Timegates

by Jack Dann

  Peter's heart was pounding miserably. He had an illusory stifling sensation, coupled with the idiotic notion that he ought to be wearing a diver's helmet. The silence was like the pause before a shout.

  But down the aisles marched the crated treasures in their hundreds.

  Peter set to work. It was difficult, exacting labor, opening the crates where they lay, removing the contents and nailing the crates up again, all without disturbing the positions of the crates themselves, but it was the price he had to pay for his lifeline. Each crate was in a sense a microcosm, like the vault itself—a capsule of unliquidated time. But the vault's term would end some fifty minutes from now, when crested heads nodded down three aisles; those of the crates' interiors, for all that Peter knew to the contrary, went on forever.

  The first crate contained lacework porcelain; the second, shakudó sword hilts; the third, an exquisite fourth-century Greek ornament in repoussé bronze, the equal in every way of the Siris bronzes.

  Peter found it almost physically difficult to set the thing down, but he did so; standing on his platform crate in the future with his head projecting above the sphere in the present—like (again the absurd thought!) a diver rising from the ocean—he laid it carefully beside the others on the workbench.

  Then down again, into the fragile silence and the gloom. The next crates were too large, and those just beyond were doubtful. Peter followed his shadow down the aisle. He had almost twenty minutes left: enough for one more crate, chosen with care, and an ample margin.

  Glancing to his right at the end of the row, he saw a door. It was a heavy door, rivet-studded, with a single iron step below it. There had been no door there in Peter's time; the whole plan of the building must have been altered. Of course! he realized suddenly. If it had not, if so much as a single tile or lintel had remained of the palace as he knew it, then the sphere could never have let him see or enter this particular here-and-now, this—what would Harold have called it?—this nexus in spacetime.

  For if you saw any now-existing thing as it was going to appear in the future, you could alter it in the present—carve your initials in it, break it apart, chop it down—which was manifestly impossible, and therefore .. .

  And therefore the first ten years were necessarily blank when he looked into the sphere, not because anything unpleasant was going to happen to him, but because in that time the last traces of the old palace had not yet been eradicated.

  There was no crisis.

  Wait a moment, though! Harold had been able to look into the near future. . . . But—of course—Harold had been about to die.

  In the dimness between himself and the door he saw a rack of crates that looked promising. The way was uneven; one of the untidy accumulations of refuse that seemed to be characteristic of the Somethings lay in windows across the floor. Peter stepped forward carefully—but not carefully enough.

  Harold Castellare had had another accident—and again, if you choose to look at it in that way, a lucky one. The blow stunned him; the old rope slipped from the stones; flaccid, he floated where a struggling man might have drowned. A fishing boat nearly ran him down, and picked him up instead. He was suffering from a concussion, shock, exposure, asphyxiation and was more than three quarters dead. But he was still alive when he was delivered, an hour later, to a hospital in Naples.

  There were, of course, no identifying papers, labels or monograms in his clothing—Peter had seen to that—and for the first week after his rescue Harold was quite genuinely unable to give any account of himself. During the second week he was mending but uncommunicative, and at the end of the third, finding that there was some difficulty about gaining his release in spite of his physical recovery, he affected to regain his memory, gave a circumstantial but entirely fictitious identification and was discharged.

  To understand this as well as all his subsequent actions, it is only necessary to remember that Harold was a Castellare. In Naples, not wishing to give Peter any unnecessary anxiety, he did not approach his bank for funds but cashed a check with an incurious acquaintance, and predated it by four weeks. With part of the money so acquired he paid his hospital bill and rewarded his rescuers. Another part went for new clothing and for four days' residence in an inconspicuous hotel, while he grew used to walking and dressing himself again. The rest, on his last day, he spent in the purchase of a discreetly small revolver and a box of cartridges.

  He took the last boat to Ischia and arrived at his own front door a few minutes before eleven. It was a cool evening, and a most cheerful fire was burning in the central hall.

