by Anthology
The past—the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved;
the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather—all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been.
He did not remember. He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed—there was only his crib and Nana’s familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried—that was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.
Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.
THE DEADLY MISSION OF PHINEAS SNODGRASS
Frederik Pohl
This is the story of Phineas Snodgrass, inventor. He built a time machine.
He built a time machine and in it he went back some two thousand years, to about the time of the birth of Christ. He made himself known to the Emperor Augustus, his lady Livia and other rich and powerful Romans of the day and, quickly making friends, secured their cooperation in bringing about a rapid transformation of Year One living habits. (He stole the idea from a science-fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp, called Lest Darkness Fall.)
His time machine wasn’t very big, but his heart was, so Snodgrass selected his cargo with the plan of providing the maximum immediate help for the world’s people. The principal features of ancient Rome were dirt and disease, pain and death. Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through twentieth-century medicine. Everything else could take care of itself, once the human race was free of its terrible plagues and early deaths.
Snodgrass introduced penicillin and aureomycin and painless dentistry. He ground lenses for spectacles and explained the surgical techniques for removing cataracts. He taught anaesthesia and the germ theory of disease, and showed how to purify drinking water. He built Kleenex factories and taught the Romans to cover their mouths when they coughed. He demanded, and got, covers for the open Roman sewers, and he pioneered the practice of the balanced diet.
Snodgrass brought health to the ancient world, and kept his own health, too. He lived to more than a hundred years. He died, in fact, in the year A.D. 100, a very contented man.
When Snodgrass arrived in Augustus’ great palace on the Palatine Hill, there were some 250,000,000 human beings alive in the world. He persuaded the principate to share his blessings with all the world, benefiting not only the hundred million subjects of the Empire, but the other one hundred millions in Asia and the tens of millions in Africa, the Western Hemisphere and all the Pacific islands.
Everybody got healthy.
Infant mortality dropped at once, from ninety deaths in a hundred to fewer than two. Life expectancies doubled immediately. Everyone was well, and demonstrated their health by having more children, who grew in health to maturity and had more.
It is a feeble population that cannot double itself every generation if it tries.
These Romans, Goths and Mongols were tough. Every thirty years the population of the world increased by a factor of two. In the year A.D. 30, the world population was a half billion. In A.D. 60, it was a full billion. By the time Snodgrass passed away, a happy man, it was as large as it is today.
It is too bad that Snodgrass did not have room in his time machine for the blueprints of cargo ships, the texts on metallurgy to build the tools that would make the reapers that would harvest the fields—for the triple-expansion steam turbines that would generate the electricity that would power the machines that would run the cities—for all the technology that 2,000 subsequent years had brought about.
But he didn’t.
Consequently, by the time of his death conditions were no longer quite perfect. A great many were badly housed.
On the whole, Snodgrass was pleased, for all these things could surely take care of themselves. With a healthy world population, the increase of numbers would be a mere spur to research. Boundless nature, once its ways were studied, would surely provide for any number of human beings.
Indeed it did. Steam engines on the Newcomen design were lifting water to irrigate fields to grow food long before his death. The Nile was damned at Aswan in the year 55. Battery-powered street-cars replaced ox-carts in Rome and Alexandria before A.D. 75, and the galley slaves were freed by huge, clumsy diesel outboards that drove the food ships across the Mediterranean a few years later.
In the year A.D. 200 the world had now something over twenty billion souls, and technology was running neck-and-neck with expansion. Nuclear-driven ploughs had cleared the Teutoburg Wald, where Varus’ bones were still mouldering, and fertiliser made from ion-exchange mining of the sea produced fantastic crops of hybrid grains. In A.D. 300 the world population stood at a quarter of a trillion. Hydrogen fusion produced fabulous quantities of energy from the sea; atomic transmutation converted any matter into food. This was necessary, because there was no longer any room for farms. The Earth was getting crowded. By the middle of the sixth century the 60,000,000 square miles of land surface on the Earth were so well-covered that no human being standing anywhere on dry land could stretch out his arms in any direction without touching another human being standing beside him.
But everyone was healthy, and science marched on. The seas were drained, which immediately tripled the available land area. (In fifty years the sea bottoms were also full.) Energy which had come from the fusion of marine hydrogen now came by the tapping of the full energy output of the Sun, through gigantic ‘mirrors’ composed of pure force. The other planets froze, of course; but this no longer mattered, since in the decades that followed they were disintegrated for the sake of the energy at their cores. So was the Sun. Maintaining life on Earth on such artificial standards was prodigal of energy consumption; in time every star in the Galaxy was transmitting its total power output to the Earth, and plans were afoot to tap Andromeda, which would care for all necessary expansion for—thirty years.
At this point a calculation was made.
