by Anthology
SHE CAUGHT HOLD OF THE TOE
Richard Hughes
Joseph was eight, Nellie seven.
Nellie found Time hanging on a beech-bough in the wood behind the house. She mistook it for a stocking, and plunged her arm into it to see what was inside. There was nothing: so she caught hold of the toe and turned it inside out.
Just then Joseph came running up. They sat down on the trunk of a tree. Joseph was minded seriously.
‘Nellie,’ he said, ‘we are very young now, only a few years of past remain behind us: what they hold for us I cannot tell: but one thing is certain, at the other end lies Birth.’
Nellie shivered slightly. ‘How can you remind me!’ she said. ‘I swear to you I don’t feel a bit younger than I shall at forty. And what is gained by brooding on Birth? One cannot alter the inevitable.’
Joseph smiled. ‘Why, Nellie, I swear you look as old to me as when I shall see you for the last time! Ah, I remember as clearly as if it were tomorrow the day of your funeral: a windy, drizzly day—Lord, what a cold I shall catch! I shall die soon after, myself—ah, how it all comes forward to me! Dear, dear! Ah, me! Forty years of happy married life! There is little behind us now, my dear; but what a comfort to the, young is the memory of a happy future!’
‘You forget the earlier time twenty years ahead of us. What a struggle we shall have to pay our bills!’
‘Well, yes; I suppose it is a symptom of youth, but memory is always clearest of that which is most distant: why, I can recall every detail of the day they will make me Lord Mayor. I . . .’
And so he rambled on.
‘But the past, the mysterious past
‘Don’t talk about the past, it frightens me!’ said Nellie. ‘Who can tell, even young as we are, what has happened to him? What misfortune lies behind him?’
‘We must trust in God,’ said Joseph gently. ‘If He thinks fit to bring calamity upon us, that all may have been right in the beginning.’
‘Amen, my dear; and yet, if only one’s eyes could pierce just a little into the mysterious past, even from one moment to the one before: I should feel less frightened of birth, I think, if I knew just when it had happened: that I might be postpared to meet it.’
‘My dear, we are not meant to see the past: we should accept it dutifully, as it goes. Sufficient to the day—why trouble, then, about a yesterday, that once was even as tomorrow?’
Nellie rose and walked over to the tree where Time was hanging.
‘What are you doing with that stocking?’
‘I am turning it right side out,’ said Nellie.
SIDEWAYS IN TIME
Murray Leinster
I
Looking back, it seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain, In early December of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was not an absolute could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen.
A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 P.M. , Greenwich mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the temperature of the earth’s surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of disturbance.
A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after disturbances in the sun’s photosphere.
For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, eggshaped mass of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.
A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes, both male, moved about the giraffe enclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed normal though immature animals.
An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical eyes of Argentine scientists.
Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of 1935 should not have understood the meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though they no longer occur. But between January and June of 1935 the news service’s of the nation were flooded with items of similar import.
For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River through the air, proceeded to “drown” in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned belly up and floated placidly at an imaginary water level some fifteen feet above the pavements of the city.
But it seems clear that Professor Minott was the only man in the world who even guessed the meaning of these two clear-cut indications of the later events. Professor Minott was instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College in Fredericksburg, Va. We know that he anticipated very nearly every one of the things which later startled and frightened the world, and not only our world. But he kept his mouth shut.
Robinson College was small. It had even been termed a “jerkwater”. college without offending anybody but the faculty and certain sensitive alumni. For a mere professor of mathematics to make public the theory Minott had formed would not even be news. It would be taken as stark insanity. Moreover, those who believed it would be scared. So he kept his mouth shut.
Professor Minott possessed courage, bitterness, and a certain cold-blooded daring, but neither wealth nor influence. He had more than a little knowledge of mathematical physics and his calculations show extraordinary knowledge of the laws of probability, but he had very little patience with problems in ethics. And he was possessed by a particularly fierce passion for Maida Hayns, daughter of the professor of Romance languages, and had practically no chance to win even her attention over the competition of most of the student body. So much of explanation is necessary, because no one but just such a person as Professor Minott would have forecast what was to happen and then prepare for it in the fashion in which he did.
We know from his notes that he considered the probability of disaster as a shade better than four to one. It is a very great pity that we do not have his calculations. There is much that our scientists do not understand even yet. The notes Professor Minott left behind have been invaluable, but there are obvious gaps in them. He must have taken most of his notes-and those the most valuable into that unguessed at place where he conceivably now lives and very probably works.
