Short Fiction Collected, page 47
Ruby studied her fingernails. “Are you asking me?”
I studied Ruby’s half-averted face. “Should I ask you?”
“No. It’s none of my business. But I’ll say it anyway. I’ve known you and Mrs. J. for a good while and . . . and I don’t think your wife is wildly happy about being just a business-party hostess and an Englewood clubwoman and one of America’s ten-best-dressed and . . . and that kind of thing. I think, if you take even the management of her own household away from her . . . well, what’s left?”
“Good point, Ruby,” I said, after a moment. “You’re an astute young lady. I wish. . . .” I stopped myself. I had been about to say that I fervently wished there might be a sure cure for Hodgkin’s disease discovered before she died of it in 1983.
She went out the door. A minute later, it opened far enough for Les Hicks to stick his head in.
“Ruby’s getting started on typing up the minutes of the meeting,” he said, “and we’re wondering—”
“Hell, I told her to go home and not waste any more of the holiday.”
Les looked puzzled, but turned back to the outer office and told Ruby, “The boss says scram. Leave the typing for tomorrow.” Then he came on into my office and shut the door behind him.
“I was asking her how many copies you’d want run off. And do we do ’em up fancy in binders and all?”
“One for everybody who was present. And say an extra twenty for those who weren’t. Whitney Baker. Any others over at Textron. And, yes, do them up presentation-style. Make them look as imposing as a Russo-American concordat.”
I stood up and started to clap my desk calendar book shut. Then something on the page stopped me. This is one of those calendars that give printed notice of any noteworthy day: Columbus Day, Mothers Day, etc. But to day’s page bore only the line: Summer Begins. It annoyed me.
“Wait a second before you go,” I said to Les, as I riffled several of the big leaves backward and forward. Flag Day was in the right place: June 14, and Labor Day: first Monday in September, but Independence Day was printed on the page for July 4.
“You’re our office manager, Les,” I said. “Couldn’t you buy desk calendars without misprints? The damned things cost enough.”
“Misprints? Like what?”
“Look. This one celebrates today as the first day of summer.”
“Well? It is, you know.”
“Big deal. But look where this sloppy printer has put Independence Day. On the fourth of July.”
“Er . . . what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with it? Why, it’s just wrong, that’s all.”
I got my oddest look of the day, and Les began perceptibly to edge away from my desk.
Suddenly things began to click. Dinah’s remark about my midsummer night’s dream. All the people at work, not sunning on the beaches. No flags or Sales Day banners along the avenues. The blank faces when I’d opened the conference with a reference to Independence Day.
“Les,” I said weakly, “would there be a perpetual calendar anywhere around here?”
“Uh. . . .” He looked about the office. “Yeah, here’s a World Almanac in your bookcase.” He got it and began to search the index. “What am I looking for?”
“What day would have been my birthday? Day of the week, I mean. I was born on the twenty-fifth of August, 1948.”
He gave me yet another apprehensive look, but finally said, “Uh . . . that would have been a Wednesday, boss.” He added, as if jollying a borderline lunatic: “Wednesday’s child is full of woe, heh heh heh.”
“Thanks,” I said. I had been born on a Thursday. Thursday’s child has far to go. I indicated the book lying before me. “Then I surmise this is a Gregorian calendar?”
“What the hell would you want on your desk? An astrolabe and a sundial?”
“But the Gregorian is the Roman Catholic calendar.”
“Well, the old-time Julian calendar was devised by a pagan. You got a Protestant calendar in mind to invent next?”
“It’s just—it’s just that I thought the Protestant countries never would adopt the Gregorian revision.”
“It took them a while,” he admitted. “But the Julian calendar was about eleven minutes wrong about the length of the year. So the Protestant and Catholic countries kept slipping further apart, timewise. England and her colonies didn’t switch to the Gregorian until just before the Revolution, and by that date they had eleven days’ difference to make up. In his own lifetime, George Washington had to change his own birthdate from February eleventh to February twenty-second.”
