by Anthology
Once I passed a party, the windows all lighted, and they were having a time, noisy and happy, and with a lot of laughing and shrieks from the women. I stopped for a minute, across the street, watching; and I saw figures passing the lighted windows, and one of them was a girl with her hair slicked close to her head, and curving down onto her cheeks in sort of J-shaped hooks. There was a phonograph going, and the music—it was “China Boy”—sounded sort of distant, the orchestration tinny, and . . . different, I can’t explain how. Once it slowed down, the tones deepening, and someone yelled, and then I heard the pitch rising higher again as it picked up speed, and knew someone was winding the phonograph. Then I walked on.
At daylight, the sky whitening in the east, the leaves of the big old trees around me beginning to stir, I was on Cherry Street. I heard a door open across the street, and saw a man in overalls walk down his steps, cut silently across the lawn, and open the garage doors beside his house. He walked in, I heard the motor start, and a cream and green ’56 Oldsmobile backed out—and I turned around then, and walked on toward Prairie Avenue and home, and was in bed a couple hours before my folks woke up Sunday morning.
I didn’t tell anyone my Jordan was gone; there was no way to explain it. Ed Smiley, and a couple other guys, asked me about it, and I said I was working on it in my garage. My folks didn’t ask; they were long since used to my working on a car for weeks, then discovering I’d sold or traded it for something else to work on.
But I wanted—I simply had to have—another Playboy, and it took a long time to find one. I heard of one in Davenport, and borrowed Jim Clark’s Hudson, and drove over, but it wasn’t a Playboy, just a Jordan, and in miserable shape anyway.
It was a girl who found me a Playboy; after school started up in September. She was in my Economics IV class, a sophomore I learned, though I didn’t remember seeing her around before. She wasn’t actually a girl you’d turn and look at again, and remember, I suppose; she wasn’t actually pretty, I guess you’d have to say. But after I’d talked to her a few times, and had a Coke date once, when I ran into her downtown—then she was pretty. And I got to liking her; quite a lot. It s like this; I’m a guy who’s going to want to get married pretty early. I’ve been dating girls since I was sixteen, and it’s fun, and exciting, and I like it fine. But I ve just about had my share of that, and I’d been looking at girls in a different way lately; a lot more interested in what they were like than in just how good-looking they were. And I knew pretty soon that this was a girl I could fall in love with, and marry, and be happy with. I won’t be fooling around with old cars all my life; it’s just a hobby, and I know it, and I wouldn’t expect a girl to get all interested in exactly how the motor of an old Marmon works. But I would expect her to take some interest in how I feel about old cars. And she did—Helen McCauley, her name is. She really did; she understood what I was talking about, and it wasn’t faked either, I could tell.
So one night—we were going to the dance at the Roof Garden, and I’d called for her a little early, and we were sitting out on her lawn in deck chairs killing time—I told her how I wanted one certain kind of old car, and why it had to be just that car. And when I mentioned its name, she sat up, and said, “Why, good heavens, I’ve heard about the Playboy from Dad all my life; we’ve got one out in the barn; it’s a beat-up old mess, though. Dad!” she called, turning to look up at the porch where her folks were sitting. “Here’s a man you’ve been looking for!”
Well, I’ll cut it short. Her dad came down, and when he heard what it was all about, Helen and I never did get to the dance. We were out in that barn, the old tarpaulin pulled off his Jordan, and we were looking at it, touching it, sitting in it, talking about it, and quoting Playboy ads to each other for the next three hours.
It wasn’t in bad shape at all. The upholstery was gone; only wads of horsehair, and strips of brittle old leather left. The body was dented, but not torn. A few parts, including one headlight, and part of the windshield mounting, were gone, and the motor was a long way from running, but nothing serious. And all the wheels were there, and in good shape, though they needed renickeling.
Mr. McCauley gave me the car; wouldn’t take a nickel for it. He’d owned that Jordan when he was young, had had it ever since, and loved it; he’d always meant, he said, to get it in running order again sometime, but knew he never would now. And once he understood what I meant about restoring a classic, he said that to see it and drive it again as it once was, was all the payment he wanted.
I don’t know just when I guessed, or why; but the feeling had been growing on me. Partly, I suppose, it was the color; the faded-out remains of the deep green this old car had once been. And partly it was something else, I don’t know just what. But suddenly—standing in that old barn with Helen, and her mother and dad—suddenly I knew, and I glanced around the barn, and found them; the old plates nailed up on a wall, 1923 through 1931. And when I walked over to look at them, I found what I knew I would find; 1923 Illinois tag 11,206.
“Your old Jordan plates?” I said, and when he nodded, I said as casually as I could, “What’s your first name, Mr. McCauley?”
I suppose he thought I was crazy, but he said, “Vincent. Why?”
“Just wondered. I was picturing you driving around when the Jordan was new; it’s a fast car, and it must have been a temptation to open it up.”
“Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “I did that, all right; those were wild times.”
“Racing trains; all that sort of thing, I suppose?”
