Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  Callahan glanced at it and frowned. “Mister,” he said, walking around from behind the bar, still holding Trevor by the ankle at arm’s length, “up until a minute ago I liked you okay. But a man who’ll try and stiff me twice running might try it a third time, and I can’t be bothered.” With no change in the tone or rhythm of his speech, he began during the last sentence to swing Trevor around by the ankle, in a wide circle paralleling the floor. Fast Eddie, divining the boss’s intent with the supersonic uptake which has earned him his name, sprang forward and opened the front door.

  Centrifugal force prevented Trevor from getting enough air into his lungs to shout, but I noticed something fluttering from his left hand, and read it the way you read the label on a spinning record.

  “Hold it, Mike,” I called out. “He’s got the sawbuck he owes you.”

  “If it’s like the last one, he’ll only bounce the once,” Callahan promised, but he slowed his swing, grabbed Trevor’s collar with his other fist and set the hapless stranger down on the floor feet first. Trevor spun three times and collapsed into a chair.

  “I don’t understand at all,” he said dizzily. “Which side am I on?”

  “The flip side, apparently,” I said, “if you really tried to cheat Callahan.”

  “But the mirror…that clock…I was halfway through the mirror, it must be a Bridge…” He shut up and looked confused.

  I looked at Callahan. “The mirror must be a bridge. Because of the clock.”

  He nodded. “Mechanical orangutan.”

  Then I saw the first bill Trevor had offered Callahan, lying forgotten on the floor. It said it was a 01$ bill.

  It actually began to make a twisted kind of sense. I turned back to Trevor and pointed a finger at him. “I only thought you said ‘Trevor’,” I said wonderingly. “It was ‘Trebor,’ wasn’t it? Robert Trebor?”

  Trebor nodded.

  “There’s a mirror dimension,” I went on, “one identical to our own, but mirror reversed. And you invented a dimensional bridge…”

  He looked at it from all sides and gave up in confusion. “Yes,” he admitted. “It can only be initiated in my continuum, because the molecules of the activating substance, thiotimoline, have different properties when they’re reversed. But if the first bill I gave you looks backwards to you, then I must be in the other dimension, where a Bridge can’t be activated. But I did get halfway through that mirror instead of breaking it, and there’s that clock—I just don’t understand this at all.”

  “The clock?” Long-Drink spoke up. “Why that’s just ouch.”

  “…just one of the many mysteries we have to consider,” I finished smoothly, smiling at the Drink and rocking back off of his toes again. “So perhaps you’d better just tell us the whole thing.”

  Trebor looked around at us suspiciously. “You’d blow the whistle,” he accused.

  Callahan drew himself up to his full height (a considerable altitude). “If I understand this,” he rumbled, “you ain’t tried to cheat me after all, so I owe you an apology. But I’d as soon you didn’t insult my friends.”

  It’s a traditional moment at Callahan’s, familiar to all of us by now. The Newcomer Examines Us and Decides Whether To Trust Us Or Not. Some take their time; some make a snap decision to open up. Nobody ever pressures them, one way or the other. Most of ’em cop. I had to admire Trebor at that moment. His mind must have been racing at a million miles an hour, just like mine, but he brought it under control for long enough to give his full attention to evaluating each of us one by one. Finally, as most do, he nodded. “I guess I’ve got to tell somebody. And even if you wanted to cross me up, there isn’t a sober witness in the lot of you. Okay.”

  We all settled into listening attitudes, and Callahan passed around fresh beers to them as needed ’em.

  “Yes, I am an inventor,” he began, “and I did invent a dimensional Bridge—which my counterpart in this dimensional continuum could not do, since as I said thiotimoline doesn’t work right here.”

  “Then this ain’t a perfect mirror of your world,” Long-Drink interrupted.

  “No,” Trebor agreed. “Not a perfect mirror. There are subtle, generally unimportant differences. In my continuum, for instance, all the rock groups are different and Shakespeare wrote Bacon. Disparities like that, that make no tangible difference to the world at large. But they’re essentially similar—like ‘identical’ twins. It’s only because of their vast congruencies that the two continua lie close enough together for a Bridge to be feasible at all.”

