by Lewis Shiner
Still, I thought. Still...
Somebody was tugging at my sleeve.
“Hey, mister,” said a little boy’s voice. “Hey.”
I winced at the sound of it. “What are you following me for? What do you want from me?”
“We need help,” Carolyn said. “If they catch us they’ll kill us.”
“Who will?”
“Them,” Jeremy said.
He wasn’t pointing at anybody. Giant ants? I wondered. “I don’t understand. What is it you want me to do?”
The girl shrugged and turned her face away from me. I could see tears glistening in her eyes. Jeremy sat crosslegged on the asphalt in front of me and reached out to hold onto one of Carolyn’s ankles. With my back to the wall of the gym I felt hemmed in by them, emotionally and physically.
Some obscure sense of guilt kept me asking questions. “What’s wrong with Jeremy? What happened in that restaurant?”
“My father says he has some kind of eppa...eppa...”
“Epilepsy?”
“Yeah. And he gets it whenever he gets too close to them.”
“Was that one of them in the restaurant?”
“Yes.”
Fingers moving against his side, empty-eyed, sunglasses. Reporting on me? “Who are they?”
The girl shook her head. For a second I saw past her hollow eyes and dirty brown hair, had just a glimpse of the woman she might be if she hung on long enough. “You won’t believe me,” she said. “You’ll think I’m crazy. “
“I’m starting to think that anyway.”
“What if I said they were from space? What would you say then?” In the last of the light her eyes had a hard gray sheen.
Oh God, I thought. Invaders from Mars. What’s happening to my past?
“See?” she said. “I warned you.”
“What about your parents? Can’t they help you?”
“My father. . .” She stopped, swallowed, started again. “My father was all I had. They killed him. Jeremy’s parents too. He’s from California and they had him in one of their ships but he got away. That’s where he got the...epilepsy. From what they did to him. My father...my father and me found him wandering around San Carlos and brought him back to the store.”
That told me where I’d seen her before. Her father ran a rock shop out on the edge of the Apache reservation. My folks had taken me out there once to see the peridots, the green crystals that only turn up in extinct volcanic craters around San Carlos and somewhere in South America. I’d noticed her because I’d just gotten to the age where I was noticing girls, but we had shied away from actually speaking to each other.
She was wearing a big peridot ring, probably her father’s, on the index finger of her right hand. “If they killed your father,” I said, “why didn’t you call the police?”
“I did. But when the policeman came, he was...one of them. Jeremy ran off into the desert and I ran after him. Now they’re looking for both of us.”
No matter how uncomfortable I felt, I had to believe that her story was just a fantasy. I had to make myself believe it. But even if I’d been sure she was hallucinating, what could I do for her? She needed a family and a psychiatrist and I couldn’t be either one in the time I had left. I took some money out of my wallet.
“Look,” I said. “Here’s twenty bucks. Go take a bus to Phoenix or somewhere. Call an aunt or a grandfather or somebody you know you can trust and get them to help you out. Okay?”
She knew she’d lost me. I could see it in her eyes.
She wadded up the bill and held it in her fist. “They know who you are,” she said.
“What?”
“They saw us with you. They’ll be looking for you, now, too.”
My heart slowed back to something like normal.
“That’s okay. I’ll risk it.”
I watched them until they faded into the darkness.
“In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins was playing in the gym and I wanted to go in and listen to it. I wanted to forget what the girl had told me and see what I’d come to see and get out of there.
I took about two steps before my stomach cramped, driving me back against the wall of the gym.
“No,” I whispered, “Not yet. Not now. Please.”
I was wasting my breath. In less than a minute the dizziness came over me and everything fell away.
The proctors weren’t too happy about my coming back in a different shirt. They didn’t care too much for the newspaper masthead either, but they had their executive order and they decided it was all academic anyhow.
They threw me in my cell and refused to let me talk to Thornberg. This time the proctors debriefed me, and I told them as little as I thought I could get away with. One of them might have been the one that had threatened me after the last trip, but I couldn’t be sure. Between the uniforms and the dark glasses they had an unnerving similarity.
Dark glasses, I thought. Sunglasses. I remembered fingers moving against a bright sport shirt.
Cut it out, I thought. You’re letting your imagination go crazy. Don’t get sucked into somebody else’s fantasy.
Finally they left me alone and I wondered if the experiment was really over. Thornberg would probably not live through the disappointment. To have worked so hard and then lose it all, to never get to use his own machine...
And what about me? I thought. To have gotten so close to seeing LeeAnn only to miss her by a few seconds?
Memories came rushing back, out of control. The first time we’d made love, in the back of my parents’ Chevy II station wagon with the seat folded down. Our first winter at Arizona State, LeeAnn in a mini, skirt and rag coat that hung to her ankles, wrapped in yards of fake fur. Politics and marches, graduation and marriage, the underground newspaper in Phoenix in the late sixties. Our first house, LeeAnn’s thirtieth birthday, the flowers and the cheap red wine...
