by Chad Oliver
The April sky was a wonderfully fragile blue, and there were no clouds to mask the warm Arizona sun. Wade lifted his copter to five thousand feet and let it drift on automatic. Green, irrigated farmland slipped by below him, and the desert was all dressed up in its Sunday best—caught in the first flush of spring, the cold winds of winter already forgotten, the searing heat of summer only a distant memory.
He spread the folder out on the counter before him, anchoring it under plastic against the breeze, and set the pages to turn slowly. He scanned the material, not trying to remember everything yet, but absorbing impressions.
The sun relaxed him; its heat tingled the back of his neck and warmed his shoulders. He could smell the land far below him—green and fresh from the spotty patches of irrigation, spiced with the strangely damp scent of sand from the desert. The air was quiet around him, his copter only a thin hum in the silence.
He thought about horses. Horses in Mexico, in 1445.
Every great technological advance made by mankind seemed to carry with it the seeds of man’s destruction—or, as Wade had always felt, seemed to require a more mature responsibility on the part of its creators. Time travel had been possible for forty years, ever since they had “lost” that week at Cal Tech in 2040, and now it had turned on them for the third time.
Twice before, it had almost happened-—by accident.
This time it was deliberate.
The folder contained a great deal of information about Daniel Hughes, and included abstracts of several of his monographs. One was titled The Influence of Urbanism on the Folk Society in Central America after Teotihuacan. Another was called Cultural Unity and the Classical Toltecs. Both were sound, scholarly works; hardly the products of a maniac.
Daniel Hughes was definitely not going to be any pushover.
Wade let the estimates of others filter through his mind. He saw the image of Daniel Hughes as seen by his wife, his professional associates, his neighbors. The impressions seemed consistent, and altogether unremarkable.
Therefore, they were wrong.
No one had really known Daniel Hughes—for the thing that he had done simply could not have been considered, much less carried out, by the rather colorless scholar portrayed in the folder.
Wade knew he would have to do better than that in his own interviewing.
The things he had to know were not in the folder.
The photograph came up again, and Wade held it stationary under the plastic.
The pleasant, smiling face looked at him, blandly.
Wade studied it again, then closed the folder. He set the copter controls for Ohio, and leaned back, grateful for the sun.
He looked down on the flowing horizon ahead of him, but he saw another kind of horizon.
The gray barrier of Time—deep beyond imagination, shadowed beyond comprehension.
Waiting.
II
The city of Columbus was like most of the cities he had known, although the total effect was not as depressing as in the neighboring cities of Cleveland or Cincinnati. It had the usual air of emptiness, of abandonment, and whole sections of old middle-class housing had been taken over by semi-nomadic squatters, who moved from city-shell to city-shell as the mood struck them.
All cities, of course, were anachronisms. The ancient threat of nuclear warfare had helped matters along, but the combination of automatic industries virtually run by computers and cheap, fast transport powered by solar energy had rendered the city obsolete.
Cities had been born from necessities: employment, protection, efficiency. When the necessities no longer existed, men returned to a more congenial way of life. Small, clean villages dotted the countryside, in which a man could get to know the people who went through life with him. Houses went up where there was land around them, and people could see the sky and the earth and hear the music of cool streams and restless winds.
The cities remained, but they were dying. Little by little, step by step, the trees and the grasses that had been briefly sheeted with sterile concrete and steel crept back—green shoots pushing up through unused streets, strong and patient roots digging beneath the gray foundations of the cities, finding earth.
A good many psychiatrists found themselves with nothing to do.
Columbus still retained a semblance of life, since it was held together by the machinery of the state government and by the old, tradition-coated campus of Ohio State.
Wade smiled at the quite handsome face of Dr. Frederick Clements, chairman of the history department, and wondered what it felt like to have an office in a city.
“What can you tell me about Daniel Hughes?” he asked.
Dr. Clements built delicate pyramids with his slender fingers and assumed an expression of considerable profundity. He managed to convey an air of tolerant distraction, as though he were making a small sacrifice of time from some Genuinely Important Research Project. Actually, he wasn’t much of a research man; he was departmental chairman because he was a good politician and liked committee meetings, but he never thought of himself as anything but a dedicated scholar.
“I find it hard to believe that Dr. Hughes is involved in anything—ah—unsavory,” Dr. Clements said.
“I didn’t say he was.”
“Come now, Mr. Dryden! You are the third Security man who has interviewed me about Hughes in a week. I am quite capable of putting two and two together in such a manner that the sum is four.”
Bully for you, Wade thought. “Ever have any trouble with Hughes? Any—well, incidents?”
“No. Dr. Hughes did his work well and faithfully. He taught his classes in person, you know. He was not what you might call aggressive in his research—seemed quite content with his solid but unspectacular reputation. His students liked him.”
“How about his private life?”
“I’m sorry, but the University makes it a point of policy not to pry into the personal lives of its faculty members. I can’t give you any valid testimony on what Dr. Hughes may or may not have done apart from his academic career.”
“You weren’t personal friends, I take it?”
Dr. Clements hesitated. “I had the greatest admiration for Dr. Hughes,” he said finally.
