by Damon Knight
Scattered shrieks arose from up forward. Johnny swallowed a large lump, and his fingers twitched. The flickering came again.
The cloud and rain were gone; the sky was an innocent blue again. "Don't do that," said the dark man. "Listen, look: You want to how something? Watch me try to tell you." He moistened his lips and began, "When you have trouble --" but on the fourth word his throat seemed to tighten and lock. His lips went on moving, his eyes bulged with effort, but nothing came out.
After a moment he relaxed, breathing heavily. "You see?" he said.
"You can't talk," said Johnny. "About that. Literally."
"Right! Now, friend, if you'll just allow me --"
"Easy. Tell me the truth: is there any way you can get around this, whatever it is, this block or whatever?" He let his fingers twitch, deliberately, as he spoke. "Any gadget, or anything you can take?"
The dark man glanced nervously out the window, where blue sky had given way to purple twilight and a large sickle moon. "Yes, but --"
"There is? What?"
The man's throat tightened again as he tried to speak.
"Well, whatever it is, you'd better use it," said Johnny. He saw the dark man's face harden with resolution, and jerked his hand away just in time as the dark man grabbed --
III
There was a whirling moment, then the universe steadied. Johnny clutched at the seat with his free hand. The plane and all the passengers were gone. He and the dark man were sitting on a park bench in the sunshine. Two pigeons took alarm and flapped heavily away.
The dark man's face was twisted unhappily. "Now you have done it! Oh, what time is it, anyway?" He plucked two watches out of his vest and consulted them in turn. "Wednesday, friend, at the latest! Oh, oh, they'll --" His mouth worked soundlessly.
"Wednesday?" Johnny managed. He looked around. They were sitting in Union Square Park, the only ones there. There were plenty of people on the streets, all hurrying, most of them women. It looked like a Wednesday, all right.
He opened his mouth, and shut it again carefully. He looked down at the limp bit of leather and metal in his hand. Start from the beginning. What did he know?
The coin, which had evidently been some kind of telltale or beacon, had in some way joined itself, after Johnny had damaged it, to some other instrument of the dark man's -- apparently the gadget that enabled him to control probability, and move from one time to another, and small chores like that.
In their present fused state, the two gadgets were ungovernable -- dangerous, the dark man seemed to think -- and no good to anybody.
And that was absolutely all he knew.
He didn't know where the dark man and his companion had come from, what they were up to, anything that would be useful to know, and he wasn't getting any nearer finding out.
-- Except that there was some way of loosening the dark man's tongue. Drugs, which were out of the question -- liquor --
Well, he thought, sitting up a trifle straighter, there was no harm in trying, anyhow. It might not work, but it was the pleasantest thought he had had all afternoon.
He said, "Come on," and stood up carefully; but his motion must have been too abrupt, became the scene around them melted and ran down into the pavement, and they were standing, not in the park, but on the traffic island at Sheridan Square.
It looked to be a little after noon, and the papers on the stand at Johnny's elbow bore today's date.
He felt a little dizzy. Say it was about one o'clock: then he hadn't got out to the airport yet; he was on his way there now, with Duke, and if he could hop a fast cab, he might catch himself and tell himself not to go . . .
Johnny steadied his mind by a strenuous effort. He had, he told himself, one single, simple problem now in hand, and that was how to get to a bar. He took a careful step toward the edge of the island. The thing in his hand bobbled; the world reeled and steadied.
With the dark man beside him, Johnny was standing on the gallery of the Reptile Room of the Museum of Natural History. Down below, the poised shapes of various giant lizards looked extremely extinct and very dry.
Johnny felt the rising rudiments of a vast impatience. At this rate, it was clear enough, he would never get anywhere he wanted to go, because every step changed the rules. All right then; if Mahomet couldn't go to the mountain --
The dark man, who had been watching him, made a strangled sound of protest.
Johnny ignored him. He swung his hand sharply down. And up. And down.
The world swung around them like a pendulm, twisting and turning. Too far! They were on a street comer in Paris. They were in a dark place listening to the sound of machinery. They were in the middle of a sandstorm, choking, blinding --
They were sitting in a rowboat on a quiet river. The dark man was wearing flannels and a straw hat.
Johnny tried to move the thing in his hand more gently: it was as if it had a life of its own; he had to hold it back.
Zip!
They were seated on stools at a marble-topped counter. Johnny saw a banana split with a fly on it.
Zip!
A library, a huge low-ceilinged place that Johnny had never seen before.
Zip!
The lobby of the Art Theatre; a patron bumped into Johnny, slopping his demitasse.
Zip!
They were sitting opposite each other, the dark man and he, at a table in the rear of Dorrie's Bar. Dust motes sparkled in the late afternoon sun. There was a highball in front of each of them.
Gritting his teeth, Johnny held his hand perfectly upright while he lowered it, so slowly that it hardly seemed to move, until it touched the worn surface of the table, He sighed. "Drink up," he said.
