Time Travel Omnibus, page 204
Walter had explained everything to me. He explained and explained every time I went over to his shop with a new part—the only trouble was, he never quite made sense.
You see, I’m a mechanic. Oh, I putter around with electricity some, and I can fix an electric toaster or even a doorbell; but I’m not what you’d strictly call a scientist. Walter is, though, and that’s how come we had the fuss.
Back about two years ago, Walter read a book, and well, he couldn’t see why, if there was a Fourth Dimension, you couldn’t monkey around with it. So he called me over one day and told me he had a machine he wanted me to help him make.
He just told me what he wanted and I fixed it up for him, or if there was no such thing I invented it. Sometimes it wasn’t as simple as it sounds, thinking up ways to bend everyday iron and copper into fool whichigigs that would fit in the way Walter said they ought to. But he paid for all of it, and I did it.
Walter said things about no single instant of Time ever being lost. Time was really “an eternally conceived Present along which one focussing instant travels endlessly at uniform speed in one direction.” Like a big road ready for use in all sections at once. One end of the road is the Past. One is the Future. The instant Now is like an automobile on this big road of Time. It started at one end, the Past, and is heading for the other—the Future—and wherever it happens to be, why, that’s the Present.
Get it? Neither do I, but that’s what Walter always kept saying to me.
But to get on with things, the only reason Time never got balled up was because some mysterious force kept the car of Now headed always in the same direction—Futureward—and once it passed a point it never came back again, never re-focused on it.
Well, Walter figured that if he could only build a machine which would reach into the Fourth Dimension, he could then reach Postward along this roadway of Time. And if he could do that, then there was no reason why he couldn’t send things into other times or bring things into our time.
This machine which Walter designed and I helped build took quite a while, and when we had it done, it would hardly stay together.
Well, the machine looked something like a cross between an oil well, a porch swing, and a Grandfather’s clock, if you get what I mean. When Walter started the motor, the wheels and the seat would start swinging back and forth, and when it began to go fast enough, it would sort of blur and disappear.
At this point it was, according to Walter, “shifting gears” and revolving its direction into the Fourth Dimension. After a moment of this shifting, it would suddenly whirl into sight again and start slowing down, bringing to us whatever it had caught from the Time Walter had sent it to.
For some reason, it always went into reverse; the Future was somehow untouchable—and that’s something that never bothered me a bit, even though it drove Walter nearly wild.
We kept trying it out, until one night the machine took my straw hat and brought back a bird instead; but I couldn’t wear a sparrow, and I told Walter so. But he just kept gawking at the bird, watching it fly around, till it finally flew out of the window. “It’s alive,” he kept yelling. “Alive!”
That same night Walter warned me not to say a word to a soul, but to come back again the next night and we’d try for a real catch. Real catch! Wow!
SO here he was on the floor of Walter’s house, on the outskirts of Boston, snoring away as though he were home in his own century. As I started to say once before, we didn’t know he was Paul Revere then: to us he was just somebody with a pigtailed wig that didn’t fit him and a pair of dirty breeches a size-and-a-half too tight.
We scuttled him up onto the table, where his big boots smashed a packet of vacuum tubes I’d set there just to make sure they would be safe. After a while then this thing we’d gotten sat up blinking stupidly from Walter to me and back again. The liquor Walter had funnelled into him was beginning to take full effect with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
He grunted, fumbling in a pocket for a watch bigger than my alarm clock. “ ’Sblood! What is the hour, good gennelmen? I’ve work to do this night.”
“How—how do you feel after your—trip?” asked Walter.
The fellow was squinting past the raven-tressed wart on his nose to study the face of his Big Ben. He was muttering to himself.
“Barkeep! Barkeep! A mug of ale and I must be off. Haste, prithee!” He fought himself into a sitting position, and belched manfully.
Walter tried to break it gently, like a salesman with his foot in the door. “Ah, Mr.—ah—what is the name, sir?” he limped, stalling.
