Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  They found the graduate student dug in behind a parapet of books in the library stacks. He was less than five feet tall, and stoop-shouldered to boot. “Professor Schlucker, Mr. Smith or Jones,” said the Counselor. “Professor Schlucker came here from the Twentieth Century via Hornbeam’s original time machine, and he’s anxious to return. I wondered if—”

  The graduate sniffed. “He can’t be here in the first place. I’ve just found an error in Hornbeam’s equations. Hornbeam believed that his apparatus only made it possible to travel into the future; actually, since g = k (t1 – t0), it is only possible to travel into the past.”

  Professor Schlucker found himself in the heart of a virgin wilderness. Naturally, since Smith or Jones had proved that time travel only worked backwards, he was just as far in the past as he would have been in the future had the machine worked as Hornbeam intended. Elementary arithmetic showed that it must be the year 906, some centuries before Lambert Bisley was to deflower the wilderness and found the University.

  A physical scientist might have been rattled by this turn of events, but not a Full Professor of Philosophy. Immediately realizing his situation, he first of all looked warily round for Indians, but none were about—906 being fortunately one of the few years for which no anthropologist had found it necessary to postulate a North-to-South migration passing through this area.

  There was still the problem of the time separating Professor Schlucker from his rightful present, but fortunately he still had the box of Thirtieth-Century suspended animation pills. He found a comfortable spot under an oak tree, counted out enough of the pills to suspend his animation for exactly 1047 years according to the directions on the box, and methodically swallowed them.

  When consciousness returned, the Professor was standing in an awkward pose in front of the Physics building. Looking down, he perceived that he was perched on the pedestal belonging to the statue of Lambert Bisley—that, in fact, he was the statue of Lambert Bisley. Unearthed 50 years earlier in his cataleptic state beneath a coating of alluvial deposits, he had been mistaken for the masterpiece of an Early American sculptor, restored with fresh plaster, and placed in his present location by order of the Board of Regents.

  Making sure he was not observed, Professor Schlucker dropped the torch of learning he had been holding aloft and climbed stiffly down off the pedestal, reflectively rubbing the spot where he had scratched a match on himself an hour earlier. Walking gingerly so that his plaster would not fall off and leave him embarrassingly exposed, he had gone only a few steps when inspiration struck him, and he veered toward the Administration building.

  Past a fluttered secretary he marched statuesquely into the President’s office. The President clutched the edge of his desk, eyes bulging with awestruck recognition. “Lambert Bisley!” he gasped.

  “See here, Prexy,” said the stone guest in sepulchral tones, “I’ve been keeping an eye on this institution—how could I help it?—and there are one or two things I should like to see corrected.”

  “Anything you say, Founder,” gulped the President.

  “Firstly,” said the pseudo-Bisley, “you have a Professor of Philosophy here. Name of Schlucker. Brilliant fellow. Grossly underpaid.”

  “I’ll attend to it at once,” stammered the President.

  “And secondly,” Professor Schlucker began—only to realize that any second request would be an anticlimax and might, indeed, imperil the certain fulfillment of the first. Cryptically he wheeled and strode out of the office.

  He found the fallacy, as he had suspected he would, lecturing to his class in Medieval Thought. None of the 27 students had noticed the difference.

  The Professor stalked into the classroom, shedding plaster. “So!” he gritted.

  “So?” echoed the fallacy abashedly.

  “In the year 3000,” said Professor Schlucker deliberately, “the college freshmen are eleven feet tall. Ergo, you, sir, are no fallacy. You are merely an invalid inference.” He half-turned and beckoned. “Take it away, boys!”

  Two assistants from the Infirmary marched in with a stretcher. The miserable ex-fallacy attempted to extrapolate itself out the window, but, being invalid, it could barely crawl. It was bundled onto the stretcher and carried out to become a charity case under treatment for an undistributed middle.

  By now Professor Schlucker was only slightly plastered. Nothing daunted, however, he took up his accustomed stance before his class.

  “Now, as I was saying—” he began.

