The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Nicholas Martin had at last achieved a personality whose ecological norm would put him on a level with Raoul St. Cyr.

  “Nick!” Erika quavered.

  Slowly Martin’s jaw protruded till his lower teeth were hideously visible. Gradually his eyelids dropped until he was peering up out of tiny, wicked sockets. Then, slowly, a perfectly shocking grin broadened Mr. Martin’s mouth.

  “Erika,” he said throatily. “Mine!”

  And with that, he shambled forward, seized the horrified girl in his arms, and bit her on the ear.

  “Oh, Nick,” Erika murmured, closing her eyes. “Why didn’t you ever—no, no, no! Nick! Stop it! The contract release. We’ve got to—Nick, what are you doing?” She snatched at Martin’s departing form, but too late.

  For all his ungainly and unpleasant gait, Martin covered ground fast. Almost instantly he was clambering over Watt’s desk as the most direct route to that startled tycoon. DeeDee looked on, a little surprised. St. Cyr lunged forward.

  “In Mixo-Lydia—” he began. “Ha! So!” He picked up Martin and threw him across the room.

  “Oh, you beast,” Erika cried, and flung herself upon the director, beating at his brawny chest. On second thought, she used her shoes on his shins with more effect. St. Cyr, no gentleman, turned her around, pinioned her arms behind her, and glanced up at Watt’s alarmed cry.

  “Martin! What are you doing?”

  There was reason for his inquiry. Apparently unhurt by St. Cyr’s toss, Martin had hit the floor, rolled over and over like a ball, knocked down a floor-lamp with a crash, and uncurled, with an unpleasant expression on his face. He rose crouching, bandy-legged, his arms swinging low, a snarl curling his lips.

  “You take my mate?” the pithecanthropic Mr. Martin inquired throatily, rapidly losing all touch with the twentieth century. It was a rhetorical question. He picked up the lamp-standard—he did not have to bend to do it—tore off the silk shade as he would have peeled foliage from a tree-limb, and balanced the weapon in his hand. Then he moved forward, carrying the lamp-standard like a spear.

  “I,” said Martin, “kill.”

  He then endeavored, with the most admirable single-heartedness, to carry out his expressed intention. The first thrust of the blunt, improvised spear rammed into St. Cyr’s solar plexus and drove him back against the wall with a booming thud. This seemed to be what Martin wanted. Keeping one end of his spear pressed into the director’s belly, he crouched lower, dug his toes into the rug, and did his very best to drill a hole in St. Cyr.

  “Stop it!” cried Watt, flinging himself into the conflict. Ancient reflexes took over. Martin’s arm shot out. Watt shot off in the opposite direction.

  The lamp broke.

  Martin looked pensively at the pieces, tentatively began to bite one, changed his mind, and looked at St. Cyr instead. The gasping director, mouthing threats, curses and objections, drew himself up, and shook a huge fist at Martin.

  “I,” he announced, “shall kill you with my bare hands. Then I go over to MGM with DeeDee. In Mixo-Lydia—”

  Martin lifted his own fists toward his face. He regarded them. He unclenched them slowly, while a terrible grin spread across his face. And then, with every tooth showing, and with the hungry gleam of a mad tiger in his tiny little eyes, he lifted his gaze to St. Cyr’s throat.

  Mammoth-Slayer was not the son of the Great Hairy One for nothing.

  * * * *

  Martin sprang.

  So did St. Cyr—in another direction, screaming with sudden terror. For, after all, he was only a medievalist. The feudal man is far more civilized than the so-called man of Mammoth-Slayer’s primordially direct era, and as a man recoils from a small but murderous wildcat, so St. Cyr fled in sudden civilized horror from an attacker who was, literally, afraid of nothing.

  He sprang through the window and, shrieking, vanished into the night.

  Martin was taken by surprise. When Mammoth-Slayer leaped at an enemy, the enemy leaped at him too, and so Martin’s head slammed against the wall with disconcerting force. Dimly he heard diminishing, terrified cries. Laboriously he crawled to his feet and set back against the wall, snarling, quite ready.…

  “Nick!” Erika’s voice called. “Nick, it’s me! Stop it! Stop it! DeeDee—”

  “Ugh?” Martin said thickly, shaking his head. “Kill.” He growled softly, blinking through red-rimmed little eyes at the scene around him. It swam back slowly into focus. Erika was struggling with DeeDee near the window.

