#
I left the backpack at the counter, where it was stored for me in a locked cabinet, but nobody patted me down to find the pocketed neuronic whip and my other handy tools, or insisted that I pass through a scanner. That had been several decades earlier, when people were more angstish about everything. Still, I was sweating slightly. They’d removed most of the paper books from the library, except for displays of volumes set up as objets d’art, and the great circular reading room with its groaning wheeled chairs and hooded green lamps was full of chatter. People leaned across long tables toward each other, disputing like students in a yeshiva, displays flickering with information and gossip. Immersive learning, they’d called it back here in the 2070s—not a bad way of finding your way around the dataverse, and a damned sight more sensible than the droning memorization I’d had to put up with as a kid.
I found a librarian eventually and asked to speak to the Director of Collections. She looked at me with extreme distrust but put a call through, and finally sent me across to an audience with Dr. Paulo Vermeer, who regarded me with similar sentiment. I tried not to stare at the Bessel function graphs dancing on his naked skull.
“Doctor, thank you for seeing me. I’m hoping that I might have the privilege of viewing the Second Mars Expedition logs in the vaults here, before they go on public display next week.”
“And you are?”
“Professor Albert M. Chop,” I told him, “Areologist,” and presented a very sincere Fijian passport card with my holographic likeness rising from its embossed surface, a University of the South Pacific faculty ID, and a driver’s license dated 2068. He gave them a perfunctory glance.
“You’re young for such a post.”
“It’s a new discipline, of course.” I wanted to tell him that I was older than he, just the lucky beneficiary of longevity plasmids from the end of the century. Instead, I watched as he regarded me with bland mockery.
“Whatever is that costume, Mr. Chop, and why are you wearing it in these hallowed halls?”
“It’s my habit,” I said, and tried to look humble but scholarly. Moira was sniggering again in my ear; I tried to ignore her and keep a straight face.
“Your what?”
“My religious garb, sir. Those of my faith, of a suitably elevated rank, are enjoined by the sacred—”
“What faith is that?” Perhaps it occurred to him that I might be affronted at an implied slur on my beliefs, and could bring him and the library up on charges. “Naturally we honor all forms of worship, but I have to admit that until now—”
“I am a Chronosophist,” I said, and reached into my pocket. “Here, I have a fascinating display unit that will bring you enlightenment, Dr. Vermeer. Why, if you will set aside just one hour of your time—”
He gave a civilized, barely visible shudder. “No need for that, my good fellow. Very well, come along with me. But don’t think—” he sent me an arch look –“you can make a habit of it.” I raised one eyebrow, something I’d trained myself to do as a kid when I was a big fan of Commander Spock. That was before real starflight, of course. As Vermeer slid out from behind his desk on a prosthesis, I saw that he’d lost both his legs, presumably in the Venezuelan conflict. Nothing I could do about that, alas. But I had larger fish to fry than a simple limited if brutal armed drone conflict. I followed him to a lift and we rose one floor. He let me into a humidity-controlled sealed room, and directed a functionary to open a vault. The Mars documents remained inside their triple-layer packaging. Even so, the Director drew on a pair of long transparent gloves, fitting them snugly under the turn-ups of his trousers, and wrapped his nose and eyes in a white surgical mask. He handed me a medical kit. “Put these on. We can’t risk damaging precious heirlooms with our breath and bodily aerosols.”
I was already fitted out with antiviral plugs deep inside my nostrils, but I put on mask and gloves and watched in terror as he slid open the containers and placed them carefully on the table. I reached cautiously for the documents, and the Director blocked my hand.
“Strictly hands-off, Professor! Look but do not touch.”