“Eleven days,” I said, and calculated in my head. “By now, we’d be thirteen days off.” I looked at my calendar page of July 4, so absurdly designated Independence Day, then flipped back thirteen pages. June 21. Today. “But Flag Day . . . and Labor Day . . . they’re in the right places. Oh, of course. They weren’t even dreamed up until. . . .”
“God amighty,” said Les. “I’ve heard that Einstein flunked gradeschool arithmetic, but I never believed it until now. Talk about absent-minded geniuses. Boss, do you really mean you’ve lived by the Julian calendar all your—?” He stopped and his face brightened. “That’s it! Your secret of success! You’ve always been thirteen days ahead of your competitors.”
And from now on, I thought woozily, I’d have thirty years jump on them. But all I said was, “Forget it, Les. I think my head’s still full of concrete from that bout of flu.”
I hardly noticed when he left my office. I sat down and stared at this calendar. Either it or I had long been marching to a different drummer. On the evidence, it was I. And the evidence answered the question I had been asking myself—and everybody else—ever since I awoke this morning. I have not been resuscitated by any future breakthrough of medical science. I have not been rejuvenated by any yet-uninvented mode of time travel.
I died—died!—just as every other human of humankind has died before me.
But I have come back. And not as a ghost, not in some other body, not as some other form of life. I have come back as myself, Greg Jeffries, but into another world—a world that is only minimally different from the one I lived and died in. Except for a trifling difference in marking time, everything and everyone here is exactly as I knew them in that other world (or time, or continuum, or whatever).
Of course, I must remind myself, I have been alive here for less than a day; I may yet find other differences. But I judge they’ll be minor, if any. At the conference table today, after the business was concluded, we chatted of the news of the day. The Mideast tensions, and Jimmy Carter preachments, the Panama Canal treaties and the ERA amendment still unratified—all the same things that concerned my acquaintances back in “my” world’s June of 1978. (Indeed, I had to bite my tongue once or twice, to keep from mentioning items like the gas-pipeline explosion that will practically obliterate Baton Rouge in 1979, the cataclysmic nuclear-plant accident that will evacuate the whole state of South Dakota in 1980, things like that.)
I died, but am no longer dead. Then am I only escaped alone to tell thee? The only one to tell, maybe, but not, I think, the only one to “escape.” There is no reason why I should be the sole human in history thus to return from the dead. I believe all the billions who went before must have done the same. I think I am exceptional only in that some quirk of fate or some celestial oversight allowed me to remember my former life and death. At any rate, so far as I know, I am the first to speak out about it with the absolute authority of having been there and back. There must be many like me in this world—who knows how many?—and no doubt there were just as many in the world I died away from. Those others simply can’t remember, or choose not to.
But if this is the Afterlife, why am I not at this moment a squawling newborn babe? The answer seems obvious. I came back at the one most significant, pivotal point in my life. I assume everyone else has been and will forever be similarly brought back. I wonder if all those others, given the second chance, manage to make the right turn at that pivot point in the (literal) next world. Me, I’m lucky. I remember. I need not guess or hesitate.
I gave my whole life to my work, at the expense of neglecting my beloved wife and denying her a life of her own. Both she and my partner opposed my reaching for still higher rungs on the ladder. When the merger brought Whit back from California, he and Dinah had that grievance in common—and soon found other things to share. I was left to make it all the way to the top—alone—and to die there, more miserably than any derelict failure. But Independence Day intervened.
I reached for the phone and dialed my home. “Dinah, please don’t have Vera hold dinner for me. You go ahead. I’ll be a little late getting back.”
“Again,” she said resignedly.
“There’s something I want to write down—an account of the day—while it’s still fresh in my memory.”
“Yes. All right, Greg.”
“You think I work too hard, don’t you?”
“No. I know you do.”
“I agree. I’ve decided to quit while I’m ahead.”
She gave a small gasp. “Did the merger fall through?”