  “Then you’re like a time-traveler into the past,” I pointed out, “At least in a sense. If you change this world in any significant way, you’ll never be able to return to your own.”

  “Precisely what I’m afraid of,” Trebor agreed. “Which is why this Bridge-mirror of yours disturbs me so much. Because I didn’t build it, which means someone else did, which means the chances of some accident making the two continua diverge have just effectively doubled. At least. I ought to get home at once…but I can’t.”

  Because his Bridge couldn’t be activated from this side? Surely he must have planned for such a contingency. I always buy a round-trip ticket.

  Unless I’m rushed…

  “What about your counterpart?” I asked, breaking his train of thought. “The Robert Trebor of this world, I mean?”

  “Oh, I swapped places with him,” Trebor said absently.

  “Where’s he now?”

  “In jail, I should exp…uh, I don’t know.”

  “I don’t get this,” Callahan growled, “but I don’t think I like it.”

  I was still enough under the influence of the Wonderbooze to be capable of positively Sherlockean flights of deduction. “I think I get it, Mike. Trebor here invents a dimension-Bridge to our world, right? What does he do? Collect samples of our ‘reversed’ artifacts as proof of where he’s been. Then when he gets home, he gets cagey and decides to keep his mouth shut. That makes sense: if too many people hear about the Bridge, it becomes useless.

  “But he makes a fatal error. Through some mix-up, just like the one he pulled here tonight, he spends some of our money over there. This puts the feds onto him, and he finds it necessary to change neighborhoods in a hurry. So he steps through the Bridge to our world again, somehow suckers his mirror-twin into trading places with him, and burns his Bridge behind him. He probably has a second Bridge hidden somewhere, set to activate itself whenever the heat has died down—all he has to do is wait. His twin takes a fall on a bad-paper rap, and he walks away clean. Pretty slick.”

  There was a pistol in Trebor’s hand. I noted absently that the safety was on the wrong side, and that it was off.

  “Very astute,” he said quietly.

  “Listen Trebor,” I called, “don’t be a jerk! Right now you’re wanted by the cops in one dimension only—in this one your biggest problem is that a barfull of guys think you stink. Don’t blow it.” I spoke with great haste, but my mind was racing even faster.

  “You have a point,” he allowed. “As long as no one is foolish enough to get in my way, I believe I’ll just take my Tiger Breath and toddle off.” He picked up the half-keg in his right arm and started edging toward the door.

  The deductions were coming like clusters of grapeshot now. I glanced up at the mirror, and what I saw there confirmed all speculation: Trebor had a reflection in the mirror, now, and the image looked straight at me with pleading eyes.

  “Hold on, buddy,” I barked. “The least you can do is tell us why you went through all this.”

  He stopped, about three feet out of position. I wanted him right on the chalk line from which one addresses the fireplace. “I don’t expect you’ll believe me, at this point, but I sincerely want to improve both worlds,” he said.

  “How? By swapping your booze for ours?”

  “That’s one small way,” he agreed. “Alcohol has a symmetrical molecule, so either one gets you loaded. It’s the congeners, the asymmetrical est
ers which produce the taste and the impact, that make one world’s mead another world’s poison.” He paused, and giggled. To my annoyance, so did I. “But there are infinite possibilities. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last week: walking around your world thinking of all the splendid possibilities. Once it’s safe to use my auxiliary Bridge, I could…well, figure it out for yourself. Suppose I swapped our smog for yours, molecule by molecule, in bulk? The reversed ozone wouldn’t be an irritant any more…”

  “Brilliant,” I said sarcastically. “It’d still block sunlight and foul our lungs, but it wouldn’t be irritating enough to remind us to clean up the source any more. Remove the nuisance value and leave the menace intact, that’s a great idea, Trebor.” I was frantically trying to catch Callahan’s eye without alerting Trebor, and at last I succeeded. I motioned imperceptibly toward the mirror, and Callahan casually turned to it. The mirror-image of Trebor gesticulated at him, and I prayed that Mike would dope it out in time. Just like Doris’s Valiant and my mailbox: the only thing that could help Trebor now was an unexpected collision.

