Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  A brown-faced urchin with a wooden box on his shoulder accosted him. “Shine your shoes, mister?”

  “Shoes don’t matter,” said Peter absently.

  “I give good shoe shine.”

  “Shoes are not important.” On sudden impulse he asked, “You don’t happen to know, I suppose, where I can buy a copy of yesterday’s paper?”

  “Okay, mister,” said the boy.

  His heart pounding with a wild hope, Peter stooped and clutched the boy’s shoulder, “You mean you know where to get one? A copy of yesterday’s paper, mind!”

  The boy looked alarmed, and tried to pull away. “Okay, mister!”

  “Don’t be afraid, just show me where the place is, right away!”

  But the boy pulled away, with dilated eyes, and almost crying, he bleated out, “Okay, mister! I give good shoe shine.”

  Peter let go and the boy raced down the street. Shoulders slumped, Peter walked on slowly. But he had taken only a few steps when a heavy body lurched into him from behind, and he whirled to look into the beaming face and slightly unfocussed eyes of a jovial American sailor.

  “Sorry, buddy,” said the sailor, “but these Egyptian sidewalks ain’t very steady. Pretty uncertain country, this is.”

  “How right you are,” said Peter, and started to walk away. But the sailor looked sympathetic and stopped him with a sunburned hand poked towards his chest.

  “Put’er there, mister. You look like you’d lost your last friend. But I’ll be your friend. What makes you look so down-cast? Did somebody die?”

  “Yes, somebody died,” said Peter.

  “Who died?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying this whole blessed day to get hold of a copy of yesterday’s paper, so I could find out.”

  “Tough luck,” said the sailor. “But I don’t see why you want to read the paper if it prints bad news like that. Why don’t you just ignore the whole thing?”

  He began to laugh, and grabbed Peter’s arm. “Say, that’s good, isn’t it? Just ignore the whole thing! Just like the story my uncle used to tell. You wanna hear this. When my uncle was a boy he lived on a farm, and there was this cat, see—”

  Peter pulled away and walked on rapidly, but when he reached the corner and was looking for a cab, he felt his shoulder grabbed again, and there was the sailor, still laughing.

  “You shouldn’t walk so fast on these unreliable sidewalks,” he said. “It’s hard for me to keep up with you. Well, this story my uncle used to tell, see, when he was a boy he lived on a farm, and they had this cat, and this cat she—”

  “Taxi!”

  A taxi screeched to a stop and Peter jumped in and slammed the door. The sailor peered through the dusty window, a hurt expression on his face.

  “Still worrying about that paper, mister? You’d feel better if you’d let me tell you about my uncle and this cat—”

  The acceleration of the car shook him off, and Peter glanced around to see him still standing there on the corner, looking puzzled and forlorn.

  It was half past two as the taxi bumped back along the Pyramids road. Peter sagged against the lumpy upholstery in utter defeat. The strains and tensions of the last three and a half hours had been so great that he could scarcely remember the original purpose of this wild journey into time. He could hardly have stated why he came, and what he hoped to gain. None of his reasons seemed to make any sense. He was conscious mainly of being unutterably tired, and of being very hungry.

  He could not remember having been so hungry since he was a small boy. How many hours had he been without food, he wondered? A minute? Four hours? Sixteen hours? Or two weeks? But the philosophical complications of travelling into the future were too intricate for his dulled mind, and he thought only, that it would be nice to have a sandwich.

  Ahead of them on the road he saw a neon sign, Pyramids Grill. It was a down-at-the-heels place, which he would never have chosen if he had had more time, but it was bandy.

  “Stop here,” he ordered the driver. “I’m hungry and tired. I’ll just sit here. You go inside and get me a cheese sandwich.”

  In less than five minutes he had a crudely wrapped sandwich in his hand, and was rolling on toward the Pyramids, but by now he lacked the energy even to eat.

  Pulled up once more in front of the Great Pyramid, he paid off his driver, waved away the guides, and trudged on through the sand.

  An Arab came running after him. “Tell your fortune, sir?”

