Time Travel Omnibus, page 247
“He was a scoundrel,” said Andrews, “but a very brilliant mind.”
Mrs. Andrews lay down again. “I was in hopes you weren’t going to dream about him any more,” she said. “I thought if I brought you up here——”
“It’s him or me,” said Andrews grimly. “I can’t stand this forever.”
“Neither can I,” Mrs. Andrews said, and there was a hint of tears in her voice.
Andrews and his host spent most of the afternoon, as Mrs. Andrews had expected, shooting at targets on the edge of the wood behind the Crowley studio. After the first few rounds, Andrews surprised Crowley by standing with his back to the huge hulk of dead tree trunk on which the targets were nailed, walking thirty paces ahead in a stiff-legged, stem-faced manner, with his revolver held at arm’s length above his head, then turning suddenly and firing.
Crowley dropped to the ground, uninjured but scared. “What the hell’s the big idea, Harry?” he yelled.
Andrews didn’t say anything, but started to walk back to the tree again. Once more he stood with his back to the target and began stepping off the thirty paces.
“I think they kept their arm hanging straight down,” Bob called to him. “I don’t think they stuck it up in the air.”
Andrews, still counting to himself, lowered his arm, and this time, as he turned at the thirtieth step, he whirled and fired from his hip, three times in rapid succession.
“Hey!” said Crowley.
Two of the shots missed the tree but the last one hit it, about two feet under the target. Crowley looked at his house guest oddly as Andrews began to walk back to the tree again, without a word, his lips tight, his eyes bright, his breath coming fast.
“What the hell?” Crowley said to himself. “Look, it’s my turn,” he called, but Andrews turned, then stalked ahead, unheeding. This time when he wheeled and fired, his eyes were closed.
“Good God Almighty, man!” said Crowley from the grass, where he lay flat on his stomach. “Hey, give me that gun, will you?” he demanded, getting to his feet.
Andrews let him take it. “I need a lot more practice, I guess,” he said.
“Not with me standing around,” said Crowley. “Come on, let’s go back to the house and shake up a drink. I’ve got the jumps.”
“I need a lot more practice,” said Andrews again.
He got his practice next morning just as the sun came up and the light was hard and the air was cold. He had crawled softly out of bed, dressed silently, and crept out of the room. He knew where Crowley kept the target pistol and the cartridges. There would be a target on the tree trunk, just as high as a man’s heart. Mrs. Andrews heard the shots first and sat sharply upright in bed, crying “Harry!” almost before she was awake. Then she heard more shots. She got up, put on a dressing gown, and went to the Crowleys’ door. She heard them moving about in their room. Alice opened the door and stepped out into the hall when Mrs. Andrews knocked. “Is Harry all right?” asked Mrs. Andrews. “Where is he? What is he doing?”
“He’s out shooting behind the studio, Bob says,” Alice told her. “Bob’ll go out and get him. Maybe he had a nightmare, or walked in his sleep.”
“No,” said Mrs. Andrews, “he never walks in his sleep. He’s awake.”
“Let’s go down and put on some coffee,” said Alice. “He’ll need some.”
Crowley came out of the bedroom and joined the women in the hallway. “I’ll need some too,” he said. “Good morning, Bess. I’ll bring him back. What the hell’s the matter with him, anyway?” He was down the stairs and gone before she could answer. She was glad of that.
“Come on,” said Alice, taking her arm. They went down to the kitchen.
Mrs. Crowley found the butler in the kitchen, just standing there. “It’s all right, Madison,” she said. “You go back to bed. Tell Clotheta it’s all right. Mr. Andrews is just shooting a little. He couldn’t sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am,” mumbled Madison, and went back to tell his wife that they said it was all right.
“It can’t be right,” said Clotheta, “shootin’ pistols at this time of night.”
“Hush up,” Madison told her. He was shivering as he climbed back into bed.
“I wish dat man would go ‘way from heah,” grumbled Clotheta. “He’s got a bad look to his eyes.”
