Honeymoon in Hell Page 8

  “I constructed the first time machine a week ago. My calculations had told me that it would work, but not how it would work. I had expected it to send an object back in time—it works backward in time only, not forward—physically unchanged and intact.

  “My first experiment showed me my error. I placed a cube of metal in the machine—it was a miniature of the one you just walked out of—and set the machine to go backward ten years. I flicked the switch and opened the door, expecting to find the cube vanished. Instead I found it had crumbled to powder.

  “I put in another cube and sent it two years back. The second cube came back unchanged, except that it was newer, shinier.

  “That gave me the answer. I had been expecting the cubes to go back in time, and they had done so, but not in the sense I had expected them to. Those metal cubes had been fabricated about three years previously. I had sent the first one back years before it had existed in its fabricated form. Ten years ago it had been ore. The machine returned it to that state.

  “Do you see how our previous theories of time travel have been wrong? We expected to be able to step into a time machine in, say, 2004, set it for fifty years back, and then step out in the year 1954 . . . but it does not work that way. The machine does not move in time. Only whatever is within the machine is affected, and then just with relation to itself and not to the rest of the Universe.

  “I confirmed this with guinea pigs by sending one six weeks old five weeks back and it came out a baby.

  “I need not outline all my experiments here. You will find a record of them in the desk and you can study it later.

  “Do you understand now what has happened to you, Norman?”

  You begin to understand. And you begin to sweat.

  The I who wrote that letter you are now reading is you, yourself at the age of seventy-five, in the year of 2004. You are that seventy-five-year-old man, with your body returned to what it had been fifty years ago, with all the memories of fifty years of living wiped out.

  You invented the time machine.

  And before you used it on yourself, you made theses arrangements to help you .orient yourself. You wrote yourself the letter which you are now reading.

  But if those fifty years are—to you—gone, what of all your friends, those you loved? What of your parents? What of the girl you are going—were going—to marry?

  You read on:

  “Yes, you will want to know what has happened. Mom died in 1963, Dad in 1968. You married Barbara in 1956. I am sorry to tell you that she died only three years later, in a plane crash. You have one son. He is still living; his name is Walter; he is now forty-six years old and is an accountant in Kansas City.”

  Tears come into your eyes and for a moment you can no longer read. Barbara dead—dead for forty-five years. And only minutes ago, in subjective time, you were sitting next to her, sitting in the bright sun in a Beverly Hills patio . . .

  You force yourself to read again.

  “But back to the discovery. You begin to see some of its implications. You will need time to think to see all of them.

  “It does not permit time travel as we have thought of time travel, but it gives us immortality of a sort. Immortality of the kind I have temporarily given us.

  “Is it good? Is it worth while to lose the memory of fifty years of one’s life in order to return one’s body to relative youth? The only way I can find out is to try, as soon as I have finished writing this and made my other preparations.

  “You will know the answer.

  “But before you decide, remember that there-is another problem, more important than the psychological one. I mean overpopulation.

  “If our discovery is given to the world, if all who are old or dying can make themselves young again, the population will almost double every generation. Nor would the world—not even our own relatively enlightened country— be willing to accept compulsory birth control as a solution.

  “Give this to the world, as the world is today in 2004, and within a generation there will be famine, suffering, war. Perhaps a complete collapse of civilization.

  “Yes, we have reached other planets, but they are not suitable for colonizing. The stars may be our answer, but we are a long way from reaching them. When we do, someday, the billions of habitable planets that must be out there will be our answer . . . our living room. But until then, what is the answer?

  “Destroy the machine? But think of the countless lives it can save, the suffering it can prevent. Think of what it would mean to a man dying of cancer. Think . .

  Think. You finish the letter and put it down.

  You think of Barbara dead for forty-five years. And of the fact that you were married to her for three years and that those years are lost to you.

  Fifty years lost. You damn the old man of seventy-five whom you became and who has done this to you . . . who has given you this decision to make.

  Bitterly, you know what the decision must be. You think that he knew, too, and realize that he could safely leave it in your hands. Damn him, he should have known.

  Too valuable to destroy, too dangerous to give.

  The other answer is painfully obvious.

  You must be custodian of this discovery and keep it secret until it is safe to give, until mankind has expanded to the stars and has new worlds to populate, or until, even without that, he has reached a state of civilization where he can avoid overpopulation by rationing births to the number of accidental—or voluntary—deaths.

