Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2 Read online

  “Of course, sir. You’re very famous.” She bit her lower lip, as if wishing she had not answered so promptly. “What I meant was—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Do you trust my word?” She frowned then, and it was a consciously pretty gesture—a child borrowing a mannerism from an adult. “It will happen tomorrow,” I said.

  “Sir?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said again, trying to find some subtler way of putting it. “What you’re waiting for . . . it will happen then.”

  “How do you—?”

  “Never mind that,” I said. I stood erect, running my fingers across the brim of my hat. In spite of everything she had the uncanny facility of making me nervous and awkward. “I’ll be across there tomorrow,” I said, pointing to the other side of the Channel. “Look out for me. I’ll be wearing these clothes, this hat. You’ll see me wave to you. That’s when it will be.”

  She said nothing to this, but looked steadily at me. I was standing against the light, and she could not have been able to see me properly. But I could see her with the sun on her face, and with light dancing in her hair and her eyes.

  She was so young, so pretty. It was like pain to be near her.

  “Wear your prettiest dress,” I said. “Do you understand?”

  She still did not answer, but I saw her eyes flicker towards the far side of the Channel. There was a pinkness in her cheeks and I knew I had said too much. I wished I had not spoken to her at all.

  I made a courtly little bow and replaced my hat.

  “Good-day to you, miss,” I said.

  “Good-day, sir.”

  I nodded to her again, then walked past her and turned on to the lawn behind the bench. I went a short way up the slope, and moved over to the side until I was hidden from Estyll by the trunk of a huge tree.

  I could see that on the far side of the Channel one of the Mykles I spotted earlier had moved out from his hiding place. He stood on the bank in clear view. He had apparently been watching me as I spoke to Estyll, for now I could see him looking across at me, shading his eyes with his hand.

  I was certain that it was him I had spoken to.

  I could help him no more. If he now crossed the Channel twice, moving forward two days, he could be on the Tomorrow Bridge to meet Estyll as she answered my signal.

  He stared across at me and I stared back. Then I heard a whoop of joy. He started running.

  He hurried along the bank and went straight to the Today Bridge. I could almost hear the hollow clumping of his shoes as he ran through the narrow way, and moments later he emerged on this side. He walked, more sedately now, to the queue for the Tomorrow Bridge.

  As he stood in line, he was looking at Estyll. She, staring thoughtfully at the ground, did not notice.

  Mykle reached the tollbooth. As he went to the paydesk, he looked back at me and waved. I took off my hat and waved it. He grinned happily.

  In a few seconds he had disappeared into the covered way, and I knew I would not see him again. I had seen happen what was to happen next.

  I replaced my hat and walked away from the Channel, up through the stately trees of the Park, past where the gardener was still pushing his heavy mower against the grass, past where many families were sitting beneath the trees at their picnic luncheons.

  I saw a place beneath a wide old cedar where I and my parents and sisters had often eaten our meals. A cloth was spread out across the grass, with several dishes set in readiness for the meal. An elderly couple was sitting here, well under the shade of the branches. The lady was sitting stiffly in a folding canvas chair, watching patiently as her husband prepared the meat. He was carving a ham joint, taking slices from beneath the notch with meticulous strokes. Two servants stood in the background, with white linen cloths draped over their forearms.

  Like me, the gentleman was in formal wear. His frockcoat was stiff and perfectly ironed, and his shoes shone as if they had been polished for weeks. On the ground beside him, his silken stove-pipe hat had been laid on a scarf.

  He noticed my uninvited regard and looked up at me. For a moment our gaze met and we nodded to each other like the gentlemen we were. I touched the brim of my hat, wished him and the lady good-afternoon. Then I hurried towards the yard outside. I wanted to see Dorynne before I caught the train to Geneva.

  PALINDROMIC

  Peter Crowther

  What seest thou else

  In the dark backward and abysm of time?

