The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Old Die Rich, by Horace Leonard Gold
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Title: The Old Die Rich
Author: Horace Leonard Gold
Illustrator: Camerage
William Ashman
Release Date: April 5, 2010 [EBook #31892]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD DIE RICH ***
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from the March 1953 issue of Galaxy. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed.
THE OLD DIE RICH
By H. L. GOLD
Illustrated by ASHMAN
_It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen times
a year, wonder about briefly, and then promptly forget--but
the real story is the one that the reporters are unable to
cover!_
* * * * *
"You again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily.
I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feeling
of hopeful eagerness. Maybe _this_ time, I thought, I'd get the
answer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places--the
quavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky
chair, tottering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the
flaking metal bed.
There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enough
to show the tight-drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that the
flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was going
over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a federal
grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape,
who had brought me here.
[Illustration]
"When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases,
Sergeant?" the M.E. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his
morbid curiosity!"
For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a
friend of mine--I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the
force--and he's a follower of Stanislavsky."
The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A
Red?"
* * * * *
I let Lou Pape explain what the Stanislavsky method of acting was,
while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky
was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was
that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed
so they could _be_ them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a
character right up to the point where a play starts--where he was
born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood,
adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money,
success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of
the life history created by the actor.
How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had
the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing old
men ever since. I had them down pretty well--it's not just a matter of
shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice,
which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like
inside--and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were
studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them
do what they did, _feel_ the compulsion that drove them to it.
The old woman on the bed, for instance, had $32,000 in five bank
accounts ... and she'd died of starvation.
You've come across such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year,
and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the
items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My
interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I
had to know as much about them as I could.
That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I
investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were
practically an obsession.
Look, they almost always have around $30,000 pinned to their
underwear, hidden in mattresses, or parked in the bank, yet they
starve themselves to death. If I could understand them, I could write
a play or have one written; I might really make a name for myself,
even get a Hollywood contract, maybe, if I could act them as they
should be acted.
So I sat there in the lone chair, trying to reconstruct the character
of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single cent of her
$32,000 for food.
* * * * *
"Malnutrition induced by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out
the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it,
Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging
into their savings."
I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to
decide that I ought to eat even if it cost me something. I came out of
it and said, "That's what you keep telling me."
"I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more.
What are the chances, Weldon?"
"Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not."
He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon
and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the
basket team. He could at least have said good-by. He never did,
though.
A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion.
Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should
have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary
desperation and needless death.
Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for
me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and
more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma
between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money
out of the bank.
I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you
acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up.
"The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right."
Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time
without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might
have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark."
"But he doesn't know old people."
"What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through
a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was--and still
would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of
acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a
psychotic than eating?"
"Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation,
no."
"Why not?"
"You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't. Not
when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a
nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid
of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly
nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent
instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I
can't see going without food altogether."
* * * * *
He took out a cigarette; he hadn't until then because he didn't want
to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out
after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables."
"It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now
really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die
of starvation?"
"That depends on age, health, amount of activity--"
"Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!"
"So it takes weeks. Where's the problem--if there is one?"
I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes--old men
seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be
different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see,
and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it
out.
"Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked.
"No. Did you?"
"In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last
couple of years--I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to
die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's
say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a way
of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room
and slowly starve to death."
He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flicked it away,
his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for
him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet.
"There's charity," I went on, "relief--except for those who have their
dough in banks, where it can be checked on--old age pension,
panhandling, cadging off neighbors."
He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact
with anybody."
"Even when they're starting to get real hungry?"
"You've got something, Mark, but that's the wrong tack," he said
thoughtfully. "The point is that _they_ don't have to make contact;
other people know them or about them. Somebody would check after a few
days or a week--the janitor, the landlord, someone in the house or the
neighborhood."
"So they'd be found before they died."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't
generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they
hardly know these old people and whether they're alive or not. Maybe
that's what threw us off. But you don't need friends and relatives to
start wondering, and investigate when you haven't shown up for a
while." He lifted his head and looked at me. "What does that prove,
Mark?"
"That there's something wrong with these cases. I want to find out
what."
* * * * *
I got Lou to take me down to Headquarters, where he let me see the
bankbooks the old woman had left.
"She took damned good care of them," I said. "They look almost new."
"Wouldn't you take damned good care of the most important thing in
the world to you?" he asked. "You've seen the hoards of money the
others leave. Same thing."
I peered closely at the earliest entry, April 23, 1907, $150. My eyes
aren't that bad; I was peering at the ink. It was dark, unfaded. I
pointed it out to Lou.
"From not being exposed to daylight much," he said. "They don't haul
out the bankbooks or money very often, I guess."
"And that adds up for you? I can see them being psychotics all their
lives ... but not _senile_ psychotics."
"They hoarded, Mark. That adds up for me."
"Funny," I said, watching him maneuver his cigarette as if he loved
the feel of it, drawing the smoke down and letting it out in plumes of
different shapes, from rings to slender streams. What a living he
could make doing cigarette commercials on TV! "I can see _you_ turn
into one of these cases, Lou."
He looked startled for a second, but then crushed out the butt
carefully so he could watch it instead of me. "Yeah? How so?"
"You've been too scared by poverty to take a chance. You know you
could do all right acting, but you don't dare giving up this crummy
job. Carry that far enough and you try to stop spending money, then
cut out eating, and finally wind up dead of starvation in a cheap
room."
"Me? I'd never get that scared of being broke!"
"At the age of 70 or 80?"
"Especially then! I'd probably tear loose for a while and then buy
into a home for the aged."
I wanted to grin, but I didn't. He'd proved my point. He'd also shown
that he was as bothered by these old people as I was.
"Tell me, Lou. If somebody kept you from dying, would you give him any
dough for it, even if you were a senile psychotic?"
I could see him using the Stanislavsky method to feel his way to the
answer. He shook his head. "Not while I was alive. Will it, maybe, not
give it."
"How would that be as a motive?"
* * * * *
He leaned against a metal filing cabinet. "No good, Mark. You know
what a hell of a time we have tracking down relatives to give the
money to, because these people don't leave wills. The few relatives we
find are always surprised when they get their inheritance--most of
them hardly remember dear old who-ever-it-was that died and left it to
them. All the other estates eventually go to the State treasury,
unclaimed."
"Well, it was an idea." I opened the oldest bankbook again. "Anybody
ever think of testing the ink, Lou?"
"What for? The banks' records always check. These aren't forgeries, if
that's what you're thinking."
"I don't know what I'm thinking," I admitted. "But I'd like to turn a
chemist loose on this for a little while."
"Look, Mark, there's a lot I'm willing to do for you, and I think I've
done plenty, but there's a limit--"
I let him explain why he couldn't let me borrow the book and then
waited while he figured out how it could be done and did it. He was
still grumbling when he helped me pick a chemist out of the telephone
directory and went along to the lab with me.
"But don't get any wrong notions," he said on the way. "I have to
protect State property, that's all, because I signed for it and I'm
responsible."
"Sure, sure," I agreed, to humor him. "If you're not curious, why not
just wait outside for me?"
He gave me one of those white-tooth grins that he had no right to
deprive women audiences of. "I could do that, but I'd rather see you
make a sap of yourself."
I turned the bankbook over to the chemist and we waited for the
report. When it came, it had to be translated.
* * * * *
The ink was typical of those used 50 years ago. Lou Pape gave me a jab
in the ribs at that. But then the chemist said that, according to the
amount of oxidation, it seemed fresh enough to be only a few months or
years old, and it was Lou's turn to get jabbed. Lou pushed him about
the aging, asking if it couldn't be the result of unusually good care.
The chemist couldn't say--that depended on the kind of care; an
airtight compartment, perhaps, filled with one of the inert gases, or
a vacuum. They hadn't been kept that way, of course, so Lou looked as
baffled as I felt.
He took the bankbook and we went out to the street.
"See what I mean?" I asked quietly, not wanting to rub it in.
"I see something, but I don't know what. Do you?"
"I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything
else about these cases."
"What do you do next?"
"Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only
a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before
they do."
"If they're loaded, they won't say so, Mark, and there's no way of
telling them from those who are down and out."
I rubbed my pipe disgruntledly against the side of my nose to oil it.
"Ain't this a beaut of a problem? I wish I liked problems. I hate
them."
Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do
except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to
Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming
myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather
die of starvation than spend a few cents for food.
I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating
starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late.
And the fresh ink, over half a century old....
* * * * *
I took to hanging around banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an
old bankbook that had fresh ink from 50 years before. Lou was some
help there--he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an
old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers
to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks.
I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage calls that
didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and
kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to
me; they'd have interrupted my outside work.
After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went
back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and
discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another
talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of
weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an
argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement--acting like a cop,
you know, instead of projecting his feelings--and he couldn't haul me
out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go.
"Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was
found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with
$17,000 in cash inside the lining of his jacket."
"_Alive?_" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again.
"Just barely. They're trying intravenous feeding to pull him through.
I don't think he'll make it."
"For God's sake, let's get there before he conks out!"
Lou raced me to the City Hospital and up to the ward. There was a
scrawny old man in a bed, nothing but a papery skin stretched thin
over a face like a skull and a body like a Halloween skeleton,
shivering as if he was cold. I knew it wasn't the cold. The medics
were injecting a heart stimulant into him and he was vibrating like a
rattletrap car racing over a gravel road.
"Who are you?" I practically yelled, grabbing his skinny arm. "What
happened to you?"
He went on shaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open.
"Ah, hell!" I said, disgusted. "He's in a coma."
"He might start talking," Lou told me. "I fixed it up so you can sit
here and listen in case he does."
"So I can listen to delirious ravings, you mean."
Lou got me a chair and put it next to the bed. "What are you kicking
about? This is the first live one you've seen, isn't it? That ought to
be good enough for you." He looked as annoyed as a director. "Besides,
you can get biographical data out of delirium that you'd never get if
he was conscious."
* * * * *
He was right, of course. Not only data, but attitudes, wishes,
resentments that would normally be repressed. I wasn't thinking of
acting at the moment, though. Here was somebody who could tell me
what I wanted to know ... only he couldn't talk.
Lou went to the door. "Good luck," he said, and went out.
I sat down and stared at the old man, _willing_ him to talk. I don't
have to ask if you've ever done that; everybody has. You keep thinking
over and over, getting more and more tense, "Talk, damn you, _talk_!"
until you find that every muscle in your body is a fist and your jaws
are aching because you've been clenching your teeth so hard. You might
just as well not bother, but once in a while a coincidence makes you
think you've done it. Like now.
