Time Travel Omnibus, page 171
“ ‘Hold my hand,’ she said—and I held her hand. She thought. ‘Tell me that you love me,’ she required. I told her that I loved her. ‘But look at me when you say it,’ she demanded—and I looked into her fleshless face with the thin lips that always reminded me of alum and said again that I loved her. Again she took thought, and I got the impression that she was inspecting her sensations. ‘Kiss me,’ she ordered; and when I did she slid to the ground in a think!
“ ‘There are mysteries in there somewhere,’ she said when I pulled her up. ‘I shall have to give a great deal of thought to them.’
“I was in a hurry! I told her—Lord forgive me!—that she was clearly falling in love with me! And within herself she found something—I can’t imagine what—that encouraged the idea. I struck while the iron was—well, not at absolute zero.
“ ‘Oh, come on,’ I urged her. ‘You see how we love each other; let’s get married and get it over with.’
“ ‘No, you’ll have to court me,’ she answered, and I’ll swear she was being coy. ‘And court me for a long time, too,’ she added. ‘I found out all about it, in your time. It takes months.’
“This was terrible! ‘But why wait? Why? We love each other. Look at Romeo and Juliet! Remember?’
“ ‘I liked that young man Rudy better,’ she came back at a tangent.
“ ‘You mean the man in the night club?’ I asked.
“ ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘He seemed to be singing just to me.’
“ ‘Not singing—crooning!’ I corrected irritably.
“ ‘Yes, crooning,’ she allowed. ‘You croon to me, Frick.’
“Imagine it! Me, of all people; she, of all people; and out in the middle of that field in broad daylight!
“But did I croon? I crooned. You have not seen me at the heights yet!
“ ‘More,’ she said abstractedly. ‘I think I feel something.’
“I crooned some more.
“ ‘Something with love and above in it,’ she ordered.
“I made up something with love and above in it.
“ ‘And something with you and true,’ she went on.
“I did it.
“ ‘Now kiss me again.’
“And I did that!
“Thank Heaven she flopped into another think! I escaped to the woods while she was unconscious, and did not see her again till the next day.
“My friends, this was the ignoble pattern of my life for the two weeks that followed.
“I suffered; how I suffered! There I was, all a-burning to be the author of a new civilization, luxuriating in advance at thought of titanic tasks complete; and there she was, surely the most extraordinary block to superhuman ambition that ever was, forever chilling my ardor, ruthlessly demanding to be courted! I held hands with her all over that portion of time; I gazed into her eyes at the tomb of old Hydrocephalus himself; I crooned to her at midnight; and I’ll bet that neighborhood was pitted for years in the places she suddenly sat down to meditate on in the midst of a kiss!
“She had observed closely—all too closely—the technique of love overtures here in our time, and noted particularly the effect on the woman, so she must needs always be going off into a personal huddle to see if, perhaps, she was beginning to react in the desired manner!
“Ah, there was brains! How glad I am that I’m dumb!
“I BEGAN to lose weight and go around tired. I saw that our courtship could go on forever. But she saved me with an idea she got out of one of those novels she had read. She told me one rainy morning, brightly, that it might be a good thing if we did not see each other for a couple of months. She had so very, very much to think over, and, incidentally, how sorry she was for her poor countrymen who had died without dreaming life could hold such wealth of emotional experience as she had accumulated from me!
“By then I was as much as ever in a rush to get my revised race off under their own power, but I was physically so exhausted that my protests lacked force, and I had to give in. So we made all arrangements and had our last talk. It was fully understood that I was to come back in two months and take her as my bride. She showed me how to operate the traveler. I set the controls, and in a matter of a minute I was back here in this room.
“But I tricked her. That is, in a sense. For I didn’t wait two months. The idea occurred to me to straddle that period in the traveler—so in only another minute I was materializing in the time two months away that was to call back and claim her! I was thankful for that machine, for the long ordeal had left my body weak and my nerves frazzled, and I don’t know how I could have stood so long a delay. You see, I was in such a hurry!
