Title: Scrambled World
Author: Wells, Basil
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Scrambled World" ***


              Redskins! Boston tealeggers! Jeep men! Time
               traveler Devin Orth clutched his temples,
              battling insanity. Some "genius" had waved
              a wand over Terran history and produced a--

                            Scrambled World

                            By BASIL WELLS

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Spring 1947.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The sun was dying. About its sullen shadow-streaked red globe thousands
of miniature artificial worlds clustered like a swarm of night-chilled
midges. So thickly did they hug the great globe of dulling flame that
it seemed Sol had acquired an outer husk of interlocked asteroids and
moonlets.

Of all the planets and their satellites only Earth remained--a shrunken
and changed planet. And Earth too had shifted its orbit until it now
swung but a few million miles from its molten primary.

In the huge ovoid of metal that was the _Time Bubble_ the three men
making up its crew had by now grown accustomed to the changes that
three million years had brought to the solar system. They had expected
great changes--and found them. This was to be their first stop in their
time quest for an efficient shield against the deadly radiations of
atomic disintegration's side effects.

Devin Orth, the lean, dark-haired young scientist sharing the
control blister with his employer and friend, Norris Horn, studied
the expanding green wilderness of what had once been northern Ohio.
He turned to the big bald man in whose brain the plans for the time
spanner had been born.

"The continents are there," he said unbelieving, "almost exactly as we
left them. And yet Earth is smaller. Its diameter has dwindled more
than a thousand miles!"

Horn's broad thick body quivered as he loosed a volcanic chuckle.

"I know," he said. "And the oceans, big though they are, are probably
very shallow. A thousand feet at the most. Water will be growing
precious."

"But," puzzled Orth, "why are there no cities and why have the
continents changed so little? Surely three million years...."

"I'd say the inhabitants of those small globes near the sun," suggested
Horn, "are descendants of Earthmen. They have used their superb command
of science to make of Earth a beautiful park or preserve as it was in
our own primitive age.

"Surely, if they have such knowledge, they can give us the secret
of atomic control that will overcome the sterility threatening
mankind. We cannot return now to the limited culture afforded by
the lesser power-sources of coal or gas without great damage to
civilization--perhaps its utter downfall."

"They have it all right," said Orth, scowling down at the open parklike
meadow toward which Horn was blasting, "but I'm worried about getting
back. So far this time travel is simply negation--outside the _Time
Bubble_ three million years pass and to us it seems less than two
hours."

Horn thrummed the landing jets smoothly and laughed his deep booming
bellow. The grassy glade came up to meet them.

"A minor detail," he said as he cut the jets and the ship jolted
abruptly to an uneven grounding. The deck was slightly tilted and from
below there sounded a muffled explosion.

"You all right, Neilson?" shouted Orth into the intercom.

The third member of their crew sounded breathless as he answered from
the power compartment.

"Thought the mixer was going for a bit," he gasped. "A forward jet went
kafoo. Boulder maybe blocking off that last blast."

Orth told Horn what Neilson had said. The big man unzipped his safety
harness and came over to his side, his big capable hand on Orth's
shoulder.

"Don't worry about getting home," he said, taking up the thread of
conversation the explosion had disrupted. "In three million years all
the secrets of time and matter will have been discovered. We'll return
with the shield."

He released the young scientist's bruised shoulder and slapped a great
paw of a hand on his back, pushing him down toward the airlock.

"Better replace that jet tip, Devin," he said. "Can't tell but we
may have to take off in a hurry. This future civilization might be
unfriendly and," he paused thoughtfully, "even non-humanoid."

Orth checked the gauges at the lock and found the outer atmosphere to
be a heady oxygen-rich mixture. Horn had gone down to help Neilson in
the power compartment and he was alone. He stuffed the jet tip into his
bag of tools and pushed through the inner port into the airlock. There
he snapped on the invisible, but oddly tingling, radiations that would
destroy any alien spores of deadly growth that might find their way
into the ship.

