The Lost Bradbury (18 page)

The Greek said, “Huh?” and Steve said, “Nothing,” and he laid out two nickels on the counter. A moment later he faced the door of the beanery, opening it, and somewhere back a million miles the Greek was talking, “You going so soon?” and Steve replied, “I guess so.” And then he said, “Greek…?”

“Yeah?”

“Ever have a million nightmares and wake up afraid and wound tight in the dark, and then go back to sleep and have one of those dreams that are high and swift and beautiful and shine like stars? It’s good, Greek. It’s a change. You forget all the nightmares for a while. You wake up alive for the first days in years. That’s what happened to me, Greek….”

The door opened under his hand, the fog came in cold and salty against the warm food-smell. He thought about things and got scared he would forget things—Ellen and the machine and the future. He must
not
forget. Ever. There, on the wall, hung J. H. McCracken’s picture. Now, take the M and the c off the last name and spell what’s left with a K. The guy looked decent. He looked like he loved his wife and kids.

Like it or not, it was a fact. J. H. McCracken was one of the men he had to kill! He had to remember that.

He remembered something else. The first, the unconsciously ironic words that he had typed the night before on the machine:

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of—”

The future! Steve Temple walked outside and shut the door in the Greek’s puzzled face. Just like that.

The fog went away after awhile, taking the darkness with it, and pretty soon it was high noon.

Threading into the open rolling green of Griffith hills a bus carried Steve Temple to the warm open fresh places described in the vivid tongue of Ellen Abbott.

He walked alone. Up ahead, where the years mellowed down into a haze with distance, there would be people here, moving and speaking and living in the palatial structure of a Dictator. Buildings would soar up like silver spears hurled and frozen. There would be music, coming soft and sweet from the hidden radio sources in trees and on hills and in coves. And across the sky airships would drift like flecks of dream stuff.

Most of all, five hundred years from now—Temple climbed a high hill and stood looking at the calm quiet, closing his eyes—on this exact spot a woman named Abbott would be held in the uppermost tier of a crystalline palace. Crimson keys would whisper under her fingers and her message would vibrate through five centuries—to him.

The future was so real, he put out a hand, almost touching it. Wind rattled typewriter paper in his grasp, a scroll of dialogue twisted from the machine during the midnight hours.

In the midst of that future’s bright fabric, the black liquid threat of Kraken spread, staining. Kraken, who was the fourth of a dynasty, the pallid, soft-faced man who held the world in two fists and wouldn’t let it go.

Steve rubbed his jaw. Here he was hating a guy he would never meet.

He could only meet him indirectly. Hell. It was a fantastic sort of thing. Waging a war against a man, fighting across all those years. Who’d have thought a little guy like him would ever be given the chance to play hero to the world?

Ellen said a lot on paper. Steve read it over:

“Father and I sweated on the dimensional method as the only force powerful enough to uproot Kraken’s rigid foundation. Tracing history back to its most probable point, the Crisis where it would be easiest for the elimination of his ancestors, was our job. Kraken passed laws forbidding Time research, fearing it for what it was. He found out what my father was doing. On the day of my father’s murder, I was captured and held. But the work was already done. I brought my ‘typewriter’ with me to the cell, supposedly to write my last day ‘memoirs.’”

Here, Steve had interjected: “Why a typewriter?” and she gave the answer:

“Father wanted to go back to The Crisis and be sure the assassinations were done correctly. Guinea pig experiments resulted—well—rather unpleasantly. Some guinea pigs came back inside out. We don’t know why. They just did. Not all of them; some came back incomplete, minus heads, lacking bodies, and some never returned. We couldn’t risk my Father on the job. Time ‘travel’ was impossible. Someone in the Past had to undertake the job, unquestioningly, without pay—”

“A guy by the name of Temple?”

“Yes. If he can, and if he will and if he is fully convinced that the future depends on it. Are you convinced, Steve?”

“I don’t know. I think I am, but—”

“We tried radio, Steve. Speaking directly, how much easier it would be convincing you. But the fourth dimension destroys radio waves. That was eliminated. Metal is more stolid than flesh or radio-wave, and out of that fact the typewriter came, strong, hard and welded of special alloys; the very last method we could use, the very best, and we’ve finally pushed through to you and time is shorter for all of us—”

Steve knew the rest of it by heart. This machine was a dimensional remanifestation of hers, self-energized and compact. More about Kraken. The slaughter of innocent people, the slavery of billions. And the pages ending with:

“You can make the dead to walk, Steve. You can resurrect my father, kill Kraken and free me from prison. All this you can do. I must go now. Tomorrow night again….”

Steve looked up from the folded typed papers, looked up at the sky where there should have been a tangible dictator’s palace and Ellen in the top of it.

Instead, he saw nothing but clouds.

“—make the dead to walk.”

He hitchhiked back to his room.

Make the dead to walk. Yes. Slay Kraken and automatically another Probable world would become concrete. The people he would have slain would live. Ellen’s father—he, too, would not be assassinated.

The worlds of probable
ifs.
IF he sat looking at the typewriter, not touching it, for the rest of the week, Ellen Abbott would be slain.
If
he killed McCracken she would live.

There were a lot of
ifs
in life. A lot of things he
could
do if he so chose. He could go to New York or Chicago or Seattle. He had a choice. He could eat or starve in those cities. He had a choice. He could commit murder. Or robbery. Or kill himself. Choice. A lot of
ifs.
Each one leading to a different life, a different existence than the others, once chosen.

