Time Travel Omnibus, page 397
It was two mornings later that the first shout of discovery came, from one of the lads who had climbed to High Point. There was a great stirring in the village and the commotion finally penetrated to Dr. Bowers’ deep study. He looked up from his work just in time to see Fay Fairchild hurry past. He called to her, sharply, but she ran on heedless, her face transfigured.
Dr. Bowers sighed and gathered his pages and stood looking down at the first one for a moment before he went out to join the rest.
The record was repeating itself, stuck in the groove. The pen was retracing what it had already written:
It was a mere pin-point in space when they first saw it . . .
VI
HE was running in a nightmare: a motionless race against Time. The seconds slipped like loose gravel under his feet, and the passageway ahead was an immeasurable length.
He was running to get Crawford . . . or was this a memory of something already done? His mind seemed like a mummy, wrapped layer after layer.
He had to get Crawford, before the alarm. Or did it go the other way? Had the alarm already sounded, or was it ahead? Had he still to reach Crawford—or was that behind? Future or past . . . or endless circle?
His feet plodded on, his mind struggled desperately. He had to get Crawford—but there wasn’t time.
Time for what?
Time before the alarm went off. But the alarm had already gone off. He was too late.
Too late for what?
Too late to catch the lifeboat. Then what was he hurrying for? Because he had to get Crawford.
He reached the turn of the passageway, and faced the door of Crawford’s cabin. The door was locked . . .
Why did he have to get Crawford, if the others had gone?
He got a sledge and raised it slowly . . .
Why bother with Crawford, if the others had gone?
But the others hadn’t gone. They waited for him to get Crawford. That was what he had to do, before it was too late . . .
His mind floundered hopelessly, seeking an out. And then he found it; saw it right before his eyes.
The lifeboat hadn’t gone! It still waited!
He dropped the sledge and ran back screaming . . . screaming for the others to wait.
THEY were waiting, the two long rows of shapeless humans in the slender arrow of the 15-G. They had waited in breathless tension, and the sudden opening of the airlock door seemed to snap them out of a spell that was like suspended motion.
Fay cried joyously, “I knew you would come!” and tried again to get free of her straps.
Spike shook his helmet in befuddled relief. “Cripes, I thought you’d never make it! What about Crawford?”
What about Crawford?
Brad stopped short, in utter confusion.
What about Crawford?
Fay cried again, like a despairing echo: “No, Brad! NO!”
But Brad didn’t hear her, and he ignored Spike’s reaching hand. His mind was fighting the mists again, groping painfully through the wraiths of memory . . .
And then he had it: knew why he had to reach Crawford and what there was to do. But they were still fighting time—the sound of the gong. He yelled for Spike to follow, then was racing back again up the narrow corridor for the second time. . .
Second or millionth? It didn’t matter now, as long as they waited and Spike was coming.
The door was still locked, but the sledge lay on the floor. He broke in the door with the second blow, and then stopped short for a startled second.
Crawford was facing him, backed against the wall, and the whole thing seemed like some weird rehearsal of a scene yet to come. He swung at Crawford, who stumbled aside, and the dreamlike quality persisted as he reached out for the chest revealed in the wall.
The alarm went off in nerve-shattering pandemonium, but he didn’t hesitate. The others were waiting, and this was what counted. He hugged the heavy little container to his chest, and turned around.
Crawford had pulled a blaster and was blocking the door. But Spike was right behind, with his own gun ready. The gun chopped down in a short hard arc, and Crawford dropped with his blaster flaring harmlessly into the ceiling.
Spike looked down and said, “I’m afraid he’s dead . . .” Then he took a long closer look and muttered unsteadily, “I’ll say he’s dead! He looks like he’s been dead a million years!”
But Brad had already pushed past. He had run out the door and was plodding down the corridor in clumsy haste. The alarm was still a driving madness in his ears, but he had reached the door that led to the engine room . . .
Then he had reached the vault itself, and he slammed the box home with a silent prayer. For two breathless eternities the alarm still held on. Then it died away as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence was a ringing echo.
Brad let out his breath in a shuddering sigh, and slowly retraced his steps to the outer door. Spike was running down the corridor—with Fay not far behind. And nothing, not even the bulk of their space-suits, could hold them apart . . .
ON the bridge of the Stella, a great golden planet was fading from the screen. Spike shook his head and looked at Gus. “That was as close one, brother, and don’t you forget it!”
Gus said gloomily, “Yeah, an’ we still gotta land sometime, an’ our control tubes are shot.”
“Hell,” answered Spike, “With that stuff we found in Crawford’s cabin we can charge ’em again a hundred times over.” Then he looked around and added hastily. “Hey, you lug, don’t drink it all!”
Gus looked from the bottle in his hand to the glass on the floor, and then took a cautious glance over his shoulder.
“Come on,” insisted Spike. “The Captain won’t mind; the Captain is busy.”
