Time Travel Omnibus, page 474
Cooper kicked him in the ribs—an equally playful gesture.
Tabby snarled at him.
“Show your teeth at me, will you!” said Cooper. “Raised you from a kitten and that’s the gratitude you show. Do it just once more and I’ll belt you in the chops.”
Tabby lay down blissfully and began to wash his face.
“Some day,” warned Hudson, “that cat will miss a meal and that’s the day you’re it.”
“Gentle as a dove,” Cooper assured him. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Well, one thing about it, nothing dares to bother us with that monstrosity around.”
“Best watchdog there ever was. Got to have something to guard all this stuff we’ve got. When Wes gets back, we’ll be millionaires. All those furs and ginseng and the ivory.”
“If he gets back.”
“He’ll be back. Quit your worrying.”
“But it’s been five years,” Hudson protested.
“He’ll be back. Something happened, that’s all. He’s probably working on it right now. Could be that he messed up the time setting when he repaired the unit or it might have been knocked out of kilter when Buster hit the helicopter. That would take a while to fix. I don’t worry that he won’t come back. What I can’t figure out is why did he go and leave us?”
“I’ve told you,” Hudson said. “He was afraid it wouldn’t work.”
“There wasn’t any need to be scared of that. We never would have laughed at him.”
“No. Of course we wouldn’t.”
“Then what was he scared of?” Cooper asked.
“If the unit failed and we knew it failed, Wes was afraid we’d try to make him see how hopeless and insane it was. And he knew we’d probably convince him and then all his hope would be gone. And he wanted to hang onto that, Johnny. He wanted to hang onto his hope even when there wasn’t any left.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” said Cooper. “What counts is that he’ll come back. I can feel it in my bones.”
And here’s another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.
God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!
“Wes is working on it right now,” said Cooper confidently.
Chapter XIV
HE was. Not he alone, but a thousand others, working desperately, knowing that the time was short, working not alone for two men trapped in time, but for the peace they all had dreamed about—that the whole world had yearned for through the ages.
For to be of any use, it was imperative that they could zero in the time machines they meant to build as an artilleryman would zero in a battery of guns, that each time machine would take its occupants to the same instant of the past, that their operation would extend over the same period of time, to the exact second.
It was a problem of control and calibration—starting with a prototype that was calibrated, as its finest adjustment, for jumps of 50,000 years.
Project Mastodon was finally under way.
THE ADJUSTERS
Jonathan Burke
The two of them were strolling under the softly glowing artificial trees of the Embankment Gardens. Above them the traffic hummed and flickered in a turmoil as the evening rush into the city intensified. The great sports stadium in the Strand sent out its summons in jabbing fingers of light that beckoned helicars and buses in from the heavens.
Alun said: “Want to go anywhere special?”
She shook her head. They sat down in the localised warmth of an arbour, away from the frosty clarity of the cold evening. He put his arm around her shoulders.
“It’s much nicer,” she said dreamily, “just sitting here.”
Then she was gone. He was left sitting there alone, with his arm curved out at an awkward absurd angle.
He swore. This was the second time it had happened this month. He pushed himself up from the seat and stamped off towards the Ministry of Adjustment. The building was four minutes’ walk from here, but he was so angry that he made it in three minutes flat.
At the moment of the girl’s disappearance, a jet car which had just begun to fall to the ground out of control over Lisbon was snatched back on to its course as though by a giant hand. There had been a fault in the atomic power pack, but now there was no fault.
An elderly widow in Bayswater whose son had been executed for murder two years earlier went downstairs to answer an aggressive ring at the door, and found him standing on the step. He was the same as ever—his lower jaw thrust out, his thick lips greedy and sensual, his eyes as hard and selfish as ever. She let him in—she could hardly have kept him out—but within ten minutes she was ringing the Ministry with a bitter complaint. It took her quite a time to get through. People were always ringing up with complaints, and the visiscreens were clogged with protesting faces and voluble mouths.
The young couple spending their honeymoon at the Trafalgar Palace Hotel had gone to bed early that night. The husband finished cleaning his teeth and came in to smile at his wife as she lay back with her eyes half-closed. She turned her head lazily and luxuriously on the pillow.
“Marianne, darling,” he said gently.
And then he disappeared.
Her eyes opened wide. She sat up abruptly and reached for the communicon.
“Get me the Ministry of Adjustment—Complaints Department,” she snapped furiously. Then, glancing down at her filmy night-dress, she added: “Screen blank. Sound only.”
A little girl who had, one moment before, been killed by a maniac as she stepped from a taxi on her way home from a party, suddenly went on crossing the courtyard into her home. There was no maniac. He had, now, never existed.
It was a busy evening for the late shift at the Ministry. The small staff had to cope with a surge of incoming calls, and to make things worse there had been several personal visits. It was easier to deal soothingly with a face in a visiscreen than with an indignant man pounding the desk in the Complaint’s Office.
