Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  I took the stack and stared at the top envelope. "May 15, 1931," I read aloud, and looked suspiciously at her. "What's this for?"

  "I don't think it's something that can be explained. At least it's never been possible before and I doubt if it would be now. I'm assuming you want both cash and bank accounts. Is that right?"

  "Well, yes. Only--"

  "We'll discuss it later." She looked along a row of shelves against one wall, searching the labels on the stacks of bundles there. She drew one out and pushed it toward me. "Please open that and put on the things you'll find inside."

  I tore open the bundle. It contained a very plain business suit, black shoes, shirt, tie and a hat with a narrow brim.

  "Are these supposed to be my burial clothes?"

  "I asked you to put them on," she said. "If you want me to make that a command, I'll do it."

  I looked at the gun and I looked at the clothes and then for some shelter I could change behind. There wasn't any.

  She smiled. "You didn't seem concerned about my modesty. I don't see why your own should bother you. Get dressed!"

  I obeyed, my mind anxiously chasing one possibility after another, all of them ending up with my death. I got into the other things and felt even more uncomfortable. They were all only an approximate fit: the shoes a little too tight and pointed, the collar of the shirt too stiffly starched and too high under my chin, the gray suit too narrow at the shoulders and the ankles. I wished I had a mirror to see myself in. I felt like an ultra-conservative Wall Street broker and I was sure I resembled one.

  "All right," she said. "Put the envelopes in your inside pocket. You'll find instructions on each. Follow them carefully."

  "I don't get it!" I protested.

  "You will. Now step into the mesh cage. Use the envelopes in the order they're arranged in."

  "But what's this all about?"

  "I can tell you just one thing, Mr. Weldon--don't try to escape. It can't be done. Your other questions will answer themselves if you follow the instructions on the envelopes."

  She had the gun in her hand. I went into the mesh cage, not knowing what to expect and yet too afraid of her to refuse. I didn't want to wind up dead of starvation, no matter how much money she might have given me--but I didn't want to get shot, either.

  She closed the mesh gate and pushed the switch as far as it would go. The motors screamed as they picked up speed; the mesh cage vibrated more swiftly; I could see her through it as if there were nothing between us.

  And then I couldn't see her at all.

  I was outside a bank on a sunny day in spring.

  * * * * *

  My fear evaporated instantly--I'd escaped somehow!

  But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her brownstone house.

  Even the season had changed!

  Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats, their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders, plain black or brown shoes--the same kind of clothes I was wearing.

  The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square bodies, tubular radiators....

  For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered the mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me electro-shock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or taken me South and left me on a street in daylight.

  But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily.

  Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis?

  That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me....

  Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been hypnotized.

  Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed the top envelope to the teller.

  He hauled $150 out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd been treated in years.

  I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance.

  The date he'd stamped was May 15, 1931.

  * * * * *

  I didn't know which I was more afraid of--being stranded, middle-aged, in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that brownstone house. I had only an instant to realize that I was a kid in high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in the city.

  The date on the envelope was May 29th and it was still 1931. I made a $75 deposit there, then $100 in another place a few days later, and so forth, spending only a few minutes each time and going forward anywhere from a couple of days to almost a month.

  Every now and then, I had a stamped, addressed envelope to mail at a corner box. They were addressed to different stock brokers and when I got one open before mailing it and took a look inside, it turned out to be an order to buy a few hundred shares of stock in a soft drink company in the name of Dr. Anthony Roberts. I hadn't remembered the price of the shares being that low. The last time I'd seen the quotation, it was more than five times as much as it was then. I was making dough myself, but I was doing even better for May Roberts.

  A few times I had to stay around for an hour or so. There was the night I found myself in a flashy speakeasy with two envelopes that I was to bet the contents of, according to the instructions on the outside. It was June 21, 1932, and I had to bet on Jack Sharkey to take the heavyweight title away from Max Schmeling.

  The place was serious and quiet--no more than three women, a couple of bartenders, and the rest male customers, including two cops, huddling up close to the radio. An affable character was taking bets. He gave me a wise little smile when I put the money down on Sharkey.

  "Well, it's a pleasure to do business with a man who wants an American to win," he said, "and the hell with the smart dough, eh?"

