Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Remember me?” he cried, laughing.

  I searched the long frazzled gray hair that blew about his cheeks, noted the white chin stubble, the sun-bleached shirt, the half-soiled denims, the sandals on his bony feet, then up again to his demon eyes.

  “Do you?” he smiled.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Simon Cross!” he exploded.

  “Who?”

  “Cross!” he bleated. “I am Simon Cross!”

  “Son of a bitch!” I reared back.

  My chair fell. The small crowd fell back, too, as if struck. The old, old man, riven, shut his eyes, flinching.

  “Bastard!” Tears leaped to my eyes. “Simon Cross? What have you done with your life!?”

  Eyes clenched, he lifted his gnarled and shivering hands, palms out, horribly empty to wait for my further cry.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said. “Your life. What did you do to it?”

  With a great thunderclap my memory reversed to forty years lost, forty years gone, and myself, thirty-three, at the start of my own career.

  And Simon Cross stood before me, nineteen years old and handsome to the point of beauty with a bright face, clear and innocent eyes, an amiable demeanor, his bones relaxed within his flesh, and a bundle of story manuscripts under his arm.

  “My sister said—” he began.

  “I know, I know,” I interrupted. “I read your stories last night, the ones she gave me. You’re a genius.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Simon Cross.

  “I would. Bring more stories. Without looking I can sell every one of them. Not as an agent, but a friend to genius.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Simon Cross.

  “I can’t help myself. Someone like you lives once in a lifetime.”

  I riffled through his new stories.

  “Oh, God, yes, yes. Beautiful. Sell them all, and take no commission.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “No, blessed. Genetically blessed, by God.”

  “I don’t go to church.”

  “You don’t need to,” I said. “Now, get out of here. Let me get my breath. Your genius is blasphemy to plain dogs like me. I admire, envy, and almost hate you. Go!”

  And he smiled a bewildered smile and got out, left me with his white-hot pages burning my hand, and within two weeks I had sold every one of these tales by a nineteen-year-old man-child whose words walked him on water and flew him midair.

  The response quaked the earth across country.

  “Where did you find this writer?” some said. “He reads like the bastard son of Emily Dickinson out of Scott Fitzgerald. You his agent?”

  “No. He’ll need no agent.”

  And Simon Cross wrote a dozen more stories that leaped from his machine into print and acclaim.

  Simon Cross. Simon Cross. Simon Cross.

  And I was his honorary father, visionary discoverer, and envious but forgiving friend.

  Simon Cross. And then, Korea.

  And him standing on my front porch in a pure salt-white sailor’s suit, his face still unshaven, his cheeks sunburned, his eyes drinking the world, a last story in his hands.

  “Come back, dear boy,” I said.

  “I’m not a boy.”

  “No? God’s forever child then, burning bright! Stay alive. Don’t become too famous.”

  “I won’t.” He hugged me and ran.

  Simon Cross. Simon Cross.

  And the war over and the time lost and him vanished. Spend ten years here, thirty there, and just rumors of my wandering genius child. Some said he had landed in Spain, married a castle, and championed dove shooting. Others swore they had seen him in Morocco, perhaps Marrakech. Spend another swift decade and jump the sill into 1998 with a Travel Machine treading useless waters in your attic and all Time on your hands, and book-signing fans pressed close when cracking the silence of forty years, what?!

  Simon Cross. Simon Cross.

  “Damn you to hell!” I shouted.

  The old, old man railed back, frightened, hands shielding his face.

  “Damn you!” I cried. “Where have you been? How have you used yourself? Christ, what a waste! Look at you! Straighten up! Are you who you say you are?”

  “I—”

  “Shut up! God, you stupid nerveless monster, what have you done to that fine young man?”

  “What fine young man?” the old, old one babbled.

  “You. You. You were the genius. You had the world by the tail. You wrote upside down backwards and it all came right! The world was your oyster. You made pearls. Christ, do you know what you’ve done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes! Nothing! And all you had to do was whistle, blink, and it was yours!”

  “Don’t hit me!” he cried.

  “Hit you? Kill you, maybe! Hit you! My God!”

  I looked around for a blunt instrument. I had only my fists, which I stared at and dropped in despair.

  “Don’t you know what life is, you damned idiot fool?” I said at last.

  “Life?” gasped the old, old man.

  “It’s a deal. A deal you make with God. He gives you life, and you pay back. No, not a gift, a loan. You don’t just take, you give. Quid pro quo!”

  “Quid—?”

  “Pro quo! One hand washes the other. Borrow and repay, give and take. And you! What a waste! My God, there are ten thousand people out there who’d kill for your talent, who’d die to be what you were and now aren’t. Lend me your body, give me your brain, if you don’t want it, give it back, but my God, run it to ruin? Lose it forever? How could you? What made you? Suicide and murder, murder and suicide! Oh damn, damn, damn you to hell!”

  “Me?” gasped the old, old man.

  “Look!” I cried, and spun him to face a shop mirror and see his own shipwreck. “Who is that?”

  “Me,” he bleated.

  “No, that’s the young man you lost! Damn!”

