The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Read online

  “Maybe five minutes, mister,” said the boy, with a happy grin. Deftly he lowered the protecting metal shield over his meager supply of papers, locked it with a padlock, and ran down the street.

  Progress at last! thought Peter, as he dodged across the street, his ears battered by the bedlam of the honking cars, yelling pedestrians, and vociferous camels. He climbed the few steps to the stone veranda of the hotel, and walked toward the shaded arch of the door. Then he stopped, and turned his back.

  Standing in the doorway, a saddened look on his face, stood Jim Dutton, talking with a U.N official. Peter side-stepped to shelter himself behind a potted palm, and cautiously peered through the leaves. Were they going or coming? Jim had been to the memorial services at the Embassy, he supposed, and had come here for a bracer before going home. The question was, was he leaving now, or was he just on his way to the bar? Standing in the doorway there, talking, he was as effective a barrier as a whole regiment of soldiers.

  As the time dragged on, Peter glanced for the hundredth time at his watch. No minutes had ever seemed so long to him. If Jim didn’t leave soon, the prospect of a drink would vanish.

  Another few minutes of talk, and Jim Dutton and the U.N. official turned, and entered the hotel. They had been arriving, not leaving.

  With a sigh of resignation, Peter turned and walked down the steps, and crossed to the newsstand.

  No boy. The traffic clattered by. A ragged urchin tugged at his sleeve.

  “Buy a chance on the sweepstakes, mister?”

  “I never take chances,” Peter snapped.

  An old man shuffled up, looked around furtively, and offered from the shadow of his flowing sleeve some “very special” postcards. Peter shook his head.

  A dragoman in pale green silk offered to guide him to the Bazaars, and Peter turned his back. But all three remained, trying to persuade him to change his mind, until he snarled at them with a vicious “Imshi!” and they scattered.

  He had waited nearly half an hour and was glaring at his watch when the dragoman sauntered by again, a smirk on his cynical face.

  “Are you waiting for somebody, sir?”

  “Yes. I’m waiting for the boy that runs this newsstand. I sent him to buy me a copy of yesterday’s paper.”

  “You gave him money?”

  “Certainly.”

  The dragoman pursed his lips. “No need to wait, sir. That boy won’t come back today.” And he strolled on, twirling his bamboo cane.

  He was right. The boy didn’t come back.

  At a quarter past one, Peter hailed a passing taxi.

  “Sharia Kasr el Nil,” he said. “Egyptian Gazette

  Five minutes later he was clattering up the wooden stairs of an old building, and on the second floor he faced a door labeled Egyptian Gazette. The door was closed.

  He knocked, but nothing happened. He rattled the door knob, but the door was firmly locked. No sound came from inside.

  He shouted. “Hello! Anybody here?”

  Presently a bent old man hobbled down the hall, peering at him with half blind eyes.

  “Nobody home,” he said.

  “But I want to get into this office, to see the editor.”

  “Nobody home.”

  “Where are they?”

  The old man broke into a flood of Arabic which left Peter’s head swimming. He cut in to the meaningless volubility.

  “Don’t you speak English?”

  “La! Nobody home.”

  “And I thought everybody in Cairo could speak English! Where’s the editor? Where’s the printers? Where is everybody?”

  The door of the adjoining office opened and an amiable, swarthy face peered out “I’m Italian myself, old boy, but I can speak English. Editor’s gone to Alex for the week-end. The help are all at church.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you realize this is Friday, old boy? All the help are Mohammedans, and this is their holy day. Like Sunday, old boy. Come back tomorrow. Where have you been living? You ought to know you can’t do business on a Friday.” With a beaming smile, he slammed his door.

  “But all I wanted,” Peter shouted desperately, “was to buy a copy of yesterday’s paper!”

  The door swung open, and the affable Italian looked out. “But nobody keeps yesterday’s paper. The day is gone, isn’t it?”

  “Haven’t you got a copy, lying around your office?”

  “Wouldn’t have it cluttering up the place. My servant takes them out and sells them, as soon as I’ve finished.”

  “But where does he sell them?”

  “Not my business. Maybe to dealers in old newsprint. Maybe somewhere else. You’ve heard of the world paper shortage, old boy? Where he sells them? Never asked him.”

  The door slammed shut again, and Peter slouched down the stairs.

  * * * *

  Walking along the street, he was without ideas, without hope, almost without conscious volition. He found himself standing, finally, beside a Bar and Restaurant, and wearily he climbed the stairs to the open-air veranda, where he sank down in a spindly chair at a marble-topped table.

  “Beer, sir?”

  “A dark Tuborg,” he ordered. He wondered if he shouldn’t give up his project and go back to his own time. He was probably dead anyway, he thought hazily, and it was ridiculous to be wearing himself out this way, for a reason which was no longer sensible. It was a good thing he hadn’t let Ruth tie herself down to such an incompetent, muddle-headed, unlucky, accident-prone kind of a man.

  He was startled back to sanity by hearing, from the table behind him, the word “moon.” He switched his chair around to look at the speaker.

