THE WRONG END OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“You’re an optimist there days!” Bratcheslavsky grunted.

“I have good reason. I found things over there I wasn’t expecting, would have assumed not to exist. Admittedly, they are neither officially admitted nor properly understood, but they exist, and I’m here because they do.”

He drew a deep breath.

“Lookl My stay there was measured in daysl I don’t believe I could have run across what I did unless thesethese virtues and talents are widespread. Just considerl” He raised a finger. “First, I encountered someone with a talent we’d never imagined to be real, only it was real and I had proof. What’s more, he . . . well, it’s an unfashionable virtue, but it is one.”

“Self-sacrifice,” Bratcheslavsky said.

“Yes.”

There was a long, cold pause. During it Sheklov felt himself carried back in space and time, to the train he had taken over the Canadian border on Danty’s instructions. None of them had the mind to question his orders by that stage. No one had suspected the genuinepess of his Canadian passport; for him it had been easy. For Lora and Magda, somewhat harder . . . but there was a wellestablished underground railway into Canada, had been for over a generation, and it had been surprisingly simple to obtain advice and even a guide. (Of course he’d only heard the details afterwards.)

For Danty, though. .

He’d looked out of the train’s window, and seen that car racing down one of the blocked stub-ends of dirt road heading north, and behind a mask of trees he’d seen that rose of flame. Just for a moment, a second or two.

Why? Why? Merely so as to ensure that when his train was checked by the border-guards, most of them would have been diverted to investigate the explosion? It was far too high a pricel

But he continued, raising another finger. “And I met Magda, who in spite of the stifling effects of public conformism had worked out, from the inside, the true historical analogies for her country’s predicament. And”a third finger-“Lore, who behaved in this crazy manner and nonetheless was ready to abandon her. old life for good and all, simply because she’d discovered that her father had lied to her since she was born. That hatred of hypocrisy is a healthy sign …. Did you bring them out safely, by the way? I didn’t hear.”

“Yes, it was confirmed this morning. They wanted to stay in Canada, I’m afraid, but of course we couldn’t allow that, not since they both knew about you and Turpin. But don’t worry-we’ll make them comfortable and take care of them.”

“Fine,” Sheklov said dispiritedly, and stubbed his cigarette in the sandbowl. “Tell me something,” he added after a moment. .”Why do you think Danty did it?”

“I can only guess,” Bratcheslavsky said. “Still, it’ll be an enlightened guess. I’m an old man, and I’ve been through so much in one lifetime I seem to have summed up whole generations of human experience. Not about the material world, but about the spiritual world. The material world is run by people like those”-he jerked his head at the door of the room, through which they were soon going to have to pass in order to explain something vitally significant to people who would have no conception of its true importance–“who are merely efficient. Good at ruling, good at directing, good at ordering other people about. That wasn’t Danty’s talent. His was for influencing people, encouraging them, not an engineer’s talent, but an artist’s.”

“Yesl” Sheklov said, almost surprised.

“You envy him that gift, don’t you?”

“I . . . Yes, I do.”

“But it killed him at twenty-one.” The words hung in the air like smoke. “And there’s only one reasonable explanation. Thanks to the gift, he saw something ahead for him that would have been -intolerable.”

“I-I guess so. But what?”

“I think you told me, didn’t you? Something you heard

from his friend Magda. The prospect of endless years of fear, of expecting that one day he would sense a crisis coming that he was powerless to prevent.”

“And he preferred not to be doomed by others,” Sheklov said. “He chose to make his own decision about an end.”

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