Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Right there he was starting to learn a little—and it was an unpleasant and shivery sort of learning—about the Law of the Conservation of Reality. The four-dimensional space-time universe doesn’t like to be changed, any more than it likes to lose or gain energy or matter. If it has to be changed, it’ll adjust itself just enough to accept that change and no more. The Conservation of Reality is a sort of Law of Least Action, too. It doesn’t matter how improbable the events involved in the adjustment are, just so long as they’re possible at all and can be used to patch the established pattern. His death, at this point, was part of the established pattern. If he lived on instead of dying, billions of other compensatory changes would have to be made, covering many years, perhaps centuries, before the old pattern could be re-established, the snarled lifelines woven back into it—and the universe finally go on the same as if his wife had shot him on schedule.

  This way the pattern was hardly affected at all. There were powder burns on his forehead that weren’t there before, but there weren’t any witnesses to the shooting in the first place, so the presence or absence of powder burns didn’t matter. The gun was lying on the floor instead of being in his wife’s hands, but he had the feeling that when the time came for her to die, she’d wake enough from the Pre-established Harmony trance to find it, just as Himself did.

  So he’d learned a little about the Conservation of Reality. He also had learned a little about his own character, especially from Himself’s last look and act. He’d got a hint that he had been trying to destroy himself for years by the way he’d lived, so that inherited fortune or accidental success couldn’t save him, and if his wife hadn’t shot him he’d have done it himself in any case. He’d got a hint that Himself hadn’t merely been acting as an agent for a self-correcting universe when he grabbed the gun; he’d been acting on his own account, too—the universe, you know, operates by getting people to cooperate.

  But, although these ideas occurred to him, he didn’t dwell on them, for he figured he’d had a partial success the second time, and the third time if he kept the gun away from Himself; if he dominated Himself, as it were, the melting-together would take place and everything else would go forward as planned.

  He had the dim realization that the universe, like a huge sleepy animal, knew what he was trying to do and was trying to thwart him. This feeling of opposition made him determined to outmaneuver the universe—not the first guy to yield to such a temptation, of course.

  And up to a point his tactics worked. The third time he gimmicked the past, everything started to happen just as it did the second time. Himself dragged miserably over to him, looking for the gun, but he had it tucked away and was prepared to hold on to it. Encouragingly, Himself didn’t grapple. The look of desperation changed to one of utter hopelessness, and Himself turned away from him and very slowly walked to the French doors and stood looking out into the sweating night. He figured Himself was just getting used to the idea of not dying. There wasn’t a breath of air. A couple of meteors streaked across the sky. Then, mixed with the up-seeping night sounds of the city, there was a low whirring whistle.

  Himself shook a bit, as if he’d had a sudden chill. Then Himself turned around and slumped to the floor in one movement. Between his eyes was a black hole.

  Then and there this Snake I’m telling you about decided never again to try and change the past, as least not his personal past. He’d had it, and he’d also acquired a healthy respect for a High Command able to change the past, albeit with difficulty. He scooted back to the Dispatching Room, where a sleepy and surprised Snake gave him a terrific chewing-out and confined him to quarters. The chewing-out didn’t bother him too much—he’d acquired a certain fatalism about things. A person’s got to learn to accept reality as it is, you know—just as you’d best not be surprised at the way I disappear in a moment or two—I’m a Snake too, remember.

  If a statistician is looking for an example of a highly improbable event, he can hardly pick a more vivid one than the chance of a man being hit by a meteorite. And, if he adds the condition that the meteorite hit him between the eyes so as to counterfeit the wound made by a 32-caliber bullet, the improbability becomes astronomical cubed. So how’s a person going to outmaneuver a universe that finds it easier to drill a man through the head that way rather than postpone the date of his death?

  TRY AND TRY AGAIN

  Pierce Askegren

  When she came to our booth to take our order, the waitress did a double take, pausing in midstride and blinking in surprise. I didn’t mind. She was pretty, with a good figure and red hair (rare where I come from) and freckles (even rarer). Anything that encouraged her to linger at our table was fine with me.

