Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  And, for another, he’d had the row with himself-at-forty just afterwards. He might have stayed happier longer if he hadn’t. The main reason—the only reason—he’d gone along with his older self and this whole craziness was that he couldn’t stand the idea of losing Megan, of having to go through a divorce. If his older self could smooth things out now, make sure that never happened, great.

  But if his older self was fighting with Megan, was making her angry at him . . . Where the hell did that leave Justin? He’d already saved the day once, which made him want to gallop back into the scene like a knight in shining armor coming to rescue the fair maiden. Would he rescue her, though? Or would he gallop in and screw things up, the way his older self said?

  He didn’t hop into his car—which was actually his older self’s car—and drive over and throw himself-at-forty out of his rightful apartment. But he couldn’t stand staying here and doing nothing, either, not for very long he couldn’t.

  After a bit more sitting on his hands, he hit on a compromise—or, to look at it another way, he found an excuse for doing what he wanted to do anyhow. I’ll call Megan, Justin thought. I did some good the last time. Maybe I can do some more now. And then I’ll brief my older self on what we talked about, so he doesn’t get caught short.

  Man is the rationalizing animal.

  Justin felt good, felt alive, felt part of things again, as he dialed the phone. It rang a couple of times, then somebody picked it up. “Hello?” Hearing Megan’s voice made him smile big and wide. It also made him horny as hell.

  “Hiya!” He gave her back her own favorite greeting.

  Silence, about fifteen seconds’ worth, on the other end of the line. Then Megan said, “Justin, this is way over, I mean way over, the top. Didn’t I tell you not two hours ago that I didn’t want to see you any more, I didn’t want to talk to you any more, I didn’t want to have anything to do with you any more? Didn’t I?”

  “But—” Justin heard the words, but he had a hard time making them mean anything.

  Megan didn’t give him much of a chance, either. She went on, “Didn’t I tell you that if I ever changed my mind, I’d call you? Didn’t I? I don’t want to be on the phone with you any more, Justin, I mean I really don’t.” She sounded furious, big-time furious.

  “Wait a minute,” Justin said frantically. “What—?”

  He was trying to say, What are you talking about? but he never got the chance. Megan filled in the blank for him: “What about the sex? I already told you, I don’t care how good it was. I don’t care that it got better the last couple weeks, either. I don’t want you treating me like I was twelve years old, and I do care about that. Now get out of my life, goddammit. Goodbye!” The phone crashed down.

  Slowly, like a man in shock—which he was—Justin hung up, too. I don’t care that it got better the last couple weeks, either? One day, when he had time to think about it, that would be a separate torment of its own. Right now, it was just part of the general disaster.

  “What do I do?” he asked, as if the bedroom could tell him. What he wanted to do was call Megan back and explain, really explain, but that wasn’t gonna fly. If he got in even two words before she hung up on him, it’d be a miracle.

  “E-mail!” he exclaimed, and ran for his PowerBook. He wrote the message. He sent it. Less than a minute later, it came back, with permanent fatal error at the top and an explanatory paragraph underneath saying that she was refusing all mail from his address. “Jesus!” he cried in real anguish. “I’ve been bozo-filtered!” That added insult to injury, and none of this, not one single thing, was his fault.

  He knew whose fault it was, though. Anguish didn’t last. Rage replaced it.

  The phone rang four times before his older self answered. “Hello?” He sounded groggy.

  Justin didn’t much care how he sounded. “You son of a bitch,” he snarled. “You goddamn stupid, stinking, know-it-all son of a bitch.”

  “I’m sorry,” himself-at-forty said. Of all the useless words in the world right now, those were the big two. “I tried to—”

  “I just tried calling Megan,” Justin said, interrupting his older self the way Megan had interrupted him. “She said she didn’t want to talk to me. She said she never wanted to talk to me again. She said she’d told me she never wanted to talk to me again, so what was I doing on the phone right after she told me that? Then she hung up on me.” He didn’t say anything about the refused e-mail. Somehow, that hurt even worse, too much to talk about.

  “I’m sorry,” his older self said again. “I—”

  “Sorry?” Justin yelled. If he hadn’t had a buzz cut, he might have pulled his hair. “You think you’re sorry now? You don’t know what sorry is, but you will. I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you, dude. You think you can get away with that, you’re full of—” He hung up on himself-at-forty even harder than Megan had hung up on him.

  He hadn’t been in a fight since middle school, and he’d lost that one. It didn’t matter. He stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. He ran down to his car—no, to his older self’s car—and headed to his old apartment, his proper apartment, as fast as he could go.

  That meant somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes. He was still incandescent when he got there. He turned the key in the lock to the security gate and drove into the Acapulco’s parking lot. His own car, the one himself-at-forty had been driving, was still in its space.

  “You thought I was kidding, did you, you bastard?” Justin’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. “I’ll show you who was kidding, asshole.”

  Finding a parking space out on the street took another minute (a well-trained Southern Californian, he never thought to use one of the empty ones in the parking garage; those weren’t his). Then he stormed up the steps into the lobby, opened the security door, and charged toward his apartment.

