After a week they did have Clurg over for dinner. It started badly. Once more he managed to sit down in empty air and crash to the floor. While they were brushing him off he said fretfully: “I can’t get used to not—” and then said no more.
He was a picky eater. Betty had done one of her mother’s specialties, veal cutlet with tomato sauce, topped by a poached egg. He ate the egg and sauce, made a clumsy attempt to cut up the meat, and abandoned it. She served a plate of cheese, half a dozen Kinds, for dessert, and Clurg tasted them uncertainly, breaking off a crumb from each, while Betty wondered where that constituted good manners. His face lit up when he tried a ripe cheddar. He popped the whole wedge into his mouth and said to Betty: “I will have that, please.”
“Seconds?” asked Walter. “Sure. Don’t bother, Betty. IT1 get it.” He brought back a quarter-pound wedge of the cheddar.
Walter and Betty watched silently as Clurg calmly ate every crumb of it He sighed. “Very good. Quite like—” The word, Walter and Betty later agreed, was see-mon-joe. They were able to agree quite early in the evening, because Clurg got up after eating the cheese, said warmly, Thank you so much!” and walked out of the house.
Betty said, “What—on—Earth!”
Walter said uneasily, “I’m sorry, doll. I didn’t think he’d be quite that peculiar—”
“—But after all!”
“—Of course he’s a foreigner. What was that word?”
He jotted it down.
While they were doing the dishes Betty said, “I think he was drunk. Falling-down drunk.”
“No,” Walter said. “It’s exactly the same thing he did in my office. As though he expected a chair to come to him instead of him going to a chair.” He laughed and said uncertainly, “Or maybe he’s royalty. I read once about Queen Victoria never looking around before she sat down, she was so sure there’d be a chair there.”
“Well, there isn’t any more royalty, not to speak of,” she said angrily, hanging up the dish towel. “What’s on TV tonight?”
“Uncle Miltie. But . . . uh . . . I think I’ll read. Uh . . . where do you keep those magazines of yours, doll? Believe I’ll give them a try.”
She gave him a look that he wouldn’t meet, and she went to get him some of her magazines. She also got a slim green book which she hadn’t looked at for years. While Walter flipped uneasily through the magazines she studied the book. After about ten minutes she said: “Walter. Seemonjoe. I think I know what language it is.”
He was instantly alert. “Yeah? What?”
“It should be spelled c-i-m-a-n-g-o, with little jiggers over the C and G. It means ‘Universal food’ in Esperanto.”
“Where’s Esperanto?” he demanded.
“Esperanto isn’t anywhere. It’s an artificial language. I played around with it a little once. It was supposed to end war and all sorts of things. Some people called it the language of the future’.” Her voice was tremulous.
Walter said, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
He saw Clurg go into the neighborhood movie for the matinee. That gave him about three hours.
Walter hurried to the Curran bungalow, remembered to slow down and tried hard to look casual as he unlocked the door and went in. There wouldn’t be any trouble—he was a good citizen, known and respected—he could let himself into a tenant’s house and wait for him to talk about business if he wanted to.
He tried not to think of what people would think if he should be caught rifling Clurg’s luggage, as he intended to do. He had brought along an assortment of luggage keys. Surprised by his own ingenuity, he had got them at a locksmith’s by saying his own key was lost and he didn’t want to haul a heavy packed bag downtown.
But he didn’t need the keys. In the bedroom closet the two suitcases stood, unlocked.
There was nothing in the first except uniformly new clothes, bought locally at good shops. The second was full of the same. Going through a rather extreme sports jacket, Walter found a wad of paper in the breast pocket. It was a newspaper page. A number had been penciled on a margin; apparently the sheet had been torn out and stuck into the pocket and forgotten. The dateline on the paper was July 18th, 2403.
Walter had some trouble reading the stories at first, but found it was easy enough if he read them aloud and listened to his voice.
