A Pleasure to Burn (40 page)

Then I went upstairs past their door and went to bed and listened and there, behind the wall, the woman was saying over and over again, “I'm afraid, I'm afraid,” faintly, crying.

And lying there I was as cold as an ancient piece of ice placed between the blankets, and I was trembling, though I knew nothing, I knew everything, for now I knew where these travelers were from and what her nightmares were and what she was afraid of, and what they were running away from.

I figured it just before I went to sleep, with her crying faintly in my ears. Lionel Westercott, I thought, will be old enough to be president of the United States in the year 2035.

Somehow, I did not want the sun to rise in the morning.

To the Future

 

T
HE FIREWORKS SIZZLED ACROSS THE COOL-TILED
square, banged against adobe café walls, then rushed on hot wires to bash the high church tower, while a fiery bull ran about the plaza chasing boys and laughing men. It was a spring night in Mexico in the year 1938.

Mr. and Mrs. William Travis stood on the edge of the yelling crowd, smiling. The bull charged. Ducking, the man and wife ran, fire pelting them, past the brass band that pulsed out vast rhythms of La Paloma. The bull passed, a framework of bamboo and gunpowder, carried lightly on the shoulders of a charging Mexican.

“I've never enjoyed myself so much in my life,” gasped Susan Travis, stopping.

“It's terrific,” said William.

“It will go on, won't it? I mean our trip?”

He patted his breast pocket. “I've enough traveler's checks for a lifetime. Enjoy yourself. Forget it. They'll never find us.”

“Never?”

Now someone hurled giant firecrackers from the bell tower.

The bull was dead. The Mexican lifted its framework from his shoulders. Children clustered to touch the magnificent papier-maché animal.

“Let's examine the bull,” said William.

As they walked past the café entrance, Susan saw the strange man looking out at them, a white man in a white suit, with a thin, sunburned face. His eyes coldly watched them as they walked.

She would never have noticed him if it had not been for the bottles at his immaculate elbow; a fat bottle of crème de menthe, a clear bottle of vermouth, a flagon of cognac, and seven other bottles of assorted liqueurs, and, at his fingertips, ten small half-filled glasses from which, without taking his eyes off the street, he sipped, occasionally squinting, pressing his thin mouth shut upon the savor. In his free hand a thin Havana cigar smoked, and on a chair stood twenty cartons of Turkish cigarettes, six boxes of cigars and some packaged colognes.

“Bill—” whispered Susan.

“Take it easy,” William said. “That man's nobody.”

“I saw him in the plaza this morning.”

“Don't look back, keep walking, examine the papier-maché bull—here, that's it, ask questions.”

“Do you think he's from the Searchers?”

“They couldn't follow us!”

“They might!”

“What a nice bull,” said William to the man who owned it.

“He couldn't have followed us back through two hundred years, could he?”

“Watch yourself!” said William.

She swayed. He crushed her elbow tightly, steering her away.

“Don't faint.” He smiled, to make it look good. “You'll be all right. Let's go right in that café, drink in front of him, so if he is what we think he is, he won't suspect.”

“No, I couldn't.”

“We've got to—come on now. And so I said to David, that's ridiculous!” He spoke this last in a loud voice as they went up the café steps.

We are here, thought Susan. Who are we? Where are we going? What do we fear? Start at the beginning, she told herself, holding to her sanity, as she felt the adobe floor underfoot.

My name is Ann Kristen, my husband's name is Roger, we were born in the year 2155 A.D. And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness.

They walked into the café. The man was staring at them. A phone rang.

The phone startled Susan. She remembered a phone ringing two hundred years in the future, on that blue April morning in 2155, and herself answering it:

“Ann, this is René! Have you heard? I mean about Travel In Time, Incorporated? Trips to Rome in 21 A.D., trips to Napoleon's Waterloo, any time, anyplace!”

“René, you're joking.”

“No. Clinton Smith left this morning for Philadelphia in 1776. Travel In Time, Inc., arranges everything. Costs money. But think, to actually see the burning of Rome, to see Kublai Khan, Moses and the Red Sea! You've probably got an ad in your tube-mail now.”

She had opened the suction mail tube and there was the metal foil advertisement:

 

ROME AND THE BORGIAS!
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AT KITTY HAWK!

Travel In Time, Inc., can costume you, put you in a crowd during the assassination of Lincoln or Caesar! We guarantee to teach you any language you need to move freely in any civilization, in any year, without friction. Latin, Greek, ancient American colloquial. Take your vacation in Time as well as Place!

 

René's voice was buzzing on the phone. “Tom and I leave for 1492 tomorrow. They're arranging for Tom to sail with Columbus—isn't it amazing?”

“Yes,” murmured Ann, stunned. “What does the government say about this Time Machine Company?”

“Oh, the police have an eye on it. Afraid people might evade the draft, run off and hide in the Past. Everyone has to leave a security bond behind, his house and belongings, to guarantee return. After all, the war's on.”

“Yes, the war,” murmured Ann. “The war.”

Standing there, holding the phone, she had thought: Here is the chance my husband and I have talked and prayed over for so many years. We don't like the world of 2155. We want to run away from his work at the bomb factory—from any position with disease-culture units. Perhaps there is some chance for us, to escape, to run for centuries into a wild country of years where they will never find us and bring us back to burn our books, censor our thoughts, scald our minds with fear, march us, scream at us with radios…

The phone rang.

They were in Mexico in the year 1938.

She looked at the stained café wall.

Good workers for the Future State were allowed vacations into the Past to escape fatigue. And so she and her husband had moved back into 1938. They took a room in New York City, and enjoyed the theaters and the Statue of Liberty which still stood green in the harbor. And on the third day, they had changed their clothes and their names, and flown off to hide in Mexico.

