The Lost Bradbury (19 page)

“Oh, Steve. Steve.”

He was getting sick. His throat ached, tight and hot.

“It’s late, and the Guard is coming to check. We’d better say our last goodbye now—”

“No! Please, Ellen. Wait. Tomorrow.”

“It’ll be too late, then, if you kill McCracken.”

“I have a plan. It’ll work—I know it’ll work. Just so I can talk with you once more, Ellen. Just one more time.”

“All right. I know it’s impossible but—tomorrow night. Good luck. Good luck and good night.”

The machine stopped moving.

It hit him hard, the silence. He sat there, weaving dazedly in the chair, laughing a little at himself.

Well—he could always go back to walking in the fog. There was always a lot of fog. It walked beside you, behind you, ahead of you, and it never spoke. It touched you once in awhile on the face as if it understood. That was all. He’d walk all night, come home, undress in the dark, and turn in, praying that once he slept he would never wake up again. Never.

“I’ll forget we ever conversed late at night. I won’t remember you, Steve.”

* * * *

In the late afternoon of January 14th, Friday, Steve Temple shoved the paralysis gun inside his dirty jacket and zippered it.

No matter what action he took, Ellen Abbott would be destroyed today. An execution chamber awaited her if he didn’t move fast. And if he succeeded, then, too, the Ellen he had known would vanish like smoke-wisps in the wind.

He would have to kill McCracken very carefully so as to speak to Ellen again. He had to get to her once more before all of Time changed, reconsolidating itself for Eternity, to give her his final message. He thought it over. He knew exactly the words to say.

He started walking, fast.

It didn’t feel like his body, it felt like somebody else’s. Like getting used to a new suit, all tight and close and too warm for the weather, that’s how it was. Eyes, mouth, his whole face set in one lined pattern he didn’t dare break. Once he relaxed it would smash the whole thing.

He got his shoulders back where they hadn’t been in years, and he made fists of hands that had long ago relaxed in despair. It was almost like getting back a hunk of self-respect, clutching a gun, knowing you were going to change the whole damned future’s profile.

He had lungs again, and used them for breathing, and his heart wasn’t just lying still in his chest. It yelled, wanting out. Sky clear overhead, his heels came down, smooth, swift, on concrete walks. Suddenly it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Strange buildings rose around him, numbers passing the calm scrutiny of his eyes. He kept walking, because if he stopped he’d never get his legs going again.

This was the street.

Suddenly he began to cry. It was all hidden behind the tautened lines of his face, warm and bitter, his brain lurching against dim skull-walls, his throat retching down to where the heart slammed upon it. Warm water got half out of his eyes before he stopped it. A wind blew far away, whining, but it was a very calm day and there was no wind. Nothing must happen now to stop him, he thought. Nothing. He turned in at an alley, walked back to a side-door, opened it, went in.

He climbed a backstairs flight where the sun, his feet scraping softly and his heart-beat were the only tangibles in a crazy nightmare. He met nobody. He wished he would meet someone, someone who would say it was only play-acting, that he could toss the gun away, wake up. Nobody stopped him. Nobody said that to him. It was four long flights of sunlit stairs.

Inside his head, his brain ran around trying to put on the brakes, but there were none. He had to do it. You can’t let the same thing happen all over again, like Hitler. Hitler growing up. Nobody laying a hand on him, or pumping his vile body full of lead. McCracken. The guy
he was going to kill looked innocent. Everybody said how swell a guy he was. Yeah. But how about his sons, and
their
sons?

Ellen. Moving his lips. Ellen. His heart moved. Ellen. Moving his feet. And there was the door. Silver-lettered across it:

J. H. McCracken, U. S. Congressional Rep.

Pale and quiet, Steve opened the door and stood looking at a young man who sat behind a bleached walnut desk. A green metal triangle said: William McCracken. The Representative’s son.

One glimpse of a square, surprised face, mouth widened to the teeth, hands coming up to fend off the inevitable.

