by Anthology
When George lost his own battle to the monster, the Englishman was again reminded of his own primitive nature. The Queen worked quickly, and in an instant, the thing severed one of George’s legs below the knee, then immediately used the amputated portion to extend one of its own freakish limbs. The Queen then cauterized the wound, and left George crippled, but alive. This was how it did things. The Queen relied utterly upon weapons of technology to perform its duties, and so the beach became littered with writhing creatures, helpless and half alive, as if the monster was building a farm from which it could harvest those unfortunate souls. It seemed to prefer maiming to murder, although many had died while attempting to preserve the integrity of their own bodies.
The technology of death worked both ways, and the other time travelers had used it, with little avail, to fend off the attacks of the Queen. At any given time, there might have been a flash of blue light, or a stream of liquid ice, but the monster was seldom slowed by the discharge of defensive weapons, and in the end, the thing would grow with the fruits of its victory. The Englishman had no such technological weapons to rely upon, nor had George, but The Time Traveler had been a child of the Nineteenth Century, and as such, he knew something of self-defense. His anger had been nurtured by a world obsessed with war, and although he prided himself on being a man of peace, he proved to be no more civilized than those he loathed. The Time Traveler’s weapons were simple ones, just as those of prehistoric man had been, and he found himself tearing rocks from the ice, then flinging them at the Queen. Blood stained the ice, and to The Time Traveler’s amazement, he learned that it had not been his own, nor that of George. The Englishman had wounded the creature, and had done so without the aid of the new technology.
Some of the other time travelers had witnessed the activities of the Englishman, and before long, it became evident that he had seeded this land with a fresh mode of destruction. Until then, those creatures on the beach had worked independently, each concentrating almost entirely upon the unattainable dream of escaping backwards through time, but the Englishman’s example had left them with a new goal, and with a very old manner in which it might be attained. They huddled together, communicating in murmurs and screams and the touch of odd chemicals, and then they overwhelmed the Queen with stones and their naked fists, but most of all with anger.
The Queen of Hearts stained the ice, then joined the ghosts of its people. George, being a creature of limitless love, had pulled himself along the surface, but by the time he reached the Queen, the work of the others had been completed. The Englishman knew what to do next, George had taught him well, and together they laid the Queen to rest within that cold necropolis. As for the remaining time travelers, those who were healthy enough went back to their dead machines, and those who were sick or maimed waited for the end to come, until, one by one, they permitted George to help.
His efforts rarely succeeded, and so the beach became more dead than alive.
Inhumanity is what had made these creatures human. The future would be peopled by Morlocks, each bound to its machine, each with a soul of steel and ice. Perhaps the Earth would be better off without the complications of love or anger, but then, that had been the world of the Eloi. There had been no easy answers for the human race, but at that time, it hardly mattered.
They sat on the beach, taking stock of George’s remaining food supply. Time travelers continued to arrive, now and then, but more often than not, the beach began to empty. Some creatures moved on, giving up hope that their useless machines would run again, some died of starvation or exposure, and a few had ended their own lives, opting not to witness what the future would bring. As for the Englishman, he learned to care for George as the creature had cared for him, and he continued to learn even as the world ran down.
Six food pills remained, more than enough for the two of them, because the sun had just risen over the ancient world, and the Earth rained with melting ice.
LOVE AT THE CORNER OF TIME AND SPACE
Annie Bellet
When she left him at the Crossroads of Time for the second time, Darrin didn’t start to worry until he’d counted to four million eight hundred and ninety-seven. Then he lost count, again, and started to wonder if Ashley was coming back for him. They’d had another big fight, about the dirty dishes or the cluttered front hall or that curvy blonde he’d kissed on Friday night at the Reel’m Inn or any number of little annoyances that seem to pile up the longer any relationship goes on.
But he knew that in a long-term relationship with a Time Traveler, things got sticky on occasion. Last time she’d dumped him here, she’d come back after a count of about a thousand with a smile on her face. Ashley hadn’t shared the joke, but she’d taken him home at least.
