Complete Stories (17 page)

“I looked at it,” Harry said finally. “I guess I owe Mr. Marston some sort of apology.” Then, with terrible inappropriateness, he giggled.

“Look at what?” I asked, sharply.

“It’s a little bit late for an apology, Dr. Gerber?” Evangeline spoke across me. Her voice was cold, but there was a hint of satisfaction in it.

“Do you think I could photograph it before …” Harry began.

“I’m not at all sure we’re going to send it off,” Evangeline replied. “Mr. Fletcher has just told me he can only guarantee a thousand years?”

Harry made a negative, froglike face. “Fletch doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Once it goes into orbit around the galaxy, the energy requirement goes down to oh-point-zilch. I can promise you ten billion years. A whole cosmic cycle.”

“What the lame-brained hell is a cosmic cycle supposed to be?” I burst out. Harry had hurt my feelings.

Evangeline seemed to know. “That’s how long the universe lasts,” she explained. “That nice little professor at Austin told me about it. Time is only supposed to be ten billion years long?”

“That’s right,” Harry said, with another giggle. “And wouldn’t it be something if your husband’s capsule lasts all the way? The first man to travel around time!”

I thought for a minute. “When you say
around
, do you mean …”

Harry interrupted me. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to get him launched tonight.”

I took a long drink of my bourbon. Sitting in the middle of Great Crater, I felt like I was at the center of a bull’s-eye. The house, the lawn, the inner fence, the fake African savanna, the rim of the crater, the outer fence…it was all Marston’s and I wanted to get out. I held my glass up to the setting sun. “So let’s get to work.”

We got the guidance system out of the car’s trunk. We had six little ion jets coupled to crystal sensors, and a power pack to drive the jets. Microprocessors were built in. The pack was no bigger than a knapsack, but we had wedged enough unconfined quarks in there to run New York City for ten years. Two of Marston’s power-plants had piped us the energy. If he was lucky enough not to have too many near misses, maybe he
would
make it into galactic orbit.

Evangeline brought the android over to help. The TV-screen face was playing a tape of Marston, in black-face, singing work-songs. Weird.

“Take dis hammer, give it to the captain,” the android crooned as it shouldered the power pack. “Take dis hammer,
give
it to the …”

Evangeline stepped forward and flicked a switch on the machine’s back. Its face shrank to a point of light and winked out. The locusts shrilled on.

Nothing Harry or Evangeline had said had prepared me for Marston’s capsule. It was like a giant razor clam. The two shell-halves were made of some shiny, lavalike substance. In back they were joined by metal hinges. In front, they were propped open with a two-by-four. Inside was a cylindrical hollow, just the size of Marston’s coffin.

“We found those…windows in the garden?” Evangeline said. “And there were some metal scraps we melted and cast into hinges. Van had the whole idea after he found the windows?” The shock of her husband’s death seemed to have worn off a little. Her halo of sexuality was building back up.

“They could just be silica that was fused when the meteor hit,” Harry mused. “But those markings …”

I looked closely at one of the shell-halves. It was darkly transparent, and was covered with scratches. The scratches were arranged in bands, and certain of them appeared over and over. It was easy to see how Marston might have convinced himself they meant something. I shuddered a little, remembering his thick, bloody coughing. I busied myself with the jets.

A few hours later we had the guidance system hooked up. It was basically just glued onto the capsule…any touch of an atmosphere would have pulled it loose…but we weren’t planning for the capsule to ever go near an atmosphere once the rocket was launched.

Although there was no way to honestly predict what the capsule might encounter once it was a few dozen light-years from Earth, we had programmed in an overall course plan. The rocket Marston had hidden in the underground silo was to take the capsule out of the solar system. Once in interstellar space, the rocket would eject the capsule. At that point our guidance system would kick on. Our basic principle would just be to avoid massive objects as they came up. According to our calculations, this would eventually get the capsule out into intergalactic space. So as not to have to deal with any more galaxies crowded with stars, we planned for the capsule to go into orbit around our galaxy once it got out there. Sooner or later it would have to fall back in…but this wasn’t exactly a short-term problem.

