’s diligence, slithered into a corner of the classroom and yielded the floor. I saw him peering balefully at the lieutenant through his dark glasses.

  “Now then,” Lieutenant Sanderson said, “you know that our big job involves maintaining the sanctity of now-time. We can’t let all kinds of random changes get introduced into our past, because that’ll mess up our present. So we have a Time Patrol that monitors the whole territory up the line and makes sure that everything happens according to the books. And I want to say, God bless the men who legislated the Time Patrol into existence.”

  “Amen,” said the penitent Dajani.

  “Mind you, it isn’t that I’m thankful for the job I have,” the lieutenant continued. “Although I am because I think it’s the most important job a human being can have, preserving the sanctity of his now-time. But when I say God bless the men who said we had to have a Time Patrol, it’s because those men are responsible for saving everything that is true and good and precious about our existence. Do you know what might have happened without a Time Patrol? What sort of things unscrupulous villains might have done? Let me give you a few examples.

  “Such as going back and killing Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, all our great religious leaders, when they were still children and hadn’t had time to formulate their wonderful and inspiring ideas.

  “Such as warning the great villains of our history of trouble in store for them, and thus allowing them to cheat destiny and continue doing harm to humanity.

  “Such as stealing the art treasures of the past and preventing millions of people over many centuries from enjoying them.

  “Such as engaging in fraudulent financial operations resulting in the bankrupting of millions of innocent investors who happened not to have information on future stock prices.

  “Such as giving false advice to great rulers and leading them into terrible traps.

  “I mention all these examples, my friends, because they are things that have actually happened. They all come from the files of the Time Patrol, believe it or not! In April, 2052, a young man from Bucharest used an illegally obtained timer to shunt up the line to A.D. 11 and poison Jesus Christ. In October, 2043, a citizen of Berlin traveled back to the year 1945 and rescued Adolf Hitler just before the Russians entered the city. In August, 2049, a woman from Nice jumped to the era of Leonardo da Vinci, stole the unfinished Mona Lisa, and hid it in her beach cabaña. In September, 2055, a New York man journeyed to the summer of 1929 and netted close to a billion dollars by selling stock short. In January, 2051, a professor of military history from Quebec journeyed to 1815 and, by marketing to the British what purported to be the French strategic program, caused the defeat of the Duke of Wellington by the forces of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. And therefore—”

  “Wait a second!” I heard myself say. “Napoleon didn’t win at Waterloo. Christ wasn’t poisoned in A.D. 11. If the past was really changed as you just said, how come no effects of it have been felt in now-time?”

  “Aha!” cried Lieutenant Sanderson. He was the best crier of “Aha!” I have ever heard. “The fluidity of the past, my friend, is a double-edged blade. If the past can be changed once, it can be changed many times. Now we come to the role of the Time Patrol.

  “Let us consider the case of the deranged person who assassinated the young Jesus. As a result of this shocking deed, Christianity did not emerge, and much of the Roman Empire was ultimately converted to Judaism. The Jewish leaders of Rome were able to steer the empire away from its collapse of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., turning it into a monolithic theocratic state that controlled all of western Europe. However, the Byzantine Empire did not develop in the East, which instead was ruled from Jerusalem by a schismatic Hebrew sect. In the tenth century a cataclysmic war between the forces of Rome and those of Jerusalem resulted in the annihilation of civilization and in the takeover of all of Europe and Asia by Turkish nomads, who proceeded to construct a totalitarian state that, by the twenty-first century, had become the most repressive in human history.

  “You can see from this how devastating it can be to meddle with the past.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  Lieutenant Sanderson gave me a frigid smile. “You are about to observe that we do not, in fact, live under a repressive Turkish tyranny. I agree. Our present pattern of existence was saved by the following procedure:

  “The murder of the young Jesus was detected by a Time Courier who went up the line late in April, 2052, escorting a party of tourists to witness the Crucifixion. When the group arrived at the time and place of the Crucifixion, they found two thieves undergoing execution; no one, however, had heard of Jesus of Nazareth. The Courier instantly notified the Time Patrol, which began a paradox search. Jesus’ time line was followed from birth through boyhood and was seen to be unchanged; but no trace of him could be found after mid-adolescence, and inquiry in the neighborhood finally turned up the information that he had died suddenly and mysteriously in the year 11. It was a simple matter then to maintain surveillance until we observed the arrival of the illegal time-traveler.

  “What do you think we did then?”

  Hands went up. Lieutenant Sanderson recognized Mr. Chudnik, who said, “You arrested the criminal five minutes before he could give the poison to Jesus, thus preventing the changing of history, and took him back down the line for trial.”

  Lieutenant Sanderson smiled genially. “Wrong,” he said. “We let him give the poison to Jesus.”

  Uproar.

  The Time Patrol man said benignly, “As you surely know, the maximum penalty for unauthorized interference in past events is death—the only capital offense now recognized in law. But before so severe a penalty can be invoked, absolute proof of the crime is necessary. Therefore, whenever a crime of this kind is detected, Time Patrolmen allow it to proceed and surreptitiously make a full record of it.”

