Time Travel Omnibus, page 350
They went up to bed and turned the lights out.
In the year 1928, William and the other small boys wrestled on the lawn, waiting for the time when they would leave to watch the circus come chuffing in to the dawn-pale railroad station on the blue metal tracks. In the leaves they lay and laughed and kicked and fought. An old man with a flashlight came across the lawn. ‘Why are you playing here on my lawn at this time of morning?’ asked the old man. Who are you?’ replied William looking up a moment from the tangle.
The old man stood over the tumbling children a long moment. Then he dropped his flashlight. ‘Oh my dear boy, I know now, now I know!’ He bent to touch the boy. ‘I am you, and you are me. I love you, my dear boy, with all of my heart! Let me tell you what will happen to you in the years to come! If you knew! I am you, and you were once me! My name is William, so is yours! And all those people going into the house, they are William, they are you, they are me!’ The old man shivered. ‘Oh, all the dark years and the passing of time!’
‘Go away,’ said the boy. ‘You’re crazy.’
‘But,’ said the old man.
‘You’re crazy. I’ll call my father!’
The old man turned and walked away.
There was a flickering of the house lights, on and off. The boys wrestled quietly and secretly in the rustling leaves. The old man stood on the dark lawn.
Upstairs, in his bed, William Latting did not sleep on his bed in the year 1947. He sat up, lit a cigarette, and looked out of the window. His wife was awake. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘That old man,’ said William Latting. ‘I think he’s still down there, under the oak tree.’
‘Oh, he couldn’t be,’ she said.
‘I can’t see very well, but I think he’s there. I can barely make him out, it’s so dark.’
‘He’ll go away,’ she said.
William Latting drew quietly on his cigarette. He nodded. ‘Who are those kids?’
From her bed his wife said, ‘What kidsT
‘Playing on the lawn out there, what a hell of a time of night to be playing in the leaves.’
‘Probably the Moran boys.’
‘Doesn’t look like them.’
He stood by the window. ‘You hear something?’
‘What?’
‘A baby crying. Way off.’
‘I don’t hear anything,’ she said.
She lay listening. They both thought they heard running footsteps on the street, a key to the door. William Latting went to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw nothing.
In the year 1937, coming in the door, William saw a man in a dressing-gown at the top of the stairs looking down, a cigarette in his hand. ‘That you, Dad?’ No answer. The man sighed and went back into some room. William went to the kitchen to raid the ice-box.
The children wrestled in the soft dark leaves of morning.
William Latting said, ‘Listen.’
He and his wife listened.
‘It’s the old man,’ said William. ‘Crying.’
‘Why should he be crying?’
‘I don’t know. Why does anybody cry? Maybe he’s unhappy.’
‘If he’s still down there in the morning,’ said his wife, in the dark room, ‘call the police.’
William Latting went away from the window, put out his cigarette and lay in the bed, his eyes closed. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I won’t call the police. Not for him, I won’t.’
‘Why not?’
His voice was certain. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that. I just wouldn’t.’
They both lay there and faintly there was a sound of crying and the wind blew and William Latting knew that all he had to do if he wanted to watch the boys wrestling in the dark cool leaves of morning would be reach out with his hand and lift the shade and look, and there they would be, far below, wrestling and wrestling as dawn came pale in the eastern sky.
FANTASIA DEMENTIA
Maurice G. Hugi
Perhaps a machine isn’t necessary for Time travel. Arty Cameron’s body was certainly in To-day, but his mind visited other places.
PROLOGUE
Arty Cameron was a car thief.
It is one way of getting a living with the minimum of exertion. See a decent car, unoccupied, drive off with it, dump it with the car spivs in the East End and collect an easy £100!
Of course, this method of getting a crust had its drawbacks. What form of living hasn’t? For instance, there were police patrol cars equipped with radio; there were policemen who seemed to have nothing better to do than loaf by unattended cars; busy business people who were not too busy to notice that the man who was getting into the car was not the same man who had parked the machine! Not to mention inconsiderate owners who appeared just as Arty Cameron was about to insert his master key in the ignition switch.