  Peter shook his head, and kept on walking. He’d had enough of trying to look into the future. Up the slopes and onto the firmer stony ground and at last the wonderfully desirable ditch which led down into the stone room where Tempestuous Tessie waited.

  It was five minutes to three when he sank down onto the chair and closed the steel cradle. His uneaten sandwich lying limply in one hand, he leaned back, closed his eyes, and waited for the shift in time.

  When Peter Harrison opened his eyes in his own time segment, it was still eleven o’clock of the night he had left. He re-arranged the apparatus as it should be, plodded through the long tunnel back to the room called Temporal Research. There he pulled up a chair, laid his head on the desk, and slept.

  It was dawn when be awoke. A sudden spasm of fear lest he be found in the laboratory sent him hurrying into the corridor, down the escalator, and out of the building, where he exhibited his identification to the incurious soldier on guard.

  As he walked across the desert toward the line of Institute jeeps, one of which would take him to his room at the Semiramis, he remembered his sandwich.

  He tore off a piece of the paper so he could bite into the exposed corner of the sandwich, but kept the rest in place to protect the bread from his sweaty, dirty hand, and began munching on the bread and cheese, peeling back the wrapping as he ate.

  As he walked, he thought. His trip had accomplished nothing that he had hoped for. He still knew, no more than the rest of the crew, what his individual fate would be. He did know, of course, that the ship would return—but the other men had never doubted it. What were his chances of coming back alive?

  The return of the ship was a hundred per cent certain. And he had added to his knowledge the fact that two of the crew would be killed, and two would survive. He had learned, furthermore, that one Peter had lived, and one Peter had died. But which one? Had that information really helped him any? His individual chances were still exactly what they had been in the first place—fifty-fifty.

  Bill Danforth had always laughed at him for being a conservative. Ruth had teased him ever since he had known her as being a man who wouldn’t take a chance, a man who had to be sure. But he had always thought of himself just as a sensible man who tried to play safe.

  For the first time in his life, it occurred to him now that there are times when a man is a fool to play safe. While you’re alive, he thought, you have to take chances. Even when you can go into the future, you can’t always find out what the safe thing is to do. He was tired of being cautious. If you were always cautious, look at the fun you’d miss!

  The sun was rising in the east, and the long black shadows of the Pyramids stretched out across the desert sands. Peter straightened his shoulders, and took another bite of his sandwich.

  Well, he thought, I’ve made up my mind. After today, nobody will have any grounds for calling me a coward, or kidding me for betting only on a sure thing.

  He lifted his sandwich. He stared at it in the growing light, and his skin prickled. The paper by which he held the bread was a piece of torn newsprint, with English words on it. He dropped the bread to the ground and stared greedily at the mutilated column of print. Yes, it was a piece of yesterday’s paper, a part of the story about the landing of the Tycho.

  Frantically he read the fragment, searching for names.

  The piece he held said:

  (Cont. from page 1)

  Among the survivors w—

  Col. Carl Johansson, o—

  Hyperphysic
s Insti—

  and Col, Peter Har—

  distinguished graduat—

  That was all.

  With a yell of rage he dashed the paper to the ground, ripped it to pieces with his boots, and stamped the fragments into the sand.

  Behind him he heard a shrill call, and turned his head briefly to see the distant figure of a white-gowned Arab running after him.

  “Ya Pasha! Ya Pasha he called, waving a long arm.

  Doesn’t Abdou ever sleep? thought Peter angrily. I wish he’d leave me alone.

  “You dropped a piece of paper!” called Abdou. “Here is the piece you dropped!”

  Peter stopped dead. That corner of paper he had torn off, when he took his first bite of the sandwich! That must be the missing fragment which held the final letters of the incomplete name.

  Did the black type read “rison?” Or “riman?”

  Then he shrugged his shoulders. What does it matter? he muttered to himself. Only a fool demands certainty in this world. And even if he read the paper, the chances would still be fifty-fifty that the editor had gotten the names twisted, just as everybody else did. Even if it read “rison” he couldn’t be sure that was right!

  He turned his back on Abdou, and strode on toward the waiting jeep.

  He crawled into the seat, woke the sleepy driver, and in a voice of authority gave his order.

