Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Thanks.”

  “I see why you didn’t shout ‘Come in!’ when I knocked.” Lucy nodded. “Do you like it?”

  “Yes, it’s one of your best. I can’t believe that you just whipped it together. It’s eerie. Larry looks like he’s fading in and out. But you’d better finish it and get it out of this house.”

  “Thanks, I was inspired. And I will keep it hidden. I will. Anyway, it’s almost finished. Want to know what I call this?” Jim did.

  “I call it, ‘Disappearing Act.’ ”

  From this more oblique angle, Jim’s conclusion was the same: Terrific drawing, depressed subject. “Lucy, we have to say something to Larry.” Lucy glanced toward Jim. Jim continued. “Not about your painting. I mean, he’s drifting through the doldrums. Larry becomes more withdrawn all the time. His ego is practically gone. You can’t get a single word out of him about what he’s doing, what he’s thinking—nothing about what interests or excites him. We have to unshell him, give him some confidence.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been saying we have to talk with Larry for months and we’re just too chicken. You know he left the screen door open again—it’s a bug habitat, this house.” Perhaps it wasn’t forgetfulness, Lucy thought, but rather he just likes all those bugs. “Somebody has to tell him either to fix himself up or see a therapist.”

  “Let’s do it. Maybe he’ll hate us, but just maybe he will seek professional help and his life and ours’ll be hundreds of times better.” She considered pausing for Jim’s answer, but decided to continue. “Chen’s sound good?”

  “Chinese food is okay with me. I’ll ask Larry if he wants to go.” Jim opened the door a crack and stuck his head out, testing whether he could stretch his neck far enough to reach the stair case landing. He could not. He took three steps in that direction. “HEY, LARRY,” Jim shouted.

  “WHAT?”

  “WE’RE GOING TO CHEN’S FOR DINNER. WANT TO COME?”

  “Okay.”

  “LEAVE IN HALF AN HOUR. OKAY?”

  “Okay,” Larry replied.

  “Come on, Larry,” Lucy yelled. “It’s nearly 6:30—your half hour expired fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Larry said, in a breathless voice, having nearly tumbled down the last three steps. “My watch says 6:10. It isn’t my fault.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll take the watch in to get it fixed for you.”

  “Gee, thanks, Lucy.”

  “Maybe over the weekend. Now let’s get moving.”

  Jim balanced the screen door as Lucy walked and Larry barreled down the front steps. “Nice shirt,” Jim offered.

  “Thanks, my mom gave it to me,” Larry said.

  At least it fits and . . . it’s clean, his roommates thought, collectively. But such hairy arms Larry really should wear long sleeve shirts no matter what the weather.

  During the fifteen minute journey to Chen’s, Jim and Lucy argued about the relative merits of various Pepperidge Farm cookies. Larry stayed silent, except for an occasional—and loud—grunt. Guess he doesn’t like cookies anymore, Lucy thought.

  At the restaurant Jim decided first. “I’m up for kung pao chicken.”

  “Sounds good,” Lucy said. “I’ll order spicy beef with broccoli.”

  “Great,” Jim added. “How about some steamed dumplings to start?”

  “That’s tasty to me,” Lucy chimed. She turned to Larry on her right. “What are you going to get? We’ve got chicken and beef, which leaves shrimp, pork, veggies . . . But I think whole fish with the eye staring up is out.”

  Larry absorbed the menu for a few more seconds. He looked to the wall, perhaps expecting to find a suggestion there, and then back at the menu. With the back of his hand he rubbed his nose and then said, “Whatever.”

  “How about Szechuan prawns,” Jim offered.

  Larry said, “Well maybe. But now that you ask, the juicy beef surprise would be good. I feel in the mood for beef.”

  “But we’ve already got a beef dish,” Lucy said. “Let’s go with Jim’s idea for prawns.”

  “All right,” Larry said.

  “So how’s work?” Jim asked.

  “It’s okay,” Larry said.

