Time Travel Omnibus, page 454
“He was touched, obviously. Just the same, he challenged me, in a way. I wanted to know something more about him, how his machine worked, how he took off, and so on. I made up my mind the next time I was in the neighborhood to look him up, hoping he wouldn’t be home.
“When I made it, his sister was alone, and in fine fettle, as cantankerous as a flea-bitten mastiff.
“ ‘He’s gone again,’ she complained bitterly.
“Clearly the two of them were at odds. I asked her whether she had seen him go. She hadn’t; he had just marched out to his shop and that was an end to him as far as she was concerned.
“I haggled around quite a lot and finally got her permission to go out and see what I could see for myself. Of course, the shop was locked. I had counted on that and had brought along a handy little skeleton key. I was inside in no time. The machine wasn’t there. Not a sign of it, or of Vanderkamp either.
“Now, I looked around all over, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he could have taken it out of that place; it was too big for doors or windows, and the walls and roof were solid and immovable. I figured that he couldn’t have got such a large machine away without his sister’s seeing him; so I locked the place up and went back to the house.
“But she was immovable; she hadn’t seen a thing. If he had taken anything larger than pocket-size out of that shop of his, she had missed it. I could hardly doubt her sincerity. There was nothing to be had from that source; so I had no alternative but to wait for him another time.”
Anna Van Tromp, considerably chastened, watched her strange suitor—she looked upon all men as suitors, without exception; for so her father had conditioned her to do—as he reached into his sack and brought out another wonder.
“Now this,” said Vanderkamp, “is an alarm clock. You wind it up like this, you see; set it, and off it goes. Listen to it ring! That will wake you up in the morning.”
“More magic,” she cried doubtfully.
“No, no,” he explained patiently. “It is an everyday thing in my country. Perhaps some day you would like to join me in a little visit there, Anna?”
“Ja, maybe,” she agreed, looking out the window to his weird and frightening carriage, which had no animal to draw it and which vanished so strangely, fading away into the air, whenever Vanderkamp went into it. “This clothes-washing machine you talk about,” she admitted. “This I would like to see.”
“I must go now,” said Vanderkamp, gazing at her with well-simulated coyness. “I’ll leave these things here with you, and I’ll just take along that bench over there.”
“Ja, ja,” said Anna, blushing.
“Six of one and half a dozen of the other,” muttered Vanderkamp, comparing Anna with his sister.
He got into his time-machine and set out for home in the twentieth century. There was some reluctance in his going. Here all was somnolent peace and quiet, despite the rigors of living; in his own time there were wars and turmoil and the ultimate threat of the greatest war of all. New Amsterdam had one drawback, however—the presence of Anna Von Tromp. She had grown fond of him, undeniably, perhaps because he was so much more interested in her circumstances than in herself. What was a man to do? Julie at one end, Anna at the other. But even getting rid of Julie would not allow him to escape the warfare to come.
He thought deeply of his problem all the way home.
When he got back, he found his sister waiting up, as usual, ready to deliver the customary diatribe.
He forestalled her. “I’ve been thinking things over, Julie. I believe you’d be much happier if you were living with brother Carl. I’ll give you as much money as you need, and you can pack your things and I’ll take you down to Louisiana.”
“Take me!” she exclaimed. “How? In that crazy contraption of yours?”
“Precisely.”
“Oh no!” she said. “You don’t get me into that machine! How do I know what it will do to me? It’s a time machine, isn’t it? It might make an old hag of me—or a baby!”
“You said that you wanted to be young again, didn’t you?” he said softly. “You said you’d like another chance . . .”
A faraway look came into her eyes. “Oh, if I only could! If I only could be a girl again, with a chance to get married . . .”
“Pack your things,” Vanderkamp said quietly.
“It must have been all of a month before I saw Vanderkamp again,” Harrigan continued, waving for another scotch and soda. “I was down in the vicinity on an assignment and I took a run over to his place.
“He was home this time. He came to the door, which he had chained on the inside. He recognized me, and it was plain at the same time that he had no intention of letting me in.
“I came right out with the first question I had in mind. ‘The thing that bothers me,’ I said to him, ‘is how you get that time machine of yours in and out of that shed.’
“ ‘Mr. Harrigan,’ he answered, ‘newspaper reporters ought to have at least elementary scientific knowledge. You don’t. How in hell could even a time machine be in two places at once, I ask you? If I take that machine back three centuries, that’s where it is—not here. And three centuries ago that shop wasn’t standing there. So you don’t go in or out; you don’t move at all, remember? It’s time that moves.’
“ ‘I called the other day,’ I went on. ‘Your sister spoke to me. Give her my regards.’
“ ‘My sister’s left me,’ he said shortly, ‘to stew, as you might say, in my own time machine.’
“ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Just what do you have in mind to do next?’
“ ‘Let me ask you something, Mr. Harrigan,’ he answered. ‘Would you sit around here waiting for an atomic war if you could get away?’
“ ‘Certainly not,’ I answered.
