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

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Many thousands of these vehicles were moving swiftly through the streets about us. We passed on, between great buildings and along wider streets, my eyes and ears numbed by what I saw about me. Then the buildings grew smaller, after we had gone for miles through them, and we were passing through the city’s outskirts. I could not believe, hardly, that it was Paris in which I was.

  “We came to a great flat and open field outside the city and there Thicourt stopped and we got out of the vehicle. There were big buildings at the field’s end, and I saw other vehicles rolling out of them across the field, ones different from any I had yet seen, with flat winglike projections on either side. They rolled out over the field very fast and then I cried out as I saw them rising from the ground into the air. Mother of God, they were flying! The men in them were flying!

  “Rastin and Thicourt took me forward to the great buildings. They spoke to men there and one brought forward one of the winged cars. Rastin told me to get in, and though I was terribly afraid, there was too terrible a fascination that drew me in. Thicourt and Rastin entered after me, and we sat in seats with the other man. He had before him levers and buttons, while at the car’s front was a great thing like a double-oar or paddle. A loud roaring came and that double-blade began to whirl so swiftly that I could not see it. Then the car rolled swiftly forward, bumping on the ground, and then ceased to bump. I looked down, then shuddered. The ground was already far beneath! I too, was flying in the air!

  “We swept upward at terrible speed that increased steadily. The thunder of the car was terrific, and, as the man at the levers changed their position, we curved around and over downward and upward as though birds. Rastin tried to explain to me how the car flew, but it was all too wonderful, and I could not understand. I only knew that a wild thrilling excitement held me, and that it were worth life and death to fly thus, if but for once, as I had always dreamed that men might some day do.

  “Higher and higher we went. The earth lay far beneath and I saw now that Paris was indeed a mighty city, its vast mass of buildings stretching away almost to the horizons below us. A mighty city of the future that it had been given my eyes to look on!

  “There were other winged cars darting to and fro in the air about us, and they said that many of these were starting or finishing journeys of hundreds of leagues in the air. Then I cried out as I saw a great shape coming nearer us in the air. It was many rods in length, tapering to a point at both ends, a vast ship sailing in the air! There were great cabins on its lower part and in them we glimpsed people gazing out, coming and going inside, dancing even! They told me that vast ships of the air like this sailed to and fro for thousands of leagues with hundreds inside them.

  “The huge vessel of the air passed us and then our winged car began to descend. It circled smoothly down to the field like a swooping bird, and, when we landed there, Rastin and Thicourt led me back to the ground-vehicle. It was late afternoon by then, the sun sinking westward, and darkness had descended by the time we rolled back into the great city.

  “But in that city was not darkness! Lights were everywhere in it, flashing brilliant lights that shone from its mighty buildings and that blinked and burned and ran like water in great symbols upon the buildings above the streets. Their glare was like that of day! We stopped before a great building into which Rastin and Thicourt led me.

  “It was vast inside and in it were many people in rows on rows of seats. I thought it a cathedral at first but saw soon that it was not. The wall at one end of it, toward which all in it were gazing, had on it pictures of people, great in size, and those pictures were moving as though themselves alive! And they were talking one to another, too, as though with living voices! I trembled. What magic!

  “With Rastin and Thicourt in seats beside me, I watched the pictures enthralled. It was like looking through a great window into strange worlds. I saw the sea, seemingly tossing and roaring there before me, and then saw on it a ship, a vast ship of size incredible, without sails or oars, holding thousands of people. I seemed on that ship as I watched, seemed moving forward with it. They told me it was sailing over the western ocean that never men had crossed. I feared!

  “Then another scene, land appearing from the ship. A great statue, upholding a torch, and we on the ship seemed passing beneath it. They said that the ship was approaching a city, the city of New York, but mists hid all before us. Then suddenly the mists before the ship cleared and there before me seemed the city.

