The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “My time machine,” he bragged, “iss better than any oder time machine. It iss cheaper. It iss also simpler, so a child can operate.”

  He might have added that he had succeeded in building it exactly two hundred and seventy-seven years before anyone even began to understand the principles of time travel—but of course he was unaware of that.

  His wife was not impressed. “Der Herr Great Cheneral,” she sniffed, “iss also an old goat, like you. But shtill you should be ashamed. Such trash! Better ve buy a shtand for his umbrella in der hall.”

  “Mama, I show you!” he cried out. He vaulted to the seat and started pedaling. “Vatch how I—”

  For an instant, both he and the machine seemed to waver. For an instant, they both appeared to turn slightly purple. Then, suddenly, he was just sitting there, smiling foolishly and rubbing his left ear.

  “Ah-ha! I told you!” crowed Mama Schimmelhorn. “It does not vork, this—”

  She broke off, staring. “But—but it iss impossible! N-now you need a haircut!”

  “Naturlich! I am avay two veeks. In Egypt. I shtay vith friends.”

  “You—you are not gone vun second!”

  “Dot iss because I come back chust vhen I shtarted.”

  “But how can der machine get to Egypt vhen it iss here in New Hafen?”

  “Because efery time machine iss a shpace-time machine. You cannot separate. Mein old friend Albert, vhen he vas alife at Princeton, could explain it, but I cannot.”

  Mama Schimmelhorn still had her wits about her. She approached the time machine and peered closely at her husband’s ear. There, on its lobe, were the marks of small—and obviously feminine—teeth.

  “So! You visit Egypt, und you shtay vith friends, und—maybe they are mices!—they bite you in der ear vhen you fly avay?”

  Papa Schimmelhorn squirmed guiltily. “In ancient Egypt iss like shaking hands. Also this Cleopatra thinks I am a god—such foolishness! Und all der time I am trying to get back here to Mama.” He smirked. “It iss vunderful, my time machine! All der vay back I coast, like down a hill, because der shpring iss vound by going there. But you are right. Ve buy der soldier boy a shtand for his umbrella in der hall. I keep der time machine myself.”

  Mama Schimmelhorn smiled grimly. “Und shneak again to Egypt for biting in der ear? Iss better for der soldier boy vith horses. I write a note. Ve send to him der time machine tonight!”

  * * * *

  Mrs. Camellia Jo Pollard stood sixteen hands high and weighed a hundred and fifty-seven pounds. Had she been a horse, these dimensions would have indicated a surprising slimness. As she was not, she had to go in for steam cabinets, small salads, and more or less violent exercise.

  On the morning of the general’s birthday, in shorts and halter, she was trying to do push-ups on her bedroom floor. Even with the occasional assistance of her cook—who, still in her early thirties, had survived three tough husbands and fourteen years of active service in army post laundries—she was having a bad time of it. When the doorbell rang, she collapsed promptly and gratefully.

  “D-do see who that is, B-Bluebelle dear,” she panted. “And if it’s anybody for the general—” She sighed. “—just say he won’t be back till that awful show is over up in Baltimore.”

  “Take it easy, kid,” grunted Bluebelle, striding off. “It’s a horse show, ain’t it?”

  Mrs. Pollard relaxed luxuriously and felt comfortably sorry for herself. Presently she heard noises downstairs, followed by the front door closing.

  “Hey, Mrs. P.!” her cook’s voice shouted. “It was two guys with a crate from that screwball with the whiskers! You want I should haul it up?”

  I suppose it’s a present for Powhattan, thought Mrs. Pollard. For a second, she hesitated. Then, “Of course, bring it up!” she called decisively. “We’ll open it right now! It’ll serve him right for leaving me alone like this.”

  “I’ll get me a claw hammer,” replied her cook. Three minutes later, in the bedroom, they surveyed Papa Schimmelhorn’s invention.

  Bluebelle pointed with the hammer. “What th’ hell?” she grumbled. “A cross between a goddamn hobbyhorse and a beat-up bicycle!”

  “Oh, it must be more than that!” Mrs. Pollard walked around it, touched it gingerly—and had a flash of inspiration. “Why!” she cried excitedly. “Isn’t that just as sweet as sweet can be? Do you suppose he made it every bit himself? I always did say he seemed a nice old man—in spite of all they said. He must’ve noticed how the general’s been gaining weight since he retired. Bluebelle, it’s a reducing machine, that’s what it is! That’s why it hasn’t any wheels. And he’s given it a horse’s head and tail so Powhattan’ll be sure to ride it.”

