Time Travelers Never Die

by Jack McDevitt

  Afterward, Shel shook his head: “I’ve never seen anyone so obviously brilliant who has everything so wrong.”

  “It’s a time without science,” Dave said. “Nobody knows anything. I felt sorry for him. Trying to make sense of orbital mechanics with no telescope. That was what, 330 B.C.?”

  “331.”

  “I think we should cut him a break.”

  “Yeah. I was dying to tell him the sun is a star. That he’s thinking small.”

  “That might be one more reason we shouldn’t be doing this. But you’re right. I was sitting there the whole time with one of the most famous guys in history. And I kept thinking, You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  WHERE else would they like to go? Some of the more interesting events, Custer’s last stand, Pearl Harbor, Actium, Hastings, Waterloo, the Teutoburg Forest, all involved a degree of personal risk that neither was anxious to assume. “In any case,” said Shel, “you can’t really show up and watch the battle. Even if you didn’t have to spend all your time hiding behind a tree, you’d still not be able to see anything except a small segment of what was going on.”

  Dave agreed. “How about the assassination of the archduke?”

  They looked at each other. Ferdinand’s death in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, was unquestionably one of the pivotal events in world history. “But,” said Shel, “I’m not excited about watching somebody get killed.”

  “Okay. Yeah, that’s a point. I’ll tell you what I’d like to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How about we go see Hamlet?”

  Shel laughed. “See it on—”

  “Opening day. Your father talked about seeing the first performance of Lear. We could go him one better.”

  “When was that?”

  They were at David’s place. He got up, walked over to the computer, and tapped the keys. “Somewhere around 1600 or 1601.”

  “That’s the best we can do?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. But here’s something interesting. Shakespeare never published his plays.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They were performed. Not published. The plays we have today were apparently more or less copied. I guess by people at the Globe.”

  “You know what?” said Shel. “We could go back and get the originals. Grab one of the scripts. It shouldn’t be that hard. He’s got to give them out to the actors.”

  “And then do what with them? Send them to a Shakespearean scholar and ruin her reputation? Let’s just go watch the show.”

  “Okay.”

  “If we can find out when it was performed.”

  THEY needed several trips to get the exact date, April 11, 1601.

  The Globe was an open-air amphitheater. Seats were arranged in sheltered compartments at three levels. They were expensive. Cheaper admission could be had into “the pit,” where the general audience had to stand, or sit, as conditions permitted.

  The stage was about five feet off the ground. It projected out over the pit. Its rear was protected by a roof, which was supported by columns. The back wall had several doors and curtains, allowing the cast members to move onstage and offstage. It was a cool afternoon, and a substantial portion of the audience, especially in the pit, had brought food and alcohol along. “I wonder,” said Dave, “when the candy counter was invented?”

  Several of the actors were handing out copies of the printed program. HAMLET, it said, by William Shakespeare. Dave looked at the cast. All were unfamiliar names, of course. Except one: The ghost was played by the author.

  He folded it carefully and slipped it into a pocket.

  Shel absentmindedly checked the time, and a young man sitting next to him gazed uncertainly at the watch. “What’s that?” he asked.

  No point lying. “It tells time.”

  “It’s a clock,” he said. “It’s really possible to make a clock you can strap to your wrist?”

  Shel showed it to him. “It’s something new. Picked it up yesterday.”

  “Where?” asked the young man. He looked to be in his midtwenties.

  “Marboro Street, I think.” Shel turned to David. “It was Marboro, wasn’t it, Dave?”

  Dave had no idea whether London even had a Marboro Street. “I think so,” he said.

  “Excellent,” said the young man. “I have to get myself one of those. May I inquire your name, sir?”

  “Adrian Shelborne.” He went on to introduce Dave.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” he said. “My name’s Ben Jonson.”

  Dave almost fell out of his chair. When he recovered, he extended his hand. “The author of Every Man in His Humour?”

  Jonson smiled. “The same.”

  “Excellent. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Your work is exquisite.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Dryden.”

  “My friends call me Dave.”

  Somewhere a horn sounded, followed by the mournful wail of a flute. Onstage, a military guard appeared and began walking his post. The flute died away. Something creaked.

  The guard turned in the direction of the sound. “Who’s there?”

  THE production ran more than four hours. Dave tried to imagine a twenty-first-century audience, many with no chairs, enduring a performance of that length.

  When he’d first looked at conditions in the theater, and saw the crowd bringing in beer and food, he’d expected a noisy, raucous evening. But once the show started, the audience became surprisingly attentive, and when necessary, they policed themselves.

  It was hard to get a good look at the playwright. The ghost wore a long dark robe, and his features were hidden within the folds of a black hood.

  There were no breaks between the acts. The show simply rolled on. But the audience was involved from the start. They watched breathlessly when the ghost appeared, and waited in expectant silence while Hamlet contemplated killing Claudius at the altar. They seemed relieved when he backed off. They roared with laughter at the idiotic Polonius, who gave everyone endless advice on how to behave. One of the loudest reactions of the night was provoked by his long-winded observation that brevity was the soul of wit.

