Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  “I don’t know!” Puff. Furiously: “But there isn’t any New York past here! It’s all gone—nothing left but . . .”

  Puff!

  Then he was standing on the lake of glassy obsidian, just like the first time.

  And then the jungle, and he said automatically, “My name is Rossi. What year . . .” But it wasn’t the jungle, really. It had been cleared back, and there were neat rows of concrete houses, like an enormous tank trap, instead of grass-topped verandas showing through the trees.

  Then came the savannah, and that was all different, too—there was a looming piled ugliness of a city rising half a mile away. Where were the nomads, the horsemen?

  And next . . .

  The beach; but it was dirty grey, not scarlet. One lone dark figure was hunched against the sun glare, staring out to sea; the golden people were gone.

  Rossi felt lost. Whatever had happened to New York, back there—to the whole world, probably—something he had said or done had made it come out differently. Somehow they had saved out some of the old grimy, rushing civilisation, and it had lasted just long enough to blight all the fresh new things that ought to have come after it.

  The stick men were not waiting on their cold beach.

  He caught his breath. He was in the enormous building again, the same tilted slab blazing with light, the same floating eggs bulging their eyes at him. That hadn’t changed, and perhaps nothing he could do would ever change it; for he knew well enough that that wasn’t a human building.

  But then came the white desert, and after it the fog, and his glimpses of the night began to blur together, faster and faster . . .

  That was all. There was nothing left now but the swift vertiginous spin to the end-and-beginning, and then the wheel slowing as he came around again.

  Rossi began to seethe. This was worse than dishwashing—his nightmare, the worst job he knew. Standing here, like a second hand ticking around the face of Time, while men who flickered and vanished threaded him with questions; a thing, a tool, a gyrating information booth!

  Stop, he thought, and pushed—a costive pressure inside his brain—but nothing happened. He was a small boy forgotten on a carousel, a bug trapped between window and screen, a moth circling a lamp . . .

  It came to him what the trouble was. There had to be the yearning, that single candle-cone focus of the spirit: that was the moving force, and all the rest—the fasting, the quiet, the rhymes—was only to channel and guide.

  He would have to get off at the one place in the whole endless sweep of time where he wanted to be. And that place, he knew now without surprise, was the scarlet beach.

  Which no longer existed, anywhere in the universe.

  While he hung suspended on that thought, the flickering stopped at the prehistoric jungle; and the clearing with its copper dead man; and the log room, empty; the church, empty, too.

  And the fiery room, now so fiercely ablaze that the hair of his forearms puffed and curled.

  And the cool lawn, where the small boy stood agape

  And the pavilion: the greybeard and the young man leaning together like blasted trees, livid-lipped.

  There was the trouble: they had believed him, the first time around, and acting on what he told them, they had changed the world.

  Only one thing to be done—destroy that belief, fuddle them, talk nonsense, like a ghost called up at a séance!

  “Then you tell me to put all I have in land,” says greybeard, clutching the crucifix, “and wait for the increase!”

  “Of course!” replied Rossi with instant cunning. “New York’s to be the biggest city—in the whole state of Maine!”

  The pavilion vanished. Rossi saw with pleasure that the room that took its place was high-ceilinged and shabby, the obvious forerunner of his own roach-haunted cubby-hole in 1955. The long, panelled room with its fireplace and the youth dozing before it were gone, snuffed out, a might-have-been.

  When a motherly looking woman lurched up out of a rocker, staring, he knew what to do.

  He put his finger to his lips. “The lost candlestick is under the cellar stairs!” he hissed, and vanished.

  The room was a little older, a little shabbier. A new partition had been added, bringing its dimensions down to those of the room Rossi knew, and there was a bed, and an old tin washbasin in the corner. A young woman was sprawled open-mouthed, fleshy and snoring, in the bed; Rossi looked away with faint prim disgust and waited.

  The same room; his room, almost; a beefy stubbled man smoking in the armchair with his feet in a pan of water. The pipe dropped from his sprung jaw.

  “I’m the family banshee,” Rossi remarked. “Beware, for a short man with a long knife is dogging your footsteps.” He squinted and bared his fangs; the man, standing up hurriedly, tipped the basin and stumbled half across the room before he recovered and whirled to the door, bellowing, leaving fat wet tracks and silence.

  Now; now . . . It was night, and the sweaty unstirred heat of the city poured in around him. He was standing in the midst of the chalk marks he had scrawled a hundred billion years ago. The bare bulb was still lighted; around it flames were licking tentatively at the edges of the table, cooking the plastic cover up into lumpy hissing puffs.

  Rossi the shipping clerk; Rossi the elevator man; Rossi the dishwasher!