“That’s right,” he said, and Helen’s mother glanced at me curiously. “That was one of the things to do in those days. We almost got it one night, too; scared me to death. Remember?” he said to his wife.
“I certainly do.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Oh”—he shrugged—“I was racing a train, out west of town one night; where the road parallels the Q tracks. I passed it, heading for the cross-road—you know where it is—that cuts over the tracks. We got there, my arms started to move, to swing the wheel and shoot over the tracks in front of that engine—when I knew I couldn’t make it.” He shook his head. “Two three seconds more; if we’d gotten there just two seconds earlier, I’d have risked it, I’m certain, and we’d have been killed, I know. But we were just those couple seconds too late, and I swung that wheel straight again, and shot on down the road beside that train, and when I took my foot off the gas, and the engine rushed past us, the fireman was leaning out of the cab shaking his fist, and shouting something, I couldn’t hear what, but it wasn’t complimentary.” He grinned.
“Did anything delay you that night,” I said softly, “just long enough to keep you from getting killed?” I was actually holding my breath, waiting for his answer.
But he only shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said without interest. “I can’t remember.” And his wife said, “I don’t even remember where we’d been.”
I don’t believe—I really don’t—that my Jordan Playboy is anything more than metal, glass, rubber and paint formed into a machine. It isn’t alive; it can’t think or feel; it’s only a car. But I think it’s an especial tragedy when a young couple’s lives are cut off for no other reason than the sheer exuberance nature put into them. And I can’t stop myself from feeling, true or not true, that when that old Jordan was restored—returned to precisely the way it had been just before young Vince McCauley and his girl had raced a train in it back in 1923—when it had been given a second chance; it went back to the time and place, back to the same evening in 1923, that would give them a second chance, too. And so again, there on that warm July evening, actually there in the year 1923, they got into that Jordan, standing just where they’d parked it, to drive on and race that train. But trivial events can affect important ones following them—how often we’ve all said: If only this or that had happened, everything would have turned out so differently. And this time it did, for now something was changed. This time on that 1923 July
evening, someone dashed in front of their car, delaying them only two or three seconds. But Vince McCauley, then, driving on to race along beside those tracks, changed his mind about trying to cross them; and lived to marry the girl beside him. And to have a daughter.
I haven’t asked Helen to marry me, but she knows I will; after I’ve graduated, and got a job, I expect. And she knows that I know she’ll say yes. We’ll be married, and have children, and I’m sure we’ll be driving a modern hard-top car like everyone else, with safety catches on the doors so the kids won’t fall out. But one thing for sure—just as her folks did thirty-two years before—we’ll leave on our honeymoon in the Jordan Playboy.
SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES
Robert J. Sawyer
The transference went smoothly, like a scalpel slicing into skin.
Cohen was simultaneously excited and disappointed. He was thrilled to be here—perhaps the judge was right, perhaps this was indeed where he really belonged. But the gleaming edge was taken off that thrill because it wasn’t accompanied by the usual physiological signs of excitement: no sweaty palms, no racing heart, no rapid breathing. Oh, there was a heartbeat, to be sure, thundering in the background, but it wasn’t Cohen’s.
It was the dinosaur’s.
Everything was the dinosaur’s: Cohen saw the world now through tyrannosaur eyes.
The colors seemed all wrong. Surely plant leaves must be the same chlorophyll green here in the Mesozoic, but the dinosaur saw them as navy blue. The sky was lavender; the dirt underfoot ash gray.
Old bones had different cones, thought Cohen. Well, he could get used to it. After all, he had no choice. He would finish his life as an observer inside this tyrannosaur’s mind. He’d see what the beast saw, hear what it heard, feel what it felt. He wouldn’t be able to control its movements, they had said, but he would be able to experience every sensation.
The rex was marching forward.
Cohen hoped blood would still look red.
It wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t red.
“And what, Ms. Cohen, did your husband say before he left your house on the night in question?”
“He said he was going out to hunt humans. But I thought he was making a joke.”
“No interpretations, please, Ms. Cohen. Just repeat for the court as precisely as you remember it, exactly what your husband said.”
“He said, ‘I’m going out to hunt humans.’ ”
“Thank you, Ms. Cohen. That concludes the Crown’s case, my lady.”
The needlepoint on the wall of the Honorable Madam Justice Amanda Hoskins’s chambers had been made for her by her husband. It was one of her favorite verses from The Mikado, and as she was preparing sentencing she would often look up and re-read the words:
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime—
The punishment fit the crime.
This was a difficult case, a horrible case. Judge Hoskins continued to think.
It wasn’t just colors that were wrong. The view from inside the tyrannosaur’s skull was different in other ways, too.
The tyrannosaur had only partial stereoscopic vision. There was an area in the center of Cohen’s field of view that showed true depth perception. But because the beast was somewhat wall-eyed, it had a much wider panorama than normal for a human, a kind of saurian Cinemascope covering 270 degrees.
The wide-angle view panned back and forth as the tyrannosaur scanned along the horizon.
Scanning for prey.
Scanning for something to kill.
