Time Travel Omnibus, page 736
“You remember that funny spot on the Ladies’ Room wall?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Well it came back this morning, only worse.”
“Probably comes from using cheap paint. I won’t be able to pass you if there’s any peeling. Lead, you know.”
“I’m afraid it’s worse than just paint.” Tomacheski stopped retreating just outside the kitchen doors.
“Well? Don’t just stand there. What happened?”
“It sort of opened up.”
“The door to the Ladies’ Room?”
“Not exactly. Sort of a hole. Where you thought the paint was bad.”
“And?” Grimes was running short of patience with this ignorant commie, or not-commie, whatever he was.
“He’s in the kitchen.” Tomacheski pushed open the doors with his back and gestured Grimes inside, never taking his eyes from Grimes’ face.
Grimes strode into the kitchen. What he saw inside nearly made him stride out again. The Negro was still there, of course, but Grimes scarcely noticed him next to the filthy, louse-ridden Indian sitting on a bench under the window and slurping soup from a Buffalo China cup. Grimes clutched his portfolio under his arm and struggled to control his voice. “What is that doing here?”
“That’s what I was trying to explain. This hole opened up, you know, on the wall of the Ladies’ Room, and he sort of fell through.”
“He was in the Ladies’ Room?” Grimes could feel his voice rising in step with his blood pressure. “What was he doing in the Ladies’ Room?”
Tomacheski and the Negro were staring at him in amazement. The Indian had pulled his blanket up over his head and was peeking out with one frightened eye. Grimes stood in one spot and trembled, imagining the bacteria count on one square inch of that skin. He put two fingers on his left wrist and felt his pulse. Not good. This bastard Tomacheski was going to be the death of him. He turned toward the Russian, took two deep breaths and let them out slowly. “What,” he repeated in a voice dripping control like icicles, “was this Indian doing in the Ladies’ Room?”
“I don’t think he was in the Ladies’ Room, exactly. You see, the wall started looking funny again, like it did yesterday and the day before, only this time it got worse, and it turned into a kind of a hole, and there was a great snowstorm on the other side.”
“A blizzard,” inteijected Duffy. “And there was all this snow blowing in on the floor, and all this cold wind, like to froze us both.”
“Duffy tells the truth. It was like some other place in there. And then we saw someone walking toward us, and this poor fellow stumbles into the hallway.”
“Well, why didn’t you push him right back through? He’s a walking health hazard!”
“Because he was half-starved and half-frozen to death!” bellowed Tomacheski.
“And also because the hole closed up right after that,” Duffy added. “Then it was just the wall again. Wasn’t nothin’ we could do after that. I think we’re stuck with this guy.”
“No,” Tomacheski said, “I don’t think so. What time were you here yesterday, Mr. Grimes?”
“Nine a.m.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Grimes snorted. “Of course I’m sure.”
“And that’s when you saw the wall not looking just right. And the morning before that I saw it, too. I’m sure it was about the same time. I thought it was the light, remember? I think that if we just wait around until nine o’clock tomorrow morning . . .”
“Tomorrow morning!”
“Yeah!” said Duffy. “If the hole opens up again tomorrow morning we could put this guy back where he belongs, and everything could get back to normal around here.”
“And in the meantime,” added Tomacheski, “We could get together some food and warm clothes. Maybe some boots . . .” He placed his foot next to the Indian’s, comparing sizes.
“Mr. Tomacheski, you will take that . . . person to the Social Welfare Department now if you want to retain your permit to operate a restaurant.” He turned and pushed through the swinging doors, knuckles white around the handle of his portfolio.
Tomacheski followed him into the dining area. “Mr. Crawford promised you would make an inspection.” Grimes turned at the door. “You will be open for business in less than two hours, and in your kitchen there is a filthy, infested savage not six feet from where food is being prepared.”