  He let it pass. The room kaleidoscope-flickered from brown to green; a young man at the washbasin was pouring something amber into a glass, gurgling and clinking.

  “Boo!” said Rossi, flapping his arms.

  The young man whirled in a spasm of limbs, a long arc of brown droplets hanging. The door banged him out, and Rossi was alone, watching the drinking glass roll, counting the seconds until . . .

  The walls were brown again; a calendar across the room said 1965 MAY 1965. An old man, spidery on the edge of the bed, was fumbling spectacles over the rank crests of his ears. “You’re real,” he said.

  “I’m not,” said Rossi indignantly. He added, “Radishes. Lemons. Grapes. Blahhh!”

  “Don’t put me off,” said the old man. He was ragged and hollow-templed, like a bird-skull, coloured like earth and milkweed floss, and his mouth was a drum over porcelain, but his oystery eyes were burning bright. “I knew the minute I saw you—you’re Rossi, the one that disappeared. If you can do that—” his teeth clacked—“you must know, you’ve got to tell me. Those ships that have landed on the moon—what are they building there? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “Please,” said the old man humbly. “You can’t be so cruel. I tried to warn people, but they’ve forgotten who I am. If you know; if you could just tell me . . .”

  Rossi had a qualm, thinking of heat flashing down in that one intolerable blow that would leave the city squashed, glistening, as flat as the thin film of a bug. But remembering that, after all, the old man was not real, he said, “There isn’t anything. You made it up. You’re dreaming.”

  And then, while the pure tension gathered and strained inside him, came the lake of obsidian.

  And the jungle, just as it ought to be—the brown people carolling, “Hello, Mister Rossi, hello again, hello!”

  And the savannah, the tall black-haired people reining in, breeze-blown, flash of teeth: “Hillo, Misser Rossi!”

  And the beach.

  The scarlet beach with its golden, laughing people: “Mista Rossi, Mista Rossi!” Heraldic glory under the clear sky, and out past the breakers the clear heart-stirring glint of sun on the sea; and the tension of the longing breaking free (stop), no need for symbols now (stop), a lifetime’s distillation of I wish . . . spurting, channelled, done.

  There he stands where he longed to be, wearing the same pleased expression, for ever caught at the beginning of a hello—Rossi, the first man to travel in Time, and Rossi, the first man to Stop.

  He’s not to be mocked or mourned. Rossi was born a stranger; there are thousands of him, unconsidered gritty particles in the gears of history: the
ne’er-do-wells, the superfluous people, shaped for some world that has never yet been invented. The air-conditioned utopias have no place for them; they would have been bad slaves and worse masters in Athens. As for the tropic isles—the Marquesas of 1800, or the Manhattan of 3256—could Rossi swim a mile, dive six fathoms, climb a fifty-foot palm? If he had stepped alive onto that scarlet shore, would the young men have had him in their canoes, or the maidens in their bowers? But see him now, stonily immortal, the symbol of a wonderful thing that happened. The childlike golden people visit him every day, except when they forget. They drape his rock-hard flesh with garlands and lay little offerings at his feet; and when he lets it rain, they thump him.

  FISH NIGHT

  Joe R. Lansdale

  It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun. The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.

  Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.

  The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.

  A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.

  “Well?” the younger man said.

  The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.

  “Damn,” the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.

  “Well?” the young man repeated.

  “Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can-opener trade this week. Deader. The radiator’s chicken-pocked with holes.”

  “Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand.”

  “Sure.”

  “A ride anyway.”

  “Keep thinking that, college boy.”

  “Someone is bound to come along,” the young man said.

  They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shade—but not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.

  The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the backseat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. “I’m sorry about this,” he said suddenly.

  “Wasn’t your fault. Wasn’t anyone’s fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on everything but the can-openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son.”

  “And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job,” the young man said.

  The old man laughed. “Bet you did. They talk a good line, don’t they?”

  “I’ll say!”

  “Make it sound like found money, but there ain’t no found money, boy. Ain’t nothing simple in this world. The company is the only one ever makes any money. We just get tireder and older with more holes in our shoes. If I had any sense I’d have quit years ago. All you got to make is this summer—”

  “Maybe not that long.”

  “Well, this is all I know. Just town after town, motel after motel, house after house, looking at people through screen wire while they shake their heads No. Even the cockroaches at the sleazy motels begin to look like little fellows you’ve seen before, like maybe they’re door-to-door peddlers that have to rent rooms too.”

  The young man chuckled. “You might have something there.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, welded in silence. Night had full grip on the desert now. A mammoth gold moon and billions of stars cast a whitish glow from eons away.

  The wind picked up. The sand shifted, found new places to lie down. The undulations of it, slow and easy, were reminiscent of the midnight sea. The young man, who had crossed the Atlantic by ship once, said as much.

