Time Travel Omnibus, page 860
Bennett heard the muted sound of a door slamming.
The fog’s hold on the world was weakening.
He looked across at the man standing in front of the sink, saw him frowning at the mug of coffee, shuffling his arms around like he was having difficulty with it. Maybe it was too hot for him . . . but, hadn’t he been drinking it all this time?
Outside, a car went by slowly, its lights playing on the mist.
Then the haurrrnk! blasted again, the same sound he’d heard before . . . but different in tone now. This time it sounded more like a warning.
The man dropped the mug and Bennett watched it bounce once, coffee spraying across the floor and the table legs and the chairs.
Bennett watched it roll to a stop—amazingly unbroken—before he looked up. The man was looking across at him, his face looking a little pale . . . and a little sad.
“I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t keep a hold of it,” he said.
“You have to go,” Bennett said. He knew it deep in his heart . . . deep in that place where he knew everything there was to know.
“Yes, I have to go.”
“I’ll see you off—”
The man held up his hand. “No,” he snapped. And then, “No, I’m sure you’ve got things to do . . . things to be getting on with.”
“Memories to build,” Bennett added.
“Right, memories to build.” He moved forward from the counter, unsteadily at first, watching his feet move one in front of the other as though he were walking a tightrope. Bennett made to give him a hand but the man pulled away. “Can’t do that,” he said.
They stood looking at each other for what seemed like a long time, Bennett desperately wanting to take that one step forward—that one step that would carry him twenty-seven years—and wrap his arms around his father, bury his face in his father’s neck and smell his old familiar smells, smells whose aroma he couldn’t recall . . . how desperately he wanted to give new life to old memories. But he knew he could not.
As he reached the door, the man stopped for a second and turned around. “You know, my son, when he was a kid, he had a nickname.”
Bennett smiled. “Yeah? What was it?”
“Bubber.”
“Bubber?” Oh my god . . . Bubber . . . it was Bubber because I—
“He had a stutter—nothing too bad, but it was there—and his name was . . . his name began with a B.”
Bennett could feel his eyes misting up.
“Kids can be cruel, can’t they?”
It was all he could do to nod.
The door closed, the screen door slammed a ricochet rat-a-tat and Bennett was alone again . . . more alone than he had ever felt in his life. “Take care,” he said to the empty kitchen.
And you, a voice said somewhere inside his head.
He waited a full minute before he went to the door and opened it, stepped out into the fresh December air and walked to the street. “And what was the message, old timer?” he said.
The fog had gone and the watery winter sun was struggling through the overhead early-morning haze.
Cars were moving up and down, people were walking on the sidewalks, but there was no sign of the man.
“Hey, Bennett!”
Bennett gave a wave to Jack Coppertone as he pulled the handbill from his pants pocket. It was now a flyer for The Science Fiction Book Club; maybe that was what it had always been. As he folded it carefully, thinking back to that final sight of his visitor pulling open the door, he suddenly turned and ran back to the house.
On the table, right where the man had placed it, was a hat.
The message!
Bennett walked carefully across the kitchen, heart beating so hard he thought it was going to burst through his chest and his shirt, and reached for it, closing his eyes, expecting to connect with just more empty air.
But his fingers touched material.
And he lifted it, not daring to open his eyes . . . he was breaking rules here, of that he was sure . . . but maybe, just maybe, if only one or maybe two senses were working, he could pull it off. He lifted the hat up and buried his face inside the brim.
What are ghosts but memories? he heard himself saying from just a few minutes earlier. And there they were . . . memories. The only question was, were they from the past or the future?
Almost as soon as he had breathed in, the fragrance dissipated until there was only the smell of soap and the feel of Bennett’s empty hands cradling his face. But deep inside his head, the memories were still there, smelling fresh as blue bonnets in spring air.
Haurrrnnnnnnnnk!
Bennett looked at the window and saw that it had started to snow.
For Percival Crowther (1913-1972)
. . . and all other fathers, wherever they may be.
HOT TIP
Billy Bruce Winkles
Dr. John Suttle had just sat down to watch the evening news when he heard the phone ring. He immediately got up to answer it, but his five-year-old daughter Annie ran into the room and got to it first.
“Hello,” she said, after she picked it up. “What? Yes.”
“Let me have it, Sweetie,” Dr. Suttle said, gently taking the phone from her hand.
“But Daddy!” she cried.
“Just a minute, Sweetie. Let Daddy talk on the phone . . . Hello.”
“Yes, hello,” a male voice said. “Is this Dr. John Suttle? The physicist?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Suttle, please listen,” said the caller, who spoke with a strange accent. “My name is Olam Stroy. I’m calling you from the twenty-fifth century, four hundred years in your future.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just listen. I’ll explain everything.”
“Please do,” Dr. Suttle said. He thought that the call was probably a prank, but he wanted to keep an open mind about the matter, and so he decided to give the caller a chance to explain.
“But Daddy,” Annie said again. She was still standing beside her father, and she had started tugging at his sleeve.
“Please wait, Sweetie,” he said. “Go ahead, Mr. Stroy. I’m listening.”
