Time Travel Omnibus, page 724
“Anything else?”
“Yes—Thoth was also the patron of science and inventions, the spokesman of the gods and their keeper of the records. Thoth invented all the arts and sciences, including surveying, geometry, astronomy, soothsaying, magic . . . do I need to go on?”
“No. I get the picture. If you wanted a god of time travel, Thoth fits the bill quite nicely. So what do we do now?”
She gave me a grim smile.
“Wait. What else? Once you’ve transmitted the recording back to base, we wait until they come up with definites.”
So we did what we were best, and worst, at: waiting.
One evening the three of us were sitting, more or less in a rough circle, engaged in frivolous tasks. I was actually doing nothing. The stars were out, above us, and I could hear the snuffling of livestock and the clank of pots from down below. The area around Plataea was becoming as unsavoury as the no man’s land of World War Two, with cesspits filling the air with an appalling stink and churned mud giving the landscape an ugly, open-wound appearance. We had been discussing our situation. Something was preventing the outer ring of our vortex from going any further, and base believed that what was stopping it was another vortex, coming from the other direction, the distant past. The two whirlpools were touching each other, and neither could proceed before the other retreated. Our friends were indeed early Egyptians. It had taken a while for this idea to sink in, but when I thought deeply about it, it was not at all far-fetched.
On a simple level, time travel involved a psychological state induced by the use of darkness and light, resulting in the fusion of infinites, of space and time. The dark and light became unified into a substance which formed a shape. That shape was common enough in the night sky: a spiral on a flat plane, moving outwards from the centre of the group, some of whom remained behind to form an anchor point for the vortex. The base-camp group. The room in which we had begun the vigil was no longer a room, but something else: a super-physical universe that possibly exists in all minds at some level of perception. There was no technological reason why an earlier civilization could not have made the same mental discovery. On the other hand, people of our rank were still not privy to the source of the discovery, and it could well be that the knowledge had come from the past. Egyptian documents perhaps, only recently decoded? I remembered something about mirrors being used to flood the dark interior passages of the pyramids with light from the sun.
A horrible thought occurred to me.
“We’re not going to stay here, until they go back?”
Miriam shrugged.
“I don’t know. I’m awaiting instructions from base.”
“Now look, we’re the ones that are here. Not them.”
“You know how it is, as well as I do, Stan.”
I stared at her.
“I know how it is,” I said, bitterly.
Her phantom features produced a faint smile.
I lay awake that night, thinking about the stalemate I had got myself into. Egyptians? If they had had time travel for so long, why hadn’t they visited future centuries? But then, of course, they probably had and we had run screaming from them, just as the goatboy had fled from us. They probably had a similar policy to ourselves: no interference, just record and return. So, on their umpteenth journey into the future, they had come to a halt, suddenly, and had no doubt come to the same conclusion as we had: someone was blocking the path.
It wasn’t difficult either to see how such a discovery might be lost to future civilizations. Hadn’t certain surgical techniques been lost too? Time travel would undoubtedly have been in the hands of an elite: probably a priesthood. Some pharaoh, his brain addled as the result of a long lineage of incestuous relationships, had destroyed the brotherhood in a fit of pique; or the priests had been put to death by invading barbarians, their secret locked in stone vaults.
On the current front, the Plataeans were still one jump ahead of the Spartans. They had abandoned their mining operations and instead had built another crescent-shaped wall inside their own, so that when the ramp was finally completed, the Spartans were faced with a second, higher obstacle. Peltasts tried lobbing spears over the higher wall, only to find the distance was too great. Archidamus had his men fill the gap between the two walls with faggots and set light to it, but a chance storm doused this attempt to burn down the city. We got a few indignant looks from the Spartans after that. As gods, we were responsible for the weather. The war trumpets of the invaders filled the air with bleating notes which we felt sure were a criticism of us and our seeming partiality towards the defenders.
Finally, battering rams were employed, over the gap between the walls, but the Plataeans had a device—a huge beam on chains—which they dropped on to the ram-headed war machines and snapped off the ends.
Archidamus gave up. He ordered yet another wall to be built, outside the palisade of stakes, and left part of his army to guard it. Winter was beginning to set in and the king had had enough of the inglorious mudbath in which he had been wallowing. He went home, to his family in the south.
The majority of the Egyptians also withdrew at this point. One of them remained behind.
We received our orders from base.
“One of us must stay,” said Miriam, “until a relief can be sent. If we all go back, the vortex will recede with us and the Egyptians will move forward, gain on us.”
“A Mexican stand-off,” I said, disgustedly.
“Right. We can’t allow them the opportunity to invade the territory we already hold . . .”
“Shit,” I said, ignoring a black look from John, “now we’ve got a cold war on our hands. Even time isn’t safe from ownership. First it was things, then it was countries . . . now it’s time itself. Why don’t we build a bloody great wall across this year, like Archidamus, and send an army of guards to defend it?”
Miriam said, “Sarcasm won’t help at this stage, Stan.”
