Suicide Mission
New Worlds Science Fiction – September 1954
(1954)
James White
Illustrated by QUINN

This story will undoubtedly revive the old controversies about a man going into the Past and killing his grandfather—in this case the murderer doesn't know his victim at all nor just why he is going to kill him. Only that he must—if he can.

-

	The heat of the early afternoon sun lay like a hot compress on the back of Maldon's neck, and he felt as though his hair was burning. A striped insect hung almost motionless above his head and buzzed loudly. Occasionally a gentle, almost imperceptible, breeze would stir the long grass which lay around him, and the rich, warm scents of growing things would for a moment replace the hot smell of mineral oil that came from the moving parts of his shot-gun. But neither the heat, nor the sounds, nor the smells were allowed to distract him. All of his mind was concentrated on just one thing—the thought of murder.

	And, he knew, if he didn't keep thinking of murder, he would fail.

	He lay very still in the long grass beside the path which was the shortcut from the Steenson house to the bus stop, and waited with great patience for Henry Steenson to appear.

	Maldon knew that the other man would come. He had seen two old press cuttings which had borne this day's date, one which stated that Steenson had been reprimanded in court for a small infringement of the traffic laws, and another that he had presided at a meeting of his fellow veterinary surgeons. The court case had been in the nearby town at eleven in the morning, the meeting had been in Steenson's own house sometime in the afternoon, so Steenson was now on his way from one to the other and was due to appear any time now.

	He had been very lucky, Maldon knew, finding those cuttings. The Historical Section of the Institute was nothing if not comprehensive, but printed matter dealing with this particular section of space and time was scarce—practically all the records had been destroyed by the Bomb which was due to hit this area a couple of years from now. It had been finding those cuttings which had given him the means of escape—the only means of escape that the Institute people were incapable of guarding against. The conditioning he had undergone at the Institute was supposed to make certain actions impossible for him, and, because the conditioning worked, he was unable to do the one thing he wished with all his being that he could do. But those cuttings had shown a loophole in that unhumanly efficient conditioning. A way of doing one thing and pretending it was something else ...

	An uncontrollable tremor shook his whole body, and the stock of the gun he had stolen slipped in his suddenly sweating hands. The conditioning! He fought desperately against an overwhelming urge to fling the gun away and flee from this spot, all the while cursing his own stupidity at allowing his mind to wander at a time like this. Furiously he renewed his concentration on the one subject that it was fairly safe to think about—murder. Gradually his quivering body grew still, and when the distant figure of his victim came into sight on the path, the gun was again rock steady in his hands.

	As Steenson came slowly nearer, Maldon got a closer look at his features—and felt suddenly unsure of himself. This was Steenson, all right. He was sure of that. One of the clippings had included a photograph. The face in the picture had been a little vague, naturally, but it was recognisably the same person. And the clothes matched, so that clinched it. But somehow, Maldon hadn't expected the other to look like this. There was something wrong about Steenson's eyes, and the bone structure of his head. Maldon didn't know much about genetics, but surely ... He brought his wandering mind sharply back to the job in hand. He had nearly messed things up again. Concentrate, he told himself desperately.

	For him the whole world became the sights of a gun lined up on the third button of an open-necked, sweat-stained shirt. The shirt bobbed gently as its wearer walked, and expanded as he came nearer. When it was near enough to make a miss impossible, Maldon fired both barrels.

-

	The way Steenson flopped to the ground told Maldon two things. He had missed, and the other had been under fire before—probably in one of the current wars. Maldon didn't know how he could have missed, but obviously he had. He reloaded and stood up. Steenson hadn't moved—there was no cover for him to move to. Maldon took careful aim and fired again. And again.

	He couldn't be missing him, Maldon knew. Not at this range. But Steenson lay shaking on the ground, white-faced and unhurt. That fact hit Maldon with almost the impact of a physical blow. He began to shake again, and this time it wasn't due to the Institute conditioning. He raised the gun for another shot. Then he saw it.

	A thin black line of burnt grass lay midway between Steenson and himself. It extended, Maldon saw with a feeling of near despair, for more than ten yards on either side of him. The most serious danger threatening Steenson at the moment, he knew, was an attack of sunstroke.

	Someone had thrown up a force-field between them. Someone who had followed Maldon from the future in order to stop him from doing what he'd come to do. And Maldon thought he knew who that someone was.

	Henning.

	It was time he got away from here. Or, more important, it was time he got away from now. He dropped the gun quickly and pulled out his ear-pads and snapped them into position. A large, calibrated dial control grew out of the flat grey box strapped to his chest. He altered the setting to 'Minus 20,' and looked round anxiously to see if his follower was in sight. There was no sign of Henning anywhere—probably the shot-gun was making him cautious. With a little sigh of relief Maldon covered both his eyes with his hands and began the first of the mental gymnastics that were designed to separate the reality that was himself from the reality that was the world around him, and so allow him to travel in time.

	Three minutes later and twenty years into the past it was still summer. The grass was damp from a recent shower and the path had disappeared, otherwise nothing had changed. Maldon started walking quickly in the direction of the Steenson house, which was a quarter of a mile away behind some trees. He didn't try to plan ahead. He tried not to think at all. The Institute conditioning made thinking in certain directions dangerous. The right words and actions would occur to him when needed—he hoped.

