Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2, page 294
part #2 of Time Travel Series
That was why he was alone. Mabel wouldn’t stand for it, nor the two girls. They sided with their mother. Girls usually don’t. One of them nearly always likes her father. But both went with Mabel. “Mental cruelty!” If all day you’ve been getting their living, and they wanted a lot, by watching like a pike to see if the other fellow couldn’t be snapped up, you couldn’t turn off the trick when you came home. You’d got into the way of striking as quickly, as surely, as automatically as a sidewinder. Well, they wouldn’t stand for it. So here he was now with his heart to watch, and nothing else. He’d done well and, he’d hoped, as soon as he was through with getting on, he’d get liked. He’d do the things—he’d have time—that get you liked: the big, generous things with which the big, easy, famous men convince everyone, everyone who now wants to forget that they were ever small, keen, mean. They’re formidable still, of course, but in such a grand way. They just go on getting their way, but with no more than an inflection of the voice—they don’t have so much as to raise a finger any longer. The old proverbial success of success. But—“Where are the monuments of those who were drowned?”
“Nothing succeeds like succession: nothing succeeds like surcease.” The phrase “declined” itself, as one used to say of verbs in school grammar lessons . . . He was trying to memorize the whole conjugation. There was only a little time. The clock above the desks showed that the preparation hour was nearly over. He had learned all the other irregular verbs but this silly one: “Success, succession, surcease . . .” How did the rest of it go? “Success, succession, surcease, decease, death, cremation”—that was it—not a very irregular verb, after all: you could tell each declension from the one before pretty well. He’d be able to remember it when called out to say it in front of the class. He looked up at the clock again. It was just going to strike the hour but, instead, it remarked in a sharper tone of voice, “Wake up!”
Mr. Bradegar once more sprang to attention to find as before that he was horizontal, sheet-swathed, pillow-sunk—and had once more missed the tide. He had been called, but by the time he’d hurried up to the doors of his body, the summoner, like a “ring-and-run” street urchin, had made off. But had it? Mr. Bradegar’s mood, which had nearly risen to the vigorous daylight state of irritated disappointment, suddenly sank, sank to apprehension. Perhaps he wasn’t going to be disappointed this time? Perhaps, this time, the ringer hadn’t run?
He was now fully awake and realized how keenly sorry he was that he wasn’t going to be disappointed. “This is the third time I’ve been roused,” he remarked to himself. There was a gentle whirring, and, as if in answer to his half-question, the clock announced that it was Three. But, whether it was because he was more awake this time, the tone of voice in which his timepiece made this, its third, summons to a new day, struck Mr. Bradegar as being a trifle more peremptory, less deferential than the discreet summons of an hour ago. Then it had almost seemed to say by its tone, “Excuse me, sir, but should you be wishing to know the precise hour, I beg to inform you that it is just two a.m.” Now its stroke rather suggested, “Take it or leave it,” with perhaps even a hint of, “But if you do slip off again I’m not responsible if you never wake up in time.”
But what was Mr. Bradegar meant to do? He was roused, but for what? The only thing was to set oneself to listen. Putting on the light wouldn’t throw any on what might be present but which always seemed just to have done what it was up to and escaped into the past. “If I did put on the light,” he reflected, “I’d only have the unpleasant feeling that whatever it is that’s nibbling at me had been looking right at me the moment before I pressed the switch.” That thought was so unpleasantly convincing that Mr. Bradegar, who had been vainly peering over the sheet’s fold into the dark, involuntarily shut his eyes—only for a moment, he felt sure. But the clock had another opinion. Mr. Bradegar was all ears as, having started striking, as if worked up to a kind of angry protest, the clock went on making its points like a lawyer pressing a conviction: “One, Two, Three, Four.”
“What?” thought Mr. Bradegar. “Five, Six.” Six! And there was no doubt that the clock’s tone was as harshly startling as the information it imparted.
