Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

“It’s…funny,” she said slowly, and getting out that second word cost her a lot. “It’s really damned funny. At first…at first, there, he was really good for my nerves. He never got angry. Nothing rattled him. He never got emotional the way men do, never got the blues. It’s not that he doesn’t feel things. I thought so at first, but I was wrong. It’s just that…living with a thing like that, either he could be irritable enough to bite people’s heads off all the time, or he could learn how to hold it all in. That’s what he did, probably back when he was a little kid. ‘What’s done is done,’ he’d say, and keep on going. He does need to be held and cared for, have his shoulders rubbed out after a bad one, have one person he can tell about it. I know I’ve been good for him, and I guess at first it made me feel kind of special. As if it took some kind of genius person to share pain.” She closed her eyes and grimaced. “Oh, and Bobby came to love him so!”

  There was silence.

  “Then the weirdness of it started to get to me. He’d put a Band-Aid in his pocket, and a couple of hours later he’d cut his finger chopping lettuce. I’d get diarrhea and run to the John, and there’d be my favorite magazine on the floor. I’d come downstairs at bedtime for vitamins and find every pot in the house full of water, and go back up to bed wondering what the hell, and wake up a little while later to find that a socket short had set the living room on fire before it tripped the breaker and he had it under control. I’d catch him concealing some little preparation from me, and know that it was for me or Bobby, and I’d carry on and beg him to tell me—and the best of those times were when all I could make him tell me was, ‘What’s done is done.’

  “I started losing sleep and losing weight.

  “And then one day the principal called just before dinner to tell me that a school bus had been hit by a tractor-trailer and fourteen students were critically injured and Bobby and another boy were…I threw the telephone across the room at him, I jumped on him like a wild animal and punched him with my fists, I screamed and screamed. ‘YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY!’” she screamed again now, and it rang and rang in the stillness of Callahan’s Place. I wanted to leap up and take her in my arms, let her sob it out against my chest, but something held me back.

  She pulled herself together and gulped cold coffee. You could hear the air conditioner sigh and the clock whir. You could not hear cloth rustle or a chair creak. When she spoke again, her voice was under rigid control. It made my heart sick to hear it.

  “I left him for a week. He must have been hurting more than I was. So I left him and stayed in a crummy motel, curled up around my own pain. He made all the arrangements, and made them hold off burying Bobby until I came back, and when I did, all he said was…what I expected him to say, and we went on living.

  “I started drinking. I mean, I started in that motel and kept it up when I went home. I never had before. I drank alone. I don’t know if he ever found out. He must have. He never said anything. I…I started growing away from him. I knew it wasn’t right or fair, but I just turned off to him completely. He never said anything. All this started happening about six months ago. I just got more and more self-destructive, more crazy, more…hungry for something.”

  She closed her eyes and straightened her shoulders.

  “Tonight is Cass’s bowling night. This afternoon I…” She opened her eyes. “…I made a date with a stockboy at the Pathmark supermarket. I told him to come by around ten, when my husband was gone. After supper he got his ball and shoes ready, like always, and left. I started to clean up in the kitchen so I’d have time to get juiced before Wally showed up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cass tiptoe back into the living room. He was carrying a big manila envelope and something else I couldn’t see; the envelope was in the way. I pretended not to see him, and in a few seconds I heard the door close behind him.

  “I dried my hands. I went into the living room. On the mantel, by the bedroom door, was the envelope, tucked behind the flowerpot. Tucked behind it was his service revolver. I left it there and walked out the door and came here and started drinking, and now I’ve had enough of this fucking coffee. I want a screwdriver.”

  Fast Eddie deserves his name. He was the first of us to snap out of the trance, and it probably didn’t take him more than thirty seconds. He walked over to the bar on his banty little legs and slapped down a dollar and said, “Screwdriver, Mike.”

  Callahan shook his head slightly. He drew on his cigar and frowned at it for having gone out. He flung it into the fireplace and built a screwdriver, and he never said a mumblin’ word. Eddie brought her the drink. She drained half at once.

