The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “It’s only a house—looks kind of deserted, though. I didn’t think you’d be afraid of haunts or spirits.” She walks forward boldly, too young to feel what Wyle feels about the place. The stones hang together precariously, furred with green-black moss. Wings rustle in the branches above, but Arcana sees no birds. The door stands open.

  At first Wyle will not enter; his knuckles are white as he grips his weapon. Arcana has to laugh at him, careless, cruel child’s laughter that rings (somehow) familiar in her ears. And he follows into the cave-damp interior of the deserted house. The room is barren; a rough bed tied with thongs and heaped with dried evergreen boughs, a huge gnarled tree-stump hollowed out into a chair, polished dark and smooth by the body of someone who had often sat there, staring into a fire on the raw-brick hearth, seeing Xesis knew what visions. Arcana tries to shake off the feeling of uneasiness that is creeping up the back of her neck. Footsteps crackle in the leaves outside, paralyzing Wyle with fear. Arcana guides him to a corner where a heavy crossbeam casts down a bar of darkness. Someone enters, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the door. As he passes Arcana averts her eyes, remembering the Time Lord’s warning, but she cannot help looking once he was gone by. He is gangling, raw-boned, but does not move in a clumsy way. His ragged shirt exposes long wristbones, strangely delicate to end in large, ungainly hands which are darkly stained. His coarse black hair curls down over his collar. Arcana finds herself wishing that he will turn around.

  He picks up a log and drops it into the fireplace. The dry wood seems to blaze up almost as he touches it. He sits down on the chair and extends his hands, letting the firelight turn them redly translucent. He seems a lonely figure, trying to bring warmth to this lost place. Arcana impulsively wishes to stand beside him, dispelling the long loneliness with a word and spend the eternal evening in talk or companionable silence. As the figure relaxes, seems to fall into a light sleep, his hand drops, almost to the floor, firelight sparking off the frost-silver of a large ring.

  Arcana is immediately all hard business as her eyes catch that spark. “I’ll sneak up close and if he’s asleep, I’ll slip the ring from his finger.”

  Wyle gripped`her convulsively. “No, you mustn’t touch him. The Time Lord played us false. I think I know this man. Only he isn’t properly a man.”

  “Quiet, he’ll waken.” Wyle’s eyes slip nervously sideways, to see if what she says is happening.

  “And even he sleeps,” he says, letting his hands slip weakly from Arcana’s shoulders.

  Her taut muscles carry her across the room, her bare feet making only the softest of sounds. But the sleeper breathes deeply, regularly, even when her fingers delicately grip the ring. It is ice, sending a shudder through her. Where the set should be is a dark opening like a tiny well that is so deep she has to keep herself from looking into it for too long. She thinks there are certain things stirring at the bottom of the well. It isn’t difficult for her to slide the ring off the lax finger. She clasps the treasure against her palm, motioning Wyle toward the door. His foot makes a scraping sound and the creature before the fire is thrusting himself upward. Though Arcana does not look back, in her peripheral sight he seems to tower upward, growing to an impossible height. She lets her fear propel her to necessary speed as she bolts through the door. Looking back over her shoulder, she sees Wyle, running slowly like a figure trapped in a dream, and unbelievably, turning his head, turning to look back at the face of what pursues him; it is just as she remembers it.

  Wyle’s legs let his body fall of its own weight and he settled to the ground, all knowledge all pain all fear all joy sliding from his features glazing over into a terrible peace. And so final. So she could see nothing but the blurred prisms of her own tears and something was tearing its way out of her, but she could still run, so, of course she did.

  And, of course, she got away, with the ring a burning cold circle in her hand and with a gnawing curiosity that made her wish that she, too, had looked back. It would have been one way of solving the mystery.

  The Time Lord’s statue stands in the indigo passageway, looking out a window as if it were waiting for her return. She will fling the silver ring at his feet. “The quest is done, you stupid, smug, stone bastard.”

