Time Travel Short Stories, page 48
Annie’s mouth dropped open even further. “But…” she continued stammering, “you were only gone for…”
“I know,” Bentley said. “A few seconds. But for me it was four years. And do you know why I stayed there for so long?”
Annie was still in shock. “I can’t…”
“Because the future is amazing, Annie,” he said. “It’s a utopia. The whole world. They’ve figured it all out. No wars, no crime, everybody’s happy, nobody’s hungry. It’s amazing.”
“But…”
“And do you know why I came back?”
“No,” Annie replied.
“To get you.”
“What?” she asked, stunned.
“C’mon, Annie, come back with me,” Bentley pleaded. “You won’t believe the world of the future. No disease, no suffering, no global warming. They’ve solved everything.”
“For how long, though,” she asked. “Go back for how long?”
“Forever, Annie,” he answered. “What have we got here?” he asked, gesturing around with his arms outstretched. “We’re orphans. Nobody cares about us. Not really.”
“But I’m only eleven, Bentley,” she said. “And you’re only…whatever you are…”
“Fifteen,” he interrupted.
“Yeah, fifteen,” she repeated. “And what if I don’t want to go to the future? What if I want to stay here and become a documentary filmmaker. It’s my dream, y’know.”
“Forget about it, Annie. At least for now.” He pushed his shirt tail aside. “Look. I brought some stuff to show you.” He was wearing a small pouch attached to his belt. He reached in and fished out a smooth translucent stone. “This is a healing stone,” he said.
He grabbed a pair of scissors from a table, opened them, and ran the blade across his forearm drawing a thin line of blood.
“Bentley,” Annie shrieked, “what are you doing?”
“Watch,” he answered. He slowly ran the stone across the wound. It healed instantly.
“Oh my god,” Annie exclaimed. She grabbed his forearm and examined it closely. “Oh my god,” she repeated.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “Just the beginning.” He reached into the pouch and took out a small jet-black cube, about the size of a dice. He held it up for her to see better. He twirled it slowly between his thumb and forefinger. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Even a little bit?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “A little, I guess.”
“Here, then,” he said handing it to her. “Put it in your mouth. Don’t chew it or swallow it, just let it sit there.” Then he added, “It’s called a Borlaug cube.”
She popped it into her mouth. “It’s delicious,” she said.
“Yes it is,” he agreed, “and it tastes differently to everyone who uses it. But, more importantly, are you still hungry?”
She thought about it for a moment. “No,” she said. “No, I’m not. Not a bit.”
“That’s because the cube detects your nutritional needs, and it fulfills them instantly. It pulls the nutrients out of the air, or in some cases it manufactures them from whatever molecules are available,” he explained. “Two hundred years from now, everyone has one of these. There’s no hunger. Anywhere.”
“Wow,” Annie said quietly, a note of awe in her voice. “What an amazing world.” She looked thoughtfully at Bentley. “But, Bentley, I’m from this world. The world of today. And I don’t really care about utopia. I just want to make documentaries.”
Bentley reached into the pouch again. “Let me show you one more thing, Annie.” He took a small silver sphere from the pouch and held it up in the palm of his hand. As Annie watched, he withdrew his hand, and the sphere remained in the same place, floating in mid-air.
“Whoa!” Annie exclaimed.
“This is a library orb,” he told her. “Everyone has one. In its memory is every document ever created. Ever.”
He touched it with a fingertip, and a hologram appeared, projected in mid-air in the room. It was small, the image of a document. Bentley touched the orb again, and the image grew much larger.
“Go ahead, read it,” Bentley said to Annie.
She did. It was an old newspaper article, and it began with a black and white photo of an elderly woman receiving a framed certificate from a nun. The caption under the photo read:
Anna Maria De La Cruz (68) receives a lifetime appreciation award for her 50 years of service as Chief Cook at the St. Jerome’s Children’s Home.
Annie was stunned. “You mean…?”
