by Anthology
But I saw then that he didn’t seemed to be worrying about the gangsters. His eyes were focused on the time machine and one trembling hand was pointing at it in horror. He was almost blubbering in his trepidation, but I did manage to catch one frightened word.
“My ww-wife,” he gasped. “My w-wife!”
I wheeled and saw that another person was emerging from the time machine.
But what a person!
She was a female. That much was obvious. But from there on, all resemblance to the females I’ve met ended. As she dropped to the floor I saw that she was as tall as I, and I’m no pigmy.
Her eyes were flashing pools of authority and power, and her features were cast in the same noble lines as those of our North American Indians. Straight, tawny hair fell to her wide, splendidly muscled shoulders. A brilliant cape swirled about her as she stepped forward. She was the living picture of power and strength and sternness.
She faced the gangsters, hands at her sides, but her wonderful flashing eyes raked them scornfully.
I could hear Dapper Dan breathing hard—and incredulously.
“What’s your racket?” he snarled. He moved the gun to cover the Amazonian creature. “I got you covered,” he snapped.
A crimson flash of anger appeared in the woman’s face.
“Put that toy away,” she thundered. “How dare you threaten me! You insolent, miserable slave.”
The power in her voice would have taxed the dynamos at Coulee dam.
The only sound in the room was Dapper Dan’s harsh breathing and then to my utter amazement, the gun slipped from his hand and banged on the floor.
“You’re running the show,” he panted. “Anything you say.”
Without a word the gloriously impressive creature pressed two buttons on her wide belt. With a faint hiss! three brilliant streaks of light crackled out and seemed to spear the gangsters in the forehead. The lances of light then seemed to dissolve in the air, and a faint acrid smokiness was the only tangible evidence of their existence.
But Dapper Dan and his chop men were stretched on the floor, apparently as lifeless as a Hollywood ‘B’ picture.
“Isn’t she wonderful!” Ruby exclaimed excitedly.
“Bosh!” snorted the impressive female. She marched across the room and jerked her husband to his feet. For an instant I thought she might tear one of his arms off and beat him over the head with it, but fortunately for Number 33 something distracted her attention.
Her eyes focused incredulously on the silly, feminine hat which was still perched on the little fellow’s head. It was ridiculous enough to distract anyone’s attention.
“Where did you get that?” she thundered.
He stared at her in blank terror, and then following the direction of her stern eyes, his hand moved guiltily to the hat.
“Well?” she demanded. “What is it? Just because you were a few thousand years away from me you evidently decided to make a perfect fool of yourself.”
I believe I felt sorrier for the little fellow right then than I had at any of his misadventures in this country. Making excuses to a wife—any wife—is no snap. But to be called upon to lie glibly to a super amazon such as this would be almost too much to expect of any man. Even Superman would have quailed.
“It—it’s a hat,” the little fellow said, swallowing weakly.
“Hmmmph!” his wife’s snort was derisive and unmollified.
“I—I got it for you,” he said desperately, the words tumbling hurriedly from his mouth. “Here, put it on.”
I shuddered as he reached out suddenly and stuck the absurd hat awkwardly on her head.
“There,” he said faintly.
The amazonian creature drew a slow breath into her massive lungs. Her cheeks reddened and her eyes flashed dangerously. I backed away like a craven. She looked as if she were ready to explode—both figuratively and literally.
But then Ruby, with what seemed to me a display of idiotic bravery, grabbed her impulsively by the arm and turned her about.
“Not that way,” she cried in horrified tones. “You don’t wear them straight. You tip them on the side and wear them over one eye.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Superwoman.
“The hat, silly,” Ruby said briskly. “It looks simply awful.”
She stepped back chin in hand, and studied the massive creature before her.
“Sit down.” she commanded suddenly. In her eyes was the gleaming light of a missionary. She flew out of the room then, and returned a second later with two objects in her hand.
“Look!” she gloated. “I found a compact and a bottle of perfume in the bedroom.”
Number 33’s wife was still standing dazedly in the center of the room, but when Ruby bustled up to her she sat down meekly, a strange bewildered look on her face.
Like an enthusiastic artist Ruby wielded the lipstick and powder, until the stern, plain features began to glow and soften under the sorcery of make-up.
Then she fluffed up the straight, tawny hair until it bore a reasonable facsimilitude to the modern mode.
On top of a swirling wave of hair she placed the silly little hat and with a few deft motions shoved it down into place—over one eye.
Then she stepped back and viewed her handiwork delightedly.
“You’re perfectly scrumptious,” she decided definitely. “There is just one thing lacking though.”
She removed the stopper from the perfume bottle and sprinkled a few drops of the scented liquid in the newly coiffed hair.
“Now,” she cried, standing back again, “you’re absolutely perfect!”
“Very nice,” I commented cautiously.
Something very peculiar was happening to the stern, powerful creature. She looked uncertainly at us as if wondering whether to believe us or not. Perhaps it was the make-up but she certainly seemed to be, somehow, more of a woman than before.
“See for yourself,” Ruby said, holding the compact mirror before her.
