By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  Joe opened his eyes, blinked. “Yeah.”

  “Hold on. Where your legs are—is that this building, thirty-two years from now? I mean, if it is, how come the doors are in different places and stuff?”

  “Nah—I started in a ten-year-old building.”

  Spud sneered. “Cripes, you’re lucky you didn’t pop out in midair! Or inside somebody’s fireplace. That was dumb—you should have started on the ground out in the open someplace.”

  Joe reddened. “What makes you think there is anyplace out in the open in Brooklyn in 2007, smart-mouth? I checked the Hall of Records and found out there was a building here in 1976, and the floor heights matched. So I took a chance. Now stop needlin’ me and help me figure this out.”

  “I guess,” Spud said reluctantly, “I’ll have to push you out into the hall, and then you can take it from there, I hope.” He dug in his heels and pushed. “Hey, squat a little, will you? Your center of gravity’s too high.” Koziack complied, and was gradually boyhandled out into the hall. It was empty.

  “Okay,” Spud panted at last. “Try walking.” Joe moved forward tentatively, then grinned and began to move faster, swinging his heavy arms.

  “Say,” he said, “this is all right.”

  “Well, let’s get going before somebody comes along and sees you,” Spud urged.

  “Sure thing,” Koziack agreed, quickening his pace. “Wouldn’t want aaaaaaAAAAAARGH!!!” His eyes widened for a moment, his arms flailed, and suddenly he dropped to the floor and began to bounce violently up and down, spinning rapidly. Spud jumped away, wondering if Joe had gone mad or epileptic. At last the fat man2 came to rest on his back, cursing feebly, the derby still on his head but quite flattened.

  “You okay?” Spud asked tentatively.

  Joe lurched upright and began rubbing the back of his head vigorously. “Fell down the mug-pluggin’ stairs,” he said petulantly.

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Joe barked.

  “Well, be more careful,” Spud said angrily. “You keep makin’ noise and somebody’s gonna come investigate.”

  “In Brooklyn? Come on! Jesus, my ass hurts.”

  “Lucky you didn’t break a leg,” Spud told him. “Let’s get going.”

  “Yeah.” Groaning, Joe began to move forward again. The pair reached the elevator without further incident, and Joe pushed the DOWN button. “Wish my own building had elevators,” he complained bitterly, still trying to rub the place that hurt. Migod, thought Spud, he literally can’t find it with both hands! He giggled, stopped when he saw Joe glare.

  The elevator slid back. A bearded young man with very long hair emerged, shouldered past the two, started down the hall and then did a triple-take in slow motion. Trembling, he took a plastic baggie of some green substance from his pocket, looked from it to Koziack and back again. “I guess it is worth two hundred an ounce,” he said to himself, and continued on his way.

  Oblivious, Spud was waving Joe to follow him into the elevator. The fat man2 attempted to comply, bounced off empty air in the doorway.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Come on, come on,” Spud said impatiently.

  “I can’t. My own hallway isn’t wide enough. You’ll have to push me in.”

  Spud raised his eyes heavenward. He set the “emergency stop” switch. Immediately alarm bells began to yammer, reverberating through the entire building. Swearing furiously, Spud scrambled past Joe into the hallway and pushed him into the elevator as fast as he could, scurrying in after him. He slapped the controls, the clamor ceased, and the car began to descend.

  At once Joe rose to the ceiling, banging his head and flattening the derby entirely. The car’s descent slowed. He roared with pain and did a sort of reverse-pushup, lowering his head a few inches. He glared down at Spud. “How…many…floors?” he grunted, teeth gritting with effort.

  Spud glanced at the indicator behind Joe. “Three more,” he announced.

  “Jesus.”

  The elevator descended at about three-quarter-normal speed, but eventually it reached the ground floor, and the doors opened on a miraculously empty lobby. Joe dropped his hands with a sigh of relief—and remained a few inches below the ceiling, too high to get out the door.

  “Oh, for the luvva—what do I do now?” he groaned. Spud shrugged helplessly. As they pondered, the doors slid closed and the car, in answer to some distant summons, began to rise rapidly. Joe dropped like an anvil, let out a howl as he struck the floor. “I’ll sue,” he gibbered, “I’ll sue the bastard! Oh my kidneys! Oh my gut!”

