The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 30

  He rose from the saddle of his machine, slid the starting level carefully into a notched position and locked it there. He stepped onto the crunching gravel, stared at the black disk that stood before the sun’s blood-red demicircle for a little while, then wheeled slowly, gazing at the face of each of the many who had waited to greet him.

  He shook his head sadly.

  Is this—? He gestured with both hands, holding them as far apart as his feet were spread on the black cinders. The palms were turned toward each other.

  Is this— all? Is this— the end? The end of it all?

  He pointed at the red, dying sun with the round black blemish now rolling slowly past its center, toward the edge where the dim glare faded into the blackness of the sky. He moved his hand so that the eye that followed was led across the oily surface of the sea, where only the occasional furious eruption of predator and prey broke the red-trimmed mourning field.

  All striving, all dreaming, all thought and suffering bring us to—this?

  He gave a shrug of hopelessness. A rictus tugged his face into momentary hideous grin.

  But we had greatness, one of the others challenged. In my time— in my time men built cities that towered above the tallest trees, filled their halls with philosophers and actors, musicians and tumblers, and living, naked tableaux. Our glories were recorded on parchment and canvas, in marble and in granite. The world he beheld us and—

  Trembled? Nebogipfel supplied.

  No, the other shook his head. No one trembled before us. The world smiled in joy, traded its goods for our art, sang the praises of our creators. We were beloved of the whole world. This was our greatness.

  And now? Nebogipfel asked. And now? What is there now of your greatness?

  The other was silent.

  In my day, a different voice spoke; in my day, we marched! The voice was harsh, strong, confident. All who stood before us, we slew! The rest we made slaves! In my day none could resist! We were the bravest, we were the strongest, we were the hardest! We were never beaten! Never! Never! Never!

  Well, said Nebogipfel. I bow to your splendor. I am dazzled by your might! Your empire stretches before me and I cringe in awe. He swept an arm, encompassing black cinders, blood-red waters, black sky.

  In my day, another claimed, we saw these limits. Yes, we had our time on the earth. We dug and we learned and we saw that we had not been the first, and we knew that we would not be the last, either, unless we burned the world and left behind only a dead stone. So we built. Not cities! No! Not fortresses! We built argosies to other worlds, ships to sail to other stars, bolts to carry our seed from the loins of this world to the wombs of a million waiting mothers scattered across God’s whole realm! Down into the dust for us, down into the dust, but our children live! Yes, they live yet on a million stars in every direction!

  And yet we just begin! A million stars? What did your age know of the universe, Nebogipfel? How many worlds did you visage? Seven? Seventy? Seventy thousand?

  A billion worlds, Nebogipfel, a billion worlds in one cinder!

  The speaker bent and lifted a blackened pebble from beneath his feet.

  What are a billion of these Nebogipfel?

  He hurled the cinder at the tweed-suited time traveler in the center of the ring. The cinder struck Nebogipfel on the cheek, split the skin above the bone and fell, clattering onto the beach. A narrow trickle of blood dribbled down the time traveler’s face and soaked into his soft shirt collar.

  The time traveler smiled.

  A billion suns? Nebogipfel asked. What are ten billion billion suns? How long will they burn? Ten billion billion years? And then—- what?

  He threw out an arm, gesturing across the sea.

  This?

  The black disk had transited the half-set redness; a little warmth returned to the tired, musty air.

  And after this? In another hundred thousand years, or another hundred million, even this ends.

  He pulled his soft cloth cap from his head. Straw-colored hair stuck up in all directions. The time traveler drew the cap across his face so the smooth silken lining covered his eyes. He bowed his head, face still covered, shoulders slumped, the image of a mourner to his own inevitable end.

  But our children! The other exclaimed.

  Nebogipfel did not move.

  The other stared, stricken, at the dying sun. Around him the ranks of the assembled time travelers stood silent and motionless.

  Then our grandchildren! Our great-grandchildren!

  Nebogipfel did not move.

  The travelers remained in silence.

  One of the two pipestem-legged travelers advanced across the black cinders, unsteady limbs quavering with every step. The figure halted, facing Nebogipfel, staring up at Nebogipfel, who stood twice the height of the other.

  The taller figure lowered the cap from before his eyes and stood, holding it in his hand, looking downward into the great, solemn, squinting-eyed countenance. An involuntary grin worked its way across Nebogipfel’s features.

  Yes?

  We knew you were coming here today, Nebogipfel. Why do you think this assemblage awaited you? Do you think that these travelers from so many eras, so may races, so many civilizations, all happened to arrive here on this beach, today, by chance?

