Time Travel Omnibus, page 983
The future is best viewed from a distance, Mike thought as he approached the Chrysler Motors Building in the Transportation Zone. Remembering its “Rocketport” display, he went inside.
Where he literally bumped into Albert Einstein.
“Pardon me, Professor,” Mike said quickly.
“Not a problem, not a problem,” the Nobel laureate said with a distracted smile, turning back to lean on a railing. Together they watched the Rocketgun simulate another blastoff into tomorrow, with full noise and light special effects.
“They’ll probably use it for shooting atomic bombs at each other,” Mike remarked, “long before they use it for passengers.”
Einstein gave him a startled look, then smiled wryly and shrugged.
This was the hard part. The only way Mike had been able to come up with to get the great man’s attention was the way Klaatu had gotten Professor Barnhart’s attention in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Mike couldn’t remember how fluent Einstein’s English was, but he pressed on quickly nonetheless.
“I know you’ve been working on unified field theory,” Mike said, pulling a folded sheaf of papers and a card from his coat pocket, “so I thought you might be interested in this.”
Unfolding the papers, Mike presented the sheaf to the professor. On the pages he had diagrammed, with explanatory captions, a particularly interesting variant of what would someday be called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen theorem.
Einstein glanced at the pages, perfunctorily at first, just humoring him. Then the physicist’s eyes grew wide as he realized the importance of what he was looking at.
“Wo—Where—?”
“I knew you’d see their merit,” Mike said, gesturing toward the thin sheaf, then handing Einstein the card with his grandfather’s name, address, and phone number. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you in person, Professor. I can be reached at this address. Let’s keep in touch.”
“Ja—er, yes!” Einstein said, shuffling papers and card about in his hands so he could shake the hand Mike offered him. Tipping his hat and turning before he melted away into the crowd, Mike was pleased he’d made his Einstein contact already.
Deciding to treat himself to as much of the Fair as possible before he made his way to the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, he toured the Town of Tomorrow. Then it was on to the Immortal Well and its streamlined Time Capsule, scheduled to be opened in 6939 A.D. Next he saw the robots Elektro the Moto-Man and his Moto-Dog, Sparko, perform in the Westinghouse Building.
He felt a childlike awe at General Electric’s ten-million-volt indoor lightning-bolt show, and Consolidated Edison’s block-long “City of Light” diorama. The line for the GM Futurama was far too long, however. His rendezvous with that tech triumph could wait for another visit.
He made his way through what felt more and more like a planetary county fair, until he at last reached the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. During the day the numbers of spectators for the pavilion’s official opening ceremonies had swelled past fifty thousand. On the fringes of the crowd, entrepreneurs sold Jewish Palestine flags, as well as armbands and yarmulkes adorned with the Star of David.
Recalling that his grandfather—though neither Orthodox nor Conservative—had on a lark bought such a yarmulke at the World’s Fair today and all those years ago, Mike now bought one as well and put it on, in hope and remembrance.
In his accented English, Einstein himself at last pronounced the words, “I am here entrusted with the high privilege of officially dedicating the building which my Palestine brethren have erected.” Amid the vast, cheering crowd, Mike despaired of finding the old man and boy he was seeking, but he kept looking.
By the time the ceremonies ended, Mike still hadn’t found the boy and the old man he sought—not even after the crowd broke up.
Worry, frustration, and anxiety warred within him as he drifted like a lost ghost through the great squares and avenues of the Fair, alongside the Lagoon of Nations, past the pavilions of states and governments. He wandered beneath the closing fireworks, his hope fading like blown starshells. He came to the reflecting pool beneath the Perisphere, at just the moment the great voice of that globe began to sound its eerie tocsin over the emptying fair.
With other stragglers he made his way toward the parking lots, panic rising in his mind. He’d lost them somewhere in the Fair! They were no longer on the grounds anywhere! He banged his forehead with palmed fists. How to find them? How to find them?
