Nightmares & Geezenstacks Page 10

  “You believed all that, boy? Did he have any proof?”

  It was the dangerous point; this was where the prime risk lay. They had had, for all practical purposes, no knowledge of the exact contours of the land, forty centuries back, nor knowledge of the presence of trees or buildings. If he appeared at the wrong spot, it might well mean instant death.

  Jan Obreen was fortunate, he didn’t hit anything. It was, in fact, the other way around. He came out ten feet in the air over a plowed field. The fall was nasty enough, but the soft earth protected him; one ankle seemed sprained, but not too badly. He came painfully to his feet and looked around.

  The presence of the field alone was sufficient to tell him that the Matthe process was at least partially successful. He was far before his own age. Agriculture was still a necessary component of human economy, definitely indicating an earlier civilization than his own.

  Approximately half a mile away was a densely wooded area; not a park, nor even a planned forest to house the controlled wild life of his time. A haphazardly growing wooded area—almost unbelievable. But, then, he must grow used to the unbelievable; of all the historic periods, this was the least known. Much would be strange.

  To his right, a few hundred yards away, was a wooden building. It was, undoubtedly, a human dwelling despite its primitive appearance. There was no use putting it off; contact with his fellow man would have to be made. He limped awkwardly toward his meeting with the twentieth century.

  The girl had evidently not observed his precipitate arrival, but by the time he arrived in the yard of the farm house, she had come to the door to greet him.

  Her dress was of another age, for in his era the clothing of the feminine portion of the race was not designed to lure the male. Hers, however, was bright and tasteful with color, and it emphasized the youthful contours of her body. Nor was it her dress alone that startled him. There was a touch of color on her lips that he suddenly realized couldn’t have been achieved by nature. He had read that primitive women used colors, paints and pigments of various sorts, upon their faces—somehow or other, now that he witnessed it, he was not repelled.

  She smiled, the red of her mouth stressing the even whiteness of her teeth. She said, “It would’ve been easier to come down the road ’stead of across the field.” Her eyes took him in, and, had he been more experienced, he could have read interested approval in them.

  He said, studiedly, “I am afraid that I am not familiar with your agricultural methods. I trust I have not irrevocably damaged the products of your horticultural efforts.”

  Susan Allenby blinked at him. “My,” she said softly, a distant hint of laughter in her voice, “somebody sounds like maybe they swallowed a dictionary.” Her eyes widened suddenly, as she noticed him favoring his left foot. “Why, you’ve hurt yourself. Now you come right on into the house and let me see if I can’t do something abut that. Why—”

  He followed her quietly, only half-hearing her words. Something—something phenomenal—was growing within Jan Obreen, affecting oddly and yet pleasantly his metabolism.

  He knew now what Matthe and the Presidor meant by paradox.

  The sheriff said, “Well, you were away when he got to your place-however he got there?”

  Lou Allenby nodded. “Yes, that was ten days ago. I was in Miami taking a couple of weeks’ vacation. Sis and I each get away for a week or two every year, but we go at different times, partly because we figure it’s a good idea to get away from each other once in a while anyway.”

  “Sure, good idea, boy. But your Sis, she believed this story of where he came from?”

  “Yes. And, Sheriff, she had proof. I wish I’d seen it too. The field he landed in was fresh plowed. After she’d fixed his ankle she was curious enough, after what he’d told her, to follow his footsteps through the dirt back to where they’d started. And they ended, or, rather, started, right smack in the middle of a field, with a deep mark like he’d fallen there.”

  “Maybe he came from an airplane, in a parachute, boy. Did you think of that?”

  “I thought of that, and so did Sis. She says that if he did he must’ve swallowed the parachute. She could follow his steps every bit of the way—it was only a few hundred yards—and there wasn’t any place he could’ve hidden or buried a parachute.”

  The sheriff said, “They got married right away, you say?”

