The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Understand, I want you to keep apart,” Jipfur said. “There is territory enough to keep you busy separately. If people see you together too often you’ll lose your charm.”

  Our chariot rolled on, and neither Kish nor Jipfur made any comment to reveal what sort of charm those forlorn and sinister-looking wretches possessed. Kish was stiffly silent, as a good attendant should be, and I took my cue from him. Jipfur, oblivious to us, hummed pleasantly to himself.

  We swung off what was apparently the main road, took a bylane past a square of irrigated farm land, and stopped only when we came to the bank of the Euphrates river. Here three female slaves were operating a shaduf, letting the pole down until the long bucket filled, then elevating it and pouring it into the irrigation trough.

  One of the workers was Betty. Jipfur stepped down from the chariot, walked over to them and asked for a drink.

  “Do you think, he is thirsty?” Kish asked me.

  That was a strange question, coming from the lips of this slim, handsome, well-disciplined young attendant. Its cynicism told me volumes. Kish’s silence in his master’s presence was the silence of dynamite in cold storage. But he was opening the way to an understanding between the two of us. He added, “If that yellow-haired girl were at the top of yonder ziggurat, Jipfur would go there to be thirsty.”

  “Now that I think of it,” I said, “I’m thirsty too.”

  I chanced the wrath of my new master and all his gods by my bold action. I stepped down from the chariot, and before Jipfur came up from the water jug to give me a merciless bawling-out, I got in a sly word with Betty—and that was what really counted.

  “I’ve just been chained to Jipfur,” I said. “But I’ll break jail whenever you say—”

  “Here—one week from tonight,” she whispered, scarcely looking at me, “when the late moon rises.”

  Jipfur ordered me back into the chariot, and after he had finished his joking with Betty, telling her he had tried to buy her, but Slaf-Carch had wanted all of four shekels, and he knew she was only worth two, we drove back down the lane. And you can see I memorized every turn in the road between that shaduj and the gates of Babylon.

  CHAPTER III

  One week later, an hour after midnight, I slipped out of Babylon and dog-trotted southward. I was a good hour ahead of the moon—only there wouldn’t be a moon tonight, or stars either. The blackness was broken only by the city’s torchlights and an occasional flare of lightning.

  No threatening storm could have kept me from my appointment. The past week of waiting had been like a year.

  Not that I hadn’t been busy every minute. Learning to work for Jipfur was no cinch. But, luckily for me, the tall lanky attendant, Kish, had tipped me off to the arrogant patesi’s pet peeves, and tutored me on those matters that every young slave ought to know. Such as, the best way to walk out of the master’s palace at midnight without being caught.

  Thunder rumbled over my head. “Betty won’t be there,” I kept telling myself. “The storm may stop her. Or Slaf-Carch—”

  Up went my temperature again! After all the talk I had heard the past week, the very thought of Slaf-Carch and Jipfur set me on fire with jealousy. The rich young nephew was determined to buy Betty before fall. His uncle was holding out stubbornly.

  I groped along through the darkness, praying cynically to Marduk to keep me between the irrigation ditches and stop me before I walked into the river. Then a streak of lightning burned across the horizon, and there were the black poles of the shaduj right before me, and there was Betty waiting. Her braids, blowing in the breeze, were platinum under the purple flash.

  “You are here,” I said in Babylonian. “Did anyone come with you?”

  “No one. I didn’t dare tell anybody I was coming.”

  Her fluent English was music to my ears. Her low voice was rich and melodic, and I couldn’t help thinking what an interesting study it would be on the vocoder.

  “Sporting of you to come,” I said. “It’s a queer time and place for a date, but if Babylonians go in for this sort of thing, far be it from me to—”

  “Don’t lead me into the river, Mr. Norton,” she said, and her fingers clinging lightly to my arm drew me back.

  “Just call me Hal,” I said, sensing that I was quoting a line no doubt trite even in these ancient times.

  “It’s good luck to be near the Euphrates,” said Betty, “but not so good to fall in it.”