  Shorty Steinitz spoke up, and his voice sounded rusty. “I service air-conditioning systems. The big ones. I was over at Century Lanes today. Their unit has an intermittent that I can’t seem to trace. It keeps cuttin’ in and out.”

  She shut her eyes and did something similar to smiling and nodded her head. “That’s it, all right. He’ll be home early.”

  Then she looked me square in the eye.

  “Well, Jake, do you understand now? I’m scared as hell! Because I’m here instead of there, and so he’s not going to kill me after all. And he tells me that if you try to prevent a death, something worse happens, and I’m going out of my mind wondering what could be worse than getting killed!”

  Total horror flooded through me; I thought my heart would stop.

  I knew what was worse than getting killed.

  Dear Jesus, no, I thought, and I couldn’t help it. I wanted very badly to keep my face absolutely straight and my eyes holding hers, and I couldn’t help it. There was just that tiny hope, and so I glanced for the merest instant at the Counterclock and then back to her. And in that moment of moments, scared silly and three-quarters bagged, she was seeing me clearly enough to pick up on it and know from my face that something was wrong.

  It was 10:15.

  My heart was a stone. I knew the answers to the next questions, and again I couldn’t help myself: I had to ask them.

  “Mrs.—”

  “Kathy Anders. What’s the matter?” Just what I had asked her, a few centuries ago.

  “Kathy, you…you didn’t lock the house behind you when you left?”

  Callahan went pale behind the bar, and his new cigar fell out of his mouth.

  “No,” she said. “What the hell has that—”

  “And you were too upset to think of—”

  “Oh Christ,” she screamed. “Oh no, I never thought! Oh Christ, Wally, that dumb cocky kid. He’ll show up at ten and find the door wide open and figure I went to the corner for beer and decide it’s cute to wait for me in bed, and—” She whirled and found the clock, and puzzled out the time somehow, and wailed, “No!” And I tore in half right down the middle. She sprang from her chair and lurched toward the bar. I could not get to my feet to follow her. Callahan was already holding out the telephone, and when she couldn’t dial it, he got the number out of her and dialed it for her. His face was carven from marble. I was just getting up on my hind legs by then. No one else moved. My feet made no sound at all on the sawdust. I could clearly hear the phone ringing on the other end. Once. Twice. Three times. “Come on, Cass, damn you, answer me!” Four times. Oh dear God, I thought, she still doesn’t get it. Five times. Maybe she does get it—and won’t have it. Six times.

  It was picked up on the seventh ring, and at once she was shrieking, “You killed him, you bastard. He was just a jerk kid, and you had to—”

  She stopped and held the phone at arm’s length and stared at it. It cluttered at her, an agitated chipmunk. Her eyes went round.

  “Wally?” she asked it weakly. Then even more weakly she said to it, “That’s his will in that manila envelope,” and she fainted.

  “Mike!” I cried, and leaped forward. The big barkeep understood me somehow and lunged across the bar on his belly and caught the phone in both hands. That left me my whole attention to deal with her, and I needed that and all my strength to get her to the floor gently. />
  “Wally,” Callahan was saying to the chipmunk, “Wally, listen to me. This is a friend. I know what happened, and—listen to me, Wally, I’m trying to keep your ass out of the slam. Are you listening to me, son? Here’s what you’ve got to do—”

  Someone crowded me on my left, and I almost belted him before I realized it was Doc Webster with smelling salts.

  “—No, screw fingerprints, this ain’t TV. Just make up the goddamn bed and put yer cigarette butts in yer pocket and don’t touch anything else—”

  She coughed and came around.

  “—sure nobody sees you leave, and then you get your ass over to Callahan’s bar, off 25A. We got thirty folks here’ll swear you been here all night, but it’d be nice if we knew what you looked like.”

  She stared up at us vacantly, and as I was helping her get up and into a chair, I was talking. I wanted her to be involved in listening to me when full awareness returned. It would be very hard to hold her, and I was absolutely certain I could do it.

