Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  “Will it take long to fix?”

  “The time machine will be working again by last week,” Uli said, standing up, “if I can get the parts.” He smiled that seldom smile at Rob again. “See, now, who says the Swiss have no sense of humor.”

  It didn’t seem to be a question. “So,” Uli said. “It is as I told you, yes? Bringing things back . . . is usually impossible.”

  Rob looked for somewhere to put the mug. Uli took it from him, and they both noticed the way his hands were shaking. “Yes,” Rob said. “Physical things, anyway.”

  Uli looked at him thoughtfully, and nodded. “Yes. Meantime, the tram back to the Hauptbahnhof will be along in a few minutes. So: are you satisfied?”

  Rob wasn’t sure what to answer. Yet he felt better than he had for a long time before he left: more cheerful—somehow more whole. Why? I didn’t get what I came for.

  But he had gotten something else instead. “Yes,” he said.

  “We will see,” Uli said. “I will bill you for the repair after you return home and have some time to see whether it is complete. Meanwhile, I suggest you contact your staff tonight. Your company is about to announce that they have mislaid you, and if that happens, the stock price will suffer, which will in turn impair both my fee and your ability to pay it.”

  Rob drank the coffee for a few moments, thinking, then stood up. “Why do you need to charge a fee at all?” he said. “With this technology, you could be richer than I am.”

  Uli sniffed, an amused sound. “I do not need the fee,” he said. “But if you did not pay what the trip was worth to you, you would get no result. Now hurry: the tram comes in two minutes.”

  He walked Rob toward the door. One last glance Rob got of the workshop as they left it—a closer look at the unusual clock hanging on the wall near the doorway, the one with the pendulum like a crescent moon. As Rob went by it, he saw he had been wrong about the crescent shape. It was not a moon. It was a scythe, the inner edge glinting with the gray of sharpened steel.

  At the door on the street, Rob paused. “Are you for real?” he said. “Is this place for real? Or will you just vanish when I go?”

  Uli made that amused sniff again. “Without me, there is no reality,” he said. “But meanwhile, one must make a living. You will not need me in this mode again. But if one of your clocks breaks—” He shook Rob’s hand. “Auf wiedersehen.”

  Rob went around the corner to catch the tram.

  Half an hour later he called his office from the Hauptbahnhof, and spent some time sweet-talking Chei into forgiving him. The next morning, the second-string Lear was sitting in a civil-aviation slot at Kloten, and Chei met him at its door with his proper passport and a pile of paperwork. By that evening they were home, back at HQ: and when the ruckus had settled down and everyone left him alone at last, Rob went to the safe to put away his bogus passport.

  The click of the safe’s opening sounded odd, muted. As the door swung open, he saw why.

  It was almost completely full of stacked glassine envelopes.

  His hands trembling, Rob reached in to the top of the left-hand stack and drew the envelope out. Inside it was a dramatic splash of gray and silver against a sky full of clouds and lightning, and a heroic face, smiling, half-hidden under the silver helmet: Captain Thunder, Issue One.

  Rob sat down shakily at his desk, slipped the comic out of the envelope and laid it carefully on the blotter. He read it, cover to cover, as twilight settled down outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The old, old joy came up from the page to meet him, as if it had never been gone.

  But now it had never been gone. . . .

  Trembling, Rob turned the last page over, and the single piece of white notepaper lay revealed between the last page of small ads and the back cover. The printing at the top of the page said WILLINGDEN FEED AND GRAIN: at the bottom, it said Call HArmon 180. And between these, someone had written, Thanks for everything.

  Carefully Rob closed Issue One and pushed it aside. Then he put his head down in his hands and cried for what he’d lost that he’d suddenly got back again—

  —not the comics.

  DOING TIME

  by Robin Wayne Bailey

  Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of a dozen novels, including the Brothers of the Dragon series, Shadowdance, and the new Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser novel Swords Against the Shadowland. His short fiction has appeared in numerous science fiction and fantasy anthologies and magazines, including Guardsmen of Tomorrow, Far Frontiers, and Spell Fantastic. An avid book collector and old-time radio enthusiast, he lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

  My name is Samuel Enderby. I am the Director and Chief Researcher of the Enderby Institute for Temporal Studies. I am a Chrononaut. And I am a murderer.