“Name?” the aroma of good old English ale he sent my way was thick enough to bear a foam. “My name? ’S Paul—Paul Revere, by my powdered, pasted periwinkle! Name, thrice-blessed name of a gennelman and a—a gennelman, sirs.” He smacked his lips. “And now, my ale, barkeep! Thunderation, but I must go!” He cocked one eye at us and belched again. “A thousand pardons,” he mumbled, “a thousand pardons. Barkeep—saddle my good mount Brondelbuss, for I must be off and away! I tell thee there’s riding to be done this night!”
“I beg your pardon, Mr.—Mr. Revere,” Walter had begun—and then it hit him like a truck. “Ride? Revere? Paul Revere? YOU?” He nearly stabbed him dead with that long bony finger of his. “Lord, Hank, it’s—PAUL REVERE!”
“S-s-sh!” Paul Revere clapped a big hand over his loose lips, wildly waving the other at Walter. “S-s-sh—don’t shout m’ name. I’m on serious business for the colonies—secret business!”
“For Pete’s sake,” I yelped, “he’s a G-Man of yesterday!”
But he ignored me and Walter jabbed me angrily in the ribs.
“Prithee,” rambled on the man out of the Past, “prithee, keep m’ name quiet, or you’ll give me away to these common tipplers here.” Then, picking up my tool-kit from the table and trying to peer in it, he roared: “By my saddle-girth! Is my tankard empty yet?”
I saw my chance. “S’cuse me, Mr. Revere,” I put in, handing him his wig and hat, which had fallen off his head when we’d rolled him’ onto the table, “but here’s your wig, sir. And maybe you can tell me something of a brand new straw hat, size—”
“Hank!” Walter flagged me down, as Revere put his wig on backward so that its pigtail draggled into his mouth. “It’s Paul Revere himself, don’t you understand? Just think, Hank—the 18th Century—one hundred and fifty years—and he’s here with us, alive and breathing! Paul Revere out of history—right here with you and me!”
“ ’S’lie!” thundered Revere, banging my tool kit on the table with a smash. “I don’t come from—from where you said, at all. I live right here in village, an’ my credit should be good for one li’l smidgeon of ale. By my powder horn and candle-snuffer, though—I’ll never come here again unless I get some service! I’ve riding to do this night, I tell thee!”
He rolled off the table onto his feet, immediately sagging as if someone were pulling him at the pockets. Walter gave him a shove and flattened him on the table again.
Walter was almost hysterical, his eyes dancing as he looked at the calendar on the wall behind us.
“Hank—look! It’s the eighteenth of April!”
“ ’Struth, ’tis!” boomed Revere. He grabbed his wig and swung it exultantly by its pigtail. “April the eighteenth, ’75, and Paul Revere’ll make history tonight. History, I say—one if by land, two if by sea . . . Another ale and I’ll have eyes like a hawk! Barkeep! ’Swounds, where is the poltroom?”
“One if by land—” I croaked in surprise. “Hey, that’s in the poem!”
“Twah!” Revere howled, wriggling his head back into his wig, now turned completely wrongside out. “Glory be, good gennelmen, and I swear a merry oath—’tis no poem. ’Tis a song! One if by land—two if by sea—I’ve a tankard of ale that’s due to me! A pox on us all—where’s my ale?”
“It’s getting close to midnight,” said Walter suddenly, his eyes wide.
“Midnight! Too late for ale—history’s in the making. One if by land, two if by sea—and Revere’ll send the alarm ringing through every Middlesex village from Charleston to Lexington and back again!”
Paul Revere notched his belt. He shot his feet at the floor with a sudden flurry of determination. “Must go,” he boomed.
“Well, if you gotta go—” I began, but Walter butted in.
For the past couple of minutes, Walter had stood with his mouth open and his face a complete blissful blank. But now he suddenly quivered all over, grabbed Paul Revere by his coat sleeve, and moaned: “Hank! Hank! We can’t let him go out of here—what’ll we do?”
“What’s this?” Revere hooted, regarding us with his bloodshot eyes. “Brigands in the tavern? Rascals, let me free!”
