Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Oh, unreservedly. I’m not supposed to talk about it, but I did some work on the Philadelphia Project, myself. I’d say that every major problem of interplanetary flight had been solved before the first robot rocket was landed on Luna.”

  “Yes. And when Mars and Venus are colonized, there will be the same historic situations, at least in general shape, as arose when the European powers were colonizing the New World, or, for that matter, when the Greek city-states were throwing out colonies across the Aegean. That’s the sort of thing we call projecting the past into the future through the present.”

  Hauserman nodded. “But how about the details? Things like the assassination of a specific personage. How can you extrapolate to a thing like that?”

  “Well . . .” More “memories” were coming to the surface; he tried to crowd them back. “I do my projecting in what you might call fictionalized form; try to fill in the details from imagination. In the case of Khalid, I was trying to imagine what would happen if his influence were suddenly removed from Near Eastern and Middle Eastern, affairs. I suppose I constructed an imaginary scene of his assassination . . .”

  He went on at length. Mohammed and Noureed were common enough names. The Middle East was full of old U. S. weapons. Stoning was the traditional method of execution; it diffused responsibility so that no individual could be singled out for blood-feud vengeance.

  “You have no idea how disturbed I was when the whole thing happened, exactly as I had described it,” he continued. “And worst of all, to me, was this Intelligence officer showing up; I thought I was really in for it!”

  “Then you’ve never really believed that you had real knowledge of the future?”

  “I’m beginning to, since I’ve been talking to these Psionics and Parapsychology people,” he laughed. It sounded, he hoped, like a natural and unaffected laugh. “They seem to be convinced that I have.”

  There would be an Eastern-inspired uprising in Azerbaijan by the middle of the next year; before autumn, the Indian Communists would make their fatal attempt to seize East Pakistan. The Thirty Days’ War would be the immediate result. By that time, the Lunar Base would be completed and ready; the enemy missiles would be aimed primarily at the rocketports from which it was supplied. Delivered without warning, it should have succeeded—except that every rocketport had its secret duplicate and triplicate. That was Operation Triple Cross; no wonder Major Cutler had been so startled at the words, last evening. The enemy would be utterly overwhelmed under the rain of missiles from across space, but until the moon-rockets began to fall, the United States would suffer grievously.

  “Honestly, though, I feel sorry for my friend Fitch,” he added. “He’s going to be frightfully let down when some more of my alleged prophecies misfire on him. But I really haven’t been deliberately deceiving him.”

  And Blanley College was at the center of one of the areas which would receive the worst of the thermonuclear hell to come. And it would be a little under a year . . .

  “And that’s all there is to it!” Hauserman exclaimed, annoyance in his voice. “I’m amazed that this man Whitburn allowed a thing like this to assume the proportions it did. I must say that I seem to have gotten the story about this business in a very garbled form indeed.” He laughed shortly. “I came here convinced that you were mentally unbalanced. I hope you won’t take that the wrong way, Professor,” he hastened to add. “In my profession, anything can be expected. A good psychiatrist can never afford to forget how sharp and fine is the knife-edge.”

  “The knife-edge!” The words startled him. He had been thinking, at that moment, of the knife-edge, slicing moment after moment relentlessly away from the future, into the past, at each slice coming closer and closer to the moment when the missiles of the Eastern Axis would fall. “I didn’t know they still resorted to surgery, in mental cases,” he added, trying to cover his break.

  “Oh, no; all that sort of thing is as irrevocably discarded as the whips and shackles of Bedlam. I meant another kind of knife-edge; the thin, almost invisible, line which separates sanity from non-sanity. From madness, to use a deplorable lay expression.” Hauserman lit another cigarette. “Most minds are a lot closer to it than their owners suspect, too. In fact, Professor, I was so convinced that yours had passed over it that I brought with me a commitment form, made out all but my signature, for you.” He took it from his pocket and laid it on the desk. “The modern equivalent of the lettre-de-cachet, I suppose the author of a book on the French Revolution would call it. I was all ready to certify you as mentally unsound, and commit you to Northern State Mental Hospital.”

  Chalmers sat erect in his chair. He knew where that was; on the other side of the mountains, in the one part of the state completely untouched by the H-bombs of the Thirty Days’ War. Why, the town outside which the hospital stood had been a military headquarters during the period immediately after the bombings, and the center from which all the rescue work in the state had been directed.

  “And you thought you could commit me to Northern State!” he demanded, laughing scornfully, and this time he didn’t try to make the laugh sound natural and unaffected. “You—confine me, anywhere? Confine a poor old history professor’s body, yes, but that isn’t me. I’m universal; I exist in all space-time. When this old body I’m wearing now was writing that book on the French Revolution, I was in Paris, watching it happen, from the fall of the Bastile to the Ninth Thermidor. I was in Basra, and saw that crazed tool of the Axis shoot down Khalid ib’n Hussein—and the professor talked about it a month before it happened. I have seen empires rise and stretch from star to star across the Galaxy, and crumble and fall. I have seen . . .”

