Time Travel Omnibus, page 303
The old man stared. “You knew Morrison?”
“I did, grandpop. We went to college together.”
“I see. Son, you haven’t answered my question.”
“Well, as to being exactly alike I . . . don’t know. There might be deviations and discrepancies. On other planets we might not be caught up in the same sequence of events, or have the same casual relations one to another. What I saw inside that cylinder convinces me that the parallels I spoke of may be as alike-unlike as certain crystalline aggregates. That is to say, you may get clusters that are identical, others that vary a little, and a few that go off the deep end, so to speak.
“We may be duplicated exactly on twenty thousand worlds and closely a half million times. Morrison’s jeep may be duplicated with a black, gray, or even pink control panel. We may be sitting here fishing on Planets Zwolle and Aason, and on Planet Sebek you may be my own greatgrandfather. You’ve got to remember that the similarities could be simply staggering in patterns which go off the deep end in half a dozen respects. I mean, if we stick to the crystalline aggregate analogy.”
“We may as well stick to it, son.”
“Well, the pattern inside that cylinder had gone off the deep end with a vengeance. Someone back there on that little inner planet, some other Morrison, had lived to complete his jeep. Grandpop, that panel had been set for a trip right up through the sixth dimension, and back down around through the inner-outer rinds of fifth, and fourth dimensional space.
“Grandpop, our Morrison had spent an hour and a half explaining that plug-in to me. It was to be his greatest achievement, the most ingenious of six alternative plug-ins. Once around the sixth dimension, grandpop. Up and around you go, and before you know it you’re right back where you started from.”
“You mean it was set for a round trip.”
“For a round trip, grandpop. But as soon as I saw that panel I knew that something had gone wrong, and that the Strangeness was in permanent command.”
“The Strangeness?”
Temple nodded. “Our Morrison called it the Strangeness, as though it were a living thing. He showed me a bulb, grandpop—a little green bulb set in the control panel.”
Temple cleared his throat. “Grandpop, you’ve got to remember that no one knew as much about the higher dimensions of time as our Morrison. He had calculated the properties of time bent back upon itself with a number of curious little vacuum-tube gadgets which looked like miniature replicas of the machine.
“He . . . he had another name for the Strangeness, grandpop. He called it the Dimension of Unreason. He thought he could send the machine around up through it, and around down back without permanently injuring the people inside.
“But of course he wasn’t sure. His jeep was never completed, and I doubt if it ever will be. His notes and diagrams and models have baffled our best minds for a quarter of a century now.
“Grandpop, Morrison told me that the bulb was a delicately adjusted synchronoscope. So long as it remained intact, he assured me, the plug-in would carry the machine once around the sixth dimension. The Strangeness would warp space-time frames inside the machine, but wouldn’t actually break them down. So long as the bulb remained intact, the warped frames would straighten out again, and the passengers return to a twentieth-century Kamith alive and unharmed. ‘But if the bulb goes, Ralph, the machine will return a million years in the future, and the passengers will be dust, and I wouldn’t want to step inside, or be on the same planet with the Strangeness.’
“Whenever I shut my eyes, grandpop, and travel back in memory to that day at the museum I can still hear our Morrison making out a case against himself. He was planning to use three or four people as guinea pigs, precisely as the other Morrison had done.
“Grandpop, kneeling there in the other Morrison’s machine, staring down at the other Morrison’s control panel, I realized with a sickening jolt that the weird crystalline life which filled the hollows and windy places and dripped down into the sea was a part of the Strangeness. It hadn’t seeped into the machine at all. It was from the sixth dimension, and had seeped out of the machine over a sterile world.
“Grandpop, on that control panel the bulb was no longer intact. On that panel the bulb had been smashed! Cold sweat poured out over me as I stared at it, and suddenly I was no longer alone in the darkness. Pressed close to me was the Joan I had lost, a Joan who was no longer a little girl.
