Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 20
“It’s murder, sure enough,” the first policeman said.
“Why couldn’t it be suicide?” Feeney asked.
The second policeman pointed to the murder weapon. It was a pretty decrepit revolver, dating back generations. It looked as if it had been oiled with mud and polished with a mailman’s sock. It lay almost twenty feet away from the corpse.
“Couldn’t he of threw it?” Mr. Feeney asked innocently.
They snorted. After that deduction, the police examined the rooms. As usual, all the windows and doors were locked, and the nearest fire escape was out in the hall, with no convenient ledges that a fiendish acrobat might have been able to use.
They did find a gun permit in one drawer. It belonged to Harold Random, now deceased. The serial number on the gun matched that on the permit.
It was a perfectly ordinary perfect crime. Random had been murdered in a locked room, with a gun that lay twenty feet away, and, as subsequent investigation proved, he hadn’t an enemy in the world. Nobody seemed to think him important enough for hatred. All reports agreed that he had been meek and inoffensive.
~ * ~
Random sat in the green easy chair, reading a fascinating book on the great strides London had made in wastage disposal. It was fascinating how an enormous city like London could do away with its sewage and yet keep its water clean.
Harold Random shook his pale, vague head admiringly. Now, take their problem of slum congestion—much greater than New York—
Zzzziiiirrrr. Whoosh!
He leaped out of the green chair, clutching his fascinating book in thin hands that suddenly had gone cold and white. A mechanical whirring had filled the room. Instantly, air had burst outward, compressing the excessively atmospheric air of the room.
Random dropped his fascinating book. At the other end of the room stood a man, faultlessly dressed.
He was the exact duplicate of Harold Random!
Of course, there were minor details. He looked more muscular, harder, much more fit. And the mustache on his stern upper lip was real black, streaked with interesting gray, instead of Harold’s dim, wispy, somewhat straining fringe.
Random abandoned his ridiculous notion, pulled at his collar, for comfort a half size too large.
“Why can’t you learn to dress properly?” the other demanded.
But Harold Random wasn’t listening. For the first time, he had noticed a compact, glistening mechanism behind the illusion who stood there disapprovingly. It was compact, yet Random couldn’t help imagining that it extended, somehow, somewhere. Nonsense, of course.
“Who—who are you?” he asked uncertainly.
Raising his neat trousers at the knees just the proper bit, the older man sat distastefully on the squat rust couch. Now that Harold Random felt almost calm, he observed the strong chin, the firm hands, the absolute self-possession of the other. He felt vaguely envious.
“I’m Harold Random,” the other man said, more pleasantly. “I know this is quite a shock, but I’m you. You see, I’ve come from the future. Been dabbling around with time machines for several years, just so I could make this visit. It’s very important to both of us.”
Random the younger smiled weakly. Weak as that smile was, it angered the other Random.
“Don’t be such a sap!” he rapped out. He gestured to the end of the room with a manicured thumb. “There’s my time machine. It cuts through the time warp. Time, the fourth dimension, can be traveled as well and easily as any other dimension, provided one has the means. I have. With an elevator or airplane you can rise into the third dimension. With a time machine you can rise above, or descend below, the main stream of time.”
“Oh,” the younger Random said puzzledly. “I see.”
“You don’t. But that doesn’t matter.”
They sat in silence for quite a while. The younger Random was conscious of his prototype’s keen and obviously disapproving scrutiny. When the older man spoke, however, it was in soft, winning tones.
“Harold,” he said, and then stopped, his dark brows drawn. “I don’t know how we should address each other. You’d better call me Mr. Random. Is that all right, Harold?”
Harold nodded baffledly. So far, it was the only touch of logic in an insane situation.
“Well,” Mr. Random continued, “what date is this?”
He strode to the tired end table, which seemed barely able to sustain the weight of an evening paper.
“December 11,1941. H-m-m-m. Then Marguerite hasn’t married that ugly ape yet. You know—Will Hanson.”
“Will Hanson?” Harold asked. Then the significance of the small word struck him. “What do you mean, she hasn’t married him yet? She is supposed to marry me.”
Mr. Random leaned forward, his immaculate elbows on his sharply creased knees.
“That’s why I’m here, Harold,” he said gently. “You know you haven’t been making much progress with her. She’s such a lovely thing, even without her fortune, that I know you’d hate to lose her. Well, let me tell you plainly—on January 11, next year, she’s going to marry Will Hanson.”
“Oh, but—” Harold protested in his usual diffident way.
“But nothing! You and your damned sewage disposal. Is that all you can talk about to her and her father?”
Harold sat back primly.
“Marguerite and her father are very intelligent. They encourage me in every way. They always prompt me to talk on the subject.”
“Sure! Sarcasm always was wasted on you.”
