Time Travel Omnibus, page 160
“I have calculated it,” said Minott harshly. “The odds are four to one that space and time and universe, every star and every galaxy in the skies, will be obliterated in one monstrous cataclysm when even the past will never have been. But there is one chance in four, and I planned to take full advantage of it. I planned—I planned——”
THEN he stood up suddenly. His figure straightened. He struck his hands together savagely. “By Heaven, I still plan! We have arms. We have books, technical knowledge, formulas—the cream of the technical knowledge of earth packed in our saddlebags! Listen to me! We cross this stream now. When the next change comes, we strike across whatever time path takes the place of this. We make for the Potomac, where that aviator saw Norse ships drawn up! I have Anglo-Saxon and early Norse vocabularies in the saddlebags. We’ll make friends with them. We’ll teach them. We’ll lead them. We’ll make ourselves masters of the world and——”
Harris said apologetically: “I’m sorry, sir, but I promised Bertha I’d take her home, if it was humanly possible. I have to do it. I can’t join you in becoming an emperor, even if the breaks are right.”
Minott scowled at him.
“Hunter?”
“I—I’ll do as the others do,” said Hunter uneasily. “I—I’d rather go home.”
“Fool!” snarled Minott.
Lucy Blair said loyally: “I—I’d like to be an empress, Professor Minott.”
Maida Haynes stared at her. She opened her mouth to speak. Blake absently pulled a revolver from his pocket and looked at it meditatively as Minott clenched and unclenched his hands. The veins stood out on his forehead. He began to breathe heavily.
“Fools!” he roared. “Fools! You’ll never get back! Yet you throw away——”
Swift, sharp, agonizing vertigo smote them all. The revolver fell from Blake’s hands. He looked up. A dead silence fell upon all of them.
Blake stood shakily upon his feet. He looked, and looked again.
“That——” He swallowed. “That is King George courthouse, in King George County, in Virginia, in our time. I think——Hell! Let’s get across that stream.”
He picked up Maida in his arms. He started.
Minott moved quickly and croaked: “Wait!”
He had Blake’s dropped revolver in his hand. He was desperate, hunted; gray with rage and despair. “I—I offer you, for the last time—I offer you riches, power, women and——”
Harris stood up, the Confederate rifle still in his hands. He brought the barrel down smartly upon Minott’s wrist.
Blake waded across and put Maida safely down upon the shore. Hunter was splashing frantically through the shallow water. Harris was shaking Bertha Ketterling to wake her. Blake splashed back. He rounded up the horses. He loaded the salvaged weapons over a saddle. He shepherded the three remaining girls over. Hunter was out of sight. He had fled toward the painted buildings of the courthouse. Blake led the horses across the stream. Minott nursed his numbed wrist. His eyes blazed with the fury of utter despair.
“Better come along,” said Blake quietly.
“And be a professor of mathematics?” Minott laughed savagely. “No! I stay here!”
Blake considered. Minott was a strange, an unprepossessing figure. He was haggard. He was desperate. Standing against the background of a carboniferous jungle, in the misfitting uniform he had stripped from a dead man in some other path of time, he was even pitiable. Shoeless, unshaven, desperate, he was utterly defiant.
“Wait!” said Blake.
He stripped off the saddlebags from six of the horses. He heaped them on the remaining two. He led those two back across the stream and tethered them.
Minott regarded him with an implacable hatred. “If I hadn’t chosen you,” he said harshly, “I’d have carried my original plan through. I knew I shouldn’t choose you. Maida liked you too well. And I wanted her for myself. It was my mistake, my only one.”
Blake shrugged. He went back across the stream and remounted.
Lucy Blair looked doubtfully back at the solitary, savage figure. “He’s—brave, anyhow,” she said unhappily.
A faint, almost imperceptible, dizziness affected all of them. It passed. By instinct they looked back at the tall jungle. It still stood. Minott looked bitterly after them.
“I’ve—I’ve something I want to say!” said Lucy Blair breathlessly. “D-don’t wait for me!”
She wheeled her horse about and rode for the stream. Again that faint, nearly imperceptible, dizziness. Lucy slapped her horse’s flank frantically.
Maida cried out: “Wait, Lucy! It’s going to shift——”
And Lucy cried over her shoulder: “That’s what I want! I’m going to stay——”
She was halfway across the stream—more than halfway. Then the vertigo struck all of them.
XIII.
EVERY ONE knows the rest of the story. For two weeks longer there were still occasional shiftings of the time paths. But gradually it became noticeable that the number of time faults—in Professor Minott’s phrase—were decreasing in number. At the most drastic period, it has been estimated that no less than twenty-five per cent of the whole earth’s surface was at a given moment in some other time path than its own. We do not know of any portion of the earth which did not vary from its own time path at some period of the disturbance.
That means, of course, that practically one hundred per cent of the earth’s population encountered the conditions caused by the earth’s extraordinary oscillations sidewise in time. Our scientists are no longer quite as dogmatic as they used to be. The dialectics of philosophy have received a serious jolt. Basic ideas in botany, zoology, and even philology have been altered by the new facts made available by our travels sidewise in time.
