Time Travel Omnibus, page 539
Arth was saying, “Where’s your hotel?”
That seemed like a good question. I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, “Haven’t got one. Town’s jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof. I don’t think we’ll ever make it, Arth. How many we got to go?”
“Lost track,” Arth said. “You can come home with me.”
We drank to that and the fog rolled in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight. I was sprawled, complete with clothes, on one of twin beds. On the other bed, also completely clothed, was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled up from the bed, staggered to the window and fumbled around for a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror, “Who . . . how . . . oh, Wodo, where’d you come from?”
I got a quick impression, looking out the window, that the Germans were certainly the most modern, futuristic people in the world. But I couldn’t stand the light. “Where’s the shade,” I moaned.
Arth did something and the window went opaque.
“That’s quite a gadget,” I groaned. “If I didn’t feel so lousy, I’d appreciate it.”
Arth was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his bald head in his hands. “I remember now,” he sorrowed. “You didn’t have a hotel. What a stupidity. I’ll be phased. Phased all the way down.”
“You haven’t got a handful of aspirin, have you?” I asked him.
“Just a minute,” Arth said, staggering erect and heading for what undoubtedly was a bathroom. “Stay where you are. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything.”
“All right,” I told him plaintively. “I’m clean. I won’t mess up the place. All I’ve got is a hangover, not lice.”
Arth was gone. He came back in two or three minutes, box of pills in hand. “Here, take one of these.”
I took the pill, followed it with a glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. “Want another mass?”
The band was blaring, and five thousand half-swacked voices were roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G’sufa!
At the G’sufa everybody upped with their king-size mugs and drank each other’s health.
My head was killing me. “This is where I came in, or something,” I groaned.
Arth said, “That was last night.” He looked at me over the rim of his beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was wrong. But I didn’t care. I finished my mass and then remembered. “I’ve got to get my bag. Oh, my head. Where did we spend last night?”
Arth said, and his voice sounded cautious, “At my hotel, don’t you remember?”
“Not very well,” I admitted. “I feel lousy. I must have dimmed out. I’ve got to go to the Bahnhof and get my luggage.”
Arth didn’t put up an argument on that. We said good-by and I could feel him watching after me as I pushed through the tables on the way out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me no good. There were no hotel rooms available in Munich. The head was getting worse by the minute. The fact that they’d somehow managed to lose my bag didn’t help. I worked on that project for at least a couple of hours. Not only wasn’t the bag at the luggage checking station, but the attendant there evidently couldn’t make heads nor tails of the check receipt. He didn’t speak English and my high school German was inadequate, especially accompanied by a blockbusting hangover.
I didn’t get anywhere tearing my hair and complaining from one end of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse by the minute. I was bleeding to death through the eyes and instead of butterflies I had bats in my stomach. Believe me, nobody should drink a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took a cab to the airport, presented my return ticket, told them I wanted to leave on the first obtainable plane to New York. I’d spent two days at the Oktoberfest, and I’d had it.
I got more guff there. Something was wrong with the ticket, wrong date or some such. But they fixed that up. I never was clear on what was fouled up, some clerk’s error, evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting as the one over. As the hangover began to wear off—a little—I was almost sorry I hadn’t been able to stay. If I’d only been able to get a room I would have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to the office rather than going to my apartment. I figured I might as well check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair he had been occupying four—or was it five—days before when I’d left. I’d lost track of the time.
I said to him, “Glad you’re here, sir. I can report. Ah, what was it you came for? Impatient to hear if I’d had any results?” My mind was spinning like a whirling dervish in a revolving door. I’d spent a wad of his money and had nothing I could think of to show for it; nothing but the last stages of a grand-daddy hangover.
“Came for?” Mr. Oyster snorted. “I’m merely waiting for your girl to make out my receipt. I thought you had already left.”
“You’ll miss your plane,” Betty said.
There was suddenly a double dip of ice cream in my stomach. I walked over to my desk and looked down at the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something to the effect that if I didn’t leave today, it would have to be tomorrow, that he hadn’t ponied up that thousand dollars advance for anything less than immediate service. Stuffing his receipt in his wallet, he fussed his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, “I suppose you haven’t changed this calendar since I left.”
Betty said, “What’s the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in.” She added, irrelevantly, “Time travelers yet.”
I tried just once more. “Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?”
“Never saw him before in my life,” she said. “Not until he came in this morning.”
“This morning,” I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, “Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door—on the way to the airport?”
