Time Travel Omnibus, page 778
“God Almighty!” She slammed her hand on the table. Glasses rattled. “Couldn’t I just swear before you and the Universe never to publish anything about this? Wouldn’t that be enough?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “From the Universe’s point of view, your publishing a paper that explicitly attributes the effects to something other than time travel seems much safer—to you as well as the Universe. Let’s say you change your mind, years from now, and try to publish a paper that says you succeeded with time travel after all. You’d already be on record in the literature as attributing those effects to something else—you’d be much less likely to be believed then. Safer for the Universe. Safer for you. A paper with a false lead is not only our best bet now, it’s an insurance policy for our future.”
Jennifer nodded, very slowly. “I guess I could come up with something—some phenomenon unrelated to time travel—unsuggestive of it. The connection of quantum effects to human thought has always had great appeal, and even though I personally never saw much more than wishful thinking in that direction.”
“That’s better,” I said quietly.
“But how can we be sure no one else will want to look into these effects?” Jennifer asked.
I shrugged. “Guarantees of anything are beyond us in this situation. The best we can hope for are probabilities—that’s how the QM realm operates anyway, isn’t it—likelihoods of our success, statistics in favor of our survival. As for your effects, well, effects don’t have much impact outside of a supportive context of theory. Psalm 51 says ‘Cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean’—the penicillin mold was first identified on a piece of decayed hyssop by a Swedish chemist—but none of this led to antibiotics until spores from a mold landed in Fleming’s petrie dish, and he placed them in the right scientific perspective. Scientists thought they had evidence of spontaneous generation of maggots in old meat, until they learned how maggots make love. Astronomers saw lots of evidence for a luminiferous ether, until Michelson-Morley decisively proved that wrong. You’re working on the cutting edge of physics with your wormholes. No one knows what to expect—you said it yourself—yours were the best minds in this area. You can create the context. No one’s left to contradict you. Let’s face it, if you word your paper properly, it will likely go unnoticed. But if not, it will point people in the wrong direction—and once pointed that way, away from time travel, the world could take years, decades, longer, to look at time travel as a real scientific possibility again. The history of science is filled with wrong glittering paths, tenaciously taken and defended. That’s the path of life for us. I’m not happy about it, but there it is.”
Our food arrived. Jennifer looked away from me, and down at her veal.
I hadn’t completely won her over yet. But she’d stopped objecting. I understood how she felt. To theoretical scientists, pursuit of truth was sometimes more important than life itself. Maybe that’s why I went into flesh-and-blood forensics. I pushed on. “The truth is, we’ve all been getting along quite well without time travel anyway—it could wreak far more havoc in everyone’s lives than nuclear weapons ever did. The Universe may not be wrong here.”
She looked up at me.
“It’s all up to you now,” I said. “I’m not a physicist. I can’t pull this off. I can take care of the general media, but not the scientific journals.” I thought about Abrahmson at Newsday. He hadn’t a clue which way was up in this thing. He’d just as soon believe this nightmare was all coincidence—the ever popular placeholder for things people didn’t want to understand. I could easily pitch it to him in that way.
She gave me a weak smile. “OK, I’ll try it. I’ll write the article with the mental spin on the exotic effects. Physics Review D was given some general info that we were doing something on exotic matter, and is waiting for our report. It’ll have maximum impact on other physicists there. The human mind in control of matter will be catnip for a lot of them anyway.”
“Good,” I smiled back. I knew she meant it. I knew because I suddenly felt very hungry, and dug into my own veal with a zest I hadn’t felt for anything in a while. It tasted great.
Two particles of humanity had connected again. Maybe this time the relationship would go somewhere.
It occurred to me, as I took Jennifer’s hand and squeezed it with relief, that maybe this was just what the Universe had wanted all along.
As they say in the Department, an ongoing string of deaths is a poor way to keep a secret.
