No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (9 page)

“That makes no difference,” said Anderson. “No difference at all. Once the System knows such salts exist all hell will break wide open. Mercury will be swamped with men looking for them—”

He stopped his tirade, walked around the desk and sat down.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed my story, Mr. Marshall.”

I gulped at that one. “Enjoyed it! Why, it’s the greatest story the System’s ever known. They’ll give it headlines two feet high. They’ll spread it—”

I stopped because I didn’t like the look that had crept into his eyes.

“You realize, of course, Mr. Marshall, that you shall never print it.”

“Never print it,” I yelped. “What did you tell it to me for?”

“I took advantage of you,” said Anderson. “I had to tell it to someone. I’ve had it corked up in me too long. And I needed time.”

I gulped again. “Time—”

He nodded. “Time for the robots to take certain measures. By this time they have discovered something is wrong. They are quick at things like that.”

He seemed to be laughing at me.

“You’ll never leave this place alive,” he said.

We sat there looking at one another. He was smiling. I don’t know how I looked. I was mad and plenty scared.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “We mustn’t be dramatic. I don’t mean I am going to kill you. I mean that you will never leave this place. If you try you’ll most assuredly be killed. You see, I can’t let you go. Not knowing what you know.”

“You dirty—” but he stopped me.

“You asked for it,” he said.

A door back of the desk opened softly and a ray of light slashed into the room. Through the door I caught the glimpse of a laboratory.

A tall, gaunt man stood in the doorway. His face was pallid above the black lounging robe he wore.

“Anderson—” he began excitedly.

“Why, Ernie,” said Anderson. “I didn’t expect to see you. We have a guest. Mr. Sherman Marshall. He’s staying for a while”—he cast me a sidelong look—“for quite a while,” he finished.

“I am glad to know you,” Ernie said to me. “Do you, by chance, play whist? Anderson is no good at it. Claims it is old-fashioned—absolutely primitive.”

“I don’t know a thing about it,” I said, “but I’m handy with cards.”

“Of course,” said Anderson to me, “you must have guessed that Ernie is my partner in crime. Not quite as old as I am but almost. Ernie Hitchcock. Once one of the best captains that ever flew in space.”

“I came to tell you,” said Hitchcock, speaking to Anderson with the old urgency in his voice, “that there has been a reaction. The kind we were hoping for. I made sure before—”

Anderson’s hands grasped at the table.

“A reaction—” he choked. “You mean it … really … what we were looking for?”

Hitchcock nodded.

Anderson turned to me. “You will excuse us?”

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I was trying to make head and tail or what had happened. What did the tall, gaunt man mean by reaction? Could it mean that a cure had been found, after all these years, for the space sickness? Did it mean that Dr. Anderson, at the moment all seemed lost, had triumphed in this search that had stretched over three lifetimes?

The two went out the door, into the laboratory and I watched them go. Minutes dragged by. I got up and paced around the room. I stared at the books in the shelves, but there was nothing to interest me, mostly medical works.

Knowing it wouldn’t do me any good, I went to the door leading into the room where I’d bashed the robot on the head. I opened it and there squarely in front of it, stood a robot with his arms folded across his chest. He looked as if he were just waiting for me to make a break. He said nothing and I said nothing. I simply shut the door.

The radio caught my attention and I wondered if it would work. Anderson had said it hadn’t been tuned in for months. Radio reception usually is almost impossible here, but with the new broadcast units put in at New Chicago in the last few months it should be halfway decent, I thought.

I turned it on and the set lighted up and hummed. Swiftly I spun the dial to the New Chicago wave length and the voice of Jimmy Doyle, newscaster, blared out, somewhat disrupted by static, but still intelligible.

Jimmy was just starting his broadcast and what he had to say held me rooted to the spot —

“—still searching for Sherman Marshall, wanted for the murder of Eli Lawrence. A warrant was issued for Marshall’s arrest ten hours ago when a canvas bag belonging to the murdered man was found in an alley near the North Wall. Marshall’s fingerprints, the police say, were found upon it. A bartender at the Sun Spot, a night club—”

There was a lot more to it, and I listened, but it didn’t mean much. The things that mattered were my fingerprints upon the canvas bag in which old Eli had carried his salts and the story the bartender at the Sun Spot had told the police.

