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+Project Gutenberg's Hunter Patrol, by Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hunter Patrol
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2006 [EBook #18641]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTER PATROL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                                    |
+|                         Transcriber's Note                         |
+|                                                                    |
+| This etext was produced from Amazing Stories May 1959. There is no |
+|    evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.    |
+|                                                                    |
++--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+HUNTER PATROL
+
+By H. BEAM PIPER and JOHN J. McGUIRE
+
+     +Many men have dreamed of world peace, but none have been able to
+     achieve it. If one man did have that power, could mankind afford to
+     pay the price?+
+
+
+At the crest of the ridge, Benson stopped for an instant, glancing first
+at his wrist-watch and then back over his shoulder. It was 0539; the
+barrage was due in eleven minutes, at the spot where he was now
+standing. Behind, on the long northeast slope, he could see the columns
+of black oil smoke rising from what had been the Pan-Soviet advance
+supply dump. There was a great deal of firing going on, back there; he
+wondered if the Commies had managed to corner a few of his men, after
+the patrol had accomplished its mission and scattered, or if a couple of
+Communist units were shooting each other up in mutual mistaken identity.
+The result would be about the same in either case--reserve units would
+be disorganized, and some men would have been pulled back from the front
+line. His dozen-odd UN regulars and Turkish partisans had done their
+best to simulate a paratroop attack in force. At least, his job was
+done; now to execute that classic infantry maneuver described as, "Let's
+get the hell outa here." This was his last patrol before rotation home.
+He didn't want anything unfortunate to happen.
+
+There was a little ravine to the left; the stream which had cut it in
+the steep southern slope of the ridge would be dry at this time of year,
+and he could make better time, and find protection in it from any chance
+shots when the interdictory barrage started. He hurried toward it and
+followed it down to the valley that would lead toward the front--the
+thinly-held section of the Communist lines, and the UN lines beyond,
+where fresh troops were waiting to jump from their holes and begin the
+attack.
+
+There was something wrong about this ravine, though. At first, it was
+only a vague presentiment, growing stronger as he followed the dry gully
+down to the valley below. Something he had smelled, or heard, or seen,
+without conscious recognition. Then, in the dry sand where the ravine
+debouched into the valley, he saw faint tank-tracks--only one pair.
+There was something wrong about the vines that mantled one side of the
+ravine, too....
+
+An instant later, he was diving to the right, breaking his fall with the
+butt of his auto-carbine, rolling rapidly toward the cover of a rock,
+and as he did so, the thinking part of his mind recognized what was
+wrong. The tank-tracks had ended against the vine-grown side of the
+ravine, what he had smelled had been lubricating oil and petrol, and the
+leaves on some of the vines hung upside down.
+
+Almost at once, from behind the vines, a tank's machine guns snarled at
+him, clipping the place where he had been standing, then shifting to
+rage against the sheltering rock. With a sudden motor-roar, the muzzle
+of a long tank-gun pushed out through the vines, and then the low body
+of a tank with a red star on the turret came rumbling out of the
+camouflaged bay. The machine guns kept him pinned behind the rock; the
+tank swerved ever so slightly so that its wide left tread was aimed
+directly at him, then picked up speed. Aren't even going to waste a
+shell on me, he thought.
+
+Futilely, he let go a clip from his carbine, trying to hit one of the
+vision-slits; then rolled to one side, dropped out the clip, slapped in
+another. There was a shimmering blue mist around him. If he only hadn't
+used his last grenade, back there at the supply-dump....
+
+The strange blue mist became a flickering radiance that ran through
+all the colors of the spectrum and became an utter, impenetrable
+blackness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were voices in the blackness, and a softness under him, but under
+his back, when he had been lying on his stomach, as though he were now
+on a comfortable bed. They got me alive, he thought; now comes the
+brainwashing!
+
+He cracked one eye open imperceptibly. Lights, white and glaring, from a
+ceiling far above; walls as white as the lights. Without moving his
+head, he opened both eyes and shifted them from right to left. Vaguely,
+he could see people and, behind them, machines so simply designed that
+their functions were unguessable. He sat up and looked around groggily.
+The people, their costumes--definitely not Pan-Soviet uniforms--and the
+room and its machines, told him nothing. The hardness under his right
+hip was a welcome surprise; they hadn't taken his pistol from him!
+Feigning even more puzzlement and weakness, he clutched his knees with
+his elbows and leaned his head forward on them, trying to collect his
+thoughts.
+
+"We shall have to give up, Gregory," a voice trembled with
+disappointment.
+
+"Why, Anthony?" The new voice was deeper, more aggressive.
+
+"Look. Another typical reaction; retreat to the foetus."
+
+Footsteps approached. Another voice, discouragement heavily weighting
+each syllable: "You're right. He's like all the others. We'll have to
+send him back."
+
+"And look for no more?" The voice he recognized as Anthony faltered
+between question and statement.
+
+A babel of voices, in dispute; then, clearly, the voice Benson had come
+to label as Gregory, cut in:
+
+"I will never give up!"
+
+He raised his head; there was something in the timbre of that voice
+reminding him of his own feelings in the dark days when the UN had
+everywhere been reeling back under the Pan-Soviet hammer-blows.
+
+"Anthony!" Gregory's voice again; Benson saw the speaker; short, stocky,
+gray-haired, stubborn lines about the mouth. The face of a man chasing
+an illusive but not uncapturable dream.
+
+"That means nothing." A tall thin man, too lean for the tunic-like
+garment he wore, was shaking his head.
+
+Deliberately, trying to remember his college courses in psychology, he
+forced himself to accept, and to assess, what he saw as reality. He was
+on a small table, like an operating table; the whole place looked like a
+medical lab or a clinic. He was still in uniform; his boots had soiled
+the white sheets with the dust of Armenia. He had all his equipment,
+including his pistol and combat-knife; his carbine was gone, however. He
+could feel the weight of his helmet on his head. The room still rocked
+and swayed a little, but the faces of the people were coming into focus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He counted them, saying each number to himself: one, two, three, four,
+five men; one woman. He swung his feet over the edge of the table, being
+careful that it would be between him and the others when he rose, and
+began inching his right hand toward his right hip, using his left hand,
+on his brow, to misdirect attention.
+
+"I would classify his actions as arising from conscious effort at
+cortico-thalamic integration," the woman said, like an archaeologist who
+has just found a K-ration tin at the bottom of a neolithic
+kitchen-midden. She had the peculiarly young-old look of the spinster
+teachers with whom Benson had worked before going to the war.
+
+"I want to believe it, but I'm afraid to," another man for whom Benson
+had no name-association said. He was portly, gray-haired,
+arrogant-faced; he wore a short black jacket with a jewelled
+zipper-pull, and striped trousers.
+
+Benson cleared his throat. "Just who are you people?" he inquired. "And
+just where am I?"
+
+Anthony grabbed Gregory's hand and pumped it frantically.
+
+"I've dreamed of the day when I could say this!" he cried.
+"Congratulations, Gregory!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That touched off another bedlam, of joy, this time, instead of despair.
+Benson hid his amusement at the facility with which all of them were
+discovering in one another the courage, vision and stamina of true
+patriots and pioneers. He let it go on for a few moments, hoping to
+glean some clue. Finally, he interrupted.
+
+"I believe I asked a couple of questions," he said, using the voice he
+reserved for sergeants and second lieutenants. "I hate to break up this
+mutual admiration session, but I would appreciate some answers. This
+isn't anything like the situation I last remember...."
+
+"He remembers!" Gregory exclaimed. "That confirms your first derivation
+by symbolic logic, and it strengthens the validity of the second...."
+
+The schoolteacherish woman began jabbering excitedly; she ran through
+about a paragraph of what was pure gobbledegook to Benson, before the
+man with the arrogant face and the jewelled zipper-pull broke in on her.
+
+"Save that for later, Paula," he barked. "I'd be very much interested in
+your theories about why memories are unimpaired when you 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 just let me ask the
+questions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. For
+instance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me and
+brought me here? The Commies?"
+
+"No, the United Nations," Anthony told him. "At least, they were the
+least exhausted when both sides decided to quit."
+
+"Then what's this dictatorship.... The Guide? Extreme Rightist?"
+
+"Walter, you'd better tell him," Gregory said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We damn near lost the war," the man in the black jacket and striped
+trousers said, "but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc was
+broken up--India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, all
+the Satellite States. Most of them turned into little dictatorships,
+like the Latin American countries after the liberation from Spain, but
+they were personal, non-ideological, generally benevolent,
+dictatorships, the kind that can grow into democracies, if they're given
+time."
+
+"Capitalistic dictatorships, he means," the cadaverous man in the blue
+jacket explained.
+
+"Be quiet, Carl," Anthony told him. "Let's not confuse this with any
+class-struggle stuff."
+
+"Actually, the United Nations rules the world," Walter continued. "What
+goes on in the Ukraine or Latvia or Manchuria is about analogous to what
+went on under the old United States government in, let's say,
+Tammany-ruled New York. But here's the catch. The UN is ruled absolutely
+by one man."
+
+"How could that happen? In my time, the UN had its functions so
+subdivided and compartmented that it couldn't even run a war properly.
+Our army commanders were making war by systematic disobedience."
+
+"The charter was changed shortly after ... er, that is, after...."
+Walter was fumbling for words.
+
+"After my death." Benson finished politely. "Go on. Even with a changed
+charter, how did one man get all the powers into his hands?"
+
+"By sorcery!" black-coat-and-white-bands fairly shouted. "By the help of
+his master, Satan!"
+
+"You know, there are times when some such theory tempts me," Paula said.
+
+"He was a big moneybags," Carl said. "He bribed his way in. See, New
+York was bombed flat. Where the old UN buildings were, it's still hot.
+So The Guide donated a big tract of land outside St. Louis, built these
+buildings--we're in the basement of one of them, right now, if you want
+a good laugh--and before long, he had the whole organization eating out
+of his hand. They just voted him into power, and the world into
+slavery."
+
+Benson looked around at the others, who were nodding in varying degrees
+of agreement.
+
+"Substantially, that's it. He managed to convince everybody of his
+altruism, integrity and wisdom," Walter said. "It was almost
+blasphemous to say anything against him. I really don't understand how
+it happened...."
+
+"Well, what's he been doing with his power?" Benson asked. "Wise things,
+or stupid ones?"
+
+"I could be general, and say that he has deprived all of us of our
+political and other liberties. It is best to be specific," Anthony said.
+"Gregory?"
+
+"My own field--dimensional physics--hasn't been interfered with much,
+yet. It's different in other fields. For instance, all research in
+sonics has been arbitrarily stopped. So has a great deal of work in
+organic and synthetic chemistry. Psychology is a madhouse of ... what
+was the old word, licentiousness? No, lysenkoism. Medicine and
+surgery--well, there's a huge program of compulsory sterilization, and
+another one of eugenic marriage-control. And infants who don't conform
+to certain physical standards don't survive. Neither do people who have
+disfiguring accidents beyond the power of plastic surgery."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paula spoke next. "My field is child welfare. Well, I'm going to show
+you an audio-visual of an interesting ceremony in a Hindu village,
+derived from the ancient custom of the suttee. It is the Hindu method of
+conforming to The Guide's demand that only beautiful children be allowed
+to grow to maturity."
+
+The film was mercifully brief. Even in spite of the drums and gongs, and
+the chanting of the crowd, Benson found out how loudly a newborn infant
+can scream in a fire. The others looked as though they were going to be
+sick; he doubted if he looked much better.
+
+"Of course, we are a more practical and mechanical-minded people, here
+and in Europe," Paula added, holding down her gorge by main strength.
+"We have lethal-gas chambers that even Hitler would have envied."
+
+"I am a musician," Anthony said. "A composer. If Gregory thinks that the
+sciences are controlled, he should try to write even the simplest piece
+of music. The extent of censorship and control over all the arts, and
+especially music, is incredible." He coughed slightly. "And I have
+another motive, a more selfish one. I am approaching the compulsory
+retirement age; I will soon be invited to go to one of the Havens. Even
+though these Havens are located in the most barren places, they are
+beauty-spots, verdant beyond belief. It is of only passing interest
+that, while large numbers of the aged go there yearly, their populations
+remain constant, and, to judge from the quantities of supplies shipped
+to them, extremely small."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"They call me Samuel, in this organization," the man in the long black
+coat said. "Whoever gave me that alias must have chosen it because I am
+here in an effort to live up to it. Although I am ordained by no church,
+I fight for all of them. The plain fact is that this man we call The
+Guide is really the Antichrist!"
+
+"Well, I haven't quite so lofty a motive, but it's good enough to make
+me willing to finance this project," Walter said. "It's very simple. The
+Guide won't let people make money, and if they do, he taxes it away from
+them. And he has laws to prohibit inheritance; what little you can
+accumulate, you can't pass on to your children."
+
+"I put up a lot of the money, too, don't forget," Carl told him. "Or the
+Union did; I'm a poor man, myself." He was smoking an excellent cigar,
+for a poor man, and his clothes could have come from the same tailor as
+Walter's. "Look, we got a real Union--the Union of all unions. Every
+working man in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa belongs
+to it. And The Guide has us all hog-tied."
+
+"He won't let you strike," Benson chuckled.
+
+"That's right. And what can we do? Why, we can't even make our
+closed-shop contracts stick. And as far as getting anything like a
+pay-raise...."
+
+"Good thing. Another pay-raise in some of my companies would bankrupt
+them, the way The Guide has us under his thumb...." Walter began, but he
+was cut off.
+
+"Well! It seems as though this Guide has done some good, if he's made
+you two realize that you're both on the same side, and that what hurts
+one hurts both," Benson said. "When I shipped out for Turkey in '77,
+neither Labor nor Management had learned that." He looked from one to
+another of them. "The Guide must have a really good bodyguard, with all
+the enemies he's made."
+
+Gregory shook his head. "He lives virtually alone, in a very small house
+on the UN Capitol grounds. In fact, except for a small police-force,
+armed only with non-lethal stun-guns, your profession of arms is
+non-existent."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I've been guessing what you want me to do," Benson said. "You want this
+Guide bumped off. But why can't any of you do it? Or, if it's too risky,
+at least somebody from your own time? Why me?"
+
+"We can't. Everybody in the world today is conditioned against violence,
+especially the taking of human life," Anthony told him.
+
+"Now, wait a moment!" This time, he was using the voice he would have
+employed in chiding a couple of Anatolian peasant partisans who were
+field-stripping a machine gun the wrong way. "Those babies in that film
+you showed me weren't dying of old age...."
+
+"That is not violence," Paula said bitterly. "That is humane
+beneficence. Ugly people would be unhappy, and would make others
+unhappy, in a world where everybody else is beautiful."
+
+"And all these oppressive and tyrannical laws," Benson continued. "How
+does he enforce them, without violence, actual or threatened?"
+
+Samuel started to say something about the Power of the Evil One; Paula,
+ignoring him, said:
+
+"I really don't know; he just does it. Mass hypnotism of some sort. I
+know music has something to do with it, because there is always music,
+everywhere. This laboratory, for instance, was secretly soundproofed; we
+couldn't have worked here, otherwise."
+
+"All right. I can see that you'd need somebody from the past, preferably
+a soldier, whose conditioning has been in favor rather than against
+violence. I'm not the only one you snatched, I take it?"
+
+"No. We've been using that machine to pick up men from battlefields all
+over the world and all over history," Gregory said. "Until now, none of
+them could adjust.... Uggh!" He shuddered, looking even sicker than when
+the film was being shown.
+
+"He's thinking," Walter said, "about a French officer from Waterloo who
+blew out his brains with a pocket-pistol on that table, and an English
+archer from Agincourt who ran amok with a dagger in here, and a trooper
+of the Seventh Cavalry from the Custer Massacre."
+
+Gregory managed to overcome his revulsion. "You see, we were forced to
+take our subjects largely at random with regard to individual
+characteristics, mental attitudes, adaptability, et cetera." As long as
+he stuck to high order abstractions, he could control himself. "Aside
+from their professional lack of repugnance for violence, we took
+soldiers from battlefields because we could select men facing immediate
+death, whose removal from the past would not have any effect upon the
+casual chain of events affecting the present."
+
+A warning buzzer rasped in Benson's brain. He nodded, poker-faced.
+
+"I can see that," he agreed. "You wouldn't dare do anything to change
+the past. That was always one of the favorite paradoxes in time-travel
+fiction.... Well, I think I have the general picture. You have a
+dictator who is tyrannizing you; you want to get rid of him; you can't
+kill him yourselves. I'm opposed to dictators, myself; that--and the
+Selective Service law, of course--was why I was a soldier. I have no
+moral or psychological taboos against killing dictators, or anybody
+else. Suppose I cooperate with you; what's in it for me?"
+
+There was a long silence. Walter and Carl looked at one another
+inquiringly; the others dithered helplessly. It was Carl who answered.
+
+"Your return to your own time and place."
+
+"And if I don't cooperate with you?"
+
+"Guess when and where else we could send you," Walter said.
+
+Benson dropped his cigarette and tramped it.
+
+"Exactly the same time and place?" he asked.
+
+"Well, the structure of space-time demands...." Paula began.
+
+"The spatio-temporal displacement field is capable of identifying that
+spot--" Gregory pointed to a ten-foot circle in front of a bank of
+sleek-cabineted, dial-studded machines "--with any set of space-time
+coordinates in the universe. However, to avoid disruption of the
+structure of space-time, we must return you to approximately the same
+point in space-time."
+
+Benson nodded again, this time at the confirmation of his earlier
+suspicion. Well, while he was alive, he still had a chance.
+
+"All right; tell me exactly what you want me to do."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A third outbreak of bedlam, this time of relief and frantic explanation.
+
+"Shut up, all of you!" For so thin a man, Carl had an astonishing voice.
+"I worked this out, so let me tell it." He turned to Benson. "Maybe I'm
+tougher than the rest of them, or maybe I'm not as deeply conditioned.
+For one thing, I'm tone-deaf. Well, here's the way it is. Gregory can
+set the machine to function automatically. You stand where he shows you,
+press the button he shows you, and fifteen seconds later it'll take you
+forward in time five seconds and about a kilometer in space, to The
+Guide's office. He'll be at his desk now. You'll have forty-five seconds
+to do the job, from the time the field collapses around you till it
+rebuilds. Then you'll be taken back to your own time again. The whole
+thing's automatic."
+
+"Can do," Benson agreed. "How do I kill him?"
+
+"I'm getting sick!" Paula murmured weakly. Her face was whiter than her
+gown.
+
+"Take care of her, Samuel. Both of you'd better get out of here,"
+Gregory said.
+
+"The Lord of Hosts is my strength, He will.... Uggggh!" Samuel gasped.
+
+"Conditioning's getting him, too; we gotta be quick," Carl said. "Here.
+This is what you'll use." He handed Benson a two-inch globe of black
+plastic. "Take the damn thing, quick! Little button on the side; press
+it, and get it out of your hand fast...." He retched. "Limited-effect
+bomb; everything within two-meter circle burned to nothing; outside
+that, great but not unendurable heat. Shut your eyes when you throw it.
+Flash almost blinding." He dropped his cigar and turned almost green in
+the face. Walter had a drink poured and handed it to him. "Uggh! Thanks,
+Walter." He downed it.
+
+"Peculiar sort of thing for a non-violent people to manufacture," Benson
+said, looking at the bomb and then putting it in his jacket pocket.
+
+"It isn't a weapon. Industrial; we use it in mining. I used plenty of
+them, in Walter's iron mines."
+
+He nodded again. "Where do I stand, now?" he asked.
+
+"Right over here." Gregory placed him in front of a small panel with
+three buttons. "Press the middle one, and step back into the small red
+circle and stand perfectly still while the field builds up and
+collapses. Face that way."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Benson drew his pistol and checked it; magazine full, a round in the
+chamber, safety on.
+
+"Put that horrid thing out of sight!" Anthony gasped. "The ... the other
+thing ... is what you want to use."
+
+"The bomb won't be any good if some of his guards come in before the
+field re-builds," Benson said.
+
+"He has no guards. He lives absolutely alone. We told you...."
+
+"I know you did. You probably believed it, too. I don't. And by the way,
+you're sending me forward. What do you do about the fact that a
+time-jump seems to make me pass out?"
+
+"Here. Before you press the button, swallow it." Gregory gave him a
+small blue pill.
+
+"Well, I guess that's all there is," Gregory continued. "I hope...." His
+face twitched, and he dropped to the floor with a thud. Carl and Walter
+came forward, dragged him away from the machine.
+
+"Conditioning got him. Getting me, too," Walter said. "Hurry up, man!"
