The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Edward M. Lerner

  When I was summoned, it was the dead of winter, and once again it was at night. I had just fallen asleep in my cold, hard bed when I was awakened by hands shaking me. A guard I did not know looked at the paper in his hand by flashlight.

  “Kolpakov?” he said. “Frederic Platonovitch Kolpakov?”

  I admitted my identity.

  “Get up and dress,” he ordered. “You are to leave this place.”

  “To leave?” I exclaimed. “Wh-what do they want of me?”

  “They didn’t tell me,” he growled. “Get your clothes on. You’ll need nothing else.”

  I rose and dressed, conscious that my companions had awakened, feeling their fear echoing my own. As I walked out with the guard, some of them whispered goodbye to me, wishing me good luck.

  The guard walked me through the icy hallways to the office of the prison commandant, a heavy man with agate eyes and a deceptive joviality. I asked him politely where they were taking me, and he replied with a barking laugh. “Why, I can’t tell you that! Every-thing’s going to be a big surprise!” He slapped me on the back. “Maybe they’ll take you to the Moscow zoo and feed you to the lions, ha-ha-ha!”

  They gave me underwear and socks and shoes, a shirt, a tie, an ill-fitting civilian suit, a badly worn but heavy overcoat. They put a shabby suitcase in my hands. I signed several documents.

  Then I and the unknown guard went out into the night. There I encountered my first surprise. No black, shrouded van awaited me. Instead, the guard walked me to an enormous limousine, its engine purring smoothly, a cloud of steam coming from its exhaust. He opened the back door.

  “Get in,” he ordered.

  As the door swung open, the light went on inside. I looked. I stared. Ignatiev was sitting there.

  He had scarcely changed. His features had matured. His head and shoulders appeared even more massive than before. I was, of course, familiar with his career, with the achievements and the fame that had, I knew, taken him far, far away from such narrow, unkind worlds as mine.

  “Come, Fredichka,” he said, all the old contempt still in his voice, “get in the pretty car. You and I are going for a ride.”

  “A-Andrei Konstantinovitch!” I stammered.

  “Good, you remember me. Get in, get in!”

  I eased myself down into the luxury of the seat, gripped the miserable suitcase between my trembling knees. The door was closed behind me. We began to move. As we drove out of the courtyard and through the surrounding rings of fences, I saw the guards we passed saluting. I was in shock. I could not imagine why I had been freed. I did not know whether I really had been freed. I was astounded at the identity of my deliverer. But I was out of prison. No walls confined me. There were no guards—at least none I could identify. Through the car’s window, I saw the winter stars, bright in the frozen sky. Tears ran down my cheeks. I could not speak.

  “You are wondering why I secured your release?” he said then. “You are wondering why I, Ignatiev, have taken my old friend Fredichka out of his prison? Well, I’ll tell you this much—it is because I need your languages. The rest you will learn later. For the moment, please remember that you are not yet fully free, that the authorities released you to work for me.”

  I shook my head. Why would Ignatiev, of all people, need my languages? I mumbled, trying to tell him of my gratitude.

  He dismissed the effort with a gesture. “Before we finish”—he leaned toward me, and suddenly the contempt left his voice—“you will have earned your pay. Also, I promise you there will be many crumbs of fame from the cake I’ll cut. But first there will be work for both of us. Tomorrow I will tell you more, and also we will have to feed you better than they have, and get you clothing to replace those rags, and have a proper doctor look at you.”

  * * * *

  There were several more miles to go before we reached his dacha, his villa far out in Moscow’s suburbs, and during the drive he asked me questions: about the prison, about the work they’d had me doing there—with which he was surprisingly familiar. I answered him as fully as I could, apologizing because events had been too much for me; and then he began talking about people we had known long ago, telling me who had died, who had been promoted or disgraced, who had published what. It was all new to me. In prison I had heard almost nothing. But he never mentioned Evgenia or her parents, and I was thankful for that. Indeed, I had never seen him so warm and human; nor was I ever to again.

