Time Exposures

by Wilson Tucker

  “Atta gal!” He pinched her but she made no protest. “You’re the kind of a doll I go for. I’m glad there ain’t no people around here—just me and you, all alone. More fun that way.”

  “Alas, they are all gone, George. Skedaddled. They’ve been gone for many days. The Hunters ate them ... gobbled them up.” She sipped at a bottle of rotgut and delightful shivers ran down her body.

  “Yeah,” he said, watching the shivers and the body. “That’s what a dumb dog told me this morning. Everybody gone, except me and you.” He swallowed another drink. “Ate them all up, eh? Imagine that, just like cannibals. What hunters?”

  “The Hunters from Glissix.”

  “Never heard of the place. Is it in Jersey?”

  “No, George.” She shook her head slowly because the rotgut was playing tricks with her equipoise. “Glissix is up there.”

  “Up where?” he asked the lone reflection in the mirror.

  She lifted a slow, lazy arm to point toward the moonlit sky. “Up there.” George wasn’t watching the arm, he had only moved his head to observe the effect on her chest.

  “Glissix is out there,” she continued, “away out there beyond the moon and the sun, George. Out there and far away; it’s dark and cold and not like here at all, it’s more like the moonplace, honeyboy. You wouldn’t like Glissix, my hero, pet, joyboy, sweetguy.”

  “Never heard of the town,” he declared and opened another bottle by striking its neck against the bar. “Have a nip of this ... do you a world of good. From Glissix, eh? Are you a Hunter? Hunter-ess?”

  “Oh no, George!” She played with his hair. “I can’t be a Hunter ... the Hunters eat living things, like you. I don’t eat living things, George. I'm a Follower.”

  “Pleased to meet’cha, follower. I don’t know what I am; I ain’t voted yet. What did them hunters want to gobble up the people for, babydoll?”

  The blonde babydoll leaned forward from her seat on the bar to wrap her legs about his waist and a friendly arm around his shoulders. The arm proved a trifle short because the rotgut was playing tricks on her again, so she lengthened it to stretch all the way around to the opposite shoulder. Babydoll placed her inviting pink lips against his and spoke while she was kissing him. The kiss had a curious dry quality.

  “They were hungry, lamb-pie. They always wake up hungry, every spring. And they go everywhere, eating everything that is alive. All summer long they eat, eat, eat, making themselves fat so they can sleep all winter. Sometimes I go hungry too, when they leave nothing behind for me.” She broke off the long kiss.

  George smacked his lips. “They didn’t eat me.”

  “They couldn’t get near you, George boy. You stunk. You turned their stomachs, so they left you behind for me. But I can’t eat you now, lover mine.”

  “I'm hungry right now,” George announced, eyeing her. “And you look good enough to eat, baby.”

  “Now, George! You wouldn’t like me and I wouldn’t like you. You’re still alive, George.”

  “I hope to tell you I'm still alive George!” George responded. He reached for the body. “Come to papa.”

  Why ... you’d think he had dishonorable intentions.

  It was long after midnight and the moon had vanished behind the opposite rim of the street canyon, leaving it in darkness. George Young lounged in the open doorway of a furniture store, scratching a stubble of beard on his face. The whiskey seemed to be wearing off, leaving him with a vaguely disappointed feeling. He turned his head to look at the blonde who was stretched out full length on a bed in the display window. She had vaguely disappointed him too, although he couldn’t quite identify the cause of the dissatisfaction.

  She raised her head and smiled. “Joyboy.”

  “I need a drink,” he answered weakly.

  The blonde leaped from the bed and worked her way through the articles in the window to join him. “I love rotgut!” she whispered, snuggling up to him.

  “You and me both; I need a stiff one. All this talk about hunters and followers gives me the creeps.”

  “Oh, but they don’t creep, George. I don’t either.”

  He mumbled something under his breath and moved out to the curb. The girl came gliding after him. He stopped with one foot lifted from the curb to peer across the street, attempting to decipher a sign hanging in the darkness.

  “What are you looking for, sweet man?”

  “A drugstore. That one over there.”

  “What’s a— Why?”

  “To get a drink, quick.” George stepped off the curb and crossed over, the girl still trailing after. The magic had somehow left her and he didn’t bother to watch for the jiggles. The drugstore doors were closed but not locked, and he pushed in to look around. Bypassing the soda fountain and the candy counters, George made his way to the far side of the store and pawed over the displays until he found flashlights. He flicked a button and lit one.

  “Ooooh, that’s pretty, George.”

  Ignoring her, he followed the beam of light to the rear of the store and through a small white door marked PRIVATE. George found himself in the druggist’s prescription and mixing room, surrounded by the ingredients of the trade. He flicked the light about the shelves.

  “Bottles,” the blonde squealed. “Look at all the nice rotgut!”

  “Naw,” George contradicted, “some of this stuff ain’t fit to drink. Wait until I locate the good stuff.”

  The good stuff he searched for proved to be a gallon can of carbon tetrachloride, although he wasted the better part of half an hour finding it. Removing the lid, he took a quick sniff and tears formed in his eyes.