  Doctor Hauserman had gotten his pen out of his pocket and was signing the commitment form with one hand; with the other, he pressed a button on the desk. A door at the rear opened, and a large young man in a white jacket entered.

  “You’ll have to go away for a while, Professor,” Hauserman was telling him, much later, after he had allowed himself to become calm again. “For how long, I don’t know. Maybe a year or so.”

  “You mean to Northern State Mental?”

  “Well . . . Yes, Professor. You’ve had a bad crack-up. I don’t suppose you realize how bad. You’ve been working too hard; harder than your nervous system could stand. It’s been too much for you.”

  “You mean, I’m nuts?”

  “Please, Professor. I deplore that sort of terminology. You’ve had a severe psychological breakdown . . .”

  “Will I be able to have books, and papers, and work a little? I couldn’t bear the prospect of complete idleness.”

  “That would be all right, if you didn’t work too hard.”

  “And could I say good-bye to some of my friends?”

  Hauserman nodded and asked, “Who?”

  “Well, Professor Pottgeiter . . .”

  “He’s outside now. He was inquiring about you.”

  “And Stanly Weill, my attorney. Not business; just to say good-bye.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Professor. He’s not in town, now. He left almost immediately after . . . After . . .”

  “After he found out I was crazy for sure? Where’d he go?”

  “To Reno; he took the plane at five o’clock.”

  Weill wouldn’t have believed, anyhow; no use trying to blame himself for that. But he was as sure that he would never see Stanly Weill alive again as he was that the next morning the sun would rise. He nodded impassively.

  “Sorry he couldn’t stay. Can I see Max Pottgeiter alone?”

  “Yes, of course, Professor.”

  Old Pottgeiter came in, his face anguished. “Ed! It isn’t true,” he stammered. “I won’t believe that it’s true.”

  “What, Max?”

  “That you’re crazy. Nobody can make me believe that.”

  He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Confidentially, Max, neither do I. But don’t tell anybody I’m not. It’s a secret.”

  Pottgeit
er looked troubled. For a moment, he seemed to be wondering if he mightn’t be wrong and Hauserman and Whitburn and the others right.

  “Max, do you believe in me?” he asked. “Do you believe that I knew about Khalid’s assassination a month before it happened?”

  “It’s a horribly hard thing to believe,” Pottgeiter admitted. “But, dammit, Ed, you did! I know, medieval history is full of stories about prophecies being fulfilled. I always thought those stories were just legends that grew up after the event. And, of course, he’s about a century late for me, but there was Nostradamus. Maybe those old prophecies weren’t just ex post facto legends, after all. Yes. After Khalid, I’ll believe that.”

  “All right. I’m saying, now, that in a few days there’ll be a bad explosion at Reno, Nevada. Watch the papers and the telecast for it. If it happens, that ought to prove it. And you remember what I told you about the Turks annexing Syria and Lebanon?” The old man nodded. “When that happens, get away from Blanley. Come up to the town where Northern State Mental Hospital is, and get yourself a place to live, and stay there. And try to bring Marjorie Fenner along with you. Will you do that, Max?”

  “If you say so.” His eyes widened. “Something bad’s going to happen here?”

  “Yes, Max. Something very bad. You promise me you will?”

  “Of course, Ed. You know, you’re the only friend I have around here. You and Marjorie. I’ll come, and bring her along.”

  “Here’s the key to my apartment.” He got it from his pocket and gave it to Pottgeiter, with instructions. “Everything in the filing cabinet on the left of my desk. And don’t let anybody else see any of it. Keep it safe for me.”

  The large young man in the white coat entered.

  THE END

  Fredric Brown

  Professor Jones had been working on time theory for many years.

  “And I have found the key equation,” he told his daughter one day. “Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.”

  Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, “This should make time run backward run time make should this,” said he, spoke he as button a pushing.

  “Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time.” Day one daughter his told he, “Equation key the found have I and.”

  Years many for theory time on working been had Jones Professor.

  THE END IN EDEN

  Steven Utley

  Some situations may seem idyllic, but if human beings are involved . . .

  Phil Morrow looked up from his game of solitaire and said, “Come in,” and the door swung inward to reveal a wizened dungaree-clad woman with close-cropped white hair. She made no move to enter; even by shipboard standards, the compartment was quite small.

  “Sal,” said Morrow.

  “Phil,” said Sal Shelton, “we’re wanted.”

  “Where?”

  “Captain’s quarters.”

  “Excuse me while I fall over in a dead faint, but how do we suddenly rate? Not just the invitation to the captain’s, but personally delivered. P. A. system on the fritz?”

  “They don’t want this broadcast all over.” Sal peered at the array of cards before Morrow. “Are you cheating? Even from here, it looks like you’re cheating.”

  Morrow sighed, stood, stretched. “A person never knows what he’s capable of until he becomes desperate—and if I’m not desperate, nobody is.”

  “Well, dear, you don’t look desperate.”

  “Ah, but I am. Desperate as in bored, Sal.”

