The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Read online

  Peter went and got his binoculars.

  The trouble was, of course, that Naples was green. Where the city ought to have been, a rankness had sprouted. Between the clumps of foliage he could catch occasional glimpses of gray-white that might equally well have been boulders or the wreckage of buildings. There was no movement. There was no shipping in the harbor.

  But something rather odd was crawling up the side of the volcano. A rust-orange pipe, it appeared to be, supported on hair-line struts like the legs of a centipede, and ending without rhyme or reason just short of the top.

  While Peter watched, it turned slowly blue.

  One day farther forward: now all the display cases had been looted; the museum, it would seem, was empty.

  Given, that in five centuries the world, or at any rate the department of Campania, has been overrun by a race of Somethings, the human population being killed or driven out in the process; and that the conquerors take an interest in the museum’s contents, which they have accordingly removed.

  Removed where, and why?

  This question, Peter conceded, might have a thousand answers, nine hundred and ninety-nine of which would mean that he had lost his gamble. The remaining answer was: to the vaults, for safety.

  With his own hands Peter built a hood to cover the apparatus on the workbench and the sphere above it. It was unaccustomed labor; it took him the better part of two days. Then he called in workmen to break a hole in the stone flooring next to the interior wall, rig a hoist, and cut the power cable that supplied the time-sphere loose from its supports all the way back to the fuse-box, leaving him a single flexible length of cable more than a hundred feet long. They unbolted the workbench from the floor, attached casters to its legs, lowered it into the empty vault below, and went away.

  Peter unfastened and removed the hood. He looked into the sphere.

  Treasure.

  Crates, large and small, racked in rows into dimness.

  With pudgy fingers that did not tremble, he advanced the rheostat. A cloudy flicker, another, a leaping blur of them as he moved the vernier faster – and then no more, to the limit of the time-sphere’s range.

  Two hundred years, Peter guessed – A.D. 2700 to 2900 or thereabout – in which no one would enter the vault. Two hundred years of “unliquidated time”.

  He put the rheostat back to the beginning of that uninterrupted period. He drew out a small crate and prised it open.

  Chessmen, ivory with gold inlay, Florentine, fourteenth century. Superb.

  Another, from the opposite rack.

  T’ang figurines, horses and men, ten to fourteen inches high. Priceless.

  The crates would not burn, Tomaso told him. He went down to the kitchen to see, and it was true. The pieces lay in the roaring stove untouched. He fished one out with a poker; even the feathery splinters of the unplanned wood had not ignited.

  It made a certain extraordinary kind of sense. When the moment came for the crates to go back, any physical scrambling that had occurred in the meantime would have no effect; they would simply put themselves together as they had been before, like Thor’s goats. But burning was another matter; burning would have released energy which could not be replaced.

  That settled one paradox, at any rate. There was another that nagged at Peter’s orderly mind. If the things he took out of that vault, seven hundred-odd years in the future, were to become part of the collection bequeathed by him to the museum, preserved by it, and eventually stored in the vault for him to find – then precisely where had they come from in the first place?

  It worried him. Peter had learned in life, as his brother in physics, that one never gets anything for nothing.

  Moreover this riddle was only one of his perplexities, and that not among the greatest. For another example, there was the obstinate opacity of the time-sphere whenever he attempted to examine the immediate future. However often he tried it the result was always the same: a cloudy blank, all the way forward to the sudden unveiling of the marble gallery.

  It was reasonable to expect the sphere to show nothing at times when he himself was going to be in the vault, but this accounted for only five or six hours out of every twenty-four. Again, presumably, it would show him no changes to be made by himself, since foreknowledge would make it possible for him to alter his actions. But he laboriously cleared one end of the vault, put up a screen to hide the rest and made a vow – which he kept – not to alter the clear space or move the screen for a week. Then he tried again – with the same result.

  The only remaining explanation was that sometime during the next ten years, something was going to happen which he would prevent if he could; and the clue to it was there, buried in that frustrating unbroken blankness.

  As a corollary, it was going to be something which he could prevent if only he knew what it was . . . or even when it was supposed to happen.

  The event in question, in all probability, was his own death. Peter therefore hired nine men to guard him, three to a shift – because one man alone could not be trusted, two might conspire against him, whereas three, with the very minimum of effort, could be kept in a state of mutual suspicion. He also underwent a thorough medical examination, had new locks installed on every door and window, and took every other precaution ingenuity could suggest. When he had done all these things, the next ten years were as blank as before.

  Peter had more than half expected it. He checked through his list of safeguards once more, found it good, and thereafter let the matter rest. He had done all he could; either he would survive the crisis or he would not. In either case, events were conserved; the time-sphere could give him no forewarning.

  Another man might have found his pleasure blunted by guilt and fear; Peter’s was whetted to a keener edge. If he had been a recluse before, now he was an eremite; he grudged every hour that was not given to his work. Mornings he spent in the vault, unpacking his acquisitions; afternoons and evenings, sorting, cataloguing, examining, and – the word is not too strong – gloating. When three weeks had passed in this way, the shelves were bare as far as the power cable would allow him to reach in every direction, except for crates whose contents were undoubtedly too large to pass through the sphere. These, with heroic self-control, Peter had left untouched.

