Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “I fell off the harrow,” said wife Regina. “I got the sycamore branches bit, though.”

  “I got clear down to the sparrow hawks,” said Homer the monster.

  “Do you remark anything different about me this time?” Diogenes asked.

  “You have little feathers on the backs of your hands where you used to have little hairs,” said Homer the man, “and on your toes. You’re barefoot now. But I wouldn’t have noticed any of it if I hadn’t been looking for something funny.”

  “I’m a gestalt four now,” said Diogenes. “My conduct is likely to become a little extravagant.”

  “It always was,” said Dr. Corte.

  “But not so much as if I were a gestalt five,” said Diogenes. “As a five, I might take a Pan-like leap onto the shoulders of young Fregona here, or literally walk barefoot through the hair of the beautiful Regina as she stands there. Many normal gestalt twos become gestalt fours or fives in their dreams. It seems that Regina does.

  “I found the shadow, but not the substance, of the whole situation in the psychology of Jung. Jung served me as the second element in this, for it was the errors of Phelan and Jung in widely different fields that set me on the trail of the truth. What Jung really says is that each of us is a number of persons in depth. This I consider silly. There is something about such far-out theories that repels me. The truth is that our counterparts enter into our unconsciousness and dreams only by accident, as being most of the time in the same space that we occupy. But we are all separate and independent persons. And we may, two or more of us, be present in the same frame at the same time, and then in a near, but not the same, place. Witness the gestalt two and the gestalt nine Homers here present.

  “I’ve been experimenting to see how far I can go with it, and the gestalt nine is the furthest I have brought it so far. I do not number the gestalten in the order of their strangeness to our own norm, but in the order in which I discovered them. I’m convinced that the concentric and congravitic worlds and people complexes number near a hundred, however.”

  “Well, there is a hole on the comer, isn’t there?” Dr. Corte asked.

  “Yes, I set it up there by the bus stop as a convenient evening point of entry for the people of this block,” said Diogenes. “I’ve had lots of opportunity to study the results these last two days.”

  “Well, just how do you set up a hole on the comer?” Dr. Corte persisted.

  “Believe me, Corte, it took a lot of imagination,” Diogenes said. “I mean it literally. I drew so deeply on my own psychic store to construct the thing that it left me shaken, and I have the most manifold supply of psychic images of any person I know. I’ve also set up magnetic amplifiers on both sides of the street, but it is my original imagery that they amplify. I see a never-ending field of study in this.”

  “Just what is the incantation stuff that takes you from one gestalt to another?” Homer the monster asked.

  “It is only one of dozens of possible modes of entry, but I sometimes find it the easiest,” said Diogenes. “It is

  Immediately Remembered, or the Verbal Ramble. It is the Evocation—an intuitive or charismatic entry. I often use it in the Bradmont Motif—named by me from two as-aff writers in the twentieth century.”

  “You speak of it as if . . . well, isn’t this the twentieth century?” Regina asked.

  “This the twentieth? Why, you’re right! I guess it is,” Diogenes agreed. “You see, I carry on experiments in other fields also, and sometimes I get my times mixed. All of you, I believe, do sometimes have moments of peculiar immediacy and vividness. It seems then as if the world were somehow fresher in that moment, as though it were a new world. And the explanation is that, to you, it is a new world. You have moved, for a moment into a different gestalt. There are many accidental holes or modes of entry, but mine is the only contrived one I know of.”

  ‘There’s a discrepancy here,” said Dr. Corte. “If the persons are separate, how can you change from one to another?”

  “I do not change from one person to another,” said Diogenes. “There have been three different Diogenes lecturing you here in series. Fortunately, my colleagues and I, being of like scientific mind, work together in close concert. We have made a successful experiment in substitution acceptance on you here this evening. Oh, the ramifications of this thing! The aspects to be studied. I will take you out of your narrow gestalt-two world and show you worlds upon worlds.”

  “You talk about the gestalt-two complex that we normally belong to,” said wife Regina, “and about others up to gestalt nine, and maybe a hundred. Isn’t there a gestalt one? Lots of people start counting at one.”