He swung open the thick oval outer door and dropped the short
grounding ladder to the blast-blackened turf. Down the eight rigid
metal rungs of the ladder he went to the ground. He stumbled awkwardly
and almost fell. The unaccustomed gravity, after the past twelve
days in space--twelve days that had actually been thirty thousand
centuries--had tricked him.

A moment later his muscles had quickly remedied this unbalance and he
found the fused jet that had blown back. As Neilson had guessed, the
_Time Bubble_ had grazed a boulder in landing and the expanding rocket
gases' escape had been blocked off.

It was good to feel the spring of turf underfoot. Even the feeble
warmth of the ancient sun was pleasant on his bared flesh. He had not
realized how homesick he had grown for Earth until now.

He put down his tools and headed toward a clump of oddly-shaped trees
near the forest's rim. As he neared them he whistled. The temperature
of the Lakes region must have changed. They were palms!

It was only then that he turned to look back at the _Time Bubble_. He
was thinking that Horn would be interested in his discovery of this
tropical growth so far north.

His eyes blinked stupidly. He blinked again.

The _Time Bubble's_ ugly ovoid of space-scarred metal was gone!

       *       *       *       *       *

Several hours had passed since the space ship's uncanny disappearance.
The Earthman was picking his way along a narrow game trail in the
semi-twilight of the mighty forest that crowded close up to Lake Erie's
shoreline.

Caution had impelled him to seek safety in the wilderness until the
truth about the spacer's disappearance was revealed.

The trail cut across a rock-strewn highway, deeply-rutted by wheeled
vehicles. Just across the way, half-hidden by a tangle of wild vines
and brush, was a small log cabin. Smoke oozed slowly skyward from its
mud-daubed stick chimney.

The odor of cooking meat sent Orth trotting hungrily across the road.
He had forgotten any possible danger until an arrow hissed viciously
past his ear. He dropped forward on his belly in a shallow depression
soggy with dead leaves. A second arrow thwocked lightly through the
gray-barked tangle of brush that his head was ramming into.

His fingers went to the flat pocket machine gun that all three
scientists aboard the _Time Bubble_ carried. This weapon, complete with
ten thousand tiny explosive cartridges, and a compact kit of tools and
essential equipment, they carried with them at all times when away from
the space ship.

Behind a light gray shaft of scaly bark, a huge tree's bole, something
red moved. His machine gun slapped a dozen needle-sized slugs at the
half-seen target. The explosions splintered and ripped at the tree's
thick trunk. The red thing leaped clear, yelling. Before Devin could
stop his weapon, it stepped into several small incredibly bright
explosions.

[Illustration: _Before Devin could stop firing, the thing leaped clear,
yelling._]

Then, from the cabin, a broad-shouldered young man emerged. He was
clad somewhat after the fashion of the early American pioneers: fur
cap, shapeless brown homespun shirt, rough skinny-legged trousers, and
thick-soled moccasins. In his hands he lifted a cumbersome weapon,
having six wooden barrels or tubes, from each of which protruded a
sharp-pointed metal dart.

"There been trouble?" he cried out in badly mangled but understandable
English.

For an instant Orth was stunned by the wonder of it. After three
million years--a man speaking English!

"Shot at me from over there," he told the frontiersman warily.

The man catfooted over to the scarred tree, his clumsy weapon poised
ready. He grunted something in badly garbled English. Then he motioned
to the Earthman to join him.

"Redskin," he told Orth.

The hairy apelike savage crouching in bloody death behind the tree was
indeed clad in flapping, red-dyed garments of skin. His skin, however,
was as white beneath its matted covering of black hair as Orth's own.
Yet the other had called the savage a redskin.

As Orth watched the tall young giant stamped his foot down on the
fallen warrior's middle, shook the long chestnut hair out of his
handsome brown face, and opening his mouth let out a prolonged hideous
screech. As he did so his fists hammered drumlike on his distended
chest.

