by Anthology
Almost precisely even with the level top of the bridge tower, they drifted slowly toward it and would have bumped gently into it if Charley hadn’t fended them off with his free arm. For a moment the flat top of the great bridge tower lay directly before them like a moonlit table top, their knees almost touching it. Inspired by the excitement of relief, Charley reached overhead and rubbed a finger across the base of the kerosene brazier. It came away blackened with soot and he leaned forward slightly and in the moonlight wrote “C.B.” on the very top of the northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. He looked at it for a moment—proudly, smiling—then glanced at Mrs. Lanidas, and she reached up to the brazier, then wrote “E.L.” just under his initials. Once more Mrs. Lanidas rubbed her finger through the soot of the brazier, reached out to the tower, and began to draw something—a circle, an oval, or something else—around the set of initials. But what it was to be Charley never knew because the breeze had them again now, their moment of motionlessness over, and they moved on across the bridge leaving their initials on its very top to the eternal mystification of the steeplejacks who painted it.
They were out over the Bay moving high above it in a wide arc that was carrying them, Charley saw, north toward the Marin County shoreline again. Off to the right lay the shining city and they stared down at it in awe. Its lights were scattered thinly now, most of the city asleep. But they picked out the floodlighted front of the Fairmont Hotel and, directly across from it at their own eye level, the huge windows of the Top of the Mark. Far to the south they saw Market Street angling across the city, the great dark rectangle of Golden Gate Park, and the whole maplike crisscrossing of San Francisco’s streets rising over and then slipping down its hills. And they heard—very clearly—the toylike cling-clang of a cable-car bell.
Then they were across the shoreline moving almost due north in a straight line which, Charley saw, would intersect their mile-and-a-half-long east-and-west street. Almost sleepily now, they simply sat waiting until they should reach it. Presently, when he recognized the curving pattern of lighted dots ahead which were the lamps of their street, they moved along it, following the curving white center line toward home.
In the morning Charley’s wife and daughter were back again, the house alive and happy once more. In the days, then weeks, then months that followed, he thought of his balloon packed away in the garage, and of using it again. But he never did and presently he realized that, alone no longer, he wasn’t going to; that he’d had what he wanted from it and needed no more. And that, in fact, his flight in the balloon could not ever really be repeated. He thought of showing the balloon to his wife and of telling her what had happened. But he realized that he wasn’t sure he knew what had happened; that what had happened was very little a matter of fact and almost entirely a matter of emotion for which he had no words.
He didn’t see Mrs. Lanidas again for six months. Then he was at a P.T.A. meeting, and, the meeting over, the parents standing in the corridor chatting, Charley stood beside his wife who was talking to someone. He’d spoken politely to a number of people whom he saw nowhere else but here. His wife had introduced him to still others. Now he stood absently waiting, wanting to go home and have a drink. When his wife touched his arm, saying, “Charley, I want you to meet”—he turned with an automatic smile as she finished—“Mrs. Lanidas, from our street.”
For a moment Charley stood looking at her knowing that, factually speaking, this was Mrs. Lanidas. Yet it wasn’t at all. This was no laughing girl in a black leotard, sailing through the sky and the night as the wind rippled her hair. This was a mother of small children with the first lines in her face, all dressed up in a hat, good dress, dark coat, and wearing a girdle. Charley nodded pleasantly. “Oh, yes,” he said politely, “I’ve met Mrs. Lanidas.”
At the absurdity of this, she smiled, and for a moment—eyes warm, almost mischievous—she was a girl once more. Speaking to both of them, but her hand rising to touch Charley’s sleeve, she said, “Not Mrs. Lanidas. Call me Josephine.”
Out in the dark schoolyard as they got into their car, Charley’s wife said, “Now, why did she say that? I’m almost certain her name isn’t Josephine. I think it’s Edna.
