Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2, page 497
part #2 of Time Travel Series
However, it has set me thinking. Some time ago, I submitted another story to Stardust Scientificion and received a penciled notation on the rejection slip stating that the story was, “too Thromberrish.”
Who the hell is Todd Thromberry? I don’t remember reading anything written by him in the ten years I’ve been interested in science fiction.
Sincerely,
Jack Lewis
April 11, 1952
Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village 28, NY
Dear Mr. Lewis:
Re: Your letter of April 5.
While the editors of this magazine are not in the habit of making open accusations and are well aware of the fact in the writing business there will always be some overlapping of plot ideas, it is very hard for us to believe that you are not familiar with the works of Todd Thromberry.
While Mr. Thromberry is no longer among us, his works, like so many other writers’, only became widely recognized after his death in 1941. Perhaps it was his work in the field of electronics that supplied him with the bottomless pit of new ideas so apparent in all his works. Nevertheless, even at this stage of science fiction’s development it is apparent that he had a style that many of our so-called contemporary writers might do well to copy. By “copy,” I do not mean rewrite word for word one or more of his works, as you have done. For while you state this has been accidental, surely you must realize that the chance of this phenomenon actually occurring is about a million times as great as the occurrence of four royal flushes in one deal.
Sorry, but we’re not that naive.
Sincerely yours,
Doyle P. Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine
April 13, 1952
Mr. Doyle P. Gates,
Editor Deep Space Magazine
New York 3, NY
Sir:
Your accusations are typical of the rag you publish.
Please cancel my subscription immediately.
Sincerely,
Jack Lewis
April 14, 1952
Science Fiction Society
114 S. Front Ave
Chicago 28, IL
Gentlemen:
I am interested in reading some of the works of the late Todd Thromberry.
I would like to get some of the publications that feature his stories.
Respectfully,
Jack Lewis
April 22, 1952
Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village 28, NY
Dear Mr. Lewis:
So would we. All I can suggest is that you contact the publishers if any are still in business, or haunt your second-hand bookstores.
If you succeed in getting any of these magazines, please let us know. We’ll pay you a handsome premium on them.
Yours,
Ray Albert President
Science Fiction Society
April 24, 1952
Mr. Sampson J. Gross,
Editor Strange Worlds Magazine
St. Louis 66, MO
Dear Mr. Gross:
I am enclosing the manuscript of a story I have just completed. As you see on the title page, I call it “Wreckers of Ten Million Galaxies.” Because of the great amount of research that went into it, I must set the minimum price on this one at not less than two cents a word.
Hoping you will see fit to use it for publication in your magazine, I remain,
Respectfully,
Jack Lewis
May 19, 1952
Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village 28, NY
Dear Mr. Lewis:
I’m sorry, but at the present time we won’t be able to use “Wreckers of Ten Million Galaxies.” It’s a great yarn though, and if at some future date we decide to use it we will make out the reprint check directly to the estate of Todd Thromberry.
That boy sure could write.
Cordially,
Sampson J. Gross Editor
Strange Worlds Magazine
May 23, 1952
Mr. Doyle P. Gates,
Editor Deep Space Magazine
New York 3, NY
Dear Mr. Gates:
While I said that I would never have any dealings with you or your magazine again, a situation has arisen which is most puzzling.
It seems that all my stories are being returned to me by reason of the fact that except for the byline, they are exact duplicates of the works of this Todd Thromberry person.
In your last letter you aptly described the odds of one accidental occurrence of this phenomenon in the case of one story. What would you consider the approximate odds on no less than half a dozen of my writings?
I agree with you—astronomical!
Yet in the interest of all mankind, how can I get the idea across to you that every word I have submitted was actually written by me! I have never copied any material from Todd Thromberry, nor have I ever seen any of his writings. In fact, as I told you in one of my letters, up until a short while ago I was totally unaware of his very existence.
An idea has occurred to me however. It’s a truly weird theory, and one that I probably wouldn’t even suggest to anyone but a science fiction editor. But suppose—just suppose—that this Thromberry person, what with his experiments in electronics and everything, had in some way managed to crack through this time-space barrier mentioned so often in your magazine. And suppose—egotistical as it sounds—he had singled out my work as being the type of material he had always wanted to write.
Do you begin to follow me? Or is the idea of a person from a different time cycle looking over my shoulder while I write too fantastic to accept?
Please write and tell me what you think of my theory?
Respectfully,
Jack Lewis
May 25, 1952
Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village 28, NY
Dear Mr. Lewis:
We think you should consult a psychiatrist.
Sincerely,
Doyle P. Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine
June 3, 1952
Mr. Sam Mines
Science Fiction Editor Standard Magazines Inc.
New York 12, NY
Dear Mr. Mines:
While the enclosed is not really a manuscript at all, I am submitting this series of letters, carbon copies, and correspondence, in the hope that you might give some credulity to this seemingly unbelievable happening.
