The COMPLEAT Collected Short SFF Stories

by Sterling E. Lanier

  "Too bad," said Colonel Morehouse in a nasty tone. "He should have left it alone so you could study it better." He turned and stalked off to his staff car.

  A sergeant from the police radio car brought Naylor a written flimsy. He studied it and handed it to the scholar without comment. Alietti read and handed it back.

  "I'm not surprised, captain. That makes three of these graves. You'll have to check every one of the roads. And even then you won't be sure. But I have another question. Have you any reason to believe that in this crowded, mobile and individualistic country, that this is the only situation of its kind?"

  "We've recommended that the Justice Department set up a special study on it. Beyond that, it's too big for us. This almost was." Naylor's voice was weary.

  The two men looked at the distant heat-shrouded town and listened to the meadowlarks caroling. Their piping rose and fell in the heat, like the piping of the temple flautists in ancient temples on the far side of the globe. It is such piping which rises to the eight-armed thing who is Sitala, who is Durga, who is Kali, the goddess-demon of the oldest murders in the world, the Thugs.

  Formerly of India.

  The End

  The Syndicated Time

  Fantasy & Science Fiction – July 1978

  The immensely entertaining account of the events following the discovery of time travel by a seedy physicist at a Florida junior college.

  Chapter One

  TIME TRAVEL is a dirty word these days. A person can get lynched just for mentioning it, like people being arrested in the old days for joking about hijacking while boarding a jet. The UN, in one of those few cases where even the Maldive Islands and Cocos-Keeling voted on the same side, has agreed that no member nation will do anything but suppress any research on the subject. Many nations passed laws of their own dealing with the treatment of those apprehended while conducting any such research. My personal favorite is the one from Uganda. Some people get sick reading it, but those old devil Amin habits die hard.

  Every country in the world is still looking for the possible inventor or (ess). Since I know who it was, I could command a hefty sum for the right squeal. The only trouble is, the loudest squeal might turn out to be mine. I couldn't fix an out-of-phase water wheel, but I'm too deeply involved. I'm no inventor, but I am a promoter. I should say, an ex-promoter.

  It all started with a greedy inventor. You think maybe Tom Edison wasn't greedy? Or read the fine clauses in the last Wright Brothers contracts. Yes, friends, they had a dream. Part of the dream was cash. Maybe only part, but still ... part.

  My friend, or let's say acquaintance (if they ever get me, he was a deadly foe), was not like Tom Edison exactly, or the Wright Brothers either. He was a seedy little physicist at a third-rate, Florida junior college. I never went there, or any other college, but I used to sell pirated texts, Formosa's best, to some of them back in my less affluent days. A flat campus, four decaying coconut trees; the lawn, solid sand spurs; the faculty, solid losers. The academic end of the line. If you retire after thirty years, you get $12,000 before taxes and a plated Bulova. The janitors make more, and for once the state has right on its side. Through these hallowed halls pass a collection of out-of-state weed-heads, local rednecks, Northern heroin salesmen and apprentice whores equal to those found anywhere, that is until one comes, of course, to the next county. Need I say more?

  I was motoring through Florida, searching, on behalf of a large conglomerate which shall be nameless, for vacant lands to develop. Bluntly, I was looking for places to put large, expensive condominiums, preferably smack on the beach sand, of course. My own employers, who I regret to say are, or were, not equal opportunity, owned a lot of them already, particularly on the west coast, the so-called "Sun Coast". They wanted more. Due to many of their other enterprises still being frowned on by the law, they had to work through middlemen. One of these was my employer, J. G. "Bushveldt" Barnstaffel, the President of Amalgamated Tourist Enterprises.

  No one in this splendid firm had a record, including the president, which made it ideal for certain purposes. Barnstaffel was a skinny slob who had once been lost in Kruger Park, R.S.A., for three whole days, while on a world tour. This almost incredible feat gave him his nickname.

