Moira started to answer, would doubtless have expressed amusement at the notion that there could be any difficulty locating a shady broker in the city which held the Vancouver Stock Exchange, but Wally overrode her: “Tell me the date, Jude.”
“Really, don’t worry,” Jude assured him. “It’s not until Fall.”
Wally groaned.
“Wally, what is it?” Moira said.
He turned to her. “I told him it was 1995, and he freaked,” he said. “And then he felt the air with his skin, and relaxed…because it couldn’t possibly be later in the year than late Summer. Don’t you get it, love? Either he isn’t from Vancouver—or in his ficton, Vancouver is as cold as the rest of Canada.”
Moira’s eyes grew round. “Oh my stars and garters. Jude!”
“Yes, Moira?”
“This is Halloween Night.”
He nodded. “I have read of it. Anti-Christian ritual holiday, yes? Dress up, like Sergeant Pepper, take Magical Mystery Tour. We have a similar ritual in late October. And your point is—”
“Halloween Night falls on 31 October.”
Jude grasped the floor on either side of him to keep from falling through it. “WHAT?” Gravity reversed itself; suddenly he rose like a launched missile, clutching at the floor with his soles to keep from flying away. “This is October?” Even internal gravity failed him: his trunk repelled his hands, and they flew out to either side. “The end of October?” He forced them to his will, brought them back in and beat them on his thighs. “The LAST FUCKING DAY of October?”
“It almost never gets cold here,” Wally said apologetically.
Physics restored itself in Jude’s vicinity: he went inert, fell back into his seat, with a thud, and kept collapsing, like a dropped dummy.
They gave him a moment with his despair. They wanted to ask, but the question was too obvious. To ask it would have insulted all three of them. Finally, Wally cleared his throat as discreetly as he could.
“Less than forty-eight hours,” Jude said hollowly.
They both sat perfectly still. How appropriate a place in which to receive the news, Wally thought. Except the clothes on their backs, a statue of Siddhartha and a forty-watt lightbulb, there was not a single material possession in the room.
All right, then: it was a good place to think. Wally thought, as hard and fast as he ever had in his life. This time, even a summary of the resulting cascade of cogitation would be impossible, but he was through within a matter of perhaps ten seconds.
“All is not lost,” he said then.
Jude nodded dispiritedly. “There is time to save ourselves, yes. With your help, perhaps I can establish a cover identity that will hold. I suppose it is possible that later, when things settle down and you rebuild your credit standing, we might try to…but then the problem becomes vastly more complex, you see. This time machine will be destroyed by the quake—and since its replacement in Halifax will just be entering operation, enforcement of regulations will be at its strictest: it’ll be years before I’ll even dare try to…oh crot, if only I’d arrived even a week earlier—” He was near tears in his frustration.
Wally turned and caught Moira’s eyes. “Tomorrow morning we can put eighty-seven thousand dollars in cash into your hands,” he said. Moira’s eyes widened—and then slowly, she nodded. They turned back to Jude.
Burned once, he was reluctant to let hope back. “That…thank you, but I don’t think that would quite be enough to—”
“You were always lousy at math, love,” Moira said to Wally. “The correct figure is ninety-six thousand, seven hundred and fourteen dollars and fifty-two cents.”
Wally nodded, mortified. In his haste, he had neglected to include their own personal net liquidity in the equation. The figure he had named represented only every penny presently in the Lower Mainland Science Fiction Society’s VanCon account, entrusted to him and Moira by a couple of thousand Pacific Northwest science fiction fans. In his heart, Wally did not feel there was anything really dishonorable about offering that money. There was not going to be a VanCon in two weeks…and only a handful of chronic pains in the ass were ever even going to ask for a refund. Nonetheless, he knew the moment Moira spoke that, having pledged both his life and his sacred honor, he really should have thought to include his fortune as well. He excused himself on the grounds that the sum was so negligible it might have escaped anyone’s attention. “Actually, darling,” he said, anxious to redeem himself, “we could hit a few cash machines, and get another two grand before we max out. So the correct figure is ninety-eight-seven and change.”
