The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  In substance, old Vorsto himself had seen a man appear out of thin air one night as he was returning from a fishing excursion. Or more accurately, the man had appeared out of a circle of little lights. The man had been dressed much as Vincent was dressed upon his first appearance.

  The man had seen Vorsto and had obviously been frightened. The man had thrown something down on the earth and then had waved his hand into the curious little line of lights. Instantly, man and lights bad disappeared.

  Vorsto had watched for the rest of the night but had seen nothing more. Only by daylight was he brave enough to pick up the shiny square “stone” that the strange figure had thrown to the earth.

  “I was so sure I saw him that I dreamed his face for many nights afterward. It was a sharp face with a long pointed nose and a black blotch on the left cheek. All of those details I could see by the light that was floating down past his head.” Old Vorsto’s eyes glistened as he talked. “But one thing more I remember that has always puzzled me. Why did he throw down only one of the square stones when he had a whole armful of them?”

  “From the reading of that stone,” said Vincent, “I think he must have had several more stops to make, and no time to waste. But we’ll never see him again. By the time he got twelve or fourteen stars down the chain, I’m very much afraid he sank to the bottom of the ocean—and all the rest of his copper plates with him.”

  “He won’t ever come back?” Vorsto asked, much relieved.

  “I think not. But if he does, you can step right up to him and call him by name. His name is Xandibaum.”

  Hunzk looked startled.

  “The same man who wrote the spider book! Then it is true!”

  Vincent looked at him queerly, and a chill ran down his back. Then he shrugged off.

  “Maybe,” he said, not at all sure of himself.

  Penzi and Hunzk and Vincent took their leave. On the way back home they turned the matter over this way and that, and in spite of all of Vincent’s efforts at explanation there were still many baffling mysteries.

  “Here is one thing I can’t get straight,” said Penzi. “Are there many time chains or only one?”

  “Only one, so far as I know,” said Vincent.

  “But did you come here on the same time chain that Xandibaum came on?”

  “Yes. It’s like I told you, I picked up the time chain in Xandibaum’s own house. He had evidently started the thing there, for there was a special air shaft that it worked through. And as I’ve often explained, as soon as it touches the ground or a floor, it reverses its course and climbs back out of reach. Goodness knows where it goes.”

  Penzi was not satisfied. “You say it always comes down at the same place for each age.”

  “It must have,” Hunzk put in proudly. “We know it has come down by this riverside at least three times, once for Xandi, and twice for Ponpo; and it always came down in Xandibaum’s house through the air cave—”

  “Maybe there are lots of time chains,” said Penzi, “one for each age, as you say—”

  “But Vorsto disproved that,” said Vincent. “With his own eyes he saw the time chain appear with Xandibaum and disappear with him. That means that the time chain jumped through the ages with him—”

  “All right,” said Penzi. “Suppose he did drown in the ocean twelve or fourteen ages ago. Why didn’t the time chain stay in that age? How did it get back to Xandibaum’s twentieth-century home if he didn’t strike it back and go back with it?”

  The three of them trudged along in silence for a time pondering Penzi’s question. Vincent had no ready answer. He felt sure that Xandibaum hadn’t come back and stopped in the twentieth-century or the custodian and the neighbors would have known it.

  “Perhaps,” said Hunzk, “an ocean wave struck it and sent it back after Xandibaum had sunk out of reach. It shot back through the ages but he didn’t.”

  “Possibly,” Vincent admitted, “or Xandibaum might have thrown a copper plate at it and struck it back.” He recalled his own temptation to try to bring the thing back within touching range by hurling a stone at it. “Something like that must have happened,” he concluded. “Anyway, I know how to use it now . . .”

  He glanced at Penzi, jogging along, tossing her head back and forth rhythmically. She was the picture of rugged, carefree youth, Vincent thought. It was hard to believe that anything could hurt her deeply. He bluntly announced: “I’ll be leaving this country as soon as the time chain comes my way again.”

