Time Travel Omnibus, page 1147
They assisted him to the platform, and made sure he had a good grip on his walker cane.
“Are you ready,” asked the navigator.
“Yes!” Grandfather’s beatific smile lit up the laboratory.
Dr. Orlov began the countdown. “Three, two, one, go.”
Nothing happened.
The technicians all cheered and raced forward to remove the blue travel vest.
“Ask him how it was!” Dr. Orlov was grinning ear to ear.
Keiko shook her head. “But nothing happened. It didn’t work.”
“Oh yes it did. Like I said, he returned to this time. Just ask him.”
The despairing look on her grandfather’s face told her all she needed to know. The Sacred Lily leaf she had pinned to his lapel was gone. She wanted to go to him, but they were too busy checking his medical signs. His hands were dirty; his shoes scuffed and coarse with dust and bits of dried mud. A tang of ozone filled the air of the lab. When he spoke, her heart squeezed in her chest.
“Tell me what he’s saying,” Orlov demanded.
Keiko couldn’t stop the tears of both relief and sadness. “He says he wants to go back. He wants me to tell you there is a shrine at the top of a hill overlooking the village. He wants you to send him there instead of back to his house.” She stifled a sob.
“What? What else did he say?”
She could barely choke out the answer. “He says next time, he wants to go 200 years.”
The technicians at Time Horizons had taken all of Sofu’s fine new clothes when he returned from his lightpulse jump, so when they went back to the Time Horizons headquarters the following week, he was forced to wear one of his older suits and a pair of black Nikes. She had not been able to find any more Japanese Sacred Lily leaves, so they’d clipped a sprig from a huge cedar tree at the Arboretum. When they reached the reception lobby, Dr. Orlov was waiting for them. He looked like a man who’d just won the lottery. Or maybe a Nobel Prize.
“Mrs. Erikson, please extend our grateful thanks to your grandfather for his bravery. We’ve only just begun to analyze the data gathered from his trip. The value and importance of this information to mankind supersedes even what scientists have been able to extrapolate from Chernobyl.”
Keiko had spent all week trying to talk Sofu out of returning, but in the end, she’d had to obey his wishes. Now, her only hope lay with the navigator.
“Dr. Orlov, I would like you to tell him that there has been a mistake. Please, tell him the machine is broken. Or that you’ve found someone else. I don’t care what you say, but I don’t want him to go.”
He gave her a puzzled look. “Why would I do that? Have you any idea the significance of your grandfather’s contributions to science? The dust on his shoes alone—.”
“I don’t care,” Keiko’s mouth trembled with the weight of her emotions. “He’s been having nightmares. He’s so upset by what he saw. He says the town is filled with angry ghosts.”
Sofu put his heavy hand on her shoulder for silence. “Two hundred years,Orlov-san,” he said. “I am ready.”
Just as before, they helped Sofu into the heavy travel vest. For this trip, Dr. Orlov explained, they added several additional measurement devices, and a digital camera. As the technicians showed him how to operate the equipment and Keiko translated the navigator’s instructions, she saw the gleam of pride return to Sofu’s weathered face.
“Now I don’t want you to worry, Mrs. Erikson. Your grandfather’s suggestion to place him at the shrine is brilliant. Those temples were really built to last. Even if people have returned to the area, they’re not likely to have torn the place down, and he’ll be as safe there as anywhere.”
Despite the heaviness of the equipment, Sofu stood straight and tall upon the platform. She shook her head. Somehow, this whole thing had gotten changed around. Sofu was no longer at peace. The angry ghosts of his ancestors truly terrified him. It was as if he believed serving the people at Time Horizons was now more important than saving his own soul. She’d tried to convince him to die in Los Angeles, but he’d refused to listen. Most of all, she hated the thought that Dr. Orlov and the scientists were using her grandfather as an experiment. They probably thought he was just some old man.
She kept her thoughts to herself.
This time, however, when the lightpulse shimmer completed, her grandfather dropped the controller and fell to his knees. He hid his face behind puffy, mottled red hands and keened softly. His walker cane was gone.
