Time Travel Omnibus, page 624
“This may all seem strange to you, Andy, and I am a bit surprised myself, for until this moment I have not really considered how I felt when I found the body, never sorted out my reactions. So, to get on with it, I picked up the cube, which I am aware I should not have done, and holding it in my hand and turning it to try to determine what it was, I saw a glint of color from inside it, so I lifted it closer to look at it and saw what you saw just now. And having seen it, there was no question in my mind at all of dropping it back where I had found it. I’ve never been more shaken in my life. I stood there, with the cold sweat breaking out on me, shaking like a leaf . . .”
“But, Neville, why?” I asked. “I’ll admit it is a clever thing, a beautiful piece of work, but . . .”
“You mean you didn’t recognize it?”
“You mean the picture in the cube? Why should I?”
“Because it is a photograph of the Battle of Marathon.”
I gasped. “A photograph? Marathon! How can you know? You are going dotty, Neville.”
“I know because I know the Plain of Marathon,” he said. “I spent three weeks there two years ago—remember? Camping on the field. Tramping up and down the battlefield. Trying to get the feel of it. And I did get the feel of it. I walked the line of battle. I traced the Persians’ flight. I lived that goddamn battle, Andy. There were times, standing in the silence, I could hear the shouting.”
“But you said a photograph. That things not any photograph. There’s not a camera made . . .”
“I know, but look at this.” He handed back the cube. “Have another look,” he said.
I had another look. “There’s something wrong,” I said. “There isn’t any water, and there was before. There was a lake off in the distance.
“Not a lake,” said Neville. “The Bay of Marathon. Now you are seeing hills, or perhaps a distant marsh. And there is still a battle.
“A hill,” I said. “Not too big a hill. What the hell is going on?”
“Turn it. Look through another face.”
I turned it. “A marsh this time. Way off. And a sort of swale. A dry creek bed.”
The Charadra,” said Neville. “A stream. Really two streams. In September, when the battle was fought, the streams no longer ran. The beds were dry. You’re looking along the route the Persians fled. Look to your right. Some pine trees.”
They look like pines.”
The Schoenia. Pines growing on a sandy beach between the marsh and sea. The Persian boats are pulled up on that beach, but you can’t see them.”
I put the cube back on the table. “What kind of gag is this?” I asked, half angrily. “What are you trying to prove?”
He almost pleaded with me. “I told you, Andy. I’m not trying to prove anything at all. That cube is a photograph of Marathon, of the battle that was fought almost twenty-five centuries ago. I don’t know who photographed it or how it was photographed, but I am certain that is what it is. It’s no snap judgment on my part. I know. I have examined it more closely than you have. After you left for the Trading Post I decided that instead of driving my car, I’d walk down to the bridge. It’s only half a mile or so. It was a fine morning and I felt like a walk. So when I found Stefan I had to come back here to get the car, and I must confess I did not drive to the Trading Post immediately. I know I should have, but I was so excited about the cube—I was fairly sure what it was, but not absolutely certain, the way I am now—and a half hour one way or the other meant nothing whatsoever to Stefan any more. So I took the time to have a good look at the cube and I used a glass on it. Here,” he said, digging around in his pocket, taking out a reading glass. “Here, use this. The picture doesn’t break up with magnification. Those are no toy figures in there, no fabrications, no clever make-believes. They are flesh-and-blood men. Look at the expressions on their faces. Note that details become clearer.”
He was right. Under the glass, the details were sharper, the faces became more human. The beards were not pasted-on beards, not painted-on beards; they were really beards. One Greek hoplite, his mouth open in a shout, had a missing front tooth, and little beads of blood had oozed out of a minor bruise across one cheek.
Somewhere,” said Neville, “there is a projector, or whatever it is called. You drop the cube into it and the scene is reproduced. You are standing in the middle of the battle, in a frozen thousandth-second of the battle. . .
“But there is no such thing,” I said.
“Neither is there a camera that would take a photograph of this sort. It’s not only a three-dimensional photograph but an all-angles photograph. Look through one face of it and you see the bay, look through another and you see the marsh. Rotate it through three hundred and sixty degrees and you see the battle all around you. You see it all as it was happening in that thousandth of a second.”
I put the cube and the reading glass back on the table. “Now, listen,” I said. “You say this had fallen out of Stefan’s pocket. Tell me this—how did Stefan get it?”
“Andy, I don’t know. First we’d have to know who Stefan was. Tell me what you know about Stefan. Tell me what you know about the other people who come to the Lodge.”
“I don’t know a thing about Stefan or the others,” I said. “Nor do you. Nor does anyone else.”
“Remember,” Neville reminded me, “how when the sheriff looked for identification on Stefan’s body, he found nothing. No billfold. No scrap of paper. Nothing. How could a man get by without a social security card? Even if he had no other identification . . .”
“He might not have wanted to be identified,” I said. “He carried nothing so that if something happened to him, there’d be no way for anyone to know who he was.”
“The same thought crossed my mind,” said Neville. “And the Lodge. It was as clean of paper as Stefan’s body.”
