by Jack Dann
Without another word, he stepped through. His image flickered momentarily, as if in a heat wave. On the other side, he raised a fist in silent triumph, and gazed at his surroundings. "Come on, Gillie. Come on over." He produced a bottle and two glasses, filled them, and held one toward me.
I hesitated.
"It's okay," he said.
I gathered my courage, and stepped through the time device. I will admit I was now convinced. Maybe it was that the notion of time travel was no more absurd than the presence of a broad field in one's living room. In any case, I strolled from the carpet onto dry grass. The air was thick with the drowsy buzz of insects and the heat of the sun. I took the glass. The bright liquid within sparkled. "To you, Mac," I said.
McHugh loosened his tie. "To the Creator," he said, "who has given us a universe with such marvelous possibilities."
The afternoon smelled vaguely of sulfur. I took my coat off. We stood on a broad field enclosed by rising forest. A dark haze hung over the valley. In the distance, I could make out a town. It looked small. Hot and dusty. Several clusters of farm buildings were distributed at the foot of the ridges, guarded by low stone walls and fences constructed of posts and rails. A wagon waited in one of the farmyards. But they all stood strangely empty. No farmers. No cows. No horses or dogs. A dirt road, also fenced, wandered through the center of the valley.
I fell in beside McHugh and we angled off toward the road. "Where the hell is everybody?" I asked.
He ignored the question. "Do you notice the farmhouses have no TV antennas?"
"I notice," I said. "On the other hand, it must be July or August." I mopped my brow. "Certainly not April."
He nodded, but showed no sign of disappointment. He was happy to have arrived somewhere. Anywhere, if it turned out to be Lincoln's America. "I agree. We've missed again. But what the hell—"
Nothing moved anywhere in the valley. The sun was hot in my eyes, and I knew the landscape.
I knew the ridges, the farms, the town. "Mac," I said, "where are the birds?" The sky was empty. Behind us, the torus hovered, McHugh's computer-laden back room vivid against the rolling hills and forest. "Maybe we should go back."
He responded by removing his jacket. "You go back if you want to, Gillie." His eyes gleamed, and he looked happier than I'd ever seen him. He fished his watch out of his pocket, glanced at it, looked at the sun, which was on our left, and shrugged. "Let's make it three o'clock," he said, setting the timepiece and winding it. He dropped it back into the pocket and folded the coat over his arm.
Near the town, a flag fluttered from a stone wall. We were too far away to count the number of stars in the blue field, but it was the national colors. I was squinting at it, when I heard the breath catch in McHugh's throat. He was peering over my shoulder, back toward the torus, toward the line of hills behind it.
"What's wrong?" I asked. His workroom still floated peacefully in the afternoon.
"The woods," he said. "Behind the nexus."
Yes: among the trees, something was moving.
As I watched, the sun struck metal, and the forest came alive with men in gray uniforms. They remained within the shelter of the trees, but I could see them moving, kneeling just beyond the sunlight, others coming in behind. Forming up.
My God. "What's going on?" asked McHugh. "Where are we?"
A bugle call split the afternoon.
And they came out in oiled precision, bayonets gleaming among battle flags. Drums rolled. Columns wheeled smartly into line and started quickstep toward us.
Behind them, on the hilltops, guns roared. Puffs of smoke appeared on the opposite ridge. And I got a good look at the standards: "Son of a bitch, Mac," I said. "It's the 24th Virginia."
I watched them come. They seemed unaware of the torus, which I suspected was invisible from the rear. Their lines were perfectly dressed, officers with drawn swords on horseback. There were thousands of them, literally parading out into that open field as far as I could see.
"Over there," I said. "The 7th Virginia. And up the line will be the 11th. Jesus." I was overwhelmed by the majesty of it. "You're right, Mac. We're here. Son of a bitch—"
"Gillie," he said, "we're where? What the hell's going on?"
A long orchestrated crescendo shook the top of the opposite ridge. "Down," I screamed, throwing myself on my belly and covering my head.
The ground erupted. Earth and rocks flew. Holes were blown in the ranks of the advancing men. Others hurried to fill up the spaces. "This is Kemper's Brigade," I said. He was staring at me, not comprehending I was surveying the ridges and road. The fences and stone walls. The farms. The town. "You've been dumped on again, Mac." I was getting to my feet. "We've got to get away from here."
The cannonade was deafening. Thunder rolled down from both slopes. The troops came on. Silent. Walking into the fire because their generals didn't understand yet that the war had changed.
McHugh was trying to restrain me. "Stay down," he said. "We'll wait it out."
"No," I shrieked. "Not this one. We've got to get back before the hole closes."
"You're crazy. You'll get killed."
"We won't survive out here." I was shaking my head violently. "You know what that is back there? It's Seminary Ridge."
McHugh was close to my ear, but he had to shout anyway. "So what?"
