The Feeling. Roger Dee.

The Feeling

Roger Dee

Galaxy Magazine, April 1961

If this story holds true in real practice, it may reveal something about us that we’ve never known.

“We’re just starting on the first one—Walraven, ship’s communications man,” Costain said, low-voiced. “Captain Maxon and Vaughn have called in. There’s been no word from Ragan.”

Coordinator Erwin took his seat beside the psychologist, his bearing as militarily authoritative in spite of civilian clothing as the room’s air was medical.

“Maybe Ragan won’t turn up,” Erwin said. “Maybe we’ve still got a man out there to bring the ship back.”

Costain made a quieting gesture, his eyes on the three-man psych team grouped about Walraven’s wheeled reclining chair. “They’ve given Walraven a light somnolent. Not enough to put him out, just enough to make him relive the flight in detail. Accurately.”

The lead psych man killed the room’s lighting to a glow. “Lieutenant Walraven, the ship is ready. You are at your post, with Captain Maxon and Lieutenants Vaughn and Ragan. The first Mars flight is about to blast off. How do you feel?”

Walraven lay utterly relaxed, his face dreaming. His voice had the waning sound of a tape running down for lack of power.

“Jumpy,” he said. “But not really afraid. We’re too well conditioned for that, I guess. This is a big thing, an important thing. Exciting.”

***

It had been exciting at first. The long preparation over, training and study and news interviews and final parties all dreamlike and part of the past. Outside now, invisible but hearteningly present beyond the ship’s impermeable hull, the essential and privileged people waiting to see them off. The ship’s power plant was humming gently like a giant, patient cat.

Captain Maxon passed out muscle-relaxant capsules. The total boneless relaxation that was their defense against acceleration came quickly.

The ship was two hours out, beyond lunar orbit and still accelerating, when, trained for months against the moment, set each about his task. Readings occupied Maxon and Vaughn and Ragan while Walraven checked his communications and telemetering gear.

It was not until the transmitter slot had licked up its first coded tape—no plain text here, security before even safety—and reported all well, the predicted borne out, that they became aware of the Feeling.

The four of them sat in their unsqueaking gimbaled seats and looked at each other, sharing the Feeling and knowing that they shared it, but not why. Vaughn, who was given to poetry and some degree of soul-searching, made the first open recognition.

“There’s something wrong,” he said.

The others agreed and, agreeing, could add nothing of explanation to the wrongness. Time passed while they sat, seeing within themselves for the answer—and if not for answer, at least for identification—but nothing came and nothing changed except that with time the steady pressure of the Feeling grew stronger.

Vaughn, again, was first to react to the pressure. “We’ve got to do something.” He twisted out of his seat and wavered in the small pseudo-gravity of the ship’s continuing acceleration. “I’ve never in my life felt so desolate, so—”

He stopped. “There aren’t any words,” he said helplessly.

Less articulate than Vaughn and knowing it, the others did not try to help find the words. Only Ragan, professional soldier without family or close tie anywhere in the world, had a suggestion.

“The ship’s power plant is partly psionic,” Ragan said. “I don’t understand the principle, but it’s been drilled into us that no other system can give a one-directional thrust without reaction. The psi-drive is tied into our minds in the same way it’s tied into the atomic and electronic components. It’s part of us and we’re part of it.”

Even Maxon, crew authority on the combination drive, missed his meaning at first.

“If our atomic shielding fails,” Ragan explained. “We’re irradiated. If our psionics bank fails, we may feel anything. Maybe the trouble is there.”

Privately they disagreed, certain that nothing so disquieting as the Feeling that weighted them down could be induced even by so cryptic a marriage of dissimilar principles as made up the ship’s power plant.

Still it was a possible avenue of relief.

“It’s worth trying,” Maxon said, and they checked.

And checked, and checked.

***

“We worked for hours,” Walraven said. “But nothing came of it. None of us, even Maxon, knew enough about the psi-drive to be sure, but we ended up certain that the trouble wasn’t there. It was in us.”