  The 27 students wrote rapidly in their 27 notebooks: Now, as I was saying—

  WAIT FOR GEORGE

  Sweet and gentle, she knew nothing about murder. She only waited

  We said Lyddie Hampton was queer in the head, that the shock of her husband’s death had unbalanced her mind. But sometimes we wondered. Especially later on.

  Everybody said, too, that what killed George Hampton was too much faith in human nature. Any fool could have seen the man called Bert was bad clean through, like a vicious kicked dog that will bite somebody the minute it thinks it’s safe.

  George used to keep the grocery store. People came there not only to buy staple groceries, patent remedies, and sundry household goods, but also to meet people, talk gossip or politics, or just talk. Mostly George ran the store by himself but Saturdays, when the farmers came in to trade, Lyddie came down to help him. If her husband had his hands full, she was brisk and efficient at taking care of customers, but if George was unoccupied, she would hesitate, murmuring, “I don’t rightly know,” and refer important questions about brands and prices to George’s masculine knowledge. They were a happy couple.

  That is not to say they never fell out. At intervals—once every two or three years, I guess—Lyddie neatly packed a suitcase for George, and George took a train for the city. Neither of them ever explained; but I think it was an arrangement they had worked out when they were first married. George would be gone a couple of days or a week; then a wire would come, and Lyddie would go down to the station. When George got off the train, carrying some extravagant tinsel-wrapped package, they would kiss right out on the platform, and walk home arm in arm.

  Whenever George left town, we kids were delighted. We liked George all right. But while he was gone, Lyddie managed the store. The grownups said they couldn’t see it made any difference, but we always found excuses to drop in. About this time Lyddie would discover that she had some candy or cookies or the like that weren’t ever going to sell and might just as well be thrown out; and we were happy to lend a hand. That this was a secret from George made it the more interesting.

  Being so young, I don’t think we ever clearly understood why we were so welcome. Lyddie and George had no children of their own.

  The man called Bert wandered in from he didn’t say where—closemouthed, mean-eyed, and unfriendly; but it was a season when most young fellows were busy with farm work, so George hired him as summer help.

  Two weeks later, in a warm August twilight, Bert pried the back door of the store open. When George came in the front way, gone back after closing for something he’d forgotten, Bert was trying to unlock the old-fashioned safe with a clumsy, homemade key he had made. They found the key, and they found the gun, too, with two shots fired from it. But they didn’t find the killer. In fact, they never did catch Bert.

  When Dr. Barlow straightened up from examining the body, the sheriff, standing at his elbow, said, “Somebody’s going to have to tell her.” The doctor felt them looking at him. He nodded, the lines around his mouth deepening, and turned up the darkenipg street to the rambling old house. The sheriff went with him, and Mrs. Whart, who went everywhere anything happened.

  When she had heard, Lyddie went briefly white. She swayed, as if about to faint for the first time in her life. Then her back stiffened, and she turned swiftly from them, saying in a strained, strange voice, “Excuse me a minute. . . .”

  They heard clinking noises from the kitchen, and then she reappeared, carrying a tr
ay with a steaming teapot and cups.

  She said in her own voice, “If it’s anything important, you’d better talk to George. He’s at the store, I guess, working late.”

  Mrs. Whart opened her eyes wide and then her mouth; but a look from the doctor froze her to the bone. They all sat and watched while Lyddie poured tea for them.

  The next morning, Lyddie opened the store at the usual hour. It must have been very quiet there, in the gloom of the dusky, laden shelves. Finally, three of us youngsters plucked up courage enough to venture inside.

  She said, “Hello, boys.” Though we listened with awful intentness, we couldn’t detect anything witchlike in her tone or in the way she looked at us, head a little on one side, as her habit was. We clutched one another’s hands as she bustled past us to slide open a glass case. “You know, I’ve got some cupcakes here that nobody seems to want. They’re just going to wrack and ruin. . . .” Within easy reach of the door, I made a hero’s effort and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Hampton.”

  She put a finger on her lips in a familiar gesture. “Don’t say anything to George when he gets home, will you now?”

