3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  "'Heart Transplant' will come true, then?" McGregor asked.

  "Oh, yes, but it's just the most dramatic one of a whole range of new techniques. . . . What else? Well, we're still holding the line against the Russians. I expect we will, a while longer. That's not a bad thing; they're smoother then than they are now, but no nicer."

  "All very interesting, I'm sure," the editor said, "but it still doesn't answer the question we've had all along: Why are you here?"

  "I thought I was explaining that," she said. "I'm trying to change the future, of course." Her voice took on a fresh urgency, as if she were a lawyer trying to convince two magistrates of the justice of her case. "We missed coming so much further than we did by so little. The moon program petered out—"

  That drew a grunt from McGregor and sent a wave of anguish through Pete. He did not want to believe it, but it fit horridly well with everything else Michelle had told them.

  He pulled his attention back to what she was saying: "Compared to my time, education, interest, and (maybe most important) purpose are still strong here and now. I'm just trying to nudge things along a little bit, to get across the idea that the best way to solve a problem is to apply knowledge to it, as you said, Mr. McGregor. That's true both of my own stories and of the ones I've taken from other writers."

  "And you've also slipped some of your special knowledge into them," the editor said.

  "Of course. An amazing number of the people who read SF are engineers and scientists themselves; that's more true now than it will be in my time. If they pick up a notion or two from one of my near-future pieces, and act on them now instead—you see what I'm driving at, I think. I've done my best to describe hardware and techniques as precisely as I could."

  "Using science fiction to save the world, eh?" McGregor said. "Much as I hate to say it, isn't that a trifle naive?"

  "If ideas don't do the trick, what will?" Michelle retorted. The Astonishing editor grunted again.

  A considerable silence fell before Pete nerved himself to ask, "Any luck?"

  "I still have hope," was all she said. "Do you really want to find out more than that?"

  "No, I suppose not," he said, and wondered if he meant it. He decided he did. Knowing what lay ahead was too much like losing his free will. He shuddered at the burden Michelle Gordian had taken on herself.

  McGregor must have been thinking along the same lines, for he said to her, "What can I do to help?"

  "The best thing would be to forget that this whole visit ever happened," she answered. "For God's sake, don't be any easier on my stories because of it. If they aren't worth reading, nobody'll care—or even find out—what's in them."

  His grin was wolfish. "You needn't worry about that. If I start publishing stories that aren't worth reading, the magazine goes under and I either starve or have to start making an honest living for myself."

  She made a face at him. "Fair enough." Stepping past Pete, she opened the door that led out to the mundane world of 1953.

  "Excuse me." When they were walking back to the house, Pete took out his cigarettes, gratefully sucked in the harsh smoke. Seeing Michelle's expression of distaste, he quoted,

  " 'Tobacco is a dirty weed.

  It satisfies no normal need.

  It makes you thin, it makes you lean,

  It takes the hair right off your bean.

  It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen. I like it.' "

  "The more fool you," she told him, but she waited until he had had enough and crushed the butt under his heel.

  Once they were inside, McGregor said feelingly, "I hope no one will argue with me when I say that calls for another drink. A very dry Martini, if you have the makings."

  "I'll wave the vermouth at it as I toss in the cherry," she promised. "Anything for you, Pete?"

  "I wouldn't turn down another beer."

  She handed it to him, made the editor's drink and a gin and tonic for herself. She watched McGregor take a cautious sip. "Is that all right?"

  "I'll let you know when my eyes uncross," he wheezed, but the glass rapidly emptied.

  After he was done, he seemed impatient to be gone. Pete thought he wanted to talk privately about the amazing day, but he said very little on the drive back to the motel. At last Pete said, "What is it, Jim? I've never seen you knock back a drink so fast, and I've never heard you so quiet."

  "You didn't pay a lot of attention to the books back there, did you?"

  "No, not really. Why?"

  "I wish I hadn't." There was a long pause. "One of them was called The James McGregor Memorial Anthology."

