Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 27
She looked at him as if trying to read his thoughts. “Do you think he made it happen to us, somehow?”
“I don’t know what I think, but he’s the only connection between reality and this dream or vision or hallucination or whatever it is. I’m going to find out what Pete’s got to do with it.
“Unless Pete was part of the hallucination, too—”
“This cylinder isn’t!”
“Let’s open the gadget,” said Jack.
Grandin held it up between his thumb and forefinger. The case was rough, as if it were some homemade experimental model. He took out his pocketknife and pried off the end opposite the terminals.
At first glance the interior looked like a burned, shapeless mass. Then Grandin saw that it was a mass of small wires burned and fused. Carefully he tried to pick among the destroyed components, but they shattered at the touch of his blade. Only one thing came out whole, a small object that looked like a glass bead. He held it up to the light and rubbed the discoloration from it. He gasped in amazement.
“It looks like an electronic tube of some kind!”
“Maybe this guy Pete isn’t as dumb as he looks,” said Jack.
The heat of the desert radiated about them and filtered into every cell of their beings as Grandin pushed the decrepit car to its limit over the burning highway. By early afternoon they arrived at the shambles of Pete’s garage.
There was no sign of life. All the doors were shut and the windows were obscured by weeks of undisturbed desert sand and dust.
“Bet he flew the coop with the cops on his tail,” said Jack.
Grandin got out and pounded on the door of the building, but there was no answer. He tried again. Suddenly, Marcia, sitting in the car, waved and pointed to the west side. Grandin and Jack ran around the corner just as a car drove out. It was in even more battered condition than the building, and Pete was at the wheel.
He looked worse than when they had seen him the day before. Whatever repulsive illness possessed him, its ravages were terrible and progressive.
“Closed up,” said Pete. Then his eyes went wide. “You’re Grandin— and Jack! You came back.”
“Apparently you didn’t expect us back.”
The man looked at them for a long moment, and slowly the light died out of his eyes. “I didn’t know. It’s of no consequence. I must be going now. I have business in Los Angeles, and my garage here will not be open any more.”
“Aren’t you installing any more of these?” Grandin held out the little gadget he had partly disassembled.
“No,” said Pete slowly. “I guess I won’t be installing any more.”
“Come on,” said Grandin with unexpected savagery. “I want to know what this is all about. We went to Los Angeles and found ruins there—ruins created by atomic bombing. I’ve got a detector that showed the radioactivity—”
He stopped. His eyes, on Pete’s face, registered first disbelief then astonished recognition.
“Those sores—they’re radiation burns! I should have known—”
Pete nodded slowly, painfully. “Yes, now you understand?”
“No. I don’t understand anything. Los Angeles is not destroyed.”
“But it is. So are Washington, New York, Chicago, and a hundred other cities we’ve been so proud of. They are destroyed in this continuum—fifteen years from now.”
“Fifteen years from now!”
Pete nodded. “I came from out of that time—came back to try to find a way to prevent the holocaust that I have seen. In my day I saw the bombs fall and our cities wiped out in flames. As far as we knew, more than seventy million were killed before communications became utterly impossible. After that there were only scattered bands in the Los Angeles area.
“The first thing I tried was to establish communication with other groups. During the electronic experiments I discovered the principle of that.” His fingers indicated the cylinder.
Grandin glanced down at it. “The principle—?”
“During the unprecedented release of atomic energy that arose during the simultaneous bombings of our cities, something happened to the very time continuum in which we exist. Don’t ask me what or how. I don’t know. A crook, a twist, a fold—explain it how you will, I accidentally stumbled upon an electronic circuit that would create a field that would enable passage from one folded section to the adjacent section. The fold proved to be about fifteen years in length, so that I found it possible to pass from the time shortly after the destruction to this period.”
Grandin listened as if in a trance. Jack’s face reflected sober incomprehension. Marcia had come up and now stood listening to Pete’s story.
Disbelief struggled with memory in Grandin’s face. “Why these?” he said at last, holding up the cylinder.
Pete closed his eyes momentarily against some unknown well of pain. “Suppose—” he said. “Just suppose that every living man could see the horror and feel the desolation and fear that you have seen and felt. Do you think men would allow it to happen if they could know the fear that you have known?”
“It would never happen,” breathed Marcia fervently, “if every man could see that world of death.”
Grandin glanced down again at the little cylinder. He felt suddenly cold in the blazing radiance of the sun. He looked into Pete’s eyes, saw there the searching, the intensity of a dream to turn aside the course of the world.
