Guardian

by Joe Haldeman

  There was an interesting surprise waiting for us at the dock—dozens of prospectors who had changed their plans, going inland along the Stikine River, the route everyone had taken to the Yukon before the Chilkoot Pass had opened. With Skagway closed down for an indefinite period, these men had chosen the somewhat longer alternative.

  And they needed more supplies.

  A broker came on deck and offered a blanket 10 percent over what we had paid in the States, for anything. Then, we found out, he turned around and sold it piecemeal with a 25 percent markup.

  Doc was sure he could bypass the broker and make a quick profit. He went to the boys about splitting the kit to sell his third, and they surprised him by saying “sell it all.”

  It was a little unfair, I supposed; they were dispirited by the day of violent illness and confused and upset by the developments in Skagway. If I had been an objective parent, I would have counseled them to wait a few days before deciding to give it up. Instead, I pounced on the chance.

  From my diary I had a list of everything and its price. I copied it out and added 25 percent, while the men were offloading the kit to the far end of Front Street, which was serving as a kind of trading post. Chuck borrowed some paint and printed on a plank EVRYTHING GOS, which made me cringe, but did the job.

  Doc and I carried two boxes of books out to the school. Grace Logan was ecstatic, and sent her three biggest boys back to carry the rest.

  By the time we’d finished that, our own boys had sold more than half of the supplies, and were stunned by the amount of money they suddenly had—$1,400 in bills and coin and gold dust.

  Doc went around comparing prices, and found that our inventory was going so fast because other people’s markups here were greater than 25 percent. We sent the boys into town for an alcoholic hangover cure and took over the selling, with an additional 10 percent markup. We sold almost everything before sundown, and got back aboard the White Nights with $2,591 and a box of cans of sardines.

  We ate sardines all the way to Nunaimo, three days, and I’ve never opened a can of them since.

  The view from midcentury.

  Doc and I were married by a city official in Seattle. The four of us had a long talk, and we decided not to risk the family fortune on oranges or artichokes, but to move back to the Midwest.

  I believe my second son was conceived one night on the Pullman car that took us back to Missouri. I named him Gordon, for reasons I could never tell anyone, and also gave him Doc’s Christian name Charles.

  Last year, in 1951, Charles Gordon Coleman was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He changed the world, this world, I hope for the better.

  Other interesting things happened between his birth and his journey to Stockholm.

  We bought acreage in Rolla and turned it into a fairly successful farm, with various crops rotating through the seasons—what they call a truck farm now. Chuck is still on the farm today, a white-bearded patriarch. My Daniel had no patience for it, and after a year went off to sea with the merchant marine.

  He joined the navy in World War I and perished when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine.

  Strange to write those words. He also died in a gunfight in Dawson City. Both deaths were real, and the first one hurt more than the second.

  I taught high school in Rolla for twenty years, part-time, as I was making more money in my second career, writing pulp fiction. I wrote at least one story a week, under a variety of male pseudonyms—westerns, science fiction, mysteries—and the occasional romance, under my own false name, Rosa Coleman.

  That figured in one of the strangest meetings of my life. I was shopping in Rolla in the summer of 1905, and sat down on a park bench to rest and cool off. A large man sat down on the other end of the bench.

  “Rosa Coleman,” he said, and I looked up, expecting one of my readers. There were several such in Rolla. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t a local.

  He gave me a mysterious smile. “Or is it Rosa Tolliver?”

  I stood and fought the impulse to flee. “Who are you?”

  “We, were never formally introduced. My name is William Sizemore. Late of the Pinkerton agency.” Of course. The last time I’d seen him, he was lying on the floor, bleeding, only the whites of his eyes showing.

  “I’ll … I’m glad to see that you’re alive.”

  He rubbed the back of his head. “Was it your son who slugged me?” I nodded. “Pretty good job.”

  “You’ve been tracking us for seven years?”

  “Hardly.” He took off his hat and mopped his forehead. “I caught up with you in Wrangell in ninety-eight on your way back to the States.” All I could do was look at him.

  “You should never have pawned the revolver. Along the bottom of the barrel, it was stamped ‘Property of the Pinkerton Agency,’ and had an identification number. I was fired for not having reported it lost—but I was about to quit anyhow.

  “I didn’t like your husband, the first one, and suspected that your story was the true version. I decided to lie—protecting myself as well as you—and telegraphed him that you had disappeared during a bad storm the previous winter, and were missing and presumed dead. It was child’s play to steal a missing-persons form from the Dodge City Police Department. Your son was presumably headed for the Philippines.

  “I followed your trail to Seattle, and found people who remembered you as the lone woman on the Russian freighter. I was headed for Skagway when the troubles there closed it, and found that the ship was returning.

  “I waited in Wrangell, pretty well disguised as a scruffy prospector. Haggled for supplies with your son and his friend, and then followed them to a bar when you and Doc showed up. We talked for a while and I got your cover story.

  “Followed you back to Seattle and saw the marriage announcement. Left you alone then, biding my time in Philadelphia, until now.”

  “What’s happened now?”

