Time Travel Omnibus, page 324
But, somehow, she didn’t, he recollected faintly, turn out to be so wonderful after all. And other girls, small girls, small girls that he’d liked because they were small. But that was getting out of one’s depth. How could one like little girls! He couldn’t think up much more incident—only a general impression remained that he’d had a crackerjack dream—not so nice in its way, but wonderful just because it had seemed so confounded real, as real as one’s own life, as real as oneself in this little old sleeping room and Uncle Andy still snoozing in the big bed by the window.
Uncle Andy yawned again, snuffled, and remarked, “You been talking in your dreams jest like one of them thar Edison sound boxes I’ve jest been hearing of. You’ve gotten indigestion—eating all that punkin pie las’ night.”
“It’s this silly little bed. It gives me cramps. I was somehow fixed so I got dreaming I couldn’t ever move again.”
“Indigestion; overdistended stummuck. You get a move on.”
“Well, I feel fine this morning.”
“Then get up and don’t sit there yarning at me and complaining of your good bed that’s held you well enough these twelve years.”
Uncle Andy was always a little sore in the mornings, Nick Bradegar remembered. Still, as he got out to fetch his towel and to go into the yard to splash under the pump, he felt, suddenly, that he must stop and ask a question. Why? It was the sort to make Uncle Andy sore. Still, something in the back of his mind made him feel it worth the risk.
“Uncle, what’s it like really to be grown up, to be as old as you are?”
Over the crumpled sheet of the big bed a rheumy eye regarded him. He thought he was going to be bawled out. But no voice came. Only the old, tired, inflamed eye kept on looking at him—first, fiercely, next, defiantly, then, pathetically—that was worst. Or was it? For suddenly it didn’t seem Uncle Andy’s eye any longer. It seemed somehow a picture of some sort, a kind of mirror, or as though you were looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Ever so small and distant, but quite clear, he saw an old man lying with fixed, open eyes on a long bed. The light was still faint, as though the window had a curtain over it. The old man lay stiffly still, all save the lid of his eye, which seemed to flicker a bit as he lay on his side looking toward Nick. He was awful like Uncle Andy, and yet, somehow, he wasn’t Uncle. The bed, too, looked far richer, just as the man in it looked even more tired than Andy.
The old, harsh clock began to strike, but it seemed more soft than usual. Still, it was enough to rouse Uncle. “You get along, you young lazy scamp. There’s the half-hour gone and you still not even washed. You leave me alone with all your dam questions. You’ll know soon enough what it is to be old—the heck you will! And, I’ll lay it, you’ll not have made the hand at living I’ve made when time comes to take a stretch, as I’ve a right to take. Get along and don’t disturb me till you’ve the coffee ready and the bacon cooked!”
He nipped out of the room. If you didn’t clear quickly when Uncle blew like that, you’d have his boots flying at your head a moment heard: the rousing of Mr. Bradegar after, and, though old and lying down, Uncle had scored more hits than misses with those old hobnails of his, which were always close at hand when off his feet.
Under the yard pump the cold water on the top of his head made his brain tingle. Like rockets, thoughts shot through his mind. He wouldn’t be a failure, like Uncle, or just conk out, the way he’d heard his parents had. He’d get through and make good. Why, he could always win in discussions at school, already. He was always twice as quick at answering back or thinking up a wisecrack. Yes, and some of those big hulks and lubbers who could kick him over a fence, they were afraid of his tongue, he knew—the way things he said would stick to the person he said ’em about. He saw himself getting on. What did one do? Law, of course. As he rubbed his red, thin body with the coarse towel, he saw himself on his feet in court, winning big law cases, first here and there and then right and left; then marrying, of course, an admiring wife and having a large family that’d look up to him, because he was clever, rich, powerful.
He went in and started cooking the breakfast in the old squalid kitchen. But he hardly smelled the bacon and coffee, so strong was the daydream on him. Only the sound of Uncle’s boots on the stairs, now, fortunately, on his old lame feet and not in his still flexible hands, roused him.
“Now, go and make the beds, you lazy fellow. I know you! If you have your breakfast first, then you never have time. You’ve got to go off to that darned school! Where they only teach you what you were born doing and do in your sleep and’ll be doing when you die in the poorhouse—talk, talk, talk. Get along with you!”
Nick Bradegar cut out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs into the frowzy bedroom. On the big bed he swung the old frayed stale sheets, worn blankets, and tattered coverlet into some sort of uneasy order. When he came to his cot, however, he paused, looking with a sort of helpless anger at the queer little cramped bed.
“Well, all I know,” he remarked to himself with vicious resolution, “if ever I make even a hundred bucks, I’ll have a decent bed. First thing I’ll have, I promise myself that. You spend nearly half your life on that one thing. Gum, if I could have a fine decent bed, I don’t think I’d mind anything else much. You’d always be able to stretch yourself in that to your heart’s content. And in a fine bed you can have fine dreams. That nightmare last night—what was it? It’s all gone, but the taste. I know the cause, though—that blasted little bed!”
