The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  With In the Garden of Iden (1997), Kage Baker (1952–2010) introduced what became a long-running series about the Company, or more accurately the Zeus Corporation, run by the mysterious Dr Zeus. The Company does not so much patrol the past as seek to preserve its treasures, both living and manufactured. The enterprise is extremely expensive, because the agents of the Company are not normal humans but ones who have been genetically engineered to withstand the rigours of time travel. Consequently the Company seeks to preserve its agents at all costs, and that’s the subject of “The Catch”, one of the more complex and convoluted of the Company stories.

  The barn stands high in the middle of back-country nowhere, shimmering in summer heat. It’s an old barn, empty a long time, and its broad planks are silvered. Nothing much around it but yellow hills and red rock.

  Long ago, somebody painted it with a mural. Still visible along its broad wall are the blobs representing massed crowds, the green diamond of a baseball park, and the primitive-heroic figure of an outfielder leaping, glove raised high. His cartoon eyes are wide and happy. The ball, radiating black lines of force, is sailing into his glove. Above him is painted the legend:

  WHAT A CATCH!

  And, in smaller letters below it:

  1951, The Golden Year!

  The old highway snakes just below the barn, where once the mural must have edified a long cavalcade of DeSotos, Packards and Oldsmobiles. But the old road is white and empty now, with thistles pushing through its cracks. The new highway runs straight across the plain below.

  Down on the new highway, eighteen-wheeler rigs hurtle through, roaring like locomotives, and they are the only things to disturb the vast silence. The circling hawk makes no sound. The cottonwood trees by the edge of the dry stream are silent too, not a rustle or a creak along the whole row; but they do cast a thin gray shade, and the men waiting in the Volkswagen Bug are grateful for that.

  They might be two cops on stakeout. They aren’t. Not exactly.

  “Are you going to tell me why we’re sitting here, now?” asks the younger man, finishing his candy bar.

  His name is Clete. The older man’s name is Porfirio.

  The older man shifts in his seat and looks askance at his partner. He doesn’t approve of getting stoned on the job. But he shrugs, checks his weapon, settles into the most comfortable position he can find.

  He points through the dusty windshield at the barn. “See up there? June 30, 1958, family of five killed. ’46 Plymouth Club Coupe. Driver lost control of the car and went off the edge of the road. Car rolled seventy meters down that hill and hit the rocks, right there. Gas tank blew. Mr and Mrs William T. Ross of Visalia, California identified from dental records. Kids didn’t have any dental records. No relatives to identify bodies.

  “Articles in the local and Visalia papers, grave with the whole family’s names and dates on one marker in a cemetery in Visalia. Some blackening on the rocks up there. That’s all there is to show it ever happened.”

  “Okay,” say the younger man, nodding thoughtfully. “No witnesses, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The accident happened on a lonely road, and state troopers or whoever found the wreck after the fact?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the bodies were so badly burned they all went in one grave?” Clete looks pleased with himself. “So . . . forensic medicine being what it was in 1958, maybe there weren’t five bodies in the car after all? Maybe one of the kids was thrown clear on the way down the hill? And if there was somebody in the future going through historical records, looking for incidents where children vanished without a trace, this might draw their attention, right?”

  “It might,” agrees Porfirio.

  “So the Company sent an operative to see if any survivors could be salvaged,” says Clete. “Okay, that’s standard Company procedure. The Company took one of the kids alive, and he became an operative. So why are we here?”

  Porfirio sighs, watching the barn.

  “Because the kid didn’t become an operative,” he says. “He became a problem.”

  1958. Bobby Ross, all-American boy, was ten years old, and he loved baseball and cowboy movies and riding his bicycle. All-American boys get bored on long trips. Bobby got bored. He was leaning out the window of his parents’ car when he saw the baseball mural on the side of the barn.

  “Hey, look!” he yelled, and leaned way out the window to see better. He slipped.

