Now Wait for Last Year (24 page)

'What deal?' the cab said, with suspicion.

'My travel permit is back at Hazeltine Corporation – remember, where you picked me up? Along with my wallet. All my money's there, too. If you turn me over to the 'Star military police my money won't be worth anything to me; you know what they'll do.'

'Yes sir,' the cab agreed. 'You'll be put to death. It's the new law, passed by decree on the tenth of May. Unauthorized travel by—'

'So why not give my money to you? As a tip. You take me back to Hazeltine Corporation, I'll pick up my wallet, I'll show you my travel permit so you won't have to bring me here again. And you can have the money. You can see how I'd benefit by the deal and how you would too.'

'We'd both gain,' the cab agreed. Its autonomic circuit clicked .rapidly as it calculated. 'How much money do you have, sir?'

'I'm a courier for Hazeltine. In my wallet there's about twenty-five thousand dollars.'

'I see! In occupation scrip or in pre-ocupation UN banknotes?'

'The latter of course.'

'I'll comply!' the cab decided eagerly. And took off once more. 'In strict sense you can't be said to have traveled, inasmuch as the destination you gave me is enemy territory and hence I did not turn even for a moment in that direction. No law has been broken.' It turned in the direction of Detroit, greedy for its loot.

When it set down at the parking lot of Hazeltine Corporation Eric got out hurriedly. 'I'll be right back.' He loped across the pavement toward a doorway of the building; a moment later he was inside. An immense testing lab lay extended before him.

When he found a Hazeltine employee he said, 'My name is Eric Sweetscent; I'm on the personal staff of Virgil Ackerman and there's been an accident. Will you get in touch with Mr Ackerman at TF&D for me, please?'

The employee, a male clerk, hesitated. 'I understood—' He lowered his voice fearfully. 'Isn't Mr Virgil Ackerman at Wash-35 on Mars? Mr Jonas Ackerman is in charge at Tijuana Fur & Dye now and I know Mr Virgil Ackerman is listed in the Weekly Security Bulletin as a war criminal because he fled when the occupation began.'

'Can you contact Wash-35 for me?'

'Enemy territory?'

'Get me Jonas on the vidphone, then.' There was not much else he could do. He followed the clerk into the business office, feeling futile.

Presently the call had been put through, Jonas' features formed on the screen; when he saw Eric he blinked and stammered, 'But – they got you, too?' He blurted, 'Why'd you leave Wash-35? My God, you were safe there with Virgil. I'm ringing off; this is some kind of a trap – the MPs will—' The screen died. Jonas had hurriedly cut the circuit.

So his other self, his normally phased, one-year-later self, had made it to Wash-35 with Virgil; that was terribly reassuring – almost unthinkably so. No doubt the reegs had managed to—

His one-year-later self.

That meant that somehow he had gotten back to 2055. Otherwise there couldn't be a self of 2056 to have fled with Virgil. And the only way he could reach 2055 would be by means of JJ-180.

And the only source of the drug was here. He was standing in the one right spot on the entire planet, by accident, due to the trick he had managed to pull off at the expense of the idiotic autonomic cab.

Relocating the clerk, Eric said, 'I'm supposed to requisition a supply of the drug Frohedadrine. One hundred milligrams. And I'm in a hurry. You want to see my identification? I can prove I work for TF&D.' And then it came to him. 'Call Bert Hazeltine; he'll identify me.' Undoubtedly Hazeltine would remember him from the encounter at Cheyenne.

The clerk muttered, 'But they shot Mr Hazeltine. You must remember that; how come you don't? When they took over this place in January.'

The expression on Eric's face must have conveyed his shock. Because all at once the clerk's manner changed.

'You were a friend of his, I guess,' the clerk said.

'Yes.' Eric nodded; that could be said.

'Bert was a good man to work for. Nothing like these 'Star bastards.' The clerk made up his mind. 'I don't know why you're here or what's wrong with you but I'll get the hundred milligrams of JJ-180: I know where it's kept.'

'Thanks.'

The clerk hurried off. Time passed. Eric wondered about the cab; was it still waiting outside on the lot? Would it, if pressed too hard, attempt to come into the building after him? An absurd and yet nerve-wracking thought, the autonomic cab forcing its way into Hazeltine, bursting – or trying to burst – through the cement wall.

