Then he shrugged apologetically. “But, can you dig this, the n-dimensional timefield effect has short-circuited the electrical system. We’re going to have to call it off. Y’all’re gonna have to go home. Sorry about your weekend, people. Good luck getting outta here….”
It was dark, but Ralph could sense, somehow, that four hundred thousand people had all turned their heads toward him. He panicked, and stabbed randomly at his mental toolbar.
Wessex, 1441.
Damn! He’d hit the Wessex button again. He was back at the market, a year later.
Ralph was an engineer: he was, he thought, the kind of man who thinks things through, so he had programmed his mental toolbox not to send him back to the same timespace twice, for fear he’d meet himself, so he knew he was exactly a year—to the second—from his previous appearance. As we know now, of course, that worry was irrelevant, but it adds a certain predictability to his visits to Wessex.
This time, Ralph thought, he would be more circumspect, and wouldn’t offer anyone money. It might be that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or maybe Julius Caesar) was not welcome on coins in this place. Or maybe the sight of a silver coin itself was terrifying. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Maybe he could beg for some small local coins.
Or—that’s it!—he could sell his peace symbol. As long as he didn’t have to talk to anybody, and could get by on grunts and nods and smiles, he was sure he’d be okay. Thank God he’d put his clothes back on.
Ralph staked himself out a small space and sat down on the ground. He smoothed the dirt in front of him and put the ceramic medallion down in the center of the smooth space.
People walked by him, and he tried to attract their attention. He coughed, he waved, he gestured at the peace medallion. People ignored him. He would have to work harder, he thought, since he wasn’t willing to say anything. But he was an engineer: sales had never been his strong point.
So Ralph stood up. He held the medallion out to passersby. They turned their heads away.
Ralph was getting hungry. He thought about the salespeople he knew. They didn’t give up: rather, they ingratiated themselves with their potential customers. He looked around nervously.
He noticed a buxom young woman in the crowd, staring at him intently. She was quite a bit older than the girl who had watched him so carefully last time he was here. She was very pretty—maybe he could include her in his sales pitch, and then, after he sold the medallion, he could buy her something safe to eat.
Ralph smiled at her with what he hoped was his most engaging smile and dangled the medallion, swinging it in her direction and then holding it up as though she might like to try it on.
Almost instantly, a crowd formed. Aha! he thought with a grin: the language of commerce is universal. But then he noticed that they were muttering in a very unpleasant tone, picking up stones and glancing in his direction. Whatever they were saying, it sounded like he was in a mess of trouble.
Ralph was getting a little queasy from this rapid temporal disassociation. He didn’t know what is now common knowledge: that the reverse-Schrödinger effect, which creates the dual timeshadow, causes info-seepage from the newly generated parallel self, adding data at a subconscious level.
Superimposition of the time-traveling Ralph over the newly generated stationary Ralph, fixed in the timestream both forward and back, generated a disorienting interference pattern. The traveling Ralph (TR) influenced the stationary Ralph (SR), and vice-versa, though neither was quite aware of the other. Each of them thought he was acting of his own free will—and indeed each one was, for certain values of free.
At any rate, the crowd was ugly, and Ralph didn’t feel so good. So, of his own free will, Ralph bailed, whacking the toolbar without saying goodbye to the young woman or, really, paying much mind to where he was headed.
Washington, DC, 1865.
Ralph looked around groggily. He was in a theater filled with well-dressed, jolly-looking people, sitting in an uncomfortable seat that was covered in a scratchy red wool. It was anything but soft: horsehair stuffing, probably. The stage in front of him was set as a drawing room. It was lit by lights in the floor that illuminated the actor and actresses rather starkly: a funny-looking, coarsely dressed man and two women in elaborate crinoline dresses.
“Augusta, dear, to your room!” commanded the older of the two actresses, pointing imperiously into the wings, stage right.
“Yes, ma,” the young woman said, giving the man a withering glance. “Nasty beast!” she said to him, and flounced off the stage.
