"That's all. It ends there."
"Well.... Aren't you...?"
Vyrko felt strange. Holt had described his feelings so precisely. He
was at peace and still curious, and the thought of Kirth-Labbery's
escape method did nibble restlessly at his brain.
He rose and sauntered into the laboratory, Lavra following him. He drew
back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. It was hard to
see the control board that seemed to control nothing. He sat in the
chair for a better look.
He made puzzled grunting noises. Lavra, her curiosity finally stirred
by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green
button.
* * * * *
Vyrko had no time for amazement when Lavra and the laboratory vanished.
He saw the archaic vehicle bearing down directly upon him and tried to
get out of the way as rapidly as possible. But the chair hampered him
and before he could get to his feet the vehicle struck. There was a red
explosion of pain and then a long blackness.
He later recalled a moment of consciousness at the hospital and a
shrill female voice repeating over and over, "But he wasn't there and
then all of a sudden he was and I hit him. It was like he came out of
nowhere. He wasn't there and all of a sudden...." Then the blackness
came back.
All the time of his unconsciousness, all through the semi-conscious
nightmares while doctors probed at him and his fever soared, his
unconscious mind must have been working on the problem. He knew the
complete answer the instant that he saw the paper on his breakfast
tray, that first day he was capable of truly seeing anything.
The paper was easy to read for a paleolinguist with special training
in _pulps_--easier than the curious concept of breakfast was to
assimilate. What mattered was the date. 1948--and the headlines
refreshed his knowledge of the Cold War and the impending election.
(There was something he should remember about that election....)
He saw it clearly. Kirth-Labbery's genius had at last evolved a time
machine. That was the one escape, the escape which the scientist had
not yet tested and rather distrusted. And Lavra had poked the green
button because Norbert Holt had said she had poked (would poke?) the
green button.
How many buttons could a wood poke poke if a wood poke would poke....
"The breakfast didn't seem to agree with him, doctor."
"Maybe it was the paper. Makes me run a temperature every morning, too!"
"Oh, doctor, you do say the funniest things!"
"Nothing funnier than this case. Total amnesia, as best we can judge by
his lucid moments. And his clothes don't help us--must've been on his
way to a fancy-dress party. Or maybe I should say fancy-_un_dress!"
"Oh, _doctor_!"
"Don't tell me nurses can blush. Never did when I was an intern--and
you can't say they didn't get a chance! But this character here ... not
a blessed bit of identification on him! Riding some kind of newfangled
bike that got smashed up.... Better hold off on the solid food for a
bit--stick to intravenous feeding."
* * * * *
He'd had this trouble before at ritual dinners, Vyrko finally recalled.
Meat was apt to affect him badly--the trouble was that he had not at
first recognized those odd strips of oily solid which accompanied the
egg as meat.
The adjustment was gradual and successful, in this as in other
matters. At the end of two weeks, he was eating meat easily (and, he
confessed, with a faintly obscene non-ritual pleasure) and equally
easily chatting with nurses and fellow patients about the events (which
he still privately tended to regard as mummified museum pieces) of 1948.
His adjustment, in fact, was soon so successful that it could not
continue. The doctor made that clear.
"Got to think about the future, you know. Can't keep you here forever.
Nasty unreasonable prejudice against keeping well men in hospitals."
Vyrko allowed the expected laugh to come forth. "But since," he said,
gladly accepting the explanation that was so much more credible than
the truth, "I haven't any idea who I am, where I live, or what my
profession is--"
"Can't remember anything? Don't know if you can take shorthand, for
instance? Or play the bull fiddle?"
"Not a thing." Vyrko felt it hardly worth while to point out his
one manual accomplishment, the operation of the as-yet-uninvented
electronic typewriter.
"Behold," he thought, "the Man of the Future. I've read all the time
travel stories. I know what should happen. I teach them everything
Kirth-Labbery knew and I'm the greatest man in the world. Only the
fictional time travel never happens to a poor dope who took for granted
all the science around him, who pushed a button or turned a knob and
never gave a damn what happened or why. Here they're just beginning
to get two-dimensional black-and-white short-range television. We had
(will have?) stereoscopic full-color world-wide video--which I'm about
as capable of constructing here as my friend the doctor would be of
installing electric light in Ancient Rome. The Mouse of the Future...."
