“I've figured it out—”
“The universities that were courting us have disassociated themselves, but there's a small college in Alabama that's still offering me a position. I'm going to work out what went wrong with the return apparatus. I promise.”
What?
“There's no money. Just my salary and what I can scrape together in research grants to do the work. But some day, Alan. Some day. You and I will be back.”
“You're going to Alabama?”
“Yeah. I leave Monday.”
“You're moving to the States?”
“Yeah.”
“You're leaving.”
“Yeah.” Victor put the keys to the warehouse in his hands. “You know, I've been combing the webnet, looking for anything that could give us a clue. There was an article from May of ‘62 in the Vancouver Sun about chimps that escaped from a private zoo. I was thinking, maybe they were our chimps. You know? Maybe our chimps got there fine—they just couldn't get back to us.”
Victor was carrying on with the project.
He'd bled Alan dry and now he was using the results, their results, to rebuild his name in academia. Alan felt the blood rising in his throat. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what? That you're taking this project away from me!”
“Taking—whoa, now. You're the one that pulled the plug, Alan.”
“Yeah, once the money was gone. How much longer did you think I'd be able to keep financing your private little scheme?”
Victor blinked. “You offered! You got the investors! You—”
“Time travel's no good if you can't get back!” Alan punched every word in an attempt to get the idea through the blockhead's skull.
“Hey, I proved—proved—that time travel works, Alan. Who has ever done that? Nobody! Getting back—getting back, that's just a technical glitch, a puzzle to work out—”
“A technical glitch that put me into bankruptcy!”
“You'll get your money, if it's so goddamn important.”
“Yeah? Well, a livelihood, yeah, that's important. Food on the table. I've been excommunicated from my family for bilking them all out of their life's savings. But you know what is the worst part? That you don't believe me when I tell you I know what the problem is. It's those goddamn chimps!”
“It's not the chimps, Alan. Listen, you'll get your money. I'll work out the problems. We'll set up the corporation, just like we planned.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And once you have the answers, what's to stop you from putting it together with some big German investor, or Japanese, or some entrepreneur you meet in the States?”
“Alan, what are you talking about? You—”
“I have no money. I have debts. I can't back you. I can't invest in this scheme.”
“Well, wherever we get the money, we're in this together.”
“Hah.”
“Alan.”
“Hah.” He stomped down the street.
The traitor! He was getting off too easy. Alan turned and came back.
He jabbed Victor in the chest with a finger. "You're going to find out why those monkeys couldn't get back?”
“Chimps.”
The word felt like a detonator on dynamite. Alan's fist exploded on Victor's face. Victor crumpled to the sidewalk on his backside, blood spouting from his nose.
Alan shook the sting from his fist.
Victor looked stupidly down at his bloody shirt.
Alan took a step toward him, then got himself under control—barely—and stomped back to his car. He opened the door. “You?” he shouted back.
Victor pulled himself to a sitting position and leaned forward, hands pressing on his nose.
“You go to hell!”
* * * *
You don't send a chimp to do a man's job.
There was a way to find out how the chimps screwed up. A very simple way. And Alan was goddamn going to prove it.
He returned to the warehouse and powered up the time machine. The target time still read 2:05 am, the arrival time for the third chimp, so he reset it for 2:07 am. He had seen the operation—participated, even—and asked so many questions over the years, he had no trouble operating it. He double-checked the settings, just as the technicians had done each time they ran a test.
The warehouse was quiet but for the hum of the generators, dim but for the single light Alan used to finalize his preparations. He stepped into the office that had been converted into a time-travel booth. He sat in the recliner and flipped the switch on the wall.
The experience of traveling back in time surprised him. He was simply there. He fell onto the floor because there was now no recliner in the office. There was a shock of displaced air molecules against his skin; his clothes were gone. Nausea touched his stomach momentarily.
He breathed and blew out sharply.
The time-travel booth was now an office, with a desk and swivel chair, neither of which were occupying the space he had materialized into, thank God.
Through the window that looked out onto the warehouse floor, he saw no time-travel computers or machinery; only three chimps fighting over a cigarette package.
God. It worked.
“Yeah!” he cried aloud and pulled open the office door. The chimps scattered, then turned to look at him. “Hey!” he yelled, and they ran in all directions. “We did it! Hey, chimps, we did it! It works!” He spun in a circle. “Victor!” he yelled. “We did it! You did it, you bastard!”
Whatever the problem was, it didn't exist now.
He had to tell Victor.
