The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  You live out your life alone. Adam without Eve in paleo-Eden. Robinson Crusoe of the dawn.

  Alone with your laptop.

  Best-case scenario, Ed Morris. You walk into camp just around dinnertime tonight, ragged and emaciated after an epic trek, and tired of subsisting on moss and invertebrates, but alive, whole, and proud of yourself.

  Not-as-good scenario, at least not as good for you, but it’d let everybody give you your due and let me be done with you. We find the cairn you built with the biggest rocks you could move. Inside the cairn, we find your laptop. The seals’re intact, the circuitry isn’t corroded. We can read the message you left for us . . .

  Lot of work for a dying man.

  Okay. First, you figure out how to survive. Then you build a cairn. You wander around building cairns all over the place, increasing the chances we’ll find at least one of them.

  Leveritt went quickly to her tent. She hung a canteen from her belt, put a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head, and started walking toward the hills. The wet ground crunched underfoot.

  The levelness of the flatland was an illusion; the ground was all barely perceptible slopes, falling, rising, like the bosom of a calm sea. When she could no longer see the camp, she planted her fists on her hips and stood looking around at the rocky litter and thought, Now what?

  Take stock, she told herself.

  I’ve eaten, I’m not lost, my life isn’t at stake here. None of which Ed Morris could say. I’m not confused and scared, either, and I haven’t been injured. Besides not having eaten for ten, twelve hours before the jump, he didn’t look like he had a lot of body fat to live off. On the plus side, he was a mountain climber and a skydiver, in good shape and not a physical coward.

  How long would it have taken him to get over the confusion and fright? Give him the benefit of the doubt. A career in accountancy implies a well-ordered mind.

  How much more time would’ve passed before it occurred to him to build a cairn? Then he’d have had to pick a site where a cairn would have a chance of being found, where it wouldn’t get washed away, where there was an ample supply of portable rock. If he was back toward the hills, he’d have found the streambeds full of smooth stones of a particularly useful size. Out here, he’d just have had to make do with what’s at hand.

  How much rock could he have moved before his strength gave out?

  Leveritt picked up a grapefruit-sized chunk of limestone, carried it a dozen feet, and set it down next to a slightly larger chunk. She worked her way around and outward from the two, gathering the bigger stones, carrying them back. After laboring steadily for the better part of two hours, she was soaked with perspiration, her arms, back, and legs ached, and she had erected an indefinite sort of pyramid approximately three feet high. Increasingly, she had expended time and energy locating suitable stones at ever-greater distances from the cairn and lugging them over to it. She squatted to survey her handiwork.

  Ed Morris, she told herself, wouldn’t have stopped working at this point, because he didn’t have a camp to return to when he got tired. Still, it’s a respectable start, stable, obviously the work of human hands.

  She rose and walked in the direction of the camp. She paused once to look back and wonder. How long before it tumbles down?

  No one in camp seemed to have noticed her absence. Typical, she thought. She discovered, however, that she could not maintain a sour mood for very long. She and Holmes worked together for an hour after dark, and then she retired to her tent and, soon, to her cot. Despite the mugginess of the evening, she had no trouble falling asleep.

  For the next two days, work thoroughly involved her. On the afternoon of the third day, she returned to the cairn. She started to add to it, decided, No, moved off a hundred yards, and built a second cairn. Thereafter, she spent most of such free daylit time as she had piling up stones. She never returned to any site.

  Now her absences did attract notice. Holmes trailed her past two abandoned cairns to her latest site. She answered his questions with monosyllables or shrugs or ignored the questions altogether, keeping on the move the whole while, finding, prying up, carrying, setting down stones. She refused his offer to help. Finally, he said, quite good-naturedly, “You need a hobby, Bonnie.”

  “This is my hobby, Mike.” She wished aloud that he would go away, and he did.

