by Anthology
“What’s the matter, Pete?” he said. “Still trying to figure our chances to six decimals? That doesn’t pay, in business like ours.”
Peter Harrison looked at the moon just rising behind the Pyramids. “That’s just what does pay, in business like ours. You figure your chances, as close as you can.”
“Sure. But when you’ve done that, why keep worrying? We’ll never know the score any closer than we do now—until we get back. Better let me run you down to the Semiramis for a drink.”
Peter shook his head. “Thanks. But I’m not in a drinking mood, now.” He scuffed his boot in the sand while he stared across the desert and brooded on the rocket ship waiting there in the dusk. “Call me anything you like, except a fool,” he said. “I’m not trying to back out on the deal. I knew what I was in for when I signed up, months ago, but I had supposed the job would look more certain, this close to take-off time. When the Tycho lifts for the moon, I go with it, but it’s not only the conservatives who are wondering if the ship will ever get back. Even the big gamblers are getting cold feet, and last night when I walked up Kasr el Nil, I couldn’t go half a block without some laddie in a nightgown stepping up and offering me sixty to forty that the Tycho will never get back.”
“So what?” said Bill. “Do you think the U.N. would have set up a project on this scale, gone to the enormous trouble of getting permission from the Egyptian Government to make this installation smack in the middle of the desert, half-way from nowhere, if they thought the jump would fail? Would they have spent millions to build the Hyperphysics Institute, to erect the Moonport, and to import thousands of specialists, just for a whim?”
“I know, I know! But I want to feel certain—absolutely certain—that I’ve checked every possibility of things going wrong. Be serious, Bill. What do you think the chances are of the Tycho’s getting us to the moon and back again, safely?”
Bill shrugged his shoulders. “What do you think I am, a fortune-teller? Maybe you should ask Jim Dutton or one of his boys over at Temporal Research to peek into the future for you.”
“I’m not kidding! I just want to figure probabilities.”
“But we’ve already figured probabilities, till those computers inside are leaking probabilities at the seams! There are four of us making the trip on the Tycho—you, me, Carl Johansson, and Pete Harriman—though how they came to foul things up by choosing two guys with names so much alike, is beyond me. Out of the four of us, what makes you so special? Pete Harriman and Carl Johansson seem able to take the risk in their stride, just like me. Yet they’ve both got wives, which you and I haven’t, and Carl even has a kid. I heard you were the worrying kind before we signed up for this deal, but I never guessed you’d take it so hard. Are you always like this?”
A hail came across the rocky plateau.
“Ya Pasha! Ya Pasha!”
They turned to see a running Arab, his bare feet slapping noiselessly over the sand, the skirts of his blue and white galabiya streaming behind him as he ran.
Out of breath, he reached the jeep and gasped, “Ya Pasha Harriman!”
“Wrong man,” said Peter. “I’m Harrison, not Harriman, and I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me Pasha. In America we don’t have any nobility, remember, and plain Colonel is good enough for me.”
“Okay, Pasha Harriman.”
Peter sighed. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Abdou, I’m Harri-son. It’s the bald-headed flyer that’s Harri-man. They call him hairy-man, because he hasn’t got any hair. Is that clear?”
Bill Danforth chuckled, as he spoke to the puzzled Arab. “He’s just trying to confuse you, Abdou. Don’t pay any attention. All you have to do is remember: red hair equals Harrison.”
“Excuse me, ya Pasha,” said Abdou. “My ears do not hear the difference well, and so it is hard to remember. But the young lady at the Hyperphysics Institute, the one at the communications office, sent me to get you. The man with red hair who is going to the moon, she said. There’s a radiophone call for you, from America.”
“Who’s calling me?”
“That’s not for me to say, sir. I think it is another young lady.”
“Oh, no!” said Peter, his forehead creased in a frown. “I wonder if it can be Ruth?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Bill. “Who’s Ruth?”
“A girl I know. I wonder if something’s happened—”
“Hop in the jeep,” said Bill. “You too, Abdou. Crawl in the back and we’ll give you a lift.”
