Time Travel Omnibus, page 500
I trod between them and said the Thing must decide this matter, but that I hoped Hjalmar would take weregild for Ketill.
“But I killed him to save my own life!” protested Gerald.
“Nevertheless, weregild must be paid, if Ketill’s kin will take it,” I explained. “Because of the weapon, I think it will be doubled, but that is for the Thing to judge.”
Hjalmar had many other sons, and it was not as if Gerald belonged to a family at odds with his own, so I felt he would agree. However, he laughed coldly and asked where a man lacking wealth would find the silver.
Thorgunna stepped up with a wintry calm and said we would pay it. I opened my mouth, but when I saw her eyes I nodded. “Yes, we will,” I said, “in order to keep the peace.”
“Then you make this quarrel your own?” asked Hjalmar.
“No,” I answered. “This man is no blood of my own. But if I choose to make him a gift of money to use as he wishes, what of it?”
Hjalmar smiled. There was sorrow crinkled around his eyes, but he looked on me with old comradeship.
“Erelong this man may be your son-in-law,” he said. “I know the signs, Ospak. Then indeed he will be of your folk. Even helping him now in his need will range you on his side.”
“And so?” asked Helgi, most softly.
“And so, while I value your friendship, I have sons who will take the death of their brother ill. They’ll want revenge on Gerald Samsson, if only for the sake of their good names, and thus our two houses will be sundered and one manslaying will lead to another. It has happened often enough erenow.” Hjalmar sighed. “I myself wish peace with you, Ospak, but if you take this killer’s side it must be otherwise.”
I thought for a moment, thought of Helgi lying with his skull cloven, of my other sons on their garths drawn to battle because of a man they had never seen, I thought of having to wear byrnies every time we went down for driftwood and never knowing when we went to bed whether we would wake to find the house ringed in by spearmen.
“Yes,” I said, “you are right, Hjalmar. I withdraw my offer. Let this be a matter between you and him alone.”
We gripped hands on it.
Thorgunna gave a small cry and fled into Gerald’s arms. He held her close. “What does this mean?” he asked slowly.
“I cannot keep you any longer,” I said, “but belike some crofter will give you a roof. Hjalmar is a law-abiding man and will not harm you until the Thing has outlawed you. That will not be before midsummer. Perhaps you can get passage out of Iceland ere then.”
“A useless one like me?” he replied bitterly.
Thorgunna whirled free and blazed that I was a coward and a perjurer and all else evil. I let her have it out, then laid my hands on her shoulders.
“It is for the house,” I said. “The house and the blood, which are holy. Men die and women weep, but while the kindred live our names are remembered. Can you ask a score of men to die for your own hankerings?”
Long did she stand, and to this day I know not what her answer would have been. It was Gerald who spoke.
“No,” he said. “I suppose you have right, Ospak . . . the right of your time, which is not mine.” He took my hand, and Helgi’s. His lips brushed Thorgunna’s cheek. Then he turned and walked out into the darkness.
I heard, later, that he went to earth with Thorvald Hallsson, the crofter of Humpback Fell, and did not tell his host what had happened. He must have hoped to go unnoticed until he could arrange passage to the eastlands somehow. But of course word spread. I remember his brag that in the United States men had means to talk from one end of the land to another. So he must have looked down on us, sitting on our lonely garths, and not known how fast word could get around. Thorvald’s son Hrolf went to Brand Sealskin-boots to talk about some matter, and of course mentioned the stranger, and soon all the western island had the tale.
Now if Gerald had known he must give notice of a manslaying at the first garth he found, he would have been safe at least till the Thing met, for Hjalmar and his sons are sober men who would not kill a man still under the protection of the law. But as it was, his keeping the matter secret made him a murderer and therefore at once an outlaw. Hjalmar and his kin rode up to Humpback Fell and haled him forth. He shot his way past them with the gun and fled into the hills. They followed him, having several hurts and one more death to avenge. I wonder if Gerald thought the strangeness of his weapon would unnerve us. He may not have known that every man dies when his time comes, neither sooner nor later, so that fear of death is useless.
At the end, when they had him trapped, his weapon gave out on him. Then he took up a dead man’s sword and defended himself so valiantly that Ulf Hjalmarsson has limped ever since. It was well done, as even his foes admitted; they are an eldritch race in the United States, but they do not lack manhood.
When he was slain, his body was brought back. For fear of the ghost, he having perhaps been a warlock, it was burned, and all he had owned was laid in the fire with him. That was where I lost the knife he had given me. The barrow stands out on the moor, north of here, and folk shun it though the ghost has not walked. Now, with so much else happening, he is slowly being forgotten.
And that is the tale, priest, as I saw it and heard it. Most men think Gerald Samsson was crazy, but I myself believe he did come from out of time, and that his doom was that no man may ripen a field before harvest season. Yet I look into the future, a thousand years hence, when they fly through the air and ride in horseless wagons and smash whole cities with one blow. I think of this Iceland then, and of the young United States men there to help defend us in a year when the end of the world hovers close. Perhaps some of them, walking about on the heaths, will see that barrow and wonder what ancient warrior lies buried there, and they may even wish they had lived long ago in his time when men were free.
