The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  The tour group applauded, and the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Portales Inn. I waited for the rush, but nobody moved. “We’re not staying here,” Tonia explained.

  “Oh,” I said, getting up. “You didn’t have to give me door-to-door service. You could have let me out at wherever you’re staying, and I could have walked over.”

  “That’s all right,” Tonia said, smiling.

  “Well,” I said, unwilling to say goodbye. “Thanks for a really interesting tour. Can I take you to dinner or something? To thank you for letting me come?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have to check everybody in and everything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well…”

  Giles the driver opened the door with a whoosh of air.

  “Thanks,” I said. I nodded to the old couple. “Thanks for sharing your seat,” and stepped down off the bus.

  “Why don’t you come with us tomorrow?” she said. “We’re going to go see Number 5516.”

  Number 5516 sounded like a county highway and probably was, the road Jack Williamson walked to school along or something, complete with peanuts and dirt, at which the group would gaze reverently and not take pictures. “I’ve got an appointment tomorrow,” I said, and realized I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. “Next time. When’s your next tour?”

  “I thought you were just passing through.”

  “Like you said, a lot of nice people live around here. Do you bring a lot of tours through here?”

  “Now and then,” she said, her cheeks bright red.

  I watched the bus pull out of the parking lot and down the street. I looked at my watch. 4:45. At least an hour till I could justify dinner. At least five hours till I could justify bed. I went in the Inn and then changed my mind and went back out to the car and drove out to see where Cross’s office was so I wouldn’t have trouble in the morning, in case it was hard to find.

  It wasn’t. It was on the south edge of town on Highway 70, a little past the Motel Super 8. The tour bus wasn’t in the parking lot of the Super 8, or at the Hillcrest, or the Sands Motel. They must have gone to Roswell or Tucumcari for the night. I looked at my watch again. It was 5:05.

  I drove back through town, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King. There’s nothing wrong with fast food, except that it’s fast. I needed a place where it took half an hour to get a menu and another twenty minutes before they took your order.

  I ended up eating at Pizza Hut (personal pan pizza in under five minutes or your money back). “Do you get a lot of tour bus business?” I asked the waitress.

  “In Portales? You have to be kidding,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, Portales is right on the road to nowhere. Do you want a box for the rest of that pizza?”

  The box was a good idea. It took her ten minutes to bring it, which meant it was nearly six by the time I left. Only four hours left to kill. I filled up the car at Allsup’s and bought a sixpack of Coke. Next to the magazines was a rack of paperbacks.

  “Any Jack Williamson books?” I asked the kid at the counter.

  “Who?” he said.

  I spun the rack around slowly. John Grisham. Danielle Steel. Stephen King’s latest thousand-page effort. No Jack Williamson. “Is there a bookstore in town?” I asked the kid.

  “Huh?”

  He’d never heard of that either. “A place where I can buy a book?”

  “Alco has books, I think,” he said. “But they closed at five.”

  “How about a drugstore?” I said, thinking of that copy of Amazing Stories.

  Still blank. I gave up, paid him for the gas and the sixpack, and started out to the car.

  “You mean a drugstore like aspirin and stuff?” the kid said. “There’s Van Winkle’s.”

  “When do they close?” I asked, and got directions.

  Van Winkle’s was a grocery store. It had two aisles of “aspirin and stuff” and half an aisle of paperbacks. More Grisham. Jurassic Park. Tom Clancy. And The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. It looked like it had been there a while. It had a faded fifties-style cover and dog-eared edges.

  I took it up to the check-out. “What’s it like having a famous writer living here?” I asked the middle-aged clerk.

  She picked up the book. “The guy who wrote this lives in Portales?” she said. “Really?”

  Which brought us up to 6:22. But at least now I had something to read. I went back to the Portales Inn and up to my room, opened a can of Coke and all the windows, and sat down to read The Legion of Time, which was about a girl who’d traveled back in time to tell the hero about the future.

