“Oh golly. Not really.”
“Let me think.” John picked up their dishes and limped back to the sink. He set them down there and fiddled with the straps and pad that connected the foot to his stump, then poured himself a cup of coffee and came back, not limping.
He sat down slowly and blew across the coffee. “What it is, is that Castle thinks there’s a scam going on. He’s wrong. I’ve taken steps to ensure that it couldn’t work.” His foot tapped twice.
“You think. You hope.”
“No. I’m sure. Anyhow, I’m stringing Castle along because I need his expertise in a certain matter.”
“ ‘A certain matter,’ yeah. Sounds wholesome.”
“Actually, that part’s not illegal.”
“So tell me about it.”
“Nope. Still might backfire.”
She snorted. “You know what might backfire. Fucking with Castle.”
“I can take care of him.”
“You don’t know. He may be more dangerous than you think he is.”
“He talks a lot.”
“You men.” She took a drink and poured the rest of the bottle into the glass. “Look, I was at a party with him, couple of years ago. He was drunk, got into a little coke, started babbling.”
“In vino veritas?”
“Yeah, and Coke is It. But he said he’d killed three people, strangers, just to see what it felt like. He liked it. I more than halfway believe him.”
John looked at her silently for a moment, sorting out his new memories of Castle. “Well ... he’s got a mean streak. I don’t know about murder. Certainly not over this thing.”
“Which is?”
“You’ll have to trust me. It’s not because of Castle that I can’t tell you.” He remembered her one universe ago, lying helpless while the Hemingway lowered its cane onto her nakedness. “Trust me?”
She studied the top of the glass, running her finger around it. “Suppose I do. Then what?”
“Business as usual. You didn’t tell me anything. Deliver me to Castle and his video camera; I’ll try to put on a good show.”
“And when he confronts you with it?”
“Depends on what he wants. He knows I don’t have much money.” John shrugged. “If it’s unreasonable, he can go ahead and show the tape to Lena. She can live with it.”
“And your department head?”
“He’d give me a medal.”
~ * ~
19. in our time
So it wasn’t the cane. He ate enough cyanide to kill a horse, but evidently only in one universe.
You checked the next day in all the others?
All 119. He’s still dead in the one where I killed him on the train—
That’s encouraging.
—but there’s no causal resonance in the others.
Oh, but there is some resonance. He remembered you in the universe where you poisoned him. Maybe in all of them.
That’s impossible.
Once is impossible. Twice is a trend. A hundred and twenty means something is going on that we don’t understand.
What I suggest—
No. You can’t go back and kill them all one by one.
If the wand had worked the first time, they’d all be dead anyhow. There’s no reason to think we’d cause more of an eddy by doing them one at a time.
It’s not something to experiment with. As you well know.
I don’t know how we’re going to solve it otherwise.
Simple. Don’t kill him. Talk to him again. He may be getting frightened, if he remembers both times he died.
Here’s an idea. What if someone else killed him?
I don’t know. If you just hired someone—made him a direct agent of your will—it wouldn’t be any different from the cyanide. Maybe as a last resort. Talk to him again first.
All right. I’ll try.
~ * ~
20. of wounds and other causes
Although John found it difficult to concentrate, trying not to think about Pansy, this was the best time he would have for the foreseeable future to summon the Hemingway demon and try to do something about exorcising it. He didn’t want either of the women around if the damned thing went on a killing spree again. They might just do as he did, and slip over into another reality—as unpleasant as that was, it was at least living—but the Hemingway had said otherwise. There was no reason to suspect it was not the truth.
Probably the best way to get the thing’s attention was to resume work on the Hemingway pastiche. He decided to rewrite the first page to warm up, typing it out in Hemingway’s style:
ALONG WITH YOUTH
1. Mitraigliatrice
The dirt on the side of the trench was never dry in the morning. If Fever could find a dry newspaper he could put it between his chest and the dirt when he went out to lean on the side of the trench and wait for the light .First light was the best time . You might have luck and see a muzzle flash to aim at . But patience was better than luck. Wait to see a helmet or a head without a helmet.
Fever looked at the enemy trench line through a rectangular box of wood that pushed through the trench wall at about ground level. The other end of the box was covered with a square of gauze the color of dirt. A man looking directly at it might see the muzzle flash when Fever fired through the box. But with luck, the flash would be the last thing he saw.
Fever had fired through the gauze six times. He ‘d potted at least three Austrians. Bow the gauze had a ragged hole in the center. One bullet had come in the other way, an accident, and chiseled a deep gouge in the floor of the wooden box. Fever knew that he would be able to see the splinters sticking up before he could see any detail at the enemy trench line.
