Time Travel Omnibus, page 540
“Not really,” Waldemar admitted. “Present theory holds that time-travel works only one way—forward. So we haven’t been able to recover any of our test specimens and see how they reacted. Of course, they do vanish when the machine is turned on, so we know they must go somewhere.”
“Oh,” Al said weakly.
He was trussed in thoroughly. Experimental wriggling of his right wrist showed him that. But even if he could get loose, these weird little men would only freeze him and put him into the machine again.
His shoulders slumped resignedly. He wondered if anyone would miss him. The Friendly Finance Corporation certainly would. But since, in a sense, it was their fault he was in this mess now, he couldn’t get very upset about that. They could always sue his estate for the $300 he owed them, if his estate was worth that much.
Nobody else was going to mind the disappearance of Albert Miller from the space-time continuum, he thought dourly. His parents were dead, he hadn’t seen his one sister in fifteen years, and the girl he used to know in Topeka was married and at last report had three kids.
STILL and all, he liked 1959.
He wasn’t sure how he would take to the 25th century—or the 25th century to him.
“Ready for temporal discharge,” Mordecai sang out.
The chubby leader peered up at Al. “We’re sorry about all this, you understand. But nothing and nobody can be allowed to stand in the way of the Cause.”
“Sure,” Al said. “I understand.” The concrete-mixer part of the machine began to revolve, bearing Al with it as it built up tempo-kinetic potential. Momentum increased alarmingly. In the background, Al heard an ominous droning sound that grew louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else. His head reeled. The room and its fat little mutants went blurry. He heard a pop! like the sound of a breaking balloon.
It was the rupturing of the space-time continuum. Al Miller went hurtling forward along the fourspace track, head first. He shut his eyes and hoped for the best.
WHEN the dizziness stopped, he found himself sitting in the middle of an impeccably clean, faintly yielding roadway, staring up at the wheels of vehicles swishing by overhead at phenomenal speeds. After a moment or two more, he realized they were not airborne, but simply automobiles racing along an elevated roadway made of some practically invisible substance.
So the temporal centrifuge had worked!
Al glanced around. A crowd was collecting. A couple of hundred people had formed a big circle. They were pointing and muttering. Nobody approached closer than fifty or sixty feet.
They weren’t potbellied mutants. Without exception, they were all straight-backed six-footers with full heads of hair. The women were tall, too. Men and women alike were dressed in a sort of tuniclike garment made of iridescent material that constantly changed colors.
A gong began to ring, rapidly peaking in volume. Al scrambled to his feet and put on a tentative smile.
“My name’s Miller. I come from 1959. Would somebody mind telling me what year this is, and—”
He was drowned out by two hundred voices screaming in terror. The crowd stampeded away, dashing madly in every direction, as if he were some ferocious monster. The gong continued to clang loudly. Cars hummed overhead.
Al saw a squat, beetle-shaped black vehicle coming toward him on the otherwise empty road. The car pulled up half a block away, the top sprang open, and a figure clad in what might have been a driver’s suit—or a spacesuit—stepped out and advanced toward Al.
“Dozzinon murrifar volan,” the armored figure called out.
“No speak,” Al replied. “I’m a stranger here.”
To his dismay, he saw the other draw something shaped like a weapon and point it at him. Al’s hands shot immediately into the air. A globe of bluish light exuded from the broad nozzle of the gun, hung suspended for a moment, and drifted toward Al. He dodged uneasily to one side, but the globe of light followed him, descended, and wrapped itself around him.
It was like being on the inside of a soap-bubble. He could see out, though distortedly. He touched the curving side of the globe in a cautious way; it was resilient and springy to the touch, but his finger did not go through.
He noticed with some misgiving that his bubble-cage was starting to drift off the ground. It trailed a ropelike extension, which the man in the armored suit deftly grabbed and knotted to the rear bumper of his car. He drove quickly away—with Al, bobbing in his impenetrable bubble of light, tagging helplessly along like a captured Gaul being dragged through the streets of Rome behind a chariot—but several feet in the air.