Another bitter silence filled the depressing rust and green room. Now that Harold thought back, he could detect signs of irony in their leading questions. But his enthusiasm for his job had been so keen, he would have spoken to a gorilla with the same boring, extensive detail.
“Anyhow,” Mr. Random said, “she’s under pressure from her pa. Why she should love an object like you, I don’t know, but she does. In January, though, what with high pressure from pa and Willie, and your general lack of everything, she is going to take the leap.
“I’ve just come from sixteen years in the future. Let me tell you, Harold—Marguerite then is even more beautiful and rich than she is now. If you don’t let me—”
Harold had come to his feet slowly. The foreshadow of the stern, aggressive Harold Random he was to become showed in the jut of his chin.
“I don’t follow,” he said uneasily.
Mr. Random got to his feet and began pacing energetically.
“You don’t want to lose Marguerite, and neither do I. But you’re incapable of handling her. Well,” he stopped pacing, faced Harold determinedly, “you and I will change places. You go into the future. I’ll stay here. You can have everything I’ve amassed, really quite a lot. In sixteen years you can also have Marguerite. O.K.?”
“I should say not! You want her youth!”
Mr. Random was outraged.
“Her youth! I’d rather have her sixteen years from now. But rather than let an idiot like you—”
This was too much for even the meek young Harold Random. He stood, really quite belligerently, toe to toe with his older self.
“I’ve stood for enough,” he stated. “You’re trying to get me out of the way so you can step in. You know I’ll win her anyhow!”
“The hell you will,” Mr. Random replied furiously. “You couldn’t win in a rigged lottery. Get into that time machine!”
Random the younger stood decisively where he was.
“Oh, you won’t, eh?” Mr. Random snapped.
He seemed to know his way about quite well. That was perhaps the only thing that might have shaken Harold’s determination, had he not been so stubbornly determined. Mr. Random pulled out a drawer of the bureau in the small bedroom. When he returned he held a gun. He stopped at the end of the living room.
“Get in that time machine!” he repeated harshly. “I’m going to count to three,” he said. “If you aren’t in there voluntarily—”
“Go ahead,” Harold invited heroically. “This is just a bluff.”
“One—”
Harold gaped at the black hole of the muzzle. It was very large.
“Two—”
At that moment Harold’s nerve broke. He made a fierce dive for the stern figure at the other end of the room. Mr. Random must have been holding in his fiery temper with a terrific effort.
“Oh, trying to put up a fight, eh?” he barked. He fired once.
That didn’t seem to satisfy him. Even as Harold dropped, writhing, he wasn’t satisfied. He jerked at the trigger again, viciously, until Harold gave a strangled last cry.
Unnnnnnnnnnnn!
The highly compressed air suddenly went back to normal. Where the glittering machine had stood, there was nothing. The poorly-cared-for gun clattered to the floor.
For there was no hand to hold it. Harold Random lay alone in death, the murder weapon almost twenty feet from him. And, naturally, there were only his own fingerprints all over everything, including the gun.
Mr. Random had overshot his mark. By destroying Harold, he had annihilated himself.
And Will Hanson married Marguerite on January 11.
>
~ * ~
E. M. Hull
THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED
How did we win the war against Nazi Germany? At what moment did that victory become inevitable? None of us really knows the answer, of course. Perhaps it was a completely unlikely incident that tilted the scales our way—an incident like the one reported in this eerie story by Edna Mayne Hull, wife of A. E. Van Vogt and superior science-fiction writer in her own right. Perhaps the moon-reflected futurian she describes really succeeded in deflecting the Nazi bullets at that crucial moment, and thus helped the world we know to avoid becoming the world that was pictured in the little black book. If this is so, of course, some remarkable events are likely to happen in our own immediate future. . . .
~ * ~
THE white crescent of moon flitted from cloud to cloud, as if it, too, was a great, three-engined plane charging high above the night waters of the northern Atlantic.
Twice, when its shape was partly hidden by a woolpack of a cloud, the illusion of another plane with all lights on was so vivid that Squadron Leader Clair stiffened, fingers instinctively reaching for the radio switch, and words quivering on his lips to warn the silly fool out there that this was war and that, within half an hour, they would enter the danger zone.
Reflections, Clair muttered the second time, damn those reflections of that bright, glowing moon.
In the half light, he turned to Flying Officer Wilson, but, for a moment, so dazzling was the play of moon rays through the domed glass cockpit that—for that prolonged instant—the navigator’s body seemed to shine, as if a million glittering reflections were concentrated on his long, powerful frame.
Clair shook his head to clear his vision, and said, “Never saw the moon so bright. Puts one in mind of the old folk tales about the power of the moonbeams to conjure shapes, to reflect strange things that do not exist—”
His voice trailed. He squinted at the man beside him. With a tiny start, he saw that it was not Wilson but one of the passengers. The fellow said in a quiet voice, “How goes it?”