  We sat on the sandy bank, enshrouded by darkness. Betty repeated a rhythmic little Babylonian proverb about the Euphrates and good luck. There was a legend, she said, that if you looked upon the Euphrates a certain number of times—the exact number being unknown—you would not die as other men. You would live on, and your manner of life would become a mystery to all men.

  “Very probably,” I said.

  “You mustn’t doubt it,” Betty declared. “The Babylonians can prove it. Have you seen a funny little flat-headed man who stands at the foot of the great ziggurat? He has stood there for generations, and they say he’ll still be there when the ziggurat is gone. That’s because he looked upon the Euphrates—”

  “The right number of times—yes. Very fanciful.”

  My slightly sarcastic interruption caused a momentary rift. I couldn’t conceive of Betty’s taking any stock in this balderdash, even though some of these superstitious ancients might choose to believe it.

  “Curious if true,” I added, after the silence had become oppressive. “I’ll stop and talk, with that funny little flat-headed man some day.”

  “He can’t talk—but he’s there.”

  “Can’t? Is he alive?”

  “He’s petrified—but he’s there.”

  I’m afraid I laughed rather too heartily. Betty didn’t intend any joke. With all the earnestness of a superstition-befogged Babylonian she clung to her fanciful story. He was there, she repeated, so in a sense he was living on, in a manner of life that was a mystery to all men.

  It was my turn to fall silent. Lightning flashed across the sky, raindrops began to spatter intermittently.

  “We’d better find shelter,” said Betty.

  She caught my hand and led me along the riverbank to an overhanging rock that protected us from the plopping drops. It was a shelter which the slaves often frequented, she said. I couldn’t see a thing until the purple lightning came. Then I caught sight of the shallow cavern we were in, a few yards above the broad Euphrates. Now all was black again, except for a few twinkling torchlights eight miles upstream—Babylon, asleep.

  “This river gets into your blood. It’s making me over. It will do the same for you.”

  “Not if I can help it,” I thought. Aloud I said, “I’ve got no business here. If there’s any way to go back to twentieth century America—”

  “I know how you feel. I pampered myself with the same sentiments for the first year.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Nearly three years.”

  “So you got trapped by the Colonel’s lousy line, too?” I said, at last enjoying an opportunity to uncork my compressed bitterness. “I suppose Milholland gave you the same pep talk he gave me—one week of the past—or two at most—a thousand dollars a week—fame and immortality for your contribution to his celebrated collection of animal voices?”

  “Something like that,” said Betty reflectively.

  “The guy’s a screwball.”

  “Definitely.”

  “How’d you get mixed up with him in the first place?”

  “He’s my uncle,” said Betty, and I groaned like a punctured balloon. She went on, unheeding, “He’s no ordinary screwball—he’s the grand duke of all screwballs. That’s why we’re stuck here. You don’t mind my talking about it?”

  “Mind? I’ve practically gone blind for lack of light on the subject,” I said.

  The rain was smashing down on the vast river now and our cavern roared and groaned with echoes of the violent percussions. The warm rock
wall was at our backs. Our shoulders barely touched. Betty talked, and her voice, close to my ear, was like a magic whisper from far flung centuries against the roar of the ages.

  “I’ll begin with my father,” she said. “He was a great man—a genius. If he had lived, the world would have looked up to him. He was a student of Einstein, but he had his own distinct theories of universes interlocked through time. His experiments were highly successful up to that fateful year when he began to use time-transfer devices.”

  “Then your father was Professor Clifton Milholland, the physicist and inventor?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately his laboratory fell to my uncle, the absent-minded Colonel, who is so zaney about making a name for himself as a naturalist that he’d gladly send you to the sun if any new animal calls were to be found there. That’s why you came here, wasn’t it? What did you bring, a phonograph-recorder?”

  “A vocoder,” I said. “You’ve seen the mused, I suppose? They break a voice down into its simple elements, such as volume—tone qualities—pitch.”

  “I remember,” said Betty. “And they remake voices, too.”

