“I guess I forgot about time. I guess I forgot those hundreds of people frozen there. I don’t know what I thought. I only know what I did. I ran across the street—reached up to lift the girl out of the air—when it happened.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Time returned. One minute the silence of the dead—and my Hands reaching for the girl. The next instant the noise of a great city. The screams of hysterical women—yes, and men too. The cry of agony from that young girl’s lips. And that is all, L. D. She dropped gently into my arms and I held her so. A boy of twelve could easily have done the same thing. And that—well that is it. That is the truth. That is why I say—I simply lifted her out of the air.”
He waited for me to speak then. I said simply: “What became of Ruth?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since.”
I didn’t take my eyes from his as I emptied my pipe into the fire—slowly and carefully refilled it. Then I asked Tommy.
“And the other girl—this older one?” And when he didn’t answer me right away. “You heard from her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “I heard from her—”
I got up. Took plenty of time to light my pipe. Then I went to my little wall safe and taking the key from my pocket opened it, put in my hand and pulled out hundreds of pages of notes.
“An interesting story, Tommy,” I said when I had returned to my chair, placed the pile of papers on my knees. “These notes have been gathered after an exhaustive study and research over a period of nearly twenty years. My book will have to do with Egypt, Tommy. I doubted if I would ever have time to finish it.”
“Perhaps,” the wistful smile was strong, now, “You don’t need time—but the absence of time.”
“Perhaps.” I was very serious. “I have a little story of my own. Not so dramatic as yours. Not so exciting as yours. But it has puzzled me a great deal. Within a period of a few hours while I slept someone got possession of these notes—made corrections and additions to them. Added material that I only dreamed about. Verified facts that I have not been able to substantiate in all those years. There is other data that I thought was beyond the knowledge of man.”
“Something like my experience with my medical research, eh?”
“Very similar,” I agreed. “There was, however, one clue. A scribbled pencil name on one of the pages. Almost undecipherable but I made it out. Is the name of Ruth’s friend—Naomi?”
“Then you do believe.” Tommy came out of his chair. “Yes—it was Naomi. I wasn’t to tell you. You were to tell me. You—” He stopped.
“She told you to come and see me?”
He looked around the room, peered hard into the shadowed corners as if he half expected to see someone, lurking there.
“Yes—she did, L. D.” And then he blurted it out. “It’s Naomi. I’m afraid of her. I don’t think she has any interest in me—or even in Ruth. It’s you. She questioned me about you for hours—and now—well, I’m not to see Ruth, again unless—unless—Lord, L.D., Naomi. She—she’s interested in you.”
“In me or my work.” I smiled at him. “But she’s right, Tommy. There won’t be enough time in life for me to finish it.” And I hope without immodesty. “It’s an important work—a great work—a very great work.”
“I’m to call her up.” Tommy was all excited as he looked toward the phone. “If I am to see Ruth again I must call Naomi at once. She sent me to you—and—and—” He paused then and swallowed his swallow. “I’m not so sure it’s simply your work, L. D. Not the way she speaks of you. And I am sure—she’s dangerous—a very dangerous woman. She wants you to step outside of time with—with her. Can you—will you—do it? She’s hundreds of years older than Ruth. Dare you do it?”
An honest boy, Tommy. A romantic one too I thought then. And I who had listened to so much—and experienced so little. Perhaps I smiled as I thought of talking with a woman—well—say, well over twenty-five hundred years old. And my work—my unfinished work.
I looked over at Tommy. He seemed so excited. It has been a great many years since I was excited—like that. I said, I think gently:
“Call up Naomi, Tommy. And tell her—I’ll be very pleased to step outside of time with her.”
BULL MOOSE OF BABYLON, by Don Wilcox
I felt trouble in my bones when I flew to Denver in answer to Colonel Jason Milholland’s wire. His mention of a time-transfer device should have been warning enough. But I plunged, like a fool, and came up gasping for air in a sand-blown battlefield just twenty-five hundred years before my time.
Ten minutes after I had convinced Milholland that my improved vocoder would analyze animal voices, modern or ancient—ten seconds after I had nodded to his outrageous proposition, I was biffed across the head by an ancient Persian soldier.
That’s how quick it happened.
One moment I was standing on the Colonel’s roof porch surrounded by the glories of the Rockies; then the big red cylinder swished down out of nowhere, like a series of neon hoops, to enclose me, and the next instant I was skidding down a sandy incline that wasn’t a golf hazard, and the desert dust and battle din was all around me. I hugged my precious black case and slid for the bottom of the ravine.
That was when the wild-eyed soldier, dashed past me, flashing and steaming in his metal armor, and whammed me—accidentally, but none the less potently—across the head with the handle of his spear.
“Wa-ha-kik-log!” he was yelling, and he must have been brass inside as well as out. He didn’t stop to notice me. He was charging into the fray, along with a few thousand other mad men.
“Wa-ha-kik-log!”
Such voices! If Colonel Milholland wanted a complete collection of the bellows of beasts, be should have had these.
