by Anthology
I stare at both of them, my mouth open. I have that same odd feeling of déjà vu that I did in the car last night.
“I’ve cleaned everything that’s hers out of our office and the lab,” Jimmy says. “It’s all in the trunk of my car.”
“And those,” Sara says, gesturing to the boxes in the corner, “are what I value from my desk and my library here. Other than my Nana’s teapot and some clothes, it’s all I’ll really need for a while. Jimmy’s family has a vacation home out in West Marin, so I won’t have to worry about rent—or privacy.”
I’m still staring. “What about your career?”
Sara puts down her teacup with a bang and begins pacing the floor. “Oh, bugger my career. I’m not giving up my work, just the university—and its hypocrisy. If one of my colleagues had a little fling, nothing much would come of it. But as a woman, I’m supposed to be some sort of paragon of unsullied Victorian virtue. Just by being in that bar last night, I put my ‘career’ in jeopardy. They’d crucify me if they knew who—or what—I am. I don’t want to live that way any more.”
She brings the teapot to the table and sits down, pouring us each another cup. “End of tirade. But that’s why I had to ask about your money. It’s enough to live on for a good long while, and to buy all the equipment I need. In a few months, with a decent lab, I should be this close,” she says, holding her thumb and forefinger together, “to time travel in practice as well as in theory. And that discovery will be mine—ours. Not the university’s. Not the government’s.”
Jimmy nods. “I’ll stay down here and finish this term. That way I can keep tabs on things and order equipment without arousing suspicion.”
“Won’t they come looking for you?” I ask Sara. I feel very surreal. Part of me has always wanted to know why this all happened, and part of me feels like I’m just prompting the part I know comes next.
“Not if they think there’s no reason to look,” Jimmy says. “We’ll take my car back to Hazel’s and pick up hers. Devil’s Slide is only a few miles up the road. It’s—”
“It’s a rainy night,” I finish. “Treacherous stretch of highway. Accidents happen there all the time. They’ll find Sara’s car in the morning, but no body. Washed out to sea. Everyone will think it’s tragic that she died so young,” I say softly. My throat is tight and I’m fighting back tears. “At least I always have.”
They both stare at me. Sara gets up and stands behind me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. “So that is how it happens?” she asks, hugging me tight. “All along you’ve assumed I’d be dead in the morning?”
I nod. I don’t trust my voice enough to say anything.
To my great surprise, she laughs. “Well, I’m not going to be. One of the first lessons you should have learned as a scientist is never assume,” she says, kissing the top of my head. “But what a terrible secret for you to have been carting about. Thank you for not telling me. It would have ruined a perfectly lovely weekend. Now let’s all have some supper. We’ve a lot to do tonight.”
Monday, February 20, 1956. 12:05 a.m.
“What on earth are you doing?” Sara asks, coming into the kitchen and talking around the toothbrush in her mouth. “It’s our last night—at least for a while. I was rather hoping you’d be waiting in bed when I came out of the bathroom.”
“I will. Two more minutes.” I’m sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a blank sheet of paper into her typewriter. I haven’t let myself think about going back in the morning, about leaving Sara, and I’m delaying our inevitable conversation about it for as long as I can. “While we were driving back from wrecking your car, I had an idea about how to nail Chambers.”
She takes the toothbrush out of her mouth. “It’s a lovely thought, but you know you can’t change anything that happens.”
“I can’t change the past,” I agree. “But I can set a bomb with a very long fuse. Like 40 years.”
“What? You look like the cat that’s eaten the canary.” She sits down next to me.
“I’ve retyped the title page to Chambers’s dissertation—with your name on it. First thing in the morning, I’m going to rent a large safe deposit box at the Wells Fargo Bank downtown, and pay the rent in advance. Sometime in 1995, there’ll be a miraculous discovery of a complete Sara Baxter Clarke manuscript. The bomb is that, after her tragic death, the esteemed Dr. Chambers appears to have published it under his own name—and won the Nobel Prize for it.”
