Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Rising stiffly, uncoiling his lengthy limbs, Poul Anderson said, “I think you have what you want, there. The mass restoration formula is on typescript page 20.”

  Eagerly, Fermeti turned the pages. Yes, there it was; peering over his shoulder, Tozzo saw the paragraph:

  If the ship followed a trajectory which would carry it into the star Proxima, it would, he realized, regain its mass through a process of leeching solar energy from the great star-furnace itself. Yes, it was Proxima itself which held the key to Torelli’s problem, and now, after all this time, it had been solved. The simple formula revolved in his brain.

  And, Tozzo saw, there lay the formula. As the article said, the mass would be regained from solar energy converted into matter, the ultimate source of power in the universe. The answer had stared them in the face all this time!

  Their long struggle was over.

  “And now,” Poul Anderson said, “I’m free to go back to my own time?”

  Fermeti said simply, “Yes.”

  “Wait,” Tozzo said to his superior. “There’s evidently something you don’t understand.” It was a section which he had read in the instruction manual attached to the time-dredge. He drew Fermeti to one side, where Anderson could not hear. “He can’t be sent back to his own time with the knowledge he has now.”

  “What knowledge?” Fermeti inquired.

  “That—well, I’m not certain. Something to do with our society, here. What I’m trying to tell you is this: the first rule of time travel, according to the manual, is don’t change the past. In this situation just bringing Anderson here has changed the past merely by exposing him to our society.”

  Pondering, Fermeti said, “You may be correct. While he was in that gift shop he may have picked up some object which, taken back to his own time, might revolutionize their technology.”

  “Or at the magazine rack at the spaceport,” Tozzo said. “Or on his trip between those two points. And—even the knowledge that he and his colleagues are pre-cogs”

  “You’re right,” Fermeti said. “The memory of this trip must be wiped from his brain.” He turned and walked slowly back to Poul Anderson. “Look here,” he addressed him. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but everything that’s happened to you must be wiped from your brain.”

  After a pause, Anderson said, “That’s a shame. Sorry to hear that.” He looked downcast. “But I’m not surprised,” he murmured. He seemed philosophical about the whole affair. “It’s generally handled this way.”

  Tozzo asked, “Where can this alteration of the memory cells of his brain be accomplished?”

  “At the Department of Penology,” Fermeti said. “Through the same channels we obtained the convicts.” Pointing his sleep-gun at Poul Anderson he said, Come along with us. I regret this . . . but it has to be done.”

  VI

  At the Department of Penology, painless electroshock removed from Poul Anderson’s brain the precise cells in which his most recent memories were stored. Then, in a semi-conscious state, he was carried back into the time-dredge. A moment later he was on his trip back to the year 1954, to his own society and time. To the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in downtown San Francisco, California and his waiting wife and child.

  When the time-dredge returned empty, Tozzo, Gilly and Fermeti breathed a sigh of relief and broke open a bottle of hundred-year-old Scotch which Fermeti had been saving. The mission had been successfully accomplished; now they could turn their attention back to the Project.

  “Where’s the manuscript that he wrote?” Fermeti said, putting down his glass to look all around his office.

  There was no manuscript to be found. And, Tozzo noticed, the antique Koyal typewriter which they had brought from the Smithsonian—it was gone, too. But why?

  Suddenly chill fear traveled up him. He understood.

  “Good Lord,” he said thickly. He put down his glass. “Somebody get a copy of the journal with his article in it. At once.”

  Fermeti said, “What is it, Aaron? Explain.”

  “When we removed his memory of what had happened we made it impossible for him to write the article for the journal,” Tozzo said. “He must have based Night Flight on his experience with us, here.” Snatching up the August 1955 copy of If he turned to the table-of-contents page.

  No article by Poul Anderson was listed. Instead, on page 78, he saw Philip K. Dick’s The Mold of Yancy listed instead.

  They had changed the past after all. And now the formula for their Project was gone—gone entirely.

  “We shouldn’t have tampered,” Tozzo said in a hoarse voice. “We should never have brought him out of the past.” He drank a little more of the century-old Scotch, his hands shaking.