He would be amused, no doubt, at the diligence with which his most unconsidered scribble is now examined and inspected and discussed by the greatest minds of our time and space. And perhaps it is quite probable he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have none as yet.
There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system but our galaxy; not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all of the space we know; more than that, the destruction of all space as we know it; and even beyond that the destruction of time, meaning not only the obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never have been. And then, besides, those other strange states of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts and futures all to be sha
ttered into’nothingness. There is no word for such a catastrophe.
It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to himself, as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival, if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier to wonder how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in 1935. We do not know. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt and what happened.
It was half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935. The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from, a comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning spiders glittered like diamond dust in the early sunshine. In the most easternly suburb a high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before schooltime. A rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It backfired, stopped, roared again, anti throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. Then, voices of children sounded among the houses. A colored washerwoman appeared, striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential street.
From an upper window a radio blatted: “one, two, three, four! Higher, now three, four! Put your weight into it! two, three, four!” The radio suddenly squawked and began to emit an insistent, mechanical shriek which changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all the static of ten thousand thunderstorms on the air at once. Then it was silent.
The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the pushbar of the lawn mower. At the instant the static ended, the boy sat down suddenly on the dew-wet grass. The colored woman reeled and grabbed frantically at the nearest tree trunk. The basket of wash toppled and spilled in a snowstorm of starched, varicolored clothing. Howls of terror from children. Sharp shrieks from women. “Earthquake! Earthquake!” Figures appeared running, pouring out of houses. Someone fled out to a sleeping porch, slid down a supporting column, and tripped over a rosebush in his pajamas. In seconds, it seemed, the entire population of the street was out of doors. And then there was a queer, blank silence. There was no earthquake. No house had fallen. No chimney had cracked. Not so much as a dish or windowpane had made a sound in smashing. The sensation every human being had felt was not an actual shaking of the ground. There had been moyement, yes, and of the earth, but no such movement as any human being had ever dreamed of before. These people were to learn of that movement much lafer. Now they stared blankly at each other.
And in the sudden, dead silence broken only by the hum of an idling car and the wail of a frightened baby, a new sound became audible. It was the tramp of marching feet. With it came a curious clanking and clattering noise. And then a marked command, which was definitely not in the English language.
Down the street of a suburb of Joplin, Missouri, on June 5, in the Year of Our Lord 1935, came a file of spear-armed, shield-bearing soldiers in the short, skirtlike togas of ancient Rome. They wore helmets upon their heads. They peered about as if they were as blankly amazed as the citizens of Joplin who regarded them. A long column of marching men came into view, every man with shield and spear and the indefinable air of being used to just such weapons.
They halted at another barked order. A wizened little man with a short sword snapped a question at the staring Americans. The high-school boy jumped. The wizened man roared his question again. The high-school boy stammered, and painfully formed syllables with his lips. The wizened man grunted in satisfaction. He talked, articulating clearly if impatiently. And the highschool boy turned dazedly to the other Americans.
“He wants to know the name of this town,” he said, unbelieving his own ears. “He’s talking Latin, like I learn in school. He says this town isn’t on the road maps, and he doesn’t know where he is. But all the same he takes possession of it in the name of the Emperor Valerius Fabricius, emperor of Rome and the far corners of the earth.” And then the school-boy stuttered, “He-he says these are the first six cohorts of the Forty second Legion, on garrison duty in Messalia. “That-that’s supposed to be two days march up that way.” He pointed in the direction of St. Louis.
The idling motor car roared suddenly into life. Its gears whined and it came rolling out into the street. Its horn honked peremptorily for passage through the shield-clad soldiers. They gaped at it. It honked again and moved toward them. A roared order, and they flung themselves upon it, spears thrusting, short swords stabbing. Up to this instant there was not one single inhabitant of Joplin who did not believe the spear-armed soldiers were motion picture actors, or masqueraders, or something else equally insane but credible. But there was nothing make-believe about their attack on the car. They assaulted it as if it were a strange and probably deadly beast. They flung themselves into battle with it in a grotesquely reckless valor.
And there was nothing at all make-believe in the thoroughness and completeness with which they speared Mr. Horace B. Davis, who had only intended to drive down to the cotton-brokerage office of which he was chief clerk. They thought he was driving this strange beast to slaughter them, and they slaughtered him instead. The high-school boy saw them do it, growing whiter and whiter as he watched. When a swordsman approached the wizened man and displayed the severed head of Mr. Davis, with the spectacles dangling grotesquely from-one ear, the high-school boy fainted dead away.