  I raised my fists and it was a moment of stunned release. Images knocked my mind: Suddenly the attic loomed and the useless Machine waiting for no purpose. The Machine I had dreamed wondering why, for what? The Machine with two chairs waiting for occupants going where?

  My fists, midair, froze. The attic flashed in my mind and I lowered my fists. I saw the wine on the signing table and took it up.

  “Were you going to hit me?” the old, old man cried.

  “No. Drink this.”

  He opened his eyes to the glass in his hand.

  “Does it make me larger or smaller?” he said inanely.

  Alice down the rabbit hole with the DRINK ME bottle that grew her outsize or dwarf-small.

  “Which?” he said.

  “Drink!”

  He drank. I refilled the glass. Astounded at this gift confounding my fury, he drank and drank a third and his eyes wet with surprise.

  “What?”

  “This,” I said, and dragged him half-crippled out to the car and slung him in like a scarecrow and was off down the road, myself grimly silent, Simon Cross, the lost son of a bitch, babbling.

  “Where?”

  “Here!”

  We swerved into my front drive. I yanked him inside and up into the attic without breaking his neck.

  We stood, imbalanced, by my Time Machine.

  “Now I know why I built it,” I said.

  “Built what?” cried Simon Cross.

  “Shut up. In!”

  “An electric chair?”

  “Maybe. Jump!”

  He jumped and I locked him in place and took the second seat and threw the control lever.

  “What?” said Simon Cross.

  “No,” I said. “Where!”

  Swiftly, I hit the tabs: year/month/day/hour/ minute; and just as swiftly: state/town/street/block/ number; and yanked the backward/turn/backward bar.

  And we were off, dials spinning, unspinning suns, moons, and years until the Machine melted to silence.

  Simon Cross, stunned
, glanced around.

  “Why,” he said, “this is my place.”

  “Your home, yes.”

  I dragged him up the front walk.

  “And there, yes, there, do you see?” I said.

  On the front porch, in his sunbright sailor’s suit, stood the beautiful young man with a clutch of story pages in his hands.

  “That’s me!” cried the old, old man.

  “You. Simon Cross.”

  “Hello,” said the young man in the fresh white sailor’s suit. He scowled at me, curious, then puzzled. “Hold on. Why do you look—different?” He nodded at his older self. “And who’s this?”

  “Simon Cross,” I said.

  In silence, youth looked at age, age looked at youth.

  “That’s not Simon Cross,” said the young man.

  “That can’t be me,” said the old one.

  “Yes.”

  Slowly, both turned to look at me.

  “I don’t understand,” said Simon Cross, nineteen years old.

  “Take me back!” the old man exclaimed.

  “Where?”

  “To where we were, wherever that was,” he gasped wildly.

  “Go away.” The young man backed off.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Look close. This is what you will become after you’ve lost yourself. Simon Cross, yes, forty years on.”

  The young sailor stood for a long moment, his eyes searching up and down the old man’s body and fixing on his eyes. The young sailor’s face reddened. His hands became fists, relaxed, became fists again. Words did not convince, but some intuition, some power unseen, an invisible vibration between the old man and himself.

  “Who are you really?” he said at last.

  The old, old man’s voice broke.

  “Simon Cross.”

  “Son of a bitch!” cried the young man. “Damn you!”

  And struck a blow to the older man’s face, and then another and another and the old, old man stood in the rain, the downpour of blows, eyes shut, drinking the violence, until he fell on the pavement with his young self astride him staring at the body.

  “Is he dead?” he wondered.

  “You killed him.”

  “I had to.”

  “Yes.”

  The young man looked at me. “Am I dead, too?”

  “Not if you want to live.”

  “Oh God, I do, I do!”

  “Then get away from here. I’ll take him with me, back to where we came from.”

  “Why are you doing this?” said Simon Cross, only nineteen.

  “Because you’re a genius.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “True. Run, now. Go.”

  He took a few steps and stopped.

  “Second chance?” he said.

  “Oh, God, I hope so,” I said.

  And then added, “Remember this. Don’t live in Spain or become the champion dove shooter in Madrid.”

  “I would never be a champion dove shooter anywhere!”

  “No?”

  “No!”

  “And never become the old, old man I must drag through Time to meet himself.”

  “Never.”

  “You’ll remember all this and live by it?”

  “It’s remembered.”

  He turned and ran down the street.

  “Come,” I said to the body, the scarecrow, the silent thing. “Let’s get you in the Machine and find you an unmarked grave.”

  In the Machine, I stared up the now empty street.

  “Simon Cross,” I whispered. “Godspeed.”

  And threw the switch and vanished in the future.

  RAINBIRD

  R.A. Lafferty

  Were scientific firsts truly tabulated the name of the Yankee inventor, Higgston Rainbird, would surely be without peer. Yet today he is known (and only to a few specialists, at that) for an improved blacksmith’s bellows in the year 1785, for a certain modification (not fundamental) in the moldboard plow about 1805, for a better (but not good) method of reefing the lateen sail, for a chestnut roaster, for the Devil’s Claw Wedge for splitting logs, and for a nutmeg grater embodying a new safety feature; this last was either in the year 1816 or 1817. He is known for such, and for no more.

