Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  “You see nothing?” asked Anthony.

  “No: I don’t think so,” said I. “And you?”

  “I think I do,” he said, and his eyes followed something which was invisible to mine. They came to rest between him and the chimney-piece. Looking steadily there, he spoke again.

  “All this happened some weeks ago,” he said, “when you were out in Switzerland, and since then, up till last night, I saw nothing further. But all the time I was expecting something further. I felt that, as far as I was concerned, it was not all over yet, and last night, with the intention of assisting any communication to come through to me from—from beyond, I went into the Dover Street tube-station at a few minutes before one o’clock, the hour at which both the assault and the suicide had taken place. The platform when I arrived on it was absolutely empty, or appeared to be so, but presently, just as I began to hear the roar of the approaching train, I saw there was the figure of a man standing some twenty yards from me, looking into the tunnel. He had not come down with me in the lift, and the moment before he had not been there. He began moving towards me, and then I saw who it was, and I felt a stir of wind icy-cold coming towards me as he approached. It was not the draught that heralds the approach of a train, for it came from the opposite direction. He came close up to me, and I saw there was recognition in his eyes. He raised his face towards me and I saw his lips move, but, perhaps in the increasing noise from the tunnel, I heard nothing come from them. He put out his hand, as if entreating me to do something, and with a cowardice for which I cannot forgive myself, I shrank from him, for I knew, by the sign that I have told you, that this was one from the dead, and my flesh quaked before him, drowning for the moment all pity and all desire to help him, if that was possible.

  Certainly he had something which he wanted of me, but I recoiled from him. And by now the train was emerging from the tunnel, and next moment, with a dreadful gesture of despair, he threw himself in front of it.”

  As he finished speaking he got up quickly from his chair, still looking fixedly in front of him.

  I saw his pupils dilate, and his mouth worked.

  “It is coming,” he said. “I am to be given a chance of atoning for my cowardice. There is nothing to be afraid of: I must remember that myself.”

  As he spoke there came from the panelling above the chimney-piece one loud shattering crack, and the cold wind again circled about my head. I found myself shrinking back in my chair with my hands held in front of me as instinctively I screened myself against something which I knew was there but which I could not see. Every sense told me that there was a presence in the room other than mine and Anthony’s, and the horror of it was that I could not see it. Any vision, however terrible, would, I felt, be more tolerable than this clear certain knowledge that close to me was this invisible thing. And yet what horror might not be disclosed of the face of the dead and the crushed chest . . . But all I could see, as I shuddered in this cold wind, was the familiar walls of the room, and Anthony standing in front of me stiff and firm, making, as I knew, a call on his courage. His eyes were focused on something quite close to him, and some semblance of a smile quivered on his mouth. And then he spoke again.

  “Yes, I know you,” he said. “And you want something of me. Tell me, then, what it is.”

  There was absolute silence, but what was silence to my ears could not have been so to his, for once or twice he nodded, and once he said, “Yes: I see. I will do it.” And with the knowledge that, even as there was someone here whom I could not see, so there was speech going on which I could not hear, this terror of the dead and of the unknown rose in me with the sense of powerlessness to move that accompanies nightmare. I could not stir, I could not speak. I could only strain my ears for the inaudible and my eyes for the unseen, while the cold wind from the very valley of the shadow of death streamed over me. It was not that the presence of death itself was terrible; it was that from its tranquillity and serene keeping there had been driven some unquiet soul unable to rest in peace for whatever ultimate awakening rouses the countless generations of those who have passed away, driven, no less, from whatever activities are theirs, back into the material world from which it should have been delivered. Never, until the gulf between the living and the dead was thus bridged, had it seemed so immense and so unnatural. It is possible that the dead may have communication with the living, and it was not that exactly that so terrified me, for such communication, as we know it, comes voluntarily from them. But here was something icy-cold and crime-laden, that was chased back from the peace that would not pacify it.

  And then, most horrible of all, there came a change in these unseen conditions. Anthony was silent now, and from looking straight and fixedly in front of him, he began to glance sideways to where I sat and back again, and with that I felt that the unseen presence had turned its attention from him to me. And now, too, gradually and by awful degrees I began to see . . .

  There came an outline of shadow across the chimney-piece and the panels above it. It took shape: it fashioned itself into the outline of a man. Within the shape of the shadow details began to form themselves, and I saw wavering in the air, like something concealed by haze, the semblance of a face, stricken and tragic, and burdened with such a weight of woe as no human face had ever worn. Next, the shoulders outlined themselves, and a stain livid and red spread out below them, and suddenly the vision leaped into clearness. There he stood, the chest crushed in and drowned in the red stain, from which broken ribs, like the bones of a wrecked ship, protruded. The mournful, terrible eyes were fixed on me, and it was from them, so I knew, that the bitter wind proceeded . . .