  That evening, over a dinner that tasted better than dinner usually did, Gilzow asked her what she was doing, and Leveritt replied, “Pursuing mental health.” Later, she was almost unable to keep herself from laughing at one of Holmes’s stupid jokes.

  Two weeks and seven cairns after she had begun, as she lay on the edge of sleep, she realized with a start that she had not thought about Ed Morris all that day.

  Four days later, when she had returned from building her eighth and last cairn, she asked around for a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Nobody had one. Gilzow offered her Emma, by Jane Austen. “Close enough,” Leveritt said.

  A month passed.

  The supply boat arrived three days ahead of schedule. Everyone turned out to carry boxes; the first people to reach the boat yelled to those following, “Brinkman’s here!” The big man, who had been downriver for ten weeks, stood in the bow, waving his shapeless hat. It transpired that the loud, sincere welcome was not entirely for him. He had brought a mixed case of liquor.

  When the supplies had been unloaded and the camp had settled down for a round or two of good stiff drinks, Brinkman sought out Leveritt and asked her to walk with him along the bluff. They had scarcely put the camp out of earshot when he heaved a great sigh, his ebullient humor fell away from him like a cloak, and he suddenly looked tired and pale under his tan and more solemn than she could recall having seen him.

  “I really came all the way up here,” he said, “to tell you this personally. Two days ago, they dug something out of the marsh down by the main camp. It was one of the – part of one of the gurneys they use in the jump station.”

  “Ed Morris,” Leveritt said bleakly. She had not said the name aloud since her conversation with Michael Diehl. Now, as though invoked by her speaking it, a humid wind swept up the valley, bearing a faint fetid breath of the estuary.

  Brinkman said, “A Navy security officer named Hales told me about it.”

  “More surprises. I’d’ve thought he’d be swearing everyone to secrecy.”

  “It was too late for that. Everybody in camp knew it by the time he heard about it. Everybody.”

  “What about Ed Morris himself?”

  “They’re digging around. They haven’t found anything else yet, and God knows if they will. The gurney’s all twisted up like a pretzel, and one end’s melted. God knows what that implies – besides the obvious, terrific heat. The thing was buried in a mud bank. Impacted. A botanist tripped over an exposed part.”

  “How long had it been there?”

  Brinkman shook his head. “They’re still working on that, but even the most conservative guess puts it before the manned phase of the expedition. As to how it got there – there has to be an inquest. You have to be there for it.”

  Leveritt groaned. “I don’t have anything to tell.”

  “So Hales said. But people higher up’re calling the shots. Everything’s got to be official, and you’ve got to be part of it.”

  “I cannot get away from this thing!” Leveritt sat down on a knob of rock and angrily kicked at the ground. “Not from Hales and the Navy, and, most of all, not from Ed Morris. I thought I’d done it, finally worked it out by myself, but—”

  “I’m sorry, Bonnie. You have to go back with me in the morning. I can find work for you to do until this thing’s over.”

  “Making coffee?” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I want to be here, Rob.”

  “I’ve never known you not to be willing to do what you had to do so you could do what you want to do. While you’re there – the San Diego bunch has talked about holding a memorial service. I kind of gather none of them knew
Morris all that well, or liked him, or something. But he is the expedition’s first casualty. Since you were almost the last person to see him, perhaps you could—”

  Leveritt shook her head emphatically. “No.”

  “Bonnie, the man is dead.”

  “I couldn’t eulogize him if my life depended on it. What I know about him wouldn’t fill half a dozen sentences. He talked too fast and dressed like Jungle Jim. He said he liked mountain climbing and sky diving. And I’m very sorry about what happened to him, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Who said it was your fault?” Brinkman knelt beside her and picked at his cuticle. “There has to be one meaningful thing you could say about him.”

  Leveritt sighed. She looked down at the supply boat and imagined herself on it again, sitting, as before, under the white canopy with Brinkman, drinking coffee from a thermos bottle, and glimpsing the pier and the cluster of tents and Quonset huts through the fog. She saw it all as though it were a movie being shown in reverse. She would have to go back and back and back, until she reached a point before Ed Morris had taken over her life, and start anew. This time, she told herself, I will make things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. I will be the hero of my own story.

