“One to a customer,” he said tonelessly, “and only one of each. He said he had only one of each.”
A hand suddenly jerked back his head and he looked up into a distorted face, a face still grimed with fresh loam. The clothes had long since rotted away and the squat hairy figure looked more ape than human.
“Ya guessed right,” it said, “but ya guessed wrong. He did only have one of each.” One massive fist opened to show a shining cylinder with a needle like orifice at one end.
“Your little friend sold it to me—except I don’t think the money did him much good. When I left he was staring at something oozing through the ceiling and squeaking like a ruptured mouse.” Jonston gave an obscene chuckle. “This thing worked, though, just like he said it would.”
“What is it?” croaked Alan.
“Well, it’s this way. Back where he came from a guy’s maybe taking a trip from one star to another and it’s maybe a thousand year deal. There ain’t much in the way of scenery so he just sets this little knob for how long he wants to be knocked out, jabs the needle in a vein, and he’s like dead until he gets there.
“You said to look you up in five hundred years so that’s just what I set it for. Then I went and dug a hole and pulled it in after me. Slept like a baby, too, except I did a lot of dreaming.” A great hand turned Alan’s head slowly so; that he could see the blank horror-filled face of the unclothed girl who huddled sobbing, on the grass.
“Guess what I was dreaming about. Just guess.”
THE MAN WHO KNEW GRODNICK
“I’m sorry, Reggie,”—there was a note of tired compassion in the agent’s voice—“if you could figure out some way to stick around for the next century or so you might find yourself back on top again. In the meantime, this is all that Stuart was able to line up for you. It’s a killer—thirty-five bucks per and you pay your own expenses—but let’s face it, the market for bosom buddies of famous Greenwich Village characters of the twenties has hit a new low. There’s a whole new generation come up in the women’s clubs that hasn’t even heard of most of the people you talk about, let alone read them.”
The slim man with silver grey hair who sat on the other side of the desk picked up the itinerary, leafed through it quickly, and then gave a convulsive shudder.
“Not Kansas again! Scott, you can’t do this to me!”
“I don’t like it any better than you do, but at least you’ll be eating.”
“Fried chicken and creamed peas with the Malthusian Ladies Guild of East Potlatch, Kansas,” said Reginald gloomily. “You call that eating?”
The agent began to study the nails on his left hand. “Maybe next year something will break. Harrison still hasn’t vetoed the idea of bringing out Red Hot Mama in his American Classics series.” He took a quick look at his watch, stood up and stretched out his hand.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, Reggie, I’m really booked up solid today. Drop me a line when you find time. If anything comes of that American Classics deal I’ll shoot you a wire.”
Reginald Southern rose gracefully to his feet, flecked a speck of dust off a frayed cuff, and then gave his agent a jaunty wave.
“See you in a hundred years,” he said. “When the royalties for Red Hot Mama start pouring in again, bank them for me, will you?”
* * * *
When the long and garbled introduction was finally finished—for some reason or other the toastmistress insisted on confusing him with Rex Stout—Reginald rose to his feet, turned on his after-dinner smile, and beaming down on the perspiring pack of much-corseted females, delivered his opening line.
“Most of you are much too young to remember the fabulous nineteen twenties, but—” He paused automatically to let an appreciative twitter run through the audience. “But as John Barrymore said to me one evening when…
He switched off conscious control and tried to ignore the sound of his own voice. The Barrymore story did make for a fast opening, but he always squirmed a little bit inside when he told it. Even though he hadn’t written anything for twenty years, he had been a semi-great for a few months, and he had known a number of the real greats of the period, some of them quite well. His only meeting with Barrymore, however, had been a mumbled introduction at a cocktail party and an extremely short conversation.
“Hot, isn’t it?” he’d said.
“Sure is,” the great actor had agreed. “Makes me thirsty. Where’s the bar?”
Reggie had pointed, Barrymore had nodded, and that had been the end of that.
The story he was telling was a true one, but the old friend he had been out with was John Grodnick, a poet nobody remembered any more. The forgotten were not proper fare for women’s clubs—they wanted speakers who would leave them with a vicarious feeling of having rubbed shoulders with the great—and each year Reggie found he had to switch more and more names around as the number of still living reputations from his period dwindled.
For a while he had been able to salve his own conscience by introducing only those he had had some contact with—at least by correspondence—but for his Ernest Hemingway story he could make no real defense. Aside from a few mutual friends, he had never had any contact with the writer.
He wanted to drop it, but he couldn’t. Hemingway was known. Hemingway was still read. When he launched into the hilarious story about how the two of them had crashed the coming out party of Dorthy Fernis—ears always pricked up at this point, Dorthy had just divorced her fourth duke— dragging a protesting and still unknown Thomas Wolfe between them and introducing him as an illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm, his audience always paid him the tribute of leaning forward eagerly. This is what they had paid for.
* * * *
The passing of a hundred years had changed New York City. For one thing, it was now located in the middle of Pennsylvania. The Big War had altered the coastline enough, however, so that it was still a seaport town.