  Then, quick as the switching off of a lamp, the spectre vanished, and the bitter wind was still, and opposite to me stood Anthony, in a quiet, bright-lit room. There was no sense of an unseen presence any more; he and I were then alone, with an interrupted conversation still dangling between us in the warm air. I came round to that, as one comes round after an anaesthetic. It all swam into sight again, unreal at first, and gradually assuming the texture of actuality.

  “You were talking to somebody, not to me,” I said. “Who was it? What was it?”

  He passed the back of his hand over his forehead, which glistened in the light.

  “A soul in hell,” he said.

  Now it is hard ever to recall mere physical sensations, when they have passed. If you have been cold and are warmed, it is difficult to remember what cold was like: if you have been hot and have got cool, it is difficult to realise what the oppression of heat really meant. Just so, with the passing of that presence, I found myself unable to recapture the sense of the terror with which, a few moments ago only, it had invaded and inspired me.

  “A soul in hell?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  He moved about the room for a minute or so, and then came and sat on the arm of my chair.

  “I don’t know what you saw,” he said, “or what you felt, but there has never in all my life happened to me anything more real than what these last few minutes have brought. I have talked to a soul in the hell of remorse, which is the only possible hell. He knew, from what happened last night, that he could perhaps establish communication through me with the world he had quitted, and he sought me and found me. I am charged with a mission to a woman I have never seen, a message from the contrite . . . You can guess who it is . . .”

  He got up with a sudden briskness.

  “Let’s verify it anyhow,” he said. “He gave me the street and the number. Ah, there’s the telephone book! Would it be a coincidence merely if I found that at No. 20 in Chasemore Street, South Kensington, there lived a Lady Payle?”

  He turned over the leaves of the bulky volume.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said.

  INSIDE TIME

  Tim Sullivan

  “My name’s Mae,” said the pretty brown woman, looking down at him. A luminous, violet ceiling was just over her head. “What’s yours?”

  “Here
l . . .” he said, uncertain of where he was. He was fastened to a flat, inclined surface. “Herel Jablov.”

  “Herel Jablov?” Mae said. “You’re famous.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” Mae said, handing him a water packet with a sucking tube sticking out of it. “Drink this.”

  “Thank you.” He accepted the packet, noticing how nice Mae smelled, not perfumed but natural. “I’m very dry.”

  “Do you remember anything?” Mae gently asked.

  “Yes,” he said, after taking a long sip. “I remember being carried through the dark by . . . I don’t know what it was, but it was unprotected out there. And then I saw a star.”

  “A star?”

  “But it wasn’t a star,” he went on. “As we came closer I saw that it was an oval of light . . . a window . . . and then I saw someone watching me through it.”

  “That was me.”

  “I could see my rescuer in the light cast from that window . . . It wasn’t human.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in a time station.”

  “A time station?”

  “That’s what I call it,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s officially called.”

  Herel looked at her. She wore a simple blue garment, a knee-length jersey. He realized that he was naked.

  “I’m not dressed,” Herel said, embarrassed.

  “The robot stripped you of your pressure suit and your thermal long-johns after it took you out of the Arrowhead and brought you inside,” she said. “Do you remember?”

  “Yes, it examined me . . . Am I okay?”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “The disorientation won’t last long. Your parietal lobes are adjusting.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Here,” she said, freeing him from clasps that held him to the gurney. She handed him a yellow garment similar to the one she was wearing. He got up and found that he floated. He quickly slipped the jersey over his head. Mae helped him arrange it, and he was calmed by feeling her fingers through the fabric.

  “Is anything coming back to you?”

  “It’s starting to.” He remembered losing contact with the other members of the team as he fell. “Did anyone else show up?”

  “No, just you.”

  “There were four of us,” he said, “Park Li-Joon, Hess, Ertegul . . . and me.”

  “Yes, I know about the team,” she said.

  “Did they make it?”

  “They all came back, all but one.”

  “Which one?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  What was she talking about? “But I’m here.”

  “It will take a little while to explain,” she said.

  Herel was confused and discomfited. It was better not to think about it right now. He gestured at the violet chamber. “Will you show me around the . . . time station?”

  “So soon?”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “Sure. Come with me.”

  He drifted behind her through a low hatchway, propelling himself forward with handholds extruding from the walls.

  “This is the kitchen,” Mae said. “Or the galley, if you prefer.”

  Like the examination room they’d just left, there were no windows set in the galley’s luminous green walls. Packets of water and food floated, but otherwise it was empty.

