The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  Time passed; and then time was all gone, and it was midnight, nearly the Nexus Point.

  In front of the hotel, a drowsy cab-driver gave them an argument. 'The Public Liberry? Listen, the Liberry ain't open this time of night. I ought to--

  Oh, thanks. Hop in.' He folded the five-dollar bill and put the cab in gear.

  Harse said ominously: 'Liberry, Mooney? Why do you instruct him to take us to the Liberry?'

  Mooney whispered: 'There's a law against being in the Park at night.

  We'll have to sneak in. The Library's right across the street.'

  Harse stared, with his luminous pale eyes. But it was true; there was such a law, for the parks of the city lately had become fields of honour where rival gangs contended with bottle shards and zip guns, where a passerby was odds-on to be mugged.

  'High Command must know this,' Harse grumbled. 'Must proceed, they say, to Nexus Point. But then one finds the aboriginals have made laws! Oh, I shall make a report!'

  'Sure you will,' Mooney soothed; but in his heart, he was prepared to bet heavily against it.

  Because he had a new strategy. Clearly he couldn't get the survival kit from Harse. He had tried that and there was no luck; his arm still tingled as the bellboy's had, from having seemingly absent-mindedly taken the handle to help Harse. But there was a way.

  Get rid of this clown from the future, he thought contentedly; meet the Nexus Point instead of Harse and there was the future, ripe for the taking!

  He knew where the rescuers would be--and, above all, he knew how to talk.

  Every man has one talent and Mooney's was salesmanship.

  All the years wasted on peddling dime-store schemes like frozen-food plans! But this was the big time at last, so maybe the years of seasoning were not wasted, after all.

  'That for you, Uncle Lester,' he muttered. Harse looked up from his viewer angrily and Mooney cleared his throat. 'I said,' he explained hastily,

  'we're almost at the--the Nexus Point.'

  • • • •

  Snow was drifting down. The cab-driver glanced at the black, quiet library, shook his head and pulled away, leaving black, wet tracks in the thin snow.

  The pale-eyed man looked about him irritably. 'You!' he cried, waking Mooney from a dream of possessing the next ten years of stock-market reports. 'You! Where is this Vale of Cashmere?'

  'Right this way, Harse, right this way,' said Mooney placatingly.

  There was a wide sort of traffic circle--grand Army Plaza was the name of it--and there were a few cars going around it.

  But not many, and none of them looked like police cars. Mooney looked up and down the broad, quiet streets.

  'Across here,' he ordered, and led the time traveller towards the edge of the park. 'We can't go in the main entrance. There might be cops.'

  'Cops?'

  'Policemen. Law-enforcement officers. We'll just walk down here a way and then hop over the wall. Trust me,' said Mooney, in the voice that had put frozen-food lockers into so many suburban homes.

  The look from those pale eyes was anything but a look of trust, but Harse didn't say anything. He stared about with an expression of detached horror, like an Alabama gentlewoman condemned to walk through Harlem.

  'Now!' whispered Mooney urgently.

  And over the wall they went.

  They were in a thicket of shrubs and brush, snow-laden, the snow sifting down into Mooney's neck every time he touched a branch, which was always; he couldn't avoid it. They crossed a path and then a road--long, curving, broad, white, empty. Down a hill, onto another path. Mooney paused, glancing around.

  'You know where you are. Going?'

  'I think so. I'm looking for cops.' None in sight. Mooney frowned. What the devil did the police think they were up to? They passed laws; why weren't they around to enforce them?

  Mooney had his landmarks well in mind. There was the Drive, and there was the fork he was supposed to be looking for. It wouldn't be hard to find the path to the Vale. The only thing was, it was kind of important to Mooney's hope of future prosperity that he find a policeman first. And time was running out.

  He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch--self-winding, shockproof, non-magnetic; the man in the hotel's jewellery shop had assured him only yesterday that he could depend on its timekeeping as on the beating of his heart. It was nearly a quarter of one.

  'Come along, come along!' grumbled Harse.