Back at New Chicago the cops were in full cry. Intent to hang the murder on someone. Anxious to make a showing because election was near.

And with those fingerprints and the bartender’s story it wouldn’t be so hard to hang it on me.

Numbly I reached out and snapped off the radio. Covering trials, both in New Chicago and back on Earth, I often had tried to put myself in the defendant’s place, had tried to imagine what he was thinking, how he felt.

And now I knew!

I was safe, I knew, for a while, for no one would think of looking for me here. Perhaps even if they did come looking they wouldn’t find me, for Anderson would want to keep me hidden. It would be to his interest to keep me where I couldn’t talk.

I thought back over the events immediately preceding and following Eli’s death—and I suddenly remembered the sand flask hidden in my dresser drawer. The sand flask with the white spaceship!

The door to the laboratory opened and Anderson entered the room. He was all smiles and he almost beamed at me.

“I have been thinking,” he said. “Perhaps I can let you go.”

“What’s that?” I yelped.

“I said I was thinking I needn’t keep you here.”

“But, Doc,” I protested, “I really want to stay. I think—”

And then I saw it wasn’t any good. If he was ready to let me leave, he would be no protection if I stayed.

“But why this sudden switch?” I demanded. “If you let me go, I’ll publish the story. Sure as hell, I will.”

“I don’t think you will,” he said. “Because I am trading you another story for it. A bigger story—”

“The cure? You’ve found the cure?”

He nodded. “There had seemed just one thing left to do. A very dangerous thing and with slight chance of success. If that failed, we feared that we were done. We had then explored every possibility. We had come to the end.

“We tried and failed—or so it seemed. But what had seemed failure was really success. The reaction was slower than we thought, took longer to manifest itself. We know now that we can cure the space sickness.”

He was staring at the wall again and there still was nothing there—

“It will take some time,” he finally said. “A little time to perfect the method. But I still have a little time … a little time … enough—”

“But, Doctor,” I yelled at him, “you must have some salts. You certainly didn’t use all that Eli brought you. There is no need to talk of time.”

He turned tired eyes to me.

“Yes, I have some salts,” he said. “Let me show you—”

He rose and went through the laboratory. I followed him.

From a cabinet above a sink he lifted down a box and opened it. Inside I saw the crystals.

“Look,” said Anderson.

He upended the box, dumped the salts into the sink, reached out and turned the tap. In silence we watched the water wash them down the drain.

“Try and tell that story now,” he said. “You’ll be laughed out of your profession. There is no evidence. I am the only evidence and I will soon be dead.

“I’ve waited for this day—for the day when I could pour them down the drain. I’ve done what I set out to do. I’ve taken the terror out of space. I’ve answered the prayers I have seen in the eyes of dying men. No one, even if they knew, and believed, my story, could say now that I had been wrong in doing what I did.”

“You forget just one thing, Doctor.”

“What is that?”

“There still is evidence. Someone stole some salts from Eli.”

He blanched at that. I knew he would. In the triumph of the moment he had forgotten it. His hand shook as he put back the box, turned off the water.

And in that instant, I think, I realized what he stood for. I could envision those long lonely years. Facing failure every year, despairing of ever doing what need be done. Keeping within his brain a knowledge that would have brought him greater glory than any man had ever had and yet keeping silent because he knew what his secret would do to the people of the System.

“Look, Doctor,” I said.

“Yes?”

“About those salts that Eli had. You needn’t worry. I know where they are.”

“You know where they are?”

“Yes, but I didn’t until a minute ago.”

He didn’t ask the question, but I answered it.

“I’ll do what’s necessary,” I said.

Silently he held out his hand to me.

I knew where those salts were, all right. But the problem was to reach them.