+
+Benson swallowed the pill, pressed the button and stepped back into the
+red circle, drawing his pistol and snapping off the safety. The blue
+mist closed in on him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This time, however, it did not thicken into blackness. It became
+luminous, brightening to a dazzle and dimming again to a colored mist,
+and then it cleared, while Benson stood at raise pistol, as though on a
+target range. He was facing a big desk at twenty feet, across a
+thick-piled blue rug. There was a man seated at the desk, a white-haired
+man with a mustache and a small beard, who wore a loose coat of some
+glossy plum-brown fabric, and a vividly blue neck-scarf.
+
+The pistol centered on the v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately,
+Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered,
+aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk,
+his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight
+seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen
+seconds, and put the muzzle to the top of the man's head, firing again
+and snapping on the safety. There had been something familiar about The
+Guide's face, but it was too late to check on that, now. There wasn't
+any face left; not even much head.
+
+A box, on the desk, caught Benson's eye, a cardboard box with an
+envelope, stamped _Top Secret! For the Guide Only!_ taped to it. He
+holstered his pistol and caught that up, stuffing it into his pocket, in
+obedience to an instinct to grab anything that looked like intelligence
+matter while in the enemy's country. Then he stepped back to the spot
+where the field had deposited him. He had ten seconds to spare; somebody
+was banging on a door when the blue mist began to gather around him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was crouching, the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his
+thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in
+front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the
+big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of
+sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years away
+in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because they
+couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a
+notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks--and he rocked
+back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As
+the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His
+muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades of his experience,
+had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any
+other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit, with
+physical violence, by a wave of almost solid heat. It didn't smell like
+the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten metal, with
+undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a multiple explosion
+that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went up. There were no
+screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.
+
+The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive
+treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had collapsed
+between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten metal. He
+blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked again. Of
+all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN, that he had
+seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his experience. And
+he'd done that with one grenade....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant
+later the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He looked
+at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at 0550;
+according to the watch, it was 0726. He was sure that, ten minutes ago,
+when he had looked at it, up there at the head of the ravine, it had
+been twenty minutes to six. He puzzled about that for a moment, and
+decided that he must have caught the stem on something and pulled it
+out, and then twisted it a little, setting the watch ahead. Then,
+somehow, the stem had gotten pushed back in, starting it at the new
+setting. That was a pretty far-fetched explanation, but it was the only
+one he could think of.
+
+But about this tank, now. He was positive that he could remember
+throwing a grenade.... Yet he'd used his last grenade back there at the
+supply dump. He saw his carbine, and picked it up. That silly blackout
+he'd had, for a second, there; he must have dropped it. Action was open,
+empty magazine on the ground where he'd dropped it. He wondered,
+stupidly, if one of his bullets couldn't have gone down the muzzle of
+the tank's gun and exploded the shell in the chamber.... Oh, the hell
+with it! The tank might have been hit by a premature shot from the
+barrage which was raging against the far slope of the ridge. He reset
+his watch by guess and looked down the valley. The big attack would be
+starting any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up
+the valley ahead of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed
+before they started coming in on him.
+
+He stopped thinking about the mystery of the blown-up tank, a solution
+to which seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and
+found himself a place among the rocks to wait. Down the valley he could
+hear everything from pistols to mortars going off, and shouting in three
+or four racial intonations. After a while, fugitive Communists began
+coming, many of them without their equipment, stumbling in their haste
+and looking back over their shoulders. Most of them avoided the mouth
+of the ravine and hurried by to the left or right, but one little clump,
+eight or ten, came up the dry stream-bed, and stopped a hundred and
+fifty yards from his hiding-place to make a stand. They were Hindus,
+with outsize helmets over their turbans. Two of them came ahead,
+carrying a machine gun, followed by a third with a flame-thrower; the
+others retreated more slowly, firing their rifles to delay pursuit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cuddling the stock of his carbine to his cheek, he divided a ten-shot
+burst between the two machine-gunners, then, as a matter of principle,
+he shot the man with the flame-thrower. He had a dislike for
+flame-throwers; he killed every enemy he found with one. The others
+dropped their rifles and raised their hands, screaming: "Hey, Joe! Hey,
+Joe! You no shoot, me no shoot!"
+
+A dozen men in UN battledress came up and took them prisoner. Benson
+shouted to them, and then rose and came down to join them. They were
+British--Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, advertising the fact by
+inconspicuous bits of tartan on their uniforms. The subaltern in command
+looked at him and nodded.
+
+"Captain Benson? We were warned to be on watch for your patrol," he
+said. "Any of the rest of you lads get out?"
+
+Benson shrugged. "We split up after the attack. You may run into a
+couple of them. Some are locals and don't speak very good English. I've
+got to get back to Division, myself; what's the best way?"
+
+"Down that way. You'll overtake a couple of our walking wounded. If you
+don't mind going slowly, they'll show you the way to advance dressing
+station, and you can hitch a ride on an ambulance from there."
+
+Benson nodded. Off on the left, there was a flurry of small-arms fire,
+ending in yells of "Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!"--the World War IV version of
+"Kamarad"!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His company was a non-T/O outfit; he came directly under Division
+command and didn't have to bother reporting to any regimental or brigade
+commanders. He walked for an hour with half a dozen lightly wounded
+Scots, rode for another hour on a big cat-truck loaded with casualties
+of six regiments and four races, and finally reached Division Rear,
+where both the Division and Corps commanders took time to compliment him
+on the part his last hunter patrol had played in the now complete
+breakthrough. His replacement, an equine-faced Spaniard with an imposing
+display of fruit-salad, was there, too; he solemnly took off the
+bracelet a refugee Caucasian goldsmith had made for his predecessor's
+predecessor and gave it to the new commander of what had formerly been
+Benson's Butchers. As he had expected, there was also another medal
+waiting for him.
+
+A medical check at Task Force Center got him a warning; his last patrol
+had brought him dangerously close to the edge of combat fatigue.
+Remembering the incidents of the tank and the unaccountably fast watch,
+and the mysterious box and envelope which he had found in his coat
+pocket, he agreed, saying nothing about the questions that were puzzling
+him. The Psychological Department was never too busy to refuse another
+case; they hunted patients gleefully, each psych-shark seeking in every
+one proof of his own particular theories. It was with relief that he
+watched them fill out the red tag which gave him a priority on jet
+transports for home.
+
+Ankara to Alexandria, Alexandria to Dakar, Dakar to Belém, Belém to the
+shattered skyline of New York, the "hurry-and-wait" procedures at Fort
+Carlisle, and, after the usual separation promotion, Major Fred Benson,
+late of Benson's Butchers, was back at teaching high school juniors the
+difference between H_{2}O and H_{2}SO_{4}.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two high schools in the city: McKinley High, on the east
+side, and Dwight Eisenhower High, on the west. A few blocks from
+McKinley was the Tulip Tavern, where the Eisenhower teachers came in the
+late afternoons; the McKinley faculty crossed town to do their
+after-school drinking on the west side. When Benson entered the Tulip
+Tavern, on a warm September afternoon, he found Bill Myers, the school
+psychologist, at one of the tables, smoking his pipe, checking over a
+stack of aptitude test forms, and drinking beer. He got a highball at
+the bar and carried it over to Bill's table.
+
+"Oh, hi, Fred." The psychologist separated the finished from the
+unfinished work with a sheet of yellow paper and crammed the whole
+business into his brief case. "I was hoping somebody'd show up...."
+
+Benson lit a cigarette, sipped his highball. They talked at
+random--school-talk; the progress of the war, now in its twelfth year;
+personal reminiscences, of the Turkish Theater where Benson had served,
+and the Madras Beachhead, where Myers had been.
+
+"Bring home any souvenirs?" Myers asked.
+
+"Not much. Couple of pistols, couple of knives, some pictures. I don't
+remember what all; haven't gotten around to unpacking them, yet.... I
+have a sixth of rye and some beer, at my rooms. Let's go around and see
+what I did bring home."
+
+They finished their drinks and went out.
+
+"What the devil's that?" Myers said, pointing to the cardboard box with
+the envelope taped to it, when Benson lifted it out of the gray-green
+locker.
+
+"Bill, I don't know," Benson said. "I found it in the pocket of my coat,
+on my way back from my last hunter patrol.... I've never told anybody
+about this, before."
+
+"That's the damnedest story I've ever heard, and in my racket you hear
+some honeys," Myers said, when he had finished. "You couldn't have
+picked that thing up in some other way, deliberately forgotten the
+circumstances, and fabricated this story about the tank and the grenade
+and the discrepancy in your watch subconsciously as an explanation?"
+
+"My subconscious is a better liar than that," Benson replied. "It
+would have cobbled up some kind of a story that would stand up. This
+business...."
+
+"Top Secret! For the Guide Only!" Myers frowned. "That isn't one of our
+marks, and if it were Soviet, it'd be tri-lingual, Russian, Hindi and
+Chinese."
+
+"Well, let's see what's in it. I want this thing cleared up. I've been
+having some of the nastiest dreams, lately...."
+
+"Well, be careful; it may be booby-trapped," Myers said urgently.
+
+"Don't worry; I will."
+
+He used a knife to slice the envelope open without untaping it from the
+box, and exposed five sheets of typewritten onion-skin paper. There was
+no letterhead, no salutation or address-line. Just a mass of chemical
+formulae, and a concise report on tests. It seemed to be a report on an
+improved syrup for a carbonated soft-drink. There were a few cryptic
+cautionary references to heightened physico-psychological effects.
+
+The box was opened with the same caution, but it proved as innocent of
+dangers as the envelope. It contained only a half-liter bottle,
+wax-sealed, containing a dark reddish-brown syrup.
+
+"There's a lot of this stuff I don't dig," Benson said, tapping the
+sheets of onion-skin. "I don't even scratch the surface of this
+rigamarole about The Guide. I'm going to get to work on this sample in
+the lab, at school, though. Maybe we have something, here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eight-thirty the next evening, after four and a half hours work, he
+stopped to check what he had found out.
+
+The school's X-ray, an excellent one, had given him a complete picture
+of the molecular structure of the syrup. There were a couple of
+long-chain molecules that he could only believe after two
+re-examinations and a careful check of the machine, but with the help of
+the notes he could deduce how they had been put together. They would be
+the Ingredient Alpha and Ingredient Beta referred to in the notes.
+
+The components of the syrup were all simple and easily procurable with
+these two exceptions, as were the basic components from which these were
+made.
+
+The mechanical guinea-pig demonstrated that the syrup contained nothing
+harmful to human tissue.
+
+Of course, there were the warnings about heightened psycho-physiological
+effects....
+
+He stuck a poison-label on the bottle, locked it up, and went home. The
+next day, he and Bill Myers got a bottle of carbonated water and mixed
+themselves a couple of drinks of it. It was delicious--sweet, dry, tart,
+sour, all of these in alternating waves of pleasure.
+
+"We do have something, Bill," he said. "We have something that's going
+to give our income-tax experts headaches."
+
+"You have," Myers corrected. "Where do you start fitting me into it?"
+
+"We're a good team, Bill. I'm a chemist, but I don't know a thing about
+people. You're a psychologist. A real one; not one of these night-school
+boys. A juvenile psychologist, too. And what age-group spends the most
+money in this country for soft-drinks?"
+
+Knowing the names of the syrup's ingredients, and what their molecular
+structure was like, was only the beginning. Gallon after gallon of the
+School Board's chemicals went down the laboratory sink; Fred Benson and
+Bill Myers almost lived in the fourth floor lab. Once or twice there
+were head-shaking warnings from the principal about the dangers of
+over-work. The watchmen, at all hours, would hear the occasional
+twanging of Benson's guitar in the laboratory, and know that he had come
+to a dead end on something and was trying to think. Football season came
+and went; basketball season; the inevitable riot between McKinley and
+Eisenhower rooters; the Spring concerts. The term-end exams were only a
+month away when Benson and Myers finally did it, and stood solemnly,
+each with a beaker in either hand and took alternate sips of the
+original and the drink mixed from the syrup they had made.
+
+"Not a bit of difference, Fred," Myers said. "We have it!"
+
+Benson picked up the guitar and began plunking on it.
+
+"Hey!" Myers exclaimed. "Have you been finding time to take lessons on
+that thing? I never heard you play as well as that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They decided to go into business in St. Louis. It was centrally located,
+and, being behind more concentric circles of radar and counter-rocket
+defenses, it was in better shape than any other city in the country and
+most likely to stay that way. Getting started wasn't hard; the first
+banker who tasted the new drink-named Evri-Flave, at Myers'
+suggestion--couldn't dig up the necessary money fast enough. Evri-Flave
+hit the market with a bang and became an instant success; soon the
+rainbow-tinted vending machines were everywhere, dispensing the
+slender, slightly flattened bottles and devouring quarters voraciously.
+In spite of high taxes and the difficulties of doing business in a
+consumers' economy upon which a war-time economy had been superimposed,
+both Myers and Benson were rapidly becoming wealthy. The gregarious
+Myers installed himself in a luxurious apartment in the city; Benson
+bought a large tract of land down the river toward Carondelet and
+started building a home and landscaping the grounds.
+
+The dreams began bothering him again, now that the urgency of getting
+Evri-Flave, Inc., started had eased. They were not dreams of the men he
+had killed in battle, or, except for one about a huge, hot-smelling tank
+with a red star on the turret, about the war. Generally, they were about
+a strange, beautiful, office-room, in which a young man in uniform
+killed an older man in a plum-brown coat and a vivid blue neck-scarf.
+Sometimes Benson identified himself with the killer; sometimes with the
+old man who was killed.
+
+He talked to Myers about these dreams, but beyond generalities about
+delayed effects of combat fatigue and vague advice to relax, the
+psychologist, now head of Sales & Promotion of Evri-Flave, Inc., could
+give him no help.
+
+The war ended three years after the new company was launched. There was
+a momentary faltering of the economy, and then the work of
+reconstruction was crying hungrily for all the labor and capital that
+had been idled by the end of destruction, and more. There was a new
+flood-tide of prosperity, and Evri-Flave rode the crest. The estate at
+Carondelet was finished--a beautiful place, surrounded with gardens,
+fragrant with flowers, full of the songs of birds and soft music from
+concealed record-players. It made him forget the ugliness of the war,
+and kept the dreams from returning so frequently. All the world ought to
+be like that, he thought; beautiful and quiet and peaceful. People
+surrounded with such beauty couldn't think about war.
+
+All the world could be like that, if only....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The UN chose St. Louis for its new headquarters--many of its offices had
+been moved there after the second and most destructive bombing of New
+York--and when the city by the Mississippi began growing into a real
+World Capital, the flow of money into it almost squared overnight.
+Benson began to take an active part in politics in the new World
+Sovereignty party. He did not, however, allow his political activities
+to distract him from the work of expanding the company to which he owed
+his wealth and position. There were always things to worry about.
+
+"I don't know," Myers said to him, one evening, as they sat over a
+bottle of rye in the psychologist's apartment. "I could make almost as
+much money practicing as a psychiatrist, these days. The whole world
+seems to be going pure, unadulterated nuts! That affair in Munich, for
+instance."
+
+"Yes." Benson grimaced as he thought of the affair in Munich--a
+Wagnerian concert which had terminated in an insane orgy of mass
+suicide. "Just a week after we started our free-sample campaign in South
+Germany, too...."
+
+He stopped short, downing his drink and coughing over it.
+
+"Bill! You remember those sheets of onion-skin in that envelope?"
+
+"The foundation of our fortunes; I wonder where you really did get
+that.... Fred!" His eyes widened in horror. "That caution about
+'heightened psycho-physiological effects,' that we were never able
+to understand!"
+
+Benson nodded grimly. "And think of all the crazy cases of
+mass-hysteria--that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody
+started tearing off each others' clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in
+New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psycho-neurotic and
+psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and all after
+Evri-Flave got on the market."
+
+"We'll have to stop it; pull Evri-Flave off the market," Myers said. "We
+can't be responsible for letting this go on."
+
+"We can't stop, either. There's at least a two months' supply out in the
+hands of jobbers and distributors over whom we have no control. And we
+have all these contractual obligations, to buy the entire output of the
+companies that make the syrup for us; if we stop buying, they can sell
+it in competition with us, as long as they don't infringe our
+trade-name. And we can't prevent pirating. You know how easily we were
+able to duplicate that sample I brought back from Turkey. Why, our legal
+department's kept busy all the time prosecuting unlicensed manufacturers
+as it is."
+
+"We've got to do something, Fred!" There was almost a whiff of hysteria
+in Myers' voice.
+
+"We will. We'll start, first thing tomorrow, on a series of tests--just
+you and I, like the old times at Eisenhower High. First, we want to
+be sure that Evri-Flave really is responsible. It'd be a hell of a
+thing if we started a public panic against our own product for nothing.
+And then...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took just two weeks, in a soundproofed and guarded laboratory on
+Benson's Carondelet estate, to convict their delicious drink of
+responsibility for that Munich State Opera House Horror and everything
+else. Reports from confidential investigators in Munich confirmed this.
+It had, of course, been impossible to interview the two thousand men
+and women who had turned the Opera House into a pyre for their own
+immolation, but none of the tiny minority who had kept their sanity and
+saved their lives had tasted Evri-Flave.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took another month to find out exactly how the stuff affected the
+human nervous system, and they almost wrecked their own nervous systems
+in the process. The real villain, they discovered, was the
+incredible-looking long-chain compound alluded to in the original notes
+as Ingredient Beta; its principal physiological effect was to greatly
+increase the sensitivity of the aural nerves. Not only was the hearing
+range widened--after consuming thirty CC of Beta, they could hear the
+sound of an ultrasonic dog-whistle quite plainly--but the very quality
+of all audible sounds was curiously enhanced and altered. Myers, the
+psychologist, who was also well grounded in neurology, explained how the
+chemical produced this effect; it meant about as much to Benson as some
+of his chemistry did to Bill Myers. There was also a secondary, purely
+psychological, effect. Certain musical chords had definite effects on
+the emotions of the hearer, and the subject, beside being directly
+influenced by the music, was rendered extremely open to verbal
+suggestions accompanied by a suitable musical background.
+
+Benson transferred the final results of this stage of the research to
+the black notebook and burned the scratch-sheets.
+
+"That's how it happened, then," he said. "The Munich thing was the
+result of all that Götterdämmerung music. There was a band at the
+baseball park in Baltimore. The New Orleans Orgy started while a local
+radio station was broadcasting some of this new dance-music. Look, these
+tone-clusters, here, have a definite sex-excitation effect. This series
+of six chords, which occur in some of the Wagnerian stuff; effect, a
+combined feeling of godlike isolation and despair. And these consecutive
+fifths--a sense of danger, anger, combativeness. You know, we could work
+out a whole range of emotional stimuli to fit the effects of Ingredient
+Beta...."
+
+"We don't want to," Myers said. "We want to work out a substitute for
+Beta that will keep the flavor of the drink without the
+psycho-physiological effects."
+
+"Yes, sure. I have some of the boys at the plant lab working on that.
+Gave them a lot of syrup without Beta, and told them to work out cheap
+additives to restore the regular Evri-Flave taste; told them it was an
+effort to find a cheap substitute for an expensive ingredient. But look,
+Bill. You and I both see, for instance, that a powerful world-wide
+supra-national sovereignty is the only guarantee of world peace. If we
+could use something like this to help overcome antiquated verbal
+prejudices and nationalistic emotional attachments...."
+
+"No!" Myers said. "I won't ever consent to anything like that, Fred! Not
+even in a cause like world peace; use a thing like this for a good,
+almost holy, cause now, and tomorrow we, or those who would come after
+us, would be using it to create a tyranny. You know what year this is,
+Bill?"
+
+"Why, 1984," Benson said.
+
+"Yes. You remember that old political novel of Orwell's, written about
+forty years ago? Well, that's a picture of the kind of world you'd have,
+eventually, no matter what kind of a world you started out to make.
+Fred, don't ever think of using this stuff for a purpose like that. If
+you try it, I'll fight you with every resource I have."
+
+There was a fanatical, almost murderous, look in Bill Myers' eyes.
+Benson put the notebook in his pocket, then laughed and threw up his
+hands.
+
+"Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!" he cried. "You're right, of course, Bill. We can't
+even trust the UN with a thing like this. It makes the H-bomb look like
+a stone hatchet.... Well, I'll call Grant, at the plant lab, and see how
+his boys are coming along with the substitute; as soon as we get it, we
+can put out a confidential letter to all our distributors and
+syrup-manufacturers...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He walked alone in the garden at Carondelet, watching the color fade out
+of the sky and the twilight seep in among the clipped yews. All the
+world could be like this garden, a place of peace and beauty and quiet,
+if only.... All the world _would_ be a beautiful and peaceful garden, in
+his own lifetime! He had the means of making it so!
+
+Three weeks later, he murdered his friend and partner, Bill Myers. It
+was a suicide; nobody but Fred Benson knew that he had taken fifty CC of
+pure Ingredient Beta in a couple of cocktails while listening to the
+queer phonograph record that he had played half an hour before blowing
+his brains out.
