The Future People Page 7

felt the classes might as well have been conducted as a conversation between the teacher and Savannah alone. All the other students only had to listen. Kenneth hadn't ever liked English, so he'd found himself doodling during that period.

  He couldn't see himself spending time with her every day.

  He found himself wishing that Unquill hadn't brought him forward to the future. The future, as Kenneth perceived it, turned out to be a boring place. They didn't even have pizza.

  THREE

  SAVANNAH HAD TRIED to understand everything Unquill had said.

  Bits and pieces of information floated through the barrier she believed was blocking her path to knowledge.

  She had been abducted and brought into the future. Furthermore, she had been brought to this place in order to speak to a man who would destroy the human race.

  Savannah didn't know what she thought about that.

  She supposed there would be no one around to preserve the works of Robert Frost, a poet she particularly enjoyed reading while in study hall. That, to her, was the worst consequence that could come out of humans no longer being alive.

  She understood the word marriage well enough, though. She had dismissed it at once, especially after Kenneth's reaction during gym class.

  She, like him, hadn't wanted to play badminton that day. A little conversation never hurt anyone, yet he had persisted in drawing forth from her mind a few words Savannah had heard her own father mention at six o'clock when the phone always rang as he sat down to eat.

  She didn't want to repeat those words, partly because she didn't understand them all and partly because she knew the word that galled him the most.

  After searching the computer with Kenneth, Unquill worked on his own, trying to determine the problem. Savannah didn't have the slightest idea what he was doing. She yawned. Images flashed across the screen. Unquill typed so fast that Savannah wondered if he'd break the keyboard. Whenever she'd sat down in front of the computer, she'd always found herself looking at the keys to see where they were. She couldn't imagine being able to type as fast as Unquill did, or how much training had to be required in order for him to do so.

  She suddenly felt tired. She wanted to sleep, but at the same time stay awake.

  Staring at the flashing images on the screen, she began to sense that many of them did repeat themselves. She watched Unquill cycle through a restart process, only to find it unchanged.

  She lay down on a cord. Her hair spilled out in all directions. She rubbed at her eyes.

  Savannah wondered if they made flip-flops in the future.

  FOUR

  UNQUILL WAS SHORT.

  He knew that he shouldn't be ashamed of his height.

  Eight feet tall had been the utmost maximum many humans throughout history could be said to expect to grow into. Yet, with the standard height of ten feet tall, eleven at most, Unquill had always been aware of his size.

  Everyone looked down at him. He could tell when they did this, for each person, irrespective of gender or age, always possessed that same odd glint in their eye.

  Unquill couldn't explain it.

  He often felt as though everyone went about patronizing him.

  In his first hundred years of life, when he'd tried to fit in as a normal member of society, the camaraderie he'd experienced with his colleagues always left him feeling inadequate. He knew that how he used his body mattered more than what his body looked like, yet he also knew that, even after many thousands of years of recorded history, the human race remained a species which always judged books by their covers.

  Unquill didn't like his cover. He often wished people would look inside, even if only for a little while.

  These thoughts crept through his mind while he performed the mind-numbing task of trying to determine what the problem was with the computer.

  It would still let him play games, though, if he wanted. He could enter a command to enter the world of Battleship Centaurs, yet any serious search activity of the computer always produced the same maddening sets of repeating images.

  When the plan to retrieve the two small human children from their time had been conceived at the highest levels of the Temporal Constabulary, Unquill had made no comment.

  He'd seen them in his future.

  They all seen the children in their future, impossibly short, always loud, always eating, always needing to use the bathroom.

  They had been thought defective at first. Beings which produced noise without substance could be no better than animals.

  Yet, when Unquill had been asked to give his opinion, he had stated that he could find no two citizens with greater significance to history than the two selected.

  The Constabulary had seen his evidence.

  They could not dispute it.

  Nor did they try.

  However, with the search function not presently working, Unquill wondered if time was indeed absolute as he'd always been taught.

  The whole basis of the project was to prove that it was not, after all.

  If he had seen the destruction of the human race as an event that had already happened, what would then occur if the destruction could be prevented?

  Unquill wondered at the implications of that.

  Preventing the destruction of the human race would mean that he, at various points in the past, would never have seen it.

  He then would have never taken steps to avert it.

  If such steps weren't taken, then the destruction would happen anyway, which would mean...

  Paradoxes hadn't been his specialty.

  Within the Constabulary-a group already perceived as rule-mongering pencil-pushers-he had been a journeyman. He had always been the one to wear the protective suits that kept him safe while a tunnel through time opened around him. He had traveled to various points in history, just to see if such places warranted further investigation.

  Moreover, given the planet's rotation about the sun, calculations for spatial displacement had to be applied as well. At every time landing, Unquill came close to passing out. He always arrived just at the edge of unconsciousness before his body's natural processes asserted themselves.

  The historians-those individuals who spent long stretches of their lives within the times in which they visited-didn't experience the same repeated sensations that a journeyman like Unquill did.

  If he'd paid more attention in his ten-year theory course, perhaps things might have turned out differently.

  Remembering temporal theory gave Unquill a jolt.

  He stopped typing. He looked at the screen, which continued to flash the same images at lightning-fast speed.

  He recalled a lesson where, sitting outside in a chair too big for him, he'd heard the instructor talk about the Causality Paradox.

  First discovered in the 64th century, journeymen and historians alike had the ability to go forward in time in order to see how they solved any complicated problem. Seeing how they solved it, they then went back in time to apply their solution. However, as the instructor had been careful to point out, depriving the mind of its ability to work out the problem by itself could lead to the problem not being solved in the correct manner. What the time traveler perceived as a solution might, in fact, complicate matters.

  Unquill could, in theory, test the Causality Paradox concerning the matter of Hinjo.

  He could go forward to see if a solution had indeed been found.

  If events could be changed, such information would prove revolutionary.

  Every respected theorist, of which there were many, agreed that the time stream could only be known, not changed.

  Knowing this, Unquill wondered why he'd been allowed to stomp about in that room of stone and wood before taking history's two most significant citizens.

  Had he always taken them?

  He could not say for certain.

  Perhaps the people with greater levels of responsibility than himself knew something he didn't.

  Some minutes had passed while Unquill had sto
od lost in his thoughts.

  The images on the screen slowed.

  A primitive bicycle, a great roaring beast, a remote-controlled machine moving along a world of red sand.

  His eyes widened when the computer did something it hadn't done before.

  It stopped flashing images past.

  It showed, in clear detail, the image of Hinjo Junta, as the future historians had recorded him, emaciated and dying.

  Unquill pressed the escape key.

  Nothing happened.

  FIVE

  SAVANNAH AWOKE TO the sound of a man whooping in excitement.

  She knew she hadn't been asleep long, for she'd developed the headache she always got whenever someone interrupted her sleep.

  She saw the image of a man, his skin stretched tight around his face, his eyes dull, emotionless.

  To her, this was the image of a man who had given up on life.

  She felt sorry for him, for she knew that he would soon die.

  She turned her face away, unable to look at the man.

  A flicker of recognition in the back of her mind told her that she'd seen this man somewhere before.

  Even while Unquill shouted the name Hinjo, she knew it had to be true.

  Here was a man who would, according to Unquill, destroy the human race, yet she had met him before.

  He had to have been a time traveler, she thought.

  She looked up to catch Kenneth staring at her.

  She stuck his tongue out at him.

  He turned his face away, pouting.

  Savannah stood up, feeling the weariness in her bones.

  Her mother had often said that Savannah had no business being tired or sore since she was so young, yet Savannah couldn't help it. She had caught the insomnia bug earlier in the year. Now, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't sleep more than