Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “You do, eh?” the Colonel’s tone was as soft as a file on a rusty hinge.

  “Yes, I do—sir.”

  “Hmmmmm,” the Colonel regarded Reggie with rheumy eyes. “I suppose,” he measured his words menacingly, “you are ass enough to want her hand in marriage?”

  Reggie smiled swiftly. This was capital. The old boy got right down to the point. Must have suspected it all along. Why, it was a breeze. The old goat would probably say a few fatherly words, and that would be that.

  “Yes, sir. You guessed it. But I wouldn’t say I was an ass, sir. She isn’t as bad as all that. Why Sandra has any number of good points, and I—”

  Colonel Vanderveer rose behind his huge mahogany desk, and to Reggie, his lantern jaw never seemed squarer, or his eyes more baleful. He was gazing at Reggie with the curious interest of a man who has seen something scuttle out from under a damp board on a rainy day.

  “Get the hell out of my study, you young whippersnapper!”

  “But—” Reggie’s protest was a muffled bleat as he backed three steps away from the figure of wrath.

  “You, marry a Vanderveer!” The Colonel was shouting wildly, now. Shouting wildly and waving his arms in great confused circles. “You, a sniveling young blatherskite without a single scrap of family background. Don’t try to argue with me, young man. I’m no damned fool. I’ve been shaking the branches of your family tree for the last two days, ever since I suspected that you and my daughter Sandra were getting sentimental and sloppy about one another!”

  “But—!”

  “Why, sir,” the colonel bellowed, really beginning to warm up to his subject. “Do you realize that the Vanderveer’s have the finest, the most noble lineage, heredity, ancestry, of any family in this country? Why, the nerve, the insolence of your presumption, sir, is enough to nauseate even the most tolerant of men!”

  “Yes, but—” Reggie began.

  Colonel Vanderveer, however, was plunging onward. “Look,” he bellowed, turning ’slightly to point to two portraits hanging side by side behind his huge study desk. “Look at those portraits, sir! Those, sir, are my forebearers, my noble ancestors. They are the two most glorious heroes of a noble Vanderveer line. The illustrious hero on the right,” thundered the Colonel, pointing to one of the portraits, “is none other than Major Lucius Vanderveer, brilliant military genius without whose aid to General Sheridan, the Union Army never would have been able to win the American Civil War.

  The Colonel paused only long enough to take a deep and reverent breath. Then he barged loudly ahead. “And this second portrait,” he bellowed, pointing to the painting on his left, “is that of Colonel Horatio Vanderveer, possibly the most glorious of all my line. It was Major Horatio Vanderveer who gave the Duke of Wellington invaluable assistance in defeating Napoleon at Waterloo!”

  “But—!”

  “Don’t interrupt me, sir. Haven’t you even background enough to know that a gentleman never interrupts another gentleman? Bah. What are you, sir. A Vliet! Nothing but a Vliet. And where, sir, were the Vliets among the world builders? Tell me that, just tell me that! Nowhere, sir. That’s where they were. Why, there isn’t a single Vliet anywhere on the pages of History. Not a single Vliet on anything but twentieth century police records!”

  “I had a grandfather who was a whisky drummer in Mississippi,” Reggie offered timidly.

  “Whissssssssky drummer, indeed! You’re a charlatan, young man. That is precisely what you are, sir. A charlatan!” The Colonel was pointing a horny and dramatic finger at the door of his study. “Get out of here, you young upstart. There is no room for the son of a son of a whiskyyy drummer in the Vanderveer line. That, sir, is final. I will not have the famous, the glorious, the splendid Vanderveer name polluted by intermarriage with a descendant of gypsies!”

  Colonel Vanderveer’s red face had turned stark crimson, and he was making fuzzy grabs at small objects on his desk. The line in his lantern jaw was twitching in frenzy. Reggie noted all this, and stepped quickly out of the study, closing the door behind him. He heard a blunt object thudding against the door, and shrugging his slim shoulders dejectedly, turned off down the hallway of the Vanderveer mansion . . .

  Reggie found Sandra Vanderveer waiting for him in the garden of the Vanderveer estate. She was slim, pretty, and brunette. She was dressed in blue slacks. Her face wore a look of anxious concern.

  “Reggie, have you seen him?”

  Reggie Vliet absently plucked a bit of fluff from the crease in his impeccable morning trousers.

