Time Travel Omnibus, page 1070
It did not take me long to realize that the time traveler and Connie were smitten with each other. The night after his awakening, in fact, he slept in her bed.
For the next weeks after that, they were inseparable and made no secret that they had become lovers. They appeared to be roughly the same age—Connie was forty-five, and Romal, though a solid physical specimen, had to be at least that old. They didn’t hide their affection for each other from me, or in public, and held hands and kissed as we walked the streets of downtown Buffalo.
Romal expressed his amazement at how swift automobiles had become, in fact, how fast life had become in this the post-modern age, with superhighways, cell phones, jets soaring above us over the buildings even taller than the ones he had seen in 1931.
Still, despite the marvels and horrors of our time, the time traveler seemed mainly interested in only one thing—Connie.
One morning, after Connie had gone shopping to the closest supermarket about ten miles from the farmhouse, I brought up the obvious. That his interest in my sister seemed to be causing a deviation from his mission. He had already remained with us a month.
“How many have you had over the years?” I asked. “Women, I mean?”
Perhaps this sudden, sharp attack had more to do with a desire to protect my sister from getting hurt by him. He was destined to leave, in the end, and that would leave her eternally alone, pining after a lover who would not awaken again until she was long dead and turned to dust.
Romal took a sip of coffee, then looked up at me with a curl of a smile over the top of the morning newspaper. It had amazed me how fast he had become acclimated to our time. He was already following the major league box scores, and was especially interested in the New York Yankees, having become a fan of the game in general, and the Yankees in particular, after his awakening in 1931.
“In ten thousand years,” he said, and thought for a time. “Three. Your sister is the fourth.”
I held a stern look.
“Can I tell you something else?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Each time I made the mistake of reentering the vessel and leaving them behind.”
“So,” I said with a laugh, “what are you telling me. This time, you won’t? You won’t continue your mission because of her? Constance?”
The time traveler’s eyes narrowed. Finally, they focused on me.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps its time for the time vessel to remain empty.”
“Has you mission succeeded, then?” I asked. “Do you think humanity is ready for Atlantean ways?”
He looked up at me with doubt in his eyes.
“I am beginning to wonder if that will ever become possible,” he said. “We are a legend among the moderns. Perhaps it is best for Atlantis to remain so.”
My heart raced as I considered what I was about to say.
“So why not let me take your place,” I blurted. “Continue your mission and go forward into the future, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of seeing what the world and mankind had come to.”
“You, Damian?” he asked. “You want to do this—to become a time traveler.”
“I don’t know,” I said, equivocating momentarily. “No, yes. I mean, the idea of it, waking every seventy-three years in the future, in a new world, does have a fascinating appeal.”
He let the idea sink in, then added:
“It did for me once, Damian, but now I must admit that I have grown tired of it. I want—I want a life.”
“You love my sister. That’s what this is about.”
His eyes brightened momentarily at the thought of her.
“Yes,” he said. “She reminds me . . .” but then, he trailed off, perhaps thinking of someone whose body had gone to dust eons ago.
My mouth had gone dry. To change places with him. To become the time traveler.
What was my life worth anyway? I had no wife. No children. No one to love, or love me. I had quit my job after the vessel had opened and had no desire to return to it or do anything except remain in care of the time traveler. I had recognized six months ago when father had revealed on his deathbed the secret of the stone sarcophagus that my life had been stuck in neutral until the time traveler awakened. And now, perhaps, I had found that the true purpose of my life was to exchange places with him and become myself, the time traveler.
He looked straight at me, and said: “Why don’t you sleep on it, Damian. Consider what it means. What you must give up. Then we can talk about it again in the morning.”
There was no more talk of it that day.
“Yes,” I blurted first thing the next morning. “I want to do it.”
I stood in the doorway of the kitchen. Romal was sitting next to Connie at the kitchen table, eating scrambled eggs she had cooked for him. They both looked up at me.
“My answer is yes.”
“Yes to what?” Connie gave me a queer, sideways look.