  She said, “When he found out how nervous I was, he gave me a pep talk. And just before I went through the hole, he gave me a wink of encouragement.”

  “Well, then, if nothing else, you owe him for that wink.” Brinkman could not have spoken more softly and been heard.

  Leveritt closed her eyes and thought of the scene in the jump station, the purposeful technicians, Ed Morris’s face framed by the bars of the railing. She looked helplessly at Brinkman, who said, “What?”

  The humid wind moved up the valley again, and again she smelled the estuary’s attenuated fetor of death and of life coming out of death. She exhaled harshly and said, “Nothing.” She had meant to say that she could not recall the color of Ed Morris’s eyes. “Never mind. I’ll think of something.” The wind passed across the rocky plain, toward the ancient crumbled hills and beyond.

  SCREAM QUIETLY

  Sheila Crosby

  Time travel does not have to involve huge time spans as the following story, set during the Victorian period, demonstrates. It also introduces us to the crucial question that if time travel is possible and is eventually perfected then surely we would have been visited at some time by people from the future.

  Sheila Crosby is a British astronomer long resident in the Canary Islands. She has to date written only a handful of short stories, mostly for small press magazines.

  Oaklands,

  Cathedral Rise,

  Lincolnshire, England

  7th July, 1849

  My Dearest Joanne,

  Sweet sister, my husband grows more violent. Little Julian greatly admired the wooden horse you sent for his first birthday, and he gave me a wonderful present, by taking his first steps! Naturally I was delighted, but then he tripped, fell, and wept a little. I thought them very few tears for the lump on his head, but in an instant George charged upstairs to us. He knocked Julian out of my arms entirely, roaring that a man had a right to peace in his own home. And does Julian have no right to peace in his house? I will not say “home”; this has never been a home to either of us. Of course, Julian screamed (which at the time I believed to be largely from terror) and George picked him up by one arm and flung him into a wardrobe, locking the door and pocketing the key. Julian was abruptly silent, which terrified me.

  Naturally I protested.

  George pushed his face within an inch of mine and screamed, “I will not have my son mollycoddled like a baby!”

  I replied, “But he is twelve months old. It is natural that he should cry when he falls.”

  “Then he must learn, I tell you!” shouted George with his face growing ever redder. I thought he would have apoplexy.

  “George, release him! Give me the key.”

  He made to go, and I stood in front of him. “The key, George. I beg you.” Perhaps you will think it rash, and indeed I was terrified, but I was desperate to rescue my child.

  He pushed me violently, and I fell over the alphabet blocks. I managed not to scream, so the neighbours will have no cause for gossip this time.

  “You brought it on yourself,” said George, and quit the house.

  He was drunk, of course, and it was not yet ten in the morning. At least on this occasion the bruises do not show, being entirely on my back.

  Lucy helped me to my feet, with many a “Poor Madam!” and “Lord have mercy!” and we surveyed the wardrobe. To my inexpressible relief, poor Julian started to whimper within.

  At length I said, “The hinges are inside. I believe we must send for a locksmith, Lucy. Julian may need the apothecary for his hurts.”

  Lucy bit her lip & shuffled her feet. “Please, Ma’am. I think I might open it,” and she did so, using my fine crochet hook. You may imagine my severe disquiet over a maid who can pick locks, but at the same time, I am very grateful to her.

  Julian was severely concussed & his collar bone was broken. The apothecary bound his arm while the collar bone heals. He suspects that the skull may have a small fracture, and recommends that he stay abed for at least a week. You know my son. Do you believe I can keep him confined for a week?

  George will doubtless be most repentant when he comes home. He blames the drink, but will not stop drinking. Oh, it is a bitter thing to be owned as a slave is owned!

