by Ray Bradbury
That was all.
The machine just sat there, shining white and saying nothing. Temple touched the keys. They were frozen hard.
He stood up, his eyes spread, and put his last cigarette in his mouth, forgetting to light it. Then he looked around for his hat, found it on his head, and locked himself out of the room quick.
He walked in the park. That was nothing new, walking in the park, but it helped; looking at stars, people and boats on the water. He walked until he got drunk-tired and he wasn’t scared any more. Then he went back.
Without turning on the lights, he undressed and went to bed. An old trick. That way you imagined you were stopping over for a night at the Biltmore.
Suddenly he switched on the lights. Looking across the room dazedly, minus his glasses, he saw the typewriter.
He turned the lights out again, pulled the covers way up over his ears.
“Sorry. Not Harry. Name is Ellen Abbott. Year 2442. Sorry. Not Harry.”
He shivered.
Somebody had kicked him in the head, for no reason. At least that’s how it felt when he woke up the next morning. The room had a disturbed, electric feel to it, as if someone had drifted in, hovered over him, and vanished instantly just before his eyes opened.
The door was locked on the inside.
He saw the typewriter. He sat down again, very slowly.
Stubborn dream, that. It persisted in being real. Yet he had completely forgotten it during sleep, and he didn’t know why he should forget something so dramatically shoved into his life.
Dressing, tidying up the room, he pretended to be interested in everything but the machine. It was a poor job of acting. Stalling as long as he dared, he exited reluctantly to hunt jobs. Pausing outside the door, he listened. Not a sound but his own breathing in his mouth. Then—he remembered. Tonight. Ellen Abbott had said it. Tonight. Same time.
He walked off to find work that didn’t exist.
He must have walked a lot; his feet were swollen. He must have talked to dozens of people and had dozens of jobs refused him, and somewhere along the line he boarded a bus, because, that evening coming home he found an unused transfer in his hand. He found a dollar bill, too. Borrowed, he didn’t know where, and he didn’t care. Getting to his room fast was the main thing.
It was the first time he had ever rushed to that room or any room. Funny. The apartment house door swung ahead of him. He walked up rickety steps with his head down. Halfway up, he stopped. His face came up, jerking, all white afire and alert.
There it was. A faint singing of chimes. And beating as quickly as his heart, the sounds that were the typewriter keys.
It had been years since he had tried leaping steps three at a try. He learned how to do it all over again.
Closing the door he stiffened when he saw it. Like a man deep under clear thick water he walked across the room in dreamy slow motion. Clicking off somewhere, the typewriter sounded, but it was right in front of him:
“Hello—Steve Temple…!”
He held himself in. Fingers twitching indecisively on the keys, he shut his jaw, hard. Then he let himself go and it was easy.
“Hello, Ellen,” he wrote. “HELLO, ELLEN!”
In the first few quiet moments after contact was sealed, Temple reluctantly sketched in his life for her. Cramped, grey years dragging on like men slogging it out in a chain gang. Nights of looking at a door, waiting for a knock, for someone to come and be his friend. And nobody ever there but the landlord whining about his rent. His only friends lived between book-covers: a few of them had grown out of his typewriter before it was pawned. That was all.
Then Ellen Abbott spoke:
“If you’re going to help me, and you are the only one I depend on now to mold the future, Steve Temple, you deserve a complete explanation. My father was Professor Abbott. You’ve heard of him, of course. No, how blind of me. How would you know him; you’ve been dead five hundred years—”
Steve swallowed nervously. “I feel quite alive, thanks. Continue.”
Ellen Abbott went on:
“It’s a paradox. I’m unborn to you, and therefore unbelievable. And you’re dead and buried five centuries ago, and yet the whole future of the world revolves about we two impossibilities, and especially about you if you agree to act in our behalf.
“Steve Temple, you will have to believe what I say. I can’t expect instantaneously blind obedience, but there are only three days more for you to decide and act and if you refuse at the last moment, all my talking will be for nothing when I could have been pleading with someone else in your age. I must convince you of my utter sincerity. There’s a job for you to do—”
Temple saw the next few words and everything got dark and uneven inside himself. The small room got cold, and Steve didn’t move, he sat and stared at the words as they appeared:
“You have a job to do for me—no, not for me, but for all of us in the future.”
The next thing that came into focus was a cup of coffee in his right hand. Contracting his throat muscles, coffee scalded his stomach. The Greek was there. You could smell him, fat and greasy behind his beanery counter. Something white flashed: the Greek’s teeth.
“Hello, Greek.” Temple’s lips barely moved. “How did I get here?”
“You walked in, just like you done every night last three years. You oughta take it easy. You look like a ghost. What’s up?”
“Same thing. Is it foggy tonight?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Me?” Steve chafed hands that were rimmed with cool moisture. “Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure, it’s foggy. I forgot.” He drew a trembling breath, and it felt like the first one he had had in hours. “Funny thing, Greek—five hundred years from now they’ll do away with fog….”
“Chamber of Commerce pass a law?”