  "Signor Peter is well, I suppose," said Harold, removing his coat.

  "Yes, Signor Harold. He is very well, very busy with his collection."

  "Where is he? I should like to speak to him."

  "He is in the vaults, Signor Harold. But . . .

  "Yes?"

  "Signor Peter sees no one when he is in the vaults. He has given strict orders that no one is to bother him, Signor Harold, when he is in the vaults."

  "Oh, well," said Harold. "I daresay he'll see me."

  It was a thing something like a bear trap, apparently, except that instead of two semicircular jaws it had four segments that snapped together in the middle, each with a shallow, sharp tooth. The pain was quite unendurable.

  Each segment moved at the end of a thin arm, cunningly hinged so that the ghastly thing would close over whichever of the four triggers you stepped on. Each arm had a spring too powerful for Peter's muscles. The whole affair was connected by a chain to a staple solidly embedded in the concrete floor; it left Peter free to move some ten inches in any direction. Short of gnawing off his own leg, he thought sickly, there was very little he could do about it.

  The riddle was, what could the thing possibly be doing here? There were rats in the vaults, no doubt, now as in his own time, but surely nothing larger. Was it conceivable that even the three-toed Somethings would set an engine like this to catch a rat?

  Lost inventions, Peter thought irrelevantly, had a way of being rediscovered. Even if he suppressed the time-sphere during his lifetime and it did not happen to survive him, still there might be other time-fishers in the remote future—not here, perhaps, but in other treasure houses of the world. And that might account for the existence of this metal-jawed horror. Indeed, it might account for the vault itself—a better man-trap—except that it was all nonsense; the trap could only be full until the trapper came to look at it. Events, and the lives of prudent time-travelers, were conserved.

  And he had been in the vault for almost forty minutes. Twenty minutes to go, twenty-five, thirty at the most, then the Somethings would enter and their entrance would free him. He had his lifeline: the knowledge was the only thing that made it possible to live with the pain that was the center of his universe just now. It was like going to the dentist, in the bad old days before procaine; it was very bad, sometimes, but you knew that it would end.

  He cocked his head toward the door, holding his breath. A distant thud, another, then a curiously unpleasant squeaking, then silence.

  But he had heard them. He knew they were there. It couldn't be much longer now.

  Three men, two stocky, one lean, were playing cards in the passageway in front of the closed door that led to the vault staircase. They got up slowly.

  "Who is he?" demanded the shortest one.

  Tomaso clattered at him in furious Sicilian; the man's face darkened, but he looked at Harold with respect.

  "I am now," stated Harold, "going down to see my brother."

  "No, Signor," said the shortest one positively.

  "You are impertinent," Harold told him.

  "Yes, Signor."

  Harold frowned. "You will not let me pass?"

  "No, Signor."

  "Then go and tell my brother I am here."

  The shortest one said apologetically but firmly that there were strict orders against this also; it would have astonished Harold very much if he had said anything else.
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  "Well, at least I suppose you can tell me how long it will be before he comes out?"

  "Not long, Signor. One hour, no more."

  "Oh, very well, then," said Harold pettishly, turning half away. He paused. "One thing more," he said, taking the gun out of his pocket as he turned, "put your hands up and stand against the wall there, will you?"

  The first two complied slowly. The third, the lean one, fired through his coat pocket, just like the gangsters in the American movies.

  It was not a sharp sensation at all, Harold was surprised to find; it was more as if someone had hit him in the side with a cricket bat. The racket seemed to bounce interminably from the walls. He felt the gun jolt in his hand as he fired back, but couldn't tell if he had hit anybody. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, and yet it was astonishingly hard to keep his balance. As he swung around he saw the two stocky ones with their hands half inside their jackets, and the lean one with his mouth open, and Tomaso with bulging eyes. Then the wall came at him and he began to swim along it, paying particular attention to the problem of not dropping one's gun.

