Time Travel Omnibus, page 541
“No, I’m not from your organization at all,” Al said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Word of honor.”
Phelp smiled cunningly. “Of course, Excellency! I understand completely.”
“Cut that out! Why doesn’t anyone ever believe me? I’m not from Baileffod and I’m not from higher up. I come from 1959. Do you hear me—1959? And that’s the truth.”
Phelp’s eyes went wide. “From the past?”
Al nodded. “I stumbled into the mutants in 1959 and they shipped me five centuries ahead to get rid of me. Only when I arrived, I wasn’t welcome, so I was shipped across the dimensional whatzis to here. Everyone thinks I’m a spy, wherever I go. What are you doing here?”
Phelp smiled. “Why, I am a spy.”
“From 2431?”
“Naturally. We have to keep tabs on the mutants somehow. I came through the gateway wearing an invisibility shield, but it popped an ultrone and I vizzed out. They jugged me last month and I suppose I’m stuck in this place for keeps.”
AL rubbed thumbs tiredly against his eyeballs. “Wait a minute how come you speak my language? On the other side, they had to get hold of a linguistics expert to talk to me.”
“All spies are trained to talk English,” said Phelp. “That’s the language the mutants speak here. In the real world, we speak Vorkish, naturally. It’s the language developed by Normals for communication during the Mutant Wars. Your ‘linguistics expert was probably one of our top spies.”
“And over here the mutants have won?”
“Completely. Three hundred years ago, in this continuum, the mutants developed a two-way time machine that enabled them to go back and forth, eliminating Normal leaders before they were born. Whereas in our world, the real world, two-way time travel is impossible. That’s where the continuum split begins. We Normals fought a grim war of extermination against the mutants in our fourspace and finally wiped them out, despite their superior powers, in 2390. Clear?”
“More or less.” Rather less than more, Al added privately. “So there are only mutants in this world, and there are only Normals in your world.”
“Exactly!”
“And you’re a spy from the other side.”
“You’ve got it now! You see, even though, strictly speaking, this world is only a phantom, it’s got some pretty real characteristics. For instance, if the mutants killed you here, you’d be dead. Permanently. So there’s a lot of rivalry across the gateway; the mutants are always scheming to invade us, and vice versa. Confidentially, I don’t think anything will ever come of all the scheming.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah,” Phelp said. “The way things stand now, each side has a perfectly good enemy just beyond reach. But actually going to war would be messy, while relaxing our guard and allowing peace to break out would foul up our economy. So we keep sending spies back and forth, and prepare for war. It’s a nice system, except when you happen to get yourself caught, like me.”
“What’ll happen to you?”
Phelp shrugged. “They may let me rot here for a few decades. Or they might decide to condition me and send me back as a spy for them. Tiger tails, who could know?”
“Would you change sides like that?”
“I wouldn’t have any choice—not after I was conditioned,” Phelp said. “But I don’t worry much about it. It’s a risk I knew about when I signed on for spy duty.”
Al shuddered. It was beyond him how someone could voluntarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutant-battling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum, he philosophically decided.
HALF an hour later, three rotund mutant police came to fetch him. They marched him downstairs and into a bare, ugly little room where a battery of interrogators quizzed him for better than an hour. He stuck to his story, throughout everything, until at last they indicated they were through with him.
He spent the next two hours in a drafty cell, by himself, until finally a gaudily robed mutant unlocked the door and said, “The Overlord commands you to present yourself.”
The Overlord looked worried. He leaned forward on his throne, fist digging into his fleshy chin. In his booming voice—Al realized at last that it was artificially amplified—the Overlord rumbled, “Miller, you’re a problem.”
“I’m sorry, Your Nobil—”
“Quiet! I’ll do the talking.”
Al did not reply.
