by Anthology
I said, “But one of these signers, from the state of Georgia, died in 1777, the year after he signed the Declaration. He didn’t leave much behind him and so authentic examples of his signature are about the most valuable in the world. His name was Button Gwinnett.”
“And how does this help us cash in?” asked my uncle Otto, his mind still fixed grimly on the eternal verities of the universe.
“Here,” I said, simply, “is an authentic real-life signature of Button Gwinnett, right on the Declaration of Independence.”
My uncle Otto was stunned into absolute silence, and to bring absolute silence out of my uncle Otto, he’s really got to be stunned!
“I said, “Now you see him right here on the extreme left of the signature space along with the two other signers for Georgia, Lyman Hall and George Walton. You’ll notice they crowded their names although there’s plenty of room above and below. In fact, the capital ‘G’ of ‘Gwinnett’ runs down into practical contact with Hall’s name. So we won’t try to separate them. We’ll get them all. Can you handle that?”
Have you ever seen a bloodhound that looked happy? Well, my uncle Otto managed it.
A spot of brighter light centered about the names of the three Georgian signers.
My uncle Otto said, a little breathlessly, “I have this never tried before.”
“What!” I screamed. Now he told me.
“It would have too much energy required. I did not wish the University to inquire what was in here going on. But don’t worry! My mathematics cannot wrong be.” I prayed silently that his mathematics not wrong were. The light grew brighter and there was a humming that filled the laboratory with raucous noise. My uncle Otto turned a knob, then another, then a third.
Do you remember the time when all of upper Manhattan and the Bronx were without electricity for twelve hours because of the damndest overload cutoff in the main powerhouse? I won’t say we did that, because I am in no mood to be sued for damages. But I will say this. The electricity went off when my uncle Otto turned the third knob.
Inside the lab, all the lights went out and I found myself on the floor with a terrific ringing in my ears. My uncle Otto was sprawled across me.
We worked each other to our feet and my uncle Otto found a flashlight.
He howled his anguish. “Fused. Fused. My machine in ruins is. It has to destruction devoted been.”
“But the signatures?” I yelled at him. “Did you get them?”
He stopped in mid-cry. “I haven’t looked.”
He looked, and I closed my eyes. The disappearance of a hundred thousand dollars is not an easy thing to watch.
He cried, “Ah, ha!” and I opened my eyes quickly. He had a square of parchment in his hand some two inches on a side. It had three signatures on it and the top one was that of Button Gwinnett.
Now, mind you, the signature was absolutely genuine. It was no fake. There wasn’t an atom of fraud about the whole transaction. I want that understood. Lying on my uncle Otto’s broad hand was a signature indited with the Georgian hand of Button Gwinnett himself on the authentic parchment of the honest-to-God, real-life Declaration of Independence.
It was decided that my uncle Otto would travel down to Washington with the parchment scrap. I was unsatisfactory for the purpose. I was a lawyer. I would be expected to know too much. He was merely a scientific genius, and wasn’t expected to know anything. Besides, who could suspect Dr. Otto Schemmelmayer of anything but the most transparent honesty.
We spent a week arranging our story. I bought a book for the occasion, an old history of colonial Georgia, in a secondhand shop. My uncle Otto was to take it with him and claim he had found a document among its leaves; a letter to the Continental Congress in the name of the State of Georgia. He had shrugged his shoulders at it and held it out over a Bunsen flame. Why should a physicist be interested in letters? Then he became aware of the peculiar odor it gave off as it burned and the slowness with which it was consumed. He beat out the flames but saved only the piece with the signatures. He looked at it and the name “Button Gwinnett” had stirred a slight fiber of memory.
He had the story cold. I burnt the edges of the parchment so that the lowest name, that of George Walton, was slightly singed.
“It will make it more realistic,” I explained. “Of course, a signature, without a letter above it, loses value, but here we have three signatures, all signers.”