With a wary eye on the thing in Johnny's hand, the dark man drank. Johnny signaled the bartender, who came over with a faintly puzzled expression. "How long you guys been here?"
"I was just going to ask you," said Johnny at random. "Two more."
The bartender retired and came back, looking hostile, with the drinks, after which he went down to the farthermost end of the bar, turned his back on them and polished glasses.
Johnny sipped his highball. "Drink up," he told the dark man. The dark man drank.
After the third swift highball, the dark man looked slightly wall-eyed. "How you feeling?" Johnny asked.
"Fine," said the dark man carefully. "Jus' fine." He dipped two fingers into his vest pocket, drew out a tiny flat pillbox and extracted from it an even tinier pill which he popped into his mouth and swallowed.
"What was that?" said Johnny suspiciously.
"Just a little pill."
Johnny looked closely at him. His eyes were clear and steady; he looked exactly as if he had not drunk any highballs at all. "Let me hear you say 'The Leith police dismisseth us,'" said Johnny.
The dark man said it.
"Can you say that when you're drunk?" Johnny demanded.
"Don't know, friend. I never tried."
Johnny sighed. Look at it any way you liked, the man had been high, at least, before he swallowed that one tiny pill. And now he was cold sober. After a moment, glowering, he pounded on his glass with a swizzle-stick until the bartender came and took his order for two more drinks. "Doubles," said Johnny as an afterthought. When they arrived, the dark man drank one down and began to look faintly glassy-eyed. He took out his pillbox.
Johnny leaned forward. "Who's that standing outside?" he whispered hoarsely.
The dark man swiveled around. "Where?"
"They ducked back," said Johnny. "Keep watching." He brought his free hand out of his trousers pocket, where it had been busy extracting the contents of a little bottle of antihistamine tablets he had been carrying around since February. They were six times the size of the dark man's pills, but they were the best he could do. He slid the pillbox out from under the dark man's fingers, swiftly emptied it onto his own lap, dumped the cold tablets into it and put it back.
"I don't see anybody, friend," said the dark man an
xiously. "Was it a man or --" He picked out one of the bogus tablets, swallowed it, and looked surprised.
"Have another drink," said Johnny hopefully. The dark man, still looking surprised, swilled it down. His eyes closed slowly and opened again. They were definitely glassy. "How do you feel now?" Johnny asked.
"Dandy, thanks. Vad heter denna ort?" The dark man's face spread and collapsed astonishingly into a large loose, foolish smile.
It occurred to Johnny that be might have overdone it. "How was that again?" Swedish, it had sounded like, or some other Scandinavian language . . .
"Voss hot ir gezugt?" asked the dark man wonderingly. He batted his head with the heel of his hand several limes. "Favor de desconectar la radio."
"The radio isn't --" began Johnny, but the dark man interrupted him. Springing up suddenly, he climbed onto the bench, spread his arms and began singing in a loud operatic baritone. The melody was that of the Toreador Song from "Carmen", but the dark man was singing his own words to it, over and over: "Dove è il gabinetto?"
The bartender was coming over with an unpleasant expression. "Cut that out!" Johnny whispered urgently. "You hear? Sit down, or I'll move this thing again!"
The dark man glanced at the object in Johnny's hand. "You don't scare me, bud. Go ahead and move it. Me cago en su highball." He began singing again.
Johnny fumbled three five-dollar bills out of his wallet -- all he had -- and shoved them at the bartender as he came up. The bartender went away.
"Well, why were you scared before, then?" Johnny asked, furiously.
"Simple," said the dark man. "Vänta ett ögenblick, it'll come back to me. Sure." He clapped a hand to his brow. "Herr Gott im Himmel!" he said, and sat down abruptly.
"Don't move it," he said. He was pale and sweat-beaded.
"Why not?"
"No control," whispered the dark man. "The instrument is tuned to you -- sooner or later you're going to meet yourself. Two bodies can't occupy the same spacetime, friend."
He shuddered. "Boom!"
Johnny's hand and wrist, already overtired, were showing a disposition to tremble. He had the hand propped against a bowl of pretzels, and that helped some, but not enough. Johnny was close to despair. The chief effect of the drinks seemed to have been to make the dark man babble in six or seven foreign tongues. The anti-drink pills were safely in his pocket; there was a fortune in those, no doubt, just as a by-product of this thing if he ever got out of it alive -- but that seemed doubtful.
All the same, he checked with a glare the dark man's tentative move toward the object in his hand. His voice shook. "Tell me now, or I'll wave this thing until something happens. I haven't got any more-patience! What are you after? What's it all about?"
"Un autre plat des pets de nonne, s'il vous plait, garçon," murmured the dark man.
"And cut that out," said Johnny. "I mean it!" Intentionally or not, his hand slipped and he felt the table shudder under them.
Zip!