  We promised. Right then we were half-convinced George was on one of his trips to the city and would be coming in on the evening train.

  Later I heard how Mrs. Whart and her church ladies descended on Dr. Barlow. “Doctor, J we’ve talked it over [“I don’t doubt it,” said the doctor] and we think you’re the one to do something. About Lydia Hampton. The poor woman’s raving mad!”

  “Has she bitten somebody?”

  “It’s nothing to joke about. It’s a disgrace. She wouldn’t listen to a word about the funeral, even. Why, when Mr. Whart passed away, I—”

  “I know,” the doctor grunted. “Poor Ed. He always hated being a public spectacle.” He eyed the women thoughtfully. “Can’t you see what Lyddie’s done? She’s solved her problem by just going on as if nothing had happened. Her make- believe world isn’t the same as the one that most of us call the one and only real world, but maybe it’s no worse for being different.

  “You’re shocked because instead of grieving she prefers to believe that George has only gone away for a while and she’ll see him again soon. Well, what do you believe?”

  The church ladies looked abashedly at one another. But Mrs. Whart returned to the attack. “All the same,” she declared stoutly, “the people of this town owe it to themselves—”

  “Would you say,” inquired the doctor mildly, “that the people of this town also owe it to themselves to—ah—inform themselves as thoroughly as possible about their civic leaders?”

  Mrs. Whart got red. “Doctor! You wouldn’t—”

  “Of course not,” said the doctor. “But I certainly wouldn’t want to hear of anybody making trouble for Lyddie.”

  Some thought the murderer, Bert, had lit out for the Far West. Others argued that he was hiding out in the country and might show up again. As it turned out, much later, they were right.

  What happened when Bert came back nobody ever knew exactly—but I think I can picture how it must have been.

  When Lyddie came home that evening there was dusk in the front hall. She didn’t see the crouching figure until it was between her and the door. She drew in a sharp breath, but didn’t waste it on screaming that wouldn’t be heard outside the solid old house.

  He jerked her purse out of her hand and spilled it open, searching. He smelled of the barns where he’d been sleeping; a dirty handkerchief hid the lower half of his face, but it was no disguise. He flung the purse down, scattering its contents. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The key. To the store safe.”

  “George,” Lyddie said breathlessly. “He has it.”

  The man blinked at her. He wasn’t surprised, though; the same bravado with which he’d entered the house by daylight must have enabled him to make inquiries in town, so he’d known something of Lyddie’s story. Certainly he knew she was still running the store and keeping receipts, against the sheriff’s cautiously worded advice, in the old safe at the store.

  The eyes above the handkerchief turned sly. He said, “George sent me to get the key, Miz Hampton. He forgot it.”

  “He did no such thing!” Lyddie blazed scornfully. “And when he comes home, he’ll fire you and run you out of town!”

  “George ain’t coming home.” He took a step toward her, but she neither shrank back nor answered, seeming not to see him. His cunning sensed that he held a weapon. He repeated flatly, “George ain’t coming home. He’s dead. You hear me? Dea—”

  “Stop it!” said Lyddie in a quaking voice. “The key—it’s upstairs, in George’s room. Take it and go away.”

  He grinned triumphantly. “Show me!”

  Up the stairs, she led the murderer, to the bedroom that had been George’s. The bed was fresh-made and the windows open to the western sun. She pointed to the roomy closet where George’s suits hung, neatly pressed.

  “It’s in the pocket of the blue suit . . . no, the gray . . . one of them.”

  “Don’t try and run,” he growled. Clothes hangers protested tinnily as he began hunting.

  Lyddie slammed the door hard. There was a racket of falling hangers and a crash against the panels. While he groped for the knob. Lyddie had already turned the key. She backed off a little and listened, her heart fluttering. Heavy thuds came from the closet. The door scarcely shook; it was solid oak, the kind you don’t break down without an ax.

  The noises stopped, and a shaken voice panted, “Miz Hampton?”

  “Yes?” said Lyddie.

  “What you going to do?”

