Time Travel Omnibus, page 546
She didn’t seem particularly surprised. “Do you really want me to?”
“I’ll say! Just as soon as I get a job and——”
“Kiss me, Roger.”
He didn’t get back to the subject till they were standing on her apartment-house steps.
“Why, of course I’ll marry you, Roger,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll take a drive into the country and make plans.”
“Fine! I’ll rent a car, and we’ll take a lunch and——”
“Never mind a lunch. Just pick me up at two.” She kissed him so hard that his toes turned up. “Good night, Roger.”
“See you tomorrow at two,” he said when his breath came back.
“Maybe I’ll ask you in for a cocktail.”
His feet never touched the ground once all the way back to the hotel. He came back down to earth with a jar, though, when he read the letter the night clerk handed him. The wording was different from that of the five others he had received in answer to his five other applications, but the essential message was the same: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
He went upstairs sadly and undressed and got into bed. After five failures in a row he should have known better than to tell the sixth interviewer about his poetic analysis of science. Modem industrial corporations wanted men with hard unadorned facts in their heads, not frustrated poets seeking symmetry in the microcosm. But, as usual, his enthusiasm had carried him away.
It was a long time before he fell asleep. When he finally did so he dreamed a long and involved dream about a girl in an Alice-blue gown, a wolf in a Brooks Brothers suit and a siren in a black sheath.
True to her word, Alayne of Altair was sitting on the bench when he came down the walk the next morning. “Hi, Rog,” she said brightly.
He sat glumly down beside her. “How was Ashley’s first edition?”
“I didn’t see it yet. Last night after we had dinner I was so tired I told him to take me straight home. He’s going to show it to me tonight. We’re going to dine by candlelight in his apartment.” She hesitated for a moment—then, with a rush: “She’s not the one for you, Rog. Becky, I mean.”
He sat up straight on the bench. “What makes you think so?”
“I—I tracked you last night on my fleglinder. It’s a little TV receiver that you beam in on whoever you want to see and hear. Last—last night I beamed it in on you and Becky.”
“You followed us, you mean! Why, you snooping little——”
“Please don’t get mad at me, Roger. I was worried about you. Oh, Rog, you’ve fallen into the clutches of a witch-woman from Muggenwort!”
It was too much. He stood up to leave, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him back down again.
“Now you listen to me, Rog,” she went on. “This is serious. I don’t know what she told you about me, but whatever it was, it’s a lie. Girls from Muggenwort are mean and cruel and crafty and will do anything to further their evil ends. They come to Earth in spaceships just as we girls from Buzenborg do—only their spaceships are big enough to hold five people instead of only two—then they take an assumed name, get a job where they’ll come into contact with lots of men and start filling their quota of four husbands——”
“Are you sitting there in broad daylight trying to tell me that the girl I—I’m going to marry is a witch from Muggenwort who came to Earth to collect four husbands?”
“Yes—to collect them and take them back to Muggenwort with her. You see, Muggenwort is a small matriarchal province near the Altair VI equator, and their mating customs are as different from ours as they are from yours. All Muggenwort women have to have four husbands in order to be accepted into Muggenwort society, and as there are no longer enough men in Muggenwort to go around, they have to travel to other planets to get them. But that’s not the worst of it. After they capture them and bring them back to Muggenwort, they put them to work twelve hours a day in the kritch fields while they lie around all day in their air-conditioned barkenwood huts chewing rutenstuga nuts and watching TV!”
Roger was more amused than angry now. “And how about the husbands? I suppose they take to all this docilely and don’t mind in the least sharing their wife with three other men!”
“But you don’t understand!” Alayne of Altair was becoming more agitated by the second. “The husbands have no choice. They’re bewitched—the same way Becky is bewitching you. Do you think it was your idea to ask her to marry you? Well, it wasn’t! It was her idea, planted in your mind by hypnosis. Didn’t you notice those gleaming gray eyes of hers? She’s a witch, Roger, and once she gets you completely in her clutches you will be her slave for life, and she must be pretty sure of you already or she wouldn’t be taking you out to her spaceship this afternoon!”
“What about her other three husbands-to-be? Are they going to accompany us on our drive into the country?”
“Of course not. They’re already in the ship, hopelessly bewitched, waiting for her. Didn’t you notice the three anklets on her leg? Well, each of them stands for a man she has conquered. It’s an old Muggenwort custom. Probably today she is wearing four. Didn’t you ever wonder what happens to all the men who disappear from the face of the Earth each year, Roger?”
“No, I never did,” Roger said. “But there is one thing I’m wondering about. Why did you come to Earth?”
Alayne of Altair’s bluebird eyes dropped to his chin. “I—I was coming to that,” she said. “You see, in Buzenborg, girls chase boys instead of boys chasing girls.”
“That seems to be a standard operating procedure on Altair VI.”
