Dangerous Visions Read online

  He pointed out to her how the time pressures had been set: low for corridors and offices, higher for bedrooms, variable for the living room. She rubbed herself against him and made an imitation purr.

  "You are thrilled, aren't you, honey?" she asked.

  "I keep thinking of the bills we have to pay. And the bills to come—three payts a basic unit—wow!" Then he saw her look of disappointment and added, "But of course I love it, darling. You know I'm going to be delighted."

  Then they bustled through the house, with the controls on. In the kitchen itself, they set themselves back to a recent early midmorning. They floated in time past at the time of day Fifi favoured most for kitchen work, when the breakfast chores were over and it was long before the hour when lunch need be planned and dialled. Fifi and Tracey had selected a morning when she had been feeling particularly calm and well; the entire ambience of that period swept over them now.

  "Marvellous! Delicious! I can do anything, cook you anything, now!"

  They kissed each other, and ran into the corridor, crying, "Isn't science wonderful!"

  They stopped abruptly. "Oh no!" Fifi cried.

  The corridor was in perfect order, the drapes in place and gleaming metallically by the two windows, controlling the amount of light that entered, storing the surplus for off-peak hours, the creep-carpet in place and resprayed, carrying them smoothly forward, the panelling all warm and soft to the touch. But they were time-controlled back to three o'clock of an afternoon a month ago, a peaceful time of day—except that a month ago the builders had been at work here.

  "Honey, they'll ruin the carpet! And I just know the panelling will not go back properly! Oh, Tracey, look—they've disconnected the drapes, and Smithy promised not to!"

  He clutched her shoulder. "Honey, everything's in order, honest!"

  "It's not! It's not in order! Look at these dirty old time tubes everywhere, and all these cables hanging about! They've ruined our lovely dust-absorbent ceiling—look at the way it's leaking dirt over everything!"

  "Honey, it's the time effect!" But he had to admit that he could not credit the perfect corridor his eyes registered; he was carried away like Fifi by his emotions of a month ago when he viewed the place as it had been then, in the hands of Smithy and his terrible men.

  They reached the end of the passage and jumped into the bedroom, escaping into another time zone. Peeping back through the door, Fifi said tearfully, "Gosh, Trace, the power of time! I guess we just have to alter the controls for the corridor, eh?"

  "Sure, we'll tune in to a year ago, say a nice summer's afternoon along the passage. You name it, we dial it! That's the motto of Central Time Board, isn't it? Anyhow, how do you like the time in here?"

  After gazing round the bedroom, she lowered her long lashes at him. "Mm, sort of relaxed, isn't it?"

  "Two o'clock in the morning, honey, early spring, and everyone in the whole zone sleeping tight. We aren't likely to suffer from insomnia now!"

  She came and stood against him, leaning on his chest and looking up at him. "You don't think that maybe eleven at night would be a more—well, bedroomy time?"

  "You know I prefer the sofa for that sort of thing, honey. Come and sit on it with me and see what you think about the living room."

  The living room was one flight down, with only the garage and the dairy on the two floors below between them and the ground. It was a fine large room with fine large windows looking over the landscape to the distant dome of the city, and it had a fine large sofa standing in the middle of it.

  They sat down on this voluptuous sofa and, past associations being what they were, commenced to cuddle. After a while Tracey reached down to the floor and pulled up a hand-switcher that was plugged into the wall.

  "We can control our own time from here, without getting up, Fifi! You name the time and we flip back to it."

  "If you're thinking of what I think you're thinking, then we'd better not go back more than ten months because we weren't married before that."

  "Now, come on, Mrs. Fevertrees, are you getting old-fashioned or something? You never let that thought bother you before we were married."

  "I did too!—Though maybe more after than at the time, when I was sort of carried away."

  He stroked her pretty hair gently. "Tell you what I thought we could try sometime—dial back to when you were twelve. You must have been very sexy in your preteens, and I'd sure as hell love to find out. How about it?"

  She was about to deliver some conventional female rebuke, but her imagination got the better of her. "We could work back to when we were tots!"

  "Attaboy! You know I have a touch of the Lolita complex!"

  "Trace—we must be careful unless in our excitement we shoot back past the day we were born, or we'll wind up little blobs of protoplasm or something."

  "Honey, you read the brochures! When we get up enough pressure to go right past our birth dates, we simply enter the consciousness of our nearest predecessors of the same sex—you your mother, me my father, and then your grandmother and my grandfather. Farther back than that, time pressure in the Rouseville mains won't let us go."

  Conversation languished under other interests until Fifi murmured dreamily, "What a heavenly invention time is! Know what, even when we're old and grey and impotent, we'll be able to come back and enjoy ourselves as we were when we were young. We'll dial back to this very instant, won't we?"

  "Mmmm," he said. It was a universally shared sentiment.

  That evening, they dined off a huge synthetic lobster. In her excitement over being on the time mains, Fifi had somehow dialled a slightly incorrect mixture—though she swore there was a misprint in the cook-book programming she had fed the kitchputer—and the dish was not all it should be. But they dialled themselves back to the time of one of the first and finest lobsters they had ever eaten together, shortly after their meeting two years before. The remembered taste took off the disappointment of the present taste.

