Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Then why don’t you let me take the money and go out and buy you some real coke?”

  He shook his head again, that ominous glint in his eyes. “It’s not the money—that’s just paper. It’s not even getting the coke anymore. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  If I’d been a bit nearer, I’d have spit in his eye. “Why you dumb ersatz pimp!” I snarled, losing the ragged edge of my temper. “You’re a terrific one to be talking about principles. You paid for the whole transaction in funny money. You stiffed me.”

  He shrugged. “Your people never would’ve noticed anything odd about that money. But that doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is—you don’t fuck around with the Time Corps. Never, ever, not even when the only mission we’re on is a clandestine dope run. You’ve screwed over the Time Corps, and we’re going to take it out of your hide, I promise you.” He smiled that thin and icy smile again, and it cut like a razor. “We’ll get that one hundred thousand dollars worth of use out of you, Jerry—one way or another.”

  I tried to keep my face still, but a hundred dreadful images were skittering behind my eyes, and he probably knew it: me as a galley slave tied to a giant oar while the salt sea spray stings the festering whipscars on my back; me as a mine slave, working deep underground, never seeing the sun, lungs straining at the foul air, my back gnarled, my hands torn and bleeding; me as a medieval serf, struggling to pull a primitive plow through the unturned soil, sweating and groaning like a mule; me being disemboweled, crucified, having my eyes put out, having molten gold poured down my throat . . . No doubt a race of time-travelers could arrange for any of those fates—history is large enough to swallow thousands of wretches like me down into nameless oblivion, and no doubt it had. Was Judge Crater now a kitchen slave in ancient Carthage? Did Ambrose Bierce now spend his time shoveling out manure piles in some barnyard in Celtic Britain?

  We’ll get one hundred thousand dollars worth of use out of you—one way or another.

  Think, damnit, think. Let’s see the Giant Brain get you out of this one, kid.

  My mind raced like a car engine does when someone has the accelerator and the brake simultaneously floored.

  I stared unflinchingly into Stringy’s ice-pale eyes for one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three, and then slowly, oh so slowly, I allowed a smile to form on my face, a beatific smile, a knowing smile, a smile that I managed to make both mocking and conspiratorial all at the same time.

  “Tell me, Stringy,” I said lazily, “do you ever meddle with the One and Proper Chain of Events instead of just preserving the status quo? Do you ever tinker with it, just a little bit, here and there, now and then. Do you ever beat the bad guys to the punch by changing something first?”

  “Well . . .” Stringy said. He looked uneasy.

  “You know something, Stringy?” I said, still in that same dreamy, drifting, conversational tone. “I’m one of the few guys in the world who can pull off the Big Con—can’t be more than five or six others who can handle it, and I’m the best of them. There can’t ever have been many; not in any age. And I took you with it, Stringy—you know that I did. I took you with it clean. And you know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for an Act of God, a million-to-one accident, you never even would have tumbled to the fact that I took you.”

  “Well . . .” Stringy said. “Maybe so . . .”

  I felt a rush of fierce singing joy and carefully hid it. I was going to do it! I was going to con the sonofabitch. I was going to take him! With the odds stacked overwhelmingly in his favor, still I was going to take him!

  I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and settled down to talk better and faster than I had ever talked before.

  Now, years later by my own subjective life clock, I sometimes wonder just who was conning whom. I think that Stringy—not actually his name, of course; but then, neither is my name Jerry—was playing me like a virtuoso angler with a record trout on the line from the moment I came stumbling through the timescreen, playing on my fear and anger and disorientation, letting me run up against black despair and then see just the faintest glimmer of hope beyond, conning me into thinking I was conning him into letting me do what he’d wanted me to do all along or, at any rate, as soon as he had realized what sort of man I was.

  Good recruits for the more exotic branches of the Time Corps are hard to come by in any age, just as I’d said, and Stringy was—and is—a very subtle fellow indeed. I always enjoy working with him, and one of the fringe benefits—for Stringy’s taste for snow was real enough—is the plenitude of high-quality dope he always manages to gather unto himself.