“Well,” she said, “I thought we might—”
“We can charge our plane tickets out of town,” he pointed out. “We can even put movers on plastic, to ship the books and music to a safe place. There’s enough walking-around money in the house.” He turned back to Jude. “Can you pull it off with ninety-eight-seven?”
Jude frowned in concentration—then all at once, shockingly, he giggled. “I’ll tell them I have to charge them G.S.T.,” he said puckishly.
Wally and Moira dissolved a lot of tension in that burst of laughter. (Canadians in 1995 regarded the Goods and Services Tax with all the affection Bostonians in 1776 had held for a similar levy on tea.) Each felt rather as though they had gnawed a leg off to escape a trap—but there was a sort of dizzy calm in that…and a quiet joy that the sacrifice would be sufficient after all. For think of the prize! New Beatles songs—not a lousy pair of them, but albums and albums—conceivably even some kind of tours again, with a living John Lennon, and stage technology the Beatles had never dreamed of in their touring days. A world healed of disco. A reconsolidation of the hopes and aspirations of the Sixties, tempered by experience—
—and it would be Wallace Kemp and Moira Rogers, Secret Masters Of Fandom, Secretary and Treasurer of LMSFS, who had helped to accomplish it! (Even if they never got to remember that…talk about your selfless sacrifices…)
In less than an hour, Jude had been fed, taken on a tour of the house and the hard drives, shown to a guest bedroom, taught to use a primitive contemporary cable-TV remote and a flush toilet, and left alone to sleep. Wally and Moira talked for another half an hour in bed, making plans, but they knew they needed rest and it had been a long night; they put out the light at around midnight, and were both asleep in a matter of minutes. Wally’s last fleeting thought, before he slipped over the edge and into Strawberry Fields, was the bemused recollection from a Catholic childhood that, in that myth-structure, Jude was the patron saint of the impossible.
Realizing their total liquidity in small bills the next day required some ingenuity as well as effort; fortunately Wally, a professional hacker, had “social engineering” skills which proved useful. He and Moira left Jude alone with the TV and Moira’s Mac (to Wally’s disgust, he was told that the basic Mac interface would triumph in the future—as indeed it had already begun to do in his own ficton), and Wally spent the day stalking money while Moira worked the phone. By nightfall, just as movers were arriving to ship their most precious possessions to Toronto at outrageously padded emergency rates, he was able to hand Jude a large Tourister suitcase stuffed with cash.
“How does it feel,” he asked as he passed it across, “to be one of the beautiful people?”
Jude grinned. “Baby, you’re a rich man, too.”
Wally handed over a bulky envelope. “Just in case you fail—in case they won’t take the bribe—here’s a plane ticket to Halifax, and cab fare to the airport. You can always sit on that cash until it’s safe to try again.” He smiled. “Keep it in a big brown bag, inside the zoo.”
Jude’s eyes were misting. “What a thing to do. Thank you, brother.”
“Driving a cab is a little harder than it sounds. Try and arrive a week or so early, give yourself time to practice. Watch it done a few times, first. I typed out some tips; you’ll find them on a sheet headed ‘Baby, You Can Drive Their Car.’ There’s a tube of pepper spray in the envelope
with it: don’t use it until he’s stopped, on a dark street, then reach past him fast and turn the key counter-clockwise. Our temporary new number in Toronto is in that envelope, too. If we don’t hear from you in a few days, we’ll assume you were successful.” He caught himself. “Excuse me. Dumb: if you succeed, we’ll never know it. Never have known it. Boy, that’s a hard concept to get my mind around. And I’m going to hate to lose the memory of the last twenty hours or so.”
“I know it seems paradoxical,” Jude said, taking his hand, “but I feel in my heart that if I succeed in my mission, somehow, in some way, you will remember your part in it for all the days of your life.”
Wally did not agree, but it was a pretty thought; he let it pass unchallenged.
Moira looked up from her sorting and packing. “Get a move on, Jude. John and Paul are waiting. Give our love to Yoko and Linda.”