“ ‘I’ve been searching for you everywhere,’ she sobbed. ‘Through the blackness, the thick blackness—’
“Grandpop, I took that half-hysterical, strawberry-blond chit of a girl into my arms, and kissed her.
“I suppose it meant I was glad she had come back. A man scarcely knows when he is all cold inside, and wants to crawl off where the Strangeness can’t get at him.
“We were holding on tight to each other and trying to reach some kind of swift decision which would light a little candle of hope for us in the darkness when the voices started in.
“All about us in the darkness we could hear a faint, musical whispering.
“ ‘Get out, get out quickly. Flee. Escape—get out, get out. Escape, we’ll help you. There is still time. Escape, get out—flee.’
“Joan gasped, and the back of my neck seemed to freeze.
“ ‘We are one and we are many, and we will help you.’
“A little sob flew out of Joan’s throat, and the darkness seemed to turn over to embrace us more tightly.
“Something was taking shape directly before us, grandpop. Something that looked a good deal like a great, shining wheel. We could see the spokes, but the circumference of the disk was enveloped in a nebulous haze, and the hub was a filmy blur which had an air of being somehow terrifyingly alive.
“Unmistakably as we stared the wheel pulsed and brightened, and suddenly the circumference resolved itself into a circle of bobbing faces joined by weaving filaments of flame. The sad, calm faces, grandpop, of twelve young girls ranging in years from sixteen to twenty. Around and around they went, with luminous flickerings. Around and around, as inexorably as a sunmill.
“Grandpop, the circumference of that wheel overshadowed all the nightmares of my childhood, but what turned my blood to ice were the faces at the hub. From the hub of that great, revolving wheel our own faces stared back at us. Joan’s face and my face, and the face of a young man who looked a little like you, grandpop. He was scarcely more than a boy, and his hair was jet black, but somehow—he reminded me of you.”
“Good Lord,” the old man said.
“Suddenly the voices started in again. ‘Stand up, join hands, and walk eight paces forward. There is still time.’
“Grandpop, we were under a compulsion. We had to obey. Joan’s small, moist hand crept into mine, and we got swayingly to our feet.
“Trembling in every limb, we took eight tottering steps forward. Instantly the darkness fell away, and we found ourselves standing on a high white cliff overlooking a tranquil sea. When we looked down into the water we could see broken domes and turrets and twisted masses of wreckage and when we looked up the sky had a timeless look, and the sun was a hoary disk that seemed to be nearing the cinder stage.
“The desolation everywhere about us was terrifying, but looking down was especially bad because the sea was shallow for miles, and we could tell at a glance that an inventive age had drawn a canceling line through all of its achievements from the viewpoint of humanity.
“Looking down, I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘City in the Sea’:
‘There shrines and palaces and towers,
Time-eaten towers that tremble not,
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around by shifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky,
The melancholy waters lie.’
“Maybe that city had once stood on a high mountain peak, and time had leveled it. I never knew, for the scene around us suddenly changed, and we were in the midst of a mighty forest, grandpop. Enormous, mottled serpents dangled from the boughs overhead, and an odor as of rotting vegetation surged heavy on the tainted air.
“ ‘Turn right, and take four slow steps backward,’ the voices hummed.
“Automatically we obeyed. The floor seemed to rise, and we were standing on another cliff gazing out over another sea. But now there was no city beneath the waves. We seemed rather to be gazing out over a scene from the Jurassic Age. In icy shallows polar lilies grew, and directly beneath us a huge, long-necked lizard shape was floundering sluggishly about.
“ ‘You’re moving now through fairly stable time-frames,’ the voices hummed. ‘We’re helping you out. Keep your hands clasped, and advance six short steps.’
“Mechanically we obeyed. Within a space of seconds the cliff dropped away and all about us there appeared—machines, grandpop. Dozens of great, glistening, manlike machines which stood staring at us with a subtle air of contempt, as though we hadn’t ought to.
