by Anthology
She just smiled, and shook her head. “Want some? She said, holding out a wrapped candy bar clutched in her hand like a banana; but printed on the wrapper just above her fist I could see the first word, Love, and the beginning vertical stroke of the next, and since Love Nests aren’t really my favorite, I said no, thanks. But when she peeled off the wrapper, and urged me again, it occurred to me that I could hardly be expected to kiss her with my mouth full of candy, so I took a bite. Surprisingly, it was delicious, and when she offered me some more, I took another. Her eyes gleaming with love, she said, “Finish it,” insisting with a gesture, so I did—chewing slowly, postponing as long as possible what I was afraid would happen next.
It happened. “Kiss me, lover,” Frieda said then, and I looked up at her, my mouth opening to say that my headache was back. But I didn’t say it. My mouth stayed open but I just sat looking at her astounded. It had suddenly occurred to me that if Frieda would simply use a judicious bobby pin or two and unsnarl that knot at the back, her hair would not only stay in place but would become a very handsome pageboy bob. And that if she’d just take off those crazy—I stood up as though in a dream, and did it myself. I pulled off those nutty glasses, and her various half-eyes merged in pairs like the split images in a camera viewfinder coming into focus, and turned into a single set of enormous, beautiful, myopic blue eyes. She couldn’t see me now but I could see her, and her face was absolutely lovely, every bit as beautiful as the accompanying figure which I now found I was holding in my arms. I started to say something about contact lenses but decided that could wait while this could not—and I kissed her long and lingeringly.
For a moment I drew back to look down at that wonderful face, then grabbed her to me again, murmuring all sorts of trite phrases such as “I love you,” to which Frieda said, “Of course,” and, “When can we get married?” to which she said, “As soon as I finish your birdhouse.” Looking down over her lovely shoulder, I noticed the candy wrapper lying where she’d dropped it on my desk, and now I could read both the words printed on it. Love Potion, they said in big blue letters and now I knew where Frieda had been during noon hour.
MAN FROM THE FUTURE
Don Wilcox
Would a man from the future like living in our world? The answer is, he wouldn’t! But here he was, from 10,950 A.D.!
Don’t get me wrong. This guy didn’t lift the street-car by himself. A dozen other fellows were heaving, and the truck that had bumped the thing off its tracks a couple of minutes before was tugging at a taut log-chain.
But it was this big innocent tancheeked fellow in the soft gray topcoat and hat that really muscled the car back on its tracks. Then he backed into the crowd modestly and pulled out a silk handkerchief to brush the dust off his pink hands.
Then and there opportunity knocked, and yours truly, Ham-and-Eggs Brown, jumped to answer. I sprang for the articles that spilled out of this guy’s handkerchief pocket. My chance to get next to him. Something told me there was money in them biceps.
“Your notebook and money, mister—” I drew up out of the shuffle of feet to hand the fellow the silver coin and the little gray memo book—But he was gone—practically. I saw him, half a head above the crowd, making for the sidewalk. I darted after him. The congestion caught me. I charged around two fat men and took a shortcut under a news-camera. By that time the fellow was out of sight.
I looked at the stuff in my hands. The coin went to my pocket automatically. The notebook hung disturbingly in my fingers.
I drifted into the first restaurant, turned the pages of the notebook over a plate of spagetti. The notes were shorthand of some sort. Might as well try to read my spagetti.
But here was a patch of neat long-hand.
Must brush up on archaic writing. The final entry was in the same legible hand:
Underwent the test. No ill effects. The time-transfer was instantaneous. Arrived at the ancient year of 1950—a 9000 year jump. Fine sunny day, but noise and smoke are terrible. Otherwise, so far so good. Must get busy at once.
I pushed my spagetti aside, gulped my ice-water, mopped my brow. The date of that entry was May 10, 10,950!
Reaching into my pocket for aspirins I found the coin. It was screwy too. Dated 10,945. And worn. The letters said, Twenty-five Cents. America.
