Hunter Patrol | Page 3

time-jump
forward and lost when you reverse the process, but let's stick to
business. We have what we wanted; now let's use what we have."
"I never liked the way you made your money," a dark-faced,
cadaverous man said, "but when you talk, it makes sense. Let's get on
with it."
Benson used the brief silence which followed to study the six. With the
exception of the two who had just spoken, there was the indefinable

mark of the fanatic upon all of them--people fanatical about different
things, united for different reasons in a single purpose. It reminded him
sharply of some teachers' committee about to beard a school-board with
an unpopular and expensive recommendation.
Anthony--the oldest of the lot, in a knee-length tunic--turned to
Gregory.
"I believe you had better...." he began.
"As to who we are, we'll explain that, partially, later. As for your
question, 'Where am I?' that will have to be rephrased. If you ask,
'When and where am I?' I can furnish a rational answer. In the temporal
dimension, you are fifty years futureward of the day of your death;
spatially, you are about eight thousand miles from the place of your
death, in what is now the World Capitol, St. Louis."
Nothing in the answer made sense but the name of the city. Benson
chuckled.
"What happened; the Cardinals conquer the world? I knew they had a
good team, but I didn't think it was that good."
"No, no," Gregory told him earnestly. "The government isn't a
theocracy. At least not yet. But if The Guide keeps on insisting that
only beautiful things are good and that he is uniquely qualified to
define beauty, watch his rule change into just that."
"I've been detecting symptoms of religious paranoia, messianic
delusions, about his public statements...." the woman began.
"Idolatry!" another member of the group, who wore a black coat
fastened to the neck, and white neck-bands, rasped. "Idolatry in deed,
as well as in spirit!"
* * * * *
The sense of unreality, partially dispelled, began to return. Benson

dropped to the floor and stood beside the table, getting a cigarette out
of his pocket and lighting it.
"I made a joke," he said, putting his lighter away. "The fact that none of
you got it has done more to prove that I am fifty years in the future than
anything any of you could say." He went on to explain who the St.
Louis Cardinals were.
"Yes; I remember! Baseball!" Anthony exclaimed. "There is no
baseball, now. The Guide will not allow competitive sports; he says
that they foster the spirit of violence...."
The cadaverous man in the blue jacket turned to the man in the black
garment of similar cut.
"You probably know more history than any of us," he said, getting a
cigar out of his pocket and lighting it. He lighted it by rubbing the end
on the sole of his shoe. "Suppose you tell him what the score is." He
turned to Benson. "You can rely on his dates and happenings; his
interpretation's strictly capitalist, of course," he said.
Black-jacket shook his head. "You first, Gregory," he said. "Tell him
how he got here, and then I'll tell him why."
"I believe," Gregory began, "that in your period, fiction writers made
some use of the subject of time-travel. It was not, however, given
serious consideration, largely because of certain alleged paradoxes
involved, and because of an elementalistic and objectifying attitude
toward the whole subject of time. I won't go into the mathematics and
symbolic logic involved, but we have disposed of the objections; more,
we have succeeded in constructing a time-machine, if you want to call
it that. We prefer to call it a temporal-spatial displacement field
generator."
"It's really very simple," the woman called Paula interrupted. "If the
universe is expanding, time is a widening spiral; if contracting, a
diminishing spiral; if static, a uniform spiral. The possibility of
pulsation was our only worry...."

"That's no worry," Gregory reproved her. "I showed you that the rate
was too slow to have an effect on...."
"Oh, nonsense; you can measure something which exists within a
microsecond, but where is the instrument to measure a temporal
pulsation that may require years...? You haven't come to that yet."
"Be quiet, both of you!" the man with the black coat and the white
bands commanded. "While you argue about vanities, thousands are
being converted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands
of his dupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!"
"All right, you invented a time-machine," Benson said. "In civvies, I
was only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniors
the difference between H^{2}O and H^{2}SO^{4}, but the theory of
time-travel is wasted on me.... Suppose you