by Anthology
“This is from a story called ‘Time Trampler’ by Frank Paulsen. I’ll read you some of the dialogue: ‘I don’t belong here. I belong in another place, another century, and I’ve been there. I want to go back.’ ‘Sophie, you need help. You need to talk to somebody. I can recommend a good shrink . . .’ ‘Sam, I’m not crazy!’ ” He looked up from the magazine with a complacent smile. “There it is. Ten bucks and a foofendorker.”
“Let me see that,” I said. He didn’t like handing it over, but it was only fair letting me have a closer look and I took pains to handle the old magazine as carefully as he had. On the third page of the story, the dialogue appeared as he’d read it. It didn’t take me long to decide I wasn’t being hoaxed. A real sixty-year-old pulp would be almost impossible to fake convincingly, and even if it could be, it wouldn’t be worth the bother for a ten-dollar bet, even with a foofendorker thrown in. I read a little more of the story in the dim light of the bar.
“Bill, this story is set in the year 2000,” I said, knowing as I said it I was grasping at straws.
“Yeah? So?”
“In 2000, we were using ‘shrink’ for psychiatrist.”
“Come on, Justin. Is that the best you can come up with? The story was written and published in 1943, and if you read it all the way through you’ll see that in no way does it depict the 2000 we know. See any references to the Internet? Anybody sending anybody e-mail? And you’ll notice everybody’s tooling around the city in their personal flying machines, which if it’s happened I haven’t noticed. That story is not prophetic at all, and the characters talk just like people in 1943 talked. Old Frank Paulsen used the term shrink because that was a slang term in use at that time, not because he had some crystal ball for slang of our time. Now please pay up.”
“Uh, sure, yeah, I will. I guess you’ve got me.” I pulled out my wallet and handed over ten dollars. “You ever heard of this Frank Paulsen before?”
Bill shrugged. “I’ve seen the name once or twice, but I don’t know anything about him. There were a lot of pulp writers. It might have been a pseudonym. He was no Max Brand or Carroll John Daly, not under that name anyway.”
I wasn’t satisfied. The ten dollars was no great loss, but something about this didn’t make sense. I’m proud of my ear for language, and seeing that use of shrink in a 1943 story was as out of kilter to me as a reference to Britney Spears would have been. Something wasn’t right, though I couldn’t quite articulate my suspicions.
To begin with, I wanted to find out more about Frank Paulsen and at the very least read “Time Trampler” in its entirety. The next Saturday morning, I turned up at the special collections department of the local university library, which housed the biggest collection of pulp magazines in a several-thousand-mile radius. Access was closely controlled, and I had to fill out a lot of forms as well as surrender my driver’s license. I think my status as a critic for the local paper turned the tide for me.
They had fully indexed their holdings in the library’s online catalog, and I quickly found the Paulsen byline had appeared ten times in pulps held by the university. “Time Trampler” was the only one in a science fiction magazine. There was one in a sports pulp, one in a western pulp, the other seven in mystery magazines. I requested all ten, and they were brought to me in the huge, cold, and silent reading room, along with a whispered lecture about how fragile they were and how to turn the pages to prevent damage.
I was instructed I could take notes only in pencil, and I was glad the clerk stopped short of a full-body search to see if I was carrying a pen. Any request to photocopy, at a dollar per page, would have to be approved by the chief special collections librarian, and there would be a delay of a week before I would have the copies. A forbidding attendant sat at an elevated desk at the front of the room, watching me and my fellow researchers for any infractions of the rules.
The time travel gimmick in “Time Trampler” was a clever one but seemed familiar somehow. The present of the story was 2000. Time travel had been perfected, but characters were able to travel only for legitimate scholarly research, qualifying for which was nearly as tough as accessing the university library’s special collections. Changing the present through accidentally tampering with the past didn’t seem to be a big problem: the course of time would spring back into its normal track unless the change was major and deliberate, and that was the kind of catastrophe the hero, a sort of time cop with the all-American name Ted Armstrong, would be sent back in time to prevent.
