He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen,
before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook
against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.
"Concentrate," Doc said hoarsely. "Concentrate...."
I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of
concentration.
The words "First Edition" were what I was thinking about most.
* * * * *
The heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, "The bullet struck
me as I was pulling on my boot...."
I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite
familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.
Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these
months--time travel.
A thin, sickly man was sprawled in the other chair in a rumpled
dressing gown. My eyes held to his face, his pinpoint pupils and
whitened nose. He was a condemned snowbird! If there was anything I
hated or held in more contempt than tourists or Martians, it was a
snowbird.
"My clients have occasioned singular methods of entry into these
rooms," the thin man remarked, "but never before have they used
instantaneous materialization."
The heavier man was half choking, half laughing. "I say--I say, I would
like to see you explain this, my dear fellow."
"I have no data," the thin man answered coolly. "In such instance, one
begins to twist theories into fact, or facts into theories. I must ask
this unemployed, former professional man who has gone through a serious
illness and is suffering a more serious addiction to tell me the place
and _time_ from which he comes."
The surprise stung. "How did you know?" I asked.
He gestured with a pale hand. "To maintain a logical approach, I must
reject the supernatural. Your arrival, unless hallucinatory--and
despite my voluntary use of one drug and my involuntary experiences
recently with another, I must accept the evidence of my senses or
retire from my profession--your arrival was then super-normal. I might
say super-scientific, of a science not of my or the good doctor's time,
clearly. Time travel is a familiar folk legend and I have been reading
an article by the entertaining Mr. Wells. Perhaps he will expand it
into one of his novels of scientific romance."
I knew who these two men were, with a tormenting doubt. "But the
other--"
"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your
cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my
theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have
suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth.
Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You
are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else
then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary
state?"
* * * * *
He was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I
couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.
"You don't exist," I said slowly, painfully. "You are fictional
creations."
The doctor flushed darkly. "You give my literary agent too much credit
for the addition of professional polish to my works."
The other man was filling a large, curved pipe from something that
looked vaguely like an ice-skate. "Interesting. Perhaps if our visitor
would tell us something of his age with special reference to the theory
and practice of temporal transference, Doctor, we would be better
equipped to judge whether we exist."
There was no theory or practice of time travel. I told them all I had
ever heard theorized from Hindu yoga through Extra-sensory Perception
to Relativity and the positron and negatron.
"Interesting." He breathed out suffocating black clouds of smoke.
"Presume that the people of your time by their 'Extra-sensory
Perception' have altered the past to make it as they suppose it to be.
The great historical figures are made the larger than life-size that we
know them. The great literary creations assume reality."
I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be
the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed
redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the
detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of
unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal.
His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. "Withdrawal
symptoms."
The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building
up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He
was not _really_ a snowbird.
After a time, I asked the doctor a question.
"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my
professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously."
Accepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great
and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.
My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote
in sunlight and stepped toward it....
... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.
* * * * *