The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

  “I’m so excited,” murmured Mrs. Draper. Stephanie watched her on one of the new televiewers, recently installed in place of the telephone.

  “What is it?”

  “Our bill has been passed by a landslide majority in both houses of Congress!”

  “Ooo!” cried Stephanie.

  “Not very coherent, my dear, but those are my sentiments exactly. In two weeks there will be a Journey to Nowhere, a special one which will include, among its passengers, a woman.”

  “But the study which had to be made—?”

  “It’s already been made. From what I gather, they can’t take it very far. Most of their conclusions had to be based on supposition. The important thing, though, is this: a woman will be sent. The way the C.E.L. figures it, my dear, is that a woman falling in the twenty-one to twenty-six age group should be chosen, a woman who meets all the requirements placed upon the young men.”

  “Yes,” said Stephanie. “Of course. And I was just thinking that I would be—”

  “Remember those chickens!” cautioned Mrs. Draper. “We already have one hundred seventy-seven volunteers who’d claw each other to pieces for a chance to go.”

  “Wrong,” Stephanie said, smiling. “You now have one hundred seventy-eight.”

  “Room for only one, my dear. Only one, you know.”

  “Then cross the others off your list. I’m already packing my bag.”

  * * * *

  When Temple regained consciousness, it was with the feeling that no more than a split second of time had elapsed. So much had happened so rapidly that, until now, he hadn’t had time to consider it.

  Arkalion had vanished.

  Vanished—he could use no other word. He was there, standing in the booth—and then he wasn’t. Simple as that. Now you see it, now you don’t. And goodbye, Arkalion.

  But goodbye Temple, too. For hadn’t Temple entered the same booth, waiting but a second until Arkalion activated the mechanism at the other end? And certainly Temple wasn’t in the booth now. He smiled at the ridiculously simple logic of his thoughts. He stood in an open field, the blades of grass rising to his knees, as much brilliant purple as they were green. Waves of the grass, stirred like tide by the gentle wind, and hills rolling off toward the horizon in whichever direction he turned. Far away, the undulating hills lifted to a half soft mauve sky. A somber red sun with twice Sol’s apparent disc but half its brightness hung mid-way between zenith and horizon completing the picture of peaceful other-worldliness.

  Wherever this was, it wasn’t Earth—or Mars.

  Nowhere?

  Temple shrugged, started walking. He chose his direction at random, crushing an easily discernible path behind him in the surprisingly brittle grass. The warm sun baked his back comfortably, the soft-stirring wind caressed his cheeks. Of Arkalion he found not a trace.

  Two hours later Temple reached the hills and started climbing their gentle slopes. It was then that he saw the figure approaching on the run. It took him fully half a minute to realize that the runner was not human.

  * * * *

  After months of weightless inactivity, things started to happen for Sophia. The feeling of weight returned, but weight as she never had felt it before. It was as if someone was sitting on every inch of her body, crushing her down. It made her gasp, forced her eyes shut and, although she could not see it, contorted her face horribly. She lost consciousness, coming to some time later with a dreadful feeling of loginess. Someone swam into her vision dimly, stung her arm briefly with a needle. She slept.

  She was on a table, stretched out, with lights glaring down at her. She heard voices.

  “The new system is far better than testing, comrade.”

  “Far more efficient, far more objective. Yes.”

  “The brain emits electromagnetic vibration. Strange, is it not, that no one before ever imagined it could tell a story. A completely accurate story two years of testing could not give us.”

  “In Russia we have gone far with the biological, psychological sciences. The West flies high with physics. Give them Mars; bah, they can have Mars.”

  “True, Comrade. The journey to Jupiter is greater, the time consumed is longer, the cost, more expensive. But here on Jupiter we can do something they cannot do on Mars.”

  “I know.”

  “We can make supermen. Supermen, comrade. A wedding of Nietzsche and Marx.”

  “Careful. Those are dangerous thoughts.”