  “Any exciting new projects?” Jim wanted to know.

  “Nope.”

  Lucy joined the conversation. “What happened to that Norway trip you were expected to take?” She poured everyone some tea. “It fell through. About two months ago. Budget problems.” Lucy puffed her cheeks. “I’m sorry to hear that. You must have been dismayed.”

  “No big deal, really. I had lots of work to do anyway,” Larry said.

  Lucy thought changing the subject would help. “Whatever became of that blind date you had?”

  Larry looked puzzled. “Date?” he said. “Yes. Uhgha. About a year ago. Last summer. We had fun I guess, but just never got together again.”

  “You should have called back,” Lucy insisted.

  Larry shrugged.

  “Why not?” Lucy asked.

  Larry shrugged again. “Dunno.” He brought the tea cup to his mouth.

  “Larry, that’s still super hot,” Jim said, attempting to parry the cup away from Larry’s mouth. But Larry wasn’t bothered and drank the whole cup.

  “Lucy,” Jim said abruptly, hiding behind his chopsticks. “You’re going to kill me. Andy called this afternoon. I forgot to tell you.” Jim cringed as Lucy’s eyes bulged toward him. “Oops. He called. There. Now I told you.”

  “You’re right, I am going to kill you.” She hurled a shrimp toward Jim, hitting the middle of his shirt and bouncing into his water glass. “Gee, I feel better already. Maybe I won’t have to kill you after all.”

  While Lucy sought to decipher the check, Jim looked at his watch and said, “The Marine Orchestra is playing on the Capitol steps, starting in twenty minutes. What do you say we grab a cab and see them.”

  “Great idea. Vamanos!” Lucy said.

  A few minutes into the ride Lucy noticed that Larry’s leg was invading her scarce space, his bushy arm hairs rubbing against her arm, so she slid slightly toward Jim. Better, Lucy thought.

  Because they arrived at the concert as it was starting, a prime lawn location was not an option. Jim and Lucy offered a few words of complaint, but were resigned to suffer for their tardiness. They leaned back on the grass and enjoyed Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” which, Lucy commented, wasn’t being played half badly. A distant lightning storm gave the Capitol building a spectacular backdrop. During the breaks between pieces, Jim and Lucy made friends with the four people occupying the blanket next to them, and who were generous with their wine. The shared wine put the six in an even more pleasant mood. As the Marine band began their finale, Lucy poured another glass of Bordeaux, perhaps burgundy—it’s so hard to tell in the dark with screw tops, she thought—into a paper cup her new friends had provided. From time to time, thunder would add an accompanying drum sound to the orchestra. “Hope it doesn’t rain,” Jim whispered into Lucy’s ear.

  “Have faith, Jimbo.”

  “Wo! Did you see that lightning?!” At the same instant six thousand people exhaled. “That was close! I’d rather have the rain than another bolt of lightning so close by.” In the next instant six thousand people resumed their silence as the band played on.

  In the dim light that spilled over the top of the U.S. Capitol building she saw Larry begin to fade.

  “Jim,” Lucy said. She pushed Jim’s shoulder to penetrate his wine-induced fog. “Jim, look, Larry’s disappearing.” Jim sat up and looked in Larry’s direction.

  “Jesus. You’re right. Parts of him are becoming transparent. I can see the grass beneath his legs. And do you see that!? There’s some kind of animal picture I can see through him. A painting in bleached pastels. There are some spears in the picture, too.”

  “Yes, I see it. It’s like a buffalo. Now his arms and torso are going.”

  Jim sat up straighter. “Not a buffalo—an elephant. It’s a draw
ing on a wall of some kind. And the cave. Do you see the cave? Jeez, he’s really vanishing. Look, the cave is glowing now—there’s a campfire inside.”

  Lucy put both hands over her mouth. “Jim! Larry’s almost no longer here. We should do something. Quickly, think—how do we stop this? Oh my God, we have to do something!” She stared at the space that Larry was rapidly no longer occupying.