Reginald Southern drew a few curious looks as he stepped off the local belt at 34th Street—he was the only one in the crowd that was wearing any clothes—but nobody bothered him. New York still preserved its old tolerance for eccentrics.
Scott Akermann, Inc. was still in business. It took Reginald some time to talk his way past the robot secretary, but at last he found himself in the inner sanctum. A sudden wave of nostalgia swept over him as he looked around the office. Somehow the old desk had been salvaged, and the current Akermann bore a close enough resemblance to his great-grandfather to have been a younger brother.
“I’m afraid the message the secretary sent through was a bit garbled,” said the agent politely. “Just who did you say you were again?”
Reginald drew the last of his cigarettes from its crumpled pack, put it in a stained ivory cigarette holder, and lit it with a flourish. Nobody seemed to smoke any longer he had noted with regret, but then his doctor had been after him to quit for years.
“I am,” he said with simple dignity, “Reginald Southern. The Reginald Southern.”
Akermann stared at him blankly.
Reginald gave a quiet little smile “I dare say this is all going to be a bit of a shock, but it will clear up after you check the files. I am Reginald Southern, the author of Red Hot Mama.’’
The agent’s face cleared suddenly and his hand began to creep toward the button that would activate the automatic ejector.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Southern,” he said, “but we never read unsolicited manuscripts. If yours hasn’t been returned to you, you might check with the secretary on the way out to see if you enclosed sufficient return postage.”
Reginald chuckled. It was going to be rather embarrassing for the agent when he realized who he was.
“Tell me, young man,” he said. “Is the American Classics series still in existence?”
Akermann looked at him in surprise. “Of course. Why?”
A tremor of uneasiness ran through the writer. “The name Reginald Southern still doesn’t mean anything to you
?
The agent’s hand moved forward again until it hovered over the ejector button again. “Much as I hate to terminate this most interesting discussion,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to—” He stopped suddenly. “What’s your name got to do with the American Classics series?”
Reginald felt a sudden sinking feeling, but he didn’t let it show. Instead he started to explain.
* * * *
When, after a long search, the yellowed folder bearing the name SOUTHERN, REGINALD J. had been exhumed from the inactive file, and Reginald had answered the last of the questions on the test sheet smoothly and confidently, Scott Akermann sat rigid in his chair, obviously shaken. He pushed a faded clipping toward Reginald.
“But this says you were killed!”
Reggie skipped over the part which referred to him as an obscure Village writer who had gained temporary notoriety in the mid-twenties when his novel Red Hot Mama was banned in Boston, and concentrated on the details of the accident.
“You’ll note,” he said when he had finished reading, “that this just says that I disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Tevis’s body was found in the wreckage of his machine, but I wasn’t. Luckily for me, the time field, or whatever it was he called it, had already formed around me when his dingbat blew up.”
“Time travel!” said Akermann in an awed voice. “It’s fantastic!” He gulped suddenly as a practical thought hit him. “This Tevis…did he explain how his machine worked?”
“He tried to,” said the other apologetically, “but I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention. Things like that have always confused me. He did say something about squaring infinity…or was he un-squaring it? I do remember that he said he was doing something with it that nobody had ever thought of before.
“Anyway,” continued Reggie, a far away look in his eyes, “it all started in Helopolis, Kansas. I hadn’t seen Tevis since we were undergraduates together and you could have knocked me over with a feather when he came rushing up to me at the bus station and dragged me home with him.
“He was head of the Physics Department at Helopolis State Teachers College—in fact, he was the Physics Department. They also had him teaching Community Dynamics, Advanced Basket Weaving, and something called Project Four, Democracy at Work.”
“Do go on,” said Akermann. There was an acid note to his voice that jerked Reginald out of his digression.
“Anyway,” he said hastily, “during all those years at Helopolis, Tevis had been tinkering away in his basement, trying to build a machine that would put his theory about time travel into practice. He’d just completed it when I hit town on my lecture tour. “When we got to his house we settled down for a long talk about the old days, but after thirty years of moving in such completely different directions, we really didn’t have much to talk about. The things I remembered he didn’t—and vice versa—so we soon got around to our own troubles. He had his share, but at least he had tenure. Me, I was making my last round of the women’s clubs, and I knew it.
“‘My place is in the future,’ I said. ‘It’s just a matter of time before I’m rediscovered. But I’m fifty-four now. Look how long John Donne had to wait. What I need is some way to jump a hundred years into the future.’
“Tevis didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he jumped up with a wild look in his eyes and dragged me down into his basement. It was there he told me about his time machine. I really didn’t believe it would work, but I was desperate enough to try anything. So I wrote a long letter to Scott—to your great-grandfather—mailed it, and then came back and sat down in an old swivel chair that was surrounded with loops and loops of silvery looking wire.”
“And?”
“He pushed a button. It must have blown up just as it kicked me forward. I was hoping that Red Hot Mama would have been rediscovered and gone over well enough so that I would find a comfortable accumulation of royalties— and an established literary position—waiting for me.” The writer paused and looked at the agent forlornly. “I guess I should have had Tevis set the machine for five hundred years. Look how long it took Chaucer.”
