Time Travel Omnibus, page 686
“Five minutes to four and counting. Why,” said the young reporter, “did no one else ever travel in time?”
“I put a stop to it myself,” said the old man, leaning over the roof, looking down at the crowds. “I realized how dangerous it was. I was reliable, of course, no danger. But, Lord, think of it—just anyone rolling about the bowling-alley time corridors ahead, knocking tenpins headlong, frightening natives, shocking citizens somewhere else, fiddling with Napoleon’s life line behind or restoring Hitler’s cousins ahead? No, no. And the government, of course, agreed—no, insisted—that we put the Toynbee Convector under sealed lock and key. Today, you were the first and last to fingerprint its machinery. The guard has been heavy and constant, for tens of thousands of days, to prevent the machine’s being stolen. What time do you have?”
Shumway glanced at his watch and took in his breath.
“One minute and counting down——”
He counted, the old man counted. They raised their champagne glasses.
“Nine, eight, seven——”
The crowds below were immensely silent. The sky whispered with expectation. The TV cameras swung up to scan and search.
“Six, five——”
They clinked their glasses.
“Four, three, two——”
They drank.
“One!”
They drank their champagne with a laugh. They looked to the sky. The golden air above the La Jolla coastline waited. The moment for the great arrival was here.
“Now!” cried the young reporter, like a magician giving orders.
“Now,” said Stiles, gravely quiet.
Nothing.
Five seconds passed.
The sky stood empty.
Ten seconds passed.
The heavens waited.
Twenty seconds passed.
Nothing.
At last, Shumway turned to stare and wonder at the old man by his side.
Stiles looked at him, shrugged and said:
“I lied.”
“You what!?” cried Shumway.
The crowds below shifted uneasily.
“I lied,” said the old man simply.
“No!”
“Oh, but yes,” said the time traveler. “I never went anywhere. I stayed but made it seem I went. There is no time machine—only something that looks like one.”
“But why?” cried the young man, bewildered, holding on to the rail at the edge of the roof. “Why?”
“I see that you have a tape-recording button on your lapel. Turn it on. Yes. There. I want everyone to hear this. Now.”
The old man finished his champagne and then said:
“Because I was born and raised in a time, in the sixties, seventies and eighties, when people had stopped believing in themselves. I saw that disbelief, the reason that no longer gave itself reasons to survive, and was moved, depressed and then angered by it.
“Everywhere, I saw and heard doubt. Everywhere, I learned destruction. Everywhere was professional despair, intellectual ennui, political cynicism. And what wasn’t ennui and cynicism was rampant skepticism and incipient nihilism.”
The old man stopped, having remembered something. He bent and from under a table brought forth a special bottle of red Burgundy with the label 1984 on it. This, as he talked, he began to open, gently plumbing the ancient cork.
“You name it, we had it. The economy was a snail. The world was a cesspool. Economics remained an insoluble mystery. Melancholy was the attitude. The impossibility of change was the vogue. End of the world was the slogan.
“Nothing was worth doing. Go to bed at night full of bad news at eleven, wake up in the morn to worse news at seven. Trudge through the day underwater. Drown at night in a tide of plagues and pestilence. Ah!”
For the cork had softly popped. The now-harmless 1984 vintage was ready for airing. The time traveler sniffed it and nodded.
“Not only the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode the horizon to fling themselves on our cities but a fifth horseman, worse than all the rest, rode with them: Despair, wrapped in dark shrouds of defeat, crying only repetitions of past disasters, present failures, future cowardices.
“Bombarded by dark chaff and no bright seed, what sort of harvest was there for man in the latter part of the incredible twentieth century?
“Forgotten was the moon, forgotten the red landscapes of Mars, the great eye of Jupiter, the stunning rings of Saturn. We refused to be comforted. We wept at the grave of our child, and the child was us.”
“Was that how it was,” asked Shumway quietly, “one hundred years ago?”
“Yes.” The time traveler held up the wine bottle as if it contained proof. He poured some into a glass, eyed it, inhaled, and went on. “You have seen the newsreels and read the books of that time. You know it all.
“Oh, of course, there were a few bright moments. When Salk delivered the world’s children to life. Or the night when Eagle landed and that one great step for mankind trod the moon. But in the minds and out of the mouths of many, the fifth horseman was darkly cheered on. With high hopes, it sometimes seemed, of his winning. So all would be gloomily satisfied that their predictions of doom were right from day one. So the self-fulfilling prophecies were declared; we dug our graves and prepared to lie down in them.”
