Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Lies!” His face twitched but the weapon remained fixed on my midsection. “I was about to finish her off when you showed up. You want to stop me!”

  “Citizen, I don’t even know what you want to do.”

  “More lies. As if you didn’t know about this!” The Brit’s free hand pulled open his uniform coat as I realized he looked a lot bulkier than the last time I’d encountered him. The reason for that became obvious as the coat pulled open to reveal a vest loaded with lots of blocks of something that looked dangerously familiar.

  What is that stuff?

  Plastic explosive, Jeannie replied.

  “You’re going to take out the Colonial militia?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” the Brit answered contemptuously. “If your little rebellion is to be crushed it must be met with overwhelming force and righteous retaliation. Boston doesn’t need to be occupied, it needs to be flattened as an example to any Colonials who support rebellion.” He gestured toward the outside with his free hand. “A battle is one thing. It will arouse outrage in England, but not enough. No, that requires the belief that the Colonials murdered large numbers of our soldiers with a cowardly trick!”

  His intent suddenly came clear. “You’re going to mingle with the British regulars and then detonate that vest?” No wonder he’d been willing to shut down his systems. He didn’t intend going home.

  “Yes! Everyone will think the Colonials concealed some explosives in the road and detonated them without warning! Even Parliament will call for Boston to be dismantled brick by brick as an appropriate response to such a barbaric attack.” He seemed enormously pleased with himself for a man who was about to commit suicide.

  “But you’re British, too. You’ll be killing your own soldiers.”

  “So?” He made a dismissive gesture. “They agreed to die for the crown.”

  “And you’re willing to do that, too?” I asked, not bothering to hide my revulsion at his attitude. “Then why isn’t there a detonator wired into that vest?”

  The Brit smiled unpleasantly and pulled a detonator out of one pocket. “No sense risking an accidental premature explosion. Once I finish you off, I’ll set this in place, then go to join the British soldiers on their way here.”

  His hand with the stun pistol still remained steady on me, making a grab for it hopeless. But I knew he’d expect me to go for the dazer, not realizing that what I needed to get was the detonator.

  I feinted toward the Brit’s gun hand, then lunged back for the hand holding out the detonator. He reacted to protect the gun, turning that side away and firing at where I should have been. As the charge tore by close enough to numb my side under my arm, I closed one hand on the detonator and swung my other fist in a low hook. I couldn’t waste a blow on the Brit’s torso since it was well cushioned by all that plastic explosive, but his vest didn’t go too far below his belt line. My fist hit his groin as the Brit tried to line up another shot at me. He squealed and his hands went limp, the detonator coming free in my left hand as I brought up my right and slapped the dazer away.

  The Brit went to his knees and the dazer skidded into the corner. The detonator flipped up out of my grip and spun twice before I frantically caught it in midair and stepped back.

  A lightening of the sky outside vaguely seen through a single window revealed that dawn was well under way. I heard commands being shouted in a way that called to mind disciplined military forces. The British regulars, deploying into line of battle at Lexington Green.

  The Brit heard it, too. Delaying to attack Pam and then me had thrown off his schedule more than he realized, since he hadn’t had his Assistant working to remind him of the time line. “Give me that detonator,” he half threatened, half pleaded as he got his feet back under him.

  “No. I don’t particularly like people who are willing to murder other people on their own side in the name of some higher cause.”

  The Brit’s eyes flicked from side to side, seeking some advantage.

  I heard more shouts outside. It sounded like someone making demands and someone else answering, though I couldn’t make out the words.

  Pam groaned and raised her head, and my eyes and attention focused on her anxiously.

  The Brit sprang. He barreled into me full force, grabbing for the detonator. I went backwards, his hand hit my wrist, and I lost my grip. The detonator flew backwards into the open front of the iron Franklin stove, hit the back wall of it, and did what detonators do when subjected to a shock like that.

  The explosion wasn’t very big, but the stove magnified the sound. The Brit stumbled to a halt and stared at the stove. “What have you done?” he shrieked.

