Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  The last time I’d seen him he was resplendent in a Mexican cavalry officer’s uniform. The time before that he’d spoken archaic Sephardic Spanish. Now he was speaking English. “Are you really an FBI man?” I asked.

  “Want to see my papers?” he tossed them on the table.

  “They look real,” I conceded. “Except these say you’re a native American. Last time I saw you, you were born in Istanbul.”

  “Dear me,” he said, switching momentarily from American to British. “In those days I drank more than I should.”

  “Getting in the FBI would be easy,” my mad friend said. “If I believed in time machines.”

  One of the Byzantine’s little quirks was that he did. From what I’d been able to guess he wasn’t born an American and had never stood still long enough to acquire citizenship, save in Istanbul. And since he wouldn’t be born there for another 300 years, that could lead to complications. But how easy, with a time machine, to materialize at midnight in some courthouse and doctor a birth record. Ditto with the yellowing archives of the little red schoolhouse up to the big, carefully non-red university. I looked at the man in the boina and suddenly laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” the Mexican girl asked.

  “I imagine,” the Byzantine said in his archaic Spanish, “that he’s visualizing the situation in an office which had too many desks one morning. Hawkshaw greets everyone as though he’d been there for the last nine years. There would have been much innocent amazement on one hand and furtive checking of records on the other. But everything was there: vouchers and cancelled pay checks for nine years, dossier in order. And when Himself had gone through his own sealed files and read glowing semi-annual efficiency reports signed in his own hand—” The Byzantine shrugged.

  “They occupy sensitive positions,” he continued. “It would never do to flap off to a psychiatrist over a little lapse like not remembering the man at the desk next to yours all these years. If such a thing ever got out it might undermine public confidence in the Department.”

  “This is the kind of thing you should write,” my mad friend said.

  “Who’d believe it?” I muttered.

  The Byzantine tossed off another cognac. Abruptly, he stood and, excusing himself, disappeared in the general direction of the men’s room.

  “About this extradition,” I probed.

  My mad friend drew himself up magnificently. “I am now police chief of Speedtrap, Ariz.,” he said.

  “There ain’t no such town,” I protested.

  “You want to see my papers?” He tossed an open billfold and an extradition warrant on the table. Again, they looked entirely too real. “Go over the seal with a low power microscope and you’ll find we incorporated only two months ago,” he volunteered.

  “But actually to christen a town Speedtrap?”

  “Desert rats have a perverted sense of humor. Something to do with the vitamin content of Gila monster.”

  It couldn’t be the booze, I decided, for my mad friend has not touched the stuff since a certain experience in North Africa . . . But the FBI had returned from a pissoir somewhere in the café‘s subterranean portion. He had a 10° list to starboard.

  “It may be impolitic to mention it,” my mad friend said, “but you once told us your only trip to the past had created havoc by planting antibiotic-hardened microbes back where no one had any immunity. Wasn’t once enough to make you swear off?”

  The Byzantine looked about with exaggerated caution. “Who said I had a time machine?”

  “You did, winter before last.”

  The Byzantine looked at us suspiciously.

  “You were eating pancakes in the only decent steak house in Nogales,” I reminded.

  “And as I recall,” my mad friend contributed, “you were going to be 40 about now. There was conjecture as to whether you’d make it.”

  The Byzantine showed teeth in a dazzling renewal of confidence. “Things have changed,” he said. “I may live several more years.”

  “That’s heartening. I was afraid you had timed your career to end about the time the world did.”

  The Byzantine made a nervous hair-patting gesture and knocked his boina askew. Before he could lower his hand another cognac was thrust into it. The smile returned. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.

  “He,” my mad friend said, pointing at me, “is already overloaded.”

  The Byzantine made a dogbedding-down-in-high-grass movement. I hoped his story would be better than the last he’d tried to foist onto me.

  “When I discovered,” he began, “that the world would end in 1960 my initial reaction was an On the Beach syndrome. Then I thought, why not tamper again? My own world was gone and yours headed for destruction. What could be lost?”

