by Fritz Leiber
She regarded him gravely, then told him, “No girl likes to lose half a meal-ticket—even the treacherous, unreliable half.”
“Treacherous—unreliable?” He was wounded to the quick.
“You’re just like my old man,” she said. “Mother never trusted him out of her sight.” Then, looking curiously at their surroundings, “What are you doing in this crummy neighborhood?”
“Your friend, Amos Willy, has his laboratory inside,” said Jerry. An impulse, fortified by two years of longing frustration, was taking shape in his mind.
“What are you taking him beside gold?” Rhoda asked. “Birdseed?”
“Come along and find out,” he told her, unlocking the door. He stood aside, holding his breath, while she hesitated.
Finally, with slightly wrinkled nose, she said, “I don’t know which of us is crazier,” and walked briskly inside. She looked around the service elevator with contempt while Jerry busied himself with the capstan, checking the numbers on the dial and praying that he was not doing anything wrong. Unquestionably, he decided, he must be out of his mind to take the girl with him. “But if this be insanity, then I be a happy lunatic,” he told himself.
He looked up and around, just to make certain Rhoda was still with him, then gave a shout of alarm. She had her hands on the cable, seemed just about to give it a pull. “No! Don’t!” he shouted, leaping for her. As he did so, the knob from the side of the capstan came away in his hand.
There was a lurch, a sickening, sideways movement, then an ominous, grinding crunch of metal. Jerry said, “Oh, my God!” and looked down to discover Rhoda’s well-advertised charms pressed close against him, her large violet eyes looking up, frightened, into his.
“What happened?” she asked. “What did I do?” Realising where she was, she disengaged herself from him as if he had been a piece of chewing gum stuck to her shoe.
“I don’t know—yet,” he told her. Taking a deep breath, he opened the lift door—and felt a flood of relief at sight of the now-familiar old-fashioned cellar. “It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s go quickly, don’t linger.”
They managed to sneak upstairs unobserved, although wheezy music from an old-fashioned upright foot-powered organ sounded from the parlor on the main floor, playing “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Not until they were safely in Amos Willy’s rooms did Jerry allow Rhoda to speak. Then she said, “It must be me that’s crazy.” She looked out the window, gave a little scream of alarm and said, “What is this—a movie set?”
Apparently, her scream was heard, for rapid footsteps were followed by a rapping on the door. “Mr. Willy! I’m surprised at you,” said a sharp, feminine voice. “You know my rules about young ladies in the upstairs rooms.”
“Mrs. Talbot?” Jerry turned on all the ingratiation he could muster. “This is Mr. Hale, Amos Willy’s employer. He’s going to be away a few days, and he offered his rooms to my bride and myself for a—” he looked at Rhoda helplessly—“for a honeymoon.”
“Oh!” There was a blend of disapproval and romantic curiosity in the single syllable. Then, “Very well, I suppose it’s all right, but I’ll have to double the rates.”
“I shall be down directly to settle the matter, I hope to your satisfaction,” said Jerry, feeling as if he were Alice, falling slowly down the White Rabbit’s hole. He waited until Mrs. Talbot’s footsteps on the stairs could no longer be heard, then said, “This isn’t a movie set, Rhoda. This is the real thing.”
She was regarding him speculatively. “Mrs. Jerry Hale,” she said dreamily.
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Rhoda! Snap out of it! We busted Amos Willy’s time machine getting here. I don’t know how to get us back. We’re trapped.”
Her face was close to his. She said, “Shut up and kiss me.”
He did so—and again time performed a dizzy parabola. However, he pulled himself out of it in time to go into the bedroom and don the clothes he had purchased from the costumer, remembering to part his hair in the middle. Rhoda looked at him disbelievingly. “Jerry, dear,” she said, “hasn’t this silly joke gone on far enough?”