  “Right. This instrument of mine is the latest, most compact model. I could take an impression of your voice; then, by operating the keys, I could make it speak my words to you in your voice—that is, in the same pitch-range, with the same overtones, the same consonant qualities, and so on. Your own mother wouldn’t know but what it was you.”

  “Remarkable,” she mused. “Have you used it?”

  “Not once . . . Well, I did take a record of Slaf-Carch’s voice—he was a vibrant, mellow baritone, you know—but I never completed the demonstration. We were prisoners at the time, and he was more interested in telling me about a foreigner-girl named Betty.” Betty quickly shifted the subject away from dangerous ground. “I suppose Jipfur has been curious about the instrument?”

  “He’s never seen it,” I said.

  “Then you’ve hid it?”

  “The fact is, I got rid of it a few days before Jipfur claimed me.”

  “Got rid of it?”

  “Sold it—to a peddler with a mule cart full of secondhand junk. I needed a little coin to buy a present for Slaf-Carch in exchange for my keep. The peddler paid a good price. He said he could pan it off on some magician as a magic box. It looks magic enough—a solid black case—heavy—”

  “You must be a cousin to Jack and the Bean Stalk, selling a valuable instrument like that—”

  “No one will know how to use it. For that matter, I doubt if anyone will open it. It locks like a steel chest, and I forgot to throw in the key. But some charlatan will get his money’s worth.”

  “And scare money out of innocent peasants—you soulless creature,” said Betty. “I’d like to have heard it work, just for the sake of old times. Did you give the Colonel a demonstration?”

  I was glad for the talk to drift back to America. Betty’s coming to this age was still a mystery to me; but I knew we must have many things in common. From the safe distance of twenty-five centuries we began poking fun at Colonel Milholland.

  “The old boy began reading the encyclopedia to me as soon as I dropped in for an interview,” I recounted. “He had a passage about a bull moose—its mating season, and such.”[*]

  “I suppose he offered to mount an animal for you if you, could bring one back from this age?”

  “Come to think of it, he did. Though it was his own wall-space he pointed toward. He suggested a bull moose with wide antlers. Don’t tell me he expected you to bring back some big game?”

  “You haven’t seen me out gunning for moose, have you?” she laughed.

  “If anything, vice versa.”

  “Meaning what?” she asked. “Meaning that there’s a certain bull moose by the name of Jipfur who dwells in a forest called Babylon. If you remember, that encyclopedic article said that in the fall the mating season—”

  “I suggest we change the subject,” said Betty shortly.

  “Very well,” I said. “But I’m still in the dark as to why you came here.”

  “In search of my family,” said Betty, a pained note in her voice.

  She told me the whole story.

  Her father had insisted on being the first to try his own invention. She and her brother were on the roof porch with him, at their Rocky Mountain laboratory, and preparations were almost complete. There were keys provided for any of a hundred different time jumps.

  Suddenly Colonel Milholland came out to join them, and in his blundering absent-minded way he dropped a book on the keys.

  “Father had warned that the machine would cut clean,” Betty said. “The instant the book struck the keys, the big magic hoops swished down from overhead aid caught my father just as he was crossing the transfer zone. His head was sliced instantly.”

  The girls’ voice became a tense whisper.

  “At once he was gone—all except the tell-tale evidence of the deadly stroke. His left leg had been sliced diagonally below the knee. The severed part lay there, not bleeding. And with it—”

  “A part of the head?”

  “Yes. A left section of the forehead, with most of the left eyeball, the left cheekbone, part of the nose, mouth, chin—”

  “But the rest of his body?”

  “Gone—through time—to one of the hundred distant ages.”

  Her whisper ceased, and there was only the solid, soothing roar of downpouring rain.

  “Couldn’t you recover the body?” I asked.

  “Not a gambler’s chance,” said Betty with a sigh. Her voice was strong and firm, now, for she had long reconciled herself to the tragedy. “You see, the instant it happened, the Colonel, seeing what he had done, jerked the book off the keys. Which ones he had struck we’ll never know.”

