Time Travel Omnibus, page 219
“Look out!” yelled De Witt, as Hedges almost stopped his time-travel at a point that intersected the space-time track of a big truck. No sound came; you could move while traveling in time, but you couldn’t hear. Hedges saw his danger and speeded up again.
Hedges gave up time-flight: since it had only one dimension, you could always find a man by moving back and forth along it far enough. He began running physically again, De Witt after him. They raced down Pennsylvania Avenue. De Witt stole a glance at his watch. It read 1959, Hedges, he thought, must have had that bomb ready so that he could carry out his threat by going into the past and blowing up some innocent bystanders. De Witt, tough as he was, was shocked. He reached for his pistol, which he had hoped not to have to use.
Hedges was getting winded. He bumped into a pedestrian. De Witt felt a psychic jar run through him.
Hedges bumped another pedestrian. The pistol vanished from De Witt’s grasp, and an umbrella took its place. He knew what had happened: the bumping of the pedestrian, a trivial matter in itself, was one of those first links in a chain of events that change history.
They were approaching a traffic-circle. In the middle of this was a circular bit of park with an ornamental fountain. A lot of people were sitting around the fountain. De Witt grasped Hedges’ intention when Hedges pulled out his bomb. If he couldn’t get away, he was going to change history right there.
De Witt dodged a couple of automobiles, and with straining lungs caught up with Hedges. He hooked the umbrella-handle around Hedges’ ankle. Brakes squealed and Hedges fell in front of a car. De Witt leaped on him. Again came that jarring sensation. De Witt knew that they Were both changing as they struggled. People were looking at them, and the sight was entering into their histories . . .
Hedges got the pin out of his bomb just as De Witt remembered his paralyzing eye. He blinked his real eye, and sighted the phoney on the back of Hedges’ neck. The bomb fell to the asphalt. De Witt snatched it up and tossed it into the fountain. He screamed: “Duck!” People looked at him blankly. Then the bomb went off, sending up a fountain of water and tossing a statue of a Triton high in the air.
The jarring sensation became almost unbearable. De Witt was horrified to feel that he had grown a beard.
A couple of people were cut a little by flying shreds of concrete. But the heavy concrete rim of the fountain had stopped all the bomb-fragments.
A police-car appeared. De Witt became aware, in that second, of many things he hadn’t had time to notice—the ancient appearance of the motor-cars; the colorful costume of the people (colorful, that is, in comparison with the grim black-and-white of his own time).
Hedges lay on the asphalt looking blankly up at him. De Witt stooped down, took the setter of Hedges’ time-watch between the fingers of his left hand, and grasped the setter of his own watch with his right fingers. He gave both setters a twist.
THEY WERE still in the traffic-circle. But it was early morning, and almost nobody in sight. The fountain supported another Triton, very new-looking. De Witt had tried to send them ahead one year, and had succeeded.
The effect of the paralysis wore off Hedges; he crawled over to the curb around the fountain and sat on it with his head in his hands.
De Witt looked at him sharply. “Say,” he said, “you aren’t the same guy.”
“You aren’t cither.”
There was little doubt of that; De Witt was six inches taller than he had been, and he still had the horrible beard. His hair was disgustingly long. Mixed up with his memory of his career as a C.B.I. man came another memory, of an easy-going life on a microscopic income, devoted to disreputable friends and the writing of quantities of stickily sentimental poetry.
“I don’t know why I did it,” said Hedges. “I’m not ambitious. All I want is a quiet place in the country.”
“That’s because you aren’t the same man,” said De Witt. “I’m not cither. I’m a damned poet.” He looked at the flower-bed around the fountain, and began to compose:
“The buttercup looks at the yellow rose,
“And loves, as I love thee, who knows?
“But the bee won’t fly to both at once,
“And the buttercup’s love—”
“What rhymes with ‘once’ ?”
“Dunce,” said Hedges. “Are you going to do that all the time?”
“Probably.”