  It was nearly midnight when we reached the dacha, a rambling wooden building more than a century old, built originally for some long-forgotten nobleman or wealthy merchant. Wonderingly, I walked into its warmth, its light and shadow, stepping on its Oriental carpets, gazing at huge tiled stoves, bronzes, paintings, ancient icons, antique furniture, a silver samovar lording it over lesser silver and silver-gilt from the great workshops of the Czarist past. Despite the hour, his housekeeper, a tall, handsome woman who I learned later also was his mistress, first brought us brandy—brandy, I could not believe it!—then took us in to supper, served by a buxom servant girl. I realized that I had not eaten a really decent meal since my imprisonment.

  For the moment, my apprehension vanished. I ate and drank for the first time in eleven years. Ignatiev also ate, talking occasionally and watching me with the familiar expression of half-amused contempt, but all my attention was focused on that meal. I, who had grown to think that I had disciplined myself beyond such things, realized suddenly how hungry I had been. Finally, when we had finished, my suspicions of him, my dislike—yes, my hatred of him—all were dulled. Gratitude comes easily to the half-starved and newly freed.

  He and the woman took me to a bedroom next to what must once have been the nursery, a nurse’s or a governess’s, small, bare, but—Bozhe moi!—with its own washbasin and toilet, all new. The bed was made. It had already been turned down. I sat down on it, smoothing the pillow unbelievingly.

  The woman left, but Ignatiev lingered for a moment. “Sleep well, Fredichka,” he said. “There’ll be no guards to wake you, no snores, no sicknesses.” He laughed. “And you can turn the light on and off when you want to. But before I leave you, I must tell you something. I am starting on a new career. I am going to be the world’s most famous archaeologist. I, Ignatiev, will tear out the best protected secrets of the past, and you shall help me. Spokoynoi noch.”

  His words echoed dully in my head, only half understood. I too mumbled a goodnight, and with that he left me. Still dazed, I un-dressed, got into bed—and could not sleep at first because of the luxurious privacy, the silence. Then twice I woke, thinking I was still in prison, dreaming. Then I slept beautifully till almost nine, when the woman, Marfa, came to wake me.

  I did not see him until much later in the day. Instead, a man whom I took to be his driver-bodyguard drove me in the big limousine to several of the best shops in Moscow, where ordinary people could not buy, and bought me clothing, shoes, everything I possibly might need. He drove with a minimum of conversation, telling me coldly and courteously that this was what Ignatiev wanted done. He bought our lunch in a good restaurant. Then we went to a clinic where a hard-faced elderly doctor checked me over: blood-tests, X- rays, specimens, cardiograms, even an electroencephalograph. I could tell that she knew at a glance where I had spent my years, but neither she nor I made any comment.

  It was five in the afternoon when we returned, and Marfa showed me to his library, where he was waiting for me, looking strangely out of place among fringed and beaded lamps, looming bookcases, and a bronze bust of Pushkin. Here too, his passion for collecting was evident. On his desk stood a lovely silver kovsh, glowing with plique-a-jour enamel, and other precious objects were everywhere. Marfa closed the door behind her. He waved me to a chair.

  I looked at the expensive suit I now was wearing. “You—you have been very kind to me, Andrei Konstantinovitch. I—I want you to know—”

  He cut me off. “If you are going to work for me—and I assure you that you’re going to work hard for me—
we can’t have your clothes stinking of a prison, and we must keep you healthy so that you can work.”

  He looked down at a pile of monographs on his desk. “Are you familiar with Professor Rivokhin’s recent work in linguistics and philology?”

  I shook my head.

  “You ought to be,” he said. “You did most of it, and it was all based on certain basic premises you suggested in a paper before they hauled you off.”

  I thought of all the work I had done over the years—and of the journals I had not received. “You—you mean that this Rivokhin—that he has simply taken credit for everything I’ve done? That he has added nothing to it?”

