Caltraps of Time (20 page)

I did not. I got back to my place.

The next time I called in at the con-recon to report progress was a month later, after which I stayed for a snack and gossip in the canteen. Opposite me was a man more than twice my age. His get-up, though obviously an attempt at current fashion, was somehow subtly wrong. I introduced myself. He bobbed his head sideways once or twice but made no other move. ‘Redging,’ he murmured.

‘Where are you from?’ I said.

‘Print-in. Just returned up back out of the Zonio.’

‘Then you belong here?’

‘Belong? Oh, exact. But not this time-belt. Had quite a run Below. You’re a placey way prior to me; unless you’re a para too?’

‘Para? No, no, I’m an imprint — edition is it? — from Down Under. Only been here a few weeks.’

‘Down Under? Oh, you intention Below?’

‘I suppose so. The other, er, universum. You’ve had a lot of experience, then?’

‘Guess out you could expression it this way. Happy to be on this present decade, believe me!’

‘How did you get to this point of time, then? I don’t get it.’

‘Making the decades Below, of course. Printed out of way to head of you. Things here were off, very off; decisioned trying out Below. Not much change. More and more off. See you don’t credit me? I was a babe when printed. Besides along of this, I took in a rejuvenation course. Suspensioned eight months on it. Worth it for a ten years’ minusing.’

‘Why did you come back?’

‘History. Knew the Golden Age was on this present time-belt, high prior to was born. Sold down on most of my clobber, buyed in on a reprint for myself, and zing, here to love it!’

‘What was the world like? When you left it Below, I mean.’

‘You’re requesting in for me to information you on the future, do I receive your message?’

‘I’d like to know what’s coming to us, certainly.’

He shot me a wary eyeful. ‘I don’t motivation like informationing you in upon this. Not cert they permission it here. If you want in for finding it out, you’ll have to make the decades here first. Negation, you won’t, you’re a patanthrope, a Belower, didn’t you announce?’

‘I’m a print-off, yes, or whatever you, er, call it.’

‘No joy then, you won’t see it back Below, you’d be out onto the past. Still, if you live it on just here, you’ll see our version. Much the same. Adhesion down onto it some thirty years and you’ll see what I got out from out of.’

‘You mightn’t find
this
time so wonderful after all. Are you going straight out into it?’

‘Negation. They want in for me to stop off in mid of them a pair of months in minimum. They say my speechways necessitate revisioning.’

‘I do find it difficult to understand you, rather; and you must find
me
a bit difficult?’

‘I home approx onto most of your program, but it has me extrapolating up on areas. Very old metal, it rings to me. But too, they opinion I’ll have to get accustomated to the spaciousness, the hand-waggings, the do-it-yourself, the mechanism-poverty, the go-out-and-get, the quiet.’

‘They do, do they?’

A tiny buzzer sounded from somewhere near his open collar. ‘Excuse, have to home in on an appointmentation.’ And he was gone. I stared thoughtfully into my cup of citron tea. My appetite had vanished, I found. I did a little diagram with my spoon handle on the tablecloth. If I reprinted without staying long, his very much wow-Golden Age would be in full swing in my own anageon before I reached middle age, and get ‘more and more off’ as I got really old; unless of course the two worlds developed differently, and evidently they didn’t, as far as general outlines went. If I ‘adhesioned down’ in this world, on the other hand, I would reach middle age about the time he was goaded into leaving it. Of course it was true I hadn’t met, or heard of, a vast horde of reprints refugeeing from the future, from either world; I had only met him. Perhaps he was biased, a misfit. Still, he’d deliberately stuck it out for thirty years more just in order to get back to my time (and taken advantage of some kind of youthifying procedure). And maybe not many people were free to face the problems of printing off and making a new life for decades on purpose to skip back thirty or forty years in history? I mean, Golden Age or no Golden Age, they had families, safe jobs and so on.

