Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  The hole was about five feet tall now, and lengthening, but on the other side was not a raging blizzard, but a narrow alley between two tall buildings. The scent of rubber and auto exhaust drifted through. A whistle sounded in the distance, and they could hear shouts and running footsteps. A balding man in a shabby suit rounded the comer of a building and ran straight for them, a blue-coated policeman in hot pursuit. Grimes yelped as the man ran through the wall, bowled him over, and slammed through the kitchen doors.

  Duffy and Tomacheski hurried into the kitchen. The Indian looked down at Grimes and said something in its barbaric language that sounded vaguely sympathetic. The hole closed as rapidly as it had opened.

  Grimes got up and brushed himself off. This was not going according to plan. And where the hell was Crawford? Well, no matter. He had that immigrant pinko now. No more extensions, no more inspections, just CLOSED. Finis. Done with. He turned and pushed on one door, which flew back in his face as the shabby man rushed back out of the kitchen.

  “Where the hell am I?” the man shouted, looking around wildly.

  Grimes felt his nose gingerly. It didn’t seem to be broken, but it was dripping blood onto his shirt and tie. He placed his folded handkerchief under it. He felt strangely calm in spite of all the shouting and confusion, bums and Indians and colored fry cooks and communist restaurant owners. Ed Crawford would be here any minute and he could wash his hands of this place forever.

  Tomacheski and Duffy had followed the bum out of the kitchen and were trying to calm him down. The Indian was standing by Duffy’s elbow looking back over his shoulder at

  Grimes, who was looking at the Ladies’ Room wall. Sweet Jesus, it was happening again!

  A churning nothingness was growing out of the wall, or into it, shaping itself into a long ovoid that stretched and grew as he watched, unable to speak or look away. Now Tomacheski could see it too, and he was backing away in torturous slow motion, grabbing Duffy by the arm. Their mouths were moving, but all Grimes could hear was the awful roaring. He realized he was moving toward the hole—not walking, it seemed—just gliding across (above?) the linoleum toward the Ladies’ Room wall.

  He put his hand out as he came up to it and it tingled like before, but this time he found it a somewhat pleasant sensation, and did not pull away. It engulfed his hand, moved up his arm to his chest, and was all over him in an instant. From somewhere far away, he felt his face form a smile.

  He was still smiling when he realized he was no longer in the diner, but in a plain white room with no windows. He was sitting on a white box on a white floor. The bum and the Indian were seated on identical boxes, and their faces slowly began to echo his confusion as they looked around at the featureless room. A door he hadn’t seen opened and a woman stepped through. She was wearing fewer clothes than a Pageant Pin-Up, and her hair was bright blue.

  “Hello, Mr. Grimes. I hope we haven’t startled you.”

  Grimes thought about it and decided he was definitely startled. “Where’s Tomacheski? Where am I? This can’t be the Ladies’ Room.” He looked around. Two other odd-looking people were talking to the bum and the Indian, who looked pretty startled, too.

  The woman smiled. “No, Mr. Grimes, I’m afraid you’re . . . someplace else. This is a holding area, actually. Visually sterile, to minimize unfamiliarity. I’ll change it for you if you like.”

  A wall appeared, a desk, some bookshelves. The boxes became chairs. They were alone. She was behind the desk in a white jacket, a stethoscope peeking out of one pocket. Bad choice. Doctors’ offices always made him sick.

  “It’s only a temporary displacement, we hope. We seem to have a bug in the system.”

  “Bug?” Grimes’ upper lip wrinkled involuntarily. “There’s been a . . . glitch?”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “A fuck-up.”

  Grimes blanched.

  “Technical difficulties beyond our control. At any rate, we’ll have you back in A.D. 1956 very soon.” She watched him as he absorbed this, then took a fountain pen out of her coat. “In the meantime, let’s talk about Mr. Tomacheski. Give me your hand, please.”

  He held out his hand and she pushed up his sleeve and passed the pen across the inside of his arm. It didn’t leave a mark, so maybe it wasn’t a pen. but he began to feel better immediately. Calmer. He still didn’t understand, but it didn’t seem to matter as much. “What about Tomacheski?” he asked.