I had been standing all this time, but now I sat down at the table. “Maybe it’s time,” I said, “that we start saying out loud some of the things we have been thinking. If that cube is what you say it is, it means that someone with greater technical skills than we have has traveled in time to take the photograph. It couldn’t be an artifact. Back when Marathon was fought no one had ever dreamed of the possibility of even a simple photograph. No one from the present time could take the kind of photograph there is in the cube. So we’ve got two factors—time travel and time travel done by someone from the future, where an advanced technology might make that photograph possible.”
Neville nodded. “That has to be the answer, Andy. But you’ll not find a responsible physicist who’ll concede even the faintest hope that time travel is possible. And if it should be, some time in the future, why should the travelers be here? There’s nothing here that could possibly attract them.”
“A hideout,” I said. “When the Lodge was built, forty years ago, these hills were a good hideout.”
“One thing puzzles me,” said Neville. “The emptiness of the Lodge. If you were traveling in time, wouldn’t you bring back some artifacts? Wouldn’t you want something to put up on the mantel?”
“It might be only a stopping place. A place to spend the night every now and then.”
He reached out and took the cube and glass. “One thing bothers me,” he said. “I should have turned this over to the sheriff.”
“What the world for?” I asked. “It would only confuse him more, and he’s confused enough already.”
“But it’s evidence.”
“Evidence, hell,” I said. “This is no murder. There’s no question what did Stefan in. There’s no mystery to it; there’s nothing to be solved.”
“You don’t blame me, Andy, for wanting to keep it? It’s not mine, I know. I have no right to it.”
“If it’s what you think it is,” I said, “you have more right to it than anyone I know. Four studies in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, all on Marathon . . .”
“Only three on Marathon,” he said. “One of them concerned the prehistoric Danube Thoroughfare. Some of the bronzes found there seemed to have some connection with Troy. There have been times when I have had some regrets about that paper. Since then I’ve told myself I wandered somewhat far afield.”
He dropped the cube back into his pocket. “I might as well get started,” he said. “I want to reach the university before nightfall. There are hundreds of color slides in my files, taken on the plain of Marathon, and I want to make some comparison checks. Also I want to get some greater magnification than this reading glass affords.”
He stood up, hesitating for a moment. “You want to come with me, Andy? We could be back in a few days.”
I shook my head. “I have to get down to work,” I said. “If I don’t get that damn book written this time around, I’ll never write it.”
He went into his bedroom and came out with his briefcase.
I stood in the cabin door and watched him drive off. He’d get no sleep this night, I knew. Once back in his office, he’d spend the night working with the photograph of Marathon. I was surprised to find how easy it had become to think of it as a photograph of Marathon. I had come to accept, I realized, what Neville said about it. If there was anyone who would know, I told myself, he would be the one. Neville Piper was among the half dozen men in the world who could be regarded as experts on the Persian campaign of 490 B.C. If he said it was Marathon, I stood ready to believe him.
I went out on the porch and sat down in a chair, looking out over the tangled wilderness of the hills. I knew I shouldn’t be sitting there. I had an attaché case and a whiskey carton, both filled with notes and half-written chapters, some of them only roughed out and others only needing polishing and checking. I had a brand-new ream of paper and I’d had the typewriter cleaned and oiled—and here I sat out on the porch, staring off into nothing.
But somehow I couldn’t make myself get up and go in to work I couldn’t get Stefan or any of the rest of it out of my mind—Stefan, the cube, Stefan’s empty pockets, and the empty Lodge, empty of everything except that incredible contraption that the sheriff had thought might be some sort of game. Thinking about it, I was fairly certain it wasn’t any game, although, for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what it was.
I sat there stupid, not moving, not wanting to move, sitting there trying to absorb and put together all the strange happenings, listening with half an ear to the sound of wind in the pines that grew just down the hill, the shrill chirring of a startled chipmunk, the squalling of a jay.
Then I became aware of another sound, a distant sound, a droning that steadily grew louder, and I knew it was the noon flight of the Galloping Goose, heading north after stopping at Pine Bend. I got out of my chair and went into the yard, waiting for the plane to come over the treetops. When it showed up it seemed to be flying lower than it usually did, and I wondered if there might be something wrong, although, except for the lower-than-usual altitude, it seemed to be all right. Then, when it was almost directly above me, something apparently did happen. Suddenly the plane, which had been flying level, perhaps actually climbing, although from the ground that would not have been immediately apparent—suddenly the plane went into a bank, dipping one wing and raising the other, and watching it, I had for an instant the distinct impression that it had shuddered. It banked and seemed to wobble, as if it might be staggering. Then, just as it disappeared above the treetops, it seemed to right itself and go on as before.
It all had happened so swiftly that I really had seen nothing that I could pin down. Somehow, however, I had the impression that the plane had hit something, although what might be up there to hit I could not imagine. It seemed to me I had read somewhere about planes coming to grief by running into flocks of birds. But that, I remembered, almost always happened on approach or takeoff. Despite the fact that the Galloping Goose had appeared to be flying lower than usual, I realized it probably had been flying too high for birds to be a hazard.
