Time Travel Omnibus, page 674
Young Tom had been killed in the Baedaker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2006, the year before they blew up St. Paul’s.
I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of human kindness. They think of everything.
Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in hospital next day; and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It seems to me that perhaps Langby is.
January 3—I went to see Dun worthy today. I don’t know what I intended to say—some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve in the firewatch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.
But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright image of St. Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry that I broke your glasses, sir.”
“How did you like St. Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.
“I loved it, sir,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”
Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul’s at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.
SEASONS OUT OF TIME
Alex Stewart
He stood in the doorway for a moment, surveying the bar, while the chill autumn mist pushed impatiently past him. The barmaid shivered. “Well, either come in or go out.”
The door swung to behind him, while his eyes flickered round the room.
Handpumps. Dark, polished wood. Horsebrasses flickered in the firelight. He approached the bar. “Quiet in here tonight.”
The barmaid was staring at his clothes. She looked up swiftly, hiding her embarrassment.
“There’s an op on tonight.” She bit her lip, glancing at one of the posters on the wall. Careless talk costs lives. The man smiled.
“I heard them going over. Quite a noise.” He turned, meeting the eyes of the girl across the room. She quirked her mouth in greeting, and raised an empty glass. He turned back to the bar, and ordered drinks. “One and eleven, please.”
He rummaged in the pocket of his windcheater, pulling out a handful of change. Sesterces. Some Jacobean farthings. Half a crown. He checked the date. Nineteen thirty-eight. That’d do. He picked up his change and the glasses, and approached the corner table.
“The usual all right?” He eased his rucksack to the floor. The girl took her drink.
“Fine. Any news?”
“Of the others?” He sank gratefully into the chair. “Not a lot. I ran into Dieter a while back.”
She nodded.
“Me too. He said he’d met you. Rome, wasn’t it?”
“Just outside it. You?”
“Paris. Eighteen sixties. It rained.”
“Anyone else?” He sipped his drink. The girl shook her head.
“How about you?”
“Only Chen. We saw The Maltese Falcon. It passed the time.”
“Sounds an interesting place.”
He shrugged.
“Middle America somewhere. God knows the date.”
She pushed her hat aside, making room for her drink on the tabletop.
“I thought I saw Karen once. But I slipped again.”
“It happens.” He drained the glass. “Another?”
She shook her head.
“I’m all right for the moment.”
He returned to the bar.
“Same again please, love.”
The barmaid filled the order, trying not to stare at him again. She couldn’t, so she glanced at the girl he was with. Then she turned away, quickly. She wasn’t a Wren after all. Two of a kind, all right. . . .
She glanced up at the man again, meeting his eyes for the first time, and the smile congealed on her lips. Then he smiled back, and took the drink.
She remembered his eyes for a long time afterwards.
“It’s getting to you, isn’t it?”
“What?” He looked up.
“You’ve been staring at nothing for the last five minutes.”
He shrugged.
“I’m tired, that’s all.”
“We all are, Mike. Tired and depressed.” The girl shook her head. “But you can’t let it get to you. Or you’ll go straight round the loop.”
He shrugged again.
“It’s escape of a sort.”
“It’s not, Mike, believe me.” She leaned across the table. “Didn’t Dieter tell you?”
“About Karen?” He nodded. “I half expected it, to be honest. When you saw her. . . .”
“I said I thought it was her.” She shivered. “I was actually glad to slip.”
“She was always unstable. Even before, I think.” He drank again.
“Dieter said she tried to cut her wrists. When that didn’t work, she just snapped.” She drained the glass. “Immortality’s a pain.”
“It’s just the futility of it that gets to me.” She toyed with her empty glass. “Never being able to do anything.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” He drank. She watched him carefully.
“Something’s upset you. hasn’t it?”
“Ten out of ten. You must have been great on the beat.”
“I was. What happened?”
“Well. . . .” He paused, reluctant, and tilted the glass again. “I hit London a couple of slips back. Nineteen sixteen. It was summer.” He swirled the beer reflectively. “A perfect summer evening. Warm, dry, just the hint of a breeze. It was beautiful.” He paused. “I turned into a sidestreet. There was a girl there, pushing a pram. And then I heard gunfire.”
“What kind of gun?”
“Heavy. Anti-aircraft. She stopped, and looked up, over my shoulder. And I turned.” He drank again.
“It was a Zeppelin. They were caught in the searchlights, and trying to gain height. I saw the ballast go first. Then they started to throw out the bomb load.” He leaned across the table. “We could hear them detonate, one after the other. Then one started dropping straight for us.” He lifted the glass, and studied it.