“ ‘Turn left now—sharply,’ the voices hummed. ‘Walk straight ahead. There are forces here which could destroy you. You must walk straight out.’
“The sullen robots fell away as we swung about. Sweating in every pore we advanced toward a square of misty radiance which pulsed and expanded and grew swiftly brighter until it seemed to fill all space about us.
“ ‘Pass straight out. Go back to your own world. Go back—go back.’
“The voices had grown fainter, but we could still hear them, grandpop. In the midst of the glow, and as we broke into a run—plaintive and pleading and hauntingly musical.
“ ‘You must not stay. You must go back to your own world. There will be upheavals, for the life on the plains and mountains is alien to Urth. It is alien, alien—it is building up tension.’ ”
“To Urth?” the old man interrupted.
“To Urth, grandpop—a name with a strange, raw rasp to it. A name difficult to pronounce.”
“And the voices hummed—”
“ ‘Good-by and good luck. You must not stay. Go back to your own world. Go back, go back. Good-by and good luck.’
“Grandpop, the radiance became blinding suddenly, and we felt ourselves falling.”
Temple set down his fishing rod, leaned forward and opened his hand again. “See that scar, grandpop?”
“You showed me it before, son.”
“Well, it was my wedding present to her.” The old man’s jaw fell open. “Your wedding—”
“Instead of joining hands, we underwent a minor operation. We had to do that. We couldn’t spend the rest of our lives holding hands, could we?”
The old man’s jaw sagged lower. “So you’re ticky in the coco! I might have known. Ticky in—”
Temple smiled. “Grandpop, when we found ourselves outside the cylinder, on the dun, firm ground, with that strange crystalline life all about us again, I’ll admit I thought so myself. For a moment I doubted my own sanity. But when we got swayingly to our feet, it was as though my sanity had been multiplied a hundredfold. For when Joan tried to pull her hand from my clasp, and it wouldn’t come free, only a very sane man could have taken it in his stride. Y’ see what I mean?
“Looking down, and observing that our palms had been welded together by ‘wild talents’ inside the Dimension of Unreason, I didn’t go off the deep end. I knew that we’d been lucky, and that a minor operation was all that we’d be needing.”
“Holy suffering cats!”
“She was just a little thing, grandpop. But when you hold a woman’s hand day after day, week after week—there were no surgeons on board our backward-forward jeep—you’re apt to find yourself getting all steamed up over trifles you’ve never even noticed before. I began by overlooking her defects, and ended by asking her to marry me.
“Grandpop, we were spliced by the commander on the twelfth week out. Later on, I got to thinking. Take two pairs of people, grandpop. One pair is the exact duplicate of the other pair. They look and think and feel alike, and there isn’t a hairbreadth of difference between them. Have you really four people, or just two people?”
“Son, I couldn’t say. I’m not Hegel.”
“Well, for twenty-two years now, grandpop, Joan and I have been making up for all the happiness we lost near the center of the known Universe—on a cool, little inner planet called Urth. And somehow, grandpop, I’ve a feeling that the faces at the hub of that wheel had hoped that we’d do that.
“I have a feeling that the wheel was—well, courage outlasting the vehicle that gave it birth, human thought surviving the brain from which it came.
“Grandpop, there may be a million Joan Harveys and Ralph Temples in the Universe of Stars, and some of us may have gone off the deep end. But here on Kamith, Joan and I have made up for all the losses, for all the mishaps, for all the patterns that didn’t jell right. We may have been Morrison’s guinea pigs on Urth, but on Kamith—”
“I wish I had caught some flats,” the old man said, getting slowly to his feet. “Yes, I see what you mean. I see what you mean, lad.”
“Give your daughter these,” Temple said, raising a string of summer flounders from the flaking tide. “I’ll stay and catch some more. Joan won’t be expecting me for another hour yet.”
THE END.