  Ironically, my specialty within the Corps has become the directing of operations where the button is supposed to come hot, where the marks are supposed to realize that they are being conned; their resultant fury, if adroitly directed toward the proper target, can have some very interesting effects indeed.

  As with the South Sea Bubble scandal, for instance, which brought Walpole—no friend of Bolingbroke’s—into power as a minor result of which—one of many, many results which echoed down the timelines for centuries—a certain motion picture starring Errol Flynn was never made, or even contemplated. Or with the Teapot Dome scandal, as a result of which—a small result among many more significant and long-term results—Harding’s name is not attached to a certain dam in Colorado, and never has been.

  My latest operation is something that will come to be called Watergate. You haven’t heard of it yet—you couldn’t have heard of it yet.

  But just give it time—you will.

  Flash Point

  Introduction to Flash Point

  This is not just one of my favorite Gardner Dozois stories—it is one of my favorite stories, period.

  At the time Gardner wrote it, it was set in the future. The future is still its nominal setting, I guess since we don’t have holo TV sets. But I think we have to concede that real time has overtaken this future—Viet Nam really is a good many years in the past, and viewpoint character Ben Jacobs is about the right age to make this a story set in the present. Right now. Today.

  Likewise the situation. Isn’t that something—“Flash Point” has actually gone from being a cautionary tale about the future to a contemporary horror story. Simply substitute another word for “holo”—say, “digital,” and you have a story that could have been written, well, this morning.

  But while the usual elements—plot, characters, conflict—make this tale so immediate and contemporary, the quality of the writing makes it classic and timeless. The words describe nothing—they show everything. You feel the sensation of riding in the truck with Jacobs; you smell the strange odor in the abandoned car; you become, by turns, angry, impatient, repelled, frightened, and at the end, you shiver in the cold, both outside and from within. This is not a story you merely read; this is something that happens to you.

  I re-read this story regularly, to remind myself of the sort of achievement I aspired to when I was first starting out. I still aspire to it. I really hope that someday I’ll write something this good.

  Pat Cadigan

  Flash Point

  Ben Jacobs was on his way back to Skowhegan when he found the abandoned car. It was parked on a lonely stretch of secondary road between North Anson and Madison, skewed diagonally over the shoulder.

  Kids again, was Jacobs’ first thought—more of the road gypsies who plagued the state every summer until they were driven south by the icy whip of the first nor’easter. Probably from the big encampment down near Norridgewock, he decided, and he put his foot back on the accelerator. He’d already had more than his fill of outer-staters this season, and it wasn’t even the end of August. Then he looked more closely at the car, and eased up on the gas again. It was too big, too new to belong to kids. He shifted down into second, feeling the crotchety old pickup shudder. It was an expensive car, right enough; he doubted that it came from within twenty miles of here. You didn’t use a big-city car on most of the roads in this neck o
f the woods, and you couldn’t stay on the highways forever. He squinted to see more detail. What kind of plates did it have? You’re doing it again, he thought, suddenly and sourly. He was a man as aflame with curiosity as a magpie, and—having been brought up strictly to mind his own business—he considered it a vice. Maybe the car was stolen. It’s possible, a’n’t it? he insisted, arguing with himself. It could have been used in a robbery and then ditched, like that car from the bank job over to Farmington. It happened all the time.

  You don’t even fool yourself anymore, he thought, and then he grinned and gave in. He wrestled the old truck into the breakdown lane, jolted over a pothole, and coasted to a bumpy stop a few yards behind the car. He switched the engine off.

  Silence swallowed him instantly.

  Thick and dusty, the silence poured into the morning, filling the world as hot wax fills a mold. It drowned him completely, it possessed every inch and ounce of him. Almost, it spooked him.

  Jacobs hesitated, shrugged, and then jumped down from the cab. Outside it was better—still quiet, but not preternaturally so. There was wind soughing through the spruce woods, a forlorn but welcome sound, one he had heard all his life. There was a wood thrush hammering at the morning, faint with distance but distinct. And a faraway buzzing drone overhead, like a giant sleepy bee or bluebottle, indicated that there was a Piper Cub up there somewhere, probably heading for the airport at Norridgewock. All this was familiar and reassuring. Getting nervy, is all, he told himself, long in the tooth and spooky.

