Time Travel Omnibus, page 800
A murmur of irritation rippled through the class.
“Now to begin with . . .” Jeff began, as one student, even later than he, hurried through the door. It was the girl with the soft brown eyes, who bit her lower lip in an apologetic Smile and slipped into a rear seat as inconspicuously as possible.
“Miss, uh . . .” Jeff inquired, returning the smile.
“Laura Chapin.”
“Yes, uh, Miss Chapin, I was just telling the class that most of these papers on the McLuhanesque interpretation of the Beatles missed the point entirely. But there were a few exceptions. And yours was among the most refreshing.”
Amy shot an I-told-you-so glance to Carla.
Laura’s eyes dilated with delight. “Thank you.”
Jeff finished the class five minutes early and headed quickly out the door. “Professor Harris,” Laura called after him. He stopped a few feet down the hall and turned to face her. Jeff realized she looked taller and older than he had thought, her brown hair jostling invitingly around her shoulders. “I wanted to thank you for what you said about my paper,” she said, slightly out of breath.
“You earned it. You have a fine mind.”
She smiled without looking too embarrassed. “I was wondering if we might be able to get together and talk sometime—in your office—I, um, have some questions I’d like to go over with you about grad school.”
Jeff looked at his watch and gestured Laura to walk with him towards the stairs. “Look, I’d ask you to join me for lunch right now, but I’ve a departmental meeting to attend. Why don’t we have lunch together next Monday?”
Now Laura’s face flushed a bit. “I . . . that would be very nice, but I’ve got labs starting at noon that run to four o’clock. Do you think it might be possible for us to meet in your office at 4:30 on Monday?”
Jeff stopped and looked steadily at Laura for a moment. Those eyes were alluring. “Monday at 4:30 it is, then,” he said crisply, and strode away.
“I almost didn’t keep our appointment today,” Jeff said, sipping the third glass of red wine he and Laura had partaken since they’d adjourned their meeting from his office.
“Oh? And what possibly could have kept you?” The wine had lowered Laura’s voice to a quiet, warm contralto. The cafe, five minutes on the subway from his office, had the smell of fine spirits and food.
“I didn’t want the aggravation,” Jeff said.
Laura considered his deadpan face, then burst out laughing. “Well, thank you very much.”
“What would you say if I told you that I could predict the future?” Jeff asked offhandedly, taking another sip of his wine.
“You mean in a socially forecasting way?”
“I mean in every way.”
“Well, Professor Harris, you told us in one of your lectures that for very good reasons no one can ever really know the future. So I would say either you were lying . . . or speaking metaphorically.”
“Good,” Jeff nodded, “but let’s say I stubbornly insisted that I did know the future, and that this in no way contradicts what I said in my lecture about no one ever being able to know the future. What would you say then?”
“I’d say you were kidding me or crazy.” Laura thought for a bit. “I don’t think the future exists yet—it doesn’t exist until it’s actually created, in the present—so there’s no way you or anyone could really know it in the way that we know we’re here in this little bistro on Broadway, for instance.”
“Fair enough.” Jeff waved to the waiter for another round of wine. “You’re sharp. But let’s say I were to tell you that Lyndon Johnson will beat Barry Goldwater by a landslide this November?”
Laura shook her head. “No. Not good enough. Everyone expects Goldwater to get the nomination, and there’s no way that Johnson won’t win big what with the Kennedy sympathy vote. You’d have to do better than that.”
Jeff smiled and rubbed his lips with his fingers. The Beatles’s “Thank You, Girl” played languorously in the background. “OK, how’s this: Let’s say I tell you that in about a year and a half from now, the Beatles will have a hit record called ‘Help’ from a movie by the same name?”
Laura laughed. “You’ve got imagination, I’ll say that for you. But I still don’t think I’d be convinced. How do I know that you’re not a personal friend of George Martin’s with some special information about the Beatles’s plans?” Laura frowned for a moment then snapped her fingers. “No, I’ve got it! You tell me what number on Billboard’s Hot 100 a wow-Beatle record—one that won’t almost certainly make number one—will be in 1966, and I’ll believe that you know the future!”