  Bluebelle, eyeing it suspiciously, began to back away. “I wouldn’t touch it, was I you!”

  “Nonsense! It’ll be much more fun than silly exercises!” She grasped the handlebars and climbed aboard. “See—” Several levers protruded from the wooden box, and she pulled them all at random. “—he’s fixed it so you can adjust the—the tension and—and everything.” Leaning forward eagerly, she started pumping. Her outline wavered. Both she and the machine turned vaguely purple—

  “Hey, wait!” bawled Bluebelle.

  But Mrs. Pollard and the time machine had disappeared.

  The phenomenon had a profound effect on Bluebelle. For a while, she simply goggled at the place where they had been. Then she inspected it carefully for something like a grease spot or an X. After that, she searched all the closets and peered behind the larger bits of furniture. Finally, emitting a shrill wail, she made for the telephone and got through to the general.

  “It—it’s me, Gen’ral, s-sir!” she sobbed. “Me! B-Bluebelle Bottomley, yer cook. She’s been s-s-snatched, sir! The p-pore little c-c-critter!”

  “Mrs. Bottomley, control yourself! Have you the heaves?”

  Somehow, Bluebelle managed to inform the general that his wife had vanished, that she had done so on a goddamn beat-up bicycle, and that Papa Schimmelhorn was responsible.

  “Have you searched the house?” The General’s voice was anxious. “You have? Tsk-tsk, Mrs. Bottomley, that’s very serious! I am much concerned. I shall take instant action!” Bluebelle sniffled with relief.

  “I’ll phone Papa Schimmelhorn,” promised the general. “I wish I could come personally, but they’re starting on the hunters, and—”

  And at that point, Bluebelle dropped the telephone with a piercing scream.

  The time machine was back.

  Bluebelle stared. Her reddened eyes bugged out. “My Gawd!” she screeched. “Mrs. P., how you’ve changed!”

  She lifted the spluttering telephone. “Gen’ral, sir, she’s right back here in her stall! And boy, oh boy, oh boy! She’s dropped forty years and all of fifty pounds! Call me a goddamn liar if she ain’t!”

  Bluebelle looked again. She saw a long, full gown of green and gold, with an astounding décolletage, lace at the wrists, a figure like a bosun’s dream, and red lips, and thick black hair, and wildly beautiful green eyes—

  “Whee-whee-ew! She’s a lulu!” Suddenly she choked. “Only—only, Gen’ral, sir, it—it ain’t her!”

  “What? What’s that?”

  “It ain’t her! It—it’s a later model!”

  The girl dismounted from the time machine, shakily thrust a crucifix at Bluebelle, said something unintelligibly Teutonic, and started to back away.

  The telephone took on a parade-ground tone. “Hold her there, Mrs. Bottomley! I shall return immediately! Don’t let her out of your sight, you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir!” shouted Bluebelle.

  She hung up. She retrieved the hammer. She pointed at a chaise longue in the corner. “Kid,” she growled, “you just go set fer a spell. You ain’t going’
no place!”

  She seated herself on Mrs. Pollard’s bed, where she could keep a wary eye on her charge, who was staring back at her with dilated pupils, and on Papa Schimmelhorn’s invention. Presently, the phone rang shrilly, and she answered it.

  “Listen carefully, Mrs. Bottomley!” thundered the general. “I have been in touch with Papa—that is, with Mr. Schimmelhorn. He is driving over and will join us there. He says you mustn’t touch the—the controls of his time machine. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Jee-sus, Gen’ral, sir! I wouldn’t touch ’em with a ten-foot pole!”

  “He says you are to lift the machine very carefully by the frame, understand? And lock it in the closet till he gets there.”

  “S-sir, I—I don’t want no truck with it at all! D-do I got to?”

  “That is an order, Mrs. Bottomley. And don’t you lay a finger on those controls!”

  The phone clicked off. Muttering apprehensively, Bluebelle edged the time machine into the closet, locked the door, and pocketed the key. “Boy, oh boy!” she addressed the world at large. “Could I use a beer!” She regarded her uninvited guest, who since the phone rang had been sobbing hysterically. “Kid,” she said, “it looks like I’m not the only one.” She made drinking motions, pointed at herself, and managed to convey the idea that she was going downstairs and would be back right away, and that the girl was to stay put—and she meant put.

