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

by Edward M. Lerner

  * * * *

  I was still drunk when I arrived. This should have fascinated Francis, because it was theoretically impossible, he had previously explained at considerable length, for me to actually leave anything physically in the past, or to bring anything forward, which was a kind of temporal failsafe to prevent serious messing with history. But the 16th century alcohol, in my system, had definitely done a bit of time-traveling, and what was I doing but seriously messing with history?

  My mind cleared only very slowly. I realized that I was in the basement of the Physics Building all right, and dressed as Falstaff, and drunk as a skunk, but there was no time-corridor. It was just a storeroom, full of boxes. And there was no sign of Francis.

  What had I done?

  The only answer, at a time like this, is research. I hurried across campus, sticking to the shadows, hoping I would not be spotted. The library was closed, but I had the key to the English Department. I let myself in, sat down in my desk.

  The room was still swaying, a little, though the cold night air and the adrenaline rush of getting here had cleared my mind considerably. I paused, gasping for breath, then fingered through my Rolodex for Francis’s number.

  He lived in Arizona now, not Pennsylvania anymore.

  I called him up. With the time-difference, it wasn’t too late. He sounded puzzled, even a little alarmed, as I rambled on, trying to pump him for information without admitting I was doing so. “Chuck, Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” He at least was allowed to call me Chuck.

  I hung up.

  I glanced around at the shelf behind my desk, and saw my familiar Penguin Shakespeare, but, beside it eight fat volumes of The Collected Dramas and Poetry of Christopher Marlowe, and next to those a biography: Marlowe: the One-Eyed Poet by a respected colleague; below that, a whole shelf of issues of Marlowe Studies, and several copies of a book with my own name on it: William Shakespeare, Friend of Marlowe by Charles Henry Tillinghast, Ph.D.

  Oh my God.… I could only sit and tear my hair, and then frantically search the internet. First, the little things. My brother. Arizona, yes. Lived in Tempe. Taught in the university there. English. I had changed history, all right, and in this new history my brother had given up physics in college and switched his major to English because he was so carried away by.…a performance he’d seen by the Royal Marlowe Company of Jenghiz Khan, Lord of the Earth.

  I web-searched frantically. Yes. Marlowe had survived. Circumstances were mysterious. It was uncertain how many people had been with him at Dame Eleanor’s Tavern on Deptford Strand that day in 1593 when he and his fellows got into a quarrel over the bill—but why, why? I’d left them with a lot of gold, hadn’t I, more than enough to pay for meat and drink.…unless, unless, my brother in the other reality, the one who became the physicist, had been correct, and you can’t leave something in the past, so the gold I’d brought there vanished when I did—where? I don’t know, scattered along the timestream somewhere. Maybe it materialized on a contemporary London street. The net result, the money disappeared, Marlowe and his pals were suddenly embarrassed for cash, the much-studied brawl ensued. Marlowe, in a drunken rage, snatched Frizer’s dagger from behind and beat him over the head with the pommel, whereupon Frizer twisted around, grabbed Marlowe’s wrist, and shoved the dagger point-first into the poet’s face.

  But the point was broken off, almost square, and the dagger took out Marlowe’s right eye, but did not kill him. He lived. He became the legendary One-Eyed Poet of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, who had wrapped the whole of English dramatic poetry of that period around himself, so that Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, John Webster, and the rest of them were remembered as contemporaries of Marlowe.

  I was still tearing through websites when I heard keys jangle, the front door open, and someone come in. It was all I could do to rush into the back of the office, change out of the Falstaff costume and make it back to my desk before—who should poke his unwelcome head into my little world, but my nemesis, Professor Lee Allan Cranchberger?

  “Hey Chuck,” he said. “Working early.…or late?”

  “Just working.”

  “How, how did you like my guest lecture the other day?”

  “Great, just great.”

  “Why thank you, Chuck. You know, I think you ought to be thanking your lucky stars that you specialized in the second banana, Shakespeare, because I’ve got the Marlovians shaking in their boots.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you have.” I kept clicking through web-pages.

