Time Travel Omnibus, page 349
She put the blueprints at his fingertips with a few clean strokes of the keys. Late tomorrow afternoon, J. H. McCracken would be in his offices in North Los Angeles, preparing last moment details before planing to Washington. He must not leave the office. His son must not leave the office, either. They were to die.
“You understand everything, Steve?”
“Yes. I have the gun.”
“Is there anything that’s not clear?”
“Ellen—from time to time I forget things. Things waver. The first night, I slept, when I woke up I’d forgotten. In the beanery, again, I had to be reminded of the date. I don’t want to forget you, Ellen. Why does it happen?”
“Oh, Steve, you still don’t understand. Time is such a strange creature to you. Like a fog, shifting in light and dark winds, the future is twisted by circumstance. There are two Ellen Abbotts, and only one of them knows Steve Temple. When something occurs that threatens her chances of ever existing, naturally you forget her. Your very contact, small as it is, with Time, is enough to waver it. That’s why you have flashing, momentary amnesia.”
He repeated it:
“I don’t want to forget you. I’ve gone ahead, hoping that if I indirectly killed Kraken, it would insure your life, but—”
She cleared it up for him. She did such a good job of it that it was like a hard blow in the stomach—like the rough kick of a mule.
“Steve, with Kraken eradicated, automatically a new free world will be born. As before, the same people will be in it, but they’ll be singing. The name Kraken will be a blank to them. And the millions he butchered will live again. In that world, there’ll be no place for Professor Abbott and his daughter Ellen.
“I won’t remember you, Steve. I will have never met you. There would be no reason, Kraken gone, for me to meet you. I’ll forget we ever conversed late at night or that I ever dreamed of building a time-typewriter. And that’s the way it will be, Steve, tomorrow night, when you kill J. H. McCracken.”
It stunned him. “But—I thought . . .”
“I didn’t fool you purposely, Steve. I thought you realized that tomorrow night would be the end, no matter what.”
“I thought that some way you might get through alive to 1967 someday, or help ME to come to your time.” His fingers shook.
“Oh, Steve. Steve.”
He was getting sick. His throat ached, tight and hot.
“It’s late, and the Guard is coming to check. We’d better say our last goodbye now—”
“No! Please, Ellen. Wait. Tomorrow.”
“It’ll be too late, then, if you kill McCracken.”
“I have a plan. It’ll work—I know it’ll work. Just so I can talk with you once more, Ellen. Just one more time.”
“All right. I know it’s impossible but—tomorrow night. Good luck. Good luck and good night.”
The machine stopped moving.
It hit him hard, the silence. He sat there, weaving dazedly in the chair, laughing a little at himself.
Well—he could always go back to walking in the fog. There was always a lot of fog. It walked beside you, behind you, ahead of you, and it never spoke. It touched you once in awhile on the face as if it understood. That was all. He’d walk all night, come home, undress in the dark, and turn in, praying that once he slept he would never wake up again. Never.
“I’ll forget we ever conversed late at night. I won’t remember you, Steve.”
IN THE late afternoon of January 14th, Friday, Steve Temple shoved the paralysis gun inside his dirty jacket and zippered it.
No matter what action he took, Ellen Abbott would be destroyed today. An execution chamber awaited her if he didn’t move fast. And if he succeeded, then, too, the Ellen he had known would vanish like smoke-wisps in the wind.
He would have to kill McCracken very carefully so as to speak to Ellen again. He had to get to her once more before all of Time changed, reconsolidating itself for Eternity, to give her his final message. He thought it over. He knew exactly the words to say.
He started walking, fast.
It didn’t feel like his body, it felt like somebody else’s. Like getting used to a new suit, all tight and close and too warm for the weather, that’s how it was. Eyes, mouth, his whole face set in one lined pattern he didn’t dare break. Once he relaxed it would smash the whole thing.
He got his shoulders back where they hadn’t been in years, and he made fists of hands that had long ago relaxed in despair. It was almost like getting back a hunk of self-respect, clutching a gun, knowing you were going to change the whole damned future’s profile.
