by Anthology
“They’ll probably use it for shooting atomic bombs at each other,” Mike remarked, “long before they use it for passengers.”
Einstein gave him a startled look, then smiled wryly and shrugged.
This was the hard part. The only way Mike had been able to come up with to get the great man’s attention was the way Klaatu had gotten Professor Barnhart’s attention in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Mike couldn’t remember how fluent Einstein’s English was, but he pressed on quickly nonetheless.
“I know you’ve been working on unified field theory,” Mike said, pulling a folded sheaf of papers and a card from his coat pocket, “so I thought you might be interested in this.”
Unfolding the papers, Mike presented the sheaf to the professor. On the pages he had diagrammed, with explanatory captions, a particularly interesting variant of what would someday be called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen theorem.
Einstein glanced at the pages, perfunctorily at first, just humoring him. Then the physicist’s eyes grew wide as he realized the importance of what he was looking at.
“Wo—Where—?”
“I knew you’d see their merit,” Mike said, gesturing toward the thin sheaf, then handing Einstein the card with his grandfather’s name, address, and phone number. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you in person, Professor. I can be reached at this address. Let’s keep in touch.”
“Ja—er, yes!” Einstein said, shuffling papers and card about in his hands so he could shake the hand Mike offered him. Tipping his hat and turning before he melted away into the crowd, Mike was pleased he’d made his Einstein contact already.
Deciding to treat himself to as much of the Fair as possible before he made his way to the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, he toured the Town of Tomorrow. Then it was on to the Immortal Well and its streamlined Time Capsule, scheduled to be opened in 6939 A.D. Next he saw the robots Elektro the Moto-Man and his Moto-Dog, Sparko, perform in the Westinghouse Building.
He felt a childlike awe at General Electric’s ten-million-volt indoor lightning-bolt show, and Consolidated Edison’s block-long “City of Light” diorama. The line for the GM Futurama was far too long, however. His rendezvous with that tech triumph could wait for another visit.
He made his way through what felt more and more like a planetary county fair, until he at last reached the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. During the day the numbers of spectators for the pavilion’s official opening ceremonies had swelled past fifty thousand. On the fringes of the crowd, entrepreneurs sold Jewish Palestine flags, as well as armbands and yarmulkes adorned with the Star of David.
Recalling that his grandfather—though neither Orthodox nor Conservative—had on a lark bought such a yarmulke at the World’s Fair today and all those years ago, Mike now bought one as well and put it on, in hope and remembrance.
In his accented English, Einstein himself at last pronounced the words, “I am here entrusted with the high privilege of officially dedicating the building which my Palestine brethren have erected.” Amid the vast, cheering crowd, Mike despaired of finding the old man and boy he was seeking, but he kept looking.
By the time the ceremonies ended, Mike still hadn’t found the boy and the old man he sought—not even after the crowd broke up.
Worry, frustration, and anxiety warred within him as he drifted like a lost ghost through the great squares and avenues of the Fair, alongside the Lagoon of Nations, past the pavilions of states and governments. He wandered beneath the closing fireworks, his hope fading like blown starshells. He came to the reflecting pool beneath the Perisphere, at just the moment the great voice of that globe began to sound its eerie tocsin over the emptying fair.
With other stragglers he made his way toward the parking lots, panic rising in his mind. He’d lost them somewhere in the Fair! They were no longer on the grounds anywhere! He banged his forehead with palmed fists. How to find them? How to find them?
Getting into the Cord, he sat and stared through the windshield. He felt forlorn and powerless as a lost child. Not even the play of faerie lights over the Trylon and Perisphere could alter his despondent mood. He leaned his head against the steering wheel and mourned inconsolably.
Yorkville.
The word drifted into his consciousness like a boon from a merciful god. Yes! New York’s German-American section, where his grandfather had had his run-in with the street gangsters. It was only a hunch, but as he left the parking lot for the streets he could think of nowhere else to go.