They were sitting at a narrow table in the Sixth Avenue Bickford's, full of the echoing clatter of inch-thick crockery.
"Well?" said Johnny, close to hysteria. The glasses on the table between them were full of milk, not whiskey. Now he was in for it. Unless he could break the dark man's nerve before be sobered up -- or unless, which was unlikely in the extreme, they happened to hit another bar --
"It's like this, friend," said the dark man. "I'm the last surviving remnant of a race of Lemurians, see, and I like to persecute people. I'm bitter, became you upstarts have taken over the world. You can't --"
"Who's the lady I saw you with?" Johnny asked sourly.
"Her? She's the last surviving remnant of the Atlanteans. We have a working agreement, but we hate each other even more than --"
Johnny's fingers were clammy with sweat around the limp leather that clung to them. He let his hand twitch, not too much.
Zip!
They were sifting facing each other on the hard cane seats of an almost empty subway train, rackety-clacking headlong down its dark tunnel like a consignment to hell. "Try again," said Johnny through his teeth.
"It's like this," said the dark man. "I'll tell you the truth. This whole universe isn't real, get me? It's just a figment of your imagination, but you got powers you don't know how to control, and we been trying to keep you confused, see, became otherwise --"
"Then you don't care if I do this!" said Johnny, and he made a fist around the leather purse and slammed it on his knee.
Zip!
A wind thundered in his ears, snatched the breath from his mouth. He could barely see the dark man, through a cloud of flying sleet, hunkered like himself on a ledge next to nowhere. "We're observers from the Galactic Union," the dark man shouted. "We're stationed here to keep an eye on you people on account of all them A-bomb explosions, because --"
"Or this!" Johnny howled, and jerked his fist again.
Zip!
They were sprawled on a freezing plain, staring at each other in the icy glitter of starlight. "I'll tell you!" said the dark man. "We're time travelers, and we got to make sure you never marry Piper Laurie, because --"
Gently, Johnny told himself.
Zip!
They were sliding side by side down the giant chute in the fun house at Jantzen's Beach in Portland, Oregon. "Listen!" said the dark man. "You're a mutant superman, see? Don't get sore -- we had to test you before we could lead you into your glorious heritage of --"
As Johnny started to get to his feet, the movement jarred the thing in his hand, and --
Zip!
They were standing on the observation platform on top of the Empire State. It was a cold, raw day. The dark man was shivering -- cold, or frightened enough to talk, or too frightened to stay drunk? His voice trembled: "Okay, this is it, friend. You aren't human -- you're an android, but such a good imitation, you don't even know it. But we're your inventors, see --"
Gently: it was the little jumps that were dangerous, Johnny reminded himself.
Zip!
They were in a revolving door, and zip! Johnny was on the staircase of his own rooming house, looking down at the dark man who was goggling up at him, trying to say something, and zip! they were standing beside a disordered banana cart while a cold chill ran up Johnny's spine, and --
"All right!" the dark man shouted. There was raw sincerity in his voice. "I'll tell you the truth, but please --"
Johnny's hand tilted in spite of himself.
Zip!
They were on the top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus parked at the curb, waiting for a load. Johnny lowered his hand with infinite care to the shiny rail top of the seat ahead. "Tell," he said.
The dark man swallowed. "Give me a chance," he said in an undertone. "I can't tell you -- if I do, they'll break me, I'll never get a post again --"
"Last chance," said Johnny, looking straight ahead. "One . . . Two . . . "
"It's a livie," the dark man said, pronouncing the first 'i' long. His voice was resigned and dull.
"A what?"
"Livie. Like movies. You know. You're an actor."
"What is this now?" said Johnny uneasily. "I'm a painter. What do you mean, I'm an ac --'
"You're an actor, playing a painter!" said the dark man. "You actors! Dumb cows! You're an actor! Understand? It's a livie."
"What is the livie about?" Johnny asked carefully.
"It's a musical tragedy. All about poor people in the slums."
"I don't live in the slums," said Johnny indignantly.
"In the slums. You want to tell me, or should I tell you? It's a big dramatic show. You're the comic relief. Later on you die." The dark man stopped short, and looked as if he wished he had stopped shorter. "A detail," he said. "Not important. We'll fix it up, next script conference." He put his hands to his temples suddenly. "Oh, why was I decanted?" he muttered. "Glorm will split me up the middle. He'll pulverize me. He'll shove me back into the --"
"You're serious?" said Johnny. His voice cr
acked. "What is this, I die? I die how?" He twitched uncontrollably.
Zip!
The Fifth Avenue bus was gone. They were sitting in the second row of a movie theater. The house lights had just gone up; the audience was shuffling out. Johnny seized the dark man by the shirt-front.
"I forget," said the dark man sullenly. "You fall off something, I think. Right before the end of the livie, when the hero gets to bed with the girl. You want to know who's the hero? Somebody you know. Duke --"