The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Bowers, sir,” said the JCS chairman.

  “That’s right. What became of him?”

  “Retired.”

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t make any difference now.” He doodled some more and finally said, “Gentlemen, it looks like this is it. How much time did you say we had?”

  “Not more than ninety days, sir. Maybe as little as thirty.”

  The President looked up at the JCS chairman.

  “We’re as ready,” said the chairman, “as we will ever be. We can handle them—I think. There will, of course, be some—”

  “I know,” said the President.

  “Could we bluff?” asked the secretary of state, speaking quietly. “I know it wouldn’t stick, but at least we might buy some time.”

  “You mean hint that we have time travel?”

  The secretary nodded.

  “It wouldn’t work,” said the CIA chief tiredly. “If we really had it, there’d be no question then. They’d become exceedingly well-mannered, even neighborly, if they were sure we had it.”

  “But we haven’t got it,” said the President gloomily.

  CHAPTER X

  The two hunters trudged homeward late in the afternoon, with a deer slung from a pole they carried on their shoulders. Their breath hung visibly in the air as they walked along, for the frost had come and any day now, they knew, there would be snow.

  “I’m worried about Wes,” said Cooper, breathing heavily. “He’s taking this too hard. We got to keep an eye on him.”

  “Let’s take a rest,” panted Hudson.

  They halted and lowered the deer to the ground.

  “He blames himself too much,” said Cooper. He wiped his sweaty forehead. “There isn’t any need to. All of us walked into this with our eyes wide open.”

  “He’s kidding himself and he knows it, but it gives him something to go on. As long as he can keep busy with all his puttering around, he’ll be all right.”

  “He isn’t going to repair the time unit, Chuck.”

  “I know he isn’t. And he knows it, too. He hasn’t got the tools or the materials. Back in the workshop, he might have a chance, but here he hasn’t.”

  “It’s rough on him.”

  “It’s rough on all of us.”

  “Yes, but we didn’t get a brainstorm that marooned two old friends in this tail end of nowhere. And we can’t make him swallow it when we say that it’s okay, we don’t mind at all.”

  “That’s a lot to swallow, Johnny.”

  “What’s going to happen to us, Chuck?”

  “We’ve got ourselves a place to live and there’s lots to eat. Save our ammo for the big game—a lot of eating for each bullet—and trap the smaller animals.”

  “I’m wondering what will happen when the flour and all the other stuff is gone. We don’t have too much of it because we always figured we could bring in more.”

  “We’ll live on meat,” said Hudson. “We got bison by the million. The plains Indians lived on them alone. And in the spring, we’ll find roots and in the summer berries. And in the fall, we’ll harvest a half-dozen kinds of nuts.”

  “Some day our ammo will be gone, no matter how careful we are with it.”

  “Bows and arrows. Slingshots. Spears.”

  “There’s a lot of beasts here I wouldn’t want to stand up to with nothing but a spear.”

  “We won’t stand up to them. We’ll duck when we can and run when we can’t duck. Without our guns, we’re no lords of creation—not in this place. If we’re going to live, we’ll have to recognize that fact.”

  “And if one of us gets sick or breaks a leg or—”

  “We’ll do the best we can. Nobody lives forever.”

  But they were talking around the thing that really bothered them, Hudson told himself—each of them afraid to speak the thought aloud.

  They’d live, all right, so far as food, shelter and clothing were concerned. And they’d live most of the time in plenty, for this was a fat and open-handed land and a man could make an easy living.

  But the big problem—the one they were afraid to talk about—was their emptiness of purpose. To live, they had to find some meaning in a world without society.

  A man cast away on a desert isle could always live for hope, but here there was no hope. A Robinson Crusoe was separated from his fellow-humans by, at the most, a few thousand miles. Here they were separated by a hundred and fifty thousand years.

  Wes Adams was the lucky one so far. Even playing his thousand-to-one shot, he still held tightly to a purpose, feeble as it might be—the hope that he could repair the time machine.