He had maps, but the maps were not the city. He got lost, again and again. By memory he had successfully navigated across sixty years of time and thousands of miles of space, but now he was having difficulty finding his way around New York City!
When at last he made his way into Yorkville, streets and landmarks began to take on the faintest aura of déjà vu familiarity. He began to remember. They’d run out of gas, yes. He had waited in the car while his grandfather had gone to fill up the gas can. His grandfather had been gone a long time—
At the far edge of a streetlight, in a vacant lot, Mike saw and heard it, before he was ready for it. Four young men yelling, “Jude! Unflitiger Jude! Verderber! Teufeljude!” as they pummeled and kicked an old man.
Mike skidded to a stop beside the nightmare tableau and got out of the car.
At the sound of the Cord screeching to a halt, the young men stopped their heavy-booted work. Hearing the car door opening and slamming, one of the men, the smallest, took to his heels. The other three stood their ground, fists clenched.
Mike walked steadily across the lot toward them. When he was perhaps fifteen feet away, one of the three abruptly broke away toward something off to one side—a gasoline can. Mike saw the youth take matches and handkerchief rag from his pockets. He knew immediately what the boy intended to do.
While the fire maker fumbled about his work, Mike in battle-dance kata waded into the remaining two, punching and kicking.
An elderly avenging angel, he felt strangely detached, as if in a minor trance. His only barely-conscious thought was an odd little mantra—ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, do-si-do, again and again.
He knew he took many blows and strikes, but he gave far more, stomping insteps, roundhouse kicking ribs, smashing noses, snapping collarbones, shattering kneecaps. Even Yorkville street toughs had never encountered such a fighting style. They fled at last, but they had done their damage.
His grandfather, doused about the neck and chest with a slosh of gasoline, was going up in slow immolation. It was all Mike could do to put out the fire with his suit coat. The old man’s pulse was thready, but the pain of his burns roused him to consciousness.
“Thank you,” he whispered, coughing blood.
“Grandpa,” Mike said, cradling the old man’s head, “it’s me, Michael.”
“Michael?” asked his grandfather, confused. “How?”
“I know—I’m old,” Mike said, picking his grandfather up awkwardly in a fireman’s carry. He headed toward the Cord, heart pounding, talking all the while, adrenalin-delirious, trying to explain. “I know it doesn’t seem to make sense. But listen, you’ve got to believe me. I’m sending you into the future. You’ll die of your wounds and burns here. I’ve come from the future to help you. Having you to save saves me, both as the boy I was, and the old man I’ll be.”
Mike opened the passenger side door of the Cord and propped his grandfather in the seat. Dazedly his grandfather watched him. Taking Grandpa Sakler’s keys and money clip, Mike tossed his own wallet onto the seat beside his grandfather.
“All the ID you’ll need to pass for me in 1999 is in that wallet and in the car,” Mike told him. His grandfather nodded weakly, or perhaps he passed out. Coming around past the back of the car, Mike opened up the driver’s side door. Slotting his own key on its key chain into the Cord’s ignition, he started the car and turned on the temporal Mobius generator.
The car was equipped with enough computer power for a full memory of his trip here, as per the
notes he had written, the notes he would write. Now, though, he would have to change its return destination.
Putting on the neuro-hookups, he fast-reversed the memory guidance record to a bifurcation point two days before he left 1999—to his last trip to the doctor’s office near St. Agnes Hospital, for his physical.
This time, the Cord would miss the turn, and not miss the cinder-block retaining wall. He remembered all he could, then imagined the car through wall and total smashup, into the hospital parking lot—right in front of Emergency, where an old-fashioned man with a secret desire to see the future would finally get his wish.
Turning to his unconscious grandfather, he kissed the old man lightly atop his bloodied head.
“I love you, Grandpa.”
