Time Travel Omnibus, page 555
I think other people saw Max in Mill Valley during those days. One of the local cab drivers who park by the bus station walked up to me one day; actually he strolled, hands in pockets, making a point of seeming very casual. He said, “Say, that friend of yours, that young guy used to be around town that died?” There was caution in his voice, and he stood watching me closely as I answered. I nodded and said yeah to show that I understood who he meant. “Well, did he have a brother or something?” the driver said, and I shook my head and said not that I knew of. He nodded but was unsatisfied, still watching my face and waiting for me to offer something more but I didn’t. And I knew he’d seen Max. I’m sure others saw him and knew who it was, as Cora and I did; it isn’t something you mention casually. And I suppose there were those who saw him and merely recognized him vaguely as someone they’d seen around town before.
I walked over to Max’s old house a day or so after we’d seen him; by that time, of course, I knew why he’d come back. The real-estate office that had it listed for rental again would have let me have the key if I’d asked; they knew me. But I didn’t know what I could tell them as a reason for going in. It was an old house, run down, too small for most people, not the kind that rents quickly or that anyone bothers guarding too diligently. I felt sure I could get in somewhere, and on the tiny back porch, shielded from view, I tried the kitchen window and it opened and I climbed in.
The few scraps of furniture that had come with the place were still there, in the silence: a wooden table and two chairs in the tiny kitchen which Max had hardly used; the iron single bed in the bedroom, the wornout musty-smelling davenport and matching chair in the living room, and the rickety card table beside the front windows where Max had worked. What little I found, I found lying on the floor beside the table: two crumpled-up wads of the yellow copy paper Max had used.
I opened them up but it’s hard to describe what was written on them. There were single words and what seemed to be parts of words and fragments of sentences and completely unreadable scribblings, all written in pencil. There was a word that might have been “forest” or “foreign”; the final letters degenerated into a scrawl as though the hand holding the pencil had begun to fall away from the paper before it could finish. There was an unfinished sentence beginning, “She ran to, and the stroke crossing the t wavered on part way across and then down the sheet till it ran off the bottom. There is no use describing in detail what is on those two crumpled sheets; there’s no sense to be made of it, though I’ve often tried. It looks, I imagine, like the scrawlings of a man weak from fever and in delirium, as though every squiggle and wobbly line were made with almost-impossible effort. And I’m sure they were. It is true that they might be notes jotted down months earlier when Max was alive and which no one bothered to pick up and remove; but I know they aren’t. They’re the reason Max came back. They’re what he tried to do, and failed.
I don’t know what ghosts are or why, in rare instances, they appear. Maybe all human beings have the power, if they have the will, to reappear as Max and a few others have done occasionally down through the centuries. But I believe that to do so takes some kind of terrible and unimaginable expenditure of psychic energy. I think it takes such a fearful effort of will that it is beyond our imagining, and that only very rarely is such an incredible effort made.
I think a Shakespeare killed before Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth were written might have put forth such effort and returned. And I know that Max Kingery did. But there was almost nothing left over to do what he came back for. Those meaningless fragments were the utmost he could accomplish. His appearances were at the cost of tremendous effort, and I think that to even turn his head and look at us in addition, as he did the night we saw him, and then to actually pronounce an audible word besides, were efforts no one alive can understand.
It was beyond him; he could not return and then write the books that were to have made the name of Max Kingery what he’d been certain it was destined to be. And so he had to give up; we never saw Max again, though we saw one more place he’d been.
Cora and I were driving to San Rafael over the county road. You can get there on a six-lane highway now, 101, that slices straight through the hills, but this was once part of the only road between the two towns and it winds a lot around and between the Marin County hills, under the trees. It’s a pleasant narrow little two-lane road, and we like to take it once in a while; I believe it’s still the shortest route to San Rafael, winding though it is. This was the end of January or early in February, I don’t remember. It was early in the week, I’d taken the day off, and Cora wanted something at Penney’s, so we drove over.
Twenty or thirty feet up on the side of a hill about a mile outside Mill Valley there’s an outcropping of smooth-faced rock facing the road, and Cora glanced at it, exclaimed and pointed, and I jammed on the brakes and looked up where she was pointing. There on the rock facing the public road, painted in great four-foot letters, was MAX KI, the lines crude and uneven, driblets of paint running down past the bottoms of letters, the final stroke continuing on down the face of the rock until the paint or oil on the brush or stick had run thin and faded away. We knew Max had painted it—his name or as much of it as he could manage—and staring up at it now, I understood the loud jacket with max on its back, and the carnival straw hat with the big red initials.
For who are the people who paint their names or initials in public places and on the rocks that face our highways? Driving from San Francisco to Reno over the Donner Pass you see them by the hundreds, some painted so high that the rocks must have been scaled, dangerously, to do it. I used to puzzle over them; to paint your name or initials up there in the mountains wasn’t impulse. It took planning. You’d have to drive over a hundred miles with the can of paint on the floor of the car. Who would do that? And who would wear the caps stitched with initials and the jackets with names on their backs? It was plain to me now; they are the people, of course, who feel that they have no identity. And who are fighting for one.
