Time Travel Omnibus, page 871
I sat up in the saddle, closing my eyes to concentrate on the scent. There was his earlier track, but . . . yes . . . he was heading uphill again. “Make another left, babe. What were you just saying?”
“What I was about to say was, I wonder if the Company wants to be sure nobody else finds this very valuable deposit of quartz?” said Mendoza, as the horse snorted and laid its ears back; it wasn’t about to gallop up Pacific. It proceeded at a grudging walk.
“Gee, Mendoza, why would Dr. Zeus worry about something like exclusive patent rights on the most valuable bioremediant substance imaginable?” I said.
She was silent a moment, but I could feel the slow burn building.
“You mean,” she said, “that the Company plans to destroy the original source of the lichen?”
“Did I say that, honey?”
“Just so nobody else will discover it before Dr. Zeus puts it on the market, in the twenty-fourth century?”
“Do you see Mr. Stuckey up there anyplace?” I rose in the saddle to study the sheer incline of Pacific Street.
Mendoza said something amazingly profane in sixteenth-century Galician, but at least she didn’t push me off the horse. When she had run out of breath, she gulped air and said: “Just once in my eternal life I’d like to know I was actually helping to save the world, like we were all promised, instead of making a lot of technocrats up in the future obscenely rich.”
“I’d like it too, honest,” I said.
“Don’t you honest me! You’re a damned Facilitator, aren’t you? You’ve got no more moral sense than a jackal!”
“I resent that!” I edged back from her sharp shoulder blades, and the glow-in-the-dark mutant Lupinus squelched unpleasantly under my behind. “And anyway, what’s so great about being a Preserver? You could have been a Facilitator like me, you know that, kid? You had what it took. Instead, you’ve spent your whole immortal life running around after freaking bushes!”
“A Facilitator like you? Better I should have died in that dungeon in Santiago!”
“I saved your life, and this is the thanks I get?”
“And as for freaking bushes, Mr. Big Shot Facilitator, it might interest you to know that certain rare porphyrins have serious commercial value in the data storage industry—”
“So, who’s making the technocrats rich now, huh?” I demanded. “And have you ever stopped to consider that maybe the damn plants wouldn’t be so rare if Botanist drones like you weren’t digging them up all the time?”
“For your information, that specimen was growing on land that’ll be paved over in ten years,” Mendoza said coldly. “And if you call me a drone again, you’re going to go bouncing all the way down this hill with the print of my boot on your backside.”
The horse kept walking, and San Francisco Bay fell ever farther below us. Finally, stupidly, I said:
“Okay, we’ve covered all the other bases on mutual recrimination. Aren’t you going to accuse me of killing the only man you ever loved?”
She jerked as though I’d shot her, and turned around to regard me with blazing eyes.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said, in a very quiet voice. “You just let him die.”
She turned away, and of course then I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I was sorry. If I did that, though, I’d probably spend the next few months in a regeneration tank, growing back my arms.
So I just looked up at the neighborhood we had entered without noticing, and that was when I really felt my blood run cold.
“Uh—we’re in Sydney-Town,” I said.
Mendoza looked up. “Oh-oh.”
There weren’t any flags or bunting here. There weren’t any torches. And you would never, ever see a place like this in any Hollywood western. Neither John Wayne nor Gabby Hayes ever went anywhere near the likes of Sydney-Town.
It perched on its ledge at the top of Pacific Street and rotted. On the left side was one long row of leaning shacks; on the right side was another. I could glimpse dim lights through windows and doorways, and heard fiddle music scraping away, a half-dozen folk tunes from the British Isles, played in an eerie discord. The smell of the place was unbelievable, breathing out foul through dark doorways where darker figures leaned. Above the various dives, names were chalked that would have been quaint and reassuring anywhere else: The Noggin of Ale. The Tam O’Shanter. The Jolly Waterman. The Bird in Hand.
