Time Waits for Winthrop

by William Tenn

  “I’m sorry,” Gygyo said. “I didn’t intend to insult you, Mary Ann, neither you nor your century. After all, we must remember that it was the first century of modern times, the crisis-sickness from which recovery began. And it was in very many ways a truly great and adventuresome period in which Man, for the last time, dared things which he has never since attempted.”

  “Well. In that case.” Mary Ann swallowed and began to feel better. And at that moment, she saw Gygyo and Flureet exchange the barest hint of a smile. She stopped feeling better. Damn these people! Who did they think they were?

  Flureet moved to the yellow square exit. “I just stopped in to say good-by before my transformation. Wish me luck, Gygyo.”

  “Your transformation? So soon? Well, all the best, of course. It’s been good knowing you, Flureet.”

  When the woman had left, Mary Ann looked at Gygyo’s deeply concerned face and asked hesitantly: “What does she mean ‘transformation’? And she said it was a major transformation. What’s she talking about?”

  The dark-haired young man studied the wall for a moment. “I’d better not,” he said at last, mostly to himself. “That’s one of the concepts you’d find upsetting, like our active food, for instance. And speaking of food, I’m hungry. Hungry, do you hear? Hungry!”

  A section of the wall shook violently as his voice rose. It protruded an arm of itself at him. A tray was balanced on the end of the arm. Still standing, Gygyo began to eat from the tray.

  He didn’t offer Mary Ann any, which, as far as she was concerned, was just as well. She had seen at a glance that it was the purple spaghettilike stuff of which he was so terribly fond.

  Maybe it tasted good. Maybe it didn’t. She’d never know. She only knew that she could never bring herself to eat anything which writhed up toward one’s mouth and wriggled about cozily once it was inside.

  That was another thing about this world. The things these people ate!

  Gygyo glanced up and saw her face. “I wish you’d try it just once, Mary Ann,” he said wistfully. “It would add a whole new dimension to food for you. In addition to flavor, texture and aroma, you’d experience motility. Think of it: food not just lying there limp and lifeless in your mouth, but food expressing eloquently its desire to be eaten. Even your friend Winthrop, culinary esthete that he is, admitted to me the other day that Centaurian libal has it all over his favorite food symphonies in many ways. You see, they can adjust their flavor to the dietary wishes of the person consuming them. That way, you get—”

  “Please! It makes me absolutely and completely sick even to think of it.”

  “All right.” He finished eating, nodded at the wall, which withdrew the arm and sucked the tray back into itself. “I give up. All I wanted was to have you sample the stuff before you left.”

  “Leaving—that’s what I came to see you about. We’re having trouble.”

  “I was hoping you’d come to see me for myself alone,” he said with a disconsolate droop of his head.

  She couldn’t tell whether he was being funny or serious, so she got angry as the easiest way of handling the situation. “See here, Gygyo Rablin, you are the very last man on Earth—past, present or future—that I ever want to see again. And you know why! Any man who—who says things to a girl like you s-said to m-me, and at s-such a t-time…”

  Against her will, and to her extreme annoyance, her voice broke. Tears tickled their way down her face. She set her lips determinedly and tried to shake them away.

  Gygyo looked really uncomfortable now. He sat down on a corner of the desk, which twitched under him more erratically than ever.

  “I am sorry, Mary Ann. Truly, terribly, sincerely sorry. I should never have made love to you in the first place. Even without our substantial temporal and cultural differences, I’m certain you know as well as I do that we have precious little in common. But I found you—well, exciting like no woman in my own time, or any woman that I’ve ever encountered in a visit to the future. Bizarre—earthy—violently female. I just couldn’t resist the attraction. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the depressing effect your peculiar cosmetics would have upon me. The actual tactile sensations were extremely upsetting.”

  “That’s not what you said. And the way you said it! You rubbed your finger on my face and lips, and you went: ‘Grea-sy! Grea-sy!’” Thoroughly in control of herself now, she mimicked him viciously.

