Time Waits for Winthrop

by William Tenn

  What could they see, from the bubbling distance of youth, of the chasms that separated Winthrop from Mrs. Brucks even more finally than the others? It was unimportant to them that he was a tight and unemotional old bachelor, while she was the warm and gossipy mother of six children, the grandmother of two, with her silver wedding anniversary proudly behind her. She and Winthrop had barely exchanged a dozen sentences with each other since they’d arrived in the future; they had disliked each other from the moment they had met in Washington at the time-travel finals.

  But—Winthrop was stubborn. That fact remained. Mr. Mead had roared his best executive-type roars at him. Mary Ann Carthington had tried to jog his senility with her lush, young figure and most fluttery voice. Even Dave Pollock, an educated man, a high school science teacher, had talked his heart out to him and been unable to make him budge.

  Someone had to change Winthrop’s mind or they’d all be stuck in the future, here in this horrible twenty-fifth century. Even if she hated it more than anything she’d had to face in a lifetime of troubles, it was up to Mrs. Brucks.

  She rose and shook out the wrinkles in the expensive black dress her proud husband had purchased in Lord & Taylor’s the day before the group had left.

  Try to tell Sam that it was pure luck that she had been chosen, just a matter of fitting the physical specifications in the message from the future! Sam wouldn’t listen: he’d probably boasted all over the shop, to all the other cutters with whom he worked, about his wife—one of five people selected in the whole United States to make a trip five hundred years into the future. Would Sam still be boasting when the six o’clock deadline passed that night and she didn’t return?

  This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and reached her nose.

  Mary Ann Carthington crooned sympathetically, “Shall I call for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?”

  “I’m crazy?” Mrs. Brucks shot back angrily. “A little walk down the hall, I need that headache-maker? A little walk I can walk.”

  She started for the door rapidly, before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing.

  But she paused and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she’d spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls: here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century.

  Then she swallowed hard and closed the door behind her. She walked hurriedly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side.

  At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in distaste, to the square. “Mr. Winthrop?”

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Mrs. Brucks!” the square boomed back at her. “Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks.”

  The patch of yellow showed a tiny hole in the center which dilated rapidly into a doorway. She stepped through gingerly, as if there might be a drop of several stories on the other side.

  The room was shaped like a long, narrow isosceles triangle. There was no furniture in it, and no other exits, except for what an occasional yellow square suggested. Streaks of color chased themselves fluently along the walls and ceilings and floors, shifting up and down the spectrum, from pinkish gray to a thick, dark ultramarine. And odors came and went with the colors, some of them unpleasant, some intriguing, but all of them touched with the unfamiliar and alien.

  From somewhere behind the walls and above the ceiling there was music, its tones softly echoing, gently reinforcing the colors and the odors. The music, too, was strange to twentieth-century ears: strings of dissonances would be followed by long or short silences, in the midst of which an almost inaudible melody might be heard like a harmonic island in an ocean of sonic strangeness.

  At the sharp apex of the triangle, an aged little man lay on a raised portion of the floor. Periodically, this would raise or lower part of itself, very much like a cow trying to find a comfortable position on the grass.

  The single garment that Winthrop wore similarly kept adjusting itself upon him. At one moment, it would be a striped red and white tunic, covering everything from his shoulders to his thighs; then it would slowly elongate into a green gown that trickled over his outstretched toes; and abruptly, it would contract into a pair of light brown shorts decorated with a complete pattern of brilliant blue seashells.

  Mrs. Brucks observed all this with disapproval. A man was meant, she felt, to be dressed approximately the same way from one minute to the next.

  The shorts she didn’t mind, though her modest soul considered them a bit too skimpy for receiving lady callers. The green gown—well, if he wanted to wear what was essentially a dress, it was his business. Even the red and white tunic which reminded her nostalgically of her granddaughter Debbie’s sunsuit was something she was willing to be generous about. But at least stick to one of them!

  Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. “Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet,” he said jovially.

  Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host’s gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and uneasily sat. “How—how are you, Mr. Winthrop?”

  “Couldn’t be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look.”

  He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers.

  Mrs. Brucks, really interested, inspected the mouthful of white, shining teeth. “A good job,” she pronounced at last. “The dentists here made them for you so fast?”

  “Dentists!” He spread his bony arms in a vast and merry gesture. “They don’t have dentists in 2458 A.D. They grew these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks.”

  “Grew? How grew?”

  “How should I know how they did it? They’re smart, that’s all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It’s a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said ‘I want new teeth’ to the machine that they’ve got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three and bingo, there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?”

  She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. “Maybe—but I better wait until it’s perfected.”

  Winthrop laughed again. “You’re like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. I’m the oldest, but that doesn’t make any difference—I’m the only one with guts.”

  Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. “But you’re also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock’s just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We’d all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop.”

  “Mary Ann is engaged? I’d never have guessed it from the way she was playing up to that temporal supervisor fellow.”

