Paycheck. Part 30

'Let's have something to drink,' Addison said. 'And then I'll outline it all for you.'

'Only thing I've got at the moment is California brandy.'

Addison Doug said, 'I'd drink anything right now, the way I feel.' He dropped to the couch, leaned back, and sighed a ragged, distressed sigh, as the girl hurriedly began fixing both of them a drink.

The FM-radio in the car yammered, '... grieves at the stricken turn of events precipitating out of an unheralded ...'

'Official nonsense babble,' Crayne said, shutting off the radio. He and Benz were having trouble finding the house, having been there only once before. It struck Crayne that this was somewhat informal a way of convening a conference of this importance, meeting at Addison's chick's pad out here in the boondocks of Ojai. On the other hand, they wouldn't be pestered by the curious. And they probably didn't have much time. But that was hard to say; about that no one knew for sure.

The hills on both sides of the road had once been forests, Crayne observed. Now housing tracts and their melted, irregular, plastic roads marred every rise in sight. 'I'll bet this was nice once,' he said to Benz, who was driving.

'The Los Padres National Forest is near here,' Benz said. 'I got lost in there when I was eight. For hours I was sure a rattler would get me. Every stick was a snake.'

'The rattler's got you now,' Crayne said.

'All of us,' Benz said.

'You know,' Crayne said, 'it's a h.e.l.l of an experience to be dead.'

'Speak for yourself.'

'But technically-'

'If you listen to the radio and TV.' Benz turned toward him, his big gnome face bleak with admonis.h.i.+ng sternness. 'We're no more dead than anyone else on the planet. The difference for us is that our death date is in the past, whereas everyone else's is set somewhere at an uncertain time in the future. Actually, some people have it pretty d.a.m.n well set, like people in cancer wards; they're as certain as we are. More so. For example, how long can we stay here before we go back? We have a margin, a lat.i.tude that a terminal cancer victim doesn't have.'

Crayne said cheerfully, 'The next thing you'll be telling us to cheer us up is that we're in no pain.'

'Addi is. I watched him lurch off earlier today. He's got it psychosomatically - made it into a physical complaint. Like G.o.d's kneeling on his neck; you know, carrying a muchtoo-great burden that's unfair, only he won't complain out loud ... just points now and then at the nail hole in his hand.' He grinned.

'Addi has got more to live for than we do.'

'Everyman has more to live for than any other man. I don't have a cute chick to sleep with, but I'd like to see the semis rolling along Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It's not what you have to live for; it's that you want to live to see it, to be there - that's what is so d.a.m.n sad.'

They rode on in silence.

In the quiet living room of the girl's house the three tempunauts sat around smoking, taking it easy; Addison Doug thought to himself that the girl looked unusually foxy and desirable in her stretched-tight white sweater and micro-skirt and he wished, wistfully, that she looked a little less interesting. He could not really afford to get embroiled in such stuff, at this point. He was too tired.

'Does she know,' Benz said, indicating the girl, 'what this is all about? I mean, can we talk openly? It won't wipe her out?'

'I haven't explained it to her yet,' Addison said.

'You G.o.ddam well better,' Crayne said.

'What is it?' the girl said, stricken, sitting upright with one hand directly between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. As if clutching at a religious artifact that isn't there, Addison thought.

'We got snuffed on reentry,' Benz said. He was, really, the cruelest of the three. Or at least the most blunt. 'You see, Miss ...'

'Hawkins,' the girl whispered.

'Glad to meet you, Miss Hawkins.' Benz surveyed her in his cold, lazy fas.h.i.+on. 'You have a first name?'

'Merry Lou.'

'Okay, Merry Lou,' Benz said. To the other two men he observed, 'Sounds like the name a waitress has st.i.tched on her blouse. Merry Lou's my name and I'll be serving you dinner and breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast for the next few days or however long it is before you all give up and go back to your own time; that'll be fifty-three dollars and eight cents, please, not including tip And I hope y'all never come back, y'hear?' His voice had begun to shake; his cigarette, too. 'Sorry, Miss Hawkins,' he said then. 'We're all screwed up by the implosion at reentry. As soon as we got here in ETA we learned about it. We've known longer than anyone else; we knew as soon as we hit Emergence Time.'

