Time Travel Omnibus, page 536
He knew what to do.
First he went to the bank and cleared the account. With what he had had in his pockets, he now had three hundred forty-seven dollars and seventy-one cents. Not much, but enough. There was a little more to come. He was about to be fired.
He didn’t go to see Mr. Kynock of Wheatie Puffets. And when he entered the Motet Advertising offices at twelve-ten, Mr. Carswell was waiting, fuming.
“Player, Kynoch just called,” said Carswell. “It seems you didn’t go to see him.”
“No,” said Gene laconically.
“Why not?”
“I had more important things to do.”
Carswell boiled over. “Player,” he said furiously, “you’re fired.”
“Thank you,” said George gratefully. That was even shorter than usual.
When he had collected his things—and his pay-check—Carswell was waiting in the outer office. He had cooled down considerably. “Perhaps I was a little hasty, Player,” he said. “I’ve no doubt you have an explanation. We don’t really want to lose you. You have a certain touch with advertising copy—”
“Thank you,” said Gene again, automatically, sidestepped him and walked out.
If you wanted them, they didn’t want you. And vice versa. Gene was philosophizing about this as he hit the sidewalk again, and felt the blast of the midday heat.
The first time, and to a lesser extent the second time, he had wanted to, keep his job. He had pleaded with Carswell, who had been adamant. Subsequently Gene had wanted nothing more than to be fired—and Carswell had pleaded with him.
Perhaps there was a pointer there to the way he should act with Belinda. He thought about that over lunch.
No point in trying to see her now. She’d already met Harry Scott—he could never get to her before that vitally important point in her life, and his.
Harry Scott was a friend of Genes, and first time round Gene had met Belinda only after they were married. Subsequently Gene had arranged not strictly chance meetings in all sorts of circumstances and places. Going to Canada, where Belinda was now, was a complete flop. Belinda’s aunt was with her, the aunt always took an instant dislike to Gene, and the results were disastrous.
No, Gene had found a strange, improbable, dangerous and apparently wildly coincidental way of meeting Belinda the day she returned from Canada in a few weeks’ time, and since it had worked effectively several times already there seemed no reason why it shouldn’t work again. There was never anything wrong then. It was later that Belinda was so much in love with Harry that there was no shifting her.
This time he’d have to make better use of that first meeting. If he failed then, there was never any chance later.
Meantime, he had work to do. He needed money, like everybody else. It was so hot, however, that he was reluctant to go to his tiny, stuffy room and get busy. He lingered in the park after lunch, as he had never done before—and right away the sequence of events began to change.
His apartment, if you could call it that, overlooked the park. He could be hard at work in five minutes. He knew he ought to get started, but for a few moments he sat in the sun, gathering Ills strength for the long, concentrated effort he would have to make.
And he saw the blonde.
She should be in a sweater and shorts instead of that hideous ankle-length gray skirt and black bodice. Funny her being alone. Even in 1975 a girl like that ought to pick up men like flies.
Having his whole course so completely preordained, knowing exactly what was going to happen, he was somehow freer, more reckless, less self-conscious than he would otherwise have been. He stopped beside her.
“You didn’t drop your handkerchief,” he said.
She pretended he didn’t exist. Now that he was close to her, he saw she was very young, probably still in her teens. She was also even more pretty than he had thought.
“Why didn’t you drop your handkerchief?” he pursued.
“I couldn’t,” she said rather nervously. “I haven’t got one.”
“You mean if you had one, you’d certainly have dropped it?”
“I don’t mean anything of the kind!” she retorted hotly. “Now if you’ll please—”
“Thank you,” he said. “I will.” He sat down beside her.
Though flustered, she couldn’t help very nearly smiling. Promising, he decided. Funny how the fact that there was only one woman in the world for you made things go so much more smoothly with other women. Perhaps it was like the Motet Advertising job. You could get anything at all, provided you didn’t want it.
“You would be pretty,” he told her.
That got her. She turned a cute little nose to him. “If what?”
“If you wore something feminine.”
She turned the cute little nose in the air.
“My name is Gene Player and I’m a writer,” he said.
No answer.
He didn’t really care, and he had work to do anyway. He got up.
“I’m Doreen Barrett,” she said quickly.
He sat down again.
This didn’t count, of course. Belinda was the only woman who mattered. He’d been in love with her for ninety-nine years—11 x 9.
At the same time he was beginning to be fatalistic. If the same thing happened with Belinda as always did happen with Belinda, there was no harm in having somebody like Doreen Barrett as a second string.
When in the early evening he got to work, he tore into it to make up for lost time.
He rolled a sheet of paper into the ancient machine, banged out “One Face for Heaven, a novel by Gene Player,” and proceeded to rush through pages at an average rate of one every ten minutes. When he stopped at 3 a.m. he had finished sixty pages, about 15,000 words.
If anything, One Face for Heaven was better every time he wrote it. The dross dropped out; only the really good sections were written word for word. Every time it was stronger, surer. The curious thing was that it always sold almost exactly the same number of copies, despite the minor changes each time which in total should have been considerable.
