Time Twisters Read online

  “I bet it does.” Pheidas gave him a shot and bandaged the wound. He was glad he’d replenished his aid kit after helping the Moabite woman. He wasn’t so glad he’d helped her, not any more.

  “Death to Dagon!” the Moabites howled. “Chemosh is king!”

  Another Moabite with a rifle ran out to try to help his friend the way Pheidas had helped the wounded Philistinian. Pheidas shot him, too. He’d never fired his own weapon in anger until this morning. One of these days, he would have to try to figure out what it all meant. Now he just wanted to stay alive.

  “What a mess.” Thanks to the shot, the wounded Philistinian sounded dreamy, not tormented.

  “Man, you can say that again,” Pheidas said. “The Arabs in Amman will be screaming about what we did to their little Semite brothers. So will the Phoenicians, and the Turks in Babylon. We’ll be lucky if we don’t wind up in another real war.”

  “Yeah.” The wounded man didn’t seem to care. That was the drug talking—the drug and the fact that he wouldn’t be doing any more fighting for a while no matter what.

  An ambulance rolled up, lights flashing and sirens wailing. The Moabites threw rocks at it even though it had the Green Waves painted on the doors. They didn’t recognize that symbol of mercy; their ambulances, like most in the Middle East, used the Green Sun instead. Parthians used the Green Lion, while most of the world preferred the Green Hammer.

  Pheidas waved to the ambulance driver, who stopped the vehicle. A couple of medics got out and picked up the man who’d been shot. They both had pistols on their hips. Medics were supposed to be non-combatants, but the Moabites didn’t care about leaving them alone, so they protected themselves as best they could.

  The ambulance screamed away. “Over here!” somebody shouted in Philistinian. “Quick!”

  Pheidas caught the slight guttural accent. “Sit tight! He’s a fraud!” he yelled. What did the Moabites have waiting? Snipers? A machine gun? Grenades?

  A tank fired. The boom of the cannon and the blam of the bursting shell came almost too close together to separate into two noises. Screams followed a moment later. Pheidas hoped some of them came from the Moabite who’d tried to trap his buddies.

  “You all right?” That was Antenor’s voice.

  “So far, yeah. You?” Pheidas called back.

  “I’m not bleeding, anyway,” his friend said. “Don’t know what the demon I’m supposed to do, though.”

  “Stay alive. Shoot the ragheads if they get too close. What else is there?” Pheidas said.

  “There should be something.” Antenor sounded desperately unhappy. Pheidas hoped he wouldn’t think too much. If you did, you were liable to give the bad guys a chance to punch your ticket when you could have punched theirs instead.

  To them, of course, you were the bad guys. The Moabites were surer they were right than Pheidas’ own folk were. Now who’s thinking too much? Pheidas wondered.

  “To me! To me!” That was an unmistakable Philistinian voice. Pheidas dashed out of the doorway. He sprayed a quick burst to make any Moabites in the neighborhood keep their heads down. The Philistinian shouted again. He was inside a grocery. Pheidas ran over and jumped through the blown-out front window.

  “What’s up?” he asked, flopping down flat.

  The Philistinian who’d called wore a captain’s three dragons on each shoulder strap. “I’ve got a captive here, and I want to make sure we get him out in one piece,” he answered, keeping his rifle trained on a plump, most dejected-looking man. “I think he’s one of those Sword Buddha maniacs from Babylon, here to stir up the Moabites.”

  “Great,” Pheidas said, peering out to make sure nobody was getting ready to rush the grocery.

  “My name is Chemoshyatti,” the man said in flawless Moabite. “I have run this grocery for years. By my god, Philistinian, you mistake me.”

  “My left one,” the captain said. “I found the tracts in your register’s cash drawer.” He didn’t turn his head away from Chemoshyatti, but addressed his next words to Pheidas: “The usual garbage.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pheidas said. In the Middle Kingdom and Southeast Asia, Buddhism was a peaceful faith. But the variant the Turks brought down off the steppe preached that nirvana came through killing foes. You didn’t even have to be a Buddhist yourself to gain it if you took enough enemies with you. Babylonia fostered terrorists as far as its acolytes could reach.

