The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (23 page)

And in the spring of that new year he first flew a heavier-than-air vehicle.

“He has made all the basic inventions,” said the many-tongued people. “Now there remains only their refinement and proper utilization.”

“Horse hokey,” said Higgston Rainbird. He made a rocket that could carry freight to England in thirteen minutes at seven cents a hundredweight. This was in 1805. He had fissionable power in 1813, and within four years had the price down where it could be used for desalting seawater to the eventual irrigation of five million square miles of remarkably dry land.

He built a Think Machine to work out the problems that he was too busy to solve, and a Prediction Machine to pose him with new problems and new areas of breakthrough.

In 1821, on his birthday, he hit the moon with a marker. He bet a crony that he would be able to go up personally one year later and retrieve it. And he won the bet.

In 1830 he first put on the market his Red Ball Pipe Tobacco, an aromatic and expensive crimp cut made of Martian lichen.

In 1836 he founded the Institute for the Atmospheric Rehabilitation of Venus, for he found that place to be worse than a smokehouse. It was there that he developed that hacking cough that stayed with him till the end of his days.

He synthesized a man of his own age and disrepute who would sit drinking with him in the after-midnight hours and say, “You’re so right, Higgston, so incontestably right.”

His plan for the Simplification and Eventual Elimination of Government was adopted (in modified form) in 1840, a fruit of his Political and Economic Balance Institute.

Yet, for all his seemingly successful penetration of the field, he realized that man was the only truly cantankerous animal, and that Human Engineering would remain one of the never completely resolved fields.

He made a partial breakthrough in telepathy, starting with the personal knowledge that shrews are always able to read the minds of their spouses. He knew that the secret was not in sympathetic reception, but in arrogant break-in. With the polite it is forever impossible, but he disguised this discovery as politely as he could.

And he worked toward corporal immortality and the apotheosis of mankind, that cantankerous animal.

He designed a fabric that would embulk itself on a temperature drop, and thin to an airy sheen in summery weather. The weather itself he disdained to modify, but he did evolve infallible prediction of exact daily rainfall and temperature for decades in advance.

And he built a retrogressor.

One day he looked in the mirror and frowned.

“I never did get around to making a better mirror. This one is hideous. However (to consider every possibility) let us weigh the thesis that it is the image and not the mirror that is hideous.”

He called up an acquaintance.

“Say, Ulois, what year is this anyhow?” 

“1844.”

“Are you sure?”

“Reasonably sure.”

“How old am I?”

“Eighty-five, I think, Higgston.”

“How long have I been an old man?”

“Quite a while, Higgston, quite a while.”

Higgston Rainbird hung up rudely.

“I wonder how I ever let a thing like that slip up on me?” he said to himself. “I should have gone to work on corporal immortality a little earlier. I’ve bungled the whole business now.”

He fiddled with his Prediction Machine and saw that he was to die that very year. He did not seek a finer reading.

“What a saddle-galled splay-footed situation to find myself in! I never got around to a tenth of the things I really wanted to do. Oh, I was smart enough; I just ran up too many blind alleys. Never found the answers to half the old riddles. Should have built the Prediction Machine at the beginning instead of the end. But I didn’t know how to build it at the beginning. There ought to be a way to get more done. Never got any advice in my life worth taking except from that nutty old man on the mountain when I was a young man. There’s a lot of things I’ve only started on. Well, every man doesn’t hang, but every man does come to the end of his rope. I never did get around to making that rope extensible. And I can’t improve things by talking to myself here about it.”

He filled his pipe with Red Ball crimp cut and thought a while.

“But I hill-hopping
can
improve things by talking to myself
there
about it.”

Then he turned on his retrogressor and went back and up.

Young Higgston Rainbird was hawking from the top of Devil’s Head Mountain on a June afternoon in 1779. He flew his hawk down through the white clouds, and decided that he was the finest fellow in the world and master of the finest sport. If there was earth below the clouds it was far away and unimportant.

