Doug squirmed and complained in Vicki's inexpert grasp. "Careful," her husband Jim said. He was hovering behind her, a big, thick-shouldered man with a coal-black handlebar mustache. "Don't hurt him."
"I'll try not to," she said. "He's just lucky to have only a cracked rib. Babies are tough little things, the doctor said."
"A good thing, too," Jim rumbled. The image of the dent in the refrigerator door would stay with him as long as he lived. He and Vicki had been trying to start a family of their own; after their nephew so suddenly and horribly became an orphan, they moved at once to start adoption proceedings.
"Shh. He's falling asleep again." Vicki carried him up the walk toward their house. As Jim hurried past her to open the door, she said softly, "If we hadn't lived a hundred and fifty miles away—" Try as she would, her mind, like his, kept coming back to Mary's kitchen.
Jim grunted and nodded. He opened the deadbolt, then the regular lock. He bent down to kiss his wife's hair as she brought the baby—their baby now, he thought—inside. She turned her head, managed a smile. He thought about how much she looked like her older sister, though her eyes were green, not blue.
She came out of the room that was now Doug's room a few minutes later. "I was just standing there watching him. He's sleeping like a little angel."
"Good. I put on a pot of coffee. After two and a half, three hours on the freeway, I need it."
"I won't turn down a cup myself."
The rich, dark smell filled the kitchen. Vicki got cups from the dish drainer. "I'll pour."
"Thanks."
She handed him his, and was pouring her own when Doug began to cry. She wasn't expecting it. The smooth brown stream wavered. "Ouch," she said. She popped a finger in her mouth. When she took it out, she was laughing. "We'll just have to get used to that, won't we?"
HINDSIGHT
Most of this story is set in the town where I grew up, at a time when I was about four years old. To help my memory along, I was lucky enough to have my father's 1953 road atlas, which showed me how much of the Los Angeles freeway system that we take for granted today didn't exist a little more than a generation ago.
What sticks in my mind most about writing "Hindsight" is the night I finished it. I wrote the last few paragraphs at my in-laws' house about 12:30 a.m. just after Christmas 1983. Laura was deathly ill from stomach flu and couldn't do anything much about it because she'd found out she was pregnant a couple of weeks before. We were all supposed to leave at three in the morning to visit her relatives in San Francisco and give them the news. I went alone and was a zombie all the way up Interstate 5. Laura flew in a day or two later, mostly recovered. It was a sleepy, busy, happy time.
Katherine tapped on the study door. "Mail's here."
"Be out soon," Pete Lundquist called, not looking up from his typewriter. He flicked the carriage return lever. The paper advanced a double space. A small part of his mind noticed that the ribbon needed changing; it was nearer gray than black. All his conscious attention, though, was focused on the novelette he was working on.
Another couple of paragraphs got him to the end of a section and, by luck, to the end of a page at the same time. A good enough place to stop for a while, he decided. He rolled the story out of the big Underwood office machine, peeled off the carbons one by one and put them in their stacks, and set the original on top of the typewriter to come back to later.
He stretched till his bones creaked. He was tall enough that his fingertips missed the ceiling only by a few inches: a thin stick of a man, with angular, not quite handsome features, very blue eyes, and a shock of blond hair that no amount of Wildroot or Vitalis could flatten for long. In a couple of weeks he would turn thirty, something he tried not to remember.
"How's it going?" Katherine asked when he finally emerged. That was not just interest in the story for its own sake. When a free-lancer had trouble writing, steak turned to hamburger and hamburger to macaroni and cheese.
She relaxed, a little, as he said, "Not bad. I should be done in a couple of days, and get it out." He looked at her fondly. Physically they were total opposites; she was dark and inclined to plumpness, and he could rest his chin on the top of her head. But she had a good deal of the discipline that kept him steadily at the typewriter. With checks coming in on no schedule and for wildly varying amounts, she needed it.
"What's the good news today?" he asked.
