Time Travel Omnibus, page 487
“Epsilon Three Thousand must undress.”
Hubingrath struggled out of his clothes and left them like an offering in front of the door. Clutching his symphony he reached for the pushbutton opener.
“Epsilon Three Thousand must put down the material that Epsilon Three Thousand is carrying.”
Hubingrath said an antique word. At the same time he heard a shout, and, turning, saw two running figures—Danl and Brud. He pushed the button and the door opened and he went in, the symphony gathered to his hairy chest.
There was nothing inside but another button. He pressed it, cutting off the machine as it was protesting: “But Epsilon Three Thousand . . .”
“Ah,” said the T-T technician. “Doctor Hubingrath. We ask no questions. I’ll buzz for your clothes . . .” He broke off and stared at the sheaf of music paper. “Artifacts! If those aren’t made of radio-plastic there’ll be a blow-out! There’s been one by this time!” He began to hit buttons.
It was a deflated Hubingrath who left the Time Port half an hour later, the droning of a dozen lectures still troubling his ears. He had been made to feel like a murderer. The symphony, which he still carried, was a loathsome thing; crossing the park, he was minded to throw it into the Serpentine. But he had not, as yet, looked at it; he was still unable to deny himself the pleasure of sight-reading a Hubingrath symphony he did not intend to write.
The corner of Gore Mews was near the Albert Hall. As he approached it was with the impression that the hall had disgorged an especially large audience into the street. But the presence of several fire engines suggested other reasons; soon he realised that the centre of attention was Gore Mews itself.
He found a familiar policeman who forced a lane for him.
“There it is,” the policeman said. “There it isn’t, I should say.”
His flat had gone—it was as emphatically absent as a knocked-out tooth. The row of mews dwellings was interrupted by a blankness and a deep hole. Already the police had caused a rope barrier to be stretched along the hole’s rim, over which people peered into the thirty-foot pit. On either side drooped ganglia of electrical wiring from the adjacent flats; a few water pipes still gushed like severed arteries. Of the fabric of his flat, of the bookish squalor and the musical muddle, nothing remained.
“Was anyone inside?”
“No evidence yet,” the policeman said.
Hubingrath began to elbow his way into Kensington Gore, suddenly obsessed with the certainty that Miss Balsam had been reduced to electromagnetic energy. Heavens, he had left her his key!
He met her, face to face, at the comer. She said, irrelevantly: “Someone so kindly gave me a cup of tea.”
It was later, amid the rationed comforts of a cheap hotel, that he remembered the symphony. He tossed it into her lap.
“See what you make of that.”
“What is it?”
“My Tenth. I haven’t read it, and I don’t much want to now. You read it.”
“What on earth do you mean?” she said. She took the sheaf of paper and there was a pause as she flipped pages. She said, wonderingly: “This was in the flat—had been for years. The one you wrote at eighteen—remember?—and never published.” Hubingrath sat down heavily.
“I remember.”
“. . . the one I always thought you should publish. A minor symphony, but exquisite. A discovery of youth and love.”
TIME TRAVEL BUSINESS
H. Philip Stratford
There was more than romantic journeys to this—Time Travel Business—
S IMON OLD KNEW THIS WAS going to be a tough one. This one might louse the world up for keeps. He twitched his thin lips good-naturedly at the Chief as soon as he came into the office.
“Take a look at these, Simon.”
The Chief tossed a splay of shots from photo-planning across his desk. Old sat down. The chair was overstuffed and comfortable, like the Chief. It also had steel springs hidden below the surface, like the Chief.
Old picked up the photographs and looked for referents. Across the bottom of each colour print familiar words had been stamped.
PROPERTY OF TIME
RECOVERY INC.
COPYRIGHT.
NOT FOR PUBLICATION.
“Bill Slazenger’s work,” Old said. “He gets the detail.
But one of these fine days he’ll drop that damn great box of his overside—and we’ll all go phut.”
“Bill’s’ safe enough, Simon.”
