Time Travel Omnibus, page 457
“Signor Peter is well, I suppose,” said Harold, removing his coat.
“Yes, Signor Harold. He is very well, very busy with his collection.”
“Where is he? I should like to speak to him.”
“He is in the vaults, Signor Harold. But . . .”
“Yes?”
“Signor Peter sees no one when he is in the vaults. He has given strict orders that no one is to bother him, Signor Harold, when he is in the vaults.”
“Oh, well,” said Harold. “I daresay he’ll see me.”
IT WAS A THING something like a bear trap, apparently, except that instead of two semicircular jaws it had four segments that snapped together in the middle, each with a shallow, sharp tooth. The pain was quite unendurable.
Each segment moved at the end of a thin arm, cunningly hinged so that the ghastly thing would close over whichever of the four triggers you stepped on. Each arm had a spring too powerful for Peter’s muscles. The whole affair was connected by a chain to a staple solidly embedded in the concrete floor; it left Peter free to move some ten inches in any direction. Short of gnawing off his own leg, he thought sickly, there was very little he could do about it.
The riddle was, what could the thing possibly be doing here? There were rats in the vaults, no doubt, now as in his own time, but surely nothing larger. Was it conceivable that even the three-toed Somethings would set an engine like this to catch a rat?
Lost inventions, Peter thought irrelevantly, had a way of being rediscovered. Even if he suppressed the time-sphere during his lifetime and it did not happen to survive him, still there might be other time-fishers in the remote future—not here, perhaps, but in other treasure houses of the world. And that might account for the existence of this metal-jawed horror. Indeed, it might account for the vault itself—a better man-trap—except that it was all nonsense; the trap could only be full until the trapper came to look at it. Events, and the lives of prudent time-travelers, were conserved.
And he had been in the vault for almost forty minutes. Twenty minutes to go, twenty-five, thirty at the most, then the Somethings would enter and their entrance would free him. He had his lifeline; the knowledge was the only thing that made it possible to live with the pain that was the center of his universe just now. It was like going to the dentist, in the bad old days before procaine; it was very bad, sometimes, but you knew that it would end.
He cocked his head toward the door, holding his breath. A distant thud, another, then a curiously unpleasant squeaking, then silence.
But he had heard them. He knew they were there. It couldn’t be much longer now.
THREE MEN, two stocky, one lean, were playing cards in the passageway in front of the closed door that led to the vault staircase. They got up slowly.
“Who is he?” demanded the shortest one.
Tomaso clattered at him in furious Sicilian; the man’s face darkened, but he looked at Harold with respect.
“I am now,” stated Harold, “going down to see my brother.”
“No, Signor,” said the shortest one positively.
“You are impertinent,” Harold told him.
“Yes, Signor.”
Harold frowned. “You will not let me pass?”
“No, Signor.”
“Then go and tell my brother I am here.”
The shortest one said apologetically but firmly that there were strict orders against this also; it would have astonished Harold very much if he had said anything else.
“Well, at least I suppose you can tell me how long it will be before he comes out?”
“Not long, Signor. One hour, no more.”
“Oh, very well, then,” said Harold pettishly, turning half away. He paused. “One thing more,” he said, taking the gun out of his pocket as he turned, “put your hands up and stand against the wall there, will you?”
The first two complied slowly. The third, the lean one, fired through his coat pocket, just like the gangsters in the American movies.
It was not a sharp sensation at all, Harold was surprised to find; it was more as if someone had hit him in the side with a cricket bat. The racket seemed to bounce interminably from the walls. He felt the gun jolt in his hand as he fired back, but couldn’t tell if he had hit anybody. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, and yet it was astonishingly hard to keep his balance. As he swung around he saw the two stocky ones with their hands half inside their jackets, and the lean one with his mouth open, and Tomaso with bulging eyes. Then the wall came at him and he began to swim along it, paying particular attention to the problem of not dropping one’s gun.
As he weathered the first turn in the passageway the roar broke out afresh. A fountain of plaster stung his eyes; then he was running clumsily, and there was a bedlam of shouting behind them.
Without thinking about it he seemed to have selected the laboratory as his destination; it was an instinctive choice, without much to recommend it logically. In any case, he realized halfway across the central hall, he was not going to get there.
He turned and squinted at the passageway entrance; saw a blur move and fired at it. It disappeared. He turned again awkwardly, and had taken two steps nearer an armchair which offered the nearest shelter, when something clubbed him between the shoulderblades. One step more, knees buckling, and the wall struck him a second, softer blow. He toppled, clutching at the tapestry that hung near the fireplace.
WHEN THE three guards, whose names were Enrico, Alberto and Luca, emerged cautiously from the passage and approached Harold’s body, it was already flaming like a Viking’s in its impromptu shroud; the dim horses and men and falcons of the tapestry were writhing and crisping into brilliance. A moment later an uncertain ring of fire wavered toward them across the carpet.
