Time Travel Omnibus, page 511
“No,” said Barron faintly, “I didn’t forget that. The machine is designed to follow the time path of Earth wherever that leads. Besides, even if Earth moved, where is the sun? Where are the stars?”
Barron went back to the controls. Nothing budged. Nothing worked. The door would no longer slide shut. Blank!
Pointdexter found it getting difficult to breathe, difficult to move. With effort he said, “What’s wrong, then?”
Barron moved slowly toward the center of the machine. He said painfully, “The particles of time. I think we happened to stall . . . between two . . . particles.”
Pointdexter tried to clench a fist but couldn’t. “Don’t understand.”
“Like an elevator. Like an elevator.” He could no longer sound the words, but only move his lips to shape them. “Like an elevator, after all . . . stuck between the floors.”
Pointdexter could not even move his lips. He thought: Nothing can proceed in nontime. All motion is suspended, all consciousness, all everything. There was an inertia about themselves that had carried them along in time for a minute or so, like a body leaning forward when an automobile comes to a sudden halt-but it was dying fast.
The light within the machine dimmed and went out. Sensation and awareness chilled into nothing.
One last thought, one final, feeble, mental sigh: Hubris, ate!
Then thought stopped, too.
Stasis! Nothing! For all eternity, where even eternity was meaningless, there would only be—blank!
BLANK?
Randall Garrett
Amnetia? Well, maybe—but how and where had he earned that $50,000?
BETHELMAN came to quite suddenly, and found himself standing on the corner of 44th Street and Madison Avenue. He was dizzy for a moment—not from any physical cause, but from the disorientation. The last thing he could remember, he had been sitting in a bar in Boston, talking to Dr. Elijah Kamiroff. After the interview was over, they’d had a few drinks, and then a few more. After that, things began to get hazy.
Bethelman rubbed his head. It wasn’t like a hangover; his head felt perfectly fine. But how in the devil had he gotten here? He looked around. No one was paying any attention to him, but no one pays any attention to any one on the streets of New York. Still feeling queer, he headed east on 44th Street.
He wanted to sit down for a bit, and the nearest place was the little bar halfway between Madison Avenue and Grand Central Station. He went in and ordered a beer.
What the hell had happened? He’d had too much to drink on several occasions, but he’d never gone to sleep in one city and awakened in another. Dr. Kamiroff must have put him on the plane; the biochemist didn’t drink much, and had probably been in better shape than Bethelman had been.
He glanced at his watch. Two-fifteen! Wow! The city editor would be wondering where he was.
He went to the phone, dropped in a dime, and dialed the city desk. When the editor’s voice answered, he said: “Hickman, this is Bethelman; I’m sorry I’m late, but—”
“Late?” interrupted Hickman, “What’re you talking about? You’ve only been gone half an hour. You sick or something?”
“I don’t feel too good,” Bethelman admitted confusedly.
“That’s what you said when you left. Hell, man, take the rest of the day off. It’s Friday; you don’t need to show up until Monday if you don’t want to. Okay?”
“Yeah,” said Bethelman. “Sure.” His mind still didn’t want to focus properly.
“Okay, boy,” said Hickman. “And thanks again for the tip. Who’d have thought Baby Joe would come in first? See you Monday.”
And he hung up.
Bethelman stood there looking foolish for a full five seconds. Then things began to connect up. Friday! It shouldn’t be Friday.
He cradled the phone and walked over to the bar where the barman was assiduously polishing a beer glass.
“What day is this?” he asked.
“Friday,” said the white-jacketed barman, looking up from the shell of gleaming glass.
“I mean the date,” Bethelman corrected.
“Fifteenth, I think.” He glanced at a copy of the Times that lay on the bar. “Yeah. Fifteenth.”
Bethelman sat down heavily on the barstool. The fifteenth! Somewhere, he had lost two weeks! He searched his memory for some clue, but found nothing. His memory was a perfect blank for those two weeks.