  "Check out the liddel colleges, Syd. Maybe some got left some land they can't use," he told me in his Dutch wheeze. He talked like George Washington or maybe Rip Van Winkle was his brother, but he was originally a simple Hollands crook, too inept for the Amsterdam police to tolerate. They flung him to the New World, or at least he decided to leave. He had fat hands, rheumy blue eyes, too close together, a bulbous red nose and an air of knowing everything in the world.

  What does this have to do with the ban on time travel? "All history hangs on the actions of a few men (or women)." Lord Acton, or someone.

  So, I pursued my merry way, from one Christawful motel to another, down the world's most architecturally fucked-up peninsula. And then, one day, in a bar I encountered Associate Professor Motley van D'Alliance III, once a faint gleam in the eye of the New York Social Register. As of the point I met him, he was a bleary little soak, leaning on the bar and trying to pick up anyone to talk to. I hasten to add that the professor was not gay, pausing to add that I have nothing against such persons, myself. Who knows who will betray you?

  "You may not believe me," says this small, drained-out lush on the next bar stool, "but I can save the world."

  I removed an olive from my Manhattan and reordered, this being a typical Florida bar, and sat, waiting for the revelation. You get a mild laugh once in a great while from these type encounters.

  "You might not think this," says this jerk, "but I am the Professor of Ascidian Ophiolatry at Southern Dugong College." He babbled on and I heard nothing, until, in the third martini, something came across. The words were "time machine".

  He had red eyes, like a semi-albino or possibly a white rat of some obscure sort. The only word for him was "unwholesome". But, somehow, we got to talking. When I told him that my employers were looking for new coast land, he got all excited. "Coast land!" he yelled. "I'll give you coast land! How would you like the best islands in the world, the finest tropic shores, absolutely untouched. Never a human print on them! I guarantee it!"

  Well, I normally don't encourage nuts. But this little weemer was so positive. Maybe it was the martinis. Cheap Florida gin made from orange pulp.

  Anyway, I called the base, i.e., New York, that night, and, of course, I got Barnstaffel. I had nothing else to report, since there was nothing left to buy. But Bushveldt was simply in love with the idea of my nut professor. "Sounds like a great lead. Make sure you don't lose him. Follow it up." And more crap like that. I didn't get it then, but after I'd hung up, a thought occurred to me. Barnstaffel sounded very anxious indeed. Maybe his unknown superiors, the boys with all the well-laundered financing, were leaning on him a bit? If these people asked the impossible, those on the end of the request often died trying. Literally.

  Well, I had made an appointment with the little jerk. So the following day I got directions and motored out to the sun-browned series of vacant lots that Dugong called a campus. The heat, even for Florida, was blistering and my soles burned even through Ked rubber. I found his office in a moldering cube of puce-colored stucco, where the peeling paint and corroded metal vied with the exposed cinder block in a tribute to rip-off contracting.

  He was crouched behind a crummy desk pretending to read a report when I walked in without knocking. The blinds were down and the place was so dark, I thought I'd stumbled into a broom closet by mistake. When I twitched up the Venetians, the place was hardly bigger, and I rated van D'Alliance a U on the alphabet scale of any college rank. For Christ's sake, it wasn't air-conditioned, even!

  He gave a pitiful moan as the light hit his eyes, but I perched myself on his desk and inspected the place at leisure.

  "What do you want?" he quavered. "I'm not seeing students today. I have work to do. What class are you in, anyw
ay?"

  I now discovered that the red in his eyes was caused by innumerable tiny broken veins, which were matched by mottled skin of the same color on his sunken face. Only his suit, which, though pretty soiled, was new, prevented him from an appearance on Skid Row as a major lead.

  "Remember me?" I said, in soft tones. He winced because any tones must have hurt. "I'm the guy you were telling about all those untouched beaches, the virgin palmy islands and junk like that which you were going to give to me. I want to hear more about them, that's all. Remember, we made a date at the Soapstone Pelican last night?"

  "I did?" he mumbled. "I forgot. I must have had one too many. I didn't know what I was saying." He rose, or rather lurched to his feet. "Now if you don't mind, I'm feeling quite ill. There must have been a mistake. Please, run along, there's a good chap, and let's forget the whole thing." In the tiny, shut office, his stale breath was sheer murder, being half booze and half pyorrhea. But I'd stood worse.

