The Wheels of If And Other Science-Fiction

Russell F. R. Hedges did not look like a world-destroyer. He was in fact an almost annoyingly harmless-looking soul, a plump person of forty-five in neat blue serge, with dark hair streaked with gray and in need of cutting, hanging down over his steel-rimmed glasses.

The folly of trying to judge people by their looks has been pointed out by generations of psychologists and such people. Rut this form of judgment seems to be ingrained in human folkways. Perhaps that is why Coordinator Ronald Q. M. Bloss underestimated Hedges. When the chief executive officer of the great North American continent is told by the head of the Bureau of Standards to do thus-and-so, thus-and-so being a program designed to put the affairs of the continent in the said head's hand, the Coordinator's natural reaction is to ring the buzzer and have the erring subordinate carted off to the hatch.

Bloss was curious. Finger poised over the button, he asked: "How, my dear Hedges, do you propose to destroy the world?"

Hedges smiled amiably. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, suspecting the presence of dictaphones: "Simple, my dear Bloss." (He was being offensively familiar; people normally addressed the Coordinator as "your Efficiency".) "You recall my investigations into the nature of Time. The process of temporal forward-jumping, vulgarly known as vanwinkling, has been an established fact for several decades, being a favorite occupation among those who are dissatisfied with the present world and hope to find a better one in the future."

"I know all that," said Bloss irritably. "You may as well calm yourself, my dear Bloss. Being in a position to be as verbose in my explanations as I please, I intend to indulge my whims in that direction. As I was about to say, the problem of backward-jumping has not hitherto been solved. It involves an obvious paradox. If I go back and slay my own grandfather, what becomes of me? It's all very well to say he wasn't killed, and that something will happen to prevent my carrying out my design. Who shall see to it that my design is in fact frustrated, once I have actually gotten back to his time and located him? Yet, if I kill him, I obviously disarrange subsequent history. Subsequent history is a tough fabric, and will no doubt try to adhere to its original pattern. That it will altogether succeed in doing so, I presume to doubt. In fact, any action on my part in bygone times that affects other persons will set in train a series of events that will ultimately wrench subsequent history of its normal channels. Someone will marry or fail to marry the spouse he would otherwise have chosen, and a great statesman will be born or will fail to be born, as the case may be. So, all I have to do is go far enough back, commit a few sufficiently significant acts, and presto! you and all the other inhabitants of the continent cease to be; or rather, you cease to be the persons you now are. You see, my dear Bloss?"