Time Travel Omnibus, page 799
He looked at the mess he had made on the street, and wondered what part of that food might have come from 2084. It would be a long, long time if ever, he knew, before he was likely to see any of that again.
A Beatles song was playing somewhere in the distance. A DJ was talking. No historical moment, no hushed build-up. Just the Beatles.
Jeff opened his eyes. He looked out of his window at the street below. Mid-April sunshine coated the sidewalk like clarified butter.
“. . . Traffic light in most places but still heavy on the Kosciuszko Bridge,” the radio continued. “HOA halfway through the third shift with you on WABC. Good morning!”
Jeff hoisted himself out of the easy chair. His clothes felt stale and rumpled—he had spent the night in them—and he needed a shave. He stripped, showered, shaved, and approached the pile which served as his wardrobe closet. Today would be a special day. He put on a blue button-down shirt, dark brown corduroy slacks, and pulled his navy-blue knit tie into a loose fitting double-Windsor, the only kind of knot he knew how to make. He slung a corduroy jacket over his shoulder and ambled down the three flights of stairs.
Jeff played with his scrambled eggs at the Yorkville Restaurant and considered his situation for a thousandth time. He pushed three pieces of egg to one side. His arrival twenty-three years earlier than planned, the luggage accident in Dallas, the destruction of the student lounge—were these all related, or three pieces of random, rotten luck?
He couldn’t accept his being a Robinson Crusoe in the past. He understood his predicament, his utter stranding in the 1960s, logically enough. And yet some part of him had waited these past five months, hoping that one of his team would one day miraculously appear to rescue him. He’d imagined Rena in this role, but how could she? The mouth to 1963 had been sealed with the implosion or trashing or whatever had taken out the lounge. He’d been back up there several times, when no one was around, but the lounge had been totally reconstructed, with no sign of the AWH.
The team had no way of knowing he was even here—presumably all they would know is that he hadn’t succeeded in stopping the Challenger disaster. If they sent anyone else back, it would likely be to 1985, where he was supposed to have gone, not here. And who knows if Rena or whoever would succeed any better than he. Maybe Steven Hawking was right in his chronology protection conjecture—maybe the Universe protects itself from alterations via time travel—removes unwelcome Thornes from its side—whether by misdirecting travelers, blowing up AWHs, both, more.
So he was probably stranded. But maybe not totally without options. He had to gingerly probe the contours of time travel—see just what small things it might allow, and then perhaps he’d try a few larger things.
What he had in mind for today was the first modest step in this direction.
Jeff paid for his breakfast and walked out into the cool morning sunlight. His money problems were finally over—he had a job with a decent salary. Some parts of the team’s exhaustive planning had worked out after all, had survived his immersion in a time twenty-three years earlier than expected. Their massive search of historical records had uncovered fourteen Harrises who had done graduate work at universities in the mid-20th century. One, named Geoffrey, had earned a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Edinburgh in 1958. The names and academic disciplines were close enough that Jeff, with a mixture of Geoff’s credentials and his own knowledge of the field, would have been able to demonstrate a convincing identity in 1985-86—the team’s reason for coming up with this. But it turned out to also be enough for Jeff to land a job back here as an Adjunct Professor at the third school whose ad he’d answered—his act sufficiently polished, hinting just enough knowledge of new trends in the field to kindle admiration without suspicion. It was a last-minute spring teaching appointment, to fill in for a regular professor unexpectedly on leave, that required only cursory credentialing. But it was a foot in the door, and it paid real money.
He squinted at the Sun and inhaled deeply. The polluted air still bothered him, and he sometimes felt as if little pieces of black soot were burning holes in his chest. He wheezed slightly. But the day felt promising, even beautiful, and he caught the crosstown bus to the IRT subway on West 86th Street. This would take him to the “Intro to Sociology” class that he taught at City College on 137th Street in Harlem.
