by Anthology
“Be not afraid. I am no creature of superstition,” Racoczky laughed. “I cast a shadow, just like you. Once I was even human. True, in the first few centuries we did feed on your kind. We preyed on them wherever we could. But we were many and you were few. Out of necessity, we learned to manufacture what we required. Soon afterwards, all those who refused the Treatment gladly accepted it. That was how humanity perished.”
Matheson’s mind reeled. All the horrors he had witnessed, all the endlessly futile wars, all had been for nothing. Humanity had perished. It had not died out. It had simply been transformed—into what? Into monsters?
“You are undoubtedly in shock,” Racoczky said. “But in time you will accept the destiny of humankind is to shed what is human. Stay with me awhile. You have travelled so far. Now let us watch the end of the universe. We are a speck in God’s eye, about to witness the destruction of his creation. And I for one am happy to see it end. I have found there are no more mysteries to explore. I long for change. Now, this is that change. Watch!”
Matheson stared into the view screen.
Two massive black holes, simply fuzzy vortices of light within the blackness of collapsed stars, began to churn more fiercely. As he watched, the lightless chasms converged into one yawning vortex of darkness. Several small constellations of stars erupted at the rim of the scything hole. Fear seized his stomach. This was it—the final supermassive vortex into which all other galaxies had been sucked.
“Behold!” Saint-Germain announced. “Charybdis!”
The rim of the black hole—if it could be called such—suddenly blazed with light. Thousands of star systems imploded under its tremendous gravity. The resulting cosmic windstorm disappeared like celestial confetti into the gaping maw. Matheson watched with awe as the colossal black mass consumed the entire, swirling nebulae. Then even the dust was gone. The black hole swept the last dying sun into itself with a faint glimmer of a nuclear explosion, viewed from hundreds of light years away. All light vanished.
Only a void remained.
The way station lights flickered, reduced to ambient red, presumably in accordance with Racoczky’s telepathic wishes.
“In a few moments, the black hole will collapse upon itself. Then perhaps a new universe will be born like a phoenix from the ashes of the old one,” Racoczky mumbled, dreamlike. “Of course, the explosion might disintegrate us, protected as we are. This new universe will contain a new sort of matter—one totally unprecedented. In any case it will be billions of years before the first life forms evolve, if indeed this universe is capable of supporting any life at all. I have theorized that perhaps there have been many universes with no life of any kind. Those universes simply were—then over countless eons they also vanished without a trace.”
“I can’t believe this is all there is,” Matheson said.
“What more can there be?” Racoczky asked. “My world ended thousands of years after I should have died. Everything became so different. It was no longer the place I had known. And I too am different. I feel things and have thoughts I never would have as a mortal man. Whether I still exist as Racoczky Saint-Germain or as some cursed immortal being, I shall never know. And now, watching it all disappear, and knowing it may never repeat itself, I only feel isolated from every other living thing in the universe.”
He turned back to Matheson, “Except you.”
His hand crept onto Matheson’s shoulder. It was cold and hard. He realized how close he had been standing next to Racoczky in his desire to see more of the end of the universe. Had his immortal thirst truly abated? Was he satisfied with synthetic liquid?
“I envy your mortal span. The urgency it brings. But perhaps this new universe will rekindle my curiosity. For it is all I have now.”
Racoczky’s hand grew tense on his shoulder.
“The rush of energy will destabilize the way station,” he said. “You may not be able to leave for some time, so I urge you to leave now, while you can.”
He gulped. Some time, in Racoczky’s terms could mean forever.
“Do you have a sample of the Treatment I could take back?” he said, impulsively. “I could save unknown numbers of human lives with it.”
Racoczky shook his head. “All things in their own time. In your lifetime, there will be huge developments in medical gerontological treatments. You may even live to see the Treatment itself being used. But I am unwilling to alter what is your future—but which would be my past.”
He turned back to the screen. “I have been thinking. I have made some experiments of my own and I am rather confident I can create new life. I may even populate a few planets and watch them grow.”