Alun leaned threateningly towards the weary middle-aged man behind the desk. He said:
“This is the second time in a month. Last time we had tickets for the Undersea Tournament, and by the time the trouble was unravelled it was too late for us to get there. Pm telling you, you’d better get busy right now.”
“I’ll investigate your case, sir.”
“Well, get a move on. There’s twenty minutes before the Palladium show starts, and I want her back so that we can get there.”
It was not true: he had just wanted to sit beneath the trees with her; but the only way to get any action out of these people was to set a time limit and make a fuss about it.
He stood away from the desk and fidgeted while the clerk thumbed buttons on the correlater and registered a complaint with Central Records at Somerset House.
One of the screens behind another desk sparked into life. The young woman at the desk sighed and accepted the call. An elderly woman’s face shaped itself on the screen. She began talking before the focus was clear.
“What do you mean by sending my son back? He was a no-good all his life, and now he’s come back to torment me. He’ll kill me, I tell you. You’ve got to do something about it. He was a criminal once, and he’s still a criminal.”
“Your name and address, madam?”
The young woman jotted down the details, and her fingers ran over buttons. Disembodied voices crackled from the desk receivers. She nodded over the results, then smiled brightly up at the indignant face in the screen.
“I’m sorry you’ve had this trouble—”
“So I should think.”
“It was a side-effect which had not been taken into account. We had to go back to a period six months before the murder which your son committed: there was a Martian transport whose passenger list had to be altered so that certain people did not travel on it. Those who did travel on it were killed in a blow-up out in space.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing to me. All I want is—”
“The readjustment,” went on the young woman smoothly, “involved the man your son was to murder. He travelled on that ship and was killed, and so of course your son could not murder him. But there is a strong case for that adjustment to be annulled.”
“So I should hope.”
“The victim was himself a criminal, so that the Ministry does not theoretically disapprove of the murder, though this does not of course affect the legal penalty to your son. As our potentiality factor shows that your son will very probably attempt to kill you for your savings, and will in any case resume a life of crime if he is allowed to continue in this time sector, we agree to go back and make a further readjustment. The other man will be restored to his old ship, the murder will take place, and your son will be executed. If you will wait for fifteen minutes while our operator goes back, your son will disappear.”
“Fifteen minutes? There’s no telling what—”
“It can’t be done in less than that. You have to allow for the equivalent time factor, you know. But I can promise you that the matter will be adjusted.”
Grumbling, the woman in the screen faded.
Alun’s impatience boiled over. He came back to the clerk at the desk and growled:
“Well, what about some results? If it takes fifteen minutes to straighten things out, we’ll—er—we’ll miss the show.”
The harassed clerk looked up at him warily. “There seems to be some snag. Records are making some checks.”
“Well, tell them to get a move on. All this messing about with Time has meant nothing but trouble since it started.”
The clerk looked offended. He evidently resented this slight on the work of the Ministry.
“It’s done more to stabilise our civilisation and prevent wars than anything else the human race has ever developed,” he said proudly. “We can go back and rub out mistakes—make sure that things which ought not to have happened don’t happen—straighten out the kinks—”
“All right, all right,” snapped Alun. “Get this kink straightened out and let me get away from here.”
Another screen glowed, but no picture formed on it. A call that had been waiting for some few minutes came through on the sound channel alone. Alun glared at it as angrily as any of the clerks were doing: he didn’t want other folk’s problems to be dealt with until his own was cleared up.
“I’m speaking from the Trafalgar Palace Hotel,” said a voice that might, under normal circumstances, be an attractive one; at the moment it was extremely bitter. “My husband has been removed—presumably by one of your foolish past-adjustment schemes. I want something done about it . . . and done quickly.”
“Your name, madam?”
“Mrs. Marianne Westing.”
The call went through as usual, and somewhere the relays began to click, the facts were collated, and the Duty Inspector made his decision. Still no word came for Alun.
Marianne listened in horrified disbelief to the sympathetic, carefully reasonable voice that came out of the receiver. It made everything sound so right and just and inevitable—and so appalling.
“We are sorry to have kept you waiting, but I am afraid your case is a somewhat complicated one. The Ministry regrets that nothing can be done to restore your husband.”
“Nothing? But you must. You can’t just—”
“Yours is one of those fortunately rare cases where definite personal hardship is unavoidable. We do all we can to frame our plans so that there is a minimum of personal inconvenience. But on this occasion the complexity of the problem has made a certain—ah—severity essential. Two children who must grow up safely and marry were in danger of death. One was the son of the President of the World Federation, the other the daughter of the Governor General of Mars, at present on holiday there. The power pack of the jet car in which the boy was travelling had been tampered with by unscrupulous opponents of the present regime. A man with a distorted sense of the value of old-fashioned terrestrial imperialism was set upon the girl. You will agree that something had to be done to wipe out those errors.”
