by Mike Ashley
The cop paused to wipe sweat off his brow, but he kept his eyes on Porfirio.
“What’s the catch, Bobby?”
“Do you know what happens when you send something back to the same year often enough?” Robert sounded amused. “Like, about a hundred million times?”
“No, Bobby, I don’t know.”
“I know. I experimented. I tried it the first time with a wheel off a toy car. I sent it to 1912, over and over, until . . . do you know where Tunguska is?”
“What are you trying to tell me, Bobby?” The psychologist was losing his professional voice.
“Then,” said Robert, “I increased the mass of the object. I sent a baseball back. Way back. Do you know what really killed off the dinosaurs?”
“Hey there, zoot suit,” said the cop, when he was close enough. “You wouldn’t be loitering, would you?”
“. . . You can wear a hole in the fabric of space and time,” Robert was saying. “And it just might destroy everything in the whole world. You included. And if you were pretty sick of being alive, but you couldn’t die, that might seem like a great idea. Don’t you think?”
There was the sound of a chair being pushed back.
Porfirio grimaced and reached into his jacket for his badge, but the cop pinned Porfirio’s hand to his chest with the tip of his nightstick.
“Bobby, we can help you!” cried the psychologist.
“I’m not little Bobby anymore, you asshole,” said the child’s voice, rising. “I’m a million, million years old.”
Porfirio looked the cop in the eye.
“Vice squad,” he said. The cop sagged. Porfirio produced his badge.
“But I got a tip from one of the residents here—” said the cop.
“Woooowwwww,” said the weird little singsong voice, and there was a brief scream.
“What happened?” demands Clete. He has gone very pale.
“We never found out,” says Porfirio. “By the time I got the patrolman to leave and ran around to the front of the building, the other techs had already gone in and secured the room. The only problem was, there was nothing to secure. The room was empty. No sign of Ross, or the mortal either. No furniture, even, except a couple of wooden chairs. He hadn’t been living there. He’d just used the place to lure us in.”
“Did anybody ever find the mortal?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Porfirio replies. “Fifty years later. In London.”
“He’d gone forward in time?” Clete exclaims. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. Isn’t it?”
Porfirio sighs.
“So they say, kid. Anyway, he hadn’t gone forward in time. Remember, about ten years ago, when archaeologists were excavating that medieval hospital over there? They found hundreds of skeletons in its cemetery. Layers and layers of the dead. And – though this didn’t make it into the news, not even into the Fortean Times – one of the skeletons was wearing a Timex.”
Clete giggles shrilly.
“Was it still ticking?” he asks. “What the hell are you telling me? There’s this crazy immortal guy on the loose, and he’s able to time-travel just using his brain, and he wants to destroy the whole world and he’s figured out how, and we’re just sitting here?”
“You have a better idea?” says Porfirio. “Please tell me if you do, okay?”
Clete controls himself with effort.
“All right, what did the Company do?” he asks. “There’s a plan, isn’t there, for taking him out? There must be, or we wouldn’t be here now.”
Porfirio nods.
“But what are we doing here now?” says Clete. “Shouldn’t we be in 1951, where he’s hiding? Wait, no, we probably shouldn’t, because that’d place even more strain on the fabric of time and space. Or whatever.”
“It would,” Porfirio agrees.
“So . . . here we are at the place where Bobby Ross was recruited. The Company must expect he’s going to come back here. Because this is where he caused the accident. Because the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, right?” Clete babbles.
“Maybe,” says Porfirio. “The Company already knows he leaves 1951 sometimes, for medical treatment.”
“And sooner or later he’ll be driven to come here,” says Clete, and now he too is staring fixedly at the barn. “And – and today is June 30, 2008. The car crash happened fifty years ago today. That’s why we’re here.”
“He might come,” says Porfirio. “So we just wait—” He stiffens, stares hard, and Clete stares hard too and sees the little limping figure walking up the old road, just visible through the high weeds.
“Goddamn,” says Clete, and is out of the car in a blur, ejecting candy bar wrappers and potato chip cans as he goes, and Porfirio curses and tells him to wait, but it’s too late; Clete has crossed the highway in a bound and is running across the valley, as fast as only an immortal can go. Porfirio races after him, up that bare yellow hill with its red rocks that still bear faint carbon traces of horror, and he clears the edge of the road in time to hear Clete bellow:
“Security! Freeze!”
“Don’t—” says Porfirio, just as Clete launches himself forward to tackle Robert Ross.
Robert is smiling, lifting his arms as though in a gesture of surrender. Despite the heat, he is wearing a long overcoat. Its lining is torn, just under his arm, and where the sweat-stained rayon satin hangs down Porfirio glimpses fathomless black night, white stars.
“Lalala la la. Woooowww,” says Robert Ross, just as Clete hits him. Clete shrieks and then is gone, sucked into the void of stars.
Porfirio stands very still. Robert winks at him.
“What a catch!” he says, in ten-year-old Bobby’s voice.
It’s hot up there, on the old white road, under the blue summer sky. Porfirio feels sweat prickling between his shoulderblades.
“Hey, Mr Policeman,” says Robert, “I remember you. Did you tell the Company what you heard? Have they been thinking about what I’m going to do? Have they been scared, all these years?”