Farther up the subway line, near a place called Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, Mrs. Sarah Harris also made her way to work. The day was beautiful to her too, and she also wheezed a bit—from asthma—as she walked down the block to Saperman’s Bakery where she worked behind the counter. Her mind was filled today, as it was on many days, with images of the Ukrainian countryside around Kiev, and with pictures of her father. She could see him as clearly as if he were standing right in front of her, even though she had last seen him more than sixty years ago and a continent away. Her brown eyes, still keen and always wise, glistened a drop, not from soot but sentiment. Those eyes were almost identical to Jeff’s. She was his great-great-grandmother.
At City College, in a place presciently named Harris Hall, Jeff labored to make a concluding point about McLuhan. “So you see, it’s not what we watch on television that’s important, it’s the fact that we’re watching television—rather than reading a book or listening to the radio—that McLuhan says really counts. This is what he means by ‘the medium is the message.’ ”
Jeff looked at the students, most of whom were scribbling his words without the slightest comprehension.
The three girls from Queens who smiled at him certainly hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about. Neither did the foreign kid, his mouth continuously hanging open, who at least made no attempt to disguise his puzzlement. But a few in the class did seem to have some understanding of what Jeff was saying. The girl in the back with the soft brown eyes seemed to be in touch with him. Anyway, Jeff liked the way she looked at him.
“OK, that’s about it for today. Read the pertinent sections of Gutenberg Galaxy, and I’ll see whether I can get you some advance copies of Understanding Media.” Jeff grabbed his corduroy coat and strode out the door, smiling at the girl with the soft brown eyes.
He hurried to the subway at 137th Street. He looked at his watch—the deflector model, for Jeff no longer cared about keeping such minor aspects of his cover. In fact, he hoped future artifacts like this might attract someone’s benevolent attention, maybe someone else from the future, who could help him. He’d have gladly kept spending his 1980s money too for the same reason, had he not been afraid that sooner or later some good Samaritan would have him arrested for counterfeiting.
It was 11:56—more than enough time.
But the subway took longer than expected, and it was 12:35 when Jeff ran down the long flights of stairs at the Pelham Parkway station in the Bronx. Saperman’s was only a few minutes away by foot, so Jeff wasn’t too worried. Still, he half-walked, half-ran.
He was sweating when he reached the bakery. He realized this was more from anxiety than exertion. His great-great-grandmother had died in 1992, at the age of ninety-seven. His grandfather, whom Jeff had spent some of the most satisfying times of his childhood with, had been just six when Sarah Harris had died. But grandpa carried memories of her warmth and voice and summers they had spent together in their cottage on Cape Cod Bay, and Jeff felt he knew Sarah through this.
But he stopped, suddenly not sure he could do this. What would he say to this woman? How would she react? A smell of apple strudel permeated his thoughts—grandpa’s strudel, an old family recipe grandpa had loved to bake—and this gave him courage. He walked in.
“Hello,” he said in the direction of the three matronly women who stood behind the counter and looked up at him as a clanking bell on the inside of the door announced his presence. Not a single one of them looked anything like his great-great-grandmother. “Can I help you?” one of them said in a soothing Jewish accent that he’d heard only in the movies.
“Uhm, yes . . .” he began, not quite sure what to say. “Does a Mrs. Sarah Harris work here?”
Just then he heard a rustle from the back. His great-great-grandmother walked out from behind a curtain, carrying some sort of cake in an open box.
“Sarah, a boichik to see you,” one of the women said with a laugh.
Jeff felt like shouting with joy. He suppressed this, along with the urge to jump over the counter and hug her. She looked great—like her best picture, from a bar mitzvah of someone named Sol, come to life.
Sarah was smiling, a wonderful smile he had seen in his father and some of his aunts and uncles and his grandfather. “You look like I know you,” she said. “You’re one of Louie’s grandsons?”
