Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  "We're all loaded and ready, sir."

  Harrington turned away from the deck. The last prisoner had settled into his seat in the boat.

  He nodded at Terry and Terry nodded back. The hands had managed to slip in a few more pawings under the guise of being helpful, but Terry seemed to have the overall situation under control.

  "She's your ship, Mr. Terry. I'll send you the final word on your prize crew as soon as I've conferred with Mr. Bonfors."

  "It looks to me like it's about time we hopped for home," Giva said.

  "Now? He's only brought one load of slaves on deck."

  "You don't really think he's going to decorate the deck with more Africans, do you? Look at my screens. I'm getting two usable images of your ancestor returning to his ship. It's a high-feel closure. All we need is a sunset."

  "There's five hundred people in that hold. Don't you think he's going to give the rest of them a chance to breathe?"

  "He exaggerated his report. Use your head, Emory. Would you go through all the hassle involved in controlling five hundred confused people when you knew they were only four or five days away from Freetown?"

  "You are deliberately avoiding the most important scene in the entire drama. We'll never know what happened next if we go now."

  "You're clinging to a fantasy. We're done. It's time to go. Hal—I request relocation to home base."

  "I have a request for relocation to home base. Please confirm."

  "I do not confirm. I insist that we—"

  "Request confirmed, Hal. Request confirmed."

  Time stopped. The universe blinked. A technology founded on the best contemporary scientific theories did something the best contemporary scientific theories said it couldn't do.

  The rig dropped onto the padded stage in Transit Room One. The bubble had disappeared. Faces were peering at them through the windows that surrounded the room.

  Giva jabbed her finger at the time strip mounted on the wall. They had been gone seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds local time.

  "We were pushing it," Giva said. "We were pushing it more than either of us realized."

  The average elapsed local time was three minutes—a fact they had both committed to memory the moment they had heard it during their first orientation lecture. The bump when they hit the stage had seemed harder than the bumps they had experienced during training, too. The engineers always set the return coordinates for a position two meters above the stage—a precaution that placed the surface of the stage just outside the margin of error and assured the passengers they wouldn't relocate below it. They had come home extra late and extra high. Giva would have some objective support for her decision to return.

  The narrow armored hatch under the time strip swung open. An engineer hopped through it with a medic right behind her.

  "Is everything all right?"

  "I can't feel anything malfunctioning," Giva said. "We had a flicker about two hours before we told Hal to shoot us home."

  Emory ripped off his seat belt. He jumped to his feet and the medic immediately dropped into his soothe-the-patient mode. "You really should sit down, Mr. FitzGordon. You shouldn't stand up until we've checked you out."

  The soft, controlled tones only added more points to the spurs driving Emory's rage. Giva was sprawling in her chair, legs stretched in front of her, obviously doing her best to create the picture of the relaxed daredevil who had courageously held off until the last minute. And now the medic was treating him like he was some kind of disoriented patient . . .

  He swung toward the medic and the man froze when he saw the hostility on Emory's face. He was a solid, broad shouldered type with a face that probably looked pleasant and experienced when he was helping chrononauts disembark. Now he slipped into a stance that looked like a slightly disguised on guard.

  "You're back, Mr. FitzGordon. Everything's okay. We'll have you checked out and ready for debriefing before you know it."

  Peter LeGrundy crouched through the hatch. He flashed his standardissue smile at the two figures on the rig and Emory realized he had to get himself under control.

  "So how did it go?" Peter said. "Did you have a nice trip?"

  Emory forced his muscles to relax. He lowered his head and settled into the chair as if he was recovering from a momentary lapse—the kind of thing any normal human could feel when he had just violated the laws of physics and traveled through three centuries of time. He gave the medic a quick thumbs up and the medic nodded.

  He had his own record of the event. He had Giva's comments. Above all, he had Peter LeGrundy. And Peter LeGrundy's ambitions. He could cover every grant Peter could need for the rest of Peter's scholarly career if he had to. The battle wasn't over. Not yet.

  You need the creatives. The creatives need your money.

  I ordered the liberated captives brought to the deck as circumstances allowed. They did not fully comprehend their change in status, and I could not explain it. Our small craft does not contain a translator among its complement. But the sight of so many souls rescued from such a terrible destiny stimulated the deepest feelings of satisfaction in every heart capable of such sentiments.

  Two well-placed candles illuminated the paper on John Harrington's writing desk without casting distracting shadows. The creak of Sparrow's structure created a background that offered him a steady flow of information about the state of his command.

  He lowered his pen. He had been struggling with his report for almost two hours. The emotions he had ignored during the battle had flooded over him as soon as he had closed the door of his cabin. The pistol that had roared in his face had exploded half a dozen times.

