Author: Rickard Nass; Rhonda Nass; Isaac Asimov; Martin Harry Greenberg; Charles G. Waugh
Date: 1984-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Description: Stories tell about time machines, time travel paradoxes, altered pasts, and visits from one's future descendants
Publisher: Heinemann/Raintree

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TIME WARPS

Copyright © 1984, Raintree Publishers Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Inquiries should be addressed to Raintree Publishers Inc.,

205 West Highland Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53203.

Library of Congress Number: 83-22888

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 87 86 85 84

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Time warps.

(Science fiction shorts)

Contents: Introduction / Isaac Asimov—Experiment / Fredric

Brown—Nightmare in time / Fredric Brown—[etc.]

1. Science fiction. 2. Children’s stories.

[1. Science fiction. 2. Short stories] I. Asimov, Isaac, 1920

II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. III. Waugh, Charles. IV. Nass,

Rickard, ill. V. Nass, Rhonda, ill. VI. Series.

PZ5.T45626    1984          [Fic]          83-22888

U.S. ISBN 0-8172-1742-8    (lib. bdg.)

U.K. SBN 0-86256-129-9

“Experiment” © 1954 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

Reprinted by permission of International Creative

Management.

“Nightmare in Time” © 1961 by Fredric Brown. Reprinted by
permission of International Creative Management.

“For the Love of Barbara Allen” © 1966 by Mercury Press, Inc. for

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August, 1966.

Reprinted by permission of Glenn Lord, agent for the heirs of

Robert E. Howard.

“The Biography Project © 1951 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation;

© 1955, 1983 by Horace L. Gold.

Time for Survival” © 1960 by King-Size Publications. Reprinted
by permission of Blassingame, McCauley and Wood.

“Over the River and Through the Woods” © 1965 by Ziff-Davis

Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Kirby

MacCauley, Ltd.

Published simultaneously in the U.K. by Blackwell Raintree.

Contents

Introduction
Isaac Asimov
Experiment
Fredric Brown
Nightmare in Time
Fredric Brown
For the Love of Barbara Allen
Robert E. Howard
The Biography Project
H.L. Gold
Time for Survival
George O. Smith
Over the River and Through the Woods
Clifford D. Simak

Introduction

ISAAC ASIMOV

In my introduction to an earlier book in this series, I said that time travel was thought to be impossible.

Why? we might wonder. We can travel north, south, east or west at will. We can even jump up into the air, or climb a mountain, or rise up in a balloon or airplane or rocket. Or we can sink down into the ocean or dig down into the ground. Or we can stand still and do none of these things.

Why should time be so different? We can’t stand still in time. We are always traveling, every one of us, along with the entire earth and the entire universe, forward toward tomorrow; and all at the same speed. Every second we travel one second into the future; every day we travel one day into the future; every year . . . Well, you get the idea.

Why can’t we travel a little faster into the future and reach next year tomorrow; or move backward and reach last year tomorrow; or even just stand still and let it be today for a whole week?

As a matter of fact, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, we can make time move more slowly if we travel through space very quickly, but that’s no good. Why can’t we fiddle with time while we are right here just by handling the controls of a time machine?

I suppose we might try to explain that by going deeply into scientific theories, but I’m not sure that I understand those theories well enough to be able to explain them clearly enough. Instead, let’s try it a different way. Let’s suppose that we can travel through time, and see what might happen if we do.

For instance, suppose you were curious to see what your grandfather was like when he was a young man. After all, you’ve only seen him when he was old and he didn’t have any photographs of himself as a young man. So you get into a time machine and go back fifty years and then go to the house where your grandfather lived when he was young.

You wait outside the house and there he is coming out. He doesn’t see you at first, and he is about to walk past you when you say, “Hello.” He turns in surprise and says “Yes? Can I do anything for you?” Naturally, he doesn’t know you, and you can’t say “I’m your grandson” because he isn’t even married yet and he will think you’re crazy. So you merely ask him directions to some particular street just to be with him a little while and then you say “Thank you,” and he walks on.

But now he gets to a particular street corner three minutes later than he would have if you hadn’t spoken to him, and an automobile that skids out of control hits him and kills him. If you hadn’t stopped him to talk to him, in all innocence, he would have crossed that street and been a block farther on when the automobile went skidding past.

Because your grandfather was dead and hadn’t married yet—perhaps hadn’t even yet met the woman he was going to marry—your father was never born, and since he was never born, you were never born.

Well, then, if you were never born, who was it who went back in time to visit his grandfather. It was nobody. The trip back in time never happened. Your grandfather walked out of the house, saw nobody, went about his business and wasn’t killed. But in that case, since he wasn’t killed, he proceeded to marry and have children. Your father was born, and then you were born.

But if you were born, then when you grew up you went back in time to see your grandfather and the result was that you weren’t born; and if you weren’t born, you didn’t do it and you were born—

You can go back and forth forever in this way and such a “you did so you didn’t so you did so you didn’t” is one example of something called “paradox.” Time travel inevitably leads to such paradoxes, and in order to get rid of them you are forced to decide that time travel is simply impossible. . . . Except that people keep thinking up new and interesting paradoxes and writing about them.

‘The first time machine; gentlemen,” Professor Johnson proudly informed his two colleagues. “True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works.”

The small-scale model looked like a small scale—a postage scale—except for two dials in the part under the platform.

Professor Johnson held up a small metal cube. “Our experimental object,” he said; “is a brass cube weighing one pound; two point three ounces. First; I shall send it five minutes into the future.”

He leaned forward and set one of the dials on the time machine. “Look at your watches,” he said.