He had lungs again, and used them for breathing, and his heart wasn’t just lying still in his chest. It yelled, wanting out. Sky clear overhead, his heels came down, smooth, swift, on concrete walks. Suddenly it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Strange buildings rose around him, numbers passing the calm scrutiny of his eyes. He kept walking, because if he stopped he’d never get his legs going again.
This was the street.
Suddenly he began to cry. It was all hidden behind the tautened lines of his face, warm and bitter, his brain lurching against dim skull-walls, his throat retching down to where the heart slammed upon it. Warm water got half out of his eyes before he stopped it. A wind blew far away, whining, but it was a very calm day and there was no wind. Nothing must happen now to stop him, he thought. Nothing. He turned in at an alley, walked back to a side-door, opened it, went in.
He climbed a backstairs flight where the sun, his feet scraping softly and his heart-beat were the only tangibles in a crazy nightmare. He met nobody. He wished he would meet someone, someone who would say it was only play-acting, that he could toss the gun away, wake up. Nobody stopped him. Nobody said that to him. It was four long flights of sunlit stairs.
Inside his head, his brain ran around trying to put on the brakes, but there were none. He had to do it. You can’t let the same thing happen all over again, like Hitler. Hitler growing up. Nobody laying a hand on him, or pumping his vile body full of lead. McCracken. The guy he was going to kill looked innocent. Everybody said how swell a guy he was. Yeah. But how about his sons, and their sons?
Ellen. Moving his lips. Ellen. His heart moved. Ellen. Moving his feet. And there was the door. Silver-lettered across it:
J. H. McCracken, U.S. Congressional Rep.
PALE and quiet, Steve opened the door and stood looking at a young man who sat behind a bleached walnut desk. A green metal triangle said: William McCracken. The Representative’s son.
One glimpse of a square, surprised face, mouth widened to the teeth, hands coming up to fend off the inevitable.
A pressure of a finger. The gun in Steve’s hand kept purring contentedly like a sleepy cat. He snapped it off, quick. All of it had taken an instant. One breath. One heartbeat. It was very easy and very hard to kill a man. He readjusted a stud on the paralyzing-tube.
From the next office, quietly: “Oh, Will, step in a moment, son. I want to check those Washington plane tickets again.”
Sometimes it’s hard to open a door, even an unlocked one.
That voice. J. H. McCracken, newly elected people’s man.
Tighter and quieter, Steve opened the second door and this time McCracken was closer when he said, “Did you get them all right, son? No slip-ups?”
Steve looked at McCracken’s broad back and said, “No slip-ups,” so that McCracken heard. He swiveled in his chair, came around, holding a lit cigar in one hand, fountain pen in the other. His eyes were blue and didn’t see the gun. “Oh, hello,” he said, smiling. Then he saw the gun and the smile went away inside him.
Steve said, “You don’t know me. You don’t know why you’re being killed because you always leaned over backward to be clean. You never cheated at marbles. Neither did I. That doesn’t mean someone else might not cheat five hundred years from now. Time’s verdict says you’re guilty. It’s too bad you don’t look like a crook, it would make it easier . . .”
McCracken opened his mouth, thinking he could talk him out of it.
THE gun sang its little song. There was no more talk. Steve sweated. Not too much power. Just enough to weaken the cardiac nerves. Walking in close, Steve kept the weapon singing half-power. Snapping it off, he bent, inserted fingers in the grey vest. The heart was still there, weak. Fading.
He said something funny to the body: “Don’t die yet. Do me a favor—keep alive until I talk to Ellen again . . .”
Then he shuddered so violently it was enough to rip the flesh from his bones. Sick, teeth chattering, his eyes blurred, he dropped the gun, picked it up and began worrying. It was a long way to his room, to the typewriter and Ellen.
He had to make it, though. Somehow he’d cheat the future. He’d think of some way to keep Ellen for himself. Some way.