A pressure of a finger. The gun in Steve’s hand kept purring contentedly like a sleepy cat. He snapped it off, quick. All of it had taken an instant. One breath. One heartbeat. It was very easy and very hard to kill a man. He readjusted a stud on the paralyzing-tube.

From the next office, quietly: “Oh, Will, step in a moment, son. I want to check those Washington plane tickets again.”

Sometimes it’s hard to open a door, even an unlocked one.

That voice. J. H. McCracken, newly elected people’s man.

Tighter and quieter, Steve opened the second door and this time McCracken was closer when he said, “Did you get them all right, son? No slip-ups?”

Steve looked at McCracken’s broad back and said, “No slip-ups,” so that McCracken heard. He swiveled in his chair, came around, holding a lit cigar in one hand, fountain pen in the other. His eyes were blue and didn’t see the gun. “Oh, hello,” he said, smiling. Then he saw the gun and the smile went away inside him.

Steve said, “You don’t know me. You don’t know why you’re being killed because you always leaned over backward to be clean. You never cheated at marbles. Neither did I. That doesn’t mean someone else might not cheat five hundred years from now. Time’s verdict says you’re guilty. It’s too bad you don’t look like a crook, it would make it easier….”

McCracken opened his mouth, thinking he could talk him out of it.

The gun sang its little song. There was no more talk. Steve sweated. Not too much power. Just enough to weaken the cardiac nerves. Walking in close, Steve kept the weapon singing half-power. Snapping it off, he bent, inserted fingers in the grey vest. The heart was still there, weak. Fading.

He said something funny to the body: “Don’t die yet. Do me a favor—keep alive until I talk to Ellen again….”

Then he shuddered so violently it was enough to rip the flesh from his bones. Sick, teeth chattering, his eyes blurred, he dropped the gun, picked it up and began worrying. It was a long way to his room, to the typewriter and Ellen.

He had to make it, though. Somehow he’d cheat the future. He’d think of some way to keep Ellen for himself. Some way.

He got hold of his fear, held it in one place, kept it there. Opening the door, he came face to face with McCracken’s bewildered, office staff. Three women, two men coming to say their goodbyes, frozen in shocked attitudes over the son’s body.

Temple fell back in the seat, mouth full of saliva he climbed out onto a fire escape, shut it, started down. Someone flung up the window behind him, yelled. Someone opened it and came down after him. Their feet made an iron clangor on the metal ladders.

Leaping to the alleyway, Steve fled for the corner, yanked open the door of the first cab he found, flopped in, shouting directions. Two of McCracken’s men rounded the alley corner, shouting. The cab slid away from the curb, smooth and quick. The cabbie hadn’t heard a thing.

Temple fell back in the seat, mouth full of saliva he couldn’t swallow, so he spat it out. He didn’t feel like a book hero. He only felt cold scared and small, crouching there. He had changed the future. Nobody knew it but himself and Ellen Abbott.

And she would forget.

“Wait, Ellen. Wait for me, please.”

So this is what it’s like to save a world. To have frozen insides and hot tears on your face and hands that shake violently if you quit grasping your knees.
Ellen!

The cab hurled itself to a stop in front of his hotel. He staggered out, saying wild, silly things to nobody. He heard the cabbie yell, but he ran ahead, anyway. He got inside, ran upstairs.

He unlocked his door and then stood there, afraid to open it. Afraid to look inside his room. The cabbie was coming up the steps behind him, cursing. What if everything was too late…?

Sucking his breath in, Steve opened the door.

It was there! The typewriter was still there!

Steve slammed the door, locked it, and then in one insane stumbling movement he was across the room to the machine, yelling and typing simultaneously.

“Ellen! Ellen Abbott! Ellen, I did it. It’s all over. Are you still there?”

A pause. Looking at the blank, horribly blank paper, his blood pounding through his veins until they ached. It seemed centuries before the typewriter keys moved and then it said:

“Oh, Steve, you succeeded. You did it for us. And I hardly know what to say. There’s no reward for you. I can’t even help you, and I wish I could. Things are changing already, getting misty and melting like waxen figures, flowing away in the Time Stream….”

