SANCTUARY

The cry was in a deep voice, a breathless, badly frightened voice. Hoarse and urgent, it rose above the roar of the distant mob, above the rattle of traffic; it flung itself into the spacious office on the third floor of the Embassy and demanded immediate attention.

His Excellency, the Ambassador from 2219 AD--the sole occupant of that office--was a man of relaxed bearing and a wonderfully calm face. His eyes transmitted the unvarying message that all things were essentially simple--and could be further simplified. It was, therefore, quite remarkable how that cry from the grounds below made him look suddenly uncertain.

He rose and moved to the window with unaccustomed haste. A tall, bearded man, whose clothes were torn and whose body was badly bruised, had just leaped onto the Embassy lawn from the surrounding high fence. The bearded man pointed the forefingers of both hands at the third-floor office of the Ambassador from 2219 AD and shrieked again:

"Sanctuary!"

There was an answering shriek from the mob cascading down the street toward him. The bearded man looked over his shoulder once, then dashed forward across the lawn. His feet could be heard pounding up the steps of the Embassy. Downstairs, a heavy door slammed behind him.

The Ambassador from 2219 AD bit his lip. Well, the fellow had made it. Now his problems began.

He turned a dial on his wrist communicator. "All Embassy personnel," he said. "Attention! This is the Ambassador speaking. Bolt and barricade all street doors immediately! Barricade all windows on the street level that are not protected by bars. All female personnel and the fugitive who has just entered will be sent up to the second floor. Havemeyer, take charge of the first floor. Bruce, take charge of the second floor--and keep the fugitive under careful guard. Dodson, report to me."

He turned the dial another notch. "Police Department? This is the Ambassador from 2219 AD. A fugitive has just entered the building, requesting sanctuary. From the looks of the mob behind him, I'd say that your normal detail down here will be inadequate to protect us. You will have to send reinforcements."

The policeman's snort was as much anger as surprise. "You're giving sanctuary to Henry Groppus and you want us to protect you? Listen, I live in this time! It's as much as my life is worth to--"

"It's as much as your job is worth if a riot detail isn't down here in two minutes. Two minutes, I said. It is now precisely twenty-seven minutes past six o'clock."

"But listen!" The voice from the dial seemed almost hysterical. "That's Henry Groppus you have in there. Do you know what he did?"

"At the moment, that's not relevant. If his request for asylum isn't honored, he will be returned to the proper authorities. I am asking protection for the Embassy from 2219 AD, for its property and personnel, which, like all Embassies and their staffs, enjoy extraterritorial status and immunity. It's your responsibility to see that we get it."

The Ambassador clicked off and drew a deep breath. His calm was returning and once more his eyes announced that all complex matters could be refined down to simple ones--and handled.

As he turned to the window again, Dodson, his First Secretary, came in and stood respectfully at his shoulder.

Together, they stared down at the mob, the relaxed, observant older man and the slender, alert young one who split his gaze between the scene below and his chief.

As far as the eye could see, in all directions, the street was the color of the yelling mob. It had pushed right up against the fence, so hard and so tight that those in front were unable to climb it as they had intended, but were jammed, screaming their agony, into the iron bars.

"The police detail on duty, sir," Dodson said in a low voice. "They weren't able to hold them back for more than a few seconds. But they gave us time we needed. Everything downstairs should be secure, sir."

The Ambassador grunted.

Now the fence was giving way. It bent slowly, steadily inward, like a black flower closing. And then it was down here and the mob spilled over it, down there and a thick wave of mob washed across the lawn, down everywhere, mob over it everywhere, mob rushing toward the building in which they stood, mob maddened and swirling all about them and breaking thunderously against the walls.

For just a moment, Dodson was looking contemptuously down through the window. "2119 AD!"

The Ambassador grunted again. The grunt could be taken any one of several ways.

