Up the Line

by Robert Silverberg

  “Sam,” I said, “I want to join the Time Service.”

  5.

  PLEASE ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS

  Name:

  Judson Daniel Elliott III

  Place of Birth:

  Newer York

  Date of Birth:

  11 October 2035

  Sex (M or F):

  M

  Citizen Registry Number:

  070=28=3479=xx5=100089891

  Academic Degrees—

  Bachelor:

  Columbia ’55

  Master:

  Columbia ’56

  Doctor:

  Harvard, Yale,

  Princeton, incomplete

  Scholar Magistrate:

  -----

  Other:

  -----

  Height:

  1 meter (s) 88 centimeters

  Weight:

  78 kg.

  Hair Color:

  black

  Eye Color:

  black

  Racial Index:

  8.5 C+

  Blood Group:

  BB 132

  Marriages (List Temporary and Permanent Liaisons, in order of registration, and duration of each):

  none

  Acknowledged Offspring:

  none

  Reason for Entering Time Service (limit: 100 words):

  To improve my knowledge of Byzantine

  culture, which is my special study area;

  to enlarge my acquaintance with human

  customs and behavior; to deepen my rela-

  tionship to other individuals through

  constructive service; to offer the bene-

  fits of my education thus far to those in

  need of information; to satisfy certain

  romantic longings common to young men.

  Names of Blood Relatives Currently Employed by Time Service:

  none

  6.

  Very little of the foregoing really mattered. I was supposed to keep the application on my person, like a talisman, in case anybody in the Time Service bureaucracy really wanted to see it as I moved through the stages of enrolling; but all that was actually necessary was my Citizen Registry Number, which gave the Time Service folk full access to everything else I had put on the form except my Reason for Entering Time Service, and much more besides. At the push of a node the master data center would disgorge not only my height, weight, date of birth, hair color, eye color, racial index, blood group, and academic background, but also a full list of all illnesses I had suffered, vaccinations, my medical and psychological checkups, sperm count, mean body temperature by seasons, size of all bodily organs including penis both flaccid and erect, all my places of residence, my kin to the fifth degree and the fourth generation, current bank balance, pattern of financial behavior, tax status, voting performance, record of arrests if any, preference in pets, shoe size, et cetera. Privacy is out of fashion, they tell me.

  Sam waited in the waiting room, molesting the hired help, while I was filling out my application. When I had finished my paperwork he rose and conducted me down a spiraling ramp into the depths of the Time Service building. Squat hammerheaded robots laden with equipment and documents rolled beside us on the ramp. A door in the wall opened and a secretary emerged; as she crossed our path Sam gave her a lusty tweaking of the nipples and she ran away shrieking. He goosed one of the robots, too. They call it appetite for life. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Sam said. “I play the part well, don’t I?”

  “What part? Satan?”

  “Virgil,” he said. “Your friendly spade guide to the nether regions. Turn left here.”

  We stepped onto a dropshaft and went down a long way.

  We appeared in a large steamy room at least fifty meters high and crossed a swaying rope bridge far above the floor. “How,” I asked, “is a new man who doesn’t have a guide supposed to find his way around in this building?”

  “With difficulty,” said Sam.

  The bridge led us into a glossy corridor lined with gaudy doors. One door had SAMUEL HERSHKOWITZ lettered on it in cutesy psychedelic lettering, real antiquarian stuff. Sam jammed his face into the scanner slot and the door instantly opened. We peered into a long narrow room, furnished in archaic fashion with blowup plastic couches, a spindly desk, even a typewriter, for God’s sake. Samuel Hershkowitz was a long, long, lean individual with a deeply tanned face, curling mustachios, sideburns, and a yard of chin. At the sight of Sam he came capering across the desk and they embraced furiously.

  “Soul brother!” cried Samuel Hershkowitz.

  “Landsmann!” yelled Sam the guru.