Some of the dark figures leaned out and bid us “G’deevnin’,” and without raising their voices too much let us know about the house specialties. At the Boar’s Head, a woman was making love to a pig in the back room; did we want to see? At the Goat and Compass, there was a man who’d eat or drink anything, absolutely anything, mate, for a few cents, and he hadn’t had a bath in ten years. Did we want to give him a go? At the Magpie, a girl was lying in the back on a mattress, so drunk she’d never wake before morning, no matter what anyone did to her. Were we interested? And other dark figures were moving along in the shadows, watching us.
Portsmouth Square satisfied simple appetites like hunger and thirst, greed, the need to get laid or to shoot at total strangers. Sydney-Town, on the other hand, catered to specialized tastes.
It was nothing I hadn’t seen before, but I’d worked in Old Rome at her worst, and Byzantium too. Mendoza, though, shrank back against me as we rode.
She had a white, stunned look I’d seen only a couple of times before. The first was when she was four years old, and the Inquisitors had held her up to the barred window to see what could happen if she didn’t confess she was a Jew. More than fear or horror, it was astonishment that life was like this.
The other time she’d looked like that was when I let her mortal lover die.
I leaned close and spoke close to her ear. “Baby, I’m going to get down and follow the trail on foot. You ride on, okay? I’ll meet you at the hotel.”
I slid down from the saddle fast, smacked the horse hard on its rump, and watched as the luminous mutant whatever-it-was bobbed away through the dark, shining feebly. Then I marched forward, looking as dangerous as I could in the damn friar’s habit, following Isaiah Stuckey’s scent line.
He was sweating heavily, now, easy to track even here. Sooner or later, the mortal was going to have to stop, to set down that sack of gold dust and wipe his face and breathe. He surely wasn’t dumb enough to venture into one of these places. . .
His trail took an abrupt turn, straight across the threshold of the very next dive. I sighed, looking up at the sign. This establishment was The Fierce Grizzly. Behind me, the five guys who were lurking paused, too. I shrugged and went in.
Inside the place was small, dark, and smelled like a zoo. I scanned the room. Bingo! There was Isaiah Stuckey, a gin punch in his hand and a smile on his flushed face, just settling down to a friendly crap game with a couple of serial rapists and an axe murderer. I could reach him in five steps. I had taken two when a hand descended on my shoulder.
“Naow, mate, you ain’t saving no souls in ’ere,” said a big thug. “You clear off, or sit down and watch the exhibition, eh?”
I wondered how hard I’d have to swing to knock him cold, but then a couple of torches flared alight at one end of the room. The stage curtain, nothing more than a dirty blanket swaying and jerking in the torchlight, was flung aside.
I saw a grizzly bear, muzzled and chained. Behind her, a guy I assumed to be her trainer grinned at the audience. The act started.
In twenty thousand years I thought I’d seen everything, but I guess I hadn’t.
My jaw dropped, as did the jaws of most of the other patrons who weren’t regulars there. They couldn’t take their eyes off what was happening on the stage, which made things pretty easy for the pickpockets working the room.
But only for a moment.
Maybe that night the bear decided she’d finally had enough, and summoned some self-esteem. Maybe the chains had reached the last stages of metal fatigue. Anyway, there was a sudden ping, like a bell cracking, and the bear got her front paws free.
About twenty guys, including me, tried to get out through the front door at the same moment. When I picked myself out of the gutter, I looked up to see Isaiah Stuckey running like mad again, farther up Pacific Street.
“Hey! Wait!” I shouted; but no Californian slows down when a grizzly is loose. Cursing, I rose and scrambled after him, yanking up my robe to clear my legs. I could hear him gasping like a steam engine as I began to close the gap between us. Suddenly, he went down.
I skidded to a halt beside him and fell to my knees. Stuckey was flat on his face, not moving. I turned him over and he flopped like a side of meat, staring sightless up at the clear cold stars. Massive aortic aneurysm. Dead as a doornail.
“No!” I howled, ripping his shirt open and pounding on his chest, though I knew nothing was going to bring him back. “Don’t you go and die on me, you mortal son of a bitch! Stupid jackass—”
Black shadows had begun to slip from the nearest doorways, eager to begin corpse-robbing; but they halted, taken aback, I guess, by the sight of a priest screaming abuse at the deceased. I glared at them, remembered who I was supposed to be, and made a grudging sign of the Cross over the late Isaiah Stuckey.