  “Twins?” she said tentatively, looking at us.

  “Hardly,” said my lunch mate. His tone and expression said that she’d offended him with the question. Naturally, I found his offense offensive, but I tried not to let irritation show in my voice. The situation was already unstable enough and I figured it would be a good idea to defuse things.

  “It’s a long story,” I told her, with what I hoped was my most winning smile. “But we could we have a moment?”

  She nodded and flashed a dimpled grin, brief but real and directed just at me. “Just give a holler,” she said. “I’m Mackenzie, by the way.”

  I could understand her confusion. Seated across from me, he looked like a distorted reflection: the same lantern jaw and same black hair, even if mine had picked up traces of silver and receded a bit. The gray eyes and high cheekbones matched, too. But his nose had been broken at some point and not properly set, and his teeth were much better than mine. Even seated, he was nearly an inch taller than me and in better shape, too; his belly didn’t push out the way mine does.

  “She’s just doing her job,” I told my dining companion.

  “She’s a subcitizen,” he said. He spoke with the matter-of-fact arrogance of someone who really hadn’t yet accomplished very much with his life but fully intended to.

  I sighed. Laminated menus loomed vertically to either side of the table’s napkin dispenser. I took two and passed one to him. “Choose something to eat,” I said. “And don’t use terms like ‘subcitizen.’ It’s an anachronism and it’s offensive.”

  He glanced at me warily. Less than an hour had passed since I had encountered him in the town square, introduced myself, and invited him to lunch. He still hadn’t decided whether to trust me.

  “It’s not in common use,” I amplified. “You’ll call attention to yourself, and I don’t think you want to do that just yet.” I paused. “Look, what’s your name?”

  “You should know that,” he said, still suspicious.

  “I should, but I don’t,” I said. “Look, let’s put it another way. What do you want me to call you?”

  “Mark,” he said. “Mark was my grandfather’s name.” For the first time, he smiled, however faintly, and looked five years younger. Memory works like that. A good memory can make you young again.

  It wouldn’t have worked with me, though. The pleasant associations just weren’t there. I never met my grandfather and I never met my parents. Sometimes I even wondered if they’d ever met one ather. My childhood memories were of crèche attendants and instructor teams.

  “That was my grandfather’s name, too,” I told him, scanning the menu. It was nothing special and held no surprises or mysteries that I could see, but he puzzled over his like an instruction manual. It was easy to see that he’d never been in a place like this before.

  Where we were was a small-town diner in southern Virginia, less than a mile off the Interstate and almost as close to a minor, but well-regarded, college. The eatery catered equally to truckers and students. Far from being a “subcitizen,” whatever that was, Mackenzie looked to me like she was waiting tables to earn her tuition. The restaurant air was heavy with appetizing aromas and slightly thickened by cooking grease. We’d taken our seats at the tail-end of the lunch rush and the place was still
busy, populated by people too occupied with their own business to care about ours. That was one reason I’d picked it.

  Mark was still working his way through the menu, I saw. “What kind of place is this?” he asked. “Everything has meat in it.”

  “Not everything,” I said, and pointed. “Here. Vegetarian.”

  Mackenzie came back. Mark ordered a salad but I opted for a roast beef sandwich, ignoring Mark’s tch of disgust. If my eating meat was the biggest shock he had to put up with today, he could consider himself lucky.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked as she moved away into the bustle her workaday world.

  He looked at me but didn’t say anything.

  “It hasn’t been long,” I said, matter-of-factly. I had been in town for nearly a week, keeping an eye out for Mark or someone like him. He must have just arrived. “You still have that deer-in-the-headlights look.”

  “Huh?” he asked. My word choice had confused him.

