Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Tom shook his head again. “Still bollocks. So says the chronology protection conjecture.”

  Will coughed out a laugh. “The what?”

  “Try reading a book with no pictures sometime, mate,” said Tom. “A simple proof. If time travel is—or ever will be—possible, where are the time travelers? Every moment of history should be mobbed with them, so where are they?”

  “Well,” said Sylvester, “I think Jon’s telling us they’re right here.” He drummed out a quick fanfare on the tabletop with his knuckles and gestured at the metal latticework on the table.

  They all looked at the gleaming model again, then back up their host. They’d reached the crux of the lecture. “So, one night about nine months ago, I was sitting right where you are, Chris. It was a Thursday, I had the TV on, and something appeared right there on the coffee table next to my feet.”

  They all paused in their dinner, except for Tom who was busy draining the last of his third beer. He let the bottle drop away from his face. “What d’you mean, something appeared?”

  “To be exact,” said Jon, “it appeared about seven inches above the coffee table and fell next to my foot. If there hadn’t been a few copies of The Observer there it probably would’ve broken on impact.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, it appeared?” he repeated.

  “I mean one minute it wasn’t here and the next minute it was. There was a little breeze, like someone slammed the front door, and this thing was there.”

  The corners of Sylvester’s mouth tugged up a bit. Chris tilted her head and pulled her hand back. She hadn’t brought herself to touch it yet. “Like someone put it here when you weren’t looking?”

  “No,” he said. “It appeared. Right out of thin air.”

  “Bollocks,” said Tom with a grin. “It’s a toy.”

  “It’s a stealth rugby ball,” said Sylvester. “What are you getting at here, Jon? Just say it and get it over with.”

  Their host cleared his throat and set down his bottle. “What I’m saying is back in 1895 somebody brilliant lived here. Somebody years ahead of his time. He lived in a house which stood right where this apartment is now. And that man figured out how to travel in time.”

  Tom rolled his eyes. They all shifted in their chairs.

  “I’m serious,” said Jon. “He figured out how to do it and he even built a model time machine as an experiment, to see if it would work. Then one day, once it was done, he pushed the little white lever there and sent this machine over a century into the future.”

  Chris tilted her head. “Why 1895?”

  “What?”

  “You said the building was leased to the same person for twenty-five years. Why say he did it in 1895?”

  Jon grinned. He crouched next to the table and oh-so-carefully took the thin framework of the machine into his hands, ignoring the sparks that leaped to his palms. The machine rolled in his grip, and his index finger came down awkwardly across the brass plate that made up the base of the model. Etched into the metal were bold Roman numerals, overlined by his slim finger.

  MDCCCXCV

  “Come on,” said Tom. “This is nonsense.”

  “Oh, no,” said Jon. “Nonsense would be if I reverse-engineered this thing and spent the past two months building a full-sized one down in the garage.”

  They froze.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “You want to see it?”

  Tom laughed first, and Will joined him. Sylvester chuckled. “Christ, for a moment there I almost believed you.”

  “It’s right downstairs. I’ve made a few adjustments from the model, but I think it will work.”

  Tom coughed back his laughs. “So what are you going to do with your machine, Jon? Travel through time and space righting wrongs?”

  “I thought I’d start with the obvious,” he said. “I figured I’d go back and see who the guy was who invented this.”

  Will laughed again and saluted their host with the last of his beer.

  “Well, if this is it for tonight’s entertainment,” said Sylvester, “I should get going. I’ve got a pile of quizzes to grade from a friend’s class I’m covering.” He gave Jon an arched eyebrow.

  “Yeah, true that,” agreed Tom. “I’ve still got half a dozen papers to go through.”

  Will vanished to the bathroom while Sylvester piled the pizza boxes and the empties together. He took a last look at the glittering apparatus and shook his head. “It is a nice piece of work.”

  Jon bowed his head. “Thanks.”

  “Now get your damned arse back to classes before Herbert decides he doesn’t need you.”

  Tom had paused by one of the family photos at the door. It showed a lean, sideburned man in well-worn clothes standing with a delicate, narrow-hipped woman. Her hair was a wild mane which spilled across her shoulders and tickled the head of a six-year old Jon standing between them. All three smiled at the camera.

  He nodded at the picture. “Who is she again, Jon? Your aunt or something?”

  “Something like that. Only met her once. I think they were more distant friends of the family or something.”

  “She’s a hottie, for sure. Got a real Eurasian Keira Knightley thing going for her, you know?”

  “You do realize she’s almost twenty years older than you, right?”

  “So she’s a hottie milf, so what? Your uncle’s a lucky man. He paid for your uni, too, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” said Jon. “He thought I’d do well in physics.” He gave a little chuckle of his own.

  Sylvester, Tom, and Will made their way out the door, giving sly winks as Chris offered to stay behind a bit longer and finish cleaning up. Jon stashed half a pizza in the fridge while she set the bottles by the trash. He ducked into the bathroom himself, and when he came back she was crouched in front of the model again. She glanced up at him, standing with the easy smile on his face.

  “Would you like to hold it?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You won’t hurt it. It’s a bit more solid than it looks.”

  She flinched for a moment as the latticework sparked in her hands. It had a good weight. It felt solid. Real. She tilted it in her hands, holding it like an oversized eggshell, and examined the small time machine from new angles. “Jon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you show us this?” She’d turned it enough to see the baseplate, and all the engraving there.

  J.M.W.

  MDCCCXCV

  She met his eyes. “Aren’t these your initials?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you hide them?”

  “Like all this wasn’t hard enough to believe?”

  “So you made this thing yourself. It’s just a joke?”

  Jon smiled. It was a bright, Christmas morning smile. “It’s not a joke.” He took the apparatus from her, wrapped it back in its black cloth, and set it down in the drawer. “Getting late, and tomorrow’s a big day. Lots to do.”

  She tried, as she often did, to tug at the buttons of his shirt. “I could make sure you get to bed.”

  He stopped her hands, as he often did, and gave her forehead a kiss.

  “Aren’t American college boys supposed to be completely sex-crazed? You’re setting a horrible example for your countrymen.”

  “Out!”

  She gave a loud, dramatic sigh and marched to the door. Jon opened it for her and she paused to look at the photo.

  “You know, I always thought you looked a lot like him.”

  “Yeah,” said Jon. “I do, don’t I?”

  THE ETERNAL WALL

  Raymond Z. Gallun

  “See you in half an hour, Betty,” said Ned Vince over the party line on the telephone. “We’ll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty . . .”

  Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it re
cklessly around Pit Bend.

  There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road.

  Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn’t yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend.

  Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath . . .

  Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat.

  Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss.

  The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn’t fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs.

  His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They’d planned to be married sometime . . . Goodbye, Betty . . .

  The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait . . .

  “Kaalleee! Tik! . . . Tik, tik, tik! . . . Kaalleee! . . .”

  The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill.

  “Kaalleee! . . . Tik, tik, tik! . . .”

  At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable.

  The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion.

  At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.

  “Kaalleee! . . . Tik, tik, tik! . . .” The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals.

  But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth.

  Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success.

  He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn’t very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout.

  But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century.

  Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy.

  “Kaalleee!” Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge.

  At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse.

  What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk’s kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah!

  “Tik, tik, tik! . . .”

  But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering.

  With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine.

  Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremen
dous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever.

  Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands.

  Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk’s people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome.

  The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk’s laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more.

  Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known.

  At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly.

  At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form.

  For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday.