Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Ralph, you idiot!” she said in a low but exasperated voice. She’s not speaking Middle English, Ralph thought. Momentarily he wondered: was she a medieval scholar of modern English? Uh . . .

  She looked at him sternly. “People here are smarter than you think! You have to take some precautions! You can’t just show up and expect everyone to ignore you.”

  “What?” said Ralph, brilliantly.

  “You dunderhead,” she said. “You’re lucky you weren’t burned at the stake. They were waiting for you, or someone like you. Any old time traveler would do.”

  “What’s your name?” Ralph asked.

  “I’m Sylvie, but that’s not important.”

  “It’s important to me,” said Ralph.

  She shook off his attention. “Come with me. Don’t say a word, don’t even open your mouth.”

  “But how did you know?” said Ralph. “How do you know I’m a time traveler? Why do you speak a language I can understand?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Sylvie. “You were the first, but you’re not the only. Historians of time travel come here all the time, to see where you landed on that very first trip. The locals are getting restless. They flayed those travelers they identified, or they burned them, or they pressed them to death with stones. We couldn’t let that happen to you, especially before you told us how it worked.”

  “How on Earth would these yokels have ever noticed me?” he asked.

  “Your damn teeth,” she said. “Your flawless, glow-in-the-dark, impossibly white teeth.” She handed him a rather ugly set of yellowish fake teeth. “Put these on now.” Ralph did.

  Sylvie then gestured toward a nearby hovel. “Over there,” she said. “Inside. It’s time for you to explain to me how time travel works.” He went where she told him to, and did what she said. How could he not? He was smitten. Fortunately for Ralph, Sylvie was likewise smitten. Many a woman would be, as he was a handsome man with good teeth, and he gave up his secrets readily.

  Sylvie then traveled forward, to a time before she was born, and told her parents the secret of time travel. Her parents, who became the most famous temporal anthropologists in history, educated a few others and, when baby Sylvie came along, brought her up to leap gracefully from one century to the next. More gracefully, in fact, than her parents themselves, who vanished in medieval England when Sylvie was twelve. She was, in fact, looking for them when she came upon Ralph that very first time.

  Ralph and Sylvie were married in Wessex in 1442, Ralph’s dental glory concealed by his fake teeth. Sylvie, inveterate time-traveler that she was, convinced him they should live in the timestream, giving them a sort of temporal immortality. And this is where Ralph, who was, after all, an engineer, not a physicist, failed to anticipate the effect of his actions.

  Time does not fly like an arrow, it turns out. It just lies there, waiting for something new to happen. So when Ralph Drumm showed up—completely inappropriately—in the past, that past changed—the past healed itself—so that he had always been there. He acquired ancestors, was born, grew to adulthood—to Ralph’s exact age in fact—and his body just happened to be in the exact place where Ralph’s time-shadow showed up.

  Time travel changes the past as well as the future: time is, in fact, an eternal present when viewed from outside the timestream.

  So, as Ralph and Sylvie moved from time to time, they created more and more shadows of themselves in the timestream. As they had children—one, two, three, many—and took them about, the timeshadows of the Drumm children were generated and multiplied. Each shadow was as real as the original. Each shadow lived and breathed . . . and bred.

  Although they were innocent of any ill intent, Ralph and Sylvie Drumm changed the flow of the stream of time in a way more profound than could be accomplished by any single action, no matter how momentous its apparent effect. Their genetic material came to dominate all of human history, an endless army of dark-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians with perfect teeth. They looked the same. They thought the same. They stuck together.

  And this is why we, the last remnants of a differentiated humanity, are waiting here today in Wessex, in 1440—to defend our future from the great surge of the Drummstream. This time, they will not escape us.

  THREE POWER PLAY

  Wes Nicholson

  Present day:

  “It’s not right,” the hooded and cloaked figure said ‘to no one in particular, as it watched the events unfolding on a screen. “It shows that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Americans built the atom bomb. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”

  A clawed hand reached out from beneath the cloak and twisted a dial. The movement on the screen slowed, stopped, and began rewinding—faster and faster. The clawed hand reached out again and brought the screen to a stop. A small counter on the bottom read: “local date, June 6, 1941.” The picture on the screen was of a tranquil palace, definitely oriental in origin but otherwise not remarkable.

  The figure did something inside its cloak and then flowed from its chair and into the screen. A shimmering something slid silently through the gardens of the palace and flowed into a spot in midair.

  A moment later the cloaked figure reappeared in front of the screen. The counter now read: “local date, June 7, 1941.”

  “Now then, let’s see how that looks,” the voice rasped, and the clawed hand reached out to turn the dial forward, just a little.

  June 9, 1941:

  The Imperial Japanese War Cabinet was meeting to discuss Japan’s options with the war in Europe and Africa.

  Should they stay out of it?

  Should they take the opportunity to subjugate China while the rest of the world was otherwise occupied?

  Should they enter the war on one side or the other?