The old man sort of came to. That is, he opened his eyes and looked
around without seeing anything, or it was so far away and long ago
that nobody else could see what he saw.
I hunched forward on the chair and willed harder than ever. Nothing
happened. He stared at the ceiling and through and beyond me. Then he
closed his eyes again and I slumped back, defeated and bitter--but
that was when he began talking.
There were a couple of women, though they might have been little girls
in his childhood, and he had his troubles with them. He was praying
for a toy train, a roadster, to pass his tests, to keep from being
fired, to be less lonely, and back to toys again. He hated his father,
and his mother was too busy with church bazaars and such to pay much
attention to him. There was a sister: she died when he was a kid. He
was glad she died, hoping maybe now his mother would notice him, but
he was also filled with guilt because he was glad. Then somebody, he
felt, was trying to shove him out of his job.
The intravenous feeding kept dripping into his vein and he went on
rambling. After ten or fifteen minutes of it, he fell asleep. I felt
so disappointed that I could have slapped him awake, only it wouldn't
have done any good. Smoking would have helped me relax, but it wasn't
allowed, and I didn't dare go outside for one, for fear he might
revive again and this time come up to the present.
* * * * *
"Broke!" he suddenly shrieked, trying to sit up.
I pushed him down gently, and he went on in frightful terror, "Old and
poor, nowhere to go, nobody wants me, can't make a living, read the
ads every day, no jobs for old men."
He blurted through weeks, months, years--I don't know--of fear and
despair. And finally he came to something that made his face glow like
a radium dial.
"An ad. No experience needed. Good salary." His face got dark and
awful. All he added was, "El Greco," or something that sounded like
it, and then he went into terminal breathing.
I rang for the nurse and she went for the doctor. I couldn't stand the
long moments when the old man's chest stopped moving, the abrupt
frantic gulps of air followed by no breath at all. I wanted to get
away from it, but I had to wait for whatever more he might say.
It didn't come. His eyes fogged and rolled up and he stopped taking
those spasmodic strangling breaths. The nurse came back with the
doctor, who felt his pulse and shook his head. She pulled the blanket
over the old man's face.
I left, feeling sick. I'd learned things I already knew about hate and
love and fear and hope and frustration. There was an ad in it
somewhere, but I had no way of telling if it had been years ago or
recently. And a name that sounded like "El Greco." That was a Spanish
painter of four-five hundred years ago. Had the old guy been
remembering a picture he'd seen?
No, he'd come up at least close to the present. The ad seemed to solve
his problem about being broke. But what about the $17,000 that had
been found in the lining of his jacket? He hadn't mentioned that. Of
course, being a senile psychotic, he could have considered himself
broke even with that amount of money. None coming in, you see.
That didn't add up, either. His was the terror of being old and
jobless. If he'd had money, he would have figured how to make it last,
and that would have come through in one way or another.
There was the ad, there was his hope, and there was this El Greco. A
Greek restaurant, maybe, where he might have been bumming his meals.
But where did the $17,000 fit in?
* * * * *
Lou Pape was too fed up with the whole thing to discuss it with me. He
just gave me the weary eye and said, "You're riding this too hard,
Mark. The guy was talking from fever. How do I know what figures and
what doesn't when I'm dealing with insanity or delirium?"
"But you admit there's plenty about these cases that doesn't figure?"
"Sure. Did you take a look at the condition the world is in lately?
Why should these old people be any exception?"
I couldn't blame him. He'd pulled me in on the cases with plenty of
trouble to himself, just to do me a favor. Now he was fed up. I guess
it wasn't even that--he thought I was ruining myself, at least
financially and maybe worse, by trying to run down the problem. He
said he'd be glad to see me any time and gas about anything or help me
with whatever might be bothering me, if he could, but not these cases
any more. He told me to lay off them, and then he left me on my own.
I don't know what he could have done, actually. I didn't need him to
go through the want ads with me, which I was doing every day, figuring
there might be something in the ravings about an ad. I spent more time
than I liked checking those slanted at old people, only to find they
were supposed to become messengers and such.
One brought me to an old brownstone five-story house in the East 80s.
I got on line with the rest of the applicants--there were men and
women, all decrepit, all looking badly in need of money--and waited my
turn. My face was lined with collodion wrinkles and I wore an antique
shiny suit and rundown shoes. I didn't look more prosperous or any
younger than they did.
I finally came up to the woman who was doing the interviewing. She sat
behind a plain office desk down in the main floor hall, with a pile
of application cards in front of her and a ballpoint pen in one
strong, slender hand. She had red hair with gold lights in it and eyes
so pale blue that they would have seemed the same color as the whites
if she'd been on the stage. Her face would have been beautiful except
for her rigid control of expression; she smiled abruptly, shut it off
just like that, looked me over with all the impersonality and
penetration of an X-ray from the soles to the bald head, exactly as
she'd done with the others. But that skin! If it was as perfect as
that all over her slim, stiffly erect, proudly shaped body, she had no
business off the stage!
"Name, address, previous occupation, social security number?" she
asked in a voice with good clarity, resonance and diction. She wrote
it all down while I gave the information to her. Then she asked me for
references, and I mentioned Sergeant Lou Pape. "Fine," she said.
"We'll get in touch with you if anything comes up. Don't call
us--we'll call you."
I hung around to see who'd be picked. There was only one, an old man,
two ahead of me in the line, who had no social security number, no
references, not even any relatives or friends she could have checked
up on him with.
Damn! _Of course_ that was what she wanted! Hadn't all the starvation
cases been people without social security, references, either no
friends and relatives or those they'd lost track of?
I'd pulled a blooper, but how was I to know until too late?
Well, there was a way of making it right.
* * * * *
When it was good and dark that evening, I stood on the corner and
watched the lights in the brownstone house. The ones on the first two
floors went out, leaving only those on the third and fourth. Closed
for the day ... or open for business?
I got into a building a few doors down by pushing a button and waiting
until the buzzer answered, then racing up to the roof while some man
yelled down the stairs to find out who was there. I crossed the tops
of the two houses between and went down the fire escape.
It wasn't easy, though not as tough as you might imagine. The fact is
that I'm a whole year younger than Lou Pape, even if I could play his
grandpa professionally. I still have muscles left and I used them to
get down the fire escape at the rear of the house.
The fourth floor room I looked into had some kind of wire mesh cage
and some hooded machinery. Nobody there.
The third floor room was the redhead's. She was coming out of the
bathroom with a terrycloth bathrobe and a towel turban on when I
looked in. She slid the robe off and began dusting herself with
powder. That skin _did_ cover her.
She turned and moved toward a vanity against the wall that I was on
the other side of. The next thing I knew, the window was flung up and
she had a gun on me.
"Come right in--Mr. Weldon, isn't it?" she said in that completely
controlled voice of hers. One day her control would crack, I thought
irrelevantly, and the pieces would be found from Dallas to North
Carolina. "I had an idea you seemed more curious than was justified by
a help-wanted ad."
"A man my age doesn't get to see many pretty girls," I told her,
making my own voice crack pathetically in a senile whinny.
She motioned me into the room. When I was inside, I saw a light over
the window blinking red. It stopped the moment I was in the room. A
silent burglar alarm.
She let her pale blue eyes wash insolently over me. "A man your age
can see all the pretty girls he wants to. You're not old."
[Illustration]
"And you use a rinse," I retorted.
She ignored it. "I specifically advertised for old people. Why did you
apply?"
It had happened so abruptly that I hadn't had a chance to use the
Stanislavsky method to _feel_ old in the presence of a beautiful nude
woman. I don't even know if it would have worked. Nothing's perfect.
"I needed a job awful bad," I answered sullenly, knowing it sounded
like an ad lib.
* * * * *
She smiled with more contempt than humor. "You had a job, Mr. Weldon.
You were very busy trying to find out why senile psychotics starve
themselves to death."
"How did you know that?" I asked, startled.
"A little investigation of my own. I also happen to know you didn't
tell your friend Sergeant Pape that you were going to be here
tonight."
That was a fact, too. I hadn't felt sure enough that I'd found the
answer to call him about it. Looking at the gun in her steady hand, I
was sorry I hadn't.
"But you did find out I own this building, that my name is May
Roberts, and that I'm the daughter of the late Dr. Anthony Roberts,
the physicist," she continued. "Is there anything else you want me to
tell you about yourself?"
"I know enough already. I'm more interested in you and the starvation
cases. If you weren't connected with them, you wouldn't have known I
was investigating them."
"That's obvious, isn't it?" She reached for a cigarette on the vanity
and used a lighter with her free hand. The big mirror gave me another
view of her lovely body, but that was beginning to interest me less
than the gun. I thought of making a grab for it. There was too much
distance between us, though, and she knew better than to take her eyes
off me while she was lighting up. "I'm not afraid of professional
detectives, Mr. Weldon. They deal only with facts and every one of
them will draw the same conclusions from a given set of circumstances.
I don't like amateurs. They guess too much. They don't stick to
reality. The result--" her pale eyes chilled and her shapely mouth
went hard--"is that they are likely to get too close to the truth."
I wanted a smoke myself, but I wasn't willing to make a move toward
the pipe in my jacket. "I may be close to the truth, Miss Roberts, but
I don't know what the devil it is. I still don't know how you're tied
in with the senile psychotics or why they starve with all that money.
You could let me go and I wouldn't have a thing on you."
She glanced down at herself and laughed for real for the first time.
"You wouldn't, would you? On the other hand, you know where I'm
working from and could nag Sergeant Pape into getting a search
warrant. It wouldn't incriminate me, but it would be inconvenient. I
don't care to be inconvenienced."
"Which means what?"
"You want to find out my connection with senile psychotics. I intend
to show you."
"How?"
She gestured dangerously with the gun. "Turn your face to the wall and
stay that way while I get dressed. Make one attempt to turn around
before I tell you to and I'll shoot you. You're guilty of
housebreaking, you know. It would be a little inconvenient for me to
have an investigation ... but not as inconvenient as for you."
* * * * *
I faced the wall, feeling my stomach braid itself into a tight,
painful knot of fear. Of what, I didn't know yet, only that old people
who had something to do with her died of starvation. I wasn't old, but
that didn't seem very comforting. She was the most frigid,
calculating, _deadly_ woman I'd ever met. That alone was enough to
scare hell out of me. And there was the problem of what she was
capable of.