The clerk returned and held out a handful of capsules to Eric.

From a nearby water cooler Eric got a cup, filled it, mouthed a capsule, and raised the Dixie cup.

'That's the recently altered JJ-180 formula,' the clerk said, watching him keenly. 'I better tell you, now that I see it's for yourself.' He was all at once pale.

Lowering the cup of water, Eric said, 'Altered how?'

'Retains the addictive and liver-toxic properties but the time-freeing hallucinations are gone.' The clerk explained, 'When the 'Starmen came in here they ordered our chemists to reconstruct the drug; it was their idea, not ours.'

'Why?' In the name of God, what good was a drug consisting of nothing but addictive and toxic properties?

'For a weapon of war against the reegs. And—' The clerk hesitated. 'Also it's used to addict rebel Terrans who've gone over to the enemy.' He did not look very happy about that part of it.

Tossing the capsules of JJ-180 onto a nearby lab bench, Eric said, 'I give up.' And then he had one more – meagre – idea. 'If I can get approval from Jonas will you supply me a company ship? I'll call him again; Jonas is an old friend of mine.' He walked toward the vidphone, the clerk trailing after him. If he could get Jonas to listen—

Two Lilistar MPs entered the lab; behind them, in the parking lot, Eric saw a 'Star patrol ship parked beside his autonomic cab.

'You are under arrest,' one of the MPs said to him, pointing an oddly shaped stick in Eric's direction. 'For travel without authorization and felony fraud. Your cab got tired of waiting and called in a complaint.'

'What fraud?' Eric said. The clerk now had wisely vanished. 'I'm a staff member of Tijuana Fur & Dye; I'm here on business.'

The oddly shaped stick glowed and Eric felt as if his brain had been touched; without hesitation he moved toward the lab door, his right hand pawing in a ticlike, useless gesture at his forehead. Okay, he thought. I'm coming. He had lost any idea of resisting the Lilistar MPs now, or even of arguing with them; he was glad to get into their patrol ship.

A moment later they had taken off; the ship glided above the rooftops of Detroit, heading toward the barracks two miles away.

'Kill him now,' one of the MPs said to his companion. 'And drop his body out; why take him to the barracks?'

'Hell, we can just push him out,' the other MP said. 'The fall will kill him.' He touched a button at the control panel of the ship and a vertical hatch slipped open; Eric saw the buildings below, the streets and conapts of the city. Think happy thoughts,' the MP said to Eric, 'on the way down.' Grabbing Eric by the arm, he slung him into a helpless, crippled posture and shoved him toward the hatch. It was all expert and entirely professional; he found himself teetering at the hatch and then the MP released him in order to escape falling himself.

From beneath the patrol ship a second ship, larger, pitted and scarred, an interplan military vessel with cannon bristling as spines, floated on its back as it ascended like some raptorial water creature. With care it fired a microbolt into the open hatch, picking off the MP who stood by Eric and then one of its larger cannon opened up and the front portion of the MP patrol ship burst and flew outward, spattering Eric and the remaining MP with molten debris.

The MP patrol ship dropped like a stone toward the city below.

Awakening from his stricken trance, the remaining MP ran to the wall of the ship and threw on the emergency manually-operated guidance system. The ship ceased to fall; it glided, wind-swept, in a spiral pattern until at last it crashed and bumped and skidded along a street, missing wheels and cabs, nosed into the curb, lifted its tail into the air and came to rest.

The remaining MP staggered up, grabbed his pistol, and somehow got to the hatch: he crouched sideways and began firing. After the third shot he snapped backward; his pistol dropped from his hand and skidded against the hull of the ship and he tumbled into a ball that rolled helplessly like an animal that had been run over until at last it collided with a portion of the hull. There it stopped, gradually unwinding into man shape once more.

The pitted, grimy military ship had parked on the street close by and now its forward side-hatch opened and a man hopped out. As Eric stepped from the MP patrol ship the man sprinted up to him.

'Hey,' the man panted. 'It's me.'

