Time Travel Omnibus, page 408
“Friday,” she replied faintly, apparently half-hypnotized.
“Sorry—I mean the date, not the day of the week.”
“Why—it’s June fifteenth,” she said slowly, still stunned.
“And the year?” he added. “No I’m neither crazy nor drunk and it is important—to me at any rate. What year is it?”
“Nineteen-one,” she said. Then she straightened, took a deep breath and began to exhibit an outraged glow. Her smoky blue eyes flashed sudden fire. She said, “Will you please state your business here—before I have you thrown off the grounds?”
“Oh!” He followed her gaze and realized that, for nineteen one, his garb was definitely not au fait. He was wearing well-scuffed loafers, rumpled light-blue gabardine slacks and a sports shirt featuring yellow dolphins cavorting on a dark-brown sea. The problem of clothing anachronisms was one he had forgotten utterly.
Otherwise Houghton was fairly well fixed. He had managed to obtain a couple of thousand dollars in nineteenth century gold coin against emergencies. His vessel held a hundred cartons of cigarettes, complete sets of almanacs and histories of the first half of the twentieth century, lockers full of canned and frozen food. But clothes as usual he had failed to consider them. He frowned faintly in self-annoyance.
Sensing that the girl was about to shout for help he said hastily, “Don’t yell—I belong here—in a way.” She hesitated and looked with disapproval on his cigarette case. Hastily he returned it to his pocket and brought out his wallet.
“You may not believe me but it’s true enough.” He made it as casual, as matter-of-fact as he could. “I have proof back there in the trees. At any rate look this over before you set the lurchers on me.”
With an expression which said silently but definitely that she could not understand why she was bothering, the girl accepted his wallet and stared at its contents. Her careful diffidence became bewilderment, then wonder, then a very fair facsimile of red-headed rage.
“If this is some sort of a joke—” she began but he cut her off incisively.
“It very definitely isn’t,” he replied. “I have come back fifty years in time to talk to my great uncle Enoch Dwight. My vessel—ship if you will—is back there in the clearing.” He paused, took the offensive with, “May I ask who you are? You very definitely aren’t my mother.”
“If you please!” she said, the tilt of her freckle-dusted nose becoming more pronounced. She handed back his wallet, then took up the croquet mallet and sent its purple-striped victim careening rapidly across the lawn into the bed of azaleas that lined the far hedge. Still holding the mallet she straightened again, regarded him coldly.
“Furthermore,” she stated, “I haven’t the slightest intention of walking with you alone through the woods—or anywhere else for that matter. You might be a kidnapper—or worse.”
“Matter of opinion,” said Dwight Houghton easily. If he knew nothing else he knew women. At thirty he had been sole beneficiary of the income from the incredible Enoch Dwight empire for nine years. And even before that his wealth and reasonable good looks had made him one of the world’s prime male targets.
He studied the girl openly—knowing he had her hooked. He said, “You must be my cousin Alison—once removed. You look a little like your father, a little like my mother’s earlier pictures. Have a cigarette? These are nineteen-fifty-one models.”
“Thank you, I don’t . . .” she began with an even sharper tilt to her nose. But her voice faded out and there was longing in the smoky blue eyes as he opened his case. All at once her hauteur dissolved and she said, “We’d better get out of sight of the house. My father . . .”
“YOUR father,” he said as they strolled through the gap in the hedge, “has not come down to us as exactly a broad-minded character—where other people’s conduct is concerned.”
They halted and Houghton lit cigarettes. The girl accepted hers, inhaled gratefully and shook her head slowly. “I still don’t believe it. You come out of nowhere, looking like a fantastic scarecrow, and calmly tell me you’re my niece’s son—and, mind you, she has yet to marry.”
“She won’t for two years,” he told her quietly. “Not until more than a year after the death of your father and your disappearance from the face of the earth.”
“My what?” she gasped, nearly choking on cigarette smoke. Casually he was walking her into the trees, toward the clearing.