“Ah, had I known! The catastrophe was already upon me! Note its terrible, brief acceleration!
“When I arrived, all was exactly as before. The great building was as dusty, the community as deserted, the block of cells just as morbid as when I left. Only the fields had changed. I found Pearl sitting before the tomb of Hydrocephalus, meditating.
“ ‘I’m surprised to find you back so soon,’ were her words of greeting. ‘It seemed only a week.’
“ ‘Did you have a good time, my Pearl-of-great-price?’ I asked tenderly. (She had come to insist on that name. Once, near despair, I had used it with a different meaning, and afterward she required me to lash myself with it whenever I addressed her.)
“ ‘It was a period of most interesting integration,’ she replied. ‘In fact, it has been a precious experience. But I have come to realize that we were hasty in terminating the noble lives of my fellow men.’
“This was ominous! I made her go for a walk in the fields with me. Three times on the way out she found things I lightly mentioned to be problems requiring immediate squatting and meditating!
“I sensed that this was the crisis, and it was. I threw all my resources into an attempt to force immediate victory. I held her hands with one of mine, hooked my free arm around her waist, placed my lips to hers and crooned, ‘Marry me right now, darling! I can’t wait! I love you, I adore you, I am quite mad over you!’—and damn it, at the word mad she squatted!
“I picked her up and tried it again, but like clockwork, on the word mad she went down again. Oh, I was mad over her, all right!
“I was boiling! You see, I had to hurry so! She was changing right under my nose!
“I fairly flew back to the time machine. I was going to learn once and for all what my future with regard to a potential human race was to be. I set its dials one year ahead.
“This time I found Pearl in the vacant cell. She was distinctly older, dryer, thinner, and her head was larger in size. She sat on the dais as had the others; and there was a light dust on her clothing——
“ ‘It is strange that you should come at this moment,’ she said in a rusty voice. ‘I was thinking of you.’
“With the last word she closed her eyes—so she should not see me, only think of me. I saw that the food box was full. Despair in my heart, I went back to the traveler.
“For a long time I hesitated in front of it. I was close to the bottom. The change had happened so quickly! To Pearl it took a year, to me, only an hour; yet her acts were as fixed, her character as immutable, as if they had been petrified under the weight of a millennium.
“I nerved myself for what I had to do. Suddenly, recklessly, I jumped on the traveler, set it for seventy years ahead, and shot forth into time.
“I saw Pearl once more. I hardly recognized her in the monster who sat on the dais in her cell. Her body was shriveled. Her head had grown huge. Her nose had subsided. Her mouth was a nasty, crooked slit. She sat in thick dust; and there was an inch of it where there had once been brown hair, and more on every little upper surface.
“She had a musty smell!
“She had reverted to type. She had overcome the differentness of her start and was already far down the nauseating road which over-brained humanity has yet to go.
“As I stood looking at her, her eyelids trembled a little, and I felt she knew I was there. It was horrible; but worse was to come. The mouth, too, moved; it twisted; opened; and out of it came an awful creak.
“ ‘Tell me that you love me.’
“I fled back to my time!”
IX.
FRICK’S long narrative had come to a close, but its end effect was of such sudden horror that Miles and I could not move from the edges of our chairs. In the silence Frick’s voice still seemed to go on, exuberant, laughing, bitter, flexing with changing moods. The man himself sat slumped back in his chair, head low, drained of energy.
We sat this way long minutes, each with his thoughts, and each one’s thoughts fixing terribly on the thing we knew Frick was going to do and which we would not ask him not to do. Frick raised his head and spoke, and I quivered at the implication of his words.
“The last time she had food for only five years,” he said.
Out of the depths of me came a voice, answering:
“It will be an act of mercy.”
“For you,” Frick said. “I shall do it because she is the loathsome last.”
He got up; fixed us in turn with bitter eyes.
“You will come?” he asked.
We did not answer. He must have read our assent in our eyes. He smiled sardonically.
