The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK®

by Fritz Leiber

  “Sounds like a good way of dealing with the problem,” Martin observed.

  Raymond looked annoyed. “It’s the adolescent way,” he said, “to do away with it, rather than find a solution. Would you destroy a whole society in order to root out a single injustice?”

  “Not if it were a good one otherwise.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. Conrad got the apparatus built, or perhaps he built it himself. One doesn’t inquire too closely into such matters. But when it came to the point, Conrad couldn’t bear the idea of eliminating our great-grandfather—because our great-grandfather was such a good man, you know.” Raymond’s expressive upper lip curled. “So Conrad decided to go further back still and get rid of his great-grandfather’s father—who’d been, by all accounts, a pretty worthless character.”

  “That would be me, I suppose,” Martin said quietly.

  Raymond turned a deep rose. “Well, doesn’t that just go to prove you mustn’t believe everything you hear?” The next sentence tumbled out in a rush. “I wormed the whole thing out of him and all of us—the other cousins and me—held a council of war, as it were, and we decided it was our moral duty to go back in time ourselves and protect you.” He beamed at Martin.

  The boy smiled slowly. “Of course. You had to. If Conrad succeeded in eliminating me, then none of you would exist, would you?”

  Raymond frowned. Then he shrugged cheerfully. “Well, you didn’t really suppose we were going to all this trouble and expense out of sheer altruism, did you?” he asked, turning on the charm which all the cousins possessed to a consternating degree.

  * * * *

  Martin had, of course, no illusions on that score; he had learned long ago that nobody did anything for nothing. But saying so was unwise.

  “We bribed another set of plans out of another of the professor’s assistants,” Raymond continued, as if Martin had answered, “and—ah—induced a handicraft enthusiast to build the gadget for us.”

  Induced, Martin knew, could have meant anything from blackmail to the use of the iron maiden.

  “Then we were all ready to forestall Conrad. If one of us guarded you night and day, he would never be able to carry out his plot. So we made our counter-plan, set the machine as far back as it would go—and here we are!”

  “I see,” Martin said.

  Raymond didn’t seem to think he really did. “After all,” he pointed out defensively, “whatever our motives, it has turned into a good thing for you. Nice home, cultured companions, all the contemporary conveniences, plus some handy anachronisms—I don’t see what more you could ask for. You’re getting the best of all possible worlds. Of course Ninian was a ninny to locate in a mercantile suburb where any little thing out of the way will cause talk. How thankful I am that our era has completely disposed of the mercantiles—”

  “What did you do with them?” Martin asked.

  But Raymond rushed on: “Soon as Ninian goes and I’m in full charge, we’ll get a more isolated place and run it on a far grander scale. Ostentation—that’s the way to live here and now; the richer you are, the more eccentricity you can get away with. And,” he added, “I might as well be as comfortable as possible while I suffer through this wretched historical stint.”

  “So Ninian’s going,” said Martin, wondering why the news made him feel curiously desolate. Because, although he supposed he liked her in a remote kind of way, he had no fondness for her—or she, he knew, for him.

  “Well, five years is rather a long stretch for any girl to spend in exile,” Raymond explained, “even though our life spans are a bit longer than yours. Besides, you’re getting too old now to be under petticoat government.” He looked inquisitively at Martin. “You’re not going to go all weepy and make a scene when she leaves, are you?”

  “No.…” Martin said hesitantly. “Oh, I suppose I will miss her. But we aren’t very close, so it won’t make a real difference.” That was the sad part: he already knew it wouldn’t make a difference.

  Raymond clapped him on the shoulder. “I knew you weren’t a sloppy sentimentalist like Conrad. Though you do have rather a look of him, you know.”

  Suddenly that seemed to make Conrad real. Martin felt a vague stirring of alarm. He kept his voice composed, however. “How do you plan to protect me when he comes?”

  “Well, each one of us is armed to the teeth, of course,” Raymond said with modest pride, displaying something that looked like a child’s combination spaceman’s gun and death ray, but which, Martin had no doubt, was a perfectly genuine—and lethal—weapon. “And we’ve got a rather elaborate burglar alarm system.”

  Martin inspected the system and made one or two changes in the wiring which, he felt, would increase its efficiency. But still he was dubious. “Maybe it’ll work on someone coming from outside this house, but do you think it will work on someone coming from outside this time?”

  “Never fear—it has a temporal radius,” Raymond replied. “Factory guarantee and all that.”

  “Just to be on the safe side,” Martin said, “I think I’d better have one of those guns, too.”

  “A splendid idea!” enthused Raymond. “I was just about to think of that myself!”

  * * * *

  When it came time for the parting, it was Ninian who cried—tears at her own inadequacy, Martin knew, not of sorrow. He was getting skillful at understanding his descendants, far better than they at understanding him. But then they never really tried. Ninian kissed him wetly on the cheek and said she was sure everything would work out all right and that she’d come see him again. She never did, though, except at the very last.