TIME LOCKER
Henry Kuttner
A useful little gadget. Stick anything in and it shrank, shrank to a point where it was invisible and totally concealed—but it would also shrink other things and permit curious sorts of crime—
Galloway played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician—but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good. He’d wanted to be an experimental technician, and would have been excellent at it, for he had a streak of genius at times. Unfortunately, there had been no funds for such specialized education, and now Galloway, by profession an integrator machine supervisor, maintained his laboratory purely as a hobby. It was the damndest-looking lab in six States. Galloway had spent ten months building what he called a liquor organ, which occupied most of the space. He could recline on a comfortably padded couch and, by manipulating buttons, siphon drinks of marvelous quantity, quality, and variety down his scarified throat. Since he had made the liquor organ during a protracted period of drunkenness, he never remembered the basic principles of its construction. In a way, that was a pity.
There was a little of everything in the lab, much of it incongruous. Rheostats had little skirts on them, like ballet dancers, and vacuously grinning faces of clay. A generator was conspicuously labeled, “Monstro,” and a much smaller one rejoiced in the name of “Bubbles.” Inside a glass retort was a china rabbit, and Galloway alone knew how it had got there. Just inside the door was a hideous iron dog, originally intended for Victorian lawns or perhaps for Hell, and its hollowed ears served as sockets for test tubes.
“But how do you do it?” Vanning asked.
Galloway, his lank form reclining under the liquor organ, siphoned a shot of double Martini into his mouth. “Huh?”
“You heard me. I could get you a swell job if you’d use that screwball brain of yours. Or even learn to put up a front.”
“Tried it,” Galloway mumbled. “No use. I can’t work when I concentrate, except at mechanical stuff. I think my subconscious must have a high I.Q.”
Vanning, a chunky little man with a scarred, swarthy face, kicked his heels against Monstro. Sometimes Galloway annoyed him. The man never realized his own potentialities, or how much they might mean to Horace Vanning, Commerce Analyst. The “commerce,” of course, was extra-legal, but the complicated trade relationships of 1970 left many loopholes a clever man could slip through. The fact of the matter was, Vanning acted in an advisory capacity to crooks. It paid well. A sound knowledge of jurisprudence was rare in these days; the statutes were in such a tangle that it took years of research before one could even enter a law school. But Vanning had a staff of trained experts, a colossal library of transcripts, decisions, and legal data, and, for a suitable fee, he could have told Dr. Crippen how to get off scot-free.
The shadier side of his business was handled in strict privacy, without assistants. The matter of the neuro-gun, for example—
Galloway had made that remarkable weapon, quite without realizing its importance. He had hashed it together one evening, piecing out the job with court plaster when his welder went on the fritz. And he’d given it to Vanning, on request. Vanning didn’t keep it long. But already he had earned thousands of credits by lending the gun to potential murderers. As a result, the police department had a violent headache.
A man in the know would come to Vanning and say, “I heard you can beat a murder rap. Suppose I wanted to—”
“Hold on! I can’t condone anything like that.”
“Huh? But—”
“Theoretically, I suppose a perfect murder might be possible. Suppose a new sort of gun had been invented, and suppose—just for the sake of an example—it was in a locker at the Newark Stratoship Field.”
“Huh?”
“I’m just theorizing. Locker Number 79, combination thirty-blue-eight. These little details always help one to visualize a theory, don’t they?”
“You mean—”
“Of course if our murderer picked up this imaginary gun and used it, he’d be smart enough to have a postal box ready, addressed to . . . say . . . Locker 40, Brooklyn Port. He could slip the weapon into the box, seal it, and get rid of the evidence at the nearest mail conveyor. But that’s all theorizing. Sorry I can’t help you. The fee for an interview is three thousand credits. The receptionist will take your check.”
Later, conviction would be impossible. Ruling 875-M, Illinois Precinct, case of State vs. Dupson, set the precedent. Cause of death must be determined. Element of accident must be considered. As Chief Justice Duckett had ruled during the trial of Sanderson vs. Sanderson, which involved the death of the accused’s mother-in-law—