The frenzied, directionless noise from below abruptly changed in quality. It became steady, rhythmical. At the peak of each pulsation, there was an enormous thump. After a while, the thumps were followed by a ripping sound.

"Sir!" Havemeyer's voice came in suddenly on the wrist communicator. "The front door's beginning to give way. All right if we move up to the second floor?"

"By all means. And as soon as you're up there, you and Bruce see to it that the doors, front and rear, are barricaded. Then I want you to stand by the destructive fuses on the Embassy files. If the mob breaks into the second floor, see to it that the files go."

"Right, sir."

"Do you think, sir, that there's any chance--" Dodson had begun, when the sound of a dozen sirens made them look up.

The riot squad was coming down from the sky on flying platforms, two men to a platform. Soupy yellow stuff flowed out of the nozzles of the canisters each policeman carried, flowed out and bubbled into the mob.

The Ambassador looked at his watch. "One minute and fifty seconds," he said comfortably. Then he went back to his desk.

Dodson stood at the window, watching the mob stumble back across the Embassy lawn in chokes and gasps. Above all, he was fascinated by the number of individuals who, in the midst of their choking, stopped and turned and shook their fists at the building behind them.

When he could tear himself away, he described them to his chief.

"They evidently feel pretty strongly, sir," he suggested. "This is no ordinary mob."

"No, it's no ordinary mob. And Groppus is no ordinary criminal. Send him in. Tell Havemeyer and Bruce to start straightening up the place. I want an itemized statement on all damage to be forwarded to the Secretary of State before five o'clock."

"Yes, sir." Dodson paused near the door. "You know, sir, the staff received him inside as something of a hero."

The Ambassador looked up, his calm eyes slightly intent. "Of course they did. How did you feel about him, Dodson--criminal or hero?"

The secretary's face went immediately blank as his burgeoning diplomat's mind tried to blunt the question. "Well, of course, sir, he's both--both criminal and hero."

"Yes, but which is he chiefly? Take a stand, Dodson. How did you feel about him? Off the record, naturally."

"Well, sir," the young man began, then hesitated. "I think the dictum that applies here is When in Rome... We are, in effect, in Rome. Therefore, Henry Groppus should undoubtedly be considered a criminal."

"Yes," the Ambassador said thoughtfully. "In Rome. All right, send him in, send him in."

Dodson left. The Ambassador sat back and stared at the ceiling--calmly. Then he got up and paced back and forth across the office--calmly. Then he went back to his desk, opened a heavy, gray-bound book, skimmed through a few pages in it and finally leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the polished desktop--calmly, very calmly.

His wrist communicator buzzed. He flipped it on.

"Your Excellency, this is the Secretary of State," said a formal, moistureless voice.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador, with equal formality. "What can I do for you?"

"Your Excellency, according to information just received by my office, a certain Henry Hancock Groppus has escaped from the jail cell in which he was awaiting execution and taken shelter in your Embassy. I must ask you if this is true."

"That is true, Mr. Secretary, except for one small detail. At the time he entered the Embassy, he was not being pursued by lawfully constituted authority, but by an unlawful and ungoverned mob."

The voice in the communicator coughed an extremely dry cough. "I cannot regard this detail as being relevant, Your Excellency. In the name of the government of the United States of America of 2119 AD--to which government you are accredited and whose laws you are bound to respect--I must ask you to surrender the person of Henry Hancock Groppus, convicted felon, to the justice of his country and his time."

"And I, Mr. Secretary," the Ambassador replied with equal dry urbanity, "as a representative and servant of United Earth of 2219 AD, must respectfully decline until I have had time to study the situation."

"In that case, Your Excellency, I regret to have to inform you of the extreme displeasure of my government and our determination to take whatever steps are necessary to secure the person of Henry Hancock Groppus."

"Noted, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador.

There was a silence. "May I speak to you on the private channel, Your Excellency?"

"You may, Mr. Secretary. One moment, please."