“No, you can’t. It’s not my work either, it’s Gil’s and—” she stops in mid-sentence, staring at me. “And he really is dead. I don’t suppose I dare give a fig about academic credit anymore, should I?”
“I hope not. Besides, Chambers can’t prove it’s not yours. What’s he going to say—Carol McCullough went back to the past and set me up? He’ll look like a total idiot. Without your formula, all he’s got is a time machine that won’t work. Remember, you never present your paper. Where I come from it may be okay to be queer, but time travel is still just science fiction.”
She laughs. “Well, given a choice, I suppose that’s preferable, isn’t it?”
I nod and pull the sheet of paper out of the typewriter.
“You’re quite a resourceful girl, aren’t you?” Sara says, smiling. “I could use an assistant like you.” Then her smile fades and she puts her hand over mine. “I don’t suppose you’d consider staying on for a few months and helping me set up the lab? I know we’ve only known each other for two days. But this—I—us—Oh, dammit, what I’m trying to say is I’m going to miss you.”
I squeeze her hand in return, and we sit silent for a few minutes. I don’t know what to say. Or to do. I don’t want to go back to my own time. There’s nothing for me in that life. A dissertation that I now know isn’t true. An office with a black and white photo of the only person I’ve ever really loved—who’s sitting next to me, holding my hand. I could sit like this forever. But could I stand to live the rest of my life in the closet, hiding who I am and who I love? I’m used to the 90s—I’ve never done research without a computer, or cooked much without a microwave. I’m afraid if I don’t go back tomorrow, I’ll be trapped in this reactionary past forever.
“Sara,” I ask finally, “are you sure your experiments will work?”
She looks at me, her eyes warm and gentle. “If you’re asking if I can promise you an escape back to your own time someday, the answer is no. I can’t promise you anything, love. But if you’re asking if I believe in my work, then yes. I do. Are you thinking of staying, then?”
I nod. “I want to. I just don’t know if I can.”
“Because of last night?” she asks softly.
“That’s part of it. I was raised in a world that’s so different. I don’t feel right here. I don’t belong.”
She kisses my cheek. “I know. But gypsies never belong to the places they travel. They only belong to other gypsies.”
My eyes are misty as she takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom.
Monday, February 20, 1956. 11:30 a.m.
I put the battered leather briefcase on the floor of the supply closet in LeConte Hall and close the door behind me. At 11:37 exactly, I hear the humming start, and when it stops, my shoulders sag with relief. What’s done is done, and all the dies are cast. In Palo Alto an audience of restless physicists is waiting to hear a paper that will never be read. And in Berkeley, far in the future, an equally restless physicist is waiting for a messenger to finally deliver that paper.
But the messenger isn’t coming back. And that may be the least of Chambers’s worries.
This morning I taped the key to the safe deposit box—and a little note about the dissertation inside—into the 1945 bound volume of The Astrophysical Journal. My officemate Ted was outraged that no one had checked it out of the physics library since 1955. I’m hoping he’ll be even more outraged when he discovers the secret that’s hidden inside it.
I walk out of LeConte and across campus to the coffee shop where Sar
a is waiting for me. I don’t like the political climate here, but at least I know that it will change, slowly but surely. Besides, we don’t have to stay in the 50s all the time—in a few months, Sara and I plan to do a lot of traveling. Maybe one day some graduate student will want to study the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Carol McCullough. Stranger things have happened.
My only regret is not being able to see Chambers’s face when he opens that briefcase and there’s no manuscript. Sara and I decided that even sending back an incomplete version of her paper was dangerous. It would give Chambers enough proof that his tempokinetic experiment worked for him to get more funding and try again. So the only thing in the case is an anonymous, undated postcard of the St. Francis Hotel that says:
“Having a wonderful time. Thanks for the ride.”
TIME HAS NO BOUNDARIES
Jack Finney
When I walked into Sergeant Ihren’s office, he stood up reluctantly, as though he weren’t sure but that he’d be throwing me into a cell in the next few minutes and would regret such politeness. I’m Bernard Weygand, I said brightly, stopping at his desk, but he didn’t smile.
