Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

“My religious garb, sir. Those of my faith, of a suitably elevated rank, are enjoined by the sacred—”

  “What faith is that?” Perhaps it occurred to him that I might be affronted at an implied slur on my beliefs, and could bring him and the library up on charges. “Naturally we honor all forms of worship, but I have to admit that until now—”

  “I am a Chronosophist,” I said, and reached into my pocket. “Here, I have a fascinating display unit that will bring you enlightenment, Dr. Vermeer. Why, if you will set aside just one hour of your time—”

  He gave a civilized, barely visible shudder. “No need for that, my good fellow. Very well, come along with me. But don’t think—” he sent me an arch look—“you can make a habit of it.” I raised one eyebrow, something I’d trained myself to do as a kid when I was a big fan of Commander Spock. That was before real starflight, of course. As Vermeer slid out from behind his desk on a prosthesis, I saw that he’d lost both his legs, presumably in the Venezuelan conflict. Nothing I could do about that, alas. But I had larger fish to fry than a simple limited if brutal armed drone conflict. I followed him to a lift and we rose one floor. He let me into a humidity-controlled sealed room, and directed a functionary to open a vault. The Mars documents remained inside their triple-layer packaging. Even so, the Director drew on a pair of long transparent gloves, fitting them snugly under the turn-ups of his trousers, and wrapped his nose and eyes in a white surgical mask. He handed me a medical kit. “Put these on. We can’t risk damaging precious heirlooms with our breath and bodily aerosols.”

  I was already fitted out with antiviral plugs deep inside my nostrils, but I put on mask and gloves and watched in terror as he slid open the containers and placed them carefully on the table. I reached cautiously for the documents, and the Director blocked my hand.

  “Strictly hands-off, Professor! Look but do not touch.”

  The functionary, a bored fellow some inches shorter and stouter than I, waited with his eyes out of focus, probably watching some Flix drivel. I took the neuronic whip out of my pocket and buzzed the Director to sleep. His head fell forward and hit the table. The functionary gave his boss an astonished look, but by that time I was beside him and cold-cocked him with the whip’s butt. I kicked out of my KT-26 joggers, dragged off his clothes, struggled into them over my own, got my feet stuck in the arms of his numbered Demons football team sweater-trousers. I shoved, had them in place, tugged the shoes back on—I needed something sturdier than a pair of foot mittens. I heaved both men well clear, piled up a stoichiometric mixture of powdered iron oxide and aluminum, and set fire to it with the propane lighter. It went up with an explosive huff, and the hot blue blaze evaporated the death-laden logs and started to melt the top of the steel table.

  The Director was stirring. I ran to the door, flung it wide. “Fire, fire!” I screamed, and ran to the elevator. “Quick, the treasures!” The polished cedar doors of the old lift creaked open. It was empty. Offices were opening, faces gaping. I flung myself in, hit the ground floor button, breathed deeply as the elevator descended, stepped forth slowly in a dignified manner and retrieved my backpack before the shouts and bells broke out in earnest behind me.

  As I skipped light-heartedly down the gray steps and onto the grass, something fast and heavy slammed into my upper back, flung me forward on my face. I rolled, twisted, came up in a crouch, but the Director’s prosthetic had pulled away out of reach. His face was livid with fury. I grabbed at my bruised neck. The rolls of toilet paper had saved me from having my spine ruptured, but I still felt as if I’d been kicked by a horse. Three fat guards tore down the steps, batons raised. I could have killed the lot of them, but my job here was to keep a low profile (ha!) and save lives. A lot of lives. Millions of lives. Mission accomplished.

  I sighed and held my hands away from my body. It’s a shame you can’t loop back into your own immediate history or I’d have seen a dozen later versions of me popping up from the gathering crowd, coming to my rescue. Nope, it just didn’t work that way. Maybe Moira—

  Through gritted teeth, she was saying in my inload, “Damn it, Bobby, are you all right? Your vitals look okay. Hang on, I’ll be with you in a—”

  They hauled me inside again and this time the lift took us down into the basement.

  “On my way,” Moira told me. Then, in a softer tone, she said, “Bobby, honey, you done good. Real good. Nine million lives spared. Oh man. When I spring you, we are going to have a party, baby.”

