by Anthology
Still not content, he started to climb again up the ladders through the central well. And he saw a door that he had passed on his way down. This time something made him stop to examine it more closely. Faintly shining in the dim light were the words: MANNSCHEN DRIVE UNIT.
Mannschen drive?
He shook his head in puzzlement. The name meant nothing to him—but it must have meant something to the English-speaking humans who had manned this ship. He started to try to open the door. It was jammed. He decided that the investigation would have to wait until later, until he found some means of forcing an entry—and then the door yielded.
It was dark in the compartment behind the door. He saw vague, hulking masses of machinery, mechanisms that seemed to make more sense than that which he had seen in the after engine room. There were wheels and levers, and their curves and straight rigid lines were reassuring.
He wished he could have more light. His hand went up inside the door, found a stud. Unconsciously he pressed it. He cried out when the lights came on. And after he had come to take the miracle of light itself for granted, he still marveled at the efficiency of the storage batteries that had made the miracle possible.
There were bodies in the Mannschen drive room, sprawled before the machine they had served. They weren’t skeletons. The tight-shut door had kept out the intruders that had stripped their shipmates elsewhere in the ship. They could have been mummies. The skin, almost black, was stretched taut over the bones of their faces. Their teeth, startlingly white, showed in unpleasant grins. They were still wearing what appeared to be a uniform of sorts. It was simple, mere shorts and shirts that had once been blue, epaulettes upon which shone gold insignia.
The castaway bent to examine the two bodies, his nostrils wrinkling with the odor o£ slow decay that still hung around them. Then he saw there was a third body behind the machine. He went to examine it, then recoiled hastily. The unlucky man, whoever he had been, had been literally turned inside out.
He had to go outside until he had fought down his rising nausea. When he returned he studiously ignored the bodies, tried to turn all his attention to the enigmatic machine. It was not long before he succeeded. The intricacy of wheels was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen. None of its parts was especially small, yet all had the workmanship associated only with the finest products of the watchmaker’s art.
There was a metal plate on one of the four pillars that formed a framework for the machine. It was covered with lettering. It was headed: INSTRUCTIONS FOR OPERATING THE MANNSCHEN INTERSTELLAR DRIVE UNIT. Most of what followed was, to the castaway, gibberish. There was continual reference to something called temporal precession. Whatever it was, it was important.
He found himself remembering the course he had taken, not so long ago, in the operation of gyro compasses. He remembered how a gyroscope will precess at right angles to an applied force. But . . . temporal precession?
Yet time, the wise men tell us, is a dimension . . .
And wasn’t there an absurd limerick about it all?
There was a young fellow called Bright,
Whose speed was much faster than light;
He started one day in a relative way—
And arrived the previous night.
Temporal precession . . . An interstellar drive . . .
It was utterly crazy, but it made a mad kind of sense.
The castaway turned from the incomprehensible machine to its control panel. Many of the switches and buttons upon it were marked with symbols utterly outside the scope of his knowledge. But there were two studs whose functions he could understand. One bore the legend START, and the other one, STOP.
He stood before the panel. His right hand raised itself. He told himself that even though there had been sufficient power in the storage batteries to operate the lighting, there would never be enough to move one minor part of the complex machine. And the memories of occasions in the past when he had been told not to meddle, not to play with things about which he understood nothing, were deliberately pushed into the background of his mind.
It would be so easy to press the button marked START. It would be just as easy to press that marked STOP if the machine showed signs of getting out of hand.
From the deck the dead men grinned at him.
But he was not looking at them.
His right index finger came up slowly. It stabbed at the starting button. The first joint whitened as he applied pressure. At first nothing happened. Then there was a sharp click. Immediately the lights dimmed, the many wheels of the machine, great and small, started to spin. The castaway turned to look at them, found his gaze caught and held by the largest of the wheels.
