by William Tenn
She had to do it for him—just like with that first girl and that first brassiere. She just put her finger on one of the little knobs or buttons, and the whole garment let out a wheeze and shriveled up into a little red bump on her right shoulder.
And off they went.
How good was she? Not great, George says. Not at all bad; just not great. And, he says, sex in the twenty-first century is still pretty much sex as we know it. If you've been in one century, he figures, you've been in them all. Maybe the two biggest differences are how many clothes you have to take off and what you do about birth control. She looked like a level-headed female so he decided he could trust her on birth control.
That left the incest angle, and I asked him about that. He says that making it with your great-great-granddaughter from the twenty-first century is not much different from making it with your clothes-designer neighbor from across the hall.
If that's what he says, that's what it is. You have to figure he knows.
They had two, three rolls, and she seemed to get a little drunker with each roll. When it was all over and they lay apart, George looked her over carefully. A real fine body—and you know what? He says she was still clutching the wedding picture of his parents in one hand. As a matter of fact, up to a few seconds ago, she'd been banging away at the sheets with it.
He got up, took it away from her and put it back in the bureau drawer.
This Antoinette Donnelly. She was still breathing hard. "You are fantastic," she said. "You are absolutely fantastic, Mr. George Rice."
"Thanks," he said with as much of a modest smirk as George can manage. "My father thanks you. My mother thanks you. And I thank you." He took her drink off the night table and handed it to her. Keep her loose.
She drank some—you know, sex always makes me thirsty too—and held up a hand. There was a wiggly black dot inside her wrist. "Ooch," she said. "It's late."
George figured it was now or never to move. "You're not going without at least giving me a hint?" he whimpered—you know how George does. "Just a hint? Not even that?"
She seemed to say something to the red bump on her right shoulder. There was a fast wheeze or something and the red playsuit kind of boiled up and out and over her body. She was obviously thinking hard.
"You are so very, very good," she grinned. "You even know exactly how to ask for something you have no right to ask."
"No right? Aw, come on." He bent down and kissed her. "I've got a perfect right. A great-great-grandfather's right."
She giggled. "Some great-great-grandfather!"
He walked back to the living room with her. Feeling great. It was obvious she couldn't refuse him, couldn't hold back. He was probably strutting a bit as he walked. You know George.
"Come on. Why did you have to see me? What's so great about me?"
"Well, to begin with there are—I mean, were—your parents. Their accomplishments."
"My parents? What are you talking about? They were all right, they led okay lives, but, hey, they didn't do very much. What accomplishments?"
"Well, for just one thing, your mother's critical study of the academic novel. That by itself is a pretty big item."
"Mom's book? Oh, no. She had to have it published by a vanity press. It cost her four thousand dollars. And it came out a year after she died."
Antoinette shrugged. "So? It's still definitive. The seminal study of the academic novel of the twentieth century. Everything else takes off from that."
"My God. And Dad? Poor old nutty Dad? Don't tell me his matchbook collection, or his beer can collection... Hey, don't tell me that."
At this point, the girl touched a couple of raised knobs on her playsuit. A kind of tinkling started up. "Well," she said, "if you're talking about his famous seven collections—the ones he left to his local branch of the public library—if you're talking about those, that's exactly what I do have to tell you."
"Famous. You said famous. Those crappy collections? I mean you couldn't walk around in our basement because of that junk."
"Yes, I said famous. Of course, I meant his accompanying monograph as much as the collections themselves. There's a two-year course at most universities based on that monograph: Popular Culture and Its Industrial Base. Well, actually only half of it is based on your father's monograph; the other half has to do with the extension into musical theory that one of your children did late in life."
"Which one of my children? How many kids will I have? Will they—"
"No. I can't go into that kind of detail about future events. Surely you can see why?" She rubbed hard on a reddish button and the tinkling developed into a definite and noticeable rhythm. A kind of hiccuppy rhythm. "I wish I could. I'd particularly like to tell you about my grandmother, one of your granddaughters. So much of her research on the speed of light as a sometime constant has been the background of all my work on time travel. Although, her cousin's theories, I'd say, are also really—"
"Cousin! That's one of my descendants, too, right? I hear what you're telling me. From my parents down, quite a goddam family!"
"Oh, yes, quite a family. A genetic delight, a eugenic fantasia. A family that's been scrutinized exactly as the Bachs of Germany have been scrutinized."
And now she was playing around with a whole bunch of those rosy buttons. Back and forth. Up and down. It almost sounded like a tune. And it was getting loud.
But George was paying no attention to that. He was hot on the trail now.
"And of that whole famous family, you picked me to come back to. Me you wanted to see. Just me!"
She was concentrating on those buttons, but she looked up, a little annoyed. "Of course you were the one I wanted to see. You have to be the most interesting one of the lot."
George grabbed her shoulders and began shaking her. "Why? You've got to tell me why. What did I do? What will I do?"
"Please!" She pushed him away hard. George says she had a lot of power for something her size. "Please! You'll defuse the spirillix. It's already falling fast."
