First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  “These,” said Pete calmly, “are my fiancée.”

  But the short, squat man saw loads of greenbacks appearing from nowhere. He drew out a short, squat revolver.

  “You got a press turning out the stuff behind that wall, huh?” he said shrewdly. “I’ll take a look!”

  He thrust forward masterfully. He pushed Thomas aside and mounted the inch-thick glass plate. Pete reached, horrified, for the switch. But it was too late. The glass plate revolved one-eighth of a revolution. The demonstrator hummed gleefully; and the officer appeared in duplicate just as Pete’s nerveless fingers cut off everything.

  Both of the officers looked at each other in flat, incredulous stupefaction. Casey stared, and the hair rose from his head. Then Arthur put a front paw tentatively upon Casey’s shoulder. Arthur had liked the cigar. The door to the laboratory had been left open. He had come in to ask for another cigar. But Casey was hopelessly unnerved. He yelled and fled, imagining Arthur in hot pursuit. He crashed into the model of a tesseract and entangled himself hopelessly.

  Arthur was an amiable kangaroo, but he was sensitive. Casey’s squeal of horror upset him. He leaped blindly, knocking Pete over on the switch and turning it on, and landing between the two stupefied copies of the other officer. They, sharing memories of Arthur, moved in panic just before the glass plate turned.

  Arthur bounced down again at the demonstrator’s hoot. The nearest copy of the short, squat man made a long, graceful leap and went flying out of the door. Pete struggled with the other, who waved his gun and demanded explanations, growing hoarse from his earnestness.

  Pete attempted to explain in terms of pretty girls stepping on banana peels, but it struck the officer as irrelevant. He shouted hoarsely while another Arthur hopped down from the glass plate—while a third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth, and seventh Arthur appeared on the scene.

  He barked at Pete until screams from practically all of Daisy made him turn to see the laboratory overflowing with five-foot Arthurs, all very pleasantly astonished and anxious to make friends with himself so he could play.

  Arthur was the only person who really approved the course events had taken. He had existed largely in his own society. But now his own company was numerous. From a solitary kangaroo, in fact, Arthur had become a good-sized herd. And in his happy excitement over the fact, Arthur forgot all decorum and began to play an hysterical form of disorganized leapfrog all about the laboratory.

  The officer went down and became a take-off spot for the game. Daisy shrieked furiously. And Arthur—all of him—chose new points of vantage for his leaps until one of him chose the driving motor of the demonstrator. That industrious mechanism emitted bright sparks and bit him. And Arthur soared in terror through the window, followed by all the rest of himself, who still thought it part of the game.

  In seconds, the laboratory was empty of Arthurs. But the demonstrator was making weird, pained noises. Casey remained entangled in the bars of the tesseract, through which he gazed with much the expression of an inmate of a padded cell. Only one of the short, squat officers remained in the building. He had no breath left. And Daisy was too angry to make a sound—all six of her. Pete alone was sanely calm.

  “Well,” he said philosophically, “things seem to have settled down a bit. But something’s happened to the demonstrator.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Thomas pallidly, “I’m no hand at machinery.”

  One of Daisy said angrily to another of Daisy: “You’ve got a nerve! That money on the plate is mine!”

  Both advanced. Three more, protesting indignantly, joined in the rush. The sixth—and it seemed to Pete that she must have been the original Daisy—hastily began to sneak what she could from the several piles accumulated by the others. Meanwhile, the demonstrator made queer noises. And Pete despairingly investigated. He found where Arthur’s leap had disarranged a handle which evidently controlled the motor speed of the demonstrator. At random, he pushed the handle. The demonstrator clucked relievedly. Then Pete realized in sick terror that five of Daisy were on the glass plate. He tried to turn it off—but it was too late.

  He closed his eyes, struggling to retain calmness, but admitting despair. He had been extremely fond of one Daisy. But six Daisies had been too much. Now, looking forward to eleven and—

  A harsh voice grated in his ear.

  “Huh! That’s where you keep the press and the queer, huh—and trick mirrors so I see double? I’m going through that trapdoor where those girls went! And if there’s any funny business on the other side, somebody gets hurt!”

