Paradox Alley

by John Dechancie

  “This Culmination business,” Dave said, sitting with us on lawn chairs out on a little porch off one side of the house. “Mind-boggling. From what you told me, this … thing will come into being approximately ten billion years in the future. Yet, you’re dealing with it now. And you’re dealing with it on a planet that you say exists back at the beginning of the universe, ten billion years ago.”

  “Near the beginning, anyway,” I said. “Within a few billion years of the Big Bang, or whatever happened back then. Yes, that’s the way it was explained to us. The Culmination transcends time. Once it was created, it became eternal.” I took a sip of my gin and tonic. “There’s a possible scientific explanation for it. If we think of it strictly on a physical plane, maybe the Culmination is nothing but an instantaneous communications device, one that makes possible the transmission of information faster than the speed of light.”

  “Relativity,” Dave said, nodding. “I’ve read a dozen books about it written for the layman. The way I understand it, if you send a message that’s faster than light, you send it back through time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “If there was an instantaneous communications device operating at a point in the far future of the universe, and if it were powerful enough, it would broadcast throughout time, and any capable receiver existing in the past would be able to pick it up.”

  “I think I understand,” Dave said, “but something as grandiose as the Culmination … I mean, it’s hard to think of it as nothing more than a souped-up radio.”

  “Right, but that may be the only handy way to think of it. Otherwise, the concept gets mystical and slippery.”

  “Well, seems, to me it’s got to get mystically slippery at some point. It sounds like what they did was create God.”

  “Or some approximation of Him … or it.”

  Dave whistled softly. “Mind-numbing. Way out. There’re no words for it.” He took a long drink of beer, looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I still can’t grasp why the Culmination built the Skyway.”

  “From what we can guess, it exists as a means to bring potential candidates to a central place for processing into the Culmination,” Darla said.

  “I understand,” Dave said, “but why do they need candidates? Why do they need minds for the Culmination?”

  “That’s what we don’t know,” I said. “We’ve some clues, but nothing like an answer. And we don’t know exactly what joining the Culmination entails. Do you get zapped into a computer? Get transmuted into pure energy? Or what?”

  “Maybe you just die,” Dave suggested.

  I chewed over the current paradox situation. Something had to be done, and soon. I talked it over with Arthur. “Arthur, do you know any reason why Prime would abduct Carl and set him loose on the Skyway?”

  “No. The notion is totally ridiculous. Prime would never do such a thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” Arthur laughed derisively. “Why in the name of all that’s holy in the universe would he?”

  “I dunno. You tell me.”

  “Well, I can’t. It makes absolutely no sense that Prime would travel ten billion light-years to a jerkwater planet and kidnap a human being—not a very bright one, at that—give him that bizarre vehicle, and set him off on the Skyway to cause all sorts of trouble. You think of Prime as a god, don’t you?”

  “A demigod, maybe.”

  “Demigod, shmemigod. Okay. The gods—or the demigods, if you will—may be inscrutable, but they sure aren’t stupid! I mean, they don’t go around doing idiotic things just to pass the time.”

  “Then who abducted Carl?”

  “I think you know the answer.”

  I did. However, I had a hell of a time convincing Carl. “Carl, let me explain it one more time…”

  Carl covered his head with a beach towel, turned over on his stomach, and shoved his face into the sand. “I’m going bananas,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “It’s crazy, but that’s the only way it works.”

  “I’m going to have myself committed. None of this is real.”

  “It probably isn’t. Look, your double—the you of a year ago—is down there in Santa Monica living the life of a typical teenager of his era. In a few weeks, he’s going to be abducted by a flying saucer and taken one hundred and fifty years into the future and set loose in a strange world. That happened to you. Now it has to happen to him, on the same day in history that it actually happened. Prime isn’t going to be around to do the deed. We have the ship, the only one of its kind in existence: Do you understand it now?”

