by Fritz Leiber
And they were running, staggering, stumbling towards it, like men in a desert tottering towards the mirage of an oasis.
They were almost there before they stopped on a single impulse, gasping for breath.
“But there’s nobody there.”
They felt it blowing out of the city, a wind of ageless antiquity. The city was built of uniform, hard, block stone and its buildings were still standing, undamaged. But they looked as if they had been buffed smooth by a giant hand. And that was the hand of time, of centuries…of eons.
They approached in awed silence, walking slowly—almost reverently.
They passed down a long street like mourners at a funeral.
“Wait,” said Hawkins. His voice rang almost blasphemously in the silence. “Something moved there.” He pointed at a glint of light between two buildings.
It was a fountain. In the age-old silence of the city, it played, pumping from some cistern underground. Watching it, grateful for some sign of movement, they did not notice the figure seated under a piece of eroded statuary. When it stirred slightly, they all jumped and faced it with a sharp drawing-in of breath.
“My God!” breathed Lindsay.
The figure was small. It looked like a five-month foetus, its head great and wrinkled and hairless. Its eyes looked upon them without wonder—without interest even. It seemed incapable of hostility.
Hawkins advanced falteringly towards it. He was conscious of the rest shuffling behind him, grouping at his back.
He said, “Good morning.”
The creature did not speak. It inclined its head very slightly, but that might have been coincidental.
Hawkins felt silly, but he added, “Greetings,” feeling that to be more formal and thus more correct in a situation like this. “We come from the past.”
Hasse grumbled in his ear, “We’re not on Earth at all. We’ve been shifted in space, not time. This is Mars, I bet.”
Still the creature before them did not speak. The only expression in its eyes was one of utter weariness.
“This is Mars,” Hasse said again, eagerly. “It’s colder on Mars. I remember reading—”
“This isn’t Mars,” stated Hawkins. “The Sun wouldn’t look as big as this on Mars. This is Earth, all right—but in God knows what remote future. Something must have gone wrong with the projector. Or maybe the calibration is only window dressing or guesswork. This isn’t seven hundred and fifty years in the future. It’s millions!”
“And that, then?” Lindsay said, gesturing at the hunched-up figure by the fountain.
“Jeez!” gasped Ez. “He looks a thousand years old.”
“Why doesn’t he speak?” Hasse asked.
“Perhaps he hasn’t anyone to speak to any more,” said Lindsay thoughtfully.
“We’re here. He could speak to us.”
“In English?”
The thought that a language called English had faded back in the depths of time shocked Hawkins at first, then made him feel strangely glad, light-hearted, relieved at last of a heavy burden. He remembered all that wrestling with words to convey this or that shade of meaning. Once it had seemed so important, so desperately important. But now it took its insignificant place in the dust of the ages. All the striving, all the poetry and music, all the machines, all the great philosophies came in the end to this—an old, old man, sitting in front of a fountain, watching the waters playing.
Was that all? Had Man never done all those things he was going to do? Was he never to find the secret at the heart of atom and universe, send ships to the stars, become wholly good, wholly wise?
Lindsay began to laugh. He stopped to gasp, “Age! I never knew what the word meant.”
Hawkins dazedly knew that that was the way they were all feeling. Old men cast out from a young and struggling world, they were the youngest ones alive—by years, centuries, eons!
All of them straightened, their backs unbent from the load of years. And when Ez pulled out his mouth-organ, they skipped to the music like six-year-olds. Even Bell. Even Green. They joined in the chorus like kids at a picnic.
“For an old man he is old,
And an old man he is grey,
But a young man’s heart is full of love.
Get away, old man, get away!”
Hawkins frowned uncomfortably for a moment, feeling the irreverence of it. After all, that man might be the last man—the very last.
But the figure seemed not to hear them. It just sat there, looking into the fountain, as unnoticing as an old man on a park bench might be of children running and playing around him.
I DID NOT HEAR YOU, SIR, by Avram Davidson
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1958.
