The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (27 page)

“I don’t know,” Bob says slowly. “Will we have time for anything else? I mean, the world must be pretty strange. Like to see some of it.”

“Of course; sure. But the rest of the world is pretty much like my place here. Nobody goes outside any more. There isn’t any air.” He doesn’t want to tell them how the air was lost, which might disturb them, but they seem to accept that as part of the distant future.

“Uh, George.” Sarah is blushing. “We’d also like, uh, some time to ourselves.

Without anybody... inside our minds.”

“Yes, I understand perfectly. You will have your own room, and plenty of time to yourselves.” Three-phasing neglects to say that there is no such thing as privacy in a telepathic society.

But sex is another thing they don’t have any more. They’re almost as curious about that as they are about books.

So the kindly men of the future gave Bob and Sarah Graham plenty of time to themselves: Bob and Sarah reciprocated. Through the Dawn couple’s eyes and brains, humanity shared again the visions of Fielding and Melville and Dickens and Shakespeare and almost a dozen others. And as for the 98% more, that they didn’t have time to read or that were in foreign languages—Three-phasing got the hang of it and would spend several millennia entertaining those who were amused by this central illusion of literature: that there could be order, that there could be beginnings and endings and logical workings-out in between; that you could count on the third act or the last chapter to tie things up. They knew how profound an illusion this was because each of them knew every other living human with an intimacy and accuracy far superior to that which even Shakespeare could bring to the study of even himself. And as for Sarah and as for Bob:

Anxiety can throw a person’s ovaries ‘way off schedule. On that beach in California, Sarah was no more pregnant than Bob was. But up there in the future, some somatic tension finally built up to the breaking point, and an egg went sliding down the left Fallopian tube, to be met by a wiggling intruder approximately halfway; together they were the first manifestation of organism that nine months later, or a million years earlier, would be christened Douglas MacArthur Graham.

This made a problem for time, or Time, which is neither like a rubber band nor like a spring; nor even like a river nor a carrier wave—but which, like all of these things, can be deformed by certain stresses. For instance, two people going into the future and three coming back on the same time-casting beam.

In an earlier age, when time travel was more common, time-casters would have made sure that the baby, or at least its aborted embryo, would stay in the future when the mother returned to her present. Or they could arrange for the mother to stay in the future.

But these subtleties had long been forgotten when Nine-hover relearned the dead art. So Sarah went back to her present with a hitch-hiker, an interloper, firmly imbedded in the lining of her womb. And its dim sense of life set up a kind of eddy in the flow of time, that Sarah had to share.

The mathematical explanation is subtle, and can’t be comprehended by those of us who synapse with fewer than four degrees of freedom. But the end effect is clear: Sarah had to experience all of her own life backwards, all the way back to that embrace on the beach. Some highlights were:

In 1992, slowly dying of cancer, in a mental hospital.

In 1979, seeing Bob finally succeed at suicide on the American Plan, not quite finishing his 9,527th bottle of liquor.

In 1970, having her only son returned in a sealed casket from a country she’d never heard of.

In the 1960’s, helplessly watching her son become more and more neurotic because of something that no one could name.

In 1953, Bob coming home with one foot, the other having been lost to frostbite; never having fired a shot in anger.

In 1952, the agonizing breech presentation.

Like her son, Sarah would remember no details of the backward voyage through her life. But the scars of it would haunt her forever.

They were kissing on the beach.

Sarah dropped the blanket and made a little noise. She started crying and slapped Bob as hard as she could, then ran on alone, up to the cabin.

Bob watched her progress up the hill with mixed feelings. He took a healthy slug from the bourbon bottle, to give him an excuse to wipe his own eyes.

He could go sit on the beach and finish the bottle; let her get over it by herself. Or he could go comfort her.

He tossed the bottle away, the gesture immediately making him feel stupid, and followed her. Later that night she apologized, saying she didn’t know what had gotten into her.

