Short Fiction, Mack Reynolds [best book reader txt] 📗

I said to Betty hopefully, “I suppose you haven’t changed this calendar since I left.”

Betty said, “What’s the matter with you? You look funny. How did your clothes get so mussed? You tore the top sheet off that calendar yourself, not half an hour ago, just before this marble-missing client came in.” She added, irrelevantly, “Time travelers yet.”

I tried just once more. “Uh, when did you first see this Mr. Oyster?”

“Never saw him before in my life,” she said. “Not until he came in this morning.”

“This morning,” I said weakly.

While Betty stared at me as though it was me that needed candling by a head shrinker preparatory to being sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished in my pocket for my wallet, counted the contents and winced at the pathetic remains of the thousand. I said pleadingly, “Betty, listen, how long ago did I go out that door⁠—on the way to the airport?”

“You’ve been acting sick all morning. You went out that door about ten minutes ago, were gone about three minutes, and then came back.”

“See here,” Mr. Oyster said (interrupting Simon’s story), “did you say this was supposed to be amusing, young man? I don’t find it so. In fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.”

Simon shrugged, put one hand to his forehead and said, “That’s only the first chapter. There are two more.”

“I’m not interested in more,” Mr. Oyster said. “I suppose your point was to show me how ridiculous the whole idea actually is. Very well, you’ve done it. Confound it. However, I suppose your time, even when spent in this manner, has some value. Here is fifty dollars. And good day, sir!”

He slammed the door after him as he left.

Simon winced at the noise, took the aspirin bottle from its drawer, took two, washed them down with water from the desk carafe.

Betty looked at him admiringly. Came to her feet, crossed over and took up the fifty dollars. “Week’s wages,” she said. “I suppose that’s one way of taking care of a crackpot. But I’m surprised you didn’t take his money and enjoy that vacation you’ve been yearning about.”

“I did,” Simon groaned. “Three times.”

Betty stared at him. “You mean⁠—”

Simon nodded, miserably.

She said, “But Simon. Fifty thousand dollars bonus. If that story was true, you should have gone back again to Munich. If there was one time traveler, there might have been⁠—”

“I keep telling you,” Simon said bitterly, “I went back there three times. There were hundreds of them. Probably thousands.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, we’re just going to have to forget about it. They’re not going to stand for the space-time continuum track being altered. If something comes up that looks like it might result in the track being changed, they set you right back at the beginning and let things start⁠—for you⁠—all over again. They just can’t allow anything to come back from the future and change the past.”

“You mean,” Betty was suddenly furious at him, “you’ve given up! Why this is the biggest thing⁠—Why the fifty thousand dollars is nothing. The future! Just think!”

Simon said wearily, “There’s just one thing you can bring back with you from the future, a hangover compounded of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu. What’s more you can pile one on top of the other, and another on top of that!”

He shuddered. “If you think I’m going to take another crack at this merry-go-round and pile a fourth hangover on the three I’m already nursing, all at once, you can think again.”

Written as Mark Mallory

They said⁠—as they have said of so many frontiersmen just like him⁠—that there must have been a woman in his past, to make him what he was. And indeed there had, but she was no flesh-and-blood female. The name of his lady was Victoria, whom the Greeks called Nike and early confounded with the Pallas Athena, that sterile maiden. And at the age of thirty-four she had Calvin Mulloy most firmly in her grasp, for he had neither wife nor child, nor any close friend worth mentioning⁠—only his hungry dream for some great accomplishment.

It had harried him to the stars, that dream of his. It had driven him to the position of top survey engineer on the new, raw planet of Mersey, still largely unexplored and unmapped. And it had pushed him, too, into foolishnesses like this latest one, building a sailplane out of scrap odds and ends around the Mersey Advance Base⁠—a sailplane which had just this moment been caught in a storm and cracked up on an island the size of a city backyard, between the banks of one of the mouths of the Adze River.

The sailplane was gone the moment it hit. Actually it had come down just short of the island and floated quickly off, what was left of it, while Calvin was thrashing for the island with that inept stroke of his. He pulled himself up, gasping, onto the rocks, and, with the coolness of a logical man who has faced crises before, set himself immediately to taking stock of his situation.

He was wet and winded, but since he was undrowned and on solid land in the semitropics, he dismissed that part of it from his mind. It had been full noon when he had been caught in the storm, and it could not be much more than minutes past that now, so swiftly had everything happened; but the black, low clouds, racing across the sky, and the gusts of intermittent rain, cut visibility down around him.

He stood up on his small island and leaned against the wind that blew in and up the river from the open gulf. On three sides he saw nothing but the fast-riding waves. On the fourth, though, shading his eyes against the occasional bursts of rain, he discerned a long, low, curving blackness that would be one of the river shores.

There lay safety. He estimated its distance from him at less than a hundred and