Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  It didn’t sound right. “Canada?” Tom asked.

  Juan shook his head. “You don’t need us to go to Canada, kid. Hop a train tonight and you can be in Vancouver on Friday. If you’re broke, go thumb a ride; you’ll get to the border inside a week. Draft resistance isn’t a crime in Canada; they won’t send you back. But you’re stuck there. The Feds bust kids who come back to their grandmothers’ funerals.”

  “Marie said somebody would take my place.” Tom tried to read the man’s expression.

  “That’s right, kid. Somebody comes down now to spend two years in the Army under your name. When their tour is over, they go back up then and on paper down now you’re a veteran, entitled to all the benefits thereof. It’s not a bad deal. It’s a damned better one than the Army will give you. You got a birth certificate, draft card, or ID?”

  “Driver’s license and draft card. Burned the induction notice.” Rolled it up and lit a joint with it, but Tom knew better than to say that.

  “The card is what matters. License doesn’t have a photo, does it?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “That’ll do. Uncle just wants bodies to fight; he doesn’t care if they’re yours. All you do is bring your papers back here, tell the substitute what he needs to know to pretend to be you, and zip into the machine. When you walk out two years from now, the substitute gives you his discharge papers and mustering-out pay, tells you where he’s been, and you’re off scot free.”

  Something didn’t add up. Tom’s mind grabbed at a question. “So where do I hide for two years?”

  “Smart kid.” Juan paused. “What did Marie tell you?”

  “Time travel, mumbo jumbo, didn’t make sense.” Tom wanted to hear what the man had to say.

  “It’s not mumbo jumbo, kid. It’s future technology. I was born in the year 2162 in Nashville. Up then, we’ve got technology that would look like magic to you. One bit of techno-magic is that we can send people back in time. We can’t go back to exactly our own past; but your world is close enough that we don’t get into trouble. You know why we come back now?”

  Tom shook his head. The congestion in his nose still smelled faintly of pot smoke, and he didn’t want to say something stupid.

  “We know how bad war is, kid, and we’ve managed to stop it, but some crazy fools up then still want to play soldier. You’ve got the wars they want, so we send them down now. Slogging through a real war is good therapy; most of them get over it. You stay out of the war. Everybody wins.”

  “Why?” Tom asked.

  Juan chuckled. “Sometimes I think you freaks are the only sane ones down now, kid. You’re harmless. Your heads are messed up, but war would only mess them up more. We help you, and you help us. That’s the way the world is.”

  Maybe the man was crazy, but Tom didn’t want to go to war or to jail. “What do you do?”

  “Find somebody from up then who can pass for you. It’s easy in 1969; nobody has DNA profiles. Your friends wouldn’t recognize you with a shave and a military haircut. What’s your height and weight?”

  “Five foot ten, one-fifty-five.”

  Juan moved the magazine to look at a sheet of paper on his desk. “We’ve got a few who can do you. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium build. Tom Jackson is a common name; nobody could track you down that way after the war. Black kids have it easier; they all look the same to Whitey.” He chuckled. “You’re in if you want it, kid.”

  “Where do I go for the next two years?” Tom worried that Juan was evading his question.

  “You skip them, kid. We send you two years into the future.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “You just pop in the time machine and walk out two years later a free man. Like you’re in an elevator, kid. The doors close, you feel a little something funny, and the doors open two years from now. You think you spent maybe a minute going up then.”

  “Have you done it?”

  Juan shook his head. “I came down now in it, but I can’t go back up then until I leave for good. Once I go forward in this time line, I can’t come back to now. It violates causality. You can only go forward, to a time where you weren’t before. Don’t worry about it kid; I don’t. I stay here, down now. They pay well, and it’s interesting. I’ve been down now almost two years; after three more, I head back up then, with a pile of money waiting. Don’t ask me how the time machine works, kid. I don’t know.”

  It sounded stark raving mad, but Tom had nothing left to lose. “Is that all?”

