The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

Crazy Tom was younger than John had expected, thirtyish with an unruly shock of black hair. A manual typewriter lay upside down on an immaculate worktable, but most of the place was definitely maculate. Thousands of peanut shells littered the floor. Crazy Tom was eating them compulsively from a large wooden bowl. When he saw John standing in the doorway, he offered some. “Unsalted,” he said. “Good for you.”

  John crunched his way over the peanut-shell carpet. The only light in the place was the bare bulb suspended over the worktable, though two unlit high-intensity lamps were clamped on either side of it. The walls were floor-to-ceiling gloomy shelves holding hundreds of typewriters, mostly black.

  “Let me guess,” the man said as John scooped up a handful of peanuts. “You’re here about a typewriter.”

  “A specific one. A 1921 Corona portable.”

  “Ah.” He closed his eyes in thought. “Hemingway. His first. Or I guess the first after he started writing. A ’27 Corona, now, that’d be Faulkner.”

  “You get a lot of calls for them?”

  “Couple times a year. People hear about this place and see if they can find one like the master used, whoever the master is to them. Sympathetic magic and all that. But you aren’t a writer.”

  “I’ve had some stories published.”

  “Yeah, but you look too comfortable. You do something else. Teach school.” He looked around in the gloom. “Corona Corona.” Then he sang the six syllables to the tune of “Corona, Corona.” He walked a few steps into the darkness and returned with a small machine and set it on the table. “Newer than 1920 because of the way it says ‘Corona’ here. Older than 1927 because of the tab setup.” He found a piece of paper and a chair. “Go on, try it.”

  John typed out a few quick foxes and aids to one’s party. The typeface was identical to the one on the machine Hadley had given Hemingway before they’d been married. The up-and-down displacements of the letters were different, of course, but Castle should be able to fix that once he’d practiced with the backup machine.

  John cracked a peanut. “How much?”

  “What you need it for?”

  “Why is that important?”

  “It’s the only one I got. Rather rent it than sell it.” He didn’t look like he was lying, trying to push the price up. “A thousand to buy, a hundred a month to rent.”

  “Tell you what, then. I buy it, and if it doesn’t bring me luck, you agree to buy it back at a pro ratum. My one thousand dollars minus ten percent per month.”

  Crazy Tom stuck out his hand. “Let’s have a beer on it.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for that?”

  “Not if you eat peanuts all morning.” He took two long-necked Budweisers from a cooler and set them on paper towels on the table. “So what kind of stuff you write?”

  “Short stories and some poetry.” The beer was good after the heavy greasy breakfast. “Nothing you would’ve seen unless you read magazines like Iowa Review and Triquarterly.”

  “Oh yeah. Foldouts of Gertrude Stein and H.D. I might’ve read your stuff.”

  “John Baird.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe. I’m no good with names.”

  “If you recognized my name from The Iowa Review you’d be the first person who ever had.”

  “I was right about the Hemingway connection?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you don’t write like Hemingway for no Iowa Review. Short declarative sentences, truly this truly that.”

  “No, you were right about the teaching, too. I teach Hemingway up at Boston University.”

  “So that’s why the typewriter? Play show-and-tell with your students?”

  “That, too. Mainly I want to write some on it and see how it feels.”

  From the back of the shop, a third person listened to the conversation with great interest. He, it, wasn’t really a “person,” though he could look like one: he had never been born and he would never die. But then he didn’t really exist, not in the down-home pinch-yourself-ouch! way that you and I do.

  In another way, he did more than exist, since he could slip back and forth between places you and I don’t even have words for.

  He was carrying a wand that could be calibrated for heart attack, stroke, or metastasized cancer on one end; the other end induced a kind of aphasia. He couldn’t use it unless he materialized. He walked toward the two men, making no crunching sounds on the peanut shells because he weighed less than a thought. He studied John Baird’s face from about a foot away.

  “I guess it’s a mystical thing, though I’m uncomfortable with that word. See whether I can get into his frame of mind.”

