by James Gunn
“You a cop?” the voice from the shadows asked suspiciously. “You been keeping track of me?"
“I won't lie to you, Tommy. No, I'm all alone. I'm just a man with a peculiar way of knowing what is going to happen. And I have to tell you that the future will be very bad for you if you do to Ms. Franklin what you have in your mind."
“She everything I can't have,” the boy said. “I get something. I ought to get something."
“Not this way, Tommy,” Johnson said. “That's just violence, not sex. All you'll get is death for yourself and a bad experience for her that may change her life and the lives of a lot of people. And you'll kill your mother. She'll die when she finds out what you've done. And your brothers and sisters—what small chance they have for happiness will be gone."
“Ah-h-h!” the boy's voice snarled, but a note of doubt had crept in. “How you know that stuff?"
“I told you that I have this strange vision,” Johnson said evenly. “I have another future for you. You let Ms. Franklin go and tomorrow you go to the place where she works—you know where it is, Tommy, because I saw you watching it this morning—and you ask for a job."
“How they gonna let me have a job after what I done?"
“You haven't done anything yet, Tommy. Ms. Franklin is frightened, but she hasn't been harmed. She understands the kind of life you've had, the anger built up in you, the hate that strikes at anybody. You've seen her before. She's worked in this city with people who are poor and struggling. She wants to make things better."
“Why they hire me?"
“Because I'll ask them to, and Ms. Franklin will ask them."
“I show up, maybe they throw me in jail."
“What for? You haven't done anything yet. And how can you be worse off than you are now?"
“They hire me, what I do?"
“My idea is that you guard Ms. Franklin, keep her from harm. You'd be good at it. You know how it can happen. You know what to look for."
“Not like you, man."
“You have other talents. You could be something. You could make things better, not worse."
“Ah, man, you talk too much,” the voice said. It sounded boyish again. And out of the darkness came Franklin, reeling as if she had been shoved, holding her throat.
Johnson caught her in his arms. “You show up tomorrow,” he called after the sound of running feet. “Are you all right?” he asked the woman trembling in his arms.
She held on to him. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Thanks to you."
“He might not have done it."
“I didn't think he would do it. I've seen him around. I didn't think he was dangerous."
“Maybe he wasn't."
“I'm afraid he was."
“Only because he was scared.” He led her back down the dark street toward the lights of the busier avenue that crossed it.
“Will he show up tomorrow?"
“There's a good chance."
“You really want me to hire him?"
“It might save him. He might save you."
“Bill,” she said and took a deep shuddering breath, “I don't want him to save me. I want it to be you. Always."
They had reached the avenue and turned now toward the brighter lights of the Capitol area and the People, Limited, building. Johnson's hand tightened on her arm. “It can't be that way. Much as I would like it."
Her hand clutched his waist. “What do you mean? Because of what you did? That was a—a crisis?"
“Maybe."
“You might forget?"
“Possibly."
“It was that important?"
“Yes."
“What would have happened?"
“It would have changed you. You would not have lost your commitment, but you would have lost your edge. A little bitterness perhaps, a little hardness, a little suspicion ... a loss of innocence."
“A loss of you,” she said. “That's what I can't endure.” She held him tightly to her side as they walked along. “You can stay. You can come with me to India. If you forget, I can make you remember. I think I love you, Bill. I know I can't lose you."
“You mustn't mistake relief and gratitude for love."
“What about your feelings? You aren't just a mechanism for solving the world's problems. You have feelings. You have a right to a little happiness."
“It would make me very happy to stay with you,” Johnson said. “And I want you to know that I could have loved you."
“'Could have'?"
“It seems to me that love doesn't happen in a day. And that's how I live my life. But it's more than that. If I stayed with you, there's a good chance we would fall in love, that you would love me beyond anything else, and that for you I would give up everything."
“What more could people want out of life?"
“Nothing, if they didn't also know that they got their happiness at the world's expense. You see, I would know that to be my wife and bear my children"—"Oh, yes,” Sally said—"humanity would have lost its best chance at limiting its size to a number that the world's resources could support. How could I live with such knowledge? How could you?"
“We would forget,” she said fiercely.
They had reached the doors of People, Limited. “No, we would never forget. We would be happy—defiantly, guiltily happy—but we would never forget. And I would see all the evils of the world that I might have been able to do something about, and I would feel unrelentingly the need to act—and my love for you would stop me."
“Oh, Bill,” she said, and pressed her head tightly against his chest.
“Go to India,” he said. “Success awaits you there. You will do great things, and you will find your happiness in doing them, and the future will be a better place for the fact that you have lived. And remember—wherever you go, whatever you do, somewhere in this world there is a man who loves you if he only knew it."
* * * *
Somewhere above the Pacific Ocean an airliner hurled itself toward India. Far below and far behind a bus crawled through hills toward the plains beyond. On it, by the light of a small reading light in the base of an overhead rack, a man was printing precise words with a pencil on the back of a ticket envelope.