He got hold of his fear, held it in one place, kept it there. Opening the door, he came face to face with McCracken’s bewildered, office staff. Three women, two men coming to say their goodbyes, frozen in shocked attitudes over the son’s body.
Temple fell back in the seat, mouth full of saliva he climbed out onto a fire escape, shut it, started down. Someone flung up the window behind him, yelled. Someone opened it and came down after him. Their feet made an iron clangor on the metal ladders.
Leaping to the alleyway, Steve fled for the corner, yanked open the door of the first cab he found, flopped in, shouting directions. Two of McCracken’s men rounded the alley corner, shouting. The cab slid away from the curb, smooth and quick. The cabbie hadn’t heard a thing.
Temple fell back in the seat, mouth full of saliva he couldn’t swallow, so he spat it out. He didn’t feel like a book hero. He only felt cold scared and small, crouching there. He had changed the future. Nobody knew it but himself and Ellen Abbott.
And she would forget.
“Wait, Ellen. Wait for me, please.”
So this is what it’s like to save a world. To have frozen insides and hot tears on your face and hands that shake violently if you quit grasping your knees. Ellen!
The cab hurled itself to a stop in front of his hotel. He staggered out, saying wild, silly things to nobody. He heard the cabbie yell, but he ran ahead, anyway. He got inside, ran upstairs.
He unlocked his door and then stood there, afraid to open it. Afraid to look inside his room. The cabbie was coming up the steps behind him, cursing. What if everything was too late . . .?
Sucking his breath in, Steve opened the door.
It was there! The typewriter was still there!
Steve slammed the door, locked it, and then in one insane stumbling movement he was across the room to the machine, yelling and typing simultaneously.
“Ellen! Ellen Abbott! Ellen, I did it. It’s all over. Are you still there?”
A PAUSE. Looking at the blank, horribly blank paper, his blood pounding through his veins until they ached. It seemed centuries before the typewriter keys moved and then it said:
“Oh, Steve, you succeeded. You did it for us. And I hardly know what to say. There’s no reward for you. I can’t even help you, and I wish I could. Things are changing already, getting misty and melting like waxen figures, flowing away in the Time Stream . . .”
“Hold on a while longer, Ellen. Please!”
“Before, we had all of Time, Steve. Now, I can’t hold reforming matter and moments. It’s like snatching at stars!”
Down below, in a sunlit street, a car braked to a stop. Voices broke out of the car, a metal door rapped home. McCracken’s men, coming to find Steve Temple. Maybe, with guns—
“Ellen! One last thing. Here, in my time, one of your ancestors must have lived—somewhere! Where, Ellen?”
“Don’t hurt yourself, Steve. Don’t you understand. It’s no use!”
“Please. Tell me. Some one I could speak to, someone I could see. Tell me. Where?”
“Cincinnati. Her name is Helen Anson. But—”
Heavy footsteps pounding in the hotel hall, muffled voices.
“The address is 6987 C Street . . .”
Then—the time was up. Across the city, McCracken lay pulsing out his last life. And here every beat of his fading heart acted upon Ellen and Steve Temple.
“Steve. Steve, I—”
Then he gave her his last message. The thing he had wanted to say for a long time, from inside him. The door was being beaten by fists and shoulders as he said it, but he said it anyhow, in the desperation of the last seconds:
“Ellen. Ellen, I love you. Hear me, Ellen! I love you! Don’t go away now. Don’t!”
He kept typing it over and over and over again, and he was crying like a kid and his throat couldn’t say it all, and he kept typing it over and over . . .
. . . until the keys misted, dissolved, melted and flowed away under his fingers, and he kept typing it until all the hard, bright wonder of the machine was gone and his hands fell through empty air to rap upon the top of an empty table.
And when they broke the door open, even then he didn’t stop crying . . .
THE END
INTERIM
Ray Bradbury
Very late on this night, the old man came from his house with a flashlight in his hand and asked of the little boys the object of their frolic. The little boys gave no answer, but tumbled on in the leaves.
