The Third Time Travel Page 10

  “Who are you?” I ask him.

  “I’m Detective Yager,” he says. “One of Inspector Keeler’s assistants. Who are you?”

  “I’m Inspector Keeler,” I tell him, “and I don’t need your assistance!”

  He stares at me deadpan for about two minutes, then gets on the desk video.

  “Harrigan!” he snaps. “There’s an old crank in here claims he’s Inspector Keeler. Come over and throw him out for me, will you?”

  For a few seconds, I can’t even talk. Then I realize my jaw is hanging. I pick it up and head for my own door, figuring to get on my own video and get to the bottom of this. Yager jumps and manages to get himself between me and the doorknob. I shove him while he’s off balance, and he takes a dive into the files. As he’s growling and floundering around, I get the door open. I wish now I never did.

  There’s this guy behind the desk, see?

  I recognize the face right away, but it takes a little while to place it. I’m running my mind through the rogues’ gallery—that’s natural, ain’t it? He just sits there, staring at me…I don’t know…half-ashamed, and yet like he’s sorry for me. Then, all of a sudden, I know!

  He’s wearing the face I see every day in the mirror, except a little older and thinner. He’s me!

  “Catch him, Yager!” I hear him saying, like a playback of my own voice.

  I realize stoneface is holding me up from behind with his big paws under my armpits, so I get my feet under me.

  “All right,” says the fellow behind the desk. “Feeling steadier now, Jack?”

  That’s the last straw, and now I know for sure he’s really me and not just a well-coached look-alike. Everybody nowadays calls me Johnny but when I was a kid it used to be “Jack,” and most of the time I think of myself or talk to myself as Jack. I take a good look.

  He isn’t exactly me, of course. He looks kind of seedy and run down, even in his new suit. I tell you, he had that hungry, beat-down air of a guy that’s been on the skids…oh, maybe ten years or so. He’s me-plus-ten-years, which makes him a little different, just like a kitten and the old, ear-chewed tom he gets to be in ten years are the same animal but not…not equal.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” he says. “This is just the way it’s going to be. You’ll get over it. I can promise you for sure that you get over it.”

  I look at him, and I don’t like what I see. Either he reads my face or he…remembers how it is, because he stares down at his desk…my desk.

  “I’ll have to ask you to leave town by midnight,” he says.

  I can’t think of a single thing to say. Yager, I guess, must have grabbed my badge and shoved me out of the office, because pretty soon I find myself creeping down the front steps.

  Out there in the sunlight, I begin to think I dreamed it. I turn around to stomp right into the commissioner’s office if I have to and yowl out loud.

  Well, I ask you! Do you think I could get in to see anybody? Not a one!

  All the guys I knew seem to be someplace else. I try video calling from the lobby, but I kept getting those simple-minded police answerbots they use to deal with cranks. I tried calling Pat Driscoll and Tony Martini and asked for Reilly. The old runaround every time! They didn’t know who I was talking about!

  Finally, I go down to the corner videonews booth, shove a buck in the slot, and check the latest. It’s the same as at breakfast time. Big shake-up, but Inspector Keeler is still in his job.

  First, I think I’ll at least go look around some of the beats the guys I know are supposed to be pounding again. The next thing, I find out they run the taxi that drifts up so handy. I wind up at my own apartment. The driver hands me a note.

  It’s from Qualu. I have it right here…look!

  “Dear Inspector,” he says. “As you probably know by now, I spoke accurately in saying there was no objection to your being transmitted through time. I feel I owe you the explanation, in fact, that Mr. Balton arranged at considerable expense to bring you back from 2012, since I was forced to deny his request to send you forward to that year.

  “Such an action, I pointed out, would scramble things horribly, since records show an Inspector Keeler present at your detective bureau throughout those years. There is no contemporary method of substitution that would account for fingerprints and other details. Mr. Balton therefore agreed to my alternative suggestion.

