Annoyance and frustration rose up in him. Here was another problem he had failed to settle—well, he’d settle it now. He ignored her complaint. “Look here, Genevieve, I’ve told you not to telephone me while I’m working. Good-by!”
“Well, of all the—You can’t talk that way to me, Bob Wilson! In the first place, you weren’t working today. In the second place, what makes you think you can use honey and sweet words on me and two hours later snarl at me? I’m not any too sure I want to marry you.”
“Marry you? What put that silly idea in your head?”
The phone sputtered for several seconds. When it had abated somewhat he resumed with, “Now just calm down. This isn’t the Gay Nineties, you know. You can’t assume that a fellow who takes you out a few times intends to marry you.”
There was a short silence. “So that’s the game, is it?” came an answer at last in a voice so cold and hard and completely shrewish that he almost failed to recognize it. “Well, there’s a way to handle men like you. A woman isn’t unprotected in this state!”
“You ought to know,” he answered savagely. “You’ve hung around the campus enough years.”
The receiver clicked in his ear.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead. That dame, he knew, was quite capable of causing him lots of trouble. He had been warned before he ever started running around with her, but he had been so sure of his own ability to take care of himself. He should have known better—but then he had not expected anything quite as raw as this.
He tried to get back to work on his thesis, but found himself unable to concentrate. The deadline of ten AM. the next morning seemed to be racing toward him. He looked at his watch. It had stopped. He set it by the desk clock—four fifteen in the afternoon. Even if he sat up all night he could not possibly finish it properly.
Besides there was Genevieve— The telephone rang again. He let it ring. It continued; he took the receiver off the cradle. He would not talk to her again.
He thought of Arma. There was a proper girl with the right attitude. He walked over to the window and stared down into the dusty, noisy street. Half-subconsciously he compared it with the green and placid countryside he had seen from the balcony where he and Diktor had breakfasted. This was a crummy world full of crummy people. He wished poignantly that Diktor had been on the up-and-up with him.
An idea broke surface in his brain and plunged around frantically. The Gate was still open. The Gate was still open! Why worry about Diktor? He was his own master. Go back and play it out—everything to gain, nothing to lose.
He stepped up to the Gate, then hesitated. Was he wise to do it? After all, how much did he know about the future?
He heard footsteps climbing the stairs, coming down the hall, no-yes, stopping at his door. He was suddenly convinced that it was Genevieve; that decided him. He stepped through.
The Hall of the Gate was empty on his arrival. He hurried around the control box to the door and was just in time to hear, “Come on. There’s work to be done.” Two figures were retreating down the corridor. He recognized both of them and stopped suddenly.
That was a near thing, he told himself; I’ll just have to wait until they get clear. He looked around for a place to conceal himself, but found nothing but the control box. That was useless; they were coming back. Still— He entered the control box with a plan vaguely forming in his mind.
If he found that he could dope out the controls, the Gate might give him all the advantage he needed. First he needed to turn on the speculum gadget. He felt around where he recalled having seen Diktor reach to turn it on, then reached in his pocket for a match.
Instead he pulled out a piece of paper. It was the list that Diktor had given him, the things he was to obtain in the twentieth century. Up to the present moment there had been too much going on for him to look it over.
His eyebrows crawled up his forehead as he read. It was a funny list, he decided. He had subconsciously expected it to call for technical reference books, samples of modern gadgets, weapons. There was nothing of the sort. Still, there was a sort of mad logic to the assortment. After all, Diktor knew these people better than he did. It might be just what was needed.
He revised his plans, subject to being able to work the Gate. He decided to make one more trip back and do the shopping Diktor’s list called for—but for his own benefit, not Diktor’s. He fumbled in the semidarkness of the control booth, seeking the switch or control for the speculum. His hand encountered a soft mass. He grasped it, and pulled it out.
It was his hat.
He placed it on his head, guessing idly that Diktor had stowed it there, and reached again. This time he brought forth a small notebook. It looked like a find—very possibly Diktor’s own notes on the operation of the controls. He opened it eagerly.
It was not what he had hoped. But it did contain page after page of handwritten notes. There were three columns to the page; the first was in English, the second in international phonetic symbols, the third in a completely strange sort of writing. It took no brilliance for him to identify it as a vocabulary. He slipped it into a pocket with a broad smile; it might have taken Diktor months or even years to work out the relationship between the two languages; he would be able to ride on Diktor’s shoulders in the matter.
The third try located the control and the speculum lighted up. He felt again the curious uneasiness he had felt before, for he was gazing again into his own room and again it was inhabited by two figures. He did not want to break into that scene again, he was sure. Cautiously he touched one of the colored beads.
The scene shifted, panned out through the walls of the boardinghouse and came to rest in the air, three stories above the campus. He was pleased to have gotten the Gate out of the house, but three stories was too much of a jump. He fiddled with the other two colored beads and established that one of them caused the scene in the speculum to move toward him or away from him while the other moved it up or down.