  “Edward remarried early this year. But it didn’t last.” He unrolled the newspaper he was holding, a week-old Philadelphia Inquirer. There was a front page story, “MILLIONAIRE LAWYER FOUND DEAD— Police suspect Young Wife in Poisoning.”

  “She’s actually admitted to it,” he said. “Even if she doesn’t go to jail, she won’t get a penny of his fortune. I think it’s time for you to reappear.”

  “As his long-lost wife?? I’m not married to him anymore.”

  “No one in Philadelphia knows that but me. And for ten percent, I’ll never tell.”

  “Ten percent of how much?”

  “More than two million dollars.”

  Of course I considered it, if just for a few moments. I tried to express my feelings to Mr. Sizemore. “Even if the millions came with no strings attached, I would hesitate.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “I’ve had millions. It was the most miserable time of my life.”

  “But you would really have them now! You could buy anything for yourself and your family.”

  “Not without explaining where the money came from.”

  “A rich relative died.”

  “And if anyone—like Edward’s nasty sister!—was curious and did the slightest investigation, it would come out that I was married to two men, and defrauded Edward’s relatives out of the money. I’d lose the money and go to prison.”

  “I think a good lawyer who knew the true circumstances could prevent both.”

  “To the shame, and perhaps loss, of my actual family.”

  He shook his head. “Consider this. The only link to your actual past is me. I would never tell anyone the truth, because my ten percent would look like extortion, then.”

  What is it now, I thought. But he hadn’t threatened to expose me.

  He handed me a business card. “This is too much, too fast for you. Think it over. I’ll be at the Hotel Central for a week. Please reconsider.” He turned to go.

  “Mr. Sizemore. You’ve gone to considerable expense to come out here. L
et me reimburse—”

  “You have even less money than I,” he said with a quaver in his voice that might have been anger. Then he walked out of my life.

  I read through the Philadelphia paper and did feel a pang at the announcements and advertisements. The opera, fine restaurants, the new moving pictures and automobiles. I lazily considered a scenario where I would go to Philadelphia and collect the money, and then a few months later, meet a nice widower from Missouri; fall in love with him and marry, and we would live wealthily ever after.

  But then Doc and Chuck and even Gordon would have to know the whole story, and live a lie for the rest of their lives.

  I thought of mailing the article to Daniel, so he would know that the monster was dead. But no need to open old wounds. I folded up the paper and dropped it in the trash.

  It would be foolish to pretend I have never regretted that decision. There’s an old joke about farming: a rich relative dies and leaves a million dollars to a farmer. A newspaperman asks him what he plans to do with all that cash. He scratches his chin and says, “Guess I’ll keep farmin’ till the money runs out.”

  The farm sustained us, though, through generations. Chuck married in 1902 and continued the Coleman dynasty. We survived the Depression and, through luck of geography, the Dust Bowl.

  I was never much more than an accessory to the farm. I put up vegetables and did the bookkeeping and the research to schedule rotation. But my main contribution was money, and it wasn’t tainted money from Edward’s family fortune.

  The farmhouse we’d bought in the Rolla estate sale came complete with a ten-year-old Remington typewriter that almost worked. Doc fixed it up and I learned how to type by writing dime novels. The first one sold for more than the farm had made in its best month! So at the age of forty-three, I embarked upon a new career.

  I had never written a story before, but had committed reams of poetry as a child, and had the required composition courses at Wellesley—plus a million or so words in my diaries. I can’t say that anything I wrote approached being literature. But I had great fun, and people paid me for it!

  Gordon didn’t like farming much more than his older brother had, but he pitched in with a kind of grim determination. Science was his passion. He made his own telescope and turned a spare storeroom into a chemistry lab, which he almost burned down a couple of times.

  He had a serious accident the summer before he started high school—his foot caught in a combine and he lost most of the toes. That got him out of a lot of farm work, and also saved him from the war that took his brother.

  Gordon was offered a scholarship to Princeton in 1917, and graduated with honors. He went to Harvard for his Ph.D., and returned to Princeton to study and teach. His mentor was the atomic pioneer Leo Szilard, and they were coequals by the time they both disappeared into the wilds of New Mexico. “War work” was all he could tell me.

  Years later, I would find out about the Manhattan Project, and how Gordon had changed the course of history.

  The original Project had planned for the production of two devastatingly powerful A-bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, which would be dropped on Japanese cities and kill millions, mostly women and children and old men. We would end the war with one vicious strike.

  Gordon calculated that the precious U-235 could be redistributed so that a third bomb, Baby Boy, could give them a possible weapon for peace. Einstein convinced Truman to okay the strategy, and so Baby Boy was dropped into Tokyo Bay as a demonstration. There was little loss of life, but a dramatic mushroom cloud hovered over the city for a long time. The High Command and Emperor knew about the other two bombs, and knew they would be in the air the next day, and Japan capitulated.

  So millions of lives were spared, American as well as Japanese, because if Manhattan had failed, they were going to invade and take Japan inch by terrible inch. Millions of lives allowed to continue, because a half-century ago on another world, Raven walked through my door and I listened to him.