“There’s a little porch out back. I’ll put him out there. He can’t go to the Welfare, Mr. Grimes, he needs to go home.” Grimes said nothing, but fixed the Russian with his gaze. “You come back tomorrow,” Tomacheski said. “You come back and see for yourself. The hole will come back. And then he will go. But not before that, because I’ve been cold, Mr. Grimes, and I’ve been hungry, and I’ve got a home I can never go back to, and I won’t do that to nobody.” Grimes looked up at the Russian and anger burned in his breast, clean and bright. “I’ll be back at nine tomorrow morning with the Chief Health Officer. Enjoy your day, Mr. Tomacheski. It will be your last doing business in this county.” He walked out and slammed the screen behind him.
Grimes adjusted his hat and knocked on Ed Crawford’s door.
“Come on in, Mort.”
“Ed, it’s ten minutes till nine. Aren’t you coming to Tomacheski’s with me?”
“Yeah, Mort. You go on ahead. I’ll be along in a couple of minutes in my car. I’ve got some things to straighten up here.” He indicated a particularly tall pile on the desk. “Well, hurry, Ed . . . please. This is important.”
“Just a few minutes, Mort. I’ll meet you there.”
The door was open, and Grimes walked in without knocking. He could hear voices coming from the back.
“I think it’s starting. Look there.”
“Yeah, there it goes. Get him ready, now.”
Grimes hurried back to the hallway. Duffy and Tomacheski stood on either side of the Indian with bags of provisions. They were all staring at the Ladies’ Room wall, where a widening hole was forming from churning whiteness that boiled out of . . . Grimes steadied himself on Tomacheski’s arm and looked away for a moment.
“You see, Mr. Grimes?” Tomacheski was shouting over the roar that was emanating from the hole. “It was true, what I said. This hole goes somewhere. Look!”
The hole was about five feet tall now, and lengthening, but on the other side was not a raging blizzard, but a narrow alley between two tall buildings. The scent of rubber and auto exhaust drifted through. A whistle sounded in the distance, and they could hear shouts and running footsteps. A balding man in a shabby suit rounded the comer of a building and ran straight for them, a blue-coated policeman in hot pursuit. Grimes yelped as the man ran through the wall, bowled him over, and slammed through the kitchen doors.
Duffy and Tomacheski hurried into the kitchen. The Indian looked down at Grimes and said something in its barbaric language that sounded vaguely sympathetic. The hole closed as rapidly as it had opened.
Grimes got up and brushed himself off. This was not going according to plan. And where the hell was Crawford? Well, no matter. He had that immigrant pinko now. No more extensions, no more inspections, just CLOSED. Finis. Done with. He turned and pushed on one door, which flew back in his face as the shabby man rushed back out of the kitchen.
“Where the hell am I?” the man shouted, looking around wildly.
Grimes felt his nose gingerly. It didn’t seem to be broken, but it was dripping blood onto his shirt and tie. He placed his folded handkerchief under it. He felt strangely calm in spite of all the shouting and confusion, bums and Indians and colored fry cooks and communist restaurant owners. Ed Crawford would be here any minute and he could wash his hands of this place forever.
Tomacheski and Duffy had followed the bum out of the kitchen and were trying to calm him down. The Indian was standing by Duffy’s elbow looking back over his shoulder at Grimes, who was looking at the Ladies’ Room wall. Sweet Jesus, it was happening again!
A churning nothingness was growing out of the wall, or into it, shaping itself into a long ovoid that stretched and grew as he watched, unable to speak or look away. Now Tomacheski could see it too, and he was backing away in torturous slow motion, grabbing Duffy by the arm. Their mouths were moving, but all Grimes could hear was the awful roaring. He realized he was moving toward the hole—not walking, it seemed—just gliding across (above?) the linoleum toward the Ladies’ Room wall.
He put his hand out as he came up to it and it tingled like before, but this time he found it a somewhat pleasant sensation, and did not pull away. It engulfed his hand, moved up his arm to his chest, and was all over him in an instant. From somewhere far away, he felt his face form a smile.
