Consciousness returned to him very slowly on this occasion, and there was a horrible, throbbing ache above his left ear that had not been there before. He was lying on his right side on a brown carpet with a very thick pile, and there seemed to be a conglomeration of metal wheels and springs and shattered glass about him.
There was but one thought in his mind by the time he had recovered sufficiently to think at all. “This,” Reggie muttered, “is my fifth chance—my last chance! If I fail to change history this time, Sandra is lost to me—forever!”
“He’s coming around,” said a shaky, masculine voice.
Something cold and wet—very wet—enveloped the pain above his left ear. And then a slim, very lovely, brunette girl dropped to her knees before him, holding a dripping towel.
“Oh Reggie, darling,” she gasped. “Are you all right?”
It, Reggie realized with a pang, was Sandra Vanderveer!
“No!” he said loudly. “It’s all wrong, darling! I’ve made a mess of everything! The five chances are gone! I haven’t changed history, Sandra; now we can never be married!”
“But Reggie,” wailed the girl. “We are married!”
“Hunh?”
“Oh, you poor dear! That crack on the head knocked what little sense you—I mean,” she corrected hastily, “that it—it… well, I’m going to sue this club for a million dollars! Letting a heavy grandfather’s clock tip over and fall on one of the members…”
And then everything was crystal clear to Reggie Vliet. Why, of course! Sandra and he had been married for years. That blankety clock had finally tumbled down from the landing leading to the club’s second floor, just as he had often predicted it would. And of course, he would be the one it struck! That, too, would account for the pile of wheels and springs around him.
Several pairs of hands helped him to his feet. Reggie teetered there uncertainly, while his newly formed explanation for his recent journey into the past began to totter.
For Lowndes’ Time Machine actually was strapped to his wrist! And he had fumbled with the mechanism; had pushed the button that operated it.
The falling grandfather’s clock had nothing to do with that fact.
“Do you feel all right now, my sweet?” Sandra was saying solicitously. “I suppose it’s all my fault,” she babbled on, “for being so insistent that you meet me here at exactly five o’clock. I was so emphatic that it be five, and not a second later, that you arrived here an hour ahead of time so’s not to disappoint me.…”
Five, thought Reggie. Five. Five. And he had had only five chances of changing history, thereby winning Sandra. Had his clock-stricken brain seized on that number and woven it into the weird dream he had just come through?
“But the Time Machine!” he said, loudly and violently. “I pushed the button. I must have gone back in Time.”
“It couldn’t have been a dream!” Sandra’s worried blue eyes regarded him tenderly. “You’ll be all right soon, darling. Please stop babbling… Why, Reggie!” she exclaimed suddenly, “where in the world did you get the odd wristwatch?”
Before Reggie could prevent, she reached out and took hold of his arm, bringing the watch to where she could see it more clearly.
“It’s certainly a queer looking timepiece,” she continued. “What’s this little button here?”
In utter horror, Reggie watched her set a finger on the button.
“No, Sandra!” he tried to scream, but it was hardly more than a croak.
Too late! Under the finger’s pressure, the button was already fully depressed!
And nothing happened!
In the brief period of stunned silence that followed Reggie’s choked protest, the young man dazedly lifted the Time Machine to his ear.
It was supposed to tick. All the time. But it was silent.
So gusty was the sigh of relief that swished between Reggie’s parted lips that the frills on Sandra’s waist wavered in the breeze. With a quick motion he slipped the watch from his wrist and dropped it into a pocket.
“Now, darling,” he said crisply, “let’s get on with this five o’clock appointment you’re so keen about.”
“Oh Reggie!” gurgled Sandra, relieved. “Now you’re acting like your old self again!”
“Righto.” Reggie tucked her tiny hand under one of his arms and they started toward the club’s outer door. “Shall we be off?”
“Speaking for you,” Sandra said, “I hope it’s no further off than usual!”
“Pip pip!” said Reginald Vliet.
INSIDE TIME, by Tim Sullivan
“My name’s Mae,” said the pretty brown woman, looking down at him. A luminous, violet ceiling was just over her head. “What’s yours?”
“Herel…” he said, uncertain of where he was. He was fastened to a flat, inclined surface. “Herel Jablov.”
“Herel Jablov?” Mae said. “You’re famous.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” Mae said, handing him a water packet with a sucking tube sticking out of it. “Drink this.”
“Thank you.” He accepted the packet, noticing how nice Mae smelled, not perfumed but natural. “I’m very dry.”