Getting into the Cord, he sat and stared through the windshield. He felt forlorn and powerless as a lost child. Not even the play of faerie lights over the Trylon and Perisphere could alter his despondent mood. He leaned his head against the steering wheel and mourned inconsolably.
Yorkville.
The word drifted into his consciousness like a boon from a merciful god. Yes! New York’s German-American section, where his grandfather had had his run-in with the street gangsters. It was only a hunch, but as he left the parking lot for the streets he could think of nowhere else to go.
He had maps, but the maps were not the city. He got lost, again and again. By memory he had successfully navigated across sixty years of time and thousands of miles of space, but now he was having difficulty finding his way around New York City!
When at last he made his way into Yorkville, streets and landmarks began to take on the faintest aura of déjà vu familiarity. He began to remember. They’d run out of gas, yes. He had waited in the car while his grandfather had gone to fill up the gas can. His grandfather had been gone a long time—
At the far edge of a streetlight, in a vacant lot, Mike saw and heard it, before he was ready for it. Four young men yelling, “Jude! Unflitiger Jude! Verderber! Teufeljude!” as they pummeled and kicked an old man.
Mike skidded to a stop beside the nightmare tableau and got out of the car.
At the sound of the Cord screeching to a halt, the young men stopped their heavy-booted work. Hearing the car door opening and slamming, one of the men, the smallest, took to his heels. The other three stood their ground, fists clenched.
Mike walked steadily across the lot toward them. When he was perhaps fifteen feet away, one of the three abruptly broke away toward something off to one side—a gasoline can. Mike saw the youth take matches and handkerchief rag from his pockets. He knew immediately what the boy intended to do.
While the fire maker fumbled about his work, Mike in battle-dance kata waded into the remaining two, punching and kicking.
An elderly avenging angel, he felt strangely detached, as if in a minor trance. His only barely-conscious thought was an odd little mantra—ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, do-si-do, again and again.
He knew he took many blows and strikes, but he gave far more, stomping insteps, roundhouse kicking ribs, smashing noses, snapping collarbones, shattering kneecaps. Even Yorkville street toughs had never encountered such a fighting style. They fled at last, but they had done their damage.
His grandfather, doused about the neck and chest with a slosh of gasoline, was going up in slow immolation. It was all Mike could do to put out the fire with his suit coat. The old man’s pulse was thready, but the pain of his burns roused him to consciousness.
“Thank you,” he whispered, coughing blood.
“Grandpa,” Mike said, cradling the old man’s head, “it’s me, Michael.”
“Michael?” asked his grandfather, confused. “How?”
“I know—I’m old,” Mike said, picking his grandfather up awkwardly in a fireman’s carry. He headed toward the Cord, heart pounding, talking all the while, adrenalin-delirious, trying to explain. “I know it doesn’t seem to make sense. But listen, you’ve got to believe me. I’m sending you into the future. You’ll die of your wounds and burns here. I’ve come from the future to help you. Having you to save saves me, both as the boy I was, and the old man I’ll be.”
Mike opened the passenger side door of the Cord and propped his grandfather in the seat. Dazedly his grandfather watched him. Taking Grandpa Sakler’s keys and money clip, Mike tossed his own wallet onto the seat beside his grandfather.
“All the ID you’ll need to pass for me in 1999 is in that wallet and in the car,” Mike told him. His grandfather nodded weakly, or perhaps he passed out. Coming around past the back of the car, Mike opened up the driver’s side door. Slotting his own key on its key chain into the Cord’s ignition, he started the car and turned on the temporal Mobius generator.
The car was equipped with enough computer power for a full memory of his trip here, as per the notes he had written, the notes he would write. Now, though, he would have to change its return destination.
Putting on the neuro-hookups, he fast-reversed the memory guidance record to a bifurcation point two days before he left 1999—to his last trip to the doctor’s office near St. Agnes Hospital, for his physical.
