FLIRGLEFLIP

Banderling, you are a fathead!

Yes, yes. I know. It is rather improbable that this message will reach you in the years that remain of your smug life; but if something, some new discovery--an unexpected warp in the plenum, say--should bring these pages to the surface, I want Thomas Alva Banderling to know that I consider him the most dilated, augmented, and amplified fathead in the history of the race.

Excepting myself, of course.

When I consider how happy I was puttering around my collection of dolik and spindfar, how splendidly my paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns was progressing--when I recall that bliss, only to be recalled in turn to the filthy, dripping necessities of my present vocation, I tend to become somewhat unacademic in my opinions of Banderling. What chance do I have now of ever returning to the creamy towers of the Institute rising in plastic beauty from the septic Manhattan soil?

--|--

I like to dream of the scholarly exhilaration I felt the day we of Field Party Nineteen returned from Mars with a shipload of punforg out of the Gllian excavation. I like to muse on my delighted reacquaintance with the problems I had left unsolved when the field trip was offered me. Banderling and his obscene radiation depressor? Why, that night was the first time I really noticed him!

"Terton," he asked suddenly, his face focusing sharp and studious in the screen of my benscope, "Terton, could you look in at my lab for a moment? I need an extra pair of hands."

I was startled. Beyond occasional meetings at Institute Assemblies, Banderling and I had had little reason for conversation. And it was fairly rare for an Associate Investigator to call on a full Investigator for mechanical assistance, especially when their fields were so different.

"Can't you get a labtech or a robot?" I asked.

"All the labtechs have gone. We're the only ones left in the Institute. Gandhi's Birthday, you know. I told my robot to package himself two hours ago when I thought I was leaving."

"Very well," I sighed, necklacing both my flirgleflip and the dolik I had been examining with it. As I walked into the benscope, giving my necklace the required tugs for the opposite wing of the Institute, I had already ceased to wonder at the oddity of Banderling's request.

The dolik on which I bad been working, you see, was the so-called Thumtse Dilemna--a thoroughly fascinating business. Most of my colleagues inclined toward Gurkheyser's statement of the problem when he discovered it at Thumtse over fifty years ago. Gurkheyser declared that it couldn't be dolik because of the lack of flirg-pattern; and it couldn't be spindfar because of the presence of flirg in minute quantities; therefore it was a consciously created paradox and, as such, had to be classified as punforg. But, by definition, punforg could not exist at Thumtse...

--|--

I wander. Once more I forget the reactions of my audience to this subject. If only this were not so, if only on this one point--In any case, I was still considering the Thumtse Dilemna when I stepped out of the benscope into Banderling's lab. I was not at all prepared psychologically to make the obvious deductions from his nervousness. Even if I had, who could have imagined such psychotic behavior from an Associate Investigator?

"Thanks, Terton," he nodded, his necklace jangling with the gadgetry that physicists seem to find necessary at all times. "Would you hold that long bar away from the turntable and press into the grid with your back? Right." He sucked at the knuckles of his right hand; with his left, he flipped a toggle and clicked a relay shut. He turned a small knob past several calibrations, frowned doubtfully and moved it back to an earlier mark.

The turntable before me--a wheel-like affair whose spokes were resistor coils and whose hub was an immense mesotronic tube--began to glow and whirl softly. Behind me, the grid was vibrating gently against my shoulder blades.

"There's--uh, nothing dangerous in what I'm doing?" I asked, moistening my lips at the roomful of fully operating equipment.

Banderling's little black beard shot up scornfully and the very hairs on his chest seemed to quiver. "What could be dangerous?"

Since I didn't know, I decided to feel reassured. I longed for Banderling's help in the process, but he was moving about rapidly now, sneering impatiently at meters and slapping at switches.

I had almost forgotten my uncomfortable position and the bar I was holding, and was considering the middle passage of my paper--the section where I intended to prove that the influence of Gll was fully as great as Tkes upon later Pegis--when Banderling's booming voice thrust a question into my consciousness.

"Terton, don't you often feel unhappy that you live in an intermediate civilization?"

He had stopped in front of the turntable and put his overlong hands truculently upon his hips.

"What do you mean--the Temporal Embassy?" I asked. I'd heard of Banderling's views.

"Exactly. The Temporal Embassy. How can science live and breathe with such a modifier? It's a thousand times worse than any of those ancient repressions like the Inquisition, military control, or university trusteeship. You can't do this--it will be done first a century later; you can't do that--the sociological impact of such an invention upon your period will be too great for its present capacity; you should do this--nothing may come of it now, but somebody in an allied field a flock of years from now will be able to integrate your errors into a useful theory. And what do all these prohibitions and restrictions accomplish; whose ends do they serve?"

"The greatest good of the greatest number in the greatest period of time," I quoted firmly from the Institute prospectus. "That humanity may continually improve itself by reshaping the past on the basis of its own historical judgment and the advice of the future."

He nodded a sneer at me. "How do we know? What is the master plan of those ultimate humans in that ultimate future where there is no temporal embassy from a still later period? Would we approve of it, would we--"

"But Banderling, we wouldn't even understand it! Humans with minds compared to which ours would look like elementary neural responses--how could we grasp and appreciate their projects? Besides, there seems to be no such ultimate future, merely temporal embassy after temporal embassy sent by each age into the preceding one, the advice of each embassy based on the best historical hindsight of the period from which it came. Temporal embassies extending always into the past from the improving future, temporal embassies without end." I paused, out of breath.

"Except here. Except in an intermediate civilization like ours. They may go out to infinity as far as the future is concerned, Terton, but they stop in our time. We send nobody into the past; we receive orders, but give none of our own."