  The extra officer stepped up on the glass plate, inexplicably empty now. The demonstrator clucked. It hummed. The plate moved—backward! The officer vanished—at once, utterly. As he had come out of the past, he returned to it, intrepidly and equally by accident. Because one of Arthur had kicked the drive lever into neutral, and Pete had inadvertently shoved it into reverse. He saw the officer vanish and he knew where the supernumerary Daisies had gone—also where all embarrassing bank notes would go. He sighed in relief.

  But Casey—untangled from the tesseract—was not relieved. He tore loose from Thomas’ helpful fingers and fled to the car. There he found his companion, staring at nineteen Arthurs playing leapfrog over the garage. After explanations the government men would be more upset still. Pete saw the roadster drive away, wabbling.

  “I don’t think they’ll come back, sir,” said Thomas hopefully.

  “Neither do I,” said Pete in a fine, high calm. He turned to the remaining Daisy, scared but still acquisitive. “Darling,” he said tenderly, “all those bank notes are counterfeit, as it develops. We’ll have to put them all back and struggle along with the contents of the woodshed and the vegetable bin.”

  Daisy tried to look absent-minded, and failed.

  “I think you’ve got nerve!” said Daisy indignantly.

  SAM, THIS IS YOU

  You are not supposed to believe this story, and, if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he is apt to say that it’s all a lie. But Sam is a bit sensitive about it. He doesn’t want the question of privacy to be raised again—especially in Rosie’s hearing. And there are other matters. But it’s all perfectly respectable and straightforward. It could have happened to anybody—well, almost anybody. Anybody, say, who was a telephone lineman for the Batesville and Rappahannock Telephone Company, who happened to be engaged to Rosie and who had been told admiringly by Rosie that anybody as smart as he was ought to do something wonderful and get rich—and, of course, anybody who’d taken that seriously, had been puttering around on a device to make private conversations on a party-line telephone possible and almost had the trick.

  It began about six o’clock on July second, when Sam was up a telephone pole near Bridge’s Run. He was hunting for the place where that party line had gone dead. He’d hooked in his lineman’s phone, and, since he couldn’t raise Central, he was just going to start looking for the break when his phone rang back. The line had checked dead both ways from this spot, but when the call-bell rang he put the receiver to his ear.

  “Hello,” said Sam. “Who’s this?”

  “Sam,” said a voice, “this is you.”

  “Huh?” said Sam. “What’s that?”

  “This is you,” the voice on the wire repeated. “You, Sam Yoder. Don’t you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the twelfth of July. Don’t hang up!”

  Sam didn’t even think of hanging up. He was pained. He was up a telephone pole trying to do some work, resting in his safety belt and with his climbing-irons safely fixed in the wood. Naturally, he thought somebody was trying to joke with him, and when a man is working is no time for practical jokes.

  “I’m not hanging up,” Sam said dourly, “but you’d better!”

  The voice was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. If it talked a little more, he knew he would. He knew it just about as well as he knew his own, and it was irritating not to be able to call this joker by name. />
  The voice said, “Sam, it’s the second of July where you are, and you’re up a pole by Bridge’s Run. The line’s dead in two places, else I couldn’t talk to you. Lucky, ain’t it?”

  Sam said formidably, “Whoever you are, it ain’t going to be lucky for you if you ever need telephone service and you’ve kept wasting my time. I’m busy!”

  “But I’m you!” the voice insisted persuasively. “And you’re me! We’re both the same Sam Yoder, only where I am it’s July twelfth. Where you are it’s July second. You’ve heard of time traveling, but that’s nonsense. That won’t work. But this is time-talking, and it does work! You’re talking to yourself—that’s me—and I’m talking to myself—that’s you—and it looks like we’ve got a mighty good chance to get rich.”

