Time Travel Omnibus, page 489
They stopped moving in time, for a fleeting instant slipped into the flow of the normal space-time continuum and then, gliding outside the foundations of the building, began the journey back. Manston handled the ship superbly. They came to rest, coming back through time, to hang outside the library, watching the deserted street. Old had that familiar prickling sensation that came to him as he contemplated the fact that inside that building he was standing superintending the loading of the ship.
“Wait!” he said shortly, and, clad in Turkish chain mail, slid to the ground and sped to the shelter of a grey wall. Worry gnawed at his mind. Ought he to have carried out a reconnaissance run first? He disposed of that idea. He knew that once Conrad got mixed up with the Turks, history would alter. It might not alter a very great deal; but the alteration might broaden out in time until the men aboard the ship, Manston, Old himself, might never have existed in the new time continuum. He might have hung the ship right outside the door so that Conrad would run into their arms; but the time interval was too short. The mass of barbarians coming in would engulf Conrad, make it impossible for him to be picked up. Old cursed everything and crouched in his tracks, waiting for the moment when Conrad would emerge.
He seemed to have been hearing that same swelling of noise all day. The guns and shrieks, the crash of falling masonry and the dervish wail of attacking Muslims tore at his nerves. The Janissaries would be piling over the walls, walking on the dead masses of bashi-bazouks. Giustiniani would be being carried away now. Constantine was ready to ride into the melee, shouting brave and noble words, to be cut down and with his death bringing the fall of the city. Old waited through it. Turks ran up the streets; brands set fire to houses; people were screaming in fear and running helter-skelter for cover. He realised with a sick feeling of loss that he had not scouted the events here; he wasn’t quite sure of what was to happen.
A mob of wild-eyed soldiers rushed into sight, heading for the library. From the east another mob came, a mob that shrieked and howled like hounds from hell. Old looked carefully at them, wondering why they should come from the opposite direction from the walls. Then he saw Conrad come out of the building and look quickly about him. There was no sign of the girl.
Old decided to stay where he was until the looters had entered the library. He must keep Conrad under observation, ensure that he didn’t do anything more to upset pre-ordained events—and Old knew that he would go a long way to make sure that events were pre-ordained in this case. His job depended on it. The rabble of Turks halted uncertainly and then, even in the instant that Old remembered this sequence on Bill Slazenger’s stereos, were ridden into by a squad of Christian soldiers. The Turks from the walls shouted and rushed to their comrades’ aid.
It was over very quickly. The knights hacked their way into the Turks who had come from inside the city, rode them down, and even Old was struck by the stupidity of the Mahomedans. They appeared totally incapable of handling their weapons. A few broke and fled. Then the second batch of Turks crashed into the knights and the Christians turned to fight more of these delaying tactics elsewhere. Old knew that Giustiniani had ordered the inside gates of the walls locked so that his men should fight to the death; but there were bands fighting all over the city now, a result of the break through in many places.
The fiendish yells of the Turks broke out afresh and they swarmed into the library. Old had a sardonic moment of humour at the thought that all their burning would consume paper and print made four thousand years in the future.
Conrad had hidden himself in the bushes near where the girl would come to hide after the Turks had left the building.
Old decided to wait until the coast was clear and then to go over and take the boy by the scruff of the neck and frogmarch him back to the ship. He was beginning to shake with anger now.
A Turk crawled through the dirt towards Old. He looked at the man, seeing the arm half-severed, the dragging legs, the anguished face, sweat-stained, gasping—
“Charlie Barnes!”
Old was horrified. He leaped out, caught Barnes’ body, drew him carefully under cover of the wall.
Barnes gasped and spat. He said: “What in hell are you doing here, Old? Time Dredgers have the licence on this job.” The anguished face contorted. “My arm,” Barnes said.
“Steady, boy.” No time now to worry about niceties. Old waved and made a signal to the empty air. The invisible ship would see them, realise that something was amiss. He had to make the ship come to him; he couldn’t move Barnes in the condition he was. And Conrad was safe for the moment.
Inside the ship Barnes, with a hypno-shot dulling his wounds, could talk. “What about the rest of the Dredger men?”
Barnes groaned. “All killed. We planned to get into the library, barricade ourselves there, and help ourselves to the books at our leisure. They’d have been destroyed according to history. Anyway, the Ministry will have something to say to you Recovery sharks homing in on the deal.”
Hardcastle said: ‘The Ministry has agreed this, Mister Barnes. Your attempt has been written off as a failure.” He looked meaningfully at Old. “As will Mister Old’s unless that foolish young man is saved.”
“I’ll see about him.” Old’s face was set and grim as he went outside again. Charlie Barnes’ expedition had run into trouble ever since they’d had a fuse blow over the dome of St Sophia—the glow on the dome that had been superstitiously referred to through history—and Barnes’ broken account told quite plainly why no sign of then had been seen in Bill Slazenger’s stereos.
Old went across to the bush where Conrad had been hiding.
The lad was gone.
Old cursed. This was getting serious. So far, as he guessed, the lad had made no impact on history. When he did, Old wouldn’t know about it. He might cease to exist, or he might become someone else, or he might do anything at all. Just anything.