That would be maybe twenty minutes. Fever wanted a cigarette . There was plenty of time to go down in the bunker and light one. But it would fox his night vision. Better to wait.
Fever heard movement before he heard the voice. He picked up one of the grenades on the plank shelf to his left and his thumb felt the ring on the cotter pin. Someone was crawling in front of his position. Slow crawling but not too quiet. He slid his left forefinger through the ring and waited.
—Help me, came a strained whisper.
Fever felt his shoulders tense. Of course many Austrians could speak Italian.
—I am wounded. Help me. I can go no farther.
—What is your name and unit, Nick Fever whispered through the box.
—Jean-Franco Dante. Four forty-seventh.
That was the unit that had taken such a beating at the evening show.—At first light they will kill me.
—All right. But I’m coming over with a grenade in my hand. If you kill me, you die as well.
—I will commend this logic to your superior officer. Please hurry.
Fever slid his rifle into the wooden box and eased himself to the top of the trench. He took the grenade out of his pocket and carefully worked the pin out, the arming lever held secure. He kept the pin around his finger so he could replace it.
He inched his way down the slope, guided by the man’s whispers. After a few minutes his probing hand found the man’s shoulder.—Thank God. Make haste, now.
The soldier’s feet were both shattered by a mine. He would have to be carried.
—Don’t cry out, Fever said. This will hurt.
—No sound, the soldier said. And when Fever raised him up onto his back there was only a breath. But his canteen was loose. It fell on a rock and made a loud hollow sound.
Firecracker pop above them and the night was all glare and bobbing shadow. A big machine gun opened up rong, cararong, rong, rong. Fever headed for the parapet above as fast as he could but knew it was hopeless. He saw dirt spray twice to his right and then felt the thud of the bullet into the Italian, who said “Jesus” as if only annoyed, and they almost made it then but on the lip of the trench a hard snowball hit Fever behind the kneecap and they both went
down in a tumble. They fell two yards to safety but the Italian was already dead.
Fever had sprained his wrist and hurt his nose falling and they hurt worse than the bullet. But he couldn’t move his toes and he knew that must be bad. Then it started to hurt.
A rifleman closed the Italian’s eyes and with the help of another clumsy one dragged Fever down the trench to the medical bunker. It hurt awfully and his shoe filled up with blood and he puked. They stopped to watch him puke and then dragged him the rest of the way.
The surgeon placed him between two kerosene lanterns. He removed the puttee and shoe and out the bloody pants leg with a straight razor. He rolled Fever onto his stomach and had four men hold him down while he probed for the bullet. The pain was great but Fever was insulted enough by the four men not to cry out. He heard the bullet clink into a metal dish. It sounded like the canteen.
“That’s a little too pat, don’t you think?” John turned around and there was the Hemingway, reading over his shoulder. “ ‘It sounded like the canteen,’ indeed.” Khaki army uniform covered with mud and splattered with bright blood. Blood dripped and pooled at its feet.
“So shoot me. Or whatever it’s going to be this time. Maybe I’ll rewrite the line in the next universe.”
“You’re going to run out soon. You only exist in eight more universes.”
“Sure. And you’ve never lied to me.” John turned back around and stared at the typewriter, tensed.
The Hemingway sighed. “Suppose we talk, instead.”
“I’m listening.”
The Hemingway walked past him toward the kitchen. “Want a beer?”
“Not while I’m working.”
“Suit yourself.” It limped into the kitchen, out of sight, and John heard it open the refrigerator and pry the top off of a beer. It came back out as the five-year-old Hemingway, dressed up in girl’s clothing, both hands clutching an incongruous beer bottle. It set the bottle on the end table and crawled up onto the couch with childish clumsiness.
“Where’s the cane?”
“I knew it wouldn’t be necessary this time,” it piped. “It occurs to me that there are better ways to deal with a man like you.”
“Do tell.” John smiled. “What is ‘a man like me’? One on whom your cane for some reason doesn’t work?”
“Actually, what I was thinking of was curiosity. That is supposedly what motivates scholars. You are a real scholar, not just a rich man seeking legitimacy?”
John looked away from the ancient eyes in the boy’s face. “I’ve sometimes wondered myself. Why don’t you cut to the chase, as we used to say. A few universes ago.”
“I’ve done spot checks on your life through various universes,” the child said. “You’re always a Hemingway buff, though you don’t always do it for a living.”
“What else do I do?”
“It’s probably not healthy for you to know. But all of you are drawn to the missing manuscripts at about this time, the seventy-fifth anniversary.”
“I wonder why that would be.”