SOME LIKE IT COLD
John Kessel
Her heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein. Lincoln was out of the question, but with a little work I could look Einsteinesque. I grew a dark mustache, adopted wild graying hair. From wardrobe I requisitioned a pair of wool slacks, a white cotton shirt, a gabardine jacket with narrow lapels. The shoes were my own, my prized possession—genuine leather, Australian copies of mid twentieth-century brogues, comfortable, well broken in. The prep-room mirror reflected back a handsomer, taller, younger relative of old Albert, a cross between Einstein and her psychiatrist Dr. Greenson.
The moment-universes surrounding the evening of Saturday, August’s were so thoroughly burned—tourists, biographers, conspiracy hunters, masturbators—that there was no sense arriving then. Besides, I wanted to get a taste of the old LA, before the quake. So I selected the Friday evening 18:00 PDT moment-universe. I materialized in a stall in the men’s room at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Some aim for deserted places: I like airports, train stations, bus terminals. Lots of strangers if you’ve missed some detail of costume. Public transport easily available. Crowds to lose oneself in. The portable unit, disguised as an overnight bag. never looks out of place. I stopped in a shop and bought a couple of packs of Luckies. At the Hertz counter I rented a navy blue Plymouth with push-button transmission, threw my canvas camera bag and overnight case into the back and, checking the map, puzzled out the motel address on Wilshire Boulevard that Research had found for me.
The hotel was ersatz Spanish, pink stucco and a red tile roof, a colonnade around a courtyard pool where a teenage boy in white T-shirt and DA haircut leaned on a cleaning net and flirted with a couple of fifteen-year-old girls. I sat in the shadowed doorway of my room, smoked a Lucky and watched until a fat woman in a caftan came out and yelled at the boy to get back to work. The girls giggled.
The early evening I spent driving around. In Santa Monica I saw the pre-tsunami pier, the one she would tell Greenson she was going to visit Saturday night before she changed her mind and stayed home. I ate at the Dancers: a slab of prime rib, a baked potato the size of a football, a bottle of zinfandel. Afterward I drove my Plymouth along the Miracle Mile. I rolled down the windows and let the warm air wash over me, inspecting the strip joints, theaters, bars, and hookers. A number of the women, looking like her in cotton-candy hair and tight dresses, gave me the eye as I cruised by.
I pulled into the lot beside a club called the Blue Note. Over the door a blue neon martini glass swamped a green neon olive in gold neon gin. Inside I ordered a scotch and listened to a trio play jazz. A thin white guy with a goatee strangled his saxophone: somewhere in there might be a melody. These cutting-edge late-moderns thought they had the future augured. The future would be cool and atonal, they thought. No squares allowed. They didn’t understand that the future, like the present, would be dominated by saps, and the big rush of 2043 would be barbershop quartets.
I sipped scotch. A brutal high, alcohol, like putting your head in a vise. I liked it. I smoked a couple more Luckies, layering nicotine buzz over the alcohol. I watched couples in the dim comers of booths talk about their pasts and their futures, all those words prelude to going to bed. Back in Brentwood she was spending another sleepless night harassed by calls telling her to leave Bobby Kennedy alone.
A woman with dark Jackie hair, black gloves, and a very low-cut dress sat down on the stool next to me. The song expired and there was a smattering of applause. “I hate this modem crap, don’t you?” the woman said.
“It’s emblematic of the times,” I said.
She gave me a look, decided to laugh. “You can have the times.”
“I’ve seen worse,” I said.
“You’re not American, are you? The accent.”
“I was born in Germany.”
“Ah. So you’ve seen bad times?”
I sipped my scotch. “You could say so.” Her eyelids were heavy with shadow, eyelashes a centimeter long. Pale pink lipstick made her thin lips look cool; I wondered if they really were. “Let me buy you a drink.”
“Thanks.” She watched me fumble with the queer, nineteenth-century style currency. Pyramids with eyes on them, redeemable in silver on demand. I bought her a gin and tonic. “My name’s Carol,” she told me.
“I am Detlev.”
“Detleff? Funny name.”
Not so common, even in Germany. “So Detleff, what brings you to LA? You come over the Berlin Wall?”
