Time Travel Omnibus, page 780
I watched his brother Jerry duck his head to get into his limo. Interested only in sports and women, Shel had said of him. And making money. If I’d told him about the Watch, he’d said, and offered to take him along„ he’d have asked to see a Super Bowl.
Shel had discovered the principles of time travel while looking into quantum gravity. He’d explained any number of times how the Watches worked, but I never understood any of it. Not then, and not now. “But why all the secrecy?” I’d asked him. “Why not take credit? It’s the discovery of the ages.” We’d laughed at the new shade of meaning to the old phrase.
“Because it’s dangerous,” he’d said, peering over the top of his glasses, not at me, but at something in the distance. “Time travel should not be possible in a rational universe.” He’d shaken his head, and his unruly black hair had fallen into his eyes. He was only thirty-eight at the time of his funeral. “I saw from the first why it was theoretically possible,” he’d said. “But I thought I was missing something, some detail that would intervene to prevent the actual construction of a device. And yet there it is.” And he’d glanced down at the watch strapped to his left wrist. He worried about Causality, the simple flow of cause and effect. “A time machine breaks it all down,” he said. “It makes me wonder what kind of universe we live in.”
I thought we should forget the philosophy and tell the world. Let other people worry about the details. When I pressed him, he’d talked about teams from the Mossad going back to drag Hitler out of 1935, or Middle Eastern terrorists hunting down Thomas Jefferson. “It leads to utter chaos,” he’d said. “Either time travel should be prohibited, like exceeding the speed of light, or the intelligence to achieve it should be prohibited.”
We used to retreat sometimes to a tower on a rocky reef somewhere downstream. No one lives there, and there is only ocean in all directions. I don’t know how he found it, or who built it, or what that world is like. Nor do I believe he did. We enjoyed the mystery of the place. The moon is bigger, and the tides are loud. We’d hauled a generator out there, and a refrigerator, and a lot of furniture. We used to sit in front of a wall-length transparent panel, sipping beer, watching the ocean, and talking about God, history, and women.
They were good days.
Eventually, he had said, I will bring Helen here.
The wind blew, the mourners dwindled and were gone, and the coffin waited on broad straps for the workmen who would lower it into the ground.
Damn. I would miss him.
Gone now. He and his Watches. And temporal logic apparently none the worse.
Oh, I still had a working unit in my desk, but I knew I would not use it again. I did not have his passion for time travel. Leave well enough alone. That’s always been my motto.
On the way home, I turned on the radio. It was an ordinary day. Peace talks were breaking down in Africa. Another congressman was accused of diverting campaign funds. Assaults against spouses were still rising. And in Los Angeles there was a curious conclusion to an expressway pileup: two people, a man and a woman, had broken into a wrecked vehicle and kidnapped the driver, who was believed to be either dead or seriously injured. They had apparently run off with him.
Only in California.
■ ■ ■
Shel had been compulsively secretive. Not only about time travel, but about everything. The mask was always up and you never really knew what he was feeling. He used to drive Helen crazy when we went out to dinner because she had to wait until the server arrived to find out what he was going to order. When he was at the university, his department could never get a detailed syllabus out of him. And I was present when his own accountant complained that he was holding back information.
He used to be fond of saying knowledge is power, and I think that was what made him feel successful, that he knew things other people didn’t. Something must have happened to him when he was a kid to leave him so in need of artificial support. It was probably the same characteristic that had turned him into the all-time great camp follower. I don’t know what the proper use for a time machine should be. We used it to make money. But mostly we used it to argue theology with Thomas Aquinas, to talk with Isaac Newton about gravity, to watch Thomas Huxley take on Bishop Wilberforce. For us, it had been almost an entertainment medium. It seemed to me that we should have done more with it.
Don’t ask me what. Maybe track down Michelangelo’s lost statue of Hermes. Shel had shown interest in the project, and we had even stopped by his workshop to admire the piece shortly before its completion. The artist was about twenty years old at the time. And the Hermes was magnificent. I would have killed to own it.
Actually, I had all kinds of souvenirs: coins that a young Julius Caesar had lost to Shel over draughts, a program from the opening night of The Barber of Seville, a quill once used by Benjamin Franklin. And photos: We had whole albums full of Alexander and Marcus Aurelius and the sails of the Santa Maria coming over the horizon. But they all looked like scenes from old movies. Except that the actors didn’t look as good as you’d expect. When I pressed Shel for a point to all this activity, he said, what more could there be than an evening before the fire with Al Einstein? (We had got to a fairly intimate relationship with him, during the days when he was still working for the Swiss patent office.)
There were times when I knew he wanted to tell Helen what we were doing, and bring her along. But some tripwire always brought him up short, and he’d turn to me with that maddeningly innocuous smile as if to say, you and I have a secret and we had best keep it that way for now. Helen caught it, knew there was something going on. But she was too smart to try to break it open.
