The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (25 page)

He could see the antigravity beamers by looking between the teeth. He could feel their influence, so nearly were they focused on the extension cage itself. If he focused them just on himself...

He felt the change; he felt both strong and lightheaded, like a drunken ballet master.

And if he now narrowed the focus...

The monster’s teeth seemed to grind harder. Svetz looked between them, as best he could.

Leviathan was no longer floating. He was hanging straight down from the extension cage, hanging by his teeth. The antigravity beamers still balanced the pull of his mass; but now they did so by pulling straight up on the extension cage.

The monster was in obvious distress. Naturally. A water beast, he was supporting his own mass for the first time in his life. And by his teeth! His yellow eyes rolled frantically. His tail twitched slightly at the very tip. And still he clung...

“Let go,” said Svetz. “Let go, you... monster.”

The monster’s teeth slid screeching down the transparent surface, and he fell.

Svetz cut the antigravity a fraction of a second late. He smelled burnt oil, and there were tiny red lights blinking off one by one on his lunch-tray control board.

Leviathan hit the water with a sound of thunder. His long, sinuous body rolled over and floated to the surface and lay as if dead. But his tail flicked once, and Svetz knew that he was alive.

“I could kill you,” said Svetz. “Hold the stunners on you until you’re dead. There’s time enough... “

But he still had ten minutes to search for a sperm whale. It wasn’t time enough. It didn’t begin to be time enough, but if he used it all...

The sea serpent flicked its tail and began to swim away. Once he rolled to look at Svetz, and his jaws opened wide in fury. He finished his roll and was fleeing again.

“Just a minute,” Svetz said thickly. “Just a science-perverting minute there...” And he swung the stunners to focus.

Gravity behaved strangely inside an extension cage. While the cage was moving forward in time,
down
was all directions outward from the center of the cage. Svetz was plastered against the curved wall. He waited for the trip to end.

Seasickness was nothing compared to the motion sickness of time travel.

Free-fall, then normal gravity. Svetz moved unsteadily to the door.

Ra Chen was waiting to help him out. “Did you get it?”

“Leviathan? No sir.” Svetz looked past his boss. “Where’s the big extension cage?”

“We’re bringing it back slowly, to minimize the gravitational side effects. But if you don’t have the whale—”

“I said I don’t have Leviathan.”

“Well, just what
do
you have?” Ra Chen demanded.

Somewhat later he said, “It wasn’t?”

Later yet he said, “You killed him? Why, Svetz? Pure spite?” 

“No, sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did during the entire trip.”

“But
why
? Never mind, Svetz, here’s the big extension cage.” A gray-blue shadow congealed in the hollow cradle of the time machine. “And there does seem to be something in it. Hi, you idiots, throw an antigravity beam inside the cage! Do you want the beast crushed?”

The cage had arrived. Ra Chen waved an arm in signal. The door opened.

Something tremendous hovered within the big extension cage. It looked like a malevolent white mountain in there, peering back at its captors with a single tiny, angry eye. It was trying to get at Ra Chen, but it couldn’t swim in air.

Its other eye was only a torn socket. One of its flippers was ripped along the trailing edge. Rips and ridges and puckers of scar tissue, and a forest of broken wood and broken steel, marked its tremendous expanse of albino skin. Lines trailed from many of the broken harpoons. High up on one flank, bound to the beast by broken and tangled lines, was the corpse of a bearded man with one leg.

“Hardly in mint condition, is he?” Ra Chen observed.

“Be careful, sir. He’s a killer. I saw him ram a sailing ship and sink it clean before I could focus the stunners on him.”

“What amazes me is that you found him at all in the time you had left. Svetz, I do not understand your luck. Or am I missing something?”

“It wasn’t luck, sir. It was the most intelligent thing I did the entire trip.’’

“You said that before. About killing Leviathan.”

Svetz hurried to explain. “The sea serpent was just leaving the vicinity. I wanted to kill him, but I knew I didn’t have the time. I was about to leave myself, when he turned back and bared his teeth.

