A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “I put in another cube and sent it two years back. The second cube came back unchanged, except that it was newer, shinier.

  “That gave me the answer. I had been expecting the cubes to go back in time, and they had done so, but not in the sense I had expected them to. Those metal cubes had been fabricated about three years previously. I had sent the first one back years before it had existed in its fabricated form. Ten years ago it had been ore. The machine returned it to that state.

  “Do you see how our previous theories of time travel have been wrong? We expected to be able to step into a time machine in, say, 2004, set it for fifty years back, and then step out in the year 1954 . . . but it does not work that way. The machine does not move in time. Only whatever is within the machine is affected, and then just with relation to itself and not to the rest of the Universe.

  “I confirmed this with guinea pigs by sending one six weeks old five weeks back and it came out a baby.

  “I need not outline all my experiments here. You will find a record of them in the desk and you can study it later.

  “Do you understand now what has happened to you, Norman?”

  YOU begin to understand. And you begin to sweat.

  The I who wrote that letter you are now reading is you, yourself at the age of seventy-five, in this year of 2004.

  You are that seventy-five-year-old man, with your body returned to what it had been fifty years ago, with all the memories of fifty years of living wiped out.

  You invented the time machine.

  And before you used it on yourself, you made these arrangements to help you orient yourself. You wrote yourself the letter which you are now reading.

  But if those fifty years are—to you—gone, what of all your friends, those you loved? What of your parents?

  What of the girl you are going—were going—to marry?

  You read on:

  “Yes, you will want to know what has happened. Mom died in 1963, Dad in 1968. You married Barbara in 1956. I am sorry to tell you that she died only three years later, in a plane crash. You have one son. He is still living; his name is Walter; he is now forty-six years old and is an accountant in Kansas City.”

  Tears come into your eyes and for a moment you can no longer read. Barbara dead—dead for forty-five years.

  And only minutes ago, in subjective time, you were sitting next to her, sitting in the bright sun in a Beverly Hills patio . . .

  You force yourself to read again.

  “But back to the discovery. You begin to see some of its implications. You will need time to think to see all of them.

  “It does not permit time travel as we have thought of time travel, but it gives us immortality of a sort.

  Immortality of the kind I have temporarily given us.

  “Is it good? Is it worthwhile to lose the memory of fifty years of one’s life in order to return one’s body to relative youth? The only way I can find out is to try, as soon as I have finished writing this and made my other preparations.

  “You will know the answer.

  “But before you decide, remember that there is another problem, more important than the psychological one. I mean overpopulation.

  “If our discovery is given to the world, if all who are old or dying can make themselves young again, the population will almost double every generation. Nor would the world—not even our own relatively enlightened country—be willing to accept compulsory birth control as a solution.

  “Give this to the world, as the world is today in 2004, and within a generation there will be famine, suffering, war. Perhaps a complete collapse of civilization.

  “Yes, we have reached other planets, but they are not suitable for colonizing. The stars may be our answer, but we are a long way from reaching them. When we do, someday, the billions of habitable planets that must be out there will be our answer . . . our living room. But until then, what is the answer?

  “Destroy the machine? But think of the countless lives it can save, the suffering it can prevent. Think of what it would mean to a man dying of cancer. Think . . .”

  THINK. You finish the letter and put it down.

  You think of Barbara dead for forty-five years. And of the fact that you were married to her for three years and that those years are lost to you.

  Fifty years lost. You damn the old man of seventy-five whom you became and who has done this to you . . . who has given you this decision to make.

  Bitterly, you know what the decision must be. You think that he knew, too, and realize that he could safely leave it in your hands. Damn him, he should have known.

  Too valuable to destroy, too dangerous to give.

  The other answer is painfully obvious.

  You must be custodian of this discovery and keep it secret until it is safe to give, until mankind has expanded to the stars and has new worlds to populate, or until, even without that, he has reached a state of civilization where he can avoid overpopulation by rationing births to the number of accidental—or voluntary—deaths.

  If neither of those things has happened in another fifty years (and are they likely so soon?), then you, at seventy-five, will be writing another letter like this one. You will be undergoing another experience similar to the one you’re going through now. And making the same decision, of course.

  Why not? You’ll be the same person again.

  Time and again, to preserve this secret until Man is ready for it.

  How often will you again sit at a desk like this one, thinking the thoughts you are thinking now, feeling the grief you now feel?

  There is a click at the door and you know that the time lock has opened, that you are now free to leave this room, free to start a new life for yourself in place of the one you have already lived and lost.

  But you are in no hurry now to walk directly through that door.

  You sit there, staring straight ahead of you blindly, seeing in your mind’s eye the vista of a set of facing mirrors, like those in an old-fashioned barber shop, reflecting the same thing over and over again, diminishing into far distance.