  Sal gestured at the cards. “I see. A person gets desperately bored, next thing you know, he’s cheating at solitaire.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  Sal stood back from the doorway to let Morrow step out of the tiny compartment and close the door behind himself. All around them, the ship throbbed with a dull mechanical persistence. “So,” he said, “what’s up?”

  “Beats me. Brinkman just told me to get you. But he did say it’s urgent.”

  “What could possibly be remotely urgent around here? Somebody misplace a trilobite?”

  “Something like that.” Sal made a moue. “From what little I gathered from Brinkman, it’s the biggest crime in four hundred million years.”

  They met the grim-faced executive officer coming from the captain’s quarters and found the captain already conferring with two other officers, one each from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. The captain barely acknowledged the two civilians with a slight movement of his head, neither a nod nor definitely anything else; he sat at his desk looking perplexed as he turned a clear plastic bag over and over in his hands. Sealed within the bag was a black vial no longer or thicker than his thumb.

  “They’d’ve missed it,” said the NCIS officer, “if the carrier hadn’t collapsed in the jump station. He seems to have botched the insertion.”

  “Insertion?” said the captain.

  “Had it hidden up his, urn, you know.”

  The captain quickly set the bag down and regarded it with considered distaste.

  “He’s in sick bay now,” said the NCIS officer. “Has he said anything?”

  “Not yet. They’re fixing him up. But he knows he’s in a lot of trouble,” and the NCIS officer sent a purposely significant look at the JAG officer. “We’re making formal charges, of course. Starting with smuggling.”

  “Yes,” said the captain, “but smuggling what? What’s in that vial? Trilobite larvae, eggs? Seeds?”

  “Spores,” said Sal. “Seeds don’t exist here.” The three Navy officers seemed at last to take notice of the two civilians; the NCIS officer gave Sal an irritated look—by association, Morrow also fell under its baleful beam—and said, “Seeds, spores. It’s something, anyway, and contraband no matter what it is.”

  The captain looked expectantly at Sal, who spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness and said, “Obviously you’re waiting for the biologists’ report on the contents of that vial. They are working on it, right?”

  The NCIS officer blinked at her. “Who are you people?”

  The captain made an apologetic noise and started to introduce everybody, but Sal cut him short. “Mr. Morrow here,” she said, “is a United States Customs agent, and I the chief civilian liaison—”

  The NCIS snickered. “Already everybody and his dog are trying to get in on it. I never imagined we had so many special agents lurking in our midst.”

  Sal smiled her blandest smile. “Who do you suppose makes sure subversives don’t get loose here in the Silurian period?”

  “Really?” The NCIS officer concentrated his disregard on Morrow. “What do all you people do?”

  “Not a whole lot,” said Morrow. “We’ve been pretty underemployed till now. I want to be present when you interrogate your man.”

  The NCIS officer and the JAG officer exchanged looks, and the former said, “This is a Navy matter.”

  Sal cleared her throat softly and said, “More accurately, it’s a federal matter. It is of course a Navy matter, but, just off the top of my head, it’s also a Customs and Border Protection matter, and also a Disease Control matter, and conceivably also a matter for the NSF, the FBI, and maybe even the BSA.”

  “Who? BSA?”

  “Boy Scouts of America. Okay, not them, but I hyperbolize to make the point that if this truly is a matter of smuggling Paleozoic biological specimens, you suddenly have a lot of federal agencies involved. This is probably where I come in, because no two of those agencies are really on good speaking terms with one another.”

  “Miz Shelby, this is hardly an occasion for—”

  “Shelton,” said Sal.

  “Doctor,” Morrow put in. “Doctor Shelton.” “The point is,” Sal said, “there is no shortage of interested parties, and unless some real effort at coordination is made at the outset, they and you going to be tromping all over each other. Obviously NCIS and JAG are involved because
the individual actually caught with biological specimens in his intimate possession is a member of the Navy.”

  “Thank you for that concession,” the NCIS officer said in a dry tone.

  “But that’s just for openers. Are these living specimens?”

  The NCIS officer nodded warily. “It’s tissue of some sort. We have been able to figure that out on our own.”

  “Living specimens mean Fish and Wildlife gets involved.”

  The captain, the NCIS officer, and the JAG officer each looked more or less astonished, and one of them said, “What?”

  Sal ignored the eruption. “Specimens smuggled across a border?”

  The three Navy officers hesitated, so Morrow said, “The spacetime anomaly does qualify as a sort of a border, does it not?”

  Sal beamed at him. “Perfect. I always knew you were clever. Endangered or threatened marine organisms?”

  Again the Navy officers hesitated, so again Morrow spoke up. “Well, they are extinct species, back home. Endangered status would seem to be a prerequisite for extinction.” “Excellent. National Marine Fisheries Service will be interested, then. Just for fun, why don’t we call these specimens pre-endangered species? A classification that can only exist in time travel. Now, Marine Fisheries only becomes involved here if the species is on a marine organisms protected list of some kind. We’ll let that go for the time being, because there are other issues to consider. Such as, whether or not these are specimens of potentially injurious wildlife.”

  The captain spread both hands palms down on his blotter and lowered his head as though tensing for a spring over the desk. “Christ, who knows?”