  I sighed. There was so much that people in our line of work need to know, but no one ever seems able to learn it all, at least not in advance. Local idioms were the hardest. “Shellshocked,” I said again. “Confused. Disoriented.” I paused. “There’s a lot to take in, Mark, and you’re going to have to do it fast. They must have told you that.”

  Mackenzie brought our food. At my suggestion, Mark had ordered iced tea, but I’d selected beer, netting me more of his disdain. She’d brought a pitcher of iced water, too, and topped off our glasses.

  “Let me know if you need anything more,” she said, with a casual touch to my shoulder. I liked her. She was just friendly enough that I could pretend she was flirting, so I smiled, too. Courtship games were another thing that had taken some getting used to.

  “She touched you,” Mark said. Apparently, his personal boundaries were very different than mine.

  “It’s an old waitress trick,” I said. “Casual contact almost always leads to bigger tips.”

  “Tips?”

  I sighed again. He really did have a lot to learn. “How old are you?” I asked.

  “That’s not an easy question,” he said. Once again, he smiled, however faintly. His sense of humor was like mine, too.

  Food for thought, that.

  “Work with me here,” I said. Another bit of vernacular welled up in my mind, and I grinned. “If you can’t trust me, who can you trust?” I asked.

  Rather than answer, Mark picked up a fork and began to push food around on his plate, as if he’d misplaced something in the jumble of greens and vegetables. He speared a radish slice, eyed it skeptically, then popped it into his mouth. Loud crunching sounds followed, and his face lit with sheer delight as he continued to chew. It was easy to see that he’d never eaten genuine dirt-grown produce before.

  The salad would likely keep him busy for a while, so I turned my attention to my own meal, thin slices of beef served open-face on whole wheat toast and awash in a sea of brown gravy. It was diner food, fast and cheap and loaded with more salt than could possibly be healthy. Even so, I made a great show of enjoying it. Mark’s disdain still rankled.

  Where I come from, animal flesh was a delicacy, scarce and expensive. I hadn’t tasted beef until Graduation Day, when Academy classmates had convened a dinner to celebrate full citizenship. The serving I ate so casually now dwarfed what I’d been served then. Even the gravy I sopped with extra bread would have cost a day’s credit.

  Mark had paused. He eyed my plate skeptically, but this time, with a glimmer of interest. My enthusiasm had piqued his curiosity.

  “How old?” I asked him again.

  Sharing food tends to inspire trust, for some reason. Or fellowship, at least. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference now,” he said slowly. “I was born in ’32. They sent me back in ’52.”

  He was just a kid. The realization made me feel very old. “Who is ‘they?’ ” I asked.

  Whoever they were, they were getting desperate, I decided, sending a kid back on a job like this.

  I hoped it had been the Academy. They weren’t fun but they were familiar. I knew how the Academy worked and how Academy agents thought. Not so with the Cadre, though. As near as I could tell, those guys practiced a type of institutionalized anarchism and never did anything the same way twice. Any long term goals they held went beyond my understanding.

  “The Imperium, of course,” Mark said.

  “The Imperium!?” I asked. I’d never heard of it before. “What the hell is the Imperium?”

  If I’d offended him before, it had been with little things that really didn’t matter very much to either of us. This was different. This time, I’d questioned the very bedrock of his life. Worse, I’d done so casually, even dismissively. He scowled at me and set down his fork with dramatic emphasis.

  “Was Sizemore running things?” I asked. It was almost always Sizemore, at the Academy and the Cadre alike.

  “I know Sizemore,” Mark said, seizing on the familiar name and relaxing. Familiar was good when you found yourself in a new world. I knew that from experience.

  “Of course you do,” I said, soothing. “We both work for him. Now, tell me what you know about the Imperium.”

  Because he really was just a kid, and one who’d been trained to obey, he did. As we worked our way through the meal, he offered up a brief history of his Imperium.

