“What do I have to do?”
“Just walk through coil and out door. Adjustment is complicated. If we don’t use care you might go back into your own era embedded up to your eyes in pavement. Or again, you might come out forty feet in air. Don’t get unbalanced.”
“I won’t,” Jed said fervently.
Greenbush came up and said, “Could you give me that coin you have?”
The young technician turned wearily and said, “Older, he has to leave with everything he brought and he can’t take anything other with him. We’ve got to fit him into same vibratory rhythm. You should know that.”
“It is such nice coin,” Greenbush sighed.
“If I tried to take something with me?” Jed asked.
“It just wouldn’t go, gesell. You would go and it would stay.”
Jed thought of another question. He turned to Greenbush. “Before I go, tell me. Where are the HUC’s kept?”
“In refrigerated underground vault at place called Fort Knox.”
“Come on, come on, you. Just walk straight ahead through coil. Don’t hurry. Push door open and go out onto street.”
Jed stood, faintly dizzy, on the afternoon sidewalk of Wall Street in Manhattan. A woman bounced off him, snarled, “Fa godsake, ahya goin’ uh comin!”. Late papers were tossed off a truck onto the corner. Jed tiptoed over, looked cautiously and saw that the date was Tuesday, June 14th, 1949.
The further the subway took him uptown, the more the keen reality of the three quarters of an hour in the bank faded. By the time he reached his own office, sat down behind his familiar desk, it had become like a fevered dream.
Overwork. That was it. Brain fever. Probably wandered around in a daze. Better take it easy. Might fade off into a world of the imagination and never come back. Skip the book for a month. Start dating Helen again. Relax.
He grinned slowly, content with his decision. “HUC’s, indeed!” he said.
Date Helen tonight. Better call her now. Suddenly he remembered that he hadn’t cashed a check, and he couldn’t take Helen far on a dollar.
He found the check in his pocket, glanced at it, and then found himself sitting rigid in the chair. Without taking his eyes from the check, he pulled open the desk drawer, took out the manuscript entitled, “Probable Bases of Future Monetary Systems,” tore it in half and dropped it in the wastebasket.
His breath whistled in pinched nostrils. He heard, in his memory, a voice saying, “You would go and it would stay.”
The check was properly made out for twenty dollars. But he had used the ink supplied by the bank. The check looked as though it had been written with a dull knife. The brown desk top showed up through the fragile lace of his signature.
Spectator Sport
Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1950.
The first man to reach the future, Dr. Rufus Maddon meets a fate far worse than any death!
Dr. Rufus Maddon was not generally considered to be an impatient man — or addicted to physical violence.
But when the tenth man he tried to stop on the street brushed by him with a mutter of annoyance Rufus Maddon grabbed the eleventh man, swung him around and held him with his shoulders against a crumbling wall.
He said, “You will listen to me, sir! I am the first man to travel into the future and I will not stand—”
The man pushed him away, turned around and said, “You got this dust on my suit. Now brush it off.”
Rufus Maddon brushed mechanically. He said, with a faint uncontrollable tremble in his voice, “But nobody seems to care.”
The man peered back over his shoulder. “Good enough, chum. Better go get yourself lobed. The first time I saw the one on time travel it didn’t get to me at all. Too hammy for me. Give me those murder jobs. Every time I have one of those I twitch for twenty hours.”
Rufus made another try. “Sir, I am physical living proof that the future is predetermined. I can explain the energy equations, redesign the warp projector, send myself from your day further into the future—”
The man walked away. “Go get a lobe job,” he said.
“But don’t I look different to you?” Rufus called after him, a plaintive note in his voice.
The man, twenty feet away, turned and grinned at him. “How?”
When the man had gone Rufus Maddon looked down at his neat grey suit, stared at the men and women in the street. It was not fair of the future to be so — so dismally normal.
Four hundred years of progress? The others had resented the experience that was to be his. In those last few weeks there had been many discussions of how the people four hundred years in the future would look on Rufus Maddon as a barbarian.
Once again he continued his aimless walk down the streets of the familiar city. There was a general air of disrepair. Shops were boarded up. The pavement was broken and potholed. A few automobiles traveled on the broken streets. They, at least, appeared to be of a slightly advanced design but they were dented, dirty and noisy.
The man who had spoken to him had made no sense. “Lobe job?” And what was “the one on time travel?”
He stopped in consternation as he reached the familiar park. His consternation arose from the fact that the park was all too familiar. Though it was a tangle of weeds the equestrian statue of General Murdy was still there in deathless bronze, liberally decorated by pigeons.
Clothes had not changed nor had common speech. He wondered if the transfer had gone awry, if this world were something he was dreaming.
He pushed through the knee-high tangle of grass to a wrought-iron bench. Four hundred years before he had sat on that same bench. He sat down again. The metal powdered and collapsed under his weight, one end of the bench dropping with a painful thump.
Dr. Rufus Maddon was not generally considered to be a man subject to fits of rage. He stood up rubbing his bruised elbow, and heartily kicked the offending bench. The part he kicked was all too solid.
He limped out of the park, muttering, wondering why the park wasn’t used, why everyone seemed to be in a hurry.
It appeared that in four hundred years nothing at all had been accomplished. Many familiar buildings had collapsed. Others still stood. He looked in vain for a newspaper or a magazine.
One new element of this world of the future bothered him considerably. That was the number of low-slung white-panel delivery trucks. They seemed to be in better condition than the other vehicles. Each bore in fairly large gilt letters the legend WORLD SENSEWAYS. But he noticed that the smaller print underneath the large inscription varied. Some read, Feeder Division — others, Hookup Division.
The one that stopped at the curb beside him read, Lobotomy Division. Two husky men got out and smiled at him and one said, “You’ve been taking too much of that stuff, Doc.”
“How did you know my title?” Rufus asked, thoroughly puzzled.
The other man smiled wolfishly, patted the side of truck. “Nice truck, pretty truck. Climb in, bud. We’ll take you down and make you feel wonderful, hey?”
Dr. Rufus Maddon suddenly had a horrid suspicion that he knew what a lobe job might be. He started to back away. They grabbed him quickly and expertly and dumped him into the truck.
The sign on the front of the building said WORLD SENSEWAYS. The most luxurious office inside was lettered, Regional Director — Roger K. Handriss.
Roger K. Handriss sat behind his handsome desk. He was a florid grey-haired man with keen grey eyes. He was examining his bank book thinking that in another year he’d have enough money with which to retire and buy a permanent hookup. Permanent was so much better than the Temp stuff you could get on the home sets. The nerve ends was what did it, of course.