  “Saved some of your countrymen.” The explosive vest completely covered his torso, so I stuck my finger against his neck and pumped the tranq crystal into him. He stiffened, then dropped limply. Tempted as I was to let him slam full force onto the floor, I have a policy of not letting high explosives slam into things if I can help it, so I caught the Brit and lowered him to the floor, vaguely aware of the sounds of more explosions echoing outside.

  That’s when I spotted Pam again. She’d gotten to her feet against one wall, her eyes on me and her expression shocked. “What did you do?” she gasped.

  “Why is everybody asking me that?” The explosions somewhere outside were rising in crescendo. “What happened?”

  Pam looked from me to the stove. “You’re hearing the Colonial militia and the British regulars exchanging fire on Lexington Green. The American Revolutionary War has started.”

  No wonder she was upset. “And because of this guy you weren’t able to deploy your gear to help find who fired that first shot.”

  Pam gave me a look like she doubted my sanity. “Are you kidding? You haven’t figured it out? You fired the first shot. You’re the shooter.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I—” It hit me then, and I pivoted to look at the stove. The detonator had exploded inside it. The metal box had magnified the sound, much of which had vented into this room, but plenty had gone up the metal tube that formed the chimney. Metal tube. Explosion at one end. The noise on the other end would sound like a gunshot. “I don’t even carry a gun and I’m the shooter.”

  Pam shook her head in amazement. “No wonder no one could localize the shot to any possible location! The noise vented upward through the chimney and got deflected to all sides by the rain baffle on top! And no one could identify the weapon because it was an anachronistic detonator ‘fired’ through a chimney ‘barrel.’ But why did you do it?”

  “What do you mean why did I do it?” I demanded. “The Brit here was about to kill you. I had to stop that, which meant I had to stop him.”

  “You started a war to save me?” Pam didn’t seem certain how she should feel about that. “Tom, that’s so very gallant. Also so very stupid, but gallant.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

  Pam came away from the wall, rubbing her forehead and grimacing. “So the shot that started the American Revolution was an accidental explosion caused because a time traveler here and now to document the American Revolution was trying to rescue another time traveler, who was here and now to find out who fired the shot, from a third time traveler who was here and now to change the events of the day but in the process made them happen the way they historically did. This is the sort of thing that makes people really upset with TIs, you know.”

  “It’s not my fault causality is circular through time,” I grumbled, retrieving the Brit’s dazer. “If I caused the shot, how come nobody discovered me doing it before this?”

  “Because even though you did it you hadn’t done it yet!”

  “And I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been following you!”

  Pam stared at me again. “Which you wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t come here and now to see you.”

  I was getting dizzy. “Which you wouldn’t have done if we weren’t going to meet in London about a hundred and thirty years from now. Which wouldn’t h
ave happened unless other people had tried to alter the outcome of a war that was decided by the future United States. I’ve always known how complex it all is, time filled with countless causality wheels interacting and blending and interfering, but where the hell did this one start?”

  “There isn’t any beginning and there isn’t any end. You know that. So did the ancients. That’s why the symbol for infinity grew out of the worm Ouroboros swallowing its own tail.” Pam sighed. “But my job here is a success. I’ve learned where the shot came from and why.”

  “But no one knew that before you came here. Why don’t I tell anyone? Aside from embarrassment, I mean.”

  Pam smiled. “I guess you’re not in your home now to tell anyone.”

  “Why wouldn’t—? Oh. I guess this means I have to emigrate to your now.”

  Her smile went away and her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Have to? Is that how you see it?”

  From the way Pam was looking at me, if I didn’t think fast the first day of the American Revolution might see another casualty. I raised my hand to my head and feigned confusion. “Did I say something that didn’t make sense? That guy hit me pretty hard, and I’m still really rattled—”

  “Your Assistant told my Assistant that you’re fine. No concussion.”

