The Productions of Time

by John Brunner

  Murray remembered something that seemed important. He said, "Dr. Cromarty, you may have another visitor in the morning. My agent, Roger Grady. I said on the phone to him last night I was going to try and get away if I could and make for your place."

  Last night? This same interval between day and day? God, how short can eternity be?

  "Wish I had my pipe," the doctor muttered. "Dragged me out in such a panic I didn't bring anything except the car keys and my surgical bag . . . Sorry, Mr. Douglas?" He half turned his head, swinging the car around a curve. "My mind was wandering." Then, realizing what had been said, "Try to get away? Man, you sound as if you were in a concentration camp!"

  "It was like that," Heather said clearly. "Didn't you follow what Murray was saying?"

  "I can hardly credit it," Cromarty admitted. "No disrespect, Mr. Douglas, but you're overwrought and -- " He interrupted himself. "No, by the lord Harry! I do believe it, every word, now I've seen that impossible dissolution. It's like the story by Poe, isn't it?"

  " Monsieur Valdemar," Heather said. Murray felt a shudder run through her and heard her teeth chatter briefly. She added, "He was hypnotized, wasn't he? Doctor, there's no risk, is there, that all the others will -- ?"

  "You heard Delgado say they'd wake up naturally and recover in a few weeks or months," Murray reminded her and put his arm around her shaking shoulders.

  "But I also heard him say he'd been born in some impossible year that hasn't happened yet." She turned blank eyes on him, seeking his reassurance through the dimness. "I think he was mad, wasn't he?"

  "If he wasn't telling the truth," Murray pointed out grimly, "there's no rational explanation for all the things that happened, up to and including his dissolution."

  "Christ, that was so horrible !" The last word peaked to a moan of terror, and the teeth chattering resumed.

  "Should have treated you for shock too, young woman, Cromarty said. "Try and control it till we get to my place. Not much further now." He jutted his jaw forward as though clamping on the stem of the forgotten pipe.

  "But tell me, Mr. Douglas, since you seem to have made sense of the whole rigmarole -- who was he?"

  Murray sighed imperceptibly. Tomorrow it would all seem like a nightmare. There would only be the memory of those who had endured it, and the few heat-twisted scraps of machinery salvaged from the ruins of Fieldfare House which were as meaningless to contemporary science as the bio-electronic gimmickry Lester had been so scathing about.

  Better so, perhaps . . .

  He said in a rusty voice, "As near as I can make out, some time in the future -- the twenty-fifth century -- they have advanced science that includes time travel and the means of altering people's personalities. They use a field broadcast by a special triplem antenna, like the one I found every night on my mattress. To satisfy the illegal cravings of some perverts, Valentine was organizing a supply of primitive experiences in recorded form, which could be played back to the purchasers and give them barbaric thrills. Oh, compare it to cockfighting in this country today. illegal, but some people enjoy it so much they don't care.

  "His customers must be -- going to be -- oh, the hell with it. A pretty horrible bunch, anyhow, considering the sort of vicarious thrills Valentine had to provide. Who'd want to enter the mind of a relapsing alcoholic, for God's sake? And I think the task was only at the halfway stage, if that. It would have fitted the pattern if, a bit later on, Gerry had gone looking for his bottle of heroin after some dirty trick Delgado played on him, and found it had been taken away. Addiction to drugs, liquor, pornography, sexual kinks -- and it was still only the start!"

  He had to pause and swallow hard, before resuming his exposition. His eyes were fixed, unseeing on the dark roadside.

  "But it's difficult enough merely to translate something from one language to another and be sure you're understood. It must have proved much worse trying to present the experiences of people far in the past to the -- well -- the modern mind. So Delgado hit on the idea of taping the experiences of actors; as he said, they live half their lives in other people's minds anyway. And this worked, and made fortunes for Valentine and his gang.

  "To make the most of their fairly limited opportunities, they deliberately encouraged unstable people to rub one another up the wrong way and heighten the emotions recorded. If I hadn't interfered, they'd have got me down as a hopeless alcoholic -- "

  "And me as a fullblown Les," Heather said. "It's so frightening, Murray! They said 'the urge was on her tapes' and, if you hadn't worried me so much that I cut the wire every night, it would have worked, and I'd have been seduced by Ida, and then someone who hasn't even been born yet would -- would -- "

  "This is carrying voyeurism a step too far," Cromarty said with an attempt at light relief. It was a ghastly failure. "But it might not have worked, young woman!"