Laura extended her hands in a triumphant gesture, pitching over a nearly full glass of red wine onto her shirt in the process. Jeff jumped up, napkin in hand, and began patting Laura’s soaked sleeve dry. He progressed from her sleeve to her cheek, and suddenly was less than an inch from Laura’s upturned face. Her eyes were rosy with wine, her mouth soft and parted. He touched his lips to hers, gently at first, then found himself lost in a realm of warmth and darkness.
He finally pulled away. “Well,” he managed, gasping a bit for breath, “no one can ever say that I don’t give my students personal attention.”
“I’d be glad to write you a letter of recommendation,” she said, smiling. “Now you see why I didn’t want to have lunch with you.”
“You found this aggravating?”
“Quite the opposite,” Laura replied.
Still standing over her, Jeff touched her hair with his finger. “I’ve got a lot I need to tell you,” he said softly. “By the way, no one but a record producer would know the exact number on the charts of a record even now, so your test of my knowledge of the future is too demanding.”
They walked hand in hand a few evenings later along groves overlooking the Hudson River. Across they could see the Palisades of New Jersey, carved whole out of stone as if by some supreme civilization, and near them the palette of Wave Hill Park in the late spring. Wave Hill—home of Mark Twain, of Toscanini, and an Easter parade of a notables across a century. In the late 1800s, William Appleton had lived here, amidst his publication in America of Darwin and Spencer. JFK had lived in a house across the street in the 1930s. Recently a British ambassador had donated most of this to the people of New York.
Jeff knew it wouldn’t especially help his larger predicament to get involved with Laura, to tell her what he was about. On the other hand, what harm could it do—set in motion a jagged time-loop which would wink him out of existence? Not likely. And the smell of her neck and his need to talk had been compelling. So he’d told her. And here he was, still around, and feeling fine.
He breathed in slowly. Fragrances real and recalled bathed his brain. “You know, when I was a kid, my grandfather used to tell me about summers he spent on Cape Cod when he was a kid himself. At night, sometimes two or three in the morning, he’d walk along the beach and gradually leave his cottage in the distance. Sometimes he’d turn around and, still seeing the light of the cottage, would walk further until it was completely gone. Then he’d close his eyes and think, there’s no difference between what I see with my eyes open and my eyes closed. He’d sit in the salty water, a foot or two deep, and feel the cold fluid pulse of the cosmos throbbing through his clothes. Then he’d get up and walk again, cold but not shivering, until he made contact with that spot of light that was his cottage. He was never sure until it happened that he would see that light again. But when he did, he’d walk with the satisfaction of knowing that after having gone out to the very limits of his usual reality and beyond, he was about to enter it again. I never really fully understood what my grandfather was saying to me—until now.”
Laura looked at him, stroked his face with the center of her palm. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Serious about what?”
“The time travel,” Laura said.
Jeff said nothing.
“I can be with you anyway,” Laura said. “I don’t have to believe it’s real. I can pretend to believe it’s real, play along that you’re from the future, like you say you are. I’m not sure there’s all that much difference between really believing and pretending to believe anyway, if you pretend sincerely enough.”
“You’ve got some philosophy there,” Jeff said.
Laura took his hand, put it to her lips.
“And you’re not worried that I really am crazy—maybe dangerous?” Jeff asked.
“Oh, you’re dangerous all right,” she said, grazing her teeth over his index finger. “And as to your story—my feeling is that whatever the truth of it, you’re a good man. I feel right about that.”
Jeff sighed. “You remember what I said the first day of class about no one really knowing for sure that anything is real—we could well be dreaming all of this, and might even dream that someone pinched us and tried to awaken us and nothing happened—but that we’d all go crazy unless we took at least some leap of faith, and assumed on nothing better than faith that the world is real and we were really here?”
