by Anthology
Weill stared at him blankly.
The man said, “Of course, the stories I want should teach science even as they amuse and excite the reader. They should open to him the vast scope of the future. Airplanes will cross the Atlantic nonstop.”
“Airplanes?” Weill caught a fugitive vision of a large metal whale, rising on its own exhaust. A moment, and it was gone. He said, “Large ones, carrying hundreds of people faster than sound.”
“Of course. Why not? Staying in touch at all times by radio.”
“Satellites.”
“What?” It was the other man’s turn to look puzzled.
“Radio waves bounce off an artificial satellite in space.”
The other man nodded vigorously. “I predicted the use of radio waves to detect at a distance in ‘Ralph 124C41+’. Space mirrors? I’ve predicted that. And television, of course. And energy from the atom.”
Weill was galvanized. Images flashed before his mind’s eye in no suitable order. “Atom,” he said, “Yes. Nuclear bombs.”
“Radium,” said the other man complacently.
“Plutonium,” said Weill.
“What?”
“Plutonium. And nuclear fusion. Imitating the Sun. Nylon and plastics. Pesticides to kill the insects. Computers to kill the problems.”
“Computers? You mean robots?”
“Pocket computers,” said Weill enthusiastically. “Little things. Hold them in your hand and work out problems. Little radios. Hold them in your hand, too. Cameras take photographs and develop them right in the box. Holographs. Three-dimensional pictures.”
The other man said, “Do you write scientifiction?”
Weill didn’t listen. He kept trying to trap the images. They were growing clearer. “Skyscrapers,” he said. “Aluminum and glass. Highways. Color television. Man on the Moon. Probes to Jupiter.”
“Man on the Moon,” said the other man. “Jules Verne. Do you read Jules Verne?”
Weill shook his head. It was quite clear now. The mind was healing a bit. “Stepping down onto the Moon’s surface on television. Everyone watching. And pictures of Mars. No canals on Mars.”
“No canals on Mars?” said the other man, astonished. “They have been seen.”
“No canals,” said Weill firmly. “Volcanoes. The biggest. Canyons the biggest. Transistors, lasers, tachyons. Trap the tachyons. Make them push against time. Move through time. Move through time. A—ma—”
Weill’s voice was fading and his outlines trembled. It so happened that the other man looked away at this moment, staring into the blue sky, and muttering, “Tachyons? What is he saying?”
He was thinking that if a stranger he met casually in the park was so interested in scientifiction, it might be a good sign that it was time for the magazine. And then he remembered he had no name and dismissed the notion regretfully.
He looked back in time to hear Weill’s last words, “Tachyonic time travel—an—amazing—stor—y—” And he was gone, snapping back to his own time.
Hugo Gernsback stared in horror at the place where the man had been. He hadn’t seen him come and now he really hadn’t seen him go. His mind rejected the actual disappearance. How strange a man—his clothes were oddly cut, come to think of it, and his words were wild and whirling.
The stranger himself said it—an amazing story. His last words.
And then Gernsback muttered the phrase under his breath, “Amazing story . . . Amazing Stories?”
A smile tugged at the comers of his mouth.
BLANK!
Isaac Asimov
“Presumably,” said August Pointdexter, “there is such a thing as overweening pride. The Greeks called it hubris, and considered it to be defiance of the gods, to be followed always by ate, or retribution.” He rubbed his pale blue eyes uneasily.
“Very pretty,” said Dr. Edward Barron impatiently. “Has that any connection with what I said?” His forehead was high and had horizontal creases in it that cut in sharply when he raised his eyebrows in contempt.
“Every connection,” said Pointdexter. “To construct a time machine is itself a challenge to fate. You make it worse by your flat confidence. How can you be sure that your time-travel machine will operate through all of time without the possibility of paradox?”
Barron said, “I didn't know you were superstitious. The simple fact is that a time machine is a machine like any other machine, no more and no less sacrilegious. Mathematically, it is analogous to an elevator moving up and down its shaft. What danger of retribution lies in that?”
