Time Travel Omnibus, page 900
Out of the comer of his eye, Porfirio saw someone laboring up the hill toward him from Highland Avenue. He turned his head and saw the cop. The too-patient adult voice continued:
“Bobby, there are a lot of other things you can be in the Future.”
“I hate the Future.”
Porfirio watched the cop’s progress as the psychologist hesitated, then pushed on:
“Do you like being a clown, Bobby?”
“I guess so,” said Robert. “At least people see me when they look at me now. The man outside the window saw me, too.”
There was a pause. The cop was red-faced from the heat and his climb, but he was grinning at Porfirio.
“Well, Bobby, that’s one of our security men, out there to keep you safe.”
“I know perfectly well why he’s there,” Robert said. “He doesn’t scare me. I want him to hear what I have to say, so he can tell Professor Bill and the rest of them.”
“What do you want to tell us, Bobby?” said the psychologist, a little shakily.
There was a creak, as though someone had leaned forward in a chair. “You know why you haven’t caught me? Because I figured out how to go to 1951 all by myself. And I’ve been living in it, over and over and over. The Company doesn’t think that’s possible, because of the variable permeability of temporal fabric, but it is. The trick is to go to a different place every time. There’s just one catch.”
The cop paused to wipe sweat off his brow, but he kept his eyes on Porfirio.
“What’s the catch, Bobby?”
“Do you know what happens when you send something back to the same year often enough?” Robert sounded amused. “Like, about a hundred million times?”
“No, Bobby, I don’t know.”
“I know. I experimented. I tried it the first time with a wheel off a toy car. I sent it to 1912, over and over, until—do you know where Tunguska is?”
“What are you trying to tell me, Bobby?” The psychologist was losing his professional voice.
“Then,” said Robert, “I increased the mass of the object. I sent a baseball back. Way back. Do you know what really killed off the dinosaurs?”
“Hey there, zoot suit,” said the cop, when he was close enough. “You wouldn’t be loitering, would you?”
“. . . You can wear a hole in the fabric of space and time,” Robert was saying. “And it just might destroy everything in the whole world. You included. And if you were pretty sick of being alive, but you couldn’t die, that might seem like a great idea. Don’t you think?”
There was the sound of a chair being pushed back.
Porfirio grimaced and reached into his jacket for his badge, but the cop pinned Porfirio’s hand to his chest with the tip of his nightstick.
“Bobby, we can help you!” cried the psychologist.
“I’m not little Bobby anymore, you asshole,” said the child’s voice, rising. “I’m a million, million years old.”
Porfirio looked the cop in the eye.
“Vice squad,” he said. The cop sagged. Porfirio produced his badge.
“But I got a tip from one of the residents here—” said the cop. “Woooowwwww,” said the weird little singsong voice, and there was a brief scream.
“What happened?” demands Clete. He has gone very pale.
“We never found out,” says Porfirio. “By the time I got the patrolman to leave and ran around to the front of the building, the other techs had already gone in and secured the room. The only problem was, there was nothing to secure. The room was empty. No sign of Ross, or the mortal either. No furniture, even, except a couple of wooden chairs. He hadn’t been living there. He’d just used the place to lure us in.”
“Did anybody ever find the mortal?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Porfirio replies. “Fifty years later. In London.”
“He’d gone forward in time?” Clete exclaims. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. Isn’t it?”
Porfirio sighs.
“So they say, kid. Anyway, he hadn’t gone forward in time. Remember, about ten years ago, when archaeologists were excavating that medieval hospital over there? They found hundreds of skeletons in its cemetery. Layers and layers of the dead. And—though this didn’t make it into the news, not even into the Fortean Times—one of the skeletons was wearing a Timex.”
Clete giggles shrilly.
“Was it still ticking?” he asks. “What the hell are you telling me? There’s this crazy immortal guy on the loose, and he’s able to time-travel just using his brain, and he wants to destroy the whole world and he’s figured out how, and we’re just sitting here?”
“You have a better idea?” says Porfirio. “Please tell me if you do, okay?” Clete controls himself with effort.
