“Yeah,” I said. “Well…”
Giles the driver opened the door with a whoosh of air.
“Thanks,” I said. I nodded to the old couple. “Thanks for sharing your seat,” and stepped down off the bus.
“Why don’t you come with us tomorrow?” she said. “We’re going to go see Number 5516.”
Number 5516 sounded like a county highway and probably was, the road Jack Williamson walked to school along or something, complete with peanuts and dirt, at which the group would gaze reverently and not take pictures. “I’ve got an appointment tomorrow,” I said, and realized I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. “Next time. When’s your next tour?”
“I thought you were just passing through.”
“Like you said, a lot of nice people live around here. Do you bring a lot of tours through here?”
“Now and then,” she said, her cheeks bright red.
I watched the bus pull out of the parking lot and down the street. I looked at my watch. 4:45. At least an hour till I could justify dinner. At least five hours till I could justify bed. I went in the Inn and then changed my mind and went back out to the car and drove out to see where Cross’s office was so I wouldn’t have trouble in the morning, in case it was hard to find.
It wasn’t. It was on the south edge of town on Highway 70, a little past the Motel Super 8. The tour bus wasn’t in the parking lot of the Super 8, or at the Hillcrest, or the Sands Motel. They must have gone to Roswell or Tucumcari for the night. I looked at my watch again. It was 5:05.
I drove back through town, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King. There’s nothing wrong with fast food, except that it’s fast. I needed a place where it took half an hour to get a menu and another twenty minutes before they took your order.
I ended up eating at Pizza Hut (personal pan pizza in under five minutes or your money back.) “Do you get a lot of tour bus business?” I asked the waitress.
“In Portales? You have to be kidding,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, Portales is right on the road to nowhere. Do you want a box for the rest of that pizza?”
The box was a good idea. It took her ten minutes to bring it, which meant it was nearly six by the time I left. Only four hours left to kill. I filled up the car at Allsup’s and bought a sixpack of Coke. Next to the magazines was a rack of paperbacks.
“Any Jack Williamson books?” I asked the kid at the counter.
“Who?” he said.
I spun the rack around slowly. John Grisham. Danielle Steel. Stephen King’s latest thousand page effort. No Jack Williamson. “Is there a bookstore in town?” I asked the kid.
“Huh?”
He’d never heard of that either. “A place where I can buy a book?”
“Alco has books, I think,” he said. “But they closed at five.”
“How about a drugstore?” I said, thinking of that copy of Amazing Stories.
Still blank. I gave up, paid him for the gas and the sixpack, and started out to the car.
“You mean a drugstore like aspirin and stuff?” the kid said. “There’s Van Winkle’s.”
“When do they close?” I asked, and got directions.
Van Winkle’s was a grocery store. It had two aisles of “aspirin and stuff” and half an aisle of paperbacks. More Grisham. Jurassic Park. Tom Clancy. And The Legion of Timeby Jack Williamson. It looked like it had been there awhile. It had a faded fifties-style cover and dog-eared edges.
I took it up to the check-out. “What’s it like having a famous writer living here?” I asked the middle-aged clerk.
She picked up the book. “The guy who wrote this lives in Portales?” she said. “Really?”
Which brought us up to 6:22. But at least now I had something to read. I went back to the Portales Inn and up to my room, opened a can of Coke and all the windows, and sat down to read The Legion of Time, which was about a girl who’d travelled back in time to tell the hero about the future.
“The future has been held to be as real as the past,” the book said, and the girl in the book was able to travel between one and the other as easily as the tour had travelled down New Mexico Highway l8.
I closed the book and thought about the tour. They didn’t have a single camera, and they weren’t afraid of rattlesnakes. And they’d looked out at the Llano Flatto like they’d never seen a field or a cow before. And they all knew who Jack Williamson was, unlike the kid at Allsup’s or the clerk at Van Winkle’s. They were all willing to spend two days looking at abandoned shacks and dirt roads—no, wait, three days. Tonia’d said they’d gone to the drugstore yesterday.
I had an idea. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, looking for a phone book. There wasn’t one. I went downstairs to the lobby and asked for one. The blue-haired lady at the desk handed me one about the size of The Legion of Time, and I flipped to the Yellow Pages.
There was a Thrifty Drug, which was a chain, and a couple that sounded locally owned but weren’t downtown. “Where’s B. and J. Drug?” I asked. “Is it close to downtown?”
“A couple of blocks,” the old lady said.
“How long has it been in business?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “It was there when Nora was little because I remember buying medicine that time she had the croup. She would have been six, or was that when she had the measles? No, the measles were the summer she…”
I’d have to ask B. and J. “I’ve got another question,” I said, and hoped I wouldn’t get an answer like the last one. “What time does the university library open tomorrow?”
She gave me a brochure. The library opened at eight and the Williamson Collection at 9:30. I went back up to the room and tried B. and J. Drugs. They weren’t open.
