Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 10
"I—I left my money home," you begin.
The cop nods. "Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me." He reaches out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. "Sir, emergency request. Would you help this gentleman?"
The pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. "How far?"
You did notice the name of the building from which you came, and you mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out, and picks up the other side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him. Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming at you both.
That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might like to stay up here in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same, and be there before you.
And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow, and goes off at once when you nod at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera, and not too dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open, and you get set to duck.
"You forget the prints, monograph, and patent applications," he says. "They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A good thing I knew the production offices of 'Atoms and Axioms' were in this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model, and we'll pick it up. What's it for—repro for a new skit in a hurry?"
You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps you for some more information, which you give him at random. But it seems to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction, and heads back to the museum.
You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator. There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there.
You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is right—the signs along the halls are the same as they were.
Then there's a sort of cough, and something dilates in the wall. It forms a perfect door, and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in, gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wondering how a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has closed, and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again, and you're at the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.
You'll never know what you stumbled over, but somehow, you move back in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then a shred of dim light appears—it's the weak light in the time machine, and you've located it.
You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You reach forward toward the green button, and hesitate—but there's a red one beside it, and you finally decide on that.
Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator, and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating it. Your finger touches the red button.
You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally doped out the fact they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying to help you. You don't care then. The field springs up around you, and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't been used so far—sends you off into the nothingness. There is no beam of light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.
It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with some pencil marks over them—PRESS THESE TO RETURN TO YOURSELF THIRTY YEARS—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't because there is only one of you this time.
Instead, everything flashes off, and you're sitting in the machine in your own back yard.
You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement, land in your backyard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then, you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic generator and taking it inside.
It isn't hard to disassemble—but you don't learn a thing; just some plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals. But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice something—everything in it is brand new, and there's one set of copper wires missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again.
And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles, and 15 amperes, you get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of the makeshift job you've just done.
But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and that the date of the patent application is 1991.
Yeah. It will begin to soak in, then. You pick up an atomic generator in the future and bring it back to the past—your present—so that it can be put in the museum with you as the inventor so you can steal it to be the inventor. And you do it in a time machine which you bring back to yourself to take yourself into the future to return to take back to yourself.
Who invented anything? And who built them? While your riches from the generator are piling in, and little kids from school are coming around to stare at the man who changed history and made atomic power so common that no nation could hope to be anything but a democracy and a peaceful one—after some of the worst times in history for a few years—while your name becomes as common as Ampere, or Faraday, or any other spelled without a capital letter, you're thinking of that.
And one day, you come across an old poem—something about some folks calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your view—and telling yourself all these things I'm telling you.
But now…
Well, the drinks are finished, you're woozy enough to go along with me without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.
Come on, let's go.
>
~ * ~
Present to Past
AT ONE time this type of time-travel story was exceedingly common in the science-fiction pulps. People were always getting into their time machines, popping back to the days of Nero and fixing things up there, or visiting the Vikings and setting them right, or changing the French Revolution. Today, thanks to a higher selectivity on the part of most editors, time travel to the past is a rare and a relatively reasonable proposition—if one can use so unseemly a word in this connection. The more obvious paradoxes involved in changing the past are avoided or, if they occur, are explained by suitably “logical” devices, some of which you will encounter in the following four stories.
>
~ * ~
A. Bertram Chandler
CASTAWAY
The author of this upsetting little tale is an officer in the British merchant marine (which is why his maritime detail is so real) and a writer of first-rate science fiction. Occasionally, when he turns to sinister fantasy of this sort, he uses the pseudonym of “George Whitley,” which is the name under which “Castaway” was originally published. His own name is used by permission.
Here, far from trying to avoid or solve the great time-travel paradox, Mr. Chandler throws his hero into its very vortex to let him either sink in it or swim out of it. The startling thing about this story is that, by the very logic of the situation, he does neither. . . .
~ * ~
The water, that at first had been so warm, enveloped him with a cold embrace that contracted his muscles, that threatened to squeeze his heart itself to a stand-still. The salt mouthfuls that he was now swallowing with almost every stroke choked him and seared his lungs. The smarting eyes were blind, no longer staring towards the yellow line of beach that, at the beginning of it all, had seemed so close. He no longer knew or cared where he was going, no longer wondered if he would ever get there. The tired limbs automatically went through their feeble, no longer rhythmic, motions — but it was only that part of himself which must always refuse to acknowledge the ultimate defeat.
Perhaps he was already drowning. Perhaps it was only his memory harking back to some happier time, some period when the world held more than this hopeless, wet misery. For it was not the whole of his past life that flashed before his inward eye as the prelude to ultimate extinction. It was only the events just prior to his present predicament.
He was walking the bridge again, warm in the afternoon sunlight, dry, the heat tempered by the pleasant Pacific breeze. And he was hearing the carefree voices of the day-workers and the watch on deck as, swinging in their bos'n's chairs, they happily slapped the Company's colours — clean, fresh cream over vividly garish red lead — on to the recently scaled funnel.
They were cheerful — and there was no reason why they should not have been. It was one of those days when, somehow, it is perfectly obvious that God is in his Heaven and that all is well with the world.
Fine on the starboard bow was the island. Lazily, he told himself that he would take a four-point bearing, would obtain a distance off and a fix. He went into the chart-room, leafed through the Pacific Pilot until he found the right page. He read ". . . when last visited, by Captain Wallis of H.M.S. Searcher in 1903, was uninhabited. There are one or two springs, and the water is good .. ."
