by Anthology
“You can’t imagine what I went through to save these when the publisher went bust,” he told me, as he looked through the files. “Everybody thought I was crazy. Nobody thought there’d be any interest in the history of the pulps, you see. When I die, they go to the university library. Until then, I can consult them. Elizabeth tells me I should write my memoirs. What do you think?”
“Absolutely.”
“There’d be a market for them now. Some of the people I worked with became famous, and some of the ones that didn’t were even more interesting. Ah, here we are.” He pulled out a hanging file marked Frank Paulsen.
“Bring it inside, gramp,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll get some lemonade for you and Julian.”
“Justin,” I corrected. So she didn’t share my besotment. Give her time.
Once Flint had the file in his hands, his memory was stoked. “Here’s the original manuscript. Look at the title of the story!” He passed it over to me.
I got another shock. The title page proclaimed, “Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time.”
“Parsley Sage!” Flint snorted. “That’s an even sillier name than Percy whatever-I-said. Of course, the hero was looking for this girl named Rosemary, and the story did involve time travel, but still what kind of a title was that to pluck out of the air?” He pondered a moment. “Sounds familiar, though.”
“It was a song,” I said.
“Was it?”
“Simon and Garfunkel. ‘Scarborough Fair.’ ” Behind me, I heard a lovely soprano singing, “Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.”
“Of course,” said Flint, smiling at his granddaughter, who had brought the lemonade. “But wait a minute. Didn’t that song come much later?”
“Yes,” I said. “Late sixties.”
“Actually, yes and no,” Elizabeth said. “Simon adapted the lyric from an old traditional English ballad. But I think the line ‘Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme’ was in the original.”
“I’m relieved,” Flint said. “This was all starting to feel a bit strange.”
Tell me about it, I thought but didn’t say.
Flint was shuffling through the correspondence. “Number of letters from Paulsen. Nothing to suggest we ever met face to face. Showed promise. I wonder what—oh, gosh, look at this.”
He handed over a handwritten letter dated June 15, 1943.
“Dear Mr. Flint,
“I’m sorry to tell you that my tenant Mr. Frank Paulsen passed away yesterday. Thought he just had flu but it took him sudden. He never said much where he came from. I know of no kin or what to do with his things. If you can help me on this please let me know. If he was a good friend of yours I’m sorry for your loss. He was a nice fellow.
“Yours very truly,
“(Mrs.) Minnie Runcible”
“That’s why there were no more stories,” Flint said. “I knew there was something about Paulsen I should have remembered.”
“That’s just the sort of thing that would happen,” I said, half to myself.
“What do you mean?”
“To a time traveler. If you traveled to another time, even fifty years ago, who knows what bugs might be around waiting to kill you, things that have been eradicated today, things we’ve lost our resistance to.”
“Young fellow, I’m the one people take for senile, but you seem to be losing your grasp on what’s fiction and what’s real.”
“I wish it were that simple,” I said. “Do you think I could borrow this file on Frank Paulsen?” I looked over Flint’s head and smiled at Elizabeth. “I’ll bring it back in good condition.”
“Sure, it can’t hurt,” he said.
As we bid goodbye at her door, I told Elizabeth I hoped I’d see her again, and at least she didn’t wince at the prospect. I got her phone number, ostensibly so I could call her in advance when I wanted to return the file, and on the way home I suggested to Flint I might help him with his memoirs, not as a ghostwriter but as a legman.
Through all of this maneuvering, I felt a little guilty: here I was working on my social life and the problem of my time-traveling fellow writer had turned much more serious. He obviously hadn’t yet made his trip into the past, or if he had, he’d become a fourth-dimensional commuter. And when he went back there again, his life would be cut off prematurely, blindsided by disease. I not only needed to find out which member of my writers’ group was the time traveler, but I had to stop him from going. I could save a life here, and surely tampering with the literary career of Frank Paulsen wouldn’t change history in a way it couldn’t snap back from. But how could I do it?
That evening, I called Bill Wandsworth. “Bill, I have a favor to ask.”
“Yeah?”
“Postpone your foofendorker one more meeting.”
“Aw, Justin, I got two things ready to read, and they kind of work together.”
“Trust me. It’s important I read a story at this meeting.”
“Why?”
“Something is going to happen, and I don’t know when it’s going to happen, and I want to stop it from happening.”
“Oh, well, that really clarifies things,” he said.
“Sure, okay. If it’s important, I’ll take your word for it.”
“One other thing. Don’t say anything about ‘Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time.’ ”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean ‘Time Trampler.’ Don’t say anything about
‘Time Trampler.’ ”
“I mentioned it at the last meeting, though.”
“You mentioned Frank Paulsen and a pulp story, but you didn’t say anything about the theme of the story. Keep it that way.”
“Okay, got it. Not a word.”
What I wrote up for the meeting over the next couple of nights was something like what you’re reading now, but it was shorter, read like fiction, and didn’t have any specific references to the members of the writers’ group. It did include the key point I wanted to make: the peril to a time traveler of unforeseen viruses.