He wanted a reasonably inconspicuous place to locate the Gate, some place where it would not attract the attention of the curious. This bothered him a bit; there was no ideal place, but he compromised on a blind alley, a little court formed by the campus powerhouse and the rear wall of the library. Cautiously and clumsily he maneuvered his flying eye to the neighborhood he wanted and set it down carefully between the two buildings. He then readjusted his position so that he stared right into a blank wall. Good enough!
Leaving the controls as they were, he hurried out of the booth and stepped unceremoniously back into his own period.
He bumped his nose against the brick wall. “I cut that a little too fine,” he mused as he slid cautiously out from between the confining limits of the wall and the Gate. The Gate hung in the air, about fifteen inches from the wall and roughly parallel to it. But there was room enough, he decided—no need to go back and readjust the controls. He ducked out of the areaway and cut across the campus toward the Students’ Co-op, wasting no time. He entered and went to the cashier’s window.
“Hi, Bob.”
“H’lo, Soupy. Cash a check for me?” “How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“Well—I suppose so. Is it a good check?”
“Not very. It’s my own.”
“Well, I might invest in it as a curiosity.” He counted out a ten, a five and five ones.
“Do that,” advised Wilson. “My autographs are going to be rare collectors’ items.” He passed over the check, took the money and proceeded to the bookstore in the same building. Most of the books on the list were for sale there. Ten minutes later he had acquired title to:
The Prince, by Niccolô Machiavelli.
Behind the Ballots, by James Farley.
Mein Kampf (unexpurgated), by Adolf Schicklgruber.
How to Make Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
The other titles he wanted were not available in the bookstore;
he went from there to the university library where he drew out Real Estate Broker’s Manual, History of Musical Instruments and a quarto titled Evolution of Dress Styles. The latter was a handsome volume with beautiful colored plates and was classified as reference. He had to argue a little to get a twenty-four hour permission for it.
He was fairly well-loaded down by then; he left the campus, went to a pawnshop and purchased two used, but sturdy, suitcases into one of which he packed the books. From there he went to the largest music store in the town and spent forty-five minutes in selecting and rejecting phonograph records, with emphasis on swing and torch—highly emotional stuff, all of it. He did not neglect classical and semi-classical, but he applied the same rule to those categories—a piece of music had to be sensuous and compelling, rather than cerebral. In consequence his collection included such strangely assorted items as the “Marseillaise,” Ravel’s “Bolero,” four Cole Porters and “L’Après-midi d’un Faune.”
He insisted on buying the best mechanical reproducer on the market in the face of the clerk’s insistence that what he needed was an electrical one. But he finally got his own way, wrote a check for the order, packed it all in his suitcases and had the clerk get a taxi for him.
He had a bad moment over the check. It was pure rubber, as the one he had cashed at the Students’ Co-op had cleaned out his balance. He had urged them to phone the bank, since that was what he wished them not to do. It had worked. He had established, he reflected, the all-time record for kiting checks—thirty thousand years.
When the taxi drew up opposite the court where he had located the Gate, he jumped out and hurried in.
The Gate was gone.
He stood there for several minutes, whistling softly and assessing— unfavorably—his own abilities, mental processes, et cetera. The consequences of writing bad checks no longer seemed quite so hypothetical.
He felt a touch at his sleeve. “See here, Bud, do you want my hack, or don’t you? The meter’s still clicking.”
“Huh? Oh, sure.” He followed the driver, climbed back in.
“Where to?”
That was a problem. He glanced at his watch, then realized that the usually reliable instrument had been through a process which rendered its reading irrelevant. “What time is it?”
“Two fifteen.” He reset his watch.
Two fifteen. There would be a jamboree going on in his room at that time of a particularly confusing sort. He did not want to go there—not yet. Not until his blood brothers got through playing happy fun games with the Gate.
The Gate!
It would be in his room until sometime after four fifteen. If he timed it right— “Drive to the corner of Fourth and McKinley,” he directed, naming the intersection closest to his boardinghouse.
He paid off the taxi driver there, and lugged his bags into the filling station at that corner, where he obtained permission from the attendant to leave them and assurance that they would be safe. He had nearly two hours to kill. He was reluctant to go very far from the house for fear some hitch would upset his timing.
It occurred to him that there was one piece of unfinished business in the immediate neighborhood—and time enough to take care of it. He walked briskly to a point two streets away, whistling cheerfully and turned in at an apartment house.
In response to his knock the door of Apartment 211 was opened a crack, then wider. “Bob darling! I thought you were working today.”
“Hi, Genevieve. Not at all—I’ve got time to burn.”
She glanced back over her shoulder. “I don’t know whether I should let you come in—I wasn’t expecting you. I haven’t washed the dishes, or made the bed. I was just putting on my make-up.”
“Don’t be coy.” He pushed the door open wide, and went on in.
When he came out he glanced at his watch. Three thirty—plenty of time. He went down the street wearing the expression of the canary that ate the cat.