My uncle Otto was thoughtful. “And if they compare the signatures with those on the Declaration and notice it is all even microscopically the same, won’t they fraud suspect?”
“Certainly. But what can they do? The parchment is authentic. The ink is authentic. The signatures are authentic. They’ll have to concede that. No matter how they suspect something queer they can’t prove anything. Can they conceive reaching through time for it. In fact, I hope they do try to make a fuss about it The publicity will boost the price.”
The last phrase made my uncle Otto laugh.
The next day he took the train to Washington with visions of flutes in his head, long flutes, short flutes, bass flutes, flute tremolos, massive flutes, micro-flutes, flutes for the individual and flutes for the orchestra. A world of flutes for mind-drawn music.
“Remember,” his last words were, “the machine I have no money to rebuild. This must work.”
And I said, “Uncle Otto, it can’t miss.”
Ha!
He was back in a week. I had made long-distance calls each day and each day he told me they were investigating.
Investigating.
Well, wouldn’t you investigate? But what good would it do them?
I was at the station waiting for him. He was expressionless. I didn’t dare ask anything in public. I wanted to say, “Well, yes or no?” but I thought let him speak.
I took him to my office. I offered him a cigar and a drink. I hid my hands under the desk but that only made the desk shake, too, so I put them in my pocket and shook all over.
He said, “They investigated.”
“Sure! I told you they would. Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha?”
My uncle Otto took a slow drag at the cigar. He said, “The man at the Bureau of Documents came to me and said, ‘Professor Schemmelmayer,’ he said, ‘you are the victim of a clever fraud.’ I said, ‘So? And how can it a fraud be? The signature a forgery is?’ So he answered, ‘It certainly doesn’t look like a forgery, but it must be!’ ‘And why must it be?’ I asked.”
My uncle Otto put down his cigar, put down his drink and leaned across the desk toward me. He had me so in suspense, I actually leaned forward toward him, so in a way I deserved everything I got.
“Exactly,” I babbled, “why must it be? They can’t prove a thing wrong with it, because it’s genuine. Why must it be a fraud, eh? Why?”
My uncle Otto’s voice was terrifyingly sweet. He said, “We got the parchment from the past?”
“Yes. Yes. You know we did.”
“Well in the past.”
“Over a hundred fifty years in the past. You said—”
“And a hundred fifty years ago the parchment on which the Declaration of Independence was written pretty new was. No?”
I was beginning to get it, but not fast enough.
My uncle Otto’s voice switched gears and became a dull, throbbing roar, “and if Button Gwinnett in 1777 died, you Godforsaken, dungheaded lump, how can an authentic signature of his be on a new piece of parchment found?”
After that it was just a case of the whole world rushing backward and forward about me.
I expect to be on my feet soon. I still ache, but the doctors tell me no bones were broken.
Still, he didn’t have to make me swallow the parchment.
BULL MOOSE OF BABYLON
Don Wilcox
I felt trouble in my bones when I flew to Denver in answer to Colonel Jason Milholland’s wire. His mention of a time-transfer device should have been warning enough. But I plunged, like a fool, and came up gasping for a
ir in a sand-blown battlefield just twenty-five hundred years before my time.
Ten minutes after I had convinced Milholland that my improved vocoder would analyze animal voices, modern or ancient—ten seconds after I had nodded to his outrageous proposition, I was biffed across the head by an ancient Persian soldier.
That’s how quick it happened.
One moment I was standing on the Colonel’s roof porch surrounded by the glories of the Rockies; then the big red cylinder swished down out of nowhere, like a series of neon hoops, to enclose me, and the next instant I was skidding down a sandy incline that wasn’t a golf hazard, and the desert dust and battle din was all around me. I hugged my precious black case and slid for the bottom of the ravine.
That was when the wild-eyed soldier, dashed past me, flashing and steaming in his metal armor, and whammed me—accidentally, but none the less potently—across the head with the handle of his spear.