  He shook his head and forced out a sentence advising the Admiralty he had placed Mr. Terry in command of the prize. He had already commended Terry's gunnery and his role in the assault. He had given Bonfors due mention. Dawkins and several other hands had been noted by name. The dead and the wounded had been properly honored.

  It had been a small battle by the standards of the war against Napoleon. A skirmish really. Against an inept adversary. But the bullets had been real. Men had died. He could have died. He had boarded an enemy ship under fire. He had led a headlong assault at an enemy line. He had exchanged shots with the captain of the enemy.

  The emotions he was feeling now would fade. One hard, unshakeable truth would remain. He had faced enemy fire and done his duty.

  He had met the test. He had become the kind of man he had read about when he was a boy.

  THE KING OF WHERE-I-GO

  Howard Waldrop

  When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.

  It wasn't my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight . . .

  We were at my paternal grandparents' house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.

  This was the first of the two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three entire months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. Ten years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day-laborer apartments a half-mile away.

  Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5¢-10¢-25¢ store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.

  But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.

  Every two weeks
we would get in our aunt's purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five miles to our maternal grandparents' farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they'd come and get us after two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.

  We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparents' place. It was after the Fourth of July because there were burned patches on my grandfather's lower field where they'd had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.

  There was a concrete walk up to the porch of our grandparents' house that divided the lawn in two. The house was three miles out of town; some time in the 1980s the city limits would move past the place when a highway bypass was built to rejoin the highway that went through town and the town made a landgrab.

  On the left side of the lawn we'd set up a croquet game (the croquet set would cost a small fortune now, I realize, though neither my grandparents or aunt was what people called well-off).

  My sister and I were playing. My grandfather had gone off to his job somewhere in the county. My grandmother was lying down, with what was probably a migraine, or maybe the start of the cancer that would kill her in a few years. (For those not raised in the South: in older homes the bedroom was also the front parlor—there was a stove, chairs for entertaining, and the beds in the main room of the house.) The bed my grandmother lay on was next to the front window.

  My sister Ethel did something wrong in the game. Usually I would have been out fishing from before sunup until after dark with a few breaks during the day when I'd have to come back to the house. Breakfast was always made by my grandfather—who had a field holler that carried a mile, which he would let out from the back porch when breakfast was ready, and I'd come reluctantly back from the Big Pond. My grandfather used a third of a pound of coffee a day, and he percolated it for at least fifteen minutes—you could stand a spoon up in it. Then lunch, which in the South is called dinner, when my aunt would come out from her job in town and eat with me and my sister, my grandmother, and any cousins, uncles, or kin who dropped by (always arranged ahead of time, I'm sure), then supper, the evening meal, after my grandfather got home. Usually I went fishing after that, too, until it got too dark to see and the water moccasins came out.

  But this morning we were playing croquet and it was still cool so I must have come back from fishing for some reason and been snookered into playing croquet.

  "Hey! You can't do that!" I yelled at my sister.

  "Do what?" she yelled back.

  "Whatever you just did!" I said.

  "I didn't do anything!" she yelled.

  "You children please be quiet," yelled my grandmother from her bed by the window.

  "You cheated!" I yelled at my sister.

  "I did not!" she hollered back.

  One thing led to another and my sister hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet about as hard as a six-year-old can hit. I went down in a heap near a wicket. I sat up, grabbed the blue croquet ball, and threw it as hard as I could into my sister's right kneecap. She went down screaming.

  My grandmother was now standing outside the screen door on the porch (which rich people called a verandah) in her housecoat.

  "I asked you children to be quiet, please," she said.

  "You shut up!" said my sister, holding her knee and crying.

  My forehead had swelled up to the size of an apple.

  My grandmother moved like the wind then, like Roger Bannister who had just broken the four-minute mile. Suddenly there was a willow switch in her hand and she had my sister's right arm and she was tanning her hide with the switch.

  So here was my sister, screaming in two kinds of pain and regretting the invention of language and my grandmother was saying with every movement of her arm, "Don't-you- ever-tell-me-to-shut-up-young-lady!"

  She left her in a screaming pile and went back into the house and lay down to start dying some more.

  I was well-pleased, with the casual cruelty of childhood, that I would never-ever-in-my-wildest-dreams ever tell my grandmother to shut up.

  I got up, picked up my rod and tackle box, and went back over the hill to the Big Pond, which is what I would rather have been doing than playing croquet anyway.

  That night my sister got what we thought was a cold, in the middle of July.

  Next day, she was in the hospital with polio.

