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

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The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 16

by Edward M. Lerner


  “Nobody will remember this hour. It will, uh, unhappen. But I remember! I’ve relived this one hour over and over!”

  “Mr. Castleberry,” the professor’s voice came sharply, “I am a very busy man, but I will give you a few more minutes. Here is what you must do. Stay there on the telephone. When the time is up, I will still be here as well. That will disabuse you of your silly notion.”

  Defeated, Castleman said. “Very well.” He looked at his clock, waiting for the digital neons to flash 1:00. They did. There was a familiar crackling sound followed by a single, loud report.

  With the echo of that crack still in his ears, Castleman looked up at the Grand Central Tower clock. It said 12:01. He turned ninety degrees and sprinted west, bouncing off startled pedestrians and recklessly dodging cars and buses as he crossed the avenues.

  At Madison he turned and continued uptown, his sprint slowing to a dogged trot as his breath came with increasing difficulty. At 49th Street he entered the Stoebler Building, mopped his sweating forehead with a soft handkerchief while he waited for the elevator to arrive, rode up to his office and snatched up the telephone after brushing past the receptionist and his secretary with breathless grunts.

  “Stephanie,” he gasped, “get me Rosenbluth back!”

  “Back, Mr. Castleman? I don’t understand.”

  “I was just talking to—him.” Castleman stopped, held the receiver away from his ear and looked at it as if to discover some secret in the official Glamdring and Glamdring beige plastic piece. “No, of course not. I’m sorry, Stephanie.” He looked at the digital clock on his desk. It said 12:06.

  “Will that be all, Mr. Castleman?” Stephanie asked.

  He thought for a few seconds. “I want you to call Long Island University, physics department, and get me a Professor Nathan Rosenbluth. This is extremely urgent, Stephanie. I’ll stay on the line while you place the call.”

  He dragged in a deep lungful of air while he waited. His eyes roamed to the low table where the morning Times and Wall Street Journal lay. In the telephone earpiece he heard Stephanie calling information, then placing the call to Rosenbluth’s office, wheedling a line to the professor from his own secretary.

  Then Rosenbluth’s voice came over the line. “This is Rosenbluth. What is it? Who is calling from Glamdring and Glamdring? Don’t you realize that I am a very busy man? What do you want?”

  Castleman moaned. Well, give it a try anyway, he thought. “Professor,” he said, “this is Myron Castleman at Glamdring and Glamdring. We were talking on the phone just a few minutes ago, do you remember that?”

  “Nonsense,” Rosenbluth’s voice came sharply. “I never heard of any Castleton, never spoke with you, and besides I just arrived here from conducting a doctoral seminar. So I could not have spoken with anyone on the telephone.”

  “I’m very sorry to have disturbed you, sir,” said Castleman. Slowly and carefully he hung the receiver back on to the telephone desk set.

  His digital clock said 12:22.

  He stood up and walked around his office again, stopping to gaze out the window at the grime of industrial Long Island City. Of course, for all that Rosenbluth was the one to discover the time-bounce phenomenon, he was as much subject to its influence as someone who’d never heard of it. Castleman could talk to him all he wanted, could possibly even convince him of what was happening during the hour-long period of a resumption, but once the bounce took place and time resumed its progress—for a single hour—Rosenbluth would be back at 12:01 just like everybody else.

  What frustration, Castleman thought, if he ever did succeed in making Rosenbluth realize that the strange phenomenon he had theorized was an actuality, had taken place, and was recurring at one-hour intervals. At the end of the hour the next resumption would find Rosenbluth as ignorant as ever—and Castleman back at his familiar post looking up at the Grand Central Tower, the place where he’d happened to be at one minute after noon. Resumption time.

  He picked up the phone again and buzzed his secretary. “Stephanie,” he said to her, “I want to do some heavy thinking for the next few minutes. Please don’t put though any calls or visitors until one o’clock.”

  He hung up, paced, started out the window, paced some more and flung himself onto the couch. The peculiarity of the time bounce, as he mulled it over, was that the resumption of the earlier state of being not only set physical objects back to their former positions, it actually wiped out the events of the lost hour. Like daylight saving indeed!

