He stiffened suddenly; something moved under the surface of his mind. The catapulting out of the ditch, from a stimulus that exploded... A sudden massive release of energy, catapulting mass, throwing it thirty feet... A straight line on the ground but a parabola in the air...
There was a twist to his vision, and the ditch was suddenly the time-line. The matter-transmitter was a rubber ball, bouncing back and forth from one side of the ditch to the other; but if you rotated the propelling surge at two right angles, the rubber ball shot up and came down well forward.
The words weren't right, the analogy wasn't really quite accurate, but he felt it, he knew it, he could wind it in wire; he had the concept now.
He could build a time machine.
Suddenly, he felt as though he were cocooned, trapped, locked into a future he hadn't really chosen, only let himself be pushed into. No! he screamed inside himself, and kicked his three-inch sole into the ground, set his teeth, clawed his fingers into the earth, and the angry negation boiled up in him: Not yet! I won't build it yet! I won't!
His anger wrenched a rift into the pathway to the future, opened a narrow channel leading straight to the empty tract house, and he knew it would stay open for as long as he wished it. He could walk straight down to that tract house if he wanted to, where everything was empty inside, and he could build it to his own shape and liking.
Angus smiled, beginning to relax, breathing more easily. He couldn't be caught. He would have to choose his future.
And he didn't. He kept his eyes on the tract house, the alternative, the life he wanted, the life he'd chosen on his own.
A sudden flash at one of the empty windows; a clot of earth shot into the air three feet to his right, pebbles stung his cheek, a shower of dirt; then the report, a loud, flat clap, harsh.
Angus knelt, staring, transfixed. A gunshot...
He threw himself flat and rolled as the second shot sounded, rolled and rolled frantically toward the crater, the only cover around, bullets tearing the ground around him. Pain seared his huge shoulder-muscle; he screamed, rolling, gunfire echoing, filling the world; pain ripped his arm, but he kept rolling, and there were more gunshots now, faster and faster, and...
He fell, howling in terror, for an hour, a second, eternity...
Earth struck up at his back, laid him flat, drove the breath from him; his head struck, hard, and the world swam about him.
Slowly, it settled and steadied. Silence rang in his ears; the only sound was his own hoarse, harsh breathing, out there, past the ringing in his ears...
The gunfire had stopped.
Then footsteps, quick, crunching in gravel, approaching... Angus tensed.
Yorick appeared over the edge of the crater, looking down, worried, grim, an old M-1 rifle in his hand.
Angus stared up, unbelieving.
"Y' okay, Ang?"
Slowly, Angus sat up. His right arm felt dead, his shoulder too. There would be pain there in a minute... He nodded.
"C'mon out, then." Yorick bent down, held out a hand. "They know there's no point in trying now."
Angus glanced at the rifle, swallowed, and grappled Yorick's hand and arm, pulled himself to his feet, out of the crater, Yorick half-lifting him. He stood shakily, one hand clamped onto Yorick's shoulder for support, and looked about him at the open field, the few trees, the tract house... There might've been ten snipers around...
But then, there might've been twenty GRIPE agents, too.
"C'mon." Yorick slung an arm around Angus's back, supporting him under the armpits, turned him toward the battered old Chevrolet.
Angus stumbled along with him, feeling guilty, ashamed, like a child caught being naughty. Just once, he wished, just once, Yorick would tell him he'd been a fool to go off alone, without a guard...
But the big man never would, of course. Angus's mouth twisted wryly. After all, that would be insubordination—wouldn't it? Even if Angus hadn't decided to invent the time machine yet, even if Angus hadn't decided to become Doc.
"It was worth it," he muttered, knowing Yorick would know what he was talking about. "It was all worth it. Because..."
The adrenaline ebbed just that little bit more, and the pain it had been blocking stabbed through—pain, sudden and scorching. He threw back his head, screaming.
Yorick frowned, turned...
And saw the hole in Angus's shoulder, and blood.