BEHIND the closed door, Brad was saying: “Whatever it is, it sure is hot! Crawford must have found it when we landed at Centauri, and that’s why he insisted on returning to Earth. He was obviously hoping to keep his find to himself, instead of splitting it like we had all agreed on a share-and-share-alike basis. But he was crazy in more ways than one. If there’s a whole lode as active as that one little specimen, it’s going to be worth a hundred fortunes.”
“And that’s what made the ship go out of control?”
Brad nodded. “It was far too hot for that low-grade collecting box he had it in. Furthermore, he took away some of the shielding from the engine room when he hid it inside his bulkhead. It was already killing him, and I was just darned lucky I was protected by my spacesuit when I had to handle it.”
“Yes . . . but I still don’t understand about the engine room.”
Brad grinned. “I’ve tried to make it simple, baby. You see, the inhibitors cut out temporarily when the drive builds up an overload. Only Crawford’s stuff was hot enough to kick them out permanently—and solar energy did the rest. If we hadn’t found that box and got it under cover . . .” He ended with a shrug. “See?”
Fay shook her head in pretty confusion, but snuggled closer. “All I know, darling, is that I waited a lifetime before you came. It even seemed to me as if we had already gone on without you. We landed in a desert, with a little green valley and some strange animals like plants, and I got old and gray and feeble.”
She looked up suddenly with horror in her face. “But that’s right! That did happen!”
Brad smiled down at her, and kissed her nose. “You’re mighty pretty for such an old woman.”
But Fay still looked troubled, and he added soberly: “I know I used up several lifetimes myself, before I got to Crawford’s cabin. It seemed almost like . . . well, that I was in some squirrel-cage of Time, and couldn’t get out. But the past doesn’t matter now, darling. We’ve got the future.”
“But it seemed so real! Did it really happen?”
“Who knows?” he said finally, and kissed her again.
THE END
I’M SCARED
Jack Finney
I’m very badly scared, not so much for myself I’m a grayhaired man of sixty-six, after all—but for you and everyone else who has not yet lived out his life. For I believe that certain dangerous things have recently begun to happen in the world. They are noticed here and there, idly discussed, then dismissed and forgotten. Yet I am convinced that unless these occurrences are recognized for what they are, the world will be plunged into a nightmare. Judge for yourself.
One evening last winter I came home from a chess club to which I belong. I’m a widower; I live alone in a small but comfortable three-room apartment overlooking lower Fifth Avenue. It was still fairly early, and I switched on a lamp beside my leather easy chair, picked up a murder mystery I’d been reading, and turned on the radio; I did not, I’m sorry to say, notice which station it was tuned to.
The tubes warmed, and the music of an accordion—faint at first, then louder—came from the loud-speaker. Since it was good music for reading, I adjusted the volume control and began to read.
Now, I want to be absolutely factual and accurate about this, and I do not claim that I paid close attention to the radio. But I do know that presently the music stopped, and an audience applauded. Then a man’s voice, chuckling and pleased with the applause, said, “All right, all right,” but the applause continued for several more seconds. During that time the voice once more chuckled appreciatively, then firmly repeated, “All right,” and the applause died down. “That was Alec Somebody-or-other,” the radio voice said, and I went back to my book.
But I soon became aware of this middle-aged voice again; perhaps a change of tone as he turned to a new subject caught my attention. “And now, Miss Ruth Greeley,” he was saying, “of Trenton, New Jersey. Miss Greeley is a pianist; that right?
A girl’s voice, timid and barely audible, said, That’s right, Major Bowes.” The man’s voice—and now I recognized his familiar singsong delivery—said, “And what are you going to play?” The girl replied, “La Paloma.” The man repeated it after her, as an announcement: “La Paloma.” There was a pause, then an introductory chord sounded from a piano, and I resumed my reading.
As the girl played, I was half aware that her style was mechanical, her rhythm defective; perhaps she was nervous. Then my attention was fully aroused once more by a gong which sounded suddenly. For a few notes more the girl continued to play falteringly, not sure what to do. The gong sounded jarringly again, the playing abruptly stopped, and there was a restless murmur from the audience. “All right, all right,” said the now familiar voice, and I realized I’d been expecting this, knowing it would say just that. The audience quieted, and the voice began, “Now—”
The radio went dead. For the smallest fraction of a second no sound issued from it but its own mechanical hum. Then a completely different program came from the loudspeaker; the recorded voice of Andy Williams singing, “You Butterfly,” a favorite of mine. So I returned once more to my reading, wondering vaguely what had happened to the other program, but not actually thinking about it until I finished my book and began to get ready for bed.
Then, undressing in my bedroom, I remembered that Major Bowes was dead. Years had passed, a decade, since that dry chuckle and familiar, “All right, all right,” had been heard in the nation’s living rooms.
Well, what does one do when the apparently impossible occurs? It simply made a good story to tell friends, and more than once I was asked if I’d recently heard Moran and Mack, a pair of radio comedians popular some thirty years ago, or Floyd Gibbons, an old-time news broadcaster. And there were other joking references to my crystal radio set.
