Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  Good. Keep him talking now. Anything at all. “So what’s all this about straight lines?”

  Paul made that sound which can be either an aborted chuckle or suppressed nausea; context offered no clue which. “Well, it just seemed like there had to be one, right?”

  “In nature, you mean? I guess so. Why?”

  “Hey, think about it. The greatest joker Who ever lived—” He waved upward at the weeping sky. “—I mean, the truly funniest sonofabitch of all time…the guy Who filled the universe with punchlines—” He mimed boxing. “—pow, pow, pow, punchlines…shit, there’d just have to be a straight-line around somewhere, now wouldn’t there?” He pointed at the horizon, where grey day was becoming rainy night. “There it is. The set-up for the cosmic joke. The sweet salty place we came from, that tries to kill us every time we try to go back.” He began to laugh, the helpless belly laugh of a driver who wakes after the crash to see his toddler wearing the dashboard for a hat.

  She took him in her arms and tried her best to stop the ghastly laughter with compression of the thorax. “Good straight-line—” he choked out between spasms. “—stare at it—long as you want—still won’t see that old punchline comin’—oh God, baby—”

  She held on, searched her memory for soothing things her mother had said to her when she was a heartbroken child. “Better soon…better soon, honey…I’m here…we’re okay so far…it’ll be all right…we’ll figure out what’s the matter, we’re too smart not to…and once we do, we’ll know how to fix it, you wait and—” She broke off. He had stopped sobbing, was looking at her with astonished eyes from a distance of three inches.

  “You don’t get it yet,” he said. “You really don’t get it.” He worked a hand between them and wiped at his nose. “Jesus, I’m really surprised.”

  “Get what?” She wasn’t going to like this. She let go of him.

  “You haven’t worked out the punchline yet.” He grimaced, covered it by rubbing at his eyes. “Hey, why should you? I’m the one it was aimed at. ‘You just happened to be comin’ along at the right time, sucker.’ You want me to spoil it for you? Or you just want a hint?”

  She took a deep breath. “Spit it out.”

  “How did I get Wally Kemp and Moira Rogers to give me ninety-eight large?”

  There having been no part for her in the Jude sting, Wally and Moira had never become real to her. She fell back on first principles: “By selling them something they wanted that much.”

  “No, I mean, who was I? Who did they think I was?”

  “A time traveler. It really was brilliant, you know.”

  He waited for her to get it, so she tried. Finally she lifted her eyebrows: I’m stumped, get on with it.

  “Who,” he said, “are we running from?”

  At first she thought he was crazy. The more she thought about it, the more terrified she became that he was not.

  “Tell me something else it could be,” he said, “that fits the facts we have so far.”

  She flailed. “Mad scientists,” she tried. “I don’t know, aliens, maybe.” She was horrified to hear herself suggesting something even more X-Files than his notion, but could find no better.

  “If you find star travelers who have some reason to be afraid of us monkeys more plausible than time travelers, hey, go for it,” he said. “I figure like this: you tell people you came across an alien artifact, either you end up in a shirt with real long sleeves and buckles, or you end up in the same room with Maury Povich: either way there’s no reason for anybody to burn your house down. But you tell people you stumbled across a human artifact that can’t be made yet, an anachronism of some kind…and maybe you end up making a paradox, and the universe goes away.”

  June had endured just enough sci fi in her life to understand the argument. Time travel had to be stealthy if it was to be done at all. Change history, and all hell broke loose. Whoever wanted them dead was trying to move like a virus: with discreet deadliness. Oh God, it made sense…more than anything else she could think of.

  The word “denial” was in her vocabulary—but only as a legal strategy. She had spent her life training herself to face facts. She couldn’t stop, just because the facts had turned weird…could she?