  * * * *

  “Mother of God, what a city! Climbing range on range of great mountain-like buildings that aspired up as though to scale heaven itself! Far beneath narrow streets pierced through them and in the picture we seemed to land from the ship, to go through those streets of the city. It was an incredible city of madness! The streets and ways were mere chasms between the sky-toppling buildings! People—people—people—millions on millions of them rushed through the endless streets. Countless ground-vehicles rushed to and fro also, and other different ones that roared above the streets and still others below them!

  “Winged flying-cars and great airships were sailing to and fro over the titanic city, and in the waters around it great ships of the sea and smaller ships were coming as man never dreamed of surely, that reached out from the mighty city on all sides. And with the coming of darkness, the city blazed with living light!

  “The pictures changed, showed other mighty cities, though none so terrible as that one. It showed great mechanisms that appalled me. Giant metal things that scooped in an instant from the earth as much as a man might dig in days. Vast things that poured molten metal from them like water. Others that lifted loads that hundreds of men and oxen could not have stirred.

  “They showed men of knowledge like Rastin and Thicourt beside me. Some were healers, working miraculous cures in a way that I could not understand. Others were gazing through giant tubes at the stars, and the pictures showed what they saw, showed that all of the stars were great suns like our sun, and that our sun was greater than earth, that earth moved around it instead of the reverse! How could such things be, I wondered. Yet they said that it was so, that earth was round like an apple, and that with other earths like it, the planets, moved round the sun. I heard, but could scarce understand.

  “At last Rastin and Thicourt led me out of that place of living pictures and to their ground-vehicle. We went again through the streets to their building, where first I had found myself. As we went I saw that none challenged my right to go, nor asked who was my lord. And Rastin said that none now had lords, but that all were lord, king and priest and noble, having no more power than any in the land. Each man was his own master! It was what I had hardly dared to hope for, in my own time, and this, I thought, was greatest of all the marvels they had shown me!

  “We entered again their building but Rastin and Thicourt took me first to another room than the one in which I had found myself. They said that their men of knowledge were gathered there to hear of their feat, and to have it proved to them.

  “‘You would not be afraid to return to your own time, Henri?’ asked Rastin, and I shook my head.

  “‘I want to return to it,’ I told them. ‘I want to tell my people there what I have seen—what the future is that they must strive for.’

  “‘But if they should not believe you?’ Thicourt asked.

  “‘Still I must go—must tell them,’ I said.

  “Rastin grasped my hand. ‘You are a man, Henri,’ he said. Then, throwing aside the cloak and hat I had worn outside, they went with me down to the big white-walled room where first I had found myself.

  “It was lit brightly now by many of the shining glass things on ceiling and walls, and in it were many men. They all stared strangely at me and at my clothes, and talked excitedly so fast that I could not understand. Rastin began to address them.

  “He seemed explaining how he had brought me from my own time to his. He used many terms and words that I could not understand, incomprehensible references a
nd phrases, and I could understand but little. I heard again the names of Einstein and De Sitter that I had heard before, repeated frequently by these men as they disputed with Rastin and Thicourt. They seemed disputing about me.

  “One big man was saying, ‘Impossible! I tell you, Rastin, you have faked this fellow!’

  “Rastin smiled. ‘You don’t believe that Thicourt and I brought him here from his own time across five centuries?’

  “A chorus of excited negatives answered him. He had me stand up and speak to them. They asked me many questions, part of which I could not understand. I told them of my life, and of the city of my own time, and of king and priest and noble, and of many simple things that they seemed quite ignorant of. Some appeared to believe me but others did not, and again their dispute broke out.

  “‘There is a way to settle the argument, gentlemen,’ said Rastin finally.

  “‘How?’ all cried.

  “‘Thicourt and I brought Henri across five centuries by rotating the time-dimensions at this spot,’ he said. ‘Suppose we reverse that rotation and send him back before your eyes—would that be proof?’

  “They all said that it would. Rastin turned to me. ‘Stand on the metal circle, Henri,’ he said. I did so.