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  It was on the third day after the aliens arrived that we made the fateful discovery which placed the future of the entire planet in our hands. That discovery was that they hadn’t arrived yet.

  There were three of us went over to the vacant lot alongside Sycamore . . . that’s me, Derby—like the hat—McLeod, plus my good friend and local genius Jimmy-James Bannister and Ed Brewster, Forest Plains’ very own bad boy . . . except there was nothing bad about Ed. Not really.

  We went up into that giant tumbleweed cloud thing that served as some kind of interstellar flivver—it had been at the aliens’ invitation, or so we thought: our subsequent discovery called that particular fact into some considerable dispute—purely to get a look at whatever this one alien was doing. Jimmy reckoned—and he was right, as it turned out—he was keeping tabs on what was going on and recording everything in some kind of ‘book’.

  Not that he—if the alien was a ‘he’: we never did find out—was writing the way you or I would write, because he wasn’t. We didn’t even know if he was writing at all until later that night, when Jimmy-James had taken a long look in that foam-book of theirs.

  Not that this book was like any other book you ever saw. It wasn’t. Just like the ship that brought them to Forest Plains wasn’t like any other ship you ever saw, not in Earth vs The Flying Saucers or even on Twilight Zone—both of which were what you might call ‘current’ back then. And the aliens themselves weren’t like any kind of alien you ever saw in the dime comicbooks or even dreamed about . . . not even maybe after eating warmed-over two-day-old pizza last thing at night on top of a gutful of Michelob and three or four plates of Ma Chetton’s cheese surprises, the small pieces of toasted cheese flapjack that Ma used to serve up when we were holding the monthly Forest Plains Pool Knockout Competition.

  It was during one of those special nights, with the moon hanging over the desert like a crazy Jack o’Lantern and the heat making your shirt stick to your back and underarms, that the whole thing actually got itself started. That was the night that creatures from outer space arrived in Forest Plains. Then again, it wasn’t.

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself here . . .

  So maybe that’s the best place to start the story, that night.

  It was a Monday, the last one in November, at about 9 o’clock. The year was 1964.

  Ma Chetton was sweeping the few remaining cheese surprises from her last visit to the kitchen down onto a plate of freshly-made cookies, their steam rising up into the smokey atmosphere of her husband Bill’s Pool Emporium over on Sycamore, when the place shook like jello and the strains of The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird, which had been playing on Bill’s pride-and-joy Wurlitzer, faded into a wave of what sounded like static. Only thing was we’d never heard of a jukebox suffering from static before. Then the lights went out and the machine just ground itself to a stop.

  Jerry Bucher was about to take a shot—six-ball off of two cushions into the far corner as I recall . . . all the other pockets being covered by Ed Brewster’s stripes: funny how you remember details like that—and he stood up ramrod tall like someone had just dropped a firecracker or something crawly down the back of his shorts.

  “What the hell was that?” Jerry asked nobody in particular, switching the half-chewed matchstalk from one side of his mouth to the other while he glanced around to put the blame on somebody for almost fouling up his shot. Ed was never what you might call a calm player and he was an even worse loser.

  Ed Brewster wa
s crouched over, his shoulders hunched up, watching the dust drifting down from the rafters and settling on the pool table, his girlfriend Estelle’s arms clamped around his waist.

  Ma was standing frozen behind the counter, empty plate in her hand, staring at the lights shining through the windows. “Felt like some kind of earthquake,” she ventured.

  Bill Chetton’s head was visible through the hatch into the kitchen, his mouth hanging open and eyes as wide as dinner plates. “Everyone okay?”

  I leaned my pool cue against the table and walked across to the windows. By rights, it should have been dark outside but it was bright as a night-time ballgame, like someone was shining car headlights straight at the windows, and when I took a look along the street I saw sand and stuff blowing across towards us from the vacant lot opposite.

  “Some kind of power failure is what it is,” Estelle announced, her voice sounding even higher and squeakier than usual and not at all reassuring.