  “Brought who?” Gilly said, with a puzzled look.

  “Don’t you remember?” Tozzo stared at him, incredulous.

  “What’s this discussion about?” Fermeti said impatiently. “And what are you two doing in my office? You both should be busy at work.” He saw the bottle of Scotch and blanched. “How’d that get open?”

  His hands trembling, Tozzo turned the pages of the journal over and over again. Already, the memory was growing diffuse in his mind; he struggled in vain to hold onto it. They had brought someone from the past, a pre-cog, wasn’t it? But who? A name, still in his mind but dimming with each passing moment . . . Anderson or Anderton, something like that. And in connection with the Bureau’s interstellar mass-deprivation Project. Or was it?

  Puzzled, Tozzo shook his head and said in bewilderment, “I have some peculiar words in my mind. Night Flight. Do either of you happen to know what it refers to?”

  “Night Flight” Fermeti echoed. “No, it means nothing to me. I wonder, though it certainly would be an effective name for our Project.”

  “Yes,” Gilly agreed. “That must be what it refers to.”

  “But our Project is called Waterspider, isn’t it?” Tozzo said. At least he thought it was. He blinked, trying to focus his faculties.

  “The truth of the matter, ” Fermeti said, “is that we’ve never titled it.” Brusquely, he added, “But I agree with you; that’s an even better name for it. Waterspider. Yes, I like that.”

  The door of the office opened and there stood a uniformed, bonded messenger. “From the Smithsonian,” he informed them. “You requested this.” He produced a parcel, which he laid on Fermeti’s desk.

  “I don’t remember ordering anything from the Smithsonian,” Fermeti said. Opening it cautiously he found a can of roasted, ground coffee beans, still vacuum packed, over a century old.

  The three men looked at one another blankly.

  “Strange,” Torelli murmured. “There must be some mistake.”

  “Well,” Fletcher said, “in any case, back to Project Waterspider.” Nodding, Torelli and Oilman turned in the direction of their own office on the first floor of Outward, Incorporated, the commercial firm at which they has worked and the project on which they had labored, with so many heartaches and setbacks, for so long.

  At the Science Fiction Convention at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Poul Anderson looked around him in bewilderment. Where had he been? Why had he gone out of the building? And it was an hour later; Tony Boucher and Jim Gunn had left for dinner by now, and he saw no sign of his wife Karen and the baby, either.

  The last he remembered was two fans from Battlecreek who wanted him to look at a display outside on the sidewalk. Perhaps he had gone to see that. In any case, he had no memory of the interval.

  Anderson groped about in his coat pocket for his pipe, hoping to calm his oddly jittery nerves—and found, not his pipe, but instead a folded piece of paper.

  “Got anything for our auction, Poul?” a member of the Convention committee asked, halting beside him. “The auction is just about to start—we have to hurry.”

  Still looking at the paper from his pocket, Poul murmured, “Urn, you mean something here with me?”

  “Like a typescript of some published story, the original man
uscript or earlier versions or notes. You know.” He paused, waiting.

  “I seem to have some notes in my pocket,” Poul said, still glancing over them. They were in his handwriting but he didn’t remember having made them. A time-travel story, from the look of them. Must have been from those Bourbons and water, he decided, and not enough to eat. “Here,” he said uncertainly, “it isn’t much but I guess you can auction these.” He took one final glance at them. “Notes for a story about a political figure called Gutman and a kidnapping in time. Intelligent slime mold, too, I notice.” On impulse, he handed them over.

  “Thanks,” the man said, and hurried on toward the other room, where the auction was being held.

  “I bid ten dollars,” Howard Browne called, smiling broadly. “Then I have to catch a bus to the airport.” The door closed after him.

  Karen, with Astrid, appeared beside Poul. “Want to go into the auction?” she asked her husband. “Buy an original Finlay?”

  “Um, sure,” Poul Anderson said, and with his wife and child walked slowly after Howard Browne.