  “Kathy, you’ve got to listen carefully to me, because if you don’t, in just another minute now you’re going to try and swallow one giant egg of guilt, and it will, believe me, stick in your throat and choke you. You’re choking on a couple already, and this one might kill you—and it’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not just. You’re gonna award yourself a guilt that you don’t deserve, and the moment you accept it and pin it on it’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. Believe me, I know. Damn it, it’s okay to be glad you’re still alive!”

  “What the hell do you know about it?” she cried out.

  “I’ve been there,” I said softly. “As recently as an hour ago.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “I came in here tonight so egocentrically wrapped up in my own pain that I sat next to you for fifteen minutes and never noticed you, until some friends woke me up. This is a kind of anniversary for me, Kathy. Five years and one day ago I had a wife and a two-year-old daughter. And I had a Big Book of Auto Repair. I decided I could save thirty dollars easy by doing my own brake job. I tested it myself and drove maybe a whole block. Five years ago tonight all three of us went to the drive-in movie. I woke up without a scratch on me. Both dead. I smiled at the man who was trying to cut my door open, and I climbed out the window past him and tried to get my wrists on his chainsaw. He coldcocked me, and I woke up under restraint.” I locked eyes with her. “I was glad to be alive too. That’s why I wanted to die so bad.”

  She blinked and spoke very softly. “How…how did you keep alive?”

  “I got talking with a doctor the size of a hippo named Sam Webster, and he got me turned loose and brought me around here.”

  She waited for me to finish. “You—that’s it? What is that?”

  “Dis is Callahan’s Place,” Eddie said.

  “This place is magic,” I told her.

  “Magic? Bullshit, magic, it’s a bar. People come here to get blind.”

  “No. Not this one. People come to this bar to see. That’s why I’m ashamed at how long it took me to see you. This is a place where people care. For as long as I sat here in my pain, my friends were in pain with me and did what they could to help. They told stories of past blunders to make it a little easier for me to make my annual toast to my family. You know what gives me the courage to keep on living? The courage to love myself a little? It’s having a whole bunch of friends who really give a goddamn. When you share pain, there’s less of it, and when you share joy, there’s more of it. That’s a basic fact of the universe, and I learned it here. I’ve seen it work honest-to-God miracles.”

  “Name me a miracle.”

  “Of all the gin joints in all the world, you come into this one. Tonight, of all the nights in the year. And you look like her, and your name is Kathy.”

  She gaped. “I—your wife?—I look—?”

  “Oh, not a ringer—that only happens on The Late Late Show. But close enough to scare me silly. Don’t you see, Kathy? For five years now I’ve been using that word, fivesight, not in conversation, just in my head, as a private label for precognition. I jumped when you said it. For five years now I’ve been wishing to God I’d been born with it. I was wishing it earlier tonight.

  “Now I know better.”

  Her jaw worked, but she made no sound.

  “We’ll help you, Kathy,” Callahan said.

  “Damn straight,” Eddie croaked.

  “We’ll help you find your own miracle,” Long-Drink assured her. “They come by here regular.”

  There were murmurs of agreement, encouraging words. She stared around the place as though we had all turned into toads. “And what do you want from me?” she snapped.

  “That you hold up your end,” I said. “That you not leave us holding the bag. Suicide isn’t just a cop-out; it’s a rip-off.”

  She shook her head, as violently as she dared. “People don’t do that; people don’t act this way.”

  My voice softened, saddened. “Upright apes don’t. People do.”

  She finished her drink. “But—”

  “Listen, we just contradicted something you said earlier. It seems like it does take some kind of genius person to share pain. And I think you did a better job than I could have done. Two, three years you stayed with that poor bastard? Kathy, that strength and compassion you gave to Cass for so long, the imagination and empathy you have so much of, those are things we badly need here. We get a lot of incoming wounded. You could be of use here, while you’re waiting for your own miracle.”

  She looked around at every face, looked long at Callahan and longest at me.