Hearing the sounds of her dressing behind me, I wanted to lunge around
and rush her, taking a chance that she might be too busy pulling on a
girdle or reaching back to fasten a bra to have the gun in her hand.
It was a suicidal impulse and I gave it up instantly. Other women
might compulsively finish concealing themselves before snatching up
the gun. Not her.
"All right," she said at last.
I faced her. She was wearing coveralls that, if anything, emphasized
the curves of her figure. She had a sort of babushka that covered her
red hair and kept it in place--the kind of thing women workers used to
wear in factories during the war. She had looked lethal with nothing
on but a gun and a hard expression. She looked like a sentence of
execution now.
"Open that door, turn to the right and go upstairs," she told me,
indicating directions with the gun.
I went. It was the longest, most anxious short walk I've ever taken.
She ordered me to open a door on the fourth floor, and we were inside
the room I'd seen from the fire escape. The mesh cage seemed like a
torture chamber to me, the hooded motors designed to shoot an
agonizing current through my emaciating body.
"You're going to do to me what you did to the old man you hired
today?" I probed, hoping for an answer that would really answer.
She flipped on the switch that started the motors and there was a
shrill, menacing whine. The wire mesh of the cage began blurring
oddly, as if vibrating like the tines of a tuning fork.
"You've been an unexpected nuisance, Weldon," she said above the
motors. "I never thought you'd get this far. But as long as you have,
we might as well both benefit by it."
"Benefit?" I repeated. "_Both_ of us?"
She opened the drawer of a work table and pulled out a stack of
envelopes held with a rubber band. She put the stack at the other edge
of the table.
"Would you rather have all cash or bank accounts or both?"
My heart began to beat. _She was where the money came from!_
* * * * *
"You trying to tell me you're a philanthropist?" I demanded.
"Business is philanthropy, in a way," she answered calmly. "You need
money and I need your services. To that extent, we're doing each other
a favor. I think you'll find that the favor I'm going to do for you
is a pretty considerable one. Would you mind picking up the envelopes
on the table?"
I took the stack and stared at the top envelope. "May 15, 1931," I
read aloud, and looked suspiciously at her. "What's this for?"
"I don't think it's something that can be explained. At least it's
never been possible before and I doubt if it would be now. I'm
assuming you want both cash and bank accounts. Is that right?"
"Well, yes. Only--"
"We'll discuss it later." She looked along a row of shelves against
one wall, searching the labels on the stacks of bundles there. She
drew one out and pushed it toward me. "Please open that and put on the
things you'll find inside."
I tore open the bundle. It contained a very plain business suit, black
shoes, shirt, tie and a hat with a narrow brim.
"Are these supposed to be my burial clothes?"
"I asked you to put them on," she said. "If you want me to make that a
command, I'll do it."
I looked at the gun and I looked at the clothes and then for some
shelter I could change behind. There wasn't any.
She smiled. "You didn't seem concerned about my modesty. I don't see
why your own should bother you. Get dressed!"
I obeyed, my mind anxiously chasing one possibility after another, all
of them ending up with my death. I got into the other things and felt
even more uncomfortable. They were all only an approximate fit: the
shoes a little too tight and pointed, the collar of the shirt too
stiffly starched and too high under my chin, the gray suit too narrow
at the shoulders and the ankles. I wished I had a mirror to see myself
in. I felt like an ultra-conservative Wall Street broker and I was
sure I resembled one.
"All right," she said. "Put the envelopes in your inside pocket.
You'll find instructions on each. Follow them carefully."
"I don't get it!" I protested.
"You will. Now step into the mesh cage. Use the envelopes in the order
they're arranged in."
"But what's this all about?"
"I can tell you just one thing, Mr. Weldon--don't try to escape. It
can't be done. Your other questions will answer themselves if you
follow the instructions on the envelopes."
She had the gun in her hand. I went into the mesh cage, not knowing
what to expect and yet too afraid of her to refuse. I didn't want to
wind up dead of starvation, no matter how much money she might have
given me--but I didn't want to get shot, either.
She closed the mesh gate and pushed the switch as far as it would go.
The motors screamed as they picked up speed; the mesh cage vibrated
more swiftly; I could see her through it as if there were nothing
between us.
And then I couldn't see her at all.
I was outside a bank on a sunny day in spring.
* * * * *
My fear evaporated instantly--I'd escaped somehow!
But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was
day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her
brownstone house.
Even the season had changed!
Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters
in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats,
their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches
of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders,
plain black or brown shoes--the same kind of clothes I was wearing.
The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square
bodies, tubular radiators....
For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered the
mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me
electro-shock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or
taken me South and left me on a street in daylight.
But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the
buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily.
Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis?
That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me....
Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been
hypnotized.
Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my
pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was
outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed
the top envelope to the teller.
He hauled $150 out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy
and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He
took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar
and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd
been treated in years.
I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd
handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work
right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance.
The date he'd stamped was May 15, 1931.
* * * * *
I didn't know which I was more afraid of--being stranded, middle-aged,
in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that
brownstone house. I had only an instant to realize that I was a kid in
high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished
as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in
the city.
The date on the envelope was May 29th and it was still 1931. I made a
$75 deposit there, then $100 in another place a few days later, and so
forth, spending only a few minutes each time and going forward
anywhere from a couple of days to almost a month.
Every now and then, I had a stamped, addressed envelope to mail at a
corner box. They were addressed to different stock brokers and when I
got one open before mailing it and took a look inside, it turned out
to be an order to buy a few hundred shares of stock in a soft drink
company in the name of Dr. Anthony Roberts. I hadn't remembered the
price of the shares being that low. The last time I'd seen the
quotation, it was more than five times as much as it was then. I was
making dough myself, but I was doing even better for May Roberts.
A few times I had to stay around for an hour or so. There was the
night I found myself in a flashy speakeasy with two envelopes that I
was to bet the contents of, according to the instructions on the
outside. It was June 21, 1932, and I had to bet on Jack Sharkey to
take the heavyweight title away from Max Schmeling.
The place was serious and quiet--no more than three women, a couple of
bartenders, and the rest male customers, including two cops, huddling
up close to the radio. An affable character was taking bets. He gave
me a wise little smile when I put the money down on Sharkey.
"Well, it's a pleasure to do business with a man who wants an American
to win," he said, "and the hell with the smart dough, eh?"
"Yeah," I said, and tried to smile back, but so much of the smart
money was going on Schmeling that I wondered if May Roberts hadn't
made a mistake. I couldn't remember who had won. "You know what J. P.
Morgan said--don't sell America short."
"I'll take a buck for my share," said a sour guy who barely managed to
stand. "Lousy grass growing in the lousy streets, nobody working, no
future, nothing!"
"We'll come out of it okay," I told him confidently.
He snorted into his gin. "Not in our lifetime, Mac. It'd take a
miracle to put this country on its feet again. I don't believe in
miracles." He put his scowling face up close to mine and breathed
blearily and belligerently at me. "Do you?"
"Shut up, Gus," one of the bartenders said. "The fight's starting."
* * * * *
I had some tough moments and a lot of bad Scotch, listening. It went
the whole 15 rounds, Sharkey won, and I was in almost as bad shape as
Gus, who'd passed out halfway through the battle. All I can recall is
the affable character handing over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for
me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the
money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes,
while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was
outside a bank again.
I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I
hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit.
There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets
to put down on Singing Wood in 1933 at Belmont Park and Max Baer over
Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in 1934, and
James Braddock over Baer in 1935, and a big daily double payoff,
Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years
like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few
minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and
myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The
envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued
interest were something to watch grow.
The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of
1938--a total of maybe four or five hours subjectively--before I
realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact
that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though
the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My
father and mother, for instance, were still alive in 1938. If I could
break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through
time, I could go and see them.
The thought attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent,
yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again
and I didn't dare. I couldn't....
_Why_ couldn't I?
Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks,
speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area,
whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May
Roberts had lined up for me.
Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits
and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The
ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it _was_ fresh; it
wasn't given a chance to oxidize--at the rate I was going, I'd be back
to my own time in another few hours or so, with $15,000 or better in
deposits, compound interest and cash.
If I'd been around 70, you see, she could have sent me back to the
beginning of the century with the same amount of money, which would
have accumulated to something like $30,000.
Get it now?
I did.
And I felt sick and frightened.
The old people had died of starvation somehow with all that dough in
cash or banks. I didn't give a hang if the time travel was
responsible, or something else was. I wasn't going to be found dead in
my hotel and have Lou Pape curse my corpse because I'd been borrowing
from him when, since 1931, I'd had a little fortune put away. He'd
call me a premature senile psychotic and he'd be right, from his point
of view, not knowing the truth.
* * * * *
Rather than make the deposit in October, 1938, I grabbed a battered
old cab and told the driver to step on it. When I showed him the $10
bill that was in it for him, he squashed down the gas pedal. In 1938,
$10 was real money.
We got a mile away from the bank and the driver looked at me in the
rear-view mirror.
"How far you want to go, mister?"
My teeth were together so hard that I had to unclench them before I
could answer, "As far away as we can get."
"Cops after you?"
"No, but somebody is. Don't be surprised at anything that happens, no
matter what it is."
"You mean like getting shot at?" he asked worriedly, slowing down.
"You're not in any danger, friend. I am. Relax and step on it again."
I wondered if she could still reach me, this far from the bank, and
handed the guy the bill. No justice sticking him for the ride in case
she should. He pushed the pedal down even harder than he had been
doing before.
We must have been close to three miles away when I blinked and was
standing outside the first bank I'd seen in 1931.
I don't know what the cab driver thought when I vanished out of his
hack. He probably figured I'd opened the door and jumped while he
wasn't looking. Maybe he even went back and searched for a body
splashed all over the street.
Well, it would have been a hopeless hunt. I was a week ahead.
I gave up and drearily made my deposit. The one from early October
that I'd missed I put in with this one.
There was no way to escape the babe with the beautiful hard face,
gorgeous warm body and plans for me that all seemed to add up to
death. I didn't try any more. I went on making deposits, mailing
orders to her stock brokers, and putting down bets that couldn't miss
because they were all past history.
I don't even remember what the last one was, a fight or a race. I hung
around the bar that had long ago replaced the speakeasy, until the
inevitable payoff, got myself a hamburger and headed out the door. All
the envelopes I was supposed to use were gone and I felt shaky,
knowing that the next place I'd see was the room with the wire mesh
cage and the hooded motors.
It was.
