by Anthology
“Whew!” said Shorty. “But how could I be in your—”
“I told you; the machine slipped. But logic hasn’t much place in my world. A paradox more or less doesn’t matter, and a time machine is a mere bagatelle. Lots of us have them. Lots of us have come back here hunting with them. That’s how we killed off the dinosaurs and that’s why—”
“Wait,” said Shorty. “Is this world we’re sitting in, the Jurassic, part of your . . . uh . . . concept, or is it real? It looks real, and it looks authentic.”
“This is real, but it never really existed. That’s obvious. If matter is a concept of mind, and the saurians hadn’t any minds, then how could they have had a world to live in, except that we thought it up for them afterward?”
“Oh,” said Shorty weakly. His mind was going in buzzing circles. “You mean that the dinosaurs never really—”
“Here comes one,” said the little man.
Shorty jumped. He looked around wildly and couldn’t see anything that looked like a dinosaur.
“Down there,” said the little man, “coming through those bushes. Watch this shot.”
Shorty looked down as his companion raised the sling shot. A small lizard-like creature, but hopping erect as no lizard hops, was coming around one of the stunted bushes. It stood about a foot and a half high.
There was a sharp pinging sound as the rubber snapped, and a thud as the stone hit the creature between the eyes. It dropped, and the little man went over and picked it up.
“You can shoot the next one,” he said.
Shorty gawked at the dead saurian. “A struthiomimus!” he said. “Golly. But what if a big one comes along? A brontosaurus, say, or a Tyrannosaurus Rex?”
“They’re all gone. We killed them off. There’s only the little ones left, but it’s better than hunting rabbits, isn’t it? Well, one’s enough for me this time. I’m getting bored, but I’ll wait for you to shoot one if you want to.”
Shorty shook his head. “Afraid I couldn’t aim straight enough with that sling shot. I’ll skip it. Where’s the time machine?”
“Right here. Take two steps ahead of you.”
Shorty did, and the lights went out again.
“Just a minute,” said the little man’s voice, “I’ll set the levers. And you want off where you got on?”
“Uh . . . it might be a good idea. I might find myself in a mess otherwise. Where are we now?”
“Back in 1958. That guy is still telling his class what he thinks happened to the dinosaurs. And that red-headed girl—Say, she really is a honey. Want to pull her hair again?”
“No,” said Shorty. “But I want off in 1953. How’s this going to get me there?”
“You got on here, from 1953, didn’t you? It’s the warp. I think this will put you off just right.”
“You think?” Shorty was startled. “Listen, what if I get off the day before and sit down on my own lap in that classroom?”
The voice laughed. “You couldn’t do that; you’re not crazy. But I did, once. Well, get going. I want to get back to—”
“Thanks for the ride,” said Shorty. “But—wait—I still got one question to ask. About those dinosaurs.”
“Yes? Well, hurry; the warp might not hold.”
“The big ones, the really big ones. How the devil did you kill them with sling shots? Or did you?”
The little man chuckled. “Of course, we did. We just used bigger sling shots, that’s all. Good-by.”
Shorty felt a push, and light blinded him again. He was standing in the aisle of the classroom.
“Mr. McCabe,” said the sarcastic voice of Professor Dolohan, “class is not dismissed for five minutes yet. Will you be so kind as to resume your seat? And were you, may I ask, somnambulating?”
Shorty sat down hastily. He said, “I . . . uh—Sorry, professor.”
He sat out the rest of the period in a daze. It had seemed too vivid for a dream, and his fountain pen was still gone. But, of course, he could have lost that elsewhere. Yet the whole thing had been so vivid that it was a full day before he could convince himself that he’d dreamed it, and a week before he could forget about it, for long at a time.
Only gradually did the memory of it fade. A year later, he still vaguely remembered that he’d had a particularly screwy dream. But not five years later; no dream is remembered that long.