In the club lounge of the Hyperphysics Institute, Peter sat on the edge of his air-cushioned chair, radiophone in hand, listening to the appalling jumble of sounds beamed into his ear.
“No!” he shouted. “I was not calling the chief Lamasery in Tibet. I’m trying to get a call from America.”
A white robed waiter, resplendent in scarlet tarbush, scarlet sash, and scarlet sandals, hurried up to place a frosted glass on the table before him, then padded away.
Ignoring the glass, Peter gripped the phone more tightly as he cried out, “Ruth! Then it was you! I can’t hear you very well, Ruth. No, operator, this is not the Addis Ababa airport, I’m trying to talk to Chicago. What’s that, Ruth? Yes, the takeoff is less than a month away, now, and as soon as we get back I’ll phone you, and you can send out the invitations. What’s that? You’re coming here?”
The warm voice rose and fell in his ear as though it were bobbing on the waves of the sea.
“The family seems to want a vacation,” she said. “We’re rocketing to London, and flying on to Cairo. We’ll arrive two weeks from today, and you can make arrangements at the Embassy for us to be married there, the evening we arrive.”
“But Ruth!” he protested, “we can’t take the chance. I’ve already explained all this to you.”
“I know you have, Pete. You’ve been explaining for nearly five years, now. First we couldn’t get married because you hadn’t finished your doctorate. Then we had to wait because it wasn’t enough for you to be a physicist, you had to know rocket theory too. Then you put it off because it wasn’t a hundred per cent certain that you’d survive the first transatlantic rocket flight. Well, you survived, just as I said you would. But did we get married? No, you asked me to wait until you’d completed the organization of the Thorium plant, because it might blow up and take you with it, along with the state of Nebraska. And now you want to wait until you’ve got back from the moon. Right?”
“Right,” said Peter, in a small voice.
‘I’m not a toy, to be kept on the shelf forever, Peter. I’ve got pioneer blood in my veins, and I’m just as ready to share the risk of the future with my man as my great-great-great grandmother was when she sat beside by grandfather in a covered wagon, and crossed the middlewestern prairies in the dead of winter. No, Pete, this is your last chance. You make arrangements for our wedding to take place at the Embassy, two weeks from tonight, or else the wedding just isn’t going to take place, ever.”
Peter reached for his misted glass and gulped down half the drink.
“Be reasonable, Ruth! What would happen to you if I don’t come back from the moon? Get off the line, operator! I don’t understand Italian.”
Ruth’s gentle voice came clearly. “You can waste a lifetime, being reasonable. If I’m willing to take a chance, Pete, why shouldn’t you be? Is it a deal?”
He wiped his streaming forehead, and said weakly, “All right, darling. It’s a deal. Two weeks from tonight.” The phone clicked off, and he replaced the set in its cradle in the arm of his chair. He drained the rest of his drink and sank back into the cushions. Glaring distractedly around the crowded lounge, he wondered if there was anyone around who could give him good advice right now?
Carl Johansson, he supposed, was having a family dinner at home, in the suburb of Maadi. Bill Danforth had gone into Cairo, to take in a new night club. He noticed Peter Harriman making for the ping pong room, his bald head gleaming under the lights—but Pete Harriman’s wife had gone back
to the States, and he was soured on matrimony.
A hand clapped him on the shoulder.
“Hi, Pete! You look low.”
It was Jim Dutton, head of Temporal Research. He’d known Jim at M.I.T., and had always liked him.
“Well, the fact is,” Pete began.
“It can’t be that bad, whatever it is,” said Jim. “Sorry. I’m meeting the wife for dinner in the Cheops Room, and I’m late. Tempestuous Tessie kept me overtime tonight.” He hurried away.
The crowd in the lounge was thinning, now, as people went in to dinner. Peter sat up and clapped his hands sharply together. When the waiter came running, he snapped an order.
“Another Moon Fizz.”
“Haadir!” said the waiter, and padded away.