He was still smiling when he realized he was no longer in the diner, but in a plain white room with no windows. He was sitting on a white box on a white floor. The bum and the Indian were seated on identical boxes, and their faces slowly began to echo his confusion as they looked around at the featureless room. A door he hadn’t seen opened and a woman stepped through. She was wearing fewer clothes than a Pageant Pin-Up, and her hair was bright blue.
“Hello, Mr. Grimes. I hope we haven’t startled you.”
Grimes thought about it and decided he was definitely startled. “Where’s Tomacheski? Where am I? This can’t be the Ladies’ Room.” He looked around. Two other odd-looking people were talking to the bum and the Indian, who looked pretty startled, too.
The woman smiled. “No, Mr. Grimes, I’m afraid you’re . . . someplace else. This is a holding area, actually. Visually sterile, to minimize unfamiliarity. I’ll change it for you if you like.”
A wall appeared, a desk, some bookshelves. The boxes became chairs. They were alone. She was behind the desk in a white jacket, a stethoscope peeking out of one pocket. Bad choice. Doctors’ offices always made him sick.
“It’s only a temporary displacement, we hope. We seem to have a bug in the system.”
“Bug?” Grimes’ upper lip wrinkled involuntarily. “There’s been a . . . glitch?”
He stared at her blankly.
“A fuck-up.”
Grimes blanched.
“Technical difficulties beyond our control. At any rate, we’ll have you back in A.D. 1956 very soon.” She watched him as he absorbed this, then took a fountain pen out of her coat. “In the meantime, let’s talk about Mr. Tomacheski. Give me your hand, please.”
He held out his hand and she pushed up his sleeve and passed the pen across the inside of his arm. It didn’t leave a mark, so maybe it wasn’t a pen. but he began to feel better immediately. Calmer. He still didn’t understand, but it didn’t seem to matter as much. “What about Tomacheski?” he asked.
“Given your present course of action in A.D. 1956, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to continue doing business in that location.”
Grimes shrugged. “I don’t particularly want him to stay in business.”
“I see. But we do. And we don’t consider your wishes to be more important than our own in this matter.” She looked around, indicated the paneled office with her hands. “This spot is quite simply the best natural spacetime nexus on this continent, and as long as we control it, we will have things the way we want them. We have decided that Tomacheski will remain in business until A.D. 1975, when he will retire peacefully to California.” She looked him in the eye. “We have plans. Those plans require things to remain as they are at Tomacheski’s. We won’t allow any tampering.”
Grimes tried to summon up indignation. “Nobody tells Morton Grimes how to do his job.” He didn’t sound very indignant, he realized, and he probably ought to be frightened, too, but he couldn’t mange it, somehow. “Nobody.”
“Wrong Mr. Grimes. We do.” She swung her feet up onto the desk. “Of course there is an alternative.” She smiled a thin smile not unlike his own. “We could always keep you here.”
“You could what? What do you mean keep me? I’m a citizen. I have rights. I want to call my lawyer! Who the hell are you, anyway?” He suddenly remembered how to be frightened.
She leaned forward and stroked his arm again with the pen. Or whatever. “One point at a time, Mr. Grimes. To begin with, your rights are moot here. If by ‘you’ you mean me, I am the person currently giving you orders. Think of me as a doctor of sorts. If you mean all of us here, we are the party, clan, race—choose one or more as you wish—currently in charge of this locus. However powerful you may imagine us to be from what you have seen, you will almost certainly be underestimating us. We try not to be deliberately cruel to primitives, but we don’t take shit from anybody. I hope that answers your questions. Believe me when I say that nothing can stop us from keeping you if we wish to do so.”
Grimes nodded and shook a finger at her unsteadily. “You’re talking time travel, here. I’ve seen ‘Science Fiction Theater’; I know about these things. Well, then, what about my life? Won’t it change something if I don’t go back?” She leaned back in the chair, hands in pockets. “Frankly, Mr. Grimes, you’d scarcely be missed. You never marry, never have children, never really affect another person’s life in any significant way.”
“You don’t mean it. You can’t keep me here.” He crossed his arms in front of him, made an effort to frown, abandoned it.