  Seablue light danced across her eyes and she felt herself grow ponderous again. The statue moved, stooped, picks up the ring, seemingly unoffended, yet perhaps her ghost-words had never reached his ears. He appears strangely pleased and reaches out to draw her nearer, but she shrugged off his touch. “I want nothing of you for myself, but my master wishes eternal youth and happiness, little may it profit the ill-smelling old crocodile.”

  The Time Lord looks at her in surprise (as though a flower from his lovely bouquet had calmly spit in his eye).

  * * * *

  A servant poured wine from the cobwebbed bottle into the crystal goblet and put it carefully into the frail, brown spotted hand. “It’s cold in here,” whined the old lady. The stags and hounds and maidens and unicorns moved with constant life along the walls. “The wind is rising again; I can hear it.”

  “Yes, Ma’am, but it’s only the wind after all,” answered the servant, a surreptitious smile appearing on his youthful face.

  “Yes.” Her querulous voice subsided and she looked around the room. It had changed very little. The small jewel-polished chairs and tables stand superciliously in their places, mirrored in the shining floor.

  Another servant appeared at the door. “My Lady, the little gentlemen is ready for bed.” A child rushed into the room, a bloom of red curls, a bird-egg speckling of freckles. “Good night, my angel,” said the old lady. A line of spittle drooled down the boy’s chin from his open mouth; his eyes shone with a heavenly, a mindless happiness. He made squealing sounds and grabbed at invisible butterflies as the maidservant led him from the room. “Good night, my little duke. Such a good boy, such a happy boy.” She nearly strangled on her own high, witch-laughter.

  The night wind prowled endlessly, sending unseen filaments to pluck at the tapestries and make the fire flutter on the hearth. The old lady’s head nodded forward, like a heavy pod on a slender stem. Dry leaves zig-zagged leisurely to the ground.

  “I’ve lost my way,” shouted Arcana, her voice deadened in this quiet place.

  “Follow me,” said a voice and Alek appeared beside her. She followed him among dark trees, but his strides were long and she had to run to keep up.

  “You’re going in circles,” she accused him at last, grabbing hold of his sleeve. He started laughing and grasping firmly the skin of his forehead, he began to peel it off easily, exposing the face of Wyle. It was peaceful, as she had last remembered it. Without speaking he gently led her along a path bordered with stone willows and starflower shrubs. She picked a flower and felt it cool and rigid against her cheek. Wyle smiled and seated himself in one of the garden chairs. She knew what was coming but still she felt her stomach contract when he removed the membraneous mask and became the Time Lord.

  “You are Arcana?” he asked. “You are much changed. I only dozed off for a moment…”

  “Years have passed and with them, my life, a life crowded with things happening, people coming and going. But you have not changed at all.” She placed the starflower in his open hand.

  He rose, holding the flower before him, where it began to flame and sizzle and throw sparks, illuminating a great darkness ahead. She walked close beside his lanky, scarecrow figure, content, for in a moment he would peel back the final mask and she would see his face.

  YESTERDAY’S PAPER, by Boyd Ellanby

  From the direction of the Tycho’s berth, Bill Danforth rolled up in his jeep and grinned at Peter Harrison’s worried face.

  “What’s the matter, Pete?” he said. “Still trying to figure our chances to six decimals? That doesn’t pay, in business like ours.”

  Peter Har
rison looked at the moon just rising behind the Pyramids. “That’s just what does pay, in business like ours. You figure your chances, as close as you can.”

  “Sure. But when you’ve done that, why keep worrying? We’ll never know the score any closer than we do now—until we get back. Better let me run you down to the Semiramis for a drink.”

  Peter shook his head. “Thanks. But I’m not in a drinking mood, now.” He scuffed his boot in the sand while he stared across the desert and brooded on the rocket ship waiting there in the dusk. “Call me anything you like, except a fool,” he said. “I’m not trying to back out on the deal. I knew what I was in for when I signed up, months ago, but I had supposed the job would look more certain, this close to take-off time. When the Tycho lifts for the moon, I go with it, but it’s not only the conservatives who are wondering if the ship will ever get back. Even the big gamblers are getting cold feet, and last night when I walked up Kasr el Nil, I couldn’t go half a block without some laddie in a nightgown stepping up and offering me sixty to forty that the Tycho will never get back.”