-

	Now that he knew Henning was hunting him, he would have to work fast. The power pack strapped to his chest contained a certain amount of radio-active material which could be detected easily by the other's instruments, Maldon knew, but the detector was accurate only to the nearest fifteen minutes or so, which meant that Henning would arrive several minutes either before or after he had. Maldon hoped desperately that it would be after. By moving himself in space as well as time, he knew, the margin of error in Henning's detector would be greatly increased. But it would do Maldon no good at all if the other man had arrived first. Henning would have had an even longer time to prepare a trap for him.

	Henning meant to stop him from killing Steenson.

	Steenson's house was a two-storey affair, painted white, with a hedged-in garden all around it. Beyond it Maldon could see a group of barns and outhouses which were almost as neat and clean as was the house itself. He hurried towards it. Beside the tiled path that led to the front door a pair of garden shears lay half hidden in the grass. They were large, heavy, and very, very sharp. He picked them up as he passed and went to ring the door-bell.

	But it wasn't Steenson who answered the door. Instead, a small, grey-haired woman with surprisingly youthful features stood in the doorway and looked at him in silent enquiry. Maldon's grip on the shears relaxed a little. He wet his lips.

	"Could I speak with Henry Steenson, please?"

	The woman shook her head. "No, I'm sorry," she said, "He's gone hiking for a couple of weeks before he starts school again. Are you from the school, too?"

	Maldon nodded mutely.

	"I thought so." She went on, "Henry said there were a lot of overseas students this year ..." She smiled up at him, "... But you've hardly any accent at all." Then she noticed the shears clenched in Maldon's right hand. "Oh, I'm always losing those things," she exclaimed and took them from him gently. "Where did I leave them this time?"

	Even if he had wanted to, Maldon could not have offered resistance. She was too nice a person. Before he could answer her she was talking again.

	"Won't you come in a minute? You look very tired," she said kindly, noticing the strain in Maldon's face. "Sit down for a while and I'll get you something." She stepped aside to let him in.

-

	The room was neat, spotlessly clean, and refreshingly cool after the heat outside. But Maldon had no time to relax. He took a chair by the window and listened to the stream of good-natured chatter and the subdued clatter of cooking utensils that came from an adjoining room while his eyes searched the approach to the house for the first sign of Henning. The talk was very one-sided—as Maldon was supposed to be a foreigner, that was to be expected—and most informative. He felt relieved, almost happy. He was being given all the information he needed, without having to ask a single question.

	This woman was Steenson's mother. She had lived in this house all her life, she said. Her youngest son, Henry, had been much brighter than her other boys—he had always wanted to be a doctor. But he was a good worker, too. Most of his summer vacation had been spent doing jobs around the place. Why, he'd just finished putting up a whole new fence only last week ...

	In a clear patch of grass, three fields away, a tiny figure flickered suddenly into being. Henning! Maldon got quickly to his feet and started for the door. Steenson had been at the farm a week ago—that was all Maldon needed to know. He would go back to then.

	He was half-way across the room when Mrs. Steenson appeared carrying a loaded tray. He muttered an excuse about being late for something, but she would have none of it. He would have to stay, she insisted, and have something to eat now that it was all ready for him. It would only take a moment, she coaxed. Maldon felt like screaming with impatience. If he just took to his heels, she would probably start shouting after him, and that would attract Henning immediately. The logical thing to do was to render her unconscious. A blow on the head should do that. But Maldon didn't want to hurt her. In his present state he might strike too hard and maybe even kill her, so that solution was no good. Then suddenly he had the answer. He had allowed the appearance of Henning to panic him into trying to run away. Running wasn't necessary. He would simply travel back in time to the desired point from inside the house—that way he would have the added advantage of surprise when he arrived.

	He sat down again and drew out his ear-pads. Mrs. Steenson paused in the laying of the table and directed a questioning glance at them, and at the power pack on his chest, but she was too mannerly to ask questions. Maldon muttered, "Hearing aid," to satisfy her curiosity, and adjusted the pads. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Henning less than a hundred yards away, walking rapidly nearer, and now and then glancing at a shiny grey instrument he was holding in his hand. Maldon took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

	This disappearance was going to be rather frightening to Mrs. Steenson, Maldon knew. Briefly he felt sorry for that, and for the pain he was going to cause her by killing her son. Or rather, the pain he had caused a week ago. Time travel was funny sometimes. Then his mind had room only for the twisting logic of the Time Equations, and his sensory perception of the room around him began to fade.

	His second arrival was a near catastrophe—for himself. A sharp, excruciating pain in his right leg made him gasp, and a chair clattered into the middle of the floor—its position had changed and he had tried to materialise with one leg inside it. As he went sprawling on his back he grabbed futilely at the table for support, but succeeded only in pulling the table-cloth and most of the dishes onto the floor beside him. Tears blurred his vision, but he could see that there were several people in the room—and one of them was Henning.

	Maldon groped instinctively for something, anything, that would serve as a weapon. The probability of either of them arriving first, he knew, was exactly equal. This time Maldon had been unlucky. But he still had a chance, if he could take advantage of the utter confusion his sudden appearance had caused in the room.

	And there certainly was confusion. Even in his present fix Maldon felt like laughing as he thought of what must have happened. The shock and terror of the occupants when Henning materialised among them, and their extreme bewilderment when he started telling them that another apparition would be along in a few minutes and that they had better take cover, because the second one intended to commit a murder ...

	Maldon's fingers found the wooden handle of a knife which had fallen to the floor. It was almost a sword, he saw, with its long, heavy blade and rivet-studded handle. He gripped it tightly and struggled to his feet.