The enclosed letters are all in proper order and should be self-explanatory. Perhaps if you publish them, some of your readers might have some idea how this phenomena could be explained.
I call the entire piece, “Who’s Cribbing?”
Respectfully,
Jack Lewis
June 10, 1952
Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village 28, NY
Dear Mr. Lewis:
Your idea of a series of letters to put across a science-fiction idea is an intriguing one, but I’m afraid it doesn’t quite come off.
It was in the August 1940 issue of Macabre Adventures that Mr. Thromberry first used this very idea. Ironically enough, the story title also was, “Who’s Cribbing?”
Feel free to contact us again when you have something more original.
Yours,
Samual Mines
Science Fiction Editor Standard Magazines Inc.
WITH FATE CONSPIRE
Vandana Singh
I saw him in a dream, the dead man. He was dreaming too, and I couldn’t tell if I was in his dream or he in mine. He was floating over a delta, watching a web of rivulets running this way and that, the whole stream rushing to a destination I couldn’t see.
I woke up with the haunted feeling that I had been used to in my youth. I haven’t felt like that in a long time. The feeling of being possessed, inhabited, although lightly, as though a homeless person was sleeping in the courtyard of my consciousness. The dead man wasn’t any trouble; he was just sharing the space in my mind, not really caring who I was. But this returning of my old ability, as unexpected as it was, startled me out of the apathy in which I had been living my life. I wanted to find him, this dead man.
I think it is because of the Machine that these old feelings are being resurrected. It takes up an entire room, although the only part of it I see is the thing that looks like a durbeen, a telescope. The Machine looks into the past, which is why I’ve been thinking about my own girlhood. If I could spy on myself as I ran up and down the crowded streets and alleys of Park Circus! But the scientists who work the Machine tell me that the scope can’t look into the recent past. They never tell me the why of anything, even when I ask—they smile and say, “Don’t bother about things like that, Gargi-di! What you are doing is great, a great contribution.” To my captors—they think they are my benefactors but truly, they are my captors—to them, I am something very special, because of my ability with the scope; but because I am not like them, they don’t really see me as I am.
An illiterate woman, bred in the back streets and alleyways of Old Kolkata, of no more importance than a cockroach—what saved me from being stamped out by the great, indifferent foot of the mighty is this . . . ability. The Machine gives sight to a select few, and it doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, man or woman.
I wonder if they guess I’m lying to them?
They’ve set the scope at a particular moment of history: the spring of 1856, and a particular place: Metiabruz in Kolkata. I am supposed to spy on an exiled ruler of that time, to see what he does every morning, out on the terrace, and to record what he says. He is a large, sad, weepy man. He is the Nawab of Awadh, ousted from his beloved home by the conquering British. He is a poet.
They tell me he wrote the song “Babul Mora,” which to me is the most interesting and important thing about him, because I learned that song as a girl. The song is about a woman leaving, looking back at her childhood home, and it makes me cry sometimes even though my childhood wasn’t idyllic. And yet there are things I remember, incongruous things like a great field of rice and water gleaming between the new shoots, and a bagula, hunched and dignified like an old priest, standing knee deep in water, waiting for fish. I remember the smell of the sea, many miles away, borne on the wind. My mother’s village, Siridanga.
How I began to lie to my captors was sheer chance. There was something wrong with the Machine. I don’t understand how it works, of course, but the scientists were having trouble setting the date. The girl called Nondini kept cursing and muttering about spacetime fuzziness. The fact that they could not look through the scope to verify what they were doing, not having the kind of brain suitable for it, meant that I had to keep looking to check whether they had got back to Wajid Ali Shah in the Kolkata of 1856.
I’ll never forget when I first saw the woman. I knew it was the wrong place and time, but, instead of telling my captors, I kept quiet. She was looking up toward me (my viewpoint must have been near the ceiling). She was not young, but she was respectable, you could see that. A housewife squatting on her haunches in a big, old-fashioned kitchen, stacking dirty dishes. I don’t know why she looked up for that moment but it struck me at once: the furtive expression on her face. A sensitive face, with beautiful eyes, a woman who, I could tell, was a warm-hearted motherly type—so why did she look like that, as though she had a dirty secret? The scope doesn’t stay connected to the past for more than a few blinks of the eye, so that was all I had: a glimpse.
Nondini nudged me, asking “Gargi-di, is that the right place and time?” Without thinking, I said yes.
That is how it begins: the story of my deception. That simple “yes” began the unraveling of everything.
The institute is a great glass monstrosity that towers above the ground somewhere in New Parktown, which I am told is many miles south of Kolkata. Only the part we’re on is not flooded. All around my building are other such buildings, so that when I look out of the window I see only reflections—of my building and the others and my own face, a small, dark oval. At first it drove me crazy, being trapped not only by the building but also by these tricks of light.