  “You can’t bring much gear with you. Just a pack you can carry into the time machine. We’ve got no room to store things. If you know anybody else who wants out, send them to Marie, but don’t tell them what it is. They’d think you’re crazy. Same thing for friends and family. Tell them you’re splitting for a while, or enlisting, but nothing about us. They’d think you’re nuts.”

  Tom nodded. It was better than waiting for the FBI to knock on the door. His parents deserved to worry for a while. “When?” he asked.

  “Monday,” Juan said. “Get here by 10 A.M.”

  Thursday night Tom missed a person-to-person call from his father. The operator left a note to call collect, but Tom ignored it. On Saturday, Tom told the bakery he wouldn’t be back; the owner thanked him and gave him $40 cash instead of a paycheck. That evening, he told the guys in the apartment he was splitting. They knew better than to ask where. They’d watched him burn the induction notice, and they didn’t want to know if the Feds came asking. He sold his sleeping bag and mattress for $20, and his cooking gear for $10. He told the guys they could have anything else he left.

  Sunday morning his father woke him up with another person-to-person call. He was still trying to sell Tom on enlisting to be a clerk. “It’s not fun, Tommy, but it’s safe.”

  “They’re lying to you. I won’t be part of the war. I’m splitting.”

  “You’re going to get in trouble.”

  Tom hung up. He’d let them worry while he was gone. They’d tried to run his life too long. That evening the guys offered him a farewell joint, but he turned it down for the first time in a long while. He wanted a clear head for the future.

  Tom knocked on the office door just after 9:30 on Monday. Juan was there, and a tall black kid with wary eyes who introduced himself as Joe. Three white guys showed up together just before 10:00, looking stoned. The five sat nervously on metal folding chairs in the office while Juan went into the back of the building. The lights flickered as a high whine came from the back. Tom fidgeted until Juan returned with five more young men with very short hair.

  One was black and tall. Three matched the other three guys, one short and blonde, the others a shade darker. The fifth had to be the substitute for Tom. Juan introduced them, and told them to sit down while he explained things.

  “These guys are going to be you kids for the next two years. They need your paperwork; they need to know enough about you to pass muster. They don’t need to know all your girlfriends, but they have to know your parents’ names and addresses, when and where you were born, where you went to school, that sort of stuff.” He turned toward the substitutes. “And you’ve each got note pads, so you write it down. No army down now will take you if you’re too dumb to remember your mother’s name. You want the sergeants to think you’re smart as well as gung-ho. Make sure you memorize it all; that’s why you don’t go down to enlist until tomorrow.”

  Juan paused and looked back and forth between the two groups. He looked toward Tom’s group. “Kids, these guys come from over 200 years in the future, so their questions are going to sound weird. They have to pass for you to the Army, but they will never talk to your families. If somebody writes a letter that reaches them, they’ll ignore it. That’s the deal. After they get out, they’ll tell you what they did, so you don’t sound like idiots when somebody asks you about the war.”

  He turned to the others. “Like they told you up then, down now doesn’t have much in the way of identification t
echnology, just photos and fingerprints. As far as we know, these kids don’t have any prints or photos in police records. All you’ve got to do is learn a little about them, and look a little like them. The draft boards just want bodies; they don’t care whose.”

  When he was done, Juan paired them off, and sent each pair to separate small rooms.

  Claude was Tom’s substitute. He asked eager, nervous questions in a voice with an odd accent. As he answered, Tom felt he was undressing himself, shedding details like clothing.

  They got down to particulars. “No shop,” Tom said when the questions turned to high school classes. “I was college prep. Wanted to be an astronomer. Didn’t want to push paper like my father.”

  Claude looked up from his notes. “Why don’t you want to go? You have the chance to be a hero. We have nothing like it in my time. We have no more heroes, no more wars, no more risks. There is no courage left in our world.”

  Tom stared at Claude, speechless. He had always preferred physics and math because the correct answers were always beyond argument. He knew right and wrong, but he didn’t know how to debate them. He had wanted to eloquently denounce the whole war machine in front of the draft board, but the words had never come. He had no words for the depths of Hell he had seen in Mike’s eyes when Mike talked about battles he had fought in.

