Time Travel Omnibus, page 255
With calculated deliberation Reggie drew the carefully-wrapped letter from his pocket. Without answering Colonel Vanderveer’s blast, without so much as looking at him, he proceeded to slowly unwrap the leather wrappings, until the letter, now wrinkled and yellowed with age, was in his hand.
“This,” he said, with diabolic deliberation, “might be of interest to you, Colonel Vanderveer. It is a letter to Major Vanderveer of the Union forces. It is from a fairly well known gentleman of that time. Shall I read it to you?” Colonel Vanderveer was trying unsuccessfully to restrain his curiosity.
“G—go ahead,” he said breathlessly, “Major Lucius Vanderveer is one of our proudest ancestors. A nobleman, a gentleman, a true blue-blood of the first water.”
Sandra Vanderveer was looking at Reggie in undisguised admiration.
“Where did you find it?” she asked happily. “You really are so terribly smart at times, Reggie.”
“Oh just around in—in a nook,” Reggie answered non-committally. “Now I’ll read this letter. It’s addressed to Major Lucius Vanderveer, attached to the command of General Philip Sheridan.”
“Yes, go on, boy,” urged Colonel Vanderveer from the edge of his chair.
“My dear Reginald,” Reggie began loudly and distinctly.
“HERE!” Colonel Vanderveer cried testily. “You said the letter was to Lucius. What’s the blooming idea of this Reginald.”
“Will you permit me to continue?” Reggie asked with all the aloof dignity he could muster.
Colonel Vanderveer subsided scratching his head perplexedly.
“My dear Reginald,” Reggie began again. “There are not words to express this country’s fervent gratitude to you for your gallant services in her behalf.” Reggie paused, and then spoke the next sentence emphatically. “The Vliets of France should well be proud of you for your efforts in behalf of Liberty and Union.”
Reggie rushed on before Colonel Vanderveer could interrupt.
“The name of Vanderveer which you have been forced to assume because of possible international complications has been honored excessively by your courage and idealism. But it is my stern duty to ask a still greater favor of you. It is my wish that you renounce your family name of Vliet and legally adopt the name of Vanderveer to circumvent the possibility of our foes learning that you have aided us.
“You are well aware what that might mean on the troubled international front. I am sure that one who has suffered and sacrificed as you have for our cause will not hesitate to make this last and most heart-felt sacrifice of an honored and distinguished family name. Trusting that you will grant me this last favor, I salute you for the last time as Reginald Vliet, and greet you for the first time as Lucius Vanderveer.”
“Preposterous!” snorted Old Vanderveer. “Expect me to believe that our noblest forbear was a Vliet, one of your people. Rot! Absolutely tommyrot!” Reggie smiled.
“The paper and ink are genuine, the seals are authentic. It is, I am happy to say, the absolute and unimpeachable truth.”
Beads of perspiration were standing out on Colonel Vanderveer’s forehead. Reggie’s casual air of assurance was upsetting him.
“Who’s it from?” he asked uneasily. “A gentleman,” Reggie said coolly, “by the name of Abraham Lincoln.” He rocked slightly on his heels and hooked both thumbs complacently in his vest holes. “Mr. Lincoln thought a lot of we Vliets. Yes indeed! Thought a powerful lot of us.”
“Let me see it,” Colonel Vanderveer said hoarsely. “There must be—be some mistake.”
Reggie handed him the letter, and put his arm about Sandra’s waist. She leaned against him, murmured.
“My but you’re wonderful, Reggie.” Reggie nodded.
He was thinking of the old goat’s face when he exploded the next bombshell in front of him. When he told him of the treachery and perfidy of the French Vanderveer who sold out to Wellington. That ought to be worth watching. The old goat would probably blow his top off proper then. Reggie smiled gloatingly, a delightful anticipation mounting in his veins. With both of the long-renowned Vanderveers consigned to ignominious oblivion, old Colonel Vanderveer would be a sadder but wiser human being.
COLONEL Vanderveer stood up then, pale and shaken.