--|--

I puzzled over Banderling as he examined the greenly sparking mesotronic tube and made an adjustment among his controls which excited it still further. He had always been considered a bit of a rebel at the Institute--by no means bad enough for a Readjustment Course, however--but surely he knew that the organization of the Institute itself was the first suggestion made by the Temporal Embassy when our age durated into its time-fix? I decided that the present difficulty with his equipment had irritated him out of normal reasoning processes. My mind trotted back to important items like spindfar problems, and I began to wish that Banderling would relieve me of the long bar so that I could denecklace my flirgleflip.

Not that I believed the Thumtse Dilemna could conceivably be spindfar. But it was possible, I had suddenly realized, for flirg--

"I've been told to call off work on my radiation depressor." The physicist's morose voice sliced into my thoughts.

"This machine, you mean?" I inquired rather politely, concealing my annoyance both at his interruption and the sudden inexplicable increase of warmth in the room.

"Hum. Yes, this machine." He turned away for a moment and came back with a modified benscope projector which he placed in front of me. "The Temporal Embassy merely suggested that I stop, of course. They suggested it to the Institute administration, which put it in the form of an order. No reason given, none at all."

I clucked sympathetically and moved my perspiring hands to another position on the bar. The vibration of the grid had almost worn a checkerboard callus into my back; and the thought of being involved in an experiment with revoked equipment when I could be doing constructive investigation into dolik, spindfar, and even punforg made me almost pathologically unsocial with impatience.

"Why?" Banderling demanded dramatically, throwing opened palms up in the air. "What is there about this device which requires an ultimatum to stop its progress? I have been able to halve the speed of light, true; I may be able to reduce it even further in the tube, possibly to zero, eventually. Does such an increase of man's scientific powers seem dangerous to you, Terton?"

I pondered the question and was happy to be able to answer in all honesty that it didn't. "But," I reminded him, "there have been other direct revocations of projects. I had one. There was this dolik which was most curiously flirgled, evidently a product of Middle Rla at the peak of its culture. I had no more established the Rlaian origin when I was called to--"

"What have these infernal, incomprehensible thingumajigs to do with the speed of light?" he blasted at me. "I'll tell you why I was ordered to stop work on my radiation depressor, Terton, after eleven years of mind-breaking research. This machine is the key to time travel."

The offense I had decided to take was forgotten. I stared at him. "Time travel? You mean you've discovered it? We have reached the point where we are permitted to send a temporal embassy of our own into the past?"

"No. We have reached a point where journeying in time is possible, where a visit to the past may be made, where we are able to set up an embassy in a previous period. But we will not be allowed to do it! Instead, I drop my radiation depressor so that a century later, say, when the Embassy approves, some other physicist will build a machine using my notes and research--and be credited by history as the father of time travel."

"Are you sure that it's time travel? Possibly only a--"

"Of course I'm sure. Haven't I been measuring duration-gap since the first indication of electromagnetic dampening? Didn't I lose two mesotronic tubes before the reverse field had even approached optimum? And didn't I duplicate the experience of the tubes with over fifteen rabbits, none of which have reappeared? No, it's time travel, Terton, and I have to drop it. Officially, that is."

His tone confused me. "What do you mean, 'officially'?"

Banderling drew a universal necklace across the screen of the benscope until it began to pulsate. "Well, by officially--Terton, would you mind lifting the bar to your chest? A little higher. Fine. We'll be all set in a moment. Suppose someone from the present should be sent into the past as a result of a laboratory accident? Time travel would be an accomplished fact; the man who had built the machine that had accomplished it would be the accredited discoverer--the Temporal Embassy and all its plans notwithstanding. That would cause repercussions clear to the last dwindling curvature of time!"

I shivered, despite the extreme warmth of the lab at this point. "It would," I agreed. "If anyone were fool enough to try it. Seriously, though, do you really think your radiation depressor could send a man from our time into the past and bring him back?"

The physicist put the necklace aside as the benscope achieved optimum pulsation. "I couldn't effect the return with my equipment. But the Temporal Embassy would take care of that. Why, even they have only emissaries operating in the pre-intermediate civilizations--highly trained operatives working secretly and under great difficulties to make the necessary alterations in cultural evolution without the dislocation that would be caused by a Temporal Revelation to primitives. Anyone from our time who wandered into a previous period would be brought back in a hurry. And since the Temporal Embassy permits itself only advisory functions in an intermediate civilization like ours, he'd be brought back alive with a suggestion to Administration that he be shut up somehow. But no matter what happened after that, the secret would be out, the mission would be accomplished. Administration would probably shrug its bureaucratic shoulders and decide to accept the existence of time travel with its attendant Advanced Civilization status. Administration wouldn't object to that at all, once the thing was done. And the temporal embassies would ricochet irritation ahead for a couple of million years; but they'd have to revise their plans. Their grip on history would be broken."

I saw it. Fascinating! Imagine solving once for all the Thumtse Dilemna by watching its creation! And what fantastic new knowledge of the flirglers themselves? We knew so little. I would be particularly interested in the relationship of punforg to--

Unfortunately, the dream was only that. Banderling's radiation depressor had been revoked. He would work on it no more after tonight. Time travel was for another age. I slumped unhappily against the grid.

"That's it, Terton!" the physicist yelled delightedly. "It's passing optimum!" He picked up the universal necklace and held it over the screen of the benscope.

"I'm glad it's working again," I told him. "This grid has been punishing my back. Banderling, I have research of my own to do."

"Don't forget your training," he warned me. "Keep your eyes open and make careful mental notes of everything you see until you're picked up. Think how many investigators in your wing of the Institute would scramble to be in your place, Terton!"

