Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1 Read online

“Well?”

  The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue.

  “My valley was perhaps five miles around. The mouth was closed. There was no way to get out. A timid beast was that bull mammoth, and I had him at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered like a fiend, pelted him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley three times before I knocked off for supper. Don’t you see? A race-course! A man and a mammoth! A hippodrome, with sun, moon, and stars to referee!

  “It took me two months to do it, but I did it. And that’s no beaver dream. Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the inner circle, eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks of sleep between. Of course, he’d get desperate at times and turn. Then I’d head for soft ground where the creek spread out, and lay anathema upon him and his ancestry, and dare him to come on. But he was too wise to bog in a mud puddle. Once he pinned me in against the walls, and I crawled back into a deep crevice and waited. Whenever he felt for me with his trunk, I’d belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking fit to split my ear drums, he was that mad. He knew he had me and didn’t have me, and it near drove him wild. But he was no man’s fool. He knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he made up his mind to keep me there. And he was dead right, only he hadn’t figured on the commissary. There was neither grub nor water around that spot, so on the face of it he couldn’t keep up the siege. He’d stand before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and flapping mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears. Then the thirst would come on him and he’d ramp round and roar till the earth shook, calling me every name he could lay tongue to. This was to frighten me, of course; and when he thought I was sufficiently impressed, he’d back away softly and try to make a sneak for the creek. Sometimes I’d let him get almost there—only a couple of hundred yards away it was—when out I’d pop and back he’d come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was. After I’d done this a few times, and he’d figured it out, he changed his tactics. Grasped the time element, you see. Without a word of warning, away he’d go, tearing for the water like mad, scheming to get there and back before I ran away. Finally, after cursing me most horribly, he raised the siege and deliberately stalked off to the water-hole.

  “That was the only time he penned me,—three days of it,—but after that the hippodrome never stopped. Round, and round, and round, like a six days’ go-as-I-please, for he never pleased. My clothes went to rags and tatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at last I ran naked as a son of earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe in one hand and a cobble in the other. In fact, I never stopped, save for peeps of sleep in the crannies and ledges of the cliffs. As for the bull, he got perceptibly thinner and thinner—must have lost several tons at least—and as nervous as a schoolmarm on the wrong side of matrimony. When I’d come up with him and yell, or lain him with a rock at long range, he’d jump like a skittish colt and tremble all over. Then he’d pull out on the run, tail and trunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing, and the way he’d swear at me was something dreadful. A most immoral beast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer.

  “But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering and crying like a baby. His spirit broke and he became a quivering jelly-mountain of misery. He’d get attacks of palpitation of the heart, and stagger around like a drunken man, and fall down and bark his shins. And then he’d cry, but always on the run. O man, the gods themselves would have wept with him, and you yourself or any other man. It was pitiful, and there was so I much of it, but I only hardened my heart and hit up the pace. At last I wore him clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry, and thirsty. When I found he wouldn’t budge, I hamstrung him, and spent the better part of the day wading into him with the hand-axe, he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to shut him off. Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man could sling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably. Barring the fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair eating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted a man a twelvemonth. I spent the winter there myself.”

  “And where is this valley?” I asked

  He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said: “Your tobacco is very good. I carry a fair share of it in my pouch, but I shall carry the recollection of it until I die. In token of my appreciation, and in return for the moccasins on your own feet, I will present to you these muclucs. They commemorate Klooch and the seven blind little beggars. They are also souvenirs of an unparalleled event in history, namely, the destruction of the oldest breed of animal on earth, and the youngest. And their chief virtue lies in that they will never wear out.”

  Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe, gripped my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow. Concerning this tale, for which I have already disclaimed responsibility, I would recommend those of little faith to make a visit to the Smithsonian Institute. If they bring the requisite credentials and do not come in vacation time, they will undoubtedly gain an audience with Professor Dolvidson. The muclucs are in his possession, and he will verify, not the manner in which they were obtained, but the material of which they are composed. When he states that they are made from the skin of the mammoth, the scientific world accepts his verdict. What more would you have?

  A SHAPE IN TIME

  Anthony Boucher

  Temporal Agent L-3H is always delectable in any shape; that’s why the bureau employs her on marriage-prevention assignments.

  But this time, as she reported to my desk, she was also dejected. “I’m a failure, Chief,” she said. “He ran away—from me. The first man in twenty-five centuries . . .”

  “Don’t take it so seriously,” I said. She was more than just another agent to me; I was the man who’d discovered her talents. “We may be able to figure out what went wrong and approach it on another time line.”

  “But I’m no good.” Her body went scrawny and sagging. Sometimes I wonder how people expressed their emotions before mutation gave us somatic control.

  “Now, there,” I said, expanding my flesh to radiate confidence, “just tell me what happened. We know from the dial readings that the Machine got you to London in 1880—”

  “To prevent the marriage of Edwin Sullivan to Angelina Gilbert,” she grimaced. “Time knows why.”

  I sighed. I was always patient with her. “Because that marriage joined two sets of genes which, in the course of three generations, would produce—”

  Suddenly she gave me one of her old grins, with the left eyebrow up. “I’ve never understood the time results of an assignment yet, and don’t try to teach me now. Marriage prevention’s fun enough on its own. And I thought it was going to be extra good this time. Edwin’s beard was red and this long, and I haven’t had a beard in five trips. But something went—The worst of it is, it went wrong when I was naked.”