  Gygyo shrugged. “I said I’m sorry and I meant it. But if you only knew how that stuff feels to a highly educated tactile sense! That smeary red lipstick—that tinted grit on your cheeks! There’s no excuse for me, that I’ll grant, but I’m just trying to make you understand why I erupted so stupidly.”

  “I suppose you think I’d be a lot nicer if I shaved my head like some of these women—like that horrible Flureet!”

  He smiled and shook his head. “You couldn’t be like them and they couldn’t be like you. There are entirely different concepts of womanhood and beauty involved. In your period, the greatest emphasis is on a kind of physical similarity, whereas we place the accent on difference, but most particularly on emotional difference. The more emotions a woman can exhibit and the more complex they are, the more striking is she considered. That’s the point of the shaved heads: to show suddenly appearing subtle wrinkles that might be missed if the area were covered with hair. We call Woman’s bald head her Frowning Glory.”

  Mary Ann’s shoulders slumped and she stared down at the floor, which started to raise a section of itself questioningly, but sank down again as it realized that nothing was required of it. “I don’t understand, and I guess I won’t ever understand. All I know is that I just can’t stay in the same world with you, Gygyo Rablin—the very thought of it makes me feel kind of all wrong and sick inside.”

  “I do understand,” he said seriously. “And for whatever comfort it may be—you have the same effect on me. I’d never have done anything as supremely idiotic as going on a locked microhunt in an impure culture before I met you. But those exciting stories of your adventuresome friend Edgar Rapp finally crept under my skin. I found I had to prove myself a man in your terms, Mary Ann—in your terms!”

  “Edgar Rapp?” She looked at him incredulously. “Adventure-some? Exciting? Edgar? The only time he ever gets close to sport is when he sits on his behind all night playing poker with the boys in the payroll department!”

  Gygyo rose and barged around the room aimlessly, shaking his head. “The casual, half-contemptuous way you say it! The constant psychic risks run, the inevitably recurring clashes of personality—subliminal and overt—as hand after hand is played, as hour after hour goes by, with not two, not three, but as many as five, six or even seven different and highly aggressive human beings involved—the bluffs, the raises, the outwitting, the fantastic rugged contest of it! There is not a man in my entire world who’d be able to stand up to fifteen minutes of such complex psychological punishment—yet, to you, it’s almost nothing!”

  Her gaze was very soft and tender as she watched him knock unhappily about the room. “And that’s why you went into that awful microscope, Gygyo? To prove that you could be as good a man as Edgar is when he’s playing poker?”

  “It’s not just the poker. That’s hair-raising enough, I grant you. It’s so many things. Take this used car that he drives you around in. Any man who’d drive one of those clumsy, unpredictable power-plants through the kind of traffic and the kind of accident statistics that your world boasts—and every day, as a matter of course! I knew the micro-hunt was a pathetic, artificial affair, but it was the only thing available that even came close!”

  “You don’t have to prove anything to me, Gygyo.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” he brooded. “But I had reached the point where I had to prove it to myself. Which is quite silly when you come to think of it, but that doesn’t make it any less real. And I proved something, after all. That two people with entirely different standards for male and female don’t have a chance, no
matter how attractive they find each other. I can’t live with my knowledge of your innate standards, and you—well, you certainly have found mine upsetting. We don’t mesh, we don’t resonate, we don’t go. As you said before, we shouldn’t be in the same world. That’s doubly true ever since—since we found out how strongly we tend to come together.”

  She nodded. “I know. The way you stopped making love to me and—and said—that horrid word, the way you kind of shuddered when you wiped your lips—Gygyo, it tore me absolutely and completely to bits. I knew right then I had to get out of your time forever. But with Winthrop acting the way he is—I don’t know what to do!”

  “Tell me about it.” He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together as he sat beside her on a section of upraised floor.