“ ‘Well, then, I don’t intend to, either.’
“All this while he was standing at the door, refusing to open it any wider or to let me in. He was making it pretty plain that there wasn’t much he had to say to me. And he seemed to be in a hurry.
“ ‘Remember me to the inquiring public thirty years hence, Mr. Harrigan,’ he said at last, and closed the door.
“That was the last I saw of him.”
Harrigan finished his scotch and soda appreciatively and looked around for the bartender.
“Did he take off then?” I asked.
“Like a rocket,” said Harrigan. “Queerest thing was that there wasn’t a trace of him. The machine was gone, too—the same way as the last time, without a disturbance in the shop. He and his machine had simply vanished off the face of the earth and were never heard from again.
“Matter of fact, though,” Harrigan went on thoughtfully, “Vanderkamp’s disappearance wasn’t the really queer angle on the pitch. The other thing broke in the papers the week after he left. The neighbors got pretty worked up about it. They called the police to tell them that Vanderkamp’s sister Julie was back, only she was off her nut—and a good deal changed in appearance, too.
“Gal going blarmy was no news, of course, but that last bit about her appearance—they said she looked about twenty years older, all of a sudden—sort of rang a bell. So I went over there. It was Julie, all right; at least, she looked a hell of a lot like Julie had when I last saw her—provided you could grant that a woman could age twenty years in the few weeks it had been. And she was off her rocker, sure enough—or hysterical. Or at least madder than a wet hen. She made out like she couldn’t speak a word of English, and they finally had to get an interpreter to understand her. She wouldn’t speak anything but Dutch—and an old-fashioned kind, too.
“She made a lot of extravagant claims and kept insisting that she would bring the whole matter up in a complaint before Governor Stuyvesant. Said she wasn’t Julie Vanderkamp, by God, but was named Anna Van Tromp—which is an old Dutch name thereabouts—and claimed that she had been abducted from her home on the Bowery. We pointed out the Third Avenue El and told her that was the Bowery, but she just sniffed and looked at us as though we were crazy.”
I toyed with my drink. “You mean you actually listened to the poor girl’s story?” I asked.
“Sure,” Harrigan said. “Maybe she was as crazy as a bedbug, but I’ve listened to whackier stories from supposedly sane people. Sure, I listened to her.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment, then went on.
“She claimed that this fellow Vanderkamp had come to her house and filled her with a lot of guff about the wonderful country he lived in, and how she ought to let him take her to see it. Apparently he waxed especially eloquent about an automatic washing-machine and dryer, and that had fascinated her, for some reason. Then, she said, he’d brought a ten-year-old girl along—though where in the world old Vanderkamp could have picked up a tot like that is beyond me—and the kid had added her blandishments to the plot. Between them, they had managed to lure her into the old guy’s machine. From what she said, it was obviously the time machine she was talking about, and if she was Julie there was no reason why she shouldn’t know about it. But she talked as though it was a complete mystery to her, as though she’d no idea what the purpose of it was. Well, anyway, here she was—and very unhappy, too. Wanted to go back to old New Amsterdam, but bad.
“It was a beautiful act, even if she was nuts. The strange thing was, though, that there were some things even a gal going whacky couldn’t explain. For instance, the house was filled with what the experts said were priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam, of the period just prior to the British siege. You’d think those things would make poor Julie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed to belong in that period, but apparently they just made her homesick. And, curiously enough, all the modern gadgets were gone. All those handy little items that make the twentieth century so livable had been taken away—including the washing-machine and dryer, by the way. Julie—or Anna, as she called herself—claimed that Vanderkamp had taken it back with him, wherever he’d gone to, after he’d brought her there.”
“Poor woman,” I said sympathetically. “They toted her off to the booby hatch, I suppose.”
“No . . .” Harrigan said slowly. “They didn’t, as a matter of fact. Since she was harmless, they let her stay in the house a while. Which was a mistake, it seems. Of course, she wasn’t from the seventeenth century. That’s impossible. All the same—” He broke off abruptly and stared moodily into his glass.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“She was found one morning about two weeks after she got there,” he said. “Dead. Electrocuted. It seems she’d stuck her finger into a light socket while standing in a bathtub full of water. An accident, obviously. As the Medical Examiner said, it was an accident any six-year-old child would have known enough about electricity to avoid.
“That is,” Harrigan added, “a twentieth-century child . . .”
HALL OF MIRRORS
Fredric Brown
It is a tough decision to make—whether to give up your life so you can live it over again!
FOR an instant you think it is temporary blindness, this sudden dark that comes in the middle of a bright afternoon.
It must be blindness, you think; could the sun that was tanning you have gone out instantaneously, leaving you in utter blackness?
Then the nerves of your body tell you that you are standing, whereas only a second ago you were sitting comfortably, almost reclining, in a canvas chair. In the patio of a friend’s house in Beverly Hills. Talking to Barbara, your fiancée. Looking at Barbara—Barbara in a swim suit—her skin golden tan in the brilliant sunshine, beautiful.
