The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (42 page)

The box was a good idea. It took her ten minutes to bring it, which meant it was nearly six by the time I left. Only four hours left to kill. I filled up the car at Allsup’s and bought a sixpack of Coke.
Next to the magazines was a rack of paperbacks.

“Any Jack Williamson books?” I asked the kid at the counter.

“Who?” he said.

I spun the rack around slowly. John Grisham. Danielle Steel. Stephen King’s latest thousand-page effort. No Jack Williamson. “Is there a bookstore in town?” I asked the kid.

“Huh?”

He’d never heard of that either. “A place where I can buy a book?”

“Alco has books,
I think,” he said. “But they closed at five.”

“How about a drugstore?” I said, thinking of that copy of
Amazing Stories.

Still blank. I gave up, paid him for the gas and the sixpack, and started out to the car.

“You mean a drugstore like aspirin and stuff?” the kid said. “There’s Van Winkle’s.”

“When do they close?” I asked, and got directions.

Van Winkle’s was a grocery store. It had two
aisles of “aspirin and stuff” and half an aisle of paperbacks. More Grisham.
Jurassic Park.
Tom Clancy. And
The Legion of Time
by Jack Williamson. It looked like it had been there a while. It had a faded fifties-style cover and dog-eared edges.

I took it up to the check-out. “What’s it like having a famous writer living here?” I asked the middle-aged clerk.

She picked up the book. “The guy who
wrote this lives in Portales?” she said. “Really?”

Which brought us up to 6:22. But at least now I had something to read. I went back to the Portales Inn and up to my room, opened a can of Coke and all the windows, and sat down to read
The Legion of Time
, which was about a girl who’d traveled back in time to tell the hero about the future.

“The future has been held to be as real as the past,”
the book said, and the girl in the book was able to travel between one and the other as easily as the tour had traveled down New Mexico Highway 18.

I closed the book and thought about the tour. They didn’t have a single camera, and they weren’t afraid of rattlesnakes. And they’d looked out at the Llano Flatto like they’d never seen a field or a cow before. And they all knew who Jack Williamson
was, unlike the kid at Allsup’s or the clerk at Van Winkle’s. They were all willing to spend two days looking at abandoned shacks and dirt roads—no, wait,
three
days. Tonia’d said they’d gone to the drugstore yesterday.

I had an idea. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, looking for a phone book. There wasn’t one. I went downstairs to the lobby and asked for one. The blue-haired lady at the
desk handed me one about the size of
The Legion of Time
, and I flipped to the Yellow Pages.

There was a Thrifty Drug, which
was a chain, and a couple that sounded locally owned but weren’t downtown. “Where’s B. and J. Drugs?” I asked. “Is it close to downtown?”

“A couple of blocks,” the old lady said.

“How long has it been in business?”

“Let’s see,” she said. “it was there when Nora was little
because I remember buying medicine that time she had the croup. She would have been six, or was that when she had the measles? No, the measles were the summer she…”

I’d have to ask B. and J. “I’ve got another question,” I said, and hoped I wouldn’t get an answer like the last one. “What time does the university library open tomorrow?”

She gave me a brochure. The library opened at 8:00 and the
Williamson Collection at 9:30. I went back up to the room and tried B. and J. Drugs. They weren’t open.

It was getting dark. I closed the curtains over the open windows and opened the book again. “The world is a long corridor, and time is a lantern carried steadily along the hall,” it said, and, a few pages later, “If time were simply an extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday?
If one could leap forward—”

Or back, I thought. “Jack Williamson lived in this house from 1947 to…” Tonia’d said, and paused and then said, “…the present,” and I’d thought the sideways glance was to see my reaction to his name, but what if she’d intended to say, “from 1947 to 1998”? Or “2015”?

What if that was why she kept pausing
when she talked, because she had to remember to say “Jack Williamson
is”
instead of “Jack Williamson
was”, “does
most of his writing” instead of “
did
most of his writing,” had to remember what year it was and what hadn’t happened yet?

“‘If the field were strong enough,’” I remembered Tonia saying out at the ranch, “‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’” And the tour group had all smiled.

