The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (7 page)

“Why... yeah. Where—”

“I ate it,” Vanning said, and retired to the couch, where he settled himself for a nap.

Hatton gave him a long, hating look. The officers tore in—

They passed by the locker, after a casual glance inside. The X-rays revealed nothing, in walls, floor, ceiling, or articles of furniture. The other offices were searched, too.

Vanning applauded the painstaking job.

In the end, Hatton gave up. There was nothing else he could do.

“I’ll clap suit on you tomorrow,” Vanning promised. “Same time I get a habeas corpus on MacIlson.”

“Step to hell,” Hatton growled.

“ ’By now.”

Vanning waited till his unwanted guests had departed. Then, chuckling quietly, he went to the locker and opened it.

The copper-colored egg that represented the suedette suitcase had vanished. Vanning groped inside the locker, finding nothing.

The significance of this didn’t strike Vanning at first. He swung the cabinet around so that it faced the window. He looked again, with identical results.

The locker was empty.

Twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable ore bonds had disappeared.

Vanning started to sweat. He picked up the metal box and shook it. That didn’t help.

He carried it across the room and set it up in another corner, returning to search the floor with painstaking accuracy.
Holy—

Hatton?

No. Vanning hadn’t let the locker out of his sight from the time the police had entered till they left. An officer had swung open the cabinet’s door, looked inside, and closed it again. After that the door had remained shut, till just now.

The bonds were gone.

So was the abnormal little creature Vanning had crushed. All of which meant—what?

Vanning approached the locker and closed it, clicking the latch into position. Then he reopened it, not really expecting that the copper-colored egg would reappear.

He was right. It didn’t.

Vanning staggered to the visor and called Gallegher.

“Whatzit? Huh? Oh. What do you want?” The scientist’s gaunt face appeared on the screen, rather the worse for wear. “I got a hangover. Can’t use thiamin, either, I’m allergic to it. How’d your case come out?”

“Listen,” Gallegher said urgently, “I put something inside that damn locker of yours and now it’s gone.”

“The locker? That’s funny.”

“No! The thing I put in it. A... a suitcase.”

Gallegher shook his head thoughtfully. “You never know, do you? I remember once I made a—”

“The hell with that. I want that suitcase back!”

“An heirloom?” Gallegher suggested.

“No, there’s money in it.”

“Wasn’t that a little foolish of you? There hasn’t been a bank failure since 1999.

Never suspected you were a miser, Vanning. Like to have the stuff around, so you can run it through your birdlike fingers, eh?”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m
trying,
” Gallegher corrected, “But I’ve built up an awful resistance over a period of years. It takes time. Your call’s already set me back two and a half drinks. I must put an extension on the siphon, so I can teletalk and guzzle at the same time.”

Vanning almost chattered incoherently into the mike. “My suitcase! What happened to it? I want it back.” 

“Well, I haven’t got it.”

“Can’t you find out where it is?”

“Dunno. Tell me the details. I’ll see what I can figure out.”

Vanning complied, revising his story as caution prompted.

“O.K.” Gallegher said at last, rather unwillingly. “I hate working out theories, but just as a favor.... My diagnosis will cost you fifty credits.”

“What? Now listen—”

“Fifty credits,” Gallegher repeated unflinchingly. “Or no prognosis.”

“How do I know you can get it back for me?”

“Chances are I can’t. Still, maybe... I’ll have to go over to Mechanistra and use some of their machines. They charge a good bit, too. But I’ll need forty-brain-power calculators—”

“O.K., O.K.!” Vanning growled. “Hop to it. I want that suitcase back.”

“What interests me is that little bug you squashed. In fact, that’s the only reason I’m tackling your problem. Life in the fourth dimension—” Gallegher trailed off, murmuring. His face faded from the screen. After a while Vanning broke the connection.

He reexamined the locker, finding nothing new. Yet the suedette suitcase had vanished from it, into thin air. Oh, hell!

Brooding over his sorrows, Vanning shrugged into a topcoat and dined ravenously at the Manhattan Roof. He felt very sorry for himself.

The next day he felt even sorrier. A call to Gallegher had given the blank signal, so Vanning had to mark time. About noon MacIlson dropped in. His nerves were shot.