  As he weathered the first turn in the passageway the roar broke out afresh. A fountain of plaster stung his eyes; then he was running clumsily, and there was a bedlam of shouting behind them.

  Without thinking about it he seemed to have selected the laboratory as his destination; it was an instinctive choice, without much to recommend it logically. In any case, he realized halfway across the central hall, he was not going to get there.

  He turned and squinted at the passageway entrance; saw a blur move and fired at it. It disappeared. He turned again awkwardly, and had taken two steps nearer an armchair which offered the nearest shelter, when something clubbed him between the shoulderblades. One step more, knees buckling, and the wall struck him a second, softer blow. He toppled, clutching at the tapestry that hung near the fireplace.

  When the three guards, whose names were Enrico, Alberto and Luca, emerged cautiously from the passage and approached Harold's body, it was already flaming like a Viking's in its impromptu shroud; the dim horses and men and falcons of the tapestry were writhing and crisping into brilliance. A moment later an uncertain ring of fire wavered toward them across the carpet.

  Although the servants came with fire extinguishers and with buckets of water from the kitchen, and although the fire department was called, it was all quite useless. In five minutes the whole room was ablaze; in ten, as windows burst and walls buckled, the fire engulfed the second story. In twenty a mass of flaming timbers dropped into the vault through the hole Peter had made in the floor of the laboratory, utterly destroying the time-sphere apparatus and reaching shortly thereafter, as the authorities concerned were later to agree, an intensity of heat entirely sufficient to consume a human body without leaving any identifiable trace. For that reason alone, there was no trace of Peter's body to be found.

  The sounds had just begun again when Peter saw the light from the time-sphere turn ruddy and then wink out like a snuffed candle.

  In the darkness, he heard the door open.

  HOLE-IN-THE-WALL

  Bridget McKenna

  Here's a mordant cautionary tale that reminds us that even in the meanest of surroundings, a shabby little hole-in-the-wall diner, say, it's always best to be respectful and polite. You never know who you're going to run into, after all—or just where they'll be popping in from .. .

  Bridget McKenna has made many short fiction sales to Asimov's Science Fiction, as well as sales to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Pulphouse, Tomorrow, and elsewhere. She lives in Ahwahnee, California.

  Morton Grimes knew it was going to be of those cases even before he walked inside the diner. Pulling the file from his portfolio, he scanned the application: Ladislaw Tomacheski—a communist name, for starters, and Grimes was no fool when it came to commies. He never missed an episode of "I Led Three Lives." Flicking a thread from his coatsleeve, he opened the screen door and went inside.

  The place seemed clean enough on the inside, but Grimes knew how clean a restaurant could look to the uneducated eye and still be a pesthole; knew all the places dirt could hide, breeding bacteria and foul smells. He shuddered as he bent down to check a red-upholstered stool, running his hand down the chrome column, bending low to see the interstices around the plate that bolted the stool to the linoleum. It all looked clean enough, but then, this place was operating on the temporary Ed Crawford had awarded last week. Give him a few more months to get sloppy, like they all did when they forgot Morton Grimes was watching.

  "Can I help you with something? Maybe you lose something down there?" A heavily accented voice spoke from above him.

  Grimes stood up quickly, rapping his head on the underside of the counter. Pain clouded his vision as he steadied himself with the chrome-studded seat of the stool and straightened his legs cautiously. "Mr. Tomacheski, I presume?" he said to the field of white before him which was slowly beginning to focus into a large beefy man a full head taller than he, in kitchen whites and apron.

  "Tomacheski," the figure said, extending a huge hand.

  Grimes tried to grasp it with the ends of his fingers, but the hand engulfed his and squeezed, pumping his arm up and down like an oil rig. He pulled loose and reached into his pocket for a card. "Morton Grimes. Health Department Officer."

  "Oh, yes. You came to grant my A-card! How do you do, Mr. Grimes!" The arm-pumping began all over again. "An unfortunate name for a man in your profession, yes?"