“All right, what did the Company do?” he asks. “There’s a plan, isn’t there, for taking him out? There must be, or we wouldn’t be here now.” Porfirio nods.
“But what are we doing here now?” says Clete. “Shouldn’t we be in 1951, where he’s hiding? Wait, no, we probably shouldn’t, because that’d place even more strain on the fabric of time and space. Or whatever.”
“It would,” Porfirio agrees.
“So . . . here we are at the place where Bobby Ross was recruited. The Company must expect he’s going to come back here. Because this is where he caused the accident. Because the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, right?” Clete babbles.
“Maybe,” says Porfirio. “The Company already knows he leaves 1951 sometimes, for medical treatment.”
“And sooner or later he’ll be driven to come here,” says Clete, and now he too is staring fixedly at the barn. “And—and today is June 30, 2008. The car crash happened fifty years ago today. That’s why we’re here.”
“He might come,” says Porfirio. “So we just wait—” He stiffens, stares hard, and Clete stares hard too and sees the little limping figure walking up the old road, just visible through the high weeds.
“Goddamn,” says Clete, and is out of the car in a blur, ejecting candy bar wrappers and potato chip cans as he goes, and Porfirio curses and tells him to wait, but it’s too late; Clete has crossed the highway in a bound and is running across the valley, as fast as only an immortal can go. Porfirio races after him, up that bare yellow hill with its red rocks that still bear faint carbon traces of horror, and he clears the edge of the road in time to hear Clete bellow:
“Security! Freeze!”
“Don’t—” says Porfirio, just as Clete launches himself forward to tackle Robert Ross.
Robert is smiling, lifting his arms as though in a gesture of surrender. Despite the heat, he is wearing a long overcoat. Its lining is tom, just under his arm, and where the sweat-stained rayon satin hangs down Porfirio glimpses fathomless black night, white stars.
“Lalala la la. Woooowww,” says Robert Ross, just as Clete hits him. Clete shrieks and then is gone, sucked into the void of stars.
Porfirio stands very still. Robert winks at him.
“What a catch!” he says, in ten-year-old Bobby’s voice.
It’s hot up there, on the old white road, under the blue summer sky. Porfirio feels sweat prickling between his shoulderblades.
“Hey, Mr. Policeman,” says Robert, “I remember you. Did you tell the Company what you heard? Have they been thinking about what I’m going to do? Have they been scared, all these years?”
“Sure they have, Mr. Ross,” says Porfirio, flexing his hands.
Robert frowns. “Come on, Mr. Ross was my father. I’m Bobby.”
“Oh, I get it. That would be the Mr. Ross who died right down there?” Porfirio points. “In the crash? Because his kid was so stupid he didn’t know better than to lean out the window of a moving car?”
An expression of amazement crosses the wrinkled, dirty little face, to be replaced with white-hot rage.
“Faggot! Don’t you call me stupid!” screams Robert. “I’m brilliant! I can make the whole world come to an end if I want to!”
“You made it come to an end for your family, anyway,” says Porfirio.
“No, I didn’t,” says Robert, clenching his fists. “Professor Bill explained about that. It just happened. Accidents happen all the time. I was innocent.”
“Yeah, but Professor Bill lied to you, didn’t he?” says Porfirio. “Like, about how wonderful it would be to five forever?”
His voice is calm, almost bored. Robert says nothing. He looks at Porfirio with tears in his eyes, but there is hate there too.
“Hey, Bobby,” says Porfirio, moving a step closer. “Did it ever once occur to you to come back here and prevent the accident? I mean, it’s impossible, sure, but didn’t you even think of giving it a try? Messing with causality? It might have been easy, for a super-powered genius kid like you. But you didn’t, did you? I can see it in your eyes.”
Robert glances uncertainly down the hill, where in some dimension a 1946 Plymouth is still blackening, windows shattering, popping, and the dry summer grass is vanishing around it as the fire spreads outward like a black pool.
“What do you think, Bobby? Maybe pushed the grandfather paradox, huh? Gone back to see if you couldn’t bend the rules, bum down this bam before the mural was painted? Or even broken Hank Bauer’s arm, so the Yankees didn’t win the World Series in 1951? I can think of a couple of dozen different things I’d have tried, Bobby, if I’d had superpowers like you.