Although the servants came with fire extinguishers and with buckets of water from the kitchen, and although the fire department was called, it was all quite useless. In five minutes the whole room was ablaze; in ten, as windows burst and walls buckled, the fire engulfed the second story. In twenty a mass of flaming timbers dropped into the vault through the hole Peter had made in the floor of the laboratory, utterly destroying the time-sphere apparatus and reaching shortly thereafter, as the authorities concerned were later to agree, an intensity of heat entirely sufficient to consume a human body without leaving any identifiable trace. For that reason alone, there was no trace of Peter’s body to be found.
THE SOUNDS had just begun again when Peter saw the light from the time-sphere turn ruddy and then wink out like a snuffed candle.
In the darkness, he heard the door open. . . . THE END
LOST IN THE FUTURE
John Victor Peterson
They had discovered a new planet—but its people did not see them until after they had traveled on.
ALBRECHT AND I went down in a shuttleship, leaving the stellatomic orbited pole-to-pole two thousand miles above Alpha Centauri’s second planet. While we took an atmosphere-brushing approach which wouldn’t burn off the shuttle’s skin, we went as swiftly as we could.
A week before we had completed man’s first trip through hyperspace. We were now making the first landing on an inhabited planet of another sun. All the preliminary investigations had been made via electronspectroscopes and electrontelescopes from the stellatomic.
We knew that the atmosphere was breathable and were reasonably certain that the peoples of the world into whose atmosphere we were dropping were at peace. We went unarmed, just the two of us; it might not be wise to go in force.
We were silent, and I know that Harry Albrecht was as perplexed as I was over the fact that our all-wave receivers failed to pick up any signs of radio communication whatever. We had assumed that we would pick up signals of some type as soon as we had passed down through the unfamiliar planet’s ionosphere.
The scattered arrangement of the towering cities appeared to call for radio communications. The hundreds of atmosphere ships flashing along a system of airways between the cities seemed to indicate the existence of electronic navigational and landing aids. But perhaps the signals were all tightly beamed; we would know when we came lower.
We dropped down into the airway levels, and still our receivers failed to pick up a signal of any sort—not even a whisper of static. And strangely, our radarscopes failed to record even a blip from their atmosphere ships!
“I guess it’s our equipment, Harry,” I said. “It just doesn’t seem to function in this atmosphere. We’ll have to put Edwards to work on it when we go back upstairs.”
We spotted an airport on the outskirts of a large city. The runways were laid out with the precision of Earth’s finest. I put our ship’s nose eastward on a runway and took it down fast through a lull in the atmosphere ship traffic.
As we went down I saw tiny buildings spotted on the field which surely housed electronic equipment, but our receivers remained silent.
I taxied the shuttle up to an unloading ramp before the airport’s terminal building and I killed the drive.
“Harry,” I said, “if it weren’t that their ships are so outlandishly stubby and their buildings so outflung, we might well be on Earth!”
“I agree, Captain. Strange, though, that they’re not mobbing us. They couldn’t take this delta-winged job for one of their ships!”
It was strange.
I looked up at the observation ramp’s occupants—people who except for their bizarre dress might well be of Earth—and saw no curiosity in the eyes that sometimes swept across our position.
“Be that as it may, Harry, we certainly should cause a stir in these pressure suits. Let’s go!”
We walked up to a dour-looking individual at a counter at the ramp’s end. Clearing my throat, I said rather inanely, “Hello!”—but what does one say to an extrasolarian?
I realized then that my voice seemed thunderous, that the only other sounds came from a distance: the city’s noise, the atmosphere ships’ engines on the horizon—
The Centaurian ignored us.
I looked at the atmosphere ships in the clear blue sky, at the Centaurians on the ramp who appeared to be conversing—and there was no sound from those planes, no sound from the people!
“It’s impossible,” Harry said. “The atmosphere’s nearly Earth-normal. It should be—well, damn it, it is as sound-conductive; we’re talking, aren’t we?”
I looked up at the Centaurians again. They were looking excitedly westward. Some turned to companions. Mouths opened and closed to form words we could not hear. Wide eyes lowered, following something I could not see. Sick inside, I turned to Albrecht and read confirmation in his drawn, blanched face.
“Captain,” he said, “I suspected that we might find something like this when we first came out of hyperspace and the big sleep. The recorders showed we’d exceeded light-speed in normal space-time just after the transition. Einstein theorized that time would not pass as swiftly to those approaching light-speed. We could safely exceed that speed in hyperspace but should never have done so in normal space-time. Beyond light-speed time must conversely accelerate!
“These people haven’t seen us yet. They certainly just observed our landing. As we suspected, they probably do have speech and radio—but we can’t pick up either. We’re seconds ahead of them in time and we can’t pick up from the past sounds of nearby origin or nearby signals radiated at light-speed. They’ll see and hear us soon, but we’ll never receive an answer from them! Our questions will come to them in their future but we can never pick answers from their past!”
“Let’s go, Harry,” I said quickly.
“Where?” he asked. “Where can we ever go that will be an improvement over this?” He was resigned.
“Back into space,” I said. “Back to circle this system at a near-light-speed. The computers should be able to determine how long and how slow we’ll have to fly to cancel this out. If not, we are truly and forever lost!”