“I see. As a historian, what do you think of Hughes’s work? Are you in agreement with it—the fundamental orientation of it, that is?”
Clements eyed him curiously. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
Wade pressed his point. “You were associated with Hughes for a good many years, Dr. Clements. A man of your eminence might be supposed to have formed some, shall we say, points of difference? I understand that you are interested in the science of history?”
Clements took the bait. “That’s rather shrewd of you, really. I had always rather felt—off the record, you understand—that Dr. Hughes didn’t really believe in some of his own work. History, you see, is a product of cause and effect, like everything else. Therefore, it can be reduced to processual forms—you follow me? The alternative, we feel, is to regard man as somehow a supernatural being, not subject to the basic principles upon which our universe operates. Now, Dr. Hughes never argued with these postulates, at least overtly. His monographs, I must say, are quite scholarly—even a bit—ah—dry, if I may say so. In conversation, however, he was more interested in people—you know. He even tried once to write a novel, I believe.”
Ah, thought Wade. Paydirt. “Was it published? Under some other name, maybe?”
Dr. Clements shook his head. “As far as I know, it was never finished.”
“Did you read any of it?”
“No. I wasn’t that—close—to Dr. Hughes. He never even discussed the book with me.” There was a faint hurt in Clements’ voice, and Wade liked the man a little better for it.
“Who would you say his best friend was, sir? Some historian?”
“I don’t think so.” Clements leaned back in his chair. “He didn’t seem to associate much with his professional colleagues, although he w
as always pleasant enough with us.” He smiled a little. “He used to get long letters from a chap in Canada. He’d read them in his office between classes, and laugh so hard it was really a bit—well, strange, you know.”
“What was his name?”
“Karpenter. Herbert Kay Karpenter.”
“The poet?”
“Yes, I believe it’s the same one—Dr. Hughes used to get advance copies of his books from the publisher; I noticed them several times.”
“I see. I want to thank you, Dr. Clements, and I hope we won’t have to bother you again. You’ve been most helpful.”
Clements smiled. “I enjoyed talking to you, Mr. Dryden. I hope everything turns out all right.”
“So do I,” Wade said.
The next day, he was in Canada.
The log house, which was a sophisticated version of a log cabin as it might have been envisioned by the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright, was on a tiny island set in a glassy cove of one of those emerald lakes which dot the great Canadian pine forests.
The island looked natural, but it was hard to tell.
Wade landed his copter in the rocky yard, took a good swallow of the fresh, pine-scented air, and knocked on the plank door.
After three minutes, he knocked again.
The door opened. A big man looked out at him with neither interest nor surprise. He was dressed in rough, unpressed clothes, and he could have used a shave and a haircut. The muscles in his arms did not come from pushing a pen, and his deep blue eyes were squinted slightly, as though in protection from cold winds and sunlight glinting off lake waters.
“Are you Mr. Herbert Kay Karpenter?”
“I’m Herb.” His voice was loud and direct. “If you want my autograph, it’ll cost you ten thousand dollars and a kick in the pants.”
Wade grinned. “I’m Wade Dryden; I called you last night.”
“Oh. About Dan. Come on in.”
Herb Karpenter led Wade into his house, which was neat and clean and stuffed with books. They went through a surprisingly large living room, which had a wonderful rock fireplace and a superb buck head on the wall, and into Karpenter’s study—a small, simple room filled with a desk and a litter of seemingly unrelated objects: books, tapes, stereos, a human skull, a cypress knee polished to a reddish sheen, a fly rod with the line thoroughly tangled on the reel.
“Sit down, Wade,” the poet said, clearing one of the chairs with a sweep of his brown hand.
Wade sat down. The room virtually demanded a pipe, so he took his out and lit it.
“Dan’s in trouble, is he?” Karpenter said, leaning against a window that looked out on a rather scrubby pine and the cold, clean water. “What’s he done?”
Wade liked Karpenter already, and had made a mental note to read some of his work. He wanted very much to tell him the truth, but that was impossible. If the news ever got out, there would be a panic, and in a panic anything could happen.
“Sorry, Herb, but the law won’t let me be very specific. Daniel Hughes is in trouble, yes. I’m trying to find out why he’s in trouble. There’s a chance I can get him out of it.”
Karpenter chewed his lip. “Dan Hughes,” he said slowly, “is a horse’s fanny.”
“More so than the rest of us?”
“I think so.” Karpenter dropped into a chair, pretty well obliterating it. “Dan’s got no more business being a historian than Thomas Wolfe would have had.”
“Who’s Thomas Wolfe?”
“Novelist—back around 1930. He wrote huge, sprawling, magnificent books. His stuff had life in it. You’ll come around to his stuff sooner or later, if you live deep enough.”
“Ummm. Dan was like this Wolfe?”
“No. But he might have been.”
“I see.”
“Like hell you do. Never mind, though. Dan was a guy like a lot of others I’ve known. He didn’t have enough guts to do what he wanted to do, so he trapped himself in the old academic rat race. Result: competence. He never amounted to a hill of beans.”
“I thought you were his best friend.”
