by Jerry Ahern
“You know what it costs, Alan, every time we send something back?” Morton Hardesty queried.
“Yeah, and I bet you do, too, Mort. Hell, it’s worth it. We can pass messages through time.” Alan looked at Marc Cole. “Did you find out if your great-grandfather had a twin brother who died?”
Marc Cole ran his fingers back through his long blond hair. “I got my mom on the phone and she called my aunt Clarisse, who was named after my great grandmother. Great grandpa Jim had a brother named Al. Al turned up missing a year or so before the turn of the century.”
“My God, what have we done?” Alan murmured, not expecting a direct, immediate answer . . .
Bethany Kaminsky paced back and forth in front of her enormous and spotless desk, her hands thrust into the pockets of pleated, loose-fitting, charcoal-gray slacks. She wore a silk blouse with long, full sleeves and deep cuffs with multiple buttons covered in the same material, the blouse nearly as dark a gray as her slacks, unbuttoned to her cleavage, a solitary—and large—diamond visible, pendant from a thin gold chain. This and a Jubilee band Rolex—he couldn’t see it, but she always wore it, even in bed—were her only jewelry.
Morton Hardesty couldn’t take his eyes off her, hadn’t been able to take his mind off her since their first clandestine meeting six months earlier. In all that time, this was the first time they’d met in her penthouse office at Lakewood Industries’ world headquarters. Because it was Sunday morning, she had insisted that it would be safe.
Bethany Kaminsky’s blonde hair formed a perfect bell shape, barely touching her shoulders, moving as she moved, thick, gorgeous, beautiful, in control, as she was. Her blue eyes sparkled under a brow that was knit in concentration and—he’d seen the look before—anger. “So,” she said at last, looking at him, “you cannot bring them back from here.”
“I don’t think so, Bethany.”
“You either think or you know, Mort! What is it?”
“Given current technology, I know that we can’t. See, as I’ve told you ever since Lakewood Industries approached me about this, Dr. Rogers didn’t invent time-travel. All she did was unwittingly participate in an accident, and her equipment kept a nearly perfect record of what transpired. She would have been the first person to tell you that time-travel, given our current level of technology, is impossible, if it would ever be possible. All she wanted to do was broadcast electricity without wires. On the plus side, we’re close to achieving that; maybe another decade’s worth of work and Horizon Enterprises will be able to bring electricity to every corner of the globe. Or,” Hardesty digressed, “if you keep paying me, Lakewood Industries will beat Horizon to the punch and get the patents and the loot that goes with them.
“All that we did when we sent inanimate objects and the like into the past,” he explained, “then eventually sent Dr. Rogers and the Nailes’ nephew, Clarence, and Dr. Greer with him into the past was to artificially duplicate the energy waves Dr. Rogers had accidentally created during the thunderstorm. Horizon Enterprises still doesn’t have a clue as to why it works. We’ve gotten really efficient at duplicating the process, however, like a dog that just keeps getting better and better at performing the same popular trick. But all that we can do is send someone or something back in time a period of ninety-six years, sixty-eight days, four hours, twenty-three minutes and sixteen seconds. We can only send someone or something to the same place and nowhere else. The whole thing is probably a research blind alley as far as real time-travel might be concerned. No way to tell.”
“So, if you time-traveled somebody from my office—” Bethany Kaminsky almost sprang onto her desk, crossing her legs Indian fashion like a child sitting on the floor, waiting for someone to tell her a story. But she was doing the talking. “So, if you time-traveled me right now, I’d wind up in exactly the same place.”
She had such tiny feet and tiny shoes. “Which,” Morton Hardesty pointed out, allowing himself to laugh a little, “would be very bad for you, Bethany. Ninety-six years and sixty-eight days ago, Lakewood Industries hadn’t yet built a high-rise office building in the Chicago Loop. Therefore, you’d wind up in the air hundreds of feet over turn-of-the-century Chicago, and you’d fall to your death.”