“To taking Romal’s place in the time vault,” I told her.
Connie looked at him.
“Damian proposed yesterday taking my place in the vessel,” Romal told her. Then, he added: “It was after I told him that I wanted to remain here with you, in this lifetime.”
Connie’s eyes widened. After some moments, she stood, came over, sat on his lap, and hugged him. Then, she looked over at me with a quizzical frown.
Suddenly, I knew, that I must do it right now, at that moment. Go downstairs, enter the secret chamber, step into the gel of the time vat, slowly immerse myself until I felt it all around me from head to toe like a warm, soothing bath overtaking my soul.
And sleep.
Without a word, I started toward the landing to the basement.
“Damian,” Connie said with some alarm. I heard from behind me the time traveler push her off him, his chair grinding across the kitchen floor.
“Damian,” Romal said, as he started after me. “No. You are not ready.”
I was already half way down the basement stairs when I stopped and looked back at him up at the landing.
“You must give it more thought than just one night,” he said.
“You want to stay here, don’t you?” I asked. “With her.”
Romal looked back at Connie.
“Don’t you?”
He nodded and reached for her hand.
“And have a child that you can watch grow up to manhood?”
“Very much,” he said, gazing into Connie’s eyes, “that is what I want.”
“Then you must promise to name him after his uncle,” I said. “And tell him to care for me when I wake up seventy-three years from today.”
Romal nodded. There was no mistaking my resolve. I had nothing to live for except this, entering the stone vessel and becoming the time traveler.
They followed me downstairs into the secret chamber. I stood for time at the brink of the time vault, its lid open, brimming with the magic gel that preserved the body.
“If you enter it,” the time traveler warned, “your life will be over. You will wake up every seventy-three years, once a generation, desperately alone each time. A few times you will venture out and remain a few weeks, months, and sometimes, you will fall in love.” He looked at Connie, then continued: “But something inside you, the vow you have made to yourself to carry on the mission no matter what, will compel you to leave, no matter how much you fall in love with that place, that time,” and he sighed, and gazed longingly into Connie’s eyes, before finishing, “that woman.”
The time traveler suddenly stepped forward and pushed past me. I watched in horror as, in the next moment, he inexplicably stepped into the vessel, back into the gel, and without another word, or even one final longing gaze at us, went under.
Connie screamed, but it was too late. The lid was already, irrevocably lowering, closing. As she rushed past me, I grabbed at her and held her back. She convulsed in my arms and by the time I looked back at the stone tomb, the lid had shut and the tomb was a solid gray lump of stone.
“No!” she howled, wept. “No!”
After gulping air for a time, she lamented: “Fool! I am carrying your child!”
She named the boy, Romal, and we called him Rommie for short. We took up residence in the old house our grandfather had built ninety years ago. Over the years, our distant neighbors wondered at the odd brother and sister living there like hermits, and the strange, bronze-skinned child they were raising.
We seemed content, however, if not completely happy. And patient.
I wondered if technology would make it possible for Constance and I to live long enough so that we would outlast the time traveler’s sleep. I also wondered what the time traveler would think of Rommie, his son. It was oddly amusing to consider that by the time he awakened, Rommie would be older than him.
But there are many years ahead of us to contemplate that.
THE WINDOW OF TIME
Richard Matheson
Let me say, at the outset, that I don’t blame my daughter for what happened. Actually, “blame” is too critical a word. What I mean to say is that my daughter was hardly responsible for what happened. Miriam is a good soul, a benevolent human being. She never (well, almost never) found fault with my living in her home. And Bob’s. And the three boys’. And if she did find fault, it was of such brief duration as to be negligible. Bob, on the other hand—well, let that go. (The main point I want to make is that my daughter did not demean me in any way for my extended residence. She knew I was alone and friendless; all of them deceased, including my beloved wife, Agnes. Appreciating that, Miriam treated me with thoughtfulness, kindness. And, most importantly, love.)
