Time Travel Omnibus, page 659
He got back into the cab and gripped the steering wheel. His head spun and ached, but he felt himself on the verge of a marvelous conclusion, a simple answer to all of this. There was evidence, yes, even though the bodies were gone, there was evidence that he had hit those people. He had not imagined it.
They must, then, be (he stumbled over the word, even in his mind, laughed at himself as he concluded:) angels. Jesus sent them, he knew it, as his mother had taught him, destroying angels teaching him the death that he had brought to his wife while daring, himself, to walk away scatheless.
It was time to even up the debt.
He started the engine and drove, slowly, deliberately toward the end of the road. And as the front tires bumped off and a sickening moment passed when he feared that the truck would be too heavy for the driving wheels to push along the ground, he clasped his hands in front of his face and prayed, aloud: “Forward!”
And then the truck slid forward, tipped downward, hung in the air, and fell. His body pressed into the back of the truck. His clasped hands struck his face. He meant to say, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” but instead he screamed, “No no no no no,” in an infinite negation of death that, after all, didn’t do a bit of good once he was committed into the gentle, unyielding hands of the ravine. They clasped and enfolded him, pressed him tightly, closed his eyes and pillowed his head between the gas tank and the granite.
“Wait,” Gemini said.
“Why the hell should we?” Officer Manwool said, stopping at the door with Orion following docilely on the end of the lovecord. Orion, too, stopped, and looked at the policeman with the adoring expression all lovecord captives wore.
“Give the man a break,” Gemini said.
“He doesn’t deserve one,” she said. “And neither do you.”
“I say give the man a break. At least wait for the proof.”
She snorted. “What more proof does he need, Gemini? A signed statement from Rodney Bingley that Orion Overweed is a bloody hitler?”
Gemini smiled and spread his hands. “We didn’t actually see what Rodney did next, did we? Maybe he was struck by lightning two hours later, before he saw anybody—I mean, you’re required to show that damage did happen. And I don’t feel any change to the present—”
“You know that changes aren’t felt. They aren’t even known, since we wouldn’t remember anything other than how things actually happened!”
“At least,” Gemini said, “watch what happens and see whom Rodney tells.”
So she led Orion back to the controls, and at her instructions Orion lovingly started the holo moving again.
And they all watched as Rodney Bingley walked to the edge of the ravine, then walked back to the truck, drove it to the edge and over into the chasm, and died on the rocks.
As it happened, Hector hooted in joy. “He died after all! Orion didn’t change a damned thing, not one damned thing!”
Manwool turned on him in disgust. “You make me sick,” she said.
“The man’s dead,” Hector said in glee. “So get that stupid string off Orion or I’ll sue for a writ of—”
“Go pucker in a corner,” she said, and several of the women pretended to be shocked. Manwool loosened the lovecord and slid it off Orion’s wrist. Immediately he turned on her, snarling. “Get out of here! Get out! Get out!”
He followed her to the door of the crambox. Gemini was not the only one who wondered if he would hit her. But Orion kept his control, and she left unharmed.
Orion stumbled back from the crambox rubbing his arms as if with soap, as if trying to scrape them clean from contact with the lovecord. “That thing ought to be outlawed. I actually loved her. I actually loved that stinking, bloody, son-of-a-bitching cop!” And he shuddered so violently that several of the guests laughed and the spell was broken.
Orion managed a smile and the guests went back to amusing themselves. With the sensitivity that even the insensitive and jaded sometimes exhibit, they left him alone with Gemini at the controls of the timelid.
Gemini reached out and brushed a strand of hair out of Orion’s eyes. “Get a comb someday,” he said. Orion smiled and gently stroked Gemini’s hand. Gemini slowly removed his hand from Orion’s reach. “Sorry, Orry,” Gemini said, “but not anymore.”
Orion pretended to shrug. “I know,” he said. “Not even for old times’ sake.” He laughed softly. “That stupid string made me love her. They shouldn’t even do that to criminals.”
He played with the controls of the holo, which was still on. The image zoomed in; the cab of the truck grew larger and larger. The chronons were too scattered and the image began to blur and fade. Orion stopped it.
By ducking slightly and looking through a window into the cab, Orion and Gemini could see the exact place where the outcropping of rock crushed Rod Bingley’s head against the gas tank. Details, of course, were indecipherable.
“I wonder,” Orion finally said, “if it’s any different.”
“What’s any different?” Gemini asked.
“Death. If it’s any different when you don’t wake up right afterward.”
A silence.
Then the sound of Gemini’s soft laughter.
“What’s funny?” Orion asked.