The functionary, a bored fellow some inches shorter and stouter than I, waited with his eyes out of focus, probably watching some Flix drivel. I took the neuronic whip out of my pocket and buzzed the Director to sleep. His head fell forward and hit the table. The functionary gave his boss an astonished look, but by that time I was beside him and cold-cocked him with the whip’s butt. I kicked out of my KT-26 joggers, dragged off his clothes, struggled into them over my own, got my feet stuck in the arms of his numbered Demons football team sweater-trousers. I shoved, had them in place, tugged the shoes back on—I needed something sturdier than a pair of foot mittens. I heaved both men well clear, piled up a stoichiometric mixture of powdered iron oxide and aluminum, and set fire to it with the propane lighter. It went up with an explosive huff, and the hot blue blaze evaporated the death-laden logs and started to melt the top of the steel table.
The Director was stirring. I ran to the door, flung it wide. “Fire, fire!” I screamed, and ran to the elevator. “Quick, the treasures!” The polished cedar doors of the old lift creaked open. It was empty. Offices were opening, faces gaping. I flung myself in, hit the ground floor button, breathed deeply as the elevator descended, stepped forth slowly in a dignified manner and retrieved my backpack before the shouts and bells broke out in earnest behind me.
As I skipped light-heartedly down the gray steps and onto the grass, something fast and heavy slammed into my upper back, flung me forward on my face. I rolled, twisted, came up in a crouch, but the Director’s prosthetic had pulled away out of reach. His face was livid with fury. I grabbed at my bruised neck. The rolls of toilet paper had saved me from having my spine ruptured, but I still felt as if I’d been kicked by a horse. Three fat guards tore down the steps, batons raised. I could have killed the lot of them, but my job here was to keep a low profile (ha!) and save lives. A lot of lives. Millions of lives. Mission accomplished.
I sighed and held my hands away from my body. It’s a shame you can’t loop back into your own immediate history or I’d have seen a dozen later versions of me popping up from the gathering crowd, coming to my rescue. Nope, it just didn’t work that way. Maybe Moira—
Through gritted teeth, she was saying in my inload, “Damn it, Bobby, are you all right? Your vitals look okay. Hang on, I’ll be with you in a—”
They hauled me inside again and this time the lift took us down into the basement.
“On my way,” Moira told me. Then, in a softer tone, she said, “Bobby, honey, you done good. Real good. Nine million lives spared. Oh man. When I spring you, we are going to have a party, baby.”
#
“You are the worst kind of terrorist,” Director Vermeer told me in a chill, shaking voice. “In a matter of seconds you destroyed not lives but the very meaning of lives, the certified historical foundation that—”
“So the Martian logs are entirely destroyed?” I tried to rise; two overweight but chunky-muscled guards held me down. At least the functionary I’d stripped of his outer garments wasn’t in the room, although his pilfered clothing had been taken away and I suppose returned to him, or maybe held for some kind of forensic examination. I’d expected the place to be swarming with firefighters, ladders, gushing hoses, media cameras. No such thing. Evidently the vault room’s internal fire protection systems had done the job, but not in time.
“Entirely incinerated, you barbarian.”
“Thank dog for that!”
“And blasphemous mockery on top of this devastation, ‘Professor’ Chop.” I could hear the inverted commas. “Oh yes, I wasted no time checking your absurd alibi. The University in Suva has no record of you, no faith exists called Chronosophy, nor is there any Albert M.—”
I chopped him off. “True. I had to deceive you to gain access to those festering Martian plague vectors. You have no idea how lucky you are, Director. How lucky the entire world is.”
“What fresh nonsense is this?”
“In two days’ time you’d have—” There was a knock at the door of the curator’s office, a long narrow room decorated with holograms of flaring galaxies, rotating, peeling, multiplying nucleic acids, two lions mating rather terrifyingly again and again in a loop, and other detritus of Installations and Exhibitions past. A woman with a floral skirt down to her wrists said apologetically, “Pardon me, Director, but there’s a police Inspector here to speak to the, the prisoner.”
My heart sank. I looked up gloomily, and Moira, in full police uniform worn upside down, but with a peaked cap covering her short red hair, said, “Good afternoon, Director. With your permission, I’d like to speak to this man in private for a moment. Then we’ll be taking him across to Police Headquarters where he will be charged with this heinous offense.” She was carrying my backpack.