  Were this all that he achieved his name would still be secure. And it is secure, in a limited way, to those who hobby in technological history.

  But the glory of which history has cheated him, or of which he cheated himself, is otherwise. In a different sense it is without parallel, absolutely unique.

  For he pioneered the dynamo, the steam automobile, the steel industry, ferro-concrete construction, the internal combustion engine, electric illumination and power, the wireless, the televox, the petroleum and petro-chemical industries, monorail transportation, air travel, worldwide monitoring, fissionable power, space travel, group telepathy, political and economic balance; he built a retrogressor; and he made great advances towards corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind. It would seem unfair that all this is unknown of him.

  Even the once solid facts—that he wired Philadelphia for light and power in 1799, Boston the following year, and New York two years later—are no longer solid. In a sense they are no longer facts.

  For all this there must be an explanation; and, if not that, then an account at least; and if not that, well—something anyhow.

  Higgston Rainbird made a certain decision on a June afternoon in 1779 when he was quite a young man, and by this decision he confirmed his inventive bent.

  He was hawking from the top of Devil’s Head Mountain. He flew his falcon (actually a tercel hawk) down through the white clouds, and to him it was the highest sport in the world. The bird came back, climbing the blue air, and brought a passenger pigeon from below the clouds. And Higgston was almost perfectly happy as he hooded the hawk.

  He could stay there all day and hawk from above the clouds. Or he could go down the mountain and work on his sparker in his shed. He sighed as he made the decision, for no man can have everything. There was a fascination about hawking. But there was also a fascination about the copper-strip sparker. And he went down the mountain to work on it.

  Thereafter he hawked less. After several years he was forced to give it up altogether.

  He had chosen his life, the dedicated career of an inventor, and he stayed with it for sixty-five years.

  His sparker was not a success. It would be expensive, its spark was uncertain and it had almost no advantage over flint. People could always start a fire. If not, they could borrow a brand from a neighbor. There was no market for the sparker. But it was a nice machine, hammered copper strips wrapped around iron teased with lodestone, and the thing turned with a hand crank. He never gave it up entirely. He based other things upon it; and the retrogressor of his last years could not have been built without it.

  But the main thing was steam, iron, and tools. He made the finest lathes. He revolutionized smelting and mining. He brought new things to power, and started the smoke to rolling. He made mistakes, he ran into dead ends, he wasted whole decades.

  But one man can only do so much.

  He married a shrew, Audrey, knowing that a man cannot achieve without a goad as well as a goal. But he was without issue or disciple, and this worried him.

  He built a steamboat and a steamtrain. His was the first steam thresher. He cleared the forests with wood-burning giants, and designed towns. He destroyed southern slavery with a steam-powered cotton picker, and power and wealth followed him.

  For better or worse he brought the country up a long road, so there was hardly a custom of his boyhood that still continued. Probably no one man had ever changed a country so much in his lifetime.

  He fathered a true machine-tool industry, and brought rubber from the tropics and plastic from the laboratory. He pumped petroleum, and used natural gas for illumination and steam power. He was honored and enriched; and, looking back, he had no reason to regard his life as wasted.

  “Ye
s, I’ve missed so much. I wasted a lot of time. If only I could have avoided the blind alleys, I could have done many times as much. I brought machine tooling to its apex. But I neglected the finest tool of all, the mind. I used it as it is, but I had not time to study it, much less modify it. Others after me will do it all. But I rather wanted to do it all myself. Now it is too late.”

  He went back and worked on his old sparker and its descendents, now that he was old.

  He built toys along the line of it that need not always have remained toys. He made a televox, but the only practical application was that now Audrey could rail at him over a greater distance. He fired up a little steam dynamo in his house, ran wires and made it burn lights in his barn.

  And he built a retrogressor.

  “I would do much more along this line had I the time. But I’m pepper-bellied pretty near the end of the road. It is like finally coming to a gate and seeing a whole greater world beyond it, and being too old and feeble to enter.”

  He kicked a chair and broke it.

  “I never even made a better chair. Never got around to it. There are so clod-hopping many things I meant to do. I have maybe pushed the country ahead a couple of decades faster than it would otherwise have gone. But what couldn’t I have done if it weren’t for the blind alleys! Ten years lost in one of them, twelve in another. If only there had been a way to tell the true from the false, and to leave to others what they could do, and to do myself only what nobody else could do. To see a link (however unlikely) and to go out and get it and set it in its place. Oh, the waste, the wilderness that a talent can wander in!

  If I had only had a mentor! If I had had a map, a clue, a hatful of clues. I was born shrewd, and I shrewdly cut a path and went a grand ways. But always there was a clearer path and a faster way that I did not see till later. As my name is Rainbird, if I had it to do over, I’d do it infinitely better.”

  He began to write a list of the things that he’d have done better. Then he stopped and threw away his pen in disgust.

  “Never did even invent a decent ink pen. Never got around to it. Dog-eared damnation, there’s so much I didn’t do!”

  He poured himself a jolt, but he made a face as he drank it.

  “Never got around to distilling a really better whiskey. Had some good ideas along that line, too. So many things I never did do. Well, I can’t improve things by talking to myself here about it.”