  “Two days later. I had the car with me, so Sis hitched the team and drove them into town—he didn’t know how to drive horses—and they got married.”

  “See the license, boy? You sure they was really—”

  Lou Allenby looked at him, his lips beginning to go white, and the sheriff said hastily, “All right, boy, 1 didn’t mean it that way. Take it easy, boy.”

  Susan had sent her brother a telegram telling him all about it, but he’d changed hotels and somehow the telegram hadn’t been forwarded. The first he knew of the marriage was when he drove up to the farm almost a week later.

  He was surprised, naturally, but John O’Brien—Susan had altered the name somewhat—seemed likable enough. Handsome, too, if a bit strange, and he and Susan seemed head over heels in love.

  Of course, he didn’t have any money, they didn’t use it in his day, he had told them, but he was a good worker, not at all soft. There was no reason to suppose that he wouldn’t make out all right.

  The three of them planned, tentatively, for Susan and John to stay at the farm until John had learned the ropes somewhat. Then he expected to be able to find some manner in which to make money—he was quite optimistic about. his ability in that line—and spending his time traveling, taking Susan with him. Obviously, he’d be able to learn about the present that way.

  The important thing, the all-embracing thing, was to plan some message to get to Doctr Matthe and the Presidor. If this type of research was to continue, all depended upon him.

  He explained to Susan and Lou that it was a one-way trip. That the equipment worked only in one direction, that there was travel to the past, but not to the future. He was a voluntary exile, fated to spend the rest of his life in this era. The idea was that when he’d been in this century long enough to describe it well, he’d write up his report and put it in a box he’d have especially made to last forty centuries and bury it where it could be dug up—in a spot that had been determined in the future. He had the exact place geographically.

  He was quite excited when they told him about the time capsules that had been buried elsewhere. He knew that they had never been dug up and planned to make it part of his report so the men of the future could find them.

  They spent their evenings in long conversations, Jan telling of his age and what he knew of all the long centuries in between. Of the long fight upward and man’s conquests in the fields of science, medicine, and in human relations. And they telling him of theirs, describing the institutions, the ways of life which he found so unique.

  Lou hadn’t been particularly happy about the precipitate marriage at first, but he found himself warming to Jan. Until…

  The sheriff said, “And he didn’t tell you what he was till this evening?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Your sister heard him say it? She’ll back you up?”

  “I… I guess she will. She’s upset now, like I said, kind of hysterical. Screams that she’s going to leave me and the farm. But she heard him say it, Sheriff. He must of had a strong hold on her, or she wouldn’t be acting the way she is.”

  “Not that I doubt your word, boy, about a thing like that, but it’d be better if she heard it too. How’d it come up?”

  “I got to asking him some questions about things in his time and after a while I asked him how they got along on race problems and he acted puzzled and then said he remembered something about races from history he’d studied, but that there weren’t any races then.

  “He said that by his time—starting after the war of something-or-other, I forget its name—all the races had blended into one.
That the whites and the yellows had mostly killed one another off and that Africa had dominated the world for a while, and then all the races had begun to blend into one by colonization and intermarriage and that by his time the process was complete. I just stared at him and asked him, ‘You mean you got nigger blood in you?’ and he said, just like it didn’t mean anything, ‘At least one-fourth.’ ”

  “Well, boy, you did just what you had to do,” the sheriff told him earnestly, “no doubt about it.”

  “I just saw red. He’d married Sis; he was sleeping with her. I was so crazy-mad I don’t even remember getting my gun.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it, boy. You did right.”

  “But I feel like hell about it. He didn’t know.”

  “Now that’s a matter of opinion, boy. Maybe you swallowed a little too much of this hogwash. Coming from the future-huh! These niggers’ll think up the damnedest tricks to pass themselves off as white. What kind of proof for his story is that mark on the ground? Hogwash, boy. Ain’t nobody coming from the future or going there neither. We can just quiet this up so it won’t never be heard of nowhere. It’ll be like it never happened.”

