Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  The cage had arrived. Ra Chen waved an arm in signal. The door opened.

  Something tremendous hovered within the big extension cage. It looked like a malevolent white mountain in there, peering back at its captors with a single tiny, angry eye. It was trying to get at Ra Chen, but it couldn’t swim in air.

  Its other eye was only a torn socket. One of its flippers was ripped along the trailing edge. Rips and ridges and puckers of scar tissue, and a forest of broken wood and broken steel, marked its tremendous expanse of albino skin. Lines trailed from many of the broken harpoons. High up on one flank, bound to the beast by broken and tangled lines, was the corpse of a bearded man with one leg.

  “Hardly in mint condition, is he?” Ra Chen observed.

  “Be careful, sir. He’s a killer. I saw him ram a sailing ship and sink it clean before I could focus the stunners on him.”

  “What amazes me is that you found him at all in the time you had left. Svetz, I do not understand your luck. Or am I missing something?”

  “It wasn’t luck, sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did the entire trip.’’

  “You said that before. About killing Leviathan.”

  Svetz hurried to explain. “The sea serpent was just leaving the vicinity. I wanted to kill him, but I knew I didn’t have the time. I was about to leave myself, when he turned back and bared his teeth.

  “He was an obvious carnivore. Those teeth were built strictly for killing, sir. I should have noticed earlier. And I could think of only one animal big enough to feed a carnivore that size.”

  “Ah-h-h. Brilliant, Svetz.”

  “There was corroborative evidence. Our research never found any mention of giant sea serpents. The great geological surveys of the first century Post Atomic should have turned up something. Why didn’t they?”

  “Because the sea serpent quietly died out two centuries earlier, after whalers killed off his food supply.”

  Svetz colored. “Exactly. So I turned the stunners on Leviathan before he could swim away, and I kept the stunners on him until the NAI said he was dead. I reasoned that if Leviathan was here, there must be whales in the vicinity.”

  “And Leviathan’s nervous output was masking the signal.”

  “Sure enough, it was. The moment he was dead the NAI registered another signal. I followed it to—” Svetz jerked his head. They were floating the whale out of the extension cage. “To him.”

  ———

  Days later, two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.

  “We took some clones from him, then passed him on to the Secretary-General’s vivarium,” said Ra Chen. “Pity you had to settle for an albino.” He waved aside Svetz’s protest: “I know, I know, you were pressed for time.”

  Beyond the glass, the one-eyed whale glared at Svetz through murky seawater. Surgeons had removed most of the harpoons, but scars remained along his flanks; and Svetz, awed, wondered how long the beast had been at war with Man. Centuries? How long did sperm whales live?

  Ra Chen lowered his voice. “We’d all be in trouble if the Secretary-General found out that there was once a bigger animal than his. You understand that, don’t you, Svetz?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good.” Ra Chen’s gaze swept across another glass wall, and a fire-breathing Gila monster. Further down, a horse looked back at him along the dangerous spiral horn in its forehead.

  “Always we find the unexpected,” said Ra Chen. “Sometimes I wonder . . . “

  If you’d do your research better, Svetz thought . . .

  “Did you know that time travel wasn’t even a concept until the first-century Ante Atomic? A writer invented it. From then until the fourth century Post Atomic, time travel was pure fantasy. It violates everything the scientists of the time thought were natural laws. Logic. Conservation of matter and energy. Momentum, reaction, any law of motion that makes time a part of the statement. Relativity.

  “It strikes me,” said Ra Chen, “that every time we push an extension cage past that particular four-century period, we shove it into a kind of fantasy world. That’s why you keep finding giant sea serpents and fire breathing—”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Svetz. He was afraid of his boss, yes; but there were limits.

  “You’re right,” Ra Chen said instantly. Almost with relief. “Take a month’s vacation, Svetz, then back to work. The Secretary-General wants a bird.”

  “A bird?” Svetz smiled. A bird sounded harmless enough. “I suppose he found it in another children’s book?”

