by Diane Duane
Uli grunted. “German,” he said, and went to the other side of the room to pull a red metal toolchest on wheels over beside the chair. “I would not have it here, but unfortunately the tourists expect them.”
“I thought they all came from here,” Rob said.
Uli gave him an ironic look. “Given the choice to either make cuckoo clocks or Rolexes,” he said, “which would you make? Those things come from the Black Forest…and meanwhile, Orson Welles has a lot to answer for. Sit down.”
Rob sat down while Uli pulled the top drawer of the chest open, revealing a number of white paper packages about two inches square. Rob suddenly realized that what he had mistaken for a toolchest was actually a medical crash cart, and besides the white paper packages, that top drawer was packed with soft foam cut out to hold numerous syringes and vials. Rob looked nervously at these as Uli picked up one of the paper packages and peeled it open, revealing a round self-stick electrode pad with a trailing wire. Rob found that he had begun to shiver. He hoped Uli would think it was anticipation. “You said you were going to tell me how this works…”
“Ach, there I would come up against the language barrier,” Uli said as he parted Rob’s hair toward the back and touched the electrode into place: Rob felt a brief sting of cold from the lubricant on the pad. “You of all people should know how it is. Talk tech to the nontechnical, it just muddies the waters.” Uli peeled another electrode and chose another spot, put the contact in place. “The mind knows the time. The heart knows the place. Everything else is engineering.”
“Oh, come on. That’s just too New Age and fuzzy. There must be more to going back in time than just using the mind and the heart.”
“Hold still. The spatial dislocation is handled by limbic and subcortical keleological transit processes,” Uli said, putting another electrode in place at the base of Rob’s skull. “Does that sound better to you? And if it does, why? All instrumentality or intervention useful to humans in this world can at base be classified in one of three ways: as science, magic or chicken soup. There is no special virtue in science when one of the others will do as well. To prefer it all the time is snobbery. Though in this case it is valid enough: you think the mind and the body are two different things? Where one goes, the other must follow, assuming there are no unresolved issues to interfere. But anyway, it is not back in time you go,” Uli said. “It’s forward.”
Rob’s eyes widened. “Uh, listen, Uli…”
“It is the same thing,” Uli said, unconcerned, as he fastened on the last electrode. “You cannot change the way the river flows. Time can only go forward: it is no good as time otherwise. You will just go all the way around, until you come out behind the originating time instead of in front of it. Is this a problem for you?”
Rob blinked. “It seems a long way out of the way, I guess…”
“The only way to get where you are going,” Uli said, “cannot be out of your way. By definition.” He checked the last connection. “Ready?”
Rob looked around him, carefully, so as not to dislodge the wires. “Is that all?”
Uli consented to smile just a little. “You want flashing lights? Machines that make big impressive noises like overheating engines when they run? Unfortunately I must disappoint you.” He went over to the PC on its desk by the wall, checked it, tapped briefly at its keyboard, did something with its mouse, clicked a couple of times, and then walked carefully once right around Rob, checking the big blind free-standing cabinets there.
“It’s a car battery in there, right?” Rob said, looking at the metal toolchest. “And tomorrow morning there’s going to be a big headline in Blick: Billionaire Victim of Homebrew Electroshock Treatment.”
“Too many words for Blick. Still… ‘homebrew,’” Uli said. “I wonder how they will translate that into German? Probably they will just say ‘homebrew.’ We usually find other languages’ neologisms cooler than our own.” He looked at Rob, and his expression said tch, tch. “You are a very reasonable man,” Uli said. “The problem is, now you must go where reason will not take you. That, you must let go.”
The tone had turned just briefly stern again, showing that glint of steel at the edge. Rob swallowed, feeling a sudden resonance in his mind, in his bones, between this moment and some other. Everything abruptly went uncertain. “I’ve done this before, haven’t I,” he said.
Uli simply looked at him. Why did he seem so unsurprised by what I told him? Rob wondered. How did he—
Otherwise you would not have come to me again, memory said.