  “Merely an allusion, comrade. Merely a harmless allusion. But you take an ordinary human being and train him on Jupiter, speeding his time-sense and metabolic rate tremendously with certain endocrine secretions so that one day is as a month to him. You take him and subject him to big Jupiter’s pull of gravity, more than twice Earth’s—and in three weeks you have, yes—you have a superman.”

  “The woman wakes.”

  “Shh. Do not frighten her.”

  Sophia stretched, every muscle in her body aching. Slowly, as in a dream, she sat up. It required strength, the mere act of pulling her torso upright!

  “What have you done to me?” she cried, focusing her still-dim vision on the two men.

  “Nothing, comrade. Relax.”

  Sophia turned slowly on the table, got one long shapely leg draped over its edge.

  “Careful, comrade.”

  What were they warning her about? She merely wanted to get up and stretch; perhaps then she would feel better. Her toe touched the floor, she swung her other leg over, aware of but ignoring her nakedness.

  “A good specimen.”

  “Oh, yes, comrade. So this time they send a woman among the others. Well, we shall do our work. Look—see the way she is formed, so lithe, loose-limbed, agile. See the toning of the muscles? Her beauty will remain, comrade, but Jupiter shall make an amazon of her.”

  Sophia had both feet on the floor now. She was breathing hard, felt suddenly sick to her stomach. Placing both her hands on the table edge, she pushed off and staggered for two or three paces. She crumpled, buckling first at the knees then the waist and fell in a writhing heap.

  “Pick her up.”

  Hands under her arms, tugging. She came off the floor easily, dimly aware that someone carried her hundred and thirty pounds effortlessly. “Put me down!” she cried. “I want to try again. I am crippled, crippled! You have crippled me.…”

  “Nothing of the sort, comrade. You are tired, weak, and Jupiter’s gravity field is still too strong for you. Little by little, though, your muscles will strengthen to Jupiter’s demands. Gravity will keep them from bulging, expanding; but every muscle fibre in you will have twice, three times its original strength. Are you excited?”

  “I am tired and sick. I want to sleep. What is Jupiter?”

  “Jupiter is a planet circling the sun at—never mind, comrade. You have much to learn, but you can assimilate it with much less trouble in your sleep. Go ahead, sleep.”

  Sophia retched, was sick. It had been years since she cried. But naked, afraid, bewildered, she cried herself to sleep.

  Things happened while she slept, many things. Certain endocrine extracts accelerated her metabolism astonishingly. Within half an hour her heart was pumping blood through her body two hundred beats per minute. An hour later it reached its full rate, almost one thousand contractions every sixty seconds. All her other metabolic functions increased accordingly, and Sophia slept deeply for a week of subjective time—in hours. The same machine which had gleaned everything from her mind far more accurately than a battery of tests, a refinement of the electro-encephalogram, was now played in reverse, giving back to Sophia everything it had taken plus electrospool after electrospool of science, mathematics, logic, economics, history (Marxian, these last two), languages (including English), semantics and certain specialized k
nowledge she would need later on the Stalintrek.

  Still sleeping, Sophia was bathed in a warm whirlpool of soothing liquid; rubbed, massaged, her muscle-toning begun while she rested and regained her strength. Three hours later, objective time, she awoke with a headache and with more thoughts spinning around madly inside her brain than she ever knew existed. Gingerly, she tried standing again, lifting herself nude and dripping wet from a tub of steaming amber stuff. She stood, stretched, permitted her fright to vanish with a quick wave of vertigo which engulfed her. She had been fed intravenously, but a tremendous hunger possessed her. Before eating, however, she was to find herself in a gymnasium, the air close and stifling. She was massaged again, told to do certain exercises which seemed simple but which she found extremely difficult, forced to run until she thought she would collapse, with her legs, dragging like lead.