The Calgary Herald, Thursday, October 16, 2042: Serial killer Rudolph Cohen, 43, was sentenced to death yesterday.
Formerly a prominent member of the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Cohen was convicted in August of thirty-seven counts of first-degree murder.
In chilling testimony, Cohen had admitted, without any signs of remorse, to having terrorized each of his victims for hours before slitting their throats with surgical implements.
This is the first time in eighty years that the death penalty has been ordered in this country.
In passing sentence, Madam Justice Amanda Hoskins observed that Cohen was “the most cold-blooded and brutal killer to have stalked Canada’s prairies since Tyrannosaurus rex . . .”
From behind a stand of dawn redwoods about ten meters away, a second tyrannosaur appeared. Cohen suspected tyrannosaurs might be fiercely territorial, since each animal would require huge amounts of meat. He wondered if the beast he was in would attack the other individual.
His dinosaur tilted its head to look at the second rex, which was standing in profile. But as it did so, almost all of the dino’s mental picture dissolved into a white void, as if when concentrating on details the beast’s tiny brain simply lost track of the big picture.
At first Cohen thought his rex was looking at the other dinosaur’s head, but soon the top of other’s skull, the tip of its muzzle and the back of its powerful neck faded away into snowy nothingness. All that was left was a picture of the throat. Good, thought Cohen. One shearing bite there could kill the animal.
The skin of the other’s throat appeared gray-green and the throat itself was smooth. Maddeningly, Cohen’s rex did not attack. Rather, it simply swiveled its head and looked out at the horizon again.
In a flash of insight, Cohen realized what had happened. Other kids in his neighborhood had had pet dogs or cats. He’d had lizards and snakes—cold-blooded carnivores, a fact to which expert psychological witnesses had attached great weight. Some kinds of male lizards had dewlap sacks hanging from their necks. The rex he was in—a male, the Tyrrell paleontologists had believed—had looked at this other one and seen that she was smooth-throated and therefore a female. Something to be mated with, perhaps, rather than to attack.
Perhaps they would mate soon. Cohen had never orgasmed except during the act of killing. He wondered what it would feel like.
“We spent a billion dollars developing time travel, and now you tell me the system is useless?”
“Well—”
“That is what you’re saying, isn’t it, professor? That chronotransference has no practical applications?”
“Not exactly, Minister. The system does work. We can project a human being’s consciousness back in time, superimposing his or her mind overtop of that of someone who lived in the past.”
“With no way to sever the link. Wonderful.”
“That’s not true. The link severs automatically.”
“Right. When the historical person you’ve transferred consciousness into dies, the link is broken.”
“Precisely.”
“And then the person from our time whose consciousness you’ve transferred back dies as well.”
“I admit that’s an unfortunate consequence of linking two brains so closely.”
“So I’m right! This whole damn chronotransference thing is useless.”
“Oh, not at all, Minister. In fact, I think I’ve got the perfect application for it.”
The rex marched along. Although Cohen’s attention had first been arrested by the beast’s vision, he slowly became aware of its other senses, too. He could hear the sounds of the rex’s footfalls, of twigs and vegetation being crushed, of birds or pterosaurs singing, and, underneath it all, the relentless drone of insects. Still, all the sounds were dull and low; the rex’s simple ears were incapable of picking up high-pitched noises, and what sounds they did detect were discerned without richness. Cohen knew the late Cretaceous must have been a symphony of varied tone, but it was as if he was listening to it through earmuffs.
The rex continued along, still searching. Cohen became aware of several more impressions of the world both inside and out, including hot afternoon sun beating down on him and a hungry gnawing in the beast’s belly.
Food.
It was the closest thing to a coherent thought that he’d yet detected from the animal, a mental picture of b
olts of meat going down its gullet.
Food.
The Social Services Preservation Act of 2022: Canada is built upon the principle of the Social Safety Net, a series of entitlements and programs designed to ensure a high standard of living for every citizen. However, ever-increasing life expectancies coupled with constant lowering of the mandatory retirement age have placed an untenable burden on our social-welfare system and, in particular, its cornerstone program of universal health care. With most taxpayers ceasing to work at the age of 45, and with average Canadians living to be 94 (males) or 97 (females), the system is in danger of complete collapse. Accordingly, all social programs will henceforth be available only to those below the age of 60, with one exception: all Canadians, regardless of age, may take advantage, at no charge to themselves, of government-sponsored euthanasia through chronotransference.
There! Up ahead! Something moving! Big, whatever it was: an indistinct outline only intermittently visible behind a small knot of fir trees.
A quadruped of some sort, its back to him/it/them.
Ah, there. Turning now. Peripheral vision dissolving into albino nothingness as the rex concentrated on the head.
Three horns.
Triceratops.
Glorious! Cohen had spent hours as a boy pouring over books about dinosaurs, looking for scenes of carnage. No battles were better than those in which Tyrannosaurus rex squared off against Triceratops, a four-footed Mesozoic tank with a trio of horns projecting from its face and a shield of bone rising from the back of its skull to protect the neck.