The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

  “Eddie, there won’t be any wars of aggression; there won’t be any slave empires. The Eddie Keenans just aren’t mean like that. They’ll want to dream and sleep, and yawn and turn over and dream again. But they’ll work when they have to, when things get really bad they’ll work in inspired spurts. Oh, how they’ll work to hold and widen their bridgeheads.

  “Lovely Utopias will well up from their unconscious minds, great, immortal gags, and they’ll make them stick. The Eddie Keenans are perfectionists. They’ll take an artist’s joy in making them stick. Nothing they’ll ever do will really make sense, but it’ll be beautiful. Oh, Eddie, it will be beautiful!”

  Almost it seemed to Eddie that Betty-Jane was holding the new blueprint out in the sunlight for him to see. She was holding it out by waltzing around on her toes, her arms upraised above the living flame of her body’s grace.

  * * * *

  The dark-skinned Eurasian dwarf swung in between the big doors and crossed the room in six impetuous strides.

  “Sit down, Mogor,” a steely voice said. “Sit down, and—let’s have it.”

  The dwarf seated himself with vigor, and then—his confidence ebbed a little. He assumed an aggressively defensive attitude the instant he found himself staring into the Interrogator’s cold eyes.

  “Move back—where your face won’t be in shadows. That’s it. Now, you followed instructions.”

  The dwarf nodded.

  “Good. Suppose you tell me exactly what happened in your own words. I should prefer not to interrupt you.”

  The dwarf squirmed under the Interrogator’s probing stare. “My instructions were to go back through the stasis my genetic twin-opposite blew in the First Glass Age, and recover the blaster,” he said carefully. “But—”

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

  The dwarf paled, then decided to ignore the interruption. “Unfortunately two Glass Age primitives—a man and a woman—stumbled on the blaster. To be strictly accurate, the man found the blaster, brought it to the woman, and she—blasted with it, blew stasis ovals at half million year intervals for a distance of”—the dwarf hesitated—“possibly a half billion years.”

  For the barest instant the Interrogator’s face was convulsed, as though a high-voltage current had touched off an explosion at the base of his brain. He shut his eyes, and endured—strong emotion, tormenting like a live coal, a thing unutterably shameful in a man whose decisions could not be questioned.

  “I didn’t see the primitives at all,” the giant said quickly. “They were gone when I emerged from the stasis, but I discovered what had happened when I filmed the region over the subatomic displacement auras with a unified field detector. There was an unbroken trail of energy perfect body auras leading back into the past.”

  “Well?”

  “I trailed the primitives back to…to—”

  The dwarf seemed to be having difficulties with his speech. His flesh had paled, so that his face seemed almost Caucasian-white, and there was stark fear in his eyes, a kind of ingrowing panic which seemed suddenly to overwhelm him, so that he faced the Interrogator silent-tongued, and with his lips wobbulating.

  “Well, well?”

  “I followed them beyond…where it’s pure torment…to go. Two ages beyond, I steeled myself, I fought what is agony…just to describe. The feeling, you can’t, mustn’t…the ghastliness of not being right with yourself. It’s like a tight band—knotted around your mind—slicing deeper and deeper. The knots sink in—become embedded. You’ve got to get out fast.”

  The Interrogator’s own flesh had paled, but so imperceptibly the dwarf was unaware just how deep an impression his words had made.

  “I…I concealed an oval as far back as I could stand an agony that kept getting worse. I sprayed the oval over by crouching just inside a stasis they’d blown in an age of luxuriant vegetation far back in the Miocene. Now if they try to return to the First Glass Age they’ll never find the stasis. You’ve got to have an air-film detector to distinguish a sprayed-out stasis from the air around it, and—

  “They haven’t got one. They’re sealed up very far back. That was all I could do. I had to get out fast.”

