Time Travel Omnibus, page 578
His last sight was of light streaming brightly in as the whole Clock collapsed in a mass of falling wood and metal cogs.
3
And it was everybody else’s last sight, too. They may, for a brief period, have seen their world freezing itself in grotesque lack of activity. They may have seen water, solidifying in its fall to complete immobility; they may have seen birds flying through air that was like treacle, finally coming to rest above the ground; they may even have seen their own faces beginning to register terror, but never completing the expression . . .
But after that, there was no time to see anything.
DIVINE MADNESS
Roger Zelazny
“. . . I is This?hearers rounded-wonder like stand them makes and stars wandering the conjures sorrow of phrase Whose . . .”
He blew smoke through the cigarette and it grew longer.
He glanced at the clock and realised that its hands were moving backwards.
The clock told him that it was 10.33, going on 10.32 in the pan.
Then came the thing like despair, for he knew there was not a thing he could do about it. He was trapped, moving in reverse through the sequence of actions past. Somehow, he had missed the warning.
Usually, there was a prism-effect, a flash of pink static, a drowsiness, then a moment of heightened perception—
He turned the pages, from left to right, his eyes retracing their path back along the lines.
“?emphasis an such hears grief whose he is What”
Helpless, there behind his eyes, he watched his body perform.
The cigarette had reached its full length. He clicked on the lighter, which sucked away its glowing point, and then he shook the cigarette back into the pack.
He yawned in reverse: first an exhalation, then an inhalation.
It wasn’t real—the doctor had told him. It was grief and epilepsy, meeting to form an unusual syndrome.
He’d already had the seizure. The Dialantin wasn’t helping. This was a post-traumatic locomotor hallucination, elicited by anxiety, precipitated by the attack.
But he did not believe it, could not believe it—not after twenty minutes had gone by, in the other direction—not after he had placed the book upon the reading-stand, stood, walked backward across the room to his closet, hung up his robe, redressed himself in the same shirt and slacks he had worn all day, backed over to the bar and regurgitated a Martini, sip by cooling sip, until the glass was filled to the brim and not a drop spilled.
There was an impending taste of olive, and then everything was changed again.
The second-hand was sweeping around his wristwatch in the proper direction.
The time was 10.07.
He felt free to move as he wished.
He redrank his Martini.
Now, if he would be true to the pattern, he would change into his robe and try to read. Instead, he mixed another drink.
Now the sequence would not occur.
Now the things would not happen as he thought they had happened, and un-happened.
Now everything was different.
All of which went to prove it had been an hallucination.
Even the notion that it had taken twenty-six minutes each way was an attempted rationalisation.
Nothing had happened.
. . . Shouldn’t be drinking, he decided. It might bring on a seizure.
He laughed.
Crazy, though, the whole thing . . .
Remembering, he drank.
In the morning he skipped breakfast, as usual, noted that it would soon stop being morning, look two aspirins, a lukewarm shower, a cup of coffee, and a walk.
The park, the fountain, the children with their boats, the grass, the pond, he hated them; and the morning, and the sunlight, and the blue moats around the towering clouds.
Hating, he sat there. And remembering.
If he was on the verge of a crackup, he decided, then the thing he wanted most was to plunge ahead into it, not to totter halfway out, halfway in.
He remembered why.
But it was clear, so dear, the morning, and everything crisp and distinct and burning with the green fires of spring, there in the sign of the Ram. April.
He watched the winds pile up the remains of winter against the far grey fence, and he saw them push the boats across the pond, to come to rest in shallow mud the children tracked.
The fountain jetted its cold umbrella above the green-tinged copper dolphins. The sun ignited it whenever he moved his head. The wind rumpled it.
Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck to a red wrapper.
Kites swayed on their rails, nosed downward, rose again, as youngsters tugged at invisible strings. Telephone lines were tangled with wooden frames and torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.
He hated the telephone lines, the kites, the children, the birds.
Most of all. though, he haled himself.
How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn’t. There is no way under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repent, curse, or forget. Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable.
A woman walked past. He did not look up in time to see her face, but the dusky blonde fall of her hair to her collar and the swell of her sure, sheer-netted legs below the black hem of her coat and above the matching click of her heels heigh-ho, stopped his breath behind his stomach and snared his eyes in the wizard-weft of her walking and her posture and some more, like a rhyme to the last of his thoughts.
He half-rose from the bench when the pink static struck his eyeballs, and the fountain became a volcano spouting rainbows.
The world was frozen and served up to him under glass.
. . . The woman passed back before him and he looked down too soon to see her face.
The hell was beginning once more, he realized, as the backward-dying birds passed before him.
He gave himself to it. Let it keep him until he broke, until he was all used up and there was nothing left.