The crossroads was more of a movie theatre than a roadway. Opaque edges lined the four-way road, with images flickering like an old movie reel across the surface of the thick mists that formed barriers to each side of the crossroads. The roads themselves were soft and gave a little, like walking on dark blue cotton balls.
Darrin sat in the middle, twisting his head around, and picked at the fluffy road. It came away in his hand in pieces, only to dissipate like cool smoke between his fingers. Four million nine hundred even, though he guessed he’d skipped a few tens somewhere in the three millions. It didn’t matter. Not if she was really going to leave him here.
Rising to his feet, Darrin fought off vertigo as the soft roadway gave under his Converse All-Stars and the images in the mists around him blurred and spun. He breathed in deep through his nose and then out his mouth and took stock. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. In fact, he felt fine, more or less. Just bored as hell and real fear had started to nibble at the edges of his mind.
“Ash?” he called out. “Okay, I’m sorry.” She couldn’t really have just left him here. Right? He shivered though it wasn’t cold. “I’ll do the damn dishes. Ashley?”
He closed his eyes and tried to remember what she’d said about the Crossroads. The time stream flowed here, each image a moment somewhere in the universe. He could dive in, randomly, and hope he ended up somewhere good. A Time Traveler could pick and choose.
But how long would she leave him here? Ashley had no concept of time, not the way he did. She was always late or early to dates with a funny little smile on her strawberry-glossed lips. Darrin shook his head. He wasn’t in time, not here. It could be a million years of nothing and he’d never know. She’d been pretty damn mad but he didn’t deserve this shit.
His college Psych professor’s voice came to him suddenly, droning about the stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Darrin pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to recall the other stages.
“Bargaining,” said a graveled voice, startling him. “Depression. Acceptance.”
Darrin opened his eyes. One of the walls had become a whole classroom, the mustard walls familiar. Dr. Graham stood in front of a group of sleepy undergrads, hands shoved into his coat pockets.
“It’s a crock of shit,” Graham said, looking directly at Darrin. “We just hold on.”
Darrin’s heart started punching his chest. He could jump through, go back to that time. He’d have to remember what he was doing, have to deal with his classes again, but he’d manage.
He stepped forward even as the image began to fade back down into the myriad streams. Then he stopped himself.
He’d made that image appear. He’d been thinking and then it had happened, coalescing for him. Fingertips tingling, Darrin stood in the Crossroads and bit his lower lip.
With a muttered prayer, he closed his eyes again and tried to remember last Thursday. The apartment had needed cleaning. He reached for the slightly sour smell of the room, the feel of the corduroy couch cover beneath his hands, the throb of bass from the stereo.
And then he could hear it. Darrin opened his eyes and stepped into the room in front of him, falling into his own body. There was a rushing noise and a sense of something ripping apart deep inside. Then . . . just the
beating of his heart in his ears and the song changing in the player.
He was back. The clock said 7:03 pm. Ashley would be home from her ballet class in twenty-three minutes. He rubbed his sweating palms on his jeans and jumped up off the couch. He turned up the music and went into the galley kitchen. With a small, secretive smile on his face, Darrin turned on the hot water, soaped up a sponge, and started to wash the dishes.
LUNCH-HOUR MAGIC
Jack Finney
I’m a big noon-hour prowler. I like to duck out of the office when I haven’t a lunch date, grab a fast bite, pick up a Hershey bar or a Snickers or something, and then poke around—into a Second Avenue antique store with a bell that clanks when you open the door, or an unclaimed-parcel auction, a store-front judo school, secondhand bookshop, pinball emporium, pawnshop, fifth-rate hotel lobby—you know what I mean?
You do if you’ve ever been a noon-hour prowler, but there aren’t too many of them, not real ones. The only other one I ever ran into from our office—Simon & Laurentz, an advertising agency on Park near Forty-fourth—was Frieda Piper from the art department. I wandered into a First Avenue hardware store one noon this last May and there she was back in the store fiddling with a lathe. At least I was pretty sure no one else could look quite that shapeless and down-at-the-heels, though it was a little dark in there and her back was to me. But, when she turned at the sound of the door opening and her hair fell over her face, I knew it had to be Frieda.
