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

by Edward M. Lerner

  Keith fitted the helmet over his head, took a deep breath, and flipped the switch. He concentrated on sending the cure for cancer back to his own brain twenty years in the past. Again came a faint electric tingling, but nothing more.

  “Well?” Sally asked. “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, pulling off the helmet. “I don’t think so. Nothing feels different.”

  “Poor dear.” She touched his shoulder. “I know how much it means to you.”

  He sighed and patted her liver-spotted hand, then looked beyond her at the circle of disappointed faces. The six staff members of the research division at O’Conner Pharmaceuticals all looked grimly resigned. Even the few of them who half understood the principles of time-transmission hadn’t really believed it would work; they had only humored him because he signed the paychecks. His reputation might have been built on a breakthrough cure for cancer, but when he started chasing time-travel, he knew he had lost their respect. Only Sally had believed, as she had always believed in him.

  “Let’s see,” Sally said. “Maybe it did work and we just don’t know it yet.”

  She motioned at the nearest wall-active, said, “News 4,” and the program flickered on.

  “…Eighty-six thousand reported dead this month in South Africa…” droned the announcer’s voice, as pictures of plague victims flashed past.

  The researchers at O’Conner Pharmaceuticals had just come up with the vaccine this week; his plants were hurrying to manufacture enough serum to cure the four million infected men, women, and children throughout the world.

  But that wouldn’t help the two million already dead. Only sending the cure back in time could save them.

  “Off!” Keith barked. The wall returned to normal. “All right, the cure didn’t make it back,” he said. “What happened?”

  “I’ll check the settings,” Dr. Benhurst said. He motioned to the other researchers. “Places, everyone. Let’s find out where we went wrong.”

  The third try…that would be the successful one, Keith knew. They were close. So many people would be saved, if only he sent the cure back fifteen years in time.

  * * * *

  By the time they got to the fiftieth try, His Imperial Majesty Keith I, Emperor of the United Earth, was almost ready to give up.

  His life was an open record of achievements. He had cured all major diseases, imposed world peace, and amassed a six-trillion-dollar fortune, which he used for the greater good of all mankind. His companies helped the poor, fed the starving, employed the unemployable. At his orders, human colonists had begun to settle the planets and moons throughout the solar system. Truly, a new age had dawned for mankind.

  If only his time-travel experiments had worked, life would be perfect.

  As his temporal transmission throne rose slowly from the isolation chamber in the center of the Silver Palace’s experimental medical unit, he had plenty of time to think about what might have gone wrong. The calculations? No, they were correct, to the last decimal! The transducer array? In perfect order! The potential Boltron particle accelerator? Hmm…

  Then the shielding swung back like an eggshell pulling into itself, and dozens of staff members clustered around, monitoring his vital signs and the equipment functions.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Sorry, Father,” said Prince Jacob, who headed the time-analysis team personally. “No change that we can detect.”

  The emperor shook his head, and his elegantly coifed silver hair—so recognizable on every stamp and every coin in the world—flipped forward over his eyes. He casually brushed it back. Age had begun to creep up on him; his hands trembled.

  “Check the settings!” he called. “Check everything! We will try again in one hour. The recipe for immortality must go back! Think of what I might accomplish if I get it young enough to make a difference! For the good of mankind, if I can be young forever, and forever inventing, there is no telling what I might accomplish!”

  “Yes, sir!” said his son, beaming with pride.

  “Keith,” said Empress Sally, taking his arm and helping him from the throne. “May I have a word in private, please?”

  She looked radiant in her platinum-and-diamond tiara and the simple white lace dress and evening gloves she favored. But the lines around her eyes and the white hair showed her age. Of course, that would disappear with the cure for old age, and they would be young together forever.

  He beamed at her. “Of course.”

  They strolled out into the Silver Palace’s halls, past countless bustling servants, who stopped and bowed, and out into one of the countless gardens. As they settled into the deeply cushioned red velvet chairs, surrounded by strolling peacocks and the raucous calls of tame monkeys, servants appeared with trays of fruit drinks and delicate appetizers. The emperor waved them away.

  “You have tried to send back the immortality formula fifty times now,” Sally said, taking his hand. “I don’t need you to be young forever, Keith. I love you just the way you are. Let it go.”

  “But—”

  “No.” She said it firmly. “It’s time to move on. Take the aging cure now and stay your present age. Fifty-six isn’t old. We’ll have forever together. That’s what matters to me.”

  He sighed, but patted her hand. Yes, she was right. He had wasted too much effort on time-travel experiments. Never mind that it had been for her…it had always been for her.

  He smiled, then kissed gently her hand.

  “For you…anything.” He rose and offered her his arm. She accepted, and together they went out to rule the world.

  Over the months and years and centuries that followed, he never gave another thought to his failed time travel experiments.

  THE ETERNAL WALL, by Raymond Z. Gallun

  “See you in half an hour, Betty,” said Ned Vince over the party line on the telephone. “We’ll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty.…”

  Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend.

  There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road.

  Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn’t yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend.

  Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.…

  Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat.

  Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss.

  The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn’t fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so t
hat he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs.

  His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyes—like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the State University this Fall. They’d planned to be married sometime.… Goodbye, Betty…

  The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.…

  * * * *

  “Kaalleee! Tik!… Tik, tik, tik!… Kaalleee!…”

  The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was red and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill.

  “Kaalleee!… Tik, tik, tik!…”

  At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable.

  The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion.

  * * * *

  At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.

  “Kaalleee!… Tik, tik, tik!…” The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals.

  But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth.

  Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy now—flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success.

  He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn’t very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout.

  But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century.

  Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junk—scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay—yes. But not this body. The answer to this was simple—alkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy.

  * * * *

  “Kaalleee!” Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge.

  At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse.

  What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering, chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk’s kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah!

  “Tik, tik, tik!…”

  But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial than cheering.

  * * * *

  With infinite care—small, sharp hand-tools were used, now—the mummy of Ned Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, and hauled into the flying machine.

  Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward, beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever.

  Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands.

  Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view—a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk’s people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome.

  The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk’s laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more.

  Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known.

  * * * *

  At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly.

&n
bsp; At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form.

  For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid as yesterday.

  Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic.

  All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince—a sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong!

  The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis.

  “Take it easy, Ned Vince.…”

  The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned’s gaze searched for the source of the voice—located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal’s tiny-fingered paws—hands they were, really—were touching rows of keys.