The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 9

  That night, Ignatiev came in as we were finishing supper, already more than slightly drunk, and he surprised me by his silence. He sat down with us, poured himself a glass of wine, and asked me seriously and politely whether I could now understand the Russian, perhaps even dialects of Russian, of four or five hundred years ago.

  I told him I was sure I could, if only the writing was clear and well-formed enough.

  “And what if it weren’t written, Fredichka?” he asked. “What if it were spoken?”

  “According to my theory, the computers have given us the sounds exactly as they were, Andrei Konstantinovitch,” I answered, smiling. “If it were possible to hear them, I should be able to understand them perfectly.”

  “Good, good,” he said. “Well, soon we shall see.” He poured himself more wine; he poured a glass for Marfa. I looked at her. She smiled very slightly, and nodded at the door. I realized that now he wanted to be alone with her, and said goodnight to them.

  For perhaps two hours, I sat up in bed, reading a novel of Jack London’s, losing myself among the snows and wild beasts and rough prospectors of the Alaskan wilderness, among dangers and discomforts other than my own. Then I turned out my light and fell asleep.

  It was two o’clock when I awakened—or rather when I was awakened. I listened, my eyes still closed. The sound was with me in my room. It was the sound of a woman weeping bitterly, and my first thought was that something terrible must have happened, that Ignatiev must have done something unspeakable to Marfa.

  Naturally, my impulse was to comfort her, perhaps to help her if I could. I turned my head and looked.

  There was a woman in my room. But she was not Marfa. She was someone I had never seen before, a small, pretty woman in a long gray dress of watered silk, cut in the fashion of the mid-19th century. Her hair was golden. She wore a golden chain, a large locket, and an enameled brooch. She was walking very slowly across the room, crying desperately, wringing a handkerchief between her anguished hands. She was perfectly visible, surrounded by an almost phosphorescent glow, and as she passed my bed a chill emanated from her, a coldness that penetrated to my blood and bones.

  I could not speak, and she did not look at me. Behind her was the nursery door, from which she must have come, though it was locked. For an instant, I wondered if somehow Ignatiev was playing a ghastly joke on me. Then, her back turned, she was at the door into the hall. Then she had walked through its thick wooden panels, and was gone. The room was dark again.

  I turned the light on hastily. I remembered all that Ignatiev had said about the ghosts of Russia, the Kremlin’s ghosts and the Red Square’s, and the dacha’s.

  That night I did not sleep again.

  There are happenings one cannot accept immediately, happenings one is compelled to wrestle with. The mind strives against accepting or rejecting them; reason and all one has been taught war with the experience of one’s senses. So it was with me. I never had believed in ghosts; on the other hand, I never dogmatically had disbelieved in them. What had I seen? She had been so real, so pitiful. I had of course heard of holograms, but only in laboratories; still experimental, could they be produced on such a scale? With Ignatiev you never knew—yet would even he have gone to such extremes merely to frighten me? Besides, there had been that sudden, penetrating cold, a phenomenon always associated with the returning dead. I sat there, arguing all these matters with myself and settling none of them, till daylight, when I took refuge in the simplicities of washing, shaving, getting dressed.

  When Marfa called me in to breakfast, I was decidedly the worse for wear. She noticed it and questioned me. I told her I had had a nightmare, had been unable to get back to sleep, that it had been too late for me to take a pill.

  Ignatiev already had gone out. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon trying to do some work, but without success; finally I gave up and, for an hour or two, napped uneasily.

  It was Ignatiev who woke me, shaking me by the shoulder. “Well, well, Fredichka,” he chuckled, “you look very pale today.”

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes, saying nothing.

  He looked down, looming over me. “If you weren’t so practical a man”—he laughed aloud—“I’d swear you’d seen a ghost. But then,

  I told you that this dacha’s haunted, didn’t I? Well, whose ghost did you see?”

  Haltingly, not wanting to, I told him, explaining that I knew it was either a hallucination or something he had scientifically contrived.

