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

  “You dropped a piece of paper!” called Abdou. “Here is the piece you dropped!”

  Peter stopped dead. That corner of paper he had torn off, when he took his first bite of the sandwich! That must be the missing fragment which held the final letters of the incomplete name.

  Did the black type read “rison?” Or “riman?”

  Then he shrugged his shoulders. What does it matter? he muttered to himself. Only a fool demands certainty in this world. And even if he read the paper, the chances would still be fifty-fifty that the editor had gotten the names twisted, just as everybody else did. Even if it read “rison” he couldn’t be sure that was right!

  He turned his back on Abdou, and strode on toward the waiting jeep.

  He crawled into the seat, woke the sleepy driver, and in a voice of authority gave his order.

  “Take me to the American Embassy.”

  The driver stretched, and tried to smooth his rumpled hair. He yawned.

  “But they won’t be awake at the Embassy yet, sir. It isn’t six, yet.”

  “Never mind that,” said Peter, “Take me to the Embassy. I’m going to make arrangements for a wedding!”

  A MATTER OF TIME, by Robert Reginald

  It was 3:15 on a Sunday afternoon when Jake Smith decided that his neighbor had finally gone over the edge and he would have to do something about it. The Rams had just scored the go-ahead touchdown with three minutes to play, and San Francisco was driving to the forty, when there was a sputtering “ka-ka-pftt” next door, and the set went dead.

  “That’s it!” Jake yelled, “that’s the last time I put up with this.”

  “Put up with what, dear?” said Martha, his occasionally loving wife.

  Smith banged out the back door, maiming the dog in the process. “Aubrey,” he shouted, “just what the hell are you doing over there?” He peered over the falling-down slat fence that divided their properties.

  Stratton Bundford Aubrey, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Santo Verdugo, grinned happily from a seared patch of his nearly non-existent lawn. “I did it,” he chirped.

  “Did what?” said Jake.

  “I traveled through time,” Aubrey said. “You see, it’s merely a proper application of a force sideways against the space-time continuum.…”

  Jake tried to humor his obviously demented neighbor. “Just how far did you go?” he asked.

  “About ten seconds,” Aubrey said. “Didn’t have very much power, and.…”

  “What?” Jake said. “You blew a transformer just so you could travel a few seconds into the past?”

  “The past?” said Aubrey. “Oh, no, the past is much easier. It’s the future that takes so much energy, because.…”

  Jake climbed over the fence. “Just a minute,” he said, “D’you mean this thing”—he pointed at a spindly contraption full of poles stuck in at all the wrong angles—“You mean this piece of junk can actually send somebody into the past?”

  “Why, yes,” Aubrey said, “or some thing—of the proper size and weight, of course. For example, if I put this rock just so”—Aubrey picked up a stone the size of his hand, and placed it into the machine—“and make the proper adjustments”—he fiddled with the controls—“and type in the proper instructions, then…”—there was another pfft—“Voilà!”—and the rock abruptly disappeared.

  “Where’d it go?” asked Jake.

  “Oh, about forty years back, I should think,” the physicist said, “somewhere in the middle of the South Pacific. We don’t want to change history, now, do we?” Aubrey grinned.

  “Saaayyy,” said Jake, suddenly standing up very straight, “Just how far back could a guy go?”

  “Well,” the doctor said, “there are only three variables: mass, distance, and time.”

  “Time?” asked Jake.

  “Yes, time,” Aubrey said. “You see, everything you send into the past eventually returns to the present, unless you exert a constant force to keep it there. Like that rock…”—there was a pop and an audible thump, and they both turned around to see a small stone draped with seaweed sitting in the middle of the lawn. “Well, sometimes they don’t come back exactly on target.” He chortled.

  “I’ll be…” Jake said, and he grinned. “You know, Doc,” he added, “I’ve been tracing my family tree, and I’ve reached this dead end, because Smith is such a common name, and I’d really like to volunteer to make the first manned expedition into the past.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Aubrey, “Insurance could be difficult.…”

  “Hey, no problem, I’ll sign a waiver,” Jake said. “Besides, I just need a couple of minutes to ask my ancestor where he came from.”