I knew, too, who had murdered Eli. But there was no way to prove it. The salts would have furnished the proof, but it was doubtful if any court, any jury would have believed my story. And using them as evidence would have told the world, would have broken faith with Dr. Jennings Anderson.

My first job was to get them.

How I did it I still don’t clearly remember. I remember that I came into the west port of the city with a jam of other cars, gambling on the belief the police would be watching outgoing cars, would pay little attention to incoming ones.

Once inside I ran the car into a side street, ducked it into an alley and abandoned it. I remember dodging up alleys, hiding in recessed doorways to avoid passers-by, working nearer and nearer to my apartment house.

Getting into the house was simpler than I thought.

Plain-clothes men were watching the place, but their watch had eased up a bit. After all, what murderer would be crazy enough to come back to a place he knew was being watched?

I waited my chance and took it. I met one man in the hall, but turned to one of the doors, fumbling in my pocket as if for a key, shielding my face from him until he was past.

My own room was unguarded. Probably they figured that it was impossible for me to slip into the building, so why guard the room?

The place had been ransacked, but nothing, apparently, had been taken.

Swiftly I went to the dresser in the bedroom, pulled out the drawer, lifted out the sand flask. With trembling fingers I pried out the cork, shook out the contents.

There was no mistaking the appearance of the white sand. It wasn’t white sand—it was the crystals Eli had shown me at the Sun Spot.

What was it Anderson had said—“
if resynthesis actually does occur a man would grow younger—
”

I hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. Then I scooped up some of the crystals, put them in my mouth and swallowed. They went down hard—like sand. But they went down. I took some more, just to make sure. I had no way of knowing how many I should take. Then I washed the rest down the bathroom drain.

After that I sat down to wait. I knew it was a dangerous thing to do, but probably it was as safe there in my room as any other place.

Four hours later I walked out of the apartment house, through the lobby, right past Floyd Duncan, SBI chief. He didn’t know me. For that matter I hardly knew myself. To all appearances, I was a youth of no more than twenty years.

The newsboys began screaming an extra as I neared the Martian Times building in Sandebar. I stopped to listen to their shouts.

“Extra!” they bellowed. “Marty Berg Guilty. Marty Berg Guilty of Eli Lawrence Murder.”

I shrugged my shoulders. It had taken Duncan plenty of time to crack that one. I grinned as I remembered him sitting in the apartment lobby, never blinking an eyelash as I sauntered past.

In the newsroom I walked up to the city editor’s desk.

“What do you want?” a hard-boiled guy barked at me.

“I thought you might need a man.”

“Can you write?”

I nodded.

“Experience?”

I rattled off the story I had fixed up.

“What the hell are you doing on Mars?” he demanded. “This isn’t any fit place for a man to live.”

“Bumming around,” I told him. “Seeing the System.”

He made doodles on a sheet of paper.

“I’ll try you out,” he said. “I like your looks. Remind me of someone. Someone I met.” He shook his head. “Can’t place him.”

But I had placed him. He was Herb North. I’d met him once, years before, at a press convention. We’d gone on a bat together.

“Ever hear of a guy named Chesty Lewis?” he asked.

“Read about him. New York gangster, isn’t he?”

“He used to be in New York,” said North, “but he lammed out here a few months ago. He’s coming up for trial this morning. That will be your first job. Funny case. Seems he took an old bird for about a billion bucks. Told the old sucker he had some stuff that would make him young again. But it didn’t and so—we have a trial.”

I nodded. I knew all about it.

Chesty Lewis had sold Andrew J. Rasmussen, Mars utility magnate, a small bottle of white sand—the kind that comes in those picture flasks they sell to tourists out on Mercury.

The Loot of Time

Clifford D. Simak has always shown an interest in ancient humans. Not only in this story—which was published in the December 1938 issue of
Wonder Stories
—but in several later stories, his characters evoked their caveman ancestors. (Cliff also wrote a sequel to “The Loot of Time,” called “The Legend of Time”—which went unpublished—and a nonfiction book titled
Prehistoric Man
.) Keep in mind that when archaeological evidence was found indicating that people had lived in Minnesota in ancient times, Cliff Simak was the journalist assigned to investigate and report on it.