  One of the cabinet members, an admiral, spoke his mind. “The time is right for the sons of Nippon to take our rightful place in the Pacific. We must kick the western influences out of our waters, beginning with the Americans in Hawaii. A strike on their fleet in Pearl Harbor will make any entry into the war on the part of the United States almost impossible.”

  There was much discussion about the wisdom of attacking a country that had so far shown no inclination to join the war, and was weighing options about which side to come in on—if it came in at all. After some debate, the cabinet members turned to the Emperor Hirohito.

  “I had a vision of the fires of destruction that will come of this action,” the Emperor said. “You should not send the Imperial Navy to Hawaii; there is a better way. Send the ships to Singapore and Malaya, and take those countries in the name of the Chrysanthemum Throne. The Americans will leave Hawaii soon enough, and then you may send the Navy there to take control.”

  The cabinet began making plans to invade Malaya and Singapore, and remove the British and Australian forces from those countries.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, debate raged about whether supporting the British in their struggle against Hitler was a good thing. For now, most accepted that the debt being built up by Britain was worth the effort—the economy was still recovering from a terrible recession, and anything that got money flowing and people working had to have at least some good points. In the press and on the radio, the far right argued that Hitler’s Aryan policies were correct and that the United States should be joining with the Germans to ethnically cleanse the country of all the inferior races.

  In the desert of Nevada, a group of American scientists worked alongside Jewish scientists who had fled Europe just before Hitler’s jackboots ground their homeland into submission.

  In Britain, the war cabinet struggled to come up with a plan that would rock Hitler back on his heels, and the people of Britain worked long and hard just to stay alive. Those who could left the big cities and went to the rural areas where the bombings didn’t happen every night. In the moors of Scotland, a group of scientists worked around the clock on weapons and technology that might defeat the Axis powers.

  P
resent day:

  “Hmm, better” the voice croaked. “Let’s look a bit further.” The dial got a sharp twist, and then wound back until the counter stopped at . . .

  December 7, 1941:

  The Imperial Japanese fleet was well in place to support the land forces in the subjugation of Malaya, the first stop in the conquest of Southeast Asia. In the economic powerhouses of the eastern United States, opinion was swinging more and more in favor of Hitler and Mussolini, and if not for the huge debt being run up by Britain, the war supplies carried by ships would be curtailed.

  Present day:

  “Ah, now it’s looking like it’s supposed to.” The hand gave the dial another sharp twist, stopping the display at . . .

  January 18, 1942:

  Singapore had fallen to Japan three days earlier, and now the sights turned south toward Indonesia, Papua/New Guinea, and Australia. A few concerned voices in New York and Washington were howled down when they pointed out that Japan now controlled most of the world’s supply of rubber and tin. More voices joined the growing chorus of calls for the US to join with Germany. The Irish-Americans were among the loudest supporters, their historical hatred of all things British fueling their desire to see Britain crushed once and for all.

  In the desert of Nevada, the scientists still labored to uncover the secrets of the atom, but their Jewish coworkers had long since fled to Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

  In the wilds of Scotland, the British scientists and their Jewish counterparts worked around the clock, convinced the secret to Hitler’s defeat lay in their work.

  In Berlin, Hitler’s advisers informed the Fuhrer that there were suitable facilities in Sweden for the development and testing of heavy water, a necessary part of building the atom bomb.

  In Russia, the people struggled to survive the last of winter and looked forward to the spring thaw.

  Present day:

  The hand twisted the dial to the right once more, until it read:

  June 3, 1943:

  The pressure from the media, and through it the public, finally pushed an ailing U.S. President to sign a declaration of war against Great Britain and her allies. The U.S.-Canadian border was formally closed, although in reality it had been a “no-go” zone for some months, and the Canadians moved a sizeable number of troops to each of the known border crossings. The U.S. Navy bases on the Atlantic seaboard were a hive of activity as the officers and men put the last touches to their ships before setting sail for Europe. Around the country, at airfields where new airplanes were being tested, work stepped up a notch to get the latest instruments of war ready for action. America was going to war with the British—again.

  In Tokyo, the Imperial War Cabinet laid plans before the Emperor to invade Northern Australia and take control of the mineral resources there. The Emperor liked what he saw, and with Indonesia and Papua/New Guinea already under Japanese control, he saw no reason to halt the expansion of the Rising Sun. He gave his approval of the plans and then retired for the night.

  Present day:

  “No, no, no.” The voice was totally devoid of emotion as it wound the dial back a day, and the view of the palace garden once again filled the screen. Once more the figure fidgeted inside its cloak, and once more it flowed into the screen, disappearing as it touched the grass. A few hours later, the screen shimmered and the cloaked figure reemerged.

  Then the dial wound forward one day and the screen focused on the Imperial War Cabinet meeting with the Emperor.

  June 3, 1943:

  The Emperor nodded at the plans and smiled, but the smile did not pass his lips. His eyes were as hard as granite.

  “No. To invade Australia at this time would not be wise. Better to consolidate our position in the region, and secure our supply lines. If the Imperial Navy can cut off shipping to the west coast of Australia, there will be no need to invade. The weakling Australians will come to us, begging to surrender.”