“That is my hope and my dream,” said Pete slowly, when he saw that Grandin was not going to speak. “I built these—” He indicated the cylinder again. “They can be attached to any vehicle. When the vehicle moves across the line where the fold of the time continuum appears, a shift to the future occurs, or vice versa. I have developed an improved ignition system for automobiles, and an improved carburetion method which will double gasoline efficiency. In both of these devices is incorporated the time changer. I supposed that it might be possible to sell some such device to the auto manufacturers, distribute others through garages, filling stations, and so on. Eventually, millions of cars would be so equipped. Near every city they would be driven through the time fold, and their occupants would witness the ruin their own folly was to bring.
“Only once would the vision be experienced. The time changer is built to be self-destructive on passing back to this side of the fold. But in the mind of every man who saw that vision would burn the reality of the horror to come. It might be enough. I don’t know. But reasoning, argument, pleading will never keep man from pulling down the world about his own head. Only fear, terrible, shattering fear of the consequences can persuade him to turn aside from self-destruction. Perhaps a vision of the world lying in death can instill that fear.
“There are other ways to utilize the principle. I have applied it to radios and television sets. Thus these would give for one terrible period of revelation the sight and sound of a dead and dying world. In every country around the earth I hoped that I might recruit agents to help in the distribution of these devices. It’s a gigantic task, one that might occupy the lifetime of a well man.
“I’m given no more than a single year to live, and the pain is too great to work more than a few hours in a day. There is no one in my own age to carry on my work. You can imagine what would happen if I tried to get the scientists of this period to listen to me. They’d laugh at me as a crazy, deluded man even if I showed them the time changer.”
As Pete spoke, he watched the reaction in Grandin’s eyes. He saw disbelief change to bewilderment and slowly melt to uncomprehending sympathy.
“And you do not believe me, either,” he said sadly. “I’ve never told anyone else this story. I thought perhaps you would. ... I just thought you might—”
Very suddenly he stopped talking as his eyes looked distantly down the road. A battered vehicle as decrepit as his own was shambling up the highway. As it approached the garage it turned into the driveway leading to Pete’s.
Grandin’s eyes widened and changed as if a specter had loomed in the air before him. And then dawning belief in the unbelievable and the unreal spread over his face.
The woman, Delsa, and the two men who had appeared with her in the ruins were emerging from the car.
Pete, watching Grandin’s amazed countenance, said softly, “The necessity for my trip has ended. Won’t you all come in where we can talk?”
In that single moment, watching the three strangers reappear, Grandin felt the loss, the sudden terrible collapse of all his logic and reason, his prejudices and a thousand beliefs and faiths. He had even been ready with an explanation for Pete’s burns. Now he knew that all he had seen had been real—somewhere—sometime.
Pete introduced the newcomers, including Delsa, who was his wife. This unexpected knowledge gave the Grandins a start and a moment of unease. They searched the face of the woman for a moment’s hope that their previous estimate of her madness had been wrong. But her eyes were still upon Jack, and there was eagerness and an unnatural hope burning there.
The two men were Dr. Bradburn and Carl Simons, an assistant physicist who had helped Pete in his electronic work.
There was a moment’s stilted acknowledgment of introductions and embarrassing memories.
Delsa said, “It’s my fault they came back, Pete. But I was so sure . . . and when I thought of him escaping—”
Pete silenced her with a touch of his hand. “It’s all right now, darling. They understand now. I’m sure you do, don’t you?” He addressed Grandin and Marcia. “You know the shock you experienced merely passing into that dead city. Perhaps you can understand the shock that my wife—all of us—have known by living through those events and that environment.”
Grandin nodded absently. His mind hadn’t been thinking of those things. It had leaped ahead to the inevitable conclusions of Pete’s story and the concrete evidence of the appearance of these people.
With man’s doom so calculable, his purposeless existence had become purposeful and reasonable. There was a goal worthy of all the energies he had so fruitlessly wasted in the eddies and coves of science. All he had done up to now had contributed to the certainty of man’s annihilation. To attempt to swerve man’s course leading to that futile destiny would be his work from now on.
These were the thoughts that he expressed when they were gathered that evening in the living quarters Pete had erected in part of the garage building.
Dr. Bradburn nodded approvingly. “None of us who have survived the explosions have more than a year to a year and a half to live. Pete has less than any of us. The best he can hope for is to pass his dream into hands that may be able to carry on the work. That is why he has searched so hard for someone who could understand and complete it.”
Marcia said, “I’m terribly sorry we misunderstood you and ran away. But it was such a shock. We were not ready to accept anything as friendly in the forbidding scene—especially after that man tried to steal our gas. But what did you mean, Delsa, when you kept speaking of Jack with such emphasis?”
For a moment Delsa’s eyes reflected panic. She glanced at Pete, but he seemed not to have heard.
“It was nothing,” she said hastily. “Just a fantastic notion that Jack was a certain someone Pete had hoped to find. You’ll have to forgive my actions, for the shock of our experiences has been almost too much for me.”
