Time Travel Omnibus, page 535
1030-VI-3 April 1963-Cleveland, Ohio-Apex Bldg: “Hey!” he repeated. “Take this damn thing off!”
“Sorry,” I apologized and did so, stuffed the net into the case, closed it. “You said you wanted to find him.”
“But—you said that was a time machine!”
I pointed out a window. “Does that look like November? Or New York?” While he was gawking at new buds and spring weather, I reopened the case, took out a packet of hundred-dollar bills, checked that the numbers and signatures were compatible with 1963. The Temporal Bureau doesn’t care how much you spend (it costs nothing) but they don’t like unnecessary anachronisms. Too many mistakes, and a general court-martial will exile you for a year in a nasty period, say 1974 with its strict rationing and forced labor. I never make such mistakes; the money was okay.
He turned around and said, “What happened?”
“He’s here. Go outside and take him. Here’s expense money.” I shoved it at him and added, “Settle him, then I’ll pick you up.”
Hundred-dollar bills have a hypnotic effect on a person not used to them. He was thumbing them unbelievingly as I eased him into the hall, locked him out. The next jump was easy, a small shift in era.
7100-VI-10 March 1964-Cleveland-Apex Bldg:There was a notice under the door saying that my lease expired next week; otherwise the room looked as it had a moment before. Outside, trees were bare and snow threatened; I hurried, stopping only for contemporary money and a coat, hat, and topcoat I had left there when I leased the room. I hired a car, went to the hospital. It took twenty minutes to bore the nursery attendant to the point where I could swipe the baby without being noticed. We went back to the Apex Building. This dial setting was more involved, as the building did not yet exist in 1945. But I had precalculated it.
0100-VI-20 Sept. 1945-Cleveland-Skyview Motel: Field kit, baby, and I arrived in a motel outside town. Earlier I had registered as—“Gregory Johnson, Warren, Ohio”, so we arrived in a room with curtains closed, windows locked, and doors bolted, and the floor cleared to allow for waver as the machine hunts. You can get a nasty bruise from a chair where it shouldn’t be—not the chair, of course, but backlash from the field. No trouble. Jane was sleeping soundly; I carried her out, put her in a grocery box on the seat of a car I had provided earlier, drove to the orphanage, put her on the steps, drove two blocks to a service station (the petroleum-products sort) and phoned the orphanage, drove back in time to see them taking the box inside, kept going and abandoned the car near the motel—walked to it and jumped forward to the Apex Building in 1963.
2200-VI-24 April 1963-Cleveland-Apex Bldg: I had cut the time rather fine—temporal accuracy depends on span, except on return to zero. If I had it right, Jane was discovering, out in the park this balmy spring night, that she wasn’t quite as “nice” a girl as she had thought. I grabbed a taxi to the home of those skinflints, had the hackie wait around a comer while I lurked in shadows.
Presently, I spotted them down the street, arms around each other. He took her up on the porch and made a long job of kissing her good-night—longer than I thought. Then she went in and he came down the walk, turned away. I slid into step and hooked an arm in his.
“That’s all, son,” I announced quietly. “I’m back to pick you up.”
“You!” He gasped and caught his breath.
“Me. Now you know who he is—and after you think it over you’ll know who you are—and if you think hard enough, you’ll figure out who the baby is—and who I am.”
He didn’t answer, he was badly shaken. It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself. I took him to the Apex Building and we jumped again.
2300-VII-12 Aug. 1985-Sub Rockies Base: I woke the duty sergeant, showed my I.D., told the sergeant to bed my companion down with a happy pill and recruit him in the morning. The sergeant looked sour, but rank is rank, regardless of era; he did what I said—thinking, no doubt, that the next time we met he might be the colonel and I the sergeant. Which can happen in our corps.
“What name?” he asked. I wrote it out. He raised his eyebrows. “Like so, eh? Hmm—”
“You just do your job, Sergeant.” I turned to my companion.
“Son, your troubles are over. You’re about to start the best job a man ever held—and you’ll do well. I know.”
“That you will!” agreed the sergeant.
“Look at me—born in 1917—still around, still young, still enjoying life.”
I went back to the jump room, set everything on preselected zero.
2301-V-7 Nov. 1970-NYC-“Pop’s Place”: I came out of the storeroom carrying a fifth of Drambuie to account for the minute I had been gone. My assistant was arguing with the customer who had been playing I’m My Own Grandpaw! I said, “Oh, let him play it, then unplug it.” I was very tired. It’s rough, but somebody must do it, and it’s very hard to recruit anyone in the later years, since the Mistake of 1972. Can you think of a better source than to pick people all fouled up where they are and give them well-paid, interesting (even though dangerous) work in a necessary cause? Everybody knows now why the Fizzle War of 1963 fizzled. The bomb with New York’s number on it didn’t go off, a hundred other things didn’t go as planned—all arranged by the likes of me.