But Charley didn’t answer. Sliding under the steering wheel he simply shrugged, smiling a little, and, half under his breath, he continued his whistling of an old, old tune.
HOT TIP
Billy Bruce Winkles
Dr. John Suttle had just sat down to watch the evening news when he heard the phone ring. He immediately got up to answer it, but his five-year-old daughter Annie ran into the room and got to it first.
“Hello,” she said, after she picked it up. “What? Yes.”
“Let me have it, Sweetie,” Dr. Suttle said, gently taking the phone from her hand.
“But Daddy!” she cried.
“Just a minute, Sweetie. Let Daddy talk on the phone . . . Hello.”
“Yes, hello,” a male voice said. “Is this Dr. John Suttle? The physicist?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Suttle, please listen,” said the caller, who spoke with a strange accent. “My name is Olam Stroy. I’m calling you from the twenty-fifth century, four hundred years in your future.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just listen. I’ll explain everything.”
“Please do,” Dr. Suttle said. He thought that the call was probably a prank, but he wanted to keep an open mind about the matter, and so he decided to give the caller a chance to explain.
“But Daddy,” Annie said again. She was still standing beside her father, and she had started tugging at his sleeve.
“Please wait, Sweetie,” he said. “Go ahead, Mr. Stroy. I’m listening.”
“Yes, Dr. Suttle. As I said, I’m calling you from the twenty-fifth century. I am also a physicist. In fact, I’m the leader of a research group that’s studying space-time contortion phenomena. Recently we discovered a way to make phone calls into the past.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, I’ll try to give you a brief summary. First, we create a miniwormhole tunnel through space-time, constructed to run from our laboratory to the general location and time period that we want to reach. We carefully maneuver the far end of the wormhole to a position near a phone system relay antenna, and then we beam a microwave signal through the wormhole to the antenna. By using the proper codes, we can link up with the commercial phone system and eventually complete the call.”
“Well, I understand the basic idea,” Dr. Suttle said. “But it must have been difficult to work out all the technical details.”
“It was. By the way, this call to you goes farther back in time than any of our previous calls.”
“Why did you call me?”
“Because, Dr. Suttle, it was your pioneering research on the elastic properties of space-time that laid the foundation for the work our group is doing now.”
“But I just started looking into that subject a few weeks ago. I haven’t accomplished anything yet.”
“But you will, Dr. Suttle. In fact, you’ll eventually make some major discoveries.”
“Daddy! Hurry!” Annie cried, giving another tug on her father’s sleeve.
But Dr. Suttle, intrigued by the call, was hardly aware of his daughter’s presence. “This is really hard to believe,” he said into the phone.
“But it’s true, Dr. Suttle.”
“Does it mean that I’ll become famous?”
“Yes . . . Well, actually, you won’t become famous until later, after you’re dead.”
“After I’m dead?”
“Yes. Unfortunately the scientific establishment won’t recognize the value of your work when it’s first published. It’ll lie buried in the journals for several centuries.”
“So its importance won’t be appreciated while I’m alive?”
“No. In fact, it’ll be considered so insignificant that you’ll eventually lose your research post.Afterward, your bitterness over the ma
tter will cause you to turn to alcohol for solace. Your drinking will become so heavy that you’ll finally end up living on the street. You’ll spend the last years of your life as a penniless beggar. And you’ll finally die in total obscurity.”
“Gee.”
“Yes. What a shame. But remember that you’ll ultimately be vindicated. Eventually your work will be rediscovered, and then its value will finally be fully appreciated.”
“Are you sure about all of this?”
“Yes Dr. Suttle, I’m sure. But listen, I’ve got to run, or I’ll be late for a meeting. It was nice talking to you. Bye.”
“But . . .”
Dr. Suttle heard a click, and then the line went dead. For a moment he stood quietly, trying to grasp what he had heard. Then suddenly he realized that his daughter was still pulling at his sleeve.
“Daddy!” she cried again.