“Certainly. But surely it could have been done without—”
“We were taken aback when we studied the various factors. The decision was made in less than five seconds, but our electronic computers did work which would have taken a human mathematician almost three years. It was revealed that the only possible resolution of the equation was by ensuring that three people thirty years ago did not meet. I am afraid that to make an adjustment at such a distance involves a large number of side issues. At least four families have, as a direct or indirect result, ceased to exist. Your husband belonged to one of those. It was not one of the major factors, but in a way that I cannot explain to you it proved to be essential nevertheless. If your husband were to be born, one of the terrorists would be born. There is no family connection, of course: it is entirely a matter of chance meetings, the friendship between certain people at the time, and a particular social circle. I am sorry, but your husband had to be eliminated; and our computers lay it down quite firmly that he must not be restored. The equation was a tricky one, and to replace your husband would be to throw out the entire reckoning and endanger the peace of the Solar System.”
“I won’t stand for this,” cried Marianne through her tears. “I’ll visit my M.P. tomorrow. You can’t get away with this bungling.”
“It is very regrettable, madam.” The voice was still sympathetic but still firm. “If you wish to file a claim for suitable compensation, it will be dealt with promptly. But the decision is inalterable.” Marianne snapped the switch off and lay back, sobbing.
She could not sleep. The evening was still young, and without her husband it would be endless. This evening, this night, the next day and all the days and weeks to follow . . . how was she to face them?
She went to the window and blinked out, the colours of the sky signs blurring fantastically through her tears. She would have to go out. She could not stay here. She would throw herself under a descending helicar, or dive into the cold river. Life could not go on.
How long she stood there, she could not tell. At last she turned back and looked wretchedly around the room.
It was useless to sink into a trance like this. If she did not pull herself together and get out, she would scream.
She had just finished dressing when the communicon chimed its resonant notes.
“What is it?” She tried to keep the misery out of her voice.
“A gentleman downstairs to see you, Mrs. Westing. A Mr. Alun Crawley.”
“I don’t know any Mr. Crawley. I’m afraid he must have made—”
“He says he has come here direct from the Ministry of Adjustment.” Marianne did not wait to reply. She was out into the corridor in a flash, thumbing the lift button, clenching her fists as the lift swooped down. In the foyer she half ran towards the young man who was waiting by the desk.
He said: “Mrs. Westing?”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?” she gasped. “You’ve found some way of fixing it up after all?”
He shook his head slowly. She saw then that the sombre expression in his eyes was not the professional sympathy of a Ministry clerk. Here was someone who had suffered—someone, she sensed, who had been through an experience similar to her own.
Her shoulders sagged. She felt dizzy. Then his hand was under her arm, guiding her towards a seat in one of the alcoves.
“I caught your name and address when I was in the Complaints Office myself,” he explained gently but urgently. “I don’t work there. I was there to get something straightened out—and they told me pretty well the same sort of story as they told you.”
Marianne sat up erect, staring straight ahead and winning control of her voice. At last she was able to say:
“But why did you come to see me?”
“I thought that we ought to do something.” He was, she realised, as hopelessly dazed and upset as she was. “I felt I couldn’t go home, couldn’t just . . . just walk out of that place and give up. I wanted to do something. I thought that as we were both involved La this business we ought to talk it over. We’ve got to take action.”
She nodded vaguely. “What sort of action?”
There was a long silence.
Then Alun said: “You don’t know anyone in the Ministry? Or—well, anyone influential?”
“No.”
“If we could bribe someone—”
“You can’t bribe them,” she said. “I had a friend who tried to do it. It was over something trivial—they’d done an adjustment a week back, so that she found herself living in a different town and all her collection of twentieth century glass had ceased to exist—but they were very severe when she was caught. It’s a serious offence to try bribing any of the staff to make private readjustments for you.”
He stared glumly at his feet. “If I could get a job there, I might find out how they travel back in time—might get on one of the duty squads myself—and then go back and fix things up . . .” There was no conviction in his tone.
Hope drained out of both of them. They looked blankly into the future.
“It’s terrible,” said Marianne. “Terrible. This tampering with the natural order won’t do any good in the long run.”
“We won’t be beaten by some damned incompetent Ministry,” Alun growled. “We’ll work out something. Look, let me meet you tomorrow and see if we can think up something. We may see things more clearly tomorrow. We’ll decide what approach to make. I’ll get an official protest drafted, and maybe we can make some influential contact. We’ll find some way of doing something.”
What they actually did, after a comparatively short time, was to marry.
This was not an official suggestion. It was not, so far as they could tell, an idea which had been cunningly implanted in their minds by harassed Ministry officials. It was just that a day came when they admitted, sheepishly at first and then with a growing, exuberant warmth, that they were fed up with pursuing enquiries and making angry representations to various authorities; they found that they were not at all anxious to restore the past. Their original impetus had carried them quite a distance, but now its force had weakened. There came that time when they frankly said that they were managing very well without their previous partners, that the whole business might as well be written off, and that in any case they did seem to get on so well together that, after all, when you came to look at it sensibly—and emotionally and passionately as well as sensibly, of course . . .
