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

by Edward M. Lerner

  “But ten years, General!” the army secretary protested.

  “Hudson came here, bringing us the greatest discovery in all history, and we kicked him out. After that, do you expect them to come crawling back to us?”

  “You think they went to someone else?”

  “They wouldn’t do that. They know what the thing they have found would mean. They wouldn’t sell us out.”

  “Hudson came with a preposterous proposition,” said the man from the state department.

  “They had to protect themselves!” yelled the general. “If you had discovered a virgin planet with its natural resources intact, what would you do about it? Come trotting down here and hand it over to a government that’s too ‘busy’ to recognize—”

  “General!”

  “Yes, sir,” apologized the general tiredly. “I wish you gentlemen could see my view of it, how it all fits together. First there were the films and we have the word of a dozen competent paleontologists that it’s impossible to fake anything as perfect as those films. But even granting that they could be, there are certain differences that no one would ever think of faking, because no one ever knew. Who, as an example, would put lynx tassels on the ears of a saber-tooth? Who would know that young mastodon were black?

  “And the location. I wonder if you’ve forgotten that we tracked down the location of Adams’ workshop from those films alone. They gave us clues so positive that we didn’t even hesitate—we drove straight to the old deserted farm where Adams and his friends had worked. Don’t you see how it all fits together?”

  “I presume,” the man from the state department said nastily, “that you even have an explanation as to why they chose that particular location.”

  “You thought you had me there,” said the general, “but I have an answer. A good one. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is a geologic curiosity. It was missed by all the glaciations. Why, we do not know. Whatever the reason, the glaciers came down on both sides of it and far to the south of it and left it standing there, a little island in a sea of ice.

  “And another thing: Except for a time in the Triassic, that same area of Wisconsin has always been dry land. That and a few other spots are the only areas in North America which have not, time and time again, been covered by water. I don’t think it necessary to point out the comfort it would be to an experimental traveler in time to be certain that, in almost any era he might hit, he’d have dry land beneath him.”

  The economics expert spoke up: “We’ve given this matter a lot of study and, while we do not feel ourselves competent to rule upon the possibility or impossibility of time travel, there are some observations I should like, at some time, to make.”

  “Go ahead right now,” said the JCS chairman.

  “We see one objection to the entire matter. One of the reasons, naturally, that we had some interest in it is that, if true, it would give us an entire new planet to exploit, perhaps more wisely than we’ve done in the past. But the thought occurs that any planet has only a certain grand total of natural resources. If we go into the past and exploit them, what effect will that have upon what is left of those resources for use in the present? Wouldn’t we, in doing this, be robbing ourselves of our own heritage?”

  “That contention,” said the AEC chairman, “wouldn’t hold true in every case. Quite the reverse, in fact. We know that there was, in some geologic ages in the past, a great deal more uranium than we have today. Go back far enough and you’d catch that uranium before it turned into lead. In southwestern Wisconsin, there is a lot of lead. Hudson told us he knew the location of vast uranium deposits and we thought he was a crackpot talking through his hat. If we’d known—let’s be fair about this—if we had known and believed him about going back in time, we’d have snapped him up at once and all this would not have happened.”

  “It wouldn’t hold true with forests, either,” said the chairman of the JCS. “Or with pastures or with crops.”

  The economics expert was slightly flushed. “There is another thing,” he said. “If we go back in time and colonize the land we find there, what would happen when that—well, let’s call it retroactive—when that retroactive civilization reaches the beginning of our historic period? What will result from that cultural collision? Will our history change? Is what has happened false? Is all—”

  “That’s all poppycock!” the general shouted. “That and this other talk about using up resources. Whatever we did in the past—or are about to do—has been done already. I’ve lain awake nights, mister, thinking about all these things and there is no answer, believe me, except the one I give you. The question which faces us here is an immediate one. Do we give all this up or do we keep on watching that Wisconsin farm, waiting for them to come back? Do we keep on trying to find, independently, the process or formula or method that Adams found for traveling in time?”

  “We’ve had no luck in our research so far, General,” said the quiet physicist who sat at the table’s end. “If you were not so sure and if the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I’d say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we’ve done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We’d like to keep on trying.”

  “Not one word of blame has been put on you for your failure,” the chairman told the physicist. “That you could do it seems to be more than can be humanly expected. If Adams did it—if he did, I say—it must have been simply that he blundered on an avenue of research no other man has thought of.”

  “You will recall,” said the general, “that the research program, even from the first, was thought of strictly as a gamble. Our one hope was, and must remain, that they will return.”

  “It would have been so much simpler all around,” the state department man said, “if Adams had patented his method.”

