Changing the Past (3 page)

Dorothy curled her lip in disapproval. “You just got back. You could just look in
Books in Print
and save a trip.”

“Ah,” said Kellog, trying to preserve his counterfeit ebullience, “but there might be something published abroad.” He seized his coat.

“But,” Dorothy protested doggedly, “what about the Haseltine?” She was referring to the proofs over which she had been laboring for days: an exposé of the gynecological profession. The book had been on schedule, but now that a TV magazine-show had done its own provocative investigation in the same area, there was every reason to advance the publication date of the printed work. It had long since been copy-edited and set in type, but when the proofs were shown belatedly to the RWM lawyers, many pretexts for possible libel actions were discovered. Naming names could obviously help book sales, but these were rich and powerful doctors who would surely sue all concerned unless hard evidence of their malfeasance could be established. It was an arduous job of the kind Walter Hunsicker would not have entrusted to anybody but Dorothy. She had to verify with the author, a quondam muckraking tabloid reporter, each of the lawyer's hundreds of queries, and not only did this man prove to have been very careless in what he wrote, but he seemed to be thoroughly drunk at whichever time of day he was reached by telephone. In person, on the occasions on which he had visited the RWM offices, he appeared to be sober but was extremely obnoxious.

In any event, Dorothy had at last completed her job that morning, and all that remained was for Hunsicker to give it one more check-through and then his imprimatur: he was to have begun that perusal this afternoon.

Jack Kellog answered her question. “The world won't end if we take our time.” He left the room and then the building, and returned, as rapidly as he could walk, to the doorway where he had encountered the little man. The rain having ended by now, he carried the damp trench coat over his arm.

Finding the doorway unoccupied was no surprise. It was merely a place to start the search, the only point of reference Kellog had with respect to the little man, who unfortunately did not seem to be a vagrant who spent his days on the streets, else he might be sought in similar crannies throughout the midtown area. The fact was, as Kellog stepped into the alcove to formulate a plan of action, he could have no serious hope of locating the person. It had been half an hour since he left him. The choice of directions in which the man could have moved, and the means of movement, foot, bus, etc., were in great variety. It was the kind of situation which Walter Hunsicker, a realist, would have had to accept with his habitual stoicism, as he had submitted, his life long, to the rulings of a Fate that kept him in his proper place in the grand scheme by which he was reasonably comfortable and relatively secure.

Jack Kellog on the other hand had a constitutional aversion to nay-saying, and his natural state of mind was definitely sanguine in the face of a challenge. Knowing nothing whatever about the habits of the little man, he might as well suppose that chance would be on his side. He prepared to set out in an easterly direction.

But he was detained by a slight noise behind the door to the shop. From its murky appearance through the dirty windows, he had assumed the place was closed. Who would buy medical appliances from such an unsanitary-looking establishment? Perhaps a burglary was in progress. With a like suspicion, Walter Hunsicker would promptly have moved on, though had he encountered a policeman in the ensuing block or two, he would not have remained silent.

Jack Kellog, however, not only stood his ground, but took a wide-legged stance should he have to defend himself. But when the door opened and a face peeped out, it was the little man for whom he had come searching!

Kellog cried, “I want to talk to you.”

“I thought that might be likely,” said the other. “Come in.”

Kellog winced in puzzlement as he entered the shop, the interior of which was even drearier than it had looked from the street. There were bins full of crutches of assorted sizes, shelves stacked with bedpans, a parking area for wheelchairs, a table holding arm- and leg-braces, some formed of or covered with a pink plastic with a resemblance to real skin.

“Do you work here?” he asked the back of the little man, who was leading the way.

“As good a place as any,” was the answer, given without turning. “I like privacy. Few people come to such a place as this unless they have serious business.”

He maintained a brisk pace. Soon they had reached a small back office behind a flimsy-looking partition. An open roll-top desk was against one wall: it was a large piece, with a multitude of pigeonholes, all of them stuffed with papers. The little man sat down in the chair that went with the desk and swiveled it to face Kellog. “All right,” he said with a sigh, “let's hear your complaint.”

Kellog had been rudely left standing, but that situation suited him for the current purpose. He was really annoyed.

“I want to know what's going on! This switching of the coats and identification papers. The people at the office calling me Jack. You got to them somehow. Is this a practical joke? I could believe that of Dorothy and maybe Myron, but Carrie would never go along with it.”

The little man pointed. “Better sit down while we get this straight.”

Kellog found a loose-jointed straight-backed chair in a dark corner. He pulled it out and sat gingerly upon it.

The merchant of crutches resumed. “It's no joke. What it is, or was supposed to be, was a conclusive demonstration that the past can be changed. Naturally you were skeptical. That's all to the good. Someone who accepted it immediately would probably be demented. A nut or eccentric would not be acceptable, I assure you. What's needed is precisely the sort of fellow you were as Walter Hunsicker. By the way, don't you want to change a lot more than that name? Your job doesn't go with it.”

Kellog would have liked to gesture, but he doubted that the chair would stand up to much motion. “I'll say one thing, though I can't explain it: my new name already feels natural.”

The little man shrugged. “Of course. So will anything else you decide on.”

“You really mean that I could choose to be—”

The other interrupted. “It's better to say ‘have been,' which inevitably involves the present, to be sure, but we should always steer clear of implications of futurity.”

Kellog was not certain that he understood this fully. He completed his question, “President of the United States?”

The little man leaned forward and asked, “But would you honestly want that?”

“No, certainly not. You're right. Then is that the criterion? That it should be something I would rather have been or done?”

The little man replied with some heat. “Else it would be capricious, just trickery, a total waste of time, not worth doing!”

Kellog shook his head. “I still can't quite believe this conversation is taking place.”

