Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  The phrasing struck Rob as odd . . . and obscurely it frightened him. Many people who thought there was no end to his riches had tried to sell Rob the impossible over the past decade. He had seen more than his share of perpetual motion machines, and had been invited to bankroll several different kinds of attempted cold fusion. Rob thought he’d developed a good early-warning system for the ridiculous, and could get up in the middle of the most formal meetings and vanish when it presented itself. Yet now he sat right where he was while Uli talked. He could never remember afterward just how the conversation got from that point to his realization that Uli claimed to be doing repairs, not merely on clocks, but on time itself.

  “Or I assist them in being made,” Uli said. “The client merely enables me to enable him to do the work. This is nothing new. There is something you wish to repair.”

  It was not a question.

  Plainly this conversation was going to surpass even Rob’s usual definition of odd. A little breath of cold passed over the back of his neck. A draft. And freezing in here, with all this marble. But he didn’t succeed in convincing himself. Who is this guy? Rob thought.

  But then—and maybe this time it was the wine, a little—he thought, Why should it matter? My people are within call And if he tries selling the story to the National Enquirer or something, I’ll just buy the pub rights from them—

  Rob went ahead and told Uli about the theft, and all the while the fear grew in him that Uli would find it foolish, and laugh. But that gray-eyed gaze rested gravely on him, unsurprised, all the while he told the story; and when Rob ran down at last, Uli merely nodded and said, “I think you must attempt this repair.”

  Rob could now only try to hide his embarrassment by scoffing. “Oh, yeah, sure. Let’s just go back in time and put it all right.”

  “ ‘Right’ can look many different ways,” Uli said, not rising even slightly to the bait. “But all your life since then, it seems, has been a rage against that night, when the thief came and stole from you what you valued most in the world. It is not that much good has not come of your actions since—but the good seems to have come to everyone else but you. You will not, what is the phrase in English, accept delivery on it.”

  “You’re going to tell me I have to ‘just let it go,’ ” Rob said, scathing.

  “No. I am going to tell you that you must catch it first,” Uli said. “What you do with it after that is your business. But I can put you where you can make the attempt to stop the theft. If you succeed, you can then stop walking the streets of city after city at night, looking for what you desire, and finding everything else instead. Not, as I say, that you have not done good. But it would make more sense to do it on purpose, rather than by accident.”

  Rob turned his empty wineglass around and around on the round marble table, and said nothing.

  “It is irresponsible,” Uli said, “to leave things broken when they can be repaired.”

  That was almost exactly Rob’s grandfather’s voice: stem, uncompromising. A shiver went down Rob’s back. Finally he looked up. “What’s this going to cost?” he said.

  “A great deal. But not more than you can afford, and not so much that your company directors will try to have you committed. This is about a repair, not further damage.”

  Rob Sat quiet for a few moments more, while Uli drank what was left of his wine. “Payment first, I suppose,” Rob said, trying to hang onto some shred of at least sarcasm, if not control.

  “Not at all. Payment afterward, when the repair has been tested.”

  This sounded completely unlike any scam Rob had ever been involved in. All of those had required up-front investments with lots of zeroes before the decimal point. And it was very hard to look at those gray eyes and find even the shadow of deceit in them.

  “What if it doesn’t take?”

  Uli didn’t say a word. But the look he gave Rob said, Coward! Stop stalling!

  Rob wanted to call for another glass of wine, and temporize . . . but the challenge in those eyes was hard to bear. Ever since his company really took off, he had been lauded everywhere as a risk-taker, a daring man. He had always known this was less true than it sounded. Now here was someone who was waiting for Rob to prove the lie.

  “. . . So what do I do?” Rob said.

  Uli straightened up, his expression going more neutral. “Wait,” he said. “The preparation takes some time. I will e-mail you. You should give me an address that is private to you, that others won’t see.”

