Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  When Paddy Donovan took the Job he knew he would have to travel a lot—but he didn’t know it would be time traveling—nor did he begin to see the danger that went with it.

  “I’M NOT asking you to take my word for this. You can check it in the papers if you want to. The ad was in the New York Express, September 18, 1945.

  The ad read:

  “Opening for young man of adventurous nature. Opportunity for travel, excitement, glory.”

  There was an address in the lower thirties, just off Fourth avenue.

  I saw the ad and I thought it over. I’d been in the army for the past four years and the travel and excitement didn’t appeal to me. But I liked the part about the glory. The Donovan clan is great for glory.

  When I got my discharge, which was right after the shooting stopped, I went to a bar and drank a silent toast to myself in the mirror.

  “Paddy Donovan,” I said to the square red face that looked back at me from the mirror. “You’re out and you’re staying out. You want no more part of any army. The Germans have been shooting at you and first sergeants have been yelling at you for the last three years. And between the two of them you’re lucky to have your sanity left. So if there’s another war they’ll have to go to the woods to find you, Paddy. And they’ll have to burn the woods and sift the ashes.”

  I meant every word of that. I lifted my drink and drained it off, thinking how pleasant it was going to be playing civilian again.

  I played civilian for about two months and then while I still had some money left, I decided to go to work. So I started looking at the ads.

  And on September 18 I saw this ad. I thought it over a while and finally decided to investigate. I clipped it out, stuck it in my wallet and headed for the address.

  The house was one of those brown-stone front affairs, which had been classy thirty year ago. I went up the worn steps and punched the bell.

  The door was opened by a tired, elderly woman, in a white apron, and holding a feather duster in her hand. She blew a stray strand of gray hair from her face and said, “What do you want?”

  “Someone at this address put an ad in the paper,” I said. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “That would be Professor O’Neill,” she said. “He’s on the third floor. Him and his daughter.”

  She pulled the door open wider and I walked into a dim hallway that smelled of old paint and Cabbage.

  I WENT up the rickety steps to the third floor. There was a landing on which two doors opened. I knocked on the first door.

  An old man opened the door and blinked at me. He had white hair and skin that looked like leather that had been out in the sun too long. He blinked his watery blue eyes again and said, “yes?” in a thin voice.

  I said, “are you Professor O’Neill, and did you put an ad in yesterday’s paper?”

  His face showed some animation.

  “Why, yes indeed young man. Won’t you come in?”

  I followed him into a room furnished about the way I expected. Shabby chairs, worn rug, junk and bric-a-brac that was fashionable thirty years ago.

  He motioned me to a chair and sat down himself with his back to the window. The sun made a halo of his white hair. He wasn’t dressed well, worn trousers, a white shirt with an old-fashioned black string tie, and a black velvet jacket, but somehow he managed to look dignified.

  “I am very happy to see you,” he said. And he sounded like he meant it. “I have tried very hard to get the right young man for the job I have in mind, but it’s so very hard.” He shook his head and said, “So very very hard,” and then he looked out the window and sighed.

  Supposing you tell me about it,” I said. “I may be the right man.”

  “Yes,” he said, brightening. “You may very well be. Now, first, what is your name?”

  “Paddy Donovan,” I said. “Excellent,” he beamed. “We Irish have imagination. And that is what this job will require of you. Imagination and faith. I am Professor O’Neill.”

  “That’s what the landlady told me,” I said.

  He looked gloomily at the floor. “She is a witless creature. An unfortunate type. We do not get on well.” But he didn’t seem to be able to stay gloomy very long. His eyes brightened and he looked back at me. “Now about the job. You will . . .”

  He got that far when the door opened and a girl came into the room. She was a slim red-haired girl with bright blue eyes. She was wearing a house dress that looked like it had been fitted by an angel, and her ankles were about the size of my two thumbs.

  “Ah, Sally,” the professor smiled. “You’re just in time to meet Mr. Paddy Donovan. He has answered my advertisement.”

  I stood up and I felt clumsy and uncomfortable with this slim young girl smiling at me. I mumbled something to her and sat down again, but I couldn’t look away from her. She sat down on the edge of her father’s chair and put a light hand on his shoulder.

  “I was just about to tell Mr. Donovan about the job I have in mind,” he said to her.

  “I don’t think you should be tiring yourself out, daddy,” she said. “You’ve been working very hard lately. And maybe Mr. Donovan won’t be interested. Did you tell him you won’t be able to pay him any money?”

  She looked at me as she said that, and she was telling me nicely I was wasting my time if I was looking for money. She didn’t like saying it, I could tell. She looked embarrassed.

  “No, I didn’t,” the professor said uneasily. “I thought I’d tell him about the job first.”

  “Well, daddy,” the girl smiled at him, “young men can’t afford to work for nothing, you know. You’d better wait until you have a little money before you start your work.”

  THE professor sighed and looked gloomily at the floor.

  I said, “I’m not interested in money. What’s money, after all?”