It was getting dark. I closed the curtains over the open windows and opened the book again. “The world is a long corridor, and time is a lantern carried steadily along the hall,” it said, and, a few pages later, “If time were simply an extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday? If one could leap forward—”
Or back, I thought. “Jack Williamson lived in this house from 1947 to—” Tonia’d said and paused and then said, “the present,” and I’d thought the sideways glance was to see my reaction to his name, but what if she’d intended to say, “from 1947 to 1998″? Or “2015″?
What if that was why she kept pausing when she talked, because she had to remember to say “Jack Williamson is” instead of “Jack Williamson was“, “does most of his writing” instead of “did most of his writing,” had to remember what year it was and what hadn’t happened yet?
“‘If the field were strong enough,’” I remembered Tonia saying out at the ranch, “‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’” And the tour group had all smiled.
What if they were the physical objects? What if the tour had travelled through time instead of space? But that didn’t make any sense. If they could travel through time they could have come on a weekend Jack Williamson was home, or during the week of the Williamson Lectureship.
I read on, looking for explanations. The book talked about quantum mechanics and probability, about how changing one thing in the past could affect the whole future. Maybe that was why they had to come when Jack Williamson was out of town, to avoid doing something to him that might change the future.
Or maybe Nonstop Tours was just incompetent and they’d come on the wrong weekend. And the reason they didn’t have cameras was because they all forgot them. And they were all really tourists, and The Legion of Time was just a science fiction book and I was making up crackpot theories to avoid thinking about Cross and the job.
But if they were ordinary tourists, what were they doing spending a day staring at a tumbledown shack in the middle of nowhere? Even if they were tourists from the future, there was no reason to travel back in time to see a science fiction writer when they could see presidents or rock stars.
Unless they lived in a future where
all the things he’d predicted in his stories had come true. What if they had genetic engineering and androids and spaceships? What if in their world they’d terraformed planets and gone to Mars and explored the galaxy? That would make Jack Williamson their forefather, their founder. And they’d want to come back and see where it all started.
The next morning, I left my stuff at the Portales Inn and went over to the library. Checkout wasn’t till noon, and I wanted to wait till I’d found out a few things before I made up my mind whether to take the job or not. On the way there I drove past B. and J. Drugs and then College Drug. Neither of them were open, and I couldn’t tell from their outsides how old they were.
The library opened at eight and the room with the Williamson collection in it at nine-thirty, which was cutting it close. I was there at 9:15, looking in through the glass at the books. There was a bronze plaque on the wall and a big mobile of the planets.
Tonia had said the collection “isn’t very big at this point,” but from what I could see, it looked pretty big to me. Rows and rows of books, filing cabinets, boxes, photographs.
A young guy in chinos and wire-rimmed glasses unlocked the door to let me in. “Wow! Lined up and waiting to get in! This is a first,” he said, which answered my first question.
I asked it anyway. “Do you get many visitors?”
“A few,” he said. “Not as many as I think there should be for a man who practically invented the future. Androids, terraforming, antimatter, he imagined them all. We’ll have more visitors in two weeks. That’s when the Williamson Lectureship week is. We get quite a few visitors then. The writers who are speaking usually drop in.”
He switched on the lights. “Let me show you around,” he said. “We’re adding to the collection all the time.” He took down a long flat box. “This is the comic strip Jack did,Beyond Mars. And here is where we keep his original manuscripts.” He opened one of the filing cabinets and pulled out a sheaf of typed yellow sheets. “Have you ever met Jack?”
“No,” I said, looking at an oil painting of a white-haired man with a long, pleasant-looking face. “What’s he like?”
“Oh, the nicest man you’ve ever met. It’s hard to believe he’s one of the founders of science fiction. He’s in here all the time. Wonderful guy. He’w working on a new book,The Black Sun. He’s out of town this weekend, or I’d take you over and introduce you. He’s always delighted to meet his fans. Is there anything specific you wanted to know about him?”
“Yes,” I said. “Somebody told me about him seeing the magazine with his first story in it in a drugstore. Which drugstore was that?”
“It was one in Canyon, Texas. He and his sister were going to school down there.”
“Do you know the name of the drugstore?” I said. “I’d like to go see it.”
“Oh, it went out of business years ago,” he said. “I think it was torn down.”
“We went there yesterday,” Tonia had said, and what day exactly was that? The day Jack saw it and bought all three copies and forgot his groceries? And what were they wearing that day? Print dresses and double-breasted suits and hats?
“I’ve got the issue here,” he said, taking a crumbling magazine out of a plastic slipcover. It had a garish picture of a man being pulled up out of a crater by a brilliant crystal. “December, 1928. Too bad the drugstore’s not there anymore. You can see the cabin where he wrote his first stories, though. It’s still out on the ranch his brother owns. You go out west of town and turn south on State Highway 18. Just ask Betty to show you around.”
“Have you ever had a tour group in here?” I interrupted.
“A tour group?” he said, and then must have decided I was kidding. “He’s not quite that famous.”
Yet, I thought, and wondered when Nonstop Tours visited the library. Ten years from now? A hundred? And what were they wearing that day?
I looked at my watch. It was 9:45. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.” I started out and then turned back. “This person who told me about the drugstore, they mentioned something about Number 5516. Is that one of his books?”