“Oh, no, all that business went—smooth as a chess game, so far, but I’m going to call it off myself.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, you don’t want it, because I’m on the way to becoming Ebenezer Scrooge. Whit doesn’t want it, because he’s proud of what we’ve made of Jeffco, and he dislikes its being absorbed into a faceless conglomerate. So I’ve decided to sign Jeffco over to him and sign myself out.”
“Greg!”
“What the hell, I’ve got the patents and the royalties. We’ll still be better than well-off. And I may even dream up some new contraptions. But what I was dreaming about right now—do you remember that time we vacationed on Blackbeard’s Island? We both loved it. I thought we might see if it’s for sale.”
“But what on earth would—? You dear imbecile, you’d wither in retirement.”
“We can build. We won’t hire an architect or a landscape designer. We’ll even pension off Vera and Hawley and the maids and the gardener. We’ll do it all ourselves, just you and me. We’ll get a cruiser for voyages, and a sailboat for puttering around the island. There’ll be horses, swimming, scubadiving. A workshop for me to tinker in. If things get boring—well, what do they raise down there on those Carolina sea islands? Cotton? Blackbeard’s bullion? We’ll start a doubloon plantation. If all that begins to pall, well, we might discuss the long-postponed patter of little feet.”
“Greg, I don’t understand—” She broke off in apparent bafflement, but her voice had been vibrant to the verge of trembling.
“You’ll understand when you read what I’m about to write.”
And this is what I wrote.
It was as well after dark when I finished the foregoing and rang down for Hawley to bring the car around. Dinah excitedly began bombarding me with questions the moment I walked into the house, but I demanded that she first bring out the champagne. Then I gave her the bundle of handwritten pages to read and carried my own glass of Veuve Clicquot to the telephone, to call Doc Harbison. By some stroke of luck, I got him instead of his answering service.
“A relapse already?” he barked at me.
“No, just a question. Do you know of any research currently being done on Hodgkin’s disease?”
“Jesus Christ, man, this morning it was schizophrenia!”
“I’m calling for a friend.”
“That’s what they all say. And then they start weeping.”
“Be serious, Bert. I am. It’s a matter of making a donation.”
“Oh? Well, skip the American Cancer Society. Any donation would dwindle to a pittance, after they’ve taken their salaries and overhead. The Damon Runyon Fund is best; it doesn’t take any rake-off at all.”
“I don’t mean cancer research in general, Bert. Do you know of any research center, or any budding Pasteur, concentrating specifically on Hodgkin’s? It would mean a sizeable and continuing grant from Jeffco.”
“No kidding? That’s a damn fine gesture. And there’s bound to be at least one deserving beneficiary. I can scout around and find out.”
“Find out,” I said and hung up and went to the bay-window seat where Dinah was just finishing the manuscript. She looked up from it with a wide, warm, loving smile.
“I particularly like that sentimental touch, where you forever fondle my perfumed note—which I never wrote and never would. And the touch of humor—marrying Vera.” She laughed delightedly. “But, darling Ebenezer, you didn’t have to go to all this trouble to justify your change of heart.”
“You don’t believe any of it?” I exclaimed, somewhat taken aback, though of course I should have expected it. “You know I don’t have the imagination—let alone the patience—to concoct a complicated story like that. Anyway, it isn’t just for you. I think it’s important enough to be submitted for publication somewhere.”
“Then I suggest you put a pen name on it, Greg. Otherwise you’ll get no end of letters—the readers will even track you to our island—demanding proofs and assurances that they’ll get a second go-round, too.” She flicked a mischievous glance at me. “But right now you’re forgetting doctor’s orders. Bert said you should get right back to bed.”
Much later, her smooth body stirred beside me, and she murmured drowsily, “But wouldn’t it be absolutely world-shakingly magnificent if it all was true?”
If my own loving wife doesn’t quite believe this story, I can’t expect you to. But only the principal names have been changed. “It all is true,” I whispered to her in the warm dark. “Sometime—a long time from now, I hope—it’ll happen to you, and to me again. To both of us together, if the fates are kind.”
