by Anthology
“You mean guns can’t hurt them? Like they’re only playing soldier?” Tom shivered.
“Not that simple, kid. The nanos can’t put somebody back together if they’re blown up as bad as Claude was. They are programmed so small wounds take a normal time to heal. We don’t want replacements to look like supermen. Nobody down now is supposed to know about this.”
“Then why are you telling him, Juan?”
“We owe it to him, Marie.” He looked at her with obvious annoyance. “We were supposed to help him, and we screwed him up instead.”
“I want to help him. This will only make things worse,” she said.
“I want to know,” Tom tried to get their attention.
Juan glanced at him, then turned back to Marie. “Look, this works because we take only kids the Feds won’t believe, heads and stoners and black kids without much schooling. Remember back in June? The cops picked up some kid on a bad trip in the Haight, and he told them all about us. I played Mr. Clean, and showed the Feds the old auto parts in the back room, and said they better lock that freak in the nuthouse. By the time the shrinks get done, he’ll think we were hallucinations.” Juan turned toward Tom. “You’re smart enough to keep your mouth shut and stay out of trouble, aren’t you kid?”
Tom nodded. “Yes.” It had all sounded too easy. “But if nobody’s going to believe me, anyway, you can tell me more, can’t you?”
“Okay, kid. We understand each other.” Juan’s eyes sparkled a moment.
Questions tumbled through Tom’s mind. “Why do they come to fight in ‘Nam?” he asked. “Why not some better war? Don’t they want to fight against Hitler?”
“Some do, but there weren’t a lot of draft dodgers in World War II. A few want to fight for Hitler, but we won’t let them,” Juan said. “Vietnam is so unpopular in America that it’s perfect for us. How many of your friends wanted to go, kid?”
“One did. He killed, and he got killed.” Tom wanted to cry, but he couldn’t cry in front of them.
“The substitutes coming back say it’s an evil war,” said Juan. “But new ones keep coming for the action. Lots of men dodged the draft for the American Civil War, but the action is too slow for up then. They would love the high-tech wars in your future, but we can’t make substitutions after the military starts genetic profiling of soldiers. Vietnam is the perfect war, kid.”
Tom didn’t understand what they meant by genetic profiling, but he wondered about the future. “Can they change what happens?”
Juan shook his head. “They can change some people’s lives, and maybe affect a battle or two, but not who wins the war. That’s a lot bigger then individual lives, kid.”
“What about my life? What am I supposed to do now?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know.” Juan looked down and drummed his fingers on the desk. “Down now you’re dead, kid. The government has closed the books on your life. The Army picked up what was left of Claude and shipped it back to Illinois, and your parents cried and buried the pieces.”
“Couldn’t they tell it wasn’t me?”
“No. There wasn’t much left, kid. The chaplain recommended a closed-casket funeral. We didn’t find out until afterwards.”
“Everybody who knew you thinks you’re dead. You’ve got nothing left down now. We can send you up then, to our future,” Marie offered. “It’s a different world, but a good one. We’ve made peace with nature and each other. With the nanos, you can live almost forever. Look at me; I’m 134 years old. There’s nothing left for you here.”
“I . . . I . . . don’t know.” Tom looked back and forth between them. “Can I come back if I don’t like it?”
Juan shook his head. “No, kid. Once you’re up then, you can’t come back down now in this time line. Otherwise you violate causality.”
The woman glared at him.
Tom stared at them both. The reality hit him slowly. On paper he was dead; Claude was in his grave. His parents had already buried him. They must have cried over his death. Tom felt tears coming, squeezed his eyes shut, and put his eyes over them so the two wouldn’t see. “Please let me think.”
“We can send you up then right away, with the substitutes returning up then. It will be much easier for you,” Marie said.
“Let him think, Marie,” Juan said. “It’s not much extra trouble to send him up then separately. Let’s get the others out of here. We’ll be back, kid. There’s just two of us down now in the Bay Area, and we’ve got to do everything.”