He waited, there on the bench, watching the slithey toves be briilig, as the fountain mucked its waters back within itself, drawing them up in a great arc above the unmoving dolphins, and the boats raced backward across the pond, and the fence divested itself of stray scraps of paper, as the birds replaced the candy bar with the red wrapper, bit by crunchy bit.
His thoughts only were inviolate, his body belonged to the retreating tide.
Eventually, he rose and strolled backwards out of the park.
On the street a boy backed past him. unwhistling snatches of a popular song.
He backed up the stairs to his apartment, his hangover growing worse again, undrank his coffee, unshowered, unswallowed his aspirins, and got into bed, feeling awful.
Let this be it, he decided.
A faintly-remembered nightmare ran in reverse through his mind, giving it an undeserved happy ending.
It was dark when he awakened.
He was very drunk.
He backed over to the bar and began spitting out his drinks, one by one into the same glass he had used the night before, and pouting them from the glass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin and vermouth was no trick all. The proper liquids leapt into the air as he held the uncorked bottles above the bar.
And he grew less and less drunk as this went on.
Then he stood before an early Martini and it was 10.07 in the P.M There, within the hallucination, he wondered about another hallucination. Would time loop the loop, forward and then backward again, through his previous seizure?
No.
It was as though it had not happened, had never been.
He continued on back through the evening, undoing things.
He raised the telephone, said “good-bye”, untold Murray that he would not be coming to work again tomorrow, listened a moment, recradled the phone and looked at it as it rang.
The sun came up in the west and people were backing their cars to work.
He read the weather report and the headlines, folded the evening paper and placed it out in the hall.
It was the longest seizure he had ever had, but he did not really care. He settled himself down within it and watched as the day unwound itself back to morning.
His hangover returned as the day grew smaller, and it was terrible when he got Into bed again.
When he awakened the previous evening the drunkenness was high upon him. Two of the bottles he refilled, recorked, resealed. He knew he would take them to the liquor store soon and get his money back.
As he sat there that day, his mouth uncursing and un-drinking and his eyes unreading, he knew that new cars were being shipped back to Detroit and disassembled, that corpses were awakening into their death-throes, and that priests the world over were saying black mass, unknowing.
He wanted to chuckle, but he could not tell his mouth to do it.
He unsmoked two and a half packs of cigarettes.
Then came another hangover and he went to bed. Later, the sun set in the east.
Time’s winged chariot fled before him as he opened the door and said “good-bye” to his comforters and they came in and sat down and told him not to grieve overmuch.
And he wept without tears as he realised what was to come.
Despite his madness, he hurt.
. . . Hurt, as the days rolled backward.
. . . Backward, inexorably.
. . . Inexorably, until he knew the time was near at hand.
He gnashed the teeth of his mind.
Great was his grief and his hate and his love.
He was wearing his black suit and undrinking drink after drink, while somewhere the men were scraping the clay back onto the shovels which would be used to undig the grave.
He backed his car to the funeral parlour, parked it, and climbed into the limousine.
They backed all the way to the graveyard.
He stood among his friends and listened to the preacher.
“dust to dust; ashes to Ashes,” the man said, which is pretty much the same whichever way you say it.
The casket was taken back to the hearse and returned to the funeral parlour.
He sat through the service and went home and unshaved and unbrushed his teeth and went to bed.
He awakened and dressed again in black and returned to the parlour.
The flowers were all back in place.
Solemn-faced friends unsigned the Sympathy Book and unshook his hand. Then they went inside to sit awhile and stare at the closed casket. Then they left, until he was alone with the funeral director.
Then he was alone with himself.
The tears ran up his cheeks.
His suit and shirt were crisp and unwrinkled again.
He backed home, undressed, uncombed his hair. The day collapsed around him into morning, and he returned to bed to unsleep another night.
The previous evening, when he awakened, he realised where he was headed.
Twice, he exerted all of his will power in an attempt to interrupt the sequence of events. He failed.
He wanted to die, if he had killed himself that day, he would not be headed back toward it now.
There were tears within his mind as he realised the past which lay less than twenty-four hours before him.
The past stalked him that day as he unnegotiated the purchase of the casket, the vault, the accessories.
Then he headed home into the biggest hangover of all and slept until he was awakened to undrink drink after drink and then return to the morgue and come back in time to hang up the telephone on that call, that call which had come to break . . .
. . . The silence of his anger with its ringing.
She was dead.
She was lying somewhere in the fragments of her car on Interstate 90 now.
As he paced, unsmoking, he knew she was lying there bleeding.
. . . Then dying, after that crash at 80 miles an hour.
. . . Then alive?
Then re-formed, along with the car, and alive again, arisen? Even now backing home at a terrible speed, to reslam the door on their final argument? To unscrcam at him and to be unscreamed at?