  With the lost hour unhappened, even memories of the time were obliterated. As far as anyone else was concerned, the hour hadn’t been spent and then undone—it seemed never to have happened at all!. Thus no one was aware of the bounce. They might be reliving a given moment for the fifth time, the fiftieth, the five millionth, and never notice it! And never get past one o’clock this afternoon, either.…

  The entire universe hung up on a single sixty-minute period, eternally repeating the events of that hour. As Castleman contemplated the prospect his head spun.

  Strangest of all was the fact that he—and so far as he could tell, no one else in the world—retained his memory of the lost hour even after the bounce. He had already piled up a whole series of memories of that hour, and by recalling those experiences and by understanding the phenomenon, he could vary his behavior each time, while everyone else simply repeated the same hour over and over—except when Castleman influenced them.

  Once Miss Dolores Park had a different luncheon companion at Hamer Heaven.

  Once the trio on the library steps had a fourth member for part of their debate.

  Once—no, twice—Professor Rosenbluth himself had had odd phone calls when he got back to his office from conducting his graduate seminar.

  But those aberrations no longer existed even as memories for the persons they had happened to. Only Castleman retained those events in his mind.

  It was a curious sort of immortality. Everyone in the world would repeat one hour, forever, and never realize that time had come to a quivering halt at that point. And Myron Castleman would be permitted to live forever, piling up experiences and memories, but each of only an hour’s duration, each resumed at 12:01 PM on this balmy spring day in Manhattan, standing outside near the Grand Central Tower.

  He looked at the clock on his desk and sighed. It was nearly one o’clock. He closed his eyes and folded his hands behind his head, waiting for the crackling sound.

  A few minutes later—or perhaps it was an hour earlier—he found himself standing in midtown, looking up at the clock. He ran to the corner United Cigar Store, hurled himself into an unoccupied phone booth, dropped a dime in the slot and dialed his own office.

  “This is Myron Castleman speaking,” he began as soon as he heard his secretary’s voice. “Now, listen, this is extremely urgent. I want you to telephone Long Island University, physics department. Get hold of Professor Nathan Rosenbluth.”

  A query.

  “R-o-s-e-n-b-l-u-t-h. Right. Tell him that I’m a big shot at Glamdring and Glamdring, that I have to talk to him immediately about his time-bounce theory. That I’m on my way now, and please to be ready for me in the lobby.

  “Tell him that it’s a vital matter, and we must complete our conversation by one o’clock or all is lost.”

  A few words in response.

  “Fine. Good.”

  He pulled open the door and vaulted from the booth, leaving the telephone hanging by its reinforced cord. He ran from the store, into Grand Central, fishing for a subway token as he ran. When he reached the lower level, he jammed the token into its slot, shoved through the turnstile, saw an express at the platform just closing its doors and managed to wedge an arm between the rubber seals.

  Reluctantly the doors rolled open again, and Castleman collapsed into a vacant seat on the half-empty noontime train. He sat gasping for breath, feeling sharp pains in his chest and shoulder. With his right hand he pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and ran it
around the inside of his collar.

  When he reached his stop, the pains had partially subsided and he had his breath back. He climbed the stairs laboriously, crossed the wide plaza and pushed his way into the building where he hoped to find Nathan Rosenbluth.

  Inside the lobby was a receptionist’s desk manned by a bored-looking student. Castleman gasped his name and asked if Professor Rosenbluth was expecting him.

  The student jerked a casual thumb over his shoulder, indicating a shabby-looking figure examining a wall plaque nearby.

  Castleman staggered to the man and introduced himself. It was Rosenbluth. Castleman said, “We only have a few minutes.” He looked frantically for a clock in the wall, saw one high on the wall behind the desk. It was eight minutes until one. He put his head into his hands and began to sob.

  Rosenbluth said, “What’s the matter? What kind of thing is this? Are you really the man from Glamdring and Glamdring? What’s going on here? I’m a busy man!”

  Castleman tried to explain his situation to Rosenbluth, tried to make him understand that the time bounce had occurred, was continuing to occur at hourly intervals. Rosenbluth seemed a mixture of disinterest and hostility.