  Mooney stalled: 'I--I think we'd better go along this way. It ought to be down there--'

  He cursed himself. Why hadn't he gone in the main entrance, where there was sure to be a cop? Harse would never have known the difference.

  But there was the artist in him that wanted the thing done perfectly, and so he had held to the pretense of avoiding police, had skulked and hidden.

  And now--

  'Look!' he whispered, pointing.

  Harse spat soundlessly and turned his eyes where Mooney was pointing.

  Yes. Under a distant light, a moving figure, swinging a nightstick.

  Mooney took a deep breath and planted a hand between Harse's shoulder blades.

  'Run!' he yelled at the top of his voice, and shoved. He sounded so real, he almost convinced himself. 'We'll have to split up--I'll meet you there. Now run!'

  • • • •

  Oh, clever Mooney! He crouched under a snowy tree, watching the man from the future speed effortlessly away ... in the wrong direction.

  The cop was hailing him; clever cop! All it had taken was a couple of full-throated yells and at once the cop had perceived that someone was in the park. But cleverer than any cop was Mooney.

  Men from the future. Why, thought Mooney contentedly, no Mrs.

  Meyerhauser of the suburbs would have let me get away with a trick like that to sell her a freezer. There's going to be no problem at all. I don't have to worry about a thing. Mooney can take care of himself!

  By then, he had caught his breath--and time was passing, passing.

  He heard a distant confused yelling. Harse and the cop? But it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was getting to the Nexus Point at one minute past one.

  He took a deep breath and began to trot. Slipping in the snow, panting heavily, he went down the path, around the little glade, across the covered bridge.

  He found the shallow steps that led down to the Vale.

  And there it was below him: a broad space where walks joined, and in the space a thing shaped like a dinosaur egg, rounded and huge. It glowed with a silvery sheen.

  Confidently, Mooney started down the steps towards the egg and the moving figures that flitted soundlessly around it. Harse was not the only time traveller, Mooney saw. Good, that might make it all the simpler. Should he change his plan and feign amnesia, pass himself off as one of their own men?

  OrA movement made him look over his shoulder.

  Somebody was standing at the top of the steps. 'Hell's fire,'

  whispered Mooney. He'd forgotten all about that aboriginal law; and here above him stood a man in a policeman's uniform, staring down with pale eyes.

  No, not a policeman. The face was--Harse's.

  Mooney swallowed and stood rooted.

  'You!' Harse's savage voice came growling. 'You are to stand. Still?'

  Mooney didn't need the order; he couldn't move. No twentieth-century cop was a match for Harse, that was clear; Harse had bested him, taken his uniform away from him for camouflage--and here he was.

  Unfortunately, so was Howard Mooney.

  The figures below were looking up, pointing and talking; Harse from above was coming down. Mooney could only stand, and wish--wish that he were back in Sea Bright, living on cookies and stale tea, wish he had planned things with more intelligence, more skill--perhaps even with more honesty. But it was too late for wishing.

  Harse came down the steps, paused a yard from Mooney, scowled a withering scowl--and passed on.

  He reached the bottom of the steps and joined the o
thers waiting about the egg. They all went inside.

  The glowing silvery colours winked and went out. The egg flamed purple, faded, turned transparent and disappeared.

  Mooney stared and, yelling a demand for payment, ran stumbling down the steps to where it had been. There was a round thawed spot, a trampled patch--nothing else.

  They were gone...

  Almost gone. Because there was a sudden bright wash of flame from overhead--cold silvery flame. He looked up, dazzled. Over him, the egg was visible as thin smoke, hovering. A smoky, half-transparent hand reached out of a port. A thin, reedy voice cried: 'I promised you. Pay?'

  And the silvery dispatch-case sort of thing, the survival kit, dropped soundlessly to the snow beside Mooney.

  When he looked up again, the egg was gone for good.

  He was clear back to the hotel before he got a grip on himself--and then he was drunk with delight. Honest Harse! Splendidly trustable Harse!

  Why, all this time, Mooney had been so worried, had worked so hard--and the whole survival kit was his, after all!

