He grins at me. "And we may have to do it again a few times," he says.
By now I know him pretty well, I think--or maybe I dreamed I know him;
I'm not sure. Anyway, I give him the two beers and wait for him to get
around to telling me whatever is on his mind.
He goes through the same act as before--only I can't be sure he did go
through the act or I dreamed he did. "Beer for the house," he yells.
"Take it easy," I cautions. "Take it easy, Rabelais."
"You never called me by my first name before, did you, Mike?"
I open my mouth to remind him that he told me to back in 1953 and then
I remember it is 1953. That confuses me because I remember, too, that
in 1954 I was--or maybe it's that I'm going to be--mayor. I just close
my mouth and wait.
Rabelais takes his time. When the early rush clears out, he gets me
off to one end of the bar and says, "Sorry to keep you waiting, Mike,
but we have to do it all over again."
"Then it wasn't a dream?"
"No dream," he says.
"But everything was going fine."
"Up to a point," he says. "Up to the sixties."
Then he explains the way his machine works. But all I get out of what
he says is that there's a law of probability so he can't go back and
shoot his grandfather when the old man is a boy or juggle stocks in
'47 to pay off and make him rich in '53 and things like that. That is
why he wouldn't let us go back into the past. He was afraid we would
do something to change history and--bingo.
And he wouldn't let us go into the future very far because up a way
the atom bomb gets loose and it is awfully sad to see and dangerous
besides.
"That was in the sixties," he says. "Or will be in the sixties. Only I
got it figured out so it won't be, Mike."
It's over my head; I just keep on waiting.
He explains that he made a pile of dough in the near future by betting
on horse races and cleaning out a few bookies and investing his
winnings in stocks he knew were going up (and in fact they wouldn't
have gone up if he hadn't looked into the future and known they would
so he could go back and buy them) and anyway, he figured the exact day
it would be safe to start and so he did.
"Only," he says, "we made a mistake by making you mayor and then
congressman. I have it figured out for you to be congressman right
from the start--in fifty-four. That gives you two extra years of
seniority on Congress and so when the chips are down you have a little
more pull."
"Fine," I says and start to take off my apron.
"The thing is," he explains, "there are a couple of lunkheads in
Congress that get super-patriotic and they're the ones who cause the
trouble with the bomb getting loose." He leans over the bar and looks
real serious at me. "And you," he goes on, "are the one who stops them
before they get started."
"Me? Me, Mike Murphy?"
"You," he says. "We just go on a different time track from the one we
tried before. And this one ought to work." He gives me his grin. "You
should see the history books about the year 2000. You're a real
national hero, Mike."