"My place? Helping you? Well, I don't know--"

Then the turntable canted toward me in a flash of oozing green light; the bar seemed to melt into my chest and the grid to flow down my rigid back. Banderling's face tilted out of recognizable perspective through shimmering heat waves. A great goblet of ear-piercing sound poured over my head and numbed my mind. Something enormous, irresistible, punched at me hard and snapped the bubble of consciousness. Nothing was left but a memory of Banderling's grin.

And I was cold. I was very cold.

I stood on a ridiculously stony thoroughfare, looking at a scene from Mark Twain, Washington Irving or Ernest Hemingway--one of the authors of that period, in any case. Brick buildings were scattered carelessly over the landscape like a newly discovered trove of spindfar; metal vehicles crawled noisily past on both sides of me; people walked on the raised stone sections near the ugly little buildings with leather clogs laced tightly to their feet and bandages of various fabrics wrapping their bodies.

But above all, it was cold. Why, the city wasn't even air-conditioned! I found myself shivering violently. I remembered some drawing I had seen of an urchin shivering in just such a scene. Medieval New York. 1650 to 1980, I believe.

Abruptly I remembered the last moments in the lab. And understood.

I raised my fists to my face. "Banderling!" I shrieked at them. "Banderling, you are a fathead!"

This, so far as I can remember, was the first time I used a remark which was to become a cliche with me. Let me repeat it nonetheless, out of a full heart and an aching body--fathead! Fathead!

Somewhere, a woman screamed. I turned and saw her looking at me. Other people were laughing and pointing. I gestured impatiently at them, sank my head on my chest and tried to return to consideration of my predicament.

Then I remembered.

I didn't know exactly when I was, but one thing all of these pre-intermediate civilizations had in common: a clothes fetish with severe penalties for those who disregarded it.

Naturally, there were reasons. I wasn't certain which of them was most important here. For example, there was evidently no thermostatic control of the atmosphere in this area, and the season was the cooling third of the four ancient natural ones.

A gesticulating group had congregated on the raised cement surface facing me. A burly figure in blue, primitive weapons dangling from his belt, shouldered his way out of the crowd and started rapidly in my direction.

"Hey, character," he said (approximately). "Whadaya think this is? Free show? Huh? C'mere!"

As I said, I approximate. I found I was terribly afraid of this savage.

I retreated, whirled, and began to run. I heard him running behind me. I ran faster; I heard him do likewise.

"C'mere!" a voice bellowed. "I said c'mere!"

Was I in an era when burning at the stake was used on those who ran contrary to the psychotic edicts of society? I couldn't remember. I considered it essential, however, to find the privacy necessary for concentration on my next move.

I found it in a dark corner of an alleyway as I galloped past a building. A large metal receptacle with a cover.

There was no one close to me at the moment. I dodged into the alleyway, removed the cover, jumped into the receptacle and got the cover back over my head just as my pursuer puffed up.

Such an incredibly barbarous period! That receptacle--unspeakable, unspeakable...

I heard a pair of feet trotting up the alley, coming back. After a while, several more pairs of feet arrived.

"Well, where did he go?"

"S'elp me, sergeant, he musta gone over that nine-foot fence in back there. I coulda sworn he turned in here, coulda sworn!"

"An old guy like that, Harrison?"

"Pretty spry for an old guy, even if he was a gejenerate. Gave me a run."

"Gave you the slip, Harrison. Guy probably took off from some sanitarium or other. Better find him, men, before he terrorizes the neighborhood."

The feet slapped off.

--|--

I decided that my temporary escape from capture was balanced by the notice I had attracted in what seemed to be the higher echelons of the city's officialdom. I tried desperately, but futilely, to remember some of my Terran history. What were the functions of a sergeant? No use. After all, sixty years since I had studied the subject...

Despite my intense olfactory discomfort, I couldn't leave the receptacle. It would be necessary to wait quite a while, until my pursuers had given up the chase; it would also be necessary to have a plan.

Generally speaking, I knew what I must do. I must somehow discover an emissary of the Temporal Embassy and request a return to my own period. Before I could go about finding him, though, I would have to equip myself with such standard equipment as clothes.

How did one go about getting clothes in this period? Barter? Brigandage? Government work- coupons? Weaving them on one's own loom? Banderling and his idiotic idea that my specialty would be useful in such a world! That fathead!

The cover of the receptacle lifted suddenly. A very tall young man with a vague and pleasant face stared down at me. He rapped on the metal of the lid.

"May I come in?" he inquired courteously.

I glared up at him, but said nothing.

"The cops are gone, Pop," he continued. "But I wouldn't get out just yet. Not in your uniform. I'll lay chick if you tell me all about you."

"Wh-who are you? And what do you want?"

"Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman." He considered for a moment. "Well, poor, anyway. I want any such story as you may have to give. I was in that crowd on the sidewalk when the cop started to chase you. I ambled along behind. You didn't look like the kind of nut who enjoys parading his glorious nakedness. When I got to the alley, I was too tired to follow law and order any more. So I took a rest against the wall and noticed the garbage can. Ecce you."

I shuffled my feet in the soft, stinking mass, and waited.

"Now, lots of people," he went on, twirling the lid absently and looking down the street, "lots of people would say, 'Joe Burns, what if he isn't a nut? Maybe he just tried to draw to an inside straight in a strip-poker game.' Well, lots of people are sometimes right. But did I or did I not I see you materialize out of relatively empty air in the middle of the street? That's what I care about, Pop. And if so, how so?"

"What will you do with the information?"

"Depends, Pop, depends. If it has color, if it has that certain--"

"For example, if I told you I came from the future."