  “My brilliant idea,” Paul said sourly. “I’ll tell you something I wasn’t ever gonna tell anybody: it wasn’t even original. I got it from a fifty-year-old story by a writer named Cyril Kornbluth—the guy that wrote ‘The Marching Morons.’ I figured it was okay to lift the gimmick in this other story because what he did with it just wasn’t practical. His grifter pretends to be a time traveler, and pulls off a sting—a lot crummier sting than the beauty I put together, by the way: it never woulda worked in real life—and then the punchline is, the real time travelers hear he’s blowing their cover, and they come boil his brain. Naturally I didn’t waste any time worrying about that little hazard—hell, no! I’m a rational man. Only in a science fiction story would time travel turn out to be real—and unlike Wally and Moira, I don’t wish my life were a science fiction story. Guess what, honey: it is anyway. Whether we like it or not.”

  The true horror of their situation washed over her, and she began to laugh herself.

  Unlike Paul, however, she had no trouble at all stopping. She sat down on the deck with her arms wrapped around her knees and thought, hard. He sat beside her and let her think, silently watching the dull grey glow go out of the world to the west.

  “I don’t get it,” June said finally, breaking the silence. “I believe you, I guess, but I still don’t understand it. How the hell does this time traveler think we threaten him? By knowing he exists? How does that make us any different from Kemp and Rogers? What are we supposed to do with the information? Sell it to Geraldo?”

  “We know where he has something buried. We don’t know what, but it must constitute proof he’s a time traveler.”

  “So what? Everybody who sees it forgets.”

  “You didn’t—for long enough to phone me.”

  “So why doesn’t he just move whatever it is fifty meters east? We’d never find it again.”

  Paul shook his head. “I don’t know. He must like it right where it is, for some reason. Maybe it’s his time gate, and once you set it up you can’t move it.” He frowned at the rain. “I wish I could call up Wally and Moira and ask them. They’ve had experience thinking seriously about this shit.”

  She shook her own head, impatiently. “Horseshit. They don’t know any more about time travel than we do. And they probably don’t even realize that.”

  “Maybe not, but they can think about this kind of stuff logically without boggling,” he said. “They actually know some real science. I haven’t got a good enough sense of what’s really ridiculous, and what’s only weird.”

  “So we do that: stick to what we know, and apply logic. How about this one—this is the one that keeps sticking in my craw: how come we know as much as we do? How come we know anything at all?”

  “Huh?”

  June went into lecture mode. “You’re a time traveler. You have powers beyond those of mortal men. You bury something you want to stay buried. So you booby-trap it: if a guy hits it with a shovel, he gets hit with a mind-ray or whatever, he forgets what he was doing and wanders off. Now: won’t you give the damn mind-ray a large enough radius to also get his buddy who wandered off a few meters to take a pee?”

  He nodded. “That bothers me some, too. You shouldn’t have had time to make that long a phone call before you got bagged.”

  “Maybe it was just a robot security system that mook triggered—”

  “Even so. It obviously read his mind; it should have noticed a better mind nearby. It would have if I designed it, and I’m probably not as smart as a time traveler.”

  June winced at the last clause, and spoke quickly to distract him, lest he hear what he had just said. “So we want to figure out why it didn’t notice me at first. Let’s just riff and see what happens. How am I different from Ange
l Gerhardt? I’m smarter…right, and the mind-ray only notices stupid people. It’d be getting a great reading off of me, now. Uh…let’s see: I’m female, I weigh less, less upper-arm strength, I probably have nicer tits—”

  “Try it this way,” Paul said. “How were you different from him that afternoon?”

  “Okay, let’s think about that. I probably had less cocaine in my system…I wasn’t planning to commit a crime, not that day, anyway…I was depressed from thinking about my mother…I didn’t have a backpack or a shovel—”

  “The depressed thing might be something,” he said. “I admit I can’t imagine what—but it’s something mental, and this is a mind-reader we’re talking about. I think so, anyway. Maybe depression is something he blocks out as long as possible.”

