Time Travel Omnibus, page 401
Over the past four days he had been with the girl a lot. In the beginning, he realized, she had been drawn to him as a symbol of an era she longed, but was unable, to visit. Now she understood him better, knew more about him—and Maitland felt that now she liked him for himself.
She had told him of her childhood in backward Aresund and of loneliness here at the school in Nebraska. “Here,” she had said, “parents spend most of their time raising their children; at home, they just let us grow. Every time one of these people looks at me I feel inferior.” She had confided her dream of visiting far times and places, then had finished, “I doubt that Swarts will ever let me go back. He thinks I am too irresponsible. Probably he is right. But it is terribly discouraging. Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go home to the fiord . . .”
Now, sitting in the sunset glow, Maitland was in a philosophic mood. “The color of grass, the twilight, the seasons, the stars—those things haven’t changed.” He gestured out the window at the slumbering evening prairie. “That scene, save for unessentials, could just as well be 1950—or 950. It’s only human institutions that change rapidly . . .”
“I’ll be awfully sorry when you go back,” she sighed. “You’re the first person I’ve met here that I can talk to.”
“Talk to,” he repeated, dissatisfied. “You’re just about the finest girl I’ve ever met.”
He kissed her playfully, but when they separated there was nothing playful about it. Her face was flushed and he was breathing faster than he had been. Savagely, he bit the inside of his cheek. “Two days I A lifetime here wouldn’t be long enough!”
“Bob.” she touched his arm and her lips were trembling. “Bob, do you have to go—out there? We could get a couple of horses tomorrow, and we would have two days.”
He leaned back and shook his head. “Can’t you see, Ingrid? This is my only chance. If I don’t go tomorrow, I’ll never get to the moon. And then my whole life won’t mean anything . . .”
HE woke with Ingrid shaking him. “Bob! Bob!” Her voice was an urgent whisper. “You’ve got to wake up quick! Bob!”
He sat up and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “What’s the matter?”
“I didn’t really believe that Swarts would let you go into space. It wasn’t like him. Bob, he fooled you. Today is when your time runs out!”
Maitland swallowed hard, and his chest muscles tightened convulsively. “You mean it was all a trick?”
She nodded. “He told me just now, while he was putting something in your milk to make you sleep.” Her face was bitter and resentful. “He said, ‘This is a lesson for you, Ching, if you ever do any work with individuals like this. You have to humor them, tell them anything they want to believe, in order to get your data.’ ”
Maitland put his feet on the floor and stood up. His face was white and he was breathing fast.
She grasped his arm. “What are you going to do?”
He shook her hand off. “I may not get to the moon, but I’m going to teach one superman the advantage of honesty!”
“Wait! That won’t get you anywhere.”
“He may be bigger than I am,” Maitland gritted, “but—”
She squeezed his arm violently. “You don’t understand. He would not fight you. He’d use a gun.”
“If I could catch him by surprise . . .”
She took hold of his shoulders firmly. “Now, listen, Bob Maitland. I love you. And I think it’s the most important thing in the world that you get to see the stars. Swarts will never let me time travel, anyway.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’ll go down to the village and get a vliegvlotter. It won’t take twenty minutes. I’ll come back, see that Swarts is out of the way, let you out of here, and take you—” she hesitated, but her eyes were steady—“wherever you want to go.”
He was trembling. “Your career. I can’t let you . . .”
She said, “Pfui,” then grinned. “My career! It’s time I went home to the fiord, anyway. Now you wait here!”
THE vliegvlotter was about fifty feet long, an ellipsoid of revolution. Maitland and Ingrid ran hand in hand across the lawn, and she pushed him up through the door, then slammed it shut and screwed the pressure locks tight.
They were strapping themselves into the seats, bathed in sunlight that flooded down through the thick plastic canopy, when she stopped, pale with consternation.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“Oh, Bob, I forgot! We can’t do this!”
“We’re going to,” he said grimly.