  My aunt Noni had had a best friend who got poliomyelitis when they were nine, just after WWI, about the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten his. (Roosevelt had been president longer than anybody, through the Depression the grownups were always talking about, and WWII, which was the exciting part of the history books you never got to in school. He'd died at the end of the war, more than a year before I was born. Then the president had been Truman, and now it was Ike.) My aunt knew what to do and had Ethel in the hospital quick. It probably saved my sister's life, and at least saved her from an iron lung, if it were going to be that kind of polio.

  You can't imagine how much those pictures in newsreels scared us all— rows of kids, only their heads sticking out of what looked like long tubular industrial washing machines. Polio attacked many things; it could make it so you couldn't breathe on your own—the iron lung was alternately a hypo- and hyperbaric chamber—it did the work of your diaphragm. This still being in vacuum-tube radio times, miniaturization hadn't set in, so the things weighed a ton. They made noises like breathing, too, which made them even creepier.

  If you were in one, there was a little mirror over your head (you were lying down) where you could look at yourself; you couldn't look anywhere else.

  Normally that summer we would have gone, every three days or so, with our aunt back to town after dinner and gone to the swimming pool in town. But it was closed because of the polio scare, and so was the theater. (They didn't want young people congregating in one place so the disease could quickly spread.) So what you ended up with was a town full of bored school kids and teenagers out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Not what a Baptist town really cares for.

  Of course you could swim in a lake or something. But the nearest lake was miles out of town. If you couldn't hitch a ride or find someone to drive you there, you were S.O.L. You could go to the drive-ins for movies. The nearest one was at the edge of the next county—again you needed someone with wheels, although once there you could sit on top of the car and watch the movie, leaving the car itself to the grownups or older teenage brothers and sisters. (They'd even taken away the seats in front of the snack bar where once you could sit like in a regular theater, only with a cloud of mosquitoes eating you all up—again because of polio.)

  Me, I had fishing and I didn't care. Let the town wimps stew in their own juices.

  But that was all before my sister made polio up close and personal in the family and brought back memories to my aunt.

  But Aunt Noni became a ball of fire.

  I couldn't go into the hospital to see my sister, of course—even though I had been right there when she started getting sick. Kids could absolutely not come down to the polio ward. This was just a small county hospital with about forty beds, but it also had a polio ward with two iron lungs ready to go, such was the fear in those days.

  My aunt took me to the hospital one day, anyway. She had had a big picture-frame mirror with her, from her house.

  "She's propped up on pillows and can't move much," my aunt said. "But I think we can get her to see you."

  "Stay out here in the parking lot and watch that window," she said. She pointed to one of the half-windows in the basement. I stayed out there until I saw my aunt waving in the window. I waved back.

  Then my aunt came out and asked, "Did you see her?"

  "I saw you."

  "She saw you," she said. "It made her happy." Yeah, I thought, the guy who kneecapped her with the croquet ball.

  "I don't know why," I said.

  Then Aunt Noni gave me some of my weekly
allowance that my parents mailed to her in installments.

  I took off to the drugstore like a bullet. I bought a cherry-lime-chocolate coke at the fountain, and a Monster of Frankenstein, a Plastic Man, and an Uncle Scrooge comic book. That took care of forty of my fifty cents. A whole dime, and nowhere to spend it. If it would have been open, and this had been a Saturday, when we usually got our allowance, I would have used the dime to go to the movies and seen eight cartoons, a Three Stooges short, a newsreel, a chapter of a serial, some previews, and a double feature: some SF flick and a Guy Madison movie if I was lucky, a couple of Westerns if I wasn't.

  But it was a weekday, and I went back to the office where my aunt Noni was the Jill-of-all-trades plus secretary for a one-man business for forty-seven years (it turned out). It was upstairs next to the bank. Her boss, Mr. Jacks, lived in the biggest new house in town (until, much later, the new doctor in town built a house out on the highway modeled on Elvis' Graceland). Mr. Jacks' house, as fate would have it, was situated on a lot touching my aunt's, only set one house over and facing the other street back.

  He wasn't in; he usually wasn't in the office when I was there. Aunt Noni was typing like a bunny, a real blur from the wrists down. She was the only one in the family who'd been to college. (Much later I would futz around in one for five years without graduating.) She could read, write, and speak Latin, like I later could. She read books. She had the librarian at the Carnegie Library in town send off to Montgomery for books on polio; they'd arrived while I was having the Coca-Cola comic book orgy and she'd gone to get them when the librarian had called her. There was a pile on the third chair in the office.

  I was sitting in the second one.

  "I want to know," she said as she typed without looking at her shorthand pad or the typewriter, "enough so that I'll know if someone is steering me wrong on something. I don't want to know enough to become pedantic—"