  “My clever Fredichka,” he said, “to be so determined a materialist!” He shook his head. “But I assure you that she was neither a figment nor a hologram. She was the Baroness Elizaveta Petrovna Kurbskaya, the wife of Baron Kurbsky—an ancient name—an officer in the fashionable Preobrazhenski Regiment. Tidy little piece, wasn’t she? You saw her weeping because her first child had just died. She herself died about fifty years later, in 1897, after she had borne four more children and lost her husband in a duel. He was an immensely interesting fellow. In a little while, after we have a drink or two, which”—his laughter roared out again—“I suspect you really need, I’ll introduce you to him.”

  I shuddered.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me. “The introduction will be quite one-sided, like your meeting with the baroness. Come along, now.”

  I went with him into the library. Everything was the same as when I had first entered it, except that the blinds were drawn, a light was on, and there was an object on his desk I had not seen before. It looked like an attaché case, but bigger and wider than they usually are.

  He poured vodka, raised his glass. “To our ghosts!” he said, and drank, and filled his glass again. Then he seated himself behind the desk, gesturing at the chair next to him. I sat down obediently, wondering if I were really sane.

  “Now,” he declared, “now, Fredichka, I will explain. Last night I arranged for you to meet the little baroness because I wanted you to have no doubts about the reality and importance of what I have discovered. My ghosts are real. But never fear—they are not the returning spirits of the dead. The dead do not return.” He waved his hand, taking in the entire room, and now the intensity was returning to his voice. “Look at these walls, that ceiling, the clock, the carpet, this desk. Everything looks so permanent. Who would think that all of it, and we ourselves, are nothing more than displays of energy. You know something of physics—I surely don’t need to explain atoms to you. Everything is process; there is no true stasis, only vast energies bound temporarily—always temporarily—conveying the impression of things static, durable, everlasting. Galaxies and suns, dead airless moons, sunflowers and lovely naked girls—all are only appearances. They do not show the underlying matrices of bound and binding energies. And Fredichka”—he rose and began pacing back and forth—“these matrices are much more complex than anyone imagines. They operate on many levels. And nothing—no process in the Universe—is isolated. All influence each other, especially those forces generated by our minds. On the gross, material level, every step taken, every word spoken, each blow one strikes, each moment of every life on earth makes subtle changes in the matrices. Everything—everything is recorded.”

  He stopped in front of me. Again he filled my glass. “You under-stand?”

  “I—I think I do.”

  “Very well. Long ago, I became interested in ghosts. Some were too well attested to to be illusions. This was true especially in certain countries, in England, Scotland, Ireland. Do you realize that in London’s Drury Lane Theatre there walks the ghost of a young man in 18th century costume who has been seen literally by thousands? That in the city of York, Roman soldiers have been seen marching through a wall on a no-longer-existent road? That in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey the chants of long-dead monks can, quite indisputably, be heard at night? I began to study these phenomena, and before long I realized that something had evoked them from the matrices in which they were recorded. I studied their geophysical environments: the underlying geologies, the p
revailing force-fields, the seasons of the year, the weather, everything—even the temper of the people. It took me years, Fredichka—I had other work to do. Then suddenly I found the key. I knew the forces that were invariably involved. I knew how to produce them, much more efficiently than nature ever had.”

  He pointed at the attaché case. “There is my key. We will begin with Holy Russia’s bloody past; it is so close at hand. You have met the baroness, and you will meet her husband, so that when we go further back you will not be afraid. You will know that the dead do not threaten us. I now can tune to any century, any day, but I still can evoke clearly only episodes where the emotional vectors were incredibly intense. The rest comes later—a simple matter of technology. It is not yet time to announce what I have found. My proof must be dramatic, indisputable, so I have told no one—not even Marfa—except you. I have published nothing; I have put nothing down in writing. When I do publish, no one must be able to deny my findings, or steal the credit from me. Make no mistake, even here in our Socialist Fatherland there are men who steal from the minds of other men.” He showed his teeth. “But I believe you know all that. Come, drink up!”

  I drank. He filled my glass again. He refilled his own.