  Trebor failed to notice. “Well,” he said, plainly crestfallen, “then suppose I imported food from my dimension, and exported yours? Really fattening items, I mean. Tarts, creampuffs, banana splits. The stereoisomer of a strawberry shortcake would taste as good as the real thing—I know, I’ve tested it—but your digestive system would ignore it entirely. All the fat people could get thin!”

  Callahan answered this time, coming around the bar with an air of total innocence, plainly involved in the intellectual exercise of talking to this nice man with the pistol. Trebor moved to let him by, covering him carefully with the pistol, placing himself just where I wanted him to be. I hoped Mike understood his part.

  “Nope, I’m afraid that’s no good either, pal,” he boomed. “Glandular cases aside, the only genuine cure for fat is to not be a hog. Your method would encourage fat people to keep on being hogs—so, they’ll keep on being fat people, regardless of what they happen to weigh. You’d know one anywhere. That’s the third time you’ve proposed to treat the symptoms instead of the disease.”

  “Third time?” Trebor said, puzzled.

  “Yeah. The first was when you decided you could get yourself out of a jam by throwing your mirror-twin to the wolves. They used to say when I was a kid that that kinda stuff’d grow hair on your palms. Self-abuse, I mean. And just like the last two ‘cures’ you proposed, it didn’t cure a thing. Look!”

  He pointed over Trebor’s shoulder at the mirror, and Trebor smiled.

  “That’s an old old gag,” he said reprovingly.

  And then Fast Eddie caught sight of the mirror and yelped, and Trebor must have known the runty little piano man was no actor, for he whirled then, gun ready, and—

  —froze. In the mirror, he saw himself, keg and all, but the “right” hand held no pistol, and it was upraised in a ritual gesture that loses nothing by mirror-reversal. Trebor’s jaw dropped, he raised the pistol…

  And Callahan kicked him square in the ass.

  No other man among us could have pulled it off—but Callahan is built along the lines of Mount Washington, and I’ve seen him carry a full keg in each hand. His big size-twelve impacted behind Trebor’s lap with the speed and power of a cannonball, lofting the inventor into the air, clean over the bar and into the mirror. As he struck it, he seemed to reverse direction and bounce back into the room, landing in a heap on the sawdust.

  But when he landed, his hand was empty.

  “Thanks,” he gasped to Callahan. “I needed that.”

  And in the mirror, a man in a grey flannel suit stepped up to that Trebor, took away his pistol, and slapped handcuffs on him. The grey man turned to the mirror, aimed the pistol at it and pulled the trigger. There was no bang, but the mirror exploded in a million shards, which fell to the floor of Callahan’s Place with the multiple crashes you’d expect.

  Fifteen minutes later, Bob Trebor—the one who belonged here—was sitting by the fireplace with his feet up, sipping at some Wonderbooze and rounding up the story of his exploits in Mirrorland.

  “If the local police had apprehended me, it might have been a sadder story. But the .I.B.F has some people bright enough to add together my story plus the fact that my fingerprints were mirror-reversed plus the scar on the wrong cheek plus what the X-rays showed and come up with the plain truth—and tough-minded enough to believe their own eyes. Pretty soon everybody I was talking to was named Smith, and they cooked up a plan to trap the other Trebor and send me home again. They put a top .I.B.F computer onto predicting Trebor’s movements, using data I supplied them as well as their own dossiers. Then, with access to his lab and notes, I used my similar background and skills to build another Bridge. It took me a week. By that time computer analysis indicated that he was 89% liable to come in here, tonight, so we had the Bridge installed. I hope you didn’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” Callahan assured him. “Livened up a dull night.”

  “I don’t get it,” Eddie complained. “Why din’t the feds just come t’ru de Bridge an’ bust ’im?”

  “They couldn’t, Eddie,” Trebor said patiently. “Jurisdictional questions aside, the more changes they caused in this continuum, the greater the chance of separating the two forever. They were nervous about doing anything at all.”

  “So you worked it out with the folks at Callahan’s Place—the other Callahan’s—and they agreed to stage as perfect an exchange as possible,” I said wonderingly. It was kinda nice to know that each world had a Callahan’s—but I wondered if the other me still had his wife and kids. Probably not, or he wouldn’t be there…but I wonder.