“But you never even tried. Why was that, Bobby?”
“La la la,” murmurs Robert, opening his arms again and stepping toward Porfirio. Porfirio doesn’t move. He looks Robert in the face and says: “You’re stupid. Unfinished. You never grew up, Bobby.”
“Professor Bill said never growing up was a good thing,” says Robert. “Professor Bill said that because he never grew up either,” says Porfirio. “You weren’t real to him, Bobby. He never saw you when he looked at you.”
“No, he never did,” says Robert, in a thick voice because he is crying. “He just saw what he wanted me to be. Freckle-faced kid!” He points bitterly at the brown discoloration that covers half his cheek. “Look at me now!”
“Yeah, and you’ll never be a baseball player. And you’re still so mad about that, all you can think of to do is to pay the Company back,” says Porfirio, taking another step toward him.
“That’s right!” sobs Robert.
“With the whole eternal world to explore, and a million other ways to be happy—still, all you want is to pay them back,” says Porfirio, watching him carefully.
Yeah!” cries Robert, panting. He wipes his nose on his dirty sleeve. He looks up again, sharply. “I mean—I mean—”
“See? Stupid. And you’re not a good boy, Bobby,” says Porfirio gently. You’re a goddamn monster. You’re trying to blow up a whole world full of innocent people. You know what should happen, now? Your dad ought to come walking up that hill, madder than hell, and punish you.”
Robert looks down the hillside.
“But he can’t, ever again,” he says. He sounds tired.
Porfirio has already moved, and before the last weary syllable is out of his mouth Robert feels the scorpion-sting in his arm.
He whirls around, but Porfirio has already retreated, withdrawn up the hillside. He stands before the mural, and the painted outfielder smiles over his shoulder. Robert clutches his arm, beginning to cry afresh.
“No fair,” he protests. But he knows it’s more than fair. It is even a relief.
He falls to his knees, whimpering at the heat of the old road’s surface. He crawls to the side and collapses, in the yellow summer grass.
“Will I have to go to the Future now?” Robert asks piteously.
“No, son. No Future,” Porfirio replies.
Robert nods and closes his eyes. He could sink through the rotating earth if he tried, escape once again into 1951; instead he floats away from time itself, into the back of his father’s hand.
Porfirio walks down the hill toward him. As he does so, an all-terrain vehicle comes barreling up the old road, mowing down thistles in its path.
It shudders to a halt and Clete leaps out, leaving the door open in his headlong rush up the hill. He is not wearing the same suit he wore when last seen by Porfirio.
“You stinking son of a bitch defective,” he roars, and aims a kick at Robert’s head. Porfirio grabs his arm.
“Take it easy,” he says.
“He sent me back six hundred thousand years! Do you know how long I had to wait before the Company even opened a damn transport depot?” says Clete, and looking at his smooth ageless face Porfirio can see that ages have passed over it. Clete now has permanently furious eyes. Their glare bores into Porfirio like acid. No convenience stores in 598,000 BC, huh? Porfirio thinks to himself.
“You knew he was going to do this to me, didn’t you?” demands Clete.
“No,” says Porfirio. “All I was told was, there’d be complications to the arrest. And you should have known better than to rush the guy.”
“You got that right,” says Clete, shrugging off his hand. “So why don’t you do the honors?”
He goes stalking back to his transport, and hauls a body bag from the back seat. Porfirio sighs. He reaches into his coat and withdraws what looks like a screwdriver handle. When he thumbs a button on its side, however, a half-circle of blue light forms at one end. He tests it with a random slice through a thistle, which falls over at once. He leans down and scans Robert Ross carefully, because he wants to be certain he is unconscious.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.
Working with the swiftness of long practice, he does his job. Clete returns, body bag under his arm, watching with grim satisfaction. Hank Bauer is still smiling down from the mural.
When the disassembly is finished, Porfirio loads the body bag into the car and climbs in beside it. Clete gets behind the wheel and backs carefully down the road. Bobby Ross may not be able to die, but he is finally on his way to eternal rest.