  1954

  THE BLAST

  Stuart Cloete

  I AM WRITING this because today I saw two girls. It was very odd after twenty years. I do not know if anyone—the word anyone looks funny—will ever find this, or be able to read it, or even if it will last, because it is written in pencil. Naturally there is no ink. It all dried up long ago, but there are plenty of pencils, thousands of them, pencils by the hundred thousand gross—all the best kinds, just for the picking up.

  It’s difficult to know where to begin. It all happened so long ago that some of the details are fogged and I’m even doubtful of the chronology. The big thing, of course, the real beginning, was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the atomic bomb and the bungling that followed it after the war: fear of Russia, fear of free enterprise, fear of communism, of Fascism—fear, in fact. I remember one thing in ‘46, and that was a senator from Florida saying that we should destroy every facility we possessed capable of producing only destructive forms of atomic energy. This made a great impression on me, just as Roosevelt’s saying, “All we have to fear is fear itself,” had done. But, of course, we did not pay any more attention to this senator than we had to the late President. We entered into a kind of armament race. Strength was the thing, power politics; and atoms were power. The common man didn’t really believe in it, but what could he do? When had he ever been able to prevent wars? All he did was fight them. Anyway, there was no war. There was only a state of fear. There were only rumors—stories that Russia and Spain were only a year behind us in the atomic race.

  These two countries were, of course, at opposite ideological poles and were a constant threat not only to each other, but to the world. Then there was the rumor that no one believed, but which nevertheless had the psychological effect of adding to the general fear and uncertainty of mankind. It was that a group of Germans in South America had discovered new fissionable material and th
at the process of refining it was so simple that bombs could be made in any garage—or if not quite in a garage, in almost any small machine shop. This, if it were true, naturally would render the inspection measures discussed by the United Nations completely ineffective because, quite obviously, all small plants all over the world could not be kept under supervision.

  Then came a new rumor—only it was a little more than a rumor because the same story came from several accredited sources—that the new bombs were minuscule, no bigger than a fountain pen, and could be taken anywhere and planted with impunity. This probably was untrue, but certainly the underlying principle was true. Bombs were being made that were both smaller and more powerful. We had been making them ourselves, ever since the very first ones we’d used in the New Mexico test and in Japan. We knew that there were many Germans in South America. We knew that many war criminals had escaped there, by various subterfuges and in various disguises. We knew that young Norwegian Nazis had been invited over as colonists. We knew that Russia was courting the all but openly Fascist southern republics—and knowing all this we discounted it all.

  What happened next is history. I never bothered writing about it till today, because, thinking myself the only survivor, I could see little point in recording the events of the last twenty years. It is, I think, the year 1972 now; and the month—I am less certain of the months—is probably May. I deduce this from the flowering shrubs, the state of the foliage, and the fact that most of the young birds have flown from their nests.

  Perhaps, too, I have avoided writing, though writing comes easily to me (it used to be my profession; I was a novelist, because of the terror of those days, which I wish to forget if possible. Even now, though the pain has been softened slightly by the passage of time, it will be difficult for me to write of the death of my wife, who, having survived the first blasts and succeeded in living with me almost a year, finally died in my arms of the Red Death, as it came to be called.

  None of this, of course, is the true reason for having either not written before or for writing now. The real reason is that previously there was no one to write for; but now there is, because I have seen people. People are an audience, and some old reflex in me has been activated.

  I thought I was over it all. Just as I had thought I was over women—girls. But I see that I have deceived myself and that this manuscript, this record, may be of some historic value. That is the true reason for this work that I am writing in a mixture of hope and fear.

  At the time of the blast—before it, that is—I was well known as the author of several South African novels. I am of South African descent and, at that time, still had a farm in the Transvaal. I suppose I have it still—even now. This is probably what saved my life, for in the beginning, though there were others who came through the plague, most people were apparently unable to stand the conditions of life when all meat had to be hunted and savage animals roamed through the piled canyons of what had been the greatest city in the world, New York, where I lived before the blast, and still live. Of course, there were great quantities of canned goods, but fresh meat, fuel and water were difficult to obtain for those who were unaccustomed to dealing with life in the raw.

  I had better go back to the blast. It was what might be called the last real event in history. I seem to be in the interesting position of having survived history, of being history itself—a kind of lonely Adam in a jungle where terror stalked by day and night.

  The Adam idea is now suddenly particularly apt because of the Eves that I have seen. I wonder what Adam would have done with two Eves. Anyway, I am glad I have hidden from them, because if they have survived, others must have. It has always seemed possible to me that in remote parts of the world some groups of those people we used to call savages might have survived, saved by their isolation from the diseases set up by radioactivity and immune or partially immune, because of their diet and the lives they led, to the Red Death which spread over the North. I have evidently been right, for the two girls—they are in their early twenties from the look of them—could not have raised themselves; which again brings up the question: are those with them friends or enemies, and what is my position? Do I wish to be a friend to these strangers after twenty years alone?

