Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 17
The girl sat up, clucking sympathetically. “Imagine. Right in Central Park. Like I was saying to Sadie just the other night, there ought to be a law. A mugger cleaned you, huh?”
A bit puzzled by her reference to a Crocodilus palustris, but emboldened by her friendliness, Ephraim came out of the cave and sat on the paper beside her. Her patois was strange but not unpleasant. Swartz was a German name. The blonde girl was probably the offspring of some Hessian. Even so, she was a pretty little doxy and he hadn’t bussed a wench for some time. He slipped an experimental arm around her waist. “Haven’t we met before?”
Gertie removed his arm and slapped him without heat. “No. And no hard feelings, understand. Ya can’t blame a guy for trying.” She saw the puckered white scars on his chest, souvenirs of King’s Mountain. “Ya was in the Army, huh?”
“Five years.”
She was amazed and pleased. “Now, ain’t that a coincidence? Ya probably know my brother Benny. He was in five years, too.” Gertie was concerned. “You were drinking last night, huh?”
“To my shame.”
Gertie made the soft clucking sound again. “How ya going to get home in that outfit?”
“That,” Ephraim said, “is the problem.”
She reached for and put on her skirt. “Look. I live just over on Eighty-second. And if ya want, on account of you both being veterans, I’ll lend you one of Benny’s suits.” She wriggled into the top part of her four-piece sun ensemble. “Benny’s about the same size as you. Wait.”
Smiling, Ephraim watched her go across the greensward to a broad turnpike bisecting the estate, then rose in sudden horror as a metallic-looking monster with sightless round glass eyes swooped out from behind a screen of bushes and attempted to run her down. The girl dodged it adroitly, paused in the middle of the pike to allow a stream of billingsgate to escape her sweet red lips, then continued blithely on her way.
His senses alerted, Ephraim continued to watch the pike. The monsters were numerous as locusts and seemed to come in assorted colors and sizes. Then he spotted a human in each and realized what they must be. While he had lain in a drunken stupor, Mother Shipton’s prophecy had come true— “Carriages without horses shall go.”
He felt sick. The malcontents would undoubtedly try to blame this on the administration. He had missed the turning of an important page of history. He lifted his eyes above the budding trees and was almost sorry he had. The trees alone were familiar. A solid rectangle of buildings hemmed in what he had believed to be an estate; unbelievable buildings. Back of them, still taller buildings lifted their spires and Gothic towers and one stubby thumb into the clouds. His pulse quickening, he looked at the date line of a paper on the grass. It was April 15, 1950.
He would never clank cups with Mr. Henry again. The fiery Virginian, along with his cousin Nathan and a host of other good and true men, had long since become legends. He should be dust. It hadn’t been a night since he had parted from Mr. Henry. It had been one hundred and sixty-one years.
A wave of sadness swept him. The warm wind off the river seemed cooler. The sun lost some of its warmth. He had never felt so alone. Then he forced himself to face it. How many times had he exclaimed: “If only I could come back one hundred years from now’’
Well, here he was, with sixty-one years for good measure.
A white object bounded across the grass toward him. Instinctively, Ephraim caught it and found it was the hard white sphere being used by the boys playing at ball.
“All the way,” one of them yelled.
Ephraim cocked his arm and threw. The sphere sped like a rifle ball toward the target of the most distant glove, some seventeen rods away.
“Wow!” said the youth. The young voice was so shocked with awe that Ephraim had an uneasy feeling the boy was about to genuflect. “Gee. Get a load of that whip. The guy’s got an arm like Joe DiMaggio. . . .”
~ * ~
Supper was good but over before Ephraim had barely got started. Either the American stomach had shrunk, or Gertie and her brother, despite their seeming affluence, were among the very poor. There had only been two vegetables, one meat, no fowl or venison, no hoecakes, no mead or small ale or rum, and only one pie and one cake for the three of them.
He sat, still hungry, in the parlor thinking of Martha’s ample board and generous bed, realizing she, too, must be dust. There was no use in returning to Middlesex. It would be as strange and terrifying as New York.
Benny offered him a small paper spill of tobacco. “Sis tells me ya was in the Army. What outfit was ya with?” Before Ephraim could tell him, he continued, “Me, I was one of the Bastards of Bastogne.” He dug a thumb into Ephraim’s ribs. “Pretty hot, huh, what Tony McAuliffe tells the Krauts when they think they got us where the hair is short and want we should surrender.”
“What did he tell them?” Ephraim asked politely.
Benny looked at him suspiciously.
“ ‘Nuts!’ he tol’ ‘em. ‘Nuts.’ Ya sure ya was in the Army, chum?”
Ephraim said he was certain.
“E.T.O. or Pacific?”
“Around here,” Ephraim said. “You know—Germantown, Monmouth, King’s Mountain.”
“Oh. Stateside, huh?” Benny promptly lost all interest in his sister’s guest. Putting his hat on the back of his head, he announced his bloody intention of going down to the corner and shooting one of the smaller Kelly Pools.
“Have a good time,” Gertie told him.