Somebody was shouting. He put the book down hastily, went out to the bridge. The men dangling from the tall funnel were calling and pointing. He looked in the direction they indicated, could not be sure of what he saw, took the telescope from its long box.
The island — white surf, yellow beach, green jungle — swam unsteadily in the circular field of the telescope. But there was a fresh colour added — column of thick, brown smoke that billowed up from the beach, that thinned to a dense haze against the blue, cloudless sky.
He had called the Captain then. The Old Man had come up, surly at the breaking of his afternoon rest, but immediately alert when he had seen the smoke. Some poor devil of an airman, he had said it might be, or the survivors of shipwreck, victims of the tropical storm, that had swept this area a few days previously.
The course was altered at once to bring the island more nearly ahead. In this there was no danger, the soundings ran fantastically deep almost to the thin line of beach itself. And the watch on deck laid aside their paint brushes, busied themselves clearing away the motor launch.
By this time the news had spread through the ship. The other officers came up, stared at the island and its smoke signal through binoculars and telescopes. Some of them said that they could see a little figure beside the fire, dancing and waving. And the Captain, after careful examination of the Pilot Book and of the largest scale chart of the vicinity, was conning his ship in on such an approach that his boat would have the minimum distance to run to the beach, but so that the ship herself would always be in deep water. As additional precautions the echo-sounding recorder was started up and look-outs posted.
And that was the last of his life before this eternity of cold, wet misery, of aching limbs that moved on and on of their own volition when he would willingly have willed them to stop: of blinded, smarting eyes, of throat and lungs burning from the increasingly frequent gulps of salt water.
His bare knees ground on something hard and sharp. The pain of it made him cry out. His hands went down, and he felt sand and coral rocks. He could see now, mistily, and he dragged himself up the beach to where the fire was still burning. And as he collapsed on the sand beside it the fleeting, ironical thought flashed through his bemused brain that now the castaway would have to give aid to one of his would-be rescuers. And that was his last thought until he awoke some hours later.
~ * ~
It was night when he woke up. There was a full moon, so he was able to take stock of his surroundings at once, did not have to go through a period of confused and panic-stricken fumbling in the darkness. Beside him, a black patch on the pale sand, the fire was no more than dead ashes.
There was something missing. At first he could not place it — then suddenly realised that it was the man who had lit the fire. He got shakily to his feet then. Every bone was aching, and the lighter which, wrapped in his tobacco pouch, he always kept in the right-hand pocket of his shorts had gouged what seemed to be a permanent hole in his hip. He stood there for a while, staring about him. There was nothing to be seen but the pale sand, luminous in the glare of the moon, stretching away on either side of him —that and the sea, smooth, misty blue, and the dark, forbidding trees inland.
He shouted then. At first it was "Ahoy! Where are you?" — and then it degenerated into a mere, wordless bellowing. But he could not keep it up for long. His throat was dry and parched, the natural aftermath of his frequent and copious swallowings of salt water was a raging thirst.
Some memory of boyhood books about castaways on desert islands stirred in his brain. He began to look for footprints. On the farther side of what had been the fire he found them. And this evidence that the castaway, the man who had built and lit the fire, did exist was rather frightening. What manner of man could he have been to have fled into the jungle? There was only one answer to the question — Mad. Possibly some poor, starved creature whose brain had finally snapped when the rescue ship, striking the floating mine (for that, the sole survivor of the rescue ship had decided, was what must have happened — even now, years after the finish of the war, blind, insensate death still lurked along the seaways), had disintegrated in flame and thunder.
~ * ~
But the footprints must lead somewhere. The man from the ship followed them. A direction was the only information they gave him. They had been made in dry sand and could not tell him anything, not even the size of the feet that had made them.
They ended where the sand stretched, for perhaps a hundred feet, in wet and glistening contrast to the dry grains on either side of it. This, obviously, was one of the springs of which mention had been made in the Pilot. Inland, among the low trees, there was a shallow channel, a sluggish stream. The man went down on his hands and knees and scooped up a double handful of the water. It was only slightly brackish. He soon tired of this unsatisfactory and unsatisfying means of quenching his thirst and plunged his face into the wet coolness. Even so, he restrained himself. He knew of the discomfort that follows upon too hasty indulgence. He rose to a sitting posture and rested. Then, after a while, he drank again.
When he had finished he felt better. Automatically his hand went to his pocket for his pipe. It was not there. He tried to remember where he had left it. He forced his memory back, step by step, until it rewarded his persistence with a picture of the old briar being placed on top of the flag locker in the wheelhouse. He swore softly. The pouch in the right-hand pocket of his shorts was more than half full. He took it out, opened it, ran his fingers through the tobacco that, in spite of his long swim, had remained dry. The lighter was dry, too. At the first flick of the little wheel the flame sprang into being. He blew it out hastily. He could not afford to waste fuel. Fire might well be his most treasured possession. He remembered, then, the fire that the other castaway had lit. He remembered, with something of a shock, the other castaway.
The unpleasant vision of a homicidal maniac sprang into brief being, then receded. He knew that he had laid himself open to attack whilst drinking at the stream — and attack had not come. His first theory must be right — that of the poor, half-starved, half-crazed creature who had fled into the jungle at the sight and sound of the explosion.
Slowly, limping a little with the pain of his gashed knees, his aching bones and muscles, he made his way back to the ashes of the fire. He sat down beside them, intending to stay awake until daylight in case the other unwilling inhabitant of the island should return. And he fell asleep almost at once.
At his second awakening the sun was well up. It was the heat that prodded him into wakefulness. When he climbed stiffly to his feet he found that his clothing was stiff and prickly, was glittering with the crystals of dry salt.