  “I . . . I don’t rightly know,” said Lyddie helplessly; then she brightened with confidence. “But George will know what’s best. You can just stay there till George comes home.” THE END

  1954

  AXOLOTL

  To our minds, this strangely but fittingly titled story, like so much of the work of Robert Abernathy, typifies modern science fiction at its best: primarily a small-scale story of recognizable human characters and problems, yet embodying a logically developed and completely surprising new idea—a balance of the emotional quality of main-stream fiction with a provocative conceptual element peculiar to this more imaginative type of narrative.

  The axolotl is a mudpuppy with an Aztec name, an unlovely creature with a whitish, flabby, unfinished-looking body, with tiny eyes, feeble limbs, and a big clumsy tail. It is a member of the Amphibia, that class of vertebrates which, in the age of the armored fishes, first crawled out of the water to begin the great adventure of air-breathing existence. But the axolotls are degenerate, amphibians whose life-cycle has aborted; they reach sexual maturity, spawn, and die in the dark ooze, breathing through gills beneath stagnant waters, for generation after generation, just as if that great Paleozoic invasion of the dry land had ended in retreat.

  At some times and places, though, when food grows scant or enemies many on the lake bottom—or for other, more subtle reasons buried somewhere under a blunt primitive skull or in the glandular mechanism of an ungainly body—a change begins. Instinct-driven, the creature moves, with the sureness of direction that in a higher life form would be called purpose, toward the shallow water, the light, and the air it cannot breathe. Painfully it creeps ashore. In the unfamiliar element, its fringed gills shrivel, and it writhes. . . .

  AS THEY PASSED through the gate, Linden returned the sentries’ salutes, scarcely aware of them; but after his back was turned, he seemed to see them nudging one another: “That’s him! Yeah, better take a good look now; may not get another chance.”

  And the other, perhaps: “No kidding? He don’t look that crazy.”

  Linden bit his lip, and cursed his imagination. Deliberately he bent his head and kept his eyes fixed on the solid reality of the asphalt roadway, half-covered by the eternally wind-driven sand. It was quiet here as they walked.

  After some 50 paces, he halted suddenly, and took a deep
breath of the clean air—the breeze was still cool, though it would not remain cool for long—and looked up. Less than a hundred yards away, the concrete apron began, and beyond it was the steel skeleton of the launching platform, and above that, steep and gleaming, towered the magnesium spire of the rocket.

  His eyes, irresistibly drawn upward, followed the line of its vertical axis, toward the imaginary, precisely calculated point up there somewhere at infinity. Tonight the stars would be beacons. But now there was only traceless and depthless blue.

  A mile away a transport muttered, sliding down a slope of air toward the landing field; and far overhead a black buzzard sailed, passed perhaps directly through that imaginary line to infinity, and sailed on unknowing.

  But the rocket was no kin to these. It was wingless, without even external steering vanes, and the sea of air many miles deep above it was no more to it than a veil to be thrust aside. It could function at its best only in hard vacuum, at a velocity of miles per second.

  Linden’s jaw muscles tightened and his breath came quickly. . . . Beside him, Marty said softly, “Look at that. She can hardly wait for tonight.”

  Something in the tone made Linden glance sidelong. Marty was hunched a little forward, and his eyes, under their shaggy scowling brows, were greedy on the spaceship. His whole posture, more than the expression of his face, betrayed a longing that was hopeless, a hopeless jealousy. Linden looked away with embarrassment.

  “Seems like it,” he answered in mechanical agreement. Nobody disagreed with Marty, who knew that machines have souls—hard, metallic souls, never planned by the designers, capable, with the unpredictability that is of the essence of life, both of fearful treachery and of loyalty past understanding.

  Marty’s knowledge of this dated from the time when—immobilized by a splintered spine, the one man left alive and conscious after the flakfires and the fighters—he had been a helpless spectator while a great airplane, itself almost mortally wounded, no hand at its controls, had fought for its life for a quarter of an hour in the air over Germany, and won. Neither laughter nor logic could shake his belief.