Time Waits for Winthrop

by William Tenn

  “He told me something we could do,” he said with careful viciousness. “He said the Temporal Embassy could help us. All we need is somebody with puff in the Temporal Embassy.”

  Mary Ann Carthington almost bit the end off the lipstick she was applying at that moment. Mrs. Brucks and Dave Pollock had both turned to stare at her. And she knew just exactly what they were thinking.

  “Well, I certainly don’t—” she started to protest.

  “Don’t be modest Mary Ann,” Dave Pollock interrupted. “This is your big chance—and right now, it looks like our only chance. We’ve got about an hour and a half left. Get yourself into a jumper skedaddle out there and turn on the charm!”

  Mrs. Brucks sat down beside her and gave her shoulders the benefit of a heavy maternal arm, “Listen, Miss Carthington, sometimes we have to do things, it’s not so easy. But stuck here is better? That you like? So—” she spread her hands—“a touch here with the powder puff, a touch there with the lipstick, a this, a that, and believe me, he won’t know what to do first for you. Crazy about you he is already—you mean to say a little favor he wouldn’t do, if you asked him?”

  “You really think so?” The girl began to preen. “Well, maybe—”

  “A pretty girl like you, a fellow like him, nothing to maybe about. What a man like Mr. Mead can’t accomplish, a woman has to do all the time. And a pretty girl like you can do it without lifting her little finger.”

  Mary Ann Carthington gave a nod of agreement to this female view of history and stood up with determination. Dave Pollock immediately called for a jumper. She stepped back as the great cylinder materialized in the room.

  “Do I have to?” she asked. “Those awful things, they’re so upsetting.”

  He took her arm and began working her under the jumper with a series of gentle, urging tugs. “You can’t walk; we don’t have the time any more. Take my word, Mary Ann, this is D-day and H-hour. So be a good girl and get under there and—Hey, listen. A smart angle with the temporal supervisor might be about how his people will be stuck in our period if Winthrop goes on being stubborn. If anyone around here is responsible for them, he is. So as soon as you get there—”

  “I don’t need you to tell me how to handle the temporal supervisor, Dave Pollock!” she said haughtily, flouncing under the jumper. “After all, he happens to be a friend of mine, not yours—a very good friend of mine!”

  “Sure,” Pollock groaned, “but you still have to convince the man. And all I’m suggesting—” He broke off as the cylinder slid the final distance down to the floor and disappeared with the girl inside.

  He turned back to the others who had been watching anxiously. “Well, that’s it,” he announced, flapping his arms with a broad, hopeless gesture. “That’s our very last hope. Her!”

  Mary Ann Carthington felt exactly like a Last Hope as she materialized in the Temporal Embassy.

  She fought down the swimming nausea which always seemed to accompany jumper transportation and, shaking her head quickly, managed to draw a deep breath.

  As a means of getting places, the jumper certainly beat Edgar Rapp’s old Buick—if only it didn’t make you feel like a chocolate malted. That was the trouble with this era: every halfway nice thing in it had such unpleasant after-effects!

  The ceiling undulated over her head in the great rotunda where she was now standing and bulged a huge purplish lump down at her. It still looked, she decided nervously, like a movie house chandelier about to fall.

  “Yes?” inquired the purplish lump politely “Whom did you wish to see?”

  She moistened her lipstick, then squared her shoulders. You had to carry these things off with a certain amount of poise; it just did not do to show nervousness before a ceiling.

  “I came to see Gygyo—I mean is Mr. Gygyo Rablin in?”

  “Mr. Rablin is not at size at the moment. He will return in fifteen minutes. Would you like to wait in his office? He has another visitor there.”

  Mary Ann Carthington thought swiftly. She didn’t entirely like the idea of another visitor, but maybe it would be for the best The presence of a third party would be a restraining influence for both of them and would take a little of the inevitable edge off her coming back to Gygyo as a suppliant after what had happened between them.

  But what was this about his not being “at size”? These twenty-fifth-century people did so many positively weird things with themselves!

  “Yes, I’ll wait in his office,” she told the ceiling. “Oh, you needn’t bother,” she said to the floor as it began to ripple under her feet. “I know the way.”