Yeah, he said. Nice of you to come, he added suspiciously and gestured at the chair before his desk. We both sat down.
Glad to come, I said, though I have no idea why you want to see me.
He didn’t rise to that; he just sat looking me over. Pretty young to be a professor, aren’t you? he said.
Well, actually I’m an assistant professor.
Young for that too, aren’t you?
Sure. That’s the reason for these metal-rimmed professor-style glasses and the burlap suit; it helps the image, as the political-science boys say. He didn’t smile; I had the sudden feeling that he was absolutely uninterested in anything but his work; that, except for crime news, he read nothing; that he was intelligent, shrewd, perceptive and humorless; and that he probably knew no one but other policemen and didn’t think much of most of them. He was a young-middle-aged, undistinguished, formidable man and, if he’d murmured boo just then, I’d have leaped from my chair and confessed to anything.
He said, There’s some people we can’t find, and I thought maybe you could help us. I looked politely puzzled, but he ignored it. One of them worked in Haring’s restaurant; you know the place, been there for years. He was a waiter, and he disappeared at the end of a three-day weekend with their entire receipts—nearly $5000. Left a note saying he liked Haring’s and enjoyed working there, but they’d been underpaying him for ten years, and now he figured they were even. Guy with an oddball sense of humor, they tell me. Ihren leaned back in his swivel chair and frowned at me. We can’t find that man. He’s been gone over a year now and not a trace of him.
I thought he expected me to say something, and I did my best. Maybe he moved to some other city and changed his name.
Ihren looked startled, as though I’d said something even more stupid than he expected. That wouldn’t help! he said, irritated.
I was tired of feeling intimidated. Bravely I said, Why not?
People don’t steal in order to hole up forever; they steal money to spend it. His money’s gone now, he feels forgotten, and he’s got a job again somewhere as a waiter. I looked skeptical, I suppose, because Ihren said, Certainly as a waiter; he won’t change jobs. That’s all he knows, all he can do. Remember John Carradine, the movie actor? Used to see him a lot. Had a face a foot long, all chin and long jaw; very distinctive. I nodded, and Ihren turned in his swivel chair to a filing cabinet. He opened a folder, brought out a glossy sheet of paper and handed it to me. It was a police WANTED poster and, while the photograph on it did not really resemble the movie actor, it had the same remarkable long-jawed memorability. Ihren said, He could move, and he could change his name, but he could never change that face. Wherever he is, he should have been found months ago; that poster went everywhere.
I shrugged, and Ihren swung to the file again. He brought out and handed me a large oldfashioned sepia photograph mounted on heavy gray cardboard. It was a group photo of a kind you seldom see any more; all the employees of a small business lined up on the sidewalk before it. There were a dozen moustached men in this and a woman in a long dress, smiling and squinting in the sun as they stood before a small building, which I recognized. It was Haring’s restaurant, looking not too different than it does now. Ihren said, I spotted this on the wall of the restaurant office; I don’t suppose anyone has really looked at it in years. The big guy in the middle is the original owner who started the restaurant in 1885, when this was taken; no one knows who anyone else in the picture was, but take a good look at the other faces.
I did and saw what he meant; a face in the old picture almost identical with the one in the WANTED poster. It had the same astonishing length, the broad chin seeming nearly as wide as the cheekbones, and I looked up at Ihren. Who is it? His father? His grandfather?
Almost reluctantly he said, Maybe. It could be, of course. But he sure looks like the guy we’re hunting for, doesn’t he? And look how he’s grinning! Almost as though he’d deliberately got a job in Haring’s restaurant again and was back in 1885, laughing at me!
I said, Sergeant, you’re being extremely interesting, not to say downright entertaining. You’ve got my full attention, and I am in no hurry to go anywhere else. But I don’t quite see—
Well, you’re a professor, aren’t you? And professors are smart, aren’t they? I’m looking for help anywhere I can get it. We’ve got half a dozen unsolved cases like that; people that absolutely should have been found, and found easy! William Spangler Greeson is another one; you ever heard of him?