  “Take me to the American Embassy.”

  The driver stretched, and tried to smooth his rumpled hair. He yawned.

  “But they won’t be awake at the Embassy yet, sir. It isn’t six, yet.”

  “Never mind that,” said Peter, “Take me to the Embassy. I’m going to make arrangements for a wedding!”

  YESTERDAY WAS MONDAY

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Harry Wright rolled over and said something spelled “Bzzzzhha-a-aw!” He chewed a bit on a mouthful of dry air and spat it out, opened one eye to see if it really would open, opened the other and closed the first, closed the second, swung his feet onto the floor, opened them again and stretched. This was a daily occurrence, and the only thing that made it remarkable at all was that he did it on a Wednesday morning, and—

  Yesterday was Monday.

  Oh, he knew it was Wednesday all right. It was partly that, even though he knew yesterday was Monday, there was a gap between Monday and now; and that must have been Tuesday. When you fall asleep and lie there all night without dreaming, you know, when you wake up, that time has passed. You’ve done nothing that you can remember; you’ve had no particular thoughts, no way to gauge time, and yet you know that some hours have passed. So it was with Harry Wright. Tuesday had gone wherever your eight hours went last night.

  But he hadn’t slept through Tuesday. Oh no. He never slept, as a matter of fact, more than six hours at a stretch, and there was no particular reason for him doing so now.

  Monday was the day before yesterday; he had turned in and slept his usual stretch, he had awakened, and it was Wednesday.

  It felt like Wednesday. There was a Wednesdayish feel to the air.

  Harry put on his socks and stood up. He wasn’t fooled. He knew what day it was.

  “What happened to yesterday?” he muttered. “Oh—yesterday was Monday.” That sufficed until he got his pajamas off. “Monday,” he mused, reaching for his underwear, “was quite a while back, seems as though.” If he had been the worrying type, he would have started then and there. But he wasn’t. He was an easygoing sort, the kind of man that gets himself into a rut and stays there until he is pushed out. That was why he was an automobile mechanic at twenty-three dollars a week; that’s why he had been one for eight years now, and would be from now on, if he could only find Tuesday and get back to work.

  Guided by his reflexes, as usual, and with no mental effort at all, which was also usual, he finished washing, dressing, and making his bed. His alarm clock, which never alarmed because he was of such regular habits, said, as usual, six twenty-two when he paused on the way out, and gave his room the once-over. And there was a certain something about the place that made even this phlegmatic character stop and think.

  It wasn’t finished.

  The bed was there, and the picture of Joe Louis. There were the two chairs sharing their usual seven legs, the split table, the pipe-organ bedstead, the beige wallpaper with the two swans over and over and over, the tiny corner sink, the tilted bureau. But none of them were finished. Not that there were any holes in anything. What paint there had been in the first place was still there. But there was an odor of old cut lumber, a subtle, insistent air of building, about the room and everything in it. It was indefinable, inescapable, and Harry Wright stood there caught up in it, wondering. He glanced suspiciously around but saw nothing he could really be suspicious of. He shook his head, locked the door and went out into the hall.

  On the steps a little fellow, just over three feet tall, was gently stroking the third step from the top with a razor-sharp chisel, shaping up a new scar in the dirty wood. He looked up as Harry approached, and stood up quickly.

  “Hi,” said Harry, taking in the man’s leather coat, his peaked cap, his wizened, bright-eyed little face. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Touch-up,” piped the little man. “The actor in the third floor front has a nail in his right heel. He came in late Tuesday night and cut the wood here. I have to get it ready for Wednesday.”

  “This is Wednesday,” Harry pointed out.

  “Of course. Always has been. Always will be.”

  Harry let that pass, started on down the stairs. He had achieved his amazing bovinity by making a practice of ignoring things he could not understand. But one thing bothered him—

  “Did you say that feller in the third floor front was an actor?”

  “Yes. They’re all actors, you know.”

  “You’re nuts, friend,” said Harry bluntly. “That guy works on the docks.”

  “Oh yes—that’s his part. That’s what he acts.”

