Time Travel Omnibus, page 386
It was really an imaginative job. One of the neatest touches about it was the note of worry than ran all through the article. It was as though there were some awful problem connected with this rage for Time-Travel that the author didn’t quite want to put into words. He kept hinting about it, wondering if new legislation weren’t needed, and so on, but I couldn’t quite figure out what he was supposed to be bothered about. Time-Travel sounded like a lot of fun to me.
“That’s a wonderful job,” I told Ted when I finished. “But what’s the point? All that trouble—for what?”
Ted shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “No point, I guess. Did you like it?”
“I sure did.”
“You can have that copy if you want. I’ve got another.”
“Thanks,” I said, and laid it in my lap. “But what did you plan to have happen next?”
“Oh,” he said, “you don’t want to hear any more.” He seemed a little embarrassed, as though he wished he hadn’t started this, and he glanced over at his wife, but she wouldn’t look at him. “Matter of fact,” he went on, “the story sort of peters out. I’m really not very good at that kind of thing.”
“Yes,” said Ann, “that’s enough.”
“Come on,” I said to Ted. “Give.”
Ted looked at me for a moment, very serious, then he shook his head again. “No,” he said, “it’s too hard to explain. You’d have to know a good deal about a world of the future, a world in which people are sick with the fear of self-destruction. Unimaginable weapons that could literally tear the entire solar system to pieces. Everyone living in absolute dread of the future.”
“What’s so hard to imagine about that?”
“Oh, hell.” He laughed. “These are peaceful times.”
“They are?”
“Sure. No weapon worth mentioning except the atom and hydrogen bombs, and those in their earliest, uncomplex stages.”
I laughed kind of sourly.
“All in all,” he said, “these are pretty nice times to be alive in.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re so sure.” I said.
“I am.” Ted answered, and he smiled. Then he stopped smiling. “But it’ll be different in another century or so, believe me. At least,” he added, “that’s how this friend and I figured it out in our story.” He shook his head a little and went on, sort of talking to himself.
“Life will barely be worth living. Everyone working twelve, fourteen hours a day, with the major part of a man’s income going for taxes, and the rest going for consumers’ goods priced sky-high because of war production. Artificial scarcities, restrictions of all kinds. And hanging over everything, killing what little joy in life is left, is the virtual certainty of death and destruction. Everyone working and sacrificing for his own destruction.” Ted looked up at me. “A lousy world, the world of the future, and not the way human beings were meant to live.”
“Go ahead,” I said, “you’re doing fine.”
He grinned, looked at me for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and settled back on the porch rail. “Time-Travel hits the world the way television has hit the country today, only it happens a hundred times faster, because it’s just about the only way to have any real fun. But it’s a wonderful way, all right. Within less than a week after the first sets reach the market, people everywhere are going swimming after work on an untouched beach in California, say in the year 1000. Or fishing or picnicking in the Maine woods before even the Norsemen had arrived. Or standing on a hill overlooking a battlefield, watching the Crusaders have it out with the infidels.”
Ted smiled. “And sometimes not so safe. In Newton, Kansas, a man arrives home in his living room, bleeding to death from arrow wounds. In Tallahassee a whole family disappears, their TT set turned on and humming, and they are never heard from again, and the same thing happens here and there all over the country and the world. In Chicago a man returns from a day in seventh-century France and dies in two days of the plague; everyone is worried stiff, but the disease doesn’t spread. In Mill Valley, California, a man reappears in his home, his face gashed, his hand mangled, his clothes torn to shreds, and he commits suicide the following day. His wife has been stoned to death as a witch because they were fools enough to appear in a crowded eleventh-century Danish public square in modern dress, talking twenty-first-century English.”
Ted grinned and winked at his wife; he was enjoying himself. I was fascinated and I think Nell was, too, whether she’d admit it or not. “But then,” he went on, “warnings are soon published and televipped by all the TT manufacturers and by the government, too, and people quickly learn caution. Brief courses of instruction are published on how to conduct oneself in various times, how to simulate the dress and customs of earlier periods, what dangerous times and places to avoid, and TT really comes into its own. There are still risks, still accidents and tragedies, of course.”
