The Collection (35 page)

At first he thought nothing had happened. Then he found that
the handle of the safe worked when he turned it and he knew that he
^'
d
made the jump to evening of the next day. And of course the time mechanism of
the safe had unlocked it en route. He opened the safe and took all the paper
money in it, stuffing it into various pockets.

He went to the alley door to let himself out, but before he
reached for the bolt that kept it locked from the inside he had a sudden
brilliant thought. If instead of leaving by a door he left by using his time
machine he
^'
d not only increase the mystery by leaving the store
tightly locked, but he
^'
d be taking himself back in time as well as
in place to the moment of his completing the time machine, a day and a half
before
the robbery.

And by the time the robbery took place he could be soundly
alibied; he'd be staying at a hotel in Florida or California, in either case
over a thousand miles from the scene of the crime. He hadn
^'
t thought
of his time machine as a producer of alibis, but now he saw that it was perfect
for the purpose.

He dialed his time machine to zero and pressed the button.

When Eustace Weaver invented his time machine he knew that
he had the world by the tail on a downhill pull, as long as he kept his
invention a secret. By playing the races and the stock market he could make
himself fabulously wealthy in no time at all. The only catch was that he was
flat broke.

Suddenly he remembered the store where he worked and the
safe in it that worked with a time lock. A time lock should be no sweat at all
for a man who had a time machine.

He sat down on the edge of his bed to think. He reached into
his pocket for his cigarettes and pulled them out—but with them came paper
money, a handful of ten-dollar bills! He tried other pockets and found money in
each and every one. He stacked it on the bed beside him, and by counting the
big bills and estimating the smaller ones, he found he had approximately
fourteen hundred dollars.

Suddenly he realized the truth, and laughed. He had
already
gone forward in time and emptied the supermarket safe and then had used the
time machine to return to the point in time where he had invented it. And since
the burglary had not yet, in normal time, occurred, all he had to do was get
the hell out of town and be a thousand miles away from the scene of the crime
when it did happen.

Two hours later he was on a plane bound for Los Angeles—and
the Santa Anita track—and doing some heavy thinking. One thing that he had not
anticipated was the apparent fact that when he took a jaunt into the future and
came back he had no memory of whatever it was that hadn
^'
t happened
yet.

But the money had come back with him. So, then, would notes
written to himself, or Racing Forms or financial pages from newspapers? It
would work out.

In Los Angeles he took a cab downtown and checked in at a
good hotel. It was late evening by then and he briefly considered jumping himself
into the next day to save waiting time, but he realized that he was tired and
sleepy. He went to bed and slept until almost noon the next day.

His taxi got tangled in a jam on the freeway so he didn
^'
t
get to the track at Santa Anita until the first race was over but he was in
time to read the winner
^'
s number on the tote board and to check it
on his dope sheet. He watched five more races, not betting but checking the
winner of each race and decided not to bother with the last race. He left the
grandstand and walked around behind and under it, a secluded spot where no one
could see him. He set the dial of his time machine two hours back, and pressed
the stud.

But nothing happened. He tried again with the same result
and then a voice behind him said,
^"
It won
^'
t work. It
^'
s
in a deactivating field.
^"

He whirled around and there standing right behind him were
two tall, slender young men, one blond and the other dark, and each of them
with a hand in one pocket as though holding a weapon.

^"
We are Time Police,
^"
the
blond one said,
^"
from the twenty-fifth century. We have come to
punish you for illegal use of a time machine."

"B-b-but," Weaver sputtered,
^"
h-how
could I have known that racing was—" His voice got a little stronger.
^"
Besides
I haven't made any bets yet."

^"
That is true," the blond young man
said.
^"
And when we find any inventor of a time machine using it
to win at any form of gambling, we give him warning the first time. But we
^'
ve
traced you back and find out your very first use of the time machine was to
steal money from a store. And that is a crime in any century." He pulled
from his pocket something that looked vaguely like a pistol.

Eustace Weaver took a step backward.
^"
Y-you
don't mean—
^"

^"
I do mean,
^"
said the blond
young man, and he pulled the trigger. And this time, with the machine
deactivated, it was the end for Eustace Weaver.

RECONCILIATION

The night outside was still and starry. The living room of
the house was tense. The man and the woman in it stood a few feet apart,
glaring hatred at each other.

The man
^'
s fists were clenched as though he wished
to use them, and the woman
^'
s fingers were spread and curved like
claws, but each held his arms rigidly at his sides. They were being civilized.

Her voice was low.
^"
I hate you," she
said. "I
^'
ve come to hate everything about you.
^"

"Of course you do," he said. "Now that you've
bled me white with your extravagances, now that I can
^'
t any longer
buy every silly thing that your selfish little heart—
^"

^"
It isn
^'
t that. You know it isn
^'
t
that. If you still treated me like you used to, you know that money wouldn
^'
t
matter. It
^'
s that —that woman.
^"

He sighed as one sighs who hears a thing for the ten thousandth
time.
^"
You know,
^"
he said, "that she didn
^'
t
mean a thing to me, not a damn thing. You drove me to—what I did. And even if
it didn
^'
t mean a damn thing, I
^'
m not sorry. I
^'
d
do it again.

