The Secret of the Ultimate Truth
by Robert B. Marcus, Jr.
The time machine finally stopped gyrating like a dentist’s drill, and I scrambled out into the thirty-fifth century. I had prepared for many things, but not for a dumpy old man in a wrinkled green uniform. He had dimples on both cheeks, and his chin and head were completely bald. His otherwise bare uniform had a symbol on the right shirt sleeve that reminded me of a trash can.
He asked something I didn’t understand, but when I looked puzzled, he said fluently in English, “I am Samuel, one of the official Greeters. Before I give you a tour, you must register.” He produced a clear piece of plastic from his pocket that expanded as he fiddled with it. I couldn’t see it very well, but words popped up on it.
“What century are you from?” he asked, handing me the clear plastic form.
“The twenty-first,” I replied. “2030, to be exact.”
For the first time, he showed surprise, and some excitement popped into his voice, “You lived right after the Lawgiver!” he exclaimed.
“Who?”
“The Lawgiver, the omniscient man who expounded the law that is the foundation of our entire civilization!”
I frowned, unable to think of anyone who lived in my time — or just before — whose wisdom would endure this long. Gandhi, Meir, Churchill, Trump, Biden... all the great statesmen’s names ran through my mind, but I had to ask: “What was his name?”
“His name is displayed in his shrine but, alas, one of the few things we know about him was that he lived in the twentieth century. Our knowledge of that time is very limited, since the Great War of 2075 destroyed almost all records before then.
“Luckily, a charred document survived with the Lawgiver’s treatise on it, with a short portion of a recording of him explaining his great Law during a panel discussion at an important world convention. It is a miracle that we could figure out how to retrieve and play the recording.” He paused, expecting me to say something.
“But you must be very familiar with the Lawgiver,” he finally added, when I made no reply.
Well, I know I had been working in my basement on my time machine a lot lately, but I couldn’t imagine failing to know about someone as famous as the Lawgiver.
“Sometimes a great prophet is not recognized in his own time,” I pointed out.
“Quite true,” the Greeter said.
“Maybe if you showed me the Law,” I said.
“Of course, it’s part of the standard tour.”
I handed him the tablet with the completed form, which had asked the usual government questions, which I was amused to see had not changed in fifteen hundred years: name, age, and purpose of trip. I wasn’t sure what to put there but finally filled in “education.”
This pleased the Greeter. “Even though you come from the hallowed centuries, I’m sure you will find our complete fulfillment of the Law satisfying.”
“Is it a physical law?”
“It is both a physical law and a societal one,” he replied, leading the way out of the greeting chamber.
“I wish I could give you a longer tour,” he said, “but rules are rules. We have so many time-machine visitors that a one-hour tour is all we can manage. But it is enough to show them the secret of peace and prosperity.”
He paused, and a window slid open. “This is our city,” he said proudly.
With quite an anticipation, I surveyed this utopia of the thirty-fifth century, expecting to see gleaming spires and clear skies. To my dismay, everywhere I looked rose steaming mounds of garbage. Scattered among the piles were giant industrial plants that, using huge conveyor belts, were gobbling up the garbage at a prodigious rate.
“Garbage!” I exclaimed.
“We call it ‘crap,’ but I assume it means the same thing. Of course, we use it in everything,” he said, “even exceeding the proper percentage, of course. It is sometimes difficult to alter it into a useful form, especially when we make artwork and food, but with persistence, we have succeeded. When you return, tell the Lawgiver what we have accomplished.”
Too numb to pay much attention to the rest of the tour, I remember seeing the food processors that turned the trash into a grimy-looking slush that the Greeter guaranteed to be delicious. I didn’t have the courage to test his statement.
Finally, we arrived at the Shrine of the Lawgiver, which, of course, lay under an enormous pile of garbage.
There was already a line coming out of the building, and we took our place in the back.
“This is a very popular spot on all the tours,” my Greeter said. “These people come from many centuries. Truth is always an attraction, and we have the ultimate truth.”
We moved forward slowly, finally easing into the chamber.
“We have to try so hard, because long ago we used up all the crap left over by previous cultures, and we have to continuously produce great quantities of our own.”
“But why bother?” I asked.
He looked at me, puzzled, shocked. “You should know that because of the Law. We do not yet understand the higher meaning of the Law, but millions of scientists and philosophers are working on it, and the Truth will soon be ours.”
Then he was reverently silent, until it was our turn to file by the glass-enclosed burned remnant of what appeared to be a meeting program. In faint lettering, I thought I could read The Eleventh World Science Fiction Convention, 1953. The only other words visible were on a different page of the old, charred document: the name Theodore Sturgeon, moderator of a panel discussion.
From invisible speakers, a crackly voice repeated what I now recognized as Sturgeon’s Law, which I had once stumbled upon in Wikipedia: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
Copyright © 2024 by Robert B. Marcus, Jr.
