Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  Victor blinked. “You offered! You got the investors! You—”

  “Time travel’s no good if you can’t get back!” Alan punched every word in an attempt to get the idea through the blockhead’s skull.

  “Hey, I proved—proved—that time travel works, Alan. Who has ever done that? Nobody! Getting back—getting back, that’s just a technical glitch, a puzzle to work out—”

  “A technical glitch that put me into bankruptcy!”

  “You’ll get your money, if it’s so goddamn important.”

  “Yeah? Well, a livelihood, yeah, that’s important. Food on the table. I’ve been excommunicated from my family for bilking them all out of their life’s savings. But you know what is the worst part? That you don’t believe me when I tell you I know what the problem is. It’s those goddamn chimps!”

  “It’s not the chimps, Alan. Listen, you’ll get your money. I’ll work out the problems. We’ll set up the corporation, just like we planned.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And once you have the answers, what’s to stop you from putting it together with some big German investor, or Japanese, or some entrepreneur you meet in the States?”

  “Alan, what are you talking about? You—”

  “I have no money. I have debts. I can’t back you. I can’t invest in this scheme.”

  “Well, wherever we get the money, we’re in this together.”

  “Hah.”

  “Alan.”

  “Hah.” He stomped down the street.

  The traitor! He was getting off too easy. Alan turned and came back.

  He jabbed Victor in the chest with a finger. “You’re going to find out why those monkeys couldn’t get back?”

  “Chimps.”

  The word felt like a detonator on dynamite. Alan’s fist exploded on Victor’s face. Victor crumpled to the sidewalk on his backside, blood spouting from his nose.

  Alan shook the sting from his fist.

  Victor looked stupidly down at his bloody shirt.

  Alan took a step toward him, then got himself under control—barely—and stomped back to his car. He opened the door. “You?” he shouted back.

  Victor pulled himself to a sitting position and leaned forward, hands pressing on his nose.

  “You go to hell!”

  You don’t send a chimp to do a man’s job.

  There was a way to find out how the chimps screwed up. A very simple way. And Alan was goddamn going to prove it.

  He returned to the warehouse and powered up the time machine. The target time still read 2:05 am, the arrival time for the third chimp, so he reset it for 2:07 am. He had seen the operation—participated, even—and asked so many questions over the years, he had no trouble operating it. He double-checked the settings, just as the technicians had done each time they ran a test.

  The warehouse was quiet but for the hum of the generators, dim but for the single light Alan used to finalize his preparations. He stepped into the office that had been converted into a time-travel booth. He sat in the recliner and flipped the switch on the wall.

  The experience of traveling back in time surprised him. He was simply there. He fell onto the floor because there was now no recliner in the office. There was a shock of displaced air molecules against his skin; his clothes were gone. Nausea touched his stomach momentarily.

  He breathed and blew out sharply.

  The time-travel booth was now an office, with a desk and swivel chair, neither of which were occupying the space he had materialized into, thank God.

  Through the window that looked out onto the warehouse floor, he saw no time-travel computers or machinery; only three chimps fighting over a cigarette package.

  God. It worked.

  “Yeah!” he cried aloud and pulled open the office door. The chimps scattered, then turned to look at him. “Hey!” he yelled, and they ran in all directions. “We did it! Hey, chimps, we did it! It works!” He spun in a circle. “Victor!” he yelled. “We did it! You did it, you bastard!”

  Whatever the problem was, it didn’t exist now.

  He had to tell Victor.

  First, though, he needed proof that he’d been here. He picked up the cigarette pack the chimps had dropped and flipped it over. BD02613 was stamped on the bottom. “Yes!”

  He flung open the door to the office to pull the switch to return to the preset time.

  He stopped short. He would never laugh about the Mars Climate Orbiter again.

  There was no switch.

  And in 2004, on his seventy-seventh birthday, his affairs in order, contentment in his heart and his wife at his side, Alan vanished.