  Traitor, I told Jeannie. “It’s probably something she can’t detect. I’m sure the medical tech in your now can handle it. I’m really happy to be going there to be with you. Did I mention that?”

  “Uh huh. Sure.”

  “Hey, I started a war because I love you! Doesn’t that count?”

  “Next time just give me chocolate,” Pam advised. “What do we do with this guy? Send him home?”

  “We can’t. He’s shut down his jump mechanism.”

  “Yeah, we can,” Pam announced. “Annie can transmit enough power to reactivate his power source, then his own power source can trigger his jump mech. Once Jeannie gets her upgrade in my now she’ll be able to do that, too. I’ll have Annie reset his jump so he comes out fifty years uptime from his home now. He’ll have a real hard time explaining his presence there and trying to get back to his home now.” Pam held still for a moment, then the Brit’s body popped out of existence. “What was that he was wearing?”

  “Explosive vest.”

  “Ugh. One of them. He’s going to get a real unpleasant reception when I sent him.” Pam looked toward the outside, alarm showing. “There’s TIs all over the place out there and some of them are getting closer. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Will you be there too?” I asked.

  “Dodge City? Yeah, 1878.”

  “I’ll be there in 1879!”

  “Late! Just like a man. Now let’s jump back to our own home nows before someone else we don’t want to meet catches us here!”

  But I waited until Pam vanished, then triggered my own jump.

  Which is how I found myself filling out the forms for emigration uptime, accompanied by the sponsor’s affidavit from Pam, and saying good-bye to everyone I knew in what would soon be my former home now. The guys I knew all told me I was nuts to be leaving my home now for a girl, and the girls I knew all cried and told me what a great guy I was. They all chipped in a little to help pay for the jump in lieu of presents for a wedding that wouldn’t happen for another century.

  I didn’t tell anyone I started the American Revolution by accident. That secret is safe for another century.

  THESE STONES WILL REMEMBER

  Reginald Bretnor

  This is my confession. I have killed Ignatiev. I have killed Academician Andrei Konstantinovitch Ignatiev, the century’s foremost genius, the universal scientist, the unique mind that triumphed in half a dozen disciplines, some of them totally unrelated. That is what Pravda and other party organs always said about him, and they did not exaggerate. He was a theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate. He was a physical chemist, again a Nobel laureate. He was the recipient of how many Lenin Prizes? How many decorations?

  It is all true. It is also true that he was a Member of the Central Committee of the Party. He was not just a creature of the men inside the Kremlin—he was one of them. He was also an egomaniac: totally self-centered, completely self-assured, utterly ruthless. Physically, he was immensely strong, with the shoulders of a bull and the huge, round, bald head of a Turkish wrestler. And he was cruel. His colleagues feared him. His women first believed they loved him, then invariably discovered that they loathed and hated him.

  He was also the man whose influence freed me after I had spent eleven years in prison.

  I met him first many years ago, when we were both at the University, where we had friends in common—a professor of mathematics, his wife, and his daughter, Evgenia, a very quiet, gentle girl whom I had hoped to marry. Always he made fun of me, of my long, thin frame, my pale thin hair, and he would make crude jokes about my specialty, about the ancient languages I loved. “Our Fredichka” he’d say, “will soon announce the most important of discoveries that there are eighty-seven words in Old Minoan referring to a woman’s private parts. Imagine it! He has written a five-hundred-page dissertation of the subject.”

  I would turn red, and he would simply roar with laughter. My name is Frederic—my father, a musician, named me after Chopin, whom he loved—but no one had called me Fredichka since childhood. Ignatiev did, and the way he did it robbed me of any dignity I might have had. Much of my life then was given to my poetry, and he mocked even that, reciting unkind parodies in a falsetto imitation of my voice. For a long time, I put up with it, for Evgenia’s and her parents’ sake. Then I became aware that she and Ignatiev were lovers, and I withdrew as unobtrusively as possible, somehow sensing that the affair, for her, would end in bitterness, in her hating and despising him—and herself even more. I withdrew into my languages, into my poetry, into the company of other language scholars and other poets. Eventually I obtained a position at the Institute for Ancient Languages, teaching, doing research, writing monographs.

