 THE MAN WHO SAW THE FUTURE Jean de Marseille, Inquisitor Extraordinary of the King of France, raised his head from the parchment that littered the crude desk at which he sat. His glance shifted along the long stone-walled torch-lit room to the file of male-clad soldiers, who stood like steel statues by its door. A word from him, and two of them sprang forward. �You may bring in the prisoner,� he said. The two disappeared through the door, and in moments there came a clang of opening bolts and grating of heavy hinges from somewhere in the building. Then the clang of the returning soldiers, and they entered the room with another man between them whose hands were fettered. He was a straight figure, and was dressed in drab tunic and hose. His dark hair was long and straight, and his face held a dreaming strength altogether different from the battered visages of the soldiers, or the changels' mask of the Inquisitor. The latter regarded the prisoner for a moment, and then lifted one of the parchment's from before him, and read from it in a smooth, clear voice. On Relothier, apothecary's assistant to Paris, he read, is charged in this year of our Lord one thousand four hundred and forty-four, with a vending against God and the King by committing the crime of sorcery. The prisoner spoke for the first time, his voice low, but steady. �I am no sorcerer, sire.� Jean de Marseille read calmly on from the parchment. It is stated by many witnesses that for long that part of Paris, called Nannly by some, has been troubled by works of the devil. Ever and on great claps of thunder have been heard issuing from an open field there without visible cause. They were evidently caused by a sorcerer of power since even exorcists could not halt them. It is attested by many that the accused On Relothier did, in spite of the known diabolical nature of the thing, spend much time at the field in question. It is also attested that the said On Relothier did state that in his opinion the thunderclaps were not of a diabolical origin, and that if they were studied their cause might be discovered. Despite being suspected from this that On Relothier was himself the sorcerer causing the thunderclaps, he was watched, and on the third day of June was seen to go in the early morning to the unholy spot with certain instruments. There he was observed going through strange and diabolical conjurations, when there came suddenly another thunderclap, and the said On Relothier did vanish entirely from view in that moment. This fact is attested beyond all doubt. The news spreading, many hundreds watched around the field during that day. Upon that night before midnight another thunderclap was heard, and the said On Relothier was seen by these hundreds to appear at the field center as swiftly and as strangely as he had vanished. The fear-stricken hundreds around the field heard him tell them how by diabolical power he had gone for hundreds of years into the future, a thing surely possible only to the devil and his minions, and heard him tell other blasphemies before they seized him and brought him to the inquisitor of the king, praying that he be burned in his work of sorcery thus halted. Therefore, On Relothier, since you were seen to vanish and reappear as only the servants of an evil one might do, and were heard by many to utter the blasphemies mentioned, I must adjudge you a sorcerer with the penalty of death by fire. If anything there be that you can advance in palation of your black offence, however, you may now do so before the final sentence is passed upon you. Jean de Marseille laid down the parchment and raised his eyes to the prisoner. The latter looked round him quickly for a moment, a half-glimpse panic for an instant in his eyes, then seemed to steady. Sire, I cannot change the sentence you will pass upon me, he said quietly. Yet do I wish well to relate once what happened to me and what I saw. Is it permitted me to tell that from first to last? The inquisitor's head bent, and On Relothier spoke, his voice gaining in strength and feather as he continued. Sire, I, On Relothier, am no sorcerer but a simple apothecary's assistant. It was always my nature, from earliest youth, to desire to delve into matters unknown to men, the secrets of the earth and sea and sky, the knowledge hidden from us. I knew well that this was wicked, that the church teaches all we need to know, and that heaven frowns when we pry into its mysteries, but so strong was my desire to know that many times I concerned myself with matters forbidden. I had sought to know the nature of the lightning, and the manner of the flight of birds, and the way in which fishes are able to live beneath the waters, and the mystery of the stars. So when these thunderclaps began to be heard in that part of Paris in which I lived, I did not fear them so much as my neighbours. I was eager to learn only what was causing them, for it seemed to me that their cause might be learned. So I began to go down to that field from which they issued to study them. I waited in it, and twice I heard the great thunderclaps myself. I thought they came from near the field centre, and I studied that place. But I could see nothing there that was causing them. I dug in the ground, I looked for hours into the sky, but there was nothing. And still, at intervals, the thunderclaps sounded. I still kept going to the field, though I knew that many of my neighbours whispered that I was engaged in sorcery. Upon that morning of the third day of June, it had occurred to me to take certain instruments, such as lodestones to the field, to see whether anything might be learned from them. I went a few superstitious ones following me at a distance. I reached the field centre, and started the examinations I had planned. Then came suddenly another thunderclap, and with it I passed from the sight of those who had followed and were watching, finished from view. Sir, I cannot well describe what happened in that moment. I heard the thunderclap come as though from all the air around me, stunning my ears with its terrible burst of sound. And at the same moment that I heard it I was buffeted as though by awful winds, and seemed falling downward through terrific depths. Then through the hellish uproar I felt myself bumping upon a hard surface, and the sounds quickly ceased from about me. I had involuntarily closed my eyes at the great thunderclap, but now slowly I opened them. I looked around me, first in stupefaction, and then in growing amazement. For I was not in that familiar field at all, Sire, that I had been in a moment before. I was in a room, lying upon its floor, and it was such a room as I had never seen before. Its walls were smooth and white and gleaming. There were windows in the walls, and they were closed with sheets of glass so smooth and clear that one seemed looking through a clear opening rather than through glass. The floor was of stone, smooth and seamless as though carbon from one great rock, yet seeming not in some way to be stone at all. There was a great circle of smooth metal inset in it, and it was on it that I was lying. All around the room were many great things the like of which I had never seen. Some seemed of black metal, seemed contrivances or machines of some sort. Black cords of wire connected them to each other, and from part of them came a humming sound that did not stop. Others had glass tubes fixed on the front of them, and there were square black plates on which were many shining little handles