Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (56 page)

I retreated, whirled, and began to run. I heard him running behind me. I ran faster; I heard him do likewise.

"C'mere!" a voice bellowed. "I said c'mere!"

Was I in an era when burning at the stake was used on those who ran contrary to the psychotic edicts of society? I couldn't remember. I considered it essential, however, to find the privacy necessary for concentration on my next move.

I found it in a dark corner of an alleyway as I galloped past a building. A large metal receptacle with a cover.

There was no one close to me at the moment. I dodged into the alleyway, removed the cover, jumped into the receptacle and got the cover back over my head just as my pursuer puffed up.

Such an incredibly barbarous period! That receptacle—unspeakable, unspeakable...

I heard a pair of feet trotting up the alley, coming back. After a while, several more pairs of feet arrived.

"Well, where did he go?"

"S'elp me, sergeant, he musta gone over that nine-foot fence in back there. I coulda sworn he turned in here, coulda sworn!"

"An old guy like that, Harrison?"

"Pretty spry for an old guy, even if he was a gejenerate. Gave me a run."

"Gave you the slip, Harrison. Guy probably took off from some sanitarium or other. Better find him, men, before he terrorizes the neighborhood."

The feet slapped off.

—|—

I decided that my temporary escape from capture was balanced by the notice I had attracted in what seemed to be the higher echelons of the city's officialdom. I tried desperately, but futilely, to remember some of my Terran history. What were the functions of a sergeant? No use. After all, sixty years since I had studied the subject...

Despite my intense olfactory discomfort, I couldn't leave the receptacle. It would be necessary to wait quite a while, until my pursuers had given up the chase; it would also be necessary to have a plan.

Generally speaking, I knew what I must do. I must somehow discover an emissary of the Temporal Embassy and request a return to my own period. Before I could go about finding him, though, I would have to equip myself with such standard equipment as clothes.

How did one go about getting clothes in this period? Barter? Brigandage? Government work- coupons? Weaving them on one's own loom? Banderling and his idiotic idea that my specialty would be useful in such a world! That fathead!

The cover of the receptacle lifted suddenly. A very tall young man with a vague and pleasant face stared down at me. He rapped on the metal of the lid.

"May I come in?" he inquired courteously.

I glared up at him, but said nothing.

"The cops are gone, Pop," he continued. "But I wouldn't get out just yet. Not in your uniform. I'll lay chick if you tell me all about you."

"Wh-who are you? And what do you want?"

"Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman." He considered for a moment. "Well, poor, anyway. I want any such story as you may have to give. I was in that crowd on the sidewalk when the cop started to chase you. I ambled along behind. You didn't look like the kind of nut who enjoys parading his glorious nakedness. When I got to the alley, I was too tired to follow law and order any more. So I took a rest against the wall and noticed the garbage can. Ecce you."

I shuffled my feet in the soft, stinking mass, and waited.

"Now, lots of people," he went on, twirling the lid absently and looking down the street, "lots of people would say, 'Joe Burns, what if he isn't a nut? Maybe he just tried to draw to an inside straight in a strip-poker game.' Well, lots of people are sometimes right. But did I or did I not I see you materialize out of relatively empty air in the middle of the street? That's what I care about, Pop. And if so, how so?"

"What will you do with the information?"

"Depends, Pop, depends. If it has color, if it has that certain—"

"For example, if I told you I came from the future."

"And could prove it? In that case, I would spread your name and photograph across the front page of the lowest, dirtiest, most thoroughly misinforming sheet in all this wide land. I refer to the eminent journal with which I am associated. Honest, Pop, did you come from the future?"

I nodded rapidly and considered. What better way to attract the attention of a temporal emissary than by letting him know through an important public communication medium that I could expose his existence in this era? That I could destroy the secrecy of the Temporal Embassy in a pre-intermediate civilization? I would be sought out frantically and returned to my own time.

Returned to scholarship, to dolik and spindfar, to punforg and the Thumtse Dilemna, to my quiet laboratory and my fascinating paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns...

