“How can you eat at a time like this?” Ingrid sounded positively weepy now.
“Don’t want to let it get cold,” Colton said cheerfully. The huevos rancheros were just as good as they’d been in 2017, only now they came with corn tortillas and the salsa on top was, well, authoritative. Serious salsa, this. He just might have had tears in his own eyes if he hadn’t been able to neutralize it with the tortillas. “Go ahead, eat yours, you’ll feel better. But watch it with the salsa.”
“Why, what’s the matter with it?” Ingrid forked up a bite of egg white and runny egg yolk and sat staring at it as if she had no idea what to do next.
“Not a thing in the world,” said Colton, “but it will definitely make you forget your other troubles.”
“Then ask them to bring a big bowl of it.” Ingrid tasted her eggs and, to Colton’s relief, began eating. She emptied half her plate by the time Colton had finished his second serving, and then sat staring at the congealing remains.
“You don’ like our cooking?” the waitress asked when she showed up to take the dishes.
“Love it,” Colton told her. “Well worth the trip from Austin. Forgive Janie May here, she allus eats lak a bird.” He fished for his wallet and handed the waitress his Visa card.
She stared at the piece of plastic as if she’d never seen anything like it before. “What’s this?”
“Uh, payment?” Colton suggested.
She dropped the card in front of them. “Funny,” she said in tones that implied anything but.
“Oh, sorry. That’s mah ID. For th’university, y’know? Here.” Colton reached into his wallet again and dropped a twenty on the table.
This received almost as warm a reception as the Visa card. “We don’ change large bills.”
With repeated fishing in his wallet and pockets, Colton came up with two dollar bills and a dollar seventy-five in coins. “Keep the change,” he said. The waitress grudgingly accepted this offering and slouched off towards the cash register.
“Cut it out with the accent,” Ingrid told him. “Sounds fake.”
Colton put on a hurt expression. “Jus’ the way ever’body talks back home, Janie May.”
“Hush! I want to hear this.”
Their waitress was telling the lady at the cash register that her customers were from Austin. “The university,” she added. “I guess that’s why the woman dresses funny. Students!”
A moment later she stalked back to the table and dropped a nickel in front of Colton. “Your change, mister.” She pulled a grayish rag out of her apron pocket and began swabbing the table with angry strokes.
Colton stood up and grabbed Ingrid’s hand. “C’mon, Janie May, we’re gon’ be late.” He was in such a hurry, he practically dragged her out of Mamie’s Tex-Mex.
“What’s the big rush?” Ingrid protested once they were outside. “I wanted to go to the restroom again and fix my hair.”
“Oh, God, girls,” Colton groaned. “You start fooling with your hair in sixth grade and never stop. Listen, we not only needed to get out of there, we need to get out of sight!”
“How come?”
“In the first place, I’m a lousy tipper. In the second place, you heard the woman, you dress funny.”
Ingrid looked down at her perfectly respectable white blouse and short polyester knit skirt, then looked around her. Every other woman on the street was wearing a print dress with a tight bodice and a long, full skirt, except for one superior-looking brunette with her hair in a French twist and a raw silk sheath dress extending well below her knees.
“And finally,” Colton said, towing Ingrid back towards the statue of Jim Bowie, “if they look too closely at the money I gave them, they’ll think we’re counterfeiters, that means worse than jail.”
“Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“Dates on the coins. And I don’t think they used holographic security features on bills in 1957. You want to try teleporting out of Federal prison?”
Settled in what was becoming their home away from home, Ingrid and Colton took stock of their resources. It wasn’t an encouraging exercise. Ingrid was conspicuous because of her clothes, and even Colton was wearing a shirt made of fabric that didn’t exist in 1957 and jeans that were too tight for any self-respecting fifties man.
“You think you’ve got it bad,” Colton said ruefully, “you’re just weird. Whereas they probably think I’m gay. A fag. Whatever slur they used back then.”