* * * * *
She was on the other side of the cage, and I had five bankbooks and
envelopes filled with cash amounting to more than $15,000, but all I
could think of was that I was hungry and something had happened to the
hamburger while I was traveling through time. I must have fallen and
dropped it, because my hand was covered with dust or dirt. I brushed
it off and quickly felt my face and pulled up my sleeves to look at my
arms.
"Very smart," I said, "but I'm nowhere near emaciation."
"What made you think you would be?" she asked.
"Because the others always were."
She cut the motors to idling speed and the vibrating mesh slowed down.
I glared at her through it. God, she was lovely--as lovely as an ice
sculpture! The kind of face you'd love to kiss and slap, kiss and
slap....
"You came here with a preconceived notion, Mr. Weldon. I'm a
businesswoman, not a monster. I like to think there's even a good deal
of the altruist in me. I could hire only young people, but the old
ones have more trouble finding work. And you've seen for yourself how
I provide nest eggs for them they'd otherwise never have."
"And take care of yourself at the same time."
"That's the businesswoman in me. I need money to operate."
"So do the old people. Only they die and you don't."
She opened the gate and invited me out. "I make mistakes occasionally.
I sometimes pick men and women who prove to be too old to stand the
strain. I try not to let it happen, but they need money and work so
badly that they don't always tell the truth about their age and state
of health."
"You could take those who have social security cards and references."
"But those who don't have any are in worse need!" She paused. "You
probably think I want only the money you and they bring back, that
it's merely some sort of profit-making scheme. It isn't."
"You mean the idea is not just to build up a fortune for you with a
cut for whoever helps you do it?"
"I said I need money to operate, Mr. Weldon, and this method serves.
But there are other purposes, much more important. What you have gone
through is--basic training, you might say. You know now that it's
possible to travel through time, and what it's like. The initial
shock, in other words, is gone and you're better equipped to do
something for me in another era."
"Something else?" I stared at her puzzledly. "What else could you
want?"
"Let's have dinner first. You must be hungry."
* * * * *
I was, and that reminded me: "I bought a hamburger just before you
brought me back. I don't know what happened to it. My hand was dirty
and the hamburger was gone, as if I'd fallen somehow and dropped it
and got dirt on my hand."
She looked worriedly at the hand, probably afraid I'd cut it and
disqualified myself. I could understand that; you never know what kind
of diseases can be picked up in different times, because I remember
reading somewhere that germs keep changing according to conditions.
Right now, for instance, strains of bacteria are becoming resistant to
antibiotics. I knew her concern wasn't really for me, but it was
pleasant all the same.
"That could be the explanation, I suppose," she said. "The truth is
that I've never taken a time voyage--somebody has to operate the
controls in the present--so I can't say it's possible or impossible to
fall. It must be, since you did. Perhaps the wrench back from the
past was too violent and you slipped just before you returned."
She led me down to an ornate dining room, where the table had been set
for two. The food was waiting on the table, steaming and smelling
tasty. Nobody was around to serve us. She pointed out a chair to me
and we sat down and began eating. I was a little nervous at first,
afraid there might be something in the food, but it tasted fine and
nothing happened after I swallowed a little and waited for some
effect.
"You did try to escape the time tractor beam, didn't you, Mr. Weldon?"
she asked. I didn't have to answer; she knew. "That's a mistaken
notion of how it functions. The control beam doesn't cover _area_; it
covers _era_. You could have flown to any part of the world and the
beam would still have brought you back. Do I make myself clear?"
She did. Too bloody clear. I waited for the rest.
"I assume you've already formed an opinion of me," she went on. "A
rather unflattering one, I imagine."
"'Bitch' is the cleanest word I can find. But a clever one. Anybody
who can invent a time machine would have to be a genius."
"I didn't invent it. My father did--Dr. Anthony Roberts--using the
funds you and others helped me provide him with." Her face grew soft
and tender. "My father was a wonderful man, a great man, but he was
called a crackpot. He was kept from teaching or working anywhere. It
was just as well, I suppose, though he was too hurt to think so; he
had more leisure to develop the time machine. He could have used it to
extort repayment from mankind for his humiliation, but he didn't. He
used it to help mankind."
"Like how?" I goaded.
"It doesn't matter, Mr. Weldon. You're determined to hate me and
consider me a liar. Nothing I tell you can change that."
* * * * *
She was right about the first part--I hadn't dared let myself do
anything except hate and fear her--but she was wrong about the second.
I remembered thinking how Lou Pape would have felt if I had died of
starvation with over $15,000, after borrowing from him all the time
between jobs. Not knowing how I got it, he'd have been sore, thinking
I'd played him for a patsy. What I'm trying to say is that Lou
wouldn't have had enough information to judge me. I didn't have enough
information yet, either, to judge her.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked warily.
"Everybody but one person was sent into the past on specific
errands--to save art treasures and relics that would otherwise have
been lost to humanity."
"Not because the things might be worth a lot of dough?" I said
nastily.
"You've already seen that I can get all the money I want. There were
upheavals in the past--great fires, wars, revolutions, vandalism--and
I had my associates save things that would have been destroyed. Oh,
beautiful things, Mr. Weldon! The world would have been so much poorer
without them!"
"El Greco, for instance?" I asked, remembering the raving old man who
had been found wandering with $17,000 in his coat lining.
"El Greco, too. Several paintings that had been lost for centuries."
She became more brisk and efficient-seeming. "Except for the one man I
mentioned, I concentrated on the past--the future is too completely
unknown to us. And there's an additional reason why I tentatively
explored it only once. But the one person who went there discovered
something that would be of immense value to the world."
"What happened to _him_?"
She looked regretful. "He was too old. He survived just long enough to
tell me that the future has something we need. It's a metal box,
small enough to carry, that could supply this whole city with power to
run its industries and light its homes and streets!"
"Sounds good. Who'd you say benefits if I get it?"
"We share the profits equally, of course. But it must be understood
that we sell the power so cheaply that everybody can afford it."
"I'm not arguing. What's the other reason you didn't bother with the
future?"
"You can't bring anything from the future to the present that doesn't
exist right now. I won't go into the theory, but it should be obvious
that nothing can exist before it exists. You can't bring the box I
want, only the technical data to build one."
"Technical data? I'm an actor, not a scientist."
"You'll have pens and weatherproof notebooks to copy it down in."
* * * * *
I couldn't make up my mind about her. I've already said she was
beautiful, which always prejudices a man in a woman's favor, but I
couldn't forget the starvation cases. They hadn't shared anything but
malnutrition, useless money and death. Then again, maybe her
explanation was a good one, that she wanted to help those who needed
help most and some of them lied about their age and physical condition
because they wanted the jobs so badly. All I knew about were those who
had died. How did I know there weren't others--a lot more of them than
the fatal cases, perhaps--who came through all right and were able to
enjoy their little fortunes?
And there was her story about saving the treasures of the past and
wanting to provide power at really low cost. She was right about one
thing: she didn't need any of that to make money with; her method was
plenty good enough, using the actual records of the past to invest in
stocks, bet on sports--all sure gambles.
But those starvation cases....
"Do I get any guarantees?" I demanded.
She looked annoyed. "I'll need you for the data. You'll need me to
turn it into manufacture. Is that enough of a guarantee?"
"No. Do I come out of this alive?"
"Mr. Weldon, please use some logic. I'm the one who's taking the risk.
I've already given you more money than you've ever had at one time in
your life. Part of my motive was to pay for services about to be
rendered. Mostly, it was to give you experience in traveling through
time."
"And to prove to me that I can't run out," I added.
"That happens to be a necessary attribute of the machine. I couldn't
very well move you about through time unless it worked that way. If
you'd look at my point of view, you'd see that I lose my investment if
you don't bring back the data. I can't withdraw your money, you
realize."
"I don't know what to think," I said, dissatisfied with myself because
I couldn't find out what, if anything, was wrong with the deal. "I'll
get you the data for the power box if it's at all possible and then
we'll see what happens."
Finished eating, we went upstairs and I got into the cage.
She closed the circuit. The motors screamed. The mesh blurred.
And I was in a world I never knew.
* * * * *
You'd call it a city, I suppose; there were enough buildings to make
it one. But no city ever had so much greenery. It wasn't just
tree-lined streets, like Unter den Linden in Berlin, or islands
covered with shrubbery, like Park Avenue in New York. The grass and
trees and shrubs grew around every building, separating them from each
other by wide lawns. The buildings were more glass--or what looked
like glass--than anything else. A few of the windows were opaque
against the sun, but I couldn't see any shades or blinds. Some kind of
polarizing glass or plastic?
I felt uneasy being there, but it was a thrill just the same, to be
alive in the future when I and everybody who lived in my day was
supposed to be dead.
The air smelled like the country. There was no foul gas boiling from
the teardrop cars on the glass-level road. They were made of
transparent plastic clear around and from top to bottom, and they
moved along at a fair clip, but more smoothly than swiftly. If I
hadn't seen the airship overhead, I wouldn't have known it was there.
It flew silently, a graceful ball without wings, seeming to be borne
by the wind from one horizon to the other, except that no wind ever
moved that fast.
One car stopped nearby and someone shouted, "Here we are!" Several
people leaped out and headed for me.
I didn't think. I ran. I crossed the lawn and ducked into the nearest
building and dodged through long, smoothly walled, shadowlessly lit
corridors until I found a door that would open. I slammed it shut and
locked it. Then, panting, I fell into a soft chair that seemed to
form itself around my body, and felt like kicking myself for the
bloody idiot I was.
[Illustration]
What in hell had I run for? They couldn't have known who I was. If I'd
arrived in a time when people wore togas or bathing suits, there would
have been some reason for singling me out, but they had all had
clothes just like ours--suits and shirts and ties for the men, a dress
and high heels for the one woman with them. I felt somewhat
disappointed that clothes hadn't changed any, but it worked out to my
advantage; I wouldn't be so conspicuous.
Yet why should anyone have yelled "Here we are!" unless.... No, they
must have thought I was somebody else. It didn't figure any other way.
I had run because it was my first startled reaction and probably
because I knew I was there on what might be considered illegal
business; if I succeeded, some poor inventor would be done out of his
royalties.
I wished I hadn't run. Besides making me feel like a scared fool, I
was sweaty and out of breath. Playing old men doesn't make climbing
down fire escapes much tougher than it should be, but it doesn't
exactly make a sprinter out of you--not by several lungfuls.
* * * * *
I sat there, breathing hard and trying to guess what next. I had no
more idea of where to go for what I wanted than an ancient Egyptian
set down in the middle of Times Square with instructions to sneak a
mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. I didn't even have that much
information. I didn't know any part of the city, how it was laid out,
or where to get the data that May Roberts had sent me for.