  “Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she’s engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office, a fine, hard-working boy. And she wants to go back to him.”

  The old man pulled up his back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulder-blades and scratched him gently. “Let her go back then. Who gives a damn?”

  Mrs. Brucks turned her hands palm up in front of her. “Remember what they told us when we arrived? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the Time Machine Building at six o’clock on the dot. If we aren’t all there on time, they can’t make the transfer, they said. So if one of us, if you, for an instance, don’t show up—”

  “Don’t tell me your troubles!” His face was flushed and his lips came back and exposed th
e brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner’s mood. The music changed to a vicious rumble. “Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “You’re damn tooting you don’t understand me! When I was a kid, my old man used to come home drunk every night and beat the hell out of me. I was a small kid, so every other kid on the block took turns beating the hell out of me, too. When I grew up, I got a lousy job and a lousy life. Remember the depression? Who do you think was on those breadlines? Me, that’s who! And then, when the good times came back, I was too old for a decent job. Night-watchman, berry-picker, dishwasher. Cheap flophouses, cheap furnished rooms. Everybody gets the gravy, Winthrop got the garbage.”

  He picked up the large egg-shaped object he had been examining when she entered and studied it moodily. “Yeah. And like you said, everybody has someone to go back to, everybody but me. You’re damn tooting I don’t have anyone to go back to. Damn tooting. I never had a friend, never had a wife, never even had a girl that stayed around longer than it took her to use up the loose change in my pocket. So why should I go back? I’m happy here. I get everything I want and I don’t have to pay for it. You people want to go back because you feel different—uncomfortable, out of place. I’m used to being out of place: I’m right at home and I’m having a good time.

  I’m staying.”

  “Listen, Mr. Winthrop.” Mrs. Brucks leaned forward anxiously, then jumped as the seat under her slunk forward. “Mr. Winthrop, everybody has troubles in their life. With my daughter Annie, I had a time that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And with my Julius—But because I have troubles, you think I should take it out on other people? I should prevent them from going home when they’re sick and tired of jumper machines and food machines and—I don’t know—machine machines and—”

  “Speaking of food machines,” Winthrop perked up, “have you seen my new food phonograph? Latest model. I said I wanted one, and first thing this morning, a brand-new one is delivered to my door. No fuss, no bother, no money. What a world!”

  “But it’s not your world, Mr. Winthrop. Even if everything is free, you’re not entitled. You got to belong to be entitled.”

  “There’s nothing in their laws about that,” he commented absent-mindedly as he opened the huge egg and peered inside at the collection of dials and switches and spigots. “See, Mrs. Brucks? Double volume controls, double intensity controls, triple vitamin controls. With this one, you can raise the fat content of a meal, say, while reducing its sweetness with that doohickey there—and if you press that switch, you can compress the whole meal so it’s no bigger than a mouthful and you’re still hungry enough to try a couple of other compositions. Want to try it? I got it set for the latest number by Unni Oehele, that new Aldebaranian composer—Memories of a Martian Soufflé.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “No. By me, a meal is served in plates. I don’t want to try it. Thank you very much.”

  “Believe me, lady, you’re missing something. The first course is a kind of light, fast movement, all herbs from Aldebaran IV mixed with a spicy vinegar from Aldebaran IX. The second course, Consommé Grand, is a lot slower and kind of majestic. Oehele bases it all on a broth made from the white chund, a kangaroo animal they have on Aldebaran IV. See, he uses only native Aldebaranian foods to suggest a Martian dish. Get it? The same thing Kratzmeier did in A Long, Long Dessert on Deimos and Phobos, only it’s a lot better. More modern-like, if you know what I mean. Now in the third course, Oehele really takes off. He—”

  “Please, Mr. Winthrop!” Mrs. Brucks begged. “Enough!” She glared at him. She’d had her fill of this sort of thing from her son Julius years ago, when he’d been running around with a crazy crowd from City College and been spouting hours of incomprehensible trash at her that he’d picked up from newspaper musical reviews and the printed notes in record albums. One thing she’d learned was how to recognize an art phony.

  Winthrop shrugged. “Okay, okay. But you’d think you’d at least want to try it. The others at least took a bite of classical Kratzmeier or Gura-Hok. They didn’t like it, they spat it out—fine. But you’ve been living on nothing but that damn twentieth-century grub since we arrived. After the first day, you haven’t set foot outside your room. And the way you asked the room to decorate itself—it’s so old-fashioned, it makes me sick! You’re living in the twenty-fifth century, lady! Wake up!”

  “Mr. Winthrop,” she said sternly, “yes or no? You’re going to be nice or not?”