The drug was wearing thin, leaving him pale and shaken. His face had a glisten of sweat under the lowered lights.

The lead psych man chose a hypodermic needle, looked to Erwin and Costain for authority, and administered a second injection.

“You gave up searching,” he said. “What then, Lieutenant?”

“We waited,” Walraven said.

He relaxed, his face smoothing to impersonal detachment as his mind slipped back to the ship and its crew. Watching, Costain felt a sudden deep unease as if the man’s mind had really winged back through time and space and carried a part of his own with it.

“There was only one more possible check,” Walraven said. “We had to wait two days for that.”

The check was Maxon’s idea, simple of execution and unarguable of result. At halfway point acceleration must cease, the ship rotate on its gyros and deceleration set in. There would be a period of waiting when the power plant must be shut off completely.

If the Feeling stemmed from the psi-drive, it would lift then.

It did not lift. They sat weightless and disoriented while the gyros precessed and the ship swung end by end and the steady pressure of the Feeling mounted up and up without relief.

“It gets worse every hour,” Vaughn said raggedly.

“It’s not a matter of time,” Maxon said. “It’s the distance. The Feeling grows stronger as we get farther from home.”

They sat for another time without talk, feeling the distance build up behind them and sensing through the unwindowed hull of the ship what the emptiness outside must be like. The ship was no longer an armored projectile bearing them snugly and swiftly to a first planetfall. It was a walnut shell without strength or direction.

In the end they talked out their problem because there was nothing else they could do.

“We’re men,” Maxon said, not as if he must convince himself but as if it were a premise that had to be made, a starting point for all logic. “We’re reasoning creatures. If the trouble lies in ourselves we can find its source and its reason for being.”

He picked Vaughn first because Vaughn had been first to sense the wrongness and because the most sensitive link in a chain is also predictably its weakest.

“Try,” Maxon said. “I know there are no words to describe this thing, but get as close as you can.”

***

Vaughn tried. “It isn’t home-sickness. It’s a different thing altogether from nostalgia. It’s not just fear. I’m afraid—not of any thing, just afraid in the way a child is afraid of falling in his dreams, when he’s really had no experience with falling because he’s never fallen more than a few inches in his life...when I think of my wife, it’s not the same at all as if I were just in some far corner of the Earth with only land and water between us. Even if I were marooned on an uncharted island somewhere with no hope of seeing home again, I wouldn’t feel this way. There wouldn’t be this awful pulling.”

Ragan agreed with Vaughn that the Feeling was essentially a pull, but beyond agreement could add nothing. Ragan had covered the world without forming a tie to hold him; one place was as good as another and he felt no loss for any particular spot on Earth.

“I only want to be back there,” he said simply. “Anywhere but here.”

“I was born on a farm in New England,” Walraven said. “Out of the land, like my father and his people before him. I’m part of that land, no matter how far from it I go, because everything I am came from it. I feel uprooted. I don’t belong here.”

Uprooted was the key for which they had hunted.

Maxon said slowly, “There are wild animals on Earth that can’t live away from their natural homes. Insects—how does a termite feel, cut off from its hive? Maybe that’s our trouble. Something bigger than individual men made the human race what it is. Maybe we’ve been a sort of composite being all along, without knowing it, tied together by the need of each other and not able to exist apart. Maybe no one knew it before because no one was ever isolated in the way we are.”

Walraven had more to say, almost defiant in his earnestness. “This is going to sound wild, but I’ve been fighting inside myself ever since Vaughn mentioned being pulled toward home. I have the feeling that if I’d only let go, I’d be back where I belong.” He snapped his fingers, he sound loud in the room. “Like that.”

No one laughed because each found in himself the same conviction waiting to be recognized. Ragan said, “Walraven’s right. There’s no place on Earth I care for more than another, but I feel I could be back there in any one of them.” He snapped his fingers, as Walraven had done. “As quickly as that.”

