Time Travel Omnibus, page 513
As he left the room Komma caught his arm. “You know, I heard. The room is wired, of course. Can we do anything to stop it, to find the bombs?”
Brent shook his head. “No.”
Komma paled and his face began to twitch. He looked about him fearfully and lowered his voice. “Already there are armed uprisings in London and New York, another bomb will finish the government.”
Brent smiled coldly. “Good. The next is due to explode in the Sahara in eight hours.”
Komma clutched at his sleeve. “You might be an important man in a different government, Mr. Brent. I haven’t laid a finger on Vian, not a finger. You understand, don’t you, I had to obey orders or be shot? You’ll testify I acted against my will?”
“You made a good thing of it while it lasted,” said Brent, coldly.
“Mr. Brent, I have valuable treasure, a good word from Brent looked down at him contemptuously. “I’m afraid you saw the writing on the wall a little too late. No doubt world government will give you a fair trial when you are called to face it.” Inwardly he was elated, if the top echelon were running for hideouts and seeking alibis, the rot had really set in.
Adermaine looked at him coldly. “So you have saved your skin, Brent? You know how it is done.”
“Yes Excellency, I know. I know when the next is going to explode and exactly where.”
Adermaine smiled thinly. “Show me on the map.”
Brent pointed. “Right here. There used to be an oasis here, years ago, but it’s dried out now.”
The dictator pressed a button and barked instructions then he turned to Brent. “My men will find it.”
Brent shook his head. “They won’t. You’re sending men to death.”
“What!” Adermaine was on his feet, face contorted.
“The bomb isn’t there yet. When they do find it—it will be too late. It’s the biggest bomb ever and it will probably turn a quarter of the Sahara into slag.”
“You mean that this bomb is a missile——?” He stopped, scowling. “Are you daring to mock me, Brent?” He banged the point of his stick angrily on the floor. “Do you imagine because some fools riot in big cities that this is the end?” He leaned forward, face again composed, voice low and intense. “Brent, I pity you, you are like these rabble, you do not understand. If I told of the voices I hear, die shining guidance, you would not believe me. You are highly intelligent but spiritually blind. You see only evil in my works but if a race would achieve its destiny it must be purged. It must be purged and united into a shining instrument of strength. I, alone, have been chosen for this task and I must do it. Sickness must be cut away like a surgeon cuts away a cancer and the race made pure for it’s destiny——”
My God, thought Brent, he really believes it himself, he’s almost making me believe it.
Adermaine pointed at him with his stick. “Make yourself clean, now, Brent. Tell me the truth.”
Brent said wearily. “Excellency, I speak the truth. Your men won’t find the bomb because it isn’t there yet. The Martians have employed the Clauserman principal, the perfect time bomb, you can’t find it because it’s still in time. Your men are searching today for a bomb that’s still in yesterday.”
Adermaine dropped his stick. “You are mad, obviously you are mad.”
Brent shrugged. “If you don’t believe me send for your experts and check, or read up the Clauserman project yourself.”
Adermaine bent slowly and retrieved his stick. When he straightened his face was expressionless but a muscle near the corner of his mouth twitched uncontrollably. “What is this Clauserman principle?”
“Time travel. Clauserman was experimenting with a high frequency sonic device and discovered the secret by accident. It was found that objects could be sent into the time stream and brought out again at predicted intervals.”
“That is an insane paradox.”
Brent shook his head. “No. The objects could be introduced into the time stream but not shuttled backwards or forwards. To all intents and purposes the objects simply vanished to appear again at the predicted time. Only mathematics confirmed that they were travelling in time. You could not send a camera, for example, from Monday to Wednesday, let it take a picture and bring it back again to Monday because the object would not shuttle through time. If you dispatched your camera on Monday, time-set to appear Wednesday, you simply waited in your laboratory on Wednesday for it to appear. As no known life form could survive the journey and it gained man no knowledge either of the future or the past, the experiments were abandoned for want of financial support.”
“What has this to do with the Martian bombs?” Adermaine’s hands shook.
“Five years ago, when you stated your intentions of uniting the occupied system into single unified control, there was, I remember, an influx of Martians. Goodwill missions, trade committees, experts who wanted to study the deserts, all sorts. The high frequency sonic field which causes an object to disappear in the time stream can be brought about by a pocket size device and a solar battery which is good for centuries. No doubt our Martian experts had suitcases with a small switch—click, a solar bomb had gone into the time stream. Other experts, no doubt, assembled powerful transmitters fitted with a tape recording and, of course, a time switch. A bomb comes out of the time stream and explodes, almost immediately after the transmitters appear, broadcast their message and vanish again into the time stream. That is why you can detect the transmitters but never find them. It is why you cannot find this bomb now.”
Adermaine shouted. “You are insane—lying. My men will find the bomb.” He punched a switch angrily. “Desert search division, Group Leader Stephens.”