  “Great. In that case, I could walk straight up to him, right now, and he’d never even notice me.” Thoughts of her mother were trying to steal her attention, but June pushed them back under the covers. She knew—somehow—that Laura Bellamy was still alive, down there in California, and she had made up her mind not to start grieving until it was grieving time. But the mental association did give her an idea of what to do next. “Look,” she said, getting to her feet, “I’m coming up empty. It’s time for me to do my thinking thing.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he agreed, remaining where he was. “It’s what you were doing when this whole clem started. And this is a good place for it, as long as you stick to the path. Take an umbrella and a flashlight.” June’s “thinking thing” was a ritual he was familiar with, and respected, even if it didn’t work for him. Faced with an intractable problem, she liked to surround herself with the physical, visual, olfactory and aural stimuli she found most conducive to thought—by walking in woods (for preference; a park or picnic area would do in a pinch) or along the shore while listening to good music on headphones. “I think I saw a Walkman in the bedroom,” he added.

  “Yeah,” she snorted. She took hold of the railing and did some stretches to work the kinks out. “I noticed it, too. What the hell is the point of owning a Walkman if you’re going to leave it behind when you go on trips? I swear, the ones with the money are always the least—WOW!”

  He rolled away from her, came to his feet in a half crouch and spun twice like a ballet dancer, snapping his head around for each turn. “Where?”

  “No, no, relax—I just had a rush of brains to the head. I was wishing I had my own FM headphones with me, so I wouldn’t have to go put on something with a pocket to put that heavy Walkman in, and deal with the cord, and so on…and that made me miss my headphones, sitting back home in Vancouver…and that reminded me that as I was leaving the house for the last time, right after you called, I looked for those ’phones and couldn’t find them. They weren’t where I always hang them by the door.”

  Paul straightened, shivered slightly, and shook adrenaline-energy from his fingertips, but kept his temper. “Okay. And from this you infer…?”

  “I know I had those ’phones on my head when I walked into Pacific Spirit Park. The jockey had put on a whole side of Coltrane ballads.” Her voice was becoming dreamy as she forced the memories to the surface. “I remember ‘Nancy With The Laughing Face,’ and ‘Little Brown Book,’ and something I didn’t know, and then another Strayhorn…‘Lush Life,’ that was it…I remember ‘Lush Life’ starting…and then the next sound-memory I have is walking out of the Park…and thinking for the thousandth time in my life that Philip Glass must have stolen half his lick from listening to birds! Paul, I was hearing birds—”

  Paul’s eyes glowed. “You didn’t have the radio on anymore. Oh, I like this. You’re absolutely right: this is a ‘WOW.’” He began to pace the deck. “Check me out on this. This Gerhardt mook starts to bury his stash. In doing so he triggers…I know it’s a feeble pun, but let’s call it a mental detector. It reads his mind, erases the parts it doesn’t like, and sends him on his way, clueless. It ought to pick you up, too, what did you say, fifty meters away, call it fifty yards, right? Only you have an FM radio right next to your skull, and that screws up the mental detector for some reason. So you get to watch the whole show. The mook buries his stash somewhere else, and goes home, and you put a message on my machine. Alright: for the Hawaiian vacation and ten thousand dollars cash, what does June Bellamy do next?”

  “I dig up his stash,” she said at once, and then, more slowly, “and maybe I take my radiophones off to wipe away the sweat—”

  “Or maybe a second mental detector has been put on the stash, now, to keep tabs on the mook if he should ever shake off the whammy and come back—and the FM radio gag only works at fifty meters.”

  “I like the first one,” she said. “It explains why they take the risk of not giving me my headphones back after they’re done.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “I like it, too. You realize what this means? For the first time, we have a clue how we can possibly defend ourselves, if the bastard catches up with us.”

  “We’re doing it again,” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Thinking of him as ‘him.’ I said I wasn’t going to do that.”

  “Hard not to.”

  She nodded. “Well, now that we’re agreed he’s not a monkey demon or a spaceman, ‘it’ doesn’t work anymore…and who knows better than I how few women warriors there are in North America? But we still ought to keep reminding ourselves that ‘he’ could just as easily be ‘they,’ at least.”