  ENTITY TRAP

  Listing from the World Biographical Dictionary, 1990 edition: DIX, John, b. Louisville, Ky., U.S.A., Feb. 1, 1960; son Harvey R. (saloonkeeper) and Elizabeth (Bailey); student Louisville public schools 1966-1974; ran away from home at 14, worked as pin boy, bell hop; sentenced 6 mos. Birmingham, Ala., 1978, charge: procuring; enlisted U.S. Army, 1979, fought as private in Sino-American War, 1979–1981; reported missing in Battle of Panamints, 1981; led Revolution of 1982, became President of United States Aug. 5, 1982, Dictator of North America Apr. 10, 1983; died at age of 23 yrs. June 14, 1983.

  The concrete of the pillbox was still moist. As Johnny Dix peered out of the slit, over the sights of his machine gun, he touched it with his finger and hoped it had hardened enough to stop the bullets of the yellow men.

  A heavy pall of dense smoke hung over the foothills of the Panamints. From the slope behind the pillbox the roar of the American artillery was thunderous. Ahead, less than a mile away, the mobile guns of the Chinese thundered back.

  Johnny Dix was too close to the war to be able to see it or to know that this was the turning point, the farthest penetration of the abortive Chinese invasion of California—made after the ICBM’s had reduced most major cities of both countries to rubble, but had still proved undecisive—and that from here the Chinese would be driven back into the sea and the war would end.

  “They’re coming,” Johnny Dix threw back over his shoulder. His companion’s ear was only inches away but Johnny had to yell to make himself heard. “Get the next belt ready. Gotta hold them.”

  Got to hold them. It ran through his mind like a refrain. This was the last fully prepared line of defense. Behind it was Death Valley; it would live up to its name if they were shoved back into those open, arid wastelands. Out in the open there they would be mowed down like wheat.

  But for three days now, the Panamint line had held. Hammered by steel from the air and steel from the ground, it had held. And the momentum of the attack had been blunted; it had even been thrown back a few hundred yards. This pillbox was one of a new line of outposts, hastily thrown up the night before under cover of darkness.

  Something black and ugly, the nose of a huge tank, pushed through the smoke and haze. Johnny Dix let go the hot handgrips of the chatter-gun, useless against the coming monster, and nudged his companion. He yelled, “Tank about to cross the mine. Throw the switch quick! Now!”

  The ground under their prone bodies shook with the terrific concussion of the exploding mine. Deafened and temporarily almost blinded by the blast that turned the monster tank into scrap iron, they did not hear the screaming dive of the plane.

  The bomb it released struck a scant yard from their pillbox. And the pillbox wasn’t there any more.

  They should both have been killed instantly, but only one of them was. Life can be tenacious. The thing that had been Johnny Dix wriggled and rolled over. One arm—the other was gone—flailed about, the fingers clutching as though searching for the grip of the machine gun that lay yards away. One eye stared upward unseeingly above a bloody gaping hole where once had been a nose. Helmet had been blown away and with it most of the hair and scalp.

  The mangled thing, no longer living but not yet dead, twisted again and began to crawl.

  Back swooped the plane. Explosive bullets from its prop gun plowed a furrow of destruction that crossed the crawling thing above the knees, cutting off the legs. Dying fingers clutched spasmodically at the ground and then relaxed.

  Johnny Dix was dead, but accident had timed with hair-trigger precision the instant of his death. His mangled body lived. This is the part of the story not known to the compilers of the World Biographical Dictionary when they made their listing for John Dix, Dictator of North America for eight months before his death at twenty-three years of age.

  The nameless entity whom we shall call the Stranger paused in his interplanar swing. He had perceived something that should not have been.

  He went back a plane. Not there. Another. Yes, this was it. A plane of matter, and yet he perceived emanations of consciousness. It was a paradox, a sheer contradiction. There were the planes of consciousness and there were the planes of physical matter—but never the two together.