  “You let me go,” DeeDee cried. “Where Raoul goes, I go.”

  “DeeDee!” pleaded a new voice. Martin glanced aside to see Tolliver Watt crumpled in a corner, a crushed lamp-shade half obscuring his face.

  With a violent effort Martin straightened up. Walking upright seemed unnatural, somehow, but it helped submerge Mammoth-Slayer’s worst instincts. Besides, with St. Cyr gone, stresses were slowly subsiding, so that Mammoth-Slayer’s dominant trait was receding from the active foreground.

  Martin tested his tongue cautiously, relieved to find he was still capable of human speech.

  “Uh,” he said. “Arrgh…ah. Watt.”

  Watt blinked at him anxiously through the lamp-shade.

  “Urgh…Ur—release,” Martin said, with a violent effort. “Contract release. Gimme.”

  Watt had courage. He crawled to his feet, removing the lamp-shade.

  “Contract release!” he snapped. “You madman! Don’t you realize what you’ve done? DeeDee’s walking out on me. DeeDee, don’t go. We will bring Raoul back—”

  “Raoul told me to quit if he quit,” DeeDee said stubbornly.

  “You don’t have to do what St. Cyr tells you,” Erika said, hanging onto the struggling star.

  “Don’t I?” DeeDee asked, astonished. “Yes, I do. I always have.”

  “DeeDee,” Watt said frantically, “I’ll give you the finest contract on earth—a ten-year contract—look, here it is.” He tore out a well-creased document. “All you have to do is sign, and you can have anything you want. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “Oh, yes,” DeeDee said. “But Raoul wouldn’t like it.” She broke free from Erika.

  “Martin!” Watt told the playwright frantically, “Get St. Cyr back. Apologize to him. I don’t care how, but get him back! If you don’t, I—I’ll never give you your release.”

  Martin was observed to slump slightly—perhaps with hopelessness. Then, again, perhaps not.

  “I’m sorry,” DeeDee said. “I liked working for you, Tolliver. But I have to do what Raoul says, of course.” And she moved toward the window.

  Martin had slumped further down, till his knuckles quite brushed the rug. His angry little eyes, glowing with baffled rage, were fixed on DeeDee. Slowly his lips peeled back, exposing every tooth in his head.

  “You,” he said, in an ominous growl.

  DeeDee paused, but only briefly.

  Then the enraged roar of a wild beast reverberated through the room. “You come back!” bellowed the infuriated Mammoth-Slayer, and with one agile bound sprang to the window, seized DeeDee and slung her under one arm. Wheeling, he glared jealously at the shrinking Watt and reached for Erika. In a trice he had the struggling forms of both girls captive, one under each arm. His wicked little eyes glanced from one to another. Then, playing no favorites, he bit each quickly on the ear.

  “Nick!” Erika cried. “How dare you!”

  “Mine,” Mammoth-Slayer informed her hoarsely.

  “You bet I am,” Erika said, “but that works both ways. Put down that hussy you’ve got under your other arm.”

  Mammoth-Slayer was observed to eye DeeDee doubtfully.

  “Well,” Erika said tartly, “make up your mind.”

  “Both,” said the uncivilized playwright. “Yes.”

  “No!” Erika said.

  “Yes,” DeeDee breathed in an entirely new tone. Limp as a dishrag, the lovely creature hung from Martin’s arm and gazed up at her captor with idolatrous admi
ration.

  “Oh, you hussy,” Erika said. “What about St. Cyr?”

  “Him,” DeeDee said scornfully. “He hasn’t got a thing, the sissy. I’ll never look at him again.” She turned her adoring gaze back to Martin.

  “Pah,” the latter grunted, tossing DeeDee into Watt’s lap. “Yours. Keep her.” He grinned approvingly at Erika. “Strong she. Better.”

  Both Watt and DeeDee remained motionless, staring at Martin.

