by Anthology
“Kerim,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to blow the deal right now. Got your suit snapped to the wall braces like I showed you?”
“Yes, Gefty.” Her voice was faint but clear.
He turned the cutter away from the line it had dug, sent it rolling off towards the far wall. He hurried around the circle, checking the four charges, lumbered over to the vault passage, stopped just around the corner. He took the firing box from his suit.
“Ready, Kerim?” He opened the box.
“Ready . . .”
“Here goes!” Gefty reached into the box, twisted the firing handle. Light flared in the vault. The deck shook below him. He came stumbling out from behind the wall.
Maulbow’s machine and its stand of instruments had vanished. Where it had stood was a dark circular hole. Nothing else seemed to have happened. Gefty clumped hurriedly over to the mining cutter, swung it around, started more cautiously back towards the hole. He didn’t have the faintest idea what would come next, but a definite possibility was that he would see the janandra’s dark form flowing up over the rim of the hole. Letting it run into the cutter beam might be the best way to discourage it from re-entering the Queen.
Instead, a dazzling brilliance suddenly blotted out everything. The cutter was plucked from Gefty’s grasp; then he was picked up, suit and all, and slammed up towards the vault ceiling. He had a feeling that inaudible thunders were shaking the ship. He seemed to be rolling over and over along the ceiling. At last, the suit crashed into something which showed a total disinclination to yield, and Gefty blacked out.
The left side of his face felt pushed out of shape; his left eye wasn’t functioning too well, and there was a severe pulsing ache throughout the top of his head. But Gefty felt happy.
There were a few qualifying considerations.
“Of course,” he pointed out to Kerim, “all we can really say immediately is that we’re back in normspace and somewhere in the galaxy.”
She smiled shakily. “Isn’t that saying quite a lot, Gefty?”
“It’s something.” Gefty glanced around the instrument room. He had placed an emergency light on the console, but except for that, the control compartment was in darkness. The renewed battering the Queen had absorbed had knocked out the power in the forward section. The viewscreens were black, every instrument dead. But he’d seen the stars of normspace through the torn vault floor. It was something . . .
“We might have the light that slugged us to thank for that,” he said. “I’m not sure just what did happen there, but it could have been Maulbow’s control unit it was attacking rather than the ship. Maulbow said the lights were sensitive to the unit. At any rate, we’re here, and we’re rid of the gadget—and of the janandra.” He hesitated. “I just don’t feel you should get your hopes too high. We may find out we’re a very long way from the Hub.”
Kerim’s large eyes showed a degree of confidence which made him almost uncomfortable. “If we are,” she said serenely, “you’ll get us back somehow.”
Gefty cleared his throat. “Well, we’ll see. If the power shutoff is something the Queen’s repair scanners can handle, the instruments will come back on any minute. Give the scanners ten minutes. If they haven’t done it by that time, they can’t do it and I’ll have to play repairman. Then, with the instruments working, we can determine exactly where we are.”
Unless, he told himself silently, they’d wound up in a distant cluster never penetrated by the Federation’s mapping teams. And there was the other little question of where they now were in time. But Kerim looked rosy with relief, and those details could wait.
He took up another emergency light, switched it on and said, “I’ll see how Maulbow is doing while we’re waiting for power. If the first aid treatment has pulled him through so far, the autosurgeon probably can fix him up.”
Kerim’s face suddenly took on a guilty expression. “I forgot all about Mr. Maulbow!” She hesitated. “Should I come along?”
Gefty shook his head. “I won’t need help. And if it’s a case for the surgeon, you wouldn’t like it. Those things work painlessly, but it gets to be a mess for a while.”
He shut off the light again when he reached the sick bay which was running on its independent power system. As he opened the cabin door from the dispensary, carrying the autosurgeon, it became evident that Maulbow was still alive but that he might be in delirium. Gefty placed the surgeon on the table, went over to the bed and looked at Maulbow.