"Not much." She displayed two envelopes and a magazine in a brown paper wrapper. "A gas bill, a check from Interplanetary—"
"The one should just about cover the other," he said sourly. Interplanetary paid late and not much and probably wasn't long for this world, but they had bought a short story he couldn't unload on any better market, so he had no real right to complain.
"—and the new Astonishing," Katherine finished.
"Aha!" he said. "Now I have the excuse I need for a break." She made a face at him; that just meant he would be busy later. She went into the kitchen to start dinner.
He lit a Chesterfield and sank into a shabby but comfortable overstuffed armchair with a sigh of contentment. It was a couple of minutes before four. He turned on the radio to catch the hourly news. The dial lit; he waited for the tubes to warm up and the sound to start.
He stripped off the Astonishing's wrapper, turned to the table of contents. He didn't have anything in this month's issue, though he had been in the last one and would show up again in a couple of months. He saw with pleasure that there was a long novelette by Mark Gordian. He wondered what this one would be like. Gordian had mastered a number of different styles.
First things first, he thought. No one who read Astonishing put off the editorial. James McGregor could be—often tried to be—infuriating, but he was never dull.
As Pete read, he listened to the news with half an ear. Queen Elizabeth's coronation dominated it. The Korean truce talks at Panmunjom dragged on and on. A new political party had been formed in the Philippines, and was promising great things. "And in sports," the announcer went on, "both the Seals and the Oaks fell further behind the Pacific Coast League–leading Hollywood Stars last night as—"
He was just turning to the Gordian story when the side door slammed. Not for the first time, he wondered how two small boys managed to sound like a platoon. "What's going on there?" he said, trying without much luck to sound stern.
"Daddy's out!" Wayne shouted joyfully. The six-year-old sounded as if Pete had just been released from jail. He came charging into the living room and flung himself at his father's lap. His brother Carl, who was seven, was right behind. Pete barely saved the Astonishing from getting squashed.
"And what have you two been up to?" he asked.
"Playing with Stevie next door," Carl answered. "His cousin Philip is visiting him from Denver. He's nine. He can throw a curveball."
"That's nice," Pete said. "Go wash your hands. With soap." He got nervous whenever his boys made a new friend—who knew whether the kid might be bringing infantile paralysis with him? The polio season was just starting, but it was already worse than last year's, and there had been almost 60,000 cases in 1952.
Pete did not get back to the Astonishing until he was done drying the dinner dishes and putting them away. He threw on a cardigan sweater; northern California late spring evenings were nothing like the ones he had grown up with in Wisconsin. But neither were the winters, thank God.
He flipped to the Gordian story. It was called "Reactions," which might mean anything. With Gordian, you never could tell—take the serial with the innocuous name "Watergate," for instance. Critics—serious critics—talked about the book version in the same breath with 1984. To Pete, though, it was science fiction at its best, straightforward extrapolation of how difficult government skulduggery would inevitably become when copy machines and recorders were everyday items.
It also made Joe McCarthy hopping mad, something else Pete approved of.
It was hard to see how the same author could also write "Houston, We Ha
ve a Problem," a gripping tale of an early moon flight gone wrong, and Tet Offensive, a future war gone wronger. Barring the exotic hardware, that one looked disquietingly possible too, if you noticed the page-four stories about the fun the French were having trying to hold on to Indochina.
But Gordian—damn him!—didn't confine himself to the near future. "Neutron Star" had had all the astronomers who read science fiction buzzing a couple of years ago (and there were a lot of them). So did "Supernova," though Pete found the casual way computing machines were handled in that one even more exciting. It was a yarn he wished he'd written himself.
There were literally dozens more, not all in Astonishing by any means; Galactic and Strangeness and Science Fantasy had their share too. "All You Zombies" made every other time-travel story obsolete. "Sunjammer I" and "Sunjammer II" struck Pete as the prose equivalent of a jazz pianist improvising on a theme. And "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" was a literary firework that defied description.
Ever since Gordian started selling in 1949, he'd turned out even more words than Asimov, and not a bad story in the bunch. All things considered, he was the one writer who made Pete feel inadequate.