  While they were eating, the pressure went.

  There was no sound. Externally, all was the same. But inside their heads, they felt themselves whirling through the days like leaves blown over a moor. Mealtimes came and went, and the lobster was sickening in their mouths as they seemed to chew in turn turkey, or cheese, or game, or trifle or sponge pudding or ice cream or breakfast cereal. For several mind-wrenching moments they sat there at table, petrified, while hundreds of assorted tastes chased themselves over their taste buds. Tracey jumped up gasping and cut off the time flow entirely at the switch by the door.

  "Something's gone wrong!" he exclaimed. "It's that guy Smith. I'll dial him straightaway. I'll shoot him!"

  But when Smith's face floated up in the vision tank, it was as bland as ever.

  "The fault's not mine, Mr. Fevertrees. As a matter of fact, one of my men just dialled me to say that there's trouble at the Rouseville time works, where your pipe joins the main supply. Time gas is leaking out. I told you this morning they were having some bother there. Go to bed, Mr. Fevertrees—that's my suggestion. Go to bed, and in the morning all will probably be fixed again."

  "Go to bed! How dare he tell us to go to bed!" Fifi exclaimed. "What an immoral suggestion! He's trying to hide something, that man. I'll bet this is some mistake of his and he's covering up with this story about a leak at the time works."

  "We can soon check on that. Let's drive down there and see!"

  They caught the elevator down to the ground floor and climbed into their land vehicle. City folk might laugh at these little wheeled hovercraft, so quaintly reminiscent of the automobiles of bygone days, but there was no doubt that they were indispensable in the country outside the domes, where free public transport did not reach.

  The doors opened and they rolled out, taking off immediately and floating forward a couple of feet above the ground. Rouseville lay over a low hill, and the time works was just on the far fringe of it. But as they sighted the first houses, something strange happened.

  T
hough all was quiet, the land vehicle began to jerk around wildly. Fifi was flung about, and the next moment they were stuck in a hedge.

  "Heck, these things are heavy! I must learn to drive one sometime!" Tracey said, climbing out.

  "Aren't you going to help me down, Tracey?"

  "Aw, I'm too big to play with girls!"

  "You gotta help me! I lost my dolly!"

  "You never had no dolly! Nuts to you!"

  He ran on across the field and she had to follow him, calling as she ran. It was just so difficult trying to control the clumsy heavy body of an adult with the mind of a child.

  She found her husband sitting in the middle of the Rouseville road, kicking and waving his arms. He giggled at her. "Tace go walkey-walkey!" he said.

  But in a few moments they were able to move along again on foot, though it was painful for Fifi, whose mother had been lame toward the end of her life. Together they hobbled forward, two young things in old postures. When they entered the little domeless village, it was to find most of the inhabitants about, and going through the whole spectrum of human age-characteristics, from burbling infancy to rattling senility. Obviously, something serious had happened at the time works.

  Ten minutes and a few generations later, they arrived at the gates. Standing below the Central Time Board sign was Smith. They did not recognise him; he was wearing an anti-time gas mask, its exhaust spluttering as it spat out old moments.

  "I thought you two might turn up!" he exclaimed. "Didn't believe me, eh? Well, you'd better come in with me and see for yourselves. They've struck a major gusher and the cocks couldn't stand the pressure and collapsed. My guess is they'll have to evacuate the whole area before they get this one fixed."

  As he led them through the gates, Tracey said, "I just hope this isn't Ruskie sabotage!"

  "Rusty what?"

  "Ruskie sabotage. The work of the Russians. I presume this plant is secret?"

  Smith stared at him in amazement. "You gone crazy, Mr. Fever-trees? The Russian nation got time mains just the same as us. You were on honeymoon in Odessa last year, weren't you?"

  "Last year, I was on active service in Korea, thank you!"

  "Korea?!"

  With mighty siren noises, a black shape bearing red flashing lights above and below its bulk settled itself down in the Time Board yard. It was a robot-piloted fire engine from the city, but its human crew tumbled out in a weird confusion, and one young fellow lay yelling for his pants to be changed before the Time Board men could issue them with anti-time gas masks. And then there was no fire for them to extinguish, only the great gusher of invisible time that by now towered over the building and the whole village, and blew to the four corners, carrying unimagined or forgotten generations on its mothproof breath.

  "Let's get forward and see what we can see," Smith said. "We might just as well go home and have a drink as stand here doing nothing."

  "You are a very foolish young man if you mean what I suppose you to mean," Fifi said, in an ancient and severe voice. "Most of the liquor currently available is bootleg and unsafe to consume—but in any case, I believe we should support the President in his worthy attempt to stamp out alcoholism, don't you, Tracey darling?"

  But Tracey was lost in an abstraction of strange memory, and whistling "La Paloma" under his breath to boot.

