Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Considerably disturbed, Henry Hassel visited Chicago and dropped into the Chicago University squash courts in the early 1940s. There, in a slippery mess of graphite bricks and graphite dust that coated him, he located an Italian scientist named Fermi.

  “Repeating Marie Curie’s work, I see, dottore? ” Hassel said.

  Fermi glanced about as though he had heard a faint sound.

  “Repeating Marie Curie’s work, dottore? ” Hassel roared.

  Fermi looked at him strangely, “where you from, amico? ”

  “State.”

  “State Department?”

  “Just State. It’s true, isn’t it, dottore, that Marie Curie discovered nuclear fission back in nineteen ought ought?”

  “No! No! No!” Fermi cried. “We are the first, and we are not there yet. Police! Police! Spy!”

  “This time I’ll go on record,” Hassel growled. He pulled out his trusty .45, emptied it into Dr. Fermi’s chest, and awaited arrest and immolation in newspaper files. To his amazement, Dr. Fermi did not collapse. Dr. Fermi merely explored his chest tenderly and, to the men who answered his cry, said, “It is nothing. I felt in my within a sudden sensation of burn which may be a neuralgia of the cardiac nerve, but is most likely gas.”

  Hassel was too agitated to wait for the automatic recall of the time machine. Instead he returned at once to Unknown University under his own power. This should have given him a clue, but he was too possessed to notice. It was at this time that I (1913—1975) first saw him—a dim figure tramping through parked cars, closed doors and brick walls, with the light of lunatic determination on his face.

  He oozed into the library, prepared for an exhaustive discussion, but could not make himself felt or heard by the catalogues. He went to the Malpractice Laboratory, where Sam, the Simplex-and-Multiplex Computer, has installations sensitive up to 10,700 angstroms. Sam could not see Henry, but managed to hear him through a sort of wave-interference phenomenon.

  “Sam,” Hassel said. “I’ve made one hell of a discovery.”

  “You’re always making discoveries, Henry,” Sam complained.

  “Your data allocation is filled. Do I have to start another tape for you?”

  “But I need advice. Who’s the leading authority on time, reference to succession of, travel in?”

  “That would be Israel Lennox, spatial mechanics, professor of, Yale.”

  “How do I get in touch with him?”

  “You don’t, Henry. He’s dead. Died in ‘75.”

  “What authority have you got on time, travel in, living?”

  “Wiley Murphy.”

  “Murphy? From our own Trauma Department? That’s a break. Where is he now?”

  “As a matter of fact, Henry, he went over to your house to ask you something.”

  Hassel went home without walking, searched through his laboratory and study without finding anyone, and at last floated into the living room, where his redheaded wife was still in the arms of another man. (All this, you understand, had taken place within the space of a few moments after the construction of the time machine; such is the nature of time and travel.) Hassel cleared his throat once or twice and tried to tap his wife on the shoulder. His fingers went through her.

  “Excuse me, darling,” he said. “Has Wiley Murphy been in to see me?”

  Then he looked closer and saw that the man embracing his wife was Murphy himself.

  “Murphy!” Hassel exclaimed. “The very man I’m looking for.

  I’ve had the most extraordinary experience.” Hassel at once launched into a lucid description of his extraordinary experience, which went something like this: “Murphy, u—v = (u½—v¼) (ua + ux+ vy) but when George Washington F (x)y+ dx and Enrico Fermi F(u½) dxdt one half of Marie Curie, then what about Christopher Columbus times the square root of minus one?”

  Murphy ignored Hassel, as did Mrs. Hassel. I jotted down Hassel’s equations on the hood of a passing taxi.

  “Do listen to me, Murphy,” Hassel said. “Greta dear, would you mind leaving us for a moment? I—For heaven’s sake, will you two stop that nonsense? This is serious.”

  Hassel tried to separate the couple. He could no more touch them than make them hear him. His face turned red again and he became quite choleric as he beat at Mrs. Hassel and Murphy. It was like beating an Ideal Gas. I thought it best to interfere.