Automatically, his hand went to his shirt pocket for cigarettes. He pulled out the pack and started to shake one out. It wouldn’t shake, so he stuck his finger in the half empty pack to dislodge a cigarette. There was a roll of paper stuck in it.
He took it out and unrolled it. It was a note.
You’re doing fine. You know something’s wrong, but you don’t know what. Go ahead and investigate; I guarantee you’ll get the answers. But be careful not to get anyone too suspicious; you don’t want to get locked up in the booby bin. I suggest you try Marco’s first.
The note was unsigned, but Bethelman didn’t need a signature.
The handwriting was his own.
HE LOOKED at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He was clean shaven—which he hadn’t been when he was drinking with Dr. Kamiroff in Boston. Also, he was wearing his tweed topcoat, which he had left in New York. A search of his pockets revealed the usual keys and change. In his billfold was three hundred dollars in cash—more than he’d ever carried around in his life—and a receipt for a new twenty-dollar hat. The receipt was dated the tenth.
He took off his hat and looked at it. Brand new, with his initials on the sweatband.
Evidently, he’d been doing something the past two weeks—but what?
He remembered talking to Kamiroff about the variability of time—something about a man named Dunne. And he remembered the biochemist saying that time travel was physically impossible. For a second or two, Bethelman wondered whether he’d been projected into the future somehow. But if he had, he reasoned, he’d still be wearing the same clothes he’d had on in Boston.
No, he decided, it’s something else. I’ve gone off my rocker. I’m daffy as a dung beetle. What I need is a good psychiatrist.
But that didn’t explain the note.
He took it out and looked at it again. It still said the same thing. He decided that before he went to a psychiatrist, he’d do what the note said. He’d go to Marco’s.
After all, if he couldn’t trust himself, who could he trust?
Marco’s was a little place down on Second Avenue. It wasn’t the most elite bar in New York, but it wasn’t the worst dive, either.
Marco was standing near the door when Bethelman entered. “ ‘Ah! Mr. Bethelman! The package you were expecting is here. The—ah—gentleman left it.” The beaming smile on his face was a marvel to behold.
“Thanks,” Bethelman said.
Marco dived behind the bar and came up with a package wrapped in brown paper and an envelope addressed to Bethelman. The package was about three inches wide, a little less than six inches long, and nearly an inch thick. He slid it into his topcoat pocket and tore open the envelope.
There should his close to ten thousand dollars in the package, the note said. You promised Marco a grand of it if number 367 won—which, of course, it did. He got hold of the runner for you.
Again, the note was in his own handwriting.
He gave Marco the thousand and left. There were some things he’d have to find out. He went to his apartment on 86th Street and put in a long distance call to Dr. Elijah Kamiroff in Boston. After an hour, he was informed that Dr. Kamiroff was out of town and was not expected back for two weeks. Where had he gone? That was confidential; Dr. Kamiroff had some work to do and did not wish to be disturbed.
Bethelman cursed the biochemist roundly and then went to his private files, where he kept clippings of his own stories. Sure enough, there were coverages of several things over the past two weeks, all properly bylined.
Two weeks before, he had written the little article on research being done on cancer at Boston University School of Medicine, most of which he’d gotten from Dr. Kamiroff. No clues there; he’d evidently been behaving naturally for the past two weeks. But why couldn’t he remember it? Why was his memory completely blanked out?
He had to know.
HE SPENT the next two weeks running down his activities during the blank period, and the more he worked, the more baffled he became. He had never been a gambling man, but he seemed to have become one over those two weeks. And a damned lucky one at that.
Horse races, the numbers game, even the stock market, all seemed to break right for him. In the blank two weeks, Bethelman had made himself close to fifty thousand dollars! And every So often, he’d come across a little note from himself, telling him that he was doing fine. Once, a note he found in his bureau drawer, tucked among the socks, told him to invest every cent he had in a certain security and then sell the next day. He did it and made another nine thousand dollars.