  “I imagine I need not remind you of our skill at controlling the movements of those under our observation. Since we will be with you—or right behind you—for some years, I advise you to accustom yourself to us. Anytime you care to match Mr. Balton’s fee, our services will, of course, be at your disposal.”

  What a laugh! He knows I won’t ever be able to match Balton. I don’t even know how I’m going to eat for the next ten years. Money in the bank? Me-plus-ten has that. They’d put me in for forgery if I tried to write a check. Unemployment insurance? Inspector John Keeler is employed! References? You tell me!

  I’m lucky to have money in my pocket to pay for that last piece of pie, now that I finally convinced those guys I got a right to eat before taking the train.

  Yeah, I said “guys.” Every time today I think I’m slipping out a back way, they wind up herding me home. Very smooth—just a bunch of friends seeing a pal back from the tavern.

  Worst of it all is that it’ll work for them.

  Yeah, they’ve even got me believing it now. It’s going to work, all right. That’s what me-plus-ten meant in the office this morning when he said he was sure how it’d be. I can see how it is with him, poor guy. Ten years on the skids, and I’ll be ready to fill any job they like and do whatever they want. What a racket for Balton then!

  And I can’t really kick!

  They’re not taking my job away; they’re making sure I stay in it.

  And how many fellows my age can bet—as an absolutely sure thing, mind you!—that they’ll be alive and…well, alive ten years from now? I got a guarantee!

  I don’t know why they take a chance on letting me tell even you about it. Maybe they think I don’t know enough to make anybody believe me. I guess I don’t. All I know is I’ll be back this morning ten years older. Maybe then I can tell you the rest of it.

  I’ll try, anyhow, if they let me keep coming to your place to eat.

  What’s that? Jimmy, how the hell do you know if it might be arranged?

  Jimmy…? Not you, too!

  THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: 42, by Grendel Briarton

  Taken from The Collected Feghoot (1992)

  It was Ferdinand Feghoot who, in 3234-zz-1877, saved the Native American from cultural extinction. The learned Texarkana Uetbacq, Doctorette of Trans-temporal Sociology and Chairman of the Society for the Aesthetic Rearrangement of History, had decided that they must be totally integrated with the 19th Century post-Potato-Famine immigrant Irish. “They are culturally sterile,” she flatly declared. “No Native American ever invented anything.”

  At once, Feghoot challenged her to go back to 1877, and at once she accepted. On the Sioux Reservation, he escorted her to the teepee of the great Sitting Bull, who sat with vast dignity behind a fire of buffalo chips. His coup-sticks—bearing his scalps and other trophies of war—were fastened to a skin stretched overhead, something never previously seen.

  “Ugh!” he announced. “Squaw look. Me great strategist. Me fix damfool Custer heap good. Huh—also fix Seventh Cavalry.”

  His visitor merely bristled.

  “Ugh!” the old warrior went on, winking at Feghoot. “Also me great inventor. Me make heap good gadget first time.”

  “Rubbish!” sneered Miss Uetbacq. “You’ll have to show me!”

  “Ugh!” said Ferdinand Feghoot, pointing up at the trophies. “A coup-stickal ceiling.”

  With thanks to Joe Olson

  NEVER GO BACK, by Charles V. de Vet

  Originally appeared in Amazing Stories, August 1953.

  Success! He had returned! But as he stood wit
h the warm rain splashing against his shoulders and running sluggishly down his naked body, the feeling of triumph he should have felt was dulled and numbed by a presentiment of disaster. Unease, tinged with a sense of horror, centered at the pit of his stomach like a lead weight. An aura of sourceless despair seemed to surround him. He felt it reach for him.

  There was just enough light to make out, vaguely, the features of the old deserted house in front of him.

  He must not be found here without clothes, he thought, as he walked around the wing of the house. His legs felt heavy and he had to lift them with an obvious effort. It was as though the night air had become viscous and clung to his legs.

  The second window was unlatched, as he had expected. He raised it and crawled through.

  Groping carefully in the dark, dim mists of memory returned as he felt remembered pieces of furniture scattered about the room. In the downstairs bedroom he found the old iron bed still standing in its corner. Ripping a tattered curtain from one of the windows, he wiped himself dry.