  “The future has been held to be as real as the past,” the book said, and the girl in the book was able to travel between one and the other as easily as the tour had traveled down New Mexico Highway 18.

  I closed the book and thought about the tour. They didn’t have a single camera, and they weren’t afraid of rattlesnakes. And they’d looked out at the Llano Flatto like they’d never seen a field or a cow before. And they all knew who Jack Williamson was, unlike the kid at Allsup’s or the clerk at Van Winkle’s. They were all willing to spend two days looking at abandoned shacks and dirt roads—no, wait, three days. Tonia’d said they’d gone to the drugstore yesterday.

  I had an idea. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, looking for a phone book. There wasn’t one. I went downstairs to the lobby and asked for one. The blue-haired lady at the desk handed me one about the size of The Legion of Time, and I flipped to the Yellow Pages.

  There was a Thrifty Drug, which was a chain, and a couple that sounded locally owned but weren’t downtown. “Where’s B. and J. Drugs?” I asked. “Is it close to downtown?”

  “A couple of blocks,” the old lady said.

  “How long has it been in business?”

  “Let’s see,” she said. “it was there when Nora was little because I remember buying medicine that time she had the croup. She would have been six, or was that when she had the measles? No, the measles were the summer she…”

  I’d have to ask B. and J. “I’ve got another question,” I said, and hoped I wouldn’t get an answer like the last one. “What time does the university library open tomorrow?”

  She gave me a brochure. The library opened at 8:00 and the Williamson Collection at 9:30. I went back up to the room and tried B. and J. Drugs. They weren’t open.

  It was getting dark. I closed the curtains over the open windows and opened the book again. “The world is a long corridor, and time is a lantern carried steadily along the hall,” it said, and, a few pages later, “If time were simply an extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday? If one could leap forward—”

  Or back, I thought. “Jack Williamson lived in this house from 1947 to…” Tonia’d said, and paused and then said, “…the present,” and I’d thought the sideways glance was to see my reaction to his name, but what if she’d intended to say, “from 1947 to 1998”? Or “2015”?

  What if that was why she kept pausing when she talked, because she had to remember to say “Jack Williamson is” instead of “Jack Williamson was”, “does most of his writing” instead of “did most of his writing,” had to remember what year it was and what hadn’t happened yet?

  “‘If the field were strong enough,’” I remembered Tonia saying out at the ranch, “‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’” And the tour group had all smiled.

  What if they were the physical objects? What if the tour had traveled through time instead of space? But that didn’t make any sense. If they could travel through time they could have come on a weekend Jack Williamson was home, or during the week of the Williamson Lectureship.

  I read on, looking for explanations. The book talked about quantum mechanics and probability, about how changing one thing in the past could affect the whole future. Maybe that was why they had to come when Jack Williamson was out of town, to avoid doing somethi
ng to him that might change the future.

  Or maybe Nonstop Tours was just incompetent and they’d come on the wrong weekend. And the reason they didn’t have cameras was because they all forgot them. And they were all really tourists, and The Legion of Time was just a science fiction book and I was making up crackpot theories to avoid thinking about Cross and the job.

  But if they were ordinary tourists, what were they doing spending a day staring at a tumbledown shack in the middle of nowhere? Even if they were tourists from the future, there was no reason to travel back in time to see a science fiction writer when they could see presidents or rock stars.

  Unless they lived in a future where all the things he’d predicted in his stories had come true. What if they had genetic engineering and androids and spaceships? What if in their world they’d terraformed planets and gone to Mars and explored the galaxy? That would make Jack Williamson their forefather, their founder. And they’d want to come back and see where it all started.

  The next morning, I left my stuff at the Portales Inn and went over to the library. Checkout wasn’t till noon, and I wanted to wait till I’d found out a few things before I made up my mind whether to take the job or not. On the way there I drove past B. and J. Drugs and then College Drug. Neither of them were open, and I couldn’t tell from their outsides how old they were.

