Time Travel Omnibus, page 902
A sibilant “Shh!” hissed from a row back.
“It’s not etiquette to talk in a theater,” whispered Hoffman. She didn’t appear happy to see him.
“Why not?” Durance said, his voice still too loud. “It’s not a live performance.”
“Shh,” said Earle.
The Warner Bothers’ theme trumpets and drums theme filled the auditorium, and the film began.
Earle slid down in the chair until his head rested against the plush. The opening credits played over a map of Africa. He trembled. An arrow traced its way from Paris, across France, through the Mediterranean to end in Casablanca where all refugees without exit visas “wait and wait and wait.”
He’d seen the picture a hundred times before. The rhythm of it was familiar—the report of the dead couriers and the stolen letters of transit, the roundup of suspects, the English couple talking to the pickpocket—but he’d never seen the movie like this, in a huge theater, and the atmosphere was different. The people sitting all around him had no idea that they were in the presence of greatness. Earle felt the same way he had at the Hindenberg. 1937. The ship was ridiculously large, only eighty-seven feet shorter than the Titanic. Earle had stood with a crowd to watch the docking. The people oohed and ahhed at her girth. They didn’t know. They didn’t know, but Earle did. To the unprepared, great moments felt like common ones until they were over.
On the screen, a model airplane flew over a crowded Moroccan street. The people stared hopefully. Hoffman leaned into him. “That’s not a very realistic looking airplane.”
“Production costs,” he whispered back. “Almost everything you see was done in the studio or back lots. No computer help.”
She wrinkled her brow. “It’s distracting.”
“The story is not about the plane.”
Scenes flicked by: Germans stepped onto the runway where Renault waited. Bogart played chess by himself at Rick’s. Ugarte bragged to Bogart about selling exit Visas cheap. “I don’t mind a parasite,” said Bogart. “I object to a cut rate one.”
Earle craned his neck to see other patrons in the theater. What were they feeling? How did the movie affect them? The woman in the floral print dress leaned forward, but he could see nothing in her or the rest of the audience’s attentive faces. For a second, Durance met Earle’s gaze, but he looked back to the screen.
Earle turned around. Within minutes, Bergman entered, saw Sam. She had to know right then, Earle thought. Rick was back in her life. The bar was called Rick’s and Sam was Rick’s best friend. Sam knew too the heartache she brought. Earle could see it in Sam’s face. Sam must have been thinking, “run, boss!” Later he would beg Rick to leave. “Please, boss, let’s go. There ain’t nothing but trouble for you here. We’ll take the car and drive all night. We’ll get drunk. We’ll go fishing and stay away until she’s gone.”
But Rick waited for a woman. He made Sam play, “As Time Goes By.”
Earle’s hands rested on his knees. Hoffman had taken the armrest. She stared at the screen, the changing light brightening then shadowing her features.
Bergman walked into Rick’s. “Can I tell you a story?” she asked Rick.
“Does it got a wow finish?” he said.
“I don’t know the finish yet.”
I don’t know the finish either, thought Earle. He felt Bogart’s pain in his loss of expression. Despite his tough-guy posturing, it was all there beneath. And the film played on, uneditable, inevitable, like history, Earle thought. He wondered what the script of the evening held for him. Was there an inevitable crash coming? Was his Hindenberg moving toward the docking tower, with him on board instead of those poor, doomed people? But, gradually, as the film clicked on, he forgot about Hoffman sitting next to him and Durance behind. He forgot about the other people in the theater. They were all in Casablanca, holding letters of transit close to their hearts, bargaining with bitterness for love. Ignoring the Nazi Major Strasser and his arrogance. Ignoring the pain in the world around them, until the passion became too much. Laszlo led the café’s band in “La Marseillaise,” overwhelming the Germans’ singing of “Die Wacht Am Rhein.” Even Yvonne, Bogart’s spurned lover who came to the bar with a German officer on her arm, joined in, tears on her cheeks. Bergman looked at her driven husband across the room, who was not thinking of himself or her or of love, but of his occupied France and the German heel in its back. It was an instant where Earle often paused the film to look at Bergman’s eyes. The world was in them, filled with respect for Laszlo’s courage, with admiration. Anyone would give a lifetime to earn the look that Bergman considered him with, and Laszlo didn’t know. He sang the song to its end, the expatriates in the café on their feet, for a moment joined in emotion.