He got used to the irregular motion after a while and relaxed enough to be able to study his surroundings. He was passing through a remarkably antiseptic-looking city, free from refuse and dust Towering buildings, all bright and spankingly new-looking, shot up everywhere. People goggled at him from the safety of the pedestrian walkways as he jounced past.
AFTER about ten minutes, the car halted outside an imposing building whose facade bore the words ISTFAQ BARNOLL. Three men in armored suits appeared from within to flank APs captor as a kind of honor guard. Al was borne within.
He was nudged gently into a small room on the ground floor. The door rolled shut behind him and seemed to join the rest of the wall; no division-line was apparent. A moment later, the balloon popped open, and just in time, too; the air had been getting quite stale inside it.
Al glanced around. A square window opened in the wall and three grim-faced men peered intently at him from an adjoining cubicle.
A voice from a speaker grid above APs head said, “Murrifar althrosk?”
“Al Miller, from the 20th century. And it wasn’t my idea to come here, believe me.”
“Durberal haznik? Quittimar?”
Al shrugged. “No parley-voo. Honest, I don’t savvy.”
His three interrogators conferred among themselves—taking what seemed to Al the needless precaution of switching off the mike to prevent him from overhearing their deliberations.
He saw one of the men leave the observation cubicle. When the man returned, some five minutes later, he brought with him a tall, gloomy-looking man wearing an impressive spade-shaped beard.
The mike was turned on again. Spadebeard said rumblingly, “How be thou hight?”
“Eh?”
“An thou reck the King’s tongue, I conjure thee speak!”
Al grinned. No doubt they had fetched an expert in dead languages to talk to him. “Right language, but the wrong time. I’m from the 20th century, not the tenth. Come forward a ways.”
Spadebeard paused to change mental gears. “A thousand pardons—I mean sorry. Wrong idiom. Dig me now?”
“I follow you. What year is this?”
“It is 2431. And from whence be you?”
“You don’t quite have it straight yet, but I’m from 1959.”
“And how came you hither?”
“I wish I knew,” Al said. “I was just trying to phone the loan company, see? Anyway, I got involved with these little fat guys who wanted to take over the world. Mutants, they said they were. And they decided they had to get rid of me, so they bundled me into their time machine and shot me forward. So I’m here.”
“A spy of the mutated ones, eh?”
“Spy? Who said anything about a spy? Talk about jumping to conclusions! I’m—”
“You have been sent by them to wreak mischief among us. No transparent story of yours will deceive us. You are not the first to come to our era, you know. And you will meet the same fate the others met.”
AL shook his head foggily. “Look here, you’re making a big mistake. I’m not a spy for anybody.
And I don’t want to get involved in any war between you and the mutants—”
“The war is over. The last of the mutated ones was exterminated 50 years ago.”
“Okay, then. What can you fear from me? Honest, I don’t want to cause any trouble. If the mutants are wiped out, how could my spying help them?”
“No action in time and space is ever absolute. In our fourspace, the mutants are eradicated—but they lurk elsewhere, waiting for their chance to enter and spread destruction.”
Al’s brain was swimming. “Let’s let that pass. I’m not a spy. I just want to be left alone. Let me settle down here somewhere—put me on probation, show me the ropes, stake me to a few credits, or whatever you use for money here. I won’t make any trouble.”
“Your body teems with microorganisms of diseases long extinct in this world. Only the fact that we were able to confine you in a force-bubble almost as soon as you arrived here saved us from a terrible epidemic of ancient diseases.”
“A couple of injections, that’s all, and you can kill any bacteria on or in me,” Al pleaded. “You’re advanced people. You ought to be able to do a simple thing like that.”