He stood on the brake, revving the engine while in gear. At the same instant he flipped the Mobius generator’s last switch, dropped his foot off the brake, and threw himself from the car, the circlets tearing free of his head.
Around him he felt the chill of death. He was every place and no place at all, every time and no time, and he was falling . . .
He landed heavily on his hip. Around him a thin mist dissipated as a breeze blew along the street. He propped himself up on his forearm, feeling old and very tired. Something had happened to his memory. His recall of the last several hours was as hazy as a dream or nightmare dissolving on waking.
“Grandpa?” A boy’s voice said, coming toward him. The boy peered into his face with evident concern. “Grandpa, is that you? You don’t look right. Are you okay?”
“Just tripped and fell down, is all,” Mike said, getting slowly to his feet. At last he began remembering something of the role he was supposed to play.
“Grandpa? Where’s the gas can?”
For a moment Mike had no idea what the boy was talking about. The boy looked around.
“Oh, here it is,” the boy said, running to pick it up from the vacant lot, then coming back, still looking at Mike. “Here. Your yarmulke fell off too.”
“I’m a bit discomboobalated from the fall, is all,” Mike said, trying painfully to smile and joke as he took the yarmulke with its Star of David from the boy’s hand. “Thank you. Lead the way back to the car. I’ll follow you.”
The short walk returned Mike partway to his senses. His chest hurt. He realized that, here in 1939, without medications or surgical techniques yet to be invented, he would not live very long.
So be it. Until he died he would lead a very full life. Here, in this time when the future was beautiful and distant as Heaven, he would spend his remaining days remembering—and planning.
“Hey, Grandpa!” the boy called when he’d reached his grandfather’s Cord automobile. “Gimme the keys.”
“What?” Mike said. He looked quizzically at the kid as he took the gas can from the boy. The can was still close to half full. Pouring its remaining contents into the fuel tank, he hoped it would be enough to restart the car.
“You know,” the boy said. “Lemme drive.”
“No, no,” Mike said, waving his hand in a light gesture of dismissal. He put the empty gas can in the trunk, then opened the doors to let them both in. He slipped the key into the ignition and looked at the smiling boy sitting on the other side of the front seat.
“You may just be driving this road, too, someday,” the old man said quietly. “Maybe sooner than you think.”
After a time, the engine caught and they drove away.
LAST BORN
Isaac Asimov
Edith Fellowes smoothed her working smock as she always did before opening the elaborately locked door and stepping across the invisible dividing line between the is and the is not. She carried her notebook and her pen although she no longer took notes except when she felt the absolute need for some report.
This time she also carried a suitcase. (“Games for the boy,” she had said, smiling, to the guard—who had long since stopped even thinking of questioning her and who waved her on.) And, as always, the ugly little boy knew that she had entered and came running to her, crying, “Miss Fellowes—Miss Fellowes—” in his soft, slurring way.
“Timmie,” she said, and passed her hand over the shaggy, brown hair on his misshapen little head.
“What’s wrong?”
He said, “Will Jerry be back to play again? I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Never mind that now, Timmie. Is that why you’ve been crying?” He looked away. “Not just about that, Miss Fellowes. I dreamed again.”
“The same dream?” Miss Fellowes’ lips set. Of course, the Jerry affair would bring back the dream. He nodded. His too large teeth showed as he tried to smile and the lips of his forward-thrusting mouth stretched wide. “When will I be big enough to go out there, Miss Fellowes?”
“Soon,” she said softly, feeling her heart break. “Soon.” Miss Fellowes let him take her hand and enjoyed the warm touch of the thick dry skin of his palm. He led her through the three rooms that made up the whole of Stasis Section One—comfortable enough, yes, but an eternal prison for the ugly little boy all the seven (was it seven?) years of his life. He led her to the one window, looking out onto a scrubby woodland section of the world of is (now hidden by night), where a fence and painted instructions allowed no men to wander without permission. He pressed his nose against the window. “Out there, Miss Fellowes?”
