You'll Die Yesterday (2 page)

"You and Miss Morris be down on the sidewalk waiting," Trowbridge went on. "I'll be
over as fast as I can get there
--which will be about as long as it takes you to get down to the street. I'm bringing men to help look for Fred Stone."

Ja
n hung up. He looked at Paula. "
The corpse has vanished," he said.

"Then it was Fred Stone!" Paula said triumphantly.

Jan shook his head. "Fred Stone was dead," he said positively. "He couldn't come back to life." He was taking off his laboratory apron. "Trowbridge wants us to meet him down in front of the building right away. He's going to try to find Fred Stone -- or whoever it was you saw."

He tossed the apron on a lab bench. They went out, slamming the door.

The door
opened again in twenty minutes. Paula came into the lab, followed by a man with wide shoulders and angular jaws. Trowbridge. Jan followed, closing the door.

"If he's still in the neighborhood," Trowbridge was saying, "the men I've
got staked out will see him."

"
Personally I think Paula was mistaken," Jan said. "That man, Fred Stone, was dead. It couldn't be him."

"That's what the coroner says too," Trowbridge said, "but the corpse is missing. It was either stolen right out of the morgue or it got up and walked out." He studied Jan quietly for a moment. "How about telling me the truth, Mr. Stevens?" he asked quietly.

"What do you mean?" Jan asked uneasily.

"For one thing," Trowbridge said, "you claimed you had never seen Fred Stone before last night when he stood up in the audience to ask you a question. But three people swear that the last words of the dying man were add
ressed to you, and they were,
I should have waited to h
ear what you wanted to tell me.
That indicates he knew you or had seen you before."

"Not necessarily," Jan said. "He could have been referring to waiting to be shot until I had answered his questions. When people are dying they sometimes say peculiar things. At the time that's what I thought-- that it was an attempt at humor on his part. A sort of
'
Too bad I had to get shot. Darned impolite of me
'
sort of thing, I still think that's what it was."

"Also," Trowbridge went on, "several witnesses tell me you took some papers out of Stone's pocket. What did you do with them, and why didn't you hand them over to me when I arrived on the scene?"

"Oh, those," Jan said uncomfortably. "They're gone. The--" He took a deep breath. "Paula and I came here afterwards last night. I wanted to try some tests on those papers. The killer showed up and took them away from us."

"I see," Trowbridge almost whispered. "And of course you called the police at once." Then, when Jan shook his head mutely, "Why not? What do you think the police department is for? I don't like this. You aren't acting like an innocent bystander who saw a stranger shot. You steal papers. The killer shows up and takes them away from you, and you keep mum about it." He glared at Jan. "I think you'd better start talking, or I'm going to have to lock you up as a material witness and -- " He clamped his lips together.

"You won't believe the truth," Jan said, "so there's no use talking."

"Why don't you try me?" Trowbridge said.

Jan looked at Paula helplessly. "All right," he said. "The talk I gave last night wasn't a prepared speech. It was off the cuff. I understand a stenographer was there taking shorthand, and the speech would be published in the quarterly journal of the Society; but last night there was no existing copy of my speech--couldn't be." He paused a moment, then went on. "Those papers I took were printed pages out of a journal, and they were my speech as I gave it last night. The paper was several years old."

"Go on," Trowbridge said. "I'm
listening."

"In other words," Jan said, "those papers were impossible. They cou
ldn't be in that man's pocket--
unless he came from the futur
e. Time travel. Coming back in t
ime from the future."

"I don't quite follow you," Trowbridge said.

"What I mean is," Jan said, "in a few weeks or months the stenographer will have translated her shorthand notes and my speech last night will be printed in the journal. It will be sent to a few hundred members of the society. Some will go to libraries. They set on shelves for years. Fred Stone, after quite a few years, runs across a copy of the journal, reads my speech, and by means of time travel comes back to attend the meeting and ask me some questions."

"And gets shot," Trowbridge added. "Tell me, doctor, just how far in the future did he come from?"

"Twenty-one sixty-three," Jan said quietly.

"You got that, of course, from the card in his billfold."

"Yes," Jan agreed, "but I confirmed before they were stolen from me. I did that by measuring the radio-activity of the paper and comparing it with charts."

Trowbridge looked at Jan with a sarcastic curve to his smile. Then slowly it was replaced by a frustrated expression.

"That's so absurd," he said, "that I find myself half believing it against my will." He paced around the lab, a frown on his face, while Jan and Paula watched him. "You know," he said, turning toward them abruptly, "if what you say it true, then Fred Stone could have been killed last night and yet be walking around full of life today."

"How?" Jan said. "I don't see how time travel could bring a man back to life after being dead. That's the thing I can't see."

"If he could come to last night from the future, Trowbridge said, "he could go to last night from today."

"That's right!" Jan exclaimed. "The man Paula saw could be Fred Stone then!"

"The way I see it," Trowbridge said, "right now he's trying to find you. That's what he's doing in this neighborhood. He can't find you, so he takes another jump backwards in Time and attends the meeting. Then he gets killed."

He looked
at Jan and Paula who were staring at him with horror filled eyes.

"Another thing," Trowbridge said. "It gives his last words some sense. Suppose he does f
ind you--say an hour from now
--and you start to tell him he's going to be killed last night"--he chuckled dryly--"but he's scared away and doesn't have time to listen to you. Then last night when he was shot he suddenly realized you had tried to warn him."

Breath exploded from Jan's lungs. He leaned against a bench weakly.

"But now that we know all that," Paula said excitedly, "we can be prepared and force him to listen. Then he will know, and won't go back to last night, and won't be killed."

"You think so?" Trowbridge said dryly. "You forget that his being killed is already a fact. You can't change it."

