Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Robert Silverberg

  Contents

  Introduction

  Needle in a Timestack

  There Was an Old Woman

  The Pain Peddlers

  The Sixth Palace

  In Entropy’s Jaws

  Absolutely Inflexible

  This Is the Road

  The Pope of the Chimps

  The Dead Man’s Eyes

  The Road to Nightfall

  Multiples

  Many Mansions

  (Now+n, Now–n)

  Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another

  The Reality Trip

  Chip Runner

  Call Me Titan

  Defenders of the Frontier

  Ishmael in Love

  The Secret Sharer

  A Biography of Robert Silverberg

  Introduction

  The 1979 edition of the collection called Needle in a Timestack, the second of the three short story collections of mine that bear this title, this being the third—and how that happened is something I’ll explain in a moment—opens with these introductory words:

  “‘Oh, sir, things change,’ says one of the characters in my story ‘Born with the Dead,’ and one place where that seems to be true is the publishing industry. Books go in and out of print, reappear in unexpected places with new covers and transmogrified interiors, and sometimes, even, change their contents. As herewith. My collection of stories, Needle in a Timestack, first appeared in the United States in 1966, a year later in Great Britain. In the interim the book has vanished several times, surfacing each time in a new and shinier format; but during the periods of vanishment, I have blithely borrowed stories from the collection to use in *other* collections, thinking that in the eternal Heraclitean flow of things it wouldn’t make much difference. Perhaps it doesn’t make much difference to most people, but it has begun to matter to me, and, as my various short story collections undergo their latest set of incarnations I am going to some pains to eliminate all such duplications and overlaps of material.

  “So what we have here is Needle in a Timestack, but not quite the same book that was published under that title a decade and more ago. About half of the original stories have been retained; the other stories, subsequently made available in other books, have been erased here and replaced with a group of stories of about the same length, vintage, and quality that are *not* (I hope) available in any other collection of mine. It is a ploy calculated to drive bibliographers insane, but should not interfere with the pleasures of normal readers.”

  And so I wrote, forty years ago, in the introduction to the second incarnation of Needle in a Timestack. That volume contained four of the ten stories from the original edition, plus five additional ones. The one thing that neither book contained was a short story called “Needle in a Timestack,” because I hadn’t happened to have written it yet. (More about that below.)

  Well, sir, things changed. I did eventually write a story called “Needle in a Timestack,” and it went on to have a considerable life of its own. One nice extra bibliographical twist came a few years later, when the British Needle in a Timestack, almost entirely different in contents from the original American one, was published in the United States. I suppose it might have seemed logical to add the Playboy story to the group, thus uniting story title and book title for the first time, but I didn’t, because I had already collected it in a different book, 1984’s The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. That was how Timestack (the collection) had yet another printing that didn’t include “Timestack” (the story).

  The story, though, after passing through several of my short story collections of other titles and being reprinted in various anthologies edited by other people, ultimately, turned into a film directed by John Ridley. With the release of that film it seemed appropriate to assemble yet another story collection called Needle in a Timestack, the third of that ilk but the first that would actually contain the eponymous short story. (I spell all this out so ponderously because I really do like bibliographers, who have been tremendously helpful to me over the years as I try to keep track of the close-to-infinite number of stories and books and articles I’ve written, and I give them all the help I can.)

  And so, fellows, here is what I suppose can be called the third edition of Needle in a Timestack by Robert Silverberg. Included in it are three of the stories that were in the first edition, one that was in both the first and second editions, and one carried over from edition number two. The story called “Needle in a Timestack” is finally included in a collection called Needle in a Timestack, also. And this, I promise you, is the last time I’m going to bring out a story collection with that title. I mean it. I swear a solemn oath. I am finished, absolutely finished, collecting my work under that title.

  You do believe me, don’t you?

  —Robert Silverberg

  January 2019

  Needle in a Timestack

  Long, long ago I was at a science fiction convention in Los Angeles, and was talking with Bill Rotsler, a very good friend of mine, when a young man intruded on our conversation and began bothering us. Bill turned to him and said, “Go away, kid, or I’ll change your future.” At which I said, “No, tell him that you’ll change his past,” and suddenly I realized that I had handed myself a nice story idea.

  I even had a ready-made title waiting for it before I wrote word one, as I have indicated above. It so happened that in 1966, when my publisher was Ballantine Books, I delivered a short story collection with a title so clunkily unwieldy that it has long disappeared from my memory. Betty Ballantine, the charming and gracious person who was my editor at that company, charmingly and graciously let me know that she thought it was a terrible title, and suggested, in its place, Needle in a Timestack. I loved it. We put it on the book, and, as I explained at great and confusing length a few pages back, I used it again a decade later on a second short story collection with a generally different table of contents. It still struck me as a lovely title, and particularly appropriate for the time-travel story I was about to write. So, at last, the short story “Needle in a Timestack,” which had not existed when I was assembling the two story collections of that name, came into being. I wrote it in January 1982—its intricate time-travel plot unfolded for me with marvelous clarity as I worked—and Alice Turner, the superb fiction editor of Playboy, bought it immediately for Playboy’s July 1983 issue.