The dialog sounded a bit stilted to Ralph’s ears, but the audience was genially awaiting the older woman’s comeuppance. Our American Cousin, he thought abruptly, that’s the play—it’s been a hit throughout the war.
He glanced up at what was obviously the presidential box: it was twice the size of the other boxes, and the velvet-covered balustrade at its front, overhanging the stage, had been decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting. Just then, President Lincoln leaned forward through the drapery at the front of the box and rested his elbow on the balustrade, to catch the next bit of dialog.
Ralph was dumb-struck, and who would not have been? Medieval England, Woodstock, these had been interesting enough places to visit—but seeing Abraham Lincoln—an iconic figure in American history, an instantly recognizable profile, in the flesh, alive, moving, a real human being, on the very day that the long war had come to a close, with a startlingly cheerful smile on his face as he anticipated a famously comic rejoinder—was to Ralph an intensely moving experience.
He held his breath, frozen, as, at the back of the box, unknown to its occupants, he saw a stunningly handsome man—John Wilkes Booth, he was sure—move in against the wall. Booth pulled out a handgun and drew a bead on the president’s head. Without thinking, Ralph leaped to his feet. “Mr. President! Duck!” he shouted.
The gun went off. There were screams and shrieks from the box. A large young man in the presidential party wrestled with Booth, as Lincoln pulled his wife to one side, shielding her. A woman’s voice rang out, “They have shot the president! They have shot the president!” Lincoln clutched his shoulder, puzzled but not seriously hurt. Booth leaped for the stage, but strong men grabbed him as he landed, and brought him down.
Oh, cripes, Ralph thought. I’ve really done it now. This would change the future irrevocably! He would never find his way back to his own time, or anything resembling it. And, panicking, he hit the mental button a third time.
Wessex, 1442.
Ralph looked around at the damned medieval street market. This time, before he could say anything, an attractive, dark-haired woman grabbed his upper arm firmly, pulled him close to her, and spoke into his ear. “Keep your mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you,” she whispered urgently. She looked remarkably like the young woman he had seen before, but a bit older and a lot more intense.
She took him by the arm, and led him through the fair. Toothless old women in their forties offered her root vegetables, but she shook her head. Children tried to sell her sweetmeats, but the young woman pushed on. Without seeming to hurry, without drawing attention to herself or him, she quickly led Ralph to the edge of the fair. People who noticed them smiled knowingly, and some of the men gave him a wink. The woman led him behind a hayrick, a seductive look on her face.
Behind the huge mound of hay, the noise of the fair was diminished, and, for the moment at least, they were visible to no one. The woman’s flirtatious manner had vanished. She pushed Ralph away from her and glared at him. Ralph was a little afraid: didn’t people in medieval times hit one another a lot? This woman was mad.
“Ralph, you idiot!” she said in a low but exasperated voice. She’s not speaking Middle English, Ralph thought. Momentarily he wondered: was she a medieval scholar of modern English? Uh….
She looked at him sternly. “People here are smarter than you think! You have to take some precautions! You can’t just show up and expect everyone to ignore y
ou.”
“What?” said Ralph, brilliantly.
“You dunderhead,” she said. “You’re lucky you weren’t burned at the stake. They were waiting for you, or someone like you. Any old time traveler would do.”
“What’s your name?” Ralph asked.
“I’m Sylvie, but that’s not important.”
“It’s important to me,” said Ralph.
She shook off his attention. “Come with me. Don’t say a word, don’t even open your mouth.”
“But how did you know?” said Ralph. “How do you know I’m a time traveler? Why do you speak a language I can understand?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Sylvie. “You were the first, but you’re not the only. Historians of time travel come here all the time, to see where you landed on that very first trip. The locals are getting restless. They flayed those travelers they identified, or they burned them, or they pressed them to death with stones. We couldn’t let that happen to you, especially before you told us how it worked.”
