by Anthology
“Charlie, please!” He fell to his knees. “This is for real; it’s for both of us.” He would have broken into tears but for something he glimpsed to his left. “Oh Jesus!”
Charlie turned and looked, too. A toddler with blond, curly hair came from the direction of the ocean, his diaper dripping with sea water, his pudgy face wreathed in a smile.
Charlie turned to Eddie and shrugged.
The children had run back. Vicki, in the red swim suit, took hold of the baby by the hand, scolded him, but the baby only laughed. She looked up. “You’re gonna get in trouble, Charlie,” she shouted. “Mama told you to watch him!”
“Well, mama told you to watch him, too!” returned Charlie, and he grinned up at Eddie. “You know, you did that about every other day. You loved the water.”
Eddie could not take his eyes off the toddler. “I look so happy.”
The girl dragged him, none too gently, toward the first white house. It had a little, white wooden arch over the end of the walkway leading from the front door.
“I can see why you liked it here,” said Eddie, “where the water is calm.”
“You know, I thought I’d get bored. The sun never sets. The raft never fills with jellyfish. But every time I dash out in the water and spear one of those things, I get a thrill. Sometimes, I can even grab one of the big round ones with my bare hands and not get stung. And every time I dump one on our pile, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. It’s counter to all the neuro-adaption theory I ever learned. I can’t explain it.”
“Well, this creation of your own Garden of Eden, it’ll make a hell of a video game.”
The boy’s brow wrinkled. “Is that what they told you?”
“Well, I thought . . .”
“This is a perpetual life machine.”
Eddie thought for a moment. “You mean, you can start a whole new life in here?”
“You can’t go that far. The size of the system is limited by—lots of factors, but you can create a little segment of life, like this one. A day’s about the limit, and then you make a loop of it. The result is that you can live the happiest day of your life over and over—forever.”
Eddie glanced up and down the shore. The waves had grown enormous and broke in two long lines before crashing onto the beach; he could hear the sound of them up and down the shore. The children ran, squealing, in and out amongst them.
“We always got big breakers after a tanker passed,” Charlie said.
Eddie took several steps back as the tail-end of the waves scudded farther up the strand.
“That’s what they want to market,” said Charlie, “a perpetual life machine. Much better than a perpetual flame, don’t you think? People near death will pay anything for it, and their families will continue paying to keep it running.”
“It does sound kinda appealing.”
“Et felicitas perpetua.”
“I give up.”
“It’s from the Latin Mass. Et lux perpetua. It means ‘and light everlasting’ except Celestial Games plugs ‘happiness’ in for ‘light.’ ”
“And Happiness Everlasting!” Eddie pronounced.
“At first, it was just an idea I toyed with secretly, but then I realized the company was spying on me, and I made a kind of game of it, hiding from them. Keeping the key was just my final ‘up yours’ to Adolphus and his cronies.”
“So, if you don’t give up the key, nobody gets back, and they can’t market the thing?”
“Something like that.”
“What about you? What happens when they unplug the computer?”
“My existence terminates.” And with that he thrust his stick deep into the sand and left it there, poking up in front of him.
“Don’t you want to go on?”
The boy turned his head to the side and looked darkly down the beach. “This didn’t work out like I thought it would.” He crossed his arms in the gesture of an old man.
“Whadaya you mean?”
“I thought I’d come back and go through this loop a couple of thousand times, maybe more, and I’d get so bored that when the company got pissed off enough to pull the plug I wouldn’t care.”
“Aren’t you getting bored?”
“Actually, I’m enjoying myself,” he said grimly. “I think it must be a defect in the program.”
“What a shame,” Eddie laughed. “But then, maybe that changes things a little.”
“Maybe it does. You know, I didn’t really have a plan. I just thought I’d live my happiest day over and over for a while and then check out. But, now I find I really do care.” He lifted his arms, palms up. “I’d like it to go on.”
“Why can’t it?”
“I didn’t think they would figure out the genetic key, but they did. And by sending you in they’ve forced my hand. They know I won’t leave you stranded in here.” His voice took on a tone of resignation. “And once they get the key there will be no incentive to keep the program running.”
“I’ll make them! I’ll make it a condition of giving them the key.”
Charlie smiled. “Thanks, Eddie, but you’re no match for those guys.”
“I’ll buy the computer. I’ll keep it running myself.”
Charlie lifted his eyebrows. “That might work, for a while at least.”
“It’ll work for a long time. I promise.”
“Move it to another location. Hire another company to monitor it.”
“You know, Charlie, suddenly, I’m feeling very assertive.”
Charlie beamed, and then they looked at one another for a long while.
“You click your heels three times.”
“No!” grinned Eddie.
“It was my favorite book,” Charlie said with a little wave of his hand. “And then you say the name of my dog.”
“Shep?”
“I loved him,” Charlie said, softly.
“And that’s the key?”
The boy grimaced. “That’s all there is.”
They said nothing for a moment.
Suddenly, Charlie pulled the stick out of the sand and offered it to Eddie. “Why don’t you come and spear some jellyfish with us?”
Eddie took the stick, the grin still on his face. But then, “Naw, I’ve got other things on my mind. I’ve gotta twist some corporate arm.” He handed the stick back. “But one more thing: you know, that bit about love?”
“Don’t start that again. There’s no point.”
“It’s important, Charlie. We both had trouble with it, and we should have talked. In the long run we had one another all along. We could have worked it out.”
“Could we?”
“You know, I’m sorry we can’t get in this thing and just do it all over again. We could be best friends.”
Charlie laughed. “The ultimate virtual reality.”
“But even if we can’t, the rest is going to be different, now.”
