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Genealogist.
A Genealogist was given one day s leave from his post with the Un-American
Ancestors Committee but could make nothing of the name of Brady beyond the fact
that it had been a common name in America for five hundred years. He suggested an
Archaeologist.
An Archaeologist was released from the Cartography Division of Invasion
Command and instantly identified the name Diamond Jim Brady. It was a historic
personage who had been famous in the city of Little Old New York some time
between Governor Peter Stuyvesant and Governor Fiorello La Guardia.
Christ! Carpenter marveled. That s centuries ago. Where the hell did Nathan
Riley get that? You d better join the experts in Ward T and follow this up.
The Archaeologist followed it up, checked his references and sent in his report.
Carpenter read it and was stunned. He called an emergency meeting of his staff of
experts.
Gentlemen, he announced, Ward T is something bigger than teleportation.
Those shock patients are doing something far more incredible ... far more
meaningful. Gentlemen, they re traveling through time.
The staff rustled uncertainly. Carpenter nodded emphatically.
Yes, gentlemen. Time travel is here. It has not arrived the way we expected it ...
as a result of expert research by qualified specialists; it has come as a plague . . . an
infection . . . a disease of the war ... a result of combat injury to ordinary men.
Before I continue, look through these reports for documentation.
The staff read the stenciled sheets. PFC Nathan Riley disappearing into the early
twentieth century in New York; M/Sgt Lela Machan.. . visiting the first century in
Rome; Corp/2 George Hanmer. . . journeying into the nineteenth century in England.
And all the rest of the twenty-four patients, escaping the turmoil and horrors of
modern war in the twenty-second century by fleeing to Venice and the Doges, to
Jamaica and the buccaneers, to China and the Han Dynasty, to Norway and Eric the
Red, to any place and any time in the world.
I needn t point out the colossal significance of this discovery, General
Carpenter pointed out. Think what it would mean to the war if we could send an
army back in time a week or a month or a year. We could win the war before it
started. We could protect our Dream . . . poetry and beauty and the fine culture of
America ... from barbarism without ever endangering it.
The staff tried to grapple with the problem of winning battles before they started.
The situation is complicated by the fact that these men and women of Ward T
are non compos. They may or may not know how they do what they do, but in any
case they re incapable of communicating with the experts who could reduce this
miracle to method. It s for us to find the key. They can t help us.
The hardened and sharpened specialists looked around uncertainly.
We ll need experts, General Carpenter said.
The staff relaxed. They were on familiar ground again.
We ll need a Cerebral Mechanist, a Cyberneticist, a Psychiatrist, an Anatomist,
an Archaeologist and a first rate Historian. They ll go into that ward and they won t
come out until their job is done. They must get the technique of time travel.
The first five experts were easy to draft from other war departments. All America
was a tool chest of hardened and sharpened specialists. But there was trouble
locating a first-class Historian until the Federal Penitentiary cooperated with the army
and released Dr. Bradley Scrim from his twenty years at hard labor. Dr. Scrim was
acid and jagged. He had held the chair of Philosophic History at a Western university
until he spoke his mind about the war for the American Dream. That got him the
twenty years hard.
Scrim was still intransigent, but induced to play ball by the intriguing problem of
Ward T.
But I m not an expert, he snapped. In this benighted nation of experts, I m
the last singing grasshopper in the ant heap.
Carpenter snapped up the intercom. Get me an Entomologist, he said.
Don t bother, Scrim said. I ll translate. You re a nest of ants . . . all working
and toiling and specializing. For what?
To preserve the American Dream, Carpenter answered hotly. We re fighting
for poetry and culture and education and the Finer Things in Life.
You re fighting to preserve me, Scrim said. That s what I ve devoted my life
to. And what do you do with me? Put me in jail.
You were convicted of enemy sympathizing and fellow-traveling, Carpenter
said.
I was convicted of believing in the American Dream, Scrim said. Which is
another way of saying I had a mind of my own.
Scrim was also intransigent in Ward T. He stayed one night, enjoyed three good
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