“Here, you come down! What ye doing all this while?” holloed Uncle Andy from below. “And wash up ‘fore you go to that darned school!”
AS NEVER WAS
P. Schuyler Miller
That bit of marvelous metal upset the whole world of science—science tried to find where it had come from. But they never would, never could—
HAVE you ever dreamed of murder?
Have you ever set your elbows on the desk and let your head slump down on your hands, and closed your eyes, and dreamed of how it would feel to drive a knife up to the hilt in a scrawny, wrinkled throat, and twist it until the thin old blood begins to slime your fingers and drip from your wrist—until the piercing old eyes roll back and close, and the skinny old legs crumple and sag? Have you felt the blood pounding in your own temples, and savage satisfaction swarming up in you as you stare down on the hideous, sprawling thing you have destroyed?
And then have you opened your eyes and looked down at the mass of scribbled papers, and the meticulously drawn sectional charts, and the trait tables and correlation diagrams and all the other dead, dry details that make up your life’s work? And picked up your pen and started making more scribbles on the papers and more checks on the charts and more little colored dots on the scattergrams, just as you’ve been doing three days out of every five since you were old enough to start the career for which you’d been tested and picked and trained?
Maybe I should go to a clinic and let the psychotherapists feed vitamins to my personality. Maybe I should go to a religious center and let the licensed clergy try to put this fear of Humanity into my reputed soul. Maybe I should go to a pleasure palace and let them mix me up an emotional hooker to jar the megrims out of my disposition, or go down and apply for a permit to wed and set about begetting another generation of archeologists who will grow up to be just as tired and bored and murderous as their illustrious father.
Night after night and day after day I dream of what might have happened that day in the laboratory if I had picked up the knife and slit the gullet of the man who had just injected the time-steam concept into the quietly maturing science of human archeology. If I could have seen ahead—
If I could have guessed what would happen to all the romantic visions he had worked so hard to inspire in me—
Why should I dream? I was a child then; I had no way of looking ahead; the knife was just another knife. And I think if he had known—if he had been able to see ahead and watch the science to which he had devoted his every waking moment for a long lifetime degenerate into a variety of three-dimensional bookkeeping—he’d have cut his own heart out and offered it to me in apology.
He was a great old man. He was my grandfather.
You’ve seen the knife. Everyone has, I guess. I was the first, after him, ever to see it, and I was about ten years old. I was sitting in a chair in his laboratory, waiting for him to come back. It was a wooden chair, something his grandfather had used, and maybe other people before that. The laboratory was just a big room at the back of the house, with a concrete floor and plenty of light from a row of windows over the worktable. There were hundreds of potsherds strewn over the table where he’d been classifying and matching them for restoration. There were trays of stone implements, and cheap wooden boxes full of uncatalogued stuff with the dirt still on it. There was a row of battered-looking notebooks, bound in imitation leather, fraying at the corners and stained with ink and dirt. There was a pot that had been half restored, the sherds joined so neatly that you could barely see where they fitted together, and a little ivory goddess whose cracks and chips were being replaced with a plastic filler until you’d never have known she was five thousand years old.
That was what an archeologist’s laboratory was like in those days.
Of course, we’ve outgrown all that. His experiment, and the knife he brought back and tossed down on the table for me to look at, have ended all that. Archeology has found its place among the major sciences. It’s no longer a kind of bastard stepchild of art and anthropology. We got money for the best equipment, the newest gadgets. We have laboratories designed by the best architects to fit the work we do in them. We can call on the technicians of a score of other sciences to do our dirty work, or can train ourselves to know as much as they do if we’re reactionaries like me. We have our own specialists, just as learned and as limited as any hairsplitter in biochemistry or galactic physics. We have prestige—recognition—everything he never had in his day, when he was the acknowledged master in his field,, and we have him to thank for it all. But Walter Toynbee, if he were living now, would dry up and die in the kind of laboratory his grandson has. He’d push his charts and his correlations back and drop his head in his hands and dream. He’d plan out his own murder.
I’d been sitting there for nearly six hours. I’d been over the worktable from one end to the other, three times. I’d picked up every potsherd—turned them over—studied them with all the solemn intentness of ten years old—put them back exactly where I’d found them, as he had taught me. I’d found four sherds that would fit onto the pot he was restoring, and two that made an ear for a little clay figurine shaped like a fat, happy puppy. I’d taken down his books, one by one, and looked at the plates and figures as I had done many times before. I had even taken down one of his notebooks and slowly leafed through it, trying to spell out the straggling handwriting and make sense of the precise sketches, until a loose slip of paper fell out from among the pages and I slipped it hurriedly back and put the book away.
All one corner of the laboratory was taken up by the time shuttle. It had cost more than all the air surveys, all the expeditions, all the books and photographs and restorations of his whole career. The copper bus bars that came in through the wall behind it were like columns in some Mayan colonnade. The instrument panel was like something you’d imagine on—well, on a time machine. The machine itself was a block of dull gray lead with a massive steel door in one side of it, the time cell floating in a magnetic bearing between the pole pieces which set up the field.