  “Oh my achin’ back,” Spud finished. “Now someone’ll see us—I mean, you. Supposed they aren’t stoned?” Joe was too involved in the novel sensation of internal bruising; it was up to Spud to think of something. He frowned—then smiled. Snatching the mashed derby from Joe’s head, he pushed the crown back out and placed the hat, upsidedown, on the floor in front of Joe.

  The door slid back at the third floor: a rotund matron with a face like an overripe avocado stepped into the car and then stopped short, wide-eyed. She went white, and then suddenly red with embarrassment.

  “Oh, you poor man,” she said sympathetically, averting her eyes, and dropped a five-dollar bill in the derby. “I never supported that war myself.” She turned around and faced forward, pushing the button marked “L.”

  Barely in time, Spud leaped onto Joe’s shoulders and threw up his hands. They hit the ceiling together with a muffled thud, clamping their teeth to avoid exclaiming. The stout lady kept up a running monologue about a cousin of hers who had also left in Vietnam some parts of his anatomy which she was reluctant to name, muffling the sounds the two did make, and she left the elevator at the ground floor without looking back. “Good luck,” she called over a brawny shoulder, and was gone.

  Spud made a convulsive effort, heaved Joe a few feet down from the ceiling, and leaped from his shoulders toward the closing door. He landed on his belly, and the door closed on his hand, springing open again at once. It closed on his hand twice more before he had enough breath back to scream at Joe, who shook off his stupor and left the elevator, snatching up his derby and holding the door for Spud to emerge. The boy exited on his knees, cradling his hand and swearing.

  Joe helped him up. “Sorry,” he said apologetically. “I was afraid I’d step on ya.”

  “With WHAT?” Spud hollered.

  “I said I was sorry, Spud. I just got shook up. Thanks for helping me out there. Look, I’ll split this finnif with you…” A murderous glare from Spud cut him off. The boy held out his hand.

  “Fork it over,” he said darkly.

  “Whaddya mean? She give it to me, didn’t she?”

  “I’ll give it to you,” Spud barked. “You say you’re gonna make me rich, but all I’ve got so far is a stiff neck and a mashed hand. Come on, give—you haven’t got a pocket to put it in anyway.”

  “I guess you’re right, Spud,” Joe decided. “I owe ya for the help. If a grownup saw me and found out about the belt, it’d probably cause a paradox or something, and I’d end upon a one-way trip to the Pleistocene. The temporal cops’re pretty tough about that kind of stuff.” He handed over the money, and Spud, mollified now, stuffed it into his pants and considered his next move. The lobby was still empty, but that could change at any moment.

  “Look,” he said finally, ticking off his options on his fingers, “we can’t take the subway—we’d cause a riot. Likewise the bus, and besides, we haven’t got exact change. A Brooklyn cabbie can’t be startled, but five bucks won’t get us to the bridge. And we can’t walk. So there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll have to clout a car.”

  Joe brightened. “I knew you’d think of something, kid. Hey, what do I do in the meantime?”

  Spud considered. Between them and the curtained lobby-door, some interior decorator’s horribly botched bonsai
caught (or, more accurately, bushwacked) his eye; it rose repulsively from a kind of enormous marble wastebasket filled with vermiculite, a good three feet high.

  “Squat behind that,” he said, pointing. “If anybody comes in, make out like you’re tying your shoelace. If you hear the elevator behind you, go around the other side of it.”

  Joe nodded. “You know,” he said, replacing his derby on his balding pink head, “I just thought. While we was upstairs at your place I shoulda grabbed something to wear that went down to the floor. Dumb. Well, I sure ain’t goin’ back.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good anyway,” Spud told him. “The only clothes we got like that are Mom’s—you couldn’t wear them.”

  Joe looked puzzled, and then light slowly dawned. “Oh, yeah, I remember from my history class. This is a tight-ass era. Men couldn’t wear dresses and women couldn’t wear pants.”

  “Women can wear pants,” Spud said, confused.

  “That’s right—I remember now. ‘The Twilight of Sexual Inequality,’ my teacher called it, the last days when women still oppressed men.”

