Time Travel Omnibus, page 638
“A natural thought in a new man. Old habits of the mind die hard. The fact is, we did not. It’d scarcely have been authorized anyway. Too dangerous. We can ill afford to lose more. Certainly we can’t when the record shows that our rescue attempt would be foredoomed if we made it.”
“Is there no way to get around that?”
Everard sighed. “I can’t think of any. Make your peace with fate, Tom.” He hesitated. “Can I . . . can we do anything for you?”
“No.” It came harsh out of Nomura’s throat. “Except leave me be for a while.”
“Sure.” Everard rose. “You weren’t the only person who thought a lot of her,” he reminded, and left.
When the door had closed behind him, the sound of the falls seemed to wax, grinding, grinding. Nomura stared at emptiness. The sun passed its apex and began to slide very slowly toward night.
I should have gone after her myself, at once.
And risked my life.
Why not follow her into death, then?
No. That’s senseless. Two deaths do not make a life. I couldn’t have saved her. I didn’t have the equipment or—The sane thing was to fetch help.
Only the help was denied—whether by man or by fate hardly matters, does it?—and so she went down. The stream hurled her into the gulf, she had a moment’s terror before it smashed the awareness out of her, then at the bottom it crushed her, plucked her apart, strewed the pieces of her bones across the floor of a sea that I, a youngster, will sail upon one holiday, unknowing that there is a Time Patrol or ever was a Feliz. Oh, God, I want my dust down with hers, five and a half million years from this hour!
A remote cannonade went through the air, a tremor through earth and floor. An undercut bank must have crumbled into the torrent. It was the kind of scene she would have loved to capture.
“Would have?” Nomura yelled and surged from the chair. The ground still vibrated beneath him.
“She will!”
He ought to have consulted Everard, but feared—perhaps mistakenly, in his grief and his inexperience—that he would be refused permission and sent upstairs at once.
He ought to have rested for several days, but feared that his manner would betray him. A stimulant pill must serve in place of nature.
He ought to have checked out a tractor unit, not smuggled it into the locker on his vehicle.
When he took the hopper forth, a Patrolman who saw asked where he was bound. “For a ride,” Nomura answered. The other nodded sympathetically. He might not suspect that a love had been lost, but the loss of a comrade was bad enough. Nomura was careful to get well over the northern horizon before he swung toward the seafall.
Right and left, it reached farther than he could see. Here, more than halfway down that cliff of green glass, the very curve of the planet hid its ends from him. Then as he entered the spume clouds, whiteness enfolded him, roiling and stinging.
His face shield stayed clear, but vision was ragged, upward along immensity. The helmet warded his hearing but could not stave off the storm which rattled his teeth and heart and skeleton. Winds whirled and smote, the carrier staggered, he must fight for every inch of control.
And to find the exact second—
Back and forth he leaped across time, reset the verniers, reflicked the main switch, glimpsed himself vague in the mists, and peered through them toward heaven; over and over, until abruptly he was then.
Twin gleams far above . . . He saw the one strike and go under, go down, while the other darted around until soon it ran away. Its rider had not seen him, where he lurked in the chill salt mists. His presence was not on any damned record.
He darted forward. Yet patience was upon him. He could cruise for a long piece of lifespan if need be, seeking the trice which would be his. The fear of death, even the knowing that she might be dead when he found her, were like half-remembered dreams. The elemental powers had taken him. He was a will that flew.
He hovered within a yard of the water. Gusts tried to cast him into its grip, as they had done to her. He was ready for them, danced free, returned to peer—returned through time as well as space, so that a score of him searched along the fall in that span of seconds when Feliz might be alive.
He paid his other selves no heed. They were merely stages he had gone through or must still go through.
THERE!
The dim dark shape tumbled past him, beneath the flood, on its way to destruction. He spun a control. A tractor beam locked onto the other machine. His reeled and went after it, unable to pull such a mass free of such a might.