  Two years passed.

  Two very long years they were—two years that brought Vincent Harrison closer to the soil that surrounded his shelter, closer to the forest that filled the nooks among the hills where game could be found when Cro-Magnon hunters were lucky.

  In two years Vincent saw the time chain three times more.

  Three times he watched it rise into the skies, sometimes against the blackness of night, sometimes against the blinding white clouds of mid-afternoon. On one of those occasions he lay sick with a high fever, wondering how near death he might be. That time he longed to go back, and would have gone if he had been able.

  The other two times he stood by and watched the lights float down to kiss the earth and slowly rise again. He stood by with his arms folded. Every muscle was tensed but he did not move. He watched the miraculous display of power pass within inches of his strong brown hands. He counted the lights as they wafted past him, his eyes following first the blue and then the red—each extending outward into infinite distance and melting away into nothingness.

  After each visit, a sickness came over him—the sort of nostalgic sickness that comes when one has looked forward to a reunion with scores of old friends, and then for some reason does not see them.

  What was it, Vincent asked himself during the blue weeks that followed these occasions, that made him pass up his opportunity?

  Was it—could it be—the grip of friendship of these Cro-Magnons upon him?

  True, he had come to dress and talk like one of them. He attended their ceremonies. If he had not been so young they would have made him a master of the arts of farming and tool-making. Strange to say, his music and his reading had not worn out for them, but rather had made him a popular visitor throughout the tribe. His stories of far-off times and places were food and drink to them.

  Before the coming of the autumn, the fourth anniversary of his arrival, he fought the matter out with himself and set his plans definitely.

  By this time he knew precisely when to expect the autumn arrival of the time chain. It would come in with the equinox. That had been the case every time he had seen it, beginning with his spring college vacation of four years previous—from which he had leaped instantly into a Cro-Magnon autumn.

  He set his plans. He decided in what manner he would dispose of his few possessions. He decided in what hasty, brusque words he would say his final farewells to the Fangler family and his other close friends. He concluded it would be best to wait until the last minute to announce his plans.

  One by one he notched off the days of the summer on his crude wooden calendar.

  Hunzk came for his reading lessons and took the book back home with him for study. Each new day he would come back with new and disturbing questions. Vincent answered them listlessly.

  But Penzi did not come back with Hunzk. Penzi was no longer annoying Vincent with her company. Not since that day that the three of them had walked home together from Vorsto’s had Penzi thrown herself in Vincent’s path.

  Sometimes Vincent saw her. That was inevitable, for good weather and tribal gatherings always went hand in hand.

  When Vincent did see her it only strengthened his determination to leave this age and this land as soon as possible.

  The reason was that Penzi had become beautiful.

  She was seventeen now, and she was a very different person from the little thirteen-year-old raggamuffin who had listened so eagerly to Vincent’s fireside stories that first winter. Now Vincent could not lo
ok at her without seeing the prettiness of her lips and her round peach-like cheeks and the soft lustrous clouds of dark hair that fell over her shoulders.

  Vincent knew instinctively that he must go back to the twentieth century soon or he would never go back.

  Sometimes he wondered whether Penzi had made her official declaration of whom she would choose to invite her to marriage. He supposed she had, though he had ceased to pry Hunzk for items of family or tribal gossip.

  One of the books that Vincent had reread dozens of times included a detailed story of the rise and fall of the Cro-Magnons, and the mystery of their vanishment.

  A little patch of clouds drifted out of the eastern horizon and the moon slid stealthily up into the vast dome of blue. The faint sounds of the gurgling river were the only music of the serene night. It was intriguing to stop and think that there were endless ages of time like this—but a throb of action was beating in Vincent’s blood.

  “I’m the only one who knows that this race is doomed. Whatever their fate is to be, I have the means of escaping it. The way out is mine—no one else’s.

  “I’d be a fool to invest any more of my life with a race that is headed for a dead end. All the friendship and work and love that I might plant here will be fruitless in the long run.

