Time Travel Omnibus, page 836
He was loading twenties and fifties and hundreds into shopping bags, feeling a lot like a gangster, when he thought, I can move out of this apartment, too, and get back whatever security deposits my older self paid—part of them, anyway. In spite of the handfuls of greenbacks he was taking out of the drawer, every dollar felt important.
He wondered what his quarter from 2012 would be worth, and whether it would be worth anything at all. But then he shook his head. “I’ll keep it,” he declared, as if someone had told him not to. “It’ll remind me what I’m shooting for.”
More than a little nervously, he took the cash down to the car. He managed it without getting mugged. He didn’t think he’d ever driven so carefully in his life as on the trip back to the Acapulco. He’d never watched the rear-view mirror so much, either. Don’t want to get rear-ended now. Oh, Jesus, no.
As he parked in front of the apartment building, a nasty thought hit him. What’ll I do if he just walked away for a few minutes and now he’s back in my place? Punching his older self’s lights out still seemed like a good plan.
But the apartment was empty. With a sigh of relief, Justin stashed the bags of cash in the little closet in the hallway that led from the living room back to the bedroom. Then he put a couple of pans by the door. He’d have to get the lock changed, but in the meantime at least he’d have some warning if his older self was still around and tried to come in.
“Have to get the rest of my stuff out of that other place, too,” he said. But, for the time being, that could wait.
He quickly went through the apartment, looking for whatever his older self had left behind. Finding a laptop from 2018—if himself-at-forty had had one with him—would have been the grand prize. He didn’t. But he did find a statement from a bank he wouldn’t have patronized if a stagecoach had run over him. When he saw how much it was for, his eyes bugged out of his head: about as much as he had in those bags in the closet.
And it’s mine, too, he thought dazedly. If he’s gone, it’s mine. I can prove I’m Justin Kloster just as well as he could. I know my mother’s maiden name just as well as he did.
For a moment, thinking of only one thing at a time, he actually felt grateful toward his older self. A twenty-one-year-old guy with six figures’ worth of money in the bank and with a plan to get ahead . . . What couldn’t he do?
I can’t have Megan. His joy blew out. Cash was great, but without his girl? Whatever his older self had done there, he’d screwed it up bigtime. And he’d said he’d never found anybody else who came close to her.
Maybe I can get her back, Justin thought. Maybe in a couple weeks, or when school starts again and I see her. Or something.
He shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t do anything about it now.
Himself-at-forty had seen to that. Justin started getting angry all over again.
And he didn’t get any happier when he looked at what was in the refrigerator. It was all stuff he’d have to cook if he wanted to eat it: even worse stuff than had been in his older self’s other place when he first got there. What were you supposed to do with ginger root or hoisin sauce? He didn’t know, and he wasn’t interested in learning. But then he started to laugh. He could afford to eat out, by God.
Eat out he did. Yang Chow was odds-on the best Chinese place in this end of the Valley. He devoured kung-pao chicken and chili shrimp, with a Tsingtao beer to put out the fire from the peppers. No sign of his older self when he got back.
Justin called the other place. The phone rang and rang. After it had gone on ringing for more than a minute, he hung up again, nodding. His older self wasn’t there, either. The more he wasn’t there, the more convinced Justin was that he’d gone back to 2018.
“He should have stayed there, the son of a bitch,” Justin said. “Maybe Megan and me would have made it. Shit—even if we didn’t, I’d still have the good memories he did. What have I got now? Not one damn thing.”
Before he went to bed, he changed the sheets and bedspread. He didn’t even want to think about what had happened on the ones he threw in the clothes basket.
He slept late the next morning, which annoyed him. He had a lot of stuff he wanted to do that day: formally leave the other apartment, close his older self’s banking account and move the money to his own, sell that other Toyota and put the proceeds from the deal in the bank, too. He was just heading out the door when the phone rang.
“Jesus!” he said, and hurried back to the bedroom. Maybe it was his older self. That would screw things up. Or maybe it was Megan. That would do anything but. “Hello?”
It wasn’t himself-at-forty. It wasn’t Megan, either, dammit. It was his boss at CompUSA, and he sounded pissed to the max. “Where the hell are you, Kloster?” he shouted. “That graphic-design outfit is coming in this morning to order their new Macs, and they don’t want to deal with anybody but you.” He said something under his breath about “Macintosh primadonnas,” then went back to bellowing: “What are you doing there when you’re supposed to be here?”
Justin had forgotten all about his CompUSA job. Evidently, his older self had been holding it down pretty well. With all the money he had, he was tempted to tell his boss to stuff it, but he didn’t. That would look bad on a résumé. He gave the best excuse he could think of: “I must have forgotten to set my alarm last night. I’ll be right there.”
His boss promptly tempted him to regret his choice, roaring, “If they show up before you do, you’re toast!” and hanging up hard.
He did get there first, and had enough time to review things before the graphic designers trooped in. Before they trooped out again, they’d bought about fifty grand worth of computers and peripherals, and his boss was acting amazingly human. Said boss even took him to lunch at a Mexican place not nearly so good as Sierra’s—though he wouldn’t have wanted to go there now—and didn’t say boo when he ordered a margarita to go with his enchilada and rice and refried beans.
