The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (13 page)

He kept waiting. For explosion. For an engine to give out. For their rise to stop.

They kept moving up.

“Three thousand,” Mason said, his voice beginning to betray the rising sense of elation he felt. The planet was getting farther and farther away. The other ship was only a memory now. He looked across at Mickey. Mickey was staring, open-mouthed, as if he were about ready to shout out
“Hurry!”
but was afraid to tempt the fates.

“Six thousand...
seven thousand!
” Mason’s voice was jubilant. “We’re
out
of it!”

Mickey’s face broke into a great, relieved grin. He ran a hand over his brow and flicked great drops of sweat on the deck.

“God,” he said, gasping, “my God.”

Mason moved over to Ross’s seat. He clapped the captain on the shoulder.

“We made it,” he said. “Nice flying.”

Ross looked irritated.

“We shouldn’t have left,” he said. “It was nothing all the time. Now we have to start looking for another planet.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t a good idea to leave,” he said.

Mason stared at him. He turned away shaking his head, thinking... you can’t win.

“If I ever see another glitter,” he thought aloud, “I’ll keep my big mouth shut. To hell with alien races anyway.”

Silence. He went back to his seat and picked up his graph chart. He let out a long shaking breath. Let Ross complain, he thought, I can take anything now. Things are normal again. He began to figure casually what might have occurred down there on that planet.

Then he happened to glance at Ross. 

Ross was thinking. His lips pressed together. He said something to himself. Mason found the captain looking at him.

“Mason,” he said.

“What?”

“Alien race, you said.”

Mason felt a chill flood through his body. He saw the big head nod once in decision.

Unknown decision. His hands started to shake. A crazy idea came. No, Ross wouldn’t do that, not just to assuage vanity. Would he?

“I don’t...” he started. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mickey watching the captain too.

“Listen,”
Ross said. “I’ll tell you what happened down there. I’ll
show
you what happened!”

They stared at him in paralyzing horror as he threw the ship around and headed back.

“What are you doing!” Mickey cried.

“Listen,” Ross said. “Didn’t you understand me? Don’t you see how we’ve been tricked?”

They looked at him without comprehension. Mickey took a step toward him.

“Alien race,” Ross said. “That’s the short of it. That time-space idea is all wet. But I’ll tell you what idea isn’t all wet. So we leave the place. What’s our first instinct as far as reporting it? Saying it’s uninhabitable? We’d do more than that. We wouldn’t report it at all.”

“Ross, you’re not taking us back!” Mason said, standing up suddenly as the full terror of returning struck him.

“You bet I am!” Ross said, fiercely elated.

“You’re crazy!” Mickey shouted at him, his body twitching, his hands clenched at his sides menacingly.

“Listen to me!” Ross roared at them. “Who would be benefited by us not reporting the existence of that planet?” 

They didn’t answer. Mickey moved closer.

“Fools!” he said. “Isn’t it obvious? There
is
life down there. But life that isn’t strong enough to kill us or chase us away with force. So what can they do? They don’t want us there. So what can they do?”

He asked them like a teacher who cannot get the right answers from the dolts in his class.

Mickey looked suspicious. But he was curious now, too, and a little timorous as he had always been with his captain, except in moments of greatest physical danger. Ross had always led them, and it was hard to rebel against it even when it seemed he was trying to kill them all. His eyes moved to the viewer screen where the planet began to loom beneath them like a huge dark ball.

“We’re alive,” Ross said, “and I say there never
was
a ship down there. We saw it, sure. We
touched
it. But you can see anything if you believe it’s there! All your senses can tell you there’s something when there’s nothing. All you have to do is
believe
it!”

“What are you getting at?” Mason asked hurriedly, too frightened to realize. His eyes fled to the altitude gauge. Seventeen thousand... sixteen thousand... fifteen...

“Telepathy,” Ross said, triumphantly decisive. “I say those men, or whatever they are, saw us coming. And they didn’t want us there. So they read our minds and saw the death fear, and they decided that the best way to scare us away was to show us our ship crashed and ourselves dead in it. And it worked... until now.”