  “Hassel!”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Come outside a moment. I want to talk to you.”

  He shot through the wall. “Where are you?”

  “Over here.”

  “You’re sort of dim.”

  “So are you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Lennox, Israel Lennox.”

  “Israel Lennox, spatial mechanics, professor of, Yale?”

  “The same.”

  “But you died in ‘75.”

  “I disappeared in ‘75.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I invented a time machine.”

  “By God! So did I,” Hassel said. “This afternoon. The idea came to me in a flash—I don’t know why—and I’ve had the most extraordinary experience. Lennox, time is not a continuum.”

  “No?”

  “It’s a series of discrete particles—like pearls on a string.”

  “Yes?”

  “Each pearl is a ‘Now.’ Each ‘Now’ has its own past and future, but none of them relate to any others. You see? if a = a + a 1, a + ax (b )—”

  “Never mind the mathematics, Henry.”

  “It’s a form of quantum transfer of energy. Time is emitted in discrete corpuscles or quanta. We can visit each individual quantum and make changes within it, but no change in any one corpuscle affects any other corpuscle. Right?”

  “Wrong,” I said sorrowfully.

  “What d’you mean, ‘Wrong’ ?” he said, angrily gesturing through the cleave of a passing coed. “You take the trochoid equations and—”

  “Wrong,” I repeated firmly. “Will you listen to me, Henry?”

  “Oh, go ahead,” he said.

  “Have you noticed that you’ve become rather insubstantial?

  Dim? Spectral? Space and time no longer affect you?”

  “Yes?”

  “Henry, I had the misfortune to construct a time machine back in ‘75.”

  “So you said. Listen, what about power input? I figure I’m using about 7.3 kilowatts per—”

  “Never mind the power input, Henry. On my first trip into the past, I visited the Pleistocene. I was eager to photograph the mastodon, the giant ground sloth, and the saber-tooth tiger. While I was backing up to get a mastodon fully in the field of view at f/6.3 at 1/100th of a second, or on the LVS scale—”

  “Never mind the LVS scale,” he said.

  “While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene insect.”

  “Aha!” said Hassel.

  “I was terrified by the incident. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed.”

  “Oho!” said Hassel.

  “I became curious. I went back to the Pleistocene and killed the mastodon. Nothing was changed in 1975. I returned to the Pleistocene and slaughtered the wildlife—still with no effect. I ranged through time, killing and destroying, in an attempt to alter the present.”

  “Then you did it just like me,” Hassel exclaimed. “Odd we didn’t run into each other.”

  “Not odd at all.”

  “I got Columbus.”

  “I got Marco Polo.”

  “I got Napoleon.”

  “I thought Einstein was more important.”

  “Mohammed didn’t change things much—I expected more from him.”

  “I know. I got him too.”

  “What do you mean, you got him too?” Hassel demanded.

  “I killed him September 16, 599.
Old Style.”

  “Why, I got Mohammed January 5, 598.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But how could you have killed him after I killed him?”

  “We both killed him.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “My boy,” I said, “time is entirely subjective. It’s a private matter—a personal experience. There is no such thing as objective time, just as there is no such thing as objective love, or an objective soul.”

  “Do you mean to say that time travel is impossible? But we’ve done it.”

  “To be sure, and many others, for all I know. But we each travel into our own past, and no other person’s. There is no universal continuum, Henry. There are only billions of individuals, each with his own continuum; and one continuum cannot affect the other. We’re like millions of strands of spaghetti in the same pot. No time traveler can ever meet another time traveler in the past or future. Each of us must travel up and down his own strand alone.”

  “But we’re meeting each other now.”

  “We’re no longer time travelers, Henry. We’ve become the spaghetti sauce.”

  “Spaghetti sauce?”