and buttons. There was a sound of voices, and I turned to find that two men were bending over me. They were men like myself, yet they were at the same time like no men I had ever met. One was white-bearded and the other plump and bare-of-face. Neither of them wore cloak or tunic or hose. Instead they wore loose and straight-hanging garments of cloth. They were both greatly excited, it seemed, and were talking to each other as they bent over me. I caught a word or two of their speech in a moment and found it was French they were talking, but it was not the French I knew, being so strange and with so many new words as to be almost a different language. I could understand the drift, though, of what they were saying. We have succeeded, the plump one was shouting excitedly. We've brought someone through at last. They will never believe it, the other replied. They'll say it was faked. Nonsense cried the first. We can do it again, Raston. We can show them before their own eyes. They bent toward me, seeing me staring at them. Where are you from? shouted the plump-faced one. What time? What year? What century? He doesn't understand, Thrycourt muttered the white-bearded one. What year is this now, my friend? he asked me. I found voice to answer. Surely, sirs, whoever you be, you know that this is the year 1444, I said. That set them off again into a babble of excited talk, of which I could make out only a word here and there. They lifted me up, seeing how sick and weak I felt, and seated me in a strange, but very comfortable chair. I felt dazed. The two were still talking excitedly, but finally the white-bearded one, Raston, turned to me. He spoke to me very slowly, so that I understood him clearly, and he asked me my name. I told him. Henri Lothier, he repeated, Well, Henri, you must try to understand. You are not now in the year 1444. You are five hundred years in the future, or what would seem to you the future. This is the year 1944. And Raston and I have jerked you out of your own time across five solid centuries, said the other grinning. I looked from one to the other. Missus, I pleaded, and Raston shook his head. He does not believe, he said to the other. Then to me. Where were you just before you found yourself here, Henri? he asked. In a field at the outskirts of Paris, I said. Well, look from that window and see if you still believe yourself in 15th-century Paris. I went to the window. I looked out. Mother of God, what a sight I saw before my eyes. The familiar gray little houses, the open fields behind them, the saunters and the dirt streets. All these were gone, and it was a new and terrible city that lay about me. These broad streets were of stone, and great buildings of many levels rose on either side of them. Great numbers of people dressed like the two beside me moved in streets and also strange vehicles or carriages, undrawn by horse or ox, that rushed to and fro at undreamed of speed. I staggered back into the chair. You believe me now, Henri? asked the white beard, Raston kindly enough, and I nodded weakly. My brain was whirling. He pointed to the circle of metal on the floor and the machines around the room. Those are what we used to jerk you from your own time to this one, he said. But how, sirs, I asked, for the love of God, how is it that you can take me from one time to another? Have you become gods or devils? Neither the one nor the other, Henri, he answered. We are simply scientists, physicists, men who want to know as much as men can know, and who spend our lives seeking knowledge. I felt my confidence returning. These were men such as I had dreamed might someday be. But what can you do with time, I asked? Is not time a thing unalterable, unchanging? Both shook their heads. No, Henri, it is not. But lately our men of science have found that out. They went on to tell me of things that I could not understand. It seemed they were telling that their men of knowledge had found time to be a mere measurement or dimension, such as length or breadth or thickness. They mentioned names with reverence that I had never heard of, Einstein and De Sitter and Lawrence. I was in a maze at their words. They said that just as men used force to move or rotate matter from one point along the three known measurements to another, so might matter be rotated from one point in time, the fourth measurement to another, if the right force were used. They said that their machines produced that force and applied it to the metal circle from five hundred years before to this time of theirs. They had tried it many times, they said, but nothing had been on the spot at that time, and they had rotated nothing but the air above it from one time to the other and the reverse. I told them of the thunderclaps that had been heard at the spot in the field, and that had made me curious. They said that they had been caused by the changing of the air above the spot from one time to another in their trials. I could not understand these things. They said then that I had happened to be on the spot when they had again turned on their force, and so had been rotated out of my own time into theirs. They said that they had always hoped to get someone living from a distant time in that way, since such a man would be a proof to all the other men of knowledge of what they had been able to do. I could not comprehend, and they saw, and told me not to fear. I was not fearful but excited at the things that I saw around me. I asked of those things, and Raston and Thrycourt laughed and explained some of them to me as best they could. Much they said that I did not understand, but my eyes saw marvels in that room of which I had never dreamed. They showed me a thing like a small glass bottle with wires inside, and then told me to touch a button beneath it. I did so, and the bottle shone with a brilliant light exceeding that of scores of candles. I shrank back, but they laughed, and when Raston touched the button again the light in the glass thing vanished. I saw that there were many of these things in the ceiling. They showed me also a rounded black object of metal with a wheel at the end. A belt ran around the wheel, and around smaller wheels connected to many machines. They touched a lever on this object, and a sound of humming came from it. And the wheel turned very fast, turning all the machines with the belt. It turned faster than any man could ever have turned it. Yet when they touched the lever again, it's turning ceased. They said that it was the power of the lightning in the skies that they used to make the light and to turn that wheel. My brain reeled at the wonders that they showed. One took an instrument from the table that he had held to his face, saying that he would summon the other scientists or men of knowledge to see their experiment that night. He spoke into the instrument as though two different men, and let me hear voices from it answering him. They said that the men who answered were leagues separated from him. I could not believe, and yet somehow I did believe. I was half dazed with wonder, and yet excited, too. The white-bearded man, Raston, saw that and encouraged me. Then they brought a small box with an opening and placed a black disk on the box, and set it turning in some way. A woman's voice came from the opening of the box singing. I shuddered when they told me that the woman was one who had died years before. Could the dead speak thus? How can I describe what I saw there? Another box or cabinet there was, with an