The Fourth Time Travel MEGAPACK® Read online

  * * * *

  Manning Stern rejoiced loudly in this fresh discovery. “This boy’s got it! He makes it sound so real that.…” The business office was instructed to pay the highest bonus rate (unheard of for a first story) and an intensely cordial letter went to the author outlining immediate needs and offering certain story suggestions.

  The editor of Surprising was no little surprised at the answer:

  …I regret to say that all my stories will be based on one consistent scheme of future events and that you must allow me to stick to my own choice of material.…

  “And who the hell,” Manning Stern demanded, “is editing this magazine?” and dictated a somewhat peremptory suggestion for a personal interview.

  The features were small and sharp, and the face had a sort of dark aliveness. It was a different beauty from Lavra’s, and an infinitely different beauty from the curious standards set by the 1949 films; but it was beauty and it spoke to Norbert Holt.

  “You’ll forgive a certain surprise, Miss Stern,” he ventured. “I’ve read Surprising for so many years and never thought.…”

  Manning Stern grinned. “That the editor was also surprising? I’m used to it—your reaction, I mean. I don’t think I’ll ever be quite used to being a woman…or a human being, for that matter.”

  “Isn’t it rather unusual? From what I know of the field.…”

  “Please God, when I find a man who can write, don’t let him go all male-chauvinist on me! I’m a good editor,” said she with becoming modesty (and don’t you ever forget it!), “and I’m a good scientist. I even worked on the Manhattan Project—until some character discovered that my adopted daughter was a Spanish War orphan. But what we’re here to talk about is this consistent-scheme gimmick of yours. It’s all right, of course; it’s been done before. But where I frankly think you’re crazy is in planning to do it exclusively.”

  Norbert Holt opened his briefcase. “I’ve brought along an outline that might help convince you.…”

  An hour later Manning Stern glanced at her watch and announced, “End of office hours! Care to continue this slugfest over a martini or five? I warn you—the more I’m plied, the less pliant I get.”

  And an hour after that she stated, “We might get some place if we’d stay some place. I mean the subject seems to be getting elusive.”

  “The hell,” Norbert Holt announced recklessly, “with editorial relations. Let’s get back to the current state of the opera.”

  “It was paintings. I was telling you about the show at the—”

  “No, I remember now. It was movies. You were trying to explain the Marx Brothers. Unsuccessfully, I may add.”

  “Un…suc…cess…fully,” said Manning Stern ruminatively. “Five martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. But I try to explain the Marx Brothers yet! Look, Holt. I’ve got a subversive orphan at home and she’s undoubtedly starving. I’ve got to feed her. You come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?”

  “Good. Fine. Always like to try a new dish.”

  Manning Stern looked at him curiously. “Now was that a gag or not? You’re funny, Holt. You know a lot about everything and then all of a sudden you go all Man-from-Mars on the simplest thing. Or do you…? Anyway, let’s go feed Raquel.”

  And five hours later Holt was saying, “I never thought I’d have this reason for being glad I sold a story. Manning, I haven’t had so much fun talking to—I almost said ‘to a woman.’ I haven’t had so much fun talking since—”

  He had almost said since the agnoton came. She seemed not to notice his abrupt halt. She simply said “Bless you, Norb. Maybe you aren’t a male-chauvinist. Maybe even you’re.… Look, go find a subway or a cab or something. If you stay here another minute, I’m either going to kiss you or admit you’re right about your stories—and I don’t know which is worse editor-author relations.”

  * * * *

  Manning Stern committed the second breach of relations first. The fan mail on Norbert Holt’s debut left her no doubt that Surprising would profit by anything he chose to write about.

  She’d never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. Or rather you could hardly say rise. Holt hit the top with his first story and stayed there. He socked the fans (Guest of Honor at the Washinvention), the pros (first President of Science Fiction Writers of America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best seller list).

  And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with him, talking about this, that and those.… Raquel, just turning sixteen, was quite obviously in love with him—praying that he’d have the decency to stay single till she grew up and “You know, Manningcita, I am Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls.…”

  But there was this occasional feeling of oddness. Like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night at SCWA.…

  “I’ve got a story problem,” Norbert Holt announced there. “An idea, and I can’t lick it. Maybe if I toss it out to the literary lions.…”

  “Story problem?” Manning said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “I thought everything was outlined for the next ten years.”

  “This is different. This is a sort of paradox story, and I can’t get out of it. It won’t end. Something like this: Suppose a man in the remote year X reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine. So he works the time machine and goes back to the year X minus 2000—let’s say, for instance, our time. So in ‘now’ he writes the story that he’s going to read two thousand years later, telling himself how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he read the story which he wrote because—”

  Manning was starting to say “Hold it!” when Matt Duncan interrupted with, “Good old endless-cycle gimmick. Lot of fun to kick around, but Bob Heinlein did it once and for all in By His Bootstraps. Damnedest tour de force I ever read; there just aren’t any switcheroos left.”

