Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  It happened then—so the Fates ordered it—that among the naval acquaintances of my betrothed, were two gentlemen who had just set foot upon the shores of England, after a year’s absence, each, in foreign travel. In company with these gentlemen, my cousin and I, preconcertedly paid uncle Rumgudgeon a visit on the afternoon of Sunday, October the tenth,—just three weeks after the memorable decision which had so cruelly defeated our hopes. For about half an hour the conversation ran upon ordinary topics, but at last, we contrived, quite naturally, to give it the following turn:

  CAPT. PRATT. “Well I have been absent just one year.—Just one year today, as I live—let me see! Yes!—this is October the tenth. You remember, Mr. Rumgudgeon, I called, this day last year to bid you good-bye. And by the way, it does seem something like a coincidence, does it not—that our friend, Captain Smitherton, here, has been absent exactly a year also—a year today!”

  SMITHERTON. “Yes! just one year to a fraction. You will remember, Mr. Rumgudgeon, that I called with Capt. Pratol on this very day, last year, to pay my parting respects.”

  UNCLE. “Yes, yes, yes—I remember it very well—very queer indeed! Both of you gone just one year. A very strange coincidence, indeed! Just what Doctor Dubble L. Dee would denominate an extraordinary concurrence of events. Doctor Dub—”

  KATE. [Interrupting.] “To be sure, papa, it is something strange; but then Captain Pratt and Captain Smitherton didn’t go altogether the same route, and that makes a difference, you know.”

  UNCLE. “I don’t know any such thing, you huzzy! How should I? I think it only makes the matter more remarkable, Doctor Dubble L. Dee—”

  KATE. “Why, papa, Captain Pratt went round Cape Horn, and Captain Smitherton doubled the Cape of Good Hope.”

  UNCLE. “Precisely!—the one went east and the other went west, you jade, and they both have gone quite round the world. By the by, Doctor Dubble L. Dee—”

  MYSELF. [Hurriedly.] “Captain Pratt, you must come and spend the evening with us tomorrow—you and Smitherton—you can tell us all about your voyage, and we’ll have a game of whist and—”

  PRATT. “Wist, my dear fellow—you forget. Tomorrow will be Sunday. Some other evening—”

  KATE. “Oh, no. fie!—Robert’s not quite so bad as that. Today’s Sunday.”

  PRATT. “I beg both your pardons—but I can’t be so much mistaken. I know tomorrow’s Sunday, because—”

  SMITHERTON. [Much surprised.] “What are you all thinking about? Wasn’t yesterday, Sunday, I should like to know?”

  ALL. “Yesterday indeed! you are out!”

  UNCLE. “Today’s Sunday, I say—don’t I know?”

  PRATT. “Oh no!—tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  SMITHERTON. “You are all mad—every one of you. I am as positive that yesterday was Sunday as I am that I sit upon this chair.”

  KATE. [Jumping up eagerly.] “I see it—I see it all. Papa, this is a judgment upon you, about—about you know what. Let me alone, and I’ll explain it all in a minute. It’s a very simple thing, indeed. Captain Smitherton says that yesterday was Sunday: so it was; he is right. Cousin Bobby, and uncle and I say that today is Sunday: so it is; we are right. Captain Pratt maintains that tomorrow will be Sunday: so it will; he is right, too. The fact is, we are all right, and thus three Sundays have come together in a week.” SMITHERTON. [After a pause.] “By the by, Pratt, Kate has us completely. What fools we two are! Mr. Rumgudgeon, the matter stands thus: the earth, you know, is twenty-four thousand miles in circumference. Now this globe of the earth turns upon its own axis—revolves—spins round—these twenty-four thousand miles of extent, going from west to east, in precisely twenty-four hours. Do you understand Mr. Rumgudgeon?—”

  UNCLE. “To be sure—to be sure—Doctor Dub—”

  SMITHERTON. [Drowning his voice.] “Well, sir; that is at the rate of one thousand miles per hour. Now, suppose that I sail from this position a thousand miles east. Of course I anticipate the rising of the sun here at London by just one hour. I see the sun rise one hour before you do. Proceeding, in the same direction, yet another thousand miles, I anticipate the rising by two hours—another thousand, and I anticipate it by three hours, and so on, until I go entirely round the globe, and back to this spot, when, having gone twenty-four thousand miles east, I anticipate the rising of the London sun by no less than twenty-four hours; that is to say, I am a day in advance of your time. Understand, eh?”

