Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (53 page)

This other world had its troubles, but it was certainly a livelier place than where he'd come from. It deserved a chance. Yes, that was how he felt: his world was drowsily moribund; this alternate was starving but managing to flail away at destiny. It
deserved
a chance.

Albin decided that he was experiencing renunciation and felt proud.

He materialized the time machine around the green instrument panel, disregarding the roomful of military figures since he knew they could not see him. The single red switch pointed downward on the instrument panel. That was the device that controlled the course of the missile. Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world!

Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him.

flick!

Now! Now to make a halfway decent world!

Max Alben pulled the little red switch toward him.

flick!

Now! Now to make a halfway interesting world!

Mac Albin pushed the little red switch from him.

flick!

...pulled the little red switch toward him.

flick!

...pushed the little red switch from him.

flick!

...toward him.

flick!

...from him.

flick!

I had two ignoble reasons for writing this story, and a third which might be considered moderately acceptable.

First, I had long wanted to use a title that rang a change on T.S. Eliot's lines in
The Hollow Men
:

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Second, I had long wanted to try something special in the way of a time-travel paradox—a
reductio ad absurdum
, say.

And third, I have always believed that no matter how history were modified, no matter how it forked, the Thoreauvian insight would still hold true. The mass of men would still lead lives of quiet desperation.

Written 1956——Published 1956

You know George.

He says one minute there was nothing in his living room but him and his TV and his VCR and the picture window overlooking half of the city, and the next minute there was this beautiful red-headed girl in a kind of shining red playsuit hovering in the air over his head. Not really hovering, not floating, but kind of all sprawled out every which way and staring down between her legs at him. Well, you know George.

George says she was making this musical sound, or something was making this musical sound, like a small synthesizer with hiccups; then she disappeared.

George says there was about three seconds of silence, just him and his VCR and his TV, then hiccup, hiccup, and she's sitting on the couch beside him, all red playsuit and beautiful long legs.

You know, he's right? It's hard to think of something to say when a girl pops into your room like that?

But you know George.

"Gin, maybe, with just the teensiest bit of vermouth?"

The girl opened first her eyes, then her mouth at him, both very wide. She nodded.

"I don't have any olives," George told her, getting up. "But I have the funniest little green onions. You'll like them."

The girl nodded again and rubbed something on her chest. Nice chest, George says. "You are good," she said. "I didn't quite expect that. You are very, very good."

"Why shouldn't I be?" George asked. He took a good look at her while he was mixing the drinks at his bar. She was still staring at him, all big hazel eyes and nice chest. The red playsuit was not really a playsuit, he noticed. It was not the actual color red, either, he says, but somehow like red, if you know what he means. I don't. George says it was kind of a rosy fog that was vibrating all over the best parts of her very nice body, and it had tiny, transparent rosy knobs every couple of inches that kept popping up and then disappearing. He couldn't see anything that looked like a zipper anywhere.

"George Rice?" the girl said slowly, tentatively. She had a nice voice, too; it came from deep in her diaphragm with plenty of breathing. "You are George Rice?"

"That's it. You're on the button," George told her. "You wanted George Rice, kid, you got George Rice." He came back with the drinks, found some coasters, and put the drinks on the whatchamacallit table next to the couch. The VCR had been running
Casablanca
all this time through the TV, so he turned it off.

The girl picked up her drink, sipped it, made a face, then nodded. She sipped some more and nodded some more. "I'm Antoinette Donnelly. This is—what? 1994? 1995?"

"Still 1994," George said. Now he took a good long look at her: she was unarguably juicy as hell. "You're a time traveler, right?"

"The first. The very first."

"Are you the inventor of time travel?"

"One of," the girl said. She put down her drink and studied it hard for a bit. Then she gave a quick little shudder and a long exhale and turned back to George. She was sitting with both feet solidly planted on the floor, not the way a girl usually sits on a couch, you know, all curled up.

"There are five of us," she explained. "I'm the youngest, the healthiest, the smoothest reflexes. And I had the best reason for going to our first logical target area, this time and place."

"The best reason?" George swirled his drink around—you know, the thoughtful, snotty way he does. But whatever he looked like, he says, he was feeling as if he had a hole in his chest and he was breathing through the hole. "Me?"

The girl walked over to the picture window and stared down the twenty or so floors. She tapped on the window and scratched at it. "Glass?"

"That's it," George said. "Glass." He tried to drink some gin and found he couldn't swallow. He set the drink on the table. "I was the reason? I mean, was I the reason?"

She came back and sat down on the couch. She wrapped her hands around her right knee and pulled it back up against her belly and rocked back and forth, just like a real girl. "Yes, I've always been terribly curious about what you were like when you were a young man. What was the name of that television special you were watching? Hasn't color television been developed yet?"

"Sure. This is a color set. I wasn't watching a TV special; it was a movie—
Casablanca
. It was made in black and white: it's a thirties or forties film. I don't like the colorized version. Why me? What did I—I mean, what will I—oh, hell, where do I stand in your time? What does history say about me? Why me? Hey? Huh? Why me?"

She shook her head at him reproachfully. "Don't do that. Be nice. I only have so very few hours before the spirillix goes down. And the skindrom's very weak on this trip. I want to see a lot and ask a lot, and I have to keep careful measurements of the chroniates in this room. So be nice. Please try not to be selfish and personally inquisitive."

George stared at this Antoinette, this Antoinette Donnelly. Who the hell did she think she was?

Still, he figured, still—There was that unarguably juicy body. And the interesting information she evidently had about him. Better go easy. Later on, maybe—

"I will try," George told her, spreading his arms out in a great, truth-embracing gesture, "not to be selfish and personally inquisitive. It'll be hard, but I'll try. Any questions that I'm
allowed
to ask? Like, maybe,
when
are you from? How far in the future?"

