Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  “Baby shoes?”

  “Beats me. Open it and see.” Ackerman undid the package and took out a small tissue paper-wrapped object and an envelope. Opening the latter, he took out a yellowed newspaper clipping, scanned it, and then looked up Carl quizzically.

  “You don’t look much like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Your grandfather.”

  “Let’s see.” Carl took the clipping, examined the photograph at its top, and nodded. “I sure don’t. Anyway,” he said, absently pocketing the clipping, “I couldn’t get away from Mother’s until after three and—”

  “Three!” Ackerman let out an outraged squawk. “It’s after six now! Where the hell have you been? For somebody who couldn’t wait to find out how much time he had left, you sure took your time getting here.”

  Carl grinned like a tired Cheshire cat, “Met this chick on the bus, see. Had to see if I still had my old touch. So between 78th and 52nd I talked her into stopping into her place for a bracer. Left her my Viet Nam Zippo as a souvenir of.”

  “You horny son of a bitch,” said the doctor in an exasperated voice. “Three months away from a wheelchair, and you still have to try and climb everything that moves.”

  “Only if it’s female . . . and human. Never went in for that kinky stuff myself.”

  The doctor grinned in spite of his annoyance, but then his face sobered as he picked up a folder from his desk.

  “Better have a seat,” he said. “Lab reports are back and the news isn’t good.”

  Carl seemed strangely unaffected. “Diagnosis confirmed?”

  The other nodded gravely. “These hereditary diseases are bastards. Better have your fun while you can because six months from now your central nervous system will have deteriorated to the point where it’s going to take an iron lung just to keep you breathing.”

  Carl shook his head slowly, a strange smile on his face. “Not this baby. You can mark my case closed and chuck that folder into the wastebasket. I’m not only cured, I never had myasthenia agitans.”

  “That’s interesting,” said the other. “Then why are you limping?”

  “Takes a while for the muscle tone to come back. Check me out and you’ll find I have the reflexes of a healthy, thirty-four-year-old stud.”

  Dr. Ackerman leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and blew a jet of smoke in Carl’s direction. “All right,” he said wearily, “what’s the gag? Been to Lourdes for a miraculous healing since I saw you last?”

  Carl was obviously enjoying himself. “Never left the city. My trip was in a different direction. You told me my disease was hereditary, and so I decided to get rid of pappy’s genes. Nailed him on the way to his own wedding reception.”

  “Painlessly, I trust?”

  “I didn’t hurt him,” Carl said. “I just put him on the bus for L.A. and told him that if he came back in less than six weeks, I’d personally rip off his head and jam it so high he’d suffer from chronic constipation the rest of his life. Dad died when I was quite young, but I remember him as always being a timid little fellow. I can guarantee that he didn’t dare stick his nose back in town until the end of April. And since I was born in November with all my fingernails, that lets me off the genetic hook.”

  “Immaculate conception?”

  “Who cares? I’m here.”

  “I know you get tired of having everybody ask you the same question, but did you walk back to 1938 or take a cab?”

  Carl chuckled, reached in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a flat, shiny gadget the size of a small transistor radio. “Used my little handy-dandy time hopper. You may be the best geneticist in the business, but I happen to be the best man in temporal physics. I’ve been playing around with the idea for this for some time. But when you lowered the boom with your diagnosis, I went to work on the design in dead earnest. Completed it just in time, too.”

  “Climb off it, Carl,” Ackerman said sharply. “This is no time for fooling around.”

  “A doubting Ackerman, eh? Do you lock the desk drawer at night?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Give me ten seconds and you’ll see.” Carl took a piece of paper from the desk, scrawled something on it, and showed it to the doctor. Then he adjusted a dial on the small, flat box. Holding the paper in one hand, he pushed a button on the box with the other and flicked out of sight. A second later he was back.

  “Did I see what I thought I just saw?” The doctor’s face was white and he was crouched back in his chair.

  “You sure did. Now check your desk drawer. I hopped back to early this morning.”

  The other slowly pulled open the desk drawer, took out a piece of paper with shaking fingers, and read aloud, “I was here. Where were you? Carl.”

  He gave a soft whistle. “It really works!”

  “It really does.”

  The doctor eyed Carl somberly for a moment and then, taking a rubber mallet out of a cabinet, went over and rapped his kneecap sharply. The foot barely moved.

  “Just as I expected,” he said. “You may be the best in your field, but you’re sure an ignoramous when it comes to mine. All you did was turn yourself from a figurative bastard to a literal one. The recessive that produces myasthenia agitans is a sex-linked gene. It had to come through your mother. As far as the disease goes, who your father was is immaterial. The male Y chromosome can’t carry it.”

  For a moment Carl lost his usual exuberance, but then with an obvious effort he bounced back.

  “Well, at least the trip wasn’t a complete waste. I met a really luscious redhead.” He hesitated for a minute. “But if pappy wasn’t the villain, who was?”

  “One of your mother’s parents. I’m checking on both and I should have the results in before too long. Drop back next week. Tuesday at four?”

  “Wilco.”

  Ackerman looked at the tissue paper-wrapped object on his desk. “Hey, you forgot something.”