“I’m here to see a movie star.”
She snorted. “Won’t find any in here.”
“I think you could be a movie star, Carol.”
“You’re not going to believe this, Detleff, but I’ve heard that line before.”
“You’ll have to offer me another then.” We flirted through three drinks. She told me she was lonely, I told her I was a stranger. We fell toward a typical liaison of the Penicillin Era: we learned enough about each other (who knew how much of it true?) not to let what we didn’t know come between us and what we wanted. Her image of me was compounded by her own fantasies. I didn’t have so many illusions. Or maybe mine were larger still, since I knew next-to-nothing about these people other than what I’d gleaned from images projected on various screens. An image had brought me here; images were my job. They had something to do with reality, but more to do with desire.
I studied the cleavage displayed by Carol’s dress, she leaned against my shoulder, and from this we generated a lust we imagined would turn to sweet compassion, make up for our losses, and leave us blissfully complete in the same place. We would clutch each others bodies until we were spent, lie holding each other close, our souls commingled, the first moment of a perfect marriage that would extend forward from this night in an endless string of equally fulfilling nights. Then we’d part in the morning and never see each other again. That was the dream. I followed her back to her apartment and we did our best to produce it. Afterward I lay awake thinking of Gabrielle, just after we’d married, sunbathing on the screened beach at Nice. I’d watched her, as had the men who passed by. How much of her wanted us to look at her? Was there any difference, in her mind, between my regard and theirs?
I left Carol asleep with the dawn coming up through the window, made my way back to the pink hotel, and got some sleep of my own.
Saturday I spent touring pre-quake LA. I indulged vices I could not indulge in Munich in 2043. I smoked many cigarettes. I walked outside in direct sunlight. I bought a copy of the Wilhelm edition of the Ching, printed on real paper. At midafternoon I stepped into a diner and ordered a bacon cheeseburger, rare, with lettuce and tomato and a side of fries. My mouth watered as the waitress set it in front of me, but after two bites I felt overcome by a wave of nausea. Hands sticky with blood and mayonnaise, I watched the grease congeal in the corner of the plate.
So far, so good. I was a fan of the dirty pleasures of the twentieth century. Things were so much more complicated then. People waited the streets under the shadow of the bomb. They all knew, at some almost biological level, that they might be vaporized at any second. Their blood vibrated with angst. Even the blonde ones. I imagined my ancestors half a world away in a country they expected momentarily to turn into a radioactive battleground, carrying their burden of guilt through the Englischer Garten. Sober Adenauer, struggling to stitch together half a nation. None of them fat. bored, or decadent.
And Marilyn, the world over, was their goddess. That improbable female body, that infantile voice, that oblivious demeanor.
Architecturally. LA 1962 was a disappointment. There was the appropriate amount of kitsch, hot-dog stands shaped like hot dogs and chiropractors’ offices like flying saucers, but the really big skyscrapers that would come down in the quake hadn’t been built yet. Maybe some of them wouldn’t be built in this time-line anymore, thanks to me. By now my presence, through the butterfly effect, had already set this history off down another path from the one of my home. Anything I did toppled dominoes. Perhaps Carol’s life would be ruined by the memory of our night of perfect love. Perhaps the cigarettes I bought saved crucial lives. Perhaps the breeze of my Plymouth’s passing brought rain to Belgrade, drought to India. For better or worse, who could say?
I killed time into the early evening. By now she was going through the two-hour session with Greenson trying to shore up her personality against that night’s depression.
At 9:00 I took my camera bag and the portable unit and got into the rental car. It was still too early, but I was so keyed up I couldn’t sit still. I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, walked along the beach at Malibu, then turned around and headed back. Sunset Boulevard twisted through the hills. The lights of the houses flickered between trees, In Brentwood I had some trouble finding Carmelina. drove past, then doubled back. Marilyn’s house was on Fifth Helena, a short street off Carmelina ending in a cul-de-sac. I parked at the end, slung my bags over my shoulder, and walked back.