Already flames were streaming out of the library and men came shouting out, scattering books, laughing insanely, burning, destroying. They were quickly tired of sheer destruction. They staggered off after more profitable booty.
Old decided he’d better stay by the bushes where the girl was hiding. She ran across from a burning house and, her face distraught and hair wild, hunkered down, hoping, as Old could, that she would be unobserved in this trampled space where the battle had ebbed. He could not, for a million pounds, have prevented himself from looking at the tall library door. A flash of white appeared at the door, fluttered, and disappeared. That was him. He was standing over there by the door, watching the approaching Turks, and he was standing here under the wall, watching both himself and the approaching Turks.
A queer conception. Old still found it queer after his experiences in the Time Scanning business.
Then he saw Conrad. The youngster was rushing round the side wall, heading for the bushes. Before Old could straighten up, Conrad seized the girl, shut her outcry with one hand, and began to run towards his commander. Old stood up and shouted.
The Turks spotted them. Laughing, they shouted obscenities and rushed on, leaving it to two of their number to deal with the girl. Conrad and Old were those two.
Old was shaking with anger and sweating with fear. Suppose the two Turks who had really killed this girl should now go on, and, because they hadn’t delayed for that small moment, do something that would cause an upheaval in the time line? He waited, as his heart beat out a dozen strokes, for the catastrophe to break upon his head.
Nothing happened.
Conrad came running on, panting, his face grinning from ear to ear.
“Mister Conrad, I’ll have your hide for this!” Old yelled. Smoke made them cough. Cannon and the crackling confusion of fire was all around the city. Constantinople was falling. An Empire was coming to an end. And Old gave Conrad an epic dressing down as they both ran for the ship. The girl was still over Conrad’s shoulder.
Old said: “You’ll have to take her back with you and I suppose you might even marry her—though I doubt it. One thing that’s certain, you can’t leave her here. She might have a child whose descendants killed Bonaparte. One of her great-great-grandchildren might put a wrench in the wrong place when the first ship goes off to the moon. Conrad, I could kill you!”
“I’ll look after her, Mister Old,” Conrad said. And Old could say nothing to the feeling in the boy’s voice. They climbed up into the ship and Old said: “Take her home, Pete. And quick.”
Through the centuries the ship moved, a marvel of science coasting through the ages, coming back at last to its own time, filled with the books of a lost age—and a young girl from that age, rudely snatched from death to the complex civilisation of an age so far beyond her comprehension that Old was filled with pity. Perhaps she might have been better off dead—then he remembered Conrad’s face, and altered that opinion.
The Chief was sitting in the chair behind his desk when Old went in and his lips were pursed up. Old grimaced.
“What d’you think Time Recovery is, Simon? A white slave outfit?”
“No, Chief,” Old said, uncomfortably.
“Well,” the Chief growled. “Tell me about it. Conrad tells me he wants to get married, that he wants you to give away the bride.”
“He wants what?” Old was astounded.
“I’ve agreed,” the Chief went on. “Only I do baulk at having a Constantinoplese—if that’s the right word—for a daughter-in-law. And you’re the only person who can give her away. After all, from what the brat tells me, you more or less brought her back.”
“The whipper-snapper—sorry, Chief. I suppose I did. Anyway, after this, tell your boy that I don’t expect any more running after women when we go back into time. He’s saddled himself with one—that should be enough.”
“I expect it will be.” The Chief smiled. “It was a good operation, Simon. Wallenstein is delighted with the books. He’s given us some more work to do.”
Old pricked up his ears.
“I was kinda hoping that I could carry on that leave on Mars—”
“Sorry, Simon. Got a job for you.”
Old leaned back in the chair. He was in the Time Travel business, and time waited for no man. Even if you could jump about in it like a power-mad jumping-bean.
“Tell me, Chief,” he said resignedly.
“It’s a simple one, this time. When the Martian Queen exploded on the way to Deimos, back in 2155, Harvey Langstrom Anglesy had just completed his greatest novel and the manuscript was lost—”
“Okay, Chief. I’ll check with photo-planning. I need a holiday in space, and jumping aboard a spaceship that’s due to explode is one way of spending it.” He smiled, feeling the old itch to get away into the vasty darkness of time.
“One thing about being in the Time Travel Business—time doesn’t hang on your hands.”
THE MESSAGE
Isaac Asimov
THEY DRANK BEER AND REMINISCED as men will who have met after long separation. They called to mind the days under fire. They remembered sergeants and girls, both with exaggeration. Deadly things became humorous in retrospect, and trifles disregarded for ten years were hauled out for airing.
Including, of course, the perennial mystery.
“How do you account for it?” asked the first. “Who started it?”
The second shrugged. “No one started it. Everyone was doing it, like a disease. You, too, I suppose.”
The first chuckled.
The third one said softly, “I never saw the fun in it. Maybe because I came across it first when I was under fire for the first time. North Africa.”
“Really?” said the second.
“The first night on the beaches of Oran. I was getting under cover, making for some native shack and I saw it in the light of a flare—”
George was deliriously happy. Two years of red tape and now he was finally back in the past. Now he could complete his paper on the social life of the foot soldier of World War II with some authentic details.