Rob blinked. Again?…
But a second later, the world steadied itself once more. Just déjà vu, Rob thought. I’ve had it a hundred times before…
Just never in a situation like this.
I think…
Uli crumpled up the electrode-peelings and put them in a small garbage can by one of the workbenches, then picked up a dishtowel and came back to Rob, standing in front of him. “Now the final warning,” Uli said, coming around in front of Rob again and wiping the electrode-lubricant off his hands. “I told you this before, but no one believes me until we get to this point. So I tell you again. The past is amber: a solid. The odds that you will be able to change anything, to free anything from the amber and bring it back, are a million to one. If that is the point of your travel, I must remind you of this now.”
Rob frowned. We’ll see about that, he thought. “I’m going anyway.”
“Of course you are. Everyone does.” Uli shrugged. “So, go well. And now, think about where and why you go.” He turned. “When you get back, would you like a coffee?”
“Uh, yes, thank you.”
Uli went out and shut the door behind him. Rob waited for a shock, a buzz…but nothing happened. Finally, because doing anything else would force him to admit to himself that he’d been had, Rob sat back in the typing chair, closed his eyes, and thought about why he was going.
*
The where took no time at all. The first thing he noticed was the faint clean scent that he hadn’t smelled in thirty years. Rob opened his eyes in the dark and looked around him. He was standing in the back yard, down by the gigantic quince bush that had always threatened to take over the whole area around the back gate where the store’s trucks parked. It was in flower, the peach-colored blossoms now bluish-pale in the starlight and the light of the mercury vapor streetlight beyond the high chain-link gate. Up at the top of the slight rise on which they stood, the house and store loomed dark. Everything was silence.
Except for a slight rustling in the bushes near where the ladder hung against the feed-shed wall.
Aha, Rob thought, and smiled grimly in the darkness, his fists balling at the sound. He stepped toward it, stopped. “You have till the count of three,” he said, “to get your sorry ass out of here before I call the cops. One—”
Nothing.
“Two—” Rob paused. “Buddy, you don’t know about Sergeant McCallister down at the precinct, do you? He really likes taking suspects into that back room, and—”
A man’s shape all in dark clothes erupted out of the bushes, running helter-skelter for the gate. He swarmed up it, over it, dropped to the far side, and ran.
Rob stood there waiting for the sound of footsteps to vanish down the back alley. Then he turned, looking at the house. There was a growing tumult in his head that he was having trouble understanding, but one thought came clear through it: I just want to see them. Just want to know they’re still there.
Silently Rob unhooked the ladder from the side of the feed shed and went up the hill with it, past the parked trucks, up the old stone stairs to the house. Very quietly he extended the ladder, and went up it carefully: a fall here would be bad.
The hole in the roof gaped before him. Rob braced himself carefully against the shingles there, stepped in.
Darkness. But he was used to being in here in the dark…and he knew, better than anything, the exact location of the thing he had come for.
T
he box was there, on the floor, behind a pile of other boxes. Rob knelt down in front of it, reached out to it, eased the top flap open. The special smell of the glassine envelopes floated up to him. He reached out in the dim starlight coming through the hole in the roof and reached out to touch the edge of Captain Thunder Number One…
Something hit him from behind, knocked him flat.
Rob went face down on the plywood covering the rafters, only a few feet from where the flooring stopped entirely and he would have gone straight down through his own bedroom ceiling. A second later someone was pummeling his back, his neck, the back of his head. “You bastard!” a small voice whispered in fury. “Leave them alone! Leave my comics alone! They’re all I have!”
Rob rolled sideways, away from where the rafters went bare, back toward the piled-up trunks and boxes in the dark. The small violent attacker fell off his back, scrambled to its hands and knees at the same time Rob did, stared him in the face.
