by Anthology
She laughed unsteadily. “That made me remember that the university sent your present with a ‘Do Not Open Before Christmas’ sticker on it. I remembered you were leaving the university and they were giving you a combination farewell gift and Christmas present. You didn’t know, but I did, that the professors decided you couldn’t possibly be back before Christmas and so they sent it to the ship. You had always told them you admired—Amos. He hung on the biology classroom wall. It seemed I suddenly knew how things had to be. I put two and two together and I took a chance on it.”
She fell silent, and the silence held for another full, shocking minute. She went on, as if with an effort.
“We threw everything out of the ship, remember? The Christmas presents, too. When I dropped from the ship later, I reached the plain and I broke open the carton with the T)o Not Open’ sticker on it, and there was Amos, as peaceful as you please. I put the ring on his finger and left him there, because I knew that some way the wind or crack-up or something would drop him in the cave. He had to turn up in the cave.
“Anyway,” she added, her lips quirking roguishly, “by our time, back there, it was December 25th.”
Masters clawed his way to his knees, his lips parted unnaturally.
“A Christmas present!” he croaked. “A Christmas present!” His face went white.
The girl said unsteadily, “Cut it out, Erie!”
She leaned weakly against the wall of the cave. “Now come up here, lieutenant, and take this gun out of my hands and don’t stare at me as if you’ve lost your senses.”
Tony forced himself to his feet, and like an automaton skirted around Braker and Yates and took the suddenly shaking weapon from her.
She uttered a weary sigh, smiled at him faintly, bemusedly, and whispered, “Merry Christmas, lieutenant!” She slumped slowly to the ground.
Tony gestured soundlessly at Masters. Masters, face abject and ashamed, picked her up in tender arms.
“Come up here, professor,” Tony said dully. He felt as if all the life had been pumped from his bones.
Overland came forward, shaking his head with emotion. “Amos!” he whispered. He broke in a half-hysterical chuckle, stopped himself. He hovered Laurette, watching her tired face. “At least my girl lives,” he whispered brokenly.
“Get up, Braker,” said Tony. “You, too, Yates.”
Yates rose, vaguely brushing dust from his pressure suit, his lips working over words that refused to emerge.
Braker s voice was a hoarse, unbelieving whisper. His eyes were abnormally wide and fixed hypnotically on the skeleton. “So that’s what we went through—for a damned classroom skeleton.” He repeated it. “For a damned classroom skeleton!”
He came to his feet, fighting to mold his strained face back to normal. “Just about back where we started, eh? Well,” he added in a shaking, bitter tone, “Merry Christmas.” He forced his lips into half-hearted cynicism.
Tony’s face relaxed. He drew in a full, much-needed breath of air. “Sure. Sure—Merry Christmas. Everybody. Including Amos—whoever he used to be.”
Nobody seemed to have anything to say. Or perhaps their thoughts were going back for the moment to a pre-asteroid world. Remembering. At least Masters was remembering, if the suffering, remorseful look on his face meant anything.
Tony broke it. “That’s that, isn’t it? Now we can go back to the ship. From there to Earth. Professor—Masters—start off.” He made a tired gesture.
Masters went ahead, without a backward look, carrying the gently breathing, but still unconscious girl. Overland stole a last look at the skeleton, at Amos, where he lay, unknowing of the chaos the mere fact of his being there, white and perfect and wired together, and with a ring on his perfect tapering finger, had caused. Overland walked away hurriedly after Masters. Amos would stay where he was.
Tony smiled grimly at Braker. He pointed with his free hand.
“Want your ring back, Braker?”
Braker’s head jerked minutely. He stared at the ring, then back at Tony. His fists clenched at his sides. “No.” Tony grinned—for the first time in three weeks.
“Then let’s get going.”
He made a gesture. Braker and Yates, walking side by side, went slowly for the ship, Tony following behind. He turned only once, and that was to look at his wrecked patrol ship, where it lay against the base of the mountain. A shudder passed down his spine. There was but one mystery that remained now. And its solution was coming to Tony Crow, in spite of his effort to shove its sheerly maddening implications into the back of his mind—
Professor Overland and Masters took Laurette to her room. Tony took the two outlaws to the lounge, wondering how he was going to secure them. Masters solved his problem by entering with a length of insulated electric wire. He said nothing, but wordlessly went to work securing Braker and Yates to the guide rail while Tony held the Hampton on them. After he had finished, Tony bluntly inspected the job. Masters winced, but he said nothing.
After they were out in the hall, going toward Laurette’s room, Masters stopped him. His face was white, strained in the half-darkness.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he began huskily.
“Say what?”
Masters’ eyes shifted, then, as if by a deliberate effort of will, came back.
“That I’m sorry.”
Tony studied him, noted the lines of suffering around his mouth, the shuddering pain in his eyes.
“Yeah, I know how you feel,” he muttered. “But I guess you made up for it when you tackled Braker and Yates. They might have been using electric wire on us by now.” He grinned lopsidedly, and clapped Masters on the arm. “Forget it, Masters. I’m with you all the way.”