Arty had spent twelve of his thirty-two years of life in prison all through the machinations of the above factors, which was most discouraging. They say crime does not pay, but, alas, Arty had yet to learn his lesson!
So he wandered the streets of Bayswater in search of a likely vehicle that would provide his needs for the next month or two. He saw a handsome Lagonda tourer carelessly parked outside a house, the ignition key conveniently left in the switch. There were some interesting looking suitcases in the back, also a good fur rug and a brief case. A nice nick if he could get away with it.
Arty surveyed the house and the street. No one at the front door or the windows, the street was happily empty of traffic or pedestrians. Now or never!
He didn’t pause in his stride. As he drew abreast of the car, Arty slipped the door handle and was behind the wheel in one smooth, practised movement. He engaged second speed, held his clutch out and switched on. As the engine roared to life he eased the clutch in and pulled away from the kerb. The deep bellow of the exhaust was rather alarming, but Arty kept his foot on the gas.
He did not hear the front door open, nor did he see the excited owner dance with impotent fury on the pavement. He took the first turning and headed for Marble Arch, he knew safety lay in numbers and Arty meant to get this car to his pals or burst!
AS he slid into top gear, his exhaust quietening down to a gentle burble, he caught sight of the owner perched on the running board of a pursuing laundry van. With a muttered curse, Arty slammed his foot down on the accelerator pedal; the Lagonda leaped forward under the impulse of the mighty engine. With the greatest of ease he left the lumbering laundry van in the rear and shot into the busy traffic along the Bayswater Road.
Unfortunately, Arty did not see the police car as he sped in and out of the traffic. But the police driver could not fail to see the apparently dangerous piece of driving that Arty was forced to indulge in to make his getaway.
The next thing Arty Cameron knew was the fact that a police car was running neck and neck with him and that the uniformed constable next the driver was waving him to draw in at the kerb. Arty was in no mood to argue with the cops, and to pull up at the kerb and take to his heels was out of the question; there were far too many people about for him to escape; so Arty roared along at a good eighty miles an hour with the police car in hot pursuit.
The Lagonda jumped the traffic lights at Marble Arch and so did the police car. More by good luck than judgment, they both avoided crashes in the tangled press of traffic. But the luck could not hold for ever, and it was the big black and gold Lagonda that crashed in trying to evade a huge lorry laden with bricks.
Arty never knew how he had skidded round the heavily laden vehicle. He mounted the pavement and smashed into the massive stone pier of a huge departmental store. He had a brief moment of terrific jolting as the Lagonda jumped the kerb, and equally brief vision of people scattering before his onslaught, and then . . .
His body flew over the windscreen, for he had slid away instinctively from the menace of being pinned by the steering column. An instant glimpse of concrete masonry, and then darkness and silence. No pain, no shock of contact; just a moment of sheer terror as he flew through the air, and then the all-enveloping blackness and quiet.
Fifteen minutes later, ambulance men picked up his shattered body and bore it off to hospital. He was rushed to the casualty ward, stripped, washed and put to bed. Two surgeons surveyed his mashed forehead. With cold-blooded precision one of them gently probed the pulverised bone with his finger tips and turned to his companion.
“Hopeless,” he muttered. “Frontal, temporal and both orbital bones smashed to smithereens. It’s a wonder his neck isn’t broken!”
They gave him forty-eight hours, but Arty Cameron refused to die. He lay in his cot, neither dead nor alive. He breathed gently, slowly, and a trickle of saliva moistened the corners of his mouth. Apart from his soft, sighing breath, he made no other movements.
Dr. Schrodinger decided to operate.
“It will probably kill him, but he’ll die anyway, if we don’t do something,” he said, after a short chat with the House Surgeon. “If I can piece those bones together, and remove the torn portions of the frontal lobe of the brain without finishing him off, it’ll be a most interesting operation.”