They looked at their watches; Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine’s platform. It vanished.

Five minutes later, to the second; it reappeared.

Professor Johnson picked it up. “Now five minutes into the past.” He set the other dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. “It is six minutes before three o’clock. I shall now activate the mechanism—by placing the cube on the platform—at exactly three o’clock. Therefore; the cube

should, at five minutes before three; vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five minutes before I place it there.”

“How can you place it there, then?” asked one of his colleagues.

“It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed there. Three o’clock. Notice, please.”

The cube vanished from his hand.

It appeared on the platform of the time machine.

“See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there!”

His other colleague frowned at the cube. “But,” he said, “what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o’clock. Wouldn’t there be a paradox of some sort involved?”

“An interesting idea,” Professor Johnson said. “I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not . . .”

There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.

But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.

Professor Jones had been working on his time theory for many years.

“And I have found the key equation,” he told his daughter one day. “Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.”

Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, “This should make time run backward run time make should this,” said he, spoke he as button a pushing.

“Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time.” Day one daughter his told he, “Equation key the found have I and.”

Years many for theory time his on working been had Jones Professor.

’Twas in the merry month of May,

When all sweet buds were swelling

Sweet William on his death-bed lay

For the love of Barbara Allen

My grandfather sighed and thumped wearily on his guitar, then laid it aside, the song unfinished.

“My voice is too old and cracked,” he said, leaning back in his cushion-seated chair and fumbling in the pockets of his sagging old vest for cob-pipe and tobacco. “Reminds me of my brother Joel. The way he could sing that song. It was his favorite. Makes me think of poor old Rachel Ormond, who loved him. She’s dyin’, her nephew Jim Ormond told me yesterday. She’s old, older’n I am. You never saw her, did you?”

I shook my head.

She was a real beauty when we was young, and Joel was alive and lovin’ her. He had a fine voice, Joel, and he loved to play his guitar and sing. He’d sing as he rode along. He was singin’ Barbara Allen’ when he met Rachel Ormond. She heard him singin’ and come out of the laurel beside the road to listen. When Joel saw her standin’ there with the mornin’ sun behind her makin’ jewels out of the dew on the bushes, he stopped dead and just stared like a fool. He told me it seemed as if she was standin’ in a white blaze of light.

“It was mornin’ in the mountains and they were both young. You never saw a mornin’ in spring, in the Cumberlands?”

“I never was in Tennessee,” I answered.

“No, you don’t know anything about it,” he retorted, in the half humorous, half petulant mood of the old. “You’re a postoak gopher. You never saw anything but sand drifts and dry shinneiy ridges. What do you know about mountain sides covered with birch and laurel, and cold clear streams windin’ through the cool shadows and tinklin’ over the rocks? What do you know about upland forests with the blue haze of the Cumberlands hangin’ over them?”

“Nothing,” I answered, yet even as I spoke, there leaped crystal clear into my mind with startling vividness the very image of the things of which he spoke, so vivid that my external faculties seemed almost to sense it—I could almost smell the dogwood blossoms and the cool lush of the deeo woods, and hear the tinkle of hidden streams over the stones.

“You couldn’t know,” he sighed. “It’s not your fault, and I wouldn’t go back, myself, but Joel loved it. He never knew anything else, till the war came up. That’s where you’d have been born if it hadn’t been for the war. That tore everything up. Things didn’t seem the same afterwards. I came west, like so many Tennessee folks did. I’ve done well in Texas—better’n I’d ever done in Tennessee. But as I get old, I get to dreamin’.”

His gaze was fixed on nothing, but he sighed deeply, wandering somewhat in his mind as the very old are likely to do at times.

“Four years behind Bedford Forrest,” he said at last. “There never was a cavalry leader like him. Ride all day, shootin’ and fightin’, bed down in the snow—up before midnight, boots and saddles,’ and we were off again.

“Forrest never hung back. He was always in front of his men, fightin’ like any three. His saber was too heavy for the average man to use, and it carried a razor edge. I remember the skirmish where Joel was killed. We come suddenly out of a

defile between low hills and there was a Yankee wagon train movin’ down the valley, guarded by a detachment of cavalry. We hit that cavalry like a thunderbolt and ripped it apart.

“I can see Forrest now, standin’ up in his stirrups, swingin’ that big sword of his, yellin’ Charge! Holler, boys, holler!’ And we hollered like wild men as we went in, and none of us cared if we lived or died, so long as Forrest was leadin’ us.

“We tore that detachment in pieces and stomped and chased the pieces all up and down the valley. When the fight was over, Forrest reined up with his officers and said, Gentlemen, one of my stirrups seems to have been shot away!’ He had only one foot in a stirrup. But when he looked, he saw that somehow his left foot had come out of the stirrup, and the stirrup had flopped up over the saddle. He’d been sittin’ on the stirrup leather, and hadn’t noticed, in the excitement of the charge.

“I was right near him at the time, because my horse had fell, with a bullet through its head, and I was pullin’ my saddle off. Just then my brother Joel came up on foot, smilin’, with the mornin’ sun behind him. But he was dazed with the fightin’ because he had a strange look on his face, and when he saw me he stopped short, as if I was a stranger. Then he said the strangest thing: ‘Why, grandad!’ he said, You’re young again! You’re younger’n I am!’ Then the next second a bullet from some skulkin’ sniper knocked him down dead at my feet.” Again my grandfather sighed and took up his guitar. “Rachel Ormond nearly died,” he said. “She never married, never looked at any other man. When the Ormonds come to Texas, she come with ’em. Now she’s dyin’, up there in their house in the hills. That’s what they say; I know she died years ago, when news of Joel’s death came to her.”

