Futures Past

by James White

  "Can I telephone?" asked the Inspector.

  "He has a night line," said Nesbitt.

  The night receptionist at the Worchester remembered Smith and, because he was not very busy, did not mind talking about him. Smith had stayed there for nearly a year, conducting a stamp business from nine to five—he lived somewhere else. He kept a very smart if conservative wardrobe in his office room—for impressing customers, he had said—but traveled to and from work in an old, shapeless suit. No, he had not acted in any way suspiciously or oddly, except that sometimes he arrived in the morning without a raincoat when it was pouring wet, and vice versa. But then the weather could change so suddenly. In this morning's forecast they had promised sunny periods ...

  During the next pause for breath Michaelson thanked the receptionist and hung up.

  A man who avoids red tape and who sells stamps without buying them and buys sheet music and copies it over and over again, apparently to memorize it. Stamps were a peculiar commodity in that they could not be stolen in bulk without the fact showing up—especially when they were over half a century old. And where could freshly plagiarized music be sold? Any country or broadcasting company who bought it would signal the fact to the whole world and if they were pirates they would hardly pay for the music in the first place.

  To make any sense at all of this puzzle he would have to look at all the pieces very carefully and move them around to see how or if they fitted. Michaelson considered the suspect's manner, appearance, everything he had found out about him and his oddly run business. Potentially they were all important pieces and he had to try fitting all of them together before he could risk discarding any as belonging to some other puzzle.

  "Would you like some coffee?" said the night patrolman. He said it three times before Michael heard him.

  "No, thanks," he said absently. The pieces, all of them, were beginning to fit together. "I would like to make another call before I leave."

  Doctor Weston had a large local practice. He also had the information on Mrs. Timmins which Michaelson needed and eventually, and with great difficulty, it was coaxed out of him. The details of her physical condition were given much more easily.

  ". . . And I gave that silly old woman until the middle of last week," said the doctor, in the tone of voice he used when he felt very strongly about a patient but did not want people to think that he was soft-hearted. "When I saw her earlier this evening I told the nurse to stay with her—she won't last the night. In her condition I don't know why she bothers to hang on."

  / do, said Michaelson, but he spoke under his breath.

  "One more call, honest," he said to Nesbitt. He had to go arrange with Greer to bring the suspect to Mrs. Timmins' flat, where he would meet them as soon as possible.

  They met twenty minutes later in her lounge. The nurse had gone into the adjoining bedroom to prepare her patient to receive visitors, leaving the suspect, Greer and Michaelson alone. The suspect looked as frightened as Michaelson had ever seen a man look, and the sergeant's expression reflected controlled puzzlement.

  He could very well be making the worst mistake of his long and fairly successful career, Michaelson thought, but if all the evidence pointed to an impossible conclusion then the impossible wasn't impossible.

  "This man has been rather naughty, Sergeant," he said. "His reticence about giving his name was ill-advised, but understandable in the circumstances. I have evidence that he is in fact the old lady's benefactor—he sent the money which she is supposed to have inherited. He hasn't admitted it yet, but I would say that it was conscience money and that he is the son or grandson of the old lady's husband who deserted her and probably married again and who wants the payoff to be anonymous so as to avoid a possible bigamy charge and questions of the legitimacy or otherwise of his children."

  Greer nodded, then said, "I'll return to the station, sir." He gave the suspect a pained look, the sort which he reserved for nice but ill-advised people who played games with the overworked constabulary, and left. Professionally the sergeant was completely disinterested in nice people.

  If anything the suspect looked even more frightened.

  "That isn't the true story," Michaelson told him, "but it will do for the Sergeant. Let's go in—she's dying and there isn't much time."

  'No!'" He looked as if he might run if he did not faint first.

  "You tried hard enough to see her and now is your chance," Michaelson began angrily. Controlling himself he went on, "I have known this old lady for a very long time. She Was and is a ... a very nice person."

  "I know that!"

  Michaelson nodded and went on, "When I was a kid she was so good, so stupidly good and generous, that I wanted to do something for her—we all did. But her problem was not susceptible to solution by ten-year-old boys. Now . . . well, I want you to inconvenience yourself just a little by going in to see her. If you don't," he added quietly, "I'll break every bone in your body."

  "You don't understand," said the suspect dully, but he began moving toward the bedroom door.

  "Maybe I do," said Michaelson. "You have two very nice businesses going—buying stamps at face value there and selling them here at a profit of several thousand per cent. You even speculated in a few rare items, which became even rarer and more valuable. The music business in the other direction—no wonder so many of today's songs sound as if they'd been plagiarized-—did not pay so well and you decided to stay where the money was...."

  The nurse opened the bedroom door, motioned them inside and then moved into the lounge.

  "You know," said the suspect, looking more relieved than frightened. "But I didn't desert her. There was an accident and I couldn't get back."

  "Tell me about it," said Michaelson.

