The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

  Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with tension. “Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!”

  That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt inward. “Step inside. We’ll have to decide what to do with you when Carlson finds you’re here.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Curt asked, stupefied. “Dell’s dying. He needs help.”

  “Get in here!”

  Curt moved slowly forward. Brown closed the door behind him and motioned toward a closed door at the other end of a short hall. They opened it and stepped into a dimly lighted room.

  Curt’s eyes slowly adjusted and he saw what seemed to be a laboratory. It was so packed with equipment that there was scarcely room for the group of twelve or fifteen men jammed closely about some object with their backs to Curt and Brown.

  Brown shambled forward like an agitated skeleton, breaking the circle. Then Curt saw that the object of the men’s attention was a large cathode ray screen occupied by a single green line. There was a pip on it rising sharply near one side of the two-foot tube. The pip moved almost imperceptibly toward a vertical red marker over the face of the screen. The men stared as if hypnotized by it.

  * * * *

  The newcomers’ arrival, however, disturbed their attention. One man turned with an irritable growl. “Brown, for heaven’s sake—”

  He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught sight of Curt’s almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.

  “Who is this? What’s he doing here?”

  The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.

  “This is Curtis Johnson,” said Brown. “He got lost looking for a doctor for Dell.”

  A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. “Your coming is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.”

  The man indicated a chair.

  “My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,” Curt snapped out, refusing to sit down. “I’ve got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you’d allow me to use your phone. I don’t know who you are nor what Dell’s hired man is doing here with you. But you’ve got to let me go for help!”

  “No.” The man, Sark, shook his head. “Dell is reconciled. He has to go. We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.”

  He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room. Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey, these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more rapidly.

  It was nightmare—meaningless—

  “I’m not staying,” Curt insisted. “You can’t prevent me from helping Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me call.”

  “You’re not going to call,” said Sark wearily. “And we assumed responsibility for Dell’s death long ago. Sit down!”

  Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown’s gun. But he’d bring them to justice somehow, he swore.

  He didn’t understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the ’scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How?

  What did the inexorably advancing pip signify?

  * * * *

  No one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt’s ears.

  Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The circle of men grew taut.

  The pip crossed the red line—and vanished.

  Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning.

  With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced uncertainly at one another.

  One said, “Well, that’s the end of Dell. We’ll soon know now if we’re on the right track, or if we’ve botched it. Carlson will call when he’s computed it.”

  “The end of Dell?” Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince himself of what he knew had happened. “The pip on the screen—that showed his life leaving him?”

  “Yes,” said Sark. “He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds more like him. But Dell couldn’t have told you of that—”

  “What will we do with him?” Brown asked abruptly.

  “If Dell is dead, you murdered him!” Curt shouted.

  A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now, even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn’t hesitate to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was nonsense.…

  “Dell must have sent you to us!” Sark said, as if a great mystery had suddenly been lifted from his mind. “He did not have time to tell you everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?”

  Curt nodded bitterly. “He told me it was the quickest way to get to a doctor.”

  “He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.”

  “What are you talking about?” Curt demanded.

  “Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?”

  “It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in the morning, but I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. I realize now that he was sick and irrational.”

  “Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,” Sark said thoughtfully. “He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed him.”

  “Succeed Dell? In what?”

  Sark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar moonlit ruin.

  “An American city,” said Sark, hurrying his words now. “Any city. They are all alike. Ruin. Death. This one died thirty years ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” Curt complained, bewildered. “Thirty years—”

  “At another point in the Time Continuum,” said Sark. “The future. Your future, you understand. Or, rather, our present, the one you created for us.”

  Curt recoiled at the sudden venom in Sark’s voice. “The future?” That was what they had in common with Dell—psychosis, systematic delusions. He had suspected danger before; now it was imminent and terrifying.

  “Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with pride,” Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt’s fear and horror. “That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside the high technical achievement these things represent.”

  Curt’s throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the pain-fired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist’s words: “The responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the scientist mercenaries—”

  “Some of us did manage to survive,” said Sark, glaring at the scene of gaunt rubble. Curt could see the veins pounding beneath the thin flesh of his forehead. “We lived for twenty years with the dream of rebuilding a world, the same dream that has followed all wars. But at last we knew that the dream was truly vain this time. We survivors lived in hermetically sealed caverns, trying to exist and recover our lost science and technology.

