Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  He received a scattered ovation, which died quickly.

  I was as stunned as anyone else, but I think my strongest reaction was irritation at having my thunder stolen. There sure and hell were a lot of hooves up there. “Eddie,” I called out bitterly, “someone has obviously gone to a lot of trouble to set up a gag. The least we can do is bite. Check it out, will you?”

  Fast Eddie Costigan got up from his upright piano, eyes on the ceiling. “Sure t’ing,” he said uncertainly.

  There are two openings onto the roof. One is the access hatch near the fireplace, with a ladder up to it built into the wall. On warm nights Mike lets customers take their drinks up there and stargaze, which accounts for the second opening: a big dumbwaiter at the end of the bar. It carries dollar bills down and drinks and peanuts back up. Mike built it himself, and he made it big enough for parties. Both openings would have been in use that night, of course, if it hadn’t been raining. Eddie went up the ladder with a hesitancy that belied his nickname, and poked the hatch door open most gingerly. A practical joke this elaborate might have teeth in it—and Eddie, being from Brooklyn, has a horror of livestock. Prepared for anything, he hooked his head up over the coaming for a quick look.

  He froze there, half out of the room, for a long moment, rain dripping in around him. Then he just slid down the ladder, landing hard on his butt. His monkey face was snow white.

  “Well?” Callahan asked.

  “Sleigh,” Eddie said. “Eight tiny reindeer. Heavyset guy with a white beard.”

  “Told ya,” Callahan said.

  Eddie nodded, dripping rainwater. “Ho ho ho.”

  The dumbwaiter came to life.

  Callahan turned to face it and put his big hands on his hips. The room was absolutely still, absolutely quiet save for the sound of the little dumbwaiter motor being overworked. It stopped. The door opened.

  Inside, a man was balanced on his head, juggling lit cherry bombs.

  “Zut alors,” he said. “God damn.”

  Callahan stepped back a pace.

  The stranger fell forward, twisting as he fell so that he landed on his feet in front of the big barkeep, still juggling. As Mike opened his mouth, the hypnotic circle of burning fireworks opened out into a long arc whose terminus was the fireplace. All four cherry bombs exploded therein with a stupendous concussion. Broken glass sprayed outward, miraculously arranging itself on the floor to spell out the word “Al.”

  The stranger vaulted the bar at once and cartwheeled into the middle of the room, people scattering frantically out of his way. He landed lightly on his feet and beamed.

  “Phee is the name,” he cried merrily, “Al Phee, and the first one who asks me what it’s all about gets a boot in the plums. Phee’s my name and commission’s my game—gather round like cattle and you shall be herd. I bring you the bazaar of the bizarre, the genuine Universal Pantechnicon, at a cost of just pennies! Sacre bleu! Baise mes fesses! Everything must go! Me stony, you savvy? Plenty bankruptcy along me.”

  We all stared at him.

  “Come on,” he shouted, “Look alive, get with it. This is opportunidad muy milagroso—act now while this offer lasts. Step right up—who’ll be the first? Oh faddle—” Suddenly he fell upon the room like a whirlwind, like a big mad mosquito or a horny hummingbird. He darted through the crowd, hugging people, kissing people, shaking hands, shaking feet, tugging on beards, introducing himself to the fire extinguisher and shaking its hose, grinning like Hell’s PR man and talking a mile a minute. He took a scissor from his breast pocket, clipped the end off Long-Drink McGonnigle’s tie and presented it to him with a bow. He produced a white mouse from a side pocket and gave it gravely to Josie, and when she only smiled he burst into delighted laughter himself, lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the mouse. He stuck his face an inch away from mine, tousled my beard and patted my ass and danced away.

  Eddie had been misleading: he didn’t look much like Santa. He was not that heavyset, for one thing. The beard was more salt than pepper, but the neat short hair was weighted the other way—and the beard itself was not a Santa-type but something in between a spade and a van dyke. I would say that he comported himself in a manner even more dapper and elegant than Gentleman John—certainly more flamboyant.

  He wore a four hundred dollar blazer over a polka-dot pajama top. He wore no trousers, and fat beaming Buddhas were printed on his shorts. He wore phosphorescent lederhosen and jester’s shoes with curled up toes and bells. A propellor beanie was rakishly canted over one eyebrow. The rain had not wet him. Behind wire-rim glasses, merry eyes sparkled.

