Free The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century by Anthology

door, trying to break it down.
    Vanning turned green. He took a hesitant step forward, and then saw the locker, in the corner to which he had moved it. The time locker—
    That was it. If he shoved the suitcase inside the locker, it would become unrecognizable. Even if it vanished again, that wouldn’t matter. What mattered was the vital importance of getting rid—immediately!—of incriminating evidence.
    The door rocked on its hinges. Vanning scuttled toward the suitcase and picked it up.
    From the corner of his eye he saw movement.
    In the air above him, a hand had appeared. It was the hand of a giant, with an immaculate cuff fading into emptiness. Its huge fingers were reaching down—
    Vanning screamed and sprang away. He was too slow. The hand descended, and Vanning wriggled impotently against the palm.
    The hand contracted into a fist. When it opened, what was left of Vanning dropped squashily to the carpet, which it stained.
     
    The hand withdrew into nothingness. The door fell in and the plainclothes men stumbled over it as they entered.
    It didn’t take long for Hatton and his cohorts to arrive. Still, there was little for them to do except clean up the mess. The suedette bag, containing twenty-five thousand credits in negotiable bonds, was carried off to a safer place. Vanning’s body was scraped up and removed to the morgue. Photographers flashed pictures, fingerprint experts insufflated their white powder, X-ray men worked busily. It was all done with swift efficiency, so that within an hour the office was empty and the door sealed.
    Thus there were no spectators to witness the advent of a gigantic hand that appeared from nothingness, groped around as though searching for something, and presently vanished once more—
    The only person who could have thrown light on the matter was Gallegher, and his remarks were directed to Monstro, in the solitude of his laboratory. All he said was:
    “So that’s why that workbench materialized for a few minutes here yesterday. Hm-m-m. Now plus x—and x equals about a week. Still, why not? It’s all relative. But—I never thought the universe was shrinking that fast!”
    He relaxed on the couch and siphoned a double martini.
    “Yeah, that’s it,” he murmured after a while. “ Whew! I guess Vanning must have been the only guy who ever reached into the middle of next week and—killed himself! I think I’ll get tight.”
    And he did.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

    A sense of the cosmic underlies much of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and manifests in a variety of forms: the computer-accelerated working out of prophecy in “The Nine Billion Names of God”; the sentient telecommunications network given the spark of life in “Dial F for Frankenstein”; and the mysterious extraterrestrial overseers guiding human destiny in the novelization of his screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
     
    Clarke’s best-known story, 2001, and its sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three, represent the culmination of ideas on man’s place in the universe introduced in his 1951 story, “The Sentinel,” and elaborated more fully in Childhood’s End, his elegiac novel on humankind’s maturation as a species and ascent to a greater purpose in the universal scheme.
    Clarke grounds the cosmic mystery of these stories in hard science. Degreed in physics and mathematics, Clarke was a contributor to numerous scientific journals and first proposed the idea for the geosynchronous orbiting communications satellite in 1945. Some of his best known work centers around the solution to a scientific problem or enigma. A Fall of Moondust tells of efforts to rescue a ship trapped under unusual conditions on the lunar surface. The Fountains of Paradise concerns the engineering problems encountered building an earth elevator to supply orbiting space stations. His Hugo- and Nebula Award–winning Rendezvous with Rama extrapolated his solid scientific inquiry into provocative new territory, telling of the