Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  I sat up and listened sharply. "So that's how you knew who I was and what I'd be wearing and what I came for! You even knew when and where I'd arrive!"

  "Correct," Blundell said.

  "What else do you know?"

  "That you suspected her of being responsible for the deaths of many old people by starvation. Your suspicion was justified, except that her father had caused all those that occurred before 1947, when she took over after his own death. All but two people were sent into the past. Roberts was curious about the future, of course, but he did not want to waste a victim on a trip that would probably be fruitless. In the past, you understand, he knew precisely what he was after. The future was completely unknown territory."

  "But she took the chance," I said.

  "If you can call deliberate murder taking a chance, yes. One man arrived in 2094, over fifty years ago. The other was yourself. The first one, as you know, died of malnutrition when he was brought back to your era."

  "And what happened to me?" I asked, jittering.

  "You will not die. We intend to make sure of that. All the other victims--I presume you're interested in their errands?"

  "I think I know, but I'd like to find out just the same."

  "They were sent to the past to buy or steal treasures of various sorts--art, sculpture, jewelry, fabulously valuable manuscripts and books, anything that had great scarcity value."

  "That's not possible," I objected. "She had all the money she wanted. Any time she needed more, all she had to do was send somebody back to put down bets and buy stocks that she knew were winners. She had the records, didn't she? There was no way she or her father could lose!"

  * * * * *

  He moved his shoulders in a plum-and-gold shrug. "Most of the treasures they accumulated were for acquisition's sake--and for the sake of vengeance for the way they believed Dr. Roberts had been treated. When there were unusual expenses, such as replacing the very costly parts of the time machine, that required more than they could produce in ready cash, both Roberts and his daughter 'discovered' these treasures."

  He waited while I digested the miserable meal and the disturbing information he had given me. I thought I'd found a loophole in his explanation: "You said people were sent back to the past to buy treasures, besides stealing them."

  "I did," he agreed. "They were provided with currency of whatever era they were to visit."

  I felt my forehead wrinkle up as my theory fell apart. "Then they could buy food. Why should they have died of malnutrition?"

  "Because, as May Roberts herself told you, nothing can exist before it exists. Neither can anything exist after it is out of existence. If you returned with a Dynapack, for example, it would revert to a lump of various metals, because that was what it was in your period. But let me give you a more personal instance. Do you remember coming back from your first trip with dust on your hand?"

  "Yes. I must have fallen."

  "On one hand? No, Mr. Weldon. May Roberts was greatly upset by the incident; she was afraid you would realize why the hamburger had turned to dust--and why the old people died of starvation. All of them, not just a few."

  He paused, giving me a chance to understand what he had just said. I did, with a sick shock.

  "If I ate your food," I said shakily, "I'd feel satisfied until I was returned to my own time. But the food wouldn't go along with me!"

  * * * * *

  Blundell nodded gravely. "And so you, too, would die of malnutrition. The foods we have given you existed in your era. We were very careful of that, so careful that many of them probably were stored years before you left your time. We regret that they are not very palatable, but at least we are positive they will go back with you. You will be as healthy when you arrive in the past as when you left.

  "Incidentally, she made you change your clothes for the same reason--they had been made in 1930. She had clothing from every era she wanted visited and chose old people who would fit them best. Otherwise, you see, they'd have arrived naked."

  I began to shake as if I were as old as I'd pretended to be on the stage. "She's going to pull me back! If I don't bring her the information about the Dynapack, she'll shoot me!"

  "That, Mr. Weldon, is our problem," Blundell said, putting his hand comfortingly on my arm to calm me.

  "Your problem? I'm the one who'll get shot, not you!"

  "But we know in complete detail what will happen when you are returned to the 20th Century."

  I pulled my arm away and grabbed his. "You know that? Tell me!"

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Weldon. If we tell you what you did, you might think of some alternate action, and there is no knowing what the result would be."

  "But I didn't get shot or die of malnutrition?"

  "That much we can tell you. Neither."

  They all stood up, so bright and attractive in their colorful clothes that I felt like a shirt-sleeved stage hand who'd wandered in on a costume play.

  "You will be returned in a month, according to the notes May Roberts left. She gave you plenty of time to get the data, you see. We propose to make that month an enjoyable one for you. The resources of our city--and any others you care to visit--are at your disposal. We wish you to take full advantage of them."

  "And the Dynapack?"

  "Let us worry about that. We want you to have a good time while you are our guest."

  I did.

  It was the most wonderful month of my life.

  * * * * *

  The mesh cage blurred around me. I could see May Roberts through it, her hand just leaving the switch. She was as beautiful as ever, but I saw beneath her beauty the vengeful, vicious creature her father's bitterness had turned her into; Blundell and Carr had let me read some of her notes, and I knew. I wished I could have spent the rest of my years in the future, instead of having to come back to this.

  She came over and opened the gate, smiling like an angel welcoming a bright new soul. Then her eyes traveled startledly over me and her smile almost dropped off. But she held it firmly in place.

  She had to, while she asked, "Do you have the notes I sent you for?"

  "Right here," I said.

  I reached into my breast pocket and brought out a stubby automatic and shot her through the right arm. Her closed hand opened and a little derringer clanked on the floor. She gaped at me with an expression of horrified surprise that should have been recorded permanently; it would have served as a model for generations of actors and actresses.

  "You--brought back a weapon!" she gasped. "You shot me!" She stared vacantly at her bleeding arm and then at my automatic. "But you can't--bring anything back from the future. And you aren't--dying of malnutrition."

