Time Travel Omnibus, page 468
The door was plainly marked.
But Neanderthal man knew nothing of doors.
THE END
EXILES OF TOMORROW
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Into the brightly youthful fabric of Carey Kennaird’s life was woven the dark and hateful tyranny of the world his birth had shattered.
“A VERY STRANGE tiling happened when I was born,” Carey Kennaird told me.
He paused and refilled his wine glass, looking at me with a curious appraisal in his young and very blue eyes. I returned his glance as casually as I could, wondering why he had suddenly decided to confide in me.
I had known Carey Kennaird for only a few weeks. We were the most casual of acquaintances; a word in the lobby of our hotel, a cup of coffee in a lunchroom he liked, mugs of beer in the quiet back room of the corner bar. He was intelligent and I had enjoyed his conversation. But until now it had consisted entirely of surface commonplaces. Today, he seemed to be opening up a trifle.
He had volunteered the information, unasked, that he was the son of a well-known research physicist, and that he was in Chicago to look for his father who had disappeared mysteriously a week or so before. Young Kennaird seemed oddly unworried about his father’s plight. But I was pleased at the way his reserve appeared to be dropping.
As I say, Carey Kennaird had a casual way with him, and he puzzled me. He did not, somehow, seem emotionally in sympathy with the hectic tempo of the rushed age in which he had grown up.
“Well,” I told him noncommitally, “childhood memories often make quite normal events seem strange. What was it?”
The appraisal in his eyes was franker now. “Mr. Grayne, do you ever read science-fiction?”
“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “At least, only very occasionally.”
He looked a little crestfallen. “Oh—well, do you know anything about the familiar science-fiction concept of traveling in time?”
“A little.” I finished my drink, wishing the waiter would bring us another bottle of wine. “It’s supposed to involve some quite staggering paradoxes, I believe. I’m thinking of the man who goes back in time and kills his own grandfather?”
He looked disgusted. “That’s at best a trite layman’s idea!”
“Well, I’m a layman,” I said genially. The arrogance of young people always strikes me as being pathetic rather than insulting. I did not think young Kennaird could have been more than nineteen. Twenty, perhaps. “Now then, young fellow, don’t tell me you’ve actually invented a time machine!”
“Good Lord, no!” The denial was so laughingly spontaneous that I had to laugh with him. “No, just an idea that interests me. I don’t really believe there’s much paradox Involved in time-travel at all.”
He paused, his eyes still on my face. “See here, Mr. Grayne, I’d like to—well, do you mind listening to something rather fantastic? I’m not drunk, but I’ve got a good reason for wanting to confide in you. You see, I know a great deal about you, really.”
I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been prepared for just such a statement. I grinned a strained grin at the boy. “No, go ahead,” I told him. “I’m interested.” I leaned back in my chair, preparing to listen.
You see, I knew what he was going to say.
II
Ryn Kenner sat in his cell, his head buried in his hands.
“Oh, God—he muttered to himself, over and over.
There were so many unpredictable risks involved. Even though he had spent three years coaching Cara, teaching her to guard against every possible contingency, he still might fail. If only he could have eliminated the psychic block. But that, of course, was the most necessary risk of all.
Sometimes, in spite of his humanitarian training, Ryn Kenner thought the old, primitive safeguards had been better. Executing murderers, locking maniacs up in cells was certainly better than exiling men in this horrible new way. Ryn Kenner knew that he would have preferred to die. Two or three times he had even thought of slashing his wrists with a razor before the Exile. Once he had actually set a razor against his right wrist, but his early training had been too strong for him. Even the word suicide could set off a mental complex of quivering nerve reactions impossible to control.
The tragedy, Kenner thought despondently, resided in the paradox that civilization had become too enlightened. There had been a time when men had thought that traveling backward in time would upset the framework of events and change the future. But it had been a manifestly mistaken idea, for in this year, 2543 A.D., the whole past had already occurred, and the present moment contained within itself the entire past, including whatever rectifying attempts time-travelers had made in that past.