  Antenor and another Philistinian soldier warily approached the grocery. Pheidas raised up enough to let them see him in helmet and uniform, then ducked down again. The captain urged them on, saying, “Now we’ve got enough men to make sure we can get this guy to the people who need to ask him questions.”

  That wouldn’t be much fun, not for the fellow who had to do the answering. Chemoshyatti, or whatever his real name was, must have decided the same thing. One second, he stood there looking innocent and sorry for himself. The next, he flung himself across the five or six cubits that separated him from the Philistinian officer. He was good; nothing gave the move away until he made it.

  But the captain was good, too. He hadn’t let the man he’d caught come too close, and he hadn’t let the fellow’s nondescript appearance lull him. Before the grocer who said he was a Moabite could reach him, the captain squeezed off a neat four-round burst, just the way he’d learned to do it in basic. The rounds stitched across the plump man’s chest. The captain sidestepped. Chemoshyatti crashed down and didn’t get up.

  He choked out a few words that weren’t Moabite: “Om mani . . . padme hum.” Then he slumped over, dead. A latrine stink filled the grocery as his bowels let go.

  “Sword Buddhist, sure as demons from the after-world,” the captain said grimly.

  “Why don’t they leave us alone?” Pheidas said. “The Moabites would be bad enough without the Turks stirring them up.”

  “That’s what the Turks live for, though,” the officer said. “Maybe we’ll have to pay some more unofficial calls on Babylon.” Philistinian planes had wrecked a Babylonian nuclear pile a few years back; the idea of Sword Buddhists with atomic bombs gave politicians all over the world the galloping jimjams. None of the big powers wanted to do anything about it, though, for fear of offending others and starting the war they wanted to head off. The Philistinians, in a tradition that dated back to the days of Crete, took the bull by the horns. Babylonian bosses often came down with sudden and unexplained cases of loss of life, too. Officially, Philistinia denied everything. But the captain hadn’t talked about anything official.

  He scooped out the propaganda pamphlets he’d mentioned. They were of the usual sort, preaching the glories of murder and martyrdom in punchy text and bright pictures. One headline grabbed Pheidas’ eyes and didn’t want to let go. CHEMOSH WANTS PHILISTINIANS DEAD! it screamed.

  “Know what I heard, sir?” Pheidas said.

  “What’s that?” the captain asked.

  “That there are Sword Buddhists in Philistinia, too. They want to get us to murder Moabites. They don’t care who kills who, as long as somebody’s killing somebody.”

  “I’ve heard the same thing. You wouldn’t want to think that kind of nonsense could take hold in modern, educated people, but it does, curse it. It does.” The captain scowled. “I’ll bet some of them get driven round the bend because of the things the Moabites do.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Pheidas nodded. Another burst of gunfire not far away made him spin back toward the window, but he decided halfway through the motion that the shooting wasn’t close enough to be dangerous. He went on, “And the ragheads say the same thing about us. How did it all get started? How do we make it stop?”

  “It goes back to the days when we first came to Philistinia,” the captain said, “all those years ago. Maybe it’d be different now if things were different back then. I don’t know. I don’t know how to get off the wheel, either, any more than anybody else does. And as long as we’re on it, we’d better keep winning.”

  “Yes,
sir,” Pheidas said.

  MUNDANE LANE

  Kevin J. Anderson

  No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that human affairs were being watched from the vast, dark reaches of space. No one even considered the possibility that alien minds immeasurably superior to our own might regard this Earth with plans to invade.

  No one even considered such a crazy idea, because in the last years of the twentieth century the genre of imaginative fiction had been forgotten. The very idea of a space program had died away from lack of interest before the first man could be shot into orbit. The Soviets had tried to launch a satellite called Sputnik, but the rocket blew up on the Cosmodrome launch-pad; the Communist Party members who had advocated the appalling waste of money were sentenced to a gulag. No one in the US or USSR ever suggested the idea again. The people of Earth were far too busy with their own problems to waste time with silly flights of fancy.

  Thus, when the giant alien motherships loomed above Earth’s cities, the members of the human race—certainly doomed—looked up at the astounding vessels and simply could not comprehend what was about to happen. . . .