Pointdexter said energetically, “An elevator doesn't involve paradoxes. You can't move from the fifth floor to the fourth and kill your grandfather as a child.”
Dr. Barron shook his head in agonized impatience. “I was waiting for that. For exactly that. Why couldn't you suggest that I would meet myself or that I would change history by telling McClellan that Stonewall Jackson was going to make a flank march on Washington, or anything else? Now I'm asking you point blank. Will you come into the machine with me?”
Pointdexter hesitated. “I . . . I don't think so.”
“Why do you make things difficult? I've explained already that time is invariant. If I go into the past it will be because I've already been there. Anything I decided to do and proceed to do. I will have already done in the past all along, so I'll be changing nothing and no paradoxes will result. If I decided to kill my grandfather as a baby, and did it I would not be here. But I am here. Therefore I did not kill my grandfather. No matter how I try to kill him and plan to kill him, the fact is I didn't kill him and so I won't kill him. Nothing would change that. Do you understand what I'm explaining?”
“I understand what you say, but are you right?”
“Of course I'm right. For God's sake, why couldn't you have been a mathematician instead of a machinist with a college education?” In his impatience, Barron could scarcely hide his contempt. “Look, this machine is only possible because certain mathematical relationships between space and time hold true. You understand that, don't you, even if you don't follow the details of the mathematics? The machine exists, so the mathematical relations I worked out have some correspondence in reality. Right? You've seen me send rabbits a week into the future. You've seen them appear out of nothing. You've watched me send a rabbit a week into the past one week after it appeared. And they were unharmed.”
“All right. I admit all that.”
“Then will you believe me if I tell you that the equations upon which this machine is based assume that time is composed of particles that exist in an unchanging order; that time is invariant. If the order of the particles could be changed in any way-any way at all-the equations would be invalid and this machine wouldn't work; this particular method of time travel would be impossible.”
Pointdexter rubbed his eyes again and looked thoughtful. “I wish I knew mathematics.”
Barron said, “Just consider the facts. You tried to send the rabbit two weeks into the past when it had arrived only one week in the past. That would have created a paradox, wouldn't it? But what happened? The indicator stuck at one week and wouldn't budge. You couldn't create a paradox. Will you come?”
Pointdexter shuddered at the edge of the abyss of agreement and drew back. He said, “No.”
Barron said, “I wouldn't .ask you to help if I could do this alone, but you know it takes two men to operate the machine for intervals of more than a month. I need someone to control the Standards so that we can return with precision. And you're the one I want to use. We share the-the glory of this thing now. Do you want to thin it out, but in a third person? Time enough for that after we've established ourselves as the first time travelers in history. Good Lord, man, don't you want to see where we'll be a hundred years from now, or a thousand; don't you want to see Napoleon, or Jesus, for that matter? We'll be like—like”—Barron seemed carried away—“like gods.”
“Exactly,” mumbled Pointdexter. “Hubris. Time travel isn't godlik
e enough to risk being stranded out of my own time.”
“Hubris. Stranded. You keep making up fears. We're just moving along the particles of time like an elevator along the floors of a building. Time travel is actually safer because an elevator cable can break, whereas in the time machine there'll be no gravity to pun us down destructively. Nothing wrong can possibly happen. I guarantee it,” said Barron, tapping his chest with the middle finger of his right hand. “I guarantee it.”
“Hubris,” muttered Pointdexter, but fell into the abyss of agreement nevertheless, overborne at last.
Together they entered the machine.
Pointdexter did not understand the controls in the sense Barron did, for he was no mathematician, but he knew how they were supposed to be handled.
Barron was at one set, the Propulsions. They supplied the drive that forced the machine along the time axis. Pointdexter was at the Standards that kept the point of origin fixed so that the machine could move back to the original starting point at any time.
Pointdexter's teeth chattered as the first motion made itself felt in his stomach, Like an elevator's motion it was, but not quite, It was something more subtle, yet very real. He said, “What if—”
Barron snapped out, “Nothing can go wrong. Please!” And at once there was a jar and Pointdexter fell heavily against the wall.