The Ambassador from 2219 AD pressed a button on his desk which locked his door and lit a Do Not Disturb indicator. Then he swung around and switched on the big screen behind his desk.

A heavy-set balding man appeared on it. "Hi, Don," he said. "This is one big stink we're in."

"I know, Cleve," the Ambassador sighed. "A bigamy case. Capital offense."

"Bigamy, hell! Polygamy, Don boy! That's what this joker's been convicted of, polygamy. Advocating, abetting and encompassing polygamy. You just don't go any lower."

"In your time, you mean. In 2119."

"In our time, yes. That's the time we're living in right now. The time that has to face the problem of one woman to every ten men because of the genetic imbalance created by the last world war. All right, so we haven't licked the Uterine Plague yet. We won't lick it for another fifty years, according to you, though you won't tell our medics how we finally will solve it."

The Ambassador gestured wearily at the screen. "You know as well as I, Cleve, there are things that Temporal Embassies can do and there are things they can't do."

"Okay. Good. No argument. You boys take your orders and have your problems. But we've got problems, too. Gigantic ones. We've got a social code that was designed in the days when there were equal numbers of men and women, and it's splitting at the seams everywhere. We've got to persuade hundreds of millions of normal men that it's right and proper for them to lead lives of the most maddening frustration if we want to keep civilization from dissolving into hand-to-hand battles. We've got them persuaded--about as well persuaded as a herd of rutting elephants. And along comes this Henry Groppus and his handful of crackpot Mendelists, making strange, sudden noises in the rear of the herd and--"

"Slow down, Cleve. Take a deep breath. I know the kind of problems your time is facing, perhaps better than you. I know it from the history I studied in school, and, since I've arrived here in 2119 as Ambassador from the Next Century, I've seen it sharp and bloodily clear, at first hand. I know what an explosive danger the Mendelist philosophy is. I couldn't be more sympathetic, I assure you.

"Nonetheless, Cleve, you're an important government official; you're not the man in the street. 2119 is grappling with the social effects of the Uterine Plague, and to 2119 it looks like the biggest thing that ever was. But 2119 is just a drop in the historical bucket. And so, for that matter," he added in all fairness, "is 2219, my own period. Be just to your position and your intellect; look at the thing in perspective."

The Secretary of State made a sluicing motion at the top of his bald head. "What perspective? How perspective?"

"Simply this, as an example. Take an Englishman of the upper middle class, a rich merchant, let us say. In the time of the Tudors, he'd be all for increasing the powers of the king, all for an absolute monarchy, all for a very strong central government--the things that would damage his superiors, the feudal nobility, the most. A century later, when the nobility had been pretty much reduced to so much court decoration, his great-great-grandson would be fighting the absolutism of the Stuarts tooth and nail, insisting that the people had a right to call their king to account and that any government which was dictatorial deserved to be overthrown.

"And a hundred years or so after that, under the Hanoverian George III, his great-great-grandson, looking across the channel to France, observing that the very common people there in the course of taking the same drastic action with their king had completely bollixed up industry, banking and commerce--he would be exclaiming his pious horror over regicides and calling for laws that would strengthen the government and keep revolutionaries in their place."

"The point being," said the Secretary of State, "that most social values are conditioned by the time, place and prevailing political climate. Is that what you mean by perspective?"

"Exactly," the Ambassador said.

The bald-headed man stared angrily out of the screen. "I wish I weren't so upset. It's my misfortune to forget every dirty word I know when I get really mad. And this calls for--Look, Don, I don't know very much about 2219, what's important, what's sacred, what's not to be touched. The rules of your outfit forbid you to give us a very clear picture of your time--and you're a close-mouthed character to begin with. But I'd give the goddam front lobe of my brain to see how you'd behave if some Henry Groppus of the twenty-third century did the future equivalent of polygamy in your neck of the woods.