“How on Earth would these yokels have ever noticed me?” he asked.
“Your damn teeth,” she said. “Your flawless, glow-in-the-dark, impossibly white teeth.” She handed him a rather ugly set of yellowish fake teeth. “Put these on now.” Ralph did.
Sylvie then gestured toward a nearby hovel. “Over there,” she said. “Inside. It’s time for you to explain to me how time travel works.” He went where she told him to, and did what she said. How could he not? He was smitten. Fortunately for Ralph, Sylvie was likewise smitten. Many a woman would be, as he was a handsome man with good teeth, and he gave up his secrets readily.
Sylvie then traveled forward, to a time before she was born, and told her parents the secret of time travel. Her parents, who became the most famous temporal anthropologists in history, educated a few others and, when baby Sylvie came along, brought her up to leap gracefully from one century to the next. More gracefully, in fact, than her parents themselves, who vanished in medieval England when Sylvie was twelve. She was, in fact, looking for them when she came upon Ralph that very first time.
Ralph and Sylvie were married in Wessex in 1442, Ralph’s dental glory concealed by his fake teeth. Sylvie, inveterate time-traveler that she was, convinced him they should live in the timestream, giving them a sort of temporal immortality. And this is where Ralph, who was, after all, an engineer, not a physicist, failed to anticipate the effect of his actions.
Time does not fly like an arrow, it turns out. It just lies there, waiting for something new to happen. So when Ralph Drumm showed up—completely inappropriately—in the past, that past changed—the past healed itself—so that he had always been there. He acquired ancestors, was born, grew to adulthood—to Ralph’s exact age in fact—and his body just happened to be in the exact place where Ralph’s time-shadow showed up.
Time travel changes the past as well as the future: time is, in fact, an eternal present when viewed from outside the timestream.
So, as Ralph and Sylvie moved from time to time, they created more and more shadows of themselves in the timestream. As they had children—one, two, three, many—and took them about, the timeshadows of the Drumm children were generated and multiplied. Each shadow was as real as the original. Each shadow lived and breathed… and bred.
Although they were innocent of any ill intent, Ralph and Sylvie Drumm changed the flow of the stream of time in a way more profound than could be accomplished by any single action, no matter how momentous its apparent effect. Their genetic material came to dominate all of human history, an endless army of dark-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians with perfect teeth. They looked the same. They thought the same. They stuck together.
And this is why we, the last remnants of a differentiated humanity, are waiting here today in Wessex, in 1440—to defend our future from the great surge of the Drummstream. This time, they will not escape us.
THE DOUBLE OF MY DOUBLE IS NOT MY DOUBLE
JEFFREY FORD
I saw my double at the mall a couple of weeks ago. I was sitting on a bench outside a clothing store. Lynn was inside, checking out the sales. My mind was pretty empty as I watched the intermittent trickle of shoppers on their way to something else. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a person sit down next to me. I turned and saw who it was and laughed. “Hey,” I said. “How’s business?”
He was dressed in a rumpled suit and tie and he looked tired. Sighing to catch his breath, he sat back. There was a weak smile on his face. “Double drill,” he said.
“Knowing me, I wouldn’t think there’d be that much to it.”
His eyes half closed and he shook his head. “The fucking paperwork alone…” he said.
“Paperwork?”
“Every time you fart, I have to fill out a 1025.”
“You must be at it all day.”
“And into the night,” he said. “On top of all of it, I’ve had to get a part-time job.”
“You’re moonlighting as my double?”
“I’m dipping things in chocolate at that old-fashioned candy store on Stokes Road. Four hours a day for folding cash. Remember a couple of meetings back after we started talking, I told you I was living in that giant house out by the wild animal rescue, the last cul-de-sac before the road turns to dirt? The mortgage on that place is crushing.”
“I thought you were living with like four or five other doubles, splitting the cost,” I said.
“Yeah, but my double salary isn’t cutting it. Dipping things in chocolate, though, pays extraordinarily well. I make a hundred dollars every four-hour session."