“I swear to you, Helen, I could follow it every inch of the way. So could she. She just stood there, hypnotised by it. I tried to grab her arm, get her to run, but it was like trying to catch smoke. And then it hit.” He shook his head. “I could see debris, and pieces of shrapnel sail through me, like mist. They went through the girl and the kid as well. But it mattered to them.” The girl shrugged.
“These things happen, Mike. You can’t change history.”
“I know that, damn it!” The barmaid looked up as his fist hit the tabletop. “But she took seven minutes to die. And all I could do was watch.”
He drained the glass. She took it from his hand, and approached the bar.
“Nothing wrong, is there?”
She shook her head.
“It’s all right. He’s just a little upset, that’s all.”
“What about?” The barmaid began to fill her order. “He saw a girl die in an air raid.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She set down the drinks, and punched the till. “We’re getting our own back tonight, though. Dresden again, I expect.” She turned back, holding the change. “That’ll teach them.”
“I’m sure it will.” The girl turned away, taking the drinks, leaving the barmaid still trying to place her uniform.
“Pleasant chat?”
“Oh yes.” She swallowed half the drink, and grimaced. “They’re bombing Dresden tonight. She seems to like the idea.”
He shook his head.
“She doesn’t realise, Helen. How could she?” He tilted his own glass. “Chen hit Hiroshima once, about an hour after the bomb. He doesn’t talk about it.”
“Once was enough, I guess. It was for me.” She drank again. “Sometimes I wonder. You know. If anyone survived.”
He shrugged.
“We did.”
“You call this survival?” She drained her glass.
“Anything’s better than dead.” He swallowed reflectively. “Maybe we are dead. And we haunt the past, because there isn’t any future left.”
“That’s not funny, Mike.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then she leaned across the table.
“Supposing. . . .”
She slipped. He felt the faint puff of air on his face, as it rushed to fill the space she’d occupied. There was a sharp crack, and a tingle of ozone. The barmaid jumped, dropping a beermug.
“What was that?” The mug rocked gently on the counter. He sighed.
“There’s a war on. You hear bangs all the time.”
“Not in here we don’t.” She looked at him suspiciously. “Where’s your friend?”
“She had to leave.”
“So do you. I called time ages ago.” She started to rack up the glasses. “I don’t know. Haven’t you people got homes to go to?”
THE LETTER
Andrew Weiner
I was on my knees in front of the filing cabinet, squinting in the light of my flashlight to read the title on the microfiche, and still not quite believing my eyes. And then the lights went on.
“It was inevitable, I suppose,” he said. “It was only a matter of time.”
He was standing in the doorway. A tall and rather nondescript individual in a sweater and baggy pants, with dose-cropped greying hair. He did not look much like a genius, but then I knew now that he wasn’t. He did not look like much of anything, except a shabby middle aged man confronting a burglar, with a .38 in his right hand.
I stood up, very slowly, hands stretched away from my body.
“A matter of time,” he said again, and laughed, a dry croaking kind of laugh.
I did not see much humor in the situation. But then, he was the one holding the gun.
“Your wallet,” he said, gesturing with his free hand. “Slowly.”
Slowly I pulled the wallet out of my jacket and tossed it across the floor. Slowly he stooped to pick it up, keeping the gun pointed at me all the time.
He flipped through it.
“Private investigator,” he said. “Licensed in New York state. You’re a little out of your territory, aren’t you?”
“A little,” I said.
“And not licensed for break-ins, I imagine?”
“Why don’t you just call the police,” I said and get this over with?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t think I would want to do that.”
And somehow I got the feeling that more than my license was at stake.
I had never been in the office of the Chief Executive of a major corporation before. For that matter, I had never been in the office of the Chief Executive of a minor corporation either, unless you count my bookie.
The office was not that impressive. It was smaller than a football field, and the carpet didn’t come up much above my ankles. As a dining table, the Chief Executive’s desk would have seated no more than twelve. And the collection of modem art on the walls was somewhat less comprehensive than the Guggenheim’s.
The Chief Executive hiked around his desk to greet me.
“Good to meet you Mr. Hendricks,” he said. “I’m Lou Staefler.”
As if there could be any doubt in the matter. Ignorant as I was in the ways of business, even I was thoroughly familiar with that craggy face. Staefler had probably been profiled more often in the news magazines, been interviewed more often on TV and testified at more government hearings than any other corporate executive alive. Every line of that face had become public property. He was Mr. Corporation.
In person, though, he was possibly even more impressive than on TV. Bigger, more vigorous, in all ways larger than life. He came across more like a movie star or a politician than a businessman. Although of course he had to be all of those things to survive as leader of one of our biggest corporations.
He motioned me to sit down on the couch, and sat facing me.
“You’ve probably wondered,” he said, “why I asked you to come here.”
