Time Travel Omnibus, page 801
“Nice to meet you,” Jeff said loudly over the twanging guitars. “Do you know Laura Chapin?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m glad to now.” Atwick said. “Are you doing graduate work?”
“Thanks for the compliment.” Laura smiled sweetly. “But I’m afraid I’m still undergrad. And if you two gentlemen have no objections, I think I’ll go off and mingle now with some of my own kind.”
“Nice.” Atwick watched her walk off and nodded at Jeff approvingly. “And what are you having to drink, Professor?”
“Please, call me Jeff.” Jeff tried not to respond to the nod. “I guess I’ll have some white wine if there’s any around.”
“Well, let’s just go and find some, shall we?” Atwick tugged on Jeff’s arm and started towards the bottles on the far side of the room. “You know, I’m delighted that you’ll be joining us again this fall in the Sociology Department. Sociology—that’s a discipline of the future! It’s good we’re building up our faculty in that area.”
“Well, I’m happy to be here at City College. It’s certainly one of the best schools in the country.”
“Well, we like to think so.” Atwick beamed. “Ah, here’s some sort of Soave. Will that do? Good.” Atwick began pouring. “Now I’ve heard your specialty is mass culture. And you did your graduate work at . . .” Atwick handed Jeff a brimming paper cup.
Jeff sipped a little and spilled a little on his shirt. “University of Edinburgh. And my specialty’s really mass media—you know, the work of Marshall McLuhan—rather than mass culture.” Jeff got a pang as he thought again about how he had successfully recycled the cover the team had provided—any thought of the team brought along painful images of Rena.
“Edinburgh, yes,” Atwick was saying. “Splendid mountain in the middle of the city. You worked under Phillip MacKenzie?”
“Mackenzie? Nope, don’t think I did,” Jeff said, wondering what he would say next if pressed. His credentials, after all, would not stand up to anyone who knew the real Geoff Harris, or even very long to anyone who knew someone who knew Geoff . . .
The sound quieted down a bit, and it occurred to Jeff that Atwick had a familiar British accent, maybe like a surgeon he half-remembered hearing once in a hospital . . .
“Of course, it’s a large university—” Atwick began.
“Professor Harris, it’s good to see you outside of the classroom!” Carla joined the men. Jeff was delighted for the intrusion.
“You know, I’m really mad at you for that C+.” She batted her eyelids flirtatiously at Jeff.
“Well, Carla, if Professor Harris had graded you for good looks, I’m sure you would have received an A+. Am I right, Jeff?”
“Absolutely,” Jeff said—thinking that, if his grasp of history was right, in a few decades that kind of bantering could bring both Atwick and him up on sexual harassment charges. He shuddered. Insane days they were, at the end of the 20th century. He’d be doing the world a big favor if the only thing he did back here was change that . . .
“Aw, I can’t stay mad at you guys, you’re too charming,” Carla mewed. “Do you believe in dancing with students, Professor Harris? Professor Atwick has already honored me with one of his cha-chas.”
Atwick bowed. “The honor was all mine.”
“Well, I’d be pleased to dance with you, Carla,” Jeff laughed, “but I’m afraid these new dances are too much for me.”
Carla smiled and subtly shifted her body so that her curves were more prominent. “I was thinking of something nice and slow.”
“Well, in that case, I’d be a madman to refuse.” Jeff winked at Atwick and extended his arm to Carla. He looked in vain for Laura as Carla escorted him to a room in which “The Best of Johnny Mathis” played incessantly.
An hour and who knows how many red dresses later, Laura came up behind Jeff. “Hi,” she whispered in his ear and kissed it. “Find out anything interesting?”
“Actually, yeah,” Jeff said, and handed Laura a glass of wine. “Amazing how many people seem to know the future when you’re primed to hear that in their conversation. One kid told me that he thinks the Beach Boys will go on to become second only to the Beatles in musical importance. Now how could he know that on the basis of ‘Surfin’ Safari’ and a couple of other uncreative songs in 1964?”