“Cheer up,” Ingrid told him, “I don’t think there were any homosexuals around here in the fifties, and if there were, they were probably so deep in the closet they could find Narnia on a cold day. You’re just weird. Like me.”
“As far as being inconspicuous, we might as well be space aliens,” Colton concluded ruefully. Also presciently, although the thing about being prescient is that you don’t know you are at the time. That problem was still in the future. Their future. Our past. Whatever.
The rest of their resources were no more help. Their cell phones showed no bars. Ingrid had five dollars and thirty-three cents in her purse, and that was counting the inevitable pennies that were hiding in the lint at the bottom. “What did you expect? Nobody uses cash any more!”
Colton was completely out of small bills and coins after paying their bill at Mamie’s. He did have three twenty-dollar bills, which were apparently about as useful as Russian rubles.
“On the bright side,” he said, “your five bucks will go a long way farther in 1957 than they would in 2017.”
“As long as nobody looks at it too closely,” said Ingrid. “Have they redesigned the five-dollar bill in the last sixty years?”
“Probably,” Colton sighed. “Not that it matters. I’m pretty sure that even in 1957, five dollars won’t last that long. Especially if we have to buy you a dress.”
A series of honks interrupted their gloomy inventory.
“What now, a parade?”
“Maybe we can pretend to be one of the floats.”
“Or a circus act.” Colton stood up and peered between Jim Bowie’s legs. “Naah, it’s just assorted bigwigs arriving for the actual ribbon cutting. Naturally the ceremony can’t start until they have a chance to get their pictures in the paper…” He stopped talking for a moment. “Ha, pictures! Paper! Ingrid, come with me, I’ve just had a brilliant idea!” He pulled her to her feet and started around the statue.
“What about – being – inconspicuous?” Ingrid panted as, willy-nilly, she followed him across the park to the crowd in front of the bottling plant.
“Oh, to hell with that. We’re going to be very conspicuous, Ingrid. Don’t you see? This is our chance to send a message to the future!”
The only place they could find was at the very back of the crowd. Everybody was pressing forward, trying to get to the front. “To have their pictures taken with the mayor,” Colton shouted over the noise. “Or at least to be in the same picture with him, so they’ll be in the newspaper. Now do you get it?”
“There’s no way we can reach the front from here!”
“Sure there is!” Colton took a firmer grip on her hand. “Brouwer!”
And they were standing right in front, all right.
In front of the mayor.
Just as the camera clicked.
“Get on his other side!” Colton told Ingrid.
“Colton, I don’t think – “
He pushed her, reached behind the mayor’s back and took her hand again. Now the pressure of the crowd jammed them right up against the portly, sweating man.
“- this is a good idea!”
“And smile for the camera!”
Another click, and the photographer lowered his camera, staring at them in some confusion.
“That should do it. Brouwer!”
And they were back behind Jim Bowie.
“Who were those people?” the photographer asked the reporter.
“Extremely pushy citizens?”
“No. They weren’t ther
e thirty seconds ago. And they aren’t there now.”
“So? Forrest, they were probably right behind the mayor, only you didn’t notice. And once they got their pictures taken, they got out of the way.”
The photographer shook his head doubtfully. He used up his remaining film with a series of random clicks, took the roll of film out of the camera and handed it to one of the small boys who hovered behind them. “Five dollars for you if you run this to the office right now,” he promised recklessly, “and another five if the pictures are developed and waiting for me when I get there.” Then, mindful of the salary which he was definitely going to need if he threw money around so recklessly, he inserted another roll into the camera and photographed every important person at the ceremony, finishing up with a fine portrait of the mayor, scissors in his hand, actually cutting the bright red ribbon printed with “Coca-Cola” in the famous script.
But none of those pictures made it into the next edition of the Weekly Britizen.
