“First—my son. The episode which I—”
“Hold on a minute!” I roared, in protest. “How could any memory from your son’s mind be inherited backwards?”
Syd smiled gravely.
“I thought you’d catch that obvious flaw,” he sighed. “But tell me this, Uncle Lem—how did you know it couldn’t? How do you, or I, for that matter, know what Time is. If Time is accepted as another dimension, then obviously Time exists all at once in some way that our three-dimensional minds are incapable of grasping. Such a theory being accepted, there is no ‘backward’ or ‘forward’ actually. Only now. Now! NOW!
“Does that hint at some explanation?”
I frowned horribly. “Not much.” Although the whole thing was beginning to give me a headache, I let him go on with his story.
“Professor Leyton’s machine transcends this three-dimensional fallacy regarding Time, and continues the ancestral thread to its ultimate end.
“My glimpses of the future were far briefer, more blurred and difficult than any past images. In this it may be said that Professor Leyton’s machine was defective.
“My moment in my son’s mind occurred in a lecture room of a large University. He was propounding a new and revolutionary theory, the very theory that I have since been completing, proving. And he was being ridiculed, scoffed at, laughed out of the auditorium.
“This was the result, I guessed, of his lifetime of arduous effort in science. It is my belief that he died a broken and unhappy man. Will die, you might say!
“He left a daughter, a weakly creature who lived only long enough to give birth to a son who carried on the ancestral thread…
“It was my great-grandson whose mind gave me a glorious thrilling glimpse that was the high-point of high-points in my travels up and down the ancestral thread of memory.
“He was an old, old man. He stood, still strong and tall and beautiful, on a glass-like precipice that lipped a skyscraper cliff of the radiant and incredible city of the world of Tomorrow. He stood gazing introspectively down at the leisurely flow of life, both above and below him.
Aircraft of feather lightness and breathtaking design sailed smoothly and silently on their accurate designated courses. Far below, on gardened streets, pedestrians strolled on marbled ramps, while on other levels ground vehicles moved, like the aircraft, swiftly, silently, smoothly.
“It was dusk, and the miraculous city began to take on a warm colorful glow. The air was soft, clean, sweet. From somewhere came music, strange but thrilling.
“My great grandson mused over this paradise world, and over his own small part in its being. He was an old man, but vigorous, and with many happy years ahead of him thanks to supermedical science.
“This was the world that had fought its way out of blood and chaos, in spite of Hitlers and Tojos, as a wonderful flower fights its way toward the sun, out of fog and dung and noisome weeds…
* * * *
“You spoke of danger,” I said gently, breaking into Syd’s reverie.
“Yes.” He broke out of his ecstatic mood. “The danger that lurked in the machine’s shortcomings, and in Leyton’s insatiable curiosity.
“The world of my great grandson was so beautiful to me that I couldn’t resist the desire to see even further into the future. I snapped the ‘Ahead’ dial ahead—
“Then it happened! My mind whirled, as if caught in some tremendous cosmic vortex. I almost lost consciousness. My head throbbed. Then it was as if a million sharp needles were plunged into it.
“Warned of impending disaster, I grabbed hold of the lever at my right, and pulled it down, shutting off the machine.
“When I was able to think clearly again, I found that something amazing had happened to my mind…”
I nodded my head sadly at that. I could well believe it!
“My mind,” Syd went on, eyeing me sternly, “had developed into a supermind. Knowledge from future generations had leaked into it. I found myself able to solve profound mental problems with ease.
“I was, in point of fact, mentally over a hundred years old—not eleven!”
“Well, I swan!” I exclaimed.
“You goose.” Syd quipped dryly. “And so the defectiveness of Professor Leyton’s machine proved of colossal benefit to me. He wasn’t so lucky, however.”
“What do you mean by that?” I queried.
“Understand, I’m only guessing. But all the evidence points to this…
“Professor Leyton managed to get his machine to bring his mind in contact with the far distant future. He voyaged mentally millions of years into what we call future time, along the ancestral thread.
“He didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the world of his day and didn’t breathe a word of his discovery to anyone. He just stayed up here alone, plunging further and further.
