Young Dr. Edward Royland, a physicist at Los Alamos in 1945, travels via a Hopi God Food to
the early 22nd century to see what a world ruled by the Axis powers will be like—and quite
possibly setting off a seemingly endless sequence of alternate WWII stories such as
The
Man in the High Castle, most of which, sadly, do not include time travel.
I liked
Kornbluth’s description of the differential analyzer as well as the cadre of office girls
solving differential equations by brute force of adding machines.
Instead of a decent differential analyzer machine they had a human sea of office girls
with Burroughs’ desk calculators; the girls screamed “Banzai!” and charged on
differential equations and swamped them by sheer volume; they clicked them to death with
their little adding machines. Royland thought hungrily of Conant’s huge, beautiful
analog differentiator up at M.I.T.; it was probably tied up by whatever the mysterious
“Radiation Laboratory” there was doing. Royland suspected that the “Radiation
Laboratory” had as much to do with radiation as his own “Manhattan Engineer
District” had to do with Manhattan engineering. And the world was supposed to be
trembling on the edge these days of a New Dispensation of Computing that would obsolete
even the M.I.T. machine—tubes, relays, and binary arithmetic at blinding speed instead
of the suavely turning cams and the smoothly extruding rods and the elegant scribed
curves of Conant’s masterpiece. He decided that he would like it even less than he
liked the little office girls clacking away, pushing lank hair from their dewed brows
with undistracted hands.