Kenner shivered as he realized that his own acts had all occurred in the past. He, Ryn Kenner, had already died—six centuries before.
Time-travel—the perfect, the most humane way of banishing criminals! He had heard all the arguments which sophistry could muster. The strong individualists were clearly misfits in the enlightened twenty-sixth century. For their own good, they should be exiled to eras psychologically congenial to them. A good many of them had been sent to California in the year 1849. They thus took a one-way trip to an era where murder was not a crime, but a social necessity, the respectable business of a gentleman. Religious fanatics were exiled to the First Dark Ages, where they could not disturb the tranquil materialism of the present century; too aggressive atheists, to the twenty-third century.
Kenner rose and began to pace his cell, which was a prison in fact, if not in appearance. Outside the wide window spread a spacious view of Nyor Harbor, and the room was luxuriously furnished. Fie knew, however, that if he stepped a foot past the lines which had been drawn around the door, he would be instantly overpowered by a powerful sleeping gas. He had tried it once, with almost disastrous results.
This hour of high decision was his last in the twenty-sixth century. In ‘fifty minutes, in his own personal, subjective time from now, he would be somewhere in the twentieth century, the era to which his rashness had condemned him when he had been apprehended by the psycho police while attempting to re-discover the fabulous atomic isotopes. And he wouldn’t remember enough to get back. He would be permitted to keep all his training—all his knowledge, and memory—but there would be a fatal reservation.
Never, for the rest of his life, would Kenner be able to remember that he had come from the past. For the three weeks during which he had been confined to the cell the radiant suggestor had been steadily beaming at his brain. No defense his mind could devise had sufficed to stay its slow inroads into his thought.
Already his brain was beginning to grow fuzzy and he knew that the time was short. He drew a long breath, hearing steps in the corridor, and the whistle which meant the hypnotic gas was being momentarily turned off.
He stopped pacing.
Abruptly the door opened, and a psycho-supervisor entered the cell. Framed in the radiance behind him—
“Cara!” Kenner almost sobbed, and ran forward to catch his wife in his arms, and hold her with hungry violence. She cried softly against him. “Rhy, Ryn, it won’t be long—”
The supervisor’s face was compassionate. “Kenner,” he said, “you may have twenty minutes alone with your wife. You will be unsupervised.” The door closed softly behind him.
Kenner led Cara to a seat. She tried to hold back her tears, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Ryn, darling, I thought you might have—”
“Hush, Cara,” he whispered. “They may be listening. Just remember everything I’ve told you. You mustn’t risk being sent to a different year. You already know what to do.”
“I’ll—find you,” she promised.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Kenner urged gently. “We haven’t long.
Grayne promised he’d look after you until—”
“I know. He’s been good to me while you were here.”
The twenty minutes didn’t seem long. The supervisor pretended not to notice while Cara dung to Kenner in a last agony of farewell. Ryn brushed the tears away from her eyes, softly.
“See you in nineteen forty-five, Cara,” he whispered, and let her go.
“It’s a date darling,” were her last words before she followed the supervisor out of the prison. Kenner, in the last few moments remaining to him, before he sank into sleep again, desperately tried to marshal what little knowledge he possessed about the twentieth century.
His brain felt dark now, and oppressed, as if someone had wrapped his mind in smothering folds of wool. Dimly he knew that when he woke, his prison would be yet unbuilt. And yet, all the rest of his life he would be in prison—the prison of a mind that would never let him speak the truth.
III
“—and of course, this hypothetical psychic block would also contain provision prohibiting marriage with anyone from the past,” Carey Kennaird finished. “It would naturally be inconvenient for children to be born of the time exiles. But if my hypothetical man from the future should actually find the wife he’d arranged to have exiled with him, there’d be no psychic block against marrying her.” He paused, staring at me steadily. “Now, what would happen to the kid?”