The story had a romantic angle: on one of his trips to tidy up the past, he intended to make a side trip to win back an old girlfriend named Rosemary. The time travel was accomplished not via a time machine out of H.G. Wells but through more psychological means. Travelers would steep themselves in the surroundings and accoutrements of the time they wanted to visit—and once they were well enough steeped, they could walk out the door and there they were.
From “Time Trampler,” I moved on to Paulsen’s other efforts. He had a measure of that flair and readability essential to writers of popular fiction, but he seemed no better and no worse than dozens of his contemporaries. I was tempted to read some stories by the real masters instead—there was a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner in one of the issues—but I stuck with Paulsen. As I read through his stories, I was on the lookout for more anachronisms, and I found a few that seemed dubious but no smoking gun. I had almost decided I must have been wrong about “shrink” when I came across this in a 1944 sports pulp: “The Lions batter looked glazed-eyed when he returned to the dugout. ‘What was that pitch, Skip?’ he asked the manager. The wily old man grinned and said, ‘He calls that his foofendorker. Don’t worry, kid. Babe Ruth couldn’t hit it either.’ ”
Foofendorker! For a second, I felt lightheaded. What was going on here? Take it easy, I told myself: I didn’t know every catchphrase that had become popular briefly and disappeared years before I was born. Our former member must have heard the term foofendorker and appropriated it for her alien race. There was nothing weird or paranormal going on here. On the other hand, nobody else in the group seemed to have heard it before, not even old Fred.
I noted the page and moved on to calming vistas of pulp mystery clichés. But three stories later, I hit something that blew all my calm reasoning up the chimney and out of the water. The first-person private eye narration ran thus: “The search for Flora sent me to every garden supply store in the city. I got my first clear lead at a place called Fred’s Compost Heap.”
That settled it for me. What was that old mystery rule out of Sherlock Holmes? When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, something like that. Well for me, two coincidences became the impossible, and what remained that had to be the truth was simply this: Frank Paulsen was one of the members of my writers’ group and a time traveler.
I trolled through the pages for other clues. Were there any letters to the editor commenting on Paulsen stories? No. Were there any biographical notes on Paulsen accompanying the stories or in the editors’ brag columns? No. I took down the names and addresses of the magazines’ publishers—though the mags were long out of business, the companies that put them out might not be—and the names of the various pulps’ editors. Maybe I could find out something through one of them, though it was a longshot any of them would still be alive.
When I was sure I’d exhausted all possibilities, I carried the magazines to the desk and made my photocopy order. I had decided to get copies of every Paulsen story, even though it would cost me a couple hundred dollars.
The attendant—I think a graduate student, not a librarian—looked at me almost accusingly. “Do you realize how rare and fragile these magazines are?” he demanded.
I wanted to say, rarer than you know, and the life we live is more fragile than you can imagine. Instead I settled for, “I assume that’s why you ask a buck a page and an Act of Congress to get copies.”
Events ground slowly from that point. By our next Wednesday m
eeting, I had no copies yet and had nothing to say to the group about my discovery. Our venue this time was Fred Bushworthy’s house, smaller than Maisie’s but somehow more comfortable and relaxed. The most prominent features of the room were vases of flowers and a wall of gardening trophies. Mrs. Bushworthy, a grandmotherly lady as cheerful as Fred, popped in to say hello but stepped out to a movie with some friends. Fred served us the traditional tea, decaf, and cookies.
The meeting was much as usual. Bill had brought only one piece to read but told the group a story by somebody named Frank Paulsen had won him his bet and reminded us all he expected to collect his foofendorker next time. I offered my sportsmanlike congratulations.
As the others read their stuff, my mind wandered more than usual, and I had fewer comments to make. I remember Maisie’s romance had a figure-skating sequence. Grace, of course, said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. Charlie had a question about one of the jumps referred to, whether it was spelled axel or axle. Judy was pretty sure it was axel and asked our own Axel if there were any figure skaters in his family. He just looked disgusted. Grace said she’d once looked up the origin of axel, but before she could say what it was, Axel pointed out we were getting off subject and it was time to hear his latest impenetrable piece of free verse. Just a typical meeting, if even more useless than usual.