It was exactly four weeks to the day after he had sat in the bar with Dr. Kamiroff that he found the last cryptic note to himself. It was in his unabridged dictionary, laying right on the page which contained the word he happened to be looking up.
Tomorrow morning, it said, you will see Dr. Kamiroff. But don’t expect him to explain anything to you until you have explained everything to him.
So he would see Kamiroff in the morning, eh? He’d been trying to get hold of the biochemist every day for the past two weeks—and there had been no results.
That night, just before bedtime, Bethelman drank a glass of beer. One glass. No more.
And that’s why he couldn’t understand waking up the next morning with a king-size hangover. He rolled over in bed, moaning—half afraid to open his eyes.
“Oooooh!” he said. “My head!”
“Want a bromo?” a familiar voice asked sympathetically.
Bethelman forced his eyes open. The stocky, smiling face of Dr. Elijah Kamiroff floated above him.
Bethelman sat straight up in bed, his eyes wide. The effort made his head hurt worse. He looked around.
He was? in the upstairs guest bedroom of Dr. Kamiroff’s suburban home.
He turned to look at the biochemist, who was busily mixing a bromo.
“What date is this?” he asked.
Kamiroff looked at him with mild blue eyes. “It’s the second,” he said. “Why?”
Bethelman took the glass of fizzing liquid and downed it. The pattern was beginning to make sense. He had gone to sleep in Boston the night of the first and awakened in New York on the fifteenth. Then he had gone to sleep in New York on the twenty-ninth and awakened on the second.
It made a weird kind of sense. He handed the empty glass back to the biochemist and said: “Dr. Kamiroff, sit down. I want to tell you something.”
HALF AN HOUR later, Kamiroff was rubbing his chin with a forefinger, deep in concentration. “It sounds wild,” he said at last, “but I’ve heard of wild things before.”
“But what caused it?”
“Do you remember what you did last night? I mean the night of the first?”
“Not clearly; we got pretty crocked, I remember.”
Kamiroff grinned. “I think you were a few up on me. Do you remember that bottle of white powder I had in the lab down in the basement?”
“No,” Bethelman admitted.
“It was diazotimoline, one of the drugs we’ve been using in cancer research on white mice. That whole family of compounds has some pretty peculiar properties. This one happens to smell like vanilla; when I let you smell it, you stuck your finger in it and licked off some of the powder before I could stop you.
“It didn’t bother me much; we’ve given it to mice without any ill effects, so I didn’t give you an emetic or anything.”
The bromo had made Bethelman’s head feel better. “But what happened, exactly?” he asked.
“As far as I can judge,” the biochemist said, “the diazotimoline has an effect on the mind. Not by itself, maybe; perhaps if needed the synergetic combination with alcohol. I don’t know.”
“Have you heard the theories that Dunne propounded on the mind?”
“Yeah,” Bethelman said. “We discussed them last night, I think.”
“Right. The idea is that the mind is independent of time, but just follows the body along through the time stream.
“Evidently, what the diazotimoline did was project your mind two weeks into the future—to the fifteenth. After two weeks—on the twenty-ninth—it wore off, and your mind returned to the second. Now you’ll relive those two weeks.”
“That sounds like a weird explanation,” Bethelman said.
“Well, look at it this way.
Let’s just say you remember those two weeks in the wrong order. The drug mixed your memory up. You remember the fortnight of the second to the fifteenth after you remember the fortnight of the fifteenth to the twenty-ninth. See?”
“Good gosh, yes! Now I see how I made all that money! I read all the papers; I know what the stocks are going to do; I know what horses are going to win! Wow!”
“That’s right,” Kamiroff agreed. “And you’ll know where to leave all those notes to yourself.”
“Yeah! And on the afternoon of the fifteenth, I’ll blank out and wake up in my bed on the morning of the thirtieth!”
“I should think so, yes,” Kamiroff said.
