The wrong end of time by John Brunner

are known that if they tried it they would be occupied, like Mexico; things were quiet enough at home for the troops to be spared. So they compromised by flagrantly favouring the East Bloc, and the most heavily patronised ocean cruises nowadays run by Canadian Pacific were to Vladivostok via Japan.
     
He had had to turn somersaults in his head now and then. When he first came to the States, he had fully expected there would be a temporary alliance between the two super-powers against China, which might degenerate into shooting war. But that had been a wrong guess. As soon as American forces began to be recalled to fight at home, it had become obvious that the Chinese were going to expand into the resulting vacuum, and unless the two schools of communism resolved their differences fast the Maoists were going to leave the Leninists standing. (What was the distinction between "homoousian" and "homoiousian"?)
     
Hasty conferences, a couple of treaties, the firing of a few scapegoats, and the definition of spheres of influence
     
not very sharply,- because the parties were always jockeying for advantage-had led to the present formally courteous accommodation, which was being strengthened as in both major countries the effects of fourth- and fifth-genera-
     
     
tion commitment were felt. A little confidence in your ancestors' achievements could work wonders.
     
And in your own achievements, too. He'd had a bad moment yesterday evening when Lora insisted on dragging that black into the photo with Prexy. Of course, she'd done it in order to embarrass him, just as she'd put on that dress she knew he loathed. Yet, as he'd realized a second later, everyone present who had kids of the same age, including Prexy-for what he was worth-would have sympathised instead of being repelled. It was a kind of in-group status symbol nowadays for teenagers to keep up this family-scale guerrilla warfare. Pour 'Spater les bourgeois! But sooner or later they'd learn that the minds of the bourgeois had been blown long before they were born.
     
So, if anything, her grand gesture, inviting this black to the party and parading around with him for hours on end, was more likely to have reinforced than weakened his coverl
     
Though naturally it would make sense to have security double-check the boy . . .
     
     
Now then: What about this question of the alien ship? What did they imagine, Back There, that he could do? He'd made all the suggestions to Sheklov that he could think of on the spur of the moment: financing some sort of hypothetical study of the problem, for example, under the guise of training in, management initiative, along the lines of courses he'd heard of many years ago that were given to industrial designers, You invented an imaginary race with three legs, or sonar instead of eyes, or living underwater, and told the students to equip this species with transport and accommodation. But this, although he personally regarded it as an inspiration because it was perfectly feasible to ask some bright young people, "How do we trade with contraterrene creatures?," apparently meant nothing to Sheklov. He kept talking about "an attitude of mind."
     
Have to go over this again in detail. Say after lunch in the den. Give the room another sweep for bugs first, naturally. But right now
     
;t Pressure that had been building up in his bladder since he awoke finally drove Turpin out of bed.
     
There appeared to be a ritual about Sunday in the Turpin household. Sheklov hoped fervently that he wouldn't have to endure it more than once. But apparently Mrs. Turpin's mother insisted on it. Her name was Gleewood, but that had not been the maiden name of Mrs. Turpin. There had been some divorces-a fact that did not in the least surprise him.
     
Not wishing to seem discourteous, he accepted Mrs. Gleewood's invitation to join her and her daughter in the living-room and watch Rev. Powell's nationally-networked service at noon-the "lip service," as someone had