  #

  “You are the worst kind of terrorist,” Director Vermeer told me in a chill, shaking voice. “In a matter of seconds you destroyed not lives but the very meaning of lives, the certified historical foundation that—”

  “So the Martian logs are entirely destroyed?” I tried to rise; two overweight but chunky-muscled guards held me down. At least the functionary I’d stripped of his outer garments wasn’t in the room, although his pilfered clothing had been taken away and I suppose returned to him, or maybe held for some kind of forensic examination. I’d expected the place to be swarming with firefighters, ladders, gushing hoses, media cameras. No such thing. Evidently the vault room’s internal fire protection systems had done the job, but not in time.

  “Entirely incinerated, you barbarian.”

  “Thank dog for that!”

  “And blasphemous mockery on top of this devastation, ‘Professor’ Chop.” I could hear the inverted commas. “Oh yes, I wasted no time checking your absurd alibi. The University in Suva has no record of you, no faith exists called Chronosophy, nor is there any Albert M.—”

  I chopped him off. “True. I had to deceive you to gain access to those festering Martian plague vectors. You have no idea how lucky you are, Director. How lucky the entire world is.”

  “What fresh nonsense is this?”

  “In two days’ time you’d have—” There was a knock at the door of the curator’s office, a long narrow room decorated with holograms of flaring galaxies, rotating, peeling, multiplying nucleic acids, two lions mating rather terrifyingly again and again in a loop, and other detritus of Installations and Exhibitions past. A woman with a floral skirt down to her wrists said apologetically, “Pardon me, Director, but there’s a police Inspector here to speak to the, the prisoner.”

  My heart sank. I looked up gloomily, and Moira, in full police uniform worn upside down, but with a peaked cap covering her short red hair, said, “Good afternoon, Director. With your permission, I’d like to speak to this man in private for a moment. Then we’ll be taking him across to Police Headquarters where he will be charged with this heinous offense.” She was carrying my backpack.

  “Very well, Inspector. I hope to hear a full accounting in due course. This arson is the most egregious—”

  My wife shepherded him to the door, and shooed out the guards with him. “Please take a seat, Mr . . . What should I call you?” she said for the sake of the library staff milling on the other side of the closing door. It clicked shut.

  “I think you could call me ‘Bobby,’ honey. Delighted to see you, but how do we proceed from here? We can’t just stroll out and take a tram to the Botanic Gardens.”

  “The machine’s out the back. No sense mucking around.”

  “Who did you clobber, by the way?”

  “Some poor cow downstairs. Had to drag her into the loo to get her uniform off her. She’s trussed up in one of their quaint cubicles. Someone’s bound to find her, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Moira was hyper, on the verge of babbling; she always gets that way when she’s pulled off some amazing exploit.

  “Okay, sweetie.” I stood up, groaning, and she marched me toward the door in a stern and professional gait. “Lay on, MacDuff.”

  The lift took us back to the ground floor, where the director hovered, literally. “We have transport waiting at the back entrance,” Moira told him. “Let’s keep this as low profile as possible, no sense getting people hysterical. The braindrain is under sedation, he’ll giv
e me no trouble.”

  We made our way briskly through confusing corridors to the back, me giving a glazed fish eye to anyone we passed. There was no vehicle, of course, but the drab graveled back space was relieved by a handsome rosebush in a large wooden pot. Nobody was watching us. It’s amazing what an air of authority and slight menace can do. We entered the disguised time machine and Moira, in the pilot’s seat, took us forward a year. It was three in the morning when we emerged, so the place was deserted. But the city lights were bright in the crisp air, and from somewhere to the northeast we heard music and laughter. No plague. No epidemic of murderous nanomites from Mars. Another horrible future with its teeth pulled, made safe for humankind. Hooray, hooray.

  “What’s up, sweetie? Let’s go back to 2099 and put our feet up.” She started to snigger. “My dog, Bobby, you were a class act with your legs jammed into a sweater and your boof head sticking out of some guy’s fly. Come on, what’s up?”

