Collected Short Fiction, page 925
He opens the door. The girl in the hallway is young and good-looking, with close-cropped dark hair and full lips. Thank you, Mary Chambers, whoever you may be. “Pardon the bathrobe,” he says, “but I wasn’t expecting company.” She steps into his apartment. Suddenly he notices how strained and tense her face is. Country girl from Ohio, suddenly having second thoughts about visiting a strange man in a strange city? He tries to put her at her ease. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks. “Not much of a selection, I’m afraid, but I have scotch, gin, some blackberry cordial—” She reaches into her purse and takes something out. He frowns. Not a gun, exactly, but it does seem like a weapon of some sort, a little glittering metal device that fits neatly in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “what’s—” “I’m so awfully sorry, Martin,” she whispers, and a bolt of terrible fire slams into his chest.
She sips the drink. It relaxes her. The glass isn’t very clean, but she isn’t worried about picking up a disease, not after all the injections Friesling gave her. Martin looks as if he can stand some relaxing too. “Aren’t you drinking?” she asks. “I suppose I will,” he says. He pours himself some gin. She comes up behind him and slips her hand into the front of his bathrobe. His body is cool, smooth, hard. “Oh, Martin,” she murmurs. “Oh! Martin!”
Ted takes a room in one of the commercial hotels downtown. The first thing he does is try to put a call through to Alice’s mother in Chillicothe. He still isn’t really convinced that his little time- jaunt flirtation has retroactively eliminated Alice from existence. But the call convinces him, all right. The middle-aged woman who answers is definitely not Alice’s mother. Right phone number, right address—he badgers her for the information—but wrong woman. “You don’t have a daughter named Alice Porter?” he asks three or four times. “You don’t know anyone in the neighborhood who does? It’s important.” All right. Cancel the old lady, ergo cancel Alice. But now he has a different problem. How much of the universe has he altered by removing Alice and her mother? Does he live in some other city, now, and hold some other job? What has happened to Bobby and Tink? Frantically he begins phoning people. Friends, fellow workers, the man at the bank. The same response from all of them: blank stares, shakings of the head. We don’t know you, fellow. He looks at himself in the mirror. Okay, he asks himself. Who am I?
Martin moves swiftly and purposefully, the way they taught him to do in the army when it’s necessary to disarm a dangerous opponent. He lunges forward and catches the girl’s arm, pushing it upward before she can fire the shiny whatzis she’s aiming at him. She turns out to be stronger than he anticipated, and they struggle fiercely for the weapon. Suddenly it fires. Something like a lightning bolt explodes between them and knocks him to the floor, stunned. When he picks himself up he sees her lying near the door with a charred hole in her throat.
The telephone’s jangling clatter brings Martin up out of a dream in which he is ravishing Alice’s luscious young body. Dry-throated, gummy-eyed, he reaches a palsied hand toward the receiver. “Yes?” he says. Ted’s face blossoms on the screen. “Grandfather!” he blurts. “Are you all right?” “Of course I’m all right,” Martin says testily. “Can’t you tell? What’s the matter with you, boy?” Ted shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “Maybe it was only a bad dream. I imagined that Alice rented one of those time machines and went back to 1947. And tried to kill you so that I wouldn’t ever have existed.” Martin snorts. “What idiotic nonsense! How can she have killed me in 1947 when I’m here alive in 2006?”
Naked, Alice sinks into Martin’s arms. His strong hands sweep eagerly over her breasts and shoulders and his mouth descends to hers. She shivers with desire. “Yes,” she murmurs tenderly, pressing herself against him. “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” They’ll do it and it’ll be fantastic. And afterward she’ll kill him with the kitchen carver while he’s lying there savoring the event. But a troublesome thought occurs. If Martin dies in 1947, Ted doesn’t get to be born in 1968. Okay. But what about Tink and Bobby? They won’t get born either, not if I don’t marry Ted. I’ll be married to someone else when I get back to 2006, and I suppose I’ll have different children. Bobby? Tink? What am I doing to you? Sudden fear congeals her, and she pulls back from the vigorous young man nuzzling her throat. “Wait,” she says. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s all a big mistake. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get out of here right away!”
