Time Travelers Never Die

by Jack McDevitt

  “We’re going to meet someone.”

  “We know somebody here?”

  “We will, shortly.”

  They got out across the street from Central Park. Shel gave the driver a dollar. “Keep the change,” he said.

  The driver thanked him and pulled away.

  Dave shook his head. “Where’d you get the money?”

  “Always come prepared.”

  “But how’d you do it?”

  “I came back last night with a few old coins. Played the races. Won a long shot.”

  “You won a long shot?”

  He grinned. “It’s pretty easy when you have a time machine. And it gave me plenty of spending money.”

  Dave grinned. “So who are we going to see? Noel Coward? George M. Cohan? Ethel Merman? Al Jolson?”

  “Just be patient.”

  It was cold. “I should have worn a heavier coat.”

  “Next time we—Wait a minute. This might be him now.”

  “Who? Where?”

  A taxi was slowing down across the street. It pulled alongside the curb and stopped. A man wearing a topcoat and bowler got out. He paid the driver and began looking for a chance to cross.

  He was overweight, in his late forties or early fifties, and he looked lost. There was something familiar about him, but Dave couldn’t place him. He’d probably turn out to be a character actor in movies of the period. Of which Dave had seen very few.

  The cab pulled away.

  “Do you recognize him?” asked Shel.

  “I’ve no clue. Who is he?”

  “Watch. But no matter what happens, do not intervene.” He placed a restraining hand on Dave’s shoulder.

  The man waited for his chance to cross. Traffic was two-way along the avenue. But he was looking to his right. The wrong way. Dave watched with horror as the man shifted his weight and prepared to step into the street.

  Shel’s grip tightened. “Habit,” he said. “And he doesn’t look like the most patient guy in town.”

  He lurched out directly in front of an oncoming sedan. The driver plowed into him, then hit the brakes. People screamed and brakes screeched. The car dragged him about twenty feet. It left him crumpled and moaning near the curb.

  Somebody ran into the street waving at the traffic to stop. A couple of people hurried to the victim’s aid.

  “Who is it?” Dave was out of patience.

  Shel sighed. “Winston Churchill.”

  THEIR view was blocked by the crowd. Horns blared. The driver got out and ran back, bleating that he didn’t mean it, he was sorry. “Are you all right?” he demanded of the victim. His voice rose over the crowd in a wail. Within minutes they heard sirens, and a police car arrived. One officer got out and ran to a call box. His partner took charge of traffic, allowing only one lane to move at a time.

  A second police car pulled up. One of the officers hurried toward the victim while the other tried to push the crowd back. And, finally, an ambulance. Medical people, ambulance attendants, whatever they called them in 1931. They jumped out, examined the fallen Churchill, and after a few minutes they lifted him carefully onto a stretcher. They spoke briefly with one of the officers, then put him into the ambulance. Two of the attendants got in with him and, escorted by a police cruiser, it left.

  “You knew it was going to happen,” Dave said.

  “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t we stop it?”

  “That’s what my father was concerned about. That somebody would meddle somewhere and create a problem.”

  “Like how? Churchill survived. What could we have changed?”

  “Probably nothing. But we don’t really know. Anyway, no harm was done.”

  “No harm? He looked as if he’d broken something.”

  “Two cracked ribs and a scalp wound. I think he develops pleurisy later because of this. But he was lucky. In any case, we know the accident happened. If we’d tried to prevent it—”

  “—We get heart attacks—”

  Shel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  They stood quietly watching the remaining policemen interviewing the driver and a bystander. “So we just watch,” said Dave. “We can go back to Dealey Plaza, but we can’t do anything. Shel, I don’t think I’m going to care much for this line of work.”

  “Dave, I thought you’d react that way. So let’s do something.”

  “What? What can we possibly do now?”

  They walked back to 76th Street, looking for a cab. It took a few minutes, but one finally pulled over. “Driver,” Shel said, “Lenox Hill Hospital, please.”

  “What are we going to do? Get him some flowers?”

  “You’re a hard man, David.”

  Dave closed his eyes and sank back in the seat. “Why are we going to the hospital? That is the one they’re taking him to, right?”

  “Yes.” He fished some bills out of his pocket. “We’re going to do a good deed.”

  THE taxi let them off in front of the emergency room. They went inside, where the injured Churchill sat in a clunky-looking wheelchair at a reception counter. A middle-aged woman was doing paperwork for another patient. Seven or eight other people were in the waiting room.

  “We’re not going to tell him who we are, are we?” asked Dave.

  “No. No, that wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  Churchill was obviously in pain. A male attendant stood beside him.

  The receptionist completed some paperwork and, finally, it was his turn. She took a piece of paper out of a stack and turned in his direction. “Name, please.”

  “Winston Churchill,” he said in a barely discernible voice.

  “Address?”

  “I’m a British statesman.”

  She looked up from the form. “I see. Do you have an address in the United States, Mr., um, Churchill?”

