The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (8 page)

“Any luck yet?”

“What do you mean?”

“My watchdogs. Your spies. They won’t find the bonds, Hatton. Better call ’em off.

Why make the poor devils do two jobs at once?”

“One job would be enough. Finding the evidence. If MacIlson drilled you, I wouldn’t be too unhappy.” 

“Well, I’ll see you in court,” Vanning said. “You’re prosecuting Watson, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Are you waiving scop?”

“On the jurors? Sure. I’ve got this case in the bag.”

“That’s what you think,” Hatton said, and broke the beam.

Chuckling, Vanning donned his topcoat, collected the guards, and headed for court.

There was no sign of MacIlson—

Vanning won the case, as he had expected. He returned to his offices, collected a few unimportant messages from the switchboard girl, and walked toward his private suite.

As he opened the door, he saw the suedette suitcase on the carpet in one corner.

He stopped, hand frozen on the latch. Behind him he could hear the heavy footsteps of the guards. Over his shoulder Vanning said, “Wait a minute,” and dodged into the office, slamming and locking the door behind him. He caught the tail end of a surprised question.

The suitcase. There it was, unequivocally. And, quite as unequivocally, the two plainclothes men, after a very brief conference, were hammering on the door, trying to break it down.

Vanning turned green. He took a hesitant step forward, and then saw the locker, in the corner to which he had moved it. The time locker—

That was it. If he shoved the suitcase inside the locker, it would become unrecognizable. Even if it vanished again, that wouldn’t matter. What mattered was the vital importance of getting rid—immediately!—of incriminating evidence.

The door rocked on its hinges. Vanning scuttled toward the suitcase and picked it up.

From the corner of his eye he saw movement.

In the air above him, a hand had appeared. It was the hand of a giant, with an immaculate cuff fading into emptiness. Its huge fingers were reaching down—

Vanning screamed and sprang away. He was too slow. The hand descended, and Vanning wriggled impotently against the palm.

The hand contracted into a fist. When it opened, what was left of Vanning dropped squashily to the carpet, which it stained.

The hand withdrew into nothingness. The door fell in and the plainclothes men stumbled over it as they entered.

It didn’t take long for Hatton and his cohorts to arrive. Still, there was little for them to do except clean up the mess. The suedette bag, containing twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable bonds, was carried off to a safer place. Vanning’s body was scraped up and removed to the morgue. Photographers flashed pictures, fingerprint experts insufflated their white powder, X-ray men worked busily. It was all done with swift efficiency, so that within an hour the office was empty and the door sealed.

Thus there were no spectators to witness the advent of a gigantic hand that appeared from nothingness, groped around as though searching for something, and presently vanished once more—

The only person who could have thrown light on the matter was Gallegher, and his remarks were directed to Monstro, in the solitude of his laboratory. All he said was:

“So that’s why that workbench materialized for a few minutes here yesterday. Hm-m-m. Now plus x—and x equals about a week. Still, why not? It’s all relative. But—I never thought the universe was shrinking
that
fast!”

He relaxed on the couch and siphoned a double martini.

“Yeah, that’s it,” he murmured after a while. “
Whew!
I guess Vanning must have been the only guy who ever reached into the middle of next week and—killed himself! I think I’ll get tight.”

And he did.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

A sense of the cosmic underlies much of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and manifests in a
variety of forms: the computer-accelerated working out of prophecy in “The Nine
Billion Names of God”; the sentient telecommunications network given the spark of life
in “Dial F for Frankenstein”; and the mysterious extraterrestrial overseers guiding
human destiny in the novelization of his screenplay for
2001: A Space Odyssey.

Clarke’s best-known story,
2001,
and its sequels,
2010: Odyssey Two
and
2061: Odyssey Three,
represent the culmination of ideas on man’s place in the universe
introduced in his 1951 story, “The Sentinel,” and elaborated more fully in
Childhood’s End,
his elegiac novel on humankind’s maturation as a species and ascent to a greater
purpose in the universal scheme.