So this is the year 1947. Well, well, well. Everything looks so cluttered and grimy and ancient. He hurries through the chilly streets toward his grandfather’s place. If his luck is good and if Friesling’s technicians have calculated things accurately, he’ll be able to head Alice off. That might even be her now, that slender woman walking briskly half a block ahead of him. He steps up his pace. Yes, it’s Alice, on her way to Martin’s. Well done, Friesling! Ted approaches her warily, suspecting that she’s armed. If she’s capable of coming back to 1947 to kill Martin, she’d kill him just as readily. Especially back here where neither one of them has any legal existence. When he’s close to her he says in a low, hard, intense voice, “Don’t turn around, Alice. Just keep walking as if everything’s perfectly normal.” She stiffens. “Ted?” she cries, astonished. “Is that you, Ted?” “Damned right it is.” He laughs harshly. “Come on. Walk to the corner and turn to your left around the block. You’re going back to your machine and you’re going to get the hell out of the twentieth century without harming anybody. I know what you were trying to do, Alice. But I caught you in time, didn’t I?”
Martin is just getting down to real business when the door of his apartment bursts open and a man rushes in. He’s middle-aged, stocky, with weird clothes—the ultimate in zoot suits, a maze of vividly contrasting colors and conflicting patterns, shoulders padded to resemble shelves—and a wild look in his eyes. Alice leaps up from the bed. “Ted!” she screams. “My God, what are you doing here?” “You murderous bitch,” the intruder yells. Martin, naked and feeling vulnerable, his nervous system stunned by the interruption, looks on in amazement as the stranger grabs her and begins throttling her. “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” he roars, shaking her in a mad frenzy. The girl’s face is turning black. Her eyes are bugging. After a long moment Martin breaks finally from his freeze. He stumbles forward, seizes the man’s fingers, peels them away from the girl’s throat. Too late. She falls limply and lies motionless. “Alice!” the intruder moans. “Alice, Alice, what have I done?” He drops to his knees beside her body, sobbing. Martin blinks. “You killed her,” he says, not believing that any of this can really be happening. “You actually killed her?”
Alice’s face appears on the telephone screen. Christ, how beautiful she is, Martin thinks, and his decrepit body quivers with lust. “There you are,” he says. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. I had such a strange dream that something awful had happened to Ted—and then your phone didn’t answer, and I began to think maybe the dream was a premonition of some kind, an omen, you know—” Alice looks puzzled. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number, sir,” she says sweetly, and hangs up.
She draws the laser and the naked man cowers back against the wall in bewilderment. “What the hell is this?” he asks, trembling. “Put that thing down, lady. You’ve got the wrong guy.” “No,” she says. “You’re the one I’m after. I hate to do this to you, Martin, but I’ve got no choice. You have to die.” “Why?” he demands. “Why?” “You wouldn’t understand it even if I told you,” she says. She moves her finger toward the discharge stud. Abruptly there is a frightening sound of cracking wood and collapsing plaster behind her, as though an earthquake has struck. She whirls and is appalled to see her husband breaking down the door of Martin’s apartment. “I’m just in time!” Ted exclaims. “Don’t move, Alice!” He reaches for her. In panic she fires without thinking. The dazzling beam catches Ted in the pit of the stomach and he goes down, gurgling in agony, clutching at his belly as he dies.
The door falls with a crash and this character in peculiar clothing materializes in a cloud of debris, looking crazier than Napoleon. It’s incredible, Martin thinks. First an unknown broad rings his bell and invites herself in and takes her clothes off, and then, just as he’s about to screw her, this happens. It’s pure Marx Brothers, only dirty. But Martin’s not going to take any crap. He pulls himself away from the panting, gasping girl on the bed, crosses the room in three quick strides, and seizes the newcomer. “Who the hell are you?” Martin demands, slamming him hard against the wall. The girl is dancing around behind him. “Don’t hurt him!” she wails. “Oh, please, don’t hurt him!”