“So it worked!” Mason exploded. “Are you going to take a chance on killing us just to prove your damn theory?”

“It’s
more
than a theory!” Ross stormed, as the ship fell, then Ross added with the distorted argument of injured vanity, “My orders say to pick up specimens from every planet. I’ve always followed orders before and, by God, I still will!”

“You saw how cold it was!” Mason said. “No one can live there anyway! Use your head, Ross!”

“Damn it,
I’m
captain of this ship!” Ross yelled, “and I give the orders!”

“Not when our lives are in your hands!” Mickey started for the captain.

“Get back!” Ross ordered. 

That was when one of the ship’s engines stopped and the ship yawed wildly.

“You fool!” Mickey exploded, thrown off balance. “You
did
it, you
did
it!”

Outside the black night hurtled past.

The ship wobbled violently.
Prediction true
was the only phrase Mason could think of. His own vision of the screaming, the numbing horror, the exhortations to a deaf heaven—all coming true. That hulk would be this ship in a matter of minutes. Those three bodies would be...

“Oh...
damn!
” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, furious at the enraging stubbornness of Ross in taking them back, of causing the future to be as they saw—all because of insane pride.

“No, they’re not going to fool us!” Ross shouted, still holding fast to his last idea like a dying bulldog holding its enemy fast in its teeth.

He threw switches and tried to turn the ship. But it wouldn’t turn. It kept plunging down like a fluttering leaf. The gyroscope couldn’t keep up with the abrupt variations in cabin equilibrium and the three of them found themselves being thrown off balance on the tilting deck.

“Auxiliary engines!” Ross yelled.

“It’s no use!” Mickey cried.

“Damn it!”
Ross clawed his way up the angled deck, then crashed heavily against the engine board as the cabin inclined the other way. He threw switches over with shaking fingers.

Suddenly Mason saw an even spout of flame through the rear viewer again. The ship stopped shuddering and headed straight down. The cabin righted itself.

Ross threw himself into his chair and shot out furious hands to turn the ship about.

From the floor Mickey looked at him with a blank, white face. Mason looked at him, too, afraid to speak.

“Now shut up!” Ross said disgustedly, not even looking at them, talking like a disgruntled father to his sons. “When we get down there you’re going to see that it’s true. That ship’ll be gone. And we’re going to go looking for those bastards who put the idea in our minds!”

They both stared at their captain humbly as the ship headed down backwards. They watched Ross’s hands move efficiently over the controls. Mason felt a sense of confidence in his captain. He stood on the deck quietly, waiting for the landing without fear. Mickey got up from the floor and stood beside him, waiting.

The ship hit the ground. It stopped. They had landed again. They were still the same.

And...

“Turn on the spotlight,” Ross told them.

Mason threw the switch. They all crowded to the port. Mason wondered for a second how Ross could possibly have landed in the same spot. He hadn’t even appeared to be following the calculations made on the last landing.

They looked out.

Mickey stopped breathing. And Ross’s mouth fell open.

The wreckage was still there.

They had landed in the same place and they had found the wrecked ship still there.

Mason turned away from the port and stumbled over the deck. He felt lost, a victim of some terrible universal prank, a man accursed.

“You said...” Mickey said to the captain.

Ross just looked out of the port with unbelieving eyes.

“Now we’ll go up again,” Mickey said, grinding his teeth. “And we’ll
really
crash this time. And we’ll be killed. Just like those... those...”

Ross didn’t speak. He stared out of the port at the refutation of his last clinging hope.

He felt hollow, void of all faith in belief in sensible things.

Then Mason spoke.

“We’re not going to crash—” he said somberly—“ever.”

“What?”

Mickey was looking at him. Ross turned and looked too.

“Why don’t we stop kidding ourselves?” Mason said. “We all know what it is, don’t we?”