  "It would have," she said obstinately. "There's a bit of it in all of us. You should know that, as a doctor. I used to get crushes on older girls when I was at school, so it's probably still in me, just below the surface, waiting for -- "

  Hysteria on the way, Murray diagnosed, and wondered if he was going to have to slap her face to quiet her. But at that moment the car slowed, and there ahead was the gate of Cromarty's home. A curtain moved at an upper window. Lights came on. The housekeeper came to the door to let them in.

  She exclaimed in horror over Heather's condition and led her away with promises of a hot bath and a comfortable bed, while Cromarty brought Murray his own thick woolen dressing gown and slippers. In the surgery, the doctor tended in silence to the burns on Murray's feet. It was not until new bandages were in place that he glanced up from under his graying brows and put the key question.

  "Mr. Douglas, do you really believe what the man Delgado said?"

  "Ask me tomorrow," Murray said wearily.

  "Yes, of course." Distressed, Cromarty jumped up. "I'm sorry, I should let you go straight to bed. Not much of a bed, I'm afraid. Mrs. Garbett has probably given the young lady the one I meant to offer you when I suggested your coming here, but we'll see what we can do -- Mrs. Garbett!"

  XXVI

  A shrilling noise. Instantly Murray was awake and terrified, thinking of the phone beside his bed and the hateful greasy voice of Valentine telling him that it was breakfast time. He was on his feet before he realized all that was past and over.

  Relief made him collapse limply on the edge of the -- it was not a bed, but a big settee in the doctor's drawing room. Outside he saw bright sunlight. An early bee was buzzing. Oh, this was a miracle!

  He checked his watch, and saw with puzzlement that it read one-twenty. Had it stopped when Valentine knocked him down last night? With one hand he touched his head gingerly, with the other shook the watch before putting it to his ear.

  Going all right. So --

  There was a tap at the door, and the smiling face of Mrs. Garbett appeared. "It's all right, Doctor, he's awake!" she threw over her shoulder, and said to Murray, "Good morning, Mr. Douglas -- or afternoon, I should say. Dr. Cromarty thought it best you should be left to sleep yourself out after what you've been through."

  "I -- oh, then it is twenty past one." Murray thrust back his sleep-tousled hair. "I'm sorry if I've been a nuisance."

  "A nuisance? Bless you, sir, after what you did last night -- It's in the paper and I read it twice. You deserve anything we can give you. There's someone to see you, or I'd not have come in."

  Someone to see me? Then the doorbell was what awakened me. Murray felt a great deal of satisfaction in establishing the fact. Before he could speak again, to ask what all this was about the papers, Mrs. Garbett had stepped aside and there in her place was Roger Grady, face white with concern, rushing forward.

  "Christ, Murray, am I glad to see you! When I heard the news at breakfast I dropped everything. Can you ever forgive me for not taking you seriously when you rang last night?"

  "Just a moment," Murray said slowly. "What news did you hear?"

&nbs
p; "About Fieldfare House burning down and your rescuing all those people!" It was Roger's turn for a blank expression.

  "But how did that get in the papers? It was so late that -- "

  "Not too late for the London editions, which come out at least as far as this. Someone should have told -- oh, of course, you've slept the whole morning. Anyhow, I heard it on the radio, and then after I spoke to Sam -- "

  "You what?" Murray put up a hand feebly. "You're going too fast for me. My God -- Sam ! What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in the hospital!"

  "Nothing wrong with me," grunted the director. He had been standing in the doorway waiting to be noticed. "When I found out what had happened I told them anyone who stopped me from coming here to thank you would get a poke in the eye."

  "Sam called me to try and find out what had become of you," Roger amplified. "No one at the hospital knew, apparently -- and fortunately for your rest, they couldn't tell any reporters. What's this?"

  "Here you are, sir," Mrs. Garbett was saying, waving the morning paper at him. "In the Stop Press , it is. 'Actor in Fire Drama. Fire swept Fieldfare House, Bakesford, where company in rehearsal for new Delgado play, two a.m. All in house were asleep except Murray Douglas, well-known actor, who gave alarm and carried to safety members of cast overcome by smoke. Three fire brigades called.'"

  "Anybody dismissing it as a Delgado-inspired publicity stunt?" Murray said bitterly after a pause.

  "As a matter of fact, yes," Roger said with some embarrassment. "I don't suppose I have to tell you who."

  "Still smarting from that sock in the jaw?"

  "Apparently."