Four Moon Fizzes later, Peter wove his way out of the lounge, took the escalator to the ground floor, exhibited his wrist identification to the soldier at the entrance, and emerged into the radiance of night in the desert. He looked up, and tried to focus his eyes. The moon was high in the sky, now, and her light was reflected from the white slopes of the Pyramids to the north of him.
He strolled on, aimlessly toward the Hyperphysics Institute, known to its workers as the Labyrinth, because the many cells of its offices and laboratories spread over a full acre of desert. His head was beginning to clear and as he looked at the pattern of lighted windows in the few labs where research went on twenty-four hours a day, he remembered a scrap of conversation.
It was ten days ago, the day of his arrival in Cairo. Abdou, acting as his guide, had been taking him to the gyro-lab. They had passed the open door of a room from which issued a high-pitched, nerve-shattering, mechanical whine, and his skin had crawled with the physical discomfort of that noise.
“What are they doing in there, Abdou?” he had asked.
Abdou smiled, and spread out his hands, palms upwards.
“It is not for me to say, ya Pasha. They say they are learning how to travel into the middle of next week. Perhaps it is a joke?”
Had it been a joke, Peter wondered? But the middle of next week wouldn’t do me any good. If only I could travel into the middle of next month, now, and find out for myself whether the Tycho will return!
He stopped short near the doorway, and an Egyptian Captain saluted smartly.
“Something wrong, Colonel Harrison? Can I help you?”
“No, thank you, Captain Hussain. I think I’ll just take another turn around before I call it a day. Nothing wrong.”
He smiled to himself as he wandered on in the moonlight. Nothing wrong at all!
Suddenly, like a jumble of letters suddenly forming themselves into a familiar word, various isolated remarks overheard in the past few days had tied themselves into coherence. He had a flash of conviction that the boys in Temporal Research had indeed learned how to travel into the middle of next week, and a whole plan of action blue-printed itself in his mind.
He still remembered something of the hyperphysics he had studied during his five years at M.I.T., and in their senior year all his class had learned the physical theory underlying the concept of time travel. Since then, he had scarcely thought of the subject, but it was hardly surprising that some practical progress should have been made since he left college. Against Jim Dutton’s advice, he remembered, he had by-passed Physics X, the course in the philosophy of time travel, having no patience with such nonsensical questions as “What would you do if you ran into yourself in the street?” When the technique reached perfection, he had always believed, such hypothetical paradoxes would be bound to vanish in the reality.
He returned to the Labyrinth.
Pausing before the guard at the entrance, he showed his wrist identification and strode in purposefully, and combed the lounge until he located Jim Dutton relaxing with a long cool drink.
“Hi, Jim,” he said. “Did you find your wife all right?”
“She’s gone on home. One of the youngsters was having an attack of gyppy tummy.”
“Too bad. Say, Jim, why do you bother with the drinks they make here? Come on down to Shepheard’s with me, and I’ll buy you a real, genuine Moon Fizz.”
Jim pulled himself to his feet, and yawned. “Can do, I guess. Just a night-cap, though.”
“I’ve been wanting to hear more details of the work in Temporal Research. Is it true that you boys can get as far ahead as the middle of next week?”
“You want to hear about the exploits of Tempestuous Tessie, do you? You underestimate her, Pete. She’s got so she can push ahead as far as the middle of next month, and not even breathe hard!”
The laboratories on corridor J 3 were usually quiet and deserted by seven o’clock each evening, and on five successive nights Peter had managed to slip into the corridor, unobserved, quietly to open the door whose brass plate read Temporal Research, and lock the door behind him. With the entrances of the Institute so completely guarded, no unauthorized person could enter the building, but an authorized person, once in, was free to wander where he liked, on the principle that no one would meddle in research that did not concern him.
At first glance, the research had seemed to consist of nothing but paper work, the feeding and milking of the giant computers in the room. But Jim Dutton had allowed himself more than a “night-cap,” while discussing the habits of Tempestuous Tessie with his old classmate, and had canvassed the subject in such detail that Peter had no trouble in locating the door concealed in the air-conditioning unit, and entering the softly lighted tunnel which led to an underground room not far from the third Pyramid.