But Earle couldn’t pause the film. It rolled on. “Viva la France!” they roared. “Viva La France!”
Like he had a hundred times before, Renault closed the café under Strasser’s orders. Bogart said, “How can they close me up? On what grounds?” Renault said, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.” Just then the croupier handed Renault a handful of cash. “Your winnings, sir.” The audience laughed, which woke Earle to his mission. He broke his gaze from the screen. The woman in the floral dress didn’t laugh. Her posture was tense. Earle could see she was mesmerized. What’s going to happen next? she must be thinking. Her life was involved now, like the audience to any worthwhile story. What’s going to happen?
In a few minutes, Bergman would wait for Bogart in his apartment. She’d plead for the letters. Finally, she’d pull a gun on him. “Go ahead and shoot,” he’d say. “You’ll be doing me a favor.” She will put the gun down. “Richard, I tried to stay away. I thought I would never see you again, that you were out of my life.” She’ll weep. “The day you left Paris, if you knew what I went through. If you knew how much I loved you, how much I still love you.” They’d kiss.
Why didn’t Bogart see what she was doing? Earle thought. The Bulgarian girl not ten minutes earlier in the film had said, “If someone loved you very much so that your happiness was the only thing she wanted in the world, and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”
But that was the beauty. Bogart didn’t. He couldn’t replay the Bulgarian girl’s words. He couldn’t edit what Bergman said to him, nor could he tinker with his own heart. Maybe by the end of the film he figured it out, but right then, Bogart went with his own emotions. He forgot his anger and held her, Bergman, with her luminous eyes and high cheekbones and smile like a sunrise.
Hoffman whispered. “You didn’t tell me the film had a sense of humor.”
Earle felt her breath in his ear, her hand on his arm. “It has irony,” he whispered back, keenly aware that Durance sat behind them. Did Bogart send Bergman off with Henreid at the end of the film because he knew she didn’t love him? Was he that keen-sighted? And how did he know?
What was Hoffman thinking? Did she care for him in the least?
Earle forced himself to look away from the screen again. He was here to experience Casablanca in a world where it hadn’t existed before. He had a job to do.
The woman in the floral dress held a handkerchief to her cheek, not moving. Her face was wet with tears. Henreid asked Bergman about the time she thought he was dead. “Were you lonely in Paris?” he asked. “I know how it is to be lonely,” he said. Was Henreid forgiving Bergman for the affair with Bogart without even knowing about it? The woman in the floral dress sobbed silently. What was her story? Was her husband at war? Did she believe him to be dead? Even now, was there a lover?
Earle watched, awed. How seldom had he been able to feel the world through someone else. The bend of her wrist. The handkerchief’s dangling end. The quiet, wracking sobs that shook her sides. How privileged he felt to be a part of her moment. What a moment of trespass on his part. Everything he hoped for in coming to see Casablanca was encompassed by this scene. This would be bigger than his Hindenberg experience.
He looked away, blinking against a momentary sting. It didn’t take much to see that his problems didn’t amount to—he sought for a comparison, then smiled—a hill of beans. It was Bogart’s line. Whatever the woman in the floral dress was going through, his own anxieties couldn’t measure up. Earle couldn’t know Hoffman’s mind any more than Bogart knew Bergman’s, and in this time he couldn’t edit in messages from her or create pictures of the two of them at romantic vacation stops, or even replay their times together. He was a time traveler stuck in the ever-present and always receding now with the people around him an enigma, like the woman in the floral dress.