II
It was sunrise of June 5, 1935. Cyrus Harding gulped down his breakfast in the pale-gray dawn. He had felt very dizzy and sick for just a moment, some little while since, but he was himself again now. The smell of frying filled the kitchen. His wife cooked. Cyrus Harding ate.
He made noises as he emptied his plate. His hands were. gnarled and work-worn, but his expression was of complacent satisfaction. He looked at a calendar hung on the wall, a Christmas sentiment from the Bryan Feed & Fertilizer Co., in Bryan, Ohio.
“Sheriff’s goin’ to sell out Amos today,” he said comfortably. “I figger I’ll get that north forty cheap.”
His wife said tiredly, “He’s been offerin’ to sell it to you for a year.”
“Yep,” agreed Cyrus Harding more complacently still. “Comin’ down on the price, too. But nobody’ll bid against me at the sale. They know I want it bad, and I ain’t a good neighbor to have when somebuddy takes somethin’ from under my nose. Folks know it. I’ll git it a lot cheaper’n Amos offered it to me for. He waited to sell it to meet his interest and hold on another year. I’ll git it for half that.”
He stood up and wiped his mouth. He strode to the door.
“That hired man shoulda got a good start with his harrowin’,” he said expansively. “I’ll take a look and go over to the sale.”
He went to the kitchen door and opened it. Then his mouth dropped open. The view from this doorway was normally that of a not especially neat barnyard, with beyond it farmland flat as a floor and cultivated to the very fence rails, with a promising crop of corn as a border against the horizon. Now the view was quite otherwise. All was normal as far as the barn. But beyond the barn was delirium.
Huge, spreading tree ferns soared upward a hundred feet. Lacy, foliated branches formed a roof of incredible density above sheer jungle such as no man on earth had ever seen before. The jungles of the Amazon basin were parkilke by comparison with its thickness. It was a riotous tangle of living vegetationin which growth was battle, and battle was life, and life was deadly, merciless conflict.
No man could have forced his way ten feet through such a wilderness. From it came a fetid exhalation which was part decay and part lush, rank, growing things, and part the overpowering perfumes of glaringly vivid flowers. It was jungle such as paleobotanists have described as existing in the Carboniferous period; as the source of our coal beds.
“It-it ain’t so!” said Cyrus Harding weakly. “It ain’t so!”
His wife did not reply. She had not seen. Wearily, she began to clean up after her lord and master’s meal.
He went down the kitchen steps, staring and shaken. He moved toward this impossible apparition which covered his crops. It did not disappear as he neared it. He went within twent
y feet of it and stopped, still staring, still unbelieving, beginning to entertain the monstrous supposition that he had gone insane.
Then, something moved in the jungle. A long, snaky neck, feet thick at its base and tapering to a mere sixteen inches behind a head the size of a barrel. The neck reached out the twenty feet to him. Cold eyes regarded him abstractedly. The mouth opened. Cyrus Harding screamed.
His wife raised her eyes. She looked through the open door and saw the jungle. She saw the jaws close upon her husband. She saw colossal, abstracted eyes half close as the something gulped; and partly choked, and swallowed. She saw a lump in the monstrous neck move from the relatively slender portion just behind the head to the feet thick section projecting from the jungle. She saw the head withdraw into the jungle and instantly be lost to sight.
Cyrus Harding’s widow was very pale. She put on her hat and went out of the front door. She began to walk toward the house of the nearest neighbor. As she went, she said steadily to herself:
“It’s come. I’m crazy. They’ll have to put me in an asylum. But I won’t have to stand him anymore. I won’t have to stand him any more!”
It was noon of June 5, 1935. The cell door opened and a very grave, whiskered man in a curious gray uniform came in. He tapped the prisoner gently on the shoulder.
“I’m Dr. Holloway,” he said encouragingly. “Suppose you tell me, suh, just what happened to you? I’m right sure it can all be straightened out.
The prisoner sputtered: “What-why—dammit,” he protested, “I drove down from Louisville this morning. I had a dizzy spell and, well, I must have missed my road, because suddenly I noticed that everything around me was unfamiliar. And then a man in a gray uniform yelled at me, and a minute later he began to shoot, and the first thing I knew they’d arrested me for having the American flag painted on my car! I’m a traveling salesman for the Uncle Sam Candy Bar Co.! Dammit, it’s funny when a man can’t fly his own country’s flag”