Time Travel Omnibus, page 661
“Our world exists more than two centuries beyond that.”
Micah shook his head silently. Food meant something. Sickness meant something. But the future? His mind already reeled with too many burdens.
John turned to Droos who was slowly stowing a silver tea service in a fabric pack.
“Can you explain it more adequately?”
Droos stared down at the objects he held. “These are truly exquisite,” he said.
“Standish Barry, Baltimore, probably about 1820.”
“Droos.”
The dark-haired man looked up and said, “This is against all the rules, you know. Why must you be a compulsive fool?”
“I was the only one in the department you could trust.” John bent down to look at Micah levelly. “Do you know about the Romans?”
Micah nodded. “Father read us stories.”
“Have you ever thought about what it would be like if you could really go back and visit the Romans?”
“Yes,” said Micah.
“Well, we can do that. Micah. We live in your future. We can come back and visit your time, or the time of the Romans, or any other-time of our choosing. We come from a year when smallpox has long since been banished from the earth and most other diseases have been eliminated equally.”
Micah knew he did not understand all that was being said to him. But a few words punched through the confusion. “You can heal smallpox?”
“Our ancestors did.” said John. “Your grandchildren will.”
“Can you cure Annie?”
Time again seemed suspended on the prairie. Everything was still. Micah stared at the men. They stared back at him.
“Well, I suppose . . .” said John.
“No,” said Droos.
“Droos has an emergency medical kit. It might alleviate the symptoms.”
“No.” This time Droos’s answer was more vehement.
John wheeled angrily on his companion. “Just once,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” said Droos. “If I have to pull rank, I’ll do so.”
“One child.” said John. “One life.”
Droos dropped a dozen silver spoons and let them lie on the dusty trail side. “Let me remind you of a few things,” he said. “I’m not being arbitrary about denying your humanitarian impulse. The first thing is that this is not exactly a sanctioned mission, you know. The second thing is that we’ll be strung up doubly by our balls if the department finds out we’ve been salvaging collectibles from the past for resale in the present. Third, there’s the primary travel directive—”
“Come on” said John. “Saving one little girl’s life is highly unlikely to alter the future in any significant—”
Droos interrupted him, raising his voice even higher. “We don’t know that. It’s one thing to scavenge these antiques because nature would have destroyed them anyway. It’s quite another to meddle with lives. Besides, we don’t know that his sister is going to die of smallpox. She might recover. I believe pioneer children were resilient—”
“I say we do it,” said John.
“If I have to, I’ll put your neck on the block without endangering mine,” said Droos, his voice quiet and deadly. “I am capable of that, you know.”
“I know that.” John spread his arms helplessly. “Please?”
“No. There are rules—and these rules we will follow implicitly. We live in that kind of world.” Droos knelt and began picking up the spoons, blowing the dust off and polishing them against his leg, before placing the utensils inside a bag of soft cloth. “Accept that.”
In the ensuing silence Micah said. “Can you cure Annie?”
John did not meet his eye this time. The towheaded man hesitated. Then he said. “No. we can’t. I’m sorry, Micah.”
Micah considered that. Then he asked, “But you could?”
Neither man said anything.
“But you won’t?”
John flushed. Droos stowed the packet of silver and extracted a crystal loop-and-petal candlestick from a crate. “I’m truly sorry,” said John. “I never should have spoken at all.”
Very slowly Micah said, “Father used to tell me. ‘I help my friends. God help my enemies.’ ”
“We’re not your enemies.” said John earnestly. “There are simply rules that say we cannot be the friends we’d wish.”
Micah said nothing. He only turned and, picking up both the dead snake and the muzzle-loader that leaned against a freestanding gilt mirror in its hardwood frame, walked away from the two men.
Micah distractedly shot the rabbit on the way back to the wagon. The big jack darted from the brush and then made the mistake of pausing to assess the intruder on the plains. The ball passed cleanly through its right eye. The meat was unspoiled.
When the boy arrived at the wagon, the sun was long past its zenith. The oxen looked up incuriously to greet him, then bent their heavy heads back to the tough grass, Micah paused by the rear of the wagon.
“Ma?” he said. “I have a snake and a rabbit, Ma.”
His mother drew the canvas flap aside and held a finger to her lips. “Hush,” she said. “Your sister is dying.” The gay colors of her gingham stood in stark contrast to the somber gray of the canvas top.
They waited an hour then a second hour, beside the small bed, listening to Annie’s labored breathing. They took turns squeezing new compresses for the girl’s forehead. Every few minutes Micah took the bucket to the river for fresh cold water.
Annie’s face continued to shine with sweat, even with the compresses. At the same time she shook as if with a chill, and they kept her bundled in her mother’s hand-loomed, thick woolen blankets.
Finally the breathing stopped. Mother and brother waited minute in the sudden stillness. Micah started to touch his mother’s shoulder. She shook his hand aside. “Let me be alone,” she said. Slowly she unwound the tine wool blankets and took up her daughter’s body in her arms. Without words she stepped down from the wagon and walked through the cotton woods toward the river’s edge.