“He was an obvious carnivore. Those teeth were built strictly for killing, sir. I should have noticed earlier. And I could think of only one animal big enough to feed a carnivore that size.”

“Ah-h-h. Brilliant, Svetz.”

“There was corroborative evidence. Our research never found any mention of giant sea serpents. The great geological surveys of the first century Post Atomic should have turned up something. Why didn’t they?”

“Because the sea serpent quietly died out two centuries earlier, after whalers killed off his food supply.”

Svetz colored. “Exactly. So I turned the stunners on Leviathan before he could swim away, and I kept the stunners on him until the NAI said he was dead. I reasoned that if Leviathan was here, there must be whales in the vicinity.”

“And Leviathan’s nervous output was masking the signal.”

“Sure enough, it was. The moment he was dead the NAI registered another signal. I followed it to—” Svetz jerked his head. They were floating the whale out of the extension cage. “To him.”

Days later, two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.

“We took some clones from him, then passed him on to the Secretary-General’s vivarium,” said Ra Chen. “Pity you had to settle for an albino.” He waved aside Svetz’s protest: “I know, I know, you were pressed for time.”

Beyond the glass, the one-eyed whale glared at Svetz through murky seawater.

Surgeons had removed most of the harpoons, but scars remained along his flanks; and Svetz, awed, wondered how long the beast had been at war with Man. Centuries? How long did sperm whales live?

Ra Chen lowered his voice. “We’d all be in trouble if the Secretary-General found out that there was once a bigger animal than his. You understand that, don’t you, Svetz?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good.” Ra Chen’s gaze swept across another glass wall, and a fire-breathing Gila monster. Further down, a horse looked back at him along the dangerous spiral horn in its forehead.

“Always we find the unexpected,” said Ra Chen. “Sometimes I wonder... “

If you’d do your research better,
Svetz thought...

“Did you know that time travel wasn’t even a concept until the first-century Ante Atomic? A writer invented it. From then until the fourth century Post Atomic, time travel was pure fantasy. It violates everything the scientists of the time thought were natural laws. Logic. Conservation of matter and energy. Momentum, reaction, any law of motion that makes time a part of the statement. Relativity.

“It strikes me,” said Ra Chen, “that every time we push an extension cage past that particular four-century period, we shove it into a kind of fantasy world. That’s why you keep finding giant sea serpents and fire breathing—”

“That’s nonsense,” said Svetz. He was afraid of his boss, yes; but there were limits.

“You’re right,” Ra Chen said instantly. Almost with relief. “Take a month’s vacation, Svetz, then back to work. The Secretary-General wants a bird.”

“A bird?” Svetz smiled. A bird sounded harmless enough. “I suppose he found it in another children’s book?”

“That’s right. Ever hear of a bird called a
roc?
”

JOE HALDEMAN

Praised for its authentic portrayal of the emotional detachment and psychological
dislocation of soldiers in a millennium-long future war, Joe Haldeman’s first science
fiction novel,
The Forever War,
won the Hugo, Nebula, and Ditmar Awards when it was
published in 1974 and later was adapted into a three-part graphic novel series. Since
then, Haldeman has returned to the theme of future war several times, notably in his
trilogy
Worlds, Worlds Apart,
and
Worlds Enough and Time,
about a future Earth
facing nuclear extinction, and in
Forever Peace,
a further exploration of the
dehumanizing potential of armed conflict. Haldeman’s other novels include
Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered,
and the alternate world opus
The Hemingway Hoax,
expanded from his Nebula Award–winning novella of the same name. Haldeman’s
stories have been collected in
Infinite Dreams
and
Dealing in Futures,
and several of his
essays are mixed with fiction in
Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds
. His powerful non–

science-fiction writing includes
War Year,
drawn from experiences during his tour of
duty in Vietnam, and
1968,
a portrait of America in the Vietnam era. He has also
coedited the anthologies
Body Armor: 2000, Space-Fighters,
and
Supertanks
. His
twenty novels, three story collections, six anthologies, and one poetry collection have
appeared in eighteen languages.

