"Don't take a fit, dearie," Arthur said calmly.
We executed a sharp turn and headed northwest for a hundred kilometers or so, soon hitting the edges of congested urban development. We jogged east again, skirting the edge of it and still bearing generally north.
"That's gotta be San Bernardino," Carl said. "Go out into the desert a little ways and land."
"Will do."
We did, settling down behind a ridge that ran along a narrow dirt road.
Carl asked, "Jake, do you have a screwdriver in the truck?"
"A power driver. Well, maybe I do have an old screwdriver lying around." I went back and found it, then met everyone in the small cargo bay. Arthur had already dilated the doorway.
"Well, we're off," Carl said, flushing with excitement.
"We're coming with you," I told him.
"Jake, you can't!"
"We're not going to stay. I just want to make sure that we haven't left you in an untenable position. We don't know exactly when we are, Carl."
"This is where I belong. I know it! This has to be my world, my time frame."
"Carl, think a minute: When exactly were you abducted? What was the date?"
"I'll never forget it. It was August twenty-fifth, 1964."
I still didn't know quite how to tell him. Arthur came into the bay and did it for me.
"Well, I've got the exact date," he said. "It was fairly easy. I monitored some local radio broadcasts. It's Tuesday, July seventh, 1964."
Finally, it dawned on Carl. "Oh, my God."
"Yeah," I said.
His eyes widened. "Then-" He broke off, his mouth hanging open.
"Right. You can't go home yet, Carl."
Carl closed his mouth and swallowed hard, looking suddenly ill. He leaned back against the fender of his car. "Shit."
"It seems we have some time to kill," Darla said.
"I can't believe it," Carl said. "I just can't believe it. You mean that if I drive to Santa Monica and knock on my front door. :"
"Your paradoxical double would get a big shock," I said. "But since it never happened, . or did it?"
"I think I'd remember it."
"Exactly. And I don't think you should do it, either. We'll just have to wait."
"Yeah, wait for Prime to come and do his dirty work. Kidnap me. And I guess we have to let him do it."
"I have some thoughts about that," I said. "I'm not sure I'm right, but-"
"I don't want to stay here," Carl said.
"Where do you want to go?"
"I have some friends who could put me up for a while."
I thought it over briefly and decided it was a good idea. The Paradox Machine was spinning its wheels frantically now, coming up to full steam. We'd have to be careful, but we'd have to act.
Arthur said, "Jake, I'm going to take the ship up into orbit, if you don't mind." He handed me an oblong-shaped object made of the same olive-drab material that was all around us. It was about ten by five centimeters and a little over one centimeter thick. "This is a communcations device. It will always be operating, monitoring you, giving your position. If you want to reach me, just hold it next to your mouth and speak, either side of it. I'll hear you." He turned to Carl. "How far away are you going? Where do you live?"
"In Santa Monica. It's right on the beach, about sixty, seventy miles from here… er, a hundred klicks, about."
"You won't have to come all the way back, Jake. Just let me know and I'll pick you up at a convenient place. I can easily home in on that beacon."
"Good," I said. Something occurred to me, and I considered the way we were all dressed. Carl and Lori had on gray utility jumpsuits which the Voloshins had lent them, and Darla was wearing her silver Allclyme survival suit. She had been wearing it when we first met. It was a little tight around the waist now.
Darla caught my stare and looked down at herself. "This won't do, will it? I'll change into that old stuff of John's. It looks ridiculous, but it's more nondescript than this."
"Hell, I left my old clothes back at Emerald City," Carl said.
"And I don't have much but this jacket and slacks," I said. "Not what you'd call outlandish in our day, but the styles might be different enough to draw a few odd looks."
"Forget it," Carl said. "This is southern California, the land of the nuts. You should see some of the getups people walk around in out here."
Home.
The reality of being back on Earth again sank in as I sat in the back seat of the Chevy, watching the countryside roll by. I had seen the surfaces of a thousand planets, and none looked exactly like this. None, no matter how "Earthlike" they were. A good part of my lifetime had been spent in alien environments, and now I was home again at long last, back in the environment that had spawned those of my kind. The Good Earth.