"I can prove it," I said swiftly. "But I fail to see the value to you of such a situation. Spreading my name and photograph, as you put it—"

"Don't worry your pretty white thatch about that angle. Joseph Burns will do right well with a tabloid tango about a guy from the future. But you have to get out of that can first. And to get you out of it you need—"

"Clothes. How does one get clothes in this period?"

He scratched his lower lip.

"Well, money is said to help. Not crucial, you understand, but one of the more important factors in the process. You wouldn't have a couple of odd bills somewhere? No-o-o, not unless you have an unrevealed marsupiality. I could lend you the money."

"Well, then—"

"But after all, how much suiting can be purchased in these inflationary times for a dollar twenty-three? Let's face it, Pop; not much. I don't get paid until the day after tomorrow. Besides, if Ferguson doesn't see much value in the yarn, I won't even be able to squeeze it onto my swindle sheet. It wouldn't do to fetch one of my suits down, either."

"Why?" The great quantity of wordage from above and garbage from below was having a very depressing effect on me.

"First, because you might be hauled away by the sanitation department before I returned, and converted into hollyhock vitamins. Then, you're somewhat stouter than me and a good deal shorter. You don't want to attract attention when you step out into this cop-infested thoroughfare; and, in my suit, believe me, Pop, you would. Add to all this the fact that the brave boys in blue may return at any moment and search the alley again—Difficult situation, Pop, most difficult. We face an impasse."

"I don't understand," I began impatiently. "If a voyager from the future appeared in my period, I would be able to help him make the necessary social adjustments most easily. Such a minor item as clothes—"

"Not minor, not minor at all. Witness the ferment in the forces of law and order. Hey! That hammer-shaped ornament, there, the one on your necklace—it wouldn't be silver by any chance?"

Twisting my chin with difficulty, I glanced down. He was pointing at my flirgleflip. I took it off and handed it to him.

"It may well have been silver before it was renucleied for flirgling purposes. Why, does it have any special value?"

"This much silver? I hope to win the Pulitzer Prize it does. Can you spare it? We can get at least one used suit of clothes and half an overcoat out of it."

"Why, I can requisition a new flirgleflip at any time. And I use the large one at the Institute for most of the important flirgling in any case. Take it by all means."

He nodded and replaced the cover of the can over my head. I heard his feet going away. After a lengthy interval in which I developed several surprisingly colorful phrases in regard to Banderling, the garbage-can cover was lifted again and some garments of crude blue cloth dropped upon my head.

"The pirate in the second-hand store would only allow me a couple of bucks on your gimmick," Burns told me as I dressed. "So I had to settle for work clothes. Hey, button those buttons before you step out. No, these.
Button
them. Oh—let me."

Having been properly fastened into the garments, I climbed out of the receptacle and suffered the reporter to tie shoes to my startled feet. Shoes—these were the leather bandages I had observed. My fingers itched for a crude flint axe to make the shambling anachronism complete.

Well, possibly not a flint axe. But a weapon like a rifle or crossbow did seem in order. Animal pelts and vegetable fibers all over my skin. Ugh!

Glancing nervously up and down the street, Burns led me by the arm to a badly ventilated underground chamber. There he flailed a path into an extremely long and ugly sectional conveyance—a subway train.

"I see that here, as elsewhere in your society, only the fittest survive."

He got a better grip on one man's shoulders and moved his feet into a more comfortable position on another's toes. "Howzat?"

"Those who are not strong enough to force their way inside are forced to remain where they are or to resort to even more primitive means of transportation."

"Honest, Pop," he said admiringly, "you'll make terrific copy. Remember to talk like that for Ferguson."

After an appreciable interval of discomfort, we emerged from the train—somewhat like two grape pips being expectorated—and clawed our way to the street.

—|—

I followed the reporter into an ornate building and stopped with him in front of a distinguished old man who sat in a small cubicle wrapped in dignified, thoughtful silence.

"How do you do, Mr. Ferguson?" I began immediately, for I was pleasantly surprised. "I am very happy to find in Mr. Burns's superior the obvious intellectual kinship which I had almost—"

"Lay off!" Burns whispered fiercely in my ear as the old man backed away. "You're scaring the pants off the guy. Fourth floor, Carlo."