For a long moment the female gladiator regarded her image, a curious expression on her face. Then she turned, somewhat shyly I thought, to her husband who had hardly taken a breath for the past five minutes. An unspoken question was in her eyes.
Number 33, the little guy in the boy scout suit, was more than equal to the situation.
“You’re absolutely beautiful,” he said dramatically.
I felt proud of him. He even put a hand to his heart as he spoke. He had learned something of flattery from his experience at Danny’s Dive.
And flattery was one weapon which his statuesque wife had no defense against.
It would be incorrect to say she simpered. But she came as close to it as anyone of her size and majestic bearing could. A faint blush stained her cheeks and her eyelids fluttered coyly.
“I probably look simply awful,” she said, as women since Eve have had a habit of saying.
Number 33 assured her stoutly that her appearance left nothing to be desired, and she giggled. Actually. I knew the war was over then.
It turned out I was right. When they climbed into the time machine a few minutes later she was calling him “Ducky” and he was calling her “Toots.”
The little fellow shook hands with me before they left.
“You’ve got a wonderful set-up here,” he said wistfully. Then he brightened. “But I’m going to have a new deal in the Future that won’t be bad.”
As he closed the hatch and settled himself happily on his wife’s knee for the return trip I found myself agreeing with him. At least I hoped he would—I mean will—be happy.
When they had gone I turned to Ruby:
“Ruby,” said I firmly, “we are going to get married. At once.”
“But I can’t” she wailed, “I’ve so many things to do, people to invite and—”
“It will,” I continued inexorably, “be a simple ceremony and it will take place as soon as we find a justice of the peace. Women may rule the Future but, by Hea
ven, I’m giving the orders now.”
“Whatever you say,” she said meekly. But she sighed softly and fluttered her eyelids.
We were married last week at the Little Church Around The Corner before three thousand people after an engagement of three months and are now living happily ever after.
All you have to do is put your foot down.
You see?
KNOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S KNOT
Howard V. Hendrix
Or, changing to a tangled story . . .
Mike Sakler knew about chaos. In the 1950s his doctoral work in turbulent airflow dynamics eventually led to a job with a major aerospace contractor in Southern California. He’d dabbled in nonlinear dynamics throughout his career, then chaos and complexity theory in the 1980s and ‘90s. Since his retirement and his wife Ginny’s death of lung cancer in 1989, he’d had lots of time for dabbling.
With the kids grown and gone, he sold the family house in Southern California and moved to the central Sierra Nevada near Alder Springs, an hour outside Fresno, among tall pines and old oaks and tree-sized manzanita. He spent his days working and playing on his twenty-acre spread and in his great barrackslike, twelve-thousand-square-foot retirement “party house.” Solar powered and off the grid, he built the house with his own hands, out of wood from his own land’s trees.
Once the house was up, he found himself playing more than working: tossing horseshoes, bowing his fiddle, strumming his banjo, jamming with young friends, endlessly tinkering with his home sound-studio’s electronics.
His fascination with the Cord 810 Beverly was much more than just play or dabbling, however. Mike considered the mothballed green 1936 Cord to be the strange attractor underlying his increasingly chaotic life.
Part of it was personal history. His own grandfather had owned a Cord exactly like the piece of automotive sculpture previously owned by Donald and Rita Batchelder: same make, model, and year. When Mike was twelve and his Grandfather Sakler about the same age as Mike himself now was, the old man took him in that very car to the 1939 World’s Fair, for the first of a dozen visits.
The Batchelder Cord had a long and complex history of its own, going back to Rita’s late husband Donald and his purchase of it at an estate sale in New York, years before. Time had pretty much blown the original paint job—a sort of silvery gray-green, like a spruce forest seen at high speed—but that was typical of Cords. Aside from that, the only further damage was the small scratch and dent made by Rita herself in 1955, for which crime Donald had forever after mothballed the car.
So it was that in all other respects the 810 looked the way it did the day it left the factory. The Cord emblem, with its art deco wings, still shining. The eyes of the hidden headlights blissfully sleeping away the years in the big pontoon fenders. The coffin-lid hood fronted by futuristic grillwork—still giving off an impression of blunt velocity, even though the car had been parked and motionless for more than forty years when Mike found it in Rita’s garage and had to have it.
Unfortunately, Mike’s relationship with Rita didn’t continue very long once the sale of the Cord was consummated. What with her calling him a “mercenary, self-centered, heartless old bastard,” he couldn’t say the affair had ended well.
Still, he reassured himself that, if he wasn’t too busy, he could always find another girlfriend through either his martial arts or folk-dancing classes—“ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, and do-si-do,” as he liked to think of them. He’d been doing all of them for so many years that he’d have black belts in all three if they handed out black belts in folk dance.
Widow Batchelder may have called him heartless, but his heart was fine—or at least as fine as years of exercise, the latest heart meds, and the occasional angioplasty could make it. Oddly, though, he took the fiasco of his break-up with Rita worse than he would have thought. Funneling all his energy into restoring the Cord had the virtue of diverting his attention to what seemed to be more tractable problems, at least at first.
He started with the car’s aesthetics—smoothing out the dent and scratch, lifting off all the chrome pieces, getting them and the bare steel bumpers all shined up again. He redid the paint job in its original green, and worked on all the detailing that would return the car to absolutely mint condition.