  “There is a number one, Regina,” said Diogenes. “I discovered it first and named it, before I realized that the common world of most of you was of a similar category. But I do not intend to visit gestalt one again. It is turgid and dreary beyond tolerating. One instance of its mediocrity will serve. The people of gestalt one refer to their world as the ‘everyday world.’ Retch quietly, please. May the lowest of us never fall so low! Persimmons After First Frost! Old Barbershop Chairs! Pink Dogwood Blossoms in the Third Week of November! Mural Cigarette Advertisements!! ” Diogenes cried out the last in mild panic, and he seemed disturbed. He changed into another fellow a little bit different, but the new Diogenes didn’t like what he saw either.

  “Smell of Sweet Clover,” he cried out. “St. Mary’s Street in San Antonio! Model Airplane Glue! Moon Crabs in March! It won’t work! The rats have run out on me! Homer and Homer, grab that other Homer there! I believe he’s a gestalt six, and they sure are mean.”

  Homer Hoose wasn’t particularly mean. He had just come home a few minutes late and had found two other fellows who looked like him jazzing his wife Regina. And those two mouth men, Dr. Corte and Diogenes Pontifex, didn’t have any business in his house when he was gone either.

  He started to swing. You’d have done it too.

  Those three Homers were all powerful and quick-moving fellows, and they had a lot of blood in them. It was soon flowing, amid the crashing and breaking-up of furniture and people—ocher-colored blood, pearl-gray blood, one of the Homers even had blood of a sort of red color. Those boys threw a real riot!

  “Give me that package of coriander seed, Homer,” wife Regina said to the latest Homer as she took it from his pocket. “It won’t hurt to have three of them. Homer! Homer! Homer! All three of you! Stop bleeding on the rug!” Homer was always a battler. So was Homer. And Homer. “Stethoscopes and Moonlight and Memory—ah—in Late March,” Dr. Corte chanted. “Didn’t work, did it? I’ll get out of here a regular way. Homers, boys, come up to my place, one at a time, and get patched up when you’re finished. I have to do a little regular medicine on the side nowadays.” Dr. Corte went out the door with the loopy run of a man not in very good condition.

  “Old Hairbreadth Harry Comic Strips! Congress Street in Houston! Light Street in Baltimore! Elizabeth Street in Sydney! Varnish on Old Bar-Room Pianos! B-Girls Named

  Dotty! I believe it’s easier just to make a dash for my house next door,” Diogenes rattled off. And he did dash out with the easy run of a man who is in good condition.

  “I’ve had it!” boomed one of the Homers—and we don’t know which one—as he was flung free from the donny-brook and smashed into a wall. “Peace and quiet is what a man wants when he comes home in the evening, not this. Folks, I’m going out and up to the comer again. Then I’m going to come home all over again. I’m going to wipe my mind clear of all this. When I turn back from the comer I’ll be whistling “Dixie” and I’ll be the most peaceful man in the world. But when I get home, I bet neither of you guys had better have happened at all.”

  And Homer dashed up to the comer.

  Homer Hoose came home that evening to the g.c.—everything as it should be. He found his house in order and his wife Regina alone.

  “Did you remember to bring the coriander seed, Homer, like gossamer of my fusus?” Regina asked h
im.

  “Ah, I remembered to get it, Regina, but I don’t seem to have it in my pocket now. I’d rather you didn’t ask me where I lost it. There’s something I’m trying to forget, Regina, I didn’t come home this evening before this, did I?”

  “Not that I remember, little dolomedes sexpunctatus.”

  “And there weren’t a couple other guys here who looked just like me only different?”

  “No, no, little cobby. I love you and all that, but nothing else could look like you. Nobody has been here but you. Kids! Get ready for supper! Papa’s home!”

  “Then it’s all right,” Homer said. “I was just daydreaming on my way home, and all that stuff never happened. Here I am in the perfect house with my wife Regina, and the kids’ll be underfoot in just a second. I never realized how wonderful it was. ahhhhnnn!!! you’re not regina!!”