“I was late for that lecture, wasn’t I?”
“No, I’m quite sure you were there,” Jeff said. “Look, I’m trying to say that—”
“I know what you’re saying.” Now she looked at him very intently. “You want me to take that leap of faith with you and your story. You want me to assume that what you’re saying is true, even though I have no evidence for it and it flies in the face of reason. You want me to say, look, I know this is crazy, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, entertain your insanity, see where it leads us. In other words, pretense isn’t good enough for you—you want to make this really hard for me.” She turned away.
“Something like that, right,” Jeff said.
“What is it about me that’s always attracted to lunatics?” she murmured. She turned around and kissed him full on the lips.
“Two papayas.” Jeff held up two fingers to the man at the Papaya King on 3rd Avenue and 86th Street. “One to drink here and a quart to go.” There was nothing like this drink in his century. Whatever the hell it was—whatever its special mixture of pulp and sugars—it was delicious.
He walked down 86th Street, package in hand, towards his place by the East River. His place . . . he was feeling more and more comfortable in this place, and that made him feel uncomfortable, out of place. There were things he missed from his world—faces on the phone, words on the screen, poles of the planet as easily accessible as the north and south parts of this borough—but he missed them less and less. Especially when he was with Laura.
Still . . . he picked up a copy of the Daily News. Johnson was on the cover, saying he was going ahead full force on the space program, and on the inside was a picture of Gus Grissom. Jeff had thought about doing something to prevent the fire that would kill Grissom, White, and Chafee in their Apollo 1 capsule on January 27, 1967. But that was still over two and a half years away, and he couldn’t be sure what impact that might have on the Moon landing, which was still the lonely high watermark of human penetration of space. No, he didn’t dare mess with that—better to bide his time, and wait the nineteen further years, almost to the day, for a chance to avert the Challenger catastrophe, and the fatal blow it had delivered, in retrospect, to the space program.
But Jeff didn’t suffer abidances of time very well. What was the point of time travel, anyway, if not to short-circuit ordinary time, make new things happen? It seemed the last thing that should be required of the time traveler was patience. Jeff knew now, ever since his experience with Sarah, that he could change the future—which meant that his existence here could make a difference. But he had to get some word back to his team in 2084. How? He’d even tried taking a page from Asimov—what was that book, The End of Eternity—and placed small, discreet, but clearly informative ads in a variety of significant journals and newspapers like The New York Times. But nothing had happened. He had no idea whether any of the ads had even come to the attention of the team—1964 was after all well before the age of on-line information, and an ad in a newspaper this old might well have slipped by the Big Scannings in the new millennium.
He opened the door to his apartment quietly, so as not to wake Laura. She’d been sleeping over a lot, and Jeff figured she’d be moving in with him soon. He wasn’t sure how his colleagues at City College would take this—the 1960s were one of the decades of sexual liberation, but Jeff wasn’t enough of an expert on that aspect of popular culture to know just how far that went.
He tiptoed into the bedroom. He liked looking at Laura when she was sleeping. Her eyes were open just a crack, and he could see the bottoms of her soft brown eyes tracing some sort of REM-dream diagram. He hoped it was of him. He looked at her body, her breasts, one nipple partly exposed. He could do a lot worse than spending the next twenty-three years with her.
He walked carefully back into the kitchen, put the papaya juice into the refrigerator—he loved it, a living antique, right out of the Smith-Sonyian—and took out some eggs. Was cholesterol verboten in this decade? He’d been meaning to ask Laura. It certainly wasn’t in his. He started a pot of water boiling for the eggs, and sat down at the table to read the paper.
“Jesus!” he shouted.
“What’s the matter?” Laura shuffled out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes.
Jeff shook his head in shocked disbelief.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Laura walked over, put a concerned hand on his shoulder.
Jeff pointed to the paper.
“What? What is it?” Laura asked.
Jeff jabbed at a picture. “I know her,” he rasped. “She was a member of my team. Rena Sarrett.”
