Time Travel Omnibus, page 230
And the girl, Laurette, she who should have been the skeleton, standing there at the mouth of the cave, her face indescribably pale, as she centered the Hampton on Braker and Yates.
Her voice edged into the aching silence.
“It’s Amos,” she said. She was silent, looking at her father’s haggard face, smiling twistedly.
“Amos,” said Overland hoarsely, saying nothing else, but in that one word showing his utter, dismaying comprehension. He stumbled forward three steps. “We thought—We thought—” He seemed unable to go on. Tears sounded in his voice. He said humbly, “We thought you were the—But no. It’s Amos!” His voice went upward hysterically.
“Stop it!” Laurette’s voice lashed out. She added softly, tenderly, “No, I’m not the skeleton. Far from it, daddy. Amos is the skeleton. He was the skeleton all along. I didn’t realize it might be that way until the ship lifted. Then it seemed that the ship was going to fall and I thought my hundred and five might help after all and anyway, I decided that the lieutenant was all alone down there. And that somehow made me think of the time all the Christmas packages tumbled down on him and how I slapped him.”
She laughed unsteadily. “That made me remember that the university sent your present with a ‘Do Not Open Before Christmas’ sticker on it. I remembered you were leaving the university and they were giving you a combination farewell gift and Christmas present. You didn’t know, but I did, that the professors decided you couldn’t possibly be back before Christmas and so they sent it to the ship. You had always told them you admired—Amos. He hung on the biology classroom wall. It seemed I suddenly knew how things had to be. I put two and two together and I took a chance on it.”
She fell silent, and the silence held for another full, shocking minute. She went on, as if with an effort.
“We threw everything out of the ship, remember? The Christmas presents, too. When I dropped from the ship later, I reached the plain and I broke open the carton with the T)o Not Open’ sticker on it, and there was Amos, as peaceful as you please. I put the ring on his finger and left him there, because I knew that some way the wind or crack-up or something would drop him in the cave. He had to turn up in the cave.
“Anyway,” she added, her lips quirking roguishly, “by our time, back there, it was December 25th.”
Masters clawed his way to his knees, his lips parted unnaturally.
“A Christmas present!” he croaked. “A Christmas present!” His face went white.
The girl said unsteadily, “Cut it out, Erie!”
She leaned weakly against the wall of the cave. “Now come up here, lieutenant, and take this gun out of my hands and don’t stare at me as if you’ve lost your senses.”
Tony forced himself to his feet, and like an automaton skirted around Braker and Yates and took the suddenly shaking weapon from her.
She uttered a weary sigh, smiled at him faintly, bemusedly, and whispered, “Merry Christmas, lieutenant!” She slumped slowly to the ground.
TONY GESTURED soundlessly at Masters. Masters, face abject and ashamed, picked her up in tender arms.
“Come up here, professor,” Tony said dully. He felt as if all the life had been pumped from his bones.
Overland came forward, shaking his head with emotion. “Amos!” he whispered. He broke in a half-hysterical chuckle, stopped himself. He hovered Laurette, watching her tired face. “At least my girl lives,” he whispered brokenly.
“Get up, Braker,” said Tony. “You, too, Yates.”
Yates rose, vaguely brushing dust from his pressure suit, his lips working over words that refused to emerge.
Braker’s voice was a hoarse, unbelieving whisper. His eyes were abnormally wide and fixed hypnotically on the skeleton. “So that’s what we went through—for a damned classroom skeleton.” He repeated it. “For a damned classroom skeleton!”
He came to his feet, fighting to mold his strained face back to normal. “Just about back where we started, eh? Well,” he added in a shaking, bitter tone, “Merry Christmas.” He forced his lips into half-hearted cynicism.
Tony’s face relaxed. He drew in a full, much-needed breath of air. “Sure. Sure—Merry Christmas. Everybody. Including Amos—whoever he used to be.”
Nobody seemed to have anything to say. Or perhaps their thoughts were going back for the moment to a pre-asteroid world. Remembering. At least Masters was remembering, if the suffering, remorseful look on his face meant anything.
