by Anthology
Ellen. Moving his lips. Ellen. His heart moved. Ellen. Moving his feet. And there was the door. Silver-lettered across it:
J. H. McCracken, U. S. Congressional Rep.
Pale and quiet, Steve opened the door and stood looking at a young man who sat behind a bleached walnut desk. A green metal triangle said: William McCracken. The Representative’s son.
One glimpse of a square, surprised face, mouth widened to the teeth, hands coming up to fend off the inevitable.
A pressure of a finger. The gun in Steve’s hand kept purring contentedly like a sleepy cat. He snapped it off, quick. All of it had taken an instant. One breath. One heartbeat. It was very easy and very hard to kill a man. He readjusted a stud on the paralyzing-tube.
From the next office, quietly: “Oh, Will, step in a moment, son. I want to check those Washington plane tickets again.”
Sometimes it’s hard to open a door, even an unlocked one.
That voice. J. H. McCracken, newly elected people’s man.
Tighter and quieter, Steve opened the second door and this time McCracken was closer when he said, “Did you get them all right, son? No slip-ups?”
Steve looked at McCracken’s broad back and said, “No slip-ups,” so that McCracken heard. He swiveled in his chair, came around, holding a lit cigar in one hand, fountain pen in the other. His eyes were blue and didn’t see the gun. “Oh, hello,” he said, smiling. Then he saw the gun and the smile went away inside him.
Steve said, “You don’t know me. You don’t know why you’re being killed because you always leaned over backward to be clean. You never cheated at marbles. Neither did I. That doesn’t mean someone else might not cheat five hundred years from now. Time’s verdict says you’re guilty. It’s too bad you don’t look like a crook, it would make it easier . . .”
McCracken opened his mouth, thinking he could talk him out of it.
The gun sang its little song. There was no more talk. Steve sweated. Not too much power. Just enough to weaken the cardiac nerves. Walking in close, Steve kept the weapon singing half-power. Snapping it off, he bent, inserted fingers in the grey vest. The heart was still there, weak. Fading.
He said something funny to the body: “Don’t die yet. Do me a favor—keep alive until I talk to Ellen again . . .”
Then he shuddered so violently it was enough to rip the flesh from his bones. Sick, teeth chattering, his eyes blurred, he dropped the gun, picked it up and began worrying. It was a long way to his room, to the typewriter and Ellen.
He had to make it, though. Somehow he’d cheat the future. He’d think of some way to keep Ellen for himself. Some way.
He got hold of his fear, held it in one place, kept it there. Opening the door, he came face to face with McCracken’s bewildered, office staff. Three women, two men coming to say their goodbyes, frozen in shocked attitudes over the son’s body.
Temple fell back in the seat, mouth full of saliva he climbed out onto a fire escape, shut it, started down. Someone flung up the window behind him, yelled. Someone opened it and came down after him. Their feet made an iron clangor on the metal ladders.
Leaping to the alleyway, Steve fled for the corner, yanked open the door of the first cab he found, flopped in, shouting directions. Two of McCracken’s men rounded the alley corner, shouting. The cab slid away from the curb, smooth and quick. The cabbie hadn’t heard a thing.
Temple fell back in the seat, mouth full of saliva he couldn’t swallow, so he spat it out. He didn’t feel like a book hero. He only felt cold scared and small, crouching there. He had changed the future. Nobody knew it but himself and Ellen Abbott.
And she would forget.
“Wait, Ellen. Wait for me, please.”
So this is what it’s like to save a world. To have frozen insides and hot tears on your face and hands that shake violently if you quit grasping your knees. Ellen!
The cab hurled itself to a stop in front of his hotel. He staggered out, saying wild, silly things to nobody. He heard the cabbie yell, but he ran ahead, anyway. He got inside, ran upstairs.
He unlocked his door and then stood there, afraid to open it. Afraid to look inside his room. The cabbie was coming up the steps behind him, cursing. What if everything was too late . . . ?
