Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 learn the technique of time travel.”
    The first five experts were easy to draft from other war departments. All America was a toolchest 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.”
    “Which means 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 my American Dream,” Scrim said. “Which is another way of saying I was jailed for having a mind of my own.”
    Scrim was also intransigent in Ward T. He stayed one night, enjoyed three good meals, read the reports, threw them down, and began hollering to be let out.
    “There’s a job for everyone and everyone must be on the job,” Colonel Dimmock told him. “You don’t come out until you’ve got the secret of time travel.”
    “There’s no secret I can get,” Scrim said.
    “Do they travel in time?”
    “Yes and no.”
    “The answer has to be one or the other. Not both. You’re evading the—”
    “Look,” Scrim interrupted wearily. “What are you an expert in?”
    “Psychotherapy.”
    “Then how the hell can you understand what I’m talking about? This is a philosophic concept. I tell you there’s no secret here that the army can use. There’s no secret any group can use. It’s a secret for individuals only.”
    “I don’t understand you.”
    “I didn’t think you would. Take me to Carpenter.”
    They took Scrim to Carpenters’s office where he grinned at the general malignantly, looking for all the world like a red-headed, underfed devil.
    “I’ll need ten minutes,” Scrim said. “Can you spare them out of your toolbox?”
    Carpenter nodded.
    “Now listen carefully. I’m going to give you the clues to something so vast and so strange that it will need all your fine edge to cut into it.”
    Carpenter looked expectant.
    “Nathan Riley goes back in time to the early twentieth century. There he lives the life of his fondest dreams. He’s a big-time gambler, the friend of Diamond Jim Brady and others. He wins money betting on events because he always knows the outcome in advance. He won money betting on Eisenhower to win an election. He won money betting on a prizefighter named Marciano to beat another prizefighter named La Starza. He made money investing in an automobile company owned by Henry Ford. There are the clues. They mean anything to you?”
    “Not without a Sociological Analyst,” Carpenter answered: He reached for the intercom.
    “Don’t order