I opened the door quietly and looked both ways before going out. After
losing myself in the cross-connecting corridors a few times, I finally
came to an outside door. I stopped, tense, trying to get my courage.
My inclination was to slip, sneak or dart out, but I made myself walk
away like a decent, innocent citizen. That was one disguise they'd
never be able to crack. All I had to do was act as if I belonged to
that time and place and who would know the difference?
There were other people walking as if they were in no hurry to get
anywhere. I slowed down to their speed, but I wished wistfully that
there was a crowd to dive into and get lost.
A man dropped into step and said politely, "I beg your pardon. Are you
a stranger in town?"
I almost halted in alarm, but that might have been a giveaway. "What
makes you think so?" I asked, forcing myself to keep at the same easy
pace.
"I--didn't recognize your face and I thought--"
"It's a big city," I said coldly. "You can't know everyone."
"If there's anything I can do to help--"
I told him there wasn't and left him standing there. It was plain
common sense, I had decided quickly while he was talking to me, not to
take any risks by admitting anything. I might have been dumped into a
police state or the country could have been at war without my knowing
it, or maybe they were suspicious of strangers. For one reason or
another, ranging from vagrancy to espionage, I could be pulled in,
tortured, executed, God knows what. The place looked peaceful enough,
but that didn't prove a thing.
I went on walking, looking for something I couldn't be sure existed,
in a city I was completely unfamiliar with, in a time when I had no
right to be alive. It wasn't just a matter of getting the information
she wanted. I'd have been satisfied to hang around until she pulled me
back without the data....
But then what would happen? Maybe the starvation cases were people who
had failed her! For that matter, she could shoot me and send the
remains anywhere in time to get rid of the evidence.
Damn it, I didn't know if she was better or worse than I'd supposed,
but I wasn't going to take any chances. I had to bring her what she
wanted.
* * * * *
There was a sign up ahead. It read: TO SHOPPING CENTER. The arrow
pointed along the road. When I came to a fork and wondered which way
to go, there was another sign, then another pointing to still more
farther on.
I followed them to the middle of the city, a big square with a park in
the center and shops of all kinds rimming it. The only shop I was
interested in said: ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES.
I went in.
A neat young salesman came up and politely asked me if he could do
anything for me. I sounded stupid even to myself, but I said, "No,
thanks, I'd just like to do a little browsing," and gave a silly
nervous laugh. Me, an actor, behaving like a frightened yokel! I felt
ashamed of myself.
He tried not to look surprised, but he didn't really succeed. Somebody
else came in, though, for which I was grateful, and he left me alone
to look around.
I don't know if I can get my feelings across to you. It's a situation
that nobody would ever expect to find himself in, so it isn't easy to
tell what it's like. But I've got to try.
Let's stick with the ancient Egyptian I mentioned a while back, the
one ordered to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe
that'll make it clearer.
The poor guy has no money he can use, naturally, and no idea of what
New York's transportation system is like, where the museum is, how to
get there, what visitors to a museum do and say, the regulations he
might unwittingly break, how much an ordinary citizen is supposed to
know about which customs and such. Now add the possible danger that he
might be slapped into jail or an insane asylum if he makes a mistake
and you've got a rough notion of the spot I felt I was in. Being able
to speak English doesn't make much difference; not knowing what's
regarded as right and wrong, and the unknown consequences, are enough
to panic anybody.
That doesn't make it clear enough.
Well, look, take the electrical appliances in that store; that might
give you an idea of the situation and the way it affected me.
The appliances must have been as familiar to the people of that time
as toasters and TV sets and lamps are to us. But the things didn't
make a bit of sense to me ... any more than our appliances would to
the ancient Egyptian. Can you imagine him trying to figure out what
those items are for and how they work?
* * * * *
Here are some gadgets you can puzzle over:
There was a light fixture that you put against any part of a wall--no
screws, no cement, no wires, even--and it held there and lit up, and
it stayed lit no matter where you moved it on the wall. Talk about
pin-up lamps ... this was really it!
Then I came across something that looked like an ashtray with a blue
electric shimmer obscuring the bottom of the bowl. I lit my
pipe--others I'd passed had been smoking, so I knew it was safe to do
the same--and flicked in the match. It disappeared. I don't mean it
was swirled into some hidden compartment. _It vanished._ I emptied the
pipe into the ashtray and that went, too. Looking around to make sure
nobody was watching, I dredged some coins out of my pocket and let
them drop into the tray. They were gone. Not a particle of them was
left. A disintegrator? I haven't got the slightest idea.
There were little mirror boxes with three tiny dials on the front of
each. I turned the dials on one--it was like using three dial
telephones at the same time--and a pretty girl's face popped onto the
mirror surface and looked expectantly at me.
"Yes?" she said, and waited for me to answer.
"I--uh--wrong number, I guess," I answered, putting the box down in a
hurry and going to the other side of the shop because I didn't have
even a dim notion how to turn it off.
The thing I was looking for was on a counter--a tinted metal box no
bigger than a suitcase, with a lipped hole on top and small
undisguised verniers in front. I didn't know I'd found it, actually,
until I twisted a vernier and every light in the store suddenly glared
and the salesman came rushing over and politely moved me aside to shut
it off.
"We don't want to burn out every appliance in the place, do we?" he
asked quietly.
"I just wanted to see if it worked all right," I said, still shaking
slightly. It could have blown up or electrocuted me, for all I knew.
"But they always work," he said.
"Ah--always?"
"Of course. The principle is simple and there are no parts to get worn
out, so they last indefinitely." He suddenly smiled as if he'd just
caught the gist. "Oh, you were joking! Naturally--everybody learns
about the Dynapack in primary education. You were interested in
acquiring one?"
"No, no. The--the old one is good enough. I was just--well, you know,
interested in knowing if the new models are much different or better
than the old ones."
"But there haven't been any new models since 2073," he said. "Can you
think of any reason why there should be?"
"I--guess not," I stammered. "But you never can tell."
"You can with Dynapacks," he said, and he would have gone on if I
hadn't lost my nerve and mumbled my way out of the store as fast as I
could.
* * * * *
You want to know why? He'd asked me if I wanted to "acquire" a
Dynapack, not _buy_ one. I didn't know what "acquire" meant in that
society. It could be anything from saving up coupons to winning
whatever you wanted at some kind of lottery, or maybe working up the
right number of labor units on the job--in which case he'd want to
know where I was employed and the equivalent of social security and
similar information, which I naturally didn't have--or it could just
be fancy sales talk for buying.
I couldn't guess, and I didn't care to expose myself any more than I
had already. And my blunder about the Dynapack working and the new
models was nothing to make me feel at all easier.
Lord, the uncertainties and hazards of being in a world you don't know
anything about! Daydreaming about visiting another age may be
pleasant, but the reality is something else again.
"Wait a minute, friend!" I heard the salesman call out behind me.
* * * * *
I looked back as casually, I hoped, as the pedestrians who heard him.
He was walking quickly toward me with a very worried expression on his
face. I stepped up my own pace as unobtrusively as possible, trying to
keep a lot of people between us, meanwhile praying that they'd think I
was just somebody who was late for an appointment. The salesman didn't
break into a run or yell for the cops, but I couldn't be sure he
wouldn't.
As soon as I came to a corner, I turned it and ran like hell. There
was a sort of alley down the block. I jumped into it, found a basement
door and stayed inside, pressed against the wall, quivering with
tension and sucking air like a swimmer who'd stayed underwater too
long.
Even after I got my wind back, I wasn't anxious to go out. The place
could have been cordoned off, with the police, the army and the navy
all cooperating to nab me.
What made me think so? Not a thing except remembering how puzzled our
ancient Egyptian would have been if he got arrested in the subway for
something everybody did casually and without punishment in his own
time--spitting! I could have done something just as innocent, as far
as you and I are concerned, that this era would consider a misdemeanor
or a major crime. And in what age was ignorance of the law ever an
excuse?
Instead of going back out, I prowled carefully into the building. It
was strangely silent and deserted. I couldn't understand why until I
came to a lavatory. There were little commodes and wash basins that
came up to barely above my knees. The place was a school. Naturally it
was deserted--the kids were through for the day.
I could feel the tension dissolve in me like a ramrod of ice melting,
no longer keeping my back and neck stiff and taut. There probably
wasn't a better place in the city for me to hide.
_A primary school!_
The salesman had said to me, "Everybody learns about the Dynapack in
primary education."
* * * * *
Going through the school was eerie, like visiting a familiar childhood
scene that had been distorted by time into something almost totally
unrecognizable.
There were no blackboards, teacher's big desk, children's little
desks, inkwells, pointers, globes or books. Yet it was a school. The
small fixtures in the lavatory downstairs had told me that, and so did
the miniature chairs drawn neatly under the low, vividly painted
tables in the various schoolrooms. A large comfortable chair was
evidently where the teacher sat when not wandering around among the
pupils.
In front of each chair, firmly attached to the table, was a box with a
screen, and both sides of the box held spools of wire on blunt little
spindles. The spools had large, clear numbers on them. Near the
teacher's chair was a compact case with more spools on spindles, and
there was a large screen on the inside wall, opposite the enormous
windows.
I went into one of the rooms and sat down in the teacher's chair,
wondering how I was going to find out about the Dynapack. I felt like
an archaeologist guessing at the functions of strange relics he'd
found in a dead city.
Sitting in the chair was like sitting on a column of air that let me
sit upright or slump as I chose. One of the arms had a row of buttons.
I pressed one and waited nervously to find out if I'd done something
that would get me into trouble.
Concealed lights in the ceiling and walls began glowing, getting
brighter, while the room gradually turned dark. I glanced around
bewilderedly to see why, because it was still daylight.
The windows seemed to be sliding slightly, very slowly, and as they
slid, the sunlight was damped out. I grinned, thinking of what my
ancient Egyptian would make of that. I knew there were two sheets of
polarizing glass, probably with a vacuum between to keep out the cold
and the heat, and the lights in the room were beautifully synchronized
with the polarized sliding glass.
I wasn't doing so badly. The rest of the objects might not be too hard
to figure out.
The spools in the case alongside the teacher's chair could be wire
recordings. I looked for something to play them with, but there was no
sign of a playback machine. I tried to lift a spool off a spindle. It
wouldn't come off.
Hah! The wire led down the spindle to the base of the box, holding the
spool in place. That meant the spools could be played right in that
position. But what started them playing?
