His dreams of drowning her fade as quickly as they came. He is not a violent man by nature. He knows he could never do it. He can’t even bring himself to step on a spider; how then could he kill his wife? If she’d die some other way, of course, without the need of his taking direct action, that would solve everything. She’s driving to the hairdresser on one of those manual-access roads she likes to use, and her car swerves on an icy spot, and she goes into a tree at eighty kilometers an hour. Good. She’s shopping on Union Boulevard, and the bank is blown up by an activist; she’s nailed by flying debris. Good. The dentist gives her a new anesthetic and it turns out she’s fatally allergic to it. Puffs up like a blowfish and dies in five minutes. Good. The police come, long faces, snuffly noses. Terribly sorry, Mr. Porter. There’s been an awful accident. Don’t tell me it’s my wife, he cries. They nod lugubriously. He bears up bravely under the loss, though.
“You can come in for dinner now,” she says. He’s sitting slouched on the sofa with another drink in his hand. He drinks more than any man she knows, not that she knows all that many. Maybe he’ll get cirrhosis and die. Do people still die of cirrhosis, she wonders, or do they give them liver transplants now? The funny thing is that he still turns her on, after eleven years. His eyes, his face, his hands. She despises him but he still turns her on.
The snow reminds him of his young manhood, of his days long ago in the East. He was quite the ladies’ man then. And it wasn’t so easy to get some action back in those days, either. The girls were always worried about what people would say if anyone found out. What people would say! As if doing it with a boy you liked was something shameful. Or they’d worry about getting knocked up. They made you wear a rubber. How awful that was: like wearing a sock. The pill was just starting to come in, the original pill, the old one-a-day kind. Imagine a world without the pill! (“Did they have dinosaurs when you were a boy, grandpa?”) Still, Martin had made out all right, Big muscular frame, strong earnest features, warm inquisitive eyes. You’d never know it to look at me now. I wonder if Alice realizes what kind of stud I used to be. If I had the money I’d rent one of those time machines they’ve got now and send her back to visit myself around 1950 or so. A little gift to my younger self. He’d really rip into her. It gives Martin a quick riffle of excitement to think of his younger self ripping into Alice. But of course he can’t afford any such thing.
As he forks down his steak he imagines being single again. Would I get married again? Not on your life. Not until I’m good and ready, anyway, maybe when I’m fifty-five or sixty. Me for bachelorhood for the time being, just screwing around like a kid. To hell with responsibilities. I’ll wait two, three weeks after the funeral, a decent interval, and then I’ll go off for some fun. Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, someplace out there. With Nolie. Or Maria. Or Ellie. Yes, with Ellie. He thinks of Ellie’s pink thighs, her soft heavy breasts, her long radiant auburn hair. Two weeks in Fiji with Ellie. Two weeks in Ellie with Fiji. Yes. Yes. Yes. “Is the steak rare enough for you, Ted?” Alice asks. “It’s fine,” he says.
She goes upstairs to check the children’s bedroom. They’re both asleep, finally. Or else faking it so well that it makes no difference. She stands by their beds a moment, thinking, I love you, Bobby, I love you, Tink. Tink and Bobby, Bobby and Tink. I love you even though you drive me crazy sometimes. She tiptoes out. Now for a quiet evening of television. And then to bed. The same old routine. Christ. I don’t know why I go on like this. There are times when I’m ready to explode. I stay with him for the children’s sake, I guess. Is that enough of a reason?
He envisions himself running hand in hand along the beach with Ellie. Both of them naked, their skins bronzed and gleaming in the tropical sunlight. Palm trees everywhere. Grains of pink sand under foot. Soft transparent wavelets lapping the shore. A quiet cove. “No one can see us here,” Ellie murmurs. He sinks down on her firm sleek body and enters her.
