Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2, page 415
part #2 of Time Travel Series
The soldiers appeared doubtful. “If what you say is true,” one of them put in, “it is the first encouraging news we have had since we were torn from our homes months ago. We hear so many depressing rumors and always there is the General Washington to scare us out of our wits. We do not wish to fight but we are made to. That is why we are so gloomy this Christmas Eve. Instead of fun and frolic, we wait for Washington to strike. And if he doesn’t Cornwallis will make us smoke him out.” The soldier shuddered. “To smoke out Washington is like trying to drive a tiger from his cave.”
“I know what’s the trouble with you fellows,” Reggie snapped. “You haven’t got any spirit. No morale. What’s the matter with you? You’re quitting before you’ve started to fight. You haven’t got that old college try in you.”
Reggie realized, even as he spoke, that he had hit the nail on the head—but definitely. The only thing wrong with the soldiers fighting for England was that they lacked spirit, courage and zip! England had been defeated—or would be defeated—by that very lack of enthusiasm and morale. Why, this was going to be a snap! All that was needed was someone who could inspire and encourage these gloomy, spineless Hessians. Once that was done, the war would certainly take a decidedly different turn. Reggie rubbed his hand in anticipation. He, Reginald Vliet, was just the boy for that job.
“Now look, boys,” he cried jubilantly. “The team that won’t be licked can’t be licked! Remember that! You’re not licked! You can’t be licked! Let’s have a little spirit, now. Turn up the lights, bring out the wine. Let’s have a real celebration in honor of the victories to come!”
Reggie had not served his trick as a college cheerleader in vain. His words brought new life to the weary, despondent mercenaries. Their mouths split wide in confident grins and they crowded about Reggie, slapping him on the back and cheering into his ear.
Lanterns were lighted, wicks turned up and the gloomy shadows of the huge room receded into the corners. Along one wall, Reggie beheld a sight that brought a delighted gleam to his eye. A magnificently carved and heavily stocked bar!
“Hurray for Christmas!” Reggie shouted. “The drinks are on the house. Get your friends, come one, come all!” The soldiers surged to the bar and soon bottles were passing from hand to mouth and the sounds of raucous merriment were swelling in a happy chorus to the ceiling. More soldiers, attracted by the sounds of gayety, poured into the room and soon it was jam-packed with happy, wildly cheering Hessians.
Reggie, obeying a strong but nameless impulse, climbed to the top of the bar and executed a neat, unrestrained clog dance. For some reason he felt wildly happy. Maybe it was the bottle of brandy that he had drained, or maybe it was the realization that he was finally succeeding in his task of rearranging history. He beamed proudly upon the lustily singing Hessians. With this kind of spirit and enthusiasm they couldn’t be stopped. They’d make short work of the colonists, and then the whole outcome of American history would be changed and Sandra at last would be within his reach.
“Have a drink!” he bellowed happily. “Jush a lil’ drink to lil’ Sandra!”
“To lil’ Sandra!” the Hessians chorused, delighted. “To lil’ Sandra.”
The bottles were dropping to the floor now as the men drained them and clamored insistently for more. Reggie jumped behind the bar and dragged case after case of dusty, spider-webbed bottles, forth, setting them within reach of the straining hands. He crawled laboriously to the top of the bar again, a fresh bottle of brandy in his hand. It was the most delightful beverage he had ever tasted. Smooth as silk and strong as steel.
“Yippeee!” he yelled. “Hurray for Princeton!”
Somewhere, men were shouting, but it was a vague, blurred echo that drifted into the hall of merriment. Reggie started to dance again, but this time something was wrong. His legs were each apparently possessed with a mind of its own, with a very firm and diametrically opposed conviction as to how this dance should be executed.
“My calves,” Reggie punned drunkenly, “are mooin’ at each other!”
This, he thought, was pretty funny, and its poor reception irritated him. He shouted something over the din of the mob and then he was lying on his back on the floor, tangled in a mass of happily threshing legs. Struggling to his feet, Reggie pieced events together.
