The wrong end of time by John Brunner

watch even while making love, confirmed that since he swallowed the first mouthful of his coffee only two minutes had gone by. The illusion that he had spent ages musing like this stemmed simply from the impression that he had been shouted at, non-stop, since he came ashore. He had met more people last night, for instance, in a shorter space of time, than ever before in his life, and digesting such a storm of information was like eating a nine-course banquet directly after fasting for a week. Mental eructations interrupted every argument he tried to think through to a conclusion.
     
One more tryl
     
His coffee-cup was empty. He thought about pressing
     
the buzzer by his bed, which would bring back Estelle _ to
     
see what he wanted. That was among the reasons why an
     
apartment in the Lakonia towers was so expensive; no
     
other dwellings had been erected in the United States for
     
over twenty years that incorporated a room for a servant
     
and facilities for summoning her. Besides, there was
     
almost literally nowhere else where anyone willing to be
     
a servant would voluntarily seek employment. No native
     
American would do so; Canadians were scarce; Mexicans
     
were allowed in only on sufferance, by way of consolation
     
for having their country policed by U.S. soldiers, and so
     
many Cuban saboteurs had sneaked in by posing as
     
Puerto Rican valets and chambermaids that a total ban
     
had been imposed.
     
(It was like being the focal point of a beam of light split up between the facets of a jewel, then reflected back towards a center by a ring of distorting mirrors. He was
     
aware, simultaneously, of the things he had been told in his briefings Back There, and of the things he had seen
     
     
that matched his briefings, and also of the things that didn't-and these last were terrifying.)
     
     
Get your head straight (And, superimposed, awareness of the fact that the phrase was older than he was.) Take It from the top!
     
So where is the top? Government level? Good enough. Here 1 am: the cherry on the sundae of the Frozen War.
     
Was anyone still trying to break that twenty-year-old international log-jam? Since they recalled and jailed the American negotiators in Canberra for collaborating with the enemy, surely someone must have had another go? Tonga? Was that where the conference last-?
     
Oh, never mind. For all practical purposes, you had to compute with the status-quo. In other words, these people knew that their country had been the first to put men on the moon, and capped that achievement by doing it a second time, and then discovered that there were two billion other people who didn't give a damn about the moon. Too late. Just in time to pull the troops back and assign them to the streets of American cities. If they'd waited a year longer, there wouldn't have been troops to pull back. Whole army corps had been decimated by desertion, exactly as happened to the Tsarist armies in 1917.
     
Then there was a slump, which rendered American corporations unable to meet overseas commitments. Then, because of the slump, there was a witch-hunt, and the possession of an American passport became the (high-priced) excuse to apply for political asylum elsewhere. The end result was, simply, that no one wanted to know the Americans any more, and the Americans stuck their noses in the air and said, "Stuff you, Jack, we're self-sufficient."
     
Like the Byzantine Empire after the loss of the rich Western provinces to the barbarians.
     
But only like that. Not the same True, they talked in similar terms, forever complaining about the foreigners who bit the hand that fed them, and they treated their fellow-creatures as objects-thus to lie with a woman was a mere discharge of tension, not the gage of a genuine liking. But there hadn't been an empire. The tentacles of what might have become one had been chopped off just in time-by the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Burmese, the Filipinos, all of them