Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal shearing through major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue and pharynx, Angie cut her throat.

  In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the shrieking Mrs. Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had become crusted with rust, and the flasks which had held vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery alveoli and spare gray cells and coils of receptor nerves held only black slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of decomposition.

  THE LOST CANAL

  Michael Moorcock

  1

  Martian Manhunt

  Mac Stone was in trouble. He heard the steady slap-slap-slap of the P140 auto-Bannings and knew they’d licked the atmosphere problem. That gadget could now find a man, stun him, or kill him according to whatever orders had come from Terra. If necessary, the bionic “wombots” it carried could follow him into space. The things worked by popping in and out of regular space the way you bunch up a piece of cloth and stick a needle through it to save time and energy. Human physiology couldn’t stand those instant translations—in and out, in and out through the cosmic “folds”—but the wombot wasn’t human; it moved swiftly and easily in that environment. Flying at cruising speed for regular space-time, the wombot could cross a million miles as if they were a hundred. The thing was a terrible weapon, outlawed on every solar colony, packing several features into one—surveillance, manhunter, ordnance. If Mac were unlucky, they’d just use it to stun him. So they could take their time with him back at RamRam City.

  Why do they want me this bad? He was baffled.

  They had him pinned down. In all directions lay the low, lichen-covered Martian hills: ochre, brown, and a thousand shades of yellow-grey almost as far as he could see. You couldn’t hide in lichen. Not unless you could afford a mirror suit. Beyond the hills were the mountains, each taller than Everest, almost entirely unexplored. That was where he was heading before a wombot scented heat from his monoflier and took it out in a second. Four days after that, they hit his camp with a hard flitterbug and almost finished him off. Nights got colder as the east wind blew. Rust-red dust swept in from the desert, threatening his lungs. It whispered against his day suit like the voices of the dead.

  If they didn’t kill him, autumn would.

  Mac plucked his last thin jane from his lips and pinched off the lit end. He’d smoke it later. If there was any “later.” The IMF had evidently gotten themselves some of the new bloodhound wombots, so compact and powerful they could carry a body to Phobos and back. Creepy little things, not much bigger than an adult salmon. They made him feel sick. He still hoped he might pick the site of his last fight. He had only had two full charges left in his reliable old Banning-6 pistol. After that, he had a knife in his boot and some knucks in his pocket. And then his bare hands and his teeth.

  They had called Stone a wild animal back on Mercury, and they were right. The Callisto slave-masters had made him into one after they pulled him from a sinking lavasub. He’d been searching for the fabled energy crowns of the J’ja. The rebel royal priests had been planning to blast Spank City to fragments before the IMF found the secret of their fire-boats and quite literally stopped them cold, freezing them in their tracks, sending the survivors out to Panic, the asteroid that liked to call herself a ship. But the J’ja had hidden their crowns first.

  So long ago. He’d been in some tough spots and survived, but this time it seemed like he’d run out of lives and luck.

  You didn’t get much cover in one of the old flume holes. They’d been dug when some crazy twenty-second-century Terran wildcat miners thought they could cut into the crust and tap the planet’s plasma. They believed there were rivers of molten gold down there. They claimed that they heard them at night when they slept curled within the cones. Someone had fallen into a particularly deep one and sworn he had seen molten platinum running under his feet. Poor devils. They’d spent too long trying to make sense of the star-crowded sky. Recently, he’d heard that the inverted cones were used by hibernating ock-crocs. Mac hoped he wasn’t waking anything up down there. He doubted the theory and did his best not to think about it, to keep out of sight and to drop his body temperature as much as he dared, release a few dead fuel pods and hope that the big Banning bloodbees would mistake him for an old wreck and its dead pilot and pass him by.

  “You only need fear the bees if you’ve broken the law.” That familiar phrase was used to justify every encroachment on citizens’ liberty. Almost all activities were semicriminal these days. Mars needed cheap human workers. Keep education as close as possible to zero. The prisons were their best resource. Industrial ecology created its own inevitable logic.