“Wait,” Matheson said. He had almost forgotten, in meeting this singularly remarkable being, why he had journeyed this far at all—the whole reason for his many time-traveling forays into the distant future. “I have a wife, children. You must give me the treatment—”
“I can see you are determined,” Racoczky smiled. “Very well. I have a sample here—”
He reached toward another console, which lifted up to reveal a second thin vial of green liquid. Matheson stepped forward.
And with that, the universe ended.
A great pulse of light shot out from the center of darkness where what had been a visible black hole was now a seething, invisible mass of superdense matter. The gravitational vortex had collapsed under the strength of its own inner forces. Now particles collided, creating massive energy waves. The quantum building blocks of all matter imploded—creating new forms—forms beyond the understanding of any physicist—simply because they were creating their own physical dynamic laws even by coming into existence.
The shock tore through the way station. What were formed were not new stars or even galaxies, but something altogether unexpected and different—a new kind of universe—one that took on a shape unknown to anything that had gone before.
Racoczky’s eyes glittered with anticipation as some kind of semi-gaseous cloud rushed toward the ship.
“Please,” he cried out to his host. “I have to know!”
Suddenly Matheson felt himself pushed back toward his ship by the force of Racoczky’s mind. He was powerless to resist as he was lifted off the floor and flung inside. The oculus closed before him.
“No, Racoczky, I want to know!”
Racoczky’s final thought accompanied him inside the orb.
“Live your life as it was meant to be,” he said.
His screams were drowned out by the deafening cacophony of whatever was coming toward them. Would the ships defenses hold? The time capsule rattled around him.
Matheson focused on survival. He strapped himself down as the outer sphere started to spin. Racoczky’s mental powers were obviously working the controls. Again he felt awe for this creature who could so effortlessly pluck thoughts from his mind.
His chair rose into the air as the pod suspended its own gravity. The walls spun faster and faster—
He felt something in the pocket of his jumpsuit. It was the vial Racoczky had given him. The thin soup contained all the power of creation—or all the artificial means to deny it. A final joke, a reprieve for humanity, or a vile temptation?
He held out the vial, his hand suspended over the edge of the chair, just inside the unified field.
What would he do with the contents?
MR. PAUL REVERE AND THE TIME MACHINE
A.W. Bernal
Backward into the past went the Time Swing, and when it returned it had a strange passenger—a man who had to get back to 1775 or America was doomed.
“Lord!” gulped Walter. I found myself unable to reply—I was gaping at it on the floor and making noises like water in the drain. I wasn’t scared; I wasn’t even surprised. I was simply paralyzed. After a while I glanced up at Walter’s sagging features. His eyes were big as light bulbs.
“Well,” I managed, finally, “it works.” I gestured at the floor.
“Yeah,” exhaled Walter mournfully, l
ike the last drink in the bottle. “Yeah . . .”
I stared down at it again, at its funny three-corner hat, at the lacy ruffles around its throat, at the tight white pants with grease spots on them. It was just like a masquerade—only Walter and I both knew it wasn’t any masquerade. That was why Walter’s hair stood out from his head like wires. That was why my heart was going like a punching bag.
It, or rather, he lay motionless on the floor, in all the dirt and scrap metal, his face the color of an uncooked biscuit. But he’d groaned, and so we knew he was alive—a little, anyhow. He had a nice sort of face, leathery from outdoor exposure, and he wore a silly white wig that was slipping off the back of his head along with his triangle hat. I could just glimpse sparse chestnut-colored hair beneath. And he had a little brown wart on the left of his nose, with two long black hairs pluming from it. The nose itself was three shades redder than a firecracker, with an alcoholic lace of tiny blue veins arabesquing through it to form a dainty design. All in all, he was a work of art.
And all this while the machine ticked on behind us, like a huge clock warming up to strike the hour. Walter suddenly seemed to grow aware of the dolorous tick-tick-ticking beside him, and reached out mechanically to shut the thing off. It stopped with a wheeze as he flipped a switch, and began to settle a few inches toward the floor.
I wouldn’t have cared if it had settled right through the floor into the cellar—in fact, I more than half-expected it to. But it didn’t. It just relaxed and stood there.