	"Now do you believe me ...?" Henning was shouting at the people in the room. He broke off when he saw the knife in Maldon's hand, and pointed urgently at a youth who was standing white-faced in the centre of the floor. He yelled, "Get him out of here, quick!"

	Maldon looked in the indicated direction. It was Steenson. A Steenson twenty years younger than the last time he had seen him—he now looked about eighteen—but there could be no mistake about it being the same person. Nice of Henning to point out his target for him, Maldon thought sardonically as he drew back his arm for the throw. He let fly, hard.

	The knife hit Steenson in the centre of the forehead—handle first. Lack of balance had made it swap ends in flight. Was nothing going to go right for him, Maldon thought furiously. Of all the filthy luck ... As Steenson staggered backwards, half conscious, he swept the room with his eyes, looking for another weapon.

	Mrs. Steenson was in one corner, screaming her head off. To the right of her two men were backed against the wall, rigid with shock and indecision. By the table, Henning, his face intent, was fiddling with the force-field attachment on his power pack. Beside him, a man with iron-grey hair and large, work-roughened hands, who Maldon guessed was Steenson's father, reached for a heavy chair and raised it above his head. He came at Maldon with it. His intention was very plain.

	Henning looked up. "Stop! Don't hurt him," he cried in sudden alarm, "I want to take him back ..." But he was wasting his breath.

-

	Maldon side-stepped automatically as the chair came swinging at his head, and hit the elder Steenson behind the ear as he blundered past. His assailant fell to his knees and the chair crashed through the window. Maldon swung round and charged at the helpless younger Steenson—and ran into a solid, invisible wall. He reeled back, shaking his head to try to make the room stop spinning, and grunted with the pain of his bruised face, knees and arms.

	He knew what had happened, of course. Henning had thrown up a force-field around Steenson. He was blocked again. And now the two men by the wall had come to life and were advancing menacingly. It was time for Maldon to leave again. But he couldn't Time-jump in his present mental condition. He made for the door.

	There was a shot-gun hanging above the door. It looked like the same one he had used—or was going to use—twenty years from now. He snatched it down. The sight of it in his hands stopped the two men dead in their tracks. Maldon flung open the door and dashed out.

	It was only then that he discovered that it was night. Things had happened so quickly since he had arrived that he hadn't noticed it.

	Minutes later, in the musty darkness of the Steenson barn, Maldon staggered into an unseen pile of hay and flopped down exhausted. He lay, with the throbbing ache of his maltreated limbs and face making havoc of his finely coordinated nervous system, and felt very sorry for himself.

	He knew he was safe here—for a while, at least. It would take Henning about ten minutes to neutralize the force-field he had thrown around Steenson—those things were easier to put up than to take down. Then the other would have to get free of the house and the people in it-—quite a job, even for a Master Psychologist. Only then would Henning come after him again. He had, Maldon calculated, about twenty minutes in which to think of some way of saving a situation that had gone from bad to nearly hopeless, and continued to deteriorate with every minute that passed.

	But his mind refused to function properly. He wasn't used to all this pain. If he had known it was going to be like this ... He gritted his teeth—as much from sheer bad temper as at the physical anguish he was suffering.

	It was all Henning's fault, anyway. The way he ran the Institute would drive anybody into trying to escape. But escape, the complete and final escape that Maldon wanted, was impossible. The Institute was not surrounded by anything so crude as a high wall, or even a force-fence—there were no physical barriers at all. But there were plenty of mental ones. The hypnotic conditioning that each person underwent on arrival made it impossible to run away. Even thinking about running away was a highly uncomfortable experience, though it could be done. The trouble was, Maldon thought bitterly, the hypnotically impressed commands did not end at that—he had been conditioned against doing other things as well.

	Escape was impossible—until he, Maldon, had discovered a way to evade that conditioning.

	A vague feeling of panic began to well up from the back of his mind, and his hands began to tremble. He was thinking the wrong thoughts again, Maldon knew, and his conditioning was making itself felt. But so long as he was careful, and did not think directly at the subject, and just lay here without acting on any of the forbidden thoughts, he knew it would remain merely a nuisance. He clasped his shaking hands together and deliberately let his mind go back to the first time the Plan had occurred to him.

	He had been working the computor in the Physics Section at the time. Henning had just been in for one of his maddeningly frequent 'talks' with him, and the others present were watching him and muttering together while pretending to work. Maldon felt the veiled hostility in their eyes—he could just imagine the plots they were hatching in their dirty little minds against him—and felt like screaming at them to go away and leave him alone. But instead he kept working on the problem assigned him and pretended to ignore them. The problem had not been difficult—he was surprised how easily the answer came to him. He was checking through it again—it was an exercise in non-Einsteinian Time Mathematics—when the answer hit him.

	Time travel!

	Of course! It was the only possible means of escape from the Institute. And, the way Maldon would plan it, it would be complete and utterly final. He would Time-jump into the Past for the necessary number of years—some research would be required to find out exactly how many that would be—then, arrived in the Past, he would ... But at that point, Maldon remembered with painful vividness, his conditioning had taken over. He had spent a bad two hours before he had been able to gain control of his thoughts again.

	But after that first lapse, he had been very careful in his thinking, and had begun working on the Plan. First he had asked Henning for a transfer from Physics to History. The request had been granted with very little trouble. Henning, it seemed, took a rather special interest in Maldon, and wanted him to settle in and start work as soon as possible—but only if the work suited Maldon. Knowing Maldon's background as he did, Henning must have been surprised at this choice of subject. But he couldn't have been suspicious. Not then.