  “Given your present course of action in A.D. 1956, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to continue doing business in that location.”

  Grimes shrugged. “I don’t particularly want him to stay in business.”

  “I see. But we do. And we don’t consider your wishes to be more important than our own in this matter.” She looked around, indicated the paneled office with her hands. “This spot is quite simply the best natural spacetime nexus on this continent, and as long as we control it, we will have things the way we want them. We have decided that Tomacheski will remain in business until A.D. 1975, when he will retire peacefully to California.” She looked him in the eye. “We have plans. Those plans require things to remain as they are at Tomacheski’s. We won’t allow any tampering.”

  Grimes tried to summon up indignation. “Nobody tells Morton Grimes how to do his job.” He didn’t sound very indignant, he realized, and he probably ought to be frightened, too, but he couldn’t mange it, somehow. “Nobody.”

  “Wrong Mr. Grimes. We do.” She swung her feet up onto the desk. “Of course there is an alternative.” She smiled a thin smile not unlike his own. “We could always keep you here.”

  “You could what? What do you mean keep me? I’m a citizen. I have rights. I want to call my lawyer! Who the hell are you, anyway?” He suddenly remembered how to be frightened.

  She leaned forward and stroked his arm again with the pen. Or whatever. “One point at a time, Mr. Grimes. To begin with, your rights are moot here. If by ‘you’ you mean me, I am the person currently giving you orders. Think of me as a doctor of sorts. If you mean all of us here, we are the party, clan, race—choose one or more as you wish—currently in charge of this locus. However powerful you may imagine us to be from what you have seen, you will almost certainly be underestimating us. We try not to be deliberately cruel to primitives, but we don’t take shit from anybody. I hope that answers your questions. Believe me when I say that nothing can stop us from keeping you if we wish to do so.”

  Grimes nodded and shook a finger at her unsteadily. “You’re talking time travel, here. I’ve seen ‘Science Fiction Theater’; I know about these things. Well, then, what about my life? Won’t it change something if I don’t go back?” She leaned back in the chair, hands in pockets. “Frankly, Mr. Grimes, you’d scarcely be missed. You never marry, never have children, never really affect another person’s life in any significant way.”

  “You don’t mean it. You can’t keep me here.” He crossed his arms in front of him, made an effort to frown, abandoned it.

  “You don’t know that, Mr. Grimes.” She chuckled softly, shaking her head. “It’s amusing, actually, when you see it from our point of view. You think you have a right to control other people’s fate—Duffy, Tomacheski, the Indian—because you think you’re naturally superior to them. That’s bigotry. We control your fate because we actually are superior. That’s simple fact.”

  The words stung. Grimes searched for a retort, but nothing came to him that he couldn’t imagine her laughing off in that arrogant way, and then the moment for rebuttal passed, leaving him silent and powerless.

  She watched him calmly for a moment, then cocked her head to one side as though listening to something he couldn’t hear. “The malfunction has been repaired,” she said, getting up from behind the desk. ‘The others will be waiting.” The room dissolved to featureless white.

  They were standing beside the Indian and the bum and two people even stranger-looking than his “doctor.” The wall was going funny. A blinding whiter w
hiteness opened up in it—the sun on snow, with tall firs on a hill. The Indian shouldered his bags of Tomacheski’s food and stepped through.

  The hole closed, and opened again on an alley at night with a moon and streetlights shining on brick walls and wet pavement. There was a scent of rain and garbage. One of the people handed the bum a wad of genuine-looking currency and shook his hand. The bum gave Grimes a little wave and walked in.

  “Your turn, Mr. Grimes,” the doctor said, turning to him. “Which will it be? Return on our terms—or stay?”

  He thought for a moment. How important was this immigrant diner-jockey in Morton Grimes’ scheme of things? The world was going to hell anyway, and it wasn’t going to get there any faster if one Russian hired one Negro to grill hamburgers. Maybe he shouldn’t worry so much.

  He had a choice, she said. He supposed he did, but he wouldn’t have any problem making it. The world was changing a little faster than he would like, even in 1956, but even given that, it was a damn sight better than dirty-talking blue-haired women and disappearing doctors’ offices and being treated like an invading bacillus. None of it seemed to be worth his time and trouble at this point.