She nodded. "A century. Just about. We thought that a century was long enough to avoid any—you know—complications, and long enough to look like a real voyage to the past."

"Look like to whom?"

"Oh, the Institute. People like that. But, of course, you were the other reason. For me, anyway."

"Of course." So they were back to him again. But he was not supposed to be personally inquisitive, now wasn't he?
Bullshit!
He felt like telling her to go measure her chroniates.

And then it hit him that the problem was also bullshit. The problem just couldn't be that difficult to solve. I mean, she knew what his achievement was: it was bound to be on her mind all the time. George represented something very, very special to her. She'd be thinking about him and his achievement every single second.

To be that famous and not know what you were famous for! To be so famous that the first time traveler went straight for you as soon as she got a chance! If that were so, it had to be incredibly big big-time, Moses-level, Shakespeare-level, Einstein-level. Maybe even bigger than that.

His autograph—what might that not be worth! The postcard he'd just scribbled to Lonnie Santangelo vacationing in Sweden—they could be bidding lunatic sums for it at an auction in some future version of Sotheby's. Where he planned to have dinner this evening could be an item of information that a biographer a century from now would give almost anything to know.

For that matter, he himself would give almost anything to know. Why waste time farting with this or doodling with that when you could be practicing the thing that was going to continue crashing like cymbals across the world long after you were dead? He had to find out.

And to all this, Antoinette Donnelly was the key. Very damn fortunately.

She was pure girl, after all, George says. You know—touch the right part at the right time in just the right way, and she's bound to react. By which, George says he means
in this case
, let her see a little bit of what he's become famous for. The first beginnings of that later big stuff.

So where to begin?

He wandered casually over to the bookcase and took his alto recorder off the top shelf, making casual conversation as he walked. "So you're from the end of the twenty-first century. Must be a pretty wonderful time to be living in."

"Not at all," she laughed. "It feels to us just as your time does to you. Except for—Well, maybe I'd better not go into that. Anyway, most of what's important to us had already begun in your period. You know, computer networking, leveraged buyouts, gene splicing, all that sort of thing."

"Oh, sure, sure." He blew the dust off the recorder and put it to his lips. First he tootled a couple of bars of "Greensleeves," then he said, "Hey, what do you think of this?" and went into the rock number. You remember, the one he and Lester Pittstein wrote and tried to peddle about four years ago?

He kept his eyes on her face as he played it. Not much. As a matter of fact, she got off the couch and went over to the bookcase beside him. She seemed a hell of a lot more interested in his paperbounds than in what he was playing.

"This just came out, didn't it?" she said, pulling a suspense novel off the shelf and opening it to the copyright page. "He's still doing nothing but hard-boiled mysteries?"

George put the recorder away and freshened her drink. It was obvious that she wasn't much used to liquor. Despite the little she had had, there was already a faint glow to her. Believe me, if George says so, he knows.

"I started to write a suspense novel once," he said, thinking, maybe she's giving me a lead? "Want to look at the first chapter?"

"Uh-uh. Where's your—your
bathroom
?"

When she'd closed the door behind her, George sat down and began thinking hard. Obviously, it was not music and it was not literature. He was famous for something else. But what? Well, there were lots of other possibilities.

Money? Was he to become one of the great multi-billionaires of all time? How do you work into that, George wondered? Perhaps start talking about stocks and bonds?

Sure. Try to be smooth! "Hey, isn't it odd how well the utilities are doing today?" Or—"Anything you especially like about four-year debentures, Antoinette, old kiddo?"

Crap.

No, better stick to the logical, the things he'd actually experimented with, the things he was a little bit good at.

Meanwhile. He freshened her drink a little bit harder. He set out the green onions near her glass and got some thirsty-making stuff from the refrigerator, you know, a plateful of real spicy salami, some hot peppers, stuff like that, to put around and near her glass.

And he turned on
Casablanca
again—maybe? just possibly?—and turned it off fast: it was at the airport scene with Conrad Veidt and Claude Rains, not to mention Bergman and Bogey. Too damn much renunciation in that scene, George says. A renunciation mood is just plain blind alley, he claims.

When she came back, she pursed her lips at the salami. "I thought you people were afraid of foods like this. Isn't it full of what you call phlogiston?" She took a bite. "But it
is
good."

George was pleased that she washed it down with another mouthful of vermouth-flavored gin. "Phlogiston? What are you talking about?"

"Caloricol, phlogisterol—something like that. You have this superstition that having it in your food is going to kill you early."

"Oh, cholesterol. No, I don't bother with that. At least not at my age. Try the peppers. They're good too."

And while she tried the peppers, he tried her with other fame possibilities among his interests. Lots else. The only thing she seemed interested in was the pair of limericks he'd written way back when for his college humor magazine. But it turned out not to be the limericks.

There was a pen-and-ink caricature of him on the page facing the limericks. Now
that
grabbed her. Antoinette kept staring at it, turning it this way and that way. She seemed fascinated by it.

"I didn't do it," George told her. "Somebody—I don't remember his name—he was only a freshman who'd wandered into the office... Do you think it's that fine?"

"Not particularly. It's just that the resemblance is so strong."

"Resemblance? You mean between me now and me then?"

"No. Between you then and him then. Him at your age."

"Him? Who?"

"Your father. You both looked exactly alike at twenty."

"You've seen pictures of my father?"

"Of course. Do you have one of your mother here? I'd love to see which is the picture you've kept of your mother."

Her eyes were sparkling away, and only part of it was the gin. She'd been doing all right with the gin, George noticed, but he had the distinct feeling it was not her usual drink. She seemed unfamiliar with it, and she was pouring it down a bit too fast. Still, all to the good.