The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

  “It is, sir. I’m not superstitious, but—”

  “Nor am I,” said the skipper, “but I’m curious. I wonder if…Sparks, you’ve studied electrical transmission. Tell me something, will you? Just what is electricity?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, sir. Nobody can tell you that. No one knows.”

  “Electronics,” mused the Old Man. “In the theory of electronics, isn’t there something about electrons being in two different places simultaneously?”

  I said slowly, “I remember something sir, vaguely. Niles Bohr, I think. An electron moving from one cycle to another without ever having been in the space between. But I never could understand it, and I never tried. I’m no scientist. I just work with the equipment the smart guys invent.” I stared at him. “But why do you ask, sir? Is it—”

  “Just curious,” repeated the skipper. “Perhaps the answer lies there, somehow. But it doesn’t matter. We can’t do anything about it. Just wait and see what we find when we reach the mainland.”

  “But I don’t understand, sir,” I said. “What are you expecting to find?”

  But he didn’t answer me. He just stood there in the doorway sucking at his cold pipe, staring through me off into space. On the morning of the fifth day after our flight from Alex, we sighted the mainland. It was a dull, gray, nasty morning, lowering with thick blankets of black cumulus that threatened to split at the seams any moment. The dim roll of thunder growled threat of a storm to come as once again the skipper, Johnny and I stood on the weather deck. There were two seamen, too, waiting till the Old Man should give the expected orders.

  “Well,” said the skipper, “this is it. In a few minutes we’ll be as close in as we dare go. Then we’ll put him ashore, Sparks.”

  I said, “But didn’t the third set course for Beyrouth, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are docks there. We won’t have to lay off shore, sir.”

  “Really?” The Old Man gave me a faint smile. “I wonder, Sparks. I hope you’re right, but—” he gestured, as briefly the dark overcast lifted, giving us a glimpse of the shoreline we approached—“but, you see, you’re wrong.”

  It was Larnaca all over again. There was no naval base at Beyrouth, but I knew it to be a modern Near Eastern metropolis, doubly astir nowadays with war activity. And the drowsy little village I beheld was far from modern. No building on its shoreline was more than one story in height, the few ships in its inlet were shallow-draft wooden vessels of single-span canvas or none.

  I said, “Skipper, I think I know what’s wrong now. There’s only one possible explanation. Your sextant’s gone haywire, that’s the trouble—”

  “No,” said the Old Man, “there’s another explanation. Don’t you see, Sparks? Don’t you see?” Then, shrugging as I just stared at him blankly: “Ah, well! Let’s not delay. Tell Johnny Goodbye for me, will you?”

  I turned to the old geezer, who had been watching the coast draw nearer with a kindling tenseness in his gaze. I touched his skinny shoulder, and he started.

  “Well, Johnny, this is it. We’re putting you off now.”

  He nodded. “So be it. I am yours to command.”

  “Anything else, sir?” I asked the skipper.

  “Nothing else, Sparks. What is to be, will be.”

  I turned to Johnny. “I guess that’s all,” I said. “Except a private word on my own hook, Pop. The skipper’s sure you’re okay, or he wouldn’t be turning you loose this way. I don’t know, myself. We don’t know whether you came off a friendly or an enemy ship. And you’ve had the run of the Grampus for three days. You’ve seen a lot more than a civilian’s supposed to see.”

  “I am a meek and miserable servant,” said Johnny, slipping into the old routine of formal, stilted phraseology, “unworthy of the wonders that have been shown me—”

  “Yeah, I know. And you’re a gone goose if you go back and spill what you’ve learned. Understand? We know who you are, and if you turn out to be on their side, we’ll come and get you. Is that clear?”

  Johnny’s strange, fanatic eyes gleamed. “I hear and obey,” he said strongly. “So be it, I gird my loins to battle the forces of evil by your side.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then—so long, and good luck!”