A chair scraped and two pairs of shoes trod across the bare concrete floor. The door opened and shut. Alone, Tom put his head on the desk and wept in silence, thinking how bad his father must have felt.
Someone knocked on the door. “Tom, you in there?” The knob turned, the door squeaked open, and Tom looked up at Joe. “What happened, man?”
“The substitute got killed. They buried him for me. Everybody thinks I’m dead.”
“What you going to do?”
Tom started to shrug, then changed his mind. “Let’s get out of here. They want to send me to their future, but I’m not ready to go.” He grabbed his pack.
“The old lady sounded really uptight. They rushed the other guys out and forgot I was in the john. They’re sending the soldiers back in the time machine.”
Tom shouldered his knapsack and Joe opened the door for him. The lights flickered and the time machine whined. They slipped out the peeling white door and walked down the alley. The day was cool and drizzly. They could see the changes two years had brought; the barber shop had become a variety store, and the other men on the street had longer hair and beards, but they didn’t stop.
“I’m hungry. I’ll buy you some lunch,” Joe offered. “Let’s go find someplace to eat and think.”
They walked several blocks, saying little as they looked around, the drizzle seeping into their clothes. A newspaper in a sidewalk box confirmed it was November 1971. The war was still going. They came to the lunch counter where Tom had eaten before visiting the draft counseling office on Telegraph. The same blonde girl was behind the counter, but she didn’t recognize Tom. Nobody would remember him after two years.
Tom ordered a hamburger platter, with fries and a soda. He was surprised to see Joe order a steak, rare. It had been a long time since Tom had bought anything but the cheapest items on the menu. Joe paid with a fresh twenty-dollar bill. It was mid-afternoon and the place was almost empty, but they took their trays to a booth in the back.
“Why would they send you to the future?” Joe asked after they sat down.
Tom’s hamburger tasted good; he squirted ketchup on the fries. “Maybe to get me out of the way. The Army sent the substitute’s body home, and my parents buried him. Everybody thinks I’m dead.”
“So the Man can’t come get you.” Joe sliced his steak and chewed with enthusiasm.
“And I can’t go back home, or I let out that I never was in the Army.”
“Do you want to go back? Parts of my past, I’d be glad to lose. I’m tired of playing dumb for white cops. Maybe the future doesn’t have bigots.”
“I don’t want to give up everything.” Tom picked up a fry and bit off the ketchup-coated end. It wasn’t perfect, but it was crisp and the ketchup tasted good.
“Me neither. Future’s likely to be a weird place. Probably couldn’t get a real beefsteak up there.” Joe chuckled as he took another bite.
“Can’t be much stranger than Berkeley,” Tom said, looking at a fry with skin still on one side. “But they said there was no coming back once I went. All I wanted was to stay out of the war.”
“It ain’t my war, and I ain’t going, that’s what I said, Maybe I’d fight the Klan, but they ain’t them.” Joe said. “Now I got discharge papers, I’m free. I told the guy who went for me to take the medal back where he came from.”
“I didn’t get anything. I don’t know what to do. Got no place to go. Maybe go underground, I guess.” Tom wondered about Canada. He didn’t kn
ow how much a train ticket would cost; maybe he could hitch.
Joe sipped his lemonade. “I guess I’m lucky. I told my uncle I was splitting, and he said I could stay with him whenever I came back.”
“Guess I screwed up everything,” Tom muttered. He felt sorry for his father. He’d buried his only brother, and now he thought he had lost his only son.
“You don’t want to go to the future?”
Tom sipped his soda through the straw. “No,” he said, thinking. “The old lady’s crazy. She said she was 134 years old, and that I could live forever in the future. They do something to people so their wounds heal. Juan said that’s why the substitutes weren’t scared.”
“She’s crazy, man. People live longer than they used to, but not forever. The guy who went in for you got killed. If people can live forever, they would end up like her.”