Compounding the wonder was the knowledge that this was Earth as it had been before I'd been born, almost a century before. A dented blue automobile passed us, spewing pale blue smoke. What the hell did it run on-burning wood? There was a smell in the air, something I didn't recognize. Gasoline, I thought. No, oil. I asked Carl if it was, and he said yes, but told me that the car was burning it because it was in bad repair. Interesting.
We came into a town, San Bernardino, Carl told us. We drove around for a bit, then pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a large shopping plaza.
"Be right back," Carl said, getting out. He took the screwdriver with him.
He returned in a few minutes, stooped in front of the car and did something, then went around and fiddled with something at the back. Then he got in.
"Had to steal some license plates," he explained. "Otherwise we'd get stopped for sure."
He pulled out of the lot, cruised down a traffic-choked boulevard, turned right at a sign and got onto a ramp leading to a multilane highway.
The sky was Earth blue, the earth the color of earth. Trees looked like what trees should look like, grass looked like grass. With all the worlds I'd been on in the last thirty years, this seemed strange.
The air was… unusual, and it got to be more so as we sped into the heart of a endless, sprawling metropolis.
Darla was rubbing her eyes. "Some kind of irritation," she said, sniffling.
"That's smog," Carl told us. "You get used to it, kinda, after living here for a while. In the fall we get the Santa Ana from the desert. Winds. They blow all the shit out to sea."
"Those poor fish," I said.
"Oh, it's not as bad as some people make it out to be."
"Carl, it smells awful," Lori said fretfully. "I don't think I'm ever going to get used to it."
"Take a good whiff of it into your lungs. You'll get to like it. Gee, I should stop and get a pack of cigarettes."
"Carl!"
It was a bright, hazy day, and the warm sun put me into a strangely good mood. The Sun. How many alien suns had warmed my skin, or irradiated it, or nearly burned it? Too many.
The sun-drenched metropolis went on and on. I couldn't believe that Los Angeles had been this big in the middle of the twentieth century, kilometer after endless kilometer of residences, businesses, office buildings, service stations, shops, institutional buildings, and apartment complexes, all laid out in a vast grid of streets and highways. These last were something. They made the Skyway look like a country lane. Clogged with murderous traffic, they met five or six at a time at snarled interchanges, twining about one another into knots of elevated ramps, cloverleafs, and cutoffs. Although speeds weren't high compared to those on the Skyway, the sheer volume of traffic made the whole mess frightening. Anyway, I was scared. Carl wasn't. He seemed to have cheered up a little, and he was navigating his way through the shifting streams of vehicles with automatic ease, like a veteran. He was home.
"There are no restraining harnesses in this buggy," I said, looking down at the blue fur-covered seats. I had known it before, but the careless disregard for safety struck me now.
"Damn good idea to have 'em," Carl said. "Con
gress should get after Detroit to make 'em mandatory." An afterthought: "I should have thought of putting them in when I was designing it."
I looked out at history. The architectural styles were strange to me. They just don't build things like that anymore. Everything was strange, yet somehow faintly familiar as well.
We took a spur to the right that shunted us off onto another highway. We were heading due west, toward the ocean. "This is the Santa Monica Freeway," Carl told us. "Straight shot into Santa Monica, then I'll be home." He laughed. "God, it's good to be back."
About twenty minutes later the freeway ended. We cruised down a wide city boulevard, then turned right onto a palmlined street running along the beach. There were lots of bathers out, catching the late afternoon sun.
"First thing I'm gonna do is get my board and go out," Carl averred.
"Your board?" Lori said.
"Surfboard."
"Oh."
"You'll love it."
"It's a nice beach."
I pulled out the communications device, thinking to test it out. I looked at its grainy surface. It was covered with the same half-visible geometrical lines and squiggles that I'd seen on the ship's material. I held it near my mouth.
"Arthur?"
There was a moment's delay, then: "Yes, dearie?"
