Then, one night, we had the identical fight that we had watched two years earlier, on our first time trip. Marge, as usual, was crying hysterically about not having long to live and I was shouting at her about wishing herself into the grave. She seemed to have forgotten that I was going to go, too, and had taken all the suffering on her own shoulders.
When I was hollering and stamping about the room, I had a funny, eerie feeling as I suddenly remembered that my younger unmarried self had watched—or was watching—the same scene.
I just stopped doing anything for a moment and stared around the room. Naturally I saw nothing, because there was nothing to see, and I remembered how quickly my younger self had fled when I had looked up like that. Ashamed, I tried to soothe Marge, but she was too far gone to be comforted.
I was glad to get out of the house every day and spend a few hours at the office. I must admit that I was scared to be with Marge because it looked as though we were going to go together and I felt safer away from her. I know it’s nothing to be proud of, but it helped ease the tension, for Marge as well as myself.
One day, Mr. Atkins stopped in at my office and sat down to talk. There was nothing unusual about this; he often visited me for a chat, even though he wasn’t so friendly with the other employees.
We talked for a while about the usual things, department business and some of the staff members.
Then Mr. Atkins turned the conversation away from business matters. “Do you have one of those newfangled Time Projector things, Gerald?” he asked. Mr. Atkins was getting on in years and called everything introduced in the last thirty years “newfangled.”
“No,” I said. “I did have one, but I stopped using it soon after I got it.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t that. I just preferred to find out for myself what would happen to me.” I didn’t want to tell him the true story or my other troubles.
Mr. Atkins sat back in his chair and sighed. “Ah, yes. I don’t suppose you remember too much about the old days, not after the last two years we’ve been through. People had problems in those days and they used to have to solve them for themselves. People don’t have to make decisions any more, you know. Do you think you could still make a decision, Gerald?”
* * * *
I got a little excited and found it difficult to stop fidgeting and stay quietly seated. I began to suspect that he was leading up to something important. It could have been the transfer to another branch or an out-of-town assignment which would explain our disappearance in the future.
“I still try to make plans and direct my own future whenever I can,” I stalled.
“It’s difficult, I know,” Mr. Atkins went on, “especially when all the news is about something that’s going to happen a day or a week or a year from now. It’s not so bad for an old man like me, but it must be tough on you young fellows. Too bad this Bilbo—uh—”
“Grundy,” I said. “Bilbo Grundy.” Mr. Atkins knew the name as well as I did, but it was one of his little tricks to pretend he was getting old and forgetful, although he really wasn’t. It used to be a good business tactic before the Grundy Projector came out. It wasn’t any more—not with people being able to see outcomes of dealings—but he couldn’t get rid of the habit.
“It’s too bad he had to invent that fool time gadget,” he went on. “I suppose your wife uses it all the time. They seem to be very popular with women.”
“Marge gave it up a short time ago,” I lied. “She got bored with it.”
Mr. Atkins nodded thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t it be nice to live in an age again when none of us knew what was going to happen? When life had lots of surprises—both good and bad? When you could get up in the morning and not be sure what was going to happen before night? Would you like that, Gerald?”
I didn’t know what to say. He was off on that wandering-mind routine and I didn’t know for sure whether he was really rambling or not.
“I think I’d like it, Mr. Atkins,” I said. “As long as everyone else was in the same boat.”
“Would you like it?” He was suddenly looking at me with the shrewd, out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye expression he had when he was handling some wealthy client’s intricate income tax problems.
“I mean it,” I told him. “I’m tired of living among people who know my business two years ahead of time.”
“I can get you to a world like that,” he said quietly.
I didn’t say anything in reply. Who could?
“I have some friends,” he went on, “who make a practice of helping people like yourself to better things.”
“What do you mean by ‘better things’?” I asked warily.
“I’m talking about time travel, Gerald. The real thing—not the Bilbo Grundy toy, but real physical time travel. These friends have gone a lot further than Grundy did with his invention and they perform the service of transporting people to a better age.”
“You mean the future?”
“The past!” said Mr. Atkins. “The chances are the future will be even worse. I’m talking about the middle of the last century, around the nineteen-fifties or thereabouts.”
I began to laugh. “The nineteen-fifties! What would I do to earn a living in those days?”
He gave me a thin smile. “I guess that would be your first unsolved problem. After all, you said you wanted problems and the chance to make plans and try to make them come true.”
“But why pick me?” I wanted to know.
“I like you, Gerald,” he said. “I would like to see you have a decent chance. And don’t flatter yourself—you wouldn’t be the first one to go. You’d be in good company.”
I just sat staring vacantly at him.
“I guess you could say this is your first big decision in two years,” he added. “There’s no hurry. You can think it over for a while.”
I asked questions—lots of them—but I didn’t get too many answers. Mr. Atkins explained that naturally the affair was hush-hush. After the way the Grundy Projector had been thrust so irresponsibly upon us, no one wanted any further complications. But there were some answers I could piece together both from what I already knew and the hints he dropped.