* * * * *
I hunted over the box minutely. Every part of it was featureless--no
dials, switches or any unfamiliar counterparts. I even tried moving my
hands over it, figuring it might be like a theramin, and spoke to it
in different shades of command, because it could have been built to
respond to vocal orders. Nothing happened.
Remember the Poe story that shows the best place to hide something is
right out in the open, which is the last place anyone would look?
Well, these things weren't manufactured to baffle people, any more
than our devices generally are. But it's only by trying everything
that somebody who didn't know what a switch is would start up a vacuum
cleaner, say, or light a big chandelier from a wall clear across the
room.
I'd pressed every inch of the box, hoping some part of it might act as
a switch, and I finally touched one of the spindles. The spool
immediately began spinning at a very low speed and the screen on the
wall opposite the window glowed into life.
"The history of the exploration of the Solar System," said an
announcer's deep voice, "is one of the most adventuresome in
mankind's long list of achievements. Beginning with the crude rockets
developed during World War II...."
There were newsreel shots of V-1 and V-2 being blasted from their
takeoff ramps and a montage of later experimental models. I wished I
could see how it all turned out, but I was afraid to waste the time
watching. At any moment, I might hear the footsteps of a guard or
janitor or whoever tended buildings then.
I pushed the spindle again. It checked the spool, which rewound
swiftly and silently, and stopped itself when the rewinding was
finished. I tried another. A nightmare underwater scene appeared.
"With the aid of energy screens," said another voice, "the oceans of
the world were completely charted by the year 2027...."
I turned it off, then another on developments in medicine, one on
architecture, one on history, the geography of such places as the
interior of South America and Africa that were--or are--unknown today,
and I was getting frantic, starting the wonderful wire films that held
full-frequency sound and pictures in absolutely faithful color, and
shutting them off hastily when I discovered they didn't have what I
was looking for.
[Illustration]
They were courses for children, but they all contained information
that our scientists are still groping for ... and I couldn't chance
watching one all the way through!
I was frustratedly switching off a film on psychology when a female
voice said from the door, "May I help you?"
* * * * *
I snapped around to face her in sudden fright. She was young and slim
and slight, but she could scream loud enough to get help. Judging by
the way she was looking at me, outwardly polite and yet visibly
nervous, that scream would be coming at any second.
"I must have wandered in here by mistake," I said, and pushed past her
to the corridor, where I began running back the way I had come.
"But you don't understand!" she cried after me. "I really want to
help--"
Yeah, help, I thought, pounding toward the street door. A gag right
out of that psychology film, probably--get the patient to hold still,
humor him, until you can get somebody to put him where he belongs.
That's what one of our teachers would do, provided she wasn't too
scared to think straight, if she found an old-looking guy thumbing
frenziedly through the textbooks in a grammar school classroom.
When I came to the outside door, I stopped. I had no way of knowing
whether she'd given out an alarm, or how she might have done it, but
the obvious place to find me would be out on the street, dodging for
cover somewhere.
I pushed the door open and let it slam shut, hoping she'd hear it
upstairs. Then I found a door, sneaked it open and went silently down
the steps.
In the basement, I looked for a furnace or a coal bin or a fuel tank
to hide behind, but there weren't any. I don't know how they got their
heat in the winter or cooled the building in the summer. Probably some
central atomic plant that took care of the whole city, piping in the
heat or coolant in underground conduits that were led up through the
walls, because there weren't even any pipes visible.
I hunched into the darkest corner I could find and hoped they wouldn't
look for me there.
* * * * *
By the time night came, hunger drove me out of the school, but I did
it warily, making sure nobody was in sight.
The streets of the shopping center were more or less deserted. There
was no sign of a restaurant. I was so empty that I felt dizzy as I
hunted for one. But then a shocking realization made me halt on the
sidewalk and sweat with horror.
Even if there had been a restaurant, what would I have used for money?
Now I got the whole foul picture. She had sent old people back through
time on errands like mine ... and they'd starved to death because they
couldn't buy food!
No, that wasn't right. I remembered what I had told Lou Pape: anybody
who gets hungry enough can always find a truck garden or a food store
to rob.
Only ... I hadn't seen a truck garden or food store anywhere in this
city.
And ... I thought about people in the past having their hands cut off
for stealing a loaf of bread.
This civilization didn't look as if it went in for such drastic
punishments, assuming I could find a loaf of bread to steal. But
neither did most of the civilizations that practiced those barbarisms.
I was more tired, hungry and scared than I'd ever believed a human
being could get. Lost, completely lost in a totally alien world, but
one in which I could still be killed or starve to death ... and God
knew what was waiting for me in my own time in case I came back
without the information she wanted.
Or maybe even if I came back with it!
That suspicion made up my mind for me. Whatever happened to me now
couldn't be worse than what she might do. At least I didn't have to
starve.
I stopped a man in the street. I let several others go by before
picking him deliberately because he was middle-aged, had a kindly
face, and was smaller than me, so I could slug him and run if he
raised a row.
"Look, friend," I told him, "I'm just passing through town--"
"Ah?" he said pleasantly.
"--And I seem to have mislaid--" No, that was dangerous. I'd been
about to say I'd mislaid my wallet, but I still didn't know whether
they used money in this era. He waited with a patient, friendly smile
while I decided just how to put it. "The fact is that I haven't eaten
all day and I wonder if you could help me get a meal."
He said in the most neighborly voice imaginable, "I'll be glad to do
anything I can, Mr. Weldon."
* * * * *
My entire face seemed to drop open. "You--you called me--"
"Mr. Weldon," he repeated, still looking up at me with that neighborly
smile. "Mark Weldon, isn't it? From the 20th Century?"
I tried to answer, but my throat had tightened up worse than on any
opening night I'd ever had to live through. I nodded, wondering
terrifiedly what was going on.
"Please relax," he said persuasively. "You're not in any danger
whatever. We offer you our utmost hospitality. Our time, you might
say, is your time."
"You know who I am," I managed to get out through my constricted
glottis. "I've been doing all this running and ducking and hiding for
nothing."
He shrugged sympathetically. "Everyone in the city was instructed to
help you, but you were so nervous that we were afraid to alarm you
with a direct approach. Every time we tried to, as a matter of fact,
you vanished into one place or another. We didn't follow for fear of
the effect on you. We had to wait until you came voluntarily to us."
My brain was racing again and getting nowhere. Part of it was
dizziness from hunger, but only part. The rest was plain frightened
confusion.
They knew who I was. They'd been expecting me. They probably even knew
what I was after.
And they wanted to help!
"Let's not go into explanations now," he said, "although I'd like to
smooth away the bewilderment and fear on your face. But you need to be
fed first. Then we'll call in the others and--"
I pulled back. "What others? How do I know you're not setting up
something for me that I'll wish I hadn't gotten into?"
"Before you approached me, Mr. Weldon, you first had to decide that we
represented no greater menace than May Roberts. Please believe me, we
don't."
So he knew about that, too!
"All right, I'll take my chances," I gave in resignedly. "Where does a
guy find a place to eat in this city?"
* * * * *
It was a handsome restaurant with soft light coming from
three-dimensional, full-color nature murals that I might mistakenly
have walked into if I'd been alone, they looked so much like gardens
and forests and plains. It was no wonder I couldn't find a restaurant
or food store or truck garden anywhere--food came up through pneumatic
chutes in each building, I'd been told on the way over, grown in
hydroponic tanks in cities that specialized in agriculture, and those
who wanted to eat "out" could drop into the restaurant each building
had. Every city had its own function. This one was for people in the
arts. I liked that.
There was a glowing menu on the table with buttons alongside the
various selections. I looked starvingly at the items, trying to decide
which I wanted most. I picked oysters, onion soup, breast of guinea
hen under Plexiglas and was hunting for the tastiest and most
recognizable dessert when the pleasant little guy shook his head
regretfully and emphatically.
"I'm afraid you can't eat any of those foods, Mr. Weldon," he said in
a sad voice. "We'll explain why in a moment."
A waiter and the manager came over. They obviously didn't want to
stare at me, but they couldn't help it. I couldn't blame them, I'd
have stared at somebody from George Washington's time, which is about
what I must have represented to them.
"Will you please arrange to have the special food for Mr. Weldon
delivered here immediately?" the little guy asked.
"Every restaurant has been standing by for this, Mr. Carr," said the
manager. "It's on its way. Prepared, of course--it's been ready since
he first arrived."
"Fine," said the little guy, Carr. "It can't be too soon. He's very
hungry."
I glanced around and noticed for the first time that there was nobody
else in the restaurant. It was past the dinner hour, but, even so,
there are always late diners. We had the place all to ourselves and it
bothered me. They could have ganged up on me....
But they didn't. A light gong sounded, and the waiter and manager
hurried over to a slot of a door and brought out a couple of trays
loaded with covered dishes.
"Your dinner, Mr. Weldon," the manager said, putting the plates in
front of me and removing the lids.
I stared down at the food.
"This," I told them angrily, "is a hell of a trick to play on a
starving man!"
* * * * *
They all looked unhappy.
"Mashed dehydrated potatoes, canned meat and canned vegetables," Carr
replied. "Not very appetizing. I know, but I'm afraid it's all we can
allow you to eat."
I took the cover off the dessert dish.
"Dried fruits!" I said in disgust.
"Rather excessively dried, I'm sorry to say," the manager agreed
mournfully.
I sipped the blue stuff in a glass and almost spat it out. "Powdered
milk! Are these things what you people have to live on?"
"No, our diet is quite varied," Carr said in embarrassment. "But we
unfortunately can't give you any of the foods we normally eat
ourselves."
"And why in blazes not?"
"Please eat, Mr. Weldon," Carr begged with frantic earnestness.
"There's so much to explain--this is part of it, of course--and it
would be best if you heard it on a full stomach."
I was famished enough to get the stuff down, which wasn't easy;
uninviting as it looked, it tasted still worse.
When I was through, Carr pushed several buttons on the glowing menu.
Dishes came up from an opening in the center of the table and he
showed me the luscious foods they contained.
"Given your choice," he said, "you'd have preferred them to what you
have eaten. Isn't that so, Mr. Weldon?"
"You bet I would!" I answered, sore because I hadn't been given that
choice.
"And you would have died like the pathetic old people you were
investigating," said a voice behind me.
I turned around, startled. Several men and women had come in while I'd
been eating, their footsteps as silent as cats on a rug. I looked
blankly from them to Carr and back again.