The man On the floor sighed heavily. Then he wrinkled his carrot nose till the little wart would have crawled right into his eye if it had only been open. But his eye remained clamped shut.
“Well, Walter, he’s yours . . . what are you going to do with him?” I asked at length.
Somewhere in the dim, vasty labyrinth of Walter’s brain, my question set off an alarm and he began to wake—slowly, though. “Yeah,” he muttered, and the words clung to his lips like autumn leaves to an ash heap, “what are we going to do with him?”
“We?” I smiled. “You! Include me out—with bells on!”
“Hank—you can’t!” Walter was getting panicky. “You’re in this with me. You’ve got to help me now—he’s coming to!”
“I know—that’s why I’m going.” But Walter was onto my arm like a drowning man, and after one look at him, I thawed. “Okay, okay, I’ll stick . . . Why don’t we jnck him up?”
“The whiskey, Hank—quick!” cried Walter.
“Who for—us?” I asked, reaching where I knew Walter kept the bottle. I nipped at it myself in transit. “This’ll pick him up,” I husked, passing it to Walter’s trembling hand. “It’ll burn out his vocal cords, but it’ll pick him up.”
“He’s had a bad shock—he needs a bracer,” Walter explained tersely, rooting the bottle in the man’s mouth. Scotch vanished in giant gurgles, then the man’s eyes flicked like little electric sparks. He looked fleetingly at Walter’s worried face, said, “More!” then wrapped his lips around the bottle-neck again.
When the quart flask had been halved, he sighed and relaxed again, flat on the floor.
“He’s all right, now,” sighed Walter, almost happily. “I think he’s just drunk.”
And that was how we brought Paul Revere into the Twentieth Century . . .
Of course, at first we didn’t know it was Paul Revere; that is, we didn’t recognize him by his looks. We hadn’t hoped for such a distinguished catch.
Walter had explained everything to me. He explained and explained every time I went over to his shop with a new part—the only trouble was, he never quite made sense.
You see, I’m a mechanic. Oh, I putter around with electricity some, and I can fix an electric toaster or even a doorbell; but I’m not what you’d strictly call a scientist. Walter is, though, and that’s how come we had the fuss.
Back about two years ago, Walter read a book, and well, he couldn’t see why, if there was a Fourth Dimension, you couldn’t monkey around with it. So he called me over one day and told me he had a machine he wanted me to help him make.
He just told me what he wanted and I fixed it up for him, or if there was no such thing I invented it. Sometimes it wasn’t as simple as it sounds, thinking up ways to bend everyday iron and copper into fool whichigigs that would fit in the way Walter said they ought to. But he paid for all of it, and I did it.
Walter said things about no single instant of Time ever being lost. Time was really “an eternally conceived Present along which one focussing instant travels endlessly at uniform speed in one direction.” Like a big road ready for use in all sections at once. One end of the road is the Past. One is the Future. The instant Now is like an automobile on this big road of Time. It started at one end, the Past, and is heading for the other—the Future—and wherever it happens to be, why, that’s the Present.
Get it? Neither do I, but that’s what Walter always kept saying to me.
But to get on with things, the only reason Time never got balled up was because some mysterious force kept the car of Now headed always in the same direction—Futureward—and once it passed a point it never came back again, never re-focused on it.
Well, Walter figured that if he could only build a machine which would reach into the Fourth Dimension, he could then reach Postward along this roadway of Time. And if he could do that, then there was no reason why he couldn’t send things into other times or bring things into our time.
This machine which Walter designed and I helped build took quite a while, and when we had it done, it would hardly stay together.
Well, the machine looked something like a cross between an oil well, a porch swing, and a Grandfather’s clock, if you get what I mean. When Walter started the motor, the wheels and the seat would start swinging back and forth, and when it began to go fast enough, it would sort of blur and disappear.
At this point it was, according to Walter, “shifting gears” and revolving its direction into the Fourth Dimension. After a moment of this shifting, it would suddenly whirl into sight again and start slowing down, bringing to us whatever it had caught from the Time Walter had sent it to.