  “We’re near the station’s center,” Mae said. “There are four extensions stretching out from this point, two cells—staterooms, I call them—at the ends of three of them and the docking node at the end of the fourth.”

  “So there’s plenty of room?”

  “It doesn’t seem like it after you’ve been here awhile.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “We have everything we need to survive,” she said, handing him a food packet, “but very little else. How’s your memory now?”

  “I remember falling after I lost contact with the others, but nothing else until the robot snagged me. Something must have happened in between.”

  “It’ll be easier if you think farther back to your childhood, say . . . You remember that, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” He sucked a mouthful of brown stuff from the tube. The grainy texture was a little off-putting, a bit sweet for Herel’s taste, but otherwise it wasn’t bad.

  “High school? University? Maybe graduate school?”

  “And earning my engineering degrees . . . my Arrowhead design being chosen . . . and being selected by the Institute . . . training for the project . . . and the big day . . .”

  “It’s what happened recently that you don’t remember, huh?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “This is going to sound odd to you, Herel, but the reason for the blank spot in your memory is that you’ve just come from the future.”

  “The future?” That did bring a lot back. “Yes, that’s what we were trying to do, go into the future.”

  “You succeeded, but you can’t remember what happened uptime.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, maybe because it hasn’t happened yet, so you’ve got no memory of it.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Maybe so, but people who come from uptime never remember what it was like.”

  He cast about for something to refute what she was saying, but he could remember nothing before the robot found him.

  “You were dropped into a Kerr hole,” Mae said. “You emerged in the future, but no one can stay there for long.”

  “Then this isn’t the future?” Despite his faulty memory, he knew that she was telling the truth.

  “No, you were pulled back, sensors picked you out of the matter flowing from the white hole out there, and you were rescued by the robot.”

  He felt as if he’d awakened from a dream about an amusement park ride. He had fallen and fallen and fallen . . .

  “If this isn’t the future, where are we?”

  Something lashed down from the ceiling and snatched his empty food packet before Mae could answer.

  “What’s that?” Herel was startled as several more of the nearly transparent fibers flailed around them.

  “I call them tendrils,” Mae said. “They’re part of the station’s maintenance system. They’re just cleaning up.”

  “How do they work?”

  “Autonomically,” she said, taking him by the hand and drifting with him into another room. “I used to find them disturbing, but I got used to them.”

  They left the busy tendrils to their task as she led him to the big oval window near the docking node. It was dark outside.

  “This is where you watched them bring me in?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Other than saying we’re in a time station near a white hole, you haven’t told me where we are.”

  “We’re inside.”

  His own gaunt face and trim body were reflected in the window. “Inside what?”

  “Inside time.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “As I understand it, we’re in a crossover loop between two branes, caused by a phase change that ties time in a knot.”

  “A knot inside time?”

  “Yes, the crossover stabilizes quarks into strangelets.”

  “And we’re pulled back from the future into this . . . strangelet universe?”

  “Yes.”

  “So time travel isn’t a one-way ticket.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, “but sometimes the return trip is misdirected.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “A physicist was stuck here for a while. We talked.”

  “I see.” He stared at the darkness through the window.

  “In our continuum, you were drawn through a rotating ring of neutrons,” she said. “That’s what makes it possible for matter to pass through the collapsing star without being destro
yed.”

  “Yes, some black holes have mass and angular momentum, but no charge.”

  “You know all about it.”

  “I should. I was one of the designers of the Arrowhead.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, you and the others went through the Kerr hole and everyone but you came back to the precise time and place where you’d started. Some people called it a hoax, said none of you had ever gone anywhere. Conspiracy theorists claimed that you’d been killed because you wanted to reveal the hoax. I was a little girl when it happened.”

  “But you’re a mature woman.”

  “I’m thirty-five.”

  “Only two years younger than me.”

  “Time doesn’t mean much here.”

  “There are no clocks?” he asked, trying to understand this strangelet reality.

  “What good would they be?”

  “They’d be useful for small tasks.” The lack of clocks disturbed Herel; he liked to quantify things.

  “There aren’t any small tasks. Everything’s taken care of,” she said. “The station is sensitive to our needs.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When you’re hungry, it will give you something to eat. Water is plentiful because the basic elements are everywhere. The atmosphere is similarly synthesized—nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and all the necessary trace elements. If you’re ill, your medical needs are attended to.”

  “The time station understands all our bodily requirements?”

  “Yes, but the mind is a different matter. We have readers, but not much else to pass the time.”

  “Readers?”

  “For viewing books, operas, films, plays, and the like,” Mae said. “You’ll find them all over the station.”

  “And that’s all the entertainment there is?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Maybe we can learn about the future from these readers.”

  “No, everything in them predates our time,” she said, “just as your epochal journey into the future predated my time.”