  They cheered when Hamlet stabbed him through the curtains, and groaned when Ophelia turned up dead.

  They sat riveted during the mass bloodletting at the finale, and were silent during the closing moments as Horatio expressed his hope that they could learn from the debacle, and Fortinbras paid a final tribute to Hamlet. The bodies were carried off to a dirge. And somewhere a cannon fired.

  The actors took their bows to wild, and moderately inebriated, applause. Shakespeare, while onstage, remained hidden within the ghost’s raiment. And finally the crowd began filing out.

  STAFF people, or somebody, showed up with brew and food for the cast, and they celebrated backstage. Dave and Shel said good-bye to Ben Jonson and headed for the party. But there were stagehands posted at all approaches. “Nobody allowed back here except the cast,” one of them said. He wasn’t quite as big as Dave, but he looked considerably more willing to do what was necessary.

  “We’re friends of Mr. Shakespeare’s,” said Shel.

  “Are y’ now?” he said in a Scottish brogue. “And what’s your name?”

  “Ben Jonson,” said Shel.

  The stagehand laughed. “Yer no more Ben Jonson than I am. Go on, now; y’ must have better things to do than hang around here.”

  Shel and Dave backed off but stayed close enough to watch for actors leaving the theater. “I’m a little nervous about this one,” Dave said.

  There were several who resembled what Shakespeare was supposed to have looked like. They had two misfires before striking gold. “Yes,” he said. “I’m Will Shakespeare. Hope you enjoyed the show.”

  Then he was carried off by his friends. Shel called after him: “It was good, Will. Really good.”

  They watched him dis
appear.

  “Well,” said Dave, “that was certainly worth the wait.”

  Shel smiled. “At least we got to see him.”

  “You know,” Dave said, “I assume eventually we’ll get to see Einstein.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When we do, are we going to call him ‘Al’?”

  “Hey,” said Shel, “it was the way he introduced himself.”

  “I know.” Dave smiled. “We could tell him that relativity is good.”

  “Okay,” said Shel. “Let it go.”

  “Really good, Al.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Awake, my heart, and sing!

  —PAUL GERHARDT (HYMN)

  ASPASIA routinely turned her phone off during social events. She arrived home from a party, and had just gotten drinks for herself and her date, when she saw a missed call from Harvey Barnard. She and Harvey had gotten their doctorates together and had remained friends. He was currently on the faculty of the classics department at Wesleyan.

  It was after midnight, so she let it go until morning. By then she’d forgotten about it. He called again while she was walking out to get into the car.

  “I’ve a question for you, Aspasia. Yesterday Rob Cutler got in touch with me. I think you met him when you were here last year.”

  “I might have. Don’t recall, Harv.”

  “Okay. It doesn’t matter. He runs the Riverside Theater in Princeton. I’d shown him the plays you sent. He wants to know whether they can do the Achilles . I checked to see whether anybody holds a copyright. Just in case.”

  Aspasia had already looked into the possibility.

  “Anyhow, they want to put it on the fall schedule. I think it’s a great idea, but I thought I’d better run it by you.”

  “I do, too, Harv. But let me look into it, and I’ll try to get back to you in a couple of days. Okay?”

  SHE put the request on her Web site: AMATEUR THEATER GROUP WANTS TO PERFORM ACHILLES. DO YOU HAVE OBJECTION? PLEASE REPLY FROM LAST POST OFFICE.

  That had been the main post office in Philadelphia, and, since she didn’t know whom she was dealing with, it would serve as confirmation.

  The response came by overnight mail.

  Dear Dr. Kephalas:

  We see no problem. The plays can be considered in the public domain.

  The letter, like the earlier correspondence, had no return address. And, of course, with no signature, wasn’t worth much. “But I’d be willing to bet,” she told Harvey later that day, “that whoever’s doing this will show up at one of the performances.”

  “You have any way of recognizing him?” said Harv.

  “Zip. Maybe, though, he, or she, will do something that would give him away.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Okay. Anyhow, I’ll keep you apprised.”

  DAVE’S cabin in the Poconos had been in the family as long as he could remember. He loved the view, loved the mountains, loved the isolation.

  He would have given a lot to be independently wealthy, so he could live in a place like that without having to worry about finances. For him, the ideal outcome would be to live up there with Helen and simply while away his life watching TV, reading, hiking, and hanging out on the deck in the moonlight. But the money part of it was never going to happen. He’d tried investing shortly after he’d begun his teaching career, hoping to ride some small company into big money. But he knew now that, no matter how the market went, twenty shares in a small electronics company wasn’t going to take him to glory.

  He hadn’t entirely given up on Helen. There was a good chance that Shel would walk away from her, and if that happened, he might be able to turn the situation to his advantage. But his odds would be much better if he had something to offer.