  The suspect had been working at nights in the university, augmenting his wages as a shop assistant by sweeping and tidying the labs—he had been saving hard to get married. Professor Morrison, one of the most important people at the university, had offered him a lot of money to take part in an experiment which he had said was perfectly safe but which must be kept secret. Professor Morrison had not explained what he was doing in detail, saying that it was too complicated, but from overheard conversations between the professor and his assistants and from his own recent reading, fictional as well as technical, he had a vague idea of how if not why the system worked.

  The field of stress which he had entered could be considered as a standing wave in time with an amplitude of exactly sixty-three years and that material objects currently in existence could go forward into the future and come back again to the present, but an object that existed in the future could not be brought back. Once the field had been set up it would remain in existence forever, he had heard the professor say, unless some outside agency or carelessness—such as materializing people or lab animals in a non-empty space—caused it to break down.

  Professor Morrison had intended to publish his results but he had first to develop a shorter-range field—as things were he could not prove that his subject had traveled forward in time if he could not bring something back from the future. He had to send someone forward who would materialize in the professor's own lifetime, and Morrison was pushing eighty. As well, his reputation was such that he could not risk being accused of scientific trickery.

  The professor's budget did not allow him to go on paying his guinea-pig, so he had devised the idea of memorizing songs of the future and selling them in the past. Memories, after all, were non-material....

  "... I thought of the stamp idea myself," the suspect continued. "I was married by then and my wife knew what I was doing. We thought eventually of coming to the future here, where I was making much more money, and I would commute to the past for stamps or anything else I needed. It was like going to work in the morning on a train, except that I commuted through time.

  "I had told her not to worry if I didn't come home for a few evenings—if I wasn't home for tea then I had sprained my ankle or something and would be a
long the next evening, or the next. The time I spent in the future exactly equaled the time I was absent from the past, you see, and I didn't want her to be waiting up for me and worrying.

  "I should have realized that the overgrown hollow I always arrived in was an old crater," he concluded, "but it was so big and shallow. All I knew was that the Professor was working on a new, short-duration field which would make his time-travel demonstrable to all, and that one evening I went back to the hollow and couldn't get home. And life here is so complicated, so much more documentation that I don't fully understand—"

  "I could help you understand it," said Michaelson quietly. He had been gradually moving the suspect closer to the bed. He added, "But you will have to do something for me."

  "Even before I traced the old newspaper references," the other went on, "I knew that I was marooned here. I had a large enough stock of stamps to be able to make enough money to set up a legitimate philatelic business if I could only sort out the red tape. But I wanted to find my wife if she was still alive. We didn't make much money on the songs I had memorized and most of it went on buying stamps, anyway. She must have moved to this place before our house was leveled to make room for the new development, but the new owner changed the name and made it difficult to trace...."

  "But you found her," Michaelson broke in softly, "and she'll be glad to see you after all this time."

  "No," said the other, beginning to back away, "I can't."

  Michaelson gripped him very firmly by the arm and said, "You are going to need help and advice and I'm willing to give it, but if you don't go to that old lady I will make you wish that you'd never been born. With your ridiculous story and lack of documentation I could easily get you in trouble—a charge of espionage, perhaps, or committal to a psychiatric—"

  "She's so old!" he burst out in a tortured whisper. "Letting her see me still young would . . . would ... it wouldn't be fair to her!"

  "That's a risk we both must take," said Michaelson more gently. "But I talked to her doctor. She is pretty far gone, far enough gone perhaps and senile enough to be living in the past, and you are exactly as she remembers you..."

  Michaelson moved toward the bed taking the other man with him. On the bedside table there was a framed wedding picture showing them together. The faces were identical to those in the cropped photographs in the suspect's wallet except that this picture was old and yellowed and had not had the old-fashioned suit and dress and bouquet trimmed away to make period identification difficult. The terribly wrinkled and shrunken and caved-in face on the pillow close by bore no resemblance to the picture at all except for the eyes. They were the same as in the photograph and the same as Michaelson remembered them as a boy.

  He stared intently at the suspect's face, looking for the slightest sign of revulsion in the other's expression as he bent over the bed, but could not find it.

  As the nurse closed the bedroom door behind him she said, "He's holding her in his arms, sir. Is the young man a relative?"

  Michaelson rubbed his eyes and said, "Only by marriage."

  ASSISTED PASSAGE

  HE knew himself to have that rare knack of making friends with everybody, and the corporal, who was also a keen amateur gardener, and himself had become very pally. Now, glancing at the stiffly marching figure beside him, Mathewson wondered if he reached for his pipe whether the corporal would shoot him.

  He would have liked to say something, but the grim set of the soldier's jaw, and the hurt, ashamed look in his usually friendly eyes made him keep silent. The major's hut was only three minutes away at this pace, and any explanation he could give would be long, complicated and quite incredible, especially if it was the true one.

  The corporal halted at the green-painted door of the Nissen hut and rapped three times. His other hand hovered over the butt of his pistol, and his eyes were grimly watchful, though he never looked any higher than the level Of Mathewson's tie. The orderly who escorted them to the inner office also avoided meeting his eyes, and the little group of civilians inside seemed to be interested only in the design of the linoleum.

  Major Turner said, "Very good, Corporal. At ease," and fell silent for the space of two long, interminable minutes, during which he stared fixedly at some papers on his blotter. Ordinary attempts at sabotage he could deal with, that was a security officer's job, as was counterespionage and the screening of technicians, but this. . . .

