Time Travel Omnibus, page 336
Among the inmates was one with whom he became as intimate as their poor minds allowed, a cobbler with one eye, who in happier days had been a wayside preacher. Old too, though not so old as the unknown, he was even madder, and having appointed himself to the post of Clerk to the Great Assize he trounced his comrade with harsh comminations.
“What is your name, please, what is your name? Speak up, what is your name?”
The man without a name would reply, “Infamy,” this having been commended to him by the one-eyed one who insisted on a designation of some sort.
“It must go in, it must go in the pleadings, you understand. Come now, state your crime, state your crime, let us hear it all.”
The other would answer, “Wickedness.”
“Ah, take care, my lord defendant, I am warning you!”
“Wickedness, Sir.”
“Was you guilty or not guilty? Speak up and shame the devil.”
Then the poor wretch would sigh, “Only the ghost of it, Sir, only the ghost.”
“Come, come, now!” the cobbler would threaten; “Your insides are naked; do you wear your heart in a nightgown or your tongue in a canister?”
“Only the ghost of it,” would be the hazed reply.
That was the general gist and limit of the cross-examination, but the mad cobbler would rehearse him again and again until the culprit confessed to having hung himself, on a tree, in an orchard, and imploringly added: “Forgive me again, aye, but this once and no more. Amen.”
In this matter, although the poor wretch could remember nothing else, his grim recollection had some truth in it; not the whole truth, but truth as far as it could range in his benighted soul. For once upon a time, in an age dropped far under the horizon of his years, he had thought to commit suicide.
What an agony of mind must have dogged one who thus incurs eternal damnation! To be so stricken that an infinity of torment, in whatever guise to follow, would seem to be a lesser evil! For if ease is not to be attained here, why should it be found there—or anywhere? Howbeit, this fellow had fastened rope to tree, drawn noose upon neck, had leapt to his doom, and at the crunch which severed soul from body his soul had launched into space with the ferocity of a rocket searching the sky, but searching without sound.
And it did not pause or falter or swerve, or break into soft drops of colour, nor did it leave a golden trail. Eyeless and bereft of knowledge, without body or any substance at all, an awareness of flight alone possessed his soul as, all ignorant of direction, it sought a goal.
But what goal? Where? And what way could be his, what true path in the boundless uncharted beyond our world of known brightness? No inkling of direction guided it, for thought and instinct were extinguished or left far behind in that body from which they had grown—and that body was now dead. This Something that had inspired a mortal form to laugh, toil, weep, love and betray, doing as all must do, this marrow of life, phantom spur and proctor of dues, was lost in the huge Shade. Like a wisp of gossamer in the vortex of a flying train it was swept past colossal tundras and pale aerial oceans without a bourne into a void of blackness where no light ever fell and time was sunk in the original sleep.
Do you imagine that even here upon earth time has any reality? It has not. A clock measures the denoted minutes and hours, calendars record the days, weeks, months and years, but this lapse and these divisions are not time itself, they mark only the movement of the globe spinning alternate night and day as it voyages round the sun. Did we always face the sun and were never moved away from its beam we should have no more awareness of time than sleeping cats or fish at the bottom of a well. Time is but a name for a garment of the world, a habit never changed; unmoving and measureless it enfolds a past that had no beginning and a futurity that can never end. It is life, not time, that is on the move; clocks and calendars may notify what they will, but time is one forever. It is we who fly, using twilight for our magnificent dreams, darkness and dawn to drowse in, and the glory of day for matters of no moment. Our flight is of life, not time, and he who goes far must fly fast; knowing his goal, and being worthy of it, he wins quickly home; but to be unworthy and know not the goal is to be lost indeed, as was this poor ghost, this thread of invisible gossamer, swept past sun, moon and stars into solitudes beyond the reach of our thought. Being ghost it had only a ghost’s awareness, had lost all mortal clues. A dog knows its kennel, the wounded mouse creeps to its hole again, blood flows from the heart of man and returns to his heart, but for the mindless disembodied soul there is no such refuge. A prisoner, inescapably sterile, it was one with the blind black aimless pattern of eternity, through which ages and ages lapsed like unnoted afternoons.
And thus, for half a million days and many more, it scoured in celestial zones, far from any realms of bliss, far from the warm bosom of the senses, lapped in oblivion. Not in death, for the soul is not destroyed though it leave a body corrupting in the world. Not in life either, for that is experience, sensation, relish, love; maybe, too, it is fortitude and high endeavour, as well as treason and greed.
To be diverted from this everlasting orbit by the collapse of a nebular system was an event the soul could neither see nor be aware of. Yet it happened so. A fringe of stars glimmering an age away loomed and whirled across its path; unseeing, unknowing, the ghost was streaming towards a tornado of spheres and leaping moons, cracked stars colliding, vast orbs dissolving, pouring their livid dust in a chorale of flames that transcribed immortal glory. At its approach the elements swarmed and united hugely to repel that jot of alien fuel and wafted it violently away. Spurned and thrown back in a wayward arc it veered towards earth again.