“And you couldn’t allow that?” asked the young reporter.
“You know I couldn’t.”
“And so you built the Toynbee Convector——”
“Not all at once. It took years to brood on it.”
The old man paused to swirl the dark wine, gaze at it and sip, eyes closed.
“Meanwhile, I drowned, I despaired, wept silently late nights thinking, What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my state, my country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last on an old and beloved book by H.G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built. I traveled, or so it seemed. The rest, as you know, is history.”
The old time traveler drank his wine, opened his eyes.
“Good God,” the young reporter whispered, shaking his head. “Oh, dear God. Oh, the wonder, the wonder——”
There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?
“Well, now,” said the old man, filling another glass with wine for the young reporter. “Aren’t I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water skies, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!”
They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.
The time traveler waved at them and turned.
“Quickly, now. It’s up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here’s a film-cassette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here’s a final manuscript. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!”
Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fall away beneath. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.
The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the Toynbee Convector.
“You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.”
He pressed the button that raised the plastic shield, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the Convector’s seat.
“Throw the final switch, young man!”
“But——”
“You’re thinking,” here the old man laughed, “if the time machine is a fraud, it won’t work, what’s the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!”
Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked at Craig Bennett Stiles.
“I don’t understand. Where are you going?”
“Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past.”
“How can that be?”
“Believe me, this time it will happen. Good-bye, dear, fine, nice young man.”
“Good-bye.”
“Now. Tell me my name.”
“What?”
“Speak my name and throw the switch.”
“Time traveler?”
“Yes! Now!”
The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.
“Oh,” said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. “Yes.”
His head fell forward on his chest.
Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.
In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler’s wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.
The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.
Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine—symbolically, anyway—go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.
The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the button for the glass elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler’s tapes and cassettes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.
The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet . . .
That one man with one lie had created.
OF TIME AND KATHY BENEDICT
William F. Nolan
Now that she was on the lake, with the Michigan shoreline lost to her, and with the steady cat-purr of the outboard soothing her mind, she could think about the last year, examine it thread by thread like a dark tapestry.
Dark.
That was the word for it.
Three dark, miserable love affairs in twelve dark, miserable months. First, with Glenn, the self-obsessed painter from the Village who had worshipped her body but refused to consider the fact that a brain went with it. And Tony, the smooth number she’d met at the new disco off Park Avenue, with his carefully tailored Italian suits and his neurotic need to dominate his women. Great dancer. Terrific lover. Lousy human being. And, finally, the wasted months with Rick, God’s gift to architecture, who promised to name a bridge after her if she’d marry him and raise his kids—three of them from his last divorce. She had tried to make him understand that as an independent woman, with a going career in research, she wasn’t ready for instant motherhood at twenty-one. And there was the night, three months into their relationship, when Rick drunkenly admitted he was bisexual and actually preferred males to females. He’d taken a cruel pleasure in explaining this preference to her, and that was the last time they’d seen each other. Which was . . . when? Over two months ago. Early October now, and they’d split in late July.
She looked ahead, at the wide, flat horizon of the lake as the small boat sliced cleanly through the glittering skin of water.
Wide.
Timeless.
Serene.
What had Hemingway called it? The last ‘free place’. The sea. She smiled. Lake St Clair wasn’t exactly what he’d been talking about, but for her, at this moment, it would do just fine. She did feel free out here, alone on the water, with the cacophonous roar of New York no longer assaulting her mind and body. The magic peace of the lake surrounded her like a pulsing womb, feeding her hunger for solitude and silence. This assignment in Michigan had been a true blessing, offering her the chance to escape the ceaseless roar of the city . . .
‘Dearborn? Where’s that?’
‘Where the museum is . . . in Detroit. You can check out everything at the museum. They’ve got the car there.’
Her boss referred to ‘999’—the cumbersome, flat-bodied, tiller-steered vehicle designed by Henry Ford and first raced here at Grosse Pointe, just east of Detroit, late in 1902. The newspaper she worked for was planning a special feature piece celebrating the anniversary of this historic event. Old 999 was the car that launched the Henry Ford Motor Company, leading to the mass-production American automobile.