“It appears to be genuine,” he said weakly. “It would seem that the man we have venerated these long years as Major Vanderveer is actually a relative of yours, a Vliet.”
Reggie nodded complacently. When he had received the communication from the dispatch rider back in the Civil war, he’d realized that it wouldn’t do to make a chump out of his own relative. That was why it had been necessary to race after Sheridan and undo the damage he had done.
“Positively staggering,” old Vanderveer said heavily.
“And that isn’t all,” Reggie said, with poisonous calm. “I have more information for you, Colonel Vanderveer. It seems—”
Colonel Vanderveer waved a hand. “It must wait,” he said, with some of his old fire. “I have something to say to you. Something that you, ahem, might consider in the way of restitution for the use of your name all these years.
“I receive a pension fund in the amount of five thousand pounds each year from the English government. It is given to me from the estate of Colonel Horatio Vanderveer, one of the outstanding English heroes, as you probably know.”
Reggie smiled gloatingly. His time had just about arrived. Let the old bore ramble on and then he’d spring the fact that Colonel Horatio Vanderveer was actually a French traitor and deserter.
“This money,” Colonel Vanderveer said pontifically, “I will bequeath to you and Sandra as a wedding present along with my blessings and best wishes for your happiness.”
“Oh Daddy!” Sandra cried, hugging him.
Reggie felt as if he would collapse. The old man’s capitulation was one amazing thing, but secondly there was the realization that the treachery of Colonel Horatio Vanderveer must continue to remain a dark secret. For Reggie knew that if the old man suspected his great-grandfather’s treachery, he would never accept the lush pension from the English government. If he refused it, as he undoubtedly would, where would one Reginald Vliet get off? Probably out in the cold as far as a substantial lump of the stuff was concerned.
Reggie fought a brief battle with his conscience and his conscience lost by a wide margin. Reggie squared his shoulders, and decided to forget forever certain circumstances concerning Colonel Horatio Vanderveer.
“This is wonderful of you, Colo—I mean, Dad,” he cried enthusiastically. He took Sandra by the arm. “Come darling,” he said masterfully, “I have things to speak to you about. Important things.”
They left the room, arm in arm, and Colonel Vanderveer winced as he heard Reggie’s clear young tenor voice floating back, singing:
“Oh we cut down the fam-lee treeeee
“And we hauled it away to the mill.”
BULL MOOSE OF BABYLON
Don Wilcox
The time-transfer machine deposited them on a Babylonian battlefield 2500 years ago
I FELT trouble in my bones when I flew to Denver in answer to Colonel Jason Milholland’s wire. His mention of a time-transfer device should have been warning enough. But I plunged, like a fool, and came up gasping for air in a sand-blown battlefield just twenty-five hundred years before my time.
Ten minutes after I had convinced Milholland that my improved vocoder would analyze animal voices, modern or ancient—ten seconds after I had nodded my agreement to his outrageous proposition, I was biffed across the head by an ancient Persian soldier.
That’s how quick it happened.
One moment I was standing on the Colonel’s roof porch surrounded by the glories of the Rockies; then the big red cylinder swished down out of nowhere, like a series of neon hoops, to enclose me, and the next instant I was skidding down a sandy incline that wasn’t a golf hazard, and the desert dust and battle din was all around me. I hugged my precious black case and slid for the bottom of the ravine.
That was when the wild-eyed soldier, dashed past me, flashing and steaming in his metal armor, and whammed me—accidentally, but none the less potently—across the head with the handle of his spear.
“Wa-ha-kik-log!” he was yelling, and he must have been brass inside as well as out. He didn’t stop to notice me. He was charging into the fray, along with a few thousand other mad men.
“Wa-ha-kik-log!”
Such voices! If Colonel Milholland wanted a complete collection of the bellows of beasts, be should have had these.
But there was no time to operate my vocoder amid this chaos. My first duty to mankind was to avoid being tramped to death. Already my new hunting togs were being torn to shreds. I rolled into a knot and hugged the hot sand and let the stampede hurdle past. But some clumsy heavyweight came pounding along, dragging his feet, and kicked the daylights out of me.