“Very well, Inspector. I hope to hear a full accounting in due course. This arson is the most egregious—”
My wife shepherded him to the door, and shooed out the guards with him. “Please take a seat, Mr. …What should I call you?” she said for the sake of the library staff milling on the other side of the closing door. It clicked shut.
“I think you could call me ‘Bobby,’ honey. Delighted to see you, but how do we proceed from here? We can’t just stroll out and take a tram to the Botanic Gardens.”
“The machine’s out the back. No sense mucking around.”
“Who did you clobber, by the way?”
“Some poor cow downstairs. Had to drag her into the loo to get her uniform off her. She’s trussed up in one of their quaint cubicles. Someone’s bound to find her, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Moira was hyper, on the verge of babbling; she always gets that way when she’s pulled off some amazing exploit.
“Okay, sweetie.” I stood up, groaning, and she marched me toward the door in a stern and professional gait. “Lay on, MacDuff.”
The lift took us back to the ground floor, where the director hovered, literally. “We have transport waiting at the back entrance,” Moira told him. “Let’s keep this as low profile as possible, no sense getting people hysterical. The braindrain is under sedation, he’ll give me no trouble.”
We made our way briskly through confusing corridors to the back, me giving a glazed fish eye to anyone we passed. There was no vehicle, of course, but the drab graveled back space was relieved by a handsome rosebush in a large wooden pot. Nobody was watching us. It’s amazing what an air of authority and slight menace can do. We entered the disguised time machine and Moira, in the pilot’s seat, took us forward a year. It was three in the morning when we emerged, so the place was deserted. But the city lights were bright in the crisp air, and from somewhere to the northeast we heard music and laughter. No plague. No epidemic of murderous nanomites from Mars. Another horrible future with its teeth pulled, made safe for humankind. Hooray, hooray.
“What’s up, sweetie? Let’s go back to 2099 and put our feet up.” She started to snigger. “My dog, Bobby, you were a class act with your legs jammed into a sweater and your boof head sticking out of some guy’s fly. Come on, what’s up?”
“Candidly,” I told her, feeling dreary, “I’m feeling dreary. How stale, flat and unprofitable are the uses of this world.”
“Come on, buddy.” My wife jabbed me in the ribs. She’s just a little thing, but her elbow is sharp, even through a stolen blue police skirt. “Remember our motto, and be proud.”
“A stitch in time,” I said without much enthusiasm. It’s the nature of our trade. You can change your future but not your own past. So you’re obliged to go further and further into the day after the day after, and track down tomorrow’s atrocities that can be reversed earlier in unborn histories you’ve never lived through, have no real stake in. Guardians of time, that’s us. We can go home, sure, as far as our first time trip, but no further back than that. No way we can repairs the horrors of our own past, the local history that made us: assassinations of the great and good, genocides, terrorist attacks, our own insignificant but painful goofs. It’s like something from a Greek tragedy or myth, seems to me sometimes. Doomed to fix everyone else’s atrocities and never get any thanks, and no chance to remedy our own mistakes.
But Moira was hugging me, and the sky was clear and filled with faint stars, through the light-spattered towers of Melbourne in 2073, which is more than could be said for some other epochs. So I hugged my wife back, and found myself grinning down at her. “Yeah. Okay. A stitch in time—”
“Saves nine,” she said. “Nine million lives, this time. Maybe our own grand-grandkids, if we decide to. So hey, let’s feel good about that, eh?”
“You bet.” I said. I did feel better, a bit. “Party time it is, honey.”
And we fell away into the future, again.
TIME AND TIME AGAIN, by H. Beam Piper
Blinded by the bomb-flash and numbed by the narcotic injection, he could not estimate the extent of his injuries, but he knew that he was dying. Around him, in the darkness, voices sounded as through a thick wall.
“They mighta left mosta these Joes where they was. Half of them won’t even last till the truck comes.”
“No matter; so long as they’re alive, they must be treated,” another voice, crisp and cultivated, rebuked. “Better start taking names, while we’re waiting.”