—dww

CHAPTER I
The Time Tractor

Hugh Cameron rose from his knees and dusted his hands. He looked at Jack Cabot and Conrad Yancey and the two of them stared back at him, questioningly.

“We’re ready to go,” Cameron announced. “I’ve checked everything.”

“You give me the willies,” Yancey spoke flatly. “Checking and rechecking.”

“Got to make sure,” Cameron told him. “Can’t take any chances, not on a trip like this.”

Cabot shoved up his hat and scratched his head.

“Are you sure that the theory and the mechanism are all right, Hugh?” he asked anxiously. “I still have a feeling we’re all crazy.”

Cameron nodded.

“Near as I can make out, Jack, it will work. I’ve gone over it step by step. Pascal has something here that’s unique. A theory that has no precedent. Treating time as something abstract, but using that very basis for time-travel.”

“It would take a guy who got kicked out of Oxford for saying Einstein’s relativity theory was all haywire to make something like this,” observed Yancey.

Cameron pointed at a crystal globe atop a mass of intricate machinery.

“The whole answer is in that time-brain,” he said. “That’s the one thing I can’t figure out. How he made it I don’t know. But it works. I have proof of that. The rest all checks out.

“Pascal has taken the position that time is purely subjective. That it has no existence in fact. That it is only a mental concept, but something that is entirely necessary for orientation.”

“That’s the part I can’t get my teeth into,” protested Cabot. “It seems to me that if a man were going to travel in time there’d have to be existent time to travel in. Time would have to be an actual factor. Otherwise it would not obey mechanical rules. There’d be no theater for mechanical operation. In other words, just how in hell are we going to travel through something that doesn’t exist?”

Cameron lit a cigarette and tried to explain.

“Your mind sticks on the mechanical part,” he said. “Pascal’s theory isn’t all mechanics or all mathematics, although there’re plenty of both. There’re a lot of psychological concepts and that’s one place where they come in. He figures that even if time is non-existent, even if it has no factual identity, that the human brain has a well-developed time-sense. Time seems entirely natural to us. Viewed from the commonplace point of view, there is absolutely no mystery about it. It is firmly embedded in the human consciousness.

“Pascal figured that if you constructed a mechanical brain you could construct it in such a manner that its time-sense would be enormously magnified. Maybe ten thousand times that of a human mind. Maybe more. There’s no way to tell. So Pascal not only constructed the mechanical counterpart of a human brain, but he constructed it with an exaggerated time-sense. That brain over there knows more about time right now than the human race will ever know. Nobody else on Earth could have done it. No twentieth-century man. Pascal’s a wizard. That’s what he is.”

“Listen, Hugh,” said Cabot, “I want to be sure. I sent over to America, had you come out to London because I knew that if any man could tell me anything about this pipe-dream it would be you. I want you to feel absolutely certain. I can’t understand it myself. I figure you can. If you have any doubt, say so now. I don’t want to get stuck halfway back in time.”

Cameron puffed away at his smoke.

“It isn’t a pipe-dream, Jack. It’s the goods. The time-sense in the brain is developed to a point where it has an ability to assume mastery over time. It can move through time. What’s more, it can move the time-tractor through time—with all of us inside the tractor. Not hypnotism, because in hypnotism you only think you’re some place or doing something that isn’t so.

“The brain actually can move back and forth in time and it can move us back and forth in time. It develops some sort of a force. Not electricity. Pascal thought it was that at first. But it isn’t, although it’s related to electricity. For want of a better term we might call it a time-force. That describes it well enough. It develops this force in sufficient amount to operate the control mechanism that guides the brain’s movement through time.”

He flipped his hands helplessly.

“That’s all I can tell you. The rest of it is mathematics that would be pure Greek to you and mechanics that you’d have to take eight years of college to understand.”

He looked at Cabot.

“You have to take my word for it, Jack, that the damn thing will run.”

Cabot smiled.