  “Nothing,” said Ignatiev. He laughed, contemptuously again. “Fredichka, Rivokhin is eminent, an Academician like myself, like myself a ranking Party Member. You have never understood the importance of belonging to the aristocracy—especially one that is secure because it calls itself servant instead of master. Solzhenitsyn recognized us for what we are, we of the new class, but few others have. So your work has become old Rivokhin’s; all he has done is to change a few words and lengthen a few sentences. He does not even understand what you were aiming at”—he leaned forward, his vast shoulders shadowing the desk—“the scientific rebuilding of ancient languages, even of lost tongues, from their surviving remnants, the reconstitution of their words, their grammars, of their exact sounds. Tell me, am I right?”

  I was astounded at his knowledge, at his insight. Here was the goal I had cherished in my mind, the goal I had never dared to formulate so clearly even to myself. My expression told him every-thing; I did not need to answer him.

  “There! We understand each other—except that you never looked ahead as far as this. You never thought of marrying your theories to computer technology, did you, Fredichka? No? Well, neither has Rivokhin.” Again he burst out laughing. “A poet in prison and a thieving intellectual dunderhead! Well, I have thought of it, and that is what we’re going to do, you and I. I will show you how to state your theories so that computers can handle them and test them. I am not worried about the outcome; I am already certain that basically they are completely valid. Can you see how this will revolutionize archaeology, this perfect knowledge of the ancient tongues?” He threw his head back. He hammered on his desk. “The discoveries of Schliemann, of Sir Aurel Stein, of Howard Carter and Carnarvon, of all the rest, will seem like nothing! I shall unearth the tomb of Alexander! I shall discover Atlantis underneath the sea! All the great mysteries of the past will open to Ignatiev!”

  Now I too was excited, not at the thought of all these triumphs—which frankly I considered improbable because even a complete and perfect knowledge of a dead tongue would be of little use unless written records could be found to work from—but at the undreamed-of prospect of realizing my own unvoiced dream. I did not even think of what my fate might be once his computers had learned all I knew.

  “Th-that would be magnificent!” I whispered.

  He rang the bell, and the servant girl came with glasses and two decanters. This time, we drank vodka, and we drank until Marfa called us in to dinner. He drank three times as much as I, and all through the meal he talked—first about the details of my work and the computer specialist with whom I would be working, then about the great things he was going to accomplish. He talked of Asian burial mounds with their golden treasures, of the vast hoard of gold the Incas hid from the greed of their Spanish conquerors.

  “Yes, Fredichka,” he told me, “I have invented a device. The principle is entirely new—only I could even have conceived of it! Did you know that under our own Kremlin there are miles of forgotten passages, of sealed chambers unopened for four hundred years? Did you know that somewhere there lies the lost library of Ivan Grozni—eight hundred precious manuscripts, many of them the heritage of Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Emperor of Byzantium, who married Ivan the Great, his grandfather? That there is reputed to be a complete Greek manuscript of Homer there? I will find that library!” He laughed his roaring laugh, rocking in his chair. He was drunk now, and drinking his after-dinner brandy, but there was no thickness in his voice, and his eyes were as shrewd and cold as they had ever been. “Not even the ghost of the Terrible Ivan can guard his library when I get after it!” he shouted; and laughter burst from him anew.

  I rose, a bit unsteadily. I explained that I had a lot of reading to catch up on before tomorrow’s working session. I asked to be excused.

  “You never could drink, could you?” he remarked. “Well, it does not matter. Get back there to your books and bed.”

  But at the door he called to me. I halted, turned. “Do you believe in ghosts, Fredichka?” he asked.

  Even jokingly, one would not admit such a belief to a Member of the Central Committee of the Party. “Certainly not, Andrei Konstantinovitch,” I answered.

  Contemptuously, he looked me up and down. “You should,” he said; and his laugh was so intense that it was almost threatening. “You should believe in them. All Russia’s haunted. The Kremlin, the Red Square, are haunted by thousands who’ve been tortured, who’ve screamed for mercy, who’ve been slaughtered there. This dacha’s haunted—and you will see its ghost. Sleep soundly, Fredichka.”