The Volkswagen sits there rusting for a month before it is stolen.
The blood remains on the old road for four months, before autumn rains wash it away, but they do wash it away. By the next summer the yellow grass is high, and the road as white as innocence once more.
A WOW FINISH
James Van Pelt
Earle woke up last, on the floor under a sheet. Durance stood at the window, watching the rain, while Hoffman, achingly beautiful, sat on the end of the bed, elbow on knee, chin in hand. They were already dressed.
Of all the field trips to all the times in all the world, she had to choose mine, Earle thought, conscious that he was naked beneath the thin covering. He wondered which of them had put the sheet over him.
“It’s a pity we always arrive in a storm,” said Durance. He tugged at his dark tie. “And the outfits are uncomfortable.” He wore a beige double-breasted suit with matching pants creased so sharply Earle thought he could cut paper with them.
“Allergens,” said Hoffman without moving. “The air’s cleaner on a rainy day. God knows what you’d react to here. Street dust. Pollutants. Pigeons. It’s safer on wet days. Cowardly, perhaps, but safer.” She smiled at Earle. “You going to lay there all evening?”
Earle rolled to his side. His clothes were neatly piled beside him. He pulled them under the sheet and dressed there, aware that Hoffman only had to shift her gaze a foot to be looking right at him. It was a struggle to get into the shoes. The stiff leather bit into his ankles, but they had a nice shine to them, and putting them on made him feel more there. More real. Somewhere distant a bell rang. He realized he’d been hearing it for a while. Beyond that a steady rumble quivered just on the edge of his perceptions.
“Look at this phone,” said Durance, picking it up. At first Earle thought that it was tied to the table. Durance said, “Wires and a dial. How do you work it?”
Hoffman stood from the bed, smoothing the front of her skirt with the edge of her hands. She’d cut her hair short for the trip and given it a curl. “Honestly, it’s like you’ve never been in the field before.”
“Nothing before 2020. My master’s was on post-rock pop. I got interested in the roots of neuro big band, though. Earle has been in the Twentieth Century, though. I sampled that thing you did on the Hindenberg. Nice work.”
Earle struggled with the shirt’s buttons. “Beginner’s luck. I was a last minute replacement.”
Durance shrugged, then put the phone back on the table. “Hard to believe the trouble I’m going through to put in an extra footnote. Tiny Hill and his orchestra are in the Green Room here in the Edison. Harry James is uptown at the Astor, and Benny Goodman opens there tomorrow. Cab Calloway plays the Park Central.”
“Pretty good lineup,” said Earle.
“I tried talking Hoffman into going with me. A live band has to be better than a dusty old movie. So why go?” Durance laughed and put his hand on Hoffman’s shoulder. She leaned into him. Earle turned away, concentrated on tying his shoe.
“Ask Earle. It’s Casablanca,” she said. “Opening week. I don’t get it either. The Hindenberg, now that was important, but a film? Well, for a me a theater’s as good a place as any.”
Durance sniffed. “I read up on the movie. Who can watch this stuff? Ancient black and white that you can’t edit while you watch, and bad piano bar music on top of that. Dooley Wilson didn’t even play the piano. He was a drummer. Then there’s a bunch of Germans singing an off-tune version of “Die Wacht Am Rhein” instead of “Deutschland Uber Alles,” which would have made more sense. I wouldn’t get anything useful. Hard to believe people would get worked up over it. Twentieth Century sentimentalism.”
“I’ve never seen it,” said Hoffman. “Studied the background, though. Vichy, France. The German advances. The resistance movement. Bogart. Bergman. I’m ready.”
Earle paused in straightening his jacket. He didn’t know that she had never seen the film. There might be hope yet. He dropped the sheet on the bed as he walked to the window. Traffic flowed below, rumbling. “Broadway,” he said. “The Great White Way. 1942. Three and a half weeks until Christmas, and an entire world that hasn’t seen Casablanca.” He could feel the cars passing through his fingertips resting on the window sill. “Bogart said, ‘When it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?’ ”