They are unknown, nearly invisible, so they feel; and their names or initials held up to the uninterested eyes of the world are silent shouts of, “Hey, look at me!” Children shout it incessantly while acquiring their identities, and if they never acquire one maybe they never stop shouting. Because the things they do must always leave them with a feeling of emptiness. Initials on their caps, names on their jackets, or even painted high on a cliff visible for miles, they must always feel their failure to leave a real mark, and so they repeat it again and again. And Max who had to be someone, who had to be, did as they did, finally, from desperation. To have never been anyone and to be forgotten completely was not to be borne. At whatever cost he too had to try to leave his name behind him even if he were reduced to painting it on a rock.
I visited the cemetery once more, that spring, plodding up the hill, eyes on the ground. Nearing the crest I looked up, then stopped in my tracks, astounded. There at the head of Max’s grave stood an enormous gray stone, the biggest by far of any in sight, and it was made not of concrete or pressed stone but of the finest granite. It would last a thousand years, and cut deeply into its face in big letters was MAXWELL KINGERY AUTHOR.
Down in his shop outside the gates I talked to the middle-aged stonecutter in the little office at the front of the building; he was wearing a work apron and cap. He said, “Yes, certainly I remember the man who ordered it—black hair and eyes, heavy glasses. He told me what it should say, and I wrote it down. Your name’s Peter Marks, isn’t it?” I said it was, and he nodded as though he knew it. “Yes, he told me you’d be here, and I knew you would. Hard for him to talk; had some speech impediment, but I understood him.” He turned to a littered desk, leafed through a little stack of papers, then found the one he wanted, and slid it across the counter to me. “He said you’d be in, and pay for it; here’s the bill. It’s expensive but worth it, a fine stone and the only one here I know of for an author.”
For several moments I just stood there staring at the paper in my hand. Then I did the only thing left to do, and got out one of the checks I carry in my wallet. Waiting while I wrote, the stonecutter said politely, “And what do you do, Mr. Marks; you an author, too?”
“No,” I said, signing the check, then I looked up smiling. “I’m just a critic.”
THE WINDS OF TIME
James H. Schmitz
He contracted for a charter trip—but the man who hired his spacer wasn’t quite a man, it turned out—and he wanted more than service!
■ Gefty Rammer came along the narrow passages between the Silver Queen’s control compartment and the staterooms, trying to exchange the haggard look on his face for one of competent self-assurance. There was nothing to gain by letting his two passengers suspect that during the past few minutes their pilot, the owner of Rammer Spacelines, had been a bare step away from plain and fancy gibbering.
He opened the door to Mr. Maulbow’s stateroom and went inside. Mr. Maulbow, face very pale, eyes closed, lay on his back on the couch, still unconscious. He’d been knocked out when some unknown forces suddenly started batting the Silver Queen’s turnip-shape around as the Queen had never been batted before in her eighteen years of spacefaring. Kerim Ruse, Maulbow’s secretary, knelt beside her employer, checking his pulse. She looked anxiously up at Gefty.
“What did you find out?” she asked in a voice that was not very steady.
Gefty shrugged. “Nothing definite as yet. The ship hasn’t been damaged—she’s a tough tub. That’s one good point. Otherwise . . . well, I climbed into a suit and took a look out the escape hatch. And I saw the same thing there that the screens show. Whatever that is.”
“You’ve no idea then of what’s happened to us, or where we are?” Miss Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she looked around fifteen. She’d been asleep in her stateroom when something smacked the Queen, and she was sensible enough then not to climb out of the bunk’s safety field until the ship finally stopped shuddering and bucking about. That made her the only one of the three persons aboard who had collected no bruises. She was scared, of course, but taking the situation very well.
Gefty said carefully, “There’re a number of possibilities. It’s obvious that the Queen has been knocked out of normspace, and it may take some time to find out how to get her back there. But the main thing is that the ship’s intact. So far, it doesn’t look too bad.”
Miss Ruse seemed somewhat reassured. Gefty could hardly have said the same for himself. He was a qualified normspace and subspace pilot. He had put in a hitch with the Federation Navy, and for the past eight years he’d been ferrying his own two ships about the Hub and not infrequently beyond the Federation’s space territories, but he had never heard of a situation like this. What he saw in the viewscreens when the ship steadied enough to let him pick himself off the instrument room floor, and again, a few minutes later and with much more immediacy, from the escape hatch, made no sense—seemed simply to have no meaning. The pressure meters said there was a vacuum outside the Queen’s skin. That vacuum was dark, even pitch-black but here and there came momentary suggestions of vague light and color. Occasional pinpricks of brightness showed and were gone. And there had been one startling phenomenon like a distant, giant explosion, a sudden pallid glare in the dark, which appeared far ahead of the Queen and, for the instant it remained in sight, seemed to be rushing directly towards them. It had given Gefty the feeling that the ship itself was plowing at high speed through this eerie medium. But he had cut the Queen’s drives to the merest idling pulse as soon as he staggered back to the control console and got his first look at the screens, so it must have been the light that had moved.