  It took Smith another five minutes of pleading and threats (during which the Forty-Niners scored, sending the game into overtime), but he finally convinced the good doctor that the experiment was beneficial for science in general, and for the reputation of Dr. Stratton Aubrey in particular. He raced home and grabbed a canteen, hunting knife, and knapsack, then quickly returned. “Everything ready?” Jake asked.

  Aubrey looked at his instruments. “Well, I think so. Taking into account your weight, available power, and the year you want to reach—1760—I can send you back for no more than five or ten minutes. After that, you’ll automatically return. OK?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jake said.

  “Everything’s ready,” said the physicist, “all you have to do is sit here.”

  Jake got in, fastened the seatbelt, and looked around nervously. “You sure this won’t hurt?”

  “Well, I guess we’ll soon see, won’t we?” The scientist smiled, and as Jake started to protest, Dr. Aubrey pressed ENTER on his terminal.

  The world went black and red and green all over, and then Jake Smith was sitting in the middle of a cow pie in a pasture in eighteenth-century Virginia.

  “My God, it worked!” he said, and quickly looked around. Fifty feet away an old man was plowing the field, plodding along behind a decrepit horse. Jake picked himself up, brushed away the good Southern sod, and hurried on over. “Six minutes,” he muttered to himself, checking his watch.

  “’Scuse me,” he shouted, “Excuse me!” The farmer stopped his horse, gaping at this strangely dressed man from the future. “I’m looking for Meredith Smith,” Jake said.

  “Ay?” the old coot said.

  “Are you Meredith Smith?”

  “Well, there’s them that calls me that,” old Smith said. “Some of them calls me other things too.” He wheezed a few times before Jake realized he was laughing at his own joke. “Who’re you?” he asked.

  “I’m, um, Jacob Smith,” Jake said. “Your, ah, your cousin.”

  Old Merry Smith looked his “cousin” up and down very carefully with his watery blue eyes. “Well, ya must be from Willyburg in the East, cuz I ain’t never seen anything like you ’round here before, cuzz. And these here duds are pretty fancy things for my kinfolk.” He grabbed Jake’s shirt with his grimy fingers, leaving smudges everywhere he touched. “What kinda cloth is this, anyhow?” he asked. “And who dya say your pappy was?”

  “I didn’t,” Jake said, backing off. “Look, Mr. Smith, cousin, I’m in kind of a hurry now, so I’d really appreciate it if you answer a few of my questions.” Five minutes were left on his watch.

  “Well, son, things move kinda slow in these here parts,” said Meredith Smith, “And me and the missus are pretty much all alone now, ’cept for old Lightning here, and Buster our yaller dawg.” He whistled, and started wheezing again when the mangy old mutt came ambling over. “But the young’uns, they’re all livin’ over in Stafford now, near the city, and they hardly ever come back to see us folk no how.…”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s great,” Jake said. He was beside himself as h
e watched the seconds ticking away. “Look, all I really want to know is where you’re from.”

  The old man shook his head in disbelief. “Gad, boy, where ya been livin’? We’re all loyal servants of his Majesty King George here. You ain’t one o’ dem Jacobites, is you?” He looked at Jake rather closely, then wheezed a third time. “Or some kind of Papist maybe? Or one of them Dissenters?”

  Jake threw up his hands in disgust. “No, no, no, of course not!” he said. “Uh, what I mean is”—there were only four minutes left—“just precisely where were you born?”

  Old Meredith Smith scratched the stubble on his chin, and popped a wad of vile-smelling tobacco into his mouth, exposing the half-dozen rotted teeth still dotting the front of his face. A stream of the brown crud oozed through one of the gaps and rolled down his chin. He looked at his visitor in disbelief. “Why, that’s easy, son,” he said, “I was a-borned in bed!”