  In his cramped basement office of a Washington think tank four blocks from the White House, Jimmy Andrews sat in his creaking government-issue chair. The walls were thick cinderblock painted a heavy sea-foam green, a shade that some bureaucrat had chosen as the perfect color for all civil servants to enjoy.

  Jimmy nudged thick black-rimmed glasses up on his nose and carefully opened the brittle yellowing pages of another issue of Amazing Stories. Copies of the long-vanished science fiction magazines were increasingly hard to find; very few had been printed before paper shortages in World War II killed the magazines entirely.

  As a sure sign of wasteful government spending, Jimmy was paid to read the absurd pulp magazines for “ideas,” a job that many considered ridiculous. Now he eagerly devoured yet another story about metal men, master-minds of Mars, and mole creatures that lived beneath the Earth’s crust. The prose was rather awkward (even a fan like Jimmy could admit that), but the ideas—ah, the ideas!

  On his desk, the red phone rang. He was so startled he knocked the fragile issue of Amazing Stories off the desktop. The red phone? Jimmy stared while it rang a second time. Until now, he had thought the phone was a mere prop. He used it as a paperweight.

  Jimmy grabbed the phone on the third ring. It wouldn’t do to let whoever called on the red phone think he was gossiping at the water cooler. “Hello? Um, I mean, Jimmy Andrews’s desk. Um, I mean, Office of Unlikely Possibilities. May I help you?”

  “This is General Ashcroft,” a gruff voice said. “Get your sorry self to the Oval Office—and I mean now! President Dole wants to see you immediately.”

  “P-P-President Dole?”

  “My spy cameras better show you running over here instead of walking, Andrews!” On the other end of the line, the red phone went dead.

  Jimmy bolted out of the office. Panting and sweating, he scuttled down the sidewalk, bumping into pedestrians who seemed frozen into awestruck statues. Why wouldn’t they get out of the way? Then he glanced upward—and saw an enormous saucer hovering over the Capitol building, its shadow large enough to cover ten square blocks.

  “The aliens really came!” he gasped. “The invasion fleet is really here.”

  A police officer pointed to the sky. “What is that? Some new aircraft? Never seen anything like it.”

  “Must be the Russians,” said another man on the sidewalk. “It’s gotta be the Russians.”

  The cop scowled at him. “Of course it’s the Russians. Who else could it possibly be?”

  Jimmy was about to explain the real alternative, when he remembered General Ashcroft’s impatience, and he began to run again.

  The Oval Office was the stuff of legend, but not such imaginative legends as an invasion from space. Jimmy came to a halt, barely catching his breath. Today of all days he wished he had worn a suit and a tie, but he didn’t have a professional wardrobe like his fellow staff workers. His faded blue T-shirt was too tight over a potbelly that was the result of spending his lunch hours reading instead of jogging along the Potomac.

  Fortunately, President Dole was too preoccupied to notice Jimmy’s clothes. Dole put his one good arm on the polished wood of the desk and leaned forward, beetling his heavy brows. “So, Mr. Andrews, I’m told you’re one of the only people left in the world who reads crazy sci-fi stuff. Now it’s time to earn back the salary that people said we were wasting on you. You’re part of a think tank, Mr. Andrews. I expect you to do some thinking for us.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. How can I help? I’ve already seen the UFO.”

  “UFO?” the President said. “Why do you call it that?”

  “Unidentified Flying Object, sir,” said General Ashcroft, who stood stiffly at attention to one side of the President’s desk. “A term invented in a proposed Air Force project called Blue Book. We decided not to fund their investigations. It was pure silliness.”

  Jimmy nearly choked. “Pure silliness? Excuse me, sir, but did I not notice a giant alien spacecraft overhead? Maybe if the Air Force had studied UFOs, we’d have had some warning!”

  “That’s enough, gentlemen.” President Dole cut them off. “If anyone else read that science fiction stuff, we might have done some planning, but who in the world imagined there could be aliens out in space? Flying saucers that might want to invade the Earth? Inconceivable!”

