by Anthology
“Goodbye, Augusta,” she said over her shoulder. “And do try to hurry if you want to make it back. You’re not getting any younger.”
BACKTRACKED
Burt Filer
The first thing he saw was Sally staring at him. She was sitting up in the big bed and had four fingers of her left hand wedged in her mouth. For some reason she’d drawn the sheet up around her and held it there with the other arm, as if caught suddenly by a stranger. Fletcher sat up.
“What’s the matter? What time is it?” He felt odd and a little woozy. His voice sounded rough and both legs hurt, the good one and the other one.
“You’ve backtracked,” Sally said. She gritted her teeth and gave that quick double shake of hers. The long brown hair fell down, and a curler came out.
Fletcher looked down at the arm he’d hooked around his good knee. It was sunburned and freckled the way August usually made it, but the August of what future year had done this? The fingers were blunter, the nails badly bitten, and the arm itself was thicker by half than the one he’d gone to bed with.
Sally lay back down, blinking, on the verge of tears. “You’re older,” she said, “a lot older. Why’d you do it?”
Fletcher tossed off the sheet and swung his legs to the floor. “I don’t know, but then I wouldn’t. It wipes you out completely, they say.” Hurrying across the old green rug they’d retired to the bedroom after long service downstairs, he stared at himself in the dressing mirror. At first he didn’t believe it.
Gone was the somewhat paunchy but still attractive businessman of thirty-six. The man in the mirror looked more like a Sicilian fisherman, all weather-beaten and knotty. Fletcher looked for several long seconds at the blue veins which wrapped his forearms and calves like fishnets. Both calves. The left, though still as warped as ever, was thick now. It looked strong, but it ached.
Fletcher’s face was older by ten years. Etched in the seams about his eyes was the grimness that age brings out through a lifetime of forced smiles. And though the hair on his chest was sun-bleached, he could easily see that a good deal of it was actually white. Fletcher shut his eyes, turned away.
Walking around to Sally’s side of the bed, he sat down and dropped a hand to her shoulder. “I must have had a good reason. We’ll find out soon enough.”
It was only six o’clock but sleep was out of the question, naturally. They dressed. Sally went down the stairs ahead of him, still slim and lithe at thirty-four, and still desirable. The envy of many.
She turned left into the kitchen and he followed, but continued past into the garage. His excuse for privacy was the bicycles just as hers was breakfast. Leave me alone and I’ll get used to it, Fletcher thought. Leave her alone and she can handle it too.
He edged around the bumper of their car to the clutter of his workbench and switched on the light. The bicycles gave him a momentary sense of rightness, gleaming there. They were so slender and functional and spare. Flipping his own over on its back, he checked tension on the derailleur. Perfect.
He righted the thing and dropped the rear wheel into the free rollers. Mounting it, he pedaled against light resistance, the way he’d always dreamed the roads would be.
Maybe they would be now, with these legs. Why had he spent ten years torturing spring into the muscles of a cripple? Sheer vanity, perhaps. But at the cost of wasting those ten years forever, it seemed unreasonable.
Fletcher was sweating, and the speedometer on the rollers said thirty. He was only halfway through the gears, though, so he shifted twice. Fifty.
Maybe he should call Time Central? No, they were duty bound to give him no help at all. They’d just say that at some point ten years in the future he had gone to them with a request to be backtracked to the present—and that before making the hop his mind had been run through that clear/reset wringer of theirs.
Sorry, Mr. Fletcher, but it’s the only way to minimize temporal contamination and paradox. Bothersome thing, paradox. Your mind belongs to Fletcher of the present; you have no knowledge of the future. You understand, of course.
What he understood was that the body of Fletcher-forty-odd had backtracked to be used by the mind of Fletcher-thirty-six, almost as a beast of burden.
And Fletcher-thirty-six could only wonder why.