“I know,” Maxon said. “But we can’t let go. We were sent out to put this ship into orbit around Mars. We’ve got to take her there.”

***

Walraven said, “It wasn’t easy. The Feeling got worse as we went out and out.

Knowing what it was helped a little, but not enough. We held onto each other, the four of us, to keep the group together. We knewwhat would happen if we let go.”

The head psych man looked to Costain and put his needle away when Costain shook his head.

“The ship,” Coordinator Erwin said sharply. “Walraven, you did put her into orbit?”

“Yes,” Walraven said. “We put her into orbit and turned on the telemetering equipment—they’ll be picking up her signals by now—and then we turned our backs on each other and we let go. There wasn’t any feeling of motion or speed, but I felt a fresh breeze on my face and when I opened my eyes I was standing beside a familiar stone fence on a hill above the house where I was born. You haven’t told me, but the others came back, too, didn’t they?”

“All but Ragan,” Erwin said.

His tone made Costain think wryly, even the military can snatch at straws.

“Maxon and Vaughn called in. But we haven’t heard from Ragan.”

“He wasn’t left behind,” Walraven said with certainty. “Ragan has no family, but he has a home. We’re standing on it.”

An orderly came in with an envelope for Costain, who opened it and handed the paper to Erwin. To Walraven, Costain said, “It’s a cablegram from North Ireland. Ragan is back.”

Erwin was still gripping the paper in his hand when he walked with Costain out of the hospital into the bright airiness of a spring day. He glared at the warm, blue sky.

“We’ll find a way,” Erwin said. “We’ve proved that we can put men on Mars. With the right conditioning, we can keep them there.”

“You’re a dedicated and resolute man, Coordinator,” Costain said. “Do you really suppose that any amount of conditioning could fit you to do what those boys failed at?”

The long moment of considering that passed before Erwin answered left a fine sheen of sweat on his face.

“No,” Erwin said.

End

I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself a long way from home, in a strange town where you don’t know anybody. You can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. When you do get home, and you know you’re going back—to work for example, there is this sinking sensation. Going to Mars—and staying there, whether for a year or two or to the extent of one’s natural life, is a prodigious enterprise. No matter how much training a person had, (and the original astronauts were all test pilots, a breed unto themselves to begin with), there would always be that distance, that separation from home and family, and all that is familiar to contend with.

The colonization of Mars will be the province of the young. I don’t think too many old people will want to go there.

That’s because there’s nothing there—

You'd have to be one hell of an idealist to even consider it.

Seriously.

Click this link for an idea of what that distance really means.

...and is there a ninth planet, one that is not Pluto, out beyond the orbits of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto...???

As is often the case, the image is a free download which the reader can get here.

Louis has books available from Createspace. Some of them are science-fiction.

Thank you for reading.

Security Plan. Joseph Farrell.

Security Plan

Joseph Farrell

                                     [

Galaxy Magazine, April 1959

        

I had something better than investing for the future...the future investing in me!

“My mother warned me,” Marilyn said again. “To think twice before I married a child prodigy. Look for somebody good and solid, she said, like Dad—somebody who will put something away for your old age.”

I tapped a transistor, put a screwdriver across a pair of wires and watched the spark. Marilyn was just talking to pass the time. She really loves me and doesn’t mind too much that I spend my spare time and money building a time machine. Sometimes she even believes that it might work.

She kept talking. “I’ve been thinking—we’re past thirty now and what do we have? A lease on a restaurant where nobody eats, and a time machine that doesn’t work.” She sighed. “And a drawer full of pawn tickets we’ll never be able to redeem. My silver, my camera, my typewriter...”

I added a growl to her sigh. “My microscope, my other equipment...”

“Uncle Johnson will have them for his old age,” she said sadly. “And we’ll be lucky if we have anything.”