Tony broke it. “That’s that, isn’t it? Now we can go back to the ship. From there to Earth. Professor—Masters—start off.” He made a tired gesture.
Masters went ahead, without a backward look, carrying the gently breathing, but still unconscious girl. Overland stole a last look at the skeleton, at Amos, where he lay, unknowing of the chaos the mere fact of his being there, white and perfect and wired together, and with a ring on his perfect tapering finger, had caused. Overland walked away hurriedly after Masters. Amos would stay where he was.
Tony smiled grimly at Braker. He pointed with his free hand.
“Want your ring back, Braker?”
Braker’s head jerked minutely. He stared at the ring, then back at Tony. His fists clenched at his sides. “No.” Tony grinned—for the first time in three weeks.
“Then let’s get going.”
He made a gesture. Braker and Yates, walking side by side, went slowly for the ship, Tony following behind. He turned only once, and that was to look at his wrecked patrol ship, where it lay against the base of the mountain. A shudder passed down his spine. There was but one mystery that remained now. And its solution was coming to Tony Crow, in spite of his effort to shove its sheerly maddening implications into the back of his mind—
PROFESSOR OVERLAND and Masters took Laurette to her room. Tony took the two outlaws to the lounge, wondering how he was going to secure them. Masters solved his problem by entering with a length of insulated electric wire. He said nothing, but wordlessly went to work securing Braker and Yates to the guide rail while Tony held the Hampton on them. After he had finished, Tony bluntly inspected the job. Masters winced, but he said nothing.
After they were out in the hall, going toward Laurette’s room, Masters stopped him. His face was white, strained in the half-darkness.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he began huskily.
“Say what?”
Masters’ eyes shifted, then, as if by a deliberate effort of will, came back.
“That I’m sorry.”
Tony studied him, noted the lines of suffering around his mouth, the shuddering pain in his eyes.
“Yeah, I know how you feel,” he muttered. “But I guess you made up for it when you tackled Braker and Yates. They might have been using electric wire on us by now.” He grinned lopsidedly, and clapped Masters on the arm. “Forget it, Masters. I’m with you all the way.”
Masters managed a smile, and let loose a long breath. He fell into step beside Tony’s hurrying stride. “Laurette’s O.K.”
“Well, lieutenant,” said Laurette, stretching lazily, and smiling up at him, “I guess I got weak in the knees at the last minute.”
“Didn’t we all!” He smiled ruefully. He dropped to his knees. She was still in her pressure suit and lying on the floor. He helped her to a sitting position, and then to her feet.
Overland chuckled, though there was a note of uneasy reminiscence in his tone. “Wait till I tell the boys at Lipton U. about this.”
“You’d better not,” Laurette warned. She added, “You broke down and admitted the ring was an omen. When a scientist gets superstitious—”
Tony broke in. “Weren’t we all?”
Masters said, dropping his eyes, “I guess we had good enough reason to be superstitious about it.” His hand went absently upward to his shoulder.
Overland frowned, and, hands behind his back, walked to the empty porthole. “All that work DeTosque, the Farr brothers, Morrell and myself put in. There’s no reason to patch up the asteroids and try to prove they were all one world. But at the same time, there’s no proof—no absolute proof—” He clicked his tongue. Then he swung on Tony, biting speculatively at his lower lip, his eyes sharpening.
“There’s one thing that needs explaining which probably never will be explained, I guess. It’s too bad. Memory? Bah! That’s not the answer, lieutenant. You stood in the cave there, and you saw the skeleton, and somehow you knew it had existed before the human race, but was not older than the human race. It’s something else. You didn’t pick up the memory from the past—not over a hundred million years. What then?” He turned away, shaking his head, came back abruptly as Tony spoke, eyes sharpening.
“I’ll tell you why,” Tony said evenly.
His head moved up and down slowly, and his half-lidded eyes looked lingeringly out the porthole toward the mountain where his wrecked patrol ship lay. “Yes, I’ll tell you why.”
Laurette, Masters and Overland were caught up in tense silence by the strangeness of his tone.