But not the Mistake of ’72; that one is not our fault—and can’t be undone; there’s no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn’t, now and forever amen. But there won’t be another like it; an order dated 1992 takes precedence any year.
I closed five minutes early, leaving a letter in the cash register telling my day manager that I was accepting his offer to buy me out, to see my lawyer as I was leaving on a long vacation. The Bureau might or might not pick up his payments, but they want things left tidy. I went to the room in the back of the storeroom and forward to 1993.
2200-VII-12 Jan 1993-Sub Rockies Annex-HQ Temporal DOL: I checked in with the duty officer and went to my quarters, intending to sleep for a week. I had fetched the bottle we bet (after all, I won it) and took a drink before I wrote my report. It tasted foul, and I wondered why I had ever liked Old Underwear. But it was better than nothing; I don’t like to be cold sober, I think too much. But I don’t really hit the bottle either; other people have snakes—I have people.
I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau—counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn’t I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting. I dropped both in the slot and headed for bed. My eye fell on The By-Laws of Time over my bed:
Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.
If at Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.
A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.
It Is Earlier When You Think.
Ancestors Are Just People.
Even Jove Nods.
They didn’t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit; thirty subjective-years of time-jumping wears you down. I undressed, and when I got down to the hide I looked at my belly. A Cesarean leaves a big scar, but I’m so hairy now that I don’t notice it unless I look for it.
Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.
The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from . . . but where did all you zombies come from?
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.
You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.
I miss you dreadfully!
TENTH TIME ROUND
J.T. McIntosh
At the Second Chance building you could—if you were rich enough—buy your way into a younger you in another, similar universe. There you could be healthy again, in love again, hopeful again. Of course, you could also suffer the special pain of failing again . . .
HAVING SAID GOODBY TO THE LAST of his friends, Gene Player took a cab to the Second Chance building; as far as his particular friends went, he was now dead. They’d never see him again—not in this universe.
He would see them again, of course . . .
The taxi-driver stared at his tip. “Maybe I should keep my big mouth shut,” he said, “but I couldn’t sleep nights. This is five thousand dollars, Bud.”
For answer Gene pointed at the Second Chance building.
“Oh,” said the cabbie. “I get it All the same, ain’t you got anybody to leave it to?”
“No,” said Gene.
He’d given money to such of his friends as he thought needed it and would be better off with it. He’d left some to charity. The rest was to go to Belinda—even if she was Mrs. Harry Scott.
He paid no attention to the big display ads in the lobbies of the vast Second Chance building. He’d seen them before, in nine similar but slightly different universes. He paid still less to the hesitant, worried, uncertain people who were looking at the displays, biting their nails, taking a step back and two forward, or vice versa.
It was a big decision, the first time. If you were at all successful in life at forty, fifty, sixty, the glorious thought of being young again, strong, healthy and probably in love, was considerably tempered by the consideration that you’d be pushed around again, that you’d have to get up at seven and work hard all day for less than a tenth of what you made now, that you’d have to go through this or that operation again, that you’d have to see your father and mother die again . . .
Besides, there was no guarantee that you’d be successful the second time. Weakened by success, you might not work as hard. Or you might make a mistake you’d avoided before.
You could do better with your life, or you could do worse.
It was the failures in life who wanted a second chance, and they were about eighty-five per cent likely to achieve the same failure. Not many of them got the opportunity-failures didn’t have the money for a flashback.
Merely because he happened to see a visiphone booth vacant and open, Gene suddenly thought of calling Belinda. It was a purely spontaneous idea—he hadn’t said goodby to her and hadn’t intended to.
However, before he had consciously made up his mind he was in the booth and dialling Belinda’s number.
Her face faded in on the screen and assumed surprise. “Why, Gene,” she said. “You promised—”
“I’m at the Second Chance building,” he said. “I’m going back to 1975.”
Her eyes softened. She didn’t say anything.
In her thirties, Belinda Scott was lovelier than she had been in her twenties, because she was that type of woman. She had always been magnificent, but her magnificence sat more gracefully on her maturity than on her youth.
“You won’t be seeing me again,” Gene said. “But I’ll be seeing you.”
There was affection in her eyes, but not love. Never love.
“Gene,” she said quietly, “can’t you just accept the fact that for me it must always be Harry?”
“Suppose Harry were dead? Suppose I killed him?”
She shook her head, smiling. “You wouldn’t do that, Gene.”
“No,” he said heavily. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Good luck, Gene,” she said, and her warm smile faded as he cut the connection.
He left the booth and made his way upstairs. He knew exactly where to go. Pethick’s secretary was a different one this time. He wondered what had happened to the honey-blonde, wondered what she was doing instead of being Pethick’s secretary.
Pethick was always the same. He didn’t know Gene; that didn’t matter.
Pethick was a little round duck of a man, an egg over a balloon over two sad little overworked legs. He came forward with his hand outstretched.
“Mr. Player?” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve read all your books.”