One said:
TAIM KOP NABD: PROSKYOOTR ASKS DETH
Patrolm’n Oskr Garth V thi Taim Polis w’z arest’d toodei at biz horn, 4365 9863th Suit, and bookd at 9768th Prisint on tchardg’z Polis-Ekspozh’r. Thi aledjd Ekspozh’r okurM hwafle Garth w’z on dooti in thi Twenti-Furst Sentch’ri. It konsist’d “v hiz admish’n too a sit’zen ‘v thi Twenti-Furst Sentch’ri that thi Taim Polis ekzisted and woz op’rated fr’m thi Twenti-Fifth Sentch’ri. Thi Proskypot’rz Ofis sed thi deth pen’lti wil be askt ifl vyoo ‘v thi heinus neitch’r ‘v thi ofens, hwitch thret’nz thi hwol fabrik ’v Twenti-Fifth-Sentch’ri eksiz-tens.
There was an advertisement on the other side:
BOIZ’ND YUNG MEN!
SERV EUR SENTCH’RI!
ENLIST IN THI TAIM POLIS RKURV NOW!
RIMEMB’R—
V THI AJEZ! ONLY IN THI TAIM POLIS KAN EU PROTEKT EUR SIVILIZASH’N FR’M VARFNS! THEIR IZ NO HAIER SERVIS TOO AR KULTCH’R! THEIR IZ NO K’REER SO FAS’NATING AZ A K’REER IN THI TAIM POLIS!
Underneath it another ad asked:
HWAI BI ASHEEMPD “V EUR TCHAIRZ? GET ROLFASTS!
No uth’r tcheir haz thi immidjit respons ’v a Rolfast Sit enihweir—eor Rolfast iz their!
Eur Rolfast mefl partz ar solid gold to avoid tairsum polishing. Eur Rolfast beirings are thi fain’st six-intch dupliks di’mondz for long wair.
Walter’s heart pounded. Gold—to avoid tiresome polishing! Six-inch diamonds—for long wear!
And Clurg must be a time policeman. “Only in the time police can you see the pageant of the ages!” What did a time policeman do? He wasn’t quite clear about that. But what they didn’t do was let anybody else—anybody earlier—know that the Time Police existed. He, Walter Lachlan of the Twentieth Century, held in the palm of his hand Time Policeman Clurg of the Twenty-Fifth Century—the Twenty-Fifth Century where gold and diamonds were common as steel and glass in this!
He was there when Clurg came back from the matinee. Mutely, Walter extended the page of newsprint Clurg snatched it incredulously, stared at it and crumpled it in his fist. He collapsed on the floor with a groan. “I’m done for!” Walter heard him say.
“Listen, Clurg,” Walter said. “Nobody ever needs to know about this—nobody.”
Clurg looked up with sudden hope in his eyes. “You will keep silent?” he asked wildly. “It is my life!”
“What’s it worth to you?” Walter demanded with brutal directness. “I can use some of those diamonds and some of that gold. Can you get it into this century?”
“It would be missed. It would be over my mass-balance,” Qurg said. “But I have a Duplix. I can copy diamonds and gold for you; that was how I made my feoff money.”
He snatched an instrument from his pocket—a fountain pen, Walter thought “It is low in charge. It would Duplix about five kilograms in one operation—”
“You mean,” Walter demanded, “that if I brought you five kilograms of diamonds and gold you could duplicate it? And the originals wouldn’t be harmed? Let me see that thing. Can I work it?”
Clurg passed over the “fountain pen”. Walter saw that within the case was a tangle of wires, tiny tubes, lenses—he passed it back hastily. Clurg said, “That is correct. You could buy or borrow jewelry and I could duplix it. Then you could return the originals and retain the copies. You swear by your contemporary God that you would say nothing?”
Walter was thinking. He could scrape together a good thirty thousand dollars by pledging the house, the business, his own real estate, the bank account, the life insurance, the securities. Put it all into diamonds, of course and then—doubled! Overnight!
“I’ll say nothing,” he told Clurg. “If you come through.” He took the sheet from the twenty-fifth-century newspaper from Clurg’s hands and put it securely in his own pocket. “When I get those-diamonds duplicated,” he said, “I’ll burn them and forget the rest. Until then, I want you to stay close to home. I’ll come around in a day or so with the stuff for you to duplicate.”
Qurg nervously promised.
The secrecy, of course, didn’t include Betty. He told her when he got home and she let out a yell of delight. She demanded the newspaper, read it avidly, and then demanded to see Clurg.
“I don’t think hell talk,” Walter said doubtfully. “But if you really want to . . .”