The old man went into his house and sat down and worried. It was three in the morning. He saw his own pale small hands trembling on his knees. He was all joints and angles, and his face, reflected above the mantel, was no more than a pale cloud of breath exhaled upon the mirror.
The children laughed softly outside, in the leaf piles.
He switched out his flashlight quietly and sat in the dark. Why he should be in any way bothered by playing children he could not know. But it was late for them to be out, at three in the morning, playing. He was very cold.
There was a sound of a key in the door and the old man arose to go see who could possibly be coming into his house. The front door opened and a young man entered with a young woman. They were looking at each other softly and tenderly, holding hands, and the old man stared at them and cried, ‘What are you doing in my house?’
The young man and the young woman replied, ‘What are you doing in our house?’ The young man said, ‘Here now, get on out.’ And took the old man by the elbow and shoved him out of the door and closed and locked it after searching him to see if he had stolen something.
‘This is my house, you can’t lock me out.’ The old man beat upon the door. He stood in the dark morning air. Looking up he saw the lights illumine the warm inside windows and rooms upstairs and then, with a move of shadows, go out.
The old man walked down the street and came back and still the small boys rolled in the dark icy morning leaves, not looking at him. He stood before the house and as he watched the lights turned on and turned off more than a thousand times. He counted softly under his breath.
A young boy of about fourteen ran by to the house, a football in his hand. He opened the door without even trying to unlock it, and went in. The door closed.
Half an hour later, with the morning wind rising, the old man saw a car pull up and a plump woman got out with a little boy three years old. They walked across the dark lawn and went into the house after the woman had looked at the old man and said, ‘Is that you, Mr. Terle?’
‘Yes,’ said the old man, automatically, for somehow he didn’t wish to frighten her. But it was a lie. He knew he was not Mr. Terle at all. Mr. Terle lived down the street.
The lights glowed on and off a thousand more times.
The children rustled softly in the dark leaves.
A seventeen-year-old boy bounded across the street, smelling faintly of the smudged lipstick on his cheek, almost knocked the old man down, cried, ‘Sorry!’ and leaped up the steps. Fitting a key to the lock he went in.
The old man stood there with the town lying asleep on all sides of him; the unlit windows, the breathing rooms, the stars all through the trees, liberally caught and held on winter branches, so much snow suspended glittering on the cold air.
‘That’s my house; who are all those people going in it!’ cried the old man to the wrestling children.
The wind blew, shaking the empty trees.
In the year which was 1923 the house was dark, a car drove up before it, the mother stepped from the car with her son William who was three. William looked at the dark morning world and saw his house and as he felt his mother lead him towards the house he heard her say, ‘Is that you, Mr. Terle?’ and in the shadows by the great wind-filled oak tree an old man stood and replied, ‘Yes.’ The door closed.
In the year which was 1934 William came running in the summer night, feeling the football cradled in his hands, feeling the dark street pass under his running feet, along the sidewalk. He smelled, rather than saw, an old man, as he ran past. Neither of them spoke. And so on into the house.
In the year 1937 William ran with antelope boundings across the street, a smell of lipstick on his face, a smell of someone young and fresh upon his cheeks; all thoughts of love and deep night. He almost knocked the stranger down, cried, ‘Sorry!’ and ran to fit a key to the front door.
In the year 1947 a car drew up before the house, William relaxed, his wife beside him. He wore a fine tweed suit, it was late, he was tired, they both smelled faintly of so many drinks offered and accepted. For a moment they both heard the wind in the trees. ‘Is that a light in our house?’ asked the wife. William felt uneasy. ‘Yes,’ he said. They got out of the car and let themselves into the house with a key. An old man came from the living-room and cried, ‘What are you doing in my house?’
‘Your house?’ said William. ‘Here now, old man, get on out.’ And William, feeling faintly sick to his stomach, for there was something to the old man that made him feel all water and nothing, searched the old man and pushed him out of the door and closed and locked it. From outside the old man cried, ‘This is my house, you can’t lock me out!’