  I’ll never forget that sun, how I stared in awful horror at it as it floated, red and swollen, on the watery horizon of that too-blue sea—a sea that shouldn’t have been there. The sky was just as strange, an unnatural cobalt color that stabbed my eyes with its wrongness. That weird light affected everything. Even the sandy beach glimmered with an intense, incorrect whiteness.

  The beach. As far as I could see, it was unmarred by driftwood or stone, shell or seaweed, any sign of life. Only the strong, warm wind had left any ripple in the sand, and closer to the water, the straining roll of a weary surf stirred a few loose grains.

  How my fingers trembled and fumbled as I unstrapped myself from my seat and rose to stand. I had been holding my breath unconsciously, but now, half-afraid, I filled my lungs. The air was thin; it tasted of salt, clean, yet strange. I turned slowly, gripping the back of the chair for balance, because—I admit it—my legs felt weak from fear and uncertainty. A stark line of cliffs, a massive escarpment really, seemed to mark the coastal boundary. I scanned the jagged, razor-sharp summits for long moments seeking movement, a tree swaying in the breeze, perhaps, or a bird. Nothing but a devastating stillness. I returned my attention to the beach, running my gaze up and down its length. Then, finally, once more I turned toward the sea.

  No blade of grass, no weed. No bird winging in the sky. And that surf—oh, it moved, but it was the twitch and rattle of a dead thing whose nerves had not yet admitted its own demise.

  I had to tear my gaze from it before despair overcame me. A console of controls made a semicircular arch around my chair, and I tried to still my trembling as I bent over the banks of my newly designed quantum computers and monitors. The displays were still flashing their warnings, but the familiarity of the keyboards under my fingers and the technology in which I felt such pride calmed me. This was only a problem. Problems always had solutions.

  Blinking in that hurtful light, I went to work. It didn’t take long to determine what had happened, although the why proved more elusive. I settled back in my seat to face an inescapable conclusion. I had overshot my mark. A number glared back at me from the primary display, astonishing in its magnitude, judgmentally cold in its significance. No reason to panic, I told myself. Still, I found it hard to swallow, and despite the harsh heat of that giant sun, a chill ran up my spine.

  I stared again at that sun, raising a hand toward it, measuring its painful glow through spread fingers with a squinting gaze.

  I had programmed a jump of one thousand years—four times as far as any of my previous jumps. Perhaps the success of those earlier excursions had gone to my head; no doubt some would find it ironic that, despite my obsession with time, patience had never been one of my virtues. But I saw no reason to yield to the advice of my colleagues and financial backers and proceed at a more cautious pace. In my arrogance, I had expected to find the walls of the Enderby Institute still rising around me, and if not the institute, then surely its successor or some similar agency charged with the continuing advancement of my research. I even dared to imagine a university named after me, maybe even a city rising out of the isolated Nevada desert.

  Those fantasies taunted me now as I continued to stare at the number on the display:

 
; Ten million years.

  Something had gone wrong, and—I couldn’t help it—I shivered. Still, I detached a palm-sized keypad from the console, rose to my feet again, and strode across the smooth metal deck of my time platform. I hesitated for some reason I couldn’t fathom. I’d never considered myself an emotional man, but I felt at the core of my being, not just out of time, but out of place, an alien on my own planet.

  Or whatever was left of my own planet.

  Finally, steeling myself, I stepped down onto the sand. When I’d gone ten paces, I turned and looked back. My footprints seemed like cuts and slashes on a pristine canvas, a violation. And my beautiful platform, a sleek disk of steel and plastic science with its six inwardly curling pylons of probing instrumentality, looked to me now like nothing so much as a dead bug on its back.