  “That’s right. Ever hear of a bird called a roc?”

  JOE HALDEMAN

  Praised for its authentic portrayal of the emotional detachment and psychological dislocation of soldiers in a millennium-long future war, Joe Haldeman’s first science fiction novel, The Forever War, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Ditmar Awards when it was published in 1974 and later was adapted into a three-part graphic novel series. Since then, Haldeman has returned to the theme of future war several times, notably in his trilogy Worlds, Worlds Apart, and Worlds Enough and Time, about a future Earth facing nuclear extinction, and in Forever Peace, a further exploration of the dehumanizing potential of armed conflict. Haldeman’s other novels include Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, and the alternate world opus The Hemingway Hoax, expanded from his Nebula Award–winning novella of the same name. Haldeman’s stories have been collected in Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and several of his essays are mixed with fiction in Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds. His powerful non–science-fiction writing includes War Year, drawn from experiences during his tour of duty in Vietnam, and 1968, a portrait of America in the Vietnam era. He has also coedited the anthologies Body Armor: 2000, Space-Fighters, and Supertanks. His twenty novels, three story collections, six anthologies, and one poetry collection have appeared in eighteen languages.

  “Anniversary Project” is one of the few stories in this collection that deals with traveling forward into the future, and in the hands of Joe Haldeman, it is a dizzying ride indeed. Given when it was published (1975), the topical events of Korea, Vietnam, and the next few decades play a surprising role in the events of the story, despite most of the action’s taking place a million years in the future.

  ANNIVERSARY PROJECT

  JOE HALDEMAN

  HIS NAME IS Three-phasing and he is bald and wrinkled, slightly over one meter tall, large-eyed, toothless and all bones and skin, sagging pale skin shot through with traceries of delicate blue and red. He is considered very beautiful but most of his beauty is in his hands and is due to his extreme youth. He is over two hundred years old and is learning how to talk. He has become reasonably fluent in sixty-three languages, all dead ones, and has only ten to go.

  The book he is reading is a facsimile of an early edition of Goethe’s Faust. The nervous angular Fraktur letters goose-step across pages of paper-thin platinum.

  The Faust had been printed electrolytically and, with several thousand similarly worthwhile books, sealed in an argon-filled chamber and carefully lost, in 2012 A.D.; a very wealthy man’s legacy to the distant future.

  In 2012 A.D., Polaris had been the pole star. Men eventually got to Polaris and built a small city on a frosty planet there. By that time, they weren’t dating by prophets’ births any more, but it would have been around 4900 A.D. The pole star by then, because of precession of the equinoxes, was a dim thing once called Gamma Cephei. The celestial pole kept reeling around, past Deneb and Vega and through barren patches of sky around Hercules and Draco; a patient clock but not the slowest one of use, and when it came back to the region of Polaris, then 26,000 years had passed and men had come back from the stars, to stay, and the book-filled chamber had shifted 130 meters on the floor of the Pacific, had rolled onto a shallow trench, and eventually was buried in an underwater landslide.

  The thirty-seventh time this slow clock ticked, men had moved the Pacific, not because they had to, and had found the chamber, opened it up, identified the books
and carefully sealed them up again. Some things by then were more important to men than the accumulation of knowledge: in half of one more circle of the poles would come the millionth anniversary of the written word. They could wait a few millennia.

  As the anniversary, as nearly as they could reckon it, approached, they caused to be born two individuals: Nine-hover (nominally female) and Three-phasing (nominally male). Three-phasing was born to learn how to read and speak. He was the first human being to study these skills in more than a quarter of a million years.

  Three-phasing has read the first half of Faust forwards and, for amusement and exercise, is reading the second half backwards. He is singing as he reads, lisping.

  “Fain’ Looee w’mun . . . wif all’r die-mun ringf . . . “ He has not put in his teeth because they make his gums hurt.