  Nevertheless, he walked very carefully toward the car, flat-footed and slow, the way he used to walk on patrol in ‘Nam, more years ago than he cared to recall. His fingers itched for something, and after a few feet he realized that he was wishing he’d brought his old deer rifle along. He grimaced irritably at that, but the wish pattered through his mind again and again, until he was close enough to see inside the parked vehicle.

  The car was empty.

  “Old fool,” he said sourly.

  Snorting in derision at himself, he circled the car, peering in the windows. There were skid marks in the gravel of the breakdown lane, but they weren’t deep—the car hadn’t been going fast when it hit the shoulder; probably it had been already meandering out of control, with no foot on the accelerator. The hood and bumpers weren’t damaged; the car had rolled to a stop against the low embankment, rather than crashing into it. None of the tires were flat. In the woods taking a leak, Jacobs thought. Damn fool didn’t even leave his turn signals on. Or it could have been his battery, or a vapor lock or something, and he’d hiked on up the road looking for a gas station. “He still should have ma’ked it off someway,” Jacobs muttered. Tourists never knew enough to find their ass in a snowstorm. This one probably wasn’t even carrying any signal flags or flares.

  The driver’s door was wide open, and next to it was a child’s plastic doll, lying facedown in the gravel. Jacobs could not explain the chill that hit him then, the horror that seized him and shook him until he was almost physically ill. Bristling, he stooped and thrust his head into the car. There was a burnt, bitter smell inside, like onions, like hot metal. A layer of grey ash covered the front seat and the floor, a couple of inches deep; a thin stream of it was trickling over the doorjamb to the ground and pooling around the plastic feet of the doll. Hesitantly he touched the ash—it was sticky and soapy to the touch. In spite of the sunlight that was slanting into the car and warming up the upholstery, the ash was cold, almost icy. The cloth ceiling directly over the front seat was lightly blackened with soot—he scraped some of it off with his thumbnail—but there was no other sign of fire. Scattered among the ashes on the front seat were piles of clothing. Jacobs could pick out a pair of men’s trousers, a sports coat, a bra, slacks, a bright child’s dress, all undamaged. More than one person. They’re all in the woods taking a leak, he thought inanely. Sta’k naked.

  Sitting on the dashboard were a 35-mm Nikon SI with a telephoto lens and a new Leicaflex. In the hip pocket of the trousers was a wallet, containing more than fifty dollars in cash, and a bunch of credit cards. He put the wallet back. Not even a tourist was going to be fool enough to walk off and leave this stuff sitting here, in an open car.

  He straightened up, and felt the chill again, the deathly noonday cold. This time he was spooked. Without knowing why, he nudged the doll out of the puddle of ash with his foot, and then he shuddered. “Hello!” he shouted, at the top of his voice, and got back only a dull, flat echo from the woods. Where in hell had they gone?

  All at once, he was exhausted. He’d been out before dawn, on a trip up to Kingfield and Carrabassett, and it was catching up with him. Maybe that was why he was so jumpy over nothing. Getting old, c’n’t take this kind of shit anymore. How long since you’ve had a vacation? He opened his mouth to shout again, but uneasily decided not to. He stood for a moment, thinking it out, and then walked back to his truck, hunch-shouldered and limping. The old load of shrapnel in his leg and hip was beginning to bother him again.

  Jacobs drove a mile down the highway to a rest stop. He had been hoping he would find the people from the car here, waiting for a tow truck, but the rest area was deserted. He stuck his head into the wood-and-fieldstone latrine, and found that it was inhabited only by buzzing clouds of bluebottles and blackflies. He shrugged. So much for that. There was a pay phone on a pole next to the picnic tables, and he used it to call the sheriff’s office in Skowhegan. Unfortunately, Abner Jackman answered the phone, and it took Jacobs ten exasperating minutes to argue him into showing any interest. “Well, if they did,” Jacobs said grudgingly, “they did it without any clothes.” Gobblegobblebuzz, said the phone. “With a kid?” Jacobs demanded. Buzzgobblefttzbuzz, the phone said, giving in. “Ayah,” Jacobs said grudgingly, “I’ll stay theah until you show up.” And he hung up.