'But there's nothing we could do,' Crayne said.

'There's nothing anyone can do,' Addison said to her, and put his arm around her. It felt like a deja vu thing but then it hit him. We're in a closed time loop, he thought, we keep going through this again and again, trying to solve the reentry problem, each time imagining it's the first time, the only time ... and never succeeding. Which attempt is this? Maybe the millionth; we have sat here a million times, raking the same facts over and over again and getting nowhere. He felt bone-weary, thinking that. And he felt a sort of vast philosophical hate toward all other men, who did not have this enigma to deal with. We all go to one place, he thought, as the Bible says. But ... for the three of us, we have been there already. Are lying there now. So it's wrong to ask us to stand around on the surface of Earth afterward and argue and worry about it and try to figure out what malfunctioned. That should be, rightly, for our heirs to do. We've had enough already.

He did not say this aloud, though - for their sake.

'Maybe you b.u.mped into something,' the girl said.

Glancing at the others, Benz said sardonically, 'Maybe we "b.u.mped into something".'

'The TV commentators kept saying that,' Merry Lou said, 'about the hazard in reentry of being out of phase spatially and colliding right down to the molecular level with tangent objects, any one of which-' She gestured. 'You know. "No two objects can occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same time." So everything blew up, for that reason.' She glanced around questioningly.

'That is the major risk factor,' Crayne acknowledged. 'At least theoretically, as Dr Fein at Planning calculated when they got into the hazard question. But we had a variety of safety locking devices provided that functioned automatically. Reentry couldn't occur unless these a.s.sists had stabilized us spatially so we would not overlap. Of course, all those devices, in sequence, might have failed. One after the other. I was watching my feedback metric scopes on launch, and they agreed, every one of them, that we were phased properly at that time. And I heard no warning tones. Saw none, neither.' He grimaced. 'At least it didn't happen then.'

Suddenly Benz said, 'Do you realize that our next of kin are now rich? All our Federal and commercial lifeinsurance payoff. Our "next of kin" - G.o.d forbid, that's us, I guess. We can apply for tens of thousands of dollars, cash on the line. Walk into our brokers' offices and say, "I'm dead; lay the heavy bread on me." '

Addison Doug was thinking, The public memorial services. That they have planned, after the autopsies. That long line of black-draped Cads going down Pennsylvania Avenue, with all the government dignitaries and doubledomed scientist types - and we'll be there and we'll be there. Not once but twice. Once in the oak hand-rubbed bra.s.s-fitted flag-draped caskets, but also ... maybe riding in open limos, waving at the crowds of mourners.

'The ceremonies,' he said aloud.

The others stared at him, angrily, not comprehending. And then, one by one, they understood; he saw it on their faces.

'No,' Benz grated. 'That's - impossible.'

Crayne shook his head emphatically. 'They'll order us to be there, and we will be. Obeying orders.'

'Will we have to smile smile?' Addison said. 'To f.u.c.king smile smile?'

'No,' General Toad said slowly, his great wattled head s.h.i.+vering about on his broomstick neck, the color of his skin dirty and mottled, as if the ma.s.s of decorations on his stiff-board collar had started part of him decaying away. 'You are not to smile, but on the contrary are to adopt a properly grief-stricken manner. In keeping with the national mood of sorrow at this time.'

'That'll be hard to do,' Crayne said.

The Russian chrononaut showed no response; his thin beaked face, narrow within his translating earphones, remained strained with concern.

'The nation,' General Toad said, 'will become aware of your presence among us once more for this brief interval; cameras of all major TV networks will pan up to you without warning, and at the same time, the various commentators have been instructed to tell their audiences something like the following.' He got out a piece of typed material, put on his gla.s.ses, cleared his throat and said, ' "We seem to be focusing on three figures riding together. Can't quite make them out. Can you?" ' General Toad lowered the paper. 'At this point they'll interrogate their colleagues extempore. Finally they'll exclaim, "Why, Roger," or Walter or Ned, as the case may be, according to the individual network-'

'Or Bill,' Crayne said. 'In case it's the Bufonidae network, down there in the swamp.'