There was a clatter of hoofbeats. Mendoza’s horse came galloping back downhill.
“Are you okay?” Mendoza leaned from the saddle. “Oh, hell, is that him?”
“The late Isaiah Stuckey,” I said bitterly. “He had a heart attack.”
“I’m not surprised, with all that running uphill,” said Mendoza. “This place really needs those cable cars, doesn’t it?”
“You said it, kiddo.” I got to my feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
Mendoza frowned, gazing at the dead man. “Wait a minute. That’s Catskill Ike!”
“Cute name,” I said, clambering up into the saddle behind her. “You knew the guy?”
“No, I just monitored him in case he started any fires. He’s been prospecting on Villa Creek for the last six months.”
“Well, so what?”
“So I know where he found your quartz deposit,” said Mendoza. “It wasn’t mined up the Sacramento at all, Joseph.”
“It’s in Big Sur?” I demanded. She just nodded.
At that moment, the grizzly shoved her way out into the street, and it seemed like a good idea to leave fast.
“Don’t take it too badly,” said Mendoza a little while later, when we were riding back toward our hotel. “You got what the Company sent you after, didn’t you? I’ll bet there’ll be Security Techs blasting away at Villa Creek before I get home.”
“I guess so,” I said glumly. She snickered.
“And look at the wonderful quality time we got to spend together! And the Pope will get his fancy crucifix. Or was that part just a scam?”
“No, the Company really is bribing the Pope to do something,” I said, “But you don’t—”
“—Need to know what, of course. That’s okay. I got a great meal out of this trip, at least.”
“Hey, are you hungry? We can still take in some of the restaurants, kid,” I said.
Mendoza thought about that. The night wind came gusting up from the city below us, where somebody at the Poulet d’Or was mincing onions for a sauce piperade, and somebody else was grilling steaks. We heard the pop of a wine cork all the way up where we were on Powell Street . . .
“Sounds like a great idea,” she said. She briefly accessed her chronometer. “As long as you can swear we’ll be out of here by 1906,” she added.
“Trust me,” I said happily. “No problem!”
“Trust you?” she exclaimed, and spat. I could tell she didn’t mean it, though.
We rode on down the hill.
GET ME TO THE JOB ON TIME
Ian Randal Strock
“Maybe it’s what you’d do with the knowledge that determines whether or not you’ll discover the secret of time travel.”
“What?” I asked the old man.
“I know for a fact that time travel is possible. I knew the man who discovered it. And you’ll never guess what he used his discovery for.”
Well, I didn’t believe that old man any more than you believe me, but we’d been waiting in that airport for four hours, so I humored him.
“All right, I’ll bite,” I said. “What did he use time travel for?”
“Wally didn’t need to see the pyramids getting built, or sail with Columbus, or even watch JFK’s assassination. What Wally wanted to do, more than anything, was get to work on time.”
An introduction like that demands a story, so I sat down and let him tell me.
Wally didn’t want fame [the old man said]. I think he would have been perfectly happy if no one but the payroll department knew his name. Did I mention we both worked in the same department?
Anyway, he loved his job. We were editors, and Wally simply loved being an editor; always got his work done on schedule, never made any mistakes, and there was no place he’d rather be.
But he had one big problem at work: Wally just could not get to work by 9:00 AM.
Some days it was a common excuse—train delays, doctor appointments, plumbing emergencies. And sometimes, the damnedest things happened to him—he got caught in hold-ups, subway hijackings, rat stampedes. Anything and everything, it seemed, conspired to keep Wally from getting to work on time.
And he could never understand it. On the one hand, his work was always done on time, and his lateness never affected anyone else—if I wanted to talk to Wally, I knew I had to wait ‘til late morning. On the other hand, he tried his hardest to get in on time, and the few times he made it, he’d usually left the house three hours early, and had been at his desk since 6:30. He just couldn’t win.