“It makes sense, now.” Then Bethelman looked up at the biochemist. “By the way, Dr. Kamiroff, I want to split this money with you; after all, you’re responsible for what happened.”
The scientist smiled and shook his head. “No need of that. I have the diazotimoline, remember? You said you couldn’t get hold of me on the phone; you said I was doing experimental work and couldn’t be disturbed.
“Now, just what do you think I’m going to be experimenting on for the next couple of months?”
TIME BOMB
Philip High
The dictator had a steely grip on the hearts and minds of Earthmen, when the time of stress came would his control of himself be as great?
Two guards brought Vian into Komma’s room and stood rigidly to attention, waiting.
“You may go.” Komma did not look up from the file he was studying. He waited until he heard the door close, then he said: “Sit down, Vian.” He sensed, rather than saw, the other sink wearily into the nearest chair. He still did not raise his eyes, first there was the psychological unease caused by indifference and, second, he had not finished the file. The file was Vian’s and contained findings from almost every department in security.
Vian had been checked for conditioning, findings—negative. Negative! Komma raised a mental eyebrow. It was unusual to send a spy who had not been conditioned against interrogation, perhaps they had lost too many good men. Conditioning could, of course, be broken down with contortion techniques but it left the recipients insane. Nevertheless, to send a spy without some form of protection against interrogation was unusual, contacts and spy network could be extracted almost without effort.
Komma turned over a page. No known contacts. He frowned. A spy operating without contacts made no sense at all. Further, Vian had brought no means of making contacts, no radio, no pocket caller, nothing.
He closed the file and looked up. Vian was a dark haired man with intense eyes and the curious suggestion of fragility common to all Martians. Despite a good breadth of shoulder he was almost effeminitely slender.
Komma studied him for some seconds expressionlessly. Vian had evidently suffered from security thugs after arrest. His lip was still swollen and there was a bruising and discoloration extending from his cheekbone to the line of his jaw.
Komma pushed across a box of cigarettes. “Help yourself, take the box.” He smiled. It was a purely muscular expression which exposed the teeth but left the eyes blank and cold. “Hungry?”
Vian nodded without speaking.
“I thought so.” Komma pressed a button beneath his desk. “After you have eaten we must talk.”
Vian nodded again. “This is the softening-up process, isn’t it?”
Komma sucked alight a cigarette. “For a man who denies espionage you seem singularly, familiar with our methods.” He exhaled smoke. “Why not come clean, Vian? We shall find out what we want to know in the end. We may have to resort to drugs but we shall find it.”
Vian nodded. “You can’t find what isn’t there.”
Komma straightened, the implications striking him almost instantly. A spy with limited instructions was something new. Do this, do that, with no connecting link of reason. Do it, not because, just do it and never mind why. It accounted for the absence of conditioning. Vian could only tell what he knew which probably wasn’t much.
A meal was delivered by the auto-service and he watched Vian wolf it hungrily. Security again, still three hundred years in the past, still imagining you could extract conditioned information from a man’s mind by force, only in this case there was no conditioning.
Komma waited until the other had finished and was leaning back, almost sleepily, a lighted cigarette between his fingers. “We shoot spies,” he said. His voice was conversational and calculated to shake the other out of his lethargy.
“Yes?” Vian raised a thin eyebrow. “I’m not a spy.”
“We have your statement but we don’t believe it.” Komma opened the file. “You landed two weeks ago in a space ship, designed, incidentally, for a one way journey, which you destroyed by explosives. You then thumbed your way into Cincinnati and booked a room at the Ohio Grand Hotel in the name of Samuels. You were plentifully supplied with credits but unarmed. After arrest you claimed you were not a spy but an ambassador. Correct?”
“Quite correct.”
Komma sighed. “Mr. Vian, do you think we are fools? Ambassadors do not arrive secretly in spaceships and under assumed names.”
“They might have to if the regular ambassadors had been expelled and diplomatic relations severed——by Earth, incidentally.”