She did, and they walked to the Curran bungalow. Clurg was gone, lock, stock and barrel, leaving not a trace behind. They waited for hours, nervously.
At last Betty said, “He’s gone back.”
Walter nodded. “He wouldn’t keep his bargain, but by God I’m going to keep mine. Come along. We’re going to the Enterprise.”
“Walter,” she said. “You wouldn’t—would you?”
He went alone, after a bitter quarrel.
At the Enterprise office he was wearily listened to by a reporter, who wearily looked over the twenty-fifth-century newspaper. “I don’t know what you’re peddling, Mr. Lachlan,” he said, “but we like people to buy their ads in the Enterprise. This is a pretty bare-faced publicity grab.”
“But—” Walter sputtered.
“Sam, would you please ask Mr. Morris to come up here if he can?” the reporter was saying into the phone. To Walter he explained, “Mr. Morris is our pressroom foreman.”
The foreman was a huge, white-haired old fellow, partly deaf. The reporter showed him the newspaper from the twenty-fifth century and said, “How about this?”
Mr. Morris looked at it and smelled it and said, showing no interest in the reading matter: “American Type Foundry Futura number nine, discontinued about ten years ago. It’s been hand-set. The ink—hard to say. Expensive stuff, not a news ink. A book ink, a job-printing ink. The paper, now, I know. A nice linen rag that Benziger jobs in Philadelphia.”
“You see, Mr. Lachlan? It’s a fake.” The reporter shrugged.
Walter walked slowly from the city room. The press-room foreman knew. It was a fake. And Clurg was a faker. Suddenly Walter’s heels touched the ground after twenty-four hours and stayed there. Good God, the diamonds! Clurg was a conman! He would have worked a package switch! He would have had thirty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds for less than a month’s work!
He told Betty about it when he got home and she laughed unmercifully. “Time Policeman” was to become a family joke between the Lachlans.
Harry Twenty-Third Street stood, blinking, in a very peculiar place. Peculiarly, his feet were firmly encased, up to the ankles, in a block of dear plastic.
There were odd-looking people and a big voice was saying: “May it please the court. The People of the Twenty-Fifth Century versus Harold Parish, alias Harry Twenty-Third Street, alias Clurg, of the Twentieth Century. The charge is impersonating an officer of the Time Police. The Prosecutor’s Office will ask the death penalty in view of the heinous nature of the offense, which threatens the whole fabric—”
Dominoes
“Money!” his wife screamed at him. “You’re killing yourself, Will. Pull out of the market and let’s go some place where we can live like human—”
He slammed the apartment door on her reproaches and winced, standing in the carpeted corridor, as an ulcer twinge went through him. The elevator door rolled open and the elevator man said, beaming: “Good morning, Mr. Born. It’s a lovely day today.”
“I’m glad, Sam,” W. J. Born said sourly. “I just had a lovely, lovely breakfast.” Sam didn’t know how to take it, and compromised by giving him a meager smile.
“How’s the market look, Mr. Born?” he hinted as the car stopped on the first floor. “My cousin told me to switch from Lunar Entertainment, he’s studying to be a pilot, but the Journal has it listed for growth.”
W. J. Born grunted: “If I knew I wouldn’t tell you. You’ve got no business in the market. Not if you think you can play it like a craps table.”
He fumed all through his taxi ride to the office. Sam, a million Sams, had no business in the market. But they were in, and they had built up the Great Boom of 1975 on which W. J. Born Associates was coasting merrily along. For how long? His ulcer twinged again at the thought.
He arrived at 9:15. Already the office was a maelstrom. The clattering tickers, blinking boards, and racing messengers spelled out the latest, hottest word from markets in London, Paris, Milan, Vienna. Soon New York would chime in, then Chicago, then San Francisco.
Maybe this would be the day. Maybe New York would open on a significant decline in Moon Mining and Smelting. Maybe Chicago would nervously respond with a slump in commodities and San Francisco’s Utah Uranium would plummet in sympathy. Maybe panic in the Tokyo Exchange on the heels of the alarming news from the States—panic relayed across Asia with the rising sun to Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, and crashing like a shockwave into the opening New York market again.