He settled in and began to read. By the end of the third page, he felt his hair trying to stand on end. He had not been so afraid since he'd driven a tank-destroyer through the crumbling wreckage of the Third Reich. But that had been a simple fear, fear that a kid with a grenade or an old man with a Panzerfaust or some diehard in a Royal Tiger tank would make sure he never saw the States again. This—
Discipline or no, he got very little writing done that night.
* * *
He spent the next week in a fever of anticipation waiting for McGregor's reply to his letter. He'd sent it airmail, and stuck another red six-cent stamp on the self-addressed return envelope he enclosed with it. At the moment, answers worried him more than pennies.
When the note finally came, he gritted his teeth against the anticlimax. "Dear Pete," the Astonishing editor had written, "I'm very sorry that Gordian picked off an idea you thought was yours, but things like that happen all the time (you should see my slush pile!). I'm sure you still have enough fresh notions to keep you going. Let me see one of those. Best, Jim."
Pete threw the letter on the kitchen table. "He doesn't believe me," he said bitterly.
"Would you, on someone's word alone?" Katherine said. "I'm still not sure I do, and I've seen your outline for myself."
"I suppose you're right," Peter admitted. "I guess I just think of Jim McGregor as slightly more than human. Well, by Christ, I can show him."
He turned on his heel and hurried into the study. He ran a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. "Dear Jim," he wrote, "I realize I should have sent the enclosed with my first letter to you. I trust you will take my word that it was drafted some months ago. If you find it interesting, let me know. Yours, Pete Lundquist."
He looked at the letter for a moment, added a P.S.: "I don't know when I would have gotten around to writing from this skeleton. I have several ideas ahead of it, and one or two of them look like novels. But it would have happened eventually, I'm sure. You tell me what that story would have looked like."
This envelope was a lot fatter than the last one, but he sent it airmail too.
Three days later the telephone rang at 6:30 a.m. The unexpected noise made Pete cut himself shaving. Holding a piece of tissue to his chin, he got to the phone a split second ahead of his wife. Their eyes met in shared alarm; calls at odd hours generally spelled trouble.
"Mr. Peter Lundquist, please," the operator said.
"Speaking."
The woman's next words were a blessed relief: "I have a long-distance person-to-person call from a James McGregor in New York City."
"Yes, go ahead," Pete said, and mouthed to Katherine, "It's McGregor."
"Ho-ho! The game's afoot, Watson."
He waved her to silence. The editor's voice came on the line, raspy not just with distance but also from too many cigarettes: "That you, Pete?"
"I'm here." He had to stop himself from adding, "sir." So did most people who talked with McGregor.
"I'm only going to ask you once, and I expect a straight answer: Are you pulling my leg?"
Pete enjoyed a certain reputation as a practical joker, which at the moment he could have done without. "No," he said.
"All right, then. In a way, I was hoping you were. As is, how do you feel about meeting me in Los Angeles next week?"
"Why Los Angeles?" Pete was not at his best early in the morning, and the three-hour time difference from New York only made McGregor's advantage worse.
The Astonishing editor's sharp sniff showed he was holding on to his patience with both hands. "Because this Mark Gordian writes out of a post-office box in a town called Gardena. It took some work with a big atlas to find the place, but it's about fifteen miles south of L.A. I'd like to have a word with Gordian—don't you think you would too?"
Pete gulped. "Put like that, I suppose I would. Uh, Jim . . . what do you think is going on?"
"I don't know." McGregor sounded angry at the admission. "The first thing that occurs to me is telepathy, and I don't much fancy that for an explanation either."
"Why not? If anyone's been urging more basic research in extrasensory perception lately, it's you."
"Research, yes. But if Gordian picked this out of your brain, he stands to everyone else on Earth like the Empire State Building to a girl's dollhouse. I edit science fiction; I never planned on living it."
That Pete understood down to the ground. He had majored in engineering at college, and drew a very firm line between what was real and what wasn't. He shivered as the implications began to sink in. "If Gordian's a telepath, how do we know he's not reading our minds right now?"