As if suddenly coming alive out of a deep trance, Pete began to speak. His eyes were farseeing and staring. “Fear,” he said, “only fear will control man’s insatiable lusts. We haven’t come very far up the evolutionary ladder. Not nearly as far as we’ve supposed. But man is not so bad that he doesn’t deserve a chance to prove what he can do. Only fear can prevent his self-destruction before he ever has that chance. Let every man and woman see the ruin and horror to come. Let it burn in the brain of every magistrate and governor of states and nations. Let it haunt the dreams of every minister of state. Only then will men and their rulers begin to work for eternal peace. Only then will they learn that men, and not things, are of chief importance to man. And perhaps it is a forlorn hope, after all—”
To Jack, listening to this talk of the destiny of man and nations, it seemed as if swift years had passed since dawn. He felt raised to man’s estate to have heard such words and seen such sights as had been his in the last two days.
But it seemed more than a brain scarcely into adolescence could endure. He’d forseen a life for himself filled with the excitement of discovery and a thousand skills and inventions of his own hands—but without purpose. Now there was a purpose, foreordained and inevitable, for he knew that his mission was aligned with that of his father for as long as he should live.
When the talk lulled he found his way out into the darkness under the desert stars, and he stood watching them. How long he had been there he did not know, when he heard the sound of a footstep.
He whirled. He recognized the shambling steps of Pete. His first impulse was of fear, for the physical form of the scientist was fearful in the night by the light of the stars and the cloud-swept moon.
“Jack—?” Pete’s voice was hesitant.
“Yes?”
“Will you sit down with me—here on the ground?”
Without waiting for answer, Pete slumped to a sitting position with his back against the side of the garage which was filled with his sign. Jack came down beside him.
“‘Pete Can Fix It.’ Remember those signs along the highway?”
“Yes,” said Jack. “We followed them all the way from Wickenburg. We wondered who this Pete was.”
“I’ve often wondered, too. You see, when I was a boy just about your age I came along this highway with my parents. We were going on a vacation somewhere, but all I can remember is that string of signs, Pete Can Fix It. That’s the only thing I have left of the world before the bombs came. Just that and my scientific knowledge and skill. After the bombing I never knew who I was, not even my name. I remembered no friends or anything that I had been—only that crazy sign, Pete Can Fix It, and those few long-ago days when I came down this highway as a boy. But even the faces of the parents who brought me along here are gone from me.
“I came back to this abandoned garage. I thought it might help bring back the memories—and help find someone I once knew.
“Tell me about yourself, Jack. The things you’ve done, the things you hope to do.”
“Nothing much has happened to me,” said Jack. “I’ve never known what I really wanted to do—until now. I went to school at Meredith. That’s near Elkins, but I guess you wouldn’t know about that. We have a place there where I can have a horse. He’s called Baldy, and we’re good pals, but he was kind of wild at first.”
Pete’s voice caught. “And he threw you—”
“Yeah, when I first got him Pop warned me not to ride him until I’d had some training and Baldy had grown used to me. But I was so anxious that I got him out one day and rode him anyway. He threw me and my foot caught in a stirrup. He dragged me a long ways before it jerked loose, carried me over some barbed wire in the field and ripped my chest.”
“Yes,” Pete whispered suddenly, fiercely, his eyes on the stars overhead. “And you struggled to the house and tried to tell the folks that you fell off the barn because you thought they’d take the horse away from you.”
“That’s right—but how did you know?” Jack turned and looked into Pete’s eyes in a moment’s fear.
“I remember now—all of it. Baldy, the old barn and the porch steps that creaked— Look!”
Pete suddenly opened his shirt, and the moon soared into full brilliance with a sudden crescendo of light that struck the jagged, livid scar that ran across his chest. Jack stared at it a moment, then gasped in horror. He recognized the fishhook shape in the center of his chest.
“You went up to your room alone and prayed that night that Baldy would’t be taken away—”
“Don’t!” Jack cried out.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Pete softly. “You see now why I came back to this road, why I had to find you. You have to know and understand. No one else can carry on my work as you can. Not even—your father. Within two or three months I’ll be utterly useless. In a year I’ll be dead. Learn from . . . your father . . . learn all the science and technique that you can cram into your head. Develop the skill of your hands. Fear—fill the whole earth with fear—fear of man’s own evil. Maybe I haven’t got the answer. Maybe there is no answer. But do your best. I’ve tried to do mine.”
Mercifully, the moon’s light was hidden for an instant while Jack’s eyes fought back the stinging and his young spirit wrestled with the sudden weight that was hardly bearable to it.
Then after a moment he said quietly, “I’ll do the best I can.”