“That’s pretty good. What do you dip?”
He leaned forward and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one but I’d quit, and he looked slightly wounded by my refusal. When he sparked his big chrome lighter, I noticed the pale hue of his complexion, the beads of sweat, the slight shaking of his hands. There was a pervasive aroma of alcohol.
He took a drag and, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, said, “You name it, I’ll dip it. It started with fruit and by the time they brought in the first steak, I knew it was gonna get out of hand. Finally, the old Swedish guy who runs the place took off his shoe and handed it to me. A chocolate loafer. After I fished it out and it dried, he and his wife laughed their asses off.”
“You don’t look well,” I told him. “You’ve put on weight and you’re pale. You look like the Pillsbury Doughboy on a bender.” The right arm of his glasses was repaired with Scotch Tape.
“Well,” he said. “This is what I’ve come to talk to you about.”
He was a wreck. I looked away. Nobody wants to see themselves tear up, watch their own bottom lip quiver.
“It seems I have a double,” he said, his voice cracking slightly.
A moment passed before I could process the news. “You’re a double and yet you have a double? How’s that work?”
“It’s rare,” he said, “but it happens. You know, as your double, I don’t bother you that often. I’ve not brought you any ill luck like in the legends. I’m just around and you see me maybe once or twice a year, we have a friendly chat, and I go on my way. The kind of double I have, though, is not benign as I am to you, it’s an evil emanation.”
“Is your double also my double?” I asked.
“Not precisely. He’s not got our good looks. For the most part he exists as a cloud, a drifting smog. But he can take physical form for short periods of a few hours. A shape-shifter. Insidious. He’s always hovering, repeating what I say in a high-pitched voice, appearing to my friends and fucking them over, making them think it’s me. When I complain to him, he laughs and pinches my chin. All night, he whispers paradoxical dreams into my ear, their riddles frustrations dipped in chocolate. He’s my double, but your psyche used me to birth him.”
“You’re losing me,” I said. “Are you saying I’m responsible?”
“Well, it’s your orbit that I’m trapped in. Everything issues from you. He’s been haunting me for th
e past six months. Can you think of some bleak or grim thought you might have had half a year back
that could have sewn the seed?”
“Grim thoughts?” I said. “I have a couple dozen a day.”
“He’s trying to supplant me as your double. If he takes my position, your ass’ll be in a sling. He’ll grind you down to powder.”
“What are we gonna do?” I asked.
“He goes by the name Fantasma-gris.”
“Spanish?”
“Yeah, it means Grey Ghost.”
“I don’t even know Spanish,” I said. “I did a couple years of it in high school. I can say meatball, count to ten, that’s it.”
“Somehow something about Fantasma-gris dribbled out of your mind. Just sit tight till I figure out a plan,” he said, resting his hand lightly on my forearm. He stood quickly. “Then I’ll be back in touch.”
“A plan for what?”
“To kill him,” He spun away then and lumbered off down the center of the mall. I watched him go and realized he was limping. I was wondering what was with his suit and tie. I hadn’t worn one in three years.
“Are you ready?” asked Lynn. She was standing before me, holding a big bag from the store she’d been in. I got up and put my arm around her shoulders as we headed off.
She said, “Let’s go get dinner somewhere.”
I agreed. We left the mall and went out into the parking lot. As we drove to the restaurant Lynn had decided on, I was preoccupied, thinking about Fantasma-gris. I wanted to tell her about it, but she’d made it clear years earlier that she didn’t want to hear any double talk. When I finally cornered my double downtown one day and spoke to him for the first time, I’d told Lynn about it.
“What do you mean ‘a double,’ she’d said.
“A doppelganger. My twin. It’s metaphysical, you know, like a spirit. I’ve been seeing him around for about a year now, and today, I went up to him and told him I knew what he was.”
She smiled and shook her head as I spoke, but at one point she stopped and squinted and said, “Are you serious?”
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