  If neither of those things has happened in another fifty years (and are they likely so soon?), then you, at seventy-five, will be writing another letter like this one. You will be undergoing another experience similar to the one you’re going through now. And making the same decision, of course.

  Why not? You’ll be the same person again.

  Time and again, to preserve this secret until Man is ready for it.

  How often will you again sit at a desk like this one, thinking the thoughts you are thinking now, feeling the grief you now feel?

  There is a click at the door and you know that the time lock has opened, that you are now free to leave this room, free to start a new life for yourself in place of the one you have already lived and lost.

  But you are in no hurry now to walk directly through that door.

  You sit there, staring straight ahead of you blindly, seeing in your mind’s eye the vista of a set of facing mirrors, like those in an old-fashioned barber shop, reflecting the same thing over and over again, diminishing into far distance.

  EXPERIMENT

  “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 wil
l, 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.

  THE LAST MARTIAN

  It was an evening like any evening, but duller than most, I was back in the city room after covering a boring banquet, at which the food had been so poor that, even though it had cost me nothing, I’d felt cheated. For the hell of it, I was writing a long and glowing account of it, ten or twelve column inches. The copyreader, of course, would cut it to a passionless paragraph or two.

  Slepper was sitting with his feet up on the desk, ostentatiously doing nothing, and Johnny Hale was putting a new ribbon on his typewriter. The rest of the boys were out on routine assignments.

  Cargan, the city ed, came out of his private office and walked over to us.

  “Any of you guys know Barney Welch?” he asked us.

  A silly question. Barney runs Barney’s Bar right across the street from the Trib. There isn’t a Trib reporter who doesn’t know Barney well enough to borrow money from him. So we all nodded.

  “He just phoned,” Cargan said. “He’s got a guy down there who claims to be from Mars.”

  “Drunk or crazy, which?” Slepper wanted to know.

  “Barney doesn’t know, but he said there might be a gag story in it if we want to come over and talk to the guy. Since it’s right across the street and since you three mugs are just sitting on your prats, anyway, one of you dash over. But no drinks on the expense account.”

  Slepper said, “I’ll go,” but Cragan’s eyes had lighted on me. “You free, Bill?” he asked. “This has got to be a funny story, if any, and you got a light touch on the human interest stuff.”

  “Sure,” I grumbled. “I’ll go.”

  “Maybe it’s just some drunk being funny, but if the guy’s really insane, phone for a cop, unless you think you can get a gag story. If there’s an arrest, you got something to hang a straight story on.”

  Slepper said, “Cargan, you’d get your grandmother arrested to get a story. Can I go along with Bill, just for the ride?”

  “No, you and Johnny stay here. We’re not moving the city room across the street to Barney’s.” Cargan went back into his office.

  I slapped a “thirty” on to end the banquet story and sent it down the tube. I got my hat and coat. Slepper said, “Have a drink for me, Bill. But don’t drink so much you t lose that light touch.”

  I said, “Sure,” and went on over to the stairway and down.

  I walked into Barney’s and looked around. Nobody from the Trib was there except a couple of pressmen playing gin rummy at one of the tables. Aside from Barney himself, back of the bar, there was only one other man in the place.

  He was a tall man, thin and sallow, who was sitting by himself in one of the booths, staring morosely into an almost empty beer glass.

  I thought I’d get Barney’s angle first, so I went up to the bar and put down a bill. “A quick one,” I told him. “Straight, water on the side. And is tall-and-dismal over there the Martian you phoned Cargan about?”

  He nodded once and poured my drink.

  “What’s my angle?” I asked him. “Does he know a reporter’s going to interview him? Or do I just buy him a drink and rope him, or what? How crazy is he?”

  “You tell me. Says he just got in from Mars two hours ago and he’s trying to figure it out. He says he’s the last living Martian. He doesn’t know you’re a reporter, but he’s all set to talk to. you. I set it up.”

  “How?”

  “Told him I had a friend who was smarter than any usual guy and could give him good advice on what to do. I didn’t tell him any name because I didn’t know who Cargan would send. But he’s all ready to cry on your shoulder.”

  “Know his name?”

  Barney grimaced. “Yangan Dal, he says. Listen, don’t get him violent or anything in here. I don’t want no trouble.”

  I downed my shot and took a sip of chaser. I said, “Okay, Barney. Look, dish up two beers for us and I’ll go over and take ’em with me.”

  Barney drew two beers and cut off their heads. He rang up sixty cents and gave me my change, and I went over to the booth with the beers.