When I came to, after hours of blackout, I was not in a downy hospital bed, and no kindly doctor was bending over me. My first impression was that my scalp had been carved in strips, that I had been hung on a hook by a segment of hide just above my right ear, that someone was striking the hook with a maul at regular intervals.
This impression underwent a slight modification as consciousness came clearer. I was actually walking on my two feet, along with some five hundred other ragged and battered prisoners of war, and my scalp was cut, not with any geometric precision, but rather in the style that a blind man with a meat cleaver might achieve.
I was still hanging onto the little black case, however. And I managed to cling to it through the unprintable year and a half that followed.
OF THOSE hectic eighteen months of imprisonment and slavery all I need say is that I gradually became accustomed to my fate. I had no power to take myself back to the twentieth century. Evidently Colonel Milholland had lost his power to bring me back. I was stuck.
During that year and a half I had learned a lot of ancient language, but I detested having to use it. My roots were in the twentieth century. I couldn’t reconcile myself to starting life over—in an age that was past and gone.
Then one day, while on the block with seventy other bedraggled assorted prisoners waiting to be sold, I noticed that one of my fellow unfortunates was eyeing me curiously. We fell into casual conversation, as casual as possible against the auctioneer’s insulting blather about our respective worths in shekels.
“My name is Slaf-Carch,” said the man, smiling toothlessly through his steel wool whiskers. His voice was resonant. “I have seen members of your race before. You are from a foreign land.”
“And a foreign time,” I said, not expecting him to make anything of it.
His twinkling eyes fairly snapped at me. “You are the third,” he said, “who has made that claim.”
“The third what?”
“The third invader from a foreign land and time. You have the same delicate dialect as the other two. That is what caught my attention. Do you have a foreign name?”
“My name is Hal Norton,” I said. “Where are these other two you speak of?” Suspicions whipped through my mind. Had Colonel Milholland sent other twentieth-century envoys back to this age? I remembered having tried to probe Milholland on this, but he had evaded me.
“One was killed under the wheel of an Assyrian chariot,” said Slaf-Carch, stroking his bronzed bald head reminiscently. “The other is still my slave.”
“Your slave?” This struck me as being more than curious, since Slaf-Carch himself was at this moment being sold as a slave. Undoubtedly this grizzly-whiskered man “had seen better days, before some captor had knocked his teeth out.
The same nomad prince who bought Slaf-Carch began bidding on me, and an hour later, bought and paid for, we were tramping along the rugged foothills of the Fertile Crescent.
“You spoke of a slave with a dialect similar to mine,” I resumed, trudging along beside Slaf-Carch. “What was his name?”
“Her name,” Slaf-Carch corrected, “and a very odd name it is: Betty.”
There wasn’t breath enough in me to comment. I needed to sit down and think this matter over, but the nomad prince and his guards had other ideas. We hiked on through the evening heat.
Obviously I wasn’t the only victim of Milholland’s time-trap. He had employed two other innocents in the service of his hare-brained hobby—one of them a girl. What price the voices of ancient animals!
“Does your Betty carry a black case like this?” I asked, indicating the vocoder.
Slaf-Carch knew nothing of any magic boxes. He probably would have been too superstitious to investigate, anyway. But he gave me other bits of information, enough to prove my assumptions. Both of my predecessors had demonstrated a strange interest in animals—an interest that had soon waned.
THAT night, long after the other slaves were asleep, Slaf-Carch and I were still talking. The red glow from the low fires gave his face intense lines. “I am eager to get back. If these nomads take us farther south, they shall lose us. We will escape.”
“Where does this slave, Betty, live?” I asked.
“At my mansion, in a village beyond Babylon, where I should be fulfilling my duties as the pate si,” he said. “By this time, many business matters will have gone undone. As for Betty, this autumn I must give her separate quarters along with my older women slaves so she can begin bearing slave children.”
“Just a minute, pal,” I blurted in English, then caught myself. In Babylonian I said pointedly, “Take my word for it, if Betty came from my land you can cancel that plan.”
