Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  That day in the study in Georgetown, she looked at Robert Macauley, in the reading glasses he never wore publicly, and felt overwhelming tenderness. Julia could call up every detail of the photo of their meeting.

  Only the boy in the background looked directly at the couple who stared into each other’s eyes. He smiled. His hand was raised. Something gold caught the sun. A ring? A tiny bow?

  Had Robert and she been hit with Eros’ arrow? All she knew was that the love she felt was very real.

  How clever they were, the gods, to give mortals just enough of a glimpse of their workings to fascinate. But never to let them know everything.

  That summer, her son went up Mount Airey alone. It bothered Julia as one more sign he was passing out of her control. “The gods won’t want to lose this one m’lady,” Smalley had told her.

  Over the next few years, Timothy entered puberty, went away to school, had secrets. His distance increased. When the family spent time at Joyous Garde, Tim would go to the Cabin often and report to her in privacy. Mundane matters like “Smalley says the back eaves need to be reshingled.” Or vast, disturbing ones like, “That jungle portal is impassable now. Smalley says soon ours will be the only one left.”

  Then came a lovely day in late August 1954. Sun streamed through the windows of Joyous Garde, sailboats bounced on the water. In the ballroom, staff moved furniture. A distant phone rang. A reception was to be held that evening. Senator Macauley would be flying in from Buffalo that afternoon. Julia’s secretary, her face frozen and wide-eyed held out a telephone and couldn’t speak. Against all advice, trusting in the good fortune which had carried him so far, her husband had taken off in the face of a sudden Great Lakes storm. Thunder, lightning and hail had swept the region. Radio contact with Robert Macauley’s one-engine plane had been lost.

  The crash site wasn’t found until late that night. The death wasn’t confirmed until the next morning. When Julia looked for him, Timothy was gone. The day was cloudy with a chill drizzle. She stood on the porch of Old Cottage a bit later when he returned. His eyes red. Dressed as he was in the photo.

  As they fell into each others’ arms, Julia caught a glimpse that was gone in an instant. Her son, as in the photo she had studied so often, approached Stoneham Cabin. This time, she saw his grief turn to surprise and a look of stunned betrayal. Timothy didn’t notice. The two hugged and sobbed in private sorrow before they turned toward Joyous Garde and the round of public mourning.

  As they did, he said, “You go up there from now on. I never want to go back.”

  FINALE

  Julia approached the grove and Cabin on that first morning of Fall. She was aware that it lay within her power to destroy this place. Julia had left a sealed letter to be shown to Timothy if she failed to return. Though she knew that was most unlikely to happen.

  A young woman, casual in slacks and a blouse, stood on the porch. In one hand she held the silver mask. “I’m Linda Martin,” she said. “Here by the will of the gods.”

  Julia recognized Linda as contemporary and smart. “An escaped slave?” she asked.

  “In a modern sense, perhaps.” The other woman shrugged and smiled. “A slave of circumstances.”

  “I’ve had what seem to be visions.” Julia said as she stepped onto the porch. “About my son and about this property.”

  “Those are my daughter’s doing, I’m afraid. Sally is nine,” Linda was apologetic yet proud. “I’ve asked her not to. They aren’t prophecy. More like possibility.”

  “They felt like a promise. And a threat.”

  “Please forgive her. She has a major crush on your son. Knows everything he has done. Or might ever do. He was very disappointed last month when he was in pain and wanted to talk to the corporal. And found us.”

  “Please forgive Tim. One’s first Rex makes a lasting impression.” Julia was surprised at how much she sounded like her grandmother.

  The living room of Stoneham Cabin still smelled of pine. The scent reminded Julia of Alcier and her first visit. As before, a door opened where no door had been. She and Linda passed through an invisible veil and the light from the twelve portals mingled and blended in the Still Room.

  “Sally, this is Julia Garde Macauley. Timothy’s mother.” The child who sat beyond the flame was beautiful. She wore a blue tunic adorned with a silver boy riding a dolphin. She bowed slightly. “Hello Mrs. Macauley. Please explain to Timothy that the corporal knew what happened was Fate and not me.”