Barron said, “What the devil!”
“What happened?” demanded Pointdexter breathlessly. “I don't know, but it doesn't matter. We're only twenty-two hours into the future. Let's step out and check.”
The door of the machine slid into its recessed panel and the breath went out of Pointdexter's body in a panting whoosh. He said, “There's nothing there.”
Nothing. No matter. No light. Blank!
Pointdexter screamed. “The Earth moved. We forgot that. In twenty-two hours, it moved thousands of miles through space, traveling around the sun.”
“No,” said Barron faintly, “I didn't forget that. The machine is designed to follow the time path of Earth wherever that leads. Besides, even if Earth moved, where is the sun? Where are the stars?”
Barron went back to the controls. Nothing budged. Nothing worked. The door would no longer slide shut. Blank!
Pointdexter found it getting difficult to breathe, difficult to move. With effort he said, “What's wrong, then?”
Barron moved slowly toward the center of the machine. He said painfully, “The particles of time. I think we happened to stall . . . between two . . . particles.”
Pointdexter tried to clench a fist but couldn't. “Don't understand.”
“Like an elevator. Like an elevator.” He could no longer sound the words, but only move his lips to shape them. “Like an elevator, after all . . . stuck between the floors.”
Pointdexter could not even move his lips. He thought: Nothing can proceed in nontime. All motion is suspended, all consciousness, all everything. There was an inertia about themselves that had carried them along in time for a minute or so, like a body leaning forward when an automobile comes to a sudden halt-but it was dying fast.
The light within the machine dimmed and went out. Sensation and awareness chilled into nothing.
One last thought, one final, feeble, mental sigh: Hubris, ate!
Then thought stopped, too.
Stasis! Nothing! For all eternity, where even eternity was meaningless, there would only be-blank!
BLUE INK
Yoon Ha Lee
It’s harder than you thought, walking from the battle at the end of time and down a street that reeks of entropy and fire and spilled lives. Your eyes aren’t dry. Neither is the alien sky. Your shoulders ache and your stomach hurts. Blue woman, blue woman, the chant runs through your head as you limp toward a portal’s bright mouth. You’re leaving, but you intend to return. You have allies yet.
Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.
This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet.
Blue is more than a fortunate accident. Jenny Chang usually writes in black ink or pencil. She’s been snowed in at her mom’s house since yesterday and is dawdling over physics homework. Now she’s out of lead. The only working pen in the house is blue.
“We’ll go shopping the instant the roads are clear,” her mom says.
Jenny mumbles something about how she hates homework over winter break. Actually, she isn’t displeased. There’s something neatly alien about all those equations copied out in blue ink, problems and their page numbers. It’s as if blue equations come from a different universe than the ones printed in the textbook.
While her mom sprawls on the couch watching TV, Jenny pads upstairs to the guestroom and curls up in bed next to the window. Fingers of frost cover the glass. With her index finger, Jenny writes a list of numbers: pi, H0 for Hubble’s constant, her dad’s cellphone number, her school’s zip code. Then she wipes the window clear of mist, and shivers. Everything outside is almost blue-rimmed in the twilight.
Jenny resumes her homework, biting her nails between copying out answers to two significant figures and doodling spaceships in the margins. There’s a draft from the window, but that’s all right. Winter’s child that she is—February 16, to be exact—Jenny thinks better with a breath of cold.
Except, for a moment, the draft is hot like a foretaste of hell. Jenny stops still. All the frost has melted and is running in rivulets down the glass. And there’s a face at the window.
The sensible thing to do would be to scream. But the face is familiar, the way equations in blue are familiar. It could be Jenny’s own, five ragged years in the future. The woman’s eyes are dark and bleak, asking for help without expecting it.
“Hold on,” Jenny says. She goes to the closet to grab her coat. From downstairs, she hears her mom laughing at some TV witticism.