  WHAT GOES AROUND

  Derryl Murphy

  Episode One:

  We meet our hero, learn a bit of his background, and leap wildly back and forth through time

  The opening sequence of “Space Cops” virtually guaranteed a great audience from the very beginning. Special effects that were extremely sophisticated for the time, exciting music and fastpaced action, and of course the handsome face of star and producer Henry Angel made for great television appeal, a very new concept at the time. As well, the series was true to the beliefs of the 1950’s; while fear of nuclear destruction hung over the heads of millions of Americans, the family, strong values and mostly a bright future were what they wanted to see on their primitive picture tubes each week.

  Witness this portion of the opening. Before credits roll, Captain Maxwell (played by Angel) and his sidekick Corporal Exeter (played by former child radio actor Spike Chapman) board their space car and launch from the asteroid they use as headquarters.

  Flames jet out from the exhaust, the car tumbles wildly, bucking and heaving until, through sheer physical might, Captain Maxwell rights it and flies into the camera, the dissolve moving from space car to Maxwell to space car to Maxwell almost seamlessly.

  Is it any wonder that such a nation, influenced so mightily by one show, would become the single most dominant space-faring country right into the late twenty-first century?

  From “Space Cops”: A Modern History,

  An AmeriNet 46 production

  Captain Michael Davis of Sector Seven pulls himself along the rails, eschewing the artificial gravity available to him at the wave of a hand. There is an emergency in his sector, a civilian ship overrun by criminals and pirates, and he needs to get to his space car as quickly as possible. Red lights flash and alarms ring all around him.

  “Davis, you there?”

  Captain Davis taps his wrist, activates his comm. “Here, Slam.” Slam Rankin is the dispatch officer for Sector Seven.

  “There are three of them, rogues that spilled over from the Belt Wars. We managed to get good pictures before they downed the emergency activator. One of them is Marcus Heimdal.”

  “Thanks, Slam. Over.” Heimdal! Davis picks up speed. Heimdal was the scourge of the force, but he’d gone missing four years before. Apparently to pull mercenary duty in the Belt. What was he doing back?

  Private Eddie Stern is waiting in his seat in the space car when Davis arrives. They quickly check all the functions, then get clearance to launch. The roar is momentarily deafening, and they are punched back into their seats as they clear Sector Seven H.Q. The car bucks and rocks and rolls for a moment, but Davis pulls it back under control and they head off to intercept the civilian ship and the pirates aboard it.

  Private Stern occupies himself with readying the weapons and checking his helmet. Nerves of steel, that boy.

  They approach the civilian ship.

  Henry sits in his living room, black and white TV screen flickering silently in the background, bottle of beer in hand, waiting for another visit. He knows that if he goes into his bedroom, it will happen right away, but he does not want that. In a perfect world, none of this would be happening, he wouldn’t be afraid that he was losing his sanity, he wouldn’t be losing himself in three cases of beer a day. In a perfect world he would have made it, wouldn’t have been caught with that lighting tech and fallen into a daze of beer and whiskey, paid for by hocking furniture and crappy little jobs for shithead directors in films that no one will ever see, or ever want to see.

  And a fucking crazy ghost from the future wouldn’t be visiting him.

  As we see in this colorized footage of him signing autographs, Henry Angel was not only remarkably successful and popular, he was also very genial. He was especially fond of children, and often broke off early from public functions if he knew of a pick-up game of baseball being played in some nearby neighborhood.

  But, it must be admitted, there was a dark side to Henry Angel. He was twice-divorced, and records show that he once received a speeding ticket from the California Highway Patrol (see: CHiPs; Erik Estrada; 1970’s). But this did not ever get in the way of his popularity.

  “Found him!” The voice is distant, kind of muffled.

  “Hmm?”

  “I said I found him. He’s locked, Michael, settled and ready to pull!”

  Michael switches on slomo/delay, tunes half of his view to see a representation of Arnold’s face; a little fuzzy, motion not quite realtime, little mem going into receiving the visit, most being kept for the standard functions. “You’re serious?”