	Ostensibly, Maldon was gathering data for a book. But in the privacy of the reading cubicles he had been able to work on the real plan. He had listened to record tapes and read microfilm projections until tinny voices gibbered through his every sleeping moment and his eyes felt like hot ball-bearings in his head. Occasionally a relevant piece of information would appear and be committed to memory, to add to, or correct, his pitifully small knowledge regarding the background of the individual he was trying to trace. And all the time his mind had to work on two levels—he had to pretend to himself that he only wanted to kill a man, when in reality he was going to do something very much worse. Then, one day he had a stroke of luck. He found the two Steenson clippings.

	Now he knew of one point in space and time at which Steenson would appear. All that remained was for Maldon to go back to that point and kill him.

	But how had Henning found out about" it?

-

	Maldon stretched painfully on the hay and glared into the impenetrable darkness of the Steenson barn. Time-travel was well-known in Maldon's era, though the people actually able to do it were relatively few. Most Specialists in Psychology could do it, he knew, so also could a few Physicists, and the Mathematician-Philosophers. The Time Equations were common property, but it required a rare flexibility of mind as well as rigorous training to be able to use them. Maldon's Speciality had not been Physics, of course, nor Psychology, but ...

	Maldon sat up suddenly in the darkness and grunted in surprise. He had just made a discovery—he didn't know what his Speciality had been. He couldn't even remember his life before coming to the Institute. What had they done to him? And just what went on at the Institute, anyway?

	He smiled ruefully. He would never find out now. And anyway, he consoled himself, it wasn't important anymore. Nothing was important anymore ...

	Maldon! Come out of there!"

	He was shocked out of his deepening mood of self-pity by the clear, confident voice of Henning speaking from outside the barn. In spite of himself he jumped to his feet in sudden panic. The hay rustled and his gun hit a metal implement that was hanging against the wall. The noise sounded deafening. Maldon forced his trembling body to be calm, and with fingers that fumbled a little in the darkness he checked to see that the gun was ready for use.

	Henning called, "I won't hurt you, Maldon. Come outside." The voice now sounded friendly, almost cajoling.

	Why, Maldon thought with sudden anger, he's coaxing me! Like a ... a mad dog or something. He raised the gun.

	He didn't particularly want to kill Henning—it was Steenson he wanted. Anyway, Maldon told himself, looking at it one way, he wasn't even trying to kill Henning. He merely intended to fire a shotgun at the dimly-seen outline of a barn door, that was all. There was no harm in that. If somebody was standing on the other side of it, lie wasn't to blame. Maldon smiled to himself. He was getting good at this double thinking. There was a knot-hole in the door about four feet from the floor. He fired at it.

	Abruptly the knot-hole was a jagged-edged rent a foot wide. From outside came an excited babble of voices. Voices? Some of the people at the house must have followed Henning to the barn. Maybe Steenson—the Steenson—was among them. He fought to keep from coughing—the fumes from this antique he was using, in this confined space, made Maldon think of some of the old war gases he read about—and edged up to the hole he had blown in the door and looked out.

	Four dark figures with white faces hugged the moonlit ground outside the door. The one nearest was Henning. Silently, but with great urgency, he was waving at the others to go back. The other three were grouped a few yards beyond Henning. They were talking in whispers, and they heeded Henning's frantic signalling not at all. One of the three, Maldon saw, was young Steenson.

	There was one charge left in the gun. Maldon raised it, took careful aim through the hole in the door—and lowered it again.

	He had very little data on the performance of these weapons. At this range, the charge might scatter and kill all three men. Maldon did not want that—he wasn't a butcher. But he did want to get Steenson.

	Or did he—now?

	Suddenly Maldon wasn't sure anymore. He was beginning to feel disgusted with the whole business. It should have been all so simple—just go back in Time and kill a man. Child's play. But it had not worked out that way at all. Henning had somehow got wind of his plan, and had blocked him at every turn. Now, with his body in such a sorry state that he could scarcely think, he was beginning to regret this mission. Far back in his mind, a tiny voice hinted cynically that maybe he didn't want to go through with it after all, and that maybe it was sheer mule-headedness that was driving him on. Maldon suppressed that thought savagely. If he kept thinking along those lines he would end by just walking out and giving himself up.

	Abruptly the four men in the yard withdrew a short distance and became a single group. They argued in low voices, with Henning doing most of it. He was trying to make Steenson return to the house, and safety. But young Steenson wouldn't budge. This man talking to him was from the Future, he was protesting. So was the man in the barn. They had Time-machines, and Force-fields, and goodness only knew what else. His curiosity was aroused. Even though the man in the barn had a shot-gun instead of a disintegrator pistol, he wanted to stay and watch.

-

	Maldon remembered a proverb he had come across during his historical researches, about a feline with an enquiring mind. It fitted the circumstances here very well. He did not bear Steenson any personal animosity—Maldon was, in fact, really sorry for what he was going to do to him.

	Henning began calling him again.

	"Maldon! Come out now, please ..." His voice sounded strained, apprehensive, "... Or these men will come in and kill you." Maldon laughed. That was funny. "Painfully," Henning emphasized. Maldon stopped laughing.

	Henning continued, "They say you have only one charge remaining in your weapon, and that—" His voice broke off abruptly. There were scuffling sounds, and loud, angry whispers. Somebody was asking with considerable heat just whose side Henning was supposed to be on, anyway? Then the voices lowered into inaudibility.