“It’s awful. But aren’t you going to arrest me or something?”
“N-No. I’m not a policeman any more.” He ran his hand through his long hair. “I think I’ll just stay here and be a poet.”
“I really ought to be arrested.”
“You’ll have to go back—or forward—to your own time and give yourself up, then. I don’t want you.”
Hedges sighed. “The best-laid schemes of mice and men—in changing the history leading up to our time, we of course changed our own history and background. I think I’d like this time too. I brought quite a wad of money along; it ought to be good. I’ll buy a little place in the country and raise flowers, and you can come out and write poetry about them.”
“Russell!”
“Mendez!” Friends for life, they shook hands.
THE SOUNDLESS, motionless earthquake brought Coordinator Bloss and Vincent M. S. Collingwood to their feet. They stared at each other in terror until the disturbance subsided.
“You’ve changed,” said Bloss.
“So have you, Your Efficiency.”
“Not very much though.”
“No, thank God. I imagine Hedges has done all the damage he can. What’s this?”
On the Chief Executive’s desk appeared two time-watches, and a pencilled note. The note read:
To His Efficiency the Co-ordinator of North
America, or to
Vincent M.S. Collingwood, Director of
the C.B.I.:
We’ve decided to stay here, in 1960. We will try not to disturb the space-time structures any more than is necessary for the rest of our lives. The time watches we are sending back to you, as a means of transporting this note. We advise you to destroy them utterly.
If you want to see how I made out, look up a late twentieth century poet of my name. Regards,
MENDEZ S.D. DE WITT
Bloss pulled out volume Dam to Edu of the encyclopedia. “Here he is,” he announced. “Yes, he was quite a well-known poet. Married in 1964, no children. Died in 1980. It even mentions his friend Hedges. I bet that story wasn’t in the encyclopedia last week. What did you do with those watches?”
Collingwood was staring popeyed at the blank desk. “Nothing—they up and disappeared. That’s the most sinister thing I ever saw.”
“Not at all,” said the Co-ordinator. “Hedges and De Witt disturbed the history between their time and ours to the point where Hedges never did any timetravel backwards in our time. So those time-watches never existed.”
“Let’s see—the watches never existed—but they were on the desk a minute ago—but—they took Hedges back so he could make it impossible for him to have done the thing he did to enable him to go back to make it impossible for him to go back—”
Bloss got out a bottle and a couple of glasses. “My dear Collingwood,” he said, “don’t drive yourself crazy trying to resolve the paradoxes of time travel. The watches are one, and I for one say it’s a good thing. Have a drink.”
Collingwood snatched up his glass. “Now, Your Efficiency, you’re talking sense!”
THE END.
HE WASN’T THERE!
John B. Michel
The little man offered ten years of time-travel for ten cents, but Winant only took two. Two, he found, were plenty!
KELLY wasn’t often in New York. When he did get to the city, it was usually on business, and he seldom had more than a few hours a day, for a week at the most, which were unconditionally his own. Those hours he usually spent in the company of an old pal, Winant. The manner of spending was varied, yet bounded by one definite specification: it must offer opportunity for full use of the candid camera.
“The only way to see New York,” Winant had advised him as soon as he had picked him up at the station, “is through a thin film of alcohol. It’s the greatest city in the world, but out-of-towners generally just can’t take it undiluted.” Thereupon, though it was only noon when they met, they proceeded to absorb liquor. Like sponges.
The two of them hoofed it up from Penn Station to Times Square, Kelly ticketing his baggage to be sent to his hotel. The Square was almost empty at this hour of a Summer Sunday, but there are almost always some things open and of interest for the out-of-towner, providing, of course, there is someone to point them out, and that the host fits the entertainment to the type of person he entertains.
Kelly and Winant had gone to school together ten years before. Their joint attendance at a farm-college had lasted only one year, Winant quitting at that time through lack of interest. He went on to New York to take the post of minor executive with a publishing company while Kelly finished out the course, then took an offered job as an asphalt salesman whose route covered the small towns of six states in the middle West. Winant envied Kelly his job, though his own paid more in salary. But Winant wanted, more than anything else, the atmosphere of freedom in which his candid-camera mad friend lived.
