The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

Straddling a chair, the giant gripped the seat with both hands, and eased his enormous bulk down upon it. He sat facing the Interrogator, grimacing with pain, fumbling for words that would ease the agony and the shame of his failure.

  Invisible lighting flooded the big, blank-walled room, and glimmered on the circular top of the examining unit, which stood against one wall, and encircled an Interrogator whose face was a glacial mask behind the glimmer.

  “Well, Ivor?” the Interrogator prodded.

  “My instructions were to familiarize myself with the First Glass Age Sector, particularly the ‘nerve-artery’ metropolises on the northeastern seaboard and the population overflow areas surrounding them,” the giant said quickly, as though repeating a formula learned by rote.

  The Interrogator frowned. “Your specific instructions were much more concrete, weren’t they?”

  The giant nodded uneasily. Surprisingly he did not feel afraid, though he knew he ought to feel terrified.

  “My specific instructions were to blast out a strategic temporal bridgehead in one of those areas. What I actually did was pin-chart the entire seaboard to eliminate the bulge areas.”

  “Well, suppose you tell me exactly what happened in your own words. I should prefer not to interrupt you.”

  “The largest Glass Age metropolis is New York in New York. But there’s a bulge there—a bad one. I decided to blast out the bridgehead in the overflow area surrounding a smaller, coastal bay metropolis a little to the north of New York. Boston in Masschutt…Massachusetts.”

  “Well, well?”

  “I blasted out a perfect stasis, clear and sharp from our side, but—”

  “But…pah. It is a synonym for failure.”

  The big Eurasian paled, then decided to ignore the interruption. “The time seepage absorber must have dilated a little too rapidly. I was standing about forty feet from the edge of the cliff when I blasted. The concussion lifted me up, and hurled me violently forward into the stasis.”

  The giant paused, as though he were seeking to convince the Interrogator of his sincerity as much by his manner as his words. The pause was soothing to his bruised ego. It enabled him to dramatize himself as a man who could time his feats of endurance to correspond with the expectations aroused by his words. It also enabled him to relive the entire incident with little more credit to himself.

  The Interrogator’s brittle fingers made a drumming sound on the flat top of the examining unit.

  “Go on.”

  “I allowed for erosion, the blotting out of a half million years of geologic weathering. But I forgot that a slight seismic disturbance could more than offset a complete reversal of the weathering process.”

  The giant shuddered. “There can be quite a lot of seismic disturbances in a half million years. Instead of advancing, the entire face of the cliff had moved back. There was a new wall, but it was thirty feet behind me. I…I dropped forty feet and landed on an outcropping about fifty feet in width, and possibly seventy feet from the bottom of the ravine. The blaster struck the shelf, rebounded, and went clattering on down.”

  “And you returned without recovering it?”

  The Interrogator’s voice was no longer steely. It now possessed a tensile edge that would have bit through steel like a knife through putty.

  The giant gnawed at his underlip, and met the Interrogator’s accusing stare with mingled pride and humiliation. The pride of a wounded tiger that has fought many formidable battles before receiving scars of which it is ashamed; the humiliation which a grievous error of judgment leaves in the mind when stark urgency makes the retracing of a wrong trail a thing not to be contemplated.

  “I weighed the risks, and decided against it,” he said. “The cliff wall was almost vertical. I might have gone down. I could not have climbed back. The stasis oval was directly above me, thirty feet from the edge of the cliff. I was badly burned—in need of surgical attention.”

  “That worried you, did it?”

  The giant’s color rose. “Suppose I’d gone down for the blaster, been captured, and sickened and died a half million years in the past. Where would THE PLAN be then?”

  “Go right ahead. Tell me how you safeguarded THE PLAN by not recovering the blaster. Your instructions were to conceal the stasis oval from prying eyes on the other side. You were supposed to go through, and spray it over with a magneto-optical thin film with the same refractive index as the air around it.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I happen to know you can’t spray out a stasis when it isn’t grounded. The vibrations would…pah! Only saving grace is the glimmering won’t be visible from the ravine.”