“The most important thing is that he doesn’t come back to Earth,” Evangeline reminded us. “Can you promise me that?”

I had known Harry long enough to read his expressions. Right now he was wiggly with suppressed laughter. I wondered how badly he’d sabotaged the guidance system.

“I promise you,” I told Evangeline, giving her arm a kindly pat. Her flesh felt like warm marble. “I think we’re ready to go.”

Evangeline and the android went down to the freezer to get Marston. While they were gone I tried to pump Harry for some information, but he just grinned and took a few pictures of the scratches in that black glass. When Evangeline came back, the android’s face-screen was back on. It was singing, “Massa’s In De Cold Cold Ground.”

I helped them heave Marston’s coffin into the capsule. I’d had those two bourbons, so of course I had to gash my finger on a rough edge. Some of my blood went with Marston.

The capsule was resting on a little dolly on tracks.

While I nursed my cut, Evangeline pushed a button on the wall, and the capsule began rolling smoothly forward. Outside, a five-meter disk of sod lifted up to reveal Marston’s personal hearse. A hydraulic lift eased the rocket up so that its hatch was level with the ground. Mechanical arms reached out and gently drew the capsule in. The hatch thudded shut, and we were ready for launch. The sky was clear. It was almost midnight. The locusts had finally knocked off. In the distance I heard a lion’s coughing roar.

“When should it go off?” Evangeline asked me in a silky whisper. She looked a little chilled in just that T-shirt.

I took my calculator out. I’d stored the master program last week. All I had to do was to enter tomorrow’s date, and the machine gave me the optimum launch time. “One thirteen,” I replied. “A.M. Where’s your console?”

“Inside.” We followed Evangeline into the dark house. I felt better being there now that Marston was out of the freezer. Evangeline opened a rolltop desk in the living room to reveal the console. She punched in
0113
and switched on the automatic sequencing. That was all there was to it. We had a little over an hour to kill. I got myself another bourbon. Harry and Evangeline stuck to soda.

Looking out the window at the rocket-tip protruding from the ground fifty meters away, something occurred to me. “That’s kind of close, you know. The exhaust is liable to set the house on fire.”

“Don’t worry,” Evangeline sang back. “The house is mostly titaniplast. Van had a lot of enemies?”

That was a good lead-in for one of Harry’s remarks, but he passed the opportunity up. He just leaned back in one of Marston’s leather chairs sipping soda and staring at Evangeline. She kept finding reasons to stand up and lean over, with her prettiest feature aimed right at him.

When it got down to the last few minutes, we all stood by the window and counted down together. I had to hand it to Marston. It seemed like a great way to go. Just before blast-off, the android came out with a magnum of cold champagne. Knowing that Marston must have programmed that into the console sequencer, we drank long and deep with a clear conscience. And at one thirteen the big bird lifted off. Marston’s lawn and garden were burned to a crisp, but inside his titaniplast house we didn’t feel a thing. We stared upward until the tiny flame was lost in the stars.

I must have had most of the champagne, because I don’t remember going to bed. All night I had whirlybed dreams. There was some trivial sequence of actions which I kept having to do—each completion was only a new beginning. The task had something to do with the scratches on Marston’s capsule. They were sort of there, yet not there…and it was up to me to make them real. But I couldn’t read them until I’d written them, and I couldn’t write them till I’d read them.

Finally I managed to wake up. Dawn. The house was quiet. I seemed to be in a guest room. On the other side of the room was an unmade bed. Where was Harry? Just as I stood up, he came padding down the hall. He had a funny expression.

“Let’s go,” he said shortly.

“Okay. But where’s …”

“Never mind. Let’s get out of here. Are you sober enough to drive?”

“Sure.”

We went down and got in the car. Harry said I should just drive up to the gate and honk. I did, and it swung open. Harry leaned out the car window, staring back at the house. Perhaps something moved at one of the windows. “I love her,” he said, finally pulling himself back in.

“What happened last night? Don’t tell me that she let you …”

Harry was close to tears. “She has a
mind
, Fletch. A body like that, and she’d even heard of my papers! I had her. I
had
her. But then I had to go and tell her. She’ll never forgive me.”