  The Stranger—a nonmaterial point in space, a focus of consciousness, an entity-paused amid the whirling stars of the matter-plane. These were familiar to him, common to all the matter-planes. But here there was something different. Consciousness, where there should be no consciousness. A foreign kind of consciousness. His perception seemed to tell him that it was allied with matter, but that was a complete contradiction in concepts. Matter was matter; consciousness was consciousness. The two could not be as one.

  The emanations were faint. Then he found that by decreasing his time-motion he could make them stronger. He continued the decrease until he had passed the point of maximum strength and then went back to it. They were clear now, but the stars no longer whirled. Almost motionless they hung against the curved curtain of infinity.

  The Stranger now began to move—to shift the focus of his thought—toward the star from which the ambiguous emanations came, toward the point which he now perceived to be the third planet of that star.

  He neared it and found himself outside the gaseous envelope that surrounded the planet. Here again he paused, bewildered, to analyze and try to understand the amazing thing his perceptions told him lay below.

  There were entities there below him, millions, even billions, of them. More in number on this tiny sphere than in the entire plane from which he had come. But these beings were each imprisoned in a finite bit of matter.

  What cosmic cataclysm, what interplanar warp, could have led to such an impossible thing? Were these entities from one of the myriad consciousness-planes who, in some unknown manner and for some unknown reason, had brought about this unthinkable misalliance of consciousness and matter?

  He tried to concentrate his perception on a single entity, but the myriad emanations of thought from the planet’s surface were too many and confusing to let him do so.

  He descended toward the solid surface of the sphere, penetrating its outer gasses. He realized he would need to come near one of the beings in order to tune out, as it were, the jumbled confusion of the thoughts of the many.

  The gas thickened as he descended. It seemed strangely agitated as though by intermittent but frequent concussions. Had not sound and hearing been things foreign to an incorporeal entity, the Stranger might have recognized the sound waves of explosions.

  The mass of smoke he recognized as a modification or pollution of the gas he had first encountered. To a creature who perceived without sight it was neither more nor less opaque than the purer air above.

  He entered solidity. That, of course, was no barrier to his progress, but he perceived now that he was on a v
ertical plane roughly coincidental with the surface of solidity; and that from that plane, on all sides of him, came the confused and mystifying emanations of consciousness.

  One such source was very near. Shielding his own thoughts, the Stranger moved closer. The consciousness-emanations of the nearby entity were clear now—and yet not clear.

  He did not know that their confusion was due to the fact that agonizing pain muddled or blanked out everything but itself. Pain, possible only to an alliance of mind and matter, was utterly inconceivable to the Stranger.

  He went closer, encountering solidity again. This time it was a different type of surface. Outside, it was wet with something thick and sticky. Below that, a flexible layer covered a less flexible layer. Beyond that, soft and strange matter, queerly convoluted.

  He was nearer the source of the incomprehensible consciousness-emanations now, but oddly they were becoming fainter. They did not seem to come from a fixed point, but from many points upon the convolutions of softness.

  He moved slowly, striving for understanding of the strange phenomenon. The matter itself was different, once he had penetrated it. It was made up of cells and there was a fluid that moved among them.

  Then, with awful suddenness, there was a convulsive movement of parts of the strange matter, a sudden flare of the un-understandable pain-consciousness-emanation—and utter blankness. Simply, the entity that he had been studying was gone. It had not moved, but it had vanished utterly.

  The Stranger was bewildered. This was the most astonishing thing he had yet encountered on this unique planet of the matter-mind misalliance. Death—deepest mystery to beings who have seen it often—was deeper mystery to one who had never conceived as possible the end of an entity.

  But more startling still, at the instant of the extinguishment of that incoherent consciousness, the Stranger had felt a sudden force, a pull. He had been shifted slightly in space, sucked into a vortex—as air is sucked into a sudden vacuum.