It was not the words themselves but a suggestive quality in the tone that, for a moment, brought to Clair a pleasant kaleidoscope of memory: his family home on the lower St. Lawrence; his mother, tall and serene; his calm-eyed father; and his younger sister soon to be married.
He shook the picture out of his brain, a little irritated; they were private possessions, not to be shared by any chance interrogator. Besides, here was merely some faint heart requiring reassurance about the flight.
“Everything’s fine!” Clair said; and then in a precise voice, he added, “I’m sorry, sir, passengers are not allowed in the cockpit. I must ask you to—”
For a second time, then, he stopped in the middle of a sentence and stared.
It was hard to see the man’s face; the moon made a dazzling, reflecting fire where it splashed against his skin and body. But what Clair could make out against that surprising glare was finely constructed, a strangely strong, sensitive countenance with gray eyes that smiled a secret smile and gazed steadily, expectantly, across at him. A tremendously interesting face it was, only—
It was not the face of any one of the passengers.
With a gasp, Clair ran his mind over the passengers, as he had checked them in hours before. Typical, they had been, two dozen of them. A sprinkling of diplomats, a little troop of military men, and a faded group of civil servants, including one government scientist.
He remembered them all vividly, and this man had not been— Beside him, the stranger said quietly, “I wish to report my presence aboard your ship!”
“You . . . WHAT?” said Clair; and his amazement was all the more violent because his mind had already led him to the very verge of the truth.
The man made no reply, simply sat there smiling quietly—and the moon, which had momentarily flashed behind a cloud, jerked into sight again and rode the dark blue heavens to the south-southwest.
The light shattered into blazing fragments on the cockpit glass, and cascaded like countless tiny jewels, bathing the stranger in a shield of radiance.
Swiftly, Clair drew his mind into a tight acceptance of the situation that was here. His eyes narrowed; his face took on a stern expression. When he finally spoke, it was the squadron leader, commander of men, who said curtly, “I have no idea why you have chosen to stow yourself on this ship, nor do I desire any details. It is my duty to place you in irons until we land in England.”
With a flick of his hand he drew his automatic—as the cockpit door opened and vaguely silhouetted the bulky figure that was Wilson.
“Queerest thing that ever happened to me, Bill,” the flying officer began. “One second I was sitting beside you, the next I was lying in the baggage compartment. I must have walked in my sleep and . . . oh!”
His eyes glinted steely blue in the moonlight as he sent one swift glance at the gun in Clair’s fingers, then flashed his gaze to the stranger.
“Trouble?” he said, and snatched his own gun.
It was the stranger who shook his head. “No trouble at the moment,” he said. “But there is going to be in a half an hour. They’ve found out about your cargo, and the attack will be in force.” He finished softly, “You will need me then.”
For a single, appalled moment Clair blanched. “You know about our cargo!” he said harshly; and then, dismayed by his own admission, snapped, “Flying Officer Wilson, you will take this man to the baggage room, search him, and put the irons on him. If he goes quietly, keep your gun in your pocket. No use alarming the passengers unnecessarily.”
“I shall go quietly,” said the stranger.
Almost disconcerted by the man’s acquiescence, Clair watched him being led through the moonlit cabin. The affair seemed unsatisfactory —unfinished.
Ten minutes later, the first distant streaks of dawn tinted the long, dark waters to the east, but the crescent moon was still master of the sky. Clair sat at the controls, his forehead twisted into a worried frown. Only occasionally did he glance at the flying shape of light that, for so many hours now, had flooded the night and the sea with its brilliance.
His brow cleared finally. Because—there was nothing to do but carry on. He turned to Wilson to say something to that effect; the navigator’s voice cut off his words: “Bill!”
With a start, Clair saw that his friend was gazing with a tensed fixedness into the mirror that showed the long, dimly visible passenger cabin. His own gaze flicked up, strained against the quiet gloom that was out there. But there was nothing.
The moon glowed in through the dozen windows, probing at the passengers with soft fingers of light. Some of the men were sleeping, heads nodding low, their faces shadowed by their posture. Others sat talking; and their countenances, too, made patterns of light and shade that shifted, as they moved, into a thousand subtly different umbral effects.
It was a restful scene, utterly normal. A puzzled question was forming on Clair’s lips, when once more, urgently, Wilson spoke. “The third seat from the back—the fellow leaning across the aisle talking to Lord Laidlaw, the British diplomatic agent—it’s him.”
Clair saw. Very slowly he stood up. He had no real sense of abnormal things. “Take the wheel, sir,” he said. “I’ll go see what’s what.”
