The Gleister resistance and Mingus’s infiltration

The Gleister resistance begins as a gathering of time-displaced versions of Charlie Gleister, brought together by the same time-traveling history that created the Emperor Mingus. It is meant to resist a ruler who can use a time machine to eliminate opponents before they become threats; its founding meeting instead becomes the stage for the Emperor’s infiltration and takeover. The reversal makes resistance inseparable from the machinery that produced both its members and their enemy.

Origins and the gathering

The immediate background is Charlie Gleister’s discovery that his time-travel actions have helped bring about a world ruled by Emperor Mingus. When he considers preventing the time machine’s invention, the possibility appears closed: returning to the past would not restore an untouched version of events, because the returning Gleister would already have been changed by what he had experienced. Nor could he simply persuade another Gleister to act differently. Each potential version would be identical only up to the moment of contact; the encounter itself would make their paths diverge.

The story then places a Gleister at a collection point in a dusty auditorium in the Crich-Kridarin foothills, near the ruins of Norfolk, about 234 years before the Emperor Mingus’s accession. Roughly a hundred men have gathered, most of them looking like Charlie because all are Gleisters. Their multiplicity is not just a practical obstacle to identifying one another. It is the condition that has made a shared political response possible: displaced versions of the same man arrive from different time tracks, carrying different experiences and increasingly distinct temperaments.

Even beginning the meeting proves difficult. The gathered Gleisters cannot decide how to establish an organization without first electing a chairman, or how to elect a chairman without an organization. As the newest arrival, Charlie is looked to for ideas. The man who takes the chair names himself Egon and calls a recess so that the others can choose unusual names; Charlie takes the name Hieronymous, distinguishing himself from the many other Charlies. When the meeting resumes, Egon names the group the Time-Space Center for Resistance to the Rule of the Emperor Mingus.

A resistance under threat

Egon describes the assembly as a collection point whose members have arrived by different routes: some deliberately searched for it, some stumbled upon it, and others found themselves there while pursuing something else. He identifies the Emperor Mingus’s rule as the common danger and warns that the ruler may already know about the group. The threat is not abstract. Many Gleisters have suffered unexplained near-fatal accidents before inventing the time machine, and Egon suspects some were caused by Mingus. The group therefore understands its existence as exposed to attack from the outset.

That fear reflects the regime’s unusual means of control. Mingus maintains a police state built around pervasive surveillance, with cameras and recorders monitored by layers of officials and the Emperor at the system’s apex. His time machine gives him an additional means of suppressing opposition: when something goes wrong, he can travel back and target a potential opponent before that person becomes an underground leader. The advantage has limits. Mingus must operate the machine personally, since entrusting it to another person could allow that person to kill him and claim the throne. But the resistance still faces a ruler able to intervene directly in the histories of his enemies.

The threat does not make the group politically uniform. The Gleisters share an origin and have undergone similar kinds of pressure, but those experiences occurred at different subjective moments. Each has been altered by the events of his own path, producing marked differences: some are frightened, others courageous; some sociable, others solitary; some quick-witted, others confused. The organization therefore gathers not one undivided self but many versions whose common identity has not erased their divergence.

The Emperor inside the organization

The crisis comes when Mordecai Gleister rises to address the meeting. He questions whether the Emperor and his aims have been judged impartially, asking the group to reconsider its assumption that Mingus is evil. Hieronymous recognizes the confident, bearded man as someone he has seen before and realizes that he is the Emperor. He shouts a warning and moves with Egon toward the speaker, while other Gleisters climb onto the stage.

Mordecai halts the confrontation by drawing a blue-steel automatic. Although housed in a Colt .45 case, the weapon is not a projectile firearm: Mordecai describes it as an invention operating on a laser-diffusion principle, capable of causing paralysis at fifteen feet and death seconds later if its beam remains on. He orders the assembly to sit, keeping Egon and Hieronymous standing as hostages whose lives depend on the others’ behavior. The meeting’s procedural order has become a scene of armed control, and the resistance’s own chairman is now physically constrained by the man it meant to oppose.

Mordecai then identifies himself as Emperor Mingus. He explains that he travelled from his own time into a depleted future, encountered a brutal world divided into small rival kingdoms, and seized power. He presents his rule not as a pursuit of personal advantage but as an attempt to organize a society he considered unready for democracy. He argues that the people of that future lacked the habits of responsibility and fairness necessary for effective self-government, and asks what alternative could have held against the disorder he found.

His account also explains why the resistance exists. Other Gleisters kept arriving from the past with the intention of assassinating him. Mingus says he tried to kidnap some and re-educate them, but there were too many, and the situation’s dynamics worked against him. He learned of the organization, returned to its gathering place, infiltrated it, and now claims to have taken it over. His appeal for cooperation makes the takeover more than a physical seizure: he asks the people who organized against him to accept his account of the regime and assist his project.

Reversal and larger consequences

Egon initially allows that Mingus’s explanation may have merit, but the Emperor’s return to the past carries a consequence he has missed. Egon argues that by coming back to the organization, Mingus has ceased to be the Emperor: there is no separate, ultimate ruler, only a Gleister who travelled to the future, took power, faced opposition, and returned to take over the resistance. In Egon’s account, that returned Gleister was killed in the attempt. Political identity and chronology fold into one another; Mingus’s claim to rule cannot be separated from the time path that made him a member of the group he sought to dominate.

The larger time-travel mechanism deepens the contradiction. Each time a Gleister leaves his normal position to travel through time, nature fills the resulting gap by supplying another identical or near-identical Gleister. Every further journey creates another displacement and another replacement. Mingus explains that the resulting Gleister sequences generate still more time-traveling Gleisters, so their numbers increase geometrically. He has housed about twelve million, but the Empire is running out of resources, and new arrivals are coming faster than before. Even shooting them on sight would not stop the progression; in his projection, Earth will eventually be covered with Gleisters.

The resistance is thus both a political response to Mingus’s power and one expression of the proliferation that makes his power unstable. Its members can organize against the Emperor, but the same time-travel process keeps producing new Gleisters, new missions, and further disruptions. Mingus’s infiltration temporarily converts the resistance into an extension of his own rule, while the multiplying population threatens the resources on which that rule depends. The episode’s final irony is that the ruler who uses time to correct threats is himself trapped by time’s accelerating consequences: as Mingus concludes, the Emperor is the slave of time.