+
+The decision had cost Benson a battle with his conscience from which he
+had emerged the sole survivor. The conscience was buried along with Bill
+Myers, and all that remained was a purpose.
+
+Evri-Flave stayed on the market unaltered. The night before the national
+election, the World Sovereignty party distributed thousands of gallons
+of Evri-Flave; their speakers, on every radio and television network,
+were backgrounded by soft music. The next day, when the vote was
+counted, it was found that the American Nationalists had carried a few
+backwoods precincts in the Rockies and the Southern Appalachians and one
+county in Alaska, where there had been no distribution of Evri-Flave.
+
+The dreams came back more often, now that Bill Myers was gone. Benson
+was only beginning to realize what a large fact in his life the
+companionship of the young psychologist had been. Well, a world of peace
+and beauty was an omelet worth the breaking of many eggs....
+
+He purchased another great tract of land near the city, and donated it
+to the UN for their new headquarters buildings; the same architects and
+landscapists who had created the estate at Carondelet were put to work
+on it. In the middle of what was to become World City, they erected a
+small home for Fred Benson. Benson was often invited to address the
+delegates to the UN; always, there was soft piped-in music behind his
+words. He saw to it that Evri-Flave was available free to all UN
+personnel. The Senate of the United States elected him as perpetual
+U. S. delegate-in-chief to the UN; not long after, the Security Council
+elected him their perpetual chairman.
+
+In keeping with his new dignities, and to ameliorate his youthful
+appearance, he grew a mustache and, eventually, a small beard. The black
+notebook in which he kept the records of his experiments was always with
+him; page after page was filled with notes. Experiments in sonics, like
+the one which had produced the ultrasonic stun-gun which rendered lethal
+weapons unnecessary for police and defense purposes, or the new musical
+combinations with which he was able to play upon every emotion and
+instinct.
+
+But he still dreamed, the same recurring dream of the young soldier and
+the old man in the office. By now, he was consistently identifying
+himself with the latter. He took to carrying one of the thick-barrelled
+stun-pistols always, now. Alone, he practiced constantly with it,
+drawing, breaking soap-bubbles with the concentrated sound-waves it
+projected. It was silly, perhaps, but it helped him in his dreams. Now,
+the old man with whom he identified himself would draw a stun-pistol,
+occasionally, to defend himself.
+
+The years drained one by one through the hour-glass of Time. Year after
+year, the world grew more peaceful, more beautiful. There were no more
+incidents like the mass-suicide of Munich or the mass-perversions of New
+Orleans; the playing and even the composing of music was strictly
+controlled--no dangerous notes or chords could be played in a world
+drenched with Ingredient Beta. Steadily the idea grew that peace and
+beauty were supremely good, that violence and ugliness were supremely
+evil. Even competitive sports which simulated violence; even children
+born ugly and misshapen....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He finished the breakfast which he had prepared for himself--he trusted
+no food that another had touched--and knotted the vivid blue scarf about
+his neck before slipping into the loose coat of glossy plum-brown, then
+checked the stun-pistol and pocketed the black notebook, its
+plastileather cover glossy from long use. He stood in front of the
+mirror, brushing his beard, now snow-white. Two years, now, and he would
+be eighty--had he been anyone but The Guide, he would have long ago
+retired to the absolute peace and repose of one of the Elders' Havens.
+Peace and repose, however, were not for The Guide; it would take another
+twenty years to finish his task of remaking the world, and he would need
+every day of it that his medical staff could borrow or steal for him. He
+made an eye-baffling practice draw with the stun-pistol, then holstered
+it and started down the spiral stairway to the office below.
+
+There was the usual mass of papers on his desk. A corps of secretaries
+had screened out everything but what required his own personal and
+immediate attention, but the business of guiding a world could only be
+reduced to a certain point. On top was the digest of the world's news
+for the past twenty-four hours, and below that was the agenda for the
+afternoon's meeting of the Council. He laid both in front of him,
+reading over the former and occasionally making a note on the latter.
+Once his glance strayed to the cardboard box in front of him, with the
+envelope taped to it--the latest improvement on the Evri-Flave syrup,
+with the report from his own chemists, all conditioned to obedience,
+loyalty and secrecy. If they thought he was going to try that damned
+stuff on himself....
+
+There was a sudden gleam of light in the middle of the room, in front of
+his desk. No, a mist, through which a blue light seemed to shine. The
+stun-pistol was in his hand--his instinctive reaction to anything
+unusual--and pointed into the shining mist when it vanished and a man
+appeared in front of him; a man in the baggy green combat-uniform that
+he himself had worn fifty years before; a man with a heavy automatic
+pistol in his hand. The gun was pointed directly at him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Guide aimed quickly and pressed the trigger of the ultrasonic
+stunner. The pistol dropped soundlessly on the thick-piled rug; the man
+in uniform slumped in an inert heap. The Guide sprang to his feet and
+rounded the desk, crossing to and bending over the intruder. Why, this
+was the dream that had plagued him through the years. But it was ending
+differently. The young man--his face was startlingly familiar,
+somehow--was not killing the old man. Those years of practice with the
+stun-pistol....
+
+He stooped and picked the automatic up. The young man was unconscious,
+and The Guide had his pistol, now. He slipped the automatic into his
+pocket and straightened beside his inert would-be slayer.
+
+A shimmering globe of blue mist appeared around them, brightened to a
+dazzle, and dimmed again to a colored mist before it vanished, and when
+it cleared away, he was standing beside the man in uniform, in the sandy
+bed of a dry stream at the mouth of a little ravine, and directly in
+front of him, looming above him, was a thing that had not been seen in
+the world for close to half a century--a big, hot-smelling tank with a
+red star on its turret.
+
+He might have screamed--the din of its treads and engines deafened
+him--and, in panic, he turned and ran, his old legs racing, his old
+heart pumping madly. The noise of the tank increased as machine guns
+joined the uproar. He felt the first bullet strike him, just above the
+hips--no pain; just a tremendous impact. He might have felt the second
+bullet, too, as the ground tilted and rushed up at his face. Then he was
+diving into a tunnel of blackness that had no end....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Fred Benson, of Benson's Butchers, had been jerked back into
+consciousness when the field began to build around him. He was
+struggling to rise, fumbling the grenade out of his pocket, when it
+collapsed. Sure enough, right in front of him, so close that he could
+smell the very heat of it, was the big tank with the red star on its
+turret. He cursed the sextet of sanctimonious double-crossers eight
+thousand miles and fifty years away in space-time. The machine guns had
+stopped--probably because they couldn't be depressed far enough to aim
+at him, now; that was a notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet
+tanks. He had the bomb out of his pocket, when the machine guns began
+firing again, this time at something on his left. Wondering what had
+created the diversion, he rocked back on his heels, pressed the button,
+and heaved, closing his eyes. As the thing left his fingers, he knew
+that he had thrown too hard. His muscles, accustomed to the heavier
+cast-iron grenades, had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to
+despair than at any other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure.
+Then he was hit, with physical force, by a wave of almost solid heat. It
+didn't smell like the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten
+metal, with undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a
+multiple explosion that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went
+up. There were no screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.
+
+The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive
+treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had collapsed
+between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten metal. He
+blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked again. Of
+all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN, that he had
+seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his experience. And
+he'd done that with one grenade....
+
+Remembering the curious manner in which, at the last, the tank had begun
+firing at something to the side, he looked around, to see the crumpled
+body in the pale violet-gray trousers and the plum-brown coat. Finding
+his carbine and reloading it, he went over to the dead man, turning the
+body over. He was an old man, with a white mustache and a small white
+beard--why, if the mustache were smaller and there were no beard, he
+would pass for Benson's own father, who had died in 1962. The clothes
+weren't Turkish or Armenian or Persian, or anything one would expect in
+this country.
+
+The old man had a pistol in his coat pocket, and Benson pulled it out
+and looked at it, then did a double-take and grabbed for his own
+holster, to find it empty. The pistol was his own 9.5 Colt automatic. He
+looked at the dead man, with the white beard and the vivid blue
+neck-scarf, and he was sure that he had never seen him before. He'd had
+that pistol when he'd come down the ravine....
+
+There was another pistol under the dead man's coat, in a
+shoulder-holster; a queer thing with a thick round barrel, like an old
+percussion pepper-box, and a diaphragm instead of a muzzle. Probably
+projected ultrasonic waves. He holstered his own Colt and pocketed the
+unknown weapon. There was a black plastileather-bound notebook. It was
+full of notes. Chemical formulae, yes, and some stuff on sonics; that
+tied in with the queer pistol. He pocketed that. He'd look both over,
+when he had time and privacy, two scarce commodities in the Army....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant
+later, the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He
+looked at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at
+0550; according to his watch, it was 0726. That was another mystery, to
+go with the question of who the dead man was, where he had come from,
+and how he'd gotten hold of Benson's pistol. Yes, and how that tank had
+gotten blown up. Benson was sure he had used his last grenade back at
+the supply-dump.
+
+The hell with it; he'd worry about all that later. The attack was due
+any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up the valley
+ahead, of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed before they
+started coming in on him.
+
+He stopped thinking about the multiple mystery, a solution to which
+seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and found
+himself a place among the rocks to wait, and while he waited, he looked
+over the plastileather-bound notebook. In civil life, he had been a
+high school chemistry teacher, but the stuff in this book was utterly
+new to him. Some of it he could understand readily enough; the rest of
+it he could dig out for himself. Stuff about some kind of a carbonated
+soft-drink, and about a couple of unbelievable-looking long-chain
+molecules....
+
+After a while, fugitive Communists began coming up the valley to make
+their stand.
+
+Benson put away the notebook, picked up his carbine, and cuddled the
+stock to his cheek....
+
+
+THE END
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                      Transcriber's Note                      |
+|                                                              |
+| Bold text was surrounded by '+' symbols.                     |
+|                                                              |
+| One "onionskin" was converted to "onion-skin" to conform     |
+| with the majority usage in the text.                         |
+|                                                              |
+| "rebuilds" and "re-builds" were left alone as there was no   |
+| predominant usage                                            |
+|                                                              |
+| The following typos were corrected:                          |
+|                                                              |
+| benificence  beneficence                                     |
+| lethel       lethal                                          |
+| "See         See                                             |
+| tyranical    tyrannical                                      |
+|                                                              |
+| Subscripts                                                   |
+|                                                              |
+| Water was shown as H_{2}O, and                               |
+| Sulfuric acid   as H_{2}SO_{4}                               |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hunter Patrol, by 
+Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTER PATROL ***
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+Project Gutenberg's Hunter Patrol, by Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hunter Patrol
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2006 [EBook #18641]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTER PATROL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
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+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/ill_cover.jpg" width="600" height="601" alt="Front Cover" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="bbox"><h3>Transcriber's Note</h3>
+<p>This etext was produced from Amazing Stories May 1959. There is no
+evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.</p></div>
+
+<h1>HUNTER PATROL</h1>
+
+<h2>By H. BEAM PIPER and JOHN J. McGUIRE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Many men have dreamed of world peace, but
+none have been able to achieve it. If one
+man did have that power, could mankind
+afford to pay the price?</b></p></div>
+
+
+<p>At the crest of the ridge,
+Benson stopped for an instant,
+glancing first at his wrist-watch
+and then back over his
+shoulder. It was 0539; the barrage
+was due in eleven minutes,
+at the spot where he was now
+standing. Behind, on the long
+northeast slope, he could see the
+columns of black oil smoke rising
+from what had been the
+Pan-Soviet advance supply dump.
+There was a great deal of firing
+going on, back there; he wondered
+if the Commies had managed
+to corner a few of his men,
+after the patrol had accomplished
+its mission and scattered, or
+if a couple of Communist units
+were shooting each other up in
+mutual mistaken identity. The
+result would be about the same
+in either case&mdash;reserve units
+would be disorganized, and some
+men would have been pulled back
+from the front line. His dozen-odd
+UN regulars and Turkish
+partisans had done their best to
+simulate a paratroop attack in
+force. At least, his job was
+done; now to execute that classic
+infantry maneuver described
+as, "Let's get the hell outa here."
+This was his last patrol before
+rotation home. He didn't want
+anything unfortunate to happen.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little ravine to
+the left; the stream which had
+cut it in the steep southern slope
+of the ridge would be dry at this
+time of year, and he could make
+better time, and find protection
+in it from any chance shots
+when the interdictory barrage
+started. He hurried toward it
+and followed it down to the valley
+that would lead toward the
+front&mdash;the thinly-held section of
+the Communist lines, and the
+UN lines beyond, where fresh
+troops were waiting to jump
+from their holes and begin the
+attack.</p>
+
+<p>There was something wrong
+about this ravine, though. At
+first, it was only a vague presentiment,
+growing stronger as
+he followed the dry gully down
+to the valley below. Something
+he had smelled, or heard, or
+seen, without conscious recognition.
+Then, in the dry sand where
+the ravine debouched into the
+valley, he saw faint tank-tracks&mdash;only
+one pair. There was
+something wrong about the vines
+that mantled one side of the
+ravine, too....</p>
+
+<p>An instant later, he was diving
+to the right, breaking his
+fall with the butt of his auto-carbine,
+rolling rapidly toward
+the cover of a rock, and as he
+did so, the thinking part of his
+mind recognized what was
+wrong. The tank-tracks had ended
+against the vine-grown side
+of the ravine, what he had
+smelled had been lubricating oil
+and petrol, and the leaves on
+some of the vines hung upside
+down.</p>
+
+<p>Almost at once, from behind
+the vines, a tank's machine guns
+snarled at him, clipping the
+place where he had been standing,
+then shifting to rage against
+the sheltering rock. With a sudden
+motor-roar, the muzzle of
+a long tank-gun pushed out
+through the vines, and then the
+low body of a tank with a red
+star on the turret came rumbling
+out of the camouflaged bay. The
+machine guns kept him pinned
+behind the rock; the tank swerved
+ever so slightly so that its
+wide left tread was aimed directly
+at him, then picked up
+speed. Aren't even going to
+waste a shell on me, he thought.</p>
+
+<p>Futilely, he let go a clip from
+his carbine, trying to hit one of
+the vision-slits; then rolled to
+one side, dropped out the clip,
+slapped in another. There was a
+shimmering blue mist around
+him. If he only hadn't used his
+last grenade, back there at the
+supply-dump....</p>
+
+<p>The strange blue mist became
+a flickering radiance that ran
+through all the colors of the
+spectrum and became an utter,
+impenetrable blackness....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There were voices in the blackness,
+and a softness under him,
+but under his back, when he had
+been lying on his stomach, as
+though he were now on a comfortable
+bed. They got me alive,
+he thought; now comes the
+brainwashing!</p>
+
+<p>He cracked one eye open imperceptibly.
+Lights, white and
+glaring, from a ceiling far
+above; walls as white as the
+lights. Without moving his
+head, he opened both eyes and
+shifted them from right to left.
+Vaguely, he could see people and,
+behind them, machines so simply
+designed that their functions
+were unguessable. He sat up and
+looked around groggily. The people,
+their costumes&mdash;definitely
+not Pan-Soviet uniforms&mdash;and
+the room and its machines, told
+him nothing. The hardness under
+his right hip was a welcome
+surprise; they hadn't taken his
+pistol from him! Feigning even
+more puzzlement and weakness,
+he clutched his knees with his
+elbows and leaned his head forward
+on them, trying to collect
+his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall have to give up,
+Gregory," a voice trembled with
+disappointment.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Anthony?" The new
+voice was deeper, more aggressive.</p>
+
+<p>"Look. Another typical reaction;
+retreat to the foetus."</p>
+
+<p>Footsteps approached. Another
+voice, discouragement heavily
+weighting each syllable: "You're
+right. He's like all the others.
+We'll have to send him back."</p>
+
+<p>"And look for no more?" The
+voice he recognized as Anthony
+faltered between question and
+statement.</p>
+
+<p>A babel of voices, in dispute;
+then, clearly, the voice Benson
+had come to label as Gregory,
+cut in:</p>
+
+<p>"I will never give up!"</p>
+
+<p>He raised his head; there was
+something in the timbre of that
+voice reminding him of his own
+feelings in the dark days when
+the UN had everywhere been
+reeling back under the Pan-Soviet
+hammer-blows.</p>
+
+<p>"Anthony!" Gregory's voice
+again; Benson saw the speaker;
+short, stocky, gray-haired, stubborn
+lines about the mouth. The
+face of a man chasing an illusive
+but not uncapturable dream.</p>
+
+<p>"That means nothing." A tall
+thin man, too lean for the tunic-like
+garment he wore, was shaking
+his head.</p>
+
+<p>Deliberately, trying to remember
+his college courses in psychology,
+he forced himself to
+accept, and to assess, what he
+saw as reality. He was on a small
+table, like an operating table;
+the whole place looked like a
+medical lab or a clinic. He was
+still in uniform; his boots had
+soiled the white sheets with the
+dust of Armenia. He had all his
+equipment, including his pistol
+and combat-knife; his carbine
+was gone, however. He could feel
+the weight of his helmet on his
+head. The room still rocked and
+swayed a little, but the faces of
+the people were coming into
+focus.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>He counted them, saying each
+number to himself: one, two,
+three, four, five men; one woman.
+He swung his feet over the
+edge of the table, being careful
+that it would be between him
+and the others when he rose, and
+began inching his right hand toward
+his right hip, using his left
+hand, on his brow, to misdirect
+attention.</p>
+
+<p>"I would classify his actions
+as arising from conscious effort
+at cortico-thalamic integration,"
+the woman said, like an archaeologist
+who has just found a
+K-ration tin at the bottom of a
+neolithic kitchen-midden. She
+had the peculiarly young-old
+look of the spinster teachers
+with whom Benson had worked
+before going to the war.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to believe it, but I'm
+afraid to," another man for
+whom Benson had no name-association
+said. He was portly, gray-haired,
+arrogant-faced; he wore
+a short black jacket with a
+jewelled zipper-pull, and striped
+trousers.</p>
+
+<p>Benson cleared his throat.
+"Just who are you people?" he
+inquired. "And just where am
+I?"</p>
+
+<p>Anthony grabbed Gregory's
+hand and pumped it frantically.</p>
+
+<p>"I've dreamed of the day
+when I could say this!" he cried.
+"Congratulations, Gregory!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That touched off another bedlam,
+of joy, this time, instead
+of despair. Benson hid his
+amusement at the facility with
+which all of them were discovering
+in one another the courage,
+vision and stamina of true
+patriots and pioneers. He let it
+go on for a few moments, hoping
+to glean some clue. Finally,
+he interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe I asked a couple of
+questions," he said, using the
+voice he reserved for sergeants
+and second lieutenants. "I hate
+to break up this mutual admiration
+session, but I would appreciate
+some answers. This isn't
+anything like the situation I last
+remember...."</p>
+
+<p>"He remembers!" Gregory exclaimed.
+"That confirms your
+first derivation by symbolic
+logic, and it strengthens the
+validity of the second...."</p>
+
+<p>The schoolteacherish woman
+began jabbering excitedly; she
+ran through about a paragraph
+of what was pure gobbledegook
+to Benson, before the man with
+the arrogant face and the jewelled
+zipper-pull broke in on her.</p>
+
+<p>"Save that for later, Paula,"
+he barked. "I'd be very much interested
+in your theories about
+why memories are unimpaired
+when you 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Anthony&mdash;the oldest of the
+lot, in a knee-length tunic&mdash;turned
+to Gregory.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you had better...."
+he began.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing in the answer made
+sense but the name of the city.
+Benson chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"What happened; the Cardinals
+conquer the world? I knew
+they had a good team, but I
+didn't think it was that good."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been detecting symptoms
+of religious paranoia, messianic
+delusions, about his public
+statements...." the woman began.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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...."</p>
+
+<p>The cadaverous man in the
+blue jacket turned to the man
+in the black garment of similar
+cut.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Black-jacket shook his head.
+"You first, Gregory," he said.
+"Tell him how he got here, and
+then I'll tell him why."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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...."</p>
+
+<p>"That's no worry," Gregory
+reproved her. "I showed you that
+the rate was too slow to have an
+effect on...."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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<sub>2</sub>O and H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>, but the
+theory of time-travel is wasted
+on me.... Suppose you just let
+me ask the questions; then I'll
+be sure of finding out what I
+don't know. For instance, who
+won the war I was fighting in,
+before you grabbed me and
+brought me here? The Commies?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, the United Nations,"
+Anthony told him. "At least,
+they were the least exhausted
+when both sides decided to quit."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what's this dictatorship.... The Guide? Extreme Rightist?"</p>
+
+<p>"Walter, you'd better tell
+him," Gregory said.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"We damn near lost the war,"
+the man in the black jacket and
+striped trousers said, "but for
+once, we won the peace. The Soviet
+Bloc was broken up&mdash;India,
+China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia,
+the Ukraine, all the Satellite
+States. Most of them turned into
+little dictatorships, like the
+Latin American countries after
+the liberation from Spain, but
+they were personal, non-ideological,
+generally benevolent, dictatorships,
+the kind that can grow
+into democracies, if they're given
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"Capitalistic dictatorships, he
+means," the cadaverous man in
+the blue jacket explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Be quiet, Carl," Anthony told
+him. "Let's not confuse this with
+any class-struggle stuff."</p>
+
+<p>"Actually, the United Nations
+rules the world," Walter continued.