  The Interrogator’s fingers had closed around the compact little energy weapon he’d used to break the back of the dwarf’s genetic twin-opposite. But there was something in his nature which made him shrink front inflicting irrevocable injuries on a man who shared a compulsion that was making his brain reel.

  “Very well,” he said sharply. “That’s all—for now.”

  The dwarf sucked in his breath, started to speak, thought better of it, and swung about on his heels. There was an alarming unsteadiness in his gait as the big doors swung shut behind him.

  For an instant the Interrogator stood as though stunned, watching the doors swing shut. A knotted cord, he told himself shakily, a knotted cord tightening and tightening was—a perfect description of the sensation he experienced whenever he tried to imagine what the remote past was like.

  Why had a revulsion against the remote past been scared into his brain before he’d been conditioned to perform the duties of his high office? Why was the remote past so dangerous it had been blotted from the memory of the dwarf?

  Well, well, he could find out easily enough. When he knew he’d no longer fear the remote past, and—he could go back himself, and take care of those two primitives.

  His hands were shaking a little when he reseated himself in the examining unit, and vibrated the emergency disk of the COVERALL.

  The droning which ensued was abruptly shattered by a coolly efficient voice. “COVERALL. COVERALL speaking. This is Correlator T G 46. What is it, Integrator V 236?”

  “I have reason to believe THE PLAN is endangered by something that has happened in the remote past,” the Interrogator said, striving to sound as though he were addressing a subordinate. “I should prefer not to go into details.”

  “What do you wish to know, 236?”

  “I find I can no longer remember what the remote past is like. No, it is worse than that. There is an…an uneasiness when I just think about the remote past. I have a feeling that, if I actually went back to, say, the Miocene, and tried to blast a stasis oval the uneasiness would be worse. I say I have a feeling. Of course—

  “COVERALL? COVERALL?”

  There was no answer.

  There was no reason why his palms should feel moist. Yet COVERALL’S silence was alarming. A minute ticked by, two—

  “Interrogator V 236?” came hoarsely, as though COVERALL were cowering in darkness far off somewhere, willing in its panic to risk a quick look around a dangerous corner, but not daring to raise its voice.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Correlator T G 49. T G 46 is…well, not well. That blotting out of the remote past—it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” the Interrogator agreed, his voice rising. “If it had, would I have called you? What right have you to take that tone with me?”

  “No right, but—I can’t help you. When I think of the remote past it’s as though a bar of white-hot…no, no, worse than that. I won’t think about it. You hear? I won’t, I won’t it’s horrible, and you can’t make me! You’ve no right—”

  The Interrogator groaned, and vibrated COVERALL out.

  The implications?

  No, no, he’d have to fight that. He’d have to stop picturing the past, all of the past, including the worst three minutes he’d ever lived through, as a…a tree.

  An enormous spreading tree with all of the upper branches shriveling, dying. A tree already dead, with only the lower branches filled with sap. No, no, no, he’d have to stop.

  Just a part of the trunk was alive, and there were little eager new sprouts down there trying to topple the dead upper part
of the tree.

  The lower part, where the sprouts were, went deep, deep down into the soil, so that the tree was really like a gigantic iceberg nine-tenths submerged. Only the upper part was dead, shriveled, but the upper part included the whole human race, and the sap up there where the human race was could no longer go down, down into the distant roots and interfere.

  Something new was coming up down there, pushing its way up—small, twisting new shoots far down insisting on a right to grow and harden into branches and become a new tree with wide, lazy leaves, and a sun-dappled bole. A new—

  The Interrogator’s thoughts congealed, and something took hold of him, and something whirled him around. Around and around and around, faster and faster, until on the circular top of the examining unit where his hands had rested were two stringy clots of filmy emptiness, and where his brain had pulsed a hollowness impossibly bright.

  EPILOGUE

  “Junior!” came from the palm-thatched hut in the clearing. “Not tomorrow, Junior. NOW!”

  Eddie stopped and stared down at his son, who was contemplating his toes in the sunlight, and squinting up through them at the swollen red disk of the sun.