We went out fairly regularly, the three of us, and my true love of the month, whoever that might be. My date was seldom the same twice because she always figured out that Helen had me locked up. Helen knew that too, of course. But Shel didn’t. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that his old friend would have considered for a moment moving in on the woman he professed (although too loudly) to love. There were moments when we’d be left alone at the table, Helen and I, usually while Shel was dancing with my date. And the air would grow thick with tension. Neither of us ever said anything directly, but sometimes our gaze touched, and her eyes grew very big and she’d get a kind of forlorn look.
Helen was a frustrated actress who still enjoyed the theater. After about a year, she abandoned the Devil’s Disciples, explaining that she simply did not have time for it anymore. But Shel understood her passion and indulged it where he could. Whenever there was a revival, we all went. Inevitably, while we watched Shaw’s trapped characters careen toward their destinies, Shel would find an opportunity to tell me he was going to take her back to meet the great playwright.
I used to promise myself to stop socializing with her, to find an excuse, because it hurt so much to sit in the awful glare of her passion for him. But if I had done that, I wouldn’t have seen her at all. At night, when the evening was over and we were breaking up, she always kissed me, sometimes lightly on the cheek, sometimes a quick hit-and-run full on the lips. And once or twice, when she’d drunk a little too much and her control had slipped, she’d put some serious effort into it.
2
Thursday, November 24. Noon.
The storm picked up while I drove home reminiscing, feeling sorry for myself. I already missed his voice, his sardonic view of the world, his amused cynicism. Together, we had seen power misused and abused all through the centuries, up close, sometimes with calculation, more often out of ignorance. Our shared experiences certainly unique in the history of the planet, had forged a bond between us. The dissolution of that bond, I knew, was going to be a long painful process.
He’d done all the research in his basement laboratory, had built the first working model of his Temporal Occluding Transport System (which, in a flash back to his bureaucratic days with the National Science Foundation, he called TOTS) in a space between his furnace and a wall filled with filing cabinets. The prototype had been a big, near-room-sized chamber. But the bulk of the device had dwindled as its capabilities increased. Eventually, it had shrunk to the size of a watch. It was powered by a cell clipped to the belt or carried in a pocket. I still had one of the power packs at the house.
I would have to decide what to do with our wardrobe. It was located in a second floor bedroom that had served as an anteroom to the ages. A big walk-in closet overflowed with costumes, and shelves were jammed with books on culture and language for every period that we’d visited, or intended to visit.
But if my time-traveling days were over, I had made enough money from the enterprise that I would never have to work again—if I chose not to. The money had come from having access to next week’s newspapers. We’d debated the morality of taking personal advantage of our capabilities, but I don’t think the issue was ever in doubt. We won a small fortune at various race tracks, and continued to prosper until two gentlemen dropped by Shel’s place one afternoon and told him that they were not sure what was behind his winning streak, but that if it continued, they would break his knees. They must have known enough about us to understand it wouldn’t be necessary to repeat the message to me.
We considered switching into commodities. But neither of us understood much about them, so we took our next plunge in the stock market. “It’s got to be illegal,” said Shel. And I’d laughed. “How could it be?” I asked him. “There are no laws against time travel.”
“Insider trading,” he suggested.
Whatever. We justified our actions because gold was the commodity of choice upstream. It was research money, and we told each other it was for the good of mankind, although neither of us could quite explain how that was so. Gold was the one item that opened all doors, no matter what age you were in, no matter what road you traveled. If I learned anything during my years as Shel’s interpreter and faithful Indian companion, it was that people will do anything for gold.
While I took a vaguely smug view of human greed, I put enough aside to buy a small estate in Exeter, and retired from the classroom to a life of books and contemplation. And travel through the dimensions.
Now that it was over, I expected to find it increasingly difficult to keep the secret. I had learned too much. I wanted to tell people what I’d done. Who I’d talked to. So we were sitting over doughnuts and coffee on St. Helena, and I said to Napoleon—
There was a thin layer of snow on the ground when I got home. Ray White, a retired tennis player who lives alone on the other side of Carmichael Drive, was out walking. He waved me down to tell me how sorry he was to hear about Shel’s death. I thanked him and pulled into the driveway. A black car that I didn’t recognize was parked in front of the house. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting inside. They opened their doors and got out as I drifted to a stop. I turned off the engine without putting the car away.
The woman was taller, and more substantial, than the man. She held out a set of credentials. “Dr. Dryden?” she asked. “I’m Sgt. Lake, Carroll County Police.” She smiled, an expressionless mechanical gesture lacking any warmth. “This is Sgt. Howard. Could we have a few minutes of your time?”
Her voice was low key. She would have been attractive had she been a trifle less official. She was in her late thirties, with cold dark eyes and a cynical expression that looked considerably older than she was.
“Sure,” I said, wondering what it was about.
Sgt. Howard made no secret of the fact that he was bored. His eyes glided over me, and he dismissed me as a lowlife whose only conceivable interest to him might lie in my criminal past.
We stepped up onto the deck and went in through the sliding glass panels. Lake sat down on the sofa, while Howard undid a lumpy gray scarf, and took to wandering around the room, inspecting books, prints, stereo, whatever. I offered coffee.
