The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes, it came as a terrible shock to me,” Ted tells Ellie. “Having her disappear like that. She simply vanished from the face of the earth, as far as anyone can determine. They’ve tried every possible way of tracing her and there hasn’t been a clue.” Ellie’s flawless forehead furrows in a fitful frown. “Was she unhappy?” she asks, “Do you think she may have done away with herself?” Ted shakes his head. “I don’t know. You live with a person for eleven years and you think you know her pretty well, and then one day something absolutely incomprehensible occurs and you realize how impossible it is ever to know another human being at all. Don’t you agree?” Ellie nods gravely. “Yes, oh, yes, certainly!” she says. He smiles down at her and takes her hands in his. Softly he says, “Let’s not talk about Alice any more, shall we? She’s gone and that’s all I’ll ever know.” He hears a pulsing symphonic crescendo of shimmering angelic choirs as he embraces her and murmurs, “I love you, Ellie. I love you.”

  She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. Young Martin drops instantly, twitches once, lies still. Dark blood begins to seep through the dense blond curls of his hair. How strange to see Martin with golden hair, she thinks, as she kneels beside his body. She puts her hand to the bloody place, probes timidly, feels the deep indentation. Is he dead? She isn’t sure how to tell. He isn’t moving. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. She wonders if she ought to hit him again, just to make certain. Then she remembers something she’s seen on television, and takes her mirror from her purse. Holds it in front of his face. No cloud forms. That’s pretty conclusive: you’re dead, Martin. R.I.P. Martin Jamieson, 1923-1947. Which means that Martha Jamieson Porter (1948- ) will never now be conceived, and that automatically obliterates the existence of her son Theodore Porter (1968- ). Not bad going, Alice, getting rid of unloved husband and miserable shrewish mother-in-law all in one shot. Sorry, Martin. Bye-bye, Ted. (R.I.P. Theodore Porter, 1968-1947. Eh?) She rises, goes into the bathroom with the steel pipe and carefully rinses it off. Then she puts it back into her purse. Now to go back to the machine and return to 2006, she thinks. To start my new life. But as she leaves the apartment, a tall, lean man steps out of the hallway shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. “Time Patrol,” he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. “You’re under arrest for temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.”

  Today has been a better day than yesterday, low on crises and depressions, but he still feels a headache coming on as he lets himself into the house. He is braced for whatever bitchiness Alice may have in store for him this evening. Bu she seems oddly relaxed and amiable. “Can I get you a drink, Ted?” she asks. “How did your day go?” He smiles and says, “Well, I think we may have salvaged the Hammond account after all. Otherwise nothing special happened. And you? What did you do today, love?” She shrugs. “Oh, the usual stuff,” she says. “The bank, the post office, my identity-reinforcement session.”

  If you had the money, Martin asks himself, how far back would you send her? 1947, that would be the year, I guess. My last year as a single man. No sense complicating things. Off you go, Alice baby, to 1947. Let’s make it March. By June I was engaged and by September Martha was on the way, though I didn’t find that out until later. Yes: March, 1947. So Young Martin answers the doorbell and sees an attractive girl in the hall—a woman, really, older than he is, maybe thirty or thirty-two. Slender, dark-haired, nicely constructed. Odd clothing: a clinging gray tunic, very short, made of some strange fabric that flows over her body like a stream. How it achieves that liquid effect around the pleats is beyond him. “Are you Martin Jamieson?” she asks. And quickly answers herself. “Yes, of course, you must be. I recognize you. How handsome you were!” He is baffled. He knows nothing, naturally, about this gift from his aged future self. “Who are you?” he asks. “May I come in first?” she says. He is embarrassed by his lack of courtesy and waves her inside. Her eyes glitter with mischief. “You aren’t going to believe this,” she tells him, “but I’m your grandson’s wife.”