  “My book is a smash, you have to admit, Chuck. I’d meant to drop off a copy for you.” He thunked a thick tome down on my desk. “I see you’re busy, so I’ll be on my way. Oh…would you like me to autograph it before I go?”

  * * * *

  Ay, here’s the rub. As I paged through The Marlowe Fraud Unmasked: Final Proof That Edward De Vere Wrote the Plays, I realized that I had been short-changed my pound of flesh. I had proven myself right, but as the only survivor of the old reality, which my meddling had otherwise wiped out, only I knew that, and I could convince no one. Some revenge, huh? The following weeks revealed that there were occasional improvements in this new version of things, notably that my brother the English major had married a nice girl in Arizona and was now a proud grandfather, as opposed to my brother the physicist in Pennsylvania who was messily divorced, bitter, and obsessed with his work—but in my situation, there was no improvement as all. Cranchberger was as insufferable and dismissive as ever. I did not have my revenge, and without my brother being a physicist, there was no time machine. I could not meddle my way out of this one.

  At times like this I think of murder, or call my brother (which would not do much good) or consider selling my soul to the Devil.

  I clicked to the university directory. Did we have a Department of Demonology?

  THE SOLID MEN, by C.J. Henderson

  A Rick Rambler/Time Patrol Mystery

  “Those wanting wit affect gravity, and go by the name of solid men.”

  —John Dryden

  “Zing, it was one when you knew how to nerk. Binkel. There was no denying it. You could feel it, tan side down--sharp.

  “Wait a minute. Fuad.”

  —klik—

  “Didn’t realize what time I was set for. I apologize. These things happen when you’re part of the Time Patrol. Of course, you don’t actually know what that means, do you?”

  I knew at least one thing I’d said had gotten through to young mister Quentin Peasley of the wilds of New Jersey, 2010 thru 2069, survived at finality date by his not-yet path-crossed wife Jenna, and his still unborn children, Cedric and Marshall. There was not, indeed, in any way, shape or form, any possibility that he knew what I meant. They never know. They can never, ever get their hands around it. I mean it.

  You simply can’t noggle a guy and come right out and say, “yes, that’s right, I’m a time cop. I move through the one-after-another seconds in all directions, across all the lines, watching for unauthorized activity of any nature.” That would be like saying something like, “hey, I’m here because I know what’s supposed to happen and am duly authorized to make sure it does, using any and all means to make certain absolutely nothing interferes with upper case ‘P,’ upper case ‘C,’ Proven Time.”

  No, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. I mean, the first thing they all want you to do is explain Proven Time, as if anyone could. The accident that set man’s sight on the One True Timeline from which all others spring was no blessing. Up until then people had been a lot happier—a whole lot. Saner, too. A lot of folks—and I’m one of them, let me tell you—feel that ol’ Doc Wezleski ignored time travel when he discovered it because he could see straight away the kind of trouble it meant for all of us.

  Anyway, the answer is “No.” In the end it’s always best to just give them some kind of story. Something like the one I fed Quentin after I’d gotten my
Local Wordage Formatter crinkled to the right year.

  “Forget all that,” I suggested, giving the poor sap ‘Knowing, Sincere Look #6,’ one of my personal favorites. “I need your help for a few hours, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “What?”

  Of course, he was half in the noggle-bag already. I swear if Central could just calibrate one decent LWF, the force wouldn’t have a third of the problems we do with insertion.

  “Here’s the story, Quentin.”

  My hands checked over the rest of my equipment while I spoke, monitoring to see if any of it was over-heating (always a possibility), smoking (sometimes a possibility), or vibrating at a rate that might indicate an eminent implosion (sadly, a 1 in 95,000 possibility). For once, however, everything seemed to have survived insertion. I had arrived, unwarmed, non-smoking, and able to expect to live through the next eighteen seconds with relative security in the year of someone’s Lord 2028, with two hours to spare before the next series of souls were scheduled to be stolen from somewhere nearby—parties undetermined.