"But when we see him it won't have happened yet to him," Paula said. "It's still in his future, and he can change that by simply not going back to yesterday."

"Trowbridge is right," Jan said wearily. "We'll see Fred Stone sometime in our future. Maybe today when he locates us. But everything that takes place is unchangeable. His future has already happened. It can't be changed."

"If it could," Trowbridge said, "we could borrow his time travel machine or whatever it is he uses, and whenever there's an accident and someone gets killed we could go back before the accident and warn the victim, and the accident wouldn't happen."

"Maybe that could be done," Paula said earnestly. "And even if you're right, we shouldn't give up. We should try to change what has happened. We must warn him."

"Of course we'll try," Jan said. "But didn't he imply last night with his last words that we tried to warn him?"

"Oh!" Paula said angrily. "You're already giving up. I can just see you, January, trying half-heartedly to warn him, because you're convinced ahead of time that you won't succeed. We've got to really try. We've got to save his life. Do you understand?"

"Miss Morris is right," Trowbridge said. A twisted smile appeared on his lips. "And don't ever say anything about this. If my superiors ever learned I had treated your story seriously they'd put me back on a beat." He sobered. "Fred Stone will probably contact you here. He'll have to if you two stay here, anyway. So what we'll do is this. We'll get some men up here. In the hall and elevators, right in this room, down on the street. The minute Fred Stone shows up we'll grab him and hold him until we can make sure he knows he's going to be killed last night. That's all we can do."

He went to the phone . . .

"Some more coffee, Paula?"
Jan asked, holding the thermos invitingly.

Paula looked down at the remains of the meal on her plate and the empty coffee cup. "No, thanks," she said. "I'm so full of it now it's running out of my ears."

Trowbridge punched out a cigarette on the already over filled ashtray. "I'll have another," he said. He stared at the top of Jan's head as the coffee was poured. "You know, Jan," he said slowly, "there's one thing I haven't got straight
ened out yet. Why was--or will
be--Fred Stone killed? The way you painted it he was just curious about your speech and wanted to ask a question or two about it. So he travels back in time to ask those questions. What was your speech about? Why should anyone a couple of hundred years from now be
so curious about what you said
--or didn't say, to be more exact. And why should he be killed
before he could find out what he wanted to know
?"

Jan looked at Paula, frowning. "I don't know," he said. "I've been trying to figure out that myself. But there's another possibility. Suppose he was killed to prevent him from revealing something, rather than to prevent him from finding out something." Trowbridge thought this over, lighting another cigarette.

"If that's the way it is," he said, "then the future is able to change. If it couldn't, whatever he might possibly tell you wouldn't matter. It would be a matter of history whether he did or not, and it would be silly of the killer to try to prevent something that had already happened anyway."

"No," Jan said. "I think the future is an open book that can be changed. It's the past that can't be changed."

Paula snorted. "Don't
forget all this is th
e remote past to the time Fred Stone came from," she said. "By the same token it would be unchangeable to him. And to the murderer."

"Paula's right," Trowbridge chuckled.

"Then we come down to this," Jan said. "We know that travel in time is possible now. We could have someone come back to our present time fro
m a million years in the future
--or up to the present from a million years in the past. Either none of it is changeable, and our least little thought or action is as unalterable as a movie, or else it's all changeable. If it's unalterable there's no such thing as free will. Even the flutter of an eyelid is as unchangeable as the travel of the planets in their orbits, according to the one picture. In the other picture, the past could be changed. Columbus could be prevented from discovering America at any moment--and we would cease to exist."

"I doubt if it would be that drastic," Trowbridge said. "If Columbus was prevented from discovering America, someone else would. Details could be altered but major trends and developments probably couldn't."

"Maybe," Jan said doubtfully.

"But let's get back to the subject," Trowbridge said. "Do you know anything that a man from the future might be very anxious to find out? Enough so to come back in Time? Something so important that someone else from his Time would follow him and kill him to keep him from finding out? Something the killer knows?"

Jan stiffened in surprise. Trowbridge watched him intently.

"So there is something," he grunted.

"No," Jan said with a supreme effort at being casual. "It's just that I hadn't though
t of that possibility before--
that the murderer might know something he killed Fred Stone to keep him from finding out." He had gained control of himself now. "How
could
know what it is? Something hinted at in my speech perhaps. Some little thing I don't know the implications of, that two centuries has brought out in a different light that I can't suspect."

"Or something that you as a scientist have discovered and never given out to the world," Trowbridge suggested. "What's the name of this best seller of yours? I think I'd like something to read while we wait for Fred Stone to show up."

He went to the phone, picked it up, and looked questioningly at Jan. Jan shrugged in defeat.

"You'll find a copy in the top drawer of the desk," fie said glumly. "It's called 'Me and My Robot'."

"Thanks," Trowbridge said, returning the phone gently to its cradle. "Thanks." He opened the drawer.

Trowbridge
closed the book slowly. He looked up at Paula, across the laboratory asleep on a cot that had been set up, and at Jan who was heating some fluid in a test tube over a bunsen burner.

"Nice story, Jan," he commented. Jan looked over at him and smiled nervously. "An intriguing story," Trowbridge went on. "So well written that at times I almost became convinced it was a true story. That
idea of a recording of the mind
--taken from the idea of taking a r
ecording of the voice, no doubt
--and placing it in a synthetic brain that controls a robot body.
That
could be fact. I've seen one of those robot monstrosities they build for the movie and television shows, with its plastic muscles that look and perform just like real muscles." He looked down at the book on his knee and tapped it significantly while Jan watche
d. "The way you tied it up so n
eatly, too. All the robots destroyed. The secret safe in the mind of the hero where it was destined to remain, because it was too dangerous to let loose. I suppose your speech last night was about this book?"

"Yes!"
Jan said, turning back to the now boiling test tube.