opening also. I thought it was like that from which I had heard the dead woman singing, but they said that it was different. They touched buttons on it, and a voice came from it speaking in a tongue I knew not. They said that the man was speaking thousands of leagues from us in a strange land across the uncrossed western ocean, yet he seemed speaking by my side. They saw how dazed I was by these things, and gave me wine. At that I took heart, for wine, at least, was as it had always been. You will want to see Paris, the Paris of our time, honoree, asked Reston. But it is different, terrible, I said. We'll take you, Thricourt said, but first your clothes. He got a long light coat that they had me put on that covered my tunic and hose, and a hat of grotesque round shape that they put on my head. They led me then out of the building and into the street. I gazed astoundedly along that street. It had a raised walk at either side, on which many hundreds of people moved to and fro, all dressed in a stranger fashion. Many, like Reston and Thricourt, seemed of gentle blood, yet in spite of this they did not wear a sword or even a dagger. There were no knights or squires or priests or peasants. All seemed dressed much the same. Small lads ran to and fro, selling what seemed sheets of very thin white parchment, many times folded and covered with lettering. Reston said that these had written in them all things that had happened through all the world, but even hours before. I said that to write even one of these sheets would take a clerk many days, but they said that the writing was done in some way very quickly by machines. In the broad stone street between the two raised walks were rushing back and forth the strange vehicles I had seen from the window. There was no animal pulling or pushing any one of them, yet they never halted their swift rush and carried many people at unthinkable speed. Sometimes those who walked stepped before the rushing vehicles, and then from them came terrible warning snarls or moans that made the walkers draw back. One of the vehicles stood at the walk's edge before us, and we entered it and sat side by side on the soft leather seat. Thricourt sat behind a wheel on a post, with levers beside him. He touched these, and a humming sound came from somewhere in the vehicle, and then it too began to rush forward. Faster and faster along the street it went, yet neither of them seemed afraid. Many thousands of these vehicles were moving swiftly through the streets about us. We passed on between great buildings and along wider streets. My eyes and ears numbed by what I saw about me. Then the buildings grew smaller, after we had gone for miles through them, and we were passing through the city's outskirts. I could not believe hardly that it was Paris in which I was. We came to a great flat and open field outside the city, and their Thricourt stopped, and we got out of the vehicle. There were big buildings at the field's end, and I saw other vehicles rolling out of them across the field, one's different from any I had yet seen, with flat wing-like projections on either side. They rolled out over the field very fast, and then I cried out as I saw them rising from the ground into the air. Mother of God, they were flying. The men in them were flying. Raston and Thricourt took me forward to the great buildings. They spoke to men there, and one brought forward one of the winged cars. Raston told me to get in, and though I was terribly afraid, there was too terrible a fascination that drew me in. Thricourt and Raston entered after me, and we sat in seats with the other man. He had before him levers and buttons. While at the car's front there was a great thing like a double oar or paddle. A loud roaring came, and that double paddle began to whirl so swiftly that I could not see it. Then the car rolled swiftly forward, bumping on the ground, and then ceased to bump. I looked down, then shuttered. The ground was already far beneath. I too was flying in the air. We swept upward at terrible speed that increased steadily. The thunder of the car was terrific, and as the men at the levers changed their position, we curved around and over, downward and upward as though birds. Raston tried to explain to me how the car flew, but it was all too wonderful, and I could not understand. I only knew that a wild thrilling excitement helped me, and that it were worth life and death to fly thus, if but for once, as I had always dreamed that men might some day do. Higher and higher we went. The earth lay far beneath, and I saw now that Paris was indeed a mighty city, its vast mass of buildings stretching away almost to the horizons below us. A mighty city of the future that it had been given my eyes to look on. There were other winged cars darting to and fro in the air about us, and they said that many of these were starting or finishing journeys of hundreds of leagues in the air. Then I cried out as I saw a great shape coming nearer us in the air. It was many rods in length, tapering to a point at both ends, a vast ship sailing through the air. They were great cabins on its lower part, and in them we glimpsed people gazing out, coming and going inside, dancing even. They told me that vast ships of the air like this sailed to and fro for thousands of leagues, with hundreds inside them. The huge vessel of the air passed us, and then our winged car began to descend. It circled smoothly down to the field like a swooping bird, and, when we landed there, Raston and Thrycourt led me back to the ground vehicle. It was late afternoon by then, the sun sinking westward, and darkness had descended by the time we rolled back into the great city. But in that city was not darkness. Lights were everywhere in it, flashing brilliant lights that shone from its mighty buildings, that blinked and burned and ran like water in great symbols upon the buildings above the streets. Their glare was like that of day. We stopped before a great building, and to which Raston and Thrycourt led me. It was vast inside, and in it were many people in rows on rows of seats. I thought it a cathedral at first, but saw soon that it was not. The wall at one end of it, toward which all in it were gazing, had, on it, pictures of people great in size, and those pictures were moving as though themselves alive. And they were talking one to another, too, as though with living voices. I trembled. What magic! With Raston and Thrycourt in seats beside me I watched the pictures enthralled. It was like looking through a great window into strange worlds. I saw the sea seemingly tossing and roaring there before me, and then saw on it a ship, a vast ship of incredible size, without sails or oars, holding thousands of people. I seemed on that ship as I watched, seemed moving forward with it. They told me it was sailing over the western ocean that never men had crossed. I feared. Then another scene, land appearing from the ship, a great statue upholding a torch, and we on the ship seemed passing beneath it. They said that the ship was approaching a city, the city of New York, but mists hid all before us. Then suddenly the mists before the ship cleared, and there before me seemed the city. Mother of God what a city! Climbing range on range of great mountain-like buildings that aspired up as though to scale heaven itself. Far beneath narrow streets pierced through them, and in the picture we seemed to land from the ship, to go through those streets of the city. It was an incredible