  The thing to do now is to continue my narrative and to describe what was certainly the end of our civilization and might have been the end of mankind—though of course man might have reappeared again by a process of natural selection in a few million years; unless this time the new animals, such as the giant wolves that stand as high as a horse, and the immense brown and white minks that attack cattle and suck their blood in a few minutes, and the many other strange beasts and birds should prove to be too much for such primitive types of man as might arise. This, at any rate, had been my opinion until I saw the two girls. It is now subject to modification.

  That I have succeeded in my fight against such wild beasts as I have described is due to my possession of modern weapons. These animals, however, are quite natural—phenomena that science once predicted might arise through the effect of atomic fission on the genes and chromosomes of the embryos extant at the time of the explosion. Or at least that is the way I remember it, though at the time—that is, before it happened—I did not pay much attention to the details about the atom in the magazines and papers, because I had no inclinations toward nuclear physics.

  The center of the blast was said to have been Gramercy Park, probably the Players Club. It was estimated that three hundred thousand people were killed. Another half-million people were wounded by flying debris or burned in varying degrees. A tiny blister, however, proved as bad as a serious burn: There was no case of recovery from a burn of any size. The patient simply appeared to dissolve slowly from the nucleus of the wound. The deaths were extremely painful, and since there were neither sufficient hospital facilities nor enough drugs of any kind to stifle pain, thousands committed suicide, while others were killed by their friends in mercy killings.

  All public services broke down, including fire and police, key men having been killed, water mains destroyed, telephone and telegraph communication ruined beyond repair. Our technological back was broken; our civilization writhed like a wounded snake, unable to advance and incapable of retreat. We were too complex to return to simplicity; and only then, when it was too late, did it become apparent to the man in the street on what a fragile base his life had rested and how tenuous had been his hold upon existence. “One world or no world,” our greatest men had said, but no one had believed them. Having refused one world, we now had no world, and each man reacted according to his nature. Some, as I say, committed suicide, not merely because they were wounded or burned but because they were terrified. They bolted like animals, leaping from the housetops of the vast circle of buildings that surrounded the empty center of devastation. Some prayed, some cursed, some raped and murdered, their lusts liberated in final orgy. The police tried in certain parts to keep order, and shot looters and assassins till their ammunition gave out, when they were lynched by police-hating mobs. All the jewelry stores were broken into, and rings and ornaments were scattered everywhere. But now, of course, diamonds and gold were useless.

  For forty-eight hours, there was madness and murder, screams, shots and shouts; the parading of loose women in stolen ermine cloaks, mink coats, stone marten stoles, with diamond tiaras on their bleached blond hair. For forty-eight hours, cars roared through the streets and tommy guns spat from the cars. Then the gasoline began to give out in the filling stations, and the ammunition began to give out for the tommy guns as it had earlier for the police, “and there was no one to hold up. Gangsters could go into any store and take anything. Their women dripped with jewels, their cars were stacked with valuable furs and piled with cases of Scotch and gin and rye. They had eaten their fill of steak cooked by trembling chefs at the point of a gun. But now there were neither steaks nor chefs left, and there was no water to wash the grime from their faces and the blood from their hands. And then, a
s suddenly as their reign of terror had begun, it ended in terror on their part. Here was a new world that they could not understand, where all that they had ever wanted was theirs and they were carrying it off. But to where, and for what? In this world they were the suckers, and, like wild animals betrayed by this new environment, they turned upon one another in a kind of gang war of extinction.

  This, of course, is all somewhat academically stated, the drama having lost its sharp cutting edge with the passing years. But there are incidents, vignettes that still stand out, separated from the general mass of somewhat amorphous memory and theory and rationalization, like the red-capped figure to be found in almost every Corot landscape. There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that. I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.

  In a book published a few years before it happened, a number of scientists had predicted what might occur, and one of them had explained what would take place if an atomic bomb were dropped in Gramercy Park. The fact that the explosion actually did take place in Gramercy Park could have been a matter of coincidence, or luck, or it might have been suggested by the chapter in question. The depositor of the bomb may have said, “Well, if they want it there, let them have it there.” He may even have had a kind of perverted sense of humor, like the guards at Buchenwald who gave towels to those of their victims who were about to be gassed, telling them the Murder House was for baths; or again, with that tidy Nazi mind, he may have wished to make fact conform to fiction. The point, however, is that the explosion did not operate quite as was expected, because, for some unknown reason, the blast did not fade out and get weaker and weaker as the distance from its center increased. Instead, it ended as if it were cut off by an invisible wall.