Authors: Clifford D. Simak
He grinned at me.
“And you might say, too, that the
Standard
no longer is published. Whether it’s the truth or not, you know. Old Johnson will go hog wild when he reads that in your story.”
I could have refused, of course, but if I had, he would have sent somebody else and tied the can on me. Even in 1950, despite a return to prosperity that beggared the flushest peak of 1929, good jobs in the newspaper field were not so easy to pick up.
So I said I’d go, and half an hour later I found myself getting just a bit excited about being one of the first men to travel into time. For I wouldn’t be the very first. Doc Ackerman had traveled ahead a few years in his own machine, often enough and far enough to prove the thing would work.
But the prospect of it gave me a headache when I tried to reason it out. The whole thing sounded wacky to me. Not so much the idea that one could really travel in time, for I had no doubt one could. J.R. wasn’t anybody’s fool. Before he sunk his money in that time machine he would have demanded ironclad, gilt-edged proof that it would operate successfully.
But the thing that bothered me was the complications that might arise. The more I thought of it, the sicker and more confused I got.
Why, with a time machine a reporter could travel ahead and report a man’s death, get pictures of his funeral. Those pictures could be taken back in time and published years before his death. That man, when he read the paper, would know the exact hour that he would die, would see his own face framed within the casket.
A boy of ten might know that some day he would be elected president of the United States simply by reading the
Globe
. The present president, angling for a third term, could read his own political fate if the
Globe
chose to print it.
A man might read that the next day he would meet death in a traffic accident. And if that man knew he was going to die, he would take steps to guard against it. But could he guard against it? Could he change his own future? Or was the future cast in a rigid mold? If the future said something was going to happen, was it absolutely necessary that it must happen?
The more I thought about it, the crazier it sounded. But somehow I couldn’t help but think of it. And the more I thought about it, the worse my head hurt.
So I went down to the Dutchman’s.
Louie was back of the bar, and when he handed me my first glass of beer, I said to him: “It’s a hell of a world, Louie.”
And Louie said to me: “It sure as hell is, Mike.”
I drank a lot of beer, but I didn’t get drunk. I stayed cold sober. And that made me sore, because I figured that by rights I should take on a load. And all the time my head swam with questions and complicated puzzles.
I would have tried something stronger than beer, but I knew if I mixed drinks I’d get sick, so finally I gave up.
Louie asked me if there was something wrong, and I said no, there wasn’t, but before I left I shook hands with Louie and said good-by. If I had been drunk, Louie wouldn’t have thought a thing of it, but I could see he was surprised I acted that way when he knew I was sober as the daylight.
Just as I was going out the door I met Jimmy Langer coming in. Jimmy worked for the
Standard
and was a good newspaperman, but mean and full of low-down tricks. We were friends, of course, and had worked on lots of stories together, but we always watched one another pretty close. There was never any telling what Jimmy might be up to.
“Hi, Jimmy,” I said.
And Jimmy did a funny thing. He didn’t say a word. He just looked right at me and laughed into my face.
It took me so by surprise I didn’t do anything until he was inside the Dutchman’s, and then I walked down the street. But at the corner I stopped, wondering if I hadn’t better go back and punch Jimmy’s nose. I hadn’t liked the way he laughed at me.
The time-machine device was installed in a plane because, Doc Ackerman told us, it wouldn’t be wise to try to do much traveling at ground level. A fellow might travel forward a hundred years or so and find himself smack in the middle of a building. Or the ground might rise or sink and the time machine would be buried or left hanging in the air. The only safe way to travel in time, Doc warned us, was to do it in a plane.
The plane was squatting in a pasture a short distance from Doc’s laboratories, situated at the edge of the city, and a tough-looking mug carrying a rifle was standing guard over it. That plane had been guarded night and day. It was just too valuable a thing to let anyone get near it.
Doc explained the operation of the time machine to me.
“It’s simple,” he said. “Simple as falling off a log.”
