Time Travel Omnibus, page 434
Mason sat down at his board. He waited tensely. He heard Mickey jump up and move over to the engine control board.
“I’m going to take us up easy,” Ross said to them. “There’s no reason why we should . . . have any trouble.”
He paused. They snapped their heads over and looked at him with muscle-tight impatience.
“Are you both ready?” Ross asked.
“Take us up,” Mickey said.
Ross jammed his lips together and shoved over the switch that read: Vertical Rise.
They felt the ship tremble, hesitate. Then it moved off the ground, headed up with increasing velocity. Mason flicked on the rear viewer. He watched the dark earth recede, tried not to look at the white patch in the corner of the screen, the patch that shone metallically under the moonlight.
“Five hundred,” he read. “Seven-fifty . . . one thousand . . . fifteen hundred . . .”
He kept waiting. For explosion. For an engine to give out. For their rise to stop.
They kept moving up.
“Three thousand,” Mason said, his voice beginning to betray the rising sense of elation he felt. The planet was getting farther and farther away. The other ship was only a memory now. He looked across at Mickey. Mickey was staring, open-mouthed, as if he were about ready to shout out “Hurry!” but was afraid to tempt the fates.
“Six thousand . . . seven thousand!” Mason’s voice was jubilant. “We’re out of it!”
Mickey’s face broke into a great, relieved grin. He ran a hand over his brow and flicked great drops of sweat on the deck.
“God,” he said, gasping, “my God.”
Mason moved over to Ross’s seat. He clapped the captain on the shoulder.
“We made it,” he said. “Nice flying.”
Ross looked irritated.
“We shouldn’t have left,” he said. “It was nothing all the time. Now we have to start looking for another planet.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t a good idea to leave,” he said.
Mason stared at him. He turned away shaking his head, thinking . . . you can’t win.
“If I ever see another glitter,” he thought aloud, “I’ll keep my big mouth shut. To hell with alien races anyway.”
SILENCE. He went back to his seat and picked up his graph chart. He let out a long shaking breath. Let Ross complain, he thought, I can take anything now. Things are normal again. He began to figure casually what might have occurred down there on that planet.
Then he happened to glance at Ross.
Ross was thinking. His lips pressed together. He said something to himself. Mason found the captain looking at him.
“Mason,” he said.
“What?”
“Alien race, you said.”
Mason felt a chill flood through his body. He saw the big head nod once in decision.
Unknown decision. His hands started to shake. A crazy idea came. No, Ross wouldn’t do that, not just to assuage vanity. Would he?
“I don’t . . .” he started. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mickey watching the captain too.
“Listen,” Ross said. “I’ll tell you what happened down there. I’ll show you what happened!”
They stared at him in paralyzing horror as he threw the ship around and headed back.
“What are you doing!” Mickey cried.
“Listen,” Ross said. “Didn’t you understand me? Don’t you see how we’ve been tricked?”
They looked at him without comprehension. Mickey took a step toward him.
“Alien race,” Ross said. “That’s the short of it. That time-space idea is all wet. But I’ll tell you what idea isn’t all wet. So we leave the place. What’s our first instinct as far as reporting it? Saying it’s uninhabitable? We’d do more than that. We wouldn’t report it at all.”
“Ross, you’re not taking us back!” Mason said, standing up suddenly as the full terror of returning struck him.
“You bet I am!” Ross said, fiercely elated.
“You’re crazy!” Mickey shouted at him, his body twitching, his hands clenched at his sides menacingly.
“Listen to me!” Ross roared at them. “Who would be benefited by us not reporting the existence of that planet?”
They didn’t answer. Mickey moved closer.
“Fools!” he said. “Isn’t it obvious? There is life down there. But life that isn’t strong enough to kill us or chase us away with force. So what can they do? They don’t want us there. So what can they do?”
He asked them like a teacher who cannot get the right answers from the dolts in his class.
Mickey looked suspicious. But he was curious now, too, and a little timorous as he had always been with his captain, except in moments of greatest physical danger. Ross had always led them, and it was hard to rebel against it even when it seemed he was trying to kill them all. His eyes moved to the viewer screen where the planet began to loom beneath them like a huge dark ball.
“We’re alive,” Ross said, “and I say there never was a ship down there. We saw it, sure. We touched it. But you can see anything if you believe it’s there! All your senses can tell you there’s something when there’s nothing. All you have to do is believe it!”
“What are you getting at?” Mason asked hurriedly, too frightened to realize. His eyes fled to the altitude gauge. Seventeen thousand . . . sixteen thousand . . . fifteen . . .
“Telepathy,” Ross said, triumphantly decisive. “I say those men, or whatever they are, saw us coming. And they didn’t want us there. So they read our minds and saw the death fear, and they decided that the best way to scare us away was to show us our ship crashed and ourselves dead in it. And it worked . . . until now.”
“So it worked!” Mason exploded. “Are you going to take a chance on killing us just to prove your damn theory?”
“It’s more than a theory!” Ross stormed, as the ship fell, then Ross added with the distorted argument of injured vanity, “My orders say to pick up specimens from every planet. I’ve always followed orders before and, by God, I still will!”
