Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  “In your detail of the vision which presented itself to you amid the hills, you have described, with the minutest accuracy, the Indian city of Benares, upon the Holy River. The riots, the combat, the massacre, were the actual events of the insurrection of Cheyte Sing, which took place in 1780, when Hastings was put in imminent peril of his life. The man escaping by the string of turbans was Cheyte Sing himself. The party in the kiosk were sepoys and British officers, headed by Hastings. Of this party I was one, and did all I could to prevent the rash and fatal sally of the officer who fell, in the crowded alleys, by the poisoned arrow of a Bengalee. That officer was my dearest friend. It was Oldeb. You will perceive by these manuscripts,” (here the speaker produced a note-book in which several pages appeared to have been freshly written) “that at the very period in which you fancied these things amid the hills, I was engaged in detailing them upon paper here at home.”

  In about a week after this conversation, the following paragraphs appeared in a Charlottesville paper:

  “We have the painful duty of announcing the death of MR. AUGUSTUS BEDLO, a gentleman whose amiable manners and many virtues have long endeared him to the citizens of Charlottesville.

  “Mr. B., for some years past, has been subject to neuralgia, which has often threatened to terminate fatally; but this can be regarded only as the mediate cause of his decease. The proximate cause was one of especial singularity. In an excursion to the Ragged Mountains, a few days since, a slight cold and fever were contracted, attended with great determination of blood to the head. To relieve this, Dr. Templeton resorted to topical bleeding. Leeches were applied to the temples. In a fearfully brief period the patient died, when it appeared that, in the jar containing the leeches, had been introduced, by accident, one of the venomous vermicular sangsues which are now and then found in the neighboring ponds. This creature fastened itself upon a small artery in the right temple. Its close resemblance to the medicinal leech caused the mistake to be overlooked until too late.

  “N.B.—The poisonous sangsue of Charlottesville may always be distinguished from the medicinal leech by its blackness, and especially by its writhing or vermicular motions, which very nearly resemble those of a snake.”

  I was speaking with the editor of the paper in question, upon the topic of this remarkable accident, when it occurred to me to ask how it happened that the name of the deceased had been given as Bedlo.

  “I presume,” said I, “you have authority for this spelling, but I have always supposed the name to be written with an e at the end.”

  “Authority?—no,” he replied. “It is a mere typographical error. The name is Bedlo with an e., all the world over, and I never knew it to be spelt otherwise in my life.”

  “Then,” said I mutteringly, as I turned upon my heel, “then indeed has it come to pass that one truth is stranger than any fiction—for Bedlo, without the e, what is it but Oldeb conversed! And this man tells me it is a typographical error.”

  A TOUCH OF PETULANCE

  Ray Bradbury

  On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

  His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fate disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:

  “Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?”

  “No!” the older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, “Yes. A very late edition.”

  Hughes glanced around. “Excuse me, but—all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?”

  “Future?” The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with

  a single exhalation. “Indeed,” he whispered. “Future change. God, what a joke.”

  Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline:

  May 2, 1999.

  “Now, see here—” he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page:

  WOMAN MURDERED

  POLICE SEEK HUSBAN

  Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—

  The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.

  The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened.

  In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:

  Jonathan Hughes,

  certified public accountant,

  of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—

  “My God!” he cried. “Get away!”

  But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.

  Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us—us? What kind of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!

  The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with traveling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to confront the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous traveling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.

  “Who are you?”

  Someone must have shouted that.

  The train rocked as if it might derail.

  The old man stood up as if shot in the heart, blindly crammed something into Jonathan Hughes’s hand, and blundered away down the aisle and into the next car.

  The younger man opened his fist and turned a card over and read a few words that moved him heavily down to sit and read the words again:

  JONATHAN HUGHES,

  CPA 679-4990.

  Plandome.

  “No!” someone shouted.

  Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is . . . me.

  There was a conspiracy, no, several conspiracies. Someone had contrived a joke about murder and played it on him. The train roared on with five hundred commuters who all rode, swaying like a team of drunken intellectuals behind masking books and papers, while the old man, as if pursued by demons, fled off away from car to car. By the time Jonathan Hughes had rampaged his blood and completely thrown his sanity off balance, the old man had plunged, as if falling, to the farthest end of the commuter’s special.

  The two men met again in the last car, which was almost empty. Jonathan Hughes came and stood over the old man, who refused to look up. He was crying so hard now that conversation would have been impossible.

  Who, thought the young man, who is he crying for? Stop, please, stop.