  “Would you like to try out one of our demonstration models?” the salesman asks pleasantly. “There’s absolutely no cost or obligation.” Ted looks at Alice. Alice looks at Ted. Her frown mirrors his inner uncertainty. She too must be wishing that they had never come to the Temponautics showroom. The salesman, pattering smoothly onward, says, “In these demonstrations we usually send our potential customers fifteen or twenty minutes into the past. I’m sure you’ll find it fascinating. While remaining in the machine, you’ll be able to look through a viewer and observe your own selves actually entering this very showroom a short while ago. Well? Will you give it a try? You go first, Mrs. Porter. I assure you it’s going to be the most unique experience you’ve ever had.” Alice, uneasy, tries to back off, but the salesman prods her in a way that is at once gentle and unyielding, and she steps reluctantly into the time machine. He closes the door. A great business of adjusting fine controls ensues. Then the salesman throws a master switch. A green glow envelopes the machine and it disappears, although something transparent and vague—retinal afterimage? the ghost of the machine?—remains dimly visible. The salesman says, “She’s now gone a short distance into her own past. I’ve programmed the machine to take her back eighteen minutes and keep her there for a total elapsed interval of six minutes, so she can see the entire opening moments of your visit here. But when I return her to Now Level, there’s no need to match the amount of elapsed time in the past, so that from our point of view she’ll have been absent only some thirty seconds. Isn’t that remarkable, Mr. Porter? It’s one of the many extraordinary paradoxes we encounter in the strange new realm of time travel.” He throws another switch. The time machine once more assumes solid form. “Voilà!” cries the salesman. “Here is Mrs. Porter, returned safe and sound from her voyage into the past.” He flings open the door of the time machine. The passenger compartment is empty. The salesman’s face crumbles. “Mrs. Porter?” he shrieks in consternation. “Mrs. Porter? I don’t understand! How could there have been a malfunction? This is impossible! Mrs. Porter? Mrs. Porter?”

  She hurries down the dirty street toward the tall brick building. This is the place. Upstairs. Fifth floor, apartment 5-J. As she starts to ring the doorbell, a tall, lean man steps out of the shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. “Time Patrol,” he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. “You’re under arrest for contemplated temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.”

  “But I haven’t any grandson,” he sputters. “I’m not even mar—” She laughs. “Don’t worry about it!” she tells him. “You’re going to have a daughter named Martha and she’ll have a son named Ted and I’m going to marry Ted and we’ll have two children named Bobby and Tink. And you’re going to live to be an old, old man. And that’s all you need to know. Now let’s have a little fun.” She touches a catch at the side of her tunic and the garment falls away in a single fluid cascade. Beneath it she is naked. Her nipples stare up at him like blind pink eyes. She beckons to him. “Come on!” she says hoarsely. “Get undressed, Martin! You’re wasting time!”

  Alice giggles nervously. “Well, as a matter of fact,” she says to the salesman, “I think I’m willing to let my husband be the guinea pig. How about it, Ted?” She turns toward him. So does the salesman. “Certainly, Mr. Porter. I know you’re eager to give our machine a test run, yes?” No, Ted thinks, but he feels the pressure of events propelling him willy-nilly. He gets into the machine. As the door closes on him he fears that claustrophobic panic will overwhelm him; he is reassured by the sight of a handle on the door’s inner face. He pushes on it and the door opens, and he steps out of the machine just in time to see his earlier self coming into the Temponautics showroom with Alice. The salesman is going forward to greet them. Ted is now eighteen minutes into his own past. Alice and the other Ted stare at him, aghast. The salesman whirls and exclaims, “Wait a second, you aren’t supposed to get out
of—” How stupid they all look! How bewildered! Ted laughs in their faces. Then he rushes past them, nearly knocking his other self down, and erupts into the shopping-center plaza. He sprints in a wild frenzy of exhilaration toward the parking area. Free, he thinks. I’m free at last. And I didn’t have to kill anybody.

  Suppose I rent a machine, Alice thinks, and go back to 1947 and kill Martin? Suppose I really do it? What if there’s some way of tracing the crime to me? After all, a crime committed by a person from 2006 who goes back to 1947 will have consequences in our present day. It might change all sorts of things. So they’d want to catch the criminal and punish him, or better yet prevent the crime from being committed in the first place. And the time machine company is bound to know what year I asked them to send me to. So maybe it isn’t such an easy way of committing a perfect crime. I don’t know. God, I can’t understand any of this. But perhaps I can get away with it. Anyway, I’m going to give it a try. I’ll show Ted he can’t go on treating me like dirt.

