New Writings in SF 21 - [Anthology] Read online

  Michaelson wrestled briefly with his conscience, but the process was little more than a token bout.

  Looking disinterested, he began sliding open the desk drawers one by one. ‘Apart from his recent absences, did he have any other hobbies or outside interests ?’

  ‘He was keen on local history,’ said Nesbitt. ‘He kept a scrapbook of old newspaper clippings, on the shelf behind you.’

  Michaelson picked up the scrapbook and went through it quickly but thoroughly. There were a few old street maps, plans of urban road systems and developments long since completed and clippings going back over half a century. He was not surprised to find several mentions of the city’s moment of stark drama some sixty years earlier when the physics building at the university had blown up, taking the physics professor—a stuffy but very brilliant old gentleman tipped for a Nobel Prize—and a mercifully small number of post-graduate assistants with it. He read the Chancellor’s statement that, so far as he knew, no explosives had been kept in the building, descriptions of the peculiarly sharp detonation and the theories, based on evidence of fusing in parts of the debris, which ranged from an old-fashioned thunderbolt from on high to a meteor strike or the premature invention of a nuclear device...

  ‘No other hobbies?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Nesbitt, then added, ‘At one time I thought he might be taking up radio as a hobby—he had read some technical articles and wanted to to know if I could tell him anything about a standing wave. He gets suddenly curious about lots of things.’

  Michaelson had a vague idea of what a standing wave might be, having listened to the engineers talking shop during a course he had taken on TV traffic monitoring systems, but he did not see how it could help his current investigation. He opened another drawer.

  And hit the jackpot.

  It contained a large desk diary, a day book recording income and expenditure and an address book. As he leafed through them the look of disinterest on his face required an increasingly greater effort to maintain.

  There were appointment notes and memos reminding the suspect that he needed stamps for various retail outlets. There was not, so far as Michaelson could see, a corresponding supplier for the stamps. Other notes, none of which were recent, comprised current song titles with remarks like ‘Piano arrangement not too difficult’ or ‘Very simple melody’ or ‘Good, but complicated orchestration needed—I can’t memorise it.’ The final entry, dated three weeks earlier, said ‘Found another possibility, will investigate the old lady tomorrow.’

  The last entry in the address book, which otherwise contained only business contacts, was that of Mrs. Timmins. It had been written so heavily that her name and address had been embossed on four of the underlying pages.

  An emotional type, thought Michaelson coldly as he began going through the cash book.

  The entries were meticulously neat and, possibly because he had forgotten which book he was using, interspersed with reminders. Like the desk diary it showed ample evidence of income from the sale of stamps, but no indication of where he got them. His expenditure seemed to be confined to rent, food, clothing and sheet music. One of the latter items was for a song with ‘Memories’ in the title and he had added, leaning very heavily on his ballpoint, ‘Memories don’t sell as easily as stamps, but they are all I can take.’ The last four entries, all dated within the past few weeks, showed the expenditure of considerable sums of money to an undisclosed company or person, with a bracketed notation which said, ‘In used notes by registered post.’ Michaelson noted the amounts.

  ‘Can I telephone?’ asked the Inspector.

  ‘He has a night line,’ said Nesbitt.

  The night receptionist at the Worcester remembered Smith and, because he was not very busy, did not mind talking about him. Smith had stayed there for nearly a year, conducting a stamp business from nine to five—he lived somewhere else. He kept a very smart if conservative wardrobe in his office room—for impressing customers, he had said—but travelled to and from work in an old, shapeless suit. No, he had not acted in any way suspiciously or oddly, except that sometimes he arrived in the morning without a raincoat when it was pouring wet, and vice versa. But then the weather could change so suddenly. In this morning’s forecast they had promised sunny periods...’

  During the next pause for breath Michaelson thanked the receptionist and hung up.

  A man who avoids red tape and who sells stamps without buying them and buys sheet music and copies it over and over again, apparently to memorise it. Stamps were a peculiar commodity in that they could not be stolen in bulk without the fact showing up—especially when they were over half a century old. And where could freshly plagiarised music be sold. Any country or broadcasting company who bought it would signal the fact to the whole world and if they were pirates they would hardly pay for the music in the first place.

  To make any sense at all of this puzzle he would have to look at all the pieces very carefully and move them around to see how or if they fitted. Michaelson considered the suspect’s manner, appearance, everything he had found out about him and his oddly-run business. Potentially they were all important pieces and he had to try fitting all of them together before he could risk discarding any as belonging to some other puzzle.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ said the night patrolman. He said it three times before Michaelson heard him.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said absently. The pieces, all of them, were beginning to fit together. ‘I would like to make another call before I leave.’