  “Actually, many people thought of it, Mr. President,” Jimmy said, standing proud. “A man named H.G. Wells wrote a book about an invasion from Mars back in 1898. It’s been long out of print, however. Even a century ago readers thought it was pure silliness.”

  “The fact is, Mr. President,” General Ashcroft said, “we should have kept watching the skies. But no one ever thought.”

  Jimmy sighed, “And now it’s too late to change the world.”

  “It may not be too late,” President Dole said. “Not strictly speaking, anyway. You see, Mr. Andrews, you’re not the only crackpot we keep on the payroll. Another one of my pie-in-the-sky geniuses, a Dr. Hawking, claims to have concocted a time machine. His strange quantum theories, his speculations about time and wormholes, have made him a laughingstock among his peers—but if he says the time machine will work, then I’m willing to give it a shot.” Dole glanced toward the ceiling of the Oval Office. “Preferably before those aliens launch their weapons.”

  “A time machine!” Jimmy could not keep the delight out of his voice. “And you want to send me back to . . . change history? Alter key events, do whatever I can to ensure that science fiction becomes popular? Yes, I see, we have to change our entire social mindset. Science fiction could inspire our scientists, give them new ideas. Yes, that would work!” He began to talk faster and faster. “If we can imagine the possibility of a threat from space, then it only follows that someone will imagine defenses against it. And the only way we can do that is by going back, oh . . . half a century, giving a few people the proper nudge. Editors, writers, fans, filmmakers. Science fiction can flourish instead of fade away!” He bowed. “And I understand why you’ve picked me to go, Mr. President. I’m the right man for the job.”

  “And let’s not forget the fact,” Ashcroft interrupted, “that in our current crisis, you are completely expendable.”

  It was 1961, and Jimmy Andrews promised to make it a different year than the one in which he had been born.

  With his quantum time machine, Dr. Hawking had glimpsed other timelines, spotting what he called cruxpoints where the futures had changed. While Jimmy and the scientist hunched together in the government laboratory, plotting and planning, the aliens had issued a dire statement that sounded like a thunderbolt: Every human should prepare to die.

  By that time, Jimmy and Dr. Hawking had identified three important cruxpoints. He looked into the scientist’s droopy eyes and thin skeletal face that had been wasted by ALS. Speaking through his voice synthesize
r, Hawking pointed out, “You have to go before the invaders obliterate my time machine.”

  Jimmy said, “These three points will have to be enough.” He gathered his notes, put together a disguise with frantic assistance from the White House, and then, feeling as if every cell in his body had turned into fizzing foam from a shaken can of warm soda pop, he had arrived back here. 1961.

  Wearing a plaid sport coat and snappy Panama hat, he carried a case of catalogs and brochures in keeping with his persona as an auto parts salesman. He stood under the neon sign of a bar in downtown Manhattan known to be a frequent haunt of authors meeting their agents.

  He looked around in the dim light, smelled cigarette smoke and old beer. Two men sat on stools pulled up to the dark wood of the bar; the meeting seemed somber, not celebratory. The one with the large, bushy beard was immediately recognizable; the other, unfamiliar man had a full tumbler of Scotch in his hand, which he sipped vigorously.

  Jimmy came close enough to eavesdrop as the man with the Scotch said consolingly, “I tell you, Frank, we’ve tried everywhere. Twenty rejection letters. Nobody understands what you’re trying to do. And sci-fi novels can’t be more than sixty thousand words long. Nobody will read something as massive as what you’ve written—four hundred pages!”

  “But this novel is my masterpiece, Lurton. Do you know how many years I’ve worked on it?”

  “Nobody said it isn’t impressive, Frank.” Lurton sipped his Scotch again. “In fact, you’re a genius. Even I don’t understand half of what you put in that book, all those strange words. One editor said that nobody could read through the first hundred pages without getting confused and annoyed.”

  “James Joyce probably had the same problems with Finnegans Wake,” the bearded man grumbled. “I absolutely believe people will read an imaginative and thought-provoking book, if anybody has the guts to publish it.”

  “Remember your audience, Frank. There are few enough readers for sci-fi as it is, and most of them are twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys.”