	That was something Maldon already knew. He had one shot to take care of Steenson. But Steenson had at last taken Henning's advice—he was now crouching behind a large water-barrel. And the other men were separating, presumably to surround the barn and come at Maldon from several directions at once. He would have to do something, fast. Maldon thought desperately, if only he had more time.

	More time! Suddenly he had the answer. In a flash of sheer inspiration a plan appeared fully-formed in his mind. And it was so simple, it couldn't fail. All it required was another short Time-jump, a small diversion to cover same, and some very accurate timing.

	Quickly he unstrapped his wrist-watch and set it on the floor. He rubbed the controls and indicators on his power pack with a sleeve and they became luminous. He synchronised the chronometer in the pack with the time-piece lying on the floor, set the Travel control for twelve hours negative, then went over to the hole in the door to begin creating his diversion. For the first time since leaving the Institute he used the Force-field.

	The Force-field was supposed to be used only in an emergency—as a protective device. It used the stored power in the packs at an appalling rate—the way Henning had been using his to save Steenson meant that he could have very little left. Time-travelling itself did not require much power. The nervous system did the actual travelling—the function of the pack was merely to direct the journey into either the past or future, and to stop it at the chosen point in time. While a person could go into the past almost as far as he liked and return to the present, he couldn't travel into his own future. It had been tried several times—with fatal results.

	Carefully Maldon set up a long, low force-wall, the end of which lay against the side of an adjoining barn. The timbers of the barn emitted sparks along the line of contact. He oscillated the field slightly, and the barn wall burst into flames.

	It was quite a good diversion, he thought.

	The farm men began running to and fro with buckets of water. Henning was running about, too, Maldon saw. Obviously the other suspected something, but while he was dashing around like that, he couldn't keep a close watch on his detector. Maldon laughed softly in the darkness, made a careful note of the time to the nearest second, and put on his ear-pads.

	The last sound he heard was Henning shouting to young Steenson not to get outlined against the fire and make a target of himself.

	For an awful moment Maldon thought he was going to fail. But somehow, he managed to put the aches of his body out of his mind for the necessary number of seconds required to use the Time Equations, and he arrived.

-

	Twelve hours in the past it was not yet midday. The sun streamed through the open barn door, but the barn itself was deserted. Maldon felt very relieved at that. He began searching the place at once.

	The barn was surprisingly roomy, and it contained several mechanisms which could have been modified to form efficient traps. But Maldon settled finally on the grab and tackle for lifting heavy bales of hay into the upper lofts. With it he raised three bales, which were already slung together with a net, up to as near the roof as they would go. Then he manoeuvred them until they hung just above the barn door. After checking to see that the quick-release mechanism on the tackle would work at the slightest touch, he picked out a nice, comfortable pile of hay and lay down to wait. All he had to do now was to make sure that nobody sprung his trap prematurely.

	All during the afternoon the farmyard noises drifted in through the open door. Most of them were meaningless to him. Occasionally he heard voices, usually belonging to the Steenson farm hands. Just once he had to hide—when the elder Steenson came in and left again with a forkfull of hay. But generally, things were very peaceful. The catastrophic arrival of Henning and himself was not due to take place until sometime late this evening. He just lay and thought.

	For a while he tried to resolve the puzzle in his mind about his work before coming to the Institute, but without success. He could remember his early life up to the age of twenty-eight or thereabouts fairly clearly, and the last few months at the Institute were particularly vivid. But the period in between—about twenty years—was a complete blank. What had they done to him?

	His resolve to carry through with this mission had been weakening. It was weak no longer. He was not going back to that place.

	But mostly he thought about Time, and the Time Join theory that Henning, for some reason, was always discussing with him. The theory was generally accepted now, but it hadn't always been. Maldon remembered how his Primary Tutor used to explain it when he was still very young.

	"Time isn't a river," he would say, "Or a railway with branching tracks. We don't know anything fundamental about its structure, but try to think of it like this.

	"Let's suppose there is a man who wants to build a wire fence. First he erects fence-posts, then he begins to link them together with wire. But unfortunately, he finds he hasn't enough staples to do the job properly—he has exactly the same number of staples as he has fence-posts! His only solution is to staple all the strands together at each post and pull and twist them apart to form a barrier between the posts."

	Here, Maldon remembered, he would have to quell some enthusiastic pupil for suggesting that the man buy more staples. Then he would continue.

	"Time—both Past and Future—is fixed. It is also infinitely variable. There have been, and will be, instants in the Past and Future where certain things must occur—those instants are your fence-posts. Now an infinite number of possible futures or pasts exists between those posts, but at widely separate intervals—just for an instant—all those Time-lines join together. All the strands, to use the 'fence' analogy again, have been bunched together under one staple. However, there is nothing orderly about this 'fence.' One strand might be stretched tight between the posts, and take only a few hundred years to get from one to the other. Another strand could twist and loop all over the place for thousands of years before joining with the others. But it would get there, eventually. After the instant of the Time Join, the strands fan out again until they hit the next one.

	"Most of the Time Joins which have occurred in the past are known to us from a careful study of history. They invariably happen just before a great turning point in human affairs. The first nuclear explosion, the landing on the Moon, and similar events. You know, sometimes I wonder if we took the long or the short line between the Join in early Roman times, and the one during the Rennaissance ..."