  “I think you’ve got that backwards,” Spud corrected.

  “I don’t think so,” Joe said dubiously.

  “I hope you’re better at sports. Look, this is wasting time. Get down behind that cactus and keep your eyes open. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Okay, Spud. Look, uh…Spud?” Joe looked sheepish. “Listen, I really appreciate this. I really do know about sports history. I mean, I’ll see that you make out on this.”

  Spud smiled suddenly. “That’s okay, Joe. You’re too fat, and you’re not very bright, but for some reason I like you. I’ll see that you get fixed up.” Joe blushed and stammered, and Spud left the lobby.

  He pondered on what he had said, as with a small part of his attention, he set about stealing a car. It was funny, he thought as he pushed open an unlocked vent-window and snaked his slender arm inside to open the door—Joe was pretty dumb, all right, and he complained a lot, and he was heavier than a garbage can full of cement—but something about him appealed to Spud. He’s got guts, the boy decided as he smashed the ignition and shorted the wires. If I found myself in a strange place with no legs, I bet I’d freak out. He gunned the engine to warm it up fast and tried to imagine what it must be like for Joe to walk around without being able to see where he was going—or rather, seeing where only part of him was going. The notion unsettled him; he decided that in Joe’s place he’d be too terrified to move an inch. And yet, he reflected as he eased the car—a battered ’59 Buick—from its parking space, that big goon is going to try and make it all the way to Manhattan. Yeah, he’s got guts.

  Or perhaps, it occurred to him as he double-parked in front of the door of his building, Joe simply didn’t have the imagination to be afraid. Well, in that case somebody’s got to help him, Spud decided, and headed for the opaquely-curtained front door, leaving the engine running. He had never read Of Mice and Men, but he had an intuitive conviction that it was the duty of the bright ones to keep the dumb ones from getting into scrapes. His mother had often said as much of her late husband.

  As he pushed open the door he saw Joe—or rather, what there was to see of Joe—bending over a prostrate young woman, tugging her dress off over her head.

  “What the hell are you doing, you moron!” he screamed, leaping in through the door and slamming it behind him. “You trying to get us busted?”

  Joe straightened, embarrassment on his round face. Since he retained his grip on the long dress, the girl’s head and arms rose into the air and then fell with a thud as the dress came free. Joe winced. “I’m sorry, Spud,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t help it. I tried to get behind the thing like you said, but there was a wall in the way—of my legs, I mean. So while I was tryin’ ta think what to do this fem come in an’ seen me an’ just fainted. So I look at her for a while an’ I look at her dress an’ I think: Joe, would you rather people look at you funny, or would you rather be in the Pleistocene? So I take the dress.” He held it up; its hem brushed the floor.

  Spud looked down at the girl. She was in her late twenties, with long blond hair and a green headband. She wore only extremely small and extremely loud floral print panties and a pair of sandals. Her breasts were enormous, rising and falling as she breathed. She was out cold. Spud stared for a long time.

  “Hey,” Joe said sharply. “You’re only a kid. What’re you lookin’ at?”

  “I’m not sure,” Spud said slowly, “but I got a feeling I’ll figure it out in a couple of years, and I’ll want to remember.”

  Joe roared with sudden laughter. “You’ll do, kid.” He glanced down. “Kinda wish I had my other half along myself.” He shook his head sadly. “Well, let’s get going.”

  “Wait a minute, stupid,” Spud snapped. “You can’t just leave her there. This is a rough neighborhood.”

  “Well, what am I sposta do?” Joe demanded. “I don’t know which apartment is hers.”

  Spud’s forehead wrinkled in thought. The laundry room? No, old Mrs. Cadwallader always ripped off any clothes left here. Leave the two of them here and go grab one of Mom’s housecoats? No good: either the girl would awaken while he was gone or, with Joe’s luck, a cop would walk in. Probably a platoon of cops.

  “Look,” Joe said happily, “it fits. I thought it would—she’s almost as big on top as I am, an’ it looked loose.” The fat man2 had seemingly become an integer, albeit in drag. Draped in paisley, he looked like a psychedelic priest and something like Henry the Eighth dressed for bed, As Anne Boleyn might have done, Spud shuddered.