Because of course it was the fourth chance which happened, and the earth survived. In our time path, at any rate. The survivors of Minott’s exploring party reached King George courthouse barely a quarter of an hour after the time shift which carried Minott and Lucy Blair out of our space and time forever. Blake and Harris searched for a means of transmitting the information they possessed to the world at large. Through a lonely radio amateur a mile from the village, they sent out Minott’s theory on short waves. Shorn of Minott’s pessimistic analysis of the probabilities of survival, it went swiftly to every part of the world then in its proper relative position. It was valuable, in that it checked explorations in force which in some places had been planned. It prevented, for example, a punitive military expedition from going past a time fault in Georgia, past which a scalping party of Indians from an uncivilized America had retreated. It prevented the dispatch of a squadron of destroyers to find and seize Leifsholm, from which a viking foray had been made upon North Centerville, Massachusetts. A squadron of mapping planes was recalled from reconnaissance work above a carboniferous swamp in West Virginia, just before the time shift which would have isolated them forever.
Some things, though, no knowledge could prevent. It has been estimated that no less than five thousand persons in the United States are missing from their own space and time, through having adventured into the strange landscapes which appeared so suddenly. Many must have perished. Some, we feel sure, have come in contact with one or another of the distinct civilizations we now know exist.
Conversely, we have gained inhabitants from other time paths.
Two cohorts of the Twenty-second Roman Legion were left upon our soil near Ithaca, New York. Four families of Chinese peasants essayed to pick berries in what they considered a miraculous strawberry-patch in Virginia, and remained there when that section of ground returned to its proper milieu.
A Russian village remains in Colorado. A French settlement in the—in their time undeveloped—Middle West. A part of the northern herd of buffalo has returned to us, two hundred thousand strong, together with a village of Cheyenne Indians who had never seen either horses or firearms. The passenger pigeon, to the number of a billion and a half birds, has returned to North America.
But our losses are heavy. Besides those daring individuals who were carried away upon the strange territories they were exploring, there are the overwhelming disasters affecting Tokio and Rio de Janeiro and Detroit. The first two we understand. When the causes of oscillation sidewise in time were removed, most of the earth sections returned to their proper positions in their own time paths. But not all. There is a section of Post-Cambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee. The Russian village in Colorado has been mentioned, and the French trading post in the Middle West. In some cases sections of the oscillating time paths remained in new positions, remote from their points of origin.
That is the cause of the utter disappearance of Rio and of Tokio. Where Rio stood, an untouched jungle remains. It is of our own geological period, but it is simply from a path in time in which Rio de Janeiro never happened to be built.
On the site of Tokio stands a forest of extraordinarily primitive type, about which botanists and paleontologists still debate. Somewhere, in some space and time, Tokio and Rio yet exist and their people still live on. But Detroit.
We still do not understand what happened to Detroit. It was upon an oscillating segment of earth. It vanished from our time, and it returned to our time. But its inhabitants did not come back with it. The city was empty—deserted as if the hundreds of thousands of human beings who lived in it had simply evaporated into the air. There have been some few signs of struggle seen, but they may have been the result of panic. The city of Detroit returned to its own space and time untouched, unharmed, unlooted, and undisturbed. But no living thing, not even a domestic animal or a caged bird, was in it when it came back. We do not understand that at all.
Perhaps if Professor Minott had returned to us, he could have guessed at the answer to the riddle. What fragmentary papers of his have been shown to refer to the time upheaval have been of inestimable value. Our whole theory of what happened depends on the papers Minott left behind as too unimportant to bother with, in addition, of course, to Blake’s and Harris’ account of his explanations to them. Tom Hunter can remember little that is useful. Maida Haynes has given some worth-while data, but it covers ground we have other observers for. Bertha Ketterling also reports very little.
The answers to a myriad problems yet elude us, but in the saddlebags given to Minott by Blake as equipment for his desperate journey through space and time, the answers to many must remain. Our scientists labor diligently to understand and to elaborate the figures Minott thought of trivial significance. And throughout the world many minds turn longingly to certain saddlebags, loaded on a led horse, following Minott and Lucy Blair through unguessable landscapes, to unimaginable adventures, with revolvers and textbooks as their armament for the conquest of a world.
THE TIME TRAGEDY
Raymond A. Palmer
• This is the first story we have had from this author in more than four years, and we are sure that you are glad to see his return. We sincerely believe that during the next few years he will become one of the leading science-fiction authors. After reading this short story, you will agree with us that he has a style far from amateurish.
Here we have the time-travel problem tackled from a new angle. Whether the author’s purpose is to prove the impossibility of time-travel or not we will leave for your own judgment.
• “Yup, the judge is taking it pretty hard. Y’see, the boy’s his only son, and him being missin’ this way for more’n a month without no word; well, if you knew as well as I do the way them two has been pals, you’d kinds get the way the judge is taking it.” Police Lieutenant McKennedy shifted his plug of tobacco to the other jaw and observed the big feet of the sergeant on the desk before him.
“Funny where he went,” came a voice from behind the feet, “just seemed to drop clean out of sight.”