  “They told me you would be cowards,” Claude said.

  It was supposed to be an insult. Tom had heard it before; from Nazis dressed up as Marines, from aging cartoonists who were no longer funny, from the washed-up Borax salesman who was governor of California. It didn’t matter. As his roommates passed around the joint he’d lit with his induction notice, they’d agreed they’d rather be live cowards than dead heroes of an evil war.

  Tom looked at Claude and saw Mike’s ghost. Claude would be a good soldier. March and follow orders. Kill and stand ramrod straight and salute, notSieg Heil but Hail Nixon. Mike had not wanted to become a monster, but Claude did, and he scared Tom. Tom didn’t want to kill or fight anyone. He wanted the war to end so everyone would leave him alone. Maybe that was how his father had felt about the Nazis. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I am. Maybe we all are. You want our places, and we give them to you.”

  “It is a vital war, you know. I have read about it up then. The communists are evil. Don’t you care?”

  “I wouldn’t make a good soldier,” Tom said, not wanting to argue. He knew a thousand reasons to stop the war, but he knew Claude didn’t want to listen any more than Mike had.

  “I’ve trained for this, up then, but our military camps only play at war. I have to test myself in a real war.”

  “You’re not afraid?” Tom had to ask.

  “No. There is risk, yes, but a small one. We have a little to fear from your weapons, but there must be some risk for there to be reward. To be a man, you have to fight and risk death. That I believe. That we all believe. That is why we came down now.”

  Tom wondered why Claude was arguing with him. Was the replacement really trying to convince himself? He let Claude talk, but he didn’t really listen.

  In the end, when they had nothing more to say, Claude stood and shook Tom’s hand formally, thanking him for the chance to be a soldier. Drained, Tom thanked the other man for going.

  They were the third pair of men to leave the little conference rooms. Juan asked if they had finished everything, running through a list, and when he was satisfied pointed them to separate benches. Joe looked at Tom when he sat down, and whispered, “They’re strange, man. They’re really strange. This dude thinks he can’t die. The Army’s all about death, man.”

  “Yeah,” Tom nodded. “Brainwashed.”

  “Must be,” whispered the other. Tom smelled liquor on Joe’s breath, but he sounded sober. “They don’t fit where they came from. That’s why they come back here. Weird guys.”

  Mutely, Tom agreed. They waited silently for the other two pairs to emerge. When all were done, Juan stood before them with a clipboard.

  “The time machine will be ready in ten minutes. It looks like a small room with metal walls. You walk inside with the gear you brought. Nobody brought more than one pack, did they?”

  His eyes swept the five as they shook their heads.

  “Good. All five of you go at the same time. I close and lock the door behind you. It will be dark inside, completely dark. Don’t try lighting a match; it can mess things up. You will feel vibrations for what seems like a couple minutes. When you get up then, it will be two years and five weeks from down now. Your replacements and I will be here to greet you. As soon as I open the door from the outside, it will swing open and you can walk out. We have to lock it for safety.”

  “Why we gotta be locked in, man?” one of the white guys asked. He sounded like he’d stayed up waiting for the Sun with a couple of joints.

  “Safety,” Juan repeated. “You’re not in normal space and time when the machine is running. Everyone can get messed up real bad if anybody freaks and tries to climb out the door.”

  “I don’t like it,” the guy said.

  “You want to go help Uncle in the rice paddies? Lots of other guys want to get out.”

  “Cool it, Frank,” one of his buddies said. “It’ll be okay.”

  Juan thanked him. “Don’t split right away when you get there. You’ll have a couple of years to catch up on.”