“Wa-ha-kik-log!” he was yelling, and he must have been brass inside as well as out. He didn’t stop to notice me. He was charging into the fray, along with a few thousand other mad men.
“Wa-ha-kik-log!”
Such voices! If Colonel Milholland wanted a complete collection of the bellows of beasts, be should have had these.
But there was no time to operate my vocoder amid this chaos. My first duty to mankind was to avoid being tramped to death. Already my new hunting togs were being torn to shreds. I rolled into a knot and hugged the hot sand and let the stampede hurdle past. But some clumsy heavyweight came pounding along, dragging his feet, and kicked the daylights out of me.
When I came to, after hours of blackout, I was not in a downy hospital bed, and no kindly doctor was bending over me. My first impression was that my scalp had been carved in strips, that I had been hung on a hook by a segment of hide just above my right ear, that someone was striking the hook with a maul at regular intervals.
This impression underwent a slight modification as consciousness came clearer. I was actually walking on my two feet, along with some five hundred other ragged and battered prisoners of war, and my scalp was cut, not with any geometric precision, but rather in the style that a blind man with a meat cleaver might achieve.
I was still hanging onto the little black case, however. And I managed to cling to it through the unprintable year and a half that followed.
Of those hectic eighteen months of imprisonment and slavery all I need say is that I gradually became accustomed to my fate. I had no power to take myself back to the twentieth century. Evidently Colonel Milholland had lost his power to bring me back. I was stuck.
During that year and a half I had learned a lot of ancient language, but I detested having to use it. My roots were in the twentieth century. I couldn’t reconcile myself to starting life over—in an age that was past and gone.
Then one day, while on the block with seventy other bedraggled assorted prisoners waiting to be sold, I noticed that one of my fellow unfortunates was eyeing me curiously. We fell into casual conversation, as casual as possible against the auctioneer’s insulting blather about our respective worths in shekels.
“My name is Slaf-Carch,” said the man, smiling toothlessly through his steel wool whiskers. His voice was resonant. “I have seen members of your race before. You are from a foreign land.”
“And a foreign time,” I said, not expecting him to make anything of it.
His twinkling eyes fairly snapped at me. “You are the third,” he said, “who has made that claim.”
“The third what?”
“The third invader from a foreign land and time. You have the same delicate dialect as the other two. That is what caught my attention. Do you have a foreign name?”
“My name is Hal Norton,” I said. “Where are these other two you speak of?” Suspicions whipped through my mind. Had Colonel Milholland sent other twentieth-century envoys back to this age? I remembered having tried to probe Milholland on this, but he had evaded me.
“One was killed under the wheel of an Assyrian chariot,” said Slaf-Carch, stroking his bronzed bald head reminiscently. “The other is still my slave.”
“Your slave?” This struck me as being more than curious, since Slaf-Carch himself was at this moment being sold as a slave. Undoubtedly this grizzly-whiskered man had seen better days, before some captor had knocked his teeth out.
The same nomad prince who bought Slaf-Carch began bidding on me, and an hour later, bought and paid for, we were tramping along the rugged foothills of the Fertile Crescent.
“You spoke of a slave with a dialect similar to mine,” I resumed, trudging along beside Slaf-Carch. “What was his name?”
“Her name,” Slaf-Carch corrected, “and a very odd name it is: Betty.”
There wasn’t breath enough in me to comment. I needed to sit down and think this matter over, but the nomad prince and his guards had other ideas. We hiked on through the evening heat.
Obviously I wasn’t the only victim of Milholland’s time-trap. He had employed two other innocents in the service of his hare-brained hobby—one of them a girl. What price the voices of ancient animals!
“Does your Betty carry a black case like this?” I asked, indicating the vocoder.
Slaf-Carch knew nothing of any magic boxes. He probably would have been too superstitious to investigate, anyway. But he gave me other bits of information, enough to prove my assumptions. Both of my predecessors had demonstrated a strange interest in animals—an interest that had soon waned.