“Anniversary Project” is one of the few stories in this collection that deals with
traveling forward into the future, and in the hands of Joe Haldeman, it is a dizzying ride
indeed. Given when it was published (1975), the topical events of Korea, Vietnam, and
the next few decades play a surprising role in the events of the story, despite most of the
action’s taking place a million years in the future.

by Joe Haldeman

His name is Three-phasing and he is bald and wrinkled, slightly over one meter tall, large-eyed, toothless and all bones and skin, sagging pale skin shot through with traceries of delicate blue and red. He is considered very beautiful but most of his beauty is in his hands and is due to his extreme youth. He is over two hundred years old and is learning how to talk. He has become reasonably fluent in sixty-three languages, all dead ones, and has only ten to go.

The book he is reading is a facsimile of an early edition of Goethe’s
Faust.
The nervous angular Fraktur letters goose-step across pages of paper-thin platinum.

The
Faust
had been printed electrolytically and, with several thousand similarly worthwhile books, sealed in an argon-filled chamber and carefully lost, in 2012 A.D.; a very wealthy man’s legacy to the distant future.

In 2012 A.D., Polaris had been the pole star. Men eventually got to Polaris and built a small city on a frosty planet there. By that time, they weren’t dating by prophets’ births any more, but it would have been around 4900 A.D. The pole star by then, because of precession of the equinoxes, was a dim thing once called Gamma Cephei. The celestial pole kept reeling around, past Deneb and Vega and through barren patches of sky around Hercules and Draco; a patient clock but not the slowest one of use, and when it came back to the region of Polaris, then 26,000 years had passed and men had come back from the stars, to stay, and the book-filled chamber had shifted 130 meters on the floor of the Pacific, had rolled onto a shallow trench, and eventually was buried in an underwater landslide.

The thirty-seventh time this slow clock ticked, men had moved the Pacific, not because they had to, and had found the chamber, opened it up, identified the books and carefully sealed them up again. Some things by then were more important to men than the accumulation of knowledge: in half of one more circle of the poles would come the millionth anniversary of the written word. They could wait a few millennia.

As the anniversary, as nearly as they could reckon it, approached, they caused to be born two individuals: Nine-hover (nominally female) and Three-phasing (nominally male). Three-phasing was born to learn how to read and speak. He was the first human being to study these skills in more than a quarter of a million years.

Three-phasing has read the first half of
Faust
forwards and, for amusement and exercise, is reading the second half backwards. He is singing as he reads, lisping.

“Fain’ Looee w’mun... wif all’r die-mun ringf... “ He has not put in his teeth because they make his gums hurt.

Because he is a child of two hundred, he is polite when his father interrupts his reading and singing. His father’s “voice” is an arrangement of logic and aesthetic that appears in Three-phasing’s mind. The flavor is lost by translating into words:

“Three-phasing my son-ly atavism of tooth and vocal cord,” sarcastically in the reverent mode, “Couldst tear thyself from objects of manifest symbol, and visit to share/help/learn, me?”

“?” He responds, meaning “with/with/of what?”

Withholding mode: “Concerning thee: past, future.”

He shuts the book without marking his place. It would never occur to him to mark his place, since he remembers perfectly the page he stops on, as well as every word preceding, as well as every event, no matter how trivial, that he has observed from the precise age of one year. In this respect, at least, he is normal.

He thinks the proper coordinates as he steps over the mover-transom, through a microsecond of black, and onto his father’s mover-transom, about four thousand kilometers away on a straight line through the crust and mantle of the earth.

Ritual mode: “As ever, father.” The symbol he uses for “father” is purposefully wrong, chiding. Crude biological connotation.

His father looks cadaverous and has in fact been dead twice. In the infant’s small-talk mode he asks, “From crude babblings of what sort have I torn your interest?”

“The tale called
Faust,
of a man so named, never satisfied with {symbol for slow but continuous accretion} of his knowledge and power; written in the language of Prussia.”

“Also depended-ing on this strange word of immediacy, your Prussian language?”

“As most, yes. The word of ‘to be’:
sein.
Very important illusion in this and related languages/cultures; that events happen at the ‘time’ of perception, infinitesimal midpoint between past and future.”