  BAD TIMING

  Molly Brown

  “Time travel is an inexact science. And its study is fraught with paradoxes.”

  —Samuel Colson, b. 2301 d. 2197.

  Alan rushed through the archway without even glancing at the inscription across the top. It was Monday morning and he was late again. He often thought about the idea that time was a point in space, and he didn’t like it. That meant that at this particular point in space it was always Monday morning and he was always late for a job he hated. And it always had been. And it always would be. Unless somebody tampered with it, which was strictly forbidden.

  “Oh my Holy Matrix,” Joe Twofingers exclaimed as Alan raced past him to register his palmprint before losing an extra thirty minutes pay. “You wouldn’t believe what I found in the fiction section!”

  Alan slapped down his hand. The recorder’s metallic voice responded with, “Employee number 057, Archives Department, Alan Strong. Thirty minutes and seven point two seconds late. One hour’s credit deducted.”

  Alan shrugged and turned back towards Joe. “Since I’m not getting paid, I guess I’ll put my feet up and have a cup of liquid caffeine. So tell me what you found.”

  “Well, I was tidying up the files—fiction section is a mess as you know—and I came across this magazine. And I thought, ‘what’s this doing here?’ It’s something from the twentieth century called Woman’s Secrets, and it’s all knitting patterns, recipes, and gooey little romance stories: ‘He grabbed her roughly, bruising her soft pale skin, and pulled her to his rock hard chest’ and so on. I figured it was in there by mistake and nearly threw it out. But then I saw this story called ‘The Love That Conquered Time’ and I realized that must be what they’re keeping it for. So I had a look at it, and it was . . .” He made a face and stuck a finger down his throat. “But I really think you ought to read it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re in it.”

  “You’re a funny guy, Joe. You almost had me going for a minute.”

  “I’m serious! Have a look at the drebbing thing. It’s by some woman called Cecily Walker, it’s in that funny old vernacular they used to use, and it’s positively dire. But the guy in the story is definitely you.”

  Alan didn’t believe him for a minute. Joe was a joker, and always had been. Alan would never forget the time Joe laced his drink with a combination aphrodisiac-hallucinogen at a party and he’d made a total fool of himself with the section leader’s overcoat. He closed his eyes and shuddered as Joe handed him the magazine.

  Like all the early relics made of paper, the magazine had been dipped in preservative and the individual pages coated with a clear protective covering which gave them a horrible chemical smell and a tendency to stick together. After a little difficulty, Alan found the page he wanted. He rolled his eyes at the painted illustration of a couple locked in a passionate but chaste embrace, and dutifully began to read.

  It was all about a beautiful but lonely and unfulfilled woman who still lives in the house where she was born. One day there is a knock at the door, and she opens it to a mysterious stranger: tall, handsome, and extremely charismatic.

  Alan chuckled to himself.

  A few paragraphs later, over a candlelit dinner, the man tells the woman that he comes from the future, where time travel has become a
reality, and he works at the Colson Time Studies Institute in the Department of Archives.

  Alan stopped laughing.

  The man tells her that only certain people are allowed to time travel, and they are not allowed to interfere in any way, only observe. He confesses that he is not a qualified traveler—he broke into the lab one night and stole a machine. The woman asks him why and he tells her, “You’re the only reason, Claudia. I did it for you. I read a story that you wrote and I knew it was about me and that it was about you. I searched in the Archives and I found your picture and then I knew that I loved you and that I had always loved you and that I always would.”

  “But I never wrote a story, Alan.”

  “You will, Claudia. You will.”

  The Alan in the story goes on to describe the Project, and the Archives, in detail. The woman asks him how people live in the twenty-fourth century, and he tells her about the gadgets in his apartment.

  The hairs at the back of Alan’s neck rose at the mention of his Neuro-Pleasatron. He’d never told anybody that he’d bought one, not even Joe.