  “Well,” he said ironically, “at least you’re not so conspicuous now.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Joe agreed cheerfully. Spud opened his mouth, then closed it again. Time was short—someone might come in at any second. The girl still snored; apparently the bang on the head had combined with her faint to put her deep under. They simply couldn’t leave her here.

  “We’ll have to take her with us,” Spud decided.

  “Hey,” Joe said reproachfully.

  “You got a better idea? Come on, we’ll put her in the trunk.” Grumbling, but unable to come up with a better idea, Joe picked the girl up in his beefy arms, headed for the door—and bounced off thin air, dropping her again.

  Failing to find an obscenity he hadn’t used yet, Spud sighed. He bent over the girl, got a grip on her, hesitated, got a different grip on her, and hoisted her over his shoulder. Panting and staggering, he got the front door open, peered up and down the street, and reeled awkwardly out to the waiting Buick. It took only a few seconds to smash open the trunk lock, but Spud hadn’t realized they made seconds that long. He dumped the girl into the musty trunk with a sigh of relief, folding her like a cot, and looked about for something with which to tie the trunk closed. There was nothing useful in the trunk, nor the car itself, nor in his pockets. He thought of weighing the lid down with the spare tire and fetching something from inside the building, but she was lying on the spare, his arms were weary, and he was still conscious of the urgent need for haste.

  Then he did a double-take, looked down at her again. He couldn’t use the sandals, but…

  As soon as he had fashioned the floral-print trunk latch (which took him a bit longer than it should have), he hurried back inside and pushed Joe to the car with the last of his strength. “I hope you can drive, Spud,” Joe said brightly as they reached the curb. “I sure as hell can’t.”

  Instead of replying, Spud got in. Joe lowered himself and sidled into the car, where he floated an eerie few inches from the seat. Spud put it in drive, and pulled away slowly. Joe sank deep in the seat-back, and the car behaved as if it had a wood stove tied to the rear-bumper, but it moved.

  Automobiles turned out to be something with which Joe was familiar in the same sense that Spud was familiar with biplanes, and he was about as comfor
table with the reality as Spud would have been in the rear cockpit of a Spad (had Spud’s Spad sped). A little bit of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was enough to lighten his complexion about two shades past albino. But he adapted quickly enough, and by the time the fifth homicidal psychopath had tried his level best to kill them (that is, within the first mile) he found his voice and said, with a fair imitation of diffidence, “I didn’t think they’d decriminalized murder this early.”

  Spud gaped at him.

  “Yeah,” Joe said, seeing the boy’s puzzlement. “Got to be too many people, an’ they just couldn’t seem to get a war going. That’s why I put my life savings into this here cut-rate time-belt, to escape. I lost my job, so I became…eligible. Just my luck I gotta get a lemon. Last time I’ll ever buy hot merchandise.”

  Spud stared in astonishment, glanced back barely in time to foil the sixth potential assassin. “Won’t the cops be after you for escaping?”

  “Oh, you’re welcome to escape, if you can. And if you can afford time-travel, you can become a previous administration’s problem, so they’re glad to see you go. You can only go backward into the past or return to when you started, you know—the future’s impossible to get to.”

  “How’s that?” Spud asked curiously. Time-travel always worked both ways on television.

  “Damfino. Somethin’ about the machine can recycle reality but it can’t create it—whatever that means.”

  Spud thought awhile, absently dodging a junkie in a panel truck. “So it’s sort of open season on your legs back in 2007, huh?”

  “I guess,” said Joe uneasily. “Be difficult to identify ’em as mine, though. The pictures they print in the daily Eligibles column are always head shots, and they sure can’t fingerprint me. I guess I’m okay.”

  “Hey,” Spud said, slapping his forehead and the horn in a single smooth motion (scaring onto the shoulder a little old lady in a new Lincoln Continental who had just pulled onto the highway in front of them at five miles per hour), “it just dawned on me: what the hell is going on back in your time? I mean, there’s a pair of legs wandering around in crazy circles, falling down stairs, right now they’re probably standing still on a sidewalk or something…”