Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/60

 a dictator ruling everything. Ruling all of the ten million peoples of Earth.

"It's a hard government, and a cruel one. There is no freedom of action, no freedom of thought, no freedom of education. There is no freedom. It is a place to be born, to live a dull, restricted working life, and die.

"You would call the movement an Underground. There are a lot of us in it. Its purpose is to bring the world back to the glories of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth centuries.

"It was ... is ... will be a very secret movement, of necessity, lest the Dictatorship uncover some phase of it. Let us use the past tense referring to my part in it. We worked secretly to build an organization that could overthrow the Dictator and return the people, after a time, of course, to their own rule.

"My part in the Underground was not a great one. I was born into it as my parents were members. Then, I was trained for one purpose—to be sent back to the past to do the job I am doing.

"You must understand: We do not have time travel, nor anything approaching it. We had one thing only, and that was a theory worked out by the mathematicians of the Underground: That a human ego could be sent back, to any time in the past, to occupy a human body pf that period, and control it.

"Only a theory, yet it was on that we based all our hopes, did all our planning. It could not even be tested. To use it at all meant consumption of a staggering amount of power—power which we could not produce ourselves, and which we would have to steal, at the proper moment, from the public circuits.

"It could be done only once. One run of the ego-translator would use all available power, stolen from forty thousand main beams, and would darken, momentarily, an entire continent. Our own power lines would stand only a fraction of a second. One person could be sent back—The experiment could never be repeated, for after that once all the beams would be so arranged as to shut off automatically on sudden overloads. The Dictator would be unlikely to know what we had done, yet suspicions would be aroused.

"We couldn't build weapons in our own time. We knew what weapons we wanted, but it was impossible to assemble the machinery, to get either power or tools or material. We had to go into the past to build our weapons. Once built, they could not be transported. They would have to be protected against Time, and then hidden so they would be ready for use when we needed them.

"The need wasn't immediate, even when I left. Remember, Mr. Tredel, our revolution would have only one chance, and it must be right the first time. There would be no second. When I left, the day for opening of the storerooms, and distribution of the weapons was still thirty years in 60