"You'd perspective him, you would. Now I'm not going to beat about the bush any more. Enough history, enough philosophy. Our government wouldn't last a week if we let Mendelists get away with preaching their vicious nonsense, let alone committing overt acts. I hate to have to put it this way, Don, but the man is the vilest of criminals. You're going to hand him over to us."

Smiling calmly, the Ambassador from 2219 AD said, "I repeat: he's a criminal in your terms. Beyond that, I repeat: I have to study the situation. He had escaped from prison; he was being pursued by a lynch mob; he took asylum in our Embassy, which is legally an enclave of 2219 in the present-day United States, an extension of our time and government into yours. Don't talk to me as if I were your office boy's assistant, Cleve."

"A criminal is a criminal," the bald-headed man went on doggedly. "This criminal has got to be brought to justice. I've asked you for him on the record and off the record. Next step is formal extradition papers. And the step after that--well, I won't like to do it, but I will."

"I wouldn't like you to do it, either," said the Ambassador calmly and softly.

Their eyes locked. The Secretary of State spread his hands. "Well, there it is," he muttered, and he clicked off.

Dodson and Groppus had been waiting patiently outside. When the Ambassador unlocked the door and nodded them in, he looked the bearded man over carefully.

A thoroughly bewhiskered, messily eyebrowed and well-muscled person, perhaps a jot past middle age, he stood clumsily tall and stiffly erect in a manner slightly reminiscent of a military cadet who had arrived at the academy just the evening before.

His eyes were mild and apologetic, not at all fanatic and intense. They had a tendency to blink if you stared at them too hard. His hands were the most vibrant part of him. Even in comparative repose, when he was listening or thinking, they kept going through the repertoire of the fluid, underlining gestures of the practiced sidewalk exhorter.

"I suppose you know, Mr. Groppus, that you are already the subject of a rather acrimonious controversy between your government and my Embassy?" said the Ambassador.

"Not my government. I don't recognize it as mine. I don't admit its jurisdiction over me."

"Unfortunately, it feels differently. And it is larger, more powerful and more numerous than you. Please sit down."

Henry Groppus lowered his head and shook it from side to side slowly, a negative gesture that could make its point the entire length of a meeting hall. "I prefer to stand, thank you. I always stand. Size, power, numbers--since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So far, they haven't succeeded."

Nodding, the Ambassador murmured, "Very true. But, on the other hand, they do exceedingly well with life and death. Which, of course, brings us back to the present moment and you. As a convicted criminal under sentence of--"

"I am not a criminal."

"You aren't? In that case, Mr. Groppus, we have all been misled. I really must beg your pardon. Suppose you tell me then: how, precisely, do you visualize your role?"

"As a political refugee! I come here, persecuted and cast out, to my true home and nation. I claim spiritual citizenship in 2219."

"Spiritual citizenship? That's hardly the best kind. But putting that complex question aside for the moment, let me ask you, Mr. Groppus: what has given you the impression that my era shares your beliefs? The first rule of all Temporal Embassies is to transmit no information about the technological status and social attitudes of their own time to the period in which they are accredited. I fail to see what basis you have for--"

"I always suspected that the future would be Mendelist, but I couldn't be really sure. When the mob broke into the jail to lynch me and I got away from them, this was the only place I could think of hiding in. Now that I've been here for a while and seen you people--I know! The next century belongs to us!"

The Ambassador looked completely startled and unbelieving, as if he'd stubbed an emotion on a projecting rock. He shot a quick, questioning glance at his First Secretary.

"I'm sorry, sir," Dodson said in a low, rapid voice. "Bruce. It was his fault. He was so busy barricading the second floor against the mob that he neglected to take proper precautions. Some of the clerks came up to the prisoner during the excitement and got into conversation with him. By the time I reached him, the damage had been done."

"Some of the clerks--" His Excellency fought with himself for a moment, then squirted out an immense, protective cloud of calm. He said, after a deep breath, "I was under the impression that my staff was composed of trained employees, regularly briefed as to their responsibilities. Well trained. Down to the very lowest echelons."