  The girl sobbed a little more loudly than before, but showed no signs of moving, and so Bluebelle took off down the stairs, found a twelve-pack of ale in the kitchen, picked up two pewter beer mugs, and returned to her captive. She opened up two bottles, poured, and proffered one of the foaming mugs.

  The girl recoiled, and Bluebelle realized that some sort of communication would have to be established. She downed half her own mug, making exaggerated signs of pleasure, and repeated a bit of Pennsylvania Dutch learned in her childhood from an aged relative. It was a mildly indelicate and imperfectly remembered verse about an elderly lady jumping somebody’s fence, but it did sound unmistakably Germanic, and she thought she saw the girl relax a little bit. She followed up by singing one or two stanzas of Lili Marlene in Occupation German, drank the rest of her own ale, and was pleased when the girl accepted hers and at least sniffed at it suspiciously.

  She filled her mug again, grinned, tapped her capacious bosom, and said, “Me Bluebelle. Catch on, sweetheart? Bluebelle.”

  Tremblingly, the girl pointed at herself, and whispered, “Ermintrude” Then, bracing herself, she took a sip of ale. Its effect was instantly therapeutic. She took a swallow, then a bigger one.

  “That’s the stuff, Trudie!” Bluebelle encouraged her, following her example. “Down the hatch!”

  By the time Papa Schimmelhorn arrived, almost two hours and several bottles later, both of them were slightly tiddly, and Ermintrude—dazzled by Twentieth Century ale and the luxuries of a Twentieth Century water closet—had stopped weeping, only dabbing at a stray tear or two when either she or Bluebelle happened to hit an especially sentimental note in the ballads they were using as a substitute for intelligible conversation.

  Papa Schimmelhorn, instead of being safely home in New Haven, had been visiting a grand-niece, Fifi Fledermaus, who had abandoned her career as a lady wrestler to manage a topless-bottomless nightspot near Alexandria—an establishment of which Mama Schimmelhorn strongly disapproved. Furthermore, though Baltimore and Alexandria were roughly equidistant from the Pollard residence, the general’s five-starred Army Cadillac had been delayed by a series of petty traffic jams which Papa Schimmelhorn’s own 1922 Stanley Steamer touring car had escaped. He had beaten his friend home by half an hour, and as soon as his bright blue eyes spied Ermintrude, he realized how fortunate he had been.

  “Ach!” he exclaimed as Bluebelle threw the door open for him. “How beautiful! Vot pretty lidtle pussycats they had in die alten days!” Bluebelle eyed him disapprovingly. Grampa, she thought, I can read your mind like it was pictures in a adult bookstore. Well, you ain’t goin’ to get anywheres near this little chick, no sirree!”

  Papa Schimmelhorn was not insensitive. Entering, he smiled at her, chucked her tenderly under her plump chin, and murmured, “But not zo beaudtiful like my lidtle Bluebelle.” He sighed. “Ach, if maybe I am forty years younger, but now it iss too late!”

  Damn old hippercrite! thought Bluebelle, but she did smile back, admitting to herself that he really was a fine figure of a man, great white beard, modishly shaggy hair, and all. His shoulders stretched the seams of his hound’s-tooth-check sports coat over his orange shirt; his mighty thighs bulged the tight, slightly bell-bottomed, wine-colored trousers he had chosen to set off his Stanley Steamer’s British Racing Green. “This here’s Ermintrude,” she informed him, only a trace of reluctance remaining in her voice. “She—she’s the one th-they traded in on pore Mrs. P. wh-when they snatched her.” Papa Schimmelhorn gave Ermintrude as grandfatherly a pat as his self-control permitted. “Such a pretty child,” he said sanctimoniously. “Soon ve get her maybe safe back home.” Then suddenly he was all business. “Frau Bluebelle,” he asked anxiously, “tell me—haff you touched die levers on der time machine?”

  Bluebelle assured him that she had not.

  “Und Ermintrude?”

  Bluebelle stuttered that she did not know.

  “Okay,” declared Papa Schimmelhorn, “ve go upshtairs und maybe ve find out.” Then, Bluebelle leading the way, they returned to Mrs. Pollard’s bedroom. The time machine was taken from its closet and inspected, and he pointed out how he had combined two Japanese calendar wristwatches and an old Chevrolet odometer to show the exact century, year, day, and hour of departure and arrival, and how a curiously contrived mechanism could be manipulated for latitude and longitude. “Ach!” he exclaimed. “She has come all der vay from Austria, und from elefen tventy-three a.m., August der eighth, tvelve hundred und forty-vun! Such a long vay from home!”