Laura leaned over, and read aloud the article associated with the photograph. “. . . Run down by a bus on Central Park South last week . . . died the next day . . . her co-workers say she was hired by Gaulin’s, an insurance firm, about six months ago . . . attempts to locate Miss Sarrett’s relatives have all proven unsuccessful . . . police would appreciate anyone with information contacting them—”
“She was part of your project?” Laura asked.
“Right,” Jeff said, his voice choked with emotion.
Laura had the presence of mind to turn off the water, which was furiously boiling. “And you and she were lovers?”
“What?” Jeff croaked.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said.
“Yeah, we were lovers. Once. A long time ago—actually, in a time which doesn’t even goddamn exist yet. Does that matter?”
“Did you love her?” Laura asked.
“Yes,” Jeff said, tears in his eyes. “But not as much as I love you.”
Laura put her arms around his neck, stroked his chest. “That’s all that matters to me. I love you too.”
Jeff rubbed the side of his face against her hand.
“What does this mean?” Laura asked. “I mean, your friend getting killed . . .”
“It means they sent her back too—maybe to find me here, who knows, maybe they got one of my messages after all,” Jeff said. “Or maybe they were trying to send her back to 1985, to do the same job I was supposed to do, but for some reason she got sucked back here to the 1960s too. I don’t know.”
“What are you—we—going to do now?” Laura asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeff said.
“I don’t really want to go to this party,” Jeff said, trudging reluctantly after Laura up a steep street in Washington Heights.
“Come on.” Laura turned around and pulled his hand. “It’s been over a month since you found out about Rena, and all you’ve been doing is moping and brooding—it’s time you got out and saw some people. It’s summer already, for God’s sake.”
“Not moping—thinking,” Jeff said. “I was knocked unconscious in Dallas, Rena was killed by a bus, both in places we shouldn’t have been. There’s got to be some comprehensible pattern in this.”
“I know,” Laura said, more softly. “It’s almost as if there’s something in the nature of things that doesn’t want people to time travel—and punishes them when they do.”
“You know I dreamed about Rena dead, shortly after I got out of the Dallas hospital,” Jeff said, recalling this for the first time. “I wonder if that has any connection to any of this.”
“Well, remember you told me that Kip Thorpe—”
“Thorne,” Jeff corrected.
“Right, Kip Thorne and his people hypothesized that people flip into alternate universes when they change history through time travel—that that’s how the loops opened by the Thorne stay clean—so maybe, somehow, because you’re here in the past, you’ve caused an alternate universe to come into being, and in that universe you already lived past knowing about Rena’s death, because that universe is progressing at a different pace, and somehow your dream connected you to this alternate version of your self . . .”
Jeff smiled. It was at times like this that he could understand how he had come to feel so close to Laura. “You don’t think I’m such a lunatic anymore, huh?”
Laura snuggled against him. “You’re definitely a lunatic—no doubt about that—but maybe not about time travel.”
Jeff kissed her on the forehead. “Well, here we are at Joannie’s building,” Laura said. “Don’t worry, I’m sure there’ll be other teachers there. Just think of this as another great safari into 1960s culture.”
“What can I fix you, Professor?”
“A scotch and water would be fine.” Richard Atwick adjusted his thin-rimmed glasses and quietly eyed the hosed legs and sleek red dress of his benefactor. “Why, thank you, Carla,” he said, taking the drink from her hand, “and I must say you’re looking as lovely tonight as always.”
He gulped half his drink down in one swallow and, sloshing the rest around in the glass, began walking through the six rooms of Joannie Pernelli’s parents’ apartment. The place was packed with partiers in varying states of dress, intimacy, and inebriation.
“Professor Harris.” Atwick strode over and extended his hand to Jeff. “I’ve seen you around campus, but I don’t think we’ve ever formally met. I’m Richard Atwick of Biology.” He suddenly put his hand to his ear as the Beatles’s “It Won’t Be Long” blared forth without warning.