"And could prove it? In that case, I would spread your name and photograph across the front page of the lowest, dirtiest, most thoroughly misinforming sheet in all this wide land. I refer to the eminent journal with which I am associated. Honest, Pop, did you come from the future?"

I nodded rapidly and considered. What better way to attract the attention of a temporal emissary than by letting him know through an important public communication medium that I could expose his existence in this era? That I could destroy the secrecy of the Temporal Embassy in a pre-intermediate civilization? I would be sought out frantically and returned to my own time.

Returned to scholarship, to dolik and spindfar, to punforg and the Thumtse Dilemna, to my quiet laboratory and my fascinating paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns...

"I can prove it," I said swiftly. "But I fail to see the value to you of such a situation. Spreading my name and photograph, as you put it--"

"Don't worry your pretty white thatch about that angle. Joseph Burns will do right well with a tabloid tango about a guy from the future. But you have to get out of that can first. And to get you out of it you need--"

"Clothes. How does one get clothes in this period?"

He scratched his lower lip.

"Well, money is said to help. Not crucial, you understand, but one of the more important factors in the process. You wouldn't have a couple of odd bills somewhere? No-o-o, not unless you have an unrevealed marsupiality. I could lend you the money."

"Well, then--"

"But after all, how much suiting can be purchased in these inflationary times for a dollar twenty-three? Let's face it, Pop; not much. I don't get paid until the day after tomorrow. Besides, if Ferguson doesn't see much value in the yarn, I won't even be able to squeeze it onto my swindle sheet. It wouldn't do to fetch one of my suits down, either."

"Why?" The great quantity of wordage from above and garbage from below was having a very depressing effect on me.

"First, because you might be hauled away by the sanitation department before I returned, and converted into hollyhock vitamins. Then, you're somewhat stouter than me and a good deal shorter. You don't want to attract attention when you step out into this cop-infested thoroughfare; and, in my suit, believe me, Pop, you would. Add to all this the fact that the brave boys in blue may return at any moment and search the alley again--Difficult situation, Pop, most difficult. We face an impasse."

"I don't understand," I began impatiently. "If a voyager from the future appeared in my period, I would be able to help him make the necessary social adjustments most easily. Such a minor item as clothes--"

"Not minor, not minor at all. Witness the ferment in the forces of law and order. Hey! That hammer-shaped ornament, there, the one on your necklace--it wouldn't be silver by any chance?"

Twisting my chin with difficulty, I glanced down. He was pointing at my flirgleflip. I took it off and handed it to him.

"It may well have been silver before it was renucleied for flirgling purposes. Why, does it have any special value?"

"This much silver? I hope to win the Pulitzer Prize it does. Can you spare it? We can get at least one used suit of clothes and half an overcoat out of it."

"Why, I can requisition a new flirgleflip at any time. And I use the large one at the Institute for most of the important flirgling in any case. Take it by all means."

He nodded and replaced the cover of the can over my head. I heard his feet going away. After a lengthy interval in which I developed several surprisingly colorful phrases in regard to Banderling, the garbage-can cover was lifted again and some garments of crude blue cloth dropped upon my head.

"The pirate in the second-hand store would only allow me a couple of bucks on your gimmick," Burns told me as I dressed. "So I had to settle for work clothes. Hey, button those buttons before you step out. No, these. Button them. Oh--let me."

Having been properly fastened into the garments, I climbed out of the receptacle and suffered the reporter to tie shoes to my startled feet. Shoes--these were the leather bandages I had observed. My fingers itched for a crude flint axe to make the shambling anachronism complete.

Well, possibly not a flint axe. But a weapon like a rifle or crossbow did seem in order. Animal pelts and vegetable fibers all over my skin. Ugh!

Glancing nervously up and down the street, Burns led me by the arm to a badly ventilated underground chamber. There he flailed a path into an extremely long and ugly sectional conveyance--a subway train.

"I see that here, as elsewhere in your society, only the fittest survive."

He got a better grip on one man's shoulders and moved his feet into a more comfortable position on another's toes. "Howzat?"

"Those who are not strong enough to force their way inside are forced to remain where they are or to resort to even more primitive means of transportation."

"Honest, Pop," he said admiringly, "you'll make terrific copy. Remember to talk like that for Ferguson."

After an appreciable interval of discomfort, we emerged from the train--somewhat like two grape pips being expectorated--and clawed our way to the street.

--|--

I followed the reporter into an ornate building and stopped with him in front of a distinguished old man who sat in a small cubicle wrapped in dignified, thoughtful silence.

"How do you do, Mr. Ferguson?" I began immediately, for I was pleasantly surprised. "I am very happy to find in Mr. Burns's superior the obvious intellectual kinship which I had almost--"

"Lay off!" Burns whispered fiercely in my ear as the old man backed away. "You're scaring the pants off the guy. Fourth floor, Carlo."

"Gee, Mr. Burns," Carlo remarked as he pulled a black lever and the cubicle containing the three of us shot upward, "you sure do come in with characters. What I mean, characters."

The newspaper office was an impossible melange of darting humanity exhibiting complicated neurosis patterns among masses of paper, desks, and primitive machines that I later learned were typewriters. Joseph Burns placed me on a wooden bench and scurried inside a glass-paneled office after various ritualistic wavings of the arm and crying of such phrases as "hiya tim, hiya joe, whadaya know abe."

After a lengthy period during which I almost became ill in the atmosphere of perspiration and frenzy, he came out followed by a small man in shirt sleeves who had a tic in his left eye.