  “Funny thing,” Crazy Tom said; “I never thought of him typing out his stories. He was always sitting in some café writing in notebooks, piling up saucers.”

  “You’ve read a lot about him?” That would be another reason not to try the forgery. This guy comes out of the woodwork and says “I sold John Baird a 1921 Corona portable.”

  “Hell, all I do is read. If I get two customers a day, one of ’em’s a mistake and the other just wants directions. I’ve read all of Hemingway’s fiction and most of the journalism and I think all of the poetry. Not just the Querschnitt period; the more interesting stuff.”

  The invisible man was puzzled. Quite obviously John Baird planned some sort of Hemingway forgery. But then he should be growing worried over this man’s dangerous expertise. Instead, he was radiating relief.

  What course of action, inaction? He could go back a few hours in time and steal this typewriter, though he would have to materialize for that, and it would cause suspicions. And Baird could find another. He could kill one or both of them, now or last week or next, but that would mean duty in the fourteenth century for more than forever – when you exist out of time, a century of unpleasantness is long enough for planets to form and die.

  He wouldn’t have been drawn to this meeting if it were not a strong causal nexus. There must be earlier ones, since John Baird did not just stroll down a back street in this little town and decide to change history by buying a typewriter. But the earlier ones must be too weak, or something was masking them.

  Maybe it was a good timeplace to get John Baird alone and explain things to him. Then use the wand on him. But no, not until he knew exactly what he was preventing. With considerable effort of will and expenditure of something like energy, he froze time at this instant and traveled to a couple of hundred adjacent realities that were all in this same bundle of doomed timelines.

  In most of them, Baird was here in Crazy Tom’s Typewriter Museum and Sales Emporium. In some, he was in a similar place in New York. In two, he was back in the Hemingway collection. In one, John Baird didn’t exist: the whole planet was a lifeless blasted cinder. He’d known about that timeline; it had been sort of a dry run.

  “He did both,” John then said in most of the timelines. “Sometimes typing, sometimes fountain pen or pencil. I’ve seen the rough draft of his first novel. Written out in a stack of seven French schoolkids’ copybooks.” He looked around, memory working. A red herring wouldn’t hurt. He’d never come across a reference to any other specific Hemingway typewriter, but maybe this guy had. “You know what kind of machine he used in Key West or Havana?”

  Crazy Tom pulled on his chin. “Nope. Bring me a sample of the typing and I might be able to pin it down, though. And I’ll keep an eye out – got a card?”

  John took out a business card and his checkbook. “Take a check on a Boston bank?”

  “Sure. I’d take one on a Tierra del Fuego bank. Who’d stiff you on a seventy-year-old typewriter?” Sylvester Castlemaine might, John thought. “I’ve had this business almost twenty years,” Tom continued. “Not a single bounced check or bent plastic.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “Why would a crook want an old typewriter?” The invisible man laughed and went away.

  10. Banbal Story

  Dear Lena & Castle,

  Typing this on the new/old machin
e to give you an idea about what has to he modified to mimic EH’s:

  abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ234567890,./”#%_&’()*?

  Other mechanical things to think about –

  1. Paper – One thing that made people suspicious about the Hitler forgery is that experts know that old paper smells old. And of course there was that fatal chemical-composition error that clinched it.

  As we discussed, my first thought was that one of us would have to go to Paris and nose around in old attics and so forth, trying to find either a stack of 75-year-old paper or an old blank book we could cut pages out of. But in the JFK Library collection I found out that EH actually did bring some American-made paper along with him. A lot of the rough draft of in our time – written in Paris a year or two after our “discovery” – was typed on the hack of 6 x 7” stationery from his parents’ vacation place in Windemere, Xerox enclosed. It should he pretty easy to duplicate on a hand press, and of course it will he a lot easier to find 75-year-old American paper. One complication, unfortunately, is that I haven’t really seen the paper; only a Xerox of the pages. Have to come up with some pretext to either visit the vault or have a page brought up, so I can check the color of the ink, memorise the weight and decide of the paper, check to see how the edges are cut . . .