“Weather control,” said Steve. Control. He thought the word over and over again, and added. “Yeah. All kinds of control. A dictatorship, maybe.”
“You think so?” Pursing his brows, the Greek leaned heavy on the counter. “You think, the way things work now, we get into one?”
“Five hundred years from now,” said Steve.
“Hell. Who cares? Five hundred years!”
“Who cares? Maybe I do, Greek. I don’t know yet.” Steve stirred his coffee for a while. “Look, Greek, if you’d known Hitler for what he’d be forty years ago, and you’d had the chance, would you have killed him?”
“Sure! Who wouldn’t? Look what a mess he made?”
“Think. Think about all the guys who grew up with Hitler, though. Some one of them must have guessed what he’d be. Did they do anything about it? No.”
The Greek shrugged heavily.
Temple slumped over his coffee for a moment. “How about me, Greek? Would you kill me, knowing I’d be tomorrow’s tyrant?”
The Greek made laughter. “You—another Hitler?”
Temple smiled twistedly. “See! You don’t believe I could endanger the world. That’s how Hitler got away with it. Because he was a little guy long before he was a big guy, and nobody pays any attention to the little guys.”
“Hitler was different.”
“Was he?” Steve tightened up. “A paperhanger? Different? That’s funny. Nobody recognizes a murderer until it’s too late.”
“Okay. Suppose I bump you off,” offered the Greek. “So, how do I prove you’re the next dictator. You’re dead, so you’re no dictator. It don’t work out. They toss me in the clink.”
“That’s the whole thing.” Temple was looking at a picture hung on the wall. A campaign advertisement of a healthy, pink faced man with crisp white hair and eyes that were blue and open. Under the picture was a label: J. H. McCracken for Congress, 13th District.
Things got black. Trembling violently, Temple
rose from his seat, looked about wildly, passed his hands in front of his eyes and yelled it: “Greek! What’s the date? Quick! I forget! I keep forgetting important things!”
It sounded as if the Greek was in an echo chamber. “Five o’clock in the morning. January 11th. Ten cents, please.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah.” Steve stood there, swaying, and still staring at that picture. The one of J. H. McCracken, electee to Congress. “I’ve still got time, then. Three days before they kill Ellen—”
The Greek said, “Huh?” and Steve said, “Nothing,” and he laid out two nickels on the counter. A moment later he faced the door of the beanery, opening it, and somewhere back a million miles the Greek was talking, “You going so soon?” and Steve replied, “I guess so.” And then he said, “Greek…?”
“Yeah?”
“Ever have a million nightmares and wake up afraid and wound tight in the dark, and then go back to sleep and have one of those dreams that are high and swift and beautiful and shine like stars? It’s good, Greek. It’s a change. You forget all the nightmares for a while. You wake up alive for the first days in years. That’s what happened to me, Greek….”
The door opened under his hand, the fog came in cold and salty against the warm food-smell. He thought about things and got scared he would forget things—Ellen and the machine and the future. He must not forget. Ever. There, on the wall, hung J. H. McCracken’s picture. Now, take the M and the c off the last name and spell what’s left with a K. The guy looked decent. He looked like he loved his wife and kids.
Like it or not, it was a fact. J. H. McCracken was one of the men he had to kill! He had to remember that.
He remembered something else. The first, the unconsciously ironic words that he had typed the night before on the machine:
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of—”
The future! Steve Temple walked outside and shut the door in the Greek’s puzzled face. Just like that.
The fog went away after awhile, taking the darkness with it, and pretty soon it was high noon.
Threading into the open rolling green of Griffith hills a bus carried Steve Temple to the warm open fresh places described in the vivid tongue of Ellen Abbott.
He walked alone. Up ahead, where the years mellowed down into a haze with distance, there would be people here, moving and speaking and living in the palatial structure of a Dictator. Buildings would soar up like silver spears hurled and frozen. There would be music, coming soft and sweet from the hidden radio sources in trees and on hills and in coves. And across the sky airships would drift like flecks of dream stuff.
Most of all, five hundred years from now—Temple climbed a high hill and stood looking at the calm quiet, closing his eyes—on this exact spot a woman named Abbott would be held in the uppermost tier of a crystalline palace. Crimson keys would whisper under her fingers and her message would vibrate through five centuries—to him.
The future was so real, he put out a hand, almost touching it. Wind rattled typewriter paper in his grasp, a scroll of dialogue twisted from the machine during the midnight hours.
In the midst of that future’s bright fabric, the black liquid threat of Kraken spread, staining. Kraken, who was the fourth of a dynasty, the pallid, soft-faced man who held the world in two fists and wouldn’t let it go.
Steve rubbed his jaw. Here he was hating a guy he would never meet.
He could only meet him indirectly. Hell. It was a fantastic sort of thing. Waging a war against a man, fighting across all those years. Who’d have thought a little guy like him would ever be given the chance to play hero to the world?