“5516? No, that’s the asteroid they’re naming after him. How’d you know about that? It’s supposed to be a surprise. They’re giving him the plaque Lectureship week.”
“An asteroid,” I said. I started out again.
“Thanks for coming in,” the librarian said. “Are you just visiting or do you live here?”
“I live here,” I said.
“Well, then, come again.”
I went down the stairs and out to the car. It was 9:50. Just enough time to get to Cross’s and tell him I’d take the job.
I went out to the parking lot. There weren’t any tour buses driving through it, which must mean Jack Williamson was back from his convention. After my meeting with Cross I was going to go over to his house and introduce myself. “I know how you felt when you saw that Amazing Stories in the drugstore,” I’d tell him. “I’m interested in the future, too. I liked what you said about it, about science fiction lighting the way and science making the future real.”
I got in the car and drove through town to Highway 70. An asteroid. I should have gone with them. “It’ll be fun,” Tonia said. It certainly would be.
Next time, I thought. Only I want to see some of this terraforming. I want to go to Mars.
I turned south on Highway 70 towards Cross’s office. “Roswell 92 miles,” the sign said.
“Come again,” I said, leaning out the window and looking up. “Come again!”
© 1996 by Connie Willis.
Originally published in The Williamson Effect, edited by Roger Zelazny.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
HOWARD WALDROP
Howard Waldrop (born September 15, 1946, in Houston, Mississippi) is a science fiction author who works primarily in short fiction.
Waldrop's stories combine elements such as alternate history, American popular culture, the American South, old movies (and character actors), classical mythology, and rock 'n' roll music. His style is sometimes obscure or elliptical: Night of the Cooters is a pastiche of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds told from the perspective of a small town Texas sheriff (a homage to Slim Pickens) who finds an off-course Martian cylinder crashing down near his town; "Heirs of the Perisphere" involves robotic Disney characters waking up in the far future; "Fin de Cyclé" describes the Dreyfus affair from the perspective of bicycle enthusiasts.
The Ugly Chickens, by Howard Waldrop
My car was broken, and I had a class to teach at eleven. So I took the city bus, something I rarely do.
I spent last summer crawling through The Big Thicket with cameras and tape recorder, photographing and taping two of the last ivory-billed woodpeckers on the earth. You can see the films at your local Audubon Society showroom.
This year I wanted something just as flashy but a little less taxing. Perhaps a population study on the Bermuda cahow, or the New Zealand takahe. A month or so in the warm (not hot) sun would do me a world of good. To say nothing of the advance of science.
I was idly leafing through Greenway’s Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. The city bus was winding its way through the ritzy neighborhoods of Austin, stopping to let off the chicanas, black women, and Vietnamese who tended the kitchens and gardens of the rich.
“I haven’t seen any of those ugly chickens in a long time,” said a voice close by.
A grey-haired lady was leaning across the aisle toward me. I looked at her, then around. Maybe she was a shopping-bag lady. Maybe she was just talking. I looked straight at her. No doubt about it, she was talking to me. She was waiting for an answer.
“I used to live near some folks who raised them when I was a girl,” she said. She pointed.
I looked down at the page my book was open to.
What I should have said was: “That is quite impossible, madam. This is a drawing of an extinct bird of the island of Mauritius. It is perhaps the
most famous dead bird in the world. Maybe you are mistaking this drawing for that of some rare Asiatic turkey, peafowl, or pheasant. I am sorry, but you are mistaken.”
I should have said all that.
What she said was, “Oops, this is my stop,” and got up to go.
———
My name is Paul Linberl. I am twenty-six years old, a graduate student in ornithology at the University of Texas, a teaching assistant. My name is not unknown in the field. I have several vices and follies, but I don’t think foolishness is one of them.
The stupid thing for me to do would have been to follow her.
She stepped off the bus.
I followed her.
———
I came into the departmental office, trailing scattered papers in the whirlwind behind me. “Martha! Martha!” I yelled.
She was doing something in the supply cabinet.
“Jesus, Paul! What do you want?”
“Where’s Courtney?”
“At the conference in Houston. You know that. You missed your class. What’s the matter?”
“Petty cash. Let me at it!”
“Payday was only a week ago. If you can’t .”
“It’s business! It’s fame and adventure and the chance of a lifetime! It’s a long sea voyage that leaves . a plane ticket. To either Jackson, Mississippi or Memphis. Make it Jackson, it’s closer. I’ll get receipts! I’ll be famous. Courtney will be famous. You’ll even be famous! This university will make even more money! I’ll pay you back. Give me some paper. I gotta write Courtney a note. When’s the next plane out? Could you get Marie and Chuck to take over my classes Tuesday and Wednesday? I’ll try to be back Thursday unless something happens. Courtney’ll be back tomorrow, right? I’ll call him from, well, wherever. Do you have some coffee?.”
And so on and so forth. Martha looked at me like I was crazy. But she filled out the requisition anyway.
“What do I tell Kemejian when I ask him to sign these?”
“Martha, babe, sweetheart. Tell him I’ll get his picture in Scientific American.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 83
