No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) by Clifford D. Simak Page B

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.

The Loot of Time
    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.
    —dww
    CHAPTER I
The Time Tractor
    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