To the extent that the emergency treatment instruments’ cautious restraints permitted, Maulbow was twisting slowly about on the bed. He was speaking in a low, rapid voice, his face distorted by emotion. The words were not slurred, but they were in a language Gefty didn’t know. It seemed clear that Maulbow had reverted mentally to his own time, and for some seconds he remained unaware that Gefty had entered the room. Then, surprisingly, the slitted blue eyes opened wider and focused on Gefty’s face. And Maulbow screamed with rage.
Gefty felt somewhat disconcerted. For the reason alone that he was under anesthetic, Maulbow should not have been conscious. But he was. The words were now ones Gefty could understand, and Maulbow was telling him things which would have been interesting enough under different circumstances. Gefty broke in as soon as he could.
“Look,” he said quietly, “I’m trying to help you. I . . .”
Maulbow interrupted him in turn, not at all quietly. Gefty listened a moment longer, then shrugged. So Maulbow didn’t like him. He couldn’t say honestly that he’d ever liked Maulbow much, and what he was hearing made him like Maulbow considerably less. But he would keep the man from the future alive if he could.
He positioned the autosurgeon behind the head of the bed to allow the device to begin its analysis, stood back at its controls where he could both follow the progress it made and watch Maulbow without exciting him further by remaining within his range of vision. After a moment, the surgeon shut off the first-aid instruments and made unobtrusive use of a heavy tranquilizing drug. Then it waited.
Maulbow should have lapsed into passive somnolence thirty seconds afterwards. But the drug seemed to produce no more effect on him mentally than the preceding anesthetic. He raged and screeched on. Gefty watched him uneasily, knowing now that he was looking at insanity. There was nothing more he could do at the moment—the autosurgeon’s decisions were safer than any nonprofessional’s guesswork. And the surgeon continued to wait.
Then, abruptly, Maulbow died. The taut body slumped against the bed and the contorted features relaxed. The eyes remained half open; and when Gefty came around to the side of the bed, they still seemed to be looking up at him, but they no longer moved. A thin trickle of blood started from the side of the slack mouth and stopped again.
The control compartment was still darkened and without power when Gefty returned to it. He told Kerim briefly what had happened, added, “I’m not at all sure now he was even human. I’d rather believe he wasn’t.”
“Why that, Gefty?” She was studying his expression soberly.
Gefty hesitated, said, “I thought at first he was furious because we’d upset his plans. But they weren’t his plans . . . they were the janandra’s. He wasn’t exactly its servant. I suppose you’d have to say he was something like a pet animal.”
Kerim said incredulously, “But that isn’t possible! Think of how intelligently Mr. Maulbow . . .”
“He was following instructions,” Gefty said. “The janandra let him know whatever it wanted done. He was following instructions again when he tried to kill me after I’d got away from the thing in the vault. The real brain around here was the janandra . . . and it was a real brain. With a little luck it would have had the ship.”
Kerim smiled briefly. “You handled that big brain rather well, I think.”
“I was the one who got lucky,” Gefty said. “Anyway, where Maulbow came from, it’s the janandra’s kind that gives the orders. And the thing is, Maulbow li
ked it that way. He didn’t want it to be different. When the light hit us, it killed the janandra on the outside of the ship. Maulbow felt it happen and it cracked him up. He wanted to kill us for it. But since he was helpless, he killed himself. He didn’t want to be healed—not by us. At least, that’s what it looks like.”
He shrugged, checked his watch, climbed out of the chair. “Well,” he said, “the ten minutes I gave the Queen to turn the power back on are up. Looks like the old girl couldn’t do it. So I’ll—”
The indirect lighting system in the instrument room went on silently. The emergency light flickered and went out. Gefty’s head came around.
Kerim was staring past him at the screens, her face radiant.
“Oh, Gefty!” she cried softly. “Oh, Gefty! Our stars!”