Sucking his breath in, Steve opened the door.
It was there! The typewriter was still there!
Steve slammed the door, locked it, and then in one insane stumbling movement he was across the room to the machine, yelling and typing simultaneously.
“Ellen! Ellen Abbott! Ellen, I did it. It’s all over. Are you still there?”
A pause. Looking at the blank, horribly blank paper, his blood pounding through his veins until they ached. It seemed centuries before the typewriter keys moved and then it said:
“Oh, Steve, you succeeded. You did it for us. And I hardly know what to say. There’s no reward for you. I can’t even help you, and I wish I could. Things are changing already, getting misty and melting like waxen figures, flowing away in the Time Stream . . .”
“Hold on a while longer, Ellen. Please!”
“Before, we had all of Time, Steve. Now, I can’t hold reforming matter and moments. It’s like snatching at stars!”
Down below, in a sunlit street, a car braked to a stop. Voices broke out of the car, a metal door rapped home. McCracken’s men, coming to find Steve Temple. Maybe, with guns—
“Ellen! One last thing. Here, in my time, one of your ancestors must have lived—somewhere! Where, Ellen?”
“Don’t hurt yourself, Steve. Don’t you understand. It’s no use!”
“Please. Tell me. Some one I could speak to, someone I could see. Tell me. Where?”
“Cincinnati. Her name is Helen Anson. But—”
Heavy footsteps pounding in the hotel hall, muffled voices.
“The address is 6987 C Street . . .”
Then—the time was up. Across the city, McCracken lay pulsing out his last life. And here every beat of his fading heart acted upon Ellen and Steve Temple.
“Steve. Steve, I—”
Then he gave her his last message. The thing he had wanted to say for a long time, from inside him. The door was being beaten by fists and shoulders as he said it, but he said it anyhow, in the desperation of the last seconds:
“Ellen. Ellen, I love you. Hear me, Ellen! I love you! Don’t go away now. Don’t!”
He kept typing it over and over and over again, and he was crying like a kid and his throat couldn’t say it all, and he kept typing it over and over . . .
. . . until the keys misted, dissolved, melted and flowed away under his fingers, and he kept typing it until all the hard, bright wonder of the machine was gone and his hands fell through empty air to rap upon the top of an empty table.
And when they broke the door open, even then he didn’t stop crying . . .
TRANSFER POINT
Anthony Boucher
It was a nasty plot Vyrko was involved in. The worst part was that he constructed it himself—and didn’t get the end right!
There were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands.
The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed the retreat and its extraordinary air-conditioning—not because his scientific genius had foreseen the coming of the poisonous element, agnoton, and the end of the human race, but because he itched.
And here Vyrko sat, methodically recording the destruction of mankind, once in a straight factual record, for the instruction of future readers (“if any,” he added wryly to himself), and again as a canto in that epic poem of Man which he never expected to complete, but for which he lived.
Lavra’s long golden hair fell over his shoulders. It was odd that its scent distracted him when he was at work on the factual record, yet seemed to wing the lines of the epic.
“But why bother?” she asked. Her speech might have been clearer if her tongue had not been more preoccupied with the savor of the apple than with t
he articulation of words. But Vyrko understood readily: the remark was as familiar an opening as P-K4 in chess.
“It’s my duty,” Vyrko explained patiently. “I haven’t your father’s scientific knowledge and perception. Your father’s? I haven’t the knowledge of his humblest lab assistant. But I can put words together so that they make sense and sometimes more than sense, and I have to do this.”
From Lavra’s plump red lips an apple pip fell into the works of the electronic typewriter. Vyrko fished it out automatically; this too was part of the gambit, with the possible variants of grape seed, orange peel . . .
“But why,” Lavra demanded petulantly, “won’t Father let us leave here? A girl might as well be in a . . . a . . .”
“Convent?” Vyrko suggested. He was a good amateur paleolinguist. “There is an analogy—even despite my presence. Convents were supposed to shelter girls from the Perils of The World. Now the whole world is one great Peril . . . outside of this retreat.”