  “Yes, old girl. I saw him. Somehow, I am beginning to suspect that your father doesn’t take to me.”

  Sandra’s eyes became suddenly moist.

  “Oh, Reggie, no. He didn’t refuse?”

  “He objected,” Reggie corrected her, “violently.” He shuddered. Faint in the distance he heard sounds that might have been the continued bull rantings of Colonel Vanderveer.

  Sandra Vanderveer’s lovely blue eyes were suddenly filled with tears. And while Reggie put his arms around her waist, she clung to him, sobbing.

  “Oh, Reggie, Reggie. This is terrible. What are we going to do?” Reggie looked resigned.

  “It’s tough, old dear. But after all, we can elope.”

  “Elope?” Sandra wailed the word.

  “Certainly. Nothing to it. Just pop off and get married. People do it all along, you know.”

  “But, Reggie. We can’t. I wouldn’t dare. What could we live on?”

  Reggie frowned.

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You haven’t any job,” Sandra reminded him softly, for this was a delicate subject. Reggie was engrossed in deep brooding.

  “I must think,” he muttered. “I must get off somewhere and put the Vliet brain to the wheel. You can’t cook an omelet without breaking the egg, you know.”

  “Oh Reggie,” Sandra breathed, eyes shining. “You’re wonderful.”

  Reggie nodded, gloom returning to his face.

  “I know,” he conceded. “But now I must go off somewhere and think.” Turning on his heel, Reggie left Sandra in the garden, gazing in wistful awe at his retreating figure. There was scotch and soda, and solitude in the Vanderveer library. It was good scotch, and he could do his thinking there . . .

  But thinking in the Vanderveer library was not the easy job that Reggie Randhope had imagined it would be; even from a deep leather chair, with a bottle and siphon beside him. For the walls of the room were alternately lined with books, and pictures.

  The books were bad enough. The titles concerned such grave matters as Complete Guide To Ancestry, Burkes Peerage, Who’s Who In Outer Arabia, and many more such volumes. Their morocco covers brought back to Reggie the realization that he was nothing but a Vliet. Just a Vliet. Not even a Lincoln, or an Adam.

  Until Colonel Vanderveer’s outburst of the afternoon, Reggie had never been particularly conscious of the fact that he was a Vliet. Neither had he been particularly ashamed of it. Of course he knew something of the importance attached to the legend of the Vanderveers. No man engaged to marry a Vanderveer could help but know the history of the Clan. If not completely, at least from the year 920 B.C. up to the French Revolution.

  Reggie had even realized that his own family crest was somewhat lacking in comparison to the Vanderveer escutchen. However, being an extremely confident young modern, it had never entered his head that this difference in family background might become the stumbling block to his marital ambitions.

  But old Colonel Vanderveer had looked Reggie Vliet up. He had, in his own words, “shaken every damned limb” of the Vliet family tree. And now he was reacting as though he had found the thing infested with chattering monkeys, or fungoid growths.

  Reggie Vliet sipped his scotch reflectively and frowned. It was obvious that something had to be done. Colonel Vanderveer had to be brought to his knees, or at least to his ankles.

  And at this moment Lowndes appeared.

  Lowndes was the b
utler of the Vanderveer manor. Lowndes had brooding eyes and a mouth full of gold teeth. His trouser cuffs reached only to his ankles—a fact which everyone pretended not to notice, inasmuch as Lowndes was generally known to be eccentric.

  Reggie regarded Lowndes. The fellow had an unpleasant habit of appearing unexpectedly, just as he had done now.

  “Hello, Lowndes,” Reggie said at last. “Where did you pop from?”

  Lowndes looked imperturbably at him, while bending over to fix a flower in a vase.

  “From the thirteenth century, sir,” Lowndes replied.

  “Oh.” Reggie considered this. “That’s nice, Lowndes.”

  Then Reggie again put his mind to thinking a way out of his dilemma. But the pictures and the books all around him continued to be bothersome. And something else was, too. Something Lowndes had said.

  Reggie frowned.

  “Lowndes?” Reggie looked up.

  “What was it that you just said?”

  Lowndes was arranging a lamp on a table.

  “I said I just came back from the thirteenth century, sir.”

