The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (11 page)

“Get up, Braker,” said Tony. “You, too, Yates.”

Yates rose, vaguely brushing dust from his pressure suit, his lips working over words that refused to emerge.

Braker’s voice was a hoarse, unbelieving whisper. His eyes were abnormally wide and fixed hypnotically on the skeleton.

“So that’s what we went through – for a damned classroom skeleton.” He repeated it. “For a damned classroom skeleton!”

He came to his feet, fighting to mold his strained face back to normal. “Just about back where we started, eh? Well,” he added in a shaking, bitter tone, “Merry Christmas.” He forced his lips into half-hearted cynicism.

Tony’s face relaxed. He drew in a full, much-needed breath of air. “Sure. Sure – Merry Christmas. Everybody. Including Amos – whoever he used to be.”

Nobody seemed to have anything to say. Or perhaps their thoughts were going back for the moment to a pre-asteroid world. Remembering. At least Masters was remembering, if the suffering, remorseful look on his face meant anything.

Tony broke it. “That’s that, isn’t it? Now we can go back to the ship. From there to Earth. Professor – Masters – start off.” He made a tired gesture.

Masters went ahead, without a backward look, carrying the gently breathing, but still unconscious girl. Overland stole a last look at the skeleton, at Amos, where he lay unknowing of the chaos the mere fact of his being there, white and perfect and wired together, and with a ring on his perfect tapering finger, had caused. Overland walked away hurriedly after Masters. Amos would stay where he was.

Tony smiled grimly at Braker. He pointed with his free hand.

“Want your ring back, Braker?”

Braker’s head jerked minutely. He stared at the ring, then back at Tony. His fists clenched at his sides. “
No!
”

Tony grinned – for the first time in three weeks.

“Then let’s get going.”

He made a gesture. Braker and Yates, walking side by side, went slowly for the ship, Tony following behind. He turned only once, and that was to look at his wrecked patrol ship, where it lay against the base of the mountain. A shudder passed down his spine. There was but one mystery that remained now. And its solution was coming to Tony Crow, in spite of his effort to shove its sheerly maddening implications into the back of his mind—

Professor Overland and Masters took Laurette to her room. Tony took the two outlaws to the lounge, wondering how he was going to secure them. Masters solved his problem by entering with a length of insulated electric wire. He said nothing, but wordlessly went to work securing Braker and Yates to the guide rail while Tony held the Hampton on them. After he had finished, Tony bluntly inspected the job. Masters winced, but he said nothing.

After they were out in the hall, going toward Laurette’s room, Masters stopped him. His face was white, strained in the half-darkness.

“I don’t know how to say this,” he began huskily.

“Say what?”

Masters’ eyes shifted, then, as if by a deliberate effort of will, came back.

“That I’m sorry.”

Tony studied him, noted the lines of suffering around his mouth, the shuddering pain in his eyes.

“Yeah, I know how you feel,” he muttered. “But I guess you made up for it when you tackled Braker and Yates. They might have been using electric wire on us by now.” He grinned lopsidedly, and clapped Masters on the arm. “Forget it, Masters. I’m with you all the way.”

Masters managed a smile, and let loose a long breath. He fell into step beside Tony’s hurrying stride. “Laurette’s O.K.”

“Well, lieutenant,” said Laurette, stretching lazily, and smiling up at him, “I guess I got weak in the knees at the last minute.”

“Didn’t we all!” He smiled ruefully. He dropped to his knees. She was still in her pressure suit and lying on the floor. He helped her to a sitting position, and then to her feet.

Overland chuckled, though there was a note of uneasy reminiscence in his tone. “Wait till I tell the boys at Lipton U. about this.”

“You’d better not,” Laurette warned. She added, “You broke down and admitted the ring was an omen. When a scientist gets superstitious—”

Tony broke in. “Weren’t we all?”

Masters said, dropping his eyes, “I guess we had good enough reason to be superstitious about it.” His hand went absently upward to his shoulder.

Overland frowned, and, hands behind his back, walked to the empty porthole. “All that work DeTosque, the Farr brothers, Morrell, and myself put in. There’s no reason to patch up the asteroids and try to prove they were all one world. But at the same time, there’s no proof – no absolute proof—” He clicked his tongue. Then he swung on Tony, biting speculatively at his lower lip, his eyes sharpening.

“There’s one thing that needs explaining which probably never will be explained, I guess. It’s too bad. Memory? Bah! That’s not the answer, lieutenant. You stood in the cave there, and you saw the skeleton, and somehow you
knew
it had existed before the human race, but was not
older
than the human race. It’s something else. You didn’t pick up the memory from the past – not over a hundred million years. What then?” He turned away, shaking his head, came back abruptly as Tony spoke, eyes sharpening.

“I’ll tell you why,” Tony said evenly.

His head moved up and down slowly, and his half-lidded eyes looked lingeringly out the porthole toward the mountain where his wrecked patrol ship lay. “Yes, I’ll tell you why.”

Laurette, Masters and Overland were caught up in tense silence by the strangeness of his tone.

He said faintly: “Laurette and I were trapped alive in the back of the cave when the two worlds crashed. We lived through it. I didn’t know she was back there, or course; she recovered consciousness later – at the right time, I’d say!” He grinned at her obliquely, then sobered again. “I saw the skeleton and somehow I was too dazed to realize it couldn’t be Laurette. Because when the gravity was dispersed, the tension holding everything back in time was released, and everything went back to the present – just a little less than the present. I’ll explain that later.”

He drew a long breath.

“This is hard to say. I was in the back of the cave. I felt something strike the mountainside.

“That was my patrol ship – with me in it.”

His glance roved around. Overland’s breath sucked in audibly.

