know I couldn’t.”
“And so you built the Toynbee Convector—”
“Not all at once. It took years to brood on it.”
The old man paused to swirl the dark wine, gaze at it and sip, eyes closed.
“Meanwhile, I drowned, I despaired, wept silently late nights thinking, What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my stage, my country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last on an old and beloved book by H. G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built. I traveled, or so it seemed. The rest, as you know, is history.”
The old time traveler drank his wine, opened his eyes.
“Good God,” the young reporter whispered, shaking his head. “Oh, dear God. Oh, the wonder, the wonder—”
There was an immense ferment in the lower gardens now and in the fields beyond and on the roads and in the air. Millions were still waiting. Where was the great arrival?
“Well, now,” said the old man, filling another glass with wine for the young reporter. “Aren’t I something? I made the machines, built miniature cities, lakes, ponds, seas. Erected vast architectures against crystal-water skies, talked to dolphins, played with whales, faked tapes, mythologized films. Oh, it took years, years of sweating work and secret preparation before I announced my departure, left and came back with good news!”
They drank the rest of the vintage wine. There was a hum of voices. All of the people below were looking up at the roof.
The time traveler waved at them and turned.
“Quickly, now. It’s up to you from here on. You have the tape, my voice on it, just freshly made. Here are three more tapes, with fuller data. Here’s a film-cassette history of my whole inspired fraudulence. Here’s a final manuscript. Take, take it all, hand it on. I nominate you as son to explain the father. Quickly!”
Hustled into the elevator once more, Shumway felt the world fall away beneath. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so gave, at last, a great hoot.
The old man, surprised, hooted with him, as they stepped out below and advanced upon the Toynbee Convector.
“You see the point, don’t you, son? Life has always been lying to ourselves! As boys, young men, old men. As girls, maidens, women, to gently lie and prove the lie true. To weave dreams and put brains and ideas and flesh and the truly real beneath the dreams. Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so.”
He pressed the button that raised the plastic shield, pressed another that started the time machine humming, then shuffled quickly in to thrust himself into the Convector’s seat.
“Throw the final switch, young man!”
“But—”
“You’re thinking,” here the old man laughed, “if the time machine is a fraud, it won’t work, what’s the use of throwing a switch, yes? Throw it, anyway. This time, it will work!”
Shumway turned, found the control switch, grabbed hold, then looked up at Craig Bennett Stiles.
“I don’t understand. Where are you going?”
“Why, to be one with the ages, of course. To exist now, only in the deep past.”
“How can that be?”
“Believe me, this time it will happen. Goodbye, dear, fine, nice young man.”
“Goodbye.”
“Now. Tell me my name.”
“What?”
“Speak my name and throw the switch.”
“Time traveler?”
“Yes! Now!”
The young man yanked the switch. The machine hummed, roared, blazed with power.
“Oh,” said the old man, shutting his eyes. His mouth smiled gently. “Yes.”
His head fell forward on his chest.
Shumway yelled, banged the switch off and leaped forward to tear at the straps binding the old man in his device.
In the midst of so doing, he stopped, felt the time traveler’s wrist, put his fingers under the neck to test the pulse there and groaned. He began to weep.
The old man had, indeed, gone back in time, and its name was death. He was traveling in the past now, forever.
Shumway stepped back and turned the machine on again. If the old man were to travel, let the machine—symbolically, anyway—go with him. It made a sympathetic humming. The fire of it, the bright sun fire, burned in all of its spider grids and armatures and lighted the cheeks and the vast brow of the ancient traveler, whose head seemed to nod with the vibrations and whose smile, as he traveled into darkness, was the smile of a child much satisfied.
The reporter stood for a long moment more, wiping his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Then, leaving the machine on, he turned, crossed the room, pressed the button for the glass elevator and, while he was waiting, took the time traveler’s tapes and cassettes from his jacket pockets and, one by one, shoved them into the incinerator trash flue set in the wall.
The elevator doors opened, he stepped in, the doors shut. The elevator hummed now, like yet another time device, taking him up into a stunned world, a waiting world, lifting him up into a bright continent, a future land, a wondrous and surviving planet.…
That one man with one lie had created.
Clara Peck had lived in the old house for some ten years before she made the strange discovery. Halfway upstairs to the second floor, on the landing, in the ceiling—
The trapdoor.
“Well, my God!”
She stopped dead, midstairs, to glare at the surprise, daring it to be true.
“It can’t be! How could I have been so blind? Good grief, there’s an attic in my house!”
She had marched up and downstairs a thousand times on a thousand days and never seen.
“Damned old fool.”
And she almost tripped going down, having forgotten what she had come up for in the first place.
Before lunch, she arrived to stand under the trapdoor again, like a tall, thin, nervous child with pale hair and cheeks, her too bright eyes darting, fixing, staring.
“Now I’ve discovered the damn thing, what do I do with it? Storage room up there, I bet. Well—”
And she went away, vaguely troubled, feeling her mind slipping off out of the sun.
“To hell with that, Clara Peck!” she said, vacuuming the parlor. “You’re only fifty-seven. Not senile, yet, by God!”
But still, why hadn’t she noticed?
It was the quality of silence, that was it. Her roof had never leaked, so no water had ever tapped the ceilings; the high beams had never shifted in any wind, and there were no mice. If the rain had whispered, or the beams groaned, or the mice danced in her attic, she would have glanced up and found the trapdoor.
But the house had stayed silent, and she had stayed blind.
“Bosh!” she cried, at supper. She finished the dishes, read until ten, went to bed early.
It was