  And still he had looted only a hundredth part of that incredible treasure-house. With grappling hooks he could have extended his reach by perhaps three or four yards, but at the risk of damaging his prizes; and in any case this would have been no solution but only a postponement of the problem. There was nothing for it but to go through the sphere himself, and unpack the crates while on the other “side” of it.

  Peter thought about it in a fury of concentration for the rest of the day. So far as he was concerned there was no question that the gain would be worth any calculated risk; the problem was how to measure the risk and if possible reduce it.

  Item: he felt a definite uneasiness at the thought of venturing through that insubstantial bubble. Intuition was supported, if not by logic, at least by a sense of the dramatically appropriate. Now, if ever, would be the time for his crisis.

  Item: common sense did not concur. The uneasiness had two symbols. One was the white face of his brother Harold just before the water closed over it; the other was a phantasm born of those gigantic, splayed footprints in the dust of the gallery. In spite of himself, Peter had often found himself trying to imagine what the creatures that made them must look like, until his visualization was so clear that he could almost swear he had seen them.

  Towering monsters they were, with crested ophidian heads and great unwinking eyes; and they moved in a strutting glide, nodding their heads, like fantastic barnyard fowl.

  But, taking these premonitory images in turn; first, it was impossible that he should ever be seriously inconvenienced by Harold’s death. There were no witnesses, he was sure; he had struck the blow with a stone; stones also were the weights that had dragged the body down, and the rope was an odd length Pete
r had picked up on the shore. Second, the three-toed. Somethings might be as fearful as all the world’s bogies put together; it made no difference, he could never meet them.

  Nevertheless, the uneasiness persisted. Peter was not satisfied; he wanted a lifeline. When he found it, he wondered that he had not thought of it before.

  He would set the time-sphere for a period just before one of the intervals of blankness. That would take care of accidents, sudden illnesses, and other unforeseeable contingencies. It would also insure him against one very real and not at all irrational dread: the fear that the mechanism which generated the time-sphere might fail while he was on the other side. For the conservation of events was not a condition created by the sphere but one which limited its operation. No matter what happened, it was impossible for him to occupy the same place-time as any future or past observer; therefore, when the monster entered that vault, Peter would not be there any more.

  There was, of course, the scent-bottle to remember. Every rule has its exception; but in this case, Peter thought, the example did not apply. A scent-bottle could roll into a rat-hole; a man could not.

  He turned the rheostat carefully back to the last flicker of grayness; past that to the next, still more carefully. The interval between the two, he judged, was something under an hour: excellent.

  His pulse seemed a trifle rapid, but his brain was clear and cool. He thrust his head into the sphere and sniffed cautiously. The air was stale and had a faint, unpleasant odor, but it was breathable.

  Using a crate as a stepping-stool, he climbed to the top of the workbench. He arranged another crate close to the sphere to make a platform level with its equator. And seven and a half centuries in the future, a third crate stood on the floor directly under the sphere.

  Peter stepped into the sphere, dropped, and landed easily, legs bending to take the shock. When he straightened, he was standing in what to all appearances was a large circular hole in the work-bench; his chin was just above the top of the sphere.

  He lowered himself, half-squatting, until he had drawn his head through and stepped down from the crate.

  He was in the future vault. The sphere was a brightly luminous thing that hung unsupported in the air behind him, its midpoint just higher than his head. The shadows it cast spread black and wedge-shaped in every direction, melting into obscurity.

  Peter’s heart was pounding miserably. He had an illusory stifling sensation, coupled with the idiotic notion that he ought to be wearing a diver’s helmet. The silence was like the pause before a shout.

  But down the aisles marched the crated treasures in their hundreds.

  Peter set to work. It was difficult, exacting labor, opening the crates where they lay, removing the contents and nailing the crates up again, all without disturbing the positions of the crates themselves, but it was the price he had to pay for his lifeline. Each crate was in a sense a microcosm, like the vault itself – a capsule of unliquidated time. But the vault’s term would end some fifty minutes from now, when crested heads nodded down these aisles; those of the crates’ interiors, for all that Peter knew to the contrary, went on forever.

  The first crate contained lacework porcelain; the second, shakudô sword-hilts; the third, an exquisite fourth-century Greek ornament in repoussé bronze, the equal in every way of the Siris bronzes.

  Peter found it almost physically difficult to set the thing down, but he did so; standing on his platform-crate in the future with his head projecting above the sphere in the present – like (again the absurd thought) a diver rising from the ocean – he laid it carefully beside the others on the workbench.

  Then down again, into the fragile silence and the gloom. The next crates were too large, and those just beyond were doubtful. Peter followed his shadow down the aisle. He had almost thirty minutes left: enough for one more crate, chosen with care, and an ample margin.