And then the day the Proctors’ Amendment passed the House. Politics and marches again, me reluctant at first, but LeeAnn outraged and dedicated, young again in the space of a few days. The first victories, Colorado voting against ratification, Texas leaning our way. People starting to wonder if the proctors really would be better than their local police, even in Houston.
And then one by one we were getting killed or crippled or lost in the basements of jails. They told me the day they arrested me that LeeAnn had died trying to construct a bomb, for God’s sake, when she had never even touched any kind of weapon.
I never got a trial, because the proctors were now the Law. No charges, no lawyers, just a cell and a lot of memories.
Time moved on.
As much as I hated the proctors, I knew better than to blame them. They hadn’t elected themselves; the citizens of the United States had listened to their televisions and voted them in, so it was their fault too. But mostly it was time’s fault. Time had passed. Times had changed. So I sat in a jail cell and thought about what it had been like to be 15 years old, before I had any idea of what time could do.
That was where Thornberg found me. He needed somebody with a memory of a specific time and place that was so strong that his machines could focus on it and follow the timelines back to it. Because it was dangerous, his funding agency had sent him to the prisons to look for volunteers, and when he saw how I tested out he wanted me. I don’t think the proctors had taken him seriously until the first test had worked, and once it did they seemed to panic.
What were they afraid of? What did they have to lose? Were they afraid I was going to escape through a hole in time?
Or were they afraid I was going to learn something they didn’t want anybody to know?
I was still thinking about it late that night when I heard my cell door open. It was Thornberg.
“How did you get in here?” I whispered.
“Never mind. The question is, do you want to go again? Tonight? Right now?”
We headed straight for the lab and I changed into my traveling clothes. T
hornberg was nervous, talking the whole time he strapped me in.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how you can have a past that’s not the same as my past. Why does yours have tracks in the desert and flying saucers?”
“How should I know?” I said. “Maybe everybody’s past is different. People never remember things the same way as anybody else. Maybe they are different. What are those waves your machine uses?”
“Retrograde probability waves.”
“Retrograde because they move backwards in time, right? But couldn’t they branch off, just like regular probability waves? Your machine uses my brain waves to sort through all those probabilities, so it would have to take me to whatever I thought the past was, right?”
Thornberg was interested. He’d gone back to his console, but he wasn’t reaching for the controls. “If that’s true, why is there no record of your melted track in the desert?”
“The different pasts all lead to the same place, the present. I guess there could be other pasts that lead to other presents, that ‘Many Worlds’ theory you were telling me about. In my past the proctors don’t want any record of the mess their spaceships made, so they just covered it up. In yours, you never knew of any spaceships. But they lead to the same thing, with the proctors in power.”
“You have a lot of imagination.”
“Yeah. I do. Imagine this, then. Suppose I change something? Made it so my past hooked onto a different future? Just like switching a train onto another track. You said every decision we make creates a whole new universe.”
“No,” Thornberg said. “Out of the question. Do you have any idea of the risk? At the end of the hour you’d be pulled back here anyway.”
Or into another future, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “All right. Calm down. If we’re going to do this we’d better get started.”
Thornberg just stared at me for a few seconds, and I could see how frightened he was. My only question was whether he was afraid for me or afraid I’d go off into some other future and leave him stuck in this one.
I never got the answer because his hand snaked out and started pushing the buttons.
Seeing myself walk into the gym was as immediate as a glance in the mirror and as distant as looking at an old photograph. I wanted to go over to myself and say, straighten up for God’s sake, and turn your collar down. But even so I could see myself through my 15-year-old eyes and know that the slouch and the clothes and the haircut were the only ways I could say the things I didn’t have words for then.
The kid had three-inch cuffs in his blue jeans, and the light jacket he wore over his T-shirt wasn’t red, like James Dean’s jacket in Rebel Without a Cause, but only because a red jacket would have been somebody else’s uniform and not his own. His hair was too long for a flat top and not long enough for a DA, but five minutes didn’t go by without him running a comb through it at least a couple of times.
Somebody put “Twilight Time” by the Platters on the record player. The overhead lights went out and two deep blue spots swept over the dancers. Martin and Dickie, the kid’s best friends, were off to his left, talking behind their hands and bumping each other with their shoulders. The kid just stood there and stared into the crowd around the bleachers, and at the few daring couples out on the gym floor, intently, like he was trying to find somebody.
So was I.
Tony Williams sang about falling in love all over again, “as I did then.”
And she walked in.
For thirty years I’d been haunted by this memory. It was strong enough to get me out of prison, to send me back in Thornberg’s machine, and now I was standing just across a high school gym from her.
And she was just a girl. Just a 15-year-old girl.
Skinny and shy and awkward, her first night in a new town, talked into coming to this dance by her mother and the principal of the school, both of them afraid she would go all summer without making any friends.
