"I want to hire you to hunt me up some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain her proper role of silent
secretary. "Time travelers," she said, not very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect, obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the pince-nez glasses and pointed them at
Betty. He said, "Have you read much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are a dozen explanations of the
paradoxes of time travel. Every writer in the field worth his salt has
explained them away. But to get on. It's my contention that within a
century or so man will have solved the problems of immortality and
eternal youth, and it's also my suspicion that he will eventually be
able to travel in time. So convinced am I of these possibilities that I
am willing to gamble a portion of my fortune to investigate the presence
in our era of such time travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying the ball this morning, so Betty said,
"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the future has developed time travel why don't
we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of twenty-five years ago and shot
Hitler, then all subsequent history would be changed. In that case, the
time traveler himself might never be born. They have to tread mighty
carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't expect you to be so well informed on
the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled again with the aspirin bottle.
* * * * *
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been considering the matter for some time
and--"
Simon held up a hand. "There's no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other--any manner will do--exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure the future will have
discovered. You're willing to pony up a part of this fortune of yours,
if I can deliver a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find one of these characters--especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again. "I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The _Oktoberfest_, that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The _Oktoberfest_," he repeated. "The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival, _feria_, _fiesta_ to beat them all. Every year
it's held in Munich. Makes the New Orleans Mardi gras look like a
quilting party." He began to swing into the spirit of his description.
"It originally started in celebration of the wedding of some local
prince a century and a half ago and the Bavarians had such a bang-up
time they've been holding it every year since. The Munich breweries do
up a special beer, _Marzenbräu_ they call it, and each brewery opens a
tremendous tent on the fair grounds which will hold five thousand
customers apiece. Millions of liters of beer are put away, hundreds of
thousands of barbecued chickens, a small herd of oxen are roasted whole
over spits, millions of pair of _weisswurst_, a very special sausage,
millions upon millions of pretzels--"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept it. The _Oktoberfest_ is one
whale of a wingding."
* * * * *
"Well," the old boy pursued, into his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the _Oktoberfest_. For one thing, a time traveler
wouldn't be conspicuous. At a festival like this somebody with a strange
accent, or who didn't know exactly how to wear his clothes correctly, or
was off the ordinary in any of a dozen other ways, wouldn't be noticed.
You could be a four-armed space traveler from Mars, and you still
wouldn't be conspicuous at the _Oktoberfest_. People would figure they
had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler want to go to a--" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity to study a people than when they are
in their cups? If _you_ could go back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites of
Dionysus, or one of Alexander's orgies. You wouldn't want to wander up
and down the streets of, say, Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not knowing how to wear the clothes
and not familiar with the city's layout." He took a deep breath. "No
ma'am, you'd have to stick to some great event, both for the sake of
actual interest and for protection against being unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well, that's the story. What are your rates?
The _Oktoberfest_ starts on Friday and continues for sixteen days. You
can take the plane to Munich, spend a week there and--"