The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Read online

  “Yes. And you allowed yourself to be carried a little beyond the present moment, into the future, without realizing it? Is that it?”

  “Something like that,” he replied, wide awake to the trap Hauserman had set, and fearful that it might be a blind, to disguise the real trap. “History follows certain patterns. I’m not a Toynbean, by any manner of means, but any historian can see that certain forces generally tend to produce similar effects. For instance, space travel is now a fact; our government has at present a military base on Luna. Within our lifetimes—certainly within the lifetimes of my students—there will be explorations and attempts at colonization on Mars and Venus. You believe that, Doctor?”

  “Oh, unreservedly. I’m not supposed to talk about it, but I did some work on the Philadelphia Project, myself. I’d say that every major problem of interplanetary flight had been solved before the first robot rocket was landed on Luna.”

  “Yes. And when Mars and Venus are colonized, there will be the same historic situations, at least in general shape, as arose when the European powers were colonizing the New World, or, for that matter, when the Greek city-states were throwing out colonies across the Aegean. That’s the sort of thing we call projecting the past into the future through the present.”

  Hauserman nodded. “But how about the details? Things like the assassination of a specific personage. How can you extrapolate to a thing like that?”

  “Well.…” More “memories” were coming to the surface; he tried to crowd them back. “I do my projecting in what you might call fictionalized form; try to fill in the details from imagination. In the case of Khalid, I was trying to imagine what would happen if his influence were suddenly removed from Near Eastern and Middle Eastern, affairs. I suppose I constructed an imaginary scene of his assassination.…”

  He went on at length. Mohammed and Noureed were common enough names. The Middle East was full of old U. S. weapons. Stoning was the traditional method of execution; it diffused responsibility so that no individual could be singled out for blood-feud vengeance.

  “You have no idea how disturbed I was when the whole thing happened, exactly as I had described it,” he continued. “And worst of all, to me, was this Intelligence officer showing up; I thought I was really in for it!”

  “Then you’ve never really believed that you had real knowledge of the future?”

  “I’m beginning to, since I’ve been talking to these Psionics and Parapsychology people,” he laughed. It sounded, he hoped, like a natural and unaffected laugh. “They seem to be convinced that I have.”

  There would be an Eastern-inspired uprising in Azerbaijan by the middle of the next year; before autumn, the Indian Communists would make their fatal attempt to seize East Pakistan. The Thirty Days’ War would be the immediate result. By that time, the Lunar Base would be completed and ready; the enemy missiles would be aimed primarily at the rocketports from which it was supplied. Delivered without warning, it should have succeeded—except that every rocketport had its secret duplicate and triplicate. That was Operation Triple Cross; no wonder Major Cutler had been so startled at the words, last evening. The enemy would be utterly overwhelmed under the rain of missiles from across space, but until the moon-rockets began to fall, the United States would suffer grievously.

  “Honestly, though, I feel sorry for my friend Fitch,” he added. “He’s going to be frightfully let down when some more of my alleged prophecies misfire on him. But I really haven’t been deliberately deceiving him.”

  And Blanley College was at the center of one of the areas which would receive the worst of the thermonuclear hell to come. And it would be a little under a year.…

  “And that’s all there is to it!” Hauserman exclaimed, annoyance in his voice. “I’m amazed that this man Whitburn allowed a thing like this to assume the proportions it did. I must say that I seem to have gotten the story about this business in a very garbled form indeed.” He laughed shortly. “I came here convinced that you were mentally unbalanced. I hope you won’t take that the wrong way, Professor,” he hastened to add. “In my profession, anything can be expected. A good psychiatrist can never afford to forget how sharp and fine is the knife-edge.”

  “The knife-edge!” The words startled him. He had been thinking, at that moment, of the knife-edge, slicing moment after moment relentlessly away from the future, into the past, at each slice coming closer and closer to the moment when the missiles of the Eastern Axis would fall. “I didn’t know they still resorted to surgery, in mental cases,” he added, trying to cover his break.