He thanked the service station salesman and gave him a quarter for his trouble, which left him with a lone dime. He looked at this coin, grinned to himself and inserted it in the pay phone in the office of the station. He dialed his own number.
“Hello,” he heard.
“Hello,” he replied. “Is that Bob Wilson?”
“Yes. Who ‘is this?”
“Never mind,” he chuckled. “I just wanted to be sure you were there. I thought you would be. You’re right in the groove, kid, right in the groove.” He replaced the receiver with a grin.
At four ten he was too nervous to wait any longer. Struggling under the load of the heavy suitcases he made his way to the boardinghouse. He let himself in and heard a telephone ringing upstairs. He glanced at his watch—four fifteen. He waited in the hall for three interminable minutes, then labored up the stairs and down the upper hallway to his own door. He unlocked the door and let himself in.
The room was empty, the Gate still there.
Without stopping for anything, filled with apprehension lest the Gate should flicker and disappear while he crossed the floor, he hurried to it, took a firm grip on his bags and strode through it.
The Hall of the Gate was empty, to his great relief. What a break, he told himself thankfully. Just five minutes, that’s all I ask. Five uninterrupted minutes. He set the suitcases down near the Gate to be ready for a quick departure. As he did so he noticed that a large chunk was missing from a corner of one case. Half a book showed through the opening, sheared as neatly as with a printer’s trimmer. He identified it as “Mein Kampf.”
He did not mind the loss of the book but the implications made him slightly sick at his stomach. Suppose he had not described a clear arc when he had first been knocked through the Gate, had hit the edge, half in and half out? Man Sawed in Half—and no illusion!
He wiped his face and went to the control booth. Following Diktor’s simple instructions he brought all four spheres together at the center of the tetrahedron. He glanced over the side of the booth and saw that the Gate had disappeared entirely. “Check!” he thought. “Everything on zero—no Gate.” He moved the white sphere slightly. The Gate reappeared. Turning on the speculum he was able to see that the miniature scene showed the inside of the Hall of the Gate itself. So far so good—but he would not be able to tell what time the Gate was set for by looking into the hall. He displaced a space control slightly; the scene flickered past the walls of the palace and hung in the open air. Returning the white time control to zero he then displaced it very, very slightly. In the miniature scene the sun became a streak of brightness across the sky; the days flickered past like light from a low frequency source of illumination. He increased the displacement a little, saw the ground become sear and brown, then snow covered and finally green again.
Working cautiously, steadying his right hand with his left, he made the seasons march past. He had counted ten winters when he became aware of voices somewhere in the distance. He stopped and listened, then very hastily returned the space controls to zero, leaving the time control as it was—set for ten years in the past—and rushed out of the booth.
He hardly had time to grasp his bags, lift them and swing them through the Gate, himself with them. This time he was exceedingly careful not to touch the edge of the circle.
He found himself, as he had planned to, still in the Hall of the Gate, but, if he had interpreted the controls correctly, ten years away from the events he had recently participated in. He had intended to give Diktor a wider berth than that, but there had been no time for it. However, he reflected, since Diktor was, by his own statement and the evidence of the little notebook Wilson had lifted from him, a native of the twentieth century, it was quite possible that ten years was enough. Diktor might not be in this era. If he was, there was always the Time Gate for a getaway. But it was reasonable to scout out the situation first before making any more jumps.
It suddenly occurred to him
that Diktor might be looking at him through the speculum of the Time Gate. Without stopping to consider that speed was no protection—since the speculum could be used to view any time sector—he hurriedly dragged his two suitcases into the cover of the control booth. Once inside the protecting walls of the booth he calmed down a bit. Spying could work both ways. He found the controls set at zero; making use of the same process he had used once before, he ran the scene in the speculum forward through ten years, then cautiously hunted with the space controls on zero. It was a very difficult task; the time scale necessary to hunt through several months in a few minutes caused any figure which might appear in the speculum to flash past at an apparent speed too fast for his eye to follow. Several times he thought he detected flitting shadows which might be human beings but he was never able to find them when he stopped moving the time control.
He wondered in great exasperation why whoever had built the double-damned gadget had failed to provide it with graduations and some sort of delicate control mechanism—a vernier, or the like. It was not until much later that it occurred to him that the creator of the Time Gate might have no need of such gross aids to his senses. He would have given up, was about to give up, when, purely by accident, one more fruitless scanning happened to terminate with a figure in the field.
It was himself, carrying two suitcases. He saw himself walking directly into the field of view, grow large, disappear. He looked over the rail, half expecting to see himself step out of the Gate.
But nothing came out of the Gate. It puzzled him, until he recalled that it was the setting at that end, ten years in the future, which controlled the time of egress. But he had what he wanted; he sat back and watched. Almost immediately Diktor and another edition of himself appeared in the scene. He recalled the situation when he saw it portrayed in the speculum. It was Bob Wilson Number Three, about to quarrel with Diktor and make his escape back to the twentieth century.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 117