  “Ahhh,” he pronounced in satisfaction, “this is it. Doll, this’ll send you.”

  “Will I like it, George?”

  “Baby, you’ll love it.” He handed her the can and she nearly dropped it, not expecting the weight. “Bottoms up.”

  “What?”

  “Wrap your mouth around that little spout and turn the can upside down. Best little old rotgut you ever tasted!” He stepped back to watch, playing the light on her.

  She did as she was told, struggling to hold the heavy can over her head. The liquid made a gurgling noise as it poured from the spout. George waited, expectant.

  “Wow!” she exclaimed after a moment and dropped the can. “Wow, George. People certainly make fine rotgut.” Her eyes grew round and for a few seconds her head balanced precariously on her shoulders, wobbling from side to side. She put up her hands to steady it. “Why did we waste time in all those saloons?”

  “I don’t know,” George said weakly. “I think I need a drink.”

  “Try some of mine, hotshot.”

  “No thanks—I’ve got ulcers.” He turned the light on a display of bottles along the wall, and presently found several dark brown jars in a locked case. Smashing the door, he reached in for them and held the flash close to read the labels. Strychnin. He set it aside and turned his attention to the next bottle, tincture of nux vomica. The label puzzled him for a moment but he placed it beside the first bottle. In rapid succession he selected acetanilid, aconite, cyanid, bichlorid of Mercury, sodium fluorid, and prussic acid. His hand hesitated over emetin and then rejected it on the off chance it might be an emetic. George recognized only a few of the names but he was certain they were potent.

  One by one he opened the bottles and dumped their contents into a mixing bowl. Poking around among the large jugs on a lower shelf, he discovered and added to the bowl a pint of methyl alcohol. The blonde obligingly held the light for him while he stirred the powders, dissolving them into the liquid.

  “There!” George announced at last, peering into the deadly brew. He wondered if the little bubbles coming to the top would add zing. “I think I’ll call it the Peoples’ Cocktail.” He took the light and handed the bowl to the girl. “Down the hatch.”

  “Bottoms up?”

  “Bottoms up. And goodnight, babydoll.”

  She tilted the bowl to her lips and
drained it. Then she sat down on the floor, hard. George turned the light on her. To his startled, wondering gaze her body seemed to scoot rapidly across the floor and smack against the far wall. The girl’s head was completely turned about, facing the rear. An arm came loose at the shoulder and toppled to the floor. The blonde finally fell over. George walked over and played the light on her.

  “Gee whiz,” he said, quite shaken.

  The head turned around again and her eyelids fluttered open. The beautiful golden eyes looked up at him, filled with adoration.

  “Oh, George—you sweet man!”

  He turned and ran for the street. In a moment he knew she was loping along behind him.

  How he came to the bank and what caused him to turn in, George never afterward fully realized. He didn’t put much stock in the manipulations of fate, and the guidings of the subconscious mind was but a meaningless phrase he had read somewhere. He was running along the darkened street in desperation, not unmixed with fright, when the gray marble building loomed up in the bobbing beam of the flashlight. He recognized the building as typical of banks everywhere, not actually dwelling on the thought, and turned to run through the double doors without hesitation. The blonde was hard on his heels.

  Inside, he could think of nothing but to continue running. He darted through a swinging gate that marked off some manager’s office, ran around behind a pair of desks and overturned chairs, and down the aisle behind the tellers’ cages. At the far end of the big room the aisle opened onto another and smaller room filled with business machines, and just beyond that, George glimpsed a huge vault door resplendent in bronze and steel trim. He sped for the vault. The girl chased after him.

  George dashed into the vault, flicked the light around wildly, and scooped up a brown canvas sack. The girl beside him snatched up its twin, and together they turned to run out again. George dropped his sack just outside the vault.

  “Quick,” he gasped, breathing hard from the effort, “money! Go get another one!”

  She turned and reentered the steel chamber. He slammed the door on her, savagely twisting the spoked wheel that secured it, just as savagely twirling the tumblers of the combination locks. And then there was silence. George was whistling as he left the bank.

  Why ... you’d think he had locked her away forever.

  George Young critically examined his face in the mirror, running a hand through his heavy beard and noting the streaks of gray sprouting here and there. It would be turning soon, he decided, turning to match the shaggy gray at his temples. He had long ago given up the task of shaving, because shaving annoyed him and because there was no one else to see him. Now, with a corner of his mind, he toyed with the idea of removing the beard if only to remove those irritating specks of gray from his daily inspection. He didn’t want to awaken some morning and have the mirror tell him he was an old man, a graybeard. He preferred to think of himself as a young man, as young as that whippersnapper who had climbed down off a train 30 years ago and taken a whiskey shower, as young as the howling soldier who had owned a blonde and a town for one full night, just once, 30 years ago.

  George sighed and turned away from the mirror.

  He picked up his carefully wrapped lunch, a book he was slowly reading, and a tin of stale pipe tobacco. Leaving the small cottage he had appropriated for himself, he mounted a bicycle waiting at the bottom of the steps and peddled off toward town, his legs dully aching with the advance of age. The sun was bright and warm on his bare head and he took his time riding down to the bank. There wasn’t much of a breeze moving through the empty streets.