“Why,” he thought angrily, “I must have fallen off the bar.”
“Somewhere in his dive, he had lost his bottle, so there was nothing to do but fight his way to the bar and uncork another. This he tilted and tried to drain at a gulp, but at least a pint of the strong liquor splashed down his braided chest.
He sagged against the bar and stared moodily about the room. Some of the noise was dying out as the soldiers collapsed against the wall in drunken weariness. Others sprawled on the floor, still nursing bottles in tight grips.
The shouting he had noticed was growing louder, and suddenly the swinging doors crashed open and a breathless sentry stumbled into the room.
“To your stations!” he shouted. “They’re coming. Up, do you hear me? The colonists are coming across the ice. Get on your feet! We must be ready to face them!”
A loud chorus of jeers and hoots arose from the drunken soldiers.
“Go ’way!” one of them bawled. “We’re goin’ win thish war, y’hear? The team that won’t be licked won’t be licked, I guesh. Have a drink to lil’ Sandra.”
“To lil’ Sandra!” the Hessians bellowed, “to lil’ Sandra!”
“To lil’ Sandra,” Reggie added, somewhat solemnly. “For she’s a jolly good—” he stopped to throw his voice into high, then continued—“fel-loooooooow, which noooobooody can denyyyyy.”
“I tell you, they’re coming!” the sentry cried distractedly. “Get to your battle stations, or all our supplies and munitions will fall into the enemies’ hands!”
One of the Hessians started to cry softly. “Auf wiedersehn, little munitions, we will miss you.”
The sentry, with one last wild look at the sodden, slumbering Hessians, fled from the room.
Reggie shrugged. Then, unable to stifle his drunken curiosity, he staggered across the floor, stepping gingerly over the recumbent Hessians.
He collapsed against the door and lurched through onto the veranda where he sprawled helplessly on his face.
“Must’ve tripped,” he muttered, as he crawled laboriously to his feet. Straightening his hat on his head, he peered foggily toward the river. Dozens of figures were climbing out of beached boats and assembling themselves in military formation on the uneven, ice-locked shore.
Reggie blinked and passed an unbelieving hand over his eyes. The soldiers were shouldering their muskets and marching rapidly toward him. By the pale light of the moon, Reggie had a clear view of their leader.
A staunch, stout figure with a stern, noble face framed by long white hair. He wore the uniform of a commander and in his right hand he carried a sword.
Reggie staggered back as if he had been kicked in the stomach by a Kentucky mule. For he knew who the grimly determined leader of the colonists was. He knew—and the knowledge turned his knees to jelly—that he was none other than the Father of the United States, George Washington!
Other facts were coming to him. This was the famous Christmas Eve raid on the carousing Hessian soldiers at Trenton. This was the historic night that Washington crossed the ice-locked Delaware River and plundered the English storehouses of munitions and supplies. Munitions and supplies that were to give the revolutionary forces new life and courage and enable them to eventually fight the English to a standstill.
Reggie thought of the drunken, helpless Hessians, made drunk and helpless by that prize ass of all ages, Reggie Randhope! He thought of what they might have done to repel the troops of Washington if he hadn’t gotten them blindly drunk. Tears of despair oozed from his bleary eyes and trickled down his cheeks.
The soldiers of the revolution were closer and suddenly Reggie realized his own danger. For a moment he was tempted to remain where he was and be shot for disturbing the peace, or something, but he thought of Sandra and changed his mind. She, poor deluded girl, was depending on him. He had wasted four of his precious opportunities in Time, and now only one remained. One chance to change the history of the world. If he failed in this last attempt, everything he held dear would be irretrievably lost.
Reggie wheeled and ran staggeringly along the veranda, plunged over a low railing and landed up to his neck in prickly bushes. Extricating himself, he staggered along the side of the house as muskets began to explode behind him. Balls blasted past his head singeing his hair with their passage. But, miraculously, he rounded the last corner in an imperforated condition. His eyes, handicapped by the fumes of brandy, tried vainly to penetrate the darkness. He was searching for the stables—there must be stables. Where his eyes left off, his nose took up. It guided him, weavingly but unerringly, to the horses.