“I’ve got a plan,” Colton said. “I think maybe we’re trying to do too much in one jump. How about we wait until night and then teleport from Britfield 1957 to Britfield 2017? And if we can get that far, even if the jump from there to Austin doesn’t work, we can get back by a previous theorem.”
“Previous theorem?”
“We rent a car and drive back.”
“Why wait until night? And where are we going to wait?”
“Here, unless you know a better spot. Night, so we won’t attract attention.”
“That didn’t work last time.”
“We’ll aim for the preceding evening. Britfield can’t have a festival every night in 2017.”
”That’s for sure,” Ingrid said. “But… do you think we can do it without sugar? We really loaded up on pralines before we jumped here.” She thought for a moment. “Although… that may have been part of the problem. Too much energy instead of too little.”
“Okay,” Colton said, “I’ve got that covered too. There’s a drugstore right next door to the bottling plant, didn’t you notice? Just before we jump, we’ll go in there and get a couple of Hershey bars. We’ll drop your five bucks on the counter and walk out. Briskly. Eat the candy on the way. We can be back in the park while the store clerk’s complaining about having to make change for such a humongous sum, and long gone before he has time to notice any tiny differences in the design of the bill… if there are any. Dammit, if my phone were working I could look it up. Apart from that, though, I think I’ve got everything covered.”
“Assuming there are Hershey bars in 1957,” Ingrid said morosely.
“There have to be. Hershey chocolate is a cultural constant. Anyway, we can always grab something else. Whatever’s out on display.”
“All right, look at these photographs, Rob. I’ve laid them out in the order they were taken. See, in the first picture they aren’t there. In the second one they’re standing in front of the mayor, and behind him you can see the exact same people as in the first picture, in the exact same poses. In the third picture they’re standing on either side of the mayor, and the same people are behind them, only now they look horrified and upset. And in the fourth… they aren’t there. Again.”
Robert Long, star (and only) reporter for the Weekly Britizen, tilted his chair a little farther back and pushed his hat up. “Does this make me look like Hildy Johnson?”
Forrest gave him a pitying look. “Rob, nothing is going to make you look like Rosalind Russell. And if that’s really your ambition, I’m not sure I want to work with you.”
“Not His Girl Friday,” Rob snapped, “the original. The Front Page. With Pat O’Brien.”
“How should I know? I wasn’t born when The Front Page came out. Anyway, a gentleman doesn’t wear his hat in the office. And you’re getting kind of long in the tooth to look like any movie star.”
Wasn’t that the truth. Nearly fifty years old, and stuck on a weekly rag in West Nowhere, Texas. With his talent! All he needed was one big story, too big for the nationals to ignore… Rob brought his chair forward. “Show me those photos again?”
Time traveling space aliens
Chapter 17
After a few fruitless interviews, Rob and Forrest hit pay dirt at Mamie’s Tex-Mex (and Hamburgers). Yolanda Martinez recognized the photos and was only too happy to complain about that morning’s weird customers.
“First I was happy, ‘cause we just started doin’ Mexican breakfast and most of our customers still wan’ steak an’ eggs. But when it come time to pay, oh sweet Jesus!” Yolanda fanned herself vigorously. “First that fellow tried to give me a little bitty piece of plastic.”
“Advanced civilization,” Rob wrote in his notebook. “Runs on credits, not cash.”
“And how would they keep track of credits?” Forrest demanded.
“They probably have advanced technology for that. Radio signals, maybe? Use of credits triggers a message to the bank teller, who takes the appropriate sum out of their account.” Rob wasn’t a devoted reader of Galaxy and Amazing Stories for nothing.
“They had cash too.” Yolanda elbowed her way between the two men. “Next thing, he tryda pay with a twenny dollar bill, can you believe it?”
“Supplied themselves with our money for this probe,” Rob wrote.
“Kind of funny looking, but I can’ remember how. Not like I see many of them. Anyway, he finally come up with real money. And then he only tipped me a lousy nickel!”
