Time Travel Omnibus, page 502
“You mean the future?”
“The past!” said Mr. Atkins. “The chances are the future will be even worse. I’m talking about the middle of the last century, around the nineteen-fifties or thereabouts.”
I began to laugh. “The nineteen-fifties! What would I do to earn a living in those days?”
HE GAVE me a thin smile. “I guess that would be your first unsolved problem. After all, you said you wanted problems and the chance to make plans and try to make them come true.”
“But why pick me?” I wanted to know.
“I like you, Gerald,” he said. “I would like to see you have a decent chance. And don’t flatter yourself—you wouldn’t be the first one to go. You’d be in good company.”
I just sat staring vacantly at him.
“I guess you could say this is your first big decision in two years,” he added. “There’s no hurry. You can think it over for a while.”
I asked questions—lots of them—but I didn’t get too many answers. Mr. Atkins explained that naturally the affair was hush-hush. After the way the Grundy Projector had been thrust so irresponsibly upon us, no one wanted any further complications. But there were some answers I could piece together both from what I already knew and the hints he dropped.
I’d been in on conferences and listened to Mr. Atkins try to figure out ways of expanding, building up our business. Each time, he’d been stymied by the Grundy Projector. If he’d bull some idea through, his competitors would see exactly how it worked out. If he didn’t, they’d know that, too. And I had heard him rant when the accountants—using the Grundy Projectors, of course—would make up their inventory, sales, profit-and-loss and tax statements two years or more in advance.
That was actually what galled him. Mr. Atkins was used to making plans, calculating risks and gains, taking his chances. With the Grundy Projectors in existence, nobody could do that any more. I gathered from what he told me that there was a syndicate of men like himself backing the inventor of a genuine time machine. They didn’t condemn the Grundy invention on any moral or religious or even selfish grounds. They just resented very bitterly the same thing that annoyed me—the sense of repetition.
As Mr. Atkins put it, “It’s no different than reading a story and then having to relive the whole thing, anticipating each action and bit of dialogue. And that’s precisely what this is. Only it’s our lives, not fiction. We didn’t like it, Gerald. We didn’t like it at all! But we did something about the problem instead of merely complaining.”
Let me say right now that I thought the solution they came up with was nonsensical and I kept searching, all the time we talked, for ways of politely turning down the offer. Escaping to to the past was a ridiculous answer. But it was just the kind of notion that would appeal to an old-fashioned character like Mr. Atkins.
I didn’t tell him so, of course. I thanked him for his consideration and shook hands and felt relieved when he finally left.
MY MIND was made up by then. I’d back out, quit if I had to, rather than take refuge in the past to evade the future.
It wasn’t until I got out of the office that I realized there was no big decision to make; it was already made for me. Either I was going to die or I was going into the past—and I wasn’t going to die if I could help it. But neither did I intend going into the past if I could really help that!
When Marge realized that I wasn’t merely trying to take her mind off the fatal day, she pounced on me and hugged me as though I myself had invented the time machine just to save her life!
“It’s wonderful, darling!” she cried. “You were right all along! Oh, how can you forgive me for making things so unbearable for you?”
“About this idea of going into the past—” I said.
“What’s the difference when we go to,” she cut in, “as long as we don’t have to die?”
“But I figured on telling Mr. Atkins at the last minute that all I want is a transfer—”
“What’s the sense of guessing?” she asked excitedly. “All we have to do is borrow a couple of Projectors and see!”
I began to feel myself being squeezed into a one-way trap. I put my foot down—but where it landed was in a Grundy Projector from the people next door—and where it figuratively emerged was eleven days later, when I couldn’t shut my non-physical eyes to the way the whole situation would turn out.
Marge and I, with half a dozen others, were getting into a helicar. I followed them out to a house in the country. We handed in all the money we had saved and in return were given old-style clothes, ancient-looking money and a small amount of luggage. Then we all stepped into what looked like an oversized version of a Grundy Projector and vanished.
Fight? Argue? Scheme?
I didn’t have a chance.
IT WAS 1956 when we arrived in old New York. We were met by others who had pioneered the way before us and they looked after our group until we learned the ropes.
There was nothing easy about getting used to the era. I wished often that I could get back to my own time, Grundy Projector or no Grundy Projector. Still, Marge didn’t complain; she was prepared to endure anything just because she thought her life had been saved. Occasionally, bothered by my blunders in adjusting to this past century, I’d start to reason with her, explain that her life hadn’t been in danger at all. But then, luckily, I would realize that convincing her would leave an angry, dissatisfied wife on my hands and I always managed to stop in time.
I got a job working as a night janitor in a bank and studied accounting in the daytime until I was able to get a steady job. We’ve been here a few years now and I guess you could say we’re pretty well assimilated. We have a house and two small sons and I’m doing well at my job. We still see some of our friends from the 21st century and they’ve also managed to make the change successfully.