“And then there is the matter of your genetic structure,” Spadebeard continued inexorably. “You bear genes long since eliminated from humanity as undesirable. Permitting you to remain here, breeding furtively, would introduce unutterable confusion. Perhaps you carry latently the same mutant strain that cost humanity so many centuries of bloodshed!”
“No,” Al protested. “Look at me. I’m pretty tall, no potbelly, a full head of hair—”
“The gene is recessive. But it crops up unexpectedly.”
“I solemnly promise to control my breeding,” Al declared. “I won’t rim around scattering my genes all over your shiny new world. That’s a promise.”
“Your appeal is rejected,” came the inflexible reply.
Al shrugged. He knew when he was beaten. “Okay,” he said wearily. “I didn’t want to live in your damn century anyway. When’s the execution?”
“Execution?” Spadebeard looked stunned. “Dove’s whiskers, do you think we would—would actually—”
He couldn’t get the word out.
Al supplied it: “Put me to death?”
Spadebeard’s expression was sickly. He looked ready to retch. Al heard him mutter vehemently to his companions in the observation cubicle: “Gonnim def larrimog! Eg-far!”
“Murrifar althrosk,” suggested one of his companions.
Spadebeard, evidently reassured, nodded. He said to Al, “No doubt a barbarian like yourself would expect to be—to be made dead.” Gulping, he went gamely on. “We have no such vindictive intention.”
“Well, what are you going to do to me?”
“Send you across the timeline to a world where your friends, the mutated ones, reign supreme,” Spade-beard replied. “It’s the least we can do for you, spy.”
THE hidden door of his cell puckered open. Another armor-suited figure entered, pointing a gun, and discharged a blob of blue light that drifted toward Al and rapidly englobed him. He was drawn by the trailing end out into a corridor.
It hadn’t been a very sociable reception here in the 25th century, he thought as he was tugged along the hallway. In a way, he couldn’t blame them. A time-traveler from the past was bound to be laden down with all sorts of germs. They couldn’t risk letting him run around breathing at everybody. No wonder that crowd of onlookers had panicked when he had opened his mouth to speak to them.
The other business, though, that of his being a spy for the mutants—he couldn’t figure that out at all. If the mutants had been wiped out fifty years ago, why worry about spies now? At least his species had managed to defeat the underground organization of potbellied little men. That was comforting. He wished he could get back to 1959, if only to snap his fingers in their jowly faces and tell them that all their sinister scheming was going to come to nothing.
Where was he heading now? Spadebeard had said, Across the timeline to a world where the mutated ones reign supreme. Whatever across the timeline meant, Al thought.
He was ushered into an impressive laboratory room and, bubble and all, was thrust into the waiting clasps of something that looked depressingly like an electric chair. Brisk technicians bustled around, throwing switches and checking connections.
Al glanced in appeal at Spadebeard. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“It is very difficult to express in medieval terms,” the linguist said. “The device makes use of dollibar force to transmit you through an inverse dormin vector—do I make myself clear?”
“Not very,” Al confessed.
“Unhelpable. But you understand the concept of parallel continua at least, of course.”
“No.”
“Does it mean anything to you if I say that you’ll be shunted across the spokes of the time-wheel to a totality that is simultaneously parallel and tangent to our four-space?”
“That isn’t much better,” Al said resignedly, for all he was really getting was a headache. “You might as well start shunting me, I suppose.”
Spadebeard nodded and turned to a technician. “Vorstrar althrosk,” he commanded.
“Murrifar.”
The technician grabbed an immense toggle switch with both hands and groaningly dragged it shut. Al heard a brief whine of closing relays. Then darkness surrounded him.
ONCE again he found himself on a city street. But the pavement was cracked and buckled, and grassblades poked up through the neglected concrete.
A dry voice said, “All right, you. Don’t sprawl there like a ninny. Get up and come along.”
Al peered doubtfully up into the snout of a fair-sized pistol of enormous caliber. It was held by a short, fat, bald-headed man. Four identical companions stood near him with arms folded. They all looked very much like Mordecai, Waldemar, Giovanni, and the rest, except that these mutants were decked out in futuristic-looking costumes bright with flashy gold trim and rocketship insignia.