  Because he is a child of two hundred, he is polite when his father interrupts his reading and singing. His father’s “voice” is an arrangement of logic and aesthetic that appears in Three-phasing’s mind. The flavor is lost by translating into words:

  “Three-phasing my son-ly atavism of tooth and vocal cord,” sarcastically in the reverent mode, “Couldst tear thyself from objects of manifest symbol, and visit to share/help/learn, me?”

  “?” He responds, meaning “with/with/of what?”

  Withholding mode: “Concerning thee: past, future.”

  He shuts the book without marking his place. It would never occur to him to mark his place, since he remembers perfectly the page he stops on, as well as every word preceding, as well as every event, no matter how trivial, that he has observed from the precise age of one year. In this respect, at least, he is normal.

  He thinks the proper coordinates as he steps over the mover-transom, through a microsecond of black, and onto his father’s mover-transom, about four thousand kilometers away on a straight line through the crust and mantle of the earth.

  Ritual mode: “As ever, father.” The symbol he uses for “father” is purposefully wrong, chiding. Crude biological connotation.

  His father looks cadaverous and has in fact been dead twice. In the infant’s small-talk mode he asks, “From crude babblings of what sort have I torn your interest?”

  “The tale called Faust, of a man so named, never satisfied with {symbol for slow but continuous accretion} of his knowledge and power; written in the language of Prussia.”

  “Also depended-ing on this strange word of immediacy, your Prussian language?”

  “As most, yes. The word of ‘to be’: sein. Very important illusion in this and related languages/cultures; that events happen at the ‘time’ of perception, infinitesimal midpoint between past and future.”

  “Convenient illusion but retarding.”

  “As we discussed 129 years ago, yes.” Three-phasing is impatient to get back to his reading, but adds:

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  “You always stick up for them.”

  “I have great regard for what they accomplished with limited faculties and so short lives.” Stop beatin’ around the bush, Dad. Tempis fugit, eight to the bar. Did Mr. Handy Moves-dat-man-around-by-her-apron-strings, 20th-century American poet, intend cultural translation of Lysistrata? If so, inept. African were-beast legendry, yes.

  Withholding mode (coy): “Your father stood with Nine-hover all morning.”

  “,” broadcasts Three-phasing: well?

  “The machine functions, perhaps inadequately.”

  The young polyglot tries to radiate calm patience.

  “Details I perceive you want; the idea yet excites you. You can never have satisfaction with your knowledge, either. What happened-s to the man in your Prussian book?”

  “He lived-s one hundred years and died-s knowing that a man can never achieve true happiness, despite the appearance of success.”

  “For an infant, a reasonable perception.”

  Respectful chiding mode: “One hundred years makes-ed Faust a very old man, for a Dawn man.”

  “As I stand,” same mode, less respect, “yet an infant.” They trade silent symbols of laughter.

  After a polite tenth-second interval, Three-phasing uses the light interrogation mode: “The machine of Nine-hover . . . ?”

  “It begins to work but so far not perfectly.” This is not news.

  Mild impatience: “As before, then, it brings back only rocks and earth and water and plants?”

  “Negative, beloved atavism.” Offhand: “This morning she caught two animals that look as man may once have looked.

  “!” Strong impatience, “I go?”

  “.” His father ends the conversation just two seconds after it began.

  Three-phasing stops off to pick up his teeth, then goes directly to Nine-hover.

  A quick exchange of greeting-symbols and Nine-hover presents her prizes. “Thinking I have two different species,” she stands: uncertainty, query.

  Three-phasing is amused. “Negative, time-caster. The male and female took very dissimilar forms in the Dawn times.” He touches one of them. “The round organs, here, served-ing to feed infants, in the female.”

  The female screams.

  “She manipulates spoken symbols now,” observes Nine-hover.

  Before the woman has finished her startled yelp, Three-phasing explains: “Not manipulating concrete symbols; rather, she communicates in a way called ‘non-verbal,’ the use of such communication predating even speech.” Slipping into the pedantic mode: “My reading indicates that such a loud noise occurs either

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  she must fear me or you or both of us.”