He went over to the door he had pointed out, unlocked it with a key from his pocket, pulled its heavy weight open, entered, switched on a light. I got up and followed, trembling, Miles after me.
“I had the traveler walled up,” Frick said. “I have never used it since.”
I saw the machine. It was as he had described it. It hung in nothingness two feet off the floor! For a moment I lacked the courage to step on, and Frick pushed me up roughly. He was beginning to show the excitement which was to gather such momentum.
Miles stepped up promptly, and then Frick himself was up, hands on the controls. “Don’t move!” he cried—and then the room was dim goldenness, then nothing at all, and I felt permeated with fathomless silence.
Suddenly there was the goldenness again, and just as suddenly it left. We were in a small dark room. It was night.
I wondered if she knew we were coming.
We went to her silently, prowlers in infinity, our carpet the dust of ages. A turn, a door—and there was field land asleep under the pale wash of a gibbous moon. A walk, a turn—and there were the thirty-six sepulchers of the degenerate dead. One, not quite dead.
I was as in a dream.
Through the tall grass we struck, stealthily, Frick in the van like a swift-stalking animal. Straight through the wet grass he led us, though it clung to our legs as if to restrain us from our single purpose. Straight in among those silent sepulchers we went. Nature was nodding; her earth stretched out everywhere oblivious; and the ages to come, they did not care. Nor cared the mummied tenants of each tomb around us. Not now, with their heads resting on their ribs. Only Frick did, very much. He was a young humanity’s agent before an old one’s degradation. Splendidly, he was judge and executioner.
He slowed down before the sepulcher where was one who was yet alive. He paused there; and I prayed. An intake of breath, and he pulled open the door and entered. Dreadfully, Miles, then I, edged in after.
The door swung closed.
The tomb was a well of ink. Unseen dust rose to finger my throat. There was a musty smell! I held my breath, but my heart pounded on furiously. Ever so faintly through the pressing silence I heard the pounding of two others.
Could it be possible that a fourth heart was weakly beating there?
Faint sounds of movement came from my left. An arm brushed my side, groping. I heard a smothered gasp; I think it was from Miles. Soon I had to have air, and breathed, in catches. I waited, straining, my eyes toward where, ahead, there might have been a deeper blackness through the incessant gloom.
Silence. Was Frick gathering courage? I could feel him peering beside me there, afraid of what he had to see.
I knew a moment when the suspense became intolerable, and in that moment it was all over. There was a movement, a scratch, a match sputtered into light; for one eternal second I looked through a dim haze of dust on a mummied monstrosity whose eyelids moved!—and then darkness swept over us again, and there was a sharp crack, as of a broken stick, and I was running wildly with Death itself at my heels through that graveyard of a race to the building where lay our traveler.
In minutes we were back in our own time; in a few more Frick had blown up the traveler and I was put of the laboratory making for the Sound, sharp on my mind, as I went, the never-to-be-forgotten picture of Miles as he had raced behind me blurting, “She blinked! Oh, she blinked!” and that other, striding godlike in the rear, a little out of his head at the moment, who waved his arms over that fulfilled cemetery and thundered:
“Sic transit gloria mundi!”
NIGHT
John W. Campbell, Jr.
The machines were far beyond anything ever conceived—machines of perfection.
CONDON was staring through the glasses with a face tense and drawn, all his attention utterly concentrated on that one almost invisible speck infinitely far up in the blue sky, and saying over and over again in the most horribly absent-minded way, “My Lord—my Lord——”
Suddenly he shivered and looked down at me, sheer agony in his face. “He’s never coming down. Don, he’s never coming down——”
I knew it, too—knew it as solidly as I knew the knowledge was impossible. But I smiled and said: “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. If anything, I’d fear his coming down. What goes up comes down.” Major Condon trembled all over. His mouth worked horribly for a moment before he could speak. “Talbot—I’m scared—I’m horribly scared. You know—you’re his assistant—you know he’s trying to defeat gravity. Men aren’t meant to—it’s wrong—wrong——”
His eyes were glued on those binoculars again, with the same terrible tensity, and now he was saying over and over in that absent-minded way, “wrong—wrong—wrong——”
Simultaneously he stiffened, and stopped. The dozen or so other men standing on that lonely little emergency field stiffened; then the major crumpled to the ground. I’ve never before seen a man faint, let alone an army officer with a D.S. medal. I didn’t stop to help him, because I knew something had happened. I grabbed the glasses.
