by Anthology
Over the past four days he had been with the girl a lot. In the beginning, he realized, she had been drawn to him as a symbol of an era she longed, but was unable, to visit. Now she understood him better, knew more about him—and Maitland felt that now she liked him for himself.
She had told him of her childhood in backward Aresund and of loneliness here at the school in Nebraska. “Here,” she had said, “parents spend most of their time raising their children; at home, they just let us grow. Every time one of these people looks at me I feel inferior.” She had confided her dream of visiting far times and places, then had finished, “I doubt that Swarts will ever let me go back. He thinks I am too irresponsible. Probably he is right. But it is terribly discouraging. Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go home to the fiord . . .”
Now, sitting in the sunset glow, Maitland was in a philosophic mood. “The color of grass, the twilight, the seasons, the stars—those things haven’t changed.” He gestured out the window at the slumbering evening prairie. “That scene, save for unessentials, could just as well be 1950—or 950. It’s only human institutions that change rapidly . . .”
“I’ll be awfully sorry when you go back,” she sighed. “You’re the first person I’ve met here that I can talk to.”
“Talk to,” he repeated, dissatisfied. “You’re just about the finest girl I’ve ever met.”
He kissed her playfully, but when they separated there was nothing playful about it. Her face was flushed and he was breathing faster than he had been. Savagely, he bit the inside of his cheek. “Two days I A lifetime here wouldn’t be long enough!”
“Bob.” she touched his arm and her lips were trembling. “Bob, do you have to go—out there? We could get a couple of horses tomorrow, and we would have two days.”
He leaned back and shook his head. “Can’t you see, Ingrid? This is my only chance. If I don’t go tomorrow, I’ll never get to the moon. And then my whole life won’t mean anything . . .”
He woke with Ingrid shaking him. “Bob! Bob!” Her voice was an urgent whisper. “You’ve got to wake up quick! Bob!”
He sat up and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “What’s the matter?”
“I didn’t really believe that Swarts would let you go into space. It wasn’t like him. Bob, he fooled you. Today is when your time runs out!”
Maitland swallowed hard, and his chest muscles tightened convulsively. “You mean it was all a trick?”
She nodded. “He told me just now, while he was putting something in your milk to make you sleep.” Her face was bitter and resentful. “He said, ‘This is a lesson for you, Ching, if you ever do any work with individuals like this. You have to humor them, tell them anything they want to believe, in order to get your data.’ ”
Maitland put his feet on the floor and stood up. His face was white and he was breathing fast.
She grasped his arm. “What are you going to do?”
He shook her hand off. “I may not get to the moon, but I’m going to teach one superman the advantage of honesty!”
“Wait! That won’t get you anywhere.”
“He may be bigger than I am,” Maitland gritted, “but—”
She squeezed his arm violently. “You don’t understand. He would not fight you. He’d use a gun.”
“If I could catch him by surprise . . .”
She took hold of his shoulders firmly. “Now, listen, Bob Maitland. I love you. And I think it’s the most important thing in the world that you get to see the stars. Swarts will never let me time travel, anyway.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’ll go down to the village and get a vliegvlotter. It won’t take twenty minutes. I’ll come back, see that Swarts is out of the way, let you out of here, and take you—” she hesitated, but her eyes were steady—“wherever you want to go.”
He was trembling. “Your career. I can’t let you . . .”
She said, “Pfui,” then grinned. “My career! It’s time I went home to the fiord, anyway. Now you wait here!”
The vliegvlotter was about fifty feet long, an ellipsoid of revolution. Maitland and Ingrid ran hand in hand across the lawn, and she pushed him up through the door, then slammed it shut and screwed the pressure locks tight.
They were strapping themselves into the seats, bathed in sunlight that flooded down through the thick plastic canopy, when she stopped, pale with consternation.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded.
“Oh, Bob, I forgot! We can’t do this!”
“We’re going to,” he said grimly.
“Bob, sometime this morning you’re going to snap back to 1950. If that happens while we’re up there . . .”
His jaw went slack as the implication soaked in. Then he reached over and finished fastening the buckle on her wide seat belt.
“Bob, I can’t. I would be killing you just as surely as . . .”
“Never mind that. You can tell me how to run this thing and then get out, if you want to.”
She reached slowly forward and threw a switch, took hold of the wheel. Seconds later they were plummeting into the blue dome of the sky.
The blue became darker, purplish, and stars appeared in daylight. Maitland gripped the edge of the seat; somewhere inside him it seemed that a chorus of angels was singing the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.
There was a ping, and Ingrid automatically flicked a switch. A screen lit up and the image of Swarts was looking at them. His eyes betrayed some unfamiliar emotion, awe or fear. “Ching! Come back here at once. Don’t you realize that—”
“Sorry, Swarts.” Maitland’s voice resonated with triumph. “You’ll just have to humor me once more.”
“Maitland! Don’t you know that you’re going to snap back to the twentieth century in half an hour? You’ll be in space with no protection. You’ll explode!”