  The old man, as if commanded, sat up, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and began to speak in a frail voice that drew Jonathan Hughes near and finally caused him to sit and listen to the whispers:

  “We were born—”

  “We?” cried the young man.

  “We,” whispered the old man, looking out at the gathering dusk that traveled like smokes and burnings past the window, “we, yes, we, the two of us, we were born in Quincy in nineteen fifty. August twenty-second—”

  Yes, thought Hughes.

  “—and lived at Forty-nine Washington Street and went to Central School and walked to that school all through first grade with Isabel Perry—”

  Isabel, thought the young man.

  “We . . .” murmured the old man. “Our” whispered the old man. “Us.” And went on a
nd on with it.

  “Our woodshop teacher, Mr. Bisbee. History teacher, Miss Monks. We broke our right ankle, age ten, iceskating. Almost drowned, age eleven; Father saved us. Fell in love, age twelve, Impi Johnson—”

  Seventh grade, lovely lady, long since dead, Jesus God, thought the young man, growing old.

  And that’s what happened. In the next minute, two minutes, three, the old man talked and talked and gradually became younger with talking so that his cheeks glowed and his eyes brightened, while the young man, weighted with old knowledge given, sank lower in his seat and grew pale so that both almost met in mid-talking, mid-listening and became twins in passing. There was a moment when Jonathan Hughes knew for an absolute insane certainty that if he dared to glance up he would see identical twins in the mirrored window of a night-rushing world.

  He did not look up.

  The old man finished, his frame erect now, his head somehow driven high by talking out, the long lost revelations.

  “That’s the past,” he said.

  I should hit him, thought Hughes. Accuse him. Shout at him. Why aren’t I hitting, accusing, shouting?

  Because . . .

  The old man sensed the question and said, “You know I’m who I say I am. I know everything there is to know about us. Now—the future?”

  “Mine?”

  “Ours,” said the old man.

  Jonathan Hughes nodded, staring at the newspaper clutched in the old man’s right hand. The old man folded it and put it away.

  “Your business will slowly become less than good. For what reasons, who can say? A child will be born and die. A mistress will be taken and lost. A wife will become less than good. And at last, oh believe it, yes, do, very slowly, you will come to—how shall I say it—hate her living presence. There, I see I’ve upset you. I’ll shut up.”

  They rode in silence for a long while, and the old man grew old again, and the young man along with him. When he had aged just the proper amount, the young man nodded the talk to continue, not looking at the other who now said:

  “Impossible, yes, you’ve been married only a year, a great year, the best. Hard to think that a single drop of ink could color a white pitcher of clear fresh water. But color it could and color it did. And at last the entire world changed, not just our wife, not just the beautiful woman, the fine dream.”

  “You—” Jonathan Hughes started and stopped. “You—killed her?”

  “We did. Both of us. But if I have my way, if I can convince you, neither of us will, she will live, and you will grow old to become a happier, finer me. I pray for that. I weep for that. There’s still time. Across the years, I intend to shake you up, change your blood, shape your mind. God, if people knew what murder is. So silly. So stupid, so ugly. But there is hope, for I have somehow got here, touched you, and begun to change. That will save our souls. Now, listen. You do admit, do you not, that we are one and the same, that the twins of time ride this train this hour this night?”

  The train whistled ahead of them, clearing the track for an encumbrance of years.

  The young man nodded the most infinitely microscopic of nods. The old man needed no more.

  “I ran away. I ran to you. That’s all I can say. She’s been dead only a day, and I ran. Where to go? Nowhere to die, save Time. No one to plead with, no judge, no jury, no proper witnesses save—you. Only you can wash the blood away, do you see? You drew me, then. Your youngness, your innocence, your good hours, your fine life still untouched, was the machine that seized me down the track. All of my sanity lies in you. If you turn away, great God, I’m lost, no, we are lost. We’ll share a grave and never rise and be buried forever in misery. Shall I tell you what you must do?”

  The young man rose.

  “Plandome,” a voice cried. “Plandome.”

  And they went out on the platform with the old man running after, the young man blundering into walls, into people, feeling as if his limbs might fly apart.

  “Wait!” cried the old man. “Oh, please!”

  The young man kept moving.

  “Don’t you see, we’re in this together, we must think of it together, solve it together, so you won’t become me and I won’t have to come impossibly in search of you, oh, it’s all mad, insane, I know, I know, but listen!”

  The young man stopped at the edge of the platform where cars were pulling in, with joyful cries or muted greeting, brief honkings, gunnings of motors, lights vanishing away. The old man grasped the young man’s elbow.