From the distance a hideous snarling and trumpeting answered the
ear-splitting sound. The man grinned at Orth and nodded toward the
forest. He stepped down and held up two fingers.

"Vello," he said, continuing to make the V sign that first saw birth in
the Second World War. "Me, I am Dun Horgan. Horgan of the wilderness.
Those are my friends you hear, the hairy apes of Afri County."

Orth held out his hand. "Shake," he said, "Horgan. I'm named Orth. I
hail from Meadville in Pennsylvania."

"Pennsylvania over that way," and Horgan pointed, "but no village that
name. Maybe small?"

Orth nodded. "Small," he agreed wryly. After three million years he
wondered that the states retained their original names.

Horgan reached down to jerk an intricately woven necklace of hair,
from which depended a crudely carved locket of bone, from the fallen
savage's neck.

"Scalp locket is worth fifteen bits bounty," he said offering it to
Orth. "It is yours."

Orth shook his head. "No, you keep it. I'll trade it for some food and
a bed." He eyed the other thoughtfully.

"And some information too," he added.

       *       *       *       *       *

Over a well cooked slab of venison and a plate of corn bread, washed
down by a muddy brown brew that Horgan served hot and sweetened, they
talked. Corn likker the frontiersman called the steaming tasteless
fluid when Orth mistakenly named it coffee.

And when they had finished his host produced squares of a fine brown
paper which he deftly filled, one-handed, with shredded greenish
tobacco, and presented the fat cigar-sized bundles to Orth. He shrugged
at the Earthman's refusal, eyeing with amusement the slender whiteness
of Orth's own cigarettes.

"Shipped from France maybe," he suggested, "or China?"

Orth handed over the pack. Horgan studied the markings that showed they
were manufactured in Kentucky. He shook his head.

"Don't reckon you'll be getting no more," he said. "General Lee ain't
been licked yet, and until Washington and Pershing break through to the
South...." He lifted his big arms in a half-shrug of doubt.

"What's all this about Lee and Pershing? Some sort of Civil War over
again? Or is this continent being invaded?"

Horgan eyed the Earthman curiously. "Maybe I'll have to tell you what
year it is," he said dryly, "and who's Boss of the States now. You're
powerful ignorant, Orth."

"Go ahead," invited Orth. "My memory's fuzzy."

"This's 1927, June the third." Horgan tugged absent-mindedly at his
long brown locks. "Our boss now is Tyad Roosfald. His third year as
Boss."

"Teddy Roosevelt." Orth studied his knuckles thoughtfully. "And I
suppose General Eisenhower is invading Germany to win our independence!"

"Not Germany," corrected the frontiersman, "but Great Britain. We have
accepted Churchill's challenge to land there and fight. Of course the
war with Germany and Japan are going on too."

Orth groaned. "What about this other thing--Lee and Washington down
South? Don't tell me it's Civil War revival week too. What kind of a
gag are you trying to pull on me, Horgan?"

Horgan rubbed a rasping palm thoughtfully along his jaw.

"There is war between the States," he said at last. "Everywhere there
is war. The broadcast drums warn us that soon we must fight Cuba."
Smoke puffed from his nostrils. "Helping Spain."

One of Orth's hands covered his eyes and he felt his face growing hot
with a mingling of anger and bewilderment. He stuttered as he tried to
talk. He swallowed smoke and coughed, choking.

"Good afternoon," called a fresh young voice, a feminine voice, from
the cabin's rude door.

       *       *       *       *       *

Their heads twisted smartly toward the opening. Horgan's bared sword
was in his fist even before he was on his feet. Together they stood
facing the tall round-bodied woman who had walked in upon them. Despite
her stature she was remarkably beautiful.

She was pale of skin and her great mass of intricately braided hair was
of a softly radiant silver hue. The simple garment of golden-hued cloth
covered her adequately--but no more than that. Even her sandals were
simple, accessories of comfort and utility rather than fashion.

"I am Ayna of Globe 64BA," she told them briskly. "I wish one or both
of you to escort me to Ivath's headquarters."