“Your disappearance,” he told her. “In case you aren’t aware of the fact you vanished from human ken one day—December eleventh of this year to be exact—and were never seen again. The chronology, of course, is that of my time.”
“I think you’re crazy,” she said slowly. She laughed shakily.
“Not as crazy as you are to walk through these woods with a total stranger,” Houghton replied. Then, “Now do you believe me?”
They had come to the clearing—the vessel was before them, its bright steel-alloy surface pitted and blackened by its journey through polydimensional sub-space to span the helical swirl of time.
Houghton walked to it, punched in peculiar sequence a small button that lay flush with the hull. The oval port swung open and the trim complex interior lay revealed. He looked around at the girl, who stood at his shoulder, her eyes again wide with surprise.
“Your horseless-carriage world never saw anything like this,” he informed her. He stood aside for her to enter. “Miss 1901,” he said, “step into 1952!”
She flashed him a hesitant glance, then compressed her normally full lips, dropped her cigarette to the grass and ground it out under a dainty heel. Then, with a defiant swirl of her skirt and revelation of a shapely silken ankle, she entered the vessel.
Houghton put out his own cigarette and came in after her. “June fifteenth,” he murmured half to himself. “Let’s see, they’ll be running the Belmont Stakes tomorrow.” He looked at her sharply. “Ever take a little flyer on the ponies, Cousin Alison?”
“Mister Houghton—if that is your name—I don’t know where you get your ideas of my character but . . .” Her voice trailed off again under his steady regard and a slow pink blush caused her freckles to fade out.
“Well,” he told her with a grin, “you didn’t stick around long enough to leave much comment in that department.” He bowed her through the oval opening that divided the control cabin from the tiny lounge-library of the vessel, then walked to a bookshelf and ran a finger along the row of almanacs in front of him.
Without turning he said, “But you were written down as a very good-looking if somewhat muleheaded young lady—with a very low boiling point and a somewhat overstrong insistence that women can, do everything men can do and with compound interest.”
“And is anything wrong with that?” she snapped.
“Not a thing in the world,” Houghton told her. He plucked one of the almanacs from the shelf, turned to face her. He noted that her color had deepened until it looked unsafe to touch. He added, “Where—or rather when—I come from the girls vote and run businesses and have most of the inherited money. Outside of biological differences—”
“Please, Mr. Houghton!” Her blush continued to burn brightly and, aware of it, she said angrily, “The almanac if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he replied and handed it to her with the page open to Belmont Stakes winners. She studied it, frowned, then said, “But this is absurd. Commando hasn’t a chance!”
“Better put something down on him all the same—the records don’t lie. Now, Cousin Alison, how about arranging for me to have a chat with your father? After all, I didn’t make this journey for kicks.”
“Why did you make it?” she asked with blunt curiosity.
“To save the world—I hope,” he replied with utter seriousness.
“You’re joking,” she said—but her attention was focused on the utterly alien surrounding in which they stood rather than on what Houghton said. It took a moment to sink in.
She closed the almanac and handed it back, said, “But Daddy is only a businessman. How do you expect a mere businessman to save the world fifty years from now—always granting your crazy story is true, which I don’t for a moment admit?”
“It’s true enough—and you know it. You can’t help it.”
She returned his gaze, then looked around her, smoky blue eyes dark with realization and growing fright. “I’m afraid I do believe you,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t want to—it scares me. But I—yes, I have to believe.”
“Then how about my getting to your father?” he asked.
She sank onto one of the foam-covered mats that covered the wall-settees. There were two of them in the lounge, slightly curved to fit against the wall, one along a part of each side. They could also do duty as bunks if need be.
She said, “Suppose you tell me just how Daddy can help to save the world in your time?”
He sighed his relief, waved a lean hand toward the rows of massive history books in the shelves behind her. “It’s all in there, Alison—but I’m afraid you’ll have to dig out the details by yourself. I haven’t time to tell you all of it.” He paused and laughed shortly, without mirth, added, “Even if I could.