Masters managed a smile, and let loose a long breath. He fell into step beside Tony’s hurrying stride. “Laurette’s O. K.”
“Well, lieutenant,” said Laurette, stretching lazily, and smiling up at him, “I guess I got weak in the knees at the last minute.”
“Didn’t we all!” He smiled ruefully. He dropped to his knees. She was still in her pressure suit and lying on the floor. He helped her to a sitting position, and then to her feet.
Overland chuckled, though there was a note of uneasy reminiscence in his tone. “Wait till I tell the boys at Lipton U. about this.”
“You’d better not,” Laurette warned. She added, “You broke down and admitted the ring was an omen. When a scientist gets superstitious—”
Tony broke in. “Weren’t we all?”
Masters said, dropping his eyes, “I guess we had good enough reason to be superstitious about it.” His hand went absently upward to his shoulder.
Overland frowned, and, hands behind his back, walked to the empty porthole. “All that work DeTosque, the Farr brothers, Morrell and myself put in. There’s no reason to patch up the asteroids and try to prove they were all one world. But at the same time, there’s no proof—no absolute proof—” He clicked his tongue. Then he swung on Tony, biting speculatively at his lower lip, his eyes sharpening.
“There’s one thing that needs explaining which probably never will be explained, I guess. It’s too bad. Memory? Bah! That’s not the answer, lieutenant. You stood in the cave there, and you saw the skeleton, and somehow you knew it had existed before the human race, but was not older than the human race. It’s something else. You didn’t pick up the memory from the past—not over a hundred million years. What then?” He turned away, shaking his head, came back abruptly as Tony spoke, eyes sharpening.
“IH tell you why,” Tony said evenly.
His head moved up and down slowly, and his half-lidded eyes looked lingeringly out the porthole toward the mountain where his wrecked patrol ship lay. “Yes, I’ll tell you why.”
Laurette, Masters and Overland were caught up in tense silence by the strangeness of his tone.
He said faintly: “Laurette and I were trapped alive in the back of the cave when the two worlds crashed. We lived through it. I didn’t kno
w she was back there, of course; she recovered consciousness later—at the right time, I’d say!” He grinned at her obliquely, then sobered again. “I saw the skeleton and somehow I was too dazed to realize it couldn’t be Laurette. Because when the gravity was dispersed, the tension holding everything back in time was released, and everything went back to the present—just a little less than the present. I’ll explain that later.”
He drew a long breath.
“This is hard to say. I was in the back of the cave. I felt something strike the mountainside.
“That was my patrol ship—with me in it.”
His glance roved around. Overland’s breath sucked in audibly.
“Careful now, boy,” he rumbled warningly, alarm in his eyes.
Tony’s lips twisted. “It happens to be the truth. After my ship crashed I got out. A few minutes later I stood at the mouth of the cave, looking at the skeleton. For a minute, I—remembered. Fragmentary things. The skeleton was—horror.
“And why not? I was also in the back of the cave, thinking that Laurette was dead and that she was a skeleton. The Tony Crow at the mouth of the cave and the Tony Crow trapped in the rear of the cave were en rapport to an infinite degree. They were the same person, in two different places at the same time, and their brains were the same.”
He stopped.
Masters whispered through his clenched teeth, “Two Tony Crows. It couldn’t be.”
Tony leaned back against the wall. “There were two rings, at the same time. There were two skeletons, at the same time. Braker had the skeleton’s ring on his finger. Amos was wrapped up in a carton with a Christmas sticker on it. They were both some place else. You all know that and admit it. Well, there were two Tony Crows, and if I think about it much longer, it’ll drive me—”
“Hold it, boy!” Overland’s tone was sharp. Then he said mildly, “It’s nothing to get excited about. The mere fact of time-travel presupposes duplicity of existence. Our ship and everything in it was made of electrons that existed somewhere else at the same time—a hundred million years ago, on the pre-asteroid world. You can’t get away from it. And you don’t have to get scared just because two Tony Crows were a few feet distant from each other. Remember that all the rest of us were duplicated, too. Ship A was thrust back into time just an hour or so before Ship B landed here after being thrust forward. You see?”
Laurette shuddered. “It’s clear, but it’s—” She made a confused motion.
Overland’s tired, haggard eyes twinkled. “Anyway, there’s no danger of us running across ourselves again. The past is done for. That’s the main thing.”
Neither Laurette nor Tony said anything. They were studying each other, and a smile was beginning at the corner of Laurette’s lips. Erie Masters squirmed uncomfortably.
Overland continued, speculatively: “There was an energy loss some place. We weren’t snapped back to the real present at all. We should have come back to the present that we left, plus the three weeks we stayed back in time. Back there it was Christmas—and Laurette was quite correct when she broke open my package.” He grinned crookedly. “But it’s still more than three weeks to Christmas here. It was a simple energy loss, I guess. If I had a penc—”
Erie Masters broke in on him, coughing uncomfortably and grinning wryly at the same time. “We’d better get down to the control room and plot out our course, professor.”