  Doctor Weston had a large local practice. He also had the information on Mrs. Timmins which Michaelson needed and eventually, and with great difficulty, it was coaxed out of him. The details of her physical condition were given much more easily.

  ‘... And I gave that silly old woman until the middle of last week,’ said the Doctor, in the tone of voice he used when he felt very strongly about a patient but did not want people to think that he was soft-hearted. ‘When I saw her earlier this evening I told the nurse to stay with her—she won’t last the night. In her condition I don’t know why she bothers to hang on.’

  I do, said Michaelson, but he spoke under his breath.

  ‘One more call, honest,’ he said to Nesbitt. He had to arrange with Greer to bring the suspect to Mrs. Timmins’ flat, where he would meet them as soon as possible.

  They met twenty minutes later in her lounge. The nurse had gone into the adjoining bedroom to prepare her patient to receive visitors, leaving the suspect, Greer and Michaelson alone. The suspect looked as frightened as Michaelson had ever seen a man look, and the Sergeant’s expression reflected controlled puzzlement.

  He could very well be making the worst mistake of his long and fairly successful career, Michaelson thought, but if all the evidence pointed to an impossible conclusion then the impossible wasn’t.

  ‘This man has been rather naughty, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘His reticence about giving his name was ill-advised, but understandable in the circumstances. I have evidence that he is in fact the old lady’s benefactor—he sent the money which she is supposed to have inherited. He hasn’t admitted it yet, but I would say that it was conscience money and that he is the son or grandson of the old lady’s husband who deserted her and probably married again and who wants the payoff to be anonymous so as to avoid a possible bigamy charge and questions of the legitimacy or otherwise of his children.’

  Greer nodded, then said, ‘I’ll return to the station, sir.’ He gave the suspect a pained look, the sort which he reserved for nice but ill-advised people who played games with the overworked constabulary, and left. Professionally the Sergeant was completely disinterested in nice people.

  If anything the suspect looked even more frightened.

  ‘That isn’t the true story,’ Michaelson told him, ‘but it will do for the Sergeant. Let’s go in—she’s dying and there isn’t much time.’

  ‘No!’ He looked as if he might run if he did not faint first.

&
nbsp; ‘You tried hard enough to see her and now is your chance,’ Michaelson began angrily. Controlling himself he went on, ‘I have known this old lady for a very long time. She was and is a ... a very nice person.’

  ‘I know that!’

  Michaelson nodded and went on, ‘When I was a kid she was so good, so stupidly good and generous, that I wanted to do something for her—we all did. But her problem was not susceptible to solution by ten-year-old boys. Now ... well, I want you to inconvenience yourself just a little by going in to see her. If you don’t,’ he added quietly, ‘I’ll break every bone in your body.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said the suspect dully, but he began moving towards the bedroom door.

  ‘Maybe I do,’ said Michaelson. ‘You have two very nice businesses going—buying stamps at face value there and selling them here at a profit of several thousand per cent. You even speculated in a few rare items, which became ever rarer and more valuable. The music business in the other direction—no wonder so many of today’s songs sound as if they’d been plagiarised—did not pay so well and you decided to stay where the money was...’

  The nurse opened the bedroom door, motioned them inside and then moved into the lounge.

  ‘You know,’ said the suspect, looking more relieved than frightened. ‘But I didn’t desert her. There was an accident and I couldn’t get back.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Michaelson.

  The suspect had been working at nights in the university, augmenting his wages as a shop assistant by sweeping and tidying the labs—he had been saving hard to get married. Professor Morrison, one of the most important people at the university, had offered him a lot of money to take part in an experiment which he had said was perfectly safe but which must be kept secret. Professor Morrison had not explained what he was doing in detail, saying that it was too complicated, but from overheard conversations between the Professor and his assistants and from his own recent reading, fictional as well as technical, he had a vague idea of how if not why the system worked.

  The field of stress which he had entered could be considered as a standing wave in time with an amplitude of exactly sixty-three years and that material objects currently in existence could go forward into the future and come back again to the present, but an object which existed in the future could not be brought back. Once the field had been set up it would remain in existence for ever, he had heard the Professor say, unless some outside agency or carelessness—such as materialising people or lab animals in a non-empty space—caused it to break down.

  Professor Morrison had intended to publish his results but he had first to develop a shorter-range field—as things were he could not prove that his subject had travelled forward in time if he could not bring something back from the future. He had to send someone forward who would materialise in the Professor’s own life-time, and Morrison was pushing eighty. As well, his reputation was such that he could not risk being accused of scientific trickery.

  The Professor’s budget did not allow him to go on paying his guinea-pig, so he had devised the idea of memorising songs of the future and selling them in the past. Memories, after all, were non-material...