Originally he had written One Face for Heaven some years after this, after many months of indifferent success. The first time he had committed it to paper in 1975 he had done so with misgivings, knowing that a book which was a tremendous success could easily be a flop ten years before or ten years after. Particularly a book like One Face for Heaven, the sexy passages of which might kill the novel stone dead in the censorious mid-seventies.
However, he needn’t have worried. In the mid-seventies, as in the Victorian age, public morality was balanced by private immorality. Everybody would censure One Face for Heaven, but everybody would read it.
The next day he wrote another 15,000 words before staggering out to see Doreen in the park again. She wasn’t there, despite her promise. The hell with her. He went back and wrote another 10,000.
Early next morning, haggard and unshaved, he dug in again. At lunchtime he suddenly noticed how hot and tired and limp he was. He was soaked in sweat.
Without shaving, washing or changing his clothes, he went out in the park again, merely for fresh air.
And Doreen was there waiting for him, pouring out apologies for not being there the day before after promising she would be . . .
She had been so eager to explain that she hadn’t looked at him properly, but she soon noticed the state he was in. “Why . . .
what’s the matter?” she said. “You look as if you’d been through hell.”
“I have,” said Gene. “Because you weren’t here yesterday.”
She was very young. “Do you really care as much as that, Gene? I didn’t know . . .” But she was also intelligent. “You’re ribbing me,” she said indignantly. “It was nothing to do with me.”
He grinned at her. She was sweet.
“What have you really been doing?” she asked.
“Writing a book. I’ve done 40,000 words since I saw you.”
“Is it worth working so hard on it?”
“Oh yes. It’s a best-seller.”
“How do you know?”
“Call it Faith.”
She was puzzled, but impressed. She was no more than eighteen, and Gene was beginning to wish he had never spoken to her. She had obviously stayed fresh and frank and innocent because she had never been in love and had had no trouble in dealing with men whom she didn’t love. But already she was falling in love with Gene, and that was a new complication.
He had never lost Belinda because some other girl was in love with him, but there had to be a first time for everything.
Of course, if he fared with Belinda as he always had, Doreen needn’t break her heart. Once he had duly lost Belinda he’d be prepared to turn without much enthusiasm to some other girl, who might as well be Doreen.
But this time he wasn’t going to lose Belinda, and that was why this wasn’t fair to Doreen.
Belinda’s love for Harry Scott couldn’t be an immutable. Gene refused even to consider the possibility.
Immutables . . . nobody knew quite what they were or what caused them. They were things which just had to happen, however they happened.
There was the atomic explosion in Pittsburg in 1981. After it had happened, a technician was sent back a few days to fix it. It had happened in one universe and couldn’t be avoided there. But in all other universes it could.
It was not surprising that the technician who volunteered to go was a man whose wife and family had been killed in the explosion.
He saved his wife and family, but the explosion still happened. It happened in all the universes Gene knew, and he was something of an expert on universes. Though the effects of the disaster could be limited, and were, it nevertheless happened—always.
There was a lesser immutable that Gene happened to know about.
First time round he’d been at a heavyweight title fight in which Frank Bolsey knocked out Fats Homeier in the seventh. Second time round he didn’t bother to go, since he knew what would happen.
On that occasion Bolsey beat Homeier on points over fifteen rounds.
Gene didn’t think much about this at the time, but was sufficiently interested to have a ringside seat the third time round. That time Homeier battered Bolsey all round the ring until the ninth round, when suddenly Bolsey won on a knock-out—his first real punch.
Gene had found since then that this fight, which was quite obviously not fixed, must be another of these strange immutables. Anything could happen in it. Homeier could be an obvious winner nine tenths of the way or Bolsey could ride easily through it—but whatever happened, Bolsey had to win.
Knowing all this, Gene stubbornly refused to believe that there was anything immutable about Belinda’s love for Harry Scott.
This time the immutable was going to be mutated.
And that was why he felt guilty about Doreen.
By the next time he saw Doreen he had finished well over a hundred thousand words.
She worked in an office which closed for two hours at lunchtime, and as she merely pecked for fifteen minutes or so, this left her a lot of time to spend in the park.
By now there wasn’t the slightest doubt of it—she was in love with him. Being a well-brought-up girl, she wouldn’t invite him to invite her to do something more than just see her in the park for an hour or so each day, but she did all that a well-brought-up girl could do to make herself as attractive as possible to him. In 1975, when clothes weren’t allowed to play their part, this wasn’t much. She might have a figure like Aphrodite, or like Aphrodite’s grandmother, for all that Gene knew.
In any case, he was a dedicated man. Apart from washing and shaving before going out to meet Doreen, eating and sleeping when he remembered, he was spending twenty-four hours a day at his typewriter. He had to—publishers take their time about handing over money for a novel, and also Gene wanted the book off his hands before Belinda got back from Canada.
He preferred doing it that way. Normally a novelist has to take time off to revise and think, or he may find himself having to throw away big chunks of what he has written. But Gene knew his story, characters, everything. He also knew that One Face for Heaven was better than ever this time, which helped.