  “Good God, your wife, mine, will be here in a moment, there’s so much to tell, you can’t know what I know, there’s twenty years of unfound information lost between which we must trade and understand. Are you listening? God, you don’t believe!” Jonathan Hughes was watching the street. A long way off a final car was approaching. He said: “What happened in the attic at my grandmother’s house in the summer of nineteen-fifty-eight? No one knows but me. Well?”

  The old man’s shoulders slumped. He breathed more easily, and as if reciting from a prompt-board said, “We hid ourselves there for two days, alone. No one ever knew where we hid. Everyone thought we had run away to drown in the lake or fall in the river. But all the time, crying, not feeling wanted, we hid above and . . . listened to the wind and wanted to die.”

  The young man turned at last to stare fixedly at his older self, tears in his eyes. “You love me, then?”

  “I had better,” said the old man. “I’m all you have.”

  The car was pulling up at the station. A young woman smiled and waved behind the glass.

  “Quick,” said the old man, quietly. “Let me come home, watch, show you, teach you, find where things went wrong, correct them now, maybe hand you a fine life forever, let me—”

  The car horn sounded, the car stopped, the young woman leaned out.

  “Hello, lovely man!” she cried.

  Jonathan Hughes exploded a laugh and burst into a manic run. “Lovely lady, hi—”

  “Wait.”

  He stopped and turned to look at the old man with the newspaper, trembling there on the station platform. The old man raised one hand, questionably.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  Silence. At last: “You,” said Jonathan Hughes. “You.”

  The car rounded a turn in the night. The woman, the old man, the young swayed with the motion.

  “What did you say your name was?” the young woman said, above the rush and run of the country and road.

  “He didn’t say,” said Jonathan Hughes, quickly.

  “Weldon,” said the old man, blinking.

  “Why,” said Alice Hughes, “That’s my maiden name.”

  The old man gasped inaudibly, but recovered. “Well, is it? How curious!”

  “I wonder if we’re related? You—”

  “He was my teacher at Central High,” said Jonathan Hughes, quickly.

  “And still am,” said the old man. “And still am.”

  And they were home.

  He could not stop staring. All through dinner, the old man simply sat with his hands empty half the time and stared at the lovely woman across the table from him. Jonathan Hughes fidgeted, talked much too loudly to cover the silences, and ate sparsely. The old man continued to stare as if a miracle was happening every ten seconds. He watched Alice’s mouth as if it were giving forth fountains of diamonds. He watched her eyes as if all the hidden wisdoms of the world were there and now found for the first time. By the look of his face, the old man, stunned, had forgotten why he was there.

  “Have I a crumb on my chin?” cried Alice Hughes, suddenly. “Why is everyone watching me?”

  Whereupon the old man burst into tears that shocked everyone. He could not seem to stop, until at last Alice came around the table to touch his shoulder.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so lovely. Please sit down. Forgive.”

  They finished off dessert and with a great display of tossing down his fork and wiping h
is mouth with his napkin, Jonathan Hughes cried, “That was fabulous. Dear wife, I love you!” He kissed her on the cheek, thought better of it, and rekissed her, on the mouth. “You see?” He glanced at the old man. “I very much love my wife.”

  The old man nodded quietly and said, “Yes, yes, I remember.”

  “You remember?” said Alice, staring.

  “A toast!” said Jonathan Hughes, quickly. “To a fine wife, a grand future!”

  His wife laughed. She raised her glass.

  “Mr. Weldon,” she said, after a moment. “You’re not drinking?”

  It was strange seeing the old man at the door to the living room.

  “Watch this,” he said, and closed his eyes. He began to move certainly and surely about the room, eyes shut. “Over here is the pipestand, over here the books. On the fourth shelf down a copy of Eisley’s The Star Thrower. One shelf up H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, most appropriate, and over here the special chair, and me in it.”

  He sat. He opened his eyes.

  Watching from the door, Jonathan Hughes said, “You’re not going to cry again, are you?”

  “No. No more crying.”

  There were sounds of washing up from the kitchen. The lovely woman out there hummed under her breath. Both men turned to look out of the room toward that humming.

  “Someday,” said Jonathan Hughes, “I will hate her? Someday, I will kill her?”

  “It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I’ve watched her for an hour and found nothing, no hint, no clue, not the merest period, semicolon or exclamation point of blemish, bump or hair out of place with her. I’ve watched you, too, to see if you were at fault, we were at fault, in all this.”