“Green dot here is us,” Gefty explained, somewhat hoarsely. He cleared his throat, went on, “Our true ship position, that is—” He stopped, realizing he was talking too much, almost babbling, in an attempt to take some of the tension out of the moment. The next few seconds might not tell them where they were, but it would show whether they had been carried beyond the regions of space charted by Federation instruments. Which would mean the difference between having a chance—whether a good chance or a bad one—of getting home eventually, and the alternative of being hopelessly lost.
There had been nothing recognizably familiar about the brilliantly dense star patterns in the viewscreens, but he gave no further thought to that. Unless the ship’s exact position was known or one was on an established route, it was a waste of time looking for landmarks in a sizable cluster.
He turned on the basic star chart. Within the locator plate the green pinpoint of light reappeared, red-ringed and suspended now against the three-dimensional immensities of the Milky Way. It stayed still a moment, began a smooth drift towards Galactic East. Gefty let his breath out carefully. He sensed Kerim’s eyes on him but kept his gaze fixed on the locator plate.
The green dot slowed, came to a stop. Gefty’s finger tapped the same button four times. The big chart flicked out of existence, and in the plate three regional star maps appeared and vanished in quick succession behind it. The fourth map stayed. For a few seconds, the red-circled green spark was not visible here. Then it showed at the eastern margin of the map, came gliding forwards and to the left, slowed again and held steady. Now the star map began to glide through the locator plate, carrying the fixed green dot with it. It brought the dot up to dead center point in the locator plate and stopped.
Gefty slumped a little. He rubbed his hands slowly down his face and muttered a few words. Then he shook his head.
“Gefty,” Kerim whispered, “what is it? Where are we?”
Gefty looked at her.
“After we got hauled into that time current,” he said hoarsely, “I tried to find out which way in space we were headed. The direction indicators over there seemed to show we were trying to go everywhere at once. You remember Maulbow’s control unit wasn’t working right, needed adjustments. Well, all those little impulses must have pretty well canceled out because we weren’t taken really far. In the last hour and a half we’ve covered roughly the distance the Queen could have gone on her own in, say, thirty days.”
“Then where . . .”
“Home,” Gefty said simply. “It’s ridiculous! Other side of the Hub from where we started.” He nodded at the plate. “Eastern Hub Quadrant. Section Six Eight. The G2 behind the green dot—that’s the Evalee system. We could be putting down at Evalee Interstellar three hours from now if we wanted to.”
Kerim was laughing and crying together. “Oh, Gefty! I knew you would . . .”
“A fat lot I had to do with it!” Gefty leaned forward suddenly, switched on the transmitter. “And now let’s pick up a live newscast. There’s something else I . . .”
His voice trailed off. The transmitter screen lit up with a blurred jumble of print, colors, a muttering of voices, music and noises. Gefty twisted a dial. The screen cleared, showed a newscast headline sheet. Gefty blinked at it, glanced sideways at Kerim, grimaced.
“The something else,” he said, his voice a little strained, “was something I was also worried about. Looks like I was more or less right.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing really bad,” Gefty assured her. He added, “I think. But take a look at the Federation dateline.”
Kerim peered at the screen, frowned. “But . . .”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why, that . . . that’s almost . . .”
“That,” Gefty said, “or rather this is the day after we started out from the Hub, headed roughly Galactic west. Three weeks ago. We’d be just past Miam.” He knuckled his chin. “Interesting thought, isn’t it?”
Kerim was silent for long seconds. “Then they . . . or we . . .”
“Oh, they’re us, all right,” Gefty said. “They’d have to be, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so. It seems a little confusing. But I was thinking. If you send them a transmitter call . . .”
Gefty shook his head. “The Queen’s transmitter isn’t too hot, but it might push a call as far as Evalee. Then we could arrange for a Com-Web link-up there, and in another ten minutes or so . . . but I don’t think we’d better.”
“Why not?” Kerim demanded.
“Because we got through it all safely, so we’re going to get through it safely. But if we receive that message now and never go on to Maulbow’s moon . . . you see? There’s no way of knowing just what would happen.”