  We don’t need to watch him now, thought Hudson. The time we’ll have to watch is when he is forced to admit he can’t fix the machine.

  And both Hudson and Cooper had been kept sane enough, for there had been the cabin to be built and the winter’s supply of wood to cut and the hunting to be done.

  But then there would come a time when all the chores were finished and there was nothing left to do.

  “You ready to go?” asked Cooper.

  “Sure. All rested now,” said Hudson.

  They hoisted the pole to their shoulders and started off again.

  Hudson had lain awake nights thinking of it and all the thoughts had been dead ends.

  One could write a natural history of the Pleistocene, complete with photographs and sketches, and it would be a pointless thing to do, because no future scientist would ever have a chance to read it.

  Or they might labor to build a memorial, a vast pyramid, perhaps, which would carry a message forward across fifteen hundred centuries, snatching with bare hands at a semblance of immortality. But if they did, they would be working against the sure and certain knowledge that it all would come to naught, for they knew in advance that no such pyramid existed in historic time.

  Or they might set out to seek contemporary Man, hiking across four thousand miles of wilderness to Bering Strait and over into Asia. And having found contemporary Man cowering in his caves, they might be able to help him immeasurably along the road to his great inheritance. Except that they’d never make it and even if they did, contemporary Man undoubtedly would find some way to do them in and might eat them in the bargain.

  They came out of the woods and there was the cabin, just a hundred yards away. It crouched against the hillside above the spring, with the sweep of grassland billowing beyond it to the slate-gray skyline. A trickle of smoke came up from the chimney and they saw the door was open.

  “Wes oughtn’t to leave it open that way,” said Cooper. “No telling when a bear might decide to come visiting.”

  “Hey, Wes!” yelled Hudson.

  But there was no sign of him.

  Inside the cabin, a white sheet of paper lay on the table top. Hudson snatched it up and read it, with Cooper at his shoulder.

  Dear guys—I don’t want to get your hopes up again and have you disappointed. But I think I may have found the trouble. I’m going to try it out. If it doesn’t work, I’ll come back and burn this note and never say a word. But if you find the note, you’ll know it worked and I’ll be back to get you. Wes.

  Hudson crumpled the note in his hand. “The crazy fool!”

  “He’s gone off his rocker,” Cooper said. “He just thought.…”

  The same thought struck them both and they bolted for the door. At the corner of the cabin, they skidded to a halt and stood there, staring at the ridge above them.

  The pyramid of rocks they’d built two months ago was gone!

  CHAPTER XI

  The crash brought Gen. Leslie Bowers (ret.) up out of bed—about two feet out of bed—old muscles tense, white mustache bristling.

  Even at his age, the general was a man of action. He flipped the covers back, swung his feet out to the floor and grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall.

  Muttering, he blundered out of the bedroom, marched across the dining room and charged into the kitchen. There, beside the doo
r, he snapped on the switch that turned on the floodlights. He practically took the door off its hinges getting to the stoop and he stood there, bare feet gripping the planks, nightshirt billowing in the wind, the shotgun poised and ready.

  “What’s going on out there?” he bellowed.

  There was a tremendous pile of rocks resting where he’d parked his car. One crumpled fender and a drunken headlight peeped out of the rubble.

  A man was clambering carefully down the jumbled stones, making a detour to dodge the battered fender.

  The general pulled back the hammer of the gun and fought to control himself.

  The man reached the bottom of the pile and turned around to face him. The general saw that he was hugging something tightly to his chest.

  “Mister,” the general told him, “your explanation better be a good one. That was a brand-new car. And this was the first time I was set for a night of sleep since my tooth quit aching.”

  The man just stood and looked at him.

  “Who in thunder are you?” roared the general.

  The man walked slowly forward. He stopped at the bottom of the stoop.

  “My name is Wesley Adams,” he said. “I’m—”

  “Wesley Adams!” howled the general. “My God, man, where have you been all these years?”