Mr. Bradegar’s attention flooded from ears to eyes. He opened them, found the sheet was over them, pushed it aside with an impatiently anxious finger—and, in a flash, realized what had happened. His whole body signaled it. Every sense, with a sort of cannonading broadside, thundered the fact. He blinked his eyes—yes, the room was light, but he could see only faintly, blurredly. He moved his legs, yes, with difficulty. He knew at once: he was not the sort of fool that fools himself. He knew how to diagnose that curious sense of constriction, that feeling as though one were walking along the foot of the bed, that imaginary sensation. Of course, it was the typical projection phenomenon, the massive sensation-pattern similar to the acute nerve response which the leg-amputation patient feels when he says his toes are being pinched.
Mr. Bradegar again stretched a little, to be quite sure. Yes, there wasn’t a shadow of doubt—that illusion of being restricted, of touching the foot of the bed, could mean only one thing. He knew he couldn’t actually be doing so, because, as it happened, he’d had that bed built to make impossible precisely that horizontal nocturnal ambulation. As a boy he’d hated a too-short bed in which he’d been made to go on sleeping when he’d outgrown it—really a child’s cot—and he’d made a promise to himself, which he’d kept, that when he grew up he’d have a footless bed and one in which, stretch as you would, you just couldn’t touch the end. Mabel had laughed at him and, later, had been annoyed. He’d grown to be a tall man. She’d said a seven-foot bed was nonsense—looked positively unbalanced. He’d replied that a bed was balanced if it stood steady on its four feet and, anyhow, it wasn’t for looks but for closing your eyes in. Of course, she’d replied that, at least as long as they were up and about, she didn’t see why her mouth should be shut by his snapping. It was one of those useless, fruitless, but fecund quarrels. They’d found by then that they could quarrel over anything, by the time he was making enough money for her always to be wanting more, and he without any time but to make it.
He felt with his foot once more. Not a doubt of it. Well, he’d like to see Mabel’s face when she heard the news—remorse for a moment, then relief—until his lawyer, whom she’d ring up quick enough, gave her the will in brief.
Thinking of Mabel’s face reminded him to repeat the visual check-up. He opened his eyes again, which had closed as he felt about with his feet under the bedclothes. True enough, eyes answered to toes, repeating the first message that they’d given him at the clock’s summons. His eyes confirmed the numbed constricted feeling of his legs, interpreting the general condition in their particular terms. He was seeing as blurredly as he felt numbly. He’d face the music: those starts in the night, he knew now exactly what they were. One, two, three, the little lesions had taken place. He’d had a serial stroke: he was quite extensively paralyzed.
He pulled himself together inwardly, as outwardly he must leave himself sprawled—“As the tree falls, so shall it lie.” He was alone in the house (he began his summary of his situation), not in pain—well, that was a reasonable expectation. But, more, he felt wonderfully light and fresh. Indeed, if he hadn’t known beyond a doubt that he was extensively paralyzed and perhaps on the verge of death, he would actually—funny thought (he began actually to chuckle), he would have thought he was wonderfully well—indeed, years younger than when he had crawled under the sheets to begin the night.
He wished a moment that he’d troubled to ask his other friends who’d had strokes whether they’d felt this lightness, freshness, this absurd sense of being free and careless. Perhaps they had all felt it. He’d often heard doctors say that many of the insane are happier than when they had their wits. Consumptives, too, they’re peculiarly optimistic just before their final hemorrhage. So it would be that when your brain is wrecked you have illusions of being young, a sort of mental face lifting—he chuckled again, and the thought floated out of his mind. He felt so careless and so easy that it wasn’t worth thinking about anything very long. That was perhaps the funniest part about it all—to be so completely at one’s ease, to feel so well in one’s body that one didn’t care about anything else, when, as a matter of fact, everything, mind, body, and estate were gone.