-

	Maldon remembered wondering about that, too. It was a fascinating subject for speculation. And when Time Travel into the past became possible without changing the present—so long as the traveller did not do anything too drastic—Maldon had begun to wish that he could do it. He had even planned his studies with that end in view. But somehow he had become side-tracked. Something discovered while working with the basic Time Equations had made him so wildly excited that he had almost forgotten his ambition to be a Time-jumper ... But he couldn't remember what it had been. Again he wondered bitterly, what the Institute had done to him, and why.

	The sudden realisation that dusk had fallen brought Maldon's fruitless memory-searching to an end. He climbed stiffly to his feet, made a last check of the booby-trap he had prepared for Steenson, and moved to stand on the same spot where he had arrived. He had been here exactly nine hours, three and a half minutes, according to the pack chronometer. Carefully he calculated the amount he would have to travel forward in order to arrive as soon as possible after his last departure, and adjusted the pack controls accordingly. Almost ritually, he put on the pads, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind for the Jump.

	When Maldon got back, Henning was still warning young Steenson about outlining himself against the burning barn wall. It had been nice timing. Henning obviously didn't even know he had been gone. The plan couldn't fail now.

	Maldon knew there was a lantern beside him on the floor. He groped for it in the darkness, lit it and turned it down until the light it gave was barely perceptible. Then he went to the hole in the door and waited for all the activity he had caused to die down. In his hands he held the shot-gun, with its double barrel protruding through the hole at such an angle that it would be sure to reflect light from the burning wall.

	Henning saw it first. He shouted a warning to the others and began to walk, crouching slightly, towards Maldon's position. Obviously he thought Maldon was getting ready to shoot, which was exactly what Maldon wanted him to think. Henning stopped about ten yards from the door. He kept glancing over his shoulder and sidling from side to side. At first Maldon thought he was taking evasive action, but then he saw that Henning was merely trying to stay in the line of fire between Steenson and himself. Poor Henning, he must want him back very badly. Henning spoke.

	"Maldon. Don't shoot yet. Listen to me."

	In the doorway, Maldon grunted indifferently, jiggled the gun a little. He was almost enjoying this.

	Henning edged nearer. He cleared his throat nervously, then said, "I know what you're trying to do here, you know. After you disappeared I spent three weeks studying your file—and incidently, doing some research myself—before I followed you. I made a serious mistake, I admit, in under-estimating your ingenuity, and in not realising how strongly you felt about your trouble. But this is a very bad thing you're doing. Bad and ... and selfish. What has this boy ever done to you?" He paused, breathing heavily, while he had been talking, his voice had struggled to sound confident, self-assured. It hadn't succeeded. He ended almost pleadingly, "Leave your gun and come out. We can be gone before the others notice anything."

	Maldon felt his anger mounting as the other talked. A great, padded hammer seemed to be pounding in his head. He burst out an explosive

	"No!", but it didn't relieve the pent-up rage that was in him. Nearly incoherent with anger, he began to tell Henning exactly what he thought about returning to the place that had stolen twenty years out of his life. And about the people who spied on him there, and the other indignities. On a note of almost hysterical incredulity, he ended, "... Go back there! Do you think I'm mad?"

	Henning's head was an expressionless shadow outlined against the flames—his features were hidden. But the awful intensity, the sheer desperation in his voice as he answered made Maldon feel suddenly afraid.

	"Yes," he said, "Yes!"

	This wasn't going according to plan at all, Maldon thought uneasily. He had intended allowing Henning to talk him into giving up. As a sign of good faith he would have thrown out the gun. Then, by pretending to be injured, he would get everyone into the barn. But as soon as young Steenson came through the door ... Smack. Half a ton of tightly-baled hay would hit him from forty feet up, and that would be the end—of everything.

	But Henning's answer had shaken Maldon. He tried to control the growing chaos in his brain, for Henning was talking again.

	"You're wrong about the Institute, you know. Completely wrong. It isn't like that at all. We were trying to help you. We didn't' steal' twenty years of your life. You did that on yourself. After the accident, you deliberately—forgot them."

	Henning stopped, apparently waiting for his reaction.

-

	Maldon didn't believe it, of course. Henning was so desperate that he couldn't even think up a decently plausible lie. Maldon decided to laugh out loud, as if it was a funny joke, but when he did, it sounded too high-pitched. There was a tiny, crawling worm of memory uncoiling deep in his brain—and it wasn't in the least bit funny. He was horribly afraid of that memory.

	"You don't believe me," Henning said, keeping his voice low. The barn fire was well under control and the other men were casting enquiring glances in his direction, and Henning didn't want them to hear him. He went on, "That's understandable, of course. You have a complete amnesia covering that period. You also, though you don't know it, have a guilt complex a mile wide. There are other less important neuroses as well. And all this in a mind that is the greatest—" He broke off, swallowed, then said seriously, "You say that we stole twenty years of your life. Well, I'm going to try returning them to you—secondhand. Will you promise to do nothing for a few minutes while I do it?"

	Without giving him time to reply, Henning moved a little nearer and began speaking rapidly. Maldon didn't want to listen—he wanted to get this business over with quickly, before he funked it—but he could not help it.

	Henning said, "Twenty-three years ago you were working for your Specialist First in Mathematics. You were also trying, as was everybody at that time who thought they had the necessary qualifications, to become a Time-jumper. Unlike the others, however, you succeeded in making your first Jump with very little trouble—an unheard of feat until then. By the way you handled the Reality Matrix in the Time Equations, it was obvious that the world had another genius on its hands. But that wasn't all. You followed this by heading an expedition to Mars, and Time-jumping there in an attempt to contact the ancient Martians. The attempt failed—the amount of penetration into the Past, while great, is limited, and the Martian cities were merely more recent ruins then. But you did make one tremendous discovery. Among those ruins you found a clue to the nature of the next Time Join, its approximate distance in the future, and, a way by which you, personally, might be able to bring it about.