  “No dust marks?”

  “We applied the microscope without much luck. Finally our best guess was that he had shot backward about twenty-five centuries, which may have been a few hundred years long, or short. Anyhow, when the Colonel, months later, decided to use the time machine for his hobby, my brother agreed to make the passage if the Colonel would send him back twenty-five hundred years.”

  “Then your brother did come here?”

  “Yes—but he accomplished nothing. If father’s body came to this age it was either devoured by lions, or buried. No clue was ever found. That was the end of that. For a time my brother squandered his days in nature study, but soon he realized that he had come on a one-way time-ride, so he cast his lot with the patesi who took him in—good old Slaf-Carch.”

  “Good old Slaf-Carch,” I echoed. “When my brother failed to return,” Betty continued, “I suspected that the Colonel wasn’t operating the time machine correctly for return trips. I wanted him to call in some scientists, but he was too conceited. Besides, we had all of my father’s instructions in black and white. So we pondered over them, but they were too deep for me. I had to admit that the Colonel seemed to be on the right track, as far as I could tell.”

  “Then you signed up for a one-way ride, I suppose?”

  “Yes. My brother had made me promise not to follow him, but I was desperate, with him and Dad both gone. If they had been swallowed up in thin air, I might as well know the worst.” That was Betty—as nervy as they come. She was strong and adventurous. A girl had to be, to come through the crises she’d faced. A man looks at a beautiful girl and tells himself there’s his prize and the campaign’s as good as won. But Betty Milholland—well, maybe the man had better think twice, whether his name is Slaf-Carch, or Jipfur—or Hal Norton.

  Those were my thoughts as she went on with her story. She had reached this age, she said, just in time to talk with her brother before his death. A chariot wheel had cut him down. He had been in Slaf-Carch’s service. A band of Assyrian cutthroats had made a surprise attack on Borbel, and the suburb had suffered several casualties.

  Betty felt no bitterness toward Slaf-Carch. She was proud that her brother had raillied to the town’s defen
se, and proud that Slaf-Carch had later led a retaliatory expedition—though this latter effort had been ill-fated, having led to Slaf-Carch’s own capture and eventual enslavement.

  “There,” said Betty, darting out of her seriousness, I’ve given you so much personal data you’ll feel like a personal credit corporation. Do I get the loan, or don’t I?”

  “I think we can arrange a mortgage, Miss Milholland,” I said, “On your estimated value of—er—what did Jipfur say you were worth?”

  Her joking mood stopped short at the mention of Jipfur. She had heard rumors, she said bitterly, that she wasn’t supposed to hear. Jipfur had offered Slaf-Carch a hundred and twenty shekels for her. However, she had been secretly informed that Slaf-Carch would never sell her. With that assurance, she had determined to accept her lot as a Babylonian slave.

  The rain was over. The clouds opened and a streak of hazy moonlight sifted down on the river. Two wet, ragged creatures came up the river path, black against the graying sky.

  As they came closer, I guessed them to be two of the three “Serpents” I had seen a week before. They entered the cavern and melted into the blackness of the wall opposite us.

  I do not know whether they could see us. They talked in hushed tones, then fell silent.

  “It’s nearly dawn,” Betty whispered. “I must get back.”

  “I’ve been living for the past eighteen months for this talk with you,” I ssfid. “But now that a couple ragamuffins have intruded on our date, how about making it again soon?”

  “We don’t dare risk seeing each other often,” said Betty, “except as we happen to meet in the line of duty. But under the surface of convention we’ll know that we’re—friends.”

  I suggested that she might use a stronger word than “friends.” After all, we had everything in common—But my delusions about falling in love were instantly derailed.

  “Hal, if were back in our own century,” Betty said, with a frankness that was dizzying, “you’re the sort of fellow I might fall for without half trying. But we’d better face the facts. We’re stuck here—five hundred and fifty B.C. Whatever we’ve been brought up to believe is right or wrong, the right thing in this age is for us to submit to the ways of Babylonian slaves.”