“You’ve been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back.”
——
“See here,” Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon’s story), “did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don’t find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.”
Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, “That’s only the first chapter. There are two more.”
“I’m not interested in more,” Mr. Oyster said. “I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you’ve done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!”
He slammed the door after him as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. “Week’s wages,” she said. “I suppose that’s one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I’m surprised you didn’t take his money and enjoy that vacation you’ve been yearning about.”
“I did,” Simon groaned. “Three times.”
Betty stared at him. “You mean—”
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, “But Simon. Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been—”
“I keep telling you,” Simon said bitterly, “I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, we’re just going to have to forget about it. They’re not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start—for you—all over again. They just can’t allow anything to come back from the future and change the past.”
“You mean,” Betty was suddenly furious at him, “you’ve given up! Why this is the biggest thing—Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!”
Simon said wearily, “There’s just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What’s more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!”
He shuddered. “If you think I’m going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I’m already nursing, all at once, you can think again.”
THE END
MUGWUMP FOUR
Robert Silverberg
Send not to know for whom the telephone rings—it’ll send for you if the number you so innocently dial happens to be . . .
AL Miller was only trying to phone the Friendly Finance Corporation to ask about an extension on his loan. It was a Murray Hill number, and he had dialed as far as MU-4 when the receiver clicked queerly and a voice said, “Come in, Operator Nine. Operator Nine, do you read me?”
Al frowned. “I didn’t want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if—”
“Just a minute. Who are you?”
“I ought to ask you that,” Al said. “What are you doing on the other end, anyway? I hadn’t even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-4 and—”
“Well? You dialed MUgwump 4 and you got us. What more do you want?” A suspicious pause. “Say, you aren’t Operator Nine!”
“No, I’m not Operator Nine, and I’m trying to dial a Murray Hill number, and how about getting off the line?”
“Hold it, friend. Are you a Normal?”
Al blinked. “Yeah—yeah, I like to think so.”
“So how’d you know the number?”
“Dammit, I didn’t know the number! I was trying to call someone, and all of a sudden the phone cut out and I got you, whoever the blazes you are.”
“I’m the communications warden at MUgwump 4,” the other said crisply. “And you’re a suspicious individual. We’ll have to investigate you.”
The telephone emitted a sudden burping sound. Al felt as if his feet had grown roots. He could not move at all. It was awkward to be standing there at his own telephone in the privacy of his own room, as unbending as a steel girder. Time still moved, he saw. The hand on the big clock above the phone had just shifted from 3:30 to 3:31.
Sweat rivered down his back as he struggled to put down the phone. He fought to lift his left foot. He strained to twitch his right eyelid. No go on all counts; he was frozen, all but his chest muscles—thank goodness for that.
SEVERAL minutes later, matters became even more awkward when his front door, which had been locked, opened abruptly. Three strangers entered. They looked oddly alike: a trio of Tweedledums, no more than five feet high, wide through the waist, jowly of face and balding of head, each wearing an inadequate single-breasted blue serge suit.
Al discovered he could roll his eyes. He rolled them. He wanted to apologize because his unexpected paralysis kept him from acting the proper part of a host, but his tongue would not obey. And on second thought, it occurred to him that the little bald men might be connected in some way with that paralysis.
The reddest-faced of the three little men hung up the telephone and the stasis ended. Al nearly folded up as the tension that gripped him broke. He said, “Just who the deuce—”
“We will ask the questions. You are Al Miller?”
Al nodded.
“And obviously you are a Normal. So there has been a grave error. Mordecai, examine the telephone.”
The second little man picked up the phone and calmly disemboweled it with three involved motions of his stubby hands. He frowned over the telephone’s innards for a moment; then, humming tunelessly, he produced a wire-clipper and severed the telephone cord.
“Hold on here!” Al burst out. “You can’t just rip out my phone like that! You aren’t from the phone company!”
“Quiet,” said the spokesman nastily. “Well, Mordecai?”
The second little man said, “Probability 1 to 1,000,000. The cranch interval overlapped and his telephone matrix slipped. His call was piped into our wire by error, Waldemar.”
“So he isn’t a spy?” Waldemar asked.
“Doubtful. As you see, he’s of rudimentary intelligence. His dialing our number was a statistical fluke.”
“But now he knows about us,” said the third little man in a surprisingly deep voice. “I vote for demolecularization.”