Ted certainly hadn’t expected to find them in bed together. He understood why she might have wanted to go back in time to murder Martin, but simply to have an affair with him, no, it didn’t make sense. Of course, it was altogether likely that she had come here to kill and had paused for a little dalliance first. You never could tell about women, even your own wife. Alley cats, all of them. Well, a lucky thing for him that she had given him these few extra minutes to get here. “Okay,” he says. “Get your clothes on, Alice. You’re coming with me.” “Just a second, mister,” Martin growls. “You’ve got your goddamned nerve, busting in like this.” Ted tries to explain, but the words won’t come. It’s all too complicated. He gestures mutely at Alice, at himself, at Martin. The next moment Martin jumps him and they go tumbling together to the floor.
“Who are you?” Martin yells, banging the intruder repeatedly against the wall. “You some kind of detective? You trying to work a badger game on me?” Slam. Slam. Slam. He feels the girl’s small fists pounding on his own back. “Stop it!” she screams. “Let him alone, will you? He’s my husband!” “Husband!” Martin cries. Astounded, he lets go of the stranger and swings around to face the girl. A moment later he realizes his mistake. Out of the corner of his eye he sees that the intruder has raised his fists high above his head like clubs. Martin tries to get out of the way, but no time, no time, and the fists descend with awful force against his skull.
Alice doesn’t know what to do. They’re rolling around on the floor, fighting like wildcats, now Martin on top, now Ted. Martin is younger and bigger and stronger, but Ted seems possessed by the strength of the insane; he’s gone berserk. Both men are bloody- faced, and furniture is crashing over everywhere. Her first impulse is to get between them and stop this crazy fight somehow. But then she remembers that she has come here as a killer, not as a peacemaker. She gets the laser from her purse and aims it at Martin, but then the combatants do a flip-flop and it is Ted who is in the line of fire. She hesitates. It doesn’t matter which one she shoots, she realizes after a moment. They both have to die, one way or another. She takes aim. Maybe she can get them both with one bolt. But as her finger starts to tighten on the discharge stud, Martin suddenly gets Ted in a bearhug and, half lifting him, throws him five feet across the room. The back of Ted’s neck hits the wall and there is a loud crack. Ted slumps and is still. Martin gets shakily to his feet. “I think I killed him,” he says. “Christ, who the hell was he?” “He was your grandson,” Alice says and begins to shriek hysterically.
Ted stares in horror at the crumpled body at his feet. His hands still tingle from the impact. The left side of Martin’s head looks as though a pile-driver has crushed it. “Good God in heaven,” Ted says thickly, “what have I done? I came here to protect him and I’ve killed him! I’ve killed my own grandfather!” Alice, wide-eyed, futilely trying to cover her nakedness by folding one arm across her breasts and spreading her other hand over her loins, says, “If he’s dead, why are you still here? Shouldn’t you have disappeared?” Ted shrugs. “Maybe I’m safe as long as I remain here in the past. But the moment I try to go back to 2006, I’ll vanish as though I’ve never been. I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this. What do you think?”
Alice steps uncertainly from the machine into the Temponautics showroom. There’s Friesling. There are the technicians. Friesling says, smiling, “I hope you had a very enjoyable journey, Mrs.—ah—uh’ He falters. “I’m sorry,” he says, reddening, “but your name seems to have escaped me.” Alice says, “It’s, ah, Alice—uh—do you know, the second name escapes me too?”
The whole clan has gathered to celebrate Martin’s eighty-third birthday. He cuts the cake, and then one by one they go to him to kiss him. When it’s Alice’s turn, he deftly spins her around so that he screens her from the others and gives her rump a good hearty pinch. “Oh, if I were only fifty years younger!” he sighs.
It’s a warm springlike day. Everything has been lovely at the office—three new accounts all at once—and the trip home on the freeway was a breeze. Alice is waiting for him, dressed in her finest and most sexy outfit, all ready to go out. It’s a special day. Their eleventh anniversary. How beautiful she looks! He kisses her, she kisses him, he takes the tickets from his pocket with a grand flourish. “Surprise,” he says. “Two weeks in Hawaii, starting next Tuesday! Happy anniversary!” “Oh, Ted!” she cries. “How marvelous! I love you, Ted darling!” He pulls her close to him again. “I love you, Alice dear.”