  “Of course if I’m just living for the pleasure of here and now—with no thought of where this old human race is going—with no responsibility—”

  Vincent Harrison found himself lost in thought. A change had come over him in the past four years, and suddenly he saw it etched as clearly as the moon against the sky.

  Four years ago he had fallen into this age all hot and bothered about returning some library books on time and practicing some maestro’s composition and getting some notebooks filled and having some dates that would enhance his prestige in his fraternity.

  But four years in a new age, with a few books and tons of quiet thought and hours of talk with men who were groping for the basic elements of civilization—these things had given him an insight and a perspective . . .

  A perspective on mankind as a whole—what it was and where it was going . . .

  And now here he was lying out under the bright moonlit sky, sleepless, pondering, charging himself with responsibilities toward the whole of the human race.

  “If the Cro-Magnons are headed for a dead end,” he repeated, “I’d better get back to the twentieth century where I belong.” He muttered his words aloud. “I’d better get back . . . If nothing else, I owe it to my descendants.”

  “Talking to yourself?” came a voice out of the darkness.

  Vincent looked around to see Hunzk approaching by the river path. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “A bad night to sleep is a good night to talk,” said Hunzk. “I have many things I need to talk over with you.”

  CHAPTER VII

  The Time Chain Once More

  Hunzk dropped down leisurely and propped his elbows against the warm sand. Vincent stood, arms folded. He was at once on the defensive, an unusual attitude for him in the presence of his closest Cro-Magnon friend.

  “Go ahead, Hunzk,” he said in a cool, uncommunicative manner. He waited, staring out into the skies, thinking how this same bright night would look from the top of a skyscraper. His fraternity had had a skyscraper party once, and he remembered vividly how he and another fellow and their dates had slipped down to the museum floor and persuaded the guard to let them browse through the relics, even though it was after hours—and how the girls had shrugged at the sight of artifacts from races dead and gone, and begged to be taken back to the moonlit roof garden . . .

  “Ponpo,” said Hunzk casually, “I am troubled until I cannot sleep.”

  “Why?”

  “Because something is going to happen to my race.”

  “What?”

  “I do not know. Even the men of your century did not know. But whatever it is, it is coming soon.”

  “Do you see any dangers about you, Hunzk?”

  “If I could see the dangers, Ponpo, I would fight them. I would organize this whole valley to fight them. It is not the dangers which can be seen that I fear. It is the dangers that I cannot see . . .”

  “Perhaps you are borrowing trouble,” said Vincent. He strolled down to the river’s edge and bathed his perspiring face and neck. Hunzk followed him.

  “It might be war, though we have never had any great fighting among us in recent years. The tribes to the south never do more than threaten. Or it might be disease—”

  “Hunzk,” Vincent interrupted, “how long have you been thinking these thoughts?”

  “Only since Penzi read to me—” Hunzk put his fingers to his lips and tried to take back his words. Vincent, who had started to scoop up another handful of water, stopped motionless. “Penzi has been reading?”

  “I have been teaching her, just as you have taught me,” said Hunzk guiltily. “But she forbade me to tell you . . .”

  Long after that night’s conversation, the news about Penzi still thumped through Vincent’s arteries. From the first, he had marvelled at the ability of these Cro-Magnons to accept the twentieth century knowledge and outlook. If this fine race had only survived to get the benefits of the manifold developments of the centuries following their disappearance, what a proud race they would have been!

  So Penzi, as well as Hunzk, was learning to read and think on Vincent’s level! And Vincent was not supposed to know. It occurred to him that many things may have happened in the Fangler family which he didn’t know.

  Vincent cut another notch in his wooden calendar. The days were growing shorter. Summer was passing. Soon would come the equinox . . .

  Weeks later a shrill voice rent the afternoon stillness. “Ponpo! Ponpo! Come quick! Come!”