  Sometimes you escaped the prisons and slipped back into RamRam City, where you could live relatively well if you knew how to look after yourself. Sometimes they just let you stay there until they had a reason to bring you in or get rid of you.

  And that’s what they appeared to be doing now.

  Slap-slap-slap.

  Why were they spending so much money to catch him? He knew what those machines cost. Even captured, he wasn’t worth a single wombot.

  Wings fluttering, big teeth grinding, the flier was coming over the horizon, and, by the way it hovered and turned in the thin air, Mac’s trick hadn’t fooled it at all. Good handling. He admired the skill. Private. Not IMF at all. One guy piloting. One handling the ordnance. Or maybe one really good hunter doing both. He reached to slide off the pistol’s safety. Looked like he was going down fighting. He wondered if he could hit the pilot first.

  Stone was a Martian born in the shadow of Low-Canal’s massive water tanks. The district had never really been a canal. It had been named by early explorers trying to make sense of the long, straight indentations, now believed to be the foundations of a Martian city. But it was where most of AquaCorps’s water was kept. Water was expensive and had to be shipped in from Venus. Sometimes there would be a leakage, and, with kids like him, he could collect almost a cup before the alarms went. His mother lived however she could in the district. His father had been a space ape on the wild Jupiter runs, carbon rods rotting and twisting as they pulled pure uranium from the Ki Sea. He’d probably died when the red spot erupted, taking twenty u-tankers with it.

  When he was seven, his ma sold Mac to a mining company looking for kids small enough to fit into the midget tunnelers working larger asteroids and moons that were able to support a human being for a year or so before they died. His mother had known that “indentured” was another word for death sentence. She knew that he was doomed to breathe modified methane until his lungs and all his other organs and functions gave out.

  Only Mac hadn’t died. He’d stolen air and survived and risen, by virtue of his uninhibited savagery, in what passed for Ganymedan society. Kru miners made him a heroic legend. They betrothed him to their daughters.

  Stone was back on Mars and planning to ship out for Terra when his mother sent word that she wanted to tell him something. He’d gone to Tank Town with the intention of killing her. When he saw her, the anger went out of him. She was a lonely old woman lacking status or family. He’d only be doing her a favor if he finished her off. So he let it go. And realized that she’d been holding her breath as he held his, and he turned and laughed that deep slow purr she knew from his father. This made her note his tobacco-colored skin, now seamed like well-used leather, and she wept to read in his face all the torments he had endured since she’d sold him. So he had let her die believing a lie, that they enjoyed a reconciliation. What he said or thought didn’t mean much to the Lord she believed in.

  After that, he’d started stealing jewels with a vengeance. Good ones. Big ones. He’d done very well. Hitting the mining trains. Fencing them back through Earth. Generous, like most thieves of his kind, and therefore much liked by the Low-Canal folk who protected him, he’d done well. He was one of their own, accepted as a Martian hero with stories told about him as V-dramas. Only two people had made i
t out of the Tanks to become famous on the V. Mac Stone was one, and Yily Chen, the little Martian girl he’d played hide-and-go-seek with as a kid, was the other. Yily now operated from Earth, mostly doing jobs the corps didn’t want anyone to associate directly with them. Her likeness had never been published. He remembered her for her lithe brown body, her golden eyes. He’d loved her then. He couldn’t really imagine what she looked like now. No doubt she’d become some hard-faced mother superior, pious and judgmental, like most tankers who grew up staying within the law, such as it was. She had put Tank Town behind her. He’d elected to stay. But he’d been sold out once again, this time to the Brothers of the Fiery Mount, whoever they were. They put him back to work on Ganymede with no idea he had family there.

  Then some war broke out on Terra for a while. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It destroyed the old cartels and opened the planet up to real trade. And everyone wanted to rearm, of course.