  UNCLE. “But Dubble L. Dee—”

  SMITHERTON. [Speaking very loud.] “Captain Pratt, on the contrary, when he had sailed a thousand miles west of this position, was an hour, and when he had sailed twenty-four thousand miles west, was twenty-four hours, or one day, behind the time at London. Thus, with me, yesterday was Sunday—thus, with you, today is Sunday—and thus, with Pratt, tomorrow will be Sunday. And what is more, Mr. Rumgudgeon, it is positively clear that we are all right; for there can be no philosophical reason assigned why the idea of one of us should have preference over that of the other.”

  UNCLE. “My eyes!—well, Kate—well, Bobby!—this is a judgment upon me, as you say. But I am a man of my word—mark that! you shall have her, boy, (plum and all), when you please. Done up, by Jove! Three Sundays all in a row! I’ll go, and take Dubble L. Dee’s opinion upon that.”

  THROUGH SPACE AND TIME WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT

  Grendel Briarton

  Story First

  It was because of an argument with Ferdinand Feghoot that Richard Wagner was convicted of plagiarism in 2867. On a visit to Bayreuth, Feghoot had told him about the planet Madamabutterfry in the Twenty-Ninth Century, and how the natives believed that every grand opera idea had been stolen from them, and how they invariably proved it. Instantly, Wagner flew into a fury. ‘Only Teutonic ideas are goot for Grand Opera!’ he stormed. ‘The rest iss all rubbish! Get your mazhine for shpace-time. Ve go to your planet. I vill show you!’

  On Madamabutterfry, the customs officials asked whether Wagner had anything to declare—any operas, acts, scenes or arias—and he sneeringly gave them a list. Within minutes, they had him arrested, and a police official was offering to show him the themes he had pilfered.

  Right at the spaceport, he was led to a vast, ancient tree with eye-buds and tentacle-tendrils. Every leaf drooped; its bark was dull, dry and scaly; it rustled hopelessly at them. Near it was a pile of used spaceship parts and a sign saying:

  Near by was a little booth manned by a small, mole-like people; its sign said simply:

  ‘So tragic,’ murmured the policeman, ‘such a valuable theme.’

  ‘But vodt could I have written aboudt it?’ roared Wagner.

  ‘That’s obvious,’ Feghoot said. ‘Tree Stan Undersold.’

  They went on to a cook-shop, where their escort showed them an enormous jar full of jam. Stretched over its top was a flat, rubbery organism with two mournful eyes and a mouth in the middle.

  ‘Such a sadness,’ lamented the policeman, dabbing away at a tear. ‘With hunger he grasps at the jar, and so does his work. But if he is fed, then he will let go and sleep.’

  ‘Can’t I please have some jam?’ called a thin little voice. ‘Just a nibble, just one. Oh, how I long for it!’

  ‘I suspect,’ remarked Feghoot before Wagner could speak, ‘that this is the Nibble-longing Lid.’

  Finally they were brought to the edge of an odorous bog, where a huge, frog-like person was unhappily tying oysters to strings and dropping them into the water to marinate them. His topknot glowed fitfully with a faint, sickly light.

  ‘This is most tragic of all,’ said the policeman. ‘Very artistic, nice to steal. No one buys now his bivalves. That is why his light-on-top cannot shine.’

  ‘An oudraitch!’ screamed Wagner, leaping and frothing and tearing his hair. ‘It iss ridiculous! Vot iss this to me?’

  ‘Dim Oyster Sinker,’ said Ferdinand Feghoot.

  Story Second

  It was Ferdinand Feghoot who discovered Yip Quong and persu
aded him to move to the Thirty-Ninth Century.

  “Mr. Yip,” he informed the Time-Travellers Club, “is the greatest natural psychokineticist in all history. He put every Chinese laundry in Milwaukee 1912 out of business. He hired no help. He needed no plant or equipment. He simply sat down before a mountain of dirty old laundry, and wished it all cleaned, ironed, sorted, and wrapped. He closed his eyes for a moment—and pop!—it was done. In no time he’d made millions of dollars.”