I felt a pang of resentment. Uncle Johnson! It seemed that every time I acquired something, Uncle Johnson soon came into possession of it. We’d been kids together, although he was quite a few years older, a hulking lout in the sixth grade while I was in the first, and I graduated from grammar school a term ahead of him. Of course I went on to high school and had a college degree at fifteen, being a prodigy. Johnson went to work in his uncle’s pawn shop, sweeping the floor and so on, and that’s when we started calling him Uncle.

This wasn’t much of a job because Johnson’s uncle got him to work for almost nothing by promising he would leave him the pawn shop when he died. And it didn’t look as if much would come of this, because the uncle was not very old and he was always telling people a man couldn’t afford to die these days, what with the prices undertakers were charging.

***

Before I had even started to shave, I had a dozen papers published in scientific journals, all having to do with the nature of time. Time travel became my ambition and I was sure I saw a way to build a time machine. But it took years to work out the details, and nobody seemed interested in my work, so I had to do it all myself. Somehow I stopped working long enough to get a wife, and we had to eat. So we ran this little hash house and lived in the back room, and at least we got our food wholesale.

And Johnson’s uncle fell down the cellar stairs and split his skull open. So Johnson became the owner of a thriving business after giving his uncle a simple funeral, because he knew his uncle wouldn’t have wanted him to waste any more money on that than he had to.

“But we have a time machine,” Marilyn said fondly. “That’s something Johnson would give us a lot on—if it worked.”

“We almost have a time machine,” I said, looking around at my life’s work. Our kitchen was the time machine, with a great winding of wires around it to create the field I had devised. The doors had been a problem that I solved by making them into switches, so that when they were closed the coils made the complete circuit of the room.

“Almost,” I repeated. “After twenty years of work, I am through except for a few small items—”

I looked at her pleadingly.

“It will run about twenty dollars. Do you think—?”

She didn’t care much for the idea, but finally she slid off the wedding ring.

“You’ll redeem this first thing, Ted? Before any of the rest of the stuff?”

I promised and took off at a dead run.

Johnson didn’t have to inspect the ring; he’d seen it before, and he counted out twenty dollars. That was the only item he’d give me a decent price on. He knew I’d be back for it.

“How’s the time machine coming along, Ted?” He had a little smirk, the way some people do when they hear I’m building a time machine. “Get in touch with Mars yet?”

“I have no interest in Mars,” I told him. “I plan to make contact with the future—about thirty years from now. And for your information, the time machine is practically finished. The first test will be tonight.”

He wasn’t smirking now, because he never forgot the way I passed him in school and he had a good respect for my brain. He looked a little thoughtful—only a little, because that’s all he was capable of.

“You get to the future, Ted, suppose you bring me a newspaper. I’ll make it worth your while. I’ve always treated you fair and square, Ted, now haven’t I?”

I looked over his shelves. Too many of those dust-covered items were mine.

And I didn’t have to be a telepath to know what he was thinking.

“Maybe you’d like a paper with the stock market quotations, Uncle? From about thirty years from now, say?”

The smirk was completely gone now. “You get something like that, Ted, I’ll pay you! Wouldn’t help you out any, because you have nothing to invest. Me now, I could buy something that will keep me in my old age. I’d give you a—hundred bucks for something like that.”

I laughed at him. A hundred dollars! Uncle always had his nerve. He was scowling when I left, still trying to figure how he could get in on the gravy, because outside of Marilyn he was the only person who ever thought I might succeed.

***

Marilyn cooked dinner for us while I was putting the final touches on the time machine.

“Tonight we celebrate,” she said. “Steak.”

It smelled wonderful, but the occasional whiff of ozone from my equipment was more exciting. I’d told Marilyn we had about an hour before I could make the test, but with my working faster than I had expected and her getting behind with the meal, she was just putting the steaks on the table when I was done with the machine.

“Oh, but let’s eat first, Ted!” she said.