“That’s good enough for me, Hugh,” he said.

A shadow blotted out the sunlight on the floor. The three looked toward the door.

Dr. Thomas Pascal stood there, a white-haired man with a face that was almost childish in its simplicity. He was one of 1940’s scientific wizards.

“All ready to start?” he asked cheerfully.

Cameron nodded.

“Everything seems all right, Doctor,” he said. “I’ve checked every cable, every cog, every contact. They’re all in perfect order.”

“All right, then,” growled Yancey. “What are we waiting for. I’m all set to slaughter me a saber-tooth.”

“You’ll find plenty of them,” Pascal told him. “I told you I’d take you to a virgin game field. A place where a rifle shot had never been fired. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Cameron laughed.

“Doctor,” he asked, “how did you ever get the idea of selling these two mad hunters on this proposition? A hunting trip back into time. That’s one for the records.”

“I needed money to finish the tractor,” Pascal told him, “so I cast around for someone who might be interested, but interested in such a way that my invention would not be used for base ends. Then I heard of Mr. Cabot and Mr. Yancey. Plenty of money. Famous hunters. What could be more appealing to them than a hunting trip back into the past? But they weren’t easy to convince. They listened only when I consented to let you check the entire machine.”

Cabot shook his head stubbornly.

“Doctor, you still have to show me those game fields back in the Riss-Wurm interglacial period. It’s fifty thousand years or more back there. A long ways to go.”

“You’ll eat mammoth steak for dinner tonight,” Pascal told him.

“If you’re going to make good on that promise,” Cameron suggested, “we had better get started. All our supplies are stored, the machinery is checked. We’re ready.”

“All right,” agreed Pascal. “Will someone shut the door and make sure the ports are closed?”

Yancey walked to the doorway, reached out to pull the door shut and lock it. For a moment he stood still, staring out over the green hills. There, only a few miles away, lay the village of Aylesford. And beyond lay the valley of the Thames. A country steeped in legend and history. In a few minutes they would be moving back, through and beyond the days which had given rise to that legend and history. Two American hunters on the maddest hunting trip the world had ever known.

Yancey closed the door, chuckling.

“Wonder how much lead it takes to stop a saber-tooth?” he mused.

Turning back to the interior of the great tractor, he saw that the time-brain was glowing greenly. Dr. Pascal, standing before it, seemed like a tiny, misshapen gnome, working before a fiery furnace.

“Door closed and locked,” Yancey reported.

“Ports all tight,” said Cabot.

“Okay,” replied Pascal.

Machinery hummed faintly, nothing more than a whisper of a sound.

There was nothing to indicate they had left the present, were moving backward through time, but when Yancey looked through a port, he choked back an exclamation.

There was nothing outside the port. Just a blank, flat, gray plane of nothingness, with now and then shadows that flitted and were gone.

Pascal sucked in his breath as the tractor rocked and bumped. The gray outside the port became less dense. Objects became faintly discernible.

“We’re going too fast,” Pascal explained. “Ground seems to be rising. Have to take it slower. We might hit something. Most things wouldn’t stop us, but there’s no use taking chances.”

“Sure the ground is rising,” Cameron told him. “Maybe by this time there isn’t any English channel. Back in the Riss-Wurm period the British Isles were connected with the continent. The Thames flowed north through the North Sea basin to reach the North Sea.”

The gray outside the ports thinned even more. The tractor rocked like a boat in a gentle swell. Then the grayness turned to white, a dazzling white that blinded Yancey. The tractor moved sharply upward, seemed to be riding a huge wave, then dropped, but more slowly.

“We just passed the Wurm glacier,” Pascal told them. “We’re in the Riss-Wurm now.”

“Take it just a little easier,” Cameron warned him. “That last bump busted a tube in the field radio. We can fix that, but we may need that radio. We don’t want to smash it entirely.”

Outside the port now Yancey could make out objects. A tree became clearer, was sharply defined and beyond it Yancey saw solid landscape, bathed in a rising sun.

He heard Pascal’s voice.