Then Jenny opens the window, and the world falls out. This doesn’t surprise her as much as it should. The wind shrieks and the cold hits her like a fist. It’s too bad she didn’t put on her scarf and gloves while she was at it.
The woman offers a hand. She isn’t wearing gloves. Nor is she shivering. Maybe extremes of temperature don’t mean the same thing in blue universes. Maybe it’s normal to have blue-tinted lips, there. Jenny doesn’t even wear make-up.
The woman’s touch warms Jenny, as though they’ve stepped into a bubble of purloined heat. Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father’s house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won’t find in any astronomer’s catalogue.
Jenny looks at her double and raises an eyebrow, because any words she could think of would emerge frozen, like the world around them. She wonders where that hell-wind came from and if it has a name.
“The end of the world is coming,” the blue woman says. Each syllable is crisp and certain.
I don’t believe in the end of the world, Jenny wants to say, except she’s read her physics textbook. She’s read the sidebar about things like the sun swelling into a red giant and the universe’s heat-death. She looks up again, and maybe she’s imagining it, but these stars are all the wrong colors, and they’re either too bright or not bright enough. Instead, Jenny asks, “Are my mom and dad going to be okay?”
“As okay as anyone else,” the blue woman says.
“What can I do?” She can no more doubt the blue woman than she can doubt the shape of the sun.
This earns her a moment’s smile. “There’s a fight,” the blue woman says, “and everyone fell. Everyone fell.” She says it the second time as though things might change, as though there’s a magic charm for reversing the course of events. “I’m the only one left, because I can walk through possibilities. Now there’s you.”
They set off together. A touch at h
er elbow tells Jenny to turn left. There’s a bright flash at the corner of her eyes. Between one blink and the next, they’re standing in a devastated city, crisscrossed by skewed bridges made of something brighter than steel, more brilliant than glass.
“Where are we?” Jenny asks.
“We’re at humanity’s last outpost,” the blue woman says. “Tell me what you see.”
“Rats with red eyes and metal hands,” Jenny says just as one pauses to stare at her. It stands up on its hind feet and makes a circle-sign at her with one of its hands, as if it’s telling her things will be all right. Then it scurries into the darkness. “Buildings that go so high up I can’t see their tops, and bridges between them. Flying cars.” They come in every color, these faraway cars, every color but blue. Jenny begins to stammer under the weight of detail: “Skeletons wrapped in silver wires”—out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees one twitch, and decides she’d rather not know—“and glowing red clocks on the walls that say it’s midnight even though there’s light in the sky, and silhouettes far away, like people except their joints are all wrong.”
And the smells, too, mostly smoke and ozone, as though everything has been burned away by fire and lightning, leaving behind the ghost-essence of a city, nothing solid.
“What you see isn’t actually there,” the blue woman says. She taps Jenny’s shoulder again.
They resume walking. The only reason Jenny doesn’t halt dead in her tracks is that she’s afraid that the street will crumble into pebbles, the pebbles into dust, and leave her falling through eternity the moment she stops.
The blue woman smiles a little. “Not like that. Things are very different at the end of time. Your mind is seeing a translation of everything into more familiar terms.”
“What are we doing here?” Jenny asks. “I—I don’t know how to fight. If it’s that kind of battle.” She draws mini-comics in the margins of her notes sometimes, when the teachers think she’s paying attention. Sometimes, in the comics, she wields two mismatched swords, and sometimes a gun; sometimes she has taloned wings, and sometimes she rides in a starship sized perfectly for one. She fights storm-dragons and equations turned into sideways alien creatures. (If pressed, she will admit the influence of Calvin and Hobbes.) But unless she’s supposed to brain someone with the flute she didn’t think to bring (she plays in the school band), she’s not going to be any use in a fight, at least not the kind of fight that happens at the end of time. Jenny’s mom made her take a self-defense class two years ago, before the divorce, and mostly what Jenny remembers is the floppy-haired instructor saying, If someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, give him your wallet. You are not an action hero.