  At the table were a boy of about nineteen, and a girl a year or so younger, obviously American, and obviously smitten by each other. The boy was drinking beer while the girl sipped lemonade and nibbled at the salted pistachio nuts in the dish before her. They were holding hands under the table, and exchanging intimate remarks.

  It’s a shame to interrupt them, thought Peter, but if I heard what I thought I heard— He coughed, and the boy looked up.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but you seem to be fellow Americans.”

  “That’s right, we are,” said the boy. “We’re on a tour. We left our ship at Suez, and we’re joining her tomorrow at Alexandria. I know it’s a slow way to travel, but you do get to see things.”

  “Isn’t Egypt wonderful?” said the girl.

  “I’d like to ask you something.” Peter shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Did I hear one of you mention the moon? Were you talking about that ship that got back yesterday?”

  The girl lowered her eyes, and the boy turned red.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But I distinctly heard one of you use the word ‘moon’”

  “That was me,” said the girl, shyly, “but it didn’t have anything to do with that ship. I just told Jerry, here, that I bet he’d even be jealous of the man in the moon. But it was too bad about the men on that ship, wasn’t it?”

  Peter leaned forward. “Yes, indeed. A terrible tragedy. But due to—that is, due to the pressure of events, I haven’t been able to learn quite all the details. Perhaps you can supply them. I understand that two of the crew were killed on the trip. Is that correct?”

  “That’s what we heard on the radio.”

  “Do you remember who they were?”

  The boy frowned. “I remember one name, in a vague way, because a fellow in my class had the same name. Somebody named Danforth, I think.”

  Bill Danforth! Peter sighed. Happy-go-lucky Bill, who was always willing to take his chances.

  But he could not waste time now in grieving.

  “And the name of the other one?”


  “I can’t tell you exactly,” said the girl, with a soft giggle. “Everybody always says I have the weakest memory! But I do remember it was somebody named Peter.”

  “Peter what?”

  “I don’t remember. But I do remember laughing, and mentioning it to Jerry, here, because there were two men on the ship both named Peter, and their last names sounded so much alike, and it seemed so silly, and I remember asking Jerry, here, how their wives ever told them apart. Why, is it important? Does it matter?”

  “No,” said Peter wearily. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, “Nothing at all.”

  He could feel their eyes staring at his back as he left his beer unfinished, and walked down the stairs.

  * * * *

  He stood at the street entrance, in despair. Three hours gone, and nothing accomplished. Could he visit a library? But the Egyptian libraries, even if they carried the English paper, would be closed today, since it was Friday. There was a library at the American Embassy, but he did not dare go there, for he might run into somebody who knew him. Wasn’t there any way in the world an intelligent man could solve such a simple problem as finding a copy of yesterday’s paper—short of waiting until yesterday arrived?

  A brown-faced urchin with a wooden box on his shoulder accosted him. “Shine your shoes, mister?”

  “Shoes don’t matter,” said Peter absently.

  “I give good shoe shine.”

  “Shoes are not important.” On sudden impulse he asked, “You don’t happen to know, I suppose, where I can buy a copy of yesterday’s paper?”

  “Okay, mister,” said the boy.

  His heart pounding with a wild hope, Peter stooped and clutched the boy’s shoulder, “You mean you know where to get one? A copy of yesterday’s paper, mind!”

  The boy looked alarmed, and tried to pull away. “Okay, mister!”

  “Don’t be afraid, just show me where the place is, right away!”

  But the boy pulled away, with dilated eyes, and almost crying, he bleated out, “Okay, mister! I give good shoe shine.”

  Peter let go and the boy raced down the street. Shoulders slumped, Peter walked on slowly. But he had taken only a few steps when a heavy body lurched into him from behind, and he whirled to look into the beaming face and slightly unfocussed eyes of a jovial American sailor.

  “Sorry, buddy,” said the sailor, “but these Egyptian sidewalks ain’t very steady. Pretty uncertain country, this is.”

  “How right you are,” said Peter, and started to walk away. But the sailor looked sympathetic and stopped him with a sunburned hand poked towards his chest.

  “Put’er there, mister. You look like you’d lost your last friend. But I’ll be your friend. What makes you look so down-cast? Did somebody die?”

  “Yes, somebody died,” said Peter.

  “Who died?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying this whole blessed day to get hold of a copy of yesterday’s paper, so I could find out.”

  “Tough luck,” said the sailor. “But I don’t see why you want to read the paper if it prints bad news like that. Why don’t you just ignore the whole thing?”

  He began to laugh, and grabbed Peter’s arm. “Say, that’s good, isn’t it? Just ignore the whole thing! Just like the story my uncle used to tell. You wanna hear this. When my uncle was a boy he lived on a farm, and there was this cat, see—”

  Peter pulled away and walked on rapidly, but when he reached the corner and was looking for a cab, he felt his shoulder grabbed again, and there was the sailor, still laughing.

  “You shouldn’t walk so fast on these unreliable sidewalks,” he said. “It’s hard for me to keep up with you. Well, this story my uncle used to tell, see, when he was a boy he lived on a farm, and they had this cat, and this cat she—”

  “Taxi!”