“Better places. Nicer places,” she said sadly as she looked at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. The forehead retreated flatly and his hair lay down in tufts upon it. The back of his skull bulged and seemed to make the head overheavy so that it sagged and bent forward, forcing the whole body into a stoop. Already, bony ridges were beginning to bulge the skin above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominently than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of, only a jawbone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years and his stumpy legs were bowed.
He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him dearly.
Her own face was behind his line of vision, so she allowed her lips the luxury of a tremor. They would not kill him. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. She opened the suitcase and began taking out the clothes it contained.
Edith Fellowes had crossed the threshold of Stasis, Inc. for the first time just a little over three years before. She hadn’t, at that time, the slightest idea as to what Stasis meant or what the place did. No one did then, except those who worked there. In fact, it was only the day after she arrived that the news broke upon the world.
At the time, it was just that they had advertised for a woman with knowledge of physiology, experience with clinical chemistry, and a love for children. Edith Fellowes had been a nurse in a maternity ward and believed she fulfilled those qualifications.
Gerald Hoskins, whose name plate on the desk included a Ph.D. after the name, scratched his cheek with his thumb and looked at her steadily.
Miss Fellowes automatically stiffened and felt her face (with its slightly asymmetric nose and its a-trifle-too-heavy eyebrows) twitch.
He’s no dreamboat himself, she thought resentfully. He’s getting fat and bald and he’s got a sullen mouth.
—But the salary mentioned had been considerably higher than she had expected, so she waited. Hoskins said, “Now do you really love children?”
“I wouldn’t say I did if I didn’t.”
“Or do you just love pretty children? Nice chubby children with cute little button-noses and gurgly ways?”
Miss Fellowes said, “Children are children, Dr. Hoskins, and the ones that aren’t pretty are just the ones who may happen to need help most.”
“Then suppose we take you on—”
“You mean you’re offering me the job now?”
He smiled briefly, and for a moment, his broad face had an absentminded charm about it. He said, “I make quick decisions. So far the offer is tentative, however. I may make as quick a decision to let you go. Are yo
u ready to take the chance?”
Miss Fellowes clutched at her purse and calculated just as swiftly as she could, then ignored calculations and followed impulse. “All right.”
“Fine. We’re going to form the Stasis tonight and I think you had better be there to take over at once. That will be at 8 P.M. and I’d appreciate it if you could be here at 7:30.”
“But what—”
“Fine. Fine. That will be all now.” On signal, a smiling secretary came in to usher her out. Miss Fellowes stared back at Dr. Hoskins’ closed door for a moment. What was Stasis? What had this large barn of a building—with its badged employees, its makeshift corridors, and its unmistakable air of engineering—- to do with children?
She wondered if she should go back that evening or stay away and teach that arrogant man a lesson. But she knew she would be back if only out of sheer frustration. She would have to find out about the children.
She came back at 7:30 and did not have to announce herself. One after another, men and women seemed to know her and to know her function. She found herself all but placed on skids as she was moved inward.
Dr. Hoskins was there, but he only looked at her distantly and murmured, “Miss Fellowes.” He did not even suggest that she take a seat, but she drew one calmly up to the railing and sat down. They were on a balcony, looking down into a large pit, filled with instruments that looked like a cross between the control panel of a spaceship and the working face of a computer. On one side were partitions that seemed to make up an unceilinged apartment, a giant dollhouse into the rooms of which she could look from above.
She could see an electronic cooker and a freeze-space unit in one room and a washroom arrangement off another. And surely the object she made out in another room could only be part of a bed, a small bed.
Hoskins was speaking to another man and, with Miss Fellowes, they made up the total occupancy of the balcony. Hoskins did not offer to introduce the other man, and Miss Fellowes eyed him surreptitiously. He was thin and quite fine-looking in a middle-aged way. He had a small mustache and keen eyes that seemed to busy themselves with everything.