  “Well, I don’t imagine you’ll believe me, but the fact is.…”

  “We’ve been waiting for you. For twenty-five long years! Or, rather, I’ve been waiting for you. Those other idiots gave up. I’ve waited right here for you, Adams, for the last three years, ever since they called off the guard.”

  Adams gulped. “I’m sorry about the car. You see, it was this way.…”

  The general, he saw, was beaming at him fondly.

  “I had faith in you,” the general said.

  He waved the shotgun by way of invitation. “Come on in. I have a call to make.”

  Adams stumbled up the stairs.

  “Move!” the general ordered, shivering. “On the double! You want me to catch my death of cold out here?”

  Inside, he fumbled for the lights and turned them on. He laid the shotgun across the kitchen table and picked up the telephone.

  “Give me the White House at Washington,” he said. “Yes, I said the White House.… The President? Naturally he’s the one I want to talk to.… Yes, it’s all right. He won’t mind my calling him.”

  “Sir,” said Adams tentatively.

  The general looked up. “What is it, Adams? Go ahead and say it.”

  “Did you say twenty-five years?”

  “That’s what I said. What were you doing all that time?”

  Adams grasped the table and hung on. “But it wasn’t.…”

  “Yes,” said the general to the operator. “Yes, I’ll wait.”

  He held his hand over the receiver and looked inquiringly at Adams. “I imagine you’ll want the same terms as before.”

  “Terms?”

  “Sure. Recognition. Point Four Aid. Defense pact.”

  “I suppose so,” Adams said.

  “You got these saps across the barrel,” the general told him happily. “You can get anything you want. You rate it, too, after what you’ve done and the bonehead treatment you got—but especially for not selling out.”

  CHAPTER XII

  The night editor read the bulletin just off the teletype.

  “Well, what do you know!” he said. “We just recognized Mastodonia.”

  He looked at the copy chief.

  “Where the hell is Mastodonia?” he asked.

  The copy chief shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You’re the brains in this joint.”

  “Well, let’s get a map for the next edition,” said the night editor.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Tabby, the saber-tooth, dabbed playfully at Cooper with his mighty paw.

  Cooper kicked him in the ribs—an equally playful gesture.

  Tabby snarled at him.

  “Show your teeth at me, will you!” said Cooper. “Raised you from a kitten and that’s the gratitude you show. Do it just once more and I’ll belt you in the chops.”

  Tabby lay down blissfully and began to wash his face.

  “Some day,” warned Hudson, “that cat will miss a meal and that’s the day you’re it.”

  “Gentle as a dove,” Cooper assured him. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Well, one thing about it, nothing dares to bother us with that monstrosity around.”

  “Best watchdog there ever was. Got to have something to guard all this stuff we’ve got. When Wes gets back, we’ll be millionaires. All those furs and ginseng and the ivory.”

  “If he gets back.”

  “He’ll be back. Quit your worrying.”

  “But it’s been five years,” Hudson protested.

  “He’ll be back. Something happened, that’s all. He’s probably working on it right now. Could be that he messed up the time setting when he repaired the unit or it might have been knocked out of kilter when Buster hit the helicopter. That would take a while to fix. I don’t worry that he won’t come back. What I can’t figure out is why did he go and leave us?”

  “I’ve told you,” Hudson said. “He was afraid it wouldn’t work.”

  “There wasn’t any need to be scared of that. We never would have laughed at him.”

  “No. Of course we wouldn’t.”

  “Then what was he scared of?” Cooper asked.

  “If the unit failed and we knew it failed, Wes was afraid we’d try to make him see how hopeless and insane it was. And he knew we’d probably convince him and then all his hope would be gone. And he wanted to hang onto that, Johnny. He wanted to hang onto his hope even when there wasn’t any left.”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” said Cooper. “What counts is that he’ll come back. I can feel it in my bones.”