  I had those one hundred and twenty minutes to ascertain the means of spatial energy theft, the vehicle of transfer, and the identity of the perpetrators before the Proven Time cosmic alignment was battered downward to a subcategory of semi-known, and mankind once more became on the whole a tree-swinging tool of fate rather than an upright, self-determining species.

  “My name is Rick Rambler. I’d like, if I might, to tag along behind you for the next several hours.” No time to waste. “In fact, I’ll give you one thousand dollars to be where you are for the next,” quick eye scan of the chronometer, “next one hundred and…counting…eighteen minutes.”

  Young mister Peasley did not seem enthused.

  “Is one thousand dollars of current currency not worth that much these days? Doesn’t that buy quite a stack of goods?”

  “I dunno,” answered Quentin, giving his best shot at getting with the program. “In like Africa, or um, what’s that’s messed-up sink-hole down south…”

  “Orlando?” I ventured.

  “Mexico,” Quentin corrected me.

  “So,” I said, pointing toward the ground, “here—what would be outrageously great pay for me following where you go and what you do for the next, ah, less than two hours?”

  “For what?” Quentin looked around, trying to nonchalantly scout for an exit, “I mean, is this a gay thing or a psycho-killer thing?”

  “Nothing of either sort,” I assured him. Spreading my hands before him, palms outward, I said, “I just have this hunch that whatever it is you’ve planned for the next two hours is where I want to be.” He couldn’t possible pick up a bad vibration from me. I was telling him the absolute truth.

  “No freaky business?”

  “What happens, where we go, et cetera,” I used the Class-A interaction tone, the one designed specifically for believability, “it’s all up to you.”

  “Man, the thousand would’ve been good.” Quentin smiled, liked he’d figured something out and was going to be just ever so impressed with himself. “But you want somethin’, so I’ll take five thousand.”

  I nodded, peeling twenty-five, what-appeared-to-me, and apparently to Quentin as well, hundred dollar bills from my currency log. Yeah, sharp move, kid.

  “Half now, half later,” I told him.

  Quentin smiled and pocketed the I-guess-it-was money after all. Actually, the little squarehead hadn’t made such a bad deal. If he lived through the next two hours, he’d get to keep the money. Oh yes, I mean all of it. Hell, I’ll give him the rest. It’s the least the Patrol can do for staking him out.

  Not that the patrol had picked him in particular or arranged whatever was going to happen in one hundred sixteen minutes.

  No, Quentin Peasley was fading from the PT stats, the record charts of Proven Time—PT—the one real time line from which all the multitudinous others are spawned. Certainly the idea has to be familiar—a billion, billion yous living a billion, billion different lives, each one just a little further removed from your own, each a single step off to the left or right, each one step closer to riches and love and security as you, but each just as easily one step closer to ruin and pain and sorrow to break the heart as well.

  What had been found the day Dr. Wendel Q. Wezleski made the connection between steam-power and inter-dimensional travel was the absolute center of everything. What was found the day after when the Pelgimbly Center for the Advanced Sciences announced he had discovered time travel years earlier as well was the beginning of a nightmare. Humanity found itself existing in the one perfect time at the core of all existence, the one which dreamt all the others. No other dimension had discovered the ability to move sideways through reality. Only us.

  As an abstract idea, it was an interesting puzzle. But, as a reality, it became a tangible thing. And all tangible things can be exploited by the human mind.

  Including time travel.

  Plenty of others had found their way to the time travel door after Wezleski proved the wall wasn’t solid, and accidentally went so far as to point out the doorknob. Sadly, when that happened, it soon became apparent that some of those crowding around this new knowledge were using it for no good end. And, where as it was one thing if they fouled up their own lives, it was another if their skipping across the centuries sent reverberations across the lines that affected all of us—affected, in other words, Prime Time, the one true dimension.

  The one which, once found, had to be protected at all costs.

  “Okay,” said a cheerful Quentin. “You’re the boss. Where to?”