  “You,” he said, thrusting a finger at DeeDee. “You stay with him. Ha?” He indicated Watt.

  DeeDee nodded in slavish adoration.

  “You sign contract?”

  Nod.

  Martin looked significantly into Watt’s eyes. He extended his hand.

  “The contract release,” Erika explained, upside-down. “Give it to him before he pulls your head off.”

  Slowly Watt pulled the contract release from his pocket and held it out. But Martin was already shambling toward the window. Erika reached back hastily and snatched the document.

  “That was a wonderful act,” she told Nick, as they reached the street. “Put me down now. We can find a cab some—”

  “No act,” Martin growled. “Real. Till tomorrow. After that—” He shrugged. “But tonight, Mammoth-Slayer.” He attempted to climb a palm tree, changed his mind, and shambled on, carrying the now pensive Erika. But it was not until a police car drove past that Erika screamed.…

  * * * *

  “I’ll bail you out tomorrow,” Erika told Mammoth-Slayer, struggling between two large patrolmen.

  Her words were drowned in an infuriated bellow.

  Thereafter events blurred, to solidify again for the irate Mammoth-Slayer only when he was thrown in a cell, where he picked himself up with a threatening roar. “I kill!” he announced, seizing the bars.

  “Arrrgh!”

  “Two in one night,” said a bored voice, moving away outside. “Both in Bel-Air, too. Think they’re hopped up? We couldn’t get a coherent story out of either one.”

  The bars shook. An annoyed voice from one of the bunks said to shut up, and added that there had been already enough trouble from nincompoops without—here it paused, hesitated, and uttered a shrill, sharp, piercing cry.

  Silence prevailed, momentarily, in the cell-block as mammoth-slayer, son of the great hairy one, turned slowly to face Raoul St. Cyr.

  THE MAN FROM TIME, by Frank Belknap Long

  Daring Moonson, he was called. It was a proud name, a brave name. But what good was a name that rang out like a summons to battle if the man who bore it could not repeat it aloud without fear?

  Moonson had tried telling himself that a man could conquer fear if he could but once summon the courage to laugh at all the sins that ever were, and do as he damned well pleased. An ancient phrase that—damned well. It went clear back to the Elizabethan Age, and Moonson had tried picturing himself as an Elizabethan man with a ruffle at his throat and a rapier in his clasp, brawling lustily in a tavern.

  In the Elizabethan Age men had thrown caution to the winds and lived with their whole bodies, not just with their minds alone. Perhaps that was why, even in the year 3689, defiant names still cropped up. Names like Independence Forest and Man, Live Forever!

  It was not easy for a man to live up to a name like Man, Live Forever! But Moonson was ready to believe that it could be done. There was something in human nature which made a man abandon caution and try to live up to the claims made for him by his parents at birth.

  It must be bad, Moonson thought. It must be bad if I can’t control the trembling of my hands, the pounding of the blood at my temples. I am like a child shut up alone in the dark, hearing rats scurrying in a closet thick with cobwebs and the tapping of a blind man’s cane on a deserted street at midnight.

  Tap, tap, tap—nearer and nearer through the darkness. How soon would the rats be swarming out, blood-fanged and wholly vicious? How soon would the cane strike?

  He looked up quickly, his eyes searching the shadows. For almost a month now the gleaming intricacies of the machine had given him a complete sense of security. As a scholar traveling in Time he had been accepted by his fellow travelers as a man of great courage and firm determination.

  For twenty-seven days a smooth surface of shining metal had walled him in, enabling him to grapple with reality on a completely adult level. For twenty-seven days he had gone pridefully back through Time, taking creative delight in watching the heritage of the human race unroll before him like a cineramoscope under glass.

  Watching a green land in the dying golden sunlight of an age lost to human memory could restore a man’s strength of purpose by its serenity alone. But even an age of war and pestilence could be observed without torment from behind the protective shields of the Time Machine. Danger, accidents, catastrophe could not touch him personally.

  To watch death and destruction as a spectator in a traveling Time Observatory was like watching a cobra poised to strike from behind a pane of crystal-bright glass in a zoological garden.