That was something of an understatement. Even if one could conceive of Staefler requiring the services of a private investigator, it was hard to imagine him wanting to deal with anyone lower than President of Pinkerton’s! I was way out of my league, and we both knew it.
“You come highly recommended,” he said, “by my friend Bud Haskell.”
Haskell was possibly the city’s classiest divorce lawyer. I had worked for him on a number of occasions. Not exciting work, or particularly elevating, but it paid the rent. Was Staefler in the market for a divorce? I had always dealt directly with Haskell before, never with his clients.
“But you’re still wondering,” he said, “why I need a private investigator?”
I nodded.
“It’s a little unusual,” he said. “Unusual circumstances. Requiring complete discretion.”
“I am nothing,” I said, “if not discreet.”
“So Bud tells me.” He paused. “What do you know,” he asked, “about market letters?”
“A little,” I said. “They’re like tip sheets, right? For investors.”
“That’s a fair description,” he said, “in the sense that they typically claim knowledge of things to come . . . of movements in the markets as a whole, or in the prices of individual shares and commodities.”
“Like the Wilks Letter,” I said. “The guy who tipped the market crash last year.”
“Tipped it or created it,” Staefler said. “When a letter has enough influence, the two begin to blur. Wilks wiped a dozen points off the Dow Jones in half an hour. He took twenty million off the value of our own shares. With one little letter.”
“You don’t hear much about him these days.”
“Oh, he’s still operating. He’s still got his followers. But he called wrong once too often. He lost it. Lost the power to stampede investors, thank God. But there’s plenty more where he came from. Hundreds of them. It’s a big business in itself. People will pay hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for what they believe to be inside information.”
He walked over to his desk and picked up a bulging file folder. He started to pass its contents to me, item by item.
“This one is from Fairfax, Alaska. The guy is a platinum bug. And this one is from Portland, Oregon, specializing in gold and the activities of the Trilateral Commission. This one is into soy bean futures and laetrile. And this one . . . A lot of these guys are just nuts.”
He passed the rest of the pile. I leafed through them. The letters came in all shapes and sizes. Some were professionally printed and attractively laid out, others were crudely mimeoed. Some were businesslike and brisk. Others were full of long-winded editorials about big government and the coming economic apocalypse, or dotted with arcane references to sun spot cycles and sixty-year economic waves.
The price tags were almost as surprising as the contents—two-, three-, four-hundred dollars a year for a monthly letter. I didn’t ask Staefler why people would pay that sort of money, but he told me anyway.
“In good times,” he said, “people don’t really give the economy much thought. But when things get shaky, they start to wonder what is happening to them. They start to grope around for the right button, the one that will make it work for them. They’re scared and they’re confused. They see their savings melting away. They have visions of pushing wheelbarrows of money down to the A and P.
“And who can blame them? It’s a financial Disneyland out there. It’s out of control, or it seems to be. The government and the banks keep on making predictions about what’s going to happen, and somehow they’re always wrong. Nobody knows what’s going on anymore. So they don’t believe us. They look elsewhere for the real low-down. And they think they find it here.
“ ‘And of course,” he said, “some of these letters are right. Not all of them, and not all of the time. But they’re right often enough to make people Come back for more, like a man playing a one-armed bandit.”
For some reason, that simile irritated me.
“Variable reinforcement,” I said.
He looked at me curiously.
“A basic Skinnerian paradigm,” I said. “Performance is greatest when rewards are intermittent and variable.”
“I forgot,” he said. “You used to be a psychologist.”
Obviously he had checked me out very carefully indeed—which was only to be expected.
“All right,” I said. “You know all about me and I know all about market letters. What’s next?”
He crossed to his desk again, and returned with a much thinner file folder, which he passed over to me.
“This is the most recent issue of a fairly new letter, the Reeve One Thousand.”
I opened the file. Inside was a fairly skimpy document, four typed pages stapled together. Like most of the letters it was marked NOT TO BE DUPLICATED. There were a couple of unusual features. One was the price, a very steep $2000 for twelve monthly issues. Another was the fact that the copy I was holding was numbered “112” in red ink in the upper right hand comer.
“What does this mean?” I asked, indicating the number.
“It means that I am subscriber number 112. And the letter is called the Reeve One Thousand because it accepted only the first one thousand applicants. No one else can sign up until someone drops out. As far as I know, very few people do.”
“It’s a lot of money,” I said.
“And worth every penny,” he said. “Let me tell you how I came to subscribe to it. About six months ago I got a mailing with the first issue, along with a covering note. The note invited me to check out six specific predictions made in the letter. I did. Every one of them was correct. I signed up immediately. Since then, I have approximately doubled my personal wealth.”
