Now Wait For Last Year Part 9

"No, miss," the cab said as it pa.s.sed out over the flat desert of Arizona, heading north toward Utah. "You appear uninjured."

Now I understand what the drug does, she thought. Why it causes objects and people to become insubstantial. It's not so magical, and it's not merely hallucinogenic; my cut is really gone-this is no illusion. Will I remember this later on? Maybe, because of the drug, I'll forget; there never will have been a cut, after a little while longer, as the action of the drug spreads out, engulfs more and more of me. Will I remember this later on? Maybe, because of the drug, I'll forget; there never will have been a cut, after a little while longer, as the action of the drug spreads out, engulfs more and more of me.

"Do you have a pencil?" she asked the cab.

"Here, miss." From a slot in the seat-back ahead of her a tablet of paper with attached writing stylus appeared.

Carefully Kathy wrote: JJ-180 took me back to before I had severe cut on finger. JJ-180 took me back to before I had severe cut on finger. "What day is this?" she asked the cab. "What day is this?" she asked the cab.

"May 18, miss."

She tried to recall if that was correct, but now she felt muddled; was it already slipping away from her? Good thing she had written the note. Or had she written the note? On her lap the tablet lay with its stylus.

The note read: JJ-180 took me JJ-180 took me And that was all; the remainder dwindled into mere labored convolutions without meaning.

And yet she knew that she had completed the sentence, whatever it had been; now she could not recall it. As if by reflex she examined her hand. But how was her hand involved? "Cab," she said hurriedly, as she felt the balance of her personality ebbing away, "what did I ask you just a moment ago?"

"The date."

"Before that."

"You requested a writing implement and paper, miss." "Anything before that?"

The cab seemed to hesitate. But perhaps that was her imagination. "No, miss; nothing before that."

"Nothing about my hand?" my hand?"

Now there was no doubt about it; the circuits of the cab did stall. At last it said creakily, "No, miss."

"Thank you," Kathy said, and sat back against the seat, rubbing her forehead and thinking, So it's confused, too. Then this is not merely subjective; there's been a genuine snarl in time, involving both me and my surroundings.

The cab said, as if in apology for its inability to a.s.sist her, "Since the trip will be several hours, miss, would you enjoy to watch TV? It, the screen, is placed directly before you; only touch the pedal."

Reflexively she lit the screen with the tip of her toe; it came to life at once and Kathy found herself facing a familiar image, that of their leader, Gino Molinari, in the middle of a speech.

"Is that channel satisfactory?" the cab asked, still apologetic.

"Oh sure," she said. "Anyhow when he gets up and rants it's on all channels." That was the law.

And yet here, too, in this familiar spectacle, something strange absorbed her; peering at the screen, she thought, He looks younger. The way I remember him when I was a child. Ebullient, full of animation and shouting excitement, his eyes alive with that old intensity: his original self that no one has forgotten, although long since gone. However, obviously it was not not long since gone; she witnessed it now with her own eyes, and was more bewildered than ever. long since gone; she witnessed it now with her own eyes, and was more bewildered than ever.

Is JJ-180 doing this to me? she asked herself, and got no answer.

"You enjoy to watch Mr. Molinari?" the cab inquired.

"Yes," Kathy said, "I enjoy to watch."

"May I hazard," the cab said, "that he will obtain the office for which he is running, that of UN Secretary?"

"You stupid autonomic robant machine," Kathy said witheringly. "He's been in office years now." Running? she thought. Yes, the Mole had looked like this during his campaign, decades ago ... perhaps that was what had confused the circuits of the cab. "I apologize," she said. "But where the h.e.l.l have you been? Parked in an autofac repair garage for twenty-two years?"

"No, miss. In active service. Your own wits, if I may say so, seem scrambled. Do you request medical a.s.sistance? We are at this moment over desert land but soon we will pa.s.s St. George, Utah."

She felt violently irritable. "Of course I don't need medical a.s.sistance; I'm healthy." But the cab was right. The influence of the drug was upon her full force now. She felt sick and she shut her eyes, pressing her fingers against her forehead as if to push back the expanding zone of her psychological reality, her private, subjective self. I'm scared, she realized. I feel as if my womb is about to fall out; this time it's. .h.i.tting me much harder than before, it's not the same, maybe because I'm alone instead of with a group. But I'll just have to endure it. If I can.

"Miss," the cab said suddenly, "would you repeat my destination? I have forgotten it." Its circuits clicked in rapid succession as if it were in mechanical distress. "a.s.sist me, please."