“Perhaps time is not the right word. With this vessel of mine, I seem to have all of past time at my disposal.” He paused again, ran long fingers through his closely-cropped black hair.
“Take my word for it, Alison, the world I come from is rocketing toward self-destruction. The so-called first World War—America gets into it in nineteen seventeen—started the trouble and a second World War just about finished things off. The weapons of destruction available to the military and the politicians who give them their orders are capable of killing every living thing on earth—if not of destroying the planet itself.”
“It sounds incredible—and horrible,” Alison murmured. Then, “But I still don’t see how a man like my father can alter such a course. After all, he’s a mere—”
“Businessman,” Houghton finished for her. “Listen, Alison—‘beginning right about now he is going to embark on the most remarkably successful series of investments known to finance. If I weren’t heir to the fortune he piled up—or will pile up—I’d know nothing about it. He kept—I mean he will keep—his methods shrewdly hidden from the eyes of the future.
“But I know them. He will put money behind a young Detroit automobile maker named Henry Ford. He will enable a pair of devout young Ohioans, named Wilbur and Orville Wright to complete certain experiments with powered aircraft they are conducting or will shortly conduct on a North Carolina beach.
“He already has money in the steel trust and with the telephone and telegraph corporations. He will vastly increase these holdings. And with this increase he will lay the groundwork for international cooperation with certain monopolistic firms in England, in, France and in Germany. Every one of them is going to pay off.”
“Which still doesn’t tell me how these activities of his will destroy the world,” said Alison Dwight. “After all it’s perfectly legitimate to seek a profit providing one has the means to do so.”
“But, Alison, in the process your father will be assembling much more than mere profit,” Houghton told her patiently. “He will be gathering power in unheard-of amounts for an individual in private life. And this power is going to be consistently misused by the very components of the corporate system he is going to set up before he dies.”
“Why don’t you, as heir to this great fortune, do something about it then?” the girl inquired with a hint of scorn.
Houghton kicked at a benchmooring. “Dammit, why do you think I had this time-vessel built?” he countered angrily. “Why do you think I took the risk of coming back here? Your father rigged—will rig—his corporations so that I haven’t the power to alter a thing where it counts. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come back in time in the hope of straightening things out at the beginning.”
“You want to change Daddy’s point of view?” the girl suggested and there was a suggestion of mockery in her tone. She rose, moved toward the oval port of the vessel. “Very well, Dwight Houghton, come along with me. But I warn you—you’ll find altering the rock of Gibraltar a far easier task.”
* * *
TWO hours later—shortly before noon—Houghton leaned back as far as possible in an immensely uncomfortable renaissance chair. He lifted his eyes from the spittoon on the carpet to the middle-aged man who sat across from him behind the huge eighteenth century Venetian desk with its gilt scrollwork and cherubs and tooled leather top.
Enoch Dwight, the great uncle he had previously seen only in posed portraits and photographs, was far more disarming than his posed images. For one thing he was not as tall as Houghton had pictured him. And the handlebar sweep of his graying mustaches was not as impeccably groomed as camera and artist had made it. Even more astonishing was Enoch Dwight’s sardonic but definite sense of humor.
“This is most extraordinary,” he said in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice, regarding Houghton benignly from the tall white fortress of his collar. “You say that you have come back through time to instruct me how to arrange my affairs so that they will not be instrumental in destroying the world some fifty years hence.” He looked almost as if he were laughing.
“Hardly you alone,” his grandnephew told him. “But what you leave behind you will be one of a number of interlocking factors that must inevitably lead to such destruction. By alteration of purpose, by reapplication of power which you are soon to assemble, there is definite possibility that the trend of events may be swung into a channel less harmful to humanity.”
“My hear Doughton—pardon me, young man, but I once took a course under Professor Spooner at Oxford and I fear the habit of twisting words is unbreakable. My dear Houghton—I am a man scarcely dedicated either to the destruction or the improvement of the world in which I find myself. I have merely sought to provide comfort and security for my family and myself and, perhaps, been a trifle more successful than the bulk of my competitors. Politics—world affairs? Save as they effect this security I care little or nothing about them.”