It turned slowly at first. It gathered speed. And, spinning, it blurred most strangely. It was a solid wheel, but its outlines faded. The glittering intricacy of those parts of the machine behind it showed with ever-increasing clarity. It was impossible to tear the eyes away from the uncanny spectacle. It seemed that it was dragging the man’s vision, the man himself, after it into some unguessable, unplumbable gulf.
He screamed then. But he could not look away, could not break the spell of this devil’s machinery. Vivid before his mind’s eye was a picture of the man at whom he had not dared to look too closely—the third body. In desperation his hand groped out behind him, fumbled, found the switchboard. He felt a stud beneath his questing fingers. He pressed. There was the same stickiness as before, the same sharp click.
The machinery slowed, spinning reluctantly to a stop. The vanishing, precessing wheel faded slowly back into view. But the castaway did not see this. Possessed by a terror such as he had never known, he had half fallen, half scrambled down the interminable ladders to the airlock; had half fallen, half jumped from there to the ground.
The afternoon sun was blazing hot as he splashed and floundered down the watercourse to the beach. The sight of the sea, an element of which he had at least a partial understanding, did much to calm him. And the sight of a faint smudge of smoke on the horizon, and all that that implied, almost drove the memory of his weird experience from his mind.
He ran up the beach to where the ashes of the fire had been. But the sand, as far as he could see, was clean. But what did it matter that some freak sea had swept away a handful or so of useless rubbish? Working with calm haste he burrowed into the jungle verge, emerged with armfuls of dry and partially dry sticks and leaves. As he piled up his beacon he glanced at frequent intervals to seaward. He could see the ship herself now, could see that her course would take her not more than three miles from the island.
He finished off his pile of inflammables with green branches and leaves. He knelt in the lee of it, with trembling hands fumbled in his pocket for his tobacco pouch and lighter. He got the lighter out, snapped back the cover. His thumb flicked the wheel, the wick caught at once, its faint, pale flame almost invisible in the bright sunlight.
And the lowermost layers of vegetable refuse smoked and smoldered ever so little—but refused to burn.
The castaway extinguished the lighter flame. He tore of? his shirt. The garment was old and threadbare, ripped as he pulled it savagely over his head. But it was ideally suited to his present purpose. He clawed out a hollow in the sand at the base of the reluctant bonfire and stuffed the cloth into it, careful to see that it was not packed too tightly.
This time the lighter was slow to function. His thumb was almost raw before he succeeded in producing a feeble, flickering flame. But the shirt caught at the first touch of fire. In what seemed to be an incredibly short space of time the flames were licking up through the dry wood to the green stuff on top, the pillar of brown smoke was climbing up into the blue sky.
At first the castaway danced and waved beside his signal fire; then as the ship drew nearer he fell silent and motionless. He stared hard at the approaching rescuers. The beginnings of panic were making his heart pump violently.
It was the funnel that frightened him. He could see it plainly now—clean fre
sh cream paint slapped on over crudely vivid red lead . . .
The water, that at first had been so warm, enveloped him with a cold embrace that contracted his muscles, that threatened to squeeze his heart itself to a standstill. The salt mouthfuls that he was now swallowing with almost every stroke choked him and seared his lungs. The smarting eyes were blind, no longer staring toward the yellow line of beach that, at the beginning of it all, had seemed so close . . .
CAVEAT TIME TRAVELER
Gregory Benford
He was easy to spot—clothes from the 21st Century, a dazed look, eyes a bit rattled.
I didn’t have to say anything. He blurted out, “Look, I’m from the past, a time traveler. But I get snapped back there in a few minutes.”
“I know.” They stood in a small street at the edge of the city, dusk creeping in. Distant, glazed towers gleamed in the sunset and pearly lights popped on down along the main road. Jaunters always chose to appear at dawn or dusk, where they might not be noticed, but could see a town. No point in transporting into a field somewhere, which could be any time at all, even the far past. Good thing he couldn’t see the city rubble, too. Or realize this was how I made a living.
His mouth twisted in surprise. “You do? I thought I might be the first to come here. To this time.”
I gave him a raised eyebrow. “No. There was another last week.”