  They kissed cheekwise. They hugged. They pounded shoulders. Then they split and Hershkowitz looked at me and said, “Who?”

  “New recruit. Jud Elliott. Naive, but he’ll do for the Byzantium run. Knows his stuff.”

  “You have an application, Elliott?” Hershkowitz asked.

  I produced it. He scanned it briefly and said, “Never married, eh? You a pervo-deviant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Just an ordinary queer?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Scared of girls?”

  “Hardly, sir. I’m just not interested in taking on the permanent responsibilities of marriage.”

  “But you are hetero?”

  “Mainly, sir,” I said, wondering if I had said the wrong thing.

  Samuel Hershkowitz tugged at his sideburns. “Our Byzantium Couriers have to be above reproach, you understand. The prevailing climate up that particular line is, well, steamy. You can futz around all you want in the year 2059, but when you’re a Courier you need to maintain a sense of perspective. Amen. Sam, you vouch for this kid?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s good enough for me. But let’s just run a check, to be sure he isn’t wanted for a capital crime. We had a sweet, clean-cut kid apply last week, asking to do the Golgotha run, which of course requires real tact and saintliness, and when I looked into him I found he was wanted for causing protoplasmic decay in Indiana. And several other offenses. So, thus. We check.” He activated his data outlet, fed in my identification number, and got my dossier on his screen. It must have matched what I had put on my application, because after a quick inspection he blanked it, nodded, keyed in some notations of his own, and opened his desk. He took from it a smooth flat tawny thing that looked like a truss and tossed it to me. “Drop your pants and put this on,” he said. “Show him how, Sam.”

  I pressed the snap and my trousers fell. Sam wrapped the truss around my hips and clasped it in place; it closed seamlessly upon itself as though it had always been one piece. “This,” said Sam, “is your timer. It’s cued in to the master shunt system, synchronized to pick up the waves of transport impulses as they come forth. As long as you don’t let it run out of phlogiston, this little device is capable of moving you to any point in time within the last seven thousand years.”

  “No earlier?”

  “Not with this model. They aren’t allowing unrestricted travel to the prehistoric yet, anyway. We’ve got to open this thing up era by era, with care. Attend to me, now. The operating controls are simplicity itself. Right here, just over your left-hand Fallopian tubes, is a microswitch that controls backward and forward motion. In order to travel, you merely describe a semicircle with your thumb against this pressure point: from hip toward navel to go back in time, from navel toward hip to go forward. On this side is your fine tuning, which takes some training to use. You see the laminated dial—year, month, day, hour, minute? Yes, you’ve got to squint a little to read it; that can’t be helped. The years are calibrated in B.P.—Before Present—and the months are numbered, and so on. The trick lies in being able to make an instant calculation of your destination—843 years B.P., five months, eleven days, and so on—and setting the dials. It’s mostly arithmetic, but you’d be surprised how many people can’t translate February 11, 1192 into a quantity of years, months, and days ago. Naturally y
ou’ll have to master the knack if you’re going to be a Courier, but don’t worry about that now.”

  He paused and looked up at Hershkowitz, who said to me, “Sam is now going to give you your preliminary disorientation tests. If you pass, you’re in.”

  Sam strapped on a timer also.

  “Ever shunted before?” he asked.

  “Never.”

  “We gonna have some fun, baby.” He leered. “I’ll set your dial for you. You wait till I give the signal, then use the left-hand switch to turn the timer on. Don’t forget to pull your pants back up.”

  “Before or after I shunt?”

  “Before,” he said. “You can work the switch through your clothes. It’s never a good idea to arrive in the past with your pants around your knees. You can’t run fast enough that way. And sometimes you’ve got to be ready to run the second you get there.”

  7.

  Sam set my dial. I pulled up my pants. He touched his hand lightly to the left-hand side of his abdomen and vanished. I described an arc from my hip to my navel on my own belly with two fingertips. I didn’t vanish. Samuel Hershkowitz did.