  Leaning against the table in front of the window, my face pressed up against the glass, I saw that the cause of that power failure was not something simple and straightforward like power lines being down between Forest Plains and Bellingham, some 35 miles away. It was something far more complicated.

  Settling down onto the empty lot across the street was something that resembled a cross between a gigantic metal canister and an equally gigantic vegetable, its sides billowing in and out.

  “Is it a helicopter?” Old Fred Wishingham asked from alongside me, his voice soft and nervous. Fred had ambled over from the booth he occupied every night of the year and was standing on the other side of the table staring out into the night. “Can’t be a plane,” he said, “so it must be some kind of helicopter.” There sounded like a good deal of wishful thinking in that last statement.

  But wishful thinking or not, the thing descending on the spare ground across the street didn’t look like any helicopter I’d ever seen—not that I’d seen many, mind you—and I told Fred as much.

  “It’s some kind of goddam hot air balloon,” Ed Brewster said, crouching down so’s he could get a better look at the top of the thing—it was tall, there was no denying that.

  “Looks more like some kind of furry cloud,” Abel Bodeen muttered to himself. I figured he was speaking so softly because he didn’t feel like making that observation widely known because it sounded a mite foolish. And it did, right enough. The truth of the matter was that the thing did look like a furry cloud . . . or maybe a giant lettuce or the head of a cauliflower, with lights flashing on and off deep inside it.

  Pretty soon we were all gathered around the window watching, nobody saying anything else as the thing settled down on the ground.

  Within a minute or two, the poolroom lights came back on and the shaking stopped. “You going out to see what it is?” Fred asked. Nobody responded. “I guess somebody should go out there to see what it is,” he said.

  Right on cue, the screen door squeaked behind us and we saw the familiar figure of Jimmy-James Bannister step out onto the sidewalk. He glanced back at the window at us all and gave a shrug. Then he started across the street.

  “Hope that damn fool knows what he’s doing.” Ed Brewster was a past master at putting everyone’s thoughts into words.

  The truth of the matter was Jimmy-James knew a whole lot of things that none of the rest of us had any idea at all about. And anything he didn’t know about he just kept on at until he did. Jimmy-James—born James Ronald Garrison Bannister (he’d made his first name into a double to go partways to satisfying his father and partways to keep the mickey-taking down to an acceptable minimum)—was the resident big brain of Forest Plains. Still only 22 years old—same age as me, at the time—he was finishing up his Master’s course over at Princeton, studying languages and applied math.

  Jimmy-James could do long division problems in his head and cuss in fourteen languages which, along with the fact that he could drink anyone else in town—including Ed—under the table, made him a pretty popular member of any group gathering . . . particularly one where any amount of liquor or even just beer was to be consumed. He was home for Thanksgiving, taking the week off, and there’s a lot of folks owes him a debt of gratitude for that fact.

  Anyway, there went Jimmy-James, large as life and twice as bold—though some might say ‘stupid’—walking across the street, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets and his head held high, proud and fearless. There were a couple of muted gasps from somewhere behind me and then the sound of shuffling as folks tried to get closer to the window to get a good look. After all, we’d all seen from the War Of The Worlds movie what happened to people who got a little too close to these objects . . . and we’d all pretty much decided that the thing across the street was about as likely to have come from anyplace on Earth as it was to have flown up to us from Vince and Molly Waldon’s general store down the street. Nobody actually came right out and said it was from another planet but we all knew that it was. But why it was here was another matter, though we weren’t in any great rush to find out the answer to that question. None of us except Jimmy-James Bannister, that is.

  “Go call the Sherrif,” Ma Chetton whispered.

  I could hear Bill Chetton pressing the receiver and saying Hello? Hello? like his life depended on it. It didn’t come as any surprise when Bill announced to the hushed room that the line seemed like it was dead. Then the jukebox kicked in again with a loud and raucous A papapapapapa . . . the needle somehow having returned to the start of the Trashmen’s hit record.