She was eyeing Orth's zippered shirt and glassid trousers curiously.

"Ivath must be slipping," she said. "You are definitely out of the
wrong century. More likely the Twenty-first. I cannot be mistaken for I
have majored in Ancient American Mythology."

"I was born in 1960!" Orth snapped, "and I definitely must be in the
wrong century. Or I'm out of my head! That's more like it. All this
pother about the Civil War and the World Wars going on at the same
time. Maybe just the names are the same. Or--what?"

"There must be a short circuiting of your memory cells," said Ayna
soothingly, "but Ivath and his helpers will soon set that right. Take
me to him and I will help you." She looked at Horgan.

Horgan was shaking his head. "Sorry," he said, "but until the Civil War
is ended--here I stay."

The girl frowned. She turned to Orth. "How about you?" she demanded.
"Are you part of the local scenery too, or can you travel?"

"I have no idea what this is all about," Orth told her, "but I go where
I please. Maybe you can set me right on a few things, Ayna. Then I'll
go along with you."

"Fine!" Her teeth flashed.

"I can go with you to Hardpan City," Dun Horgan said slowly. "That's
where I trade off my furs and gold dust. We can thump a ride on one of
the waggons going to New Yok."

"What are we waiting for then?" demanded Ayna. "Bring extra slugs for
your six guns." She looked at Orth. "Don't you have a gun?"

Orth tugged out his compact machine pistol. Apparently the clumsy
spring-powered weapons with six barrels were what the girl called six
guns, for Horgan belted a second weapon around his waist. The girl
examined his hand gun with curious eyes and fingers.

"Unusual design," she commented. "Not authentic for your period
costume."

"Come along," said Horgan, cutting across Orth's protesting words.
"About time for the afternoon waggon train."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Here they come!" cried Horgan as they quitted the path for the rutted
highway.

He seized a long length of pole and started beating at the road with
it. Dust clouded up about them. And further down the road a growing
cloud of dust neared. These must be the waggons Horgan was going to
hail, Orth decided.

"Why is he pounding the ground, Ayna?" demanded Orth.

The woman laughed. "He is thumping for a ride," she explained. "It is a
peculiar custom of this age. In this way he asks assistance."

Orth's dark face reddened with sudden mirth that he choked back. The
twisted idiomatic expressions of this strange world were taking a
familiar pattern. Even the scrambled pattern of wars and their military
leaders began to make sense. _Thumping_ a ride, six shooters, and scalp
_lockets_ linked up with Ayna's reference to Ancient American Mythology.

"You're from the little globes clustering around the sun," he said,
"and you were visiting Earth--or this primitive duplication of it. Sort
of a park for your people, this. Your spacer crashed or you've lost it."

Ayna frowned at Orth. "Yes," she said slowly, "I landed on Earth,
contrary to the regulations, and a herd of mammoths wrecked my ship.
But how could you, a creature of Ivath's great workship, know anything
of spacers?"

"I do not know Ivath," Orth said angrily, "and I came here in a spacer
that has vanished.... Now, how do we get out of this make believe world
of yours to your home?"

"But this is real," the girl protested. "If a redskin's arrow or a
tearunner's slug cuts you down you will die. Until the war is ended, or
you take me to Ivath's headquarters, we are not safe."

"All I can say is human beings are as crazy as they were three million
years ago," grunted Orth.

Meanwhile the dust cloud rolled closer and slowed. Horgan's thumping
had halted them. Orth saw three great waggons, their twenty foot-high
metal-tired wheels fitting deep down into the rutted way.

Sixty feet in length they were, and beneath a low roof, that Ayna
called a hood, there was a broad treadmill geared up with the eight
huge wheels. Between eighty and a hundred thick-bodied little ponies
were tied upon this raised moving belt. Above the hood lifted a sort of
tower, its roof twenty feet above the ground, and here the two waggon
drivers sat, steering the cumbersome vehicle with a spoked wooden wheel.