“You said it. I ain’t never seen anything . . . dang it, there goes the phone again.” McKennedy reached over and yanked the instrument to his chest. “Police headquarters,” he barked. “Oh, hello, judge, no word yet . . . what!”
The sergeant’s feet thumped to the floor at the incredulous enunciation of the last word. McKennedy clapped his hand over the mouthpiece.
“My God, sarge, the judge is going nuts . . . says he’s going to commit suicide. Get out the squad and hurry down to his place while I try to stall him.”
McKennedy removed his hand from die mouthpiece as the sergeant turned on his heel. “Wait a minute, judge; say that again.”
The voice from the receiver sounded clearly in the silence of the office. “I said I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to go insane otherwise.”
“Good Lord, judge, don’t do that. We’ll find the boy soon now . . .”
“No you won’t. He’s dead.”
“Who told you that? We’ve no report indicating anything . . .”
“I tell you he’s dead! And I killed him! Now listen, McKennedy; my mind is going and I’ve got to tell you before I die. I killed him, I tell you, over thirty years ago!”
McKennedy’s face paled at the terror shrilling into his ear through the receiver, but his attempt at interruption was vain. There was no stopping the voice. It rang on.
“Don’t try to stop me. I’ve got to tell the story from the beginning. You’ve got to believe it. This afternoon the photographer delivered the prints of a snapshot I took just before William disappeared. Then the newspapers called asking for some information about the missing boy, and I got out an old scrapbook of family clippings. A similarity between the photo I had just received and an old newsprint picture drew my attention . . . but I must begin at the beginning or you won’t understand.” And this is the judge’s story:
* * *
In the spring of 1901, two years after I took the bench, my father, Andrew Gregory, was murdered. I remember the night horribly well. Father had gone into the library to secure a book on law to substantiate a point in argument, while I remained seated before the comfortable fire in the living room—you know the situation; the house is the same now as it was then. Suddenly I heard a peculiar whining noise, the noise that a swiftly running dynamo might make, then a crash. Father cried out and I dashed toward the library to investigate, but I was too late. On the floor, blood oozing from a deep wound in his head, was Father, and standing over him in an attitude of stupefaction was a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old. A heavy andiron from the library fireplace was in his hand.
For a moment we faced each other, the young fellow staring at me with what seemed, at the time, an unnaturally horrified air. I tell you, that young man was more terrified at the sight of me than he was of the deed he had just committed.
“You!” he gasped, Then pale as a ghost, but with an astounding alacrity, he leaped from a window and was gone.
Our police department was as efficient as it is now, and before the night was over, he was in a cell.
I went down to see him the next day.
When I appeared at the entrance to his cell, he leaped to his feet, presenting an extremely disheveled countenance to my view—a face that had gone through hell.
“God, no!” he cried, thrusting an arm before his eyes protectingly. “It can’t lie true!”
“But it is, you scoundrel!” I retorted. “Young man, do you realize that you are a murderer?”
He did not answer, continuing to cower hack in that strange terror of me.
“What is your name?” I tried another question.
He turned downright ashen then, dropping his arm from his eyes to stare into mine. “William Gregory,” he choked out as if the words were the hardest he had ever spoken.
I was taken aback. It was something of a shock to learn that his last name was the same as mine, and thus, of course, also that of his victim, I remember how the newspapers played that up.
I pursued my questioning. “What was your errand in my house last night? You don’t look like a thief.”
He ignored my question, continuing to stare at me. I grew uncomfortable under the horror possessing the depths of those black eyes. Then suddenly he burst out, “Tell me,” he begged, “tell me, what year is this? They told me it was . . .” he halted, as if dreading to mention it.
“What year?” I asked in an astounded tone. “Why it’s 1901, of course. Are you trying to feign insanity? If you are, you aren’t going to get away with it.”
• At once he dropped to his cot, a blank look of despair settling upon his face, and he addressed no one in particular. “William Gregory—1901—sentenced to . . . no!” His shout was sudden and determined. “No, I’m not insane. My mind is as clear as yours—a whole lot clearer. As to what I was doing in your house last night, 1 cannot tell you. You would not believe, nor would it change the course of events were I to tell you. What has been, must be.”
From that moment on, McKennedy, I marveled with everyone else at the silence the youth steadfastly maintained. All through the trial we could get nothing from him but an admission of his guilt and the meaningless statement that what had been, must be. The jury found him guilty in what was claimed record time. They were influenced by what the papers decried as “incredible stubbornness and an apparent indifference to his crime.”
On May 29. 1901, I sentenced him to hang by the neck until he should be dead—on July 8 the sentence was carried out. I have the clippings before me bearing those fatal dates. Until this day I have had no reason to examine them closely in an effort to refresh my memory, but now they burn in my brain in letters of fire.
But to continue my story in proper sequence, William Gregory, the murderer, became but a dim, hardly remembered memory that finally faded out entirely.
In 1908 I married, and in 1909 my son was born. A momentary recollection of the case flashed into my mind at the news that my wife had selected William as the name for my son, but I dismissed it as unworthy of mention, since she seemed so thoroughly to like the name.