city of madness. The streets and ways were mere chasms between sky toppling buildings. People, people, people, millions on millions of them rushed through the endless streets. Countless ground vehicles rushed to and fro also, and other different ones that roared above the streets and still others below them. Coming to flying cars and great airships were sailing to and fro over the titanic city, and in the waters around it great ships of the sea and smaller ships were coming, as man never dreamed of surely, that reached out from the mighty city on all sides, and when the coming of darkness the city blazed with living light. The pictures changed, showed other mighty cities, though none so terrible as that one. It showed great mechanisms that appalled me, great metal things that scooped in an instant from the earth as much as a man might dig in days, vast things that poured molten metal from them like water, others that lifted loads that hundreds of men in oxen could not have stirred. They showed men of knowledge like Raston and Thrycourt beside me. Some were healers, working miraculous cures in ways that I could not understand. Others were gazing through giant tubes at the stars, and the pictures showed what they saw, showed that all the stars were great suns like our sun, and that our sun was greater than the earth, and that earth moved around it instead of the reverse. How could such things be, I wondered? Yet they said it was so, that earth was round like an apple, and that with other earths like it, the planets moved around the sun. I heard but could scarce understand. At last Raston and Thrycourt led me out of that place of living pictures and to their ground vehicle. We went again through the streets to their building, where first I had found myself. As we went I saw that none challenged my right to go, nor asked who was my lord. And Raston said that none now had lords, but that all were lord, king and priest and noble, having no more power than any in the land. Each man was his own master. It was what I had hardly dared to hope for, in my own time, and this, I thought, was greatest of all the marvels that they had shown me. We entered again their building, but Raston and Thrycourt took me first to another room than the one in which I had found myself. They said that their men of knowledge were gathered there to hear of their feet, and to have it proved to them. You would not be afraid to return to your own time, Henri, asked Raston, and I shook my head. I want to return to it, I told them. I want to tell my people there what I have seen, what the future is that they must strive for. But if they should not believe you, Thrycourt asked, still I must go, must tell them, I said. Raston grasped my hand. You are a man, Henri, he said. Then throwing aside the cloak and hat I had worn outside, they went with me down to the big white-walled room where first I had found myself. It was lit brightly now by many of the shining glass things on the ceiling and walls, and in it were many men. They all stared strangely at me, and at my clothes, and talked excitedly so fast that I could not understand. Raston began to address them. He seemed explaining how he had brought me from my own time to his. He used many terms and words that I could not understand, incomprehensible references and phrases, and I could understand but little. I heard again the names of Einstein and De Sitter that I had heard before, repeated frequently by these men, as they disputed with Raston and Thrycourt. They seemed disputing about me. One big man was saying, impossible, I tell you, Raston, you have faked this fellow. Raston smiled. You don't believe that Thrycourt and I brought him here from his own time across five centuries? A chorus of excited negatives answered him. He had me stand up and speak to them. They asked me many questions, part of which I could not understand. I told them of my life and of the city of my own time, and of king and priest and noble, and of many simple things that they seemed quite ignorant of. Some appeared to believe me, but others did not, and again their dispute broke out. There is a way to settle the argument, gentlemen, said Raston finally. How, all cried. Thrycourt and I brought Henri across five centuries by rotating the time dimensions at this spot, he said. Suppose we reverse that rotation and send him back before your eyes. Would that be proof? They all said it would. Raston turned to me. Stand on the metal circle, Henri, he said. I did so. All were watching very closely. Thrycourt did something quickly with the levers and buttons of the mechanisms in the room. They began to hum, and blue light came from the glass tubes on some. All were quiet, watching me as I stood there on the circle of metal. I met Raston's eyes, and something in me made me call good-bye to him. He waved his hand and smiled. Thrycourt pressed more buttons, and the hum of the mechanisms grew louder. Then he reached toward another lever. All in the room were tense, and I was tense. Then I saw Thrycourt's arm move as he turned one of the many levers. A terrific clap of thunder seemed to break around me, and as I closed my eyes before its shock I felt myself whirling around and falling at the same time as though into a maelstrom, just as I had done before. The awful falling sensation ceased in a moment, and the sound subsided. I opened my eyes. I was on the ground at the center of the familiar field from which I had vanished hours before upon the morning of that day. It was night now, though. For that day I had spent five hundred years in the future. There were many people gathered around the field, fearful, and they screamed, and some fled when I appeared in the thunderclap. I went toward those who remained. My mind was full of things I had seen, and I wanted to tell them of these things. I wanted to tell them how they must work ever toward that future time of wonder. But they did not listen. Before I had spoken minutes to them they cried out on me as a sorcerer and a blasphemer, and seized me and brought me here to the Inquisitor, to you, Sire. And to you, Sire, I have told the truth in all things. I know that in doing so I have set the seal of my own fate, and that only a sorcerer would ever tell such a tale. Yet, despite that, I am glad. Glad that I have told one, at least, of this time of what I saw, five centuries in the future. Glad that I saw. Glad that I saw the things that some day, some time must come to be. It was a week later that they burned Henri Lothier. Jean de Marseillais, lifting his gaze from his endless parchment accusation and examines on that afternoon, looked out through the window at a thick curl of black smoke going up from the distant square. Strange that one, he mused. A sorcerer, of course. But such a one as I have never heard before. I wonder, he half whispered. Was there any truth in that wild tale of his? The future. Who can say what men might do? There was silence in the room as he brooded for a moment, and then he shook himself as one ridding himself of an absurd speculation. But, tush, enough of these crazy fancies. They will have me for a sorcerer if I yield to these wild fancies and visions of the future. And, binning again with his pen to the parchment before him, he went gravely on with his work. The end. End of The Man Who Saw the Future by Edmund Hamilton Recording by Xander Phillips A Matter of Proportion by Ann Walker. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dale In order to make a man stop, you must convince him that it's impossible to go on. Some people, though, just can't be convinced. In the dark our glider shoots zeroed neatly on target. Only Art Benjamin missed the edge of the gorge. When we were sure invader hadn't heard the crashing of bushes, I climbed down after him. The climb and what I found left me shaken. A special corps squad leader is not expendable by order. Clyde Estabrook, my second and I CEG mate, would have to mine the viaduct while my nerve and glycogen stabilized. We timed the patrols, Clyde said. Have to wait till a train's coming. No time, otherwise. Well, it was his show. When the next pair of burly-coated men came over at a trot, he breathed, now, and ghosted out almost before they were clear. I switched on the I CEG, intercortical encephalograph planted in my temporal bone. My own senses could hear young furred breathing feel and smell the mat of pine needles under me. Through Clyde's I could hear the blind waffle of wind in the girders, feel the crude wood of ties, and the iron-cold molding of rails in the star-dark. I could feel, too, an odd, lilting elation in his mind, as if this savage universe were a good thing to take on, spray guns, cold, and all. We wanted to set the mine so the wreckage would clobber a trail below, one like they'd built in Burma and Japan, where you wouldn't think a monkey could go, but it probably carried more supplies than the viaduct itself. So Clyde made adjustments precisely, just as we'd figured it with the model back at base. It was a tricky, slow job in the bitter dark. I began to figure. If he armed it for this train and ran, she'd go off while we were on location, and we'd be drenched in search lights and spray guns. Already through his fingers I felt the hum in the rails that every tank-town-reared kid knows. I turned up my I CEG. All right, Clyde, get back. Arm it when she's gone past for the next one. I felt him grin, felt his lips form words. I'll do better than that, will he? Look, Daddy-o, no hands. He slid over the edge and rested elbows and ribs on the raw tie ends. We're all acrobats in the core, but I didn't like this act one little bit. Even if he could hang by his hands, the heavy train would jolt him off. But I swallowed my thoughts. He groped with his foot, contacted a sloping beam, and brought his other foot in. I felt a dull, scraping slither under his moccasin soles. Frost, he thought calmly, rubbed a clear patch with the edge of his foot, put his weight on it, and transferred his hands to the beam with a twist we hadn't learned in core school. My heart did a double-take. One slip and he'd be off into the gorge, and the frost stung, melting under his bare fingers. He lay in the trough of the massive H-beam, slid down about twenty feet to where it made an angle with an upright, and wedged himself there. It took all of twenty seconds, really, but I let out a breath as if I'd been holding it for minutes. As he settled, searchlights began skimming the bridge. If he'd been running, he'd have been shot to a sieve. As it was, they'd never see him in the mingled glare and black. His heart hadn't even speeded up beyond what was required by exertion. The train roared around his shoulder and onto the viaduct, shaking it like an angry hand. But as the box-car's thunder-clattered above his head, he was peering into the gulf at a string of feeble lights threading the bottom. There's the fly-walk, Willie. They know their stuff. But we'll get it. Then as the caboose careened over and the searchlights cut off, well, that gives us ten minutes before the patrol comes back. He levered on to his side, adjoined at a time, and began to climb the beam. Never again for me, even by proxy. You just couldn't climb that thing, know-how. The slope was too steep. The beam was too massive to shinny, yet too narrow to lie inside an elbow up. The metal was too smooth, and scummed with frost. His fingers were beginning to numb, and he was climbing. In each fin of the beam every foot or so was a round hole. He'd get one finger into a hole and pull, inching his body against the beam. He timed himself into some striding music I didn't know. Not fast, but no waste motion. Even the pauses rhythmic. I tell you, I was sweating under my leathers. Maybe I should have switched the ICEG off for my own sake if not to avoid distracting Clyde. But I was hypnotized, climbing. In the old days, when you were risking your neck, you were supposed to think great solemn thoughts. Recently, you're supposed to think about something silly like a singing commercial. Clyde's mind was neither posturing in front of his mental mirror nor running in some feverish little circle. He faced terror as big as the darkness from gorge bottom to stars, and he was just simply as big as it was. Sheer life exulting in defying the dark, the frost and wind with the zombie grip of invader. I envied him. Then his rhythm checked. Five feet from the top. He reached confidently for a finger hole. No hole. He had already reached as high as he could without shifting his purchase and risking a skid. And even his wrestlers muscles wouldn't make the climb again. My stomach quaked. Never see sunlight in the trees anymore. Just cling till dawn picked you out like a crow's nest in a dead tree or drop. Not Clyde. His flame of life crouched in anger. Not only the malice of nature and the rage of enemies, but human shiflessness against him, too. Good. He'd take it on. Shoulder, thigh, knee, foot scraped off frost. He jammed his jaw against the wet iron. His right hand never let go, but it crawled up the fin of the strut like a blind animal, while the load on his points of purchase mounted. Watchmaker coordination where you'd normally think in Boilermaker terms. The flame sank to a spark as he focused, but it never blinked out. This was not the anticipated warded danger, but the trick punch from nowhere. This was it. A sneak squall buffeted him. I cursed thinly, but he sensed an extra purchase from its pressure and reached the last four inches with a swift glide. The next hole was there. He waited five heartbeats and pulled. He began at the muscular disadvantage of aligned joints. He had to make it the first time. If you can't do it with a dollar, you won't do it with a change. But as elbow and shoulder bent, the flame soared again. Score one more for life. A minute later, he hooked his arm over the butt of a tie, his chin, his other arm, and hung a moment. He didn't throw a knee up, just rolled and lay between the rails. Even as he relaxed, he glanced at his watch. Three minutes to spare. Leisurely, he armed the mine and jogged back to me and Ferd. As I broke ICEG contact, his flame had sunk to an ember glow of anticipation. We had almost reached the cave, pricked on our map, when we heard the slam of the mine, we and far off. We were lying dago, looking out at the snow-peaks incandescent in dawn, when the first invader patrols trailed by below. Our equipment was a miracle of hot food and basic medication. Not past times, though, and by the second day of hiding I was thinking too much. There was Clyde, an Inca chief with a thread of black mustache and incongruous hazel eyes, my friend and ICEG mate. What made him tick? Where did he get his delight in the bright eyes of danger? How did he gear his daredevil valor, not to the icy iron and obligatory killing, but to the big music and stars over the gorge? But in the core we don't ask questions and above all never eavesdrop on ICEG. Young