  “Jesus Christ!” screamed his mom, and lunging into the back she tried to grab the seat of his pants. She collided with his dad’s arm. His dad cursed; the car swerved. Bobby felt himself gripped, briefly, and then all his mom had was one of his sneakers, and then the sneaker came off his foot. Bobby flew from the car just as it went over the edge of the road.

  He remembered afterward standing there, clutching his broken arm, staring down the hill at the fire, and the pavement was hot as fire too on his sneakerless foot. His mind seemed to be stuck in a little circular track. He was really hurt bad, so what he had to do now was run to his mom and dad, who would yell at him and drive him to Dr Werts, and he’d have to sit in the cool green waiting room that smelled scarily of rubbing alcohol and look at dumb Humpty Dumpty Magazine until the doctor made everything all right again.

  But that wasn’t going to happen now, because . . .

  But he was really hurt bad, so he needed to run to his mom and dad—

  But he couldn’t do that ever again, because— But he was really hurt bad—

  His mind just went round and round like that, until the spacemen came for him.

  They wore silver suits, and they said, “Greetings, Earth Boy; we have come to rescue you and take you to Mars,” but they looked just like ordinary people and in fact gave Bobby the impression they were embarrassed. Their space ship was real enough, though. They carried Bobby into it on a stretcher and took off, and a space doctor fixed his broken arm, and he was given space soda pop to drink, and he never even noticed that the silver ship had risen clear of the hillside, one step ahead of the state troopers, until he looked out and saw the curve of the Earth. He’d been lifted from history, as neatly as a fly ball smacking into an outfielder’s mitt.

  The spacemen didn’t take Bobby Ross to Mars, though. It turned out to be some place in Australia. But it might just as well have been Mars. Because, instead of starting fifth grade, and then going onto high school, and getting interested in girls, and winning a baseball scholarship, and being drafted, and blown to pieces in Viet Nam – Bobby Ross became an immortal.

  “Well, that happened to all of us,” says Clete, shifting restively. “One way or another. Except I’ve never heard of the Company recruiting a kid as old as ten.”

  “That’s right.” Keeping his eyes on the barn, Porfirio reaches into the back seat and gropes in a cooler half-full of rapidly melting ice. He finds and draws out a bottle of soda. “So what does that tell you?”

  Clete considers the problem. “Well, everybody knows you can’t work the immortality process on somebody that old. You hear rumors, you know, like when the Company was starting out, that there were problems with some of the first test cases—” He stops himself and turns to stare at Porfirio. Porfirio meets his gaze but says nothing, twisting the top off his soda bottle.

  “This guy was one of the test cases!” Clete exclaims. “And the Company didn’t have the immortality process completely figured out yet, so they made a mistake.”

  Several mistakes had been made with Bobby Ross.

  The first, of course, was that he was indeed too old to be made immortal. If two-year-old Patty or even five-year-old Jimmy had survived the crash, the process might have been worked successfully on them. Seat belts not having been invented in 1946, however, the Company had only Bobby with whom to work.

  The second mistake had been in sending “spacemen” to collect Bobby. Bobby, as it happened, didn’t like science fiction. He liked cowboys and baseball, but rocket ships left him cold. Movi
e posters and magazine covers featuring bug-eyed monsters scared him. If the operatives who had rescued him had come galloping over the hill on horseback, and had called him Pardner instead of Earth Boy, he’d undoubtedly have been as enchanted as they meant him to be and bought into the rest of the experience with a receptive mind. As it was, by the time he was offloaded into a laboratory in a hot red rocky landscape, he was far enough out of shock to have begun to be angry, and his anger focused on the bogusness of the spacemen.

  The third mistake had been in the Company’s choice of a mentor for Bobby.

  Because the Company hadn’t been in business very long – at least, as far as its stockholders knew – a lot of important things about the education of young immortals had yet to be discovered, such as: no mortal can train an immortal. Only another immortal understands the discipline needed, the pitfalls to be avoided when getting a child accustomed to the idea of eternal life.