Revolutionary soldiers raced around the corner of the building before Reggie could climb onto a horse. They advanced cautiously, holding their fire until they could gain a clear, unobstructed shot at their target. Reggie experienced a foggy sort of terror. With his last sober strength he climbed awkwardly to the bony back of a horse. Then he slapped it wildly with his hat. The animal bolted forward like a shot from a cannon. Reggie saw something flashing toward him but he didn’t duck in time. A beam of the stable struck him a stunning blow across the head, and the next instant the floor smashed him athwart the skull. He rolled aside frantically as a slug blasted into the floor next to him. He could hear the triumphant shouts of the colonists as his hand groped for the Time Machine.
He spun the indicator wildly, while his mind sought for an idea, where he might go to make his last bid for a chance to change history. But the sight of a uniformed member of the Continental Army, his bearded face twisted with satisfaction as he drew a bead on the Vliet right eye, was too much for Reggie. Already the soldier’s heavy forefinger was tightening on the musket trigger.
Heedless of the pointer’s location, he pressed the button on the watch just as the roar of the musket filled his ears with thunder and his eyes with fire. There was a prolonged sensation of falling, and Reggie Vliet knew no more . . .
Consciousness returned to him very slowly on this occasion, and there was a horrible, throbbing ache above his left ear that had not been there before. He was lying on his right side on a brown carpet with a very thick pile, and there seemed to be a conglomeration of metal wheels and springs and shattered glass about him.
There was but one thought in his mind by the time he had recovered sufficiently to think at all. “This,” Reggie muttered, “is my fifth chance—my last chance! If I fail to change history this time, Sandra is lost to me—forever!”
“He’s coming around,” said a shaky, masculine voice.
Something cold and wet—very wet—enveloped the pain above his left ear. And then a slim, very lovely, brunette girl dropped to her knees before him, holding a dripping towel.
“Oh Reggie, darling,” she gasped. “Are you all right?”
It, Reggie realized with a pang, was Sandra Vanderveer!
“No!” he said loudly. “It’s all wrong, darling! I’ve made a mess of everything! The five chances are gone! I haven’t changed history, Sandra; now we can never be married!”
“But Reggie,” wailed the girl. “We are married!”
“Hunh?”
“Oh, you poor dear! That crack on the head knocked what little sense you—I mean,” she corrected hastily, “that it—it . . . well, I’m going to sue this club for a million dollars! Letting a heavy grandfather’s clock tip over and fall on one of the members . . .”
And then everything was crystal clear to Reggie Vliet. Why, of course! Sandra and he had been married for years. That blankety clock had finally tumbled down from the landing leading to the club’s second floor, just as he had often predicted it would. And of course, he would be the one it struck! That, too, would account for the pile of wheels and springs around him.
Several pairs of hands helped him to his feet. Reggie teetered there uncertainly, while his newly formed explanation for his recent journey into the past began to totter.
For Lowndes’ Time Machine actually was strapped to his wrist! And he had fumbled with the mechanism; had pushed the button that operated it.
The falling grandfather’s clock had nothing to do with that fact.
“Do you feel all right now, my sweet?” Sandra was saying solicitously. “I suppose it’s all my fault,” she babbled on, “for being so insistent that you meet me here at exactly five o’clock. I was so emphatic that it be five, and not a second later, that you arrived here an hour ahead of time so’s not to disappoint me . . .”
Five, thought Reggie. Five. Five. And he had had only five chances of changing history, thereby winning Sandra. Had his clock-stricken brain seized on that number and woven it into the weird dream he had just come through?
“But the Time Machine!” he said, loudly and violently. “I pushed the button. I must have gone back in Time.”
“It couldn’t have been a dream!” Sandra’s worried blue eyes regarded him tenderly. “You’ll be all right soon, darling. Please stop babbling . . . Why, Reggie!” she exclaimed suddenly, “where in the world did you get the odd wristwatch?”
