Somebody yelled at Sam. He got out of the truck, looked at the damage and tried to figure out how it was that neither he nor Rosie had been killed. Then he tried despairingly to think how he was going to explain to the telephone company that he’d let Rosie drive.
The voice yelled louder. Right at the edge of the woodland there was a reddish-haired character screaming at him and tugging at his hip pocket. The words he used were not fit for Rosie’s shell-like ears—even if they did probably come near matching the way she felt. The reddish-haired man said more naughty words at the top of his voice. His hand came away from his hip pocket with something glittering in it.
Sam was swinging when the glitter began, and he connected before the pistol bore. There was a sort of squashy smacking sound, and the reddish-haired man lay down in the road and was still.
“Migawd!” said Sam blankly. “This was the fella in front of the bank! He’s one of those bank robbers!”
He stared. There was a loud crashing in the brushwood. The accident had happened at the edge of some woodland, and Sam did not need a high IQ to know that the friends of the red-haired man must be on the way. A second later he saw them. Rosie was just getting out of the car then. She was very pale, and there wasn’t time to tell her to get started up if possible and away from there. One of the two running men was carrying a canvas bag with the words Bank of Dunnsville on it. They came for Sam. As they came they expressed opinions of the state of things, of Sam, of the cosmos—of everything but the weather—in terms even more reprehensible than the first man had used.
They saw the reddish-haired man lying down on the ground. One of them—he’d come out into the road behind the truck and was running for Sam—jerked out a pistol. He was in the act of raising it to use it on Sam at a range of something like six feet when there was a peculiar noise behind him. It was a sort of hollow clunk! That even at such a time needed to have attention paid to it. The man jerked his head around to see.
And the clunk! had been made by Rosie’s monkey wrench, falling imperatively on the head of another man who had come out of the woods. She had carried it to use on Sam. She used it on a total stranger. He fell down and lay peacefully still.
Then Sam swung a second time, on the man behind him.
Then there was silence, save for the sweet singing of birds among the trees and the whirrings and other insect noises of creatures in the grass and brushwood.
Presently there were other noises, but they were made by Rosie. She wept, hanging onto Sam.
He unwound her arms from around his neck, went thoughtfully to the back of the truck and got some phone wire and his pliers. He fastened the men’s hands together behind them, and then he tied their feet. He piled the three bank robbers in the back of the light truck together with the money they had stolen.
Presently they came to, one by one, and Rosie and Sam explained severely that they must watch their language in the presence of a lady. But the three seemed so dazed by what had befallen them that Sam and Rosie didn’t have much trouble.
Rosie’s parents would have been pleased at how completely proper their behavior was while they took the three bank robbers into town and turned them over to the sheriff. Rosie’s parents would also have been surprised.
That night Rosie sat out on the porch with Sam, and they discussed the particular events of the day in some detail. But Rosie was still cagey about the other Sam. So Sam decided to assert himself.
About half-past nine he said firmly, “Well then, Rosie, I guess I’d better be getting along home. I’ve got to try one more time to call myself up on the telephone and tell me to mind my own business.”
“Says who?” said Rosie grimly. “Oh, no you’re not! You’re staying locked up right here tonight, and I’m riding with you tomorrow. If I kept you honest this far, I can keep it up till sundown tomorrow! Then maybe it’ll stick!”
Sam protested, but it didn’t work. Rosie was adamant. Not only about keeping him from being a crook, but from having any fun to justify his virtue. She shooed him into her brother’s room, and her father locked him in. Sam did not sleep very well, because it looked like virtue wasn’t even its own reward and the future looked dark indeed. He sat up, brooding. It must have been close to dawn when the obvious hit him like a ton of bricks.
Then he gazed blankly at the wall and said, “Migawd! O’course!”
He grinned, all by himself, as though he would split his throat. And at breakfast he practically sang as he stuffed himself with pancakes and syrup, and Rosie’s utterly depressed expression changed to one of baffled despair.
He smiled tenderly upon her when she came doggedly out to the truck in her blue jeans and with the monkey wrench in her pocket. They started off just like any other day and he said amiably, “Rosie, the sheriff says we get five thousand dollars reward from the bankers’ association, and there’s more from the insurance company, and there’s odd bits of change due for rewards specially offered for those fellas for past performances. We’re going to be right well off.”