  About that time Long-Drink caught up with him, roaring something about his tie. Phee spun to meet him, smiled with the enormous delight of one encountering an old and dear friend, picked three glasses of whiskey from a nearby table and began to juggle them. Not a drop did he spill. Long-Drink stopped dead in his tracks and his long jaw hung down. Phee began to clap his hands rhythmically while he juggled, then slapped his thighs.

  Without taking his eyes from the glasses, the Drink felt for his tie, yanked it from his neck and tramped it into the sawdust.

  Phee backed away, still juggling and clapping, until he was back in the center of the room where he had started. Suddenly the glasses were all upside down in their stately circle, their contents in motion. Each cataract ended up in Phee’s mouth, and his beard was dry when he finished.

  His cyclone passage among us had shattered our group stasis—the room was filled with the rooba-rooba of many people talking all at once. When the last of the three empty glasses hit the hearth, and the fragments had spelled “PHEE” next to the “AL,” the murmur became a standing ovation.

  “Mister,” Long-Drink said, “that was the best goddamn juggling I ever saw in my life.”

  Phee smiled indulgently, shook his head. “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen it done with chainsaws. Eek! Heavy, baby.”

  Eddie spoke for all of us. “What de fuck is goin’ on?”

  “Mutual introductions, of course. I am Al Phee, and you are, in order,” he ticked us off, “Marshall Artz, Boyle Deggs, Tom Foolery, Rachel Prejudice, Dee Jenrette, Miss Fortune,” (pointing at Josie) “Flemming Ayniss, Manny Peeples, and Euell P. Yorpanz. Now that we know who we are, we may consider what we are: c’est simple, non? Shit-fire, and dog my cats. I am a yoofo.”

  “A which?”

  “Not a foe of you, but a U.F.O. And you are all Hugos. Unidentified goggling objects. What’s wrong with you imbeciles ce soir, don’t you see? Ding an sich: I am from outer space.”

  “With reindeer?” Callahan asked.

  “We used to make ’em look like dishware, but believe it or not, that wasn’t silly enough—people who saw us kept reporting it. Nobody reports a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.”

  I think Phee expected this latest announcement to be the most stunning so far. If so, he was disappointed. Long-Drink nodded and said, “Sure, that explains it,” and there was a general air of demystification everywhere. I wished that Mickey Finn were around that night. (Finn is an extraterrestrial himself, and I wondered what he would think of this guy. But of course it was summer, and Finn was way up north on the Gaspé Peninsula, tending his farm.)

  “So what can we do for you?” Callahan asked imperturbably.

  “What’s a pantechnicon?” I added.

  If he was disappointed at our collective sang-froid, Phee hid it well. “Merde d’une puce,” he exclaimed, eyes flashing, “don’t you know your own language?” He had one of the loudest voices I’d ever heard.

  “Furniture warehouse,” Gentleman John put in.

  “Correct,” Phee admitted, “But not the meaning I meaning.”

  “Oh, you must mean the 19th Century bazaars in London,” John said, light dawning.

  “—where arts and crafts were sold, yes,” Phee said, applauding silently. “B plus. Pan plus technikos—comme j’ai dit, a bazaar of the bizarre.”

  Callahan’s eyes widened. “Do you mean
to tell me—?” he began, teeth clenched on his cigar.

  Phee smiled like a flashbulb going off. “Exactement, my large. I am an Intergalactic Traveling Salesman.”

  People began to giggle, then laugh outright, then guffaw. Folks folded at the middle, slapped their thighs, pounded on tables with their fists, met each other’s eyes and laughed anew. Even Callahan roared with gargantuan mirth, clapping his big knuckly hands together. Phee might have been excused for thinking we doubted his story—but I could see through my own tears of mirth that, after a moment’s annoyance, he understood. Somehow he understood our laughter was not derision but delight.

  It’s like I said earlier—when you’ve been hanging out at Callahan’s bar for a while, you begin to see a zany kind of symmetry to the way things happen there. “Hannibal’s Holy Hairpiece, it’s perfect!” Long-Drink crowed. “A traveling salesman has flown into Callahan’s on Tall Tales Night. Sell my clothes, I’m gone to heaven!”