We get together now and then, and talk over old times, and laugh at some things and get nostalgic over other things. Now that there aren’t any Grundy Projectors around, we’ve started feeling once more that our fates are in our own hands.
Rog Owens has an interesting viewpoint. He said one night, “It wasn’t the future that was fixed; it was the Grundy Projectors that fixed the future! Whatever people saw would happen, they just let happen . . . or even worked to make it happen. No matter what it was, including their own deaths. Hell, how’s that any different than voodoo?”
That was pretty much how each of us had felt, only we hadn’t figured it out so clearly. But Rog Owens has a special reason for thinking particularly hard about the problem. Mr. Atkins and his syndicate hadn’t send us back for purely altruistic reasons; they learned that Rog’s daughter Ann would marry a fellow (not one of us) named Jack Grundy and that they’d have a son named Bilbo, who would invent the Grundy Projector. Our assignment was to keep that from happening.
Well, we couldn’t prevent the marriage, but we could—and did—make sure their son would have a good, plain American name. It’s William Grundy.
But today my younger boy told me their kindergarten teacher calls William “Billy Boy.”
And one little girl can’t pronounce it. She calls him Bilbo.
ABSOLUTELY INFLEXIBLE
Robert Silverberg
It’s never really safe to go skating on the quicksands of Time. But Mahler was determined to execute a complete letter Y.
THE DETECTOR over in one corner of Mahler’s little office gleamed a soft red. He indicated it with a weary gesture of his hand to the sad-eyed time jumper who sat slouched glumly across the desk from him, looking cramped and uncomfortable in the bulky spacesuit he was compelled to wear.
“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”
“And not one has been set free,” the time jumper said. “Every time-traveler who’s come here has been packed off to the Moon immediately. Every one.”
“Every one,” Mahler said. He peered through the thick shielding, trying to see what sort of man was hidden inside the spacesuit. Mahler often wondered about the men he condemned so easily to the Moon. This one was small of stature, with wispy locks of white hair pasted to his high forehead by perspiration. Evidently he had been a scientist, a respected man of his time, perhaps a happy father (although very few of the time jumpers were family men). Perhaps he possessed some bit of scientific knowledge that would be invaluable to the twenty-eighth century; perhaps not. It did not matter. Like all the rest, he would have to be sent to the Moon, to live out his remaining days under the grueling, primitive conditions of the Dome.
“Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?” the other asked. “I came here with no malice, no intent to harm whatsoever. I’m simply a scientific observer from the past. Driven by curiosity, I took the Jump. I never expected that I’d be walking into life imprisonment.”
“I’m sorry,” Mahler said, getting up. He decided to end the interview; he had to get rid of this jumper because there was another coming right up. Some days they came thick and fast, and this looked like one of them. But the efficient mechanical tracers never missed one.
“But can’t I live on Earth and stay in this spacesuit?” the time-jumper asked, panicky now that he saw his interview with Mahler was coming to an end. “That way I’d be sealed off from contact at all times.”
“Please don’t make this any harder for me,” Mahler said. “I’ve explained to you why we must be absolutely inflexible about this. There cannot—must not—be any exceptions. It’s two centuries since last there was any occurrence of disease on Earth. In all this time we’ve lost most of the resistance acquired over the previous countless generations of disease. I’m risking my life coming so close to you, even with the spacesuit sealing you off.”
Mahler signaled to the tall, powerful guards waiting in the corridor, grim in the casings that protected them from infection. This was always the worst moment.
“Look,” Mahler said, frowning with impatience. “You’re a walking death-trap. You probably carry enough disease germs to kill half the world. Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.”
“But I’d—”
“I know. You’d swear by all that’s holy to you or to me that you’d never leave the confines of the spacesuit. Sorry. The word of the most honorable man doesn’t carry any weight against the safety of the lives of Earth’s billions. We can’t take the slightest risk by letting you stay on Earth. It’s unfair, it’s cruel, it’s everything else. You had no idea you would walk into something like this. Well, it’s too bad for you. But you knew you were going on a one-way trip to the future, and you’re subject to whatever that future wants to do with you, since there’s no way of getting back.”
Mahler began to tidy up the papers on his desk in a way that signaled finality. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll just have to see our way of thinking about it. We’re frightened to death at your very presence here. We can’t allow you to roam Earth, even in a spacesuit. No; there’s nothing for you but the Moon. I have to be absolutely inflexible. Take him away,” he said, gesturing to the guards. They advanced on the little man and began gently to ease him out of Mahler’s office.
Mahler sank gratefully into the pneumochair and sprayed his throat with laryngogel. These long speeches always left him feeling exhausted, his throat feeling raw and scraped. Someday I’ll get throat cancer from all this talking, Mahler thought. And that’ll mean the nuisance of an operation. But if I don’t do this job, someone else will have to.
Mahler heard the protesting screams of the time jumper impassively. In the beginning he had been ready to resign when he first witnessed the inevitable frenzied reaction of jumper after jumper as the guards dragged them away, but eight years had hardened him.