  Guardian of life. Because I lived, and gave birth, the World War didn’t end in a nuclear holocaust.

  It occurs to me now that Raven didn’t stop there. Of course he went ahead into myriad futures, nudging humanity away from Armageddon. Why, and in whose service? I never thought to ask; he may well have had a simple answer. That ignorance has haunted me for half a century.

  Other than Daniel, I’ve only told two people about Raven. One was a psychiatrist I went to in 1918, to help me deal with the grief and helplessness I felt, losing my firstborn twice.

  He listened with interest for several sessions, and then told me gently that I had built up a remarkably complex and consistent set of delusions in order to deal with intolerable memories: the recent grief and the old one, the sexual violence Edward had delivered to me and our son. He said that at my age, and in my situation, the best thing would be to continue believing the Raven story was true—as long as I didn’t tell anybody else about it!—because it amounted to a belief system that allowed me to think that Daniel was still alive, in some millions of alternative universes where the torpedo missed his ship.

  I could almost believe him—like most analysts of the time, he had the shrunken heart of a master salesman—because his belief system was as internally consistent as my own, and he had the beard and couch and framed diplomas to reinforce its reality.

  It doesn’t explain the new dress, though. Fifty-five years ago I greeted my dead son and forced him to admit I was wearing a dress that I hadn’t owned a few hours before—in fact, it was the only copy of that dress in the whole world, because it didn’t appear in catalogs until the next month. It also didn’t explain my instant acquisition of Tlingit language and lore.

  The analyst tacitly accepted both as necessary lies. I came to realize that I could stay on that couch until the next ice age, and never dislodge him from his pinnacle of Freudian certainty. So I said good-bye and made him the villain in a novella in Spicy Detective.

  The only other man I’ve told was the magazine publisher and editor Hugo Gernsback. On a whim I went to New York in 1930, Christmas shopping for the grandchildren. It was a strange bleak time for most people, little work and low wages even if you found some. But the penny or two per word that I got from Gernsback and his rivals, at as much as two thousand words a day, made us a comparatively wealthy family. So after I stood in the crowd and watched the window displays at Macy’s and Gimbel’s, I could actually go inside and buy things, armloads, and have them delivered to my hotel. As I’d done at older stores when I was young and rich.

  I’d read in the letters column of Gernsback’s Science Wonder Quarterly about a science fiction club called the Scienceers, who met every week or so in New York City. I’d written down the address, and took a cab there without calling ahead.

  They were a bunch of earnest young men, not quite prepared for a seventy-two-year-old woman to show up and claim she was Lance Williams, author of the Zodiac Jones series. But one of their members was David Lasser, the editor of Science Wonder Stories, the magazine that ran my series. He called up the publisher, Hugo Gernsback, and the great man actually drove through the snow to meet me.

  He was a strange, intense man, of middle years but crackling with energy. He was delighted to find out that I was a woman, and an old woman at that.

  After a few minutes he declared that the place was too smoky for him, and I emphatically agreed, so he asked me whether I would care to come have a cup of coffee with him.

  The city sky was sparkling with winter stars, which I don’t suppose would be possible today. He pointed out the Great Nebula in the sword of Orion, and told me astronomers thought new stars, new worlds, were birthing there.

  I took a deep breath and told him that I knew it was true. I’d been there.

  He listened to me for an hour or more, walking along and then in the café, quietly asking pointed questions.

  I think he half believed me, but then he believed many strange things. He made me a business proposition: wri
te it up as an “as-told-to” interview, Lance Williams talking to an old lady who claimed to have had this experience. He would devote most of an issue of his new “scientifiction” magazine Amazing to it, presenting it as fact, and see what the response was. Maybe my Raven had visited other people, and this would make them come forward.

  It sounded like a good idea to me. Most readers would accept it as fiction, done with a clever angle, but indeed there might be people out there who could corroborate my story. I did suspect it had happened to four other writers—Flammarion, of course, and also Homer, William Blake, and Jonathan Swift. (Swift left a message in Gulliver’s Travels, describing the tiny moons of Mars 150 years before Asaph Hall discovered them, coincidentally at the same time that I was studying astronomy in college.)

  I couldn’t tell the whole story, sodomy and all, in a pulp magazine then—and couldn’t now, twenty years later—so I substituted whippings and verbal abuse, as I had when I related the story to Gernsback.

  If I’d known he was about to start publishing the magazine Sexology, I might have confided in him.

  The “interview” took up half of the April 1931 issue of the magazine, and the $580 Gernsback paid for it was most welcome. But the two letters I got from people who claimed to be fellow travelers were evidence of something more ordinary than my experience.

  World without end.

  I continued writing off and on for the next decade, but paper shortages during the War closed down most of my markets.

  By then I was doing more church work than anything else, and enjoying my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  I suppose I went back to the church to fill the hole in my life left when Doc passed away in 1935. He’d had six more years than his allotted three score and ten, and simple people, I think, were surprised by the intensity of my grief. You must have known his days were numbered, they were thinking. My days, too, then as now, and yours no less than mine.