  Rob reached into his pocket, pulled out a business card, felt inside his jacket for a pen, and on the back of the card scribbled down one of the five most wanted private e-mail addresses in the world. Uli took the card, read the back of it, slipped it into his wallet and got up. “I will bill you for the clock,” he said, “after you have taken it home and had a chance to let it run a while in place. I think, though, that you should move it to a place of more safety: somewhere your ex-wife cannot bump into it ‘by mistake.’ ”

  While Rob was still trying to think what to say to that, Uli reached down to the clock, adjusted its minute hand two minutes further along, and replaced the crystal dome over it, while the pendulum serenely spun on its axis. “Good night,” he said, and went out the door that led onto the street.

  Rob sat there looking at the clock until it chimed six-thirty.

  How did he know?

  Shortly he glanced up and saw the waiter standing near him, curious, watching the golden gleam of the pendulum under the bright lights. Rob ordered another glass of the Fendant, and drank it slowly. Then he put the clock back in its box, took it upstairs to his suite, and the next morning, went home to wait.

  And now the waiting was over. After fourteen hours of intermittent sleep and nervousness, Rob took off the eyeshades, made one more visit to the lavatory to put himself in order, and got off the plane, walking down what seemed endlessly long plate glass-walled corridors, all full of a slanting golden afternoon, to Swiss passport control. “Business or pleasure?” said the uniformed man in the glass booth as Rob handed him his passport.

  “Pleasure,” Rob said, as the control officer peered at the picture. “I’m going to Luzern.”

  The control officer gave Rob a weary aren’t-you-all? look, stamped the passport, and handed it back. “Enjoy your stay.”

  And that was all. Thank you, Lawyer Ron, Rob thought, and went to reclaim his baggage. Ten minutes later he was on a train from the airport’s underground train station to the center of the city. Fifteen minutes later he stepped out under the echoing, overarching roof of the Hauptbahnhof.

  Rob paused only briefly there, stopping outside the station’s main newsstand to study the tabloid-headline easels that stood outside it, while diners next door at the “sidewalk cafe” tables gazed at him incuriously and without recognition. The newspaper Blick would certainly have plastered the disappearance of the world’s tenth richest man all over its front page, but at present its Helvetica-Bold headlines were only shouting about some crooked financier in a money-laundering scandal. So nothing’s made it to the media yet, Rob thought. That would have been Chei’s doing. It would have offended her sense of order to have the world find out that he’d vanished before the company could find some way to cover for his disappearance. Naturally she was sensitive to what such news could do to the company’s stock price; her own several hundred thousand shares made certain of that.

  Satisfied, Rob went to the bank of phones over by the escalators that led down to the locker level and the shopping center below that. He found a one-franc piece, deposited it, and dialed the number that by now he knew by heart.

  “Hallo?”

  “I’m here,” Rob said.

  “Good. Go get some sleep. Come and meet me tomorrow at six. You have the directions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Tomorrow, then.” And Uli hung up.

  Rob went out to the tram plaza next to the station, found the Number Four tram, and rode it for about a mile to
where the River Limmat has only one more bridge to pass under before it pours itself all swan-laden into the lake. There he made his way up a narrow cobbled alley to one of the little hotels that serves the Old Town, checked in, showered, and lay down on the bed, just for a little while, to stretch the kinks out of his muscles. . . .

  Their house had been one of the oldest ones in town, built in the late eighteen hundreds and then added to again and again, over the following decades and generations, until it went straggling off in five different directions. The core of it had been a solid, stone-built edifice of two storeys, with the shop and back kitchen downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs. As the business had grown, the shop had been enlarged out toward the back, an extension had been built out to one side, a huge storage shed erected down at the bottom of the garden: and these were added to in their turn. By 1920, Willingden Feed and Grain was the biggest grocery operation in the small city that had grown up around it. By 1960, it was beginning to head toward decline, threatened by the supermarkets going up elsewhere in the county. But there was still a lot to do in the shop, and as soon as he got old enough, Robby had been given various jobs to do—cleaning the meat sheer, polishing the tremendous brass cash register, sweeping up in the shop, bringing up slabs of the home-cured bacon from the cold cellar. For these services he was given two dollars a week, on Friday afternoon, when the rest of the staff got paid. And when the staff went home with their pay packets, Robby ran straight down the street to Mr. Garibaldi’s newsstand and bought comics.