  “What indeed?” my mad friend wondered.

  “But there remained the question: Whence the fatal spore which grew into that planet sterilizing mushroom?”

  “Wasn’t that obvious?” my mad friend asked. “Your alleged world was unified, prosperous, and panChristian some three or four hundred years hence, until you unwittingly planted the plague in 562 AD.”

  “Sharp,” the Byzantine said in English. “But you forget.” He lapsed into Spanish again and I noticed his Sephardic tendency to convert ‘s’ into ‘esh’ was growing stronger. “There is only one time track. When I created this world I destroyed my own. My problem now was to go back and find the focal point which started man off on atomic research.”

  “Well, obviously you didn’t scrag Einstein in his infancy,” I said.

  “Pointless,” the Byzantine said. “There would still have been Rutherford.”

  “And Cavendish.”

  “And Curie.”

  “And Democritus.”

  “Heretics all,” my mad friend growled.

  “You might have started with Thales of Miletus,” I said.

  The Byzantine spread his hands in a helpless gesture and the waiter thrust a cognac into one. “Somewhere in history was a beginning—a nexus point whence all atomic research must stem. I visited many civilizations.”

  “Babylonia?” my mad friend asked. “Those temples were to get closer to the sun. If you walked E down the main street of one of those towns you went up a ramp right to the top of the ziggurat.”

  The Byzantine looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  Wearing a look of impossibly eager innocence, my mad friend pointed at me. “The man from the Saucer Works says launching ramps should always face E to take advantage of rotational velocity.”

  “You were looking for a nexus,” I reminded.

  “Ah sí. By now I knew the time machine a little better and could flicker at the low edge of visibility. Also, I had enclosed it and carried my own air, I always drenched it with disinfectant before going back, and thus caused no new plagues.”

  “But the nexus?” I insisted. “Where did atomic research begin?”

  The Byzantine gave an eloquent shrug. “There is none,” he said. “It seems to be an inalienable part of your civilization.”

  I was annoyed. “You seem singularly carefree for a man who’s going to travel beyond Saturn without a space suit any day.”

  “I am,” the Byzantine said. “I don’t believe I’m tampering when I tell you that all is not lost.”

  “I shall light a candle for you,” my mad friend said.

  “When I was convinced that nothing short of destroying the human race could prevent it from annihilating itself I began sleeping in a foetal position. Then curiosity came to my rescue. Although he was no longer in style, I decided to find the Missing Link.” My mad friend began mumbling an exorcism.

  “Did you find him?” I asked. “No. The machine’s range is limited to thousand year jumps. By the 3rd jump Byzantium-New Rome-Constantinople-Istanbul—the polynomial city of my youth had shrunk to a trading depot inside a log stockade.”

  “1000 BC is a trifle late for missing links,” I ventured.

  The Byzantine nodde
d and made that nervous gesture which knocked his boina askew again. Before he could lower his hand the waiter thrust another cognac into it. “Some Phoenicians were pouring blazing pitch down onto a band of savages. The savages were howling antisemitic slogans as I flipped the switch.”

  “Never sell this one,” my mad friend muttered.

  The Byzantine turned on his chalice-poisoning smile and permitted the interruption. “¿Por qué?” he asked.

  “You’ve got a time machine. You go back and back and nothing happens. So what?”

  “So the next jump,” the Byzantine continued, “also nothing happened. The Golden Horn was still there but wider and shallower. A frigid wind made me suspect the ice cap lay not far N of the Caucasus. One look told me the Phoenician subdivision was yet to come. It also told me something I should have thought of in the first place: that, though excellent for viajes temporales, the time machine was useless for geographical voyaging.”

  “A plumber never brings the right wrench,” I sympathized.

  “Nor did I,” the Byzantine agreed, “I went back, wondering what changes I had inadvertently caused.”

  “The Bomb and the Ultimatum are still with us,” my mad friend groused. “You didn’t change that.”

  “My germicidal precautions were satisfactory and, remaining virtually invisible, I startled no one into flapping up a new religion.”

  ‘The Missing Link,” I pressed.