But one man—this was at a lodge meeting the following Thursday—listened to my story with utter seriousness, and when I had finished he told me a queer little story of his own. He is a thoughtful, intelligent man, and as I listened I was not frightened, but puzzled at what seemed to be a connecting link, a common denominator, between this story and the odd behavior of my radio. The following day, since I am retired and have plenty of time, I took the trouble of making a two-hour train trip to Connecticut in order to verify the story at firsthand. I took detailed notes, and the story appears in my files now as follows:
Case 2. Louis Trachnor, coal and wood dealer, R.F.D. I, Danbury, Connecticut, aged fifty-four.
On July 20, 1956, Mr. Trachnor told me, he walked out on the front porch of his house about six o’clock in the morning. Running from the eaves of his house to the floor of the porch was a streak of gray paint, still damp. “It was about the width of an eight-inch brush,” Mr. Trachnor told me, “and it looked like hell, because the house was white. I figured some kids did it in the night for a joke, but if they did, they had to get a ladder up to the eaves and you wouldn’t figure they’d go to that much trouble. It wasn’t smeared, either; it was a careful job, a nice even stripe straight down the front of the house.”
Mr. Trachnor got a ladder and cleaned off the gray paint with turpentine.
In October of that same year, Mr. Trachnor painted his house. “The white hadn’t held up so good, so I painted it gray. I got to the front last and finished about five one Saturday afternoon. Next morning when I came out, I saw a streak of white right down the front of the house. I figured it was the damned kids again, because it was the same place as before. But when I looked close, I saw it wasn’t new paint; it was the old white I’d painted over. Somebody had done a nice careful job of cleaning off the new paint in a long stripe about eight inches wide right down from the eaves! Now, who the hell would go to that trouble? I just can’t figure it out.”
Do you see the link between this story and mine? Suppose for a moment that something had happened, on each occasion, to disturb briefly the orderly progress of time. That seemed to have happened in my case; for a matter of some seconds I apparently heard a radio broadcast that had been made years before. Suppose, then, that no one had touched Mr. Trachnor’s house but himself; that he had painted his house in October, and that through some fantastic mix-up in time, a portion of that paint appeared on his house the previous summer. Since he had cleaned the paint off at that time, a broad stripe of new gray paint was missing after he painted his house in the fall.
I would be lying, however, if I said I really believed this. It was merely an intriguing speculation, and I told both these little stories to friends, simply as curious anecdotes. I am a sociable person, see a good many people, and occasionally I heard other odd stories in response to mine.
Someone would nod and say, “Reminds me of something I heard recently . . .” and I would have one more to add to my collection. A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York on Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.
And so on, and so on; my stories were now in demand at parties and I told myself that collecting and verifying them was a hobby. But the day I heard Julia Eisenberg’s story, I knew it was no longer that.
Case 17. Julia Eisenberg, office worker, New York, City, aged thirty-one.
Miss Eisenberg lives in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. I talked to her there after a chess-club friend who lives in her neighborhood had repeated to me a somewhat garbled version of her story, which was told to him by the doorman of the building he lives in.
In October, 1954, about eleven at night, Miss Eisenberg left her apartment to walk to the drugstore for toothpaste. On her way back, not far from her apartment, a large black and white dog ran up to her and put his front paws on her chest.
“I made the mistake of petting him,” Miss Eisenberg told me, “and from then on he simply wouldn’t leave. When I went into the lobby of my building, I actually had to push him away to get the door closed. I felt sorry for him, poor hound, and a little guilty, because he was still sitting at the door an hour later when I looked out my front window.”
This dog remained in the neighborhood for three days, discovering and greeting Miss Eisenberg with wild affection each time she appeared on the street. “When I’d get on the bus in the morning to go to work, he’d sit on the curb looking after me in the most mournful way, poor thing. I wanted to take him in, and I wish with all my heart that I had, but I knew he’d never go home then, and I was afraid whoever owned him would be sorry to lose him. No one in the neighborhood knew who he belonged to, and finally he disappeared.”
Two years later a friend gave Miss Eisenberg a three-week-old puppy. “My apartment is really too small for a dog, but he was such a darling I couldn’t resist. Well, he grew up into a nice big dog who ate more than I did.”
Since the neighborhood was quiet, and the dog well behaved, Miss Eisenberg usually unleashed him when she walked him at night, for he never strayed far. “One night—I’d last seen him sniffing around in the dark a few doors down—I called to him and he didn’t come back. And he never did; I never saw him again.
“Now, our street is a solid wall of brownstone buildings on both sides, with locked doors and no areaways. He couldn’t have disappeared like that, he just couldn’t. But he did.”
Miss Eisenberg hunted for her dog for many days afterward, inquired of neighbors, put ads in the papers, but she never found him. “Then one night I was getting ready for bed; I happened to glance out the front window down at the street, and suddenly I remembered something I’d forgotten all about. I remembered the dog I’d chased away over two years before.” Miss Eisenberg looked at me for a moment, then she said flatly. “It was the same dog. If you own a dog you know him, you can’t be mistaken, and I tell you it was the same dog. Whether it makes sense or not, my dog was lost—I chased him away—two years before he was born.”