“Hold on a while longer, Ellen. Please!”

“Before, we had all of Time, Steve. Now, I can’t hold reforming matter and moments. It’s like snatching at stars!”

Down below, in a sunlit street, a car braked to a stop. Voices broke out of the car, a metal door rapped home. McCracken’s men, coming to find Steve Temple. Maybe, with guns—

“Ellen! One last thing. Here, in my time, one of your ancestors must have lived—somewhere! Where, Ellen?”

“Don’t hurt yourself, Steve. Don’t you understand. It’s no use!”

“Please. Tell me. Some one I could speak to, someone I could see. Tell me. Where?”

“Cincinnati. Her name is Helen Anson. But—”

Heavy footsteps pounding in the hotel hall, muffled voices.

“The address is 6987 C Street….”

Then—the time was up. Across the city, McCracken lay pulsing out his last life. And here every beat of his fading heart acted upon Ellen and Steve Temple.

“Steve. Steve, I—”

Then he gave her his last message. The thing he had wanted to say for a long time, from inside him. The door was being beaten by fists and shoulders as he said it, but he said it anyhow, in the desperation of the last seconds:

“Ellen. Ellen, I love you. Hear me, Ellen! I love you! Don’t go away now. Don’t!”

He kept typing it over and over and over again, and he was crying like a kid and his throat couldn’t say it all, and he kept typing it over and over….

…until the keys misted, dissolved, melted and flowed away under his fingers, and he kept typing it until all the hard, bright wonder of the machine was gone and his hands fell through empty air to rap upon the top of an empty table.

And when they broke the door open, even then he didn’t stop crying….

 
JONAH OF THE JOVE-RUN

Previously uncollected, “Jonah of the Jove-Run” was originally titled by Bradbury as “The Calculator.” It was published in its current title in February 1948 in
Planet Stories
.

* * * *

Nibley stood in the changing shadows and sounds of Marsport, watching the great supply ship TERRA being entered and left by a number of officials and mechanics. Something had happened. Something was wrong. There were a lot of hard faces and not much talk. There was a bit of swearing and everybody looked up at the night sky of Mars, waiting.

But nobody came to Nibley for his opinion or his help. He stood there, a very old man, with a slack-gummed face and eyes like the little bubbly stalks of crayfish looking up at you from a clear creek. He stood there fully neglected. He stood there and talked to himself.

“They don’t want me, or need me,” he said. “Machines are better, nowadays. Why should they want an old man like me with a taste for Martian liquor? They shouldn’t! A machine isn’t old and foolish, and doesn’t get drunk!”

Way out over the dead sea bottoms, Nibley sensed something moving. Part of himself was suddenly awake and sensitive. His small sharp eye moved in his withered face. Something inside of his small skull reacted and he shivered. He
knew.
He knew that what these men were watching and waiting for would never come.

Nibley edged up to one of the astrogators from the TERRA. He touched him on the shoulder. “Say,” he said. “I’m busy,” said the astrogator. “I know,” said Nibley, “but if you’re waiting for that small repair rocket to come through with the extra auxiliary asteroid computator on it, you’re wasting your time.”

“Like hell,” said the astrogator, glaring at the old man. “That repair rocket’s got to come through, and quick; we need it. It’ll get here.”

“No, it won’t,” said Nibley, sadly, and shook his head and closed his eyes. “It just crashed, a second ago, out on the dead sea bottom. I—
felt
—it crash. I sensed it going down. It’ll never come through.”

“Go away, old man,” said the astrogator. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. It’ll come through. Sure, sure, it has to come through.” The astrogator turned away and looked at the sky, smoking a cigarette.

“I know it as a fact,” said Nibley, but the young astrogator wouldn’t listen. He didn’t want to hear the truth. The truth was not a pleasant thing. Nibley went on, to himself. “I know it for a fact, just like I was always able to know the course of meteors with my mind, or the orbits or parabolas of asteroids. I tell you—”