  “No,” Jake said, “I mean, I mean,” trying to control himself, “where exactly?”

  The farmer scratched his head and looked puzzled at such an obvious question. “Well, I don’t rightly know,” he said. “I think it was in my pappy’s house. I was kinda young then, ya know.” There was another round of wheezing and a long blattt accompanied by a foul odor.

  Jake waved his hands up and down to clear the air. “Uh, in what state,” he said, “no, what area, what, uh, province…?” He fumbled for the right words and looked frantically at his watch: three minutes left.

  The old coot noticed the device for the first time. “Hey, what’s that shiny thing that you keep lookin’ at on your wrist, mister? You ain’t in league with the Devil, is you?” He started to edge away.

  This was not going at all well. This was not what he had planned. Jake tried to calm himself, taking several deep breaths. “No,” he said, “I am not a devil worshipper. I’m your cousin. Really. And all I want, sir, is the answer to a few simple questions. I’d just like to know where you’re from.”

  Meredith Smith wiped the back of his hand across his chin, and then swabbed that mess all over his coveralls. “Well, son,” he said, “you certainly know how to rile a man up. What’s yer hurry, anyways? Why don’t you come on down to the house, and the missus will run you a cup of ale to wash away that dust, and we can talk about it a piece.” He looked around. “Why, it’s just too danged hot out here in the sun to get upset about much.” He brushed away a blanket of flies.

  “I don’t have time,” Jake Smith shouted, “I only have two minutes left.”

  “Left for what?” old Smith asked.

  Jake wanted to strangle his great-great-whatever-grandfather. “Tell me. Please! Please tell me! Who were your aunts and uncles?”

  Meredith shook his head. “Why, I never knew any of them, son. Not even sure I had any. We left home when I was just a wee lad, and my pappy, he just never talked much about any of them.”

  “Where was home?” Jake asked, with only a minute now left in his two-century voyage.

  The farmer started laughing and slapped his knee, raising a dust cloud that drifted Jake’s way. “Why, the old country, of course,” he said, “where dya think it was? Penn-silly-vaniya?” There wasn’t all that much entertainment out here in the sticks.

  “Ahhh, ahhh”—only thirty seconds left—“just answer me this,” Jake said, “Just, just this one thing. You tell me this and I promise you, I promise I’ll never, ever bother you again.”

  Old Smith grinned. “Well, don’t be a-countin’ the daisies, son, what is it?” He spat a wad of slightly-used tobacco on some incipient shoots nearby.

  “What was your father’s name?” Jake asked.

  The sky started to fade around him, but he heard Meredith Smith’s faint (but crystal clear) reply just before he transported. “Why, Mr. Smith, of course!”

  The Rams lost that day.

  THE MAN WHO SAW THROUGH TIME, by Leonard Raphael

  “It will be soon,” Walter Yale told himself for the fiftieth time. “It must be soon now.”

  He was very tired. His eyelids were as swollen as Hitler’s chest, and his head felt like London after an all-night bombing. But he gritted his teeth and kept staring out of the window, looking at the place where Gary Fraxer should soon appear.

  For months the two had been working out on the desert, sleeping all day when the sun shone brightest and working hard all through the cool nights. They used an old shack for their laboratory.

  The little wooden building was the only structure in sight on the broad expanse of desert.

  That was one of the reasons they had chosen this spot. They had wanted a place where no one would disturb them. So they had come out here and pretended to be doing astronomical observation. Actually, they were perfecting a time machine.

  It had been Fraxer’s idea originally.

  “You see,” he had said, “all we need is a machine which can travel in the fourth dimension; a machine that will take a person through time. According to Einstein, time travels in a curved line. This machine would not only move ahead, but would take a short-cut from one point in the line, the present, to another, the future.”

  They had slaved over the machine until they were exhausted, but neither of them had any intention of giving up. And then, one night when they were both bleary-eyed from loss of sleep and overwork, the machine had been completed.