  The library opened at eight and the room with the Williamson collection in it at 9:30, which was cutting it close. I was there at 9:15, looking in through the glass at the books. There was a bronze plaque on the wall and a big mobile of the planets.

  Tonia had said the collection “isn’t very big at this point,” but from what I could see, it looked pretty big to me. Rows and rows of books, filing cabinets, boxes, photographs.

  A young guy in chinos and wire-rimmed glasses unlocked the door to let me in. “Wow! Lined up and waiting to get in! This is a first,” he said, which answered my first question.

  I asked it anyway. “Do you get many visitors?”

  “A few,” he said. “Not as many as I think there should be for a man who practically invented the future. Androids, terraforming, antimatter, he imagined them all. We’ll have more visitors in two weeks. That’s when the Williamson Lectureship week is. We get quite a few visitors then. The writers who are speaking usually drop in.”

  He switched on the lights. “Let me show you around,” he said. “We’re adding to the collection all the time.” He took down a long flat box. “This is the comic strip Jack did, Beyond Mars. And here is where we keep his original manuscripts.” He opened one of the filing cabinets and pulled out a sheaf of typed yellow sheets. “Have you ever met Jack?”

  “No,” I said, looking at an oil painting of a white-haired man with a long, pleasant-looking face. “What’s he like?”

  “Oh, the nicest man you’ve ever met. It’s hard to believe he’s one of the founders of science fiction. He’s in here all the time. Wonderful guy. He’s working on a new book, The Black Sun. He’s out of town this weekend, or I’d take you over and introduce you. He’s always delighted to meet his fans. Is there anything specific you wanted to know about him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Somebody told me about him seeing the magazine with his first story in it in a drugstore. Which drugstore was that?”

  “It was one in Canyon, Texas. He and his sister were going to school down there.”

  “Do you know the name of the drugstore?” I said. “I’d like to go see it.”

  “Oh, it went out of business years ago,” he said. “I think it was torn down.”

  “We went there yesterday,” Tonia had said, and what day exactly was that? The day Jack saw it and bought all three copies and forgot his groceries? And what were they wearing that day? Print dresses and doublebreasted suits and hats?

  “I’ve got the issue here,” he said, taking a crumbling magazine out of a plastic slipcover. It had a garish picture of a man being pulled up out of a crater by a brilliant crystal. “December, 1928. Too bad the drugstore’s not there anymore. You can see the cabin where he wrote his first stories, though. It’s still out on the ranch his brother owns. You go out west of town and turn south on State Highway 18. Just ask Betty to show you around.”

  “Have you ever had a tour group in here?” I interrupted.

  “A tour group?” he said, and then must have decided I was kidding. “He’s not quite that famous.”

  Yet, I thought, and wondered when Nonstop Tours visited the library. Ten years from now? A hundred? And what were they wearing that day?

  I looked at my watch. It was 9:45. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.” I started out and then turned back. “This person who told me about the drugstore, they mentioned something about Number 5516. Is that one of his books?”

  “5516? No, that’s the asteroid they’re naming after him. How’d you know about that? It’s supposed to be a surprise. They’re giving him the plaque Lectureship week.”

  “An asteroid,” I said. I started out again.

  “Thanks for coming in,” the librarian said. “Are you just visiting or do you live here?”

  “I live here,” I said.

  “Well, then, come again.”

  I went down the stairs and out to the car. It was 9:50. Just enough time to get to Cross’s and tell him I’d take the job.

  I went out to the parking lot. There weren’t any tour buses driving through it, which must mean Jack Williamson was back from his convention. After my meeting with Cross I was going to go over to his house and introduce myself. “I know how you felt when you saw that Amazing Stories in the drugstore,” I’d tell him. “I’m interested in the future, too. I liked what you said about it, about science fiction lighting the way and science making the future real.”