And to you, too. You’ll see.
Hell’s Fire
What if the U.S. and the Soviets simultaneously latched on to a new, unlimited source of energy? And what if the “current administration”—Jimmy and Ham and Jody and Cy—cooked up the ultimate deal with the devil? The connection will soon be made clear to you. . . .
AFTER THE END
Courtesy of the Recording Demon, in Hell II on the planet Mercury, a few facts pertinent to the end:
In 1980, the mightiest weapons in the arsenals of the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were, respectively, the MX and the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles. By the terms of SALT II, each of the two nations was allowed only 308 of those heaviest ICBMs, but that was really rather more than enough. Either an American MX or a Soviet SS-18 could carry as many as ten nuclear warheads—they averaged eight apiece—independently aimed to fall upon various targets. In other words, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had the combined capability to drop a separate H-bomb on each of 4,928 cities and towns—no matter that there were only 4,643 communities on Earth big enough to be called cities or towns. And each of those H-bomb warheads packed a 1000-kiloton punch, or nearly fifty times the destructive power of the primitive A-bomb which devastated Hiroshima. In other words, each of the 4,928 warheads was powerful enough to obliterate all life in a city the size of Shanghai, Mexico City and Tokyo combined—no matter that no city of that immensity existed on Earth. Suffice it to say that the two arsenals of ICBMs (not to mention stockpiles of lesser weapons) were capable of making the whole planet a lifeless black cinder.
And yet the inhabitants of that fragile Earth complained. As if ignorant of those all-too-lightly-leashed behemoths throbbing with pent-up energy, the mortals complained. Right up until the end, they complained of an “energy shortage.”
THE BEGINNING
“Ham,” the Secretary of Energy said urgently, “I’ve got to see Jimmy soonest.”
The White House Chief of Staff looked up from his album of gossipcolumn clippings, and said, “He’s having his morning meditation, Charlie, contemplating his navel.”
“Which one? He’s born-again.”
“Very funny. I tell you, Charlie, I worry that he’ll meditate himself right into catatonia one of these times. The pressures are getting to him. Inflation, Kennedy, unemployment, Kennedy, the energy crisis, Kennedy, kamikaze rabbits. . . .”
“Well, you can scratch the energy crisis, at least,” said the Secretary of Energy, smiling and dry-washing his hands. “I’ve finally come up with the answer to that one.”
“Holy smog!” blurted Ham. “Let’s go!” And he led the way to the Oval Office.
Jimmy lifted woeful eyes from his Bible and the latest Gallup Poll report. “Morning, Charlie,” he said dismally. “You look as pert as some ole boy that’s finally got to the head of the gasoline line. What’s all the enthusiasm?”
“There won’t be any more gasoline lines, Jimmy. You may not believe this, but I think I’ve solved the energy problem, once and for all time. We’ll have energy to bum.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I know, it sounds unbelievable. It’ll sound cockamamie even when I explain. But it’s true. Oh, a few little details to work out, sure. But it’s been right under our noses all the time. Under our feet, maybe I should say.”
“Charlie, we’re already trying everything under our noses and under God’s blue sky. Solar power, tidal power, nuclear power, flower power, oil from shale, oil from coal, gasohol, wind power, geothermal power, cordwood . . .”
“Yes, yes,” the Secretary said impatiently. “All sorts of new ideas. But I propose to exploit the oldest source of energy available, and the most dependable. Come on, fellows, think! What’s right under our feet?” He sort of danced a little bit.
Jimmy leaned to peer over the big dish of salted peanuts on his desk. “The rug? The floor?” The Secretary made beckoning charade gestures. “The downstairs? The White House tourists?” Beckon, beckon. “The basement? Nixon’s old tapes?” Feverish beckoning. “Now cut it out, Charlie. In ten minutes, I’ve got an appointment with the White House barber. I need another new image. I’m fixing to have my hair parted from side to side . . .”