  The tiny mouth drew back in a wry expression.

  Nebogipfel tugged his cloth cap back onto his straw-colored head. I suppose there was a plan of some sort, then, he said. He drew himself up to his full height so he towered more than ever over the tiny figure. This is the end of my journey, Nebogipfel said. I miss the London of my era. I lost my Weena. I hate the world of AD 802,701, and every later age I ever visited only made me more laden with gloom, more burdened with hopelessness.

  All I want is to go back to my home. Here—

  He slapped a hand on the saddle of his time machine, setting the whole thing to quivering and tipping as if it were about to tumble into the black cinders or the blood-red water.

  That is precisely what you must not do, the tiny figure piped.

  I shall board again with Mrs. Watchett, Nebogipfel said. I shall contribute another seventeen papers on physical optics to the Philosophical Review. I shall become the most ordinary of men among ordinary men. No more shall I see the white sphinx.

  There you are wrong! the little being piped. Officiously, he gestured and men and women moved forward from the semicircle that stood surrounding Nebogipfel. Strong arms seized the original time traveler. Cords appeared and he was bound and placed on the saddle of his machine.

  We are all time travelers, Nebogipfel, the little being said. But you are the prototype, you are the ideal of whom we are all faint reflections. You say that you despair of the ultimate end of life. What would you call it? Some would say, the ultimate entropy. Some would say, the heat death of the universe. Some would say, the cosmic nirvana.

  But your own philosophy says, there is no forever. There is nothing that endures unending. When the universe reaches its end, Nebogipfel, what lies beyond the end? What lies beyond the end?

  Again the little being gestured. A hand moved an ivory bar on Nebogipfel’s time machine. Another turned the glittering quartz rod.

  Nebogipfel shouted. No! Send me back! Send me back!

  But the other said, Yes! You must go on, Nebogipfel! Once you have tasted of futurity, there is no returning! You must go onward, not back! What lies beyond the end, Nebogipfel? What lies beyond the end?

  A tiny hand gestured. A powerful hand reached, unlocked the starting lever of Nebogipfel’s time machine. The lever was thrown. Nebogipfel shouted. The machine and its rider flickered, faded, disappeared from the beach.

  The tiny figure returned to its place at the edge of the pink foaming sea.

  None of us will know, one of the people standing there said.

  Nebogipfel knows, another said.

  UNBORN TOMORROW, by Mack Reynolds

  Betty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, “You’re late.�
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  “Don’t yell at me, I feel awful,” Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle.

  He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, “What I need is a vacation.”

  “What,” Betty said, “are you going to use for money?”

  “Providence,” Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle, “will provide.”

  “Hm-m-m. But before providing vacations it’d be nice if Providence turned up a missing jewel deal, say. Something where you could deduce that actually the ruby ring had gone down the drain and was caught in the elbow. Something that would net about fifty dollars.”

  Simon said, mournful of tone, “Fifty dollars? Why not make it five hundred?”

  “I’m not selfish,” Betty said. “All I want is enough to pay me this week’s salary.”

  “Money,” Simon said. “When you took this job you said it was the romance that appealed to you.”

  “Hm-m-m. I didn’t know most sleuthing amounted to snooping around department stores to check on the clerks knocking down.”

  Simon said, enigmatically, “Now it comes.”

  There was a knock.

  Betty bounced up with Olympic agility and had the door swinging wide before the knocking was quite completed.

  He was old, little and had bug eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His suit was cut in the style of yesteryear but when a suit costs two or three hundred dollars you still retain caste whatever the styling.

  Simon said unenthusiastically, “Good morning, Mr. Oyster.” He indicated the client’s chair. “Sit down, sir.”

  The client fussed himself with Betty’s assistance into the seat, bug-eyed Simon, said finally, “You know my name, that’s pretty good. Never saw you before in my life. Stop fussing with me, young lady. Your ad in the phone book says you’ll investigate anything.”

  “Anything,” Simon said. “Only one exception.”

  “Excellent. Do you believe in time travel?”

  Simon said nothing. Across the room, where she had resumed her seat, Betty cleared her throat. When Simon continued to say nothing she ventured, “Time travel is impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why?”

  Betty looked to her boss for assistance. None was forthcoming. There ought to be some very quick, positive, definite answer. She said, “Well, for one thing, paradox. Suppose you had a time machine and traveled back a hundred years or so and killed your own great-grandfather. Then how could you ever be born?”

