Time Travel Omnibus, page 361
* * * * *
“—insisted that we should do no further experimenting until we had checked the mathematical aspects of the problem yet again. They went so far as to state that it was possible that if changes occurred we would not notice them, that no instruments imaginable could detect them. They claimed we would accept these changes as things that had always existed. Well! This at a time when our country—and theirs, ladies and gentlemen of the press, theirs, too—was in greater danger than ever. Can you—”
Words failed him. He walked up and down the booth, shaking his head. All the reporters on the long, wooden bench shook their heads with him in sympathy.
There was another gong. The two dull spheres appeared briefly, clanged against each other and ricocheted off into opposite chronological directions.
“There you are.” The government official waved his arms at the transparent laboratory floor above them. “The first oscillation has been completed; has anything changed? Isn’t everything the same? But the dissidents would maintain that alterations have occurred and we haven’t noticed them. With such faith-based, unscientific Brooklyn Project viewpoints, there can be no argument. People like these—”
* * * * *
II. Two billion years ago. The great ball clicked its photographs of the fiery, erupting ground below. Some red-hot crusts rattled off its sides. Five or six thousand complex molecules lost their basic structure as they impinged against it. A hundred didn’t.
* * * * *
“—will labor thirty hours a day out of thirty-three to convince you that black isn’t white, that we have seven moons instead of two. They are especially dangerous—”
A long, muted note as the apparatus collided with itself. The warm orange of the corner lights brightened as it started out again.
“—because of their learning, because they are sought for guidance in better ways of vegetation.” The government official was slithering up and down rapidly now, gesturing with all of his pseudopods. “We are faced with a very difficult problem, at present—”
* * * * *
III. One billion years ago. The primitive triple tribolite the machine had destroyed when it materialized began drifting down wetly.
* * * * *
“—a very difficult problem. The question before us: should we shllk or shouldn’t we shllk?” He was hardly speaking English now; in fact, for some time, he hadn’t been speaking at all. He had been stating his thoughts by slapping one pseudopod against the other—as he always had . . .
* * * * *
IV. A half-billion years ago. Many different kinds of bacteria died as the water changed temperature slightly.
* * * * *
“This, then, is no time for half measures. If we can reproduce well enough—”
* * * * *
V. Two hundred fifty million years ago. VI. A hundred twenty-five million years ago.
* * * * *
“—to satisfy the Five Who Spiral, we have—”
* * * * *
VII. Sixty-two million years. VIII. Thirty-one million. IX. Fifteen million. X. Seven and a half million.
* * * * *
“—spared all attainable virtue. Then—”
* * * * *
XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. Bong—bong—bong bongbongbongongongngngngggg . . .
* * * * *
“—we are indeed ready for refraction. And that, I tell you, is good enough for those who billow and those who snap. But those who billow will be proven wrong as always, for in the snapping is the rolling and in the rolling is only truth. There need be no change merely because of a sodden cilium. The apparatus has rested at last in the fractional conveyance; shall we view it subtly?”
They all agreed, and their bloated purpled bodies dissolved into liquid and flowed up and around to the apparatus. When they reached its four square blocks, now no longer shrilling mechanically, they rose, solidified, and regained their slime-washed forms.
“See,” cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. “See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven’t changed.” He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. “Nothing has changed!”
AMPHISKIOS[*]
John D. MacDonald
Four people, plucked out of time at the instant of dying, become hunted beings in a grim game whose object is their second death!
ANY diagrammatic presentation of the time concept must perforce be a simplification. Time is neither pulsations nor is it a winding river nor yet coiled upon itself like a spring. To best understand it and to free it of metaphysical confusions we must revert a full five thousand years to the basic Einstein conjectures, many of them since disproven in the mighty laboratory of stellar space. Draw two lines intersecting. An X. Where they cross is the “now”.
The upper half is the past, the lower half the future.
Both the understandable past and the foreseeable future are severely limited by the sides which form a crude, angular hour-glass. The sidelines represent the speed of light, the infinite Fitzgerald
Contraction, the bitter barrier of existence.
Each soul is a grain of sand in this hour-glass, but suspended forever at the point of “now”. Since the origin of this concept twenty-five generations of experimentation have proved that man, pinned in the focal point of existence, can move timewise neither up into the past nor down into the future.
Thus it has been conceded that escape from this trap of time, from the jaws of inevitability, lies in the possibility of lateral movement, which, of course, assumes a penetration of the barrier of the speed of light.
Assuming the possibility of lateral movement, this movement could thus be reversed and the person which had existed for a moment outside the time barrier would return at an alien focal point, thus completing the illusion of a “journey” within time.
All this is, of course, a simplification $o extreme as to render the entire exposition almost meaningless.
“Narración de Viajes en Tiempo”—Agabanzo Historical Collection—Martian Micro-library
Chapter I
Four are Chosen
HOWARD LOOMIS glanced down at the dashboard clock and cursed the long-winded customer who had delayed him for over two hours. His sample cases packed the back seat. He had already reported to the sales manager that he would spend the night in Alexandria, seventy miles away.