Bloodgood Bixbee knew nothing about art, but he knew what he didn’t like: What he didn’t like, he said—loudly and with much profane redundancy—was Bein’ Played For A Sucker… See?
Milo Anderson saw, all right; he knew he should never have sold Bixbee the unauthenticated Wilson Peale, anymore than he should have collected in advance the five percent of the contract which he could nevexdr negotiate. But there were so few people left in the capital whom he could still expect to swindle…and he needed the money. He had counted too much on Bixbee’s not being able to admit participation in an illegal deal, and it certainly wasn’t the moral aspect of not telling the rich lumberman about the cloud on the picture’s title which worried him. In fact, nothing about Bixbee had worried him at the time—for who, back in Qualliupp, Washington, would know a Wilson Peale from a citron peel?—all that concerned him had been getting the check to the bank in time. And then to the phone…
Checks, checks, telephones, telephones, and…
Damn them all, with their greedy open hands and yapping mouths.
Big crooks have littler crooks to bite ’um
And so on down, ad infinitum.
Wasn’t Bloodgood Bixbee a crook, stealing lumber rights and ravishing the forests with a ruthless hand? Sure he was. And then following the classic pattern of trying to set himself up as a man of culture, with Genuine Oil Paintings on his walls. How the Hell did he find out, anyway? Was it possible that even Qualliupp had in it someone like Edmond Hart Ransome, from whom Milo had gotten the picture? No, impossible. The whole State of Washington was too new to interest old E.H.R., who seldom concerned himself with anything later than the end of the 1700’s.
Anderson ran over in his mind the list of those with whom he had done business. Some one of them—there had to be at least one—would be in a mood to help him now, to advance money against future cooperation.
He dialed an unlisted number, tried to swallow. A man’s voice, very quiet and cautious: “Yes?”
“Ovlomov?” He must not seem too—
“Who is this?” the voice inquired. A man with whom Mr. Ovlomov had done business? Didn’t he know that Mr. Ovlomov had returned only that day to his homeland? He should follow the newspapers—No, no—he, the one speaking, was not interested in Ovlomov’s contacts. Nor would it be of any use to call again: the number was being discontinued: Ovlomov was indiscreet.
So that way—the way of being a tenth-rate spy pretending to be a third-rate one—was out, and he was no closer to being clear of his snarl of checks and phone calls: people he was blackmailing (but only able to get small sums from), people who were blackmailing him (and getting large sums). For a while he had had an easy stretch, living at old Ransome’s place.
The lease was up in a few days—another problem.
It wasn’t as if the painting wasn’t his; Ransome had left it to him, it was clear enough in his will. That was the devilish part of it—before simply stating “and all the rest of my property now located in my apartment,” the old man had “left” him, had specifically n
amed, every single article Milo had stolen from him. He had known. “And this bequest I make for a reason well known to my secretary, the said Milo Anderson.” Rubbing it in. Always rubbing it in. “Fast horses and slow women, eh, Mr. Anderson?” That sort of thing.
Perhaps it would have been better not to have meddled with the old man’s medicine bottles—but it was so easy—and so soon after the doctor had called; no trouble about a death certificate… All the rest of my property…for a reason well known to the said Milo Anderson.
But little enough property was left in the apartment by now.
By now everything was coming all at once. Bloodgood Bixbee wanting his money back and raving raw head and bloody bones if he didn’t get it. Big Patsy the bookmaker wanting the markers to be made good, wanting it right away, not threatening but promising. And Mrs. Pritchard, her voice like half-melted margarine: “Carried you on the books a long time, Milo—been good to you—we all’ve been good to you. Now we have to get the money because the Syndicate goes over the books tomorrow, and you know what that means, Milo.”