'Who are you?' Eric said; the man who had tackled the MP ship with his own was certainly familiar – Eric confronted a face which he had seen many times and yet it was distorted now, witnessed from a weird angle, as if inside out, pulled through infinity. The man's hair was parted on the wrong side so that his head seemed lopsided, wrong in all its lines. What amazed him was the physical unattractiveness of the man. He was too fat and a little too old. Unpleasantly gray. It was a shock to see himself like this, without preparation; do I really look like that? he asked himself morosely. What had become of the clean-cut youth whose image he still, evidently, superimposed onto his shaving mirror each morning ... who had substituted this man bordering on middle age?

'So I've gotten fat; so what?' his self of 2056 said. 'Christ, I saved your life; they were going to pitch you out.'

'I know that,' Eric said irritably. He hurried along beside the man who was himself; they entered the interplan ship and his 2056 self at once slammed the hatch shut and sent the ship hurtling into the sky, out of reach of any possibility of containment by the Lilistar military police. This was obviously an advanced ship of the line; this was no barge.

'Without intending to insult your intelligence,' his 2056 self said, 'which I personally consider very high, I'd like to review for your benefit a few of the moronic aspects of what you had in mind. First, if you had been able to obtain the original type of JJ-180 it would have carried you to the future, not back to 2055, and you would have been readdicted. What you need – and you seemed for a time to have worked this out – is not more JJ-180 but something to balance the effects of the antidote.' His 2056 self nodded his head. 'Over there in my coat.' His coat hung by a magnetic spot on the wall of the ship. 'Hazeltine has had a year to develop it. In exchange for your bringing them the formula for the antidote – you couldn't get back to 2055. And you know you do. Or will, rather.'

'Whose ship is this?' It impressed him. It could pass freely through Lilistar lines, penetrate Terra's defenses with ease.

'It's reeg. Made available to Virgil at Wash-35. In case something goes wrong. We're going to bring Molinari to Wash-35 when Cheyenne falls, which it eventually will, probably in another month.'

'How's his health?'

'Much better. He's doing what he wants now, what he knows he should be doing. And there's more... but you'll find out. Go get the antidote to Lilistar's antidote.'

Eric fumbled in the pockets of the coat, found the tablets, took them without benefit of water. 'Listen,' he said, 'what's the story on Kathy? We ought to confer.' It was good having someone he could talk to about his most wasting, obsessive problem, even if it was only himself; at least the illusion of collaboration was achieved.

'Well, you got – will get – her off JJ-180. But not before she's suffered major physical damage. She'll never be pretty again, even with reconstructive surgery, which she'll try several times before she gives up. There's more but I'd rather not tell you; it'll just make your difficulties worse. I'll say only this. Have you ever heard of Korsakow's syndrome?'

'No,' Eric said. But of course he had. It was his job.

'Traditionally it's a psychosis occurring in alcoholics; it consists of actual pathological destruction of cortical brain tissue due to long periods of intoxication. But it also can occur from the steady use of narcotic drugs.'

'Are you saying that Kathy has it?'

'Remember those periods when she wouldn't eat for three days at a time? And her violent, destructive rages – and ideas of reference, that everyone was being mean to her. Korsakow's syndrome, and not from JJ-180, but from all the drugs she took prior to that. The doctors at Cheyenne, while getting her ready to be returned to San Diego, ran an E E G on her and picked it up. They'll tell you very soon after your return to 2055. So prepare yourself.' He added, 'It's irreversible. Needless to say. Removal of the toxic agents is not enough.'

Both of them were silent then.

'It's rough,' his 2056 self said finally, 'to be married to a woman with psychotic traits. As well as showing her physical deterioration. She's still my wife. Our wife. Under phenothia-zine sedation she's quiet, anyhow. You know, it's interesting that I – we – didn't pick it up, weren't able to diagnose a case we're living with day in, day out. A commentary on the blinding aspects of subjectivity and over-familiarity. It unfolded slowly, of course; that tended to conceal its identity. I think eventually she'll have to be institutionalized, but I'm putting that off. Possibly until after the war's won. Which it will be.'

'You have proof? Through JJ-180?'

'Nobody's using JJ-180 any more except for Lilistar, and that as you know is only for the toxic and addictive properties. So many alternate futures have been disclosed that the task of relating them to our world had to be put aside for after the war. It takes literally years to test out a new drug thoroughly; we both know that. But of course we'll win the war; the reegs have invested half of Lilistar's Empire. Now listen to me. I have instructions for you and you must fulfill them; otherwise another alternate future will split off and it may cancel my stand with you against the 'Star MPs.'