And my captors were trapped too, but they seemed unmindful of the fact. They had grown accustomed. I resolved in my first week that I would not become accustomed. No, I didn’t regret leaving behind my mean little life, with all its difficulties and constraints, but I was under no illusions. I had exchanged one prison for another.
In any life, I think, there are apparently unimportant moments that turn out to matter the most. For me as a girl it was those glimpses of my mother’s village, poor as it was. I don’t remember the bad things. I remember the sky, the view of paddy fields from my grandfather’s hut on a hillock, and the tame pigeon who cooed and postured on a wooden post in the muddy little courtyard. I think it was here I must have drawn my first real breath. There was an older cousin I don’t recall very well, except as a voice, a guide through this exhilarating new world, where I realized that food grew on trees, that birds and animals had their own tongues, their languages, their stories. The world exploded into wonders during those brief visits. But always they were just small breaks in my life as one more poor child in the great city. Or so I thought. What I now think is that those moments gave me a taste for something I’ve never had—a kind of freedom, a soaring.
I want to be able to share this with the dead man who haunts my dreams. I want him, whoever he is, wherever he is, to have what I had so briefly. The great open spaces, the chance to run through the fields and listen to the birds tell their stories. He might wake up from being dead then, might think of other things besides deltas.
He sits in my consciousness so lightly, I wonder if he even exists, whether he is an imagining rather than a haunting. But I recognize the feeling of a haunting like that, even though it has been years since I experienced the last one.
The most important haunting of my life was when I was, maybe, fourteen. We didn’t know our birthdays, so I can’t be sure. But I remember that an old man crept into my mind, a tired old man. Like Wajid Ali Shah more than a hundred years ago, this man was a poet. But there the similarity ended because he had been ground down by poverty; his respectability was all he had left. When I saw him in my mind he was sitting under an awning. There was a lot of noise nearby, the kind of hullabaloo that a vegetable market generates. I sensed immediately that he was miserable, and this was confirmed later when I met him. All my hauntings have been of people who are hurt, or grieving, or otherwise in distress.
He wasn’t a mullah, Rahman Khan, but the street kids all called him Maula, so I did too. I think he accepted it with deprecation. He was a kind man. He would sit under a tree at the edge of the road with an old typewriter, waiting for people to come to him for typing letters and important documents and so on. He only had a few customers. Most of the time he would stare into the distance with rheumy eyes, seeing not the noisy market but some other vista, and he would recite poetry. I found time from my little jobs in the fruit market to sit by him and sometimes I would bring him a stolen pear or mango. He was the one who taught me to appreciate language, the meanings of words. He told me about poets he loved, Wajid Ali Shah and Khayyam and Rumi, and our own Rabindranath and Nazrul, and the poets of the humbler folk, the baul and the maajhis. Once I asked him to teach me how to read and write. He had me practice letters in Hindi and Bengali on discarded sheets of typing paper, but the need to fill our stomachs prevented me from giving time to the task, and I soon forgot what I’d learned. In any case at that age I didn’t realize its importance—it was no more than a passing fancy. But he did improve my Hindi, which I had picked up from my father, and taught me some Urdu, and a handful of songs, including “Babul Mora.”
Babul Mora, he would sing in his thin, cracked voice. Naihar chuuto hi jaaye.
It is a woman’s song, a woman leaving her childhood home with her newlywed husband, looking back from the cart for the last time. Father mine, my home slips away from me. Although my father died before I was grown, the song still brings tears to my eyes.
The old man gave me my fancy way of speaking. People laugh at me sometimes when I use nice words, nicely, when a few plain ones would do. What good is fancy speech to a woman who grew up poor and illiterate? But I don’t care. When I talk in that way I feel as though I am touching the essence of the world. I got that from Maula. All my life I have tried to give away what I received but my one child died soon after birth and nobody else wanted what I had. Poetry. A vision of freedom. Rice fields, birds, the distant blue line of the sea. Siridanga.
Later, after my father died, I started to work in people’s houses with my mother. Clean and cook, and go to another house, clean and cook. Some of the people were nice but others yelled at us and were suspicious of us. I remember one fat lady who smelled strongly of flowers and sweat, who got angry because I touched the curtains.
The curtains were blue and white and had lace on them, and I had never seen anything as delicate and beautiful. I reached my hand out and touched them and she yelled at me. I was just a child, and whatever she said, my hands weren’t dirty. I tried to defend myself but my mother herself shut me up. She didn’t want to lose her job. I remember being so angry I thought I would catch fire from inside. I think all those houses must be under water now. There will be fish nibbling at the fine lace drawing room curtains. Slime on the walls, the carpets rotted. All our cleaning for nothing!