  And here’s another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.

  God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!

  “Wes is working on it right now,” said Cooper confidently.

  CHAPTER XIV

  He was. Not he alone, but a thousand others, working desperately, knowing that the time was short, working not alone for two men trapped in time, but for the peace they all had dreamed about—that the whole world had yearned for through the ages.

  For to be of any use, it was imperative that they could zero in the time machines they meant to build as an artilleryman would zero in a battery of guns, that each time machine would take its occupants to the same instant of the past, that their operation would extend over the same period of time, to the exact second.

  It was a problem of control and calibration—starting with a prototype that was calibrated, as its finest adjustment, for jumps of 50,000 years.

  Project Mastodon was finally under way.

  12:01 P.M., by Richard A. Lupoff

  There was the echo of that single, loud sound resembling the crashing implosion of air into a shattered vacuum tube or the report of a small-caliber firearm. The clock on the Grand Central Tower said 12:01, as it always did at resumption time, and Castleman knew that the dateline on the newspapers being hawked at the corner of Lexington and 46th would be the same that it always was.

  He waited for the familiar grime-crusted, green-and-silver bus to make its turn onto short Vanderbilt Avenue, dodged the usual yellow taxi while crossing Vanderbilt himself, and passed between the two Cadillac limousines waiting at the curb for their passengers to return from whatever errand detained them.

  On the west side of Madison he stopped in front of Finchley’s and waited for the middle-aged window dresser to set up the full-length mirror at the back of the display, as he did every time, and perfunctorily inspected himself in its shiny surface. Same tweed suit, striped button-down shirt and modishly broad tie, same hair-comb with one stubborn lock sticking out above his left ear. He put a hand to his chin and rubbed vigorously, but there was no particular evidence of stubble.

/>   Not that he could have grown much stubble in an hour, but if the effect of the hours was cumulative for him, it should become apparent after a dozen or two resumptions.

  Strolling casually toward the West Side, he decided to stop at the first convenient restaurant and get himself a snack. The sky was blue and unusually clear for midtown, the air warm and slightly moist with the moisture of a balmy spring day rather than the sticky humidity that used to come later in the year. A good thing, Castleman thought, that the resumptions had come on such an afternoon rather than in the middle of a midwinter cold snap with the streets full of dirty slush and everyone sneezing and coughing flu bugs at one another.

  He stepped into Hamburger Heaven and surveyed the situation vis-à-vis seating. There were no vacancies but only a handful of people waited ahead of him. No point in waiting in a long line or trying to dine in a fancy restaurant where a fancy lunch could take two hours to consume. If he couldn’t get served and finish his meal by one o’clock, it was a waste.

  Which is not to say that it wasn’t one anyhow. At the next resumption he’d be back on the sidewalk gazing up at the Grand Central Tower anyway; he’d have a pleasant appetite anyway; if he took off his tie and flushed it down the toilet in the basement washroom of Hamburger Heaven, he’d find it back knotted around his neck, clean and dry. Or at least he was confident that he would; that might prove an interesting experiment to try sometime, but the result was pretty well a foregone conclusion.

  The hostess had come over to the small group of customers waiting for seats and was holding up two fingers in a V sign. Castleman looked beside him and found, to his surprise, that he had reached the head of the line. He turned to the person beside him and asked if she would mind sharing a table.

  “It’ll save time,” he said, stifling an urge to laugh at his own line.

  The woman nodded agreement, and the hostess showed them to a tiny wooden table near the back of the restaurant. They contorted themselves onto the fixed wooden seats and received oversized ketchup- and coffee-stained menus. Castleman decided quickly what he wanted and lowered his menu, letting his eyes take in his impromptu companion.

  She was obviously a working girl—or woman, more accurately. Slightly overage and overweight for the blouse and modish-length skirt she affected, with her hair done up in an elaborately curled style that almost suited her oval face. She put her menu down, clearly having made her own choice of food, and looked at Castleman.