  He had touched it gingerly before picking it up but it didn't shock him; clearly the protective devices, whatever they were, were off.

  He sweated over it for an hour and a half, looking for levers, buttons, a slit that he might pry wider with the blade of a knife. At last he kicked it and yelled, past endurance: 'Open up, damn you!'

  It opened wide on the floor before him.

  'Oh, bless your heart!' cried Mooney, falling to his knees to drag out the string of wampum, the little mechanical mice, the viewing-machine sort of thing. Treasures like those were beyond price; each one might fetch a fortune, if only in the wondrous new inventions he could patent if he could discover just how they worked.

  But where were they?

  Gone! The wampum was gone. The goggles were gone. Everything was gone--the little flat canisters, the map instruments, everything but one thing.

  There was, in a corner of the case, a squarish, sharp-edged thing that Mooney stared at blindly for a long moment before he recognized it. It was a part--only a part--of the jointed construction that Harse had used to rid himself of undesirables by bathing them in blue light.

  What a filthy trick! Mooney all but sobbed to himself.

  He picked up the squarish thing bitterly. Probably it wouldn't even work, he thought, the world a ruin around him. It wasn't even the whole complete weapon.

  Still—

  There was a grooved, saddle-shaped affair that was clearly a sort of trigger; it could move forward or it could move back. Mooney thought deeply for a while.

  Then he sat up, held the thing carefully away from him with the pointed part towards the wall and pressed, ever so gently pressed forward on the saddle-shaped thumb-trigger.

  The pale blue haze leaped out, swirled around and, not finding anything alive in its range, dwindled and died.

  Aha, thought Mooney, not everything is lost yet! Surely a bright young man could find some use for a weapon like this which removed, if it did not kill, which prevented any nastiness about a corpse turning up, or a messy job of disposal

  Why not see what happened if the thumb-piece was moved backward?

  Well, why not? Mooney held the thing away from him, hesitated, and slid it back.

  There was a sudden shivering tingle in his thumb, in the gadget he was holding, running all up and down his arm. A violet haze, very unlike the blue one, licked soundlessly forth--not burning, but destroying as surely as flame ever destroyed; for where the haze touched the gadget itself, the kit, everything that had to do with the man from the future, it seared and shattered. The gadget fell into white crystalline powder in Mooney's hand and the case itself became a rectangular shape traced in white powder ridges on the rug.

  Oh, no! thought Mooney, even before the haze had gone. It can't be!

  The flame danced away like a cloud, spreading and rising. While Mooney stared, it faded away, but not without leaving something behind.

  Mooney threw his taut body backward, almost under the bed. What he saw, he didn't believe; what he believed filled him with panic.

  No wonder Harse had laughed so when Mooney asked if its victims were dead. For there they were, all of them. Like djinn out of a jar, human figures jelled and solidified where the cloud of violet flame had not at all diffidently rolled.

  They were alive, as big as life, and beginning to move--and so many of them! Three--five--six:

  The truckdriver, yes, and a man in long red flannel underwear who must have been the policeman, and Uncle Lester, and the bartender's brother, and the chambermaid, and a man Mooney didn't know.

  They were there, all of them; and they came towards him, and oh! but they were angry!

  I Plinglot, Who You?

  1

  'Let me see,' I said, 'this is a time for the urbane. Say little. Suggest much,'

  So I smiled and nodded wisely, without words, to the fierce flash bulbs.

  The committee room was not big enough, they had had to move the hearings. Oh, it was hot. Senator Schnell came leaping down the aisle, sweating, his forehead glistening, his gold tooth shining, and took my arm like a trap. 'Capital, Mr. Smith,' he cried, nodding and grinning, 'I am so glad you got here on time! One moment.'

  He planted his feet and stopped me, turned me about to face the photographers and threw an arm around my shoulder as they flashed many bulbs. 'Capital,' said the senator with a happy voice. 'Thanks, fellows! Come along, Mr. Smith!'