First, though, he needed proof that he'd been here. He picked up the cigarette pack the chimps had dropped and flipped it over. BD02613 was stamped on the bottom. “Yes!”
He flung open the door to the office to pull the switch to return to the preset time.
He stopped short. He would never laugh about the Mars Climate Orbiter again.
There was no switch.
And in 2004, on his seventy-seventh birthday, his affairs in order, contentment in his heart and his wife at his side, Alan vanished.
Copyright (c) 2008 Susan Forest
* * * *
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* * *
Short Story: FINALIZING HISTORY
by Richard K. Lyon
Is anything ever really final?
* * * *
1
The only people who know our phone number in Maine also know to call here only in an emergency. Anxiously grabbing the phone, I heard someone say, “Hello, this is John W. Campbell. I'm calling on a matter of extreme importance for Earl Stanley Gardner. I'm the editor of Analog Science—"
“I know who you are, Mr. Campbell,” I said, “but why are you calling me? I haven't written science fiction since 1932.”
Before Campbell could reply, someone who must have been standing beside him said, in a thick Hungarian accent, “Tell him that the fate of the world is at stake!”
“Who said that?” I demanded.
“That was Edward Teller,” Campbell explained. “He's right, though it's not that dire. The world isn't coming to an end or anything like that. It's just that there's a decision of great historic importance hanging in the balance. Please, could you tell me something? I know this is a strange question, but am I correct in assuming that you haven't taken a nap today?”
“I haven't. What's that got to do with anything?” I demanded.
“We'll explain when we get to your house,” Campbell said, his voice brittle as if he were under stress. It sounded as if there were several people standing around him, all trying to tell him things at once. Was one of them really Edward Teller? Campbell must have gestured all of them to silence, because the background sounds quieted and he continued, “We'll be driving from my house in New Jersey, so it'll be several hours before we can reach you. Please, Mr. Gardner, don't go to sleep in the meantime. I can't explain, but I give you my word that it's a matter of the utmost importance. We must talk to you before you sleep.”
“Just who is this ‘we’ you're talking about?” I asked. When he told me, I stared at the phone in astonishment. Something big and very strange was going on. Out of habit, I gave him directions, while I tried to understand the mystery that had just confronted me.
I'd hung up the phone before I noticed that my wife Agnes was staring at me angrily. “Earl,” she said firmly, “you know we absolutely cannot have visitors. It's not just that the house is a mess. You've got that horrid old outhouse in the backyard! The thing's an eyesore! Why, anyone who saw it—”
Agnes went on at some length. Strictly speaking, the outhouse might not qualify as a historic building, but it did date from before the Revolutionary War. Agnes's attitude toward the outhouse had changed when I married her. For several decades as my secretary, the perfect Della Street to my imperfect Perry Mason, she'd never said anything about the outhouse. As my wife, however, she saw a few things differently.
Switching gears, she stopped telling me why it was impossible for us to have visitors here in Maine the way we did at our New York apartment. Instead she demanded, “Who's coming and when will they get here?”
It would have been nice if I could have told her that our coming visitors weren't anyone of any importance. Instead I had to say, “Well, there's John Campbell, he's the editor of Analog Science Fiction magazine, Robert Heinlein, he used to write for Campbell, and, ahh, Edward Teller—”
“The father of the hydrogen bomb?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I admitted, “he's the one who said the fate of the world depends on my not going to sleep until they get here. There's also that actor, Ronald Reagan. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild, and, ahh—” I hesitated, fearing how my wife would react. Since there wasn't any way around it, I said, “Jackie Kennedy, the wife of the President Elect.”
“That's the group?” my wife wanted to know.
“That's who Campbell had at his house in New Jersey,” I explained. “They'll be driving through New York City to pick up General Douglas MacArthur.”
She started laughing. “Earl,” she said when she regained control, “This Campbell fellow told you all that, and you actually believed him!”
“But Campbell's a serious professional editor,” I objected. “He wouldn't play a silly practical joke.”
“He's the editor who published that Dianetics garbage,” she reminded me. “What he told you is obviously nonsense. In the first place, the Secret Service would never let the wife of the President Elect just drive up here, and she'd never come with Ronald Reagan. He's a Democrat, but he campaigned for Nixon.”
Since logic was on her side, I didn't argue. The sensible thing for us to do was to ignore Campbell's absurd request. If he hadn't called, we'd have spent today putting the last touches on a Perry Mason novel. Normally that was something we could finish in time for dinner and a good night's sleep.