“You do not know our ways, Hal,” he replied. “Betty has seen more of Babylon than you.”
I didn’t deny this. But it was as uncomfortable to swallow as a baseball. This girl might have had the hard luck to be stranded here and forced into the Babylonian slave system. But that didn’t mean she would desert all her own twentieth-century ideals and sentiments. If she had the good American spunk to fight this ancient balderdash, I would fight with her; if she didn’t, I hoped I would never meet her—in spite of being starved for some twentieth-century conversation.
Slaf-Carch sketched a picture in the sand to show me how beautiful Betty was. I couldn’t make anything out of it, but the fire in his eyes conveyed a strong impression.
“Let her go her own way,” I said shortly. “I’ll go mine.”
Slaf-Carch wanted to know what my way was. What, did I do back home, and what did I expect to do here?
His questions stirred me to the depths. It was the first time any fellow-slave had talked in terms of purposes. I answered proudly that I, too, was a man of vast importance in my own land and time, and had no doubt been sorely missed. I had planned to help analyze radio voices, using my vocoder—a matter which he wouldn’t understand—when my sudden time-transfer set my life back. No doubt my own civilization had simply marked time since my absence.
I snapped on a vocoder switch while we talked, thinking to demonstrate how easily I could break Slaf-Carch’s voice into its separate parts—pitch, resonance, volume, and consonant qualities. But in deference to his superstitions I snapped the thing off without showing him the results.
Meanwhile, the old grizzle-beard speculated futilely upon my chances to return to my native country.
“If we can break free and reach Babylon, then I may be able to help you back to your land and time,” he offered hopefully. “I have wealth. My nephew, Jipfur, is also quite rich.”
I shook my head, tried to explain. But the time element was a stumbler for him. He looked blankly and fell to drawing another sand sketch of his Betty.
HOWEVER, these thoughts were no passing fancies with him. He persisted in digging into my history. I told him of my agreement to make a study of the voices of ancient animals; my arrival in the midst of battle; the stampede of Persian infantry, my months of slavery, my fights to hold on to my magic box—which was left to me only because its black color threw a superstitious scare into my captors. Those things he could understand much better than my burning desire for a bath, a shave, some Palm Beach clothes, a quarter ton of Neapolitan ice cream, and, most of all, a sudden lift back into my own century.
“Your trouble,” he counselled, “is that you are refusing to accept your real situation.”
“I don’t want to accept it!” I said so loudly that one of the guards snapped his fingers at me. “I want to get out of it.”
“Never hope to be lifted bodily out of trouble,” Slaf-Carch said. “Things don’t happen that way. I know. And I am much older than you.”
I was tempted to challenge this statement, but he continued:
“Dig your hands into the soil of the hour, wherever you are, and claw through your own troubles.”
“No more philosophy, please,” I protested. “I’ve been on a diet of it for eighteen months. If you could offer me a candy bar—”
“Take the lion by the mane,” he said sagely. “If your task is studying animals—”
“No animals, please,” I said. “I’ve lost ninety-eight percent of my respect for the man who set me on that wild goose chase—or rather, moose chase.”
“Then you must find other pastimes. The slaves are treated decently enough in this valley. They have a few hours each day to themselves. Besides, they need something to think about while they lift water at the shaduj. Something besides revolt “What do you think about while you are a slave?” I asked.
“Betty,” he replied, none too stoically.
CHAPTER II
ONE night two weeks later we were attacked by a band of cavalrymen. “Babylonians!” Slaf-Carch hissed in my ear. “Our chance!”
We slaves fled back into the darkness, out of reach of the swords and axes. When the fight grew hot we dodged into the leaping shadows and did our bit throwing stones. I’ll never forget the smell of that desert dawn, nor the sight of flashing knives and falling heads. Sunlight showed our camp a shambles.
The Babylonian cavalrymen won the fray, in the end, so we slaves were in fair enough luck. If the nomads had won they’d have cut us to bits for helping the attackers. As matters had turned, we had earned a reward—the right to be slaves for the Babylonians.