  "The—oh, Jim!"

  "Yeah. It's good to know I'll be well thought of, I suppose."

  Pete could only admire the editor's composure. Even a kidnapper facing the gas chamber could hope his sentence would be commuted; this one, though indefinite, was certain. Pete hesitated, then asked, "Did you, uh, look at the copyright date?"

  "The hell I did!" McGregor said, echoing Pete's feelings exactly: "That's a chunk of the future I have no desire to know more about, thank you very much."

  "What will you do now?"

  "What would you expect? Get a flight back to New York and go on with Astonishing, of course. There's certainly nothing I'd rather do." He fished his wallet out of his pocket, pawed through it. "Where's that Trans World reservation-and-ticket number? Oh, here it is—MIchigan 8141. I'll have to give them a call when we get back to our digs."

  They were pulling into the motel parking lot when Pete said reflectively, "Things aren't going to be as simple—or as good—up ahead as I'd hoped, from what Michelle says."

  The editor laughed at him. "Remember what de Camp put in the mouth of one of his characters? Something to the effect that a truthful traveler coming back from heaven would report its charm greatly overrated."

  "Well, maybe so. Still, I'm not sorry she's trying to bend the future a bit. Imagine reaching the moon and then cutting back on space exploration. It's crazy!"

  "You get no arguments from me. If I thought you were wrong, I'd be calling the FBI now, not TWA." Pete turned off the ignition. They got out of the car. McGregor went on, "Let's get ourselves packed. Our wives will be missing us."

  "So they will," Pete agreed, but he was disturbed to find himself thinking as much of Michelle Gordian as of Katherine.

  * * *

  The big propellers began to spin, slowly at first but then blurring toward invisibility. Even behind the steel and glass of the terminal, the roar of the radial engines sank into a man's bones. The airliner rolled west along the runway. It sprang into the air; the landing gear folded up into its belly.

  Wishing McGregor well, Pete walked back through the terminal toward the parking lot off Century Boulevard. He passed the row of telephones in which the editor had searched in vain for "Mark" Gordian's number. He hesitated, took out a dime, and went over to an unused phone.

  He dialed with a rising sense of trepidation. He heard three rings, four, five; he was about to hang up, more relieved than not, when his call got answered. "Hello?"

  "Michelle?"

  "Yes, this is Michelle Gordian. Who's calling, please?" She sounded out of breath; she had probably come running in from outside, he thought, to pick up the phone.

  "This is Pete Lundquist, Michelle."

  "How did you get my number?" she demanded, both anger and alarm in her voice.

  "I saw it on your telephone yesterday," he said apologetically. "I have a good memory for such things."

  "Oh." She seemed mollified, but only a little. "What is it you want, then?"

  Not altogether sure of the answer to that himself, he decided to take her literally. "I've been thinking of the conversation we had yesterday, and—"

  "—you decided you really want to know what's going to happen after all," she interrupted. Again he heard her full of the cynicism that appeared to come so easily to the future. She said, "You were smarter before, I promise you."

  "I believe it," he said
quickly. "It's just that—well, there I was in a room full of machines from your time, and every one of them turned off! I felt like Tantalus and the bunch of grapes. All I was going to ask was to see them work just once. Anything more than that I'll cheerfully stay ignorant of."

  The line was silent so long that he said, "Hello?"

  "I'm here," she answered. "Well, why not? The worst part of living back here is the loneliness. My neighbors are friendly, but we have so little in common with one another, and I don't dare show them what I have in the garage. Either they wouldn't understand or they'd expose me. You're enough different that—tell you what. I was just going out to the garage to work on a story of my own when you called, and that'll probably keep me busy through the afternoon. Why don't you come over around nine tonight? Come straight out to the garage; I'll probably still be in there anyhow."