  “I see, the thirteenth century,” Reggie said reflectively. Then: “That’s quite a bit off, isn’t it Lowndes? I mean, in time and all that? Sort of difficult to get to, I’d imagine.”

  Lowndes gazed tolerantly at Reggie.

  “Oh, no sir. Not at all, sir. Not for me it isn’t.”

  Reggie considered this.

  “Not for you?”

  Lowndes smiled confidentially.

  “Oh, no sir. I can go anywhere I please in time. I can just zip off. Do it constantly, sir. An interesting hobby, sir.”

  Reggie nodded.

  “I should imagine. No end of fun, what? How do you go about it? Any special trick?”

  Lowndes smiled confidingly.

  “My watch, sir.” He pointed to a wrist watch on his left hand. “It’s a time machine stripped down to the essentials. Made it myself. A very cunning job, if I do say so, sir.”

  Reggie looked at the watch on the butler’s wrist.

  “Well,” he declared, “this is rather novel. An odd sort of timepiece.”

  “Decidedly odd, sir.” There was staunch pride in Lowndes tone. “I can just set it, as one would an ordinary watch, to any one of the centuries designated on the face of it.”

  “And off you’ll go, to that particular century?” There was a marveling tone in Reggie’s voice. A shrewd fellow, Lowndes.

  Lowndes nodded.

  “Yes, sir. Off I’ll go, after I press this little button on the side.” He indicated a button beneath the mainspring.

  “Try it, Lowndes,” Reggie suggested. “Shock me, old boy.”

  And while Reggie looked on in appreciation, Lowndes pressed the button beneath the mainspring and quite promptly vanished.

  Reggie drew his breath in sharply. “Well,” he ejaculated, “what won’t they think of next?”

  And in the next instant, Lowndes was back in the room again, standing before him and smirking proudly.

  “You see, sir. Simple, eh?”

  Reggie nodded.

  “Where did you go to then?”

  “The time of Christopher Columbus,” Lowndes said calmly. “Back in the fifteenth century.”

  The smile was still on Reggie’s features, the same bland, wondering smile. But a new glint was creeping into his eyes. And he looked around the walls of the library, from which the paintings of countless Vanderveers hung. Vanderveers in uniform, Vanderveers in costumes of state, Vanderveers on horses, Vanderveers signing great documents. All very impressive. All very historical.

  It was then that Reggie noticed all the paintings were concerned with the dignified and very historical antics of the two most prominent of the Vanderveer clan, namely, Major Lucius Vanderveer, and Colonel Horatio Vanderveer. They were evidently the prize roots from the Vanderveer family tree, Reggie realized, especially since these two gents were the ones whose portraits hung behind the desk in Colonel Vanderveer’s study.

  And then the idea exploded in a blinding flash upon his brain.

  He had it—had it proper! The Vanderveer family tree. The one thorn in the toe of his marriage, was based on these two historical old duffers who had been forebearers of the proud Vanderveer line.

  Reggie thought aloud.

  “Supposing,” he wondered, “that these two old ducks in the pictures on the walls hadn’t been famous?”

  “Eh, sir?” Lowndes was puzzled. Reggie waved his hand impatiently. “One moment, Lowndes, I am thinking!” Then he drove on to the nub of this great idea that was dawning upon him. Supposing history hadn’t been what it was? Wouldn’t it then be possible that the Vanderveers might not have been famous? It would not only be possible, it would undoubtedly be probable. If history were different, there would be no place for the Vanderveer pride in a family tree. And old Colonel Vanderveer couldn’t be so confounded arrogant. And he, Reggie Vliet, could marry Sandra Vanderveer just like that!

  The thought was staggering, stupendous, colossal. And, better than that, it was a good, an excellent, a splendid idea!

  Reggie grabbed Lowndes by the arm. “Lowndes old boy,” he breathed excitedly. “That dingus on your wrist—”

  “You mean my simplified time machine?” Lowndes asked coldly. “And while you’re speaking of the scientific side of me, sir, I’d prefer you to call me Doctor Lowndes.”

  “No offense, Lowndes, I mean Doctor Lowndes,” Reggie was babbling rapidly. “I am in a great state of excitement. What I want to know is this—do you ever lend your time whatcham’callit to anyone?”

  “You want to borrow it, sir?”

  Reggie nodded excitedly.

  “That’s it, Lowndes. I want to borrow it for a little while. I just thought of a few people and one or two things I’d like to take care of.”