Ignoring Doreen’s wistful hints, he went back to work. When it was quite late, he was so near completing the book that he decided to go straight on, and around 7 a.m. he banged The End, and thankfully flopped in bed.
When he opened his gummy eyes Doreen was bending over him. He saw with acute surprise that even with dresses the way they were, a pretty girl of eighteen bending over far enough could be quite sensational.
He didn’t sit up. “How did you get up here?” he said indistinctly. “Did you have to shoot Mrs. Schukelmacher?”
“Your landlady? I saw her go out. Gene, this place is filthy. You’ve been living like a pig.”
“I know,” he sighed. He sat up, wincing; Doreen wasn’t bending over him any more. His throat was raw from too much smoking, his head ached, and he had a whale of a hangover, which was unfair as he had drunk nothing alcoholic since 1986.
Doreen threw open the window to let out the blue-gray fog in the room. The temperature must have been close to a hundred, the air was used up, and it was no wonder Gene had a tongue four sizes too big and a skull six sizes too small.
“I came when I didn’t see you in the park,” Doreen said. “I was afraid you . . .”
She turned away quickly and started picking things up.
Gene got to his feet, swaying. He remembered something. “This is Saturday,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You don’t work at all today.”
“No.”
“You usually go home for the weekends.”
She didn’t reply. She kept her face turned away from him.
It was too late to retreat. She had said she’d see him in the park as usual, and he saw now that she had remained in town specially to do so. He hadn’t realized that the day before, being too soaked in One Face for Heaven to notice anything.
He knew that if he said he had work to do, she’d go away meekly, disappointed and hurt but bravely concealing it. Trying hard to think rationally, he decided it would be a lot better if she did.
Yet if he sent her away he’d feel a heel. If he sent her away he’d be a heel. Also a fool.
“Doreen,” he said, “let’s leave this place exactly as it is, go out in the country, swim, laze in the sun, maybe dance in the evening.” The thought of swimming made him shudder, but he knew it would make a new man of him. That would be all to the good, too, for the one he was was shot.
Doreen’s eyes were shining.
“Wonderful, Gene,—but—what about your book?”
He picked up the pile of sheets and started to knock them into a neat oblong. “Finished,” he said thankfully. “I ought to check it over, cut out anachronisms, but what the hell. They’ll like it as it is, and all that can be done afterwards.”
He started clumsily wrapping the fat pile of quarto paper in brown paper.
“Let me do that,” said Doreen quickly.
“With pleasure.”
While she did so he had a quick shower and put on his lightest clothes. He didn’t eat anything, merely washed out his mouth. When he was good and hungry he’d eat.
They left the gloomy rooming-house and he mailed the typescript. Then, recklessly, he hired an old car and drove Doreen to the apartment she shared with another girl.
Before she went in, she hesitated. “Were you serious about swimming, Gene?” she asked.
“Sure, why?”
“Oh, nothing.” But still she hesitated.
“What’s the matter? Can’t you swim?”
“Yes, but . . . my costume isn’t . . . it’s old, and . . .”
He got it “I promise not to be shocked,” he said kindly.
She wasn’t sure how to take that, and went slowly up the steps while he waited in the car.
They drove far enough for Gene to become ravenous and then stopped at a drive-in for lunch. They picked up a packed lunch while they were there, and drove on until they found an uncommercialized lake.
It was so uncommercialized that in getting to it the car got stuck and had to be left blocking the alleged road. Nobody was at the lake when they walked the rest of the way, and nobody could get there later with the car blocking the road.
When Doreen emerged reluctantly from the bushes in a white two-piece swimsuit which might have fitted her at fifteen but was pleasingly inadequate now, Gene’s mind reeled. For all of a couple of seconds he forgot Belinda.
The fact that he hadn’t previously seen even her arms or ankles, let alone the gorgeous rest of her, made the impact nearly fatal. However, he rallied.
“Honey,” he said weakly, “get into the water before I lose control of myself.”
She gulped and said recklessly: “I don’t think I’d run screaming if you did, Gene.”
Gene Player fought a short but violent battle with himself. He was careful not to look at Doreen as he did so, because if he had, there would have been no battle.
She was in love for the first time, and like everybody in love for the first time, she was ready to throw everything out of the window. If it weren’t for Belinda . . .
He won his battle. “Let’s swim,” he said.
Afterwards, when they lay in the sun, he told Doreen about his flashback. He didn’t think it necessary to tell her he’d done it nine times.
She wasn’t incredulous. She’d heard about it.
“It really works?” she said. “You’ve come back from the year 1986?”
“Not exactly. I’ve never really left 1975. It’s just that I know what happened in the next eleven years in another universe—not this one.”
Her eyes searched his, puzzled. She was wondering what this had to do with her, what effect it had on her relations with Gene.
He told her about the novel, that he knew it would be an enormous success.
“Why don’t you just bet on horses?” she asked. “Or on the market? Or—”