"Yes, sir, but these were three youngsters on their first extratemporal assignment. I'm not trying to make excuses for them, but it's been very dull at the Embassy these last few months, especially for romantic kids who came out all hot and bothered at the idea of seeing history come alive and happen. And then, all of a sudden, there's a lynch mob and a siege of the Embassy. They find themselves standing next to an actual twenty-second-century Mendelist Martyr in the flesh. Well, you know how it is, sir. They started out by asking excited, admiring questions--and ended up answering them."

The Ambassador nodded gravely. "Groppus is the man to do just that. But after this affair has been cleared up, Vice-Consul Bruce and those three clerks will be the subject of an investigation and a report through Temporal Embassy channels clear to the end of the line."

Groppus, meanwhile, had wound himself up and was now running strong.

"It had to be! It had to be!" he chanted, pacing up and down the office, his torn clothes whipping in the breeze created by his gesticulating hands. "We carried the word to the people and told them it had to be. If the Uterine Plague means that nine-tenths of all female children are still-born, does it follow that the remaining precious tenth should marry at random? No, we said. Such a thought stinks in the nostrils of evolution!

"It's not enough to require every prospective husband to show a certificate of fecundity. We must go further! We must march under the slogan of a maximum genetic potential in every marriage. After all, we are not living in the darkness of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries! With modern eugenic methods, we can know exactly what we are getting in every fetus conceived. But even that is not enough. We must--"

"All right," said the Ambassador from 2219 AD wearily, dropping into his chair and frowning at the desktop. "I am quite familiar with the sentiments. I had them drummed into me all through childhood, and I had to memorize and repeat them all through my adolescence."

"Even that is not enough!" repeated the bearded man, his voice rising majestically. "We must go further yet, we told them. We must turn a curse into a blessing, the Uterine Plague into a true genetic revival! If only the best should be allowed to reproduce, why not the best of the best? And if only the best of the best--if only the smallest, most refined nugget of mankind is to be allowed the privileges of further heredity--" here his voice sank to a dramatic whisper, before suddenly soaring up again--"surely we will not presume to impose the ancient, outworn limitation of one woman, one wife, one mate at a time?

"Surely the race--stumbling and floundering in a deadly biological morass--deserves more than this mote, this snippet of aid? Doesn't the next, the smaller generation, deserve the best of the previous, the larger generation, whatever custom may whine and morality may squeak to the contrary? We don't preach sexual monopoly: we preach sexual salvation! And I say to you--"

"Oh, Dodson, please take him out!" the Ambassador begged. "I have to think, and these grammar school recitations are giving me a headache!"

At the door, Groppus abruptly slid from his dizzy forensic heights and landed springily on his feet. "So you won't allow them to extradite me, Your Excellency? You won't relinquish me to the justice of these primitives?"

"I haven't decided one way or the other. There's more at stake than your person. I have to consider the matter carefully."

"Consider? Are you for light or for darkness? Are you for the future or the past? What is there to consider? I am a spiritual citizen, a philosophical forefather of 2219 AD. I have the right to sanctuary here--I demand that you give me asylum!"

The Ambassador stared at him calmly. "Neither spiritual citizenship nor philosophical forebears are included in the category of duties for which I am responsible. And I would like to point out to you, Mr. Groppus, that under international law--from which the body of extratemporal law is derived--a fugitive's rights of asylum are never implicit, but are dependent entirely upon the determination of the state to which he flees or the embassy of refuge in each separate case."

Dodson closed the door on the bearded man's dawning expression of consternation.

When he returned, having deposited Groppus with guards who were going to be very self-consciously uncommunicative, the Ambassador told him of the threat contained in the Secretary of State's last comment.

The young man swallowed. "That seems to imply that--that shortly after we're served with extradition papers, sir, a forcible entry of the Embassy will be made in order to remove the prisoner. But that's unheard of!"