Yes, everything: for he now realized that not only was he helplessly paralyzed and his sight blurred but his mind was rapidly going. That was it—the brain hemorrhage must be spreading rapidly. He couldn’t think now of what he’d last been thinking, only a moment ago! What was that thing he meant to ask old sick men about? Something to do with what they felt when they were ill. Oh, well, it didn’t matter. What would he be wanting to do, bothering old wrecks about what they felt or didn’t feel! His mind was so light and gay that he couldn’t keep it more than a moment on anything. And that, too, he found rather fun. Still, as things ran through his mind, it was jolly just to run after them, as it were. To keep track of the carnival, he began to talk aloud to himself as a sort of comment on his thoughts. Evidently his speech was left, or at least it seemed so.
But, before he’d time to check up on that, his voice was joined by another, or rather was collided into by it. “Don’t keep on murmuring to yourself like that,” it said.
He stopped and listened. Another sound broke on his ear. It was a sort of breathless howl. A breathless howl? Why, of course, that was a yawn! Someone was in the room and was waking up. Mr. Bradegar raised his head—so that, too, wasn’t paralyzed. And that movement discovered something else for him—his eyes hadn’t suddenly failed; fact was, they were as fresh as his mind. He laughed. He’d fancied he was going blind because his nose almost had been touching the raised wooden sidepiece of the bed head—that silly boy’s bed in which he was still made to sleep though he was far too big for it and could never stretch his legs. He flung them over the edge. What was that dream about his not being able to move? The sort of nightmare one would get in a suffocating little bunk like this. But he’d dreamed a lot more than that. If he could catch the whole spiel before it slipped away, he’d remember all sorts of odd things. Gosh! it was a dream as long as David Copperfield; longer, by gum—all about all sorts of things: being a success and arguing people down, far better than at the school debating club, and meeting a wonderful girl.
But, somehow, she didn’t, he recollected faintly, turn out to be so wonderful after all. And other girls, small girls, small girls that he’d liked because they were small. But that was getting out of one’s depth. How could one like little girls! He couldn’t think up much more incident—only a general impression remained that he’d had a crackerjack dream—not so nice in its way, but wonderful just because it had seemed so confounded real, as real as one’s own life, as real as oneself in this little old sleeping room and Uncle Andy still snoozing in the big bed by the window.
Uncle Andy yawned again, snuffled, and remarked, “You been talking in your dreams jest like one of them thar Edison sound boxes I’ve jest been hearing of. You’ve gotten indigestion—eating all that punkin pie las’ night.”
“It’s this silly little bed. It gives me cramps. I was somehow fixed so I got dreaming I couldn’t ever move again.”
“Indigestion; overdistended stummuck. You get a move on.”
“Well, I feel fine this morning.”
“Then get up and don’t sit there yarning at me and complaining of your good bed that’s held you well enough these twelve years.”
Uncle Andy was always a little sore in the mornings, Nick Bradegar remembered. Still, as he got out to fetch his towel and to go into the yard to splash under the pump, he felt, suddenly, that he must stop and ask a question. Why? It was the sort to make Uncle Andy sore. Still, something in the back of his mind made him feel it worth the risk.
“Uncle, what’s it like really to be grown up, to be as old as you are?”
Over the crumpled sheet of the big bed a rheumy eye regarded him. He thought he was going to be bawled out. But no voice came. Only the old, tired, inflamed eye kept on looking at him—first, fiercely, next, defiantly, then, pathetically—that was worst. Or was it? For suddenly it didn’t seem Uncle Andy’s eye any longer. It seemed somehow a picture of some sort, a kind of mirror, or as though you were looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Ever so small and distant, but quite clear, he saw an old man lying with fixed, open eyes on a long bed. The light was still faint, as though the window had a curtain over it. The old man lay stiffly still, all save the lid of his eye, which seemed to flicker a bit as he lay on his side looking toward Nick. He was awful like Uncle Andy, and yet, somehow, he wasn’t Uncle. The bed, too, looked far richer, just as the man in it looked even more tired than Andy.