"Testing," I told him.
"Receiving you fine," Arthur said, his voice reproducing with high fidelity.
"Good. Where are you?"
"Oh, the back side of the moon, hovering at about two hundred kilometers."
"Really? See anything interesting?"
"Nope. Frankly, I'm bored. I think I'm going to hibernate until you need me."
"How long will it take you to get here if we need you in a hurry?"
"Oh, about ten minutes, if I hurry."
"Maybe you should stay in Earth orbit."
"If you want. I might be detected, though."
I agreed. "Yeah, you might. Stay put, and we'll contact you later."
"Have fun."
"By the way, what are our chances of getting back to Microcosmos?"
"Fair," Arthur said. "Since I know where we are, it makes it fairly easy. You just have to aim for the center of the universe."
"The center of the universe?"
"Fourth dimensionally speaking, that's where Microcosmos is, almost all the way back to the beginning of the universe. It's a little off-center though, by about one or two billion years."
"Oh," I said. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. If another ship like yours entered the solar system, would you have any way of detecting it?"
"Yes, but that's not going to happen," Arthur told me.
"Why?"
"Because this is the only ship of its kind ever built."
"What about the chance of encountering the ship's paradoxical double? You call it a spacetime ship: Doesn't that mean it's a time machine?"
"In a way," Arthur said thoughtfully, "but I don't think there's much chance of it happening."
Neither did I.
16
I told Arthur that we'd keep in touch, and signed off.
We headed north on the Coast Highway for a few kilometers, then turned right at a sign which read Topanga Canyon Boulevard and followed a winding road bearing up into the hills. Eventually, Carl made a right onto a gravel road, then a left into a driveway leading back to a beige-painted clapboard cottage with a small beetle-shaped automobile parked beside it.
Carl pulled up in front of the house and turned the motor off.
"Friends?" I asked.
"Yeah, one friend. A guy, a little older than me. He's a writer."
"What's he write?"
"TV scripts, movies, stuff like that. I know he did a Gunsmoke, and I think he wrote a version of some big Hollywood movie-one of those Roman Empire epics. I can't think of the name of it. Anyway, his name wasn't on the credits. A couple of friends of mine used to come over here and mess around, watch old movies, listen to jazz records."
"Records?" Darla asked.
"Uh… recorded music."
"Oh, I see."
"Anyway, he's home. He's gonna think I've totally flipped when I tell him what's happened."
Lori silently mouthed, Gunsmoke?
We got out. Carl banged on the front door. No one answered, and Carl banged again. Faint sounds of upbeat music came from within.
Carl was ready to knock a third time when the door was opened by a youngish dark-haired man wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses, a short-sleeved yellow pullover shirt, and dark pants. He had on leather moccasins and carried a carved briar pipe. He looked friendly but impatient.
"Carl!" he said. "Hey, I'm working." Puzzled, he glanced at Darla, Lori, and me, then said to Carl, "What's up?"
"Need your help. We're in a jam."
"A jam?" He eyed me again, scrutinizing my maroon starrigger's jacket. "Yeah?" He looked Carl up and down. "Are you guys shooting something?"
"Huh?" Carl answered.
"What's with the costumes?"
"It's a long story."
The man nodded. "I've a feeling I'm going to hear it. Come on in." He swung the door back, turned and walked inside. We followed him in.
The living room was really a work space. There were three debris-littered desks, a half-dozen loaded bookcases, one sofa, and a few chairs. A piece of equipment which I recognized to be a typewriter sat on one desk amid piles of manuscript, stacks of periodicals, and other paraphernalia. Besides clogging the shelves, books lay everywhere, piled in stacks on the desks, on the floor, and on the furniture. The place did have the look of a writer's lair.
"Dave," Carl said, "these are some friends of mine. Uh, this is Jake……
"Hi," Dave said, shaking my hand.
"Dave Feinmann."
"And this is Darla," Carl said.
"Hello, Darla. And you're…?"
"Lori."
"Hello, Lori."