  I’m starting to sound like a real forger. In for a penny, though, in for a pound. One of the critics who’s sent the fragment might want to see the actual document, and compare it with the existing Windemere pages.

  2. Inks. This should not he a problem. Here’s a recipe for typewriter ribbon ink from a 1918 book of commercial formulas:

  8 oz. lampblack

  4 oz. gum arabic

  1 quart methylated spirits

  That last one is wood alcohol. The others ought to be available in Miami if you can’t find them on the Rock.

  Aging the ink on the paper gets a little tricky. I haven’t been able to find anything about it in the libraries around here; no FORGERY FOR FUN & PROFIT. May check in New York before coming back.

  (If we don’t find anything, I’d suggest baking it for a few days at a temperature low enough not to greatly affect the paper, and then interleaving it with blank sheets of the old paper and pressing them together for a few days, to restore the old smell, and further absorb the residual ink solvents.)

  Toyed with the idea of actually allowing the manuscript to mildew somewhat, but that might get out of hand and actually destroy some of it – or for all I know we’d be employing a species of mildew that doesn’t speak French. Again, thinking like a true forger, which may be a waste of time and effort, but I have to admit is kind of fun. Playing cops and robbers at my age.

  Weh, I’ll call tonight. Miss you, Lena.

  Your partner in crime,

  John

  11. A Divine Gesture

  When John returned to his place in Boston, there was a message on his answering machine: “John, this is Nelson Van Nuys. Harry told me you were in town. I left something in your box at the office and I strongly suggest you take it before somebody else does. I’ll be out of town for a week, but give me a call if you’re here next Friday. You can take me and Doris out to dinner at Panache.”

  Panache was the most expensive restaurant in Cambridge. Interesting. John checked his watch. He hadn’t planned to go to the office, but there was plenty of time to swing by on his way to returning the rental car. The train didn’t leave for another four hours.

  Van Nuys was a fellow Hemingway scholar and sometimes drinking buddy who taught at Brown. What had he brought ninety miles to deliver in person, rather than mail? He was probably just in town and dropped by. But it was worth checking.

  No one but the secretary was in the office, noontime, for which John was obscurely relieved. In his box were three interdepartmental memos, a textbook catalog, and a brown cardboard box that sloshed when he picked it up. He took it all back to his office and closed the door.

  The office made him feel a little weary, as usual. He wondered whether they would be shuffling people around again this year. The department liked to keep its professors in shape by having them haul tons of books and files up and down the corridor every couple of years.

  He glanced at the memos and pitched them, irrelevant since he wasn’t teaching in the summer, and put the catalog in his briefcase. Then he carefully opened the cardboard box.

  It was a half-pint Jack Daniel’s bottle, but it didn’t have bourbon in it. A cloudy greenish liquid. John unscrewed the top and with the sharp Pernod tang the memory came back. He and Van Nuys had wasted half an afternoon in Paris years ago, trying to track down a source of true absinthe. So he had finally found some.

  Absinthe. Nectar of the gods, ruination of several generations of French artists, students, workingmen – outlawed in 1915 for its addictive and hallucinogenic qualities. Where had Van Nuys found it?

  He screwed the top back on tightly and put it back in the box and put the box in his briefcase. If its effect really was all that powerful, you probably wouldn’t want to drive under its influence. In Boston traffic, of course, a little lane weaving and a few mild collisions would go unnoticed.

  Once he was safely on the train, he’d try a shot or two of it. It couldn’t be all that potent. Child of the sixties, John had taken LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy, and peyote, and remembered with complete accuracy the quality of each drug’s hallucinations. The effects of absinthe wouldn’t be nearly as extreme as its modern successors. But it was probably just as well to try it first in a place where unconsciousness or Steve Allen imitations or speaking in tongues would go unremarked.

