* * * * *
My fear evaporated instantly--I'd escaped somehow!
But then a couple of realizations slapped me from each side. It was
day instead of night. I was out on the street and not in her
brownstone house.
Even the season had changed!
Dazed, I stared at the people passing by. They looked like characters
in a TV movie, the women wearing long dresses and flowerpot hats,
their faces made up with petulant rosebud mouths and bright blotches
of rouge; the men in hard straw hats, suits with narrow shoulders,
plain black or brown shoes--the same kind of clothes I was wearing.
The rumble of traffic in the street caught me next. Cars with square
bodies, tubular radiators....
For a moment, I let terror soak through me. Then I remembered the
mesh cage and the motors. May Roberts could have given me
electro-shock, kept me under long enough for the season to change, or
taken me South and left me on a street in daylight.
But this was a street in New York. I recognized it, though some of the
buildings seemed changed, the people dressed more shabbily.
Shrewd stagesetting? Hypnosis?
That was it, of course! She'd hypnotized me....
Except that a subject under hypnosis doesn't know he's been
hypnotized.
Completely confused, I took out the stack of envelopes I'd put in my
pocket. I was supposed to have both cash and a bank account, and I was
outside a bank. She obviously wanted me to go in, so I did. I handed
the top envelope to the teller.
He hauled $150 out of it and looked at me as if that was enough to buy
and sell the bank. He asked me if I had an account there. I didn't. He
took me over to an officer of the bank, a fellow with a Hoover collar
and a John Gilbert mustache, who signed me up more cordially than I'd
been treated in years.
I walked out to the street, gaping at the entry in the bankbook he'd
handed me. My pulse was jumping lumpily, my lungs refusing to work
right, my head doing a Hopi rain dance.
The date he'd stamped was May 15, 1931.
* * * * *
I didn't know which I was more afraid of--being stranded, middle-aged,
in the worst of the depression, or being yanked back to that
brownstone house. I had only an instant to realize that I was a kid in
high school uptown right at that moment. Then the whole scene vanished
as fast as blinking and I was outside another bank somewhere else in
the city.
The date on the envelope was May 29th and it was still 1931. I made a
$75 deposit there, then $100 in another place a few days later, and so
forth, spending only a few minutes each time and going forward
anywhere from a couple of days to almost a month.
Every now and then, I had a stamped, addressed envelope to mail at a
corner box. They were addressed to different stock brokers and when I
got one open before mailing it and took a look inside, it turned out
to be an order to buy a few hundred shares of stock in a soft drink
company in the name of Dr. Anthony Roberts. I hadn't remembered the
price of the shares being that low. The last time I'd seen the
quotation, it was more than five times as much as it was then. I was
making dough myself, but I was doing even better for May Roberts.
A few times I had to stay around for an hour or so. There was the
night I found myself in a flashy speakeasy with two envelopes that I
was to bet the contents of, according to the instructions on the
outside. It was June 21, 1932, and I had to bet on Jack Sharkey to
take the heavyweight title away from Max Schmeling.
The place was serious and quiet--no more than three women, a couple of
bartenders, and the rest male customers, including two cops, huddling
up close to the radio. An affable character was taking bets. He gave
me a wise little smile when I put the money down on Sharkey.
"Well, it's a pleasure to do business with a man who wants an American
to win," he said, "and the hell with the smart dough, eh?"
"Yeah," I said, and tried to smile back, but so much of the smart
money was going on Schmeling that I wondered if May Roberts hadn't
made a mistake. I couldn't remember who had won. "You know what J. P.
Morgan said--don't sell America short."
"I'll take a buck for my share," said a sour guy who barely managed to
stand. "Lousy grass growing in the lousy streets, nobody working, no
future, nothing!"
"We'll come out of it okay," I told him confidently.
He snorted into his gin. "Not in our lifetime, Mac. It'd take a
miracle to put this country on its feet again. I don't believe in
miracles." He put his scowling face up close to mine and breathed
blearily and belligerently at me. "Do you?"
"Shut up, Gus," one of the bartenders said. "The fight's starting."
* * * * *
I had some tough moments and a lot of bad Scotch, listening. It went
the whole 15 rounds, Sharkey won, and I was in almost as bad shape as
Gus, who'd passed out halfway through the battle. All I can recall is
the affable character handing over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for
me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the
money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes,
while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was
outside a bank again.
I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I
hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit.
There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets
to put down on Singing Wood in 1933 at Belmont Park and Max Baer over
Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in 1934, and
James Braddock over Baer in 1935, and a big daily double payoff,
Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years
like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few
minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and
myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The
envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued
interest were something to watch grow.
The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of
1938--a total of maybe four or five hours subjectively--before I
realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact
that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though
the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My
father and mother, for instance, were still alive in 1938. If I could
break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through
time, I could go and see them.
The thought attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent,
yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again
and I didn't dare. I couldn't....
_Why_ couldn't I?
Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks,
speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area,
whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May
Roberts had lined up for me.
Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits
and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The
ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it _was_ fresh; it
wasn't given a chance to oxidize--at the rate I was going, I'd be back
to my own time in another few hours or so, with $15,000 or better in
deposits, compound interest and cash.
If I'd been around 70, you see, she could have sent me back to the
beginning of the century with the same amount of money, which would
have accumulated to something like $30,000.
Get it now?