"I don't know where you're going," she said. "That's your business; you figure it out. Just fly around, if you can't remember." What did she care where it went? What did it have to do with her?

"It began with a C," the cab said hopefully.

"Chicago."

"I feel otherwise. However, if you're sure-" Its mechanism throbbed as it altered course.

You and I are both in this, Kathy realized. This drug-induced fugue. You made a mistake, Mr. Corning, to give me the drug without supervision. Corning? Who was Corning?

"I know where we were going," she said aloud. "To Corning."

"There is no such place," the cab said flatly.

"There must be." She felt panic. "Check your data again."

"Honestly, there isn't!"

"Then we're lost," Kathy said, and felt resigned. "G.o.d, this is awful. I have to be in Corning tonight, and there's no such place; what'll I do? Suggest something. I depend on you; please don't leave me to founder like this-I feel as if I'm losing my mind."

"I'll request administrative a.s.sistance," the cab said. "From top-level dispatching service at New York. Just a moment." It was silent for a time. "Miss, there is is no top-level dispatching service at New York, or if there is, I can't raise them." no top-level dispatching service at New York, or if there is, I can't raise them."

"Is there anything at New York?"

"Radio stations, lots of them. But no TV transmissions or anything on the FM band or ultra-high frequency; nothing on the band we use. Currently I am picking up a radio station which is broadcasting something ent.i.tled 'Mary Marlin.' A piano piece by Debussy is being played as theme."

She knew her history; after all she was an antique collector and it was her job. "Put it on your audio system so I can hear it," she instructed.

A moment later she heard a female voice, detailing a wretched tale of suffering to some other female, a dreary account at best. And yet it filled Kathy with frantic excitement.

They're wrong, she thought, her mind working at its peak pitch. This won't destroy me. They forgot this era is my specialty-I know it as well as the present. There's nothing threatening or disintegrative about this experience for me; in fact it's an opportunity.

"Leave the radio on," she told the cab. "And just keep flying." Attentively, she listened to the soap opera as the cab continued on.

8.

It had-against nature and reason-become daytime. And the autonomic cab knew the impossibility of this; its voice was screechy with pain as it exclaimed to Kathy, "On the highway below, miss! An ancient car that can't possibly exist!" It sank lower. "See for yourself! Look!" Look!"

Gazing down, Kathy agreed, "Yes. A 1932 Model A Ford. And I agree with you; there haven't been any Model A Fords for generations." Rapidly and with precision she reflected, then said, "I want you to land."

"Where?" Decidedly, the autonomic cab did not like the idea.

"That village ahead. Land on a rooftop there." She felt calm. But in her mind one realization dominated: it was the drug. And only the drug. This would last only so long as the drug operated within her cycle of brain metabolism; JJ-180 had brought her here without warning and JJ-180 would, eventually, return her to her own time-also without warning. "I am going to find a bank," Kathy said aloud. "And set up a savings account. By doing so-" And then she realized that she possessed no currency of this period; hence there existed no way by which she could transact business. So what could she do? Nothing? Call President Roosevelt and caution him about Pearl Harbor, she decided caustically. Change history. Suggest that years from now they not develop the atom bomb.

She felt impotent-and yet overwhelmed with her potential power; she experienced both sensations at once, finding the mixture radically unpleasant. Bring some artifact back to the present for Wash-35? Or check on some research quibble, settle some historical dispute? Snare the actual authentic Babe Ruth, bring him back to inhabit our Martian enterprise? It would certainly impart verisimilitude.

"Virgil Ackerman," she said slowly, "is alive in this period as a small boy. Does that suggest anything?"

"No," the cab said.

"It gives me enormous power over him." She opened her purse. "I'll give him something. The coins I have, bills." Whisper to him the date the United States enters the war, she thought. He can use that knowledge later on, somehow ... he'll find a way; he's always been smart, much smarter than I. G.o.d, she thought, if only I could put my finger on it! Tell him to invest in what? General Dynamics? Bet on Joe Louis in every fight? Buy real estate in Los Angeles? What do you tell an eight-or nine-year-old boy when you have exact and complete knowledge of the next hundred and twenty years?

"Miss," the cab said plaintively, "we've been in the air so long that I'm running short of fuel."

Chilled, she said, "But you ought to be good for fifteen hours."

"I was low." It admitted this reluctantly. "It's my fault; I'm sorry. I was on my way to a service station when you contacted me."