  “Oh, no; all that sort of thing is as irrevocably discarded as the whips and shackles of Bedlam. I meant another kind of knife-edge; the thin, almost invisible, line which separates sanity from non-sanity. From madness, to use a deplorable lay expression.” Hauserman lit another cigarette. “Most minds are a lot closer to it than their owners suspect, too. In fact, Professor, I was so convinced that yours had passed over it that I brought with me a commitment form, made out all but my signature, for you.” He took it from his pocket and laid it on the desk. “The modern equivalent of the lettre-de-cachet, I suppose the author of a book on the French Revolution would call it. I was all ready to certify you as mentally unsound, and commit you to Northern State Mental Hospital.”

  Chalmers sat erect in his chair. He knew where that was; on the other side of the mountains, in the one part of the state completely untouched by the H-bombs of the Thirty Days’ War. Why, the town outside which the hospital stood had been a military headquarters during the period immediately after the bombings, and the center from which all the rescue work in the state had been directed.

  “And you thought you could commit me to Northern State!” he demanded, laughing scornfully, and this time he didn’t try to make the laugh sound natural and unaffected. “You—confine me, anywhere? Confine a poor old history professor’s body, yes, but that isn’t me. I’m universal; I exist in all space-time. When this old body I’m wearing now was writing that book on the French Revolution, I was in Paris, watching it happen, from the fall of the Bastile to the Ninth Thermidor. I was in Basra, and saw that crazed tool of the Axis shoot down Khalid ib’n Hussein—and the professor talked about it a month before it happened. I have seen empires rise and stretch from star to star across the Galaxy, and crumble and fall. I have seen.…”

  Doctor Hauserman had gotten his pen out of his pocket and was signing the commitment form with one hand; with the other, he pressed a button on the desk. A door at the rear opened, and a large young man in a white jacket entered.

  “You’ll have to go away for a while, Professor,” Hauserman was telling him, much later, after he had allowed himself to become calm again. “For how long, I don’t know. Maybe a year or so.”

  “You mean to Northern State Mental?”

  “Well.… Yes, Professor. You’ve had a bad crack-up. I don’t suppose you realize how bad. You’ve been working too hard; harder than your nervous system could stand. It’s been too much for you.”

  “You mean, I’m nuts?”

  “Please, Professor. I deplore that sort of terminology. You’ve had a severe psychological breakdown.…”

  “Will I be able to have books, and papers, and work a little? I couldn’t bear the prospect of complete idleness.”

  “That would be all right, if you didn’t work too hard.”

  “And could I say good-bye to some of my friends?”

  Hauserman nodded and asked, “Who?”

  “Well, Professor Pottgeiter.…”

  “He’s outside now. He was inquiring about you.”

  “And Stanly Weill, my attorney. Not business; just to say good-bye.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Professor. He’s not in town, now. He left almost immediately after.… After.…”

  “After he found out I was crazy for sure? Where’d he go?”

  “To Reno; he took the plane at five o’clock.”

  Weill wouldn’t have believed, anyhow; no use trying to b
lame himself for that. But he was as sure that he would never see Stanly Weill alive again as he was that the next morning the sun would rise. He nodded impassively.

  “Sorry he couldn’t stay. Can I see Max Pottgeiter alone?”

  “Yes, of course, Professor.”

  Old Pottgeiter came in, his face anguished. “Ed! It isn’t true,” he stammered. “I won’t believe that it’s true.”

  “What, Max?”

  “That you’re crazy. Nobody can make me believe that.”

  He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Confidentially, Max, neither do I. But don’t tell anybody I’m not. It’s a secret.”

  Pottgeiter looked troubled. For a moment, he seemed to be wondering if he mightn’t be wrong and Hauserman and Whitburn and the others right.

  “Max, do you believe in me?” he asked. “Do you believe that I knew about Khalid’s assassination a month before it happened?”