  The general raged at him. “And had it published, all neat and orderly, in the patent office records so that anyone who wanted it could look it up and have it?”

  “We can be most sincerely thankful,” said the chairman, “that he did not patent it.”

  CHAPTER VI

  The helicopter would never fly again, but the time unit was intact.

  Which didn’t mean that it would work.

  They held a powwow at their camp site. It had been, they decided, simpler to move the camp than to remove the body of Old Buster. So they had shifted at dawn, leaving the old mastodon still sprawled across the helicopter.

  In a day or two, they knew, the great bones would be cleanly picked by the carrion birds, the lesser cats, the wolves and foxes and the little skulkers.

  Getting the time unit out of the helicopter had been quite a chore, but they finally had managed and now Adams sat with it cradled in his lap.

  “The worst of it,” he told them, “is that I can’t test it. There’s no way to. You turn it on and it works or it doesn’t work. You can’t know till you try.”

  “That’s something we can’t help,” Cooper replied. “The problem, seems to me, is how we’re going to use it without the whirlybird.”

  “We have to figure out some way to get up in the air,” said Adams. “We don’t want to take the chance of going up into the twentieth century and arriving there about six feet underground.”

  “Common sense says that we should be higher here than up ahead,” Hudson pointed out. “These hills have stood here since Jurassic times. They probably were a good deal higher then and have weathered down. That weathering still should be going on. So we should be higher here than in the twentieth century—not much, perhaps, but higher.”

  “Did anyone ever notice what the altimeter read?” asked Cooper.

  “I don’t believe I did,” Adams admitted.

  “It wouldn’t tell you, anyhow,” Hudson declared. “It would just give our height then and now—and we were moving, remember—and what about air pockets
and relative atmosphere density and all the rest?”

  Cooper looked as discouraged as Hudson felt.

  “How does this sound?” asked Adams. “We’ll build a platform twelve feet high. That certainly should be enough to clear us and yet small enough to stay within the range of the unit’s force-field.”

  “And what if we’re two feet higher here?” Hudson pointed out.

  “A fall of fourteen feet wouldn’t kill a man unless he’s plain unlucky.”

  “It might break some bones.”

  “So it might break some bones. You want to stay here or take a chance on a broken leg?”

  “All right, if you put it that way. A platform, you say. A platform out of what?”

  “Timber. There’s lot of it. We just go out and cut some logs.”

  “A twelve-foot log is heavy. And how are we going to get that big a log uphill?”

  “We drag it.”

  “We try to, you mean.”

  “Maybe we could fix up a cart,” said Adams, after thinking a moment.

  “Out of what?” Cooper asked.

  “Rollers, maybe. We could cut some and roll the logs up here.”

  “That would work on level ground,” Hudson said. “It wouldn’t work to roll a log uphill. It would get away from us. Someone might get killed.”

  “The logs would have to be longer than twelve feet, anyhow,” Cooper put in. “You’d have to set them in a hole and that takes away some footage.”

  “Why not the tripod principle?” Hudson offered. “Fasten three logs at the top and raise them.”

  “That’s a gin-pole, a primitive derrick. It’d still have to be longer than twelve feet. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. And how are we going to hoist three sixteen-foot logs? We’d need a block and tackle.”

  “There’s another thing,” said Cooper. “Part of those logs might just be beyond the effective range of the force-field. Part of them would have to—have to, mind you—move in time and part couldn’t. That would set up a stress.…”

  “Another thing about it,” added Hudson, “is that we’d travel with the logs. I don’t want to come out in another time with a bunch of logs flying all around me.”

  “Cheer up,” Adams told them. “Maybe the unit won’t work, anyhow.”

  CHAPTER VII

  The general sat alone in his office and held his head between his hands. The fools, he thought, the goddamn knuckle-headed fools! Why couldn’t they see it as clearly as he did?

  For fifteen years now, as head of Project Mastodon, he had lived with it night and day and he could see all the possibilities as clearly as if they had been actual fact. Not military possibilities alone, although as a military man, he naturally would think of those first.

  The hidden bases, for example, located within the very strongholds of potential enemies—within, yet centuries removed in time. Many centuries removed and only seconds distant.

  He could see it all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost nor a man.

  Except that if you had the bases, you need never strike the blow. If you had the bases and let the enemy know you had them, there would never be the provocation.

  And on the home front, you’d have air-raid shelters that would be effective. You’d evacuate your population not in space, but time. You’d have the sure and absolute defense against any kind of bombing—fission, fusion, bacteriological or whatever else the labs had in stock.

  And if the worst should come—which it never would with a setup like that—you’d have a place to which the entire nation could retreat, leaving to the enemy the empty, blasted cities and the lethally dusted countryside.