+"What goes on in the
+Ukraine or Latvia or Manchuria
+is about analogous to what went
+on under the old United States
+government in, let's say, Tammany-ruled
+New York. But
+here's the catch. The UN is
+ruled absolutely by one man."</p>
+
+<p>"How could that happen? In
+my time, the UN had its functions
+so subdivided and compartmented
+that it couldn't even
+run a war properly. Our army
+commanders were making war
+by systematic disobedience."</p>
+
+<p>"The charter was changed
+shortly after ... er, that is,
+after...." Walter was fumbling
+for words.</p>
+
+<p>"After my death." Benson
+finished politely. "Go on. Even
+with a changed charter, how did
+one man get all the powers into
+his hands?"</p>
+
+<p>"By sorcery!" black-coat-and-white-bands
+fairly shouted. "By
+the help of his master, Satan!"</p>
+
+<p>"You know, there are times
+when some such theory tempts
+me," Paula said.</p>
+
+<p>"He was a big moneybags,"
+Carl said. "He bribed his way
+in. <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original reads '&quot;See'.">See</ins>, New York was bombed
+flat. Where the old UN buildings
+were, it's still hot. So The Guide
+donated a big tract of land outside
+St. Louis, built these buildings&mdash;we're
+in the basement of
+one of them, right now, if you
+want a good laugh&mdash;and before
+long, he had the whole organization
+eating out of his hand. They
+just voted him into power, and
+the world into slavery."</p>
+
+<p>Benson looked around at the
+others, who were nodding in
+varying degrees of agreement.</p>
+
+<p>"Substantially, that's it. He
+managed to convince everybody
+of his altruism, integrity and
+wisdom," Walter said. "It was
+almost blasphemous to say anything
+against him. I really don't
+understand how it happened...."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what's he been doing
+with his power?" Benson asked.
+"Wise things, or stupid ones?"</p>
+
+<p>"I could be general, and say
+that he has deprived all of us of
+our political and other liberties.
+It is best to be specific," Anthony
+said. "Gregory?"</p>
+
+<p>"My own field&mdash;dimensional
+physics&mdash;hasn't been interfered
+with much, yet. It's different in
+other fields. For instance, all research
+in sonics has been arbitrarily
+stopped. So has a great
+deal of work in organic and synthetic
+chemistry. Psychology is
+a madhouse of ... what was the
+old word, licentiousness? No, lysenkoism.
+Medicine and surgery&mdash;well,
+there's a huge program
+of compulsory sterilization, and
+another one of eugenic marriage-control.
+And infants who don't
+conform to certain physical
+standards don't survive. Neither
+do people who have disfiguring
+accidents beyond the power of
+plastic surgery."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Paula spoke next. "My field is
+child welfare. Well, I'm going to
+show you an audio-visual of an
+interesting ceremony in a Hindu
+village, derived from the ancient
+custom of the suttee. It is the
+Hindu method of conforming to
+The Guide's demand that only
+beautiful children be allowed to
+grow to maturity."</p>
+
+<p>The film was mercifully brief.
+Even in spite of the drums and
+gongs, and the chanting of the
+crowd, Benson found out how
+loudly a newborn infant can
+scream in a fire. The others looked
+as though they were going to
+be sick; he doubted if he looked
+much better.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, we are a more
+practical and mechanical-minded
+people, here and in Europe,"
+Paula added, holding down her
+gorge by main strength. "We
+have lethal-gas chambers that
+even Hitler would have envied."</p>
+
+<p>"I am a musician," Anthony
+said. "A composer. If Gregory
+thinks that the sciences are controlled,
+he should try to write
+even the simplest piece of music.
+The extent of censorship and
+control over all the arts, and
+especially music, is incredible."
+He coughed slightly. "And I
+have another motive, a more
+selfish one. I am approaching the
+compulsory retirement age; I
+will soon be invited to go to one
+of the Havens. Even though
+these Havens are located in the
+most barren places, they are
+beauty-spots, verdant beyond belief.
+It is of only passing interest
+that, while large numbers of the
+aged go there yearly, their populations
+remain constant, and, to
+judge from the quantities of
+supplies shipped to them, extremely
+small."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"They call me Samuel, in this
+organization," the man in the
+long black coat said. "Whoever
+gave me that alias must have
+chosen it because I am here in
+an effort to live up to it. Although
+I am ordained by no
+church, I fight for all of them.
+The plain fact is that this man
+we call The Guide is really the
+Antichrist!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I haven't quite so lofty
+a motive, but it's good enough
+to make me willing to finance
+this project," Walter said. "It's
+very simple. The Guide won't let
+people make money, and if they
+do, he taxes it away from them.
+And he has laws to prohibit inheritance;
+what little you can
+accumulate, you can't pass on to
+your children."</p>
+
+<p>"I put up a lot of the money,
+too, don't forget," Carl told him.
+"Or the Union did; I'm a poor
+man, myself." He was smoking
+an excellent cigar, for a poor
+man, and his clothes could have
+come from the same tailor as
+Walter's. "Look, we got a real
+Union&mdash;the Union of all unions.
+Every working man in North
+America, Europe, Australia and
+South Africa belongs to it. And
+The Guide has us all hog-tied."</p>
+
+<p>"He won't let you strike,"
+Benson chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right. And what can
+we do? Why, we can't even make
+our closed-shop contracts stick.
+And as far as getting anything
+like a pay-raise...."</p>
+
+<p>"Good thing. Another pay-raise
+in some of my companies
+would bankrupt them, the way
+The Guide has us under his
+thumb...." Walter began, but
+he was cut off.</p>
+
+<p>"Well! It seems as though this
+Guide has done some good, if
+he's made you two realize that
+you're both on the same side,
+and that what hurts one hurts
+both," Benson said. "When I
+shipped out for Turkey in '77,
+neither Labor nor Management
+had learned that." He looked
+from one to another of them.
+"The Guide must have a really
+good bodyguard, with all the
+enemies he's made."</p>
+
+<p>Gregory shook his head. "He
+lives virtually alone, in a very
+small house on the UN Capitol
+grounds. In fact, except for a
+small police-force, armed only
+with non-lethal stun-guns, your
+profession of arms is non-existent."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"I've been guessing what you
+want me to do," Benson said.
+"You want this Guide bumped
+off. But why can't any of you do
+it? Or, if it's too risky, at least
+somebody from your own time?
+Why me?"</p>
+
+<p>"We can't. Everybody in the
+world today is conditioned
+against violence, especially the
+taking of human life," Anthony
+told him.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, wait a moment!" This
+time, he was using the voice he
+would have employed in chiding
+a couple of Anatolian peasant
+partisans who were field-stripping
+a machine gun the wrong
+way. "Those babies in that film
+you showed me weren't dying of
+old age...."</p>
+
+<p>"That is not violence," Paula
+said bitterly. "That is humane
+<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original reads 'benificence'.">beneficence</ins>. Ugly people would be
+unhappy, and would make others
+unhappy, in a world where
+everybody else is beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>"And all these oppressive and
+<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original reads 'tyranical'.">tyrannical</ins> laws," Benson continued.
+"How does he enforce
+them, without violence, actual or
+threatened?"</p>
+
+<p>Samuel started to say something
+about the Power of the
+Evil One; Paula, ignoring him,
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"I really don't know; he just
+does it. Mass hypnotism of some
+sort. I know music has something
+to do with it, because there
+is always music, everywhere.
+This laboratory, for instance,
+was secretly soundproofed; we
+couldn't have worked here, otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>"All right. I can see that you'd
+need somebody from the past,
+preferably a soldier, whose conditioning
+has been in favor
+rather than against violence. I'm
+not the only one you snatched, I
+take it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. We've been using that
+machine to pick up men from
+battlefields all over the world
+and all over history," Gregory
+said. "Until now, none of them
+could adjust.... Uggh!" He
+shuddered, looking even sicker
+than when the film was being
+shown.</p>
+
+<p>"He's thinking," Walter said,
+"about a French officer from
+Waterloo who blew out his
+brains with a pocket-pistol on
+that table, and an English archer
+from Agincourt who ran amok
+with a dagger in here, and a
+trooper of the Seventh Cavalry
+from the Custer Massacre."</p>
+
+<p>Gregory managed to overcome
+his revulsion. "You see, we were
+forced to take our subjects largely
+at random with regard to individual
+characteristics, mental
+attitudes, adaptability, et cetera."
+As long as he stuck to high
+order abstractions, he could control
+himself. "Aside from their
+professional lack of repugnance
+for violence, we took soldiers
+from battlefields because we
+could select men facing immediate
+death, whose removal from
+the past would not have any effect
+upon the casual chain of
+events affecting the present."</p>
+
+<p>A warning buzzer rasped in
+Benson's brain. He nodded,
+poker-faced.</p>
+
+<p>"I can see that," he agreed.
+"You wouldn't dare do anything
+to change the past. That was always
+one of the favorite paradoxes
+in time-travel fiction....
+Well, I think I have the general
+picture. You have a dictator who
+is tyrannizing you; you want to
+get rid of him; you can't kill him
+yourselves. I'm opposed to dictators,
+myself; that&mdash;and the
+Selective Service law, of course&mdash;was
+why I was a soldier. I
+have no moral or psychological
+taboos against killing dictators,
+or anybody else. Suppose I cooperate
+with you; what's in it
+for me?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a long silence.
+Walter and Carl looked at one
+another inquiringly; the others
+dithered helplessly. It was Carl
+who answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Your return to your own
+time and place."</p>
+
+<p>"And if I don't cooperate with
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Guess when and where else
+we could send you," Walter
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Benson dropped his cigarette
+and tramped it.</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly the same time and
+place?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the structure of space-time
+demands...." Paula began.</p>
+
+<p>"The spatio-temporal displacement
+field is capable of
+identifying that spot&mdash;" Gregory
+pointed to a ten-foot circle
+in front of a bank of sleek-cabineted,
+dial-studded machines "&mdash;with
+any set of space-time
+coordinates in the universe.
+However, to avoid disruption of
+the structure of space-time, we
+must return you to approximately
+the same point in space-time."</p>
+
+<p>Benson nodded again, this
+time at the confirmation of his
+earlier suspicion. Well, while he
+was alive, he still had a chance.</p>
+
+<p>"All right; tell me exactly
+what you want me to do."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A third outbreak of bedlam,
+this time of relief and frantic
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up, all of you!" For so
+thin a man, Carl had an astonishing
+voice. "I worked this out,
+so let me tell it." He turned to
+Benson. "Maybe I'm tougher
+than the rest of them, or maybe
+I'm not as deeply conditioned.
+For one thing, I'm tone-deaf.
+Well, here's the way it is. Gregory
+can set the machine to function
+automatically. You stand
+where he shows you, press the
+button he shows you, and fifteen
+seconds later it'll take you forward
+in time five seconds and
+about a kilometer in space, to
+The Guide's office. He'll be at his
+desk now. You'll have forty-five
+seconds to do the job, from the
+time the field collapses around
+you till it rebuilds. Then you'll
+be taken back to your own time
+again. The whole thing's automatic."</p>
+
+<p>"Can do," Benson agreed.
+"How do I kill him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm getting sick!" Paula
+murmured weakly. Her face was
+whiter than her gown.</p>
+
+<p>"Take care of her, Samuel.
+Both of you'd better get out of
+here," Gregory said.</p>
+
+<p>"The Lord of Hosts is my
+strength, He will.... Uggggh!"
+Samuel gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"Conditioning's getting him,
+too; we gotta be quick," Carl
+said. "Here. This is what you'll
+use." He handed Benson a two-inch
+globe of black plastic. "Take
+the damn thing, quick! Little
+button on the side; press it, and
+get it out of your hand
+fast...." He retched. "Limited-effect
+bomb; everything within
+two-meter circle burned to
+nothing; outside that, great but
+not unendurable heat. Shut
+your eyes when you throw it.
+Flash almost blinding." He dropped
+his cigar and turned almost
+green in the face. Walter had a
+drink poured and handed it to
+him. "Uggh! Thanks, Walter."
+He downed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Peculiar sort of thing for a
+non-violent people to manufacture,"
+Benson said, looking at
+the bomb and then putting it in
+his jacket pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't a weapon. Industrial;
+we use it in mining. I used
+plenty of them, in Walter's iron
+mines."</p>
+
+<p>He nodded again. "Where do
+I stand, now?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Right over here." Gregory
+placed him in front of a small
+panel with three buttons. "Press
+the middle one, and step back
+into the small red circle and
+stand perfectly still while the
+field builds up and collapses.
+Face that way."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Benson drew his pistol and
+checked it; magazine full, a
+round in the chamber, safety
+on.</p>
+
+<p>"Put that horrid thing out of
+sight!" Anthony gasped. "The ... the other thing ... is what
+you want to use."</p>
+
+<p>"The bomb won't be any good
+if some of his guards come in
+before the field re-builds," Benson
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"He has no guards. He lives
+absolutely alone. We told
+you...."</p>
+
+<p>"I know you did. You probably
+believed it, too. I don't. And
+by the way, you're sending me
+forward. What do you do about
+the fact that a time-jump seems
+to make me pass out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here. Before you press the
+button, swallow it." Gregory
+gave him a small blue pill.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I guess that's all there
+is," Gregory continued. "I hope...."
+His face twitched, and he
+dropped to the floor with a thud.
+Carl and Walter came forward,
+dragged him away from the machine.</p>
+
+<p>"Conditioning got him. Getting
+me, too," Walter said.
+"Hurry up, man!"</p>
+
+<p>Benson swallowed the pill,
+pressed the button and stepped
+back into the red circle, drawing
+his pistol and snapping off the
+safety. The blue mist closed in
+on him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This time, however, it did not
+thicken into blackness. It became
+luminous, brightening to a
+dazzle and dimming again to
+a colored mist, and then it cleared,
+while Benson stood at raise
+pistol, as though on a target
+range. He was facing a big desk
+at twenty feet, across a thick-piled
+blue rug. There was a man
+seated at the desk, a white-haired
+man with a mustache and a
+small beard, who wore a loose
+coat of some glossy plum-brown
+fabric, and a vividly blue neck-scarf.</p>
+
+<p>The pistol centered on the v-shaped
+blue under his chin.
+Deliberately, Benson squeezed,
+recovered from the recoil, aimed,
+fired, recovered, aimed, fired.
+Five seconds gone. The old man
+slumped across the desk, his
+arms extended. Better make a
+good job of it, six, seven, eight
+seconds; he stepped forward to
+the edge of the desk, call that
+fifteen seconds, and put the muzzle
+to the top of the man's head,
+firing again and snapping on the
+safety. There had been something
+familiar about The Guide's
+face, but it was too late to check
+on that, now. There wasn't any
+face left; not even much head.</p>
+
+<p>A box, on the desk, caught
+Benson's eye, a cardboard box
+with an envelope, stamped <i>Top
+Secret! For the Guide Only!</i>
+taped to it. He holstered his pistol
+and caught that up, stuffing
+it into his pocket, in obedience
+to an instinct to grab anything
+that looked like intelligence matter
+while in the enemy's country.
+Then he stepped back to the
+spot where the field had deposited
+him. He had ten seconds to
+spare; somebody was banging on
+a door when the blue mist began
+to gather around him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>He was crouching, the spherical
+plastic object in his right
+hand, his thumb over the button,
+when the field collapsed. Sure
+enough, right in front of him,
+so close that he could smell the
+very heat of it, was the big tank
+with the red star on its turret.
+He cursed the sextet of sanctimonious
+double-crossers eight
+thousand miles and fifty years
+away in space-time. The machine
+guns had stopped&mdash;probably because
+they couldn't be depressed
+far enough to aim at him, now;
+that was a notorious fault of
+some of the newer Pan-Soviet
+tanks&mdash;and he rocked back on
+his heels, pressed the button, and
+heaved, closing his eyes. As the
+thing left his fingers, he knew
+that he had thrown too hard. His
+muscles, accustomed to the heavier
+cast-iron grenades of his
+experience, had betrayed him.
+For a moment, he was closer to
+despair than at any other time
+in the whole phantasmagoric adventure.
+Then he was hit, with
+physical violence, by a wave of
+almost solid heat. It didn't smell
+like the heat of the tank's engines;
+it smelled like molten
+metal, with undertones of burned
+flesh. Immediately, there was
+a multiple explosion that threw
+him flat, as the tank's ammunition
+went up. There were no
+screams. It was too fast for that.
+He opened his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The turret and top armor of
+the tank had vanished. The two
+massive treads had been toppled
+over, one to either side. The
+body had collapsed between
+them, and it was running sticky
+trickles of molten metal. He
+blinked, rubbed his eyes on the
+back of his hand, and looked
+again. Of all the many blasted
+and burned-out tanks, Soviet and
+UN, that he had seen, this was
+the most completely wrecked
+thing in his experience. And he'd
+done that with one grenade....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At that moment, there was a
+sudden rushing overhead, and an
+instant later the barrage began
+falling beyond the crest of the
+ridge. He looked at his watch,
+blinked, and looked again. That
+barrage was due at 0550; according
+to the watch, it was
+0726. He was sure that, ten
+minutes ago, when he had looked
+at it, up there at the head of
+the ravine, it had been twenty
+minutes to six. He puzzled about
+that for a moment, and decided
+that he must have caught the
+stem on something and pulled it
+out, and then twisted it a little,
+setting the watch ahead. Then,
+somehow, the stem had gotten
+pushed back in, starting it at the
+new setting. That was a pretty
+far-fetched explanation, but it
+was the only one he could think
+of.</p>
+
+<p>But about this tank, now. He
+was positive that he could remember
+throwing a grenade....
+Yet he'd used his last grenade
+back there at the supply dump.
+He saw his carbine, and picked
+it up. That silly blackout he'd
+had, for a second, there; he must
+have dropped it. Action was
+open, empty magazine on the
+ground where he'd dropped it.
+He wondered, stupidly, if one of
+his bullets couldn't have gone
+down the muzzle of the tank's
+gun and exploded the shell in
+the chamber.... Oh, the hell
+with it! The tank might have
+been hit by a premature shot
+from the barrage which was
+raging against the far slope of
+the ridge. He reset his watch by
+guess and looked down the valley.
+The big attack would be
+starting any minute, now, and
+there would be fleeing Commies
+coming up the valley ahead of
+the UN advance. He'd better get
+himself placed before they started
+coming in on him.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped thinking about the
+mystery of the blown-up tank,
+a solution to which seemed to
+dance maddeningly just out of
+his mental reach, and found himself
+a place among the rocks to
+wait. Down the valley he could
+hear everything from pistols to
+mortars going off, and shouting
+in three or four racial intonations.
+After a while, fugitive
+Communists began coming, many
+of them without their equipment,
+stumbling in their haste
+and looking back over their
+shoulders. Most of them avoided
+the mouth of the ravine and hurried
+by to the left or right, but
+one little clump, eight or ten,
+came up the dry stream-bed, and
+stopped a hundred and fifty
+yards from his hiding-place to
+make a stand. They were Hindus,
+with outsize helmets over
+their turbans. Two of them came
+ahead, carrying a machine gun,
+followed by a third with a flame-thrower;
+the others retreated
+more slowly, firing their rifles to
+delay pursuit.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Cuddling the stock of his carbine
+to his cheek, he divided a
+ten-shot burst between the two
+machine-gunners, then, as a matter
+of principle, he shot the man
+with the flame-thrower. He had
+a dislike for flame-throwers; he
+killed every enemy he found with
+one. The others dropped their
+rifles and raised their hands,
+screaming: "Hey, Joe! Hey,
+Joe! You no shoot, me no
+shoot!"</p>
+
+<p>A dozen men in UN battledress
+came up and took them
+prisoner. Benson shouted to
+them, and then rose and came
+down to join them. They were
+British&mdash;Argyle and Sutherland
+Highlanders, advertising the
+fact by inconspicuous bits of tartan
+on their uniforms. The subaltern
+in command looked at him
+and nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Captain Benson? We were
+warned to be on watch for your
+patrol," he said. "Any of the rest
+of you lads get out?"</p>
+
+<p>Benson shrugged. "We split
+up after the attack. You may
+run into a couple of them. Some
+are locals and don't speak very
+good English. I've got to get
+back to Division, myself; what's
+the best way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Down that way. You'll overtake
+a couple of our walking
+wounded. If you don't mind going
+slowly, they'll show you the
+way to advance dressing station,
+and you can hitch a ride on an
+ambulance from there."</p>
+
+<p>Benson nodded. Off on the left,
+there was a flurry of small-arms
+fire, ending in yells of "Hey,
+Joe! Hey, Joe!"&mdash;the World
+War IV version of "Kamarad"!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>His company was a non-T/O
+outfit; he came directly under
+Division command and didn't
+have to bother reporting to any
+regimental or brigade commanders.