A STITCH IN TIME
Howth Castle and J.P. Caravan
When you start trying to figure out a way to go back in time and clean up on the horse races, it’s time to see a psychiatrist. Bosley did, and the psychiatrist solved his problem.
IT was a pleasant morning, a very pleasant morning, the rich kind of morning that promises a gold and silver day. Doctor Nicholls squeaked his hands together in delight and rubbed them fondly over his bald head. He whirled happily in his swivel chair and hummed what may have been a tune. The expensive desk glittered in the gay sunshine; the expensive clock struck ten.
“Time is money,” cried Doctor Nicholls to himself. “To work, to work.” He pushed a button.
The expensive receptionist came into the office. “There is one patient, doctor. A new one.”
The doctor’s heart jumped with delight, like a trout leaping high after a golden bug. “Fine,” he said. “Does my goatee need combing?”
“It’s perfect, doctor.”
“Good. Let’s have the nut in, then.”
“Doctor . . .” She stood in the doorway, hesitating.
“Well?”
“This one doesn’t look rich.”
“Not rich?”
“This one looks crazy.”
The gold went out of the sunshine: it wasn’t a pleasant morning any more. The doctor’s regular patients were all plump and wealthy and sometimes a bit neurotic. Whenever someone who was less than wealthy and more than neurotic came to the doctor for help, he would have the patient committed at once. Sometimes Doctor Nicholls lost a whole afternoon in the process.
He sighed. “All right, Martha. Send him in. You might call the State Hospital and have them reserve a bed.”
“What ward, doctor?”
“How should I know what ward before I’ve seen the patient? The violent ward, tell them the violent ward—they’re usually violent when I have them committed.” When he laughed you could see the gold glitter in his teeth. “Especially the sane ones. Show him in, Martha, show him in.”
In good humor again, he waited for his patient.
“Hello, Uncle Milton.”
Doctor Nicholls leaped to his feet. “Bosley,” he said angrily. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m crazy, Uncle Milton.”
“Get out of here.”
Bosley ran a hand through his dust-colored hair. “You better cure me,” he said. “Suppose I went and told some of your patients what the Latin on that diploma of yours really means.”
The doctor slumped back in his chair. It squeaked mournfully beneath him. “You wouldn’t,” he said.
“Know all men by these here presents that Milton Nicholls has fulfilled and accomplished the requirements of our faculty and has proven himself fully worthy of the honors and trusts and rights and benefits of a graduate of this school and is hereby awarded the certificate of Television Service Man, second class.”
“All right,” said the doctor. “All right.”
“Why second class, Uncle Milton?”
“I flunked.”
“Oh.”
“What is it you want, Bosley?”
“I told you, Uncle Milton. I want you to cure me.”
“Cure you of what?”
“I got a feeling . . .”
“Come to the point, Bosley. Don’t waste my time. Time is money.”
“Yeah.” Bosley waved a racing form at his uncle. “That’s just my problem: time and money. I got this idea a couple of years ago and now it’s driven me batty.”
The doctor waved glumly at the couch. “Lie down and tell me about it.”
“I better stay standing up. I fall asleep if I lie down.”
“Get plenty of fresh air and vegetables. Take a long trip. Goodbye.”
“I can’t take a trip. I got no money.”
“You have no money?”
“If you cure me I’ll pay you a million dollars.”
“Bosley, will you tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Listen, Uncle Milton. It’s like this. I figured if I knew how all the horse races came out for the last hundred years or so I could really clean up. Know what I mean?”
The doctor twisted his goatee, “No,” he said.
“I figured I could win every time if I just learned the winner of each race and then went back and made a bet on it.”
“Went back where, in heaven’s name?”
“Went back in time, Uncle Milton. I figured this all out, understand? I figured it out and then I spent the next couple of years learning them.”
“Learning what?”
“I told you. I learned the results of every race in the world for the last hundred years.”
The doctor looked at his nephew. “My advice to you, Bosley, is to go back in time and make your bets. Goodbye.” He reached out to shake hands.
“I can’t.”
“You can’t? You can’t do a simple thing like that? Shame, Bosley. Why don’t you go away somewhere and try some more?”
“That’s what’s driving me crazy, Uncle Milton. You got to fix me up so I can go back in time.” So for six months Doctor Nicholls wasted his golden afternoons trying to cure his nephew.
“Bosley,” he said after the end of the sixth month. “Are you sure you know the results of every race for the last hundred years?”
“Sure.”
The doctor took down a book. “Tell me who won the stakes at Dublin on June 16th of 1904.”
“Throwaway.” Bosley smiled proudly. “Do you want the time?”
“Never mind. I had hoped you might be forgetting this absurd information.”
“It’s not absurd, Uncle Milton. Soon as I go back I can clean up.”
“Listen, Bosley.” The doctor placed his hands together and leaned over his desk. He had worked hard to reach this minute. It was his last plan. “Listen. If you really went back to 1904, would you remember the future?”
“Don’t be silly, doc. How can you remember what hasn’t happened yet?”
“Then how would you remember the winner?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Milton. I just would. I’d just walk up to the bookie and the name of the horse would come to me.”
