Crosstime Traffic, page 1
Crosstime
Traffic
Crosstime Traffic
Twenty stories of fantasy & science fiction
by
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Misenchanted Press
Bainbridge Island
These stories are works of fiction. None of the characters and events portrayed herein are intended to represent actual person living or dead.
Crosstime Traffic
Copyright ©1992, 2000, 2013, 2023 by Lawrence Watt Evans
All rights reserved
“Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” “Real Time,” “Windwagon Smith and the Martians,” “One-Shot,” “A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates,” “Storm Trooper,” and “New Worlds” originally appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, copyright by Davis Publications, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991.
“An Infinity of Karen” and “The Drifter” originally appeared in Amazing Stories, copyright by TSR Inc., 1988, 1991.
“The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan” and “After the Dragon is Dead” originally appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, copyright by Marion Zimmer Bradley Ltd. 1989, 1990.
“The Rune and the Dragon” originally appeared in Dragon Magazine, copyright by TSR Inc. 1984.
“Paranoid Fantasy #1” originally appeared in American Atheist in slightly different form. Copyright 1975 by The American Atheist. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“One Night At A local Bar” originally appeared under the title “Minus Two Reaction,” in The Space Gamer, copyright 1980.
“Science Fiction” originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, copyright by Davis Publications 1991.
“Monster Kidnaps Girl At Mad Scientist’s Command” originally appeared in Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine. Copyright 1992 by Lawrence Watt Evans.
“Truth, Justice, and the American Way” originally appeared in Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick. Copyright 1992 by Lawrence Watt Evans.
“Watching New York Melt” originally appeared in Newer York, edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Copyright 1990 by Lawrence Watt Evans.
“The Final Folly of Captain Dancy” originally appeared in The Rebirth of Wonder, by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Copyright 1992 by Lawrence Watt Evans.
Cover art by Luca Oleastri – www.rotwangstudio.com
Cover design by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Published by Misenchanted Press
www.misenchantedpress.com
Dedicated to
Barbara Conroy,
as explained elsewhere.
Contents
Foreword (2023)
Introduction (1992)
Paranoid Fantasy #1
Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers
A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates
An Infinity of Karen
The Drifter
Storm Trooper
One-Shot
Truth, Justice, and the American Way
Real Time
New Worlds
One Night At A Local Bar
Science Fiction
Watching New York Melt
Monster Kidnaps Girl At Mad Scientist’s Command!
Windwagon Smith and the Martians
The Rune and the Dragon
The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan
The Final Folly of Captain Dancy
The Man Who Loved Dragons
After the Dragon is Dead
Afterword: Ten (or Twenty, or Thirty) Years Later
About the Author
Foreword
(2023)
Starting on the next page you’ll find a long, self-indulgent autobiographical introduction explaining how I became a writer and where the nineteen stories in the original 1992 edition of this book came from.
I definitely wouldn’t include all that stuff if I was assembling this as a new book, and certainly I wouldn’t put it at the front. I’m mildly surprised Del Rey let me do it in the original.
Feel free to skip it.
Introduction
(1992)
Welcome to my book!
Maybe you’re here because you’ve enjoyed my novels, or because you’ve seen some of these stories in magazines or anthologies and liked them. Or maybe the title piqued your interest, or the cover caught your eye. Whatever the reason, I hope you’ll be pleased by the stories; I think there are some good ones.
I always wanted to see my name on a collection of short stories; I’ve always wanted to be a writer, always loved short stories. My novels have been appearing for over a decade, and much of the thrill has worn off, but short stories are still special for me, and a single-author collection like this—well, it’s been something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember, and I’ve finally made it.
It’s taken a long time for it to happen, and I want to use this introduction to tell you how it came about. Let me start off with an explanation of how I wound up as a writer of fantasy and science fiction. After that I’ll explain where the stories in this collection came from. It’s going to be largely a shameless display of egotism, so nobody will be offended if you get bored and skip ahead to the stories.
Here’s the beginning: I started reading science fiction when I was five. Honest. And I decided to write it when I was seven.
Both my parents read science fiction, you see. That meant my three older siblings read it, as well. I don’t remember ever not knowing what science fiction was; the concept had percolated into my consciousness by the time I was four, definitely.
It was about that age that I noticed my sibs reading comic books, and I saw the nifty pictures of dinosaurs and spaceships and stuff and I wanted to read comic books, too.
And when I was five, I learned the letters of the alphabet in kindergarten, and the sounds each one made. I still remember the flash of insight when the teacher wrote a song called “K-K-Katy” on the blackboard and taught us to sing it, and the connection between those three Ks and the sound at the beginning of the song clicked into place somewhere in my head, and I began sounding out words.