You wore swimming trunks. Now you do not feel them on you; the slight pressure of the elastic waistband is no longer there against your waist. You touch your hands to your hips. You are naked. And standing.
Whatever has happened to you is more than a change to sudden darkness or to sudden blindness.
You raise your hands gropingly before you. They touch a plain smooth surface, a wall. You spread them apart and each hand reaches a corner. You pivot slowly. A second wall, then a third, then a door. You are in a closet about four feet square.
Your hand finds the knob of the door. It turns and you push the door open.
There is light now. The door has opened to a lighted room . . . a room that you have never seen before.
IT is not large, but it is pleasantly furnished—although the furniture is of a style that is strange to you. Modesty makes you open the door cautiously the rest of the way. But the room is empty of people.
You step into the room, turning to look behind you into the closet, which is now illuminated by light from the room. The closet is and is not a closet; it is the size and shape of one, but it contains nothing, not a single hook, no rod for hanging clothes, no shelf. It is an empty, blank-walled, four-by-four-foot space.
You close the door to it and stand looking around the room. It is about twelve by sixteen feet. There is one door, but it is closed. There are no windows. Five pieces of furniture. Four of them you recognize—more or less. One looks like a very functional desk. One is obviously a chair . . . a comfortable-looking one. There is a table, although its top is on several levels instead of only one. Another is a bed, or couch. Something shimmering is lying across it and you walk over and pick the shimmering something up and examine it.
It is a garment.
You are naked, so you put it on. Slippers are part way under the bed (or couch) and you slide your feet into them. They fit, and they feel warm and comfortable as nothing you have ever worn on your feet has felt. Like lamb’s wool, but softer.
You are dressed now. You look at the door—the only door of the room except that of the closet (closet?) from which you entered it. You walk to the door and before you try the knob, you see the small typewritten sign pasted just above it that reads:
This door has a time lock set to open in one hour. For reasons you will soon understand, it is better that you do not leave this room before then. There is a letter for you on the desk. Please read it.
It is not signed. You look at the desk and see that there is an envelope lying on it.
You do not yet go to take that envelope from the desk and read the letter that must be in it.
Why not? Because you are frightened.
You see other things about the room. The lighting has no source that you can discover. It comes from nowhere.
It is not indirect lighting; the ceiling and the walls are not reflecting it at all.
They didn’t have lighting like that, back where you came from. What did you mean by back where you came from?
You close your eyes. You tell yourself: I am Norman Hastings. I am an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California. I am twenty-five years old, and this is the year nineteen hundred and fifty-four.
You open your eyes and look again.
THEY didn’t use that style of furniture in Los Angeles—or anywhere else that you know of—in 1954. That thing over in the corner—you can’t even guess what it is. So might your grandfather, at your age, have looked at a television set.
You look down at yourself, at the shimmering garment that you found waiting for you. With thumb and forefinger you feel its texture.
It’s like nothing you’ve ever touched before.
I am Norman Hastings. This is nineteen hundred and fifty-four.
Suddenly you must know, and at once.
You go to the desk and pick up the envelope that lies upon it. Your name is typed on the outside: Norman Hastings.
Your hands shake a little as you open it. Do you blame them?
There are several pages, typewritten. Dear Norman, it starts. You turn quickly to the end to look for the signature. It is unsigned.
You turn back and start reading.
“Do not be afraid. There is nothing to fear, but much to explain. Much that you must understand before the time lock opens that door. Much that you must accept and—obey.
“You have already guessed that you are in the future—in what, to you, seems to be the future. The clothes and the room must have told you that. I planned it that way so the shock would not be too sudden, so you would realize it over the course of several minutes rather than read it here—and quite probably disbelieve what you read.
“The ‘closet’ from which you have just stepped is, as you have by now realized, a time machine. From it you stepped into the world of 2004. The date is April 7th, just fifty years from the time you last remember.
“You cannot return.
“I did this to you and you may hate me for it; I do not know. That is up to you to decide, but it does not matter.
What does matter, and not to you alone, is another decision which you must make. I am incapable of making it.
“Who is writing this to you? I would rather not tell you just yet. By the time you have finished reading this, even though it is not signed (for I knew you would look first for a signature), I will not need to tell you who I am. You will know.
“I am seventy-five years of age. I have, in this year 2004, been studying ‘time’ for thirty of those years. I have completed the first time machine ever built—and thus far, its construction, even the fact that it has been constructed, is my own secret.
“You have just participated in the first major experiment. It will be your responsibility to decide whether there shall ever be any more experiments with it, whether it should be given to the world, or whether it should be destroyed and never used again.”
END of the first page.
You look up for a moment, hesitating to turn the next page. Already you suspect what is coming.
You turn the page.
“I constructed the first time machine a week ago. My calculations had told me that it would work, but not how it would work. I had expected it to send an object back in time—it works backward in time only, not forward—physically unchanged and intact.