  I gave him my hand to shake, but the idiot didn’t. Instead, he crouched and kissed it. I yanked it away, embarrassed, glancing at the skipper swiftly. But the Old Man simply sighed and nodded, almost as if that were what he expected. He spoke to the snickering seamen. “Very well, lads.”

  They lifted Johnny into the inflated raft we were scooting him off in, and shoved him off. The sea was high and choppy. The Old Man nodded. “Oil, lads.” The boys broke loose a canister, smoothing a patch around the Grampus and the life raft. Johnny moved away slowly, and we watched him go until the skipper said abruptly, “It’s raining, lads. We’d better go below.” The first fat drops of rain turned swiftly to a driving sheet as we ran to the tower. The closing hatch dulled the rumbling drums of thunder. The Old Man frowned.

  “Sad old beggar! I hope he makes it to shore before he’s waterlogged!”

  He moved to the periscope, cranked it around to cover Johnny’s passage.

  “Can you see him, sir?” I asked. “Is he—”

  “He’s made it. He’s landing now. I see people… God!”

  The Old Man shouted, covered his eyes with his hands, and fell away from the periscope blindly. I cried, “What is it, sir? What—”

  Then my voice caught in my throat, even as I put out a hand. For the Grampus was humming…yes, humming!…with a wild outré cacophony of sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard. A weird tingling burned through my veins, and black vertigo danced before my eyes. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t stir. I seemed to be rising…falling…turning…dropping through unfathomable depths of burning blackness to a screaming emptiness…

  As suddenly as it had started, it ended. And the Old Man’s voice was croaking in my ear.

  “God! Sparks, are you all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” I faltered. “I think so, sir. What was it? What happened?”

  “Lightning. A direct smash, forward. I thought for a moment it had blinded me. Look!”

  He gestured to the eyepiece of the periscope. I looked—and drew back. The sea about us was in flames from the lightning burst igniting the oil. I suddenly remembered Johnny. I said, “The poor old bloke! He must think we’ve been burned to a crisp.”

  “Or,” said the skipper, “that we disappeared in a sea of flame.”

  I gaped at him stupidly.

  “Look again, Sparks. Beyond the fire. The shore.”

  I looked. The flames were gone. The storm clouds had vanished, and the sky was crystal blue. There was a patrol-ship racing toward us, a bone of froth in its teeth, the Union Jack astern. White, modern buildings rimmed a harbor abristle with docks and quays, the glory of a modern seaport. The city was Beyrouth!

  I said, “But—but I don’t understand, sir! How did we get here?”

  The Old Man said, quietly, “When the patrol arrives, Sparks, I will tell them we had trouble and drifted off our course. I dare not tell them the truth. They’d never understand. No more than you do—or I do.”

  “Understand what, sir?”

  “Where we have been,” said the Old Man, “or when. I’m not sure I can explain, Sparks. Perhaps there’s a clear and logical explanation. Possibly you were right about the sextant; we misjudged our position off Cyprus. And maybe we were all insensible for a few minutes after that lightning struck the ship. I don’t know. Maybe we’ve been laying off this harbor for an hour.”

  “But the village we saw?”

  “Dimly, through a brief rift in the fog. There is such a thing as a mirage.”

  I said, “You
don’t really believe that, sir. You’re just rationalizing.”

  He groped for his pipe and pouch, steadying shaken nerves with old, familiar movements. “Yes, Sparks, I am. Logic rejects what I really believe.”

  “And that is, sir?”

  “Suppose electricity were somehow connected with time? Then what?”

  “With time, sir?”

  “The present and the past,” mused the Old Man, “and the future. Days and hours leaping like electrons from one place to another, without ever having passed through intervening space. A bomb scored a near miss on the Grampus, and everything was strangely changed. Lightning struck us—and we have returned to our proper era.”