  “It’s a horribly hard thing to believe,” Pottgeiter admitted. “But, dammit, Ed, you did! I know, medieval history is full of stories about prophecies being fulfilled. I always thought those stories were just legends that grew up after the event. And, of course, he’s about a century late for me, but there was Nostradamus. Maybe those old prophecies weren’t just ex post facto legends, after all. Yes. After Khalid, I’ll believe that.”

  “All right. I’m saying, now, that in a few days there’ll be a bad explosion at Reno, Nevada. Watch the papers and the telecast for it. If it happens, that ought to prove it. And you remember what I told you about the Turks annexing Syria and Lebanon?” The old man nodded. “When that happens, get away from Blanley. Come up to the town where Northern State Mental Hospital is, and get yourself a place to live, and stay there. And try to bring Marjorie Fenner along with you. Will you do that, Max?”

  “If you say so.” His eyes widened. “Something bad’s going to happen here?”

  “Yes, Max. Something very bad. You promise me you will?”

  “Of course, Ed. You know, you’re the only friend I have around here. You and Marjorie. I’ll come, and bring her along.”

  “Here’s the key to my apartment.” He got it from his pocket and gave it to Pottgeiter, with instructions. “Everything in the filing cabinet on the left of my desk. And don’t let anybody else see any of it. Keep it safe for me.”

  The large young man in the white coat entered.

  THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT (10), by Grendel Briarton

  It was Ferdinand Feghoot who discovered Yip Quong and persuaded him to move to the Thirty-Ninth Century.

  “Mr. Yip,” he informed the Time-Travellers Club, “is the greatest natural psychokineticist in all history. He put every Chinese laundry in Milwaukee 1912 out of business. He hired no help. He needed no plant or equipment. He simply sat down before a mountain of dirty old laundry, and wished it all cleaned, ironed, sorted, and wrapped. He closed his eyes for a moment—and pop!—it was done. In no time he’d made millions of dollars.”

  Old Dr. Gropius Volkswagen rose to his feet. “Then why is he here?” he demanded unpleasantly. “Why did he not stay where he was so happy and rich?”

  “He was rich but not happy,” Feghoot answered. “His fellow Chinese weren’t at all fond of him. Some of them snubbed him completely, and none of them ever invited him over for tea.”

  “That is strange. The Chinese worshipped commercial success. Did he commit some unforgivable crime? Did he violate some precept of maybe Confucius?”

  “Oh no,” said Ferdinand Feghoot. “It was nothing like that. It was just that they found him a little too wishy-washy.”

  TIME BUM, by C.M. Kornbluth

  Harry Twenty-Third Street suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.

  “I just thought of a new con,” Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still chuckling.

  Farmer Brown shook his head positively. “There’s no such thing, my man,” he said. “There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got—a store con? Shall you be needing a roper?” He tried not to look eager as a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Farmer needed a connection badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.

  Harry said, “Sorry, old boy. No details. It’s too good to split up. I shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust, before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is going to call copper after I take him. It’s beautiful and it’s mine. I will see you around, my friend.”

  Harry got up from the booth and left, nodding cheerfully to a safe-blower here, a fixer there, on his way to the locked door of the hangout. Naturally he didn’t nod to such small fry as pickpockets and dope peddlers. Harry had his pride.

  The puzzled Farmer sipped his lemon squash and concluded that Harry had been kidding him. He noticed that Harry had left behind him in the booth a copy of a magazine with a space ship and a pretty girl in green bra and pants on the cover.

  * * * *

  “A furnished…bungalow?” the man said hesitantly, as though he knew what he wanted but wasn’t quite sure of the word.

  “Certainly, Mr. Clurg,” Walter Lachlan said. “I’m sure we can suit you. Wife and family?”

  “No,” said Clurg. “They are…far away.” He seemed to get some secret amusement from the thought. And then, to Walter’s horror, he sat down calmly in empty air beside the desk and, of course, crashed to the floor looking ludicrous and astonished.

