Time Travel Omnibus, page 384
“Strange,” said Dee, recalling how unpleased Alan had been over his win at Belmont the day before. “I wonder why?”
“A fellow with his luck can afford to be a bit cracked,” said Mike bitterly. “Now, about this husband of yours, Dee. We’ve got word he’s coming back to New York to ask for a cut in his alimony. He claims he can’t afford to pay it.”
“I don’t want to be unfair,” said Dee, to whom both husband and alimony were distasteful subjects. “If Chuck can’t afford it—”
“Can’t afford it!” exploded Mike angrily. “Your ex-spouse—sorry, I mean spouse—has just come into another trust fund. His Uncle Joe died in Mexico City last month. He’s just trying to get out of his responsibility. After all, he was the one who did the playing around. He was the one who wanted the divorce. You had nothing whatever to do with it.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Dee a little dreamily. “After all, if I had handled him a bit more sympathetically—he was really just a big spoiled overgrown kid.”
“Women!” cried Mike, raising eyes and hands to the ceiling. Then he sighed, counted ten almost visibly and smiled wanly at her. “Dee, honey,” he said, “how about dinner tonight?”
“I’m sorry,” she told him, “but I have a date.”
“With Alan Burnet?” Mike’s eyebrows were lifted curiously.
“With Alan Burnet,” she told him, then leaned across the desk to touch his wrist with a gloved finger. “I’m terribly sorry, Mike, but this is the way it is. It’s better than pretending a thing I don’t feel. I wish it were different but—”
“So do I,” Mike sighed, managed a grin. “But look out for that spoiled-over-grown ex-baby of yours. I’m not actually sure why he’s coming back to New York. Maybe he wants to remarry you.”
“That,” she said crisply, rising from, her chair, “is out. So long, Mike—and, thanks for everything.”
“Oh, sure—so long,” said Mike in open self-derision.
Alan, in his foolish and costly little roadster, was waiting for her outside. She had told him about her appointment with Mike. At sight of his smile, at the touch of his hand on her arm, the vague misgivings she had felt upstairs about him vanished. She repressed a desire to say, “Oh, Alan!” softly and got into the car. From that moment she knew she was sunk without trace.
“We’re going for a sail,” he told her. “I have a little S-boat at Sands Point. It ought to be fun.”
“It sounds lovely, Alan,” she told him, squinting up at the bright blue of the sky. “But I’ll have to go home and get some things first.”
He kissed her when they were in her Beekman Place apartment and it took them quite awhile to get started for Long Island. At one point the telephone rang but Alan simply lifted it from its cradle, leaving it to buzz its complaints unheard.
The sun was hazy in a metallic sky when they finally got out on the water but neither of them cared. They cruised the sound in the little sailboat, reveling in the freshness of the salt air, in the gentle clop-clop of the water against the hull, in the sweep of white canvas, in each other’s nearness. They didn’t talk much—they didn’t have to.
The squall caught them unaware. One moment the air was still and the water smooth as an oil-slick. The next the sky was dark, the waves crashing on deck and cockpit as if seeking to engulf and devour the little sailboat. Terrified, Dee crouched in a corner of the rocking vessel while Alan coolly brought her through.
“We’ll be all right,” he told, her and there was unhappiness in his voice as he shouted the words. He pulled savagely at the halyards after locking the tiller, still graceful as he held his balance on that precariously tilting deck. Even then, in her terror, she wondered a little why he should be unhappy in his confidence that they were not going to drown.
The wind gave a final furious blow and their mainsail was rent to shreds. Somehow Alan lowered the tattered canvas and they rocked less violently, powered only by the jib. The waters were growing calmer, the air, which had cooled, grew warm again.
“We’ll be lucky to get back to the Point,” said Alan somberly, rejoining her in the cockpit. “I’ll bring her in wherever I can and we’ll find a phone and call the club. Oh-oh!”
“What’s wrong, darling?” Dee asked him.
“Fog,” he told her briefly. “This damned freak weather.” But he grinned at her reassuringly. She snuggled close to his wet body, not caring at the moment that she must look like a drowned rat. She felt almost worship for him—for the coolness with which he had brought them through the storm.