Sitting down beside Ephraim, she fiddled with the knobs on an ornate commode, and a diminutive mule skinner appeared out of nowhere cracking a bull whip and shouting something almost unintelligible about having a Bible in his pack for the Reverend Mr. Black.
Ephraim shied away from the commode, wide-eyed.
Gertie fiddled with the knobs again and the little man went away. “Ya don’t like television, huh?” She moved a little closer to him. “Ya want we should just sit and talk?”
Patting at the perspiration on his forehead with one of Benny’s handkerchiefs, Ephraim said, “That would be fine.”
As with the horseless carriages, the towering buildings, and the water that ran out of taps hot or cold as you desired, there was some logical explanation for the little man. But he had swallowed all the wonders he was capable of assimilating in one night.
Gertie moved still closer. “Wadda ya wanna talk about?”
Ephraim considered the question. He wanted to know if the boys had ever been able to fund or reduce the national debt. Seventy-four million, five hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and forty-one dollars was a lot of money. He wanted to know if Mr. Henry had been successful in his advocation of the ten amendments to the Constitution, hereinafter to be known as the Bill of Rights, and how many states had ratified them. He wanted to know the tax situation and how the public had reacted to the proposed imposition of a twenty-five-cent-a-gallon excise tax on whisky.
“What,” he asked Gertie, “would you say was the most important thing that happened this past year?”
Gertie considered the question. “Well, Rita Hayworth had a baby and Clark Gable got married.”
“I mean politically.”
“Oh. Mayor O’Dwyer got married.”
Gertie had been very kind. Gertie was very lovely. Ephraim meant to see more of her. With Martha fluttering around in heaven exchanging receipts for chowchow and watermelon preserves, there was no reason why he shouldn’t. But as with modern wonders, he’d had all of Gertie he could take for one night. He wanted to get out into the city and find out just what had happened during the past one hundred and sixty-one years.
Gertie was sorry to see him go. “But ya will be back, won’t you, Ephraim?”
He sealed the promise with a kiss. “Tomorrow night. And a good many nights after that.” He made hay on what he had seen the sun shine. “You’re very lovely, my dear.”
She slipped a bill into the pocket of his coat. “For the ferry fare back to Joisey.” There were lighted candles in her eyes. “Until tomorrow night, Ephraim.”
~ * ~
The streets were even more terrifying than they had been in the daytime. Ephraim walked east on Eighty-second Street, south on Central Park West, then east on Central Park South. He’d had it in mind to locate the Pig and Whistle. Realizing the futility of such an attempt, he stopped in at the next place he came to exuding a familiar aroma, and, laying the dollar Gertie had slipped into his pocket on the bar, he ordered rum.
The first thing he had to do was find gainful employment. As a Harvard graduate, lawyer, and former congressman, it shouldn’t prove too difficult. He might, in time, even run for office again. A congressman’s six dollars per diem wasn’t to be held lightly.
A friendly, white-jacketed Mine Host set his drink in front of him and picked up the bill. “I thank you, sir.”
About to engage him in conversation concerning the state of the nation, Ephraim looked from Mine Host to the drink, then back at Mine Host again. “E-yah. I should think you would thank me. I’ll have my change, if you please. Also a man-sized drink.”
No longer so friendly, Mine Host leaned across the wood. “That’s an ounce and a half. What change? Where did you come from, Reuben? What did you expect to pay?”
“The usual price. A few pennies a mug,” Ephraim said. “The war is over. Remember? And with the best imported island rum selling wholesale at twenty cents a gallon—”
Mine Host picked up the shot glass and returned the bill to the bar. “You win. You’ve had enough, pal. What do you want to do, cost me my license ? Go ahead. Like a good fellow. Scram.”
He emphasized the advice by putting the palm of his hand in Ephraim’s face, pushing him toward the door. It was a mistake. Reaching across the bar, Ephraim snaked Mine Host out from behind it and was starting to shake some civility into the publican when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s let it go at that, chum.”
“Drunk and disorderly, eh?” a second voice added.
The newcomers were big men, men who carried themselves with the unmistakable air of authority. He attempted to explain, and one of them held his arms while the other man searched him and found the Spanish pistol.
“Oh. Carrying a heater, eh? That happens to be against the law, chum.”
“Ha,” Ephraim laughed at him. “Also ho.” He quoted from memory Article II of the amendments Mr. Henry had read him in the Pig and Whistle:
“ ‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ “
“Now he’s a militia,” the plainclothes man said.
“He’s a nut,” his partner added.
“Get him out of here,” Mine Host said.
~ * ~
Ephraim sat on the bunk in his cell, deflated. This was a fine resurrection for a member of the First Congress.
“Cheer up,” a voice from the upper bunk consoled. “The worst they can do is burn you.” He offered Ephraim a paper spill of tobacco. “The name is Silovitz.”
Ephraim asked him why he was in gaol.
“Alimony,” the other man sighed. “That is, the nonpayment thereof.”
The word was new to Ephraim. He asked Silovitz to explain. “But that’s illegal, archaic. You can’t be jailed for debt.”