“You,” the younger man answered. “Only one thing left that you haven’t tried, isn’t there?”
“How could I do it?” Orion asked, half-seriously (only half?). “They’d only clone me back.”
“Simple enough,” Gemini said. “All you need is a friend who’s willing to turn off the machine while you’re on the far end. Nothing is left. And you can take care of the actual suicide yourself.”
“Suicide,” Orion said with a smile. “Trust you to use the policeman’s term.”
And that night, as the other guests slept off the alcohol in beds or other convenient places, Orion lay on the chair and pulled the box over his head. And with Gemini’s last kiss on his cheek and Gemini’s left hand on the controls, Orion said, “All right. Pull me over.”
After a few minutes Gemini was alone in the room. He did not even pause to reflect before he went to the breaker box and shut off all the power for a critical few seconds. Then he returned, sat alone in the room with the disconnected machine and the empty chair. The crambox soon buzzed with the police override, and Mercy Manwool stepped out. She went straight to Gemini, embraced him. He kissed her, hard.
“Done?” she asked.
He nodded.
“The bastard didn’t deserve to live,” she said.
Gemini shook his head. “You didn’t get your justice, my dear Mercy.”
“Isn’t he dead?”
“Oh yes, that. Well, it’s what he wanted, you know. I told him what I planned. And he asked me to do it.”
She looked at him angrily. “You would. And then tell me about it, so I wouldn’t get any joy out of this at all.” Gemini only shrugged.
Manwool turned away from him, walked to the timelid. She ran her fingers along the box. Then she detached her laser from her belt and slowly melted the timelid until it was a mass of hot plastic on a metal stand. The few metal components had even melted a little, bending to be just a little out of shape.
“Screw the past anyway,” she said. “Why can’t it stay where it belongs?”
A TOUCH OF PETULANCE
Ray Bradbury
On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.
His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fate disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:
“Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?”
“No!” the older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, “Yes. A very late edition.”
Hughes glanced around. “Excuse me, but—all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?”
“Future?” The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. “Indeed,” he whispered. “Future change. God, what a joke.”
Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline:
May 2, 1999.
“Now, see here—” he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page:
WOMAN MURDERED
POLICE SEEK HUSBAN
Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—
The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.
The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened.
In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:
Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant, of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—
“My God!” he cried. “Get away!”
But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.
Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us—us? What kind of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!
The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with traveling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to confront the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous traveling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.
“Who are you?”
Someone must have shouted that.
The train rocked as if it might derail.
The old man stood up as if shot in the heart, blindly crammed something into Jonathan Hughes’s hand, and blundered away down the aisle and into the next car.
The younger man opened his fist and turned a card over and read a few words that moved him heavily down to sit and read the words again:
JONATHAN HUGHES, CPA
679-4990. Plandome.
“No!” someone shouted.
Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is . . . me.
There was a conspiracy, no, several conspiracies. Someone had contrived a joke about murder and played it on him. The train roared on with five hundred commuters who all rode, swaying like a team of drunken intellectuals behind masking books and papers, while the old man, as if pursued by demons, fled off away from car to car. By the time Jonathan Hughes had rampaged his blood and completely thrown his sanity off balance, the old man had plunged, as if falling, to the farthest end of the commuter’s special.
The two men met again in the last car, which was almost empty. Jonathan Hughes came and stood over the old man, who refused to look up. He was crying so hard now that conversation would have been impossible.
Who, thought the young man, who is he crying for? Stop, please, stop.
The old man, as if commanded, sat up, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and began to speak in a frail voice that drew Jonathan Hughes near and finally caused him to sit and listen to the whispers:
“We were born—”
“We?” cried the young man.
“We,” whispered the old man, looking out at the gathering dusk that traveled like smokes and burnings past the window, “we, yes, we, the two of us, we were born in Quincy in nineteen fifty. August twenty-second—”
Yes, thought Hughes.
“—and lived at Forty-nine Washington Street and went to Central School and walked to that school all through first grade with Isabel Perry—”
Isabel, thought the young man.
“We . . .” murmured the old man. “Our,” whispered the old man. “Us.” And went on and on with it.
“Our woodshop teacher, Mr. Bisbee. History teacher, Miss Monks. We broke our right ankle, age ten, iceskating. Almost drowned, age eleven; Father saved us. Fell in love, age twelve, Impi Johnson—”
Seventh grade, lovely lady, long since dead, Jesus God, thought the young man, growing old.