He began to thrum his guitar and sing in the curious wailing chant of the hill people.

They sent to the east, they sent to the west,

To the place where she was dwellin’,

Sweet William s sick, and he sends for you,

For the love of Barbara Allen.

My father called to me from his room on the other side of the house.

“Go out and stop those horses from fighting. I can hear them kicking the sides out of the barn.”

My grandfather’s voice followed me out of the house and into the stables. It was a clear still day and his voice carried far, the only sound besides the squealing and kicking of the horses in the stables, the crowing of a distant cock, and the clamor of sparrows among the mesquites.

Barbara Allen! An echo of a distant and forgotten homeland among the post-oak covered ridges of a barren land. In my mind I saw the settlers forging westward from the Piedmont, over the Alleghenies and along the Cumberland River—on foot, in lumbering wagons drawn by slow-footed oxen, on horseback—men in broadcloth and men in buckskin. The guitars and the banjos clinked by the fires at night, in the lonely log cabins, by the stretches of river black in the starlight, up on the long ridges where the owls hooted. Barbara Allen—a tie to the past, a link between today and the dim yesterdays.

I opened the stall and went in. My mustang Pedro, vicious as the land which bred him, had broken his halter and was assaulting the bay horse with squeals of rage, wicked teeth bared, eyes flashing, and ears laid back. I caught his mane, jerked him around, slapping him sharply on the nose when he snapped at me, and drove him from the stall. He lashed out wickedly at me with his heels as he dashed out, but I was watching for that and stepped back.

I had forgotten the bay horse. Stung to frenzy by the mustang’s attack, he was ready to kill anything that came within his reach. His steel shod hoof barely grazed my skull, but that was enough to dash me into utter oblivion.

My first sensation was of movement. I was shaken up and down, up and down. Then a hand gripped my shoulder and shook me, and a voice bawled in an accent which was familiar, yet strangely unfamiliar: “Hyuh, you, Joel, yuh goin’ to sleep in yo’ saddle!”

I awoke with a jerk. The motion was that of the gaunt horse under me. All about me were men, gaunt and haggard in appearance, in worn gray uniforms. We were riding between two low hills, thickly timbered. I could not see what lay ahead of us because of the mass of men and horses. It was a dawn, a gray unsteady dawn that made me shiver.

“Sun soon be up now,” drawled one of the men, mistaking my feeling. “We’ll have fightin’ enough to warm our blood purty soon. Old Bedford ain’t marched us all night just for fun. I heah theah’s a wagon train cornin’ down the valley ahaid of us.”

I was still struggling feebly in a web of illusion. There was a sense of familiarity about all this, yet it was strange and alien, too. There was something I was striving to remember. I slipped a hand into my inside pocket, as if by instinct, and drew out a photograph, an old-fashioned picture. A girl smiled bravely at me, a beautiful girl with tender lips and brave eyes. I replaced it, shaking my head dazedly.

Ahead of us a low roar went up. We were riding out of the defile, and a broad valley lay spread out before us. Along this valley moved a train of clumsy, lumbering wagons. I saw men on horseback—men in blue, whose appearance and whose horses were fresher than ours. The rest is dim and confused.

I remember a bugle blown. I saw a tall, rangy man on a great horse at the head of our column draw his sword and stand up in his stirrups, and his voice rang above the blast of the bugle: “Charge! Holler, boys, holler!”

Then there was a shout that rent the skies apart, and we stormed out of the defile and down into the valley like a mountain torrent. I was like two men—one that rode and shouted and slashed right and left with a reddened saber, and one who sat wondering and fumbling for something elusive which he could not grasp. But the conviction was growing that I had experienced all this before; it was like living an episode forewarned in a dream.

The blue line held for a few minutes, then it broke in pieces before our irresistible onslaught, and we hunted them up and down the valley. The battle resolved itself into a hundred combats, where men in blue and men in gray circled each other on stamping, rearing horses, with bright blades glittering in the rising sun.

My gaunt horse stumbled and went down and I

pulled myself free. In my daze I did not take off his saddle. I walked toward a group of officers and men who were clustered about the tall man who had led the charge. As I approached, I heard him say: “Gentlemen, it seems the enemy has shot off one of my stirrups.”

Then before I could hear anything else, I came face to face with a man I recognized at last. Yet like all else he was subtly altered. I gasped: “Why grandad! You’re young again! You’re younger than I am!” And in that flash I knew, and I clenched my fists and stood dumbly waiting, frozen, paralyzed, unable to speak or stir. Then something crashed against my head, and with the impact, a great blaze of light lighted universal darkness for an instant, and then all was oblivion.

Sweet William, he has died of grief,

And I shall die of sorrow!

My grandfather’s voice still wailed in my ears, faint with the distance, as I staggered to my feet, pressing my hand to the gash the bay’s hoof had laid open in my scalp. I was sick and nauseated and my head swam dizzily. My grandfather was still singing. Less than seconds had elapsed since the bay’s hoof felled me senseless on the littered stable floor. Yet in those brief seconds I had traveled through the eternities and back. I knew at last my true cosmic identity and the reason for those dreams of wooded mountains and gurgling rivers and of a brave, sweet face which had haunted my dreams since childhood.

Going out into the corral, I caught the mustang and saddled him, without bothering to dress my scalp wound. It had quit bleeding and my head was clearing. I rode down the valley and up the hill until I came to the Ormond house, perched in gaunt poverty on a sandy hillside, limned against the brown post-oak thickets behind it. The paint on the warped boards had long ago been worn away by rain and sun, both equally fierce in the hills of the Divide.