+He walked for an hour with
+half a dozen lightly wounded
+Scots, rode for another hour on
+a big cat-truck loaded with casualties
+of six regiments and four
+races, and finally reached Division
+Rear, where both the
+Division and Corps commanders
+took time to compliment him on
+the part his last hunter patrol
+had played in the now complete
+breakthrough. His replacement,
+an equine-faced Spaniard with
+an imposing display of fruit-salad,
+was there, too; he solemnly
+took off the bracelet a refugee
+Caucasian goldsmith had made
+for his predecessor's predecessor
+and gave it to the new commander
+of what had formerly been
+Benson's Butchers. As he had
+expected, there was also another
+medal waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>A medical check at Task Force
+Center got him a warning; his
+last patrol had brought him dangerously
+close to the edge of
+combat fatigue. Remembering
+the incidents of the tank and the
+unaccountably fast watch, and
+the mysterious box and envelope
+which he had found in his coat
+pocket, he agreed, saying nothing
+about the questions that
+were puzzling him. The Psychological
+Department was never
+too busy to refuse another case;
+they hunted patients gleefully,
+each psych-shark seeking in
+every one proof of his own particular
+theories. It was with relief
+that he watched them fill out
+the red tag which gave him a
+priority on jet transports for
+home.</p>
+
+<p>Ankara to Alexandria, Alexandria
+to Dakar, Dakar to Bel&eacute;m,
+Bel&eacute;m to the shattered skyline of
+New York, the "hurry-and-wait"
+procedures at Fort Carlisle,
+and, after the usual separation
+promotion, Major Fred
+Benson, late of Benson's Butchers,
+was back at teaching high
+school juniors the difference between
+H<sub>2</sub>O and H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There were two high schools
+in the city: McKinley High, on
+the east side, and Dwight
+Eisenhower High, on the west.
+A few blocks from McKinley was
+the Tulip Tavern, where the
+Eisenhower teachers came in
+the late afternoons; the McKinley
+faculty crossed town to do
+their after-school drinking on
+the west side. When Benson entered
+the Tulip Tavern, on a
+warm September afternoon, he
+found Bill Myers, the school
+psychologist, at one of the tables,
+smoking his pipe, checking over
+a stack of aptitude test forms,
+and drinking beer. He got a
+highball at the bar and carried
+it over to Bill's table.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, hi, Fred." The psychologist
+separated the finished from
+the unfinished work with a
+sheet of yellow paper and crammed
+the whole business into his
+brief case. "I was hoping somebody'd
+show up...."</p>
+
+<p>Benson lit a cigarette, sipped
+his highball. They talked at random&mdash;school-talk;
+the progress
+of the war, now in its twelfth
+year; personal reminiscences, of
+the Turkish Theater where Benson
+had served, and the Madras
+Beachhead, where Myers had
+been.</p>
+
+<p>"Bring home any souvenirs?"
+Myers asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Not much. Couple of pistols,
+couple of knives, some pictures.
+I don't remember what all;
+haven't gotten around to unpacking
+them, yet.... I have a
+sixth of rye and some beer, at
+my rooms. Let's go around and
+see what I did bring home."</p>
+
+<p>They finished their drinks and
+went out.</p>
+
+<p>"What the devil's that?" Myers
+said, pointing to the cardboard
+box with the envelope
+taped to it, when Benson lifted
+it out of the gray-green locker.</p>
+
+<p>"Bill, I don't know," Benson
+said. "I found it in the pocket of
+my coat, on my way back from
+my last hunter patrol.... I've
+never told anybody about this,
+before."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the damnedest story
+I've ever heard, and in my racket
+you hear some honeys," Myers
+said, when he had finished. "You
+couldn't have picked that thing
+up in some other way, deliberately
+forgotten the circumstances,
+and fabricated this story
+about the tank and the grenade
+and the discrepancy in your
+watch subconsciously as an explanation?"</p>
+
+<p>"My subconscious is a better
+liar than that," Benson replied.
+"It would have cobbled up some
+kind of a story that would stand
+up. This business...."</p>
+
+<p>"Top Secret! For the Guide
+Only!" Myers frowned. "That
+isn't one of our marks, and if it
+were Soviet, it'd be tri-lingual,
+Russian, Hindi and Chinese."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, let's see what's in it. I
+want this thing cleared up. I've
+been having some of the nastiest
+dreams, lately...."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, be careful; it may be
+booby-trapped," Myers said urgently.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry; I will."</p>
+
+<p>He used a knife to slice the
+envelope open without untaping
+it from the box, and exposed five
+sheets of typewritten <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: Hyphen introduced to conform to majority usage in text.">onion-skin</ins>
+paper. There was no letterhead,
+no salutation or address-line.
+Just a mass of chemical formulae,
+and a concise report on
+tests. It seemed to be a report
+on an improved syrup for a carbonated
+soft-drink. There were
+a few cryptic cautionary references
+to heightened physico-psychological
+effects.</p>
+
+<p>The box was opened with the
+same caution, but it proved as
+innocent of dangers as the envelope.
+It contained only a half-liter
+bottle, wax-sealed, containing
+a dark reddish-brown syrup.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a lot of this stuff I
+don't dig," Benson said, tapping
+the sheets of onion-skin. "I don't
+even scratch the surface of this
+rigamarole about The Guide.
+I'm going to get to work on this
+sample in the lab, at school,
+though. Maybe we have something,
+here."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At eight-thirty the next evening,
+after four and a half hours
+work, he stopped to check what
+he had found out.</p>
+
+<p>The school's X-ray, an excellent
+one, had given him a complete
+picture of the molecular
+structure of the syrup. There
+were a couple of long-chain
+molecules that he could only believe
+after two re-examinations
+and a careful check of the machine,
+but with the help of the
+notes he could deduce how they
+had been put together. They
+would be the Ingredient Alpha
+and Ingredient Beta referred to
+in the notes.</p>
+
+<p>The components of the syrup
+were all simple and easily procurable
+with these two exceptions,
+as were the basic components
+from which these were
+made.</p>
+
+<p>The mechanical guinea-pig
+demonstrated that the syrup contained
+nothing harmful to human
+tissue.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there were the
+warnings about heightened psycho-physiological
+effects....</p>
+
+<p>He stuck a poison-label on the
+bottle, locked it up, and went
+home. The next day, he and Bill
+Myers got a bottle of carbonated
+water and mixed themselves a
+couple of drinks of it. It was delicious&mdash;sweet,
+dry, tart, sour,
+all of these in alternating waves
+of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"We do have something, Bill,"
+he said. "We have something
+that's going to give our income-tax
+experts headaches."</p>
+
+<p>"You have," Myers corrected.
+"Where do you start fitting me
+into it?"</p>
+
+<p>"We're a good team, Bill. I'm
+a chemist, but I don't know a
+thing about people. You're a psychologist.
+A real one; not one of
+these night-school boys. A juvenile psychologist,
+too. And what
+age-group spends the most
+money in this country for soft-drinks?"</p>
+
+<p>Knowing the names of the
+syrup's ingredients, and what
+their molecular structure was
+like, was only the beginning.
+Gallon after gallon of the School
+Board's chemicals went down the
+laboratory sink; Fred Benson
+and Bill Myers almost lived in
+the fourth floor lab. Once or
+twice there were head-shaking
+warnings from the principal
+about the dangers of over-work.
+The watchmen, at all hours,
+would hear the occasional twanging
+of Benson's guitar in the
+laboratory, and know that he had
+come to a dead end on something
+and was trying to think. Football
+season came and went; basketball
+season; the inevitable
+riot between McKinley and
+Eisenhower rooters; the Spring
+concerts. The term-end exams
+were only a month away when
+Benson and Myers finally did it,
+and stood solemnly, each with a
+beaker in either hand and took
+alternate sips of the original and
+the drink mixed from the syrup
+they had made.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit of difference,
+Fred," Myers said. "We have
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>Benson picked up the guitar
+and began plunking on it.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey!" Myers exclaimed.
+"Have you been finding time to
+take lessons on that thing? I
+never heard you play as well as
+that!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>They decided to go into business
+in St. Louis. It was centrally
+located, and, being behind
+more concentric circles of radar
+and counter-rocket defenses, it
+was in better shape than any
+other city in the country and
+most likely to stay that way.
+Getting started wasn't hard; the
+first banker who tasted the new
+drink-named Evri-Flave, at
+Myers' suggestion&mdash;couldn't dig
+up the necessary money fast
+enough. Evri-Flave hit the market
+with a bang and became an
+instant success; soon the rainbow-tinted
+vending machines
+were everywhere, dispensing the
+slender, slightly flattened bottles
+and devouring quarters
+voraciously. In spite of high
+taxes and the difficulties of doing
+business in a consumers'
+economy upon which a war-time
+economy had been superimposed,
+both Myers and Benson were
+rapidly becoming wealthy. The
+gregarious Myers installed himself
+in a luxurious apartment in
+the city; Benson bought a large
+tract of land down the river toward
+Carondelet and started
+building a home and landscaping
+the grounds.</p>
+
+<p>The dreams began bothering
+him again, now that the urgency
+of getting Evri-Flave, Inc.,
+started had eased. They were not
+dreams of the men he had killed
+in battle, or, except for one
+about a huge, hot-smelling tank
+with a red star on the turret,
+about the war. Generally, they
+were about a strange, beautiful,
+office-room, in which a young
+man in uniform killed an older
+man in a plum-brown coat and
+a vivid blue neck-scarf. Sometimes
+Benson identified himself
+with the killer; sometimes with
+the old man who was killed.</p>
+
+<p>He talked to Myers about
+these dreams, but beyond generalities
+about delayed effects of
+combat fatigue and vague advice
+to relax, the psychologist,
+now head of Sales &amp; Promotion
+of Evri-Flave, Inc., could give
+him no help.</p>
+
+<p>The war ended three years
+after the new company was
+launched. There was a momentary
+faltering of the economy,
+and then the work of reconstruction
+was crying hungrily
+for all the labor and capital that
+had been idled by the end of destruction,
+and more. There was
+a new flood-tide of prosperity,
+and Evri-Flave rode the crest.
+The estate at Carondelet was
+finished&mdash;a beautiful place, surrounded
+with gardens, fragrant
+with flowers, full of the songs
+of birds and soft music from
+concealed record-players. It
+made him forget the ugliness of
+the war, and kept the dreams
+from returning so frequently.
+All the world ought to be like
+that, he thought; beautiful and
+quiet and peaceful. People surrounded
+with such beauty couldn't
+think about war.</p>
+
+<p>All the world could be like
+that, if only....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The UN chose St. Louis for
+its new headquarters&mdash;many of
+its offices had been moved there
+after the second and most destructive
+bombing of New York&mdash;and
+when the city by the
+Mississippi began growing into
+a real World Capital, the flow of
+money into it almost squared
+overnight. Benson began to take
+an active part in politics in the
+new World Sovereignty party.
+He did not, however, allow his
+political activities to distract
+him from the work of expanding
+the company to which he owed
+his wealth and position. There
+were always things to worry
+about.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," Myers said to
+him, one evening, as they sat
+over a bottle of rye in the psychologist's
+apartment. "I could
+make almost as much money
+practicing as a psychiatrist,
+these days. The whole world
+seems to be going pure, unadulterated
+nuts! That affair in
+Munich, for instance."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." Benson grimaced as he
+thought of the affair in Munich&mdash;a
+Wagnerian concert which
+had terminated in an insane orgy
+of mass suicide. "Just a week
+after we started our free-sample
+campaign in South Germany,
+too...."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped short, downing his
+drink and coughing over it.</p>
+
+<p>"Bill! You remember those
+sheets of onion-skin in that envelope?"</p>
+
+<p>"The foundation of our fortunes;
+I wonder where you really
+did get that.... Fred!" His
+eyes widened in horror. "That
+caution about 'heightened psycho-physiological
+effects,' that
+we were never able to understand!"</p>
+
+<p>Benson nodded grimly. "And
+think of all the crazy cases of
+mass-hysteria&mdash;that baseball-game
+riot in Baltimore; the
+time everybody started tearing
+off each others' clothes in Milwaukee;
+the sex-orgy in New
+Orleans. And the sharp uptrend
+in individual psycho-neurotic
+and psychotic behavior. All in
+connection with music, too, and
+all after Evri-Flave got on the
+market."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll have to stop it; pull
+Evri-Flave off the market," Myers
+said. "We can't be responsible
+for letting this go on."</p>
+
+<p>"We can't stop, either. There's
+at least a two months' supply out
+in the hands of jobbers and distributors
+over whom we have no
+control. And we have all these
+contractual obligations, to buy
+the entire output of the companies
+that make the syrup for
+us; if we stop buying, they can
+sell it in competition with us, as
+long as they don't infringe our
+trade-name. And we can't prevent
+pirating. You know how
+easily we were able to duplicate
+that sample I brought back from
+Turkey. Why, our legal department's
+kept busy all the time
+prosecuting unlicensed manufacturers
+as it is."</p>
+
+<p>"We've got to do something,
+Fred!" There was almost a whiff
+of hysteria in Myers' voice.</p>
+
+<p>"We will. We'll start, first
+thing tomorrow, on a series of
+tests&mdash;just you and I, like the
+old times at Eisenhower High.
+First, we want to be sure that
+Evri-Flave really is responsible.
+It'd be a hell of a thing if we
+started a public panic against
+our own product for nothing.
+And then...."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It took just two weeks, in a
+soundproofed and guarded laboratory
+on Benson's Carondelet
+estate, to convict their delicious
+drink of responsibility for that
+Munich State Opera House Horror
+and everything else. Reports
+from confidential investigators
+in Munich confirmed this. It had,
+of course, been impossible to interview
+the two thousand men
+and women who had turned the
+Opera House into a pyre for
+their own immolation, but none
+of the tiny minority who had
+kept their sanity and saved
+their lives had tasted Evri-Flave.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It took another month to find
+out exactly how the stuff affected
+the human nervous system,
+and they almost wrecked their
+own nervous systems in the
+process. The real villain, they
+discovered, was the incredible-looking
+long-chain compound alluded
+to in the original notes as
+Ingredient Beta; its principal
+physiological effect was to greatly
+increase the sensitivity of the
+aural nerves. Not only was the
+hearing range widened&mdash;after
+consuming thirty CC of Beta,
+they could hear the sound of an
+ultrasonic dog-whistle quite
+plainly&mdash;but the very quality of
+all audible sounds was curiously
+enhanced and altered. Myers, the
+psychologist, who was also well
+grounded in neurology, explained
+how the chemical produced this
+effect; it meant about as much
+to Benson as some of his chemistry
+did to Bill Myers. There
+was also a secondary, purely
+psychological, effect. Certain musical
+chords had definite effects
+on the emotions of the hearer,
+and the subject, beside being directly
+influenced by the music,
+was rendered extremely open to
+verbal suggestions accompanied
+by a suitable musical background.</p>
+
+<p>Benson transferred the final
+results of this stage of the research
+to the black notebook and
+burned the scratch-sheets.</p>
+
+<p>"That's how it happened,
+then," he said. "The Munich
+thing was the result of all that
+G&ouml;tterd&auml;mmerung music. There
+was a band at the baseball park
+in Baltimore. The New Orleans
+Orgy started while a local radio
+station was broadcasting some
+of this new dance-music. Look,
+these tone-clusters, here, have a
+definite sex-excitation effect.
+This series of six chords, which
+occur in some of the Wagnerian
+stuff; effect, a combined feeling
+of godlike isolation and despair.
+And these consecutive fifths&mdash;a
+sense of danger, anger, combativeness.
+You know, we could
+work out a whole range of emotional
+stimuli to fit the effects of
+Ingredient Beta...."</p>
+
+<p>"We don't want to," Myers
+said. "We want to work out a
+substitute for Beta that will
+keep the flavor of the drink without
+the psycho-physiological effects."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sure. I have some of the
+boys at the plant lab working on
+that. Gave them a lot of syrup
+without Beta, and told them to
+work out cheap additives to restore
+the regular Evri-Flave
+taste; told them it was an effort
+to find a cheap substitute for an
+expensive ingredient. But look,
+Bill. You and I both see, for instance,
+that a powerful world-wide
+supra-national sovereignty
+is the only guarantee of world
+peace. If we could use something
+like this to help overcome antiquated
+verbal prejudices and
+nationalistic emotional attachments...."</p>
+
+<p>"No!" Myers said. "I won't
+ever consent to anything like
+that, Fred! Not even in a cause
+like world peace; use a thing like
+this for a good, almost holy,
+cause now, and tomorrow we, or
+those who would come after us,
+would be using it to create a
+tyranny. You know what year
+this is, Bill?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, 1984," Benson said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. You remember that old
+political novel of Orwell's, written
+about forty years ago? Well,
+that's a picture of the kind of
+world you'd have, eventually, no
+matter what kind of a world you
+started out to make. Fred, don't
+ever think of using this stuff for
+a purpose like that. If you try it,
+I'll fight you with every resource
+I have."</p>
+
+<p>There was a fanatical, almost
+murderous, look in Bill Myers'
+eyes. Benson put the notebook in
+his pocket, then laughed and
+threw up his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!" he
+cried. "You're right, of course,
+Bill. We can't even trust the UN
+with a thing like this. It makes
+the H-bomb look like a stone
+hatchet.... Well, I'll call Grant,
+at the plant lab, and see how his
+boys are coming along with the
+substitute; as soon as we get it,
+we can put out a confidential letter
+to all our distributors and
+syrup-manufacturers...."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>He walked alone in the garden
+at Carondelet, watching the
+color fade out of the sky and the
+twilight seep in among the clipped
+yews. All the world could be
+like this garden, a place of peace
+and beauty and quiet, if only....
+All the world <i>would</i> be a beautiful
+and peaceful garden, in his
+own lifetime! He had the means
+of making it so!</p>
+
+<p>Three weeks later, he murdered
+his friend and partner, Bill
+Myers. It was a suicide; nobody
+but Fred Benson knew that he
+had taken fifty CC of pure Ingredient
+Beta in a couple of
+cocktails while listening to the
+queer phonograph record that he
+had played half an hour before
+blowing his brains out.</p>
+
+<p>The decision had cost Benson
+a battle with his conscience from
+which he had emerged the sole
+survivor. The conscience was
+buried along with Bill Myers,
+and all that remained was a purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Evri-Flave stayed on the market
+unaltered. The night before
+the national election, the World
+Sovereignty party distributed
+thousands of gallons of Evri-Flave;
+their speakers, on every
+radio and television network,
+were backgrounded by soft music.
+The next day, when the vote
+was counted, it was found that
+the American Nationalists had
+carried a few backwoods precincts
+in the Rockies and the
+Southern Appalachians and one
+county in Alaska, where there
+had been no distribution of Evri-Flave.</p>
+
+<p>The dreams came back more
+often, now that Bill Myers was
+gone. Benson was only beginning
+to realize what a large fact in
+his life the companionship of
+the young psychologist had been.
+Well, a world of peace and
+beauty was an omelet worth the
+breaking of many eggs....</p>
+
+<p>He purchased another great
+tract of land near the city, and
+donated it to the UN for their
+new headquarters buildings; the
+same architects and landscapists
+who had created the estate at
+Carondelet were put to work on
+it. In the middle of what was to
+become World City, they erected
+a small home for Fred Benson.
+Benson was often invited to address
+the delegates to the UN;
+always, there was soft piped-in
+music behind his words. He saw
+to it that Evri-Flave was available
+free to all UN personnel.
+The Senate of the United States
+elected him as perpetual U. S.
+delegate-in-chief to the UN; not
+long after, the Security Council
+elected him their perpetual chairman.</p>
+
+<p>In keeping with his new dignities,
+and to ameliorate his youthful
+appearance, he grew a mustache
+and, eventually, a small
+beard. The black notebook in
+which he kept the records of his
+experiments was always with
+him; page after page was filled
+with notes. Experiments in sonics,
+like the one which had produced
+the ultrasonic stun-gun
+which rendered <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original reads 'lethel'.">lethal</ins> weapons
+unnecessary for police and defense
+purposes, or the new musical
+combinations with which he
+was able to play upon every emotion
+and instinct.</p>
+
+<p>But he still dreamed, the
+same recurring dream of the
+young soldier and the old man
+in the office. By now, he was consistently
+identifying himself
+with the latter. He took to carrying
+one of the thick-barrelled
+stun-pistols always, now. Alone,
+he practiced constantly with it,
+drawing, breaking soap-bubbles
+with the concentrated sound-waves
+it projected. It was silly,
+perhaps, but it helped him in his
+dreams. Now, the old man with
+whom he identified himself
+would draw a stun-pistol, occasionally,
+to defend himself.</p>
+
+<p>The years drained one by one
+through the hour-glass of Time.