Ours are neater now, but inside they’re about the same. Old Walter Toynbee was an artist to the core, and Balmer, who built the machine for him from Maleeewicz’s notes, had a flair for functional design. It was the first shuttle big enough and powerful enough to push a man and his baggage more than twenty years into the future—or the past, for that matter. Malecewicz had gone back fifteen years. He never returned. His equations showed why that was, and the archeological world, which had been rubbing its hands in anticipation of striking up a speaking acquaintance with Hatshepsut and Queen Shub-Ad, went back to its trowels and whisk-brooms with sighs of resignation. All but my grandfather. All but Walter Toynbee.
Malecewicz had never taken time to really work out his theory of the time function and lapsed interval, or he might be alive now. Laymen will still ask you why we archeologists don’t simply climb into a shuttle with a solido camera and slip back to Greece or Elam or maybe Atlantis, and film what went on instead of tediously slicing the dust of millennia over the graveyards of past civilizations. It can be done, but the man who does it must be utterly self-centered, wrapped up in knowledge for its own sake, utterly unconcerned with his duties to his fellow men. As any schoolchild learns, the time shuttler who goes into the past introduces an alien variable into the spacio-temporal matrix at the instant when he emerges. The time stream forks, an alternative universe is born in which his visit is given its proper place, and when he returns it will be to a future level in the new world which he has created. His own universe is forever barred to him.
The future is by nature different. All that we are now and all that we have been or become from moment to moment is integral in the structure and flow of our particular thread of time. The man who visits the future is not changing it: his visit is a foredestined part of that future. As the ancients might have said: “It is written.” Though I should imagine that the writing is in the matrix of spacetime and not in the record book of God.
Walter Toynbee was a brilliant man who might have made a success of many sciences. He had money to guarantee him such comfort as he might want, and he chose the science which most attracted him—archeology. He was the last of the great amateurs. He had known Malecewicz well—financed some of his experimental work—and when the physicist failed to return he wheedled the trustees of the university into turning the man’s notes over to him. He showed them almost at once where Malecewicz had gone and why he would never return, and he saw immediately that there was no such barrier between Man and his tomorrows. Inside of a, week he and Balmer were moving cases of artifacts out of the back room to make room for the shuttle. Night after night they sat up into the wee hours, arguing over fantastic-looking diagrams. In two months the power lines were coming in across the fields, straight from the generators at Sheldon Forks, and Balmer’s men were pouring the colossal concrete base on which the machine would sit.
It was past dinner time. I had been sitting there alone since a little after one o’clock, when he had stepped into the shuttle and asked me to wait until he returned. There it sat, just as it had sat for the last six hours, shimmering a little as though the air around it were hot and humming like a swarm of bees deep in an old beech. I got down a big book of plates of early Sumerian cylinder seals and began to turn the pages slowly. The sameness of them had grown boring when I realized that the humming had stopped.
I looked up at the lead cube. It was no longer shimmering. I closed the book and put it carefully back on the shelf, just as the great steel door of the shuttle swung silently open, and my grandfather stepped down out of the time cell.
He had been digging. His breeches and heavy jacket were covered with whitish dust. Dirt made grimy gutters under his eyes and filled in the creases and wrinkles of his face and neck. He had a stubble of dirty gray beard on his chin, which hadn’t been there six hours before, and his shirt was dark with sweat. He was tired, but there was a gleam of satisfaction in his sharp black eyes and a kind of grin on his wrinkled face.
The battered canvas bag in which he kept his tools and records was slung over one shoulder. He slapped at his thighs and puffs of dust spurted from his trousers. He took off the shabby felt hat which he always wore, and his thin gray hair was damp and draggled. He came over to the table, fumbling with the buckle on the bag. I watched his knotted fingers wide-eyed, for I had seen them pull many wonders out of that dusty wallet. I can hear his trimphant chuckle as he drew out a knife—the knife—and tossed it ringing on the table among the sherds.
You’ve seen it, of course. It’s been in the pictures many times, and there are solidographs of the thing in most museums. I saw it then for the first time—ever—in our time.
He hadn’t washed it. There was dirt on the fine engraving of the dull-black hilt, and caked in the delicate filigree of the silver guard.
But the blade was clean, and it was as you have seen it—cold, gleaming, metallic blue—razor-edged—and translucent.
Maybe you’ve had a chance to handle it, here in the museum. Where the blade thins down to that feather-edge you can read small print through it. Where it’s thicker, along the rib that reinforces the back of the blade, it’s cloudy—milky looking. There has been engraving on the blade, too, but it has been ground or worn down until it is illegible. That is odd, because the blade is harder than anything we know except diamond. There is no such metal in the System or the Galaxy, so far as we know, except in this one well-worn and apparently very ancient knife blade.