  ‘... I thought of the stamp idea myself,’ the suspect continued. ‘I was married by then and my wife knew what I was doing. We thought eventually of coming to the future here, where I was making much more money, and I would commute to the past for stamps or anything else I needed. It was like going to work in the morning on a train, except that I commuted through time.

  ‘I had told her not to worry if I didn’t come home for a few evenings—if I wasn’t home for tea then I had sprained my ankle or something and would be along the next evening, or the next. The time I spent in the future exactly equalled the time I was absent from the past, you see, and I didn’t want her to be waiting up for me and worrying.

  ‘I should have realised that the overgrown hollow I always arrived in was an old crater,’ he concluded, ‘but it was so big and shallow. All I knew was that the Professor was working on a new, short-duration field which would make his time-travel demonstrable to all, and that one evening I went back to the hollow and couldn’t get home. And life here is so complicated, so much more documentation which I don’t fully understand------’

  ‘I could help you understand it,’ said Michaelson quietly. He had been gradually moving the suspect closer to the bed. He added, ‘But you will have to do something for me.’

  ‘Even before I traced the old newspaper references,’ the other went on, ‘I knew that I was marooned here. I had a large enough stock of stamps to be able to make enough money to set up a legitimate philatelic business if I could only sort out the red tape. But I wanted to find my wife if she was still alive. We didn’t make much money on the songs I had memorised and most of it went on buying stamps, anyway. She must have moved to this place before our house was levelled to make room for the new development, but the new owner changed the name and made it difficult to trace...’

  ‘But you found her,’ Michaelson broke in softly, ‘and she’ll be glad to see you after all this time.’

  ‘No,’ said the other, beginning to back away, ‘I can’t.’

  Michaelson gripped him very firmly by the arm and said, ‘You are going to need help and advice and I’m willing to give it, but if you don’t go to that old lady I will make you wish that you’d never been born. With your ridiculous story and lack of documentation I could easily get you in trouble—a charge of espionage, perhaps, or committal to a psychiatric------’

  ‘She’s so old!’ he burst out in a tortured whisper. ‘Letting her see me still young would ... would ... it wouldn’t be fair to her!’

  That’s a risk we both must take,’ said Michaelson more gently. ‘But I talked to her doctor. She is pretty far gone, far enough gone perhaps and senile enough to be living in the past, and you are exactly as she remembers you ...’

  Michaelson moved towards the bed taking the other with him. On the bedside table there was a framed wedding picture showing them together. The faces were identical to those in the cropped photographs in the suspect’s wallet except that this picture was old and yellowed and had not had the old-fashioned suit and dress and bouquet trimmed away to make period identification difficult. The terribly wrinkled and shrunken and caved-in face on the pillow close by bore no resemblance to the picture at all except for the eyes. They were the same as in the photograph and the same as Michaelson remembered them as a boy.

  He stared intently at the suspect’s face, looking for the slightest sign of revulsion in the other’s expression as he bent over the bed, but could not find it.

  As the nurse closed the bedroom door behind him she said, ‘He’s holding her in his arms, sir. Is the young man a relative?’

  Michaelson rubbed his eyes and said, ‘Only by marriage.’

  <>

  * * * *

  THE POSSESSED

  by Sydney J. Bounds

  Rachel Waters was a good medium; when in a trance she drew magnificent pictures of other times and places, most of them disconcertingly real. The puzzle was—where were they? And could their inhabitants influence today?

  * * * *

  The consulting room was big and airy, quiet except for the scratch of crayon. Dr. Shannon, crisp greying hair above a youngish face, looked over Rachel’s shoulder as she drew with coloured crayons on a large sheet of strawboard.

  He controlled his breathing though he knew he was not likely to interrupt her trance.

  The new drawing showed a city that covered all horizons, the buildings cubes and cones, oblongs and spheres so huge they made ants of the people in the grid of avenues. It was an aerial view, looking down. There was no traffic other than pedestrian, no trees or grass; only the chessboard city revealed in a dull orange light.

  Different again, he thought; why were they always different? This was the latest in a series she had drawn, written down or spoken on to tape while in a trance. Not only were
the scenes different from anything she could know in life, they were different from each other.

  Rachel’s hand paused, muscles relaxing as she returned to normality. She put down her crayon and glanced at the picture she had made.

  ‘I’m glad I don’t live there, Doctor.’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone does. It probably doesn’t exist outside your imagination.’

  ‘It does,’ she stated flatly. ‘Somewhere, it exists.’

  Shannon didn’t argue. He propped the drawing on a filing cabinet: sombre was the word for it. He glanced at Rachel, busy scrubbing crayon off her fingers; she wasn’t interested, he realised. And just as well, for not one of her drawings appeared to be by the same hand.

  ‘When can you come again? Next week?’