“I couldn’t eat! After so much work—” I stared in fascination at the master switch—the door. “This is it, Marilyn! What I’ve been working toward all these years!”

She saw the way I felt and maybe she was a little excited herself.

“Go ahead, Ted,” she told me.

I closed the door.

There was more ozone and a blurring in the middle of the room. We stepped away from the thickest of the blurring, where something seemed to be gathering substance.

The something, we soon saw, was a man sitting in a chair surrounded by strange apparatus, most of which I couldn’t guess the purpose of. It was a very young man, when I could see him better, probably nineteen, wearing bright clothes in what I figured must be the style of 1989.

“Man-o!” he said. “This time machine is low Fahrenheit, o-daddy! Right to the bottom! It’s the deepest!”

I blinked. “Parlez vous Francais?”

Marilyn said, “I think he means he likes it. But who is he and just where did he come from?”

The gaily dressed youth got out of the chair and smiled at us. Each of his shoulders had padding the size of a football. His coat tapered from four feet wide at the shoulders to a tightly bound waist, the lapels from a foot at the top to zero. The trousers widened out to wide stiff hoops that ended six inches above his shoes. And the shoes! But at least they weren’t really alive, as I had thought at first.

“How is it,” asked Marilyn. “That a cool cat from the future comes to visit us in a time machine? I would expect a more scholarly type.”

“Not so, doll-o. The angleheads don’t reach the real science. The scientist pros believe that all knowledge is known. They delve not into the sub-zero regions of thought. That is done by us amateurs.”

***

He did a short bit of syncopated tap and introduced himself. “I am Solid Chuck Richards, ambassador to the past, courtesy of the Friday Night Bull Session and Experimentation Society.”

“Are they all like you?” I asked.

“No, o-daddy-man. Some are deep, some are high on the scale, but all of them reach together on one thing—they all feel that the pro-scientists have grown angular and lost the sense of wonder. So we gather together on Friday nights to work on the off-beat side of science. We read your books—if you are Ted Langer?”

I admitted it.

He danced a rhythmic circle around me, staring in what was evidently adoration, and kept murmuring, “Reach that deep man! Ted Langer—the father of time travel! O-man-o! Deep! Real deep!”

“Now see here,” I finally broke in. “Don’t they talk English where you come from? And just how do you come to be here anyway? I built a time machine to travel into the future, and instead I get you telling me how deep I am. Are you here or am I there?”

“You are here, o-daddy-boy, and I also am here. But, to explain this, I may have to use some angle talk, which is what you mean by English. We read your books—which are collectors’ items, by the way—and we decided you were way under the zero mark, especially when we saw that the angleheads wouldn’t touch any of your ideas. So we got together and made our time machine. But I am sad to report, doctor-o, that your theory was a bit less than two-hundred-per-cent correct. There were a few errors, which we found.”

It was something of a shock to hear this future rock-and-roller tell me there were mistakes in my work, and I started to argue with him about it. But his attention wasn’t on the conversation. He was sniffing thoughtfully, the thing he’d called sense of wonder shining in his eyes. He was looking at the steaks Marilyn had set on the table.

“Reach that!” he said, awed. “Gen-you-wine solid flesh! Man-o! I haven’t seen a steak like that in all my off-beat life!”

So naturally we invited him to sit down at the table and he didn’t have to be asked more than once. It seemed that food was pretty expensive in 1991, which is the year he came from, and what there was of it mostly came from factories where they shoveled soy beans and yeast into a machine and it came out meat at the other end, if you didn’t make too much fuss about what you called meat. But with so much of the good farm land ruined by atomic dust, and so much more turned into building lots on account of the growing population, it was the best they could do.

***

When we heard this, we pushed the second steak in front of him and he showed he was a growing boy by finishing every scrap, along with a double order of French frieds and half a dozen ears of corn on the cob. But he had to give up after two pieces of pie.

He sat back in the chair, patted his stomach and looked as if he had just won the Irish sweepstakes. He looked at the big refrigerator. When Marilyn opened it to put things away, his eyes almost popped out at the sight of the meat stored there.