  Then something came into Sam’s memory, and he stiffened. Every muscle in his body went taut and tight, even as he was saying to himself, “It can’t be!” But he’d remembered hearing somewhere that, if a man goes and stands in a corner and talks to the wall, his voice will sound to him just like it sounds to somebody else. And being in the telephone business he’d tried it. And now he did recognize the voice. It was his. His own. Talking to him. Which, of course, was impossible, only it appeared to be a fact.

  “Look,” Sam said hoarsely, “I don’t believe this!”

  “Then listen,” said the voice briskly. And it was his own voice. There couldn’t be any more mistake about it than if he’d been looking in a mirror at his own face. But in about half a minute Sam’s face began to get red. It burned. His ears began to feel scorched. Because the voice—his voice—was telling him strictly private anecdotes that nobody else in the world knew. Nobody but he and Rosie.

  “Quit it!” Sam groaned. “Either you or me is crazy! Or you’re Old Scratch! Quit it! Somebody might be listening. Tell me what you want and ring off!”

  The voice—his own voice—told him what it wanted. It sounded pleased. It told him precisely what it wanted him to do. And then, very kindly, it told him exactly where the two breaks in the line were. And then it rang off.

  Sam sweated when he looked at the first of the two places. The break was there, all right. He fixed it. He looked at the second place, where a joining was bad, and he fixed that. It was where his voice had said it would be. And that was as impossible as anything else. When he’d fixed the second dead place Sam called Central and told her he was sick and was going home and that, if there were any other phones that needed fixing today, people were probably better off without phone service, anyhow.

  He went home, washed his face, and made himself a brew of coffee and drank it—but none of his memory changed. Presently he heard himself muttering.

  So he said defiantly, “There ain’t any crazy people in my family, so it ain’t likely I’ve gone out of my head. But Gawd knows nobody but Rosie knows about me telling her sentimental that her nose is so cute I couldn’t believe she’d ever had to blow it! Maybe it was me, talking to myself.”

  Talking to oneself is not abnormal. Lots of people do it. But Sam missed the implication he could have drawn from the fact that he’d answered himself back. He reasoned painfully.

  “If somebody drove over to Rappahannock, past Dunnsville, and telephoned back that there was a brush fire at Dunnsville, I wouldn’t be surprised to get to Dunnsville and find a brush fire there. So, if somebody phones back from next Tuesday that Mr. Broaddus broke his leg next Tuesday—why, I shouldn’t be surprised to get to next Tuesday and find he done it. Going to Rappahannock past Dunnsville and going to next Thursday past next Tuesday ain’t so much difference. It’s only the difference between a road-map and a calendar!”

  Then he began to see implications. He blinked.

  “Yes, sir!” he said, in awe. “I wouldn’t’ve thought of it if I hadn’t told myself on the telephone, but there is money to be made out of this! I must be near as smart as Rosie thinks I am! I’d better get that dinkus set up!”

  He set to work in some enthusiasm. He’d more or less half-heartedly worked out an idea of how a party-line telephone conversation could be made private, and just out of instinct he’d accumulated a lot of stuff around the house that should have been on the phone company’s inventory. There were condensers and phone-microphones and selective-ringing bells and resistances and the like. He’d meant to put some of them together some day and see what happened. But he’d been too busy courting Rosie to get at it.

  Now he did get to work. His own voice on the telephone had told him to. It’d warned him that one thing he’d intended wouldn’t work, but something else would. It was essentially simple, after all. He finished it, cut off his line from Central and hooked the gadget in. He rang. Half a minute later somebody rang back.

  “Hello!” said Sam, sweating. He’d broken the line to Central, remember. In theory, he shouldn’t have gotten anybody anywhere.

  But a very familiar voice said, “Hello,” back at him, and Sam swallowed and said, “Hello, Sam! This is you in the second of July.”

  The voice at the other end agreed cordially. It said that Sam had done pretty well, and now the two of them—Sam in the here and now and Sam in the middle of the week after next—would proceed to get rich together. But the voice from July twelfth seemed less absorbed in the conversation than Sam thought quite right. It seemed even abstracted. And Sam was at once sweating from the pure unreasonableness of the affair and conscious that he rated congratulations for the highly technical device he had built. After all, not everybody could build a time-talker! He said with some irony, “If you’re too busy to talk—”

  “I’ll tell you,” said the voice from the twelfth of July, gratified. “I am kind of busy right now. You’ll understand when you get to where I am. Don’t get mad, Sam! Tell you what! You go see Rosie, and tell her about this and have a nice evening together. Ha ha!”