Tempestuous Tessie was located in the ruins of a mastaba, the tomb of one Lord Harakhte, a long forgotten noble, and its stone walls still bore traces of color where paintings had been. Just below the ceiling, at ground level, two modern windows had been installed, about six inches square, not likely to be noticed even if some tourist should wander so far from the conventional tour of the antiquities. One rock wall was covered with a slab of transparent neo-lucite, studded with numerous dials and rheostats, and the main buss bars were connected to power cables as thick as a man’s arm. The opposite wall was overlaid with a complex of circuit diagrams, in engineer’s shorthand.
In the center of the room stood Tempestuous Tessie, a plastic chair standing in a cube made of the intricate intermeshing of steel and aluminum ribbons.
By his sixth night of work, Peter felt himself ready for his little jump into the middle of next month. He had made his plans with his customary care, and nothing at all, he was certain, could go wrong. It would be as simple as ordering a drink at a bar, and getting it.
The schedule of the Tycho called for her to blast off at dawn, on Saturday, February 10. She would land on the moon some seven hours later, her crew of four would spend several days in observation, exploring the surface and recording data, and the rocket would return to its base the following Friday morning, February 16. This first trip was just a trial run, a pilot journey for future research.
After much careful, calculation, Peter decided to set the machine to project him to that important Friday at around eleven o’clock in the morning. He would then take a desert taxi to the Moonport, and if he were lucky he might see with his own eyes the landing of the ship. If the Tycho arrived before he did, he had only to ask some passer-by the details of the landing, or to read about them in the daily paper.
The power supply of the machine would limit his stay in the future to four hours, and if at the end of that time, by three in the afternoon, the ship had not returned, he would know that some terrible accident had occurred, and that in all probability the ship and its crew would never again reach Earth.
It was all very simple, he thought. Just an hour’s glimpse of the future, and he would be able to order his entire life as a sensible man likes to do.
He glanced at his wrist watch. A few minutes before eleven. He checked the settings on the dials. All correct.
He settled back into the chair, closed his eyes, and closed the switch.
He felt slightly dizzy when he opened his eyes, but as he stepped from the cage a current of cold air from the surface helped to revive him. His watch read just eleven. Quickly he climbed up the narrow ramp, the once secret entrance left centuries ago by the mastaba’s builders, and emerged into the desert daylight. Walking quickly down the slope toward the Pyramids, he pushed through the stream of tourists until he reached the crowd of dragomans, waiting near the entrance of the Great Pyramid.
A white-bearded patriarch with cane in hand and ingratiating smile on his face approached him.
“Want a nice camel ride, mister?”
“No, no,” said Peter, glancing impatiently at the sky. “Can you tell me if the ship has come back from the moon, yet?”
“Very nice camel, mister. His name is George Washington. He rides easy.”
Peter shook off the restraining hand. “No, I want a desert taxi to take me over to the Moonport. I want to see the ship when it comes in.”
“Too late, mister,” said the dragoman. “Ship came in yesterday. You better stop worrying about the moon, and take nice camel ride instead.”
“What!” shouted Peter. “Are you sure it came in yesterday?”
“I’m sure, okay. Yesterday no business here. No tourists. Nobody wanted camel rides, everybody watching the ship come back from the moon. Business is very bad, mister. I have many children; and they don’t have enough to eat. Give me ten piasters for my family.”
“Blast your family,” said Peter. “I want to know about the ship. Why did she come back yesterday?”
“Something wrong. Where were you yesterday, not to hear? People all talked about it.”
“Never mind where I was yesterday. What went wrong?”
“How should I know? I’m only a poor old man with many hungry children.”
“Did everybody get back safe?”
“God, he knows,” said the old man, “but people say that two of the men, Americans, like you, were carried out of the ship on stretchers. And they say that the American government will send the bodies back to America. But only God knows.”