  “No bother at all, miss,” the floor replied cheerfully, and continued to carry her across the rotunda to Rablin’s private office. “It’s a pleasure.”

  Mary Ann sighed and shook her head. Some of these fixtures were so opinionated! She relaxed and let herself be carried along, taking out her compact on the way for a last quick check of her hair and face.

  But the glance at herself in the mirror evoked the memory again. She flushed and almost called for a jumper to take her back to Mrs. Brucks’ room. No, she couldn’t—this was their last chance to get out of this world and back to their own. But damn Gygyo Rablin, anyway!

  A yellow square in the wall having dilated sufficiently, the floor carried her into Rablin’s private office and lay flat again. She looked around at the familiar surroundings.

  There was Gygyo’s desk, if you could call that odd, purring thing a desk. There was that peculiar squirmy couch that—

  She caught her breath. A young woman was lying on the couch, one of those horrible bald-headed women they had here.

  “Excuse me,” Mary Ann said in one fast breath. “I had no idea—I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” the young woman said, still apparently staring up at the ceiling. “You’re not intruding. I just dropped in on Gygyo myself. Have a seat.”

  The floor shot up a section of itself under Mary Ann and, when she was securely cradled in it, lowered itself slowly to sitting height.

  “You must be that twentieth century—” the young woman paused, then amended rapidly, “the visitor whom Gygyo has been seeing lately. My name’s Flureet. I’m just an old childhood friend—way back from Responsibility Group Three.”

  Mary Ann nodded primly. “How nice, I’m sure. My name is Mary Ann Carthington. And really, if in any way I’m—”

  “I told you it’s all right. Gygyo and I don’t mean a thing to each other. This Temporal Embassy work has dulled his taste for the everyday female; they’ve either got to be atavisms or precursors. I’m awaiting transformation—major transformation—so you couldn’t expect very strong feelings from my side, now could you? So let’s just say hello and go on from there.”

  Flureet flexed her arm in what Mary Ann recognized disdainfully as the standard greeting gesture. Such women! It made them look like a man showing off his muscle.

  “The ceiling said,” Mary Ann began uncertainly, “that Gyg—Mr. Rablin isn’t at size at the moment. Is that like what we call not being at home?”

  “In a sense,” said the bald girl. “He’s in this room, but he’s hardly large enough to talk to. Gygyo’s size right now is—let me think, what did he say he was setting it for?—oh, yes, 35 microns. He’s inside a drop of water in the field of that microscope to your left.”

  Mary Ann swung around and considered the spherical black object resting on a table against the wall. Outside of the two eyepieces set flush with the surface, it had little in common with pictures of microscopes she had seen in magazines.

  “In—in there? What’s he doing in there?”

  “He’s on a micro-hunt. You should know your Gygyo by now. An absolutely incurable romantic. Who goes on micro-hunts any more? And in a culture of intestinal amebae, of all things. Killing the beasties by hand instead of by routine psycho- or even chemo-therapy appeals to his dashing soul. ‘Grow up, Gygyo,’ I said to him. ‘These games are for children a
nd for Responsibility Group Four children at that.’ Well, that hurt his pride and he said he was going in with a fifteen-minute lock. A fifteen-minute lock! When I heard that, I decided to come here and watch the battle, just in case.”

  “Why? Is a fifteen-minute lock dangerous?” Mary Ann asked. Her face was tightly set, however; she was still thinking of that “you should know your Gygyo” remark. That was another thing about this world she didn’t like. With all their talk of privacy and the sacred rights of the individual, men like Gygyo didn’t think twice of telling the most intimate matters about people to—to other people.

  “Figure it out for yourself. Gygyo’s set himself for 35 microns. That’s about twice the size of most of the intestinal parasites he’ll have to fight—amebae like Endolimax nana, lodamoeba butschlii and Dientamoeba fragilis. But suppose he runs into a crowd of Endamoeba colii, to say nothing of our tropical dysentery friend, Endamoeba hystolytica—what then?”

  “What then?” the blonde girl echoed. She had not the slightest idea. One did not face problems like this in San Francisco.