  “Yes,” Trebor agreed. “And fortunately for me, you were as quick on the uptake as your counterparts assured me you’d be. You followed my cues beautifully.”

  “The Wonderbooze helped,” Callahan observed, sweeping the last of the mirror into the fireplace.

  “That it did. Amazing what molecular reversal will do for liquor.” He gazed meditatively at his glass.

  “That’s what I don’t get,” I admitted. “Most of our food must have been wrong for his digestive system—and theirs must’ve been mostly useless to you. How come neither of you came down with malnutrition?”

  “We were both starting to,” Trebor said drily. “That’s what brought him to Dr. Webster, which in turn brought him here. He must have planned to use his alternate Bridge to bring food across eventually, and he must have had a cache of food with him that he could ration out ’til then. If I find it at my house I’ll bring it around.” That, by the way, is how Doc Webster came to lose a hundred pounds. For awhile, anyway—the hog. Don’t tip him off, okay? “I guess he simply expected me to starve—if he thought about it. He couldn’t have been very imaginative, or he’d have realized that I had enough evidence to sell the truth to the .I.B.F”

  “That kinda bothers me too,” I said. “The feds are not, for one reason and another, my favorite people—and I don’t imagine a mirror-fed is any better. I have to admit I don’t find it reassuring that men analogous to our F.B.I. possess a secret bridge to our world.”

  “True,” said Callahan “But what do we do? Tell our feds? With no sober witnesses and no way to make a working Bridge in this world? If we could put it over, would it help—or make things worse?”

  “Forget it,” Trebor advised. “Whatever their intentions, there isn’t a lot they can do, for good or ill. If they take any action benefiting their continuum at the expense of ours, the two continua become too dissimilar and the Bridge is useless.”

  Callahan burst into gargantuan laughter. “I’ll bet they’re sittin’ around a table right now, quiet as mice, wonderin’ what the hell they can possibly do with the goddam thing,” he whooped, and slapped the bar.

  The picture of a dozen top government thinkers staring in silent frustration at a device more awesome than the atomic bomb—with no known use—was so lovely that we all broke up, and Eddie struck up St
evie Wonder’s “It Ain’t No Use.”

  “At least they got a half-keg o’ Wonderbooze out of it,” Long-Drink yelled, and we laughed louder; and then Eddie yelled, “An’ so did we!” and a cheer went up that rattled the rafters.

  But I noticed that Trebor wasn’t smiling. “What’s wrong, Bob?”

  He sighed moodily and sipped of the Wonderbooze. “It’s not fair,” he said.

  “How do you mean?” Callahan asked. “You’re home free and your rotten twin is in htrownevaeL—what’s your beef?”

  “That’s it precisely,” Trebor said exasperatedly. “My counterpart is, I agree with you, rotten. I knew him only for the half hour it took him to shanghai me into stepping through his damned Bridge, but in retrospect I don’t believe I’ve ever met a more classic sociopath. I, on the other hand, like to think of myself as…well, as one of the good guys, and I believe I’ve conducted myself honorably throughout this affair. I even took a kick in the pants that I’m not certain I deserved. That’s why I think it’s unfair.”

  He emptied his glass, tossed it into the fire, and sighed again.

  “Why is it,” he mourned, “that I will never again see my face in the shaving mirror without wincing?”

  Concerning “Mirror/rorriM, Off The Wall”:

  As I say, I’ve never actually caught Jake in a flat lie. But often his earns are built on elements I find oddly familiar—perhaps because both Jake and I are regular readers of sf (We take prunes to keep it that way.)

  The mirror-reversal business in this story, for instance, bears a remarkable resemblance to ideas put forth in Roger Zelazny’s demonically inventive novel, Doorways In The Sand (although the two stories in no other way resemble each other).

  Similarly, Isaac Asimov has written extensively about thiotimoline—which in this continuum has the odd property of reacting a split second before it contacts the reagent. Interested readers are directed to the Good Doctor’s (Is he a good doctor? Does he make house calls?) autobiography: specifically to Volume One, In Memory Almost Ripe.16