It was Robby. Was I really that skinny? Rob thought. Did I really think that buzz-cut looked good on me? But the small figure in striped pajamas and bathrobe was glaring at him in utter rage, and questions of how he’d looked when he was ten now withered in the glare.
“I dreamed this happening, just a little while ago,” the boy whispered. “I kept waking up and falling asleep again all night, and I dreamed it different ways. Once the other guy just went out with them. I yelled, but he got away. This time the other guy ran away, and you came in instead. But you just want to steal them, too, and I won’t be able to stop you, and it’s going to be the same! It’s always going to be the same! Why did you make it this way?!” Robby was crying now, but in no way did it take the edge off his rage. “What kind of bastard keeps trying to steal some kid’s comic books?”
Rob started to answer. “You’ve got it all wrong,” Rob whispered. “That wasn’t me! I came here to—” Steal them before the other guy did? he thought. Boy, he’s not going to like the sound of that—
And then Rob fell silent as, in memory, this scene in which he stood re-presented itself to him another way, in memory…as if he was seeing it all happen from a slightly different angle. That dark shape escaping out the hole in the roof, with the box under his arm—this time Robby saw a profile. It had been a stranger’s face to Robby then.
But it was not strange to Rob now, for he saw it every morning in the mirror.
He reeled. I did steal them first…at least once.
Why didn’t I remember this before? Because I hadn’t made it happen yet?
Or maybe now I have…and my memory is of the world I made. And the me I made…
“Oh, my God,” Rob said softly as he knelt there, and he hid his face in his hands. He had very little time. It would only take a few minutes for his dad and mom to hear what was happening, and get up here.
What will I do…?!
How many times have I been in this moment?…
Lots, probably. I have enough money to do it again and again.
But how many times have I screwed it up?
He would have thought that once you’d repaired time, you shouldn’t have been able to remember how it had been broken. But apparently if you stood at the right spot, you could. Memories were tangling and writhing in Rob’s head like a nest of snakes, images and realities jostling one another, trying to push one another out of place. Here, at the nexus moment, they were all accessible. Unresolved issues, Uli had said….
But these are what I came for. What I’m going to be paying millions of dollars to reach. I don’t want to just see them. I want to take them back with me. I want to save them. That’s what all this is about—
He rubbed his eyes, let his hands fall. “Robby, listen to me,” Rob said. “Let me have them. I can take them where they’ll always be safe.”
“What’s the use of them being safe if I can’t have them?” Robby said, anguished.
“But you will have them. I’m you.”
“You’re not me now! And I don’t care about having them when I’m old! I care about having them now! I need them now!” His voice choked up. “I dreamed you too. I don’t want to be the me I’m going to be if I have to lose these! I don’t want to be you!”
Rob fell silent, unable to think of anything to say to that.
Except, eventually:
Neither do I.
That’s what all this is about.
Downstairs, Rob’s parents’ bedroom door creaked. His and Robby’s heads both turned.
Do it now, said a voice in the back of his mind. Take them. Run. It’ll be what happened. And Captain Thunder will be safe with you.
Rob stared at the box.
What kind of bastard steals comic books from a kid? said another voice.
Rob put his hands on the box again, one on either side. He had never felt anything as utterly as he now felt this plain smooth cardboard against his skin. Inside the box, all the color, all the joy, a whole childhood lost, seemed to boil and seethe like a cartoned volcano.
If you don’t take them now…you won’t be you, said one of the voices in his head. Beware…
Footsteps started to come up the stairs. Rob’s eyes met Robby’s.
Rob tried to swallow the lump in his throat, failed. “Captain Thunder,” Rob said with difficulty, “would never steal. Not even from Emperor Fulgor.”
Very slowly, Robby’s eyes began to shine with something besides repressed tears.