  “Keep it. Who wants baby shoes?” said Carl over his shoulder as he limped out the door.

  Ackerman unwrapped the package, looked at its contents for a moment, and then rewrapped it and put it in his desk drawer.

  “What happened?” said Dr. Ackerman, glancing at his watch. “You not only made it back on Tuesday, you made it on time.”

  “Just curious,” said Carl. “The results on my grandparents come in yet?”

  “Just your grandmother’s side. I had a three-generation check made and that line’s clean as a hound’s tooth. Most of the natural deaths took place after eighty. Even those who were hung, electrocuted, or shot in barroom brawls had all made it into their forties. I never heard of a myasthenia agitans case yet who wasn’t dead by his middle thirties.”

  “Thanks,” said Carl wryly.

  “I haven’t the results on your grandfather’s line yet. He was born in Russia, and getting hold of the necessary vital statistics isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Why bother?”

  “It’s standard practice. Once the genetic transmission line is worked out, we can at least warn other descendants of the chance they are taking if they have children. Fortunately I met a Russian geneticist in London last year who shared my enthusiasm for blondes and Scotch. I cabled him and he’s running interference for me. The results should be through before too long.”

  “I still don’t see why my choice of fathers doesn’t make any difference but my choice of grandfathers does,” said Carl.

  “If you physicists took more interest in the biological sciences, you wouldn’t ask such silly questions. There’s a generation skip in sex-linked chromosome hereditary diseases. When a male carrying the gene links with a female who doesn’t, his sons come out clean, but his daughters are carriers. The males of the next generation have a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting. You lost the toss. Unfortunately your grandfather died in his early twenties immediately after your mother was conceived. Since myasthenia agitans is a disease of the thirties, there was no advance warning as far as you were
concerned.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and then Carl said grimly, “Looks like I’m going to have to go back and take care of grandpappy too.”

  “Now hold it!” protested Ackerman. “I don’t care how you twist the paradoxes involved, you still can’t go back and kill your own grandfather, because if you do, you’ll never be born to go back and do it—or something like that,” he concluded lamely.

  “Better not to be born at all than to be the way I’m going to be in a few months. Look, friend, I’ve appreciated your leveling with me, but your description of what I can expect in the short time I have left hasn’t been exactly calculated to encourage a stoic acceptance. I’ve been doing a bit of investigating on my own.” He pulled out a faded clipping which pictured a young soldier in World War I uniform.

  “Remember this? It was in the package Mother gave me that I gave you. From what I can calculate from the difference between mother’s birth date and the date grandfather’s troopship pulled into New York, conception had to take place almost immediately after his arrival. A week after he landed, his body was found floating in the East River, and he’d been dead for some days then. All that I intend to do is move the inevitable up a day or two.” He rose to his feet with a certain amount of difficulty. “See you in a few days. This one’s going to take a bit of preparation.”

  1919. It was unseasonably warm for early May, and Carl felt half-choked by the high neck of the heavy wool WW I Air Corps officer’s tunic he’d picked up at the costume rental shop. He leaned against a pillar beside the gangplank leading down from the rusty troopship, the old clipping containing his grandfather’s picture in one hand and a Fatima cigarette in the other. The heavy, sweet smoke was gagging him, but his usual filter-tip 100’s would have been too conspicuous in his new time slot. At last a sailor came down the gangplank, a bulging sea bag slung over each shoulder.

  “Hey,” Carl called. “When’s Aero Squadron 139 due to disembark? I’ve got a relative on board.”

  The sailor dropped his bags at the sight of the captain’s bars and snapped a quick salute. “Won’t be until way after midnight, sir. They can’t be cleared from quarantine until the port doctor gets here. He’s still got two ships to go before he can check out this one.”

  Carl nodded his thanks and pulled out his thick pocket Ingersoll. At least three hours. He stuffed the watch back in his pocket and wandered off to find a friendly bar and a long drink.

  Pat’s Place was less crowded with uniforms than the other places he’d checked. He understood why when, after fifteen minutes, he still hadn’t been able to get a drink.

  “Hey, love,” he called to the cute but harried barmaid, “how about working down this way? I’m dying of thirst.”

  She flashed a look at his carefully selected service ribbons—in a moment of generosity he’d awarded himself the Congressional Medal of Honor—and then gave him a weary smile. “Sorry, Captain, but Pat and the regular bartender are out with the flu and I’ve been trying to run this whole place by myself. Why don’t you try next door? I’m going to be closing down in fifteen minutes anyway. My old man’s ship pulled in this afternoon and he’s due to disembark around ten.”

  “What’s he on?”

  “The John Francis. And I hope he’s in a better mood when he gets off than he was in when he left. Beats me why I ever married that mean son of a bitch. Why do you ask?”

  “I just came from the pier. They’re hung up in quarantine. It’ll be at least two A.M. before they get turned loose. But why don’t you shut down anyway so the two of us can have a quiet drink. If he’s as mean as you say he is, you need to get braced up for that reunion.”