  “Trouble, that’s what. Serious trouble. The colii might be as large as he is, and hystolyticae run even bigger—36, 37 microns, sometimes more. Now the most important factor on a micro-hunt is size, especially if you’re fool enough to limit your arsenal to a conventional sword and won’t be seen carrying an automatic weapon even as insurance. Well, under those circumstances, if you lock yourself down to smallness so that you can’t get out and nobody can take you out for a full fifteen minutes, you’re just asking for trouble. And trouble is exactly what our boy is having!”

  “He is? I mean is it bad?”

  The other girl gestured at the microscope. “Have a look. I’ve adjusted my retina to the magnification, but you people aren’t up to that yet, I believe. You need mechanical aids for every little thing. Go ahead, have a look. That’s Dientamoeba fragilis he’s fighting now. Small, but fast. And very, very vicious.”

  Mary Ann hurried to the spherical microscope and stared intently through the eyepieces.

  There, in the very center of the field, was Gygyo. A transparent bubble helmet covered his head and he was wearing some sort of thick but flexible one-piece garment over the rest of his body. About a dozen amebae, the apparent size of dogs, swarmed about, reaching for him with blunt, glassy pseudopods. He hacked away at them with a great two-handed sword in tremendous sweeps that cut in two the most venturesome and persistent of the creatures. But Mary Ann could see from his frantic breathing that he was getting tired. Every once in a while, he glanced rapidly over his left shoulder as if keeping watch on something in the distance.

  “Where does he get air from?” she asked.

  “The suit always contains enough oxygen for the duration of the lock,” Flureet’s voice explained behind her, sounding somewhat surprised at the question. “He has about five minutes to go, and I think he’ll make it. He’ll probably be shaken up enough, though, to—Did you see that?”

  Mary Ann gasped. An elongated, spindle-shaped creature which ended in a thrashing whiplike streak had just darted across the field, well over Gygyo’s head. It was half again his size. He had gone into a crouch as it passed and the amebae surrounding him had also leaped away. They were back at the attack in a moment, however, once the danger had passed. Very wearily now, he continued to chop at them.

  “What was it?”

  “A trypanosome. It went by too fast for me to identify it, but it looked like either Trypanosoma gambiense or rhodesiense—the African sleeping sickness protozoans. No, it was a bit too big to be either of them, now that I remember. It could have been—Oh, the fool!”

  Mary Ann turned to her, genuinely frightened. “What did he do?”

  “He neglected to get a pure culture, that’s what. Taking on several different kinds of intestinal amebae is wild enough, but if there are trypanosomes in there with him, then there might be anything! And him down to 35 microns!”

  Remembering the worried glances that Gygyo had thrown over his shoulder, Mary Ann swung back to the microscope. The man was still fighting desperately, but the strokes of the sword came much more slowly. Suddenly another ameba, different from those attacking Gygyo, swam into the field. It was almost transparent and about half his size.

  “That’s a new one,” she told Flureet. “Is it dangerous?”

  ‘No, Iodamoeba butschlii is just a sluggish, friendly lump. But what in the world is Gygyo afraid of to his left? He keeps turning his head as if—Oh.”

  The last exclamation came out almost as a simple comment, so completely was it weighted with despair. An oval monster—its length three times and its width fully twice Gygyo’s height—shot into the field from the left boundary as if making a stage entrance in reply to her question. The tiny hairlike appendages with which it was covered seemed to give it fantastic speed.

  Gygyo’s sword slashed at it, but it swerved aside and out of the field. It was back in a moment, coming down like a dive bomber. Gygyo and his other attackers leaped away, but one of the amebae was a little too slow. It disappeared, struggling madly, down the funnel-shaped mouth which indented the forward end of the egg-shaped horror.

  “Balantidium coli,” Flureet explained, “100 microns long, 65 microns wide. Fast and deadly and terribly hungry. I was afraid he’d hit something like this sooner or later. Well, that’s the end of our micro-hunting friend. He’ll never be able to avoid it long enough to get out. And he can’t kill a bug that size.”

  “Can’t you do something?” Mary Ann pleaded shakily.