“He was insatiable. He trekked the furthest reaches of his future ancestors’ mind-lives; and then to ancestors that no longer were men at all! What gigantic secrets he learned will never be known. Then, at last, at the very end of time itself—”
Syd broke off with a strangely gruff sigh.
“What happened to him?” I breathed, feeling my skin crawl at the thought of anyone seeing the very end of Time.
Syd got up from where he’d been sitting on the edge of the work bench, and motioned me to come over to the machine. I tossed my apple core away, and walked over.
Syd pointed down under the metal chair that fronted the weird machine, at a large roundish stain. It was an unpleasant blotch, green and brown, soaked indelibly into the unpainted floor-wood of the attic.
“That, I think,” said Syd dramatically, “is Professor Leyton!”
I leaped back a step, uttering a squawk. Then, gulping, I went back to my apple box.
“Now what?” I said, anxious to shake the attic’s dust off my heels. “We can still make the baseball game if—”
“Baseball!” Syd snorted. “You, Lem Mason, are going to sit down on the metal chair. You don’t believe anything I’ve told you, so I’m going to prove it to you! I’m going to send your mind back into the past, along your ancestral thread!”
I bounded up.
“Me?” I squeaked. “I should say not! Why, Syd, I-I-I believe you. Sure I-I-I do.”
I made for the attic door.
“No you-you-you don’t. Come back here, you coward!” His voice was scornful. His arms were crossed, like a gestapo leader’s.
“Who’s a coward?” I protested weakly. “But, Syd, how about Professor Leyton—he’s only a blob on the barroom, I mean attic, floor. I don’t relish the thought of being a blob on—”
“It happened because he tried to delve too far into the future,” Syd snapped. “Besides—you don’t believe any of my story! You think I’m wacky! How could a machine that an eleven-year-old boy whipped up out of tin cans and old bottle caps hurt you?”
He sounded very contemptuous and sarcastic.
I didn’t say a word, but I was thinking lots. Maybe that machine was made by Professor Leyton, like Syd said. But maybe working with it had unhinged his mind, made him a bit pixilated. Gosh, I didn’t want to rush home to Susie May talking like a man from the Moon!
Still and all, the last thing I remembered Susie May saying to me was, “Humor him, Lem, dear. Play any kind of games he wants you to. He’s a sensitive child. All he needs is to be understood.”
Understood! How could I understand all his high-falutin’ double-talk about ancestral threads? Gosh, I’m only a humble bookkeeper down at Mammoth Cement.
I sniffed uncomfortably, then turned and shuffled slowly back to the machine. Syd stood there with his arms crossed, like a Spanish inquisitor.
“Okay,” I muttered unhappily. I sat down gingerly on the metal seat. “Only not too fast. I can’t stand to go too fast.” My own words made me giggle nervously.
“Take this capsule,” Syd ordered, handing me an ominous green pill.
I tried to swallow it, choked over i
t, coughed, sputtered, and slapped my knee. The capsule stuck in my throat, poised, then dropped. I looked at Syd with reproachful tear-filled eyes.
“How far back would you like to go, Uncle Lem?” he asked, kindly.
“Lemme see,” I pondered, half-believing I could. “Oh, yes—two notches back, please. Grandpop was supposed to be a rootin’ tootin’ bad man in some old Western town. He was a real tough guy called Fearless Murgatroyd, with a blazing six-gun in each hand, and everybody scared to death when he swaggered through town. Be nice to visit him, huh?”
* * * *
“Certainly,” Syd agreed gravely.
So I grabbed hold of the two metal handles in front of me, while Syd managed the dials and levers. And then suddenly I was whirling, dipping, sliding, falling—as if I was riding all the concessions down at the beach at once.
“Yeow!” I yelled, trying to let go. But I couldn’t. The handles stuck as if glued to me.
Blurredly I saw Syd adjust dials.
Then all was blackness for a while.
Somebody had hold of me from the back, and swung me through the air and bounced me onto the hard ground.
I squirmed and struggled, and gurgled and guggled. The person who had hold of me by the top of my britches laughed. It was a rasping, sneery laugh.