The bodywork went well. Rita claimed her husband had drained the gas and thoroughly changed the oil when he mothballed the car in 1955, so Mike felt his odds of restoring the engine should at least be even, too.
He removed all the plugs and mystery-oiled the holes. The car wouldn’t start.
He removed and cleaned the fuel system. It wouldn’t start.
He rebuilt the carburetor, did a leak-down test for the rings, and checked the valves. It wouldn’t start.
He hooked pulleys to an external electric motor and cranked things around a bit to check the compression. It wouldn’t start.
He adjusted what didn’t need replacing, brought up the fuel, water, and electrical levels, put the key in the ignition, said a fervent prayer, and still—it wouldn’t start.
He would have loved to give up, but he couldn’t. When he neglected to work on it, he felt guilty, as if shirking some responsibility he didn’t fully understand. He returned to it again and again, often reluctantly.
He put less effort into keeping up his own health. Where before he had been more than willing to “keep active,” now he avoided trips down to the valley for martial arts classes and dance performances.
He’d be damned if he’d let the sawbones put him on one of those bland rabbit food diets. He would eat the way he wanted to, thank you. If you couldn’t enjoy life while trying to stay alive, you might as well already be dead.
The same was true of his drinking—which, after long hiatus, he took up again in a big way. His young party-people friends kept visiting for a while, some even helping him with his automotive restoration work, but gradually his “drinkering and tinkering” drove them away.
A year and a half into the Cord project, after the endless big failures and small successes, Mike Sakler finally hit bottom.
He drank heavily the first part of the night, then fell asleep. Toward morning, Mike knew he was starting to wake up again when he dreamed he was drunk—and had tied a noose to hang himself.
He had hoped for months and months the drinking would crank up the stage machinery that made the fog in his brain, until it filled the theater of his consciousness, obscuring his memory uniformly. It hadn’t worked out that way.
Instead, as the months had passed, his memory had become more and more like the Tule fog that came up out of the ground in the valley below—fog thick yet low, so that it was easier to look straight up through it and see a star shining down out of all those long lost light-years than see the streetlamp just passed a block and a moment before.
The star that shone down on him in his foggiest darkness now was a perfect image of the Perisphere and Trylon, with the Helicline ramping down around them: the “Egg, Spike, and Ramp,” the prime symbols of the 1939 World’s Fair and its “World of Tomorrow” theme.
That was the future that was—yet never was yet. His childhood attempts with the Build-Your-Own New York World’s Fair kits never got much beyond building scale models of the 610-foot-tall Trylon obelisk, its 188-foot-tall Perisphere globe companion, and the Helicline ramp linking them, but that had been all right with him. Those three were what really mattered.
How much Grandpa had loved that fair was a surprise to everyone in the family. Patriarch of a large New York Jewish clan, all the relations thought him old-fashioned, with his banjo and fiddle playing, the same instruments he’d taught Mike to play before Mike was ten.
Mike knew his grandfather wasn’t old fashioned, though. The old man had been picking up Amazing This and Popular That at the newsstand for years and sharing them with his precocious, frenetic, problem-child of a grandson.
After that first trip to the Fair, Grandpa was a quiet visionary no more—a result of the same run-in wit
h Yorkville street toughs that had altered the old man’s physiognomy, or so some in the family theorized. From whatever cause, in his last two years of life Grandfather Sakler experienced a personal Indian summer, a blaze of fierce, bright, quirky creativity in his closing days. He began keeping a journal and corresponding with world leaders and thinkers, especially Albert Einstein, with whom he met once (by accident) at the Fair and, later, by appointment at Princeton—twice.
Now, amid his deepest fog, Mike remembered the trunkload of Fair memorabilia he inherited from the old man. Rummaging with sudden furious energy through closets and drawers in the eight empty bedrooms and the enormous party room on the top floor of his cavernous house, he found he couldn’t remember where he’d stored the trunk.
He staggered down his house’s great spiral staircase to the main floor and pillaged more storage spaces. Fear and frustration gnawing at him, he stumbled down one last circuit of the turning stairway. In a spare basement room he finally found it: the musty sealed steamer trunk that was his legacy from an old man dead more than fifty years.
Inside, he found journals and correspondence and other writings, an intriguing but inexplicable device apparently handcrafted by the old man, even a full suit of what appeared to be his grandfather’s clothes, smelling slightly of smoke, with fine shoes and shirts and underwear, too, wrapped in a garment bag that had grown brittle with age.
All the Fair memorabilia was still there. The Trylon and Perisphere-adorned orange and blue high-modern Official Souvenir Book. Democracity clocks. Fair plates and puzzles and radios. Heinz pickle pins and a crop of GM-Futurama “I Have Seen The Future” buttons—of which the old man had been particularly fond.
Mike hadn’t looked at any of this stuff since the early ‘50s and had looked at none of it thoroughly at any time. What he remembered, from his previous glances through it, was embarrassment—and fear that, in his final years, his grandfather had become a slightly crazed technobabbler, his notebooks full of inexplicable terms, diagrams, and equations.