  I chuckled rather weakly, and said goodnight, but as I went down the corridor, hastened on my way by that enormous laughter, I felt a chill—was it merely of superstition?—descend on me.

  * * * *

  For four months, I lived there with Ignatiev. On the third day, after the reports from my physical examination had come in, he introduced me to the computer expert, a small, neat, pleasant man with silver spectacles. His name was Artiemko, and he was interested only in his computers and in chess. He was an easy man to get along with, and as Ignatiev had installed him in a room not far from mine, he was almost always available. I had no difficulty explaining how my theory operated, and how, unlike most theories in philology, it applied not just to certain groups of languages, but to all except possibly the most primitive; and he, on his part, took a genuine interest, explaining just as patiently how that theory could be exploited by his instruments. We worked all day, every day, usually at Ignatiev’s house, but sometimes at an Institute laboratory, where Artiemko was regularly employed. Sometimes, too, I would get Ignatiev’s permission to use the libraries, when I needed references which could not readily be brought to me.

  I had always taken pleasure in my work; and now new horizons had opened to me. I enjoyed my days. Sometimes, after supper, when Ignatiev was not home—and that was usually five evenings out of seven—I would play chess either with Artiemko or with Marfa, or we would watch the television together. She was kind to me—as kind, I think, as she dared to be. She never talked about Ignatiev. It was obvious that she loved him. It was equally obvious that she was desperately unhappy; several times, in the morning, I surprised her weeping. But if I needed anything, I only had to ask her. If I felt unwell, she brought me broth or gave me medicines. Then, when I had trouble sleeping after Ignatiev had been drinking, when lying in bed I could still hear his laughter sounding in my ears, she gave me the sleeping pills a doctor had prescribed for her. She gave me the whole bottle, warning me that they were very strong, and saying that she herself had never needed them. I wonder now what will become of her.

  Actually, my insomnia did not last for long. I realized that, in order to get all my work done, in order to survive, I would have to sleep naturally and not rely on opiates. Alone in my room at night, I realized that I did not even fully understand the situation I was in. Prison, no matter how unpleasant, had been predictable. Ignatiev, I knew, was not. I would lie there wondering what his intentions really were toward me, whether he would send me back to prison after he had sucked me dry, or whether, alive even in prison, I might not be a danger to his new reputation. And there were nights when I lay there half-waking and half-sleeping, imagining—or was I imagining?—strange sounds within the walls, and subtle movements of the air.

  Finally, before e
ven half a dozen of the sleeping pills were gone, I remembered how I had taught myself to sleep in prison. I have always had an almost perfect memory for poetry, and so I recited Pushkin to myself, and Lermontov, and my own poetry and my friends’, and endless passages of Byron, and in my mind’s eye I played entire scenes from Racine and Molière. The library in my mind was instantly accessible, not hidden underground like Ivan Grozni’s.

  The weeks and months went by, and we made progress. At that stage, we were working in two basic linguistic areas, the Slavonic and the Greek; and now we first found that computer-evolved words—words reproduced as they would have been a few hundred, a few thousand years previously—were valid. When I checked them against old documents and antique inscriptions—Slavonic writings a few hundred years old, Greek going back two or three thousand years—they corresponded. First there were individual words, then entire phrases. I became more and more excited. So did Ignatiev. He would drink and boast, and talk about his risen ghosts, and—as always—laugh at my discomfiture.

  During the second month, he ordered me to concentrate on the Slavonic tongues, especially on Russian. That, he told me, was where our results would be most immediate and dramatic. “We are here,” he said, “in the midst of all our Russian-speaking ghosts, are we not, Fredichka? We must make the best of our opportunity.”

  As the fourth month drew to a close, Artiemko announced that his own work was done, that he would have to go back to his job at the laboratory. He promised to return from time to time and play chess with me, and I was genuinely sorry to see him go.