LONG ISLAND became shadowy and vanished as fog and night wrapped them doubly. In a little while the only sentient thing around them was the slop-slop of water against the hull. It was like being wrapped in a vacuum. They sat still there for more than an hour, waiting for something to show.
“I’ve got to get you out of this,” he told her finally, removing his arm from about her. His voice was oddly unsteady.
“Don’t hurry, darling,” Dee said, putting a restraining hand on his wet sleeve. “It’s bound to lift sometime. And don’t worry. I’m perfectly happy here alone with you.”
“Sweet!” There was reassurance in the pressure of his fingers on her shoulder. “But if I can rig the flashlight . . .”
“To see through this?” She gestured at the fog about them, all but lost sight of her own hand in the process.
He said nothing, fumbled his way forward in the cockpit to the small emergency locker. She heard him grunt and mutter something, then caught the faint flare of his cigarette lighter. It reflected light briefly from the cylindrical tube of a flashlight.
Moments later a brilliant shaft of light cut through the fog like a drill, widening but not losing brightness as it progressed. Where it was, the fog simply wasn’t. Alan lifted the beam until the shore of Long Island lay revealed a half mile or so away. He murmured something to himself, then came back to-the tiller. They inched their way slowly via jib-power toward shore.
At last they reached a cove with a rotting wharf. Rickety wooden stairs led to a shuttered Charles Addams sort of house atop a low bluff. Alan moored the sloop to the wharf and held her fiercely for a long moment, his lips hard on hers.
“Stay here,” he told her. “I’m going to find a phone and get help. You’ll be all right.”
“I want to come with you,” she said. “No—the going may be rough and I don’t want to worry about you, honey. I can make it quicker alone.”
“Okay, Alan,” she said with a submissiveness hitherto alien to her nature.
He kissed her again, saltily, and was gone. She sat down in the cockpit and managed finally to get a damp cigarette going. At least, she thought, Alan hadn’t guessed right on their sail. He had hot foreseen the storm. It gave her an odd sense, of relief. The idea of a man who knew everything was frightening.
How long she sat there she did not know but she smoked four moist cigarettes before she heard the clop-clop of water against the bottom of another vessel. She picked up the flashlight Alan had left with her, swung it in the direction of the sound and pushed the little button on its metallic side.
“Hey—shut that off! Do you want to blind me?” shouted a rasping, too-familiar voice. She obeyed numbly, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes. It was Chuck Lord, her ex-husband, sailing alone in a Brutal Beast. Moments later he was alongside the S-boat, making fast with a painter.
“What was that thing you flashed at me?” he asked querulously in his yes-I’ve-been-drunk-but-now-I’m-sober-and-what-about-it? tone. I spotted it in the fog and was able to follow you in. He saw Dee then, blinked, said, “Oh, it is you. Where’s whozis?”
“If you mean Alan Burnet, he has gone to get help,” she said with all the haughtiness her damp condition would admit. She wished Chuck were drunk. When he was sober he was smart—too smart.
“All alone and no telephone,” he said, grinning at her. Then, “Let’s have a look at that light.”
“It’s just a stepped-up flashlight,” she told him, glad to tell him anything that would keep the talk from personal subjects.
“Just a stepped-up—my foot!” He took the light from her nerveless fingers, studied it, pointed it out over the water, pushed the button. On the horizon the Connecticut shore line was clearly visible in the circle of brilliant light.
“Frau that used to be mine,” Chuck Lord said softly, “I was all ready to be a nuisance. I was tired of paying that alimony check every three months—and getting nothing in return. I was going to put the screws on but good.”
“How did you get here?” Dee asked. She had huddled herself protectively into a ball, like a spineless porcupine or an armadillo, in the furthest corner of the cockpit.
“Partly luck.” He laughed, still studying the lamp in his hand. “I called your apartment this morning and you took the phone off the hook. So I went over there and waited and followed. I managed to rent me a boat—of sorts. I lost you lovebirds in the fog, of course, but this light brought me back on the beam.” He put it on, peered at it in the reflection of its own light. For an instant it shone in Dee’s eyes and she cried out in pain.