For some reason, it always went into reverse; the Future was somehow untouchable—and that’s something that never bothered me a bit, even though it drove Walter nearly wild.
We kept trying it out, until one night the machine took my straw hat and brought back a bird instead; but I couldn’t wear a sparrow, and I told Walter so. But he just kept gawking at the bird, watching it fly around, till it finally flew out of the window. “It’s alive,” he kept yelling. “Alive!”
That same night Walter warned me not to say a word to a soul, but to come back again the next night and we’d try for a real catch. Real catch! Wow!
So here he was on the floor of Walter’s house, on the outskirts of Boston, snoring away as though he were home in his own century. As I started to say once before, we didn’t know he was Paul Revere then: to us he was just somebody with a pigtailed wig that didn’t fit him and a pair of dirty breeches a size-and-a-half too tight.
We scuttled him up onto the table, where his big boots smashed a packet of vacuum tubes I’d set there just to make sure they would be safe. After a while then this thing we’d gotten sat up blinking stupidly from Walter to me and back again. The liquor Walter had funnelled into him was beginning to take full effect with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
He grunted, fumbling in a pocket for a watch bigger than my alarm clock. “ ’Sblood! What is the hour, good gennelmen? I’ve work to do this night.”
“How—how do you feel after your—trip?” asked Walter.
The fellow was squinting past the raven-tressed wart on his nose to study the face of his Big Ben. He was muttering to himself.
“Barkeep! Barkeep! A mug of ale and I must be off. Haste, prithee!” He fought himself into a sitting position, and belched manfully.
Walter tried to break it gently, like a salesman with his foot in the door. “
Ah, Mr.—ah—what is the name, sir?” he limped, stalling.
“Name?” the aroma of good old English ale he sent my way was thick enough to bear a foam. “My name? ’S Paul—Paul Revere, by my powdered, pasted periwinkle! Name, thrice-blessed name of a gennelman and a—a gennelman, sirs.” He smacked his lips. “And now, my ale, barkeep! Thunderation, but I must go!” He cocked one eye at us and belched again. “A thousand pardons,” he mumbled, “a thousand pardons. Barkeep—saddle my good mount Brondelbuss, for I must be off and away! I tell thee there’s riding to be done this night!”
“I beg your pardon, Mr.—Mr. Revere,” Walter had begun—and then it hit him like a truck. “Ride? Revere? Paul Revere? YOU?” He nearly stabbed him dead with that long bony finger of his. “Lord, Hank, it’s—PAUL REVERE!”
“S-s-sh!” Paul Revere clapped a big hand over his loose lips, wildly waving the other at Walter. “S-s-sh—don’t shout m’ name. I’m on serious business for the colonies—secret business!”
“For Pete’s sake,” I yelped, “he’s a G-Man of yesterday!”
But he ignored me and Walter jabbed me angrily in the ribs.
“Prithee,” rambled on the man out of the Past, “prithee, keep m’ name quiet, or you’ll give me away to these common tipplers here.” Then, picking up my tool-kit from the table and trying to peer in it, he roared: “By my saddle-girth! Is my tankard empty yet?”
I saw my chance. “S’cuse me, Mr. Revere,” I put in, handing him his wig and hat, which had fallen off his head when we’d rolled him’ onto the table, “but here’s your wig, sir. And maybe you can tell me something of a brand new straw hat, size—”
“Hank!” Walter flagged me down, as Revere put his wig on backward so that its pigtail draggled into his mouth. “It’s Paul Revere himself, don’t you understand? Just think, Hank—the 18th Century—one hundred and fifty years—and he’s here with us, alive and breathing! Paul Revere out of history—right here with you and me!”
“ ’S’lie!” thundered Revere, banging my tool kit on the table with a smash. “I don’t come from—from where you said, at all. I live right here in village, an’ my credit should be good for one li’l smidgeon of ale. By my powder horn and candle-snuffer, though—I’ll never come here again unless I get some service! I’ve riding to do this night, I tell thee!”