“I don’t want that,” Tom said. He could still feel her trying to pull strings to make him do what she wanted. Ideas tumbled through his mind. He wanted to tell his parents he was alive, but couldn’t just go back home and say he’d never been in the Army. Canada should be more like home than the future, and he could call his parents from there. “I need time to get my head together.”
“I know the feeling,” Joe said. He cut another piece of steak and chewed slowly, savoring the red meat. His dark eyes looked into Tom’s. He put down his knife and fork and pulled a thick envelope from his pants pocket. Tom stared when he saw it was full of twenty-dollar bills. “It was his mustering-out pay,” Joe said. He peeled off some bills and pushed them toward Tom. “Take it.”
Tom stared at the money. “I can’t. It’s yours.”
Joe put the envelope back in his pocket, cut another piece of steak and shook his head. “It’s really the other guy’s, the guy who went in for me. Back in the little room where we talked, he handed it to me, and said ‘You were right. The war was awful. Make this do some good.’ I got my uncle in Oakland; right now you don’t have anybody. You need it.”
Tom looked at the money. The $60 in his pocket wouldn’t take him far. The twenties would buy a ticket to Vancouver, and pay for someplace to stay. “I’ll pay you back. I . . .”
“Don’t worry about me. When the time comes, you help a brother.”
Tom thanked him and picked up the money. When they were finished eating, he went back to the counter and bought them both cups of coffee and slices of apple pie with scoops of vanilla ice cream on top. Then they caught a bus to the Oakland train station.
The railroad cars were dirty, worn, and mostly empty; Tom was happy to sit alone and watch the country go by. He counted the money he had left; Joe had given him $300. It would hold him until he could get a job. Later he could try college again. Farms, forests, and mountains went by as the wheels clicked on the rails, calming him. After night fell, he dozed off looking at the stars.
The sky cleared overnight, and the morning Sun hit his face through the east-facing window. Thinking of his parents, Tom cried, but he felt better as the Sun rose higher. His mind felt sharp for the first time in months, and when he got up for a drink of water, he stuffed the little leather bag that had held his stash of pot into the trash.
At the Vancouver station, he stopped to get Canadian money on his way to a phone booth. He gave the operator his parents’ number, and dropped coins into the slot. The coins dinged, distant metal switches clicked and clacked, and the phone rang. His father’s voice answered.
“Dad, it’s Tom. I’m alive.”
The line was silent. Tom worried that his father might have had a heart attack, but after an age the reply came. “Oh my God!”
“I’m safe. I’m in Vancouver.”
“It is you! Thank God!” came his father’s voice across two thousand miles. “I’m sorry I gave you so much grief. I was worried because you were drifting. I didn’t want you to get dragged into this awful war and killed like your uncle. This war isn’t right, and you’re my son. That’s why I tried to get you a desk job. I tried that for myself, once.”
With the haze gone from his head, Tom understood. “It’s okay, Dad,” Tom said. “I know I screwed up bad back in Berkeley, but I couldn’t become part of the war machine, and I had to do it myself.”
“That’s how we learn, son. I hope someday we’ll learn how to stop war.”
“We will, Dad,” Tom said, thinking of the time travelers. “It may take a long time, but we will.”
DRINK IN A SMALL TOWN
Peter Wood
Wallace picked a hell of a place to watch the first Mars expedition land. The small Georgia town probably hadn’t changed in a hundred years.
He parked in front of Scooter’s Tavern, the place the interstate gas station attendant had suggested. He wondered how dives like Scooter’s survived. Except for the bar he saw nothing but boarded-up buildings. The dark street had only one other car.
He thought twice about leaving the interstellar drive’s blueprints in the trunk. But he didn’t feel like lugging them around. After the frustrating week trying to get money to manufacture the drive, he half hoped somebody would steal the damned plans.
Inside, the wheezing window air conditioner fought August’s heat and humidity. A teetering stack of water-stained boxes leaned against a dented video poker machine. Wallace hoped he hadn’t made a mistake coming in here. “Do y’all serve food?” he asked the bartender, a greasy-haired man in a NASCAR T-shirt.