Dominoes, W. J. Born thought. A row of dominoes. Flick one and they all topple in a heap. Maybe this would be the day.
Miss Illig had a dozen calls from his personal crash-priority clients penciled in on his desk pad already. He ignored them and said into her good-morning smile: “Get me Mr. Loring on the phone.”
Loring’s phone rang and rang while W. J. Born boiled inwardly. But the lab was a barn of a place, and when he was hard at work he was deaf and blind to distractions. You had to hand him that. He was screwy, he was insolent, he had an inferiority complex that stuck out a yard, but he was a worker.
Loring’s insolent voice said in his ear: “Who’s this?”
“Born,” he snapped. “How’s it going?”
There was a long pause, and Loring said casually: “I worked all night. I think I got it licked.”
“What do you mean?”
Very irritated: “I said I think I got it licked. I sent a clock and a cat and a cage of white mice out for two hours. They came back okay.”
“You mean—” W. J. Born began hoarsely, and moistened his lips. “How many years?” he asked evenly.
“The mice didn’t say, but I think they spent two hours in 1977.”
“I’m coming right over,” W. J. Born snapped, and hung up. His office staff stared as he strode out.
If the man was lying—! No; he didn’t lie. He’d been sopping up money for six months, ever since he bulled his way into Bern’s office with his time machine project, but he hadn’t lied once. With brutal frankness he had admitted his own failures and his doubts that the thing ever would be made to work. But now, W. J. Born rejoiced, it had turned into the smartest gamble of his career. Six months and a quarter of a million dollars—a two-year forecast on the market was worth a billion! Four thousand to one, he gloated; four thousand to one! Two hours to learn when the Great Bull Market of 1975 would collapse and then back to his office armed with the information, ready to buy up to the very crest of the boom and then get out at the peak, wealthy forever, forever beyond the reach of fortune, good or bad!
He stumped upstairs to Loring’s loft in the West Seventies.
Loring was badly overplaying the role of casual roughneck. Gangling, redheaded, and unshaved, he grinned at Born and said: “Wat-cha think of soy futures, W. J.? Hold or switch?”
W. J. Born began automatically: “If I knew I wouldn’t—oh, don’t be silly. Show me the confounded thing.”
Loring showed him. The whining generators were unchanged; the tall Van de Graaf accumulator still looked like something out of a third-rate horror movie. The thirty square feet of haywired vacuum tubes and resistances were still an incomprehensible tangle. But since his last visit a phone booth without a phone had been added. A sheet-copper disk set into its ceiling was connected to the machine
ry by a ponderous cable. Its floor was a slab of polished glass.
“That’s it,” Loring said. “I got it at a junkyard and fixed it up pretty. You want to watch a test on the mice?”
“No,” W. J. Born said. “I want to try it myself. What do you think I’ve been paying you for?” He paused. “Do you guarantee its safety?”
“Look, W. J.,” Loring said, “I guarantee nothing. I think this will send you two years into the future. I think if you’re back in it at the end of two hours you’ll snap back to the present. I’ll tell you this, though. If it does send you into the future, you had better be back in it at the end of two hours. Otherwise you may snap back into the same space as a strolling pedestrian or a moving car—and an H-bomb will be out of your league.”
W. J. Bern’s ulcer twinged. With difficulty he asked: “Is there anything else I ought to know?”
“Nope,” Loring said after considering for a moment. “You’re just a paying passenger.”
“Then let’s go.” W. J. Born checked to make sure that he had his memorandum book and smooth-working pen in his pocket and stepped into the telephone booth.
Loring closed the door, grinned, waved, and vanished—literally vanished, while Born was looking at him.
Born yanked the door open and said: “Loring! What the devil—” And then he saw that it was late afternoon instead of early morning. That Loring was nowhere in the loft. That the generators were silent and the tubes dark and cold. That there was a mantle of dust and a faint musty smell.
He rushed from the big room and down the stairs. It was the same street in the West Seventies. Two hours, he thought, and looked at his watch. It said 9:55, but the sun unmistakably said it was late afternoon. Something had happened. He resisted an impulse to grab a passing high-school boy and ask him what year it was. There was a newsstand down the street, and Born went to it faster than he had moved in years. He threw down a quarter and snatched a Post, dated September 11th, 1977. He had done it.
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