And what he said was true. All you had to do was set the indicator forward the number of years you wished to travel. When you pressed the activator stud you went into the time spin, or whatever it was that happened to you, and you stayed in it until you reached the proper time. Then the mechanism acted automatically, your time speed was slowed down, and there you were. You just reversed the process to go backward.
Simple. Simple, so Doc said, as falling off a log. But I knew that behind all that simplicity was some of the most wonderful science the world had ever known—science and brains and long years of grueling work and terrible disappointment.
“It will be like plunging into night,” Doc told me. “You will be traveling in time as a single dimension. There will be no heat, no air, no gravitation, absolutely nothing outside your plane. But the plane is insulated to keep in the heat. In case you do get cold, just snap on those heaters. Air will be supplied, if you need it, by the oxygen tanks. But on a short trip like five hundred years you probably won’t need either the heaters or the oxygen. Just a few minutes and you’ll be there.”
J.R. had been sore at me because I had been late. Sore, too, because Herb had one of the most beautiful hangovers I have ever laid eyes on. But he’d forgotten all about that now. He was hopping up and down in his excitement.
“Just wait,” he chortled. “Just wait until Johnson sees this down at the
Standard
. He’ll probably have a stroke. Serve him right, the stubborn old buzzard.”
The guard, standing just outside the door of the ship, was shuffling his feet. For some reason the fellow seemed nervous.
Doc croaked at him. “What’s the matter with you, Benson?”
The guy stammered and shifted his rifle from one hand to another. He tried to speak, but the words just dried up in his mouth. Then J.R. started some more of his gloating and we forgot about the guard.
Herb had his cameras stowed away and everything was ready. J.R. stuck out his fist and shook hands with me and Herb, and the old rascal was pretty close to tears.
Doc and J.R. got out of the ship, and I followed them to the door. Before I closed and sealed it I took one last look at the city skyline. There it shimmered, in all its glory, through the blue haze of an autumn day. Familiar towers, and to the north the smudge of smoke that hung over the industrial district.
I waved my hand at the towers and said to them: “So long, big boys. I’ll be seeing you five hundred years from now.”
The skyline looked different up there in the future. I had expected it to look different because in five hundred years some buildings would be torn down and new ones would go up. New architectural ideas, new construction principles over the course of five centuries will change any city skyline.
But it was different in another way than that.
I had expected to see a vaster and a greater and more perfect city down below us when we rolled out of our time spin, and it was vaster and greater, but there was something wrong.
It had a dusty and neglected look.
It had grown in those five hundred years, there was no doubt of that. It had grown in all directions, and must have been at least three times as big as the city Herb and I had just left behind.
Herb leaned forward in his seat.
“Is that really the old burg down there?” he asked. “Or is it just my hangover?”
“It’s the same old place,” I assured him. Then I asked him. “Where did you pick up that beauty you’ve got?”
“I was out with some of the boys,” he told me. “Al and Harry. We met up with some of the
Standard
boys and had a few drinks with them later in the evening.”
There were no planes in the sky and I had expected that in 2450 the air would fairly swarm with them. They had been getting pretty thick even back in 1950. And now I saw the streets were free of traffic, too.
We cruised around for half an hour, and during that time the truth was driven home to us. A truth that was plenty hard to take.
That city below us was a dead city! There was no sign of life. Not a single automobile on the street, not a person on the sidewalks.
Herb and I looked at one another, and disbelief must have been written in letters three feet high upon our faces.
“Herb,” I said, “we gotta find out what this is all about.”
Herb’s Adam’s apple jiggled up and down his neck.
“Hell,” he said. “I was figuring on dropping into the Dutchman’s and getting me a pick-up.”
It took almost an hour to find anything that looked like an airport, but finally I found one that looked safe enough. It was overgrown with weeds, but the place where the concrete runways had been was still fairly smooth, although the concrete had been broken here and there, and grass and weeds were growing through the cracks.
I took her down as easy as I could, but even at that we hit a place where a slab of concrete had been heaved and just missed a crackup.