“Inevitably some people talk too much—the temptation is terribly strong—and they land in insane asylums or jails. Others can’t stay away from the danger times and are lynched by superstitious mobs. A good many people die of the common cold, which science had eradicated and to which the human race had lost its old resistance. But there’s risk in anything. and the important thing is that once again it’s possible to take a vacation. To really get away from it all for a week, a day, or even an hour before dinner. To go back to simpler, more peaceful times, when life is worth living again. And nearly every last soul in the world soon finds a way somehow to own a TT set or get access to one.”
Ted looked at me, then at Nell. “Naturally, then, the inevitable happened; the only possible ending to my story. Maybe you’ve figured out what had to happen?”
I shook my head, and Ted looked at Nell to see if she knew; then he said, “It’s easy. People simply stopped coming back. All over the world, within less than a month after TT is introduced, the same almost simultaneous thought seems to strike everyone: Why return? By this time everyone has discovered a favorite time and place in the history and geography of the world. And everybody is enthusiastic for his own particular discovery; some one century or decade, some country, city, town, island, woods or seashore, some one spot on the world’s surface at a certain time that best suits his temperament. And so the same inspiration hits nearly everyone: Why not stay there? Why come back? To what?”
Ted slapped at a stray mosquito and said, “Within forty days’ time the population of the entire world is down to less than seven million people, and nearly all of them are getting ready to leave. Suddenly the world is left to the tiny fraction of one per cent of human beings who want wars and who cause them. But the people who fight them walk out. Before the governments of the world realize what’s happening—before there’s time to do anything about it—the world’s population is nearly gone.”
“The last emergency Cabinet meeting of the U.S. government breaks up when the assembled members discover that all but one of them are themselves planning to leave for other times. In six more days the twenty-first century is deserted like a sinking ship, its population scattered thinly back through the preceding twenty-five hundred years. And of the very few who are finally left—the tiny minority who preferred the present—most are soon forced, out of sheer loneliness and the breakdown of a world, to join friends and families in earlier times.”
Ted looked at us for a moment, then said, “And that, my friends, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.”
For maybe half a minute Ted sat staring at nothing, and no one said anything; a cricket began to chirp feebly off in the grass somewhere. Then Ted smiled. “Well,” he said, “how do you like it, Al? Good story?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, still thinking about it. “Yeah,” I said, “I like it fine. Why don’t you write it; maybe get it published somewhere?”
“Well, I thought about that, as a matter of fact, but on the whole I prefer inventing. It’s easier.”
“Well, it’s a good story,” I said. “though there are some flaws in it, of course.”
“I’m sure of it,” Ted said, “but what are they?”
“Well, for one thing, wouldn’t people in those earlier times notice the sudden increase in population?”
“I don’t think so. Spread the world’s population through the thousands of preceding years, and at any one time or place it wouldn’t be more than a drop in the bucket.”
“Okay,” I said, “but speaking of inventions, wouldn’t everyone traveling back to simpler times start introducing twenty-first-century inventions?”
“Not to amount to anything. You mean like space ships in 1776?”
“Something like that.”
Ted shook his head. “It couldn’t happen. Suppose you went back a hundred years; could you make a television set?”
“No.”
“Or even a radio?”
“I might. A simple one, anyway. Maybe a crystal set.”
“All right,” Ted said. “suppose you did. I doubt if you could find all the materials—copper wire, for example—but suppose you managed; what would you listen to? You’d tell people it was a radio and what it was for, and they’d lock you up. You see? And what do most people know anyway about the marvelous things they use every day? Practically nothing. And even the few who do know could never find what they’d need to duplicate them, except in the actual time they belong in. The best you could do would be to introduce one or two of the very simplest things people used in your time, like a modern safety pin in Elizabethan England, if you could find the steel. And a few things like that wouldn’t upset the history of the world.”