“Yes, sir.” Fingers fumbled at his identity badge. “Hartley, Allan; Captain, G5, Chem. Research AN/73/D. Serial, SO-23869403J.”
“Allan Hartley!” The medic officer spoke in shocked surprise. “Why, he’s the man who wrote Children of the Mist, Rose of Death, and Conqueror’s Road!”
He tried to speak, and must have stirred; the corpsman’s voice sharpened.
“Major, I think he’s part conscious. Mebbe I better give him ’nother shot.”
“Yes, yes; by all means, sergeant.”
Something jabbed Allan Hartley in the back of the neck. Soft billows of oblivion closed in upon him, and all that remained to him was a tiny spark of awareness, glowing alone and lost in a great darkness.
* * * *
The Spark grew brighter. He was more than a something that merely knew that it existed. He was a man, and he had a name, and a military rank, and memories. Memories of the searing blue-green flash, and of what he had been doing outside the shelter the moment before, and memories of the month-long siege, and of the retreat from the north, and memories of the days before the War, back to the time when he had been little Allan Hartley, a schoolboy, the son of a successful lawyer, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
His mother he could not remember; there was only a vague impression of the house full of people who had tried to comfort him for something he could not understand. But he remembered the old German woman who had kept house for his father, afterward, and he remembered his bedroom, with its chintz-covered chairs, and the warm-colored patch quilt on the old cherry bed, and the tan curtains at the windows, edged with dusky red, and the morning sun shining through them. He could almost see them, now.
He blinked. He could see them!
For a long time, he lay staring at them unbelievingly, and then he deliberately closed his eyes and counted ten seconds, and as he counted, terror gripped him. He was afraid to open them again, lest he find himself blind, or gazing at the filth and wreckage of a blasted city, but when he reached ten, he forced himself to look, and gave a sigh of relief. The sunlit curtains and the sun-gilded mist outside were still there.
He reached out to check one sense against another, feeling the rough monk’s cloth and the edging of maroon silk thread. They were tangible as well as visible. Then he saw that the back of his hand was unscarred. There should have been a scar, souvenir of a rough-and-tumble brawl of his cub reporter days. He examined both hands closely. An instant later, he had sat up in bed and thrown off the covers, partially removing his pajamas and inspecting as much of his body as was visible.
It was the smooth body
of a little boy.
That was ridiculous. He was a man of forty-three; an army officer, a chemist, once a best-selling novelist. He had been married, and divorced ten years ago. He looked again at his body. It was only twelve years old. Fourteen, at the very oldest. His eyes swept the room, wide with wonder. Every detail was familiar: the flower-splashed chair covers; the table that served as desk and catch-all for his possessions; the dresser, with its mirror stuck full of pictures of aircraft. It was the bedroom of his childhood home. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. They were six inches too short to reach the floor.
For an instant, the room spun dizzily; and he was in the grip of utter panic, all confidence in the evidence of his senses lost. Was he insane? Or delirious? Or had the bomb really killed him; was this what death was like? What was that thing, about “ye become as little children”? He started to laugh, and his juvenile larynx made giggling sounds. They seemed funny, too, and aggravated his mirth. For a little while, he was on the edge of hysteria and then, when he managed to control his laughter, he felt calmer. If he were dead, then he must be a discarnate entity, and would be able to penetrate matter. To his relief, he was unable to push his hand through the bed. So he was alive; he was also fully awake, and, he hoped, rational. He rose to his feet and prowled about the room, taking stock of its contents.
There was no calendar in sight, and he could find no newspapers or dated periodicals, but he knew that it was prior to July 18, 1946. On that day, his fourteenth birthday, his father had given him a light .22 rifle, and it had been hung on a pair of rustic forks on the wall. It was not there now, nor ever had been. On the table, he saw a boys’ book of military aircraft, with a clean, new dustjacket; the flyleaf was inscribed: To Allan Hartley, from his father, on his thirteenth birthday, 7/18 ’45. Glancing out the window at the foliage on the trees, he estimated the date at late July or early August, 1945; that would make him just thirteen.
The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 17