“Right, Louie,” Jeff answered quickly. His mind sped through family history. Louie was Sarah’s older brother. The two had come with a middle brother—Hymie—to New York around 1900. Sarah was a little girl then, about five, and Louie was like a father to her. Her real father and nine other brothers and sisters she would never see again. Louie—Uncle Louie, Jeff’s grandfather had always called him—had moved to the West Coast after World War II. He had fathered a big family himself, and Jeff recalled that these in turn had given Louie dozens of grandchildren who from time to time showed up at weddings and bar mitzvahs on the East Coast. Good. Jeff for now would be one of them.
Sarah took off her apron and moved out from behind the counter. “I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off,” she said to the matrons. “You tell Murray I’ll make up the time this weekend, OK?”
“No, no, please, Mrs. Harris,” Jeff raised his hand and smiled. He didn’t think he could take more than a few minutes with his great-great-grandmother in this first meeting. “I’ve got just a little over an hour before an appointment downtown, and I don’t want you to lose time from your job. How about we go for a cup of tea at the Dairy Restaurant by Lydig Avenue? It’s kosher, right?” He had checked out this whole neighborhood a week ago.
Sarah laughed heartily. “It seems you know me and this area very well. OK, let’s go to Lydig. Tell Murray I’m back in an hour,” she said over her shoulder to the counter.
“So it seems you know my name but I don’t know yours,” Sarah said as the two walked the half block around the corner to Lydig Avenue.
“I’m Jeff. Jeffrey Rosenberg.” Jeff was 99 percent positive that Rosenberg was Sarah’s maiden name.
Sarah’s eyes widened in pleasure. “Yosef was the name of my father. Wonderful of Shlomo to name you after him. We have only one son, and we named him after my husband’s—Yitzhak’s—mother. So you’re Shlomo’s boy, then?” Now Sarah’s eyes furrowed in some confusion. “Or are you Harry’s?”
Jeff smiled and thought frantically as they entered the restaurant. He ushered Sarah to a table, and once seated, ordered two cups of tea—with lemon for Sarah, milk for him—from the elderly waiter who looked like he had about five minutes left to live.
He knew that Sarah prided herself on perfect recall of every relationship in her extended family. Right now she was probably realizing that as far as she knew, Shlomo had no son named Jeffrey, and neither did Harry. Jeff breathed in sharply. Time to talk about the impossible.
“I’m not really Louie’s grandson,” he said slowly.
In another time and place—in fact, in most times and places, including this one—such an admission would have been cause for alarm for Sarah. But her powerful intuition told her this was not a stranger to be feared—not a stranger at all.
“You’re much closer to me than Louie’s grandchildren,” Sarah finally said. Her eyes looked loving, not challenging, to Jeff.
“You’ve traveled very far in your lifetime, Sarah,” Jeff said softly. “Do think it might be possible to travel across years, across time, just like you’ve traveled across great distances?” The tea arrived.
Sarah chuckled. “You mean like angels? Or maybe like the meshugenas on the Twilight Zone?” She pronounced the “w” like a “v,” so the show sounded like Tvilight Zone.
Jeff couldn’t help laughing. He would have sworn that the only TV this woman would have ever watched, other than the news, was the Lawrence Welk Show. “Yes, something like that.” Jeff felt much better after laughing. He put his teacup down. “Sarah, I’m going to tell you something now. You’re a very intelligent women, and what I’m going to tell you will seem totally crazy. But please hear me out. It will take just a minute. And then I’m going to ask you to do a very important favor for me. You don’t have to agree now, but please promise me that you’ll think about it.”
“It’s about what Hitler did in Europe?” she asked with a cry in her voice. Her hand shook, and she spilled some of her tea, though the cup was only half full. Jeff suddenly felt very guilty. His great-great-grandmother looked so much younger than he had pictured her, seen her in most of her pictures, that she had seemed at first not so old to him. Now she looked every one of her sixty years, and Jeff felt terrible that he was stirring up these demons about the Holocaust and who knows what else. But he had to finish what he had started here.
“No, it’s not about Hitler.” He paused. Tm your great-great-grandson, Jeffrey Harris.”