  She said it all in a voice shocked into toneless wonder.

  "The food I ate and this gun are from the present," I said. "The people of the future knew I was coming. They gave me food that wouldn't vanish from my cells when I returned. They also gave me the gun instead of the plans for the Dynapack."

  "And you took it?" she screamed at me. "You idiot! I'd have shared the profits honestly with you. You'd have been worth millions!"

  "With acute malnutrition," I amended. "I like it better this way, thanks--poor, but alive. Or relatively poor, I should say, because you've been very generous and I appreciate it."

  "By shooting me!"

  "I hated to puncture that lovely arm, but it wasn't as painful as starving or getting shot myself. Now if you don't mind--or even if you do--it's your turn to get into the cage, Miss Roberts."

  She tried to grab for the derringer on the floor with her left hand.

  "Don't bother," I said quietly. "You can't reach it before a bullet reaches you."

  * * * * *

  She straightened up, staring at me for the first time with terror in her eyes.

  "What are you going to do to me?" she whispered.

  "I could kill you as easily as you could have killed me. Kill you and send your body into some other era. How many dozens of deaths were y
ou responsible for? The law couldn't convict you of them, but I can. And I couldn't be convicted, either."

  She put her hand on the wound. Blood seeped through her fingers as she lifted her chin at me.

  "I won't beg for my life, Weldon, if that's what you want. I could offer you a partnership, but I'm not really in a position to offer it, am I?"

  She was magnificent, terrifyingly intelligent, brave clear through ... and deadlier than a plague. I had to remember that.

  "Into the cage," I said. "I have some friends in the future who have plans for you. I won't tell you what they are, of course; you didn't tell me what I'd go through, did you? Give my friends my fondest regards. If I can manage it, I'll visit them--and you."

  She backed warily into the cage. It would have been pleasant to kiss those wonderful lips good-by. I'd thought about them for a whole month, wanting them and loathing them at the same time.

  It would have been like kissing a coral snake. I knew it and I concentrated on shutting the gate on her.

  "You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you, Weldon?" she asked through the mesh.

  "I can be," I said. "I have the machine. I can send people into the past or future and make myself a pile of dough. Only I'd give them food to take along. I wouldn't kill them off to keep the secret to myself. Anything else on your mind?"

  "You want me," she stated.

  I didn't argue.

  "You could have me."

  "Just long enough to get my throat slit or brains blown out. I don't want anything that much."

  I rammed the switch closed.

  The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the floor, but she was gone into the future I had just come from.

  That was when the reaction hit me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun, but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped my stomach over and unhinged my knees.

  Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found a phone.

  * * * * *

  Lou Pape got there so quickly that I still hadn't gotten over the tremors, in spite of a bottle of brandy I dug out of a credenza, maybe because the date on the label, 1763, gave me a new case of the shivers.

  I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himself that I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him what had happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess I hadn't really expected him to.

  "If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark head unhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Even knowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do."

  "All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly. "From what I was told, there ought to be plenty."

  We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood with his face slack.

  "Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!"

  The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice as high as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammed with paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts, goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, and tapestries in brilliant color ... and everything was as bright and sparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of a lot of it.

  "The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lou said. "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was a collector and she knew where to find things."

  "She certainly did," I agreed.

  "What did you do with her?"

  "I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me and I sent her into the future."

  He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. You wanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got rid of her body somehow."

  "Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leave sleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his hands loose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here? Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'd have sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody--including you--would know I'd ever been here. Come on, use your head."

  "That's easy. You lost your nerve."

  "I'm not even losing my patience."

  * * * * *

  He pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff or because of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're no friend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, and I'll make sure you fry."

  "You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead and wrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, send me up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do the proving, not me."

  He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break or I'll plug you as if I never saw you before."

  He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particular damn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killed May Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, would have stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason for my relief--if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find, he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have tried to get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievable explanation.

  But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'd shot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at and that had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.

  She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; they regarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with their marvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contented citizen, living out her existence in an era that had given me more happiness than I'd ever had.

  I sat and tried to stupefy myself with brandy that should long ago have dried to brick-hardness, while Lou Pape stood at the door with his hand near his holster and glared at me. He didn't take his eyes off me until somebody named Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson came in and was introduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs.

  It was minutes before I realized what they were going to do. I ran up after them.

  I was just in time to see Aaronson carefully take the housing off the hooded motors, and leap back suddenly from the fury of lightning sparks.

  * * * * *

  The whole machine fused while we watched helplessly--motors, switches, panel and mesh cage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and melted together in a charred and molten pile.

  "Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to short if it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a mess like this."

  He finally glanced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching all the way around the rear for it with his left hand.

  Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any sense of it, Prof?" he asked.

  "Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify it when it looks like this."

  He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief.

  Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine to--ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now we'll have to dig through the house to find her body."

  "You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of me."

  He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for her body, Mark?"

  "Tear the
place apart if you want."

  "We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide."

  "Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like."

  "You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through."

  I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in the future could take on the job--they could do it faster and better than I can--but some nice, peaceful quiet would help."

  * * * * *

  He didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest.

  She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep.

  But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care could have made a great and honored scientist out of him.

  They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible.

  I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone. Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are impossible to work out ever could.

  I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came over to where I was sitting.

  "You knew we wouldn't find her," he said.

  "That's what I kept telling you."

  "Where is she?"

  "In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in veils for the depraved--"