  By the third month of Stone’s return, his clan, riding a wave of similar revolutions through the colonies, had conquered a significant number of exec towers and looted a museum for a heliograph system they’d been able to copy. Communications. Codes. Bribes. Clever strategy. Guerrilla tactics. By the sixth month, as they prepared for the long tomorrow, they had won the moon and were doing business with four of the richest nations of Terra and New Japan.

  Meanwhile, over at the freshly built Martian Scaling Station, the “black jump” was opening up the larger universe hidden in the folds of space-time through which the wombots traveled. They’d begun to realize that they were part of a denser, mostly invisible cosmos. Until recently, the “cosmic fog” had obscured so much from the astronomers. The discovery brought about new power shifts and unexpected alliances. With the right start, they said, some of those worlds could be reached in days! Now it didn’t matter if Terra was dying. Was that really the prevailing logic?

  Mac knew that he and the human race were at some sort of crossroads, poised at last on their way to the stars. They might find an unbeatable enemy out there. Or beatable enemies. Or they could learn to negotiate. The game Mac knew best wasn’t necessarily the best game. For now, however, he needed capital to play with the big guys, and he was never going to get that kind of money in one piece. Not while he remained an outworld Martian wolfshead. He knew enough about those odds. He knew who the men were who owned the worlds. All of which was to his advantage. His equal share of the Ganymede profits wasn’t large enough, and he didn’t like his public profile getting bigger. He’d made his ex-brother-in-law boss and quietly returned to Mars and his old trade. He—or really the pseudonym he’d chosen—developed a serious reputation. He was credited with any number of unsolved cases. No one knew what to expect from him. Few knew his face or his real name. A fist diamond had paid to have every mug shot and most records wiped. He began to build his pile. The first thing he needed was a good ship of his own. He went into water brokerage. He had a half share in an atmosphere factory. He was earning that ship when he’d been, he assumed, betrayed. He wondered if that had anything to do with the sneaky little Venusian lep who had come to see him with a suspicious offer a week or two before his arrest.

  To his surprise, because it was a special private prison, they took him straight to Tarpauling Hill. Or meant to. Escaping his escort had not been difficult. Escaping a planet was going to be harder.

  This was his eighth Martian day on the run. There were no real maps of the hinterland. He knew the Interplanetary Military Force. They let their big robot Bannings loose if they thought that someone was hiding in an area. He could have stayed in RamRam City, hidden in the Tanks, but it would get expensive in terms of human lives. He’d had to lead them into wild, unpopulated country or they might have killed half Low-Canal’s population. Out to the wide valleys and high mountains of the Monogreanimi, where, it was said, the old high queens of Mars still dreamed in the deep ice.

  Mac was trying to find one of the legendary “blowholes,” sunk by Mars’s last race, who had been seeking air for the shelters in which they’d taken refuge from the Long Rain, the incessant meteor storms pulverizing the planet. The falling meteors had destroyed almost every sign of the dozen or so major civilizations that had once ruled a Mars almost as lush as Venus.

  Mac hated Venus. He hated her fecundity as well as her unpredictable gas storms, which regularly wiped out hundreds. Terran Venusians went crazy just to survive the extremes. He hated native Venusians, the smelly little green people nicknamed leprechauns by Terrans. He hated Terrans, too. And he really hated Mercury. Mars, he could not help loving. He loved her vast, tranquil deserts, her hills and high, wild mountains where nothing breathed. Once he’d longed to make her self-sustaining again. He’d dreamed of bringing in enough water to make her bloom as she had in the days when the few surviving pictograms and engravings had been created. When she still had seas. There were other legends of how she had been, but these could all be traced back to myths created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  All Mac wanted was the reality. To see the canals running again while sun and moons illuminated blue forests and small fields of brass-colored crops. To settle down on a few acres of land, growing enough to sell and sustain himself. Then maybe a family. To make a new Mars, a peaceful Mars where kids could grow. That’s what he’d dreamed. That’s what had kept him alive all these years. He let out a brief, not particularly bitter, laugh. Now the best he could hope for was a quick death.