  But when Bobby was being made immortal, there weren’t any other immortals yet – not successful ones, anyway – so the Company might be excused that error, at least. And if Professor Bill Riverdale was the last person who should have been in charge of Bobby, worse errors are made all the time. Especially by persons responsible for the welfare of young children.

  After all, Professor Riverdale was a good, kind man. It was true that he was romantically obsessed with the idyll of all-American freckle-faced boyhood to an unhealthy degree, but he was so far in denial about it that he would never have done anything in the least improper.

  All he wanted to do, when he sat down at Bobby’s bedside, was help Bobby get over the tragedy. So he started with pleasant conversation. He told Bobby all about the wonderful scientists in the far future, who had discovered the secret of time travel, and how they were now working to find a way to make people live forever.

  And Bobby, lucky boy, had been selected to help them. Instead of going to an orphanage, Bobby would be transformed into, well, nearly into a superhero! It was almost as though Bobby would never have to grow up. It was every boy’s dream! He’d have super-strength and super-intelligence and never have to wash behind his ears, if he didn’t feel like it! And, because he’d live forever, one day he really would get to go to the planet Mars.

  If the immortality experiment worked. But Professor Riverdale – or Professor Bill, as he encouraged Bobby to call him – was sure the experiment would work this time, because such a lot had been learned from the last time it had been attempted.

  Professor Bill moved quickly onto speak with enthusiasm of how wonderful the future was, and how happy Bobby would be when he got there. Why, it was a wonderful place, according to what he’d heard! People lived on the moon and on Mars too, and the problems of poverty and disease and war had been licked, by gosh, and there were no Communists! And boys could ride their bicycles down the tree-lined streets of that perfect world, and float down summer rivers on rafts, and camp out in the woods, and dream of going to the stars . . .

  Observing, however, that Bobby lay there silent and withdrawn, Professor Bill cut his rhapsody short. He concluded that Bobby needed psychiatric therapy to get over the guilt he felt at having caused the deaths of his parents and siblings.

  And this was a profound mistake, because Bobby Ross – being a normal ten-year-old all-American boy – had no more conscience than Pinocchio before the Cricket showed up, and it had never occurred to him that he had been responsible for the accident. Once Professor Bill pointed it out, however, he burst into furious tears.

  So poor old Professor Bill had a lot to do to help Bobby through his pain, both the grief of his loss and the physical pain of his transformation into an immortal, of which there turned out to be a lot more than anybody had thought there would be, regardless of how much had been learned from the last attempt.

  He studied Bobby’s case, paying particular attention to the details of his recruitment. He looked carefully at the footage taken by the operatives who had collected Bobby, and the mural on the barn caught his attention. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the sight of the ballplayer must have been Bobby’s last happy memory, the final golden moment of his innocence.

  “What’d he do?” asks Clete, taking his turn at rummaging in the ice chest. “Wait, I’ll bet I know. He used the image of the mural in the kid’s therapy, right? Something to focus on when the pain got too bad? Pretending he was going to a happy place in his head, as an escape valve.”

  “Yeah. That was what he did.”

  “There’s only root beer left. You want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, so why was this such a bad idea? I remember having to do mental exercises like that, myself, at the Base school. You probably did, too.”

  “It was a bad idea because the Professor didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” says Porfirio. The distant barn is wavering in the heat, but he never takes his eyes off it.

  Bobby’s other doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing either. They’d figured out how to augment Bobby’s intelligence pretty well, and they already knew how to give him unbreakable bones. They did a great job of convincing his body it would never die, and taught it how to ward off viruses and bacteria.

  But they didn’t know yet that even a healthy ten-year-old’s DNA has already begun to deteriorate, that it’s already too subject to replication errors for the immortality process to be successful. And Bobby Ross, being an all-American kid, had got all those freckles from playing unshielded in ultraviolet light. He’d gulped down soda pop full of chemicals and inhaled smoke from his dad’s Lucky Strikes and hunted for tadpoles in the creek that flowed past the paper mill.