Angus had some very weird dreams while he was under the anesthesia. A myriad of faces, all his own, all lined and careworn but, other than that, identical to his, and all fifty years old: a business man, a farmer, a professor, an electrical engineer, a good husband and father living in a small tract house with a wife and a horde of kids...
At least he knew that one was impossible.
They swam past his face in endless succession but, again and again and again, one face out of all swam up to leer down at him, one face recurring, a face with a white lab coat below it, looking down at him with contempt and disgust. Each time Angus felt an answering anger and hatred, and the face would recede for a time, and the parade would begin anew.
A hundred, a thousand of them, some happy, some despairing, most barely content, or at least resigned: they were all the Anguses that could be, all the possible men that he could become—but only one of them would live, become real, the one that he decided would be.
The rest?
The rest would vanish as though they had never been—which, of course, they never would have. They were only potential, all of them, including the old bastard in the white lab coat.
That was the strangest dream, the most vivid, and it came back, again and again. Between that and the pain-killers they fed him all the next day, he could almost see the black haze around him, dark and palpable.
The day after, he came limping back home with Yorick's arm ready to grab in case he should stumble. He collapsed into the armchair in his bedroom and stayed there, the black haze still around him, unseen now, but there nonetheless. Angus simply sat, numb, drinking the mugs of soup that Yorick brought him now and then without tasting them, letting the shock wear off—but it was the dream that had shocked him more than the bullet.
Which one of those faces would he make real?
None of them! Something inside him shouted. I'm going to live the life I choose!
Which of course he would—and one of those future selves would thereby become real.
So he sat alone in the room while the afternoon faded and the twilight turned into night—there in the darkness, with only the light from a distant streetlamp, sitting, staring into space, hands lying useless in his lap.
Finally he rose, slowly, stiffly, and went out into the living room.
Yorick looked up from his newspaper with relief. "Feeling better, Angus?"
Angus didn't answer, only took down his coat from the peg and went out into the night.
Angus limped from one pool of lamplight to another, letting the black fog settle over his mind, letting random thoughts spin through, go wheeling away, reeling and laughing, howling derision at him. The parade of faces moved past him again, himself fifty years old in one suit of clothes after another, one hat after another.
Twenty yards behind him, there was a grunt, a sudden scuffle, but Angus didn't even hear it. He was aware only of the fragmented images in the darkness behind his eyes, the waves of chill shuddering through him.
He couldn't make sense of it. Any of it.
Behind him, a black-clothed man stepped out from behind a tree, lifting a strange-looking pistol.
Across the street, another man stepped into the light of a streetlamp, leveling a pistol at the first.
The first hesitated, but another man stepped out of the shadows on his side of the street, leveling a rifle.
Across the street, another man stepped out and lifted a rifle of his own.
The first man heard above him the sound of a rifle being cocked.
Across the street, a sizzle sounded, briefly lightin
g the face of a sniper in a tree; the muzzle of his weapon began to glow.
All the assassins looked at one another, shrugged, and stepped back into the shadows.
Angus walked on, unheeding.
Behind him came a parade of twenty sharpshooters, each with weapon ready, each watching for the slightest opening from the others, an opening which never came.
Finally Angus came to the lights of a business district. He stopped, mental images gradually fading enough for him to recognize a coffee shop. He went in; the door closed behind him.
The would-be assassins looked at one another, waited a few minutes, then quietly slipped back into the shadows.
Inside the coffee shop, the presence of other people, the susurrus of conversation around him, brought Angus out of his brown study and back into the world of the living. He looked around him, frowning, then down into his coffee cup—and suddenly realized his vulnerability. That's when he began to shake.
When the tremors had subsided, he stared down into the darkness of the coffee as though waiting for inspiration to rise. He sat in the corner with his token cup cooling before him, then remembered that light and company didn't necessarily make him safe and lifted his gaze, watching the few other people in the room very carefully, dread hollowing his belly, waiting for someone to take out a gun.