So much for the outset. The upshot? I know that my daughter and her family were in a constant state of stress because of me. I did the best I could, using their second bathroom (I didn’t have the temerity to utilize the master bathroom) as expeditiously as possible, watching television on the small black-and-white set in my bedroom, rarely watching the fifty-five-inch LCD color TV in their living room and sharing that only when we all agreed on a specific program. Most of my personal books were in storage and scarcely ever reread. I’d read them all anyway.
Oh, there were other elements of stress. Certain foods I couldn’t eat. Medicine prescriptions I needed periodically. Rides to various doctors. (I’d lost my driver’s license in 2008 following my stroke.) Well, why go on? I was, to be brief, in the way. So I decided to leave. I had enough private income from social security and my retirement pension from the Writers Guild. (I was rather a successful series television writer in the ’60s and ’70s.) So I had enough income to keep paying Miriam by the month even though I wasn’t there.
I didn’t tell her I was leaving. I knew she’d try to dissuade me. My age (eighty-two, I’d married late), my health (questionable), my need for company (beyond question). I didn’t want to debate with her. So I just left, a parting note on the kitchen table. I didn’t take any belongings with me. I could get them after I located a furnished room or flat. I waited until Miriam had gone shopping for groceries. Bob was at work (he’s a car salesman, poor chap), the boys—Jeremy, seventeen, Arthur, fourteen, and Melvin, twelve—were at school. So I decamped from the three-bedroom, two-bath Kelsey domicile (Jeremy would likely be delighted at long last to acquire his own room) and walked over to Church Avenue. (Did I mention that their house was in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn? No, I didn’t. Well, it is.) And I had seen (for some time) an ad in the local news sheet about a retirement home in that area called Golden Years. The name gave me the pip. Golden Years my foot! But I was in no position—or condition, for that matter—to go searching to hell and gone for an appropriate landing spot.
The home—I had trouble thinking of it as a “home”—was a couple of blocks west of Flatbush Avenue. The ad described it so. To be truthful, I can’t tell east from west or north from south. I assumed that I was heading in the right direction and evidently, I was. I found the house a block and a half distant from what had been the RKO Kenmore Theatre in my youth. Not a bad-looking house, cleanly painted, a sign hanging above its porch which read G-LDEN YEARS , the O missing. No mention of retirement. I had to assume it was the place I was searching for.
No doorbell. Instead, a rather portentous-looking knocker made, I guessed, of cast iron painted to resemble copper. It made such a deafening resonance when I struck it against the door that it made me wince.
An old lady answered the door. My immediate assumption was that the house was hers and she was attempting to keep from losing it by renting out unused bedrooms.
She smiled at me. “You’ve come looking for a place,” she said.
Her assumption would, ordinarily, have offended me. But her demeanor was so friendly, her voice so agreeable, that I felt nothing but acceptance in her presence. “Yes, I am,” I answered her. Politely.
“Come in then,” she said, still smiling.
There was no mention of rental as she led me down the dimlit hall. Hung on both sides were old, faded photographs and paintings. She must be almost my age, I thought although I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking. Her hair was silvery-gray, her clothes outdated, her dark dress ankle-length. She walked with a youthful step, however.
Reaching a door, she opened it. “Here it is,” she said. “Let me know if it’s what you need.” With that, she was gone.
I closed the door behind me and looked around. What I need? An odd expression to use. Fundamentally true, though. I did need some place to hang my hat. (My cap.) I needed to give Miriam a much-needed breather from my presence.
There were two windows in the room. Through the one in front of me, I could see Church Avenue, the passing cars and occasional pedestrians. Nothing special there. I looked around the room. Nothing special there, either. The furniture was as elderly as I was, equally so. No private bathroom, of course. I’d have to share. Not a problem. The house was pleasantly quiet except for the motor hum of passing vehicles. The room would do.
I moved to the other window. It looked out on a barren lot. To the right was a view of Church Avenue. I looked at it for a few moments.