So Ellen and Kraken weren’t improbable. She lived in the most Probable
if-
world. She would continue living in it and be executed Friday night if he didn’t stop it.
If. If. If.

If
he had the nerve. IF he was successful.
If
someone didn’t stop him.
If
he lived that long. Tomorrow’s world was a honey-comb of probabilities, waiting to be filled with reality, with definite, decided actions.

That evening Ellen and he talked about music and painting. He learned of her passionate regard for Beethoven, Debussey, Chopin, Gliere, and someone named Mourdene born in 1987. Her favorite literature was the product of Dickens, Chaucer, Christopher Morley….

They didn’t even mention a man by the name of McCracken. Or another, named Kraken.

Through it all, Temple didn’t have a body or a voice or anything but fire and warmth around him. His room was transformed with some touch, some essence of her yet unborn world. It was like sunlight pouring in through high, cathedral windows, washing away with clean light all the dingy world of 1967. You can’t be lonely with sun on your face and inside you and your fingers working in unison on a machine with someone named Ellen Abbott, talking about sociology and psychology, literature, semantics and so many other important things.

“All the details must be clear, Steve. If you will believe in my world as it is and as it will become after you change it, you must know everything. I didn’t expect you to learn or make up your mind immediately. That would be against every known rule of logic. I gambled on you——”

When midnight came they were still bursting back and forth with a tide of information. Fashions, religions, beliefs.

And even—love.

“Very sorry,” wrote Ellen, “that there was never time for love. I was so busy so many years, running from city to city, working, encouraging father. At the time, he was my one devotion. Very sorry. If only there were time——”

“There’ll be time,” retorted Steve quietly. “If what you say about Probable futures is sound theory, then there’ll be plenty. More than you can use. I’ll see to it.”

“And—if you should fail?”

He didn’t want to think about it at all—not at all.

* * * *

There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. In the middle of it, Steve heard his heart pulsing at the base of his throat. He didn’t remember writing it; his hands only moved a few times, and there it was:

“I—I’d like to see you, Ellen.
Just once.”

More silence. The silence lasted so long that he was afraid she would never speak again. But, she did.

“You’re a fine man, Steve Temple. Time changes little in the way of emotion. Look. There’s a weak energy field encompassing this machine. Press your fingers down, bend near the machine and concentrate. Maybe—for an instant—our images may become
en rapport.
Press close, Steve….”

Steve obeyed instantly, something in his grey, blank eyes that had never been there before. Something warm. His lips went back from his teeth, tight with expectancy.

Something happened to his lungs so he couldn’t breathe.

She was there.

Just a faint quavering outline at first, increasing. Sitting across from him. Across from him by five hundred years. Her hair was like the sun and her eyes were grave and blue under the glow of that hair, and her pink mouth opened mutely and formed the words, “Hello, Steve—”

Just like that.

Then the image washed out, and the room was warm as molten steel on all sides of him, and they typed a bit longer, his eyes swimming, and then it was over for that night, she was gone, he sat there looking at the place she had been, and the room very slowly got cold again.

That night he had dreams
before
he went to sleep.

He had never taken anything in his life.

He stole a gun, a nice new shiny paralysis gun from a Weapon Shop on East Ninth. It took half the day to get up the nerve to do it, five minutes to do it, and the rest of the day to try and calm down and forget about doing it.

By that time it was Thursday evening and five hundred years away a woman was sitting down to write her “memoirs….”

They talked less of frivolous art things. They talked the hard, grim stuff that faced him in a short time. That glimpse, that one vivid materialization of her image the previous night had convinced him. Someone so cool, so soft, so right in her loveliness, someone like she was—well, he could sacrifice for her.

She put the blueprints at his fingertips with a few clean strokes of the keys. Late tomorrow afternoon, J. H. McCracken would be in his offices in North Los Angeles, preparing last moment details before planing to Washington. He must not leave the office. His son must not leave the office, either. They were to die.

“You understand everything, Steve?”

“Yes. I have the gun.”

“Is there anything that’s not clear?”

“Ellen—from time to time I forget things. Things waver. The first night, I slept, when I woke up I’d forgotten. In the beanery, again, I had to be reminded of the date. I don’t want to forget you, Ellen. Why does it happen?”

“Oh, Steve, you still don’t understand. Time is such a
strange creature to you. Like a fog, shifting in light and dark winds, the future is twisted by circumstance. There are two Ellen Abbotts, and only one of them knows Steve Temple. When something occurs that threatens her chances of ever existing, naturally you forget her. Your very contact, small as it is, with Time, is enough to waver it. That’s why you have flashing, momentary amnesia.”

He repeated it:

“I don’t want to forget you. I’ve gone ahead, hoping that if I indirectly killed Kraken, it would insure your life, but—”

She cleared it up for him. She did such a good job of it that it was like a hard blow in the stomach—like the rough kick of a mule.

“Steve, with Kraken eradicated, automatically a new free world will be born. As before, the same people will be in it, but they’ll be singing. The name Kraken will be a blank to them. And the millions he butchered will live again. In
that
world, there’ll be no place for Professor Abbott and his daughter Ellen.

“I won’t remember you, Steve. I will have never met you. There would be no reason, Kraken gone, for me to meet you. I’ll forget we ever conversed late at night or that I ever dreamed of building a time-typewriter. And that’s the way it will be, Steve, tomorrow night, when you kill J. H. McCracken.”

It stunned him. “But—I thought….”

“I didn’t fool you purposely, Steve. I thought you realized that tomorrow night would be the end, no matter what.”

“I thought that some way you might get through alive to 1967 someday, or help ME to come to your time.” His fingers shook.