He yawned, lit a cigarette and ran the window down, hoping the cold air would keep sleep away. He was a thin and nervous young man with a mobile mouth, a receding hairline and driving ambition.
He began to think of the prospects in Alexandria then as sleep welled up over him. His hands relaxed on the wheel. He awakened with a start as his front right wheel went off onto the shoulder. The big car swerved and he fought it back under control.
It was a clear cold night—below freezing. It had rained during the afternoon but the road was dry.
He decided to increase his speed, depending on the added responsibility to keep him awake.
In the white glow of his headlights he saw a bridge ahead—a bridge over railroad tracks.
The tires whined on the concrete, changed tone as they hit the steel tread of the bridge.
The bridge was coated with thin clear ice.
As the back end began to swing Howard Loomis bit down on his lower lip, fighting both panic and sheer disbelief that this could be happening to him.
The back end swung in the other direction and there was a grinding smash as it tore through the side railing.
The big car tipped. Howard Loomis caught a glimpse of the steel tracks far below. Ridiculously the thought that he could not live through the fall was intermingled with the thoughts of the potential customers in Alexandria.
There was the spinning silence of the fall, the sickening lunge through space, and . . .
* * * * *
The third show was coming up and she knew that it would be rough and unpleasant. During the second show a drunk who fancied himself a comic, after chanting, “Take it off!” had come out onto the floor to offer assistance. There would be more drunks for the third show.
Her name was Mary Callahan—Maurine Callaix on the bill—and she was a tall girl with the blue-black hair, milky skin and blue eyes of her race.
She was checking the concealed hooks in her working dress when Sally, the new singer, came into the dressing room and stood watching her.
“How can you do it, Mary?” she asked.
“Do what, kid?”
“I mean, get out there in front of all those people and—”
Mary smiled tightly. “It’s just a business. I was the gal who was going to knock them dead in ballet. But I grew too big. It doesn’t bother me any more.”
Sally looked at her, shook her head and said, “I could never do it.”
Mary Callahan stared at the smaller girl for a moment. Mary Callahan thought of the last three years, of the ten months’ hospital bill her mother had accumulated while dying, of the money for milk and meat and bread for the twin nephews.
“I hope you don’t have to do it. Ever.”
“How about Hick?” Sally asked.
MARY CALLAHAN frowned. “The guy worries me. I don’t know what gave him the idea that I was his prize package. He’s a hophead, dearie. He stopped me at the door tonight and I had to slap him across the teeth to get by him.”
“Was that safe?” Sally asked.
“He hasn’t got the nerve to try anything. I hope.”
She got the call and went on, pausing just off the floor for the blue spot to pick her up, then walking on in a slow half dance to the sultry beat of the tomtom, wearing the mechanical lascivious smile, reaching gracefully for the first concealed snap on the evening gown.
When Rick came into the glow of the spot the music faltered and stopped.
Mary Callahan watched his hand, watched the gun.
Suddenly she knew that he would shoot. She saw his pinpoint pupils, the twisted mouth, the stained teeth.
She saw the gun come up. She looked down the barrel, saw his finger whiten on the trigger, saw the first orange-red bloom of the flower of death and . . .
* * * * *
Joe Gresham padded across the I beam, his eyes fixed on the upright opposite him. He had learned three years before that when you’re on the high iron you never look at your feet. Because then you’d see the cars below, like beetles, the people like small slow bugs, and something would happen to your stomach.
He was a sun-hardened man, with wide shoulders, knotted hands and an impassive though good-humored face.
Above him he heard the rivets clanking into the bucket, the buck of the hammer. The sun was bright.
When he heard the shout, he stopped dead. The red-hot rivet struck him just above the right ear.
For long seconds he fought for balance, gave up, tried to drop in such a way that his hands would clasp the girder on which he had been walking.
But he had waited too long, and his hands merely slapped the girder.
He spun down through the warm morning air and it was as though the earth spun slowly around him. Each time he saw the street it was startlingly closer. And as he fell he thought, “This isn’t happening to me. This can’t be the end of Joe Gresham!”
And . . .
* * * * *
Stacey Murdock took three more smooth crawl strokes, rolled over onto her back and looked back at the lake shore, at the vast white house, the wide green lawns.
She grinned as she wondered if the two muscle-men her father had hired were still sitting in the house waiting for her to get up. Nothing could be more ridiculous than Daddy’s periodic kidnaping scares. Why kidnaping was out of fashion! Even when the gal in question would one day inherit more millions than she had fingers and toes.
Stacey was a trim, small girl with pale blond hair, a rather sallow face and a wide, petulant mouth.
The party last night had been a daisy. The cold water of the lake felt good. Best thing in the world for a hangover.
She had climbed down, dressed in a terricloth robe, from the terrace outside her bedroom window. She could see the robe on the dock, glinting white in the sun.
It was so much more pleasant to swim without a suit.
Her soaked hair plastered her forehead. She pushed it aside, rolled over and began her long, effortless crawl out into the big lake. The waves were a bit higher way out and sometimes when she rolled her face up to breathe, one would slap her in the face.