  Jim watched the diffused light replace Larry’s shape. “Do what, Lucy?” Jim bowed his head to the weak impression in the grass that marked Larry’s spot. “He’s gone. But look, that’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?” Lucy asked.

  “Larry’s watch is still here.” He picked up Larry’s watch. “It says . . . 8:40pm.” Jim glanced at Larry’s watch, then Lucy’s. “Exactly on time. Larry’s watch is exactly correct. Never was before.”

  One of their newly acquired friends on the adjacent blanket uttered a harsh, “Shh!”

  “Oh, sorry,” Lucy said.

  “Sorry,” Jim said, turning his head back to watch the band. “Could you pass the wine?” Jim whispered.

  THE LITTLE BLACK BAG

  C.M. Kornbluth

  Old Dr. Full felt the winter in his bones as he limped down the alley. It was the alley and the back door he had chosen rather than the sidewalk and the front door because of the brown paper bag under his arm. He knew perfectly well that the flat-faced, stringy-haired women of his street and their gap-toothed, sour-smelling husbands did not notice if he brought a bottle of cheap wine to his room. They all but lived on the stuff themselves, varied with whiskey when pay checks were boosted by overtime. But Dr. Full, unlike them, was ashamed. A complicated disaster occurred as he limped down the littered alley. One of the neighborhood dogs—a mean little black one he knew and hated, with its teeth always bared and always snarling with menace—hurled at his legs through a hole in the board fence that lined his path. Dr.

  Full flinched, then swung his leg in what was to have been a satisfying kick to the animal’s gaunt ribs. But the winter in his bones weighed down the leg. His foot failed to clear a half-buried brick, and he sat down abruptly, cursing. When he smelled unbottled wine and realized his brown paper package had slipped from under his arm and smashed, his curses died on his lips. The snarling black dog was circling him at a yard’s distance, tensely stalking, but he ignored it in the greater disaster.

  With stiff fingers as he sat on the filth of the alley, Dr. Full unfolded the brown paper bag’s top, which had been crimped over, grocer-wise. The early autumnal dusk had come; he could not see plainly what was left. He lifted out the jug-handled top of his half gallon, and some fragments, and then the bottom of the bottle. Dr. Full was far too occupied to exult as he noted that there was a good pint left. He had a problem, and emotions could be deferred until the fitting time.

  The dog closed in, its snarl rising in pitch. He set down the bottom of the bottle and pelted the dog with the curved triangular glass fragments of its top. One of them connected, and the dog ducked back through the fence, howling. Dr. Full then placed a razor-like edge of the half-gallon bottle’s foundation to his lip and drank from it as though it were a giant’s cup. Twice he had to put it down to rest his arms, but in one minute he had swallowed the pint of wine.

  He thought of rising to his feet and walking through the alley to his room, but a flood of well-being drowned the notion. It was, after all, inexpressibly pleasant to sit there and feel the frost-hardened mud of the alley turn soft, or seem to, and to feel the winter evaporating from his bones under a warmth which spread from his stomach through his limbs.

  A three-year-old girl in a cut-down winter coat squeezed through the same hole in the board fence from which the black dog had sprung its ambush. Gravely she toddled up to Dr. Full and inspected him with her dirty forefinger in her mouth. Dr. Full’s happiness had been providentially made complete; he had been supplied with an audience.

  “Ah, my dear,” he said hoarsely. And then: “Preposserous accusation. ‘If that’s what you call evidence,’ I should have told them, ‘you better stick to your doctoring.’ I should have told them: ‘I was here before your County Medical Society. And the License Commissioner never proved a thing on me. So, gennulmen, doesn’t it stand to reason? I appeal to you as fellow memmers of a great profession?’ ”

  The little girl, bored, moved away, picking up one of the triangular pieces of glass to play with as she left. Dr. Full forgot her immediately, and continued to himself earnestly: “But so help me, they couldn’t prove a thing. Hasn’t a man got any rights?”

