have no idea who you really are, but you’re obviously a liar in addition to being a raving lunatic. The fact that you’re here and now proves that. The Authority has never sent any diehard Transhumanist fanatics into the past, and it never will.”
Franco took on an infuriatingly complacent look. “Who said anything about the Authority?”
“Talk sense! The Authority operates the only temporal displacer in existence.”
“So it pleases the Authority to think. Shortly after Weintraub’s initial experiments, we stole his data—it was pathetically easy, and we were very interested in its potentialities. Our research ran parallel to, but in advance of, Fujiwara’s. She and Weintraub were brilliant, for Pugs, but they followed several false trails. The result was a ‘brute force’ approach to temporal displacement, requiring a titanic installation and a lavish expenditure of energy. We soon spotted the flaws in their mathematics. Our displacer is relatively compact and energy-efficient, and therefore concealable.”
“Are you saying,” said Jason, thunderstruck, “that there are two displacers on Earth in our era?” He wanted to believe it was a lie, because it removed the foundations of his accustomed structure of assumptions. But, try as he might, he could see no other way to account for the presence of unauthorized time travelers with proscribed equipment.
“Only since the Authority’s came into operation,” said Franco, amused. “Ours was the first. We’ll probably build more, as the one we have is getting somewhat overworked. As I mentioned, we have been intensely interested in time travel ever since Weintraub demonstrated that it was a theoretical possibility.”
“Why? I’ve never heard that the Transhumanists had any interest in historical research.”
“We don’t.” Once again Franco leaned forward avidly. “We look to the future, not the past. We don’t want to study history. We want to change it.”
For a heartbeat or two, Jason stared openmouthed. Then he burst out laughing.
“Now I know you’re a lunatic!” he finally gasped. “History can’t be changed! But please don’t let me stop you. I hope you try—I really do. In fact, I hope you try very, very hard!”
“I never said we thought we could change observed history. But have you ever considered how much of the human past is unobserved and unrecorded? There are vast empty stretches of territory and time in which we are constantly changing the past, filling up those stretches with what will, in the end, turn out to have been humanity’s secret history—a history inevitably leading to our eventual triumph at a date which . . . I don’t believe I’ll reveal to you. We call it, simply, The Day.”
“And how, precisely, are you doing that?” Jason inquired, unable to keep a reluctant and horrified fascination out of his voice. In one corner of his mind, he wondered why Franco was telling him all this. Probably the Transhumanist simply felt a need for someone besides his own underlings to brag to. Jason had known enough blowhards, in his own time and others, to be able to recognize the type.
Of course, there was another, more unsettling explanation: Franco thought his revelations could do no possible harm because he had no intention of letting his listeners live.
“We have various techniques. For example, we plant genetic flaws in the unmodified human population by infecting populations with gengineered retroviruses, which by The Day will have rendered those populations vulnerable to a biochemical warfare using tailored proteins or polysaccharides. Another approach is to plant retroactive plagues, spreading mutagens whose genetic time-clocks result in the poisoning of certain vital food supplies on The Day. And there are even more subtle ‘time bombs’ that we plant, some of a purely psychological nature.”
“But,” said Jason with an incredulous headshake, “things like that would be extremely long-term, and require repeated visits to various eras in succession.” Inwardly, he fought to hold at bay an obscene vision of Earth as a rotten apple, seemingly sound on the outside but a writhing mass of worms inside the skin, waiting to break through it.
“To repeat, our temporal displacement technology is less expensive than yours by orders of magnitude. We are therefore less constrained in how far into the past we can go, and how often. This is particularly helpful in my own work: the establishment of cults and secret societies, which we nurture over the centuries by repeated visits from the same, seemingly ageless agent at prophesied times. At those times the agent foretells the next visit, dazzles the faithful with technological ‘magic,’ and gives them enough foreknowledge of the future to confirm the succeeding