  “You’re in your fifties,” he pointed out. “Fifties, Mrs. Brucks. In our time, you can expect to live what? Ten or fifteen more years. Tops. Here, you might see another thirty, maybe forty. Me, I figure I’m good for at least twenty. With the medical machines they got, they can do wonders. And no wars to worry about, no epidemics, no depressions, nothing. Everything free, lots of exciting things to do, Mars, Venus, the stars. Why in hell are you so crazy to go back?”

  Mrs. Brucks’ already half-dissolved self-control gave way completely. “Because it’s my home! Because it’s what I understand! Because I want to be with my husband, my children, my grandchildren! And because I don’t like it here, Mr. Winthrop!”

  “So go back!” Winthrop yelled. The room, which for the last few moments had settled into a pale golden yellow, turned rose color again. “There’s not one of you with the guts of a cockroach. Even that young fellow, what’s-his-name, Dave Pollock, I thought he had guts. He went out with me for the first week and he tried everything once. But he got scared, too, and went back to his little old comfy room. It’s too dec-a-dent, he says, too dec-a-dent. So take him with you and get the hell back, all of you!”

  “But we can’t, Mr. Winthrop. Remember they said the transfer has to be complete on both sides? One stays behind, all stay. We can’t go back without you.”

  Winthrop smiled and stroked the throbbing vein on his neck. “You’re damn tooting you can’t go back without me. And I’m staying. This is one time that old Winthrop calls the tune.”

  “Please, Mr. Winthrop, don’t be stubborn. Be nice. Don’t make us force you.”

  “You can’t force me,” he told her with a triumphant leer. “I know my rights. According to the law of twenty-fifth-century America, no human being can be forced to do anything. Fact. You try to gang up on me, all I do is set up a holler that I’m being forced and a flock of government machines show up and turn me loose. Put that in your old calabash and smoke it!”

  “Listen,” she said as she turned to leave. “At six o’clock, we’ll all be in the Time Machine Building. Maybe you’ll change your mind, Mr. Winthrop.”

  “That’s one thing you can be sure of—I won’t change my mind.”

  So Mrs. Brucks went back to her room and told the others that Winthrop was stubborn as ever.

  Oliver T. Mead, vice-president in charge of public relations for Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc., of Gary, Indiana, drummed impatiently on the arm of the red leather easy chair that Mrs. Brucks’ room had created especially but uneasily for him.

  “Ridiculous!” he exclaimed.

  “That a derelict, a vagrant, should be able to keep people from going about their business… do you know there’s going to be a nationwide sales conference of Sweetbottom retail outlets in a few days? I absolutely must return tonight as scheduled, no ifs, no ands, no buts. There’s going to be one unholy mess, I can tell you, if the responsible parties in this period don’t see to that.”

  “I bet there will be,” Mary Ann Carthington said from behind round, respectful and well-mascaraed eyes. “A big firm like that can really give them what for, Mr. Mead.”

  Dave Pollock grimaced at her wearily. “A firm five hundred years out of existence? Who’re they going to complain to—the history books?”

  As the portly man stiffened angrily, Mrs. Brucks held up her hands and said, “Let’s
talk, let’s think it out, only don’t fight. You think it’s the truth we can’t force him to go back?”

  Mr. Mead leaned back and stared out of a non-existent window. “Could be. Then again, it might not. I’m willing to believe anything of 2458 by now, but this smacks of criminal irresponsibility. That they should invite us to visit their time and then not make every possible effort to see that we return safe and sound—besides, what about their people visiting in our time, the five with whom we transferred? If we’re stuck here, they’ll be stuck in 1958. Forever. Any government worthy of the name owes protection to its citizens traveling abroad. Without it, it’s less than worthless: a tax-grubbing, boondoggling, inept bureaucracy!”

  Mary Ann Carthington’s pert little face had been nodding in time to his fist beating on the red leather armchair. “That’s what I say. Only the government seems to be all machines. How can you argue with machines? The only government man we’ve seen since we arrived was that Mr. Storku who welcomed us to the United States of 2458. And he didn’t seem very interested in us. At least he didn’t show any interest.”

  “The Chief of Protocol for the State Department, you mean?” Dave Pollock asked. “The one who yawned when you told him how distinguished he looked?”

  The girl made a light slapping gesture at him. “Oh, you.”

  “Well, then, here’s what we have to do. One.” Mr. Mead rose and proceeded to open the fingers of his right hand a single finger at a time. “We have to go on the basis of the only human being in the government we’ve met personally, this Mr. Storku. Two, we have to select a representative from among us. Three, this representative has to see Mr. Storku and lay the facts before him. How his government managed somehow to communicate with our government the fact that time travel was possible, but only if certain physical laws were taken into consideration, most particularly the law of—the law of—What is that law, Pollock?”

  “Conservation of energy and mass. If you want to transfer five people from 2458 to 1958, you have to replace them simultaneously in their own time with five people of exactly the same structure and mass from the time they’re going to. Otherwise, you’d have a gap in the mass of one space-time continuum and a corresponding surplus in the other. It’s like a chemical equation—”