  “I can go back if I promise to leave Tomacheski alone?”

  “You are not permitted to take any action that will endanger him or his business.”

  He supposed he could live with that. “Fine,” he told her. “I’ll go.” He buttoned his shirtsleeve, straightened his tie and jacket. His hat must have blown off as he came through.

  He ran fingers through his hair as the hole began to grow again.

  “You should arrive within a minute or so of your departure. Have an adequate life, Mr. Grimes, and remember—we’ll be watching.”

  The hole punched through to the diner, with an agitated Tomacheski and Duffy talking and gesturing to someone he couldn’t see. Grimes looked back for a moment to see if he was really free to go.

  “You’d better hurry, or you’ll miss this one. Go on.” She made a hurry along gesture to him, and he stepped forward onto his hat and into the arms of Ed Crawford.

  “Mort! What the hell were you doing in the Ladies’ Room? And where’s that Indian you were raving about? You okay, Mort? You look terrible.”

  Grimes stepped back and turned around. The wall was a wall again. He picked up the hat and made a few useless attempts at straightening it, then put it on his head. He needed a drink, he decided—maybe two. He turned to Tomacheski, who was watching him expectantly. “My inspection is completed. Don’t bother to see me out—I’ll leave your A-placard on my way. Coming, Ed?”

  Crawford looked confused, but turned to go.

  “What about the Indian?” Tomacheski whispered, pointing at the wall.

  “And the bum?” Duffy added.

  Grimes stooped to pick up his portfolio from the hallway floor. Suddenly he felt incredibly tired. He didn’t understand the present, and the future stunk. He looked from Duffy to Tomacheski and nodded slowly, more to himself than to either of them. “Home,” he said, tucking the case under his arm and following Crawford out of the hallway. “They’ve gone home.”

  Straightening his shoulders, Grimes walked down the narrow length of shining linoleum, pulsing pink and green with neon light, and paused to flip the A-placard onto the counter before he opened the screen door and let it click shut behind him.

  He was home too, he supposed, but he couldn’t find much joy in it, not given what he knew. He turned and looked back at the little diner and the garish sign, and at Duffy and Tomacheski watching him from the doorway. He scowled at them; they smiled and waved.

  “The world is going straight to hell,” he told them . . . but not loud enough so that they’d hear.

  He pulled his hat low against the sunlight, and walked away.

  HOME ALONE

  Jack Finney

  On the sixth day that he was home alone Charley Burke walked out onto the patio, nodded at the empty chairs, saying, “Hello, everybody. Don’t get up,” and dropped into a lounge chair. He was wearing the tan wash pants and brown loafers he’d just changed into and the white shirt he’d worn that day in San Francisco at the office. Now he tilted far back in the chair, his feet rising higher than his head. It was August, still daylight, and he lay staring up at the clear blue sky. He was conscious of the emptiness of the suburban house beside him but absently so, used to it now. Then his jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and he lay motionless, staring up at the sky, paralyzed by the strength of a strange new emotion.

  His house, across the Bay from the city, in Marin County, lay in a miniature valley; the street wound between two rows of hills. Fifty yards above the hills that rose behind the patio a hawk hung in the air high in the sun. He was there often hunting field rodents; Charley had seen him before. But now he saw him, actually, for the first time. The big bird didn’t move. Wings out he lay on an invisible column of air that pressed against the sides of the hills to be deflected upward.

  He lay there magically neither rising nor falling, moving neither forward nor back, no least movement of his wings necessary to sustain him. Then the wings tilted, the bird dropped in a sudden swift and graceful arc and soared up again. The wings tilted back once more and again the hawk hung in the summer sky belonging to it; and all that Charley Burke wanted of the entire world was somehow to be able to do that, too.

  It was no idle wish. It was an overpowering seizure, a wild and passionate necessity. Its intensity drew him to his feet and he walked the patio, smiling, trying to laugh the feeling away. But there was no escape. He was possessed by an irresistible urge to rise in effortless detachment from gravity up into the blueness till he could feel the sky around him touching his skin. And it occurred to him that he could do what he wanted to do—not in a plane fighting the air but in a balloon.