I dismounted and entered the yard with its barbed wire fence. Chickens pecking on the porch scampered squawking out of the way, and a scrawny hound bayed at me. The door opened to my knock and Jim Ormond stood framed in it, a gaunt, stooped man with sunken cheeks and lackluster eyes and gnarled hands.

He looked at me in dull surprise, for we were only acquaintances.

“Is Miss Rachel—” I began. “Is she—has she—” I halted in some confusion. He shook his bushy head.

“She’s dyin’. Doc Blaine’s with her. I reckon her time’s come. She don’t want to live, noway. She keeps callin’ for Joel Grimes, pore old soul.”

“May I come in?” I asked. “I want to see Doc Blaine.” Even the dead can not intrude uninvited on the the dying.

“Come in.” He drew aside, and I went into the miserably bare room. A frowsy-headed woman was moving about listlessly, and cotton-headed children looked timidly at me from other doorways. Doc Blaine came out from an inner room and stared at me.

“What the devil are you doing here?”

The Ormonds had lost interest in me. They went wearily about their tasks. I came close to Doc Blaine and said in a low voice. “Rachel! I must see her!” He stared at the insistence of my tone, but he is a man who sometimes instinctively grasps things that his conscious mind does not understand.

He led me into a room and I saw an old, old woman lying on a bed. Even in her old age her vitality was apparent, though that was waning fast. She lent a new atmosphere even to the wretched surroundings. And I knew her and stood transfixed. Yes, I knew her, beyond all the years and the changes they had wrought.

She stirred and murmured: “Joel! Joel! I’ve waited for you so long! I knew you’d come.” She stretched out withered arms, and I went without a word and seated myself beside her bed. Recognition came into her glazing eyes. Her bony fingers closed on mine caressingly. Her touch was that of a young girl.

“I knew you’d come before I died,” she whispered. “Death couldn’t keep you away. Oh, the cruel wound on your head, Joel! But you’re past suffering, just as I’ll be in a few minutes. You never forgot me, Joel?”

“I never forgot you, Rachel,” I answered, and I felt Doc

Blaine’s start behind me and knew that my voice was not that of the John Grimes he knew, but another, a different voice whispered down the ages. I did not see him go, but I knew he tip-toed out.

“Sing to me, Joel,” she whispered. “There’s your guitar hanging on the wall. I’ve kept it always. Sing the song you sang when we met that day beside the Cumberland River. I always loved it.”

I took up the ancient guitar, and though I had never played one before, I had no doubts. I struck the worn strings and sang, and my voice was weird and golden. The dying woman’s hands were on my arm, and as I looked, I saw and recognized the picture I had seen in the defile of the dawn. I saw youth and love everlasting and understanding.

Sweet William lies in the upper churchyard;

And by his side, his lover,

And on his grave grew a lily-white rose,

And on hers grew a briar.

They grew, they grew to the church steeple-top,

And there they grew no higher,

They tied themselves in a true lover’s knot,

And there remained for ever.

The string snapped loudly. Rachel Ormond was lying still and her lips were smiling. I disengaged my hand gently from her dead fingers and went out. Doc Blaine met me at the door.

“Dead?”

“She died years ago,” I said heavily. “She waited long for him; now she must wait somewhere else. That’s the hell of war; it upsets the balance of things and throws lives into confusion that eternity cannot make right.”

There was something tremendously exciting about the opening of the Biofilm Institute. Even a hardened Sunday supplement writer like Wellman Zatz felt it.

Arlington Prescott a wiper in a contact-eyeglass factory; while searching for a time machine; had invented the Biotime Camera; a standard movie camera—minus sound; of course—that projected a temporal beam; re-accumulated if and focused it on a temporal-light-sensitized film. When he discovered that he had to be satisfied with merely photographing the past not physically visiting if Prescott had quit doing research and become principal of a nursery school.

But; Zatz explained; dictating his notes by persfone to a voxtyper in the telenews office; the Biofilm Institute was based on Prescott’s repudiated invention. A huge; massive building; mostly below ground; in the twenty-third century style; and equipped with 1,000 Biotime Cameras; it was the gift of Humboldt Maxwell; wealthy manufacturer of Snack Capsules. There were 1,000 teams of biographers; military analysts; historians; etc.; to begin recording history as it actually happened—with special attention; according to Maxwell’s grant; to past leaders of industry; politics; science; and the arts; in the order named.

Going through the Biofilm Institute, Wellman Zatz gained mostly curt or snarled interviews with the Bioteams; fishing through time for incidents or persons was a nervous job, and they resented interruptions.

He settled finally on a team that seemed slightly friendlier. They were watching what looked like a scene from Elizabethan England on the monitor screen.

“Sir Isaac Newton,” Kelvin Burns, the science biographer, grunted in reply to Zatz’s question. “Great man. We want to find out why he went off the beam.”

Zatz knew about that, of course. Sunday feature articles for centuries had used the case of Sir Isaac to support arguments for psychic phenomena. After making all his astonishing discoveries by the age of twenty-five, the great seventeenth century scientist had spent the rest of his long life in a hunt for precognition, the philosopher’s stone, and other such paraphernalia of mysticism.

“My guess,” said Mowbray Glass, the psychiatrist, “is paranoia caused by feelings of rejection in childhood.”

But the screen showed a happy boy in what seemed to be a normal seventeenth century home and school environment. Glass grew puzzled as Sir Isaac eventually produced his binomial theorem, differential and integral calculus, and went to work on gravity—all without evidencing any symptoms of emotional imbalance.