  “Candidly,” I told her, feeling dreary, “I’m feeling dreary. How stale, flat and unprofitable are the uses of this world.”

  “Come on, buddy.” My wife jabbed me in the ribs. She’s just a little thing, but her elbow is sharp, even through a stolen blue police skirt. “Remember our motto, and be proud.”

  “A stitch in time,” I said without much enthusiasm. It’s the nature of our trade. You can change your future but not your own past. So you’re obliged to go further and further into the day after the day after, and track down tomorrow’s atrocities that can be reversed earlier in unborn histories you’ve never lived through, have no real stake in. Guardians of time, that’s us. We can go home, sure, as far as our first time trip, but no further back than that. No way we can repairs the horrors of our own past, the local history that made us: assassinations of the great and good, genocides, terrorist attacks, our own insignificant but painful goofs. It’s like something from a Greek tragedy or myth, seems to me sometimes. Doomed to fix everyone else’s atrocities and never get any thanks, and no chance to remedy our own mistakes.

  But Moira was hugging me, and the sky was clear and filled with faint stars, through the light-spattered towers of Melbourne in 2073, which is more than could be said for some other epochs. So I hugged my wife back, and found myself grinning down at her. “Yeah. Okay. A stitch in time—”

  “Saves nine,” she said. “Nine million lives, this time. Maybe our own grand-grandkids, if we decide to. So hey, let’s feel good about that, eh?”

  “You bet.” I said. I did feel better, a bit. “Party time it is, honey.”

  And we fell away into the future, again.

  TIME ENOUGH

  Damon Knight

  The walls and the control panel were gray, but in the viewscreen it was green summer noon.

  “That’s the place,” said the boy’s voice in Vogel’s ear.

  The old man gently touched the controls, and the viewpoint steadied, twenty feet or so above the ground. In the screen, maple leaves swayed in a light breeze. There was just a glimpse of the path below, deep in shadow.

  The display, on the tiny screen, was as real as if one could somehow squeeze through the frame and drop into those sunlit leaves. A warm breath of air came into the room.

  “Guess I could go there blindfold, I remember it so well,” he heard Jimmy say. The boy seemed unable to stop talking; his hands tightened and relaxed on his knees. “I remember, we were all standing around in front of the drugstore in the village, and one of the kids said let’s go swimming. So we all started off across town, and first thing I knew, we weren’t going down to the beach; we were going out to the old quarry.”

  The leaves danced suddenly in a stronger breeze. “Guess we’ll see them in about a minute,” Jimmy said. “If you got the right time, that is.” His weight shifted, and Vogel knew he was staring up at the dials on the control board, even before his high voice read aloud: 222 “May twenty-eight, nineteen sixty. Eleven-nine-thirty-two A.M.”

  His voice grew higher. “Here they come.”

  In the screen, a flicker of running bodies passed under the trees. Vogel saw bare brown backs, sports shirts, tee shirts, dark heads and blond. There were eight or nine boys in the pack, all aged about twelve; the last, lagging behind, was a slender brown-haired boy who seemed a little younger. He paused, clearly visible for a moment through the leaves, and looked up with a white face. Then he turned and was gone into the dark flickering green.

  “There I go,” said Jimmy’s raw voice. “Now we’re climbing up the slope to the quarry. Dark and kind of clammy up there, so many old spruces you can’t even see the sky. That moss was just like cold mud when you stepped on it barefoot.”

  “Try to relax,” said Vogel carefully. “Would you like to do it later?”

  “No, now,” said Jimmy convulsively. His voice steadied. “I’m a little tensed up, I guess, but I can do it. I wasn’t really scared; it was the way it happened, so sudden. They never gave me time to get ready.”

  “Well, that’s what the machine is for,” said Vogel soothingly. “More time—time enough for everything.” “I know it,” said Jimmy in an inattentive voice.

  Vogel sighed. These afternoons tired him; he was not a young man any more and he no longer believed in his work. Things did not turn out as you expected. The work had to be done, of course; there was always the chance of helping someone, but it was not the easy, automatic thing that youth in its terrible confidence believed.