Kelly was sleepy. “Let’s take in a movie,” he suggested. “Maybe I can snap some stills.”
Winant stared at the surrounding marquees. “What do you want—first run picture or revival?”
Kelly snorted loudly. “First run! Every show on this street is a revival to me. I’ve seen all the ones I can stomach.” It was quite true, as Winant was aware. Broadway got its “premiere” showings from a week to six months after they had been played in most of the small towns of the country. There didn’t seem to be any sane reason for it, thought Winant, and it was a sore spot to his New Yorker ego.
“All right then. Let’s forget about the movies,” he said. “Tell you what—let’s take a squint at the Futurama. It’s just around the corner here. You haven’t seen that in a road company out yonder!”
Kelly shook his head. “Fair enough. Lead on. I’m just in the mood for passive entertainment.”
The Futurama, hit of the New York World’s Fair of the year before, had been moved to Times Square when the Fair closed its doors for good. The piece was an excellent advertising for the firm sponsoring it, an automobile company. Simple in concept, it had meant a great deal of planning and ingenuity, the outlay of large sums of money, and the labor of many men. You paid your quarter and you walked in. Inside the entrance, an attendant placed you in an armchair, part of a long string of chairs which moved along in an endless chain. You sat down and moved a short distance, then there was a faint dick and a voice beside your ears began a commentary on the tiny model houses and villages and roadways that were spread out before you. First, you saw a scale model of the countryside of today, with its autos, horses, barns, farmhouses, and death-dealing highways, full of intersections, blind curves, and the like. Suddenly the string of chairs rounded a curve, and you saw, in beautiful exactitude, tomorrow’s world.
“It’s all about highways, isn’t it?” commented Kelly suddenly as they were sitting down. “Seems like a sort of busman’s holiday to me, but I guess it’s too late to turn back.”
They saw it; they enjoyed it, and they came out proudly wearing white enamel buttons bearing the legend: “I Have Seen the Future!” in their lapels.
Kelly jerked against Winant in astonishment as they left, grabbing his right arm in a death-grip.
“For Heaven’s sake! What’s that?” he ejaculated.
Winant stared, too, and whipped out his camera.
THE object of their attention paused and smiled. It was a fat little man, occupying loosely the confines of a black Prince Albert coat, with a derby hat on his head. From between the slit in the tails, the end of a loud red handkerchief protruded. The man smiled again, nodding to his photographer, and began to walk up and down before the Futurama, waving a big sign tacked on a broomstick before the eyes of bystanders. In huge, perfectly printed black letters, the sign read:
DON’T BE FOOLED
The Futurama is a Phoney!
Patronize the real Stuff!
Time Travel, Inc.
TEN YEARS FOR TEN CENTS!
Satisfaction or your money back.
The bystanders looked and walked on. Some looked back, occasionally, laughing or commenting to their companions, but none paid attention of a serious nature to the little man. Presently the street was almost empty.
“For Heaven’s sake!” gasped Kelly again, trying to shake off the mental fog that was swirling about him. “Look at that guy!”
“Interesting,” agreed Winant. “Do you suppose that Incorporated part of the sign is on the level?”
“It better be. The Futurama people probably won’t care for this guy’s picketing them, and they can have him jailed in a second if it isn’t actually incorporated.”
“I wouldn’t want to see him go to jail,” said Winant reflectively. “Maybe we can do something about getting him away from here.”
Grasping Kelly’s arm, he hustled over to the little man, casting about in his mind for a suitable way of opening a conversation. “Uh—er—” he began, “we—my friend and I here—just saw the Futurama. We thought it was pretty good. What’s your service got that it doesn’t have?”