“You took your time in springing me,” he started immediately. “Well, what now?

Have you got a drink anywhere around?”

“You don’t need a drink,” Vanning grunted. “You’ve got a skinful already, by the look of you. Run down to Florida and wait till this blows over.”

“I’m sick of waiting. I’m going to South America. I want some credits.” 

“Wait’ll I arrange to cash the bonds.”

“I’ll take the bonds. A fair half, as we agreed.”

Vanning’s eyes narrowed. “And walk out into the hands of the police? Sure.”

MacIlson looked uncomfortable. “I’ll admit I made a boner. But this time—no, I’ll play smart now.”

“You’ll wait, you mean.”

“There’s a friend of mine on the roof parking lot, in a helicopter. I’ll go up and slip him the bonds, and then I’ll just walk out. The police won’t find anything on me.”

“I said no,” Vanning repeated. “It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous as things are. If they locate the bonds—”

“They won’t.”

“Where’d you hide ’em?”

“That’s my business.”

MacIlson glowered nervously. “Maybe. But they’re in this building. You couldn’t have finagled ’em out yesterday before the cops came. No use playing your luck too far.

Did they use X-rays?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I heard Counsel Hatton’s got a batch of experts going over the blueprints on this building. He’ll find your safe. I’m getting out of here before he does.”

Vanning patted the air. “You’re hysterical. I’ve taken care of you, haven’t I? Even though you almost screwed the whole thing up.”

“Sure,” MacIlson said, pulling at his lip. “But I—” He chewed a finger nail. “Oh, damn! I’m sitting on the edge of a volcano with termites under me. I can’t stay here and wait till they find the bonds. They can’t extradite me from South America—where I’m going, anyway.”

“You’re going to wait,” Vanning said firmly. “That’s your best chance.”

There was suddenly a gun in MacIlson’s hand. “You’re going to give me half the bonds. Right now. I don’t trust you a little bit. You figure you can stall me along—hell, get those bonds!”

“No,” Vanning said.

“I’m not kidding.”

“I know you aren’t. I can’t get the bonds.”

“Eh? Why not?”

“Ever heard of a time lock?” Vanning asked, his eyes watchful. “You’re right; I put the suitcase in a concealed safe. But I can’t open that safe till a certain number of hours have passed.”

“Mm-m.” MacIlson pondered. “When—”

“Tomorrow.”

“All right. You’ll have the bonds for me then?”

“If you want them. But you’d better change your mind. It’d be safer.”

For answer MacIlson grinned over his shoulder as he went out. Vanning sat motionless for a long time. He was, frankly, scared.

The trouble was, MacIlson was a manic-depressive type. He’d kill. Right now, he was cracking under the strain, and imagining himself a desperate fugitive. Well—precautions would be advisable.

Vanning called Gallegher again, but got no answer. He left a message on the recorder and thoughtfully looked into the locker again. It was empty, depressingly so.

That evening Gallegher let Vanning into his laboratory. The scientist looked both tired and drunk. He waved comprehensively toward a table, covered with scraps of paper.

“What a headache you gave me! If I’d known the principles behind that gadget, I’d have been afraid to tackle it. Sit down. Have a drink. Got the fifty credits?”

Silently Vanning handed over the coupons. Gallegher shoved them into Monstro. 

“Fine. Now—” He settled himself on the couch. “Now we start. The fifty-credit question.”

“Can I get the suitcase back?”

“No,” Gallegher said flatly. “At least, I don’t see how it can be worked. It’s in another spatiotemporal sector.”

“Just what does that mean?”

“It means the locker works something like a telescope, only the thing isn’t merely visual. The locker’s a window, I figure. You can reach through it as well as look through it. It’s an opening into Now plus x.”

Vanning scowled. “So far you haven’t said anything.”

“So far all I’ve got is theory, and that’s all I’m likely to get. Look. I was wrong originally. The things that went into the locker didn’t appear in another space because there would have been a spatial constant. I mean, they wouldn’t have got smaller. Size is size. Moving a one-inch cube from here to Mars wouldn’t make it any larger or smaller.”

“What about a different density in the surrounding medium? Wouldn’t that crush an object?”