  “We could not emerge into the Earth’s
atmosphere. Its pollution with virulent aerosols would persist for another hundred years. We could not bear a new race out of these famished and rickety bodies of ours. Unless Man was to vanish completely from the face of the Earth, we had only a single hope. That hope was to prevent the destruction from ever occurring!”

  Sark’s eyes were burning now. “Do you understand what that means? We had to go back, not forward. We had to arm to fight a new war, a war to prevent the final war that destroyed Mankind.”

  “Back? How could you go back?” Curt hesitated, grasping now the full insanity of the scene about him. “How have you come back?” He waited tautly for the answer. It would be gibberish, of course, like all the mad conversation before it.

  * * * *

  “The undisturbed flow of time from the beginning to the end—neither of which we can experience—we call the Prime Continuum,” Sark replied. “Mathematically speaking, it is composed of billions of separate bands of probability running side by side. For analogy, you may liken it to a great river, whose many insignificant tributaries merge into a roaring, turbulent whole. That is the flow of time, the Prime Continuum.

  “You may change one of these tributaries, dam it up, turn it aside, let it reach the main stream at a different point. No matter how insignificant the tributary, the stream will not be the same after the change. That is what we are doing. We are controlling critical tributaries of the Prime Continuum, altering the hell that you scientists have so generously handed down to us.

  “Dell was a critical tributary. You, Dr. Curtis Johnson, are another. Changing or destroying such key individuals snips off branches of knowledge before they come into fruit.”

  It was an ungraspable answer, but it had to be argued against because of its conclusion. “The scientists are not bringing about the war,” Curt said, looking from one fleshless face to another. “Find the politicians responsible, those willing to turn loose any horror to gain power. They are the ones you want.”

  “That would mean destroying half the human race. In your day, nearly every man is literally a politician.”

  “Talk sense!” Curt said angrily.

  “A politician, as we have come to define him, is simply one willing to sacrifice the common good for his own ends. It is a highly infectious disease in a day when altruism is taken for cowardice or mere stupidity. No, we have not mistaken our goal, Dr. Johnson. We cannot hasten the maturity of the race. We can only hope to take the matches away so the children cannot burn the house down. Whatever you doubt, do not doubt that we are from the future or that we caused Dell’s death. He is only one of many.”

  Curt slumped. “I did doubt it. I still do, yet not with conviction. Why?”

  “Because your own sense of guilt tells you that you and Dell and others like you are literally the matches which we have to remove. Because your knowledge of science has overcome your desire not to believe. Because you know the shape of the future.”

  “The war after the Third World War—” Curt murmured. “Someone said it would be fought with stones and spears, but your weapons are far from stones and spears.”

  “Perhaps not so far at that,” said Sark, his face twisting wryly. He reached to a nearby table and picked up a tomato and a carrot. “These are our weapons. As humble and primitive as the stones and spears of cavemen.”

  “You’re joking,” Curt replied, almost ready to grin.

  “No. This is the ultimate development of biological warfare. Man is what he eats—”

  “That’s what Dell’s sign said.”

  “We operate hundreds of gardens and farms such as Dell’s. We work through the fertilizing compounds we supply to these farms. These compounds contain chemicals that eventually lodge in the cells of those who eat the produce. They take up stations within the brain cells and change the man—or destroy him.

  “Certain cells of the brain are responsible for specific characteristics. Ways of altering these cells were found by introducing minute quantities of specific radioactive materials which could be incorporated into vegetable foods. During the Third War wholesale insanity was produced in entire populations by similar methods. Here, we are using it to accomplish humane purposes.

  “We are simply restraining the scientists responsible for the destroying weapons that produced our nightmare world. You saw the change that took place in Dell. There is a good example of what we do.”

  “But he did change,” Curt pointed out. “He was carrying out your work. Wasn’t that enough for you? Why did you decide he had to die?”

  “Ordinarily, we don’t want to kill if the change is produced. Sometimes the brain cells are refractory and the characteristics too ingrained. The cells develop tumorous activity as a result of the treatment. So it was with Dell. In his case, however, we would have been forced to kill him by other means if he had not died as he did. This, too, he understood very well. That was why he really wanted no doctor to help him.”