“I get the point, Mort. What’s the exact problem with making it a two-way street?”
“Okay, Bethany, you’re not a physicist, but this is the general idea. We can’t reverse the wave pattern fully unless we have equipment in place at the point of origination for the persons or things that we wish to bring back.”
“You mean there, there, ahh, back in the past.”
“Bingo! In theory, if we were to send duplicate equipment ninety-six years back in time, and we had it perfectly synchronized with the equipment here in the present day, we could probably do it.”
“Then why hasn’t Horizon done it? What’s Alan Naile afraid of?” Bethany Kaminsky lit a cigarette, climbed off the desk and took an ashtray from the glass coffee table in front of the couch. She set the ashtray on the desk and resumed her cross-legged seated position, this time kicking her shoes halfway across the office. She wore semi-transparent black stockings. He wondered if they were pantyhose or if she used a garter belt.
“A couple of things. First, Alan’s afraid he’ll fuck up history. I told you about the thing with the dead cowboy and our mission control guy, Cole. We don’t know if it happened, but if it did, the consequences of any further deaths in the past might prove devastating, people disappearing all over the place and we’d—for the most part, at least—never even know they were gone, because they never would have been here . . . in a way, at least. You need the damn math to even talk about this, Bethany. This is—”
“What else?”
“That’s the principal thing,” Hardesty told her. “As much as he’d like to get Clarence and Peggy Greer back, and Alan Naile feels he needs to before history is further disrupted, there’s an even bigger problem.”
“Which is?” Bethany Kaminsky lit a second cigarette from the glowing tip of the first. He could almost taste her lipstick on the filter.
“To do it—and we never really shared this point with Dr. Rogers—we needed a small nuclear-powered generator. We were extremely careful and nothing ever happened out of the ordinary. To bring them back from the past, if we could, we’d have to ship the identical apparatus, about which I spoke a moment ago, into the past. Including a duplicate nuclear-powered generator. If something went wrong and we lost control of the device, we could be responsible for something incalculable.
“You have to remember,” Hardesty continued patiently, “that there were whole bunches of really sharp scientists around ninety-six years ago. Once we shipped the equipment into the past, there’d be no way of retrieving it, since the equipment itself would be needed to transport the equipment. Somebody would have to stay behind, and then there’d still be potential problems, maybe worse than those that Clarence and Peggy Greer might cause or have caused already. And, if some really good and creative scientists from 1898—well, it’s 1899 there, now—got hold of that generator, instead of the first atomic bombs coming at the end of World War Two, hell, a nuclear weapon might have been dropped— Here,” he said, motivated by a flash of inspiration. “Let’s say that all of that happened and the right German scientists got their hands on fissionable material. Instead of everybody slogging back and forth through the mud of no-man’s-land in France during World War One, the Germans could have used biplanes to fly cover and dropped a nuclear weapon over Paris or something, out of a dirigible, or smuggled a nuke into London to force the British out. Hell, when America joined the war in 1917, the Germans could have sent a bomb to New York or Washington and cleaned our clocks for good.
“Alan is right, I’m afraid,” Hardesty concluded. “There’s just too much risk in this thing for any rational person to take.”
Bethany Kaminsky seemed unfazed, and Hardesty was more than slightly unnerved at the thought. “So, if we went back in time to—1899 now?�
�to 1899, and, let’s say, we set up the initial equipment at a spot somewhere in present-day Germany or England or wherever, we could ship all the equipment we needed back in time to that same spot in Germany or England. And we could just travel back and forth between now and the past, however we wanted, like going through a damn revolving door. And, if we had a cadre of personnel armed with state-ofthe-art modern weaponry, nobody back then could hope to win against us and seize the stuff. Right?”
“In theory, yeah—but, Beth, you can’t—” And Morton Hardesty suddenly shivered, because he realized that what he feared was exactly what she was thinking.