And that’s what happened. In the next minute, two minutes, three, the old man talked and talked and gradually became younger with talking so that his cheeks glowed and his eyes brightened, while the young man, weighted with old knowledge given, sank lower in his seat and grew pale so that both almost met in mid-talking, mid-listening and became twins in passing. There was a moment when Jonathan Hughes knew for an absolute insane certainty that if he dared to glance up he would see identical twins in the mirrored window of a night-rushing world.
He did not look up.
The old man finished, his frame erect now, his head somehow driven high by talking out, the long lost revelations.
“That’s the past,” he said.
I should hit him, thought Hughes. Accuse him. Shout at him. Why aren’t I hitting, accusing, shouting?
Because . . .
The old man sensed the question and said, “You know I’m who I say I am. I know everything there is to know about us. Now—the future?”
“Mine?”
“Ours,” said the old man.
Jonathan Hughes nodded, staring at the newspaper clutched in the old man’s right hand. The old man folded it and put it away.
“Your business will slowly become less than good. For what reasons, who can say? A child will be born and die. A mistress will be taken and lost. A wife will become less than good. And at last, oh believe it, yes, do, very slowly, you will come to—how shall I say it—hate her living presence. There, I see I’ve upset you. I’ll shut up.”
They rode in silence for a long while, and the old man grew old again, and the young man along with him. When he had aged just the proper amount, the young man nodded the talk to continue, not looking at the other who now said:
“Impossible, yes, you’ve been married only a year, a great year, the best. Hard to think that a single drop of ink could color a white pitcher of clear fresh water. But color it could and color it did. And at last the entire world changed, not just our wife, not just the beautiful woman, the fine dream.”
“You—” Jonathan Hughes started and stopped. “You—killed her?”
“We did. Both of us. But if I have my way, if I can convince you, neither of us will, she will live, and you will grow old to become a happier, finer me. I pray for that. I weep for that. There’s still time. Across the years, I intend to shake you up, change your blood, shape your mind. God, if people knew what murder is. So silly. So stupid, so ugly. But there is hope, for I have somehow got here, touched you, and begun to change. That will save our souls. Now, listen. You do admit, do you not, that we are one and the same, that the twins of time ride this train this hour this night?”
The train whistled ahead of them, clearing the track for an encumbrance of years.
The young man nodded the most infinitely microscopic of nods. The old man needed no more.
“I ran away. I ran to you. That’s all I can say. She’s been dead only a day, and I ran. Where to go? Nowhere to die, save Time. No one to plead with, no judge, no jury, no proper witnesses save—you. Only you can wash the blood away, do you see? You drew me, then. Your youngness, your innocence, your good hours, your fine life still untouched, was the machine that seized me down the track. All of my sanity lies in you. If you turn away, great God, I’m lost, no, we are lost. We’ll share a grave and never rise and be buried forever in misery. Shall I tell you what you must do?”
The young man rose.
“Plandome,” a voice cried. “Plandome.”
And they went out on the platform with the old man running after, the young man blundering into walls, into people, feeling as if his limbs might fly apart.
“Wait!” cried the old man. “Oh, please!”
The young man kept moving.
“Don’t you see, we’re in this together, we must think of it together, solve it together, so you won’t become me and I won’t have to come impossibly in search of you, oh, it’s all mad, insane, I know, I know, but listen!”
The young man stopped at the edge of the platform where cars were pulling in, with joyful cries or muted greeting, brief honkings, gunnings of motors, lights vanishing away. The old man grasped the young man’s elbow.
“Good God, your wife, mine, will be here in a moment, there’s so much to tell, you can’t know what I know, there’s twenty years of unfound information lost between which we must trade and understand. Are you listening? God, you don’t believe!” Jonathan Hughes was watching the street. A long way off a final car was approaching. He said: “What happened in the attic at my grandmother’s house in the summer of nineteen-fifty-eight? No one knows but me. Well?”
The old man’s shoulders slumped. He breathed more easily, and as if reciting from a prompt-board said, “We hid ourselves there for two days, alone. No one ever knew where we hid. Everyone thought we had run away to drown in the lake or fall in the river. But all the time, crying, not feeling wanted, we hid above and . . . listened to the wind and wanted to die.”
The young man turned at last to stare fixedly at his older self, tears in his eyes. “You love me, then?”
“I had better,” said the old man. “I’m all you have.”
The car was pulling up at the station. A young woman smiled and waved behind the glass.
“Quick,” said the old man, quietly. “Let me come home, watch, show you, teach you, find where things went wrong, correct them now, maybe hand you a fine life forever, let me—”
The car horn sounded, the car stopped, the young woman leaned out.
“Hello, lovely man!” she cried.