Jude nodded and left without another word, threading his way through the movers.
“Have you noticed?” Moira said. “He has a passing resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard…”
His last words came back to them both with great vividness and force…on the very next evening, as they sat up late into the night, in the guest bedroom of a friend and fellow SMOF in Toronto, listening in growing horror to a television and a radio and an Internet Reuters feed that all doggedly refused to report anything whatsoever about an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. They tried desperately for hours to persuade each other that Jude had merely made some small error in the date, or that the authorities were censoring the news to prevent panic, or…
But they were not stupid people, only silly ones. By dawn, shortly after Wally realized and pointed out that only in the unlikely event it finally provoked Canadians to open Boston-Tea-Party-style insurrection could the G.S.T. reasonably have been remembered in history long enough for someone from the year 2287 to have heard of it, they had both finally conceded that love is not all you need.
Wally gave Moira the chore of booking transport back home, while he went down to Bathurst Street and, with some difficulty, bought a handgun.
Chapter 3
What’d I Say
Jude ceased to exist about a hundred meters from Wally and Moira’s house. Operation of his physical plant was taken over then by Paul Throtmanian, who made a point of existing whenever it was not inconvenient. It was he who conveyed the bag of swag a kilometer or two, from one end of Point Grey to the other (passing within a block of the edge of Pacific Spirit Park), softly and triumphantly singing John Lennon songs every step of the way. When he got within two blocks of his current home—just as he got to the words, “I don’t believe…in Beatles”—Paul too ceased to exist, and became Ralph Metkiewicz, programmer, solid citizen, and tenant-of-record for that address.
Ralph was the only safe person to be in this particular neighborhood—was a considerably safer identity altogether than either of the other two. (Though there were no warrants outstanding for him under any of those names.) Nonetheless he kept the lowest possible profile, walking in shadow whenever possible, and using every trick he knew to make himself unobtrusive when he could not. He knew it would not be safe to openly enter his home tonight, even in darkness. Moira’s sweatshirt and Wally’s parachute pants and sockasins were just too weird for his persona, too memorable should certain questions ever be asked. Not that they would be, but he was an artist…and a professional pessimist, besides.
Happily, Ralph’s home had been chosen specifically because one could leave it without being seen, even if it were surrounded by many policemen…and the process worked just as well in reverse. He entered the underground parking garage of an apartment building on West Fourteenth, used a key to open a knobless maintenance door on its far wall, let himself thereby into a long concrete corridor that led past the buildings boiler room, and then turned left. Halfway along this corridor, which ran the width of the building, he bent and picked up a small unobtrusive piece of articulated wire from the filthy floor, about the length and strength of a paper clip and bent at six places. At the corridor’s end he came to a blank wall, seemingly made of particle board sealed somehow to the raw concrete. There was a heavy-duty electrical outlet set in it at about chest height, inset perhaps a quarter of an inch as if sloppily installed. He inserted the bit of wire into the right-hand slot of the socket in a certain way, rotated it clockwise, twice, and heard a small clack! sound. Then he repeated the procedure, counterclockwise, with the left slot. He removed the lockpick and tossed it behind him toward the spot on the floor where he’d found it. He set down his bag, put his fingertips into the shallow space formed by the wall socket’s inset, braced himself, and heaved sideways. The wall slid away smoothly and noiselessly to the left. He reclaimed his satchel of swag, stepped through the resulting opening into a tunnel, turned and slid the false wall back into place, and continued on without troubling to turn on the lights. At the end of the tunnel he found the keypad in the dark, tapped the combination, and was admitted into his own basement.
The moment the door locked behind him, Ralph was tempted to become Paul again. But he waited until he had queried the security system and confirmed that his was the only entry, authorized or otherwise, since his departure. Then he morphed back to himself, losing Ralph’s slouch and outthrust jaw, and emitted a sustained whoop of triumph and glee that made the basement ring.
It was more than the ninety-eight large. His place in the annals of the great was assured. As of this moment, Paul Throtmanian was legend. He had detected, perfected, and just now effected the first new con in at least a hundred years.