+Year after year, the world grew
+more peaceful, more beautiful.
+There were no more incidents
+like the mass-suicide of Munich
+or the mass-perversions of New
+Orleans; the playing and even
+the composing of music was
+strictly controlled&mdash;no dangerous
+notes or chords could be played
+in a world drenched with Ingredient
+Beta. Steadily the idea
+grew that peace and beauty were
+supremely good, that violence
+and ugliness were supremely evil.
+Even competitive sports which
+simulated violence; even children
+born ugly and misshapen....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>He finished the breakfast
+which he had prepared for himself&mdash;he
+trusted no food that
+another had touched&mdash;and knotted
+the vivid blue scarf about his
+neck before slipping into the
+loose coat of glossy plum-brown,
+then checked the stun-pistol and
+pocketed the black notebook, its
+plastileather cover glossy from
+long use. He stood in front of
+the mirror, brushing his beard,
+now snow-white. Two years, now,
+and he would be eighty&mdash;had he
+been anyone but The Guide, he
+would have long ago retired to
+the absolute peace and repose of
+one of the Elders' Havens. Peace
+and repose, however, were not
+for The Guide; it would take
+another twenty years to finish
+his task of remaking the world,
+and he would need every day of
+it that his medical staff could
+borrow or steal for him. He
+made an eye-baffling practice
+draw with the stun-pistol, then
+holstered it and started down
+the spiral stairway to the office
+below.</p>
+
+<p>There was the usual mass of
+papers on his desk. A corps of
+secretaries had screened out
+everything but what required
+his own personal and immediate
+attention, but the business of
+guiding a world could only be
+reduced to a certain point. On
+top was the digest of the world's
+news for the past twenty-four
+hours, and below that was the
+agenda for the afternoon's meeting
+of the Council. He laid both
+in front of him, reading over the
+former and occasionally making
+a note on the latter. Once his
+glance strayed to the cardboard
+box in front of him, with the
+envelope taped to it&mdash;the latest
+improvement on the Evri-Flave
+syrup, with the report from his
+own chemists, all conditioned to
+obedience, loyalty and secrecy. If
+they thought he was going to
+try that damned stuff on himself....</p>
+
+<p>There was a sudden gleam of
+light in the middle of the room,
+in front of his desk. No, a mist,
+through which a blue light seemed
+to shine. The stun-pistol was
+in his hand&mdash;his instinctive reaction
+to anything unusual&mdash;and
+pointed into the shining mist
+when it vanished and a man appeared
+in front of him; a man
+in the baggy green combat-uniform
+that he himself had worn
+fifty years before; a man with
+a heavy automatic pistol in his
+hand. The gun was pointed directly
+at him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The Guide aimed quickly and
+pressed the trigger of the ultrasonic
+stunner. The pistol dropped
+soundlessly on the thick-piled
+rug; the man in uniform slumped
+in an inert heap. The Guide
+sprang to his feet and rounded
+the desk, crossing to and bending
+over the intruder. Why, this
+was the dream that had plagued
+him through the years. But it
+was ending differently. The
+young man&mdash;his face was startlingly
+familiar, somehow&mdash;was
+not killing the old man. Those
+years of practice with the stun-pistol....</p>
+
+<p>He stooped and picked the automatic
+up. The young man was
+unconscious, and The Guide had
+his pistol, now. He slipped the
+automatic into his pocket and
+straightened beside his inert
+would-be slayer.</p>
+
+<p>A shimmering globe of blue
+mist appeared around them,
+brightened to a dazzle, and
+dimmed again to a colored mist
+before it vanished, and when it
+cleared away, he was standing
+beside the man in uniform, in
+the sandy bed of a dry stream
+at the mouth of a little ravine,
+and directly in front of him,
+looming above him, was a thing
+that had not been seen in the
+world for close to half a century&mdash;a
+big, hot-smelling tank with
+a red star on its turret.</p>
+
+<p>He might have screamed&mdash;the
+din of its treads and engines
+deafened him&mdash;and, in panic, he
+turned and ran, his old legs racing,
+his old heart pumping
+madly. The noise of the tank increased
+as machine guns joined
+the uproar. He felt the first bullet
+strike him, just above the
+hips&mdash;no pain; just a tremendous
+impact. He might have felt
+the second bullet, too, as the
+ground tilted and rushed up at
+his face. Then he was diving
+into a tunnel of blackness that
+had no end....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Captain Fred Benson, of Benson's
+Butchers, had been jerked
+back into consciousness when
+the field began to build around
+him. He was struggling to rise,
+fumbling the grenade out of his
+pocket, when it collapsed. Sure
+enough, right in front of him,
+so close that he could smell the
+very heat of it, was the big tank
+with the red star on its turret.
+He cursed the sextet of sanctimonious
+double-crossers eight
+thousand miles and fifty years
+away in space-time. The machine
+guns had stopped&mdash;probably because
+they couldn't be depressed
+far enough to aim at him, now;
+that was a notorious fault of
+some of the newer Pan-Soviet
+tanks. He had the bomb out of
+his pocket, when the machine
+guns began firing again, this
+time at something on his left.
+Wondering what had created the
+diversion, he rocked back on his
+heels, pressed the button, and
+heaved, closing his eyes. As the
+thing left his fingers, he knew
+that he had thrown too hard. His
+muscles, accustomed to the heavier
+cast-iron grenades, had betrayed
+him. For a moment, he
+was closer to despair than at any
+other time in the whole phantasmagoric
+adventure. Then he was
+hit, with physical force, by a
+wave of almost solid heat. It
+didn't smell like the heat of the
+tank's engines; it smelled like
+molten metal, with undertones of
+burned flesh. Immediately, there
+was a multiple explosion that
+threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition
+went up. There were
+no screams. It was too fast for
+that. He opened his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The turret and top armor of
+the tank had vanished. The two
+massive treads had been toppled
+over, one to either side. The
+body had collapsed between
+them, and it was running sticky
+trickles of molten metal. He
+blinked, rubbed his eyes on the
+back of his hand, and looked
+again. Of all the many blasted
+and burned-out tanks, Soviet
+and UN, that he had seen, this
+was the most completely wrecked
+thing in his experience. And he'd
+done that with one grenade....</p>
+
+<p>Remembering the curious
+manner in which, at the last, the
+tank had begun firing at something
+to the side, he looked
+around, to see the crumpled body
+in the pale violet-gray trousers
+and the plum-brown coat. Finding
+his carbine and reloading it,
+he went over to the dead man,
+turning the body over. He was
+an old man, with a white mustache
+and a small white beard&mdash;why,
+if the mustache were
+smaller and there were no beard,
+he would pass for Benson's own
+father, who had died in 1962.
+The clothes weren't Turkish or
+Armenian or Persian, or anything
+one would expect in this
+country.</p>
+
+<p>The old man had a pistol in
+his coat pocket, and Benson pulled
+it out and looked at it, then
+did a double-take and grabbed
+for his own holster, to find it
+empty. The pistol was his own
+9.5 Colt automatic. He looked at
+the dead man, with the white
+beard and the vivid blue neck-scarf,
+and he was sure that he
+had never seen him before. He'd
+had that pistol when he'd come
+down the ravine....</p>
+
+<p>There was another pistol under
+the dead man's coat, in a
+shoulder-holster; a queer thing
+with a thick round barrel, like
+an old percussion pepper-box,
+and a diaphragm instead of a
+muzzle. Probably projected ultrasonic
+waves. He holstered his
+own Colt and pocketed the unknown
+weapon. There was a
+black plastileather-bound notebook.
+It was full of notes. Chemical
+formulae, yes, and some stuff
+on sonics; that tied in with the
+queer pistol. He pocketed that.
+He'd look both over, when he had
+time and privacy, two scarce
+commodities in the Army....</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At that moment, there was a
+sudden rushing overhead, and an
+instant later, the barrage began
+falling beyond the crest of the
+ridge. He looked at his watch,
+blinked, and looked again. That
+barrage was due at 0550; according
+to his watch, it was 0726.
+That was another mystery, to go
+with the question of who the
+dead man was, where he had
+come from, and how he'd gotten
+hold of Benson's pistol. Yes, and
+how that tank had gotten blown
+up. Benson was sure he had used
+his last grenade back at the supply-dump.</p>
+
+<p>The hell with it; he'd worry
+about all that later. The attack
+was due any minute, now, and
+there would be fleeing Commies
+coming up the valley ahead, of
+the UN advance. He'd better get
+himself placed before they started
+coming in on him.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped thinking about the
+multiple mystery, a solution to
+which seemed to dance maddeningly
+just out of his mental
+reach, and found himself a place
+among the rocks to wait, and
+while he waited, he looked over
+the plastileather-bound notebook.
+In civil life, he had been a
+high school chemistry teacher,
+but the stuff in this book was
+utterly new to him. Some of it
+he could understand readily
+enough; the rest of it he could
+dig out for himself. Stuff about
+some kind of a carbonated soft-drink,
+and about a couple of
+unbelievable-looking long-chain
+molecules....</p>
+
+<p>After a while, fugitive Communists
+began coming up the
+valley to make their stand.</p>
+
+<p>Benson put away the notebook,
+picked up his carbine, and
+cuddled the stock to his cheek....</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+<hr style='width: 100%;' />
+
+<div class="bbox">
+<h3>Transcriber's Note</h3>
+<ul><li>One "onionskin" was converted to "onion-skin" to conform
+with the majority usage in the text.</li>
+<li>"rebuilds" and "re-builds" were left alone as there was no
+predominant usage</li>
+<li>The following typos were corrected:
+<ul><li>benificence&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;beneficence</li>
+<li>lethel&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;lethal</li>
+<li>"See&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;See</li>
+<li>tyranical&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;tyrannical</li></ul></li></ul>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hunter Patrol, by 
+Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Hunter Patrol, by Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hunter Patrol
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2006 [EBook #18641]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTER PATROL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                                    |
+|                         Transcriber's Note                         |
+|                                                                    |
+| This etext was produced from Amazing Stories May 1959. There is no |
+|    evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.    |
+|                                                                    |
++--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+HUNTER PATROL
+
+By H. BEAM PIPER and JOHN J. McGUIRE
+
+     +Many men have dreamed of world peace, but none have been able to
+     achieve it. If one man did have that power, could mankind afford to
+     pay the price?+
+
+
+At the crest of the ridge, Benson stopped for an instant, glancing first
+at his wrist-watch and then back over his shoulder. It was 0539; the
+barrage was due in eleven minutes, at the spot where he was now
+standing. Behind, on the long northeast slope, he could see the columns
+of black oil smoke rising from what had been the Pan-Soviet advance
+supply dump. There was a great deal of firing going on, back there; he
+wondered if the Commies had managed to corner a few of his men, after
+the patrol had accomplished its mission and scattered, or if a couple of
+Communist units were shooting each other up in mutual mistaken identity.
+The result would be about the same in either case--reserve units would
+be disorganized, and some men would have been pulled back from the front
+line. His dozen-odd UN regulars and Turkish partisans had done their
+best to simulate a paratroop attack in force. At least, his job was
+done; now to execute that classic infantry maneuver described as, "Let's
+get the hell outa here." This was his last patrol before rotation home.
+He didn't want anything unfortunate to happen.
+
+There was a little ravine to the left; the stream which had cut it in
+the steep southern slope of the ridge would be dry at this time of year,
+and he could make better time, and find protection in it from any chance
+shots when the interdictory barrage started. He hurried toward it and
+followed it down to the valley that would lead toward the front--the
+thinly-held section of the Communist lines, and the UN lines beyond,
+where fresh troops were waiting to jump from their holes and begin the
+attack.
+
+There was something wrong about this ravine, though. At first, it was
+only a vague presentiment, growing stronger as he followed the dry gully
+down to the valley below. Something he had smelled, or heard, or seen,
+without conscious recognition. Then, in the dry sand where the ravine
+debouched into the valley, he saw faint tank-tracks--only one pair.
+There was something wrong about the vines that mantled one side of the
+ravine, too....
+
+An instant later, he was diving to the right, breaking his fall with the
+butt of his auto-carbine, rolling rapidly toward the cover of a rock,
+and as he did so, the thinking part of his mind recognized what was
+wrong. The tank-tracks had ended against the vine-grown side of the
+ravine, what he had smelled had been lubricating oil and petrol, and the
+leaves on some of the vines hung upside down.
+
+Almost at once, from behind the vines, a tank's machine guns snarled at
+him, clipping the place where he had been standing, then shifting to
+rage against the sheltering rock. With a sudden motor-roar, the muzzle
+of a long tank-gun pushed out through the vines, and then the low body
+of a tank with a red star on the turret came rumbling out of the
+camouflaged bay. The machine guns kept him pinned behind the rock; the
+tank swerved ever so slightly so that its wide left tread was aimed
+directly at him, then picked up speed. Aren't even going to waste a
+shell on me, he thought.
+
+Futilely, he let go a clip from his carbine, trying to hit one of the
+vision-slits; then rolled to one side, dropped out the clip, slapped in
+another. There was a shimmering blue mist around him. If he only hadn't
+used his last grenade, back there at the supply-dump....
+
+The strange blue mist became a flickering radiance that ran through
+all the colors of the spectrum and became an utter, impenetrable
+blackness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were voices in the blackness, and a softness under him, but under
+his back, when he had been lying on his stomach, as though he were now
+on a comfortable bed. They got me alive, he thought; now comes the
+brainwashing!
+
+He cracked one eye open imperceptibly. Lights, white and glaring, from a
+ceiling far above; walls as white as the lights. Without moving his
+head, he opened both eyes and shifted them from right to left. Vaguely,
+he could see people and, behind them, machines so simply designed that
+their functions were unguessable. He sat up and looked around groggily.
+The people, their costumes--definitely not Pan-Soviet uniforms--and the
+room and its machines, told him nothing. The hardness under his right
+hip was a welcome surprise; they hadn't taken his pistol from him!
+Feigning even more puzzlement and weakness, he clutched his knees with
+his elbows and leaned his head forward on them, trying to collect his
+thoughts.
+
+"We shall have to give up, Gregory," a voice trembled with
+disappointment.
+
+"Why, Anthony?" The new voice was deeper, more aggressive.
+
+"Look. Another typical reaction; retreat to the foetus."
+
+Footsteps approached. Another voice, discouragement heavily weighting
+each syllable: "You're right. He's like all the others. We'll have to
+send him back."
+
+"And look for no more?" The voice he recognized as Anthony faltered
+between question and statement.
+
+A babel of voices, in dispute; then, clearly, the voice Benson had come
+to label as Gregory, cut in:
+
+"I will never give up!"
+
+He raised his head; there was something in the timbre of that voice
+reminding him of his own feelings in the dark days when the UN had
+everywhere been reeling back under the Pan-Soviet hammer-blows.
+
+"Anthony!" Gregory's voice again; Benson saw the speaker; short, stocky,
+gray-haired, stubborn lines about the mouth. The face of a man chasing
+an illusive but not uncapturable dream.
+
+"That means nothing." A tall thin man, too lean for the tunic-like
+garment he wore, was shaking his head.
+
+Deliberately, trying to remember his college courses in psychology, he
+forced himself to accept, and to assess, what he saw as reality. He was
+on a small table, like an operating table; the whole place looked like a
+medical lab or a clinic. He was still in uniform; his boots had soiled
+the white sheets with the dust of Armenia. He had all his equipment,
+including his pistol and combat-knife; his carbine was gone, however. He
+could feel the weight of his helmet on his head. The room still rocked
+and swayed a little, but the faces of the people were coming into focus.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He counted them, saying each number to himself: one, two, three, four,
+five men; one woman. He swung his feet over the edge of the table, being
+careful that it would be between him and the others when he rose, and
+began inching his right hand toward his right hip, using his left hand,
+on his brow, to misdirect attention.
+
+"I would classify his actions as arising from conscious effort at
+cortico-thalamic integration," the woman said, like an archaeologist who
+has just found a K-ration tin at the bottom of a neolithic
+kitchen-midden. She had the peculiarly young-old look of the spinster
+teachers with whom Benson had worked before going to the war.
+
+"I want to believe it, but I'm afraid to," another man for whom Benson
+had no name-association said. He was portly, gray-haired,
+arrogant-faced; he wore a short black jacket with a jewelled
+zipper-pull, and striped trousers.
+
+Benson cleared his throat. "Just who are you people?" he inquired. "And
+just where am I?"
+
+Anthony grabbed Gregory's hand and pumped it frantically.
+
+"I've dreamed of the day when I could say this!" he cried.
+"Congratulations, Gregory!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That touched off another bedlam, of joy, this time, instead of despair.
+Benson hid his amusement at the facility with which all of them were
+discovering in one another the courage, vision and stamina of true
+patriots and pioneers. He let it go on for a few moments, hoping to
+glean some clue. Finally, he interrupted.
+
+"I believe I asked a couple of questions," he said, using the voice he
+reserved for sergeants and second lieutenants. "I hate to break up this
+mutual admiration session, but I would appreciate some answers. This
+isn't anything like the situation I last remember...."
+
+"He remembers!" Gregory exclaimed. "That confirms your first derivation
+by symbolic logic, and it strengthens the validity of the second...."
+
+The schoolteacherish woman began jabbering excitedly; she ran through
+about a paragraph of what was pure gobbledegook to Benson, before the
+man with the arrogant face and the jewelled zipper-pull broke in on her.
+
+"Save that for later, Paula," he barked. "I'd be very much interested in
+your theories about why memories are unimpaired when you 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 just let me ask the
+questions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. For
+instance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me and
+brought me here? The Commies?"
+
+"No, the United Nations," Anthony told him. "At least, they were the
+least exhausted when both sides decided to quit."
+
+"Then what's this dictatorship.... The Guide? Extreme Rightist?"
+
+"Walter, you'd better tell him," Gregory said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We damn near lost the war," the man in the black jacket and striped
+trousers said, "but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc was
+broken up--India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, all
+the Satellite States. Most of them turned into little dictatorships,
+like the Latin American countries after the liberation from Spain, but
+they were personal, non-ideological, generally benevolent,
+dictatorships, the kind that can grow into democracies, if they're given
+time."
+
+"Capitalistic dictatorships, he means," the cadaverous man in the blue
+jacket explained.
+
+"Be quiet, Carl," Anthony told him. "Let's not confuse this with any
+class-struggle stuff."
+
+"Actually, the United Nations rules the world," Walter continued. "What
+goes on in the Ukraine or Latvia or Manchuria is about analogous to what
+went on under the old United States government in, let's say,
+Tammany-ruled New York. But here's the catch. The UN is ruled absolutely
+by one man."
+
+"How could that happen? In my time, the UN had its functions so
+subdivided and compartmented that it couldn't even run a war properly.
+Our army commanders were making war by systematic disobedience."
+
+"The charter was changed shortly after ... er, that is, after...."
+Walter was fumbling for words.
+
+"After my death." Benson finished politely. "Go on. Even with a changed
+charter, how did one man get all the powers into his hands?"
+
+"By sorcery!" black-coat-and-white-bands fairly shouted. "By the help of
+his master, Satan!"
+
+"You know, there are times when some such theory tempts me," Paula said.
+
+"He was a big moneybags," Carl said. "He bribed his way in. See, New
+York was bombed flat. Where the old UN buildings were, it's still hot.
+So The Guide donated a big tract of land outside St. Louis, built these
+buildings--we're in the basement of one of them, right now, if you want
+a good laugh--and before long, he had the whole organization eating out
+of his hand. They just voted him into power, and the world into
+slavery."
+
+Benson looked around at the others, who were nodding in varying degrees
+of agreement.
+
+"Substantially, that's it. He managed to convince everybody of his
+altruism, integrity and wisdom," Walter said. "It was almost
+blasphemous to say anything against him. I really don't understand how
+it happened...."
+
+"Well, what's he been doing with his power?" Benson asked. "Wise things,
+or stupid ones?"
+
+"I could be general, and say that he has deprived all of us of our
+political and other liberties. It is best to be specific," Anthony said.
+"Gregory?"