Before Reggie could prevent, she reached out and took hold of his arm, bringing the watch to where she could see it more clearly.
“It’s certainly a queer looking timepiece,” she continued. “What’s this little button here?”
In utter horror, Reggie watched her set a finger on the button.
“No, Sandra!” he tried to scream, but it was hardly more than a croak.
Too late! Under the finger’s pressure, the button was already fully depressed!
And nothing happened!
In the brief period of stunned silence that followed Reggie’s choked protest, the young man dazedly lifted the Time Machine to his ear.
It was supposed to tick. All the time. But it was silent.
So gusty was the sigh of relief that swished between Reggie’s parted lips that the frills on Sandra’s waist wavered in the breeze. With a quick motion he slipped the watch from his wrist and dropped it into a pocket.
“Now, darling,” he said crisply, “let’s get on with this five o’clock appointment you’re so keen about.”
“Oh Reggie!” gurgled Sandra, relieved. “Now you’re acting like your old self again!”
“Righto.” Reggie tucked her tiny hand under one of his arms and they started toward the club’s outer door. “Shall we be off?”
“Speaking for you,” Sandra said, “I hope it’s no further off than usual!”
“Pip pip!” said Reginald Vliet.
TIME OUT
Edward M. Lerner
Prologue
I’m coughing, choking. Every breath sears my throat and rasps like sandpaper at my lungs. Fire licks hungrily at walls, furniture, equipment. Smoke is everywhere: thick, black, and toxic. The flames hiss, crackle, and roar.
But nothing masks the screams.
I fear I’ve been reliving it aloud, because the cop seated across the table glances at the wall with the one-way glass. Following his eyes, I catch my own reflection. That slump-shouldered, expressionless figure seems at least twice my thirty years.
The cop’s look asks, “Do we let him keep talking or read him his rights?”
My rights. I try to care. Only the flames and smoke—and the screaming—are real to me.
Maybe I overlooked some signal. Maybe the cop made up his own mind. He begins reciting, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can . . .”
No matter my rights, I must remain silent. I dare not let anyone even suspect, or it will all have been for naught.
The horror once more washes over me, untouched by conviction I could not have done anything else. Again memories obliterate the present.
I’m in the warehouse. I feel the scorching heat, and I hear the screams, and I smell—
Convulsively, I throw up.
Chapter 1
The tale began and ended—if it has ended—with Jonas.
I would have liked to see myself as Watson to Jonas’s Holmes: a colleague, though not an equal. I knew better. I was more clueless even than Watson.
Better to call me Ishmael to Jonas’s Ahab, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Igor to his Victor Frankenstein. There were no happy endings to those pairings.
So, Jonas . . .
Mornings spent in the Home Depot parking lot had cured my pallor. Flab, alas, did not yield so easily. The owlish glasses probably didn’t recommend me, either. Whatever the reason, the weathered-looking men in their battered, mud-spattered trucks had yet to acknowledge me, much less to offer me work.
A Mutt and Jeff pair, grinning, had ridden off on the flatbed of a pickup, twenty or so minutes earlier. Likely they were the last who’d get work today. The main thing that I’d learned about day labor was that construction jobs began early. That, and that soon the store manager would tell us rejects and laggards to shove off, before the parking area and the store got busy. The understanding was we’d be elsewhere by ten.
I’d barely set off for home, such as it was, the June day already warm and humid, when the Hyundai station wagon pulled up. Dirt lay as thick on it as on any truck that had come trawling for cheap laborers, but still it didn’t fit. The back seat was folded down, and the cargo deck was filled with—I had no idea what. Like a tornado had hit a Radio Shack, and deposited the debris there. The driver’s shirt, seen through the grimy windshield, might have been white. The faint music sounded orchestral and baroque.
A window slid down. (The music swelled; Vivaldi, I decided.) This was where the would-be employer would shout out for carpenters, or painters, or just strong backs.