  Why did my big mouth say that? I don’t know. I’m Irish and I worship the green. Especially when it’s in neat stacks and has Washington’s or Lincoln’s picture on it. Maybe it was the way the girl looked at me. Maybe I thought she was wonderful. I don’t know. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

  The professor beamed fondly at me. “Imagination and faith, my boy. I see you have both. Now about the job.” His daughter said, “but daddy,” and then she looked at me, and it was such a grateful look that I felt my chest grow about six inches. “I guess you’re both beyond hope,” she said, with a little laugh.

  “Of course we are,” the professor said. “Now! I said in the ad that this job offers an opportunity for travel. Do you have any idea of the kind of travel I meant?”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t.”

  “Well.” He paused and looked at me with bright, excited eyes. “I meant travel in time.”

  “Travel in time,” I repeated matter-of-factly. “That should be interesting. I’ve always thought . . . My mind, which had been thinking about a pair of slim ankles, and bright blue eyes, suddenly realized what the words meant. “What!”

  He smiled. “You’re astonished. That is natural. Everyone is at first.” My collar felt too tight. I wanted to get up and march firmly out of that room without looking back, but the slim ankles and the blue eyes, kept me right in my chair.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, and my voice was weak.

  “Naturally you don’t. You must take some of the things I’m going to tell you on faith. You have faith. Some of the things I’m going to tell you will require that you use imagination. You have imagination. So there is no difficulty.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “I’m willing to listen to anything that doesn’t have the army mixed up in it somewhere. That’s the only thing I won’t have anything to do with, Professor. The army.”

  “I think I understand,” he said.

  “But you have no worries on that score. Now I’m going to tell you about time travel.”

  He put a thin cigar in his mouth, lighted it, and blew a cloud of smoke expansively at the ceilin
g.

  “First of all,” he said. “Time travel is nothing new or revolutionary. As a matter of fact I believe it is one of the oldest things in the world. And when we conquer all the problems of time travel it will not be by using new principles, but rather by ancient ones which have been forgotten by man through the ages.

  I BELIEVE that early man had the power of transporting himself through time and space, as a means of escape from his enemies which were the early animals and birds, which were stronger and faster than man. If he didn’t have some means of escape from them he would have perished.

  “Now through the ages man developed weapons which put him on superior plane to the animals and gradually this ability of his to project himself in time slowly atrophied. That is a common phenomena. When a man’s faculties are no longer used and needed they disappear. Our sense of smell, for instance, was once as acute as the animals, because we needed it in the struggle for survival. But it has atrophied now until it only can differentiate between the most violent of contrasts, such as perfumes and garbage.

  “Immanuel Kant was the first great philosopher to clearly understand this. He perceived that time and space were not objective properties, but subjective ones, belonging to the mind, just as our instincts do. But he stopped short before he completed his thesis. Or perhaps he was afraid of its dating implications and wisely chose to leave further speculation to a more liberal age.

  “No matter. I am convinced that time and space are properties of the mind, and the ability to use them, just as we use our will and reason, has been lost to man, simply because the necessity for using them has disappeared.”

  “I didn’t understand half the words he used. But the ones I did understand made sense in a funny way. It was like listening to somebody talk about atoms. You knew it was right, but it still sounds pretty silly.

  “I,” he continued, “have developed a machine which artificially stimulates those dormant abilities. And with it I can travel back in time just as easily as you would travel from here to Chicago.”

  That was quite a statement. Some of my native cynicism was returning. But I glanced down and saw Sally’s neat little foot swinging in a slow circle and I forgot all my doubts. Mind may be superior to matter, but when the matter is a pair of slim ankles it works out the other way around.

  The professor kept talking and I tried to listen but it was hard. But finally he said something that caught my attention.

  “I am ready to go right now,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  “Where?” I asked blankly. But I knew what he meant and I didn’t like it. He wanted to go back into time. And before I did anything like that I wanted to think out all the angles.

  I was right. He said, “I am ready to make my first experiment and I need you. I am an old man and Sally is just a girl. We need a young man, a strong, fearless young mart to go with us.”

  “Oh,” I said, “is Sally going?”

  SHE smiled at me, a wonderful smile, and said, “I wouldn’t let you two go alone. You might never come back to me.” The way she said that made it sound like it was important that I come back. I felt my chest getting tight again.

  “Of course I’ll go,” I heard my big mouth say. And I wasn’t sorry.

  “Excellent,” the professor said. “We will make the attempt immediately.”

  He got up and crossed the room to a large desk Against the wall. From one of the drawers he removed a metal box, about six inches square, with handles attached to each side. He placed this on a table in the middle of the room.

  “I have some work to do first,” he said. “A few final preparations. But it won’t take me a minute.”

  Sally stood up and said, “I’ll make a cup of coffee.”

  She smiled at me so prettily as she left the room that I was in a daze until she returned with a tray and three cups of coffee.

  The professor meanwhile had been tinkering with his metal box and pausing every few minutes to thumb through a thick file of dusty notes.

  Sally gave me a cup of coffee, put cream and sugar in it, and it was fine. I love a girl who can make good coffee.