“The most unbelievable demonstrative and deductive powers I’ve encountered,” said Pinero Schmidt, the science integrator. “I can’t believe such a man could go mystical.”

“But he did,” Glass said, and tensed. “Look!”

Alone in a dark, cumbersomely furnished study, the man on the screen, wearing a satin coat, stock and breeches, glanced up sharply. He looked directly into the temporal beam for a moment, and stared into the shadows of the room. He grabbed up a silver candlestick and searched the corners, holding the heavy candlestick like a weapon.

“He’s mumbling something,” reported Gonzalez Carson, the lip-reader. “Spies. He thinks somebody’s after his discoveries.”

Burns looked puzzled. “That’s the first sign we’ve seen of breakdown. But what caused it?”

“I’m damned if I know,” admitted Glass.

“Heredity?” Zatz suggested.

“No,” Glass said positively. “It’s been checked.”

The Bioteam spent hours prying further. When the scientist was in his thirties, he developed a continuing habit of looking up and smiling secretly. On his deathbed, forty years later, he moved his lips happily, without fear.

“ ‘My guardian angel,’ ” Carson interpreted for them. “ ‘You’ve watched over me all my life. I am content to meet you now.’ ”

Glass started. He went to one Bioteam after another, asking a brief question of each. When he came back, he was trembling.

“What’s the answer, Doc?” Zatz asked eagerly.

“We can’t use the Biotime Camera any more,” Glass said, looking sick. “My colleagues have been investigating the psychoses of Robert Schumann, Marcel Proust and others, who all eventually developed delusions of persecution.”

“Yeah, but why?” Zatz persisted.

“Because they thought they were being spied upon. And they were, of course. By us!”

The storm ruined my plan.

Not by seasickness. I’d come prepared for the worst; knowing how rough it could get on a sailing ship of the Nineteenth Century. I outrode the storm easily, stowed away in the hold. Not even the breakage of some of the 1,700 barrels of alcohol carried as a cargo bothered me although the stench was terrific.

But on the morning of 25 November 1872, the first mate, Albert Richardson, sent the second mate, Andrew Gilling, below with two of the German seaman to assay the storm damage. They found me and I was hauled aloft before Captain Briggs as a stowaway.

Captain Briggs of the Mary Celeste eyed my strange clothing with deep curiosity, but his interest was obviously more concerned with my unauthorized presence. He said sternly, “When did you get aboard?”

I realized that I had to impress him. I smiled. “You delayed your sailing from the Fifth November to the Sixth so that you and Mrs. Briggs could have dinner aboard Die Gratia with Captain Morehouse,” I said.

“How can you know so much?” he exclaimed. “How can you live as a stowaway for almost twenty days?”

I held up my chronithon contactor, knowing that now I could impress him indeed. “Captain Briggs,” I said. “I am a time-traveling historian from the Twenty-Second Century.” I pointed to the big red button on the top. “Until I depress this button and return to my own day and age, every morning I receive my daily ration of food and water. It’s about—”

I’d timed it close. I was interrupted by the click of the chronithon as it time-transferred my daily ration. I opened the cabinet and offered a bite of twenty-second century breakfast to the captain.

He said, “This is a sailor’s tall tale, I think. You claim that you’re a time-traveling historian? Then tell me, why are you here on Mary Celeste?”

“Captain Briggs,” I said, “the Time Machine was invented in 1987. Within twenty years every historical event had been painstakingly researched and authentically written—rewritten—by time-traveling historians who viewed the event as partaking eye-witnesses. By my time, fame and fortune awaits any man who has the luck and dogged determination to scour historic time to locate some event that has not been recounted faithfully to the last niggling little detail. Why, Captain Briggs, in Jim Bishop’s famous The Day Columbus Landed they record the name of the man who owned the hen that laid the egg that Columbus stood on end to impress Isabella with his ability. And so, Captain Briggs, I stowed away because I—”

A woman’s voice interrupted me, I turned to look at the captain’s wife who, of course, was the only woman aboard Mary Celeste. She was carrying little Sophia Matilda in her arms. She said, “Edward, what unearthly manner of ship is that?”

The steward, Edward Head, replied, “I don’t rightly know, ma-am.”

I turned to look. No more than fifty feet from the starboard rail was vast barge. Upon the barge were serried rows of seats that stretched upwards and backwards for hundreds of feet. The seats were filling rapidly; ushers were escorting the spectators efficiently, vendors were selling refreshments and programs. A thrumming sound came from overhead and I looked up to watch the materialization of jetcopters and personnel

carriers and even a poised spacecraft hanging in a dome above our heads.

Over the lee rail came a crew of technicians carrying the heavy Ward-Workman tridi recorders of the Twenty-Seventh Century, and their director pulled a script from his pocket and said:

“Joe, you and Pete dislocate the binnacle and break the compass. Al, open the fore hatch and lazarette. Tony, that spring-wound chronometer is a pre-atomic clock and worth a fortune to the National Museum, put it among my personal loot, along with the sextant. You can keep the ship’s register, but give the navigation books to George with my compliments. Let’s see, um. Sails, jib and fore-topmast. Now toss the yawl overboard; get it out of the way. It’s missing.” One of his men came up and said something to him that I could not hear. “No,” he replied, “It would not be more dramatic to dummy-up a half-eaten breakfast and a pan of milk warming on the stove for the baby. Too many writers tried to make it that way in the beginning. I know what’s authentic.”