She wore her hair like someone in an 1895 out-of-focus tin-type, parted somewhere near the middle in a jagged lightning streak, hanging straight down at the sides, and snarled up at the back in a sagging granny-knot. It covered the sides of her face as though she were peeking out through a pair of curtains, and it kept creeping out over her eyes as though she’d ducked back behind them. Walking toward her through the hardware store I was thinking that her dresses were like old ladies’ hats; you couldn’t imagine where they sold that kind. The one she had on now, like all her others, was no particular color; call it anything and you wouldn’t be wrong. It was a sort of reddish, greenish, blackish, brownish, haphazard draping of cloth that looked as though it had accidentally fallen on her from a considerable height; even I could see that the hem on one side was a good three inches lower than the other.
The heels of her shoes—not just the ones she had on now but all her shoes all the time—were so run down that her ankles bent out as though she were learning to skate, and her stocking seams were so crooked you wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d actually turned loops. It was an office joke that she bought her stockings in special unmatched pairs with the runs already in, and she’s the only young adult woman I ever saw with one of the side pieces of her glasses broken and held together with adhesive tape. They were the same kind of fancy glasses other girls wear, studded here and there with little shiny stones, but half the stones were missing, and the glasses were so knocked out of shape that they hung cockeyed on her nose, one eye almost squinting out over the top of the frame, the other trying to peer out underneath. She looked like the model for some of her own wilder cartoons.
I said, “Hi, Frieda; buying a lathe?”
She surprised me. “Hi, Ted,” she said. “Yeah, I’m thinking about it. I’ve got a drill press, a router, a planer, a belt-sander, and a nine-inch table saw; now I need a lathe.” I looked puzzled; someone had told me she lived in a little two-room apartment on upper Madison Avenue somewhere. She said, “Oh, I haven’t much room to use them, but I’m crazy about tools! I’m not too interested in clothes,” she said as though she thought I might not have noticed, “so I’m filling my hope chest with tools. Some day when I’m married, I can build all our furniture. Maybe even the house.”
I was pleased at the thought of a girl with a hope chest full of power tools, and wanted to hear a little more about it, and I brought out a Baby Ruth I’d bought, and offered Frieda some. She said no, she still had half a Love Nest left, and pulled it out of her skirt pocket, and we wandered around the hardware store for a while. She chattered away about her wood-working projects. One of them, a wedding gift for her future husband, was to be an enormous multiple-dwelling birdhouse, a sort of slum-clearance project I gathered, and I figured that the guy who married her would probably appreciate it.
She talked all the way back to the office, looking up at me eagerly through her slanted glasses, shoving the hair back off her face. The upper edge of her glasses bisected her right eye, the lower edge bisected the left; and since one lens made half her eye slightly smaller than normal, while the other lens magnified half of the remaining eye, she seemed to have four separate half-eyes of varying sizes, resembling a Picasso painting, and I got a little dizzy and tripped and nearly fell over a curb.
But I learned that Frieda was a full-fledged noon-hour prowler; she’d been to most of the places I had, and she mentioned several, including a bootleg tattooing parlor in the back of a cut-rate undertaker’s place, that I hadn’t run across. So I wasn’t surprised later that week when I passed a Lexington Avenue dance studio to see Frieda there. It was on the second floor, a corner room with big windows; I’d stopped in one noon and knew they offered you a free trial lesson when you came in. So now as I passed on the opposite side of the street, I glanced up and there was Frieda taking the free lesson, her dress billowing and flapping like loose sails in a typhoon. Her head rested dreamily on the instructor’s shoulder, her eyes were closed behind the cockeyed glasses, and she was chewing in time to the music; the hand behind the instructor’s back held half a candy bar. He was looking down at her as though he were wondering how he’d ever gotten into this line of work.