George bounced back. "Come on. Don't do this. Tell me why. Why me particularly?" He says his voice had gotten hoarse. He was practically yelling in a whisper.
She looked up from the buttons and stared at him. "Don't you see? Surely you know!"
"Know what? What's special about me? What?"
"You're the only one in the family, the only one for a whole bunch of generations who achieved nothing, absolutely nothing. And, when I was given the chance, I just had to find out why."
"Nothing? Nothing at all?" George says his two lips tasted like paper.
"Nothing at all. I've been puzzled by it all my life. Nor am I the only one in my time who finds it baffling. The articles! The hypotheses! And I found out why just two minutes or so after I arrived. It's so obvious."
"Obvious?" George says he croaked out.
"Yes. You're just too good at what you do do." She gestured toward the bedroom. "The way you managed me into there. And the way—How could there be room for any other skill?"
Those musical sounds got very loud and very fast. And then she was gone. George says like a bubble bursting, a bubble bursting where no bubble had been.
And that's all. I mean, that's all, folks.
It's a pretty weird story, you have to admit. It's not a story every guy would tell about himself.
But he says Antoinette Donnelly missed the whole point. He says the record will damn well show he was first-rate at something. He grins like a cat when he says that.
Well, you know George.
AFTERWORD
I think this is not at all a bad story. In fact, it has some rather really good bits. But I couldn't figure out a way to end it. When my agent, Virginia Kidd, began pointing out to me that it had been a long time since I had given her a chance to show me her marketing ability, out of sheer shame I finished up the piece and sent it to her. She sold it immediately.
I still don't quite like the ending. I need help, I feel, with the last coup
le of paragraphs. I've never found that help.
Can you, do you think...
Written 1987——Published 1993
FLIRGLEFLIP
Banderling, you are a fathead!
Yes, yes. I know. It is rather improbable that this message will reach you in the years that remain of your smug life; but if something, some new discovery—an unexpected warp in the plenum, say—should bring these pages to the surface, I want Thomas Alva Banderling to know that I consider him the most dilated, augmented, and amplified fathead in the history of the race.
Excepting myself, of course.
When I consider how happy I was puttering around my collection of dolik and spindfar, how splendidly my paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns was progressing—when I recall that bliss, only to be recalled in turn to the filthy, dripping necessities of my present vocation, I tend to become somewhat unacademic in my opinions of Banderling. What chance do I have now of ever returning to the creamy towers of the Institute rising in plastic beauty from the septic Manhattan soil?
—|—
I like to dream of the scholarly exhilaration I felt the day we of Field Party Nineteen returned from Mars with a shipload of punforg out of the Gllian excavation. I like to muse on my delighted reacquaintance with the problems I had left unsolved when the field trip was offered me. Banderling and his obscene radiation depressor? Why, that night was the first time I really noticed him!
"Terton," he asked suddenly, his face focusing sharp and studious in the screen of my benscope, "Terton, could you look in at my lab for a moment? I need an extra pair of hands."
I was startled. Beyond occasional meetings at Institute Assemblies, Banderling and I had had little reason for conversation. And it was fairly rare for an Associate Investigator to call on a full Investigator for mechanical assistance, especially when their fields were so different.
"Can't you get a labtech or a robot?" I asked.
"All the labtechs have gone. We're the only ones left in the Institute. Gandhi's Birthday, you know. I told my robot to package himself two hours ago when I thought I was leaving."
"Very well," I sighed, necklacing both my flirgleflip and the dolik I had been examining with it. As I walked into the benscope, giving my necklace the required tugs for the opposite wing of the Institute, I had already ceased to wonder at the oddity of Banderling's request.
The dolik on which I bad been working, you see, was the so-called Thumtse Dilemna—a thoroughly fascinating business. Most of my colleagues inclined toward Gurkheyser's statement of the problem when he discovered it at Thumtse over fifty years ago. Gurkheyser declared that it couldn't be dolik because of the lack of flirg-pattern; and it couldn't be spindfar because of the presence of flirg in minute quantities; therefore it was a consciously created paradox and, as such, had to be classified as punforg. But, by definition, punforg could not exist at Thumtse...
—|—
I wander. Once more I forget the reactions of my audience to this subject. If only this were not so, if only on this one point—In any case, I was still considering the Thumtse Dilemna when I stepped out of the benscope into Banderling's lab. I was not at all prepared psychologically to make the obvious deductions from his nervousness. Even if I had, who could have imagined such psychotic behavior from an Associate Investigator?
"Thanks, Terton," he nodded, his necklace jangling with the gadgetry that physicists seem to find necessary at all times. "Would you hold that long bar away from the turntable and press into the grid with your back? Right." He sucked at the knuckles of his right hand; with his left, he flipped a toggle and clicked a relay shut. He turned a small knob past several calibrations, frowned doubtfully and moved it back to an earlier mark.