The Overlord went on, “We’ve checked your story inside and out, and confirmed it with one of our spies on the other side of the gate. You really are from 1959, or thereabouts. What can we do with you? Generally speaking, when we catch a Normal snooping around here, we psycho-condition him and send him back across the gateway to spy for us. But we can’t do that to you, because you don’t belong on the other side, and they’ve already tossed you out once. On the other hand, we can’t keep you here, maintaining you forever at state expense. And it wouldn’t be civilized to kill you, would it?”
“No, Your Nobil—”
“Silence!”
Al gulped.
The Overlord glowered at him and continued thinking out loud. “I suppose we could perform experiments on you, though. You must be a walking laboratory of Normal microorganisms that we could synthesize and fire through the gateway when we invade their fourspace. Yes, by the Grome, then you’d be useful to our cause! Zechariah?”
“Yes, Nobility?” A ribbon-bedecked guardsman snapped to attention.
“Take this Normal to the biological laboratories for examination. I’ll have further instructions as soon as—”
Al heard a peculiar whanging noise from the back of the throne room. The Overlord appeared to freeze on his throne. Turning, Al saw a band of determined-looking Normals come bursting in, led by Darren Phelp.
“There you are!” Phelp cried. “I’ve been looking all over for you!” He was waving a peculiar needle-nozzled gun.
“What’s going on?” Al gasped.
Phelp grinned. “The invasion! It came, after all! Our troops are pouring through the gateway armed with these freezer guns. They immobilize any mutant who gets in the way of the field.”
“When—when did all this happen?”
“It started two hours ago. We’ve captured the entire city! Come on, will you? Whiskers, there’s no time to waste!”
“Where in blazes am I supposed to go?”
Phelp smiled. “To the nearest dimensional lab, of course. We’re going to send you back to your own time.”
A DOZEN triumphant Normals stood in a tense knot around Al in the laboratory. From outside came the sound of jubilant singing. The invasion was a howling success.
As Phelp had explained it, the victory was due to the recent invention of a kind of time-barrier projector. The projector had cut off all contact between the mutant world and its own future, preventing time-traveling mutant scouts from getting back to 2431 with news of the invasion. With two-way travel, the great mutant advantage, thus nullified, the success of the surprise attack was made possible—and easy.
Al listened to this explanation with minimal interest. He barely understood every third word, and, in any event, his main concern was in getting home.
He was strapped into a streamlined and much modified version of the temporal centrifuge that had originally hurled him forward into 2431.
Phelps explained things to him. “You see here, we set the machine for 1959. What day was it when you left? And how close can you get to the moment?”
“Ah—October 10. It was exactly 3:30 in the afternoon.”
“Make the setting, Frozz.” Phelp nodded. “You’ll be shunted back along the time-line. Of course, you’ll land in this continuum, since in our world there’s no such thing as pastward time travel. But once you reach your own time, all you do is activate this small transdimensional generator, and you’ll be hurled across safe and sound into the very day you left, in your own fourspace.”
“You can’t know how much I appreciate all this,” Al said very warmly.
He felt a pleasant glow of love for all mankind, for the first time since his unhappy phone call. At last someone was taking sympathetic interest in his plight. At last he was on his way home, back to the relative sanity of 1959, where he could start forgetting this entire nightmarish jaunt. Mutants and Normals and spies and time machines . . .
“You’d better get going,” Phelp said. “We have to get the occupation under way here.”
“Sure,” Al agreed. “Don’t let me hold you up. I can’t wait to get going—no offense intended.”
“And remember, soon as your surroundings look familiar, jab the activator button on this generator. Otherwise you’ll slither into an interspace where we couldn’t answer for the consequences.”
Al nodded tensely. “I won’t forget.”
“I hope not. Ready?”
“Ready.”
Someone threw a switch. Al began to spin. He heard the popping sound that was the rupturing of the temporal matrix. Like a cork shot from a champagne bottle, Al arched out backward through time, heading for 1959.