It was like looking directly into the sun.
“Quite a gadget—who made it?” Chuck asked her casually.
“Alan put it together,” she said, then: wished she hadn’t. Her Ex was showing much too much interest in the light.
“I’d like to meet him some time,” said Chuck; “As I said, I was ready to kick up a stink—but maybe I won’t. I’ll make a deal. Let me take this light and I’ll lay off. Okay?”
“But it’s not mine,” said Dee, relieved and fearful at once.
“That’s right,” he said mockingly. “Possession is nine points of the law, I believe. Well, Here—I’ll give you this.” He tossed another flashlight into the boat cockpit, began unfastening the painter. “So long—darling. Happy alimony.”
PERHAPS half an hour later she heard footsteps on the wooden stairs of the bluff. It was Alan and she clung to him happy and afraid at once, crying a little against his shoulder.
“Hey!” he said, holding her off from him. “What gives? I wasn’t gone that long. They’re sending over a car from the Point.”
“Oh, darling, I’m so glad you’re back,” she cried.
“Well, so am I,” he told her. He lit them cigarettes, said, “Let’s have that flashlight. I want to set it at normal.”
“It is normal,” she said, not wanting, to talk about Chuck, and his swap. “It went back to normal just a few minutes ago. Alan, I don’t like to seem inquisitive, but what did you do to it?”
“It went back!” he exclaimed, running a hand over his forehead and staring at her. “You’re sure of it?”
“See for yourself,” she told him. He picked up the flashlight from beside her, tried it, tried it again.
“Good Lord!” he cried. “It can’t be! It simply can’t be.”
“Is something wrong?” Dee asked him.
“No!” he shouted, grabbing her close to him and hugging her madly. “Everything’s wonderful.” He kissed her until she struggled clear of him in near-exasperation.
“Alan Burnet,” she said, “if you don’t tell me what—”
“Okay,” he told her. “I can tell you now, darling. But you must promise not to tell anyone about it—not anyone.”
“I’ll be good,” she said meekly and meant it. Something in his tone told her he wasn’t kidding.
“I pulled a switch in the batteries of that flash that released atomic power,” he told her. “It should have held its light for two hundred years—in my world at any rate. And it didn’t.”
“What do you mean, Alan—‘your world?’ ” she asked him, a sudden cold chill settling around her heart.
“I’m the one who got away,” he told her grimly. “My. world was wiped out by indiscriminate use of atomic power in nineteen sixty-two, darling. No, I’m not crazy. I can prove it.”
From a pocket in his shirt he brought out a water-proof package, opened it. Under the dim glow of the flashlight they could see its contents clearly enough. There was money there, lots of it, in crisp thousand-dollar bills—all of them dated in the late nineteen fifties. There were newspaper clippings and an almanac, all of them placed in the future. There were a few other little gadgets whose nature Dee did not know.
“I saw the explosion coming,” said Alan. “I was a scientist and, like others, I sought a way out. There were space expeditions planned, even time travel.
Me, I sought a parallel time track—an Earth in a universe whose future was dissimilar to that of the doomed Earth on which I was stuck.
“I found it,” he told her exultantly. “I know how old man Archimedes felt when he shouted, ‘Eureka!’ No, honey, I’m sane.”
“But, Alan,” said Dee, frowning at the almanac and trying to comprehend what she-had just been told, “this is only nineteen fifty. How can you be sure you’re not on the same Earth?”
“That’s what has had me terrified,” he told her. “Every time I found a prediction fulfilled, every time I won a bet or a stock market play, felt increasingly trapped. Perhaps, I thought I had merely gone backwards in time instead of across it. But not any more, darling, not any more.”
“Why not, dear?” she countered.
“Because of you,” he told her exultantly. “You and the flashlight. You’ve broken the chain. We’re safe—see?” He turned the now-dull beam on the almanac, riffled through to a certain page, put it into her hands. “Read that, honey, read it.”