  He went wherever candle flames go when they’re snuffed, and in the same instant Sam popped back into view beside me, and the two of us stood looking at each other in Hershkowitz’ empty office. “What happened?” I said. “Where is he?”

  “It’s half-past eleven at night,” said Sam. “He doesn’t work overtime, you know. We left him two weeks down the line when we made our shunt. We’re riding the time-winds now, boy.”

  “We’ve gone back two weeks into the past?”

  “We’ve gone two weeks up the line,” Sam corrected. “Also half a day, which is why it’s nighttime now. Let’s go take a walk around the city.”

  We left the Time Service building and rose to the third level of Under New Orleans. Sam didn’t seem to have any special destination in mind. We stopped at a bar for a dozen oysters apiece; we downed a couple of beers; we winked at tourists. Then we reached Under Bourbon Street and I realized suddenly why Sam had chosen to go back to this night, and I felt the tingle of fear in my scrotum and started suddenly to sweat. Sam laughed. “It always gets the new ones right around this point, Jud-baby. This is where most of the washouts wash out.”

  “I’m going to meet myself!” I cried.

  “You’re going to see yourself,” he corrected. “You better take good care not to meet yourself, not ever, or it’ll be all up for you. The Time Patrol will use you up if you pull any such trick.”

  “Suppose my earlier self happens to see me, though?”

  “Then you’ve had it. This is a test of your nervous system, man, and you better have the juice turned on. Here we go. You recognize that dumb-looking honky coming up the street?”

  “That’s Judson Daniel Elliott III.”

  “Yeah, man! Ever see anything so stupid in your life? Back in the shadows, man. Back in the shadows. White folks there, he ain’t smart, but he ain’t blind.”

  We huddled in a pool of darkness and I watched, sick-bellied, as Judson Daniel Elliott III, fresh off the pod out of Newer York, came wandering up the street toward the sniffer palace on the corner, suitcase in hand. I observed the slight slackness of his posture and the hayseed out-turning of his toes as he walked. His ears seemed amazingly large and his right shoulder was a trifle lower than his left. He looked gawky; he looked like a rube. He went past us and paused before the sniffer palace, staring intently at the two nude girls in the tank of cognac. His tongue slid forth and caressed his upper lip. He rocked on the balls of his toes. He rubbed his chin. He was wondering what his chances were of spreading the legs of one or the other of those bare beauties before the night was over. I could have told him that his chances were pretty good.

  He entered the sniffer palace.

  “How do you feel?” Sam asked me.

  “Shaky.”

  “At least you’re honest. It always hits them hard, the first time they go up the line and see themselves. You get used to it, after a while. How does he look to you?”

  “Like a clod.”

  “That’s standard too. Be gentle with him. He can’t help not knowing all the things you know. He’s younger than you are, after all.”

  Sam laughed softly. I didn’t. I was still dazed by the impact of seeing myself come up that street. I felt like my own ghost. Preliminary disorientations, Hershkowitz had said. Yes.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sam. “You’re doing fine.”

  His hand slipped familiarly into the front of my pants and I felt him make a small adjustment on my timer. He did the same to himself. He said, “Let’s shunt up the line.”

  He vanished. I followed him up the line. A blurry half instant later we stood side by side again, on the same street, at the same time of night.

  “When are we?” I asked.

  “Twenty-four hours previous to your arrival, in New Orleans. There’s one of you here and one of you in Newer York, getting ready to take the pod south. How does that catch you?”

  “Crosswise,” I said. “But I’m adapting.”

  “There’s more to come. Let’s go home now.”

  He took me to his flat. There was nobody there, because the Sam of this time slot was at work at the sniffer palace. We went into the bathroom and Sam adjusted my timer again, setting it 31 hours forward. “Shunt,” he said, and we went down the line together and came out still in Sam’s bathroom, on the next night. I heard the sound of drunken laughter coming from the next room; I heard hoarse gulping cries of lust. Swiftly Sam shut the bathroom door and palmed the seal. I realized that I was in the next room sexing with Betsy or Helen, and I felt fear return.