“That’s right, Annie,” Bentley answered. “Apparently you’re not gonna be a filmmaker after all.” Then he added, “At least, not if you stay here.”
Annie was crushed, her shoulders slumped with disappointment.
Then after a moment of reflection, she straightened up and said, “So, tell me Bentley, this time travel stuff. Does it hurt?”
Bentley grinned. “Not one bit.” He opened the cardboard hatch on the machine. “It’s kind of exhilarating, really.”
They climbed in, and the hatch closed behind them.
The time machine filled the screen. It started vibrating, then a whirring sound began. Then a shower of sparks. A flash of light. And …POP… a cloud of smoke filled the video screen.
Moments later, when it cleared, the time machine was gone.
* * *
In the Columbia County Sheriff’s Department briefing room, Detective Henry P. Stanchion let the tape run, and he watched the video of an empty room for another five minutes, until the screen went black. He watched the black screen for a few more minutes, until he finally got up and rewound the tape.
He brought it back to his desk, and just as he got there Detective Dunn returned. “You ready to get rolling?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Stanchion replied, tentatively. He held up the tape. “Have you watched this?” he asked Dunn.
“What is it? The one with the time machine?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I watched it, years ago,” Dunn replied. “Back when the case was open.”
“Man, it’s weird,” Stanchion said. “They just disappeared.”
Dunn chuckled. “You can fake anything on video these days.”
“That’s what I told myself, too, but what about those inventions the kid had? The healing stone, and the floating ball, and the newspaper article projected in mid-air?”
“Fake, fake, and fake,” Dunn replied.
“Man, they didn’t look fake,” Stanchion said. “Plus, here we are, ten years later, and those kids are still gone. Where are they?”
“They probably ran away,” Dunn conjectured. “Kids run away all the time. Plus these two were orphans. No family ties. Nothing much holding them back.”
“Yeah, I guess not,” Stanchion answered. He looked at the tape, then he tossed it into the cardboard file box with the rest of the evidence.
“You ready to start your orientation?” Dunn asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Stanchion nodded, and the two detectives left the room.
As they walked down the hall they passed a technician, a young Hispanic woman, early twenties maybe, wearing a white lab coat. She entered the room they had just left and walked straight to Detective Stanchion’s desk. She picked up the file box and left the room.
She carried the box to the basement and down a long, dark hallway to a small room with a sign on the door: Evidence Locker: Cold Case Files. The door was cracked open, a small wad of paper towels wedged between the door and the jamb. She brought the box into the room and locked the door behind her.
She set the box on a shelf. She fished through the contents, found the video tape, and slipped it into the pocket of her lab coat. She pushed the box to the back of the shelf and hid it among a group of similar evidence boxes.
Then she walked quickly between the rows of storage shelves to the farthest, darkest corner of the room. There on the floor was… the cardboard box time machine.
She opened the flap, and with a little effort she shoehorned herself inside.
After a few moments, the thing came to life, blinking lights, spinning wheels, vibrating, wild shaking, humming, whirring, the whole shebang. Then, a shower of sparks. A cloud of smoke.
POP!
A bright flash of light.
And the machine disappeared, departing the twenty-first century for the very last time.
The Clock that Went Backward
Edward Page Mitchell
Chapter I
A row of Lombardy poplars stood in front of my great-aunt Gertrude’s house, on the bank of the Sheepscot River. In personal appearance my aunt was surprisingly like one of those trees. She had the look of hopeless anemia that distinguishes them from fuller blooded sorts. She was tall, severe in outline, and extremely thin. Her habiliments clung to her. I am sure that had the gods found occasion to impose upon her the fate of Daphne she would have taken her place easily and naturally in the dismal row, as melancholy a poplar as the rest.
Some of my earliest recollections are of this venerable relative. Alive and dead she bore an important part in the events I am about to recount: events which I believe to be without parallel in the experience of mankind.