I never believed in a determinist universe, but in Wally’s case, I was starting to make an exception.
Discovering time travel, I think, was his calling. If he hadn’t, the perversity of the Universe would have been proven beyond all doubt.
One Monday, Wally and I both walked in the door at 9:00 on the dot. He wasn’t a few minutes late, nor screamingly early; he was precisely on time.
“Wally!” I said, “I’m stunned!”
“That’s two of us,” he said, and sat down to get to work.
I let the incident go, chalking it up to blind chance. I mean, if you’re working in a place for a couple of years, the odds have to favor walking in the door at 9:00 AM at least once, right?
Well, the next morning, wouldn’t you know it? He and I were in the same elevator, and on our floor at 9:00 on the tick.
“Okay Wally,” I said. “Two days in a row you’re on time. What gives? Are you leaving three hours early, and then waiting for me to get here on time?”
“No, no,” he stammered. “Nothing like that. It’s just . . . well . . . I think I’ve finally figured out how to get here on time.”
“How’d you do it?” I asked.
“Can you keep a secret?” I nodded. “I’ve discovered the secret of time travel.”
And he clammed up. Wouldn’t say another word. I looked over at him every now and again throughout the day, and when he caught my eye, he’d wink and smile a little, so I wasn’t sure if he’d been pulling my leg or not.
Come Friday, I couldn’t stand it. I sidled up to Wally’s desk about 9:30, and whispered to him, “Time travel, huh?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said.
“So what time did you leave home to get here at 9:00?”
“You won’t believe me,” he said.
“Try me.”
“Today, I woke up at noon, watched the news, showered, ate breakfast about one this afternoon, took an uncrowded subway ride in to work, got to the lobby about quarter to two this afternoon, and then time-traveled back to 8:57 this morning. Then I stepped out from behind that big potted fern and joined the throng jostling for the elevators.”
“Do you really expect me to believe that cockamamie story?” I asked him.
“No, not really. But it’s the truth.” And he went back to work.
I sat down at my desk, staring at the papers in front of me and not seeing them. Then I gave up. I dialed Wally’s home phone number. It rang five times, and I was looking at Wally the whole time. On the sixth ring, a groggy Wally picked up; I knew his voice. I’m listening to Wally wake up on the phone while I’m watching him working at his desk not ten feet from me.
I hung up and went back to Wally’s desk.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “Before I woke up at noon, the phone woke me sometime in the morning, but there was no one there.”
I left the company a few years later, but by that time, I believed him. I think he really had found the secret to time travel.
I asked him about it at my going-away party. “If you’ve really discovered time travel, what are you going to do with it?”
“What do you mean, ‘do with it’ ?” he asked. “I get to work on time. Isn’t that enough?”
And the thing about Wally was, getting to work on time really was enough for him.
Then our flight was called. I boarded early to get to my seat in the back, while the old man waited for his row to be called. I figured I wouldn’t see him again.
On the plane, however, he smiled at me as I walked to the back.
And we landed two hours early.
THE ONLY KNOWN JUMP ACROSS TIME
Eugene Mirabelli
1
THE ONLY KNOWN JUMP across time produced by an apparatus, a so-called time machine, took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May of 1928. The people who performed the brief transit were Lydia Webster Chase and Enzo Augusto Capellino.
2
Enzo Capellino was a tailor and Lydia Chase was the daughter of Prescott Chase, a retired professor of botany at Harvard University. Enzo and Lydia knew of each other only because her father had his shirts and suits made in Capellino’s shop. One day in 1908, while being fitted for a summer-weight linen suit jacket, Professor Chase happened to make small talk about gardening. Now, young Enzo Capellino was an avid gardener and he invited the professor to walk through the sunny patch he cultivated behind his shop. Old Professor Chase was delighted by this tangled paradise of Sicilian fruit trees, grapevines, and vegetables, and in return he invited Mr. Capellino to visit his garden, a halfacre of flower beds, cool moss and ferns and fish pools, gravel walks and willow trees which lay behind his large square house on Kirkland Street.