  “Ouroboros,” Joe Henderson contributed.

  Norbert Holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per evening was Joe’s maximum contribution.

  Austin Carter picked it up. “Ouroboros, the worm, that circles the universe with its tail in its mouth. The Asgard Serpent, too. And I think there’s something in Mayan literature. All symbols of infinity—no beginning, no ending. Always out by the same door where you went in. See that magnificent novel of Eddison’s, The Worm Ouroboros; the perfect cyclic novel, ending with its recommencement, stopping not because there’s a stopping place, but because it’s uneconomical to print the whole text over infinitely.”

  “The Quaker Oats box,” said Duncan. “With a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a.…”

  It was standard professional shop-talk. It was a fine evening with the boys. But there was a look of infinitely remote sadness in Norbert Holt’s eyes.

  That was the evening that Manning violated her first rule of editor-author relationships.

  * * * *

  They were having martinis in the same bar in which Norbert had, so many years ago, successfully said unsuccessfully.

  “They’ve been good years,” he remarked, apparently to the olive.

  There was something wrong with this evening. No bounce. No yumph. “That’s a funny tense,” Manning confided to her own olive. “Aren’t they still good years?”

  “I’ve owed you a serious talk for a long time.”

  “You don’t have to pay the debt. We don’t go in much for being serious, do we? Not so dead-earnest-catch-in-the-throat serious.”

  “Don’t we?”
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  “I’ve got an awful feeling,” Manning admitted, “that you’re building up to a proposal, either to me or that olive. And if it’s me, I’ve got an awful feeling I’m going to accept—and Raquel will never forgive me.”

  “You’re safe,” Norbert said dryly. “That’s the serious talk. I want to marry you, darling, and I’m not going to.”

  “I suppose this is the time you twirl your black mustache and tell me you have a wife and family elsewhere?”

  “I hope to God I have!”

  “No, it wasn’t very funny, was it?” Manning felt very little, aside from wishing she were dead.

  “I can’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve loved two women before; one had talent and a brain, the other had beauty and no brain. I think I loved her. The damnedest curse of Ouroboros is that I’ll never quite know. If I could take that tail out of that mouth.…”

  “Go on,” she encouraged a little wildly. “Talk plot-gimmicks. It’s easier on me.”

  “And she is carrying…will carry…my child—my children, it must be. My twins.…”

  “Look, Holt. We came in here editor and author—remember back when? Let’s go out that way. Don’t go on talking. I’m a big girl, but I can’t take…everything. It’s been fun knowing you and all future manuscripts will be gratefully received.”

  “I knew I couldn’t say it. I shouldn’t have tried. But there won’t be any future manuscripts. I’ve written every Holt I’ve ever read.”

  “Does that make sense?” Manning aimed the remark at the olive, but it was gone. So was the martini.

  “Here’s the last.” He took it out of his breast-pocket, neatly folded. “The one we talked about at SCWA—the one I couldn’t end. Maybe you’ll understand. I wanted somehow to make it clear before.…”

  The tone of his voice projected a sense of doom, and Manning forgot everything else. “Is something going to happen to you? Are you going to—Oh, my dear, no! All right, so you, have a wife on every space station in the asteroid belt; but if anything happens to you.…”

  “I don’t know,” said Norbert Holt. “I can’t remember the exact date of that issue.…” He rose abruptly. “I shouldn’t have tried a goodbye. See you again, darling—the next time round Ouroboros.”

  She was still staring at the empty martini glass when she heard the shrill of brakes and the excited up-springing of a crowd outside.

  * * * *

  She read the posthumous fragment late that night, after her eyes had dried sufficiently to make the operation practicable. And through her sorrow her mind fought to help her, making her think, making her be an editor.

  She understood a little and disbelieved what she understood. And underneath she prodded herself, “But it isn’t a story. It’s too short, too inconclusive. It’ll just disappoint the Holt fans—and that’s everybody. Much better if I do a straight obit, take up a full page on it.…”

  She fought hard to keep on thinking, not feeling. She had never before experienced so strongly the I-have-been-here-before sensation. She had been faced with this dilemma once before, once on some other time-spiral, as the boys in SCWA would say. And her decision had been.…

  “It’s sentimentality,” she protested. “It isn’t editing. This decision’s right. I know it. And if I go and get another of these attacks and start to change my mind.…”

  She laid the posthumous Holt fragment on the coals. It caught fire quickly.

  * * * *

  The next morning Raquel greeted her with, “Manningcita, who’s Norbert Holt?”

  Manning had slept so restfully that she was even tolerant of foolish questions at breakfast. “Who?” she asked.

  “Norbert Holt. Somehow the name popped into my mind. Is he perhaps one of your writers?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Raquel frowned. “I was almost sure.… Can you really remember them all? I’m going to check those bound volumes of Surprising.”

  “Any luck with your…what was it…? Holt?” Manning asked the girl a little later.

