Back to the Time Trap, page 1
part #2 of Time Trat Series
Back To The Time Trap
Time Trap 02
(1992)*
Keith Laumer
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Book Information
PROLOGUE
Roger Tyson was in his living room, sitting in a grossly overstuffed chair in a pink-and-yellow floral design, which, he realized, would appear grotesque to anyone who didn't know how much Sears had charged him for it. Q'nell came in from the kitchen with a plate of hot-from-the-oven tollhouse cookies and a glass of cold milk.
Roger looked up at his beautiful bride, whom he never called "Nellie," and admired for the zillionth time her perfect profile, her slender neck, and the soul-stirring curve of her right breast. Stifling the impulse to reach out and caress that organ, he picked up a cookie instead.
"This is the life, Nellie," he murmured, and pulled her down into his lap. Prosser on Torts fell to the floor with a forlorn thump!
"Stop it, silly," Q'nell ordered without conviction.
Just then the phone rang. Roger ignored it, but Q'nell picked it up. She listened with a puzzled expression and said hesitantly, "Yes, it is, but—" She recoiled slightly from the instrument in her hand.
"It's a Mr. Ucker," she told Roger, who put up a hand like a traffic cop.
"I'm not here!" he barked. "Besides, it couldn't be! That was all a delirium-dream, remember?"
Q'nell put the phone in his hand, patted his cheek, and went back into the kitchen, casting an anxious glance back at him.
"Never mind how I am!" Roger yelled into the phone, "And I am definitely NOT 'your boy'! And I don't care what dire calamity is about to befall the world! Solve it without my help!"
Roger's eye was caught by a quick movement over behind the home entertainment center, over seven hundred bucks at Simon's, on the blink, and not even paid for yet. His ire intensified. "Q'nell!" he yelled. "Bugs! As big as rats!"
Q'nell came back in, her expression one of mild curiosity.
"T'son," she said softly. "What—"
"Over there!" Roger barked. "Behind the telly! A huge black bettle! Don't you even know how to keep this place clean? If there were no food scraps lying around, Dugs wouldn't be attracted!" He realized he was motormouthing and shut up abruptly.
"It's six P.M.!" he said suddenly, then changed his tone to a wheedling one: "Let's watch Daphne's Dilemma." Without awaiting her agreement as she sat beside him, he used his new remote to switch on the TV. The screen flickered and brightened, showing a reddish, rutabagalike entity with head-tentacles and sharp-pointed limbs like metallic crab-legs. Roger switched off and threw the control unit from him. Q'nell exclaimed and went after it. "Roger," she said reproachfully, using the name she employed only when seriously displeased with her mate's behavior.
"All right! All right!" Tyson groaned. "You see? He's already starting to ruin everything!"
"Oh! My casserole!" Q'nell exclaimed and headed for the kitchen.
"Didn't you see him?" Roger yelled after her.
Her pert features poked around the door. "See whom, dear?" she cooed.
"The Rhox!" Roger barked. "Instead of Daphne, we got the Rhox!"
"What rocks, Roger?"
"The Rhox!" Roger snapped. "That Oob fellow! Don't tell me you've forgotten!"
"Roger," Q'nell said reproachfully, coming back to sit beside him again and take his hand in hers. "Didn't we agree that was a delirium induced by the shock of the accident?"
"Sure," Roger agreed, "but we know we were lying!" He took her shapely chin in his hand and turned her face so that he could look into her eyes.
"The Trans-Temporal Bore," he said distinctly, "Culture One, and the null engine, and that damned love-nest contract with R'heet!"
"Roger, we agreed we'd never mention all that again."
"Right!" Roger gobbled. "But I have to. Didn't you see him on the TV just then?"
"Whom? Rheet?"
"No! Oob!" Roger corrected. "We agreed not to talk about him, but when I see him right here in our living room ...! And there was the phone call before that! It was UKR, warning me, or whatever; wanted me to volunteer for some kind of suicide mission!"
"Why, don't you do it, T'son."
"Don't worry!" Roger said fervently. "Do you think I'm crazy?"
She patted his hand. "Let's not go into that again, dear," she urged softly, looking concernedly into his eyes.
"Watch! I'll show you!" He retrieved the remote tuner and switched it on. The distraught face of a pretty young woman appeared, registering disquiet, or perhaps a bad smell.
"Don't be so upset, Daphne," Q'nell suggested. "Fen-wick is coming back; he was only delayed by a flat tire."
"To Perdition with Fenwick!" Roger yelled. "The trouble with TV is they all just look like nice-looking young folks who came to Hollywood to see if maybe they could make it on the tube. Take Fenwick, there; he doesn't look like a brain surgeon—he looks like a TV actor!"
"I see what you mean, Roger," his bride agreed. "But is it worth getting all upset about?"
"It is if it means wrecking my home!"
"Silly boy. It's only a soap opera. Fenwick is moving on Daphne, not me."