  Click! One key in the dead bolt. Click! The other in the lock. The door opened. Justin slammed it shut behind him. “All right, you fucker, now you’re gonna get it,” he growled.

  No one answered. Justin strode into the bedroom. It was as empty of life—except his own—as the front room and kitchen had been. He checked the bathroom. He checked the closets. He checked under the bed. He didn’t take long to decide he was the only one in the place.

  But his older self hadn’t taken his car. “He can’t have gone far,” Justin muttered: again, the Southern California assumption that nobody without wheels could do much. Justin scratched his head. Was himself-at-forty running for his life? Hopping a cab? Waiting for a bus? None of those made much sense.

  But the chair in the bedroom was pulled a long way out from the desk. You couldn’t use the iMac with the chair out there. You could sure as hell use a laptop, though. What would a laptop from 2018 be able to do? Justin didn’t know, but the mere thought was plenty to make him salivate.

  His older self had said coming back from then to now was a matter of good programming. If he had a machine like that, if he had the program on the hard drive, could he go back the way he’d come?

  “How should I know?” Justin asked nobody in particular. But the apartment felt very, very empty. Maybe his older self had fled where he couldn’t hope to follow for nineteen years.

  Or could he? He knew some things he wouldn’t have if his older self hadn’t come back and . . . And screwed up my life, Justin thought. He knew going back in time involved superstrings and programming. The combination wouldn’t have crossed his mind in a million years—no, in something close to nineteen years—if himself-at-forty hadn’t returned to 1999 to meddle.

  And he knew the thing could be done in the first place. Knowing that was half the battle, maybe more than half. He’d never let himself get discouraged. No matter how bleak things looked, he wouldn’t give up and decide he was chasing something impossible.

  And . . . A slow smile stole over his face. He had a nest egg now that he hadn’t had before, thanks to the cash his older
self had left behind. He hadn’t blown very much of it. If he made some investments and they worked out, he could be sitting pretty by the time he got to the frontiers of middle age.

  “Inflation,” he said, reminding himself. “Gotta watch out for inflation.” Himself-at-forty had said his stash of cash wouldn’t be worth nearly so much in 2018 as it was now. Whatever he put the money into, he’d have to make sure rising prices didn’t erode it into chump change.

  What he had to do right now was get his hands on the cash, which was still sitting back at the other apartment. Then he’d have to figure out how to put it into his bank account without getting busted as a drug runner or money launderer. You could put only so much cash in at a time, or else the bank had to report you to the Feds. He knew that. But what was the upper limit? He had no idea. I’ll find out on the Net, he thought, and put it out of his mind for the time being.

  As he drove over to the other apartment, something else struck him: I can get rid of this car. That’ll bring in some more money to help set me up.

  All that assumed his older self wasn’t hanging around in 1999. Justin didn’t know himself-at-forty wasn’t, not for a fact. If his older self did remain here in the twentieth century, Justin still intended to punch his lights out the first chance he got.

  He was loading twenties and fifties and hundreds into shopping bags, feeling a lot like a gangster, when he thought, I can move out of this apartment, too, and get back whatever security deposits my older self paid—part of them, anyway. In spite of the handfuls of greenbacks he was taking out of the drawer, every dollar felt important.

  He wondered what his quarter from 2012 would be worth, and whether it would be worth anything at all. But then he shook his head. “I’ll keep it,” he declared, as if someone had told him not to. “It’ll remind me what I’m shooting for.”

  More than a little nervously, he took the cash down to the car. He managed it without getting mugged. He didn’t think he’d ever driven so carefully in his life as on the trip back to the Acapulco. He’d never watched the rear-view mirror so much, either. Don’t want to get rear-ended now. Oh, Jesus, no.

  As he parked in front of the apartment building, a nasty thought hit him. What’ll I do if he just walked away for a few minutes and now he’s back in my place? Punching his older self’s lights out still seemed like a good plan.

  But the apartment was empty. With a sigh of relief, Justin stashed the bags of cash in the little closet in the hallway that led from the living room back to the bedroom. Then he put a couple of pans by the door. He’d have to get the locks changed, but in the meantime at least he’d have some warning if his older self was still around and tried to come in.

  “Have to get the rest of my stuff out of that other place, too,” he said. But, for the time being, that could wait.

  He quickly went through the apartment, looking for whatever his older self had left behind. Finding a laptop from 2018—if himself-at-forty had had one with him—would have been the grand prize. He didn’t. But he did find a statement from a bank he wouldn’t have patronized if a stagecoach had run over him. When he saw how much it was for, his eyes bugged out of his head: about as much as he had in those bags in the closet.

  And it’s mine, too, he thought dazedly. If he’s gone, it’s mine. I can prove I’m Justin Kloster just as well as he could. I know my mother’s maiden name just as well as he did.

  For a moment, thinking of only one thing at a time, he actually felt grateful toward his older self. A twenty-one-year-old guy with six figures’ worth of money in the bank and with a plan to get ahead . . . What couldn’t he do?