Micah stood in the rear of the wagon and watched her go. The thought reverberated in his mind: What sort of people would allow a child to die this way? What form of Christian charity would let his sister perish in such a fashion?
He realized he simply did not know.
After what seemed a long long time, Micah emptied his mother’s most prized possession, the finely carved sandalwood chest, and repacked it.
The two men who claimed to be from the future were a half a mile farther down the frail from where they had met with Micah. They were still rummaging through the heaps of abandoned goods, apparently working their way toward Missouri.
Scrub cottonwoods sage, a dusty draw, juts of porous stone, the wagon ruts themselves, all lent Micah cover. The boy knew that an Indian would have discerned him in a moment. But John and Droos had no such skills. For the second time, but for only a moment, Micah truly wondered what it was like in the future. Then his mind told him once again that such speculation was an impossible luxury and he bent all he effort to remaining undiscovered.
For two or three seconds, he actually stood in full view. But both men were apparently absorbed in examining a bulky contraption of legs and drawers. Micah set the sandalwood chest down in the dust strategically in sight only a few yards beyond the men. Then he melted back into the country’s natural cover.
In a few minutes, Micah reappeared walking down the slope toward John and Droos and making no effort at concealment. The two men were looking over a William and Mary highboy touching the smooth finish, sliding the drawers in and out checking the joints. “Note the lacquered Chinese detail,” said Droos. “Though not actually executed by Oriental artisans the figures are Chinese in both feeling and technique.” Buried in his task he did not look up to see why John had not responded until Micah stood before them.
The boy’s face was coated with dust, his eyes felt like burnt holes in a mask. He tasted prairie grit and would have spat out the dirt but he no longer had the saliva.
John sounded unsure and awkward. “Hello Micah. Welcome back. We were just preparing to—leave. Our time is almost up and we must go home.”
Micah looked from one to the other steadily. He had to start the words several times because of the dry rasp in his throat. “You still would do nothing for my sister?”
“We can do nothing,” said Droos. “We come from a quite different world, Micah. There are things we must not do. There are rules.”
Micah turned his gaze to John. John finally stared at the ground and nodded.
“Very well,” the boy said, sounding tired and much older than his thirteen years.
The men looked at him warily. “I truly am sorry,” said John.
Micah said nothing. Nor did he answer any other entreaty made by either of the men. He retreated to sit on a wooden crate that held mining tools and simply watched them.
“We’d best get back to work,” said Droos, checking something on his wrist.
With redoubled energy the two men again busied themselves among the debris. Every once in a while they looked at Micah. The boy remained stationery on the box.
“A swirl bottle,” said Droos. “A second!”
“This looks like a Pennsylvania Dutch door hanging,” said John.
“A full set of eighteenth-century sextant gear.”
“Another Roosevelt teapot.”
“What’s this?” John hunkered down beside the sandalwood chest.
“What extraordinary workmanship,” said Droos, also bending over the chest. “Absolutely gorgeous.” His fingertips ran eagerly over the inlaid panels. Then he raised the lid and said, “Oh yes, yes indeed. Drawing the contents from the chest he said, “Shetland?”
“Looks like it,” said John.
And loomed by my mother’s hand, thought Micah, but he spoke no word aloud.
Droos again inspected his wrist and said, “Damn! It’s almost over. You attach a tracer to the chest. I’ll finish up the rest.”
Their departure was not dramatic.
“Ten seconds,” said Droos, adjusting something at his belt.
John at least spoke to Micah. “Good bye,” he said offering a slow sad wave of his hand. “I’m sorry Micah.”
Both men simply were gone. As though they had never existed. Micah watched as all up and down the trail objects vanished. Crates and bags melted into the air. The massive William and Mary highboy disappeared. Finally, his mother’s sandalwood chest vanished too; and along with it, the fine hand-loomed blankets of good Shetland wool, the blankets that had kept his sister from the frontier cold these past nights.
Micah stood then and hoped his mother was waiting for him at the wagon. The chest and blankets were gone. They had left him there to stand sweating in the prairie sun in a plain of near-absolute stillness, hushed but no longer expectant—a plain on which it seemed to him anything could happen.
And it had.
THE FINAL DAYS
David Langford
It was under the hot lights that Harman always felt most powerful. The air throbbed and sang with dazzlement and heat, wherein opponents—Ferris merely the most recent—might shrivel and wilt; but Harman sucked confidence from cameras, glad to expose something of himself to a nation of watchers, and more than a nation. Just now the slick, machine-stamped interviewer was turned away, towards Ferris; still Harman knew better than to peer surreptitiously at his own solid, blond and faintly smiling image in the monitor. Control was important, and Harman’s image was imperturbable: his hands lay still and relaxed, the left on the chair-arm, the right on his thigh, their stillness one of the many small negative mannerisms which contributed to the outward Harman’s tough dependability.
Gradually the focus was slipping away from Ferris, whose mere intelligence and sincerity should not be crippling his handling of the simplest, the most hypothetical questions.
“What would be your first act as President, Mr. Ferris?”
“Well, er . . . it would depend on . . .”