  * * * *

  It was a complicated mass of machinery which would have bewildered anyone but its creators. To them, however, each lever, each nut and bolt was familiar. They looked at it for a little while, hardly believing it was done at last.

  Walter Yale put into words the thought that was in both their minds.

  “Who tries it?” he questioned hoarsely.

  Gary Fraxer passed a nervous hand over the heavy stubble on his chin.

  “I guess it’s all mine,” he said. “Guess again. You’re thinking that this experiment with time is too dangerous, and you don’t want me to risk my life. No, you’ve done enough already. This time I’m going to take the chance.”

  “I should be the one,” protested Fraxer. “After all you wouldn’t be much use to Carol Lewis if you were stranded somewhere in the future.”

  “Quit kidding. We both love Carol, and she cares for you as much as for me. She’d be just as sorry if you were lost. We can’t tell who she’ll finally choose for a husband, so that’s no reason for your going.”

  “Well,” said Fraxer, “you can’t blame a guy for trying. What about flipping a coin?”

  “You’re too lucky at that. I’ve got a better idea.”

  He pointed to a cockroach crawling along a crack in the table.

  “If the cockroach crawls toward you, you go. If it comes to me, I go.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The two men bent over the table, watching the insect intently. The insect paused; then, attracted by a stray crumb of bread, crawled slowly toward Fraxer.

  Fraxer smiled.

  “Looks like my luck holds out even in this.”

  The two men wheeled the machine outside, and Fraxer climbed up into the seat. He put his hand on the lever. “Well, here I go.”

  He pulled back sharply. There was a sudden buzzing and whirling of wheels, and then the machine was gone.

  * * * *

  Now Yale was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting. Fraxer had been gone over twelve hours. Despite his resolve to keep awake, Yale started to nod sleepily.

  He was half-asleep when the door suddenly banged open. Yale started, instantly wide awake, as Gary Fraxer came walking in.

  “What happened?” burst out Yale. “What did you find? Is the machine all right?”

  “I found plenty. As for the machine, that’s resting about a thousand years in the future. I fixed that as soon as I got back.” There
was a strained, half-hysterical note in Fraxer’s voice.

  Yale jumped up from the little cot.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Keep back.”

  A gun sprang from Fraxer’s holster like a live thing. Yale looked at his partner in amazement:

  “Have you gone completely out of your mind?”

  At that moment Fraxer did look like a madman. His face was twisted into a mask of hate, the eyes shining like cold bits of glass, the mouth a mere slash of red.

  “No, I’m not insane. But I’d be crazy to pass up an opportunity like this. You’re the only man in the world who stands between Carol Lewis and myself.”

  “What’s she got to do with this?”

  “Quite a bit in an indirect way. Except for the fact that you’re still alive, she’d marry me. So you’re not going to go on living. I’ll fix that.”

  Walter Yale stared unbelievingly at the man with the leveled gun. It took him a little while to realize that Gary Fraxer, the man he had trusted above all others, was going to kill him. This wasn’t really happening, he tried to tell himself, it was a dream, a nightmare.

  But you couldn’t fit that steady gun or that white, set face into a dream.

  “It’s that damned time machine,” said Yale. “Traveling in it must have affected your mind.”

  At the mention of the time machine, the gun in Fraxer’s hand wavered ever so slightly. Walter Yale’s hand moved a little closer to the drawer of the table.

  “Hold it,” said Fraxer, and his voice was cold, hard. He reached over, opened the drawer, and laid the revolver in it on the top of the table.

  “You’ll be put on trial for murder,” said Yale, staring at it, “and probably be convicted. Even if they don’t find you guilty, Carol would never marry a man suspected of killing me.”

  “No one will suspect anything,” said Fraxer confidently. “Two graduate students who are very close friends go out into the desert to do some research work in astronomy. One of them—you, Walter—happens to wander off and is lost forever. Too bad, but other men have died in the desert. There will be no trial. People will sympathize with me because I have lost a friend, not condemn me for killing him.”