“You saw how cold it was!” Mason said. “No one can live there anyway! Use your head, Ross!”
“Damn it, I’m captain of this ship!” Ross yelled, “and I give the orders!”
“Not when our lives are in your hands!” Mickey started for the captain.
“Get back!” Ross ordered.
That was when one of the ship’s engines stopped and the ship yawed wildly.
“You fool!” Mickey exploded, thrown off balance. “You did it, you did it!”
OUTSIDE the black night hurtled past.
The ship wobbled violently. Prediction true was the only phrase Mason could think of. His own vision of the screaming, the numbing horror, the exhortations to a deaf heaven—all coming true. That hulk would be this ship in a matter of minutes. Those three bodies would be . . .
“Oh . . . damn!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, furious at the enraging stubbornness of Ross in taking them back, of causing the future to be as they saw—all because of insane pride.
“No, they’re not going to fool us!” Ross shouted, still holding fast to his last idea like a dying bulldog holding its enemy fast in its teeth.
He threw switches and tried to turn the ship. But it wouldn’t turn. It kept plunging down like a fluttering leaf. The gyroscope couldn’t keep up with the abrupt variations in cabin equilibrium and the three of them found themselves being thrown off balance on the tilting deck.
“Auxiliary engines!” Ross yelled.
“It’s no use!” Mickey cried.
“Damn it!” Ross clawed his way up the angled deck, then crashed heavily against the engine board as the cabin inclined the other way. He threw switches over with shaking fingers.
Suddenly Mason saw an even spout of flame through the rear viewer again. The ship stopped shuddering and headed straight down. The cabin righted itself.
Ross threw himself into his chair and shot out furious hands to turn the ship about.
From the floor Mickey looked at him with a blank, white face. Mason looked at him, too, afraid to speak.
“Now shut up!” Ross said disgustedly, not even looking at them, talking like a disgruntled father to his sons. “When we get down there you’re going to see that it’s true. That ship’ll be gone. And we’re going to go looking for those bastards who put the idea in our minds!”
They both stared at their captain humbly as the ship headed down backwards. They watched Ross’s hands move efficiently over the controls. Mason felt a sense of confidence in his captain. He stood on the deck quietly, waiting for the landing without fear. Mickey got up from the floor and stood beside him, waiting.
The ship hit the ground. It stopped. They had landed again. They were still the same.
And . . .
“Turn on the spotlight,” Ross told them.
Mason threw the switch. They all crowded to the port. Mason wondered for a second how Ross could possibly have landed in the same spot. He hadn’t even appeared to be following the calculations made on the last landing.
They looked out.
Mickey stopped breathing. And Ross’s mouth fell open.
The wreckage was still there.
They had landed in the same place and they had found the wrecked ship still there.
Mason turned away from the port and stumbled over the deck. He felt lost, a victim of some terrible universal prank, a man accursed.
“You said . . .” Mickey said to the captain.
Ross just looked out of the port with unbelieving eyes.
“Now we’ll go up again,” Mickey said, grinding his teeth. “And we’ll really crash this time. And we’ll be killed. Just like those . . . those . . .”
Ross didn’t speak. He stared out of the port at the refutation of his last clinging hope.
He felt hollow, void of all faith in belief in sensible things.
Then Mason spoke.
“We’re not going to crash—” he said somberly—“ever.”
“What?”
Mickey was looking at him. Ross turned and looked too.
“Why don’t we stop kidding ourselves?” Mason said. “We all know what it is, don’t we?”
He was thinking of what Ross had said just a moment before. About the senses giving evidence of what was believed. Even if there was nothing there at all . . .
Then, in a split second, with the knowledge, he saw Ross and he saw Carter. As they were. And he took a short shuddering breath, a last breath until illusion would bring breath and flesh again.
“Progress,” he said bitterly, and his voice was an aching whisper in the phantom ship.
“The Flying Dutchman takes to the universe.”
THE OTHER INAUGURATION
Anthony Boucher
From the journal of Peter Lanroyd, Ph. D.:
Mon Nov 5 84.: To any man even remotely interested in politics, let alone one as involved as I am, every 1st Tue of every 4th Nov must seem like one of the crucial if points of history. From every American presidential election stem 2 vitally different worlds, not only for U S but for world as a whole.
It’s easy enough, esp for a Prof of Polit Hist, to find examples—1860, 1912, 1932 . . . & equally easy, if you’re honest with yourself & forget you’re a party politician, to think of times when it didn’t matter much of a special damn who won an election. Hayes-Tilden . . . biggest controversy, biggest outrage on voters in U S history . . . yet how much of an if-tfleet?
But this is different. 1984 (damn Mr Orwell’s long-dead soul! he jinxed the year!) is the key if-crux as ever was in U S hist. And on Wed Nov 7 my classes are going to expect a few illuminating remarks—wh are going to have to come from me, scholar, & forget about the County Central Comm.
So I’ve recanvassed my precinct (looks pretty good for a Berkeley Hill precinct, too; might come damn close to carrying it), I’ve done everything I can before the election itself, & I can put in a few minutes trying to be non-party-objective on why this year of race 1984 is so if-vital.