He said faintly: “Laurette and I were trapped alive in the back of the cave when the two worlds crashed. We lived through it. I didn’t know she was back there, of course; she recovered consciousness later—at the right time, I’d say!” He grinned at her obliquely, then sobered again. “I saw the skeleton and somehow I was too dazed to realize it couldn’t be Laurette. Because when the gravity was dispersed, the tension holding everything back in time was released, and everything went back to the present—just a little less than the present. I’ll explain that later.”
He drew a long breath.
“This is hard to say. I was in the back of the cave. I felt something strike the mountainside.
“That was my patrol ship—with me in it.”
His glance roved around. Overland’s breath sucked in audibly.
“Careful now, boy,” he rumbled warningly, alarm in his eyes.
TONY’S LIPS twisted. “It happens to be the truth. After my ship crashed I got out. A few minutes later I stood at the mouth of the cave, looking at the skeleton. For a minute, I—remembered. Fragmentary things. The skeleton was—horror.
“And why not? I was also in the back of the cave, thinking that Laurette was dead and that she was a skeleton. The Tony Crow at the mouth of the cave and the Tony Crow trapped in the rear of the cave were en rapport to an infinite degree. They were the same person, in two different places at the same time, and their brains were the same.”
He stopped.
Masters whispered through his clenched teeth, “Two Tony Crows. It couldn’t be.”
Tony leaned back against the wall. “There were two rings, at the same time. There were two skeletons, at the same time. Braker had the skeleton’s ring on his finger. Amos was wrapped up in a carton with a Christmas sticker on it. They were both some place else. You all know that and admit it. Well, there were two Tony Crows, and if I think about it much longer, it’ll drive me—”
“Hold it, boy!” Overland’s tone was sharp. Then he said mildly, “It’s nothing to get excited about. The mere fact of time-travel presupposes duplicity of existence. Our ship and everything in it was made of electrons that existed somewhere else at the same time—a hundred million years ago, on the pre-asteroid world. You can’t get away from it. And you don’t have to get scared just because two Tony Crows were a few feet distant from each other. Remember that all the rest of us were duplicated, too. Ship A was thrust back into time just an hour or so before Ship B landed here after being thrust forward. You see?”
Laurette shuddered. “It’s clear, but it’s—” She made a confused motion.
Overland’s tired, haggard eyes twinkled. “Anyway, there’s no danger of us running across ourselves again. The past is done for. That’s the main thing.”
Neither Laurette nor Tony said anything. They were studying each other, and a smile was beginning at the corner of Laurette’s lips. Erie Masters squirmed uncomfortably.
Overland continued, speculatively: “There was an energy loss some place. We weren’t snapped back to the real present at all. We should have come back to the present that we left, plus the three weeks we stayed back in time. Back there it was Christmas—and Laurette was quite correct when she broke open my package.” He grinned crookedly. “But it’s still more than three weeks to Christmas here. It was a simple energy loss, I guess. If I had a penc—”
Erie Masters broke in on him, coughing uncomfortably and grinning wryly at the same time. “We’d better get down to the control room and plot out our course, professor.”
“What?” Overland’s eyes widened. He looked around at the man and girl. “Oh.” He studied them, then turned, and clapped Masters on the back. “You’re dead right, son. Let’s get out!”
“I’m glad you weren’t Amos,” Tony told the girl.
“I couldn’t very well have been, lieutenant.”
He grinned, coloring slightly.
Then he took her hands in his, and put his head as close to hers as the helmets would allow.
He said, “When we get back to Earth, I’m going to put a r—” He stopped, biting at his lip. Remembrances of another time, on a pre-asteroid world, flooded back with the thought.
She started, paled. Involuntarily, her eyes turned to the open port, beyond which was a mountain, a cave, a skeleton, a ring.
She nodded, slowly, faintly. “It’s a good idea,” she murmured. She managed a smile. “But not—an emerald.”
THE END.