"That's not what I mean. I saw him! Just a second ago, right on the screen!"
"Certainly you did. That was just a flashback, so we'd know about the flat tire."
"I don't mean that! I mean that Rhox!"
"Oh, you mean that desert background in the Auburn ad. Lovely! They shoot all those ads in Arizona, I read in the TV Guide."
"What do you mean, 'Auburn ad'?" Roger demanded. "Auburn folded back in the Depression!"
"No, I mean Auburn-Cord-Deusenberg," Q'nell amplified. "The big car company."
"That's what I mean, too!" Roger cut her off. "There hasn't been an Auburn ad since 1933."
"Don't be silly, Roger," Q'nell urged. "They didn't even have TV in 1933!"
"Of course not!" Roger answered. "That's my point!"
"Why, didn't you like the lovely desert scenery?" Q'nell wondered. "I always thought you wanted to go there someday."
"I mean Oob!" Roger corrected. "With UKR phoning me, and Oob popping up on the tube, I feel like we're right back in the Time Trap!"
"But, Roger," Q'nell pointed out. "We aren't; we're right here at home, perfectly safe and happy. And your cookies are getting cold. You know you like them while the chocolate chips are still melted."
Roger grabbed one and stuffed it back. "Umm, delicious, ' he murmured. Q'nell kissed him. The phone rang again.
"Don't answer it!" Roger ordered, and resumed what he was doing.
"Roger, not right here in the living room," Q'nell objected mildly. She picked up the phone.
"Oh, yes, Mary," she said, nodding. "Tomorrow will be fine. About three, then?" She hung up. Roger grabbed the phone:
"UKR?" he yelled into it. "Leave me alone, dammit! I'm not going!"
Q'nell took the phone and cradled it again. "You weren't invited," she reported. "It's strictly a hen party."
"Look!" Roger blurted. "He's back!" He pointed to the screen, where Oob, his usual robust magenta darkened to a dull beet-red, was waving his tentacles wildly.
"Tyson!" he called. "Help! In the name of the Builder, help me! They're overwhelming the Control Center! Just come over here, I beg you!" His color faded to a sickly off-white. "Farewell!" he croaked. "I'm done for, Tyson! Perhaps if you act in time, you can still avert—" A shiny blue-black beetle-like creature obtruded between Oob and the camera. Roger just had time to glimpse rows of shredding-hooks on its momentarily exposed underside before it fell on Oob and his voice trailed off in an agonized wail as the creature began to devour him alive.
"Hold it! That's different!" Roger blurted, and rushed to the TV, where, behind the embattled Rhox, Daphne was now holding a match to the corner of a document, watching it begin to blacken and curl. "We have to stop it!" Roger groaned.
"Roger!" Q'nell interceded. "It's only the fake will she had Ben make up to fool Winslow into revealing himself! It's all right! Do sit down! You're spoiling the whole segment!"
"I'm not talking about that dopey soap," Roger retorted. "Didn't you see Oob just then, when he practically filled the screen—and that blue cockroach that was eating him?"
"I don't know what you mean," she said concernedly. "Do sit down, T'son, and tell me what you're talking about!"
"I'm talking about the damned Museum, or filing system, or laboratory slides, or whatever!" Roger replied in a tightly controlled tone. "I know we
"Why," Q'nell asked reasonably, "would anyone want to involve us, of all people, in such nonsense?"
"It's not nonsense!" Roger yelled, then, "I'm sorry, dear, I didn't mean to shout at you."
The TV burped and flashed spectral colors, then cleared to show a crisp, 3-D image of a lumpy shape like a potato, only dull red, with a wide, lipless mouth, a single enormous eye, and multiple appendages.
Roger stared. "But it's turned off!' he stated in a tone of astonishment, and pushed the off button again. There was no change, except that Oob extended a limb like a stainless-steel crab leg—out a good six inches beyond the glass surface of the screen, Roger realised wildly. The pincers-tipped member groped over the control knobs. The image brightened. Roger advanced, reached out and switched channels to UHF. Oob dwindled away for a moment, then reappeared, more vivid than before.
"Thank you, my boy," he said in his familiar gluey voice.
"What are you doing here?" Roger demanded, as Q'nell grasped his arm and tugged gently.
"If you'll just come and lie down awhile," she suggested.
He shook her hand off and whirled to face her. "Can't you see him?" he demanded. "It's Oob! You remember Oob! He was the rutabaga oa the Yamaha who was chasing you the night we met!"
That was part of the delirium, Roger," she chided. "We agreed—"
"I don't give a damn what we agreed!" Roger barked in a strangled voice as he attempted to suppress his fury at her imperturbability. He felt a touch from behind, and spun to face Oob, the Rhox, standing on pointed limbs not two feet away, while Daphne chattered on the screen behind him.
"There's no point in fighting it, lad," Oob told him sternly. "She can't see me: I'm in tight focus. There are imbalances in the Cosmic All which only you, due to your accumulation of Y-energies during your transit of the Bore, can remedy. Just come along quietly."