That night, long after the other slaves were asleep, Slaf-Carch and I were still talking. The red glow from the low fires gave his face intense lines. “I am eager to get back. If these nomads take us farther south, they shall lose us. We will escape.”
“Where does this slave, Betty, live?” I asked.
“At my mansion, in a village beyond Babylon, where I should be fulfilling my duties as the patesi,” he said. “By this time, many business matters will have gone undone. As for Betty, this autumn I must give her separate quarters along with my older women slaves so she can begin bearing slave children.”
“Just a minute, pal,” I blurted in English, then caught myself. In Babylonian I said pointedly, “Take my word for it, if Betty came from my land you can cancel that plan.”
“You do not know our ways, Hal,” he replied. “Betty has seen more of Babylon than you.”
I didn’t deny this. But it was as uncomfortable to swallow as a baseball. This girl might have had the hard luck to be stranded here and forced into the Babylonian slave system. But that didn’t mean she would desert all her own twentieth-century ideals and sentiments. If she had the good American spunk to fight this ancient balderdash, I would fight with her; if she didn’t, I hoped I would never meet her—in spite of being starved for some twentieth-century conversation.
Slaf-Carch sketched a picture in the sand to show me how beautiful Betty was. I couldn’t make anything out of it, but the fire in his eyes conveyed a strong impression.
“Let her go her own way,” I said shortly. “I’ll go mine.”
Slaf-Carch wanted to know what my way was. What, did I do back home, and what did I expect to do here?
His questions stirred me to the depths. It was the first time any fellow-slave had talked in terms of purposes. I answered proudly that I, too, was a man of vast importance in my own land and time, and had no doubt been sorely missed. I had planned to help analyze radio voices, using my vocoder—a matter which he wouldn’t understand—when my sudden time-transfer set my life back. No doubt my own civilization had simply marked time since my absence.
I snapped on a vocoder switch while we talked, thinking to demonstrate how easily I could break Slaf-Carch’s voice into its separate parts—pitch, resonance, volume, and consonant qualities. But In deference to his superstitions I snapped the thing off without showing him the results.
Meanwhile, the old grizzle-beard speculated futilely upon my chances to return to my native country.
&n
bsp; “If we can break free and reach Babylon, then I may be able to help you back to your land and time,” he offered hopefully. “I have wealth. My nephew, Jipfur, is also quite rich.”
I shook my head, tried to explain. But the time element was a stumbler for him. He looked blankly and fell to drawing another sand sketch of his Betty.
However, these thoughts were no passing fancies with him. He persisted in digging into my history. I told him of my agreement to make a study of the voices of ancient animals; my arrival in the midst of battle; the stampede of Persian infantry, my months of slavery, my fights to hold on to my magic box—which was left to me only because its black color threw a superstitious scare into my captors. Those things he could understand much better than my burning desire for a bath, a shave, some Palm Beach clothes, a quarter ton of Neapolitan ice cream, and, most of all, a sudden lift back into my own century.
“Your trouble,” he counseled, “is that you are refusing to accept your real situation.”
“I don’t want to accept it!” I said so loudly that one of the guards snapped his fingers at me. “I want to get out of it.”
“Never hope to be lifted bodily out of trouble,” Slaf-Carch said. “Things don’t happen that way. I know. And I am much older than you.”
I was tempted to challenge this statement, but he continued:
“Dig your hands into the soil of the hour, wherever you are, and claw through your own troubles.”
“No more philosophy, please,” I protested. “I’ve been on a diet of it for eighteen months. If you could offer me a candy bar—”
“Take the lion by the mane,” he said sagely. “If your task is studying animals—”
“No animals, please,” I said. “I’ve lost ninety-eight percent of my respect for the man who set me on that wild goose chase—or rather, moose chase.”
“Then you must find other pastimes. The slaves are treated decently enough in this valley. They have a few hours each day to themselves. Besides, they need something to think about while they lift water at the shaduf. Something besides revolt.”