  I have walked around the room to calm myself a little. It is true that my lot is far better than a slave. Whatever else I may have to bear, I am well fed & clothed, and nobody requires sixteen hours of hard labour from me each day, merely a vast amount of fawning & cringing. I still wish most fervently that George had no part in such a cruel and illegal trade, but George sees no difference between carrying slaves to America in his ships and carrying bolts of cloth home. I confess, I should be delighted were the West Africa Squadron to capture one of his clippers and free the slaves, though George should be ruined, and I with him.

  Well, I have a little lighter news also. Do you remember Mary Dunn at school? She is Mary Bassom now, having married a farmer, and lives in Yorkshire. You probably remember her as I do, a good-hearted girl, but solemn & unimaginative. We have corresponded since we left Miss Bainbridge’s Academy, although I do not open my heart to her as I do to you. In her last letter, she assures me that she has recently had visits from faeries! Can you credit it? I confess, I know not what to think, unless she has left her wits. Her letter seemed rational and collected enough. At any event, she says her fey guests do not speak English, but German, and are clearly anxious to communicate something. Since I was so very clever at foreign languages, she says, would I do her the kindness of visiting? Though I cannot conceive that faeries (if faeries they be!) would speak German, I should cheerfully live in Newgate jail to escape George for a while. (My Dear, that is not a hint. I am perfectly aware that your employers consider it unthinkable for a governess to have visitors, and my thoughts are with you, always. Alas, I should find your company very much more congenial than Mary’s. Doubtless I shall hear a good more than I care for about what the baker’s wife’s second cousin said to the haberdashery assistant’s sister on Thursday. Or was it Wednesday?)

  I shall use all my charm to persuade George to permit this visit, as soon as possible, even though Julian is scarcely fit to travel. At some wayside inn he would be safe from violence, if not from bedbugs.

  Your loving sister,

  Sophie

  The Nag’s Head Inn,

  Nether Grassmeade,

  Lincolnshire, England

  8th July, evening

  My Dearest Joanne,

  My circumstances are greatly altered and Julian & I left for Windscour Farm this morning. I have explained to everyone that George is travelling on business and I do not expect his return in the near future. Would that I could write more! But all explanations must wait.

  As
we entered the coach, a gentlewoman of middle years approached and called me by name. I thought her familiar, but could not place her at all. At all events, she looked deep into my eyes and said, “All will turn out for the best, my dear. But you will need all your courage.”

  Would that I could believe her! And yet I cannot forget her either.

  Your loving sister,

  Sophie

  Windscour Farm,

  Otley,

  W. Yorkshire, England

  14th July, 1849

  My Dear Joanne,

  The journey was less dreadful than I expected. We brought our own sheets, and travelled but twenty miles each day. I had expected Julian to be a sore trial, confined for so many hours each day to the jolting coach, but he was enchanted with the changing view, and when he tired of that, Lucy & I sang to him and he would sleep. At each inn they immediately ascribed his hurts to an upset of the coach, and couldn’t do enough for him. Poor Frank came in for a good deal of scolding from innkeepers’ wives for his supposed reckless driving. He nobly forbore from telling otherwise.

  On arrival, we bathed, of course, and after some bread & milk, I left Julian sleeping under Lucy’s watchful eye, while I went to take tea with Mary. She was most concerned about Julian, and recommended that I find a new coachman. In justice to Frank, I had to tell her that Julian came by his wounds before our journey began. Then she was horrified that I subjected the child to a journey in such a condition, whereupon the whole story of my marriage came out. Mary & Mr Bassom were loud in their sympathy, and warm in their offer of a refuge here as long as possible. In short, until George positively insists on my return. Mr Bassom opined that the law is unjust to women, that it is unreasonable that George may do anything to Julian & I short of murder. “A woman is not a pair of boots, and should not be treated thus!” he said.

  Naturally, I was most moved by their kindness, and I repent my last letter’s attempt at wit at Mary’s expense.