She rushed forward, but Orlov held her back so the medical technicians could treat Sofu.
“What is it? What’s wrong with him?” She twisted away from Orlov.
“Ask him!”
But Sofu answered before she could ask. “Bees,” he said.
They gave him Benadryl, and within thirty minutes, he was resting more comfortably. Keiko counted seventeen bee stings, mostly on his hands and arms.
This time the interview took much longer. She held his hand as she translated for Dr. Orlov and his team. Sofu described the changes he observed in the immediate vicinity of the temple. The landscape had become overgrown, he said; the people had not yet returned to live in the village. The sky was yellow; thick with clouds which rained down ash. In the distance, Mount Fuji had been belching noxious gouts of gas and lightning. He had been making his way around the temple when an earthquake struck, and the beehive had been knocked to the ground close to where he had fallen. Unable to get away from them, he pressed the return button when the bees began to attack.
As before, he was determined to go back.
“No, Ojiisan,” she begged tearfully. “You cannot.” His puffy, swollen face and arms bore testimony to the danger of returning. She could not bear the thought of him lying in a distant future; suffering and dying alone. He might as well be on some distant planet.
Sofu’s chin jutted forward resolutely. “One thousand years,Orlov-san,” he said. “I am ready.”
They waited for weeks for word, and when none came, Keiko began to relax. The bee stings seemed to take the starch out of Sofu, at least for a while. He slept a lot. Things at home with Dan and the kids went back to normal. Christmas passed, and then Valentine’s Day. Sufo accompanied her to the kids soccer games, and on the Tuesday mornings, they visited the LA County Arboretum.
By the end of April, his appetite began to fail.
Dr. Orlov’s assistant Brad called to say that if Mr. Yakashita was still interested in making a lightpulse leap of 1000 years, Time Horizons would be willing to send him.
That night, she tried again to reason with him. She pointed out that in a thousand years there might be nothing left of earth. What if something worse than bees happened to him? What if he was trapped there with the angry ghosts? When she suggested that Dr. Orlov was just using him as a guinea pig, he turned his back to her.
This time, she dressed in black. She brushed her long dark hair until it shone, then twisted it up into a tight chignon, holding it in place with new bobby pins. She found a little pillbox hat with a bit of veil and wore her good wool suit, even though it was May, and nobody wore mourning clothes in LA anymore. In the car on the drive over, neither one of them spoke. She’d hoped the traffic would make them late, but the universe turned against her and they arrived early.
She whipped her BMW into a spot in the visitor parking lot, stomping the brakes abruptly. He sat as a stone against her and she was ashamed. This was not the way she wanted to say good-bye.
She reached out and caressed the empty place on his lapel. “I am a stupid, stubborn woman.”
All the tension went out of him then. He took her hand and held it against his heart for a moment. “Yes.”
Someone had blown up one of the photographs Sofu had of the shrine taken during the trip 200 years into the future, had it framed, and hung on the wall of the laserpulse lab.
As the technicians helped the frail old man into his blue travel vest, she saw his eyes glisten and knew he would not be coming home with her. When Orlov spoke the countdown, Sofu winked at her, something she hadn’t seen him do since she was a little girl. The digital clock in the bottom right corner of each of the monitors said 9:23 a.m.
She held her breath.
This time, the lightpulse shimmered and Sofu was gone.
On the floor of the launch platform, the weathered blue vest lay in a jumbled heap. When the technicians opened the bulging zippered pockets, they were filled with hundreds of Sacred Lily blossoms.
NICE TIMESTREAM YOUSE GOT HERE
Lee Allred
“Say, you know what the hardest part of being in the Agency is, Vince?” Maizie asked me as she slid her little square of butter off its waxed paper backing and scraped it across her toast.
Her voice carried easily over the clatter of plates and clatter of voices in the crowded Brooklyn diner. Breakfast rush, the joint was crowded, but not so crowded I couldn’t keep watch out the window for our collar.
I didn’t answer. The dingy chrome trim in the diner was brighter than Maizie.