Andrews brightened Clotheta’s life by going away late that afternoon. When he and his wife got in their car and drove off, the Crowleys slumped into chairs and looked at each other and said, “Well.” Crowley got up finally to mix a drink. “What do you think is the matter with Harry?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said his wife. “It’s what Clotheta would call the shoots, I suppose.”
“He said a funny thing when I went out and got him this morning,” Crowley told her.
“I could stand a funny thing,” she said.
“I asked him what the hell he was doing there in that freezing air with only his pants and shirt and shoes on. ‘I’ll get him one of these nights,’ he said.”
“Why don’t you sleep in my room tonight?” Mrs. Andrews asked her husband as he finished his Scotch-and-water nightcap.
“You’d keep shaking me all night to keep me awake,” he said. “You’re afraid to let me meet him. Why do you always think everybody else is better than I am? I can outshoot him the best day he ever lived. Furthermore, I have a modem pistol. He has to use an old-fashioned single-shot muzzle-loader.” Andrews laughed nastily.
“Is that quite fair?” his wife asked after a moment of thoughtful silence.
He jumped up from his chair. “What do I care if it’s fair or not?” he snarled.
She got up top. “Don’t be mad with me, Harry,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, taking her in his arms.
“I’m very unhappy,” she sobbed.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said again. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be all right. I’ll be fine.” She was crying too wildly to say anything more.
When she kissed him good night later on she knew it was really good-by. Women have a way of telling when you aren’t coming back.
“Extraordinary,” said Dr. Fox the next morning, letting Andrews’ dead left hand fall back upon the bed. “His heart was as sound as a dollar when I examined him the other day. It has just stopped as if he had been shot.”
Mrs. Andrews, through her tears, was looking at her dead husband’s right hand. The three fingers next to the index finger were closed in stiffly on the palm, as if gripping the handle of a pistol. The taut thumb was doing its part to hold that invisible handle tightly and unwaveringly. But it was the index finger that Mrs. Andrews’ eyes stayed on longest. It was only slightly curved inward, as if it were just about to press the trigger of the pistol. “Harry never even fired a shot,” wailed Mrs. Andrews. “Aaron Burr killed him the way he killed Hamilton. Aaron Burr shot him through the heart. I knew he would. I knew he would.”
Dr. Fox put an arm about the hysterical woman and led her from the room. “She is crazy,” he said to himself. “Stark, raving crazy.”
KIDNAPED INTO THE FUTURE
William P. McGivern
Sid Hunt hadn’t counted on this act in his Follies of the Future. Not a real machine out of time!
I WAS stretched flat on the stage of the Empire theater trying to get a good candid shot of the big cellophane space ship, when Sid Hunt, the small, volatile producer of Follies of the Future, came storming out of the wings.
He shot one rapid glance about the stage and then clapped both hands to his head despairingly.
“Where is she?” he moaned. “Where is she? She should be on stage now. The curtain goes up in three minutes.” I took the camera away from my face and sat up.
“So will my blood pressure,” I said. “Let me remind you that I was hired as a press agent, not as a combination nurse, stage hand, stooge and crystal ball gazer. How do I know where she is? Did you try her dressing room?”
“No,” Sid Hunt said rather sulkily. “I was going to try the obvious places last.”
“Fine,” I said, climbing to my feet. “Now while you’re looking in back of all the pictures and in all the ashtrays, I’ll try her dressing room and then her apartment. At that you’ll probably have better results.”
But I was wrong. Ruby was in her dressing room for a change, and ready to go on.
“Darling,” I said sweetly. “I don’t want to change any plans you might have made, but the curtain is going up in a few seconds and we’d all appreciate it if you’d put in an appearance for old times’ sake.”
Blissfully ignoring me, she pirouetted before the full length mirror, smiling charmingly at herself.
“Mr. Hunt,” I said patiently, “has just collapsed from nervous prostration. If there’s a streak of Florence Nightingale in you, you won’t keep him on the rack a second longer than necessary.”