  “Hey,” yelled Carl to a hulking young corporal. “Your name Petrovsky? Peter Petrovsky?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The clipping didn’t do him justice. The blurred, course-screen print hadn’t revealed the extent to which his chin actually receded or the pustular blackheads which gave testimony to a lifelong aversion to soap and water.

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Why? My shoes ain’t shiny enough for you? Pocket flap ain’t buttoned?” Petrovsky’s little pig eyes screwed up malevolently. “Screw! Two years now little snots like you been giving me the shaft. But no more. You can take them bars and stuff them. War’s over, and I don’t have to take no more crap from no more college punks nowhow.”

  Clearing his throat, he spat a gob of slimy phlegm in the general direction of Carl’s shiny boots.

  “You figuring on dishing out some more? Like maybe calling the M.P.’s ’cause I didn’t give your tin bars a proper salute?”

  Carl gazed in dismay at the loutish figure that was advancing toward him. Nervously he backed into a narrow alleyway formed by two high rows of crates.

  “Now, look,” he said in a placating voice, “I don’t mind your not saluting. In a few weeks we’ll all be civilians again. It’s just that—”

  “And then the likes of you will be sitting up in the front office lording it over the likes of me,” snarled the corporal. “Fire me for spending too much time in the can, will you?”

  With a growl of maniacal rage, he whipped a trench knife out of his boot and lunged toward Carl, the point held low for a ripping thrust. At the sight of death hurtling toward him, Carl’s old combat reflexes took over, slowed somewhat by the disease that was slowly robbing his axones of their protective myelin coating, but still adequate. One hand lept out, grabbed the wrist of the arm bearing the knife; and then with a quick, easy motion, he ducked and sent the corporal hurtling over his shoulder. A split second later there was the thud of a heavy body slamming into unyielding metal, and then a despairing scream. He spun around just in time to see a pair of dirty GI boots disappear through the narrow gap between the pier and the rusty side of the John Francis. A splash was followed by silence.

  “Grandfather,” murmured Carl contritely, “I didn’t mean for it to end this way.”

  “Freeze!”

  Carl turned and blinked at the M.P. sergeant who had appeared out of nowhere and stood, legs straddled, one hand resting casually on the butt of a holstered forty-five.

  “Unprovoked assault on an enlisted man,” the NCO said with obvious satisfaction. “Couldn’t wait to get back in that front office so you could get back to firing the likes of us for spending too much time in the can, could you? Well, Captain, when the general court-martial hears my testimony—”

  “They won’t believe it,” said Carl as he reached in his pocket and pushed the button that would flip him back to the present.

  “O.K., thorn in the side of the AMA,” proclaimed Carl as he bounced into Ackerman’s office, “give me the hammer whack which will pronounce me a free man.” The doctor looked up from some papers he had been studying. “You know,” he said, “I’ve always known you were a number of unusual things, but there was one I never suspected you of being.”

  “A medical anomaly. Thanks to you, the Ackerman syndrome is about to find a place in medical history. The statistics on your grandfather’s family just came through from Russia. No myasthenia agitans in that line either.” Picking up his rubber mallet, he walked over and tapped Carl briskly on the knee. This time the leg didn’t quiver. “For the first time in the history of medical science an obvious case of myasthenia agitans has surfaced in which the recessive gene can’t be traced farther back than the mother.”

  “Then it wasn’t Petrovsky,” Carl muttered.

  “What?”

  “I went back.”

  “And?”

  “You might say he committed suicide. I didn’t actually plan on killing him. I just intended to get him out of the way long enough to keep grandmother from being impregnated by him. It wasn’t my fault he ended up dead. Or at least my intent,” he added sadly. Then he gave a wan smile. “But at least one thing didn’t change with time.”

  “No again?”

  Carl gave a happy nod.

  “And what did she get?�
�

  “A gold-plated pocket Ingersoll complete with engraved pilot’s wings.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “There went Ackerman’s syndrome.” He reached in his desk drawer and pulled out a small tissue paper-wrapped object. “What’s that?”

  “A family heirloom. You left it here the day you came from your mother’s. I unwrapped it after you left, but I didn’t pay any attention to it until you pushed the magic button just now. Here.”

  Carl removed the tissue paper wrapping. In his hand lay a gold-plated pocket Ingersoll complete with engraved pilot’s wings. He stared at it blankly for a minute. “Then that means. . . .” Ackerman nodded slowly. “I can’t believe it either, but somehow you’ve managed to end up being your own grandfather. Which makes your mother your daughter. And I’d rather not think any more about any of this.”

  Carl looked dazed. “Then I inherited the disease from myself!”

  “Right. If you hadn’t started your silly time hopping, you’d be healthy as a horse right now. Petrovsky was clean.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and then Carl pulled a small, flat, shiny gadget out of his pocket.

  “A little tinkering with the circuitry. . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Ackerman looked at him blankly for a moment. Then his face lit up with a look of sudden comprehension.

  “The future! Of course! If you move far enough ahead, you’ll be able to find a cure for anything. Even myasthenia agitans

  “If I’m lucky,” said Carl. “But just in case they haven’t found the answer up there, will you do me a favor?”