And he knew, oh, he knew all right. Even before the phone rang and the voice—an ordinary coarse unlettered unviolent sort of voice, saying its say as the cabbie might ask Where To or the laundryman announce the bill—Anderson: Get it ready, get the money ready, we’ll pick it up (by now the voice a bit bored with so many routine calls) as soon after midnight as we get around there…
Milo Anderson’s eye ran hopelessly around the apartment. Over the mantelpiece (or over where the marble had been before he’d sold it) was the faded place where the alleged Wilson Peale had hung before going to take its place over the silent hi-fi set in the Bloodgood Bixbee place in Qualliupp (who’d bother with hi-fi when the TV offered such quality fare?). The cabinet of old coins had stood over there—the Pine Tree shillings, the “York” pieces, halfreales, the dismes: all sold by now, and sold well, but the money long ago (it seemed long ago) spent… Big Patsy, Mrs. Pritchard, and all the others… Edward Hart Ransome’s place had been stuffed with the treasures of the late 1700’s, but almost everything had been sold or pawned by now except for a few pieces of essential furniture. These had been already priced and would bring only a fraction of what was needed.
Milo Anderson was not more fearful than most men, perhaps he was a degree less fearful. But there were too many things piling up just now. Everybody was putting the screws on him and there was nobody he could squeeze in turn—not now—not tonight… Like a hungry man who opens and reopens icebox and pantry: there must be some food left, only let me look once more: Milo roamed the shadowy apartment, looking and peering and hoping and fearing, something to sell, something overlooked, something…
With sweat cold on his back and with kneecaps articulating far from firmly, he pawed among the discards the dealers had left. Bellows, wood-carders, trivets (“Three for a quarter on the Boston Post Road,” the dealer said.), apple-corers and nutmeg graters, new model spinning wheels…and this damned thing. Whatever it was. The dealer had simply laughed. Milo was about to kick it. He groaned, sighed heavily, listlessly began to examine it.
Basic design was a cabinet, smallish box, done—he peered closer—in curly cherrywood, a favorite wood of the period. It stood on four legs and on one side was a little wheel and on the other side, just sticking out, was a curved copper or brass…funnel, was it? He twisted the metal horn, it moved under pressure. He turned the wheel. Nothing happened, and this was, of course, wrong: for no Colonial craftsman would have spent time making a device which didn’t do anything. He spun the wheel again, and a bell tinkled inside.
Well, yes—a box had to have an inside. Why hadn’t he looked inside? People (he pushed a stubborn peg) were always hiding money inside of… There. The panel slid open easily enough. The bell tinkled again, a tiny silver bell on a silver loop in an upper corner. A small black horn (calf? bison?) hung on a thong. Copper wires led from the small end of the horn, and parchment, like a tiny drumhead, covered the wide end. Wedged firmly behind a glass panel were two glass jars lined with metal foil.
The thing to do was to get a hammer and—the bell rang a third time. Death, he thought, was waiting, and here he was, playing with an antique toy. He seized the horn, was about to tear it loose, then he put it to his ear instead. At once he dropped it and jumped.
“Your conversant, Sir?” That was what the horn had said in his ear. Or was it, “You’re conversant…?” What was the apparatus supposed to be, a music box with vox humana, a primitive phonograph, a… No, if it resembled any piece of equipment he was familiar with, it was the telephone. Without stopping to rationalize his action in turning eagerly to anything which could divert him from his trouble, he thought, Let’s see: Buffalo horn to ear, speak into…mm…copper tube (funnel, trumpet) on outside. Feeling a bit foolish, he said—what else could he say but: “Hello?”
The odd voice in his ear repeated what it had said before. Milo asked, “Conversant with what?”
“With whom, Sir,” the voice corrected him; and then, as he remained baffled and silent: “I do not hear you, Sir. Pray consult the compendium, Sir, for the cypher of the conversant desired… Servant, Sir.”
“Hello? Hello? Hey!” He even whistled shrilly, but there was no reply.
Putting the horn down he began pressing and poking around the box, and dislodged something from a narrow space under the shelf where the odd jars were. It was a small thin leather-bound book. He opened it. Obviously laid paper, linen-rag, age-yellowed and “foxed”: brown-flecked…names, numbers…turn to the front…
THE COMPENDIUM OF THE NAMES, RESIDENCES, & CYPHERS OF THE HONORABLE & WORTHY PATRONS OF THE MAGNETICKAL INTELLIGENCE ENGINE.
