The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

It was awful and he hadn’t wanted to and—it was awful. He had to go down on his hands and knees and claw his way out.

  Fortunately the ordeal was not of long duration, and only his temples were bursting when he tumbled out into the sunlight and sank in soft mud to his knees beside the Cyclopean beast which had preceded him through the glimmering.

  The tiger was lying on its back with its short hindpaws buried in its stomach, and the blood which had welled up front the gaping hole in its breast had congealed to a red film covering it.

  It looked even huger dead, and Eddie felt a little sick as he stared wildly about him.

  He was standing in a bog much thicker than the one inside the glimmering, above him marched a red sandstone cliff, and closer to him than breathing was the girl he’d married.

  “B-Jane, why wasn’t I…the tiger…why wasn’t I, the first time you blasted?”

  “You weren’t standing directly in the line of fire,” came in a faint whisper. “That tiger was. Just the concussion or something must have blown you through into where we were before we came through into here. Eddie, get a grip on yourself—you’re not dead, so why are you trembling?”

  Eddie wanted to believe her. But not helping him at all were the moon-faced painted devils. They were squatting on their haunches in a semicircle around the bog, as though hoping the two ugly-looking strangers with no color at all on their faces would just try and wade out.

  Betty-Jane screamed when she saw them, floundering close to Eddie, and tugging frantically at his arm.

  “Eddie, Eddie, ohhh—baboons?”

  Even as she cried out Betty-Jane found herself wondering wildly how she could have clutched at such a straw. The creatures didn’t in the least resemble baboons except that baboons were pigmented just as gaudily in a less refined way.

  They were as large as gorillas, barrel-chested, with long dangling arms and patches of red fur on their chests. But despite their hairiness they were clasping rude, flint-tipped wooden spears, and there was something unmistakably human, or humanoid, in their expressions. A petulance tinged with curiosity, a kind of avaricious just-you wait and-we’ll-know-all-about you look.

  Blue-purple-orange were their faces, the baggy folds of flesh over their jowls giving them a weird otherness of aspect—giving Eddie the wild idea that he was staring at the inhabitants of another planet.

  Then, suddenly, the truth struck him like a bomb from a rocket gun, shedding dazzlement in all directions.

  “Dawn men!” he almost hissed.

  “Eddie, they aren’t. No, no, Eddie—their faces! They look like painted buffoons! It’s just not possible—”

  Eddie stiffened as though bracing himself to face the full impact of an onrushing nightmare.

  “Bright pigmentation occurs pretty high up in the evolutionary scale,” he said, breathing hard. “There are blue-cheeked new world monkeys. The theory, of course, is that it has some erotic—”

  “Eddie, don’t—I can’t stand it. The dawn men I’ve met in museums—”

  “Not cogent!” he flung at her, almost savagely. “You’re talking about hit-or-miss reconstructions. All museums have to go on are skulls and bone fragments. Skin pigmentation pure guesswork—from the Trinil skull to the Man from Broken Hill. For all we know there may have been big-brained Miocene gibbons which flaunted every color on nature’s palette.”

  Eddie’s own color had ebbed entirely. “Great Scott, B-Jane! They’re toting worked flints—”

  “Is that good, Eddie? Does that date them?”

  “No. It means they’ve jumped the gun on the archaeologists!”

  “Eddie!” Betty-Jane shrieked. “Look out!”

  The warning came too late. From behind the dead saber-tooth four insane blue-orange faces popped. There was a flutter of red-yellow palms, and a flint-tipped spear whizzed through the air to bury itself in Eddie’s shoulder.

  Eddie stiffened, a look of utter consternation on his face. Then—he flattened himself, gripping Betty-Jane’s wrist and dragging her down into the muck beside him.

  His shoulders almost flush with the muck, the spear quivering in his flesh, he started to edge toward the glimmering on his hands and knees. The oval was less than a yard from the cliff wall, and protecting him in the opposite direction was a towering wall of dead tiger.