  There was a rustle in the screen, and Vogel saw Jimmy’s hands clench into desperate fists on his knees. A boy flashed into view, the same boy, running clumsily with one hand over his face. His head rocked back and forth. He blundered past, whipped by undergrowth, and the swaying branches closed behind him.

  Jimmy’s hands relaxed slowly. “There I go,” his voice said, low and bitter. “Running away. Crying like a baby.”

  After a moment Vogel’s spidery fingers reached out to the controls. The viewpoint drifted slowly closer to the ground. Galaxies of green leaves passed through it like bright smoke, and then the viewpoint stopped and tilted, and they were looking up the leaf-shadowed path, as if from a point five feet or so above the ground.

  Vogel asked carefully, “Ready now?”

  “Sure,” said Jimmy, his voice thin again.

  The shock of the passage left him stumbling for balance, and he fetched up against a small tree. The reeling world steadied around him; he laughed. The tree trunk was cool and papery under his hand; the leaves were a dancing green glory all around. He was back in Kellogg’s Woods again, on that May day when everything had gone wrong, and here it was, just the same as before. The same leaves were on the trees; the air he breathed was the same air.

  He started walking up the trail. After a few moments he discovered that his heart was thumping in his chest. He hated them, all the big kids with their superior, grinning faces. They were up there right now, waiting for him. But this time he would show them, and then afterward, slowly, it would be possible to stop hating. He knew that. But oh, Christ, how he hated them now!

  It was dark under the spruces as he climbed, and the moss was squashy underfoot. For a passing moment he was sorry he had come. But it was costing his family over a thousand dollars to have him sent back. They 224 were giving him this golden chance, and he wouldn’t waste it.

  Now he could hear the boys’ voices, calling hollow, and the cold splash as one of them dived.

  Hating and bitter, he climbed to where he could look down across the deep shadowed chasm of the old quarry. The kids were all tiny figures on the other side, where the rock slide was, the only place where you could climb out of the black water. Some of them were sitting on the rocks, wet and shivering. Their voices came up to him small with distance.

  Nearer, he saw the dead spruce that lay slanting downward across the edge of the quarry, with its tangled roots in the air. The trunk was silvery gray, perhaps a foot thick at the base. It had fallen straight down along the quarry wall, an old tree with all the stub
s of limbs broken off short, and its tip was jammed into a crevice. Below that, there was a series of ledges you could follow all the way down.

  But first you had to walk the dead tree.

  He climbed up on the thick, twisting roots, trying not to be aware just yet how they overhung the emptiness below. Down across the shadowed quarry, he could see pale blurs of faces turning up one by one to look at him.

  Now he vividly remembered the way it had been before, the line of boys tightrope-walking down the tree, arms waving for balance, bare or tennis-shoed feet treading carefully. If only they hadn’t left him till last!

  He took one step out onto the trunk. Without intending to, he glanced down and saw the yawning space under him—the black water, and the rocks.

  The tree swayed under him. He tried to take the next step and found he couldn’t. It was just the same as before, and he realized now that it was impossible to walk the tree—you would slip and fall, down, down that cliff to the rocks and the cold water. Standing there fixed between the sky and the quarry, he could tell himself that the others had done it, but it didn’t help. What good was that, when he could see, when anybody could see, it was impossible?

  Down there, the boys were waiting, in their cold and silent comradeship.

  Jimmy stepped slowly back. Tears of self-hatred burned his lids, but he climbed over the arching roots and left the quarry edge behind him, hearing the clear, distant shouts begin again as he stumbled down the path.

  “Don’t blame yourself too much,” said Vogel in his gray voice. “Maybe you just weren’t ready, this time.” Jimmy wiped his eyes angrily with the heel of his hand. “I wasn’t ready,” he muttered. “I thought I was, but . . . Must have been too nervous, that’s all.”

  “Or, maybe . . .” Vogel hesitated. “Some people think it’s better to forget the past and solve our problems in the present.”

  Jimmy’s eyes widened with shock. “I couldn’t give up now!” he said. He stood up, agitated. “Why, my whole life would be ruined—I mean, I never thought I’d hear a thing like that from you, Mr. Vogel. I mean, the whole point of this machine, and everything . . .”