IN THE CARDS
Alan Cogan
It is one thing to safeguard the future . . . and something else entirely to see someone you love cry in terror two years from now!
THE FIRST thing I did when I bought my Grundy Projector was take a trip to about two years ahead and see what was going to happen to me. Everyone was doing it around that time; students were taking short trips into the future to learn whether or not they would pass their exams, married couples were looking ahead to see how many kids they were going to have, businessmen were going into the future to size up their prospects.
I took the trip because I was getting married and I couldn’t resist the temptation of finding out how things would work out with my fiancée Marge and myself. Not that I had any doubts about Marge, but the Grundy Projectors were guaranteed harmless and there’s no point in taking chances with a serious step like marriage.
Everybody was looking ahead then. Within a week after the Grundy Projectors were introduced, you could walk past homes every evening and see people with those shimmering bird-cages around them. Their bodies were there, but heaven knows when their minds were—months and often even years ahead of time.
I knew exactly when to go on my first time trip. I even knew where: I’d already put a down payment on a home in the new dome housing area where Marge and I would be living after the wedding. Knowing where to go on a time trip is important. On this one, for instance, I hadn’t been assigned an address yet and there were all sorts of changes in the place—buildings and streets where there had only been empty lots and sections marked off by string—and I just had to hunt until I came to our home.
You can imagine how much more difficult finding my future self would be if I hadn’t known the exact location. That’s about the only major drawback to making time trips and I don’t see how it can be overcome. Directories would be one answer, but how would you go about putting them together if your crews can’t ask questions or touch filing cards or even open future visiphone books?
EVENTUALLY, after setting the dial around the two-year mark, which is about the maximum limit on most models, I found myself in my future home in the dome housing area. I was watching myself as I would be and Marge as she would be. Only I didn’t like what I saw.
We were fighting and screaming at each other. You could tell at a glance that we hated each other. And after only two years!
I was completely stunned as I watched that scene. Future Marge looked furious; she had the kind of look I never even suspected she could get on her face. But I think I was more enraged at my future self than at her. At the time, I was seriously in love with Marge—although it seemed evident it wasn’t going to last—and I loathed myself for acting that way toward her. And after all those rash promises I had been making, too!
I was really a tangled mess of emotions as I watched our future selves battling it out.
I became conscious of not being alone as I watched. It didn’t take long to discover that it was Marge who had come to join me. I should have expected her—she must have been just as curious about her marriage as I was and, like myself, would naturally take her Projector to the two-year limit. Of course we couldn’t hold hands the way we would have if our bodies had been there, but then we probably wouldn’t have held them long. We were both pretty embarrassed by what we saw.
The cause of the fight was very obscure, and though we saw and heard everything perfectly, we still didn’t really understand. However, the emotions expressed were plain enough.
“You aren’t going to die, Marge,” my future self was yelling at her. “Try and get that through your damned thick stupid skull!”
“I am! I am!” she was screaming back at me. “You know I’m going to die. You want to get rid of me. Our marriage has been one long fight from the start.”
“Don’t talk such damned rot,” my future self hollered back at her. “There’s probably a perfectly good explanation for it all and you’re too ignorant to see it!”
“The only explanation is that I’m going to die,” future Marge insisted. She broke down, sobbing into an already saturated handkerchief.
My future self stamped around the room, cursing and furiously kicking the furniture. “Why don’t you find out for sure? Why don’t you go in closer and find out the real reason?”
She sobbed even louder. “I daren’t! You do it for me. Go find out for yourself and then tell me.”
That seemed to make my future self even madder. “You know I wouldn’t touch one of those things even to save my life. I mean it, too! Besides, if you do die, it’ll be your own fault. You’ll have believed yourself to death! You think you’re going to die and now you won’t be happy until you are dead.”
Future Marge began to sob hysterically and my Marge, who had been right beside me, suddenly seemed to grow a little more remote.
Then a strange thing happened. My future self stopped pacing up and down the room and turned to look straight at me with the queerest expression on his face. That was enough for me. I got out of there fast and flipped back to the peace and security of 2017.
I CLIMBED out of my Grundy Projector, glad to be back in the relative calm of my body, although it still took me a long time to get settled down. I felt like smashing the Projector there and then, and I guess I should have done it.
The problem that had me all tied in knots was whether or not I should go ahead and marry Marge after what I had seen. I know it looked as though I was going to marry her anyway, but in my innocence I figured I could beat that.
I soon realized I was going to get nowhere sitting all by myself in my room, so I went over to Marge’s place. She was waiting for me, swinging quietly to and fro on the hammock on the dark patio. Normally I would have sat right down beside her, but this time I just stood back sheepishly and waited.
Neither of us said anything for a while and I just watched as the hammock floated in the faint bluish light from some nearby lamps. Marge seemed to shine almost angelically as the glow caught her dark eyes and her softly tanned arms and legs.