"This him?" the small man asked. "Uh-huh. Well, it sounds good, I don't say it don't sound good. Uh-huh. He knows he sticks to this future gag no matter how they try to break him down, and if he does break, nobody's to know we were in on it. He knows it, huh? He looks good for the gag, just old enough, just enough like a crazy prof. It looks good all around, Burns. Uh-huh. Uh-huh, uh-huh."

"Wait till you hear his line," the reporter broke in. "Talk about color, Ferguson!"

"I am unfamiliar with my prismatic possibilities," I told them coldly. "But I must own to a great disappointment that the first representative individuals of the pre-intermediate civilization to hear a coherent account of my origins persist in idiotic droolings--"

The small man's left eye rapped out an impatient tic. "Can that free copy. Or save it for Burns: he'll take it down. Listen, Joey boy, we got something good here. Uh-huh. Two days before the World Series start and not a stick of red-ink news in the town. We can let it run all over the front page, more if it bounces up enough argument. I'll take care of the milking--the regulation comments by the university guys and science societies all around your copy. Meanwhile, you haul whozis here--"

"Terton," I told him desperately. "My name."

"Terton. Uh-huh. You haul Terton here over to a good hotel, get a decent suite and start dragging copy out of him. Keep him isolated until tomorrow morning when there should be a nice thick smell started up. Tomorrow morning, uh-huh. Bring him over again and I'll have a bunch of psychs all ready to swear he's crazy and another bunch crying with tears in their eyes that he's normal and every word sounds like the truth. Get a couple of pics taken of him before you leave."

"Sure, Ferguson. Only trouble, the cop might recognize him as the guy who turned up stark naked in the street. He claims that nobody wears clothes in his period. The police department would have him certified and in Bellevue in no time."

"Lemme think." Ferguson walked around a swift little circle, scratching his nose and winking his eye. "Then we'll play it heavy. For keeps. Uh-huh, for keeps. Find out what he claims his job is--I mean, was--I mean, is going to be--uh-huh, and I'll have a couple of specialists in the same field lined up and insisting that he sounds just like one of them a thousand years from now."

"Just a moment," I insisted. "A thousand years is fantas--"

Tic went Ferguson's eye. "Get him out of here, Joey boy," he said. "He's your baby. I got work to do."

Not until we were in the hotel room was I able to convey to the reporter my extreme disgust at the stolid lunacy of his culture. And his attitude before Ferguson. Why, he had acted as if he shared Ferguson's opinions!

"Take it easy, Pop," the young man told me, his long legs spilling carelessly over the arm of a garishly upholstered couch. "Let us avoid bitterness and reproach. Let us live out our wealthy two days in harmony. Sure, I believe you. But there are certain proprieties to be observed. If Ferguson suspected that I ever believed anybody, let alone a guy who walks through busy office traffic on Madison Avenue with his bare skin hanging out, it would be necessary for me to seek gainful employment not only with another firm, but possibly in another occupation. Besides, all you care about is attracting the attention of one of these temporal emissary queebles. To do that, you feel you have to threaten him with exposure, you have to make a splash. Believe me, Pop, with the wire service tie-up we have, you'll make a splash that will moisten the ears of Eskimos fishing peacefully off Greenland. Australian Bushmen will pause between boomerangs to ask each other--'What's with this Terton character?'"

After much reflection, I agreed. As a result of Banderling's fatheaded use of me as a thrown gauntlet, I had to adjust myself to the customs of a ridiculous era. As they say, when in 200 AD...

By the time Burns had finished questioning me, I was exhausted and hungry. He ordered a meal sent up, and despite my repugnance for the badly cooked meal in unsanitary glazed pottery, I began eating as soon as it was set before me. To my surprise, the taste sensations were rather pleasant.

"You'd better crawl into the sack as soon as you've finished blotting up calories," Burns advised from the table where he was typing. "You look like a hundred-yard man who's just tried to cop the cross-country crown. Bushed, Pop, bushed. I'll run the copy over to the office when I get it done. I don't need you any more tonight."

"The facts are sufficient and satisfactory?" I yawned.

"Not quite sufficient, but very satisfactory. Enough to give Ferguson a bunch of happy gurgles. I only wish--Oh, well, the date business for example. It would help out a lot."

"Well," I said sleepily, "I can think a bit more about 1993."

"No. We've been through that from every angle. Let it ride. Get yourself some sleep, Pop."

--|--

The newspaper office had changed its population quality when Burns and I walked in. An entire section of the huge floor had been roped off. Signs had been posted at regular intervals reading "FOR SCIENTISTS ONLY." Between them were other signs extending a welcome to "THE VISITOR FROM 2949," announcing that "THE NEW YORK BLARE SALUTES THE FAR FUTURE" and minor obscure comments concerning such things as "HANDS ACROSS THE TIMESTREAM" and "THE PAST, PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE ARE ONE AND INDIVISIBLE WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!"

Various elderly gentlemen milled about in the roped enclosure into which I was half jostled, half guided. What I had come to recognize as flashbulbs were expended blindingly and in quantity by troops of photographers, some of whom lay prone on the floor, while others contorted on chairs, and still others hung suspended from trapeze-like affairs attached to the ceiling.