Rob got hurriedly to his feet, blinking. He made his way to the hole in the roof, stepped out of it, found the first step of the ladder. He heard the attic door open. Rob went down the ladder too fast, blinking hard, unable to see where he was going in the dark. It wasn’t supposed to go this way, he thought, as he misstepped, and fell—
*
The crash shook every bone in him. Rob sat up too suddenly, and immediately felt woozy. There were workbenches all around him, and pegboards on the walls: and the noise hadn’t been him falling after all—just the sound of something in the workshop blowing up.
“Come on, now,” Uli’s voice said. “Sit up. That is right. Here is your coffee.”
Bleary, Rob reached out and took the plain white ceramic coffee mug. The stuff in it was brewed darker than he usually liked it, but it was also half milk: he drank it down greedily. When Rob finished, he looked around and saw Uli kneeling by the red metal crash cart, poking at its innards with a resigned expression and making that tch, tch sound again. “Oh my, “ Uli said, “that was the equivocator.”
“Will it take long to fix?”
“The time machine will be working again by last week,” Uli said, standing up, “if I can get the parts.” He smiled that seldom smile at Rob again. “See, now, who says the Swiss have no sense of humor.”
It didn’t seem to be a question. “So,” Uli said. “It is as I told you. yes? Bringing things back…is usually impossible.”
Rob looked for somewhere to put the mug. Uli took it from him, and they both noticed the way his hands were shaking. “Yes,” Rob said. “Physical things, anyway.”
Uli looked at him thoughtfully, and nodded. “Yes. Meantime, the tram back to the Hauptbahnhof will be along in a few minutes. So: are you satisfied?”
Rob wasn’t sure what to answer. Yet he felt better than he had for a long time before he left: more cheerful—somehow more whole. Why? I didn’t get what I came for.
But he had gotten something else instead. “Yes,” he said.
“We will see,” Uli said. “I will bill you for the repair after you return home and have some time to see whether it is complete. Meanwhile, I suggest you contact your staff tonight. Your company is about to announce that they have mislaid you, and if that happens, the stock price will suffer, which will in turn impair both my fee and your ability to pay it.”
Rob drank the coffee for a few moments, thinking, then stood up. “Why do you need to charge a fee at all?” he said. “With this technology, you could be richer than I am.”
Uli sniffed, an
amused sound. “I do not need the fee,” he said. “But if you did not pay what the trip was worth to you, you would get no result. Now hurry: the tram comes in two minutes.”
He walked Rob toward the door. One last glance Rob got of the workshop as they left it—a closer look at the unusual clock hanging on the wall near the doorway, the one with the pendulum like a crescent moon. As Rob went by it, he saw he had been wrong about the crescent shape. It was not a moon. It was a scythe, the inner edge glinting with the grey of sharpened steel.
At the door on the street, Rob paused. “Are you for real?” he said. “Is this place for real? Or will you just vanish when I go?”
Uli made that amused sniff again. “Without me, there is no reality,” he said. “But meanwhile, one must make a living. You will not need me in this mode again. But if one of your clocks breaks—“ He shook Rob’s hand. “Auf wiedersehen.”
Rob went around the corner to catch the tram.
*
Half an hour later he called his office from the Hauptbahnhof, and spent some time sweet-talking Chei into forgiving him. The next morning, the second-string Lear was sitting in a civil-aviation slot at Kloten, and Chei met him at its door with his proper passport and a pile of paperwork. By that evening they were home, back at HQ: and when the ruckus had settled down and everyone left him alone at last, Rob went to the safe to put his bogus passport away.
The click of the safe’s opening sounded odd, muted. As the door swung open, he saw why.
It was almost completely full of stacked glassine envelopes.
His hands trembling, Rob reached in to the top of the left-hand stack and drew the envelope out. Inside it was a dramatic splash of grey and silver against a sky full of clouds and lightning, and a heroic face, smiling, half-hidden under the silver helmet: Captain Thunder, issue one.
Rob sat down shakily at his desk, slipped the comic out of the envelope and laid it carefully on the blotter. He read it, cover to cover, as twilight settled down outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The old, old joy came up from the page to meet him, as if it had never been gone.