  “Use the British consulate.”

  Patiently: “What is their address, please?”

  “I really do not know, madam.” Churchill tried to get more comfortable, but twisted something and cried out.

  “Be careful, sir,” she said. “Try not to move around too much.”

  He cleared his throat. “Madam, I was injured out there this evening. I’m in considerable pain. Would it be possible to administer something to alleviate my situation? Perhaps some chloroform?”

  “We’ll try to help you, Mr. Churchill. How do you wish to pay?”

  “Can’t we settle that later?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. But we require payment in advance.”

  With his teeth clenched, Churchill fumbled in his pockets. Came out with a few dollars. “How much did you want?”

  The receptionist glanced at the money. “Mr. Churchill, this is insufficient.”

  “All right,” he said. “Call the Waldorf. My wife is there. She’ll bring some money over.”

  Shel turned to Dave and handed him a wad of bills. “You do it,” he said.

  Marvelous. He took the money, whispered thanks to Shel, and strode to the counter. “Mr. Churchill,” he said, “I’d like to help, if I may.” He held the bills up for the receptionist to see. “Please get some assistance for this gentleman. Quickly.”

  Churchill’s eyes looked up at him. And for the first time, Dave saw the future prime minister. “Why, thank you, sir,” he said. The voice was a shadow of the one Dave remembered from the World War II audios. The one that challenged Hitler and spoke to the world in its darkest moment. “I am in your debt, sir.”

  “I think we are in yours, Mr. Churchill.”

  CHAPTER 8

  It cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

  THE converter brought them back to David’s house, six seconds after departure. It
was still just before nine Saturday morning.

  “Thanks, Dave,” said Shel. “I appreciate your coming.”

  Dave was still having a problem grasping what had happened. “My God,” he said, “are you serious? I still don’t believe it.”

  “I know. I doubt you’ll ever get used to it.” He held out his hand for the converter, which was still attached to Dave’s belt.

  “You don’t want me to hold on to it?”

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea, Dave.”

  “I wouldn’t lose it.”

  “Dave.”

  “Or misuse it.”

  “Not a good idea. Not that I don’t trust you, but—”

  “Okay.” He unclipped it and handed it over. “When are you going after your father?”

  “I want to give it a little time. No point in my going back there if I can’t speak Italian.”

  “Maybe you should try Ben Franklin first.”

  “I think Galileo’s our best bet.”

  “Okay. You’ll have to take some language lessons.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Good. Now, when you’ve done that, and you’re ready to go—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m invited, right?”

  “Of course. It’s why I came. You will come—”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you when I’m ready.” He started for the door.

  “Shel, one more question. What happens if we materialize in midair? Does the thing always set you on the ground?”

  “It wasn’t something I thought to ask. We can put it to him when we find him.” He opened the door. Paused. “Dave, thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  “And don’t forget: Tell nobody, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It won’t be easy. I want to talk about this to everybody I know.”

  “I hear you. That was once in a lifetime out there tonight.”

  SHEL was dead right. Dave wanted to call everybody. Old friends, his folks, his occasional girlfriend Katie Gibson, the guys on his bowling team, his department chairman at the university. Listen, Professor, you won’t believe this, but guess where I was earlier today. Or no, that wasn’t quite correct. Guess where I was one night in 1931, well before you were born. And who I talked to.

  He should have brought something back. And remembered that he had. He reached into his pants pocket and retrieved it: a receipt from Lenox Hill Hospital for an amount that would barely pay a decent restaurant tab today. Dated December 13, 1931.

  Looking as if it had been issued within the last hour.

  Tomorrow he’d buy a frame. That baby was going to hang over his desk.

  He should have tried to get Churchill to initial it. Should have taken some pictures.

  Had he recalled Helen, he’d have realized he still had plenty of time to try for his accidental meeting with her at the Serendip. But she never entered his mind.

  IT was almost impossible to get through his Monday classes. Latin 311 was reading Plutarch, the lives of Demosthenes and Cicero, and Dave couldn’t resist himself. “Try to imagine what it would be like,” he told his thirteen students, “if we could go back to classical Greece for an afternoon and join the crowd listening to Demosthenes. We’d hear a great orator persuading the Athenians to make war on Alexander. They lost, of course. And what’s the lesson, Jim?”

  Jim laughed. “Just because somebody is articulate doesn’t mean he makes sense.”

  That was as close as he got to telling them the truth, but it was a near thing. He wanted desperately to let them know that it really was possible to travel in time. No: more than that. That he had walked across to another century. That he had done it. Gone to another time. And he, by God, had the receipt from the Lenox Hill Hospital to prove it.

  Hardest for him was sitting in the department meeting two days later, listening to Larry Stevens, unctuous, self-i mportant, always going on about his latest linguistic conclusions. The evolution of the German verb arbeiten, whose earlier forms, it seemed, had appeared farther back than anyone had realized. “Think what that means.”