Back of the cab was the covered cargo deck of the waggon where bags of
grain, hides and other produce were heaped.

One of the wooden blocks that had braked the enormous wheels was
smoking and now it burst into flame. One of the drivers hastily tossed
a bucket of water on the block and put it out.

"Going through Hardpan City?" Horgan asked.

"Climb aboard," cheerfully answered a runty driver with a huge dusty
red moustache. He jabbed his thumb at the ladder bolted to the waggon's
side.

"You ride this waggon," Horgan said to Ayna and Orth. "I'll hop the
next one."

The red-moustached man helped them into the cab, his squinted pale
eyes studying the girl appreciatively, and then he spoke to his
hulking companion. This driver was a hairy apish giant without ears.
Now he slowly released the brakes that locked the treadmill while Red
Moustache freed the wheels.

The treadmill revolved faster and faster and they went clanking and
bumping off down the highroad, the miniature horses sweating in their
involuntary struggle to keep on their feet. The great hooded vehicle
had a pace of perhaps ten miles an hour.

"I hear," shouted the little driver at Orth and Ayna, "that the Boss
is sending a hundred men to New Yok soon. They're to hunt down the red
jitterbugs and outlaws that range the highways."

He paused long enough to catch his breath and curse the thick fog of
dust that filled the cab.

"A hundred soldiers to wipe out three or four thousand tea sellers and
their gunmen!" He snorted. "Of course they're jeep men--Hoovers, you
know--but they can't do any good."

"The Boss is all wise," said the earless man, bumping his clenched fist
against his nose. "He is the Boss."

Orth turned to Ayna. "Now," he said, "who is Ivath?"

The girl shrugged. "For a creation of Ivath's laboratories," she said,
"you are refreshingly human. So I will treat you as one of us." Her
eyes were thoughtful. "After all a robot does possess a limited power
of reasoning."

"Ivath!" Orth barked the word at her. "Forget the insults for the time
being. I may look funny but I'm human."

"Ivath is the director of our theater of space," she said. "This, as
you know, is a huge hollow globe on whose surface world-wide dramas
from the ages past are brought to life. He is painstakingly accurate in
his depiction of the bygone dress, customs and speech."

Orth laughed shortly. "Even to vehicles with horses for power," he
said, "and guns without gunpowder."

The girl disregarded him. "But Ivath has surpassed other directors
of the past. He uses androids, living robots, and impresses on their
memory cells the accurate thought and instinct patterns of their own
chosen age. It is really amazing how closely their actions follow the
historical patterns of the ancient past."

"You mean he sprinkles cities, forests and--robots, all around and
watches what happens? No script for them to follow? No deadline or time
to end it all?"

"He usually changes the entire surface of the globe every fifty years,"
Ayna told him. "The next drama will be that of ancient Mars before the
Earthmen came, and shortly afterward."

"If it is as accurate as this mess," said Orth dryly, "it will be
something to see, and worse to hear. I lived in the years of the first
Martian exploration, Ayna. And I came from the Twentieth Century that
your director is supposed to be presenting here!"

Ayna's face was serious. Orth felt a curious prickling sensation in his
head and then everything went hazy for a time....

Eventually the blur faded. He found that they had left the forest
behind and were entering a region of cultivated fields and little
huddles of log and sod dwellings. The clumsy vehicle in which they
sat was slowing until it was barely crawling between two rows of
brick-fronted cabins.

"You are not lying," Ayna said. "I probed your mind, Devin Orth. You
are not an android. And I believe that your space ship has been seized
by Ivath. It was an alien object on the vast canvas of his pictured
world."

"Here's Hardpan," Red Moustache said, leering slack-jawed at Ayna.
"Sorry you couldn't go along to New Yok," he added to Orth, "you and
your squirt. She's some fowl."

Orth choked and gulped twice. He thanked the driver and climbed down
the ladder. Horgan was already standing in the shadow of a doorway
above which swung a dust-grimed sign. _Two Drik Tony's_, the sign read.