“Go on,” Lavra urged. She had long ago learned, Vyrko suspected. That he was a faintly over-serious young man with no small talk, and that she could enjoy his full attention only by asking to have something explained, even if for the nth time.
He smiled and thought of the girls he used to talk with, not at, and of how little breath they had for talking now in the world where no one drew an unobstructed breath.
It had begun with the accidental discovery in a routine laboratory analysis of a new element in the air, an inert gas which the great paleolinguist Larkish had named agnoton, the Unknown Thing, after the pattern of the similar nicknames given to others: neon, the New Thing; xenon, the Strange Thing.
It had continued (the explanation ran off so automatically that his mind was free to range from the next line of the epic to the interesting question of whether the presence of ear lobes would damage the symmetry of Lavra’s perfect face) it had continued with the itching and sneezing, the coughing and wheezing, with the increase of the percentage of agnoton in the atmosphere, promptly passing any other inert gas, even argon, and soon rivaling oxygen itself.
And it had culminated (no, the lines were cleaner without lobes), on that day when only the three of them were here in this retreat, with the discovery that the human race was » allergic to agnoton.
Allergies had been conquered for a decade of generations. Their cure, even their palliation, had been forgotten. And mankind coughed and sneezed and itched . . . and died. For while the allergies of the ancient past produced only agonies to make the patient long for death, agnoton brought on racking and incessant spasms of coughing and sneezing which no heart could long withstand.
“So if you leave this shelter, my dear,” Vyrko concluded, “you too will fight for every breath and twist your body in torment until your heart decides that it is all just too much trouble. Here we are safe, because your father’s eczema was the only known case of allergy in centuries—and was traced to the inert gases. Here is the only air-conditioning in the world that excludes the inert gases—and with them agnoton. And her—”
Lavra leaned forward, a smile and a red fleck of apple skin on her lips, the apples of her breasts touching Vyrko’s shoulders. This too was part of the gambit.
Usually it was merely declined. (Tyrsa stood between them. Tyrsa, who sang well and talked better; whose plain face and beautiful throat were alike racked by agonton . . . ) This time the gambit was interrupted.
Kirth-Labbery himself had come in unnoticed. His old voice was thin with weariness, sharp with impatience. “And here we are, safe in perpetuity, with our air-conditioning, our energy plant, our hydroponics! Safe in perpetual siege, besieged by an inert gas!”
Vyrko grinned. “Undignified, isn’t it Kirth-Labbery managed to laugh at himself. “Damn your secretarial hide, Vyrko. I love you like a son, but if I had one man who knew a meson from a metazoon to help me in the laboratory . . .”
“You’ll find something, Father,” Lavra said vaguely.
Her father regarded her with an odd seriousness. “Lavra,” he said, “your beauty is the greatest thing that I have wrought—with a certain assistance, I’ll grant, from the genes so obviously carried by your mother. That beauty alone still has meaning. The sight of you would bring a momentary happiness even to a man choking in his last spasms, while our great web of civilization . . .”
He absently left the sentence unfinished and switched on the video screen. He had to try a dozen channels before he found one that was still casting. When every erg of a man’s energy goes to drawing his next breath, he cannot tend his machine.
At last Kirth-Labbery picked up a Nyork newscast. The announcer was sneezing badly (“The older literature,” Vyrko observed, “found sneezing comic . . .”), but still contriving to speak, and somewhere a group of technicians must have had partial control of themselves.
“Four hundred and seventy-two planes have crashed,” the announcer said, “in the past forty-eight hours. Civil authorities have forbidden further plane travel indefinitely because of the danger of spasms at the controls, and it is rumored that all vehicular transport whatsoever is to come under the same ban. No Rocklipper has arrived from Lunn for over a week, and it is thirty-six hours since we have made contact with the Lunn telestation. Yurp has been silent for over two days, and Asia a week . . .”