The doctor had been thinking, too. He said, "Notice you're a great
reader. Librarian's been telling me about you--went through the whole
damn hospital library like a bookworm with a tapeworm!"
Vyrko laughed dutifully. "I like to read," he admitted.
"Ever try writing?" the doctor asked abruptly, almost in the tone in
which he might reluctantly advise a girl that her logical future lay in
Port Saïd.
This time Vyrko really laughed. "That does seem to ring a bell, you
know.... It might be worth trying. But at that, what do I live on until
I get started?"
"Hospital trustees here administer a rehabilitation fund. Might wangle
a loan. Won't be much, of course; but I always say a single man's got
only one mouth to feed--and if he feeds more, he won't be single long!"
"A little," said Vyrko with a glance at the newspaper headlines, "might
go a long way."
* * * * *
It did. There was the loan itself, which gave him a bank account on
which, in turn, he could acquire other short-term loans--at exorbitant
interest. And there was the election.
He had finally reconstructed what he should know about it. There had
been a brilliant Wheel-of-If story in one of the much later pulps,
on _If_ the Republicans had won the 1948 election. Which meant that
actually they had lost; and here, in October of 1948, all newspapers,
all commentators, and most important, all gamblers, were convinced that
they must infallibly win.
On Wednesday, November third, Vyrko repaid his debts and settled
down to his writing career, comfortably guaranteed against immediate
starvation.
A half-dozen attempts at standard fiction failed wretchedly. A matter
of "tone," editors remarked vaguely, on the rare occasions when they
did not confine themselves to the even vaguer phrases of printed
rejection forms. A little poetry sold--"if you can call that selling,"
Vyrko thought bitterly, comparing the financial position of the poet
here and in his own world.
His failures were beginning to bring back the bitterness and boredom,
and his thoughts turned more and more to that future to which he could
never know the answer.
_Twins._ It had to be twins--of opposite sexes, of course. The only
hope of the continuance of the race lay in a matter of odds and
genetics.
Odds.... He began to think of the election bet, to figure other angles
with which he could turn foreknowledge to profit. But his pulp-reading
had filled his mind with fears of the paradoxes involved. He had
calculated the election bets carefully; they could not affect the
outcome of the election, they could not even, in their proportionately
small size, affect the odds. But any further step....
Vyrko was, like most conceited men, fond of self-contempt, which he
felt he could occasionally afford to indulge in. Possibly his strongest
access of self-contempt came when he realized the simplicity of the
solution to all his problems.
He could write for the science fiction pulps.
The one thing that he could handle convincingly and skilfully, with the
proper "tone," was the future. Possibly start off with a story on the
Religious Wars; he'd done all that research on his novel. Then....
It was not until he was about to mail the manuscript that the full
pattern of the truth struck him.
Soberly, yet half-grinning, he crossed out KIRTH VYRKO on the first
page and wrote NORBERT HOLT.
* * * * *
Manning Stern rejoiced loudly in this fresh discovery. "This boy's
got it! He makes it sound so real that...." The business office was
instructed to pay the highest bonus rate (unheard of for a first story)
and an intensely cordial letter went to the author outlining immediate
needs and offering certain story suggestions.
The editor of _Surprising_ was no little surprised at the answer:
... I regret to say that all my stories will be based on one
consistent scheme of future events and that you must allow me to
stick to my own choice of material....
* * * * *
"And who the hell," Manning Stern demanded, "is editing this magazine?"
and dictated a somewhat peremptory suggestion for a personal interview.
The features were small and sharp, and the face had a sort of dark
aliveness. It was a different beauty from Lavra's, and an infinitely
different beauty from the curious standards set by the 1949 films; but
it was beauty and it spoke to Norbert Holt.
"You'll forgive a certain surprise, Miss Stern," he ventured. "I've
read _Surprising_ for so many years and never thought...."
Manning Stern grinned. "That the editor was also surprising? I'm used
to it--your reaction, I mean. I don't think I'll ever be quite used to
being a woman ... or a human being, for that matter."
"Isn't it rather unusual? From what I know of the field...."
"Please God, when I find a man who can write, don't let him go all
male-chauvinist on me! I'm a good editor," said she with becoming
modesty (and don't you ever forget it!), "and I'm a good scientist. I
even worked on the Manhattan Project--until some character discovered
that my adopted daughter was a Spanish War orphan. But what we're here
to talk about is this consistent-scheme gimmick of yours. It's all
right, of course; it's been done before. But where I frankly think
you're crazy is in planning to do it _exclusively_."