  “Still missing.”

  “Anyone,” my mad friend pontificated, “who would make such a statement is abysmally ignorant of contemporary politics.”

  “And religion,” I added.

  “I’ll get to that later,” my friend retorted.

  “How big is this time machine?” I asked.

  Again the Byzantine unveiled his skatophagous smile. “Too small for a Land Rover. Thanks,” he continued, “to my FBI connections, I acquired a nuclear powered, folding back pack copter—one of those new ones with silenced ramjets so as not to apprise the enemy of his impending vertical envelopment.”

  There had been hints of this gadget at the Saucer Works but the Byzantine had apparently anticipated even the Russian version of Popular Mechanics.

  “It was a tight fit but after dousing it with germicide I milleni-skipped five thousand years back past the previous stop.”

  “Which put you approximately 7000 BC,” my mad friend surmised.

  “Al grano,” the Mexican girl suggested, “let’s get to the point.” The Byzantine was unruffled. “If I did not find the Missing Link, I contented myself that I had discovered Eden.

  “The ice cap had shuffled half a hundred leagues backward in its agelong waltz across the northern hemisphere. My many-named homeland was wooded, but no longer frigid. There was a difference which I felt immediately. It was like that frisson which comes on first reading Homer—on finding oneself transported beyond the dawn where the air is still unbesmogged and the gods have, perhaps, created man but have not as yet gotten around to inventing sin.

  ‘The forest was shaggy, like your unmanicured American woods, but five thousand years newer than Troy. The Golden Horn was chocked with reeds and roofed with a milling mass of screeching waterfowl. There was a cry which repeated endlessly—some sort of crane, I suppose, but the spell of the moment made me expect something between man and goat to step tootling from the reeds. But if Pan was born, he was not present that day.”

  “Another theory shot to hell,” I grunted.

  The Byzantine shot me an inquiring look.

  “According to his theory,” my mad friend said, “Europe was overrun by Bushmen or, as we of the Hibernian persuasion call them, Firbolgs.”

  “Ah, sí.” Leprejón was the nearest the Byzantine could approximate to the trumpeted Gaelic vowels.

  “A relict of paganism,” my mad friend said disapprovingly.

  “Also extinct, save in the Kalahari.”

  “We don’t live in South Africa,” the Mexican girl said.

  The Byzantine lurched abruptly to his feet and made for the pissorr. More unsteadily than last time, I noted.

  “This Speedtrap, Ariz., jazz,” I prodded. “If you’re so newly incorporated, how come the extradition?”

  “We couldn’t afford a large municipal payroll so the offices of auditor and treasurer were combined.”

  “Oh gad!” I muttered. “Say an Ave Maria for the traditional checks and balances.”

  “R.I.P. would be better,” my friend conceded. “It was all checks and no balance.”

  “You’re here to recover the municipal funds?”

  “If she hasn’t spent them.”

  “She?”

  “If I hear it again I’ll shout soprano but, in Algonquin, Polynesian, or Baluchistani, I cherche for the woman.”

  The Byzantine returned. His roundabout progress brushed him against the table where Cataldn revolutionaries still conversed. They glanced up and lapsed into silence. A moment later one got up and left hurriedly without paying the check.

  “Where was I?” the Byzantine asked, sitting down and giving us a fuzzy look.

  “You had just discovered that the Golden Horn was populated neither by Bushmen nor Pan.”

  Ah si pues, I left the time machine beneath an oak, perhaps a hundred meters from the water’s edge, and turned on its radio beacon. Then I unfolded the copter. It went together like an erector set, all with wing nuts. Guaranteed to assemble without wrenches in less than ten minutes. Two hours later I was finally heading NW.”

  “Exactly opposite from where I’d have gone,” my mad friend observed.

  The Byzantine gave a faintly superior smile. “I was familiar with the parking problem in Babylon,” he said. “I was looking for a country boy.”

  “NW of Istanbul,” the Mexican girl mused, “would be somewhere in Germany.”

  “The Neander Valley, to be exact.”