After lunch, he was upgrading system software on one of the iMac demos when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around to see who it was; the Macintosh ministore inside the CompUSA didn’t get nearly the foot traffic he thought it deserved. “Lindsey!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, you told me where you worked.” She looked nervous. “I just thought I’d come over and say hi. Hi!” She fluttered her fingers at him in an arch little wave, then quickly went on. “I don’t want to make trouble or anything. I know you said you were seeing somebody.” By the way she stood on the balls of her feet, she was poised to flee if Justin barked at her.
But that, right this second, was the last thing he wanted to do. “I was, yeah,” he answered, and watched her eyes widen at the past tense, “but we just broke up. Somebody came between us, I guess you’d say.”
“Oh, my God!” Lindsey exclaimed, and then frowned anxiously. “I hope you don’t mean me. She wasn’t, like, jealous ’cause you went up to Simi Valley and ran into me or anything? That’d be awful.”
“No, no, no,” Justin assured her. “Had nothing to do with you. It was another guy. An older guy.” The first and last parts of that were true, anyway. The middle? He wasn’t so sure.
“That’s terrible!” Lindsey said. “You must be all torn up inside.” She reached out and put a sympathetic hand on his arm.
“I was bummed,” he admitted—about as much as a male his age was likely to say. “It’s really nice, that you came all the way from Simi to see me.” They both laughed, even though Justin hadn’t quite made the joke on purpose. Lindsey smiled at him. He wasn’t always fast on the uptake, but something got through. He set his hand on hers. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it won’t work out too bad after all.”
TIME OUT OF JOINT
Pauline Ashwell
There’s one sure way to provide the authenticity collectors say they want . . .
“We’ve been accused of robbing tombs, more than once,” said my friend the Time Traveller, “and of handling forgeries, fakes and stolen goods, but this is the first time I’ve actually been called a thief.”
In this century, the Time Traveller is an antiques dealer, specializing in objects from the Classical Period, between two to three thousand years ago. This trade has given rise to more types of profitable dishonesty than most, so that a reputation for probity is one of a dealer’s most important assets. The other, of course, is his expertise. In a just world the Time Traveller’s reputation would be spotless on both counts. His goods are always exactly as he describes them to be; he does not make even honest mistakes, because he buys directly from the artists or craftsmen who made them.
Unfortunately, he can hardly tell his customers that. When they disagree with his attribution of an object he can only defend it as an opinion, not a known fact. This can get very irritating, especially when dealing with the more opinionated type of collector. I often get to hear about it, because the Time Traveller drops in fairly regularly to let off steam. He always apologizes afterwards for imposing on my patience; but as a rule I enjoy it. This time, however, I was a good deal shocked.
I said, “Was the man mad?”
“Not only sane,” said the Time Traveller ruefully, “but also perfectly sober, and one of my best customers, or he used to be—the Curator of the Sulven Collection. You may have heard of it.”
I certainly had. It had been put together by an American billionaire who had erected a sumptuous building to house it, and then died.
“It was in the papers a few months ago,” I said. “The heirs had been allowed to get out of paying inheritance tax on the collection provided they allowed reasonable public access to it, and the public—well, the part of it with an interest in Classical artifacts—complained about not being allowed in. Did part of it get stolen? But why on earth should they blame you?”
The Time Traveller poured himself another whisky—he brings a bottle whenever he visits me—and gave a deep sigh.
“You’ve probably read that a lot of stuff goes missing from museums, often without being noticed—the big ones have all sorts of things tucked away in storerooms and never seen except when some scholar puts in a special request.”
“Well, yes,” I said, “but I hadn’t thought that the Sulven Collection was like that.”
“It isn’t. Old man Sulven only bought things that he had room to display. One of them was a certain vase; Athenian red-figure; there are dozens in the British Museum. The scenes painted on them are among the most importance sources of information about classical Greece.”
“All the books on Greek history use them as illustrations,” I said.
“Right. Well, I commissioned that vase from an Athenian potter living in Italy—the South was colonized from Greece in a big way—and had it painted with scenes from a performance of The Frogs. Sulven rather took to Aristophanes—said the plays were like a comic strip crossed with political cartoons—so I thought the vase would appeal to him. It did. That was about three years before he died.
“One of the men who’d been kicking up a fuss about being excluded from the collection was a student called Robinson who was writing a thesis on the Greek theatre. What he chiefly wanted was to study that vase. For some reason Greek artists don’t seem to have liked the theatre as a subject. There are very few depictions of stage productions, and most of them come from Southern Italy, not mainland Greece.
“It was old man Sulven’s heirs who wanted to keep the collection private, not the curator; he was only too pleased to have someone to talk to. Robinson mentioned that seeing there were so few pictures of any Greek play he wished the painter had chosen another one, because there was a vase painted with The Frogs in one of the Italian museums already. Then the curator ushered him into the room where the vase was kept and left him in front of its case.