“Don’t I look pretty?” she asked, noticing me for the first time.
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t lie about it. She was supposed to be wearing the Costume Of Tomorrow. If our conception of the next century’s attire is correct, I certainly envy my great-great-grandson. That is if there are girls like Ruby around to wear them.
With her lovely auburn hair and slender, beautifully molded chassis, she would have made the male inhabitants of any century sit up and stare.
I reluctantly transferred my gaze from her more obvious charms to her wide innocent brown eyes.
“Your mascara is running,” I said, “but I doubt if anyone will look up to notice it. That, however, is beside the point. You have, my beautiful bird-brain, exactly twenty-three seconds to take your place before the last curtain call. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Her eyes flew to the small clock on her vanity.
“Oh,” she wailed, “why didn’t somebody tell me?”
Without even a last glance in the mirror she skipped past me and down the corridor.
I SHOOK my head and walked after her, thinking gloomily of the fall on the head I had suffered as a baby. I always felt that it was this misfortune which had led indirectly to my becoming a press agent. For if I hadn’t been dropped on my head I might have grown up with enough common sense to keep out of this bug-house racket.
Muttering to myself like Hamlet I turned a corner and bumped squarely into the nattily attired figure of Dapper Dan Lopez.
“You’re just the man I want to see,” Dapper Dan smiled.
“The feeling is not mutual,” I growled and started off, but he caught my arm. His black eyes were gittering, but the thin smile was still on his lips.
“No sense being hard headed,” he said gently.
I turned and faced him. Dapper Dan was a front man for one of the town’s unwholesome mobsters, Tony Scarlotti. Scarlotti, whose finger was in every lucrative pie in the city, wanted a cut in on the show.
“I told you before,” I said quietly, “that Sid Hunt wants no part of you or Scarlotti.”
“Hunt has a lot of confidence in you,” Dapper Dan suggested casually. “You might put in a kind word for the boss.” I smiled sweetly.
“Will you crawl back under your damp rock,” I said, “and tell Scarlotti that I wouldn’t recommend him for a job stoking the furnaces of Hades. As for you,” I went on, “if you aren’t out of this theater in four and two-tenths seconds flat I will personally throw you out.”
“Listen sucker,” Dapper Dan barked, “I—”
I grabbed him by the arm, jerked him around and with a hand at his collar and seat, propelled him forcibly toward the door. The watchman scrambled to his feet and jerked open the door as he saw us coming.
With a hearty heave I pitched the twisting, swearing mug into the alley. He hit the cobblestones off balance and sprawled forward onto his face.
“That,” I said to the watchman, “is one of the lower members of the rodent family. If you ever see it scurrying around the premises again, step on it.”
Dapper Dan Lopez crawled to his feet, shouted something quite unprintable in my general direction and then hurried angrily off.
I brushed my hands off, but I still felt as if I needed a good bath with plenty of strong soap to remove the feeling the niftily dressed mobster had left with me.
When I got to the wings and took my usual position alongside Sid Hunt, Ruby was just starting her first song.
I took a quick gander at the audience and saw that they were settling back comfortably to be entertained and thrilled.
IF I DO say it myself it was a pretty clever revue, as those things go. The theme was supposedly completely futuristic. The stage backdrop was a mammoth black drape against which blazing discs of light were in relief. These discs were tagged Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc. In the middle was the brightest and biggest blazer, Old Sol, himself. Against this background cellophane space ships floated idly. It was very pretty.
As props we had huge globular contraptions labeled Time Machines. More atmosphere was provided by papier-mâché atomic cannons, disintegrator guns and such. From there on the show was in no way different than any time-honored Broadway musical.
The chorines were very scantily clad in abbreviated outfits we called Space Suits and they moved through their paces with the good old wiggle that nineteen-forty developed. Maybe it was goofy, but the public ate it up, which may or may not prove anything.