“Now to begin with . . .” Jeff began, as one student, even later than he, hurried through the door. It was the girl with the soft brown eyes, who bit her lower lip in an apologetic Smile and slipped into a rear seat as inconspicuously as possible.
“Miss, uh . . .” Jeff inquired, returning the smile.
“Laura Chapin.”
“Yes, uh, Miss Chapin, I was just telling the class that most of these papers on the McLuhanesque interpretation of the Beatles missed the point entirely. But there were a few exceptions. And yours was among the most refreshing.”
Amy shot an I-told-you-so glance to Carla.
Laura’s eyes dilated with delight. “Thank you.”
Jeff finished the class five minutes early and headed quickly out the door. “Professor Harris,” Laura called after him. He stopped a few feet down the hall and turned to face her. Jeff realized she looked taller and older than he had thought, her brown hair jostling invitingly around her shoulders. “I wanted to thank you for what you said about my paper,” she said, slightly out of breath.
“You earned it. You have a fine mind.”
She smiled without looking too embarrassed. “I was wondering if we might be able to get together and talk sometime—in your office—I, um, have some questions I’d like to go over with you about grad school.”
Jeff looked at his watch and gestured Laura to walk with him towards the stairs. “Look, I’d ask you to join me for lunch right now, but I’ve a departmental meeting to attend. Why don’t we have lunch together next Monday?”
Now Laura’s face flushed a bit. “I . . . that would be very nice, but I’ve got labs starting at noon that run to four o’clock. Do you think it might be possible for us to meet in your office at 4:30 on Monday?”
Jeff stopped and looked steadily at Laura for a moment. Those eyes were alluring. “Monday at 4:30 it is, then,” he said crisply, and strode away.
“I almost didn’t keep our appointment today,” Jeff said, sipping the third glass of red wine he and Laura had partaken since they’d adjourned their meeting from his office.
“Oh? And what possibly could have kept you?” The wine had lowered Laura’s voice to a quiet, warm contralto. The cafe, five minutes on the subway from his office, had the smell of fine spirits and food.
“I didn’t want the aggravation,” Jeff said.
Laura considered his deadpan face, then burst out laughing. “Well, thank you very much.”
“What would you say if I told you that I could predict the future?” Jeff asked offhandedly, taking another sip of his wine.
“You mean in a socially forecasting way?”
“I mean in every way.”
“Well, Professor Harris, you told us in one of your lectures that for very good reasons no one can ever really know the future. So I would say either you were lying . . . or speaking metaphorically.”
“Good,” Jeff nodded, “but let’s say I stubbornly insisted that I did know the future, and that this in no way contradicts what I said in my lecture about no one ever being able to know the future. What would you say then?”
“I’d say you were kidding me or crazy.” Laura thought for a bit. “I don’t think the future exists yet—it doesn’t exist until it’s actually created, in the present—so there’s no way you or anyone could really know it in the way that we know we’re here in this little bistro on Broadway, for instance.”
“Fair enough.” Jeff waved to the waiter for another round of wine. “You’re sharp. But let’s say I were to tell you that Lyndon Johnson will beat Barry Goldwater by a landslide this November?”
Laura shook her head. “No. Not good enough. Everyone expects Goldwater to get the nomination, and there’s no way that Johnson won’t win big what with the Kennedy sympathy vote. You’d have to do better than that.”
Jeff smiled and rubbed his lips with his fingers. The Beatles’s “Thank You, Girl” played languorously in the background. “OK, how’s this: Let’s say I tell you that in about a year and a half from now, the Beatles will have a hit record called ‘Help’ from a movie by the same name?”
Laura laughed. “You’ve got imagination, I’ll say that for you. But I still don’t think I’d be convinced. How do I know that you’re not a personal friend of George Martin’s with some special information about the Beatles’s plans?” Laura frowned for a moment then snapped her fingers. “No, I’ve got it! You tell me what number on Billboard’s Hot 100 a wow-Beatle record—one that won’t almost certainly make number one—will be in 1966, and I’ll believe that you know the future!”