  There were guttural whisperings from beyond the crest of that lesser barrier, but no more spears came hurtling toward him. To Betty-Jane, advancing at his side, it seemed incredible—the sheerest, most primitive kind of stupidity.

  The dawn men actually waited, hardly making a sound, until Eddie was so close to the oval that his shoulders were etched against the glimmering, and only then came swarming down over the belly of the tiger toward him.

  Betty-Jane fired without taking aim, swiveling about in the muck, and sloshing the gun upward between her elbows.

  The concussion spattered mud in all directions, lifted up the inverted beast, and hurled Eddie forward through a splotch of furiously pin-wheeling carnival colors dissolving in a blaze of light.

  * * * *

  There were times when Eddie found himself inwardly dynamiting the entire creaky structure. The House which Freud and Jung had built so laboriously, with a dash of paprika from the bad boy down the street. Watson was the bad boy, and he, too, had missed the boat. The behaviorists denied, categorically, that there was such a thing as the unconscious. You thought with your throat muscles.

  Good—a telling jab at the great black hinterland which was supposed to lurk somewhere inside a man. He, Eddie, just didn’t believe in a subjective hierarchy of infantile repressions… Not in the Freudian sense, he didn’t.

  No sensible man repressed his inmost thoughts, or was ashamed of them. Yet sensible men had phobias.

  An over-simplification?

  Bah! the house was creaky from cellar to attic. Watson was right—but horribly wrong. The human infant doesn’t just start off with throat muscles. It starts off with instincts. Instincts, bundles of them. Inherited instincts. And why not? How could Freud have missed it? Children at play don’t secretly want to murder their great-aunts. They want to wriggle their ears, scratch themselves furtively under their armpits. A long infancy, a long learning period—no instincts? Bah, they want to crinkle their coccyxes. No—the plural is coccyges.

  Warmth. On his eyelids, on his throbbing throat. A tugging and a whispering.

  “Eddie, you’re not hurt—just shaken up. I’ve got it out. The flint’s out, Eddie. But you won’t have to look at it. It’s in the lake. Eddie—this is paradise!”

  Eddie opened his eyes. He couldn’t believe it at first. The vegetation was a deep emerald green, luxuriant, but not lush, the air balmy, the sky flecked with little fleecy clouds, and,, as though that were not enough, the sunlight that was warming him through his clothes sparkled on the waters of a jasper lake so still and lovely it brought a catch to his throat.

  “Oh, Eddie, Eddie, it was worth the nickel. It was worth it, and I’m glad they attacked us. I’m glad they swarmed down without giving ns a chance to stop and think.”

  “Nickel?” Eddie said slowly.

  “You know what I mean. We’ve silenced the juke box. In the right kind of juke boxes there are blank records. If you want peace for five minutes, you put a nickel in and tunes stop coming out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  “We’ll go back. All the way back to where it isn’t peaceful. We’ll have to because everybody we know is back there, and if we stayed here we’d be running out. But just let me sit here a minute, and drink this in. Then we’ll go back.”

  “Will we? Aren’t you forgetting those carnival-faced semi-apes we left squatting around the hole you blew in the other side. They’ll be waiting to pay us
out. They may even try to come through into here.” Betty-Jane paled. “Eddie!”

  “No, I guess they won’t. Dawn men feared the unknown, and those glimmerings will be taboo to them. Taboo, in case you don’t know, is the custom of setting aside certain persons or objects as sacred or accursed. Those ovals are objects and will be sacred. But we’re persons, and if we step back through and get ’em all steamed lip again—”

  Abruptly Eddie did an incredible thing. He reached over and pried the gun from his wife’s cold clasp.

  “B-Jane, what makes all of the rare old coins come out of the bottom slot?”

  Betty-Jane was staring at him wide-eyed. “I don’t know exactly, Eddie. I just sort of played by ear—the way you did when you figured out where we’re not.”