Far, far up in the sky was that little orange speck—far, where there is almost no air, and he had been forced to wear a stratosphere suit with a little alcohol heater. The broad, orange wings were overlaid now with a faint-glowing, pearl-gray light. And it was falling. Slowly, at first, circling aimlessly downward. Then it dipped, rose, and somehow went into a tail spin.
It was horrible. I know I must have breathed, but it didn’t seem so. It took minutes for it to fall those miles, despite the speed. Eventually it whipped out of that tail spin—through sheer speed, whipped out and into a power dive. It was a ghastly, flying coffin, hurtling at more than half a thousand miles an hour when it reached the Earth, some fifteen miles away.
The ground trembled, and the air shook with the crash of it. We were in the cars and roaring across the ground long before it hit. I was in Bob’s car, with Jeff, his laboratory technician—Bob’s little roadster he’d never need again. The engine picked up quickly, and we were going seventy before we left the field, jumped a shallow ditch and hit the road—the deserted, concrete road that led off toward where he must be. The engine roared as Jeff clamped down on the accelerator. Dimly, I heard the major’s big car coming along behind us.
Jeff drove like a maniac, but I didn’t notice. I knew the thing had done ninety-five but I think we must have done more. The wind whipped tears in my eyes so I couldn’t be sure whether I saw mounting smoke and flame or not. With Diesel fuel there shouldn’t be—but that plane had been doing things it shouldn’t. It had been trying out Carter’s antigravity coil.
We shot up the flat, straight road across wide, level country, the wind moaning a requiem about the car. Far ahead I saw the side road that must lead off toward where Bob should be, and lurched to the braking of the car, the whine and sing of violently shrieking tires, then to the skidding corner. It was a sand road; we slithered down it and for all the lightness and power, we slowed to sixty-five, clinging to the seat as the soft sand gripped and clung.
Violently Jeff twisted into a branching cow path, and somehow the springs took it. We braked to a stop a quarter of a mile from the plane.
IT WAS in a fenced field of pasture and wood lot. We leaped the fence, and raced toward it; Jeff got there first, just as the major’s car shrieked to a stop behind ours.
The major was cold and pale when he reached us. “Dead,” he stated.
And I was very much colder and probably several times as pale. “I don’t know!” I moaned. “He isn’t there!”
“Not there!” The major almost screamed it. “He must be—he has to be. He had no parachute—wouldn’t take one. They say he didn’t jump——”
I pointed to the plane, and wiped a little cold sweat from my forehead. I felt clammy all over, and my spine prickled. The solid steel of the huge Diesel engine was driven through the stump of a tree, down into the ground perhaps eight or nine feet, and the dirt and rock had splashed under that blow like wet mud.
The wings were on the other side of the field, flattened, twisted straws of dural alloy. The fuselage of the ship was a perfect silhouette—a longitudinal projection that had flattened in on itself, each separate section stopping only as it hit the ground.
The great torus coil with its strangely twined wrappings of hair-fine bismuth wire was intact! And bent over it, twisted, utterly wrecked by the impact, was the main-wing stringer—the great dural-alloy beam that supported most of the ship’s weight in the air. It was battered, crushed on those hair-fine, fragile bismuth wires—and not one of them was twisted or displaced or so much as skinned. The back frame of the ponderous Diesel engine—the heavy supercharger was the anvil of that combination—was cracked and splintered. And not one wire of the hellish bismuth coil was strained or skinned or displaced.