  I can’t have Megan. His joy blew out. Cash was great, but without his girl? Whatever his older self had done there, he’d screwed it up big-time. And he’d said he’d never found anybody else who came close to her.

  Maybe I can get her back, Justin thought. Maybe in a couple weeks, or when school starts again and I see her. Or something.

  He shoved the thought aside. He couldn’t do anything about it now. Himself-at-forty had seen to that. Justin started getting angry all over again.

  And he didn’t get any happier when he looked at what was in the refrigerator. It was all stuff he’d have to cook if he wanted to eat it: even worse stuff than had been in his older self’s other place when he first got there. What were you supposed to do with ginger root or hoisin sauce? He didn’t know, and he wasn’t interested in learning. But then he started to laugh. He could afford to eat out, by God.

  Eat out he did. Yang Chow was odds-on the best Chinese place in this end of the Valley. He devoured kung-pao chicken and chili shrimp, with a Tsingtao beer to put out the fire from the peppers. No sign of his older self when he got back.

  Justin called the other place. The phone rang and rang. After it had gone on ringing for more than a minute, he hung up again, nodding. His older self wasn’t there, either. The more he wasn’t there, the more convinced Justin was that he’d gone back to 2018.

  “He should have stayed there, the son of a bitch,” Justin said. “Maybe Megan and me would have made it. Shit—even if we didn’t, I’d still have the good memories he did. What have I got now? Not one damn thing.”

  Before he went to bed, he changed the sheets and bedspread. He didn’t even want to think about what had happened on the ones he threw in the clothes basket.

  He slept late the next morning, which annoyed him. He had a lot of stuff he wanted to do that day: formally leave the other apartment, close his older self’s banking account and move the money to his own, sell that other Toyota and put the proceeds from the deal in the bank, too. He was just heading out the door when the phone rang.

  “Jesus!” he said, and hurried back to the bedroom. Maybe it was his older self. That would screw things up. Or maybe it was Megan. That would do anything but. “Hello?”

  It wasn’t himself-at-forty. It wasn’t Megan, either, dammit. It was his boss at CompUSA, and he sounded pissed to the max. “Where the hell are you, Kloster?” he shouted. “That graphic-design outfit is coming in this morning to order their new Macs, and they don’t want to deal with anybody but you.” He said something under his breath about “Macintosh prima donnas,” then went back to bellowing: “What are you doing there when you’re supposed to be here?”

  Justin had forgotten all about his CompUSA job. Evidently, his older self had been holding it down pretty well. With all the money he had, he was tempted to tell his boss to stuff it, but he didn’t. That would look bad on a résumé. He gave the best excuse he could think of: “I must have forgotten to set my alarm last night. I’ll be right there.”

  His boss promptly tempted him to regret his choice, roaring, “If they show up before you do, you’re toast!” and hanging up hard.

  He did get there first, and had enough time to review things before the graphic designers trooped in. Before they trooped out again, they’d bought about fifty grand worth of computers and peripherals, and his boss was acting amazingly human. Said boss even took him to lunch at a Mexican place not nearly so good as Sierra’s—though he wouldn’t have wanted to go there now—and didn’t say boo when he ordered a margarita to go with his enchilada and rice and refried beans.

  After lunch, he was upgrading system software on one of the iMac demos when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around to see who it was; the Macintosh ministore inside the CompUSA didn’t get nearly the foot traffic he thought it deserved. “Lindsey!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, you told me where you worked.” She looked nervous. “I just thought I’d come over and say hi. Hi!” She fluttered her fingers at him in an arch little wave, then quickly went on, “I don’t want to make trouble or anything. I know you said you were seeing somebody.” By the way she stood on the balls of her feet, she was poised to flee if Justin barked at her.

  But that, right this second, was the last thing he wanted to do. “I was, yeah,” he answered, and watched her eyes widen at the past tense,
“but we just broke up. Somebody came between us, I guess you’d say.”

  “Oh, my God!” Lindsey exclaimed, and then frowned anxiously. “I hope you don’t mean me. She wasn’t, like, jealous ’cause you went up to Simi Valley and ran into me or anything? That’d be awful.”

  “No, no, no,” Justin assured her. “Had nothing to do with you. It was another guy. An older guy.” The first and last parts of that were true, anyway. The middle? He wasn’t so sure.

  “That’s terrible!” Lindsey said. “You must be all torn up inside.” She reached out and put a sympathetic hand on his arm.

  “I was bummed,” he admitted—about as much as a male his age was likely to say. “It’s really nice, that you came all the way from Simi to see me.” They both laughed, even though Justin hadn’t quite made the joke on purpose. Lindsey smiled at him. He wasn’t always fast on the uptake, but something got through. He set his hand on hers. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it won’t work out too bad after all.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Harry Turtledove was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After flunking out of Caltech, he earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine history at UCLA. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. His alternate history works have included many short stories and the Civil War classic The Guns of the South, the World War I epic The Great War series, and the Worldwar tetralogy that began with Worldwar: In the Balance. He is a Hugo winner, a Nebula finalist, and the winner of the Sidewise Award for best Alternate History for his novel How Few Remain.