  “No, Manningcita. I was quite unsuccessful.”

  …unsuccessful.… Now why in Heaven’s name, mused Manning Stern, should I be thinking of martinis at breakfast time?

  GUEST IN THE HOUSE, by Frank Belknap Long

  Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946.

  Roger Shevlin set down his bags, shook the rain from his umbrella and wondered just how long it would be before he found himself consulting a psychiatrist. He’d made mistakes before—plenty of them. But he was essentially a man of sound judgment, and it was hard to believe he could have allowed himself to be talked into renting a twenty-room house.

  He was amazed at his own incredible stupidity; the lack of judgment he’d shown right up to the instant he’d signed the lease and returned the pen to the renting agent with a complacent smirk.

  A huge and misshapen ogre of a dwelling it was, with ivy-hung eaves and a broken-down front porch, and as Shevlin stood in the lower hallway staring up the great central staircase a shudder went through him. There was always a chance, of course, that the place would shed some of its ugliness amidst the changing colors of autumn and the sweet-warbled songs of meadowlarks and grasshopper sparrows.

  But Shevlin knew that no one would ever refer to the place he’d leased as a “house.” It would always be “that place the Shevlins settled in—the poor chumps!” or “Johnny, run over to the Shevlin place and see if Mrs. Shevlin has any butter to spare.”

  To add to Shevlin’s woes, the children had brushed right past him, and were losing no time in making themselves at home. Children could take root and sprout almost anywhere and the Shevlin youngsters were hardy perennials six and nine respectively. Already the house was beginning to resound with yells, shrieks and blood-curdling whoops.

  A man should be proud to be the father of two such sturdy youngsters, Shevlin thought, and glared at his wife.

  “The place won’t look half so bad when I get those new curtains ironed out and hung up,” Elsie said, and could have bitten her tongue out.

  “Thanks,” Shevlin said, dryly. “I was waiting for that. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go down in the cellar and mix myself a rum collins.”

  “Why pick on the cellar,” Elsie said, miserably. “There’s nothing down there but a lot of rusty machinery which we’ll have to pay someone to rip out and cart away. The renting agent said the last tenant was a professor of—what did he say he was a professor of, Roger?”

  “Of physics,” Roger grunted. “Perhaps if I go down in the cellar and surround myself with just the right atmosphere it will work with me.”

  Elsie stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “The homeopathic system of therapeutics,” Shevlin said. “If you have something bad, you dose yourself with more of the same until it either cures or kills you.”

  A queer feeling of insecurity took hold of Shevlin when he saw the cellar.

  It was damper than he’d ever thought a cellar could be. And chillier.

  The machinery was damp, too. It was studded with little blobs of moisture and under the wetness was a rustiness which made Shevlin think of tin cans rusting in the sun, and an ax half-buried in a chopping block in an abandoned woodshed.

  Ah, well—a gloomy life and a stagnant one was better than being cooped up in a city apartment with two small kids running around in circles every time the doorbell rang.

  The machinery was really quite elaborate. So elaborate, in fact, that if Shevlin had been writing a book about machinery he’d have gone out and hired a ghost writer solely to avoid describing it.

  Shevlin took another sip of the rum collins and wished that he were out of the cellar and upstairs in the attic. Of one thing he was certain. It wou
ld be sheer insanity for him to remain in the cellar when he could roam all over the house without let or hindrance.

  Once as a child Shevlin had almost tangled with a bulldozer and the experience had left an ineffaceable impression on his mind. He had no intention of touching the machinery, or becoming embroiled with it in any way.

  Clumsy hands he had. Clumsy hands and a clumsy head, early to rise and early to bed.

  He must have stumbled, though it was hard to see how he could have been so unsteady on his feet after just one rum collins.

  He had a vague recollection of making a frantic clutch at something huge that glistened. He had a much sharper recollection of feeling that something move beneath his fingers.

  The whirring began immediately and didn’t stop. It was faint at first, very faint, but it increased so rapidly in volume that Shevlin had no time to leap back.

  For one terrifying instant he seemed to be standing on the brink of a colossal sandstorm, his ears filled with a dull roar that was half a silence. Then there was a flurry of scintillating metal particles, and something seemed to lift him up, and hurl him backwards through a cyclone of motion toward a tumbled waste of emptiness.

  When Shevlin struggled to a sitting position the floor was once more firm beneath him, and the machinery had ceased to gyrate. For an instant the walls had seemed to contract in fitful gusts, but now there was nothing to indicate that a convulsion of incalculable magnitude had taken place on the opposite side of the cellar.

  He was beginning to think he’d suffered a vertigo attack and imagined the whole thing when he heard his wife’s voice calling to him from the head of the stairs.

  “Roger, come up here quick! I can’t see out of the windows! Roger, hurry!”

  Shevlin gasped, got swayingly to his feet, and mounted the stairs in five long bounds that carried him well past his wife, who had retreated into the lower hallway, and was staring at him out of eyes that seemed to fill her face.