  He didn't quite know what to do. Finally he spoke; his voice was low, but the suppressed anger in it was unmistakable.

  "If we were at war, you know what I would do to you." It was a statement rather than a question. "Shoot you."

  And Dr. Mathewson knew he would have done just that, too. The major was tough. He kept silent, trying to think of a way of presenting the truth in such a way as to make it appear not completely incredible, because he knew the questions, cold, incisive, deeply-probing questions, would start in a matter of short seconds now, and any story based on a lie wouldn't stand up for more than five minutes. Besides being a martinet, the major had tacked onto his name a few solid degrees in psychology that very few people knew about.

  One of the five civilians present stirred restlessly. It was Ellison. The mention of shooting had shaken him. He spoke hesitantly, almost inaudibly, without raising his eyes.

  "But the doc isn't a spy. There must be some explanation for what he's done. He isn't the type that would, would—" he broke off, then finished lamely, "He's never—, he doesn't act like a spy."

  The major glanced at him and murmured softly, pityingly, "Famous last words." His tone left no doubt in the hearer's mind what he thought of Ellison, which was that he was far too childlike and trusting to be allowed out. "Get conscious," he ended sharply. "D'you think they all look like cloak and dagger desperados?"

  Ellison looked as if he was about to tell the major exactly what he thought of him, but Turner had resumed staring at his blotter, so he subsided sullenly, a slow blush creeping over his neck and ears. He was of far too shy and sensitive a nature to win a name-calling contest against the Major, anyway.

  Mathewson had of course expected some support from the civilians present, but Ellison's sincere if somewhat incoherent defense of his character had come as a bit of a shock, for Ellison, more than any other individual on the site, had the most reasons to hate his guts. It gave him a warm, grateful feeling to know that he had inspired such loyalty and affection....

  His musings were cut short by the major who was talking again. With a start he realized that it was to him.

  ". . . that lying will be futile and a complete waste of my time and your breath. I'll tell you what happened that night, you can then tell me why it happened, and, the most important piece of information," he nodded slightly toward the two NCO's wearing phones and staring intently at radar screens over in a darkened corner of the room, "what will happen next."

  He paused, then continued in a low voice devoid of feeling, like a judge summing up after a murder trial, not wishing to influence the jurymen.

  "At approximately 22.40 hours on the night in question you entered the canteen and ordered, very tactfully, of course, that Ellison should go to bed and get as much rest as possible before takeoff at 06.00 the following morning. You accompanied him to his room and doped his hot milk and saw that he drank it all before leaving. At 23.08 you drew a light truck from the M.T. Officer telling him it was required to take some gear to the ship for last-minute tests on the automatic controls. While the people in the canteen were loudly finishing off their farewell party to the, by now, deeply unconscious official pilot, you arrived at the ship with a load of equipment and Allen. Together you made between nine and eleven trips up into the ship. The last time you came down alone and succeeded in making the guard believe that Allen had already left for his hut—" Here he glared coldly at the corporal, "—leaving the truck for you. At 23.40 you drove the truck to the Administration block and entered the building. At approximately 23.52 the corporal on guard heard th
e ship's gyros start up, followed by the fuel pumps and the automatic fire alarm. After switching the siren to General Emergency he went quickly to the safety trench at the edge of the takeoff apron. It was now 23.58. Two minutes later the ship took off."

  The low monologue stopped, and a hint of puzzlement crept into the major's voice when he resumed. The others sat in strained, attentive silence, scarcely moving. The proverbial pin, had it dropped just then, would have made quite a clatter.

  "There was a good deal of confusion for several hours after the departure of the ship. You, as director of research and hence the highest-ranking authority on the site, could have got clean away at any time up until the declaration of martial law early this morning. I don't quite understand that. You must be very new to this game or . . ." He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said sharply, "Or did you think the corporal would have died in the blast? If that had happened you could have told any cock and bull story you pleased and been believed, because Allen wasn't with you when the M.T. officer gave you the truck. It very nearly happened that way, too."

  He looked straight at the standing doctor and said softly, "A spy and a murderer. You play the game dirty, don't you, Doc?"

  This last accusation came as a shock to Mathewson. Allen and himself had made the vital decision a long time ago, and planned the operation in such a way that no foreseeable change in circumstance would find them at a loss. They had discussed, many times and at great lengths, all the possible repercussions taking the spaceship would have on the authorities, and the steps those authorities would take regarding Mathewson, and devised various means of keeping him at least physically unharmed until the second stage of the plan began. A charge of murder was the only thing not allowed for. The whole thing sounded unreal, fantastic; his ears must surely be lying. Spies, in this modern age, were rarely just shot out of hand, he knew. And in the more civilized countries they sometimes weren't shot at all. Murderers were different. Little wonder none of them would look him in the face. But the thing was silly. Stupid. Surely they knew him well enough to realize he could never bring himself to do a thing like that—most of the people present had known him for years. The major was the one he had to convince, however. He glanced sideways at the corporal a little anxiously before replying.