“Bob, sometime this morning you’re going to snap back to 1950. If that happens while we’re up there . . .”
His jaw went slack as the implication soaked in. Then he reached over and finished fastening the buckle on her wide seat belt.
“Bob, I can’t. I would be killing you just as surely as . . .”
“Never mind that. You can tell me how to run this thing and then get out, if you want to.”
She reached slowly forward and threw a switch, took hold of the wheel. Seconds later they were plummeting into the blue dome of the sky.
The blue became darker, purplish, and stars appeared in daylight. Maitland gripped the edge of the seat; somewhere inside him it seemed that a chorus of angels was singing the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.
There was a ping, and Ingrid automatically flicked a switch. A screen lit up and the image of Swarts was looking at them. His eyes betrayed some unfamiliar emotion, awe or fear. “Ching! Come back here at once. Don’t you realize that—”
“Sorry, Swarts.” Maitland’s voice resonated with triumph. “You’ll just have to humor me once more.”
“Maitland! Don’t you know that you’re going to snap back to the twentieth century in half an hour? You’ll be in space with no protection. You’ll explode!”
“I know,” Maitland said. He looked up through the viewport. “Right now I’m seeing the stars as I’ve never seen them before. Sorry to make you lose a case, Swarts, but this is better than dying of pneumonia or an atomic bomb.”
He reached forward and snapped the image off.
TWENTY minutes later, Maitland had Ingrid cut the drive and turn the ship so that he could see the earth. It was there, a huge shining globe against the constellations, ten thousand miles distant, one hundred times the size of familiar Luna. North America was directly below, part of Canada covered with a dazzling area of clouds. The polar icecap was visible in its entirety, along with the northern portions of the Eurasian land mass. The line of darkness cut off part of Alaska and bisected the Pacific Ocean, and the sun’s reflection in the Atlantic was blinding.
And there was Venus, a brilliant white jewel against the starry blackness of interstellar space; and now he could see the sun’s corona . . .
The ship was rotating slowly, and presently the moon, at first quarter, came into view, not perceptibly larger than seen from earth. Maitland heaved a sigh of regret. If only this could have been but the beginning of a voyage . . .
Ingrid touched his arm. “Bob.”
He turned to look at her golden beauty.
“Bob, give me one more kiss.”
He loosened his seat strap and put his arms around her. For a moment he felt her soft lips on his . . .
Then she was gone, and the ship had vanished. For perhaps as long as a second, alone in space, he was looking with naked, unprotected, ambition-sated eyes at the distant stars.
The luring white blaze of Venus was the last image he took with him into the night without stars.
THE CHOICE
W. Hilton-Young
Before Williams went into the future he bought a camera and a tape recording-machine and learned shorthand. That night, when all was ready, we made coffee and put out brandy and glasses against his return.
“Good-bye,” I said. “Don’t stay too long.”
“I won’t,” he answered.
I watched him carefully, and he hardly flickered. He must have made a perfect landing on the very second he had taken off from. He seemed not a day older; we had expected he might spend several years away.
“Well?”
“Well,” said he, “let’s have some coffee.”
I poured it out, hardly able to contain my impatience. As I gave it to him I said again, “Well?”
“Well, the thing is, I can’t remember.”
“Can’t remember? Not a thing?”
He thought for a moment and answered sadly, “Not a thing.”
“But your notes? The camera? The recording-machine?”
The notebook was empty, the indicator of the camera rested at “1” where we had set it, the tape was not even loaded into the recording-machine.
“But good heavens,” I protested, “why? How did it happen? Can you remember nothing at all?”
“I can remember only one thing.”
“What was that?”
“I was shown everything, and I was given the choice whether I should remember it or not after I got back.”
“And you chose not to? But what an extraordinary thing to—”
“Isn’t it?” he said. “One can’t help wondering why.”
THE MAN WHO BOUGHT TOMORROW
William P. McGivern
Reggie paid a nickel for a look at tomorrow’s news . . . and demanded a fast refund!