“Yes, Dr. Suttle. As I said, I’m calling you from the twenty-fifth century. I am also a physicist. In fact, I’m the leader of a research group that’s studying space-time contortion phenomena. Recently we discovered a way to make phone calls into the past.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, I’ll try to give you a brief summary. First, we create a miniwormhole tunnel through space-time, constructed to run from our laboratory to the general location and time period that we want to reach. We carefully maneuver the far end of the wormhole to a position near a phone system relay antenna, and then we beam a microwave signal through the wormhole to the antenna. By using the proper codes, we can link up with the commercial phone system and eventually complete the call.”
“Well, I understand the basic idea,” Dr. Suttle said. “But it must have been difficult to work out all the technical details.”
“It was. By the way, this call to you goes farther back in time than any of our previous calls.”
“Why did you call me?”
“Because, Dr. Suttle, it was your pioneering research on the elastic properties of space-time that laid the foundation for the work our group is doing now.”
“But I just started looking into that subject a few weeks ago. I haven’t accomplished anything yet.”
“But you will, Dr. Suttle. In fact, you’ll eventually make some major discoveries.”
“Daddy! Hurry!” Annie cried, giving another tug on her father’s sleeve.
But Dr. Suttle, intrigued by the call, was hardly aware of his daughter’s presence. “This is really hard to believe,” he said into the phone.
“But it’s true, Dr. Suttle.”
“Does it mean that I’ll become famous?”
“Yes . . . Well, actually, you won’t become famous until later, after you’re dead.”
“After I’m dead?”
“Yes. Unfortunately the scientific establishment won’t recognize the value of your work when it’s first published. It’ll lie buried in the journals for several centuries.”
“So its importance won’t be appreciated while I’m alive?”
“No. In fact, it’ll be considered so insignificant that you’ll eventually lose your research post.Afterward, your bitterness over the matter will cause you to turn to alcohol for solace. Your drinking will become so heavy that you’ll finally end up living on the street. You’ll spend the last years of your life as a penniless beggar. And you’ll finally die in total obscurity.”
“Gee.”
“Yes. What a shame. But remember that you’ll ultimately be vindicated. Eventually your work will be rediscovered, and then its value will finally be fully appreciated.”
“Are you sure about all of this?”
“Yes Dr. Suttle, I’m sure. But listen, I’ve got to run, or I’ll be late for a meeting. It was nice talking to you. Bye.”
“But . . .”
Dr. Suttle heard a click, and then the line went dead. For a moment he stood quietly, trying to grasp what he had heard. Then suddenly he realized that his daughter was still pulling at his sleeve.
“Daddy!” she cried again.
“Yes, Sweetie,” he finally said. “What is it?”
“What did that lady on the phone mean? What’s a collect call?”
THE MASK OF THE REX
Richard Bowes
THE LAST DAYS OF SUMMER have always been a sweet season on the Maine coast. There’s still warmth in the sun, the crickets’ song is mellow and the vacationers are mostly gone. Nowhere is that time more golden than on Mount Airey Island.
Late one afternoon in September of 1954, Julia Garde Macauley drove north through the white shingled coastal towns. In the wake of a terrible loss, she felt abandoned by the gods and had made this journey to confront them.
Then, as she crossed Wenlock Sound Bridge which connects the island with the world, she had a vision. In a fast montage, a man, his face familiar yet changed, stood on crutches in a cottage doorway, plunged into an excited crowd of kids, spoke defiantly on the stairs of a plane.
The images flickered like a TV with a bad picture and Julia thought she saw her husband. When it was over, she realized who it had been. And understood even better the questions she had come to ask.
The village of Penoquot Landing on Mount Airey was all carefully preserved clapboard and widow’s walks. Now, after the season, few yachts were still in evidence. Fishing boats and lobster trawlers had full use of the wharves.
Baxter’s Grande Hotel on Front Street was in hibernation until next summer. In Baxter’s parlors and pavilions over the decades, the legends of this resort and Julia’s own family had been woven.
Driving through the gathering dusk, she could almost hear drawling voices discussing her recent loss in same way they did everything having to do with Mount Airey and the rest of the world.
“Great public commotion about that fly-boy she married.”
“The day their wedding was announced, marked the end of High Society.”
“In a single engine plane in bad weather. As if he never got over the war.”
“Or knew he didn’t belong where he was.”
Robert Macauley, thirty-four years old, had been the junior senator from New York for a little more than a year and a half.
Beyond the village, Julia turned onto the road her grandfather and Rockefeller had planned and had built. “Olympia Drive, where spectacular views of the mighty Atlantic and piney mainland compete for our attention with the palaces of the great,” rhapsodized a writer of the prior century. “Like a necklace of diamonds bestowed upon this island.”
The mansions were largely shut until next year. Some hadn’t been opened at all that summer. The Sears estate had just been sold to the Carmelites as a home for retired nuns. Where the road swept between the mountain and the sea, Julia turned onto a long driveway and stopped at the locked gates. Atop a rise stood Joyous Garde, all Doric columns and marble terraces. Built at the dawn of America’s century, its hundred rooms overlooked the ocean, “One of the crown jewels of Olympia Drive.”