General Toad ignored him. 'They will severally exclaim, "Why Roger I believe we're seeing the three tempunauts themselves! Does this indeed mean that somehow the difficulty-?" And then the colleague commentator says in his somewhat more somber voice, "What we're seeing at this time, I think, David," or Henry or Pete or Ralph, whichever it is, "consists of mankind's first verified glimpse of what the technical people refer to as Emergence Time Activity or ETA. Contrary to what might seem to be the case at first sight, these are not not - repeat, not - our three valiant tempunauts as such, as we would ordinarily experience them, but more likely picked up by our cameras as the three of them are temporarily suspended in their voyage to the future, which we initially had reason to hope would take place in a time continuum roughly a hundred years from now ... but it would seem that they somehow undershot and are here now, at this moment, which of course is, as we know, our present." ' - repeat, not - our three valiant tempunauts as such, as we would ordinarily experience them, but more likely picked up by our cameras as the three of them are temporarily suspended in their voyage to the future, which we initially had reason to hope would take place in a time continuum roughly a hundred years from now ... but it would seem that they somehow undershot and are here now, at this moment, which of course is, as we know, our present." '

Addison Doug closed his eyes and thought, Crayne will ask him if he can be panned up on by the TV cameras holding a balloon and eating cotton candy. I think we're all going nuts from this, all of us. And then he wondered, How many times have we gone through this idiotic exchange?

I can't prove it, he thought wearily. But I know it's true. We've sat here, done this minuscule scrabbling, listened to and said all this c.r.a.p, many times. He shuddered. Each rinky-d.i.n.k word ...

'What's the matter?' Benz said acutely.

The Soviet chrononaut spoke up for the first time. 'What is the maximum interval of ETA possible to your threeman team? And how large a per cent has been exhausted by now?'

After a pause Crayne said, 'They briefed us on that before we came in here today. We've consumed approximately one half of our maximum total ETA interval.'

'However,' General Toad rumbled, 'we have scheduled the Day of National Mourning to fall within the expected period remaining to them of ETA time. This required us to speed up the autopsy and other forensic findings, but in view of public sentiment, it was felt ...'

The autopsy, Addison Doug thought, and again he shuddered; this time he could not keep his thoughts within himself and he said, 'Why don't we adjourn this nonsense meeting and drop down to pathology and view a few tissue sections enlarged and in color, and maybe we'll brainstorm a couple of vital concepts that'll aid medical science in its quest for explanations? Explanations - that's what we need. Explanations for problems that don't exist yet; we can develop the problems later.' He paused. 'Who agrees?'

'I'm not looking at my spleen up there on the screen,' Benz said. 'I'll ride in the parade but I won't partic.i.p.ate in my own autopsy.'

'You could distribute microscopic purple-stained slices of your own gut to the mourners along the way,' Crayne said. 'They could provide each of us with a doggy bag; right, General? We can strew tissue sections like confetti. I still think we should smile.'

'I have researched all the memoranda about smiling,' General Toad said, riffling the pages stacked before him, 'and the consensus at policy is that smiling is not in accord with national sentiment. So that issue must be ruled closed. As far as your partic.i.p.ating in the autopsical procedures which are now in progress-'

'We're missing out as we sit here,' Crayne said to Addison Doug. 'I always miss out.'

Ignoring him, Addison addressed the Soviet chrononaut. 'Officer N. Gauki,' he said into his microphone, dangling on his chest, 'what in your mind is the greatest terror facing a time traveler? That there will be an implosion due to coincidence on reentry, such as has occurred in our launch? Or did other traumatic obsessions bother you and your comrade during your own brief but highly successful time flight?'

N. Gauki, after a pause, answered, 'R. Plenya and I exchanged views at several informal times. I believe I can speak for us both when I respond to your question by emphasizing our perpetual fear that we had inadvertently entered a closed time loop and would never break out.'

'You'd repeat it forever?' Addison Doug asked.