By this time Ruby had finished her first number, a torchy thing called Jupiter Taught Me A Thing Or Two, and was getting an enthusiastic hand.
She curtsied prettily, blowing kisses to the bald-headed cheering section in the first row.
Congratulating myself on the way things were starting out, I turned away for an instant to light a cigarette, and that was when it happened.
“Look!” Sid Hunt hissed, grabbing my arm.
There was such a mixture of shock and amazement in his voice that I wheeled to him quickly.
“What is it?” I snapped.
He was staring onto the stage at Ruby and pointing a trembling excited finger in her direction, too flabbergasted to speak.
I had my eyes off the stage possibly for the space of a few seconds, but when I turned them back I almost swallowed my cigarette.
For in that split second a thick globular machine had materialized on the stage beside Ruby.
“What kind of a gag is this?” Sid Hunt was yelling in my ear. “This isn’t supposed to be in the act. Is this some of your doings, Flannigan?”
I was too shocked to answer. You’d think as long as I’ve been in show business that nothing could surprise me. But I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach by Man O’ War.
The machine was reddish in color and looked somewhat like the props we had scattered about the stage, labeled Time Machines. On top of the strange machine was a mechanism that reminded me of the late model automobile headlights, wired for sound.
Sid Hunt was jerking my arm again.
“Look!” he shrieked. “There’s a man inside!”
He wheeled on me, shaking his fist under my nose.
“This is your work,” he yelled excitedly. “Trying to slip in some act without telling me about it. If it’s a stinker I’ll have you blacklisted from one coast to the other. You won’t be able to get a job in New York, California, Chi—”
“Never mind the travelogue,” I cut in. “I get the general idea. But I don’t know a bit more about this damn thing than you do.”
I turned back to the stage.
THE BOSS had not been kidding when he said a man was inside the machine. I could see him myself, hazily outlined through the glass shell, twisting knobs and gadgets frantically. He had on something that looked like a little boy’s suit.
My eyes flicked to Ruby. She was standing within a few feet of the machine, her gorgeous eyes widening incredulously. I couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was going to laugh or scream.
The audience had stopped applauding and now there was an irritable murmur of impatience running through it. They evidently thought the materialized machine part of the show, and they were a little tired of waiting for something to happen.
Suddenly from the disc on the top of the machine a brilliantly bright flash of orange light streamed, bathing Ruby in its glare. Only the edges of the beam were visible. The rest was like black light.
For an instant she stood stock still, her beautiful body outlined in the dazzling beam. Then she screamed loudly, the way a woman will do seeing a mouse. Not in pain or shock, but merely a cry of outraged surprise.
“Curtain!” yelled Sid Hunt.
Men sprang to obey him. In three seconds the heavy drapes had touched the floor hiding the scene from the audience.
The stage became a confused nightmare as prop men, chorines and stage hands rushed out of the wings to gape at the strange machine. Sid Hunt dashed to the center of the stage shouting directions.
“Get this thing off the stage,” he yelled, to the stagehands. Wheeling to the chorines, he waved his arms wildly, like a farmer shooing chicks.
“Line up,” he shouted. “Get ready for the first act finale. The curtain’s going back up in thirty seconds.”
The machine which had caused the consternation was shoved off the stage into the wings, and a reasonable facsimile of order was restored.
I was right behind Sid Hunt as he bustled up to where the stagehands had shoved the globular machine. He circled it helplessly, a study in baffled rage.
“If this is a gag,” he declared wrathfully, “someone is going to have his sense of humor kicked right in the pants.”
Ruby was peering into the interior of the machine like a curious kitten.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “there’s a man inside!”
“Go to the head of the class,” I said. “We thought it was a tame elephant.”
She laughed gaily.
“Whatever made you think that?” she asked.
“I give up,” I said wearily. “I must be getting old.”
Suddenly all of the chatter ceased as a lid on top of the contraption swung open. A second later a small man popped into sight. He had pleasant though rather grotesque features and small blue eyes that blinked uncertainly.