  Phee bowed. “No fear? Marvelous; I impress. Hot damn. It is a business doing pleasure with you. I was told by blackguards that you did not civilize yet. Lies, by jiminy!”

  “It just come on recent,” Doc Webster said, and broke up again.

  Phee waited politely until we were all finished. Then he produced a burning cigarette from out of thin air, flipped it into his face, and began chewing on the filter. “To business we then progress, jawohl? Groovey. Innkeeper, gib mir getrank—a flagon of firewater. Darn the torpedoes. Gosh.”

  Callahan poured whiskey and passed it across the bar. “How come no sample cases, brother? What’s your line?”

  “Oh, but I have a sample case, sweetheart. Mais oui.” He reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and removed a hole. It had no edges, no boundaries, and it was no color at all. It was just…a hole, about the size of the lid on a half gallon of ice cream. He held it by the edge it didn’t have, extended it to arm’s length, and when he dropped his hand it stayed there, a circle of nothing.

  There were whistles and much awed murmuring.

  “Nonsense,” Phee said airily, “Is nothing sacred? Voila le sample case.”

  “Say,” Long-Drink began, “how many of those would you think it’d take to fill the Alb—ouch!” He glared at Doc Webster and began rubbing his shin.

  “No, compadres,” Phee said, “It is not a hole-o-graph. It is a hyperpocket, a dimensional bridge to a…ahem…pocket universe. Regardez!”

  He reached an elegantly manicured hand into the hole, and the hand failed to reappear on the other side. “Pardon,” he muttered, rummaging. “Ah!” His hand emerged. It was holding, by the throat, an extremely long-necked dragon, whose scaled head had barely fit through the hole. Reptilian eyes regarded us coldly, the fanged jaws opened, and a gout of flame set Phee’s hair on fire.

  “Damn,” he said irritably, “wrong drawer. One of these days I’m going to get this office organized.” He thrust the dragon’s head back into the hole with an air of embarrassment. He ignored the fire on his head, and it seemed impolite to mention it, so it burned undisturbed as he rummaged, until his scalp was covered with black smoldering curls. The beanie was unaffected. “Boñiga de la mestizo enano…aha! Now see.”

  People edged discreetly away, and he pulled out a vaguely spherical object wrapped in soft cloth. He yanked on a corner of the cloth, and the object flew sparkling into the air; he caught it with his other hand. My first crazy thought was: “burning ice.”

  “My line:” he said triumphantly. “Jewels.”

  It looked something like a cut diamond the size of a softball, at least in physical structure. It was symmetrically faceted, very nearly transparent, and contained within it, like flies trapped in amber, perhaps a dozen splashes and streaks of liquid color, unbearably pure and lambent. The colors and shapes harmonized. It was so beautiful it hurt to look at.

  “Is there anyone here who is chronically worried?” Phee asked loudly.

  Slippery Joe Maser stepped forward. “I got two wives.”

  “Splendid! Kommen ze hier.”

  Joe hung back.

  “Umgawa,” Phee rapped impatiently. “Don’t be such a chickenshit. Four centuries on the road this trip, and I haven’t lost a customer yet. Come on, be a mensch.”

  Joe approached uneasily.

  “You are a worrier. Lucky I was passing by. Catch!”

  He tossed the gleaming jewel to Joe, who caught it awkwardly in both hands. He stared down at the thing for a long moment.

  “What do you worry about most?” Phee asked. “No, mon vieil asperge, don’t tell me—just think about it.”

  Joe closed his eyes and thought about it.

  From the places where his fingertips touched the jewel, streamers of a gray, milky substance began to infuse it, like milk being poured into a glass of weak tea from several points at once. Soon the entire interior of the gem was swirling gray, all the spatters of aching color hidden.

  I tore my eyes from it to look at Joe. His face shone with the light that was obscured now in the jewel. Every feature was relaxed; for the first time since I’ve known him, his forehead was utterly smooth, no more wrinkles than a Gothic novel.

  His eyes opened. “What the hell was I worryin’ about?” he breathed contentedly. He worked his shoulders like a man who has just set down, at long last, a crushing burden.

  “What’s to worry?”

  Callahan’s voice was shockingly harsh. “Is that goddamn thing addictive?”