“That’s because the man shortage isn’t confined to Muggenwort alone but encompasses the whole planet. When push-button-type spaceships became available, Buzenborg as well as Muggenwort girls began renting them and traveling to other planets in search of husbands, and Buzenborg as well as Muggenwort girls schools started teaching alien languages and customs. The information was easily available because the Altair VI world government has been sending secret anthropological expeditions to Earth, and planets like it, for years, so that we will be ready to make contact with you when you finally lick space travel and qualify for membership in the League of Super Planets.”
“What’s the Buzenborg husband quota?” Roger asked acidly.
“One. That’s why we Buzenborg girls wear wodgets. We’re not like those witches from Muggenwort. They don’t care whom they get, just so they have strong backs; but we girls from Buzenborg do. Anyway, when my wodget registered ninety, I knew that you and I were ideally suited for each other, and that’s why I struck up a conversation with you. I—I didn’t know at the time that you were half bewitched.”
“Suppose your wodget had been right. What then?”
“Why, I’d have taken you back to Buzenborg with me, of course. Oh, you’d have loved it there, Rog,” she rushed on. “Our industrial corporations would be crazy about your poetic analysis of science, and you could have got a swell job, and my folks would have built us a house and we could have settled down and raised—and—raised—” Her voice grew sad. “But I guess I’ll have to settle for Ashley instead. He only registers sixty on my wodget, but sixty is better than nothing.”
“Are you naive enough to believe that if you go to his apartment tonight he’ll marry you and return to Buzenborg with you?”
“I have to take a chance. I only had enough money to rent the ship for a week. What do you think I am—a rich witch from Muggenwort?”
She had raised her eyes to his, and he searched them vainly for the deceit that should have been in them. There must be some way he could trap her. She had eluded his time trap and his baseball trap and——
Wait a minute! Maybe she hadn’t eluded his time trap after all. If she was telling the truth and really did want to cut Becky out and really did have a spaceship equipped with faster-than-light drive, she was overlooking a very large ace up her sleeve.
“Did you ever hear the limerick about Miss Bright?” he asked. She shook her head. “It goes something like this:
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned home the previous night.[*]
“Let me elaborate,” Roger went on. “I met Becky a little less than twenty-four hours before I met you, and I met her the same as I did you—on the very bench we’re sitting on now. So if you’re telling the truth you really don’t have a problem at all. All you have to do is make a round trip to Altair VI enough in excess of the velocity of light to bring you back to Earth twenty-four hours before your original arrival. Then you simply come walking down the walk to where I’m sitting on the bench, and if your wodget is worth a plugged nickel I’ll feel the same way toward you as you feel toward me.”
“But that would involve a paradox, and the cosmos would have to create a time shift to compensate for it,” Alayne of Altair objected. “The millisecond I attained the necessary velocity and the extent of the paradox became evident, time would go whoom! And you, I and everybody else in the cosmos would be catapulted back to the moment when the paradox began, and we’d have no memory of the last few days. It would be as though I’d never met you, as though you’d never met me——”
“And as though I’d never met Becky. What more do you want?”
She was staring at him. “Why—why, it just might work at that. It—it would be sort of like Aparicio stealing first base. Let me see now, if I take a bus out to the farm, Ill get there in less than an hour. Then if I set the grodgel for Lapse Two, and the borque for——”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Roger said, “come off it, will you!”
“Sh-sh!” Alayne of Altair said. “I’m trying to think.”
He stood up. “Well, think then! I’m going back to my room and get ready for my date with Becky!”
Angrily he walked away. In his room, he laid his best suit out on the bed. He shaved and showered leisurely and spent a long time getting dressed. Then he went out, rented a car and drove to Becky’s apartment. It was 2:00 P.M. on the nose when he rang her bell. She must have been taking a shower, because when she opened the door all she had on was a terry-cloth towel and three anklets. No, four.
“Hi, Roger,” she said warmly. “Come on in.”
Eagerly he stepped across the threshold and made——
Whoom! Time went.
Little did Roger Thompson dream when he sat down on the park bench that Friday morning in June that in a celibate sense his goose was already in the oven and that soon it would be cooked. He may have had an inkling of things to come when he saw the cute blonde in the blue dress walking down the winding walk some several seconds later, but that inkling could not conceivably have apprised him of the vast convolutions of time and space which the bowing out of his bachelorhood had already set in motion.
The cute blonde sat down at the other end of the bench, produced a little red notebook and began writing in it. Presently she glanced at her wrist watch. Then she gave a start and looked over at him.
He returned the look cordially. He saw a dusting of golden freckles, a pair of eyes the hue of bluebirds and a small mouth the color of sumac leaves after the first hard frost.
A tall brunette in a red sheath came down the walk. Roger hardly even noticed her. Just as she was opposite the bench one of her spike heels sank into a crevice and brought her to an abrupt halt. She slipped her foot out of the shoe and, kneeling down, jerked the shoe free with her hands. Then she put it back on, gave him a dirty look and continued on her way.
The cute blonde had returned her attention to her note book. Now she faced him again. Roger’s heart turned three somersaults and made an entrechat.
“How do you xpell matrimony?” she said. THE END
[*] By Arthur H.B. Buller; © Punch.
THE END
Fredric Brown
Professor Jones had been working on time theory for many years.