Throughout the evening, I wondered which of them, if my theory was correct, might be the time traveler. Frank Paulsen, who had written in predominately masculine genres, was probably a man. Bill himself seemed the most likely to want to travel back in time and make a name for himself in the pulps, but if he was Paulsen and didn’t want it known, why would he make that bet with me? Fred’s time on Earth actually overlapped Paulsen’s, and maybe he wanted to travel out of a sense of nostalgia, but judging by his sincere and knowledgeable but ineptly written gardening nonfiction, I doubted he had the writing chops to produce Paulsen’s output. Charlie clearly had the chops, but he didn’t seem to relate to old popular fiction, and as for Axel, well, you couldn’t tell about him, but his deadly serious commitment to inaccessible highbrow literature didn’t fit with a pulp magazine sensibility.
Could Frank Paulsen be a woman? Certainly, but could he be one of these women? Maisie, with her calculatedly shocking patches of graphic romance, had a sort of toughness about her, along with the sense of humor that was implicit in Paulsen’s career. Grace was certainly interested in the period, but she never finished anything in our time and it seemed doubtful she’d be turning out pulp stories if she lived sixty years ago. Judy seemed so doggedly (wrong word) devoted to her cute cat stories, she was disinclined to travel out of the state, let alone to 1943. The women just didn’t fit.
Then another thought occurred to me, one that would accommodate a Paulsen of either gender. Maybe Paulsen was not a solo byline. Maybe my time traveler was collaborating on those pulp stories with somebody else native to that period.
A couple days later, I got my photocopies in the mail from the university and I was able to steep myself in Paulsen’s work. Many of the plots seemed familiar, not in the general way of popular fiction formulae but in very specific ways, as if Paulsen were taking later writers’ plots and recycling them (or do I mean precycling them?) point-by-point. Frank the preemptive plagiarist.
Between rereading the stories, I used my computer to Google all those editors, and for a while hit one dead end after another. Mostly all I could find were obituaries. Finally, though, I struck pay dirt. At least one of them was still living: C. Hardy Flint, editor of a whole string of pulps, including Stunning Science Adventures, was in fact resident of an assisted-living facility in this very city.
When I phoned to ask if I could arrange a visit with him, a pleasant-voiced woman assured me he’d love it. He didn’t get that many visitors, and he’d welcome somebody to talk to. But what, I wondered, if all his memories were wiped clean by time and nature? I inquired delicately if the old fellow, who must be ninety plus, was all there.
“Very much all there,” came the amused answer. “But—let me put it this way. Do you have a room in your house where you put everything you have no current use for but don’t want to throw away?”
“Sure.” I could have said my whole apartment was like that.
“You have an idea what’s in the room, and once you find a particular item, you can put it to use. But you can’t always remember exactly where it is, and you can’t put your hand on it at any given moment—and when you can’t, it frustrates you.”
“I get it. You’re telling me he’s senile.”
“I can see you’re not afflicted with political correctness,” she said. “No, he’s not senile. He can often remember things from seventy or eighty years ago like they happened yesterday, but—oh, I think you understand my metaphor, don’t you?”
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Are you? Oh, then I know he’ll want to talk to you.”
Having been warned of his cluttered attic, I figured it would be wise to prepare the old fellow in advance, so I wrote him a letter and enclosed a photocopy of “Time Trampler” before I went for a visit. When C. Hardy Flint met me in the cheery and spacious lobby of his building a week later, he was spiffily turned out in a three-piece suit. He told me almost immediately, with a mixture of pride and wonder, that he was ninety-four years old, and I assured him truthfully he didn’t look a day over seventy. He had brought the copy I’d sent of “Time Trampler.”
“This story brought back memories,” he said when we were seated in the comfortable visiting area.
“Of Frank Paulsen?” I said hopefully.
“No. Just of that whole time in my life. To tell the truth, I can’t call the fellow to mind. I worked with so many writers, you know. Sounds kind of familiar, but—what else did he write?”