“I know,” Maitland said. He looked up through the viewport. “Right now I’m seeing the stars as I’ve never seen them before. Sorry to make you lose a case, Swarts, but this is better than dying of pneumonia or an atomic bomb.”
He reached forward and snapped the image off.
Twenty minutes later, Maitland had Ingrid cut the drive and turn the ship so that he could see the earth. It was there, a huge shining globe against the constellations, ten thousand miles distant, one hundred times the size of familiar Luna. North America was directly below, part of Canada covered with a dazzling area of clouds. The polar icecap was visible in its entirety, along with the northern portions of the Eurasian land mass. The line of darkness cut off part of Alaska and bisected the Pacific Ocean, and the sun’s reflection in the Atlantic was blinding.
And there was Venus, a brilliant white jewel against the starry blackness of interstellar space; and now he could see the sun’s corona . . .
The ship was rotating slowly, and presently the moon, at first quarter, came into view, not perceptibly larger than seen from earth. Maitland heaved a sigh of regret. If only this could have been but the beginning of a voyage . . .
Ingrid touched his arm. “Bob.”
He turned to look at her golden beauty. ‘
“Bob, give me one more kiss.”
He loosened his seat strap and put his arms around her. For a moment he felt her soft lips on his . . .
Then she was gone, and the ship had vanished. For perhaps as long as a second, alone in space, he was looking with naked, unprotected, ambition-sated eyes at the distant stars.
The luring white blaze of Venus was the last image he took with him into the night without stars.
AMPHISKIOS
John D. MacDonald
Four people, plucked out of time at the instant of dying, become hunted beings in a grim game whose object is their second death!
Prologue
Any diagrammatic presentation of the time concept must perforce be a simplification. Time is neither pulsations nor is it a winding river nor yet coiled upon itself like a spring. To best understand it and
to free it of metaphysical confusions we must revert a full five thousand years to the basic Einstein conjectures, many of them since disproven in the mighty laboratory of stellar space. Draw two lines intersecting. An X. Where they cross is the “now”.
The upper half is the past, the lower half the future.
Both the understandable past and the foreseeable future are severely limited by the sides which form a crude, angular hour-glass. The sidelines represent the speed of light, the infinite Fitzgerald
Contraction, the bitter barrier of existence.
Each soul is a grain of sand in this hour-glass, but suspended forever at the point of “now”. Since the origin of this concept twenty-five generations of experimentation have proved that man, pinned in the focal point of existence, can move timewise neither up into the past nor down into the future.
Thus it has been conceded that escape from this trap of time, from the jaws of inevitability, lies in the possibility of lateral movement, which, of course, assumes a penetration of the barrier of the speed of light.
Assuming the possibility of lateral movement, this movement could thus be reversed and the person which had existed for a moment outside the time barrier would return at an alien focal point, thus completing the illusion of a “journey” within time.
All this is, of course, a simplification $o extreme as to render the entire exposition almost meaningless.
“Narracion de Viajes en Tiempo”
—Agabanzo Historical Collection
—Martian Micro-library
Chapter I
Four are Chosen
Howard Loomis glanced down at the dashboard clock and cursed the long-winded customer who had delayed him for over two hours. His sample cases packed the back seat. He had already reported to the sales manager that he would spend the night in Alexandria, seventy miles away.
He yawned, lit a cigarette and ran the window down, hoping the cold air would keep sleep away. He was a thin and nervous young man with a mobile mouth, a receding hairline and driving ambition.
He began to think of the prospects in Alexandria then as sleep welled up over him. His hands relaxed on the wheel. He awakened with a start as his front right wheel went off onto the shoulder. The big car swerved and he fought it back under control.
It was a clear cold night—below freezing. It had rained during the afternoon but the road was dry.
He decided to increase his speed, depending on the added responsibility to keep him awake.
In the white glow of his headlights he saw a bridge ahead—a bridge over railroad tracks.
The tires whined on the concrete, changed tone as they hit the steel tread of the bridge.
The bridge was coated with thin clear ice.
As the back end began to swing Howard Loomis bit down on his lower lip, fighting both panic and sheer disbelief that this could be happening to him.
The back end swung in the other direction and there was a grinding smash as it tore through the side railing.
The big car tipped. Howard Loomis caught a glimpse of the steel tracks far below. Ridiculously the thought that he could not live through the fall was intermingled with the thoughts of the potential customers in Alexandria.
There was the spinning silence of the fall, the sickening lunge through space, and . . .
The third show was coming up and she knew that it would be rough and unpleasant. During the second show a drunk who fancied himself a comic, after chanting, “Take it off!” had come out onto the floor to offer assistance. There would be more drunks for the third show.
Her name was Mary Callahan—Maurine Callaix on the bill—and she was a tall girl with the blue-black hair, milky skin and blue eyes of her race.
She was checking the concealed hooks in her working dress when Sally, the new singer, came into the dressing room and stood watching her.