Then he paused as the Ward-Workman cameramen panned around Mary Celeste making close-up and approach shots. One by one they finished their work and reported to him.

“Fine,” he said, looking at his strapwatch. “Nowlet’s back off for some long shots. And remember, we don’t know what kind of a catastrophe this is going to be, so keep those tridi recorders running constantly until I tell you to stop!”

Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs of Mary Celeste put an arm around his wife. To me he said, “I don’t completely understand, but I do get enough to realize that we re the subject of something evil.”

“Yes,” I replied, “you—”

“We re not waiting here to let it happen to us!” he snapped.

“But you can’t change history!” I objected.

Watch,” he said roughly. And then with a stentorian voice, Captain Briggs roared: “Abandon ship!”

The captain and his wife, still carrying their daughter Sophia Matilda, mingled with the photorecording crew. The two mates, the steward, the four German seamen went over the side and swam swiftly for the barges. There were flurries of

activity when they went aboard the barges, but the activity stilled and I was alone on Mary Celeste.

I looked around me and realized that Captain Briggs hadn’t changed history. He’d made it!

Slowly the barges emptied, the spectators returned to their own time and place among the Centuries. Sorrowfully I pressed my button and went home. My fame would never be, my fortune would never start. My book would remain unwritten, for I knew full well that potential customers for my book on this historic event had been here as an eyewitness. After seeing it, who’d bother to buy my book?

On 4 December 1872, Captain Morehouse of Die Gratia sighted Mary Celeste yawing in a mild sea with jib and foretopmast sails set, no one at the helm and no one aboard. The binnacle was knocked out of place, the compass was broken. The sextant, chronometer, ship’s register and navigation books were missing. The ship’s yawl, lashed to the main hatch, was missing. The fore hatch and lazarette were open and about a dozen of the ship’s cargo of 1,700 barrels of alcohol were broken or leaking badly.

The last notation in the ship’s deck log had been made early in the morning of 25 November 1872, and the account of the previous hours indicated that Mary Celeste had come through a severe storm on the previous day and most of the night.

Accounts that include half-eaten plates of food, half-packed bags and other evidences of an abrupt interruption and panicky flight for safety are false.

No survivors have ever turned up, no explanation can be given. Researchers in the “Mystery of Mary Celeste” suggest that the storm, the leaking alcohol, combined to frighten Captain Briggs with a threat of fire or explosion and that they all took off in the ship’s yawl, which floundered.

We will not know the truth until someone invents the Time Machine.

The two children came trudging down the lane in applecanning time, when the first goldenrods were blooming and the wild asters large in bud. They looked, when she first saw them, out the kitchen window, like children who were coming home from school, for each of them was carrying a bag in which might have been their books. Like Charles and James, she thought, like Alice and Maggie—but the time when those four had trudged the lane on their daily trips to school was in the distant past. Now they had children of their own who made their way to school.

She turned back to the stove to stir the cooking apples, for which the wide-mouthed jars stood waiting on the table, then once more looked out the kitchen window. The two of them were closer now and she could see that the boy was the older of the two—ten, perhaps, and the girl no more than eight.

They might be going past, she thought, although that did not seem too likely, for the lane led to this farm and to nowhere else.

They turned off the lane before they reached the barn and came sturdily trudging up the path that led to the house. There was no hesitation in them; they knew where they were going.

She stepped to the screen door of the kitchen as they came onto the porch and they stopped before the door and stood looking up at her.

The boy said: “You are our grandma. Papa said we were to say at once that you were our grandma.”

“But that’s not . . .” she said, and stopped. She had been about to say it was impossible, that she was not their grandma. And, looking down into the sober, childish faces, she was glad that she had not said the words.

“I am Ellen,” said the girl, in a piping voice.

“Why, that is strange,” the woman said. “That is my name, too.”

The boy said, “My name is Paul.”

She pushed open the door for them and they came in, standing silently in the kitchen, looking all about them as if they’d never seen a kitchen.

“It’s just like Papa said,” said Ellen. “There’s the stove and the churn and . . .”

The boy interrupted her. “Our name is Forbes,” he said.

This time the woman couldn’t stop herself. “Why, that’s impossible,” she said. “That is our name, too.”

The boy nodded solemnly. “Yes, we knew it was.”

“Perhaps,” the woman said, “you’d like some milk and cookies.”

“Cookies!” Ellen squealed, delighted.

“We don’t want to be any trouble,” said the boy. “Papa said we were to be no trouble.”

“He said we should be good,” piped Ellen.

“I am sure you will be,” said the woman, “and you are no trouble.”

In a little while, she thought, she’d get it straightened out.

She went to the stove and set the kettle with the cooking apples to one side, where they would simmer slowly.

“Sit down at the table,” she said. “I’ll get the milk arid cookies.”

She glanced at the clock, ticking on the shelf. Four o’clock, almost. In just a little while the men would come in from the fields. Jackson Forbes would know what to do about this; he had always known.

They climbed up on two chairs and sat there solemnly, staring all about them, at the ticking clock, at the wood stove with the fire glow showing through its draft, at the wood piled in the wood box, at the butter churn standing in the corner.

They set their bags on the floor beside them, and they were strange bags, she noticed. They were made of heavy cloth or canvas, but there were no drawstrings or no straps to fasten them. But they were closed, she saw, despite no straps or strings.

“Do you have some stamps?” asked Ellen.

“Stamps?” asked Mrs. Forbes.

“You must pay no attention to her,” said Paul. “She should not have asked you. She asks everyone and Mama told her not to.”

“But stamps?”

