Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Read online

  But the blind hope that somehow there would be an answer to the problem of the missing element kept him going. He laid down the pen, and turned to the pages he had already written. He passed up the math and started through the text, trying to absorb its content and find an explanation of velac.

  There was none. She simply referred to the procurement of the velac as if it were a stock item he could pick off the shelves.

  What if she had missed by a mere ten years, he thought. Could he hope to wait out the development of the velac, whatever it might be, and go to her when it turned up?

  But it might as easily be fifty years. That would not be a large error in the great span of time that separated them. It would be easy for her to make an error of half a century.

  When it came time for her to repeat the reference to the velac he wrote down her words again but there was no clarification.

  The remaining four days passed as if in a single blur. For George there was scarcely any dividing line between them. On two more nights he slept in the lab without anyone knowing it. On two others, however, he had to go to his apartment for a few hours of rest.

  * * * *

  It was Saturday night—the end of the week Rena had given. George sat alone beside the mass of haywired equipment that he had tested and checked as best he could. In some near-miraculous manner it had been thrown together. The circuits checked—all but those involving the velac.

  He sat staring bitterly at the unfinished machine. The pen was in his hand—but it hadn’t begun to write. Rena had promised to contact him at seven-thirty, just a half hour before her time of departure in her age.

  He watched the sweep second hand of the clock swing slowly around. Precisely on time the pen point began dancing in swift whorls.

  Hello, darling. Are you all ready to go? Check the calibrations very carefully once again, both temporal and spatial. I want to arrive in Cell Four and find you right there beside me. Oh, it’s going to be so wonderful to see you again! It seems as if ten thousand years have passed in the last week.

  I’m so tired and I know you must be too. Do you know what I think we’re going to find? I think it will be a lovely world where men have conquered everything, including themselves. Where there won’t be anything to make us unhappy again.

  I think we’ll arrive on a little hill overlooking a lovely town. It will be night there and there will be a slow warm rain. I love to walk in the rain but it will be dismal without you —George, I’m afraid. What if you aren’t there. You don’t know what’s it’s been like, trying to reach you all this week, hoping you’d be reading my words, never knowing for sure.

  I keep thinking, what if you can’t build the alternator for some reason? I tried to make the instructions as simple as I could and specify materials you could obtain in your time. But I keep wondering, what if there’s just one question you need to ask?

  I’ll have to stop this. In just a few minutes now I won’t have to worry and wonder any more, will I? I’m at the University now. I’m going through the alternator in the Historical Lab here. My parents are here to say goodbye and Harkase seems as pleased as a fat hog. Sometimes I hate him. I think he’s been able to see something that none of the rest of us have.

  There’s time for no more now. The field is coming up. I’m walking towards it. So this is goodbye and—hello, darling!

  He waited. There was no more.

  The pen was still. She was gone utterly beyond his reach. He dropped his head to the table and he could not hold back the tears.

  After a time he tried the pen again to see if perhaps Rena were trying to reach him from Cell Four. If she were it was in vain. The pen remained a dead thing in his hand, silent and decaying. Somehow he knew it would never write again.

  He fled from the laboratory and out of the building. He felt that he had to keep his body in physical motion to retain sanity.

  The now widened gap of thirty-two hundred years seemed more terrible than ever. He thought of Rena, stepping into the field, hopeful of meeting him on the other side. What was she doing now?

  She knew that he had failed. Her agony would be as great as his and she would be in a strange world that might be far different from the dream world she had hoped for. It might be a fierce and savage place where men and beasts would give her little chance for survival.

  In vain he tried to comprehend the philosophy of her time which would allow her to take such risks with little concern for her life but which would deny her any right to be with George, regardless of her happiness. There was savagery in her age too.

  He walked for endless miles, it seemed. At last it began to rain, slowly and gently. “I love to walk in the rain but it would be dismal without you — “

  He headed for the nearest package store and reached it just at closing time.

  For three days he was on a solid drunk. Sykes finally came for him on the next Wednesday.

  “I suppose you had to do it sooner or later,” said the section chief. “But I hope it’s not going to be a permanent state. Let’s get you into the shower and after you absorb a gallon of coffee we’ll take a walk around the block.”

  “It’s no good,” said George. “You’d better get one of the other guys to engineer that new contract. I’ll be lucky if I can hold a job in a repair shop.”

  “Yeah? Listen, you dope, they’ve tracked Rena as far as Detroit. I got a report this morning. She was positively identified there on Monday. I’ll admit you don’t find a girl like her more than once in a lifetime but you’ve had your binge now and it’s time to pick up the pieces and get ready to see Rena when they catch up with her.”

  “Yeah—yeah, sure. I wouldn’t want her to see me like this, would I?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t. Now you’re talking sense.”

  It was almost a relief to get back to work the next day. Work and time would dim grief and make it bearable.