  “It won’t be!” the giant echoed the words as though they were pearls beyond price. “You’ve got to stand on a level with a stasis to see it.”

  “It will be visible from the cliff top,” the Interrogator hammered, shattering each pearl with merciless precision. “But don’t get the idea I’m worried about just that one oval. If they find that blaster, they’ll know they’ve had a visitor.”

  The Eurasian’s lips were white. “How could they know? They did not believe time travel to be possible. Their weapons were all incendiary, not atomic. In a crude way they altered electronic orbits and laid the groundwork for much that we have come to regard as end products. But—”

  “Like the relativity of time,” the Interrogator suggested chillingly.

  “They were familiar with the concept, of course. They could imagine what it would be like to leave their own age, and travel into the past. But they no more thought they could do so than that they could travel to…to Betelgeuse.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do, yes. The concept of time blasting, of time undermined and made cavernous, would be utterly beyond the comprehension of Glass Age primitives. Quite apart from the contrasting primitiveness of mining and quarrying with crude detonating instruments in three dimension, the sheer audacity of THE PLAN would—”

  “Pah—a mouthful of rhetoric. Now you’ve spit it out, suppose we strip the binding energies from a few facts. We’ve blasted out temporal bridgeheads at strategic temporal Intervals clear back to the Old Stone Age. The past is honeycombed now, and it’s going to become more so. Suppose they find that blaster, blow out a stasis of their own, and start searching for our riddlings.

  “Suppose they find one of our riddlings without searching, like the one you left glimmering in plain view when you allowed for erosion, but not for brain shrinkage. If they find the blaster, they’ll be all eyes and ears. Suppose they close in on one of our Sector scouts right after he’s blown a stasis, and before he can spray it out?”

  The Interrogator had shut his eyes, and seemed almost to be speaking to himself. “The success of the entire PLAN will depend on how quickly we can move back and forth through time. If we attempted to conquer each age separately, if we attempted an age-hopping campaign, the divergence in weapon power alone between the more primitive societies and the atomic power civilizations close to our own age might easily result in a decimation of our forces.

  “The struggle in many temporal sectors may go against us at first, but, if we can retreat through the stasis ovals when we’re hard-pressed, we’ll be in a position to regroup our forces. We’ll stage a fluid attack on all of the past, a stupendous temporal blitz which will pit age against age until we’re victorious.

  “Our enemies will have to fight in one age, with a limited array of weapons. We can utilize not only our own weapons, but the weapons of every age, the peculiar military genius of every age in which those weapons originated. Since the location of the sprayed-over stasis ovals will be known to us alone we’ll command all the arteries into the past, all the temporal bridgeheads.”

  The Interrogator seemed to have forgotten that one artery had become dan
gerously insecure through the development of an unforeseen flaw in the mental alloy of the man before him.

  But suddenly his eyes unlidded themselves and became cobra-opaque.

  “Tell me, how did you get back through a stasis that was hovering in the empty air forty feet above your empty skull?”

  “I…I climbed back to the top of the cliff and took a running leap,” the big Eurasian stammered.

  “I see. A severely burned man could do that, but it would be asking too much to expect him to go down into a shallow ravine and recover something that’s sure to be missed. Suppose you try that on, just for the fit.”

  “My burns—” the giant whispered huskily. “I knew if I lost consciousness before I could—”

  The Interrogator cut him off by leaning sharply forward.

  “Tell me, Ivor. Just how much would you have told them? We know they were not squeamish. They had means of getting at the truth, gradations of torture—”

  “I don’t know,” the giant said, with startling candor. “We no longer torture a man when we want him to speak the truth. We put a drug in his food, so that he doesn’t even suspect that he has been sentenced to death. We—”

  The giant’s pupils dilated and he leaped up with a startled cry.