And felt my spine turn to cold water. I shuddered so violently that I visualized my spine collapsing like a thin tower and splashing out of my body.
It was Church Avenue all right. But not the avenue I was accustomed to. It was unquestionably—incredibly—different. In brief, I didn’t recognize it. It was different. How different, I had no idea.
So what did I do? Old fool that I am, I raised the window and—bones creaking—climbed (clambered, actually) outside and dropped to the ground. The fall gave me spinal pain; now it was hard bone again. I ignored the pain and moved as quickly as I could to Church Avenue.
“My God,” I remember muttering. (I muttered it innumerable times that afternoon.)
It was different. Totally different. Appearing as it had when I was young.
Young! I shuffled, unable to move distinctly, and looked at my reflection in the nearest store window. No difference there. My reflection was, as usual, that of an eighty-two-year-old man—white bearded (albeit well trimmed), face not too noticeably lined, white cap covering hair-receded skull. Not too bad looking. But still eighty-two. Church Avenue might have changed. I had not.
I looked into the store. It was a butcher shop. There was a sign printed on the window: ESPOSITO MEATS.
That cold, liquid sensation in my spine again. Johnny Esposito! The Y! The gang! Was that the time I’d reached? How old was I? Thirteen? Fourteen? What? “My God,” I said again. (As I mentioned, one of many I muttered that afternoon.)
No, I was still eighty-two. But what year was I in? If Johnny Esposito was about, were Harry Pearce and Ken Naylor and all the others? Good God, could I walk up a few blocks, turn right and come to the YMCA? Would I see the old gang playing softball in the yard? Hit the porch column and get a double! Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that in ages!
No. I had to shake my head. It was all too insane. What if I could reach the Y? What if I saw my young self playing in the yard? Pitching for the Ravens. Would I stare? Walk away? Yell to myself? “Hey, strike ’im out, Rich!” Impossible. Put the crazy notion aside. So Church Avenue had changed. That was no reason to believe that the area for miles around had changed too. I was sure it hadn’t.
Or had it?
Now the entire madness of what I was experiencing flooded through me. I had time traveled! I’d written television scripts about that, but now I was actually living it! Or was I dreaming it? Was I at home in Miriam’s house, sacked out on my bed, fantasizing about my past? But, if that was true, why was I still eighty-two? Why was I experiencing every moment in my brain and body?
Only one way to validate. Keep moving. Keep looking. Should I try to find the Y? Probably not. I had no proof that this pocket of the past (insane notion) extended blocks beyond where I stood. Not knowing what had caused it in the first place, how could I be sure of its entirety? Better not, I decided. Stay on Church Avenue. Maybe that’s all there was. Go the other way. The Y and what I might find there was really immaterial anyway. The gang was part of my youth but not so important a part that I had to see it. And God knew I’d rather avoid seeing my young self playing softball. More important things to see. And who knew how long this mad excursion into yesteryear would last? I didn’t.
So I started—what, east?—down Church Avenue toward, I believed, Flatbush Avenue. The accuracy of my impulse was verified by the sight of the Kenmore Theatre marquee. I was able to see the letters. LITTLE MISS MARKER. The sight of it thrilled me. I’d seen it one afternoon after Sunday school. My sister treated my mother and me to the show; they were coming from church. How old was I? Twelve? Thirteen? Impossible to recollect, but I was getting close, I thought.
Before the show, we had lunch at Bickford’s Cafeteria, which (thrilled again) I could now see across the way, on Flatbush Avenue; I was at its intersection with Church. My God. One remembered sight followed another. Now the Flatbush Theatre on Church Avenue just past Flatbush. I could barely make out the letters on its smaller marquee. BROOKLYN, USA. I remembered seeing it. The scene in the barbershop, the customer, (a gangster, I recalled) getting murdered with an ice pick. Scary stuff to a—what?—thirteen-year-old. Fourteen? And just down the avenue was the bar-restaurant where real gangsters met and ate and even married. I’d read about it in the newspaper when I was—whatever age I was, I still didn’t know.