“Tall blond, sun-tanned boy, Mark?” Laura asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Well, he looks like one of the Beach Boys, so maybe he’s just self-impressed,” Laura laughed, and spilled her wine. “Oops.”
“You’ve got no luck with wine, have you?” Jeff was laughing too, now. He had to admit he was having a good time. “Here, take mine. I just poured it. I’ll go get another.”
“I think I’ve had fantastic luck with wine at least one time,” Laura said.
Jeff went to fetch another bottle in an adjacent room. The music there was louder than anywhere else. Jeff cringed a bit under the sound assault, then realized he was hearing something else mixed in with the music . . . a piercing wail coming from the next room. He dropped the bottle and ran in and found Laura shrieking on the floor.
“Laura, what’s the matter?” He lifted her face and looked intently into her eyes. They were grossly dilated. Her shrieks suddenly turned into hysterical laughter.
“Professor Harris, is she sick or something?” Sandy, who Jeff realized had been standing over them, was nearly in tears herself.
“I don’t know, Sandy. Look, could you please call me a cab?”
Jeff helped Laura to her feet. She was screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs but Jeff couldn’t make out what she was saying. She passed out in his arms in the elevator. He carried her into the back seat of the cab that arrived a few minutes later. “Get me to the closest hospital emergency room,” he told the driver, who looked as if he’d seen it all.
He carefully put her head on his lap and wiped big beads of sweat from the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were tightly shut and she drooled slightly from the corner of her mouth. He gently wiped that also. She was moaning and half-singing some Beatles song.
He had read of the effects of sixties psychedelic drugs on people—assuming that’s what this was, though it seemed a little early in the 1960s for that—and could see this was a very bad reaction, likely from something more nasty than LSD. Who the hell had given it to her?
In his day and age, treating it by simple suffusion would be child’s play. But here, more than a century earlier, with no nano-syndics at all—jeez, he hoped these “doctors” were up to this. What would they use to cleanse her chemistry? He sighed, stroked her face. There was no point in torturing himself. That wouldn’t stop her from dying. He had no choice but to put Laura in whatever primitive doctor’s hands this cabbie placed her.
But why did this happen?
Another damn mishap?
He had a searing insight for an instant. Yes, of course . . . But the cab swerved too sharply around some corner, and he lost it.
He looked down at Laura’s lips, and trembled.
Jeff had always found strength in the rivers of New York. He had spent hours as a child wandering along the banks of the Bronx River—more a stream, really, than a river—admiring its waterfalls, sticking his toes in its pools, following its path through the Botanic and Zoological Gardens. Years later, he would sit on the terrace of Rena’s high-rise on 125th Street, watching the powerful Hudson roll through the ninth decade of the stagnant 21st century. Good in medicine, agriculture, the intraphysics that the Thorne embodied, but not much else. Good in looking inward, backward, not outward. He walked now around Carl Schurz Park, looking down on the East River and its reflection of this 1960s city, hoping to find something he could use to recover his balance.
Laura was OK, resting in his apartment, well out of danger. That wasn’t the problem.
“Close,” the doctor had said. “Good thing you rushed her over here. Combo of booze and that kind of drug is dangerous. Good thing it responded to—”
Better get used to it, doc—you’ll see a lot more of it before this decade is over.
Thank God Laura was OK.
But Jeff wasn’t.
He had slept maybe an hour after bringing her home from the hospital, undressing her, tucking her safely in their bed. He’d had nightmares—older and younger versions of his great-great-grandmother coming in and out of his life, changing it with each appearance, editing the narrative that was him so many times that he had no bearings. Only alterations, of alterations.
Jeff had always valued the sanctity and clarity of his mind. That’s why he’d steered clear of the psychedelic drugs of his century—better to improve external reality than just your perception of it. But he figured the contamination now of his past and future was far more toxic to the psyche than the worst drugs. Coleridge, de Quincey, Huxley, Leary, Goonatilake—you’re all pikers compared to me.
But why was he feeling the brunt of this now?