“Sure, and it’d stay squashed. It wouldn’t return to its former size and shape when it was taken out of the locker again. X plus y never equal xy. But x times y—”

“So?”

“That’s a pun,” Gallegher broke off to explain. “The things we put in the locker went into time. Their time-rate remained constant, but not the spatial relationships. Two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time. Ergo, your suitcase went into a different time. Now plus x. And what x represents I don’t know, though I suspect a few million years.”

Vanning looked dazed. “The suitcase is a million years in the future?”

“Dunno how far, but—I’d say plenty. I haven’t enough factors to finish the equation. I reasoned by induction, mostly, and the results are screwy as hell. Einstein would have loved it. My theorem shows that the universe is expanding and contracting at the same time.” 

“What’s that got to do—”

“Motion is relative,” Gallegher continued inexorably. “That’s a basic principle. Well, the universe
is
expanding, spreading out like a gas, but its component parts are shrinking at the same time. The
parts
don’t actually grow, you know—not the suns and atoms.

They just run away from the central point. Galloping off in all directions... where was I?

Oh. Actually, the universe, taken as a unit, is shrinking.”

“So it’s shrinking. Where’s my suitcase?”

“I told you. In the future. Deductive reasoning showed that. It’s beautifully simple and logical. And it’s quite impossible of proof, too. A hundred, a thousand, a million years ago the Earth—the universe—was larger than it is now. And it continues to contract. Sometime in the future the Earth will be just half as small as it is now. Only we won’t notice it because the universe will be proportionately smaller.”

Gallegher went on dreamily. “We put a workbench into the locker, so it emerged sometime in the future. The locker’s an open window into a different time, as I told you.

Well, the bench was affected by the conditions of that period. It shrank, after we gave it a few seconds to soak up the entropy or something. Do I mean entropy? Allah knows.

Oh, well.”

“It turned into a pyramid.”

“Maybe there’s geometric distortion, too. Or it might be a visual illusion. Perhaps we can’t get the exact focus. I doubt if things will really look different in the future—except that they’ll be smaller—but we’re using a window into the fourth dimension. We’re taking a pleat in time. It must be like looking through a prism. The alteration in size is real, but the shape and color are altered to our eyes by the fourth-dimensional prism.”

“The whole point, then, is that my suitcase is in the future. Eh? But why did it disappear from the locker?”

“What about that little creature you squashed? Maybe he had pals. They wouldn’t be visible till they came into the very narrow focus of the whatchmacallit, but—figure it out. Sometime in the future, in a hundred or a thousand or a million years, a suitcase suddenly appears out of thin air. One of our descendants investigates. You kill him. His pals come along and carry the suitcase away, out of range of the locker. In space it may be anywhere, and the time factor’s an unknown quantity. Now plus x. It’s a time locker.

Well?”

“Hell!” Vanning exploded. “So that’s all you can tell me? I’m supposed to chalk it up to profit and loss?” 

“Uh-huh. Unless you want to crawl into the locker yourself after the suitcase. God knows where you’d come out, though. The composition of the air probably would have changed in a few thousand years. There might be other alterations, too.”

“I’m not that crazy.”

So there he was. The bonds were gone, beyond hope of redemption. Vanning could resign himself to that loss, once he knew the securities wouldn’t fall into the hands of the police. But MacIlson was another matter, especially after a bullet spattered against the glassolex window of Vanning’s office.

An interview with MacIlson had proved unsatisfactory. The defaulter was convinced that Vanning was trying to bilk him. He was removed forcibly, yelling threats. He’d go to the police—he’d confess—

Let him. There was no proof. The hell with him. But, for safety’s sake, Vanning clapped an injunction on his quondam client.

It didn’t land. MacIlson clipped the official on the jaw and fled. Now, Vanning suspected, he lurked in dark corners, armed, and anxious to commit suicide. Obviously a manic-depressive type.

Vanning took a certain malicious pleasure in demanding a couple of plainclothes men to act as his guards. Legally, he was within his rights, since his life had been threatened.

Until MacIlson was under sufficient restriction, Vanning would be protected. And he made sure that his guards were two of the best shots on the Manhattan force.

He also found out that they had been told to keep their eyes peeled for the missing bonds and the suedette suitcase. Vanning televised Counsel Hatton and grinned at the screen.