He was thinking of what Ross had said just a moment before. About the senses giving evidence of what was believed. Even if there was nothing there at all...

Then, in a split second, with the knowledge, he saw Ross and he saw Carter. As they
were.
And he took a short shuddering breath, a last breath until illusion would bring breath and flesh again.

“Progress,” he said bitterly, and his voice was an aching whisper in the phantom ship.

“The Flying Dutchman takes to the universe.”

L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP

L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000) began writing in the 1930s, and published more than
one hundred science-fiction and fantasy novels, dozens of short stories, and many
acclaimed nonfiction works during his career. Known early on for his space opera
novels, he was first critically and popularly recognized for his novel
Lest Darkness Fall,
the story of one man’s attempt to change history during the Roman Empire. Adept in
every genre he turned his hand to, he has written everything from fantasy (
The Incomplete Enchanter
series) to Conan pastiches, revising and publishing Robert E.

Howard’s unfinished works in the collection
Tales of Conan,
to books on writing
science fiction (
Science-Fiction Handbook
). He also wrote many excellent nonfiction
books on topics that varied from author biographies, including books on H. P. Lovecraft
and Robert E. Howard, to texts on aspects of science and even the Scopes monkey trial.

He was loved, respected, and lauded in the science-fiction and fantasy field, receiving
the Gandalf (the Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement in Fantasy) Award, and
the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. In 1997,
his autobiography,
Time and Chance,
received the Hugo Award for best nonfiction
work. He married Catherine A. Crook in 1939, and they remained together for more
than sixty years, traveling the world and writing, until her death in 2000.

De Camp was able to take virtually any topic and make a smooth, believable story out
of it by the time he was done, and “A Gun for Dinosaur” is a perfect example. In
contrast to Bradbury’s emphasis on the bells and whistles, he sidesteps the idea of a
time paradox in about five paragraphs, and it’s on to the meat (slight pun intended) of
the story, hunting what would arguably be the most challenging game of all—a late
Mesozoic dinosaur. The idea of time travel actually takes a backseat to the rest of the
story—except, of course, for one character’s admittedly gruesome end, also described in
a few paragraphs where de Camp shows his mastery of answering a logical question by
showing the results, and wrapping up his plot as neat as can be.

by L. Sprague De Camp

No, I’m sorry, Mr. Seligman, but I can’t take you hunting Late Mesozoic dinosaur.

Yes, I know what the advertisement says.

Why not? How much d’you weigh? A hundred and thirty? Let’s see; that’s under ten stone, which is my lower limit.

I could take you to other periods, you know. I’ll take you to any period in the Cenozoic. I’ll get you a shot at an entelodont or a uintathere. They’ve got fine heads.

I’ll even stretch a point and take you to the Pleistocene, where you can try for one of the mammoths or the mastodon.

I’ll take you back to the Triassic where you can shoot one of the smaller ancestral dinosaurs. But I will jolly well not take you to the Jurassic or Cretaceous. You’re just too small.

What’s your size got to do with it? Look here, old boy, what did you think you were going to shoot your dinosaur with?

Oh, you hadn’t thought, eh?

Well, sit there a minute.... Here you are: my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn’t it? But it’s rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs fourteen and a half pounds and has a muzzle energy of over seven thousand foot-pounds. Costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. Lot of money for a gun, what?

I have some spares I rent to the sahibs. Designed for knocking down elephant. Not just wounding them, knocking them base-over-apex. That’s why they don’t make guns like this in America, though I suppose they will if hunting parties keep going back in time.

Now, I’ve been guiding hunting parties for twenty years. Guided ’em in Africa until the game gave out there except on the preserves. And all that time I’ve never known a man your size who could handle the six-nought-nought. It knocks ’em over, and even when they stay on their feet they get so scared of the bloody cannon after a few shots that they flinch. And they find the gun too heavy to drag around rough Mesozoic country. Wears ’em out.

It’s true that lots of people have killed elephant with lighter guns: the .500, .475, and .