  * * * *

  As usual dealings with the military started out with a snarled-up mess in which the technical brass considered it possible to order engineering impossibilities with the same ease they could command a private to polish a general’s buttons.

  Their stupidity was refreshing as he let them back themselves into one corner after another. It would be quite a number of days before there would be agreement on preliminary specs, he saw.

  After the conference he wiped up a few change orders on his last project and two others in current production, He almost had a phobia about going into the screen room where the unfinished alternator was. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to order Jack and Marvin to dismantle it.

  It was Saturday and he went in just before one o’clock quitting time. His feelings seemed dulled now by the events of the past week. He could almost view the machine dispassionately as a mere technical achievement, not as a broken key to reunion with Rena.

  He sat down over the papers that he had written with her pen. He thumbed through them. Much of the math still eluded him but he began a leisurely examination that replaced the panicky haste which had possessed him before.

  Here were the basic principles of the machine. Why couldn’t he work it out from there? Why wasn’t it possible for him to design his own alternator and velac if necessary?

  If he could do it, would it still be possible to arrive in Four simultaneously with Rena, eliminating the probability of her arriving without him?

  He glanced speculatively at the machine and turned back to the pages of math. Was it worth a try? He smiled to himself. He would be trying all the remaining days of his life. For him there would be nothing else worth doing.

  He began working his way slowly through the equations again, following the theory and transformation step by step. And then, after five and a half hours, forty pages deep in the pile, he found it.

  Rena used the term, velocity acceleration of hyperbolic stream flow.

  Velocity acceleration—velac.

  The kind of term that would come into common use after technicians
had been working with a device for a while. But how far in the future would it be?

  Swiftly, he went on through the equations describing the phenomenon. It seemed suddenly as if a cold blast descended upon him. He read through the math again.

  He knew those equations. They were descriptive of the electron flow within the tempora tube that he and Carl had made.

  The tempora tube was the velac—with modifications.

  Rena had erred by mere months perhaps, even weeks. She had known that he had helped develop it. No wonder there had been no explanation. But she had forgotten that the contraction, velac, had not yet been coined.

  In his previous haste and intense fatigue he had defeated himself by passing over those equations without recognizing them. He swore futilely. If Rena had been harmed or lost to him because of his own thick headedness —He went to the screen room where Carl worked and broke open the cabinet that held the existing models of the tempora-velac. He took them back to his own room and returned to the math.

  There would have to be minor alterations. They were not developed closely enough to the form in which Rena knew them. He contemplated the two-foot globe with its complex innards. It would mean opening the bottle and resealing it.

  The company boasted a television tube lab but it was ill-suited to anything else and George was even less suited as a glass technician.

  He computed the alterations required in the elements and built a tiny grid assembly that would have to be added. He took the tubes to the other lab.

  Carefully he heated one and broke the seal. Then he removed the largest terminal seal that contained a single high-voltage lead. It left a hole three inches in diameter. Deftly, he worked through it to alter the elements and insert the additional grid. His fingers felt clumsy and thick. He wondered if he could ever depend on the operation of the tube when he was through.

  Finally the terminal seal was replaced and the vacuum line joined. It seemed an endless wait while the mercury pump scavenged the thinning molecules of air.

  Then he flashed it—and a clear thin line appeared almost all the way around the tube.

  He glanced wearily out the window. It was almost daylight—Sunday. No one would be down. He could try again with the other tube but he felt the exhaustion creeping up on him again and he remembered the other blunder that fatigue had cost.

  Still, he couldn’t give up a whole day with possible success this close. If the next tube were a failure he could get the lab to make another on Monday.

  He returned to the work. He let the glass anneal for hours after he finished the alterations. This time there was no cracking.

  The sun was setting when he took the finished tube back to his own lab, He clamped the tempora-velac in place and adjusted the orifice as Rena had directed. Twenty-four hours after he had first recognized the velac equations the alternator was ready for the application of power.

  * * * *

  He was ready to go—eight days late. Would it make a difference? Could he still join Rena at that moment when she passed into Cell Four? She had given him exact coordinate settings for the machine with warning not to alter them in any way. It was possible that other factors of which he was ignorant were involved. He didn’t know but he carefully adjusted the time setting to eight days less.

  It was anti-climatic now. A week ago he had been keyed to intolerable pitch when failure had come. Now Rena’s written thoughts seemed like ghostly memories out of an irretrievable past. He looked about the lab where he had worked for eight years. He wondered what they’d think when he disappeared.

  The alternator was set for self destruction. They could never follow. The pen was in his pocket and Rena’s papers had been carefully burned in a wastebasket. There would be no evidence he had left as far as he knew—unless it were his own body found dead in an alternator that was a failure.

  The gray field was rising now. It pressed like gelatin fingers against the space beyond its confining plates. He glanced at the clock. It was ten minutes after eight.

  He walked into the grayness.