  By the time she had finished, his recovery was complete. Dismayed, Mary Ann watched him become once more a highly urbane, extremely intelligent and slightly supercilious young man of the twenty-fifth century, and felt in her very bone marrow her own awkwardness increase, her garish, none-too-bright primitiveness come thickly to the surface.

  “I can’t do a thing for you,” he said. “I wish I could.”

  “Not even,” she asked desperately, “with the problems you and I have? Not even considering how terrible it’ll be if I stay here, if I don’t leave on time?”

  “Not even considering all that. I doubt that I could make it clear to you, however much if I tried, but I can’t force Winthrop to go, I can’t in all conscience give you any advice on how to force him, and I can’t think of a thing that would make him change his mind. You see, there’s a whole social fabric involved which is far more significant than our personal little agonies, however important they may be to us. In my world, as Storku pointed out, one just doesn’t do such things. And that, my sweet, is that.”

  Mary Ann sat back. She hadn’t needed the slightly mocking tone of Gygyo’s last words to tell her that he was now completely in control of himself, that once more he was looking upon her as an intriguing but—culturally speaking—extremely distant specimen.

  She knew only too well what was happening: she’d been on the other end of this kind of situation once or twice herself. Just two months ago, a smooth salesman who handled the Nevada territory for her company had taken her out on a date and almost swept her off her feet. Just as she’d reached the point where the wine in her brain was filled with bubbles of starlight, she’d taken out a cigarette and dreamily, helplessly, asked him for a light. The salesman had clicked a lighter at her in an assured and lordly gesture, but the lighter had failed to work. He had cursed, clicked it futilely a few more times, then had begun picking at the mechanism madly with his fingernails.

  In the next few moments, as he continued to claw at the lighter, it had seemed to Mary Ann that the glossy surface of his personality developed an enormous fissure along its entire length and all the underlying desperation that was essentially him looked out. He was no longer a glamorous, successful and warmly persuasive young man, but a pathetically driven creature who was overpoweringly uncertain, afraid that if one item in his carefully prepared presentation missed its place on the schedule, the sale would not take place.

  And it didn’t. When he’d looked at her again, he saw the cool comprehension in her eyes. His lips sagged. And no matter how he tried to recapture the situation, how cleverly he talked, how many oceans of sparkling urgency he washed over her, she was his master now. She had seen through his magic to the unhooded yellow light bulbs which made it work.

  She remembered feeling somewhat sorry for him as she’d asked him to take her home—not sorrow for someone with whom she’d almost fallen in love, but slight sorrow for a handicapped child (someone else’s handicapped child) who had tried to do something utterly beyond his ability.

  Was that what Gygyo was feeling for her now? With brimming anger and despair, Mary Ann felt she had to reach him again, reach him very personally. She had to wipe off that smile of his.

  “Of course,” she said, selecting the first weapon that came to hand, “it won’t do you any good if Winthrop doesn’t go back with us.”

  He looked at her questioningly. “Me?”

  “Well, if Winthrop doesn’t go back, we’ll be stuck here. And if we’re stuck here, the people from Your time who are visiting ours will be stuck in the twentieth century. You’re the temporal supervisor—you might get fired from your job.”

  “My dear little Mary Ann! Getting fired—what a concept! Next you’ll be telling me I’m liable to have my ears cropped!”

  To her chagrin, he chuckled all over.

  “Don’t you even feel responsible? Don’t you feel anything?”

  “Well, whatever I feel, it certainly isn’t responsibility. The five people from this century who volunteered to make the trip back to yours were well-educated, extremely alert, highly responsible human beings. They knew they were running risks.”

  She rose agitatedly. “But how were they to know that Winthrop was going to be stubborn? And how could we know that?”

  “Even assuming that the possibility entered nobody’s mind,” he pointed out, tugging at her arm gently until she sat down beside him again, “one has to admit, in all reason, that transferring to a period five centuries away must be accompanied by certain dangers. Not being able to return is one of them. Then one has to further admit that, this being so, one or more of the people making the transfer recognized this danger and—at least unconsciously—wished to subject themselves to its consequences.