  “Damned foolishness,” he muttered. This was going to cost him the morning.

  County Sheriff Joe Riddick arrived an hour later. He was a stocky, slab-sided man, apparently cut all of a piece out of a block of granite—his shoulders seemed to be the same width as his hips, his square-skulled, square-jawed head thrust belligerently up from his monolithic body without any hint of a neck. He looked like an old snapping turtle: ugly, mud-colored, powerful. His hair was snow-white, and his eyes were bloodshot and ill-tempered. He glared at Jacobs dangerously out of red-rimmed eyes with tiny pupils. He looked ready to snap.

  “Good morning,” Jacobs said coldly.

  “Morning,” Riddick grunted. “You want to fill me in on this?”

  Jacobs did. Riddick listened impassively. When Jacobs finished, Riddick snorted and brushed a hand back over his close-cropped snowy hair. “Some damn fool skylark more’n likely,” he said, sourly, shaking his head a little. “O-kay, then,” he said, suddenly becoming officious and brisk. “If this turns out to be anything serious, we may need you as a witness. Understand? All right.” He looked at his watch. “All right. We’re waiting for the state boys. I don’t think you’re needed anymore.” Riddick’s face was hard and cold and dull—as if it had been molded in lead. He stared pointedly at Jacobs. His eyes were opaque as marbles. “Good day.”

  Twenty minutes later Jacobs was passing a proud little sign, erected by the Skowhegan Chamber of Commerce, that said: HOME OF THE LARGEST SCULPTED WOODEN INDIAN IN THE WORLD! He grinned. Skowhegan had grown a great deal in the last decade, but somehow it was still a small town. It had resisted the modern tropism to skyscrape and had sprawled instead, spreading out along the banks of the Kennebec River in both directions. Jacobs parked in front of a dingy storefront on Water Street, in the heart of town. A sign in the window commanded: EAT; at night it glowed an imperative neon red. The sign belonged to an establishment that had started life as the Colonial Cafe, with a buffet and quaint rustic decor, and was finishing it, twenty years and three recessions later, as a greasy lunchroom with faded movie posters on the wall—owned and operated by Wilbur and Myna Phipps, a cheerful and indestructible couple
in their late sixties. It was crowded and hot inside—the place had a large number of regulars, and most of them were in attendance for lunch. Jacobs spotted Will Sussmann at the counter, jammed in between an inverted glass bowl full of doughnuts and the protruding rear-end of the coffee percolator.

  Sussmann—chief staff writer for the Skowhegan Inquirer, stringer and columnist for a big Bangor weekly—had saved him a seat by piling the adjacent stool with his hat, coat, and briefcase. Not that it was likely he’d had to struggle too hard for room. Even Jacobs, whose father had moved to Skowhegan from Bangor when Jacobs was three, was regarded with faint suspicion by the real oldtimers of the town. Sussmann, being originally an outer-stater and a “foreigner” to boot, was completely out of luck; he’d only lived here ten years, and that wasn’t enough even to begin to tip the balance in his favor.

  Sussmann retrieved his paraphernalia; Jacobs sat down and began telling him about the car. Sussmann said it was weird. “We’ll never get anything out of Riddick,” he said. He began to attack a stack of hotcakes. “He’s hated my guts ever since I accused him of working over those gypsy kids last summer, putting one in the hospital. That would have cost him his job, except the higher echelons were being ‘foursquare behind their dedicated law enforcement officers’ that season. Still, it didn’t help his reputation with the town any.”

  “We don’t tolerate that kind of thing in these pa’ts,” Jacobs said grimly. “Hell, Will, those kids are a royal pain in the ass, but—” But not in these pa’ts, he told himself, not that. There are decent limits. He was surprised at the depth and ferocity of his reaction. “This a’n’t Alabama,” he said.