The hunting bird came back, climbing the tall air, with a pigeon from the lower regions.

“Forget the bird,” said the old man, “and give a listen with those outsized ears of yours. I have a lot to tell you in a very little while, and then you must devote yourself to a concentrated life of work. Hood the bird and clip him to the stake. Is that bridle clip of your own invention? Ah yes, I remember now that it is.”

“I’ll just fly him down once more, old man, and then I’ll have a look at what you’re selling.”

“No. No. Hood him at once. This is your moment of decision. That is a boyishness that you must give up. Listen to me, Higgston, and I will orient your life for you.”

“I rather intended to orient it myself. How did you get up here, old man, without my seeing you? How, in fact, did you get up here at all? It’s a hard climb.”

“Yes, I remember that it is. I came up here on the wings of an invention of my own.

Now pay attention for a few hours. It will take all your considerable wit.”

“A few hours and a perfect hawking afternoon will be gone. This may be the finest day ever made.”

“I also once felt that it was, but I manfully gave it up. So must you.”

“Let me fly the hawk down again and I will listen to you while it is gone.”

“But you will only be listening with half a mind, and the rest will be with the hawk.”

But young Higgston Rainbird flew the bird down through the shining white clouds, and the old man began his rigmarole sadly. Yet it was a rang-dang-do of a spiel, a mummy-whammy of admonition and exposition, and young Higgston listened entranced and almost forgot his hawk. The old man told him that he must stride half a dozen roads at once, and yet never take a wrong one; that he must do some things earlier that on the alternative had been done quite late; that he must point his technique at the Think Machine and the Prediction Machine, and at the unsolved problem of corporal immortality.

“In no other way can you really acquire elbow room, ample working time. Time runs out and life is too short if you let it take its natural course. Are you listening to me, Higgston?”

But the hawk came back, climbing the steep air, and it had a gray dove. The old man sighed at the interruption, and he knew that his project was in peril.

“Hood the hawk. It’s a sport for boys. Now listen to me, you spraddling jack. I am telling you things that nobody else would ever be able to tell you! I will show you how to fly falcons to the stars, not just down to the meadows and birch groves at the foot of this mountain.”

“There is no prey up there,” said young Higgston.

“There
is.
Gamier prey than you ever dreamed of. Hood the bird and snaffle him.”

“I’ll just fly him down one more time and listen to you till he comes back.”

The hawk went down through the clouds like a golden bolt of summer lightning.

Then the old man, taking the cosmos, peeled it open layer by layer like an onion, and told young Higgston how it worked. Afterwards he returned to the technological beginning and he lined out the workings of steam and petro- and electromagnetism, and explained that these simple powers must be used for a short interval in the invention of greater power. He told him of waves and resonance and airy transmission, and fission and flight and over-flight. And that none of the doors required keys, only a resolute man to turn the knob and push them open. Young Higgston was impressed.

Then the hawk came back, climbing the towering air, and it had a rainbird.

The old man had lively eyes, but now they took on a new light.

“Nobody ever gives up pleasure willingly,” he said, “and there is always the sneaking feeling that the bargain may not have been perfect. This is one of the things I have missed. I haven’t hawked for sixty-five years. Let me fly him this time, Higgston.”

“You know how?”

“I am adept. And I once intended to make a better gauntlet for hawkers. This hasn’t been improved since Nimrod’s time.”

“I have an idea for a better gauntlet myself, old man.”

“Yes. I know what your idea is. Go ahead with it. It’s practical.” 

“Fly him if you want to, old man.”

And old Higgston flew the tercel hawk down through the gleaming clouds, and he and young Higgston watched from the top of the world. And then young Higgston Rainbird was standing alone on the top of Devil’s Head Mountain, and the old man was gone.

“I wonder where he went? And where in appleknocker’s heaven did he come from?