A blazing band of pain tightens like a strip of hot metal across Martha’s chest. He staggers away from the window, dropping into a low crouch as he stumbles toward a chair. The heart. Oh, the heart! That’s what you get for drooling over Alice. Dirty old man. “Help,” he calls feebly. “Come on, you filthy machine, help me!” The medic, activated by the key phrase, rolls silently toward him. Its sensors are already at work scanning him, searching for the cause of the discomfort. A telescoping steel-jacketed arm slides out of the medic’s chest and, hovering above Martin, extrudes an ultrasonic injection snout. “Yes,” Martin murmurs, “that’s right, damn you, hurry up and give me the drug!” Calm. I must try to remain calm. The snout makes a gentle whirring noise as it forces the relaxant into Martin’s vein, He slumps in relief. The pain slowly ebbs. Oh, that’s much better. Saved again. Oh. Oh. Oh. Dirty old man. Ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Ted knows he won’t get to Fiji with Ellie or anybody else. Any realistic assessment of the situation brings him inevitably to the same conclusion. Alice isn’t going to die in an accident, any more than he’s likely to murder her. She’ll live forever. Unwanted wives always do. He could ask for a divorce, of course. He’d probably lose everything he owned, but he’d win his freedom. Or he could simply do away with himself. That was always a temptation for him. The easy way out, no lawyers, no hassles. So it’s that time of the evening again. It’s the same every night. Pretending to watch television, he secretly indulges in suicidal fantasies.
Bare-bodied dancers in gaudy luminous paint gyrate lasciviously on the screen, nearly large as life. Alice scowls. The things they show on TV nowadays! It used to be that you got this stuff only on the X-rated channels, but now it’s everywhere. And look at him, just lapping it up! Actually she knows she wouldn’t be so stuffy about the sex shows except that Ted’s fascination with them is a measure of his lack of interest in her. Let them show screwing and all the rest on TV, if that’s what people want. I just wish Ted had as much enthusiasm for me as he does for the television stuff. So far as sexual permissiveness in general goes, she’s no prude. She used to wear nothing but hunks at the beach, until Tink was born and she started to feel a little less proud of her figure. But she still dresses as revealingly as anyone in their crowd. And gets stared at by everyone but her own husband. He watches the TV cuties. His other women must use him up. Maybe I ought to step out a bit myself, Alice thinks. She’s had her little affairs along the way. Not many, nothing very serious, but she’s had some. Three lovers in eleven years, that’s not a great many, but it’s a sign that she’s no puritan. She wonders if she ought to get involved with somebody now. It might move her life off dead center while she still has the chance, before boredom destroys her entirely. “I’m going up to wash my hair,” she announces. “Will you be staying down here till bedtime?”
There are so many ways he could do it. Slit his wrists. Drive his car off the bridge. Swallow Alice’s whole box of sleeping tabs. Of course those are all old-fashioned ways of killing yourself. Something more modern would be appropriate. Go into one of the black taverns and start making loud racial insults? No, nothing modern about that. It’s very 1975. But something genuinely contemporary does occur to him. Those time machines they’ve got now: suppose he rented one and went back, say, sixty years, to a time when one of his parents hadn’t yet been born. And killed his grandfather. Find old Martin as a young man and slip a knife into him. If I do that, Ted figures, I should instantly and painlessly cease to exist. I would never have existed, because my mother wouldn’t ever have existed. Poof. Out like a light. Then he realizes he’s fantasizing a murder again. Stupid: if he could ever murder anyone, he’d murder Alice and be done with it. So the whole fantasy is foolish. Back to the starting point is where he is.
She is sitting under the hair-dryer when he comes upstairs. He has a peculiarly smug expression on his face, and as soon as she turns the dryer off she asks him what he’s thinking about. “I may have just invented a perfect murder method,” he tells her. “Oh?” she says. He says, “You rent a time machine. Then you go
back a couple of generations and murder one of the ancestors of your intended victim. That way you’re murdering the victim too, because he won’t ever have been born if you kill off one of his immediate progenitors. Then you return to your own time. Nobody can trace you because you don’t have any fingerprints on file in an era before your own birth. What do you think of it?” Alice shrugs. “It’s an old one,” she says. “It’s been done on television a dozen times. Anyway, I don’t like it. Why should an innocent person have to die just because he’s the grandparent of somebody you want to kill?”