We met at Judy Klinger’s house, surprisingly catless and uncutesy, though she offered a rich chocolate fudge along with the traditional cookies. Throughout the evening, especially when I read my story, I kept an eye on one member of the group. By that time, I’d put a couple of things together and was pretty sure who my time traveler was. But I thought it would be better to have him come to me than for me to accuse him outright. When I finished reading, I told the group I wasn’t sure how the story should end, and could anybody help me? Feel free to see me privately, if so. And, yes, someone took the bait, pulled me to one side as we were all going out to our cars, asked me to meet him at a nearby twenty-four-hour coffee shop. We both ordered coffee, the real stuff.
Now I was looking across the table at Frank Paulsen, and he told me his story.
“I hate the twenty-first century, you know. I’m not quite forty, but I feel that my century is over, and everything is downhill from here. I got to thinking, if only time travel were possible and I could go back to another, better time.” He smiled. “Not to the Crusades or ancient Rome or the Middle Ages or Elizabethan England or anything like that. For one thing, I wouldn’t be equipped to speak the language or follow the customs in a way to be seen as anything but a freak. For another, conditions of people, even the very rich, before the twentieth Century would seem unacceptably miserable to any of us, at least those lucky enough to be born middle class in the developed world. And although I didn’t think to apply them to a time so recent, I did consider the medical aspects. I figured if I went back too far, some long-forgotten or long-defeated plague would get me as soon as I stepped out of my time machine.”
Of course, I jumped on that. “Then there is a machine?”
He smiled slyly. “Figure of speech. I can’t tell you exactly how it works, except to say the version in my story is seriously over-simplified. It started when I got into a talk with a physicist over at the university on
e evening. We hit it off and would get together for a drink occasionally. Over a period of time he started hinting and finally revealed to me that time travel existed, that he in fact had done it, that I could do it, too, if I really wanted to. He said getting back to the starting point had been the hardest part, and the uncertainty of being able to do that had kept him from further experiments. The guy has a family, and he likes the twenty-first century, can you imagine? I replied that I had no people, no real ties to the world we live in, and that I would not be coming back. If I keep my appointment with him, I guess I’ll also be keeping that pledge, eh?”
“But you don’t have to keep that appointment.”
“And what happens if I don’t?”
“Probably nothing terrible. I don’t think you’re suicidal, are you?”
“No, no, I do want to live. Just not in this time. Anyway, I’ve made all arrangements, packed my bags so to speak, and I’m expected to depart for World War II America a week from now. Tonight would be my last meeting of the writers’ group, though obviously I was not about to say so.”
“Why World War II? An odd period to choose.” He shrugged. “Safe enough on the home front, and at least I know we win. I would have to change my name, of course. Landing in America of the forties with the name Axel Gruber might draw some unwelcome attention, don’t you think? I had my name all picked out, and that’s why I was alarmed when that figure skating jump was mentioned at one of our meetings. Bill had said the author of the pulp story that won his bet was Frank Paulsen, and I didn’t want Grace to tell everybody the axel was named after a Swedish skater named Axel Paulsen. I’d borrowed my pulp-writing surname from him and the forename Frank from a pulp-writing namesake of mine, though no relation that I know of, Frank Gruber.” He looked at me humorously across the table. “You figured that out, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I confessed. “I looked up axel in the dictionary after that meeting. It was a short jump—pardon the pun—to the Gruber part.”
“I had always had some writing talent, though no one would know it from those dreadful poems I made you people suffer through. And I figured writing would be a sure way to make a living in another time without drawing too much attention to myself, at least at first. If I could do a little subtle plagiarism from writers who came later, it would help me sell my work, and I couldn’t imagine it would really hurt them. When I heard about your writers’ group, I thought I could gather some pointers, especially from you and Bill, who seemed to know the writing world I wanted to enter. But I wanted to reveal as little of myself as possible. I heard your group lacked a poet, and I thought that persona would be the easiest to fake. I used to act in college, and playing a role is fun for me, so I made Axel Gruber as obnoxious as possible. My scientist friend over at the university is understandably secretive, and I didn’t want to the whole project to blow up in our faces, so to speak.”
“Did you actually write those stories in 1943?”
“I haven’t been there yet. But no, I’ve been stock-piling them to take with me, assuming that’s possible. Since they got in print, I guess it is.”
“Why the anachronisms?”
“Not intentional. ‘Shrink’ was just a slip.”
“And the references to the group? Foofendorker and Fred’s compost heap?”
“Just playfulness, like a message in a bottle in the timestream? Chances were you’d never come across it, and I’d be long gone from this time anyway.”
“But you’re not going now, are you?”
“Perhaps I have to. Perhaps I have no choice, having already made my mark on the past.” He looked at me for a moment and shook his head. “No, I won’t go. You’ve saved my life, Justin. Doomed me to live it in the twenty-first century, but saved it nonetheless. I’ll call my scientist friend and tell him to find another guinea pig. What do you think the consequences will be, though? Will we wake up in the morning and find we lost World War II because the literary career of Frank Paulsen never happened?”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“And what will we remember? What will the other people you’ve talked to about Frank Paulsen remember? Will the two of us even remember this conversation, or will our memories be erased?”