  “Confound it if I know,” the little fellow growled. “How?”

  Simon said, “Let’s get to the point, what you wanted to see me about.”

  “I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers,” the old boy said.

  Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent secretary. “Time travelers,” she said, not very intelligently.

  The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at Betty. He said, “Have you read much science fiction, Miss?”

  “Some,” Betty admitted.

  “Then you’ll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has explained them away. But to get on. It’s my contention that within a century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and eternal youth, and it’s also my suspicion that he will eventually be able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence in our era of such time travelers.”

  Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said, “But … Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don’t we ever meet such travelers?”

  Simon put in a word. “The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can’t afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty carefully.”

  Mr. Oyster was pleased. “I didn’t expect you to be so well informed on the subject, young man.”

  Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle.

  Mr. Oyster went on. “I’ve been considering the matter for some time and—”

  Simon held up a hand. “There’s no use prolonging this. As I understand it, you’re an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him.”

  Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then nodded.

  Simon said, “You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some manner or other—any manner will do—exhort from him the secret of eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have discovered. You’re willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours, if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler.”

  “Right!”

  Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively, “But where are you going to find one of these characters—especially if they’re interested in keeping hid?”

  The old boy was the center again. “I told you I’d been considering it for some time. The Oktoberfest, that’s where they’d be!” He seemed elated.

  Betty and Simon waited.

  “The Oktoberfest,” he repeated. “The greatest festival the world has ever seen, the carnival, feria, fiesta to beat them all. Every year it’s held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a quilting party.” He began to swing into the spirit of his description. “It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up time they’ve been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do up a special beer, Marzenbräu they call it, and each brewery opens a tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole over spits, millions of pair of weisswurst, a very special sausage, millions upon millions of pretzels—”

  “All right,” Simon said. “We’ll accept it. The Oktoberfest is one whale of a wingding.”

  “Well,” the old boy pursued, into his subject now, “that’s where they’d be, places like the Oktoberfest. For one thing, a time traveler wouldn’t be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange accent, or who didn’t know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn’t be noticed. You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still wouldn’t be conspicuous at the Oktoberfest. People would figure they had D.T.’s.”

  “But why would a time traveler want to go to a—” Betty began.

  “Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are in their cups? If you could go back a few thousand years, the things you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of Dionysus, or one of Alexander’s orgies. You wouldn’t want to wander up and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on, particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes and not familiar with the city’s layout.” He took a deep breath. “No ma’am, you’d have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of actual interest and for protection against being unmasked.”

  The old boy wound it up. “Well, that’s the story. What are your rates? The Oktoberfest starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and—”

  Simon was shaking his head. “Not interested.”

  As soon as Betty had got her jaw back into place, she glared unbelievingly at him.

  Mr. Oyster was ta
ken aback himself. “See here, young man, I realize this isn’t an ordinary assignment, however, as I said, I am willing to risk a considerable portion of my fortune—”

  “Sorry,” Simon said. “Can’t be done.”

  “A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,” Mr. Oyster said quietly. “I like the fact that you already seem to have some interest and knowledge of the matter. I liked the way you knew my name when I walked in the door; my picture doesn’t appear often in the papers.”

  “No go,” Simon said, a sad quality in his voice.

  “A fifty thousand dollar bonus if you bring me a time traveler.”

  “Out of the question,” Simon said.

  “But why?” Betty wailed.

  “Just for laughs,” Simon told the two of them sourly, “suppose I tell you a funny story. It goes like this:”

  * * * *

  I got a thousand dollars from Mr. Oyster (Simon began) in the way of an advance, and leaving him with Betty who was making out a receipt, I hustled back to the apartment and packed a bag. Hell, I’d wanted a vacation anyway, this was a natural. On the way to Idlewild I stopped off at the Germany Information Offices for some tourist literature.

  It takes roughly three and a half hours to get to Gander from Idlewild. I spent the time planning the fun I was going to have.

  It takes roughly seven and a half hours from Gander to Shannon and I spent that time dreaming up material I could put into my reports to Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to give him some kind of report for his money. Time travel yet! What a laugh!

  Between Shannon and Munich a faint suspicion began to simmer in my mind. These statistics I read on the Oktoberfest in the Munich tourist pamphlets. Five million people attended annually.

  Where did five million people come from to attend an overgrown festival in comparatively remote Southern Germany? The tourist season is over before September 21st, first day of the gigantic beer bust. Nor could the Germans account for any such number. Munich itself has a population of less than a million, counting children.