Out of the warless, insipid society of the thirtieth century, he found himself for one glorious moment in the tense, superlative drama of the warlike twentieth.
North Africa! Site of the first great sea-borne invasion of the war! How the temporal physicists had scanned the area for the perfect spot and moment. This shadow of an empty wooden building was it. No human would approach for a known number of minutes. No blast would seriously affect it in that time. By being there, George would not affect history. He would be that ideal of the temporal physicist, the “pure observer.”
It was even more terrific than he had imagined. There was the perpetual roar of artillery, the unseen tearing of planes overhead. There were the periodic lines of tracer bullets splitting the sky and the occasional ghastly glow of a flare twisting downward.
And he was here! He, George, was part of the war, part of an intense kind of life forever gone from the world of the thirtieth century, grown tame and gentle.
He imagined he could see the shadows of an advancing column of soldiers, hear the low cautious monosyllables slip from one to another. How he longed to be one of them in truth, not merely a momentary intruder, a “pure observer.”
He stopped his note taking and stared at his stylus, its micro-light hypnotizing him for a moment. A sudden idea had overwhelmed him and he looked at the wood against which his shoulder pressed. This moment must not pass unforgotten into history. Surely doing this would affect nothing. He would use the older English dialect and there would be no suspicion.
He did it quickly and then spied a soldier running desperately toward the structure, dodging a burst of bullets. George knew his time was up, and, even as he knew it, found himself back in the thirtieth century.
It didn’t matter. For those few minutes he had been part of World War II. A small part, but part. And others would know it. They might not know they knew it, but someone perhaps would repeat the message to himself.
Someone, perhaps that man running for shelter, would read it and know that along with all the heroes of the twentieth century was the “pure observer,” the man from the thirtieth century, George Kilroy. He was there!
A GUN FOR DINOSAUR
L. Sprague de Camp
In the bloodiest and most ferocious arena of all prehistoric Earth, hunting reptile heavyweights isn’t for human lightweights!
NO, MR. SELIGMAN, I won’t take you hunting late-Mesozoic dinosaur. Why not? How much d’you weigh? A hundred and thirty? Let’s see, that’s under ten stone, which is my lower limit.
I’ll take you to any period in the Cenozoic. I’ll get you a shot at an entelodont or a titanothere or a uintathere. The’ve all got fine heads.
I’ll even stretch a point and take you to the Pleistocene, where you can try for one of the mammoths or the mastodon.
I’ll take you back to the Triassic where you can shoot one of the smaller ancestral dinosaur.
But I will not—will jolly well not—take you to the Jurassic or Cretaceous. You’re just too small.
No offense, of course.
What’s your weight got to do with it?
Look here, old boy, what did you think you were going to shoot them with?
You hadn’t thought, eh?
WELL, sit there a minute . . .
Here you are, my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn’t it? But it’s rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 nitro express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs fourteen and a half pounds and has a muzzle energy of over seven thousand foot-pounds. Costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. Lot of money for a gun, what?
I have some spares I rent to the sahibs. Designed for knocking down elephant. Not just wounding them, knocking them base-over-apex. That’s why they don’t make guns like this in America, though I suppose they will if hunting parties keep going back in time through Prochaska’s machine.
I’ve been guiding hunting parties for twenty years. Guided ’em in Africa until the game gave out there except on the preserves. That just about ended the world’s real big-game hunting.
My point is, all that time I’ve never known a man your size who could handle the six-nought-nought. It knocks ’em over. Even when they stay on their feet, they get so scared of the bloody cannon after a few shots that they flinch. Can’t hit an elephant at spitting range. And they find the gun too heavy to drag around rough Mesozoic country. Wears ’em out.
It’s true, lots of people have killed elephant with lighter guns: the .500, .475, and .465 doubles, for instance, or even .375 magnum repeaters. The difference is that with a .375 you have to hit something vital, preferably the heart, and can’t depend on simple shock-power.
An elephant weighs—let’s see—four to six tons. You’re planning to shoot reptiles weighing two or three times as much as an elephant and with much greater tenacity of life. That’s why the syndicate decided to take no more people dinosaur-hunting unless they could handle the .600. We learned the hard way, as you Americans say. There were some unfortunate incidents . . .
I’ll tell you, Mr. Seligman. It’s after seventeen hundred. Time I closed the office. Why don’t we stop at the bar on our way out while I tell you the story?
IT WAS about the Raja’s and my fifth safari. The Raja? Oh, he’s the Aiyar half of Rivers & Aiyar. I call him the Raja because he’s the hereditary monarch of Janpur. Means nothing nowadays, of course. Knew him in India and ran into him in New York running the Indian tourist agency. That dark chap in the photograph on my office wall, the one with his foot on the dead saber-tooth.
Well, the Raja was fed up with handing out brochures about the Taj Mahal and wanted to do a bit of hunting again. I was at loose ends when we heard of Professor Prochaska’s time machine at Washington University.
Where is the Raja? Out on safari in the early Oligocene, after titanothere, while I run the office. We take turn about now, but the first few times we went out together.