But there was no time to operate my vocoder amid this chaos. My first duty to mankind was to avoid being tramped to death. Already my new hunting togs were being torn to shreds. I rolled into a knot and hugged the hot sand and let the stampede hurdle past. But some clumsy heavyweight came pounding along, dragging his feet, and kicked the daylights out of me.
When I came to, after hours of blackout, I was not in a downy hospital bed, and no kindly doctor was bending over me. My first impression was that my scalp had been carved in strips, that I had been hung on a hook by a segment of hide just above my right ear, that someone was striking the hook with a maul at regular intervals.
This impression underwent a slight modification as consciousness came clearer. I was actually walking on my two feet, along with some five hundred other ragged and battered prisoners of war, and my scalp was cut, not with any geometric precision, but rather in the style that a blind man with a meat cleaver might achieve.
I was still hanging onto the little black case, however. And I managed to cling to it through the unprintable year and a half that followed.
* * * *
Of those hectic eighteen months of imprisonment and slavery all I need say is that I gradually became accustomed to my fate. I had no power to take myself back to the twentieth century. Evidently Colonel Milholland had lost his power to bring me back. I was stuck.
During that year and a half I had learned a lot of ancient language, but I detested having to use it. My roots were in the twentieth century. I couldn’t reconcile myself to starting life over—in an age that was past and gone.
Then one day, while on the block with seventy other bedraggled assorted prisoners waiting to be sold, I noticed that one of my fellow unfortunates was eyeing me curiously. We fell into casual conversation, as casual as possible against the auctioneer’s insulting blather about our respective worths in shekels.
“My name is Slaf-Carch,” said the man, smiling toothlessly through his steel wool whiskers. His voice was resonant. “I have seen members of your race before. You are fr
om a foreign land.”
“And a foreign time,” I said, not expecting him to make anything of it.
His twinkling eyes fairly snapped at me. “You are the third,” he said, “who has made that claim.”
“The third what?”
“The third invader from a foreign land and time. You have the same delicate dialect as the other two. That is what caught my attention. Do you have a foreign name?”
“My name is Hal Norton,” I said. “Where are these other two you speak of?” Suspicions whipped through my mind. Had Colonel Milholland sent other twentieth-century envoys back to this age? I remembered having tried to probe Milholland on this, but he had evaded me.
“One was killed under the wheel of an Assyrian chariot,” said Slaf-Carch, stroking his bronzed bald head reminiscently. “The other is still my slave.”
“Your slave?” This struck me as being more than curious, since Slaf-Carch himself was at this moment being sold as a slave. Undoubtedly this grizzly-whiskered man had seen better days, before some captor had knocked his teeth out.
The same nomad prince who bought Slaf-Carch began bidding on me, and an hour later, bought and paid for, we were tramping along the rugged foothills of the Fertile Crescent.
“You spoke of a slave with a dialect similar to mine,” I resumed, trudging along beside Slaf-Carch. “What was his name?”
“Her name,” Slaf-Carch corrected, “and a very odd name it is: Betty.”
There wasn’t breath enough in me to comment. I needed to sit down and think this matter over, but the nomad prince and his guards had other ideas. We hiked on through the evening heat.
Obviously I wasn’t the only victim of Milholland’s time-trap. He had employed two other innocents in the service of his hare-brained hobby—one of them a girl. What price the voices of ancient animals!
“Does your Betty carry a black case like this?” I asked, indicating the vocoder.
Slaf-Carch knew nothing of any magic boxes. He probably would have been too superstitious to investigate, anyway. But he gave me other bits of information, enough to prove my assumptions. Both of my predecessors had demonstrated a strange interest in animals—an interest that had soon waned.
* * * *
That night, long after the other slaves were asleep, Slaf-Carch and I were still talking. The red glow from the low fires gave his face intense lines. “I am eager to get back. If these nomads take us farther south, they shall lose us. We will escape.”
“Where does this slave, Betty, live?” I asked.
“At my mansion, in a village beyond Babylon, where I should be fulfilling my duties as the patesi,” he said. “By this time, many business matters will have gone undone. As for Betty, this autumn I must give her separate quarters along with my older women slaves so she can begin bearing slave children.”
“Just a minute, pal,” I blurted in English, then caught myself. In Babylonian I said pointedly, “Take my word for it, if Betty came from my land you can cancel that plan.”
“You do not know our ways, Hal,” he replied. “Betty has seen more of Babylon than you.”
I didn’t deny this. But it was as uncomfortable to swallow as a baseball. This girl might have had the hard luck to be stranded here and forced into the Babylonian slave system. But that didn’t mean she would desert all her own twentieth-century ideals and sentiments. If she had the good American spunk to fight this ancient balderdash, I would fight with her; if she didn’t, I hoped I would never meet her—in spite of being starved for some twentieth-century conversation.
Slaf-Carch sketched a picture in the sand to show me how beautiful Betty was. I couldn’t make anything out of it, but the fire in his eyes conveyed a strong impression.
“Let her go her own way,” I said shortly. “I’ll go mine.”