  And then the doctors introduced millions of nanobots into Bobby’s system, and the nanobots’ job was to keep him perfect. But the doctors didn’t know yet that the nanobots had to be programmed with an example to copy. So the nanobots latched onto the first DNA helix they encountered, and made it their pattern for everything Bobby ought to be. Unfortunately, it was a damaged DNA helix, but the nanobots didn’t know that.

  Bobby Ross grew up at the secret laboratory, and as he grew it became painfully obvious that there were still a few bugs to be worked out of the immortality process. There were lumps, there were bumps, there were skin cancers and deformities. His production of pineal tribrantine three was sporadic. Sometimes, after months of misery, his body’s chemistry would right itself. The joint pain would ease, the glands would work properly again.

  Or not.

  Professor Bill was so, so sorry, because he adored Bobby. He’d sit with Bobby when the pain was bad, and talk soothingly to send Bobby back to that dear good year, 1951 – and what a golden age 1951 seemed by this time, because it was now 1964, and Bobby had become Robert, and the world seemed to be lurching into madness. Professor Bill himself wished he could escape back into 1951. But he sent Robert there often, into that beautiful summer afternoon when Hank Bauer had leaped so high from the green diamond – and the ball had smacked into his leather glove – and the crowds went wild!

  Though only in Robert’s head, of course, because all this was being done with hypnosis.

  Nobody ever formally announced that Robert Ross had failed the immortality process, because it was by no means certain he wasn’t immortal. But it had become plain he would never be the flawless super-agent the Company had been solving for, so less and less of the laboratory budget was allotted to Robert’s upkeep.

  What did the Company do with unsuccessful experiments? Who knows what might have happened to Robert, if Professor Bill hadn’t taken the lad under his wing?

  He brought Robert to live with him in his own quarters on the Base, and continued his education himself. This proved that Professor Bill really was a good man and had no ulterior interest in Robert whatsoever; for Bobby, the slender kid with skin like a sun-speckled apricot, was long gone. Robert by this time was a wizened, stooping, scarred thing with hair in unlikely places.

  Professor Bill tried to make it up
to Robert by giving him a rich interior life. He went rafting with Robert on the great river of numbers, under the cold and sparkling stars of theory. He tossed him physics problems compact and weighty as a baseball, and beamed with pride when Robert smacked them out of the park of human understanding. It made him feel young again, himself.

  He taught the boy all he knew, and when he found that Robert shone at Temporal Physics with unsuspected brilliance, he told his superiors. This pleased the Company managers. It meant that Robert could be made to earn back the money he had cost the Company, after all. So he became an employee, and was even paid a modest stipend to exercise his genius by fiddling around with temporal equations on the Company’s behalf.

  “And the only problem was, he was a psycho?” guesses Clete. “He went berserk, blew away poor old Professor Riverdale and ran off into the sunset?”

  “He was emotionally unstable,” Porfirio admits. “Nobody was surprised by that, after what he’d been through. But he didn’t kill Professor Riverdale. He did run away, though. Walked, actually. He walked through a solid wall, in front of the Professor and about fifteen other people in the audience. He’d been giving them a lecture in advanced temporal paradox theory. Just smiled at them suddenly, put down his chalk, and stepped right through the blackboard. He wasn’t on the other side, when they ran into the next room to see.”

  “Damn,” says Clete, impressed. “We can’t do that.”

  “We sure can’t,” says Porfirio. He stiffens, suddenly, seeing something move on the wall of the barn. It’s only the shadow of the circling hawk, though, and he relaxes.

  Clete’s eyes have widened, and he looks worried.

  “You just threw me a grenade,” he says. Catching a grenade is security slang for being made privy to secrets so classified one’s own safety is compromised.

  “You needed to know,” says Porfirio.