And that laugh was echoed on all sides.
Everything was still black. Then, my eyes were opened.
I blinked.
A bright golden light blinded me. The sun. The hot noonday sun of the desert.
I was talking, jabbering at a terrific pace. Or at least the body I had intruded into was jabbering. It was ranting, begging, pleading.
“Don’t do it!” grandpop (I supposed it to be he) kept screaming in deathly terror. “Don’t hang me!”
“Heh, heh,” chuckled the geezer who dandled grandpop up and down by the top of his dusty blue pants. “Nah, we won’t string him up, will we, fellers? Heh, heh!”
That heh-heh was an evil heh-heh. And the words only served to scare grandpop worse.
I gandered around me, through grandpop’s eyes.
Where was I? I wondered. And what was the reason for all this stringing up of grandfathers?
Fearless Murgatroyd, alias grandpop, was the central figure of a little knot of evilly heh-hehing miners and cattlemen in loud shirts, dusty overall pants, and greasy hats. Fearless Murgatroyd was a little runt, with a wisp of a straw mustache that quivered like an aspen leaf, right now.
The group of men and their horses stood under a huge dead, though staunch, oak tree that had a heavy low-hanging branch. That branch was significant.
Half a mile back along the horse-trail was a drowsy little desert town, sleeping in the sun.
It was plain as a pikestaff that grandpop had been jogged along that trail from town, yanked off his horse by the big galoot under this tree ceremoniously; and it was obvious to the veriest dunce that Fearless Murgatroyd was the unhappy nucleus of an old-fashioned necktie party.
Some high-point in my ancestral thread I had picked out!
Had I been master of my soul at that moment, I would have joyously winged my way back to my original Lem Mason body and thanked my lucky stars that the “good old days” were gone forever. But that, alas, was not in my power.
Meanwhile Fearless Murgatroyd kept on begging and pleading in a steady incoherent babble, his bony knees failing under him every now and then. The big galoot kept him from sinking to the ground in a miserable heap.
“Don’t ha-ha-hang me!” he bleated.
Over and over and over. I wanted finally to yell out, your point is made, pass on to something else!
I could see that these brown-skinned, horny-handed, dirty-booted blockheads were getting a great big bang out of the fuss grandpop was kicking up. It was quite a picnic.
They laughed and laughed. The big galoot laughed loudest of all.
The horses champed dispiritedly at the straggly clumps of grass that spotted the desert’s edge, flecking flies off their rumps with their tails and eyeing the proceedings with great disinterest.
I had solved the problem of where I was, more or less, and what was up. But the question of why still worried me. What had Fearless Murgatroyd done to deserve such an ignominious fate?
“Grandpop, you old fraud!” I wanted to yell. “What are you doing here, when you should be shooting up towns and scaring people to death, instead of shivering like a licked pup?”
“Karp,” the galoot who was holding Fearless Murgatroyd up, uncomfortably, wanted to know. “Yu got the rope ready?”
“Yep,” a bleary-eyed critter with two front teeth missing replied, with a grin. He held up a lasso that he had transformed into a knotted strangler.
“Toss it up over thet branch, Karp. An’ tie it tuh one of the horses.” The galoot was evidently in charge.
“Shore nuff, Sampson.”
Fearless Murgatroyd’s fascinated eyes watched the rope swing over the branch that was ideal for their purpose, and watched Karp tie it deftly to the saddle of his horse.
“Think it’ll hold him?” somebody in the back row speculated.
“This yere runt?” Sampson scoffed, bouncing grandpop up and down like a puppet. “Sakes! It held thet two-twenty pound outlaw Eagle-beak Larmont last week, didn’t it?”
“Real purty hangin’ it was,” somebody else reminisced. “Not quite so hot as ’tis today.”
There was but one word for it, and that was—ghoulish.
I shivered, longing to be back in the attic, back in my own body. Horrible thoughts plagued me. Thoughts about Professor Leyton, the smear on the attic floor.
And there was little Syd’s mental transformation, too. What sinister thing might happen to me? When grandpop died, wouldn’t I die too?