I had glanced down and now, for some reason I don’t remember, perhaps for no reason at all, I glanced up at the sky and saw a dark dot hanging almost directly over me. As I watched it got larger, and I could see that it was something falling. It was wobbling about as if it might be tumbling in its fall. From the distance that I viewed it, it looked remarkably like a suitcase, and the thought occurred to me that a piece of luggage may have fallen or been thrown from the plane. Then I realized the improbability of throwing anything from a plane in flight, and realized, as well, that if a cargo hatch had popped open, there’d be more than one piece of luggage falling to the ground.
The whole thing was ridiculous, of course, but it didn’t seem ridiculous while I stood there watching the flapping, tumbling whatever-it-was falling toward the ground. Afterward it did seem ridiculous, but not at that time.
For a moment it seemed to be rushing straight down upon me. I even took a couple of steps to one side so it wouldn’t hit me, before I saw that it would come to earth a short distance down the slope below the cabin.
It came crashing down, brushing through the branches of a maple tree, and when it hit the ground it made a soggy thud. In the last few seconds before it hit the tree I could see it was not a piece of luggage. It was hard to make out what it was, but it did look something like a saddle, and of all the things a man would expect to come falling from the sky a saddle would have been the last upon the list.
When I heard it hit, I went running down the slope and there, in a dry ravine below the road, I found it—and it was a saddle, although no kind of saddle I had ever seen before. But it did have stirrups and a seat and what I took to be an adaptation of a saddle horn. It was scratched up a bit, but it really wasn’t damaged much. It had fallen in a deep drift of leaves, and the leaves had cushioned its fall. There was, I saw, a rather deep dent in the saddle horn, if that was what it was.
It was heavy, but I managed to hoist it on one shoulder and went puffing and panting up the slope. Back at the cabin I dumped it on the porch floor and it lay all humped up, but when I straightened it out there was no doubt that it was a saddle. The seat was wide and ample and the stirrups were cinched up to the right length for an ordinary man. The horn rose somewhat higher than one would find in an ordinary saddle and was considerably larger and flattened on the top, with what seemed to be control buttons set into its face. The entire structure of the horn was shaped like an elongated box. The saddle was constructed of a good grade of heavy leather, and from the feel of it the frame was made of metal. But leather covered all of it and no metal could be seen. Attached to the forward saddle skirts were two closed saddlebags.
I squatted on the floor beside the saddle and my fingers itched to open up the bags, but I didn’t do it for a time. I squatted there and tried to fight down the thought that had popped into my head—not that I wanted to do away with it, to banish it, but rather to bring it down to proper perspective, carve it down in size a bit.
Now let’s be logical, I told myself. Let’s put down the facts we have. First there is a saddle and the saddle is a fact. It is something one can see and touch. It fell out of the sky and that is another fact—for I had seen it fall. It had fallen after the Galloping Goose had gone through a rather strange maneuver—and that probably could be better listed as an observation rather than a fact.
It all seemed clear to me. The saddle had been up there in the sky and the Galloping Goose had come along and collided with it. After the collision the saddle had fallen from the sky. But, I cautioned myself, I could not be sure of that. I could be sure the saddle had fallen from the sky, but I couldn’t be positively sure the plane had caused the fall. Fairly sure, of course, but not entirely so.
Questions rattled in my mind, and on the heel of questions, answers. I pushed both the questions and the answers back and stayed looking at the saddlebags. They lay quite flat, and there was no bulge to them.
Although, I told myself, there might be something in them. It wouldn’t need to be too much. A clue was all I needed. A clue that would give some support to that one big answer roaring in my brain.
I hunkered down and opened up the first bag. There was nothing in it. I opened the second bag and there was nothing in it, either. Empty—as empty as Stefan’s pockets, as empty as the Lodge.
I got up and staggered to the chair and sat weakly in it. The saddle sprawled upon the porch floor and I tried not to look at it.
A time machine, I asked myself—a traveling time machine? You got into the saddle and rose up in the air, then you turned it on and went where you wished in time. But, hell, I told myself, it wouldn’t work. Even if you could blind yourself to the impossibility of time travel, there still were a dozen easy reasons why it wouldn’t work. I must be insane, I told myself, to even think about it. But tell me, said that mocking, illogical portion of my mind that I didn’t even know I had—tell me this, what would a saddle be doing up there in the sky?
I got down on the porch floor on all fours and looked the saddle over. I examined it inch by inch. Hoping, I suppose, for an impression somewhere in the leather which would read: Texas Saddle and Leather Corp., Houston, or something of the sort, anything at all to take my imagination off the hook. I found nothing. There was no imprint or tag to tell the saddle’s origin. I felt cold feet walking on my spine. I picked up the saddle and took it in the cabin, tossed it on the floor of the closet off my bedroom and shut the door. Then, halfway back to the porch, I turned around and went back again and threw a pair of trousers and an old sweatshirt over the saddle so it would be hidden. I went back to the porch and sat there, thinking I should get at the book but knowing I’d have to wait for a while before I would get to it. I tried to watch the birds and chipmunks and the other creatures that skittered about the woods, but couldn’t seem to work up too much interest in them. I thought about going fishing but decided not to. After a while I cooked myself some eggs and bacon and, after eating, went out on the porch again.