The tide nearly had him when help came. Two vehicles, three, four, all straining together, they hauled Feliz’s loose. She sagged horribly limp in her saddle harness. He didn’t go to her at once. First he went back those few blinks in time, and back, to be her rescuer and his own.
When finally they were alone among fogs and furies, she freed and in his arms, he would have burnt a hole through the sky to get ashore where he could care for her. But she stirred, her eyes blinked open, after a minute she smiled at him. Then he wept.
Beside them, the ocean roared onward.
The sunset to which Nomura had leaped ahead was not on anybody’s record either. It turned the land golden. The falls must be afire with it. Their song resounded beneath the evening star.
Feliz propped pillows against headboard, sat straighter in the bed where she was resting, and told Everard: “If you lay charges against him, that he broke regulations or whatever male stupidity you are thinking of, I’ll also quit your bloody Patrol.”
“Oh, no.” The big man lifted a palm as if to fend off attack. “Please. You misunderstand. I only meant to say, we’re in a slightly awkward position.”
“How?” Nomura demanded, from the chair in which he sat and held Feliz’s hand. “I wasn’t under any orders not to attempt this, was I? All right, agents are supposed to safeguard their own lives if possible, as being valuable to the corps. Well, doesn’t it follow that the salvaging of a life is worthwhile too?”
“Yes. Sure.” Everard paced the floor. It thudded beneath his boots, above the drumbeat of the flood. “Nobody quarrels with success, even in a much tighter organization than ours. In fact, Tom, the initiative you showed today makes your future prospects look good, believe me.” A grin went lopsided around his pipestem. “As for an old soldier like myself, it’ll be forgiven that I was too ready to give up.” A flick of somberness: “I’ve seen so many lost beyond hope.”
He stopped in his treading, confronted them both, and stated: “But we cannot have loose ends. The fact is, her unit does not list Feliz a Rach as returning, ever.”
Their clasps tightened on each other.
Everard gave him and her a smile—haunted, nevertheless a smile—before he continued: “Don’t get scared, though. Tom, earlier you wondered why we, we ordinary humans at least, don’t keep closer track of our people. Now do you see the reason?
“Feliz a Rach never checked back into her original base. She may have visited her former home, of course, but we don’t ask officially what agents do on their furloughs.” He drew breath. “As for the rest of her career, if she should want to transfer to a different headquarters and adopt a different name, why, any officer of sufficient rank could approve that. Me, for example.
“We operate loose in the Patrol. We dare not do otherwise.”
Nomura understood, and shivered.
Feliz recalled him to the ordinary world. “But who might I become?” she wondered.
He pounced on the cue. “Well,” he said, half in laughter and half in thunder, “how about Mrs. Thomas Nomura?”
TIMETIPPING
Jack Dann
Since timetipping, everything moved differently. Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street.
Take Moishe Hodel, who was too old and fat to be climbing ladders; yet he insisted on climbing to the roof of his suburban house so that he could sit on the top of a stone-tuff church in Goreme six hundred years in the past. Instead of praying, he would sit and watch monks. He claimed that since time and space were meshuggeneh (what’s crazy in any other language?), he would search for a quick and Godly way to travel to synagogue. Let the goyim take the trains.
Of course, Paley Litwak, who was old enough to know something, knew from nothing when the world changed and everything went blip. His wife disappeared, and a new one returned in her place. A new Golde, one with fewer lines and dimples, one with starchy white hair and missing teeth.
Upon arrival all she said was, “This is almost right. You’re almost the same, Paley.
Still, you always go to shul?”
“Shul?” Litwak asked, resolving not to jump and scream and ask God for help. With all the changing, Litwak would stand straight and wait for God. “What’s a shul?”
“You mean you don’t know from shul, and yet you wear such a yarmulke on your head?” She pulled her babushka through her fingers. “A shul. A synagogue, a temple.
Do you pray?”