“Yeah. If you say so.” Old was examining the shots with a minute care his casual manner concealed. He tapped the picture with a thumb nail.
“Any prizes for guessing where and when, Chief?”
“You kidding? I asked you here because I want you to tackle it. It’s a sticky one.”
“It looks it.”
The photographs were a sequence. A great walled city full of domes on the promontory, with the ground outside covered with men and horses and tents. Everywhere along the landward wall forming the base of a triangle the flicker of weapons and the gushing puffs of smoke. The frantic rushing to and fro of the men within the walls. Men clambering over. Houses and churches catching fire and spreading black smoke to mingle and subdue the last remnants of white. Men in the streets. A great building on fire. Men running. Chaos. A hideous record of man’s attitude to man.
“Who’s paying?” Old asked, throwing the photographs onto the desk. He’d been called in from an interesting hunt on Mars—she was the daughter of a Member of Parliament and had considered Old to be terribly romantic by reason of his profession—and he was under the necessity of reimbursing his personal exchequer.
“Martin Wallenstein the Tenth,” the Chief said, with a flash of humour. “He badly wants to complete his library and is willing to pay our prices. Since he gets from Neptune in a month what we’re asking, he’s getting off lightly.”
“That’s big money.” Old felt genuine interest. “Why hasn’t he had anyone go back before?”
“That’s the devil of it, Simon.” The Chief pursed his lips—a bad sign. “Last year he retained Time Dredgers Inc. to go back to Constantinople—Istanbul—to get out the books he wants. They failed. As far as we know they didn’t upset the time-continuum; but they’ve been very close mouthed about it all. I had Bill go back and shoot a few sequences. No sign of Time Dredgers.”
“Anything of me back there?” Old felt no real wonder at asking if a photograph might already exist of himself in this world, taken some four thousand years previously, at a place that he had not yet visited. That’s the sort of screwy logic you got to accept in this game.
The Chief said: “Nothing of any of us. As of this date, the books we want are still in the Constantinople Public Library and will be burnt and destroyed by the Turks in 1453. The Ministry of Chronoscansion have only Time Dredger’s claim registered, and as they failed, that automatically lapses. Martin Wallenstein the Tenth swings enough power in the House to have our claim put through without bother, and we’re the only company in the field.”
“Now if we could cruise into the future from now and check up for ourselves,” Old grumbled.
“The back-room boys aren’t even working on that any more. They say we can only travel into the past and return along the exact same line we went in. Any alteration of the events of the past and—well, you know the answer to that one, Simon. Your neck depends on it.”
“Yeah. I might return to find you’re an overgrown ant sitting cleaning your feelers at this desk. I know.”
“You sure love me, don’t you, Simon?” The Chief grinned and suddenly Old smiled, too, in answer to that. They got along.
“In point of fact you can dicker with the minor things of the past,” Simon said reflectively. “Provided you don’t knock against a node—”
“Hold hard, Simon! You know the rules of this game. The government would revoke our licence and the other companies would swarm in and take over all our contracts. This is cut-throat competition, you know.”
“Yeah. We’re in competition with the past, the present and the future. Some career I chose.”
“Can you do it?”
“Wallenstein wants the books from the Public Library you said? Any idea how many books are involved, or which ones in particular he wants?” The Chief said, heavily: “There were 600,000 books in the library.”
“Whew! And that was before printing was invented, I know. They must have worn down some ball-points—no, of course, before them, too.”
“Contemporary accounts say that 120,000 books were destroyed, burnt or sold.”
“Well, that makes it easy, doesn’t it?”
The Chief ignored the sarcasm. “You can’t touch the ones that were sold—unless you manage to buy them, which might be a risky thing if they showed up later on in recorded history. The ones that were burnt and destroyed you could grab and substitute dummies. In this game the genuine article has attained a value almost fantastic in importance—remember the schemozzle over the tapes of the first ship to hit Mars?”
Old laughed. “That lawsuit became quite famous—at least, it established our profession as a legal and respectable pursuit. But the guy who forged the log-tapes of that spaceship must have been a genius—and they were much more dramatic than the genuine ones.”