“Really? The professor said the other experiments failed. They couldn’t prove they’d been into the future at all.”
They always want to talk, though they’d learn more with their mouths closed.
He rattled on, “I have to take something back, to show I was here. Something—”
“How about this?” I pulled out a slim metal cylinder. “Apply it to your neck five times a day and it extracts cancer precursors. In your era, that will extend your average lifetime by several years.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Wow! Sure—” He reached for it but I snatched it back.
“What do I get in exchange?” I said mildly.
That startled him. “What? I don’t have anything you could use . . .” He searched his pockets in the old-fashioned wide-label jacket. “How about money?” A fistful of bills.
“I’m not a collector, and those are worthless now, inflated away in value.”
The time jaunter blinked. “Look, this is one of the first attempts to jump forward and back. I don’t have—”
“I know. We’ve seen jaunters from your era already. Enough to set up a barter system. That’s why I had this cancer-canceller.”
Confusion swarmed in his face. “Lady, I’m just a guinea pig here. A volunteer. They didn’t give me—”
I pointed. “Your watch is a pleasant anachronism. I’ll take that.” I gave him the usual ceramic smile.
He sighed with relief. “Great—” but I kept the cylinder away from him.
“That’s an opener offer, not the whole deal.” A broader smile.
He glanced around, distracted by my outfit. I always wore it when the chron-senser networks said there was a jaunt about to happen. Their old dress styles were classic, so they weren’t prepared for my peekaboo leggings, augmented breasts and perfectly symmetric face. The lipstick was outrageous for our time, but fit right into the notorious 21st Century kink.
He raised a flat ceramic thing and it whirred. Taking pictures, like the rest. They still hadn’t learned, whenever this guy came from.
“Your pictures won’t develop,” I told him with a seemingly sympathetic smile.
“Huh? They gave me this—”
“You’ve heard of time paradoxes, yes? Space-time resolves those nicely. You can’t take back knowledge that alters the past. All that gets erased automatically, a kind of information cleansing. Very convenient physics.”
Startled, he glanced at his compact camera. “So . . . it’ll be blank?”
“Yes,” I said crisply. My left eye told me the chron-senser network was picking up an approaching closure. I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. “Thanks! It’s such a thrill to meet someone from the ancient times.”
That shook him even more. Best to keep them off balance.
“So how do I get that cancer thing?” he said, eyes squinting with a canny cast.
“Let me have your clothes,” I shot back.
“What? You want me . . . naked?”
“I can use them as antiques. That cancer stick is pretty expensive, so I’m giving you a good deal.”
He nodded and started shucking off his coat, pants, shoes, wallet, coins, cash, set of keys. Reached for his shorts—
“Never mind the underwear.”
“Oh.” He handed me the bundle and I gave him the cancer stick. “Hey, thanks. I’ll be back. We just wanted to see—”
Pop. He vanished. The cancer stick rattled on the ground. It was just a prop, of course. Cancer was even worse now.
They never caught on. Of course, they don’t have much time. That made the fifth this month, from several different centuries.
Time was like a river, yes. Go with the flow; it’s easy. Fight against the current and space-time strips you of everything you’re carrying back—pictures, cancer stick, memories. He would show up not recalling a thing. Just like the thousands of others I had turned into a nifty little sideline.
The past never seemed to catch on. Still, they stimulated interest in those centuries where time jaunters kept hammering against the laws of physics, like demented moths around a light bulb.
I hefted the clothes and wallet. These were in decent condition, grade 0.8 at least. They should fetch a pretty price. Good; I needed to eat soon. Time paid off, after all. A sucker born every minute, and so many, many moments in the lost, rich past.
CAVERNS OF TIME
Carlos McCune
Clive nosed the truck over the brow of the ridge and rapidly shifted up through the gears as it gained momentum on the down-grade. He didn’t like the ridge, it was too steep and too crooked, and worse, there were too many timid tourists hugging the inside on blind curves. In their present state the brakes on this small truck were ridiculously inadequate for the relatively heavy load of twelve hundred gallons of gasoline that filled the tank. Clive didn’t know why he took such chances when there was an even chance of “piling up,” but unconsciously the thrill of uncertainty was his only incentive for staying on this truck-driving job the four months of the year that he was not studying medicine.