  She understood, now. Somehow she knew she was on Jupiter, the fifth and largest planet, where the force of gravity is so much greater than on Earth that it is an effort even to walk. She also knew that her metabolic rate had been accelerated beyond all comprehension and that in a comparatively short time—objective time—she would have thrice her original strength. All this she knew without knowing how she knew, and that was the most staggering fact of all. She did what her curt instructors bid, then dragged her aching muscles and her headache into a dining room where tired, forlorn-looking men sat around eating. Well the food at least was good. Sophia attacked it ravenously.

  * * * *

  It did not take Temple long to realize that the creature running downhill at him, leaving a crushed and broken wake in the purple and green grass, was not human. At first Temple toyed with the idea of a man on horseback, for the creature ran on four limbs and had two left over as arms. Temple gaped.

  The whole thing was one piece!

  Centaur?

  Hardly. Too small, for one thing. No bigger than a man, despite the three pairs of limbs. And then Temple had time to gape no longer, for the creature, whatever it was, flashed past him at what he now had to consider a gallop.

  More followed. Different. Temple stared and stared. One could have been a great, sentient hoop, rolling downhill and gathering momentum. If he carried the wheel analogy further, a huge eye stared at him from where the hub would have been. Something else followed with kangaroo leaps. One thick-thewed leg propelled it in tremendous, fifteen-foot strides while its small, flapper-like arms beat the air prodigiously.

  Legions of creatures. All fantastically different. I’m going crazy, Temple thought, then said it aloud. “I’m going crazy.”

  Theorizing thus, he heard a whir overhead, whirled, looked up. Something was poised a dozen feet off the ground, a large, box-like object seven or eight feet across, rotors spinning above it. That, at least, he could understand. A helicopter.

  “I’m lowering a ladder, Kit. Swing aboard.”

  Arkalion’s voice.

  Stunned enough to accept anything he saw, Temple waited for the rope ladder to drop, grasped its end, climbed. He swung his legs over a sill, found himself in a neat little cabin with Arkalion, who hauled the ladder in and did something to the controls. They sped away. Temple had one quick moment of lucid thought before everything which had happened in the last few moments shoved logic aside. What he had observed looked for all the world like a foot-race.

  “Where the hell are we?” Temple demanded breathlessly.

  Arkalion smiled. “Where do you think? Journey’s end. Welcome to Nowhere, Kit. Welcome to the place where all your questions can be answered because there’s no going back. Sorry I set you down in that field by mistake, incidentally. Those things sometimes happen.”

  “Can I just throw the questions at you?”

  “If you wish. It isn’t really necessary, for you will be indoctrinated when we get you over to Earth city where you belong.”

  “What do you mean, there’s no going back? I thought they had a rotation system which for one reason or another wasn’t practical at the moment. That doesn’t sound like no going back, ever.”

  Arkalion grunted, shrugged. “Have it your way. I know.”

  “Sorry. Shoot.”

  “Just how far do you think you have come?”

  “Search me. Some other star system, maybe?”

  “Maybe. Clean across the galaxy, Kit.”

  Temple whistled softly. “It isn’t something you can grasp just by hearing it. Across the galaxy.…”

  “That isn’t too important just now. How long did you think the journey took?”

  Temple nodded eagerly. “That’s what gets me. It was amazing, Alaric. Really amazing. The whole trip couldn’t have taken more than a moment or two. I don’t get it. Did we slip out of normal space into some other—uh, continuum, and speed across the length of the galaxy like that?”

  “The answer to your questions is yes. But your statement is way off. The journey did not take seconds, Kit.”

  “No? Instantaneous?”

  “Far more than seconds. To reach here from Earth you traveled five thousand years.”

  “What?”

  “More correctly, it was five thousand years ago that you left Mars. You would need a time machine to return, and there is no such thing. The Earth you know is the length of the galaxy and five thousand years behind you.”

  CHAPTER VII

  It could have been a city in New England, or maybe Wisconsin. Main Street stretched for half a mile from Town Hall to the small department store. Neon tubing brightened every store front, busy proprietors could be seen at work through the large plate glass windows. There was the bustle you might expect on any Main Street in New England or Wisconsin, but you could not draw the parallel indefinitely.