‘The museum people restored it, right down to the original red paint. It’s supposed to look exactly like it did back in 1902,’ Kathy’s boss had told her. ‘You go check it out, take some shots of it, dig up some fresh info, then spend a few days at Grosse Pointe . . . get the feel of the place.’
She’d been delighted with the assignment. Autumn in Michigan. Lakes and rivers and hills . . . Trees all crimson and gold . . . Sun and clear blue sky . . . Into Detroit, out to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, a look at Ford’s birthplace, a long talk with the curator, some pictures of ridiculous old 999 (‘. . . and they named her after the New York Central’s record-breaking steam locomotive’) and on out to Grosse Pointe and this lovely, lonely, soothing ride on the lake. Just what she’d been needing. Balm for the soul.
As a little girl, she’d vacationed with her parents in Missouri and Illinois, in country much like this—and the odours of crushed leaves, of clean water, of hills rioting in autumn colours came back to her sharply here on the lake. It was a reunion, a homecoming. Emotionally, she belonged here, not in the rush and rawness of New York. Maybe, she told herself, when I save enough I can come here to live, meet a man who loves lakes and hills and country air . . .
Something was wrong. Suddenly, disturbingly wrong.
The water was gradually darkening around the boat; she looked up to see an ugly, bloated mass of grey-black clouds filling the lake sky. It seemed as if they had instantly materialised there. And, just as suddenly, a cold wind was chopping at her.
Kathy recalled the warning from the old man at the boathouse: ‘Wouldn’t go too far out if I was you, miss. Storm can build up mighty fast on the lake. You get some mean ones this time of year. Small boat like this is no good in a storm . . . engine can flood out . . . lotsa things can go wrong.’
The clouds rumbled—an ominous sound—and rain stung her upturned face. A patter at first, then heavier. The cold drops bit into her skin through her skirt and light sweater. Lucky thing she’d taken her raincoat along ‘just in case’. Kathy quickly pulled the coat on, buttoning it against the wind-blown rain.
Time to head back, before the full storm hit. She swung the boat around towards shore, adjusting the throttle for maximum speed.
The motor abruptly sputtered and died. Too much gas. Damn! She jerked at the start rope. No luck.
Again.
And again.
Wouldn’t start. Forget it; she was never any good with engines. There were oars and she could row herself in. Shore wasn’t far, and she could use the exercise. Good for her figure.
So row. Row, row, row your boat . . .
As a child, she’d loved rowing. Now she found it it was tougher than she’d remembered. The water was heavy and thick; it seemed to resist the oars, and the boat moved sluggishly.
The storm was increasing in strength. Rain stabbed at her, slashing against her face, and the wind slapped at the boat in ice-chilled gusts. God, but it was cold! Really, really cold. The coat offered no warmth; her whole body felt chilled, clammy.
Now the lake surface was erupting under the storm’s steadily increasing velocity; the boat rocked and pitched violently. Kathy could still make out the broken shoreline through the curtaining rain as she laboured at the oars, but it grew dimmer with each passing minute. Her efforts were futile: she was rowing against the wind, and whenever she paused for breath the shoreline fell back, with the wind forcing her out into the heart of the lake.
She felt compelled to raise her head, to scan the lake horizon. Something huge was out there. Absolutely monstrous! Coming for her. Rushing towards the boat.
A wave.
How could such a mountain of water exist here? This ravening mammoth belonged in Melville’s wild sea—not here in a Michigan lake. Impossible, she told herself; I’m not really seeing it. An illusion, created by freak storm conditions, unreal as a desert mirage.
Then she heard the roar. Real. Horribly, undeniably real.
The wave exploded over her, a foam-flecked beast that tossed her up and over in its watery jaws—flinging her from the boat, taking her down into the churning depths of the lake.
Into blackness.
And silence.
‘You all right, miss?’
‘Wha—what?’
‘I asked if you’re all right. Are you hurt? Leg broken or anything? I could call a doctor.’
She brought the wavering face above her into focus.
Male. Young. Intense blue eyes. Red hair. A nice, firm, handsome face.
‘Well, ma’am, should I?’
‘Should you what?’ Her voice sounded alien to her.
‘Call a doctor! I mean, you were unconscious when I found you, and I—’
‘No. No doctor. I’m all right. Just a little . . . dizzy.’