  Old Dr. Gropius Volkswagen rose to his feet. “Then why is he here?” he demanded unpleasantly. “Why did he not stay where he was so happy and rich?”

  “He was rich but not happy,” Feghoot answered. “His fellow Chinese weren’t at all fond of him. Some of them snubbed him completely, and none of them ever invited him over for tea.”

  “That is strange. The Chinese worshipped commercial success. Did he commit some unforgivable crime? Did he violate some precept of maybe Confucius?”

  “Oh no,” said Ferdinand Feghoot. “It was nothing like that. It was just that they found him a little too wishy-washy.”

  Story Third

  In was Ferdinand Feghoot who, in Homeric times, first raised the Oracle of Delphi to full prominence. Its Pythoness and its Holy Ones had been scurvily treated and worse paid by the Greek rulers who were beginning to seek advice there. The sensitive Pythoness was above such mundane matters as money, and the Holy Ones were the world’s worst administrators. They agreed to put their financial affairs and public relations into Feghoot’s competent hands, and he speedily organized them into the PHOU, the Pan-Helenic Oracular Union.

  Their next customers, an assortment of Tyrants, Kings, Autarchs, and Obligarchs from some twenty Greek cities, were presented a very stiff schedule of rates which, tremendously angered, they refused absolutely to pay. For weeks, they camped at the Oracle, bitterly denouncing Feghoots the Barbarian.

  Finally Feghoot gave them an ultimatum. “If you refuse to pay up,” he said, “we’ll leave Greece bag and baggage and go over to Asia Minor. Then who’ll answer your questions?”

  “NEVER!” roared a Spartan, shaking his spear. “It would be revolution! It would be rebellion against all the gods!”

  “Nonsense!” replied Ferdinand Feghoot. “It’ll just be a sybil rites movement.”

  Story Fourth

  When the redoubtable Esmeralda Birdbath, Executive Professor of English Literature and Gracious Living at Weekatonk University, assumed the Presidency of the Society for the Aesthetic Rearrangement of History, she at once sent Ferdinand Feghoot off to 2882 to learn whether he pet program—for the Butlerization of Literary Criticism—was to succeed.

  “I must know!” she cried. “Return instantly, to this precise moment!” And she pushed him into the Society’s temporal transmitter.

  A tense few minutes later, he reappeared.

  “You have triumphed!” he announced. “In 2882, Samuel Butler’s great dictum that the true test of literary genius is not the ability to write an inscription but the ability to name a kitten dominates all literary criticism, and I’m happy to say that I, in the three weeks I spent there, won their much-coveted Samuel Butler Memorial Gold Medal by doing so. I and five hundred others were in the finals, and the names we chose had to reflect our kittens’ backgrounds and breeds. They brought me a delightful blue-point Siamese, a tom, and I named him instantly—Levi Strauss—to tremendous applause.”

  “But that’s absurd,” she snapped. “A Jewish name could have nothing to do with that kitten’s heredity!”

  “On the contrary, dear Esmeralda,” said Ferdinand Feghoot. “I called him that because of his blue genes.”

  THUS WE FRUSTRATE CHARLEMAGNE

  R.A. Lafferty

  We detested Today—so naturally we edited Yesterday to suit us!

  “We’ve been on some tall ones,” said Gregory Smirnov of the Instiute, “but we’ve never stood on the edge of a bigger one than this, nor viewed one with sfhakier expectations. Still, if the calculations of Epiktistes are correct, this will work.”

  “People, it will work,” Epikt said.

  This was Epiktistes the Ktistec machine? Who’d have believed it? The main bulk of Epikt was five floors below them, but he had run an extension of himself up to this little penthouse lounge. All it took was a cable, no more than a yard in diameter, and a functional ‘head set on the end of it.

  And what a head he chose! It was a sea-serpent head, a dragon head, five feet long and copied from an old carnival float. Epikt had also given himself human speech of a sort, a blend of Irish and Jewish and Dutch comedian patter from ancient vaudeville. Epikt was a comic to his last para-DNA relay when he rested his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever born.

  But he was serious about this project.