“Keepin’ track of things,” she said like I’d answered back anyways. She wasn’t looking for conversation, she was what they call waxin’ philosophical about the job again.
In this racket, it don’t pay to get philosophical about the job. Get in, get done, get out. There’s a reason why I’m the number one troubleshooter for the Agency and it ain’t cuz I wax any which way, philosophical nor other type wise.
“Like rememberin’ what things is called what where,” she went on. She held up another papered square of butter. “Like this here. They call it a ‘pat’ of butter here. That guy at the counter looked at me like I was some kind of creep asking for a flop of butter like a regular person.”
She waved the butter square like it offended her delicate sensibilities, not that she had any. “This ain’t no pat of butter. It’s a flop. A pat is what comes out of the other end of the cow.”
“Sure,” I said around a forkful of eggs. “Like youse know about cows. The closest youse ever came to a cow was walking past the milkman’s cart at 2 a.m.”
I bit into my own slice of toast. “So theyse call it a pat here in this neighborhood,” I said, swallowing and chasing it down with a cup of black coffee. “So what? So maybe theyse call the other end a cow flop? Who cares? You see me in an uproars just cause they got ‘scrambled eggs’ printed on the menu ‘stead of ‘stirred eggs?’ I made myself understood like, didn’t I? Got my order the way I like, didn’t I? Shaddap and eat. You’re givin’ me the pepto.”
She shadapped and ate. For two whole minutes anyways.
Now, some of my other partners have got to waxin’ philosophical about the job, and let me tell ya, brother, nothing good ever comes of it. Givin’ themselves the pepto about who just got in the White House, who just won the World Series, who just got their ugly dead political mug plastered all over the face of a coin by an Act of Congress.
Who cares?
Life goes on, don’t it?
Mugs in the Agency who worry about that kind of stuff don’t last too long, and I’m one of the reasons they don’t. I ship ’emback upstream without their paddle, they start waxin’ philosophical.
Unless of course their name is Maizie. Her, I don’t ship back.
I know what you’re thinking, and it ain’t like that. And don’t start smirking like there’s something wrong with me neither, or I’ll butter your necktie. I’m just as red-blooded as the next regular Joe.
Yeah, so it might not look it from the way I act all calm and collected and disinterested around her, but trust me, I know better than anyone else how Maizie’s put together. You’ve seen those newsreels about Our Boys At Sea and all them mighty battleships and whatnot heaving and rolling and yawing and pitching on the high seas? Well, bub, when Maizie walks down the street, you better believe it’s Naval Appreciation Day, and let me tell ya, brother, the fleet’s in.
Trust me, I know. I gotta work with her all day long. And that’s just what I do and that’s all I do.
See, I got to be the one stuck with her as my partner because the Chief he knows I’m his one guy in the Agency who’s smart enough not to sink her battleship if you catch my drift.
He knows I wouldn’t touch her with a ten foot canoodle on account of a) she’s the Chief’s daughter; and b) I gotta listen to her yammer day in, day out, all day long—you think I wanna listen to her all night, too, once I get home? And I wouldn’t be able to do nuthin’ to shut her up neither on account of c) she’s the Chief’s daughter.
So me and Maizie, we’re strictly business. I’m the Brains and the Muscle of the team, and she’s the Distraction. Boy, is she ever. Kewpie doll face. Kewpie doll voice. Kewpie doll brain. And her very own pair of Sink-The-Bismarks that no Kewpie doll nowhere has ever had.
So I sat there and just let her yammer on about this, that, and some other fool thing while I finished up my eggs and bacon. The way the Agency keeps us on the road, I don’t get many chances to eat a real breakfast in a real New York diner like a civilized person—you should see some of the joints I gotta eat at ‘cuz of this job—so I was going to enjoy this breakfast, come Maizie or highwater.
Besides, I knew this chump we was tailing was buying his own Kosher breakfast two delis up the street. No hurry. Mister Regular Routine, he was.