+
+"My own field--dimensional physics--hasn't been interfered with much,
+yet. It's different in other fields. For instance, all research in
+sonics has been arbitrarily stopped. So has a great deal of work in
+organic and synthetic chemistry. Psychology is a madhouse of ... what
+was the old word, licentiousness? No, lysenkoism. Medicine and
+surgery--well, there's a huge program of compulsory sterilization, and
+another one of eugenic marriage-control. And infants who don't conform
+to certain physical standards don't survive. Neither do people who have
+disfiguring accidents beyond the power of plastic surgery."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paula spoke next. "My field is child welfare. Well, I'm going to show
+you an audio-visual of an interesting ceremony in a Hindu village,
+derived from the ancient custom of the suttee. It is the Hindu method of
+conforming to The Guide's demand that only beautiful children be allowed
+to grow to maturity."
+
+The film was mercifully brief. Even in spite of the drums and gongs, and
+the chanting of the crowd, Benson found out how loudly a newborn infant
+can scream in a fire. The others looked as though they were going to be
+sick; he doubted if he looked much better.
+
+"Of course, we are a more practical and mechanical-minded people, here
+and in Europe," Paula added, holding down her gorge by main strength.
+"We have lethal-gas chambers that even Hitler would have envied."
+
+"I am a musician," Anthony said. "A composer. If Gregory thinks that the
+sciences are controlled, he should try to write even the simplest piece
+of music. The extent of censorship and control over all the arts, and
+especially music, is incredible." He coughed slightly. "And I have
+another motive, a more selfish one. I am approaching the compulsory
+retirement age; I will soon be invited to go to one of the Havens. Even
+though these Havens are located in the most barren places, they are
+beauty-spots, verdant beyond belief. It is of only passing interest
+that, while large numbers of the aged go there yearly, their populations
+remain constant, and, to judge from the quantities of supplies shipped
+to them, extremely small."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"They call me Samuel, in this organization," the man in the long black
+coat said. "Whoever gave me that alias must have chosen it because I am
+here in an effort to live up to it. Although I am ordained by no church,
+I fight for all of them. The plain fact is that this man we call The
+Guide is really the Antichrist!"
+
+"Well, I haven't quite so lofty a motive, but it's good enough to make
+me willing to finance this project," Walter said. "It's very simple. The
+Guide won't let people make money, and if they do, he taxes it away from
+them. And he has laws to prohibit inheritance; what little you can
+accumulate, you can't pass on to your children."
+
+"I put up a lot of the money, too, don't forget," Carl told him. "Or the
+Union did; I'm a poor man, myself." He was smoking an excellent cigar,
+for a poor man, and his clothes could have come from the same tailor as
+Walter's. "Look, we got a real Union--the Union of all unions. Every
+working man in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa belongs
+to it. And The Guide has us all hog-tied."
+
+"He won't let you strike," Benson chuckled.
+
+"That's right. And what can we do? Why, we can't even make our
+closed-shop contracts stick. And as far as getting anything like a
+pay-raise...."
+
+"Good thing. Another pay-raise in some of my companies would bankrupt
+them, the way The Guide has us under his thumb...." Walter began, but he
+was cut off.
+
+"Well! It seems as though this Guide has done some good, if he's made
+you two realize that you're both on the same side, and that what hurts
+one hurts both," Benson said. "When I shipped out for Turkey in '77,
+neither Labor nor Management had learned that." He looked from one to
+another of them. "The Guide must have a really good bodyguard, with all
+the enemies he's made."
+
+Gregory shook his head. "He lives virtually alone, in a very small house
+on the UN Capitol grounds. In fact, except for a small police-force,
+armed only with non-lethal stun-guns, your profession of arms is
+non-existent."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I've been guessing what you want me to do," Benson said. "You want this
+Guide bumped off. But why can't any of you do it? Or, if it's too risky,
+at least somebody from your own time? Why me?"
+
+"We can't. Everybody in the world today is conditioned against violence,
+especially the taking of human life," Anthony told him.
+
+"Now, wait a moment!" This time, he was using the voice he would have
+employed in chiding a couple of Anatolian peasant partisans who were
+field-stripping a machine gun the wrong way. "Those babies in that film
+you showed me weren't dying of old age...."
+
+"That is not violence," Paula said bitterly. "That is humane
+beneficence. Ugly people would be unhappy, and would make others
+unhappy, in a world where everybody else is beautiful."
+
+"And all these oppressive and tyrannical laws," Benson continued. "How
+does he enforce them, without violence, actual or threatened?"
+
+Samuel started to say something about the Power of the Evil One; Paula,
+ignoring him, said:
+
+"I really don't know; he just does it. Mass hypnotism of some sort. I
+know music has something to do with it, because there is always music,
+everywhere. This laboratory, for instance, was secretly soundproofed; we
+couldn't have worked here, otherwise."
+
+"All right. I can see that you'd need somebody from the past, preferably
+a soldier, whose conditioning has been in favor rather than against
+violence. I'm not the only one you snatched, I take it?"
+
+"No. We've been using that machine to pick up men from battlefields all
+over the world and all over history," Gregory said. "Until now, none of
+them could adjust.... Uggh!" He shuddered, looking even sicker than when
+the film was being shown.
+
+"He's thinking," Walter said, "about a French officer from Waterloo who
+blew out his brains with a pocket-pistol on that table, and an English
+archer from Agincourt who ran amok with a dagger in here, and a trooper
+of the Seventh Cavalry from the Custer Massacre."
+
+Gregory managed to overcome his revulsion. "You see, we were forced to
+take our subjects largely at random with regard to individual
+characteristics, mental attitudes, adaptability, et cetera." As long as
+he stuck to high order abstractions, he could control himself. "Aside
+from their professional lack of repugnance for violence, we took
+soldiers from battlefields because we could select men facing immediate
+death, whose removal from the past would not have any effect upon the
+casual chain of events affecting the present."
+
+A warning buzzer rasped in Benson's brain. He nodded, poker-faced.
+
+"I can see that," he agreed. "You wouldn't dare do anything to change
+the past. That was always one of the favorite paradoxes in time-travel
+fiction.... Well, I think I have the general picture. You have a
+dictator who is tyrannizing you; you want to get rid of him; you can't
+kill him yourselves. I'm opposed to dictators, myself; that--and the
+Selective Service law, of course--was why I was a soldier. I have no
+moral or psychological taboos against killing dictators, or anybody
+else. Suppose I cooperate with you; what's in it for me?"
+
+There was a long silence. Walter and Carl looked at one another
+inquiringly; the others dithered helplessly. It was Carl who answered.
+
+"Your return to your own time and place."
+
+"And if I don't cooperate with you?"
+
+"Guess when and where else we could send you," Walter said.
+
+Benson dropped his cigarette and tramped it.
+
+"Exactly the same time and place?" he asked.
+
+"Well, the structure of space-time demands...." Paula began.
+
+"The spatio-temporal displacement field is capable of identifying that
+spot--" Gregory pointed to a ten-foot circle in front of a bank of
+sleek-cabineted, dial-studded machines "--with any set of space-time
+coordinates in the universe. However, to avoid disruption of the
+structure of space-time, we must return you to approximately the same
+point in space-time."
+
+Benson nodded again, this time at the confirmation of his earlier
+suspicion. Well, while he was alive, he still had a chance.
+
+"All right; tell me exactly what you want me to do."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A third outbreak of bedlam, this time of relief and frantic explanation.
+
+"Shut up, all of you!" For so thin a man, Carl had an astonishing voice.
+"I worked this out, so let me tell it." He turned to Benson. "Maybe I'm
+tougher than the rest of them, or maybe I'm not as deeply conditioned.
+For one thing, I'm tone-deaf. Well, here's the way it is. Gregory can
+set the machine to function automatically. You stand where he shows you,
+press the button he shows you, and fifteen seconds later it'll take you
+forward in time five seconds and about a kilometer in space, to The
+Guide's office. He'll be at his desk now. You'll have forty-five seconds
+to do the job, from the time the field collapses around you till it
+rebuilds. Then you'll be taken back to your own time again. The whole
+thing's automatic."
+
+"Can do," Benson agreed. "How do I kill him?"
+
+"I'm getting sick!" Paula murmured weakly. Her face was whiter than her
+gown.
+
+"Take care of her, Samuel. Both of you'd better get out of here,"
+Gregory said.
+
+"The Lord of Hosts is my strength, He will.... Uggggh!" Samuel gasped.
+
+"Conditioning's getting him, too; we gotta be quick," Carl said. "Here.
+This is what you'll use." He handed Benson a two-inch globe of black
+plastic. "Take the damn thing, quick! Little button on the side; press
+it, and get it out of your hand fast...." He retched. "Limited-effect
+bomb; everything within two-meter circle burned to nothing; outside
+that, great but not unendurable heat. Shut your eyes when you throw it.
+Flash almost blinding." He dropped his cigar and turned almost green in
+the face. Walter had a drink poured and handed it to him. "Uggh! Thanks,
+Walter." He downed it.
+
+"Peculiar sort of thing for a non-violent people to manufacture," Benson
+said, looking at the bomb and then putting it in his jacket pocket.
+
+"It isn't a weapon. Industrial; we use it in mining. I used plenty of
+them, in Walter's iron mines."
+
+He nodded again. "Where do I stand, now?" he asked.
+
+"Right over here." Gregory placed him in front of a small panel with
+three buttons. "Press the middle one, and step back into the small red
+circle and stand perfectly still while the field builds up and
+collapses. Face that way."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Benson drew his pistol and checked it; magazine full, a round in the
+chamber, safety on.
+
+"Put that horrid thing out of sight!" Anthony gasped. "The ... the other
+thing ... is what you want to use."
+
+"The bomb won't be any good if some of his guards come in before the
+field re-builds," Benson said.
+
+"He has no guards. He lives absolutely alone. We told you...."
+
+"I know you did. You probably believed it, too. I don't. And by the way,
+you're sending me forward. What do you do about the fact that a
+time-jump seems to make me pass out?"
+
+"Here. Before you press the button, swallow it." Gregory gave him a
+small blue pill.
+
+"Well, I guess that's all there is," Gregory continued. "I hope...." His
+face twitched, and he dropped to the floor with a thud. Carl and Walter
+came forward, dragged him away from the machine.
+
+"Conditioning got him. Getting me, too," Walter said. "Hurry up, man!"
+
+Benson swallowed the pill, pressed the button and stepped back into the
+red circle, drawing his pistol and snapping off the safety. The blue
+mist closed in on him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This time, however, it did not thicken into blackness. It became
+luminous, brightening to a dazzle and dimming again to a colored mist,
+and then it cleared, while Benson stood at raise pistol, as though on a
+target range. He was facing a big desk at twenty feet, across a
+thick-piled blue rug. There was a man seated at the desk, a white-haired
+man with a mustache and a small beard, who wore a loose coat of some
+glossy plum-brown fabric, and a vividly blue neck-scarf.
+
+The pistol centered on the v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately,
+Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered,
+aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk,
+his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight
+seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen
+seconds, and put the muzzle to the top of the man's head, firing again
+and snapping on the safety. There had been something familiar about The
+Guide's face, but it was too late to check on that, now. There wasn't
+any face left; not even much head.
+
+A box, on the desk, caught Benson's eye, a cardboard box with an
+envelope, stamped _Top Secret! For the Guide Only!_ taped to it. He
+holstered his pistol and caught that up, stuffing it into his pocket, in
+obedience to an instinct to grab anything that looked like intelligence
+matter while in the enemy's country. Then he stepped back to the spot
+where the field had deposited him. He had ten seconds to spare; somebody
+was banging on a door when the blue mist began to gather around him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was crouching, the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his
+thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in
+front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the
+big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of
+sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years away
+in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because they
+couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a
+notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks--and he rocked
+back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As
+the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His
+muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades of his experience,
+had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any
+other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit, with
+physical violence, by a wave of almost solid heat. It didn't smell like
+the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten metal, with
+undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a multiple explosion
+that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went up. There were no
+screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.
+
+The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive
+treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had collapsed
+between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten metal. He
+blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked again. Of
+all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN, that he had
+seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his experience. And
+he'd done that with one grenade....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant
+later the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He looked
+at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at 0550;
+according to the watch, it was 0726. He was sure that, ten minutes ago,
+when he had looked at it, up there at the head of the ravine, it had
+been twenty minutes to six. He puzzled about that for a moment, and
+decided that he must have caught the stem on something and pulled it
+out, and then twisted it a little, setting the watch ahead. Then,
+somehow, the stem had gotten pushed back in, starting it at the new
+setting. That was a pretty far-fetched explanation, but it was the only
+one he could think of.
+
+But about this tank, now. He was positive that he could remember
+throwing a grenade.... Yet he'd used his last grenade back there at the
+supply dump. He saw his carbine, and picked it up. That silly blackout
+he'd had, for a second, there; he must have dropped it. Action was open,
+empty magazine on the ground where he'd dropped it. He wondered,
+stupidly, if one of his bullets couldn't have gone down the muzzle of
+the tank's gun and exploded the shell in the chamber.... Oh, the hell
+with it! The tank might have been hit by a premature shot from the
+barrage which was raging against the far slope of the ridge. He reset
+his watch by guess and looked down the valley. The big attack would be
+starting any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up
+the valley ahead of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed
+before they started coming in on him.
+
+He stopped thinking about the mystery of the blown-up tank, a solution
+to which seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and
+found himself a place among the rocks to wait. Down the valley he could
+hear everything from pistols to mortars going off, and shouting in three
+or four racial intonations. After a while, fugitive Communists began
+coming, many of them without their equipment, stumbling in their haste
+and looking back over their shoulders. Most of them avoided the mouth
+of the ravine and hurried by to the left or right, but one little clump,
+eight or ten, came up the dry stream-bed, and stopped a hundred and
+fifty yards from his hiding-place to make a stand. They were Hindus,
+with outsize helmets over their turbans. Two of them came ahead,
+carrying a machine gun, followed by a third with a flame-thrower; the
+others retreated more slowly, firing their rifles to delay pursuit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cuddling the stock of his carbine to his cheek, he divided a ten-shot
+burst between the two machine-gunners, then, as a matter of principle,
+he shot the man with the flame-thrower. He had a dislike for
+flame-throwers; he killed every enemy he found with one. The others
+dropped their rifles and raised their hands, screaming: "Hey, Joe! Hey,
+Joe! You no shoot, me no shoot!"
+
+A dozen men in UN battledress came up and took them prisoner. Benson
+shouted to them, and then rose and came down to join them. They were
+British--Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, advertising the fact by
+inconspicuous bits of tartan on their uniforms. The subaltern in command
+looked at him and nodded.
+
+"Captain Benson? We were warned to be on watch for your patrol," he
+said. "Any of the rest of you lads get out?"
+
+Benson shrugged. "We split up after the attack. You may run into a
+couple of them. Some are locals and don't speak very good English. I've
+got to get back to Division, myself; what's the best way?"
+
+"Down that way. You'll overtake a couple of our walking wounded. If you
+don't mind going slowly, they'll show you the way to advance dressing
+station, and you can hitch a ride on an ambulance from there."
+
+Benson nodded. Off on the left, there was a flurry of small-arms fire,
+ending in yells of "Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!"--the World War IV version of
+"Kamarad"!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His company was a non-T/O outfit; he came directly under Division
+command and didn't have to bother reporting to any regimental or brigade
+commanders. He walked for an hour with half a dozen lightly wounded
+Scots, rode for another hour on a big cat-truck loaded with casualties
+of six regiments and four races, and finally reached Division Rear,
+where both the Division and Corps commanders took time to compliment him
+on the part his last hunter patrol had played in the now complete
+breakthrough. His replacement, an equine-faced Spaniard with an imposing
+display of fruit-salad, was there, too; he solemnly took off the
+bracelet a refugee Caucasian goldsmith had made for his predecessor's
+predecessor and gave it to the new commander of what had formerly been
+Benson's Butchers. As he had expected, there was also another medal
+waiting for him.
+
+A medical check at Task Force Center got him a warning; his last patrol
+had brought him dangerously close to the edge of combat fatigue.
+Remembering the incidents of the tank and the unaccountably fast watch,
+and the mysterious box and envelope which he had found in his coat
+pocket, he agreed, saying nothing about the questions that were puzzling
+him. The Psychological Department was never too busy to refuse another
+case; they hunted patients gleefully, each psych-shark seeking in every
+one proof of his own particular theories. It was with relief that he
+watched them fill out the red tag which gave him a priority on jet
+transports for home.
+
+Ankara to Alexandria, Alexandria to Dakar, Dakar to Belem, Belem to the
+shattered skyline of New York, the "hurry-and-wait" procedures at Fort
+Carlisle, and, after the usual separation promotion, Major Fred Benson,
+late of Benson's Butchers, was back at teaching high school juniors the
+difference between H_{2}O and H_{2}SO_{4}.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two high schools in the city: McKinley High, on the east
+side, and Dwight Eisenhower High, on the west. A few blocks from
+McKinley was the Tulip Tavern, where the Eisenhower teachers came in the
+late afternoons; the McKinley faculty crossed town to do their
+after-school drinking on the west side. When Benson entered the Tulip
+Tavern, on a warm September afternoon, he found Bill Myers, the school
+psychologist, at one of the tables, smoking his pipe, checking over a
+stack of aptitude test forms, and drinking beer. He got a highball at
+the bar and carried it over to Bill's table.
+
+"Oh, hi, Fred." The psychologist separated the finished from the
+unfinished work with a sheet of yellow paper and crammed the whole
+business into his brief case. "I was hoping somebody'd show up...."
+
+Benson lit a cigarette, sipped his highball. They talked at
+random--school-talk; the progress of the war, now in its twelfth year;
+personal reminiscences, of the Turkish Theater where Benson had served,
+and the Madras Beachhead, where Myers had been.
+
+"Bring home any souvenirs?" Myers asked.
+
+"Not much. Couple of pistols, couple of knives, some pictures. I don't
+remember what all; haven't gotten around to unpacking them, yet.... I
+have a sixth of rye and some beer, at my rooms. Let's go around and see
+what I did bring home."
+
+They finished their drinks and went out.
+
+"What the devil's that?" Myers said, pointing to the cardboard box with
+the envelope taped to it, when Benson lifted it out of the gray-green
+locker.
+
+"Bill, I don't know," Benson said. "I found it in the pocket of my coat,
+on my way back from my last hunter patrol.... I've never told anybody
+about this, before."
+
+"That's the damnedest story I've ever heard, and in my racket you hear
+some honeys," Myers said, when he had finished. "You couldn't have
+picked that thing up in some other way, deliberately forgotten the
+circumstances, and fabricated this story about the tank and the grenade
+and the discrepancy in your watch subconsciously as an explanation?"
+
+"My subconscious is a better liar than that," Benson replied. "It
+would have cobbled up some kind of a story that would stand up. This
+business...."
+
+"Top Secret! For the Guide Only!" Myers frowned. "That isn't one of our
+marks, and if it were Soviet, it'd be tri-lingual, Russian, Hindi and
+Chinese."
+
+"Well, let's see what's in it. I want this thing cleared up. I've been
+having some of the nastiest dreams, lately...."
+
+"Well, be careful; it may be booby-trapped," Myers said urgently.
+
+"Don't worry; I will."
+
+He used a knife to slice the envelope open without untaping it from the
+box, and exposed five sheets of typewritten onion-skin paper. There was
+no letterhead, no salutation or address-line. Just a mass of chemical
+formulae, and a concise report on tests. It seemed to be a report on an
+improved syrup for a carbonated soft-drink. There were a few cryptic
+cautionary references to heightened physico-psychological effects.
+
+The box was opened with the same caution, but it proved as innocent of
+dangers as the envelope. It contained only a half-liter bottle,
+wax-sealed, containing a dark reddish-brown syrup.
+
+"There's a lot of this stuff I don't dig," Benson said, tapping the
+sheets of onion-skin. "I don't even scratch the surface of this
+rigamarole about The Guide. I'm going to get to work on this sample in
+the lab, at school, though. Maybe we have something, here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eight-thirty the next evening, after four and a half hours work, he
+stopped to check what he had found out.
+
+The school's X-ray, an excellent one, had given him a complete picture
+of the molecular structure of the syrup. There were a couple of
+long-chain molecules that he could only believe after two
+re-examinations and a careful check of the machine, but with the help of
+the notes he could deduce how they had been put together. They would be
+the Ingredient Alpha and Ingredient Beta referred to in the notes.
+
+The components of the syrup were all simple and easily procurable with
+these two exceptions, as were the basic components from which these were
+made.
+
+The mechanical guinea-pig demonstrated that the syrup contained nothing
+harmful to human tissue.
+
+Of course, there were the warnings about heightened psycho-physiological
+effects....
+
+He stuck a poison-label on the bottle, locked it up, and went home. The
+next day, he and Bill Myers got a bottle of carbonated water and mixed
+themselves a couple of drinks of it. It was delicious--sweet, dry, tart,
+sour, all of these in alternating waves of pleasure.