But such details were best not discussed with a passenger. Kerim Ruse would be arriving at enough disquieting speculations on her own; the less he told her, the better. There was the matter of the ship’s location instruments. The only set Gefty had been able to obtain any reading on were the direction indicators. And what they appeared to indicate was that the Silver Queen was turning on a new heading something like twenty times a second.
Gefty asked, “Has Mr. Maulbow shown any signs of waking up?”
Kerim shook her head. “His breathing and pulse seem all right, and that bump on his head doesn’t look really bad, but he hasn’t moved at all. Can you think of anything else we might do for him, Gefty?”
“Not at the moment,” Gefty said. “He hasn’t broken any bones. We’ll see how he feels when he comes out of it.” He was wondering about Mr. Maulbow and the fact that this charter had showed some unusual features from the beginning.
Kerim was a friendly sort of girl; they’d got to calling each other by their first names within a day or two after the trip started. But after that, she seemed to be avoiding him; and Gefty guessed that Maulbow had spoken to her, probably to make sure that Kerim didn’t let any of her employer’s secrets slip out.
Maulbow himself was as aloof and taciturn a client as Rammer Spacelines ever had picked up. A lean, blond character of indeterminate age, with pale eyes, hard mouth. Why he had selected a bulky semifreighter like the Queen for a mineralogical survey jaunt to a lifeless little sun system far beyond the outposts of civilization was a point he didn’t discuss. Gefty, needing the charter money, had restrained his curiosity. If Maulbow wanted only a pilot and preferred to do all the rest of the work himself, that was certainly Maulbow’s affair. And if he happened to be up to something illegal—though it was difficult to imagine what—Customs would nail him when they got back to the Hub.
But those facts looked a little different now.
Gefty scratched his chin, inquired, “Do you happen to know where Mr. Maulbow keeps the keys to the storage vault?”
Kerim looked startled. “Why, no! I couldn’t permit you to take the keys anyway while he . . . while he’s unconscious! You know that.”
Gefty grunted. “Any idea of what he has locked up in the vault?”
“You shouldn’t ask me—” Her eyes widened. “Why, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with what’s happened!”
He might, Gefty thought, have reassured her a little too much. He said, “I wouldn’t know. But I don’t want to just sit here and wonder about it until Maulbow wakes up. Until we’re back in normspace, we’d better not miss any bets. Because one thing’s sure—if this has happened to anybody else, they didn’t turn up again to report it. You see?”
Kerim apparently did. She went pale, then said hesitantly, “Well . . . the sealed cases Mr. Maulbow brought out from the Hub with him had some very expensive instruments in them. That’s all I know. He’s always trusted me not to pry into his business any more than my secretarial duties required, and of course I haven’t.”
“You don’t know then what it was he brought up from that moon a few hours ago—those two big cases he stowed away in the vault?”
“No, I don’t, Gefty. You see, he hasn’t told me what the purpose of this trip is. I only know that it’s a matter of great importance to him.” Kerim paused, added, “From the careful manner Mr. Maulbow handled the cases with the cranes, I had the impression that whatever was inside them must be quite heavy.”
“I noticed that,” Gefty said. It wasn’t much help. “Well, I’ll tell you something now,” he went on. “I let your boss keep both sets of keys to the storage vault because he insisted on it when he signed the charter. What I didn’t tell him was that I could make up a duplicate set any time in around half an hour.”
“Oh! Have you—?”
“Not yet. But I intend to take a look at what Mr. Maulbow’s got in that vault now, with or without his consent. You’d better run along and get dressed while I take him up to the instrument room.”
“Why move him?” Kerim asked.
“The instrument room’s got an overall safety field. I’ve turned it on now, and if something starts banging us around again, the room will be the safest place on the ship. I’ll bring his personal luggage up too, and you can start looking through it for the keys. You may find them before I get a new set made. Or he may wake up and tell us where they are.”
Kerim Ruse gave her employer a dubious glance, then nodded, said, “I imagine you’re right, Gefty,” and pattered hurriedly out of the stateroom. A few minutes later, she arrived, fully dressed, in the instrument room. Gefty looked around from the table-shelf where he had laid out his tools, and said, “He hasn’t stirred. His suitcases are over there. I’ve unlocked them.”
Kerim gazed at what showed in the screens about the control console and shivered slightly. She said, “I was thinking, Gefty . . . isn’t there something they call Space Three?”
“Sure. Pseudospace. But that isn’t where we are. There’re some special-built Navy tubs that can operate in that stuff if they don’t stay too long. A ship like the Queen . . . well, you and I and everything else in here would be frozen solid by now if we’d got sucked somehow into Space Three.”
“I see,” Kerim said uncomfortably. Gefty heard her move over to the suitcases. After a moment, she asked, “What do the vault keys look like?”
“You can’t miss them if he’s just thrown them in there. They’re over six inches long. What kind of a guy is this Maulbow? A scientist?”
“I couldn’t say, Gefty. He’s never referred to himself as a scientist. I’ve had this job a year and a half. Mr. Maulbow is a very considerate employer . . . one of the nicest men I’ve known, really. But it was simply understood that I should ask no questions about the business beyond what I actually needed to know for my work.”
“What’s the business called?”