  “But how,” Miss Dalessandro demanded, “does the past get unchanged that way?”

  “Aha!” cried Lieutenant Sanderson. “Once we have a proper record of the commission of the crime, we can obtain a quick conviction and secure permission to carry out sentence. This was done. The Time Patrol investigators returned with their evidence to the night of April 4, 2052. This was the date of the departure up the line of the would-be murderer of Jesus. They presented their proof of the crime to the Time Patrol commissioners, who ordered the execution of the criminal. Time Patrol executioners were dispatched to the home of the criminal, seized his timer, and painlessly put him to death an hour before his intended trip into the past. Thus he was erased from the time-stream and the main current of the past was preserved, for in fact he did not make his trip and Jesus lived on to preach his creed. In this way—through detection of unlawful changes and eradication of the changers in advance of their departure up the line—we preserve the sanctity of now-time.”

  How beautiful, I thought.

  I’m too easily satisfied. Miss Dalessandro, that arch-troublemaker, put up her fleshy hand, and when called on, said, “I’d like one clarification, though. Presumably when your Time Patrolmen returned to April, 2052, with the evidence of the crime, they were returning to a changed world run by Turkish dictators. Where would they find Time Patrol commissioners? Where would they even find the murderer? He might have ceased to exist as a consequence of his own crime, because by murdering Jesus he set in motion some train of events that eliminated his own ancestors. For that matter, maybe time-travel itself was never invented in that world where Jesus didn’t live, and so the moment Jesus was killed a
ll Time Patrolmen and Time Couriers and tourists would become impossibilities, and cease to exist.”

  Lieutenant Sanderson did not look pleased.

  “You bring up,” he said slowly, “a number of interesting subsidiary paradoxes. I’m afraid that the time at my disposal isn’t sufficient to deal with them properly. Briefly, though: if the timecrime of 11 A.D. had not been detected relatively quickly, the focus of change would indeed have widened over the centuries and eventually transformed the entire future, possibly preventing the emergence of the Benchley Effect and the Time Patrol itself, leading to what we call the Ultimate Paradox, in which time-travel becomes its own negation. In fact, though, the vast potential consequences of the poisoning of Jesus never occurred because of the detection of the crime by the Time Courier visiting the Crucifixion. Since that event took place in A.D. 33, only the years 11 to 33 were ever affected by the timecrime, and the changes created by the absence of Jesus from those years were insignificant, because Jesus’ influence on history emerged only long after the Crucifixion. Meanwhile the retroactive deletion of the timecrime canceled even the slight changes that had taken place in the 22-year period affected; those two decades were pinched off into another track of time, inaccessible to us and in effect nonexistent, and the basic and authentic track was restored in full continuity from A.D. 11 to the present.”

  Miss Dalessandro wasn’t satisfied. “There’s something circular here. Shouldn’t the Ultimate Paradox have occurred all the way down the line, the instant Jesus was poisoned? How did any of the Couriers and Patrolmen manage to continue to exist, let alone to remember how the past should have gone? It seems to me that there ought not to be any way of correcting a timecrime sweeping enough to bring on the Ultimate Paradox.”

  “You forget, or perhaps you don’t yet know,” said Sanderson, “that time-travelers currently up the line at the moment of a timecrime are unaffected by any change in the past, since they’re detached from their time matrices. A time-traveler in transit is a drifting bubble of now-time ripped loose from the matrix of the continuum, immune to the transformations of paradox. This means that anyone currently up the line may observe and correct an alteration of the true past, and will continue to retain memories both of the temporary false condition and of his role in correcting it. Of course, any time-traveler leaving the sanctuary of the transit state is vulnerable once he comes back to his starting point down the line. That is, if you go up the line and kill your grandfather before his marriage, you won’t instantaneously wink out of existence, since you’re shielded from paradox by the Benchley Effect. But the moment you return to the present you will cease ever to have existed, since as a result of your alteration of your own past you no longer have a time-link to the present. Clear?”

  No, I thought. But I kept quiet.

  Miss Dalessandro pressed onward. “Those in transit are protected by—”

  “The Paradox of Transit Displacement, we call it.”

  “The Paradox of Transit Displacement. They’re encapsulated, and as they travel they’re free to compare what they see with what they remember true time to have been like, and if necessary they can make changes to restore the true order if it’s been changed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why should they be immune? I know I keep coming back to this point, but—”

  Lieutenant Sanderson sighed. “Because,” he said, “if they were affected by a past-change while they were in the past themselves, this would be the Ultimate Paradox: a time-traveler changing the era that produced time-travel. This is even more paradoxical than the Paradox of Transit Displacement. By the Law of Lesser Paradoxes, the Paradox of Transit Displacement, being less improbable, holds precedence. Do you see?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’m afraid I can’t dwell on this in greater detail,” said the Patrolman. “However, no doubt Mr. Dajani will go into these matters at later instruction sessions.”

  He gave Dajani a sickly smile and excused himself fast.