Rosie looked at him gloomily. There was still the matter of the other Sam in the middle of the week after next. And just then Sam—who had been watching the telephone-lines beside the road as he drove—pulled off the road and put on his climbing-irons.
“What’s this?” asked Rosie mournfully. “You know—”
“You listen,” said Sam happily.
He climbed zestfully to the top of the pole. He hooked in the little gadget that didn’t make private conversations possible on a party line, but did make it possible for a man to talk to himself two weeks in the future.
Or the past.
“Hello!” said Sam, up at the top of the telephone pole. “Sam, this is you.”
A voice he knew perfectly well sounded in the receiver.
“Huh? Who’s that?”
“This is you,” said Sam. “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!”
He heard Rosie gasp, all the way down there in the banged-up telephone-truck. Sam had seen the self-evident at last, and now, on the twelfth of July, he was talking to himself on the telephone. Only instead of talking to himself in the week after next, he was now talking to himself in the week before last—he being back there ten days before, working on the very same telephone-line on this very same pole. And it was the same conversation, word for word.
When he came down the pole, rather expansively, Rosie clung to him weeping.
“Oh, Sam!” she sobbed. “It was you all the time! Only you!”
“Yeah,” said Sam complacently. “I figured it out last night. That me back there in the second of July, he’s cussing me out. And he’s going to tell you about it, and you’re going to get all wrought up. But I can make that dumb me back yonder do what has to be done. And you and me, Rosie, have got a lot of money coming to us. I’m going to carry on through so he’ll earn it for us. But I’m warning you, Rosie, he’ll be back at my house waiting for me to talk to him tonight, and I’ve got to be home to tell him to go over to your house. I’m goin’ to say ha ha, ha ha at him.”
“A-all right,” said Rosie, wide-eyed. “You can.”
“But,” said Sam, “I remember that when I call me up tonight, back there ten days ago, I’m going to be right busy here and now tonight. I’m going to make me mad, because I don’t want to waste time talking to myself back yonder. Remember?” Then Rosie turned red. “Now what would I be doing tonight that makes me not want to waste time talking to myself ten days ago?” Sam asked mildly. “You got any ideas, Rosie?”
“Sam Yoder!” Rosie said. “I won’t! I wouldn’t! I never heard of such a thing!”
Sam looked at her and shook his head regretfully.
“Too bad! If you won’t, I guess I’ve got to call me up in the week after next and find out what’s cooking.”
“You—you shan’t!” said Rosie fiercely. “You, Sam Yoder—I’ll get even with you! But you shan’
t talk to that—” Then she wailed. “Doggone you, Sam! Even if I do have to marry you so you’ll be wanting to talk to that dumb you ten days back, you’re not going to—you’re not—”
Sam grinned. He kissed her. He put her in the truck and they rode off to Batesville to get married. And they did.
But as you’re not supposed to believe all this, and if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he’s apt to say that it’s all a lie. He doesn’t want the question of privacy raised again. And there are other matters. For instance, Sam’s getting to be a pretty prominent citizen these days. He makes a lot of money, one way and another. Nobody around home will ever bet with him on who’s going to win a baseball game, anyhow.
SIDEWISE IN TIME
FOREWORD
Looking back, it seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain. In early December of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was not an absolute—could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen.
A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m., Greenwich mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the temperature of the earth’s surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of disturbance.
A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after disturbances in the sun’s photosphere.
For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, egg-shaped mass of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.
A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes, both male, moved about the giraffe enclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed normal though immature animals.
An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical eyes of Argentine scientists.
Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of 1935 should not have understood the meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though they no longer occur. But between January and June of 1935 the news services of the nation were flooded with items of similar import.
For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River through the air, proceeded to “drown” in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned belly up and floated placidly at an imaginary water level some fifteen feet above the pavements of the city.
But it seems clear that Professor Minott was the only man in the world who even guessed the meaning of these—to us—clear-cut indications of the later events. Professor Minott was instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College in Fredericksburg, Va. We know that he anticipated very nearly every one of the things which later startled and frightened the world, and not only our world. But he kept his mouth shut.
Robinson College was small. It had even been termed a “jerkwater” college without offending anybody but the faculty and certain sensitive alumni. For a mere professor of mathematics to make public the theory Minott had formed would not even be news. It would be taken as stark insanity. Moreover, those who believed it would be scared. So he kept his mouth shut.