"It's sizzling and bubbling, Joey boy," Ferguson babbled as he writhed his way up to us and put several sheets of ink-fresh newspaper into the reporter's hands. "Some say he's a nut, uh-huh, and some say he's a resurrection of the prophet Nehemiah; but everybody in town is buying the paper. Two full days before the World Series and we've got a solid newsbeat. The other rags have their tongues hanging out for a look-in--they can kiss my basket. Nice slew of copy, uh-huh, nice angles. I had some trouble finding a couple of archaeologists who'd swear Terton was a member of the guild, but Ferguson never fails--we got our men." Ferguson's left eye momentarily lost its tic and developed a positive oscillation. "Look," he growled hoarsely, as he pushed me into a seat, "don't go prima donna on us now. No fancy stuff, see! Uh-huh. That's right. You just stick to your story for today and tomorrow and you'll get yourself a nice hunk of the publisher's dough. If you're good enough, maybe you can even last through the first two games of the Series. Stick to your story--you came from the future, and that's all you know. Uh-huh, and stay away from facts!"

As he clapped his bands, calling the assembled scientists to attention, Joseph Burns slid into the chair next to mine.

"Sorry about the archaeologist complication, Pop. But remember my copy is edited thoroughly at this end. What you told me just doesn't look good on paper. Martian archaeologist is close enough for the masses. If I were you, I'd stay away from any detailed description of your occupation. It'll density the air no end."

"But Martian archaeologist is wholly inaccurate!"

"Come now, Pop, you seem to forget that your primary objective is to attract attention, enough attention so that you'll be considered a dangerous big-mouth and sent back to your time. Well, glance to your right and occasionally to your left. Lots of attention, no? This is the way to do it: huge heads and lurid lines."

I was still considering my reply when I noticed that Ferguson had finished introducing me to the scientists, most of whom wore thin little curled smiles. "Uh-huh, and here he is! Terton, the man from the impossibly far future. He will speak to you himself, he will answer your questions. The New York Blare requests, however, that questions be brief and limited in number; just for the first day, gentlemen. After all, our guest is tired and upset after his long, hazardous journey through time!"

The dignified questions sputtered at me as I rose to my feet. "Exactly what year do you claim as your origin, Mr. Terton? Or is the figure 2949 correct?"

"Quite incorrect," I assured the questioner. "The actual date in terms of a translation from the Octet Calendar which we use--Now, what was that rule about translating from the Octet?"

"Could you explain the construction of a rocket motor of your period?" someone asked as I was deep in the complicated and unfamiliar methodology of calendar mathematics. "You speak of interplanetary flight."

"And interstellar flight," I added. "And interstellar flight. Except that rockets are not used. A complicated propulsion method called the space pressure spread is employed."

"And what exactly is a space pressure spread?"

I coughed embarrassedly. "Something which, I am afraid, I had never the slightest interest in investigating. I understand it is based on Kuchholtz's Theory of the Missing Vector."

"And what--"

"Kuchholtz's Theory of the Missing Vector," I told them with a good deal of firmness, "has been the one thing that attracted my mind even less than the operation of a space pressure spread."

--|--

So it went. From triviality to triviality. These primitive though well-meaning savants, living as they did at the very dawn of specialization, could not even faintly appreciate how cursory my education had been in everything but my chosen field. In their period of microscopic knowledge and rudimentary operational devices it was already difficult for one man to absorb even a generalization of total learning. How much more so in my time, I tried to tell them, with separate biologies and sociologies for each planet--to mention but one example. And then, it had been so many years since I had touched upon the elementary sciences! I had forgotten so much!

Government (as they called it) was almost impossible to illustrate. How can you demonstrate to twentieth-century savages the nine levels of social responsibility with which every child has thoroughly experimented before reaching adolescence? How can you make clear the "legal" status of such a basic device as the judicialarion? Possibly someone from my time deeply versed in this period's tribal lore and superstitions might, with the aid of rough parallels, give them a glimmering of such things as communal individuality or mating by neurone-pattern--but not I. I? Good cause had I to berate Banderling as the chuckles rippled higher.

"I am a specialist," I cried at them. "I need another specialist like myself to understand me."

"You need a specialist all right," a brown-clothed, middle-aged man said as he rose in the back row. "But not like you. Like me. A psychiatrist."

There was a roar of agreeing laughter. Ferguson rose nervously and Joseph Burns came quickly to my side.

"This the man?" the psychiatrist inquired of a blue-clad figure who had just entered the office. I recognized my chief pursuer of the day before. He nodded.

"Him, all right. Runnin' around nood. Should be ashamed. Or committed. I dunno which, honestly I don't."

"Just a moment," one of the scientists called out as Ferguson cleared his throat. "We've spent this much time; the least we can do is find out what he claims as his specialty. Some form of archaeology--Martian archaeology, no less."

At last. I drew a deep breath. "Not Martian archaeology," I began. "Not archaeology." That had been Banderling's misconception! Behind me, Burns groaned and slumped back into his chair.

"I am a flirgleflip. A flirgleflip is one who flips flirgs with a flirgleflip." There was a loud intake of breath.

I discussed my profession at great length. How the first dolik and spindfar discovered in the sands of Mars had been considered nothing more than geological anachronisms, how the first punforg had been used as a paperweight. Then Cordes and that almost divine accident which enabled him to stumble upon the principle of the flirgleflip; then Gurkheyser who perfected it and may rightly be considered the father of the profession. The vistas that opened as the flirg-patterns were identified and systematized. The immense beauty, created by a race that even living Martians have no conception of, which became part of man's cultural heritage.

I told of the commonly accepted theory as to the nature of the flirglers: that they were an energy form which at one time attained intelligence on the red planet and left behind them only the flirg-patterns which were vaguely equivalent to our music or non-objectivist art; that being energy forms they left permanent energy records of all kinds in their only material artifacts--dolik, spindfar, and punforg. I told proudly of my decision at an early age to dedicate myself to flirg-patterns: how I was responsible for the system of using present-day Martian placenames to identify the sites on which the artifacts were found in their loosely scattered fashion. Then, modestly, I mentioned my discovery of an actual contrapuntal flirg-pattern in some dolik--which had resulted in a full Investigatorship at the Institute. I referred to my forthcoming paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns and became so involved in a description of all the facets of the Thumtse Dilemna, that it seemed to me I was back at the Institute giving a lecture--instead of fighting for my very identity.