This time, the Cord would miss the turn, and not miss the cinder-block retaining wall. He remembered all he could, then imagined the car through wall and total smashup, into the hospital parking lot—right in front of Emergency, where an old-fashioned man with a secret desire to see the future would finally get his wish.
Turning to his unconscious grandfather, he kissed the old man lightly atop his bloodied head.
“I love you, Grandpa.”
He stood on the brake, revving the engine while in gear. At the same instant he flipped the Mobius generator’s last switch, dropped his foot off the brake, and threw himself from the car, the circlets tearing free of his head.
Around him he felt the chill of death. He was every place and no place at all, every time and no time, and he was falling . . .
He landed heavily on his hip. Around him a thin mist dissipated as a breeze blew along the street. He propped himself up on his forearm, feeling old and very tired. Something had happened to his memory. His recall of the last several hours was as hazy as a dream or nightmare dissolving on waking.
“Grandpa?” A boy’s voice said, coming toward him. The boy peered into his face with evident concern. “Grandpa, is that you? You don’t look right. Are you okay?”
“Just tripped and fell down, is all,” Mike said, getting slowly to his feet. At last he began remembering something of the role he was supposed to play.
“Grandpa? Where’s the gas can?”
For a moment Mike had no idea what the boy was talking about. The boy looked around.
“Oh, here it is,” the boy said, running to pick it up from the vacant lot, then coming back, still looking at Mike. “Here. Your yarmulke fell off too.”
“I’m a bit discomboobalated from the fall, is all,” Mike said, trying painfully to smile and joke as he took the yarmulke with its Star of David from the boy’s hand. “Thank you. Lead the way back to the car. I’ll follow you.”
The short walk returned Mike partway to his senses. His chest hurt. He realized that, here in 1939, without medications or surgical techniques yet to be invented, he would not live very long.
So be it. Until he died he would lead a very full life. Here, in this time when the future was beautiful and distant as Heaven, he would spend his remaining days remembering—and planning.
“Hey, Grandpa!” the boy called when he’d reached his grandfather’s Cord automobile. “Gimme the keys.”
“What?” Mike said. He looked quizzically at the kid as he took the gas can from the boy. The can was still close to half full. Pouring its remaining contents into the fuel tank, he hoped it would be enough to restart the car.
“You know,” the boy said. “Lemme drive.”
“No, no,” Mike said, waving his hand in a light gesture of dismissal. He put the empty gas can in the trunk, then opened the doors to let them both in. He slipped the key into the ignition and looked at the smiling boy sitting on the other side of the front seat.
“You may just be driving this road, too, someday,” the old man said quietly. “Maybe sooner than you think.”
After a time, the engine caught and they drove away.
THE BEETHOVEN PROJECT
Donald Moffitt
Motivation is everything . . .
“Flat,” said Harv Saltz, the marketing director for Divergences, Inc. “Sales have been goddamn flat since that Bach thing, what was it?” He snapped his fingers impatiently.
Marty Stent, the firm’s creative director, spoke up. “Bach’s Variations and Fugue on a tune by Gershwin,” he said. It was his riff on ‘The Man I Love.’ The old guy went crazy with those descending chromatics. We livened it up with just a touch of wire brush, and . . .”
“Yeah, yeah. The point is, we haven’t had a hit since then. While The Music Factory, those snakes, have been cranking out hit after hit at our expense. What’s the one that’s been off the charts all week—‘Flipping the Byrd’ or something? That was our idea, goddammit, and we dropped the ball.”
“They bribed some temporal engineer at Timesplitters Associates to muscle in on a timeline that we paid for,” Marty protested. “It was legal because . . .”
“Because we didn’t get our branch registered before the statutory waiting period ran out, and they were able to file for a new intervention!” Harv shot back. His face was getting dangerously purple.
Lester Krieg sat back and kept his mouth shut. He was painfully aware that he was a very junior account executive, and that he was privileged to have been invited by Marty to a meeting of the big boys. But it was starting to look as if being Marty’s protégé might not be an unalloyed blessing.