Taking the weight of the average man at about a hundred and thirty pounds—in round numbers, 6 x 104 grammes—and allowing for a continued doubling of population every thirty years (although there was no such thing as a ‘year’ any more, since the Sun had been disintegrated; now a lonely Earth floated aimlessly towards Vega), it was discovered that by the year 1970 the total mass of human flesh, bone and blood would be 6 x 1027 grammes.
This presented a problem. The total mass of the Earth itself was only 5.98 x 1027 grammes. Already, humanity lived in burrows penetrating crust and basalt and quarrying into the congealed nickel-iron core; by 1970 all the core itself would have been transmuted into living men and women, and their galleries would have to be tunnelled through masses of their own bodies, a writhing, squeezed ball of living corpses drifting through space.
Moreover, simple arithmetic showed that this was not the end. In finite time the mass of human beings would equal the total mass of the Galaxy; and in some further time it would equal and exceed the total mass of all galaxies everywhere.
This state of affairs could no longer be tolerated, and so a project was launched.
With some difficulty resources were diverted to permit the construction of a small but important device. It was a time machine. With one volunteer aboard (selected from the 900 trillion who applied) it went back to the year 1. Its cargo was only a hunting rifle with one cartridge, and with that cartridge the volunteer assassinated Snodgrass as he trudged up the Palatine.
To the great (if only potential) joy of some quintillions of never-to-be-born persons, Darkness blessedly fell.
THE DAY TIME STOPPED MOVI
NG
Bradner Buckner
Dave Miller would never have done it, had he been in his right mind. The Millers were not a melancholy stock, hardly the sort of people you expect to read about in the morning paper who have taken their lives the night before. But Dave Miller was drunk—abominably, roaringly so—and the barrel of the big revolver, as he stood against the sink, made a ring of coldness against his right temple.
Dawn was beginning to stain the frosty kitchen windows. In the faint light, the letter lay a gray square against the drain-board tiles. With the melodramatic gesture of the very drunk, Miller had scrawled across the envelope:
“This is why I did it!”
He had found Helen’s letter in the envelope when he staggered into their bedroom fifteen minutes ago—at a quarter after five. As had frequently happened during the past year, he’d come home from the store a little late . . . about twelve hours late, in fact. And this time Helen had done what she had long threatened to do. She had left him.
The letter was brief, containing a world of heartbreak and broken hopes.
“I don’t mind having to scrimp, Dave. No woman minds that if she feels she is really helping her husband over a rough spot. When business went bad a year ago, I told you I was ready to help in any way I could. But you haven’t let me. You quit fighting when things got difficult, and put in all your money and energy on liquor and horses and cards. I could stand being married to a drunkard, Dave, but not to a coward . . .”
So she was trying to show him. But Miller told himself he’d show her instead. Coward, eh? Maybe this would teach her a lesson! Hell of a lot of help she’d been! Nag at him every time he took a drink. Holler bloody murder when he put twenty-five bucks on a horse, with a chance to make five hundred. What man wouldn’t do those things?
His drug store was on the skids. Could he be blamed for drinking a little too much, if alcohol dissolved the morbid vapors of his mind?
Miller stiffened angrily, and tightened his finger on the trigger. But he had one moment of frank insight just before the hammer dropped and brought the world tumbling about his ears. It brought with it a realization that the whole thing was his fault. Helen was right—he was a coward. There was a poignant ache in his heart. She’d been as loyal as they came, he knew that.
He could have spent his nights thinking up new business tricks, instead of swilling whiskey. Could have gone out of his way to be pleasant to customers, not snap at them when he had a terrific hangover. And even Miller knew nobody ever made any money on the horses—at least, not when he needed it. But horses and whiskey and business had become tragically confused in his mind; so here he was, full of liquor and madness, with a gun to his head.
Then again anger swept his mind clean of reason, and he threw his chin up and gripped the gun tight.
“Run out on me, will she!” he muttered thickly. “Well—this’ll show her!”
In the next moment the hammer fell . . . and Dave Miller had “shown her.”
Miller opened his eyes with a start. As plain as black on white, he’d heard a bell ring—the most familiar sound in the world, too. It was the unmistakable tinkle of his cash register.
“Now, how in hell—” The thought began in his mind; and then he saw where he was.
The cash register was right in front of him! It was open, and on the marble slab lay a customer’s five-spot. Miller’s glance strayed up and around him.
He was behind the drug counter, all right. There were a man and a girl sipping cokes at the fountain, to his right; the magazine racks by the open door; the tobacco counter across from the fountain. And right before him was a customer.
Good Lord! he thought. Was all this a—a dream?
Sweat oozed out on his clammy forehead. That stuff of Herman’s that he had drunk during the game—it had had a rank taste, but he wouldn’t have thought anything short of marihuana could produce such hallucinations as he had just had. Wild conjectures came boiling up from the bottom of Miller’s being.