  The street outside seemed like it was holding its breath in much the same way as the folks looking out of the window were holding their breath . . . both it and us waiting to see what was going to happen.

  What happened was both awesome and kind of an anticlimax.

  Just as Jimmy-James reached the sidewalk across the street, the sides of the giant vegetable balloon canister from another world dropped down and became a kind of shiny skirt reaching all the way to the ground. No sooner had that happened than a whole group of smaller vegetable things—smaller but still twice the size of Jimmy-James . . . and, at almost six-four, JJ is not a small man—came sliding down the platform onto terra firma . . . and into the heart of Forest Plains.

  We could hear their caterwauling from where we were, even over the drone of The Trashmen telling anyone who would listen that the Bird was the Word . . . and, as we watched, we saw the vegetable-shapes come to a halt on the sidewalk right in front of Jimmy-James where they kind of spun around and then gathered around him in a tight circle. Then all but one of them moved back a few feet and then the last one moved back, too.

  At this point, Jimmy-James turned around and waved to us. “Come on out,” he yelled.

  “You think it’s safe?” Ed Brewster asked.

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be they mean any harm,” Ma Chetton said softly, the wonder in her voice as plain as the streaks of grey coloring the hair around her ears and temples.

  “They come all the way from wherever it is they come from, seems to me that if they’d had a mind to do us any harm they’d have done it by now,” said Old Fred Wishingham. “That said, mind you,” he added, “I’m not about to go charging out there until we see what it is they have come for.”

  “Maybe they haven’t come for nothing at all,” Estelle suggested.

  Somebody murmured that such an unlikely scenario could be the case but they weren’t having none of it. That was the way folks were in Forest Plains in those days—the way folks were all over this country, in fact. Nobody (with the possible exception of Ed Brewster, and even he only did it for fun) wanted to make anyone look or feel a damned fool and hurt their feelings if they could get away without doing so. With Estelle it could be difficult. Estelle had turned making herself look a damned fool into something approaching an artform.

  “You mean, like they’re exploring . . . something like that?” Abel Bodeen said to help her out a mite.

  “Yeah,” Est
elle agreed dreamily, “exploring.”

  “Well, I’m going out,” Ma said. And without so much as a second glance or a pause to allow someone to talk her out of it, she rested the empty plate on the counter-top and strode over to the door. A minute or so later she was walking across the street. It seemed like the things had sensed she was going to come out because they’d moved across the street like to greet her, swivelling around at the last minute—just as Ma came to a stop—and ringing her just the way they had done with Jimmy-James.

  They seemed harmless enough but I felt like we should have the law in on the situation. “Phone still out, Bill?” I shouted. Bill Chetton lifted the receiver and tried again. He nodded and returned it to the cradle.

  “Okay Ed,” I said, “let’s me and you scoot out the back and run over to the Sherriff’s office.”

  Ed said okay, after thinking about that for a second or two, and then the two of us slipped behind the counter and into Bill’s and Ma’s kitchen, then out of the back door and into the yard, past the trashcans towards the fence . . . and then I heard someone calling.

  “What was that?” I whispered across to Ed.

  Ed had stopped dead in his tracks on the other side of the fence. He was staring ahead of him. When I got to the fence I looked in the directioon Ed was looking and there they were. Three of them. Right in front of us, wailing. I’ll never forget that sound . . . like the wind in the desert, lost and aimless.

  The door we’d just come out of opened up again behind us and Fred Wishingham’s voice shouted, “Hold it right where you . . .” and then trailed off when Fred saw the things. “I was just going to tell you that some of those things had just turned around and headed over to where you’d be appearing . . . and, well, you already saw that.” Fred had lowered his voice like he’d just been caught shooting craps in Church.

  Ed nodded and I told Fred to get back inside.

  As I heard the lock click on the door, I whispered to Ed. “You think maybe they can read our minds?”