  They lie peacefully side by side, sweaty, drowsy, exhausted in the good exhaustion that comes after a first-rate screw. Martin tenderly strokes her belly and thighs. How smooth her skin is, how pale, how transparent! The little blue veins so clearly visible. “Hey,” he says suddenly. “I just thought of something. I wasn’t wearing a rubber or anything. What if I made you pregnant? And if you’re really who you say you are. Then you’ll go back to the year 2006 and you’ll have a kid and he’ll be his own grandfather, won’t he?” She laughs. “Don’t worry much about it,” she says.

  A wave of timidity comes over her as she enters the Temponautics office. This is crazy, she tells herself. I’m getting out of here. But before she can turn around, the salesman she spoke to the day before materializes from a side room and gives her a big hello. Mr. Friesling. He’s practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation of landing a contract. “So nice to see you again, Mrs. Porter.” She nods and glances worriedly at the demonstration models. “How much would it cost,” she asks, “to spend a few hours in the spring of 1947?”

  Sunday is the big family day. Four generations sitting down to dinner together: Martin, Martha, Ted and Alice, Bobby and Tink. Ted rather enjoys these reunions, but he knows Alice loathes them, mainly because of Martha. Alice hates her mother-in-law. Martha has never cared much for Alice, either. He watches them glaring at each other across the table. Meanwhile old Martin stares lecherously at the gulf between Alice’s breasts. You have to hand it to the old man, Ted thinks. He’s never lost the old urge. Even though there’s not a hell of a lot he can do about gratifying it, not at his age. Martha says sweetly, “You’d look ever so much better, Alice dear, if you’d let your hair grow out to its natural color.” A sugary smile from Martha. A sour scowl from Alice. She glowers at the older woman. “This is its natural color,” she snaps.

  Mr. Friesling hands her the standard contract form. Eight pages of densely packed type. “Don’t be frightened by it, Mrs. Porter. It looks formidable, but actually it’s just a lot of empty legal rhetoric. You can show it to your lawyer, if you like. I can tell you, though, that most of our customers find no need for that.” She leafs through it. So far as she can tell, the contract is mainly a disclaimer of responsibility. Temponautics, Ltd, agrees to bear the brunt of any malfunction caused by its own demonstrable negligence, but wants no truck with acts of God or with accidents brought about by clients who won’t obey the safety regulations. On the fourth page Alice finds a clause warning the prospective renter that the company cannot be held liable for any consequences of actions by the renter which wantonly or willfully interfere with the already determined course of history. She translates that for herself: If you kill your husband’s grandfather, don’t blame us if you get in trouble. She skims the remaining pages. “It looks harmless enough,” she says. “Where do I sign?”

  As Martin comes out of the bathroom he finds Martha blocking his way. “Excuse me,” he says mildly, but she remains in his path. She is a big fleshy woman. At fifty-eight she affects the fashions of the very young, with grotesque results; he hates that aspect of her. He can see why Alice dislikes her so much. “Just a moment,” Martha says. “I want to talk to you, Father.” “About what?” he asks. “About those looks you give Alice. Don’t you think that’s a little too much? How tasteless can you get?” “Tasteless? Are you anybody to talk about taste, with your face painted green like a fifteen-year-old?” She looks angry: he’s scored a direct hit. She replies, “I just think that at the age of eighty-two you ought to have a greater regard for decency than to go staring down your own grandson’s wife’s front.” Martin sighs. “Let me have the staring, Martha. It’s all I’ve got left.”