  Stumbling after Smith, they got to the building, where two police officials stopped them. At that moment a plump man in a formal suit appeared and spoke to one of the police through his gas mask. Smith hailed him, and they greeted each other like brothers. It turned out they were brothers. Clayball Smith beckoned them all into the plant, gallantly taking Fifi's arm—which, to reveal his personal tragedy, was about as much as he ever got of any pretty girl.

  "Shouldn't we have been properly introduced to this gentleman, Tracey?" Fifi whispered to her husband.

  "Nonsense, my dear. Rules of etiquette have to go by the board when you enter one of the temples of industry." As he spoke, Tracey seemed to stroke an imaginary side whisker.

  Inside the time plant chaos reigned. Now the full magnitude of the disaster was clear. They were pulling the first miners out of the hole where the time explosion had occurred; one of the poor fellows was cursing weakly and blaming George III for the whole terrible matter.

  The whole time industry was still in its infancy. A bare ten years had elapsed since the first of the subterrenes, foraging far below the Earth's crust, had discovered the time pockets. The whole matter was still a cause for wonder, and investigations were as yet at a comparatively early stage.

  But big business had stepped in and, with its usual bigheartedness, seen that everyone got his fair share of time, at a price. Now the time industry had more capital invested than any other industry in the world. Even in a tiny village like Rouseville, the plant was worth millions. But the plant had broken down right now.

  "It's terrible dangerous here—you folks better not stay long," Clay-ball said. He was shouting through his gas mask. The noise here was terrible, especially since a news commentator had just started his spiel to the nation a yard away.

  In answer to a shouted question from his brother, Clayball said, "No, it's more than a crack in the main supply. That was just the cover story we put out. Our brave boys down there struck a whole new time seam and it's leaking out all over the place. Can't plug it! Half our guys were back to the Norman Conquest before we guessed what was wrong." He pointed dramatically down through the tiles beneath their feet.

  Fifi could not understand what on earth he was talking about. Ever since leaving Plymouth, she had been adrift, and that not entirely metaphorically. It was bad enough playing Pilgrim Mother to one of the Pilgrim Fathers, but she did not dig this New World at all. It was now beyond her comprehension to understand that the vast resources of modern technology were fouling up the whole time schedule of a planet.

  In her present state, she could not know that already the illusions of the time gusher were spreading across the continent. Almost every communication satellite shuttling above the world was carrying more or less accurate accounts of the disaster and the events leading up to it, while their bemused audiences sank back through the generations like people plumbing bottomless snowdrifts.

  From these deposits came the supply of time that was piped to the million million homes of the world. Experts had already computed that at present rates of consumption all the time deposits would be exhausted in two hundred years. Fortunately, other experts were already at work trying to develop synthetic substitutes for time. Only the previous month, the small research team of Time Pen Inc., of Ink, Penn, had announced the isolation of a molecule nine minutes slower than any other molecule known to science, and it was firmly expected that even more isolated molecules would follow.

  Now an ambulance came skidding up, with another behind it. Archibald Smith tried to pull Tracey out of the way.

  "Unhand me, varlet!" quoth Tracey, attempting to draw an imaginary sword. But the ambulance men were jumping out of their vehicles, and the police were cordoning off the area.

  "They're going to bring up our brave terranauts!" Clayball shouted.

  He could hardly be heard above the hubbub. Masked men were everywhere, with here and there the slender figure of a masked nurse. Supplies of oxygen and soup were being marshalled, searchlights swung overhead, blazing down into the square mouth of the inspection pit. The men in yellow overalls were lowering themselves into the pit, communicating to each other by wrist radio. They disappeared. For a moment a hush of awe fell over the building and seemed to spread to the crowds outside.

  But the moment stretched into minutes, and the noise found its way back to its own level. More grim-faced men came forward, and the commentators were pushed out of the picture.

  "It thinks me we should suffer ourselves to get gone from here, by God's breath!" Fifi whispered faintly, clutching at her homespun with a trembling hand. "This likes me not!"

  At last there was activity at the head
of the pit. Sweating men in overalls hauled on ropes. The first terranaut was pulled into view, wearing the characteristic black uniform of his kind. His head lolled back, his mask had been ripped away, but he was fighting bravely to retain consciousness. Indeed, a debonair smile crossed his pale lips, and he waved a hand at the cameras. A ragged cheer went up from the onlookers.

  This was the intrepid breed of men that went down into the uncharted seas of time gas below the Earth's crust, risking their lives to bring back a nugget of knowledge from the unknown, pushing back still further the boundaries of science, unsung and unhonoured by all save the constant battery of world publicity.

  The ace commentator had struggled through the crowd to reach the terranaut and was trying to question him, holding a microphone to his lips while the hero's tortured face swam before the unbelieving eyes of a billion viewers.

  "Hell down there . . . . Dinosaurs and their young," he managed to gasp, before he was whisked into the first ambulance. "Right down deep in the gas. Packs of 'em, ravening . . . . Few more hundred feet lower and we'd have fetched . . .fetched up against the creation . . .of the world . . . ."