'Yes, Mr A. Doug,' the chrononaut said, nodding somberly.

A fear that he had never experienced before overcame Addison Doug. He turned helplessly to Benz and muttered, 's.h.i.+t.' They gazed at each other.

'I really don't believe this is what happened,' Benz said to him in a low voice, putting his hand on Doug's shoulder; he gripped hard, the grip of friends.h.i.+p. 'We just imploded on reentry, that's all. Take it easy.'

'Could we adjourn soon?' Addison Doug said in a hoa.r.s.e, strangling voice, half rising from his chair. He felt the room and the people in it rus.h.i.+ng in at him, suffocating him. Claustrophobia, he realized. Like when I was in grade school, when they flashed a surprise test on our teaching machines, and I saw I couldn't pa.s.s it. 'Please,' he said simply, standing. They were all looking at him, with different expressions. The Russian's face was especially sympathetic, and deeply lined with care. Addison wished - 'I want to go home,' he said to them all, and felt stupid.

He was drunk. It was late at night, at a bar on Hollywood Boulevard; fortunately, Merry Lou was with him, and he was having a good time. Everyone was telling him so, anyhow. He clung to Merry Lou and said, 'The great unity in life, the supreme unity and meaning, is man and woman. Their absolute unity; right?'

'I know,' Merry Lou said. 'We studied that in cla.s.s.' Tonight, at his request, Merry Lou was a small blonde girl, wearing purple bellbottoms and high heels and an open midriff blouse. Earlier she had had a lapis lazuli in her navel, but during dinner at Ting Ho's it had popped out and been lost. The owner of the restaurant had promised to keep on searching for it, but Merry Lou had been gloomy ever since. It was, she said, symbolic. But of what she did not say. Or anyhow he could not remember; maybe that was it. She had told him what it meant, and he had forgotten.

An elegant young black at a nearby table, with an Afro and striped vest and overstuffed red tie, had been staring at Addison for some time. He obviously wanted to come over to their table but was afraid to; meanwhile, he kept on staring.

'Did you ever get the sensation,' Addison said to Merry Lou, 'that you knew exactly what was about to happen? What someone was going to say? Word for word? Down to the slightest detail. As if you had already lived through it once before?'

'Everybody gets into that s.p.a.ce,' Merry Lou said. She sipped a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary.

The black rose and walked toward them. He stood by Addison. 'I'm sorry to bother you, sir.'

Addison said to Merry Lou, 'He's going to say, "Don't I know you from somewhere? Didn't I see you on TV?" '

'That was precisely what I intended to say,' the black said.

Addison said, 'You undoubtedly saw my picture on page forty-six of the current issue of Time Time, the section on new medical discoveries. I'm the GP from a small town in Iowa catapulted to fame by my invention of a widespread, easily available cure for eternal life. Several of the big pharmaceutical houses are already bidding on my vaccine.'

'That might have been where I saw your picture,' the black said, but he did not appear convinced. Nor did he appear drunk; he eyed Addison Doug intensely. 'May I seat myself with you and the lady?'

'Sure,' Addison Doug said. He now saw, in the man's hand, the ID of the US security agency that had ridden herd on the project from the start.

'Mr Doug,' the security agent said as he seated himself beside Addison, 'you really shouldn't be here shooting off your mouth like this. If I recognized you some other dude might and break out. It's all cla.s.sified until the Day of Mourning. Technically, you're in violation of a Federal Statute by being here; did you realize that? I should haul you in. But this is a difficult situation; we don't want to do something uncool and make a scene. Where are your two colleagues?'

'At my place,' Merry Lou said. She had obviously not seen the ID. 'Listen,' she said sharply to the agent, 'why don't you get lost? My husband here has been through a grueling ordeal, and this is his only chance to unwind.'

Addison looked at the man. 'I knew what you were going to say before you came over here.' Word for word, he thought. I am right, and Benz is wrong and this will keep happening, this replay.