  Glancing to his right at the end of the row, he saw a door.

  It was a heavy door, rivet-studded, with a single iron step below it. There had been no door there in Peter’s time; the whole plan of the building must have been altered. Of course!, he realized suddenly. If it had not, if so much as single tile or lintel had remained of the palace as he knew it, then the sphere could never have let him see or enter this particular here-and-now, this – what would Harold have called it? – this nexus in space-time.

  For if you saw any now-existing thing as it was going to appear in the future, you could alter it in the present – carve your initials in it, break it apart, chop it down – which was manifestly impossible, and therefore . . .

  And therefore the first ten years were necessarily blank when he looked into the sphere, not because anything unpleasant was going to happen to him, but because in that time the last traces of the old palace had not yet been eradicated.

  There was no crisis.

  Wait a moment, though! Harold had been able to look into the near future . . . But – of course – Harold had been about to die.

  In the dimness between Peter and the door he saw a rack of crates that looked promising. The way was uneven; one of the untidy accumulations of refuse that seemed to be characteristic of the Somethings lay in windows across the floor. Peter stepped forward carefully – but not carefully enough.

  Harold Castellare had had another accident – and again, if you choose to look at it in that way, a lucky one. The blow stunned him; the old rope slipped from the stones; flaccid, he floated where a struggling man might have drowned. A fishing boat nearly ran him down, and picked him up instead. He was suffering from a concussion, shock, exposure, and asphyxiation and was more than three-quarters dead . . . But he was still alive when he was delivered, an hour later, to a hospital in Naples.

  There were of course no identifying papers, labels or monograms in his clothing – Peter had seen to that – and for the first week after his rescue Harold was quite genuinely unable to give any account of himself. During the second week he was mending but uncommunicative, and at the end of the third, finding that there was some difficulty about gaining his release in spite of his physical recovery, he affected to recover his memory, gave a circumstantial but entirely fictitious identification and was discharged.

  To understand this as well as all his subsequent actions, it is only necessary to remember that Harold was a Castellare. In Naples, not wishing to give Peter any unnecessary anxiety, he did not approach his bank for funds but cashed a check with an incurious acquaintance, and predated it by four weeks. With part of the money so acquired he paid his hospital bill and rewarded his rescuers. Another part went for new clothing and for four days’ residence in an inconspicuous hotel, while he grew used to walking and dressing himself again. The rest, on his last day, he spent in the purchase of a discreetly small revolver and a box of cartridges.

  He took the last boat to Ischia, and arrived at his own front door a few minutes before eleven. It was a cool evening, and a most cheerful fire was burning in the central hall.

  “Signor Peter is well, I suppose,” said Harold, removing his coat.

  “Yes, Signor Harold. He is very well, very busy with his collection.”

  “Where is he? I should like to speak to him.”

  “He is in the vaults, Signor Harold. But –”

  “Yes?”

  “Signor Peter sees no one when he is in the vaults. He has given strict orders that no one is to bother him, Signor Harold, when he is in the vaults.”

  “Oh, well,” said Harold. “I dare say he’ll see me.”

  It was a thing something like a bear trap, apparently, except that instead of two semicircular jaws it had four segments that snapped together in the middle, each with a shallow, sharp tooth. The pain was quite unendurable.

  Each segment moved at the end of a thin arm, cunningly hinged so that the ghastly thing would close over whichever of the four triggers you stepped on. Each arm had a spring too powerful for Peter’s muscles. The whole affair was connected by a chain to a staple solidly embedd
ed in the concrete floor; it left Peter free to move in any direction a matter of some ten inches. Short of gnawing off his own leg, he thought sickly, there was very little he could do about it.

  The riddle was, what could the thing possibly be doing here? There were rats in the vaults, no doubt, now as in his own time, but surely nothing larger. Was it conceivable that even the three-toed Somethings would set an engine like this to catch a rat?

  Lost inventions, Peter thought irrelevantly, had a way of being rediscovered. Even if he suppressed the time-sphere during his lifetime and it did not happen to survive him, still there might be other time-fishers in the remote future – not here, perhaps, but in other treasure-houses of the world. And that might account for the existence of this metal-jawed horror. Indeed, it might account for the vault itself – a better man-trap – except that it was all nonsense, the trap could only be full until the trapper came to look at it. Events, and the lives of prudent time-travelers, were conserved.

  And he had been in the vault for almost forty minutes. Twenty minutes to go, twenty-five, thirty at the most, then the Somethings would enter and their entrance would free him. He had his lifeline; the knowledge was the only thing that made it possible to live with the pain that was the center of his universe just now. It was like going to the dentist, in the bad old days before procaine; it was very bad, sometimes, but you knew that it would end.

  He cocked his head toward the door, holding his breath. A distant thud, another, then a curiously unpleasant squeaking, then silence.

  But he had heard them. He knew they were there. It couldn’t be much longer now.

  Three men, two stocky, one lean, were playing cards in the passageway in front of the closed door that led to the vault staircase. They got up slowly.