  While it was plain that not all the Imperial War Cabinet agreed with this strategy, none dared argue with the Emperor, and so it was that the plans for the invasion of Australia were shelved—for now at least.

  In the desert of Nevada, the scientists made a breakthrough and begun constructing a device to test their new theory. If it worked, this new war with Britain would be over in a matter of weeks.

  In the Scottish moors, the scientists loaded a crate onto a nondescript truck in the dead of night and drove it to an abandoned coal mine, where they unloaded it and hauled it into the mine on an ore car. If the night had not been so dark, a curious onlooker might have wondered why an abandoned mine didn’t have rusted rails. But there was only one curious onlooker, and it knew the answer. A thin laugh escaped from beneath the hood as it watched events unfold.

  In Russia, the warm weather was matched by warm smiles from many of the workers in the fields. Only the ones dressed in one-piece gray outfits were not smiling, and that was because they were German POWs being forced into slave labor. A few managed the occasional wry grin, as they realized their lot was better than that of the Jews who were on “holiday” in Germany.

  June 4, 1943:

  In Scotland and Northern England, all the wireless sets suddenly stopped working at 6 AM.

  In Scandinavia, people felt the earth tremble and wondered if an avalanche was coming.

  In the British Isles, people felt the tremor and looked out their windows, expecting to see a long line of tanks or heavy vehicles passing by. But there was none to see, and the people got on with their lives as best they could—each doing his or her bit to keep Britain’s war effort going.

  Present day:

  The claw turned the dial to the right again, and the display read:

  June 6, 1944:

  For a year now the British had stood almost alone against the might of the Third Reich, and the American Navy was making sure almost no supplies got through from Canada. It was clear the Germans were massing troops on the beaches of Normandy in preparation for an invasion of England and Wales. The skies were filled with German and American fighter planes, and although the Spitfires and Hurricanes gave as good as they got, the enemy was simply too numerous. It was only going to be a matter of weeks, if that, before Winston Churchill would be forced to eat his claim that Britain “will never surrender.”

  Japan had a solid grip on Southeast Asia and China, and the Imperial War Cabinet again raised the possibility of invading Australia. Admiral Kogetashi pointed out to his lord and master that Australia had sufficient resources of its own that the lack of supply from outside was an inconvenience, not a stranglehold that would bring the country to its knees. But the Emperor would not be swayed. That evening, the admiral committed seppuku to atone for his temerity.

  In the Nevada desert, the scientists showed the Army and Air Force generals what it was they had been working on these past four years—a bomb, about the size of the one-thousand-pound ones that had been raining on Britain the past twelve months. The generals were disbelieving when told that this bomb was over ten thousand times more powerful than a conventional bomb the same size. The scientists had known would happen, and so had prepared a little demonstration for their high-ranking visitors. At 6 AM the next day, they would show the generals what all the fuss, and funds, had been about.

  In France, and throughout occupied Europe, the leaders of the Resistance movement were quietly contacted and told to get their people out of Berlin—within twenty-four hours. For some, this was not going to be possible, but they did their best. None knew why such an instruction would come from the French leaders in England, but there was surely some important reason for it.

  In Moscow, the Russian commanders received a coded message from London that it was time to end this war—one way or the other. This was the signal they had been waiting for, and they quickly dispatched messages to their field commanders to prepare to march on Germany.

  June 7, 1944:

  In the desert of Nevada, as the sun rose over the Rocky Mountains, ther
e was a rumbling sound from beneath the earth and a bright flash at the base of the mountains. Where the day before there had been a moderate-sized town nestled at the base of the mountain range, now there was nothing but a huge cloud of dust thrown up when the earth heaved. The doubting generals doubted no longer, and inquired as to how long it would take to get these bombs into production. When the scientists said it would take another year, the generals said it was wartime, and they had six months to get the job done.

  On the Russian front, the German forces were getting nervous. It was clear the Russians were up to something, but the superior German equipment and training had so far kept the Russians from mounting an attack. If not for the Russians being so well dug-in, the Germans would have overrun them last summer. They had learned the lesson of Russian winters, and would not repeat that mistake. But summer was a different matter.

  In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a message to Berlin, and another to Washington, inviting Hitler and Roosevelt to contact him to discuss surrender terms. With Britain on her knees, it did not occur to any of Churchill’s staff, nor Hitler’s, nor Roosevelt’s, to wonder why the Prime Minister had not explicitly stated whose surrender it was to be.

  In the north of Scotland, far from the nearest town or farmhouse, at a secret airfield, six planes were loaded with a single bomb each, and every spare cubic inch of space on four of them was taken up with extra fuel tanks. The planes were wheeled into separate hangars, all of them disguised with peat moss to look like another hillock on the moors. As soon as darkness fell, four of the planes would be on their way, the other two following around dawn. The flying fuel cans would make a stop at Port au Choix for refuel before heading to their final destinations.