Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

“Yes,” he said. “I’m an accountant.”

  Muriel took his hand. “That’s a good job,” she said. “A real good profession. Do you like to read?”

  Jameson nodded and Muriel handed him the book, pointing to a passage. He read it to her and she leaned in against him, her warmth fighting off the encroaching winter.

  Jameson figured out a schedule. He could stay for long stretches in the past and then go back to his own time just moments after he left. The trouble was, he was sick of his mother, he was sick of her ire now fully unleashed on him, how he was ungrateful for all she did for him. He was sick of his boss having him do all the work, while he took all the glory and bonuses. He began spending even more time in the past, taking Muriel out for walks, to shows, reading to her in the park.

  It was Muriel who proposed. She asked that he make them legitimate. It was only after he said no that she confessed she missed her period.

  “You seem so distant lately,” Jameson’s mother said. “Is everything okay?” They were eating Shepherd’s Pie.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, moving mashed potatoes, browned with mutton, around his plate.

  “A woman can tell when another woman is causing trouble, especially when that women is your mother,” she said.

  “It’s just—”

  “Do you love her?” his mother asked.

  “I think so.” He said.

  “If you’re not sure you don’t. You love me, right?”

  “Of course!” he said, lifting his head. She shuffled over to him, put her hands on his shoulder.

  “Of course you do. You’re a good boy. Some naughty girl just has her hooks in you, doesn’t she?”

  When Jameson’s mother died, he decided to hide his grief in the past, with Muriel. He had enough in her will to buy the place he had always lived in, the family home. Jameson never married her, but they lived together for a while. When their son was born, she named him “Jameson,” the son of James. She got a job as a secretary at the firm where he was an accountant. He hoped he could have a future here, found an old box, and took apart the time machine, prying up a board in the attic to hide it.

  Muriel made him dinner every night. She had lunch with him every day at work, and shooed away all other co-workers who tried to sit with them. She bought his clothes, starched his shirts, and watched him sleep. If he had to work late, she’d sit outside his office and pretend to be his secretary, smiling through the glass at him. She bought him gifts, planned special surprises, told him constantly how much she loved him. She begged Jameson to read to her, to rock her in her chair as she knit booties for baby Jameson. Finally he had enough. He said words like ‘suffocating’ and ‘needy.’ He said words like ‘crazy’ and ‘sociopath’ after she hit a woman that brought Jameson a late night memo at work, and he left. He left her, he left baby Jameson, he left the Legoland Time Machine, and walked away from it all.

  ROTATING CYLINDERS

  Larry Niven

  “Three hundred years we’ve been at war,” said Quifting, “and I have the means to end it. I can destroy the Hallane Regency.” He seemed very pleased with himself, and not at all awed at being in the presence of the emperor of seventy worlds.

  The aforementioned emperor said, “That’s a neat trick. If you can’t pull it off, you can guess what penalties I might impose. None of my generals would dare such a brag.”

  “Their tools are not mine.” Quifting shifted in a valuable antique massage chair. He was small and round and completely hairless: the style of the nonaristocratic professional. He should have been overawed, and frightened. “I’m a mathematician. Would you agree that a time machine would be a useful weapon of war?”

  “I would,” said the emperor. “Or I’d take a faster-than-light starship, if you’re offering miracles.”

  “I’m offering miracles,” said Quifting, “but to the enemy.” The emperor wondered if Quifting was mad. Mad or not, he was hardly dangerous. The emperor was halfway around the planet from him, on the night side. His side of the meeting room was only a holographic projection, though Quifting wouldn’t know that.

  Half a dozen clerks and couriers had allowed this man to reach the emperor’s ersatz presence. Why? Possibly Quifting had useful suggestions, but not necessarily. Sometimes they let an entertaining madman through, lest the emperor grow bored.

  “It’s a very old idea,” Quifting said earnestly. “I’ve traced it back three thousand years, to the era when space-flight itself was only a dream. I can demonstrate that a massive rotating cylinder, infinite in length, can be circled by closed timelike paths. It seems reasonable that a long but finite—”

  “Wait. I must have missed something.”

  “Take a massive cylinder,” Quifting said patiently, “and put a rapid spin on it. I can plot a course for a spacecraft that will bring it around the cylinder and back to its starting point in space and time.”

  “Ah. A functioning time machine, then. Done with relativity, I expect. But must a cylinder be infinitely long?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. A long but finite cylinder ought to show the same behavior, except near the endpoints.”

  “And when you say you can demonstrate this . . .”

  “To another mathematician. Otherwise I would not have been allowed to meet Your Splendor. In addition, there are historical reasons to think that the cylinder need not be infinite.”

  Now the emperor was jolted. “Historical? Really?”

  “That’s surprising, isn’t it? But it’s easy to design a time machine, given the Terching Effect. You know about the Terching Effect?”

  “It’s what makes a warship’s hull so rigid,” confirmed the emperor.

  “Yes. The cylinder must be very strong to take the rotation without flying apart. Of course it would be enormously expensive to build. But others have tried it. The Six Worlds Alliance started one during the Free Trade period.”

  “Really?”