I COULD have whipped myself for treating her the way I had seen myself treating her in the future. It must have been a mistake. There had to be a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t have made myself do anything to hurt her.
Her voice was husky and scared when she spoke. “Do you think it’ll happen the way we saw it, Gerry?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “They say that whatever you see always turns out to be the thing that happens.”
“Do you think we’ll fight like that when—if we’re married?”
It was on the end of my tongue to talk common sense and logic to her, but then I realized that neither of us wanted to hear anything like that. We were in love and we didn’t want to hear anything that conflicted with our emotions.
Marge sat up in the hammock and made room for me to sit down beside her.
“I just don’t see how it could happen to us,” I said. “I don’t see how we could fight like that. There must have been some mistake. Maybe we looked in on the wrong people.”
Neither of us added anything to that. We both knew we weren’t going to change so much that we couldn’t recognize ourselves two years later.
“Maybe it was some sort of alternative world we saw,” I suggested, eagerly clutching at any straw, “showing us what could happen if we didn’t work hard at our marriage. It could have been a sort of warning of what could happen to some people. But not us, of course!”
Marge’s lonely little hand crept into mine for comfort and I began to warm up to the subject.
“Don’t you worry about it,” I assured her. “What would we ever find to quarrel about?”
The idea seemed so preposterous, we both began to laugh.
“I couldn’t fight with you, Gerry,” Marge said, snuggling closer.
“Me, neither,” I said. “Don’t worry about what we saw. The scientific boys will probably have a rational explanation worked out for the whole thing. I’ll bet it’s happened to lots of people.”
Somehow, while we were talking, we had managed to get very close together in the hammock. Marge and I could never talk far apart for long.
“I couldn’t wait for you to come over,” Marge said in a small voice.
“I couldn’t wait to get here,” I lied. “I just don’t believe that what we saw could possibly happen to us. What on Earth would we ever find to fight over?”
That was the one basic mistake that we, and everyone else, made when we discussed the Bilbo Grundy Projector. When the Projector showed you something was going to happen, it happened.
That night, Marge and I made plans to get married even sooner and the ceremony took place four weeks later.
GRUNDY’S PROJECTOR had been a well-kept secret until it suddenly burst upon us with a carefully planned publicity campaign. There hadn’t even been a hint of experiments in the time-travel field until the discovery had suddenly been made public in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the whole world.
Grundy had discovered a way of projecting a person’s view into the future and the equipment required turned out to be amazingly compact, simple and inexpensive. The average cost of a Projector was fifty-five dollars—well within practically anyone’s price range.
Grundy and his backers had lined up a large number of famous people beforehand, all of whom had tried the Projector and were only too willing to tell us how great it was. Terrific fun—the newest thrill since the first radio, or the first airplane, or the first space rocket. And absolutely harmless, too!
All you had to do was set a dial and get into the cage and you could watch yourself an hour or a day or up to two years ahead of time. If you wanted to see if it was going to rain that weekend, all you did was climb in and take a look. If you wanted to see where you would be going for your annual vacation, just press a button and you would see yourself making the final plans. All for fifty-five dollars. What with all the advertising coming at us via every possible medium, Grundy sold a million in the first five days.
Because he knew exactly how many he was going to sell—just by making use of his own invention—Grundy was fully prepared for the onslaught of customers.
Everyone talked of nothing but the new sensation. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about it. It seemed as if the rest of the world had stopped.
Before long, there wasn’t a thing about the next two years that we didn’t know. We all jumped ahead in great leaps and found out all kinds of things that were due to happen to us and to the world. If the things were good, we waited happily for them to happen. If things didn’t look too good, we shrugged it off, like Marge and me, and said it couldn’t happen to us.
BUT that was the catch. Whatever we saw happening did take place exactly as we saw it—it was inescapable. The first instance I saw of this was in the accounting office where I operated an accounts analyzer. We advertised for a new operator to assist in my department and lined up interviews with thirty-two applicants. When the day of the interviews arrived, only one applicant turned up. He was found suitable and got the job.
The president, Mr. Atkins, was pretty het up about the whole affair. “Why would thirty-one men not present themselves for interviews as they had arranged?” he kept asking me. “It’s a good job, isn’t it, Gerald?”
I tried to explain to him that the Time Projector was probably involved in the affair, although I couldn’t see how exactly. Mr. Atkins was an old man who didn’t believe in new gadgets of any kind and he wasn’t convinced. Finally, however, I managed to get him to call some of the applicants and ask them why they had not appeared for their interviews.
He almost went apoplectic when he heard the reasons. Each of the thirty-one answered that he had flipped ahead to see what was going to happen on that particular day and each one had seen that he wasn’t going to visit Mr. Atkins in search of a job, so he didn’t go. Some of them even told him that they knew they were going to get jobs elsewhere on a certain date and that they were just taking a vacation until that day came.
I had a hard time soothing Mr. Atkins that afternoon. He wouldn’t stop talking about it. Finally, just to satisfy himself, he re-interviewed the sole successful applicant. As we should have expected, the new man answered that he had looked ahead to see that he was going to get the job and had dutifully made his appearance.