“Yes, Sweetie,” he finally said. “What is it?”
“What did that lady on the phone mean? What’s a collect call?”
HOUSE OF BONES
Robert Silverberg
After the evening meal Paul starts tapping on his drum and chanting quietly to himself, and Marty picks up the rhythm, chanting too. And then the two of them launch into that night’s installment of the tribal epic, which is what happens, sooner or later, every evening.
It all sounds very intense but I don’t have a clue to the meaning. They sing the epic in the religious language, which I’ve never been allowed to learn. It has the same relation to the everyday language, I guess, as Latin does to French or Spanish. But it’s private, sacred, for insiders only. Not for the likes of me.
“Tell it, man!” B.J. yells. “Let it roll!” Danny shouts.
Paul and Marty are really getting into it. Then a gust of fierce stinging cold whistles through the house as the reindeerhide flap over the doorway is lifted, and Zeus comes stomping in.
Zeus is the chieftain. Big burly man, starting to run to fat a little. Mean-looking, just as you’d expect. Heavy black beard streaked with gray and hard, glittering eyes that glow like rubies in a face wrinkled and carved by windburn and time. Despite the Paleolithic cold, all he’s wearing is a cloak of black fur, loosely draped. The thick hair on his heavy chest is turning gray too. Festoons of jewelry announce his power and status: necklaces of seashells, bone beads, and amber, a pendant of yellow wolf teeth, an ivory headband, bracelets carved from bone, five or six rings.
Sudden silence. Ordinarily when Zeus drops in at B.J.’s house it’s for a little roistering and tale-telling and butt-pinching, but tonight he has come without either of his wives, and he looks troubled, grim. Jabs a finger toward Jeanne.
“You saw the stranger today? What’s he like?”
There’s been a stranger lurking near the village all week, leaving traces everywhere—footprints in the permafrost, hastily covered-over campsites, broken flints, scraps of charred meat. The whole tribe’s keyed. Strangers aren’t common. I was the last one, a year and a half ago. God only knows why they took me in: because I seemed so pitiful to them, maybe. But the way they’ve been talking, they’ll kill this one on sight if they can. Paul and Marty composed a Song of the Stranger last week and Marty sang it by the campfire two different nights. It was in the religious language so I couldn’t understand a word of it. But it sounded terrifying.
Jeanne is Marty’s wife. She got a good look at the stranger this afternoon, down by the river while netting fish for dinner. “He’s short,” she tells Zeus. “Shorter than any of you, but with big muscles, like Gebravar.” Gebravar is Jeanne’s name for me. The people of the tribe are strong, but they didn’t pump iron when they were kids. My muscles fascinate them. “His hair is yellow and his eyes are gray. And he’s ugly. Nasty. Big head, big flat nose. Walks with his shoulders hunched and his head down.” Jeanne shudders. “He’s like a pig. A real beast. A goblin. Trying to steal fish from the net, he was. But he ran away when he saw me.”
Zeus listens, glowering, asking a question now and then—did he say anything, how was he dressed, was his skin painted in any way. Then he turns to Paul.
“What do you think he is?”
“A ghost,” Paul says. These people see ghosts everywhere. And Paul, who is the bard of the tribe, thinks about them all the time. His poems are full of ghosts. He feels the world of ghosts pressing in, pressing in. “Ghosts have gray eyes,” he says. “This man has gray eyes.”
“A ghost, maybe, yes. But what kind of ghost?”
“What kind?”
Zeus glares. “You should listen to your own poems,” he snaps. “Can’t you see it? This is a Scavenger Folk man prowling around. Or the ghost of one.”
General uproar and hubbub at that.
I turn to Sally. Sally’s my woman. I still have trouble saying that she’s my wife, but that’s what she really is. I call her Sally because there once was a girl back home who I thought I might marry, and that was her name, far from here in another geological epoch.
I ask Sally who the Scavenger Folk are.