'Maybe,' the security agent said, 'I can induce you to go back to Miss Hawkins' place voluntarily. Some info arrived' - he tapped the tiny earphone in his right ear - 'just a few minutes ago, to all of us, to deliver to you, marked urgent, if we located you. At the launch site ruins ... they've been combing through the rubble, you know?'

'I know,' Addison said.

'They think they have their first clue. Something was brought back by one of you. From ETA, over and above what you took, in violation of all your prelaunch training.'

'Let me ask you this,' Addison Doug said. 'Suppose somebody does see me? Suppose somebody does recognize me? So what?'

'The public believes that even though reentry failed, the flight into time, the first American time-travel launch, was successful. Three US tempunauts were thrust a hundred years into the future - roughly twice as far as the Soviet launch of last year. That you only went a week week will be less of a shock if it's believed that you three chose deliberately to remanifest at this continuum because you wished to attend, in fact felt compelled to attend-' will be less of a shock if it's believed that you three chose deliberately to remanifest at this continuum because you wished to attend, in fact felt compelled to attend-'

'We wanted to be in the parade,' Addison interrupted. 'Twice.'

'You were drawn to the dramatic and somber spectacle of your own funeral procession, and will be glimpsed there by the alert camera crews of all major networks. Mr Doug, really, an awful lot of high-level planning and expense have gone into this to help correct a dreadful situation; trust us, believe me. It'll be easier on the public, and that's vital, if there's ever to be another US time shot. And that is, after all, what we all want.'

Addison Doug stared at him. 'We want what?'

Uneasily, the security agent said, 'To take further trips into time. As you have done. Unfortunately, you yourself cannot ever do so again, because of the tragic implosion and death of the three of you. But other tempunauts-'

'We want what? Is that what we want?' Addison's voice rose; people at nearby tables were watching now. Nervously.

'Certainly,' the agent said. 'And keep your voice down.'

'I don't want that,' Addison said. 'I want to stop. To stop forever. To just lie in the ground, in the dust, with everyone else. To see no more summers - the same same summer.' summer.'

'Seen one, you've seen them all,' Merry Lou said hysterically. 'I think he's right, Addi; we should get out of here. You've had too many drinks, and it's late, and this news about the-'

Addison broke in, 'What was brought back? How much extra ma.s.s?'

The security agent said, 'Preliminary a.n.a.lysis shows that machinery weighing about one hundred pounds was lugged back into the time-field of the module and picked up along with you. This much ma.s.s-' The agent gestured. 'That blew up the pad right on the spot. It couldn't begin to compensate for that much more than had occupied its open area at launch time.'

'Wow!' Merry Lou said, eyes wide. 'Maybe somebody sold one of you a quadraphonic phono for a dollar ninetyeight including fifteen-inch air-suspension speakers and a lifetime supply ofNeilDiamond records.' She tried to laugh, but failed; her eyes dimmed over. 'Addi,' she whispered, 'I'm sorry. But it's sort of - weird. I mean, it's absurd; you all were briefed, weren't you, about your return weight? You weren't even to add so much as a piece of paper to what you took. I even saw Dr Fein demonstrating the reasons on TV. And one of you hoisted a hundred pounds of machinery into that field? You must have been trying to self-destruct, to do that!' Tears slid from her eyes; one tear rolled out onto her nose and hung there. He reached reflexively to wipe it away, as if helping a little girl rather than a grown one.

'I'll fly you to the a.n.a.lysis site,' the security agent said, standing up. He and Addison helped Merry Lou to her feet; she trembled as she stood a moment, finis.h.i.+ng her b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. Addison felt acute sorrow for her, but then, almost at once, it pa.s.sed. He wondered why. One can weary even of that, he conjectured. Of caring for someone. If it goes on too long - on and on. Forever. And, at last, even after that, into something no one before, not G.o.d Himself, maybe, had ever had to suffer and in the end, for all His great heart, succ.u.mb to.

As they walked through the crowded bar toward the street, Addison Doug said to the security agent, 'Which one of us-'

'They know which one,' the agent said as he held the door to the street open for Merry Lou. The agent stood, now, behind Addison, signaling for a gray Federal car to land at the red parking area. Two other security agents, in uniform, hurried toward them.