  “Wait here,” Sam said crisply, “and don’t let anybody in unless he knocks two longs and a short. I’ll be right back, maybe.”

  He went out. I locked the bathroom door after him. Two or three minutes passed. There came two long knocks and a short, and I opened up. Grinning, Sam said, “It’s safe to peek. Nobody’s in any shape to notice us. Come on.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “If you want to get into the Time Service you do.”

  We slipped out of the bathroom and went to sightsee the orgy. I had to fight to keep from coughing as the fumes hit my unready nostrils. In Sam’s living room I confronted acres of bare writhing flesh. To my left I saw Sam’s huge black body pounding against Helen’s sleek whiteness; all that was visible of her beneath him was her face, her arms (clasped across his broad back) and one leg (hooked around his butt). To my right I saw my own prior self down on the floor entwined with busty Betsy. We lay in a kamasutroid posture, she on her right hip, I on my left, her upper leg arched over me, my body curved and pivoted at an oblique angle to hers. In a kind of cold terror I watched myself having her. Although I’ve seen plenty of copulation scenes before, in the tridim shows, on the beaches, occasionally at parties, this was the first time I had ever witnessed myself in the act, and I was shattered by the grotesqueness of it, the idiot gaspings, the contorted features, the sweaty humpings. Betsy made bleating sounds of passion; our thrashing limbs rearranged themselves several times; my clutching fingers dug deep into her meaty buttocks; the mechanical thrustings went on and on and on. And my terror ebbed as I grew accustomed to the sight, and I found a cold clinical detachment stealing over me, and my fear-born perspiration dried and at last I stood there with my arms folded, coolly studying the activities on the floor. Sam smiled and nodded as if to tell me that I had passed a test. He reset my timer once more and we shunted together.

  The living room was empty of fornicators and free of fumes. “When are we now?” I asked.

  He said, “We’re back thirty-one hours and thirty minutes. In a little while now, you and I are going to come walking into the bathroom, but we won’t stay around to wait for that. Let’s go up on top of the town.”

  We journeyed uplevel to Old New Orleans, under the starry sky.

  The robot who monitors the comings and goings of the
eccentrics who like to go outdoors made note of us, and we passed through, into the quiet streets. Here was the real Bourbon Street; here were the crumbling buildings of the authentic French quarter. Spy-eyes mounted on the lacy grillwork balconies watched us, for in this deserted area the innocent are at the mercy of the depraved, and tourists are protected, through constant surveillance, against the marauders who prowl the surface city. We didn’t stay long enough to get into trouble, though. Sam looked around, considering things a bit, and positioned us against a building wall. As he adjusted my timer for another shunt, I said, “What happens if we materialize in space that’s already occupied by somebody or something?”

  “Can’t,” Sam said. “The automatic buffers cut in and we get kicked back instantly to our starting point. But it wastes energy, and the Time Service doesn’t like that, so we always try to find a nonconflicting area before we jump. Up against a building wall is usually pretty good, provided you can be fairly sure that the wall was in the same position at the time you’re shunting to.”

  “When are we going to now?”

  “Shunt and see,” he said, and jumped. I followed.

  The city came to life. People in twentieth-century clothes strolled the streets: men wearing neckties, women with skirts that came down to their knees, no real flesh showing, not even a nipple. Automobiles crashing along emitting fumes that made me want to vomit. Horns honking. Drills digging up the ground. Noise, stench, ugliness. “Welcome to 1961,” Sam said. “John F. Kennedy has just been sworn in as President. The very first Kennedy, dig? That thing up there is a jet airplane. That’s a traffic light. It tells when it’s safe for you to cross the street. Those up here are street lights. They work by electricity. There are no underlevels. This is the whole thing, the city of New Orleans, right here. How do you like it?”