“It’s no joke,” he told her. He had been wondering if he hadn’t made a ghastly mistake in telling Mrs. Talbot that Rhoda was his wife. After all… However, looking at that lush, lovely face and figure, he felt his heart indulge in some odd but not unpleasant thumps. He had wanted this girl for two years. Now, she couldn’t leave the rooms if she wanted to—not without causing a riot in her 1956 clothes. An old phrase floated through his mind… “Once aboard the lugger, and the girl is mine.”
He was humming a little tune as he went downstairs to see Mrs. Talbot, carefully wiping off the stains of Rhoda’s lipstick around his mouth.
Mrs. Talbot proved charming, once she saw a ten-dollar gold piece, and even agreed to bring them a little supper. Jerry continued to hum as he ran up the stairs. “Once aboard the lugger…”
* * * *
The supper proved to be incredibly ample and extremely good—but Jerry spent the night on the horsehair sofa, while Rhoda slept peacefully on the bed in the next room. She had killed his ideas in exactly two syllables—“No soap!”
The following afternoon, with Rhoda wearing an ill-fitting ready-made dress that Jerry had managed to purchase for her at a large department store, they were married at the city registry—an absurdly quaint, gas-lit structure of red-brick that, in their own time, had long since been replaced by a towering municipal skyscraper.
Rhoda went through the ceremony gravely. Not until they were ensconced in a hansom cab, with the horse trotting noisily over a cobbled pavement, did she say, “I’d almost given up here.” Snuggling close to him, she murmured, “Jerry, I’m so happy.”
“I’m a little stunned,” said Jerry, slipping an arm about familiar shoulders covered with unfamiliar ruffles. “Why did you give me the brush for so long, honey?”
“Because,” she told him, “you didn’t have marriage in mind.”
* * * *
The following day, they moved from Mrs. Talbot’s house to a large hotel. For fifteen dollars a week, Jerry rented the bridal suite, complete with its gray marble private bathroom. Rhoda spent the next few days shopping, while Jerry moved about the city, making the connections he wanted. It was not as simple as he had expected, but he was not a man to be denied. On the fourth day, they took a chugging steam train that conveyed them, along with a mixed crowd in holiday mood, to an ornate racetrack on the outskirts of town.
“Who’s that man—the one who nodded to you?” Rhoda asked curiously as they took their places in a grandstand box close to the finish line. “The one with the handlebar mustache.”
“Oh—” said Jerry. “That’s Mr. Watson, Mr. Phil Watson from Philadelphia. We have a little wager on the fifth race—the Vanderlip Silver Cup. He believes a horse called Shoo-in is going to win.” Jerry found he was beginning to like Rhoda, even without lipstick. But then, he told himself, he would have liked her tattooed blue.
“And Shoo-in isn’t going to win?” she asked him quaintly.
He patted the little book in his pocket. “Not unless history is wrong,” he replied confidently.
He bet mildly, disinterestedly, on the first four races, since he had no record of them, managed to do a little better than break even. He placed another bet, with a bookmaker, on Breakaway, the long-odds filly scheduled to take the big race. He and Rhoda were on their feet, yelling their heads off, when Breakaway caught Shoo-in in the home stretch and won, going away, by half a length.
“We won! You did it!” Rhoda shouted in his ear, her arms around his neck. Then, restraining herself. “How much?”
“About eleven thousand,” he told her proudly.
“Wonderful!” she replied. “Then I can buy that Worth copy at Mr. Wanamaker’s tomorrow.”
�
��You can buy the original,” he told her grandly, biting off the end of a Corona Corona.
Women! he thought. Bless ’em!
A few minutes later, Mr. Philip Watson from Philadelphia entered the box, shook hands with Rhoda and pulled a number of orange-backed gold certificates from an exceedingly plump wallet. “I don’t know how you called that one, Hale,” he told Jerry. “But you earned this.” He put the money into Jerry’s waiting hands, then added with a speculative gleam in his little eyes. “The Diamond Tray comes up next week—how about giving me a chance to win some of it back?”
“Who do you like?” Jerry asked him.