Long, long the journey, yet in the end it swung once more into the range of the world, no longer the slave of its own speed but floating high in clouds, borne on draughts of polar air from mountains always white. Skimming the seas it drifted into a tangle of the forests of Finland, and thence scudding aerially along a wild shore was caught against the prong of a half-buried rusty anchor and there stayed.
The eternal gates were unbarred and the prisoner freed!
Dawn had come to the world, the wind blew; tides rolled, flowed out, came in. At noon it was cold and grey and the roaring waters dressed the sea with sombre foliage. At eve the tides lapsed and withdrew from ridges of pebbles across floors of wrinkled sand. No eye had seen, no eye could see, that ancient filament blown against a half-buried anchor—for who has ever seen the soul? But the miracle had happened, it was there upon the earth again after centuries of voyaging beyond unknown offings and was lodged upon a rusty anchor. Still unaware, and ignorant of its fortune, it was shaken free and bumbled like a pappus across continent and sea until, faring one day over the flats of Huntingdon it came to rest indeed, to life again, sensation and awareness again, for it clung to a human body, warm and receptive.
There in an orchard again, a body hung from a tree again, a noose about its neck again. Some other piteous soul had just launched in the selfsame way upon the selfsame journey, and at that very moment the long-wandering one drifted into the vacant breast, there to cling with mad unity, aware at once of human being, of noise, sight, touch, smell, danger, joy, but noise most of all of men shouting and thrusting as they severed the rope and tumbled the half-choked body to the grass. They slapped the face, they chafed the hands and limbs.
“Hey, man, hey!” several voices were crying “What a to-do! Are ye living? Whatever made ye ‘tempt to hang yourself! Who are ye? Where from?”
The noise their tongues made was like the babble of evening birds. He was dazed, he could not understand them. It was not the world he had known. Strange beings surrounded him, uncouth admonishing faces peered against his, he was in terrible fear. When he opened his mouth and spoke they could not make head or tail of the mysterious sounds that issued from his lips; the gushes of meaningless intonation awed them and they drew themselves away to glance and nod warningly together. Then one bolder than the others advanced, took him by the hand, shook him and sat him up:
“What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you speak proper?”
The poor alien, altogether without understanding, gazed one by one at the half-dozen countrymen jabbering around him.
“Mad, stark and staring!” they were exclaiming. “Just in time it were, but he’s mad right enough. As yet he is however. It’s true insanity.”
Such was their opinion, and when the authorities came and took him away to enquire into the matter it was their verdict also—that he was quite mad and unaccountable. He could neither ask nor answer, he could not use or understand their slow plain speech, could utter no sounds save the queer incomprehensible syllables that rippled from his lips, so to the madhouse he must go. He was a stranger, nobody owned him, nothing was known of his antecedents, and his senseless gibble-gabble was testimony of a mind collapsed in ruins, while his mad act—as it was taken to be—gave proof of dangerous qualities; to be capable of killing one’s self was surely to be capable of murder. To the madhouse he must go, there to stay until sense and civility returned to him.
Whether mad or not, he gave no trouble but settled down in the madhouse with the creatures of strange behaviour for good and all, submissive, humble and well-behaved. Long friendless years rolled by and gradually the circumstance of his coming was forgotten. In time he made some acquaintance with their language and could use it, but all remembrance was gone and he could tell nothing of himself, his history, friends, home, or his flight from the world. Despite his placability and meekness he was shunned by all except the one-eyed cobbler who, from having been a wayside preacher, was devout to mania, with large gaping holes in his intellect. Yet it was from this derelict that our lost soul gained some knowledge of the world and life and behaviour, in particular the doom and disaster that were to befall, the pit of wrath awaiting sinners, and that heavenly shield of the wise, the Saviour of mankind. With a slap of the hand upon his tattered bible the cobbler would growl:
“There be three in this book that shall not escape our vengeance. Not three only, believe you me! but three among many, and these three above all. Clearly you may perceive this. Listen! Firstly there is Eve, that tremendous trollop, source of our downfall, the original, the everlasting one! She has broken the world, but it can be mended and it will be mended. I will learn you about her.”
And he taught him the story of the Fall.
“Secondly: that high and haughty Salome, whore of Herod and slayer of John Baptist. I will learn you about her.”
And he told him the story of the dancer and the tetrarch and the wild prophet.
“Thirdly and lastily, I come to that cursed Judas, who betrayed the Son of Man with a villain’s kiss. And all for thirty shillings! He hung himself to death on a tree, he was so cursed.”
“What tree?” asked his friend.
“I heard it was an apple, but it might be walnut, or pear; it was in an orchard. All’s one in the hands of the Lord.”
“Do you mean God?”
“I mean Jesus, the holy and innocent Saviour,” the cobbler answered. “He betrayed him.”
“Who did?”
“That Judas fiend, Judas Iscariot, the curse of the world. But there is no escape for him.” The cobbler lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively about. “Do you know, he never died! No, it is not easy for him. He goes wandering forever, lost, lost, and rejected, but we shall smell him out, mark it you, we shall find him. Mark my words, O mark them!”
A ghost has no memory, only the ghost of a memory, yet the mind of the shunned wanderer began to swarm with fearful tremors.