“Careful now, boy,” he rumbled warningly, alarm in his eyes.

Tony’s lips twisted. “It happens to be the truth. After my ship crashed I got out. A few minutes later I stood at the mouth of the cave, looking at the skeleton. For a minute, I – remembered. Fragmentary things. The skeleton was – horror.

“And why not? I was also in the back of the cave, thinking that Laurette was dead and that she was the skeleton. The Tony Crow at the mouth of the cave and the Tony Crow trapped in the rear of the cave were
en rapport
to an infinite degree. They were the same person, in two different places at the same time, and their brains were the same.”

He stopped.

Masters whispered through his clenched teeth, “Two Tony Crows. It couldn’t be.”

Tony leaned back against the wall. “There were two rings, at the same time. There were two skeletons, at the same time. Braker had the skeleton’s ring on his finger. Amos was wrapped up in a carton with a Christmas sticker on it. They were both some place else. You all know that and admit it. Well, there were two Tony Crows, and if I think about it much longer, it’ll drive me—”

“Hold it, boy!” Overland’s tone was sharp. Then he said mildly, “It’s nothing to get excited about. The mere fact of time-travel presupposes duplicity of existence. Our ship and everything in it was made of electrons that existed somewhere else at the same time – a hundred million years ago, on the pre-asteroid world. You can’t get away from it. And you don’t have to get scared just because two Tony Crows were a few feet distant from each other. Remember that all the rest of us were duplicated, too. Ship A was thrust
back
into time just an hour or so before Ship B landed here after being thrust
forward
. You see?”

Laurette shuddered. “It’s clear, but it’s—” She made a confused motion.

Overland’s tired, haggard eyes twinkled. “Anyway, there’s no danger of us running across ourselves again. The past is done for. That’s the main thing.”

Neither Laurette nor Tony said anything. They were studying each other, and a smile was beginning at the corner of Laurette’s lips. Erle Masters squirmed uncomfortably.

Overland continued, speculatively: “There was an energy loss some place. We weren’t snapped back to the real present at all. We should have come back to the present that we left,
plus
the three weeks we stayed back in time. Back there it was Christmas – and Laurette was quite correct when she broke open my package.” He grinned crookedly. “But it’s still more than three weeks to Christmas here. It was a simple energy loss, I guess. If I had a penc—”

Erle Masters broke in on him, coughing uncomfortably and grinning wryly at the same time. “We’d better get down to the control room and plot out our course, professor.”

“What?” Overland’s eyes widened. He looked around at the man and girl. “Oh.” He studied them, then turned, and clapped Masters on the back. “You’re dead right, son. Let’s get out!”

“I’m glad you weren’t Amos,” Tony told the girl.

“I couldn’t very well have been, lieutenant.”

He grinned, coloring slightly.

Then he took her hands in his, and put his head as close to hers as the helmets would allow.

He said, “When we get back to Earth, I’m going to put a r—” He stopped, biting at his lip. Remembrances of another time, on a pre-asteroid world, flooded back with the thought.

She started, paled. Involuntarily, her eyes turned to the open port, beyond which was a mountain, a cave, a skeleton, a ring.

She nodded, slowly, faintly. “It’s a good idea,” she murmured. She managed a smile. “But not – an emerald.”

T
he village at night made a curiously timeless picture. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City and made what the telestats called – he remembered the phrase vividly – “a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.”

Fara believed that utterly. The street before him with its weedless, automatically tended gardens, its shops set well back among the flowers, its perpetual hard, grassy sidewalks and its street lamps that glowed from every pore of their structure – this was a restful paradise where time had stood still.

And it was like being a part of life that the great artist’s picture of this quiet, peaceful scene before him was now in the collection of the empress herself. She had praised it, and naturally the thrice-blest artist had immediately and humbly begged her to accept it.

What a joy it must be to be able to offer personal homage to the glorious, the divine, the serenely gracious and lovely Innelda Isher, one thousand one hundred eightieth of her line.

As they walked, Fara half turned to his wife. In the dim light of the nearest street lamp, her kindly, still youthful face was almost lost in shadow. He murmured softly, instinctively muting his voice to harmonize with the pastel shades of night:

“She said – our empress said – that our little village of Glay seemed to her to have in it all the wholesomeness, the gentleness, that constitutes the finest qualities of her people. Wasn’t that a wonderful thought, Creel? She must be a marvelously understanding woman. I—”

He stopped. They had come to a side street, and there was something about a hundred and fifty feet along in that—

“Look!” Fara said hoarsely.

He pointed with rigid arm and finger at a sign that glowed in the night, a sign that read:

FINE WEAPONS
THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT
TO BE FREE

Fara had a strange, empty feeling as he stared at the blazing sign. He saw that other villagers were gathering. He said finally, huskily, “I’ve heard of these shops. They’re places of infamy, against which the government of the empress will act one of these days. They’re built in hidden factories, and then transported whole to towns like ours and set up in gross defiance of property rights. That one wasn’t there an hour ago.”

Fara’s face hardened. His voice had a harsh edge in it, as he said, “Creel, go home.”

Fara was surprised when Creel did not move off at once. All their married life she had had a pleasing habit of obedience that had made cohabitation a wonderful thing. He saw that she was looking at him wide-eyed, and that it was a timid alarm that held her there. She said, “Fara, what do you intend to do? You’re not thinking of—”

“Go home!” Her fear brought out all the grim determination in his nature. “We’re not going to let such a monstrous thing desecrate our village. Think of it” – his voice shivered before the appalling thought – “this fine, old-fashioned community, which we had resolved always to keep exactly as the empress has it in her picture gallery, debauched now, ruined by this . . . this thing. But we won’t have it; that’s all there is to it.”