Fearless Murgatroyd bawled like a newly born doggie when Sampson swung him over into position for the kill.
Grandpop wriggled and twisted helplessly as he dropped the noose over his head. Then, carefully, as if he was trimming a birthday cake, Sampson tightened the knot in place and got everything in apple-pie order.
“I ain’t had no proper trial!” Fearless bawled, tears streaming down his dirty face, into his mustache.
“Ain’t we just giv yu a trial?” Karp retorted. “An’ didn’t yu admit yu stole them hosses offa Pete Morrison?”
“I stole ’em. Yu can tell thet from the brand.” Fearless was repentant and anxious to save his hide any possible way. “He can take ’em back, and mine too. Only, leave me go this time fellas. I won’t do it again, honest.”
He ended off in a doleful blubbering.
“Sorry, Murg,” Sampson said, with a wink at the others. “F’it was only one hoss we maybe could see our way clear to let yu go. But three hosses is too many!”
“We cain’t do it!”
And then they were silent. Ominously silent.
Grandpop Fearless shut his eyes tight, as he had on the horse ride to his doom. As for me, I was as good as dead already.
But the death jolt didn’t come. Apparently the audience hadn’t enjoyed the suspense quite to its furthest stretching point yet. They wanted to prolong their fun.
“Yu see, Murg, yu ol’ coyote,” Sampson broke the silence, poking Fearless in the ribs until he opened his eyes. “It ain’t only the hosses. It’s the lies yu go spreading around these hyar parts. Lies thet yur such a tough hombre, and how the rest of us is allus crawlin’ tu yu on our bellies. We don’t hanker much for thet kind of talk, Murg.”
“I won’t do it any more! Honest!” Fearless whined.
“I’ll say yu won’t!”
Fearless shivered violently. His cracked lips emitted a weird moan.
“Now say, just say fur instance, Murg—if we did let yu go—would you stop all this year swell-headed braggin’ and boastin’. An’ quit callin’ yourself Fearless Murgatroyd?”
Fearless could hardly believe his ears. Nor could I hardly believe his ears. “W-W-What?” he squeaked.
Samps
on repeated. A guffaw was unleashed from back of them.
“Yessir. Yessir. Yessir!” Fearless bobbed his head up and down until he all but strangled himself with the noose that circled his neck. “I—I—I’d go far away! I wouldn’t call myself nuthin’. I—I—I wouldn’t brag about nuthin’. I wouldn’t hardly even say nuthin’!”
Sampson seemed to weigh this in his mind.
“What say, fellers,” he said at last. Shall we let Murg off if he promises to behave himself, an’ go away, an’ not brag about hisself any more?”
Grandpop’s eyes searched the mob’s anxiously.
“Shore,” Karp spoke up. “Put Murg onto his hoss, and tell him to high-tail it out of these parts for good!”
Several voices affirmed this suggestion.
So Sampson lifted the rope from around Fearless Murgatrayd’s throat, and allowed him to wipe the tears and sweat off his face with his blue bandana.
Then the burly leader swung grand-pop up on his horse.
“Thanks, fellas,” Fearless muttered weakly.
Sampson’s riding whip touched the horse’s flank, and away rode Fearless.
Away into the desert. Away from the tree of evil fruit. Away like the wind, in a cloud of desert dust…
* * * *
“Aaahhhh!” I sighed, coming out of the past.
It had seemed hours, but in reality had all taken place in a few minutes. A very crucial few minutes.
“Now do you believe me?” Syd demanded, as I tottered up from the metal chair.
I felt of my arms and my legs, and my neck. Especially my neck. They were okay. I was back safe and sound, just as I had been before, except for the knowledge of that awful experience back in the days of the wild and woolly west.
“Yes,” I had to say. “I believe you, Syd. But you’ll never get me to sit in that chair again! No, sir!”
I started to tell Syd what had happened to me, but he didn’t seem much interested. He was fussing with test tubes full of chemicals, pouring them into different glass parts of the machine.
“Shut up, Uncle Lem,” he told me. “I’m concentrating. Yes. Yes.”
He went on muttering and working this way for some time, ignoring my existence.
The Third Time Travel Page 13