Litwak was not a holy man, but he could hold up his head and not be afraid to wink at God. Certainly he prayed. And in the following weeks Litwak found himself in shul more often than not—so she had an effect on him; after all, she was his wife. Where else was there to be? With God he had a one-way conversation—from Litwak’s mouth to God’s ears—but at home it was turned around. There, Litwak had no mouth, only ears.
How can you talk with a woman who thinks fornicating with other men is holy?
But Litwak was a survivor; with the rest of the world turned over and doing flip-flops, he remained the same. Not once did he trip into a different time, not even an hour did he lose or gain; and the only places he went were those he could walk to. He was the exception to the rule. The rest of the world was adrift; everyone was swimming by, blipping out of the past or future and into the present here or who-knows-where.
It was a new world. Every street was filled with commerce, every night was carnival.
Days were built out of strange faces, and nights went by so fast that Litwak remained in the synagogue just to smooth out time. But there was no time for Litwak, just services, and prayers, and holy smells.
Yet the world went on. Business almost as usual. There were still rabbis and chasids and grocers and cabalists; fat Hoffa, a congregant with a beard that would make a storybook Baal Shem jealous, even claimed that he knew a cabalist that had invented a new gemetria for foretelling everything concerning money.
“So who needs gemetria?” Litwak asked. “Go trip tomorrow and find out what’s doing.”
“Wrong,” said Hoffa as he draped his prayer shawl over his arm, waiting for a lull in the conversation to say the holy words before putting on the talis. “It does no good to go there if you can’t get back. And when you come back, everything is changed, anyway.
Who do you know that’s really returned? Look at you, you didn’t have gray hair and earlocks yesterday.”
“Then that wasn’t me you saw. Anyway, if everybody but me is tripping and tipping back and forth, in and out of the devil’s mouth, so to speak, then what time do you have to use this new gemetria?”
Hoffa paused and said, “So the world must go on. You think it stops because heaven shakes it . . .”
“You’re so sure it’s heaven?”
“. . . but you can go see the cabalist; you’re stuck in the present, you sit on one line. Go talk to him; he speaks a passable Yiddish, and his wife walks around with a bare behind.”
“So how do you know he’s there now?” asked Litwak. “They come and go. Perhaps a Neanderthal or a klezmer from the future will take his place.”
“So? If he isn’t there, what matter? At least you know he’s somewhere else. No?
Everything goes on. Nothing gets lost. Everything fits, somehow. That’s what’s important.”
It took Litwak quite some time to learn the new logic of the times, but once learned, it became an advantage—especially when his pension checks didn’t arrive. Litwak became a fair second-story man, but he robbed only according to society’s logic and his own ethical system: one-half for the shul and the rest for Litwak.
Litwak found himself spending more time on the streets than in the synagogue, but by standing still on one line he could not help but learn. He was putting the world together, seeing where it was, would be, might be, might not be. When he became confused, he used logic.
And the days passed faster, even with praying and sleeping nights in the shul for more time. Everything whirled around him. The city was a moving kaleidoscope of colors from every period of history, all melting into different costumes as the thieves and diplomats and princes and merchants strolled down the cobbled streets of Brooklyn.
With prisms for eyes, Litwak would make his way home through the crowds of slaves and serfs and commuters. Staking out fiefdoms in Brooklyn was difficult, so the slaves momentarily ran free, only to trip somewhere else where they would be again grabbed and raped and worked until they could trip again, and again and again until old logic fell apart. King’s Highway was a bad part of town. The Boys’ Club had been turned into a slave market and gallows room.
Litwak’s tiny apartment was the familiar knot at the end of the rope. Golde had changed again, but it was only a slight change. Golde kept changing as her different time lines met in Litwak’s kitchen, and bedroom. A few Goldes he liked, but change was gradual, and Goldes tended to run down. So for every sizzling Golde with blond-dyed hair, he suffered fifty or a thousand Goldes with missing teeth and croaking voices.
