The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The hum grew louder still, and they went to the window to watch the ship arrive. Peering into the darkness, Herel saw nothing.

  “Are you sure it’s coming?” he asked, conscious of a stricture in his chest.

  “Yes.”

  The humming stopped. Herel could hear himself breathing. His vision shook with each of his heartbeats.

  And then it was there. It seemed to emerge all at once into the light cast from the window. What he could see of it was sleek and strange, designed perhaps a thousand years or ten thousand years beyond his time. He was awestricken to think of how much its makers must have known—or would know…

  Somewhere inside the time knot was another Kerr hole, and he would be dropped into it. It had to be. Would he go forward? Would he be drawn back to his own time? Or would he go somewhere and sometime he’d never dreamed of? It didn’t matter, as long as the ship took him away from the time station.

  He got into his suit and went to the airlock. He put on his helmet and tested his air supply. This was it.

  He slammed his palm against the switch and opened the inner hatch.

  Entering the airlock, he faced the outer hatch. He opened it, taking pleasure in the sound of oxygen rushing in from the ship. The light coming from inside it was so bright it hurt his eyes. Its interior seemed tantalizingly familiar, but that couldn’t be. He couldn’t remember the future.

  He saw shiny, unidentifiable objects. One of them came to life in the patch of brilliance cast into the airlock. It was a robot.

  It stood and looked down at him, a slender, bronzed humanoid with the graceful lines of a racehorse, some three meters tall.

  Herel pushed himself forward.

  The robot effortlessly picked up a box, serpentine arms spanning its width. The box’s smoky sides did not hide what was inside it.

  It was Conway.

  He was desiccated, but his shriveled nakedness was recognizable inside his transparent coffin. His skin was gray paper glued to bones, his tats almost indiscernible from the leathery wrinkles. His lips were pulled back to bare his filed teeth in a terrible grin. He was curled up like a fetus.

  Herel stopped, shocked to see the corpse. Conway was small, so very small.

  Herel rebuked himself for hesitating. A dead man couldn’t hurt him. He moved forward again.

  Something held him back.

  He looked down to see tendrils lashing out and coiling around his arms and legs. The station’s maintenance system was restraining him.

  The impassive robot watched as Herel was dragged back through the inner hatch. He struggled, but he was helpless as more tendrils slithered over his body. As thin as they were, their grip was steel.

  The robot entered the time station and set the box down just inside the examination room. It stepped back through the airlock and returned to the docking node without turning around, like a film running in reverse.

  “Good-bye, Herel,” Mae said. Her voice was muffled through his helmet.

  “Mae!” he cried to her in terror as he was pulled farther and farther from the airlock. “What’s happening to me?”

  “You’re staying here.”

  He was carried past her. She was buoyant as tendrils helped her put on her pressure suit. They seemed to caress her. Scores of them, hundreds of them, swayed about her like seaweed in a gentle current.

  “What are you doing?” he cried.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “But how?”

  It was the first time he’d heard her laugh since he’d killed Conway.

  “Looks like the rest of my sentence has been commuted,” she said, accepting her helmet from a waving skein of tendrils. “And yours is just beginning.”

  “But they can’t do this!” he shouted, bound and helpless. “It’s impossible!”

  “Is it?” she said, not bothering to put on the helmet.

  “Mae—”

  She was inside the hatch.

  “Mae! Don’t go!”

  She floated through the airlock.

  “Mae!” he screamed, writhing in the grip of the tendrils. “Don’t leave me alone! Please!”

  She didn’t look back.

  “Mae!”

  She was rising into the light when the inner hatch closed.

  THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: 116, by Grendel Briarton

  “I’m terribly worried, Ferdinand Feghoot,” sighed Ronald Reagan during the last week of his presidency. “The minute I’m out of the White House, Congress is going hog-wild. Spend, spend, spend! Where will the money come from?”

  “Never fear,” said Feghoot. “By 1991, genetic engineering will have solved the whole problem.”

  “Do you mean by changing the people?”

  “Not at all. By growing completely new trees—leafless, burgeoning with Federal Reserve notes in every denomination.”

  “Come, come!” Reagan protested. “Money doesn’t grown on trees!”

  Feghoot smiled. “Just let me get to my time shuttle.”

  In eight hours, he returned, bearing what looked like a small maple tree, except that instead of leaves it was covered with hundred-dollar bills.

  “There you are!” he announced. “Each with its own serial number. There’ll be an unending harvest to divvy up with every branch of government.”

  “It’s a miracle!” Reagan cried. “What will they call it?”

  “It will be know,” said Ferdinand Feghoot,” as the great dividend, Ron.”

  THE GALLERY OF HIS DREAMS, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations…. It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  1838

  Brady leaned against a hay bale and felt the blades dig into his back. He smelled of pig dung and his own sweat, and his muscles ached. His da had gone to the pump to wash up, and then into the cow shed, but Brady claimed he needed a rest. His da, never one to argue with relaxation, let him sit against the hay bales. Brady didn’t dare stay too long; if his ma saw him, she would be on the front porch, yelling insults unintelligible through her Irish brogue.