Dave went to a cabinet containing a rack of equipment that, from the look of it, was a device for playing audio disks, something I'd never seen in my life. He turned a knob, and the music, which sounded like early jazz, faded into the background. He cleared some books off the furniture and motioned for us to sit down, taking a seat himself in front of the typewriter. He lit his pipe, cocking his head toward the typewriter. "Doing a treatment for an episode of this new science fiction series. Producer's a friend of mine. Looks like they've sold the pilot."
"Yeah?" Carl said. "Great."
Dave got the pipe going. He gave Carl a funny look, then shrugged. "So, you're in a jam. What is it this time? Did the cops finally-" He broke off and squinted at Carl. "Jesus. You look different, somehow. Where did you get that crazy haircut?"
Carl passed a hand through his hair. "Crazy? Yeah, I guess it is."
"It's way out. I-" Dave passed his eyes over the four of us, looking uneasy. "What are you people up to? You're not extras-you're not working a shoot nearby?"
"No, Dave," Carl said. "You're not going to believe this, but…"
For the next half hour, Carl spilled his story, though leaving out a good bit of it for economy's sake. I spent the time watching Dave's shifting reactions. He began with simple bemused skepticism, modulated to adamant disbelief, then switched to shocked credulity. By the time Carl had gotten through most of what he had to say, Dave's expression was almost blank. He looked numb, and a little shaken. Several times, early on, he had interrupted Carl, insisting, "This is a gag, right?" He wasn't insisting now.
Carl finished up and sat back, looking at Dave expectantly. Silent, Dave puffed on his pipe and stared out the window. He did this for a long while.
Finally Carl snapped, "Jesus Christ, Dave, say something!"
"I'm waiting for Rod Serling to come out and do the teaser," Dave said quietly.
Carl sighed. "I knew you wouldn't believe it."
"Oh, I believe it."
"You do?"
"Yeah." Dave crossed his legs and sat back. "There are exa
ctly three possibilities. Either you've flipped, or I've flipped, or you're telling the truth. There's another, maybe, but I know you, Carl, and you couldn't keep a straight face this long if you were jiving me. But let me tell you something right now-if I've read you wrong and you are indeed pulling my leg, if you got these people out of central casting and came up here to see how long you could keep me on the hook, if this is a gag, Carl, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to get out my samurai short sword, disembowel you, and feed your liver to you-without onions."
Carl shook his head slowly. "It's no gag."
I took out the communicator and handed it to Dave. "Ever see a radio like that?" I asked.
Dave examined it. "Radio?"
"Maybe you'd call it a walkie-talkie. Say something into it."
Dave scowled. "Into it? Where? There's nothing to this."
"Speak into this side," I told him, pointing.
Dave rolled his eyes, then held it near his mouth and said, "Hello?"
"Hello?" came Arthur's voice.
Dave jumped, dropping the communicator. "Jesus Christ! It sounds like he's in the room. That can't be a walkie-talkie."
"Yes, it does have good reproduction for a long-range receiver."
Dave pointed. "Is that-"
"Yeah, that's Arthur," Carl said.
"Hello?" a puzzled Arthur said. "Jake, are you there?"
I picked it up. "Yeah, Arthur. Sorry, we were just testing it again."
"I think we can rest assured that it works," Arthur said peevishly.
Dave chewed his lip, then asked, "He's a robot, right? And he's up on this… saucer?"
"Spacetime ship," I told him.
"On the moon?"
"Arthur, are you still on the moon?"
"That's right, dearie. Is that a new friend of yours?"
"Yeah, that's Dave."
"Hi, Dave!"
Dave looked around uncomfortably before he said, "Uh…hi."
"Lively one, isn't he?" Arthur commented.
Dave was nonplussed. Suddenly, something snapped and he jumped up. "This is too much." He thumped the pipe into an ashtray and raised his hands palms up in a helpless, despairing gesture. "I don't believe it. On top of everything, the robot's a smart-shit. He's in this fucking flying saucer, and he's on the fucking moon, for Christ's sake, and I'm feeding him straight lines."
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