  “Now what,” Sam said cagily, “do you mean by that ‘Ha ha’?”

  “You’ll find out,” said the voice. “Knowin’ what I know, I’ll even double it. Ha ha, ha ha!”

  There was a click. Sam yapped at the dead telephone. He rang back, but got no answer. He may have been the first man in history to take an instinctive and completely sincere dislike to himself for good cause. But presently he muttered, “Smart, huh? There’s two can play at that. I’m the one that’s got to do things if we are both goin’ to get rich.”

  He put his gadget away carefully, parted his hair, ate some cold food around the house and drove over to see Rosie. It was a night and an errand that ordinarily would have seemed purely romantic. There were fireflies floating about, and the moon shone down splendidly, and a perfumed breeze carried mosquitos from one place to another. It was the sort of night on which ordinarily Sam would have thought only of Rosie, and Rosie would have optimistic ideas about how housekeeping could, after all, be conducted on what Sam made a week.

  They got settled down in the hammock on Rosie’s front porch, and Sam said expansively, “Rosie, I’ve made up my mind to get rich. You ought to have everything your little heart desires. Suppose you tell me what you want so I’ll know how rich I’ve got to get?”

  Rosie drew back. She looked sharply at Sam.

  “Do you feel all right, Sam?”

  He beamed at her. He’d never been married, and he didn’t know how crazy it sounded to Rosie to be queried on how much money would satisfy her. There simply isn’t any answer to that question.

  “Listen,” Sam said tenderly. “Nobody knows it, but tonight Joe Hunt and the Widow Backus are eloping romantic to North Carolina to get married. We’ll find out about it tomorrow. And day after tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, Dunnsville is going to win the baseball game with Bradensburg, seven to five, all tied till the ninth inning, and then George Peeby is going to hit a homer with Fred Holmes on second base.”

  Rosie stared at him. Sam explained complacently. The Sam Yoder in the middle of the week after next had told him what to expect in those particular cases. He would tell him other things t
o expect, so Sam was going to get rich.

  Rosie said, “Sam! Somebody was playing a joke on you!”

  “Yeah?” Sam said comfortably. “Who else but me knows what you said to me that time you thought I was mad with you and you were crying out back of the well-house?”

  “Sam!” said Rosie.

  “And,” Sam went on, “nobody else knows about that time we were picnicking and a bug got down the back of your dress and you thought it was a hornet.”

  “Sam Yoder!” wailed Rosie. “You never told anybody about that!”

  “Nope,” Sam said truthfully, “I never did. But the me in the week after next knew. He told me! So he had to be me talking to me. Couldn’t’ve been anybody else.”

  Rosie gasped. Sam explained all over again. In detail. When he had finished, Rosie seemed dazed.

  Then she said desperately, “S-Sam! Either you’ve t-told somebody else everything we ever said or did together, or else—else there’s somebody who knows every word we ever said to each other. That’s awful! Do you really and truly mean to tell me—”

  “Sure I mean to tell you,” Sam said happily. “The me in the week after next called me up and talked about things nobody knows but you and me. Can’t be no doubt at all!”

  Rosie shivered. Then she chattered, “He—he knows every word we ever said. Then he knows every word we’re saying now!” She gulped. “Sam Yoder, you go home!”

  Sam gaped at her. She got up and backed away from him.

  “D-do you think,” she said despairingly, “that I—that I’m g-going to talk to you when—s-somebody else listens to every w-word I say and—knows everything I do? D-do you think I’m going to m-marry you, Sam Yoder?”

  Then she ran away, weeping noisily, slammed the door on Sam and wouldn’t come out again. Her father came out presently, looking patient, and asked Sam to go home so Rosie could finish crying and he could read his newspaper in peace.