“You don’t know that, Mr. Grimes.” She chuckled softly, shaking her head. “It’s amusing, actually, when you see it from our point of view. You think you have a right to control other people’s fate—Duffy, Tomacheski, the Indian—because you think you’re naturally superior to them. That’s bigotry. We control your fate because we actually are superior. That’s simple fact.”
The words stung. Grimes searched for a retort, but nothing came to him that he couldn’t imagine her laughing off in that arrogant way, and then the moment for rebuttal passed, leaving him silent and powerless.
She watched him calmly for a moment, then cocked her head to one side as though listening to something he couldn’t hear. “The malfunction has been repaired,” she said, getting up from behind the desk. ‘The others will be waiting.” The room dissolved to featureless white.
They were standing beside the Indian and the bum and two people even stranger-looking than his “doctor.” The wall was going funny. A blinding whiter whiteness opened up in it—the sun on snow, with tall firs on a hill. The Indian shouldered his bags of Tomacheski’s food and stepped through.
The hole closed, and opened again on an alley at night with a moon and streetlights shining on brick walls and wet pavement. There was a scent of rain and garbage. One of the people handed the bum a wad of genuine-looking currency and shook his hand. The bum gave Grimes a little wave and walked in.
“Your turn, Mr. Grimes,” the doctor said, turning to him. “Which will it be? Return on our terms—or stay?”
He thought for a moment. How important was this immigrant diner-jockey in Morton Grimes’ scheme of things? The world was going to hell anyway, and it wasn’t going to get there any faster if one Russian hired one Negro to grill hamburgers. Maybe he shouldn’t worry so much.
He had a choice, she said. He supposed he did, but he wouldn’t have any problem making it. The world was changing a little faster than he would like, even in 1956, but even given that, it was a damn sight better than dirty-talking blue-haired women and disappearing doctors’ offices and being treated like an invading bacillus. None of it seemed to be worth his time and trouble at this point.
“I can go back if I promise to leave Tomacheski alone?”
“You are not permitted to take any action that will endanger him or his business.”
He supposed he could live with that. “Fine,” he told her. “I’ll go.” He buttoned his shirtsleeve, straightened his tie and jacket. His hat must have blown off as he came through.
He ran fingers through his hair as the hole began to grow again.
“You should arrive within a minute or so of your departure. Have an adequate life, Mr. Grimes, and remember—we’ll be watching.”
The hole punched through to the diner, with an agitated Tomacheski and Duffy talking and gesturing to someone he couldn’t see. Grimes looked back for a moment to see if he was really free to go.
“You’d better hurry, or you’ll miss this one. Go on.” She made a hurry along gesture to him, and he stepped forward onto his hat and into the arms of Ed Crawford.
“Mort! What the hell were you doing in the Ladies’ Room? And where’s that Indian you were raving about? You okay, Mort? You look terrible.”
Grimes stepped back and turned around. The wall was a wall again. He picked up the hat and made a few useless attempts at straightening it, then put it on his head. He needed a drink, he decided—maybe two. He turned to Tomacheski, who was watching him expectantly. “My inspection is completed. Don’t bother to see me out—I’ll leave your A-placard on my way. Coming, Ed?”
Crawford looked confused, but turned to go.
“What about the Indian?” Tomacheski whispered, pointing at the wall.
“And the bum?” Duffy added.
Grimes stooped to pick up his portfolio from the hallway floor. Suddenly he felt incredibly tired. He didn’t understand the present, and the future stunk. He looked from Duffy to Tomacheski and nodded slowly, more to himself than to either of them. “Home,” he said, tucking the case under his arm and following Crawford out of the hallway. “They’ve gone home.”
Straightening his shoulders, Grimes walked down the narrow length of shining linoleum, pulsing pink and green with neon light, and paused to flip the A-placard onto the counter before he opened the screen door and let it click shut behind him.
He was home too, he supposed, but he couldn’t find much joy in it, not given what he knew. He turned and looked back at the little diner and the garish sign, and at Duffy and Tomacheski watching him from the doorway. He scowled at them; they smiled and waved.
