Clifford Simak - No Life of Their Own And Other Stories

“What is that?”

“There still is evidence. Someone stole some salts from Eli.”

He blanched at that. I knew he would. In the triumph of the moment he had forgotten it. His hand shook as he put back the box, turned off the water.

And in that instant, I think, I realized what he stood for. I could envision those long lonely years. Facing failure every year, despairing of ever doing what need be done. Keeping within his brain a knowledge that would have brought him greater glory than any man had ever had and yet keeping silent because he knew what his secret would do to the people of the System.

“Look, Doctor,” I said.

“Yes?”

“About those salts that Eli had. You needn’t worry. I know where they are.”

“You know where they are?”

“Yes, but I didn’t until a minute ago.”

He didn’t ask the question, but I answered it.

“I’ll do what’s necessary,” I said.

Silently he held out his hand to me.

I knew where those salts were, all right. But the problem was to reach them.

I knew, too, who had murdered Eli. But there was no way to prove it. The salts would have furnished the proof, but it was doubtful if any court, any jury would have believed my story. And using them as evidence would have told the world, would have broken faith with Dr. Jennings Anderson.

My first job was to get them.

How I did it I still don’t clearly remember. I remember that I came into the west port of the city with a jam of other cars, gambling on the belief the police would be watching outgoing cars, would pay little attention to incoming ones.

Once inside I ran the car into a side street, ducked it into an alley and abandoned it. I remember dodging up alleys, hiding in recessed doorways to avoid passers-by, working nearer and nearer to my apartment house.

Getting into the house was simpler than I thought.

Plain-clothes men were watching the place, but their watch had eased up a bit. After all, what murderer would be crazy enough to come back to a place he knew was being watched?

I waited my chance and took it. I met one man in the hall, but turned to one of the doors, fumbling in my pocket as if for a key, shielding my face from him until he was past.

My own room was unguarded. Probably they figured that it was impossible for me to slip into the building, so why guard the room?

The place had been ransacked, but nothing, apparently, had been taken.

Swiftly I went to the dresser in the bedroom, pulled out the drawer, lifted out the sand flask. With trembling fingers I pried out the cork, shook out the contents.

There was no mistaking the appearance of the white sand. It wasn’t white sand—it was the crystals Eli had shown me at the Sun Spot.

What was it Anderson had said—“ if resynthesis actually does occur a man would grow younger— ”

I hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. Then I scooped up some of the crystals, put them in my mouth and swallowed. They went down hard—like sand. But they went down. I took some more, just to make sure. I had no way of knowing how many I should take. Then I washed the rest down the bathroom drain.

After that I sat down to wait. I knew it was a dangerous thing to do, but probably it was as safe there in my room as any other place.

Four hours later I walked out of the apartment house, through the lobby, right past Floyd Duncan, SBI chief. He didn’t know me. For that matter I hardly knew myself. To all appearances, I was a youth of no more than twenty years.

The newsboys began screaming an extra as I neared the Martian Times building in Sandebar. I stopped to listen to their shouts.

“Extra!” they bellowed. “Marty Berg Guilty. Marty Berg Guilty of Eli Lawrence Murder.”

I shrugged my shoulders. It had taken Duncan plenty of time to crack that one. I grinned as I remembered him sitting in the apartment lobby, never blinking an eyelash as I sauntered past.

In the newsroom I walked up to the city editor’s desk.

“What do you want?” a hard-boiled guy barked at me.

“I thought you might need a man.”

“Can you write?”

I nodded.

“Experience?”

I rattled off the story I had fixed up.

“What the hell are you doing on Mars?” he demanded. “This isn’t any fit place for a man to live.”

“Bumming around,” I told him. “Seeing the System.”

He made doodles on a sheet of paper.

“I’ll try you out,” he said. “I like your looks. Remind me of someone. Someone I met.” He shook his head. “Can’t place him.”

But I had placed him. He was Herb North. I’d met him once, years before, at a press convention. We’d gone on a bat together.

“Ever hear of a guy named Chesty Lewis?” he asked.

“Read about him. New York gangster, isn’t he?”

“He used to be in New York,” said North, “but he lammed out here a few months ago. He’s coming up for trial this morning. That will be your first job. Funny case. Seems he took an old bird for about a billion bucks. Told the old sucker he had some stuff that would make him young again. But it didn’t and so—we have a trial.”

I nodded. I knew all about it.

Chesty Lewis had sold Andrew J. Rasmussen, Mars utility magnate, a small bottle of white sand—the kind that comes in those picture flasks they sell to tourists out on Mercury.

Clifford D. Simak has always shown an interest in ancient humans. Not only in this story—which was published in the December 1938 issue of Wonder Stories —but in several later stories, his characters evoked their caveman ancestors. (Cliff also wrote a sequel to “The Loot of Time,” called “The Legend of Time”—which went unpublished—and a nonfiction book titled Prehistoric Man .) Keep in mind that when archaeological evidence was found indicating that people had lived in Minnesota in ancient times, Cliff Simak was the journalist assigned to investigate and report on it.

Hugh Cameron rose from his knees and dusted his hands. He looked at Jack Cabot and Conrad Yancey and the two of them stared back at him, questioningly.

“We’re ready to go,” Cameron announced. “I’ve checked everything.”

“You give me the willies,” Yancey spoke flatly. “Checking and rechecking.”

“Got to make sure,” Cameron told him. “Can’t take any chances, not on a trip like this.”

Cabot shoved up his hat and scratched his head.

“Are you sure that the theory and the mechanism are all right, Hugh?” he asked anxiously. “I still have a feeling we’re all crazy.”

Cameron nodded.

“Near as I can make out, Jack, it will work. I’ve gone over it step by step. Pascal has something here that’s unique. A theory that has no precedent. Treating time as something abstract, but using that very basis for time-travel.”

“It would take a guy who got kicked out of Oxford for saying Einstein’s relativity theory was all haywire to make something like this,” observed Yancey.

Cameron pointed at a crystal globe atop a mass of intricate machinery.

“The whole answer is in that time-brain,” he said. “That’s the one thing I can’t figure out. How he made it I don’t know. But it works. I have proof of that. The rest all checks out.

“Pascal has taken the position that time is purely subjective. That it has no existence in fact. That it is only a mental concept, but something that is entirely necessary for orientation.”

“That’s the part I can’t get my teeth into,” protested Cabot. “It seems to me that if a man were going to travel in time there’d have to be existent time to travel in. Time would have to be an actual factor. Otherwise it would not obey mechanical rules. There’d be no theater for mechanical operation. In other words, just how in hell are we going to travel through something that doesn’t exist?”