"You d.a.m.n fool mechanism," she said with fury. But that was that; they couldn't reach Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.; they were at least a thousand miles from it. And this period, of course, lacked the high-grade super-refined protonex which the cab required. And then all at once she knew what she had to do. The cab had given her the idea, unintentionally. Protonex was the finest fuel ever developed-and it was derived from sea water. All she had to do was mail a container of protonex to Virgil Ackerman's father, instruct him to procure an a.n.a.lysis of it and then a patent on it.

But there was no way she could mail anything, not without money to buy stamps. In her purse she had a small wad of dog-eared postage stamps, but of course all from her own era, from 2055. --, she said furiously to herself, overwhelmed. Here I have it right before me, the solution as to what I should do-and I can't can't do it. do it.

"How," she asked the cab, "can I send a letter in this time period with no contemporary stamps? Tell me that."

"Send the letter unstamped, with no return address, miss. The post office will deliver it with a postage due stamp attached."

"Yes," she said, "of course." But she could not get protonex into a first-cla.s.s envelope; it would have to go parcel post, and in that cla.s.s, lacking franking power, it would not be delivered. "Listen," she said. "Do you have any transistors in your circuits?"

"A few. But transistors became obsolete when-"

"Give me one. I don't care what it does to you; yank it out and let me have it, and the smaller it is the better."

Presently, from the slot in the back of the seat before her, a transistor rolled; she caught it as it fell.

"That puts my radio transmitter out of service," the cab complained. "I'll have to bill you for it; it'll be expensive because of-"

"Shut up," Kathy said. "And land in that town; get down as soon as you can." She wrote hurriedly on the tablet of paper: "This is a radio part from the future, Virgil Ackerman. Show it to no one but save it until the early 1940s. Then take it to Westinghouse Corp. or to General Electric or any electronics (radio) firm. It will make you rich. I am Katherine Sweetscent. Remember me for this, later on."

The cab landed gingerly on the roof of an office building in the center of the small town. Below on the sidewalk the rustic, archaic-looking pa.s.sersby gaped.

"Land on the street," Kathy reinstructed the cab. "I have to put this in the mail." She found an envelope in her purse, hurriedly wrote out Virgil's address in Wash-35, put the transistor and note into the envelope and sealed it. Below them the street with its obsolete old cars rose slowly.

A moment later she was racing to a mailbox; she deposited the letter and then stood gasping for breath.

She had done it. Insured Virgil's economic future and therefore her own. This would make his career and hers forever.

The h.e.l.l with you, Eric Sweetscent, she said to herself. I don't ever have to marry you now; I've left you behind.

And then she realized with dismay, I've still got to marry you in order to acquire the name. So that Virgil can identify me, later on in the future, in our own time. What she had done, then, came to exactly nothing.

Slowly, she returned to the parked cab.

"Miss," the cab said, "can you help me find fuel, please?"

"You won't find any fuel here," Kathy said. Its obstinate refusal-or inability-to grasp the situation maddened her. "Unless you can run on sixty octane gasoline, which I very much doubt."

A pa.s.serby, a middle-aged man wearing a straw hat, frozen in his tracks by the sight of the autonomic cab, called to her, "Hey lady, what's that, anyhow? A US Marine Corps secret weapon for war games?"

"Yes," Kathy answered. "And in addition later on it'll stop the n.a.z.is." As she boarded the cab she said to the group of people who had cautiously formed around the cab at a safe distance, "Keep the date December 7,1941, in mind; it'll be a day to remember." She closed the cab door. "Let's go. I could tell those people so much ... but it seems hardly worth it. A bunch of Middle Western hicks." This town, she decided, lay either in Kansas or Missouri, from the looks of it. Frankly, it repelled her.

The cab dutifully ascended.

The 'Starmen should see Kansas in 1935, she said to herself. If they did they might not care to take over Terra; it might not seem worth it.

To the cab she said, "Land in a pasture. We'll sit it out until we're back in our own time period." It probably would not be long now; she had an impression of a devouring in-substantiality here in this era-the reality outside the cab had gained a gaseous quality which she recognized from her previous encounter with the drug.

"Are you joking?" the cab said. "Is it actually possible that we-"

"The problem," she said tartly, "is not in returning to our own time; the problem is finding a way to stay under the drug's influence until something of worth can be accomplished." The time was just not long enough.

"What drug, miss?"

"None of your G.o.ddam business," Kathy said. "You nosy autonomic nonent.i.ty with your big prying circuits all opened up and flapping." She lit a cigarette and leaned back against the seat, feeling weary. It had been a tough day and she knew, with acuity, that more lay ahead.