“I am.” Karpenter picked up an eraser and flicked it at the wall. “You trying to say that you can’t understand a man and like him too?”
“I guess not.” Wade retreated briefly to his pipe. Karpenter’s bluntness made him a little hard to get used to. “Did he want to write, is that it?”
“I don’t know. He thought so, on and off.”
“Did you read his novel?”
“I read what there was of it, yes. He called it A Window on the Stars. I told him to burn it.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“My friend, it stank.”
“What was it about?”
“It was one of those impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness things. It was what I like to call a whither book. You know—Whither Man? Whither our tiny celestial sphere? Whither childhood and the little furry creatures of the forests? Whither whither? Claptrap.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“No. Dan wasn’t in that book. That’s why it was what it was.”
“Herb, what was Dan like? I’ve got to know.”
Karpenter shrugged. “He doesn’t fit into any slot,” he said. “That was his problem, maybe. He had a mind—a good mind, an independent mind. He asked good questions. He liked to fish. He had a wife; he didn’t love her. No kids. He was nervous most of the time, tense. He tolerated his work. He got drunk once in a while—usually here—and he was a good guy. Dan lacked roots, if you’ll excuse the expression. He never quite found what he was looking for, because he never had a solid platform to look from. Hell, I don’t know what Dan was like. He wasn’t simple. One thing about people, you know—they can’t be summed up too glibly. People surprise you sometimes, thank God.”
“I hope I can get him back.”
“Maybe he’d be happier where he is.”
“I’ll do my best, Herb.”
Karpenter stood up. “You’re not married, are you?”
“No,” Wade said, surprised. “How’d you know?”
Karpenter smiled. “I’m a poet, man. Come on out in the kitchen and meet Faye. She’ll have the coffee ready by now.”
Karpenter’s wife was a delightful person: not beautiful in any conventional sense, but she brightened the whole house. Her devotion to Karpenter was frank and open, and he returned it with interest.
The coffee was delicious.
Karpenter escorted him to the door. “When all this is over,” he said, “you come on back and see us. We’ll see if we’re smarter than the trout.”
“Thanks, Herb. I appreciate it.”
The two men shook hands.
Wade looked at the warm house and the clean lake and the ferns growing between the rocks. He felt a regret deep down inside, a regret he had not felt so keenly for many years.
He climbed into his copter, took off into a twilight sky, and flew south into darkness.
The wife of Daniel Hughes, while her husband was in the field, had gone to live with a sister in California.
She greeted Wade with courtesy, and served him weak tea with evident pride, but it was obvious that she couldn’t tell him much about Daniel Hughes. She was thin, wore clothes that had a retiring, apologetic air, and she was grimly interested in the Universal Minders, one of the several thousand lunatic-fringe metaphysical groups in Southern California.
“Did your husband seem at all—unusual—the last time you saw him, Mrs. Hughes?”
“Oh, no, no. Poor Daniel!” she said vaguely, “I was not feeling well, not at all well—my fever, you know—and dear Daniel was so thoughtful, getting his own breakfast and all. I really haven’t been myself for some years, ever since—”
“I see,” Wade broke in, smiling to show how sympathetic he was. “He was quite happy, was he?”
“Poor Daniel! Happy? Oh, yes, I suppose. So lost in his books, you know how scholars are! Sometimes he hardly knew I was in the house. And me with my
fever, and it being so difficult for me to get around and all—”
“Yes indeed. Mrs. Hughes, do you perhaps remember a book your husband started to write, called A Window on the Stars?”
“Oh my, yes. That was dear Daniel’s novel. He was quite excited about it once, I remember, though it hardly seemed worthy of him. I mean, not like his serious work, if you know what I mean. I really couldn’t get through it—you mustn’t tell him this—although I tried for just days and days—”
“Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Hughes. You’ve been very helpful to us.”
She fingered her handkerchief. “Daniel—he’s not in any—I mean, he hasn’t done anything, has he?”
“Of course not. This is just a routine check. Don’t you worry about him.” “He’s so careless sometimes.” She looked away, lost in herself. “If he should need me, Mr. Dryden—you will call me?”
Wade took her hand. Daniel Hughes had never needed his wife, or had never thought he did. “We’ll call you,” he said.
He finished his tea and left.
The copter lifted into a California fog, and Wade flew eastward toward Arizona.
He had done what he could here.
Now, he had to go back. Back to Daniel Hughes.
III
The Time Security Commission maintained what was technically known as an Orientation Center in Arizona, not far from the unique beauty of Oak Creek Canyon. Wade had never heard the Center referred to by its proper name; it was known as the Pumphouse to almost everyone except confirmed bureaucrats.
No one, of course, was permitted to travel in time unless he knew his stuff backwards and forwards. If a man wanted to go to Rome in the time of Cicero, he had to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of Latin and he had to understand the mores and folkways of Italy in the century before Christ.
One mistake was too many, if you were fooling with time. The unguessed consequences of a single action might well destroy a civilization—and it might be your civilization.
Given millennia, little things could snowball.
The Pumphouse existed to make mistakes almost impossible. It accepted no man at his own valuation; it took him in and pumped him full of what he had to know.