“To maintain what you have already begun to build,” said Houghton quietly, “you must care for them ever increasingly. I do not expect you to believe me—as yet. But I can furnish ample proof of my identity and of the fact that I have traveled backward in time.”
“Hmmm,” muttered Enoch Dwight. His light-blue eyes narrowed and the corners of his small mouth tightened visibly beneath the heavy sweep of hair on his upper lip. “You say that Amalgamated Wheat is going to jump four points between now and tomorrow’s opening?”
“That’s right, sir,” Houghton assured him. His greatuncle studied him for a long moment, then reached for the elaborately impractical gold-plated telephone on the desk before him.
“Very well, young man—incidentally you do seem to favor my side of the family somewhat. My daughter is waiting for you outside. Have her arrange with Jermyn—he’s the butler—to put you up here as a house guest for the time being. And have him procure you some clothing fit to be seen in.” He regarded Houghton’s casual 1951 sports attire with a combination of scorn and disbelief.
“Thank you, sir,” said Houghton, who had not used such a term of respect for anyone since his prep-school days. But there was a quality about his Greatuncle Enoch, laissez-faire-ism, Spoonerisms and all, that demanded such courtesies.
As Houghton rose from the huge uncomfortable chair his greatuncle added, “I shall be occupied with my affairs until dinner—which is served promptly at eight, young man. Tomorrow morning—after the Market opening—you and I will discuss your extraordinary proposition further.”
DISMISSED, Houghton left the room to find Alison Dwight awaiting him in the big library outside the study where her father had interviewed him. He gave the girl her father’s instructions. She looked puzzled and, he thought, decidedly attractive. He wondered how she would appear in a 1952 haircut and with 1952 makeup—not that she would need much makeup with her smooth clear complexion and vivid coloring. Also the effect of 1952 fashions upon that figure. It might prove to be an experiment both interesting and decidedly worth while.
“I’m surprised that Daddy was so—easy,” she told him and shook her head slowly. She added, “He can be very deceptive when he wants to.”
“Thanks,” said Houghton with a quick look at the closed massive door through which he had just passed. “I’ve got the vessel locked.” She shot him a smoky sidelong glance and the corners of her mouth quirked enchantingly. Then, “I think I’ll have Jermyn put you in the east wing.”
“I’d prefer the south,” he told her. I “That’s where I have my own rooms!—I mean, I like the view of the reed pond better.”
“Touché,” said Alison, smiling, openly. “I should have known you’d have your own ideas about the house. Very well, the south wing it is.” She moved to the wall and pulled a hanging damask bell-cord.
Jermyn, who proved to be a hound-faced sad-eyed elder statesman of unmistakably British origin, eyed Houghton’s unorthodox attire with only the briefest flicker of astonishment. Then, with silent efficiency, he set about fulfilling his master’s orders.
When he came downstairs for lunch Houghton felt as if he were something under glass in a wax museum, labeled The Mauve Decade. He wore peg-top trousers, a stiff-collared long-sleeved shirt with pleated bosom and a speckled Norfolk jacket with belt and pleats in the back. His tie might have doubled for a shoe-lace—and his shoes were pointed of toe and buttoned.
“My, aren’t we handsome!” mocked Alison when he joined her at the Chippendale table in the small dining room overlooking the side lawn.
“We’re choking to death,” he told her, trying vainly to work a finger between collar and neck.
The luncheon—it was far more than lunch—was elaborately prepared and served and in quantity overwhelming to a young man fresh from the era of salads and ulcers. There was a heavy bean soup, served from an immense silver tureen, followed by a fish course, a roast and sherbet, potatoes, broccoli and a complex and sweet dessert—served by a footman whose aim in life seemed to be achievement of Jermyn’s dolorous gravity.