"Pickett's Charge," I said. "We're in the middle of Pickett's Charge."
We got back moments before a cannonball roared through the workroom, blew three walls apart, collapsed the front porch, and nailed Harvey Keating's Toyota, which was parked in his driveway.
The equipment was in ruins. Again.
Nevertheless, McHugh was exultant. "You see?" he said. "It is possible."
And I trembled. I trembled because I knew that, for a few minutes on the third day of the battle, I had actually been at Gettysburg.
And I trembled for another reason. "Mac," I said. "You've made four attempts now. All four have been disasters."
"But we're learning," he said. "We're getting better. You have to expect problems. But we know how to travel."
"That's what scares me." I looked around the smoking ruins. "What are the odds against accidentally arriving at the exact time and place of a major event?"
He shrugged. "Slim, I would think."
"You've done it twice."
I knew he wouldn't quit, though. He bought more equipment, and went back to work. "Making improvements," he said. A few weeks later he was ready to try again, and issued another invitation. I told him no thanks. I could see he was disappointed in me.
But hell, I can take a hint.
So I wasn't too surprised when his newspapers started piling up. I waited a couple of days and broke in.
The house was empty.
In the back room, I found his equipment intact. Except for the TDI: a stone-tipped feathered arrow jutted from its polished black metal. It had penetrated right between the mode lamps.
ANNIVERSARY PROJECT
Joe Haldeman
We never really know what the future holds in store for us, in spite of all the money people spend on psychic hot lines and Tarot card readings. And, as the sly and ironic story that follows demonstrates, perhaps that's just as well . . .
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel, The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the 1970s. He won another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story "Tricentennial," and then the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year. (Although usually thought of primarily as a "hard-science" writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an acc
omplished poet and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre.) He won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of "The Hemingway Hoax." His story "None So Blind" won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II) Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, and The Hemingway Hoax, the "techno-thriller" Tools of the Trade, the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, and Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent books are a major new mainstream novel, 1969, and a new collection, None So Blind. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.
His name is Three-phasing and he is bald and wrinkled, slightly over one meter tall, large-eyed, toothless and all bones and skin, sagging pale skin shot through with traceries of delicate blue and red. He is considered very beautiful but most of his beauty is in his hands and is due to his extreme youth. He is over two hundred years old and is learning how to talk. He has become reasonably fluent in sixty-three languages, all dead ones, and has only ten to go.
The book he is reading is a facsimile of an early edition of Goethe's Faust. The nervous angular Fraktur letters goose-step across pages of paper-thin platinum.
The Faust had been printed electrolytically and, with several thousand similarly worthwhile books, sealed in an argon-filled chamber and carefully lost, in 2012 A.D.; a very wealthy man's legacy to the distant future.
In 2012 A.D., Polaris had been the pole star. Men eventually got to Polaris, and built a small city on a frosty planet there. By that time, they weren't dating by prophets' births any more, but it would have been around 4900 A.D. The pole star by then, because of procession of the equinoxes, was a dim thing once called Gamma Cephei. The celestial pole kept reeling around, past Deneb and Vega and through barren patches of sky around Hercules and Draco; a patient clock but not the slowest one of use, and when it came back to the region of Polaris, then 26,000 years had passed and men had come back from the stars, and the book-filled chamber had shifted 130 meters on the floor of the Pacific, had rolled onto the shallow trench, and eventually was buried in an underwater landslide.
The thirty-seventh time this slow clock ticked, men had moved the Pacific, not because they had to, and had found the chamber, opened it up, identified the books and carefully sealed them up again. Some things by then were more important to men than the accumulation of knowledge: in half of one more circle of the poles would come the millionth anniversary of the written word. They could wait a few millennia.
As the anniversary, as nearly as they could reckon it, approached, they caused to be born two individuals: Nine-hover (nominally female) and Three-phasing (nominally male). Three-phasing was born to learn how to read and speak. He was the first human being to study these skills in more than a quarter of a million years.
Three-phasing has read the first half of Faust forwards and, for amusement and exercise, is reading the second half backwards. He is singing as he reads, lisping.
"Fain' Looee w'mun . . . wif all'r die-mun ringf . . . He has not put in his teeth because they make his gums hurt.
Because he is a child of two hundred, he is polite when his father interrupts his reading and singing. His father's "voice" is an arrangement of logic and aesthetic that appears in Three-phasing's mind. The flavor is lost by translating into words:
"Three-phasing my son-ly atavism of tooth and vocal cord," sarcastically in the reverent mode, "Couldst tear thyself from objects of manifest symbol, and visit to share/help/learn, me?"
"?" He responds, meaning, "with/with/of what?"
Withholding mode: "Concerning thee: past, future."
He shuts the book without marking his place. It would never occur to him to mark his place, since he remembers perfectly the page he stops on, as well as every word preceding, as well as every event, no matter how trivial, that he has observed from the precise age of one year. In this respect, at least, he is normal.