  He did need to think, though. Milking cows and cleaning the pig pen didn’t give him enough time to make plans. He couldn’t stay on the farm the rest of his life, he knew that. He hated the work, the animals, the smell, and the long hours that all led to a poor, subsistence living. His da thought the farm a step up from the hovel he had grown up in and certainly an improvement from Brady’s grandfather’s life back in the Old Country. Brady often wished he could see what his da’s or his grandfather’s life had really been like. But he had to trust their memories, memories that, at least in his grandfather’s case, had become more and more confusing as the years progressed.

  Brady pulled a strand of hay from the bale, sending a burst of sharp fresh summer-scent around him. He wanted more than a ruined farm and a few livestock in upstate New York. Mr. Hanley, his teacher, had pulled Brady aside on the day he left school, and reminded him that in the United States of American even farmboys could become great men. Mr. Hanley used to start the school day by telling the boys that the late President Thomas Jefferson defined the nation’s creed when he wrote that all men were created equal, and President Andrew Jackson had proven the statement true with his election not ten years before.

  Brady didn’t want to be president. He wanted to do something different, something he couldn’t even imagine now. He wanted to be great—and he wanted to be remembered.r />
  1840

  The spring thaw had turned the streets of New York City into rivers.

  Brady laughed as he jumped from one sidewalk board to the next, then turned and waited for Page to jump. Page hesitated a moment, running a slender hand through his beard. Then he jumped and landed, one tattered shoe in the cold water, one out. Brady grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled him up.

  “Good Lord, William, how far away is this man’s home?”

  “He’s not just any man,” Page said, shaking the water off his legs. “He’s a painter, and a damn fine one.”

  Brady smiled. Page was a painter himself and had, a few months earlier, opened a studio below their joint apartment. Brady helped with the rent on the studio as a repayment for Page’s help in moving Brady from the farm. Being a clerk at A.T. Stewart’s largest store was an improvement over farm life—the same kind of improvement that Brady’s father had made. Only Brady wasn’t going to stop there. Page had promised to help by showing Brady how to paint. While Brady had an eye for composition, he lacked the firm hand, the easy grace of a portraitist. Page had been polite; he hadn’t said that Brady was hopeless. But they both knew that Mathew B. Brady would never make his living with a paintbrush in his hand.

  Brady braced himself against a wooden building as he stepped over a submerged portion of sidewalk. “You haven’t said what this surprise is.”

  “I don’t know what the surprise is. Samuel simply said that he had learned about it in France and that we would be astonished.” Page slipped into a thin alley between buildings and then pulled open a door. Brady followed, and found himself staring up a dark flight of stairs. Page was already half-way up, his wet shoe squeaking with each step. Brady gripped the railing and took the stairs two at a time.

  Page opened the door, sending light across the stairs. Brady reached the landing just as Page bellowed, “Samuel!” Brady peered inside, nearly choking on the scent of linseed and turpentine.

  Large windows graced the walls, casting dusty sunlight on a room filled with canvases. Dropcloths covered most of the canvases and some of the furniture scattered about. A desk, overflowing with papers, stood under one window. Near that a large wooden box dwarfed a rickety table. A stoop-shouldered long-haired man braced the table with one booted foot.

  “Over here, Page, over here. Don’t dawdle. Help me move this thing. The damn table is about to collapse.”

  Page scurried across the room, bent down, and grabbed an edge of the box. The man picked up the other side and led the way to his desk. He balanced the box with one hand and his knee while his other hand swept the desk clean. They set the box down and immediately the man pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the sweat that had dripped into his bushy eyebrows.

  “I meant to show you in a less dramatic fashion,” he said, then looked up. Brady whipped his hat off his head and held it with both hands. The man had sharp eyes, eyes that could see right through a person, clear down to his dreams.

  “Well?” the man said.

  Brady nodded. He wouldn’t be stared down. “I’m Mathew B. Brady, sir.”

  “Samuel F. B. Morse.” Morse tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and clasped his hands behind his back. “You must be the boy Page has been telling me about. He assumes you have some sort of latent talent.”

  Brady glanced at Page. Page blushed, the color seeping through the patches of skin still visible through his beard.

  “Hmmm,” Morse said as he stalked forward. He paced around Brady, studied him for a moment. “You’re what, eighteen?”

  “Almost, sir.”

  “If you had talent, you’d know it by now.” Morse shook his head. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs. “No, no. You’re one of the lucky ones, blessed with drive. A man with talent merely has a head start. A man with drive succeeds.”

  Morse stalked back to his desk, stepping on the papers that littered the floor. “Drive but no talent. I have the perfect machine for you.” He put his hand on the box. “Ever hear of Louis Daguerre? No, of course not. What would a farmboy know of the latest scientific discoveries?”

  Brady started, then shot another look at Page. Perhaps Page had said something about Brady’s background. Page ignored him and had come closer to Morse.