Ferd wasn't so inhibited. Benjamin's death had shaken him. Losing your ICEG mate is like losing an eye. He began flyfishing Clyde. How had Clyde learned that stunt in the dark with the few minutes he'd had? There's always a way, Ferd, if you're fighting for what you really want. Well, I want to throw out invader all right, but that's the start, of course, but beyond that. He changed the subject. Perhaps only I knew of his dream about a stronghold for rebels far in these mountains. He smiled. I guess you get used to calculated risks. Except for imagination, you're as safe walking a ledge twenty stories up as down on the sidewalk. Not if you trip. That's the calculated risk. If you climb it, you get used to it. Well, how did you get used to it? Were you a mountaineer or an acrobat? In a way, both. Clyde smiled again a trifle bitterly and switched the topic. Anyway, I've been in action for the duration except for some time in hospital. Ferd was onto that boner like an infielder. To get into SC you have to be not only championship fit, but have no history of injury that could crop up to haywire you in a pinch. So hospital, you sure don't show it now. Clyde was certainly below par. To cover his slip, he backed into a bigger if less obvious one. Oh, I was in that operation armada at Golden Gate had to be patched up. He must have figured Ferd had been a kid then and I hadn't been too old. Odds were we'd recall the episode and no more. Unfortunately, I'd been a ham operator and I'd been in the core that beam those fire ships onto the invader supply fleet in the dense fog. The whole episode was burned into my brain. It had been kamikaze stuff, though there'd been a theoretical chance of the 30 men escaping to justify sending them out. Actually, one escape boat did get back with three men. I'd learned about those men out of morbid, conscious, scalded curiosity. Their leader was Edwin Scott, a medical student. At the very start he'd been shot through the lower spine. So his companions put him in the escape boat while they clinched their prey. But as the escape boat sheared off the blast of enemy fire killed three and disabled two. Scott must have been some boy. He'd already doctored himself with hemostatics and local anesthetics, but from the hips down he was dead as salt-pork, and his visceral reflexes must have been reacting like a worm cut with a hoe. Yet somehow he doctored the two others and got that boat home. The other two had died, but Scott lived as sole survivor of Operation Armada. And he hadn't been a big bronze Latin Indian within congruous hazel eyes, but a snub-nosed redhead. And he'd been wheel-chaired for life. They'd patched him up, decorated him, sent him to a base hospital in Wisconsin where he could live in whatever comfort was available. So he dropped out of sight. And now this? Clyde was lying, of course. He'd picked the episode at random, except that so much else about him didn't square, including his name compared to his physique. Now I thought about it. I tabled it during our odyssey home, but during post-mission leave it kept bothering me. I checked and came up with what I'd already known. Scott had been sole survivor, and the others were certified dead. But about Scott I got a run around. He'd apparently vanished. Oh, they'd check for me, but that could take years, which didn't lull my curiosity any. Into Clyde's past I was sworn not to pry. We were training for our next assignment when word came through of the surrender at Kelowna. It was a flare of sunlight through a black sky. The end was suddenly close. Clyde and I were in Victoria, British Columbia. Not subscribing to the folkway that prescribes seasick intoxication as an expression of joy, we did the town with discrimination. At midnight we found ourselves strolling along the waterfront in that fine Vancouver Island mist, with just enough drink taken to be moving through a dream. At one point we leaned on a rail to watch the mainland lights twinkling dimly like the hope of a new world, black out being lifted. Suddenly Clyde said, What's fraying you recently will? When we were taking our ICEG reconditioning it came through strong as garlic, though you wouldn't notice it normally. Why be coy about an opening like that? Clyde, what do you know about Edwin Scott? That let him spin any yarn he chose if he chose. He did the cigarette lighting routine and said quietly, Well, I was Edwin Scott. Well, then as I waited. Yes, really me, the real me talking to you. This, he held out a powerful coppery hand. Once belonged to a man called Marco de Sanjau. You've heard of transplanting limbs? I had, but this man was no transplant job, and if a spinal cord is cut, transplanting legs from Ipilovsky the Primo Ballerino is worthless. I said, What about it? I was the first successful brain transplant in man. For a moment it queered me, but only a moment. Hell, you read in fairy tales and fantasy magazines about one man's mind in another man's body, and it's marvelous, not horrible. But by curiosity, I know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal back in the forties had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb with colored plates as if for a real procedure. Footnote, hall, whole upper extremity transplant for human beings, annals of surgery, 1944, page 120, paragraph 12. Then they developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host serum so it would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted hunks of ear and such. Then in the sixties, fingers, feet, and whole arms, in fact. But a brain is another story. A cut nerve can grow together. Every fiber has an insulating sheath which survives the cut and guides growing stumps back to their stations. In the brain and spinal cord, no sheaths. Growing fibers have about the chance of restoring contact that you'd have of traversing the Amazon jungle on foot without a map. I said so. I know, he said, I learned all I could and as near as I can put it, it's like this. When you cut your finger, it can heal in two ways. Usually, it bleeds, scabs, and skin grows under the scab, taking a week or so. But if you align the edges exactly at once, they may join almost immediately healing by first intent. Likewise, in the brain, if they line up cut nerve fibers before the cutoff bit degenerates, it'll join up with the stump. So, take a serum conditioned brain and fit it to the stem of another brain so that the big fiber bundles are properly fitted together fast enough and you can get better than 90% recovery. Sure, I said parading my own knowledge, but what about injury to the masses of nerve cells and you'd have to shear off the nerves growing out of the brain? There's always a way, Willie. There's a place in the brain stem called the isthmus. No cell masses, just bundles of fiber running up and down. Almost all the nerves come off below that point. And the few that don't can be spliced together except the smell nerves and optic nerve. Ever notice I can't smell, Willie? And they transplanted my eyes with the brain, biggest trick of the whole job. It figured. But I'd still hate to go through with it. What could I lose? Some paraplegics seem to live a fuller life than ever. Me, I was going mad. And I'd seen the dogs this research team at my hospital was working on. Old dogs, brains in welp's bodies, spry as natural. Then came the chance. Dosanjo was a Brazilian wrestler stranded here by the war. Not his war, he said, but he did have the decency to volunteer as medical