  “Back in Time, sir?” Lowndes asked. “Right, back in Time. You see, Lowndes, I mean Doctor Lowndes, here’s the story.” And Reggie lowered his voice to an excited whisper as he outlined his plan to the Vanderveer butler. Lowndes listened gravely, nodding now and then.

  “I think you might be able to do it, sir,” Lowndes said at last. “And, just between the two of us,” Lowndes lowered his voice, “I have no particular relish for the blusterings of Colonel Vanderveer, myself. Perhaps, sir, if you mess up Time sufficiently, I shall be the employer of the old tyrant, rather than vice versa, as it is now.” A thoughtful gleam came into Lowndes’ dark brooding eyes.

  Reggie was bubbling, now.

  “Capital, Lowndes, capital. You probably shall. Now, if you’ll just explain the workings of this Time thingamajig, and hand it over, I can be on my way.”

  “Where do you figure on starting, sir?” Lowndes was curious.

  “Why,” Reggie was thoroughly excited by his brilliant plan, now, “I’ll pop back right to the nub of the trouble, old boy. I’ll hie myself back to the era in which Colonel Horatio Vanderveer, invaluable aide to Wellington, was in flower!”

  Reggie pounded a fist into his palm. “Damn, Lowndes, it’s an excellent idea, eh?”

  “Doctor Lowndes,” the butler reproved him, “Doctor Lowndes, sir.” Then, admiringly: “It is an excellent plan, sir, extraordinarily so.”

  “Napoleon Bonaparte’s era!” Reggie rubbed his hands enthusiastically at the thought. “Wow, this is going to be festive Lowndes, strictly festive!” Lowndes essayed something that came fairly close to a smile. Then he unstrapped his time machine from his wrist, handing it over to Reggie. As the young man listened intently, Lowndes then went into a detailed explanation of the gadget’s workings. This done, he strapped the time machine to Reggie’s wrist and set the dial on it.

  “It’s all fixed to take me to where I want to go?” Reggie demanded.

  “Absolutely, sir. The exact year, and time of year. I wish I could go along with you, sir. But the machine is too small to transport more than one person. Good luck, sir!”

  Reggie gripped Lowndes hand.

&
nbsp; “I shan’t return, old boy, until I have thoroughly made a mess of history. I shall, in a sense, be the chap who will cut down the Vanderveer family tree!”

  “Press the button, sir, and you’ll be on the way,” Lowndes directed.

  “What ho, Lowndes,” Reggie said, his finger finding the button. “If Miss Vanderveer asks for me, tell her I have a luncheon engagement with the Duke of Wellington. Pip, pip!”

  And Reggie pressed the button . . .

  CHAPTER II

  Reggie Gets a Uniform

  Reggie experienced, then, for a timeless interval the sensation a person might enjoy during a drop from the top of the Empire State building. A roaring river of sound thundered by his ears, blanketing all his senses by its very immensity. Blackness surrounded him on every side as he plummeted down and down and down.

  Dizziness assailed him. The blackness began to dissolve into spinning multi-colored discs that were laced with flickering streaks of light. This kaleidoscopic phenomenon was the last straw. With a sigh Reggie’s puzzled brain gave up the battle and slipped gratefully into the irresponsibility of oblivion . . .

  The next sensation he experienced was one of delightful buoyancy and softness. It was as if he were floating on fleecy, downy clouds. His taut muscles relaxed and he breathed a sigh of pure relief and sheer animal comfort.

  Then he opened his eyes. For an instant he blinked unbelievingly and then he sat up. He shook his head groggily and his mouth dropped open and stayed there. There was a roaring in his ears.

  Now Reggie was conscious of two things. First of all, the roaring in his ears had ceased and sunlight was shining. Secondly he was standing on a dusty, clay banked road, somewhere on a countryside. And if Lowndes’ calculations in setting the time machine had been correct, he was undoubtedly in France, in the year 1815, and somewhere in the vicinity of the Battle of Waterloo.

  Reggie took a deep breath as he looked around.

  “So this is France,” he said aloud. And then, quite suddenly, his stomach seemed to be filled with butterflies. He felt much like a self-conscious valedictorian at a high school graduation who suddenly realizes the enormity of the audience facing him, and the monstrosity of the task that lies ahead of him.