A small shriek came from Sarah, and the blood left her cheeks. “Sarah, please.” Jeff took her hand. “I have to leave now. But I need you to do something for me that is very very important—my life may depend upon it. In twenty-five years, you’ll get to know my grandfather, when he was just a little boy and you’ll be much older.” Jeff realized there were tears in his eyes. “And you’ll be a wonderful grandma to him, believe me. But I want you to promise that you’ll tell him—your little grandson—about this meeting. I’m not asking you to believe me now. You can tell your grandson that you had this meeting with a crazy man who claimed to be your great-great-grandson years ago. But everything depends on your telling him something—something about me, about this—twenty-five years from now.”
Sarah’s head shook—not no, but from tremors. Her eyes were a confused mixture of anger, uncertainty, love. Now she slowly shook her head no. “I don’t know you,” she whispered.
“I know. But I’m part of you—I’m your DNA, your blood.” Jeff stood up, then leaned over and kissed her. “I love you, Sarah, I always will. Go by your instincts in this.” He put a five-dollar bill on the table, and hurried out the door.
Now the April breeze caught his face, seemed to move him along. He walked in a daze, not really knowing where he was going, to the Pelham Parkway station. He paid his fare, walked through the wooden turnstile—nearly getting a splinter in his thigh—and sat down on the rotting green bench to wait for the train.
And then he remembered. His grandpa swinging with him on the hammock. Talking about a summer he’d spent years ago when his grandma was still alive, on Cape Cod. He was four, maybe five, so it was 1990 or 1991. His parents and little sister had gone out to Cooke’s for supper. He’d had a bad cold, and had to stay in the cottage. Grandma Sarah stayed with him. It had started raining—very hard—an August Cape Cod storm that seemed to drench the beach and every living thing. And she told him about the strange man who had come to her long ago in Saperman’s, the bakery where she used to work.
Jeff shook as he recalled his grandfather’s words. Thank you, Sarah—you came through for me. He felt like running back and hugging her, but didn’t dare, lest this somehow throw a curve into what he had just accomplished here.
He was sure this memory of what his grandfather had told him about what his grandmother had told him hadn’t existed before. It proved that he was real in this convoluted past—that he could do things here which could indeed change the future, even if the change was as slight as a grandmother’s words in a Cape Cod storm some sixty years before he’d been born. But those words, his memory of his grandfather’s conveyance of them, meant everything. Sarah Harris had given him his first real hope. If he could change the future through her, he could figure out a way to somehow contact his team, and get back to where he belonged.
He was crying. For he also realized that in a deep, indescribable way he missed Sarah Harris even more than his world of 2084, and he knew there was no way he ever could have both.
“I think he’s very attractive,” Carla Caplan of Flushing said. “You know, not in the Marlon Brando or Paul Newman way, but in a cuddly way. Like a teddy bear.” She stroked her left thumbnail with an emery board.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Amy Jacobson replied. “His accent is a little strange. And anyway, he never pays any attention to us. The only girl he ever looks at is the girl in back of the class.”
Carla moved her hand along the nylon stocking on her leg. “That’s not true, Amy. I’ve seen him look at us lots of times.”
“The two of you are ridiculous.” Sandy Greenfarb shook her curly brown hair. “Besides, teachers don’t date students in this pathetic school. City College is too old-fashioned for that.”
“Who said anything about dating?” Carla replied. “And you’re wrong, anyway. Didn’t you hear about Atwick in the bio department? They say he got a girl pregnant. Put some Spanish Fly in her drink.”
Sandy blushed. “That’s absurd. And anyway, Professor Harris is nothing like Professor Atwick. He’s much more refined—more of a gentleman.”
“How would you know?” Amy jumped back in.
“No one knows much about Professor Harris. He just started teaching here this term,” Carla said.
“He’s not married. That’s all Carla needs to know.” Amy laughed.
“Shh,” Sandy said as Jeff walked into the room.
“Late as usual.” Amy whispered.
“Well, I’ve read through most of your papers.” Jeff slouched into the chair on wheels and stretched his feet out on the desk. “And I’m afraid to say that they were more gruesome than I expected.”