  “Junior, your mother is a very patient woman. You obey her now and then, I suppose?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why not, Pop?”

  “Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. I was just wondering.”

  “Pop, I’ve gone and figured out a poem for myself. Want to hear it?”

  “O. K., Junior—shoot.”

  “The sun goes down,

  And the moon comes up,

  But right where I’m sitting

  The earth, being round,

  Keeps chasing itself like a pup.

  H’d’ya like it, Pop?”

  “Well, the rhythm and the astronomy ain’t…ain’t is basic English, Junior…ain’t so hot. And you don’t talk like that.”

  “Shucks, Pop, I just talk like I think.”

  “Yeah, well, it is kind of nice, Junior. You thought that up all by yourself, did you?”

  “That’s right, Pop.”

  “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but it was hard too, Pop. It made me sweat.”

  “You like to sweat, don’t you?”

  “In a way, Pop, at times—but not every day, Pop.”

  “Well, that’s line, Junior. That’s as it should be. None of the really big towns—Rome, London, New York—were built in a day.”

  * * * *

  Soon now, soon, he’ll be big and strong like his dad, thought the big little girl with the mud-caked cheeks and tangled, wild hair. Crouching in the long grass, her skin berry-brown in the red sunlight, her mind went back to the lonely years—before she’d found people like her own mom and dad again, after being so long alone for years and years and years. And that little boy who only came to her shoulder now but would soon be as tall as she.

  Years and years, and deep in her mind was the strange dim memory still. An automobile upset in a ditch, and a bright, shining light on the road, and she a very little girl climbing through. Then another light and another light, and she’d kept on crawling through the lights and the woods between, the wild, wild woods with the ape creatures, and then—out into here.

  And the funny dwarf with the bicycle pump and shiny clothes peering out of the last light, and making the light disappear. And the big ape creatures that had been mom and dad to her until she’d found people just like her real mom and dad had been back when she’d had dolls to undress, and cornflakes for breakfast, and Perkins to talk to, and mom and dad playing bridge away off somewhere, and then coming home with more dolls and upstairs maids and bathtubs, and she’d had to wash behind her ears.

  “Junior! Mary Ann!”

  Oh, those brats, thought Betty-Jane, standing in the door of the hut in the clearing. Eddie’s, and a green-eyed little minx that wasn’t at all, even though she’d managed somehow to come running in out of the rain, trembling and afraid, and straight into her heart. A would-be glamour girl, and with Junior not yet forewarned. Six years difference in their ages too, and she setting her cap for him as though she wasn’t just a silly little thing with wild twigs snagging up her hair.

  CRUSOE IN NEW YORK, by Ron Goulart

  Originally published in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, March 1982.

  He was standing there amidst hopeless idiots. The cold didn’t faze them, nor did the slush underfoot. They were gathered there on late-afternoon Fifth Avenue—at least thirty of them, a pack of certified nitwits—staring into the bright-lit window of the D. Trumbo Bookstore. All of them ogling the pudgy lump of a man who was sitting in the window with a sickening smirk on his nondescript face. The microphone dangling over the small metal desk picked up the sound of his stubby fingers as they pecked at file keys of his battered portable typewriter, carried the sound, along with the typer’s self-satisfied whimpers, out to the small crowd of imbeciles gathered on the chill late February sidewalk.

  “You are watching one of America’s favorite young authors at work,” announced an unseen spokesman of the bookstore.

  “Young?” said Barney Sears inside his head. “He’s my age, which is thirty-nine almost forty. We were in college together, we have the same agent.”

  “…yes, you’re enjoying the opportunity of watching the world-renowned Buster Menjou create a chapter for his upcoming novel of unbearable suspense…”

  “That’s the right word. Unbearable,” Barney said to himself as he stood there watching the sorry spectacle. “And Jesus, the little toad can only type with two fingers.” He jammed his hands deeper into the pockets of his seven-year-old overcoat. He was a tall, lank man, dark and lantern-jowled.