“We’ll see,” I said with a shrug.
“Or not,” Axel said. “It’s sort of like death. Either you wake up tomorrow with new insights, or everything disappears and it doesn’t really matter.”
As it turned out, I remembered everything (or I wouldn’t have been able to tell this story) and I imagine Axel Gruber did, too, though he never mentioned it again. As for the others, the best way I can put it is that they all sort of remembered.
When I woke up the day after the meeting and found the file on Frank Paulsen was not on my desk where I’d left it, I didn’t think for a moment it had been stolen or I’d mislaid it. I was sure the old pulpster’s career was over, that is, had never happened.
C. Hardy Flint remembered our discussion of “Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Time,” but only as a story idea I’d told him about, not as a real-time event. And he agreed to let me help him with his memoirs. When I called Elizabeth to arrange a time to come and search through his files, I said casually, “It’s nice of you to store those for your grandfather. You probably have no interest in the old pulps.”
After a pause, that musical voice said, “I think my favorites are Norbert Davis, Murray Leinster, and Fredric Brown.”
Now I knew I was in love—but I’d better not introduce her to Bill Wandsworth.
Speaking of Bill, I had a call from him at work the day after my talk with Axel Gruber. “Okay, Justin,” he said. “I’m licked. I’m ready to pay off that bet. I was sure I had a reference to ‘shrink’ in one of my pulps, but damned if I can find it. Meet me at Liam’s and I’ll pay you.”
When he handed over the ten that evening, I pondered: was this the same ten I gave him when I thought I’d lost the bet, which meant I’d broken even? Or had I now never given him that ten, which meant I was ten dollars ahead? Another time travel paradox.
PAWLEY’S PEEPHOLES
John Wyndham
When I called round at Sally’s I showed her the paragraph in the Westwich Evening News.
“What do you think of that?” I asked her.
She read it, standing, and with an impatient frown on her pretty face.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, finally.
Sally’s principles of belief and disbelief are a thing I’ve never got quite lined up. How a girl can dismiss a pack of solid evidence as though it were kettle steam, and then go and fall for some advertisement that’s phoney from the first word as though it were holy writ, I just don’t . . . Oh well, it keeps on happening, anyway.
This paragraph read:
MUSIC WITH A KICK
Patrons of the concert at the Adams Hall last night were astonished to see a pair of legs dangling knee-deep from the ceiling during one of the items. The whole audience saw them, and all reports agree that they were bare legs, with some kind of sandals on the feet. They remained visible for some three or four minutes, during which time they several times moved back and forth across the ceiling. Finally, after making a kicking movement, they disappeared upwards, and were seen no more. Examination of the roof shows no traces, and the owners of the Hall are at a loss to account for the phenomenon.
“It’s just one more thing,” I said.
“What does it prove, anyway?” said Sally, apparently forgetful that she was not believing it.
“I don’t know that—yet,” I admitted.
“Well, there you are, then,” she said.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Sally has no real respect for logic.
However, most people were thinking the way Sally was, more or less, because most people like things to stay nice and normal. But it had already begun to look to me as if there were things happening that ought to be added together and make something.
The first man to bump up against it—th
e first I can find on record, that is—was one Constable Walsh.
It may be that others before him saw things, and just put them down as a new kind of pink elephant; but Constable Walsh’s idea of a topnotch celebration was a mug of strong tea with a lot of sugar, so when he came across a head sitting up on the pavement on what there was of its neck, he stopped to look at it pretty hard. The thing that really upset him, according to the report he turned in when he had run half a mile back to the station and stopped gibbering, was that it had looked back at him.
Well, it isn’t good to find a head on a pavement at any time, and 2 a.m. does somehow make it worse, but as for the rest, well, you can get what looks like a reproachful glance from a cod on a slab if your mind happens to be on something else. Constable Walsh did not stop there, however. He reported that the thing opened its mouth “as if it was trying to say something”. If it did, he should not have mentioned it; it just naturally brought the pink elephants to mind. However, he stuck to it, so after they had examined him and taken disappointing sniffs at his breath, they sent him back with another man to show just where he had found the thing. Of course, there wasn’t any head, nor blood, nor signs of cleaning up.
And that’s about all there was to the incident—save, doubtless, a few curt remarks on a conductsheet to dog Constable Walsh’s future career.
But the Constable hadn’t a big lead. Two evenings later a block of flats was curdled by searing shrieks from a Mrs. Rourke in No. 35, and simultaneously from a Miss Farrell who lived above her. When the neighbors arrived, Mrs. Rourke was hysterical about a pair of legs that had been dangling from her bedroom ceiling, and Miss Farrell the same about an arm and shoulder that had stretched out from under her bed. But there was nothing to be seen on the ceiling, and nothing more than a discreditable amount of dust to be found under Miss Farrell’s bed. And there were a number of other incidents, too.