By this time the tablecloth was getting illegibly wrinkled, and my citron tea and Guelph rarebit were both cold. I left. Outside, the news vendors’ placards proclaimed DOCTORS STRIKE OVER DRINK-TEST DECASUALIZATION. A headline in the paper said, MERITA: LORD’S STRIKERS DEMAND TRIPLE HOLIDAY PAY. As a result of the hoof and snout epidemic, Tribish meat prices were rising to those current in the Modern Carcass. I dropped into the nearest bar and ordered a volga-and-skoda. Who should I see there but one of the Johns. He had his badge off, so I couldn’t tell which.

‘You know,’ he said in an undertone over our third round, ‘the Crippen Paxton has just turned up. Guess where it was.’

‘Not the faintest.’

‘In the patacosm, of course. Only they found the same thing happened there, so they got scared and brought it back. Then they mailed it to the Minster from an alienist address.’

‘How did it get past the computer and all that?’

‘Hand luggage, and a load of influence. All the same, crime doesn’t pay up in the con-recon business.’

I looked at him covertly out of the corner of my eye.

‘...by the Western Symphonic Orchestra, conductor Desto Weniger,’ said the radio’s cultured tones. Someone hastily switched to pop.

‘How are you making on? I’ve seen you in the Centre rather a deal.’

‘I don’t find it easy to fall in step with this world. I like to have a base of operations where I won’t put my foot in it so much.’

‘You mean, you like to have a foot on the ground where you won’t put a leg wrong, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so. I can’t get quite in tune with your world.’

‘For a pata you’re doing all right. You need to be bolder, man, step on a bit. It’s no use waiting for Doggo. You must grasp the bush by the thorns.’

After this evening I tried to take his advice. I started to take the girls out at the office. They thought I was a bit old-fashioned, and not only about sex. But it seemed to increase my fascination for them (or as it has recently become the misleading fashion to say,
their
fascination for
me!).
I guess they thought I was something of a poppet, something that wanted showing around.

I was sitting at a cafe table waiting for Thoria to turn up and idly scanning the evening paper. A Triton Nationalist in Nimportou had written an open letter of challenge to Le Gode. Jack Dammet in the Treasury said there would be no tax relief for stricken doctors’ families, but three words would end the bank lock-out. A neo-nazi resurgence was reported at Irrstadt. The expulsion from Eden was in full swing; sniping had begun again from the organization Es Seif (The Sword), and a Tribish soldier in Eden was heard to say ‘That flaming Sword’ll have us out without any breakfast.’ A carriageful of football supporters, who had done five thousand pounds’ worth of damage on the train, was given a police escort to a match. At the Union (Enosis) debate, General Stivas declared his faith in a communion of faiths, but the Imam Paysel asserted that the Orthodox had no place in the island; interviewed later, however, on
48 Hours,
General Stivas said that the Imam’s brinkmanship in bringing up a host had outraged Orthodox Catholics throughout the world. Interviewed on TV again, Kurdish students said the only way to peace was war. Meanwhile back in Tribain, the Forward-Drivers’ party in power, imposing a go-slow economy after invalidation of the pound, refused coalition with the Brakes-On party in a National Cybernation, even if the go-slow policy should bring the country to a standstill.

‘Having bad dreamsies, sonny boy?’ said Thoria’s voice in my ear. ‘Don’t you know your old mum, then? Snap out of it, for Hell’s sake!’

She was wearing an aquamarine wig, some beads, a lot of
decollation
(as they called it here) — in her case it amounted to what they called deep ‘declivity’ — and a mega-skirt apparently made of Scotchlite, slit at the side nearly to navel height. I found the effect rather terrifying. After a few drinks and the beginning of a meal, however, I felt I was afloat all right even if it was out of my depth.

‘Tell you what — how around the Dizzique tonight?’ she said a little later.

‘I thought somewhere quieter.’

‘Not in your life, sonny boy. It’s the lights and the music for me.’

The Dizzique was crowded. We were out on the floor at once. Thoria’s mega didn’t seem to hobble her much. In between bouts, an eternity and a half later, she suddenly waved across the room and yanked me over. There, quite at ease in spite of his age, was one of the Johns. ‘Hi, Johnnyo!’ cried Thoria. ‘Meet Ian.’

John blinked his eyes at me, a sign I took to mean ‘Don’t recognize me’ (although it might have had something to do with the ‘Ian’) and held out his hand. ‘Just came in,’ he said to Thoria, and to me, ‘What’ll you have?’