  Walter gaped and helped him up, sputtering apologies and wondering privately what was wrong with the man. There wasn’t a chair there. There was a chair on the other side of the desk and a chair against the wall. But there just wasn’t a chair where Clurg had sat down.

  Clurg apparently was unhurt; he protested against Walter’s apologies, saying: “I should have known, Master Lachlan. It’s quite all right; it was all my fault. What about the bang—the bungalow?”

  Business sense triumphed over Walter’s bewilderment. He pulled out his listings and they conferred on the merits of several furnished bungalows. When Walter mentioned that the Curran place was especially nice, in an especially nice neighborhood—he lived up the street himself—Clurg was impressed.

  “I’ll take that one,” he said. “What is the…feoff?” Walter had learned a certain amount of law for his real-estate license examination; he recognized the word. “The rent is seventy-five dollars,” he said. “You speak English very well, Mr. Clurg.” He hadn’t been certain that the man was a foreigner until the dictionary word came out. “You have hardly any accent.”

  “Thank you,” Clurg said, pleased. “I worked hard at it. Let me see—seventy-five is six twelves and three.” He opened one of his shiny-new leather suitcases and calmly laid six heavy little paper rolls on Walter’s desk. He broke open a seventh and laid down three mint-new silver dollars. “There I am,” he said. “I mean, there you are.”

  Walter didn’t know what to say. It had never happened before. People paid by check or in bills. They just didn’t pay in silver dollars. But it was money—why shouldn’t Mr. Clurg pay in silver dollars if he wanted to? He shook himself, scooped the rolls into his top desk drawer, and said: “I’ll drive you out there, if you like. It’s nearly quitting time anyway.”

  * * * *

  Walter told his wife Betty over the dinner table: “We ought to have him in some evening. I can’t imagine where on Earth he comes from. I had to show him how to turn on the kitchen range. When it went on he said, ‘Oh, yes—electricity!’ and laughed his head off. And he kept ducking the question when I tried to ask him in a nice way. Maybe he’s some kind of a political refugee.”

  “Maybe…” Betty began dreamily and then shut her mouth. She didn’t want Walter laughing at her again. As it was, he made her buy her science-fiction magazines downtown instead of at neighborhood newsstands. He thought it wasn’t becoming for his wife to read the
m. He’s so eager for success, she thought sentimentally.

  That night while Walter watched a television variety show, she read a story in one of her magazines. (Its cover, depicting a space ship and a girl in green bra and shorts, had been prudently torn off and thrown away.) It was about a man from the future who had gone back in time, bringing with him all sorts of marvelous inventions. In the end the Time Police punished him for unauthorized time traveling. They had come back and got him, brought him back to his own time. She smiled. It would be nice if Mr. Clurg, instead of being a slightly eccentric foreigner, were a man from the future with all sorts of interesting stories to tell and a satchelful of gadgets that could be sold for millions and millions of dollars.

  After a week they did have Clurg over for dinner. It started badly. Once more he managed to sit down in empty air and crash to the floor. While they were brushing him off he said fretfully: “I can’t get used to not—” and then said no more.

  He was a picky eater. Betty had done one of her mother’s specialties, veal cutlet with tomato sauce, topped by a poached egg. He ate the egg and sauce, made a clumsy attempt to cut up the meat, and abandoned it. She served a plate of cheese, half a dozen kinds, for dessert, and Clurg tasted them uncertainly, breaking off a crumb from each, while Betty wondered where that constituted good manners. His face lit up when he tried a ripe cheddar. He popped the whole wedge into his mouth and said to Betty: “I will have that, please.”

  “Seconds?” asked Walter. “Sure. Don’t bother, Betty. I’ll get it.” He brought back a quarter-pound wedge of the cheddar.

  Walter and Betty watched silently as Clurg calmly ate every crumb of it. He sighed.