“Sure they have, Mr Ross,” says Porfirio, flexing his hands.
Robert frowns. “Come on, Mr Ross was my father. I’m Bobby.”
“Oh, I get it. That would be the Mr Ross who died right down there?” Porfirio points. “In the crash? Because his kid was so stupid he didn’t know better than to lean out the window of a moving car?”
An expression of amazement crosses the wrinkled, dirty little face, to be replaced with white-hot rage.
“Faggot! Don’t you call me stupid!” screams Robert. “I’m brilliant! I can make the whole world come to an end if I want to!”
“You made it come to an end for your family, anyway,” says Porfirio.
“No, I didn’t,” says Robert, clenching his fists. “Professor Bill explained about that. It just happened. Accidents happen all the time. I was innocent.”
“Yeah, but Professor Bill lied to you, didn’t he?” says Porfirio. “Like, about how wonderful it would be to live forever?”
His voice is calm, almost bored. Robert says nothing. He looks at Porfirio with tears in his eyes, but there is hate there too.
“Hey, Bobby,” says Porfirio, moving a step closer. “Did it ever once occur to you to come back here and prevent the accident? I mean, it’s impossible, sure, but didn’t you even think of giving it a try? Messing with causality? It might have been easy, for a super-powered genius kid like you. But you didn’t, did you? I can see it in your eyes.”
Robert glances uncertainly down the hill, where in some dimension a 1946 Plymouth is still blackening, windows shattering, popping, and the dry summer grass is vanishing around it as the fire spreads outward like a black pool.
“What do you think, Bobby? Maybe pushed the grandfather paradox, huh? Gone back to see if you couldn’t bend the rules, burn down this barn before the mural was painted? Or even broken Hank Bauer’s arm, so the Yankees didn’t win the World Series in 1951? I can think of a couple of dozen d
ifferent things I’d have tried, Bobby, if I’d had superpowers like you.
“But you never even tried. Why was that, Bobby?”
“La la la,” murmurs Robert, opening his arms again and stepping toward Porfirio. Porfirio doesn’t move. He looks Robert in the face and says:
“You’re stupid. Unfinished. You never grew up, Bobby.”
“Professor Bill said never growing up was a good thing,” says Robert.
“Professor Bill said that because he never grew up either,” says Porfirio. “You weren’t real to him, Bobby. He never saw you when he looked at you.”
“No, he never did,” says Robert, in a thick voice because he is crying. “He just saw what he wanted me to be. Freckle-faced kid!” He points bitterly at the brown discoloration that covers half his cheek. “Look at me now!”
“Yeah, and you’ll never be a baseball player. And you’re still so mad about that, all you can think of to do is to pay the Company back,” says Porfirio, taking a step toward him.
“That’s right!” sobs Robert.
“With the whole eternal world to explore, and a million other ways to be happy – still, all you want is to pay them back,” says Porfirio, watching him carefully.
“Yeah!” cries Robert, panting. He wipes his nose on his dirty sleeve. He looks up again, sharply. “I mean . . . I mean . . .”
“See? Stupid. And you’re not a good boy, Bobby,” says Porfirio gently. “You’re a goddamn monster. You’re trying to blow up a whole world full of innocent people. You know what should happen, now? Your dad ought to come walking up that hill, madder than hell, and punish you.”
Robert looks down the hillside.
“But he can’t, ever again,” he says. He sounds tired.
Porfirio has already moved, and before the last weary syllable is out of his mouth Robert feels the scorpion-sting in his arm.
He whirls around, but Porfirio has already retreated, withdrawn up the hillside. He stands before the mural, and the painted outfielder smiles over his shoulder. Robert clutches his arm, beginning to cry afresh.
“No fair,” he protests. But he knows it’s more than fair. It is even a relief.
He falls to his knees, whimpering at the heat of the old road’s surface. He crawls to the side and collapses, in the yellow summer grass.
“Will I have to go to the Future now?” Robert asks piteously.
“No, son. No Future,” Porfirio replies.
Robert nods and closes his eyes. He could sink through the rotating earth if he tried, escape once again into 1951; instead he floats away from time itself, into the back of his father’s hand.
Porfirio walks down the hill toward him. As he does so, an all-terrain vehicle comes barreling up the old road, mowing down thistles in its path.
It shudders to a halt and Clete leaps out, leaving the door open in his headlong rush up the hill. He is not wearing the same suit he wore when last seen by Porfirio.
“You stinking son of a bitch defective,” he roars, and aims a kick at Robert’s head. Porfirio grabs his arm.
“Take it easy,” he says.
“He sent me back six hundred thousand years! Do you know how long I had to wait before the Company even opened a damn transport depot?” says Clete, and looking at his smooth ageless face Porfirio can see that ages have passed over it. Clete now has permanently furious eyes. Their glare bores into Porfirio like acid. No convenience stores in 598,000 BC, huh? Porfirio thinks to himself.
“You knew he was going to do this to me, didn’t you?” demands Clete.
“No,” says Porfirio. “All I was told was, there’d be complications to the arrest. And you should have known better than to rush the guy.”