  “COVERALL said I’d feel better if I drank some…no, oh no! Why are you nodding? COVERALL didn’t…no, no, wait…you must wait! Don’t cut me down—not like that—it’s horrible that way, it’s horrible, it’s horrible—”

  The compact little energy weapon in the Interrogator’s clasp tore a gaping hole in the giant’s chest, spun him about, broke his back, and almost cut him in two.

  For a full minute it continued to revolve, splashing radiance on the walls and ceiling of the big room, releasing its energies with a hornet’s nest drone.

  Actually it made very little noise, and the giant was dead when he struck the floor. But for a full minute the redness welling up from his chest gave the Interrogator an illusion of continuing vitality on which to vent his rage.

  He vented it by keeping the weapon trained on the inert lump of flesh until it no longer resembled anything human.

  * * * *

  “Things are all right with us now, Eddie,” said Betty-Jane Keenan. “But where will we be tomorrow?”

  Eddie Keenan stared straight up the hill through the windsights of his converted jeep roadster, telling himself that now he’d married the girl he’d have to watch his temper. He didn’t want to lose any part of his everything, waves and waves of happiness swirling around and around somewhere inside of him. Marriage could break up over a little rock as well as a big one, and it didn’t take much to wreck a cottage in the pines on the crest of a post-war argument.

  “Eddie, I know I shouldn’t say anything about it. You’ll think I’m nagging you when I’m only thinking how much happier you’d be if you had a steady income. You know what they say about a man who makes his living by his wits. Of course you’re clever. Very few people could live as luxuriously as we do in short jumps and spasms. Every seventh week we’re in the chips, we’re jive-happy. Then we sit on the edge of the cliff patching up a parachute with I. O. U.’s and crisp new pawn tickets.”

  Eddie gave the wheel a savage twist. “Aw, B-Jane, you’re making a mountain out of a rejection slip.”

  “Am I? The last time you pulled yourself back up by your bootstraps the girl you married almost ran off with a psychiatrist. It just shouldn’t happen to such really nice people like ourselves.”

  Eddie gave the wheel another twist. “How much did I get for my last gag, B-Jane?” he said softly.

  “Five hundred dollars—for something with no sense.”

  “And how long would it take you to save that much if I just sat in a cage thumbing through other people’s money? That gag welled up from my subconscious in exactly a tenth of a second. Typing it out took a couple of minutes, but—”

  “Yes, I know. But who did you ghost-write it for? A pigeon-chested crooner who’ll stick his neck out so far one of these days somebody will mistake him for Thanksgiving’s little gift to Lizzie Borden. One of these days he just won’t be around, but we will—with nothing to look forward to but a long life behind a seeing-eye dog together.”

  “B-Jane, the trouble with you is you’re afraid to grease the roller coaster. You want to feel safe every waking hour. There’s no safety in writing gags at twenty bucks a comma, but it’s nice work if you can get it. I can get it.”

  “Eddie, you’re heading into trouble because people who live by their wits end up at their wits’ end. The well dries up, the big, bad, lone wolf of a late-sleeping, timeclock-avoiding genius runs out of ideas. Did you ever know one who didn’t?”

  “No-oo—Look, B-Jane, that last crack, about my being a wolf. You don’t really think I’m a wolf.”

  “I wouldn’t have married you if you weren’t. Oh, Eddie, oh, Eddie, oh…look out—”

  It might have been a worse accident. All the car did was leave the road, turn completely about, balance itself on two wheels and slither down into a ditch.

  Neither Eddie nor Betty-Jane was hurt. But the car was in such a condition that just climbing out, and ascending to the road left them angry, flushed and winded.

  “B-Jane,” Eddie stormed. “We were gypped! That salesman gypped us! The next time I buy a jeep, I’ll go down on my hands and knees, and check on its adhesiveness. If it’s been over too many cow pastures—”

  Eddie kicked a stone at the edge of the road, and decided it wasn’t big enough. He vented his spleen on the inanimate, allowing expletives which gave Betty-Jane the most intense satisfaction to well up from the depths of his mind without worrying about replacements.