  “All were watching very closely. Thicourt did something quickly with the levers and buttons of the mechanisms in the room. They began to hum, and blue light came from the glass tubes on some. All were quiet, watching me as I stood there on the circle of metal. I met Rastin’s eyes and something in me made me call goodbye to him. He waved his hand and smiled. Thicourt pressed more buttons and the hum of the mechanisms grew louder. Then he reached toward another lever. All in the room were tense and I was tense.

  “Then I saw Thicourt’s arm move as he turned one of the many levers.

  “A terrific clap of thunder seemed to break around me, and as I closed my eyes before its shock, I felt myself whirling around and falling at the same time as though into a maelstrom, just as I had done before. The awful falling sensation ceased in a moment and the sound subsided. I opened my eyes. I was on the ground at the center of the familiar field from which I had vanished hours before, upon the morning of that day. It was night now, though, for that day I had spent five hundred years in the future.

  “There were many people gathered around the field, fearful, and they screamed and some fled when I appeared in the thunderclap. I went toward those who remained. My mind was full of things I had seen and I wanted to tell them of these things. I wanted to tell them how they must work ever toward that future time of wonder.

  “But they did not listen. Before I had spoken minutes to them they cried out on me as a sorcerer and a blasphemer, and seized me and brought me here to the Inquisitor, to you, sire. And to you, sire, I have told the truth in all things. I know that in doing so I have set the seal of my own fate, and that only a sorcerer would ever tell such a tale, yet despite that I am glad. Glad that I have told one at least of this time of what I saw five centuries in the future. Glad that I saw! Glad that I saw the things that someday, sometime, must come to be—”

  * * * *

  It was a week later that they burned Henri Lothiere. Jean de Marselait, lifting his gaze from his endless parchment accusation and examens on that afternoon, looked out through the window at a thick curl of black smoke going up from the distant square.

  “Strange, that one,” he mused. “A sorcerer, of course, but such a one as I had never heard before. I wonder,” he half-whispered, “was there any truth in that wild tale of his? The future—who can say—what men might do—?”

  There was silence in the room as he brooded for a moment, and then he shook himself as one ridding himself of absurd speculations. “But tush—enough of these crazy fancies. They will have me for a sorcerer if I yield to these wild fancies and visions of the future.”

  And bending again with his pen to the parchment before him, he went gravely on with his work.

  A TRAVELER IN TIME, by August Derleth

  “Tell me what time is,” said Harrigan one late summer afternoon in a Madison Street bar. “I’d like to know.”

  “A dimension,” I answered. “Everybody knows that.”

  “All right, granted. I know space is a dimension and you can move forward or back in space. And, of course, you keep on aging all the time.”

  “Elementary,” I said.

  “But what happens if you can move backward or forward in time? Do you age or get younger, or do you keep the status quo?”

  “I’m not an authority on time, Tex. Do you know anyone who traveled in time?”

  Harrigan shrugged aside my question. “That was the thing I couldn’t get out of Vanderkamp, either. He presumed to know everything else.”

  “Vanderkamp?”

  “He was another of those strange people a reporter always runs into. Lived in New York—downtown, near the Bowery. Man of about forty, I’d say, but a little on the old-fashioned side. Dutch background, and hipped on the subject of New Amsterdam, which, in case you don’t know, was the original name of New York City.”

  “Don’t mind my interrupting,” I cut in. “But I’m not quite straight on what Vanderkamp has to do with time as dimension.”

  “Oh, he was touched on the subject. He claimed to travel in it. The fact is, he invented a time-traveling machine.”

  “You certainly meet the whacks, Tex!”