Kerim looked hesitant, frowned. “I suppose you’re right,” she agreed reluctantly at last. “So Mr. Maulbow will have to stay dead now. And that janandra.” After a moment she added pensively, “Of course, they weren’t really very nice—”
Gefty shivered. One of the things he’d learned from Maulbow’s ravings was the real reason he and Kerim had been taken along on the trip. He didn’t feel like telling Kerim about it just yet, but it had been solely because of Maulbow’s concern for his master’s creature comforts. The janandra could go for a long time without food, but after fasting for several years on the moon, a couple of snacks on the homeward run would have been highly welcome.
And the janandra was a gourmet. It much preferred, as Maulbow well knew, to have its snacks still wriggling-fresh as it started them down its gullet.
“No,” Gefty said, “I couldn’t call either of them really nice.”
THE WOMAN WHO CAME TO THE PARADOX
Derek J. Goodman
Reggie stepped out of the light and onto the streets of Braunau am Inn, Austria. It was dark and the general look of the street seemed about right, but until he found a newspaper or something he couldn’t be certain that he’d arrived on the night he intended. He looked down at himself, making sure he hadn’t lost any part of his costume in his journey. It looked intact, but he really didn’t expect to need it for long. All he needed to do was walk down to the Gasthof zum Pommer and kill the newborn baby Adolf Hitler.
He heard footsteps on the street somewhere behind him. Reggie turned, afraid that someone out late at night had seen his miraculous appearance, but it was an old woman just now coming onto the street. She was hunched over and walked very slowly, but she looked up briefly at him, nodded, and carefully sat herself down against the side of the nearest building. Reggie thought she looked vaguely familiar, but that couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t like he had time traveled before. This lady was just some anonymous footnote in history, and Reggie had no reason to pay her any more mind.
He took a deep breath and looked around to get his bearings. He wasn’t nervous, not really. He was more excited than anything else. Here he was, only twenty-five years old and inventor of the first time machine. As soon as he had invented it, however, the government had swooped down like vultures off their perch and tried to regulate his brain child. He couldn’t have that. He’d used it before they had the opportunity to stop him, and he’d come here to prove his point.
>
In truth, he really didn’t care about whether what he was about to do was right or wrong. Everyone always used this hypothetical scenario as a test of morals, but Reggie only cared about this point in history because it was high profile. He would be the first person to completely reshape history as he saw fit.
The old woman made a noise that might have been a snort or maybe a snore. Reggie ignored it and started down the street in the direction of the gasthof.
A light flashed five feet in front of him, and someone stepped out of it. Reggie blinked, not realizing who he was seeing at first. He recognized the clothes as the same ones he wore now, except they were ripped, dirty, and charred in a few places. The face was more difficult to recognize through the smudges and blood, but as the person fought to catch his breath, Reggie realized this was him.
“Thank God I made it,” the other Reggie said (Reggie immediately in his mind labeled the other as Reggie-B). “You can’t do this.”
“You’re me?” Reggie asked.
“You from two weeks in your future,” Reggie-B said. “I’ve come to stop you. You can’t kill him.”
“You can’t be me. Why would I try to stop myself?”
“Because you have no idea what kind of changes you will cause. The destruction, it’s unimaginable. You see, if you actually go through with this . . .”
Five feet to Reggie’s right, a light flashed and another Reggie stepped out from it. “No!” the new Reggie (Reggie-C?) said to Reggie-B. “You can’t do this!”
“You’re me?” Reggie-B said. Reggie looked from Reggie-B to Reggie-C, trying to understand this.
“You from three days in your future,” Reggie-C said. “I’ve come to stop you from stopping you.”
“But why would I try . . .” Reggie-B began, but Reggie-C stopped him with a groan.
“Really,” Reggie-C said, “I don’t have time for this.” He shoved Reggie-B backward, and the light flashed again, swallowing Reggie-B back up into the time stream.