"We don't," McGregor said. "And I have another question for you: If Gordian's a telepath, why is he reading your mind instead of Einstein's or Eisenhower's or Albert Schweitzer's? You'll be driving down to L.A., won't you?"
"I guess so," Pete said absently. He was still chewing on the more important query; in conversation as in his letters, McGregor had a gift for going right to the heart of an issue.
"Good. Pick me up at the airport, then. I'll be getting in at about a quarter past five on Friday evening—it's Trans World flight 107. If you've come up with any good answers, give 'em to me then."
"All right," Pete said. He was talking to a dead line.
* * *
Pete left with first light Thursday morning. By starting early, he got into Los Angeles before dark. The ride south along U.S. 101 was both hot and dull. Radio stations faded in and out as he drove. A little above Santa Barbara, the road came down to the Pacific. It was pretty enough to tempt Pete to stay on the Coast Highway the rest of the way, but he went back to 101 when it jogged inland again below Ventura and ran east toward the San Fernando Valley.
Sepulveda Boulevard led him south through the Sepulveda Pass and into the more built-up part of Los Angeles. None of the famous freeways was anywhere close; the nearest one, the Harbor, stopped just south of downtown, though his map showed its projected route all the way out to San Pedro.
He checked into a motel in a suburban district called Westchester, used the change from his ten-spot to buy a sandwich and Coke at the coffee shop down the street, then came back, took a shower, and went to sleep.
The six-lane tunnel that took Sepulveda under the airport's runways had only been open for a couple of months. Pete could see how much easier it made access to the facility. It had also allowed the runways to be lengthened.
The big silver DC-6 rolled to a stop about half an hour late. The enormous propellors spun themselves to silence. The people who filed off the plane looked weary, and no wonder; counting a forty-five-minute layover in St. Louis, they had been traveling for ten hours.
"Jim!" Pete called, striding forward to shake the editor's hand. As always, he was disappointed that James McGregor looked nothing like
Kimball Kinnison. McGregor was in his early forties, of average height and build. His sandy crewcut was going gray above his ears, and his hair thinned at the temples. When younger, his face had been beaky; now craggy was a better word. Only his eyes seemed lensman-keen, and even then one had to look sharply, for he wore heavy, dark-framed glasses.
"Good to see you," McGregor said. They had met several times at conventions and other gatherings, and Pete had dropped into the Astonishing office once while in New York on other business. They argued for two hours. Pete lost, over and over, but the experience gave him notions for three new stories, all of which McGregor bought.
"Let's get my luggage," the editor said, "and some food, and a drink, and then back to wherever you're staying. I have some things to show you, now."
"Okay," Pete said, but disappointedly, "if you don't want to go down to Gardena first."
"What for? All we have to go on is a post-office box number, and the post office is closed."
Pete shook his head in chagrin at not having thought of that, but McGregor was already going on: "Unless, of course, he has a phone number in the local book. Worth a try, don't you think?" They were passing a bank of telephones on the way to the baggage claim area; McGregor found a chained phone book for the right part of town, pawed through its dog-eared pages. "Gordan . . . Gorden . . . Gordillo—so much for that. Well, we're no worse off."
"No," Pete said, still slightly stunned. The Astonishing editor could no more help throwing off ideas than a fissioning plutonium atom could help spitting neutrons, and the results were about as explosive.
Over dinner at the coffee shop near the motel, the talk had nothing to do with the mysterious Mark Gordian. Perhaps because he was tired, McGregor was full of sarcasm about the rioting in East Germany ("Which shows where the workers stand in the workers' paradise."), the unmanned Navajo guided bomber ("It'll be obsolete before it flies. Rockets are faster than jets."), and the way CBS and NBC has handled the televising of Queen Elizabeth's coronation ("Imagine sending P-51s to meet the British jet that brought the film to Canada. The RCAF has jets of their own, and got their film to the lab first and on the air first. Naturally—jets are faster than prop jobs.").
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