“True. But they weren’t worth the film they were recorded on, whilst the originals, dull though they might seem to us, fetched a cool half-million.”
“All right, Chief. Give me a couple of weeks to get organised and—”
“Uh, huh, Simon.” The Chief was pursing his lips again. “You start in two days.”
“Hell, that’s short; but if you say so . . .”
“We might be tripping gaily over thousands of years, Simon; but we need the money from Wallenstein inside a fortnight. That’s the way it is.”
“If you’ll authorise a crew and a ship. Oh, and I’d like to talk to Bill. I gather he won’t be coming? No? I thought not. Who are you giving me?”
“Bill’s needed for a Martian canal job. I can let you have Peter Manston as your second. Normal crew. You’ll take ship three. And, Simon.” The Chief paused and his hands played for a brief moment with the recorder on his desk. Then he said, heavily: “You’ll be taking Conrad as trainee scanner.”
Old choked back the words that came to his lips. He nodded briefly, then stood up, his lean face expressionless.
“Okay, Chief. I’ll prepare everything and let you know when we take off.”
“Right. And, Simon, this is a tricky one—so watch your step.”
“I’ll remember. I’d hate to find you an ant, Chief.”
Old went out, grinning in spite of himself, and tried to believe that Conrad wasn’t such a headache as he knew he would be.
In the Time Travel business you learned to play hard and for keeps, otherwise, you just wouldn’t be in business any more. And a time scanner who made a muff of a job-providing the mistake hadn’t altered the time continuum so that his environment changed out of recognition—would stand as much chance of being taken on by another company as a space-pinnace in the field of Jupiter. As far as Simon Old knew his lifeline in this civilisation was the original time track. But any time someone drastically altered some important event of the past which influenced the future—a nodal point—a whole new time track would commence from that point and expand alongside the original. So far the boffins hadn’t been able to crosstrack through the resulting parallel dimensions—when they did, some very interesting world-states might result.
A world-state that was the direct outcome of Simon Old kissing a girl back in the Twentieth Century, for example. Time scanners had quite a responsibility. And the Ministry of Chronoscansion never let them forget it. Old’s lean face was still carrying a trace of the smile with which he had left the Chief’s office as he told himself not to worry. The Ministry boys were breathing so hard down his neck he wouldn’t dare pick a single flower from the field where the first ship had landed on Venus. That act might cause all the difference between success and failure—which would mean a different Earth today and, very likely, no Simon Old.
Although, he reminded himself soberly as he turned into the passageway leading to the crews’ quarters, he could tamper with the past, in a very limited fashion, providing he knew exactly what he was doing and the results of his actions.
“Hey, Simon! Thought you were on Mars?”
“Hi, Pete. So did I. The Chief thought otherwise. You’ve volunteered with me for the Constantinople job.”
“I have? Oh, yes. Sure. When?”
“Fourteen fifty three. When the Turks took over. There’s around 120,000 books in the Public Library and Wallenstein wants ’em.”
“Him? Well, the money’s all right. Come on in.”
Old went through into the crews’ quarters. The room was long and spacious, with bed and locker space for two hundred men. The crews of the timeships had to be treated as units of a single mind, like a Navy, their discipline and morale maintained at a peak of efficiency. Any sloppiness in their work meant far more trouble than machine-part rejects or even the wreck of a spaceship.
If these boys slipped up the whole world might go fizz. And nobody would know.
Old spent the rest of the day poring over maps and photographs, unable to contact Bill Slazenger, who was off on a job somewhere. By the time evening dropped over the city and chalked black smears down the soaring concrete and glass of Time Recovery’s immense building he felt that he had the operation’s preliminary layout firmly fixed in his mind.
Ship Three would do. She was not new, but she was bulky, a necessary virtue if she was to carry back through time even a part of the 120,000 volumes desired by Wallenstein. So far Old had given no thought to the unpalatable pill of Conrad. Now he straightened up and took one one of Manston’s selfigs and drew it into life.