“Ten minutes later Robinson shot out and asked at the top of his voice whether he knew that he was harboring stolen property; because the vase was the very one he’d studied in Italy three years before.”
“Three years is quite a long time,” I said.
“He’d photographed the vase from every angle and had copies in his briefcase. The curator went through them three times, standing in front of the vase, and ended up convinced that they were the same—I know what you’re going to say,” he added as I opened my mouth. “The painter could have painted another one exactly the same. Apart from the fact that the vase-painters never precisely repeated a design, he was not particularly pleased with that one. And anyway the vase had been slightly damaged while it was aging—a chunk of stone fell out of the cave’s ceiling onto the crate and made a crack in the base. I’d had it repaired, of course, but it was still visible; and Robinson’s photographs showed exactly the same repair.”
I understood the reference to aging. If the Time Traveller sold his wares directly from the maker, modern tests would show that they were only a few years old. They are stored in an underground cavern somewhere in the Pliocene to rack up the appropriate number of centuries, so that tests for thermoluminescence and cosmic ray tracks give the right answer.
What I could not understand was how thus mixup could have occurred.
“The curator rang up the museum, of course,” my friend continued gloomily, “and asked if one of his staff could visit and be shown the vase with the painting of The Frogs. After the usual runaround he was connected to the chief administrator, who said he knew the vase in question—someone had asked for it three years ago and there had been quite a fuss before they found out where it had been stowed. Nobody could say just where it was now; he rather thought it was on loan to an exhibition somewhere, but all the museum’s records were in the process of being transferred to a computer and there was no way of finding out where anything was until that was complete.”
“And I suppose he couldn’t say when they obtained it, or how?” I said.
“He couldn’t, but Robinson had a photocopy of the index card. The vase had been in the museum nearly ten years, having been purchased from a man named Massimo Colladi, for about half its market value. There were some codes which indicated that the museum had never dealt with the man before, and they’d checked that the vase was not on any list of stolen antiques.”
It was all totally incomprehensible, except—
“This man Massimo,” I exclaimed, “can he be from Elsewhere too?”
“Must be, I suppose,” said the Time Traveller gloomily. “Nobody outside could have pulled it off. But why?”
The organization to which my friend belongs is based in another Universe—the pocket, not the alternative variety—which they refer to as Elsewhere. It was created at some time in the far future and peopled from many different periods on Earth.
Since even half the market value of the vase was probably a small fortune, why may seem to be obvious. The people of Elsewhere need money to purchase various items which it would be too difficult or too time-consuming to make for themselves: hence my friend’s trading, and an assortment of other money-making activities. But within Elsewhere all needs are provided for centrally. Personal gain is not to the point.
I said, “What are you doing to do?”
“Go to Elsewhere, I suppose, and try to sort it out.” He got to his feet with a faint groan, thanked me for my patience, and withdrew.
It was past my usual bedtime, but I remained sitting on the sofa for some minutes, wondering whether everybody in Elsewhere was really as indifferent to money as my friend seemed to believe. But having stolen the vase, why sell it ten years earlier? It might be sensible to carry it back six months, so as to sell it before it was missed, but ten years was overdoing it.
Presently I noticed that the room had grown cold. I got up and started for the kitchen, to make a hot drink to take up to bed.
As I reached for the handle the door flew open and I found myself face to face with the Time Traveller again.
Nowadays when he calls on me, the Time Traveller comes to the front door and rings the bell. I mentioned once or twice that the spectacle of a friend with his back apparently embedded, however briefly, in the plaster of the wall, was one I found disagreeable, and eventually it sank in. However, he finds it convenient to leave by way of a “Gate” in a comer of the hallway; which is why I do not escort him out. Seeing him, I thought that for some reason he had not yet left.
He said, “I found out what went wrong!”
“What, in ten minutes?” I exclaimed. Then I saw that he was wearing a different suit and had at least two days’ stubble on his chin.
For a moment he looked thoroughly bewildered. Then he blinked.
“Oh, damn. I forgot to change settings on the Gate. You’ve had enough of me already, and you want to go to bed—”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I shan’t be able to sleep until I’ve heard about it. Come and sit down.”
When he was back in his chair, with a glass of whisky in hand, he didn’t seem to know how to begin. His lips parted several times, but nothing emerged. Finally he sighed and leaned back.
“Massimo Colladi was his real name,” he said. “That’s how I found him, in the end. What delayed me was that he won’t be recruited for another month.”
My own lips parted. Probably I gaped. The Time Traveller gave a weary nod.
“It threw me, too, and I’ve been living along two timelines for more than fifty years. But I’ve always tried to keep things synchronized—if I spend a year on Earth my next visit to Elsewhere will be a year later than the last, unless there’s some reason to do otherwise. And I try to keep my visits to this century consecutive, though as you know I haven’t always managed it.”
The first time I noticed him he was in the British Museum twice, having made an appointment with one of the keepers and then, four years afterwards on his personal timeline, set up a meeting with another official half an hour later on the same day.