"Gee, Mr. Burns," Carlo remarked as he pulled a black lever and the cubicle containing the three of us shot upward, "you sure do come in with characters. What I mean,
characters
."

The newspaper office was an impossible melange of darting humanity exhibiting complicated neurosis patterns among masses of paper, desks, and primitive machines that I later learned were typewriters. Joseph Burns placed me on a wooden bench and scurried inside a glass-paneled office after various ritualistic wavings of the arm and crying of such phrases as "hiya tim, hiya joe, whadaya know abe."

After a lengthy period during which I almost became ill in the atmosphere of perspiration and frenzy, he came out followed by a small man in shirt sleeves who had a tic in his left eye.

"This him?" the small man asked. "Uh-huh. Well, it sounds good, I don't say it don't sound good. Uh-huh. He knows he sticks to this future gag no matter how they try to break him down, and if he does break, nobody's to know we were in on it. He knows it, huh? He looks good for the gag, just old enough, just enough like a crazy prof. It looks good all around, Burns. Uh-huh. Uh-huh, uh-huh."

"Wait till you hear his line," the reporter broke in. "Talk about color, Ferguson!"

"I am unfamiliar with my prismatic possibilities," I told them coldly. "But I must own to a great disappointment that the first representative individuals of the pre-intermediate civilization to hear a coherent account of my origins persist in idiotic droolings—"

The small man's left eye rapped out an impatient tic. "Can that free copy. Or save it for Burns: he'll take it down. Listen, Joey boy, we got something good here. Uh-huh. Two days before the World Series start and not a stick of red-ink news in the town. We can let it run all over the front page, more if it bounces up enough argument. I'll take care of the milking—the regulation comments by the university guys and science societies all around your copy. Meanwhile, you haul whozis here—"

"Terton," I told him desperately. "My name."

"Terton. Uh-huh. You haul Terton here over to a good hotel, get a decent suite and start dragging copy out of him. Keep him isolated until tomorrow morning when there should be a nice thick smell started up. Tomorrow morning, uh-huh. Bring him over again and I'll have a bunch of psychs all ready to swear he's crazy and another bunch crying with tears in their eyes that he's normal and every word sounds like the truth. Get a couple of pics taken of him before you leave."

"Sure, Ferguson. Only trouble, the cop might recognize him as the guy who turned up stark naked in the street. He claims that nobody wears clothes in his period. The police department would have him certified and in Bellevue in no time."

"Lemme think." Ferguson walked around a swift little circle, scratching his nose and winking his eye. "Then we'll play it heavy. For keeps. Uh-huh, for keeps. Find out what he claims his job is—I mean, was—I mean, is going to be—uh-huh, and I'll have a couple of specialists in the same field lined up and insisting that he sounds just like one of them a thousand years from now."

"Just a moment," I insisted. "A thousand years is fantas—"

Tic
went Ferguson's eye. "Get him out of here, Joey boy," he said. "He's your baby. I got work to do."

Not until we were in the hotel room was I able to convey to the reporter my extreme disgust at the stolid lunacy of his culture. And his attitude before Ferguson. Why, he had acted as if he shared Ferguson's opinions!

"Take it easy, Pop," the young man told me, his long legs spilling carelessly over the arm of a garishly upholstered couch. "Let us avoid bitterness and reproach. Let us live out our wealthy two days in harmony. Sure, I believe you. But there are certain proprieties to be observed. If Ferguson suspected that I ever believed anybody, let alone a guy who walks through busy office traffic on Madison Avenue with his bare skin hanging out, it would be necessary for me to seek gainful employment not only with another firm, but possibly in another occupation. Besides, all you care about is attracting the attention of one of these temporal emissary queebles. To do that, you feel you have to threaten him with exposure, you have to make a splash. Believe me, Pop, with the wire service tie-up we have, you'll make a splash that will moisten the ears of Eskimos fishing peacefully off Greenland. Australian Bushmen will pause between boomerangs to ask each other—'What's with this Terton character?'"

After much reflection, I agreed. As a result of Banderling's fatheaded use of me as a thrown gauntlet, I had to adjust myself to the customs of a ridiculous era. As they say, when in 200 AD...