The turntable before me—a wheel-like affair whose spokes were resistor coils and whose hub was an immense mesotronic tube—began to glow and whirl softly. Behind me, the grid was vibrating gently against my shoulder blades.
"There's—uh, nothing dangerous in what I'm doing?" I asked, moistening my lips at the roomful of fully operating equipment.
Banderling's little black beard shot up scornfully and the very hairs on his chest seemed to quiver. "What could be dangerous?"
Since I didn't know, I decided to feel reassured. I longed for Banderling's help in the process, but he was moving about rapidly now, sneering impatiently at meters and slapping at switches.
I had almost forgotten my uncomfortable position and the bar I was holding, and was considering the middle passage of my paper—the section where I intended to prove that the influence of Gll was fully as great as Tkes upon later Pegis—when Banderling's booming voice thrust a question into my consciousness.
"Terton, don't you often feel unhappy that you live in an intermediate civilization?"
He had stopped in front of the turntable and put his overlong hands truculently upon his hips.
"What do you mean—the Temporal Embassy?" I asked. I'd heard of Banderling's views.
"Exactly. The Temporal Embassy. How can science live and breathe with such a modifier? It's a thousand times worse than any of those ancient repressions like the Inquisition, military control, or university trusteeship. You can't do this—it will be done first a century later; you can't do that—the sociological impact of such an invention upon your period will be too great for its present capacity; you should do this—nothing may come of it now, but somebody in an allied field a flock of years from now will be able to integrate your errors into a useful theory. And what do all these prohibitions and restrictions accomplish; whose ends do they serve?"
"The greatest good of the greatest number in the greatest period of time," I quoted firmly from the Institute prospectus. "That humanity may continually improve itself by reshaping the past on the basis of its own historical judgment and the advice of the future."
He nodded a sneer at me. "How do we know? What is the master plan of those ultimate humans in that ultimate future where there is no temporal embassy from a still later period? Would we approve of it, would we—"
"But Banderling, we wouldn't even understand it! Humans with minds compared to which ours would look like elementary neural responses—how could we grasp and appreciate their projects? Besides, there seems to be no such ultimate future, merely temporal embassy after temporal embassy sent by each age into the preceding one, the advice of each embassy based on the best historical hindsight of the period from which it came. Temporal embassies extending always into the past from the improving future, temporal embassies without end." I paused, out of breath.
"Except here. Except in an intermediate civilization like ours. They may go out to infinity as far as the future is concerned, Terton, but they stop in our time. We send nobody into the past; we receive orders, but give none of our own."
—|—
I puzzled over Banderling as he examined the greenly sparking mesotronic tube and made an adjustment among his controls which excited it still further. He had always been considered a bit of a rebel at the Institute—by no means bad enough for a Readjustment Course, however—but surely he knew that the organization of the Institute itself was the first suggestion made by the Temporal Embassy when our age durated into its time-fix? I decided that the present difficulty with his equipment had irritated him out of normal reasoning processes. My mind trotted back to important items like spindfar problems, and I began to wish that Banderling would relieve me of the long bar so that I could denecklace my flirgleflip.
Not that I believed the Thumtse Dilemna could conceivably be spindfar. But it was possible, I had suddenly realized, for flirg—
"I've been told to call off work on my radiation depressor." The physicist's morose voice sliced into my thoughts.
"This machine, you mean?" I inquired rather politely, concealing my annoyance both at his interruption and the sudden inexplicable increase of warmth in the room.
"Hum. Yes, this machine." He turned away for a moment and came back with a modified benscope projector which
he placed in front of me. "The Temporal Embassy merely suggested that I stop, of course. They suggested it to the Institute administration, which put it in the form of an order. No reason given, none at all."
I clucked sympathetically and moved my perspiring hands to another position on the bar. The vibration of the grid had almost worn a checkerboard callus into my back; and the thought of being involved in an experiment with revoked equipment when I could be doing constructive investigation into dolik, spindfar, and even punforg made me almost pathologically unsocial with impatience.
"Why?" Banderling demanded dramatically, throwing opened palms up in the air. "What is there about this device which requires an ultimatum to stop its progress? I have been able to halve the speed of light, true; I may be able to reduce it even further in the tube, possibly to zero, eventually. Does such an increase of man's scientific powers seem dangerous to you, Terton?"
I pondered the question and was happy to be able to answer in all honesty that it didn't. "But," I reminded him, "there have been other direct revocations of projects. I had one. There was this dolik which was most curiously flirgled, evidently a product of Middle Rla at the peak of its culture. I had no more established the Rlaian origin when I was called to—"
"What have these infernal, incomprehensible thingumajigs to do with the speed of light?" he blasted at me. "I'll tell you why I was ordered to stop work on my radiation depressor, Terton, after eleven years of mind-breaking research. This machine is the key to time travel."
The offense I had decided to take was forgotten. I stared at him. "Time travel? You mean you've discovered it? We have reached the point where we are permitted to send a temporal embassy of our own into the past?"