  "Yeah," I said, and tried to smile back, but so much of the smart money was going on Schmeling that I wondered if May Roberts hadn't made a mistake. I couldn't remember who had won. "You know what J. P. Morgan said--don't sell America short."

  "I'll take a buck for my share," said a sour guy who barely managed to stand. "Lousy grass growing in the lousy streets, nobody working, no future, nothing!"

  "We'll come out of it okay," I told him confidently.

  He snorted into his gin. "Not in our lifetime, Mac. It'd take a miracle to put this country on its feet again. I don't believe in miracles." He put his scowling face up close to mine and breathed blearily and belligerently at me. "Do you?"

  "Shut up, Gus," one of the bartenders said. "The fight's starting."

  * * * * *

  I had some tough moments and a lot of bad Scotch, listening. It went the whole 15 rounds, Sharkey won, and I was in almost as bad shape as Gus, who'd passed out halfway through the battle. All I can recall is the affable character handing over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes, while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was outside a bank again.

  I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit.

  There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets to put down on Singing Wood in 1933 at Belmont Park and Max Baer over Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in 1934, and James Braddock over Baer in 1935, and a
big daily double payoff, Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued interest were something to watch grow.

  The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of 1938--a total of maybe four or five hours subjectively--before I realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My father and mother, for instance, were still alive in 1938. If I could break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through time, I could go and see them.

  The thought attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent, yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again and I didn't dare. I couldn't....

  Why couldn't I?

  Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks, speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area, whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May Roberts had lined up for me.

  Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it was fresh; it wasn't given a chance to oxidize--at the rate I was going, I'd be back to my own time in another few hours or so, with $15,000 or better in deposits, compound interest and cash.

  If I'd been around 70, you see, she could have sent me back to the beginning of the century with the same amount of money, which would have accumulated to something like $30,000.

  Get it now?

  I did.

  And I felt sick and frightened.

  The old people had died of starvation somehow with all that dough in cash or banks. I didn't give a hang if the time travel was responsible, or something else was. I wasn't going to be found dead in my hotel and have Lou Pape curse my corpse because I'd been borrowing from him when, since 1931, I'd had a little fortune put away. He'd call me a premature senile psychotic and he'd be right, from his point of view, not knowing the truth.

  * * * * *

  Rather than make the deposit in October, 1938, I grabbed a battered old cab and told the driver to step on it. When I showed him the $10 bill that was in it for him, he squashed down the gas pedal. In 1938, $10 was real money.

  We got a mile away from the bank and the driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

  "How far you want to go, mister?"

  My teeth were together so hard that I had to unclench them before I could answer, "As far away as we can get."

  "Cops after you?"

  "No, but somebody is. Don't be surprised at anything that happens, no matter what it is."

  "You mean like getting shot at?" he asked worriedly, slowing down.

  "You're not in any danger, friend. I am. Relax and step on it again."

  I wondered if she could still reach me, this far from the bank, and handed the guy the bill. No justice sticking him for the ride in case she should. He pushed the pedal down even harder than he had been doing before.

  We must have been close to three miles away when I blinked and was standing outside the first bank I'd seen in 1931.

  I don't know what the cab driver thought when I vanished out of his hack. He probably figured I'd opened the door and jumped while he wasn't looking. Maybe he even went back and searched for a body splashed all over the street.

  Well, it would have been a hopeless hunt. I was a week ahead.

  I gave up and drearily made my deposit. The one from early October that I'd missed I put in with this one.

  There was no way to escape the babe with the beautiful hard face, gorgeous warm body and plans for me that all seemed to add up to death. I didn't try any more. I went on making deposits, mailing orders to her stock brokers, and putting down bets that couldn't miss because they were all past history.

  I don't even remember what the last one was, a fight or a race. I hung around the bar that had long ago replaced the speakeasy, until the inevitable payoff, got myself a hamburger and headed out the door. All the envelopes I was supposed to use were gone and I felt shaky, knowing that the next place I'd see was the room with the wire mesh cage and the hooded motors.

  It was.

  * * * * *

  She was on the other side of the cage, and I had five bankbooks and envelopes filled with cash amounting to more than $15,000, but all I could think of was that I was hungry and something had happened to the hamburger while I was traveling through time. I must have fallen and dropped it, because my hand was covered with dust or dirt. I brushed it off and quickly felt my face and pulled up my sleeves to look at my arms.