“You told her how you sabotaged the guidance system?”

“I
didn’t
sabotage it. I didn’t have to. Time is a circle, Fletch. If she had really understood my papers she would have known that. Time is a circle ten billion years around. And Marston’s body is going to make the round trip.”

I thought a minute. “So? That just means that there’s two Marstons out there. There’s the Marston we just launched, and there’s the Marston who’s traveled ten billion years around. One Marston is seventy and the other is ten-billion-and-seventy.”

“That won’t wash, Fletch. What if we’d decided not to launch him? How would the ten-billion-and-seventy-year-old know whether or not to exist? A particle’s world-line can’t be like a thread winding around and around time. It has to close off, to come back on itself.”

“I still don’t get the point, Harry.”

“The point is that circular time means the universe
repeats
. Every ten billion years everything comes back to the same place. It’s like a pool table. If you plug all the pockets and hit a hard enough break-shot, the balls will eventually reform into the triangular pattern you started with. Every atom in Marston’s capsule has to come back to where it started from.”

We were almost at the edge of the crater floor now. Suddenly it clicked. “You mean this crater …”

“Has to be, Fletch.
Has
to be! Marston’s ship is going to go around time and crash here…say in AD 1100. There’s probably even a Zuni Indian legend about it. And then Marston’s capsule is going to lie buried until he digs it up five years ago. Sealed in the capsule is going to be some rotten compost which he is going to plow into his vegetable garden.”

The joy of science had driven off Harry’s sorrow at losing Evangeline. He gave a wild giggle. “And Marston thought he was a vegetarian! He thought he could avoid rotting on Earth!”

The same snake we’d seen yesterday was lying in the same place in the driveway. It had its tail tucked into its mouth. I down-shifted and drove up the slope to the lip of the crater. The android guard was already holding the gate open for us. The TV-camera over the gate scanned back and forth. For an instant the camera pointed at the android’s face, and it became a TV-screen with a picture of a TV-screen with a picture of a TV-screen with a picture of …

I pulled onto the paved road and started driving toward the airport. I had a hell of a hangover.

============

Written in Spring, 1980.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, December, 1982.

This is another story that could have been a paper for
Philosophy of Science
. But instead I made it a Fletcher and Harry story. Harry’s appearance is based on a professor I knew when I was a mathematics graduate student. The story went that when this particular professor had been drafted, years earlier, they’d had to discharge him after a week because he refused to ever let go of his special briefcase full of math papers!

Houdini is broke. The vaudeville circuit is dead, ditto big-city stage. Mel Rabstein from Pathé News phones him up looking for a feature.

“Two G advance plus three points gross after turnaround.”

“You’re on.”

The idea is to get a priest, a rabbi and a judge to be on camera with Houdini in all the big scenes. It’ll be feature-length and play in the Loews chain. All Houdini knows for sure is that there’ll be escapes, bad ones, with no warnings.

It starts at four in the morning, July 8, 1948. They bust into Houdini’s home in Levittown. He lives there with his crippled mom. Opening shot of priest and rabbi kicking the door down. Close on their thick-soled black shoes. Available light. The footage is grainy, jerky, can’t-help-it-cinema-verité. It’s all true.

The judge has a little bucket of melted wax, and they seal up Houdini’s eyes and ears and nose-holes. The dark mysterioso face is covered over and over before he fully awakes, relaxing into the events, leaving dreams of pursuit. Houdini is ready. They wrap him up in Ace bandages and surgical tape, a mummy, a White Owl cigar.

Eddie Machotka, the Pathé cameraman, time-lapses the drive out to the airstrip. He shoots a frame every ten seconds so the half-hour drive only takes two minutes on screen. Dark, the wrong angles, but still convincing. There’s
no cuts
. In the back of the Packard, on the laps of the priest, judge and rabbi, lies Houdini, a white loaf crusty with tape, twitching in condensed time.

The car pulls right onto the airstrip, next to a B-15 bomber. Eddie hops out and films the three holy witnesses unloading Houdini. Pan over the plane. “The Dirty Lady,” is lettered up near the nose.