  Comics were genuinely the only thing that he and his parents disagreed about. In every other way, Robby’s parents gave him nearly everything a child could want. But to them, fantasy was suspect. Dreams were something pleasant but useless that you did while you were asleep, and the characters in the comics were to them emphatically “just made-up silliness.”

  Of course Robby knew the comic-book heroes were made up, dreams of a special kind. He wasn’t stupid. But they were the only dreams he had in color, and he treasured them. The bold terrible fire of explosions, the brilliant costumes like bright flags cracking across an otherwise gray sky—the flash of the silver underlining to Captain Thunder’s cape, as he rode the lightning crackling around him to destroy Emperor Fulgor’s evil plans one more time; his courtesy and tenderness to the beautiful Minna Whelan, who loved him but could never be trusted with the secret of his identity, or with his love, because the terrible Gift of the jealous Lightning God might destroy her—to Robby, all these things somehow made life seem worth living. It seemed to him that everything worthwhile about people—courage, certainty, truth, knowledge, honor, the right use of power—was to be found in the comics. The newspaper, that banner of reality, seemed to have nothing but bad news in it, robbery, accidents, court cases, death. Life was desperately dull in Robby’s little town, and he was only ten years old, and would be stuck there for a long time yet before he could go hunting truth and honor on his own terms. For the time being, right now, he needed heroes . . .

  . . . and then they were taken from him.

  Robby’s mother called Robby’s comics a waste of money, and actually discussed with his father whether they should stop giving him an allowance at all, if he was going to spend it on “that junk, it’s going to rot his mind, he won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy . . .” Robby already knew the difference all too well: reality was overhearing conversations like that one, and peering around the comer of the dining room door to see his father, his back turned, nodding slowly. Robby took the hint and “vanished” his complete collection of Captain Thunder up to a box up in the attic, carefully lined with a cut-up garbage bag to keep out any moisture from possible leaks, with the comics all lined up inside it, in order, each in perfect condition in its own glassine bag. He already knew what every kid eventually discovers—that adults have so much on their minds that if you stop showing them one specific thing that bothers them, the odds are good that they’ll forget all about it in a matter of days. His mother, also, had given him the hint he needed after he got a bad mark on a math test. “This wouldn’t happen if you weren’t spending all your time on those trashy comics; don’t let me catch you reading them any more, or I’ll bum them!” Robby immediately made sure she would be unable to catch him reading them, by no longer doing so anywhere except in bed, under the covers, after he knew his mother was asleep—he would set his alarm on its softest setting and wake up at three a.m. There he would read, again and again, the single comic he brought down from the attic box once a week when his mom and dad were both busy downstairs in the shop, and afterward hid in the floor space under a loose board beneath his bed. To cover himself, Robby made sure the last thing his mother saw at night was him reading a math textbook, and whenever she chanced to notice how tired he looked in the morning, she would say approvingly to his father, “Look how hard your son has been studying . . .!”

  And then, just as things seemed to be settling down, the attic caught fire.

  Or part of it did. It had started as a chimney fire, started by something truly idiotic: his father throwing a pizza carton onto the dining-room fireplace. It burned too hot in a chimney that hadn’t been swept in a long time, and set the built-up soot on fire. By the time the fire department got there, the chimney fire had actually gone out . . . but the heat of the scorching brick had set alight the old dried-out roof joists nearby, and the roof over the extension of the house was already burning merrily, the tar under the shingles melting and dripping down from the roof. To put the fire out before it got at the rest of the house, the firemen had to chop a hole in the main attic roof and go into the side attic that way. Everything in the extension, from roof to cellar, was drenched. The whole neighborhood was standing around, wondering at the damage, by the time the firemen left.