In spite of everything he had gone through, Scott Akermann was still an agent. He hastily leafed through the folder until he found what he was looking for, pulled it out and smoothed it reverently.
“What’s that?” asked Reginald.
“Your original contract with Scott Akermann, Inc. I notice that it contains the usual twelve month cancellation clause. You didn’t, did you?”
“Didn’t what?”
“Give notice that you wanted to terminate your contract?”
Reginald shook his head.
Akermann began to beam. “I guess that legally I still represent you then.” He coughed delicately. “There have been a few changes since your day. For one thing, the standard agent’s fee is now fifty per cent. I don’t approve of it myself, of course…” He coughed again. “But what with inflation, and the war on, and the high price of paper…” His face brightened. “But on the other hand, Patagonian rights are only forty per cent.”
“That’s nice,” said Reginald vaguely. He couldn’t get excited about the division of non-existent royalties. In fact, he couldn’t get excited about anything. The failure of Red Hot Mama to have its expected revival had completely crushed him.
“But even with necessary deductions,” continued the agent, “you should make enough out of the reprinting of your book to set you up for life.”
Reprinting! Reginald couldn’t quite believe his ears.
“Do you really think there’s a chance?” he asked tremulously.
“Chance?” Scott laughed. “With a ‘man from the past’ publicity tie-in we can’t miss.” He put his fingers together and gazed dreamily at the ceiling.
“First we’ll have a reception for the press, and then a big dinner for the major publishers at the Waldorf-Hilton at which you’ll be the principal speaker.” He closed his eyes and then suddenly snapped them open.
“Say,” he demanded, “did you by any chance know Grodnick? John Grodnick, the neo-Puritan poet?”
“Of course,” said Reggie in surprise. “He was a good friend of mine. But why call him neo-Puritan? John’s poetry was strictly wine, women, and song stuff.”
The agent shrugged. “Not according to the university boys. But anyway he’s really hot this season.” He thought for a moment and then said enthusiastically, ‘The Man Who Knew Grodnick.’ With a kicker like that we’ve really got it made! We’ll keep the build-up going for a couple of months and then we’ll let the big boys fight over reprint rights. What did you say your book was called?”
“Red Hot Mama,” said Reginald patiently.
Akermann made a quick note on a scratch pad. “I guess I’d better take a look at it before I do anything else.” He switched on his intercom and gave an order to his robot secretary.
* * * *
“Look at the paper!” protested Reginald. “Look at the binding! I’ve been pirated by some cheap, fly-by-night outfit!”
“Cheap, hell!” said Akermann grimly. He tossed the book down on his desk angrily. “Do you know how much I had to pay for this?”
Reginald shook his head.
“Fifty credits!”
“Is that a lot?”
“A lot? A credit is worth about two of your mid-twentieth century dollars.”
Reginald let out a whistle. “A hundred dollars! For a copy of my book!” He gave an ecstatic smile. “Why didn’t you tell me I was that important?”
“Because I didn’t know it,” said Akermann sourly. “I’m not in the habit of buying pornography.”
“Pornography!” Reginald jumped wildly to his feet. “Not that again!”
“Again?”
“I went through all that in Boston. But the courts supported me. If you’ll check back into chapter six, you’ll find that when Alice climbs into bed with the sheep herder, she has her bathrobe on and never takes if off. If a dirty minded public chooses
to assume she did,” he continued virtuously, “it’s not my responsibility. James Joyce and I, we both—”
“Mr. Southern!” interrupted Akermann sharply. “You don’t understand the changes that have taken place since your time. For an unmarried couple to go to bed with their clothes on…or a married one for that matter…” He blushed in spite of himself. “I like a risqué story as well as the next man, but after all…I mean, really, Reggie…” He controlled himself with difficulty. “We’ll just have to think of something else.”
The trouble was that he couldn’t. “Have you got any ideas?” he said at last.
“Well,” said Reginald unhappily, “there’s always…” His voice broke and it took him a moment before he got it back under control again. “There’s always…”
* * * *
Reginald Southern stepped out on the platform and took an appreciative breath of the dry cool air that billowed in through the open windows. Now that automatic weather control had been installed, Kansas wasn’t so bad after all. He looked down at the smiling faces of the expectant audience (it was a shame, though, that corsets had had to go out with all the rest) and gave them an affectionate nod as he thought of the banquet that was to follow his lecture. After six months of the sloppy synthetics that New Yorkers were so fond of, the prospect of fried chicken and creamed peas was enough to make a man’s salivary glands work overtime.
As he waited for the toastmistress to finish her introduction, he ran quickly through his mental notes for the coming lecture. He’s better scrap that “most of you are too young to remember” line. After a hundred years it wasn’t as complementary as it once had been. The Hemingway story…he’d have to keep that—at least until the current revival was over —but he could dump John Barrymore and restore Grodnick to his rightful place.
Next year, if the American Classics series brought out Red Hot Mama in an expurgated edition as Akermann had promised they would, he wouldn’t have to make any more one night stands. He’d be able to stay in New York and…
The First Theodore R. Cogswell Megapack Page 14