And the monitor would ruthlessly cut back to Harman in relaxed close-up, faintly smiling. One of the tricks was to be always the same. Ferris, alternately tense and limp, seemed scarcely camera-trained. Why? Ferris did not speak naturally toward the interviewer, nor oratorically into the camera which now pushed close, its red action-light ablink; his gaze wavered as he assembled libertarian platitudes, and his attention was drawn unwillingly beyond the arena’s heat and light, to something that troubled him. Harman glanced easily about the studio, and followed Ferris’s sick fascination to his own talisman, the magic box which traced the threads of destiny. (Always to be ready with a magniloquent phrase; that was another of the tricks.)
He could have laughed. Ferris, supposedly a seasoned performer and a dangerous opponent, could not adapt to this novelty. Four days to go, and his skill was crumbling under the onslaught of a gigantically magnified stage-fright. Posterity was too much for him.
Looking up from the box, the technician intercepted Harman’s tightly relaxed gaze and held up five fingers; and five more; and four. Harman’s self-confidence and self-belief could hardly burn brighter. Fourteen watchers. Favoured above all others, he had never before scored higher than ten. The wheel still turned his way, then. Ecce homo; man of the hour; man of destiny; he half-smiled at the clichés, but no more than half.
The interviewer swivelled his chair to Harman, leaving Ferris in a pool of sweat. His final questions had been gentle, pityingly gentle; and Ferris with flickering eyes had fumbled nearly all.
“Mr. Ferris has explained his position, Mr. Harman, and I’m sure that you’d like to state yours before I ask you a few questions.”
Harman let his practised voice reply at once, while his thoughts sang fourteen . . . fourteen.
“I stand, as I have said before, for straight talking and honest action. I stand for a rejection of the gutless compromises which have crippled our economy. I want a fair deal for everyone, and I’m ready to fight to see they get it.”
The words were superfluous. Harman’s followers had a Sign.
“I’ll tell you a true story about something that happened to me a while ago. I was walking home at night, in a street where vandals had smashed up half the lights, and a mugger came up to me. One of those scum who will be swept from the streets when our program of police reform goes through.”
(He detected a twitch of resentment from Ferris; but Ferris was off-camera now.)
“He showed me a knife and asked for my wallet, the usual line of talk. Now I’m not a specially brave man, but this was what I’d been talking about when I laid it on the line about political principles. You just don’t give in to threats like that. So I said damn you, come and try it, and you know, he just crumpled up. There’s a moral in that story for this country, a moral you’ll see when you think who’s threatening us right now—”
It was a true story. As it happened, the security man on Harman’s tail had shot the mugger as he wavered.
“A few questions, then,” said the interviewer. “I think we’re all waiting to hear more about the strangest gimmick ever included in a Presidential campaign. A lot of people are pretty sceptical about these scientists’ claims, you know. Perhaps you could just briefly tell the viewers what you yourself think about these eyes, these watchers—?”
When you’re hot, you’re hot. Harman became still chattier.
“It’s not a gimmick and it’s not really part of my campaign. Some guys at the Gravity Research Foundation discovered that we—or some of us—are being watched. By, well, posterity. As you’ll know from the newspapers, they were messing about with a new way of picking up gravity waves, which is something a plain man like me knows nothing about; and instead their gadget spotted these (what did they call them?) little knots of curdled space. The nodes, they called them later, or the peepholes. The gadget tells you when they’re looking and how many are looking. It turns out that ordinary folk”—he suppressed the reflexive like you and me—“aren’t watched at all; important people might get one or two or half-a-dozen eyes on them . . .”
At a sign from the interviewer, a previously dormant camera zoomed in on the technician and the unremarkable-looking Box. “Can you tell us how many—eyes—are present in this studio, sir?”
The technician paused to make some minor adjustment, doubtless eager for his own tiny share of limelight. He looked up after a few seconds, and said:
“Fifteen.”
Ferris shuddered very slightly.
“Of course,” said Harman smoothly, “some of these will be for Mr. Ferris.” Ferris, he knew, had two watchers; intermittently; and it seemed that he hated it. The interviewer, giant of this tiny studio world, was never watched for his own sake when alone. He was marking time now, telling the tale of Sabinnen, that artist whom they tagged important in earlier tests of the detectors. Sabinnen was utterly obscure at that time; that ceased when they tracked the concentration of eight eyes, and his cupboardful of paintings came to light, and did it not all hang together, this notion of the Future watching the famous before their fame?
Harman revelled in the silent eyes which so constantly attended him. It recalled the curious pleasure of first finding his home and office bugged; such subtle flattery might dismay others, but Harman had nothing to hide.
“But I must emphasize that this is only a pointer,” he said, cutting in at the crucial moment. “The people have this hint of the winning side, as they might from newspaper predictions or opinion polls—but the choice remains theirs, a decision which we politicians must humbly accept. Of course I’m glad it’s not just today’s voters who have faith in me—” He was full of power; the words came smoothly, compellingly, through the final minutes—while Ferris stared first morosely at his shoe and then bitterly at Harman, while the interviewer (momentarily forgetful of the right to equal time, doubtless reluctant to coax the numbered Ferris through further hoops) listened with an attentive silence which clearly said In four days you will be President.
