Van Vogt, AE The Weapon Shops of Isher

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had been told, had the weapon shop door's unique sensitivity for recognizing
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hidden hostility. And its basic structure included the ability, also built into every
gun, to recognize and react within limitations. Like the weapons that would not
kill except in self-defense or under other restrictions, its intricately acute
electronic senses perceived minute differences in the reactions of every part of
the examined body. It was an invention that had been developed since the last
time he had been a member of the weapon shops a hundred-odd years before. It
was new to him. And their dependence on it made it necessary for Robert
Hedrock, Earth's one immortal man, friend of the weapon shops, to make sure it
was as effective a safeguard as they thought.
But that was for later. It was the least of the problems confronting him. He was a
man who had to make up his mind, how soon was not yet clear-but all too soon it
seemed to him. The first great attack of the youthful empress had already closed
the weapon shops in every large city on earth. But even that was secondary
compared to the problem of the endless seesaw. He could not escape the
conviction that only he, of all the human beings on earth, was qualified to make
the decision about that. And he still had not an idea of what to do.
His thought reached that point, as he came to the door marked Private-
Executives Only, his destination. He knocked; waited the necessary seconds, then
entered without further preliminary.
It was a curiously arranged room in which he found himself. Not a large room, by
Isher standards, but large enough. It was so close to being a 200-foot cube that
Bedrock's eyes could not detect the difference. Its most curious feature was that
the door, through which he entered, was about a hundred feet above the floor
with the ceiling an equal distance higher. There was a platform just inside the
door. From it projected an energy plane. Hedrock stepped into one of the pairs of
insulators on the platform. The moment he felt them grip his shoes he walked out
onto the vaguely glowing latticework of force.
In the center of the room (center on height-depth as well as length-width level)
seven weapon shop councilors were standing around a machine that floated in a
transparent plastic case. They greeted Hedrock briefly, then returned their
attention to the machine. Hedrock watched them silently, conscious of ther
intense, unnormal depression. Beside him Peter Cadron whispered, "It's almost
time for another swing."
Hedrock nodded. And slowly, as he gazed at the wizard mechanism floating in its
vacuumized case, their absorption communicated itself to him. It was a map of
time. A map of inter-crossed lines so finely drawn that they seemed to waver like
heat waves on a torrid day.
Theoretically the lines extended from a central point into the infinite past and the
infinite future (with the limitation that in the mathematics employed, infinity was
almost zero). But after several trillion years the limitation operated to create a
blurred effect, which was enhanced by the unwillingness of the eyes to accept the
image. On that immense ocean of time, the shadowy shapes, one large and very
near the center, one a mere speck on the curving vastness of the map, lay
moveless. Hedrock knew that the speck was a magnified version of the reality,
which was too small to make out with the naked eye. The image had been so
organized that its every movement was followed by a series of magnifiers. These
instruments were attuned to separate sensitive energies and adjusted
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automatically to the presence of additional onlookers.
As Hedrock watched with pitying eyes both shadows moved. It was a movement
that had no parallel in macro-cosmic space-a movement so alien that the vision
could not make an acceptible image. It was not a particularly swift process but, in
spite of that, both shadows-withdrew? Where? Even the weapon shop scientists
had never quite decided that. They withdrew and then slowly reappeared, but
now their positions were reversed, with variations.
They were farther out. The large shadow, which had been wavering one month
and three days from the center in the past, was suddenly a month and three days
and a few hours in the future. The tiny speck, which had been 97 billion years in
the future, reversed to about 106 billion years in the past. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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