  "Very smart," I said, "but I'm nowhere near emaciation."

  "What made you think you would be?" she asked.

  "Because the others always were."

  She cut the motors to idling speed and the vibrating mesh slowed down. I glared at her through it. God, she was lovely--as lovely as an ice sculpture! The kind of face you'd love to kiss and slap, kiss and slap....

  "You came here with a preconceived notion, Mr. Weldon. I'm a businesswoman, not a monster. I like to think there's even a good deal of the altruist in me. I could hire only young people, but the old ones have more trouble finding work. And you've seen for yourself how I provide nest eggs for them they'd otherwise never have."

  "And take care of yourself at the same time."

  "That's the businesswoman in me. I need money to operate."

  "So do the old people. Only they die and you don't."

  She opened the gate and invited me out. "I make mistakes occasionally. I sometimes pick men and women who prove to be too old to stand the strain. I try not to let it happen, but they need money and work so badly that they don't always tell the truth about their age and state of health."

  "You could take those who have social security cards and references."

  "But those who don't have any are in worse need!" She paused. "You probably think I want only the money you and they bring back, that it's merely some sort of profit-making scheme. It isn't."

  "You mean the idea is not just to build up a fortune for you with a cut for whoever helps you do it?"

  "I said I need money to operate, Mr. Weldon, and this method serves. But there are other purposes, much more important. What you have gone through is--basic training, you might say. You know now that it's possible to travel through time, and what it's like. The initial shock, in other words, is gone and you're better equipped to do something for me in another era."

  "Something else?" I stared at her puzzledly. "What else could you want?"

  "Let's have dinner first. You must be hungry."

  * * * * *

  I was, and that reminded me: "I bought a hamburger just before you brought me back. I don't know what happened to it. My hand was dirty and the hamburger was gone, as if I'd fallen somehow and dropped it and got dirt on my hand."

  She looked worriedly at the hand, probably afraid I'd cut it and disqualified myself. I could understand that; you never know what kind of diseases can be picked up in different times, because I remember reading somewhere that germs keep changing according to conditions. Right now, for instance, strains of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. I knew her concern wasn't really for me, but it was pleasant all the same.

  "That could be the explanation, I suppose," she said. "The truth is that I've never taken a time voyage--somebody has to operate the controls in the present--so I can't say it's possible or impossible to fall. It must be, since you did. Perhaps the wrench back from the past was too violent and you slipped just before you returned."

  She led me down to an ornate dining room, where the table had been set for two. The food was waiting on the table, steaming and smelling tasty. Nobody wa
s around to serve us. She pointed out a chair to me and we sat down and began eating. I was a little nervous at first, afraid there might be something in the food, but it tasted fine and nothing happened after I swallowed a little and waited for some effect.

  "You did try to escape the time tractor beam, didn't you, Mr. Weldon?" she asked. I didn't have to answer; she knew. "That's a mistaken notion of how it functions. The control beam doesn't cover area; it covers era. You could have flown to any part of the world and the beam would still have brought you back. Do I make myself clear?"

  She did. Too bloody clear. I waited for the rest.

  "I assume you've already formed an opinion of me," she went on. "A rather unflattering one, I imagine."

  "'Bitch' is the cleanest word I can find. But a clever one. Anybody who can invent a time machine would have to be a genius."

  "I didn't invent it. My father did--Dr. Anthony Roberts--using the funds you and others helped me provide him with." Her face grew soft and tender. "My father was a wonderful man, a great man, but he was called a crackpot. He was kept from teaching or working anywhere. It was just as well, I suppose, though he was too hurt to think so; he had more leisure to develop the time machine. He could have used it to extort repayment from mankind for his humiliation, but he didn't. He used it to help mankind."

  "Like how?" I goaded.

  "It doesn't matter, Mr. Weldon. You're determined to hate me and consider me a liar. Nothing I tell you can change that."

  * * * * *

  She was right about the first part--I hadn't dared let myself do anything except hate and fear her--but she was wrong about the second. I remembered thinking how Lou Pape would have felt if I had died of starvation with over $15,000, after borrowing from him all the time between jobs. Not knowing how I got it, he'd have been sore, thinking I'd played him for a patsy. What I'm trying to say is that Lou wouldn't have had enough information to judge me. I didn't have enough information yet, either, to judge her.