“Man-o!” he said. “You must be rich!”

Marilyn laughed. “No, not rich—far from it. We operate a restaurant and that’s our stock you see.”

“Oh, doll-o! I should not have eaten so much. What do you charge for a meal like that?”

“We would get three and a half for each order,” I said, diplomatically not mentioning all his side orders. “Although we don’t get much carriage trade here. But don’t let it worry you. Nothing’s too good for a guest from the future.”

“Three and a half?” He looked amazed. “Why, such a feed would bring twenty-five or thirty where I come from—if you could find it! Let me pay, o-daddy-friend, at least your price.”

And he pulled out some bills. I started to push them back, for of course I wasn’t going to spoil this great moment in my life by asking a traveler from the future to pay for a meal.

But then I saw what he was trying to give me.

I picked up the bills and stared. Marilyn’s head was over my shoulder and she was staring just as hard. She took one out of my hand.

“It’s not real,” she said. “There’s not that much money in the world.”

She had the five. I had the ones. The five-thousand and the one-thousand-dollar bills, that is. I looked up at Solid Chuck Richards.

“When you said that meal would cost twenty-five or thirty, did you mean twenty-five or thirty thousand?”

“You reach me, man. Inflation, you know. It’s terrible. I remember when a gee would keep the beat rocking in a juke palace for an hour. Now you pay half a gee a number. It’s terrible.”

***

After we explained to him that the inflation was even worse than that, he decided it was something more than terrible. It seems he hadn’t paid much attention to money in his younger days, though he did recall now that when he was very small he’d been able to get a good nickel candy bar for twenty dollars, but he hadn’t seen anything smaller than a hundred in some time now.

“There should be a law against this sort of thing,” he said indignantly. “It’s enough to turn a man into an anglehead, the way they keep pushing up the price of fumes. And what they charge for Bulgy Sanders records—”

He picked up the bills and looked at them.

“But I think maybe we can find a way to profit on this, daddy-boy! I have a deep thought—we members of the Friday Night Bull Session and Experimentation Society will come to your restaurant and pay you five gees for a steak dinner, which is a fine price for you but very little for us. In that way, we will eat good food and you will gather a good bundle of the stuff of life.”

There was a thudding noise at the window. I looked over quick. Somebody was hanging on outside, off balance, as if he had been standing on a ladder outside and had fallen against the window.

I ran for the door, forgetting it was a switch. But Solid Chuck Richards realized it. He dived back into his chair and called, “Reach you later, o-daddy!” He disappeared as I pulled the door open.

The sudden flash as the time machine stopped operating reminded me about those switches on the door, but it was too late now. I ran out and around the side just in time to see a figure disappearing up the alley. Sure enough, there was a ladder against the window.

I didn’t bother chasing the man very far, because, after a fast look at him, I had a pretty good idea who it was. I’d speak to him later.

***

Marilyn and I sat around looking at the big bills. They were the size of present-day currency, and were beautifully made, and would have passed easily except for a few things. Such as that ‘Series 1988’ inscribed alongside the signature of Irving P. Walcourt, Secretary of the Treasury. And the Treasurer of the United States in 1988 would be Kuru Hamonoto. From the State of Hawaii, I wondered, or—?

“They’re no use to us at all,” said Marilyn. “Unless we hold them until 1988. I was talking about security for our old age. Do you suppose—”

“You forget,” I said. “That steak will run you twenty-five or thirty thousand in 1988. This is going to be a great disappointment to the members of the Friday Night Bull Session and Experimentation Society, but I fear we must explain to Solid Chuck Richards that we just cannot afford to do much business of this type.”