  He lay on the bed and curled up to sleep. The summer night was warm and the old house still held its trapped heat. He’d need no blankets.

  This was the same bed his grandfather had died in months before, but it gave him no feeling of unrest to sleep here. He had always liked his grandfather, and the liking had been returned.

  The bed had a faint odor of mold and mustiness.

  * * * *

  Sometime toward morning Meissner awoke. Coolness had crept into the house and he was too uncomfortable to go back to sleep. Through the window at his head he saw the first light of breaking dawn.

  He rose and rubbed his body vigorously to bring warmth back into the flesh. Then he left the bedroom, went through the dining room, and up the stairway to the second floor.

  In one of the clothes-closets off the hall he found a shirt, a pair of trousers—slightly too large for him—and shoes. There were no stockings but the pants came down low on his legs and probably no one would notice. In one of the trouser pockets he found a half-dollar. This was an unexpected bit of luck and, for a moment, it lifted the black depression that still rode his spirits like a cloak.

  When his grandfather had died, Meissner remembered, the house had been left pretty much as it was for almost a year. Now and then some one of his children—all of them married—would drop in and pick up something he wanted. But it was a year before the house was completely cleaned out and sold.

  Meissner waited until broad daylight before venturing outside. He had not walked far before he recognized two men coming toward him.

  “Good morning, Mr. van Nemortal. And Mr. Plucker,” Meissner said, as they met.

  The men looked at him in surprise and grunted noncommittal replies. This would never do, Meissner reflected. Too much familiarity with his surroundings could easily lead to trouble. He must keep his identity secret at all costs.

  At the Busy Bee Meissner had wheat cakes and coffee. He took his time eating them, waiting for the business district of the small town to come to life. In the meantime he glanced at the calendar and verified the date. July 8, 1933. Becker had done a good job in figuring when he would appear again in his trip into the past. He should be in time to save Norbert Kerl’s life.

  At a quarter to nine he left the Busy Bee and walked over to the school grounds. And now the first excitement of expectation ran through him like a live current—but mingled with it was the ever present dread. He wished he could put his finger on the reason for that dread.

  In a few minutes he should be able to see himself as he had been twenty years earlier. What would his sensations be as he watched himself playing in the school yard?

  Most of the children were already out on the grounds, playing a game called pump-pump-pull-away. He had almost forgotten that game, but it had been very popular in his youth.

  For five minutes Meissner watched, but saw no signs of his former self. However, he recognized one of the smaller boys as Norbert Kerl.

  Primarily, he had come back out of scientific curiosity, to see if the medium he and Becker had devised would work. However, in picking a date he had decided on July 8, 1933. That was the date young Kerl had drowned in the old stone pit. And, incidental as it was to the main purpose of his journey, Meissner wanted to prevent that tragedy, if at all possible.

  He did not know how long it would be before he snapped back into the future. Perhaps he would not have time to prevent Kerl from going to the swimming hole, so he decided to scare him away somehow. He walked nearer to where the boys were playing. “Norbert,” he called, “will you come here a minute?”

  “Yeah?” Kerl asked as he ran over.

  “How’s the water in the old swimming hole?” Meissner asked.

  “Pretty good,” Kerl answered, looking at him questioningly.

  “I was over there the other day,” Meissner said. “And I saw a mother copperhead with fourteen young ones swimming around. That’s going to be a dangerous place to swim for awhile.”

  “Copperheads?” Kerl asked. “They’re poison, ain’t they?”

  “A bite from one of them will kill you in ten minutes,” Meissner told him. “I wouldn’t go near there for a long time if I were you.”

  “I won’t,” Kerl said. “Thanks.” He shifted his feet uncomfortably. “I got to go back and play now.”

  “Just a minute,” Meissner said, before Kerl could leave. “Where is little Art Meissner now? I don’t see him playing.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Oh, sure you do,” Meissner said. “He’s about your size. Dark hair. You play with him a lot.”