“Interesting? Unique, I’d say,” the House Surgeon observed. “Can you hazard what the effects of the partial removal of the front allobe may have on the patient?”
Dr. Schrodinger pursed his lips. “That is doubtful. It may affect his speech slightly if I have to cut too deeply into the Fissure of Sylvius. Hearing may also become damaged or distorted. I can’t say more, except that I remember a case where the time-sense was temporarily upset, but that patient fully recovered.”
Still Arty Cameron refused to die. The operation was carried out, Dr. Schrodinger performing extensive trephining to the frontal bone. He replaced the fragments with a plate of silver. Damaged portions of the brain were removed and the entire operation went off without a hitch. Arty Cameron was returned to his bed and watched day and night. At last the time came when the doctors decided that he could come off the danger list.
Now, instead of a nurse, a policeman sat at his bedside. From time to time he was relieved by other policemen, but the car thief was kept under constant surveillance.
Arty lay there. The doctors were puzzled. He neither spoke nor moved. His reflexes were negative, he was apparently stone-deaf. Though his eyes were wide open, his gaze was fixed. He had to be fed and washed by the nurses. Twice in three weeks he stirred and groaned, and a clammy sweat beaded his scarred brow. He spoke once, just before he died; it was a coherent tale he told.
And so, Arty Cameron died. And this is the story he told before he passed away.
I
ARTY CAMERON had a moment of terror as he hurtled through the air, his eyes glued in fascination to the concrete buttress of the great store. He instinctively raised his arms to ward off the blow.
It came like a thunderclap. No shock, no pain. Just an instant of tremendous compression, then a sensation of sinking into a soft, velvety blackness. No vivid lights, no receding stars; just blackness, silence, a feeling of sleepy restfulness.
How long he had been submerged in that ocean of bouyant blackness, Arty did not know. Time had no meaning for him. It might have been ten minutes; it might have been ten days; or even ten centuries! He was conscious of floating to the surface of the Seas of Sleep; of resting, softly cradled in a trough of ease.
Still no pain. He sighed luxuriously as he laid there. No pain, nothing to worry about. He Was dead, he knew that. If he was alive, he would be in a torment of agony. No man could crash into that massive pillar and live, anyway!
As he lay there, swaying in a gentle see-saw motion on that placid lake of semi-consciousness, he perceived a dim, distant star. It was faint, but burning steadily. Without thought, he fastened his eyes to that friendly luminescence. He felt it was his spirit, his ego, floating there above him.
After a time it seemed closer. He reached for it. It came as a shock to him to realise he was bodiless! Yet, if he had no body, he was fully aware of resting on the bouyant inky blackness. He could faintly sense the resistance to his back. He could even press his formless body against it!
For a time he lay there, puzzling out this seeming paradox. How could nothingness press against nothingness so that there could be tangible resistance? His eyes wandered back to the fully gleaming star.
It was brighter now, and larger. It did not burn; it did not even glow; just a disc of blank whiteness in the all-enveloping blackness. It’s bottom was flattened out curiously, a queer kind of serrated flatness. As he watched, aeons rolled by. From a vast distance he heard a soft voice whisper:
“His eyes are open, Doctor, otherwise no change.”
He turned in the direction of the voice, yet was not conscious of any change of position. The resistance to his back was more determined; the waves of sleep had petrified into stiff little rucks; the white spot grew larger and clearer. Slowly, he realized that he was no longer cradled in velvety blackness, but was actually lying on a bed. That explained the resistance to his back; the creases in the bedclothes, his petrified waves.
THE white star was now the ward ceiling, and its serrated and flattened edge was the top of the screen surrounding his bed. Dimly he realised he was in hospital, somewhere. And gradually the memory of the Lagonda’s wild skid, the jolt on mounting the pavement, the scattering pedestrians, the instant he arched through the air towards that grim pile of concrete. So vivid was the memqry that Arty Cameron screamed.
He shrieked with mind and soul—but no whisper came to his lips!