  Vincent thought someone must have been murdered, the way the young son of Fangler was yelling. He leaped from his perch above the cave entrance and bounded down the path toward the frantic child. “What is it, my boy?”

  “Hurry! Penzi wants you!”

  “Where is she?”

  But the youngster took no more time to answer questions. He led the way down the hillsides with the nimbleness and speed of a hunted rabbit, Vincent following.

  The course led straight to Vincent’s own shelter. “What would Penzi be doing there?” His whirling thoughts could find no answer.

  “Hurry, Ponpo!” That was Penzi’s voice. “You can still make it!” She was running beside him. “The time chain . . .”

  “And we’re going with you, Ponpo!” That shocking announcement boomed forth in Hunzk’s big voice. As Vincent rounded his shelter he came upon the party of them—the other two children jumping up and down with excitement, Hunzk and Lindova arm in arm and dressed for travel—and rising above the level of their heads, the gleaming time chain!

  “No time to lose!” Hunzk barked. “If that thing will take three of us, Lindova and I are going to risk it. Here, let me lift you, Ponpo! Hold tight around my waist, Lindova—”

  Before Vincent could catch his bearings, the strong arms of Hunzk lifted him off his feet and held him high. The little blue and red glowing dots were right before his fingertips.

  In that crucial second of time Vincent’s old rebellion against leaping out of this age once more surged through him. Even with Hunzk and Lindova going with him, he was being railroaded out. He was being packed off. Penzi thrust the saxophone case into his arm.

  He caught it under his elbow. Then, on a decisive impulse, his hand seized Penzi by the wrist. His other hand swung at the first of the blue lights.

  But the swing took Hunzk slightly off balance—with the result that Vincent’s hand struck through a full score of the reddish lights.

  The reeling sensation lasted only a split second. It was the sensation of a harmless tumble of the human pyramid—Hunzk Lindova, Vincent and Penzi—plus the saxophone. They all fell to the ground—different ground.

  Vincent jumped to his feet and whirled on Hunzk.


  “What did you do that for?” he asked angrily. “Now there’s no telling where we are. . .” he paused to stare around, saw a primitive forest, and no sign of living thing “. . . this isn’t 1941, certainly, and that’s where we wanted to go. I hit the right light, all right, but you made me hit a whole string of them. We might even be in the world of the insects, 102,000 years in the future.”

  “I hope so,” said Hunzk eagerly. “Then we can fight!”

  Penzi looked around, speculation in her bright eyes.

  “No, I don’t think we are in that age,” she remarked. “This looks very much like our own world, back in 25,000 B.C.”

  Vincent stared at her, then looked around soberly. “Yes, it does, almost,” he agreed, “except for one thing . . .” he pointed, “off there, through the trees, I see a building. There were no buildings in your world.”

  Hunzk uttered a loud cry, and followed by Lindova, he bounded toward the clearing Vincent had indicated.

  “Let us go see it!” he shouted.

  Vincent bit his lip, and grabbed Penzi’s arm.

  “Come on,” he said. “He is foolish for running blindly ahead. Maybe there are dangers here. If I’m not mistaken, that building is in ruins.”

  “I saw that, too,” Penzi agreed.

  “You did?” Vincent looked down at her. “Sharp eyes, haven’t you?”

  They went after Hunzk and Lindova, soon caught up with them, standing beside the ruined building, staring at it in puzzlement.

  “There is no one living here,” said Hunzk in a tone of disappointment. “It has fallen down.”

  “Not fatten” corrected Vincent in perturbed tones. “That building has been very thoroughly wrecked! Almost as if by a . . . war!”

  Lindova’s brow wrinkled. “A war?” Vincent nodded. “Yes. That building is only a few years old. The mortar is comparatively new. Even the smashed bricks are not covered with moss. But there’s something funny about this building. It isn’t modem. It isn’t even the kind of a building you’d expect from a future world, past 1941. It’s almost a primitive building—such as the Cro-Magnons might have built, had they surviv . . .” Vincent halted abruptly.