  Nobody ever ate lunch with Larry.

  And Dave would have loved to point out that, if it really mattered, he could take Larry into a second-century Bavarian forest, where they could settle the business about the German verb once and for all.

  The department chair was staring at him.

  Later someone told him he’d been giggling.

  KATIE had come into a small inheritance. She celebrated by taking him to dinner and a movie. “What did you want to see?” he asked her.

  Thurgood. The film was, of course, a biopic of Thurgood Marshall. “Is that okay with you?”

  Not really. But he didn’t conceal his lack of interest very effectively. “Sure,” he said.

  “What’s wrong? It’s gotten good reviews.”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Let’s go see it.”

  “Dave . . . ?”

  “No. It’s fine.” Dave had developed a resistance to any kind of drama written around racial conflict. He’d never been able to bring himself to read To Kill a Mockingbird. Or to see A Raisin in the Sun. His folks had given him a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, which included some of DuBois’s essays and letters. It was painful reading, and Dave didn’t like pain. He refused to watch movies about terminal illness or marital breakups. He wanted his entertainment light. Entertainment, he insisted, should entertain. Life can be hard enough.

  “What do you want to see?”

  There was a baseball romance, Rounding Third, that he’d have liked. “No. Let’s go see Thurgood. That’s fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  FOR Shel, discretion was even more difficult. Helen had swept him off his feet. On that first date, the same day he’d taken Dave to 1931, they’d gone to dinner at Fayette’s, his favorite luxury nightspot. There they ate by candlelight, while a pianist played “It Had to Be You.” They talked about trivia. She was commenting on how enticing the atmosphere was, and he said something about work or maybe about a movie he’d seen recently. Like Dave, he was aching to talk about how he’d been walking the streets of Depression-era New York, that he could take her there now. That he could take her anywhere. To any time. She liked George Bernard Shaw, and he could take her back to London at the beginning of the twentieth century to watch the opening of Man and Superman. You want the date of a lifetime, sweetheart?

  “So what exactly do you do, Shel?” she asked. And managed to look interested.

  What did he do? “I do public relations for Carbolite. Basically, we sell engineering systems. To individuals or to manufacturers. Anybody who wants to build a better house, we can show him how.”

  Yawn.

  “Really?” she said. “How does that work?”

  Well, the truth is, love, I travel in time. The other night I rescued Winston Churchill. Tomorrow, I’m going to pop by and say hello to Cicero. He explained about making presentations to engineers and how people had better washing machines because of Carbolite technology. It took only a few minutes before her eyes began to glaze.

  “But enough about me,” he said. “How’s life in medicine these days?”

  She was too smart to take the bait. She asked whether he really enjoyed the theater or actually used the Disciples as a way of meeting women. What did he do when he wasn’t selling better washing machines? (She didn’t phrase it that way, but he understood what she meant.) Where did he want to be ten years down the road?

  That one stopped him cold. Where indeed? He had no ambitions, really, beyond the moment. A decade from now, he’d like to be making a substantial amount of money. And he’d like to be happily married, maybe with one or two kids. But suddenly that all sounded mundane. And it occurred to him he could take his time device and go look. Find out what he’d be doing. Find out what they’d both be doing.

  And he wondered, while he talked in a circle about ambitions he re
ally didn’t have, how it would affect them if he did take her forward so they could find out.

  Let’s go look.

  “I’d like to be with a larger corporation,” he said, finally. “One of the blue chips, maybe GE, running their PR office.”

  “Well.” She sipped her rum and Coke and looked at him across the rim of her glass with those spectacular blue-green eyes. “Good luck with it, Shel.” She almost sounded as if it all had some significance.

  There was a time when he had seriously believed in the transformative power of public relations. Image is everything. If you believe it’s a better world, it is a better world. But somehow selling a more efficient computer system to the Wall Street Journal no longer galvanized his sense of worth. The existence he had imagined for himself, creative, appreciated, a guy who walked into the room and everybody automatically got quiet—it had happened. But he couldn’t see that it mattered.

  He wondered if Helen would be interested in talking baseball.

  GALILEO had been born in February 1564, in Pisa. It was a time when Aristotelian astronomy was held in high regard, when the assumption that the sun and planets rotated around the Earth was dogma, and when any who disagreed risked more than their reputations. (Although it was possible to venture an opposing opinion, so long as you did so, as Coper nicus had, in Latin. And were careful not to be too loud about it.)

  “He first heard about the telescope in 1609,” said Shel.

  “When did he die?” asked Dave.

  “In 1642.”

  “So, if we assume that he would want the meeting to take place after Galileo started using the telescope—”

  “We can’t assume that.”

  “We can’t?”

  “There’s a good chance he’d have wanted to see the Pisa experiment.”

  “Dropping cannonballs off the Tower?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Sometime between 1589 and 1592.”

  “That leaves us half a century to search.”