  “Daguerre found a way to preserve the world in one image. Look.” He handed Page a small metal plate. As Page tilted it toward the light, Brady saw the Unitarian Church he walked past almost every day.

  “This is a daguerreotype,” Morse said. “I made this one through the window of the third floor staircase at New York University.”

  “That is the right view,” Page’s voice held awe. “You used no paints.”

  “I used this,” Morse said, his hand pounding on the box’s top. “It has a lens here—” and he pointed at the back end from which a glass-topped cylinder protruded “—and a place here for the plates. The plates are silver on copper, which I treat with iodine and expose to light through the lens. Then I put the plate in another box containing heated mercury, and when I’m done—an image! An exact reproduction of the world in black and white.”

  Brady touched the cool edge of the plate. “It preserves memories,” he said, thinking that if such a device had existed before, he could have seen his father’s hovel, his grandfather’s home.

  “It does more than that, son,” Morse said. “This is our future. It will destroy portrait painting. Soon everything will be images on metal, keepsakes for generations to come.”

  Page pulled back at the remark about portrait painting. He went to the window, looked at the street below. “I suppose that’s why you brought us up here. To show me that I’ll be out of work soon?”

  “No, lad.” Morse laughed and the sound boomed and echoed off the canvas-covered walls. “I want to save you, not destroy you. I’m opening a school to teach this new process and I invite you to join. Fifty dollars tuition for the entire semester and I promise you’ll be a better portraitist when you’re done than you are now.”

  Page gave Morse a sideways look. Page’s back was rigid and his hands were clenched in trembling fists. Brady could almost feel his friend’s rage. “I paint.” Page spoke with a slow deliberation. “I have no need for what will clearly become a poor man’s art.”

  Morse did not seem offended by Page’s remark. “And you, young Brady. Will you use your drive to acquire a talent?”

  Brady stared at the plate and mysterious box. Fifty dollars was a lot of money, but he already had twenty set aside for a trip home. Page did say he had an eye for composition. And if a man with an eye for composition, a lot of drive, and a little talent took Daguerre’s Box all over the world, he would be able to send his memories back to the people left behind.

  Brady smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll take your class.”

  He would postpone the trip to see his parents, and raise the rest of the money somehow. Page whirled away from the window as if Brady had betrayed him. But Brady didn’t care. When they got home, he would explain it all. And it was so simple. He had another improvement to make.

  1840

  That night, Brady dreamed. He stood in a large cool room, darkened and hidden in shadows. He bumped into a wall and found himself touching a ribbed column—a Doric column, he believed. He took cautious steps forward, stumbled, then caught himself on a piece of painted wood. His hands slid up the rough edges until he realized he was standing beside a single-horse carriage. He felt his way around to the back. The carriage box had no windows, but the back stood wide open. He climbed inside. The faint rotten-egg smell of sulphur rose. He bumped against a box and glass rattled. A wagon filled with equipment. He climbed out, feeling like he was snooping. There was more light now. He saw a wall ahead of him, covered with portraits.

  The darkness made the portraits difficult to see, but he thought he recognized the light and
shadow work of a Daguerre portrait and yet—and yet—something differed, distorted, perhaps, by the dream. And he knew he was in a dream. The cool air was too dry, the walls made of a foreign substance, the lights (what he could see of them), glass-encased boxes on the ceiling. The portraits were of ghastly things: dead men and stark fields, row after row of demolished buildings. On several, someone had lettered his last name in flowing white script.

  “They will make you great,” said a voice behind him. He turned, and saw a woman.At least, he thought it was a woman. Her hair was cropped above her ears, and she wore trousers.

  “Who will make me great?” he asked.

  “The pictures,” she said. “People will remember them for generations.” He took a step closer to her, but she smiled and touched his palm. The shadows turned black and the dream faded into a gently, restful sleep.

  1849

  Brady leaned against the hand-carved wooden railing. The candles on the large chandelier burned steady, while the candelabras flickered in the breezes left by the dancing couples. A pianist, a violinist, and a cello player—all, Mr. Handy had assured him, very well respected—played the newest European dance, the waltz, from one corner of the huge ballroom. Mothers cornered their daughters along the wall, approving dance cards, and shaking fans at impertinent young males. The staircase opened into the ballroom, and Brady didn’t want to cross the threshold. He had never been to a dance like this before. His only experiences dancing had been at gatherings Page had taken him to when he first arrived in New York. He knew none of the girls, except Samuel Handy’s daughter Juliet, and she was far too pretty for Brady to approach.

  So he watched her glide across the floor with young man after young man, her hooped skirts swaying, her brown hair in ringlets, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks flushed. Handy had told him that at the age of four, she had been presented to President Jackson. She had been so beautiful, Handy said, that Jackson had wanted to adopt her. Brady was glad he hadn’t seen her as a child, glad he had seen the mature beauty. When he finished taking the portraits of her father, he would ask if he could take one of her. The wet-plate process would let him make copies, and he would keep one in his own rooms, just so that he could show his friends how very lovely she was.