  “We have perfect test conditions,” the machine Epikt said as though calling them to order. “We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes. For our test plot, we have taken that portion of our own middle-sized city that can be viewed from this fine vantage point. If the world in its past-present continuity is changed by our meddling, then the face of our city will also change instantly as we watch it.

  “We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world: eight humans and one Ktistec machine, myself. Remember that there are nine of us. It might be important.”

  The nine finest minds were: Epiktistes, the transcendent machine who put the “K” in Ktistec; Gregory Smirnov, the large-souled director of the Institute; Valery Mok, an incandescent lady scientist; her over-shadowed and over-intelligent husband Charles Cogsworth; the humorless and inerrant Glasser; Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius; Willy McGilly, a man of unusual parts (the seeing third finger on his left hand he had picked up on one of the planets of Kapteyn’s Star) and no false modesty; Audifex O’Hanlon; and Diogenes Pontifex. The latter two men were not members of the Institute (on account of the Minimal Decency Rule), but when the finest minds in the world are assembled, these two cannot very well be left out.

  “We are going to tamper with one small detail in past history and note its effect,” Gregory said. “This has never been done before openly. We go back to an era that has been called ‘A patch of light in the vast gloom,’ the time of Charlemagne. We consider why that light went out and did not kindle others. The world lost four hundred years by that flame expiring when the tinder was apparently ready for it. We go back to that false dawn of Europe and consider where it failed. The year was 778, and the region was Spain. Charlemagne had entered alliance with Marsilies, the Arab king of Saragossa, against the Caliph Abd ar-Rahmen of Cordova. Charlemagne took such towns as Pamplona, Huesca and Gerona and cleared the way to Marsilies in Saragossa. The Caliph accepted the situation. Saragossa should be independent, a city open to both Moslems and Christians. The northern marches to the border of France should be permitted their Christianity, and there would be peace for everybody.

  “This Marsilies had long treated Christians as equals in Saragossa, and now there would be an open road from Islam into the Frankish Empire. Marsilies gave Charlemagne thirty-three scholars (Moslem, Jewish and Christian) and some Spanish mules to seal the bargain. And there could have been a cross-fertilization of cultures.

  “But the road was closed at Roncevalles where the rearguard of Charlemagne was ambushed and destroyed on its way back to France. The ambushers were more Basque than Moslems, but Charlemagne locked the door at the Pyrenees and swore that he would not let even a bird fly over that border thereafter. He kept the road closed, as did his son and his grandsons. But when he sealed off the Moslem world, he also sealed off his own culture.

  “In his later years he tried a revival of civilization with a ragtag of Irish half-scholars, Greek vagabonds and Roman copyists who almost remembered an older Rome. These weren’t enough to revive civilization, arid yet Charlemagne came close with them! Had the Islam
door remained open, a real revival of learning might have taken place then rather than four hundred years later. We are going to arrange that the ambush at Roncevalles did not happen and that the door between the two civilizations was not closed. Then we will see what happens to us.”

  “Intrusion like a burglar bent,” said Epikt.

  “Who’s a burglar?” Glasser demanded.

  “I am,” Epikt said. “We all are. It’s from an old verse. I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind downstairs if you’re interested.”

  “We set out a basic text of Hilarius,” Gregory continued. “We note it carefully, and we must remember it the way it is. Very soon, that may be the way 128 it was. I believe that the words; will change on the very page of this book as we watch them. Just as soon as we have done what we intend to do.”

  The basic text marked in the open book read:

  “The traitor Gano, playing a multiplex game, with money from the Cordova Caliph hired Basque Christians (dressed as Saragossan Mozarabs) to ambush the rear-guard of the Frankish force. To do this it was necessary that Gano keep in contact with the Basques and at the same time delay the rear-guard of the Franks. Gano, however, served both as guide and scout for the Franks. The ambush was effected. Charlemagne lost his rear-guard, his scholars and his Spanish mules. And he locked the door against the Moslem world.” That was the text by Hilarius. “When we, as it were, push the button (give the nod to Epiktistes), this will be changed,” Gregory said. “Epikt, by a complex of devices which he has assembled, will send an Avatar (party of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction), and something will have happened to the traitor Gano along about sundown one night on the road to Roncevalles.”