During our periodical visits of duty to Aunt Gertrude in Maine, my cousin Harry and myself were accustomed to speculate much on her age. Was she sixty, or was she six score? We had no precise information; she might have been either. The old lady was surrounded by old-fashioned things. She seemed to live altogether in the past. In her short half-hours of communicativeness, over her second cup of tea, or on the piazza where the poplars sent slim shadows directly toward the east, she used to tell us stories of her alleged ancestors. I say alleged, because we never fully believed that she had ancestors.
A genealogy is a stupid thing. Here is Aunt Gertrude’s, reduced to its simplest forms:
Her great-great-grandmother (1599–1642) was a woman of Holland who married a Puritan refugee, and sailed from Leyden to Plymouth in the ship Ann in the year of our Lord 1632. This Pilgrim mother had a daughter, Aunt Gertrude’s great-grandmother (1640–1718). She came to the Eastern District of Massachusetts in the early part of the last century, and was carried off by the Indians in the Penobscot wars. Her daughter (1680–1776) lived to see these colonies free and independent, and contributed to the population of the coming republic not less than nineteen stalwart sons and comely daughters. One of the latter (1735–1802) married a Wiscasset skipper engaged in the West India trade, with whom she sailed. She was twice wrecked at sea – once on what is now Seguin Island and once on San Salvador. It was on San Salvador that Aunt Gertrude was born.
We got to be very tired of hearing this family history. Perhaps it was the constant repetition and the merciless persistency with which the above dates were driven into our young ears that made us skeptics. As I have said, we took little stock in Aunt Gertrude’s ancestors. They seemed highly improbable. In our private opinion the great-grandmothers and grandmothers and so forth were pure myths, and Aunt Gertrude herself was the principal in all the adventures attributed to them, having lasted from century to century while generations of contemporaries went the way of all flesh.
On the first landing of the square stairway of the mansion loomed a tall Dutch clock. The case was more than eight feet high, of a dark red wood, not mahogany, and it was curiously inlaid with silver. No common piece of furniture was this. About a hundred years ago there flourished in the town of Brunswick a horologist named Cary, an industrious and accomplished workman. Few well-to-do houses on that part of the coast lacked a Cary timepiece. But Aunt Gertrude’s clock had marked the hours and minutes of two full centuries before the Brunswick artisan was born. It was running when William the Taciturn pierced the dikes to relieve Leyden. The name of the maker, Jan Lipperdam, and the date, 1572, were still legible in broad black letters and figures reaching quite across the dial. Cary’s masterpieces were plebeian and recent beside this ancient aristocrat. The jolly Dutch moon, made to exhibit the phases over a landscape of windmills and polders, was cunningly painted. A skilled hand had carved the grim ornament at the top, a death’s head transfixed by a two-edged sword. Like all timepieces of the sixteenth century, it had no pendulum. A simple Van Wyck escapement governed the descent of the weights to the bottom of the tall case.
But these weights never moved. Year after year, when Harry and I returned to Maine, we found the hands of the old clock pointing to the quarter past three, as they had pointed when we first saw them. The fat moon hung perpetually in the third quarter, as motionless as the death’s head above. There was a mystery about the silenced movement and the paralyzed hands. Aunt Gertrude told us that the works had never performed their functions since a bolt of lightning entered the clock; and she showed us a black hole in the side of the case near the top, with a yawning rift that extended downward for several feet. This explanation failed to satisfy us. It did not account for the sharpness of her refusal when we proposed to bring over the watchmaker from the village, or for her singular agitation once when she found Harry on a stepladder, with a borrowed key in his hand, about to test for himself the clock’s suspended vitality.
One August night, after we had grown out of boyhood, I was awakened by a noise in the hallway. I shook my cousin. “Somebody’s in the house,” I whispered.
We crept out of our room and on to the stairs. A dim light came from below. We held breath and noiselessly descended to the second landing. Harry clutched my arm. He pointed down over the banisters, at the same time drawing me back into the shadow.
We saw a strange thing.