The immense wall screen flickered suddenly and hardened into a clear picture. The three-dimensional picture was so perfect that they might have been looking from a large window.
A dusty group leader saluted smartly. “Excellency?”
“Have you found the bomb?”
“No, Excellency. As you see we are even using excavators but nothing has been found.”
Brent looked at the thousands of searching men, the circling bubble flyers, the long lines of parked air transport and the waiting troops. All those men were going to die unless he did something fast. He almost pushed past Adermaine so that he filled the screen.
“Withdraw all men and equipment a hundred miles, leave a telecamera on the site and another ten miles back, a third ten miles behind that and so on. Make it fast, you have forty minutes.” He turned quickly. “If I am lying, Excellency, I am here to be punished. If I am not lying, you will see the phenomena and save your best troops.”
Adermaine looked at him with angry suspicious eyes, then he nodded briefly. “Obey the order.”
“Yes, Excellency.” The group leader saluted again.
They waited. The sun glared from the sand and the heat shimmered and danced like smoke on the distant dunes.
When it came Brent’s nerves were almost at breaking point and there were angry red half-moons in his palms where his nails had been pressing.
There was a blurring about twenty feet from the camera, an indeterminate shimmering which gradually hardened into outline and solidity. They were looking at a suitcase, an old brown, medium sized suitcase, half buried in the sand. As they watched, blisters appeared on the sides, the brown turned to black and a greenish mist began to creep slowly upwards.
The picture began to blurr, lines wavered over the lens and the desert seemed to tumble sideways——
The picture cleared again as the second camera took over. Ten miles away a pillar of green mist began to assume a frightening brightness which turned the glaring sand to twilight. Dark shutters began to fall into place over the lens but still the brightness grew. Around the core of heat, white hot sand billowed upwards in a gigantic wave and rushed towards them, howling—
Brent turned. “You see, Excellency——”. He stopped.
Adermaine sat hunched in a chair staring sightlessly in front of him. He was sucking his fingers noisily and a trickle of froth ran down his chin. “Thuitcathe,” he lisped, “old thuitcathe.” He rolled slowly from the chair and onto the floor, slowly his body assumed the foetal position of an infant.
Earth curved below, a green blue sphere with a lacing of white frail cloud. A free Earth, marred only by two useless deserts which had been turned to slag.
Brent turned suddenly to Vian. “What about the other bombs?”
Vian looked puzzled. “What other bombs?”
“The ones you planted in our principal cities in case we sent a fleet?”
Vian laughed softly. “There were no other bombs, our campaign was based on psychological tensions not upon force. I gave you the clues, remember?”
Brent stared unseeingly at the polished metal above the recoil bunk and suddenly everything seemed to fall into place, the picture made sense. The Martian campaign had never been directed at Earth at all or even at causing an uprising. It had been directed at one man—Adermaine. With the dictator in power the regime would have held together, despite uprisings, their aim had been to remove the king-pin. The finest psychologists in the system had worked out a chart, correctly assessed the probable date of annexation and based their plans accordingly. Two solar bombs, some brief but effective propaganda and an energy pellet in a statue had raised public feeling to the correct tension but that tension had been directed at one man. The Martians had certainly produced the perfect time bomb, but the real bomb, the one the Martians had been working to trigger off had been in Adermaine’s mind.
The dictator believed implicitly in his divinity and while limitless power could solve his problems, he remained an outwardly sane and dangerous ruler. By using a solar bomb hidden in the time field the Martians had created conditions which no power on Earth could solve. No doubt in his last sane moments Adermaine had prayed for help, waited for the guidance which never came, the voices which remained mute.
Vian himself was probably a psychologist, giving just the right amount of information to the right people at the right time.
Bluntly the Martians had cooked up a situation and dumped it into the lap of the man who thought of himself as God. When ‘God’ found he couldn’t solve the problem his mind blew up. The Martians, using the dictator’s own mental tensions had applied pressure and cracked him like a nut.
“When we are three weeks out from Mars,” Vian was saying, “you will see a bright light in the centre of the planet. It is our sea—yes, we have a sea——”
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
Robert Sheckley
To commit the flawless crime, a it Barthold needed were centuries in which to plan and execute it—and an insurance policy with—
EVERETT Barthold didn’t take out a life insurance policy casually. First he read up on the subject, with special attention to Breach of Contract, Willful Deceit, Temporal Fraud, and Payment. He checked to find how closely insurance companies investigated before paying a claim. And he acquired a considerable degree of knowledge on Double Indemnity, a subject which interested him acutely.
When this preliminary work was done, he looked for an insurance company which would suit his needs. He decided, finally, upon the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation, with its main office in Hartford, Present Time. Inter-Temporal had branch offices in the New York of 1959; Rome, 1530; and Constantinople, 1126. Thus they offered full temporal coverage. This was important to Barthold’s plans.
Before applying for his policy, Barthold discussed the plan with his wife. Mavis Barthold was a thin, handsome, restless woman, with a cautious, contrary feline nature.