“Think of the possibilities, Morty. Hmm,” Bethany purred. “The reason Horizon Enterprises has always been a jump ahead of Lakewood Industries isn’t because the Nailes were such sharp business people. No! Hell, no! They knew what was going to happen. So, what if we went back and made a deal, long before Horizon Enterprises became anything more than a fucking fancy variety store and a pissy little ranch? We offered the future’s technology to the three countries which would have the capability and the balls to use it, the manufacturing infrastructure to make it happen to our specifications. The United States, England and Germany. The only three contenders, with France a distant number four.
“Whichever one came out as the best deal,” Bethany enthused, “gets us under contract with a shitload of money and real power in exchange for us giving them the tech stuff to take over the whole fucking world. And they can’t double cross us, because we still control superior technology that they want and we can use to crush them like fucking bugs if we have to. And they’ll be terrified we’ll make a deal with their enemies. It’s perfect. It’s a marriage made in Heaven, Morty.”
“Look, Bethany. I’m nuts about you. You know that. But you’re talking crazy stuff now. What you’re proposing could just as easily be a marriage made in Hell.”
“Well, if the fucking’s good, who cares, right?” Bethany didn’t glare at him, only smiled. “By the 1920s, we’d be the ultimate power in the whole world, Mort. By now, 1995, we’d flat-out rule the whole fucking planet.”
“You might obliterate your own existence, too, Bethany. Or you might destroy the whole population of the planet with just one mistake.”
“Then again,” Bethany smiled almost wistfully, “I might pull it off. We might, Morty,” and she drew her feet up under her then, catlike, and sprang from her desk. She crossed to his chair in two long, easy strides and sat down in Morton Hardesty’s lap. Bethany Kaminsky’s hands grabbed his face roughly, and her mouth crushed his lips under her own.
CHAPTER
TEN
The Nugget, Atlas’ optimistically renamed newspaper, had dispatched its top-flight photographer—who was also the editor, the copy boy, the reporter and the paper delivery person—to take their picture. “All of you should remember that this photo will help build business for Jack Naile—General Merchandise, so you should smile because of all the money you’ll be bringing in.”
This was the photo, her daughter and herself with absurd picturebook hats, hourglass-waisted long dresses worn over heavy-boned corsets, David in a pinchback suit, spats and a derby, Jack wearing a black vested suit, white shirt and tie and the black Stetson he’d painstakingly shaped to match the one worn by Richard Boone. Jack and David were armed, of course. And this was the photo Arthur Beach had sent them in the future, confirming that an impossible set of ircumstances was about to alter their lives forever, an impossible set of circumstances that had become their lives.
Ellen Naile had watched this scene in countless western movies she’d seen on television on Saturday afternoons with her father (when Jack Brickhouse wasn’t doing play-by-play for a Chicago Cubs game), seen it also in western movies her Jack had talked her into watching over the years of their life together. Given their present circumstances, the threat of watching a western movie had passed; she lived a western movie, instead.
The photographer’s left hand was raised high, holding the long flash-powder tray, his right hand controlling the shutter; his head vanished under the camera’s black cloth shroud. Perhaps it was just the desire to stay in character for the period, or perhaps it was something deeper than that, an unexpressed fear that, when the flash powder detonated, they would all be blown to bits. But they stood rigidly, waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
There was the flash, and the photo was made. Ellen leaned up to whisper in Jack’s ear, “I’m going into the back of the store to change and get rid of this stupid hat and this damn corset.”
“I’ll help you, at least with the corset part,” Jack gallantly volunteered.
“I bet you will.”
Ellen entered the store, expecting that Lizzie would be right behind her, expecting that Lizzie would be just as eager as she to change into more comfortable clothing. But, as she looked behind her, she saw that young Bobby Lorkin, the boy who did odd jobs and messengering, was outside, trying to make conversation with Lizzie. He was sweet on her, Ellen knew the look well, remembered it from the mirror when she’d had that look in her own eyes after first becoming aware of Jack as more than just one of the guys in high school.
