Time Travel Omnibus, page 580
Her eyes opened wide and her lips trembled and she was almost Desert Helen right there in the office.
“There’s magic and enchantment in regular life, if you look at it right,” I said. “Don’t you think so, Helen?”
“I know it!” she said. She turned pale and dropped her pencil. “Owen was enchanted into having a wife and three daughters and he was just a boy. But he was the only man we had and all of them but me hated him because we were so poor.” She began to tremble and her voice went flat. “He couldn’t stand it. He took the treasure and it killed him.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “I tried to think he was only enchanted into play-dead and if I didn’t speak or laugh for seven years, I’d uncharm him.”
She dropped her head on her hands. I was alarmed. I came over and put my hand on her shoulder.
“I did speak.” Her shoulders heaved with sobs. ‘They made me speak, and now Owen won’t ever come back.”
I bent and put my arm across her shoulders.
“Don’t cry, Helen. He’ll come back,” I said. “There are other magics to bring him back.”
I hardly knew what I was saying I was afraid of what I had done, and I wanted to comfort her. She jumped up and threw off my arm.
“I can’t stand it! I’m going home!”
She ran out into the hall and down the stairs and from the window I saw her run down the street, still crying. All of a sudden my game seemed cruel and stupid to me and right that moment I stopped it. I tore up my map of fairyland and my letters to Colonel Lewis and I wondered how in the world I could ever have done all that.
After dinner that night old Dave motioned me out to one end of the veranda. His face looked carved out of wood.
“I don’t know what happened in your office today, and for your sake I better not find out. But you send Helen back to her mother on the morning stage, you hear me?”
“All right, if she wants to go,” I said. “I can’t just fire her.”
“I’m speaking for the boys. You better put her on that morning stage, or we’ll be around to talk to you.”
“All right, I will, Dave.”
I wanted to tell him how the game was stopped now and how I wanted a chance to make things up with Helen, but I thought I had better not. Dave’s voice was flat and savage with contempt and, old as he was, he frightened me.
Helen did not come to work in the morning. At nine o’clock I went out myself for the mail. I brought a large mailing tube and some letters back to the office. The first letter I opened was from Dr. Lewis, and almost like magic it solved all my problems.
On the basis of his preliminary structure contour maps Dr. Lewis had gotten permission to close out the field phase. Copies of the maps were in the mailing tube, for my information. I was to hold an inventory and be ready to turn everything over to an army quartermaster team coming in a few days. There was still a great mass of data to be worked up in refining the map. I was to join the group again and I would have a chance at the lab work after all.
I felt pretty good. I paced and whistled and snapped my fingers. I wished Helen would come, to help on the inventory. Then I opened the tube and looked idly at the maps. There were a lot of them, featureless bed after bed of basalt, like layers of a cake ten miles across. But when I came to the bottom map, of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape, the hair on my neck stood up.
I had made that map myself. It was Helen’s fairytale. The topography was point by point the same.
I clenched my fists and stopped breathing. Then it hit me a second time, and the skin crawled up my back.
The game was real. I couldn’t end it. All the time the game had been playing me. It was still playing me.
I ran out and down the street and overtook old Dave hurrying toward the feedyard. He had a holstered gun on each hip.
“Dave, I’ve got to find Helen,” I said.
“Somebody seen her hiking into the desert just at daylight,” he said. “I’m on my way for a horse.” He did not slow his stride. “You better get out of there in your stinkwagon. If you don’t find her before we do, you better just keep on going, son.”
I ran back and got the jeep and roared it out across the scrubby sagebrush. I hit rocks and I do not know why I did not break something. I knew where to go and feared what I would find there. I knew I loved Helen Price more than my own life and I knew I had driven her to her death.
I saw her far off, running and dodging. I headed the jeep to intercept her and I shouted, but she neither saw me nor heard me. I stopped and jumped out and ran after her and the world darkened. Helen was all I could see, and I could not catch up with her.
“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun. I saw a knot of horsemen on the horizon. They were heading for where Owen had been found. That boy had run a long way, alone and hurt and burdened.
I got Helen up to the office. She sat at her desk with her head down on her hands and she quivered violently. I kept my arm around her.
“It was only a storm inside our two heads, Helen,” I said, over and over. “Something black blew away out of us. The game is finished and we’re free and I love you.”
Over and over I said that, for my sake as well as hers. I meant and believed it. I said she was my wife and we would marry and go a thousand miles away from that desert to raise our children. She quieted to a trembling, but she would not speak. Then I heard hoofbeats and the creak of leather in the street below and then I heard slow footsteps on the stairs.
Old Dave stood in the doorway. His two guns looked as natural on him as hands and feet. He looked at Helen, bowed over the desk, and then at me, standing beside her.