I’d been in on conferences and listened to Mr. Atkins try to figure out ways of expanding, building up our business. Each time, he’d been stymied by the Grundy Projector. If he’d bull some idea through, his competitors would see exactly how it worked out. If he didn’t, they’d know that, too. And I had heard him rant when the accountants—using the Grundy Projectors, of course—would make up their inventory, sales, profit-and-loss and tax statements two years or more in advance.
That was actually what galled him. Mr. Atkins was used to making plans, calculating risks and gains, taking his chances. With the Grundy Projectors in existence, nobody could do that any more. I gathered from what he told me that there was a syndicate of men like himself backing the inventor of a genuine time machine. They didn’t condemn the Grundy invention on any moral or religious or even selfish grounds. They just resented very bitterly the same thing that annoyed me—the sense of repetition.
As Mr. Atkins put it, “It’s no different than reading a story and then having to relive the whole thing, anticipating each action and bit of dialogue. And that’s precisely what this is. Only it’s our lives, not fiction. We didn’t like it, Gerald. We didn’t like it at all! But we did something about the problem instead of merely complaining.”
Let me say right now that I thought the solution they came up with was nonsensical and I kept searching, all the time we talked, for ways of politely turning down the offer. Escaping to to the past was a ridiculous answer. But it was just the kind of notion that would appeal to an old-fashioned character like Mr. Atkins.
I didn’t tell him so, of course. I thanke
d him for his consideration and shook hands and felt relieved when he finally left.
* * * *
My mind was made up by then. I’d back out, quit if I had to, rather than take refuge in the past to evade the future.
It wasn’t until I got out of the office that I realized there was no big decision to make; it was already made for me. Either I was going to die or I was going into the past—and I wasn’t going to die if I could help it. But neither did I intend going into the past if I could really help that!
When Marge realized that I wasn’t merely trying to take her mind off the fatal day, she pounced on me and hugged me as though I myself had invented the time machine just to save her life!
“It’s wonderful, darling!” she cried. “You were right all along! Oh, how can you forgive me for making things so unbearable for you?”
“About this idea of going into the past—” I said.
“What’s the difference when we go to,” she cut in, “as long as we don’t have to die?”
“But I figured on telling Mr. Atkins at the last minute that all I want is a transfer—”
“What’s the sense of guessing?” she asked excitedly. “All we have to do is borrow a couple of Projectors and see!”
I began to feel myself being squeezed into a one-way trap. I put my foot down—but where it landed was in a Grundy Projector from the people next door—and where it figuratively emerged was eleven days later, when I couldn’t shut my non-physical eyes to the way the whole situation would turn out.
Marge and I, with half a dozen others, were getting into a helicar. I followed them out to a house in the country. We handed in all the money we had saved and in return were given old-style clothes, ancient-looking money and a small amount of luggage. Then we all stepped into what looked like an oversized version of a Grundy Projector and vanished.
Fight? Argue? Scheme?
I didn’t have a chance.
* * * *
It was 1956 when we arrived in old New York. We were met by others who had pioneered the way before us and they looked after our group until we learned the ropes.
There was nothing easy about getting used to the era. I wished often that I could get back to my own time, Grundy Projector or no Grundy Projector. Still, Marge didn’t complain; she was prepared to endure anything just because she thought her life had been saved. Occasionally, bothered by my blunders in adjusting to this past century, I’d start to reason with her, explain that her life hadn’t been in danger at all. But then, luckily, I would realize that convincing her would leave an angry, dissatisfied wife on my hands and I always managed to stop in time.
I got a job working as a night janitor in a bank and studied accounting in the daytime until I was able to get a steady job. We’ve been here a few years now and I guess you could say we’re pretty well assimilated. We have a house and two small sons and I’m doing well at my job. We still see some of our friends from the 21st century and they’ve also managed to make the change successfully.
We get together now and then, and talk over old times, and laugh at some things and get nostalgic over other things. Now that there aren’t any Grundy Projectors around, we’ve started feeling once more that our fates are in our own hands.
Rog Owens has an interesting viewpoint. He said one night, “It wasn’t the future that was fixed; it was the Grundy Projectors that fixed the future! Whatever people saw would happen, they just let happen…or even worked to make it happen. No matter what it was, including their own deaths. Hell, how’s that any different than voodoo?”
That was pretty much how each of us had felt, only we hadn’t figured it out so clearly. But Rog Owens has a special reason for thinking particularly hard about the problem. Mr. Atkins and his syndicate hadn’t send us back for purely altruistic reasons; they learned that Rog’s daughter Ann would marry a fellow (not one of us) named Jack Grundy and that they’d have a son named Bilbo, who would invent the Grundy Projector. Our assignment was to keep that from happening.
Well, we couldn’t prevent the marriage, but we could—and did—make sure their son would have a good, plain American name. It’s William Grundy.
But today my younger boy told me their kindergarten teacher calls William “Billy Boy.”
And one little girl can’t pronounce it. She calls him Bilbo.