Professor Minott possessed courage, bitterness, and a certain cold-blooded daring, but neither wealth nor influence. He had more than a little knowledge of mathematical physics and his calculations show extraordinary knowledge of the laws of probability, but he had very little patience with problems in ethics. And he was possessed by a particularly fierce passion for Maida Haynes, daughter of the professor of Romance languages, and had practically no chance to win even her attention over the competition of most of the student body.
So much of explanation is necessary, because no one but just such a person as Professor Minott would have forecast what was to happen and then prepare for it in the fashion in which he did.
We know from his notes that he considered the probability of disaster as a shade better than four to one. It is a very great pity that we do not have his calculations. There is much that our scientists do not understand even yet. The notes Professor Minott left behind have been invaluable, but there are obvious gaps in them. He must have taken most of his notes—and those the most valuable—into that unguessed at place where he conceivably now lives and very probably works.
He would be amused, no doubt, at the diligence with which his most unconsidered scribble is now examined and inspected and discussed by the greatest minds of our time and space. And perhaps—it is quite probable—he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have none as yet.
There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system but our galaxy; not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all of the space we know; more than that, the destruction of all space as we know it; and even beyond that, the destruction of time, meaning not only the obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never have been. And then, besides, those other strange states of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts and futures—all to be shattered into nothingness. There is no word for such a catastrophe.
It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to himself, as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival, if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier to wonder how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in 1935. We do not know. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt—and what happened.
I
It was half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935. The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from a comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning spiders glittered like diamond dust in the early sunshine. In the most easternly suburb a high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before schooltime. A rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It backfired, stopped, roared again, and throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. The voices of children sounded among the houses. A colored washerwoman appeared, striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential street.
From an upper window a radio blatted: “—one, two three, four! Higher, now!—three, four! Put your weight into it!—two, three, four!” The radio suddenly squawked and began to emit an insistent, mechanical shriek which changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all the static of ten thousand thunderstorms on the air at once. Then it was silent.
The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the push bar of the lawn mower. At the instant the static ended, the boy sat down suddenly on the dew-wet grass. The colored woman reeled and grabbed frantically at the nearest tree trunk. The basket of wash toppled and spilled in a snowstorm of starched, varicolored clothing. Howls of terror from children. Sharp shrieks from women. “Earthquake! Earthquake!” Figures appeared running, pouring out of houses. Someone fled out to a sleeping porch, slid down a supporting column, and tripped over a rosebush in his pajamas.
In seconds, it seemed, the entire population of the street was out-of-doors.
And then there was a queer, blank silence. There was no earthquake. No house had fallen. No chimney had cracked. Not so much as a dish or window-pane had made a sound in smashing. The sensation every human being had felt was not an actual shaking of the ground. There had been movement, yes, and of the earth, but no such movement as any human being had ever dreamed of before. These people were to learn of that movement much later. Now they stared blankly at each other.
And in the sudden, dead silence broken only by the hum of an idling car and the wail of a frightened baby, a new sound became audible. It was the tramp of marching feet. With it came a curious clanking and clattering noise. And then a marked command, which was definitely not in the English language.
Down the street of a suburb of Joplin, Missouri, on June 5, in the Year of Our Lord 1935, came a file of spear-armed, shield-bearing soldiers in the short, skirtlike togas of ancient Rome. They wore helmets upon their heads. They peered about as if they were as blankly amazed as the citizens of Joplin who regarded them. A long column of marching men came into view, every man with shield and spear and the indefinable air of being used to just such weapons.
They halted at another barked order. A wizened little man with a short sword snapped a question at the staring Americans. The high-school boy jumped. The wizened man roared his question again. The high-school boy stammered, and painfully formed syllables with his lips. The wizened man grunted in satisfaction. He talked, articulating clearly if impatiently. And the high-school boy turned dazedly to the other Americans.
“He wants to know the name of this town,” he said, unbelieving his own ears. “He’s talking Latin, like I learn in school. He says this town isn’t on the road maps, and he doesn’t know where he is. But all the same he takes possession of it in the name of the Emperor Valerius Fabricius, emperor of Rome and the far corners of the earth.” And then the school-boy stuttered: “He—he says these are the first six cohorts of the Forty-second Legion, on garrison duty in Messalia. That—that’s supposed to be two days’ march up that way.”
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 40