Charlie nodded. “You still have some time left.”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too, in my own little paradise.”
“I wish you could come back with me.”
“Don’t,” cried Charlie. “Don’t make me sorry.”
“No, no. I don’t mean to.”
The boy bit his lip. “But you could come and see me.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
“And don’t forget that someday later, maybe much later, when you’re about to—you know—you could come back and stay.”
Eddie was quiet. “I’ll have to think about that.”
“Yeah, it takes some getting used to, and maybe your paradise would be different from this.”
Eddie’s throat was dry, and his nose started running. “Goodbye, Charlie. I’m really glad I got to see you again,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “And I’ll come back and spear some jellyfish, I promise.” And then, he knelt in the sand and opened his arms. “Can we . . .”
The boy looked at him, a flicker of fear on his face, but then he r
ushed forward and threw himself into his brother’s arms.
To Eddie, the little body felt so small, so thin and frail. Eddie cried. The boy squirmed, and Eddie released him. Then he stood up and watched as Charlie turned and ran with his stick toward the ocean, the sand flying from his little feet, his hair blowing in the salt breeze.
AND COMES OUT HERE
Lester del Rey
There is one fact no sane man can quarrel with . . . everything has a beginning and an end. But some men aren’t sane; thus it isn’t always so!
No, you’re wrong. I’m not your father’s ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it’s a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have . . . or do . . . or will. I don’t know, verbs get all mixed up. We don’t have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.
Anyhow, you’ll let me in. I did, so you will.
Thanks. You think you’re crazy, of course, but you’ll find out you aren’t. It’s just that things are a bit confused. And don’t look at the machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you’ll find it’s hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You’ll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.
You’re wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not? And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for me as you’re having. Of course we have the same tastes—we’re the same person. I’m you thirty years from now, or you’re me. I remember just how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.
Here, have one of these. You’ll get to like them in a couple more years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. You’ll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn’t matter.
Right now, you’re shocked. It’s a real wrench when a man meets himself for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people. You sense things. So I’ll simply go ahead talking for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you’ll come along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I might as well do the same. I probably couldn’t help telling you the same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don’t intend to try. I’ve gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.
So let’s begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me. You’ll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it’ll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine. You’ll sense that, too. You’ve seen it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You’ll be puzzling over what I’ll tell you, and you’ll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You won’t exactly believe it, but you’ll want to go along.
I’ll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button, and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section isn’t protected, though.
You start to say something, but by then I’m pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but it isn’t there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no there. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are.
You can’t feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out, all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn’t hurt, and when you pull your arm back, you’re still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening and you don’t try it again.
Then it comes to you slowly that you’re actually traveling in time. You turn to me, getting used to the idea. “So this is the fourth dimension?” you ask.
Then you feel silly, because you’ll remember that I said you’d ask that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can’t help answering when you speak.
“Not exactly,” I try to explain. “Maybe it’s no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you’re going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you’d need a fifth. Don’t ask me. I didn’t invent the machine and I don’t understand it.”
“But . . .”
I let it go, and so do you. If you don’t, a good way of going crazy. You’ll see later why I couldn’t have invented the machine. Of course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. It’s simpler just to figure that this is the way time got bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it’s just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.
Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. You look at your watch and it’s still running. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. I don’t know, and you won’t think about that then, either.
I’m smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven’t seen any effects of air loss.
“Where are we getting our air?” you ask. “Or why don’t we lose it?”
“No place for it to go,” I explain. There isn’t. Out there is neither time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel gravity, but I can’t explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.
Then the machine stops—-at least, the field around us cuts off. You feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe easier, though we’re in complete darkness, except for the weak light in the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the machine, just as I do.
I’ve got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It’s a sort of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels comfortable.
“I’m staying here,” I tell you. “This is like the things they wear in this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to pass fairly well. I’ve had all my fortune—the one you make on that atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some identification I’ve got with me, so I’ll do all right. I know they still use some kind of money, you’ll see evidence of that. And it’s a pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We’ll go up and I’ll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won’t be coming back with you.”
You nod, remembering I’ve told you about it. “What century is this, anyway?”
I’d told you that, too, but you’ve forgotten. “As near as I can guess, it’s about 2150. He told me, just as I’m telling you, that it’s an interstellar civilization.”
You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I’ve got a small flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor. This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs, and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.
“What about the time machine?” you ask.
“Since nobody ev
er stole it, it’s safe.”
We get in the elevator, and I say “first” to it. It gives out a soughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There’s no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says “first” back at us.
It’s obviously a service elevator and we’re in a dim corridor, with nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. “You go that way. Don’t worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can’t. Find the museum, grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.”
You act as if you’re dreaming, though you can’t believe it’s a dream. You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later, you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I’m asking questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off.
You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at them, realizing for the first time that things have changed.
Steij.neri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenseri. The signs are very quiet and dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains, and the like. What a zergot is, you don’t know. You stop at a sign that announces: Trav:l Biwrou—F :rst-Clas T wrz—Man, Viin*s, and x: Trouj.n Planets. Spej:l reits tu aol s*nz wixin 60 lyt iirz! But there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get the hang of the spelling they use, though.
Now there are people around you, but nobody pays much attention to you. Why should they? You wouldn’t care if you saw a man in a leopard-skin suit; you’d figure it was some part in a play and let it go. Well, people don’t change much.
You get up your courage and go up to a boy selling something that might be papers on tapes.
“Where can I find the Museum of Science?”
“Downayer rien turn lefa the sign. Stoo bloss,” he tells you. Around you, you hear some pretty normal English, but there are others using stuff as garbled as his. The educated and uneducated? I don’t know.