  I struggled to dismiss such thoughts and tapped out a code on the keypad, locking the jump-controls. I tapped out a second code. In response, various devices within the pylons went to work analyzing air quality, monitoring radiation levels, meteorological phenomena, and more. My time platform was as sophisticated a planetary probe as any ever launched into space, only the world it was designed to study was the world of the past and the future.

  As my machine got to work, I resolved to do the same. I had my own observations and discoveries to make, my own questions to answer. What had happened to my world, to my Earth?

  Slipping the keypad into a pocket, I headed northward up the beach with my long black shadow at my right side for company. I kept glancing at the sun, watching it sink lower and lower into the sea, knowing that night was coming. Still, I walked. When the stars began to appear one by one, I began to feel an oppressive sadness that deepened with every step. The stars that I had called by name in my own time were unrecognizable to me now, and the constellations I had known since childhood were no more.

  Perhaps it was the heat or the thinness of the air, but I couldn’t think rationally. I strove for a scientist’s detachment, but that eluded me. I felt as if I was in a nightmare. I was thirsty, but had no water. No food, either, though I was not hungry at all. I should have returned to the platform, but the deadness of the darkening landscape had a mesmerizing quality.

  When my legs at last grew tired from trudging through the sand, I stopped to rest. The waves that dappled the sea’s surface were weak, small things. I noted the timid encroachment of the water as the sun went down. What had happened to the tide?

  The answer came shortly when a faint light began to shine in the eastern heavens above the escarpment. My spirits lifted somewhat as I anticipated the moon, the unchanging and familiar moon. I knew that orb well, knew its mares and mountains by name. I knew that cratered face like the face of an old friend, and I desperately longed for a friend now. How could I explain to anyone the loneliness I felt, sure that I was the only human being, indeed, the only living thing, on—even now it is hard to say—a dead Earth.

  I turned my back to the horrid discoloration that marked the sun’s westward setting and sat down in the soft sand to await the rising of the moon.

  Then, though it unmanned me, I began to weep.

  It was not the moon that rose above the cliffs, but a milky ring of shattered fragments and dust. The moon—my moon!—was gone. What remained hung like a stark mockery in the sky. I cried, and wondered if my sanity was slipping away.

  I wanted nothing more than to return to my platform and try to make my way home. Home. That word had never held such power before. I didn’t know what accident or mistake had brought me to this dismal future, but I wanted, needed, to be quit of it, to forget it entirely if I could. Yet, if I didn’t know how I got here, could I get home? In near-darkness, I started back down the beach. I didn’t know how far I’d walked, but it didn’t matter. With the keypad, I could always locate the platform. I put one foot in front of the other, shuffling through my own oncoming footprints without even my shadow for company now.

  In this state of mind I walked for maybe an hour without ever lifting my head. There were wonders to see, had I not been blind to them. That ring that was once the moon had a beauty, as did that soft, quiet sea, and never had a night sky been so resplendently bejeweled. Yet I was filled with grief and mourning for a past and for things I couldn’t even guess at.

  An unexpected rush of wind caused me to stop in midstride, and finally I looked up. The air crackled with energy, and down the beach the night seemed to waver as if with heat-shimmer. Every hair on my body stood suddenly on end, and my heart hammered. I knew this phenomenon! There was no way it could be happening, yet it was!

  When that patch of wavering blackness exploded, I threw up my hands and jerked my gaze away from the impossible spectrum of light that burst forth, and when the light subsided, and I dared to look . . .

  Despite the energy signature, there wasn’t another time platform, after all.

  There was only a man. Whoever he was, he seemed totally disoriented. His bald head rolled back on his shoulders as his knees buckled. Without even putting Up his hands to catch himself, he fell forward on the sand and lay still.

  I ran toward him and threw myself down at his side. He gave a little moan as I touched his arm. Not dead, then! As gently as I could manage, I rolled him over and felt for a pulse at his throat. It was quite strong, suggesting that the cause of his collapse wasn’t life threatening. He moaned again. His eyes fluttered, and he shot out a hand and caught my wrist. “Who—who are you?” His voice was a harsh whisper of fear. The words were English, though I couldn’t place his accent.