“It’ll never work,” she said at once.
“It’s foolproof,” Barthold told her firmly.
“They’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”
“Not a chance,” Barthold assured her. “It can’t miss—if you cooperate.”
“That would make me an accessory,” said his wife. “No, darling.”
“My dear, I seem to remember you expressing a desire for a coat of genuine Martian scart. I believe there are very few in existence.”
MRS. Barthold’s eyes glittered. Her husband, with canny accuracy, had hit her weak spot.
“And I thought,” Barthold said carelessly, “that you might derive some pleasure from a new Daimler hyper-jet, a Letti Det wardrobe, a string of matched ruumstones, a villa on the Venusian Riviera, a—”
“Enough, darling!” Mrs. Barthold gazed fondly upon her enterprising husband. She had long suspected that within his unprepossessing body beat a stout heart. Barthold was short, beginning to bald, his features ordinary, and his eyes were mild behind horn-rimmed glasses. But his spirit would have been perfectly at home in a pirate’s great-muscled frame.
“Then you’re sure it will work?” she asked him.
“Quite sure, if you do what I tell you and restrain your fine talent for overacting.”
“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Barthold, her mind fixed upon the glitter of ruumstones and the sensuous caress of scart fur.
Barthold made his final preparations. He went to a little shop where some things were advertised and other things sold. He left, several thousand dollars poorer, with a small brown suitcase tucked tightly under his arm. The money was untraceable. He had been saving it, in small bills, for several years. And the contents of the brown suitcase were equally untraceable.
He deposited the suitcase in a public storage box, drew a deep breath, and presented himself at the offices of the Inter-Temporal Insurance Corporation.
For half a day, the doctors poked and probed at him. He filled out the forms and was brought, at last, to the office of Mr. Gryns, the regional manager.
Gryns was a large, affable man. He read quickly through Barthold’s application, nodding to himself.
“Fine, fine,” he said. “Everything seems to be in order. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Barthold asked, his heart suddenly pounding.
“The question of additional coverage. Would you be interested in fire and theft? Liability? Accident and health? We insure against everything from a musket ball to such trivial but annoying afflictions as the very definitely common cold.”
“Oh,” said Barthold, his pulse rate subsiding to normal. “No, thank you. At present, I am concerned only with a life insurance policy. My business requires me to travel through time. I wish adequate protection for my wife.”
“Of course, sir, absolutely,” Gryns said. “Then I believe everything is in order. Do you understand the various conditions that apply to this policy?”
“I think I do,” replied Barthold, who had spent months studying the Inter-Temporal standard form.
“The policy runs for the life of the assured,” said Mr. Gryns. “And the duration of that life is measured only in subjective physiological time. The policy protects you over a distance of one thousand years on either side of the Present. But no further. The risks are too great.”
“I wouldn’t dream of going any further,” Barthold said.
“And the policy contains the usual double indemnity clause. Do you understand its function and conditions?”
“I believe so,” answered Barthold, who knew it word for word.
“All is in order, then. Sign right here. And here. Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you,” said Barthold. And he really meant it.
BARTHOLD returned to his office. He was sales manager for the Alpro Manufacturing Company (Toys for All the Ages). He announced his intention to leave at once on a sales tour of the Past.
“Our sales in time are simply not what they should be,” he said. “I’m going back there myself and take a personal hand in the selling.”
“Marvelous!” cried Mr. Carlisle, the president of Alpro. “I’ve been hoping for this for a long time, Everett.”
“I know you have, Mr. Carlisle. Well, sir, I came to the decision just recently. Go back there yourself, I decided, and find out what’s going on. Went out and made my preparations, and now I’m ready to leave.”
Mr. Carlisle patted him on the shoulder. “You’re the best salesman Alpro ever had, Everett. I’m very glad you decided to go.”
“I am, too, Mr. Carlisle.”
“Give ’em hell! And by the way—” Mr. Carlisle grinned slyly—”I’ve got an address in Kansas City, 1895, that you might be interested in. They just don’t build ’em that way any more. And in San Francisco, 1840, I know a—”
“No, thank you, sir,” Barthold said.
“Strictly business, eh, Everett?”
“Yes, sir,” Barthold said, with a virtuous smile. “Strictly business.”
Everything was in order now. Barthold went home and packed and gave his wife her last instructions.
“Remember,” he told her, “when the time comes, act surprised, but don’t simulate a nervous breakdown. Be confused, not psychotic.”
“I know,” she said. “Do you think I’m stupid or something?”
“No, dear. It’s just that you do have a tendency to wring every bit of emotion out of situations. Too little would be wrong. So would too much.”
“Honey,” said Mrs. Barthold in a very small voice.
“Yes?”
“Do you suppose I could buy one little ruumstone now? Just one to sort of keep me company until—”
“No! Do you want to give the whole thing away? Damn it all, Mavis—”