Laura extended her hands in a triumphant gesture, pitching over a nearly full glass of red wine onto her shirt in the process. Jeff jumped up, napkin in hand, and began patting Laura’s soaked sleeve dry. He progressed from her sleeve to her cheek, and suddenly was less than an inch from Laura’s upturned face. Her eyes were rosy with wine, her mouth soft and parted. He touched his lips to hers, gently at first, then found himself lost in a realm of warmth and darkness.
He finally pulled away. “Well,” he managed, gasping a bit for breath, “no one can ever say that I don’t give my students personal attention.”
“I’d be glad to write you a letter of recommendation,” she said, smiling. “Now you see why I didn’t want to have lunch with you.”
“You found this aggravating?”
“Quite the opposite,” Laura replied.
Still standing over her, Jeff touched her hair with his finger. “I’ve got a lot I need to tell you,” he said softly. “By the way, no one but a record producer would know the exact number on the charts of a record even now, so your test of my knowledge of the future is too demanding.”
They walked hand in hand a few evenings later along groves overlooking the Hudson River. Across they could see the Palisades of New Jersey, carved whole out of stone as if by some supreme civilization, and near them the palette of Wave Hill Park in the late spring. Wave Hill—home of Mark Twain, of Toscanini, and an Easter parade of a notables across a century. In the late 1800s, William Appleton had lived here, amidst his publication in America of Darwin and Spencer. JFK had lived in a house across the street in the 1930s. Recently a British ambassador had donated most of this to the people of New York.
Jeff knew it wouldn’t especially help his larger predicament to get involved with Laura, to tell her what he was about. On the other hand, what harm could it do—set in motion a jagged time-loop which would wink him out of existence? Not likely. And the smell of her neck and his need to talk had been compelling. So he’d told her. And here he was, still around, and feeling fine.
He breathed in slowly. Fragrances real and recalled bathed his brain. “You know, when I was a kid, my grandfather used to tell me about summers he spent on Cape Cod when he was a kid himself. At night, sometimes two or three in the morning, he’d walk along the beach and gradually leave his cottage in the distance. Sometimes he’d turn around and, still seeing the light of the cottage, would walk further until it was completely gone. Then he’d close his eyes and think, there’s no difference between what I see with my eyes open and my eyes closed. He’d sit in the salty water, a foot or two deep, and feel the cold fluid pulse of the cosmos throbbing through his clothes. Then he’d get up and walk again, cold but not shivering, until he made contact with that spot of light that was his cottage. He was never sure until it happened that he would see that light again. But when he did, he’d walk with the satisfaction of knowing that after having gone out to the very limits of his usual reality and beyond, he was about to enter it again. I never really fully understood what my grandfather was saying to me—until now.”
Laura looked at him, stroked his face with the center of her palm. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Serious about what?”
“The time travel,” Laura said.
Jeff said nothing.
“I can be with you anyway,” Laura said. “I don’t have to believe it’s real. I can pretend to believe it’s real, play along that you’re from the future, like you say you are. I’m not sure there’s all that much difference between really believing and pretending to believe anyway, if you pretend sincerely enough.”
“You’ve got some philosophy there,” Jeff said.
Laura took his hand, put it to her lips.
“And you’re not worried that I really am crazy—maybe dangerous?” Jeff asked.
“Oh, you’re dangerous all right,” she said, grazing her teeth over his index finger. “And as to your story—my feeling is that whatever the truth of it, you’re a good man. I feel right about that.”
Jeff sighed. “You remember what I said the first day of class about no one really knowing for sure that anything is real—we could well be dreaming all of this, and might even dream that someone pinched us and tried to awaken us and nothing happened—but that we’d all go crazy unless we took at least some leap of faith, and assumed on nothing better than faith that the world is real and we were really here?”