“Come on down, son. The boys want to talk to you,” he said.
I followed him into the hall and stopped.
“She isn’t hurt,” I said. “The lode is really out there, Dave, but nobody is ever going to find it.”
“Tell that to the boys.”
“We’re closing out the project in a few more days,” I said. “I’m going to marry Helen and take her away with me.”
“Come down or we’ll drag you down!” he said harshly. “We’ll send Helen back to her mother.”
I was afraid. I did not know what to do.
“No, you won’t send me back to my mother!”
It was Helen beside me in the hall. She was Desert Helen, but grown up and wonderful. She was pale, pretty, aware and sure of herself.
“I’m going with Duard,” she said. “Nobody in the world is ever going to send me around like a package again.”
Dave rubbed his jaw and squinted his eyes at her.
“I love her, Dave,” I said. “I’ll take care of her all my life.”
I put my left arm around her and she nestled against me. The tautness went out of old Dave and he smiled. He kept his eyes on Helen.
“Little Helen Price,” he said, wonderingly. “Who ever would’ve thought it?” He reached out and shook us both gently. “Bless you youngsters,” he said, and blinked his eyes. “I’ll tell the boys it’s all right.”
He turned and went slowly down the stairs. Helen and I looked at each other, and I think she saw a new face too.
That was sixteen years ago. I am a professor myself now, graying a bit at the temples. I am as positivistic a scientist as you will find anywhere in the Mississippi drainage basin. When I tell a seminary student “That assertion is operationally meaningless,” I can make it sound downright obscene. The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game, and it’s safe only if it is kept pure. I work hard at that, I have yet to meet the student I can not handle.
My son is another matter. We named him Owen Lewis, and he has Helen’s eyes and hair and complexion. He learned to read on the modem sane and sterile children’s books. We haven’t a fairy tale in the house—but I have a science library. And Owen makes fairy tales out of science. He is taking the measure of space and time now, with Jeans and Eddington. He cannot possibly understand a tenth of what he reads, in the way I understand it. But he understands all of it in some other way privately his own.
Not long ago he said to me, “You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”
And I have to tell him just what I did in the war. I know I found manhood and a wife. The how and why of it I think and hope I am incapable of fully understanding. But Owen has, through Helen, that strangely curious heart. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he will understand.
THUS WE FRUSTRATE CHARLEMAGNE
R.A. Lafferty
We detested Today—so naturally we edited Yesterday to suit us!
“We’ve been on some tall ones,” said Gregory Smirnov of the Instiute, “but we’ve never stood on the edge of a bigger one than this, nor viewed one with sfhakier expectations. Still, if the calculations of Epiktistes are correct, this will work.”
“People, it will work,” Epikt said.
This was Epiktistes the Ktistec machine? Who’d have believed it? The main bulk of Epikt was five floors below them, but he had run an extension of himself up to this little penthouse lounge. All it took was a cable, no more than a yard in diameter, and a functional ‘head set on the end of it.
And what a head he chose! It was a sea-serpent head, a dragon head, five feet long and copied from an old carnival float. Epikt had also given himself human speech of a sort, a blend of Irish and Jewish and Dutch comedian patter from ancient vaudeville. Epikt was a comic to his last para-DNA relay when he rested his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever born.
But he was serious about this project.
“We have perfect test conditions,” the machine Epikt said as though calling them to order. “We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes. For our test plot, we have taken that portion of our own middle-sized city that can be viewed from this fine vantage point. If the world in its past-present continuity is changed by our meddling, then the face of our city will also change instantly as we watch it.
“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world: eight humans and one Ktistec machine, myself. Remember that there are nine of us. It might be important.”
The nine finest minds were: Epiktistes, the transcendent machine who put the “K” in Ktistec; Gregory Smirnov, the large-souled director of the Institute; Valery Mok, an incandescent lady scientist; her over-shadowed and over-intelligent husband Charles Cogsworth; the humorless and inerrant Glasser; Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius; Willy McGilly, a man of unusual parts (the seeing third finger on his left hand he had picked up on one of the planets of Kapteyn’s Star) and no false modesty; Audifex O’Hanlon; and Diogenes Pontifex. The latter two men were not members of the Institute (on account of the Minimal Decency Rule), but when the finest minds in the world are assembled, these two cannot very well be left out.