  Julia remembered Smalley saying, “It’s a child will be my undoing.” She smiled and nodded. Linda held out the mask which found its way to Sally’s face.

  “This is something I dreamed about your son.”

  What Julia saw was outdoors and in winter. It was men mostly. White mostly. Solemn. Formally dressed. A funeral? No. A man in judicial robes held a book. He was older, but Julia recognized an ally of her husband’s, a young congressman from Oregon. This was the future.

  “A future,” said the voice from behind the mask. Julia froze. The child was uncanny. Another man, seen from behind, had his hand raised as he took the oath of office. An inauguration. Even with his back turned, she knew her son.

  “And I’ve seen this. Like a nightmare.” Flames rose. The Cabin and the grove burned.

  “I don’t want that. This is our home.” She was a child and afraid.

  Later, Linda and Julia sat across a table on the rear porch and sipped wine. The foliage below made Mirror Lake appear to be ringed with fire.

  “It seems that the gods stood aside and let my husband die. Now they want Tim.”

  “Even the gods can’t escape Destiny,” Linda said. “They struggle to change it by degrees.”

  She looked deep into her glass. “I have Sally half the year. At the cusps of the four seasons. The rest of the time she is with the Great Mother. Once her abilities were understood, that was as good an arrangement as I could manage. Each time she’s changed a little more.”

  Another mother who must share her child, Julia thought. We have much to talk about. How well the Immortals know how to bind us to their plans. She would always resent that. But she was too deeply involved not to comply. Foreknowledge was an addiction.

  A voice sang, clear as mountain air. At first Julia thought the words were in English and that the song came from indoors.

  Then she realized the language was ancient Greek and that she heard it inside her head. The song was about Persephone, carried off to the Underworld, about Ganymede abducted by Zeus. The voice had an impossible purity. Hypnotic, heartbreaking, it sang about Time flowing like a stream and children taken by the gods.

  THE MESSAGE

  Isaac Asimov

  They drank beer and reminisced as men will who have met after long separation. They called to mind the days under fire. They remembered sergeants and girls, both with exaggeration. Deadly things became humorous in retrospect, and trifles disregarded for ten years were hauled out for airing.

  Including, of course, the perennial mystery.

  “How do you account for it?” asked the first. “Who started it?”

  The second shrugged. “No one started it. Everyone was doing it, like a disease. You, too, I suppose.”

  The first chuckled.

  The third one said softly, “I never saw the fun in it. Maybe because I came across it first when I was under fire for the first time. North Africa.”

  “Really?” said the second.

  “The first night on the beaches of Oran. I was getting under cover, making for some native shack and I saw it in the light of a flare—”

  George was deliriously happy. Two years of red tape and now he was finally back in the past. Now he could complete his paper on the social life of the foot soldier of World War II with some authentic details.

  Out of the warless, insipid society of the thirtieth century, he found himself for one glorious moment in the tense, superlative drama of the warlike twentieth.

  North Africa! Site of the first
great sea-borne invasion of the war! How the temporal physicists had scanned the area for the perfect spot and moment. This shadow of an empty wooden building was it. No human would approach for a known number of minutes. No blast would seriously affect it in that time. By being there, George would not affect history. He would be that ideal of the temporal physicist, the “pure observer.”

  It was even more terrific than he had imagined. There was the perpetual roar of artillery, the unseen tearing of planes overhead. There were the periodic lines of tracer bullets splitting the sky and the occasional ghastly glow of a flare twisting downward.

  And he was here! He, George, was part of the war, part of an intense kind of life forever gone from the world of the thirtieth century, grown tame and gentle.

  He imagined he could see the shadows of an advancing column of soldiers, hear the low cautious monosyllables slip from one to another. How he longed to be one of them in truth, not merely a momentary intruder, a “pure observer.”

  He stopped his note taking and stared at his stylus, its micro-light hypnotizing him for a moment. A sudden idea had overwhelmed him and he looked at the wood against which his shoulder pressed. This moment must not pass unforgotten into history. Surely doing this would affect nothing. He would use the older English dialect and there would be no suspicion.