Somehow, he didn't want to go back outside.
He didn't notice that two of the other patrons were indeed watching him very closely—but were watching each other more closely still.
Fortunately, it was a coffee house that stayed open all night. Between the continual cups of coffee and the constant apprehension, Angus should have been on the verge of nervous collapse by sunrise—but adrenaline can keep pumping just so long, and Angus was still convalescent, so even though he had spent a long, sleepless night, he was strangely calm as the street outside lightened with false dawn. He finished his coffee, rose, and went out the door.
A minute later, the other two patrons rose too, as if by common consent, and followed him.
Angus turned his steps toward his apartment, then lost track of what he was doing, absorbed once again in the memory of that parade of fifty-year-old faces. If only he could find out which one would come to be, how he would choose...
He stopped stock-still outside an apartment house as insight struck. Of course! He could! He could find out how it all came out in, say, thirty years. All he had to do was build the time machine—and use it! He could destroy it after that one trip, if he wanted to.
Of course, he could do it without the time machine, for that matter—but on this issue, his sentry-host might be less than honest and, this time at least, Angus had to be sure.
So. It had to be the time machine. And he was the only man in the world who could build one, right now...
And he could. He was sure of that. He remembered the cardinal exploding, remembered himself shooting out of the ditch, and was certain.
For a moment, though, he was torn. Why should he take an advantage that was denied to the rest of humanity?
On the other hand, if he had to take all the disadvantages that went with being Angus McAran, why shouldn't he take the one big advantage with them?
Rage and resentment poured through him. Damn it, if the world was going to do all this to him, he was blasted well going to take it for everything he could!
He didn't even stop to wonder where Yorick was as he stomped through the living room and locked himself in his bedroom.
He got out the asbestos pad, the soldering iron, the tools, the wire. Then he sat down and started winding a coil.
Three hours, three new coils. Open the matter transmitter, solder in a few new resistors, replace the coils, link in a new rheostat and one hell of a big capacitor. He plugged it in, put away his tools, and sat down with his slide rule. A trajectory through the fourth dimension should require the same amount of power for the same "distance," after the initial surge that set it at right angles to the matter transmission trajectory... Angus frowned, slipped the stick, made some notes.
Half an hour later, he ran a few quick experiments, sending a sugar cube a minute ahead, waiting...
It didn't show up.
Angus scowled, turned down the rheostat, tried again... and again, and again, and again...
He got out the tools, hooked in a rheostat with reduction gear and, with the resultant fine-tuning, managed to get a sugar-cube to reappear after a ten-minute wait.
He hooked in a meter, took a reading, went back to the slide rule. Re-figure, re-hypothesize, re-experiment—after four hours, he finally got results to match predictions.
He felt a cold chill on his spine. On house current only, he had a two-hundred-thousand-year-range. Apparently time travel didn't require quite as much power as he'd thought. Of course, that was only for the mass of a sugar cube, but still...
He scowled, thinking furiously... Of course! He was doing a flat trajectory now, not a bank shot off the chronocline... But could that make so very much difference?
His lips pressed tight. It didn't matter, did it? Theorize later; all that mattered now was that he had a machine that could take him where he wanted to go. He set the rheostat for thirty years, checked the terminals to make sure the polarity was future-ward (if he reversed the connections, he'd go back in time), and stepped to the center of the room, under the hanging coil, with the remote button in his hand.
Shouts, yells, from the living room. A series of muted, heavy thuds—silenced gunshots! A scream; running feet coming up to the door, stopping; the sound of splintering wood, more muted thuds...
Angus stared at the door, amazed it was still intact, paralyzed with horror.
He snapped out of the paralysis, limped to the doorway with the button still in his hand, threw the door wide...
Yorick knelt just outside, blocking the narrow hall, kneeling behind a barrier of a chair and a broken table (the top was chipped, and Angus caught the gleam of metal). Pencil-thin beams of ruby light speared over Yorick's head, through the wood of the chair, just missing him as he twisted aside, fired with a silenced automatic...