Assuming—and a crazy-mad assumption it was, but here the thing stood in front of him—assuming that the telephone, or some long-forgotten precursor of it, had been invented in those days…But how could it still be working? Or was this some quirk of a few other off-beat antiquarians like old Ransome, to have their own odd-ball Bell System? Or was he simply out of his senses and imagining it all? Oh, well. He turned the page.
EXORDIUM. The Artificers of this Device have spared neither Pains nor Oeconomy to obtain the primest Materials and Workmanship, the Cabinetmaking being that of Mr. D. Phyfe, the Leyden-jars and other Magnetick Parts are the Manufactory of Dr. B. Franklin, Mr. P. Revere has fabrickated the Copper and Brass, and Mr. Meyer Meyers the Pewter and Silver.
SUBMONITION. The Cypher of each Patron is listed Alphabetickally. Spin the Wheel and on perceiving the Tintinnabulation of the Bell, Inform the Engineer of the Cypher of the Conversant desired, caveat. It is absolutely inhibited to tamper with the Leyden-jars.
Still dubious, but certainly curious, so much so that he even forgot his own danger, Anderson looked through the book. Almost automatically his finger stopped at Washington, Geo., Gent. Planter, Mt. Vernon. He spun the wheel. The bell tinkled. He put the small horn to his ear.
“Your conversant, Sir?”
This time he was prepared. He cleared his throat and said, “Patriot 1-7-7-0.”
“Your servant, Sir.” Somewhere away another little bell began to tinkle.
“Say—Engineer?” Milo ventured.
“Servant, Sir.”
“Um…what’s your name?”
“There are no names, Sir.”
Trrrinnggg…trrrinnggg…
“Well, uh, what time are you in—or where are you?”
“There is neither time nor place, Sir. And it is not permitted to hold non-pertinent discourse whilst the engine is in use, Sir.”
Trrrinnggg…
Suddenly the parchment crackled and a deep voice boomed from the horn: “Ah heah you, Seh!” Milo swallowed.
“Mr. Washington?” Surely not yet General in 1770.
“Yes, Seh—and no thanks to you, Seh! What do you mean by it, you da
mned horse-leecher? Sellin me these con founded artifized denticles—! Why, a wind-broken, bog-spavined stallion couldn’t get ’em comftable in his mouth!” The false teeth were heard clacking and grinding. The Patriot’s voice rose. “Haven’t ett a decent piece of butcher’s meat in days! Live on syllabub and sugar-tiddy! Plague take your flimsy British crafts—give me honest Colonial works, say I!” The outraged voice rang in Milo’s ear, then died away.
Mistaken for a quack dentist! Perhaps the only crime he never had committed. Milo wanted to call back, found he’d forgotten the number—the “cypher,” rather—but the place where it had been was blank. He shivered. The engineer’s voice responded to his signal. “What is George Washington’s cypher?” Milo demanded.
“That intelligence is not available, Sir. Pray consult—”
“But it’s no longer in the compendium!”
“Cyphers not in the compendium do not exist… Your servant, Sir.”
* * * *
Well, so much for the Father of His Country. Anderson had discovered a hitherto-overlooked cause of the American Revolution, but a lot of good it did him. Once again, he realized his position. There was no one he could turn to—not in the present, anyway. Not knowing what else to do, he turned once more to the past. Spun the wheel, opened the little book.
“Your conversant, Sir?”
“Printing house 1-7-7-1…”
Trrrinnggg… The voice was brisk, still retaining after all the years a trace of the Boston twang.
“We must all hang together or we shall surely hang separately… What’s your need, neighbor? The colonies should and will unite, but meanwhile the day’s work goes on.”
“Benjamin Franklin, I presume?”
“That same, my friend. Job-printing? Nice new line of chapbooks for your pleasure and instruction? Latest number of Poor Richard’s Almanack? Bay Psalm Book? Biblical Concordance? Hey?”