“No, I don’t suppose it will, but it makes me feel good. So what happens now? We draw straws?”
“I suggest we do it democratically.” She produced three shards of pottery that she had gathered from the ground below, and distributed one to each of us.
“We each write the name of the person we think most competent to remain behind,” she explained, “and then toss them in the middle.”
“Most competent—I like the diplomatic language,” I muttered. John, I knew, would put down his own name. He was one of those selfless types, who volunteered for everything. His minor household gods were Duty and Honour. He would actually want to stay.
I picked up my piece of pot. It was an unglazed shard depicting two wrestlers locked in an eternal, motionless struggle, each seemingly of equal strength and skill, and each determined not to give ground. I turned it over and wrote JOHN in clear letters, before placing it, picture-side up, in the middle of the ring.
Two other pieces clattered against mine. Miriam sorted through them, turning them over.
My name was on two of them.
I turned to John.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It had to be somebody. You’re the best man for the job.”
“Bullshit,” I said. I turned to Miriam. “What if I refuse to stay? I’ll resign, terminate my contract.”
Miriam shook her head. “You won’t do that. You’d never get another trip and while you get restless in the field, you get even worse at home. I know your type, Stan. Once you’ve been back a couple of weeks you’ll be yelling to go again.”
She was right, damn her. While I got bored in the field, I was twice as bad back home.
“I’m not a type,” I said, and got up to go below. Shortly afterwards, Miriam followed me.
“I’m sorry, Stan,” She touched my arm. “You see it for what it is—another political attempt at putting up fences by possessive, parochial old farts. Unless I go back and convince them otherwise, they’ll be sending death squads down the line to wipe out the Egyptians. You do understand?”
“So it had to be me.”
“John’s too young to leave here alone. I’ll get them to replace you as soon as I can—until then . . .”
She held out her slim hand and I placed my own slowly and gently into her grip. The touch of her skin was like warm silk.
“Goodbye,” I said.
She went up the ladder and John came down next.
I said coldly, “What is this? Visiting day?”
“I came to say goodbye,” he said, stiffly.
I stared hard at him, hoping I was making it difficult, hoping the bastard was uncomfortable and squirming.
“Why me, John? You had a reason.”
He suddenly looked very prim, his spectral features assuming a sharp quality.
“I thought about volunteering myself, but that would have meant you two going back alone—together, that is . . .” He became flustered. “She’s a married woman, Stan. She’ll go back to her husband and forget you.”
I rocked on my heels.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Miriam. I’ve seen the way you two look at each other.”
I stared at him, finding it difficult to believe he could be so stupid.
“You’re a fool, John. The worst kind of fool. It’s people like you, with twisted minds, that start things like that war out there. Go on—get out of my sight.”
He started to climb the ladder, then he looked down and gave me a Parthian shot. “You put my name on your shard. Why should I feel guilty about putting yours?”
And he was right, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to jerk the ladder from under him and breaking his bloody neck.
They were gone within the hour, leaving me to haunt the Greeks all on my own, a solitary ghost moving restlessly around the parapet of the tower. I saw my Egyptian counterpart once, in the small hours, as a shimmering figure came out into the open to stare at my prison. I thought for a moment he or she was going to wave again, but nothing so interesting happened, and I was left to think about my predicament once more. I knew how slowly things moved back home. They had all the time in the world. I wondered whether Egyptians could learn to play chess. It was a pity Diogenes wasn’t yet alive, or I might have been tempted to wander down to Corinth. He would certainly have enjoyed a game, providing I stayed out of his sun. Me and Diogenes, sitting on top of his barrel, playing chess a thousand years before the game was invented—that would have been something. Plato was a newborn babe in arms. Socrates was around, in his early forties, but who would want to play with that cunning man. Once he got the hang of it, you’d never win a game.
Flurries of snow began to drift in, over the mountains. The little Plataeans were in for a hard winter. I knew the result of the siege, of course. Three hundred Plataeans and seconded Athenians would make a break for it in a year’s time, killing the sentries left by Archidamus on the outer wall and getting away in the dark. All of them would make it, to Athens, fooling their pursuers into following a false trail, their inventive minds never flagging when it came to survival. Those Plataeans whose hearts failed them when it came to risking the escape, almost two hundred, would be put to death by the irate Spartans. The city itself would be razed. Perhaps the Spartans would learn something from the incident, but I doubted it. There was certainly a lot of patience around in the ancient world.
Patience. I wondered how much patience those people from the land of the pharaohs had, because it occurred to me that the natural movement of time was on their side. Provided we did nothing but maintain the status quo, standing nose to nose on the edges of our own vortices, they would gain, ever so gradually. Hour by hour, day by day, we were moving back to that place I call home.
We might replace our frontier guards, by one or by thousands, but the plain fact of the matter is we will eventually be pushed back to where we belong. Why, they’ve already gained several months as it is . . . only another twenty-five centuries and I’ll be back in my own back yard.