  Helen had admitted she was tired of her career track. The world, she’d told him several times, was full of hypochondriacs, people who craved attention and could find no way to get it other than by either pretending to be sick, or convincing themselves that they were sick. She’d begun talking about going into teaching. Get herself a position at a medical school. The odd thing about such pronouncements was that she always made them when Shel was out of earshot.

  Dave had told her on occasion about his dream of moving into the cabin, and she’d encouraged him. Told him it sounded like a good way to live. That didn’t mean she’d necessarily find it appealing, but there was a chance.

  He never ceased regretting that he hadn’t challenged Shel for her from the beginning. He could have been more persistent with her. Moved on her like a Marine landing party, the way Katie had suggested. But he’d let it go, constantly put it off, hoping that, in some idiotic way, his chances would improve if he remained aloof.

  Aloof.

  He’d paid a price for that.

  Talking with Tom Paine, and Galileo, and Aristarchus, had shown him how shallow and dreary his own life was. Not the time-travel part, of course. But his real life. He and Shel had visited Rome in the glory days of the Republic, and he’d come home to bored students who had no appreciation for, nor interest in, the power of living languages. Or the instability of democratic forms of government.

  Maybe it was time to stop playing by Shel’s rules.

  ON the impulse, without waiting to think it out, knowing that if he did, he’d back away, he set the converter for the same location, his living room, at 10:00 A.M. five days later, and punched the button.

  The living room faded and came back. The only thing that had changed was that the books and a newspaper on the coffee table had moved around. It was Monday, April 28, and the future Dave Dryden was, of course, at school. He didn’t want to start appearing in the house when he was already there. That was too much of a mind bender.

  He listened to the faint whir of an air vent. Why did his own house feel so strange? “You’re not here anywhere, are you, Dave?”

  Nothing.

  Good. He sat down at the computer and checked out the weekend race results.

  CHAPTER 29

  Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK

  FOR Shel and Dave, life had become a lark. Though neither spoke the language, they navigated through a Russian week, visiting Moscow in 1913 to attend a concert performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s The Bells. The next evening, they traveled to St. Petersburg, December 23, 1888, to listen to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. They took two nights off so Dave could grade some papers, then returned to the Bolshoi, March 5, 1877, for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

  They sat down one evening at Lenny Pound’s and put together a to-do list: Dave thought they should find a way to spend an evening with Marcus Aurelius. Shel didn’t know who he was, but when Dave explained, he said okay.

  Shel wanted to meet Michelangelo. “Preferably, we should catch him early, before he becomes famous. Maybe get to him at about the time he arrives in Rome.”

  Check.

  What else?

  Dave inspected his beer. “I’d like to ride downriver on Mark Twain’s steamboat.”

  “Okay,” said Shel. He was making notes. “I’d like to see the comet of 1811.”

  “Big one, was it?”

  “Enormous. Double tail.”

  “Put it down.”

  “I’ll tell you what else I’d like to do.”

  “What’s that, Shel?”

  “Socrates. I’d like to be there for the last dialogue.”

  “You mean when he drank the hemlock?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought we wanted to avoid killings and stuff.”

  “This is different. He talked about life and death during those last hours. It would be painful, and my Greek is still not that good, but—”

  “Okay.”

  Shel made the entry and looked up. “What else?”

  Dave took a healthy swig of his beer. “Ride with Kit Carson.”

  “You?
I’ve seen you on a horse.”

  “I’ll learn.”

  “Okay.” He wrote it down.

  Shel thought he’d enjoy spending an evening with Charles Darwin.

  Dave wanted to meet Lord Byron.

  “Speaking of meeting people,” said Shel, “I’ll tell you the guy I’d particularly like to meet.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Leonidas. I’d like to run into him on the way to Thermopylae.”

  And so it went. They recorded ideas and wrote down names, and eventually they got to Ben Franklin.

  Dave pushed his empty glass aside. “Yes,” he said. “I’d enjoy that. But how do we get in to see him?”

  “Shouldn’t be hard. How’d we get to see Tom Paine? Make something up.”

  THE first step was to travel to London in October 1726 to pick up a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, then just published. They stopped at Carleton’s Book Store, off Regent’s Park. The salesclerk, who was also apparently the owner, told them they’d been lucky, that he couldn’t keep the book in stock. “Only got one left,” he said. “I’ll confess, I don’t understand the thing myself. But it’s getting a lot of attention.” He was about sixty, congenial, with enormous eyebrows.

  Except it wasn’t there, on the center shelf of the fiction section, where he’d expected. He had to change glasses to go looking for it. Shel helped out, and they hunted through the romance shelves. “I was sure,” the clerk said, “I put it here.”

  It was prominently displayed, in two volumes, in the front of the store. He changed glasses, took them down from the shelf, and handed them to Shel.