  I tried to calm him. “My name is Enderby,” I answered. “Samuel Enderby. Your turn now. Who are you, my friend, and more importantly, how did you get here?”

  He released my wrist and sat up slowly. For the first time, I took note of the nondescript gray coverall he wore and the eight-digit number printed above his left breast pocket. His stubbled face and the inch-long scar at the left corner of his mouth only emphasized a generally rough appearance. “Prisoner 31463577,” he answered automatically as he rubbed a thumb and forefinger over his eyes. Then, he gave me a hard look. “Sanders,” he added sharply. “Name’s Sanders.”

  Prisoner? Surely, I was still having some nightmare.

  “As for how I got here, asshole, same as you, I guess.” He scooped up a handful of sand and tossed it into the air at nothing in particular, then sneered. “Drop-kicked through the goalposts of eternity by the Nevada State Correctional System. The long, long, long walk. Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time.” He looked around as he sagged back on one elbow. “But, man, I never thought it would be like that. I feel like I’ve been turned inside out.” He held up a hand and wiggled his fingers. “Everything’s still tingly.”

  He wasn’t a large man. Rather short, actually, though of stocky build. I suspected the ill-fitting coverall concealed a lot of muscle. I should have left him lying there while he was still weak, but a dreadful curiosity compelled me to stay. Like myself, Sanders was obviously a time-jumper, though maybe not a willing one. And the Nevada connection we shared couldn’t have been coincidence.

  “You got any food or water?” he asked, sitting up again. Then his gaze narrowed, and he pointed. “Say, they let you keep a wristwatch!” He jumped to his feet and kicked a cloud of sand. “Shit, man, they didn’t let me keep anything! They took everything away but this rag I’m wearing before they launched my ass!”

  The numbing effects of his journey had clearly worn off. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask: what year he came from, how he got here without a platform, why he’d been sentenced to this extreme form of banishment. So many more! I did no more than glance at the wristwatch that had sparked his agitation as I rose to my feet.

  And Sanders jumped me. His fist hammered my jaw, and I hit the sand hard. When I struggled to get up, he slammed a foot into my ribs. He straddled me then, pummeled me with three hard punches, maybe more, and I blacked out.

  I awoke with sand in my mouth and pain in
every part of my body. My watch was gone, of course, and so was Sanders. I rose unsteadily to my feet and trudged down to the sea to wash my face. The water was cool and cleansing. But suddenly, I straightened. My watch wasn’t the only thing missing. I patted my pockets frantically.

  The keypad!

  Half running, half-stumbling, ignoring the growing heat and the strangely bright light of the rising sun, I made my way down the beach. Two sets of footprints guided me now, my own and Sanders’. I cursed and prayed at the same time.

  Only a circular depression in the sand marked the place where my time platform had rested. Sanders’ footprints trailed straight by the spot and continued southward. I doubted if he’d even seen the machine. I’d programmed a safety feature into my platform, and if any commands or numbers were punched into the keypad that were not predetermined codes known only to me, the machine jumped three seconds into the future and remained there until recalled by the correct sequence.

  It was easy to imagine that a man like Sanders, having stolen the keypad from my pocket, had punched any number of keys in a vain effort to determine its purpose. And unable to understand its functions, he had nevertheless kept it.

  I had no choice but to follow him. I cursed myself again. I was a scientist, not an adventurer. How ill-prepared I was for this accidental expedition. No food, no water—and I was horribly thirsty—but worse yet, I was weaponless.

  Sanders proved a cunning rat, and like all rats, he had a sixth sense about traps and mazes. His footprints turned suddenly inward away from the sea and toward the escarpment. He’d found something that had eluded me—a way off the beach and up to the summit. It was a fissure, a split in the rock itself that angled steeply up behind the facade just wide enough for a bold man to climb. In different light it would have been practically invisible. As it was, the way was full of shadows, and the surprising smoothness of the stone promised treacherous footing. Nevertheless, I attacked the climb with a vengeful determination.