  It was a good life, and my career, though quiet, was not undistinguished. There were no Nobel Prizes for me, no glittering honors, but enough recognition so that I felt established, necessary. Unfortunately, too, there was enough to arouse jealousy among a few over whose heads I was promoted; and I had been indiscreet enough, and had felt secure enough, to associate too carelessly with poets who were dissidents, and to publish poems of my own crying out against political injustices. I never did learn who denounced me, but one night, after eight and a half years, they came for me.

  If you have read Solzhenitsyn, you are familiar with what followed: Lubyanka Prison, the cells, the questionings—the endless questionings, the subtle tortures of the mind and body—and then the mockery of a trial, and the cold, locked, closely guarded van to Dvershinsk Barracks. There I spent those eleven years. It was a prison for scientists and scholars, very much like the one in The First Circle. We worked interminably, given the minimum of food, of warmth, of clothing needed to keep us working. Often I wondered whose learned papers I was writing, what influential Party academic’s translations I was toiling over. But at least I was able to study, learn, and maintain my linguistic skills, and to scribble poetry too, for my fellow prisoners and sometimes even for the guards.

  When I was summoned, it was the dead of winter, and once again it was at night. I had just fallen asleep in my cold, hard bed when I was awakened by hands shaking me. A guard I did not know looked at the paper in his hand by flashlight.

  “Kolpakov?” he said. “Frederic Platonovitch Kolpakov?”

  I admitted my identity.

  “Get up and dress,” he ordered. “You are to leave this place.”

  “To leave?” I exclaimed. “Wh-what do they want of me?”

  “They didn’t tell me,” he growled. “Get your clothes on. You’ll need nothing else.”

  I rose and dressed, conscious that my companions had awakened, feeling their fear echoing my own. As I walked out with the guard, some of them whispere
d goodbye to me, wishing me good luck.

  The guard walked me through the icy hallways to the office of the prison commandant, a heavy man with agate eyes and a deceptive joviality. I asked him politely where they were taking me, and he replied with a barking laugh. “Why, I can’t tell you that! Every-thing’s going to be a big surprise!” He slapped me on the back. “Maybe they’ll take you to the Moscow zoo and feed you to the lions, ha-ha-ha!”

  They gave me underwear and socks and shoes, a shirt, a tie, an ill-fitting civilian suit, a badly worn but heavy overcoat. They put a shabby suitcase in my hands. I signed several documents.

  Then I and the unknown guard went out into the night. There I encountered my first surprise. No black, shrouded van awaited me. Instead, the guard walked me to an enormous limousine, its engine purring smoothly, a cloud of steam coming from its exhaust. He opened the back door.

  “Get in,” he ordered.

  As the door swung open, the light went on inside. I looked. I stared. Ignatiev was sitting there.

  He had scarcely changed. His features had matured. His head and shoulders appeared even more massive than before. I was, of course, familiar with his career, with the achievements and the fame that had, I knew, taken him far, far away from such narrow, unkind worlds as mine.

  “Come, Fredichka,” he said, all the old contempt still in his voice, “get in the pretty car. You and I are going for a ride.”

  “A-Andrei Konstantinovitch!” I stammered.

  “Good, you remember me. Get in, get in!”

  I eased myself down into the luxury of the seat, gripped the miserable suitcase between my trembling knees. The door was closed behind me. We began to move. As we drove out of the courtyard and through the surrounding rings of fences, I saw the guards we passed saluting. I was in shock. I could not imagine why I had been freed. I did not know whether I really had been freed. I was astounded at the identity of my deliverer. But I was out of prison. No walls confined me. There were no guards—at least none I could identify. Through the car’s window, I saw the winter stars, bright in the frozen sky. Tears ran down my cheeks. I could not speak.