The other two whirled on their companion. “Always bloodthirsty, eh, Giovanni?” said Mordecai. “You’d violate the code at the snap of a meson.”
“There won’t be any demolecularization while I’m in charge,” added Waldemar.
“What do we do with him then?” Giovanni demanded.
Mordecai said, “Freeze him and take him down to Headquarters. He’s their problem.”
“I think this has gone about as far as it’s going to go,” Al exploded at last. “However you three creeps got in here, you’d better get yourselves right out again, or—”
“Enough,” Waldemar said.
Al felt his jaws stiffen. He realized bewilderedly that he was frozen again. And frozen, this time, with his mouth gaping foolishly open.
THE trip took about five minutes, and so far as Al was concerned, it was one long blur. At the end of the journey, the blur lifted for an instant, long enough to give Al one good glimpse of his surroundings—a residential street in what might have been Brooklyn or Queens (or Cincinnati or Detroit, he thought morbidly)—before he was hustled into the basement of a two-family house. He found himself in a windowless, brightly lit chamber cluttered with complexlooking machinery and with a dozen or so alarmingly identical little bald-headed men. Not until then did his paralysis lift.
The chubbiest of the bunch glared sourly at him and asked, “Are you a spy?”
“I’m just an innocent bystander,” Al said earnestly. “I picked up my phone and started to dial, and all of a sudden some guy asked me if I was Operator Nine. Honest, that’s all.”
“Overlapping of the cranch interval,” muttered Mordecai. “Slipped matrix.”
“Umm. Unfortunate,” the chubby one commented. “We’ll have to dispose of him.”
“Demolecularization is the best way,” Giovanni put in immediately.
“Dispose of him humanely, I mean. It’s revolting to think of taking the life of an inferior being. But he simply can’t remain in this fourspace any longer, not if he knows.”
“But I don’t know!” Al protested. “I couldn’t be any more mixed up if I tried! Won’t you please tell me—”
“Very well,” said the pudgiest one, who seemed to be the leader. “Waldemar, tell him about us.”
Waldemar said, “You’re now in the local headquarters of a secret mutant group working for the overthrow of humanity as you know it. By some accident, you happened to dial our private communication exchange, MUtant 4—”
“I thought it was MUgwump 4,” Al interjected.
“The code name, naturally,” said Waldemar. “To continue: you channeled into our communication network. You now know too much. Your presence in this space-time nexus jeopardizes the success of our entire movement. Therefore we are forced—”
“—to demolecularize—” Giovanni began.
“—to dispose of you,” Waldemar continued sternly. “We’re humane beings—most of us—and we won’t do anything that would make you suffer. But you can’t stay in this area of space-time, can you?”
Al shook his head dimly. These little potbellied men were mutants working for the overthrow of humanity? Well, he had no reason to think they were lying to him. The world was full of little potbellied men. Maybe they were all part of the secret organization.
“Look,” he said, “I didn’t want to dial your number. It was all a silly accident. But I’m a fair guy. Let me get out of here and I’ll keep mum about the whole thing. You can go ahead and overthrow humanity, if that’s what you want to do. I promise not to interfere in any way. If you’re mutants, you ought to be able to look into my mind and see that I’m sincere—”
“We have no telepathic powers,” declared the chubby leader curtly. “If we had, there would be no need for a communications network in the first place. In the second place, your sincerity is not the issue. We have enemies. If you were to fall into their hands—”
“I won’t say a word! Even if they torture me—brainwash me—I swear I’ll keep quiet!”
“No. At this stage in our campaign, we can take no risks. You’ll have to go. Prepare the temporal centrifuge, Mordecai.”
FOUR of the little men, led by Mordecai, unveiled a complicated-looking device of the general size and shape of a concrete mixer. Waldemar and Giovanni shoved Al toward the machine. It came rapidly to life: dials glowed, indicator needles teetered, loud buzzes and clicks implied readiness.
Al said nervously, “What are you going to do to me?”
“This machine will hurl you forward in time,” Waldemar explained. “Too bad we have to rip you right out of your temporal matrix, but we’ve no choice. You’ll be well taken care of up ahead, though. No doubt, by the 25th century, our kind will have taken over completely. You’ll be the last of the Normals. Practically a living fossil. You’ll love it. You’ll be a walking museum piece.”
“Assuming the machine works,” Giovanni put in maliciously. “We don’t really know if it does, you see.”
Al gaped. They were busily strapping him to a cold copper slab in the heart of the machine. “You don’t even know if it works?”