“I was late for that lecture, wasn’t I?”
“No, I’m quite sure you were there,” Jeff said. “Look, I’m trying to say that—”
“I know what you’re saying.” Now she looked at him very intently. “You want me to take that leap of faith with you and your story. You want me to assume that what you’re saying is true, even though I have no evidence for it and it flies in the face of reason. You want me to say, look, I know this is crazy, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, entertain your insanity, see where it leads us. In other words, pretense isn’t good enough for you—you want to make this really hard for me.” She turned away.
“Something like that, right,” Jeff said.
“What is it about me that’s always attracted to lunatics?” she murmured. She turned around and kissed him full on the lips.
“Two papayas.” Jeff held up two fingers to the man at the Papaya King on 3rd Avenue and 86th Street. “One to drink here and a quart to go.” There was nothing like this drink in his century. Whatever the hell it was—whatever its special mixture of pulp and sugars—it was delicious.
He walked down 86th Street, package in hand, towards his place by the East River. His place . . . he was feeling more and more comfortable in this place, and that made him feel uncomfortable, out of place. There were things he missed from his world—faces on the phone, words on the screen, poles of the planet as easily accessible as the north and south parts of this borough—but he missed them less and less. Especially when he was with Laura.
Still . . . he picked up a copy of the Daily News. Johnson was on the cover, saying he was going ahead full force on the space program, and on the inside was a picture of Gus Grissom. Jeff had thought about doing something to prevent the fire that would kill Grissom, White, and Chafee in their Apollo 1 capsule on January 27, 1967. But that was still over two and a half years away, and he couldn’t be sure what impact that might have on the Moon landing, which was still the lonely high watermark of human penetration of space. No, he didn’t dare mess with that—better to bide his time, and wait the nineteen further years, almost to the day, for a chance to avert the Challenger catastrophe, and the fatal blow it had delivered, in retrospect, to the space program.
But Jeff didn’t suffer abidances of time very well. What was the point of time travel, anyway, if not to short-circuit ordinary time, make new things happen? It seemed the last thing that should be required of the time traveler was patience. Jeff knew now, ever since his experience with Sarah, that he could change the future—which meant that his existence here could make a difference. But he had to get some word back to his team in 2084. How? He’d even tried taking a page from Asimov—what was that book, The End of Eternity—and placed small, discreet, but clearly informative ads in a variety of significant journals and newspapers like The New York Times. But nothing had happened. He had no idea whether any of the ads had even come to the attention of the team—1964 was after all well before the age of on-line information, and an ad in a newspaper this old might well have slipped by the Big Scannings in the new millennium.
He opened the door to his apartment quietly, so as not to wake Laura. She’d been sleeping over a lot, and Jeff figured she’d be moving in with him soon. He wasn’t sure how his colleagues at City College would take this—the 1960s were one of the decades of sexual liberation, but Jeff wasn’t enough of an expert on that aspect of popular culture to know just how far that went.
He tiptoed into the bedroom. He liked looking at Laura when she was sleeping. Her eyes were open just a crack, and he could see the bottoms of her soft brown eyes tracing some sort of REM-dream diagram. He hoped it was of him. He looked at her body, her breasts, one nipple partly exposed. He could do a lot worse than spending the next twenty-three years with her.
He walked carefully back into the kitchen, put the papaya juice into the refrigerator—he loved it, a living antique, right out of the Smith-Sonyian—and took out some eggs. Was cholesterol verboten in this decade? He’d been meaning to ask Laura. It certainly wasn’t in his. He started a pot of water boiling for the eggs, and sat down at the table to read the paper.
“Jesus!” he shouted.
“What’s the matter?” Laura shuffled out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes.
Jeff shook his head in shocked disbelief.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Laura walked over, put a concerned hand on his shoulder.
Jeff pointed to the paper.
“What? What is it?” Laura asked.
Jeff jabbed at a picture. “I know her,” he rasped. “She was a member of my team. Rena Sarrett.”
