Short Fiction

stopped, remembering. Her eyes grew wide and startled, and I could see that she was remembering too.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did they catch that vicious rat?”

She brushed back her hair, the sunlight suddenly harsh on her face. “He fell into the canal. The bullets brought him down, and he collapsed on the bank.”

Her hand tightened on my wrist. “Bill told me. He tried to swim, but the current carried him under. He went down and never came up.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “Did anyone in the camp ever see him before?”

Molly shook her head. “Bill said he was a drifter⁠—a dangerous maniac who must have been crazed by the sun.”

“I see,” I said.

I reached out and drew her into my arms again, and we rested for a moment stretched out side by side on the sand.

“It’s funny,” I said after a while.

“What is?”

“You know what they say about the whispering. Sometimes when you listen intently you seem to hear words deep in your mind. As if the Martians had telepathic powers.”

“Perhaps they have,” she said.

I glanced sideways at her. “Remember,” I said. “There were cities on Mars when our ancestors were hairy apes. The Martian civilization was flourishing and great fifty million years before the pyramids arose as a monument to human solidarity and worth. A bad monument, built by slave labor. But at least it was a start.”

“Now you’re being poetic, Tom,” she said.

“Perhaps I am. The Martians must have had their pyramids too. And at the pyramid stage they must have had their Larsens, to shoulder all the guilt. To them we may still be in the pyramid stage. Suppose⁠—”

“Suppose what?”

“Suppose they wanted to warn us, to give us a lesson we couldn’t forget. How can we say with certainty that a dying race couldn’t still make use of certain techniques that are far beyond us.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said, puzzled.

“Someday,” I said, “our own science will take a tiny fragment of human tissue from the body of a dead man, put it into an incubating machine, and a new man will arise again from that tiny shred of flesh. A man who can walk and live and breathe again, and love again, and die again after another full lifetime.

“Perhaps the Martian science was once as great as that. And the Martians might still remember a few of the techniques. Perhaps from our human brains, from our buried memories and desires, they could filch the key and bring to horrible life a thing so monstrous and so terrible⁠—”

Her hand went suddenly cold in mine. “Tom, you can’t honestly think⁠—”

“No,” I said. “It’s nonsense, of course. Forget it.”

I didn’t tell her what the whispering had seemed to say, deep in my mind.

We’ve brought you Larsen! You wanted Larsen, and we’ve made him for you! His flesh and his mind⁠—his cruel strength and his wicked heart! Here he comes, here he is! Larsen, Larsen, Larsen!

The Man from Time

Daring Moonson, he was called. It was a proud name, a brave name. But what good was a name that rang out like a summons to battle if the man who bore it could not repeat it aloud without fear?

Moonson had tried telling himself that a man could conquer fear if he could but once summon the courage to laugh at all the sins that ever were, and do as he damned well pleased. An ancient phrase that⁠—damned well. It went clear back to the Elizabethan Age, and Moonson had tried picturing himself as an Elizabethan man with a ruffle at his throat and a rapier in his clasp, brawling lustily in a tavern.

In the Elizabethan Age men had thrown caution to the winds and lived with their whole bodies, not just with their minds alone. Perhaps that was why, even in the year 3689, defiant names still cropped up. Names like Independence Forest and Man, Live Forever!

It was not easy for a man to live up to a name like Man, Live Forever! But Moonson was ready to believe that it could be done. There was something in human nature which made a man abandon caution and try to live up to the claims made for him by his parents at birth.

It must be bad, Moonson thought. It must be bad if I can’t control the trembling of my hands, the pounding of the blood at my temples. I am like a child shut up alone in the dark, hearing rats scurrying in a closet thick with cobwebs and the tapping of a blind man’s cane on a deserted street at midnight.

Tap, tap, tap⁠—nearer and nearer through the darkness. How soon would the rats be swarming out, blood-fanged and wholly vicious? How soon would the cane strike?

He looked up quickly, his eyes searching the shadows. For almost a month now the gleaming intricacies of the machine had given him a complete sense of security. As a scholar traveling in Time he had been accepted by his fellow travelers as a man of great courage and firm determination.

For twenty-seven days a smooth surface of shining metal had walled him in, enabling him to grapple with reality on a completely adult level. For twenty-seven days he had gone pridefully back through Time, taking creative delight in watching the heritage of the human race unroll before him like a cineramoscope under glass.

Watching a green land in the dying golden sunlight of an age lost to human memory could restore a man’s strength of purpose by its serenity alone. But even an age of war and pestilence could be observed without torment from behind the protective shields of the Time Machine. Danger, accidents, catastrophe could not touch him personally.

To watch death and destruction as a spectator in a traveling Time Observatory was like watching a cobra poised to strike from behind a pane of crystal-bright glass in a zoological garden.

You got a tremendous thrill in just thinking: How dreadful if the glass should not be there! How lucky I