“Unfamiliar with currency values. Thank you, Miss Martinez.”
“Wait a minute, I got more! They was dress’ funny, too.”
Rob jotted down some details of the woman’s clothes before he realized that Yolanda was describing the same outfit he’d seen in Forrest’s photos, only with commentary. He hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the outfit, but then he might have been too focused on the shapely legs revealed by that short skirt. Yolanda said no decent woman showed her knees like that, and the skirt had been made of some kind of shiny fabric that “din’t hang right, know what I mean?”
Rob had no idea what she meant, but he nodded and kept scribbling.The man, Yolanda said, looked “almost normal” in jeans and a regular shirt, but his jeans were way too tight. “Said they come up from the University in Austin, and you know,” Yoland dropped her voice, “what-all kinda people they got down there. Say, am I gonna get my picture in the paper?”
“Count on it,” Forrest said, snapping a few quick shots before they left to look for more witnesses.
“Them folks?” said an oldster sitting on a park bench. “Sure, I saw them. They was holding these little bitty metallic-type things and poking them. Like they was pushing buttons or something.”
“Death rays,” Rob scribbled, suddenly feeling less enthusiastic about pursuing the space aliens. Oh, well, if he was killed or atomized by an alien device, maybe that would make the front page in Austin.
“Now they’re just standing there.”
“Probably using mind powers beyond our comprehension… What? Now? You can see them?”
“Sonny, anybody who ain’t blind can see ‘em just fine. They’re right over there by the statue.”
Rob stared at the two strange beings who were peering between Jim Bowie’s legs. From this distance they looked remarkably human – well, humanoid, anyway. And the details matched Forrest’s photo: tight jeans, short skirt, fantastic legs. He started across the park, trying for a casual stroll that somehow got more and more like a run as he drew closer to his targets. The aliens looked up, startled – at least, if they’d been human, that’s what their expressions would have meant – and drew back.
“Hey! I just want to talk to you,” Rob called.
The aliens vanished, leaving behind only a wobbly-looking blur that quickly solidified into the pedestal of the statue. Rob pulled up short.
“Did you get that?” he demanded of Forrest.
“Too late. I only got the statue. Of which,” Forrest said bitterly, “we already have
far too many pictures in the archives.”
Rob shook his head, staring at the place where the aliens had disappeared. The statue and pedestal were quite clear and ordinary now, but a bit of the park beyond the statue shimmered with a yellowish-green blur. “Come on!” he snapped at Forrest. “Their cloaking device isn’t quite perfect!”
They pursued the constantly changing blur across the street and down two blocks, attracting quite a lot of attention and a following of bored children who’d been wishing ever since the free Coke distribution had stopped that something, anything would happen to enliven a Saturday afternoon in Britfield. Parents followed their children, the two policemen who’d been dozing in their car followed the parents, and Forrest began to feel like the Pied Piper. He envied Rob, whose monomaniacal pursuit of the moving blur evidently left him no brain cells with which to wonder how the hell they were going to explain themselves if the space aliens got away unseen.
The blur shimmered at the corner of the alley behind Miller’s General Store and then disappeared. Rob charged down the alley. At the brick wall that closed off the far end the bricks blurred briefly; then the aliens popped into existence.
“How should I have known?” the – female? – alien was saying to the other one. “There wasn’t – isn’t – argh! There won’t be a wall here in 2017.”
Time-traveling aliens!
They looked back at Rob and Forrest and their train of followers, now filling up the alley.
“Can you jump us out of here?” the big alien in jeans asked the one with the good legs.
“Too tired after running all that way. You?”
Before the big alien could answer, a policeman shouldered his way through the crowd and clicked handcuffs on him.
“What’s the use?” Rob moaned while Cletus Taylor informed the aliens that they were under arrest for vagrancy, disturbing the peace, and whatever else he could think up while transporting them to the jail. “They’ll just disappear again.”
An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2) Page 14