I didn’t know I was actually reading; I assumed that there was some trick to it I hadn’t learned yet, but what I was doing seemed to work, so I tried it out.
I tried it not on Dr. Seuss or any of the kid stuff I was supposed to read, but on a coverless comic book, identified twenty years later as Adventures into the Unknown #105, that my sister Marian had picked up somewhere and left lying around the house. The lead story, “Last of the Tree People,” involved a botanist who goes to the Moon and finds intelligent trees and carnivorous dinosaurs. Another story was called “The Martian Mirage,” and had this nifty domed city that appeared and disappeared. A third was “Born to Be A Grocer,” about these weird disembodied intelligences that live among us—and who are about to take over the world.
I was hooked.
Not on science fiction, per se—on comic books.
Tarzan, Turok, Superboy, all of those. It was 1959. I’d missed the Golden Age of Comics; the gruesome horror and crime of the early 1950s had been stamped out; the great superhero revival hadn’t really started yet. All the same, there were plenty of exciting comic books out there to read, and I loved them all. I had no money, but I had two older sisters who bought them, and that was just as good.
I had an older brother, too, but I don’t remember him ever having any money or buying any comic books. Fortunately, Marian and Jody weren’t the stereotypical 1950s sissy-type girls—they didn’t bring home romance comics, they brought home westerns and science fiction and superhero stuff. Also Little Lulu and Donald Duck, but those were great, too.
And there was a whole big box that had accumulated before I’d learned to read.
So I went on to first grade and discovered that I was reading the right way after all, and then I went on to second grade, where several very important events in my life happened.
First, I ran out of comic books. I’d worked my way through the box, and I was reading them faster than my sisters bought them, and my weekly allowance was only a dime, and even at the used book store in those pre-inflation days that only bought two second-hand comics—or four, if I got coverless ones.
I could go through four in an afternoon; what about the other six days each week?
My parents had been complaining all along that I should read something better than comic books, so, in desperation, I took them up on it. I’d had my fill of Dick and Jane and their kin in school—books, I am convinced, that were designed to teach kids that reading is excruciatingly dull. I wanted something good.
Well, my parents read books for fun, so I swiped two of those, and snuck ’em up to my room, and even into school. The idea of reading an entire grown-up novel was too daunting to contemplate, so I picked two that were collections of short stories.
The first one was The Green Hills of Earth, by Robert A. Heinlein. The second one was The October Country, by Ray Bradbury.
That got me hooked on science fiction. And fantasy. And horror. I was thoroughly caught, even though I couldn’t follow a lot of what the heck was going on in those stories—when I was seven, most of “Delilah and the Space Rigger” or “The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse” went right over my head.
The next important event was my first in-class writing assignment. The teacher, Miss Conroy, gave us a title, and told us to write something to go with it—a story, an essay, anything. The title was “Little Bird.”
Most of the kids did stuff like, “See the bird. It is a little bird. See the bird fly away. Fly, bird, fly.” Dick and Jane strike again. Bleah.
A few got some rudimentary plot in there; I remember there were about three that I thought were okay.
Mine was a love story about two chickadees—it just about covered both sides of the sheet of paper we were given. When the teacher read it it sounded pretty dumb—but not as bad as the other kids, and Miss Conroy praised it and said something about maybe someday I’d be a writer.
I liked that idea. Writing it had been fun. Not much of what I did in school was fun, at that point. So I went home and showed my paper with the gold star on it to my mother and said, “I want to be a writer when I grow up.”
Seven is an age when the subject of what you’ll be when you grow up is a popular one. I’d previously talked about being in real estate (“a house seller”) or urban planning (“a city builder”) or the sciences (“an atom bomb builder”), and my parents had always encouraged me.
But when I said I wanted to be a writer, my mother said, “Are you sure? That’s a very hard way to make a living; you might not be able to do it.”
I was astonished and baffled. I could be a rocket scientist, or a nuclear physicist, but not a writer?
So I tried it out on my father, and got about the same reaction.
I’m still not quite sure why, even after thirty years. It wasn’t just a bad day, or anything; from then on, right up until I sold my first novel, my parents encouraged me to write, if I wanted to, but as a hobby—making a career of it they seemed to consider impractical or downright impossible.
I took it as a challenge, though.
I read my third grown-up book not long after that—an anthology called Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, edited by Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin. The stories in there were a lot of fun, but not so spectacularly well-written as Heinlein and Bradbury, and they were short, too. I could imagine writing as long and as well as some of these other guys—I did imagine writing as long and as well as some of these other guys.