  “The plot agglutinates,” my mad friend said unenthusiastically.

  “Why not take the time machine along and save a trip back?” I wondered.

  “The power comes from a connection in a basement workshop in a New Rome suburb which will never exist. Moving it might pull out the plug.”

  My mad friend sipped coffee and stared morosely at the table vacated by the Catalán.

  “The trip was uneventful. The climate was slightly balmier than nowadays. Europe had not been logged off but the Carpathian Alps were still mountains and the Schwarzwald was still the Black Forest.”

  “Full of elves making Volkswagens?” my friend baited, but the Byzantine did not rise.

  “Stilt houses in a few lakes were inhabited by brown-skinned burrheads whom I took for Cro-Magnons. I pushed on in my search for a real country boy.”

  “To Neanderthal?”

  “Empty.”

  My mad friend looked up incredulously.

  “He had been there but a raid, a plague, a bad winter, had come. Ashes in the caves were several years old.”

  Someone collapsed in the table’s single empty chair. I glanced up and recognized one of my mad friend’s wives. “I thought you didn’t bring any,” I exclaimed.

  Ignoring me, he whipped the warrant from his pocket and proclaimed, “I arrest you in the name of the people of Speedtrap, Arizona.”

  “Does that mean we have to go home?” his wife asked.

  “Probably take another couple of weeks to arrange passage,” my mad friend answered.

  “Is she the embezzling treasurer?” But the Byzantine was talking again.

  “Being at loose ends, I decided to go up to Schleswig-Holstein and see if it was true about the amber traders having a marine railway across the isthmus so they wouldn’t have to sail around Denmark.”

  “Did they?” I asked absently. I wanted to question the newly arrived wife but she was deep in a discussion of the other wife’s new botch look.

  The Byzantine spread his hands. “I never got there,” he explained. “The booklet clearly stated that the copter could be assembled
without wrenches but hand-tight was not tight enough. I fluttered along, tightening first one wing nut, then another. Somewhere between the Elbe and the Oder, a dozen loosened simultaneously. I decided to land and bang them all tight with a rock. I had nearly reached the ground when one flew off and I found myself holding things together with one hand.

  “Miraculously, the glide flattened. I progressed nearly a half kilometer into a box canyon before the second nut dropped off. I was moving slowly now, only a meter above ground, but I was frantic for fear the rotor would be damaged unless I could stop its windmilling. After another hundred meters of hoppity-skipping through a bramble patch I made it. The jet pods were less scratched than I.

  “It turned visibly darker as I merthiolated the worst of my scratches. It was late summer from the looks of the berries, so I wouldn’t freeze. I couldn’t hunt for the wing nuts after dark so I decided to build a fire to keep away whatever carnivores lurked nearby.

  “I realized next morning that those last hundred meters had taken more out of me than was apparent at first glance. But the Trinity of my youth still looked after its own for, though I had built no fire, I was alive and, despite numerous aches, could walk.

  “After breakfasting on a Hershey bar, I started back-tracking for my missing wing nuts.”

  “Talk about needles in haystacks,” I grunted.

  The Byzantine smiled. “I had a pocket radar which would make a solid pip whenever I got close to that much metal.” He stuck out his hand and the waiter immediately filled it. “It wasn’t until I had retraced my glide through the briar patch that I saw the tracks and thought to load my Mendoza-McGirr.

  “Oh, you don’t have them yet,” he remembered. “.25, with a triangular plastic cartridge. The slug is a gob of contact explosive.”

  “Nice thing to carry around in your pocket,” my mad friend observed sardonically.

  “The explosive is inactive until the propelling charge compresses it through a choke bore,” he explained. “But even with a Menmac I was not eager to round a bush and face a bear large enough to leave these tracks.

  “I proceeded slowly out of the canyon with one eye on the scope and the other carefully peeled for the berry-eating bear. Crossing a mud creek-bank, I learned my bear walked on two feet and was accompanied by several smaller bipeds. I came very carefully out of the brambles, through low scrub timber to a meadow where I caught a flicker of motion in the distance.