  “You must have driven him insane first!”

  “Look at this and see if you still think so.” Sark led the way to a small instrument and pointed to the eyepiece of it. “Look in there.”

  Curt bent over. Light sprang up at Sark’s touch of a switch. Then a scene began to move before Curt’s eyes.

  “Dell!” he exclaimed.

  The scene was of some vast and well-equipped biological laboratory, much like those of Camp Detrick. Silent, mask-faced technicians moved with precision about their tasks. Dr. Dell was directing operations.

  But there was something wrong. The figure was not the Dell that Curt knew.

  As if Sark sensed Curt’s comprehension of this, the scene advanced and swelled until the whole area of vision was filled with Dell’s face. Curt gasped. The face was blank and hideous. The eyes stared. When the scene retreated once more, Curt saw now that Dell moved as an automaton, almost without volition of his own.

  * * * *

  As he moved away from the bench like a sleepwalker, there came briefly into view the figure of an armed guard at the door. The figure of a corporal, grim in battle dress.

  Curt looked up, sick as if some inner sense had divined the meaning of that scene which he could not yet put into words.

  “Had enough?” asked Sark.

  “What does it mean?”

  “That is Dell as he would have been. That is what he was willing to die to avoid.”

  “But what is it?”

  “A military research laboratory twelve years into your future. You are aware that in your own time a good deal of research has come to a standstill because many first-string scientists have revolted against military domination. Unfortunately, there are plenty of second-stringers available and they are enough for most tasks—the youngsters with new Ph.D.s who are awed by the glitter of golden laboratories. But, lacking experience or imagination, they can’t see through the glitter or have the insight for great work. Some will eventually, too late, however, and they will be replaced by eager new youngsters.”

  “This scene of Dell—”

  “Just twelve years from what you call now. Deadlier weapons will be needed and so a bill will be passed to draft the reluctant first-line men—against their will, if necessary.”

  “You can’t force creative work,” Curt objected.

  Sark shrugged. “There are drugs that do wonderful and terrible things to men’s minds. They can force creation or mindless destruction, confession or outrageous subterfuge. You saw your opponents make some use of them. A cardinal, for example, and an engineer, among others. Now you have seen your friend, Dell, as he would have been. Not the same drugs, of course, but the end result is the same.”

  Curt’s horror turned to stubborn disbelief. “America wouldn’t use such methods,” he said flatly.

  “Today? No,” agreed Sark. “But when a country is committed to inhu
man warfare—even though the goal may be honorable—where is the line to stop at? Each brutality prepares the way for the next. Even concentration camps and extermination centers become logical necessities. You have heard your opponents say that the end justifies the means. You have seen for yourself—the means become the end.”

  “But Dell could have escaped,” Curt protested. “You could have helped him to your own time or another. He was still valuable. He needn’t have died!”

  “There is no such thing as actual travel in time,” explained Sark. “Or at least in our day we have found none. There is possible only a bending back of a branch of the Prime Continuum so that we can witness, warn, instruct, gain aid in saving the future. And there can be meeting only in this narrow sector of unreality where the branch joins the main stream. Our farms adjoin such sectors, but farther than that we cannot go, nor can one of you become a citizen of the world you have created for us.

  “But I wish it were so!” Sark bit out venomously. “We’d kidnap you by the millions, force you to look upon the ruin and the horror, let you breathe the atmosphere that no man can inhale and live, the only atmosphere there is in that world. Yes, I wish you could become our guests there. Our problem would be easier. But it can’t be done. This is the only way we can work.

  “Dell had to go. There was no escape for him, no safety for us if he lived. He would have been tracked down, captured like a beast and set to work against his will. It was there in the Prime Continuum. Nothing could cancel it except death, the death that saves a billion lives because he will not produce a toxin deadlier than D. triconus.”

  The vengeance in Sark’s voice was almost tangible. Involuntarily Curt retreated a step before it. And—almost—he thought he understood these men out of time.

  “What is there—” he began hoarsely and had to stop. “What is there that I can do?”

  “We need you to take over Dell’s farm. It is of key importance. The list of men he was treating was an extremely vital one. That work cannot be interrupted now.”