  “B-but, Andrei Konstantinovitch,” I asked. “How did you ever manage to have it made? How could you even get the parts? Without—that is—”

  “Without anybody finding out? You are thinking like a prisoner, Fredichka. Remember, I am one of the authorities. I did not have it made. You have heard of Nicola Tesla? He invented everything up here.” He touched a finger to his forehead. “When he designed the first alternating current motor, he built it in his head. He was out walking with a friend, and suddenly he pointed at the empty air. ‘See!’ he cried out. ‘See, it runs!’ That was how I built my device, and then it simply was a matter of getting a few parts from someone here, from someone there, from colleagues working in space vehicle research and even in more secret fields. All that was necessary was to assemble them, and that I did myself.”

  He opened up the attaché case. Its front hinged downwards, revealing dials, knobs, electronic displays in long rows. He pressed a switch. The device came to life. Four lines of tiny lights began to wink at varying rates across the board.

  “It scans the matrices,” Ignatiev told me. “It scans the centuries slowly, to miss nothing, the months more rapidly, the days to the precise minute, the exact second. Come over here and look. See, it is going back: the display reads 1910, now 1909 and 1908. See, February the 28th, 27th, 26th. And those dancing blood-red lines on the tube—they tell us when something is happening in this room. Much that occurred was not charged emotionally; as I said, I can’t yet pick that material up too clearly. But eventually, Fredichka, I will.”

  I watched as the months and years rolled back, my mind in turmoil from trying to absorb it all. We turned the corner of the century, and the years, one by one, unrolled before us. The bright red lines danced their swift, erratic dance across the tube. He said nothing more until the display came to 1872. “Now I must slow it down,” he told me. “It was an afternoon in May, the 12th, late in the afternoon. At nineteen minutes after four, to be precise. There!” He touched a button. His displays read 4:19 P.M., 12 May 1872, but no lights blinked, the face of the tube was still. “We will begin the evocation now,” he said, touching a control; and the screen glowed again, and the displays began to count the seconds and the minutes, but in reverse this time.

  I thought I heard someone clear his throat; I heard a distinct knock on the door. It was repeated twice. “Fredichka,” said Ignatiev, “turn around. You will meet Baron Kurbsky, and you will see that he is very much annoyed.”

  I turned. The glow I had seen the night before was there, in the room’s far corner. There was the shadow of a chair, a chair not there before. And towering over it was a tall man, straight and powerful, red-cheeked, with mutton-chop whiskers and a fierce moustache. He wore a splendid uniform; he wore a sword. In front of him, at strict attention, stood an orderly. The knock came again.

  “Open it!” the baron ordered, his deep voice perfectly clear, perfectly distinct, yet somehow apart from us, remote.

  The orderly saluted, obeyed.

  Two officers entered, wearing the uniform of the same regiment. One of them was short, almost fragile, but with eyes like ice; the other, tall and slightly stooped, had a gentle, almost scholarly look about him, accentuated by his spectacles.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” the baron said.

  “Good evening, Pavel Pavlovitch,” answered the taller of the two.

  “You have, I trust, met with Prince Skriavin’s seconds?”

  “We have, Pavel Pavlovitch. The answer is almost as we had expected. He has accepted. He has, of course, chosen pistols. But he wants to fight at a mere ten yards.”

  The baron’s mouth twisted.

  “Look at the tube, Fredichka,” said Ignatiev; and I saw that its whole surface was pulsating wildly, fired with a darker red. “That baron was a real man, I tell you—a true Russian! What a temper! See how clear the whole scene is.”

  “The coward!” Baron Kurbsky growled. “He is afraid to fight me like a soldier, with swords. Well, if he wants pistols he shall have them!”

  The taller officer looked troubled. He placed a hand softly on the baron’s forearm. “Pavel, Pavel,” he said, urgently, “my friend, please consider. The prince is deadly with the pistol. He has killed four good men already. You are married. You have three boys, a girl. Could not we, your seconds, go to him and try to compose the quarrel? It was only over a ballet girl, not any matter of importance.”