  When I'd mentioned the reason I was there, a light had flickered in back of the beat-up face, the eyes had glittered and the mouth worked. This piece of academic flotsam knew something, or at least he thought he did. This was the only reason I didn't blow the unwholesome joint and leave him to his d.t.'s.

  "Now, now," I said soothingly. "Let's not take that attitude. Have you any classes today? At my tasteful motel, we can lounge by the crystal pool and partake of cool beverages. Just the thing for a man in your condition. Then, if you feel like going further into the aforesaid matter, it's up to you." What a man in his condition really needed was oxygen, vitamin B-12 injections and restraint, not necessarily in that order.

  I had the sorry bastard hooked in one sentence. After that office, cool drinks and someone else paying, by a pool, must have sounded like Paradise. He hesitated an easy split second, the stumbled around his desk, croaking, "I'll have one with you for old times' sake. What did you say your name was? Have you got a car?"

  I gave him the name I was registered under, which we'll call Joe Doakes, and led him out to my air-conditioned Toyota. He almost fainted from the cool as we pedaled off campus, but the first gin and tonic by the pool pepped him up in no time. Maybe the dank reek of chlorine and the grinding and screeching noises from the highway out front added to the glamor. It was the off season, so the place was almost empty, and I had provided lots of gin (not the orange-pulp variety) and ice.

  He'd reached a stage of his drinking life that I'd had lots of experience with in the past, starting with my own old man. I don't think the guy was ever what you'd call sober, but he probably never was really flat-out drunk either. He just coasted along in a paranoid fog of dreams, frustrated ambitions, half-started projects, meaningless fucked-up jobs and general discontent. These types of people always have a glorious past and a fantastic future. During the now, or present, they are always being held back or harried by treachery, infidelity and corruption in high places, plus fire, plague and the Loch Ness Monster. All I had to do was sit back, listen and pour, judging his intake with a careful orb. Some of them fade like a quarterback at one gill too many.

  I heard all about the van D'Alliances to open with. "Would you believe, my dear chap, grandmother had footmen in powder? I mean people knew what was due, then!" And the balls at the Waldorf. And his club at Yale. And his mother. And the Southhampton Yacht Club. And his first, or society wife (she was too good for him, of course). And so on, adbullshititem.

  When he'd caromed off the New York Racquet Club, "my dear chap", for the third time and was starting a second round of "if they could only see me now!" I judged it was time for the kill.

  Ever so gently, I leaned over and glared into his glazed eyes from about one inch away.

  "But you'll show them, Motley!" I hissed at him. "You'll be batting those racquets with the best of them!" I paused. "When you find all those lovely islands or palmy shores you were talking about last night! That's when you'll be back where you belong! Old chap," I added.

  He was pretty far gone into his private dream world, and I'd gone and yanked him back by his zipper, but I'd also, please note, added the dream world to my own question. He gulped some gin while it sank in. Then a funny, kind of shy look came over him and, with it, that same flicker I'd seen before, in his cubicle.

  "Well," he mumbled. "It's not fully tested yet." He gulped more booze and his face got redder. "In fact, to be honest, it might not work at all." He stared at the pool. "I haven't dared make many tests. I think it works, but that's not enough for a scientist, old chap." For one fleeting moment, damned if I didn't feel sorry for the useless, dumb bastard. For a whole second, I thought I saw something that maybe might have once been a real scientist.

  "I suppose it has commercial uses. Possibly even military," he was going on, "but I can't finance proper tests. I'm at the end of the line, even down here. They won't renew my present contract. I can't get a job at a shitty high school, if this place goes and blackballs me." He stared at me in what he must have thought of as honest candor or something. He just looked polluted, defeated, overripe and stale. His voice lowered in confidence. "The fact is, old chap, I have a slight drinking problem, nothing serious ..." but he reached eagerly for the bottle, but I snaked it away first.

  "Now look, Motley," I purred. "I just happen to work for some very big interests. Very large on the cash flow, understand. People who back real science and real discoveries. With good old honest cash. These are important people, Motley, old chap. Ever heard of C. J. Wallingford? He's on the board, in fact, he's one of the men I report to. The biggest, see?"