The latest Golde had somehow managed to buy a parakeet, which turned into a blue jay, a parrot with red feathers, and an ostrich, which provided supper. Litwak had discovered that smaller animals usually timetipped at a faster rate than men and larger animals; perhaps, he thought, it was a question of metabolism. Golde killed the ostrich before something else could take its place. Using logic and compassion, Litwak blessed it to make it kosher—the rabbi was not to be found, and he was a new chasid (imagine) who didn’t know Talmud from soap opera; worse yet, he read Hebrew with a Brooklyn twang, not unheard of with such new rabbis. Better that Litwak bless his own meat; let the rabbi bless goyish food.
Another meal with another Golde, this one dark-skinned and pimply, overweight and sagging, but her eyes were the color of the ocean seen from an airplane on a sunny day.
Litwak could not concentrate on food. There was a pitched battle going on two streets away, and he was worried about getting to shul.
“More soup?” Golde asked.
She had pretty hands, too, Litwak thought. “No, thank you,” he said before she disappeared.
In her place stood a squat peasant woman, hands and ragged dress still stained with rich, black soil. She didn’t scream or dash around or attack Litwak; she just wrung her hands and scratched her crotch. She spoke the same language, in the same low tones, that Litwak had listened to for several nights in shul. An Egyptian named Rhampsinitus had found his way into the synagogue, thinking it was a barbarian temple for Baiti, the clown god.
“Baiti?” she asked, her voice rising. “Baiti,” she answered, convinced.
So here it ends, thought Litwak, just beginning to recognize the rancid odor in the room as sweat.
Litwak ran out of the apartment before she turned into something more terrible.
Changes, he had expected. Things change and shift—that’s logic. But not so fast. He had slowed down natural processes in the past (he thought), but now he was slipping, sinking like the rest of them. A bald Samson adrift on a raft.
Time isn’t a river, Litwak thought as he pushed his way through larger crowds, all adrift, shouting, laughing, blipping in and out, as old men were replaced by ancient monsters and fears; but dinosaurs occupied too much space, always slipped, and could enter the present world only in torn pieces—a great ornithischian wing, a stegosaurian tail with two pairs of bony spikes, or, perhaps, a four-foot-long tyrannosaurus head.
Time is a hole, Litwak thought. He could feel its pull.
Whenever Litwak touched a stranger—someone who had come too many miles and minutes to recognize where he was—there was a pop and a skip, and the person disappeared. Litwak had disposed of three gilded ladies, an archdeacon, a birdman, a knight with Norman casque, and several Sumerian serfs in this manner. He almost tripped over a young boy who was doggedly trying to extract a tooth from the neatly severed head of a tyrannosaurus.
The boy grabbed Litwak’s leg, racing a few steps on his knees to do so, and bit him.
Screaming in pain, Litwak pulled his leg away, felt an unfamiliar pop, and found the synagogue closer than he had remembered. But this wasn’t his shul; it was a cathedral, a caricature of his beloved synagogue.
“Catch him,” shouted the boy with an accent so thick that Litwak could barely make out what he said. “He’s the thief who steals from the shul.”
“Gevalt, this is the wrong place,” Litwak said, running toward the cathedral.
A few hands reached for him, but then he was inside. There, in God’s salon, everything was, would be, and had to be the same: large clerestory windows; double aisles for Thursday processions; radiating chapels modeled after Amiens 1247; and nave, choir, and towers, all styled to fit the stringent requirements of halakic law.
Over the altar, just above the holy ark, hung a bronze plate representing the egg of Khumu, who created the substance of the world on a potter’s wheel. And standing on the plush pulpit, his square face buried in a prayer book, was Rabbi Rhampsinitus.
“Holy, holy, holy,” he intoned. Twenty-five old men sang and wailed and prayed on cue. They all had beards and earlocks and wore conical caps and prayer garments.
“That’s him,” shouted the boy.
Litwak ran to the pulpit and kissed the holy book.
“Thief, robber, purloiner, depredator.”
“Enough,” Rhampsinitus said. “The service is concluded. God has not winked his eye.