Not U. S. A. Just America. I looked around to see if some gagster was watching over my shoulder. Hell, if this thing was on the level the guy that heaved that street-car was no mere Hercules, he was a gold mine! He needed a promoter. Ham-and-Eggs Brown to the rescue! Bundle this fellow off to Hollywood—
But where would I find him? A chill hit me. Darned if I hadn’t let him slide right through my lunch-hooks and lose himself among four million—
A shadow crossed my unfinished spagetti and I looked up to see the well filled gray topcoat and hat crossing in front of me. I almost leaped.
“Steady, Ham!” I said to myself. “He might be delicate. Don’t scare him off. Don’t—ah!”
The fellow had forgotten his check. I picked it up, started after him, at the same time glancing in his notebook for his name.
“Mr. Destinoval.”
The fellow whirled and a passing waiter jumped to avoid a spill.
“Your check, Mr. Destinoval.” I gave him my suavest smile. “Also the things you spilled by the street-car.”
As his hand closed over the articles I got a good look at his face. Aside from being contorted with bewilderment it was a good face, one to compare with your favorite movie hero. A trifle less heavy on the jaw, a bit bulgier on forehead. Something sensitive in his features like a well-bred racehorse. At the sound of his name his ears pinkened, his crisp eyelashes flickered.
Then he managed a smile and uttered some words too fast for me to understand, which I took to mean thank you.
“My name is Ham Brown, Mr. Destinoval—”
The introduction was lost. He was off. He strode past the cashier, never stopping to pay.
The cashier shouted and a little dried apple of a manager and two husky waiters caught their cue and bounded outdoors after him. I slapped my money down and gave chase, overtaking them approximately two pie-throws down the street.
The argument was painfully onesided. The little dried apple waved his fists and cursed the air blue. Destinoval looked scared to death—obviously up to his ears in trouble. So I plunged.
“I’ll pay it.”
The glares turned on me. But as quick as J. D. Destinoval saw he was supposed to fork over his check, I put some cash with it and the matter was settled. Dried apple and bodyguard trooped off grumbling contentedly.
This time I grabbed my protégé by the sleeve and hung on.
“Why’d you do it, pal? Don’t you know no better?”
What he answered buzzed off his tongue fast enough to put a tobacco auctioneer to shame. I didn’t get a word of it.
“Come again,” I said, “or ain’t you hep to English?”
He gave me the same scared eye he’d wasted on the restaurant manager and tried to pull away. I bulldogged his coatsleeve all the way to the stoplight. Then I let go. Two cops and a plainclothes on the other side of the street were looking our way hungrily.
We backed into a doorway and my protégé talked on.
“Hold it!” I said. “Is that the way you talk where you come from?”
He nodded eagerly. He rattled on, pointing first to me and then to the gray memo book. His eyes brightened as we came to an understanding.
“Yes, I read a little of it.” I admitted. “That’s where I got your name. If you’re on the level about coming back from 10,950—”
He almost hugged me, he was so excited. He shook both my hands at once. Out of the wild rattle of his words I caught exactly nothing. I broke in:
“Listen, partner, you need a friend and I’m it. I’m your general manager, see?” I flashed a card at him. “Promoter, that’s my business. We’ll draw up a contract. But first you’ve got to slow down that sixteen cylind
er jabber—Quiet! We can’t both talk at once . . . What’s that . . . Say it again . . . Slow! . . . Slower!”
Gradually I throttled him down and his smooth rich voice made sense.
“I’m at sea, my dear atom-smasher.” He was addressing me with a term of endearment, as I later learned. “Why can’t we both talk at once?”
“It’s bad manners.”
“Why?”
“Because when one guy’s talking the other oughta listen.”
“That’s absurd,” he said. “Can’t you talk and listen at the same time?”
“Maybe you can,” I said skeptically. “Of course. It’s perfectly good etiquette as long as not more than six talk at once. It takes five or six to round out a conversation, in my times, and nobody misses a word.”