He jerked his arm loose with a twist that buckled his legs under him and he finally compromised by sinking to one knee. “Whew,” he muttered, eyes closed desperately, “I’m not so steady as I might be, with what I’ve to do this night. Help me to horse—strap m’ feet to the stirrups. Blast my boiled buttons, I’ve drunk too much for duty!” He sighed, and sank a little further toward the floor.
Walter was still just staring at him. “Hank,” he pleaded, turning my way, “don’t you get it? We’ve got to get him back in the machine right away! Don’t you see? We’ve botched up history, Hank. This is the eighteenth of April—the night of his famous ride. The British man-of-war Somerset is on her way into the Charles’ River this very instant!”
“Huh?”
“Oh, you dope!” Walter exploded. “Can’t you see that if Paul Revere doesn’t get back to his own Time to warn the colonists, the American Revolution may never come off?”
“HUH?”
That was when it hit me. “But, Walter, that’s old stuff—it’s been done and forgotten a hundred and fifty years ago!”
“Don’t be a mucklehead! Can’t you grasp the fact that the Past is just as real as the Present? Use your head, Hank. Look—Paul Revere, in ’75, on the eighteenth of April, was all set to make history as planned, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Shut up. Now, all at once a couple of blamed fools like us reach into the Past where we have no business, and snag Revere out of his own Time and yank him into our own year—1940!”
“Yeah, but—”
“Shut up. Now, here’s Paul on the floor of our room in 1940, half-crocked on ale and the Scotch we loaded him with a while back. How d’you suppose he’s going to be in two different centuries at once?”
“Well, he’s here now—”
“So he can’t be back in ’75 where he should be! And if he isn’t back in history where he belongs, he can’t warn the minute-men that the British are coming. And if he can’t do that, General Gage on the Somerset will land his troops and probably wipe out the American military supplies at Concord and cripple our forces like they intend to do. And they’ll capture John Hancock and Samuel Adams, too—they’re part of what Gage is after! And if that happens, then the Revolution’ll be over before it gets going, and the Redcoats’ll win and retain America as a British colony, and then—Oh, Hank, we’ve gone and bungled things so the whole history of our nation will be remade in a single night, and a hundred and fifty years of American freedom will be blotted out—be non-existent.”
“Walter,” I tried to calm him, “now, Walter, it can’t happen that way. What’s done is done—history is history, and—And, look, Walter! Maybe it’ll come out all right anyway!”
“Maybe,” cried Walter, a wild gleam in his eye, “but we don’t dare take that chance! Hank, we’ve not a second to lose. We’ve got to get Paul Revere back to his own time before the British ruin everything!”
So there we were.
It was half-past ten. In a little over an hour back there in that other world where Paul Revere should have been, the Redcoats would be sighted by Paul’s buddy in the belfry and the signal would be flashed to Revere himself, on the other side of the river.
And it was up to us to meet a crisis which occurred a hundred and fifty years before we were born!
How we went about it I don’t know.
While I worked on the machine with every tool I had, Walter was in no less of a dither pouring black coffee down the throat of a very much bewildered Paul Revere. By dint of much shouting and repetition, and the aid of a bucket of cold water in the groaning hero’s face, Walter was finally able to bring him to the realization that something was definitely haywire. We raced like madmen against the ominous ticking of the wall clock, fighting against each second that drove us that much closer to the moment when the Old North Church belfry should gleam with a lantern light back there in ’75.
FINALLY I wheeled, “Ready!” I wrapped my wrench around the last loose nut. Sweat cascaded down my face in a regular Niagara, but I was done, and it was just past eleven o’clock. “Throw him in the cage!” I panted.
Walter was busy all this time going over the situation endlessly with Paul Revere. “Don’t you understand?” he moaned hoarsely. “It’s our fault . . . It’s the Fourth Dimension.”
“Fourth Dimension? ’Sblood and pantaloons! Could you repeat it all just once more, citizen?”
“It’s no use,” Walter wept. “It just isn’t any use!”
“Looky!” I shrieked now, getting almost as mad as I was scared. “This is 1940. You’re from 1775 and you must get back. See?” Then I gave him a good hard shove toward the cage of the Time Swing, and, “Now you get the drift, buddy,” I finished, “we got no time to lose. Hop in!”