  I was incredulous and said so.

  “I don’t think even you really understand this, Chief. Because you are a man,” her half smile complimented me by putting the italics of memory under “man,” and men never have understood it. But the fact is that what men want naked, in any century, in any country, is what they’re used to seeing clothed, if you follow me. Oh, there are always some women who have to pad themselves out or pull themselves in, but the really popular ones are built to fit their clothes. Look at what they used to call ‘feelthy peectures’; anytime, anyplace, the girls that are supposed to be exciting have the same silhouette naked as the fashion demands clothed. Improbable though it seems.”

  “L!” I gasped. She had suddenly changed so completely that there was hardly more than one clue that I was not looking at a boy.

  “See?” she said. “That’s the way I had to make myself when you sent me to the 1920s. And the assignment worked; this was what men wanted. And then, when you sent me to 1957 . . .”

  I ducked out of the way as two monstrous mammae shot
out at me. “I hadn’t quite realized . . .” I began to confess.

  “. . . Or the time I had that job in sixteenth century Germany.”

  “Now you look pregnant!”

  “They all did. Maybe they were. Or when I was in Greece, all waist and hips . . . But all of these worked. I prevented marriages and improved the genetic time flow. Only with Edwin . . .”

  She was back in her own delectable shape, and I was able to give her a look of encouraging affection.

  “I’ll skip the buildup,” she said. “I managed to meet Edwin, and I gave him this . . .” I nodded; how well I remembered this and its effects. “He began calling on me and taking me to theaters, and I knew it needed just one more step for him to forget all about that silly pink-and-white Angelina.”

  “Go on,” I urged.

  “He took a step, all right. He invited me to dinner in a private room at a discreet restaurant—all red plush and mirrors and a screen in front of the couch. And he ordered oysters and truffles and all that superstitious ritual. The beard was even better than I’d hoped: crisp and teasing ticklish and . . .” She looked at me speculatively, and I regretted that we’d bred out facial follicles beyond even somatic control. “When he started to undress me—and how much trouble that was in 1880!—he was delighted with this.”

  She had changed from the waist up, and I had to admit that this was possibly more accurate than these. They were as large as the startling 1957 version, but molded together as almost one solid pectoral mass.

  “Then he took off my skirts and . . .” L-3H was as near to tears as I had ever known her, “Then he . . . ran. Right out of the restaurant. I would’ve had to pay the check if I hadn’t telekinned the Machine to bring me back now. And I’ll bet he ran to that Angelina and made arrangements to start mixing genes and I’ve ruined everything for you.”

  I looked at her new form below the waist. It was indeed extraordinary and hardly to my taste, but it seemed correct. I checked the pictures again in the Sullivan dossier. Yes, absolutely.

  I consoled her and absolved her. “My dear L, you are—Time help me!—perfectly and exactly a desirable woman of 1880. The failure must be due to some slip on the part of the chronopsychist who researched Edwin. You’re still a credit to the bureau, agent L-3H!—and now let’s celebrate. No, don’t change back. Leave it that way. I’m curious as to the effects of—what was the word they used for it in 1880?—of a woman’s bustle.”

  A SOUND OF THUNDER

  Ray Bradbury

  The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and I the sign burned in this momentary darkness:

  TIME SAFARI, INC.

  SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.

  YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

  WE TAKE YOU THERE. YOU SHOOT IT.

  A warm phlegm gathered in Eckels’ throat; he swallowed land pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed la smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.

  “Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?”

  “We guarantee nothing,” said the official, “except the dinosaurs.” He turned. “This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He’ll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there’s a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible Government action, on your return.”

  Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

  A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.

  “Unbelievable.” Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. “A real Time Machine.” He shook his head. “Makes you think. If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He’ll make a fine President of the United States.”

  “Yes,” said the man behind the desk. “We’re lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it’s not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith’s President now. All you got to worry about is—”

  “Shooting my dinosaur,” Eckels finished it for him.

  “A Tyrannosaurus rex. The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry.”

  Eckels flushed angrily. “Trying to scare me!”

  “Frankly, yes. We don’t want anyone going who’ll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We’re here to give you the severest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest game in all of Time. Your personal check’s still there. Tear it up.”

  Mr. Eckels looked at the check. His fingers twitched.

  “Good luck,” said the man behind the desk. “Mr. Travis, he’s all yours.”

  They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.

  First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night-day. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

  They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

  Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

  “Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?” Eckels felt his mouth saying.

  “If you hit them right,” said Travis on the helmet radio. “Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That’s stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain.”

  The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. “Think,” said Eckels. “Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois.”

  The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.

  The sun stopped in the sky.

  The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

  “Christ isn’t born yet,” said Travis. “Moses has not gone to the mountain to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler—none of them exists.”

  The man nodded.

  “That”—Mr. Travis pointed—“is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-f
ive years before President Keith.”

  He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over streaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

  “And that,” he said, “is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use. It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn’t touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It’s an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don’t go off it. I repeat. Don’t go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there’s a penalty. And don’t shoot any animal we don’t okay.”

  “Why?” asked Eckels.

  They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

  “We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past. The government doesn’t like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species.”

  “That’s not clear,” said Eckels.

  “All right,” Travis continued, “say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!”

  “So they’re dead,” said Eckels. “So what?”

  “So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!”