  “You mean we’ve been in the—”

  “The past—yes.” The skipper’s pipe was lighted now, and with its indrawn fragrance he relaxed. He smiled at me. “It does make sense that way, Jake. If I were a better Christian and you a better Jew, we might have understood earlier. Think! Doesn’t our passenger remind you of anyone?”

  “He always did,” I acknowledged. “From the moment I first laid eyes on him. But I can’t seem to—wait a minute! Now I remember. An old rabbi I knew when I was a kid. A fiery old man, like an ancient prophet.”

  “Your wireless worked, but received nothing. Suppose there was nothing to receive?”

  “Skipper, I—”

  “There was a man,” said the skipper softly, “who set forth from Joppa to Tarshish to escape the service of the Lord. But where he traveled, punishment pursued him. And his shipmates rose against him, casting him adrift…”

  The small hairs tingled on my neck, and a coldness crept up my spine. I was remembering the stories now—the old, old stories told by taper-light, and the liquid cadence of the cantor’s voice.

  The skipper said, “Three days, Jake. He was three days our passenger aboard the Grampus. And you told him what a grampus is.”

  “His name?” I whispered.

  “We called him Johnny,” sighed the skipper. “The nearest English equivalent to the first part of his long name. But his real name, Sparks, was…”

  * * * *

  Heed ye! Ware and repent, I cry, and sue Their mercy ere it be too late; this do I bid and warn. For I have dwelt amongst Them; mine eyes have seen with awe Their strength and righteous anger. These have I seen; yea, even I…Jonah of Gathhephur, prophet of the Lord!

  OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, by William Tenn

  Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1956.

  It was a good job and Max Alben knew whom he had to thank for it—his great-grandfather.

  “Good old Giovanni Albeni,” he muttered as he hurried into the laboratory slightly ahead of the escorting technicians, all of them, despite the excitement of the moment, remembering to bob their heads deferentially at the half-dozen full-fleshed and hard-faced men lolling on the couches that had been set up around the time machine.

  He shrugged rapidly out of his rags, as he had been instructed in the anteroom, and stepped into the housing of the enormous mechanism. This was the first time he had seen it, since he had been taught how to operate it on a dummy model, and now he stared at the great transparent coils and the susurrating energy bubble with much respect.

  This machine, the pride and the hope of 2089, was something almost outside his powers of comprehension. But Max Alben knew how to run it, and he knew, roughly, what it was supposed to accomplish. He knew also that this was the first backward journey of any great duration and, being scientifically unpredictable, might well be the death of him.

  “Good old Giovanni Albeni,” he muttered again affectionately.

  If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Blight, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout.

  And if that had not been discovered, the ruling powers of Earth, more than a century later, would never have plucked Max Alben out of an obscure civil-service job as a relief guard at the North American Chicken Reservation to his present heroic and remunerative eminence. He would still be patrolling the barbed wire that surrounded the three white leghorn hens and two roosters—about one-sixth of the known livestock wealth of the Western Hemisphere—thoroughly content with the half-pail of dried apricots he received each and every payday.

  No, if his great-grandfather had not demonstrated long ago his unique capacity for remaining conscious during time travel, Max Alben would not now be shifting from foot to foot in a physics laboratory, facing the black market kings of the world and awaiting their final instructions with an uncertain and submissive grin.

  Men like O’Hara, who controlled mushrooms, Levney, the blackberry tycoon, Sorgasso, the packaged-worm monopolist—would black marketeers of their tremendous stature so much as waste a glance on someone like Alben ordinarily, let alone confer a lifetime pension on his wife and five children of a full spoonful each of non-synthetic sugar a day?

  Even if he didn’t come back, his family was provided for like almost no other family on Earth. This was a damn good job and he was lucky.

  Alben noticed that Abd Sadha had risen from the straight chair at the far side of the room and was approaching him with a sealed metal cylinder in one hand.

  “We’ve decided to add a further precaution at the last moment,” the old man said. “That is, the scientists have suggested it and I have—er—I have given my approval.”