He was an associate professor now, and had his own class in paleontology. “The saurians,” he was telling them, “died out in the late Jurassic age. Becoming too large and unwieldy to supply themselves with food—”
As he talked, he was staring at the pretty red-headed graduate student in the back row. And wondering how he could get up the nerve to ask her for a date.
There was a bluebottle fly in the room; it had risen in a droning spiral from a point somewhere at the back of the room. It reminded Professor McCabe of something, and while he talked, he tried to remember what it was. And just then the girl in the back row jumped suddenly and yipped.
“Miss Willis,” said Professor McCabe, “is something wrong?”
“I . . . I thought something pulled my hair, professor,” she said. She blushed, and that made her more of a knockout than ever. “I . . . I guess I must have dozed off.”
He looked at her—severely, because the eyes of the class were upon him. But this was just the chance he’d been waiting and hoping for. He said, “Miss Willis, will you please remain after class?”
PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY AND TIME
John L. Breen
It all started with a bet I had lost but was sure I should have won.
I was one of those wannabe writers determined to reach the shrinking ranks of willing-to-be readers, and for the past few years I had belonged to a writers’ group that met every other Wednesday evening at the home of a member. The members ranged in age from late thirties to early seventies. Some, including me, were what’s called pre-published, a vile euphemism that never raised my self esteem by a single degree. Others could lord it over the rest with a sale or two. A couple were so successful we wondered why they would bother with the group, maybe out of genuine altruism or maybe for relief from the built-in loneliness of the keyboard.
My chosen field was crime fiction, but no stories or novels by Justin Prince (classy byline, no?) had yet seen professional print. A recently acquired gig reviewing mystery novels for the local paper had raised my spirits, however.
The Wednesday after my first reviews appeared, we were meeting at Maisie Goldblatt’s house, a quaintly cozy, fragilely feminine venue better suited to genteel romance than mean-streets violence. To sustain us through the evening, we had coffee (decaf only in these wimpy times), tea, and cookies; the readings were as mixed a bag as usual.
Our oldest member, retired math teacher Fred Bushworthy, had just finished reading his latest essay on the fine art of orchid growing.
Grace Needleman said, “Fred, that is just beautiful. I can just see those orchids. I feel like they’re family.” Grace invariably liked everything and encouraged everybody.
“Fred,” I said, “your target market is a popular gardening magazine, right?”
“I hope so,” he said cheerfully.
“Well, it’s way too technical. Your weekend gardener is going to get lost in all that terminology.” I glanced at the notes I’d made. “Like stigmatic depression and non-parasitic epiphyte.”
“It’s redundant anyway,” said Maisie Goldblatt, who obviously understood the lingo better than I did. “Epiphytes are non-parasitic by definition.”
“I think you need to either simplify it—”
“You can’t write down to your readers,” our perpetually gloomy poet Axel Gruber intoned. “Respect their intelligence. Don’t treat them like children.” It was his hobbyhorse, and variations on it were almost the only comments he made on other members’ work.
I persisted. “Writing at a level they can understand isn’t writing down. Fred, you’re falling between two audiences. Eith
er write it so the amateur can understand it or add some footnotes and send it to a professional journal.”
Always cheerful in the face of criticism, Fred shrugged and said, “I get it. You’re telling me this is another candidate for Fred’s compost heap.”
I shook my head in denial. Fred’s compost heap, which we all swore would some day bring forth blossoms, was a running joke of the group.
Fred was and always would be a hobbyist who wrote to keep busy and didn’t care greatly whether he sold.
Next to share was one of our successful pros. The latest chapter of Judy Klinger’s cute-cat mystery in progress struck me as oversweet as the dessert recipe that accompanied it, but she was selling the damn things, so the group cooed over it.
“Isn’t Itsy-poo just the darlingest pussy?” Grace enthused.
“Has there been a murder in this one?” Bill Wandsworth asked innocently.
“Three chapters ago,” Maisie remembered.