“And I have found the key equation,” he told his daughter one day. “Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.”
Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, “This should make time run backward run time make should this,” said he, spoke he as button a pushing.
“Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time.” Day one daughter his told he, “Equation key the found have I and.”
Years many for theory time on working been had Jones Professor.
END THE
EXTEMPORE
Damon Knight
Everybody knew; everybody wanted to help Rossi the time-traveller. They came running up the scarlet beach, naked and golden as children, laughing happily.
“Legend is true,” they shouted. “He is here, just like great-grandfathers say!”
“What year is this?” Rossi asked, standing incongruously shirt-sleeved and alone in the sunlight—no great machines bulking around him, no devices, nothing but his own spindling body.
“Thairty-five twainty-seex, Mista Rossi!” they chorused.
“Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Goodbyee!”
Flick. Flick. Flick. Those were days. Flicketaflicketaflick—weeks, months, years. WHIRRR . . . Centuries, millennia streaming past like sleet in a gale!
Now the beach was cold, and the people were buttoned up to their throats in stiff black cloth. Moving stiffly, like jointed stick people, they unfurled a huge banner: ‘SORI WI DO NOT SPIC YOUR SPICH. THIS IS YIR 5199 OF YOUR CALENDAR. HELO MR. ROSI.”
They all bowed, like marionettes, and Mr. Rossi bowed back. Flick. Flick. FlicketaflicketaWHIRRR . . .
The beach was gone. He was inside an enormous building, a sky-high vault, like the Empire State turned into one room. Two floating eggs swooped at him and hovered alertly, staring with poached eyes. Behind them reared a tilted neon slab blazing with diagrams and symbols, none of which he could recognise before flicketaWHIRRRR . . .
This time it was a wet stony plain, with salt marshes beyond it. Rossi was not interested and spent the time looking at the figures he had scrawled in his notebook. 1956, 1958, 1965 and so on, the intervals getting longer and longer, the curve rising until it was going almost straight up. If only he’d paid more attention to mathematics in school . . . flickRRR . . .
Now a white desert at night, bitter cold, where the towers of Manhattan should have been. Something mournfully thin flapped by over flkRRRR . . .
Blackness and fog was all he could fkRRRR . . .
Now the light and dark blinks in the greyness melted and ran together, flickering faster and faster until Rossi was looking at a bare leaping landscape as if through soap-smeared glasses—continents expanding and contracting, ice-caps slithering down and back again, the planet charging towards its cold death while only Rossi stood there to watch, gaunt and stiff, with a disapproving, wistful glint in his eye.
His name was Albert Eustace Rossi. He was from Seattle, a wild bony young man with a poetic forelock and the stare-you-down eyes of an animal. He had learned nothing in twelve years of school except how to get passing marks, and he had a large wistfulness but no talents at all.
He had come to New York because he thought something wonderful might happen.
He averaged two months on a job. He worked as a short-order cook (his eggs were greasy and his hamburgers burned), a plate-maker’s helper in an offset shop, a shill in an auction gallery. He spent three weeks as a literary agent’s critic, writing letters over his employer’s signature to tell hapless reading-fee clients that their stories stank. He wrote bad verse for a while and sent it hopefully to all the best magazines, but concluded he was being held down by a clique.
He made no friends. The people he met seemed to be interested in nothing but baseball, or their incredibly boring jobs, or in making money. He tried hanging around the Village, wearing dungarees and a flowered shirt, but discovered that nobody noticed him.
It was the wrong century. What he wanted was a villa in Athens; or an island where the natives were childlike and friendly, and no masts ever lifted above the blue horizon; or a vast hygienic apartment in some future underground Utopia.
He bought certain science-fiction magazines and read them defiantly with the covers showing in cafeterias. Afterward, he took them home and marked them up with large exclamatory blue and red and green pencil and filed them away under his bed.
The idea of building a time machine had been growing a long while in his mind. sometimes in the morning on his way to work, looking up at the blue cloud-dotted endlessness of the sky, or staring at the tracery of lines and whorls on his unique fingertips, or trying to see into the cavernous unexplored depths of a brick in a wall, or lying on his narrow bed at night, conscious of all the bewildering sights and sounds and odours that had swirled past him in twenty-odd years, he would say to himself, Why not?
Why not? He found a second-hand copy of J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time and lost sleep for a week. He copied off the charts from it. Scotch-taped them to his wall; he wrote down his startling dreams every morning as soon as he awoke. There was a time outside time, Dunne said, in which to measure time; and a time outside that, in which to measure the time that measured time, and a time outside that . . . Why not?
An article in a barbershop about Einstein excited him, and he went to the library and read the encyclopaedia articles on relativity and space-time, frowning fiercely, going back again and again over the paragraphs he never did understand, but filling up all the same with a threshold feeling, an expectancy.
What looked like time to him might look like space to somebody else, said Einstein. A clock ran slower the faster it went. Good, fine. Why not? But it wasn’t Einstein, or Minkowski, or Wehl who gave him the clue; it was an astronomer named Milne.