"Wait for us in that store," said Horgan, pointing out a door across
the street that was flanked by barrels of fruit and other produce.
"Orth and me needs a drink."

Orth started to protest and then desisted as he saw the girl's
eyelid twitch and her head motion toward the door. He followed the
frontiersman. Ayna was talking softly to herself as they left her.

       *       *       *       *       *

They joined the men bellied up to the bar. Dun Horgan ordered two shots
of alcohol which were brought to them in shallow saucers of glass.
Horgan dropped three bits on the bar.

"How about a shot of tea?" he whispered to the bartender.

The man's flabby pink face whitened. Imperceptibly he nodded toward the
back room and scooped up the three shining coins. The two men downed
their fiery drinks and then elbowed their way toward the closed door.

"It's this accursed Volsad Law," said Horgan. "All a result of the
Boston tea runners. Tried to smuggle it in and then the reform crowd
took it up. Blamed tea for crime and poverty. Pushed the laws through
outlawing its sale."

Orth grinned. "So now the bootleggers, or tealeggers, maybe, are
getting rich."

Horgan nodded. Inside the door the bartender met them and slipped a
small bottle of cold tea into Horgan's pocket. Then he motioned toward
the half-open door leading into the alley beyond.

"Please," he said. "There may be jeep men watching my bar."

They quitted the building and leaving the alley reached the main
street. Ayna was waiting in the store's door and as she saw them she
started to walk in their direction.

A bony stoop-shouldered man with a naked skull beneath his
droopy-brimmed hat lurched into her path. His sunken dark eyes were
bloodshot and hot. He jerked her arm.

"Looking for someone?" he demanded. "I'm here."

Ayna's fist landed flush on the man's jaw. He staggered back, but still
gripped her. Orth seized the man's shoulder and spun him about. With
the same movement his other fist crashed the bony man backward for
several paces.

       *       *       *       *       *

But he had not been alone. With him were three other hard-faced men.
They helped him to his feet and came pacing toward Orth and Horgan.
Their hands were inching down toward their big holstered spring guns.
Orth reached for his own hand machine gun, and with his movement their
four enemies went for their own weapons.

Horgan was slapping his bolts at the quartet. Ayna was hugging the
dirty street. Orth felt one smashing impact before his weapon started
sewing the explosive little pellets across the four men's middles.
Pain was just starting to throb in his left elbow when the last of the
others slumped, dead, into the dusty street. Horgan staggered toward
him, a six gun bolt in his right side.

"Just nicked me," he said calmly, his hand holding back the blood that
seeped through his coarse-woven shirt.

Orth found it hard to believe that these fallen men were actually but
pseudo-men, robots. Their laboratory-given life blood was as red and
sticky as a true man's, and their dying struggles were as realistic as
his own might have been.

The bartender came sidling up to Orth. He was but one of a score of
muttering, staring onlookers.

"Better clear outta town," he advised. "Krepp's brother is sheriff. And
if he don't hang you Krepp's mob will do you up."

"Thanks," Orth said. There were a dozen horses, saddled and bridled,
drooping at a nearby hitchrail, and toward these he moved.

"Come on," he told Horgan and Ayna. "We're riding out of here."

Horgan shrugged. "Might as well get neckties for rustling a horse as
for killing Krepp," he conceded, reloading his two spring guns.

They climbed into the saddles, Orth snapping a warning burst of
explosive slugs into the road and Horgan menacing the glowering knot
of townspeople and riders, and went riding eastward out of the village
street.

Once they were free of the town and climbing a long easy grade into the
low tree-clad hills the men of Hardpan City organized their pursuit.
Orth saw horses, light waggons, and high-wheeled vehicles resembling
bicycles come streaming up the highway after them.

Drums began to boom all along the cleared valley they had left and in
the hills ahead.