“Do you remember anything?” Mae gently asked.
“Yes,” he said, after taking a long sip. “I remember being carried through the dark by… I don’t know what it was, but it was unprotected out there. And then I saw a star.”
“A star?”
“But it wasn’t a star,” he went on. “As we came closer I saw that it was an oval of light… a window… and then I saw someone watching me through it.”
“That was me.”
“I could see my rescuer in the light cast from that window… It wasn’t human.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a time station.”
“A time station?”
“That’s what I call it,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s officially called.”
Herel looked at her. She wore a simple blue garment, a knee-length jersey. He realized that he was naked.
“I’m not dressed,” Herel said, embarrassed.
“The robot stripped you of your pressure suit and your thermal long-johns after it took you out of the Arrowhead and brought you inside,” she said. “Do you remember?”
“Yes, it examined me… Am I okay?”
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “The disorientation won’t last long. Your parietal lobes are adjusting.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Here,” she said, freeing him from clasps that held him to the gurney. She handed him a yellow garment similar to the one she was wearing. He got up and found that he floated. He quickly slipped the jersey over his head. Mae helped him arrange it, and he was calmed by feeling her fingers through the fabric.
“Is anything coming back to you?”
“It’s starting to.” He remembered losing contact with the other members of the team as he fell. “Did anyone else show up?”
“No, just you.”
“There were four of us,” he said, “Park Li-Joon, Hess, Ertegul… and me.”
“Yes, I know about the team,” she said.
“Did they make it?”
“They all came back, all but one.”
“Which one?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
What was she talking about? “But I’m here.”
“It will take a little while to explain,” she said.
Herel was confused and discomfited. It was better not to think about it right now. He gestured at the violet chamber. “Will you show me around the…time station?”
“So soon?”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Sure. Come with me.”
* * * *
He drifted behind her through a low hatchway, propelling himself forward with handholds extruding from the walls.
“This is the kitchen,” Mae said. “Or the galley, if you prefer.”
Like the examination room they’d just left, there were no windows set in the galley’s luminous green walls. Packets of water and food floated, but otherwise it was empty.
“We’re near the station’s center,” Mae said. “There are four extensions stretching out from this point, two cells—staterooms, I call them—at the ends of three of them and the docking node at the end of the fourth.”
“So there’s plenty of room?”
“It doesn’t seem like it after you’ve been here awhile.”
“I suppose not.”
“We have everything we need to survive,” she said, handing him a food packet, “but very little else. How’s your memory now?”
“I remember falling after I lost contact with the others, but nothing else until the robot snagged me. Something must have happened in between.”
“It’ll be easier if you think farther back to your childhood, say… You remember that, don’t you?”
“Sure.” He sucked a mouthful of brown stuff from the tube. The grainy texture was a little off-putting, a bit sweet for Herel’s taste, but otherwise it wasn’t bad.
“High school? University? Maybe graduate school?”
“And earning my engineering degrees…my Arrowhead design being chosen…and being selected by the Institute… training for the project…and the big day…”
“It’s what happened recently that you don’t remember, huh?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“This is going to sound odd to you, Herel, but the reason for the blank spot in your memory is that you’ve just come from the future.”
“The future?” That did bring a lot back. “Yes, that’s what we were trying to do, go into the future.”
“You succeeded, but you can’t remember what happened uptime.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, maybe because it hasn’t happened yet, so you’ve got no memory of it.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“Maybe so, but people who come from uptime never remember what it was like.”
He cast about for something to refute what she was saying, but he could remember nothing before the robot found him.
“You were dropped into a Kerr hole,” Mae said. “You emerged in the future, but no one can stay there for long.”
“Then this isn’t the future?” Despite his faulty memory, he knew that she was telling the truth.
“No, you were pulled back, sensors picked you out of the matter flowing from the white hole out there, and you were rescued by the robot.”
He felt as if he’d awakened from a dream about an amusement park ride. He had fallen and fallen and fallen…
“If this isn’t the future, where are we?”
Something lashed down from the ceiling and snatched his empty food packet before Mae could answer.
“What’s that?” Herel was startled as several more of the nearly transparent fibers flailed around them.
“I call them tendrils,” Mae said. “They’re part of the station’s maintenance system. They’re just cleaning up.”
“How do they work?”
“Autonomically,” she said, taking him by the hand and drifting with him into another room. “I used to find them disturbing, but I got used to them.”
They left the busy tendrils to their task as she led him to the big oval window near the docking node. It was dark outside.