  He did it quickly and then spied a soldier running desperately toward the structure, dodging a burst of bullets. George knew his time was up, and, even as he knew it, found himself back in the thirtieth century.

  It didn’t matter. For those few minutes he had been part of World War II. A small part, but part. And others would know it. They might not know they knew it, but someone perhaps would repeat the message to himself.

  Someone, perhaps that man running for shelter, would read it and know that along with all the heroes of the twentieth century was the “pure observer,” the man from the thirtieth century, George Kilroy. He was there!

  THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK AFTER NEXT

  Murray Leinster

  It can be reported that Mr. Thaddeus Binder is again puttering happily around the workshop he calls his laboratory, engaged again upon something that he—alone—calls philosophic-scientific research. He is a very nice, little, pink-cheeked person, Mr. Binder—but maybe somebody ought to stop him.

  Mr. Steems could be asked for an opinion. If the matter of Mr. Binder’s last triumph is mentioned in Mr. Steems’ hearing, he will begin to speak, rapidly and with emotion. His speech will grow impassioned; his tone will grow shrill and hoarse at the same time; and presently he will foam at the mouth. This occurs though he is not aware that he ever met Mr. Binder in person, and though the word “compenetrability” has never fallen upon his ears. It occurs because Mr. Steems is sensitive. He still resents it that the newspapers described him as the Taxi Monster—a mass murderer exceeding even M. Landru in the number of his victims. There is also the matter of Miss Susie Blepp, to whom Mr. Steems was affianced at the time, and there is the matter of Patrolman Cassidy, whose love-life was rearranged. Mr. Steems’ reaction is violent. But the background of the episode was completely innocent. It was even chastely intellectual.

  The background was Mr. Thaddeus Binder. He is a plump little man of sixty-four, retired on pension from the Maintenance Department of the local electric light and power company. He makes a hobby of a line of research that seems to have been neglected. Since his retirement, Mr. Binder has read widely and deeply, quaffing the wisdom of men like Kant, Leibnitz, Maritain, Einstein, and Judge Rutherford. He absorbs philosophical notions from those great minds and then tries to apply them practically at his workbench. He does not realize his success. Definitely!

  Mr. Steems drove a taxicab in which Mr. Binder rode just after one such experiment. The whole affair sprang from that fact. Mr. Binder had come upon the philosophical concept of compenetrability. It is the abstract thought that—all experience to the contrary notwithstanding—two things might manage to be in the same place at the same time. Mr. Binder decided that it might be true. He experimented. In Maintenance, before his retirement, he had answered many calls in the emergency truck, and he knew some things that electricity on the loose can do. He knows some other things that he doesn’t believe yet. In any case, he used this background of factual data in grappling with a philosophical concept. He made a device. He tried it. He was delighted with the results. He then set out to show it to his friend Mr. McFadden.

  It was about five o’clock in the afternoon of May 3rd. Mr. Binder reached the corner of Bliss and Kelvin Streets near his home. He had a paper-wrapped parcel under his arm. He saw Mr. Steems’ cab parked by the curb. He approached and gave the address of his friend, Mr. McFadden, on Monroe Avenue. Mr. Steems looked at him sourly. Mr. Binder got into the cab and repeated the address. Mr. Steems snapped, “I got it the first time!” He pulled out into the traffic, scowling. Everything was normal.

  Mr. Binder settled back blissfully. The inside of the cab was dingy and worn, but he did not notice. The seat-cushion was so badly frayed that there was one place where a spring might stab through at any instant. But Mr. Binder beamed to himself. He had won an argument with his friend, Mr. McFadden. He had proof of his correctness. It was the paper parcel on his lap.

  The cab passed Vernon Street. It went by Dupuy Street. Mr. Binder chuckled to himself. In his reading, the idea of compenetrability had turned up with a logical argument for its possibility that Mr. Binder considered hot stuff. He had repeated that argument to Mr. McFadden, who tended to skepticism. Mr. McFadden had said it was nonsense. Mr. Binder insisted that it was a triumph of inductive reasoning. Mr McFadden snorted. Mr. Binder said, “All right, I’ll prove it!” Now he was on the way to do so.