I pushed aside the money and began thinking about some of the things the youth from 1991 had told me. There were holes in my theories—a lot of holes. True, I had succeeded in building a time machine, but I could never go anyplace in it. Because time travel was possible only by traveling from one time machine to another. The amateurs of 1991, knowing from my books (I must remember to write them) that I had built a time machine in 1959, were able to make contact. Solid Chuck Richards was selected by lot from several volunteers to try the machine. I met the other members of the Society later and learned that and a number of other things from them.

The reason Solid Chuck came back instead of my going forward made solid sense. I could see it now. My time machine had never existed in 1991.

His had existed in 1959, or at least its parts had. I could overcome that problem—if I had the full power of the Sun for several minutes to work with, and a way to handle it. Then I could change things so that my time machine would have existed in the future...

Even the verb tenses were going wrong on me.

These amateur experimenters, it seemed, were considered a bit on the crackpot side, taking such pseudo-science as mine seriously. Not knowing enough science to realize that the ideas I wrote about were impossible, as any professional scientist would have, they followed them through. They tried to get in touch with me in their time, but I wasn’t available, which saved me another paradox. Suppose I had joined the Society and come back as a volunteer?

But it was encouraging to know the reason I was going to be unavailable in 1991. Marilyn and I had gone on a second honeymoon—on the first commercial passenger liner to Mars.

“And so,” I told her. “You don’t have to worry about security in your old age. Tickets to Mars must cost a few trillion dollars. We won’t be poor.”

Marilyn was still looking at the currency of the future.

“We will be,” she said. “If we keep selling steak for the price of soy-bean hamburger. By the way, Ted, I wonder who that was at the window?”

The answer came to me then. I put the bills into my pocket and kissed her.

“We will not have to eat soy-bean hamburger, o-doll. And I will take you to Mars for your second honeymoon—as soon as they start passenger service. I am going out to make a down payment on the tickets right now.”

***

Uncle Johnson took the glass from his eye. He looked very tense, like a fisherman with a prize catch on a very thin line.

“It’s good,” he said, and his voice trembled a little. “I—suppose your time machine worked?”

“Surprised, are you, Uncle?”

“Yes, yes. But I see your situation, Ted. You, of course, can’t afford to hold these for thirty years. Now—ah—I can. And I’ll be glad to help you out by taking them off your hands. Naturally I have to hold them a long time, so—let’s say twenty dollars a thousand?”

“Let’s not say that.” I took the bill from his hand. “I figure fifty is a fair price. There’ll be lots more, Uncle. And, as you say, I am always broke and cannot afford to put them away for my old age. But running the time machine is expensive and I can’t afford to take less than fifty.”

He looked as if he were going to snatch the bill right out of my hand, he was so eager.

“All right, Ted, I realize there are expenses. Thirty-five.”

We compromised on forty.

“But I want a promise,” he said emphatically. “I’m to be the only one you sell these bills to!”

“You reach me, o-uncle.” I handed him the bills. “You’re deep, man. Real deep!”

Real deep in the hole, that is—he mortgaged his house and his regular inventory to buy up all the money I began taking in. Once we redeemed the wedding ring and all the other articles, I got to feeling mellow and even a bit grateful. He’d started me in business, so to speak. I couldn’t stick him with all those millions that would just about buy him a helicab ride to the poorhouse in 1988.

So when Marilyn and I got just as deep in the black, because the Society members gave us some books on stock-market statistics, I started giving Uncle tips every now and then. Not free, of course—I asked for half and we settled on seventy-thirty. With that plus the ones I bought, both for now and the long pull, I guess we’re the only people living today who can be sure of having a second honeymoon on Mars, although Solid Chuck Richards tells me he hears Mars is overrated, there not being a juke on the whole planet, and even if there were you couldn’t jump to any decent kind of beat in that low gravity.

I wouldn’t say so to Solid Chuck Richards, but that sounds like absolute zero to me.

End

That is one nice time machine. I’d like one just like it, only in red. A quick search revealed nothing about this author.

The above image is a free download.

Louis Shalako has a few books and stories available from Amazon.

Thank you for reading.