"You know," I heard a voice say wonderingly near me, "it almost sounds logical. Like one of those double-talk hits or the first verse of Jabberwocky, it almost sounds as if it exists."

"Wait!" I said suddenly. "The sensation of flirg-pattern is impossible to describe in words. You must feel it for yourself." I tore open the rough cloth of my upper garment and pulled the necklace out. "Here, examine for yourselves the so-called dolik of the Thumtse Dilemna with my flirgleflip. Observe--"

I stopped. I was not wearing the flirgleflip! I'd forgotten.

Joseph Burns leaped up. "Mr. Terton's flirgleflip was exchanged for the suit of clothes he is now wearing. I'll volunteer to go out and buy it back."

My gratitude went with him as he picked his way through the amused scientists.

"Listen, guy," Ferguson told me wetly. "You'd better do something fast. Burns isn't a genius: he may not be able to work up a good out. There's an alienist here--uh-huh, I said an alienist--and they'll shove you behind soft walls if you don't come up with something new. You're looking so bad, all our men are sitting on their tongues. They're afraid for their reps."

One of the younger scientists asked for the necklace. I handed it to him, the dolik still attached. He scrutinized both objects, then scratched them with his fingernail. He returned them to me.

"That necklace--ah--was what you claimed could send you or teleport you anywhere on Earth, I believe?"

"Through a benscope," I pointed out. "You need benscope receivers and transmitters."

"Quite. And the small thing is what you call a--hum--a dolik. Thumbnail's Dilemna, or some such. Gentlemen, I am an industrial chemist, as you know. That necklace, I am convinced--and chemical analysis would merely confirm my visual impressions--is nothing more than a very fine spun glass. Nothing more."

"It's been renucleied for use with a benscope, you fool! What difference does the nature of the material make, when it's been renucleied?"

"Whereas the dolik," the young man went on equably, "the Martian dolik is really a treasure. Something quite unique. Oh, yes. Old red sandstone such as the average geologist can find almost anywhere on Earth in fifteen minutes. Old red sandstone!"

--|--

It was a while before I could make myself heard again. Unfortunately, I lost my temper. The idea of anyone referring to the Thumtse Dilemna as old red sandstone almost made me insane. I shouted at them for their bigotry, their narrowness, their lack of knowledge. Ferguson stopped me. "You'll get yourself put away for sure," he whispered. "You're almost frothing. Uh-huh, and don't think it'll do the sheet a bit of good for you to be dragged out of here in a straitjacket." I took a deep breath.

"Gentlemen," I suggested. "If any of you were suddenly to find yourselves in an earlier century, you would have great difficulty in using your specialized knowledge with the primitive equipment you would then find available. How much more must I--"

"You have a point there," a man with a stout face admitted. "But there is one thing, one means of identification always open to a traveler from the future."

"What's that?" Several academic necks were craned at him.

"Dates. Historical events. Things of this month or this year. The significant occurrences. You claim to regard this period as your past. Tell us of it. What will happen?"

"Unfortunately--" I made an unhappy gesture and the laughter sped forth anew, "my Terran history is very fragmentary. One brief course in childhood. I was brought up on Mars, and even Martian history is rather vague to me. Historical dates I never could assimilate. As I told Joseph Burns last night, I remember only three around this general period."

"Yes?" Their interest was substantial now.

"First, 1993."

"What happens in 1993?"

"I don't know, I regret to say. But it seems to have some great significance. Possibly a plague, an invention, the date of a masterpiece. Or possibly a date which was mentioned to me casually and which I've retained. Not very useful, in any case. Then August, 1945. The atom bomb. Mr. Burns says this isn't particularly useful either since it is already several years in your past. Please remember, that I have great difficulty with your calendar."

"What's the third date?" a voice called.

"1588," I told him hopelessly. "The Spanish Armada."

Chairs scraped. The scientists rose and prepared to leave. "Hold 'em," Ferguson shrilled at me. "Say something, do something." I shrugged.

"One moment." It was the young industrial chemist. "I think we can settle the hash of this hoax most definitely. I noticed in Mr. Burns's lurid little article that you said you had played on the Martian sands as a child. What were you wearing at the time?"

"Nothing." I was puzzled. "Some warm clothing. Nothing else."

"No helmet of any sort, say?"

"No, none at all."

He grinned. "Just some warm clothing. Yet we know that the temperature at the equator rarely rises above freezing. We also know that there is--practically speaking--no oxygen on Mars. The spectroscope has continually confirmed this over the years. Warm clothing, no oxygen helmet. Hah!"

I puzzled after their retreating, contemptuous backs as they left. This was one point I couldn't understand at all. What if their instruments showed only minute quantities of oxygen on Mars and a temperature below freezing? I had played in the Martian desert as a boy. I had been there and I remembered it very clearly. No oxygen helmet, some warm clothing. These savages and their instruments!

"Better scram fast," Ferguson told me, the tic in his left eye batting unhappily. "The cop and the alienist are still out in the corridor. It don't look good for you and it won't look good for the sheet if they wrap you up. Better get out with the service elevator. Uh-huh, the service elevator."

--|--

I went down to the street, pondering how the temporal emissaries would get in touch with me now. Evidently, in Joseph Burns's words, I hadn't made a sufficiently great "splash." Or had it been enough? Possibly one of the scientists was a temporal emissary, observing me and preparing to send me back to my own time before I could cause any more disruption in this period.