He thinks the proper coordinates as he steps over the mover-transom, through a microsecond of black, and onto his father's mover-transom, about four thousand kilometers away on a straight line through the crust and mantle of the earth.
Ritual mode: "As ever, father." The symbol he uses for "father" is purposefully wrong, chiding. Crude biological connotation.
His father looks cadaverous and has in fact been dead twice. In the infant's small-talk mode he asks "From crude babblings of what sort have I torn your interest?"
"The tale called Faust, of a man so named, never satisfied with { symbol for slow but continuous accretion } of his knowledge and power; written in the language of Prussia."
"Also depended-ing on this strange word of immediacy, your Prussian language?"
"As most, yes. The word of `to be': sein. Very important illusion in this and related languages/cultures; that events happen at the `time' of perception, infinitesimal midpoint between past and future."
"Convenient illusion but retarding."
"As we discussed 129 years ago, yes." Three-phasing is impatient to get back to his reading, but adds:
"You always stick up for them."
"I have great regard for what they accomplished with limited faculties and so short lives." Stop beatin' around the bush, Dad. Tempis fugit, eight to the bar. Did Mr. Handy Moves-dat-man-around-by-her-apron-strings, 20th-century American poet, intend cultural translation of Lysistrata? If so, inept. African were-beast legendry, yes.
Withholding mode (coy): "Your father stood with Nine-hover all morning."
"," broadcasts Three-phasing: well?
"The machine functions, perhaps inadequately."
The young polyglot tries to radiate calm patience.
"Details I perceive you want; the idea yet excites you. You can never have satisfaction with your knowledge, either. What happened-s to the man in your Prussian book?"
"He lived-s one hundred years and died-s knowing that a man can never achieve true happiness, despite the appearance of success."
"For an infant, a reasonable perception."
Respectful chiding mode: "One hundred years makes-ed Faust a very old man, for a Dawn man."
"As I stand," same mode, less respect, "yet an infant." They trade silent symbols of laughter.
After a polite tenth-second interval, Three-phasing uses the light interrogation mode: "The machine of Nine-hover . . . ?"
"It begins to work but so far not perfectly." This is not news.
Mild impatience: "As before, then, it brings back only rocks and earth and water and plants?"
"Negative, beloved atavism." Offhand: "This morning she caught two animals that look as man may once have looked.
"!" Strong impatience, "I go?"
"." His father ends the conversation just two seconds after it began.
Three-phasing stops off to pick up his teeth, then goes directly to Nine-hover.
A quick exchange of greeting-symbols and Nine-hover presents her prizes. "Thinking I have two different species," she stands: uncertainty, query.
Three-phasing is amused. "Negative, time-caster. The male and female took very dissimilar forms in the Dawn times." He touches one of them. "The round organs, here, served-ing to feed infants, in the female."
The female screams.
"She manipulates spoken symbols now," observes Nine-hover.
Before the woman has finished her startled yelp, Three-phasing explains: "Not manipulating concrete symbols; rather, she communicates in a way called `non-verbal,' the use of such communication predating even speech." Slipping into the pedantic mode: "My reading indicates that such a loud noise occurs either
she must fear me or you or both of us.
"Or the machine,
" Nine-hover adds.
Symbol for continuing. "We have no symbol for it but in Dawn days most humans observed `xenophobia,' reacting to the strange with fear instead of delight. We stand as strange to them as they do to us, thus they register fear. In their era this attitude encouraged-s survival.
"Our silence must seem strange to them, as well as our appearance and the speed with which we move. I will attempt to speak to them, so they will know they need not fear us."
Bob and Sarah Graham were having a desperately good time. It was September of 1951 and the papers were full of news about the brilliant landing of U.S. Marines at Inchon. Bob was a Marine private with two days left of the thirty days' leave they had given him, between boot camp and disembarkation for Korea. Sarah had been Mrs. Graham for three weeks.
Sarah poured some more bourbon into her Coke. She wiped the sand off her thumb and stoppered the Coke bottle, then shook it gently. "What if you just don't show up?" she said softly.
Bob was staring out over the ocean and part of what Sarah said was lost in the crash of breakers rolling in. "What if I what?"
"Don't show up." She took a swig and offered the bottle. "Just stay here with me. With us." Sarah was sure she was pregnant. It was too early to tell, of course; her calendar was off but there could be other reasons.
He gave the Coke back to her and sipped directly from the bourbon bottle. "I suppose they'd go on without me. And I'd still be in jail when they came back."
"Not if—"
"Honey, don't even talk like that. It's a just cause."
She picked up a small shell and threw it toward the water. "Besides, you read the Examiner yesterday."
"I'm cold. Let's go up." She stood and stretched and delicately brushed sand away. Bob admired her long naked dancer's body. He shook out the blanket and draped it over her shoulders.