The reason I mention Frieda is because of what happened the following week. One noon hour I was clear across town wandering around west of Sixth Avenue in the Forties somewhere, and I came to a narrow little place jammed in between an all-night barbershop and a Turkish bath. It said MAGIC SHOP on the window, and down in a corner in smaller letters, NOVELTIES, JOKES, JEWELRY, SOUVENIRS. I went in, of course; there were glass showcases on three sides, practically filling the place. The proprietor was back of one, leaning on the counter reading the Daily News. He was a thin, tired-looking, bald guy about thirty-five, and he just looked up and nodded, then went back to his paper till I was ready for business.
I looked at the stuff in the showcases; it was about what you’d expect. There was some jewelry in one case—fake gold rings mounted with big zircons, imitation turquoise-and-silver Navaho jewelry, Chinese good-luck rings. On one counter was a metal rack filled with printed comic signs, and a display of practical jokes in the showcase underneath; a plastic ice cube with a fly in it; an ink bottle with a shiny metal puddle of what looked like spilled ink—that kind of stuff.
I said, “What’s new in the magic-trick line?” and the guy finished a line of what he was reading, then looked up.
“Well,” he said, “have you seen this?” and reached into the showcase and brought out a little brass cylinder with a handle, but I recognized it. It changed a little stack of nickels into dimes, and I told him I’d seen it. “Well, there’s this,” he said, and brought out a trick deck of cards, and demonstrated them, staring boredly out the window as he shuffled. I nodded when he finished, and waited. For a moment he stood thinking, then he shrugged a little, reached into the showcase, and pulled out a cheap gray cardboard box filled with a dozen or so pairs of glasses. “These are new; some salesman left them last week.” I picked up a pair, and looked at them; it was just a cheap plastic frame with clear-glass lenses, no false nose attached or anything like that, and I looked up at the guy again, and said, “What’re they for?”
He reached wearily into the showcase once more—he’d demonstrated so many little tricks for so many people and made so few sales—and brought out a thin silk handkerchief. He made a fist with his other hand, draped the handkerchief over it, and held it up. “Put on the glasses,” he said, and I did.
It wasn’t a bad trick. As soon as I put
on the glasses I could see his fist under the handkerchief very clearly, the handkerchief itself barely visible. “Not bad,” I said, “How’s it work?
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Salesman said a few rays of light get through cloth if it’s thin, but not enough to see by. The lenses are ground some way to magnify the rays so you can see the hand underneath.”
I nodded, taking the glasses off to examine them. “Is that the whole trick?”
“Yeah.” He looked away boredly. “There are a couple others you can do with it, too.”
I glanced out the window. A truck and several cabs stood motionless, blocked in a traffic jam. A man in a business suit and carrying a briefcase turned to cross the street between two of the cabs. A tall good-looking showgirl type from one of the theaters around here walked along the other side of the street. I put the glasses on again absently, wondering if I wanted them; I felt I ought to buy something. The truck and the cabs sat there, the drivers leaning on their wheels trying to keep calm. The man in the business suit stepped up onto the opposite curb. The showgirl was still walking—the showgirl’s dress was gone!
There she was, walking along just as before glancing into store windows, and wearing nothing but high heels, a bra, lace-edged panties, and a purse! Then I saw the dress, ghostlike and almost invisible, swaying as she walked. I snatched off the glasses, and instantly the dress was solid—thin but nontransparent cloth. I jammed the glasses back on before she got out of sight, almost putting my eye out with one of the side pieces, the dress became ghostly, and there she was again, by George, that handsome swaying figure under the nearly vanished dress marvelously visible once more.
I rushed to the doorway, looked toward the corner, and there they all were—all the sweet young office girls, not in their summer dresses but walking delightfully along in shoes, bras, and panties. It was entrancing, and I stood there for several happy and amazing minutes. When I finally turned back into the store again the proprietor was reading the News. “Ah, look,” I said, hesitating, “these are fine, but . . . I was wondering if you had a stronger pair?”