THE SEQUENCE went about like this: A printing machine, in some unaccountable manner, fouled up an ad in one issue of a magazine called True Astrology.
A month later, a Chicago news vendor sat on a fruit crate beside his stand peering at this one particular copy of the magazine. His name was Creepy Brown, and he was a small, red-nosed little man, with narrow, alert eyes, thinning brown hair, and an impressive gift for self-delusion. Creepy was an optimist; he believed in astrology, in fortune tellers, in the exploiters of the occult—in anything, for that matter, that promised him a break, a train trip, a blonde, a pot of gold. Creepy, on this night, was reading one particular ad over and over, his lips moving slowly, his forehead crinkling with effort. There was something wrong with the ad. Some of the words were strange to his eye. The ones he recognized offered a promise of help, but the sense of the message was destroyed by the unfamiliar words.
Still, it was exciting to roll those words on his tongue. They had a nice solid ring to them, and gave him a sense of power which he enjoyed without understanding.
Supposing someone should help him, he thought pleasurably. Wouldn’t that be fine! But how? What did he really want? Girl’s? Money? Well, of course. But supposing he could have anything he wanted. What would it be?
Creepy’s thoughts strayed along the horizon of his interests, on which loomed nothing so trivial as atom bombs, wars, and the state of the world. Standing prominently before all else was the forthcoming fight between Ace Nelson and Wild Billy Bell for the middle-weight championship of the world. That was it! If he could only know how that battle was going to turn out. What more could anybody want? Now, if someone would just tell him that little thing—or better still, let him see a copy of the newspapers after the fight. That would do it.
Smiling and rubbing his jaw, Creepy bent closer to the book and reread the ad in a clear, slow voice.
YOH-AGPARTH twitched in his century-old sleep, and caused a tremor that dislodged a mountain side in the Himalayas. He rose on one elbow, and the frown on his dark face was blacker than the lightless depths of his vast cavern. Again it came, the faint, tugging, loathsome command, bringing him up to a sitting position. How long had it been since that call had brought him from these passages? Not since the Egyptian seer, Farak, had divined the secrets of Bal.
And now again! A slave to human whims. Yoh-Agparth cursed horribly, and the demons of hell, hearing him, tried piteously to cross themselves.
And what was it this time? Ah, the same foolish plea. The future! Always they wanted to know what was coming. Why couldn’t they wait? Did they expect tomorrow to be kinder? The fools!
Yoh-Agparth stretched his arms and leaped skyward, and his harsh laughter trailed behind him like a plume . . .
ON THE same night that these two things occurred, Reggie Saint Gregory strolled from his club and stood for a quiet, rewarding moment contemplating the glacial serenity of Lake Michigan. Reggie rather liked nature. Trees and bushes and water. Things like that. A chap knew where he stood with them. They were solid and comfortable. No shifting around, no back talk. You could look at a tree all day without getting into trouble. No confusion about trees. A chap stood here, the tree stood there, and that was that. But people—altogether different matter.
“Nice night, isn’t it, sir?” the doorman said.
“Ah . . . yes,” Reggie said. He rather liked conversation, too. Until it got out of hand. At the moment, though, it was going fine. A fine, spirited give-and-take.
“But a bit cold after all,” the doorman said.
“Well . . .” The talk was going off on a tangent now, Reggie realized moodily.
The doorman stifled a yawn. His feet hurt and he wished Reggie would go home. “Considering last year though, it’s not bad,” he said.
Reggie thought hard, trying to remember last year’s weather. It must have been important, or this chap wouldn’t have brought it up. Something fishy about last year’s weather, maybe. What could it be? “Ah . . . yes,” he said, straddling the issue slyly.
The doorman eyed Reggie’s lean, pleasantly vacant face with misgivings. Sometimes talk with this young man had a way of trailing on indefinitely. “Anyway, the farmers are probably happy,” he said, seeking another avenue of interest.