“From the old times,” she says. “Lived here when we first came. But they’re all dead now. They—”
That’s all she gets a chance to tell me. Zeus is suddenly looming over me. He’s always regarded me with a mixture of amusement and tolerant contempt, but now there’s something new in his eye. “Here is something you will do for us,” he says to me. “It takes a stranger to find a stranger. This will be your task. Whether he is a ghost or a man, we must know the truth. So you, tomorrow: you will go out and you will find him and you will take him. Do you understand? At first light you will go to search for him, and you will not come back until you have him.”
I try to say something, but my lips don’t want to move. My silence seems good enough for Zeus, though. He smiles and nods fiercely and swings around, and goes stalking off into the night.
They all gather around me, excited in that kind of animated edgy way that comes over you when someone you know is picked for some big distinction. I can’t tell whether they envy me or feel sorry for me. B.J. hugs me, Danny punches me in the arm, Paul runs up a jubilant-sounding number on his drum. Marty pulls a wickedly sharp stone blade about nine inches long out of his kit-bag and presses it into my hand.
“Here. You take this. You may need it.”
I stare at it as if he had handed me a live grenade.
“Look,” I say. “I don’t know anything about stalking and capturing people.”
“Come on,” B.J. says. “What’s the problem?”
B.J. is an architect. Paul’s a poet. Marty sings, better than Pavarotti. Danny paints and sculpts. I think of them as my special buddies. They’re all what you could loosely call Cro-Magnon men. I’m not. They treat me just like one of the gang, though. We five, we’re some bunch. Without them I’d have gone crazy here. Lost as I am, cut off as I am from everything I used to be and know.
“You’re strong and quick,” Marty says. “You can do it.”
“And you’re pretty smart, in your crazy way,” says Paul. “Smarter than he is. We aren’t worried at all.”
If they’re a little condescending sometimes, I suppose I deserve it. They’re highly skilled individuals, after all, proud of the things they can do. To them I’m a kind of retard. That’s a novelty for me. I used to be considered highly skilled too, back where I came from.
“You go with me,” I say to Marty. “You and Paul both. I’ll do whatever has to be done but I want you to back me up.”
“No,” Marty says. “You do this alone.”
“B.J.? Danny?”
“No,” they say. And their smiles harden, their eyes grow chilly. Suddenly it doesn’t look so chummy around here. We may be buddies but I have to go out there by myself. Or I may have misread the whole situation and we aren’t such big buddies at all. Either way this is some kind of test, some rite of passage maybe, an initiation. I don’t know. Just when I think these people are exactly like us except for a few piddling differences of custom
s and languages, I realize how alien they really are. Not savages, far from it. But they aren’t even remotely like modern people.
They’re something entirely else. Their bodies and their minds are pure Homo sapiens but their souls are different from ours by 20,000 years.
To Sally I say, “Tell me more about the Scavenger Folk.”
“Like animals, they were,” she says. “They could speak but only in grunts and belches. They were bad hunters and they ate dead things that they found on the ground, or stole the kills of others.”
“They smelled like garbage,” says Danny. “Like an old dump where everything was rotten. And they didn’t know how to paint or sculpt.”
“This was how they screwed,” says Marty, grabbing the nearest woman, pushing her down, pretending to hump her from behind. Everyone laughs, cheers, stamps his feet.
“And they walked like this,” says B.J., doing an ape-shuffle, banging his chest with his fists.
There’s a lot more, a lot of locker-room stuff about the ugly shaggy stupid smelly disgusting Scavenger Folk. How dirty they were, how barbaric. How the pregnant women kept the babies in their bellies twelve or thirteen months and they came out already hairy, with a full mouth of teeth. All ancient history, handed down through the generations by bards like Paul in the epics. None of them has ever actually seen a Scavenger. But they sure seem to detest them.
“They’re all dead,” Paul says. “They were killed in the migration wars long ago. That has to be a ghost out there.”