“We’ve been saddled with young Conrad,” he said. “The Chief wants him to get some experience. He’s put in for Scanner rank.”
Peter Manston made a wry grimace. “The quicker the back-room boys crack through the dimensions the better I’ll like it. I’d like to know of a safe bolt-hole when Conrad begins Scanning.”
Old laughed. “It won’t be as bad as that. He’s very young, and, even though he is the son of the moneyed partner, he’ll do what I tell him on operations.” Manston’s head nodded and he threw Old a quick glance which the latter didn’t miss. “I’m beginning to feel sorry for the brat.”
A footstep scuffed the plastic floor covering behind them.
“And who are you feeling sorry for, Mister Manston?” They both swung round. Old took his selfig from his mouth and emitted a streamer of smoke. Manston smiled quietly and said, pleasantly: “Hullo, Conrad. Didn’t hear you come in.”
“I see.” Conrad’s young face had the thin nose and tight mouth of a son born to authority. He was used to having his own way. Old felt sorry for the kid. By the time he found out about life he might have missed a lot of it; which, to Old’s way of thinking, would be a great pity for anybody.
“You’re coming with us on this trip, Conrad,” Old said. “You’re training for Scanner, and this will give you a quicker insight into procedures than any classroom theory.”
“I am aware of that, Mister Old. What are your orders?”
“Well, firstly,” Old said, slightly exacerbated by the brat’s freshness, “I’d be obliged if you’d check with Bill Slazenger and ask him to set up the stereos he made.”
“I’ll do that, Mister Old.” Conrad went out, leaving a gap of silence that was louder than a rocket take-off.
“Money!” Manston said contemptuously.
“Okay, Pete. He’ll learn. Now, the plan is for us to run a scan over the city through the last days of the siege. We’ll have to be careful; those boys were so full of superstition we might found a new religion and the Ministry wouldn’t like that. If they were still there. Second, we dress up as Turks and make sure we are in there in the van during the actual burning and looting of the library. I estimate, depending on what fresh information the scan turns up, that we’ll have some time undisturbed in the library itself before the besiegers break in. We’ll know which books were destroyed and select those and shoot them back here and substitute dummies. Then we pull out. Wallenstein pays up and Time Recovery pays a bonus. Check?”
“Check. As far as it goes. The scan will decide for us on final details, I imagine.”
“Right. Oh, here’s Bill.”
Bill Slazenger popped his head in the door, shouted and disappeared. Old grinned.
“Come on, Pete. Bill’s in a hurry to get to Mars.”
They went out and down to the studio. Slazenger had his stereos set up and the rest of the crew assembled. They sat down in the front row and the lights dimmed. Before them the crystal globe of the stage whirled into pearly translucence, appeared to vanish behind swathes of smoke and then, as the infra-reds cut in, displayed the scene of their future operations. Or their past operations, depending on which way you liked to look at it.
“I’ll spare you the sound,” Bill Slazenger said, from around his enormous and filthy pipe. “It’s not very pleasant.”
Old let himself relax, and as his body went limp in the softness of the chair brought his mind to a needle-sharp instrument of penetration. He wanted to soak up what had happened those thousands of years ago, know down to the last detail just what had happened in and around the library, so that when he and his crew went back there through time they would not disturb one hair of one corpse that wasn’t allowed for in recorded history. He watched the stereo globe, letting the scenes sink in, visualising himself there, seeking points of vantage and hiding, and all the time vaguely aware that if he slipped up—He thrust that away and concentrated on the siege and sack of Constantinople.
“Who’s the guy with the nutcracker nose and the moustaches?” asked Manston.
“Sultan Mahomet II. Quite a big-time guy. He was the first man in history to use cannon efficiently, in a siege train, battering a city walls to rubble. Look—” Old pointed and in the stereo a yawning cannon, almost as wide across as long, belched flame and smoke. “That’s a bloke called Urban. Built and fires the thing himself. Takes two hours to load. Needs sixty oxen to pull it, two hundred men to watch it doesn’t fall over and two hundred more to make a road for it.”