	"The next great turning point in human history—the next Time join—was to be the first Interstellar flight."

	While Henning talked, the two Steenson farmhands had been moving cautiously up behind him. One of them held a pitch-fork—at exactly the same angle that he had once been taught to hold a bayonet. Henning saw them out of the corner of his eye and gestured frantically for them to stay back, and without a pause in his narrative, went on, "World Council were convinced that your ideas were correct, they backed you up with everything they had. But it wasn't until two years ago that a ship with the new space-warp drive was built and taken out for its first test flight. The ship failed to perform. You brought it back and worked on it some more. The work was retarded greatly by the fact that you were the only person who fully understood the operating principles of the thing. Finally, six months ago it took off again, and this time it worked."

	"Unfortunately, during the landing, there was an ... an ..." Henning stammered a little, as he tried to find a word to describe the indescribable, "... an accident. Everyone but you was killed. You brought the ship down yourself, however."

-

	It was all lies, of course, Maldon told himself fiercely. It was one of Henning's tricks—a ruse to gain time. Something to put him off balance. But was it all lies? Little, isolated memories were beginning to make pictures in that twenty-year blank in his mind—and the memories fitted into Henning's fantastic story. Suddenly Maldon thought that it was very important that he stop Henning talking before the other made him remember that accident. He felt like shooting Henning, just so he would not have to remember it. But if he did that he couldn't kill Steenson. And if Steenson didn't die ...

	Frozen in indecision, with his mind a whirling chaos of half-remembered facts and sheer nightmare, and with a horrible doubt as to which was which, Maldon stood in the barn doorway and listened helplessly.

	Henning was saying, "If you hadn't already been on the verge of a nervous breakdown through over-working on the Interstellar Drive, you would have realised that the accident wasn't your fault. You couldn't possibly have foreseen that bringing the ship in so close to a planetary mass on the new drive would set up a space-strain fatal to living organisms ..."

	Maldon staggered suddenly against the door, and clenched his teeth desperately to keep from screaming. His memory had come back. All of it.

	Henning's voice and image faded away, as did the shadowy figures of Steenson and the farmhands who were now grouped behind him. Maldon saw and heard instead the thirty top-flight scientists who had helped him test the Drive, and who were enthusiastically and good-naturedly belittling the whole affair now that it was successful. Vennar, a Specialist First Class in Wave Mechanics, was complaining that it would take all of twelve minutes to go to Alpha Centauri, when theoretically it could be done in seven point two three minutes. One of the Gravities team was urging an immediate trip to Sirius while arguing with someone else who preferred a different star. Everybody had been talking loudly. Maldon had had to shout that he wasn't going to risk leaving the Solar System at all until he had checked the ship thoroughly. And that a hop from the orbit of Mars across the system to the orbit of Pluto in nothing flat did not mean they should take chances. They were all going home, he told them, now. While a general wail of protest had gone up, he had worked the few controls necessary, and the cloud-wrapped Earth had winked into existence five hundred miles below them.

	And in that instant, it happened.

	Somehow Maldon had kept the grisly things from fouling his controls—and kept the more important indicators wiped free of the bright red blood splashes—while he landed the ship. He was unharmed—cautious as ever, he had still been wearing a shielded and insulated space suit. But everybody else was very horribly dead. Materialising the ship so close to Earth had caused a momentary dimension-warp to be set up within it, and the unshielded members of the crew had—quite literally—been turned inside out. The floor of the control-room had been like a ...

	"Maldon! Get hold of yourself! Listen to me!"

	It was Henning again, snouting at him. With a shock Maldon realised that he himself had been shouting for the last few minutes. Desperately he tried to forget that nightmare on the ship, and force his mind to concentrate on his plan. He was almost succeeding when Henning began talking again.

	"When you were brought to the Institute, you had a twenty-year blank in your memory. Everything in your mind relating to the Drive had been wiped out. So, because you were the only living person who knew how the Drive worked, it was our job to bring your memory back."

	"We knew that, psychologically, you were in a mess. For one thing, you wanted to kill yourself. But we thought that the usual hypnotic conditioning would keep you from harming yourself. And when you became interested in a nice, quiet subject like History, we were sure that it would be only a matter of time before you cured yourself. We never suspected that all the time you were ..." Henning stopped talking abruptly. When he went on there was a puzzled, almost incredulous note in his voice. He said, "That conditioning is supposed to be fool-proof—a solid barrier against self-destruction while our normal therapy is proceeding. But you have been thinking over and around that barrier so much recently that it must now have dissolved through sheer neglect.

	"I want to make a test."

	Henning took a deep breath. In a loud, clear voice he stated, "Your conditioning forbids suicide. By travelling back in time and killing Henry Steenson, who is your grandfather, you are committing suicide. I am reminding you of this fact." He stopped, waiting for Maldon's reaction.

	For a moment Maldon felt panic as the one fact he had been so carefully thinking around was brought into the open, but the feeling died quickly. It was true. He had been through too much recently for a little thing like the conditioning to bother him, and the returned memory of that accident overshadowed everything. He didn't want to live with that in his mind. lie would kill himself, now that the conditioning no longer bound him ... But it was a pity, really, because Maldon thought he now knew how that ship could be shielded so that a repetition of that disaster would be impossible.