  Carl turned over again and unraveled the towel. He lay back, blinked sand from his eyes, and covered them with his arm.

  For a minute, we listened to the Beatles sing of love and its loss.

  “I understand,” Carl said finally. “I think. It doesn’t make sense, but I understand it. I’m getting used to things not making sense.”

  “Good,” I said, “because they rarely do.”

  “There’s only one thing.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. If things are so screwed up, so backward and impossible, then it must be true that Lori is Debbie.”

  I nodded. “Again, it doesn’t make sense, but…”

  “Yeah. Besides, it works out better that way. If Debbie is another person, then I got some explaining to do.”

  I asked, “When did you finally convince yourself that she isn’t another person?”

  “The other day, when we went to the clothing store. When Lori came out wearing that pink blouse with the white lace around the cuffs, I recognized it. Debbie was wearing that blouse when we first met. I remember because I teased her about how shocking pink, it was. When I saw Lori choose it in the store, I stood there like I’d been struck by lightning, because it hit me that hard. I knew then that somehow—and don’t even know how, yet—somehow Debbie and Lori are the same person. The only difference is the hair. Debbie’s was darker. Not by much, either, now that I think of it, but it was darker. Seems to me that it was a little longer, too, but that may be my lousy memory. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Debbie.”

  Darla came back from a swim and lay down beside me, her skin glistening wet in the sunlight. She had bought a one-piece maternity swimsuit with a little skirt, and she’d been complaining that she looked ridiculous. She didn’t look ridiculous.

  I asked Carl, “Where did you meet Debbie?”

  “That’s another strange thing. She came right up to me on the—”

  Carl sat up with a look of shocked realization.

  I nodded and said sympathetically, “Yeah, Carl, it’s going to be rough.”

  I tried to look fatherly.

  Lori and I had come down into L.A. by way of Sunset Boulevard, which had taken us through Brentwood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, and into West Hollywood. It had been a nice drive, traffic on the moderate side, and I had reached a point where I felt comfortable operating Dave’s Volkswagen. It was a good, economical little car. I know, because I had filled it up before we left. Gasoline was ridiculously cheap as it was. I couldn’t see the price staying that low for any length of time.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to let you off around Vine Street. Do you remember the address in Culver City?”

  “Yeah,” Lori said. She was nervous and a little scared. “Dave’s sister is expecting you at ten.”

  “Ten, right. But I don’t know where Culver City is.”

  “If everything goes well, Carl—Carl Two, the double—should take you there. He knows where Culver City is.”

  We had asked Dave if he knew anyone who could put Lori up for a few days. We couldn’t have Carl Two bringing her to Dave’s place. Carl One said that Debbie lived in Culver City, and it turned out, Dave had a sister who lived there. Dave phoned her with the story of a social worker friend of his who ran a shelter for runaways, and of a girl who needed a place to stay because of overcrowding. Debbie Smith�
��nice kid, basically, just needs a little special attention. Dave’s sister said fine, send her over.

  Lori was chewing her lip anxiously. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “What if…?” She shivered. “Oh, Jake, this is so scary. What if I can’t get Carl to pick me up? What happens then?”

  “Good question,” I said, “and I’d be lying if I said I knew. I don’t know what happens if you foul up a paradox. I don’t know that a paradox can be fouled up. But I don’t think you’re going to have any trouble. Those jeans of yours look sprayed on.”

  “They shrank in that silly clothes dryer of Dave’s.”

  “All to the good, I say. Just walk around looking as pretty as you are.”

  She frowned and flicked a hand through her hair. “I think I look horrible as a brunette. What an awful color that dye turned out to be.”

  “Darla did her best. Okay, what street is this?”

  “Bonita.”

  I turned left, went two blocks, and turned right onto Hollywood Boulevard. I cruised for a few blocks, then pulled over.

  “This is it,” Lori said.

  I looked around. “I don’t see him, but our Carl said that this is one of his hunting grounds.” There were plenty of kids out, riding in cars, shouting at one another, standing on street corners, and generally misspending their collective youth.