And then her mother said something to her that made her laugh and her head dropped down and the long red hair fell over her face and it wasn’t just a girl anymore, it was LeeAnn, and I felt like somebody had just put a fist into my throat.
I turned my back on her and stood in the doorway, letting the hot night air work on my eyes until I could see again.
Something moved, just out of the range of the lanterns. Carolyn and the boy again, I thought. I didn’t want to see them, didn’t even want to think about them anymore. Hadn’t I done enough? What more did they want from me?
I was turning back to look at LeeAnn when a flash of color across the gym distracted me. The man from Upton’s, the one in the sport shirt, darted through the crowd, fingers working against his left side.
A voice behind me said, “Come outside and we’ll talk.” The delivery was as deep and smooth as a TV announcer’s.
I turned. Two of them filled the doorway, tall, non-descript, their eyes and mouths so hard it looked like their facial nerves had been cut. They would have made terrific proctors.
Admit it, I told myself. You want to believe it. If the proctors come from out there somewhere, that lets you off the hook. It lets everybody off. Sure TV rots people’s brains and fast food makes people fat and gives them heart attacks, but it’s not our fault. We’re just being manipulated by creatures of vastly superior technology.
“Outside,” one of them said. “Let’s go.”
But suppose you really did want to take over the world. Where would you start? Level Washington with your laser cannons? Why not just take over a few ad agencies? Tell people they want to buy lots of polyester, throw your weight behind mindless situation comedies. In a few years people don’t care what they watch, or what they eat, or what they wear, and after a while they don’t care about anything else either. You’ve got everything, without having to fire a shot.
Except maybe a few in the desert, just to keep in practice.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, letting them maneuver me out onto the playground. “What’s going on?’”
The one in the lead showed me a pistol. It looked a lot like a squirt gun I used to have except that the end of the barrel was hollow and the thing had a heavy, chromed sense of menace about it. “The Others want to talk to you. “
“Others? What Others?”
“They’re waiting in the ship. Outside town.” Either this is real, I thought, or it isn’t. If I could bring back a shirt and a piece of newspaper then it was probably real, or at least real enough to get me killed.
I decided to be scared.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s talk. What do you want to talk about?”
“Over there,” said the one with the gun.
I had just looked to see where he was pointing when a wail came out of the darkness. It sounded like it had been building up inside of something that wasn’t strong enough to hold it and it had just blown its way free.
Jeremy.
“What’s that?” whispered the one with the pistol.
“It’s that kid, I think,” said the other one.
“Well, shut him up, for God’s sake.”
The second alien disappeared into the shadows just as Jeremy screamed. The one with the gun looked around involuntarily and I went for him.
We hit the asphalt and rolled. I felt one knee tear out of my pants, just like in the old days. The alien was bigger and stronger than I was and he came out on top. He was pounding at me with his left hand, trying to get the gun around to use it on me. I grabbed his right wrist with both hands and yanked his elbow down into the pavement. The gun rattled in his grip and I slammed the elbow again. This time the gun came loose and skittered away into the darkness.
With both hands free he really opened up on me. I tried to cover up, but I didn’t have enough hands, and he got a good one into my ribs. Everything turned white for a second and he started on my face and head.
I thought maybe I should have let him keep the gun. That way it would at least have been quick. In a few
more seconds he was going to kill me with his bare hands anyway.
Just like they’d killed LeeAnn.
I went a little berserk, but all it got me was a knee in the gut. I was finished.
A sound whipped through the air above me. I saw a flash of pink light and then the alien fell off of me.
I rolled onto my side and pulled my knees up to my chest. I was still fighting for breath when my eyes cleared enough to see Carolyn a few feet away, still holding the gun straight out in front of her, a stunned look on her face. Jeremy sounded like pieces of his throat were coming loose, and a shadow flashed in the corner of my vision.
“Carolyn,” I said, and she came unstuck, firing the pistol again. I saw the second alien fall as Jeremy’s scream cut off in mid-air,
I got onto my hands and knees. In the distance, like some kind of cosmic soundtrack, I could hear Brenda Lee singing “I’m Sorry” in the gym. The music echoed flatly off the asphalt.
“You okay, mister?” Carolyn asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” For once I was glad to see her.
A hand laser, I thought. A junior version of the thing on their ship that had cut that line through the desert. Like it or not, the aliens were as real as anything else in this version of 1961. Whether this was really my past or just some kind of metaphor, the aliens were a part of it.
Jeremy staggered over and threw his arms around Carolyn’s waist. Even in the dimness of the playground I could see that her eyes were dry and clear. She looked at the gun in her hand. “This changes things,” she said. “This changes everything.”
The words echoed in my mind. I thought of Thornberg and his Many Worlds. The smallest thing, he’d said, can change the entire universe. In time.
“Back at the dance,” I said. “There’s more of...them.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “aliens.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “We’ll take care of it.”
“Take care of it? But you’re just...” I tried to stand up and didn’t make it.