orderly. But he got conscripted by a bomb that took off a corner of the hospital and one off his head. They got him into chemical stasis quicker than it had ever been done before. But he was dead as a human being. No brain worth salvaging above the isthmus. So the big guns at the hospital saw a chance to try their game on human material. Superb body and lower nervous system in ideal condition, waiting for a brain. Only whose. Naturally, some big shots near the end of his rope and willing to gamble. But I decided it would be a forgotten little shot. Name of Edwin Scott. I already knew the surgeons from being a guinea pig on ICEG. Of course, when I sounded them out they gave me a kindly brush off. The matter was out of their hands. However, I knew whose hands it was in and I waited for my chance. A big job that needed somebody expendable. Then I'd make a deal, writing my own ticket because they'd figure I'd never collect. Did you hear about Operation Seedcorn? That was the underground railway that ran thousands of farmers out of occupied territory. Manpower was what finally broke invader, improbable as it seems. Epidemics, desertions, overextended lines, thinned that overwhelming combat strength, and every farmer spirited out of their hands equaled 10 casualties. I nodded. Well, I planned that with myself as director and sold it to Phillipson. I contemplated him. Just a big man in a trench coat and droop brimmed hat silhouetted against the lamplit mist. I said, you directed Seedcorn out of a wheelchair in enemy territory and came back to get transplanted into another body? Man, you didn't tell Ferd a word of a lie when you said you were used to walking up to death. But there was more. Besides that Dower Scott's fortitude, where did he come by that high-hearted valor? He shrugged. You could—you do what you can with what you've got. Those weren't the big adventures I was thinking about when I said that. I had a team behind me and those. I could only Josh. I'd sure like to hear the caperoo then. He towed out his cigarette. You're the only person who's equipped for it. Maybe you'd get it, Willie. How do you mean? I kept an ICEG record. Not that I knew it was going to happen. Just wanted proof if they gave me a deal, and I pulled it off. Phillipson wouldn't renege, but generals were expendable. No one knew I had that transport-mitter in my temporal bone, and I rigged it to get a tape on my home receiver. Like to hear it? I said what anyone would and steered him back to quarters before he'd think better of it. This would be something. On the way, he filled in the background. Scott had been living out of hospital in a small apartment, enjoying as much liberty as he could, manage. He had equipment so he could stump around and an antique car specially equipped. He wasn't complimentary about them. Orthopedic products had to be unreliable, hard to service, unsightly, intricate, and uncomfortable. If they also squeaked and cut your clothes, fine. Having to plan every move with an eye on weather and a dozen other factors, he developed an uncanny foresight. Yet he had to improvise at a moment's notice. With life a continuous highwire act, he trained every surviving fiber to precision, dexterity, and tenacity. Finally, he avoided help. Not pride, self-preservation. The compulsively helpful have rarely the wit to ask before rushing in to knock you on your face, so he learned to bide his time till the horizon was clear of beaming simpletons. Also, he found an interest in how far he could go. These qualities and the time he had for thinking begot seed-corn. When he had it convincing, he applied to see General Philipson, head of regional intelligence, a man with both insight and authority to make the deal. But also as tough as his post demanded. Scott got an appointment two weeks ahead. That put it early in April, which decreased the weather hazard, a major consideration in even a trip to the supermarket. What was Scott's grim consternation then when he woke on D-Day to find his windows plastered with snow under a driving wind, not mentioned in last night's forecast, of course. He could concoct a plausible excuse for postponement, which Philipson was just the man to see through, or call help to get him to HQ and have Philipson bark, man, you can't even make it across town on your own power because of a little snow. No, come hell or blizzard, he'd have to go solo. Besides, when he faced the inevitable, unexpected behind invader lines, he couldn't afford a precedent of having flinched now. He dressed and breakfasted with all the petty foresight that can mean the shaving of clearance in a tight squeeze, and got off with all the margin of time he could muster. In the apartment court he had a parking space by the basement exit, and for a wonder no freewheeling nincompoop had done him out of it last night. Even so, getting to the car door illustrated the ordeal ahead. The snow was the damp, heavy stuff that packs and glares. The streets were nasty, but he had the advantage of having learned restraint and foresight. HQ had been the post office, a ponderous redstone building filling a whole block. He had scouted it thoroughly in advance, outside and in, and scheduled his route to the general's office, allowing for minor hazards. Now he had half an hour extra for the unscheduled major hazard. But on arriving he could hardly believe his luck. No car was yet parked in front of the building, and the walk was scraped clean and salted to kill the still falling flakes. No problems. He parked, and began to unload himself quickly to forestall the elderly MP who hurried towards him. But as Scott prepared to thank him off, the man said, Sorry Mac, no one can park here this morning. Scott felt the chill of nemesis. Knowing it was useless, he protested his identity and mission. But, sorry major, but you'll have to park around back. They're bringing in the big computer. General himself can't park here, them's orders. He could ask the sergeant to park the car, but the man couldn't leave his post would make a to-do calling someone, and that was Phillipson's sweet overlooking the scene. No dice. Go see what might be possible. But side and back parking were jammed with refugees from the computer, and so was the other side. And he came around to the front again. Five minutes wasted. He thought searchingly. He could drive to a taxi lot, park there, and be driven back by taxi, disembark on the clean walk, and there you were. Of course he could hear Phillipson's, Thought you drove your own car, huh? And his own damaging excuses. But even out yonder you'd cut corners in emergency. It was all such a comfortable out. He relaxed. And relaxing saw his alternative. He was driving around the block again, and noted the back entrance. This was not ground level because of the slope of ground. It faced a broad landing reached by a double flight of steps. These began on each side at right angles to the building, and then turned up to the landing along the face of the wall. Normally they were negotiable, but now, even had he found parking near them, he hadn't the chance of the celluloid cat and hell of even crossing the ten feet of unclean sidewalk. You might as well climb an eighty degree fifty foot wall of rotten ice. But there was always a way, and he saw it. The unpassable walk itself was an avenue of approach. He swung his car onto it at the corner, and drove along it to the steps to park in the angle between steps and wall, and discovered a new shutout. He'd