“Your name is Bill Johnson,” he wrote. “You have saved the woman who will be the single most important factor in saving the world from overpopulation, and you don't remember. You may read stories in the newspapers about her accomplishments, but you will find no mention of your part in them.
“For this there are several possible explanations...."
After he had finished, he put the envelope in his inside jacket pocket, and turned off the overhead light. Now the bus was completely dark except for the faint glow near the driver. The passenger stared out at the night beyond the windows. Once in a great while a light would appear in the darkness—a farmhouse or some lonely country crossing—and then sweep past to be lost behind, while the empty miles turned under the wheels.
Episode Six
Will-of-the-Wisp
The sun rose behind the mountains like a bloodshot eye peering after the fleeing bus. Dawn should have revealed a fair prospect of fertile farms and grazing animals, but haze lay across the plain and the bus dived into it as if trying to escape a pursuing Polyphemus.
In the seat next to a window, the man who had no name stirred and opened his eyes. They were dark and strangely empty, like the eyes of someone who has been awakened from a dream and does not remember who or where he is. His face was honey-colored and pleasant, good-looking but not memorable. He was not a boy, but his skin was smooth, unlined by time, unmarked by events.
He sat up straighter in his seat and adjusted the gray tweed jacket. A wince crossed his face as if his body had reminded him of a night spent trying to lie flat in a place that inclined only a few degrees from the vertical.
The man looked around the bus at the heads of the other passengers. Most of them were sleeping or had their eyes closed, but a few stared stonily at the back of the seat a
head of them or with unseeing eyes out the window beside them.
The turning of the wheels on the interstate highway beneath them enclosed the passengers in an environment of unrelenting sound and vibration. The odor of urine and feces soured the air. The man looked toward the rear of the bus where an enclosed cubicle indicated a toilet that had been pushed beyond its capacity.
The man sank back in his seat and looked out the window. The mist swirled as the bus passed. Occasionally it lifted to reveal brief glimpses of the countryside. It looked like a battlefield after all the soldiers had been buried.
Harvest was over. A few stalks of corn stubble remained in the baked fields. But, by the evidence of the scattered stalks, the harvest had been meager. Occasionally, back from the road, could be seen a discouraged farmhouse and deteriorating outbuildings. Rusting machinery or the remains of old cars littered barnyards and the corners of fields. A few animals—bony cattle and horses, forlorn sheep and ever-hopeful goats—tried to forage in dry pastures or licked mud from the bottom of dry ponds.
The man staring out the window looked pained, as if he were gazing not at the landscape passing but beyond that into a circle of the inferno. Even after the fog closed around the bus again, and nothing could be seen, he continued to stare, until finally, as if he had seen too much, he turned away and began to search through his pockets.
Finally, in his inside jacket pocket, he found a ticket envelope with neat words printed precisely across it in pencil.
“Your name is Bill Johnson,” he read. “You have saved the woman who will be the single most important factor in saving the world from overpopulation, and you don't remember. You may read stories in the newspapers about her accomplishments, but you will find no mention of your part in them.
“For this there are several possible explanations, including the likelihood that I may be lying or deceived or insane. But the explanation on which you must act is that I have told you the truth: you are a man who was born in a future that has almost used up all hope; you were sent to this time and place to alter the events that created that future.
“Am I telling the truth? The only evidence you have is your apparently unique ability to foresee consequences—it comes like a vision, not of the future because the future can be changed, but of what will happen if events take their natural course, if someone does not act, if you do not intervene.
“But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget.
“I wrote this message last night to tell you what I know, just as I learned about myself this morning by reading a message printed on a piece of cardboard, for I am you and we are one, and we have done this many times before."
The man who now had a name, Bill Johnson, stared down at the envelope as if he was trying to deny its existence and then, with a kind of revulsion, he tore it into small pieces and tossed them into the litter on the floor. He turned to look out the window again. The fog lifted for a moment.
The highway was passing beside a broad river, but the water was mud-colored, as if it had swallowed a thousand farms, and its surface had a gray-green sheen. Nothing moved in or above it. The countryside had given way to shacks that had grown up like toadstools along the flat land alongside the river. Sad-faced children stood among them, clothed in rags, bellies protruding, watching the bus pass their small corner of the world, appearing out of nowhere, disappearing into the unknown.
The shacks evolved into more permanent dwellings; once decent houses, they had long since ceased to care about appearances. Their walls looked as if they had never seen paint, and the bare soil around them was littered with abandoned junk, old boxes, and discarded papers. Factories raised their concrete-and-sheet-metal barricades along the riverbank and, in stinking gushes, exhausted their wastes from big pipes into the sullen flow beneath.
As Johnson watched he saw a remarkable phenomenon: the river began to burn. Flames licked across the surface like red and blue sprites dancing on the water. It was like a sign from whatever fallen angels ruled this particular region. From a distance it seemed marvelous, but as the highway drew the bus closer to the river Johnson could see oily smoke ascending into the clouds hanging close above before the fog closed in again.