The bartender’s eyes opened wide. He grabbed a half-filled beer off the counter and gulped it down. “Evening, sir. I’m Ray. We got burgers and chips. Want a drink?”
Wallace sat down on a duct-taped stool. He needed a drink. After trudging through South Carolina and Georgia, he still hadn’t found a single investor. The real world was even less interested in his ideas about string theory and exceeding light speed than the Ph.D. physics program. Days like this he almost wished he hadn’t dropped out. “Burger and chips. And whatever you have on draft.”
Ray slapped a patty on the grill and poured Wallace a tall Stroh’s. He turned on the flat screen TV with a remote. “Those boys are about to land.”
“I wouldn’t want to be the first man out of the lander. Too much pressure. Hard to top Neil Armstrong.” “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind,” Ray said. “You know your history,” Wallace said. Ray smiled. “It’s my specialty.” Wallace sipped his beer. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. “How old’s this place?”
Ray shrugged. “Who knows? Ninety years? I was here when the Supreme Court ended segregation. The Vietnam War. The Moon landing.” His voice was slurred.
“You were here?”
“Of course not.” Ray coughed. “I meant the bar’s been here that long.”
“This must be a slow night with the landing and all,” Wallace said.
“Nope. Normal crowd.” Grease spattered as Ray flipped the burger. The rich smell of sautéing onions filled the air. “It’s our last night.” He poured himself another beer.
“So, I’m celebrating.”
Wallace studied the unswept concrete floor, and the cracked plastic chairs and Formica tables. He wondered if the dusty pinball machine worked. “Hard to make money downtown with the interstate, I guess. Everybody goes to Red Lobster or Applebee’s.”
Ray leaned against the counter. “Our work’s done is all. I’ll miss it. A good spot to watch the world. Nobody bothers you.”
Wallace doubted anyone could see much of the world from a street that probably had less traffic than a suburban cul-de-sac. The countdown clock on TV said thirty minutes to landing.
Ray placed a steaming hamburger before Wallace. He unclipped a bag of barbecue chips from the wall. “Sorry, we’re out of plain and sour cream. Not much point in restocking.”
Wallace slathered the burger with mustard and Texas Pete hot sauce. He took a bite and remembered why he had left the generic chains near the highway. “This is great.”
“You’re a long way from home, ain’t you?” Ray a
sked.
“I’m from Florida.” Ray took another sip of beer. “Good day’s drive to Miami.”
“How’d you know I was from Miami?”
“You must have told me, sir.” Ray pointed to the TV. “There’s going to be a delay.”
Wallace glanced at the ticking countdown clock. “Everything looks on schedule.” Ray grinned. “Wait a second.”
A commentator replaced the picture of the rapidly approaching surface of Mars. “The computers are out of sync, but Mission Control promises they’ll fix the problem in ten or fifteen minutes. We—”
Ray picked up the remote and muted the sound. “The landing will be fine.”
“How do you know?”
“The same way I know your fund raising trip went well.” Had he told Ray about that? God, he was tired. “Nobody’s interested in my company.”
Ray finished the beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “That venture capitalist in Macon wants to invest. He’ll call tonight.”
“Are you watching me?”
“We’re watching this time in history. Tomorrow we return to our time.” The Georgia accent was gone. He poured another Stroh’s and pushed it to Wallace. “On the house.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m saying too much, but I don’t drink usually. And there’s something I have to tell you in a minute.” He smiled. “What do you think of the Mars landing?”
Wallace squinted. Was the man crazy? Maybe he was just drunk. “You don’t want to know.”
“Sure I do.”
Wallace rolled his eyes. “It came in billions over budget. We should have a base on Mars by now. We should have friggin’ FTL drive. And why is space travel still a national project? We need to work with India, Japan, China, Brazil. Don’t get me started.”
“Don’t worry,” Ray said. “Your little startup will fix that faster than light problem, but I got to tell you something. Helium 3 is a dead end. It’s inefficient and too expensive to mine.”