  "Nine o'clock," he repeated. "I'll be there." He hung up. Everything is okay, he told himself fiercely; I'm only going to have a look at marvels I won't have the chance to see again. But the interior dialog would not stop: In that case, why are your palms so sweaty? came the next question. His response was to ignore it.

  As things worked out, he was late; never having gone directly to Michelle Gordian's house, he lost his way a couple of times, and streetlights were few and far between. When he finally did arrive, he thought she had changed her mind and was going to meet him in the house: behind drawn drapes, the lights were on. But no one came to the door when he rang the bell. He went back around the house to the garage.

  Michelle was at the word processor when he entered her sanctum. She waved without turning around, saying, "With you in a couple of minutes. I'm working through a tough part, and it's taking longer than I thought it would. Sorry."

  He didn't answer. He was not sure she could hear him: a record was spinning on the turntable, and she was listening to it through a pair of earphones. Instead, he walked over to the green-glowing screen in front of which she was sitting. As he came up, she muttered an obscenity under her breath, punched a couple of keys. Pete stared—on the screen, a paragraph had disappeared. A letter at a time, a new version began taking shape.

  "I want this gadget!" he cried in honest envy, thinking of scissors and paste and snowdrifts of crumpled paper in his wastebasket.

  She could hear—he saw her smile at him. "I think that'll do it," she said. She hit different buttons. A light on the small rectangular box next to the screen came on; the box started chuckling to itself. "Storing what I've written on the floppy disc," she explained, taking off the earphones. "I'll print it out tomorrow."

  He must have looked like a small boy who had just lost his candy. "Oh, you really were interested in the machines, then?" she said.

  He nodded, but felt his face grow hot at her ironic tone.

  She waited until the disc drive had fallen silent, typed out a new command. Pete jumped as the printer started purring like a large mechanical cat. Paper rose at an astonishing rate. "How fast does it type?" he asked.

  "About three hundred words a minute, I think," she said indifferently.

  He peered into its works, exclaimed, "It's printing left-to-right and right-to-left!"

  "Why not? It's quicker that way. It's not as if it knows what it's doing, or anything like that. It's just a tool, like an automobile."

  "Yes, but I'm used to automobiles, and I'm not used to this." He changed the subject. "Was the record you had on from your time or mine?"

  "Mine, or at least you would say so. Actually, it's pretty old. It's from, uh"—she looked at the back of the cardboard sleeve—"1978."

  "That's new enough for me," he laughed. He took the record cover, turned it over. The design on the front was the same as that on the other side: a stylized street lined with geometric shapes running like a purple-pink bend sinister across a black background. "'Robin Trower. Caravan to Midnight,'" he read. "May I hear it?"

  He was surprised when she hesitated. "I don't know if I ought to do this to you," she said. "It's only rock-and-roll, but I like it."

  "Only what?"

  "Never mind. Popular music."

  "It's okay," he reassured her. "I like Bach and Vivaldi, sure, but I can listen to Perry Como too."

  For some reason, that seemed to fluster her more. "It's not—like Perry Como."

  "Is Robin Trower a girl singer, then, like Rosemary Clooney? That's all right."

  "He's an Englishman who plays electric guitar," Michelle said flatly.

  "Oh." If she thought she was going to put him off, she was wrong. The idea of futuristic technology married to music only intrigued him more. "Sounds fascinating."

  His determination made her throw her hands in the air. "All right. Don't say you weren't warned." She set the earphones on his head. They were padded with red sponge rubber, lighter and more comfortable than the ones radiomen had used during the war. "You might as well listen to the first side first," she said, flipping the record in her hands. He saw it flex, and guessed it was unbreakable. He wished some of the hard shellac platters he'd once owned had been.

  Then the needle—housed in a more elaborate cartridge than current phonographs employed—was dropping. Pete heard it hiss on the opening grooves of the record, listened to the syncopated thump of drums. He just had time to realize that the sound was marvelously clear before the snarling whine of the guitar made him jump straight up. Then everything was happening at once—guitar, drums, and a singer who attacked his song like a man going after a snake with an axe.