HE woke in his own room on 23rd Street. His head hurt. His mind was full of phrases like temporal centrifuge and transdimensional generator.
He picked himself off the floor and rubbed his head.
Wow, he thought. It must have been a sudden fainting spell. And now his head was crowded with nonsense.
Going to the sideboard, he pulled out the half-empty bourbon bottle and measured off a few fingers’ worth.
After the drink, his nerves felt steadier. His mind was still cluttered with inexplicable thoughts and images. Sinister little fat men and complex machines, transparent roadways in the air and men in fancy tunics.
A bad dream, he thought.
Then he remembered. It wasn’t any dream. He had actually taken the round trip into 2431, returning by way of some other continuum.
He had pressed the generator button at the proper time, and now here he was, safe and sound. No longer the football of a bunch of different factions. Home in his own snug little fourspace, or whatever it was.
He frowned. He recalled that Mordecai had severed the telephone wire. But the phone looked intact now. Maybe it had been fixed while he was gone. He picked it up. Unless he got that loan extension today, he was cooked.
There was no need for him to look up the number of the Friendly Finance Corporation; he knew it all too well. He began to dial. MUrray Hill 4—
The receiver clicked queerly. A voice said, “Come in, Operator Nine. Operator Nine, do you read me?”
Al’s jaw sagged. This is where I came in, he thought wildly. He struggled to put down the phone. But his muscles would not respond. It would be easier to bend the sun in its orbit than to break the path of the continuum. He heard his own voice say, “I didn’t want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if—”
“Just a minute. Who are you?” Al fought to break the contact. But he was hemmed away in a small corner of his mind while his voice went on, “I ought to ask you that. 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!” Inwardly, Al wanted to scream. No scream would come. In this continuum, the past (his future) was immutable. He was caught on the track, and there was no escape. None whatever. And, he realized in frozen horror, there never would be.
“I LOVE GALESBURG IN THE SPRINGTIME”
Jack Finney
“. . . and in the summer when it sizzles, and in the fall, and in the winter when the snow lies along the black branches of the trees that line its streets!”
—Lines tapped out on his typewriter, when he should have been writing up the Soangetaha Country Club dance) by Oscar Mannheim, Galesburg, Illinois, Register-Mail reporter.
I didn’t make the mistake—he’d have thrown me down the elevator shaft—of trying to see E. V. Marsh in his room at the Custer. I waited in the lobby, watching the coffeeshop, till he’d finished breakfast and was sipping his second cup of coffee before I braced him, walking up to his table smiling my lopsided, ingratiating, Jimmy Stewart smile.
When he learned I was from the paper he tried to fend me off. “I’ve got nothing for you,” he said, shaking his head. He was a heavy man in his fifties, with straight thinning hair. “There’s no story. There just won’t be any factory of mine in Galesburg, that’s all. I’m leaving this town on the first train I can get.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said untruthfully, and dragged up a chair from an adjacent table. Straddling it, I sat down facing Marsh across the chair back, chin on my folded arms. “But that’s not why I’m here,” I added softly, and waited. I’m a tall, bone-thin man; my pants legs flop like sails when I walk. I have a bony face, too, more or less permanently tanned, and straight Indian-black hair; and I’m still young, I guess. People generally like me all right.
But Marsh was mad now, his face reddening, his jaw muscles working; he knew what I meant. I glanced quickly around the room; it was still early and there were only a few people here. We were at a corner table looking out on Kellogg Street; no one was near us.
Leaning closer to Marsh’s table, my chair legs tilting forward, I said, “I’d rather get the story from you as it really happened than try to piece it together from a lot of half-true rumors floating around town.”
He glared. Then he leaned toward me, voice quiet but furious. “I wasn’t drunk. I can tell you that!”
“I’m sure you weren’t. Tell me about it.” And because I’m a reporter, he did.