Norbert Holt opened his briefcase. "I've brought along an outline that
might help convince you...."
An hour later Manning Stern glanced at her watch and announced, "End of
office hours! Care to continue this slugfest over a martini or five? I
warn you--the more I'm plied, the less pliant I get."
And an hour after that she stated, "We might get some place if we'd
stay some place. I mean the subject seems to be getting elusive."
"The hell," Norbert Holt announced recklessly, "with editorial
relations. Let's get back to the current state of the opera."
"It was paintings. I was telling you about the show at the--"
"No, I remember now. It was movies. You were trying to explain the Marx
Brothers. Unsuccessfully, I may add."
"Un ... suc ... cess ... fully," said Manning Stern ruminatively. "Five
martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. But I try to
explain the Marx Brothers yet! Look, Holt. I've got a subversive orphan
at home and she's undoubtedly starving. I've _got_ to feed her. You
come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?"
"Good. Fine. Always like to try a new dish."
Manning Stern looked at him curiously. "Now was that a gag or not?
You're funny, Holt. You know a lot about everything and then all of a
sudden you go all Man-from-Mars on the simplest thing. Or do you...?
Anyway, let's go feed Raquel."
And five hours later Holt was saying, "I never thought I'd have this
reason for being glad I sold a story. Manning, I haven't had so much
fun talking to--I almost said 'to a woman.' I haven't had so much fun
talking since--"
He had almost said _since the agnoton came_. She seemed not to notice
his abrupt halt. She simply said "Bless you, Norb. Maybe you aren't a
male-chauvinist. Maybe even you're.... Look, go find a subway or a cab
or something. If you stay here another minute, I'm either going to kiss
you or admit you're right about your stories--and I don't know which is
worse editor-author relations."
* * * * *
Manning Stern committed the second breach of relations first. The fan
mail on Norbert Holt's debut left her no doubt that _Surprising_ would
profit by anything he chose to write about.
She'd never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity.
Or rather you could hardly say _rise_. Holt hit the top with his first
story and stayed there. He socked the fans (Guest of Honor at the
Washinvention), the pros (first President of Science Fiction Writers of
America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science
fiction book to stay three months on the best seller list).
And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work
with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent
it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something
odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with
him, talking about this, that and those.... Raquel, just turning
sixteen, was quite obviously in love with him--praying that he'd have
the decency to stay single till she grew up and "You know, Manningcita,
I _am_ Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls...."
But there _was_ this occasional feeling of _oddness_. Like the potluck
and the illogical keyboard and that night at SCWA....
"I've got a story problem," Norbert Holt announced there. "An idea, and
I can't lick it. Maybe if I toss it out to the literary lions...."
"Story problem?" Manning said, a little more sharply than she'd
intended. "I thought everything was outlined for the next ten years."
"This is different. This is a sort of paradox story, and I can't get
out of it. It won't end. Something like this: Suppose a man in the
remote year X reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine.
So he works the time machine and goes back to the year X minus
2000--let's say, for instance, our time. So in 'now' he writes the
story that he's going to read two thousand years later, telling himself
how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he
read the story which he wrote because--"
Manning was starting to say "Hold it!" when Matt Duncan interrupted
with, "Good old endless-cycle gimmick. Lot of fun to kick around, but
Bob Heinlein did it once and for all in _By His Bootstraps_. Damnedest
tour de force I ever read; there just aren't any switcheroos left."
"Ouroboros," Joe Henderson contributed.
Norbert Holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per
evening was Joe's maximum contribution.
Austin Carter picked it up. "Ouroboros, the worm, that circles
the universe with its tail in its mouth. The Asgard Serpent, too.
And I think there's something in Mayan literature. All symbols of
infinity--no beginning, no ending. Always out by the same door where
you went in. See that magnificent novel of Eddison's, _The Worm
Ouroboros_; the perfect cyclic novel, ending with its recommencement,
stopping not because there's a stopping place, but because it's
uneconomical to print the whole text over infinitely."
"The Quaker Oats box," said Duncan. "With a Quaker holding a box with a
Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a...."
It was standard professional shop-talk. It was a fine evening with the
boys. But there was a look of infinitely remote sadness in Norbert
Holt's eyes.