So when I was eight I wrote my first science fiction story, and hid it from my parents. I still have it. It’s terrible, of course, but not bad for a third grader. It’s in first person, told by a mutant lab mouse—I stole the idea of a super-intelligent rodent from “Barney,” by Will Stanton, but making him the narrator was original with me.
From then on, I wrote stories off and on, and unless they were for school assignments, I never showed them to anybody. They weren’t all science fiction, by any means; for one thing, in high school I discovered the distinction between science fiction and fantasy, and encountered the fantasy subgenre known as sword-and-sorcery, which I fell in love with for a time.
In 1972 I burned most of those old stories. Also in 1972 I first submitted one, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
It got rejected, of course. But it was a form rejection—there wasn’t any letter telling me that if I ever again polluted their slushpile they’d track me down and smash my typewriter.
I found this moderately encouraging.
Also in 1972 I sold a few feature articles to a local weekly paper—a very bad local weekly, but they paid me actual money. This was encouraging, too. And I published a sort of satirical underground newspaper called Entropy, using borrowed equipment, and sold it in my high school for a dime a copy and actually turned a profit. I wrote about half of each issue myself, including parodies of Conan the Barbarian and the like.
And it was fun. I’d never enjoyed making money before, when I’d shoveled snow or sold greeting cards or bagged groceries at the local supermarket, but I was getting paid for writing, which was what I did for fun anyway!
And people liked it!
I came to the conclusion that writing for money had to be about the best racket there ever was, and I was determined to get into it, sooner or later, somehow. My parents notwithstanding, I was convinced I could do it.
Not convinced enough to start immediately, though. Instead I went off to college on schedule, majoring in architecture.
I had a good time in college. Too good a time. Early in 1974 I got kicked out (“asked to withdraw”) for what I think was officially termed “flagrant neglect of studies.” Which means I was partying instead of going to class for much of my final semester.
Now, having been kicked out, I was faced with the problem of what to do next.
One thing I did not want to do was go home and face my parents— especially my father, who had graduated summa cum laude from the same university that I’d just flunked out of, and had been the class salutatorian, as well. His father had taken his degree there cum laude. That was a lot of family history I preferred to avoid.
So I went to Pittsburgh and rented a furnished room, using borrowed money. (Why Pittsburgh? Because my girlfriend was there—the one I’m married to now.)
Another thing I did not want to do was to get a real job. I’ve always hated the very concept of holding down a real job, and I haven’t been impressed with the reality, either, on those occasions when I’ve tried it. And I rather resented having been kicked out. It was my own damn fault, but I still didn’t like it. I wanted back in.
Fortunately, the university had (and has, I believe) a fairly generous readmission policy. The theory seems to be that if you got in in the first place you can do the work; if you got kicked out, the problem was motivation, not ability, and that’s something that can easily change. So you can be re-admitted up to three times.
You have to apply for it, though, and prove you’ve been doing something with yourself other than sitting in a basement somewhere listening to Led Zeppelin over headphones for sixteen hours a day. And you are supposedly required to be gone for more than a year, though I knew people who had managed to get around that part.
That meant that I could apply for readmission in the spring of 1975, and theoretically, if I impressed the relevant bureaucrats, I could return to campus in September of ’75 to take another shot at the semester I’d blown off.
I wanted something I could put in my readmission application that would make it look like I was doing something interesting with myself, something conducive to personal growth and self-discovery and all that sort of thing. I also wanted something to do with my time that I could use as an excuse for not going full-time flipping burgers somewhere. I had a year and a few months.
And I’d recently heard a story—I still don’t know if it’s true—about Larry Niven that I took as an inspiration.
According to the story, when Niven decided to be a writer he gave himself a year. He holed up somewhere and wrote, and did nothing much except write, for a year. He collected lots of rejection slips, and then, toward the end of the year, started selling short stories.
Sounded good to me. If I wrote for a year, I would collect lots of rejection slips that I could then enclose with my application for readmission. That should look sufficiently interesting to the people considering my case. It would be an excuse not to get a real job. And what the heck, the stuff might start selling.
So I started writing.
I didn’t just write, in the event; I did a stint as a cook at Arby’s, among other things. Mostly, though, I pounded away at the typewriter. I turned out reams of stuff, including fragments that are still in my “to be finished someday“ pile; I actually finished about two dozen short stories and a couple of novelets, and submitted them to every market I could think of. Most of them were fantasy, some were science fiction, a few were mysteries, humor, or unclassifiable.
And in the spring of 1975, just a few days apart, two important pieces of mail arrived.
I’d been readmitted.
And I’d sold my first story.
The sale was for all of ten dollars, to a market I’d found in Writer’s Market and submitted to almost as a joke; I went back to college.