A brick and stucco wall shielded the house from the street. I circled round through the neighbor’s yard, pushed through the bougainvillea and approached from the back. It was a modest hacienda-style ranch, a couple of bedrooms, tile roof. The patio lights were off and the water in the pool lay smooth as dark glass. Lights shone from the end bedroom to the far left.
First problem would be to get rid of Eunice Murray, her companion and housekeeper. If what had happened in our history was true in this one, she’d gone to sleep at midevening. I stepped quietly through the back door, found her in her bedroom and slapped a sedative patch onto her forearm, holding my hand across her mouth against her struggling until she was out.
A long phone cord snaked down the hall from the living room and under the other bedroom door. The door was locked. Outside, I pushed through the shrubs, mucking up my shoes in the soft soil, reached in through the bars over the opened window, and pushed aside the blackout curtains. Marilyn sprawled face down across the bed, right arm dangling off the side, receiver clutched in her hand. I found the unbarred casement window on the adjacent side of the house, broke it open, then climbed inside. Her breathing was deep and irregular. Her skin was clammy. Only the faintest pulse at her neck.
I rolled her onto her back, got my bag. pried back her eyelid and shone a light into her eye. Her pupil barely contracted. I had come late on purpose, but this was not good.
I gave her a shot of apomorphine, lifted her off the bed and shouldered her toward the bathroom. She was surprisingly light—gaunt, even. I could feel her ribs. In the bathroom, full of plaster and junk from the remodelers. I held her over the toilet until she vomited. No food, but some undigested capsules. That would have been a good sign, except she habitually pierced them with a pin so they’d work faster. There was no way of telling how much Nembutal she had in her bloodstream.
I dug my thumb into the crook of her elbow, forcing the tendon. Did she inhale more strongly? “Wake up, Norma Jeane,” I said. “Time to wake up.” No reaction.
I took her back to the bed and got the blood filter out of my camera bag. The studio’d had me practicing on indigents hired from the state. I wiped a pharmacy’s worth of pill bottles from the flimsy table next to the bed and set up the machine. The shunt slipped easily into the artery in her arm, and I fiddled with the flow until the readout went green. What with one thing and another I had a busy half hour before she was resting in bed, bundled up. feet elevated. asleep but breathing normally, God in his heaven, and her blood circulating merrily through the filter like money through my bank account.
I went outside and smoked a cigarette. The stars were out and a breeze had kicked up. On the tile threshold outside the front door words were emblazoned: “Cursum Perficio.” I am finishing my journey. I looked in on Mrs. Murray. Still out. I went back and sat in the bedroom. The place was a mess. Forests of pill bottles covered every horizontal surface. A stack of Sinatra records sat on the record player. On top: “High Hopes.” Loose-leaf binders lay scattered all over the floor. I picked one up. It was a script for Something’s Got to Give.
I read through the script. It wasn’t very good. About 2:00 a.m. she moaned and started to move. I slapped a clarifier patch onto her arm. It wouldn’t push the pentobarbital out of her system any faster, but when it began to take hold it would make her feel better.
About 3:00 the blood filter beeped. I removed the shunt, sat her up, made her drink a liter of electrolyte. It took her a while to get it all down. She looked at me through fogged eyes. She smelled sour and did not look like the most beautiful woman in the world. “What happened?” she mumbled.
“You took too many pills.
You’re going to be all right.”
I helped her into a robe, then walked her down the hallway and around the living room until she began to take some of the weight herself. At one end of the room hung a couple of lurid Mexican Day of the Dead masks, at the other a framed portrait of Lincoln. When I got tired of facing down the leering ghouls and honest Abe. I took her outside and we marched around the pool in the darkness. The breeze wrote cat’s paws on the surface of the water. After a while she began to come around. She tried to pull away but was weak as a baby. “Let me go,” she mumbled.
“You want to stop walking?”
“I want to sleep,” she said.
“Keep walking.” We circled the pool for another quarter hour. In the distance I heard sparse traffic on Sunset; nearer the breeze rustled the fan palms. I was sweaty, she was cold.