  Needless to affirm, I had never heard of C. J. Wallingford, either, but this sorry soak brightened up at once. "Ah, of course, Shaker Heights people. Made their money in corsets, but still quite acceptable. How is the old man?"

  "He's great, a grand old boy. And he's backing this group to the hilt, Motley. To the hilt. He'll be counting on you, if things go right."

  Whoever might be counting on him, or me either, I couldn't say for sure. Beyond and above Barnstaffel, the office chatter differed, opinions ranging between the Salupo Family of Brooklyn and the Figliosi Clan, with interests in Philadelphia and Miami. None of us really wanted to know, to be honest. The letter, to misquote from the Good Book, ain't all that kills.

  I hauled my mad scientist back from his lost world of Grosse Point, or wherever he'd got to, and now gave him the works, plus a small gin. He'd long since forgotten the tonic and even the ice.

  "Now look, Motley," I said. "You know and I know, you didn't just gabble about islands and such last night. You also used two magic words. They had to do with time, right? So let's discuss that aspect, like good chums, eh?"

  He didn't turn pale, or anything, to my surprise. I think by now, what with the intake of battery acid and all his childhood memories, he'd fitted me into his crazy mental world, like I belonged there. He looked at me and slurped down some more gin.

  "Well, it's at the house. Can't have a thing like that at the college, old chap. They'd steal it or say I was crazy." He giggled and looked at his cheap wristwatch. Of course it had stopped.

  "Maybe we could go and look," I coaxed. "It's only just a little before noon. We could take a bottle in case we get tired, hmm?"

  This made him look eager and nervous at the same time. "I don't know, old man. My wife, you know. Splendid woman and all that. Not quite my own class, you know, but splendid. Still, she gets a bit annoyed at times. Thinks I drink too much, you know." Again I snatched the booze away from questing fingers.

  "That's easy," I said. "Look, we sneak out to your place, all very quiet. Should your frau get a peek at us, why I'll tell her we're discussing big business, very big money, and please not to interrupt. What can you lose?"

  He looked impressed and I poured him another small bite which increased his pleasure. Then I capped the bottle, the second bottle, that is, and stuffed it into a paper bag as I stood up.

  He lived in the kind of scruffy subsection, which, to be fair, cannot be b
lamed on the Sunshine State alone. A lot of nasty little piles of congealed cinder block, all exactly alike, squatted inside an imitation brick gate, which said on top, "El Dorado Gardens". That is, it should have, but the D and one o were missing, making it "El rado Gardens". The van D'Alliance manse was even crappier than the average, but a broken television antenna hanging off over the roof and roosting on a dead palm tree gave it that different look. The grass was dead too, the windows were shuttered, and the dump looked abandoned.

  "Charming," I said as we pulled up under his carport, which incidentally was full of holes. "A real haven of rest, away from the workaday world." He was plastered but not that far gone, and he gave me a dirty look as I helped him out of the car.

  Just behind the carport was, logically, a small, one-car garage. This was padlocked, not once but twice. It took Motley three tries to fish out both keys and get the locks off, but he finally made it. He pushed feebly at the sliding overhead door, and I finally had to help him. He wobbled over to one side and switched on a light, then managed to pull the door back down. I noticed he bolted it, too. Maybe he was a nut, but he at least thought he had something worth protecting. A window built into one wall of the room was filled with a window-unit air conditioner. We were sealed in.

  The place was a mess and smelled as stale as its owner. There were rusting tools all over the concrete floor. A long work bench held more of them, plus a lot of oddly shaped bits of metal and also lots of wires, some in coils and others strung about in weird patterns. But in the middle, close to the back wall, was something else. It was a great big metal box, really, about six feet square, with gauges all over the outside. It was very thick metal, which I could see because it had a round door, like a porthole, and this was open. Actually it looked more like one of those thick hatches you see on a submarine, and you could also note it had heavy clamps. A kid of six could have scrunched into the inside of this box thing, but nothing much bigger.