Ellen said a lot on paper. Steve read it over:
“Father and I sweated on the dimensional method as the only force powerful enough to uproot Kraken’s rigid foundation. Tracing history back to its most probable point, the Crisis where it would be easiest for the elimination of his ancestors, was our job. Kraken passed laws forbidding Time research, fearing it for what it was. He found out what my father was doing. On the day of my father’s murder, I was captured and held. But the work was already done. I brought my ‘typewriter’ with me to the cell, supposedly to write my last day ‘memoirs.’”
Here, Steve had interjected: “Why a typewriter?” and she gave the answer:
“Father wanted to go back to The Crisis and be sure the assassinations were done correctly. Guinea pig experiments resulted—well—rather unpleasantly. Some guinea pigs came back inside out. We don’t know why. They just did. Not all of them; some came back incomplete, minus heads, lacking bodies, and some never returned. We couldn’t risk my Father on the job. Time ‘travel’ was impossible. Someone in the Past had to undertake the job, unquestioningly, without pay—”
“A guy by the name of Temple?”
“Yes. If he can, and if he will and if he is fully convinced that the future depends on it. Are you convinced, Steve?”
“I don’t know. I think I am, but—”
“We tried radio, Steve. Speaking directly, how much easier it would be convincing you. But the fourth dimension destroys radio waves. That was eliminated. Metal is more stolid than flesh or radio-wave, and out of that fact the typewriter came, strong, hard and welded of special alloys; the very last method we could use, the very best, and we’ve finally pushed through to you and time is shorter for all of us—”
Steve knew the rest of it by heart. This machine was a dimensional remanifestation of hers, self-energized and compact. More about Kraken. The slaughter of innocent people, the slavery of billions. And the pages ending with:
“You can make the dead to walk, Steve. You can resurrect my father, kill Kraken and free me from prison. All this you can do. I must go now. Tomorrow night again….”
Steve looked up from the folded typed papers, looked up at the sky where there should have been a tangible dictator’s palace and Ellen in the top of it.
Instead, he saw nothing but clouds.
“—make the dead to walk.”
He hitchhiked back to his room.
Make the dead to walk. Yes. Slay Kraken and automatically another Probable world would become concrete. The people he would have slain would live. Ellen’s father—he, too, would not be assassinated.
The worlds of probable ifs. IF he sat looking at the typewriter, not touching it, for the rest of the week, Ellen Abbott would be slain. If he killed McCracken she would live.
There were a lot of ifs in life. A lot of things he could do if he so chose. He could go to New York or Chicago or Seattle. He had a choice. He could eat or starve in those cities. He had a choice. He could commit murder. Or robbery. Or kill himself. Choice. A lot of ifs. Each one leading to a different life, a different existence than the others, once chosen.
So Ellen and Kraken weren’t improbable. She lived in the most Probable if-world. She would continue living in it and be executed Friday night if he didn’t stop it. If. If. If.
If he had the nerve. IF he was successful. If someone didn’t stop him. If he lived that long. Tomorrow’s world was a honey-comb of probabilities, waiting to be filled with reality, with definite, decided actions.
That evening Ellen and he talked about music and painting. He learned of her passionate regard for Beethoven, Debussey, Chopin, Gliere, and someone named Mourdene born in 1987. Her favorite literature was the product of Dickens, Chaucer, Christopher Morley….
They didn’t even mention a man by the name of McCracken. Or another, named Kraken.
Through it all, Temple didn’t have a body or a voice or anything but fire and warmth around him. His room was transformed with some touch, some essence of her yet unborn world. It was like sunlight pouring in through high, cathedral windows, washing away with clean light all the dingy world of 1967. You can’t be lonely with sun on your face and inside you and your fingers working in unison on a ma
chine with someone named Ellen Abbott, talking about sociology and psychology, literature, semantics and so many other important things.
“All the details must be clear, Steve. If you will believe in my world as it is and as it will become after you change it, you must know everything. I didn’t expect you to learn or make up your mind immediately. That would be against every known rule of logic. I gambled on you——”
When midnight came they were still bursting back and forth with a tide of information. Fashions, religions, beliefs.
And even—love.
“Very sorry,” wrote Ellen, “that there was never time for love. I was so busy so many years, running from city to city, working, encouraging father. At the time, he was my one devotion. Very sorry. If only there were time——”
“There’ll be time,” retorted Steve quietly. “If what you say about Probable futures is sound theory, then there’ll be plenty. More than you can use. I’ll see to it.”
“And—if you should fail?”
He didn’t want to think about it at all—not at all.
* * * *
There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. In the middle of it, Steve heard his heart pulsing at the base of his throat. He didn’t remember writing it; his hands only moved a few times, and there it was:
“I—I’d like to see you, Ellen. Just once.”
More silence. The silence lasted so long that he was afraid she would never speak again. But, she did.
“You’re a fine man, Steve Temple. Time changes little in the way of emotion. Look. There’s a weak energy field encompassing this machine. Press your fingers down, bend near the machine and concentrate. Maybe—for an instant—our images may become en rapport. Press close, Steve….”
Steve obeyed instantly, something in his grey, blank eyes that had never been there before. Something warm. His lips went back from his teeth, tight with expectancy.