Something Laura had said or done—not her almost ODing, but something that had happened then, though he didn’t know what—had unhinged him—
“Hi, honey.” A soft, cool hand touched his as he leaned against the stone embankment. He turned to Laura. She still looked pale.
“You shouldn’t be out yet. How are you feeling?”
She held up her palms in an I-don’t-know gesture. “I think pretty much better. I was going crazy in the house, and you were gone a long time. I was worried.”
Jeff pulled her close. “Oh, Laura, Laura,” he said softly, sadly. “What’s going on?”
They parted and held hands, looking down at the lights that slid upon the inky water below “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”
“I think so,” Jeff said quietly.
“Tell me,” Laura said.
“I think you know.”
“No.” Laura’s face furrowed in confusion.
Jeff dropped her hand and turned to face her. “You look very nice in those shorts.”
Laura patted the light red shorts she was wearing on this humid summer evening and looked even more confused. “What do my shorts have to do with anything?”
“For God’s sake, stop playing games with me, Laura!” A nearby elderly woman with blue-tinted hair glared at Jeff. He glared back and lowered his voice. “Try being honest with me for a change.”
She turned and looked out over the water. “I think I have been honest. I’ve told you how much I love you.” Her voice was husky.
“I don’t suppose you remember much of what you did when the DMT first hit you?” Jeff continued impassively.
“No, I don’t remember much of anything. The whole experience was horrible. You know that.” She started crying.
“So you have no idea what song you were singing when I took you home in the cab?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe I was singing in that state—”
“Well, would it surprise you to know that you were singing a few lines of the Beatles’ ‘Yes It Is’ over and over again? ‘Please don’t wear red tonight.’ ”
“And you place some sort of significance on this?”
“I’ve been driving myself crazy, wandering around here for hours, trying to figure out what’s been bothering me ever since I heard you singing those lines. I didn’t even know until I saw you and your red shorts a few seconds ago that that song was the problem. But now I’m starting to understand. You still want to claim you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion.” For the first time, annoyance was in Laura’s voice. She had stopped crying.
“I think you do. Do you know what today’s date is? June 29, 1964. Now the Beatles have released two albums in America so far, Meet the Beatles and The Beatles’ Second Album. Actually, they also have a third album on Veejay Records with some early songs. There’s also an album with songs from their Hard Day’s Night movie and a few new songs, Something New, which will be released here in a couple of weeks. You see I know all of this because I taught history of rock for five years when I first got my Ph.D.”
“I know all about your past and future,” Laura said tartly.
“Good.” Jeff grabbed her arm and raised his voice again. “And do you also know that ‘Yes It Is’ is on none of those albums? None of them! And in fact it won’t be heard in America until an album called Beatles VI is released sometime late next year?”
Laura pulled away and laughed sarcastically. “And that’s what all this is about? That when I was stoned out of my mind on some Brazilian drug maybe intended for you I sang some song that won’t be released in the US for another few months? There are a thousand explanations for that. I might know some English guy who heard Lennon and McCartney perform that song in a personal appearance. You yourself might have sung the song in your sleep. What’s the big deal?” Her voice was rasping, and she started to cough.
“Your life’s at stake,” Jeff said. “That’s the big deal. Don’t you get it?”
Laura just looked at him, eyes wide and brimming with tears. She started to walk away.
“Listen to me, goddamn it!” Jeff caught up to her, spun her around, put his hands heavily on her shoulders. “Rena died. I think I was almost killed. You were almost killed. These are serious forces we’re playing around with here.”
She turned her head away, as if from the intensity of his reasoning.
“Tell me the truth!” he demanded.
“I love you,” Laura said.
“We need more now,” Jeff insisted.
Laura exhaled, squeezed close to Jeff, then pulled away. “It’s getting windy out here,” she shivered. “Let’s go back to the apartment and I’ll try to tell you as much as I can.”
The kettle whistled. Jeff carefully poured the water into the porcelain teapot, let it warm a bit, then added two servings of Darjeeling tea and the extra one for the pot.