  * * * *

  He was standing on a low hill and there was a city not far away just as she had said. It was even raining and the lights glistened in the slowly falling shower. And then he heard her step, saw her moving in the shadows.

  “Rena!”

  “George—oh, George, darling!”

  He pressed her close in his arms and when he kissed her face he tasted her tears mingled with the rain.

  “I’ve been waiting,” she said. “I was sure I’d failed and you weren’t coming,”

  He tried to see his watch.“Ten minutes. Ten minutes isn’t bad—out of thirty-two hundred years.”

  “I know. But it seemed so long when I thought I would never see you again. I’ve found out about these cells. There’s no going back through them—only forward—even for us. I could never have gone back to try to reach you again.”

  She shivered, half with cold and half with the thought of the awful impenetrable gulf that might have separated them at this moment if they had failed.

  “It’s just as you dreamed it would be,” she said. “But you’re cold. Let’s go down to the city and find out what kind of a world we’ve come into. Maybe even the people are as you dreamed of them,”

  They moved down the muddy slope towards the town.

  * * * *

  Not far away in space but six centuries back in time, Dr. Papes Harkase sat in weary relief before his instruments in the Historical Laboratory. The others had gone. It had been an hour since Rena had left. He had spent that time in desperate urgent probing with his instruments.

  They told a story of success and the relief that followed laid bare the incredible exhaustion that had crept upon him the past months. He had brought to fruitful conclusion the project that had occupied nearly all his professional life.

  In it all there was only one deep regret. He remembered the face of Rena that day when George had been sent back to his own time and blocked. He remembered how she had looked when she said, “You were all in on it, weren’t you?”

  He wished he could have explained just why he had been in on it. He wished he could have spared her some of the agony of that terrible week when she never knew that her thoughts were being received.

  Well, it had been pretty terrible for him too, he thought. He had had to take dangerous steps—impressing Rena to take her pen and leave it with George.

  He had not known for certain that her thoughts could reach the pen through the block. It had been a well-indicated theory—but only a theory.

  He picked up the sheaf of papers on the desk. He wished that he might have shown them to her, for they explained why he had taken advantage of Cramer’s fanatical attitude and helped send George back, to be blocked forever unless he could come through to Cell Four by his own devices.

  For that had been the requirement laid down by the immutable mathematical laws that defined the only circumstances under which their blind branch could ever be regrafted to the main stem of history, which they had left so long ago.

  He laid the sheets down and patted them with finality. Rena could not have been told what was in them. Her knowing would in itself have broken the laws by which the regrafting could be performed. And so he had manipulated the situation according to the requirements of those merciless equations and with all his skill as Master Historian.

  But the price of his success was Rena’s eternal hatred and, though he would never see her again, he wished that it didn’t have to be so.

  He rose and shut down the massive panel of instruments. It was done. No longer was Cell Four like a blind bud on the end of a probability branch six hundred years ahead. Rena and George had reached the Cell together and now the tenuous fiber of possibility that had reached tentatively back to the main stream was a strong bridge, an indestructible link.

  A chain of men whose names were Brooks.

  THE CAT AND THE KING

  “The cat is symbolic,” said Jason Cartw
right. “I shall keep him.” His eyes went from the motionless silhouette of the giant Maltese sitting in the window overlooking the gray city. They settled on the mud-spattered, ill-clothed form of his brother.

  “I find I can’t trust men these days,” Jason continued. “Seems to me like there used to be an old saying ‘even a cat may look at a king’—and it’s almost arrived at the state where only a cat may look at this king.

  “And don’t say I’m not a king, Robert. I’m king of the greatest industrial and commercial empire the universe has seen, and it’s growing every hour. Yes, I’ll most certainly keep Old Tom. He doesn’t talk back, and he keeps quiet about what he sees. All I have to do is rub his ears to get more affection than all the human beings alive would give me.”

  “If that’s all you came for, get out. I’m keeping Old Tom.”

  But Robert Cartwright didn’t rise. He only shifted his muddy feet upon the luxurious carpet that covered the office floor. “As you say, the cat is symbolic. You began your career of commercial imperialism as a boy with a stolen cat—mine. And so you crush me financially and take the one insignificant thing that I desire to keep, Old Tom. But have you ever thought of the complete symbolism of the cat? You end your career just as you started it—and perhaps you are nearer the end than you think.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Jason’s face went dark as he thrust his blunt head towards his brother, “I don’t like threats.”

  “I don’t have to make threats. Your own weight will crush you. You’ve built an industrial empire upon blood and theft, and you’re out of date if you think you can—maintain it. Imperialism in commerce was at its height when you and I were boys and saw our father destroyed by it. But now it’s dying so fast that you are going to be caught right in its death throes. You began with a stolen cat, and you shall end with only a stolen cat.”

  “So cries the poor peasant as the king passes by,” sneered Jason.”

  You’d be quite willing to trade places, I’m sure, but you’ve never even gotten the mud off your feet since you came to Venus, have you?”