Joyous Garde had been closed and was, in any case, not planned for convenience or comfort. Julia was expected. She beeped and waited.
Welcoming lights were on in Old Cottage just inside the gates. Itself a substantial affair, the Cottage was on a human scale. Henry and Martha Eder were the permanent caretakers of the estate and lived here year round. Henry emerged with a ring of keys and nodded to Julia.
Just then, she caught flickering images, of this driveway and what looked at first like a hostile, milling mob.
A familiar voice intoned. “Beyond these wrought iron gates and granite pillars, the most famous private entryway in the United States, and possibly the world, the Macauley family and friends gather in moments of trial and tragedy.”
Julia recognized the speaker as Walter Cronkite and realized that what she saw was the press waiting for a story.
Then the gates clanged open. The grainy vision was gone. As Julia rolled through, she glanced up at Mt. Airey. It rose behind Joyous Garde covered with dark pines and bright foliage.
Martha Eder came out to greet her and Julia found herself lulled by the old woman’s Down East voice. Julia had brought very little luggage. When it was stowed inside, she stood on the front porch of Old Cottage and felt she had come home. The place was wooden-shingled and hung with vines and honeysuckle. Her great-grandfather, George Lowell Stoneham, had built it seventy-five years before. It remained as a guest house and gate house and as an example of a fleeting New England simplicity.
ONE
George Lowell Stoneham was always referred to as one of the discoverers of Mt. Airey. The Island, of course, had been found many times. By seals and gulls and migratory birds, by native hunters, by Hudson and Champlain and Scotch-Irish fishermen. But not until after the Civil War was it found by just the right people: wealthy and respectable Bostonians.
Gentlemen, such as the painter Brooks Carr looking for proper subjects, or the Harvard naturalist George Lowell Stoneham trying to loose memories of Antietem, came up the coast by steamer, stayed in the little hotels built for salesmen and schooner captains. They roamed north until they hit Mt. Airey.
At first, a few took rooms above Baxter’s General Provisions And Boarding House in Penoquot Landing. They painted, explored, captured bugs in specimen bottles. They told their friends, the nicely wealthy of Boston, about it. Brooks Carr rented a house in the village one summer and brought his young family.
To Professor Stoneham went the honor of being the first of these founders to build on the island. In 1875, he bought (after hard bargaining) a chunk of land on the seaward side of Mt. Airey and constructed a cabin in a grove of giant white pine that overlooked Mirror Lake.
In the following decades, others also built: plain cabins and studios at first, then cottages. In those days, men and boys swam naked and out of sight at Bachelor’s Point on the north end of the island. The women, in sweeping summer hats and dresses that reached to the ground, stopped for tea and scones at Baxter’s which now offered a shady patio in fine weather. There, they gossiped about the Saltonstall boy who had married the Pierce girl then moved to France, and about George Stoneham’s daughter Helen and a certain New York financier.
This filet of land in this cream of a season did not long escape the notice of the truly wealthy. From New York they came and Philadelphia. They acquired large chunks of property. The structures they caused to rise were still called studios and cottages. But they were mansions on substantial estates. By the 1890’s those who could have been anywhere in world chose to come in August to Mount Airy.
Trails and bridle paths were blazed through the forests and up the slopes of the mountain. In 1892 John D. Rockefeller and Simon Garde constructed a paved road, Olympia Drive, around the twenty-five mile perimeter of the island.
Hiking parties into the hills, to the quiet glens at the heart of the island, always seemed to find themselves at Mirror Lake with its utterly smooth surface and unfathomable depths.
The only work of man visible from the shore, and that just barely, was Stoneham Cabin atop a sheer granite cliff.
Julia Garde Macauley didn’t know what caused her great-grandfather to build on that exact spot. But she knew it wasn’t whim or happenstance. The old tintypes showed a tall man with a beard like a wizard’s and eyes that had gazed on Pickett’s Charge.
Maybe the decision was like the one Professor Stoneham himself described in his magisterial WASPS OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES. “In the magic silence of a summer’s afternoon, the mud wasp builds her nest. Instinct, honed through the eons guides her choice.”
Perhaps, though, it was something more. A glimpse. A sign. Julia knew for certain that once drawn to the grove, George Stoneham had discovered that it contained one of the twelve portals to an ancient shrine. And that the priest, or the Rex as the priest was called, was an old soldier, Lucius, a Roman centurion who worshipped Lord Apollo. Lucius had been captured and enslaved during Crassus’ invasion of Parthia in the century before Christ. He escaped with the help of his god who then led him to one of the portals of the shrine. The reigning priest at that time was a devoted follower of Dionysus. Lucius found and killed the man, put on the silver mask and became Rex in his place.
Shortly after he built the cabin, George Lowell Stoneham built a cottage for his family at the foot of the mountain. But he spent much time up in the grove. After the death of his wife, he even stayed there, snowbound, for several winters researching, he said, insect hibernation.
In warmer seasons, ladies in the comfortable new parlors at Baxter’s Hotel, alluded to the professor’s loneliness.