  After that, there’s a lot of grabbing and pulling to his rock hard chest, melting sighs and kisses, and finally a wedding and a “happily ever after” existing at one point in space where it always has and always will.

  Alan turned the magazine over and looked at the date on the cover. March 14, 1973.

  He wiped the sweat off his forehead and shook himself. He looked up and saw that Joe was standing over him.

  “You wouldn’t really do that, would you,” Joe said. “Because you know I’d have to stop you.”

  Cecily Walker stood in front of her bedroom mirror and turned from right to left. She rolled the waistband over one more time, making sure both sides were even. Great; the skirt looked like a real mini. Now all she had to do was get out of the house without her mother seeing her.

  She was in the record shop wondering if she really should spend her whole allowance on the new Monkees album, but she really liked Peter Tork, he was so cute, when Tommy Johnson walked in with Roger Hanley. “Hey, Cess-pit! Whaddya do, lose the bottom half of your dress?”

  The boys at her school were just so creepy. She left the shop and turned down the main road, heading toward her friend Candy’s house. She never noticed the tall blond man that stood across the street, or heard him call her name.

  When Joe went on his lunch break, Alan turned to the wall above his desk and said, “File required: Authors, fiction, twentieth century, initial ‘W’.”

  “Checking,” the wall said. “File located.”

  “Biography required: Walker, Cecily.”

  “Checking. Biography located. Display? Yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  A section of wall the size of a small television screen lit up at eye-level, directly in front of Alan. He leaned forward and read: Walker, Cecily, b. Danville, Illinois, U.S.A. 1948 d. 2037. Published works: “The Love That Conquered Time,” March, 1973. Accuracy rating: fair.

  “Any other published works?”

  “Checking. None found.”

  Alan looked down at the magazine in his lap.

  “I don’t understand,” Claudia said, looking pleadingly into his deep blue eyes. Eyes the color of the sea on a cloudless morning, and eyes that contained an ocean’s depth of feeling for her, and her alone. “How is it possible to travel through time?”

  “I’ll try to make this simple,” he told her, pulling her close. She took a deep breath, inhaling his manly aroma, and rested her head on his shoulder with a sigh. “Imagine that the universe is like a string. And every point on that string is a moment in space and time. But instead of stretching out in a straight line, it’s all coiled and tangled and it overlaps in layers. Then all you have to do is move from point to point.”

  Alan wrinkled his forehead in consternation. “File?”

  “Yes. Waiting.”

  “Information required: further data on Walker, Cecily. Education, family background.”

  “Checking. Found. Display? Yes or . . .”

  “Yes!”

  Walker, Cecily. Education: Graduate Lincoln High, Danville,

  1967. Family background: Father Walker, Matthew. Mechanic, automobile. d. 1969. Mother no data.

  Alan shook his head. Minimal education, no scientific background. How could she know so much? “Information required: photographic likeness of subject. If available, display.”

  He blinked and there she was, smiling at him across his desk. She was oddly dressed, in a multi-colored tee-shirt that ended above her waist and dark blue trousers that were cut so low they exposed her navel and seemed to balloon out below her knees into giant flaps of loose-hanging material. But she had long dark hair that fell across her shoulders and down to her waist, crimson lips and the most incredible eyes he had ever seen—huge and green. She was beautiful. He looked at the caption: Walker, Cecily. Author: Fiction related to time travel theory. Photographic likeness circa 1970.

  “File,” he said, “Further data required: personal details, i.e. marriage. Display.”

  Walker, Cecily M. Strong, Alan.

  “Date?”

  No data.

  “Biographical details of husband, Strong, Alan?”

  None found.

  “Redisplay photographic likeness. Enlarge.” He stared at the wall for several minutes. “Print,” he said.

  Only half a block to go, the woman thought, struggling with two bags of groceries. The sun was high in the sky and the smell of Mrs. Henderson’s roses, three doors down, filled the air with a lovely perfume. But she wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it. All the sun made her feel was hot, and all the smell of flowers made her feel was ill. It had been a difficult pregnancy, but thank goodness it was nearly over now.