  The bald woman brought her eyes down from the ceiling at last. Making what seemed an intense effort, she focused them on the girl. They were lit with bright astonishment.

  “What can I do? He’s locked inside that culture for another four minutes. Do you expect me to go in there and rescue him?”

  “If you can—of course!”

  “But that would be interfering with his sovereign rights as an individual! My dear girl, even if his wish to destroy himself is unconscious, it is still a wish originating in an essential part of his personality and must be respected. The whole thing is covered by the Subsidiary Rights Covenant of—”

  “How do you know he wants to destroy himself?” Mary Ann wept. “I never heard of such a thing! He’s supposed to be a—a friend of yours! Maybe he just accidentally got himself into more trouble than he expected and he can’t get out. I’m positive that’s what happened. Oh—poor Gygyo, while we’re standing here talking, he’s getting killed!”

  Flureet considered. “You may have a legitimate argument. He is a romantic and associating with you has given him all sorts of swaggering adventure-some notions. He’d never have done anything as risky as this before. But tell me: do you think it’s worth taking a chance of interfering with sovereign individual rights, just to save the life of an old and dear friend?”

  “I don’t understand you,” Mary Ann said helplessly. “Of course! Why don’t you let me—just do whatever you have to and send me in there after him. Please!”

  The other woman rose and shook her head. “No, I think I’d be more effective. I must say this romanticism is catching. And,” she laughed to herself, “just a little intriguing. You people in the twentieth century led such lives!”

  She turned some switch and shrank down swiftly. Just as she disappeared, there was a whispering movement, like a flame curving from a candle, and her body seemed to streak toward the microscope.

  Gygyo was down on one knee now, trying to present as small a target to the oval monster as possible. The amebae had either all fled or been swallowed. He was swinging the sword back and forth rapidly over his head as the Balantidium coli swooped down first on one side, then on the other, but he looked very tired. His lips were clenched together, his eyes squinting with desperation.

  And then the huge creature came straight down, feinted with its body, and, as he lunged at it with the sword, swerved slightly and hit him from the rear. Gygyo fell, losing his
weapon.

  Hairy appendages churning, the monster spun around so that its funnel-shaped mouth was in front and came streaking back for the kill.

  An enormous hand, a hand the size of Gygyo’s whole body, swung into view and knocked the beast to one side. Gygyo scrambled to his feet, regained the sword and looked up unbelievingly. He exhaled with relief and then smiled. Flureet had evidently stopped her shrinkage at a size several times larger than a hundred microns. Her body was not visible in the microscope to Mary Ann, but it was obviously far too visible to the Balantidium coli, which turned and scudded away.

  And for the remaining minutes of the lock, there was not a creature which seemed even vaguely inclined to wander into Gygyo’s neighborhood.

  To Mary Ann’s astonishment, Flureet’s first words to Gygyo when they reappeared beside her at their full height were an apology: “I’m truly sorry, but your fire-eating friend here got me all excited about your safety, Gygyo. If you want to bring me up on charges of violating the Covenant and interfering with an individual’s carefully prepared plans for self-destruction—”

  Gygyo waved her to silence. “Forget it. In the words of the past: Covenant, Shmovenant. You saved my life and, as far as I know, I wanted it saved. If I started proceedings against you for interfering with my unconscious, in all fairness we’d have to subpoena my conscious mind as a witness in your defense. The case could drag on for months and I’m far too busy.”

  “You’re right,” the bald woman agreed. “There’s nothing like a schizoid lawsuit when it comes to complications and verbal quibbling. But all the same, I’m grateful to you—I didn’t have to go and save your life. I don’t know quite what got into me.”

  “That’s what got into you.” Gygyo gestured at Mary Ann. “The century of regimentation, of total war, of massive meddling. I know: it’s contagious.”

  Mary Ann exploded. “Well, really! I never in my life—I just can’t believe it! First she doesn’t want to save your life, because it would be interfering with your unconscious—your unconscious! Then, when she finally does something about it, she apologizes to you—she apologizes! And instead of thanking her, you talk as if you’re excusing her for—for committing assault and battery! And then you start insulting me and—”