"Hi, Pop. I called the office. Tough go."

"Burns!" I turned in relief to the young man lounging against the wall of the building. The only friend I had made in this crazy, barbaric era. "You didn't get the flirgleflip. They'd bartered it, or sold it, or lost it."

"No, Pop, I didn't get the flirgleflip." He took my arm gently. "Let's walk."

"Where?"

"Find a job for you, an occupation into which you can fit your futuristic talents."

"And what would that be?"

"That is the problem, the nasty, difficult problem. Not many flirgles to be flipped in this period. That's all you can do well and you're too old to learn another profession. Yet a man must eat. If he doesn't, he gets odd feelings and strange, mournful quaverings in his abdomen. Ah, well."

"Evidently, you were wrong about the temporal emissary."

"No, I wasn't. You attracted their attention. You've been contacted."

"By whom?"

"Me."

I would have stopped in astonishment directly in the path of a scudding vehicle if Burns's pressure on my arm hadn't kept me moving.

"You mean you're a temporal emissary? You take me back?"

"Yes, I'm a temporal emissary. No, I don't take you back."

Completely confused, I shook my head carefully. "I don't--"

"You don't go back, Pop. First, because this way Banderling is accused of destroying the rights of a communal individual--namely you. This way the Institute decides that the radiation depressor will bear years of investigation and development before anything but completely stable individuals are allowed near it. Eventually time travel will be discovered--and in the proper period--as the result of a textual cross-reference to Banderling's radiation depressor. Second, you don't go back because it is now impossible for you to blab loudly about temporal emissaries without getting into a walled establishment where they make guests wear their sheets like overcoats."

"You mean it was all deliberate, your meeting me and worming the flirgleflip out of my possession and convincing me that I must make a splash, as you put it, so that I am maneuvered into a position where nobody in this society will believe me--"

--|--

We turned right down a narrow street of little cafes. "I mean even more than that was deliberate. It was necessary for Banderling to be the kind of person he is--"

"A fathead?" I suggested bitterly.

"--so that the radiation depressor would be put on the shelf a sufficient number of years as a result of the 'Terton Tragedy.' It was necessary for you to have the profession and background you do, completely unfit for the needs of this period, so that you will be able to make no appreciable alteration in it. It was further necessary--"

"I thought you were my friend. I liked you."

"It was further necessary for me to be the kind of person I am so that your confidence would be won by me as soon as you--er, arrived and the project began to work properly. Also, being the kind of person I am, I am going to be very uncomfortable at what I did with you. This discomfort is probably also necessary for another facet of the Temporal Embassy's plans. Everything fits, Terton, into everything else--even the temporal embassy at the end of time, I suspect. Meanwhile, I had a job to do."

"And Banderling? What happens to him when I fail to return?"

"He's barred from physical research, of course. But since he's young, he will manage to develop a new profession. And the mores of your era being what they are, he will become a flirgleflip--replacing you in the community. He will have a Readjustment Course first, however. Which reminds me--I've been concentrating so hard on getting you a job you can do, I forget important things."

I mused on the irony of Banderling's supposed revolt being part of the plans of the Temporal Embassy. And on the pathos of my spending what remained of my lifetime in this insane age. Suddenly I noticed that Burns had detached the dolik from my necklace.

"One of those oversights," he explained as he pocketed it. "You shouldn't have taken it with you, according to our original plans. Now I'll have to see that it's returned as soon as I get you settled in your job. That dolik is the Thumtse Dilemna, you know. The schedule calls for its problem to be solved by one of your colleagues at the Institute."

"Who solves it?" I asked with great interest. "Masterson, Foule, Greenblatt?"

"None of them." He grinned. "According to the schedule, the Thumtse Dilemna is solved finally by Thomas Alva Banderling."

"Banderling," I cried as we paused in front of a grimy restaurant which had a Dishwasher Wanted sign in the window. "Banderling? That fathead?"

AFTERWORD

Some stories just don't work. I rewrote this one several times, and I never could make it even slightly better. Really, when it comes to the creative act, there does not seem to be any rule that holds true all the way down the line.

I have written full-length stories in one night and done no more beyond the first draft than correct spelling mistakes--and been reasonably proud of the result. I have written and rewritten others over the years and have come to consider them among my best. And, conversely, stories that I've ripped hot from my typewriter and immediately sent off to an agent or editor have, upon later rereading, turned out to be things that I've wanted to hide under sofa cushions or behind wallpaper. And so have been pieces that I've worked and reworked and changed and buffed and polished until there's nothing left but a single subordinate clause from the original draft.

Lovely, lovely babies and dismal miscarriages--they all come up in their turn and have to be accepted as my very own.

The notion that precipitated "Flirgleflip" seemed to be a good one: temporal embassies from every century to the century before, working, on the basis of known historical results, to improve the future (and, of course, no longer being sent back to a period when knowledge that time travel was possible might have deleterious consequences). The thought of creating an occupation or future profession that would be close to meaningless in the present also intrigued me (as, for example, what would the Egyptians of 500 AD be able to make of a twenty-first-century exobiologist or computer technician or particle physicist?).

But the story qua story never took off. Upon reexamination more than half a century later, I wonder if I've found the reason. After all, I cut out a whole lot of subordinate clauses, but I did always keep the first line. That's because the story, whatever it is, seems to unroll precisely from the agonized exclamation, "Banderling, you are a fathead!" and repeat that in the inevitable conclusion.

No, that first line belongs as first line.

Still... If I did put "Flirgleflip" in my word processor now... If I did try one last rewrite, taking out the first line and substituting another one...

Ahh...