  A taxi screeched to a stop and Peter jumped in and slammed the door. The sailor peered through the dusty window, a hurt expression on his face.

  “Still worrying about that paper, mister? You’d feel better if you’d let me tell you about my uncle and this cat—”

  The acceleration of the car shook him off, and Peter glanced around to see him still standing there on the corner, looking puzzled and forlorn.

  * * * *

  It was half past two as the taxi bumped back along the Pyramids road. Peter sagged against the lumpy upholstery in utter defeat. The strains and tensions of the last three and a half hours had been so great that he could scarcely remember the original purpose of this wild journey into time. He could hardly have stated why he came, and what he hoped to gain. None of his reasons seemed to make any sense. He was conscious mainly of being unutterably tired, and of being very hungry.

  He could not remember having been so hungry since he was a small boy. How many hours had he been without food, he wondered? A minute? Four hours? Sixteen hours? Or two weeks? But the philosophical complications of travelling into the future were too intricate for his dulled mind, and he thought only, that it would be nice to have a sandwich.

  Ahead of them on the road he saw a neon sign, Pyramids Grill. It was a down-at-the-heels place, which he would never have chosen if he had had more time, but it was bandy.

  “Stop here,” he ordered the driver. “I’m hungry and tired. I’ll just sit here. You go inside and get me a cheese sandwich.”

  In less than five minutes he had a crudely wrapped sandwich in his hand, and was rolling on toward the Pyramids, but by now he lacked the energy even to eat.

  Pulled up once more in front of the Great Pyramid, he paid off his driver, waved away the guides, and trudged on through the sand.

  An Arab came running after him. “Tell your fortune, sir?”

  Peter shook his head, and kept on walking. He’d had enough of trying to look into the future. Up the slopes and onto the firmer stony ground and at last the wonderfully desirable ditch which led down into the stone room where Tempestuous Tessie waited.

  It was five minutes to three when he sank down onto the chair and closed the steel cradle. His uneaten sandwich lying limply in one hand, he leaned back, closed his eyes, and waited for the shift in time.

  * * * *

  When Peter Harrison opened his eyes in his own time segment, it was still eleven o’clock of the night he had left. He re-arranged the apparatus as it should be, plodded through the long tunnel back to the room called Temporal Research. There he pulled up a chair, laid his head on the desk, and slept.

  It was dawn when be awoke. A sudden spasm of fear lest he be found in the laboratory sent him hurrying into the corridor, down the escalator, and out of the building, where he exhibited his identification to the incurious soldier on guard.

  As he walked across the desert toward the line of Institute jeeps, one of which would take him to his room at the Semiramis, he remembered his sandwich.

  He tore off a piece of the paper so he could bite into the exposed corner of the sandwich, but kept the rest in place to protect the bread from his sweaty, dirty hand, and began munching on the bread and cheese, peeling back the wrapping as he ate.

  As he walked, he thought. His trip had accomplished nothing that he had hoped for. He still knew, no more than the rest of the crew, what his individual fate would be. He did know, of course, that the ship would return—but the other men had never doubted it. What were his chances of coming back alive?

  The return of the ship was a hundred per cent certain. And he had added to his knowledge the fact that two of the crew would be killed, and two would survive. He had learned, furthermore, that one Peter had lived, and one Peter had died. But which one? Had that information really helped him any? His individual chances were still exactly what they had been in the first place—fifty-fifty.

  Bill Danforth had always laughed at him for bei
ng a conservative. Ruth had teased him ever since he had known her as being a man who wouldn’t take a chance, a man who had to be sure. But he had always thought of himself just as a sensible man who tried to play safe.

  For the first time in his life, it occurred to him now that there are times when a man is a fool to play safe. While you’re alive, he thought, you have to take chances. Even when you can go into the future, you can’t always find out what the safe thing is to do. He was tired of being cautious. If you were always cautious, look at the fun you’d miss!

  The sun was rising in the east, and the long black shadows of the Pyramids stretched out across the desert sands. Peter straightened his shoulders, and took another bite of his sandwich.

  Well, he thought, I’ve made up my mind. After today, nobody will have any grounds for calling me a coward, or kidding me for betting only on a sure thing.

  He lifted his sandwich. He stared at it in the growing light, and his skin prickled. The paper by which he held the bread was a piece of torn newsprint, with English words on it. He dropped the bread to the ground and stared greedily at the mutilated column of print. Yes, it was a piece of yesterday’s paper, a part of the story about the landing of the Tycho.

  Frantically he read the fragment, searching for names.

  The piece he held said:

  (Cont. from page 1)

  Among the survivors w—

  Col. Carl Johansson, o—

  Hyperphysics Insti—

  and Col, Peter Har—

  distinguished graduat—

  That was all.

  With a yell of rage he dashed the paper to the ground, ripped it to pieces with his boots, and stamped the fragments into the sand.

  Behind him he heard a shrill call, and turned his head briefly to see the distant figure of a white-gowned Arab running after him.

  “Ya Pasha! Ya Pasha he called, waving a long arm.

  Doesn’t Abdou ever sleep? thought Peter angrily. I wish he’d leave me alone.