YESTERDAY WAS MONDAY
Theodore Sturgeon
HARRY WRIGHT ROLLED OVER and said something spelled “Bzzzzhha-a-aw!” He chewed a bit on a mouthful of dry air and spat it out, opened one eye to see if it really would open, opened the other and closed the first, closed the second, swung his feet onto the floor, opened them again and stretched. This was a daily occurrence, and the only thing that made it remarkable at all was that he did it on a Wednesday morning, and—
Yesterday was Monday.
Oh, he knew it was Wednesday all right. It was partly that, even though he knew yesterday was Monday, there was a gap between Monday and now; and that must have been Tuesday. When you fall asleep and lie there all night without dreaming, you know, when you wake up, that time has passed. You’ve done nothing that you can remember; you’ve had no particular thoughts, no way to gauge time, and yet you know that some hours have passed. So it was with Harry Wright. Tuesday had gone wherever your eight hours went last night.
But he hadn’t slept through Tuesday. Oh no. He never slept, as a matter of fact, more than six hours at a stretch, and there was no particular reason for him doing so now. Monday was the day before yesterday; he had turned in and slept his usual stretch, he had awakened, and it was Wednesday.
If felt like Wednesday. There was a Wednesdayish feel to the air.
Harry put on his socks and stood up. He wasn’t fooled. He knew what day it was. “What happened to yesterday?” he muttered. “Oh—yesterday was Monday.” That sufficed until he got his pajamas off. “Monday,” he mused, reaching for his underwear, “was quite a while back, seems as though.” If he had been the worrying type, he would have started then and there. But he wasn’t. He was an easygoing sort, the kind of man that gets himself into a rut and stays there until he is pushed out. That was why he was an automobile mechanic at twenty-three dollars a week; that’s why he had been one for eight years now, and would be from now on, if he could only find Tuesday and get back to work.
Guided by his reflexes, as usual, and with no mental effort at all, which was also usual, he finished washing, dressing, and making his bed. His alarm clock, which never alarmed because he was of such regular habits, said, as usual, six twenty-two when he paused on the way out, and gave his room the once-over. And there was a certain something about the place that made even this phlegmatic character stop and think.
It wasn’t finished.
The bed was there, and the picture of Joe Louis. There were the two chairs sharing their usual seven legs, the split table, the pipe-organ bedstead, the beige wallpaper with the two swans over and over and over, the tiny corner sink, the tilted bureau. But none of them were finished. Not that there were any holes in anything. What paint there had been in the first place was still there. But there was an odor of old cut lumber, a subtle, insistent air of building, about the room and everything in it. It was indefinable, inescapable, and Harry Wright stood there caught up in it, wondering. He glanced suspiciously around but saw nothing he could really be suspicious of. He shook his head, locked the door and went out into the hall.
On the steps a little fellow, just over three feet tall, was gently stroking the third step from the top with a razor-sharp chisel, shaping up a new scar in the dirty wood. He looked up as Harry approached, and stood up quickly.
“Hi,” said Harry, taking in the man’s leather coat, his peaked cap, his wizened, bright-eyed little face. “Whatcha doing?”
“Touch-up,” piped the little man. “The actor in the third floor front has a nail in his right heel. He came in late Tuesday night and cut the wood here. I have to get it ready for Wednesday.”
“This is Wednesday,” Harry pointed out.
“Of course. Always has been. Always will be.”
Harry let that pass, started on down the stairs. He had achieved his amazing bovinity by making a practice of ignoring things he could not understand. But one thing bothered him—
“Did you say that feller in the third floor front was an actor?”
“Yes. They’re all actors, you know.”
“You’re nuts, friend,” said Harry bluntly. “That guy works on the docks.”
“Oh yes—that’s his part. That’s what he acts.”
“No kiddin’. An’ what does he do when he isn’t acting?”
“But he—Well, that’s all he does do! That’s all any of the actors do!”
“Gee—I thought he looked like a reg’lar guy, too,” said Harry. “An actor? ’Magine!”
“Excuse me,” said the little man, “but I’ve got to get back to work. We mustn’t let anything get by us, you know. They’ll be through Tuesday before long, and everything must be ready for them.”