“ ‘The most serious threat of this epidemic,’ the head of the Academy has said in an authorized statement, is the complete disruption of the systems of communication upon which world civilization is based. When man becomes physically incapable of governing his machines . . .”
It was then that they saw the first of the yellow bands.
It was just that: a band of bright yellow some thirty centimeters wide, about five meters long, and so thin as to seem insubstantial, a mere stripe of color. It came underneath the backdrop behind the announcer. It streaked about the casting room with questing sinuosity. No features, no appendages relieved its yellow blankness.
Then with a deft whipping motion it wrapped itself around the announcer. It held him only an instant. His hideously shriveled body plunged toward the camera as the screen went dead.
That was the start of the horror.
Vyrko, naturally, had no idea of the origin of the yellow bands. Even Kirth-Labbery could offer no more than conjectures. From another planet, another system, another galaxy, another universe . . .
It did not matter. Precise knowledge had now lost its importance. Kirth-Labbery was almost as indifferent to the problem as was Lavra; he speculated on it out of sheer habit. What signified was that the yellow bands were alien, and that they were rapidly and precisely completing the destruction of mankind begun by the agnoton.
“Their arrival immediately after the epidemic,” Kirth-Labbery concluded, “cannot be coincidence. You will observe that they function freely in an agnoton-laden atmosphere.”
“It would be interesting,” Vyrko commented, “to visualize a band sneezing . . .”
“It’s possible,” the scientist corrected, “that the agnoton was a poison-gas barrage laid down to soften Earth for their coming; but is it likely that they could know that a gas harmless to them would be lethal to other life? It’s more probable that they learned from spectroscopic analysis that the atmosphere of Earth lacked an element essential to them, which they supplied before invading.”
Vyrko considered the problem while Lavra sliced a peach with delicate grace. She was unable to resist licking the juice from her fingers.
“Then if the agnoton,” he ventured, “is something that they imported, is it possible that their supply might run short?”
Kirth-Labbery fiddled with the dials under the screen. It was still possible to pick up occasional glimpses from remote sectors, though by now the heart sickened in advance at the knowledge of the inevitable end of the cast.
“It is possible, Vyrko. It is the only hope. The three of us here, where the agnoton and the yellow bands are alike helpless to enter, may continue our self-sufficien
t existence long enough to outlast the invaders. Perhaps somewhere on Earth there are other such nuclei, but I doubt it. We are the whole of the future . . . and I am old.”
Vyrko frowned. He resented the terrible weight of a burden that he did not want but could not reject. He felt himself at once oppressed and ennobled. Lavra went on eating her peach.
The video screen sprang into light. A young man with the tense, lined face of premature age spoke hastily, urgently. “To all of you, if there are any of you . . . I have heard no answer for two days now . . . It is chance that I am here. But watch, all of you! I have found how the yellow bands came here. I am going to turn the camera on it now . . . watch!”
The field of vision panned to something that was for a moment totally incomprehensible. “This is their ship,” the old young man gasped. It was a set of bars of a metal almost exactly the color of the bands themselves, and it appeared in the first instant like a three-dimensional projection of a tesseract. Then as they looked at it, their eyes seemed to follow strange new angles. Possibilities of vision opened up beyond their capacities. For a moment they seemed to see what the human eye was not framed to grasp.
“They come,” the voice panted on, “from . . .”
The voice and the screen went dead. Vyrko covered his eyes with his hands. Darkness was infinite relief. A minute passed before he felt that he could endure once more even the normal exercise of the optic nerve. He opened his eyes sharply at a little scream from Lavra, v He opened them to see how still Kirth-Labbery sat. The human heart, too, is framed to endure only so much; and, as the scientist had said, he was old.
It was three days after Kirth-Labbery’s death before Vyrko had brought his prose-and-verse record up to date. Nothing more had appeared on the video, even after the most patient hours of knob-twirling. Now Vyrko leaned back from the keyboard and contemplated his completed record—and then sat forward with abrupt shock at the thought of that word completed.