A lot of people did it to escape some unhappiness in their later years. It seldom worked. They inevitably became anachronistic misfits among their once-contemporaries. But ten years at Fletcher’s age wasn’t really that much, and he guessed they’d all get used to him. But would Sally?
Sixty, said the dummy speedometer. Fletcher noted with some surprise that he’d been at it for fifteen minutes. Better slow down, and save some for the trip. What strength I Maybe he’d learn to play tennis. He could see himself trouncing Dave Schenk, Sally looking on from the sidelines—Fletcher was smiling now. Sally would come around. She had a powerful older man in place of a soft young one, a cripple at that.
Polio. He’d been one of the last. Other men had held doors open for him ever since, and he’d learned to smile . . .
Up to fifty again, slow down. And where was breakfast? This body of his hungered. And what had it done, this body? Knowing from bitter experience how slowly it responded to exercise, Fletcher decided that the lost ten years must have been devoted almost exclusively to physical development.
But for what? Some kind of crisis, that he might meet with superior strength on the second go-around? And why had he decided to backtrack to this particular morning?
“Fletch, breakfast,” Sally called. The voice was lighter and steady. Dismounting, Fletcher stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the silver wheel whir slowly to a stop.
She wouldn’t want to discuss it. Not for a while, anyhow. It’d been the same with his leg, back before they were married. He switched the light off and went in.
“It’ll be nice after that bums off,” he said, nodding out the window.
The bench in the breakfast nook felt hard as he sat on it. Less flesh there now. Sally handed down two plates and joined him. Not across the table but at his side. A show of confidence. They ate slowly, silently.
Fletcher looked over at her profile. With her hair tied back like that she was very patrician. Straight nose, serious mouth. Like Anastasia, Dave Schenk had said, a displaced princess. She caught him looking at her, began to smile, changed her mind, put down her fork.
She faced him squarely. “I think I’ll make it, Fletch.” She lowered her forehead a fraction, waiting for a reassuring peck, and he gave it to her.
He turned out to have been right about the weather. Within an hour they were pedaling in bright sunlight and had stopped to remove their sweaters. Sally seemed cheerful. For perhaps the third time, Fletcher caught her gazing with frank wonder at his body, especially his leg. He glowed inwardly. Aloud he said, “Forward, troops,” and swooped off ahead.
They wound their way up Storm King Mountain. Occasionally a car would grind past them on the steep grades, but soon the two bicycles left the road. They had the clay path which led up to the reservoir all to themselves. May-pale sumacs on the left, and a hundred feet of naked air on the right.
“Hey,” said Sally, “slow down.” Dismounting, they sat under a big maple. She leaned her head on his shoulder and slid one hand cosily between his upper arm and his ribs. “Oh,” she said, and raised her eyebrows.
They sat there for some time. Over them the branches reached across the path and out beyond the cliffs. Below, the Hudson wound in a hugeness, a round green island at one end. It was a wide old river, moving slowly. A tug dragged clumped barges upstream in an efficient line that cut off most of the curves. In the distance a few motorboats buzzed like flies, little white wakes behind them. Crawling along the far shore was a passenger train headed for New York.
It smelled like spring. Rising, Sally went over by the bicycles and bent to pick a white umbrella of Queen Anne’s lace. She came back twirling the stalk between her fingers. “Ready,” she s
aid.
He set her an easy pace, but did it the hard way himself, not using the lower gears. One of Dave Schenk’s subtler tricks. Fletcher wished he was with them today.
At about eleven o’clock they reached the top. Between the power company’s storage reservoir and the bluffs was a little park that no one else ever seemed to use. Sally spread most of their food on a weathered wooden picnic table. Then she went over and sat on a broad granite shelf. Fletcher set about starting a fire.
It was taking him quite a while, as he’d forgotten the starter and had to whittle some twigs for tinder. He nicked his thumb, frowned, sucked it, looked up.