"These are the clothes we ordinarily wear," Carr said. "An 18th
Century motif, as you can see--updated knee breeches and shirt
waists, a modified stock for the men, the daring low bodices of that
era, the full skirts treated in a modern way by using sheer materials
for the women, bright colors and sheens, buckled shoes of spun
synthetics. Very gay, very ornamental, very comfortable, and
thoroughly suitable to our time."
"But everybody I saw was dressed like me!" I protested.
"Only to keep you from feeling more conspicuous and anxious than you
already were. It was quite a project, I can tell you--your styles
varied so greatly from decade to decade, especially those for
women--and the materials were a genuine problem; they'd gone out of
existence long ago. We had the textile and tailoring cities working a
full six months to clothe the inhabitants of this city, including, of
course, the children. Everybody had to be clad as your contemporaries
were, because we knew only that you would arrive in this vicinity, not
where you might wander through the city."
"There was one small difference you didn't notice," added a handsome
mature woman. "You were the only man in a gray suit. We had a full
description of what you were wearing, you see, and we made sure nobody
else was dressed that way. Naturally, everyone knew who you were,
and so we were kept informed of your movements."
[Illustration]
"What for?" I demanded in alarm. "What's this all about?"
* * * * *
Pulling up chairs, they sat down, looking to me like a witchcraft jury
from some old painting.
"I'm Leo Blundell," said a tall man in plum-and-gold clothes. "As
chairman of--of the Mark Weldon Committee, it's my responsibility to
handle this project correctly."
"Project?"
"To make certain that history is fulfilled, I have to tell you as much
as you must know."
"I wish _somebody_ would!"
"Very well, let me begin by telling you much of what you undoubtedly know
already. In a sense, you are more a victim of Dr. Anthony Roberts than his
daughter. Roberts was a brilliant physicist, but because of his eccentric
behavior, he was ridiculed for his theories and hated for his arrogance.
He was an almost perfect example of self-defeat, the way in which a man
will hamper his career and wreck his happiness, and then blame the world
for his failure and misery. To get back to his connection with you,
however, he invented a time machine--unfortunately, its secret has since
been lost and never re-discovered--and used it for anti-social purposes.
When he died, his daughter May carried on his work. It was she who sent
you to this time to learn the principle by which the Dynapack operates.
She was a thoroughly ruthless woman."
"Are you sure?" I asked uneasily.
"Quite sure."
"I know a number of old people died after she sent them on errands
through time, but she said they'd lied about their age and health."
"One would expect her to say that," a woman put in cuttingly.
Blundell turned to her and shook his head. "Let Mr. Weldon clarify his
feelings about her, Rhoda. They are obviously very mixed."
"They are," I admitted. "She seemed hard, the first time I saw her,
when I answered her ad, but she could have been just acting
businesslike. I mean she had a lot of people to pick from and she had
to be impersonal and make certain she had the right one. The next
time--I hope you don't know about that--it was really my fault for
breaking into her room. I really had a lot of admiration for the way
she handled the situation."
"Go on," Carr encouraged me.
"And I can't complain about the deal she gave me. Sure, she came out
ahead on the money I bet and invested for her. But I did all right
myself--I was richer than I'd ever been in my life--and she gave that
money to me before I even did anything to earn it!"
"Besides which," somebody else said, "she offered you half of the
profits on the Dynapack."
* * * * *
I looked around at the faces for signs of hostility. I saw none. That
was surprising. I'd come from the past to steal something from them
and they weren't at all angry. Well, no, it wasn't really stealing. I
wouldn't be depriving them of the Dynapack. It just would have been
invented before it was supposed to be.
"She did," I said. "Though I wouldn't call that part of it
philanthropy. She needed me for the data and I needed her to
manufacture the things."
"And she was a very beautiful woman," Blundell added.
I squirmed a bit. "Yes."
"Mr. Weldon, we know a good deal about her from notes that have come
down to us among her private papers. She had a safety deposit box
under a false name. I won't tell you the name; it was not discovered
until many years later, and we will not voluntarily meddle with the
past."
I sat up and listened sharply. "So that's how you knew who I was and
what I'd be wearing and what I came for! You even knew when and where
I'd arrive!"
"Correct," Blundell said.
"What else do you know?"
"That you suspected her of being responsible for the deaths of many
old people by starvation. Your suspicion was justified, except that
her father had caused all those that occurred before 1947, when she
took over after his own death. All but two people were sent into the
past. Roberts was curious about the future, of course, but he did not
want to waste a victim on a trip that would probably be fruitless. In
the past, you understand, he knew precisely what he was after. The
future was completely unknown territory."
"But she took the chance," I said.
"If you can call deliberate murder taking a chance, yes. One man
arrived in 2094, over fifty years ago. The other was yourself. The
first one, as you know, died of malnutrition when he was brought back
to your era."
"And what happened to me?" I asked, jittering.
"You will not die. We intend to make sure of that. All the other
victims--I presume you're interested in their errands?"
"I think I know, but I'd like to find out just the same."
"They were sent to the past to buy or steal treasures of various
sorts--art, sculpture, jewelry, fabulously valuable manuscripts and
books, anything that had great scarcity value."
"That's not possible," I objected. "She had all the money she wanted.
Any time she needed more, all she had to do was send somebody back to
put down bets and buy stocks that she knew were winners. She had the
records, didn't she? There was no way she or her father could lose!"
* * * * *
He moved his shoulders in a plum-and-gold shrug. "Most of the
treasures they accumulated were for acquisition's sake--and for the
sake of vengeance for the way they believed Dr. Roberts had been
treated. When there were unusual expenses, such as replacing the very
costly parts of the time machine, that required more than they could
produce in ready cash, both Roberts and his daughter 'discovered'
these treasures."
He waited while I digested the miserable meal and the disturbing
information he had given me. I thought I'd found a loophole in his
explanation: "You said people were sent back to the past to _buy_
treasures, besides stealing them."
"I did," he agreed. "They were provided with currency of whatever era
they were to visit."
I felt my forehead wrinkle up as my theory fell apart. "Then they
could buy food. Why should they have died of malnutrition?"
"Because, as May Roberts herself told you, nothing can exist before it
exists. Neither can anything exist after it is out of existence. If
you returned with a Dynapack, for example, it would revert to a lump
of various metals, because that was what it was in your period. But
let me give you a more personal instance. Do you remember coming back
from your first trip with dust on your hand?"
"Yes. I must have fallen."
"On one hand? No, Mr. Weldon. May Roberts was greatly upset by the
incident; she was afraid you would realize why the hamburger had
turned to dust--and why the old people died of starvation. _All_ of
them, not just a few."
He paused, giving me a chance to understand what he had just said. I
did, with a sick shock.
"If I ate your food," I said shakily, "I'd feel satisfied until I was
returned to my own time. _But the food wouldn't go along with me!_"
* * * * *
Blundell nodded gravely. "And so you, too, would die of malnutrition.
The foods we have given you existed in your era. We were very careful
of that, so careful that many of them probably were stored years
before you left your time. We regret that they are not very palatable,
but at least we are positive they will go back with you. You will be
as healthy when you arrive in the past as when you left.
"Incidentally, she made you change your clothes for the same
reason--they had been made in 1930. She had clothing from every era
she wanted visited and chose old people who would fit them best.
Otherwise, you see, they'd have arrived naked."
I began to shake as if I were as old as I'd pretended to be on the
stage. "She's going to pull me back! If I don't bring her the
information about the Dynapack, she'll shoot me!"
"That, Mr. Weldon, is our problem," Blundell said, putting his hand
comfortingly on my arm to calm me.
"Your problem? I'm the one who'll get shot, not you!"
"But we know in complete detail what will happen when you are returned
to the 20th Century."
I pulled my arm away and grabbed his. "You know that? Tell me!"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Weldon. If we tell you what you did, you might think
of some alternate action, and there is no knowing what the result
would be."
"But I didn't get shot or die of malnutrition?"
"That much we can tell you. Neither."
They all stood up, so bright and attractive in their colorful clothes
that I felt like a shirt-sleeved stage hand who'd wandered in on a
costume play.
"You will be returned in a month, according to the notes May Roberts
left. She gave you plenty of time to get the data, you see. We propose
to make that month an enjoyable one for you. The resources of our
city--and any others you care to visit--are at your disposal. We wish
you to take full advantage of them."
"And the Dynapack?"
"Let us worry about that. We want you to have a good time while you
are our guest."
I did.
It was the most wonderful month of my life.
* * * * *
The mesh cage blurred around me. I could see May Roberts through it,
her hand just leaving the switch. She was as beautiful as ever, but I
saw beneath her beauty the vengeful, vicious creature her father's
bitterness had turned her into; Blundell and Carr had let me read some
of her notes, and I knew. I wished I could have spent the rest of my
years in the future, instead of having to come back to this.
She came over and opened the gate, smiling like an angel welcoming a
bright new soul. Then her eyes traveled startledly over me and her
smile almost dropped off. But she held it firmly in place.
She had to, while she asked, "Do you have the notes I sent you for?"
"Right here," I said.
I reached into my breast pocket and brought out a stubby automatic and
shot her through the right arm. Her closed hand opened and a little
derringer clanked on the floor. She gaped at me with an expression of
horrified surprise that should have been recorded permanently; it
would have served as a model for generations of actors and actresses.
"You--brought back a weapon!" she gasped. "You shot me!" She stared
vacantly at her bleeding arm and then at my automatic. "But you
can't--bring anything back from the future. And you aren't--dying of
malnutrition."
She said it all in a voice shocked into toneless wonder.
"The food I ate and this gun are from the present," I said. "The
people of the future knew I was coming. They gave me food that
wouldn't vanish from my cells when I returned. They also gave me
the gun instead of the plans for the Dynapack."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
"And you took it?" she screamed at me. "You idiot! I'd have shared the
profits honestly with you. You'd have been worth millions!"
"With acute malnutrition," I amended. "I like it better this way,
thanks--poor, but alive. Or relatively poor, I should say, because
you've been very generous and I appreciate it."
"By shooting me!"
"I hated to puncture that lovely arm, but it wasn't as painful as
starving or getting shot myself. Now if you don't mind--or even if you
do--it's your turn to get into the cage, Miss Roberts."
She tried to grab for the derringer on the floor with her left hand.
"Don't bother," I said quietly. "You can't reach it before a bullet
reaches you."
* * * * *
She straightened up, staring at me for the first time with terror in
her eyes.
"What are you going to do to me?" she whispered.