  Castleman’s chest pains were growing worse. He could feel a cold sweat on his brow, feel perspiration dripping down his sleeves from his armpits. He pulled off his jacket and threw in onto the floor, pleading with Rosenbluth to find a way to get time flowing normally again.

  “I don’t want immortality,” Castleman wept, “not this way, anyhow! Everybody else has it, but they don’t know it! I know it and it’s unbearable. I can’t go on living this hour over and over!”

  Rosenbluth demanded to know what evidence Castleman could give him.

  Castleman looked at the clock. It said 12:56. The pain in his chest and shoulder became excruciating; a hot wave seemed to pass through his entire body, and he couldn’t breath.

  He pitched forward onto the floor of the room; but before he ever felt the impact of his body on the dirty terrazzo, a roaring filled his ears, a red film seemed to cover his eyes, and then everything went black.

  Death! Death was Castleman’s last thought. Death, oblivion would help him to escape from the maddening trap he found himself in, would bring him dissolution and release from the terrible form of immortality that fate had thrust upon him.

  There was total oblivion.

  For Castleman, time was meaningless, but for the rest of the world just over three minutes ticked away while Rosenbluth and the student receptionist worked over Castleman’s inert form, massaging the chest and forcing air futilely in and out of Castleman’s lungs.

  Oblivion.

  There was the echo of a single loud sound resembling the report of a small-caliber firearm. Castleman found himself looking up at the clock on the Grand Central Tower. His tweed jacket was back on his body, and an unruly lock of hair stood out over his left ear.

  It was 12:01 PM.

  TIME CONSIDERED AS A SERIES OF THERMITE BURNS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, by Damien Broderick

  My time machine was disguised as a Baronne Henriette de Snoy rosebush in full bloom. I left it in the Royal Botanic Gardens, next to a thicket of imported English foliage. We could have appeared near the library building itself, but I wanted to get the lay of the land and insinuate myself. Besides, seeing time machines pop out of the air can make people nervous. Moira remained inside, shielded, and said through my inload, “Good luck, Bobby. Try not to get arrested again.”

  “Should be back in a couple of hours, max,” I murmured. The internet and global communications systems had been dismantled six decades earlier, after the tsunami of leaked classified documents. “I’ll keep the images rolling, but let’s nix the chitchat. Oh, and if I do get arrested, maybe you should come and get me.”

  My wife sighed. “Just don’t get all tangled up, I hate time loops.”

  * * * *

  There were still trams running along St. Kilda Road, so I waited at the nearest stop and took one up Swanston Street to the State Library.

  In this year the trams floated atop some kind of monorail set flush into the road, probably a magnetic levitation effect. Luckily, as the garbled pre-catastrophe records suggested, public transport was free in 2073 Melbourne, so I had no hassles with out-of-date coins or lack of swipe cards or injected RFID chips, all that nonsense that’s tripped me up before and always ruins a nice outing. Especially if it ends with incarceration in the local lockup.

  On the tram, I had a different kind of hassle, the usual sort. Other passengers stared at me with surprise, disdain or derision. You couldn’t blame them. For obvious reasons, we’d found no reliable records in 2099 or later of the fashions in 2073. I was clad in the nearest thing to a neutral garment Moira and I have ever come up with: an inconspicuous grey track suit, no hoodie, sports shoes (you never know when you’re going to have to run like hell, and anyway they’re comfortable unless you find yourself up to your ankles or knees in an urban Greenhouse swamp), backpack.

  A broad-shouldered youth with acne was nudging his bald oafish associates and rolling his eyes in my direction. I moved further down the tram and tried to merge with the crowd. Most of the men, except a few elderly, sported shaved heads decorated with glowing shapes that moved around like fish in a bowl. The women wore their hair like Veronica Lake in those old 1940s black-and-white movies.

  We crossed Collins Street, which didn’t look all that different from 1982 or 2002—it’s startling how persistent the general look of a city can be, even in periods of architectural enthusiasm and mad-dog greedy developers. The thug followed me toward the back, smirking. He grabbed my track suit pants from behind and tried to give me a wedgie. My pack got in his way. I had a neuronic whip in my pocket, an Iranian special I’d picked up at a flea market in 2034, and I wrapped my hand around it, but didn’t want to use it and cause a ruction.