  “…in our Trumbo window. Of course, we can’t duplicate the spacious studio Mr. Menjou works in at his palatial villa on the fabled Riviera…”

  “Must be the shady side of the Riviera. Buster’s face is pasty and pale as a frog’s belly.”

  “…otherwise, you’re seeing him working exactly as he does in the privacy of his own…”

  “Oh, so? Where are the piles of Ludlum and Follett novels that he swipes whole thick paragraphs from?”

  “…during an unprecedented tour of his native country, Mr. Menjou will be making appearances in the windows of all four hundred and eighty-six D. Trumbo Bookstores across this…”

  “Jesus, think of how many nitwits he’s going to attract. Let’s see, thirty times four-eighty-six is…well, a lot.”

  “…remind you that every half-hour during his unprecedented display of creativity, Mr. Menjou will take a quick break to sign your copies of his latest book.”

  “Two hours of creativity will use up all Buster’s got.”

  “…forty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, of course, is Buster Menjou’s The Brinkerhoff Memo. Trumbo’s also has, of course, copies of his latest paperback, which is now number two on the list, The Hackensacker Blowoff.”

  “Who but an idiot would want to read books with titles like those?”

  “…soon to be a major motion picture…”

  “How can you make a major motion picture out of a minor novel?”

  Barney was suddenly tapped gently on the back.

  “You mustn’t take it to heart,” said a soft sympathetic voice. “Your work will outlive his.”

  He swung around, just in time to see the blond young woman pushing away through the Buster Menjou watchers. “Hey, wait!” he called.

  She kept going, a slim girl in her late twenties, wearing a crimson raincoat and matching boots.

  Barney had seen her before, three times at least. Twice she’d been with a man, a big guy all muffled up in a dark overcoat, scarf, and ski cap. Barney had the feeling they were watching him, following him,
and had been for at least the past week or so. The girl was pretty and the one he always noticed first. She’d showed up at the Mexican restaurant in the Village six nights ago, the night he’d had the quarrel with Olympia and barreled out of the flat to dine alone. And just three days ago, when he was crossing the wide lobby of the Dibble Building on Lex after visiting his agent, she’d been buying breath mints at the cigar stand. Yesterday, he’d decided to start jogging again, and she and the muffled guy had been on a bench up in Central Park. Now, today, she’d spoken to him.

  Barney stumbled, slipping on a mound of slush and nearly falling off the curb and into the slick street. He kept his balance, though, and started running.

  “How does she know I’m a writer, too? They never put author photos on the kind of paperback crap I write. I don’t loll around in shop windows either.”

  The red raincoat was easy to keep track of. The blonde was roughly a half block ahead of him, hurrying along late afternoon Fifth Avenue.

  “I have hardly any fans at all. So, now I meet one and she runs off.”

  He increased his pace, dodging pedestrians, pools of slush, and a blind beggar. Two blocks up from D. Trumbo’s he caught up with her.

  “I’m not a mugger, Miss,” he announced, taking careful hold of her arm. “Not a flasher, sadist, chain stealer, or nonspecific loon. But you spoke to me and—”

  “I shouldn’t have. It was a viola—a mistake. I’m sorry.” A delicate flush touched her pretty face.

  “Not a mistake since you seem to know who I am.” He kept hold of her arm and walked briskly at her side. “Some writers, like that egomaniacal Buster Menjou, can be nasty with fans. I, on the other hand, like to talk with mine. What few fans I have.”

  “You mustn’t let people like Buster Menjou bother you,” she told him, slowing. “Don’t allow his fleeting success to upset you.”

  “That little schmuck has earned near sixty-four million in the past seven years.” Barney was breathing through his mouth. “I don’t mind when I hear a Rockefeller makes that, or an Arab oil sheik, but Buster I went to school with, and—”