The first time Gene had been flattered, had talked about his novels and found out that Pethick really had read them all. Since that time, he had not bothered.
“Frankly, Mr. Player,” Pethick said, “though I’m glad as a director of Second Chance Incorporated that you’re considering flashback, I’m sorry as a reader.”
“Thank you,” said Gene automatically. Even sincere things sounded pretty thin the ninth time around. “But I’m not considering it. I’ve already considered. I’m going.”
“There are certain things I have to tell you—”
“I know them. I’ve done it before.”
“Oh.” Pethick was interested. “Have you met me in other universes?”
“Always.”
“Always? How often—”
“Nine times. This is the tenth.”
Pethick looked startled. “And you come back here every time? You must have a very good reason—”
“I have.”
“Mr. Player, if you’re trying to change something and have failed eight or nine times, there must be a strong possibility that you’re up against a buttressed situation, what we call an immutable. In that case—”
“I know about that. It’s my worry.”
“Of course, but—”
“I want to go back to June 3, 1975.”
“That’s the very first day we can reach,” said Pethick, struck by the coincidence. “And it’s only this week we’ve been allowed to extend flashback as far as that.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
“You’ve waited till 1986 to be able to go back to 1975?”
“Yes.”
Pethick was quite excited over all this. Gene Player was his most interesting client for a long time.
“Does it always work exactly as planned?” he asked. “Do you always land exactly—”
“Eleven-twenty, Tuesday, June 3, 1975. It’s always raining and I always get soaked. I wasn’t wearing a raincoat that day.”
“Perhaps we could make it a little later in the day, say—”
“Please, Mr. Pethick. I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve already been through something very like this conversation nine times already.”
“Of course, Mr. Player.”
“Then could we cut the cackle and get to business?”
Pethick was hurt, as usual. Few things changed as little from universe to universe as Pethick did. From the moment of flashback you were doing, thinking, saying different things and creating a new world. That didn’t matter to the one you’d just left; it went on happily without you. The one you’d entered, or re-entered, was another matter. Within days you could have been the cause of some remarkable changes.
There were, however, a few things, some big, some small, some important, some unimportant, which didn’t change. Which couldn’t be changed.
The immutables.
They didn’t bother with a medical; this body was going to be as good as dead within seconds anyway.
It wasn’t time-travel, exactly. Nothing travelled except consciousness and memory. Which was why nobody could ever take any money.
Your consciousness and memory were put back into the you of another universe, at any time between June 3, 1975, when the whole business started, and the current date. In Gene’s case that was February 9, 1986.
Naturally there wouldn’t be any point in this unless you knew about it. Gene would know exactly what he knew as of February 9, 1986, plus what he had known on June 3, 1975. It would be quite a jolt for the 1975 Gene Player, but Gene knew he could take it.
Gene paid no attention to the technical side; this was an old story.
Pethick had been flabbergasted when he produced a check for $191,732, the exact fee with all dues and extras and tax. That never changed either.
They warned him that it was just about to happen, and he nodded. He knew he was exasperating everybody by being so casual about it all . . .
He was in a city street, running for shelter in a sudden shower.
The brain and body belonged to a Gene Player who was twenty-six, not thirty-seven, and though he tried to take over with his 1986 mind, the shock was so great that he stumbled and fell headlong.
By the time he’d picked himself up, he was already soaked, and shelter no longer mattered so much. People huddling in doorways stared at him curiously.
It wouldn’t occur to any of them what had happened, because though some of them must have heard about flashback, due to operate from that day, hardly anybody believed it yet.
The rain stopped abruptly, very much to Gene’s surprise. His arrival couldn’t possibly have any immediate effect on the weather. He glanced at his watch and saw it was eleven-forty-one. Twenty-one minutes later than usual.
If Pethick had to fiddle with his time of arrival, he might have made it five minutes later, after the rain was off.
The sun blazed and the streets steamed. The hordes emerged from the doorways and clacked along the sidewalks.
The 1975 Gene was marvelling incredulously, but as usual it was the 1986 Gene who was really in control. Within an hour or two they’d have merged completely.
People were always the same, but fashion was always a momentary surprise. It seemed impossible that the Twentieth Century could include a phase of super-modesty, yet here it was, right at its peak. In 1975, city councils were stopping theatres from showing movies more than two years old, be cause of the shocking depravity of feminine dress before 1973. Girls of twenty were hotly denying that at seventeen they had worn shorts and frequently had left their shoulders bare.
It was a brief, curious phase and would last, Gene remembered, just six more months before fashion started to swing towards the salaciousness of the early eighties and the comparatively innocent nudity of the middle eighties, if the swing went as far as it had done in run six.
Drab colors went with the repressive clothes, naturally—dark blues and browns, grays, blacks, bottle-greens. Nobody, but nobody, wore red.
Gene shook off his surprise. He knew all about 1975 and its superficial drabness. It was a shock merely as it is a shock to see an old photograph.