  “Yes. You and I can visit any strand we like, because we’ve destroyed ourselves.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When a man changes the past he only affects his own past—no one else’s. The past is like memory. When you erase a man’s memory, you wipe him out, but you don’t wipe out anybody else’s. You and I have erased our past. The individual worlds of the others go on, but we have ceased to exist.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘ceased to exist’ ?”

  “With each act of destruction we dissolved a little. Now we’re all gone. We’ve committed chronicide. We’re ghosts. I hope Mrs.

  Hassel will be very happy with Mr. Murphy . . . Now let’s go over to the Académie. Ampère is telling a great story about Ludwig Boltzmann.”

  THE MASK OF THE REX

  Richard Bowes

  1.

  The last days of summer have always been a sweet season on the Maine coast. There’s still warmth in the sun, the crickets’ song is mellow and the vacationers are mostly gone. Nowhere is that time more golden than on Mount Airey Island.

  Late one afternoon in September of 1954, Julia Garde Macauley drove north through the white shingled coastal towns. In the wake of a terrible loss, she felt abandoned by the gods and had made this journey to confront them.

  Then, as she crossed Wenlock Sound Bridge which connects the island with the world, she had a vision. In a fast montage, a man, his face familiar yet changed, stood on crutches in a cottage doorway, plunged into an excited crowd of kids, spoke defiantly on the stairs of a plane.

  The images flickered like a TV with a bad picture and Julia thought she saw her husband. When it was over, she realized who it had been. And understood even better the questions she had come to ask.

  The village of Penoquot Landing on Mount Airey was all carefully preserved clapboard and widow’s walks. Now, after the season, few yachts were still in evidence. Fishing boats and lobster trawlers had full use of the wharves.

  Baxter’s Grande Hotel on Front Street was in hibernation until next summer. In Baxter’s parlors and pavilions over the decades, the legends of this resort and Julia’s own family had been woven.

  Driving through the gathering dusk, she could almost hear drawling voices discussing her recent loss in same way they did everything having to do with Mount Airey and the rest of the world.

  “Great public commotion about that fly-boy she married.”

  “The day their wedding was announced, marked the end of High Society.”

  “In a single engine plane in bad weather. As if he never got over the war.”

  “Or knew he didn’t belong where he was.”

  Robert Macauley, thirty-four years old, had been the junior senator from New York for a little more than a year and a half.

  Beyond the village, Julia turned onto the road her grandfather and Rockefeller had planned and had built. “Olympia Drive, where spectacular views of the mighty Atlantic and piney mainland compete for our attention with the palaces of the great,” rhapsodized a writer of the prior century. “Like a necklace of diamonds bestowed upon this island.”

  The mansions were largely shut until next year. Some hadn’t been opened at all that summer. The Sears estate had just been sold to the Carmelites as a home for retired nuns. Where the road swept between the mountain and the sea, Julia turned onto a long driveway and stopped at the locked gates. Atop a rise stood Joyous Garde, all Doric columns and marble terraces. Built at the dawn of America’s century, its hundred rooms overlooked the ocean, “One of the crown jewels of Olympia Drive.”

  Joyous Garde had been closed and was, in any case, not planned for convenience or comfort. Julia was expected. She beeped and waited.

  Welcoming lights were on in Old Cottage just inside the gates. Itself a substantial affair, the Cottage was on a human scale. Henry and Martha Eder were the permanent caretakers of the estate and lived here year round. Henry emerged with a ring of keys and nodded to Julia.

  Just then, she caught flickering images, of this driveway and what looked at first like a hostile, milling mob.

  A familiar voice intoned. “Beyond these wrought iron gates and granite pillars, the most famous private entryway in the United States, and possibly the world, the Macauley family and friends gather in moments of trial and tragedy.”

  Julia recognized the speaker as Walter Cronkite and realized that what she saw was the press waiting for a story.

  Then the gates clanged open. The grainy vision was gone. As Julia rolled through, she glanced up at Mt. Airey. It rose behind Joyous Garde covered with dark pines and bright foliage.