  “So what?” said Bill. “Do you think the U.N. would have set up a project on this scale, gone to the enormous trouble of getting permission from the Egyptian Government to make this installation smack in the middle of the desert, half-way from nowhere, if they thought the jump would fail? Would they have spent millions to build the Hyperphysics Institute, to erect the Moonport, and to import thousands of specialists, just for a whim?”

  “I know, I know! But I want to feel certain—absolutely certain—that I’ve checked every possibility of things going wrong. Be serious, Bill. What do you think the chances are of the Tycho’s getting us to the moon and back again, safely?”

  Bill shrugged his shoulders. “What do you think I am, a fortune-teller? Maybe you should ask Jim Dutton or one of his boys over at Temporal Research to peek into the future for you.”

  “I’m not kidding! I just want to figure probabilities.”

  “But we’ve already figured probabilities, till those computers inside are leaking probabilities at the seams! There are four of us making the trip on the Tycho—you, me, Carl Johansson, and Pete Harriman—though how they came to foul things up by choosing two guys with names so much alike, is beyond me. Out of the four of us, what makes you so special? Pete Harriman and Carl Johansson seem able to take the risk in their stride, just like me. Yet they’ve both got wives, which you and I haven’t, and Carl even has a kid. I heard you were the worrying kind before we signed up for this deal, but I never guessed you’d take it so hard. Are you always like this?”

  A hail came across the rocky plateau.

  “Ya Pasha! Ya Pasha!”

  They turned to see a running Arab, his bare feet slapping noiselessly over the sand, the skirts of his blue and white galabiya streaming behind him as he ran.

  Out of breath, he reached the jeep and gasped, “Ya Pasha Harriman!”

  “Wrong man,” said Peter. “I’m Harrison, not Harriman, and I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me Pasha. In America we don’t have any nobility, remember, and plain Colonel is good enough for me.”

  “Okay, Pasha Harriman.”

  Peter sighed. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Abdou, I’m Harri-son. It’s the bald-headed flyer that’s Harri-man. They call him hairy-man, because he hasn’t got any hair. Is that clear?”

  Bill Danforth chuckled, as he spoke to the puzzled Arab. “He’s just trying to confuse you, Abdou. Don’t pay any attention. All you have to do is remember: red hair equals Harrison.”

  “Excuse me, ya Pasha,” said Abdou. “My ears do not hear the difference well, and so it is hard to remember. But the young lady at the Hyperphysics Institute, the one at the communications office, sent me to get you. The man with red hair who is going to the moon, she said. There’s a radiophone call for you, from America.”

  “Who’s calling me?”

  “That’s not for me to say, sir. I think it is another young lady.”

  “Oh, no!” said Peter, his forehead creased in a frown. “I wonder if it can be Ruth?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Bill. “Who’s Ruth?”

  “A girl I know. I wonder if something’s happened—”

  “Hop in the jeep,” said Bill. “You too, Abdou. Crawl in the back and we’ll give you a lift.”

  * * * *

  In the club lounge of the Hyperphysics Institute, Peter sat on the edge of his air-cushioned chair, radiophone in hand, listening to the appalling jumble of sounds beamed into his ear.

  “No!” he shouted. “I was not calling the chief Lamasery in Tibet. I’m trying to get a call from America.”

  A white robed waiter, resplendent in scarlet tarbush, scarlet sash, and scarlet sandals, hurried up to place a frosted glass on the table before him, then padded away.

  Ignoring the glass, Peter gripped the phone more tightly as he cried out, “Ruth! Then it was you! I can’t hear you very well, Ruth. No, operator, this is not the Addis Ababa airport, I’m trying to talk to Chicago. What’s that, Ruth? Yes, the takeoff is less than a month away, now, and as soon as we get back I’ll phone you, and you can send out the invitations. What’s that? You’re coming here?”