“She collects them. She goes around snitching letters that other people have. For the stamps on them, you know.”

“Well, now,” said Mrs. Forbes, “there may be some old letters. Well look for them later on.”

She went into the pantry and got the earthen jug of milk and filled a plate with cookies from the jar. When she came back they were sitting there sedately, waiting for the cookies.

“We are here just for a little while,” said Paul. “Just a short vacation. Then our folks will come and get us and take us back again.”

Ellen nodded her head vigorously. “That’s what they told us when we went. When I was afraid to go.”

“You were afraid to go?”

“Yes. It was all so strange.”

“There was so little time,” said Paul. “Almost none at all. We had to leave so fast.”

“And where are you from?” asked Mrs. Forbes.

“Why,” said the boy, “just a little ways from here. We walked just a little ways and of course we had the map. Papa gave it to us and he went over it carefully with us. . . .”

“You’re sure your name is Forbes?”

Ellen bobbed her head. “Of course it is,” she said.

“Strange,” said Mrs. Forbes. And it was more than strange, for there were no other Forbeses in the neighborhood except her children and her grandchildren and these two, no matter what they said, were strangers.

They were busy with the milk and cookies and she went

back to the stove and set the kettle with the apples back on the front again, stirring the cooling fruit with a wooden spoon.

“Where is Grandpa?” Ellen asked.

“Grandpa’s in the field. He’ll be coming in soon. Are you finished with your cookies?”

“All finished,” said the girl.

“Then we’ll have to set the table and get the supper cooking. Perhaps you’d like to help me.”

Ellen hopped down off the chair. “I’ll help,” she said.

“And I,” said Paul, “will carry in some wood. Papa said I should be helpful. He said I could carry in the wood and feed the chickens and hunt the eggs and . . .”

“Paul,” said Mrs. Forbes, “it might help if you’d tell me what your father does.”

“Papa,” said the boy, “is a temporal engineer.”

The two hired men sat at the kitchen table with the checkerboard between them. The two older people were in the living room.

“You never saw the likes of it,” said Mrs. Forbes. “There was this piece of metal and you pulled it and it ran along another metal strip and the bag came open. And you pulled it the other way and the bag was closed.”

“Something new,” said Jackson Forbes. “There may be many new things we haven’t heard about, back here in the sticks. There are inventors turning out all sorts of things.”

“And the boy,” she said, “has the same thing on his trousers. I picked them up from where he threw them on the floor when he went to bed and I folded them and put them on the chair. And I saw this strip of metal, the edges jagged-like. And the clothes they wear. That boy’s trousers are cut off above his knees and the dress the girl was wearing was so short. . . .”

“They talk of plains,” mused Jackson Forbes, “but not the plains we know. Something that is used, apparently, for folks to travel in. And rockets—as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Earth.”

“We couldn’t question them, of course,” said Mrs. Forbes. “There was something about them, something that I sensed.”

Her husband nodded. “They were frightened, too.”

“You are frightened, Jackson?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “’but there are no other Forbeses. Not close, that is. Charlie is the closest and he’s five miles away. And they said they walked just a little piece.”

’What are you going to do?” she asked. “’What can we do?”

“I don’t rightly know,” he said. “Drive in to the county seat and talk with the sheriff; maybe. These children must be lost. There must be someone looking for them.”

‘But they don’t act as if they’re lost,” she told him. “They knew they were coming here. They knew we would be here. They told me I was their grandma and they asked after you and they called you Grandpa. And they are so sure. They don’t act as if we’re strangers. They’ve been told about us. They said they’d stay just a little while and that’s the way they act. As if they’d just come for a visit.”

“I think,” said Jackson Forbes; “that I’ll hitch up Nellie after breakfast and drive around the neighborhood and ask some questions. Maybe there’ll be someone who can tell me something.”

“The boy said his father was a temporal engineer. That just don’t make sense. Temporal means the worldly power and authority and . . .”

“It might be some joke,” her husband said. “Something that the father said in jest and the son picked up as truth.”

“I think.” said Mrs. Forbes, “I’ll go upstairs and see if they’re asleep. I left their lamps turned low. They are so little and the house is strange to them. If they are asleep, I’ll blow out the lamps.”

Jackson Forbes grunted his approval. “Dangerous,” he said; “to keep light burning of the night. Too much chance of fire.”

The boy was asleep; flat upon his back—the deep and healthy sleep of youngsters. He had thrown his clothes upon the floor when he had undressed to go to bed; but now they were folded neatly on the chair, where she had placed them when she had gone into the room to say goodnight.

The bag stood beside the chair and it was open, the two rows of jagged metal gleaming dully in the dim glow of the lamp. Within its shadowed interior lay the dark forms of jumbled possessions; disorderly and helter-skelter; no way for a bag to be.

She stooped and picked up the bag and set it on the chair and reached for the little metal tab to close it. At least she told herself it should be closed and not left standing open. She grasped the tab and slid it smoothly along the metal tracks and then stopped; its course obstructed by an object that stuck out.

She saw it was a book and reached down to rearrange it so she could close the bag. And as she did so, she saw the title in its faint gold lettering across the leather backstrap—Holy Bible.

With her fingers grasping the book; she hesitated for a moment; then slowly drew it out. It was bound in an expensive black leather that was dulled with age. The edges were cracked and split and the leather worn from long usage. The gold edging of the leaves was faded.

Hesitantly; she opened it and there, upon the fly leaf in old and faded ink, was the inscription:

To Sister Ellen
from Amelia

Oct. 30; 1896
Many Happy Returns of the Day

She felt her knees grow weak and she let herself carefully to the floor and there, crouched beside the chair, read the fly leaf once again.