He turned his head from the agonising vision; thrust out his arms to ward off the blow—but in actuality he did not so much as flutter an eyelid!
A cold sweat seemed to envelop his mind. He could see, he could hear, but he was completely paralysed. Now time once more existed for him. He could sense the soft, sighing breaths as he inhaled and exhaled. He could hear the soft, but determined pulse of his heart. And so he lay, night succeeding day and day following night, immovable and unmoved. Many times he was fed and washed. He could feel everything they did to him; taste every morsel of food and drink; but move, no!
How queer, he thought, that though I am paralysed I-can feel everything that contacts me. I always thought a paralytic was insensible to touch or pain.
The doctors hurt him and drove him almost mad when they made a test of his reflexes. When they needled the soles of his feet for reaction; when they needled, or pressed, or rubbed sensitive nervous spots of his body.
Again and again the silent screams cut across his mind. He struggled and fought to escape the thorough, remorseless examination, yet not even the expression of his eyes could change.
The House Surgeon grunted half humourously to the attendant nurse: “Blighter’s dead, but won’t lie down!” and Arty cursed him mentally with every shred of his ego. But to no purpose.
They left him alone after that. Once or twice the hated uniform of a policeman came across his line of vision, so that Arty was aware the authorities had not given up the hope of nabbing him and sending him down for yet another stretch.
But even this left Arty Cameron cold. He lay on his painless couch wondering how long he was to linger thus, ever wakeful; never able to sleep and always vividly conscious, unable to even blink an eye.
Whole eternities seemed to pass by. Then, without warning, there came a shrill buzzing in his head, like a rapidly plucked harp string. It grew shriller and shriller. The sustained humming made his very soul quiver in sympathy.
Mounting. Crescendo upon crescendo. Louder and yet louder.
Hummmm! Hummmm! Hummmm!
ZING!
Arty Cameron felt sick unto death as with a final crashing chord, all sound ceased and his vision dimmed.
He felt himself tumble into bottomless space, turning over and over, slowly, as he plunged into inky blackness.
ZING!
Once again that soul searing note of utter confusion.
Then . . . blankness!
II
ARTY CAMERON sat up and nursed his aching head. His whole body still quivered from that final crashing cacaphony of inner vibration.
Feeling sick and dizzy, he struggled to his feet and stumbled a few paces. For some minutes he could not recollect his thoughts, then, as memory flooded back he gave a gasp.
Good God! He had been a paralytic, chained to a hospital bed, with a uniformed constable at his side waiting to arrest him for stealing a car the moment he had recovered; and now he was free and walking!
As the thought came to him he checked in midstride. He looked down at his body. He was utterly naked. His flesh was opalescent and glowing with a faint aura as of an electrical discharge! For some moments he toyed with the wild idea that he was dead and that this was his spirit form!
But if he were dead, then where was he? Heaven, Hell, or the Limbo of Idiots? He knelt down in the Stygian darkness and viewed the terrain by the glow of his body. The ground was smooth and cold and hard as if formed of iron. It was indeed iron, for here and there were rust flecks!
He got up greatly mystified. Which direction should he take? He shrugged. What did it matter; all directions were equal in this darkness. Without objective he would walk in a circle, anyway.
As he walked, strength poured back into him. His head cleared and his step grew lithe and springy. The darkness also seemed less intent now; his vision, without a doubt, was becoming attuned to the lack of light.
He became aware of a distant horizon, lit by a faint, purplish glow; and he also became aware of vague, amorphous forms drifting around him; jelly-like bladders of a slightly lighter shade than the all-pervading gloom.
They writhed and twisted like agonised souls and their shapes changed continuously. Some had long, trailing tendrils that whipped towards him. Others, suckers that opened and closed convulsively with faint slobbering sounds. Yet others were covered with coarse bristles or blotchy, leprous spots. One or two bumped into him, so that he screamed and beat them off wildly with flailing arms, as their cold, slimy contact shrivelled the soul within him.