+
+"We do have something, Bill," he said. "We have something that's going
+to give our income-tax experts headaches."
+
+"You have," Myers corrected. "Where do you start fitting me into it?"
+
+"We're a good team, Bill. I'm a chemist, but I don't know a thing about
+people. You're a psychologist. A real one; not one of these night-school
+boys. A juvenile psychologist, too. And what age-group spends the most
+money in this country for soft-drinks?"
+
+Knowing the names of the syrup's ingredients, and what their molecular
+structure was like, was only the beginning. Gallon after gallon of the
+School Board's chemicals went down the laboratory sink; Fred Benson and
+Bill Myers almost lived in the fourth floor lab. Once or twice there
+were head-shaking warnings from the principal about the dangers of
+over-work. The watchmen, at all hours, would hear the occasional
+twanging of Benson's guitar in the laboratory, and know that he had come
+to a dead end on something and was trying to think. Football season came
+and went; basketball season; the inevitable riot between McKinley and
+Eisenhower rooters; the Spring concerts. The term-end exams were only a
+month away when Benson and Myers finally did it, and stood solemnly,
+each with a beaker in either hand and took alternate sips of the
+original and the drink mixed from the syrup they had made.
+
+"Not a bit of difference, Fred," Myers said. "We have it!"
+
+Benson picked up the guitar and began plunking on it.
+
+"Hey!" Myers exclaimed. "Have you been finding time to take lessons on
+that thing? I never heard you play as well as that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They decided to go into business in St. Louis. It was centrally located,
+and, being behind more concentric circles of radar and counter-rocket
+defenses, it was in better shape than any other city in the country and
+most likely to stay that way. Getting started wasn't hard; the first
+banker who tasted the new drink-named Evri-Flave, at Myers'
+suggestion--couldn't dig up the necessary money fast enough. Evri-Flave
+hit the market with a bang and became an instant success; soon the
+rainbow-tinted vending machines were everywhere, dispensing the
+slender, slightly flattened bottles and devouring quarters voraciously.
+In spite of high taxes and the difficulties of doing business in a
+consumers' economy upon which a war-time economy had been superimposed,
+both Myers and Benson were rapidly becoming wealthy. The gregarious
+Myers installed himself in a luxurious apartment in the city; Benson
+bought a large tract of land down the river toward Carondelet and
+started building a home and landscaping the grounds.
+
+The dreams began bothering him again, now that the urgency of getting
+Evri-Flave, Inc., started had eased. They were not dreams of the men he
+had killed in battle, or, except for one about a huge, hot-smelling tank
+with a red star on the turret, about the war. Generally, they were about
+a strange, beautiful, office-room, in which a young man in uniform
+killed an older man in a plum-brown coat and a vivid blue neck-scarf.
+Sometimes Benson identified himself with the killer; sometimes with the
+old man who was killed.
+
+He talked to Myers about these dreams, but beyond generalities about
+delayed effects of combat fatigue and vague advice to relax, the
+psychologist, now head of Sales & Promotion of Evri-Flave, Inc., could
+give him no help.
+
+The war ended three years after the new company was launched. There was
+a momentary faltering of the economy, and then the work of
+reconstruction was crying hungrily for all the labor and capital that
+had been idled by the end of destruction, and more. There was a new
+flood-tide of prosperity, and Evri-Flave rode the crest. The estate at
+Carondelet was finished--a beautiful place, surrounded with gardens,
+fragrant with flowers, full of the songs of birds and soft music from
+concealed record-players. It made him forget the ugliness of the war,
+and kept the dreams from returning so frequently. All the world ought to
+be like that, he thought; beautiful and quiet and peaceful. People
+surrounded with such beauty couldn't think about war.
+
+All the world could be like that, if only....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The UN chose St. Louis for its new headquarters--many of its offices had
+been moved there after the second and most destructive bombing of New
+York--and when the city by the Mississippi began growing into a real
+World Capital, the flow of money into it almost squared overnight.
+Benson began to take an active part in politics in the new World
+Sovereignty party. He did not, however, allow his political activities
+to distract him from the work of expanding the company to which he owed
+his wealth and position. There were always things to worry about.
+
+"I don't know," Myers said to him, one evening, as they sat over a
+bottle of rye in the psychologist's apartment. "I could make almost as
+much money practicing as a psychiatrist, these days. The whole world
+seems to be going pure, unadulterated nuts! That affair in Munich, for
+instance."
+
+"Yes." Benson grimaced as he thought of the affair in Munich--a
+Wagnerian concert which had terminated in an insane orgy of mass
+suicide. "Just a week after we started our free-sample campaign in South
+Germany, too...."
+
+He stopped short, downing his drink and coughing over it.
+
+"Bill! You remember those sheets of onion-skin in that envelope?"
+
+"The foundation of our fortunes; I wonder where you really did get
+that.... Fred!" His eyes widened in horror. "That caution about
+'heightened psycho-physiological effects,' that we were never able
+to understand!"
+
+Benson nodded grimly. "And think of all the crazy cases of
+mass-hysteria--that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody
+started tearing off each others' clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in
+New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psycho-neurotic and
+psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and all after
+Evri-Flave got on the market."
+
+"We'll have to stop it; pull Evri-Flave off the market," Myers said. "We
+can't be responsible for letting this go on."
+
+"We can't stop, either. There's at least a two months' supply out in the
+hands of jobbers and distributors over whom we have no control. And we
+have all these contractual obligations, to buy the entire output of the
+companies that make the syrup for us; if we stop buying, they can sell
+it in competition with us, as long as they don't infringe our
+trade-name. And we can't prevent pirating. You know how easily we were
+able to duplicate that sample I brought back from Turkey. Why, our legal
+department's kept busy all the time prosecuting unlicensed manufacturers
+as it is."
+
+"We've got to do something, Fred!" There was almost a whiff of hysteria
+in Myers' voice.
+
+"We will. We'll start, first thing tomorrow, on a series of tests--just
+you and I, like the old times at Eisenhower High. First, we want to
+be sure that Evri-Flave really is responsible. It'd be a hell of a
+thing if we started a public panic against our own product for nothing.
+And then...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took just two weeks, in a soundproofed and guarded laboratory on
+Benson's Carondelet estate, to convict their delicious drink of
+responsibility for that Munich State Opera House Horror and everything
+else. Reports from confidential investigators in Munich confirmed this.
+It had, of course, been impossible to interview the two thousand men
+and women who had turned the Opera House into a pyre for their own
+immolation, but none of the tiny minority who had kept their sanity and
+saved their lives had tasted Evri-Flave.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took another month to find out exactly how the stuff affected the
+human nervous system, and they almost wrecked their own nervous systems
+in the process. The real villain, they discovered, was the
+incredible-looking long-chain compound alluded to in the original notes
+as Ingredient Beta; its principal physiological effect was to greatly
+increase the sensitivity of the aural nerves. Not only was the hearing
+range widened--after consuming thirty CC of Beta, they could hear the
+sound of an ultrasonic dog-whistle quite plainly--but the very quality
+of all audible sounds was curiously enhanced and altered. Myers, the
+psychologist, who was also well grounded in neurology, explained how the
+chemical produced this effect; it meant about as much to Benson as some
+of his chemistry did to Bill Myers. There was also a secondary, purely
+psychological, effect. Certain musical chords had definite effects on
+the emotions of the hearer, and the subject, beside being directly
+influenced by the music, was rendered extremely open to verbal
+suggestions accompanied by a suitable musical background.
+
+Benson transferred the final results of this stage of the research to
+the black notebook and burned the scratch-sheets.
+
+"That's how it happened, then," he said. "The Munich thing was the
+result of all that Goetterdaemmerung music. There was a band at the
+baseball park in Baltimore. The New Orleans Orgy started while a local
+radio station was broadcasting some of this new dance-music. Look, these
+tone-clusters, here, have a definite sex-excitation effect. This series
+of six chords, which occur in some of the Wagnerian stuff; effect, a
+combined feeling of godlike isolation and despair. And these consecutive
+fifths--a sense of danger, anger, combativeness. You know, we could work
+out a whole range of emotional stimuli to fit the effects of Ingredient
+Beta...."
+
+"We don't want to," Myers said. "We want to work out a substitute for
+Beta that will keep the flavor of the drink without the
+psycho-physiological effects."
+
+"Yes, sure. I have some of the boys at the plant lab working on that.
+Gave them a lot of syrup without Beta, and told them to work out cheap
+additives to restore the regular Evri-Flave taste; told them it was an
+effort to find a cheap substitute for an expensive ingredient. But look,
+Bill. You and I both see, for instance, that a powerful world-wide
+supra-national sovereignty is the only guarantee of world peace. If we
+could use something like this to help overcome antiquated verbal
+prejudices and nationalistic emotional attachments...."
+
+"No!" Myers said. "I won't ever consent to anything like that, Fred! Not
+even in a cause like world peace; use a thing like this for a good,
+almost holy, cause now, and tomorrow we, or those who would come after
+us, would be using it to create a tyranny. You know what year this is,
+Bill?"
+
+"Why, 1984," Benson said.
+
+"Yes. You remember that old political novel of Orwell's, written about
+forty years ago? Well, that's a picture of the kind of world you'd have,
+eventually, no matter what kind of a world you started out to make.
+Fred, don't ever think of using this stuff for a purpose like that. If
+you try it, I'll fight you with every resource I have."
+
+There was a fanatical, almost murderous, look in Bill Myers' eyes.
+Benson put the notebook in his pocket, then laughed and threw up his
+hands.
+
+"Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!" he cried. "You're right, of course, Bill. We can't
+even trust the UN with a thing like this. It makes the H-bomb look like
+a stone hatchet.... Well, I'll call Grant, at the plant lab, and see how
+his boys are coming along with the substitute; as soon as we get it, we
+can put out a confidential letter to all our distributors and
+syrup-manufacturers...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He walked alone in the garden at Carondelet, watching the color fade out
+of the sky and the twilight seep in among the clipped yews. All the
+world could be like this garden, a place of peace and beauty and quiet,
+if only.... All the world _would_ be a beautiful and peaceful garden, in
+his own lifetime! He had the means of making it so!
+
+Three weeks later, he murdered his friend and partner, Bill Myers. It
+was a suicide; nobody but Fred Benson knew that he had taken fifty CC of
+pure Ingredient Beta in a couple of cocktails while listening to the
+queer phonograph record that he had played half an hour before blowing
+his brains out.
+
+The decision had cost Benson a battle with his conscience from which he
+had emerged the sole survivor. The conscience was buried along with Bill
+Myers, and all that remained was a purpose.
+
+Evri-Flave stayed on the market unaltered. The night before the national
+election, the World Sovereignty party distributed thousands of gallons
+of Evri-Flave; their speakers, on every radio and television network,
+were backgrounded by soft music. The next day, when the vote was
+counted, it was found that the American Nationalists had carried a few
+backwoods precincts in the Rockies and the Southern Appalachians and one
+county in Alaska, where there had been no distribution of Evri-Flave.
+
+The dreams came back more often, now that Bill Myers was gone. Benson
+was only beginning to realize what a large fact in his life the
+companionship of the young psychologist had been. Well, a world of peace
+and beauty was an omelet worth the breaking of many eggs....
+
+He purchased another great tract of land near the city, and donated it
+to the UN for their new headquarters buildings; the same architects and
+landscapists who had created the estate at Carondelet were put to work
+on it. In the middle of what was to become World City, they erected a
+small home for Fred Benson. Benson was often invited to address the
+delegates to the UN; always, there was soft piped-in music behind his
+words. He saw to it that Evri-Flave was available free to all UN
+personnel. The Senate of the United States elected him as perpetual
+U. S. delegate-in-chief to the UN; not long after, the Security Council
+elected him their perpetual chairman.
+
+In keeping with his new dignities, and to ameliorate his youthful
+appearance, he grew a mustache and, eventually, a small beard. The black
+notebook in which he kept the records of his experiments was always with
+him; page after page was filled with notes. Experiments in sonics, like
+the one which had produced the ultrasonic stun-gun which rendered lethal
+weapons unnecessary for police and defense purposes, or the new musical
+combinations with which he was able to play upon every emotion and
+instinct.
+
+But he still dreamed, the same recurring dream of the young soldier and
+the old man in the office. By now, he was consistently identifying
+himself with the latter. He took to carrying one of the thick-barrelled
+stun-pistols always, now. Alone, he practiced constantly with it,
+drawing, breaking soap-bubbles with the concentrated sound-waves it
+projected. It was silly, perhaps, but it helped him in his dreams. Now,
+the old man with whom he identified himself would draw a stun-pistol,
+occasionally, to defend himself.
+
+The years drained one by one through the hour-glass of Time. Year after
+year, the world grew more peaceful, more beautiful. There were no more
+incidents like the mass-suicide of Munich or the mass-perversions of New
+Orleans; the playing and even the composing of music was strictly
+controlled--no dangerous notes or chords could be played in a world
+drenched with Ingredient Beta. Steadily the idea grew that peace and
+beauty were supremely good, that violence and ugliness were supremely
+evil. Even competitive sports which simulated violence; even children
+born ugly and misshapen....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He finished the breakfast which he had prepared for himself--he trusted
+no food that another had touched--and knotted the vivid blue scarf about
+his neck before slipping into the loose coat of glossy plum-brown, then
+checked the stun-pistol and pocketed the black notebook, its
+plastileather cover glossy from long use. He stood in front of the
+mirror, brushing his beard, now snow-white. Two years, now, and he would
+be eighty--had he been anyone but The Guide, he would have long ago
+retired to the absolute peace and repose of one of the Elders' Havens.
+Peace and repose, however, were not for The Guide; it would take another
+twenty years to finish his task of remaking the world, and he would need
+every day of it that his medical staff could borrow or steal for him. He
+made an eye-baffling practice draw with the stun-pistol, then holstered
+it and started down the spiral stairway to the office below.
+
+There was the usual mass of papers on his desk. A corps of secretaries
+had screened out everything but what required his own personal and
+immediate attention, but the business of guiding a world could only be
+reduced to a certain point. On top was the digest of the world's news
+for the past twenty-four hours, and below that was the agenda for the
+afternoon's meeting of the Council. He laid both in front of him,
+reading over the former and occasionally making a note on the latter.
+Once his glance strayed to the cardboard box in front of him, with the
+envelope taped to it--the latest improvement on the Evri-Flave syrup,
+with the report from his own chemists, all conditioned to obedience,
+loyalty and secrecy. If they thought he was going to try that damned
+stuff on himself....
+
+There was a sudden gleam of light in the middle of the room, in front of
+his desk. No, a mist, through which a blue light seemed to shine. The
+stun-pistol was in his hand--his instinctive reaction to anything
+unusual--and pointed into the shining mist when it vanished and a man
+appeared in front of him; a man in the baggy green combat-uniform that
+he himself had worn fifty years before; a man with a heavy automatic
+pistol in his hand. The gun was pointed directly at him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Guide aimed quickly and pressed the trigger of the ultrasonic
+stunner. The pistol dropped soundlessly on the thick-piled rug; the man
+in uniform slumped in an inert heap. The Guide sprang to his feet and
+rounded the desk, crossing to and bending over the intruder. Why, this
+was the dream that had plagued him through the years. But it was ending
+differently. The young man--his face was startlingly familiar,
+somehow--was not killing the old man. Those years of practice with the
+stun-pistol....
+
+He stooped and picked the automatic up. The young man was unconscious,
+and The Guide had his pistol, now. He slipped the automatic into his
+pocket and straightened beside his inert would-be slayer.
+
+A shimmering globe of blue mist appeared around them, brightened to a
+dazzle, and dimmed again to a colored mist before it vanished, and when
+it cleared away, he was standing beside the man in uniform, in the sandy
+bed of a dry stream at the mouth of a little ravine, and directly in
+front of him, looming above him, was a thing that had not been seen in
+the world for close to half a century--a big, hot-smelling tank with a
+red star on its turret.
+
+He might have screamed--the din of its treads and engines deafened
+him--and, in panic, he turned and ran, his old legs racing, his old
+heart pumping madly. The noise of the tank increased as machine guns
+joined the uproar. He felt the first bullet strike him, just above the
+hips--no pain; just a tremendous impact. He might have felt the second
+bullet, too, as the ground tilted and rushed up at his face. Then he was
+diving into a tunnel of blackness that had no end....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Fred Benson, of Benson's Butchers, had been jerked back into
+consciousness when the field began to build around him. He was
+struggling to rise, fumbling the grenade out of his pocket, when it
+collapsed. Sure enough, right in front of him, so close that he could
+smell the very heat of it, was the big tank with the red star on its
+turret. He cursed the sextet of sanctimonious double-crossers eight
+thousand miles and fifty years away in space-time. The machine guns had
+stopped--probably because they couldn't be depressed far enough to aim
+at him, now; that was a notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet
+tanks. He had the bomb out of his pocket, when the machine guns began
+firing again, this time at something on his left. Wondering what had
+created the diversion, he rocked back on his heels, pressed the button,
+and heaved, closing his eyes. As the thing left his fingers, he knew
+that he had thrown too hard. His muscles, accustomed to the heavier
+cast-iron grenades, had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to
+despair than at any other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure.
+Then he was hit, with physical force, by a wave of almost solid heat. It
+didn't smell like the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten
+metal, with undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a
+multiple explosion that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went
+up. There were no screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.
+
+The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive
+treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had collapsed
+between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten metal. He
+blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked again. Of
+all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN, that he had
+seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his experience. And
+he'd done that with one grenade....
+
+Remembering the curious manner in which, at the last, the tank had begun
+firing at something to the side, he looked around, to see the crumpled
+body in the pale violet-gray trousers and the plum-brown coat. Finding
+his carbine and reloading it, he went over to the dead man, turning the
+body over. He was an old man, with a white mustache and a small white
+beard--why, if the mustache were smaller and there were no beard, he
+would pass for Benson's own father, who had died in 1962. The clothes
+weren't Turkish or Armenian or Persian, or anything one would expect in
+this country.
+
+The old man had a pistol in his coat pocket, and Benson pulled it out
+and looked at it, then did a double-take and grabbed for his own
+holster, to find it empty. The pistol was his own 9.5 Colt automatic. He
+looked at the dead man, with the white beard and the vivid blue
+neck-scarf, and he was sure that he had never seen him before. He'd had
+that pistol when he'd come down the ravine....
+
+There was another pistol under the dead man's coat, in a
+shoulder-holster; a queer thing with a thick round barrel, like an old
+percussion pepper-box, and a diaphragm instead of a muzzle. Probably
+projected ultrasonic waves. He holstered his own Colt and pocketed the
+unknown weapon. There was a black plastileather-bound notebook. It was
+full of notes. Chemical formulae, yes, and some stuff on sonics; that
+tied in with the queer pistol. He pocketed that. He'd look both over,
+when he had time and privacy, two scarce commodities in the Army....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant
+later, the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He
+looked at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at
+0550; according to his watch, it was 0726. That was another mystery, to
+go with the question of who the dead man was, where he had come from,
+and how he'd gotten hold of Benson's pistol. Yes, and how that tank had
+gotten blown up. Benson was sure he had used his last grenade back at
+the supply-dump.
+
+The hell with it; he'd worry about all that later. The attack was due
+any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up the valley
+ahead, of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed before they
+started coming in on him.
+
+He stopped thinking about the multiple mystery, a solution to which
+seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and found
+himself a place among the rocks to wait, and while he waited, he looked
+over the plastileather-bound notebook. In civil life, he had been a
+high school chemistry teacher, but the stuff in this book was utterly
+new to him. Some of it he could understand readily enough; the rest of
+it he could dig out for himself. Stuff about some kind of a carbonated
+soft-drink, and about a couple of unbelievable-looking long-chain
+molecules....
+
+After a while, fugitive Communists began coming up the valley to make
+their stand.
+
+Benson put away the notebook, picked up his carbine, and cuddled the
+stock to his cheek....
+
+
+THE END
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+|                                                              |
+|                      Transcriber's Note                      |
+|                                                              |
+| Bold text was surrounded by '+' symbols.                     |
+|                                                              |
+| One "onionskin" was converted to "onion-skin" to conform     |
+| with the majority usage in the text.                         |
+|                                                              |
+| "rebuilds" and "re-builds" were left alone as there was no   |
+| predominant usage                                            |
+|                                                              |
+| The following typos were corrected:                          |
+|                                                              |
+| benificence  beneficence                                     |
+| lethel       lethal                                          |
+| "See         See                                             |
+| tyranical    tyrannical                                      |
+|                                                              |
+| Subscripts                                                   |
+|                                                              |
+| Water was shown as H_{2}O, and                               |
+| Sulfuric acid   as H_{2}SO_{4}                               |
+|                                                              |
++--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hunter Patrol, by
+Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTER PATROL ***
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