To Thoria he gave her usual, to me and himself a volga-and-skoda. Was it the same John I’d met in that pub? He started a long inconsequential chatter to Thoria, fed me the odd sentence, asked me what I thought of the place, told a few funny stories, and faded out suddenly, said he had to dog a man.

Next time Thoria and I made an evening of it, she again suggested the Dizzique. John was there before us, presumably the same John; anyway, he greeted us like long-lost friends, and half an hour later swept us into his autobil and along to his place, a high flat in the middle of town. Plenty of jazz and booze, rather flashy decor. When we left he invited us to a party there six weeks later.

The news went on as usual. Human Wrongs Year opened. The Emperor of Helas was found AWOL by a tribunal of his generals. A plebiscite of the Divided Nations vetoed the vote of Algebra Tariff to stay with Tribain. The Aldborough airport project was shelved, to the relief of naturalists of the Ouse Conservancy Society; the Stampead Airport was abandoned, and a pressure group started campaigning for one at Thames-mead. Clannie and Boyd fashions became the ‘rave’, as they called it; even Thoria, who was a bit independent, tried them. Some trawlers were lost off Cecily and some submarines off Islandia, where there was a very nasty earthquake. The Tip Tribain movement got a lot of publicity and so did the landscaping Operation Cleanup, but somehow I never seemed to see either of them in actual practice, except that a lot of replacement parts for Tribish gadgets became unobtainable, because they turned out to be made abroad. The hero of the Winter Olympiads was Milly, until threatened with deprival as an alleged professional. The Chemico Olympiads, however, were to be boycotted by South Capricorn and Tuba because yellow Capricorn states were taking part. H. Wilson the ‘Great Brain’ robber, now wearing a beard, was arrested in Candia.

Thoria, despite luminous eyelashes, was a bit quiet and moody going along to the party. There was a lot of music and some dancing going on. John, who was talking on one side with a bulky man with a bullet head, and a thin man with a bluish jaw, came over with both hands outstretched, kissed Thoria, pulled me into a group of drinkers and disappeared with Thoria. I was a bit mad, but two of the drinkers were real dazzlers of girls, and I found it easy to keep my eyes on them. One was introduced as Cat — it turned out later her name was Catriocia, pronounced Katrisha. She was black-haired (shortcut), pale and petite, with a little black shift and delicious bare arms. The other was one of the two Mays from the party at the con-recon, but transformed by an orange hairdo — unless it was a wig — and a lot more good-looking than I remembered her. She gave no sign of recognition, but was quite amiable. After being rather thrown around by Thoria it was a nice change to find I was making a hit with Cat. The rest of the group gradually melted away and we started an earnest talk on the sofa. Out of the tail of my eye I saw John — if it was the same John? — making little signs to the thin man across the room. The thin man slipped out and I went on exchanging views about life with Cat. I was already in a sort of trance. I was an iron filing and she was the magnet. I hardly looked up when Thoria tripped over my feet, on her way across the room with the bulky man. They went on. I started showing Cat around the flat a couple of Nirvanas later, and we passed the thin man and Thoria at the telephone in earnest talk with someone. ‘Who’s the thin man with Thoria, do you know?’ I said in passing.

‘He’s some crony of John’s. John names him Patch.’

‘He was with a big sort of man with a, er, football-head earlier on; do you know
him?’

‘I know the one you refer, but I never saw him before tonight. What’s in here?’

‘Here’ was John’s bedroom. We retreated in some confusion. John was in it, with bullet-head, packing up some bulky objects about the size of suitcases, or maybe unpacking them — we didn’t stop long enough to find out. We settled down gazing over the lights of town from John’s balcony. I believe there were two other couples there but I never really took them in. We got a bit entwined. An eternity after that we were wandering back and John stopped us in the corridor. ‘Oh, Fitchey,’ he said, ‘Thoria had a bad headpain. We couldn’t find you, so I took her home.’

‘Thanks — I’m sorry — she all right?’

‘Yes, only a headpain. She asked not to bother you, you might as well stay on. You don’t
look
anxious to quit early!’