  "Well, he's not going to get away with it!" Blizzard barked. "I'm going to his editor this afternoon, and if he bleats one snide word in his column tomorrow I'll have him barred from every theater in the country, I swear it. Ah -- Murray." His voice dropped. "I guess I owe you not merely thanks, but an apology. I don't know what Delgado was up to, not yet, but one thing stands out a mile. He was doing something abominable to us. Must have been. All of us, snoring blithely away while the house was on fire? It just isn't possible. I don't believe it. I didn't even wake up in the ambulance, or when they put me to bed in the hospital. None of us did. We were sleeping like the dead. And that's what we could have been.

  "I was taken in by Delgado, that's the plain truth."

  "He was a genius. Or at least his tapes made him one."

  "What?" Blizzard said, bewildered.

  "Skip it," Murray sighed. "Anyway, much as I appreciate your kind words, I'd rather have some breakfast and get some clothes from somewhere -- "

  "I brought some," Roger interrupted eagerly. I'll fetch them. You're near enough my size, though I don't know about shoes."

  He hastily vanished. Blizzard, though, stood his ground. "Murray, you're not going to slide out of it. And I'm not going to waste the money and effort I sank into these weeks of work. I'm going to finish this job, and the hell with Delgado. Let him rot in his grave along with his damned tape recorders and sleep-teaching gimmicks."

  "He's rotted already," Murray said.

  Blizzard checked. "Someone said something about that at the hospital. Said he was brought to the mortuary in a sort of puddle, as though his flesh had melted off his bones. But it sounds crazy."

  "Just be glad that you're not. Another couple of weeks, and you wouldn't have had a play. You'd have had a spectacle to make the Marat-Sade look like a Christmas pantomime." Murray stretched and rose.

  "I'm going to have a play," Blizzard said doggedly. "And it's going to put your name back where it belongs, at the head of the list. It's the least I can do. I believe every accusation you made against Delgado now. I believe he tried to frame you into seeming drunk, I believe he got those damned stewards to cover up for him -- the rat was playing with our lives like a Punch-and-Judy man. Making us wallow in dirt and then boasting about it!" His face was red with his vehemence.

  Murray was going to correct the mistaken assumption about the "stewards," but changed his mind. What was the point, anyway? He said absently, "Not right away, though -- hm?"

  "Of course not. We've lost the house and its theater. But the insurance will cover it, and between us we can recreate the outline we had and the dialogue too. Anyway, we shan't get the Margrave after all, thanks to Patsy pulling strings, but the New Brecht has offered us a season in two months if we're available, and I wouldn't object to a pre-London run, frankly."

  Murray was hardly listening. Physically, he was much better, but his whole mind was pervaded with unutterable weariness. There would be time later for matters like salvaging the play, sorting out the finances, and related problems. Right now there was only one point he had to make.

  "If you're seriously going on with it," he said, and waited.

  "Damnation, am I going to throw away all this work -- not to mention the money?" roared Blizzard.

  "Then remember Heather, won't you? You know why Delgado wanted her around, don't you?"

  "I think I've figured that out this morning," Blizzard agreed. "To -- uh -- to amuse Ida. Not for her own sake."

  "Correct." Murray's eyes had roved to the window; Roger was coming back, carrying a bulging traveling bag. "Well, she's going to be in the production if I have to write a part for her myself."

  "I was going to ask you," Blizzard said. "Thinking back, I realized we owed a good half of the material to your suggestions, and -- "

  Murray wasn't listening. He had pulled on Dr. Cromarty's dressing gown and gone into the hallway, ignoring Roger at the front door with the bag of clothes. "Mrs. Garbett! Mrs. Garbett! Where did you put Heather?"

  And the hell with any susceptibilities you may have.

  "In the room on the right at the top of the stairs, Mr. Douglas," the housekeeper called demurely. "I don't know if she's awake yet, but I was just going to take her a cup of tea and -- "

  She appeared with a laden tray. There were two cups on it. Murray took it from her with a wan grin and started up the stairs, favoring his sore feet.

  But the pain seemed to belong to the past, and he was heading for the future. Like it or not.

  True or false? A madman's raving, a tissue of lies told by a twisted genius, or cold appalling fact?

  Never mind. Let the dead bury the dead, in or out of time. For him, at this moment and, with luck, forever, it was enough that in Delgado's death he had found his own life anew. The idea was still strange, but it was comforting. He tapped on the door to which he had been directed, went in, and closed it behind him.

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