  His reading of abstruse philosophy had brought him happiness. He gloated as he rode behind Mr. Steems. He even untied his parcel to admire the evidence all over again. It was a large, thin, irregularly-shaped piece of soft leather, supposedly a deerskin. It has been a throw-over on the parlor settee, and had had a picture of Hiawatha and Minnehaha on it. The picture was long gone, now, and the whole thing was about right to wash a car with; but Mr. Binder regarded it very happily. It was his proof that compenetrability was possible.

  Another cab eeled in before Mr. Steems, forcing him to stop or collide. Mr. Steems jammed on his brakes, howling with wrath. The brakes screamed, the wheels locked, and Mr Binder slid forward off his seat. Mr. Steems hurled invective at the other driver. In turn, he received invective. They achieved heights of eloquence, which soothed their separate ires. Mr. Steems turned proudly to Mr. Binder.

  “That told him off, huh?”

  Mr. Binder did not answer. He was not there. The back of the cab was empty. It was as if Mr. Binder had evaporated.

  Mr. Steems fumed. He turned off abruptly into a side street, stopped his cab, and investigated. Mr. Binder was utterly gone. A large patch of deerskin lay on the floor. On the deerskin there was an unusual collection of small objects. Mr. Steems found:

  1 gold watch, monogrammed THB, still running

  87 cents in silver, nickel, and copper coins

  1 pocket-knife

  12 eyelets of metal, suitable for shoes

  1 pair spectacles in metal case

  1 nickel-plated ring, which would fit on a tobacco-pipe

  147 small bits of metal, looking like zipper-teeth

  1 key-ring, with keys

  1 metal shoelace tip

  1 belt-buckle, minus belt

  Mr. Steems swore violently. “Smart guy, huh!” he said wrathfully. “Gettin’ a free ride! He outsmarted himself, he did! Let ’im try to get this watch back! I never seen ’im!”

  He pocketed the watch and money. The other objects he cast contemptuously away. He was about to heave out the deer hide when he remembered that Miss Susie Blepp had made disparaging remarks about the condition of his cab. So had her mother, while grafting dead-head cab-rides as Mr. Steems’ prospective mother-in-law. Mr. Steems said, “The hell with her!” But th
en, grudgingly, he spread the deerhide over the backseat cushion. It helped. It hid the spring that was about to stab through.

  Mr. Steems was dourly pleased. He went and hocked Mr. Binder’s watch and felt a great deal better. He resumed his lawful trade of plying the city streets as a common carrier. Presently he made a soft moaning sound.

  Susie’s mother stood on the curb, waving imperiously. His taxi flag was up. Trust her to spot that first! He couldn’t claim he was busy. Bitterly, he pulled in and opened the back door for her. She got in, puffing a little. She was large and formidable, and Mr. Steems marveled gloomily that a cute trick like Susie could have such a battleaxe for a mother.

  “Susie told me to tell you,” puffed Mrs. Blepp, “that she can’t keep tonight’s date.”

  “Oh, no?” said Mr. Steems sourly.

  “No,” said Susie’s mother severely. She waited challengingly for Steems to drive her home (any hesitation on his part would mean a row with Susie). She slipped off her shoes. She settled back.

  Mr. Steems drove. As he drove, he muttered. Susie was breaking a date.

  Maybe she was going out with, someone else. There was a cop named Cassidy who always looked wistfully at Susie, even in the cab of her affianced boyfriend. Mr. Steems muttered anathemas upon all cops.

  He drew up before Susie’s house Susie wouldn’t be home yet. He turned to let Susie’s mother out.

  His eyes practically popped out of his head.

  The back of the cab was empty. On the seat there was 17 cents in pennies, one nickel, a slightly greenish wedding-ring, an empty lipstick container, several straight steel springs, twelve bobbie pins, assorted safety pins, and a very glittering dress-ornament. On the floor Mrs. Blepp’s shoes remained—size ten-and-a-half.

  Mr. Steems cried out hoarsely. He stared about him, gulped several times for air, and then drove rapidly away. Something was wrong. He did not know what, but it was instinct to get away from there. Mr. Steems did not want trouble. He especially did not want trouble with Susie. But here it was.