  Grimes stiffened. "An A-placard is not given lightly, Mr. Tomacheski. I'll be making an extensive inspection of your premises." Oh, indeed, I will, you Red bastard. The accent was definitely Russian, Grimes thought. This guy wasn't even trying to sound like an American. Of course that could mean he wasn't really a communist, since if he was, he probably wouldn't sound so much like one. Well, he could decide about that later, he had an inspection to do.

  ". . . Of course we weren't expecting you until Wednesday," the Russian was saying.

  "Bacteria don't make appointments. Mr. Tomacheski. A Health Department Officer is empowered to inspect a business at any time."

  "Of course. Well, where would you like to begin?"

  "Let's begin with the exterior of the premises. On the application here, it says that the name of the business is `Tomacheski's Hole in the Wall.' You would not appear to be doing business under that name."

  "But yes, of course. That's the name. What it says right there on the paper."

  "Yet," Grimes continued, warming up now, "there is no sign outside to that effect. There is only that."

  He pointed out the front window at the sign, which said only EAT, but said it so brightly that even in broad daylight it was sending coruscating pink and green waves through the glass bricks that made up most of the front wall.

  "This is a little place, Mr. Grimes." He put two huge hands close together to show how small. "The name is too big for the building. But EAT is what people come here to do, yes? So the sign says the important thing. Excuse me, but this is a concern of the Health Department, this sign business?"

  "Not exactly, Mr. Tomacheski, but the Department doesn't operate in a vacuum. We have an understanding with other branches of city and county government to report possible violations of any nature."

  "Well, the sign has been approved by the county, Mr. Grimes. Now, where would you like to begin?"

  "With the kitchen." Grimes pushed ahead of the big man in the narrow space between the counter stools and the booths and walked into the back of the diner. "Well, here's your first problem right here," he said, pulling out a notepad and his Parker. "Peeling paint on the wall of the, uh . . . ' He peered around the corner. "Ladies' Room. Peeling paint is a serious health hazard in a food service establishment. Lead, you know."

  The paint seemed to melt and run even as Grimes looked at it. He put his finger to the wall to determine the degree of flaking. A hot tingling ran up his arm to the elbow and he pulled away, shakin
g his hand. "What have you got here, Tomacheski? Loose wiring in this wall? I think the Fire Department will want to know about this."

  "They were here yesterday, Mr. Grimes, and the wiring is good in this building. The paint is good too, I think. I saw this same thing yesterday morning, and I think it is only a trick of the light. Look." He pointed at the wall. The spot was gone.

  Grimes touched the wall lightly with an index finger. No shock. No paint. He stood there for a moment, feeling puzzled and not liking it. Then he turned on his heel and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen with Tomacheski following close behind. A row of high windows illuminated the room with a fine morning light. Grimes marched into the cooking area and stopped dead in his tracks. Tomacheski pulled up, but too late to avoid bumping Grimes, who was propelled forward into the arms of the very Negro whose presence in the kitchen had alarmed him so.

  "You all right, Mister?" the Negro asked, setting him back on his feet.

  Grimes pulled away from the man's grasp and brushed off his clothes. "I'm fine," he croaked. "Fine." He stared for a moment at the black face, the white cap and apron, then spun around to face Tomacheski. "We need to talk. Out there." He walked back through the kitchen doors and into the dining room.

  "You weren't in the kitchen very long, Mr. Grimes. You sure you saw everything you need to see?"

  "I'm scarcely finished with my inspection, Mr. Tomacheski. In fact, you might say I'm just getting started." He pointed back the way they had come. "Mr. Tomacheski, there's a Negro in your kitchen." He folded his arms across his chest and waited for the other man's reply.

  Tomacheski blinked, furrowed his brow, and blinked again. "Yes."

  "Well, who is he, and what is he doing there?" Grimes could hear his voice climbing a bit, like it always did when his blood pressure went up. He could definitely feel it going up now.