“It must be him,” whispered Susan, looking at the stranger seated at the table. “Those cigarettes, the cigars, the liquor. They give him away. Remember our first night in the Past?”

A month ago, on their first night in New York, before their flight, they had tasted all the strange drinks, bought odd foods, perfumes, cigarettes of ten dozen rare brands, for they were scarce in the Future, where war was everything. So they had made fools of themselves, rushing in and out of stores, salons, tobacconists, going up to their room to get wonderfully ill.

And now here was this stranger, doing likewise, doing a thing that only a man from the Future would do, who had been starved for liquors and cigarettes too many years.

Susan and William sat and ordered a drink.

The stranger was examining their clothes, their hair, their jewelry, the way they walked and sat. “Sit easily,” said William under his breath. “Look as if you've worn this clothing style all your life.”

“We should never have tried to escape.”

“My God,” said William. “He's coming over. Let me do the talking.”

The stranger bowed before them. There was the faintest tap of heels knocking together. Susan stiffened. That military sound—unmistakable as that certain ugly rap on your door at midnight.

“Mr. Kristen,” said the stranger, “you did not pull up your pant legs when you sat down.”

William froze. He looked at his hands lying on either leg, innocently. Susan's heart was beating swiftly.

“You've got the wrong person,” said William, quickly. “My name's not Krisler.”

“Kristen,” corrected the stranger.

“I'm William Travis,” said William. “And I don't see what my pant legs have to do with you.”

“Sorry.” The stranger pulled up a chair. “Let us say I thought I knew you because you did not pull your trousers up. Everyone does. If they don't the trousers bag quickly. I am a long way from home, Mr.—Travis—and in need of company. My name is Simms.”

“Mr. Simms, we appreciate your loneliness, but we're tired. We're leaving for Acapulco tomorrow.”

“A charming spot. I was just there, looking for some friends of mine. They are somewhere. I shall find them yet. Oh, is the lady a bit sick?”

“Good night, Mr. Simms.”

They started out the door, William holding Susan's arm firmly. They did not look back when Mr. Simms called, “Oh, just one other thing.” He paused and then slowly spoke the words:

“Twenty-one fifty-five A.D.”

Susan shut her eyes and felt the earth falter under her. She kept going, into the fiery plaza, seeing nothing…

 

T
HEY LOCKED THE DOOR
of their hotel room. And then she was crying and they were standing in the dark, and the room tilted under them. Far away, firecrackers exploded, there was laughter in the plaza.

“What a damned, loud nerve,” said William. “Him sitting there, looking us up and down like animals, smoking his damn cigarettes, drinking his drinks. I should have killed him then!” His voice was nearly hysterical. “He even had the nerve to use his real name to us. The Chief of the Searchers. And the thing about my pant legs. I should have pulled them up when I sat. It's an automatic gesture of this day and age. When I didn't do it, it set me off from the others. It made him think: Here's a man who never wore pants, a man used to breech-uniforms and future styles. I could kill myself for giving us away!”

“No, no, it was my walk, these high heels, that did it. Our haircuts, so new, so fresh. Everything about us odd and uneasy.”

William turned on the light. “He's still testing us. He's not positive of us, not completely. We can't run out on him, then. We can't make him certain. We'll go to Acapulco, leisurely.”

“Maybe he is sure of us, but is just playing.”

“I wouldn't put it past him. He's got all the time in the world. He can dally here if he wants, and bring us back to the Future sixty seconds after we left it. He might keep us wondering for days, laughing at us.”

Susan sat on the bed, wiping the tears from her face, smelling the old smell of charcoal and incense.

“They won't make a scene, will they?”

“They won't dare. They'll have to get us alone to put us in the Time Machine and send us back.”

“There's a solution then,” she said. “We'll never be alone, we'll always be in crowds.”

Footsteps sounded outside their locked door.

They turned out the light and undressed in silence. The footsteps went away.

Susan stood by the window looking down at the plaza in the darkness. “So that building there is a church?”

“Yes.”

“I've often wondered what a church looked like. It's been so long since anyone saw one. Can we visit it tomorrow?”

“Of course. Come to bed.”

They lay in the dark room.

Half an hour later, their phone rang. She lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“The rabbits may hide in the forest,” said a voice, “but a fox can always find them.”

She replaced the receiver and lay back straight and cold in the bed.

Outside, in the year 1938, a man played three tunes upon a guitar, one following another …

During the night, she put her hand out and almost touched the year 2155. She felt her fingers slide over cool spaces of time, as over a corrugated surface, and she heard the insistent thump of marching feet, a million bands playing a million military tunes. She saw the fifty thousand rows of disease-culture in their aseptic glass tubes, her hand reaching out to them at her work in that huge factory in the future. She saw the tubes of leprosy, bubonic, typhoid, tuberculosis. She heard the great explosion and saw her hand burned to a wrinkled plum, felt it recoil from a concussion so immense that the world was lifted and let fall, and all the buildings broke and people hemorrhaged and lay silent. Great volcanoes, machines, winds, avalanches slid down to silence and she awoke, sobbing, in the bed, in Mexico, many years away…

In the early morning, drugged with the single hour's sleep they had finally been able to obtain, they awoke to the sound of loud automobiles in the street. Susan peered down from the iron balcony at a small crowd of eight people only now emerging, chattering, yelling, from trucks and cars with red lettering on them. A crowd of Mexicans had followed the trucks.

“Qué pasa?” Susan called to a little boy.

The boy replied.

Susan turned back to her husband.

“An American motion picture company, here on location.”