“I’ll get back to it,” Judy assured us, “but you’ll find when you’ve been at this as long as I have that your characters just take over and do whatever they feel like. I could no more tell Itsy-poo what to do than I could any other cat. And the people are just as intractable. Characters that really live and breathe can’t be ordered around.”
Preciously pernicious advice, but what could you say? She was a successful pro.
Next, Maisie treated us to a chapter of steamy romance that a few years ago would have been classified as soft-core porn.
“Can you get that graphic in a romance nowadays?” Charlie Wallace asked. Years in city journalism hadn’t destroyed his ability to blush.
“You sure can,” Maisie assured him. “I watch my market closely.”
Bill Wandsworth, who was almost my age and thus younger than the rest of the group, had become a close friend. As usual, he regaled us with another case for his tough but unsold private eye Johnny Whiplash, who went through all the familiar paces, including taking on a beautiful but treacherous client and surviving another blow to the skull. This shamus had undergone enough concussions to retire half a dozen NFL quarterbacks, but he kept coming back for more.
“Bill,” I said, “the pace is great and I liked some of your similes, but Johnny still seems to me like a forties character living in the twenty-first century.”
“But don’t you get it?” he said. “That’s the whole point!”
There was no point, but I let it go. Not for the first time, I wondered if I was wasting my time taking these Wednesday sessions so seriously. Were we just spinning our wheels, making and not hearing the same comments, never getting any farther ahead? If not for my reviewing gig, the predictable course of the evening would have depressed me.
Now it was time once again to hear the newly revised first chapter of Grace Needleman’s novel, a saga that would cover the whole rich canvas of twentieth-century American life. We all agreed it was getting better, the descriptions sharper, the writing tighter, the portents more portentous, but she’d been revising that first chapter for the past year. If she ever started chapter two, we’d have to break out the champagne.
We listened to Axel Gruber’s latest poem, his usual surrealistic and impenetrable free verse.
“Axel,” I said mildly, “have you ever tried writing a sonnet, I mean, as an exercise in self-discipline?” I wondered if he could, just as I wondered if abstract painters could draw a horse if they had to.
“I do not write sonnets,” he intoned, voice dripping with disdain. “Nor limericks. Nor haikus. Nor clerihews. Real poetry, great poetry, doesn’t color inside the lines; poetry isn’t made by a cookie-cutter; poetry doesn’t come with a set of printed rules like Scrabble. Poetry is the deepest expression of the self.”
When no one seemed ready to add anything to that, I said, “Well, I guess it’s my turn.” Next to last on the evening’s bill of fare, I regaled them with a new beginning on a suspense novel; I had a lot more beginnings than endings, but at least I offered a new one every week. Grace liked it; she always does. Judy made some grudging and patronizing remarks on my promise.
That brought us to the evening’s last reader, our calming influence and the man whose unaccountably regular presence held the group together. Charlie Wallace, a columnist for the local paper and a thorough pro, read us one of his humorous essays. And as usual all we had to offer him was appreciative laughter. Why did he keep coming to the meetings? Maybe the silent appreciation of his readers wasn’t enough. Maybe he was a frustrated stand-up. It was good to have Charlie as the last act, so to speak. If we ever let Axel go last, we’d all go out and kill ourselves.
The group’s unwritten bylaw was that no adult beverages would be offered until the reading was over and the purely social part of the evening began. This time Maisie brought out a bottle of sub-Dom-Perignon-but-better-than-chainstore champagne, filled a flute for everybody, and offered a toast: “Here’s to Justin’s first sale.”
Luckily, the group took the term sale rather loosely—what I was getting paid as a book reviewer was a little more than a free book but hardly enough to earn the exalted label of sale. It would have been more appropriately toasted with a boxed chardonnay. But I was pleased about it and happily accepted a round of congratulations. They all seemed to have read my first group of reviews and had nice things to say.
“It’s so hard to review a mystery without giving too much away,” Judy said. “So often, at least in my case, a reviewer will reveal something the reader should find out for herself. The people who write jacket copy are even worse. You hit just the right balance, Justin.” She simpered coyly, and I caught a flickering glimpse of the pretty young woman in her years-old publicity photo. “Maybe you’ll be reviewing me one day.”