  He wondered if he could gain any time by giving himself up in the hope that he’d find another chance of escape. It would avoid what was probably an inevitable death out here. He had to take control of his own determined soul, which would rather fight and die than wait for another chance. But that was all he could do. He got hold of himself and, disgusted by his chosen action, he snarled and pulled a big white silk scarf out of a leg pouch in his leathers.

  He was tying this to the barrel of his Banning when he felt something moist, cold, and scaly slip around his ankle and give it an experimental tug.

  He yanked free. It took a tighter hold. It seemed patient. It knew he couldn’t escape. He’d done his best to keep clear of the wombot’s sensors, but his movement had already alerted the thing. It chickled out a challenge. Again, he tried to yank his leg away.

  The wombot spit a bubble of death syrup all over the nearby rocks. They weren’t going to waste valuable gas or darts on him unless they had to. At least he wasn’t going to need a white flag. Now he knew that they wanted him dead rather than alive.

  Below Mac, the ground powdered. The tentacle tugged harder and the area beneath him broke open, dragging him down a fissure, scraping every inch of his day suit. The suit’s circuits wouldn’t survive another attack. Suddenly, it was inky-dark. He heard the odd rattle and boom of the thing’s heart-lung. He forgot the native name someone had guessed at, but it was without doubt an ock-croc.

  Mac Stone prepared himself for death.

  2

  To Destroy the Future

  He was still trying to point his pistol when the fissure became a tunnel, thick with something caked around its sides. The worst stink in creation. Croc dung! Threat of death really did sharpen the memory. That’s what it coated its long burrow with. The Martian wanal or ock-croc was the only large predator left. These giant, tentacled reptilian insects drove deep burrows using old blowholes or wells; they weren’t particular. They hibernated for years, woke up very hungry. The first hatchling typically ate all its siblings and sometimes its parent. Then it ate whoever was still hibernating. Although not radioactive themselves, they preferred areas still “buzzy” and lethal to humans. If the croc didn’t eat Stone right away, the chances were he’d soon die painfully of radiation poisoning.

  “Oh, damn!” He couldn’t do anything with his holstered gun. The thing seemed to know precisely how to catch him so he did it the least damage. He had to be many meters down now, the Banning long since passed out of sight and no longer his main fear. A bion
ic wombot might follow him, but so far he felt relatively sanguine about that. The chances were the croc would also eat the wombot, built-in explosives and all. The thought gave Mac a brief moment of satisfaction.

  The tunnel opened into a pit occupied by a huge pulsing head with six round eyes the size of portholes, which slowly retreated from him as a single tentacle—one of many—dragged him deeper.

  Mac did all he could to slow his descent into the pit, where its own green-yellow luminescence revealed the croc’s enormous carcass. A nightmare of snakelike waving arms with a long snout full of dagger-size needles for teeth, the wriggling body a black blob of scaly horror. More tentacles snared him so that he couldn’t move any part of his body without making things worse. He was resigned to what must happen next.

  He heard a double click as the thing disconnected its jaw, ready to swallow him. Then he thought he heard human speech. One tentacle released his right arm. If he could only get hold of his gun, he might not kill the croc but he’d give it the worst attack of indigestion it had known in all its long, quasi-reptilian life. He made one last lunge. His fingers clutched for the butt.

  As his Banning came loose, something else fell out of the air and rattled on the rock. He looked down and saw a tiny blue flickering of flame. Voices seemed to jeer inside his head.

  He felt horribly cold. At this rate, he’d freeze to death before the croc ate him. The questor had found him just as he was making camp. He’d had to move fast. When the Martian night caught him without his Hopkins blanket, it would be over anyway. The wanal only had to wait for him to lose a little more heat. They were famous for their cunning patience. Once, there had been a dozen varieties of the creature. Mac had seen pictures of them in the old hunting cubes of the Sindolu, the extinct nomads of the northern hemisphere, from whose encampments a few artifacts had been miraculously preserved. The wanal they had feared most had massive mandibles and ten tentacles. This was that kind of wanal.