Sally was on her feet again, picking more flowers. She paused from time to time to gaze out over the river. The view was even more spectacular here, Fletcher knew, even though too far back to see it himself. They were three or four hundred feet straight above the water.
Running a few feet beyond the main line of the bluff was a grassy promontory. Several bunches of Queen Anne’s lace waved above the wild hay and creepers. He wished she’d get away from there and took a breath to tell her to.
Sally screamed as her legs slid out of sight. Twisting midair, she clutched two frantic handfuls of turf.
She was only sixty feet away, but the fireplace and the big old table lay directly between them. Fletcher planted both hands on the smoking stone chimney and vaulted it. The thing was four feet high, but could have been five and he’d still have made it. A dozen running steps, each faster and longer than the last, carried him to the table. He yanked his head down and his right leg up to hurdle it, snapping the leg down on the other side and swinging the weaker one behind. Pain shot through it, and Fletcher nearly sprawled. It took him four steps to straighten out, and in four more he was there.
He hurled himself at the two slender wrists that were falling away, and got one.
Sally screamed again, this time in pain. Fletcher hauled her up to his chin, both sinewy hands around her small white one. Edging backward on his knees, he drew her fully up. Fletcher stood shakily and attempted to help her to her feet. His left leg gave way.
Falling beside her, he lay on the warm granite and tried to catch his breath. It was difficult for some reason. Her face swam before him, and as he lost consciousness he heard himself repeating, “So that’s why, that’s why—”
Fletcher’s eyelids were burning, so he opened them, to look directly into the sun. He must have been lying there an hour. Sally—his mind leapfrogged back and the breath stopped in his throat. But no, it was over, she lay here beside him now. Fletcher rose to an elbow. His leg throbbed between numbness and intolerable pain, and it looked as if someone had taken an axe to it.
But Sally’s wrist looked just as bad. The drying scum near her lips attested to that. As he moved her head gently away from the puddle, she moaned.
It took him ten minutes to crawl over to the table and return with a bottle of wine. They’d brought no water. He sprinkled some on her forehead, then held it to her lips. She came around, fainted, came around again.
Sally had made it about halfway down to the road when she ran into some picnickers. The jeep came at three, and at four they were both in the orthopedic ward at Rockland State.
Fletcher was still dopey with anesthetic and delayed shock. As he told the reporter what had happened, the little man nearly drooled. Their episode had occurred on Saturday. When they were released from the hospital and sent home on Wednesday, their story was still up on page four. On the front porch was a yellow plastic wastebasket full of unopened telegrams and letters.
They hadn’t had much privacy at the hospital. So after Sally had made the coffee she sat down opposite Fletcher at the kitchen table and asked, “How’ve you been?”
“Okay. Still a little disoriented, maybe.”
“Yes.” She stared into her cup. “Fletch, I guess the first time we went through that, I fell?”
Fletcher nodded. “I’d never have made it to you, the old way.” He stared down at the cast on his leg. “Ten years of mine, for all of yours. I’d do it again.”
“It wasn’t cheap,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t cheap.”
They made love that night. Fletcher had been worried about that, and found his fears justified to some extent. Ten years made a difference. But Sally held him long afterward and cried a little, which was the best with her. He fell asleep feeling reassured for then, but knowing what was to come.
Fletcher dyed his hair and had some minor facial surgery done to smooth out his eyes and throat. He gained ten pounds. He looked pretty much like the Fletcher of thirty-six. A certain amount of romance was attached to his reputation now, and when he changed jobs his salary almost doubled.
His broken left leg never healed solidly, though, and for all intents and purposes he was back to where he’d started. He and Sally remained childless right up until their divorce two years later. She was later married to David Schenk, but Fletcher remained alone.
BACK
Susan Forest
Sometimes attention to detail is really important . . .
It was while Alan and Victor were touring the warehouse with the real estate agent that a slip of paper bearing the words, “It worked,” materialized on a desk in the office.