“This is where you watched them bring me in?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Other than saying we’re in a time station near a white hole, you haven’t told me where we are.”
“We’re inside.”
His own gaunt face and trim body were reflected in the window. “Inside what?”
“Inside time.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“As I understand it, we’re in a crossover loop between two branes, caused by a phase change that ties time in a knot.”
“A knot inside time?”
“Yes, the crossover stabilizes quarks into strangelets.”
“And we’re pulled back from the future into this… strangelet universe?”
“Yes.”
“So time travel isn’t a one-way ticket.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said, “but sometimes the return trip is misdirected.”
“How do you know all this?”
“A physicist was stuck here for a while. We talked.”
“I see.” He stared at the darkness through the window.
“In our continuum, you were drawn through a rotating ring of neutrons,” she said. “That’s what makes it possible for matter to pass through the collapsing star without being destroyed.”
“Yes, some black holes have mass and angular momentum, but no charge.”
“You know all about it.”
“I should. I was one of the designers of the Arrowhead.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Yes, you and the others went through the Kerr hole and everyone but you came back to the precise time and place where you’d started. Some people called it a hoax, said none of you had ever gone anywhere. Conspiracy theorists claimed that you’d been killed because you wanted to reveal the hoax. I was a little girl when it happened.”
“But you’re a mature woman.”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“Only two years younger than me.”
“Time doesn’t mean much here.”
“There are no clocks?” he asked, trying to understand this strangelet reality.
“What good would they be?”
“They’d be useful for small tasks.” The lack of clocks disturbed Herel; he liked to quantify things.
“There aren’t any small tasks. Everything’s taken care of,” she said. “The station is sensitive to our needs.”
“How do you mean?”
“When you’re hungry, it will give you something to eat. Water is plentiful because the basic elements are everywhere. The atmosphere is similarly synthesized—nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and all the necessary trace elements. If you’re ill, your medical needs are attended to.”
“The time station understands all our bodily requirements?”
“Yes, but the mind is a different matter. We have readers, but not much else to pass the time.”
“Readers?”
“For viewing books, operas, films, plays, and the like,” Mae said. “You’ll find them all over the station.”
“And that’s all the entertainment there is?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Maybe we can learn about the future from these readers.”
“No, everything in them predates our time,” she said, “just as your epochal journey into the future predated my time.”
“You’re the only one who knows what happened to me…”
“I guess I am, and I’m grateful to you, Herel. I owe you my life for designing the Arrowhead. I would have died out there without it. How did you come up with such an ingenious design?”
“It was tricky, juggling space limitation, stress factors, and shielding while keeping costs down.”
“See, your memory’s coming back strong.”
“So it is,” Herel said. “I do remember emerging from the white hole.”
“Floating on the waters of Lethe,” she said.
“What?�
�
“It’s the river of forgetfulness in classical mythology.”
“I never had much time for literature,” Herel said. “Is the physicist you mentioned gone?”
“Lillian? Yes, she’s gone. People never stay long… except for me.”
“Except for you.” He struggled to remember her name. “—Mae?”
“Yes.”
“How do people get out of here?”
“A ship comes and takes them.”
“Who pilots the ship?”
“No one, it’s completely AI.”
“Where does it go?”
She shrugged. “Maybe there’s another Kerr hole somewhere inside the time knot, an escape hatch, but I don’t know.”
“Did robots build the time station?”
“I think so, at the direction of the uptime people.”
“But the uptime people don’t come here themselves?”
“No, but they have a way of sending directives into the knot.”
“It was very humane of them to have this station built.”
“Well, that may have been their intention,” Mae said, “but the reality is something quite different.”
He looked at her sad brown eyes and realized how inane his comment must have sounded to her. She’d already told him she was stranded here. He looked away, flushed and embarrassed. That awkward feeling was all too familiar, as if he never knew how to say the right thing.
“Why can’t you leave?” Herel asked.
“Because I’m a criminal,” Mae replied in sweet tones that belied her words.
“What?”
“I protested the System War,” she said, “a struggle between the regime on Earth and colonists on Luna, Mars, and the gas giants’ moons.”
“You were against the regime?”
“Yes.”
“So this is a prison?”
“For me it is,” she said. “For others it’s a way station.”
“That’s unfair.”
“The court didn’t think so.”
“But how could the court even know this station had been built?” Herel asked.
“They couldn’t,” she said. “They didn’t care about that. The conventional wisdom held that there were too many people already, so they might as well get rid of the troublemakers.”
The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Page 52