expected the steps to be a mean job in the raw wind that favored this face of the building. But a wartime janitor had swept them sketchily only down the middle, far from the balustrades he must use. By the balustrades early feet had packed a semi-ice far more treacherous than the untouched snow, and the two bottom steps curved out beyond the balustrade. So, a sufficiently reckless alpinist might assay a cliff in a sleet storm and a gale, but he couldn't even try it if it began with an overhang. Still time for the taxi? And so. Again Scott saw the way that was always there. Set the car so he could use its hood to heft up those first steps. Suddenly his thinking metamorphosed. He faced not a miserable and warranted forlorn hope, but the universe as it was. Titanic pressure suit against the hurricanes of Jupiter, and against a gutter fresh it, life was always outclassed and always fought back. Proportions didn't matter, only mood. He switched on his ICEG to record what might happen. I auditioned it, but I can't disentangle it from what he told me. For example, in his words, Multiply distances by five, heights by ten, and slickness by twenty, and in the playback, thirty chin high ledges loaded with soft lard and only finger holds and toe holds, and you did it on stilts that began, not at your heels, at your hips. Add the hazard of helpful Hosea here, let me give you a hand, Mac, grabbing a key arm and crashing down the precipice on top of you. Switching on the ICEG took his mind back to the snug apartment where its receiver stood, the armchair, books, desk of diverting work. It looked awful good, but life fought back and always it found a way. He shucked his windbreaker because it would be more encumbrance than help in the showdown. He checked shoelaces and strapped on the cleats he had made for what they were worth. He vetoed the bag of sand and salt he kept for minor difficulties, far too slow. He got out of the car. This could be the last job he'd have to do incognito, seed-corn, he'd get credit for. Therefore he cherished it, triumph for its own sake. Alternatively he'd end at the bottom in a burlesque clutter of chrome-alum splints and sticks with maybe a broken bone to clinch the decision. For some men death is literally more tolerable than defeat in humiliation. Eighteen shallow steps to the turn, twelve to the top. Once he'd have cleared it in three heartbeats. Now he had to make it to a twenty-minute deadline without rope or Alpenstock, a moon man adapted to a fraction of earth gravity. With the help of the car hood the first two pitches were easy. For the next four or five wind had swept the top of the balustrade providing damp, gritty hand-hold. Before the going got tougher he developed a technique, a rhythm and sense system of thrusts proportion to heights and widths, a way of scraping holds where ice was not malignantly welded to stone, an appreciation of snow texture and depth, an economy of effort. He was enjoying a prematerialation when, on the twelfth step, a cleat strap gave. Luckily he was able to take his lurch with a firm grip on the balustrade, but he felt depth yawning behind him. Dourly he took thirty seconds to retrieve the cleat. Stitching had been sawed through by a metal edge, just as he'd told the cocksure workman it would be. Oh, to have a world where imbecility wasn't entrenched. Well, he was fighting here and now for the resources to found one. He resumed the escalade, his rhythm-knocked cockeyed. Things even out. Years back an invader bomber had scored a near miss on the building, and minor damage to stonework was unrepaired. Crevices gave finger-hold, chipped out hollows gave barely perceptible purchase to the heel of his hand. Salutes to the random effects of unlikely causes. He reached the turn, considered swiftly. His fresh strength was blunted. His muscles, especially in his thumbs, were stiffening with chill. Now he could continue up the left side by the building, which was tougher and hazardous with frozen drippings, or by the outside right-hand rail, which was easier but meant crossing the open, half-swept, wide step and recrossing the landing up top. Damn. Why hadn't he foreseen that? Oh, you can't think of everything. Get going. Left side. The wall of the building was rough hewn and ornamented with surplus carvings. Cheers for the 1890s architect. Qualified cheers. The first three lifts were easy, with handholds and a freeze of lotus. For the next he had to heft with his side-jaw against a boss of stone. A window ledge made the next three facile. The final five stared, an open gap without recourse. He made two by grace of the janitors having swabbed his broom a little closer to the wall. His muscles began to wobble and waver. In his proportions he'd made 200 feet of almost vertical ascent. But climbing a real icefall you'd unleash the last convulsive effort because you had to. Here, when you came down to it, you could always sit and bump yourself down to the car, which was in that context a mere safe 40 feet away. So he went on because he had to. He got the rubber tip off one stick. The bare metal tube would bore into the snowpack. It might hold if he bore down just right and swung his weight just so, and got just the right sliding purchase on the wall, and the snow didn't give under foot or under cane. And if it didn't work, it didn't work. Beyond the landing westwards the sky had broken into April blue, far away over Iowa and Kansas, over Operation Seed Corn, over the refuge for rebels that lay at the end of all his roads. He got set and lifted. A thousand miles nearer the refuge, got set and lifted, balanced over plunging gulfs. His reach found a round pilaster at the top, a perfect gripped for a hand. He drew himself up, and this time his cleated foot cut through snow to stone and slipped. But his hold was too good, and there he was. No salutes, no cheers, only one more victory for life. Even in victory, unlife gave you no respite. The doorstep was three feet wide, hollowed by eighty years of traffic and filled with frozen drippings from its pseudo-norman arch. He had to tilt across it and catch the brass knob like snatching a ring in a high dive. No danger now except sitting down in a growing puddle till someone came along to hoist him under the armpits, and then arriving at the generals late with his seat black wet. You unhors your fulmin, curve it up to the royal box to receive the victor's chaplet, swing from your saddle, and fall flat on your face. But he cogitated on the bench inside, getting his other cleat off, and the tip back on his stick, things do even out. No hardy helper had intervened, no snot-nosed gaping child had twitched his attention, nobody's secretary, pretty of course, had scurried to helpfully knock him down with the door. They were all out front, superintending a rival of the computer. The general said, only if tartly, oh yes, major, come in, you're late, aren't you? It's still icy, said Ed Scott, had to drive carefully, you know. In fact he had lost minutes that way, enough to have saved his exact deadline, and that excuse being in proportion to Philipson's standard dimension was fair game. I wondered what dimension Clyde would go on to, now that the challenge of war was passed. To his rebel's refuge at last, maybe? Does it matter? Whatever it is, life will be outclassed, and Scott Estrebrook's brand of life will fight back. The End. End of A Matter of Proportion by Ann Walker. Recorded by Dale in Tucson, Arizona, June 2009.