How did he get behind the counter? Who was the woman he was waiting on? What—
The woman’s curious stare was what jarred him completely into the present. Get rid of her! was his one thought. Then sit down behind the scenes and try to figure it all out.
His hand poised over the cash drawer. Then he remembered he didn’t know how much he was to take out of the five. Avoiding the woman’s glance, he muttered:
“Let’s see, now, that was—uh—how much did I say?”
The woman made no answer. Miller cleared his throat, said uncertainly:
“I beg your pardon, ma’am—did I say—seventy-five cents?”
It was just a feeler, but the woman didn’t even answer to that. And it was right then that Dave Miller noticed the deep silence that brooded in the store.
Slowly his head came up and he looked straight into the woman’s eyes. She returned him a cool, half-smiling glance. But her eyes neither blinked nor moved. Her features were frozen. Lips parted, teeth showing a little, the tip of her tongue was between her even white teeth as though she had started to say “this” and stopped with the syllable unspoken.
Muscles began to rise behind Miller’s ears. He could feel his hair stiffen like filings drawn to a magnet. His glance struggled to the soda fountain. What he saw there shook him to the core of his being.
The girl who was drinking a coke had the glass to her lips, but apparently she wasn’t sipping the liquid. Her boy friend’s glass was on the counter. He had drawn on a cigarette and exhaled the gray smoke. That smoke hung in the air like a large, elongated balloon with the small end disappearing between his lips. While Miller stared, the smoke did not stir in the slightest.
There was something unholy, something supernatural, about this scene!
With apprehension rippling down his spine, Dave Miller reached across the cash register and touched the woman on the cheek. The flesh was warm, but as hard as flint. Tentatively, the young druggist pushed harder; finally, shoved with all his might. For all the result, the woman might have been a two-ton bronze statue. She neither budged nor changed expression.
Panic seized Miller. His voice hit a high hysterical tenor as he called to his soda-jerker.
“Pete! Pete!” he shouted. “What in God’s name is wrong here!”
The blond youngster, with a towel wadded in a glass, did not stir. Miller rushed from the back of the store, seized the boy by the shoulders, tried to shake him. But Pete was rooted to the spot.
Miller knew, now, that what was wrong was something greater than a hallucination or a hangover. He was in some kind of trap. His first thought was to rush home and see if Helen was there. There was a great sense of relief when he thought of her. Helen, with her grave blue eyes and understanding manner, would listen to him and know what was the matter.
He left the haunted drug store at a run, darted around the corner and up the street to his car. But, though he had not locked the car, the door resisted his twisting grasp. Shaking, pounding, swearing, Miller wrestled with each of the doors.
Abruptly he stiffened, as a horrible thought leaped into his being. His gaze left the car and wandered up the street. Past the intersection, past the one beyond that, on up the thoroughfare until the gray haze of the city dimmed everything. And as far as Dave Miller could see, there was no trace of motion.
Cars were poised in the street, some passing other machines, some turning corners. A street car stood at a safety zone; a man who had leaped from the bottom step hung in space a foot above the pavement. Pedestrians paused with one foot up. A bird hovered above a telephone pole, its wings glued to the blue vault of the sky.
With a choked sound, Miller began to run. He did not slacken his pace for fifteen minutes, until around him were the familiar, reassuring trees and shrub-bordered houses of his own street. But yet how strange to him!
The season was autumn, and the air filled with brown and golden leaves that tossed on a frozen wind. Miller ran by two boys lying on a lawn, petrified i
nto a modern counterpart of the sculptor’s “The Wrestlers.” The sweetish tang of burning leaves brought a thrill of terror to him; for, looking down an alley from whence the smoke drifted, he saw a man tending a fire whose leaping flames were red tongues that did not move.
Sobbing with relief, the young druggist darted up his own walk. He tried the front door, found it locked, and jammed a thumb against the doorbell. But of course the little metal button was as immovable as a mountain. So in the end, after convincing himself that the key could not be inserted into the lock, he sprang toward the back.
The screen door was not latched, but it might as well have been the steel door of a bank vault. Miller began to pound on it, shouting:
“Helen! Helen, are you in there? My God, dear, there’s something wrong! You’ve got to—”
The silence that flowed in again when his voice choked off was the dead stillness of the tomb. He could hear his voice rustling through the empty rooms, and at last it came back to him like a taunt: “Helen! Helen!”
CHAPTER II
Time Stands Still
For Dave Miller, the world was now a planet of death on which he alone lived and moved and spoke. Staggered, utterly beaten, he made no attempt to break into his home. But he did stumble around to the kitchen window and try to peer in, anxious to see if there was a body on the floor. The room was in semi-darkness, however, and his straining eyes made out nothing.
He returned to the front of the house, shambling like a somnambulist. Seated on the porch steps, head in hands, he slipped into a hell of regrets. He knew now that his suicide had been no hallucination. He was dead, all right; and this must be hell or purgatory.