He cried out within his mind. He wrung the hands of his spirit.
It couldn’t stop at this point. No. Not now.
All his grief and his love and his self-hate had brought him back this far. this near to the moment . . .
It couldn’t end now.
After a time, he moved to the living room, his legs pacing, his lips cursing, himself waiting.
The door slammed open.
She stared in at him, her mascara smeared, tears upon her cheeks.
“! hell to go Then,” he said.
“! going I’m.” she said.
She stepped back inside, closed the door.
She hung her coat hurriedly in the hall closet.
“it about feel you way the that’s If.” he said, shrugging.
“! yourself but anybody about care don’t You,” she said.
“!child a like behaving You’re,” he said.
“! sorry you’re say least at could You”
Her eyes flashed like emeralds through the pink static, and she was losely and alive again. In his mind he was dancing.
The change came.
“You could at least say you’re sorry!”
“I am.” he said, taking her hand in a grip that she could not break. “How much, you’ll never know.
“Come here.” and she did.
THE SECRET PLACE
Richard McKenna
That morning my son asked me what I did in the war. He’s fifteen and I don’t know why he never asked me before. I don’t know why I never anticipated the question.
He was just leaving for camp, and I was able to put him off by saying I did government work. He’ll be two weeks at camp. As long as the counselors keep pressure on him, he’ll do well enough at group activities. The moment they relax it, he’ll be off studying an ant colony or reading one of his books. He’s on astronomy now. The moment he comes home, he’ll ask me again just what I did in the war, and I’ll have to tell him.
But I don’t understand just what I did in the war. Sometimes I think my group fought a death fight with a local myth and only Colonel Lewis realized it. I don’t know who won. All I know is that war demands of some men risks more obscure and ignoble than death in battle. I know it did of me.
It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker. Dr. Lewis was called to duty as a reserve colonel and ordered to find the vein. But the whole area was overlain by thousands of feet of Miocene lava flows and of course it was geological insanity to look there for a pegmatite vein. The area had no drainage pattern and had never been glaciated. Dr. Lewis protested that the crystal could have gotten there only by prior human agency.
It did him no good. He was told he’s not to reason why. People very high up would not be placated until much money and scientific effort had been spent in a search. The army sent him young geology graduates, including me, and demanded progress reports. For the sake of morale, in a kind of frustrated desperation, Dr. Lewis decided to make the project a model textbook exercise in mapping the number and thickness of the basalt beds over the search area all the way down to the prevolcanic Miocene surface. That would at least be a useful addition to Columbia Plateau lithology. It would also be proof positive that no uranium ore existed there, so it was not really cheating.
That Oregon countryside was a dreary place. The search area was flat, featureless country with black lava outcropping everywhere through scanty gray soil in which sagebrush grew hardly knee high. It was hot and dry in summer and dismal with thin snow in winter. Winds howled across it at all seasons. Barker was about a hundred wooden houses on dusty streets, and some hay farms along a canal. All the young people were away at war or war jobs, and the old people seemed to resent us. There were twenty of us, apart from the contract drill crews who lived in their own trailer camps, and we were gown against town, in a way. We slept and ate at Colthorpe House, a block down the street from our headquarters. We had our own “gown” table there, and we might as well have been men from Mars.
I enjoyed it, just the same. Dr. Lewis treated us like students, with lectures and quizzes and assigned reading. He was a fine teacher and a brilliant scientist, and we loved him. He gave us all a turn at each phase of the work. I started on surface mapping and then worked with the drill crews, who were taking cores through the basalt and into the granite thousands of feet beneath. Then I worked on taking gravimetric and seismic readings. We had fine team spirit and we all knew we were getting priceless training in field geophysics. I decided privately that after the war I would take my doctorate in geophysics. Under Dr. Lewis, of course.
In early summer of 1944 the field phase ended. The contract drillers left. We packed tons of well logs and many boxes of gravimetric data sheets and seismic tapes for a move to Dr. Lewis’s Midwestern university. There we would get more months of valuable training while we worked our data into a set of structure contour maps. We were all excited and talked a lot about being with girls again and going to parties. Then the army said part of the staff had to continue the field search. For technical compliance, Dr. Lewis decided to leave one man, and he chose me.
It hit me hard. It was like being flunked out unfairly. I thought he was heartlessly brusque about it.
“Take a jeep run through the area with a Geiger once a day,” he said. “Then sit in the office and answer the phone.”
“What if the army calls when I’m away?” I asked sullenly.
“Hire a secretary,” he said. “You’ve an allowance for that.”
So off they went and left me, with the title of field chief and only myself to boss. I felt betrayed to the hostile town. I decided I hated Colonel Lewis and wished I could get revenge. A few days later old Dave Gentry told me how.