  “Nyet,” Phee responded at once. “Au contraire. Watch.”

  Joe was looking at the gray-washed jewel in his hands, and his expression was mournful. “Geeze,” he said sadly, “did I do that?”

  “You see?” Phee said smugly. “To despoil such a loveliness is ashaming: the sahib feels like a jerk. The more he uses it, the more he is conditioned not to generate worry in the first place. Bojemoi. One’s self-indulgence is less tolerable when it is made visible as dung on a diamond, n’est-ce pas?”

  “What’s de t’ing cost?” Fast Eddie asked.

  “Just pennies, I told you,” Phee said, rummaging in his hyperpocket again. “Now this little sucker here is even more amazing, calculated to breed greed and fully warranteed.” He produced and unwrapped a second jewel. It was similar to the first, but tinted rather than clear. The tint was the blue of a tropic lagoon before the white man came, restful to contemplate. Within it were not color impurities this time, but tiny angels. Miniature aleate females, the size of fireflies and correctly scaled. Somehow they flew slowly and gracefully to and fro within the jewel, as though it were filled with viscous fluid instead of being solid. It made my eyes sting.

  “Is anyone here particularly angry?” Phee inquired.

  Gentleman John looked long at Josie—who was watching Phee with rapt attention—and then at me. “Well,” he said, “I’m not generally angry, but I suppose I am particularly angry. This bleeder here wrecked a perfectly good pun.”

  “I heard, from on high,” Phee agreed sympathetically. “Monstrous. Insupportable. Tough shit. Venez ici.”

  John took the jewel from him, glanced again at me, murmured, “rat bastard,” and closed his eyes.

  The jewel began to suffuse with red. The tiny angels tried unsuccessfully to avoid the red, and where it touched them it congealed like quick-setting jello, imprisoning them. Soon they were invisible, and the jewel was an angry scarlet. People gasped.

  John opened his eyes, blinked at the thing, and slumped. “What a vile thing anger is,” he said bitterly. “I’m truly sorry, Jake.” He smiled then. “Glad to be shut of it, though.”

  “Both jewels will clear again within an hour,” Phee said brightly. “With real rage, this one becomes uncomfortably hot to the touch, in proportion to the strength of the fury. Both may be used repeatedly at hourly intervals, and will never wear out or malfunction. The Tsuris Trap and the Rage-Assuager, available only from your pal Al, votre ami Phee. Sanitario e no addictivo—”

  “Cuanto?” Eddie said. “I me
an, how much?”

  “C’est absurdité ou surdité.” Phee frowned. “I already told you, ducks: just pennies! Fritz du Leiber, twenty-three skidoo! But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” He looked at the hyperpocket. “Well, perhaps you have—but the best is yet to come, as the bishop said to the actress. Behold, deholed:”

  He produced a third jewel, and this one was untinted and contained hundreds of tiny beads of every color in the rainbow, writhing like kittens beneath the scintillant surface. It…wept music as he touched it, little plaintive chords and arpeggios.

  “You,” he said, pointing at me. “You say you play a guitar. Your face is furry, your hair abundant. You have experience of hallucinogens, si?”

  “So?”

  “Ca.” He tossed me the jewel.

  Phantasms flickered briefly around the room as I caught it, little not-quite-seen things. My fingers tingled where they touched it.

  “Think of a piece of music,” Phee commanded. “Any music that you love.”

  I picked the first thing that came into my head. Suddenly the room filled with lush strings. I jumped and they were gone.

  “Again,” Phee directed. “Roll ’em, baby.”

  The strings returned, and when they had finished their simple eight-chord prelude, Brother Ray sang, “Georgia…”

  People sat back and smiled all over Callahan’s bar.

  At first it was precisely like the definitive recording that everybody knows—right down to the crackle-pop surface noise of the treasured copy I own. It skipped in the same place. That told me where it was coming from, so I experimented. I have never willingly missed an opportunity to record a Ray Charles TV performance, and I have eleven different versions of “Georgia On My Mind.” I concentrated, and Ray suddenly slipped smoothly into the extended bridge he has been using the last few years, where the band and the drummer just go away and let him play with it awhile. The surface noise vanished; fidelity became perfect. When the bridge was over he segued back into the original without a seam, and murmurs of appreciation came from Fast Eddie and a few others.