Laura was on the couch, arms around her knees and legs tucked under, talking. “We knew there was danger right after the arrival, but we didn’t think it continued years after.”
“None of the little expeditions before mine ran into any trouble at all,” Jeff said. “As far as I know, I was the first not to return—the first whose AWH self-destructed, or was destroyed by something else, after my time jump.”
“None of those little events before yours were intended to seriously alter history,” Laura said. “Your Challenger attempt was the first big-scale operation.”
Jeff felt cold, and touched the teapot for warmth. The number of lives lost in the Challenger explosion—if only he hadn’t been funneled back here to the 1960s.
“Suppose you start at the beginning,” he said, “though it still bothers me to talk of beginnings that in one sense haven’t even happened yet.”
“The gist is this,” Laura said. “My team was—will be—situated about fifteen years after yours in the future. We knew about your team. Knew about you, Rena, her getting killed here. When your team uncovered her death in a cache of old microfiche, they stopped the project. Sealed all the files. My team found out about it and decided, secretly and illegally, to reopen it. My job was to—”
“Don’t tell me—to stop the killing of JFK.”
“No,” Laura said.
“But you’re here in the 1960s,” Jeff said.
“My job was to keep an eye on you—assuming I could find you,” Laura said.
Jeff’s mouth hung open. “They sent you back here to find me?”
“Actually, not back here—to 1985,” Laura said.
“But—”
“Right,” Laura said. “But I wound up back here, just like you, and just like Rena. My team didn’t understand that at first. Neither did I. But I think it’s clear what’s going on now. The Thorne operates by creating basins of subatomic attraction, at both ends of the artificial wormhole. But if you create enough artificial basins, all in one place, that in effect must begin to operate like one hugely powerful natural basin, attracting all out-of-time units in its temporal vicinity. Like a well-worn ditch attracting rivulets of water.”
“Three were intended to go back to 1985 . . .” Jeff mused.
“Yes,” Laura said, “and they all ended up here more than twenty years earlier. Think about it. Your team perfected time travel, tried to bury it, my team dug it up—you can’t as a society, a species, unlearn a kind of knowledge. There must be thousands of time travel operations throughout the future. And a likely place for many of them to focus is JFK—first assassination on film, on tape, copied onto digiscan, holoscan, mirrorims, and who knows what new media. It’s the cultural icon of assassination, the beacon against which all others are measured.”
“The glittering prize for time travelers,” Jeff said, bringing Laura her tea.
“Yes,” Laura said, gratefully sipping.
“And pulling any other time travelers back here who happened to be floating around nearby in time-flux,” Jeff said.
Laura nodded. “Look at this very year—1964. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marshall McLuhan—the sexual revolution, feminism, the ecology movement all get big boosts in the next few years. Why all of that packed into this one decade? Couldn’t be coincidence. The answer is that the 1960s were infected—and inspired—by time travelers. Despite all of our attempts at curbing possible cultural contamination from the future, it can’t be done. You’ve seen that. Some leaks out—and causes massive cultural upheavals.”
“John Lennon was a time traveler?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know, maybe,” Laura said. “Maybe that’s why he was murdered. At very least I’d say he was touched by time travel.”
Jeff’s head was reeling. Someone else who didn’t deserve to die, whose death he’d like to prevent if he could. Surprise Lennon’s killer in that Dakota alley, break his goddamn gun-hand.
Was Jeff bound to spend his whole life now as a shackled witness to history? “How’d you find me?”
“Wasn’t too hard,” Laura said. “Once I got back here, realized I was stranded, I figured I might as well see if you landed back here too. We knew you were a teacher. You had to live, earn money somewhere. So I went around to every school in the area, saying I wanted to be a sociology major, and asking for information about the faculty. This was my plan for 1985, so I had some good credentials ready, made them just right with a little alteration. And when I talked to your chair at City College, I knew I hit pay dirt—he showed me your outline, and its emphasis on McLuhan. McLuhan’s been well known in Canada for over a decade, but not down here.”