	The sound of an animal-like growl coming from one of the farmhands jerked Maldon's thoughts back to the present. Mention of his plan to kill Steenson had made him flaming mad. Maldon saw Henning start in surprise. Apparently the other had forgotten the existence of the three men behind him. Henning turned and said something to them in an undertone, but the answer he got could not have been satisfactory, for he whirled and took three rapid paces towards Maldon, stopped, and made a last, desperate appeal.

	"Maldon, don't do it," he begged, "Think of our future. If you kill Steenson or yourself, this Time Line we are at present moving along will be disrupted to such an extent that it may not reach the next Time-Join for thousands of years. But if you come back with me now, the first interstellar flight will be only years away at most. Maldon, you can't hold the race back like that."

	Henning paused hopefully, but Maldon kept silent. When the other went on his voice was low, dispirited. Obviously he already knew without a doubt that he had failed, but he was going to keep on trying anyway. He said, "These men are going to rush you in a minute. They're thinking of killing you. Why not throw out your weapon and give yourself up—they won't kill you if you're unarmed."

-

	While Henning had been talking, a bitter struggle had raged in Maldon's mind. Fighting his blind urge to self-destruction was a part of his mind that was saner and more objective about things. A part that looked dispassionately at this whole suicide mission of his—and pronounced it un-sane, un-moral, and downright silly. Normally, Maldon wasn't a murderer, and now that he knew the true reasons for his recent actions, he found himself totally incapable of killing Steenson. Now that a measure of sanity had returned to him, he was incapable of killing anyone.

	And, he realised with a shock, his inability to kill anyone made him seriously doubt his ability to kill himself—no matter how heavily the accident weighed on his mind.

	Strangely, Maldon felt relieved when he made that discovery. He was almost happy when he called to Henning, "You talked me into it, Doctor. Here's the gun."—He tossed it through the hole in the door, and saw one of the Steenson men run to pick it up—" But I don't want to go outside—I've damaged a leg. Will you come in here, instead? If you'll wait a second there'll be a light."

	As he was turning up the wick of the lantern he remembered the booby-trap he'd laid for Steenson. He called urgently, "Henning! Come in alone."

	But Henning didn't come in alone. The two farmhands were close on his heels, and their expressions were ugly. But worst of all, Maldon saw that young Steenson had followed as well, and was standing just inside the barn doorway—right under the booby-trap. Maldon felt the cold sweat break out on his forehead. Suppose something slipped. He didn't want to die anymore. He pointed at Steenson and tried to shout a warning, but his vocal cords wouldn't function—he could only mouth silently and make pushing motions with his hands. Maldon had the sudden awful conviction that Steenson was going to die, no matter what he did. 

	"Get him!"

	It was the man who had picked up the shot-gun. He kept the weapon trained on Henning as his companion gripped the pitchfork he was carrying tightly and ran at Maldon. "You dirty murderer ..." he panted, and brought the three long, wicked prongs up level with Maldon's chest. Henning was taken by surprise. He couldn't do a thing.

	There was a bucket at Maldon's feet. He threw it at the charging man's head and ducked frantically. The prongs ruffled his hair as they passed and tore a piece of fabric out of his blouse, and the man blundered into his bent shoulder. Maldon straightened suddenly, and his attacker went flying backwards over his head—to land with a crash right on top of the lifting tackle which Maldon had rigged as a trap for Steenson.

	Maldon heard the faint creaking sounds as the drum began to unwind, and knew without looking up that those heavy bales were already plummeting downward at young Steenson. He did the only thing possible—he took a running dive at the white-faced youth in the doorway. They both landed in a heap on the ground outside at the same instant that the load crashed down.

	Steenson, who had just taken Maldon's head right in the stomach, was knocked out cold.

	Maldon was still lying on top of the unconscious youth when the man with the shot-gun climbed over the fallen bales, took one look at the tableau on the ground, and pointed the gun at Maldon's head. He said thickly, "Kill young Henry, would you ..." The range was approximately four feet.

	Instinctively Maldon hit the emergency stud on his power pack, and a cylindrical force-field flashed into being around his body. As he bounced away from Steenson the gun barrel erupted flame and thunder. The charge, striking the frictionless surface of the force-field, ricocheted, and young Steenson's shirt front was suddenly a bright red sponge. The sponge rose and fell a few times, then stopped.

	Maldon felt that he was living a nightmare. This couldn't be happening. Here was his grandfather lying dead. He laughed crazily. What was HE doing hanging about when he had never even been born? He lay looking at Steenson's body, waiting for his existence to stop.

	After what seemed a long time he heard Henning's voice saying, "Neutralise your force-field, Maldon. We're going home." Dazedly, he did as he was told, noticing that the man with the shot-gun had gone.

	As he climbed to his feet Henning said gently, "Your mission would have failed, anyway, Maldon. When we traced your family tree after you'd jumped, we found something which you had missed due to the limited resources available to you for the search. It was merely an indication then—that's why I was so anxious about Steenson—but now we know that it was a fact."

	"Steenson's death will undoubtedly change the future—but not to any large extent. And it won't affect you at all. You see," he explained, "Henry Steenson was merely your father's foster father."

	Maldon was still trying to assimilate this last piece of information when Henning brushed some loose straw off his blouse and said gruffly, "You're all right now. Let's go home. We've a starship to build ..."

The End