The Toynbee Convector (2 page)

“Six, five—”

They clinked their glasses.

“Four, three, two—”

They drank.

“One!”

They drank their champagne with a laugh. They looked to the sky. The golden air above the La Jolla coast line waited. The moment for the great arrival was here.

“Now!” cried the young reporter, like a magician giving orders. “Now!” said Stiles, gravely quiet. Nothing. Five seconds passed. The sky stood empty. Ten seconds passed. The heavens waited. Twenty seconds passed. Nothing. At last, Shumway turned to stare and wonder at the old man by his side.

Stiles looked at him, shrugged and said:

“I lied.”

“You what!?” cried Shumway.

The crowds below shifted uneasily.

“I lied,” said the old man simply.

“No!”

“Oh, but yes,” said the time traveler. “I never went anywhere. I stayed but made it seem I went. There is no time machine—only something that
looks
like one.”

“But why?” cried the young man, bewildered, holding to the rail at the edge of the roof. “Why?”
“I see that you have a tape-recording button on your lapel. Turn it on. Yes. There. I want everyone to hear this. Now.”

The old man finished his champagne and then said:

“Because I was born and raised in a time, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, when people had stopped believing in themselves. I saw that disbelief, the reason that no longer gave itself reasons to survive, and was moved, depressed and then angered by it.

“Everywhere, I saw and heard doubt. Everywhere, I learned destruction. Everywhere was professional despair, intellectual ennui, political cynicism. And what wasn’t ennui and cynicism was rampant skepticism and incipient nihilism.”

The old man stopped, having remembered something. He bent and from under a table brought forth a special bottle of red Burgundy with the label 1984 on it This, as he talked, he began to open, gently plumbing the ancient cork.

“You name it, we had it The economy was a snail. The world was a cesspool. Economics remained an insolvable mystery. Melancholy was the attitude. The impossibility of change was the vogue. End of the world was the slogan.

“Nothing was worth doing. Go to bed at night full of bad news at eleven, wake up in the morn to worse news at seven. Trudge through the day underwater. Drown at night in a tide of plagues and pestilence. Ah!”

For the cork had softly popped. The now-harmless 1984 vintage was ready for airing. The time traveler sniffed it and nodded.

“Not only the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode the horizon to fling themselves on our cities but a fifth horse man, worse than all the rest, rode with them: Despair, wrapped in dark shrouds of defeat, crying only repetitions of past disasters, present failures, future cowardices.

“Bombarded by dark chaff and no bright seed, what sort of harvest was there for man in the latter part of the incredible twentieth century?

“Forgotten was the moon, forgotten the red land scapes of Mars, the great eye of Jupiter, the stunning rings of Saturn. We refused to be comforted. We wept at the grave of our child, and the child was
us
.”

“Was that how it was,” asked Shumway quietly, “one hundred years ago?”

“Yes.” The time traveler held up the wine bottle as if it contained proof. He poured some into a glass, eyed it, inhaled, and went on. “You have seen the newsreels and read the books of that time. You know it all.

“Oh, of course, there were a few bright moments. When Salk delivered the world’s children to life. Or the night when Eagle landed and that one great step for mankind trod the moon. But in the minds and out of the mouths of many, the fifth horseman was darkly cheered on. With high hopes, it sometimes seemed, of his winning. So all would be gloomily satisfied that their predictions of doom were right from day one. So the self-fulfilling prophecies were declared; we dug our graves and prepared to lie down in them.”

‘And you couldn’t allow that?” said the young reporter.

“You know I couldn’t.”

“And so you built the
Toynbee Convector
—”

“Not all at once. It took years to brood on it.”

The old man paused to swirl the dark wine, gaze at it and sip, eyes closed.

“Meanwhile, I drowned, I despaired, wept silently late nights thinking, What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my stage, my country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last on an old and beloved book by H. G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built I traveled, or so it seemed. The rest, as you know, is history.”

The old time traveler drank his wine, opened his eyes. “Good God,” the young reporter whispered, shaking his head. “Oh, dear God. Oh, the wonder, the wonder—” There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?

“Well, now,” said the old man, filling another glass with wine for tide young reporter. “Aren’t I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water sides, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!”

They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.

The time traveler waved at them and turned.

“Quickly, now. It’s up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here’s a film-cassette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here’s a final manuscript. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!”

Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fell away beneath. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.

The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the
Toynbee Converter
.

“You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.”

He pressed the button that raised the plastic shield, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the
Convector’s
seat.

“Throw the final switch, young man!”

“But—”

“You’re thinking,” here the old man laughed, “if the time machine is a fraud, it won’t work, what’s the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!”

Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked up at Craig Bennett Stiles.

“I don’t understand. Where are you
going
?”

“Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past”
“How can that beT “Believe me, this time it will happen. Goodbye, deai; fine, nice young man.”

“Goodbye.”

“Now. Tell me my name.”

“What?”

“Speak my name and throw the switch.”

“Time traveler?”

“Yes!
Now
!”

The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.

“Oh,” said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. “Yes.”

His head fell forward on his chest.

Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.

In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler’s wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.

The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.

Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine-symbolically, anyway—go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.

The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the button for the glass elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler’s tapes and cassettes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.

The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet. . . .

That one man with one lie had created.

Trapdoor

Clara Feck had lived in the old house for some ten years before she made the strange discovery. Halfway upstairs to the second floor, on the landing, in the ceiling—

The trapdoor.

“Well, my God!”

She stopped dead, midstairs, to glare at the surprise, daring it to be true.

“It can’t be! How could I have been so blind? Good grief, there’s an
attic
in my house!” She had marched up and downstairs a thousand times on a thousand days and never seen.

“Damned old fool.”

And she almost tripped going down, having forgotten what she had come up for in the first place.

Before lunch, she arrived to stand under the trapdoor again, like a tall, thin, nervous child with pale hair and cheeks, her too bright eyes darting, fixing, staring.

“Now I’ve discovered the damn thing, what do I
do
with it? Storage room up there, I bet. Well—” And she went away, vaguely troubled, feeling her mind slipping off out of the sun.

“To hell with that, Clara Peck!” she said, vacuuming the parlor. “You’re only fifty-seven. Not senile, yet, by God!”

But still, why hadn’t she
noticed
?

It was the quality of silence, that was it. Her roof had never leaked, so no water had ever tapped the ceilings; the high beams had never shifted in any wind, and there were no mice. If the rain had whispered, or the beams groaned, or the mice danced in her attic, she would have glanced up and found the trapdoor.

But the house had stayed silent, and she had stayed blind.

“Bosh!” she cried, at supper. She finished the dishes, read until ten, went to bed early.

It was during that night that she heard the first, feint, Morse-code tapping, the first graffiti-scratching above, behind the blank ceiling’s pale, lunar face.

Half-asleep, her lips whispered: Mouse?

And then it was dawn.

Going downstairs to fix breakfast, she fixed the trap door with her steady, small-girl’s stare and felt her skinny fingers twitch to go fetch the stepladder.

“Hell,” she muttered. “Why bother to look at an empty attic? Next week, maybe.”

For about three days after that, the trapdoor vanished.

That is, she forgot to look at it. So it might as well not have been there.

But around midnight on the third night, she heard the mouse sounds or the whatever-they-were sounds drifting across her bedroom ceiling like milkweed ghosts touching the lost surfaces of the moon.

From that odd thought she shifted to tumbleweeds or dandelion seeds or just plain dust shaken from an attic sill.

She thought of sleep, but the thought didn’t take.

Lying flat in her bed, she watched the ceiling so fixedly she felt she could x-ray whatever it was that cavorted behind the plaster.

A flea circus? A tribe of gypsy mice in exodus from a neighbor’s house? Several had been shrouded, recently, to look like dark circus tents, so that pest-killers could toss in killer bombs and run off to let the secret life in the places die.

That secret life had most probably packed its fur luggage and fled. Clara Peck’s boarding house attic, free meals, was their new home away from home.

And yet . . . .

As she stared, the sounds began again. They shaped themselves in patterns across the wide ceiling’s brow; long fingernails that, scraping, wandered to this corner and that of the shut-away chamber above.

Clara Peck held her breath.

The patterns increased. The soft prowlings began to cluster toward an area above and beyond her bedroom door. It was as if the tiny creatures, whatever they were, were nuzzling another secret door, above, wanting out.

Slowly, Clara Peck sat up in bed, and slowly put her weight to the floor, not wanting it to creak. Slowly she cracked her bedroom door. She peered out into a hall flooded with cold light from a full moon, which poured through the landing window to show her—

The trapdoor.

Now, as if summoned by her warmth, the sounds of the tiny lost ghost feet above rushed to cluster and fret at the trapdoor rim itself.

Christ! thought Clara Peck. They
hear
me. They want me to— The trapdoor shuddered gently with the tiny rocking weights of whatever it was arustle there.

And more and more of the invisible spider feet or rodent feet of the blown curls of old and yellowed newspapers touched and rustled the wooden frame.

Louder, and still louder.

Clara was about to cry: Go! Git!

When the phone rang.

“Gah!” gasped Clara Peck.

She felt a ton of blood plunge like a broken weight down her frame to crush her toes. “Gah!” She ran to seize, lift and strangle the phone. “Who!?” she cried. “Clara! It’s Emma Crowley! What’s
wrong
?!”

“My God!” shouted Clara. “You scared the hell out of me! Emma, why are you calling this late?”