We need Heisenberg. We could hold on by sheer brute strength, and maybe weather the storm, but we’d lose control in the long run, and the country—maybe the world—would go slowly to hell. More than half the workforce are followers of Heisenberg in some sense or other. Their hopes of what might happen when he returns are all that’s keeping the economy staggering along. We could handle the initial shock if we were to lose him, but we’d never put the pieces together again well enough to stop the rot that’s sending us slowly into a new dark age. Without Heisenberg, we’ll lose everything.”
It was a speech that Marcangelo had made many times before. It was a position he’d taken up some years previously, and he was convinced of its truth. The capital was now the only city in the States with more than a million inhabitants. Since the eastern seaboard had been bombed out, together with most of the south-west, the USA had been in the grip of a slow decline.
The population was stabilizing again now that the last of the plagues had shot its bolt, but there were millions who existed only as silver statues locked in time—escapists, mostly carrying plague or already dying from radiation poisoning. The city still lived and maintained a front of technological civilization, but elsewhere the population was moving back to the rural areas as agriculture became a labor-intensive business again. There was still fuel for tractors, but only because the plagues had left such big reserves. Within another generation, the farmers would be using horses again, and cars would disappear from the roads. The loss wasn’t irremediable, but if the backsliding were to be halted and reversed there would have to be some very powerful motivating force to mobilize and co-ordinate the efforts of the people.
Only Paul Heisenberg could provide that motivation, because Paul Heisenberg, thanks to the accident of fate that had made him the first time-jumper, had become the focus of the hopes of countless people—even people who could not jump themselves. Only Paul Heisenberg could stem the steady drain of escapists, who set off for an uncertain future rather than stay in a derelict present, because it was in his name that most of them jumped. It was the future he had talked about (though never explicitly described) in his book that gave the jumpers something to aim for, and the evidence even suggested that it was faith in his holy word that permitted most jumpers actually to project themselves into stasis. It was not that there was anything special about his words—it was faith itself that seemed to be important—but faith in Paul Heisenberg’s crazy doctrine of metascientific speculation was the most widespread and powerful faith left in the western hemisphere.
Marcangelo knew that Diehl didn’t see things the same way. Diehl wasn’t really a long-term thinker, and his imagination extended no further than commonplace political expediency. What Diehl cared about was power, and it didn’t particularly matter to him whether the world was going headfirst down to hell or not, just as long as he could stay on top of it all the way. So far, Lindenbaum had always taken the same line as Marcangelo, but now that the situation had come to a head, things might change very quickly indeed.
“If Heisenberg were to get out,” said Diehl, pensively, “and Wishart were to get hold of him....”
“He can’t,” said Marcangelo. “All of Wishart’s strength is south of the river. You’ve seen to that. You’ve kept the Movement from organizing anything substantial in the north.”
Diehl stared into Marcangelo’s face, looking down through the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles like a caricature of a schoolmaster. “Tomorrow,” he said, “the cults will have new members by the thousand, and the Movement too. Today we could count on the loyalty of nine policemen in ten; tomorrow, who can tell? We’d better find him quickly. Very quickly.”
Marcangelo was saved the trouble of answering by the sound of a roaring motor. The presidential helicopter was settling down on to the landing strip behind the Manse. Diehl abandoned his staring match and went to the window to look out into the night.
“But who has him?” murmured Marcangelo. “And how?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Paul sipped the dark liquid gingerly. It was hot, and very sweet. The girl had spooned a lot of sugar into it. When she had given it to him she had murmured something about it being impossible to get coffee or tea, but it tasted enough like instant coffee for him not to have known that it wasn’t. She hadn’t said anything else, yet. She was waiting for him to recover a little more fully.
He looked around the room, studying its every detail in the hope that he might see something that would touch a chord in his memory and tell him what was happening to him.
He was sitting on a single bed, still warm from the girl’s body. She was sitting on a dilapidated armchair whose brown upholstery was peeling away from its wooden frame. There was a small electric fire, whose reflector was tarnished a dull brown. It, too, seemed very old.
The carpet was brown and very dirty, but the walls had been painted in the not-too-distant past in dark blue. The curtains that covered the window were heavy, patterned in shades of green. There was a big bookcase against the wall opposite the bed, filled with tattered volumes, mostly paperback, with balls of string, pens, a comb and a great deal of miscellaneous bric-a-brac taking up the shelf margin in front of the books.
Set in the wall opposite the window there was a mantelpiece, but the fireplace had been bricked up. There were some pictures stuck to the wall, mostly cut from newspapers, others drawn in colored inks on white paper. His eye was finally drawn to the light-fitting: a none-too-bright bulb shielded by a makeshift shade.
There was nothing that seemed in the least unusual, except for the vague impression that the structural features were very old. It was not that they were dirty, just that they seemed to be in a state of barely-perceptible decay.
He looked back at the girl. She was dark-haired and dark-complexioned. Her skin was smooth. She wore no make-up and she seemed untidy, although that was only to be expected, in view of the fact that she had been dragged from her bed in the middle of a winter night. She was wearing a toweling dressing-gown two or three sizes too large for her. Her feet were tucked up on the seat of the chair, with the excess material of the gown wrapped over them to protect them from the cold. Underneath, she was wearing a thick shirt and jeans.
She met his curious gaze for a few moments, and then was embarrassed into speech. “My name’s Rebecca,” she said. “Don’t try to talk just yet. It won’t make much sense. I’ll try to explain what’s happened to you.”
Paul sipped at the sweet liquid, and was content to reply with a smile.
“You’re a time-traveler,” she said. “At some time in the past you managed to throw yourself into a state where time passed very much more slowly for you than for the world—more than that, because, in some way that nobody understands, you took yourself right out of the world, leaving a surface that reflects all radiation and is impervious to all force, as if you had become an immovable object. You probably jumped deliberately, although it does sometimes happen accidentally. No one knows just how it’s done—some people can’t seem to do it, no matter how they try. I don’t know how long ago you jumped, but most of the people waking now already knew what they were doing. The earliest ones didn’t, because no one actually came out of the stasis until 2035 or thereabouts, forty years after the first jump. This is January 2119. Do you understand all that?”
Paul wasn’t sure whether to nod or to shake his head. He understood what the words meant, but it didn’t make sense. It was a story, which hadn’t the remotest connection with the world that he knew. It had to be a dream of some kind. He tried hard to recapture a harvest of memories, and found images of himself, the performance in the stadium, Adam Wishart, the book, the people staring...and he remembered that the man in the car had said something about not telling anyone who he was.
It had to be a dream.
“It’s okay,” she said, perceiving his uncertainty. “It takes a lot of getting used to. I’ve never jumped, but Ronnie has—he lives here too. We sometimes help people like you. There aren’t too many people living in the neighborhood now; most people moved south of the river, but there are a lot of jumpers here, because of Paul Heisenberg. He’s only five or six miles away. Someone