  He is at the office, deep in complicated negotiations, when his autosecretary bleeps him and announces that a call has come in from a Mr. Friesling, of the Union Boulevard Plaza office of Temponautics, Ltd. Ted is puzzled by that: What do the time machine people want with him? Trying to line him up as a customer? “Tell him I’m not interested in time trips,” Ted says. But the autosecretary bleeps again a few moments later. Mr. Friesling, it declares, is calling in reference to Mr. Porter’s credit standing. More baffled than before, Ted orders the call switched over to him. Mr. Friesling appears on the desk screen. He is small-featured and bright-eyed, rather like a chipmunk. “I apologize for troubling you, Mr. Porter,” he begins. “This is strictly a routine credit check, but it’s altogether necessary. As you surely know, your wife has requested rental of our equipment for a fifty-nine-year time jaunt, and inasmuch as the service fee for such a trip exceeds the level at which we extend automatic credit, our policy requires us to ask you if you’ll confirm the payment schedule that she has requested us to—” Ted coughs violently. “Hold on,” he says. “My wife’s going on a time jaunt? What the hell, this is the first time I’ve heard of that!”

  She is surprised by the extensiveness of the preparations. No wonder they charge so much. Getting her ready for the jaunt takes hours. They inoculate her to protect her against certain extinct diseases. They provide her with clothing in the style of the mid-twentieth century, ill-fitting and uncomfortable. They give her contemporary currency, but warn her that she would do well not to spend any except in an emergency, since she will be billed for it at its present-day numismatic value, which is high. They make her study a pamphlet describing the customs and historical background of the era and quiz her in detail. She learns that she is not under any circumstances to expose her breasts or genitals in public while she is in 1947. She must not attempt to obtain any mind-stimulating drugs other than alcohol. She should not say anything that might be construed as praise of the Soviet Union or of Marxist philosophy. She must bear in mind that she is entering the past solely as an observer, and should engage in minimal social interaction with the citizens of the era she is visiting. And so forth. At last they decide it’s safe to let her go. “Please come this way, Mrs. Porter,” Friesling says.

  After staring at the telephone a long while, Martin punches out Alice’s number. Before the second ring he loses his nerve and disconnects. Immediately he calls her again. His heart pounds so furiously that the medic, registering alarm on its delicate sensing apparatus, starts toward him. He waves the robot away and clings to the phone. Two rings. Three. Ah. “Hello?” Alice says. Her voice is warm and rich and feminine. He has his screen switched off. “Hello? Who’s there?” Martin breathes heavily into the mouthpiece. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Listen, you pervert, if you phone me once more—” Ah. Ah. Ah. A smile of bliss appears on Martin’s withered features. Alice hangs up. Trembling, Martin sags in his chair. Oh, that was good! He signals fiercely to the medic. “Let’s have the injection now, you metal monster!” He laughs. Dirty old man.

  Ted realizes that it isn’t necessary to kill a person’s grandfather in order to get rid of that person. Just interfere with some crucial event in that person’s past, is all. Go back and break up the marriage of Alice’s grandparents, for example. (Ho
w? Seduce the grandmother when she’s eighteen? “I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your intended bride is no virgin, and here’s the documentary evidence.” They were very grim about virginity back then, weren’t they?) Nobody would have to die. But Alice wouldn’t ever be born.

  Martin still can’t believe any of this, even after she’s slept with him. It’s some crazy practical joke, most likely. Although he wishes all practical jokes were as sexy as this one. “Are you really from the year 2006?” he asks her. She laughs prettily. “How can I prove it to you?” Then she leaps from the bed. He tracks her with his eyes as she crosses the room, breasts jiggling gaily. What a sweet little body. How thoughtful of my older self to ship her back here to me. If that’s what really happened. She fumbles in her purse and extracts a handful of coins. “Look here,” she says. “Money from the future. Here’s a dime from 1993. And this is a two-dollar piece from 2001. And here’s an old one, a 1979 Kennedy half dollar.” He studies the unfamiliar coins. They have a greasy look, not silvery at all. Counterfeits? They won’t necessarily be striking coins out of silver forever. And the engraving job is very professional. A two-dollar piece, eh? Well, you never can tell. And this. The half dollar. A handsome young man in profile. “Kennedy?” he says. “Who’s Kennedy?”