  Some years later a major American movie company bought it also. They gave me quite a lot of money, which was very pleasant, but they didn’t do anything about actually making the movie. In the fullness of time I got the rights back, and eventually my agent sold it to the same movie company, which had undergone a total change of ownership and management, and once again they let the rights lapse. But in the interim the story had attracted the attention of John Ridley, the Oscar-winning writer of Twelve Years a Slave. Ridley snapped it up, wrote a splendid script totally faithful to my story, found financing, and directed the film. Which led, finally, to the present story collection, in which story title and book title come together at last, half a century after Betty Ballantine set it all in motion.

  Between one moment and the next the taste of cotton came into his mouth, and Mikkelsen knew that Tommy Hambleton had been tinkering with his past again. The cotton-in-the-mouth sensation was the standard tip-off for Mikkelsen. For other people it might be a ringing in the ears, a tremor of the little finger, a tightness in the shoulders. Whatever the symptom, it always meant the same thing: your time-track has been meddled with, your life has been retroactiv
ely transformed. It happened all the time. One of the little annoyances of modern life, everyone always said. Generally, the changes didn’t amount to much.

  But Tommy Hambleton was out to destroy Mikkelsen’s marriage, or, more accurately, he was determined to unhappen it altogether, and that went beyond Mikkelsen’s limits of tolerance. In something close to panic he phoned home to find out if he still had Janine.

  Her lovely features blossomed on the screen-glossy dark hair, elegant cheekbones, cool sardonic eyes. She looked tense and strained, and Mikkelsen knew she had felt the backlash of this latest attempt too.

  “Nick?” she said. “Is it a phasing?”

  “I think so. Tommy’s taken another whack at us, and Christ only knows how much chaos he’s caused this time.”

  “Let’s run through everything.”

  “All right,” Mikkelsen said. “What’s your name?”

  “Janine.”

  “And mine?”

  “Nick. Nicholas Perry Mikkelsen. You see? Nothing important has changed.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes, of course, darling. To you.”

  “Keep going. What’s our address?”

  “11 Lantana Crescent.”

  “Do we have children?”

  “Dana and Elise. Dana is five, Elise is three. Our cat’s name is Minibelle, and—”

  “Okay,” Mikkelsen said, relieved. “That much checks out. But I tasted the cotton, Janine. Where has he done it to us this time? What’s been changed?”

  “It can’t be anything major, love. We’ll find it if we keep checking. Just stay calm.”

  “Calm. Yes.” He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. The little annoyances of modern life, he thought. In the old days, when time was just a linear flow from then to now, did anyone get bored with all that stability? For better or for worse it was different now. You go to bed a Dartmouth man and wake up Columbia, never the wiser. You board a plane that blows up over Cyprus, but then your insurance agent goes back and gets you to miss the flight. In the new fluid way of life there was always a second chance, a third, a fourth, now that the past was open to anyone with the price of a ticket. But what good is any of that, Mikkelsen wondered, if Tommy Hambleton can use it to disappear me and marry Janine again himself?

  They punched for readouts and checked all their vital data against what they remembered. When your past is altered through time-phasing, all records of your life are automatically altered too, of course, but there’s a period of two or three hours when memories of your previous existence still linger in your brain, like the phantom twitches of an amputated limb. They checked the date of Mikkelsen’s birth, parents’ names, his nine genetic coordinates, his educational record. Everything seemed right. But when they got to their wedding date the readout said 8 Feb 2017, and Mikkelsen heard warning chimes in his mind. “I remember a summer wedding,” he said. “Outdoors in Dan Levy’s garden, the hills all dry and brown, the 24th of August.”

  “So do I, Nick. The hills wouldn’t have been brown in February. But I can see it—that hot dusty day—”

  “Then five months of our marriage are gone, Janine. He couldn’t unmarry us altogether, but he managed to hold us up from summer to winter.” Rage made his head spin, and he had to ask his desk for a quick buzz of tranks. Etiquette called for one to be cool about a phasing. But he couldn’t be cool when the phasing was a deliberate and malevolent blow at the center of his life. He wanted to shout, to break things, to kick Tommy Hambleton’s ass. He wanted his marriage left alone. He said, “You know what I’m going to do one of these days? I’m going to go back about fifty years and eradicate Tommy completely. Just arrange things so his parents never get to meet, and—”

  “No, Nick. You mustn’t.”

  “I know. But I’d love to.” He knew he couldn’t, and not just because it would be murder. It was essential that Tommy Hambleton be born and grow up and meet Janine and marry her, so that when the marriage came apart she would meet and marry Mikkelsen. If he changed Hambleton’s past, he would change hers too, and if he changed hers, he would change his own, and anything might happen. Anything. But all the same he was furious. “Five months of our past, Janine—”

  “We don’t need them, love. Keeping the present and the future safe is the main priority. By tomorrow we’ll always think we were married in February of 2017, and it won’t matter. Promise me you won’t try to phase him.”

  “I hate the idea that he can simply—”

  “So do I. But I want you to promise you’ll leave things as they are.”

  “Well—”

  “Promise.”

  “All right,” he said. “I promise.”

