THE WRONG END OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

Suddenly uncaged in his mind, the doubts and disbeliefs he had dutifully tried to conquer came striding back with echoing, lead-heavy steps.

There is no wisdom for the unsteady and there is no meditation for the unsteady and for the unmeditative there is no peace. How can there be any happiness for those without peace?

Are all human beings mentally deformed? Why else should they think in negatives all the time? Health is more than the absence of overt sickness, sanity more than the absence of dangerous psychosis. Peace too must be more than the absence of a shooting war. Peace must be . . .

No use. He could sense it, recognize it as possible. But he could not make it real in his mind. He had seen people

who were apparently at peace-there was the kicker-but he had never accomplished it himself.

Anyway, if you do reach that unscalable pinnacle, what about the rest of the world?

He almost cried aloud, in anguish; he almost asked,

How long before the world is cured of finding patchwork solutions to single problems-solutions that generate problems in their turn? It’s bad enough Back There, but here…!

Men assembling in the cold morning light to tear up a road with pick and shovel so it could be re-laid by a machine!

America, of all countries! he mourned silently. Why did they send me to America?

When he was young he had spent three years in the India that had ultimately chosen to preserve its heritage, rather than accept aid conditional upon alliance with one of the great power-blocs. There, many people were sick, most were ill-fed and ill-housed.

And some were happy.

How long before we start looking for a way of life in which problems don’t matter?

Turpin was still making would-be helpful suggestions, proposing to invoke the resources of his company, its psychologists, its computers, its enormous data-banks. It seemed he had completely missed the point.

Not that Sheklov felt he understood it properly himself.

Listening, he came to suspect that Turpin was simply uttering polite noises. News of something “out near Pluto”-even if it could distort the totality of human experience, Eastern and Western-had no concrete referents for him. A generation of isolation, half-voluntary, half-enforced, had colored the thinking of his adopted countrymen, of whom. he was so contemptuous; inevitably, though, in order to protect himself among them, he had had to let his own thinking be conditioned by their example.

In which case . . .

As a loyal agent, Sheklov found the conclusion he was being driven to repugnant. Yet he had to face it He was compelled to wonder whether those who had sent him here genuinely believed they were dispatching him on

the trail of a clue, or whether they had merely lapsed into the pattern of the old days, when America was the wealthy rival, to be first emulated, then surpassed.

But that attitude was obsolete. The paths of the two blocs had diverged a long way now.

Though, of course, since they were both branches of the same species, the people who lived under the aegis of these supposedly irreconcilable systems coincided in surprising ways. If he were to go into one of those handsome housing developments overlooked by the superway, would he not find, as he would Back There, people who contrived casually to mention their courage in moving to a building that wasn’t blast-proof? And kept a year’s supply of food in the freezer anyway?

Of course 1 would.

They would take pains to impress him with their loyalty, their right thinking; they would have the proper photographs and flags on display. Small matter if they were afraid of some impersonal, august, omniscient security force, rather than of the cold consensus of their neighbors-the effect was essentially the same. They would strive to be dedicated pillars of their community, set on raising their children to follow in their footsteps, endlessly quarrelling with them when they scoffed or asked unanswerable questions.

But he had seen a man under a tree: thin, wearing only a loincloth, one eye filmed with a cataract, who spent the day in ecstatic enjoyment of the sun’s heat on his skin, and at nightfall fumbled in the bowl before him and ate what he found. There was always something in the bowl.

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