He sighed a little, going through the motions of reluctance, but actually—and this is usually true—he was glad to talk now that he had to or thought he did. Ilene brought over the coffee I’d ordered when I walked into the room and I picked up my cup and tasted it; the coffee’s good at the Custer. Then I dropped my chin to my folded arms, feeling alive and eager, anxious to listen. Because the only reason I was here, the only reason I’m a reporter at all, was simple curiosity. Haven’t you ever wished it were somehow possible to cross-examine an absolute stranger about something none of your business but damned interesting all the same? Well, think it over—if you’re a reporter, you can. There’s no law says it has to be printed.
“I had two drinks before dinner,” Marsh said. “We all did. We ate up in my suite—the property owner, a Chamber of Commerce man, an attorney from the city, and a couple of councilmen. If you want a list of their names, ask them for it. After dinner most of us had a brandy. But we sat at the table from seven till ten and whatever drinks I had were spread over a considerable time; I wasn’t drunk or even close.” Marsh shrugged impatiently. “We worked things out—the price of the factory site, option terms, the probable contractor. Both councilmen and the attorney assured me there’d be no trouble about changing zoning restrictions, if necessary, or running my trucks down Broad Street to the Santa Fe depot. All friendly and pleasant.” Marsh took a cigar from the breast pocket of his suit coat and offered it. I shook my head and he began pulling off the cellophane wrapper. “But I like to sleep on a deal of any importance and told them I’d think it over. They left about ten and I took a walk.”
Marsh stuck the unlighted cigar in his mouth, bulging one cheek out, and leaned toward me. “I always do that,” he said angrily. “I take a walk and go over the facts in my mind; then home to bed, and when I wake up in the morning I usually know what I want to do. So I left the hotel here, walked up Kellogg to Main Street, then over to the Public Square, and when I came to Broad Street I turned up it. Not because the proposed factory site was on Broad; it’s way out near the city limits, a dozen blocks or more, and I wasn’t planning to walk that. Besides I’d been all over the site that day and I couldn’t have seen anything in the dark anyway. But Broad was as good a street as any other to walk along.” Marsh brought out matches, prepared to strike one, then sat staring at the tabletop instead. “At that, I walked a lot farther than I meant to. Pleasant street.” He struck his match and looked up at me for comment, sucking the flame onto the cigar end.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, nodding. “All those streets—Broad, Cherry, Prairie, Kellogg, Seminary, and all the others—are beautiful,” and I was remembering the day my father, mother, sister, and I got off the train from Chicago at the Q depot. We rode through Galesburg then, in a taxi, to the house my father had bought on Broad Street. The driver took us up Seminary first, from the depot, then along Kellogg, Prairie, and Cherry—a few blocks on each street—before turning onto Broad. I was six and as we rode something in me was responding to the town around us, and I began falling in love with Galesburg even before we reached our house. It happened completely, love at first sight, just north of Main Street when I first saw the thick old trees that line the streets of Galesburg, arching and meeting high overhead as far as I could see. We moved along under those new-leaved trees and the first warm-weather insects were sounding and the street was dappled with shade and sun, the pattern of it stirring as the trees moved in the late spring air. Then I heard our tires humming with a ripply sound that was new to me, and saw that the street was paved with brick. I guess that’s not done any more; nowadays, it’s concrete or asphalt, never brick.
But a great many Galesburg streets are still brick-paved, and some of the curbing is still quarried stone. And in the grassways beside those brick-paved streets there still remain stone curbside steps for entering or leaving carriages. Near them—not added for quaintness’ sake, but remaining from the days when they were put there for use—is an occasional stone or cast-iron hitching post. Back past the grassways and the sidewalks (of brick, too, often), and beyond the deep front lawns, rise the fine old houses. Many are wood, often painted white; some are brick or time-darkened stone; but—there along Cherry, Broad, Prairie, Academy, and the other old streets—they have the half comically ugly, half charming look, made of spaciousness, dignity, foolishness, and conspicuous waste, that belongs to another time.