“You’re back in the twentieth century now, brother,” I advised. “A word to the wise. And another thing—this business of walking out on your bills—” Anxiety flickered through his face. This was a matter he’d tried to ask about, he said, but no one had understood him. I questioned him and saw there was a trouble cloud gathering.
You see, he carried a head full of dangerous notions. They might be good for 10,950 but they were screwball for 1950.
“I supposed food was free,” he said. “Now in my times—”
“These ain’t your times,” I snapped. He squinted an eye at me.
“Do you pay to walk on the sidewalks? To sit in the parks?”
“Of course not. That’s public. Everybody uses the streets and parks—
“My point exactly,” he said. “In my times everybody uses food and beds. The public pays the bill from our taxes. If a man needs a room at a hotel—”
“Great guns! Don’t tell me you’ve walked out on a hotel bill!”
My answer came in action stronger than words. The cops and the plainclothes man had crossed the street toward us. The plainclothes, who happened to be the house dick at the Ingerbond Hotel, thrust a thumb at my friend and muttered,
“That’s him. Professional deadbeat, most likely.”
“We’ll let the judge look into it,” said a cop.
As they led him to a wagon he looked back with a hint of scare in his movie-star face and called, “Don’t forget, you’re my manager.”
I grabbed a car for the police station.
Then remembering I was short on ready cash I back-tracked, through a time-costly traffic jam, to the Daily Beacon. I brushed past the city editor and hove up at the desk labeled: VELMA MACK, SOCIETY.
“She’s not in,” growled Split-Infinitive, the rewrite man.
“Give her my love,” I said. “Tell her bluebirds are singing. She’ll get that vacation to Atlantic City. I’m taking her myself.”
Split looked me up and down. “When’d your rich uncle die?”
“None of that. I’ve just made the discovery of the year—a man with uncanny talents—hell, he’s colossal! I’m giving him six months on vaudeville—I’ve got an in, you know—then Hollywood.”
Split lit a cigarette.
“What’s his name?”
“J.D. Dest—” I considered. This man from the future needed a name that would look well in the headlines. Ah—“John Doe Destiny.”
I sat down at Velma Mack’s desk to write her a note. A cigar was burning in her ash tray and the aroma caught me.
“Beau Tassel’s been here.”
Split nodded.
“His Detroit fights were called off.”
“I don’t like the way he comes borrowing money from Velma.”
“He didn’t. Just came to say he’d take her on her Atlantic City vacation—”
“He’d take her!” I bounced up from the chair. “Hell, that won’t do. Anyway he can’t swing it—”
“He was dressed up like a million.” I writhed. If Beau was sporting a new outfit, he’d dipped into our prize money again—that three hundred dollar radio contest award that had brought him and Velma and me together in an off-the-record corporation.
“Beau claimed he’d sighted a bonanza.” Split opened the noon edition to a picture of the derailed street-car. It showed the dozen men heaving and the center one was John Doe Destiny. The staff artist had drawn a question mark on Destiny’s back. The story started off.
Who is he?
Who is the mysterious Hercules that swung the street-car back on its tracks and disappeared in the crowd before the reporters could . . .
The thing caught me in the ribs.
“Is that all Beau Tassel had to go on?”
“He said he’d round up this he-man and make a heavyweight champ out of him. If you ask me, Velma went along to throw a monkey-wrench.”
“Went where? They’ll never find him. I’m the only one who knows—”
“Don’t kid yourself. One reporter over at the police station called in twenty minutes ago to say the guy they’d dumped in cell seventeen was—” I leaped from the desk and caught up my hat on the run. Outside the door I hailed a taxi and was off.
The cop dozing in the tilted chair inside the rear door of the station opened one eye at me. I flashed my card at him and he let the eye fall closed. I strode back to seventeen. John Doe Destiny was there. And no one else, thank goodness. I assumed that Velma and Beau hadn’t come yet. I extended my friendliest hand through the bars.