Al put up his hands. “Where am I?” he asked in confusion.
“Earth, of course. You’ve just come through a dimensional gateway from the continuum of the Normals. Come along, spy. Into the van.”
“But I’m not a spy,” Al mumbled without very much hope as the five little men bundled him into a blue and red car the size of a small yacht. “At least, I’m not spying on you. I mean—”
“Save the explanations for the Overlord,” was the curt instruction.
Al huddled miserably cramped between two vigilant mutants, while the others sat behind him. The van moved seemingly of its own volition, and at an enormous rate. A mutant power, Al thought. After a while he said, “Could you at least tell me what year this is?”
“Yes—2431,” snapped the mutant to his left.
“But that’s the same year it was over there.”
“Certainly. What else could it be?”
The question floored Al. He was silent for perhaps half a mile more. Since the van had no windows, he stared morosely at his feet.
Finally he asked, “How come you aren’t afraid of catching my germs then? Over back of—ah—the dimensional gateway, they kept me cooped up in a force-field all the time so I wouldn’t contaminate them. But you go right ahead breathing the same air I do.”
“Do you think we fear the germs of a Normal, spy?” sneered the mutant at Al’s right. “You forget that we’re a superior race.”
Al nodded. “Yes. I forgot about that.”
The van halted suddenly and the mutant police hustled Al out, past a crowd of peering little fat men and women, and into a colossal dome of a building whose exterior was covered completely with faceted green glass. The effect was one of massive ugliness.
They ushered him into a sort of throne room presided over by a mutant fatter than the rest. The policeman gripping Al’s right arm hissed, “Bow when you enter the presence of the Overlord.”
Al wasn’t minded to argue. He dropped to his knees along with the others. A booming voice from above rang out. “What have you brought me today?”
“A spy, Your Nobility.”
“Another? Rise, spy.”
Al rose. “Begging Your Nobility’s pardon, I’d like to put in a word or two on my own behalf—”
“Silence!” the Overlord roared. Al closed his mouth.
The mutant drew himself up to his full height, about five feet one, and said, “The Normals have sent you across the dimensional gulf to spy on us.”
“No, Your Nobility. They were afraid I’d spy on them, so they sent me over here. I’m from the year 1959, you see.” Briefly, he explained everything, beginning with the bollixed phone call and ending with his capture by the Overlord’s men a short while ago.
The Overlord looked skeptical. “It is well known that the Normals plan to cross the dimensional gulf from their phantom world to this, the real one, and invade our civilization. You’re but the latest of their advance scouts. Admit it!”
“No, Your Nobility, I’m not On the other side, they told me I was a spy from 1959, and now you say I’m a spy from the other dimension. But I tell you—”
“Enough!” the mutant leader thundered. “Take him away. Place him in custody. We shall decide his fate later!”
SOMEONE else already occupied the cell into which Al was thrust. He was a lanky, sad-faced Normal who slouched forward to shake hands once the door had clanged shut.
“Thurizad manifosk,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t speak that language,” said Al.
The other grinned. “I understand. All right: greetings. I’m Darren Phelp. Are you a spy too?”
“No, dammit!” Al snapped. Then: “Sorry. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. My name’s Al Miller. Are you a native of this place?”
“Me? Dove’s whiskers, what a sense of humor! Of course I’m not a native! You know as well as I do that there aren’t any Normals left in this fourspace continuum.”
“None at all?”
“Hasn’t been one born here in centuries,” Phelp said. “But you’re just joking, eh? You’re from Baileffod’s outfit, I suppose.”
“Who?”
“Baileffod. Baileffod! You mean you aren’t? Then you must be from higher up!” Phelp thrust his hands sideways in some kind of gesture of respect “Penguin’s paws, Excellency, I apologize. I should have seen at once—”