“No, Al, you’d just have to take your place as best you could in the world as you found it, no matter what you knew about the future.”
Well, I let it go at that. I didn’t mean to get started knocking holes in Ted’s story, and I went into the house and broke out beer for all hands. I liked Ted’s story, though, and so did Nell, and we both said so, and after a while even Ann broke down and said she liked it, too. Then the conversation got off onto other things.
But there you are. It’s like I said; the Hellenbeks were strange in some ways, but very interesting neighbors, and I was sorry to see them move away. They moved not too long afterward. They liked California fine, they said, and liked the people they’d met. But they were lonesome for old friends, people they’d grown up with, and that’s understandable, of course.
So they moved to Orange, New Jersey. Some old friends were arriving there soon, they said, and the Hellenbeks were anxious to be with them. They expected them, Ted told me, sometime in the spring of 1951, and they wanted to be on hand to meet them.
There’s a new couple next door now—perfectly nice people who play a good game of bridge, and we like them okay. But I don’t know; after the Hellenbeks, they seem kind of dull.
. . . AND IT COMES OUT HERE
Lester del Rey
There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with . . . everything has a beginning and an end. But some men aren’t sane; thus it isn’t always so!
NO YOU’RE wrong. I’m not your father’s ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it’s a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have . . . or do . . . or will. I don’t know, verbs get all mixed up. We don’t have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.
Anyhow, you’ll let me in. I did, so you will.
Thanks. You think you’re crazy, of course, but you’ll find out you aren’t. It’s just that things are a bit confused. And don’t look at the machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you’ll find it’s hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You’ll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.
You’re wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not? And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for me as you’re having. Of course we have the same tastes—we’re the same person. I’m you thirty years from now, or you’re me. I remember just how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.
Here, have one of these. You’ll get to like them in a couple more years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. You’ll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn’t matter.
Right now, you’re shocked. It’s a real wrench when a man meets himself for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people. You sense things. So I’ll simply go ahead talking for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you’ll come along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I might as well do the same. I probably couldn’t help telling you the same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don’t intend to try. I’ve gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.
So let’s begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me. You’ll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it’ll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You’ll sense that, too. You’ve seen it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You’ll be puzzling over what I’ll tell you, and you’ll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You won’t exactly believe it, but you’ll want to go along.
I’LL BE tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button, and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section isn’t protected, though.
You start to say something, but by then I’m pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but it isn’t there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no there. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are.
You can’t feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out, all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn’t hurt, and when you pull your arm back, you’re still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening and you don’t try it again.
Then it comes to you slowly that you’re actually traveling in time. You turn to me, getting used to the idea. “So this is the fourth dimension?” you ask.
Then you feel silly, because you’ll remember that I said you’d ask that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can’t help answering when you speak.
“Not exactly,” I try to explain. “Maybe it’s no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you’re going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you’d need a fifth. Don’t ask me. I didn’t invent the machine and I don’t understand it.”
“But . . .”
I let it go, and so do you. If you don’t, a good way of going crazy. You’ll see later why I couldn’t have invented the machine. Of course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. It’s simpler just to figure that this is the way time got bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it’s just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.
Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. You look at your watch and it’s still running. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. I don’t know, and you won’t think about that then, either.
I’M SMOKING, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven’t seen any effects of air loss.
“Where are we getting our air?” you ask. “Or why don’t we lose it?”
“No place for it to go,” I explain. There isn’t. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel gravity, but I can’t explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.
Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we’re in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the machine, just as I do.
I’ve got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It’s a sort of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels comfortable.
“I’m staying here,” I tell you. “This is like the things they wear in this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to pass fairly well. I’ve had all my fortune—the one you make on that atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some identification I’ve got with me, so I’ll do all right. I know they still use some kind of money, you’ll see evidence of that. And it’s a pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We’ll go up and I’ll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won’t be coming back with you.”