  Little phasings happened all the time. Someone in Illinois makes a trip to eleventh-century Arizona and sets up tiny ripple currents in time that have a tangential and peripheral effect on a lot of lives, and someone in California finds himself driving a silver BMW instead of a gray Toyota. No one minded trifling changes like that. But this was the third time in the last twelve months, so far as Mikkelsen was able to tell, that Tommy Hambleton had committed a deliberate phasing intended to break the chain of events that had brought about Mikkelsen’s marriage to Janine.

  The first phasing happened on a splendid spring day—coming home from work, sudden taste of cotton in mouth, sense of mysterious disorientation. Mikkelsen walked down the steps looking for his old ginger tomcat, Gus, who always ran out to greet him as though he thought he was a dog. No Gus. Instead a calico female, very pregnant, sitting placidly in the front hall.

  “Where’s Gus?” Mikkelsen asked Janine.

  “Gus? Gus who?”

  “Our cat.”

  “You mean Max?”

  “Gus,” he said. “Sort of orange, crooked tail—”

  “That’s right. But Max is his name. I’m sure it’s Max. He must be around somewhere. Look, here’s Minibelle.” Janine knelt and stroked the fat calico. “Minibelle, where’s Max?”

  “Gus,” Mikkelsen said. “Not Max. And who’s this Minibelle?”

  “She’s our cat, Nick,” Janine said, sounding surprised. They stared at each other.

  “Something’s happened, Nick.”

  “I think we’ve been time-phased,” he said.

  Sensation as of dropping through trapdoor—shock, confusion, terror. Followed by hasty and scary inventory of basic life-data to see what had changed. Everything appeared in order except for the switch of cats. He didn’t remember having a female calico. Neither did Janine, although she had accepted the presence of the cat without surprise. As for Gus—Max—he was getting foggier about his name, and Janine couldn’t even remember what he looked like. But she did recall that he had been a wedding gift from some close friend, and Mikkelsen remembered that the friend was Gus Stark, for whom they had named him, and Janine was then able to dredge up the dimming fact that Gus was a close friend of Mikkelsen’s and also of Hambleton and Janine in the days when they were married, and that Gus had introduced Janine to Mikkelsen ten years ago when they were all on holiday in Hawaii.

  Mikkelsen accessed the household callmaster and found no Gus Stark listed. So the phasing had erased him from their roster of friends. The general phone directory turned up a Gus Stark in Costa Mesa. Mikkelsen called him and got a freckle-faced man with fading red hair, who looked more or less familiar. But he didn’t know Mikkelsen at all, and only after some puzzling around in his memory did he decide that they had been distantly acquainted way back when, but had had some kind of trifling quarrel and had lost touch with each other years ago.

  “That’s not how I think I remember it,” Mikkelsen said. “I remember us as friends for years, really close. You and Donna and Janine and I were out to dinner only last week, is what I remember, over in Newport Beach.”

  “Donna?”

  “Your wife.”

  �
�My wife’s name is Karen. Jesus, this has been one hell of a phasing, hasn’t it?” He didn’t sound upset.

  “I’ll say. Blew away your marriage, our friendship, and who knows what-all else.”

  “Well, these things happen. Listen, if I can help you any way, fella, just call. But right now Karen and I were on our way out, and—”

  “Yeah. Sure. Sorry to have bothered you,” Mikkelsen told him.

  He blanked the screen.

  Donna. Karen. Gus. Max. He looked at Janine.

  “Tommy did it,” she said.

  She had it all figured out. Tommy, she said, had never forgiven Mikkelsen for marrying her. He wanted her back. He still sent her birthday cards, coy little gifts, postcards from exotic ports.

  “You never mentioned them,” Mikkelsen said.

  She shrugged. “I thought you’d only get annoyed. You’ve always disliked Tommy.”

  “No,” Mikkelsen said, “I think he’s interesting in his oddball way, flamboyant, unusual. What I dislike is his unwillingness to accept the notion that you stopped being his wife a dozen years ago.”

  “You’d dislike him more if you knew how hard he’s been trying to get me back.”

  “Oh?”

  “When we broke up,” she said, “he phased me four times. This was before I met you. He kept jaunting back to our final quarrel, trying to patch it up so that the separation wouldn’t have happened. I began feeling the phasings and I knew what must be going on, and I told him to quit it or I’d report him and get his jaunt-license revoked. That scared him, I guess, because he’s been pretty well behaved ever since, except for all the little hints and innuendoes and invitations to leave you and marry him again.”

  “Christ,” Mikkelsen said. “How long were you and he married? Six months?”

  “Seven. But he’s an obsessive personality. He never lets go.”

  “And now he’s started phasing again?”

  “That’s my guess. He’s probably decided that you’re the obstacle, that I really do still love you, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So he needs to make us unmeet. He’s taken his first shot by somehow engineering a breach between you and your friend Gus a dozen years back, a breach so severe that you never really became friends and Gus never fixed you up with me. Only it didn’t work out the way Tommy hoped. We went to that party at Dave Cushman’s place and I got pushed into the pool on top of you and you introduced yourself and one thing led to another and here we still are.”