  Lori got out, closed the door, and poked her head in the window, her eyes wide with apprehension. “Jake? What if there really is a Debbie?”

  I smiled. “Don’t stay out too late, Debbie.”

  A little of the anxiety left her face, and she smiled thinly. “Wish me luck,” she said.

  I watched her walk away. Those jeans really were a second skin. Carl Two didn’t have a chance.

  17

  IT WAS a lovely summer with an undercurrent of suspense. The Paradox seemed to be working out on schedule. “Debbie” saw “Carl” on the average of three times a week. They’d go out driving, cruising the main boulevards and meeting friends, or they’d go to “drive-in” motion picture theaters, afterward ingesting hamburgers and accompanying confections at various establishments offering same. Every odd day they went to the beach, where Debbie learned the rudiments of surfboarding, Frisbee sailing, and increasing the natural pigmentation of the skin by overexposure to ultraviolet radiation. All these activities, and more, we were told, were typical pastimes for young people of the period and locale. “Debbie” didn’t care much for surfboarding. “I’m always hanging ten,” she complained—whatever that meant.

  Meanwhile, Carl (our Carl) would grind his teeth. The drive-in movies upset him especially. He never mentioned it but once, and never asked Lori what transpired when the couple visited these “passion pits,” as he called them.

  “I know damn well what they’re doing,” he told me. “ ‘Cause I did it, too!”

  But he endured it. After all, it wasn’t as if Lori were dating another guy. It was as if … In the final analysis, the language lacked the means for accurately describing the situation.

  It was good, then, that Lori spent a good deal of time over at Dave’s sister’s place. Shelly and her husband seemed to like “Debbie” a great deal, and didn’t balk at the prospect of her staying on indefinitely.

  “Shelly can’t turn away a stray animal,” Dave explained. “Drives Bob nuts—they must have half a dozen cats by now.” The couple had no children of their own.

  Dave took Lori down to the Federal Building in L.A. to get her a Social Security card, which she obtained by presenting the authorities there with a false birth certificate that Dave had conjured up.

  “Didn’t cost a hell of a lot, either,” Dave told us. “Amazing possibilities, if you think about it.”

  What did Debbie do, mostly, over at Bob and Shelly’s? “Watch TV, sit and read movie magazines. Eat a lot. I’ve put on five pounds. I like TV.”

  She liked rock music, too. She adored the Rolling Stones.

  There were dangers inherent in the situation of having two versions of the same human being running around in proximity to one another. Dave was worried that the other Carl might drop in some time, as he was wont to do on occasion. We forestalled that eventuality by having Dave call Carl up and tell him that he’d be away for a month or two—up in the mountains writing a feature film script. There was still the possibility that the two Carls might bump into each other. But the consensus was that, as Carl had no memory of encountering a twin of himself, it never happened. Ergo, it wouldn’t happen. We could have rewritten the textbooks on logic that summer, if we’d have put our minds to it.

  Something else was bothering Carl. I tried to sound him out on it, but didn’t get very far. Obviously the prospect of reliving the abduction, compounded by the monstrous irony of his having to take part in it, was taking its toll on his nerves. There was nothing I could do except to assure him it would all go according to plan.

  And I wondered myself, Whose plan?

  The summer wore on and the crisis approached. The Paradox Machine clanked and whirred and shot bright blue sparks, its spinning sharp-toothed wheels up to full speed.

  We summoned Arthur.

  It was a balmy California evening. We stood in a hollow in back of Dave’s house, watching the skies. There were few stars; only the biggest and brightest could make it through the hazy glare that the sprawling electric grid of Los Angeles threw back at the sky

  “I’ve got goose bumps,” Dave said, playing his flashlight beam up into the night. “This is like a scene out of The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

  “A movie?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And if Arthur looks anything like Gort, I’m going to shit enough bricks to build a barbecue pit.”