  “Or the machine,” Nine-hover adds.

  Symbol for continuing. “We have no symbol for it but in Dawn days most humans observed ‘xenophobia,’ reacting to the strange with fear instead of delight. We stand as strange to them as they do to us, thus they register fear. In their era this attitude encouraged-s survival.

  “Our silence must seem strange to them, as well as our appearance and the speed with which we move. I will attempt to speak to them, so they will know they need not fear us.”

  ———

  Bob and Sarah Graham were having a desperately good time. It was September of 1951 and the papers were full of news about the brilliant landing of U.S. Marines at Inchon. Bob was a Marine private with two days left of the thirty days’ leave they had given him, between boot camp and disembarkation for Korea. Sarah had been Mrs. Graham for three weeks.

  Sarah poured some more bourbon into her Coke. She wiped the sand off her thumb and stoppered the Coke bottle, then shook it gently. “What if you just don’t show up?” she said softly.

  Bob was staring out over the ocean and part of what Sarah said was lost in the crash of breakers rolling in. “What if I what?”

  “Don’t show up.” She took a swig and offered the bottle. “Just stay here with me. With us.” Sarah was sure she was pregnant. It was too early to tell, of course; her calendar was off but there could be other reasons.

  He gave the Coke back to her and sipped directly from the bourbon bottle. “I suppose they’d go on without me. And I’d still be in jail when they came back.”

  “Not if—”

  “Honey, don’t even talk like that. It’s a just cause.”

  She picked up a small shell and threw it toward the water.

  “Besides, you read the Examiner yesterday.”

  “I’m cold. Let’s go up.” She stood and stretched and delicately brushed sand away. Bob admired her long naked dancer’s body. He shook out the blanket and draped it over her shoulders.

  “It’ll be over by the time I get there. We’ll push those bastards—”

  “Let’s not talk about Korea. Let’s not talk.”

  He put his arm around her and they started walking back toward the cabin. Halfway there, she stopped and enfolded the blanket around both of them, drawing him toward her. He always closed his eyes when they kissed, but she always kept hers open. She saw it: the air turning luminous, the seascape fad
ing to be replaced by bare metal walls. The sand turns hard under her feet.

  At her sharp intake of breath, Bob opens his eyes. He sees a grotesque dwarf, eyes and skull too large, body small and wrinkled. They stare at one another for a fraction of a second. Then the dwarf spins around and speeds across the room to what looks like a black square painted on the floor. When he gets there, he disappears.

  “What the hell?” Bob says in a hoarse whisper.

  Sarah turns around just a bit too late to catch a glimpse of Three-phasing’s father. She does see Nine-hover before Bob does. The nominally-female time-caster is a flurry of movement, sitting at the console of her time net, clicking switches and adjusting various dials. All of the motions are unnecessary, as is the console. It was built at Three-phasing’s suggestion, since humans from the era into which they could cast would feel more comfortable in the presence of a machine that looked like a machine. The actual time net was roughly the size and shape of an asparagus stalk, was controlled completely by thought, and had no moving parts. It does not exist any more, but can still be used, once understood. Nine-hover has been trained from birth for this special understanding.

  Sarah nudges Bob and points to Nine-hover. She can’t find her voice; Bob stares open-mouthed.

  In a few seconds, Three-phasing appears. He looks at Nine-hover for a moment, then scurries over to the Dawn couple and reaches up to touch Sarah on the left nipple. His body temperature is considerably higher than hers, and the unexpected warm moistness, as much as the suddenness of the motion, makes her jump back and squeal.

  Three-phasing correctly classified both Dawn people as Caucasian, and so assumes that they speak some Indo-European language.

  “GuttenTagsprechesieDeutsch?” he says in a rapid soprano.

  “Huh?” Bob says.

  “Guten-Tag-sprechen-sie-Deutsch?’ Three-phasing clears his throat and drops his voice down to the alto he uses to sing about the St. Louis woman. “Guten Tag,” he says, counting to a hundred between each word. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”