A WITCH IN TIME, by Janet Fox
The guts of the city, the labyrinthian network of side streets and half forgotten alleyways, stirred with life even as the dayside city slept. An aged whore leaned out of a doorway where the smell of piss hung strongly in the air, her shapeless mouth drawn up into a withered grin as if someone had tightened the string of a well worn leather pouch.
“By Xesis, that’d take the lust out of a man, just the sight of her, let alone the smell.”
His companion let the remark pass, as he often did when he was following his own oblique thoughts. “Don’t let anyone come too close by you here. Babes in their mothers’ arms are weaned on purse-snatching.”
A lone man shouldered by them in the narrow alley where dampness beaded the stones. His face in the dull green glow of moonlight was crossed with a wide silvery scar that led into an eye that was only an empty sac of puckered flesh.
Wyle shuddered. “In this place they play rough. I hope we can soon find the one the old toad wants.”
“We will. I’ve seen her often hereabouts, prowling the streets or running with a pack.”
They continued their progress between moldering buildings that jostled each other for space. Balconies jutted out over the street from which the house slops might conveniently be emptied. They passed the inert body of a man, who was either drunk or dead (in this place it hardly mattered). Alek said something under his breath and pushed Wyle into the side of a building. A circle of small figures was gathered in the street, grotesque with bony elbows and knees in awkward positions and ragged garments flapping around their bodies. They seemed to playing a game as they shrieked and pounded each other. Alek motioned him forward, and Wyle saw, as they drew closer, a band of street urchins, gambling and squabbling over a small pile of treasure that must have been loot. A scrawny girl, with uncut shag of hair that turned blue/black/violet as she moved in the dim light, squealed as the die fell and with a quick gesture snatched up a golden bracelet and an empty silk purse.
“That one,” directed Alek and the two men ran forward. The children took to their heels, disappearing into alleys, doorways, the foul-smelling shadows themselves. Wyle saw the girl slip into an almost hidden side street, half blocked by a fallen and decayed house.
“Haste. She moves through this dung heap like a swallow through air.”
They explored the turnings of the narrow way but could not find where she had gone.
“There,” said Alek and he was pointing to the ground where lay a circle of gold. “All we need to do is bide in the shadows awhile.” Alek’s narrow face radiated a tense happiness.
Wyle wasn’t so sure his partner was right, and his muscles were beginning to complain of his cramped posture beneath a broken stairway when a small noise alerted him. Bending low to the ground and constantly turning her head as she looked and listened acutely, the girl searched for the bracelet. Her hand was just closing over the golden circle when Wyle, sneaking up behind her, grabbed her arm. “I’ve been stabbed!” he roared as something tore at his face. The flesh in his grasp was electric; it writhed, twisted…something like a trap closed on his fingers. By this time he had let go, but Alek had both hands on the girl’s throat and was squeezing.
“Alek, let go,” said Wyle without much conviction as he nursed his lacerated hand. “The frog-face wants something more than a corpse, I’ll wager. We’ll not collect our wages this way.”
“’Tis said this Arcana is a witch and I don’t want her putting any of her spells on me.”
/> “’Tis said by washerwomen and puling old men,” laughed Wyle. “Come now, Man, she’s turning blue.”
* * * *
Arcana felt the world returning by slow stages. Only it was upside down. Her throat was constricted with bright bands of pain and below her head two boot heels rang on the paving stones. She was being carried like a sack and was very uncomfortable but she decided it might be best to feign unconsciousness, then surprise them when her feet touched the ground. If only I hadn’t come back for the bracelet.
The city began to take on a new aspect: streets widened, dwellings became newer and well-cared for, built with space between them. What a waste, thought Arcana. There are no hiding places. Where can the people of this sector hide when the guards are after them?
She felt herself carried through a door and closed her eyes as she was lowered to a smooth, cold floor. She would count ten slowly, open her eyes for a look, then run. Her eyes opened as she was scrambling to her feet, but a quick look showed her that she was alone in the room. There were two doors, both locked and a window, too high and narrow.
The room she found herself in was huge with a vaulted ceiling and a floor of dark wood polished to mirror surface. The tapestries that softened the walls were woven in vibrant colors in the images of huntsmen, stags, warriors, maidens, and unicorns that moved as if with life when the draft along the cold walls stirred them subtly. The furniture intimidated her; delicate chairs of exotic wood hand rubbed until they glowed like jewels forbade even the thought that anyone might sit in them, especially Arcana in her ragged black shirt and trousers, smelling richly of life on the street.
A tray of food was on one of the tables and after sniffing it to see if she could detect poison, she ate, tearing meat off the bones and stuffing her mouth with fresh fruit as if someone was waiting to snatch it away. She was wiping the grease from around her mouth with a ragged sleeve when the door opened. Two panting servants staggered into the room, their arms extended to form a chair, and between them they carried something…a man, his body grown gross with age and gluttony. His neckless head sprouted from the collar of a burgundy robe as though someone had dressed a frog in velvet. Brown spots mottled his fragile skin and his eyes swam in rheum.
The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Page 11