"Broken?" the psychotherapist demanded in a worried voice.
"No. Dislocated. He looks like he"s been hit by a sledge hammer, wherever he is now, whatever"s happening. This E.C.R. is the d.a.m.ndest thing."
Temple"s still form shuddered convulsively. He began to gasp and cough, obviously fighting for breath. An ugly blue swelling had by now lumped the base of his jaw.
"What"s happening?" demanded the psychotherapist.
"I can"t be sure," said the doctor, shaking his head. "He seems to have difficulty in breathing ... it"s as if he were--drowning."
"Bad. Anything we can do?"
"No. We wait until this particular sequence ends." The doctor examined Temple again. "If it doesn"t end soon, this man will die of asphyxiation."
"Call it off," the psychotherapist pleaded. "If he dies now Earth will be represented by Russia. Call it off!"
Someone entered the room. "_I_ have the authority," he said, selecting a hypodermic from the doctor"s rack and piercing the skin of Temple"s forearm with it. "This first test has gone far enough. The Russian entry is clearly the winner, but Temple must live if he is to compete in another."
The wracking convulsions which shook Temple"s body subsided. He ceased his choking, began to breathe regularly. With grim swiftness, the doctor went to work on Temple"s dislocated jaw while the man who had stopped the contest rendered artificial respiration.
The man was Alaric Arkalion.
The Comrade Doctor was exultant. "Jupiter training, comrade, has given us a victory."
"How can you be sure?"
"Our entrant is unharmed, the contest has been called. Wait ... she is coming to."
Sophia stretched, rubbed her bruised knees, sat up.
"What happened, Comrade?" the doctor demanded.
"My knees ache," said Sophia, rubbing them some more. "I--I killed him, I think. Strange, I never dreamed it would be that real."
"In a sense, it _was_ real. If you killed the American, he will stay dead."
"Nothing mattered but that world we were in, a fantastic place. Now I remember everything, all the things I couldn"t remember then."
"But your--ah, dream--what happened?"
Sophia rubbed her bruised knees a third time, ruefully. "I knocked him unconscious with these. I forced his head under water and drowned him.
But--before I could be sure I finished the job--I came back.... Funny that I should want to kill him without compunction, without reason."
Sophia frowned, sat up. "I don"t think I want anymore of this."
The doctor surveyed her coldly. "This is your task on the Stalintrek.
This you will do."
"I killed him without a thought."
"Enough. You will rest and get ready for the second contest."
"But if he"s dead--"
"Apparently he"s not, or we would have been informed, Comrade Petrovitch."
"That is true," agreed the second man, who had remained silent until now. "Prepare for another test, Comrade."
Sophia was on the point of arguing again. After all it wasn"t fair. If in the dream-worlds which were not dream worlds she was motivated by but one factor and that to destroy the American and if she faced him with the strength of her Jupiter training it would hardly be a contest. And now that she could think of the American without the all-consuming hatred the dream world had fostered in her, she realized he had been a pleasant-looking young man, quite personable, in fact.
_I could like him_, Sophia thought and hoped fervently she had not drowned him. Still, if she had volunteered for the Stalintrek and this was the job they a.s.signed her....
"I need no rest," she told the doctor, hardly trusting herself, for she realized she might change her mind. "I am ready any time you are."
CHAPTER IX
His name was Temple and it was the year 1960. Hectic end of a decade, 1960. Ancient Joe Stalin was still alive, drugged half senseless against the tortures of an incurable stomach cancer, although the world thought he died in 1953. He would hang on grimly another year and a half, yielding the reins of empire to stout Malenkov who in the s.p.a.ce of a few years would lose them to a crafty schoolteacherish whiplash called Beria. 1960--eleventh year of the fantastic Korean situation, in which the Land of the Morning Sun had become, with no pretentions to the contrary, a glorified training camp for the armies of both sides.
The Cold War flared hot in Burma by mid-1960. Indo-China was a Red Fortress and with Tibet hopelessly behind the Iron Curtain, India awoke to the fact that neutrality was an impossibility in the era of pushb.u.t.tonry, lending her chaotic bulk to the West. Mao Tse Tung fell before an a.s.sa.s.sin"s bullet in Peking, but a shining new political sewage system cleared the streets of celebration before it fairly got under way. Inside of forty-eight hours, China had a new Red boss--imported from Moscow.
For some reason, it took until 1960 for the first batch of Hiroshima-Nagasaki mutants not to miscarry, and Sunday Supplement editors had a field day with the pathetic little creatures, one of which was born with two heads and actually survived for ten years. In 1960 the first manned s.p.a.ceship reached Luna, but the public knew nothing of this for another fourteen months. In the United States the increase in taxes and prices was matched everywhere except in the pocketbook of the white collar worker by an increase in wages.
Shortages in all branches of engineering forced the government to subsidize engineering students and exempt them permanently from the draft and the soon-to-be-started Nowhere Journey, while engineers"
salaries rose to match those of top business executives. Big news in the world of sports was the inclusion in the baseball Major Leagues of eight teams from the Pacific Coast, replacing the World Series with what was to become a mathematician"s nightmare, the Triangle Game.
But Christopher Temple had his own problems. He had his own life, too, which had nothing to do with the life of the real Christopher Temple, departed thirty-odd years later on the Nowhere Journey. Or rather, this _was_ Christopher Temple, living his second E.C.R.... Temple who had lost once, and who, if he lost again, would take the dreams and hopes of the Western world down into the dust of defeat with him. But as the fictional (although in a certain sense, real) Christopher Temple of 1960, he knew nothing of this.
The world could go to pot. The world was going to pot, anyway. Temple shuddered as he poured a fourth Canadian, downing it in a tasteless, burning gulp. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with government subsidized degrees from three universities including the fine new one at Desert Rock. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with top-secret government clearance. Temple was a thermo-nuclear engineer with more military secrets buzzing around inside his head than in a warehouse of burned Pentagon files.
Temple was also a thermo-nuclear engineer whose wife spied for the Russians.
He"d found out quite by accident, not meaning to eavesdrop at all.
Returning home early one afternoon because the production engineer called a halt while further research was done on certain unstable isotopes, Temple was surprised to find his wife had a gentleman caller. He heard their voices clearly from where he stood out in the sun-parlor, and for a ridiculous instant he was torn between slinking upstairs and ignoring them altogether or barging into the living room like a high school boy flushed with jealousy. The mature thing to do, of course, was neither, and Temple was on the point of walking politely into the living room, saying h.e.l.lo and waiting for an introduction, when s.n.a.t.c.hes of the conversation stopped him cold.
"Silly Charles! Kit doesn"t suspect a thing. I would _know_."
"How can you be sure?"
"Intuition."
"On a framework of intuition you would place the fate of Red Empire?"
"Empire, Charles?" Temple could picture Lucy"s raised eyebrow. He listened now, hardly breathing. For one wild moment he thought he would retreat upstairs and forget the whole thing. Life would be much simpler that way. A meaningless surrender to unreality, however, and it couldn"t be done.
"Yes, Empire. Oh, not the land-grabbing, slave-dominating sort of things the Imperialists used to attempt, but a more subtle and hence more enduring empire. Let the world call us Liberator, we shall have Empire."
Lucy laughed, a sound which Temple loved. "You may keep your ideology, Charles. Play with it, bathe in it, get drunk on it or drown yourself in it. I want my money."