Alan stared at the note, strength draining from every muscle in his body as disbelief turned to realization, then to euphoria.
“Alan—” Victor swallowed, turning white as the paper, his eyes wide beneath unruly curls.
Alan lifted the note and fingered its crisp, white softness. It was real. Real.
“We haven’t started the experiments yet.”
Thirteen years—thirteen goddamn years of hope and faith. And now, Alan’s belief in Victor had been borne out.
Victor turned to the real estate agent. “We’ll take it.”
“This proves it.” Words poured from Alan’s mouth, out of control, as he paced the room. “It’s going to happen, Victor. The world has changed. It has.”
“Well, something’s happened,” Victor conceded. He snapped his laser measure closed and knelt on the concrete floor to record the width of the West Vancouver warehouse in his notebook.
Alan squatted in front of him, next to the wall. “And no one knows it but you and me.”
It was pushing ten o’clock, and neither of them had thought to go home. The warehouse was dusty and dark, lit by a half dozen fluorescents high above their heads and the sound of traffic and trains filtered in from beyond the aging brick and lumber walls. The real estate agent, frightened and suspicious—but ten thousand dollars richer—had left with their signed lease hours ago.
Victor pushed his stylus behind his ear. “We still have to build the time machine and send that paper back to today’s date. The experiment isn’t done until we do.”
“But we know the results. The rest is just technical.”
Victor eyed Alan. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“We can still screw up, Alan.”
Alan slapped the paper as proof. “Look at it. How can you be so skeptical?”
Victor frowned in annoyance. “Put the paper down before you wear it out. If this turns out to be what we hope, that’s a valuable archive you’ve got your biodegrading sweat on.”
Alan hurried to the office, holding the evidence gingerly by one corner and put it in his briefcase, letting his eyes linger on the handwritten scrawl for one last moment. Then he whirled back to Victor, who was on the floor, pointing the laser measure at the ceiling.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? How could this paper appear out of nowhere, unless we sent it back in time?”
“Lots of explanations. Maybe someone’s working on a molecular transporter or duplicator. Could have been someone else also working on time travel. There’s been sufficient data in the world archive since 2032 for anyone to access.” Victor collapsed the laser beam. “We have competitors, you know, Alan.”
“Competitors with a paper marked, ‘It wo
rked,’ in my handwriting?”
Victor pulled himself to a sitting position and pushed his long curls away from his glasses. “Alan, you set your heart on things. I don’t want you to be disappointed. I don’t want you to give me credit for being a genius when so many things can still go wrong. It’s possible to want something so badly you miss the obvious, you know.”
“The paper appeared out of nowhere in front of our eyes in the very location we leased to do the experiments. I didn’t miss that.”
“Besides, we don’t know how far along other researchers are. We still have a lot of work to do.” Victor punched the measurements into his notebook. “And we have no university or grant money or big corporations behind us.”
Alan sat cross-legged on the floor. “Because we don’t want red tape to tie us up until we’re ninety.”
Victor shrugged. “Academic backing lends credibility.”
“Not always. Corporations and universities have agendas, Victor. The only way to really do this is on our own.”
“So you say. But, Alan, have you thought about how much it’ll cost before we get results we can publish? Have you really worked it out?”
“You know I have the money.”
“Enough?”
“Great-uncle Alan never made a bad investment in his life. There’s more than enough.”
“But are you sure?” Victor closed his notebook. “There are other things you could do with your inheritance.”
“Like what? Lie on a beach somewhere?” Alan snorted. “Would you do that with your life?”
The sound of a freight train slowing as it approached the docks almost drowned Victor’s response. “No,” he said. He lifted his head. “I wouldn’t.”
“Listen. The money’s mine. I can do with it what I want.”
“Whatever you want, sure.” Victor crawled over to the wall to inspect an electrical outlet. “But Alan, your great-uncle, or whoever he was, may not have meant investing in time travel.”