They’re probably in bed together right now, Martin thinks gloomily. Stark naked side by side. The lights are out. The house is quiet. Maybe they’re smoking a little grass. Do they still call it grass, he wonders, or is there some new nickname now? Anyway the two of them turn on. Yes. And then he reaches for her. His hands slide over her cool, smooth skin. He cups her breasts. Plays with the hard little nipples. Sucks on them. The other hand wandering down to her parted thighs. And then she. And then he. And then they. And then they. Oh, Alice, he murmurs. Oh, Ted, Ted, she cries. And then they. Go to it. Up and down, in and out. Oh. Oh. Oh. She claws his back. She pumps her hips. Ted! Ted! Ted! The big moment is arriving now. For her, for him. Jackpot! Afterward they lie close for a few minutes, basking in the afterglow. And then they roll apart. Goodnight, Ted. Goodnight, Alice. Oh, Jesus. They do it every night, I bet. They’re so young and full of juice. And I’m all dried up. Christ, I hate being old. When I think of the man I once was. When I think of the women I once had. Jesus. Jesus. God, let me have the strength to do it just once more before I die. And leave me alone for two hours with Alice.
She has trouble falling asleep. A strange scene keeps playing itself out obsessively in her mind. She sees herself stepping out of an upright coffin-size box of dark gray metal, festooned with dials and levers. The time machine. It delivers her into a dark, dirty alleyway, and when she walks forward to the street she sees scores of little antique automobiles buzzing around. Only they aren’t antiques, they’re the current models. This is the year 1947. New York City. Will she be conspicuous in her futuristic clothes? She has her breasts covered, at any rate. That’s essential back here. She hurries to the proper address, resisting the temptation to browse in shop windows along the way. How quaint and ancient everything looks. And how dirty the streets are. She comes to a tall building of red brick. This is the place. No scanners study her as she enters. They don’t have annunciators yet or any other automatic home-protection equipment. She goes upstairs in an elevator so creaky and unstable that she fears for her life. Fifth floor. Apartment 5-J. She rings the doorbell. He answers. He’s terribly young, only twenty-four, but she can pick out sips of the Martin of the future in his face, the strong cheekbones, the searching blue eyes. “Are you Martin Jamieson?” she asks. “That’s right,” he says. She smiles. “May I come in?” “Of course,” he says. He bows her into the apartment. As he momentarily turns his back on her to open the coat closet she takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock.
Ted and Alice visit him at Sunset Village two or three times a month. He can’t complain about that; it’s as much as he can expect. He’s an old, old man and no doubt a boring one, but they come dutifully, sometimes with the kids, sometimes without. He’s never gotten used to the idea that he’s a great-grandfather. Alice always gives him a kiss when she arrives and another when she leaves. He plays a private little game with her, copping a feel at each kiss. His hand quickly stroking her butt. Or sometimes when he’s really rambunctious it travels lightly over her breast. Does she notice? Probably. She never lets on, though. Pretends it’s an accident touch. Most likely she thinks it’s charming that a man of his age would still have at least a vestige of sexual desire left. Unless she thinks it’s disgusting, that is.
The time-machine gimmick, Ted tells himself, can be used in ways that don’t quite amount to murder. For instance. “What’s that box?” Alice asks. He smiles cunningly. “It’s called a panchronicon,” he says. “It gives you a kind of televised reconstruction of ancient times. The salesman loaned me a demonstration sample.” She says, “How does it work?” “Just step inside,” he tells her. “It’s all ready for you.” She starts to enter the machine, but then, suddenly suspicious, she hesitates on the threshold. He pushes her in and slams the door shut behind her. Wham! The controls are set. Off goes Alice on a one-way journey to the Pleistocene. The machine is primed to return as soon as it drops her off. That isn’t murder, is it? She’s still alive, wherever she may be, unless the saber-tooth tigers have caught up with her. So long, Alice.