“But, good gentlemen—” He was getting a little of our own anxiety, now. Who wouldn’t, with two bleary-eyed and chalky faces gaping at him. Paul Revere was cold sober now—cold sober and plenty panicky.
“You—you don’t mean the Redcoats have already come?”
“You see, Einstein—” Walter began. “Skip Einstein—” I shoved Walter away. I jerked Paul Revere to his feet by the lapels of his funny coat. “Now, squat!”
He squatted. Huddled there in that big metal cage, surrounded on all sides by wheels and pistons, his eyes were popping with an uncomprehending fright.
“How’ll he find out what the British are going to do?” Walter turned to me.
“For Pete’s sake—tell him!” I yelped, busy wrapping Revere’s numb fingers around some arm-supports on the sides of the cage. “Now hang on tight so you won’t spill out somewhere in the Gay Nineties.” Then to Walter again: “Tell him—you know how it all came out! Tell him—and for God’s sake, throw that switch!”
Walter’s eyes lit up. “We know what happened, don’t we? By sea! Two lamps, Revere—that’s the signal! Two, man, d’ you understand?”
Paul Revere was nodding so hard his wig slid off into his lap. “By sea—” he was echoing, like a school kid, “two lamps in the Old North tower. By sea! I knew it!” His face dropped again. “But Brondelbuss—what have you done with my horse?”
“Sit still! Walter—that switch!” Walter leapt at the control-panel, his hands buried in switches up to his wrists. “Close your eyes and count twenty;” he sputtered, “then grab the first horse you can find—and light out for Lexington!”
“But—” Revere began . . .
Then Walter slammed everything home.
THERE came a wheeze, a jerk, a whirring thump, and the Time Swing trembled into life.
Then Walter howled. “Grab ’er, Hank—she’s tipping!”
Faster and faster, and the old machine was beginning to groan and strain forward like it always did. I made a jump for her supports and hung on, the nuts and bolts I had so laboriously tightened a minute ago hopping about me like popcorn.
Then the gear-shifting began. Our anachronistic friend was now nothing more than a bluish blur with a frightened look running across it, slowly creeping off at right angles to everything else in the universe—climbing into that infernal Fourth Dimension.
Walter gulped.—“I—I think it’s working.”
The next second I thought he’d drop dead. Two of the wildly stomping beams of the rocking oil-well support of the Time Swing tore unexpectedly loose from their moorings, and the whole kaboodle of machinery waltzed in a crazy circle right across the room, leaving me holding about twenty pounds of loose ends in my hands. I stabbed Walter with a look and whirled back.
The seat in the cage was empty.
“It’s busted,” said Walter, dully.
I couldn’t believe it myself.
There came a long pause.
“We’ll soon know,” Walter said quietly.
I didn’t feel any too good all of a sudden, either. After all, even if my forefathers didn’t come over on the Mayflower, I am an American, and proud of this Depression-bitten promontory of ours. And right at this moment I loved America, and I hated to think that Walter and me had tossed her right smack in the laps of the Redcoats back there on that fateful night a century and a half before either of us was born.
“Hank.” If there had been a deep pit under the floor of Walter’s shack, that is where his voice would have come from. “He didn’t make it. The Swing didn’t hold long enough. He couldn’t have made it. We threw him out in some unknown year—threw him away forever . . .”
I looked at the clock and shook my head. “He’d have had time to make it, too. Ain’t quite eleven yet. Had till midnight, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” mourned Walter gently. “ ‘ ’Twas twelve by the village clock,’ ” he quoted sadly, “ ‘when he galloped into Medford town.’ Yes—if only the machine had held, he’d have made it in good time.” Walter sighed.
“Yeah. And then we’d still be American citizens, huh?”
“YES, Hank.” He was slowly shoving parts of the machine back together again. Absently, I chipped in with my wrench on a few bolts.
“We lost the Revolution, huh?”
“We will—at dawn, I guess, Hank. Throw me that bundle of wire, will you?”
I tossed it to him. I tightened something more with my wrench. “I wonder if he didn’t make it, though,” I said.