  He brooded over the question, of whose answer he was so sure, but on which the Committee on Ethics of the County Medical Society had been equally certain. The winter was creeping into his bones again, and he had no money and no more wine.

  Dr. Full pretended to himself that there was a bottle of whiskey somehere in the fearful litter of his room. It was an old and cruel trick he played on himself when he simply had to be galvanized into getting up and going home. He might freeze there in the alley. In his room he would be bitten by bugs and would cough at the moldy reek from his sink, but he would not freeze and be cheated of the hundreds of bottles of wine that he still might drink, the thousands of hours of glowing content he still might feel. He thought about that bottle of whiskey—was it back of a mounded heap of medical journals? No; he had looked there last time. Was it under the sink, shoved well to the rear, behind the rusty drain? The cruel trick began to play itself out again.

  Yes, he told himself with mounting excitement, yes, it might be! Your memory isn’t so good nowadays, he told himself with rueful good-fellowship. You know perfectly well you might have bought a bottle of whiskey and shoved it behind the sink drain for a moment just like this.

  The amber bottle, the crisp snap of the sealing as he cut it, the pleasurable exertion of starting the screw cap on its threads, and then the refreshing tangs in his throat, the warmth in his stomach, the dark, dull happy oblivion of drunkenness—they became real to him. You could have, you know! You could have! he told himself.

  With the blessed conviction growing in his mind—It could have happened, you know! It could have!—he struggled to his right knee. As he did, he heard a yelp behind him, and curiously craned his neck around while resting. It was the little girl, who had cut her hand quite badly on her toy, the piece of glass. Dr. Full could see the riling bright blood down her coat, pooling at her feet.

  He almost felt inclined to defer the image of the amber bottle for her, but not seriously. He knew that it was there, shoved well to the rear under the sink, behind the rusty drain where he had hidden it. He would have a drink and then magnanimously return to help the child. Dr. Full got to his other knee and then his feet, and proceeded at a rapid totter down the littered alley toward his room, where he would hunt with calm optimism at first for the bottle that was not there, then with anxiety, and then with frantic violence. He would hurl books and dishes about before he was done looking for the amber bottle of whiskey, and finally would beat his swollen knuckles against the brick wall until old scars on them opened and his thick old blood oozed over his hands. Last of all, he would sit down somewhere on the floor, whimpering, and would plunge into the abyss of purgative nightmare that was his sleep.

  After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” genus homo had bred itself into an impasse. Dogged biometricians had pointed out with irrefutable logic that mental subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supernormal and that the process was occurring on an exponential curve.

  Every fact that could be mustered in the argument proved the biometricians’ case, and led inevitably to the conclusion that genus homo was going to wind up in a preposterous jam quite soon. If you think that had any effect or breeding practices, you do not know genus homo.

  There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by that other’ exponential function, the accumulation of technological devices. A moron trained to punch an addi
ng machine seems to be a more skillful computer than a medieval mathematician trained to count on his fingers. A moron trained to operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a linotype seems to be a better typographer than a Renaissance printer limited to a few fonts of movable type. This is also true of medical practice.

  It was a complicated affair of many factors. The supernormals “improved the product” at greater speed than the subnormals degraded it, but in smaller quantity because elaborate training of their children was practiced on a custom-made basis.

  The fetish of higher education had some weird avatars by the twentieth generation: “colleges” where not a member of the student body could read words of three syllables; “universities” where such degrees as “Bachelor of Typewriting,” “Master of Shorthand” and “Doctor of Philosophy (Card Filing)” were conferred with the traditional pomp. The handful of supernormals used such devices in order that the vast majority might keep some semblance of a social order going.

  Some day the supernormals would mercilessly cross the bridge; at the twentieth generation they were standing irresolutely at its approaches wondering what had hit them. And the ghosts of twenty generations of biometricians chuckled malignantly.