On the screen, Bergman slipped away from her motel room to meet Bogart, to tell him of her life after she married Laszlo, how she thought Laszlo was dead when she’d met Bogart in Paris. Earle slid his arm out from under Hoffman’s hand, then walked to the rear of the theater. From the back, he could see all the still heads. Earlier in the film he’d heard conversation, but now there was nothing but Bogart and Bergman’s voices. Bergman buried her head in Bogart’s shoulder. She said the line: “I ran away from you once, I can’t do it again.”
Earle nodded. He’d seen this moment over and over. It seemed to him that Bergman was exactly torn. She loved her husband, but she also loved Bogart. It was a perfect scene, balancing the two men she loved against the sureness that she would have to leave one behind. Maybe she believed that Laszlo really lived for his work and could go on without her, or maybe she knew that no matter what happened, if she demonstrated her love for Laszlo by deserting him for another man that she had done the right thing. There was no way to tell. Regardless, she chose Bogart and set him in motion for the end of the film.
Who was the audience rooting for? Laszlo seemed a bit of a cold fish, but he was absolutely blameless in his love for his wife and devotion to his anti-Nazism. Bogart was flawed and scarred, but his passion for Bergman redeemed him. And now, in the time the audience watched, France was still occupied. The Vichy government still danced to Germany’s pipes. Soldiers were dying over what song the people would sing, “Die Wacht Am Rhine” or “La Marseillaise.”
Earle moved to where he could see more of the audience. He imagined how the sequence would replay when he downloaded the nanotech recordings. The noisy projector clicking away in the background. The feel of plush beneath his hands. The hint of rain held in wet coats dripping onto the floor.
Now came the plan, the thinking that Bogart did for Bergman. Bergman believed she was leaving Casablanca with Bogart. They went to the airport. Bogart told Renault to fill out the letters of transit with Laszlo and Bergman’s name. Bergman was confused. Bogart explained, the time travelers lament, that if she didn’t leave she would regret it, “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” The plane took off. Major Strasser was shot. Bogart and Renault walk into the fog together.
Earle closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. The soundtrack boomed out “La Marseillaise.” People clapped. He opened his eyes. Some of the audience was standing, applauding the screen as the curtains closed and the lights came up. They kept clapping. Even though there were no live performers to appreciate their reaction, they applauded. Finally, they turned, gathered their umbrellas and coats to head toward the exits.
“I loved that,” said a woman to her companion as they passed Earle on the way out. “Who would have believed Bogart could play a romantic lead?” said another.
Hoffman walked up the aisle, the house lights catching the shimmer in her hair. “You were right to come here. I had no idea,” she said, her hand brushing his as she passed. “I’ll see you in the lobby.” She nodded back into the nearly empty theater.
Only Durance and the woman in the floral dress remained. Durance stood next to her, leaning down over where she was seated, speaking earnestly.
Earle glanced to the exit. Hoffman was already gone. He walked down the aisle toward Durance and the woman. It wasn’t until Earle was close enough to touch them that Durance looked up.
“She seemed upset,” said Durance.
“I’m better now, really,” said the woman. She’d dried her face, but her mascara had smudged. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“I understand,” said Durance. “Look,” he said to Earle. “You were right.” He fumbled for words, “I didn’t think a film . . . it wasn’t sentimental.” He inhaled deeply, and in the exhalation was a hint of an emotional quiver. “They’re doing the show again, aren’t they, in a half hour?”
Earle nodded.
“And it will be exactly the same, won’t it? They can’t change it?” said Durance.
The woman looked at him quizzically.
Earle understood. The film would always play out the same way. Like the Hindenberg. Like all of history, unrolling in its immutable way. That was its charm. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
Durance took a seat next to the woman. “We thought we’d see it again.” He gestured toward the exits. “Could you pay for our tickets?” Durance and the woman faced the screen, waiting for the lights to go down and the curtain to open.
In the lobby, Hoffman stood by the door. They stepped onto the sidewalk without speaking, where the rain had slowed to a gentle patter, hinting of snow. A block later, while they waited to cross the street, Hoffman said, “It was a good story.”