Mr. Watson hesitated, then shrugged and said, “I’ve got a gelding going for me that should be about ready, a colt I picked up at the Louisville auction last year. Of course, she’s a slow starter, and mighty green, but I feel I ought to back her—purely out of sentiment, of course.”
Jerry laughed and said, “Sentiment, my eye! What’s his name?”
“Carryall,” said Mr. Phil Watson.
“Just a moment,” said Jerry. Turning away, he got out the record book in his pocket, shielding it carefully from prying eyes. He found the Diamond Tray Stakes, checked 1891. The winner, unless history lied again, was a nag called Footless. He put away the little book and turned to close the deal. Mr. Watson sighed and turned away.
“Such a sad little man,” said Rhoda with sympathy—to Jerry’s amazement, she actually had sympathy now that he had finally come to know her in a biblical, as well as in a professional, sense.
“He’s only worth about five million bucks,” Jerry told her, unfeelingly. “Made it in cod liver oil.”
“Such a sad little millionaire then,” said his wife. Then, wriggling uncomfortably, “Take me home, honey. These damned stays are cutting me in two.”
* * * *
He didn’t see much of Rhoda while the sun was up the next week. His affairs kept him busy during the day—there were so many people to meet, so many things to do, so many places to go—but she didn’t seem discontented. They dined in state, visited the theaters, had happy nights of love. To his surprise, when Diamond Tray Stakes day came around, Rhoda pleaded a headache and refused to go with him.
That was the day the blow fell. Footless was running well in front of the field as they rounded the home turn, but then the horse skidded and actually fell down, throwing its jockey almost to the outer rail. While Jerry looked on in disbelief and mounting horror, the rest of the field swept past his choice and came home, with Carryall nicely in front.
“I’ll have to get the balance from the bank tomorrow,” said Jerry, handing over the contents of his wallet—a little matter of ten thousand dollars, which was only half the amount of the bet.
Philip Watson’s little eyes were like twin diamond bits boring into him. Jerry didn’t think he had ever seen anything quite so hard. The sportsman said in tones made all the more menacing because they were gentler by far than his normal speech, “Have the money at my office before noon, or you may find matters a trifle unpleasant.” Before turning away, he added, “Please convey my regards to your beautiful lady.”
“By all means,” said Jerry, in a fog of bewilderment laced with fear. This was disaster in more ways than one—for very evidently either history did lie, or he and Rhoda were not in the past of the same world into which they had been born.
Riding back to the city, Jerry tried desperately to figure it out. He wished he had listened more attentively to what Amos Willy had tried to tell him about the machine. Something about its not being exactly a time-travel instrument…
Jerry knew the theory of parallel time-tracks, although, until this moment, he had never before given it much attention. It involved—but to hell with theory. Fantastic or not, he was stuck with hard fact, caught in a past whose future he could not predict. Worse, there was no way out. He still had about twelve hundred in the bank—hardly enough to satisfy Phil Watson, but enough to take Rhoda and himself out of the city and give them a stake in this world where a dollar went such a long way.
Somehow, memory of Watson’s diamond-drill eyes told him that wouldn’t work. And, if the dollar in this world went a long way, it was also correspondingly difficult to make. Five thousand dollars a year meant prosperity—but, to earn it, a man had to put in six long days of labor. If he could find a job that paid that much…
He wondered what Phil Watson had meant by the ominous words, “a trifle unpleasant”—and decided he didn’t want to stick around and find out. The hotel would cash a check for him, and he and Rhoda could be off that night. He thought longingly of the security of his blond-mahogany desk back at R-D, Inc., somewhere in time, on some other world, and cursed Amos Willy and all his works. Then he began to wonder how Rhoda was going to take the bad news.
* * * *
She was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel when he got there, and she already knew some of it. She said, “I know you lost your shirt, Jerry.” She sounded a little like the Rhoda of old—the fearsome Rhoda of the outer office.
“Not so loud!” he muttered furtively. “I don’t want it to get around here.”
“It’s already around,” she told him. “When Philadelphia Phil—yes, that’s what they call your ‘nice’ Mr. Watson—When Philadelphia Phil makes a killing, everybody knows about it.”