  Arnold’s face jumps about as he nods; his scalp slides off and floats momentarily through the air before settling in again on his chin, a new beard. “I found him at the address we got from those old files.”

  “Does he know?”

  A herky-jerky smile, teeth dancing a chorus line, all dressed up in perfect little tuxes. “I’ve been there three times now, tried to talk to him. He doesn’t want to hear it, so I figure I should do the pull, explain from this side. Fait accompli, as it were.”

  “Good idea,” says Mike. “I’ll be out as soon as I finish running this mission.”

  When the ghost comes the last time for him, Henry is ready. Good and pissed, but ready. He stands, a little shakily, brushes pretzel crumbs from his shirt and pants, then stumbles forward into the receptor, glaring white light and screaming winds pounding his senses, scaring him so bad he shits his pants as he steps in and falls through time.

  I mean, why the fuck not?

  Episode Two:

  Our hero begins to see the future as it might really be

  (POV Shift: Pull camera back, encompassing view of large office area. Tangled mass of wires lead from deposit site to fuser and two well-used pocket supercomputers sitting on otherwise empty desk, walls a nondescript and unadorned brown, doors occupying three of them)

  Henry staggered as he hit the floor, shuffled drunkenly for a second or two, then fell flat on his face. A pair of hands gently grabbed him around the waist and lifted him up, helped him shuffle along the floor and through a door, where he was sat upon a cot. He blinked fiercely the whole time, trying to shake the vicious light from his head, the spinning of the decades and more from his eyes.

  “There’s a toilet behind you,” said a voice, presumably belonging to the hands. “I’ll leave you for a few minutes, let you clean up. You can drop your clothes in the basket by the sink; there’s a fresh uniform for you, hanging on the wall behind me.” A door shut.

  Henry sat for another moment to let his eyes clear, uncomfortable with the lump of stool in his pants, unable to convince himself to get up. As things slipped back into focus, he took notice of what surrounded him in the room. It was small, maybe ten feet by twelve, the walls a quiet shade of brown and the door an off-white. The cot was small, low to the ground, and didn’t seem to have springs or any other metal; he felt with h
is hands and bent over to look, but couldn’t tell what it was made of. The toilet and sink were in plain view, no door or walls to block it off. Like a prison.

  The clothing hanging on the wall looked familiar. Henry stood up, with some trouble, and shuffled over to have a look.

  Aw, fuck!

  It was the uniform, that fucking uniform from that fucking show, the one that busted him, that caused so much shit and grief in his life. One episode and marked for life, even though couldn’t be more than a few dozen people even saw the thing. Stupid show, stupid tech, stupid booze, stupid everything!

  He went to the toilet, puked up the last dregs of his liquid supper, pissed, then cleaned himself. He stood there, looking at the uniform, trying to keep from shaking, and desperately wanting a beer.

  “Here we see the U.S.S. Spelling as it drifts silently through deep space, well beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Note the sleekness of her design, the fins and grids, pods and wires, that dance from her hull like leaping, shining metallic rainbows. The gun and missile placements bristle angrily, ready to take on any and all comers, looking for an excuse to put down further armed rebellion.

  “This newest ship in the fleet, the pride of our armed might in space, is the replacement for the late, great U.S.S. Tesh, sadly lost with all hands in the gravity well of Saturn after a cowardly attack by . . .

  “Jesus, I’m getting all, all emotional. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll be all right, but . . . those boys, they died for our country.”

  From AmeriNet 46 News at 0336

  After much hesitation, Henry decided to put the uniform on. It fit well, better than that piece of crap that the costume designers had come up with for the pilot. It also had the added advantage that it didn’t stink like shit.

  Shortly after dressing, the door cracked open tentatively, then opened wide. A man stood there, the oddest-looking man Henry had ever seen.

  He was wearing a dull grey sweater that every few seconds rippled with what looked like tiny waves of oil-slick water, running in a different direction each time. His slacks were dark blue, almost black, and appeared to stiffen as the man stood still and then crack in a wild pattern of shiny crow’s feet whenever he shifted a leg; he wore pale green sandals and matching socks.