  The last remark was added with a slight questioning note as the Secretary-General of the United Nations looked back rapidly at the black market princes on the couches behind him. Since they stared back stonily, but offered no objection, he coughed in relief and returned to Alben.

  “I am sure, young man, that I don’t have to go into the details of your instructions once more. You enter the time machine and go back the duration for which it has been preset, a hundred and thirteen years, to the moment after the Guided Missile of 1976 was launched. It is 1976, isn’t it?” he asked, suddenly uncertain.

  “Yes, sir,” one of the technicians standing by the time machine said respectfully. “The experiment with an atomic warhead guided missile that resulted in the Blight was conducted on this site on April 18, 1976.” He glanced proudly at the unemotional men on the couches, very much like a small boy after completing a recitation before visiting dignitaries from the Board of Education.

  “Just so.” Abd Sadha nodded. “April 18, 1976. And on this site. You see, young man, you will materialize at the very moment and on the very spot where the remote-control station handling the missile was—er—handling the missile. You will be in a superb position, a superb position, to deflect the missile in its downward course and alter human history for the better. Very much for the better. Yes.”

  He paused, having evidently stumbled out of his thought sequence.

  “And he pulls the red switch toward him,” Gomez, the dandelion-root magnate, reminded him sharply, impatiently.

  “Ah, yes, the red switch. He pulls the little red switch toward him. Thank you, Mr. Gomez, thank you very much, sir. He pulls the little red switch on the green instrument panel toward him, thus preventing the error that caused the missile to explode in the Brazilian jungle and causing it, instead, to explode somewhere in the mid-Pacific, as originally planned.”

  The Secretary-General of the United Nations beamed. “Thus preventing the Blight, making it nonexistent, as it were, producing a present-day world in which the Blight never occurred. That is correct, is it not, gentlemen?” he asked, turning anxiously again.

  None of the half-dozen men on couches deigned to answer him. And Alben kept his eyes deferentially in their direction, too, as he had throughout this period of last-minute instruction.

  He knew who ruled his world—these sto
lid, well-fed men in clean garments with a minimum of patches, and where patches occurred, at least they were the color of the surrounding cloth.

  Sadha might be Secretary-General of the United Nations, but that was still a civil-service job, only a few social notches higher than a chicken guard. His clothes were fully as ragged, fully as multi-colored, as those that Alben had stepped out of. And the gnawing in his stomach was no doubt almost as great.

  “You understand, do you not, young man, that if anything goes wrong,” Abd Sadha asked, his head nodding tremulously and anticipating the answer, “if anything unexpected, unprepared-for, occurs, you are not to continue with the experiment but return immediately?”

  “He understands everything he has to understand,” Gomez told him. “Let’s get this thing moving.”

  The old man smiled again. “Yes. Of course, Mr. Gomez.” He came up to where Alben stood in the entrance of the time machine and handed the sealed metal cylinder to him. “This is the precaution the scientists have just added. When you arrive at your destination, just before materializing, you will release it into the surrounding temporal medium. Our purpose here, as you no doubt—”

  Levney sat up on his couch and snapped his fingers peremptorily. “I just heard Gomez tell you to get this thing moving, Sadha. And it isn’t moving. We’re busy men. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “I was just trying to explain a crucial final fact,” the Secretary-General apologized. “A fact which may be highly—”

  “You’ve explained enough facts.” Levney turned to the man inside the time machine. “Hey, fella. You. Move!”

  Max Alben gulped and nodded violently. He darted to the rear of the machine and turned the dial which activated it.

  flick!

  It was a good job and Mac Albin knew whom he had to thank for it—his great-grandfather.

  “Good old Giovanni Albeni,” he laughed as he looked at the morose faces of his two colleagues. Bob Skeat and Hugo Honek had done as much as he to build the tiny time machine in the secret lab under the helicopter garage, and they were fully as eager to go, but—unfortunately for them—they were not descended from the right ancestor.