  The professor had finished by that time and we drank our coffee without saying much. Both he and Sally looked serious and I was busy looking at Sally.

  Finally we were ready.

  The professor motioned us to the table. “Now,” he said, “We will each hold one of the handles. If my theories are right it won’t take more than a few minutes for the stimulus to work. Ready?”

  I put my right hand around the thin metal hand-grip. It was warm. I don’t know whether it was my imagination but I felt something coming out of that box and up my arm. I started to sweat!

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” the professor said. “But I think it will be Egypt.”

  I began to feel something. And it wasn’t imagination. My head felt light and I thought maybe I was going to fall on my face. I looked at Sally and she looked a long way off. And her big blue eyes were going in circles.

  “Professor,” I gasped. “It’s workin’.”

  “I know, I know,” he said excitedly.

  “I’m scared,” Sally cried.

  “I’ll be with you,” I said through the fog that was coming in between us. “Don’t be frightened, Sally.” I tried to reach her, to put my free arm around her shoulders, but I couldn’t make it.

  I was falling into a shimmering, spinning tunnel of blackness. It had no bottom.

  I CAME out of that blackness slowly.

  I saw light a long way in front of me and I put out my hands toward it and then I opened my eyes.

  The first thing I saw was Sally. And that was a wonderful sight. She was sitting beside me, stroking my forehead with cool gentle fingers.

  I was lying on a big soft couch, looking up at a gold ceiling. I looked to my right and I saw a big brass vase, with a smoky incense coming out of it. I looked left and saw silken tapestries on the wall. I looked down and saw a big tiger skin on a hard-packed dirt floor.

  The professor was pacing up and down on this floor, reading a long sheet of paper with an anxious look on his face.

  Sally said, “Do you feel all right?”

  “I guess so,” I said. I really didn’t know. My head ached and my stomach was jumping like a juke joint, but otherwise I was okay.

  I sat up and looked around. The room we were in wasn’t so big. The walls were covered with silk and the light came from some stuff that was burning in big pots in each corner of the room. The smoke smelled like smoldering tar.

  “Did we make it?” I asked foolishly. “Yes, yes,” the professor said excitedly. “We made it my boy.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s go out and meet the natives. I could stand some fresh air.”

  “Not just yet,” the professor said. And he frowned worriedly at the floor. “I have already met a few of them. They are terrified of us. They put us in here to await the decision of their council. I can understand enough of their dialect to converse with them. And I am not sure yet that they are friendly.”

  “Fine way to treat visitors,” I said bitterly. “Here we come a couple of thousand years to see them and they treat us like lepers.”

  “We had better go slowly,” the professor said. “For myself I am not afraid. But Sally . . .”

  He looked at her and I got what he meant. It scared me.

  We didn’t have time for any more conversation. A gong sounded from somewhere and the silk tapestries on one wall were pulled far enough aside to let a woman into the room.

  She was a filthy old hag, barefooted, and dressed in bright loose clothes that were covered with clasps of gold and silver. Gray lank hair fell over her face. Her skin was brown and dirty.

  She was carrying a metal tray with three cups of some kind of liquid. She set the tray on the floor, and kept her eyes down. She looked as scared as an Irishman going home on a dark night through the fairy country in Kildare.


  SHE started away but the professor stopped her with a word I didn’t understand.

  She answered something, and then they gabbled back and forth for a while. The woman wanted to get away, she kept backing toward the wall but the professor kept throwing questions at her, which she answered sullenly.

  When she finally departed the professor turned to us and his face was grave.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. And I wasn’t feeling too chipper.

  “Perhaps nothing,” he said. He made an effort and smiled down at the tray. “At least they aren’t going to starve us.” He picked up one of the cups and sipped the contents. “It’s an herb wine,” he said. “It won’t hurt us. Better try it.”

  It wasn’t bad stuff. Hot and spicy and strong. It made me feel a lot better almost immediately.

  “Now let’s have the bad news,” I said. “I could tell from your face when the old crone was talking, that she wasn’t giving you a good thing in the fifth race at Olympia Fields.”

  “I don’t like to admit failure,” he said. “But I think we had better leave this place. The woman told me of her religion. And it isn’t a pretty topic. These people are members of the original Kultibar clan, an Egyptian sect whose worship is based on human sacrifice. I don’t know whether we are in any danger, but I don’t like to take a chance.”

  Sally’s hand touched mine. I held it tightly and tried to smile at her. She looked white and scared. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.

  “Let’s vamoose, if we can,” I told the professor. “We can find some place where they’re more hospitable.”

  “Oh, yes, let’s go,” Sally cried. “I’m not a sissy, but this place gives me the creeps.”

  I patted her hand. “I’ll take care of you,” I said. I felt very brave and Irish.

  “Very well,” the professor said. “We won’t wait any longer.”

  He went to a corner of the room and, from behind one of the smoking pots, he took the metal box, with the four hand-grips. He placed it on the couch beside us.

  “Let’s hurry,” Sally said.

  I put my hand on one of the handles and put my other arm around her. She pressed a little closer to me and smiled.