  “Don’t I!” He grinned appreciatively and leaned reminiscently over the bar. “But Vanderkamp had the wildest dreams of the lot. And in the end he managed the neatest conjuring trick of them all. I was on the Brooklyn Enterprise at that time; I spent about a year there. Special features, though I was on a reporter’s salary. Vanderkamp was something of a local celebrity in a minor way; he wrote articles on the early Dutch in New York, the nomenclature of the Dutch, the history of Dutch place-names, and the like. He was handy with a pen, and even handier with tools. He was an amateur electrician, carpenter, house-painter, and claimed to be an expert in genealogy.”

  “And he built a time-traveling machine?”

  “So he said. He gave me a rather hard time of it. He was a glib talker and half the time I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. He kept me on my toes by taking for granted that I accepted his basic premises. I got next to him on a tip. He could be close-mouthed as a clam, but his sister let things slip from time to time, and on this occasion she passed the word to one of her friends in a grocery store that her brother had invented a machine that took him off on trips into the past. It seemed like routine whack stuff, but Blake, who decided what went into the Enterprise and what didn’t, sent me over to Manhattan to get something for the paper, on the theory that since Vanderkamp was well-known in Brooklyn, it was good neighborhood copy.

  “Vanderkamp was a sharp-eyed little fellow, about five feet or so in height, and I hit him at a good time. His sister said he had just come back from a trip—she left me to draw my own conclusions about what kind of trip—and I found him in a mild fit of temper. He was too upset, in fact, to be truculent, which was more like his nature.

  “Was it true, I wanted to know, that he’d invented a machine that traveled in time?

  “He didn’t make any bones about it. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘I’ve been using it for the last month, and if my sister hadn’t decided to blab nobody would know about it yet. What about it?’

  “‘You believe it can take you backwards or forwards into the past or the future?’

  “‘Do I look crazy? I said so, didn’t I?’

  “Now, as a matter of fact, he did look crazy. Unlike most of the candidates for my file of queer people, Vanderkamp actually looked like a nut. He had a wild eye and a constantly working mouth; he blinked a good deal and stammered when he was excited. In features he was as Dutch as his name implied. Well, we talked back and forth for some time, but I stuck with him and in the end he took me out into a shed adjoining his house and showed me the contraption he’d built.

  “It lo
oked like a top. The first thing I thought of was Brick Bradford, and before I could catch myself, I’d asked, ‘Is that pure Brick Bradford?’

  “He didn’t turn a hair. ‘Not by a long shot,’ he answered. ‘H. G. Wells was there first. I owe it to Wells.’

  “‘I see,’ I said.

  “‘The hell you do!’ he shot back. ‘You think I’m as nutty as a fruit-cake.’

  “‘The idea of time travel is a little hard to swallow,’ I said.

  “‘Sure it is. But me, I’m doing it. So that’s all there is to it.’

  “‘If you don’t mind, Mr. Vanderkamp,’ I said, ‘I’m a dummy in scientific matters. I have all I can do to tell a nut from a bolt.’

  “‘That I believe,’ he said.

  “‘So how do you time travel?’

  “‘Look,’ he said, ‘time is a dimension like space. You can go up or down this ruler,’ he snatched a steel ruler and waved it in front of me, ‘from any given point. But you move. In the dimension of time, you only seem to move. You stand still; time moves. Do you get it?’

  “I had to confess that I didn’t.

  “He tried again, with obviously strained patience. Judging by what I could gather from what he said, it was possible for him—so he believed—to get into his machine, twirl a few knobs, push a few buttons, relax for any given period, and end up just where he liked—back in the past, or ahead in the future. But wherever he ended up, he was still in this same spot. In other words, whether he was back in 1492 or ahead in 2092, the place he got out of his time machine was still his present address.

  “It was beyond me, frankly, but I figured that as long as he was a little touched, it wouldn’t do any harm to humor him. I intimated that I understood and asked him where he’d been last.

  “His face fell, his brow clouded, and he said, ‘I’ve been ahead thirty years.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘What a time! I’ll be seventy, and you won’t even be that, Mr. Harrigan. But we’ll be in the middle of the worst atomic war you ever dreamed about.’