  “Mr. Dal?” I said. “My name is Bill Everett. Barney tells me you have a problem I might help you on.”

  He looked up at me. “You’re the one he phoned? Sit down, Mr. Everett. And thanks very much for the beer.”

  I slid into the booth across from him. He took the last sip of his previous beer and wrapped nervous hands around the glass I’d just bought him.

  “I suppose you’ll think I’m crazy,” he said. “And maybe you’ll be right, but—I don’t understand it myself. The bartender thinks I’m crazy, I guess. Listen, are you a doctor?” “Not exactly,” I told him. “Call me a consulting psychologist.”

  “Do you think I’m insane?”

  I said, “Most people who are don’t admit they might be. But I haven’t heard your story yet.”

  He took a draught of the beer and put the glass down again, but kept his hands tightly around the glass, possibly to keep them from shaking.

  He said, “I’m a Martian. The last one. All the others are dead. I saw their bodies only two hours ago.”

  “You were on Mars only two hours ago? How did you get here?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the horrible thing. I don’t know. All I know is that the others were dead, their bodies starting to rot. It was awful. There were a hundred million of us, and now I’m the last one.”

  “A hundred million. That’s the population of Mars?” “About that. A little over, maybe. But that was the population. They’re all dead now, except me. I looked in three cities, the three biggest ones. I was in Skar, and when I found all the people dead there, I took a targan—there was no one to stop me—and flew it to Undanel. I’d never flown one before, but the controls were simple. Everyone in Undanel was dead, too. I refueled and flew on. I flew low and watched and there was no one alive. I flew to Zandar, the biggest city—over three million people. And all of them were dead and starting to rot. It was horrible, I tell you. Horrible. I can’t get over the shock of it”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “You can't. Of course it was a dying world, anyway; we didn’t have more than another dozen generations left to us, you understand. Two centuries ago, we numbered three billion—most of them starving. It was the kryl, the disease that came from the desert wind and that our scientists couldn’t cure. In two centuries it reduced us to one-thirtieth of our number and it still kept on.”

  “Your people died, then, of this—kryl?”

  “No. When a Martian dies of kryl, he withers. The corpses I saw were not withered.” He shuddered and drank the rest of his beer. I saw that I’d neglected mine and downed it. I raised two fingers at Barney, who was watching our way and looking worried.

  My Martian went on talking. “We tried to develop space travel, but we couldn’t. We thought some of us might escape the kryl, if we came to Earth or to other worlds. We tried, but we failed. We couldn’t even get to Deimos or Phobos, our moons.”

  “You didn’t develop space travel? Then how—"

  “I don’t know. I don't know, and I tell you it’s driving me wild. I don’t know how I got here. I
’m Yangan Dal, a Martian. And I'm here, in this body. It’s driving me wild, I tell you.”

  Barney came with the beers. He looked worried enough, so I waited until he was out of hearing before I asked, “In this body? Do you mean—”

  “Of course. This isn’t, this body I’m in. You don’t think Martians would look exactly like humans, do you? I’m three feet tall, weigh what would be about twenty pounds here on Earth. I have four arms with six-fingered hands. This body I’m in—it frightens me. I don’t understand it, any more than I know how I got here.”

  “Or how you happen to talk English? Or can you account for that?”

  “Well—in a way I can. This body; its name is Howard Wilcox. It’s a bookkeeper. It’s married to a female of this species. It works at a place called the Humbert Lamp Company. I’ve got all its memories and I can do everything it could do; I know everything it knew, or knows. In a sense, I am Howard Wilcox. I’ve got stuff in my pockets to prove it. But it doesn’t make sense, because I’m Yangan Dal, and I’m a Martian. I’ve even got this body’s tastes. I like beer. And if I think about this body’s wife, I—well, I love her.”

  I stared at him and pulled out my cigarettes, held out the package to him. “Smoke?”

  “This body—Howard Wilcox—doesn’t smoke. Thanks, though. And let me buy us another round of beers. There’s money in these pockets.”

  I signaled Barney.

  “When did this happen? You say only two hours ago? Did you ever suspect before then that you were a Martian?” “Suspect? I was a Martian. What time is it?”

  I looked at Barney’s clock. “A little after nine.”

  “Then it’s a little longer than I thought. Three and a half hours. It would have been half past five when I found myself in this body, because it was going home from work then, and from its memories I know it had left work half an hour before then, at five.”