  “But of course I am, Homer. Lycosa Regina is my species name. Well, come, come, you know how I enjoy our evenings together.”

  She picked him up, lovingly broke his arms and legs for easier handling, spread him out on the floor, and began to devour him.

  “No, no, you’re not Regina,” Homer sobbed. “You look just like her, but you also look like a giant monstrous arachnid. Dr. Corte was right, we got to fix that hole on the comer.”

  “That Dr. Corte doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Regina munched. “He says I’m a compulsive eater.”

  “What’s you eating Papa again for, Mama?” daughter Fregona asked as she came in. “You know what the doctor said.”

  “It’s the spider in me,” said Mama Regina. “I wish you’d brought the coriander seed with you, Homer. It goes so good with you.”

  “But the doctor says you got to show a little restraint, Mama,” daughter Fregona cut back in. “He says it becomes harder and harder for Papa to grow back new limbs so often at his age. He says it’s going to end up by making him nervous.”

  “Help! help!” Homer screamed. “My wife is a giant spider and is eating me up. My legs and arms are already gone. If only I could change back to the first nightmare! Night-Charleys under the Bed at Grandpa’s House on the Farm! Rosined Cord to the Make Bull-Roarers on Hallowe’en! Pig Mush in February! Cobwebs on Fruit Jars in the Cellar! No, no, not that! things never work when you need them. That Diogenes fools around with too much funny stuff.”

  “All I want is a little affection,” said Regina, talking with her mouth full.

  “Help, help,” said Homer as she ate him clear up to his head. “Shriek, shriek!”

  THE HOMELESS ONE

  A.E. Coppard

  Near the northeast corner of the county of Huntington lies a small town which once nourished an asylum for the care, retention, or reclamation of the possessed, in other words a madhouse, and within its walls dwelt an old man who had no name. So long had he been immured there that no one remembered his coming; so aged was he that no kindred were left to care for him; so quiet and well-behaved that he might have been proclaimed as a model of madhouse welfare. No record existed of when, how or why he was so incarcerated, he himself did not know, he was there, he had always been there. Where he came from, how brought, to whom he belonged, were alike unknown. A slight tang of foreignness hung about him, hard to define, and it was his lunatic whim to claim that he was now a ghost, having once upon a time hung himself because of some wickedness he had done in the far-back years. Poor old ninny! That he had now no name was his special grievance; it had been stolen from him—so he averred—in the far-back ages long ago, but if pressed about the circumstances of this misappropriation he at times grew anguished and demented, at other times he would be cunning and defensive.

  Among the inmates was one with whom he became as intimate as their poor minds allowed, a cobbler with one eye, who in happier days had been a wayside preacher. Old too, though not so old as the unknown, he was even madder, and having appointed himself to the post of Clerk to the Great Assize he trounced his comrade with harsh comminations.

  “What is your name, please, what is your name? Speak up, what is your name?”

  The man without a name would reply, “Infamy,” this having been commended to him by the one-eyed one who insisted on a designation of some sort.

  “It must go in, it must go in the pleadings, you understand. Come now, state your crime, state your crime, let us hear it all.”

  The other would answer, “Wickedness.”

  “Ah, take care, my lord defendant, I am warning you!”

  “Wickedness, Sir.”

  “Was you guilty or not guilty? Speak up and shame the devil.”

  Then the poor wretch would sigh, “Only the ghost of it, Sir, only the ghost.”

  “Come, come, now!” the cobbler would threaten; “Your insides are naked; do you wear your heart in a nightgown or your tongue in a canister?”

  “Only the ghost of it,” would be the hazed reply.

  That was the general gist and limit of the cross-examination, but the mad cobbler would rehearse him again and again until the culprit confessed to having hung himself, on a tree, in an orchard, and imploringly added: “Forgive me again, aye, but this once and no more. Amen.”

