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Chalmers went on to elaborate. It was a relief to talk to somebody like
Pottgeiter, who wasn't bothered by the present moment, but simply boycotted
it. Eventually, the period-bell rang. Pottgeiter looked at his watch, as
from conditioned reflex, and then rose, saying that he had a class and
excusing himself. He would have carried his cigar with him if Chalmers hadn't
taken it away from him.
After Pottgeiter had gone Chalmers opened a book he didn't notice
what it was and sat staring unseeing at the pages. So the moving
knife-edge had come down on the end of Khalid ib'n Hussein's life;
what were the events in the next segment of time, and the segments to follow?
There would be bloody fighting all over the Middle East with consternation, he
remembered that he had been talking about that to Pottgeiter. The Turkish army
would move in and try to restore order. There would be more trouble in
northern Iran, the Indian Communists would invade Eastern Pakistan, and then
the general war, so long dreaded, would come. How far in the future
that was he could not "remember," nor how the nuclear-weapons
stalemate that had so far prevented it would be broken. He knew that today,
and for years before, nobody had dared start an all-out atomic war. Wars, now,
were marginal skirmishes, like the one in Indonesia, or the steady underground
conflict of subversion and sabotage that had come to be called the Subwar. And
with the United States already in possession of a powerful Lunar base.... He
wished he could "remember" how events between the murder of Khalid and the
Thirty Day's War had been spaced chronologically. Something of that had come
to him, after the incident in Modern History
IV, and he had driven it from his consciousness.
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He didn't dare go home where the reporters would be sure to find him. He
simply left the college, at the end of the school-day, and walked without
conscious direction until darkness gathered. This morning, when he had seen
the paper, he had said, and had actually believed, that the news of the murder
in Basra would put an end to the trouble that had started a month ago in the
Modern History class. It hadn't: the trouble, it seemed, was only beginning.
And with the newspapers, and Whitburn, and Fitch, it could go on forever....
It was fully dark, now; his shadow fell ahead of him on the sidewalk,
lengthening as he passed under and beyond a street-light, vanishing as he
entered the stronger light of the one ahead. The windows of a cheap cafe
reminded him that he was hungry, and he entered, going to a table and ordering
something absently. There was a television screen over the combination bar and
lunch-counter. Some kind of a comedy programme, at which an invisible
studio-audience was laughing immoderately and without apparent cause. The
roughly dressed customers along the counter didn't seem to see any more humor
in it than he did. Then his food arrived on the table and he began to eat
without really tasting it.
After a while, an alteration in the noises from the television
penetrated his consciousness; a news-program had come on, and he raised his
head. The screen showed a square in an Eastern city; the voice was saying:
"... Basra, where Khalid ib'n Hussein was assassinated early this
morning early afternoon, local time.
This is the scene of the crime; the body of the murderer has been removed, but
you can still see the stones with which he was pelted to death by the mob...."
A close-up of the square, still littered with torn-up paving-stones. A
Caliphate army officer, displaying the weapon it was an old M3, all right;
Chalmers had used one of those things, himself, thirty years before, and he
and his contemporaries had called it a "grease-gun." There were some recent
pictures of Khalid, including one taken as he left the plane on his return
from Ankara. He watched, absorbed; it was all exactly as he had "remembered" a
month ago. It gratified him to see that his future "memories" were reliable
in detail as well as generality.
"But the most amazing part of the story comes, not from Basra, but from
Blanley College, in California,"
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