"News broadcasters," Horgan informed him, "warning all cruising scout
waggons and squad carts of our escape. Their squad carts are fast--they
have pulley drives that can be shifted. If we can only reach the
forests again...."

"We'll make it," Orth said. He grinned encouragingly at Ayna. "Maybe
we'll find your precious Ivath, too," he added.

At that moment they were riding up a short grade, tree-lined and
stony, beyond which they could see nothing but an endless stretch of
undulating tree-tops. Nothing, Orth was thinking, could now keep them
from achieving safety.

Suddenly the ground swayed underfoot and their horses spilled them from
the saddles.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a moment of rushing blackness, as though they were falling
into a pit of tar, and then they felt themselves being whirled
horizontally along for a time into a blurring twilight, only to slide
softly to a stop.

Orth heard a click and a whir from somewhere above him and saw a
vast square section of grayness detach itself from the sky above and
disappear. He lay quietly for a long minute but the ground was solid
underfoot and so he stood up.

"That," said Ayna, laughing rather breathlessly, "was some of Ivath's
work. He's brought this section of the crust inside for repairs." She
hesitated. "Or perhaps because of you, Devin Orth."

"Me? I get it. If he took the _Time Bubble_ this same way.... Yeah."

Orth swallowed thickly. No telling what the mysterious Ivath might be
planning to do with them. He was glad Ayna was along. She knew this
insane future world.

"Here he comes now," said Ayna, low-voiced. "Ivath, I mean. And, by the
way, he is my great grandfather. So don't mind him too much."

Orth found himself looking at a transparent bubble of plastic, with
a puffy over-sized belt of jade-green metal fixed about its middle.
It floated a few feet above the ground, sparks buzzing faintly as it
dropped too low and was forced upward again.

Inside there was a bony little parody of a man's body, or rather, its
upper torso. Below the arms there was nothing save a shining metallic
cylinder. The huge blue-veined skull was supported by soft wide bands
of plastic material, and the bony arms rested on cushioned ledges.

"Greetings, Earthman," something inside his brain seemed to say. "I
have your fellows here, my honored guests. You will join them."

"They are here, my companions?" asked Orth stupidly. "You mean Horn and
Neilson? Did you say that to me?"

"He speaks only in thoughts," said Ayna. "When our people reach the age
of two hundred they submit to this operation. With their lungs gone
there is, of course, no vocal speech. But we live on for centuries
untroubled by bodily breakdowns."

Ivath motioned with his feeble old arms.

"Come," he flashed at them, "we will join them."

       *       *       *       *       *

As they sat in a small spacer cruising within the vast hollow of
Ivath's world-sized stage, Ayna explained more of the mysteries of this
future world. How the planets had been cut up into smaller spheres and
moved into the dwindling radiations of Sol. How their fleets of space
ships crossed the void to trade and mine the precious elements they
required, and of the other galactic cultures they met.

"It is sad," said the girl at last, "that you can never return to the
past. It is there that our science has utterly failed. Travel in time
is but a one-way voyage."

"You mean, Ayna," Orth said slowly, "we can't carry back the knowledge
of an atomic shield that will arrest the spread of sterility--that
mankind must abandon his use of atomic power?"

"You cannot go back," smiled Ayna, putting her hand on his shoulder as
she spoke. "But there is no need. In 1980--if our records are not too
wrong--Eric Ensamoff discovered such a shield."

"Great!" cried Orth. "I won't mind being stranded here. There's
Ivath to set right on his ancient history. There's your perfected
civilization to study." He swallowed his tongue momentarily and
recovered it.

"And then there's you, Ayna," he blurted. "You're...."

The girl slid her fingers across a toggle-switch in the wall. "No use
letting all the worlds hear us," she said softly, "much less see us.
You see, I was sent to interview you and get your reactions. All the
world was watching while you explored."

Orth took the girl and pulled her closer. He studied her face. She
smiled.

"Sure it's turned off?" he demanded. She nodded.

"Fine ... no, they don't need to see _this_ reaction...."



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Scrambled World" ***

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