Reggie frowned slightly. What the devil did the farmers have to do with it? This doorman, he thought, while obviously a good solid chap, behaved as if his mind were on a pogo stick. Really, it was wearing. He sighed. “I don’t know any farmers,” he said. “I couldn’t say.”
“Well, naturally,” the doorman said, with a little laugh.”
Reggie pondered this. Why was it “natural” that he knew no farmers? Come to think of it, why didn’t he? With a little start of alarm, he realized that the conversation had taken a mad turn. He had to break it off before it got completely out of hand, “Well . . . good night,” he said.
“Good night, sir,” the doorman said, and went gratefully back to his cubicle beside the lobby.
ALONE, REGGIE strolled down the quiet, wind-swept grandeur of Lake Michigan, mulling over the evening. It had been pleasant, in a dullish sort of way. Dinner at the club, and then a quiet snooze in the library. After that a bit of poker. Actually, Reggie didn’t play poker; he wasn’t allowed to. But he watched with great enthusiasm. He never understood why the members were so damned secretive about their cards. Acted as if money were involved instead of a lot of silly chips.
Reggie walked past the Water Tower, past the Tribune Tower, and then turned East on Ohio street. He had a small bachelor apartment in this neobohemian but still elegant area of Chicago. The streets were empty now, and the, wind coming off the lake was definitely cold.
He hurried along, eager to get out of this weather and into his apartment. The streets were empty, and bits of waste paper somersaulted along the curb. High above him a cold, pale, lonely star blinked in the black sky. Reggie turned up his coat collar and put his hands deep in his pockets. Hellish weather. He remembered something about the farmers, but he couldn’t pin it down. They either were happy or unhappy about it, that was it.
He plowed along, head bent against the wind, until he came to the first intersection east of Michigan Boulevard, where there was a newsstand at which he bought his papers. There was a nickel in his overcoat pocket, cold to the touch even through his gloves, and he fished it out and raised his head to the wind. He was almost abreast of the newsstand, and what he saw then made him raise his eyebrows in astonishment.
The newsdealer whose name, Reggie knew, was Creepy, was sitting on a fruit crate and leaning back limply against the wooden side of the stand. His eyes were fixed straight ahead of him in a glazed state, and his teeth were rattling together like hot dice. On his lap was an open copy of a magazine.
Directly before him knelt a tall, splendidly proportioned man, with calm, noble features and eyes that gleamed with a crimson light. This magnificent creature wore a flowing white robe, and his curling black hair was held in place with a heavy, jewel-encrusted band of gold. In his powerful outstretched hands he held a golden tray; and on the tray rested a single newspaper.
“Well, well,” Reggie said.
He put his hands on his hips and studied the weird tableau. This is dauced queer, he thought, regarding the seemingly paralyzed newsdealer and the kneeling figure of the strange man with a little frown. Deuced queer way to sell newspapers, he thought. He dropped his nickel on the golden tray and took the newspaper and put it in his pocket. Must be a new merchandising stunt. Damned lot of overhead, though. Two men at every stand, instead of just one, and neither of them paying much attention to business.
Mildly curious, Reggie picked up the magazine from the newsdealer’s lap, and looked at it. True Astrology. An ink-ringed ad on the open page caught his eye, and he read it slowly, stumbling over several words that were unfamiliar to him. The gist of it, as nearly as he could make out, was that if you got into a jam someone would come and help you out. Like his Uncle Ephraim. His Uncle Ephraim was always bailing him out of trouble. But that was over now, Reggie thought with regret. Uncle Ephraim had died of a heart attack several months ago in a Paris bordello, and had left the bulk of his not inconsiderable fortune to a scientific foundation that was studying the breeding habits of plant lice. Well, Reggie thought, dropping the magazine back onto the newsdealer’s lap, maybe he could use this help sometime. If he ever had an anchor around his neck and was about to practise high-diving . . . But at the moment he didn’t need any help, thank you.
