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

got to develop new tools.” He snapped up his intercom. “Get me a college,” he said.
    They got him Yale.
    “I want some experts in mind over matter. Develop them,” Carpenter ordered. Yale at once introduced three graduate courses in Thaumaturgy, Extrasensory Perception, and Telekinesis.
    The first break came when one of the Ward T experts requested the assistance of another expert. He needed a Lapidary.
    “What the hell for?” Carpenter wanted to know.
    “He picked up a reference to a gemstone,” Colonel Dimmock explained. “He’s a personnel specialist and he can’t relate it to anything in his experience.”
    “And he’s not supposed to,” Carpenter said approvingly. “A job for every man and every man on the job.” He flipped up the intercom. “Get me a Lapidary.”
    An expert Lapidary was given leave of absence from the army arsenal and asked to identify a type of diamond called Jim Brady. He could not.
    “We’ll try it from another angle,” Carpenter said. He snapped up his intercom. “Get me a Semanticist.”
    The Semanticist left his desk in the War Propaganda Department but could make nothing of the words “Jim Brady.” They were names to him. No more. He suggested a Genealogist.
    A Genealogist was given one day’s leave from his post with the Un-American Ancestors Committee, but could make nothing of the name Brady beyond the fact that it had been a common name in America for five hundred years. He suggested an Archaeologist.
    An Archaeologist was released from the Cartography Division of Invasion Command and instantly identified the name Diamond Jim Brady. It was a historic personage who had been famous in the city of Little Old New York sometime between Governor Peter Stuyvesant and Governor Fiorello La Guardia.
    “Christ!” Carpenter marveled. “That’s ages ago. Where the hell did Nathan Riley get that? You’d better join the experts in Ward T and follow this up.”
    The Archaeologist followed it up, checked his references and sent in his report. Carpenter read it and was stunned. He called an emergency meeting of his staff of experts.
    “Gentlemen,” he announced, “Ward T is something bigger than teleportation. Those shock patients are doing something far more incredible … far more meaningful. Gentlemen, they’re traveling through time.”
    The staff rustled uncertainly. Carpenter nodded emphatically.
    “Yes, gentlemen. Time travel is here. It has not arrived the way we expected it … as a result of expert research by qualified specialists; it has come as a plague … an infection … a disease of the war … a result of combat injury to ordinary men. Before I continue, look through these reports for documentation.”
    The staff read the stenciled sheets. PFC Nathan Riley … disappearing into the early twentieth century in New York; M/Sgt Lela Machan … visiting the first century in Rome; Corp/2 George Hanmer … journeying into the nineteenth century in England. And all the rest of the twenty-four patients, escaping the turmoil and horrors of modern war in the twenty-second century by fleeing to Venice and the Doges, to Jamaica and the buccaneers, to China and the Han Dynasty, to Norway and Eric the Red, to any place and any time in the world.
    “I needn’t point out the colossal significance of this discovery,” General Carpenter pointed out. “Think what it would mean to the war if we could send an army back in time a week or a month or a year. We could win the war before it started. We could protect our Dream … Poetry and Beauty and the Culture of America … from barbarism without ever endangering it.”
    The staff tried to grapple with the problem of winning battles before they started.
    “The situation is complicated by the fact that these men and women of Ward T are non compos . They may or may not know how they do what they do, but in any case they’re incapable of communicating with the experts who could reduce this miracle to method. It’s for us to