“That’s good,” Raymond said. “I’m glad to hear it. If any of the little bastards give you any trouble let me know – he’ll be out of here so fast that it’ll take thirty seconds for his screams of anguish to catch up to him.”
“Well.”
“What?”
“Its that, um … “
“Someone is giving you a problem?”
“Oh, no. It’s me. Something has been bothering me for the last few days, and I think it would be best if I told you about it.”
“Well, what? Tell me about it. I don’t care what it is, I’ll have it solved for you before the day’s finished. What?”
“I didn’t invent the wheel.”
Raymond’s look startled Elko. It was as if Raymond’s eyes had almost popped out of their sockets. Then he quickly looked back and forth down the long, wide hall to see if anyone had been near enough to hear. “Let’s not discuss this here,” Raymond said in a strained voice. “Follow me.” He led the way to his office, then ushered Elko quickly inside and shut and locked the door behind them. “Okay,” he said, “what is this nonsense?”
“I don’t belong here with these people,” Elko said. “I’m not one of the great minds of humanity.”
“Don’t be silly! You belong here more than most of those other idiots in the Great Hall!”
“I feel like a fraud, Raymond.”
“This has something to do with Gibson, doesn’t it? What has he said to you?”
“He knows that I didn’t invent the wheel.”
“But you did invent the wheel! I saw you do it!”
“No, I recreated something I saw as a child. There was a group of nomads, and they had an oxen pulling a giant basket which rolled on wheels. I was five, maybe six years old, and they were off in the distance. It was a strange sight, and it always stuck in my mind – but it never occurred to me to duplicate their cart until that one day when my potting wheel tipped over.”
Raymond was silent for a moment, looking very agitated. “This is absolute nonsense!” he finally blurted. “This memory of yours could have been a dream for all we know! A product of your own imagination. As a matter of fact, it could have been a very recent dream brought on by post-hypnotic suggestion because of that damn Steve Gibson!”
“No–-”
“Yes, Elko! Yes. Your mind can easily play tricks upon you.
Memories are fragile, unreliable things. Every time you remember something it gets restored, and every time it gets restored it is restored slightly different. Every time you remember something you change your memory. It gets to the point that you’re remembering memories of memories of memories, and it becomes very unreliable.
Things that you swear happened to you as a child are in actuality memories of dreams. I myself for years swore that as a child I saw a news report about a giant frog being found during World War Three, and have vivid memories of photos of this giant frog being towed into the San Francisco bay by an aircraft carrier. This never happened! I dreamed it. Don’t you see?”
“No,” Elko said. “I saw those nomads. That’s where I got the idea for using wheels. I didn’t invent it.”
“Shut up!” Raymond yelled. “God damn you, you little Sumerian bastard! What are you trying to do to me? You want to wreck my career! I don’t give a damn about what you remember. History shows that you invented the wheel, and that’s final.”
“But–-”
“You just forget about it! I swear to god, if you blab this to anybody, it’ll be the hardest on you! You, Elko! I saved your god damned ass right out of the Euphrates, and I can put it right back in there. We have a clone of you growing right now, did you know that? A clone that we have to send back in time to replace you in your death. It wouldn’t be hard at all for me to keep the clone here and sent you back with a rock strapped to your back. Do you understand me? Do you, Elko?”
“Yes.”
“Have you said a word about this to anyone else?”
“No.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. Forget about it. I mean it, if you open your mouth and destroy everything I worked on, my whole god damned career, you’ll be right back in that river. You have my promise on that!”
Elko left Raymond’s office with the promise still ringing in his ears. All through the day he kept trying not to think about it. During his classes he tried not to think about it. During dinner that night, in Franz’s apartment, he was consciously not saying anything about it.
“It’s absurd,” John was saying, “they bring me here and they expect me to teach politics and leadership. But they wont’ let me join in their politics or lead anybody. Have you gentlemen noticed that, honored as we’re supposed to be, we’re not really citizens in this society? We’re not. We more resemble possessions than anything else. Items in a collection. Pass the salt, would you, Elko?”
Elko passed the salt, consciously not saying anything.
“I know the feeling,” Franz said. “They brought me here and filled my head with this Esperanto language, interpreted the way they wanted it to be interpreted, then sat me in front of a class and expected me to teach creative writing. How can I teach these kids how to write, especially in a class? The best thing I say to them is, ‘Lock yourself alone in a room and write your thoughts.’
And another thing, they set me in front of a word processor and say, ‘Write anything you like.’ On a word processor? How can you concentrate on writing with a word processor? It’s the most fascinating device I’ve ever seen, so much so that I’m more interested in the word processor than my writing. I find that this computer device can do so much more than word processing, and that I can use it to do just about anything. So I learn a programming language and I start writing programs. Is Technica happy? Are they supportive? No, they want me to write fiction. Well, fiction writing was the first part of my life. They give me a new life, I take up a new career. If we had computers back in the old days I never would have been a writer.”
Elko’s silence broke. He couldn’t help it. “Professor Burns told me today that they’re growing a clone of me to send back in time to die in my place.”
“That is so that they don’t change history,” Franz said. “As if they were able to do such a thing. They have to act like they can change history, though, to be able to time travel. What actually happened, though, is that you never did drown in that river. Your clone did.”
That’s not for certain, Elko thought, but he said nothing.
“It’s just like I never really died in that ghastly sanitarium in Kierling, my clone did. And John here was never shot by a sniper.”
“Thank god for that,” John said.
“So, then, all these things in history never actually happened?”
“No. Not to us.”
“Then it’s a lie?”
“Yes,” Franz said.
“For an institute dedicated to truth, this whole place seems to be built on lies,” John said. “It’s ironic, really. It’s not much different from when I was … alive? There’s an odd thought.”
“You think of yourself as dead?” Elko said.
“Yes, I do, or at least part of me does.”
Franz nodded emphatically at John. “I feel that the Franz they pulled out of the death bed was a different Franz that is alive and talking to you here and now.”
“I feel like I am dead,” Elko said. “Or at least, I feel like I’m supposed to be dead. It’s not like I want to die, though, it just feels like I’m not really alive.”
“It’s the lack of free will,” John said. “What passes for free will for us is an illusion. We’re not really free. We can’t walk out of here and say, ‘I quit.’ What kind of life is this?” He looked at Elko and at Franz. “Gentlemen, I’m going to level with you. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I say we should get the hell out of here.”
“I agree with you, but I don’t see how it would be possible,”
Franz said. “They have the time devices, they can see where we went and be there before we get there.”
“The time devices put us at a severe disadvantage,” John said. “But they have a weakness. Aren’t all of them controlled by one central computer?”
Franz nodded.
“You’re the programmer, Franz. What can we do?”
Franz thought for a moment, then his eyes brightened. “The computer is programmed, by law, not to let anyone use the time devices for traveling into the future, or anywhere shorter than a hundred-twenty-five years in the past. It’s a blackout program, locking the controls out of a certain range.”