  Then she shook her head and said, “Maybe I already got it,” and she burst finally and explosively into tears, flinging herself into my arms. They were the right kind of tears. I smiled and smiled for some considerable time, and then I saw the clock and got very businesslike. Wally would be along soon, and there was much to be done. “Okay, Eddie, you get her address from her purse and ankle over there. Make sure that fool kid didn’t screw up. Pyotr, you Litvak Samaritan, go on out and wake up your wheels. Here, Drink, you get her out to the parking lot; I can’t hold her up much longer. Margie, you’re the girlfriend she went to spend the weekend with yesterday, okay? You’re gonna put her up until she’s ready to face the cops. Doc, you figure out what she’s contracted that she doesn’t want to bother her husband by calling. Shorty, if nobody discovers the body by, say, tomorrow noon, you make a service call to the wrong address and find him. Mike—”

  Callahan was already holding out one finger of Irish.

  “Say, Jake,” Callahan said softly, “didn’t I hear your wife’s name was Diane? Kinda short and red-haired and jolly, gray eyes?”

  We smiled at each other. “It was a plausible miracle that didn’t take a whole lot of buildup and explanation. What if I’d told her we stopped an alien from blowing up the earth in here once?”

  “You talk good on your feet, son.”

  I walked up to the chalk line. “Let me make the toast now,” I said loudly. “The same one I’ve made annually for five years—with a little addition.”

  Folks hushed up and listened.

  “To my family,” I said formally, then drained the Irish and gently underhanded my glass onto the hearth.

  And then I turned around and faced them all and added, “Each and every one of you.”

  Concerning “Fivesight”:

  There’s been a wave of stuff about precognition in the popular media these days—people who dream disasters before they happen and so forth. Whether or not there’s anything to it I couldn’t say, but I’m willing to believe it can happen.

  But when I will become seriously interested in precognition is the first time I hear of a disaster averted because of precognition. If some guy dreams a given flight is going to go down, and they cancel the flight and discover on inspection that it would have gone down, then I will join my local Support Your Prophets Club.

  Unless and until that happens, I
suspect the kindest thing to do for precognitors is to shoot them. Kindest for the future victims, too—if you know the date and manner of my death, kindly keep it to yourself.

  Life’s greatest virtue is its ability to surprise.

  Postscript: both of the anecdotes told by Tommy Janssen and Long-Drink McGonnigle early in “Fivesight” actually occurred, exactly as described—but not to them. Each stole his story from me (that’s all right—I’ve stolen them back). The first happened to my old college chum, Dirty Jack, and the second happened to my brother-in-law, John Moore.

  Honest.

  SOUL SEARCH

  Rebecca Howell stood beside the plexiglass tank that contained the corpse of her husband Archer, trembling with anticipation.

  A maelstrom of conflicting emotions raged within her: fondness, yearning, awe, lust, triumphant satisfaction, fierce joy and an underlayer of fear all trying to coexist in the same skull. Perhaps no one in all human history had experienced that precise mix of emotions, for her situation was close to unique. Because she was who and what she was, it would shortly lead her to develop the first genuinely new motive for murder in several thousand years.

  “Go ahead,” she said aloud, and eight people in white crowded around the transparent cryotank with her. In practiced silence, they began doing things.

  John Dimsdale touched her shoulder. “Reb,” he said softly, “come on. Let them work.”

  “No.”

  “Reb, the first part is not pretty. I think you should—”

  “Dammit, I know that!”

  “I think,” he repeated insistently, “you should come with me.”

  She stiffened; and then she saw some of the things the technicians were doing. “All right. Doctor Bharadwaj!”

  One of the white-suited figures looked up irritably.

  “Call me before you fire the pineal. Without fail.” She let Dimsdale lead her from the room, down white tile corridors to Bharadwaj’s offices. His secretary looked up as they entered, and hastened to open the door leading into the doctor’s inner sanctum for them. Dimsdale dismissed him, and Howell sat down heavily in the luxurious desk chair, putting her feet up on Bharadwaj’s desk. They were both silent for perhaps ten minutes.