  In this matter, although the poor wretch could remember nothing else, his grim recollection had some truth in it; not the whole truth, but truth as far as it could range in his benighted soul. For once upon a time, in an age dropped far under the horizon of his years, he had thought to commit suicide.

  What an agony of mind must have dogged one who thus incurs eternal damnation! To be so stricken that an infinity of torment, in whatever guise to follow, would seem to be a lesser evil! For if ease is not to be attained here, why should it be found there—or anywhere? Howbeit, this fellow had fastened rope to tree, drawn noose upon neck, had leapt to his doom, and at the crunch which severed soul from body his soul had launched into space with the ferocity of a rocket searching the sky, but searching without sound.

  And it did not pause or falter or swerve, or break into soft drops of colour, nor did it leave a golden trail. Eyeless and bereft of knowledge, without body or any substance at all, an awareness of flight alone possessed his soul as, all ignorant of direction, it sought a goal.

  But what goal? Where? And what way could be his, what true path in the boundless uncharted beyond our world of known brightness? No inkling of direction guided it, for thought and instinct were extinguished or left far behind in that body from which they had grown—and that body was now dead. This Something that had inspired a mortal form to laugh, toil, weep, love and betray, doing as all must do, this marrow of life, phantom spur and proctor of dues, was lost in the huge Shade. Like a wisp of gossamer in the vortex of a flying train it was swept past colossal tundras and pale aerial oceans without a bourne into a void of blackness where no light ever fell and time was sunk in the original sleep.

  Do you imagine that even here upon earth time has any reality? It has not. A clock measures the denoted minutes and hours, calendars record the days, weeks, months and years, but this lapse and these divisions are not time itself, they mark only the movement of the globe spinning alternate night and day as it voyages round the sun. Did we always face the sun and were never moved away from its beam we should have no more awareness of time than sleeping cats or fish at the bottom of a well. Time is but a name for a garment of the world, a habit never changed; unmoving and measureless it enfolds a past that had no beginning and a futurity that can never end. It is life, not time, that is on the move; clocks and calendars may notify what they will, but time is one forever. It is we who fly, using twilight for our magnificent dreams, darkness and dawn to drowse in, and the glory of day for matters of no moment. Our flight is of life, not time, and he who goes far must fly fast; knowing his goal, and being worthy of it, he wins quickly home; but to be unworthy and know not the goal is to be lost indeed, as was this poor ghost, this thread of invisible gossamer, swept past sun, moon and stars into solitudes beyond the reach of our thought. Being ghost it had only a ghost�
�s awareness, had lost all mortal clues. A dog knows its kennel, the wounded mouse creeps to its hole again, blood flows from the heart of man and returns to his heart, but for the mindless disembodied soul there is no such refuge. A prisoner, inescapably sterile, it was one with the blind black aimless pattern of eternity, through which ages and ages lapsed like unnoted afternoons.

  And thus, for half a million days and many more, it scoured in celestial zones, far from any realms of bliss, far from the warm bosom of the senses, lapped in oblivion. Not in death, for the soul is not destroyed though it leave a body corrupting in the world. Not in life either, for that is experience, sensation, relish, love; maybe, too, it is fortitude and high endeavour, as well as treason and greed.

  To be diverted from this everlasting orbit by the collapse of a nebular system was an event the soul could neither see nor be aware of. Yet it happened so. A fringe of stars glimmering an age away loomed and .whirled across its path; unseeing, unknowing, the ghost was streaming towards a tornado of spheres and leaping moons, cracked stars colliding, vast orbs dissolving, pouring their livid dust in a chorale of flames that transcribed immortal glory. At its approach the elements swarmed and united hugely to repel that jot of alien fuel and wafted it violently away. Spurned and thrown back in a wayward arc it veered towards earth again.

  Long, long the journey, yet in the end it swung once more into the range of the world, no longer the slave of its own speed but floating high in clouds, borne on draughts of polar air from mountains always white. Skimming the seas it drifted into a tangle of the forests of Finland, and thence scudding aerially along a wild shore was caught against the prong of a half-buried rusty anchor and there stayed.