Johnson shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat as if he was trying to forget what he had seen, but then, as the bus slowed, he opened them again. The bus stopped, and the universe of sound and vibration in which the passengers had existed for so long suddenly ended.
People stirred and irritated voices demanded to know what was going on.
“Are we there?” an older woman asked.
“Breakfast stop, twenty-five minutes,” the bus driver announced gruffly.
“That's hardly long enough to wash our hands,” a man complained behind Johnson, “much less get rid of enough of this bus stink to be able to eat anything."
“Twenty-five minutes,” the bus driver repeated. He opened the door, and the stench of the world outside poured in. It had not been fog but smog, filled with smoke and other irritants, seen and unseen.
“I wasn't hungry anyway,” the man said behind Johnson.
But Johnson shifted and stood up. He started down the aisle, and then, as if by afterthought, reached back and took a suitcase out of the rack above his head.
“Just a stop, mister,” the bus driver growled as he saw the suitcase.
Johnson looked at the diner on the frontage road beside the burning river. It was not in much better repair than the shacks and decayed houses they had passed. “EAT,” read a sign above the front door. “Fine Food,” said an unlighted neon sign in a fly-specked window. Whatever fine foods had ever existed inside the building had long ago turned into wastes.
A double row of gas pumps lined a cracked concrete island where the bus stood, and a small building housed a sleepy attendant and a couple of doors that said “Men” and “Women.” “Thought I might clean up,” Johnson said. “Maybe even change."
“Thirty-five people gotta use them johns,” the driver snarled.
“I won't be long,” Johnson said, and brushed past, walking toward the door marked “Men.” But he kept walking and found himself along the riverbank where a trail had been beaten through weeds and brush. On his left was the burning river. On his right was an impenetrable forest of scrub trees.
The purposefulness with which Johnson had left the bus deserted him there, as if he had only enough willpower for a single act. His shoulders drooped, and he stared without expression at the dirt path as he put one foot in front of the other.
* * * *
He came upon the dump along the riverside about midday. The city had grown around him. The skyscrapers were still in the distance, but the buildings on the other side of the river and those he could glimpse above the riverbank on his side were larger and more permanent. The dump was an area where the bank had widened or been dug out. Trucks pulled up to the road above and let loose small avalanches of trash. Dust billowed. Pickups and cars contributed their sly plastic sacks. The place had a stink of rot and moist decay that was different from the general odor of industrial effluents and machine exhausts. The dump odor was so omnipresent that it became the way the world was and was soon forgotten.
Johnson put down his suitcase and rubbed his elbow. He was about to sit on the suitcase when a voice spoke behind him.
“Welcome to hell!” a man said easily.
Johnson turned. Behind him stood a small man in the remains of what might once have been a gray business suit. But he had no tie on the ragged collar of his white shirt, the suit was torn and droopy, and he carried a shopping sack. He was white-haired and had several days’ growth of white beard on his face, but his eyes were blue and bright and he gave the illusion of being dapper.
“Thanks,” Johnson said. He smiled briefly.
“Are you abandoning hope,” the other said, “or just
slumming?"
“I don't know,” Johnson said.
“A bit of indecision never hurt anybody in this place,” the other man said. “Most people don't arrive with suitcases, however,” he went on. “A few got knapsacks or bedrolls. What you got in there? Going to share? Or hide it out?"
“I don't know,” Johnson said. “I mean, I don't know what I've got in here.” He knelt down beside the suitcase and opened it. “I'd be glad to share."
The little man gave him an odd glance. “You're a strange duck,” he said. “Stranger than most.” Then he gave his attention to what Johnson was revealing in the suitcase: a few shirts, underclothes, pairs of socks—all serviceable but worn. “Thanks,” he said, “but I'll keep my own. Fit better, too. Some might steal those, however, even here, where people are honester than usual. Better keep them close-by."
Johnson closed the suitcase and laid it flat. Then he emptied his pockets on it: a few coins, a pocket comb, a bus ticket to Kansas City, and a billfold that contained five bills—two ones, two fives, and a ten. He also had a plastic-encased social security card made out to Bill Johnson and a Visa charge card made out to the same name.
“Help yourself,” Johnson said, gesturing at the little pile of belongings as if he had no sense of ownership.
The little man leaned over and gently extracted one dollar bill from the heap. “More would lead me in the wrong direction,” he said cheerfully. “I'd begin to want things again. You'd better put the rest away where they won't easily be found. Particularly that.” He indicated the charge card with his toe. “A person could do a lot of damage to himself with one of those."
When Johnson had stowed things away, the little man said, “Now that we've got rid of the preliminaries, maybe we should introduce ourselves. I'm Sylvester Harding Vines, Jr. But people around here call me ‘Duke.’”
“Bill Johnson,” Johnson said.
They shook hands formally.
“What did you do before... ?” Johnson looked around the dump.
Duke raised a small, white hand. “You can get away with a lot of things around a place like this, but one question nobody asks is what you did before or why you're here. All of us got reasons, some guilty, some painful, and people who go poking around are considered antisocial."