1974
Capricorn Games
Nikki stepped into the conical field of the ultrasonic cleanser, wriggling so that the unheard droning out of the machine’s stubby snout could more effectively shear her skin of dead epidermal tissue, globules of dried sweat, dabs of yesterday’s scents, and other debris; after three minutes she emerged clean, bouncy, ready for the party. She programmed her party outfit: green buskins, lemon-yellow tunic of gauzy film, pale orange cape soft as a clam’s mantle, and nothing underneath but Nikki—smooth, glistening, satiny Nikki. Her body was tuned and fit. The party was in her honor, though she was the only one who knew that. Today was her birthday, the seventh of January, 1999: twenty-four years old, no sign yet of bodily decay. Old Steiner had gathered an extraordinary assortment of guests: he promised to display a reader of minds, a billionaire, an authentic Byzantine duke, an Arab rabbi, a man who had married his own daughter, and other marvels. All of these, of course, subordinate to the true guest of honor, the evening’s prize, the real birthday boy, the lion of the season—the celebrated Nicholson, who had lived a thousand years and who said he could help others to do the same. Nikki . . . Nicholson. Happy assonance, portending close harmony. You will show me, dear Nicholson, how I can live forever and never grow old. A cozy soothing idea.
The sky beyond the sleek curve of her window was black, snow-dappled; she imagined she could hear the rusty howl of the wind and feel the sway of the frost-gripped building, ninety stories high. This was the worst winter she had ever known. Snow fell almost every day, a planetary snow, a global shiver, not even sparing the tropics. Ice hard as iron bands bound the streets of New York. Walls were slippery, the air had a cutting edge. Tonight Jupiter gleamed fiercely in the blackness like a diamond in a raven’s forehead. Thank God she didn’t have to go outside. She could wait out the winter within this tower. The mail came by pneumatic tube. The penthouse restaurant fed her. She had friends on a dozen floors. The building was a world, warm, snug. Let it snow. Let the sour gales come. Nikki checked herself in the all-around mirror: very nice, very very nice. Sweet filmy yellow folds. Hint of thigh, hint of breasts. More than a hint when there’s a light-source behind her. She glowed. Fluffed her short glossy black hair. Dab of scent. Everyone loved her. Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved. It was nine o’clock.
“Upstairs,” she said to the elevator. “Steiner’s place.”
“Eighty-eighth floor,” the elevator said.
“I know that. You’re so sweet.”
Music in the hallway: Mozart, crystalline and sinuous. The door to Steiner’s apartment was a half-barrel of chromed steel, like the entrance to a bank vault. Nikki smiled into the scanner. The barrel revolved. Steiner held his hands like cups, centimeters from her chest, by way of greeting. “Beautiful,” he murmured.
“So glad you asked me to come.”
“Practically everybody’s here already. It’s a wonderful party, love.”
She kissed his shaggy cheek. In October they had met in the elevator. He was past sixty and looked less than forty. When she touched his body she perceived it as an object encased in milky ice, like a mammoth fresh out of the Siberian permafrost. They had been lovers for two weeks. Autumn had given way to winter and Nikki had passed out of his life, but he had kept his word about the parties: here she was, invited.
“Alexius Ducas,” said a short, wide man with a dense black beard, parted in the middle. He bowed. A good flourish. Steiner evaporated and she was in the keeping of the Byzantine duke. He maneuvered her at once across the thick white carpet to a place where clusters of spotlights, sprouting like angry fungi from the wall, revealed the contours of her body. Others turned to look. Duke Alexius favored her with a heavy stare. But she felt no excitement. Byzantium had been over for a long time. He brought her a goblet of chilled green wine and said, “Are you ever in the Aegean Sea? My family has its ancestral castle on an island eighteen kilometers east of—”
“Excuse me, but which is the man named Nicholson?”
“Nicholson is merely the name he currently uses. He claims to have had a shop in Constantinople during the reign of my ancestor the Basileus Manuel Comnenus.” A patronizing click, tongue on teeth. “Only a shopkeeper.” The Byzantine eyes sparkled ferociously. “How beautiful you are!”