My own glass stood empty. I signalled to the waiter, but Kennaird shook his head. “Thanks, I’ve had enough.”
I paid for the wine. “Suppose we walk to the hotel together, Kennaird?” I said. “You’ve got a fascinating theory there, my boy. It would make a fine plot for a science-fiction novel. Are you a writer? Of course, what happened to the boy—” we passed together into the blinding sunlight of the Chicago Loop, “—would be the climax of your story.”
“It would,” Kennaird agreed.
We crossed the street beneath the thundering El trains, and stood in front of Marshall Fields while Carey lit a cigarette.
“Smoke?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No thanks. You said you had a reason for confiding in me, young man. What is it?”
He looked at me curiously. “I think you know, Mr. Grayne. You weren’t born in the Twentieth Century. I was, of course. But you’re like Dad and Cara. You’re a time exile, too, aren’t you?
“I know you can’t say anything, because of the psychic block. But you don’t have to deny it. That’s how Dad told me. He made me read science-fiction. Then he made me ask him leading questions—and just answered yes or no.” Young Kennaird paused. “I don’t have the psychic block. Dad was trying to help me discover the time-travel device. He came up to Chicago, and disappeared. But I’m on the right track now. I’m sure of it. I think Dad got back somehow.”
Even though I’d known what he was going to say, I swallowed hard.
“Something very strange did happen when you were born,” I said. “You put a peculiar strain on the whole framework of time. It was something that never should have happened, because of—” my voice faltered, “the psychic block against marrying anyone from the past.”
Carey Kennaird looked at me intently. “Hard to talk about the psychic block, isn’t it? Dad never could.”
I nodded without speaking. We climbed the hotel steps together. “Come up to my room,” I urged. “We’ll talk it over. You see, Carey—I’m going to call you that—Kenner used to be my friend.”
“I wonder,” Carey said, “If Dad got home to the twenty-sixth century.”
“He did.”
Carey stared. “Mr. Grayne! Is he all right?”
Regretfully, I shook my head. The elevator boy let us off on the fourth floor. I wondered if he, too, were an exile. I wondered how many people in Chicago were exiles, sullen behind the mask of a mental block which clamped a gag on their lips when they tried to speak the truth.
I wondered how many men, and how many women, were living such a lie, day in, and day out, lonely, miserable exiles from their own tomorrow, victims of a fate literally worse than death. Small wonder they would do anything to avoid such a fate.
My door closed behind us. While Carey stared, wide-eyed, at the device which loomed darkly in one corner of the room, I went to my desk, and removed the shining disk. I walked straight up to him. “This is “from your father,” I told him. “Look at it carefully.”
He accepted it eagerly, his eyes blazing with excitement, sensing at once that it had come from the twenty-sixth century.
He died instantly.
Hating my work, hating time-travel, hating the whole chain of events, which had made me an instrument of justice, I stepped into the device that would return me to the twenty-sixth century.
Carey Kennaird had told the truth. A very strange thing had happened at his birth. Like an extra electron bombarding an unstable isotope, he had broken the link that held the framework of time together. His birth had started a chain reaction that had ended, for me, a week before in 2556, when Kenner and Cara had reappeared in the twenty-sixth century and been murdered in a panic by the psycho-supervisors. I, already condemned to time exile, had won a free pardon for my work, a commutation of my sentence to a light reprimand and the loss of my position. It was ugly work and I hated it, for Kenner and Cara had been my friends. But I had no freedom of choice. Anything was better than exile into time.
Anything, anything.
Besides, it had been necessary.
It isn’t lawful for children to be born before their parents.
OF MISSING PERSONS
Jack Finney
Walk in as though it were an ordinary travel bureau, the stranger I’d met at a bar had told me. Ask a few ordinary questions—about a trip you’re planning, a vacation, anything like that. Then hint about The Folder a little, but whatever you do, don’t mention it directly; wait till he brings it up himself. And if he doesn’t, you might as well forget it. If you can. Because you’ll never see it; you’re not the type, that’s all. And if you ask about it, he’ll just look at you as though he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
I rehearsed it all in my mind, over and over, but what seems possible at night over a beer isn’t easy to believe on a raw, rainy day, and I felt like a fool, searching the store fronts for the street number I’d memorized. It was noon hour, West 42nd Street, New York, rainy and windy; and like half the men around me, I walked with a hand on my hatbrim, wearing an old trench coat, head bent into the slanting rain, and the world was real and drab, and this was hopeless.
Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking, who am I to see The Folder, even if there is one? Name? I said to myself, as though I were already being asked. It’s Charley Ewell, and I’m a young guy who works in a bank; a teller. I don’t like the job; I don’t make much money, and I never will. I’ve lived in New York for over three years and haven’t many friends. What the hell, there’s really nothing to say—I see more movies than I want to, read too many books, and I’m sick of meals alone in restaurants. I have ordinary abilities, looks and thoughts. Does that suit you; do I qualify?
Now I spotted it, the address in the two-hundred block, an old, pseudo-modernized office building, tired, outdated, refusing to admit it but unable to hide it. New York has a lot of them west of Fifth.
I pushed through the brass-framed glass doors into the tiny lobby, paved with freshly mopped, permanently dirty tile. The green-painted walls were lumpy from old plaster repairs; in a chrome frame hung a little wall directory—white celluloid easily-changed letters on a black felt background. There were some twenty-odd names, and I found “Acme Travel Bureau” second on the list, between “A-1 Mimeo” and “Ajax Magic Supplies.” I pressed the bell beside the old-style open-grille elevator door; it rang high up in the shaft. There was a long pause, then a thump, and the heavy chains began rattling slowly down toward me, and I almost turned and left—this was insane.
But upstairs the Acme office had divorced itself from the atmosphere of the building. I pushed open the pebble-glass door, walked in, and the big square room was bright and clean, fluorescent-lighted. Beside the wide double windows, behind a counter, stood a tall gray-haired, grave-looking man, a telephone at his ear. He glanced up, nodded to beckon me in, and I felt my heart pumping—he fitted the description exactly. “Yes, United Air Lines,” he was saying into the phone. “Flight’—he glanced at a paper on the glass-topped counter—“seven-o-three, and I suggest you check in forty minutes early.”
Standing before him now, I waited, leaning on the counter, glancing around; he was the man, all right, and yet this was just an ordinary travel agency: big bright posters on the walls, metal floor racks full of folders, printed schedules under the glass on the counter. This is just what it looks like and nothing else, I thought, and again I felt like a fool.
“Can I help you?” Behind the counter the tall gray-haired man was smiling at me, replacing the phone, and suddenly I was terribly nervous.
“Yes.” I stalled for time, unbuttoning my raincoat. Then I looked up at him again and said, “I’d like to—get away.” You fool, that’s too fast! I told myself. Don’t rush it! I watched in a kind of panic to see what effect my answer had had, but he didn’t flick an eyelash.
“Well, there are a lot of places to go,” he said politely. From under the counter he brought out a long, slim folder and laid it on the glass, turning it right side up for me. “Fly to Buenos Aires—Another World!” it said in a double row of pale green letters across the top.
I looked at it long enough to be polite. It showed a big silvery plane banking over a harbor at night, a moon shining on the water, mountains in the background. Then I just shook my head; I was afraid to talk, afraid I’d say the wrong thing.
“Something quieter, maybe?” He brought out another folder: thick old tree trunks, rising way up out of sight, sunbeams slanting down through them—“The Virgin Forests of Maine, via Boston and Maine Railroad.”
“Or”—he laid a third folder on the glass—“Bermuda is nice just now.” This one said, “Bermuda, Old World in the New.”