  The warm voice rose and fell in his ear as though it were bobbing on the waves of the sea.

  “The family seems to want a vacation,” she said. “We’re rocketing to London, and flying on to Cairo. We’ll arrive two weeks from today, and you can make arrangements at the Embassy for us to be married there, the evening we arrive.”

  “But Ruth!” he protested, “we can’t take the chance. I’ve already explained all this to you.”

  “I know you have, Pete. You’ve been explaining for nearly five years, now. First we couldn’t get married because you hadn’t finished your doctorate. Then we had to wait because it wasn’t enough for you to be a physicist, you had to know rocket theory too. Then you put it off because it wasn’t a hundred per cent certain that you’d survive the first transatlantic rocket flight. Well, you survived, just as I said you would. But did we get married? No, you asked me to wait until you’d completed the organization of the Thorium plant, because it might blow up and take you with it, along with the state of Nebraska. And now you want to wait until you’ve got back from the moon. Right?”

  “Right,” said Peter, in a small voice.

  ‘I’m not a toy, to be kept on the shelf forever, Peter. I’ve got pioneer blood in my veins, and I’m just as ready to share the risk of the future with my man as my great-great-great grandmother was when she sat beside by grandfather in a covered wagon, and crossed the middlewestern prairies in the dead of winter. No, Pete, this is your last chance. You make arrangements for our wedding to take place at the Embassy, two weeks from tonight, or else the wedding just isn’t going to take place, ever.”

  Peter reached for his misted glass and gulped down half the drink.

  “Be reasonable, Ruth! What would happen to you if I don’t come back from the moon? Get off the line, operator! I don’t understand Italian.”

  Ruth’s gentle voice came clearly. “You can waste a lifetime, being reasonable. If I’m willing to take a chance, Pete, why shouldn’t you be? Is it a deal?”

  He wiped his streaming forehead, and said weakly, “All right, darling. It’s a deal. Two weeks from tonight.” The phone clicked off, and he replaced the set in its cradle in the arm of his chair. He drained the rest of his drink and sank back into the cushions. Glaring distractedly around the crowded lounge, he wondered if there was anyone around who could give him good advice right now?

  Carl Johansson, he supposed, was having a family dinner at home, in the suburb of Maadi. Bill Danforth had gone into Cairo, to take in a new night club. He noticed Peter Harriman making for the ping pong room, his bald head gleaming under the lights—but Pete Harriman’s wife had gone b
ack to the States, and he was soured on matrimony.

  A hand clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Hi, Pete! You look low.”

  It was Jim Dutton, head of Temporal Research. He’d known Jim at M.I.T., and had always liked him.

  “Well, the fact is,” Pete began.

  “It can’t be that bad, whatever it is,” said Jim. “Sorry. I’m meeting the wife for dinner in the Cheops Room, and I’m late. Tempestuous Tessie kept me overtime tonight.” He hurried away.

  The crowd in the lounge was thinning, now, as people went in to dinner. Peter sat up and clapped his hands sharply together. When the waiter came running, he snapped an order.

  “Another Moon Fizz.”

  “Haadir!” said the waiter, and padded away.

  * * * *

  Four Moon Fizzes later, Peter wove his way out of the lounge, took the escalator to the ground floor, exhibited his wrist identification to the soldier at the entrance, and emerged into the radiance of night in the desert. He looked up, and tried to focus his eyes. The moon was high in the sky, now, and her light was reflected from the white slopes of the Pyramids to the north of him.

  He strolled on, aimlessly toward the Hyperphysics Institute, known to its workers as the Labyrinth, because the many cells of its offices and laboratories spread over a full acre of desert. His head was beginning to clear and as he looked at the pattern of lighted windows in the few labs where research went on twenty-four hours a day, he remembered a scrap of conversation.

  It was ten days ago, the day of his arrival in Cairo. Abdou, acting as his guide, had been taking him to the gyro-lab. They had passed the open door of a room from which issued a high-pitched, nerve-shattering, mechanical whine, and his skin had crawled with the physical discomfort of that noise.