“It” was a brief chronology of important and interesting events, year; by year; in the world from which Alan had come. Dee looked at it, saw the entry 1950, read—
. . . first cheap and widespread use of atomic power obtained through suit brought by woman non-scientist against ex-husband she claimed had stolen it. Irene Deering greatest name in science since Madame Curie . . . St. Louis Cardinals won the World . . .
“You see, honey?” said Alan. “That’s how the whole horror began. The fools thought it was progress—it was ruin, a cancer for the Earth. There was more to it than that, of course. It all ran according to Hoyle right up to the flashlight failing.” He grinned and tapped it fondly. “Good old failure,” he said. He looked at her fondly and chuckled, “It’s a good thing I made hay while I could, honey, or we’d be poor as churchmice.”
“Yes, it’s swell, darling,” said Irene Deering (“Dee”) Lord, wondering how she could recover that flashlight. The courts . . .
SUCH INTERESTING NEIGHBORS
Jack Finney
I can’t honestly say I knew from the start that there was something queer about the Hellenbeks. I did notice some strange things right away, and wondered about them, but I shrugged them off. They were nice people, I liked them, and everyone has a few odd little tricks.
We were watching from our sun-parlor windows the day they arrived; not snooping or prying, you understand, but naturally we were curious. Nell and I are pretty sociable and we were hoping a couple around our own ages would move into the new house next door.
I was just finishing breakfast—it was a Saturday and I wasn’t working—and Nell was running the vacuum cleaner over the sun-parlor rug. I heard the vacuum shut off, and Nell called out, “Here they are, Al!” and I ran in and we got our first look at the Hellenbeks.
He was helping her from a cab, and I got a good look at him and his wife. They seemed to be just about our ages, the man maybe thirty-two or so and his wife in her middle twenties. She was rather pretty, and he had a nice, agreeable kind of face.
“Newlyweds?” Nell said, a little excited.
“Why?”
“Their clothes are all brand-new. Even the shoes. And so’s the bag.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” I watched for a second or so, then said, “Foreigners, too, I think,” showing Nell I was pretty observant myself.
“Why do you think so?”
“He’s having trouble with the local currency.” He was, too. He couldn’t seem to pick out the right change, and finally he held out his hand and let the driver find the right coins.
But we were wrong on both counts. They’d been married three years, we found out later, had both been born in the States, and had lived here nearly all their lives.
Furniture deliveries began arriving next door within half an hour; everything new, all bought from local merchants. We live in San Rafael, California, in a neighborhood of small houses. Mostly young people live here, and it’s a friendly, informal place. So after a while I got into an old pair of flannels and sneakers and wandered over to get acquainted and lend a hand if I could, and I cut across the two lawns. As I came up to their house, I heard them talking in the living room. “Here’s a picture of Truman,” he said, and I heard a newspaper rattle.
“Truman,” she said, kind of thoughtfully. “Let’s see now; doesn’t Roosevelt come next?”
“No. Truman comes after Roosevelt.”
“I think you’re wrong, dear,” she said. “It’s Truman, then Roosevelt, then—”
When my feet hit their front steps, the talk stopped. At the door I knocked and glanced in; they were sitting on the living-room floor, and Ted Hellenbek was just scrambling to his feet. They’d been unpacking a carton of dishes and there was a bunch of wadded-up old newspapers lying around, and I guess they’d been looking at those. Ted came to the door. He’d changed to a T-shirt, slacks and moccasins, all brand-new.
“I’m Al Lewis from next door,” I said. “Thought maybe I could give you a hand.”
“Glad to know you.” He pushed the door open, then stuck out his hand. “I’m Ted Hellenbek,” and he grinned in a nice friendly way. His wife got up from the floor, and Ted introduced us. Her name was Ann.
Well, I worked around with them the rest of the morning, helping them unpack things, and we got the place into pretty good order. While we were working, Ted told me they’d been living in South America—he didn’t say where or why—and that they’d sold everything they had down there, except the clothes they traveled in and a few personal belongings, rather than pay shipping expenses. That sounded perfectly reasonable and sensible, except that a few days later Ann told Nell their house in South America had burned down and they’d lost everything.