  “Point taken. Tell you the truth, I kind of hope there are two of them.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Well, we seem to have found a counter for the mental detector slash obedience ray slash brainwasher.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Without that, the best these guys can possibly be is supernaturally good…so if there’s two of them, that makes it a fair fight.” Even in the growing dark she could see his grin. “I like a fair fight.”

  “God, testosterone is an amazing thing. I’ll settle for there’s only one of him and we kick his ass without working up a sweat.”

  He shook his head, still grinning happily. “One way or another, I’m working up a sweat. I disapprove of people who do B&Es on my sweetie’s skull.”

  It came to her that testosterone had its uses. “Not to mention people who spoil your greatest triumph and burn your house down.”

  He shrugged. “Those things too. For them I’d hurt him. For you, I’m going to kill him.”

  A primitive thrill made her tingle, and a few more uses for testosterone occurred to her. “You say the sweetest things,” she murmured, and moved nearer.

  But he was not quite ready to segue from blood lust to the other kind. “I’m glad it pleases you,” he said, “but I have to be honest: I think my motives are more selfish than anything else. Nobody is going to know you better than I do.”

  She pressed her attack, ignoring his body language. “Darling, our relationship is based on enlightened mutual selfishness, you know that.” Her tongue made a demand of his neck. “Our interests coincide.” She could smell him shifting gears. “You kill him, and I’ll make you a lovely loincloth from the hide.” Her fingers asked a question of his penis. “Now drag me into the cave and exploit me, you brute.”

  As she was being carried in from the deck, she remembered that he always lasted forever when he was stoned, and she shivered with anticipation. Her lover’s funk was definitely over. They had a plan…and just possibly the beginnings of an edge.

  “The first thing we do tomorrow morning,” he said sleepily, “we find out where’s the nearest place to score a couple of sets of FM headsets. Shit, one of us may have to go back to Vancouver; I’ll be surprised if they stock ’em out here on Gilligan’s Island. Maybe I could work up some kind of headband rig to hold a Walkman against our skulls—did you notice whether O’Leary’s has FM? Or is it just the tape kind? June? Are you listening to me? Hey—are you crying? God, was I that good, or are you—”

  “Mom is down.”
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  He stared.

  “I just know, okay? She’s gone.”

  “Aw jeeze—”

  “Shit, I can’t even call Pop and console him.”

  And her funk began.

  By the middle of the next day, it had so thoroughly thickened the atmosphere in that lavish little A-frame that Paul volunteered to walk to “town” in a low-probability search for headphones with FM radios built in, despite the ever present rain. Better to soak than choke.

  Although he kept his ears open for the sound of Tom Waits along the way, he was not fortunate enough to encounter Moe Lycott, and he could not quite suppress the instincts of a lifetime enough to stick his thumb out for the occasional stranger who did drive past. Consequently it was midafternoon, and he was footsore and sweaty under his mackinaw, by the time he reached the cluster of shops by the ferry terminus. He looked with longing upon the first tavern he came to…then remembered his marijuana binge of the night before, reminded himself sharply that he was on combat-alert, and began to walk on by. But the first step hurt so much, after the momentary respite, that he converted the second into a pivot and trod heavily into the welcoming shade where ice-cold beer lived.

  He emerged with a much lighter step half an hour later, scoped the street without seeming to, and made his way to the general store the bartender had suggested, humming softly.

  Two beers was not enough, however, to make him follow the bartender’s suggestion that he ask for “Space Case,” despite assurances that this was the name of the clerk most likely to be able to help him. Instead he simply looked over the two clerks available in the little shop, figured out which a yokel would be most likely to call Space Case, and approached that one. “Uh, excuse me—I wonder if you could help me out.”

  “I can try. Define the problem.”

  Ah, a technical mind. “My wife and I have decided we prefer radio to tape. It’s more unpredictable, eh? And we do a lot of walking, and gosh, to get the same amount of choice from a Walkman that a radio offers, you need an extra pack just for cassettes. Plus I always get the cord caught. You wouldn’t by any chance happen to have a couple of sets of dedicated FM headphones around the shop, would you?”