JACK DANN

Jack Dann has written or edited over fifty books, many dealing with humanity’s own
consciousness and its role in comprehending the universe. His novels include the
international best-seller
The Memory Cathedral,
about the travels of Leonardo da Vinci
outside his native Italy and the changes his fertile mind brings to other countries. Other
works include
The Man Who Melted,
in which three Nebula-nominated novellas about
a future society under assault by its citizens are woven into a story of an amnesiac man
searching for his wife. Dann collaborated with Jack C. Haldeman II on the novel
High Steel,
which took ruthless American corporations into space and pitted them against a
Native American protagonist trying to hold on to his history while working out in space.

His short fiction was recently collected in the anthology
Jubilee,
which features the title
story about the reality
-
altering effects of an alien consciousness attempting to contact
Earth. Dann’s work has been compared to that of Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis
Carroll, Carlos Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Mark Twain. He is a
recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Australian Aurealis
Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (twice), and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa
Fantastica award. He has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed
Knight).

Dann takes a metaphysical, existential look at time travel in “Timetipping,” mingling
his Jewish heritage with a world where people and things slip in and out of different
times every instant of the day, and a person can find himself in a new dimension in the
blink of an eye. The hero of his story, an everyday sort just trying to get by, is stuck in
this world, but unlike everyone else, he watches everything around him change, while
never timetipping himself, and it is this singular point of view that the story is built on.

by Jack Dann

Since timetipping, everything moved differently. Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street.

Take Moishe Hodel, who was too old and fat to be climbing ladders; yet he insisted on climbing to the roof of his suburban house so that he could sit on the top of a stone-tuff church in Goreme six hundred years in the past. Instead of praying, he would sit and watch monks. He claimed that since time and space were
meshuggeneh
(what’s crazy in any other language?), he would search for a quick and Godly way to travel to synagogue. Let the goyim take the trains.

Of course, Paley Litwak, who was old enough to know something, knew from nothing when the world changed and everything went blip. His wife disappeared, and a new one returned in her place. A new Golde, one with fewer lines and dimples, one with starchy white hair and missing teeth.

Upon arrival all she said was, “This is almost right. You’re almost the same, Paley.

Still, you always go to shul?”

“Shul?” Litwak asked, resolving not to jump and scream and ask God for help. With all the changing, Litwak would stand straight and wait for God. “What’s a shul?”

“You mean you don’t know from shul, and yet you wear such a yarmulke on your head?” She pulled her babushka through her fingers. “A shul. A synagogue, a temple.

Do you pray?”

Litwak was not a holy man, but he could hold up his head and not be afraid to wink at God. Certainly he prayed. And in the following weeks Litwak found himself in shul more often than not—so she had an effect on him; after all, she was his wife. Where else was there to be? With God he had a one-way conversation—from Litwak’s mouth to God’s ears—but at home it was turned around. There, Litwak had no mouth, only ears.

How can you talk with a woman who thinks fornicating with other men is holy?

But Litwak was a survivor; with the rest of the world turned over and doing flip-flops, he remained the same. Not once did he trip into a different time, not even an hour did he lose or gain; and the only places he went were those he could walk to. He was the exception to the rule. The rest of the world was adrift; everyone was swimming by, blipping out of the past or future and into the present here or who-knows-where.

It was a new world. Every street was filled with commerce, every night was carnival.

Days were built out of strange faces, and nights went by so fast that Litwak remained in the synagogue just to smooth out time. But there was no time for Litwak, just services, and prayers, and holy smells.

Yet the world went on. Business almost as usual. There were still rabbis and chasids and grocers and cabalists; fat Hoffa, a congregant with a beard that would make a storybook Baal Shem jealous, even claimed that he knew a cabalist that had invented a new gemetria for foretelling everything concerning money.

“So who needs gemetria?” Litwak asked. “Go trip tomorrow and find out what’s doing.”