"It may be the sort of thing that isn't talked about much, but it certainly isn't unheard of. It would mean, of course, that the Temporal Embassy would be permanently withdrawn from the United States of this era."

"Would they risk that, sir? After all, it's their link with the future! We can't give them all the information they want, but we do give them whatever knowledge the Temporal Embassies in our own time say is safe. And we take nothing in return. It would be idiotic for them to break relations."

The Ambassador studied a page in the gray-bound book on his desk.

"Nothing which must be done is idiotic," he said, largely to himself. "Precedent after precedent. A matter of finding the right kind of spurious legality in which to cloak such action. And who is to say what is spurious or not about the reasons a sovereign state gives for taking drastic measures, if it believes that the measures are essential to its survival? A case like this, so intricately involved with mass frustration and the most basic problems of individual male egos.

Dodson was watching him closely. "So we give up the fugitive? I thought we would have to from the very beginning, if you'll pardon me for saying so, sir. He is a criminal, no doubt about it. But it is going to be an uncomfortable business, very much like turning in a forefather, at that. He thinks so much like us."

The young man rubbed a hand reflectively against a clean-shaven chin. "Even looks like us--I mean the way we looked back home in 2219, before we were anachronized for the Embassy in this period. It's amazing in how many petty and minor ways, as well as large and important ones, Groppus has anticipated our age."

His Excellency stood up and stretched at great length. "Nonsense, Dodson, nonsense! Don't confuse cause with effect and real history with dramatic personalities. Henry Groppus didn't grow whiskers because he envisioned the possibility that every man in our time will--that's not the way it works at all. We go about bearded because our entire civilization is based on the Genetic File. And the concept of the Genetic File had its roots among the ideas of the twenty-second-century Mendelists--a maladjusted anti-social bunch who wore whiskers in a non-whiskered time as part of their general protest.

"Put the Utopian babblings of Henry Groppus up against the hard, workaday facts on the Genetic File in our age--do you see any real correspondence? Here and there, clumsily--as in Groppus advocating compulsory polygamy, or genetic aristocrats, and in our society allowing an occasional, gifted man, under special circumstances, to take more than one wife. The sad truth about political saints of any given past is that nobody but a scholar will take the trouble to read their complete works and try to see them whole. But all this to one side: the Mendelists are political saints in our time and we can't turn one of them in."

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir," Dodson objected. "You said just a moment ago that the present-day United States government felt so strongly about this matter that it was prepared to recover fugitives by force, even at the cost of breaking diplomatic relations with our time. Well, sir? And then there's paragraph 16a of the Temporal Embassy By-laws: '...and above all the duty of respecting the laws, the customs and the mores peculiar to the time in which an Embassy is accredited and of giving no offense whatsoever thereto'."

The Ambassador from 2219 AD began emptying his desk, explaining gently over his shoulder: "By-laws are one thing, Dodson. Natural laws are another. And the first and most fundamental natural law of a public servant is this: don't bite the hand that feeds you. Don't offend the sensibilities of the government officials who employ you. And above all, don't offend the sensibilities of the public who employs them. If I turned Groppus in, I would receive the heartfelt appreciation of this period--and never get another diplomatic appointment from 2219 AD. That's the basis on which I finally made my decision.

"So we simplify things. We close down the Embassy before even the extradition warrant arrives, and we leave, with all our personnel, papers and our precious fugitive, through the emergency chrondromos in the basement. Back in our time, we make the necessary explanations, they make the necessary apologies to this period, and, after a necessary interval has elapsed and memories have dimmed a bit, a new Temporal Ambassador from 2219 AD is appointed--one who will swear upon his arrival that he would absolutely never dream of obstructing justice. Everyone's face is saved."