  They found me a first-class seat, near a window, where the air-conditioning made such a clatter that I could scarcely hear, but what was there to hear before I myself spoke? Outside the Washington Monument cast aluminium rays from the sun.

  We'll get started in a minute,' whispered Mr. Hagsworth in my ear--he was young and working for the committee--'as soon as the networks give us the go-ahead.'

  He patted my shoulder in a friendly way, with pride; they were always doing something with shoulders. He had brought me to the committee and thus I was, he thought, a sort of possession of his, a gift for Senator Schnell, though we know how wrong he was in that, of course. But he was proud. It was very hot and I had in me many headlines.

  Q. (Mr. Hagsworth.) Will you state your name, sir?

  A. Robert Smith.

  Q. Is that your real name?

  A. No.

  Oh, that excited them all! They rustled and coughed and whispered, those in the many seats. Senator Schnell flashed his gold tooth. Senator Loveless, who as his enemy and his adjutant, as it were, a second commander of the committee but of opposite party, frowned under stiff silvery hair. But he knew I would say that, he had heard it all in executive session the night before.

  Mr. Hagsworth did not waste the moment, he went right ahead over the coughs and the rustles.

  Q. Sir, have you adopted the identity of 'Robert P. Smith' in order to further your investigations on behalf of this committee?

  A. I have.

  Q. And can you--

  Q. (Senator Loveless.) Excuse me.

  Q. (Mr. Hagsworth.) Certainly, Senator.

  Q. (Senator Loveless.) Thank you, Mr. Hagsworth. Sir--that is, Mr.

  Smith--do I understand that it would not be proper, or advisable, for you to reveal--that is, to make public--your true or correct identity at this time? Or in these circumstances?

  A. Yes.

  Q. (Senator Loveless.) thank you very much, Mr. Smith. I just wanted to get that point cleared up.

  Q. (Mr. Hagsworth.) Then tell us, Mr. Smith--

  Q. (Senator Loveless.) It's clear now.

  Q. (The Chairman.) Thank you for helping us clarify the matter, Senator. Mr. Hagsworth, you may proceed.

  Q. (Mr. Hagsworth.) Thank you, Senator Schnell. Thank you, Senator Loveless. Then, Mr. Smith, will you tell us the nature of the investigations you have just concluded for this committee?

  A. Certainly. I was investigating the question of interstellar space travel.

  Q. That is, travel be
tween the planets of different stars?

  A. That's right

  Q. And have you reached any conclusions as to the possibility of such a thing?

  A. Oh, yes. Not just conclusions. I have definite evidence that one foreign power is in direct contact with creatures living on the planet of another star, and expects to receive a visit from them shortly.

  Q. Will you tell us the name of that foreign power?

  A. Russia.

  Oh, it went very well. Pandemonium became widespread: much noise, much hammering by Senator Schnell, and at the recess all the networks said big Neilsen. And Mr. Hagsworth was so pleased that he hardly asked me about the file again, which I enjoyed as it was a hard answer to give. 'Good theatre, ah, Mr. Smith,' he winked.

  I only smiled.

  • • • •

  The afternoon also was splendidly hot, especially as Senator Schnell kept coming beside me and the bulbs flashed. It was excellent, excellent

  Q. (Mr, Hagsworth.) Mr. Smith, this morning you told us that a foreign power was in contact with a race of beings living on a planet of the star Aldebaran, is that right?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Can you describe that race for us? I mean the ones you have referred to as 'Aldebaranians'?

  A. Certainly, although their own name for themselves is--is a word in their language which you might here render as Triops'. They average about eleven inches tall. They have two legs, like you. They have three eyes and they live in crystal cities under the water, although they are air-breathers.

  Q. Why is that, Mr. Smith?

  A. The surface of their planet is ravaged by enormous beasts against which they are defenceless.

  Q. But they have powerful weapons ?

  A. Oh, very powerful, Mr. Hagsworth.

  And then it was time for me to take it out and show it to them, the Aldebaranian hand-weapon. It was small and soft and I must fire it with a bent pin, but it made a hole through three floors and the cement of the basement, and they were very interested. Oh, yes!