  “We have the records. Archeology had them fifty years ago, but they had no idea what the construct was intended to do. Idiots.” Quifting’s scowl was brief. “Never mind. A thousand years later, during the One Race Wars, the Mao Buddhists started to build such a time machine out in Sol’s cometary halo. Again, behind the Coal Sack is a long, massive cylinder, a quasi-Terching-Effect shell enclosing a neutronium core. We think an alien race called the Kchipreesee built it. The ends are flared, possibly to compensate for edge effects, and there are fusion rocket motors in orbit around it, ready for attachment to spin it up to speed.”

  “Did nobody ever finish one of these, ah, time machines?” Quitting pounced on the word. “Nobody!” and he leaned forward, grinning savagely at the emperor. No, he was not awed. A mathematician rules his empire absolutely, and it is more predictable, easier to manipulate, than any universe an emperor would dare believe in.

  “The Six Worlds Alliance fell apart before their project was barely started. The Mao Buddhist attempt—well, you know what happened to Sol system during the One Race Wars. As for the Kchipreesee, I’m told that many generations of space travel killed them off through biorhythm upset.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It may be, but they are certainly extinct, and they certainly left their artifact half-finished.”

  “I don’t understand,” the emperor admitted. He was tall, muscular, built like a middleweight boxer. Health was the mark of aristocracy in this age. “You seem to be saying that building a time machine is simple but expensive, that it would handle any number of ships—it would, wouldn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “—and send them back in time to exterminate one’s enemies’ ancestors. Others have tried it. But in practice, the project is always interrupted or abandoned.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you believe in cause and effect?”

  “Of course. I . . . suppose that means I don’t believe in time travel, doesn’t it?”

  “A working time machine would
destroy the cause-and-effect relationship of the universe. It seems the universe resists such meddling. No time machine had ever been put into working condition. If the Hallane Regency tries it something will stop them. The Coal Sack is in Hallane space. They need only attach motors to the Kchipreesee device and spin it up.”

  “Bringing bad luck down upon their foolish heads. Hubris. The pride that challenges the gods. I like it. Yes. Let me see . . .” The emperor generally left war to his generals, but he took a high interest in espionage. He tapped at a pocket computer and said, “Get me Director Chilbreez.”

  To Quifting he said, “The director doesn’t always arrest enemy spies. Sometimes he just watches ’em. I’ll have him pick one and give him a lucky break. Let him stumble on a vital secret, as it were.”

  “You’d have to back it up—”

  “Ah, but we’re already trying to recapture Coal Sack space. We’ll step up the attacks a little. We should be able to convince the Hallanes that we’re trying to take away their time machine. Even if you’re completely wrong—which I suspect is true—we’ll have them wasting some of their industrial capacity. Maybe start some factional disputes, too. Pro-and anti-time-machine. Hah!” The emperor’s smile suddenly left him. “Suppose they actually build a time machine?”

  “They won’t.”

  “But a time machine is possible? The mathematics works?”

  “But that’s the point, Your Splendor. The universe itself resists such things.” Quifting smiled confidently. “Don’t you believe in cause and effect?”

  “Yes.”

  Violet-white light blazed through the windows behind the mathematician, making of him a star-edged black shadow. Quifting ran forward and smashed into the holograph wall. His eyes were shut tight, his clothes were afire. “What is it?” he screamed. “What’s happening?”

  “I imagine the sun has gone nova,” said the emperor.

  The wall went black.

  A dulcet voice spoke. “Director Chilbreez on the line.”

  “Never mind.” There was no point now in telling the director how to get an enemy to build a time machine. The universe protected its cause-and-effect basis with humorless ferocity. Director Chilbreez was doomed; and perhaps Quifting had ended the war after all. The emperor went to the window. A churning aurora blazed bright as day, and grew brighter still.

  SAFARI TO THE LOST AGES

  William P. McGivern

  Chapter I

  The Present

  Barry Rudd glanced up from the charts on his desk as McGregor, his burly, square-faced assistant, lumbered into his office.

  McGregor’s red face was redder than usual and there was an outraged gleam in his normally mild eyes.

  “Boss,” he said hoarsely, “I’m reaching the limits of my patience. No fair man will deny that I’ve stood for a lot, but this is the final straw. I just can’t take any more.”

  “What’s up, Mac?” Barry Rudd asked quizzically.

  “It’s just this: We’re goin’ soft as lap dogs on a cream diet. When I think of what we used to be and what we are now I could weep for the shame of it. And it’s gone far enough, I tell you. Right now is the time to stop.”

  The big Scotchman paused and swept a heavy arm about the elaborately furnished office.

  “This ain’t our style, boss,” he said, almost pleadingly. “We don’t belong on the two hundred and fifteenth floor of an office building.”

  Barry Rudd stood up, grinning faintly. He was a tall young man with solid shoulders and narrow hips. His features were regular and pleasant, but his gray eyes were startlingly out of place in that ordinary face. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen everything the world contained and who has found much of it not worth looking at. They were not cynical, but, rather, amused, as if deep inside he were grinning at something that others couldn’t see.

  “Are you sure it’s not spring fever that’s bothering you, Mac?” he asked, still smiling.