That was the evening that Manning violated her first rule of
editor-author relationships.
* * * * *
They were having martinis in the same bar in which Norbert had, so many
years ago, successfully said _unsuccessfully_.
"They've been good years," he remarked, apparently to the olive.
There was something wrong with this evening. No bounce. No yumph.
"That's a funny tense," Manning confided to her own olive. "Aren't they
still good years?"
"I've owed you a serious talk for a long time."
"You don't have to pay the debt. We don't go in much for being serious,
do we? Not so dead-earnest-catch-in-the-throat serious."
"Don't we?"
"I've got an awful feeling," Manning admitted, "that you're building up
to a proposal, either to me or that olive. And if it's me, I've got an
awful feeling I'm going to accept--and Raquel will _never_ forgive me."
"You're safe," Norbert said dryly. "That's the serious talk. I want to
marry you, darling, and I'm not going to."
"I suppose this is the time you twirl your black mustache and tell me
you have a wife and family elsewhere?"
"I hope to God I have!"
"No, it wasn't very funny, was it?" Manning felt very little, aside
from wishing she were dead.
"I can't tell you the truth," he went on. "You wouldn't believe it.
I've loved two women before; one had talent and a brain, the other
had beauty and no brain. I think I loved her. The damnedest curse of
Ouroboros is that I'll never quite know. If I could take that tail out
of that mouth...."
"Go on," she encouraged a little wildly. "Talk plot-gimmicks. It's
easier on me."
"And she is carrying ... will carry ... my child--my children, it must
be. My twins...."
"Look, Holt. We came in here editor and author--remember back when?
Let's go out that way. Don't go on talking. I'm a big girl, but I
can't take ... everything. It's been fun knowing you and all future
manuscripts will be gratefully received."
"I knew I couldn't say it. I shouldn't have tried. But there won't be
any future manuscripts. I've written every Holt I've ever read."
"Does that make sense?" Manning aimed the remark at the olive, but it
was gone. So was the martini.
"Here's the last." He took it out of his breast-pocket, neatly folded.
"The one we talked about at SCWA--the one I couldn't end. Maybe you'll
understand. I wanted somehow to make it clear before...."
The tone of his voice projected a sense of doom, and Manning forgot
everything else. "Is something going to happen to you? Are you going
to--Oh, my dear, _no_! All right, so you, have a wife on every space
station in the asteroid belt; but if anything happens to you...."
"I don't know," said Norbert Holt. "I can't remember the exact date of
that issue...." He rose abruptly. "I shouldn't have tried a goodbye.
See you again, darling--the next time round Ouroboros."
She was still staring at the empty martini glass when she heard the
shrill of brakes and the excited up-springing of a crowd outside.
* * * * *
She read the posthumous fragment late that night, after her eyes had
dried sufficiently to make the operation practicable. And through her
sorrow her mind fought to help her, making her think, making her be an
editor.
She understood a little and disbelieved what she understood. And
underneath she prodded herself, "But it isn't a _story_. It's too
short, too inconclusive. It'll just disappoint the Holt fans--and
that's everybody. Much better if I do a straight obit, take up a full
page on it...."
She fought hard to keep on thinking, not feeling. She had never before
experienced so strongly the I-have-been-here-before sensation. She
had been faced with this dilemma once before, once on some other
time-spiral, as the boys in SCWA would say. And her decision had
been....
"It's sentimentality," she protested. "It isn't _editing_. This
decision's right. I know it. And if I go and get another of these
attacks and start to change my mind...."
She laid the posthumous Holt fragment on the coals. It caught fire
quickly.
* * * * *
The next morning Raquel greeted her with, "Manningcita, who's Norbert
Holt?"
Manning had slept so restfully that she was even tolerant of foolish
questions at breakfast. "Who?" she asked.
"Norbert Holt. Somehow the name popped into my mind. Is he perhaps one
of your writers?"
"Never heard of him."
Raquel frowned. "I was almost sure.... Can you really remember them
all? I'm going to check those bound volumes of _Surprising_."
"Any luck with your ... what was it...? Holt?" Manning asked the girl a
little later.
"No, Manningcita. I was quite unsuccessful."
... _unsuccessful_.... Now why in Heaven's name, mused Manning Stern,
should I be thinking of martinis at breakfast time?