“Was it me?” he quavered in anguish; “Was it me? Ah, dear Christ of Heaven, forgiveness! Holy and innocent Saviour, forgive me, aye, but this once—and no more. Amen.”
VICIOUS CIRCLE
John Russell Fearn
Back and forth from past to future, like a human pendulum, oscillates Dick Mills—while others watch in sheer horror!
THIS IS the story of a man accursed, of one human being in multi-millions who did not get a fair chance. In a word, I am a sort of scapegoat of Nature. I resent it—bitterly, but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
My name is Richard Mills. I am dark, five foot eight, and my age is—well, that’s part of the story. But for the sake of convenience let’s say that I was thirty-two when the horror started.
It’s odd, you know, how you don’t always appreciate the onset of something enormously significant. I should have guessed that there was something wrong when, from the age of fifteen I often found myself mysteriously a few hours ahead of the right time without knowing how I had done it. I should also have attached suspicion to repeating actions I had done before. But then all of us have felt that we have done such-and-such a thing before and so, like you, I didn’t think any more about it.
Until the impossible happened!
I had just left the office at 6:15 p.m. I was then clerk to a big firm of lawyers. In the usual way I took the elevator to the street level and went outside. The October evening was darkening to twilight and the lights of New York were on either side of me as usual, climbing into drear muggy sky.
I remember singing to myself as I swung along. Another day over, Betty to meet, and a cheery evening ahead of both of us . . . But I did not keep that appointment. Because, you see, I walked into something which was at once beyond all sane imagining.
One moment I was streaking for the ’bus stop—then the next I was in the midst of a completely formless gray abyss. It had neither up nor down, light nor dark, form nor outline. I was running on something solid and yet I couldn’t see it, and it was just when I was trying to imagine the reason for this sudden fog that I found myself still running down a broad highway I had never in my life seen before!
I slowed to a standstill and cuffed my hat up on my forehead as I looked about me. The street had altered inexplicably. It was not gray and dirty but highly glazed, as though the road surface were made of polished black glass. The traffic too was strangely designed and almost silent. There were no gasoline fumes—I noticed this particularly. In general the buildings were much the same, only shiny on the facades and somewhat taller.
And the lighting! It was still night but instead of the usual street illumination there were great elliptical globes swinging in midair somehow and casting a brilliance below that had no shadows. Everything had the pallid brightness of diffused daylight.
“Anything the matter?” a pleasant voice asked me.
I TURNED sharply as a passer-by paused.
Until now I hadn’t noticed that the men and women passing up and down the sidewalk were rather odd in their attire—the women in particular. The absurd hats, the queer translucent look of their clothes, the multicolored paints to enhance their features. Still women—eternally feminine—but different. And now this stranger. He was tall and young with pleasant eyes and the most amazingly designed soft hat.
“I noticed you hesitating,” he explained, passing a curious but well mannered eye over my attire. “Can I help you?”
It surprised me to find anybody so courteous.
“I’m just wondering—where I am,” I replied haltingly. “This is New York, isn’t it?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Wall Street?”
His look of surprise deepened. “Why, no,” he said. “You’re on Twenty-Seven Street. Don’t you remember that all street names were abolished ten years ago to avoid duplication?”
I could only gaze at him fixedly, and he gave a slight smile.
“Look here, you’re mixed up somewhere,” he said, taking my arm. “It’s a part of the city’s ‘Lend a Hand’ policy for us to help each other, so I’m going to make you my especial charge. Incidentally, the ‘Lend a Hand’ policy is a good idea, don’t you think?” he asked, forcing me to stroll along with him. “It’s done away with a lot of the old backbiting.”
“Oh, surely,” I agreed, weakly. “But look here—er—what sort of cars are those? They’re very quiet.”
“You mean the atom-cars? Say, where have you lived? And if you’ll forgive me, that’s an awfully old fashioned coat you’ve got on. I know it’s a breach of courtesy but I’m curious.”
I dragged to a stop and faced him directly.
“You won’t credit this,” I said. “But only what seems about ten minutes ago I was running down Wall Street for an ordinary gasoline-driven ’bus. Then I ran into a fog, or something and—suddenly I was here!”
“It would be ill mannered for me to disbelieve,” he said slowly, regarding me. “Yet I am puzzled. It may help you if I explain that you are in New York City which was resurfaced with plastic in Nineteen Fifty-Eight. The present date is October the twelfth, Nineteen Seventy-One.”
1971! Twenty-five years! Great Goeffrey!
Somehow I had slipped a quarter of a century ahead of my own time of 1946. You can think of such things but you dare not believe them. Yet hang it, it had happened!
I had no opportunity to ask my genial friend anything more for he was blending into the returning gray mist, and I was back again in that blank world where nothing is, or ever was, that world which is outside time, space, and understanding. I stood wondering and fearful, waiting.
This time I sensed that the interval was longer, but when the mist evaporated it revealed that I was back again in familiar Wall Street, only I had moved some two hundred yards from the bus stop—or, in other words—the precise distance I had walked with the stranger!