“Everything, it seems. Mostly mystery, but some sports and westerns.”
“For some reason, I think I should remember him.” The old man shook his head in befuddlement, then brightened. “Now, the guy that did the illustration. I can tell you all about him. No signature, but I’d know that style anywhere.” What he said about the black and white interior illustration’s artist might have fascinated me at any other time, but I wanted to know about Paulsen.
“Do you remember the story at all?”
A smile came to his wrinkled face. “Oh, I remember the story all right. My memory’s great, just get a little static now and then. Yes, indeed. But I’m pretty sure that story came in over the transom. I don’t think I ever met Paulsen. As I recall, we changed the name of the hero. It wasn’t Ted Armstrong originally. It was something else, some precious name like an Edwardian detective, what the hell was it? Percy something. Can you imagine a red-blooded pulp reader of the forties wanting to read about a hero with a sissified name like Percy?”
“No,” I said, “unless he was the Scarlet Pimpernel on the side. What else can you remember about the story?”
“Well, of course, you can see it was derivative as hell. Most of them were. It may not even have struck me at the time, but when I was rereading the story you sent me, I could see where he stole his time travel gimmick. Two different sources actually.”
“What were they?”
“Well, that whole business about time police and time snapping back into place if you didn’t change it too much—that was Poul Anderson’s. And the thing about sitting around in the atmosphere of a past time and soaking if up and just sort of thinking your way into it—you ever see The Music Man?”
“Sure.”
“The guy selling the band instruments knew nothing about music, so he told the kids they’d have to learn to play by the ‘think system.’ That’s what this time travel gimmick is: the think system.”
“So he stole it from Meredith Willson?”
Flint looked at me disparagingly. “No, no. Your science fictional knowledge leaves something to be desired. It was in that book by Jack Finney. Some science fiction people hated it, but it
was a great book. What was it called? Time and Again.”
He said it with such confidence, I hoped I wouldn’t upset him with what I said next. “Mr. Flint, I do know that book, but it came years later. Nobody in 1943 had ever heard of Poul Anderson or Jack Finney.”
“Why, yes, I guess you’re right. So did Anderson and Finney both read Frank Paulsen and borrow from him?” Flint looked lost in thought for a moment, then came to a decision. “There’s something about this I should remember and I can’t. We’ll have to check my files.”
“Your files?” I said, half hopeful and half dubious. I didn’t think you could bring a bunch of old business files to a place like this.
He read my mind. “Oh, I don’t have them here. My granddaughter’s keeping them for me. Just until I check out.” He smiled. We both knew he didn’t mean check out of the assisted-living facility to move to his own place and reclaim the files. “She lives about a half hour drive from here, out in the suburbs, very nice place. If you could drive me out there, I might be able to help you a little bit more. How about it? I don’t get out much, you know.”
I was still dubious. Was he just stringing me along to get a rare trip off base? But if the files really existed, it would be great, and if not, I’d be doing a good deed for a nice old man.
“Will they let you go out?” I asked.
“Young fellow,” he said with amused rebuke, “I am still a free man. No commitment papers have been signed.”
So he called his granddaughter, told the front desk where he was going, and a few minutes later was sitting in the passenger seat of my aging Camry. He seemed to be enjoying himself so much, I decided not to mind if this turned out to be a wild goose chase.
His granddaughter’s house was lovely, part of a tree-shaded upscale tract with enough individuality not to look like one. The granddaughter was lovely, too. Her name was Elizabeth, Flint had told me, with all diminutives and truncations (Eliza, Lizzie, Beth, Betty) firmly rejected. She had no children, no animals, and no husband (I got the impression she was divorced) and cheerfully pronounced the two-story house much too big for her. I had no logical reason to be interested in the granddaughter, but it’s amazing what information you can pick up when you’re besotted. Maybe I’d embark on a research project about the old pulps that would give me an excuse to visit her again. But for now, we’d concentrate on business. C. Hardy Flint’s files were in half a dozen large filing cabinets that reduced the garage to single-vehicle capacity.