In the morning she drives Bobby and Tink to school. Then she stops at the bank and post office. From ten to eleven she has her regular session at the identity-reinforcement parlor. Ordinarily she would go right home after that, but this morning she strolls across the shopping center plaza to the office that the time machine people have just opened. TEMPONAUTICS, LTD., the sign over the door says. The place is empty except for two machines, no doubt demonstration models, and a bland-faced, smiling salesman. “Hello,” Alice says nervously. “I just wanted to pick up some information about the rental costs of one of your machines.”
Martin likes to imagine Alice coming to visit him by herself some rainy Saturday afternoon. “Ted isn’t able to make it today,” she explains. “Something came up at the office. But I knew your were expecting us, and I didn’t want you to be disappointed. Poor Martin, you must lead such a lonely life.” She comes close to him. She is trembling. So is he. Her face is flushed and her eyes are bright with the unmistakable glossiness of desire. He feels a sense of sexual excitement too, for the first time in ten or twenty years, that tension in the loins, that throbbing of the pulse. Electricity. Chemistry. His eyes lock on hers. Her nostrils flare, her mouth goes taut. “Martin,” she whispers huskily. “Do you feel what I feel?” “You know I do,” he tells her. She says, “If only I could have known you when you were in your prime!” He chuckles. “I’m not altogether senile yet,” he cries exultantly. Then she is in his arms and his lips are seeking her fragrant breasts.
“Yes, it came as a terrible shock to me,” Ted tells Ellie. “Having her disappear like that. She simply vanished from the face of the earth, as far as anyone can determine. They’ve tried every possible way of tracing her and there hasn’t been a clue.” Ellie’s flawless forehead furrows in a fitful frown. “Was she unhappy?” she asks. “Do you think she may have done away with herself?” Ted shakes his head. “I don’t know. You live with a person for eleven years and you think you know her pretty well, and then one day something absolutely incomprehensible occurs and you realize how impossible it is ever to know another human being at all. Don’t you agree?” Ellie nods gravely. “Yes, oh, yes, certainly!” she says. He smiles down at her and takes her hands in his. Softly he says, “Let’s not talk about Alice any more, shall we? She’s gone and that’s all I’ll ever know.” He hears a pulsing symphonic crescendo of shimmering angelic choirs as he embraces her and murmurs, “I love you, Ellie. I love you.”
She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. Young Martin drops instantly, twitches once, lies still. Dark blood begins to seep through the dense blond curls of his hair. How strange to see Martin with golden hair, she thinks, as she kneels beside his body. She puts her hand to the bloody place, probes timidly, feels the deep indentation. Is he dead? She isn’t sure how to tell. He isn’t moving. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. She wonders if she ought to hit him again, just to make certain. Then she remembers something she’s seen on television, and takes her mirror from her purse. Holds it in front of his face. No cloud forms. That’s pretty conclusi
ve: you’re dead, Martin. R.I.P. Martin Jamieson, 1923-1947. Which means that Martha Jamieson Porter (1948- ) will never now be conceived, and that automatically obliterates the existence of her son Theodore Porter (1968- ). Not bad going, Alice, getting rid of unloved husband and miserable shrewish mother-in-law all in one shot. Sorry, Martin. Bye-bye, Ted. (R.I.P. Theodore Porter, 1968-1947. Eh?) She rises, goes into the bathroom with the steel pipe and carefully rinses it off. Then she puts it back into her purse. Now to go back to the machine and return to 2006, she thinks. To start my new life. But as she leaves the apartment, a tall, lean man steps out of the hallway shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. “Time Patrol,” he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. “You’re under arrest for temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.”
Today has been a better day than yesterday, low on crises and depressions, but he still feels a headache coming on as he lets himself into the house. He is braced for whatever bitchiness Alice may have in store for him this evening. But, oddly, she seems relaxed and amiable. “Can I get you a drink, Ted?” she asks. “How did your day go?” He smiles and says, “Well, I think we may have salvaged the Hammond account after all. Otherwise nothing special happened. And you? What did you do today, love?” She shrugs. “Oh, the usual stuff,” she says. “The bank, the post office, my identity-reinforcement session.”
Universe 03 - [Anthology] Page 10