“Mine is the real thing,” was the fat little man’s answer. “It’s just what the sign says. I know how to travel in time.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Winant, who liked his chance acquaintances to be odd and interesting. Kelly, though amused for a moment by this New York City type-character, decided that the little man must be mad, wondered how he could get Winant away.
“I’m glad that someone at least shows the courtesy of asking about my service,” the fat little man went on. “I don’t think any of the others believed me—perhaps you do not, either. And I tried so hard to fit my sign to their psychology. Sales pressure, you know; the proper approach and all that soft of thing. All gone to waste. I don’t suppose that a single one of the six or seven hundred people that saw me in the time I’ve been here would be willing to put their stupid prejudices against whatever they haven’t been told a thousand times is true to the test. And—that reminds me,” he added eagerly. “Will you put me to the test—will you try me out? Remember: ‘satisfaction or your money back’, just like it says on the sign.” Winant wasn’t sleepy any more, not even a little bit. “What do you say?” he asked Kelly. “Shall we see what’s ahead for us?”
The fat little man tugged at Winant’s sleeve. “You’ve got entirely the wrong slant!” he exclaimed indignantly. “I am not a fortune teller. I will show you the future—the whole future. The future of the city and country, as a whole. Not your own, particular, individual future.”
“Fine,” replied Winant heartily. “Well, shall we?”
“I can’t,” said Kelly. “I just can’t. I’ve got to have lunch with the Sales Manager today. I told you about it, but I guess you forgot it, too, just as I did. Why don’t you go ahead and see what it’s all about; I’ll meet you—tomorrow, at around noon, in your office. We can have lunch together before I catch my train.”
THE fat little man resumed his walking up and down for awhile as the two made their arrangements. Kelly left, and Winant stood undecided for a moment. Then he walked up to the odd man, a bit put out at having been left alone. “Well—when do we start?” he asked.
The fat man looked at him blankly, as though he had forgotten he’d had a prospective customer. “Oh—you,” he said finally. “Well, could you wait a few minutes? It would hardly pay me to operate the equipment for just one person, you know. Just ten minutes, if you can wait that long. I’ll leave now if you like, but, really, my machine uses up a lot of power, and it would hardly pay me to operate the equipment for . . .”
“Okay, okay,” replied Winant. “Where shall I wait?”
“Yes, of course,” mused the little man. “You have to wait somewhere, don’t you? Well . . . Oh, I know what. Wait in my car. Here,” and he fumbled through his pockets, “I’ll give you the keys. You won’t run off with it, will you? Of course not. It’s parked right around the corner. You’ll know it—it’s a new Pontiac, red car. I like red, myself.” He handed Winant the keys, then turned away and resumed his picketing.
Winant stared after him, shrugged, and sought out the car. It was a new car, and a very nice one. Also expensive—apparently the little man was not dependent on his “Time-Travel, Inc.” for a living. Perhaps, after all, he was really just a practical joker. Winant shrugged again, unlocked the car door and got in. If the fellow was a joker he was going to a lot of trouble, and the denouement was bound to be pretty funny. Possibly even funny enough for the victim to appreciate.
Sinking back into the soft upholstery, Winant looked about him. Being single and of solitary frame of mind, he was strictly a coupe man himself, and the feeling of so much vacant space in the rear seat behind him gave him a sense of uneasiness. He twisted in his seat and peered at the back. On the floor, he discovered, was a canvas sack. He stretched and prodded it: it was almost empty, but contained some small metal objects that clinked against each other. Coins, possibly, or more probably metal parts for some gadget or other. It suddenly occurred to him that the little man might come along and find him acting inquisitively; hastily he straightened and turned to the front.
There was a radio in the car, he discovered, so, for lack of something better to do, he snapped it on. It warmed up very rapidly, he found, but he encountered difficulties when he tried to dial a station. His fingers slipped as though the plastic knobs were heavily larded with some sort of grease. But it wasn’t the knob, after all. He held his hand up before him and saw that there was unpleasant-looking grey slime, with threads of red and yellow floating in it, on his fingers.