Then again, I might receive that terrible message I have been dreading, which would turn me from being the Athenian I believe I am, into a Spartan. Which would have me laying down my scroll and taking up the spear and shield. A ghost-warrior from the future, running forth to meet a god-soldier from the past. I can only hope that the possible historical havoc such action might cause will govern any decision made back home. I can’t help thinking, however, that the wish for sense to prevail must have been in the lips of a million-million such as me, who killed or died in fields, in trenches, in deserts and jungles, on seas and in the air.
The odds are stacked against me.
REAL TIME
Lawrence Watt Evans
Someone was tampering with time again; I could feel it, in my head and in my gut, that sick, queasy sensation of unreality.
I put my head down and gulped air, waiting for the discomfort to pass, but it only got worse.
This was a bad one. Someone was tampering with something serious. This wasn’t just someone reading tomorrow’s papers and playing the stock market; this was serious. Someone was trying to change history.
I couldn’t allow that. Not only might his tampering interfere with my own past, change my whole life, possibly even wipe me out of existence, but I’d be shirking my job. I couldn’t do that.
Not that anyone would know. They must think I’m dead. I haven’t been contacted in years now, not since I was stranded in this century. They must think I was lost when my machine and my partner vanished in the flux.
But I’m not dead, and I had a job to do. With help from headquarters or without, with a partner or without, even with my machine or without, I had a job to do, a reality to preserve, a whole world to safeguard. I knew my duty. I know my duty. The past can’t take tampering.
They might send someone else, but they might not. The tampering might have already changed things too much. They might not spot it in time. Or they might simply not have the manpower. Time travel lets you use your manpower efficiently, with 100 per cent efficiency, putting it anywhere you need it instantly, but that’s not enough when you have all of the past to guard, everything from the dawn of time to the present—not this present, the real present—you’d need a million men to guard it all, and they’ve always had trouble recruiting. The temptations are too great. The dangers are too great. Look at me, stuck here in the past, for the dangers—and as for the temptations, look at what I have to do. People trying to change everything, trying to benefit themselves at the cost of reality itself—they need men they can trust, men like me, and there can never be enough of us.
I sat up straight again and I looked at the mirror behind the bar and I knew what I had to do. I had to stop the tampering. Just as I had stopped it before, three—no, four—four times now.
They might send someone else, but they might not, and I couldn’t take that chance.
I had to find the tamperer myself, and deal with him. If I couldn’t find him directly, if he wasn’t in this time period but later, then I might need to tamper with time myself, to change his past without hurting mine.
That’s tricky, but I’ve done it.
I slid off the stool and stood up, gulped the rest of my drink, and laid a bill on the bar—five dollars in the currency of the day. I shrugged, straightening my coat, and I stepped out into the cool of a summer night.
Insects sang somewhere, strange insects extinct before I was born, and the streetlights pooled pale grey across the black sidewalks. I turned my head slowly, feeling the flux, feeling the shape of the time-stream, of my reality.
Downtown was firm, solid, still rooted in the past and the present and secure in the future. Facing in the opposite direction I felt my gut twist. I crossed the empty street to my car.
I drove out the avenues, ignoring the highways. I can’t feel as well on the highways; they’re too far out of the city’s life-flow.
I went north, then east, and the nausea gripped me tighter with every block. It became a gnawing pain in my belly as the world shimmered and shifted around me, an unstable reality. I stopped the car by the side of the street and forced the pain down, forced my perception of the world to steady itself.
When I was ready to go on I leaned over and checked in the glove compartment. No gloves—the name was already an anachronism even in this time period. But my gun was there. Not my service weapon; that’s an anachronism, too advanced. I don’t dare use it. The knowledge of its existence could be dangerous. No, I had bought a gun here, in this era.
I pulled it out and put it in my coat pocket. The weight of it, that hard, metal tugging at my side, felt oddly comforting.
I had a knife, too. I was dealing with primitives, with savages, not with civilized people. These final decades of the twentieth century, with their brushfire wars and nuclear arms races, were a jungle, even in the great cities of North America. I had a knife, a good one, with a six-inch blade I had sharpened myself.
Armed, I drove on, and two blocks later I had to leave the avenue, turn onto the quiet side-streets, tree-lined and peaceful.
Somewhere, in that peace, someone was working to destroy my home, my life, my self.
I turned again, and felt the queasiness and pain leap within me, and I knew I was very close.
I stopped the car and got out, the gun in my pocket and my hand on the gun, my other hand holding the knife.
One house had a light in the window; the homes on either side were dark. I scanned, and I knew that that light was it, the center of the unreality—maybe not the tamperer himself, but something, a focus for the disturbance of the flow of history.
Perhaps it was an ancestor of the tamperer; I had encountered that before.
I walked up the front path and rang the bell.
I braced myself, the knife in one hand, the gun in the other.
The porch light came on, and the door started to open. I threw myself against it.
It burst in, and I went through it, and I was standing in a hallway. A man in his forties was staring at me, holding his wrist where the door had slammed into it as it pulled out of his grip. There had been no chain-bolt; my violence had, perhaps, been more than was necessary.
