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 sales-man 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