Aunt Gertrude stood on a chair in front of the old clock, as spectral in her white nightgown and white nightcap as one of the poplars when covered with snow. It chanced that the floor creaked slightly under our feet. She turned with a sudden movement, peering intently into the darkness, and holding a candle high toward us, so that the light was full upon her pale face. She looked many years older than when I bade her good night. For a few minutes she was motionless, except in the trembling arm that held aloft the candle. Then, evidently reassured, she placed the light upon a shelf and turned again to the clock.
We now saw the old lady take a key from behind the face and proceed to wind up the weights. We could hear her breath, quick and short. She rested a band on either side of the case and held her face close to the dial, as if subjecting it to anxious scrutiny. In this attitude she remained for a long time. We heard her utter a sigh of relief, and she half turned toward us for a moment. I shall never forget the expression of wild joy that transfigured her features then.
The hands of the clock were moving; they were moving backward.
Aunt Gertrude put both arms around the clock and pressed her withered cheek against it. She kissed it repeatedly. She caressed it in a hundred ways, as if it had been a living and beloved thing. She fondled it and talked to it, using words which we could hear but could not understand. The hands continued to move backward.
Then she started back with a sudden cry. The clock had stopped. We saw her tall body swaying for an instant on the chair. She stretched out her arms in a convulsive gesture of terror and despair, wrenched the minute hand to its old place at a quarter past three, and fell heavily to the floor.
Chapter II
Aunt Gertrude’s will left me her bank and gas stocks, real estate, railroad bonds, and city sevens, and gave Harry the clock. We thought at the time that this was a very unequal division, the more surprising because my cousin had always seemed to be the favorite. Half in seriousness we made a thorough examination of the ancient timepiece, sounding its wooden case for secret drawers, and even probing the not complicated works with a knitting needle to ascertain if our whimsical relative had bestowed there some codicil or other document changing the aspect of affairs. We discovered nothing.
There was testamentary provision for our education at the University of Leyden. We left the military school in which we had learned a little of the theory of war, and a good deal of the art of standing with our noses over our heels, and took ship without delay. The clock went with us. Before many months it was established in a corner of a room in the Breede Straat.
The fabric of Jan Lipperdam’s ingenuity, thus restored to its native air, continued to tell the hour of quarter past three with its old fidelity. The author of the clock had been under the sod for nearly three hundred years. The combined skill of his successors in the craft at Leyden could make it go neither forward nor backward.
We readily picked up enough Dutch to make ourselves understood by the townspeople, the professors, and such of our eight hundred and odd fellow students as came into intercourse. This language, which looks so hard at first, is only a sort of polarized English. Puzzle over it a little while and it jumps into your comprehension like one of those simple cryptograms made by running together all the words of a sentence and then dividing in the wrong places.
The language acquired and the newness of our surroundings worn off, we settled into tolerably regular pursuits. Harry devoted himself with some assiduity to the study of sociology, with especial reference to the round-faced and not unkind maidens of Leyden. I went in for the higher metaphysics.
Outside of our respective studies, we had a common ground of unfailing interest. To our astonishment, we found that not one in twenty of the faculty or students knew or cared a sliver about the glorious history of the town, or even about the circumstances under which the university itself was founded by the Prince of Orange. In marked contrast with the general indifference was the enthusiasm of Professor Van Stopp, my chosen guide through the cloudiness of speculative philosophy.
This distinguished Hegelian was a tobacco-dried little old man, with a skullcap over features that reminded me strangely of Aunt Gertrude’s. Had he been her own brother the facial resemblance could not have been closer. I told him so once, when we were together in the Stadthuis looking at the portrait of the hero of the siege, the Burgomaster Van der Werf. The professor laughed. “I will show you what is even a more extraordinary coincidence,” said he; and, leading the way across the hall to the great picture of the siege, by Warmers, he pointed out the figure of a burgher participating in the defense. It was true. Van Stopp might have been the burgher’s son; the burgher might have been Aunt Gertrude’s father.