  He turned in the rental car and took a cab to South Station rather than juggle suitcase, briefcase, and typewriter through the subway system. Once there, he nursed a beer through an hour of the Yankees murdering the Red Sox, and then rented a cart to roll his burden down to track 3, where a smiling porter installed him aboard the Silver Meteor, its range newly extended from Boston to Miami.

  He had loved the train since his boyhood in Washington. His mother hated flying and so they often clickety-clacked from place to place in the snug comfort of first-class compartments. Eidetic memory blunted his enjoyment of the modern Amtrak version. This compartment was as large as the ones he had read and done puzzles in, forty years before – amazing and delighting his mother with his proficiency in word games – but the smell of good old leather was gone, replaced by plastic, and the fittings that had been polished brass were chromed steel now. On the middle of the red plastic seat was a Hospitality Pak, a plastic box encased in plastic wrap that contained a wedge of indestructible “cheese food,” as if cheese had to eat, a small plastic bottle of cheap California wine, a plastic glass to contain it, and an apple, possibly not plastic.

  John hung up his coat and tie in the small closet provided beside where the bed would fold down, and for a few minutes he watched with interest as his fellow passengers and their accompaniment hurried or ambled to their cars. Mostly old people, of course. Enough young ones, John hoped, to keep the trains alive a few decades more.

  “Mr. Baird?” John turned to face a black porter, who bowed slightly and favored him with a blinding smile of white and gold. “My name is George, and I will be at your service as far as Atlanta. Is everything satisfactory?”

  “Doing fine. But if you could find me a glass made of glass and a couple of ice cubes, I might mention you in my will.”

  “One minute, sir.” In fact, it took less than a minute. That was one aspect, John had to admit, that had improved in recent years: The service on Amtrak in the sixties and seventies had been right up there with Alcatraz and the Hanoi Hilton.

  He closed and locked the compartment door and carefully poured about two ounces of the absinthe into the glass. Like Pernod, it turned milky on contact with the ice.

  He swirled it around and breathed deeply. It did smell much like Pernod, but with an acrid tang that was probably oil of wormwood. An experimental sip: the
wormwood didn’t dominate the licorice flavor, but it was there.

  “Thanks, Nelson,” he whispered, and drank the whole thing in one cold fiery gulp. He set down the glass and the train began to move. For a weird moment that seemed hallucinatory, but it always did, the train starting off so smoothly and silently.

  For about ten minutes he felt nothing unusual, as the train did its slow tour of Boston’s least attractive backyards. The conductor who checked his ticket seemed like a normal human being, which could have been a hallucination.

  John knew that some drugs, like amyl nitrite, hit with a swift slap, while others creep into your mind like careful infiltrators. This was the way of absinthe; all he felt was a slight alcohol buzz, and he was about to take another shot, when it subtly began.

  There were things just at the periphery of his vision, odd things with substance, but somehow without shape, that of course moved away when he turned his head to look at them. At the same time a whispering began in his ears, just audible over the train noise, but not intelligible, as if in a language he had heard before but not understood. For some reason the effects were pleasant, though of course they could be frightening if a person were not expecting weirdness. He enjoyed the illusions for a few minutes, while the scenery outside mellowed into woodsy suburbs, and the visions and voices stopped rather suddenly.

  He poured another ounce and this time diluted it with water. He remembered the sad woman in “Hills Like White Elephants” lamenting that everything new tasted like licorice, and allowed himself to wonder what Hemingway had been drinking when he wrote that curious story.

  Chuckling at his own – what? Effrontery? – John took out the 1921 Corona and slipped a sheet of paper into it and balanced it on his knees. He had earlier thought of the first two lines of the WWI pastiche; he typed them down and kept going:

  The dirt on the sides of the trenches was never completely dry in the morning. If Nick could find an old newspaper he would put it between his chest and the dirt when he went out to lean on the side of the trench and wait for the light. First light was the best time. You might have luck and see a muzzle flash. But patience was better than luck. Wait to see a helmet or a head without a helmet.