  Raymond and Martin moved into a luxurious mansion in a remote area. The site proved a well-chosen one; when the Second Atomic War came, half a dozen years later, they weren’t touched. Martin was never sure whether this had been sheer luck or expert planning. Probably luck, because his descendants were exceedingly inept planners.

  Few people in the world then could afford to live as stylishly as Martin and his guardian. The place not only contained every possible convenience and gadget but was crammed with bibelots and antiques, carefully chosen by Raymond and disputed by Martin, for, to the man from the future, all available artifacts were antiques. Otherwise, Martin accepted his new surroundings. His sense of wonder had become dulled by now and the pink pseudo-Spanish castle—“architecturally dreadful, of course,” Raymond had said, “but so hilariously typical”—impressed him far less than had the suburban split-level aquarium.

  “How about a moat?” Martin suggested when they first came. “It seems to go with a castle.”

  “Do you think a moat could stop Conrad?” Raymond asked, amused.

  “No,” Martin smiled, feeling rather silly, “but it would make the place seem safer somehow.”

  The threat of Conrad was beginning to make him grow more and more nervous. He got Raymond’s permission to take two suits of armor that stood in the front hall and present them to a local museum, because several times he fancied he saw them move. He also became an adept with the ray gun and changed the surrounding landscape quite a bit with it, until Raymond warned that this might lead Conrad to them.

  During those early years, Martin’s tutors were exchanged for the higher-degreed ones that were now needful. The question inevitably arose of what the youth’s vocation in that life was going to be. At least twenty of the cousins came back through time to hold one of their vigorous family councils. Martin was still young enough to enjoy such occasions, finding them vastly superior to all other forms of entertainment.

  * * * *

  “This sort of problem wouldn’t arise in our day, Martin,” Raymond commented as he took his place at the head of the table, “because, unless one specifically feels a call to some profession or other, one just—well, drifts along happily.”

 
“Ours is a wonderful world,” Grania sighed at Martin. “I only wish we could take you there. I’m sure you would like it.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Grania!” Raymond snapped. “Well, Martin, have you made up your mind what you want to be?”

  Martin affected to think. “A physicist,” he said, not without malice. “Or perhaps an engineer.”

  There was a loud, excited chorus of dissent. He chuckled inwardly.

  “Can’t do that,” Ives said. “Might pick up some concepts from us. Don’t know how; none of us knows a thing about science. But it could happen. Subconscious osmosis, if there is such a thing. That way, you might invent something ahead of time. And the fellow we got the plans from particularly cautioned us against that. Changing history. Dangerous.”

  “Might mess up our time frightfully,” Bartholomew contributed, “though, to be perfectly frank, I can’t quite understand how.”

  “I am not going to sit down and explain the whole thing to you all over again, Bart!” Raymond said impatiently. “Well, Martin?”

  “What would you suggest?” Martin asked.

  “How about becoming a painter? Art is eternal. And quite gentlemanly. Besides, artists are always expected to be either behind or ahead of their times.”

  “Furthermore,” Ottillie added, “one more artist couldn’t make much difference in history. There were so many of them all through the ages.”

  Martin couldn’t hold back his question. “What was I, actually, in that other time?”

  There was a chilly silence.

  “Let’s not talk about it, dear,” Lalage finally said. “Let’s just be thankful we’ve saved you from that!”

  So drawing teachers were engaged and Martin became a very competent second-rate artist. He knew he would never be able to achieve first rank because, even though he was still so young, his work was almost purely intellectual. The only emotion he seemed able to feel was fear—the ever-present fear that someday he would turn a corridor and walk into a man who looked like him—a man who wanted to kill him for the sake of an ideal.

  But the fear did not show in Martin’s pictures. They were pretty pictures.

  * * * *

  Cousin Ives—now that Martin was older, he was told to call the descendants cousin—next assumed guardianship. Ives took his responsibilities more seriously than the others did. He even arranged to have Martin’s work shown at an art gallery. The paintings received critical approval, but failed to evoke any enthusiasm. The modest sale they enjoyed was mostly to interior decorators. Museums were not interested.

  “Takes time,” Ives tried to reassure him. “One day they’ll be buying your pictures, Martin. Wait and see.”

  Ives was the only one of the descendants who seemed to think of Martin as an individual. When his efforts to make contact with the other young man failed, he got worried and decided that what Martin needed was a change of air and scenery.

  “’Course you can’t go on the Grand Tour. Your son hasn’t invented space travel yet. But we can go see this world. What’s left of it. Tourists always like ruins best, anyway.”

  So he drew on the family’s vast future resources and bought a yacht, which Martin christened The Interregnum. They traveled about from sea to ocean and from ocean to sea, touching at various ports and making trips inland. Martin saw the civilized world—mostly in fragments; the nearly intact semi-civilized world and the uncivilized world, much the same as it had been for centuries. It was like visiting an enormous museum; he couldn’t seem to identify with his own time any more.

  The other cousins appeared to find the yacht a congenial head-quarters, largely because they could spend so much time far away from the contemporary inhabitants of the planet and relax and be themselves. So they never moved back to land. Martin spent the rest of his life on The Interregnum. He felt curiously safer from Conrad there, although there was no valid reason why an ocean should stop a traveler through time.