  If that is at all the situation, interference would be a major crime, not only against Winthrop’s conscious desires, but against such people’s unconscious motivations as well—and both have almost equal weight in the ethics of our period. That’s about as simple as I can make it, Mary Ann. Do you understand now?”

  “A—a little,” she confessed. “You mean it’s like Flureet not wanting to save you when you were almost being killed in that micro-hunt, because maybe, unconsciously, you wanted to get yourself killed?”

  “Right! And believe me, Flureet wouldn’t have lifted a finger, old friend or no old friend, your romantic twentieth-century dither notwithstanding, if she hadn’t been on the verge of major transformation, with the concurrent psychological remove from all normal standards and present-day human frames of reference.”

  “What is this major transformation business?”

  Gygyo shook his head emphatically. “Don’t ask me that; It’s a concept and a practice as peculiar to our time as—oh, say, tabloid journalism and election-night excitement are to yours. What you want to appreciate is this other thing—the way we protect and nurture the individual eccentric impulse, even if it should be suicidal. Let me put it this way. The French Revolution tried to sum itself up in the slogan, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité; the American Revolution used the phrase, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

  “We feel that the entire essence of our civilization is contained in these words: The Utter Sacredness of the Individual and the Individual Eccentric Impulse. The last part is the most important, because without it our society would have as much right to interfere with the individual as yours did. A man wouldn’t even have the elementary freedom of doing away himself without first getting the proper papers filled out by the proper government official. A person who wanted to—”

  Mary Ann stood up with determination. “All right! I’m not the least little bit interested in this nonsense. You won’t help us in any way, you don’t care if we’re stuck here for the rest of our natural lives, and that’s that! I might as well go.”

  “In the name of the Covenant, girl, what did you expect me to tell you? I’m no Oracle Machine. I’m just a man.”

  “A man?” she cried scornfully. “You call yourself a man? Why, a man would—a real man would just—Oh, let me get out of here!”

  The dark-haired young man shrugged and rose, too. He called for a jumper. When it materialized beside them, he gestured toward it courteously. Mary Ann
started for it, paused, then held out a hand to him.

  “Gygyo,” she said, “whether we stay or leave on time, I’m never going to see you again. I’ve made up my mind on that. But there’s one thing I want you to know.” As if realizing what she was going to say, he had dropped his eyes. His head was bent over the hand he had taken.

  Seeing this, Mary Ann felt her voice grow gentler and more tender. “It’s just—just that—oh, Gygyo, it’s that you’re the only man I’ve ever loved. Ever really, truly, absolutely and completely loved. I want you to know that, Gygyo.”

  He didn’t reply. He was still holding her fingers tightly and she couldn’t see his eyes.

  “Gygyo,” she said, her voice breaking. “You’re feeling the same, aren’t—” He looked up. There was an expression of puzzlement on his face. He pointed to the fingers he had been holding. Each nail was colored with a bright, recently applied lacquer.

  “Why in the world,” he asked, “do you limit it to the fingernail? Most primitive peoples did it on larger parts of the body. One would expect that at least you would tattoo the whole hand—Mary Ann! Did I say anything wrong again?”

  Sobbing bitterly, the girl darted past him and into the jumper.

  She went back to Mrs. Brucks’ room, and, when she had been calmed sufficiently, explained why Gygyo Rablin, the temporal supervisor, either could not or would not help them with Winthrop’s stubbornness.

  Dave Pollock glared around the oval room. “So we give up? Is that what it comes to? Not one person in all this brilliant, gimmicky, gadgety future will lift a finger to help us get back to our own time and our own families—and we can’t help ourselves. A brave new world, all right. Real achievement. Real progress.”

  “I don’t see what call you have to shoot your mouth off, young man,” Mr. Mead growled from where he was sitting at the far end of the room. Periodically, his necktie curled upward and tried to nuzzle against his lips; wearily, petulantly, he slapped it down again. “At least we tried to do something about it. That’s more than you can say.”