"I could kill you as easily as you could have killed me. Kill you and
send your body into some other era. How many dozens of deaths were you
responsible for? The law couldn't convict you of them, but I can. And
I couldn't be convicted, either."
She put her hand on the wound. Blood seeped through her fingers as she
lifted her chin at me.
"I won't beg for my life, Weldon, if that's what you want. I could
offer you a partnership, but I'm not really in a position to offer it,
am I?"
She was magnificent, terrifyingly intelligent, brave clear through ...
and deadlier than a plague. I had to remember that.
"Into the cage," I said. "I have some friends in the future who have
plans for you. I won't tell you what they are, of course; you didn't
tell me what I'd go through, did you? Give my friends my fondest
regards. If I can manage it, I'll visit them--and you."
She backed warily into the cage. It would have been pleasant to kiss
those wonderful lips good-by. I'd thought about them for a whole
month, wanting them and loathing them at the same time.
It would have been like kissing a coral snake. I knew it and I
concentrated on shutting the gate on her.
"You'd like to be rich, wouldn't you, Weldon?" she asked through the
mesh.
"I can be," I said. "I have the machine. I can send people into the
past or future and make myself a pile of dough. Only I'd give them
food to take along. I wouldn't kill them off to keep the secret to
myself. Anything else on your mind?"
"You want me," she stated.
I didn't argue.
"You could have me."
"Just long enough to get my throat slit or brains blown out. I don't
want anything that much."
I rammed the switch closed.
The mesh cage blurred and she was gone. Her blood was on the floor,
but she was gone into the future I had just come from.
That was when the reaction hit me. I'd escaped starvation and her gun,
but I wasn't a hero and the release of tension flipped my stomach over
and unhinged my knees.
Shaking badly, I stumbled through the big, empty house until I found a
phone.
* * * * *
Lou Pape got there so quickly that I still hadn't gotten over the
tremors, in spite of a bottle of brandy I dug out of a credenza, maybe
because the date on the label, 1763, gave me a new case of the
shivers.
I could see the worry on Lou's face vanish when he assured himself
that I was all right. It came back again, though, when I told him what
had happened. He didn't believe any of it, naturally. I guess I
hadn't really expected him to.
"If I didn't know you, Mark," he said, shaking his big, dark head
unhappily, "I'd send you over to Bellevue for observation. Even
knowing you, maybe that's what I ought to do."
"All right, let's see if there's any proof," I suggested tiredly.
"From what I was told, there ought to be plenty."
We searched the house clear down to the basement, where he stood with
his face slack.
"Christ!" he breathed. "The annex to the Metropolitan Museum!"
The basement ran the length and breadth of the house and was twice as
high as an average room, and the whole glittering place was crammed
with paintings in rich, heavy frames, statuettes, books, manuscripts,
goblets and ewers and jewelry made of gold and huge gems, and
tapestries in brilliant color ... and everything was as bright and
sparkling and new as the day it was made, which was almost true of a
lot of it.
"The dame was loaded and she was an art collector, that's all," Lou
said. "You can't sell me that screwy story of yours. She was a
collector and she knew where to find things."
"She certainly did," I agreed.
"What did you do with her?"
"I told you. I shot her through the arm before she could shoot me and
I sent her into the future."
He took me by the front of the jacket. "You killed her, Mark. You
wanted all this stuff for yourself, so you knocked her off and got rid
of her body somehow."
"Why don't you go back to acting, where you belong, Lou, and leave
sleuthing to people who know how?" I asked, too worn to pull his hands
loose. "Would I kill her and call you up to get right over here?
Wouldn't I have sneaked these things out first? Or more likely I'd
have sneaked them out, hidden them and nobody--including you--would
know I'd ever been here. Come on, use your head."
"That's easy. You lost your nerve."
"I'm not even losing my patience."
* * * * *
He pushed me away savagely. "If you killed her for this stuff or
because of that crazy yarn you gave me, I'm a cop and you're no
friend. You're just a plain killer I happened to have known once, and
I'll make sure you fry."
"You always did have a taste for that kind of dialogue. Go ahead and
wrap me up in an airtight case, have them throw the book at me, send
me up the river, put me in the hot squat. But you'll have to do the
proving, not me."
He headed for the stairs. "I will. And don't try to make a break or
I'll plug you as if I never saw you before."
He put in a call at the phone upstairs. I didn't give a particular
damn who it was he'd called. I was too relieved that I hadn't killed
May Roberts; destroying anything that beautiful, however evil, would
have stayed with me the rest of my life. There was another reason for
my relief--if I'd killed her and left the evidence for Lou to find,
he'd never help me. No, that's not quite so; he'd probably have tried
to get me to plead insanity on the basis of my unbelievable
explanation.
But most of all, I couldn't get rid of the look on her face when I'd
shot her through the arm, the arm that was so wonderful to look at and
that had held a murderous little gun to greet me with.
She was in the future now. She wouldn't be executed by them; they
regarded crime as an illness, and they'd treat her with their
marvelously advanced therapy and she'd become a useful, contented
citizen, living out her existence in an era that had given me more
happiness than I'd ever had.
I sat and tried to stupefy myself with brandy that should long ago
have dried to brick-hardness, while Lou Pape stood at the door with
his hand near his holster and glared at me. He didn't take his eyes
off me until somebody named Prof. Jeremiah Aaronson came in and was
introduced briefly and flatly to me. Then Lou took him upstairs.
It was minutes before I realized what they were going to do. I ran up
after them.
I was just in time to see Aaronson carefully take the housing off the
hooded motors, and leap back suddenly from the fury of lightning
sparks.
* * * * *
The whole machine fused while we watched helplessly--motors, switches,
panel and mesh cage. They flashed blindingly and blew apart and melted
together in a charred and molten pile.
"Rigged," Aaronson said in the tone of a bitter curse. "Set to short
if it was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were
incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a
mess like this."
He finally glanced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed
with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to
cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching
all the way around the rear for it with his left hand.
Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any
sense of it, Prof?" he asked.
"Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other
piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify
it when it looks like this."
He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief.
Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top
physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine
to--ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now
we'll have to dig through the house to find her body."
"You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered
miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is
how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see
them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate
and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because
the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of me."
He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for her
body, Mark?"
"Tear the place apart if you want."
"We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide."
"Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like."
"You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through."
I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your
digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of
murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in
the future could take on the job--they could do it faster and better
than I can--but some nice, peaceful quiet would help."
* * * * *
He didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to
arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men
with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest.
She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no
more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep.
But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the
oldsters who'd died of starvation with the riches she'd given them
still untouched, on deposit in the banks or stuffed into hiding places
or pinned to their shabby clothes. She needed treatment for the
illness her father had inflicted on her. But even he, they'd said, had
been suffering from a severe emotional disturbance and proper care
could have made a great and honored scientist out of him.
They'd told me the truth and made me hate her, and they'd told me
their viewpoint and made that hatred impossible.
I was here, in the present, without her. The machine was gone.
Yearning over something I couldn't change would destroy me. I had no
right to destroy myself. Nobody did, they'd told me, and nobody who
reconciles himself to the fact that some situations just are
impossible to work out ever could.
I'd realized that when the squad packed up and left and Lou Pape came
over to where I was sitting.
"You knew we wouldn't find her," he said.
"That's what I kept telling you."
"Where is she?"
"In Port Said, exotic hellhole of the world, where she's dancing in
veils for the depraved--"
"Cut out the kidding! Where is she?"
"What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?"
"That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead."
"She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else,
just that."
He hauled me out of the chair and stared hard at my face. "You aren't
lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not."
"All right, then."
"But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any
part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but
she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and
better-looking than her, for one thing--"
"Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man
when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my
naked scalp. "With a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens
to be a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me--they
checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The
only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head,
which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten
together like gin and tonic."
* * * * *
Lou arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on
you?"
"Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glanced out the
window at the smoky city. "That's why. They couldn't tell me if I'd
ever get back to the future. I wasn't taking any chances. As long as
there was a possibility that I'd be stranded in my own time, I wasn't
going to lose my livelihood. Which reminds me, you have anything else
to do here?"
"There'll be a guard stationed around the house and all her holdings
and art will be taken over until she comes back--"
"She won't."
"--or is declared legally dead."
"And me?" I broke in.
"We can't hold you without proof of murder."
"Good enough. Then let's get out of here."
"I have to go back on duty," he objected.
"Not any more. I've got over $15,000 in cash and deposits--enough to
finance you and me."
"Enough to kill her for."
"Enough to finance you and me," I repeated doggedly. "I told you I had
the money before she sent me into the future--"
"All right, all right," he interrupted. "Let's not go into that again.
We couldn't find a body, so you're free. Now what's this about
financing the two of us?"
I put my fingers around his arm and steered him out to the street.
"This city has never had a worse cop than you," I said. "Why? Because
you're an actor, not a cop. You're going back to acting, Lou. This
money will keep us both going until we get a break."
He gave me the slit-eyed look he'd picked up in line of duty. "That
wouldn't be a bribe, would it?"
"Call it a kind of memorial to a lot of poor, innocent old people and
a sick, tormented woman."
We walked along in silence out in the clean sunshine. It was our
silence; the sleek cars and burly trucks made their noise and the
pedestrians added their gabble, but a good Stanislavsky actor like Lou
wouldn't notice that. Neither would I, ordinarily, but I was giving
him a chance to work his way through this situation.
"I won't hand you a lie, Mark," he said finally. "I never stopped
wanting to act. I'll take your deal on two considerations."
"All right, what are they?"
"That whatever I take off you is strictly a loan."
"No argument. What's the other?"
He had an unlit cigarette almost to his lips. He held it there while
he said: "That any time you come across a case of an old person who
died of starvation with $30,000 stashed away somewhere, you turn fast
to the theatrical page and not tell me or even think about it."
"I don't have to agree to that."
* * * * *
He lowered the cigarette, stopped and turned to me. "You mean it's no
deal?"
"Not that," I said. "I mean there won't be any more of those cases.
Between knowing that and both of us back acting again, I'm satisfied.
You don't have to believe me. Nobody does."
He lit up and blew out a pretty plume, fine and slow and straight,
which would have televised like a million in the bank. Then he
grinned. "You wouldn't want to bet on that, would you?"
"Not with a friend. I do all my sure-thing betting with bookies."
"Then make it a token bet," he said. "One buck that somebody dies of
starvation with a big poke within a year."
I took the bet.
I took the dollar a year later.
--H. L. GOLD
* * * * *
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