  I got in the car and drove through town to Highway 70. An asteroid. I should have gone with them. “It’ll be fun,” Tonia said. It certainly would be.

  Next time, I thought. Only I want to see some of this terraforming. I want to go to Mars.

  I turned south on Highway 70 towards Cross’s office. Roswell 92 miles, the sign said.

  “Come again,” I said, leaning out the window and looking up. “Come again!”

  Parking Fines and Other violations

  Ado

  The Monday before spring break I told my English lit class we were going to do Shakespeare. The weather in Colorado is usually wretched this time of year. We get all the snow the ski resorts needed in December, use up our scheduled snow days, and end up going an extra week in June. The forecast on the Today show hadn’t predicted any snow till Saturday, but with luck it would arrive sooner.

  My announcement generated a lot of excitement. Paula dived for her corder and rewound it to make sure she’d gotten my every word, Edwin Summer looked smug, and Delilah snatched up her books and stomped out, slamming the door so hard it woke Rick up. I passed out the release/refusal slips and told them they had to have them back in by Wednesday. I gave one to Sharon to give Delilah.

  “Shakespeare is considered one of our greatest writers, possibly the greatest,” I said for the benefit of Paula’s corder. “On Wednesday I will be talking about Shakespeare’s life, and on Thursday and Friday we will be reading his work.”

  Wendy raised her hand. “Are we going to read all the plays?”

  I sometimes wonder where Wendy has been the last few years—certainly not in this school, possibly not in this universe. “What we’re studying hasn’t been decided yet,” I said. “The principal and I are meeting tomorrow.”

  “It had better be one of the tragedies,” Edwin said darkly.

  By lunch the news was all over the school. “Good luck,” Greg Jefferson, the biology teacher, said in the teachers’ lounge. “I just got done doing evolution.”

  “Is it really that time of year again?” Karen Miller said. She teaches American lit across the hall. “I’m not even up to the Civil War yet.”

  “It’s that time of year again,” I said. �
��Can you take my class during your free period tomorrow? I’ve got to meet with Harrows.”

  “I can take them all morning. Just have your kids come into my room tomorrow. We’re doing ‘Thanatopsis.’ Another thirty kids won’t matter.”

  “‘Thanatopsis’?” I said, impressed. “The whole thing?”

  “All but lines ten and sixty-eight. It’s a terrible poem, you know. I don’t think anybody understands it well enough to protest. And I’m not telling anybody what the title means.”

  “Cheer up,” Greg said. “Maybe we’ll have a blizzard.”

  Tuesday was clear, with a forecast of temps in the sixties. Delilah was outside the school when I got there, wearing a red “Seniors Against Devil Worship in the Schools” T-shirt and shorts. She was carrying a picket sign that said, “Shakespeare is Satan’s Spokesman.” “Shakespeare” and “Satan” were both misspelled.

  “We’re not starting Shakespeare till tomorrow,” I told her. “There’s no reason for you not to be in class. Ms. Miller is teaching ‘Thanatopsis.’”

  “Not lines ten and sixty-eight, she’s not. Besides, Bryant was a Theist, which is the same thing as a Satanist.” She handed me her refusal slip and a fat manila envelope. “Our protests are in there.” She lowered her voice. “What does the word ‘thanatopsis’ really mean?”

  “It’s an Indian word. It means, ‘One who uses her religion to ditch class and get a tan.’”

  I went inside, got Shakespeare out of the vault in the library, and went into the office. Ms. Harrows already had the Shakespeare file and her box of Kleenex out. “Do you have to do this?” she said, blowing her nose.

  “As long as Edwin Summer’s in my class, I do. His mother’s head of the President’s Task Force on Lack of Familiarity with the Classics.” I added Delilah’s list of protests to the stack and sat down at the computer.

  “Well, it may be easier than we think,” she said. “There have been a lot of suits since last year, which takes care of Macbeth, The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, and Richard III.”