  More cousins were in residence at once than ever before, because they came for the ocean voyage. They spent most of their time aboard ship, giving each other parties and playing an avant-garde form of shuffleboard and gambling on future sporting events. That last usually ended in a brawl, because one cousin was sure to accuse another of having got advance information about the results.

  Martin didn’t care much for their company and associated with them only when not to have done so would have been palpably rude. And, though they were gregarious young people for the most part, they didn’t court his society. He suspected that he made them feel uncomfortable.

  * * * *

  He rather liked Ives, though. Sometimes the two of them would be alone together; then Ives would tell Martin of the future world he had come from. The picture drawn by Raymond and Ninian had not been entirely accurate, Ives admitted. True, there was no war or poverty on Earth proper, but that was because there were only a couple of million people left on the planet. It was an enclave for the highly privileged, highly interbred aristocracy, to which Martin’s descendants belonged by virtue of their distinguished ancestry.

  “Rather feudal, isn’t it?” Martin asked.

  Ives agreed, adding that the system had, however, been deliberately planned, rather than the result of haphazard natural development. Everything potentially unpleasant, like the mercantiles, had been deported.

  “Not only natives livin’ on the other worlds,” Ives said as the two of them stood at the ship’s rail, surrounded by the limitless expanse of some ocean or other. “People, too. Mostly lower classes, except for officials and things. With wars and want and suffering,” he added regretfully, “same as in your day.… Like now, I mean,” he corrected himself. “Maybe it is worse, the way Conrad thinks. More planets for us to make trouble on. Three that were habitable aren’t any more. Bombed. Very thorough job.”

  “Oh,” Martin murmured, trying to sound shocked, horrified—interested, even.

  “Sometimes I’m not altogether sure Conrad was wrong,” Ives said, after a pause. “Tried to keep us from getting to the stars, hurting the people—I expect you could call them people—there. Still—” he smiled shamefacedly—“couldn’t stand by and see my own way of life destroyed, could I?”

  “I suppose not,” Martin said.

  “Would take moral courage. I don’t have it. None of us does, except Conrad, and even he—” Ives looked out over the sea. “Must be a better way out than Conrad’s,” he said without conviction. “And everything will work out all right in the end. Bound to. No sense to—to anything, if it doesn’t.” He glanced wistfully at Martin.

  “I hope so,” said Martin. But he couldn’t hope; he couldn’t feel; he couldn’t even seem to care.

  During all this time, Conrad still did not put in an appearance. Martin had gotten to be such a crack shot with the ray pistol that he almost wished his descendant would show up, so there would be some excitement. But he didn’t come. And Martin got to thinking.…

  He always felt that if any of the cousins could have come to realize the basic flaw in the elaborate plan they had concocted, it would have been Ives. However, when the yacht touched at Tierra del Fuego one bitter winter, Ives took a severe chill. They sent for a doctor from the future—one of the descendants who had been eccentric enough to take a medical degree—but he wasn’t able to save Ives. The body was buried in the frozen ground at Ushuaia, on the southern tip of the continent, a hundred years or more before the date of his birth.

  A great many of the cousins turned up at the simple ceremony. All were dressed in overwhelming black and showed a great deal of grief. Raymond read the burial service, because they didn’t dare summon a clerical cousin from the future; they were afraid he might prove rather stuffy about the entire undertaking.

  “He died for all of us,” Raymond concluded his funeral eulogy over Ives, “so his death was not i
n vain.”

  But Martin disagreed.

  * * * *

  The ceaseless voyaging began again. The Interregnum voyaged to every ocean and every sea. Some were blue and some green and some dun. After a while, Martin couldn’t tell one from another. Cousin after cousin came to watch over him and eventually they were as hard for him to tell apart as the different oceans.

  All the cousins were young, for, though they came at different times in his life, they had all started out from the same time in theirs. Only the young ones had been included in the venture; they did not trust their elders.

  As the years went by, Martin began to lose even his detached interest in the land and its doings. Although the yacht frequently touched port for fuel or supplies—it was more economical to purchase them in that era than to have them shipped from the future—he seldom went ashore, and then only at the urging of a newly assigned cousin anxious to see the sights. Most of the time Martin spent in watching the sea—and sometimes he painted it. There seemed to be a depth to his seascapes that his other work lacked.

  When he was pressed by the current cousin to make a land visit somewhere, he decided to exhibit a few of his sea paintings. That way, he could fool himself into thinking that there was some purpose to this journey. He’d come to believe that perhaps what his life lacked was purpose, and for a while he kept looking for meaning everywhere, to the cousin’s utter disgust.

  “Eat, drink and be merry, or whatever you Romans say when you do as you do,” the cousin—who was rather woolly in history; the descendants were scraping bottom now—advised.

  Martin showed his work in Italy, so that the cousin could be disillusioned by the current crop of Romans. He found that neither purpose nor malice was enough; he was still immeasurably bored. However, a museum bought two of the paintings. Martin thought of Ives and felt an uncomfortable pang of a sensation he could no longer understand.