“Seventy thousand years, approximately,” he said. “We should be where we intended to go.”

But Yancey was intent on the scene outside. The tractor stood on the top of a high knoll. Below unfolded a panorama of wild beauty. Rolling hills fell away to a wide valley, green with lush grass, while in the distance a stream caught the sunlight of early dawn and glinted like a ribbon of silver. And on the hills and in the valley below were black dots, feeding game herds, some so close he could make out individual animals. Others mere black spots.

Yancey whistled soundlessly.

He wheeled from the port.

“Jack,” he began breathlessly, “there are thousands of herds out there—”

But Cabot, he saw, had already unlocked the door.

The four of them stood grouped in the doorway and stared out. Pascal smiled.

“You see,” he reminded them, “that I told you the truth.”

Cabot drew in his breath sharply.

“You sure did,” he admitted. “I doubt if Africa in its prime was better than this.”

“An overlapping of fauna,” said Pascal. “The old Stone Age merging with the modern. One type dying out, another coming in. The most diversified and plentiful game herds that ever existed on the face of the earth before or since. The cave bear, the saber-tooth, the cave hyena, the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros living coincidentally with vast herds of wild ox, reindeer, Irish elk and other animals of more recent times.”

“Some hunting!” said Yancey.

Cabot nodded in agreement. He stepped down from the door onto the ground.

“Let’s stretch our legs,” he suggested.

“Can’t right now,” said Cameron. “Have to check the machinery over. I want to be sure everything’s all right.”

Yancey jumped to the ground.

“You fellows had better take your rifles,” warned Cameron.

Cabot laughed.

“We have our revolvers,” he said. “We aren’t going far away.”

The two hunters walked slowly, wonderingly, away from the tractor. The ground beneath their feet was soft to the tread with thick grass. Head-high thickets spotted the hillsides that sloped away toward the river. On some of the hills reared great, grotesque rock formations. And everywhere was game.

Yancey halted and lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes. For several minutes he stood, studying the landscape. Then he lowered the glasses and slipped the thong from his neck. He handed them to Cabot.

“Take a look, Jack,” he invited. “You won’t believe it until you see it with your own eyes. There’s a herd of mammoth down by the river. That dark spot just this side of the big grove. And there’s another big bunch up the river a bit. I picked up a few woolly rhinos. And bison, something like the old American buffalo.”

“Bos priscus,”
said Cabot. “I read up some on Stone Age animals the last few weeks. Primitive form of bison. Maybe we’ll be able to get a few
Bos latifrons.
Big brutes with a horn spread of ten feet. But maybe they’re extinct. They’re the grandpappies of those fellows out there.”

“What’s that big bunch across the river?” Yancey asked.

Cabot trained the glasses in the direction of Yancey’s pointing finger.

“Irish elk,” he pronounced.

A coughing roar brought the two men halfway around. What they saw held them petrified for a moment.

Less than a hundred feet away, at the edge of a thicket, through which he must have come without a sound, stood a massive bear. A huge beast, six feet at the shoulders. He was dark brown in color and he was angry. He rocked gently from side to side and champed his jaws. From his chest rumbled a growl that seemed to shake the earth.

“For God’s sake,” hissed Cabot, “don’t move fast! Edge over toward the tractor easy. That boy is ready to charge!”

Yancey’s hand dropped to his gun butt. Out of the tail of his eye Cabot caught the motion.

“Yancey, you damn fool,” he whispered huskily, “keep your hand away from that. A forty-five slug wouldn’t more than tickle him.”

Slowly the two men backed away from the bear, back toward the towering gray form of the time-tractor, their eyes never leaving the monstrous beast that stood swaying before them. The bear was working himself into a rage. His chest rumbling was almost continuous now, like a train crossing a long trestle. He snarled and the snarl was a sound of raw fury that sent cold shivers up Cabot’s spine.

Tensely they paced their slow backward march. Yancey’s heel caught in a root and he stumbled, but righted himself quickly. The bear growled thunderously and shook his head. Foam from his drooling jaws flecked the massive brown shoulders.