She was looking into the distance. Not at him.
“Yes,” he said.
“It had a good finish.”
“Yes.”
As they crossed, Hoffman took his arm. He realized she hadn’t brought her umbrella. Water ran off the edges of her hat. She said, “What should we do now?”
When they reached the sidewalk, she still held his arm.
Earle thought of Bogart walking into the fog with Renault. It was a good ending, a wow finish. Earle said, “I hear that Cab Calloway is playing at the Park Central.”
Hoffman smiled in a lingering way that seemed very much like Ingrid Bergman. “Do you know how to dance?”
A passing car splashed water on their legs. Earle didn’t care. They had another twenty hours or so in New York, in the city that never sleeps. Meanwhile, in Casablanca, Sam sang at his piano, the old song, Bogart’s and Bergman’s song. Everybody’s song.
It’s true, Earle thought as the rain came down, as the water gurgled in the gutters, as the undersides of clouds glowing in New York’s evening lights twisted slowly above. Sam was right: it’s still the same old story, and it would always be, as time goes by.
THE ECKENER ALTERNATIVE
James L. Cambias
The Hindenburg swung gently on the mast at Lakehurst as the sky over New Jersey turned to purple twilight. All the passengers, the reporters, the newsreel men were gone. A couple of sailors stood guard beneath the big ship to enforce the no-smoking rule.
John Cavalli waited until the watchman below had turned away, then slid down the stern rope to the ground. He hunkered down next to the big rolling anchor weight for a couple of minutes, then hurried off into the darkness beyond the floodlights.
Once he was clear, Cavalli stopped to peel off the Russian Army arctic commando suit he’d been wearing ever since the zeppelin had lifted off from Frankfurt-am-Main. It had kept him warm as he hid among the gas cells with his IR goggles and fire extinguisher, but now in the warmth of a spring evening it was stifling.
He hit the RETURN button on his wristband and disappeared.
“You can’t make big changes,” said the instructor the first day of Temporal Studies class. He was a very laid-back physicist recruited from California in the 2020s. “That’s the most important rule. The folks we work for are the result of a particular set of historical events. Change history too much and their probability level drops below 50 percent. If that happens, all this”—his gesture encompassed the Time Center—“goes away and we’re out of a job. If we even exist anymore.”
A student in the row ahead of Cavalli raised his hand. “What about making little changes?”
“Little changes are fine. We make little changes all the time. Most of them are things like making long-term investments, buying up art treasures for safekeeping, keeping species from going extinct, that kind of thing. You’re going to learn all about gauging the effect of changes, avoiding heterodynes and chaotic points, and when it’s okay to step on butterflies.”
Cavalli was listening, but in the margin of his notebook he was doodling airships.
The timegate stage was dark and the control room was empty, just as he’d left it. The Coke can was still on the console. Was it maybe a little further to the left than he remembered? He stepped off the stage and took a drink. Still tasted the same. It would take a pretty big timeshift to change the flavor of Coca-Cola.
Cavalli locked the door behind him with his purloined master key—the Time Center used mechanical locks because they were a bit more resistant to minor time-shifts—and headed for the library. He found a book about zeppelins he didn’t remember and skimmed the pages. Hindenburg served safely until 1939; scrapped when World War Two broke out. No postwar zeppelins. The usual “return of the airship” speculations.
Damn. It hadn’t worked. He had hoped erasing the vivid image of the Hindenburg fire would have been enough to keep passenger airships alive, but the war still marked the end of their era.
“So why don’t we stop things like the Holocaust or the firebombing of Dresden?” It was a relatively quiet dorm room party with half a dozen trainees blowing off steam after the first written exam. Cavalli didn’t see who asked the question, but he sounded drunk.
Anna Kyle, the third-year trainee, answered. “Too big. The models predict major shifts in the 21st Century if there’s no Holocaust. You lose the Cold War and the whole Jihad era. We just stay away from World War Two if we can help it. Rescue a few things from museums before they get flattened, take some videos for historians, that’s all.”