Laura leaned over, and read aloud the article associated with the photograph. “. . . Run down by a bus on Central Park South last week . . . died the next day . . . her co-workers say she was hired by Gaulin’s, an insurance firm, about six months ago . . . attempts to locate Miss Sarrett’s relatives have all proven unsuccessful . . . police would appreciate anyone with information contacting them—”
“She was part of your project?” Laura asked.
“Right,” Jeff said, his voice choked with emotion.
Laura had the presence of mind to turn off the water, which was furiously boiling. “And you and she were lovers?”
“What?” Jeff croaked.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said.
“Yeah, we were lovers. Once. A long time ago—actually, in a time which doesn’t even goddamn exist yet. Does that matter?”
“Did you love her?” Laura asked.
“Yes,” Jeff said, tears in his eyes. “But not as much as I love you.”
Laura put her arms around his neck, stroked his chest. “That’s all that matters to me. I love you too.”
Jeff rubbed the side of his face against her hand.
“What does this mean?” Laura asked. “I mean, your friend getting killed . . .”
“It means they sent her back too—maybe to find me here, who knows, maybe they got one of my messages after all,” Jeff said. “Or maybe they were trying to send her back to 1985, to do the same job I was supposed to do, but for some reason she got sucked back here to the 1960s too. I don’t know.”
“What are you—we—going to do now?” Laura asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeff said.
“I don’t really want to go to this party,” Jeff said, trudging reluctantly after Laura up a steep street in Washington Heights.
“Come on.” Laura turned around and pulled his hand. “It’s been over a month since you found out about Rena, and all you’ve been doing is moping and brooding—it’s time you got out and saw some people. It’s summer already, for God’s sake.”
“Not moping—thinking,” Jeff said. “I was knocked unconscious in Dallas, Rena was killed by a bus, both in places we shouldn’t have been. There’s got to be some comprehensible pattern in this.”
“I know,” Laura said, more softly. “It’s almost as if there’s something in the nature of things that doesn’t want people to time travel—and punishes them when they do.”
“You know I dreamed about Rena dead, shortly after I got out of the Dallas hospital,” Jeff said, recalling this for the first time. “I wonder if that has any connection to any of this.”
“Well, remember you told me that Kip Thorpe—”
“Thorne,” Jeff corrected.
“Right, Kip Thorne and his people hypothesized that people flip into alternate universes when they change history through time travel—that that’s how the loops opened by the Thorne stay clean—so maybe, somehow, because you’re here in the past, you’ve caused an alternate universe to come into being, and in that universe you already lived past knowing about Rena’s death, because that universe is progressing at a different pace, and somehow your dream connected you to this alternate version of your self . . .”
Jeff smiled. It was at times like this that he could understand how he had come to feel so close to Laura. “You don’t think I’m such a lunatic anymore, huh?”
Laura snuggled against him. “You’re definitely a lunatic—no doubt about that—but maybe not about time travel.”
Jeff kissed her on the forehead. “Well, here we are at Joannie’s building,” Laura said. “Don’t worry, I’m sure there’ll be other teachers there. Just think of this as another great safari into 1960s culture.”
“What can I fix you, Professor?”
“A scotch and water would be fine.” Richard Atwick adjusted his thin-rimmed glasses and quietly eyed the hosed legs and sleek red dress of his benefactor. “Why, thank you, Carla,” he said, taking the drink from her hand, “and I must say you’re looking as lovely tonight as always.”
He gulped half his drink down in one swallow and, sloshing the rest around in the glass, began walking through the six rooms of Joannie Pernelli’s parents’ apartment. The place was packed with partiers in varying states of dress, intimacy, and inebriation.
“Professor Harris.” Atwick strode over and extended his hand to Jeff. “I’ve seen you around campus, but I don’t think we’ve ever formally met. I’m Richard Atwick of Biology.” He suddenly put his hand to his ear as the Beatles’s “It Won’t Be Long” blared forth without warning.