“Ah my friend—”
The man from the future ignored the hand. He blew his nose into his silk handerchief, rolled his watery eyes like a prize bull at a livestock show suffering with nostalgia. I threw in a load of good cheer.
“I’ll have you out right away, old man. I’ve got big plans for you—no, don’t thank me now. Wait till we’ve cleaned up—”
“I’m sick!” John Doe Destiny moaned. “I’ve been back in this bygone age only twenty-four hours and I’ve already contracted one of your deadly diseases.”
I gulped.
“What the hell?
“I’ve got a cold.”
“In twenty-four hours? Must have had it coming on when you left home.”
“We don’t have colds back home,” he blubbered. “I think I’ll go back.”
“Oh, no. You couldn’t. You just got here. I’ve got to make Atlantic—er—you’ve got a career to think of, my boy. Come, brace up!”
“I’ll probably die. I’ve no resistance.” He took time out for sniffles. He really had ’em.
“Take it easy. Anybody in the pink like you—” I paused and turned the subject. “What kind of athlete were you back home? How’d you come to be so strong?”
“I’m just average,” he said; but after I prodded him a little he opened up on his past, nine thousand years in the future. Everybody was in fine health there, he said. You had to be, or pay a fine for your negligence. He believed that scientific diet and exercise must have improved the race considerably, judging from what he had seen of us poor denizens of 1950.
While he talked I jotted a contract on an envelope. I’d get an exclusive on this mint.
“You haven’t told anyone about yourself but me, have you?” I asked.
“At first I tried to tell everyone,” he said, “but nobody understood. I never knew I was talking too fast till you told me.”[*]
“I’m your doctor, J. D. Put your trust in me. Your whirlwind talk and street-car lifting and ability to hear six conversations will make you a top-notch attraction. Six months of footlights, then klieg. Sign here, Desty, and we’ll transpose it onto sheepskin later.”
He reached through the bars but didn’t take the pen. He patted me on the shoulder.
“Brown, you’re a real atom-buster. Tonight when I flash back through time I’ll remember you as my best friend from these ancient days.”
I was touched. The fellow was both sick and homesick. The bitter truth was, he’d got his stomach full of twentieth century in twenty-four hours.
Besides his cold, he’d filled up on smoke and dust. He’d listened to more terrifying traffic noises, witnessed more near-accidents, seen mor
e people that looked like escapees from madhouses, heard more stupid slow-motion conversation, seen more evidence of outlandish superstitions, than he had ever supposed a civilization could be guilty of possessing.
Beyond that, he’d crashed into some silly laws and got himself jailed. The humiliation of it! Before he’d had time to get his bearings.
“All because you didn’t meet the right people,” I said. “I’ll make your troubles melt like snowflakes.”
“Snowflakes!” he groaned. “It’s all a blinding blizzard. If I survive this cold there are a thousand other diseases. The sanitation’s abominable!” He paced his cell, a shaken man. “Already I’ve been hounded by a mouse in this very room. And this morning in my hotel I was awakened to find a deadly little winged beast hovering over me, the kind I’ve read about in horror stories of the past—a housefly.”
He closed his eyes at the hideous thought. I tried to comfort him but he was off on another depressing rhapsody.
“How can I endure all this money madness? It’s money, money, every time I turn around.”
I tackled him on that point. How could he expect to come back and share this century’s blessings (he raised a dubious eyebrow at my term) unless he contributed something?
That nettled him. He had come with a purpose. He hinted at some far-flung research that I wouldn’t understand.
“Perfectly clear,” I said. “Sign here and I’ll see that you earn all you need. You can even start an anti-mouse campaign—”
A voice back of me broke in.
“Don’t sign anything, Buddy. I’ve got you all fixed up.”
I turned to glare into the massaged face of Beau Tassel. He strode up in a sprucy blue suit and blue hat with a yellow feather, and tapped a new white cane against the bars.
“I’ve phoned some pals to get a fight booked. I’ll have you out of that cold and in training togs before you know it, Buddy.”