  You got a tremendous thrill in just thinking: How dreadful if the glass should not be there! How lucky I am to be alive, with a thing so deadly and monstrous within striking distance of me!

  For twenty-seven days now he had traveled without fear. Sometimes the Time Observatory would pinpoint an age and hover over it while his companions took painstaking historical notes. Sometimes it would retrace its course and circle back. A new age would come under scrutiny and more notes would be taken.

  But a horrible thing that had happened to him, had awakened in him a lonely nightmare of restlessness. Childhood fears he had thought buried forever had returned to plague him and he had developed a sudden, terrible dread of the fogginess outside the moving viewpane, the way the machine itself wheeled and dipped when an ancient ruin came sweeping toward him. He had developed a fear of Time.

  There was no escape from that Time Fear. The instant it came upon him he lost all interest in historical research. 1069, 732, 2407, 1928—every date terrified him. The Black Plague in London, the Great Fire, the Spanish Armada in flames off the coast of a bleak little island that would soon mold the destiny of half the world—how meaningless it all seemed in the shadow of his fear!

  Had the human race really advanced so much? Time had been conquered but no man was yet wise enough to heal himself if a stark, unreasoning fear took possession of his mind and heart, giving him no peace.

  Moonson lowered his eyes, saw that Rutella was watching him in the manner of a shy woman not wishing to break in too abruptly on the thoughts of a stranger.

  Deep within him he knew that he had become a stranger to his own wife and the realization sharply increased his torment. He stared down at her head against his knee, at her beautiful back and sleek, dark hair. Violet eyes she had, not black as they seemed at first glance but a deep, lustrous violet.

  He remembered suddenly that he was still a young man, with a young man’s ardor surging strong in him. He bent swiftly, kissed her lips and eyes. As he did so her arms tightened about him until he found himself wondering what he could have done to deserve such a woman.

  She had never seemed more precious to him and for an instant he could feel his fear lessening a little. But it came back and was worse than before. It was like an old pain returning at an unexpected moment to chill a man with the sickening reminder that all joy must end.

  His decision to act was made quickly.

  The first step was the most difficult but with a deliberate effort of will he accomplished it to his satisfaction. His secret thoughts he buried beneath a continuous mental preoccupation with the vain and the trivial. It was important to the success of his plan that his companions should suspect nothing.

  The second step was less difficult. The mental block remained firm and he succeeded in carrying on actual preparations for his departure in complete secrecy.

  The third step was the final one and it took him from a large compartment to a small one, from a high-arching
surface of metal to a maze of intricate control mechanisms in a space so narrow that he had to crouch to work with accuracy.

  Swiftly and competently his fingers moved over instruments of science which only a completely sane man would have known how to manipulate. It was an acid test of his sanity and he knew as he worked that his reasoning faculties at least had suffered no impairment.

  Beneath his hands the Time Observatory’s controls were solid shafts of metal. But suddenly as he worked he found himself thinking of them as fluid abstractions, each a milestone in man’s long progress from the jungle to the stars. Time and space—mass and velocity.

  How incredible that it had taken centuries of patient technological research to master in a practical way the tremendous implications of Einstein’s original postulate. Warp space with a rapidly moving object, move away from the observer with the speed of light—and the whole of human history assumed the firm contours of a landscape in space. Time and space merged and became one. And a man in an intricately-equipped Time Observatory could revisit the past as easily as he could travel across the great curve of the universe to the farthest planet of the farthest star.

  The controls were suddenly firm in his hands. He knew precisely what adjustments to make. The iris of the human eye dilates and contracts with every shift of illumination, and the Time Observatory had an iris too. That iris could be opened without endangering his companions in the least—if he took care to widen it just enough to accommodate only one sturdily built man of medium height.

  Sweat came out in great beads on his forehead as he worked. The light that came through the machine’s iris was faint at first, the barest glimmer of white in deep darkness. But as he adjusted controls the light grew brighter and brighter, beating in upon him until he was kneeling in a circle of radiance that dazzled his eyes and set his heart to pounding.

  I’ve lived too long with fear, he thought. I’ve lived like a man imprisoned, shut away from the sunlight. Now, when freedom beckons, I must act quickly or I shall be powerless to act at all.