His cell mate lighted a cigarette. “No. Of course not. Right now I’m sitting in the Stork Club buying Linda Darnell a drink.” He studied Ephraim’s face. “Say, I’ve been wondering who you look like. I make you now. You look like the statue of Nathan Hale the D.A.R. erected in Central Park.”
“It’s a family resemblance,” Ephraim said. “Nat was a second cousin. They hanged him in ‘76, the same year I went into the Army.”
Silovitz nodded approval. “That’s a good yarn. Stick to it. The wife of the judge you’ll probably draw is an ardent D.A.R. But if I were you I’d move my war record up a bit and remove a few more cousins between myself and Nathan.”
He smoked in silence a minute. “Boy. It must have been nice to live back in those days. A good meal for a dime. Whisky five cents a drink. No sales or income or surtax. No corporate or excise profits tax. No unions, no John L., no check-off. No tax on diapers and coffins. No closed shops. No subsidies. No paying farmers for cotton they didn’t plant or for the too many potatoes they did. No forty-two billion dollar budget.”
“I beg your pardon?” Ephraim said.
“Ya heard me.” Swept by a nostalgia for something he’d never known, Silovitz continued. “No two hundred and sixty-five billion national debt. No trying to spend ourselves out of the poorhouse. No hunting or fishing or driving or occupational license. No supporting three-fourths of Europe and Asia. No atom bomb. No Molotov. No Joe Stalin. No alimony. No Frankie Sinatra. No Video. No bebop.”
His eyes shone. “No New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Democrats, Jeffersonian Democrats, Republicans, State’s Righters, Communists, Socialists, Socialist-Labor, Farmer-Labor, American-Labor, Liberals, Progressives, and Prohibitionists, and W.C.T.U.ers. Congress united and fighting to make this a nation.” He quoted the elderly gentleman from Pennsylvania. “ ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ Ah. Those were the days.”
Ephraim cracked his knuckles. It was a pretty picture, but according to his recollection, not exactly correct. The boys had hung together pretty well during the first few weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But from there on in, it had been a dog fight. No two delegates had been able to agree on even the basic articles of confederation. The Constitution itself was a patchwork affair and compromise drafted originally as a preamble and seven Articles by delegates from twelve of the thirteen states at the May ‘87 convention in Philadelphia. And as for the boys’ hanging together, the first congress had convened on March 4 and it had been April 6 before a quorum had been present.
Silovitz sighed. “Still, it’s the little things that get ya. If only Bessie hadn’t insisted on listening to ‘When a Girl Marries’ when I wanted to hear the B-Bar-B Riders. And if only I hadn’t made that one bad mistake.”
“What was that?” Ephraim asked.
Silovitz told him. “I snuck up to the Catskills to hide out on the court order. And what happens? A game warden picks me up because I forgot to buy a two-dollar fishing license!”
~ * ~
A free man again. Ephraim stood on the walk in front of the Fifty-second Street Station diverting outraged pedestrians into two rushing streams as he considered his situation. It hadn’t been much of a trial. The arresting officers admitted the pistol was foul with rust and probably hadn’t been fired since O’Sullivan was a gleam in his great-great-grandfather’s eyes.
“Ya name is Hale. An’ ya a veteran, uh?” the judge had asked.
“Yes,” Ephraim admitted, “I am.” He’d followed Silovitz’s advice. “What’s more, Nathan Hale was a relation of mine.”
The judge had beamed. “Ya don’ say. Ya a Son of the Revolution, uh?”
On Ephraim admitting he was and agreeing with the judge the ladies of the D.A.R. had the right to stop someone named Marion Anderson from singing in Constitution Hall if they wanted to, the judge, running for re-election, had told him to go and drink no more, or if he had to drink, not to beef about his bill.
“Ya got ya state bonus and ya N.S.L.I. refund, didncha?”
Physically and mentally buffeted by his night in a cell and Silovitz’s revelation concerning the state of the nation, Ephraim stood frightened by the present and aghast at the prospect of the future.
Only two features of his resurrection pleased him. Both were connected with Gertie. Women, thank God, hadn’t changed. Gertie was very lovely. With Gertie sharing his board and bed he might manage to acclimate himself and be about the business of every good citizen, begetting future toilers to pay off the national debt. It wasn’t an unpleas-ing prospect. He had, after all, been celibate one hundred and sixty-one years. Still, with rum at five dollars a fifth, eggs eighty cents a dozen, and lamb chops ninety-five cents a pound, marriage would run into money. He had none. Then he thought of Sam Osgood’s letter. . . .
~ * ~
Mr. Le Due Neimors was so excited he could hardly balance his pince-nez on the aquiline bridge of his well-bred nose. It was the first time in the multimillionaire’s experience as a collector of early Americana he had ever heard of, let alone been offered, a letter purported to have been written by the first Postmaster General, franked by the First Congress, and containing a crabbed footnote by the distinguished patriot from Pennsylvania who was credited with being the founding father of the postal system. He read the footnote aloud:
