Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  Remember! Irene closed her eyes, and forced herself to recall the details of the day.

  The moon cast long shadows against the graves of the cemetery. Irene used the light of the moon and stars to guide her way to her son’s gravesite. Her arms were fully recovered, the skin soft, supple, new, flawless, perfect.

  She felt out of breath, robbed of her joy. She should be celebrating the resurrection of her son, at home, with her husband.

  Today, everything was meant to be fixed. Instead, it was shattered.

  Her son’s grave was filled, with a small indentation and her son’s headstone the only proof it ever existed. Irene saw no sign of her husband.

  Where did he go?

  She began to panic. What if he escaped? What if he tries to hurt my son again?

  He was bound, she reminded herself. Four strong men. You saw it yourself.

  She crouched at the grave, and let her hands linger over the memory of her son still etched in the stone. If she had a hammer, she would destroy it, break it down to dust. She worked the stone with her hands, pressing it until it fell over in a muffled thump.

  Irene stood and ran her eyes around the small graveyard, looking for her husband. She did not know what she would do once she found him. Her mind refused to answer any time she asked. What will you do? she chided herself. Scream at him? Hit him? Kill him?

  “Delbert!” She called into the darkness. “Where are you, you whoreson?!”

  Above her, the old sentinel tree groaned in answer. Irene looked up.

  Remember!

  Her husband’s body swung from the tree, his legs twisting one way in the wind, then another. He had fashioned a rude noose from the scraps of hemp the diggers had used to bind him. His fingers were raw and bloody. The purple sheen of his face was hard to pick out against the backdrop of the night sky.

  Irene fell to her knees and broke her eyes away from her dead husband, letting her vision fall to the tree’s trunk. Her husband had cut into the wood, worked at the dry, dead bark with his bare hands.

  The words he left behind were simple, covered in blood:

  LOOK AFTER HIM.

  Her husband had not forgotten.

  “I’m sorry,” Irene whispered.

  February 13, 1933

  Irene had dreaded this day. Unlike the future, the past was inevitable.

  She panted through exertion, her body covered in a clammy sheen of sweat. There was little heat in the hospital, and she only had a thin cotton gown to separate her skin from the cold. Goosebumps pebbled her exposed arms and thighs, and her spread legs were high above her body, mounted in stirrups.

  “We’re almost there, Irene.” The doctor smiled from between her legs. He was an older man, with well-styled whiskers and a bald head.

  “You’re doing great,” a nurse echoed, dressed in a white apron and cap. She was standing next to her, holding her hand as she took in large gasps of air.

  She gritted her teeth and balled her fists as the doctor pushed her son deeper. She recalled the pain of childbirth, and knew that it was nothing compared to this. She could feel her son struggling as he went higher into her uterus, with his sharp feet and hard elbows.

  Irene had dreaded this day, but not for the pain.

  She cried out in grief. These three years had been wonderful, an era of brightness where her life held few flaws.

  Yet the anniversary of her son’s birth always hung over Irene, like dark storm clouds on the horizon, a constant reminder that his end was coming. Now her son was on the final path of his life. He would live another nine months, until he became a part of her.

  Irene could feel him struggling, his limbs searching for room in her cramped stomach. She cried out as her son flipped, planting a hard heel up against her diaphragm.

  “And we’re done. You did a great job, kid,” the doctor said. He turned and scrubbed his hands in a metal basin, a wan smile on his lips.

  Irene ran a hand across her bulging belly and rested her sweat-soaked hair on the over-starched hospital pillow. Her smile was sad. There was little joy in it.

  Irene still remembered.

  She would never forget.

  IN THE CARDS

  Alan Cogan

  The first thing I did when I bought my Grundy Projector was take a trip to about two years ahead and see what was going to happen to me. Everyone was doing it around that time; students were taking short trips into the future to learn whether or not they would pass their exams, married couples were looking ahead to see how many kids they were going to have, businessmen were going into the future to size up their prospects.

  I took the trip because I was getting married and I couldn’t resist the temptation of finding out how things would work out with my fiancee Marge and myself. Not that I had any doubts about Marge, but the Grundy Projectors were guaranteed harmless and there’s no point in taking chances with a serious step like marriage.

  Everybody was looking ahead then. Within a week after the Grundy Projectors were introduced, you could walk past homes every evening and see people with those shimmering bird-cages around them. Their bodies were there, but heaven knows when their minds were—months and often even years ahead of time.

  I knew exactly when to go on my first time trip. I even knew where: I’d already put a down payment on a home in the new dome housing area where Marge and I would be living after the wedding. Knowing where to go on a time trip is important. On this one, for instance, I hadn’t been assigned an address yet and there were all sorts of changes in the place—buildings and streets where there had only been empty lots and sections marked off by string—and I just had to hunt until I came to our home.

  You can imagine how much more difficult finding my future self would be if I hadn’t known the exact location. That’s about the only major drawback to making time trips and I don’t see how it can be overcome. Directories would be one answer, but how would you go about putting them together if your crews can’t ask questions or touch filing cards or even open future visiphone books?

  Eventually, after setting the dial around the two-year mark, which is about the maximum limit on most models, I found myself in my future home in the dome housing area. I was watching myself as I would be and Marge as she would be. Only I didn’t like what I saw.

  We were fighting and screaming at each other. You could tell at a glance that we hated each other. And after only two years!

  I was completely stunned as I watched that scene. Future Marge looked furious; she had the kind of look I never even suspected she could get on her face. But I think I was more enraged at my future self than at her. At the time, I was seriously in love with Marge—although it seemed evident it wasn’t going to last—and I loathed myself for acting that way toward her. And after all those rash promises I had been making, too!

  I was really a tangled mess of emotions as I watched our future selves battling it out.

  I became conscious of not being alone as I watched. It didn’t take long to discover that it was Marge who had come to join me. I should have expected her—she must have been just as curious about her marriage as I was and, like myself, would naturally take her Projector to the two-year limit. Of course we couldn’t hold hands the way we would have if our bodies had been there, but then we probably wouldn’t have held them long. We were both pretty embarrassed by what we saw.

  The cause of the fight was very obscure, and though we saw and heard everything perfectly, we still didn’t really understand. However, the emotions expressed were plain enough.

  “You aren’t going to die, Marge,” my future self was yelling at her. “Try and get that through your damned thick stupid skull!”

  “I am! I am!” she was screaming back at me. “You know I’m going to die. You want to get rid of me. Our marriage has been one long fight from the start.”

  “Don’t talk such damned rot,” my future self hollered back at her. “There’s probably a perfectly good explanation for it all and you’re too ignorant to see
it!”

  “The only explanation is that I’m going to die,” future Marge insisted. She broke down, sobbing into an already saturated handkerchief.

  My future self stamped around the room, cursing and furiously kicking the furniture. “Why don’t you find out for sure? Why don’t you go in closer and find out the real reason?”

  She sobbed even louder. “I daren’t! You do it for me. Go find out for yourself and then tell me.”

  That seemed to make my future self even madder. “You know I wouldn’t touch one of those things even to save my life. I mean it, too! Besides, if you do die, it’ll be your own fault. You’ll have believed yourself to death! You think you’re going to die and now you won’t be happy until you are dead.”

  Future Marge began to sob hysterically and my Marge, who had been right beside me, suddenly seemed to grow a little more remote.

  Then a strange thing happened. My future self stopped pacing up and down the room and turned to look straight at me with the queerest expression on his face. That was enough for me. I got out of there fast and flipped back to the peace and security of 2017.

  I climbed out of my Grundy Projector, glad to be back in the relative calm of my body, although it still took me a long time to get settled down. I felt like smashing the Projector there and then, and I guess I should have done it.

  The problem that had me all tied in knots was whether or not I should go ahead and marry Marge after what I had seen. I know it looked as though I was going to marry her anyway, but in my innocence I figured I could beat that.

  I soon realized I was going to get nowhere sitting all by myself in my room, so I went over to Marge’s place. She was waiting for me, swinging quietly to and fro on the hammock on the dark patio. Normally I would have sat right down beside her, but this time I just stood back sheepishly and waited.

  Neither of us said anything for a while and I just watched as the hammock floated in the faint bluish light from some nearby lamps. Marge seemed to shine almost angelically as the glow caught her dark eyes and her softly tanned arms and legs.

  I could have whipped myself for treating her the way I had seen myself treating her in the future. It must have been a mistake. There had to be a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t have made myself do anything to hurt her.

  Her voice was husky and scared when she spoke. “Do you think it’ll happen the way we saw it, Gerry?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They say that whatever you see always turns out to be the thing that happens.”

  “Do you think we’ll fight like that when—if we’re married?”

  It was on the end of my tongue to talk common sense and logic to her, but then I realized that neither of us wanted to hear anything like that. We were in love and we didn’t want to hear anything that conflicted with our emotions.

  Marge sat up in the hammock and made room for me to sit down beside her.

  “I just don’t see how it could happen to us,” I said. “I don’t see how we could fight like that. There must have been some mistake. Maybe we looked in on the wrong people.”

  Neither of us added anything to that. We both knew we weren’t going to change so much that we couldn’t recognize ourselves two years later.

  “Maybe it was some sort of alternative world we saw,” I suggested, eagerly clutching at any straw, “showing us what could happen if we didn’t work hard at our marriage. It could have been a sort of warning of what could happen to some people. But not us, of course!”

  Marge’s lonely little hand crept into mine for comfort and I began to warm up to the subject.

  “Don’t you worry about it,” I assured her. “What would we ever find to quarrel about?”

  The idea seemed so preposterous, we both began to laugh.

  “I couldn’t fight with you, Gerry,” Marge said, snuggling closer.

  “Me, neither,” I said. “Don’t worry about what we saw. The scientific boys will probably have a rational explanation worked out for the whole thing. I’ll bet it’s happened to lots of people.”