The Hemingway waved the beer bottle in a disarmingly mature gesture. “The Omniverse is full of threads of coincidence like that. They have causal meaning in a dimension you can’t deal with.”
“Try me.”
“In a way, that’s what I want to propose. You will drop this dangerous project at once, and never resume it. In return, I will take you back in time, back to the Gare de Lyon on December 14, 1921.”
“Where I will see what happens to the manuscripts.”
Another shrug. “I will put you on Hadley’s train, well before she said the manuscripts were stolen. You will be able to observe for an hour or so, without being seen. As you know, some people have theorized that there never was a thief; never was an overnight bag; that Hadley simply threw the writings away. If that’s the case, you won’t see anything dramatic. But the absence of the overnight bag would be powerful indirect proof.”
John looked skeptical “You’ve never gone to check it out for yourself?”
“If I had, I wouldn’t be able to take you back. I can’t exist twice in the same timespace, of course.”
“How foolish of me. Of course.”
“Is it a deal?”
John studied the apparition. The couch’s plaid upholstery showed through its arms and legs. It did appear to become less substantial each time. “I don’t know. Let me think about it a couple of days.”
The child pulled on the beer bottle and it stretched into a long amber stick. It turned into the black-and-white cane. “We haven’t tried cancer yet. That might be the one that works.” It slipped off the couch and sidled toward John. “It does take longer and it hurts. It hurts awfully.”
John got out of the chair. “You come near me with that and I’ll drop kick you into next Tuesday.”
The child shimmered and became Hemingway in his mid-forties, a big-gutted barroom brawler. “Sure you will Champ.” It held out the cane so that the tip was inches from John’s chest “See you around.” It disappeared with a barely audible pop, and a slight breeze as air moved to fill its space.
John thought about that as he went to make a fresh cup of coffee. He wished he knew more about science. The thing obviously takes up space, since its disappearance caused a vacuum, but there was no denying that it was fading away.
Well, not fading. Just becoming more transparent. That might not affect its abilities. A glass door is as much of a door as an opaque one, if you try to walk through it
He sat down on the couch, away from the manuscript so he could think without distraction. On the face of it this offer by the Hemingway was an admission of defeat. An admission, at least that it couldn’t solve its problem by killing him over and over. That was comforting. He would just as soon not die again, except for the one time.
But maybe he should. That was a chilling thought. If he made the Hemingway kill him another dozen times, another hundred ... what kind of strange creature would he become? A hundred overlapping autobiographies, all perfectly remembered? Surely the brain has a finite capacity for storing information; he’d “fill up,” as Pansy said. Or maybe it wasn’t finite, at least in his case—but that was logically absurd. There are only so many cells in a brain. Of course he might be “wired” in some way to the John Bairds in all the other universes he had inhabited.
And what would happen if he died in some natural way, not dispatched by an interdimensional assassin? Would he still slide into another identity? That was a lovely prospect: sooner or later he would be 130 years old, on his deathbed, dying every fraction of a second for the rest of eternity.
Or maybe the Hemingway wasn’t lying, this time, and he had only eight lives left. In context, the possibility was reassuring.
The phone rang; for a change, John was grateful for the interruption. It was Lena, saying her father had come home from the hospital, much better, and she thought she could come on home day after tomorrow. Fine, John said, feeling a little wicked; I’ll borrow a car and pick you up at the airport. Don’t bother, Lena said; besides, she didn’t have a flight number yet.
John didn’t press it. If, as he assumed, Lena was in on the plot with Castle, she was probably here in Key West, or somewhere nearby. If she had to buy a ticket to and from Omaha to keep up her end of the ruse, the money would come out of John’s pocket.
He hung up and, on impulse, dialed her parents’ number. Her father answered. Putting on his professorial tone, he said he was Maxwell Perkins, Blue Cross claims adjuster, and he needed to know the exact date when Mr. Monaghan entered the hospital for this recent confinement. He said you must have the wrong guy; I haven’t been inside a hospital in twenty years, knock on wood. Am I not speaking to John Franklin Monaghan? No, this is John Frederick Monaghan. Terribly sorry, natural mistake. That’s okay; hope the other guy’s okay, good-bye, good night, sir.
So tomorrow was going to be the big day with Pansy. To his knowledge, John hadn’
t been watched during sex for more than twenty years, and never by a disinterested, or at least dispassionate, observer. He hoped that knowing they were being spied upon wouldn’t affect his performance. Or knowing that it would be the last time.
A profound helpless sadness settled over him. He knew that the last thing you should do, in a mood like this, was go out and get drunk. It was barely noon, anyhow. He took enough money out of his wallet for five martinis, hid the wallet under a couch cushion, and headed for Duval Street.
~ * ~
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 37