  He liked to look at the familiar spots—here a saloon where a bit of a swim suit still hung from a buck’s antlers, there a bed in a display window where he had briefly slept. He never failed to pass the drugstore without recalling the blonde’s last words of endearment. The words and scenes were all quite clear in his memory. Thirty years didn’t seem such a long time—until you began thinking of them in another way.

  George parked the bicycle outside the bank and entered the double doors, walking across a floor thick with money because it pleased him to walk on it. Several years ago he had scattered the money there, and had pulled a desk over to the vault door, a desk now littered like a housekeeper’s nightmare. The desk top was crammed with empty liquor bottles, old tobacco tins, books he had long since read, wadded papers from hundreds or thousands of past lunches, and mounds of pipe ashes. Over everything but the most recently used hung the dust of years. George cleared away a little space on a corner of the desk and put down his fresh lunch, his tobacco and the book he was reading that week. Finally he sat down in a comfortable chair and lit his pipe.

  Hitching his chair up to the vault door, he scanned the endless possible combinations he had penciled there and noted those that had already been checked off. George took a heavy drink from the bottle, and leaned forward to put his hands on the tumblers, turning them. Any day now, or any year, he might hit upon the right combination.

  Why ... you’d think he wanted his blonde back again.

  The End

  *********************************

  Able to Zebra,

  by Wilson Tucker

  F&SF March 1953

  Short Story - 5902 words

  Whenever the waggish Mr, Tucker puts a standard theme of science fiction

  on his own peculiar witness stand, his cross-examination usually results

  in a complete revision of our thinking on the subject. Here is some such

  Tucker-elicited evidence, primarily on time travel, but testimony to other

  odd facts of fiction is ably presented. We're reasonably certain that Counsellor

  Tucker's argument will convince you that hitherto you have been all

  wrong about time travel itself, you have erred completely in your opinions

  on the nature of time travelers and their motives and, finally, you have

  never known the whole truth concerning the career of a certain giant of

  literature.

  Horace Reid kicked aside the thoroughly scanned copy of the New York Times and finished the last of the coffee in his breakfast cup. With no real interest he reached for the San Francisco Chronicle and lazily thumbed through its pages. Both of the papers were a day old and he had known the news they contained twenty-four hours ago, while it was still fresh, but still it was his daily chore to read those and the others littering the floor. Situated at the opposite ends of the country as those two were, they might contain some small item of purely local interest that his own Chicago papers would never know.

  The important national news came over the radio of course. Listening to that too, was a weary chore. But it was the occasional regional story that needed his attention.

  Horace dropped the Chronicle after awhile and reached for the coffee percolator. Empty. He looked over the table, found nothing more to eat other than the broken crusts of the toast, and resigned himself. Carefully lighting a cigarette, he reached for the morning Tribune.

  The matter was on page eight.

  Horace studied the story slowly at first, after working his way through the headline; he supposed he would never get used to the tight, compact, and not always sensible combination of words the headline writers here employed to gain attention.

  PROF DENIES INDIANS

  SWAPPED WAMPUM FOR PENNIES

  Digesting that with but a second’s hesitation he grasped the headline’s message: some professor had denied that native aborigines exchanged their money for that of others. So? That was worth a headline? He swept on into the body of the story and was abruptly jerked to attention.

  According to the brief dispatch, filed by AP from a small Illinois river town the preceding evening, a Professor Forrestor of State Normal University and his class of archeology students had unearthed a new Indian mound along the banks of the Illinois, one of many that had been located in the region. Other than the normal student excitement over the find, the opening and preparing o
f the mound had followed in the usual manner. A number of skeletons were uncovered, along with their paraphernalia: weapons, beads, pottery and trinkets. In one corner of the mound the definitely unusual turned up. The skeleton of a one-armed Indian was located, with that one bony arm wrapped possessively around a glass jar full of Indian-head pennies.

  Horace stopped reading to consider that.

  “By George!” he said. And then he giggled.

  Old Forrestor at first believed he was the victim of a student hoax, a belief shared by a Mr. Jay Toliver, official representative of the state archeology society who was attached to the class on this field trip. Following an emphatic denial by the students, a minute examination of the find “proved” that no hoax was involved. Both Forrestor and Toliver agreed in declaring that the mound and its complete contents were of equal antiquity; the one-armed Indian and his strange treasure had been buried together about 400 years ago. Officials of the state and experts at the University of Illinois were hurrying to the scene.

  Horace said “By George!” once more, and dropped the newspaper. The giggle spread across his face in a wide grin and soon he was laughing aloud.

  From his bookshelf he pulled a large volume, leafing through it until he found a relief map of the state; after that he put in a long distance telephone call to the chief of police in the river town. Posing as a reporter for a radio wire service, he queried the policeman on the previous night’s discovery and on recent developments since then. There were no new developments, he learned, except that carloads of people had arrived from the state capitol, the university, and every other city and town within a hundred mile radius to examine and gawk at the uncovered mound. It was creating quite a traffic problem, the chief declared. The mound itself? No, nothing new there—the experts still wrangled.