Or was he ever here at all? That’s a danged funny machine he came in, if he did come in it. All the wheels are on the inside. But I can use the gears from it, and the clock, and the copper wire. It must have taken weeks to hammer that much wire out that fine. I wish I’d paid more attention to what he was saying, but he poured it on a little thick. I’d have gone along with him on it if only he’d have found a good stopping place a little sooner, and hadn’t been so insistent on giving up hawking. Well, I’ll just hawk here till dark, and if it dawns clear I’ll be up again in the morning. And Sunday, if I have a little time, I may work on my sparker or my chestnut roaster.”

Higgston Rainbird lived a long and successful life. Locally he was known best as a hawker and horse racer. But as an inventor he was recognized as far as Boston.

He is still known, in a limited way, to specialists in the field and period; known as contributor to the development of the moldboard plow, as the designer of the Nonpareil Nutmeg Grater with the safety feature, for a bellows, for a sparker for starting fires (little used), and for the Devil’s Claw Wedge for splitting logs.

He is known for such, and for no more.

LARRY NIVEN

Larry Niven established his credentials as a master of the hard-science
-
fiction story
with his Nebula Award–winning novel
Ringworld,
about a ribbonlike planetary body
with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circumference that rings a
remote star and poses unique technical problems in navigation and escape for its
human inhabitants. The novel and its sequels,
Ringworld Engineers
and
Ringworld Throne,
are part of Niven’s vast Tales of Known Space saga, an acclaimed future
history of humankind’s populating of interstellar space that has accommodated
exploration of a wide variety of themes including alien cultures, immortality, time
travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, and teleportation. The novels
World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth, Protector, The Patchwork Girl, The Integral Trees,
and
The Smoke Ring
, as well as the story collections
Neutron Star, The Shape of Space, Crashlander,
and
Flatlander,
elaborate an epic billion-and-a-half-year history that
integrates innovative technologies with colorful developments of alien races and human
and extraterrestrial interactions. The allure of Niven’s invention can be measured by
the seven volumes in the
Man-Kzin Wars
anthology series, which have attracted his
colleagues in hard science fiction to contribute stories, bolstering the plausibility of the
series through a shared-world sensibility. Niven has also written the novel
A World Out of Time,
a far-future projection in which human evolution leads to immortality, and the
series of science fiction mystery stories collected in
The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.

Much of his work at novel length has been written in collaboration.
The Mote in God’s Eye,
coauthored with Jerry Pournelle, is a memorable first-contact story about
the accidental discovery of an alien race determined to seed our solar system with their
proliferating population. Niven and Pournelle have also written a sequel,
The Gripping Hand;
the disaster novel
Lucifer’s Hammer;
and
Inferno,
which transports a science
fiction writer to a Danteesque Hell. With Steve Barnes, Niven has written
Dream Park, The Barsoom Project,
and
The Voodoo Game,
all set in a future amusement park where
imagined realities are manifested through virtual reality. Niven has also written a series
of fantasies concerned with primitive magic that includes
The Magic Goes Away
and
Time of the Warlock.

“Leviathan!” postulates a fascinating question regarding time travel: what if where a
traveler ended up is not only back in time, but back in some other time stream? Moving
across dimensions is a delightfully developed risk in the following story, and combines
Niven’s sense of humor with a practical, at least to the people in the story, application
for time travel.

by Larry Niven

Two men stood on one side of a thick glass wall.

“You’ll be airborne,” Svetz’s beefy red-faced boss was saying. “We made some improvements in the small extension cage while you were in the hospital. You can hover it, or fly it at up to fifty miles per hour, or let it fly itself; there’s a constant-altitude setting. Your field of vision is total. We’ve made the shell of the extension cage completely transparent.”

On the other side of the thick glass, something was trying to kill them. It was forty feet long from nose to tail and was equipped with vestigial batlike wings. Otherwise it was built something like a slender lizard. It screamed and scratched at the glass with murderous claws.