  “Like this?” Eddie asked, moving his fingers back and forth over the stock.

  “Eddie, be careful. You’ll—”

  Eddie had intended to be careful. But something he had no control over deep in his mind, a racial, hairy-chested something that had a deep instinctive horror of going soft, had its own ideas about paradise.

  An earth-shaking concussion moved sideways from Eddie’s right knee, lifting up his wife, and hurling her with great violence into a glimmering out of sight.

  “Eddie, Eddie, I can’t stand any more of this! Neither can you. Take me home, Eddie.”

  Eddie felt dizzy from having floundered through a dozen glimmerings into ages that were terrifyingly remote. He hadn’t intended to fire the gun again and again and again, but every age he’d entered had made him lose his head. They’d been simple accidents and complex ones like that carnivorous dinosaur. Not a Tyrant King, but a very slender, malign little allosaur with withered red forelimbs and a carrion stench. Hideously it had parried for an opening, hissing and dodging about with its forked tongue darting in and out.

  They’d gone through from there to meet a dragon fly with a wing span of eighteen feet, and a calamite fern so high up the bare little pinkish fronds growing out from it had made a dent in the stratosphere.

  Twice he’d fired in sheer panic, when they’d been nothing tangible to put them on its menu, and compel them to move on. Once he’d given the gun back to Betty-Jane, and that had been a mistake.

  The Ordovician landscape which now stretched in all directions from the tight little lava island they’d found on the far side of the thirtieth glimmering seemed chillingly unreal.

  A reddish mist swirled about them, the air was sulphurous and almost unbreathable, and most of the distant volcanoes were mere truncated cones which had blown their tops. Those that hadn’t gave off occasional dull rumblings and lava streams that looked—hot.

  In utter silence Eddie gathered his wife up in his arms, and swung about.

  Going back, there were so many ways they could have ended up as fossils that just passing from glimmering to glimmering turned Eddie’s blood to ice. It was mostly touch and go, duck and run, with a clashing of teeth too close for comfort in more ages than Eddie could count.

  In what was probably the early Eocene there was a distance of fifty yards between the glimmering, and they had to flatten themselves while a herd of tiny, four-toured horses—genus Hyracotherium—clattered past. They had to sprint wildly to make it in the late Eocene, when the horses were larger, and could have trampled them into the dust.

  There was something in the Oligocene that should have been much further back. With slippery belly-glidings it had thumbed its snout at the paleontologists, and hung around until it was out of date. It wasn’t—out of teeth.

  Only Paradise hadn’t changed, and when they stumbled back into it Betty-Jane gave a little sob and sank down at the edge of the lake without bothering to pluck out the spines an infuriated hedgehog platypus had hurled at her three ovals back.

  “Oh, Eddie, oh—this is heavenly! I can’t help feeling this age was made especially for us!”

  “It’s just an age like any other age,” Eddie grunted, clearing the huskiness from his throat. “An age of luxuriant vegetation in the middle Miocene. The Miocene was just right for our remote ancestors, so why shouldn’t it seem like paradise to us? In the Miocene our kind of folk first started using their hands to develop arboreal dexterity, and an intracranial pressure area of dubious survival value.”

  Betty-Jane did not reply. She had turned about and was staring with dilating pupils at the light collecting in little pools on the shore of the lake.

  It was to her credit that she did not become hysterical, did not even faint. She did feel a little ill, but it was a steely kind of illness such as a huge bronzed Amazon of a woman might feel after plodding home to her native village over a mountain of skulls.

  When Betty-Jane’s awareness wasn’t focused on little chunks of reality, when it embraced vast vistas tragic in scope, she could be both strong and great.

  “Eddie.”

  “Yeah, what—”

  “You’d better brace yourself, Eddie. I…I don’t know whether to tell you, or let you find out for yourself. Perhaps it would be less of a shock if you—Go ahead, Eddie, get up and look.”