The sales manager, Larry McGavin, tossed in his two cents worth. “We need a biggie, Marty,” he said. “Something surefire.”
Harv seconded him with a rumble that Lester interpreted as meaning, “Or else.”
Marty was nothing if not quick on his feet. “And that’s why I brought in my boy Lester here,” he said smoothly. “Lester may be relatively new to the game, but he’s impressed me with his creative ideas. And more important, he’s a young guy who’s in tune with the tastes of the avant-retro generation. I’d like you all to hear what he told me this morning.”
All eyes swiveled toward Lester. He shrank in his chair. He hadn’t discussed anything with Marty that morning.
“Go ahead, son,” Harv said, not unkindly.
Lester thought furiously. “I asked myself,” he temporized, “what concept would most strike a responsive chord in literally everybody, not just your ordinary music buffs, but even people with a limited knowledge of music.”
He had their attention now. “Go on,” Harv said.
“And then it came to me.” He swallowed hard, and then it did, in fact, come to him all in a flash.
“Beethoven’s Tenth,” he said.
They all looked at one another. A murmur of appreciation went round the table. Encouraged, Lester plunged ahead.
“Everybody and his brother Jake knows that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and stopped there. And even the dimmest of music lovers has wish fulfillment fantasies about what a tenth would have sounded like.”
He had them nodding now. Ted Fisher, head of the research department, had started to take notes. Marty caught Lester’s eye and signaled him to go for it.
Lester took a deep breath. “Beethoven was always short of money. He conned his publishers. He wasn’t above selling the same composition to two or three different patrons if he thought he could get away with it. We know he thought about writing a tenth symphony after he finished the ninth, but he put the project aside for more profitable commissions. All we have to do is make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Larry McGavin from sales was nodding his head enthusiastically. “I like it,” he said. He turned to Harv Saltz. “What do you say, Harv?”
The comptroller, Adam Fisk, was putting on that long face of his. “It’s going to be expensive, Harv. Opening another timeline, assembling all that cash in gold, reconnoitering expenses, figuring the optimum date for an insert—”
Harv cut him off. “Let’s do it.”
“An offer he can’t refuse,” Marty said. “How about it, Ted?”
Lester watched Ted Fisher’s face warily. So far, the research director hadn’t raised any objections. Not that he could have stalled the project after the executive committee had given it a green light, but he could still throw sand in the gears if he wanted to throw his weight around.
The three of them were closeted in Marty’s office with the door closed and all calls on hold. Marty had sent out for lunch, and the wrappings were still strewn about. He had started the meeting by telling them, with a broad smile, that Harv had approved his budget.
Ted shuffled the sheaf of printouts he had brought with him. “We’ve just done the preliminaries, but as far as I can tell, Lester was right on target. Beethoven was offered three hundred guineas by the London Philharmonic Society for a ninth and tenth symphony, but he held out for four hundred. That didn’t go over too well, and negotiations stalled. In 1822, they settled on fifty pounds for an eighteen-month exclusive for one symphony. That, of course, was the one that turned out to be the ninth, and after Beethoven collected the advance, he turned around and dedicated it to King Freidrich Wilhelm of Prussia, for which he got a diamond ring that turned out to be fake. He also jumped the gun and premiered it May of 1824 in Vienna, before the Londoners even got the manuscript. But the box-office receipts in Vienna were disappointing, and despite further offers from the Philharmonic Society, he gave up on his plans for a tenth symphony and concentrated on string quartets.”
“The last quartets,” Marty said reverently.
Despite himself, Lester began to have qualms. “Beethoven died in 1827,” he said. “We’d be depriving the world of the last five quartets and the Grosse Fugue.”
“Not our world, kid,” Marty said. “Look at it this way. They get the tenth as a consolation prize. We’ve got the tenth and the quartets. Besides, who’s to say that he won’t knock off a quartet or two anyway, after he finishes the symphony?”