  Michelle had the volume up very high. Pete felt as if he were listening to a jet engine warming up in stereophonic sound (something he knew only from a few big movie theaters). "It's not like Perry Como at all," he said. He could hardly hear himself talk. He saw Michelle's lips move, but made nothing of her reply.

  He had almost snatched the earphones off at the first stunning jolt, but he soon realized that this Robin Trower knew exactly what he was doing and had his unruly instrument under control. The music was so strange he could not tell whether he liked it or not, but he recognized talent when he heard it.

  The song—it was called "My Love (Burning Love)," he saw on the sleeve—came to an appropriately fiery end. In the brief moment of silence between tracks, Michelle said, "The next one's quieter."

  "Jesus, I hope so." He lifted off the earphones. "Too strong for my blood, I think," he said, adding reflectively, "That's what I'd call real zorch."

  He was obscurely pleased that he had managed to puzzle her. "Real what?"

  "It's what the young hepcats say when they mean something like 'strange and marvelous,'" he explained. "There's a bop-talking San Francisco disk jockey named Red Blanchard who's their hero up where I live. Bunch of crazy kids, the kind who dye their hair green or wear purple lipstick or red eyebrow pencil—what's so funny?"

  "Nothing, really," she got out after a while. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, that's all." She studied him. "What would you like now?"

  He hesitated but played safe. "If this is your record player, what can your TV do?"

  She shrugged, turned it on. The picture filled the screen much more quickly than on the sets with which he was familiar, and it was very sharp, but the difference seemed of degree rather than of kind. He was disappointed. He must have shown it, for she said, "Remember, it can only give back the signal it's getting. However—" She went over to her desk, took out a plastic case a little larger than a fat paperback. "A videocassette," she said, loading it into the box attached to the television.

  "Magnetic tape?" Pete asked, and at her startled nod he said smugly, "They were talking about it in Time last month."

  "That'll teach me to show off. I ought to tell you this is old too. I've seen it a million times, but I never mind watching it again."

  He did not answer. He was staring at the words flowing across the starry background: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . ." The story background being laid out mattered much less to him than the fact that the lettering
was glowing gold. There had been talk of color TV for years, but unexpectedly seeing one was something else again.

  Michelle brought her desk chair over next to his. He felt about seventeen, at the movies with a date. The headlong action of the space opera he was watching only added to the feeling; it reminded him of a film made by splicing several months' worth of serials together.

  Halfway through, he burst out, "My Lord, that's Alec Guinness!" The actor's snow-white beard brought home the inexorable passage of time even more starkly than the calculator card Michelle carried; Pete wondered what the years would do to him.

  "What did you think?" she asked when the tape was done.

  "The Hollywood word is 'colossal,' isn't it? The color, the trick photography—unbelievable. I almost hate to quibble about how thin the plot is."

  "A man of taste." She sighed. "It's so much fun, though, I don't want to admit that you're right."

  He glanced down at his watch. "It's almost one," he said in disbelief. "I ought to be getting back to the motel." He rose and stretched. "Thank you for a really marvelous time,"

  The hackneyed formality of the phrase made the evening seem more like a date than ever. Without much conscious thought, Pete put his arms around Michelle to try for a good-night kiss.

  He got more than he bargained for. Her body molded itself to his; he could feel the soft firmness of her breasts against his chest. And the kiss, instead of the prim peck he had expected, left delighted thunder in his brain when he finally came up for air.

  Michelle pulled back, just a little. "The hardest thing for me living back here, I think, is having a relationship," she said.

  "A wh—a what?" he stammered, still half-stunned by the yielding warmth of her under his hands—but not too stunned to respond, another part of him noted clinically.

  "Most men here and now treat a woman as if she were a child," Michelle said, "and even with the ones who might not, how can I get close? I have too much to hide. But you already know my secret, and you've been looking forward for years. It's a damned attractive combination." She swayed toward him again.