“Oh, that's understandable,” said the little man in his first display of sympathy. “Initial faith is required. Remember when you first learned to swim? Or your first experience of sexual intercourse? Sure, everybody else can do it, but
you'll
never be able to. But this is only temporary cold feet—once you've become habituated you'll look back with amusement on the time of disbelief.”

Kellog was still shaking his head. “The difference is that I've never heard of anyone's changing the past. I'd be the first, wouldn't I?”

The little man raised a twiglike finger. “You don't know that, and I'd advise you not to speculate on the matter. It might make a bad impression.”

“On whom?”

The man smiled with his irregular front teeth. His expression was suddenly of the kind called boyish. “You never know.”

“I'm afraid I
must
know more about this business,” Kellog said. “It might be easy for you to make such a wild assertion—that my past can be changed just like that—and I'll admit I can't explain the things that have happened so far, but that doesn't mean I can blindly accept them, either, without some sense of who's behind the project.” He threw a thumb at the doorway. “I'm assuming this medical equipment is a false front or cover. Who are you? Government? Ours, I hope.”

The little man scowled. “If any government, anywhere, had anything to do with it, do you believe it would work?” He snorted. “The riding mac would have been three sizes too big and would have leaked!”

“No doubt,” Kellog said, “but I really can't go along with you unless I know more. I want no part of a deal in which I take all the chances and am furthermore in the dark as to the larger picture.”

“Yeah,” the little man said wryly. “That's too much like life. But here's an opportunity to do that one all over again and get it right.”

Kellog was shaking his head. “Whatever your aim, you're not going to give me something for nothing.”

The little man made a rasping sound, politely covering his mouth, though not before Kellog could see several large silver fillings. “What a cynical fellow you are. That's still Hunsicker speaking. People who rise higher in life never lose their illusions.”

“You took me for the kind of jerk who has lived such a dull life he would jump at the chance to change it.”

“On the contrary, Walter—I mean Jack—you were chosen because you were seemingly satisfied with your life.”

“You're giving me another chance to be unhappy?”

“Only if you perversely choose to be negative about the matter.” The little man rubbed his wrinkled nose. “It's up to you, of course.”

Kellog said levelly, “It's not worth my soul.”

“You're being melodramatic. Look here, any time you want to change your past, you come here to the store—during business hours, of course, nine to six on weekdays only—and it will be arranged without delay. In answer to your question: this program is a scientific experiment, a study in human volition.”

Kellog assumed he would have to sign a paper or at least shake hands, but the little man said merely, “Then let's get on with it. I gather the name Jack Kellog is satisfactory. If not, it can be changed again. Now what do you want by way of profession, home, wife, children…?”

“I told you I was happily married, and my son is the best,” Kellog said with asperity. “I certainly don't want to change anything about my family. They're really my sole accomplishment, if it comes to that, and even there most of the credit should go to my wife.”

“You're still thinking like Hunsicker,” the little man said, sneering. “If you don't believe you've done much of consequence, then
change your past!”

But to what? The principle sounded fine; the trouble came with the particulars. “Let's see, when I was a kid, what did I want to grow up to be? Professional ballplayer, of course…. Soldier of fortune! Foreign correspondent. Counsel for the defense—but only with innocent clients. But that was the stuff of daydreams. In my early teens, believe it or not, I wanted the war to last long enough so that I could get into it, but it ended a month before my eighteenth birthday. My service was over and done with by the time of Korea: I guess I could have been recalled, but for some reason that never happened, and I didn't regret it, for by that time the moment had passed and I was in college.”

“But,” derisively asked the little man, “if you had it to do all over again, would you marry a woman who would cuckold you almost immediately after the ceremony? And would you want once again to be the father of a homosexual?”

For an instant Kellog lowered his head. Then he raised it and said calmly, “That was Hunsicker.”

“Very good!” The little man spun around in the swivel chair and plucked a piece of paper from one of the cubbyholes of the rolltop desk. He scribbled on it with a pencil stub he found in the middle drawer. He turned back to Kellog.

“What kind of job do you have?”

“I inherited quite a bit of money from my father, who took what Grandpa left him and went on with it, not only expanding the laundry-and-cleaning business but also going in a big way into city real estate. Maybe you know the Kellog building? The firm for which Hunsicker worked occupied just one floor of it.”

The little man was nodding eagerly as he took more notes. “Splendid, you're getting the idea now. A word of advice: if you change one thing, you've altered a lot, usually more than you might think. It's a chain reaction. If you have different children, then you've necessarily had a different wife.”

Suddenly, Hunsicker had returned. “Look, I have the finest wife in the world. There's an explanation: he was an old boyfriend, down on his luck. Martha's the most compassionate person in the world. She simply couldn't reject him when he was in that situation. I know, it might sound implausible, but that's really the way she is. It wasn't easy for me to experience, I'll admit.” He sighed before he might have to sob. How terrible that he should have to think of this matter again, after all those years. “As to my son, it's true that I was devastated when I first learned of it, which to his credit was from him, face-to-face. But that was long ago, more than a decade. He's a marvelous fellow. You know, he was a first-rate athlete in college. He might have realized my old dream to play professional ball. He had offers. His E.R.A. was one point eight. He batted three eighty-four in his senior year.”

“Nevertheless, you'd never want to go through all that again,” said the little man.

“Poor Hunsicker,” said Kellog. “He had his limitations. I am myself separated from my third childless wife. It got into the tabloids when Mimi took a shot at me on the penthouse terrace. She came back from Barbados a day early and caught me in the sack with her best friend—female, I should add.”

“It looks like you're on your way,” the little man said, folding the piece of paper. He found a cubbyhole into which roughly to insert it. He rose. “If things are going well, there'll be no need to report in. But if you wish to make more changes of the past, come around and see me. But remember the office hours. I don't have a home phone.”