  “There ain’t no kid here by that name,” Kerl answered. He ran back to the other children.

  No kid here by that name! The dreariness that had been gnawing at Meissner’s vitals became a cry of agony. He remembered the school, and the children—though he had forgotten most of their names—and everything he saw around him. He, in his youth, had to be there somewhere. He decided to take the risk of talking to his old teacher.

  “Miss Gallagher,” Meissner said, “I’m looking for a boy by the name of Arthur Meissner. I understand he’s in your class.”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Miss Gallagher replied. “There’s no boy by that name in school. There is a George Meissner in the eighth grade; but he has no brothers.”

  George Meissner was his older brother. The feeling was worse now. She had said that George had no brothers. That wasn’t possible.

  “Well, thank—” the words caught in Meissner’s throat and he turned and stumbled blindly out of the room.

  Something was wrong here—terribly wrong. But he had to be absolutely certain that he was making no mistake. He started determinedly down the street.

  At the end of three blocks Meissner came to the large, square house where he had lived as a boy. His mother should be home now.

  It wouldn’t do to blurt out that he had come from the future and that he was her son, he decided. Especially now that there was a mystery here that he must clear up. He’d have to think up some plausible story to use while he talked to her. He rang the bell.

  “Yes?” The woman who answered was younger than Meissner had remembered. She was younger than he. Yet, she was unmistakably his mother. Her face and figure already bore the signs of hard work’s molding. She had always worked hard, he remembered.

  “I’m Mr. Anderson,” Meissner said. “I’ve been hired by the board of education to conduct a survey of parents with children in school. You have two, have you not, Mrs. Meissner?”

  “I have only one child,” the woman said, drying her hands on the dish towel she carried. “His name is George, and he’s in the eighth grade.”

  The crying inside became worse and Meissner could no longer hold it inside. “Mother,” he cried, “don’t you recognize me? I’m your son!”

  The woman looked alarmed, and instantly Meissner realized how grave a misstep he had made. Here he was, a man older than she, claiming to be her
son. “I’m afraid I can’t talk any longer,” the woman said. She was clearly frightened now.

  “Please, just one more question,” Meissner begged. “You’re positive that you do not have a son by the name of Arthur?”

  “Yes,” she said and closed the door quickly.

  * * * *

  Meissner spent the afternoon at the old swimming hole. He did not think it wise to remain around town. Probably by now his mother had spread an alarm about a strange-acting man. The townspeople would undoubtedly think him insane. Perhaps they would even arrest him. Further, he wanted to be certain that young Kerl did not visit the swimming hole that day. As he remembered, Kerl had drowned at about four-thirty in the afternoon.

  The day was warm and Meissner lay in the cool shade of a willow tree. Overhead a bird chirped cheerfully, and Meissner knew that ordinarily he should have felt peaceful and relaxed on a day like this. But his nerves were taut as stretched wires, and his emotions were those of a man sentenced to die. All day long a dog howled dismally off in the distance.

  When dusk came Meissner knew that at least he had managed to prevent Kerl’s drowning—on that day anyway. He started back for his grandfather’s house.

  Becker had estimated that Meissner would spend about twenty-four hours in past time before he snapped back into the future. His analogy had been that it would be like a rubber band, snapping twenty years into the past, where it would pause—for the time he would be able to spend there—before it began its return journey. Becker had not been able to estimate it exactly.

  Meissner opened the door of his grandfather’s house and felt himself snatched as in a giant hand and whisked out of time and space.

  * * * *

  When Meissner returned he found himself standing in the dim light of nearly dawn. But where was Becker, he wondered. Becker was supposed to be waiting for him. And when he was not able to be here, he was to have left a change of clothing for Meissner. There was none to be seen.

  Becker had not been able to estimate the exact time he would return. He had only been able to conclude that it would be a bit beyond the time Meissner had started. His rubber band would snap him back and its momentum would carry him a bit beyond his original starting point. Probably about a week into the future. That would give Becker plenty of time to make arrangements for his return. But there was no one here.