The tanker continued to pick up speed, while Clive gave it all the brake he had on his approach to curves that couldn’t be negotiated otherwise. Ten miles of this slope and he was preparing to congratulate himself upon the successful descent, as was his custom, when he saw something that instantly tensed all of the muscles in his body. He grabbed the hand-brake, at the same time slamming the foot-brake pedal to the floor-boards, finally coming to a stop.
“Clive, you’re wacky,” he muttered; “you’re asleep and you don’t know it.”
From past experience he knew there was only one treatment for sleepiness. He leaned over the steering-wheel and closed his eyes. He was just dozing off when he was startled nearly through the windshield by a terrific din. Quickly composing himself he scrambled out of the cab, making his way toward the rear of the truck—sure that he would find another car smashed into the rear of the tanker. He had barely taken two steps, however, when the sound of voices caused him to stop dead in his tracks. The voices were speaking in a foreign tongue—French. Clive immediately recognized it for he had studied this language for three years in his undergraduate days.
“Well Messieurs, what do you make of it?” One voice was saying.
“Strike it again, d’Artagnan, perhaps we can rouse some creature from within.” This speaker’s voice was boisterously loud.
“I am afraid, Messieurs, that after the mad dash we have just witnessed we will find no living creature in this strange vehicle. It is a miracle that it stopped before dashing itself to pieces against the rocks you see ahead.” Th
is voice had an air of quiet dignity that immediately commanded Clive’s respect.
“Then it wasn’t a dream,” Clive murmured: “Or it was and I am still dreaming.” His eyes wandered to the deep, transparent blue of the sky, and to the eagle that was scarcely violating its solitude, floating about on motionless wings. The sun beat down mercilessly, but paradoxically a cool breeze was blowing down through the canyon to the right, as it always did about this time of day. Clive inhaled deeply this refreshing draught. “I can’t possibly be asleep,” he thought; “everything is too real.” He again turned his attention to the voices on the other side of the truck.
“Athos is right, but perhaps the coachman was spared by the same providence that saved the coach,” said a fourth voice.
“Mordieu!” The second voice was even more boisterous than before: “What kind of providence would spare a coachman that would lose his horses on such a grade?”
Clive could contain himself no longer, dream or no dream, he was going to enjoy the situation to the fullest. He walked boldly around the truck, and addressed the strange company:
“I have the horses safely under lock and key, friends, all 85 of them, and so if you will climb back on your respective mounts, and ride back to the booby hatch, or the circus, or wherever you belong I’ll skin this wagon on into town.”
The four men he addressed were indeed a strange sight—small wonder that Clive suspected himself of dreaming. They wore long cloaks—much too warm for this near-desert climate—and large felt hats with flowing plumes. They wore high leather boots reaching above their knees, and each carried a long straight sword at his side. The mounts were as remarkable as the riders. In this country of cow-boys and horses Clive had never seen horse furnishings such as these noble animals carried—a combination of leather, steel, silver, and velvet—very impractical, but having a very business-like appearance.
Though they rode almost identical mounts, and dressed similarly, the four men certainly were not drawn together by any personal similarity. One was rather short and stocky, having prominent cheek-bones, and a swarthy complexion. “D’Artagnan,” was the thought that flashed through Clive’s mind, for he was the exact picture of the hero of Clive’s life-long favorite novel. A second was, in contrast, a veritable giant. A shock of light hair hung to his shoulders, framing a flushed face which bore a rather blank expression. “Porthos,” this one registered. A third gave the impression of effeminate elegance, an impression that was belied by the cold glitter in his eye. “Aramis,” thought Clive. Fourth was the most commanding figure of the group. Tall and handsome, this man embodied all the qualities commonly ascribed to aristocracy. This could only be Athos.