“Wrong,” said Hoffa as he draped his prayer shawl over his arm, waiting for a lull in the conversation to say the holy words before putting on the talis. “It does no good to go there if you can’t get back. And when you come back, everything is changed, anyway.

Who do you know that’s really returned? Look at you, you didn’t have gray hair and earlocks yesterday.” 

“Then that wasn’t
me
you saw. Anyway, if everybody but me is tripping and tipping back and forth, in and out of the devil’s mouth, so to speak, then what time do you have to use this new gemetria?”

Hoffa paused and said, “So the world must go on. You think it stops because heaven shakes it....”

“You’re so sure it’s heaven?”

“...but
you
can go see the cabalist; you’re stuck in the present, you sit on one line. Go talk to him; he speaks a passable Yiddish, and his wife walks around with a bare behind.”

“So how do you know he’s there now?” asked Litwak. “They come and go. Perhaps a Neanderthal or a
klezmer
from the future will take his place.”

“So? If he isn’t there, what matter? At least you know he’s somewhere else. No?

Everything goes on. Nothing gets lost. Everything fits, somehow. That’s what’s important.”

It took Litwak quite some time to learn the new logic of the times, but once learned, it became an advantage—especially when his pension checks didn’t arrive. Litwak became a fair second-story man, but he robbed only according to society’s logic and his own ethical system: one-half for the shul and the rest for Litwak.

Litwak found himself spending more time on the streets than in the synagogue, but by standing still on one line he could not help but learn. He was putting the world together, seeing where it was, would be, might be, might not be. When he became confused, he used logic.

And the days passed faster, even with praying and sleeping nights in the shul for more time. Everything whirled around him. The city was a moving kaleidoscope of colors from every period of history, all melting into different costumes as the thieves and diplomats and princes and merchants strolled down the cobbled streets of Brooklyn.

With prisms for eyes, Litwak would make his way home through the crowds of slaves and serfs and commuters. Staking out fiefdoms in Brooklyn was difficult, so the slaves momentarily ran free, only to trip somewhere else where they would be again grabbed and raped and worked until they could trip again, and again and again until old logic fell apart. King’s Highway was a bad part of town. The Boys’ Club had been turned into a slave market and gallows room.

Litwak’s tiny apartment was the familiar knot at the end of the rope. Golde had changed again, but it was only a slight change. Golde kept changing as her different time lines met in Litwak’s kitchen, and bedroom. A few Goldes he liked, but change was gradual, and Goldes tended to run down. So for every sizzling Golde with blond-dyed hair, he suffered fifty or a thousand Goldes with missing teeth and croaking voices.

The latest Golde had somehow managed to buy a parakeet, which turned into a blue jay, a parrot with red feathers, and an ostrich, which provided supper. Litwak had discovered that smaller animals usually timetipped at a faster rate than men and larger animals; perhaps, he thought, it was a question of metabolism. Golde killed the ostrich before something else could take its place. Using logic and compassion, Litwak blessed it to make it kosher—the rabbi was not to be found, and he was a new chasid (imagine) who didn’t know Talmud from soap opera; worse yet, he read Hebrew with a Brooklyn twang, not unheard of with such new rabbis. Better that Litwak bless his own meat; let the rabbi bless goyish food.

Another meal with another Golde, this one dark-skinned and pimply, overweight and sagging, but her eyes were the color of the ocean seen from an airplane on a sunny day.

Litwak could not concentrate on food. There was a pitched battle going on two streets away, and he was worried about getting to shul.

“More soup?” Golde asked.

She had pretty hands, too, Litwak thought. “No, thank you,” he said before she disappeared.

In her place stood a squat peasant woman, hands and ragged dress still stained with rich, black soil. She didn’t scream or dash around or attack Litwak; she just wrung her hands and scratched her crotch. She spoke the same language, in the same low tones, that Litwak had listened to for several nights in shul. An Egyptian named Rhampsinitus had found his way into the synagogue, thinking it was a barbarian temple for Baiti, the clown god.