  Then, after Bluebelle had broken out the ale again, he revealed that his genius was by no means just mechanical. The fact that Ermintrude spoke a form of German seven hundred years older than his own did not trouble him at all. “Ve miss a vord,” he explained to Bluebelle. “Okay, ve try again. I am a Shviss—all kinds of langvidges und dialects I shpeak.”

  In scarcely ten minutes, it was clear that they understood each other at least in the essentials; in fifteen, he had determined that she, leaping impulsively to the saddle of the magic horse on which the witch had arrived in the great hall of her father’s castle, had done nothing more than touch the pedals; and by the time Bluebelle opened the front door to the returning general, he was sitting on the chaise longue with the lovely Ermintrude on his lap, her little fingers twining in his beard, and her delightful laughter echoing in his ear.

  Hastily, as she followed her employer up the stairs, Bluebelle tried to prepare him for this spectacle. “Hey, sir,” she commented, “that Papa pal of yours sure is a fast worker—you oughta see how he’s been makin’ out with that bird they sent us back in place of Mrs. P. He’s all man, buhlieve me! You ever felt his muscles?”

  “For his years,” said the general coldly, “Mr. Schimmelhorn is remarkably well preserved.”

  “Well preserved?” grumbled Bluebelle sotto voce. “Sir, if you was half that well preserved, you’d still be chasin’ majors’ wives round Fort Bliss, Texas.” She hesitated, decided that it would be more prudent not to mention that she was quoting Mrs. Pollard, and finished rather lamely with, “Beggin’ yer pardon, sir, fer the familyarity.”

  Fortunately, General Pollard did not hear her, for he had reached the bedroom door.

  “Soldier boy!” boomed Papa Schimmelhorn joyously as the general strode in. “Velcome home! Look vhat I haff done. First I make you der magic horse to ride back into der past, vhen iss lots of horses! Then ve haff caught a pretty pussycat—lid
tle Ermintrude from der Thirteenth Century.” He burst abruptly into song. “Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday dear soldier boy! Happy Birthday to you!”

  Bluebelle enthusiastically joined in, except that she tactfully substituted “Gen’ral, sir” for “soldier boy,” and Ermintrude, staring wide-eyed at the general, began to giggle.

  Blackjack Pershing, a fellow cavalryman who also had attained the exalted rank of General of the Armies, had once remarked that Lieutenant Powhattan Fairfax Pollard looked more like a horse than any human being he had ever met. This expert observation had remained quite valid. The patrician planes of General Pollard’s face, the arrogance of his slightly Roman nose, the way he tossed his mane of gray hair and flared his nostrils as he regarded Ermintrude—all these endowed him with an unmistakably equine quality, an effect in no way spoiled by his immaculate Peale boots, perfectly tailored breeches, and a jacket straight from Savile Row.

  Ermintrude giggled again and whispered to Papa Schimmelhorn. He in turn chuckled appreciatively and whispered back to her. Then they both laughed.

  General Pollard glanced at the time machine, shook his head as though to clear it of obfuscations, and took the chair Bluebelle offered him.

  “She asked me who you vere,” explained Papa Schimmelhorn. “So I haff told her you are married to die vitc—die lady who vas caught vhen der time machine appeared in der hall. Alvays iss better for a young voman to be told vhen an older man iss married, nicht wahr?”

  “Have you told her about Mrs. Schimmelhorn?” enquired the general icily.

  “Naturlich,” purred Papa Schimmelhorn, pinching Ermintrude. “I haff tried, but she does not beliefe. She says I do not haff der married look—imachine it, after more than sixty years! Her husband vas a graf, a count in Austria, but he vas killed two years ago in a big battle vith die Turks—zo sad! Her papa also iss a graf, mit a big castle near Wiener-Neustadt, so I haff told her I am a count also, Graf von Schimmelhorn, because vay back in A.D. Tvelve forty-vun it iss important. This also she does not beliefe, because—” He pointed at the time machine. “—she knows already I am der great magician, und thinks I am also maybe somevun else. But if I am a graf perhaps it helps vhen pretty soon I take her home und bring you Mrs. Pollard back again.”