  “No kiddin’. An’ what does he do when he isn’t acting?”

  “But he—Well, that’s all he does do! That’s all any of the actors do!”

  “Gee—I thought he looked like a reg’lar guy, too,” said Harry. “An actor? ’Magine!”

  “Excuse me,” said the little man, “but I’ve got to get back to work. We mustn’t let anything get by us, you know. They’ll be through Tuesday before long, and everything must be ready for them.”

  Harry thought: this guy’s crazy nuts. He smiled uncertainly and went down to the landing below. When he looked back the man was cutting skillfully into the stair, making a neat little nail scratch. Harry shook his head. This was a screwy morning. He’d be glad to get back to the shop. There was a ’39 sedan down there with a busted rear spring. Once he got his mind on that he could forget this nonsense. That’s all that matters to a man in a rut. Work, eat, sleep, pay day. Why even try to think anything else out?

  The street was a riot of activity, but then it always was. But not quite this way. There were automobiles and trucks and buses around, aplenty, but none of them were moving.

  And none of them were quite complete. This was Harry’s own field; if there was anything he didn’t know about motor vehicles, it wasn’t very important. And through that medium he began to get the general idea of what was going on.

  Swarms of little men who might have been twins of the one he had spoken to were crowding around the cars, the sidewalks, the stores and buildings. All were working like mad with every tool imaginable. Some were touching up the finish of the cars with fine wire brushes, laying on networks of microscopic cracks and scratches. Some, with ball peens and mallets, were denting fenders skillfully, bending bumpers in an artful crash pattern, spider-webbing safety-glass windshields. Others were aging top dressing with high-pressure, needlepoint sandblasters. Still others were pumping dust into upholstery, sandpapering the dashboard finish around light switches, throttles, chokes, to give a finger-worn appearance. Harry stood aside as a half dozen of
the workers scampered down the street bearing a fender which they riveted to a 1930 coupé. It was freshly bloodstained.

  Once awakened to this highly unusual activity, Harry stopped, slightly open-mouthed, to watch what else was going on. He saw the same process being industriously accomplished with the houses and stores. Dirt was being laid on plate-glass windows over a coat of clear sizing. Woodwork was being cleverly scored and the paint peeled to make it look correctly weather-beaten, and dozens of leather-clad laborers were on their hands and knees, poking dust and dirt into the cracks between the paving blocks. A line of them went down the sidewalk, busily chewing gum and spitting it out; they were followed by another crew who carefully placed the wads according to diagrams they carried, and stamped them flat.

  Harry set his teeth and muscled his rocking brain into something like its normal position. “I ain’t never seen a day like this or crazy people like this,” he said, “but I ain’t gonna let it be any of my affair. I got my job to go to.” And trying vainly to ignore the hundreds of little, hard-working figures, he went grimly on down the street.

  When he got to the garage he found no one there but more swarms of stereotyped little people climbing over the place, dulling the paint work, cracking the cement flooring, doing their hurried, efficient little tasks of aging. He noticed, only because he was so familiar with the garage, that they were actually making the marks that had been there as long as he had known the place. “Hell with it,” he gritted, anxious to submerge himself into his own world of wrenches and grease guns. “I got my job; this is none of my affair.”

  He looked about him, wondering if he should clean these interlopers out of the garage. Naw—not his affair, He was hired to repair cars, not to police the joint. Long as they kept away from him—and, of course, animal caution told him that he was far, far outnumbered. The absence of the boss and the other mechanics was no surprise to Harry; he always opened the place.

  He climbed out of his street clothes and into coveralls, picked up a tool case and walked over to the sedan, which he had left up on the hydraulic rack yester—that is, Monday night. And that is when Harry Wright lost his temper. After all, the car was his job, and he didn’t like having anyone else mess with a job he had started. So when he saw his job—his ’39 sedan—resting steadily on its wheels over the rack, which was down under the floor, and when he saw that the rear spring was repaired, he began to burn. He dived under the car and ran deft fingers over the rear wheel suspensions. In spite of his anger at this unprecedented occurrence, he had to admit to himself that the job had been done well. “Might have done it myself,” he muttered.