The old, harsh clock began to strike, but it seemed more soft than usual. Still, it was enough to rouse Uncle. “You get along, you young lazy scamp. There’s the half-hour gone and you still not even washed. You leave me alone with all your dam questions. You’ll know soon enough what it is to be old—the heck you will! And, I’ll lay it, you’ll not have made the hand at living I’ve made when time comes to take a stretch, as I’ve a right to take. Get along and don’t disturb me till you’ve the coffee ready and the bacon cooked!”
He nipped out of the room. If you didn’t clear quickly when Uncle blew like that, you’d have his boots flying at your head a moment heard: the rousing of Mr. Bradegar after, and, though old and lying down, Uncle had scored more hits than misses with those old hobnails of his, which were always close at hand when off his feet.
Under the yard pump the cold water on the top of his head made his brain tingle. Like rockets, thoughts shot through his mind. He wouldn’t be a failure, like Uncle, or just conk out, the way he’d heard his parents had. He’d get through and make good. Why, he could always win in discussions at school, already. He was always twice as quick at answering back or thinking up a wisecrack. Yes, and some of those big hulks and lubbers who could kick him over a fence, they were afraid of his tongue, he knew—the way things he said would stick to the person he said ‘em about. He saw himself getting on. What did one do? Law, of course. As he rubbed his red, thin body with the coarse towel, he saw himself on his feet in court, winning big law cases, first here and there and then right and left; then marrying, of course, an admiring wife and having a large family that’d look up to him, because he was clever, rich, powerful.
He went in and started cooking the breakfast in the old squalid kitchen. But he hardly smelled the bacon and coffee, so strong was the daydream on him. Only the sound of Uncle’s boots on the stairs, now, fortunately, on his old lame feet and not in his still flexible hands, roused him.
“Now, go and make the beds, you lazy fellow. I know you! If you have your breakfast first, then you never have time. You’ve got to go off to that darned school! Where they only teach you what you were born doing and do in your sleep and’ll be doing when you die in the poorhouse—talk, talk, talk. Get along with you!”
Nick Bradegar cut out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs into the frowzy bedroom. On the big bed he swung the old frayed stale sheets, worn blankets, and tattered coverlet into some sort of uneasy order. When he came to his cot, however, he paused, looking with a sort of helpless anger at the queer little cramped bed.
“Well, all I know,” he remarked to himself with vicious resolution, “if ever I make even a hundred bucks, I’ll have a decent bed. First thing I’ll have, I promise myself that. You spend nearly half your life on that one thing. Gum, if I could have a fine decent bed, I don’t think I’d mind anything else much. You’d always be able to stretch yourself in that to your heart’s content. And in a fine bed you can have fine dreams. That nightmare last night—what was it? It’s all gone, but the taste. I know the cause, though—that blasted little bed!”
“Here, you come down! What ye doing all this while?” holloed Uncle Andy from below. “And wash up ‘fore you go to that darned school!”
THE SECRET PLACE
Richard McKenna
That morning my son asked me what I did in the war. He’s fifteen and I don’t know why he never asked me before. I don’t know why I never anticipated the question.
He was just leaving for camp, and I was able to put him off by saying I did government work. He’ll be two weeks at camp. As long as the counselors keep pressure on him, he’ll do well enough at group activities. The moment they relax it, he’ll be off studying an ant colony or reading one of his books. He’s on astronomy now. The moment he comes home, he’ll ask me again just what I did in the war, and I’ll have to tell him.
But I don’t understand just what I did in the war. Sometimes I think my group fought a death fight with a local myth and only Colonel Lewis realized it. I don’t know who won. All I know is that war demands of some men risks more obscure and ignoble than death in battle. I know it did of me.
It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker. Dr. Lewis was called to duty as a reserve colonel and ordered to find the vein. But the whole area was overlain by thousands of feet of Miocene lava flows and of course it was geological insanity to look there for a pegmatite vein. The area had no drainage pattern and had never been glaciated. Dr. Lewis protested that the crystal could have gotten there only by prior human agency.