  “I can’t say for sure, but Arthur probably doesn’t look anything like Gort. Arthur doesn’t look like anyone or anything I know.”

  “There?” Darla whispered, pointing to a distant shape moving against the semidarkness.

  We heard a low droning accompanied by a chopping sound.

  “Helicopter,” Dave said. “See the lights?” Dave stamped his foot. “Damn, there’s a lot of air traffic tonight.”

  “Probably better that way,” I said, wishing I had the communicator. Lori had it. She was out somewhere with Carl Two. Arthur said he already had Dave’s house pinpointed and would be able to land if we stood near the site and signaled visually. Carl One was in the house, biting his nails. Would Carl Two repeat history and go up to Mulholland Drive, there to meet his destiny? Only time would tell, and time wasn’t telling yet.

  Dave gasped, and I looked up.

  There was the ship, ghosting over the lip of the hollow, its dark ovate bulk outlined by a constellation of flashing red and blue lights. I smiled. Arthur had done a good job of camouflage. The lights were positioned to mimic the configuration of a conventional aircraft. I wondered if he’d been tracked on radar. Soundlessly, like some sort of dirigible whale, the craft cased to the ground, its immensity filling up the hollow. The main cargo bay dilated and we went in.

  “Je-sus! This is your truck?” Dave said, awestruck.

  “That’s it.”

  “This thing’s a monster! You say it’s atomic powered?”

  “Nuclear fusion. Want to climb in?”

  “Je-sus.”

  He did, and we did. I gave him the tour, and Dave oohed and aahed for a while, then fell into silent wonderment.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  He took his hands from the steering bars. “You know, up till now, I gotta admit that there was a tiny bit of doubt in the back of my mind about all this. I was secretly hoping, desperately hoping, I guess, that I’d fallen into a group delusional psychosis thing, like those saucer cultists who camp out in the desert waiting for the aliens to come down and save the world.” He slapped the instrument panel. “But here it is, in all its mind-shredding reality. You know, there were times when I thought—”

  Brought up short, he stared numbly out the viewscreen.
“Oh, my God,” he said in a hollow voice.

  I looked. It was Arthur. “Yoo-hoo!” Arthur waved.

  We got out, and I introduced Dave to our quasiandroid servant.

  “Are you tracking Lori?” I asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” Arthur said.

  “Where are they?”

  He gestured vaguely. “Out there somewhere. Nowhere near the pick-up zone, which you said wasn’t far from here.”

  “Well, we have some time,” I said, then glanced around. “Carl should be here. Darla, would you run and get him?”

  “Sure.”

  I noticed that Dave was still gawking at Arthur, who was returning a supercilious glare. Suddenly self-conscious, Dave averted his eyes.

  “Dave’s been a real help,” I said to Arthur. “Don’t get on his case.”

  “Well, excuse me,” Arthur sniffed.

  “My fault,” Dave said. “I was staring. I’ve never seen a seven-foot tall, pink and purple person before.”

  “And yellow,” Arthur said, pointing to an appropriate section of his plasticlike skin.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Quite all right. You know, Dave, I’m not as strange as I look.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “He’s stranger.”

  “All I get is abuse,” Arthur lamented. “A servant’s lot. One of these days I’m going to rise above my station in life and tell you how passing strange I think humans are.”

  “We know we’re strange, Arthur,” I said. “Don’t forget. You may not look it, but you’re human, too.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Arthur conducted Dave on a tour of the ship.

  “It’s so empty,” Dave remarked, perplexed. “There’s nothing in here.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of auxiliary equipment,” Arthur said. “It’s all built in.” Arthur went to a bulkhead and ran his index finger over its surface, outlining a simple oblong shape. Suddenly, the pattern materialized and the portion of bulkhead that it described tilted out. Arthur detached it and held it in both hands. “This is a weapon, for instance. There are lots of things hidden in the walls, everything from scientific instrumentation to—”