  None of it made a whole lot of sense. Apparently, where Mark came from, the Revolution Academe had never happened, let alone happened and prevailed, and the French government had remained pretty much intact until the end of the century. The revolt’s absence meant that there had been no Academy, not as I’d known it, and no Cadre, either. The Battle of New Flanders had never happened, so the New Monarchism had never been quashed. Thus, the Imperium.

  The scenario was new to me, and not easy to accept. I had no tears to shed for the Cadre, but I have to admit that the complete nonexistence of the Academy, even as a footnote, was a bit of a shock. Better the devil you know than the one that you don’t and all that. And it sounded to me like Mark’s outfit combined the worst elements of my people and the Cadre both. The whole thing gave me pause, even though I knew it didn’t really matter.

  “So things actually get worse,” I said. I set down my fork and reached for the beer Mackenzie had brought with the food. Two gulps half-drained the bottle and made the world a slightly better place.

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” he said. He was speaking like a good citizen now. The only reason I didn’t worry about his being overheard was that what he was saying would have made even less sense to eavesdroppers than it did to me. “Antarctica is nearly pacified, and the Biomass Affiance Protocols have been implemented. All we need is more time. In two generations—”

  “Mark,” I said, interrupting as gently as I could. “That’s not going to happen. None of it. And Sizemore’s never going to pull you back. He’s gone, too.”

  I watched carefully to see how he responded, remembering my own reaction to his news about the Academy. Mark was ten years younger than me, and looked like he was in better shape. Depending on the nature of his assignment, he might be dangerous. It didn’t seem likely that Sizemore would have armed him with a mumble-gun or a nerve-knife or any other technology that could cause long-range problems, but he had a fork in one hand and a knife in the other. A properly trained man in good condition could do a lot of damage with either. I knew that from experience, but I needn’t have worried. He responded with confusion and surprise rather than violence, about the way I would have.

  “What?” he said. “But Sizemore sent you—”

  “My Sizemore. He’s gone, too.”

  “But—”

  “Just a moment,” I said, raising my hand. Mackenzie was coming back to check on us. She seemed to have an excellent sense of timing. “Do you want dessert?” I asked Mark.

  “Dessert?” It was as if he’d never heard the word.

  I sighed. The Imperium sounded less and less like a place
where I would want to live.

  The waitress gathered up our plates, with the kind of efficiency and grace that comes only with practice. That was another reason I liked eating at places like the diner; it was always good to see someone do a job well and enjoy doing it.

  “You didn’t finish your sandwich,” she said, in mild reproof. “It was okay?”

  “It was fine,” I said.

  “How about you?” she asked Mark. He’d scoured his plate, but she still wanted to know. “How was the salad?”

  “It was fine,” he told her, parroting my words. He was learning.

  “Anything else, then?” she asked. “We’ve got banana cream pie today.”

  “That sounds good, but I’ll tell you what sounds better,” I said. “Root beer floats. Two, with extra syrup and whipped cream.”

  “Good choice!” she said.

  “Beer has alcohol, right?” Mark asked tentatively. He seemed relieved to have something else to talk about. “I don’t drink alcohol. It’s forbidden.”

  “It’s root beer,” I said. “Something different. You’ll see.”

  He looked doubtful.

  “Smile at her when she comes back,” I said. “They like that. Make eye contact, too. It’s polite.”

  “I don’t think I need to learn the local mores.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “Mark, you’re going to be here a long time.”

  He shook his head doggedly. “No more than seventeen local hours,” he said. “Then I go home.”

  Seventeen hours. I thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re here for the conference, aren’t you?”

  It was a college town. The local school was primarily a liberal arts operation, but the Dean of Mathematics had aspirations. He’d been able to justify and arrange a gathering of promising students from across the country, an invitation-only conclave complete with guest lecturers. In the here-and-now, it was nothing special, but I knew that it was precisely the type of event that loomed large in written histories. People would meet one another for the first time. Insights would be imparted, personal and professional relationships formed. Lives would be shaped. I tried to keep an eye out for events like the conference, and the announced topic had been particularly interesting.