  Dajani, you can bet on it, didn’t deal with Miss Dalessandro’s paradoxes properly, or at all. He found cunning ways to sidetrack her every time she brought up the issue. “You can be sure,” he said, “that the past is restored whenever it is changed. The hypothetical worlds created by unlawful change cease retroactively to exist the moment the changer is apprehended. Q.E.D.”

  That didn’t explain a damned thing. But it was the best explanation we ever got.

  12.

  One thing they made clear to us was that good changes in the past are also forbidden. Dozens of people have been eliminated for trying to persuade Abe Lincoln to stay home from the theater that night, or for trying to tell Jack Kennedy that he should for God’s sake put the bullet-proof bubble on his car.

  They get wiped out, just like the murderers of Jesus and the rescuers of Hitler. Because it’s just as deadly to the fabric of now-time to help Kennedy serve out his term as it would be to help Hitler rebuild the Third Reich. Change is change, and even the virtuous changes can have unpredictably catastrophic results. “Just imagine,” said Dajani, “that because Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963, the escalation of the Vietnamese War that in fact did take place under his successor did not occur, and so the lives of thousands of servicemen were spared. Suppose now that one of those men, who otherwise would have died in 1965 or 1966, remained alive, became President of the United States in 1992, and embarked on an atomic war that brought about the destruction of civilization. You see why even supposedly beneficial alterations of the past must be prevented?”

  We saw. We saw it over and over again.

  We saw it until we were scared toothless of going into the Time Service, because it seemed inevitable that we would sooner or later do something up the line that would bring down on us the fatal wrath of the Time Patrol.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “The way they talk, the death penalty is inflicted a million times a day. Actually I don’t think there have been fifty executions for timecrime in the past ten years. And all of those were real nuts, the kind whose mission it is to murder Mohammed.”

  “Then how does the Patrol keep the past from being changed?”

  “They don’t,” said Sam. “It gets changed all the time. Despite the Time Patrol.”

  “Why doesn’t our world change?”

  “It does. In little ways.” Sam laughed. “If a Time Courier gives Alexander the Great antibiotics and helps him live to a ripe old age, that would be an intolerable change, and the Time Patrol would prevent it. But a lot of other stuff goes on all the time. Couriers recovering lost manuscripts, sleeping with Catherine the Great, collecting artifacts for resale in other eras. Your man Dajani was peddling the True Cross, wasn’t he? They found out about him, but they didn’t execute him. They just suspended him from his profitable run for a while and stuck him in a classroom. Most of the petty tinkering never even gets discovered.” He let his glance rove meaningfully over his collection of artifacts from the past. “As you get into this business, Jud, you’ll find out that we’re in constant intersection with past events. Every time a Time Courier steps on an ant in 2000 B.C., he’s changing the past. Somehow we survive. The dumb bastards in the Time Patrol watch out for structural changes in history, but they leave the little crap alone. They have to. There aren’t enough Patrolmen to handle everything.”

  “But that means,” I said, “that we’re building up a lot of tiny alterations in history, bit by bit, an ant here and a butterfly there, and the accumulation may someday cause a major change, and nobody will then be able to trace all the causes and put things back the way they ought to be!”

  “Exactly.”

  “You don’t sound worried about it,” I said.

  “Why should I be? Do I own the world? Do I give a damn if history gets changed?”

  “You would if the change involved seeing to it that you had never existed.”

  “There are bigger things to worry about, Jud. Like having a good time from day to
day.”

  “Doesn’t it scare you that someday you might just pop out of existence?”

  “Someday I will,” Sam said. “No maybes about it. If not sooner, then later. Meanwhile I enjoy myself. Eat, drink, and be merry, kid. Let the yesterdays fall where they will.”

  13.

  When they were finished hammering the rules into our heads, they sent us on trial runs up the line. All of us had already been into the past, of course, before beginning the instruction sessions; they had tested us to see if we had any psychological hangups about time-traveling. Now they wanted us to observe Couriers in actual service, and so they let us go along as hitchhikers with tour groups.

  They split us up, so there wouldn’t be more than two of us to each six or eight tourists. To save expense, they assigned us all to visit events right in New Orleans. (In order to shoot us back to the Battle of Hastings, say, they would have had to fly us to London first. Time-travel doesn’t include space travel; you have to be physically present in the place you want to reach, before you jump.)

  New Orleans is a fine city, but it hasn’t had all that many important events in its history, and I’m not sure why anybody would want to pay very good money to go up the line there when for about the same fee he could witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the fall of Constantinople, or the assassination of Julius Caesar. But the Time Service is willing to provide transport to any major historical event whatever—within certain limits of taste, I mean—for any group of at least eight tourists who have the stash for tickets, and I suppose the patriotic residents of New Orleans have every right to sightsee their city’s own past, if they prefer.

  So Mr. Chudnik and Miss Dalessandro were shipped to 1815 to cheer for Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Mr. Burlingame and Mr. Oliveira were transported to 1877 to watch the last of the carpetbaggers thrown out. Mr. Hotchkiss and Mrs. Notabene went off to 1803 to see the United States take possession of Louisiana after buying it from the French. And Miss Chambers and I went up the line to 1935 to view the assassination of Huey Long.