  There were only men. No women.

  The hills in which the town nestled were too purple—not purple with distance but the natural color of the grass.

  A somber red sun hung in the pale mauve sky.

  This was Earth City, Nowhere.

  Arkalion had deposited Temple in the nearby hills, promised they would see one another again. “It may not be so soon,” Arkalion had said, “but what’s the difference? You’ll spend the rest of your life here. You realize you are lucky, Kit. If you hadn’t come, you would have been dead these five thousand years. Well, good luck.”

  Dead—five thousand years. The Earth as he knew it, dust. Stephanie, a fifty generation corpse. Nowhere was right. End of the universe.

  Temple shuffled his feet, trudged on into town. A man passed him on the street, stooped, gray-haired. The man nodded, did a mild double-take. I’m an unfamiliar face, Temple thought.

  “Howdy,” he said. “I’m new here.”

  “That’s what I thought, stranger. Know just about everyone in these here parts, I do, and I said to myself, now there’s a newcomer. Funny you didn’t come in the regular way.”

  “I’m here,” said Temple.

  “Yeah. Funny thing, you get to know everyone. Eh, what you say your name was?”

  “Christopher Temple.”

  “Make it my business to know everyone. The neighborly way, I always say. Temple, eh? We have one here.”

  “One what?”

  “Another fellow name of Temple. Jase Temple, son.”

  “I’ll be damned!” Temple cried, smiling suddenly. “I will be damned. Tell me, old timer, where can I find him?”

  “Might be anyplace. Town’s bigger’n it looks. I tell you, though, Jase Temple’s our co-ordinator. You’ll find him there, the co-ordinator’s office. Town Hall, down the end of the street.”

  “I already passed it,” Temple told the man. “And thanks.”

  Temple’s legs carried him at a brisk pace, past the row of store fronts and down to the Town Hall. He read a directory, climbed a flight of stairs, found a
door marked:

  JASON TEMPLE

  Earth City Co-ordinator.

  Heart pounding, Temple knocked, heard someone call, “Come in.”

  He pushed the door in and stared at his brother, just rising to face him.

  “Kit! Kit! What are you doing…so you took the journey too!”

  Jason ran to him, clasped his shoulders, pounded them. “You sure are looking fit. Kit, you could have knocked me over with half a feather, coming in like that.”

  “You’re looking great too, Jase,” Temple lied. He hadn’t seen his brother in five years, had never expected to see him again. But he remembered a full-faced, smiling man somewhat taller than himself, somewhat broader across the shoulders. The Jason he saw looked forty-five or fifty but was hardly out of his twenties. He had fierce, smouldering eyes, gaunt cheeks, graying hair. He seemed a bundle of restless, nervous energy.

  “Sit down, Kit. Start talking, kid brother. Start talking and don’t stop till next week. Tell me everything. Everything! Tell me about the blue sky and the moon at night and the way the ocean looks on a windy day and.…”

  “Five years,” said Temple. “Five years.”

  “Five thousand, you mean,” Jason reminded him. “It hardly seems possible. How are the folks, Kit?”

  “Mom’s fine. Pop too. He’s sporting a new Chambers Converto. You should see him, Jase. Sharp.”

  “And Ann?” Jason looked at him hopefully. Ann had been Jason’s Stephanie—but for the Nowhere Journey they would have married.

  “Ann’s married,” Temple said.

  “Oh. Oh. That’s swell, Kit. Really swell. I mean, what the hell, a girl shouldn’t wait forever. I told her not to, anyway.”

  “She waited four years, then met a guy and—”

  “A nice guy?”

  “The best,” said Temple. “You’d like him.”

  Temple saw the vague hurt come to Jason’s smouldering eyes. Then it was the same. One part of Jason wanted her to remain his over an unthinkable gap, another part wanted her to live a good, full life.