Anyways, I like making a collar after we’ve both had our breakfast and our morning coffee and our blood sugar is nice and level. They’re less likely to try something stupid on a full stomach, and I’m less likely to blow their fool heads off from them givin’ me the pepto.
Little touches like that is why I’m the Chief’s Number One and got the New York beat, not makin’ the rounds in, say, Racine, Indiana. Or Wisconsin. Or wherever Racine is.
So therefore on account of my advance planning, a few minutes later I’m sitting there leaning back in my chair and just finishing my fifth cup of coffee when I see our pigeon go walking past the window. I slap a silver dollar down on the table to cover the bill, grab my hat, and yank Maizie (“Hey! I ain’t finished yet, Vince!”) by the wrist and drag her out the door after him.
Like they say, time and tide don’t wait up fer no man, even if youse work for the Temporal Protection Agency an’ got all the time—and timestreams—in the world.
We followed our prize chump down two blocks and over another block to the crummy little brownstone he was rooming at.
Now, us guys in the Agency got all kinds of fancy augments embedded and gene-spliced and nano-grown and what have you inside us. Some of dese help make us stronger and faster—Maizie could benchpress Joe Louis wit’out breakin’ a sweat—and others just help us get the job done, like the gizmo we got that lets us track a time traveler by them chrono-sumpthin’s he gives off, him not being a native of the here-and-now.
That’s not even counting all the extra augments I’ve picked up over the years from here-and-there-and-then that the Agency don’t know I got (and I ain’t telling ’em I got). If youse gonna be the A-Number One, youse gotta have a hole card, ya know?
But I didn’t need all that schmanzy stuff to trail this bird. All I needed was my own eyeballs. He was wearing his fedora like he ain’t never worn a hat in his life, and also he couldn’t figure out hows to cross the street wit’out there being no streetlight. Even Maizie could spot him just by looking.
Still, we had a nice little stroll anyhows.
As far as 1940 New York Cities go, this was a pretty good one. No giant red Schicklgruber flags deckin’ the halls, no surrendering your wallet at Henry Wallace Economic Justice checkpoints, no zeppelins filled with killer bees. Just shiny new DeSotos and Hudsons honking their way down the street, ragamuffin newsboys standing on the corner hawking their papers, and brawny construction guys wolf-whistling at Maizie as she bounced past ’em in her checkered sundress .
It was a bee-you-tee-ful Brooklyn morning that promised to turn into a warm, sunny day. The Dodgers were playing this afternoon. I was ahead on my caseload, so I got thinking me and Maizie might catch the game right after this collar. Being A-Number One does have certain advantages, and mister, that ain’t hay!
So anyway, when our chump got a half block from his beige brownstone, me and Maizie sped up our pace and passed him just before he trotted up the stoop. We bustled inside, leaving him in our dust.
Now, there are good ways and bad ways to tail somebody wit’out them noticizing you. One of the best is to not be following in the first place, especially if youse know where they’re going. Get there ahead of them.
We knew exactly what apartment he was headed to thanks to the lingering chrono trail he’d left schlepping up and down the stairs the past week. We started up the rickety stairwell, floorboards creaking every step of the way, all the way up to the fifth floor. And him trailing five steps behind us, getting the pepto cause on accounts of us being so slow.
Now we wasn’t suspiciously following him, see? We wuz annoyingly blockin’ his way ahead of him like some Sunday driver and not worth a second thought five minutes later. See the difference?
Just for certainties, I nudged Maizie in the ribs with my elbow and she went into her Distraction routine. Maizie may have a peabrain the size of a dinky .22 slug, but there ain’t no finer Distracter than her when she gets going. A regular idiot savannah or whatevers deys call it.
She started yammering on like we was some newlywed couple checking out the sublet on an apartment like, and her complaining all the way up ‘bout how she liked the other joint better on accounts it was ground floor and how she wasn’t going to climb no five flights of stairs what with her being in the family way and whatnot.
Only she was describing the blessed event in terms that’d make a drunken sailor blush, all the time climbing the stairs with a wiggle in her caboose that’d be right at home on the runway of Minski’s. That’s a Maizie distraction.