  She wondered who the man was, standing on her front porch. He might be the new mechanic at her husband’s garage, judging by his orange cover-alls. Nice-looking, she thought, wishing that she didn’t look like there was a bowling ball underneath her dress.

  “Excuse me,” the man said, reaching out to help her with her bags. “I’m looking for Cecily Walker.”

  “My name’s Walker,” the woman told him. “But I don’t know any Cecily.”

  “Cecily,” she repeated when the man had gone. What a pretty name.

  Alan decided to work late that night. Joe left at the usual time and told him he’d see him tomorrow.

  “Yeah, tomorrow,” Alan said.

  He waited until Joe was gone, and then he took the printed photo of Cecily Walker out of his desk drawer and sat for a long time, staring at it. What did he know about this woman? Only that she’d written one published story, badly, and that she was the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. Of course, what he was feeling was ridiculous. She’d been dead more than three hundred years.

  But there were ways of getting around that.

  Alan couldn’t believe what he was actually considering. It was lunacy. He’d be caught, and he’d lose his job. But then he realized that he could never have read about it if he hadn’t already done it and got away with it. He decided to have another look at the story.

  It wasn’t there. Under Fiction: Paper Relics: 20th Century, subsection Magazines, American, there was shelf after shelf full of Amazing Stories, Astounding, Analog; Weird Tales and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, but not one single copy of Woman’s Secrets.

  Well, he thought, if the magazine isn’t there, I guess I never made it after all. Maybe it’s better that way. Then he thought, but if I never made it, how can I be looking for the story? I shouldn’t even know about it. And then he had another thought.

  “File,” he said. “Information required: magazines on loan.”

  “Display?”

  “No, just tell me.”

  “Woman’s Secrets, date 1973. Astounding, date . . .”

  “Skip the rest. Who’s got Woman’s Secrets?”

  “Checking. Signed out to Project Control through Joe Two-fingers
.”

  Project Control was on to him! If he didn’t act quickly, it would be too late.

  It was amazingly easy to get into the lab. He just walked in. The machines were all lined up against one wall, and there was no one around to stop him. He walked up to the nearest machine and sat down on it. The earliest model developed by Samuel Colson had looked like an English telephone box (he’d been a big

  Doctor Who fan), but it was hardly inconspicuous and extremely heavy, so refinements were made until the latest models were lightweight, collapsible, and made to look exactly like (and double up as) a folding bicycle. The control board was hidden from general view, inside a wicker basket.

  None of the instruments were labeled. Alan tentatively pushed one button. Nothing happened. He pushed another. Still nothing.

  He jumped off and looked for an instruction book. There had to be one somewhere. He was ransacking a desk when the door opened.

  “I thought I’d find you here, Alan.”

  “Joe! I . . . uh . . . was just . . .”

  “I know what you’re doing, and I can’t let you go through with it. It’s against every rule of the Institute and you know it. If you interfere with the past, who knows what harm you might do?”

  “But Joe, you know me. I wouldn’t do any harm. I won’t do anything to affect history, I swear it. I just want to see her, that’s all. Besides, it’s already happened, or you couldn’t have read that magazine. And that’s another thing! You’re the one who showed it to me! I never would have known about her if it hadn’t been for you. So if I’m going now, it’s down to you.”

  “Alan, I’m sorry, but my job is on the line here, too, you know. So don’t give me any trouble and come along quietly.”

  Joe moved towards him, holding a pair of handcuffs. Attempted theft of Institute property was a felony punishable by five years’ imprisonment without pay. Alan picked up the nearest bike and brought it down over the top of Joe’s head. The machine lay in pieces and Joe lay unconscious. Alan bent down and felt his pulse. He would be okay. “Sorry, Joe. I had to do it. File!”