^"
You
will
do it again, as often as
you get a chance. But I won
^'
t be around to be humiliated by it.
Humiliated before my friends—
^"

^"
Friends! Those vicious bitches whose nasty
opinions matter more to you than—
^"

Blinding flash and searing heat. They knew, and each of them
took a sightless step toward the other with groping arms; each held desperately
tight to the other in the second that remained to them, the final second that
was all that mattered now.

"O my darling I love—"

^"
John, John, my sweet—"

The shock wave came.

Outside in what had been the quiet night a red flower grew
and yearned toward the canceled sky.

Happily, I was taking the last coins out of our machines and
counting them while Ma entered the figures in the little red book as I called
them out. Nice figures they were.

Yes, we'd had a good play on both of the Sirian planets,
Thor and Freda. Especially on Freda. Those little Earth colonies out there are
starved to death for entertainment of any kind, and money doesn
^'
t
mean a thing to them. They
^'
d stood in line to get into our tent and
push their coins into our machines—so even with the plenty high expenses of the
trip we
^'
d done all right by ourselves.

Yes, they were right comforting, those figures Ma was entering.
Of course she'd add them up wrong, but then Ellen would straighten it out when
Ma finally gave up. Ellen
^'
s good at figures. And got a good one
herself, even if I do say it of my only daughter. Credit for that goes to Ma
anyway, not to me. I'm built on the general lines of a space tug.

I put back the coin box of the Rocket-Race and looked up.
"Ma—" I started to say. Then the door of the pilot's compartment
opened and John Lane stood there. Ellen, across the table from Ma, put down her
book and looked up too. She was all eyes and they were shining.

Johnny saluted smartly, the regulation salute which a
private ship pilot is supposed to give the owner and captain of the ship. It
always got under my skin, that salute, but I couldn
^'
t talk him out
of it because the rules said he should do it.

He said,
^"
Object ahead, Captain Wherry.
^"

^"
Object?
^"
I queried.
^"
What
kind of object?
^"

You see, from Johnny
^'
s voice and Johnny
^'
s
face you couldn
^'
t guess whether it meant anything or not. Mars City
Polytech trains
^'
em to be strictly deadpan and Johnny had graduated
magna cum laude. He
^'
s a nice kid but he
^'
d announce the
end of the world in the same tone of voice he'd use to announce dinner, if it
was a pilot's job to announce dinner.

"It seems to be a planet, sir," was all he said.

It took quite a while for his words to sink in.

^"
A planet?" I asked, not particularly brilliantly.
I stared at him, hoping that he'd been drinking or something. Not because I had
any objections to his seeing a planet sober but because if Johnny ever unbent
to the stage of taking a few drinks, the alky would probably dissolve some of
the starch out of his backbone. Then I'd have someone to swap stories with. It
gets lonesome traveling through space with only two women and a Polytech grad
who follows all the rules.

^"
A planet, sir. An object of planetary
dimensions, I should say. Diameter about three thousand miles, distance two
million, course apparently an orbit about the star Sirius A.
^"

^"
Johnny," I said,
^"
we
^'
re
inside the orbit of Thor, which is Sirius I, which means it's the first planet
of Sirius, and how can there be a planet inside of that? You wouldn't be
kidding me, Johnny?"

^"
You may inspect the viewplate, sir, and
check my calculations,
^"
he replied stiffly.

I got up and went into the pilot
^'
s compartment.
There was a disk in the center of the forward viewplate, all right. Checking
his calculations was something else again. My mathematics end at checking coins
out of coin machines. But I was willing to take his word for the calculations.
"Johnny," I almost shouted, "we've discovered a new planet! Ain
^'
t
that something?
^"

^"
Yes, sir," he commented, in his usual
matter-of-fact voice.

It was something, but not too much. I mean, the Sirius
system hasn't been colonized long and it wasn
^'
t too surprising that
a little three-thousand-mile planet hadn't been noticed yet. Especially as
(although this wasn
^'
t known then) its orbit is very eccentric.

There hadn
^'
t been room for Ma and Ellen to follow
us into the pilot
^'
s compartment, but they stood looking in, and I
moved to one side so they could see the disk in the viewplate.

^"
How soon do we get there, Johnny?
^"
Ma wanted to know.

"Our point of nearest approach on this course will be
within two hours, Mrs. Wherry," he replied.
^"
We come
within half a million miles of it.
^"

"Oh,
do
we?
^"
I wanted to know.

^"
Unless, sir, you think it advisable to
change course and give it more clearance.
^"

I gave clearance to my throat instead and looked at Ma and
Ellen and saw that it would be okay by them.
^"
Johnny,
^"
I said,
^"
we
^'
re going to give it less clearance. I
^'
ve
always hankered to see a new planet untouched by human hands. We
^'
re
going to land there, even if we can
^'
t leave the ship without oxygen
masks.
^"

He said,
^"
Yes, sir,
^"
and
saluted, but I thought there was a bit of disapproval in his eyes. Oh, if there
had been, there was cause for it. You never know what you
^'
ll run into
busting into virgin territory out here. A cargo of canvas and slot machines isn
^'
t
the proper equipment for exploring, is it?

But the Perfect Pilot never questions an owner
^'
s
orders, dog-gone him! Johnny sat down and started punching keys on the calculator
and we eased out to let him do it.

^"
Ma,
^"
I said,
^"
I'm
a blamed fool.
^"

^"
You would be if you weren
^'
t,
^"
she came back. I grinned when I got that sorted out, and looked at Ellen.