  Sanctuary—that had been what Hudson had offered the then-secretary of state fifteen years ago—and the idiot had frozen up with the insult of it and had Hudson thrown out.

  And if war did not come, think of the living space and the vast new opportunities—not the least of which would be the opportunity to achieve peaceful living in a virgin world, where the old hatreds would slough off and new concepts have a chance to grow.

  He wondered where they were, those three who had gone back into time. Dead, perhaps. Run down by a mastodon. Or stalked by tigers. Or maybe done in by warlike tribesmen. No, he kept forgetting there weren’t any in that era. Or trapped in time, unable to get back, condemned to exile in an alien time. Or maybe, he thought, just plain disgusted. And he couldn’t blame them if they were.

  Or maybe—let’s be fantastic about this—sneaking in colonists from some place other than the watched Wisconsin farm, building up in actuality the nation they had claimed to be.

  They had to get back to the present soon or Project Mastodon would be killed entirely. Already the research program had been halted and if something didn’t happen quickly, the watch that was kept on the Wisconsin farm would be called off.

  “And if they do that,” said the general, “I know just what I’ll do.”

  He got up and strode around the room.

  “By God,” he said, “I’ll show ’em!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  It had taken ten full days of back-breaking work to build the pyramid. They’d hauled the rocks from the creek bed half a mile away and had piled them, stone by rolling stone, to the height of a full twelve feet. It took a lot of rocks and a lot of patience, for as the pyramid went up, the base naturally kept broadening out.

  But now all was finally ready.

  Hudson sat before the burned-out campfire and held his blistered hands before him.

  It should work, he thought, better than the logs—and less dangerous.

  Grab a handful of sand. Some trickled back between your fingers, but most stayed in your grasp. That was the principle of the pyramid of stones. When—and if—the time machine should work, most of the rocks would go along.

  Those that didn’t go would simply trickle out and do no harm. There’d be no stress or strain to upset the working of the force-field.

  And if the time unit didn’t work?

  Or if it did?

  This was the end of the dream, thought Hudson, no matter how you looked at it.

  For even if they did get back to the twentieth century, there would be no money and with the film lost and no other taken to replace it, they’d have no proof they had traveled back beyond the dawn of history—back almost to the dawn of Man.

  Although how far you traveled would have no significance. An hour or a million years would be all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go back the million years, it was within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness—back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk stroke of destiny.

  Another helicopter would cost thirty thousand dollars—and they didn’t even have the money to buy the tractor that they needed to build the stockade.

  There was no way to borrow. You couldn’t walk into a bank and say you wanted thirty thousand to take a trip back to the Old Stone Age.

  You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they’d run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.

  “There’s one thing that still bothers me,” said Cooper, breaking the silence. “We spent a lot of time picking our spot so we’d miss the barn and house and all the other buildings.…”

  “Don’t tell me the windmill!” Hudson cried.

  “No. I’m pretty sure we’re clear of that. But the way I figure, we’re right astraddle that barbed-wire fence at the south end of the orchard.”

  “If you want, we
could move the pyramid over twenty feet or so.”

  Cooper groaned. “I’ll take my chances with the fence.” Adams got to his feet, the time unit tucked underneath his arm. “Come on, you guys. It’s time to go.”

  They climbed the pyramid gingerly and stood unsteadily at its top.

  Adams shifted the unit around, clasped it to his chest.

  “Stand around close,” he said, “and bend your knees a little. It may be quite a drop.”

  “Go ahead,” said Cooper. “Press the button.”

  Adams pressed the button.

  Nothing happened.

  The unit didn’t work.

  CHAPTER IX

  The chief of Central Intelligence was white-lipped when he finished talking.

  “You’re sure of your information?” asked the President.

  “Mr. President,” said the CIA chief, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life.”

  The President looked at the other two who were in the room, a question in his eyes.

  The JCS chairman said, “It checks, sir, with everything we know.”

  “But it’s incredible!” the President said.

  “They’re afraid,” said the CIA chief. “They lie awake nights. They’ve become convinced that we’re on the verge of traveling in time. They’ve tried and failed, but they think we’re near success. To their way of thinking, they’ve got to hit us now or never, because once we actually get time travel, they know their number’s up.”

  “But we dropped Project Mastodon entirely almost three years ago. It’s been all of ten years since we stopped the research. It was twenty-five years ago that Hudson—”

  “That makes no difference, sir. They’re convinced we dropped the project publicly, but went underground with it. That would be the kind of strategy they could understand.”

  The President picked up a pencil and doodled on a pad.

  “Who was that old general,” he asked, “the one who raised so much fuss when we dropped the project? I remember I was in the Senate then. He came around to see me.”