Clarke grounds the cosmic mystery of these stories in hard science. Degreed in
physics and mathematics, Clarke was a contributor to numerous scientific journals and
first proposed the idea for the geosynchronous orbiting communications satellite in
1945. Some of his best known work centers around the solution to a scientific problem
or enigma.
A Fall of Moondust
tells of efforts to rescue a ship trapped under unusual
conditions on the lunar surface.
The Fountains of Paradise
concerns the engineering
problems encountered building an earth elevator to supply orbiting space stations. His
Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning
Rendezvous with Rama
extrapolated his solid
scientific inquiry into provocative new territory, telling of the human discovery of an
apparently abandoned alien space ship and human attempts to understand its advanced
scientific principles. Clarke’s other novels include
Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars, Earthlight, Imperial Earth,
and
The Deep Range,
a futuristic exploration of undersea life
in terms similar to his speculations on space travel. He has written the novels
Islands in the Sky
and
Dolphin Island
for young readers, and his short fiction has been collected
in
Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales from the White Hart, The Wind from the Sun,
and others. His numerous books of nonfiction include his award-winning
The Exploration of Space,
and the autobiographical
Astounding Days.
Clarke was knighted
in 2000.

The plot of traveling back to prehistoric times, particularly to the time of the
dinosaur, followed soon after the first time travel stories were written. Arthur C.

Clarke’s cunningly plotted story extrapolates one of these encounters both from the
present point of view and, at the same time, millions of years in the past. His story also
gives rise to the idea that perhaps prehistoric creatures wouldn’t be as afraid of man as
one might think.

by Arthur C. Clarke

The river was dead and the lake already dying when the monster had come down the dried-up watercourse and turned onto the desolate mud-flats. There were not many places where it was safe to walk, and even where the ground was hardest the great pistons of its feet sank a foot or more beneath the weight they carried. Sometimes it had paused, surveying the landscape with quick, birdlike movements of its head. Then it had sunk even deeper into the yielding soil, so that fifty million years later men could judge with some accuracy the duration of its halts.

For the waters had never returned, and the blazing sun had baked the mud to rock.

Later still the desert had poured over all this land, sealing it beneath protecting layers of sand. And later—very much later—had come Man.

“Do you think,” shouted Barton above the din, “that Professor Fowler became a palaeontologist because he likes playing with pneumatic drills? Or did he acquire the taste afterward?”

“Can’t hear you!” yelled Davis, leaning on his shovel in a most professional manner.

He glanced hopefully at his watch.

“Shall I tell him it’s dinnertime? He can’t wear a watch while he’s drilling, so he won’t know any better.”

“I doubt if it will work,” Barton shrieked. “He’s got wise to us now and always adds an extra ten minutes. But it will make a change from this infernal digging.”

With noticeable enthusiasm the two geologists downed tools and started to walk toward their chief. As they approached, he shut off the drill and relative silence descended, broken only by the throbbing of the compressor in the background.

“About time we went back to camp, Professor,” said Davis, wristwatch held casually behind his back. “You know what cook says if we’re late.”

Professor Fowler, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S., mopped some, but by no means all, of the ocher dust from his forehead. He would have passed anywhere as a typical navvy, and the occasional visitors to the site seldom recognized the Vice-President of the Geological Society in the brawny, half-naked workman crouching over his beloved pneumatic drill.

It had taken nearly a month to clear the sandstone down to the surface of the petrified mud-flats. In that time several hundred square feet had been exposed, revealing a frozen snapshot of the past that was probably the finest yet discovered by palaeontology. Some scores of birds and reptiles had come here in search of the receding water, and left their footsteps as a perpetual monument eons after their bodies had perished. Most of the prints had been identified, but one—the largest of them all—was new to science. It belonged to a beast which must have weighed twenty or thirty tons: and Professor Fowler was following the fifty-million-year-old spoor with all the emotions of a big-game hunter tracking his prey. There was even a hope that he might yet overtake it; for the ground must have been treacherous when the unknown monster went this way and its bones might still be near at hand, marking the place where it had been trapped like so many creatures of its time.