  “Wherever you want, Quent.” I sighed. “Remember?”

  Quentin scrunched up his face. Suddenly an unusually bright light came on behind his dull eyes. Its excitement suggested that young master potatohead still did not understand exactly what I was driving to get across.

  “Look,” I told him, finger in his face, drawing his vision from my eyes so I could scan the area, “don’t worry about me. Don’t think about me. I’m just another guy who happens to be wherever you are for the next one hundred and fifteen minutes. Whatever you were on your way to do, just go do it.”

  Quentin rolled his tongue around his pressed-closed lips for a handful of seconds while his brain tried to struggle past the moment of overload the presence of twenty-five hundred dollars could make in his life. It was an Unguarded Instant—one of the moments all Time Patrollers love, fear and hate.

  Here comes the big concept, okay? The thing newbies have the hardest time wrapping their nut around. We know everything? Understand? Get it—do you dig? We know everything. Or at least, we can know everything.

  Wezleski gave us access to proven time. With chronal motion we can move up and down the one true timeline with greater ease than geese winging their way home for the winter. We can go anywhere, anytime—see anyone doing anything. We know about the aliens that watched us from 1687 to 2089, waiting to allow us to mature sufficiently to join the universal federation and how wonderful everything became once their technologies were introduced into our lives. We know what really happened to Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain and Yippie the Back-Flipping Dog. We know the last time you masturbated and whose picture you had in your hand.

  But, when a TeePee interacts with the past, they end up instituting Unguarded Instants, moments in time that were never—could never have been—previously catalogued, because this was their first appearance. We’re not actually supposed to let them happen, but since they can’t be helped, officially we’re supposed to keep them to a minimum.

  I wasn’t, under any circumstances, supposed to offer young Quentin a hundred dollars, or a thousand or any other amount of currency. But I did; after all, I had to do something. What was going to happen to him somewhere in the near future was going to be an unguarded instant, too—a godsdamned insanely cold-blooded one—the one I’d come back to prevent.

  The Time Patrol was created to guard Proven Time. Any threat from one time period to events i
n another are met with the harshest punishments. There was a movie once, back when they made them still, that had a line in it that kind of sums up what we do. A guy holds out a pocket watch and says something like, “it’s just a cheap piece of junk, but bury it in the desert for a thousand years and it becomes priceless.”

  If that were the extent of timecrime, I’m not certain anyone would even care. That’s not the kind of stuff the Patrol was formed to stop. No, at the point in time from where the TeePee operates, everyone pretty much lives in that kind of happy spandex wonderful peace, complete with the tall, gleaming buildings. But even with everything they could want, some people aren’t happy.

  The ones I was after were using a power source called a Gravity Well to skim through the past and steal the souls of helpless folks living there. Gravity Wells are the bio-mech centers of the big space cruisers, massive theory engines that actually “suppose” their way through space by thinking they’re heavy enough to do what they do. They’re fabulously heady devices, and full of tricks, which is what made this case so impossible.

  First off, they’re infinitely expensive. Not that many of them exist. Most are in the hands of the planetary government. Industry controls some, but they’re heavily regulated. Back home, when the first person died in the past from having their soul removed to whom this was not supposed to happen, alarm bells rang from the end of time back to the Mesozoic.

  This was big.

  And, for those who don’t know what I mean exactly by the word “soul,” I’m talking about that weight allotment of energy and human static that exits the body at the time of death. It contains all the memories, emotional ticks and everything else that makes one bag of flesh, skin, blood and flatulence different and unique from the next one. They’re part of a delicate mix in this universe, and when they don’t get to where they’re suppose to go, well…I mean, gink me, that’s just asking for trouble.

  So, the Patrol took it pretty serious when someone started fishing for souls. It didn’t take long to determine that a) it was being done by someone in our own time, that b) they were using a gravity well to do it, and that c) they didn’t look as if they had any intention of stopping. In fact, if psychiatry is anything like an exact science, it was pretty definite they were going to be spreading murder up and down the time stream like liver snacks at a kennel.