Oct. 30; 1896—that was her birthday; certainly; but it had not come as yet, for this was only the beginning of September; 1896.

And the Bible—how old was this Bible she held within her hands? A hundred years, perhaps, more than a hundred years.

A Bible, she thought—exactly the kind of gift Amelia would give her. But a gift that had not been given yet, one that could not be given, for that day upon the fly leaf was a month into the future.

It couldn’t be, of course. It was some kind of stupid joke. Or some mistake. Or a coincidence; perhaps. Somewhere else someone else was named Ellen and also had a sister who was named Amelia and the date was a mistake—someone had written the wrong year. It would be an easy thing to do.

But she was not convinced. They had said the name was Forbes and they had come straight here and Paul had spoken of a map so they could find the way.

Perhaps there were other things inside the bag. She looked at it and shook her head. She shouldn’t cry. It had been wrong to take the Bible out.

On Oct. 30 she would be fifty-nine—an old farm-wife with married sons and daughters and grandchildren who came to visit her on weekends and on holidays. And a sister Amelia who, in this year of 1896, would give her a Bible as a birthday gift.

Her hands shook as she lifted the Bible and put it back into the bag. She’d talk to Jackson when she went downstairs. He might have some thought upon the matter and he’d know what to do.

She tucked the book back into the bag and pulled the tab and the bag was closed. She set it on the floor again and looked at the boy upon the bed. He still was fast asleep, so she blew out the light.

In the adjoining room little Ellen slept, baby-like, upon her stomach. The low flame of the turned-down lamp flickered gustily in the breeze that came through an open window.

Ellen’s bag was closed and stood squared against the chair with a sense of neatness. The woman looked at it and hesitated for a moment, then moved on around the bed to where the lamp stood on a bedside table.

The children were asleep and everything was well and she’d blow out the light and go downstairs and talk with Jackson, and perhaps there’d be no need for him to hitch up Nellie in the morning and drive around to ask questions of the neighbors.

As she leaned to blow out the lamp, she saw the envelope upon the table, with two large stamps of many colors affixed to the upper right-hand corner.

Such pretty stamps, she thought—I never saw so pretty. She leaned closer to take a look at them and saw the country name upon them. Israel. But there was no such actual place as Israel. It was a Bible name, but there was no country. And if there were no country, how could there be stamps?

She picked up the envelope and studied the stamp, making sure that she had seen right. Such a pretty stamp!

She collects them, Paul had said. She’s always snitching letters that belong to other people.

That envelope bore a postmark, and presumably a date, but it was blurred and distorted by a hasty, sloppy cancellation and she could not make it out.

The edge of a letter sheet stuck a quarter inch out of the ragged edges where the envelope had been tom open and she pulled it out, gasping in her haste to see it while an icy fist of fear was clutching at her heart.

It was, she saw, only the end of a letter, the last page of a letter, and it was in type rather than in longhand—type like one saw in a newspaper or a book.

Maybe one of those new-fangled things they had in big city offices, she thought, the ones she’d read about. Typewriters—was that what they were called?

do not believe, the one page read, your plan is feasible. There is no time. The aliens are closing in and they will not give us time.

And there is the further consideration of the ethics of it, even if it could be done. We cannot, in all conscience, scurry back into the past and visit our problems upon the people of a century ago. Think of the problems it would create for them, the economic confusion and the psychological effect.

If you feel that you must, at least, send the children back, think a moment of the wrench it will give those two good souls when they realize the truth. Theirs is a smug and solid world—sure and safe and sound. The concepts of this mad century would destroy all they have, all that they believe in.

But I suppose I cannot presume to counsel you. I have done what you asked. I have written you all I know of our old ancestors back on that Wisconsin farm. As historian of the family, I am sure my facts are right. Use them as you see fit and God have mercy on us all.

Your loving brother,

Jackson

P.S. A suggestion. If you do send the children back, you might send along with them a generous supply of the new cancer-inhibitor drug. Great-great-grandmother Forbes died in 1904 of a condition that I suspect was cancer. Given those pills, she might survive another ten or twenty years. And what, I ask you, brother, would that mean to this tangled future? I don t pretend to know. It might save us. It might kill us quicker. It might have no effect at all. I leave the puzzle to you.

If I can finish up work here and get away, III be with you at the end.

Mechanically she slid the letter back into the envelope and laid it upon the table beside the flaring lamp.

Slowly she moved to the window that looked out on the empty lane.

They will come and get us, Paul had said. But would they ever come? Could they ever come.

She found herself wishing they would come. Those poor people, those poor frightened children caught so far in time.

Blood of my blood, she thought, flesh of my flesh, so many years away. But still her flesh and blood, no matter how removed. Not only these two beneath this roof tonight, but all those others who had not come to her.

The letter had said 1904 and cancer and that was eight years away—she’d be an old, old woman then. And the signature had been Jackson—an old family name, she wondered, carried on and on, a long chain of people who bore the name of Jackson Forbes?

She was stiff and numb, she knew. Later she’d be frightened. Later she would wish she had not read the letter, did not know.

But now she must go back downstairs and tell Jackson the best way that she could.

She moved across the room and blew out the light and went out into the hallway.

A voice came from the open door beyond.

“Grandma, is that you?”

“Yes, Paul,” she answered. “What can I do for you?”

In the doorway she saw him crouched beside the chair, in the shaft of moonlight pouring through the window, fumbling at the bag.

“I forgot,” he said. “There was something papa said I was to give you right away.”