Slaf-Carch wanted to know what my way was. What, did I do back home, and what did I expect to do here?
His questions stirred me to the depths. It was the first time any fellow-slave had talked in terms of purposes. I answered proudly that I, too, was a man of vast importance in my own land and time, and had no doubt been sorely missed. I had planned to help analyze radio voices, using my vocoder—a matter which he wouldn’t understand—when my sudden time-transfer set my life back. No doubt my own civilization had simply marked time since my absence.
I snapped on a vocoder switch while we talked, thinking to demonstrate how easily I could break Slaf-Carch’s voice into its separate parts—pitch, resonance, volume, and consonant qualities. But In deference to his superstitions I snapped the thing off without showing him the results.
Meanwhile, the old grizzle-beard speculated futilely upon my chances to return to my native country.
“If we can break free and reach Babylon, then I may be able to help you back to your land and time,” he offered hopefully. “I have wealth. My nephew, Jipfur, is also quite rich.”
I shook my head, tried to explain. But the time element was a stumbler for him. He looked blankly and fell to drawing another sand sketch of his Betty.
* * * *
However, these thoughts were no passing fancies with him. He persisted in digging into my history. I told him of my agreement to make a study of the voices of ancient animals; my arrival in the midst of battle; the stampede of Persian infantry, my months of slavery, my fights to hold on to my magic box—which was left to me only because its black color threw a superstitious scare into my captors. Those things he could understand much better than my burning desire for a bath, a shave, some Palm Beach clothes, a quarter ton of Neapolitan ice cream, and, most of all, a sudden lift back into my own century.
“Your trouble,” he counseled, “is that you are refusing to accept your real situation.”
“I don’t want to accept it!” I said so loudly that one of the guards snapped his fingers at me. “I want to get out of it.”
“Never hope to be lifted bodily out of trouble,” Slaf-Carch said. “Things don’t happen that way. I know. And I am much older than you.”
I was tempted to challenge this statement, but he continued:
“Dig your hands into the soil of the hour, wherever you are, and claw through your own troubles.”
“No more philosophy, please,” I protested. “I’ve been on a diet of it for eighteen months. If you could offer me a candy bar—”
“Take the lion by the mane,” he said sagely. “If your task is studying animals—”
“No animals, please,” I said. “I’ve lost ninety-eight percent of my respect for the man who set me on that wild goose chase—or rather, moose chase.”
“Then you must find other pastimes. The slaves are treated decently enough in this valley. They have a few hours each day to themselves. Besides, they need something to think about while they lift water at the shaduf. Something besides revolt.”
“What do you think about while you are a slave?” I asked.
“Betty,” he replied, none too stoically.
CHAPTER II
One night two weeks later we were attacked by a band of cavalrymen.
“Babylonians!” Slaf-Carch hissed in my ear. “Our chance!”
We slaves fled back into the darkness, out of reach of the swords and axes. When the fight grew hot we dodged into the leaping shadows and did our bit throwing stones. I’ll never forget the smell of that desert dawn, nor the sight of flashing knives and falling heads. Sunlight showed our camp a shambles.
The Babylonian cavalrymen won the fray, in the end, so we slaves were in fair enough luck. If the nomads had won they’d have cut us to bits for helping the attackers. As matters had turned, we had earned a reward—the right to be slaves for the Babylonians.
Of course, those among us who were Babylonians and not foreigners were in double luck, for they were free.
B
ut no one was so lucky as Slaf-Carch. By a rare chance, this war party had been sent out by his own nephew, the rich young patesi of Babylon—Jipfur.
We traveled all night, and those of us on foot were near exhaustion by dawn. Then patches of reflected sunlight appeared on the distant desert horizon to quicken our pace. Those sharp little rectangles grew before our eyes during the hours of travel that followed. For they were the buildings of Babylon, their glazed tile walls gleaming like mirrors.
The glorious Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar! What a thrill for a wanderer from the machine-age! Speaking of machines, I craved one as never before—preferably a motorcar or an airplane. My legs threatened to fold up with every step.
That afternoon summer clouds floated over the city, reducing Babylon’s glaring colors to pastel blues, yellows, lavenders. The city walls spread wide along the Euphrates, the palaces reared high, and a great multistoried ziggurat towered into the clouds. No twentieth century skyline was ever more breathtaking. As a matter of fact, only the tallest of New-World skyscrapers rose—or would rise, twenty-five hundred years hence—to a greater height than this magnificent ziggurat.
It was twilight when we at last neared the city’s gates. Jipfur, the nephew of Slaf-Carch, rode out to join us, accompanied by two armored cavalrymen.
“Noble Slaf-Carch, the patesi of Borbel, the brother of my mother, you have returned from the dead!”
The meeting was replete with formal greetings—it was plain to see that Jipfur relished the dignified formalities to which his wealth and importance entitled him—but under the surface of conventional manners, Slaf-Carch’s deep gratitude showed through glistening eyes. No matter if his rescue had been coincidental; he was no less grateful for having been miraculously saved.
The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Page 34