“We are going to tamper with one small detail in past history and note its effect,” Gregory said. “This has never been done before openly. We go back to an era that has been called ‘A patch of light in the vast gloom,’ the time of Charlemagne. We consider why that light went out and did not kindle others. The world lost four hundred years by that flame expiring when the tinder was apparently ready for it. We go back to that false dawn of Europe and consider where it failed. The year was 778, and the region was Spain. Charlemagne had entered alliance with Marsilies, the Arab king of Saragossa, against the Caliph Abd ar-Rahmen of Cordova. Charlemagne took such towns as Pamplona, Huesca and Gerona and cleared the way to Marsilies in Saragossa. The Caliph accepted the situation. Saragossa should be independent, a city open to both Moslems and Christians. The northern marches to the border of France should be permitted their Christianity, and there would be peace for everybody.
“This Marsilies had long treated Christians as equals in Saragossa, and now there would be an open road from Islam into the Frankish Empire. Marsilies gave Charlemagne thirty-three scholars (Moslem, Jewish and Christian) and some Spanish mules to seal the bargain. And there could have been a cross-fertilization of cultures.
“But the road was closed at Roncevalles where the rearguard of Charlemagne was ambushed and destroyed on its way back to France. The ambushers were more Basque than Moslems, but Charlemagne locked the door at the Pyrenees and swore that he would not let even a bird fly over that border thereafter. He kept the road closed, as did his son and his grandsons. But when he sealed off the Moslem world, he also sealed off his own culture.
“In his later years he tried a revival of civilization with a ragtag of Irish half-scholars, Greek vagabonds and Roman copyists who almost remembered an older Rome. These weren’t enough to revive civilization, arid yet Charlemagne came close with them! Had the Islam door remained open, a real revival of learning might have taken place then rather than four hundred years later. We are going to arrange that the ambush at Roncevalles did not happen and that the door between the two civilizations was not closed. Then we will see what happens to us.”
“Intrusion like a burglar bent,” said Epikt.
“Who’s a burglar?” Glasser demanded.
“I am,” Epikt said. “We all are. It’s from an old verse. I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind downstairs if you’re interested.”
“We set out a basic text of Hilarius,” Gregory continued. “We note it carefully, and we must remember it the way it is. Very soon, that may be the way 128 it was. I believe that the words; will change on the very page of this book as we watch them. Just as soon as we have done what we intend to do.”
The basic text marked in the open book read:
“The traitor Gano, playing a multiplex game, with money from the Cordova Caliph hired Basque Christians (dressed as Saragossan Mozarabs) to ambush the rear-guard of the Frankish force. To do this it was necessary that Gano keep in contact with the Basques and at the same time delay the rear-guard of the Franks. Gano, however, served both as guide and scout for the Franks. The ambush was effected. Charlemagne lost his rear-guard, his scholars and his Spanish mules. And he locked the door against the Moslem world.” That was the text by Hilarius. “When we, as it were, push the button (give the nod to Epiktistes), this will be changed,” Gregory said. “Epikt, by a complex of devices which he has assembled, will send an Avatar (party of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction), and something will have happened to the traitor Gano along about sundown one night on the road to Roncevalles.”
“I hope the Avatar isn’t expensive,” Willy McGilly said.
“When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”
“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time. Willy?”
“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It’s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”
“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.
“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”
“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.
“Willy’s not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”
“Regard the world,” Aloysius said softly. “We see our own middle-sized town with half a dozen towers of pastel-colored brick. We will watch it as it grows or shrinks. It will change if the world changes.”
“There’s two shows in town I haven’t seen,” Valery said. “Don’t let them take them away! After all, there are only three shows in town.”
“We regard the Beautiful Arts as set out in the reviews here which we also taken as basic texts,” Audifex O’Hanlon said. “You can say what you want to, but the arts have never, been in meaner shape. Painting of three schools only, all of them bad. Sculpture is the heaps-of-rusted-metal school and the obscene tinker-toy erectives. The only popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, has become unimaginative, stylized and ugly.
“The only thinkers to be thought of are the dead Teilhard de Chardin and the stillborn Sartre, Zielinski, Aichinger. Oh well, if you’re going-to laugh there’s no use going on.”
“All of us here are experts on something,” Cogsworth said. “Most of us are experts on everything. We know the world as it is. Let us do what we are going to do land then look at the world.”
“Push the button, Epikt!” Gregory Smirnov ordered.
From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. Along about sundown on the road from Pamplona to Roncevalles, on August 14th of the year 778, the traitor Gano was taken up from the road and hanged on a carob tree, the only one in those groves of oak and bench. And all things thereafter were changed.
“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Louis Lobachevski demanded. “I can’t see a change in anything.”
“The Avatar is back and reports his mission accomplished,” Epikt stated. “I can’t see any change in anything either.”
“Let’s look at the evidence,” Gregory said.
The thirteen of them, the ten humans and the Ktistec, Chresmoeidec and Proaisthematic machines, turned to the evidence and with mounting disappointment.