  “The sea?” the old man replied. “Yes, yes, exactly like that. I was thinking the same. That’s part of the reason it bothers me. Part of why I was stirred up this afternoon. Wasn’t just the heat doing it. There are memories of mine out here,” he nodded at the desert, “and they’re visiting me again.”

  The young man made a face. “I don’t understand.”

  “You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t. You’d think I’m crazy.”

  “I already think you’re crazy. So tell me.”

  The old man smiled. “All right, but don’t you laugh.”

  “I won’t.”

  A moment of silence moved in between them. Finally the old man said, “It’s fish night, boy. Tonight’s the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right—I mean, doesn’t the night feel like it’s made up of some fabric, that it’s different from other nights, that it’s like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon?”

  “You lost me.”

  The old man sighed. “But it feels different. Right? You can feel it too, can’t you?”

  “I suppose. Sort of thought it was just the desert air. I’ve never camped out in the desert before, and I guess it is different.”

  “Different, all right. You see, this is the road I got stranded on twenty years back. I didn’t know it at first, least not consciously. But down deep in my gut I must have known all along I was taking this road, tempting fate, offering it, as the football people say, an instant replay.”

  “I still don’t understand about fish night. What do you mean, you were here before?”

  “Not this exact spot, somewhere along in here. This was even less of a road back then than it is now. The Navajos were about the only ones who traveled it. My car conked out like this one today, and I started walking instead of waiting. As I walked the fish came out. Swimming along in the starlight pretty as you please. Lots of them. All the colors of the rainbow. Small ones, big ones, thick ones, thin ones. Swam right up to me . . . right through me! Fish just as far as you could see. High up and low down to the ground.

  “Hold on boy. Don’t start looking at me like that. Listen: You’re a college boy, you know what was here before we were, before we crawled out of the sea and changed enough to call ourselves men. Weren’t we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?”

  “I guess, but—”

  “Millions and millions of years ago this desert was a sea bottom. Maybe even the birthplace of man. Who knows? I read that in some science books. And I got to thinking this: If the ghosts of people who have lived can haunt houses, why can’t the ghosts of creatures long dead haunt where they once lived, float about in a ghostly sea?”

  “Fish with a soul?”

  “Don’t go small-mind on me, boy. Look here: Some of the Indians I’ve talked to up North tell me about a thing they call the manitou. That’s a spirit. They believe everything has one. Rocks, trees, you name it. Even if the rock wears to dust or the tree gets cut to lumber, the manitou of it is still around.”

  “Then why can’t you see these fish all the time?”

  “Why can’t we see ghosts all the time? Why do some of us never see them? Time’s not right, that’s why. It’s a precious situation, and I figure it’s like some fancy time lock—like the banks use. The lock clicks open at the bank; and there’s the money. Here it ticks open and we get the fish of a world long gone.”

  “Well, it’s something to thi
nk about,” the young man managed.

  The old man grinned at him. “I don’t blame you for thinking what you’re thinking. But this happened to me twenty years ago and I’ve never forgotten it. I saw those fish for a good hour before they disappeared. A Navajo came along in an old pickup right after and I bummed a ride into town with him. I told him what I’d seen. He just looked at me and grunted. But I could tell he knew what I was talking about. He’d seen it too, and probably not for the first time.

  “I’ve heard that Navajos don’t eat fish for some reason or another, and I bet it’s the fish in the desert that keep them from it. Maybe they hold them sacred. And why not? It was like being in the presence of the Creator; like crawling around in the liquids with no cares in the world.”

  “I don’t know. That sounds sort of . . .”

  “Fishy?” The old man laughed. “It does, it does. So this Navajo drove me to town. Next day I got my car fixed and went on. I’ve never taken that cutoff again—until today, and I think that was more than accident. My subconscious was driving me. That night scared me, boy, and I don’t mind admitting it. But it was wonderful too, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind.”

  The young man didn’t know what to say.

  The old man looked at him and smiled. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “Not even a little bit. Maybe I am crazy.”

  They sat awhile longer with the desert night, and the old man took his false teeth out and poured some of the warm water on them to clean them of coffee and cigarette residue.

  “I hope we don’t need that water,” the young man said.

  “You’re right. Stupid of me! We’ll sleep awhile, start walking before daylight. It’s not far to the next town. Ten miles at best.” He put his teeth back in. “We’ll be just fine.”

  The young man nodded.

  No fish came. They did not discuss it. They crawled inside the car, the young man in the front seat, the old man in the back. They used their spare clothes to bundle under, to pad out the cold fingers of the night.

  Near midnight the old man came awake suddenly and lay with his hands behind his head and looked up and out the window opposite him, studied the crisp desert sky.