The old fellow with the rifle could have stepped from the pages of a history of early pioneer days except that once in a while the pioneers probably got a haircut.
He came out of the bushes about a mile from the airport, and his rifle hung cradled in his arm. There was something about him that told me he wasn’t one to fool with.
“Howdy, strangers,” he said in a voice that had a whiny twang.
“By Heaven,” said Herb, “it’s Daniel Boone himself.”
“You jay birds must be a right smart step from home,” said the old guy, and he didn’t sound as if he’d trust us very far.
“Not so far,” I said. “We used to live here a long time ago.”
“Danged if I recognize you.” He pushed back his old black felt hat and scratched his head. “And I thought I knew everybody that ever lived around here. You wouldn’t be Jake Smith’s boys, would you?”
“Doesn’t look like many people are living here any more,” said Herb.
“Matter of fact, there ain’t,” said Daniel Boone. “The old woman was just telling me the other day we’d have to move so we’d be nearer neighbors. It gets mighty lonesome for her. Nearest folks is about ten miles up thataway.”
He gestured to the north, where the skyline of the city loomed like a distant mountain range, with gleaming marble ramparts and spires of mocking stone.
“Look here,” I asked him. “Do you mean to say your nearest neighbor is ten miles away?”
“Sure,” he told me. “The Smiths lived over a couple of miles to the west, but they moved out this spring. Went down to the south. Claimed the hunting was better there.”
He shook his head sadly. “Maybe hunting is all right. I do a lot of it. But I like to do a little farming, too, And it’s mighty hard to break new ground. I had a right handsome bunch of squashes and carrots this year. ‘Taters did well, too.”
“But at one time a lot of people lived here.” I insisted. “Thousands and thousands of people. Probably millions of them.”
“I heard tell of that,” agreed the old man, “but I can’t rightfully say there’s any truth in it. Must’ve been a long time ago. Somebody must have built all them buildings—although what for I just can’t figure out.”
The
Globe
editorial rooms were ghostly. Dust lay everywhere, and a silence that was almost as heavy as the dust.
There had been some changes, but it was still a newspaper office. All it needed was the blur of voices, the murmur of the speeding presses to bring it to life again.
The desks still were there, and chairs ringed the copy table.
Our feet left trails across the dust that lay upon the floor and raised a cloud that set us both to sneezing.
I made a beeline for one dark corner of the room; there I knew I would find what I was looking for.
Old bound files of the paper. Their pages crackled when I opened them, and the paper was so yellowed with age that in spots it was hard to read.
I carried one of the files to a window and glanced at the date. September 14, 2143. Over three hundred years ago!
A banner screamed: “Relief Riots in Washington.”
Hurriedly we leafed through the pages. And there, on the front pages of those papers that had seen the light more than three centuries before, we read the explanation for the silent city that lay beyond the shattered, grime-streaked windows.
“Stocks Crash to Lowest Point in Ten Years!” shrieked one banner. Another said: “Congress Votes Record Relief Funds.” Still another: “Taxpayers Refuse to Pay.” After that they came faster and faster. “Debt Moratorium Declared”; “Bank Holiday Enforced”; “Thousands Starving in Cleveland”; “Jobless March on Washington”; “Troops Fight Starving Mobs”; “Congress Gives Up, Goes Home”; “Epidemic Sweeping East”; “President Declares National Emergency”; “British Government Abdicates”; “Howling Mob Sweeping Over France”; “U.S. Government Bankrupt.”
In the market and financial pages, under smaller heads, we read footnotes to those front-page lines. Story after story of business houses closing their doors, of corporations crashing, reports on declining trade, increasing unemployment, idle factories.
Civilization, three hundred years before, had crashed to ruin under the very weight of its own superstructure. The yellowed files did not tell the entire story, but it was easy to imagine.
“The world went nuts,” said Herb.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like that guy who took the dive.”
I could see it all as plain as day. Declining business, increasing unemployment, heavier taxation to help the unemployed and buy back prosperity, property owners unable to pay those taxes. A vicious circle.