Lizzie did not have that look for Bobby Lorkin, hadn’t yet had it for anyone. And Lizzie was waiting for that look. Lizzie wanted a marriage for love, not convenience.
Ellen walked on through the store, toward the back room, where she would change. David hadn’t yet turned the store into a supermarket, but it was a little reminiscent of a convenience store. Stock was arranged to facilitate traffic patterns, to allow customers to inspect goods at closer range than over a counter. The self-serve supermarket was not to be “invented” for quite some time yet, the credit for that innovation reserved for Piggly Wiggly stores. Yet David had displays, was using his merchandising skills to pitch product rather than merely waiting for a customer to ask for something by name. Since so much ordering was done from catalogs, David had catalogs arranged on a smallish desk the height of a bar, with three bar stools next to the desk, the setup almost identical to that used with pattern books in some stores in the late twentieth century.
Closing the storeroom door behind her and wedging a chair under the door handle in order to avoid having someone walk in on her while she was changing, Ellen began to undress, the ridiculous hat the first thing to go. The hairstyle that went with it would be rectified later. She started getting out of the dress. For a woman to properly dress, with all the requisite undergarments of the period, could take the better part of a half hour. Undressing was quicker, but not anything near what one might call convenient or quick.
But, all told, things weren’t so bad. They had working plumbing and could shower and wash hair as regularly as they had in the future. A large, central room of the house—for privacy’s sake a room with no windows—was relatively fully electrified. They could listen to music, watch a video, run a hair dryer, almost live like normal people. Admittedly, washing dishes without a dishwasher was a total drag, and cooking on a wood stove, albeit the best multiburner model available from back East, was not only a chore, but sometimes quite an adventure.
By rationing her supply of modern 35mm film and mastering the antiquated equipment of what was the present day, she’d been taking some of the best pictures she’d ever taken, and had been forced by necessity to get into developing, something she had always avoided (just as Jack, firearms aficionado that he was, had always shied away from hand loading ammunition).
She had created a small scandal in town by taking on a few writing assignments for the local newspaper, pieces which had nothing to do with church socials, recipes or women’s fashions.
Although David, through skillful ordering, could obtain many comparatively modern products for their use, to get a decent shampoo still required brewing their own. Other personal items demanded innovative approaches as well. Lizzie and Helen Bledsoe had become great unlikely friends. Theirs was an improbable friendship because Elizabeth, with the vastly broader range of exp
eriences to which she had been exposed, was savvy and sophisticated. Helen was wildly naive. Whereas Helen was grounded, by and large, in only the homely skills and her knowledge of the world was, by any standard, parochial, Liz had traveled much of the United States, had rubbed elbows with the famous, stayed in some of the finest hotels and dined in some of the best restaurants. Through books, magazines, newspapers, television and radio—even school field trips—Liz had a knowledge of the world around her and its possibilities, even in this time. She knew that men would walk on the Moon in three-quarters of a century, would perform open-heart surgery, and would cross the United States coast to coast in hours rather than months. Yet more importantly still, Liz had been raised with the idea that “The only thing a man can do that a woman can’t is piss standing up without getting his legs wet.” For a woman to compensate for the superior physical strength and endurance of the male simply meant—usually—the substitution of brain for brawn, even if that meant recruiting a man to do the strength-related task for her, such as twisting open a stubborn jar lid. Elizabeth was very much the traditional female, but realized that her horizons could be as broad or nearly so as she worked to make them. Helen was schooled in the idea of achieving full contentment and realization of personal abilities in keeping a clean home for a husband who was the ultimate authority and had the final say-so in every aspect of life, to raise their children so that the boys would be as he was and the girls would, however such meekness might not be to their liking, acquiesce, serve, obey.
In discussing this concept of female second-classcitizenship with their daughter once, Jack had described the arrangement in a manner at once bizarre, yet painfully accurate. “However much a man might care for a woman, genuinely love her, in certain societies at certain times— even today—a wife was/is expected to be a love dummy which does not require inflation, yet is capable of housecleaning and cooking.”