  It didn’t take Eddie long to discover that something he thought of course would be hovering in plain view was nowhere in sight. Of all the ages they’d traveled through the two pursing ovals had stood out like sore thumbs. Now there was only one thumb, and it beckoned toward the age they’d just left.

  Under the shattering impact of palpably evident finalities the human brain will often fuse and act upon impulses on a lower level of consciousness. What Eddie did when he turned from the lake shore was so startling it took away Betty-Jane’s breath.

  He drew her into his arms, and held on to her tight. Then he kissed her and said, a little huskily: “You are beautiful, B-Jane. I don’t think I’ve ever fully realized just how beautiful.”

  Smoothing her dark hair back from her temples he made a cameo-like life mask of her face, and stood a little away from her as though admiring his own artistry.

  “Eddie,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve always thought of you as, well—an escapist. I’ve found myself wondering whether you really cared much whether I am or not. Right now I’m not looking my best, and you’re hurting my ears. Eddie, you’re making me nervous—”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “All right, pin my ears back. But try not to forget we’re completely trapped. How completely you haven’t realized yet. If I’m a reality to you, I’m glad. You’re going to need me, and we’re going to need each other. Without something very solid to hold on to we’ll be babes in a very terrible kind of trap.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Betty-Jane seemed to be trying to spoil the mask he’d made of her. She’d removed herself from his embrace and was kneading her cheeks with her knuckles, as though the putty hadn’t set right.

  “Eddie,” she said, suddenly. “In those imaginative science stories you tried to make me like, exactly what happened when people went back into the past. The paradox of time travel, you called it. Just how is time travel a paradox?”

  Eddie stared at her before replying.

  “Well, if you went back in time you’d change the past. Your mere presence in the past would set a new chain of events in motion. You’ve heard about the man—he’s a bromide now in that kind of story—who goes back and kills his own great-grandfather.”

  “I haven’t, but go on.”

  “Don’t you see? If he killed his grandfather, he’d never be born, so how could he travel back and kill his grandfather?”

  “I think I understand.”

  Eddie nodded. “There’s your paradox. The most obvious solution is no solution at all. You assume the existence of numerous might-have-been futures, futures which still exist in a kind of ghostly dimension somewhere, running paralle
l with the strong, main-line future you’re going back has changed. Science-fiction writers call them ‘alternative futures.’

  “But that just can’t be the answer, because the instant you accept it exactly six hundred and twelve new paradoxes arise. The most sagacious writers do not accept it.”

  “What do they do, Eddie?”

  “They accept the paradox, not the solution. They just go ahead and write a story with such a depth of imaginative insight that it comes out very beautifully in all respects. Because, if you’ll think a moment, everything we do is a paradox, from the instant we’re born. The white, cold light of the absolute turns prismatic the instant it plays over the little spot where we are.

  “When we’ve called that spot reality we think we’ve nailed it down. But we haven’t. We haven’t at all. The right nails are very long and twisted, and are in other hands outside the scope of our perceptions. It has though…well, for all we know the main building may still be in the blueprint stage. Reality may be just somebody’s wrong guess—a lot of overlapping calculations on a crumpled scratch-sheet, tossed aside for something that makes sense.”

  Betty-Jane was silent a moment. When she met Eddie’s eyes again her eyes were shining.

  “Eddie, I like that analogy. I like it. A few of those tossed-aside calculations would make sense. Why waste them inside a crumpled sheet? Why not lift them out, transfer them to a clean sheet—a new blueprint, Eddie?”

  “Huh?”

  “A new blueprint for the human race, Eddie, Eddie—or, Eddie, think! If everyone were like you, if everyone were like you from the very beginning those mean, acrobatic-clownish dawn men right up ahead would have no more chance of developing into real human beings than a gorilla would in the twentieth century. When the little, romping, gag-writing Eddie Keenans catch up with them the stage will be set, and they’ll be out in the wings.”

  Eddie was so startled he scarcely noticed Betty-Jane’s sudden dropping of her suppositives.