  The main part of the house was undamaged. But now Robby found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling in the darkness. He’d lain awake for a long time, thinking about how lucky he was that the comics hadn’t been hurt. But they were still up there. At least it wasn’t going to rain tonight. He’d thought of moving them, but that would have made his mother start asking him questions—and in the present atmosphere of soot, dripping water, and frayed tempers, Robby hadn’t wanted to start anything he’d regret later.

  The trouble was . . . he heard something. Now he realized what had awakened him. There was someone up there.

  It came to him instantly what was happening, and Robby slipped out of bed, threw on a bathrobe, opened his door silently, and went down the hall to the attic stairs. The whole town had been out there, today. Someone had seen the hole in the roof. Someone had sneaked over the back gate into the service yard and found the ladder, where it always stood by the feed shed, and right now someone was ( upstairs, going through their attic, seeing what he could steal. . . .

  Robby crept up the stairs, avoided the one that creaked, opened the attic door, closed it behind him, and stood still, letting his eyes get used to the dark. Starlight and a blue-green light reflected from the sodium-vapor streetlights out behind the back gate showed him a silhouetted form: a man, moving, a man with a box in his hands. Robby’s comics box . . .

  “What are you doing?” Robby whispered, furious. “Put it down!”

  The man froze just for a second, looked at him, his expression impossible to read in the dark. Then he was gone, down the ladder.

  Robby rushed to the hole, yelled after him, “Stop! Thief! Mom, Dad, there’s somebody up here, there’s a thief!” But by the time the house was roused, it was too late. The man had vanished into the darkness. “What did he take?” Robby’s father had asked, and when Robby wailed, “My comics!” his mother had said, “Is that all? What a relief that’s all he had time for. But why would anyone do that? It’s not like they’re worth anything.”

  “A collector,” Robby said, already beginning to drown in grief. “Captain Thunder Number One is worth fifty dollars now.”

  His mother looked over at the burned, d
ripping roof joists. “Oh, don’t be silly. There are much more valuable things up here.”

  “It’s downstairs he had his eye on, more likely,” Robby’s father said. “Probably he was going to try to get down into the shop from the inside, and break into the cash register or the safe. Instead, when you startled him, he just grabbed the first thing he could lay hands on and ran off.” He gripped Robby’s shoulder. “Good job, son. We’ll get that roof fixed first thing in the morning.”

  They went back to their beds, and sent Robby back to his own. But there was no more sleep for him that night, and no more joy, ever. They were blind to the dreams that had been in the box, blind to the joy that those dreams had brought him . . . and now the dreams were gone.

  For a week’s worth of mourning he tried to tell his mom or his dad how he was hurting . . . but they couldn’t understand. You’ll get over it, you’ll feel better in a while, it’s nothing important . . . was all he heard. After a while, when Robby bought new comics and found they didn’t make him happy any more, because he was afraid they, too, might get stolen, he started to wonder if his folks were right. Eventually, a few months later, with a final sob of the soul, he gave up, and walled the pain away in the back of his mind, along with the old joy he had felt in the company of heroes. There his childhood ended. Rob turned all his attention to the kind of dreaming that seemed to please his dad and mom—the kind that showed him how to build practical, useful things. Over time he and his work became very useful indeed, to millions of people. His dad had died very well pleased with him. So had his grandfather, who had given him the clock. You were always good at taking care of things, the old man had said a few weeks before he died. You’ll take care of this—Robby hadn’t contradicted him, briefly remembering the one thing that had really mattered to him, the thing he hadn’t been able to protect. Now, though, he stood again in the attic, looking at the place in the shadows where the box had been, a long time ago, and he thought: If I can just beat the thief there . . .