  Somehow, while we were talking, we had managed to get very close together in the hammock. Marge and I could never talk far apart for long.

  “I couldn’t wait for you to come over,” Marge said in a small voice.

  “I couldn’t wait to get here,” I lied. “I just don’t believe that what we saw could possibly happen to us. What on Earth would we ever find to fight over?”

  That was the one basic mistake that we, and everyone else, made when we discussed the Bilbo Grundy Projector. When the Projector showed you something was going to happen, it happened.

  That night, Marge and I made plans to get married even sooner and the ceremony took place four weeks later.

  Grundy’s Projector had been a well-kept secret until it suddenly burst upon us with a carefully planned publicity campaign. There hadn’t even been a hint of experiments in the time-travel field until the discovery had suddenly been made public in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the whole world.

  Grundy had discovered a way of projecting a person’s view into the future and the equipment required turned out to be amazingly compact, simple and inexpensive. The average cost of a Projector was fifty-five dollars—well within practically anyone’s price range.

  Grundy and his backers had lined up a large number of famous people beforehand, all of whom had tried the Projector and were only too willing to tell us how great it was. Terrific fun—the newest thrill since the first radio, or the first airplane, or the first space rocket. And absolutely harmless, too!

  All you had to do was set a dial and get into the cage and you could watch yourself an hour or a day or up to two years ahead of time. If you wanted to see if it was going to rain that weekend, all you did was climb in and take a look. If you wanted to see where you would be going for your annual vacation, just press a button and you would see yourself making the final plans. All for fifty-five dollars. What with all the advertising coming at us via every possible medium, Grundy sold a million in the first five days.

  Because he knew exactly how many he was going to sell—just by making use of his own invention—Grundy was fully prepared for the onslaught of customers.

  Everyone talked of nothing but the new sensation. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about it. It seemed as if the rest of the world had stopped.

  Before long, there wasn’t a thing about the next two years that we didn’t know. We all jumped ahead in great leaps and found out all kinds of things that were due to happen to us and to the world. If the things were good, we waited happily for them to happen. If things didn’t look too good, we shrugged it off, like Marge and me, and said it couldn’t happen to us.

  But that was the catch. Whatever we saw happening did take place exactly as we saw it—it was inescapable. The first instance I saw of this was in the accounting office where I operated an accounts analyzer. We advertised for a new operator to assist in my department and lined up interviews with thirty-two applicants. When the day of the interviews arrived, only one applicant turned up. He was found suitable and got the job.

  The president, Mr. Atkins, was pretty het up about the whole affair. “Why would thirty-one men not present themselves for interviews as they had arranged?” he kept asking me. “It’s a good job, isn’t it, Gerald?”

  I tried to explain to him that the Time Projector was probably involved in the affair, although I couldn’t see how exactly. Mr. Atkins was an old man who didn’t believe in new gadgets of any kind and he wasn’t convinced. Finally, however, I managed to get him to call some of the applicants and ask them why they had not appeared for their interviews.

  He almost went apoplectic when he heard the reasons. Each of the thirty-one answered that he had flipped ahead to see what was going to happen on that particular day and each one had seen that he wasn’t going to visit Mr. Atkins in search of a job, so he didn’t go. Some of them even told him that they knew they were going to get jobs elsewhere on a cert
ain date and that they were just taking a vacation until that day came.

  I had a hard time soothing Mr. Atkins that afternoon. He wouldn’t stop talking about it. Finally, just to satisfy himself, he re-interviewed the sole successful applicant. As we should have expected, the new man answered that he had looked ahead to see that he was going to get the job and had dutifully made his appearance.

  Mr. Atkins was flabbergasted and he spluttered and fumed for minutes on end. Then he looked crafty. “What am I going to do now?” he asked the new man.

  “You’re going out to get drunk, sir,” the new man answered.

  And that’s exactly what Mr. Atkins did.

  Crazy situations like that became commonplace in no time. The newspapers were filled with them every day, though it still took us quite a while to understand that there was nothing we could do to avoid the inevitable. It was all pretty staggering and naturally we protested like madmen. Naturally it didn’t do a bit of good. It was in the cards that we would protest without results.

  Even when we did get quieted down, we were still in a daze because of the weird things that were happening. For instance, there was this fellow on our street who suddenly became famous for writing a best-selling novel.

  For ten years, he had been writing without selling a word and then suddenly he broke into the big time with a best-seller. Everyone asked him how he had done it and he calmly explained that he looked into the future and saw himself with a popular novel to his credit. He found out what the novel was about and then came back to his own time and wrote it and his success worked out exactly as he had seen it on his time trip. No one could say that he hadn’t written the book himself.

  My kid brother Willy was in first year medicine when he looked ahead and saw that he wasn’t going to be present at the term-end exams, so he just didn’t bother to attend. He stayed in bed that day. He didn’t want to be a doctor, anyway—I think he only started it for my mother’s sake. A lot of people argued with him and said if he had only gotten out of bed that morning and gone to school, the prediction would have been proven false.