“You got that right,” says Clete, shrugging off his hand. “So why don’t you do the honors?”
He goes stalking back to his transport, and hauls a body bag from the back seat. Porfirio sighs. He reaches into his coat and withdraws what looks like a screwdriver handle. When he thumbs a button on its side, however, a half-circle of blue light forms at one end. He tests it with a random slice through a thistle, which falls over at once. He leans down and scans Robert Ross carefully, because he wants to be certain he is unconscious.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.
Working with the swiftness of long practice, he does his job. Clete returns, body bag under his arm, watching with grim satisfaction. Hank Bauer is still smiling down from the mural.
When the disassembly is finished, Porfirio loads the body bag into the car and climbs in beside it. Clete gets behind the wheel and backs carefully down the road. Bobby Ross may not be able to die, but he is finally on his way to eternal rest.
The Volkswagen sits there rusting for a month before it is stolen.
The blood remains on the old road for four months, before autumn rains wash it away, but they do wash it away. By the next summer the yellow grass is high, and the road as white as innocence once more.
REAL TIME
Lawrence Watt Evans
Patrolling the past will not be without its hazards and the following story is all the more powerful and memorable because of its brevity.
Lawrence Watt Evans established his reputation as a writer of high fantasy with The Lure of the Basilisk (1980), the first of his Lords of Dus series, but he has since written many science-fiction stories and novels, starting with The Chromosomal Code (1984).
Someone was tampering with time again; I could feel it, in my head and in my gut, that sick, queasy sensation of unreality.
I put my head down and gulped air, waiting for the discomfort to pass, but it only got worse.
This was a bad one. Someone was tampering with something serious. This wasn’t just someone reading tomorrow’s papers and playing the stock market; this was serious. Someone was trying to change history.
I couldn’t allow that. Not only might his tampering interfere with my own past, change my whole life, possibly even wipe me out of existence, but I’d be shirking my job. I couldn’t do that.
Not that anyone would know. They must think I’m dead. I haven’t been contacted in years now, not since I was stranded in this century. They must think I was lost when my machine and my partner vanished in the flux.
But I’m not dead, and I had a job to do. With help from headquarters or without, with a partner or without, even with my machine or without, I had a job to do, a reality to preserve, a whole world to safeguard. I knew my duty. I know my duty. The past can’t take tampering.
They might send someone else, but they might not. The tampering might have already changed things too much. They might not spot it in time. Or they might simply not have the manpower. Time travel lets you use your manpower efficiently, with 100 per cent efficiency, putting it anywhere you need it instantly, but that’s not enough when you have all of the past to guard, everything from the dawn of time to the present – not this present, the real present – you’d need a million men to guard it all, and they’ve always had trouble recruiting. The temptations are too great. The dangers are too great. Look at me, stuck here in the past, for the dangers – and as for the temptations, look at what I have to do. People trying to change everything, trying to benefit themselves at the cost of reality itself – they need men they can trust, men like me, and there can never be enough of us.
I sat up straight again and I looked at the mirror behind the bar and I knew what I had to do. I had to stop the tampering. Just as I had stopped it before, three – no, four – four times now.
They might send someone else, but they might not, and I couldn’t take that chance.
I had to find the tamperer myself, and deal with him. If I couldn’t find him directly, if he wasn’t in this time period but later, then I might need to tamper with time myself, to change his past without hurting mine.
That’s tricky, but I’ve done it.
I slid off the stool and stood up, gulped the rest of my drink, and laid a bill on the bar – five dollars in the currency of the day. I shr
ugged, straightening my coat, and I stepped out into the cool of a summer night.
Insects sang somewhere, strange insects extinct before I was born, and the streetlights pooled pale grey across the black sidewalks. I turned my head slowly, feeling the flux, feeling the shape of the time-stream, of my reality.
Downtown was firm, solid, still rooted in the past and the present and secure in the future. Facing in the opposite direction I felt my gut twist. I crossed the empty street to my car.
I drove out the avenues, ignoring the highways. I can’t feel as well on the highways; they’re too far out of the city’s life-flow.
I went north, then east, and the nausea gripped me tighter with every block. It became a gnawing pain in my belly as the world shimmered and shifted around me, an unstable reality. I stopped the car by the side of the street and forced the pain down, forced my perception of the world to steady itself.
When I was ready to go on I leaned over and checked in the glove compartment. No gloves – the name was already an anachronism even in this time period. But my gun was there. Not my service weapon; that’s an anachronism, too advanced. I don’t dare use it. The knowledge of its existence could be dangerous. No, I had bought a gun here, in this era.
I pulled it out and put it in my coat pocket. The weight of it, that hard, metal tugging at my side, felt oddly comforting.
I had a knife, too. I was dealing with primitives, with savages, not with civilized people. These final decades of the twentieth century, with their brushfire wars and nuclear arms races, were a jungle, even in the great cities of North America. I had a knife, a good one, with a six-inch blade I had sharpened myself.
Armed, I drove on, and two blocks later I had to leave the avenue, turn onto the quiet side-streets, tree-lined and peaceful.
Somewhere, in that peace, someone was working to destroy my home, my life, my self.