They had given him the job because he was hard, in the first place. It was a job that called for a hard man. Condrin, his predecessor, had not been the same sort of man Mahler was, and for that reason Condrin was now himself on the Moon. He had weakened after heading the Bureau for a year and had let a jumper go; the jumper had promised to secrete himself at the tip of Antarctica, and Condrin, thinking that Antarctica was as safe as the Moon, had foolishly released him. That was when they called Mahler in. In eight years Mahler had sent four thousand men to the Moon. (The first was the runaway jumper, intercepted in Buenos Aires after he had left a trail of disease down the hemisphere from Appalachia to Argentine Protectorate. The second was Condrin.)
It was getting to be a tiresome job, Mahler thought. But he was proud to hold it. It took a strong man to do what he was doing. He leaned back and awaited the arrival of the next jumper.
The door slid smoothly open as the burly body of Dr Fournet, the Bureau’s chief medical man, broke the photo-electronic beam. Mahler glanced up. Fournet carried a time-rig dangling from one hand.
“Took this away from our latest customer,” Fournet said. “He told the medic who examined him that it was a two-way rig, and I thought I’d bring it to show you.”
Mahler came to full attention quickly. A two-way rig? Unlikely, he thought. But it would mean the end of the dreary jumper prison on the Moon if it were true. Only how could a two-way rig exist?
He reached out and took it from Fournet. “It seems to be a conventional twenty-fourth century type,” he said.
“But notice the extra dial here,” Fournet said, pointing. Mahler peered and nodded.
“Yes. It seems to be a two-way rig. But how can we test it? And it’s not really very probable,” Mahler said. “Why should a two-way rig suddenly show up from the twenty-fourth century when no other traveler’s had one? We don’t even have two-way time-travel ourselves, and our scientists don’t think it’s possible. Still,” he mused, “it’s a nice thing to dream about. We’ll have to study this a little more closely. But I don’t seriously think it’ll work. Bring him in, will you?”
As Fournet turned to signal the guards, Mahler asked him, “What’s his medical report, by the way?”
“From here to here,” Fournet said sombrely. “You name it, he’s carrying it. Better get him shipped off to the Moon as soon as possible. I won’t feel safe until he’s off this planet.” The big medic waved to the guards.
Mahler smiled. Fournet’s overcautiousness was proverbial in the Bureau. Even if a jumper were to show up completely free from disease, Fournet would probably insist that he was carrying everything from asthma to leprosy.
The guards brought the jumper into Mahler’s office. He was fairly tall, Mahler saw, and young. It was difficult to see his face clearly through the dim plate of the protective spacesuit all jumpers were compelled to wear, but Mahler could tell that the young time-jumper’s face had much of the lean, hard look of Mahler’s own. It seemed that the jumper’s eyes had widened in surprise as he entered the office, but Mahler was not sure.
“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly. “Your name is Mahler, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Mahler agreed.
“To go all these years—and find you. Talk about improbabilities!”
Mahler ignored him, declining to take up the gambit. He had found it was good practice never to let a captured jumper get the upper hand in conversation. His standard procedure was firmly to explain to the jumper the reasons why it was imperative that he be sent to the Moon, and then send him, as quickly as possible.
“You say this is a two-way time-rig?” Mahler asked, holding up the flimsy-looking piece of equipment.
“That’s right,” the other agreed. “Works both ways. If you pressed the button, you’d go straight back to 2360 or thereabouts.”
“Did you build it?”
“Me? No, hardly,” said the jumper. “I found it. It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. In fact, if I tried to tell it, I’d only make things ten times worse than they are, if that’s possible. No. Let’s get this over with, shall we? I know I don’t stand much of a chance with you, and I’d just as soon make it quick.”
“You know, of course, that this is a world without disease—” Mahler began sonorously.
“And that you think I’m carrying enough germs of different sorts to wipe out the whole world. And therefore you have to be absolutely inflexible with me. I won’t try to argue with you. Which way is the Moon?”
Absolutely inflexible. The phrase Mahler had used so many times, the phrase that summed him up so neatly. He chuckled to himself; some of the younger technicians must have tipped the jumper off about the usual procedure, and the jumper was resigned to going peacefully, without bothering to plead. It was just as well.
Absolutely inflexible.
Yes, Mahler thought, the words fit him well. He was becoming a stereotype in the Bureau. Perhaps he was the only Bureau chief who had never relented and let a jumper go. Probably all the others, bowed under the weight of the hordes of curious men flooding in from the past, had finally cracked and taken the risk. But not Mahler; not Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. He knew the deep responsibility that rode on his shoulders, and he had no intention of failing what amounted to a sacred trust. His job was to find the jumpers and get them off Earth as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Every one. It was a task that required unsoftening inflexibility.
“This makes my job much easier,” Mahler said. “I’m glad I won’t have to convince you of the necessity of my duty.”