Despite the mechanical aids available, the work was very tedious. Only the upper layers could be removed by the power tools, and the final uncovering had to be done by hand with the utmost care. Professor Fowler had good reason for his insistence that he alone should do the preliminary drilling, for a single slip might cause irreparable harm.

The three men were halfway back to the main camp, jolting over the rough road in the expedition’s battered jeep, when Davis raised the question that had been intriguing the younger men ever since the work had begun.

“I’m getting a distinct impression,” he said, “that our neighbors down the valley don’t like us, though I can’t imagine why. We’re not interfering with them, and they might at least have the decency to invite us over.”

“Unless, of course, it
is
a war research plant,” added Barton, voicing a generally accepted theory.

“I don’t think so,” said Professor Fowler mildly. “Because it so happens that I’ve just had an invitation myself. I’m going there tomorrow.”

If his bombshell failed to have the expected result, it was thanks to his staff’s efficient espionage system. For a moment Davis pondered over this confirmation of his suspicions; then he continued with a slight cough:

“No one else has been invited, then?”

The Professor smiled at his pointed hint. “No,” he said. “It’s a strictly personal invitation. I know you boys are dying of curiosity but, frankly, I don’t know any more about the place than you do. If I learn anything tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about it. But at least we’ve found out who’s running the establishment.”

His assistants pricked up their ears. “Who is it?” asked Barton. “My guess was the Atomic Development Authority.” 

“You may be right,” said the Professor. “At any rate, Henderson and Barnes are in charge.”

This time the bomb exploded effectively; so much so that Davis nearly drove the jeep off the road—not that that made much difference, the road being what it was.

“Henderson and Barnes? In
this
god-forsaken hole?”

“That’s right,” said the Professor gaily. “The invitation was actually from Barnes. He apologized for not contacting us before, made the usual excuses, and wondered if I could drop in for a chat.”

“Did he say what they are doing?”

“No; not a hint.”

“Barnes and Henderson?” said Barton thoughtfully. “I don’t know much about them except that they’re physicists. What’s their particular racket?”

“They’re
the
experts on low-temperature physics,” answered Davis. “Henderson was Director of the Cavendish for years. He wrote a lot of letters to
Nature
not so long ago.

If I remember rightly, they were all about Helium II.”

Barton, who didn’t like physicists and said so whenever possible, was not impressed.

“I don’t even know what Helium II is,” he said smugly. “What’s more, I’m not at all sure that I want to.”

This was intended for Davis, who had once taken a physics degree in, as he explained, a moment of weakness. The “moment” had lasted for several years before he had drifted into geology by rather devious routes, and he was always harking back to his first love.

“It’s a form of liquid helium that only exists at a few degrees above absolute zero. It’s got the most extraordinary properties—but, as far as I can see, none of them can explain the presence of two leading physicists in this corner of the globe.”

They had now arrived at the camp, and Davis brought the jeep to its normal crash-halt in the parking space. He shook his head in annoyance as he bumped into the truck ahead with slightly more violence than usual.

“These tires are nearly through. Have the new ones come yet?”

“Arrived in the ’copter this morning, with a despairing note from Andrews hoping that you’d make them last a full fortnight this time.’’ 

“Good! I’ll get them fitted this evening.”

The Professor had been walking a little ahead; now he dropped back to join his assistants.

“You needn’t have hurried, Jim,” he said glumly. “It’s corned beef again.”

It would be most unfair to say that Barton and Davis did less work because the Professor was away. They probably worked a good deal harder than usual, since the native laborers required twice as much supervision in the Chief’s absence. But there was no doubt that they managed to find time for a considerable amount of extra talking.