This time, however, we were in a mess. Thanks to scheduling problems, I had to send my publishers a finished manuscript tomorrow morning. While that's not usually a problem, I work with a group of volunteers in my “Court of Last Resort.” Over the years, we've secured the release of several men unjustly convicted of crimes they didn't commit. Yesterday, however, they'd told me about a case that was very similar to the novel I'd just written. The big difference was that the man in jail was most likely innocent, while the corresponding character in my novel was guilty.
Published as was, my novel could make it a great deal harder to get the innocent man a new trial. Since many of the similarities between the real and fictional cases were purely cosmetic, the obvious cure was to change the novel. That, unfortunately, would be a long job.
Della Street never did better by Perry Mason than Agnes did by me tonight. With endless patience but always demanding that I do my best, she worked with me, until, in the small hours of the morning, the novel was finished.
That was when a long black limousine pulled into our driveway. As its doors opened and men in black suits poured out, a second and a third limo entered our driveway and waited some distance from our house.
One of the men from the first limo knocked on our door. Opening the door I found myself facing a man whose wellfitting suit didn't quite conceal the gun he wore in a shoulder holster. “Mr. and Mrs. Gardner, I'm Special Agent Carr. I hope you don't mind if we look around before Mrs. Kennedy comes in.”
“Sure,” I said, but he was looking at my wife. She had an expression on her face, the one she wears when she's about to get into a bargaining contest with a Maine merchant.
“Of course,” she said, smiling, “you need to make sure everything is safe for the new First Lady, and I need to get my house in order for her visit. You'll find the vacuum cleaner in the closet over there.”
In a few minutes, our house was spic and span. When I couldn't understand why the Secret Service was being so obliging, Agnes told me, “Mrs. Kennedy coming here on a fool's errand and they know it. They want to spare us any embarrassment, so we'll do likewise for her.”
My wife even got them to park their chase limo so it hid the outhouse.
* * * *
2
Having arrived in the first limo, John Campbell walked toward my house well before the cleanup was done. A solidly built man with an angular face, horn-rim glasses and buzz cut brown hair, he paused on my doorstep to discard a cigarette butt. While my wife's judgment of him seemed a little harsh to me, he did have a history of courting controversy. In principle that was a good thing. Unorthodox ideas deserve a fair hearing. My Court of Last Resort, however, depended on my credibility. I needed to avoid being involved in anything too controversial.
Despite my misgivings I stepped out of the house into the moonlit night and walked toward him. “Mr. Gardner,” he said, speaking rapidly, “I know you want a sensible reasonable explanation, but all I can tell you are the facts. Two nights ago I had what, for want of a better word, I'll call a dream.”
Pausing to light a cigarette and give me one, he continued, “In this dream, I was one of nine human beings summoned to serve on an
advisory committee. The summons came from an extraterrestrial, an incredibly powerful being capable of voyaging between the stars and traveling through time. What it wanted from us was a unanimous recommendation regarding a decision that would greatly impact the course of human history.”
When Campbell paused, I didn't say anything. Part of being a good interviewer is knowing when being silent will prod the other guy to say more.
In a moment Campbell continued, “When I woke up, my memories of this strange dream were sharp and clear, unlike any dream I've ever had before. Thinking it might be useful story material, I wrote down a very detailed account of the dream. Later that day, I had a phone conversation with Robert Heinlein. Three nights before he'd had the identical dream—no—I mean he'd had the exactly corresponding dream. In my dream we'd been sitting at a conference table with him two chairs down on my right. In his I'd been two chairs up on the left. One of the other seven people was a woman neither of us recognized and we were in perfect agreement on the identity of the other six.
“We also came up with identical seating arrangements. Since that could not be coincidence, Robert and I started calling people. We began with the writers. While I had a problem getting your number up here, we did reach Clifford Simak. He's a newspaper editor who writes science fiction. He was absolutely fascinated by our story and was very polite, but he hadn't had the dream and I'm not sure he believed us.
“We almost dropped the whole thing, but I had a friend who gave us Ronald Reagan's number. It turned out he'd had the dream, and he could give us the numbers for Edward Teller and General MacArthur. They'd both had the dream, and MacArthur had Jackie Kennedy's phone number.
“It wasn't until we talked with her that it hit us. None of us had had the dream on the same night as any of the others, and the nights we dreamed corresponded to where we sat around that alien's conference table. That meant Clifford Simak would have the dream last night, and you'd have it tonight.
“The problem was that Clifford's taking a vacation in Hawaii, and he'd already gone to bed by the time we called his hotel. All we could do was leave a message for him to call us in the morning.
Analog SFF, June 2008 Page 17