He chucklingly prodded the astonished First Secretary in the ribs with the gray-bound Casebook of Extratemporal Law. "Jump, my boy, jump! The Embassy has to be ready to move out of here in an hour. And Havemeyer has to check out the scientific problems involved in bringing Henry Groppus into the future! And you have to write out a visa for him."

Three weeks later--or, to be exact, one hundred years and three weeks later--Dodson called on the Ambassador, who was packing busily, having just been appointed to the Embassy on Ganymede. Both men scratched from time to time at newly sprouted hair on their faces.

"Have you heard, sir? About Groppus? He finally did it!"

"Did what, my boy? The last I heard, he was going from triumph to triumph. Adoring crowds everywhere. A speech at the Monument to the Mendelist Martyrs. Another speech on the steps of the North American Genetic File, tearfully hailing the concrete reality of a dream hallowed in blood--or some such moist metaphor."

The young man shook his head excitedly. "That's what I mean. After the speech on the steps of the North American Genetic File last week, he went inside with a flourish and made out an application for a fatherhood certificate--just in case, he explained, he ran into a woman he wanted to marry. Well, this morning the Genetic File completed its regulation chromosome survey on him--and he was turned down! Too many unstable patterns, said the voucher. But that's nothing, sir, nothing! What do you think he did fifteen minutes ago?"

"I don't know." The Ambassador shrugged. "Blew up the Genetic File?"

"That's exactly what he did! He made up the explosive himself, he said. He claimed he had to free mankind from the tyranny of eugenic red tape. He destroyed the File completely, sir!"

He sat down heavily.

The Ambassador's face had gone white. "But," he whispered, "but--the Genetic File! The only complete genetic record of every individual in North America! The basis of our civilization!"

"Isn't it--Isn't it--" Dodson gave up trying to express the calamity in words. He clenched his fists. "He's under heavy guard. But I can tell you this, sir, and I'm not the only one who feels that way--he'll never live to face sentence. Not if I know 2219 AD!"

--|--

The cry was in a deep voice, a breathless, badly frightened voice. Hoarse and urgent, it rose above the roar of the distant mob, above the rattle of traffic; it flung itself into the spacious office on the third floor of the Embassy and demanded immediate attention.

His Excellency, the Ambassador from 2319 AD--the sole occupant of that office--was a man of tense bearing and an extremely strained face. His eyes transmitted the unvarying message that all things were essentially complex--and might be further complicated. It was, therefore, not at all remarkable how that cry from the grounds below made him look suddenly uncertain.

He rose and moved to the window with his usual haste. A tall, bearded man, whose clothes were torn and whose body was badly bruised, had just leaped onto the Embassy lawn from the surrounding high fence. The bearded man pointed the forefingers of both hands at the third-floor office of the Ambassador from 2319 AD and shrieked again:

"Sanctuary!"

AFTERWORD

A century ago, any American could have described Thomas Jefferson quite easily. He was above all one of the great Founding Fathers, pretty much a secular saint. Today he's still a Founding Father, of course, but many see him as a libertine and a bit of a hypocrite, especially with regard to slavery.

And take the great African-American statesman and writer, W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1900, most white Americans who knew of him would have described him as a vicious troublemaker, if not an out-and-out revolutionary. A century later, he's seen as a courageous visionary and an important leader.

Sitting Bull? Victoria Woodhull? During my adolescence, I read about them as terrifying or comical figures. Now, in my elder years, I see them as anything but.

It was such metamorphoses in viewpoint, as one era succeeds another, that have always fascinated me and that led to "Sanctuary." It also led me to coin the term "temporal provincialism" in my first anthology, Children of Wonder, in 1953.

But "Sanctuary" has an even more specific accent. It seems to be about the governmental organization of time travel, but it's actually quite nakedly about history. It's my belief that all good science fiction, from H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Cliff Simak, Brian Aldiss, and Connie Willis, is about history--past history, future history, or alternate history--even when it seems to be about developments in technology, theology, or information management.

In other words, the science in science fiction is actually history. Nothing more and nothing other.