“No, thanks,” said Lake. Howard just looked as if I hadn’t meant him. Lake crossed her legs. “I wanted first to offer my condolences on the death of Dr. Shelborne. I understand he was a close friend of yours?”
“That’s correct,” I said. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”
She nodded, produced a leather-bound notebook, opened it, and wrote something down. “Did you have a professional relationship?” she asked.
“No,” I said slowly. “We were just friends.”
“I understand.” She paused. “Dr. Dryden,” she said, “I’m sorry to tell you this: Dr. Shelborne was murdered.”
My first reaction was simply to disbelieve the statement. “You’re not serious,” I said.
“I never joke, Doctor. We believe someone attacked the victim in bed, struck him hard enough to fracture his skull, and set fire to the house.”
Behind me, the floor creaked. Howard was moving around. “I don’t believe it,” I said.
Her eyes never left me. “The fire happened between 2:15 and 2:30 A.M., on the twelfth. Friday night, Saturday morning. I wonder if you’d mind telling me where you were at that time?”
“At home in bed,” I said. There had been rumors that the fire was deliberately set, but I hadn’t taken any of it seriously. “Asleep,” I added unnecessarily. “I thought lightning hit the place?”
“No. There’s really no question that it was arson.”
“Hard to believe,” I said.
“Why?”
“Nobody would want to kill Shel. He had no enemies. At least, none that I know of.”
I was beginning to feel guilty. Authority figures always make me feel guilty. “You can’t think of anyone who’d want him dead?”
“No,” I said. But he had a lot of money. And there were relatives.
She looked down at her notebook. “Do you know if he kept any jewelry in the house?”
“No. He didn’t wear jewelry. As far as I know, there was nothing like that around.”
“How about cash?”
“I don’t know.” I started thinking about the gold coins that we always took with us when we went upstream. A stack of them had been locked in a desk drawer. (I had some of them upstairs in the wardrobe.) Could anyone have known about them? I considered mentioning them, but decided it would be prudent to keep quiet, since I couldn’t explain how they were used. And it would make no sense that I knew about a lot of gold coins in his desk and had never asked about them. “Do you think it was burglars?” I said.
Her eyes wandered to one of the bookcases. It was filled with biographies and histories of the Renaissance. My favorite period. The eyes were black pools that seemed to be waiting for something to happen. “That’s possible, I suppose.” She canted her head to read a title. It was Ledesma’s biography of Cervantes, in the original Spanish. “Although burglars don’t usually burn the house down.” Howard had got tired poking around, so he circled back and lowered himself into a chair. “Dr. Dryden,” she continued, “is there anyone who can substantiate the fact that you were here asleep on the morning of the twelfth?”
“No,” I said. “I was alone.” The question surprised me. “You don’t think I did it, do you?”
“We don’t really think anybody did it, yet.”
Howard caught her attention and directed it toward the wall. There was a photograph of the three of us, Shel and Helen and me, gathered around a table at the Beach Club. A mustard-colored umbrella shielded the table, and we were laughing and holding tall, cool drinks. She studied it, and turned back to me. “What exactly,” she said, “is your relationship with Dr. Suchenko?”
I swallowed and felt the color draining out of my face. I loved her. I’ve loved her from the moment I met her. “We’re friends,” I said. “Is that all?” I caught a hint of a smile. But nobody knew. I had kept my distance all this time. I’d told no one. Even Helen didn’t know. Well, she knew, but neither of us had ever admitted to it.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s all.”
She glanced around the room. “Nice house.”
It was. I had treated myself pretty well, installing leather furniture and thick pile carpets and a stow-away bar and some original art. “Not bad for a teacher,” she added.
“I don’t teach anymore.”
She closed her book. “So I understand.”
I knew what was in her mind. “I did pretty well on the stock market,” I said. I must have sounded defensive.
“As did Dr. Shelborne.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s so.”
“Same investments?”
Yes, they were the same. With only slight variations, we’d parlayed the same companies into our respective fortunes. “By and large, yes,” I said. “We did our research together. An investment club, you might say.”
Her eyes lingered on me a moment too long. She began to button her jacket. “Well, I think that’ll do, Dr. Dryden,” she said.
I was still numb with the idea that someone might have murdered Shelborne. He had never flaunted his money, had never even moved out of that jerkwater townhouse over in River Park. But someone had found out. And they’d robbed him. Possibly he’d come home and they were already in the house. He might even have been upstream. Damn, what a jolt that would have been: return from an evening in Babylon and get attacked by burglars.
I opened the sliding door for them. “You will be in the area if we need you?” Lake asked. I assured her I would be, and that I would do whatever I could to help find Shel’s killer. I watched them drive away and went back inside and locked the door. It had been painful enough believing that Shel had died through some arbitrary act of nature. But that a thug who had nothing whatever to contribute to the species would dare to take his life filled me with rage.
I poured a brandy and stared out the window. The snow was coming harder now. I couldn’t believe anyone would think for a moment that I could be capable of such an act. It chilled me.
In back somewhere, something moved. It might have been a branch scraping against the side of the house, but it sounded inside.
Snow fell steadily against the windows.