  Tom hadn’t thought much about that. Two years would be 1971. More men would have walked on the Moon. His wise-ass sister would be in college. He wondered what would happen as he hoisted his pack and walked with the others into the metal box. Juan clanked the door shut and there was darkness and utter silence except for a hum that came from the shaking of the metal itself. He felt stuck in suddenly thick air, unable to move or talk, unconscious of breathing. The box pulled back and forth, floating, rising, falling, like a stoned elevator. Somebody screamed, and the sound echoed down corridors. Then the door opened, light blinded him, and off-balance, Tom staggered against the wall. The guy who had complained had fallen to the floor.

  Juan held the door as they staggered out. As Tom’s eyes adjusted, he realized the light was dim. Five people sat on folding chairs, but as they came into focus, he realized Marie was one of them. Joe’s replacement was there, and three white soldiers, but not Claude. Tom looked around, but saw no one else.

  “Welcome to November 21, 1971. It’s debriefing time, kids. You soldiers need to tell the dodgers what happened. You dodgers, you need to pick up enough of their stories to pass for veterans. On paper you spent the last two years in the war. The briefing rooms are set up; the same ones you used before you left. We put note pads in the rooms, and you can have all the time you want.”

  He looked straight at Tom; two sudden years showed on his face, a dash of gray in the long sideburns that hadn’t been on his face when Tom had left. Juan looked very tired, with deep circles under his eyes. “We’ve got to talk to you separately, kid.”

  Tom walked to the office with Juan and Marie. The room had aged; the walls needed paint, trying to remind him two years had passed. “Where’s Claude?” he asked when they sat down.

  “The damned fool got himself killed, kid.” Juan put his hand over his face and sighed deeply. “It had to happen sometime. Some of them think they’re immortal down now. He played hero, charging the VC, and they dropped an artillery shell square onto him. There wasn’t enough left to put him back together, even up then.”

  Two years or half an hour ago Tom had talked to the dead man. He felt numb, but it was not like when he had heard about Mike. When Tom heard the sadness in his father’s voice on the heavy black phone, he had known something was wrong. “We got a call from Mrs. Szczepanski,” his father had said slowly, and Tom had known that Mike was dead. “I’m sorry, Tommy, but I had to tell you.” His father was crying, and Tom had cried too. His father had started talking about missing his brother, and cried some more before Tom hung up, went back to his room and got stoned.

  “I’m so
rry,” Tom said, looking at Juan. “But lots of people get killed in ‘Nam. Claude knew it.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be possible, kid.”

  “He must have known there was a risk, Juan,” Marie said. “Nobody up then is immortal. They make all the substitutes coming down now certify that they understand the dangers. We had to do that ourselves. Remember?”

  “Sure. But the nanos can heal all ordinary twentieth-century diseases, the same way they can fix up wounds that would kill anybody else on the battlefield.”

  Juan’s words cut through the last wisps of haze in Tom’s mind. Something the substitutes had brought from the future could save them from being killed in the war. “What?” he broke in.

  The two looked at him, uneasily.

  “You said something could fix wounds on the battlefield. What was it?”

  The woman looked at Juan, seeming very shaken. “We aren’t supposed to say anything about the nanos, Juan. Just let the dope-heads think they were off on another trip.”

  After a long pause, Juan turned toward her. “Does it matter? No technology down now can detect the nanos. We’re clean.”

  Tom looked between them, climbing step by step through levels of uneasy dreams toward whatever passed for reality. It had been hard to sort reality from the dreams when his nose still pulled in ghosts of pot smoke with every breath. The only smell in the old office was stale air, harsh in his lungs.

  Juan turned toward him. “Look, kid, remember we told you we came from the future. Up then, we’ve learned how to repair the body. Not just sew up wounds, but heal them. We have little synthetic cells in our bloodstreams; we call them nanos. Some stop cancer cells from multiplying; some clean up arteries so the blood flows smoothly. Some can build new organs to replace damaged ones. If a substitute takes a bullet through the heart, the nanos can rebuild the damaged tissue in minutes. Nanos in the brain fix up any damage from loss of blood. The substitutes wake up in ten, fifteen minutes, weak but okay, like they were stunned. In the thick of battle, nobody notices.”