  Martha Eder came out to greet her and Julia found herself lulled by the old woman’s Down East voice. Julia had brought very little luggage. When it was stowed inside, she stood on the front porch of Old Cottage and felt she had come home. The place was wooden-shingled and hung with vines and honeysuckle. Her great-grandfather, George Lowell Stoneham, had built it seventy-five years before. It remained as a guest house and gate house and as an example of a fleeting New England simplicity.

  2.

  George Lowell Stoneham was always referred to as one of the discoverers of Mt. Airey. The Island, of course, had been found many times. By seals and gulls and migratory birds, by native hunters, by Hudson and Champlain and Scotch-Irish fishermen. But not until after the Civil War was it found by just the right people: wealthy and respectable Bostonians.

  Gentlemen, such as the painter Brooks Carr looking for proper subjects, or the Harvard naturalist George Lowell Stoneham trying to loose memories of Antietem, came up the coast by steamer, stayed in the little hotels built for salesmen and schooner captains. They roamed north until they hit Mt. Airey.

  At first, a few took rooms above Baxter’s General Provisions And Boarding House in Penoquot Landing. They painted, explored, captured bugs in specimen bottles. They told their friends, the nicely wealthy of Boston, about it. Brooks Carr rented a house in the village one summer and brought his young family.

  To Professor Stoneham went the honor of being the first of these founders to build on the island. In 1875, he bought (after hard bargaining) a chunk of land on the seaward side of Mt. Airey and constructed a cabin in a grove of giant white pine that overlooked Mirror Lake.

  In the following decades, others also built: plain cabins and studios at first, then cottages. In those days, men and boys swam naked and out of sight at Bachelor’s Point on the north end of the island. The women, in sweeping summer hats and dresses that reached to the ground, stopped for tea and scones at Baxter’s which now offered a shady patio in fine weather. There, they gossiped about the Saltonstall boy who had married the Pierce girl then moved to France, and about George Stoneham’s daughter Helen and a certain New York financier.

  This filet of land in this cream of a season did not long
escape the notice of the truly wealthy. From New York they came and Philadelphia. They acquired large chunks of property. The structures they caused to rise were still called studios and cottages. But they were mansions on substantial estates. By the 1890’s those who could have been anywhere in world chose to come in August to Mount Airy.

  Trails and bridle paths were blazed through the forests and up the slopes of the mountain. In 1892 John D. Rockefeller and Simon Garde constructed a paved road, Olympia Drive, around the twenty-five mile perimeter of the island.

  Hiking parties into the hills, to the quiet glens at the heart of the island, always seemed to find themselves at Mirror Lake with its utterly smooth surface and unfathomable depths.

  The only work of man visible from the shore, and that just barely, was Stoneham Cabin atop a sheer granite cliff.

  Julia Garde Macauley didn’t know what caused her great-grandfather to build on that exact spot. But she knew it wasn’t whim or happenstance. The old tintypes showed a tall man with a beard like a wizard’s and eyes that had gazed on Pickett’s Charge.

  Maybe the decision was like the one Professor Stoneham himself described in his magisterial WASPS OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES. “In the magic silence of a summer’s afternoon, the mud wasp builds her nest. Instinct, honed through the eons guides her choice.”

  Perhaps, though, it was something more. A glimpse. A sign. Julia knew for certain that once drawn to the grove, George Stoneham had discovered that it contained one of the twelve portals to an ancient shrine. And that the priest, or the Rex as the priest was called, was an old soldier, Lucius, a Roman centurion who worshipped Lord Apollo. Lucius had been captured and enslaved during Crassus’ invasion of Parthia in the century before Christ. He escaped with the help of his god who then led him to one of the portals of the shrine. The reigning priest at that time was a devoted follower of Dionysus. Lucius found and killed the man, put on the silver mask and became Rex in his place.

  Shortly after he built the cabin, George Lowell Stoneham built a cottage for his family at the foot of the mountain. But he spent much time up in the grove. After the death of his wife, he even stayed there, snowbound, for several winters researching, he said, insect hibernation.