Suddenly she felt the churn of nausea. The hangover was worse than she thought. But messy to be sick out in the water like this.
She floated for a time as the feeling got worse. When the paroxysms started, she doubled over, unable to catch her breath, unable to straighten out. She coughed under water and it made a strange bubbling by her ears. Then, stupidly, she had to breathe and she strangled on the water she was sucking into her longs.
She had no idea where the surface was, and she was climbing up an endless green ladder with arms as limp as wet doth and then there was a softness of music in her ears and it was so much easier and more delicious just to lie back and relax and sleep and . . .
* * * * *
It was Baedlik who first penetrated the barrier of the speed of light. The feat was not performed, as one might suppose, in the depths of space but in his laboratory in London. By bombarding the atoms of Baedlium with neutrons, he so increased the mass and attraction of the nuclei that the outer rings of electrons, moving at forty thousand miles per hour, were drawn in toward the nuclei, their speed proportionately increasing.
This decreased the dead space within the atom, resulting in an incredibly heavy material. When the speed of the outer rings passed the speed of light, the samples of Baedlium, to all intents and purposes, naturally ceased to exist at Baedlik’s focal point.
This, for over seventy years, was called Baedlik’s Enigma, until the lateral movement in time was explained by Glish, who also set forward the first set of formulae designed to predict and control this lateral movement.
Ibid
Chapter II
The Watching Boxes
HOWARD LOOMIS did not have, in his background or experience, any comparable sensation. One moment every fibre of his body was tensed in vain effort to withstand the smash which would tear soul from body.
And, without transition, he lay on a gentle slope, still curled in a seated position, and the air that was cold was warm the night that was dark was suddenly a new day.
He sat up, still dressed in gray conservative suit, snap-brim hat, buttoned topcoat. His trembling hands rested against the grass. Or was it grass? It was not a proper green, having a bluish cast mixed with it.
Seventy feet away a fairytale forest cast a heavy shadow—mammoth trunks, roots like broken fingers, crowns as high as redwoods, reaching up toward a sky that was too blue. It was a purple blue. The disk of the sun was wide and in its yellow-glare was a tinge of blood.
Breathing hard, he scrambled to his feet, turning, looking around him, seeing nothing but the expanse of grass, a ragged outcropping of rock that glinted silver, the side of a hill that restricted his horizon.
There was no sign of car, bridge or tracks. And, after the first few seconds, he did not look for any. This was alien, this world. The air was thin, as on a high mountain and to have seen in this place his car or any fragment of the world he knew would have been as grotesque an anachronism as his own presence.
He listened and heard the distant sound of birds. The air was sweet with the scent of sun-warmed grasses.
Howard Loomis dropped to his knees.
His hat rolled away, unheeded. He ran thin fingers through his thinning hair and thought about delirium, Valhalla and death.
He took off his topcoat and threw it aside. He fingered the fabric of his familiar suit, hoping to gain from the touch of the smooth weave a surer grasp on reality. He looked at his sleeve, saw the place where the weaver had fixed the cigarette burn in Baltimore.
He spun to his feet as she coughed.
She was a tall girl in a wine evening dress. Her blue eyes were wide with fear and she stood, her hands at her throat. She looked at something in the air in front of her which did not exist.
“Rick!” she gasped.
Howard Loomis began to laugh. He couldn’t control it. He fell onto his hands and knees and laughed until the tears dripped ridiculously from the end of his sharp nose.
“Too—too much,” he gasped. “Now bring on the—the golden harps.”
“Who are you calling a harp?” the girl snapped.
The sound of her angry voice snapped him out of it. He stared at her in silence. “Where is this place? Who are you?”
“Those are my lines, mister.”
“I car’t tell you where we are, but I’m Howard Loomis. I sell Briskies. I skidded off a railroad bridge but I don’t remember hitting the bottom. I ended up right here.”
“You don’t belong here?” she asked. “Do I look it? In this decorator’s nightmare am I part of the decor?”
“No,” she said. “You’re the Junior Chamber of Commerce type. You and blue trees don’t mix. I’m Mary Callahan. I was starting my strip when a hoppie named Rick walked up and shot me right between the eyes. At least that was where he was aiming. I saw him pull the trigger but I didn’t feel it hit.”
She reached an unsteady hand up and touched her smooth forehead between her eyebrows with her fingertips.
He took out his cigarettes. She came over and sat down beside him. They smoked in silence.
“Oh, great!” Mary Callahan said. “Meaning that it’s tougher on you than on the common people? Let’s take a hike around this glamour pasture and see where we are?”
“In these?” she asked, holding out a slim foot encased in a silver sandal with a four inch heel. “You walk. I’ll wait.” He shrugged. When he was forty feet from her, walking toward the hill, she said, “Hey! Howie! Don’t look now but there’s something floating over you.” He looked up quickly and his mouth sagged open. It was a little metal box about the size of a cigar box. A fat lense protruded from the bottom of it. It had no visible means of support. Howard stepped quickly to one side. So did the box.