  “You’re a bloody weird, dinger,” the thug informed me. “Watcha, going to a fancy dress party with yer downpoot mates?” He jolted me with a knee to my thigh, and I oofed.

  “Don’t hurt him, Bobby,” Moira hissed in my inload. “My dog, what the hell are these morons wearing?”

  A seated middle-aged fellow was jostled and got to his feet.

  “See here, enough of this lollygagging foof! Leave the poor fellow alone, it’s obvious he’s a braindrain.” He took my arm, and stepped past me. “Here, son, have my seat. I’m getting out at Lonsdale anyway.” He trod heavily on the thug’s foot as he passed, confident in his shiny top hat. Probably didn’t hurt much, they wore something like soft woolen gloves on their feet, each toe separately snug, and I hoped water repellent. Maybe the Greenhouse effect wasn’t quite critical yet, but Melbourne is famous for its abrupt downpours.

  “Lonsdale, yeah, me, too,” I said, for Moira’s benefit, and followed him closely, to the jeers of the style-conscious oafs. My thigh hurt, but I had to force myself not to smile. Obviously this was one of those tiresome years when almost everyone bowed to the dictates of fashion. I stepped down from the tram onto the traffic island, surveyed the citizens wandering along the street, young and old and in between, and despite myself burst out laughing anyway. It was like some kind of cosplay epidemic had overtaken downtown, maybe the whole continent. For a moment the attire had baffled me. It was baggy in the wrong places and tight everywhere else. Looked horribly uncomfortable, but that seems to be the rule with fashion in a lot of decades.

  “Bobby, this is crazy!” Moira was laughing in my inner ear. “They’re all wearing their pants over their heads!”

  It wasn’t just those on the tram. Most of the men in 2073 Melbourne central district, I realized with another snort of amusement, were wearing business suit trousers or blue jeans on top, arms through the rolled-up legs, sparkly shaven heads shoved through the open flies. A few women with their hair up in luxurious folds wore the same, although many preferred skirts, hanging down over their arms like something a nun would have worn back when I was a kid, in the
days before nuns dressed like social workers.

  “And check out the leggings,” I muttered under my breath.

  Everyone had their legs through the knitted arms of merrily patterned sweaters, cinched at the waist by the inverted trouser belts. Something modestly blocked the neck holes. I saw after a moment that baseball caps were sewn into the necks, brims forward for the men, up or down depending on age, and backward for women, like tails. I could tell by the sniggers and glances that passers-by all despised my own absurd and out-of-date garb.

  “Wow, fashion statement,” Moira said.

  “You think this is silly, check your wiki for eighteenth-century toffs. Those stupid wigs. Those silk stockings. Gak.” A woman gave me a sharp glance. Man in ridiculous clothes talking to himself in broad daylight, cellphones a thing of the past. “Hey, I’d better shut up and get it done.”

  I crossed to the library at Little Lonsdale Street, settling my pack more comfortably. It was heavy on my shoulders. Item by item, we’ve worked out the optimal contents for the pack: obvious things, like food for several days, a sealed course of Cipro plus a box of heavy-duty paracetamol, two rolls of toilet paper (you’d be amazed and depressed how often that turns out to be a life saver), a code-locked wallet of cards and coins from several eras, although hardly ever the ones you need right now, but still), a googlefone that doesn’t work beyond 2019 because they keep “upgrading” the “service” and then it stops, a Swiss Army knife of course, a set of lockpicks, a comb, a false beard, and a cut-throat razor (useful for shaving and cutting throats, if it ever comes to that), and a holographic wiki I picked up in 2099 containing yottabytes of data on everything anyone will ever have learned about anything but with an index I still haven’t mastered. One of these days. And that wiki might not even exist if I botched this job.

  I paused on the library steps, under the bold banners proudly announcing next week’s unprecedented exhibition of the original Second Mars Expedition logs. No need to look again at a map of the floor plans, we’d got all those from water-stained future records and I’d memorized everything that seemed relevant. I rummaged, found my bottle of aluminum thermite powder and an old ceramic cigarette lighter, put them carefully in separate pockets. The Optix woven into my hair was recording everything in its field of view, date-stamped for later archiving. If I got out of this alive and in one piece. At least Moira would have it backed up.

 

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