“What?” Overland’s eyes widened. He looked around at the man and girl. “Oh.” He studied them, then turned, and clapped Masters on the back. “You’re dead right, son. Let’s get out!”
“I’m glad you weren’t Amos,” Tony told the girl.
“I couldn’t very well have been, lieutenant.”
He grinned, coloring slightly.
Then he took her hands in his, and put his head as close to hers as the helmets would allow.
He said, “When we get back to Earth, I’m going to put a r—” He stopped, biting at his lip. Remembrances of another time, on a pre-asteroid world, flooded back with the thought.
She started, paled. Involuntarily, her eyes turned to the open port, beyond which was a mountain, a cave, a skeleton, a ring.
She nodded, slowly, faintly. “It’s a good idea,” she murmured. She managed a smile. “But not—an emerald.”
TIME, AGAIN
Tim Maly
1
Before we met, you showed me your diary.
I must confess that I am still confused by this sequence of events, as, I imagine, you must be confused by my decision to leave your life so suddenly. I’ve gone over everything in my head time and time again and I can’t shake the feeling that, somehow, everything got mixed up. Though this may seem a flimsy reason to you, it is reason enough for me. I don’t understand, so I’m going to leave.
Before we met, you showed me your diary and then we were having sex on the wooden floor of your living room. I still remember the way the plants filtered the sunlight and the sound of the tea kettle building up steam. Then our son was at the foot of the bed, asking me where you’d gone.
“I don’t know,” I told him, “I expect she’ll be back soon.”
Today I went into your study and found that you’d converted it into a gallery. The first photo of every roll of film we’d ever had developed was there, somewhere. I found that I could date every one, even the ones that hadn’t happened yet. They seemed to go on forever, a jumbled mess of happy memories, each one partially obscured by blinding white light. I knocked over a jar full of tacks but when I went to pick them up I was overcome with vertigo and I had to leave.
We were making desperate love in your basement when you told me about spacetime. You said that the future is just as real as the past. You told me that just because you aren’t there yet doesn’t mean it isn’t real. You said it was like Baghdad still being real when you’re in London. You talked about personal time and light cones and folding space and I didn’t understand anything except the way that your breasts moved and the way your breath misted in the cold. Then we were on a roller coaster and you were screaming and you said, “This is what it’s going to be like all the time.” A balloon seller lost hold of his wares and they floated majestically into the sky. It was beautiful.
2
After you introduced yourself, we resumed our date and I asked you again why you’d chosen a drive-in. You told me that you had a special soft spot in your heart for B-movies. You said that there was something endearing about the earnestness of it all. You said that they called out to our imaginations in a way that big budget films can no longer achieve. You said that all science fiction—no matter how dismal—was optimistic in that it assumed that there would be a future at all. We were in a board room and you were explaining to the assembled group of investors about the Machine. They were smiling and nodding. They didn’t really understand but experts had told them that your idea showed promise and, after all, a war was on. The coffee tasted terrible and I kept fidgeting in my seat. You were radiant. No one thought to ask what would happen if the Machine broke.
Today, I watched an egg assemble itself on the kitchen floor. It made a strange popping noise as the last bit of eggshell attached itself. It flew into the air up and up and then came to rest on the counter. A helicopter roared overhead and our son came in and told me he was scared. I didn’t know what to tell him. The war has begun and no one can say how or when it will end.
I remember your reaction when you read this letter. I remember how the last line, where I say “we weren’t meant to live like this,” brought a tear to your eye and you turned to our son and tried to explain to him that I was gone. But how could you explain? What does ‘gone’ mean to a child his age? Then we were lying together under the stars and when the first fireworks went off, you leaned over and kissed me for the first time. You tasted like popcorn. I can’t blame you for choosing a new husband.
When you finally came back, you were younger. That was the hardest for both of us, I think. We didn’t share the same
memories anymore. You held me and told me that it would be alright, that you had hardly changed but I think that we both know now that that wasn’t true at all. Time changed people. That’s how it worked.
3
Today, I went down to the basement and stared at the Machine. I can still remember the day you turn it on. You’ll stand in front of a crowd of reporters with our son and your new husband at your side and you’ll give your speech about the tyranny of time and death and the triumph of science and about setting us free. But inside, you’ll be thinking, “I wish he had been here to see this.” I know this because, before we met, you showed me your diary and you wrote about this day. How could you not? It was the most important day of your life. You saved us from the enemy and ended the war. You asked me to stop it. There’s nothing I can do. The future is just as real as the past. There is no before or after anymore. Because of you, there never was.
We weren’t meant to live like this.
TIME’S ARROW
Arthur C. Clarke
The river was dead and the lake already dying when the monster had come down the dried-up watercourse and turned onto the desolate mud-flats. There were not many places where it was safe to walk, and even where the ground was hardest the great pistons of its feet sank a foot or more beneath the weight they carried. Sometimes it had paused, surveying the landscape with quick, birdlike movements of its head. Then it had sunk even deeper into the yielding soil, so that fifty million years later men could judge with some accuracy the duration of its halts.