  “Eddie, when you use words like that you’re not the man I married. You’re making me fall for somebody I really could like.”

  “That so? You’d like the guy even better if you could hear what he’s thinking.”

  “Eddie, a big stone under one of the rear wheels would be more practical than the heaviest sort of cussing. I’ll help you heave. Just find a stone, and…hey, be sure it’s a big one!”

  Eddie had turned and was already advancing across the road toward a woody stretch where gloomy looking trees clustered thickly.

  “Well, I’ll see if I can find a stone!” he called back over his shoulder.

  * * * *

  Betty-Jane could hardly believe her eyes when she saw the “stone.” It was massive, and it glittered, and he was cradling it in the crook of his arm the way he’d have cradled a gun if it had been a gun—which of course it wasn’t.

  It wasn’t, that is, at first glance. When he came up over the hump of the road and she got a good look at it her incredulity diminished a little, and she feared she might have to kiss good-by to her sanity.

  He’d been gone twenty minutes, a long enough time for something outlandish to happen. But how could he have wrapped himself in an…aura when his gait showed he couldn’t have met up with an old brass rail and a row of pink ladies. Certainly the gun wasn’t pinkish, and he was backing away from it and making faces. He was holding it.

  “B-Jane,” he panted. “Look…look at this! Look at it, B-Jane! It’s some sort of outlandish weapon. There’s a cliff back there, and it was lying—”

  She knew he’d come straight to her with the gun because he was like a little boy in some respects. He just couldn’t keep shining new discoveries to himself. Most of his discoveries were subjective, but this one certainly wasn’t.

  It seemed odd to her he should have used a word that had popped up out of her own subconscious in connection with it until it dawned on her he’d been peppered and made dizzy in precisely the same way.

  Odd—but understandable. The gun was outlandish, as though it had come right out of one of those imaginative science magazines which
Eddie was always reading. Visitors from other planets, fantastic future weapons, and—things.

  When she shut her eyes she could still hear Eddie praising the superlative insight of the writers, as though the tentacled thing with a puckered mouth on one of the covers had slithered right out from the compact little magazine in Eddie’s pocket.

  “B-Jane, a good many of these stories are mature, genuine. Not enough people realize how much sound science and mental elbow grease goes into them. Take that ray gun now. You can bet your sweet life the artist who drew that had to sweat holes in his imagination.”

  The weapon in Eddie’s clasp looked as though somebody had been sweating holes in the Government’s post-war priority program. Apparently a lot of valuable new metals had gone into it, along with some very tensile mental haywire. It had a startling you’ll-never-guess-where-I-came-from look.

  Betty Jane would have preferred not to try, but she knew she’d have to when she saw how pale Eddie was. Along with the shining new discovery look his eyes held unmistakable glints of panic.

  “It was lying in a pool of rain water right at the base of the cliff, B-Jane. How do you suppose it got there? It’s a high-bracket piece of hardware, all right—complex, massive. I can’t imagine anyone deliberately—”

  “I can!” she said, snatching it from his clasp as though it were a razor-edged top he’d won shooting marbles. “Post-war letdown unhinges bright young inventor. In the blue Massachusetts hills he has what he thinks is an inspiration. He’ll use the family barn, and that big junk pile the neighbors are always adding to.

  “Night and day he keeps plugging away, and suddenly—he has it, he’s got it! A weapon that’ll separate out the fatty components of milk, that’ll churn milk up into butter before it leaves the cow. He gets all steamed up, and rushes out into the woods looking for a purple cow. But suddenly again…you know how crackpots are…he gets the idea the weapon is an unwanted kitten, and tries to drown it, in a pool of rain water. Then he gets scared, or something, and you happen along.”