"Never!" Roger yelled, at which Oob sidled deftly past him to confront Q'nell. She smiled sweetly, Roger saw in the instant before he launched himself at the monster's back. Oob fended him off with a complicated thrust of ropy tentacles. Q'nell screamed.
That's more like it!" Roger clutched her. "I know you didn't see as much as I did of Oob the last time, but anybody can see he's not somebody you'd want climbing out of your practically-new sixty-five-dollar Atwater Kent! He released the sobbing giri and grabbed two of Oob's muscular tentacles; not without effort, he tied them in a square knot. Oob responded by turning a pale pink and uttering a despairing wail.
"How did you know?" he sobbed. "That sneaky UKR must have tipped you off that intertwining my prime manipulator with my tertiary stabilator-limb would inhibit the function of my stasis-node!"
"He did indeed!" Roger confirmed, wondering what the Rhox was talking about. Now," he went on, maintaining the bluff, "if you'll just go back where you came from—
"But now can I, with my node paralyzed?" Oob demanded. "If I should attempt to override—"
The doorbell dangled in the same instant that Oob ceased to be present. Roger was groping empty space, as Q'nell sank, sobbing, to the (truly hideous, Roger noted absently) floral-patterned carpet. He sprang to her as she sat up, looking dazed but unhurt.
"The door!' she said, and got to her feet. "Roger, do see who's there! It's probably poor Mary, wondering where I've gotten to."
Roger obediently went along the short hall and opened the fake old-English oak door, to admit an elderly gentleman of distinguished appearance, clad in a fur-collared overcoat. Behind him a vast and lovely Cadillac phaeton stood at the curb, a liveried driver at the wheel.
"Holy Moses!" the stranger said. "Roger! You haven't changed a bit! Not a bit, by golly. I'd have known you anywhere!" He seized Roger's limp hand and pumped it vigorously.
"Have we met?" Roger mumbled. "Come in, sir, come in."
The newcomer stepped inside, sniffed, looked down the hall and turned a puzzled expression on Roger.
"Why?" he demanded. "Why do you live here in this dump—I mean in such modest surroundings? You, the most amazing psychic of all time—and generous, too, no doubt about that! You could be living like a king—like me!" He caught a glimpse of Q'nell as she came along the brown-papered entry-hall.
"Ah, my dear!" he bleated. "You, too, look just as you did the last time I saw you, there in the trench at St. Mihiel! So charming! But I still don't understand! You're him, and he's you, and yet you're not! But I only came to express my gratitude, whoever each of you are, or is, or whatever!
"After the war," the old fellow went on, "I was able to trace you by the billfold you dropped, you know; I wanted to return it, and to find out why, in Heaven's name, a beautiful young woman was wandering about on the battlefield!' He paused. "You can imagine my amazement when I found that the owner of the wallet was actually a man, just as the name 'Roger Tyson' suggested. But anyway, here you both are, and so am I! I acted on your tips, of course, my dear, and got out of Consolidated Wagon and Buggy just in time. I tell you, they were dropping like flies all along the Street that black October day! But not Charles S. Shlumph, nosirree! I had mine! I weathered the Depression, and when World War Two started up, I was able to endow a Hopeless Alcoholic Unit in honor of Ron, and, yes, Ludwig, too! After all, we all shared the same hardships, so why cut him out just because he happened to be on the losing side, eh? After all, my own great-grandfather came from Pomerania! Got through that one OK too, thanks to my aircraft stocks, and I've been looking for you ever since, to thank you!"
"Just who—" Roger started, then looked surprised as a ghostly Mazda lamp of one hundred watts appeared above his head.
"Charlie Shlumph! In the trench!" he blurted. "There was this German with the terrible yokes, and the Englishman, and an American—you! I almost recognize you now! I told you about the future! Warned you about the Crash, and then—"
"Then you turned sideways and disappeared," Charlie supplied. "We hunted for you, explored the trench half a mile in each direction, and not a trace of you did we find! Not even a footprint! That's why I determined to find you and have you explain that whole bizarre incident. Ron didn't survive the war, poor boy, and Ludwig was all caught up in Herman Goring's World Peace Movement, so thereafter ... anyway, please explain."
"It was like this," Roger replied. "At that particular moment, Q'nell and I had temporarily exchanged bodies, so while it was me there in the trench, I looked like I was her. OK so far?"
"No!" Charlie stated with feeling. "Go on!"
"Well, we finally got that straightened out, and met UKR in person, and got Oob quieted down, and arrived at the Terminal Locus, and found out from the Builder all about the Bore."
"Bored?" Charlie queried. "By no means, kiddo! I don't claim to understand, but who said I have to understand? My net worth, thanks entirely to your tip, is just a bit over ten billions, and—"
" 'Ten billions'?" Roger gasped. "You mean dollars?"