  “Enough!” shouted the baron. Roughly he flung off his friend’s hand. “Serozha, I will not apologize! Never say anything like that to me again! Yes, yes, you are a true friend, I know. So go and meet again with his seconds. Arrange the time and place. Inform me. We will see how deadly this prince is!”

  The two officers bowed; they said goodnight; the orderly stood at attention by the door as they filed out. But the door as we knew it remained closed; and I realized that, throughout that hot and angry scene, the deep chill had flowed from all of them toward us, toward me.

  * * * *

  Ignatiev switched off his machine. He laughed. “What a fool he was! The prince was just as deadly as they said. The two fought next morning, in a field belonging to another nobleman, and the prince, very cool and quick, wounded him mortally at the first exchange; the baron’s ball missed by several inches. His doctors and the baroness nursed him for several painful days, but there was nothing to be done.”

  He filled our glasses. This time, we drank to the baron and the prince.

  “There!” he said. “By now are you convinced that there’s no danger to you, no matter what turns up out of the past? That is important—for tomorrow you’ll have to have your wits about you. What we evoke where we are going may be far more dreadful than these small domestic scenes I’ve shown you. Tomorrow we shall scan matrices going back four hundred years, when Ivan Grozni ruled in Muscovy. Your linguistic skills will have to be as sharp as possible, for you will hear the Russian spoken then—and God only knows in what sort of accent. You are quite sure of your ability to understand?”

  Still shaken, still oppressed by that strange chill, I said I was, that the computers could be relied upon.

  Then it was supper time, and he dropped the subject. We ate hurriedly and in silence, so much so that even Marfa was surprised and puzzled, looking from one to the other of us but not asking questions. I realized that he could hardly wait to get back into the library, his decanters, and his plans.

  As soon as we returned, he began drinking again—brandy this time—and getting increasingly excited as he talked.

  “Tomorrow, Fredichka,” he told me, “I take the first small step. I have a friend in the Department of Antiquities, and they have given me permission to investigate a passage they have found. It’s in the heart of Moscow, under an old Czarist building da
maged in the war and just torn down. A fine new building will be erected on the site, and the plans called for a cellar much deeper than the existing one, so they began digging and found a deeper cellar still, filled in not just with earth but with what was left of a great ancient house that burned and collapsed into it, probably when the Khan of the Crimea and his Tartars burned Moscow in 1571. Ah, that was a time, Fredichka! Ivan fled to the far north, leaving Moscow to its fate, and the gates of the defended Kremlin were kept locked against the people while the Tartars looted, raped, and burned. The city was destroyed—yes, there was actually a modern fire-storm, imagine it! But some escaped. There were deep secret tunnels leading from houses in the city, under the Kremlin moat, under the walls. And that, I think, is what they’ve found. There is a great bronze door, and it was barred from the inside, but they have opened it. It leads into a vaulted passage, and this in turn has curious arched alcoves along each side, any of which could be the bricked-up entrance to a room, for tunnels such as these were not only for escape. Sometimes they themselves served as hiding places, from enemies, from the Czar’s wrath, for treasure, who knows? Now the passage has been completely blocked by fallen rubble; it extends only about fifty yards. But I and the Department of Antiquities both want to know what lies along its walls. I told them that if there were any hidden rooms my device would find them. My friend there offered to assist me, but I told him no—that I wanted no one present if it failed to work, that I would bring my own assistant, who wouldn’t dare to say, ‘I told you so!’”

  His laughter rumbled in his throat. “You wouldn’t, would you, Fredichka?”

  I told him truthfully that I would not.

  “We will drink to that!” He poured brandy for the two of us. “I can see ways already to make the instrument so sensitive that the emotional vectors will be much less critical. I can see ways to in-crease the area covered immeasurably. Perhaps we shall raise the ghosts of entire battles! We shall watch as Dmitri Donskoi defeats the Mongols, and see Greeks and Persians fighting to the death at Salamis! We shall see blood flowing in the Roman Coliseum—ah, there will be ghosts there, I can tell you!”