“Philadelphia Phil?” Somewhere, in Jerry’s memory, a gong reverberated. Philadelphia Phil—why, that would be this world’s version of Pittsburgh Phil, the most famous and ruthless big-time race-track winner of his own and Rhoda’s world. He sank onto a settee and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
Rhoda stood over him. “Well, Jerry, what are you going to do?” she asked quietly. “You know you haven’t the money to pay him.”
He took her hands in his, like a drowning man clutching twin life-preservers, said in a low voice, “We’re going to cash a check and get out of here—tonight.”
“Are we?” she asked. “I don’t think so.” She nodded toward a couple of extremely sporty looking, and extremely tough looking, characters, who were lounging close to the entrance to the men’s bar, their gimlet eyes fixed on him. “These gentlemen have been waiting for your arrival. I overheard them talking to the clerk.”
“Oh, my God!” gasped Jerry. “What am I going to do? I’m sorry I got you into this, honey—only I’m not sorry about us.”
“You mean that, Jerry?” Her voice, briefly, was tender.
“I mean it,” he told her. “Then this is what we’re going to do,” she told him firmly. “We’re going to pay Mr. Watson tonight in full.”
“With what?” he asked her, astonished.
“With this.” She plunged a hand into her reticule and pulled from it a thick roll of bills. “Then you’re going to work—for me.”
“I don’t understand,” he told her. “How…?”
She said, “While you’ve been wasting your time and money trying to make a dishonest killing, I’ve been busy trying to do the women of this world a little good—and make an honest profit.”
“But with what?” he asked her, still unable to credit his senses. “How can you do women some good?”
She wriggled uncomfortably and said, “I’m getting them out of these horrible stays. I’ve been going out of my mind in them. So I took my panty girdle to a manufacturer and made a deal. The patent is already applied for, and I’m going into business—only you are going into it with me and see that our interest is protected.”
He looked at her with awe, “You mean…” he began.
“I mean,” she said firmly, “that from now on, there will be no more betting—except maybe a little, for fun. It’s going to take all I got today—ten thousand—to pull you out of this hole. That will leave us a little to keep going on. The rest is up to you.”
“You doll!” he said fer
vently. “You violet-eyed wonder!” He moved to embrace her, right there in the lobby.
“No more bets?” she managed before his lips sealed hers.
“No more bets,” he whispered.
The sound of a throat-clearing behind him brought him out of his rapture. He turned to see a bedraggled-looking Amos Willy standing there.
Amos said, “Mr. Hale—Miss Carlin—thank God, I’ve found you. Mr. Doheny is going out of his mind.”
“It will never miss him,” said Rhoda. “And the name is not Miss Carlin—it’s Mrs. Hale.” Then, “Mr. Willy! How did you ever…?”
“It wasn’t easy,” was the reply. “I had to take the whole machine to pieces and put it together again. What did you do to it, Mr. Hale? It was all warped.”
“Never mind,” said Jerry. “You did it.”
“We should be getting back,” said Amos. “It’s taken me several days to find you here, and Mr. Doheny is really worried.”
The nightmare was over. Jerry felt as if the weight of the ages had been lifted from his shoulders. He said, “I’m sorry about the machine, Amos, but, since you’ve fixed it.” He turned toward Rhoda, added, “Come on, honey. Let’s go.”
“We’re not going back.” The words were low-pitched but unmistakably firm. “We have our roots down here.”
“Not going back?” Jerry was incredulous. “But, honey, we don’t belong here—not really. In our own time, in our own world—”
“In our own time, in our own world, I’m Miss Carlin, not Mrs. Hale. I’m a stenographer, not a capitalist, a—a babe, not a lady. Besides, you promised…”
“That’s right,” said Jerry. “I did.” He looked at his wife for a long moment, then turned to Amos Willy and said, “Sorry, chum, you heard what the lady said.”
“But what will I tell Mr. Doheny?” the inventor asked helplessly, his myopic, dedicated eyes ablink.