“How can you do it, Mary?” she asked.
“Do what, kid?”
“I mean, get out there in front of all those people and—”
Mary smiled tightly. “It’s just a business. I was the gal who was going to knock them dead in ballet. But I grew too big. It doesn’t bother me any more.”
Sally looked at her, shook her head and said, “I could never do it.”
Mary Callahan stared at the smaller girl for a moment. Mary Callahan thought of the last three years, of the ten months’ hospital bill her mother had accumulated while dying, of the money for milk and meat and bread for the twin nephews.
“I hope you don’t have to do it. Ever.”
“How about Hick?” Sally asked.
Mary Callahan frowned. “The guy worries me. I don’t know what gave him the idea that I was his prize package. He’s a hophead, dearie. He stopped me at the door tonight and I had to slap him across the teeth to get by him.”
“Was that safe?” Sally asked.
“He hasn’t got the nerve to try anything. I hope.”
She got the call and went on, pausing just off the floor for the blue spot to pick her up, then walking on in a slow half dance to the sultry beat of the tomtom, wearing the mechanical lascivious smile, reaching gracefully for the first concealed snap on the evening gown.
When Rick came into the glow of the spot the music faltered and stopped.
Mary Callahan watched his hand, watched the gun.
Suddenly she knew that he would shoot. She saw his pinpoint pupils, the twisted mouth, the stained teeth.
She saw the gun come up. She looked down the barrel, saw his finger whiten on the trigger, saw the first orange-red bloom of the flower of death and . . .
*****
Joe Gresham padded across the I beam, his eyes fixed on the upright opposite him. He had learned three years before that when you’re on the high iron you never look at your feet. Because then you’d see the cars below, like beetles, the people like small slow bugs, and something would happen to your stomach.
He was a sun-hardened man, with wide shoulders, knotted hands and an impassive though good-humored face.
Above him he heard the rivets clanking into the bucket, the buck of the hammer. The sun was bright.
When he heard the shout, he stopped dead. The red-hot rivet struck him just above the right ear.
For long seconds he fought for balance, gave up, tried to drop in such a way that his hands would clasp the girder on which he had been walking.
But he had waited too long, and his hands merely slapped the girder.
He spun down through the warm morning air and it was as though the earth spun slowly around him. Each time he saw the street it was startlingly closer. And as he fell he thought, “This isn’t happening to me. This can’t be the end of Joe Gresham!”
And . . .
*****
Stacey Murdock took three more smooth crawl strokes, rolled over onto her back and looked back at the lake shore, at the vast white house, the wide green lawns.
She grinned as she wondered if the two muscle-men her father had hired were still sitting in the house waiting for her to get up. Nothing could be more ridiculous than Daddy’s periodic kidnaping scares. Why kidnaping was out of fashion! Even when the gal in question would one day inherit more millions than she had fingers and toes.
Stacey was a trim, small girl with pale blond hair, a rather sallow face and a wide, petulant mouth.
The party last night had been a daisy. The cold water of the lake felt good. Best thing in the world for a hangover.
She had climbed down, dressed in a terricloth robe, from the terrace outside her bedroom window. She could see the robe on the dock, glinting white in the sun.
It was so much more pleasant to swim without a suit.
Her soaked hair plastered her forehead. She pushed it aside, rolled over and began her long, effortless crawl out into the big lake. The waves were a bit higher way out and sometimes when she rolled her face up to breathe, one would slap her in the face.
Suddenly she felt the churn of nausea. The hangover was worse than s
he thought. But messy to be sick out in the water like this.
She floated for a time as the feeling got worse. When the paroxysms started, she doubled over, unable to catch her breath, unable to straighten out. She coughed under water and it made a strange bubbling by her ears. Then, stupidly, she had to breathe and she strangled on the water she was sucking into her longs.
She had no idea where the surface was, and she was climbing up an endless green ladder with arms as limp as wet doth and then there was a softness of music in her ears and it was so much easier and more delicious just to lie back and relax and sleep and . . .
*****
It was Baedlik who first penetrated the barrier of the speed of light. The feat was not performed, as one might suppose, in the depths of space but in his laboratory in London. By bombarding the atoms of Baedlium with neutrons, he so increased the mass and attraction of the nuclei that the outer rings of electrons, moving at forty thousand miles per hour, were drawn in toward the nuclei, their speed proportionately increasing.
This decreased the dead space within the atom, resulting in an incredibly heavy material. When the speed of the outer rings passed the speed of light, the samples of Baedlium, to all intents and purposes, naturally ceased to exist at Baedlik’s focal point.
This, for over seventy years, was called Baedlik’s Enigma, until the lateral movement in time was explained by Glish, who also set forward the first set of formulae designed to predict and control this lateral movement.
Ibid
Chapter II
The Watching Boxes
Howard Loomis did not have, in his background or experience, any comparable sensation. One moment every fibre of his body was tensed in vain effort to withstand the smash which would tear soul from body.