Sure; who hasn’t in San Francisco?
That’s right; big society name. But did you know he didn’t have a dime of his own?
I shrugged. How should I know? I’d have assumed he was rich.
His wife is; I suppose that’s why he married her, though they tell me she chased him. She’s older than he is, quite a lot. Disagreeable woman; I’ve talked to her. He’s a young, handsome, likable guy, they say, but lazy; so he married her.
I’ve seen him mentioned in Herb Caen’s column; had something to do with the theater, didn’t he?
Stage-struck all his life; tried to be an actor and couldn’t make it. When they got married, she gave him the money to back a play in New York, which kept him happy for a while; used to fly East a lot for rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts. Then he started getting friendly with some of the younger stage people, the good-looking female ones. His wife punished him like a kid. Hustled him back here, and not a dime for the theater from then on. Money for anything else, but he couldn’t even buy a ticket to a play anymore; he’d been a bad boy. So he disappeared with $175,000 of hers, and not a sign of him since, which just isn’t natural. Because he can’t—you understand, he can’t—keep away from the theater. He should have shown up in New York long since with a fake name, dyed hair, a mustache, some such nonsense. We should have had him months ago, but we haven’t; he’s gone too. Ihren stood up. I hope you meant it when you said you weren’t in a hurry, because—
Well, as a matter of fact—
—because I made an appointment for both of us. On Powell Street near the Embarcadero; come on. He walked out from behind his desk, picking up a large Manila envelope lying on one corner of it. There was a New York Police Department return address on the envelope, I saw, and it was addressed to him. He walked to the door without looking back, as though he knew I’d follow. Down in front of the building he said, We can take a cab; with you along I can turn in a chit for it. When I went by myself, I rode the cable car.
On a day like this, anyone who takes a cab when he can ride the cable car is crazy enough to join the police force.
Ihren said, O.K., tourist, and we walked all the way up to Market and Powell in silence. A cable car had just been swung around on its turntable, and we got an outside seat, no one near us; presently the car began crawling and clanging leisurely up Powell. You can sit outdoor
s on the cable cars, you know, and it was nice out, plenty of sun and blue sky; a typical late-summer San Francisco day. But Ihren might as well have been on the New York subway. So where is William Spangler Greeson? he said, as soon as he’d paid our fares. Well, on a hunch I wrote the New York police, and they had a man put in a few hours for me at the city historical museum. Ihren opened his Manila envelope, pulled out several folded sheets of grayish paper and handed the top one to me. I opened it; it was a Photostatic copy of an old-style playbill, narrow and long. Ever hear of that play? Ihren said, reading over my shoulder. The sheet was headed:
TONIGHT & ALL WEEK!
SEVEN GALA NIGHTS!
Below that, in big type:
MABEL’S GREENHORN UNCLE!
Sure, who hasn’t? I said. Shakespeare, isn’t it? We were passing Union Square and the St. Francis Hotel.
Save the jokes for your students and read the cast of characters.
I read it, a long list of names; there were nearly as many people in old-time plays as in the audiences. At the bottom of the list it said:
MEMBERS OF THE STREET CROWD
Followed by a dozen or more names in the middle of which appeared:
WILLIAM SPANGLER GREESON
Ihren said, That play was given in 1906. Here’s another from the winter of 1901. He handed me a second Photostat, pointing to another listing at the bottom of the cast.
ONLOOKERS AT THE BIG RACE!
This one said, and it was followed by a half inch of names in small type, the third of which was:
WILLIAM SPANGLER GREESON
I’ve got copies of two more playbills, Ihren said, one from 1902, the other from 1904, each with his name in the cast.
The car swung off Powell, and we hopped off and continued walking north on Powell. Handing back the Photostat, I said, It’s his grandfather. Probably Greeson inherited his interest in the stage from him.