Historical b g:
A) U S always goes for 2-party system, whatever the names.
B) The Great Years 1952/76 when we had, almost for 1st time, honest 2-partyism. Gradual development (started 52 by Morse, Byrnes, Shivers, etc) of cleancut parties of “right” & “left” (both, of course, to the right of a European “center” party). Maybe get a class laugh out of how both new parties kept both old names, neither wanting to lose New England Repub votes or Southern Demo, so we got Democratic American Republican Party & Free Democratic Republican Party.
C) 1976/84 God help us growth of 3d party, American. (The bastards! The simple, the perfect name . . . !) Result: Gradual withering away of DAR, bad defeat in 1980 presidential, total collapse in 82 congressional election. Back to 2-party system: Am vs FDR.
So far so good. Nice & historical. But how tell a class, without accusations of partisanship, what an Am victory means? What a destruction, what a (hell! let’s use their own word) subversion of everything American. . . .
Or am I being partisan? Can anyone be as evil, as anti-American, as to me the Senator is?
Don’t kid yrself Lanroyd. If it’s an Am victory, you aren’t going to lecture on Wed. You’re going to be in mourning for the finest working democracy ever conceived by man. And now you’re going to sleep & work like hell tomorrow getting out the vote.
It was Tuesday night. The vote had been gotten out, and very thoroughly indeed, in Lanroyd’s precinct, in the whole state of California, and in all 49 other states. The result was in, and the TV commentator, announcing the final electronic recheck of results from 50 state-wide electronic calculators, was being smug and happy about the whole thing. (“Conviction?” thought Lanroyd bitterly. “Or shrewd care in holding a job?”)
“. . . Yessir,” the commentator was repeating gleefully, “it’s such a landslide as we’ve never seen in all American history—and American history is what it’s going to be from now on. For the Senator, five . . . hundred . . . and . . . eighty . . . nine electoral votes from forty . . . nine states. For the Judge, four electoral votes from one state.
“Way back in 1936, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt” (he pronounced the name as a devout Christian might say Judas Iscariot) “carried all but two states, somebody said, ‘As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.’ Well, folks, I guess from now on we’ll have to say—ha! ha!—‘As Maine goes . . . so goes Maine.’ And it looks like the FDR party is going the way of the unlamented DAR. From now on, folks, it’s Americanism for Americans!
“Now let me just recap those electoral figures for you again. For the Senator on the American ticket, it’s five eighty-nine—that’s five hundred and eighty-nine—electoral—”
Lanroyd snapped off the set. The automatic brought up the room lighting from viewing to reading level.
He issued a two-syllable instruction which the commentator would have found difficult to carry out. He poured a shot of bourbon and drank it. Then he went to hunt for a razor blade.
As he took it out of the cabinet, he laughed. Ancient Roman could find a good use for this, he thought. Much more comfortable nowadays, too, with thermostats in the bathtub. Drift off under constantly regulated temperature. Play hell with the M.E.’s report, too. Jesus! Is it hitting me so bad I’m thinking stream of consciousness? Get to work, Lanroyd.
One by one he scraped the political stickers off the window. There goes the FDR candidate for State Assembly. There goes the Congressman—twelve-year incumbent. There goes the United States Senator. State Senator not up for reelection this year, or he’d be gone too. There goes NO ON 13. Of course in a year like this State Proposition f 13 passed too; from now on, as a Professor at a State University, he was forbidden to criticize publicly any incumbent government official, and compelled to submit the reading requirements for his courses to a legislative committee.
There goes the Judge himself . . . not just a sticker but a full lumino- portrait. The youngest man ever appointed to the Supreme Court; the author of the great dissenting opinions of the ’50s; later a Chief Justice to rank beside Marshall in the vitality of his interpretation of the Constitution; the noblest candidate the Free Democratic Republican Party had ever offered . . .
There goes the last of the stickers. . . .
Hey, Lanroyd, you’re right. It’s a symbol yet. There goes the last of the political stickers. You’ll never stick ’em on your window again. Not if the Senator’s boys have anything to say about it.
Lanroyd picked up the remains of the literature he’d distributed in the precincts, dumped it down the incinerator without looking at it, and walked out into the foggy night.
If . . .
All right you’re a monomaniac. You’re 40 and you’ve never married (and what a sweet damn fool you were to quarrel with Clarice over the candidates in 72) and you think your profession’s taught you that politics means everything and so your party loses and it’s the end of the world. But God damn it this time it is. This is the key-point.
If. . .
Long had part of the idea; McCarthy had the other part. It took the Senator to combine them. McCarthy got nowhere, dropped out of the DAR reorganization, failed with his third party, because he attacked and destroyed but didn’t give. He appealed to hate, but not to greed, no what’s-in- it-for-me, no porkchops. But add the Long technique, every-man-a-king, fuse ’em together: “wipe out the socialists; I’ll give you something better than socialism.” That does it, Senator. Coming Next Year: “wipe out the democrats; I’ll give you something better than democracy.”