God, I hoped not. If the opportunity came, I’d quietly turn it down on conflict of interest grounds—I could claim Judy, whom I could barely stand, was too dear a friend for me to retain my objectivity.
All the comments were complimentary until Bill said offhandedly, “You made one gaffe, though, you know.”
I was wounded, of course. You’ll always remember that single flotsam of rebuke in a sea of praise. “What do you mean?”
“When you were reviewing that mystery about the World War II home front, you said the use of the term ‘shrink’ was an anachronism.”
“It was,” I said. “ ‘Shrink’ as slang for psychiatrist didn’t come in until much later.”
Charlie came to my aid. “Justin’s right. I would say maybe in the late forties or early fifties, they started to use headshrinker as a slang term for psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Eventually, this got shortened to shrink, but not before, I don’t know, maybe late fifties, early sixties. For sure, early forties is too early.”
Fred said, “Charlie’s got it right. I’m older than anybody here, and I don’t remember hearing shrink to mean shrink before the Kennedy administration.”
“It’s not a serious mistake, though,” Maisie said. “It’s not easy to keep track of period slang.”
“I never said it was a serious mistake,” I said, sounding more defensive than I intended. “I just mentioned it in passing in a damn favorable review. The author should be very happy with that review.”
“Not the issue,” Bill said. “You got it wrong, Justin, and the rest of you—well, all I can say is your memories are imperfect.”
“Bill,” Fred pointed out, “you’re too young to remember when they said shrink or didn’t say shrink. I was there.”
“On the couch?” Charlie said. Fred grinned, and the tension lifted a little, but Bill wouldn’t leave it alone.
“No, I wasn’t there, but I read a lot from that period, and I’m sensitive to language. They did use shrink in that way at that time, and I can prove it.”
“You can’t because they didn’t,” I said, even while thinking we were making way too big a deal of this.
“I’ll bet you ten bucks and a foofendorker I can prove it.”
Ah, the dread
ed foofendorker, our group’s equivalent of the triple-dog-dare. Foofendorker had been the name of an alien race in a science fiction story by one of our former members. We were so hard on that story, we reduced her to tears one week, and to make amends and keep her in the group, we agreed to break our rule limiting members to one reading per meeting and awarded her an extra one at our next. She still drifted off, not getting the unalloyed praise she wanted except from Grace, and from that day forward the awarding of an extra reading was called a foofendorker, to much hilarity. If I awarded a foofendorker to another member through a wager, it would mean giving up my own turn to read that week.
“You’re on,” I said, confident I would win.
A couple of days later, Bill called me at work, asking me to meet him that afternoon at Liam’s Irish Pub so he could collect his ten bucks.
“You haven’t proved anything,” I pointed out.
“I will. You know, of course, that I collect old pulp magazines.”
“Right. It’s a very positive influence on your writing.” That last was sarcastic and he knew it. I liked the old pulps, too, but I hadn’t moved in.
When we met after work at Liam’s, we would normally stand at the bar, often arguing which of our office day jobs was the more exasperating and unful-filling. Sometimes we would chat with the bartender, yet another wannabe writer who swore he would join our group if not for his working hours. But today was different. Bill insisted we repair to a booth in the most secluded back corner. He looked around with exaggerated furtiveness, then opened his briefcase and removed an old pulp magazine in a clear plastic slipcase. He could not have handled it more carefully if it had been an original Picasso or a vial of nitroglycerine.
He showed me the cover, which I peered at in the barely adequate bar lighting. The magazine was called Stunning Science Adventures, dated January 1943, and its cover showed a classic bug-eyed monster wearing a Nazi armband menacing a voluptuous young woman in a see-through space suit, with a barren moonscape in the background, a recognizable Earth above the horizon. Then he carefully withdrew the magazine from its slipcase and opened its browning pages.