A shout of triumph down the hall; a ruby pencil charred wood near Angus's head, singeing his cheek. He jumped back, howling, and a ruby ray speared through the space where his head had been.
Yorick's head snapped up; he saw Angus and his face went livid with rage. "Go!" he bellowed, and his foot lashed out, cracking into Angus's hip-bone, slamming him back into the bedroom. "Get out of here! Get out, or we're all dead! Go on, get into the future, GO!"
"But..."
Yorick twisted aside just as a ray snapped through the wood. Another ray crackled over his head as a wiry, dark-clothed man dove over the barricade, gun hissing fire.
Yorick rolled, shot straight up into the man's chest. The enemy screamed as his dead body flew high into the air; as he fell, Yorick caught him, folded him up against the barricade. A sizzle, a stink of burned flesh...
"Don't you understand?" Yorick bellowed, somehow pleading. "Once you're out of here, they'll quit trying! Get gone! It's the only help you can give! Will you GO!"
Clap of gunfire from the living room, a scream in the hall... Angus slammed the door, leaped to the center of the room, pushed the button.
Metal walls, a foot to each side and a foot in front of him... Claustrophobia hit, then vanished as Angus turned and saw an angular, lined face above a white lab coat two feet in front of him, smiling sardonically. With a sense of horror, Angus recognized that face for his own.
"The time," the face said precisely, "is May 14, 4:23 P.M., 1986. Remember that."
Angus stared.
"My name is Doc. Dr. Angus McAran. And all you're going to find out from me is that you've just made your decision."
Angus stared, going rigid; then he screamed.
"Shut up and listen!" Doc snapped. "You've come into your own future to visit me. Not a possible me, not a probable me—the definite me, the real me. You've chosen to make me real. You've selec
ted one of your many possible futures, your many possible future selves—me. Dr. Angus McAran. Doc Angus. You've made your choice. Now you get to live with it."
Angus had run the emotional gamut from shock to anger to cold hatred while Doc talked. Now his eyes narrowed to slits, and Angus's voice was level, emotionless. "It's not true. I can still kill you. All I have to do is destroy that first time machine."
"Oh, you can—but you won't, you know." The older man smiled sourly. "You won't believe me, though. So quit wasting my time." His hand moved outside the cubicle, as if to throw a switch.
Angus suddenly realized that he was standing inside a time machine—considerably more sophisticated than his pilot model. And Doc was sending him back. He jabbed at a button, and...
...Angus was standing, rigid with rage, in the center of his bedroom again. In the dark, with only the light of the streetlamp outside.
Angus frowned, looked around, puzzled. The trip hadn't taken that long, had it?
His gaze fastened on the coil that was positioned on the table. It was smaller than the one he'd wound that afternoon—and it didn't have the right convolutions...
A matter transmitter coil.
Angus swallowed, hard. The bastard had sent him back at least twenty-four hours, maybe more—before he'd built the time machine!
And he'd hadn't thought to build in a reverse circuit. He was stranded.
He could either re-build the time machine, or hide out until tomorrow, May 14.
But he couldn't hide out here. His twenty-four-hour-younger self was out roaming the streets right now—Lord! Only twenty-four hours ago?—but he'd be back tomorrow morning, to start building the time machine. And Angus didn't much like thought of really meeting himself.
He frowned at a new thought. How could he be sure it was May 13 right now? That old bastard Doc might have sent him back to May 12, or 11, in which case Yorick would be bringing Angus home from the hospital tomorrow, or the next day...
Angus stiffened. May 12. Two days ago.
Doc might have been lying. It was in his interest to make Angus believe he'd made his decision for once and for all. If Angus didn't decide to go through with inventing the time machine and finishing setting up GRIPE, Doc Angus would never have existed.
Mind Out of Time Page 8