With any luck, the bulk of the fame—the on-the-record portion—would be posthumous. Ideally his achievement would not reach the ears of anyone who wasn’t bent until Paul was comfortably in the ground, or at least past the statutes of limitations. But the players would all know, well before then. In the bucket-shops of Vancouver and Melbourne and Markham, at all the major stock exchanges, in the great seine of Times Square, in the cabs of Florida pickup trucks painted with the names of hurricane-repair contractors, backstage at alien-abductee conferences, after hours in Alternative AIDS clinics and Stop Smoking clinics and Facilitated Communication clinics and Cure Cancer clinics, on cruise ships and in revival tents and in Vegas and Key West and along Bourbon Street, in between dropping wallets or recovering memories of fetal rape or pretending to treat frozen shoulder or dispensing market or other psychic advice, the grifter elite of the English-speaking world would sooner or later speak of Paul Throtmanian with respect, and even admiration. The beauty of the sting, the sheer joy of it, the thing that would sell it, was that the higher the mark’s IQ, the more likely he was to bite. Pleasure without guilt, like Pepperidge Farm cookies. You could almost use MENSA’s mailing list for a hit sheet. It was possible that his fame would become planetary, for the gag would work in any culture which had been exposed to science fiction. It was even conceivable that the gambit might come to be known as a Throtmanian…the way Murphy’s and Vesco’s and Rockford’s names had entered the language. Today, Paul had become one of the immortals.
For once, he would outshine his partner.
That thought came close to derailing his joy, for he loved her and respected her professionally and did not want to envy her, and besides there was darkness in her life just now. But he also knew that she would not begrudge him his triumph—she would probably take some of the credit for it, and probably deserved it—and perhaps his glow would brighten her present darkness just a bit. If not, perhaps ninety-eight large in cash would. And he had to share the news or burst.
She must be back from California by now, was probably at her own apartment waiting for his call. (They had learned, early on in the five years they’d been a team so far, that both their personal and professional relationships went better if they maintained separate addresses. Aside from that they were practically married.) So: check in with her at once. Or nearly…
He left the cash in a place even the building’s architect co
uld not have found without deep radar, and set demons to guard it. He stripped off Wally’s and Moira’s clothing and fed it to the furnace, along with the air ticket to Halifax, the Toronto phone number, the cab-driving tips and the envelope that had contained them. The pepper spray and the cab fare he took with him as he padded naked up the stairs. He went straight to the phone machine, which greeted him with four blinks. The first call was a hangup—no manners left in the world. The second was an infant or small child, happily pushing buttons at random—no parents left in the world. The third caller warned him that the opportunity to buy into lucrative lottery ticket syndicates in other, tax-free nations was about to slip through his fingers—Paul recognized the voice, and grinned. The fourth, at last, was his lady love, who said:
“Honey, I’m into something heavy here. I’m walking in the Endowment Lands, and I ran across a mook looking to bury something nice just off the Lowrie Trail, Dorothy twice, but that’s not the good part. He was digging away at the base of a huge old toppled elm tree, and he hit something with his shovel that made a sound like clack, something like plywood or plastic. And then…I know this is nuts, but then he had an orgasm, all by himself, standing up. And then he started to talk out loud, as if somebody was grilling him—only I was only fifty meters away and I swear there was no one else there. He said his name was Angel Gerhardt and he lived over in the East End on William Street and his e-mail handle, God help us all, was ‘Frosty,’ and he named his girlfriend Linda Wu and his two housemates and said none of them knew where he planned to bury the…the thing…and the weird part was, he didn’t say any of this like a mope giving information to the heat, he said it like a guy opening his soul to his new lover, happy as a clam. Then he filled the hole back in and buried the package in another spot. He’s gone now. I’m going to put the package somewhere else—but I’m not going near that goddam fallen elm without you, and maybe Rosco. I don’t know what we’ve got ahold of here, but whatever it is is very very big. Call me as soon as you get in, okay? I hope everything went okay.”
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