The sallow-faced young man, who oddly enough already possessed a conspicuous paunch, as if physically yielding to the more lush pleasures at this, the planet's financial and political capital, shook Eric Sweetscent's hand damply and said, "I'm Don Festenburg, doctor. It's good to hear you're joining us. How about an old-fas.h.i.+oned?"

"No thanks," Eric said. There was something about Festenburg which he did not care for but he could not put his finger on it. Despite his obesity and bad complexion Festenburg seemed friendly enough, and certainly he was competent; the latter alone counted, after all. But-Eric pondered as he watched Festenburg mix himself his drink. Perhaps it's because I don't think anyone should speak for the Secretary, he decided. I'd resent anyone who holds the job Festenburg does.

"Since we're alone," Festenburg said, glancing around the room, "I'd like to suggest something that may make me more palatable to you." He grinned knowingly. "I can tell what your feelings are; I'm sensitive, doctor, even if I'm the pyknic body-type. Suppose I suggested that an elaborate ruse has been carried off successfully, convincing even you. The flabby, aging, utterly discouraged and hypochondriacal Gino Molinari whom you've met and accepted as the authentic UN Secretary-" Festenburg lazily stirred his drink, eyeing Eric. "That's the robant simulacrum. "That's the robant simulacrum. And the robust, energetic figure you witnessed on video tape a short while ago is the living man. And this ruse must necessarily be maintained, of course, to sidetrack no one else but our beloved ally, the 'Starmen." And the robust, energetic figure you witnessed on video tape a short while ago is the living man. And this ruse must necessarily be maintained, of course, to sidetrack no one else but our beloved ally, the 'Starmen."

"What?" Startled, he gaped. "Why would-" Startled, he gaped. "Why would-"

"The 'Starmen consider us harmless, unworthy of their military attention, only so long as our leader is palpably feeble. Quite visibly unable to discharge his responsibilities-in other words, in no sense a rival to them, a threat."

After a pause Eric said, "I don't believe this."

"Well," Festenburg said, shrugging, "it's an interesting idea from the ivory tower, intellectual standpoint. Don't you agree?" He walked toward Eric, swirling the contents of his gla.s.s. Standing very close to him, Festenburg breathed his noxious breath into Eric's face and said, "It could could be. And until you actually subject Gino to an intensive physical examination you won't know, because everything in that file you read-it could all be faked. Designed to validate a gross, well-worked-out swindle." His eyes twinkled with merciless amus.e.m.e.nt. "You think I'm out of my mind? I'm just playing, like a schizoid, with ideas for the fun of it, without regard to their actual consequences? Maybe so. But you can't prove what I just now told you is untrue, and as long as this remains the case-" He took a ma.s.sive swallow of his drink, then made a face. "Don't deplore what you saw on that Ampex video tape. Okay?" be. And until you actually subject Gino to an intensive physical examination you won't know, because everything in that file you read-it could all be faked. Designed to validate a gross, well-worked-out swindle." His eyes twinkled with merciless amus.e.m.e.nt. "You think I'm out of my mind? I'm just playing, like a schizoid, with ideas for the fun of it, without regard to their actual consequences? Maybe so. But you can't prove what I just now told you is untrue, and as long as this remains the case-" He took a ma.s.sive swallow of his drink, then made a face. "Don't deplore what you saw on that Ampex video tape. Okay?"

"But as you say," Eric said, "I'll know as soon as I have a chance to examine him." And, he thought, that will come soon. "So if you'll excuse me I'd like to end this conversation. I haven't yet had time to set up my conapt here satisfactorily."

"Your wife-what's her name? Kathy?-isn't coming, is she?" Don Festenburg winked. "You can enjoy yourself. I'm in a position to give you a hand. That's my department, the land of the illicit, the feral, and the-let's just call it the peculiar. Instead of the unnatural. But you come from Tijuana; I probably can't teach you a thing."

Eric said, "You can teach me to deplore not only what I saw on the video tape but-" He broke off. Festenburg's personal life was, after all, his own business.

"But its creator as well," Festenburg finished for him. "Doctor, did you know that in the Middle Ages the ruling courts had people who lived in bottles, spent their entire lives ... all shrunken, of course, put in while babies, allowed to grow-to some extent, anyhow-within the bottle. We don't have that now. However-Cheyenne is the contemporary ranking seat of kings; there are a few sights that could be shown you, if you're interested. Perhaps from the purely medical standpoint-a sort of professional, disinterested-"