  “Spring fever!” McGregor snorted. “That’s not my trouble and you know it. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me.”

  “I wish you would,” Barry sighed.

  “All right. Time travel today is just as common as telephones were a couple of hundred years ago. You can’t deny that we had a lot to do with convincing people that it’s a safe and sensible pastime. Now that, in a nutshell, is my gripe.”

  Barry ran his hand through his black kinky hair and laughed.

  “I don’t follow you, Mac. Sure time travel is safe. If it wasn’t we’d be darn soon out of business. If people weren’t making vacation excursions into the past there would be little use for our time travel agency, our machines and our services. We organize, equip and direct expeditions into the past. It’s a good business. We make nice money. I don’t see your complaint.”

  McGregor jammed his hands into his pockets and paced nervously up and down the room, breathing heavily.

  “Maybe I can’t explain what I feel,” he growled. “In the old days we had fun. There was a lot of excitement exploring the past. Sure, it wasn’t all coffee and cake, but damn it, it was living. Remember that fracas we had in the twelfth century? The time I got captured by the Saracens and you got there just in time to save me from being cut into sixty-six pieces?”

  “I remember,” Barry said softly. McGregor’s words were churning memories to life within him.

  “Now,” McGregor went on disgustedly, “we’re acting as nursemaids for a lot of tittering school teachers who don’t want to go back any farther than their own grandparents. I tell you it ain’t right. And this girl is the last straw. She—”

  “Girl?” Barry interrupted. “What girl?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” McGregor stopped pacing. “I guess I was so mad I forgot all about it.”

  “I guess you did,” Barry said drily. “She’s out in the reception room now,” McGregor continued moodily. “She wants to see you.”

  “Why didn’t you send her in?” Barry asked.

  “I was just going to,” McGregor said guiltily, “when all of a sudden I looked at her and got mad all over. I told her to wait and I came in to get this off my chest.”

  Barry sat down behind his desk and toyed with a pencil with lean strong fingers.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked ironically. “She must be pretty terrible if the mere sight of her caused you to explode like this.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” McGregor muttered. “She’s little and pretty with great big eyes. But she’s either a college dame or a society debutante. I could tell that from her clothes.”

  “Very shrewd of you,” Barry said with faint sarcasm.

  “You don’t get what I mean,” McGregor said miserably. “If we start taking business like that we’re sunk forever. She’ll probably want us to take a party of young punks back fifty or sixty years for a party or something. Or maybe she’ll want an expedition for a sorority initiation.” The big Scotchman shuddered visibly at the thought. “Don’t you see, boss,” he went on desperately, “if we start sending out joy rides like that we’re through. Let me tell her you aren’t in. Then let’s lock the door of this office and throw the key away. That’s the only way we’ll ever get away.”

  “It’s a tempting idea,” Barry said thoughtfully, “but it’s out of the question right now. Maybe when we get ourselves straightened out financially we can make a break like that. Now you’d better show the young lady in before she decides to take her business somewhere else.”

  “All right,” McGregor grumbled mournfully, “but wait and see. You’re making a mistake.”

  When the girl walked into his office, Barry received a start. McGregor had neglected to say that she was extraordinarily beautiful. Her hair was long and dark and her eyes were the clearest, deepest and bluest that Barry had ever seen. There was a lithe grace in her stride as she approached his desk.

  He stood up and held a chair for her. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re Barry Rudd, aren’t you?”

/>   “Guilty,” he smiled. “What can I do for you?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. Instead her deep eyes regarded him thoughtfully, almost appraisingly.

  “Is anything wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “You’ve changed a little, but not too much.”

  “Changed?” Barry asked, mystified. “Have we met before?”

  “No,” the girl said, “we haven’t met before. But five years ago, Mr. Rudd, you were a special hero of mine. I suppose every girl in her teens has one. I collected all the pictures and stories of you that I ran across and pasted them into a scrapbook. I followed your career as closely as I could. It used to be my fondest dream that I could go with you on one of your exciting trips into the deep past.”

  Barry ran a finger under his collar uncomfortably.

  “That’s very nice,” he said awkwardly, “but why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because,” the girl said quietly, “I need the Barry Rudd of five years ago. I need the Barry Rudd who laughed at the danger of time travel, who loved the excitement of it, who flashed deeper into the past than any man has since, and did it with a smile on his lips. There was something about that Barry Rudd that made him seem a knight in shining armor to a silly sixteen year old girl. I’m wondering if the armor is still shining, Mr. Rudd.”

  Barry sat down behind his desk, face expressionless. He cupped his chin in his hands and stared steadily at the girl.

  “Suppose you tell me what you want?” he suggested quietly.

  The girl leaned forward eagerly and Barry noticed that her small hands were clasped together, the knuckles whitening with strain.

  “My name is Linda Carstairs,” she said. “My father, Professor Carstairs, traveled into the past about three months ago. His trip was supposed to be a very brief one. In fact he only took food enough for three or four days. He was accompanied by his laboratory assistant. They haven’t returned.”

  “I remember reading about it,” Barry said, “As I recall they were going back to the fourth century. Is that correct?”