  Stepping between the open glass doors, he stood in the living room, neat in the gathering darkness—ashtrays emptied, magazines stacked. But when he snapped on a light the room looked dusty. He stood thinking over all he knew about balloons. Mostly this was just a picture in his mind of a large, rounded object shaped like a giant punching bag upside down in the sky. It was made in vertical panels of contrasting colors, a long ribbon pennant fluttered from its top, and under it hung a trapezelike bar on which sat a man wearing tights. He wore his hair parted in the center, had a large mustache, and sat smiling, ankles crossed, legs dangling gracefully, a hand negligently holding to one rope of his perch. Stitched to the chest of his tights was an American flag. This picture was supplanted by another very much like it except that now a square basket with high sides hung under the balloon. A man stood in the basket staring out at him; he wore a black silk hat, black frock coat, square-cut beard, pince-nez, and had a brass telescope tucked under one arm.

  That was all Charley knew about balloons. He took down volume two of the encyclopedia on the living-room bookshelves, found the article on balloons, and sat down at one end of the davenport, leaning over the pages. “Balloon,” the article began, “a bag of impermeable material which, when inflated with a gas lighter than air, rises from the ground.” This had almost the lilt of poetry, he felt, the last four words especially, and he read it through several times, glancing up each time to smile.

  Then he read everything in the article about how and why a balloon rises, descends, and is controlled, and it seemed to him as simple and effective a device as man has yet invented. Filled with a gas lighter than the volume of air it displaces, a balloon must rise. Release some of the gas and its ascent is checked or reversed. Spill ballast and its rise will resume. The open book on his lap, Charley sat back, hands clasped behind his head, at peace with this explanation.

  It was easily understood without special training, like most of the mechanical devices of the previous century. Men understood the things they used then; they were masters of the machines that served them. He felt sure that passengers riding in hydraulic elevators of the time knew how they worked, and that most men, a forefinger on a sha
rp-etched woodcut diagram, could trace through the workings of a horsecar mechanism. Of the thousands of years men have been civilized, it is only in the last fifty, Charley thought, that things we use daily have gone beyond the understanding of most of us—our television sets, jet planes, even our automobiles today. Most of us use them in helplessness, no longer their masters, no longer masters of very much at all any more. So that to understand the balloon was a solid satisfaction and Charley stood up and began to sing. It was an ancient song he hadn’t thought of in years and the house being empty he shouted it full voice. “Come, Josephine, in my flying machine, and it’s up we’ll go, up we’ll go!” he yelled in sudden exuberance, and walked quickly to the garage where he began hunting for things he needed, such as his wife’s plastic clothesline and two old tennis nets.

  Through that and the following two evenings, working hard and steadily, Charley made a balloon. He cut the panels from two rolls of lightweight rubberized cloth—one was blue, and one was white—which he bought in San Francisco, and stitched them together on his wife’s sewing machine. With odds and ends around the house—a wire coat hanger, an aluminum pot lid, his wife’s clothes pole—he completed the balloon, then hung it from a rope over the patio.

  It could turn chilly after the sun was down here in the San Francisco Bay area, and Charley changed into black ski pants and jersey, light in weight but snug-fitting and very warm. Looking down at himself it occurred to him that they somewhat resembled a balloonist’s tights, and he smiled. Finally, well after eleven at night, Charley stood on the patio beside the brick barbecue tending a bed of coals. The electric blower was on full, the coals white hot and flameless in the forced draft, and a steady rush of hot air roared up through a stovepipe resting on the grill and into the balloon hanging overhead.

  Almost instantly the long blue-and-white wrinkles of hanging cloth rising up into the night over Charley’s head had begun to stir; now they were visibly distending. From a long, wrinkled prune the balloon swelled into a thin pear, then rounded into a smooth-skinned sphere. At eleven forty-five the bag, round and tight, began to lift. Within minutes, it seemed alive. Tugging at the anchor rope tied to the barbecue, it swayed in the air fat, buoyant, and eager. Two tennis nets hung draped over it. Tied to their ends by short lengths of clothesline hung a trapezelike seat made from half a clothes pole. Several dozen paper bags imprinted Mill Valley Market and filled with sand hung in the netting.