What if they were the physical
objects? What if the tour had traveled through time instead of space? But that didn’t make any sense. If they could travel through time they could have come on a weekend Jack Williamson was home, or during the week of the Williamson Lectureship.

I read on, looking for explanations. The book talked about quantum mechanics and probability, about how changing one thing in the past could affect the
whole future. Maybe that was why they had to come when Jack Williamson was out of town, to avoid doing something to him that might change the future.

Or maybe Nonstop Tours was just incompetent and they’d come on the wrong weekend. And the reason they didn’t have cameras was because they all forgot them. And they were all really tourists, and
The Legion of Time
was just a science fiction book
and I was making up crackpot theories to avoid thinking about Cross and the job.

But if they were ordinary tourists, what were they doing spending a day staring at a tumbledown shack in the middle of nowhere? Even if they were tourists from the future, there was no reason to travel back in time to see a science fiction writer when they could see presidents or rock stars.

Unless they lived in
a future where all the things he’d predicted in his stories had come true. What if they had genetic engineering and androids and spaceships? What if in their world they’d terraformed planets and gone to Mars and explored the galaxy? That would make Jack Williamson their forefather, their founder. And they’d want to come back and see where it all started.

The next morning, I left my stuff at the
Portales Inn and went over to the library. Checkout wasn’t till noon, and I wanted to wait till I’d found out a few things before I made up my mind whether to take the job or not. On the way there I drove past B. and J. Drugs and then College Drug. Neither of them were open, and I couldn’t tell from their outsides how old they were.

The library opened at eight and the room with the Williamson
collection in it at 9:30, which was cutting it close. I was there at 9:15, looking in through the glass at the books. There was a bronze plaque on the wall and a big mobile of the planets.

Tonia had said the collection “isn’t very big at this point,” but from what I could see, it looked pretty big to me. Rows and rows of books, filing cabinets, boxes, photographs.

A young guy in chinos and wire-rimmed
glasses unlocked the door to let me in. “Wow! Lined up and waiting to get in! This is a first,” he said, which answered my first question.

I asked it anyway. “Do you get many visitors?”

“A few,” he said. “Not as many as I think there should be for a man who practically invented the future. Androids, terraforming, antimatter, he imagined them all. We’ll have more visitors in two weeks. That’s
when the Williamson Lectureship week is. We get quite a few visitors then. The writers who are speaking usually drop in.”

He switched on the lights. “Let me show you around,” he said. “We’re adding to the collection all the time.” He took down a long flat box. “This is the comic strip Jack did,
Beyond Mars.
And here is where we keep his original manuscripts.” He opened one of the filing cabinets
and pulled out a sheaf of typed yellow sheets. “Have you ever met Jack?”

“No,” I said, looking at an oil painting of a white-haired man with a long, pleasant-looking face. “What’s he like?”

“Oh, the nicest man you’ve ever met. It’s hard to believe he’s one of the founders of science fiction. He’s in here all the time. Wonderful guy. He’s working on a new book,
The Black Sun.
He’s out of town
this weekend, or I’d take you over and introduce you. He’s always delighted to meet his fans. Is there anything specific you wanted to know about him?”

“Yes,” I said. “Somebody told me about him seeing the magazine with his first story in it in a drugstore. Which drugstore was that?”

“It was one in Canyon, Texas. He and his
sister were going to school down there.”

“Do you know the name of the
drugstore?” I said. “I’d like to go see it.”

“Oh, it went out of business years ago,” he said. “I think it was torn down.”

“We went there yesterday,” Tonia had said, and what day exactly was that? The day Jack saw it and bought all three copies and forgot his groceries? And what were they wearing that day? Print dresses and doublebreasted suits and hats?

“I’ve got the issue here,” he said,
taking a crumbling magazine out of a plastic slipcover. It had a garish picture of a man being pulled up out of a crater by a brilliant crystal. “December, 1928. Too bad the drugstore’s not there anymore. You can see the cabin where he wrote his first stories, though. It’s still out on the ranch his brother owns. You go out west of town and turn south on State Highway 18. Just ask Betty to show you
around.”

“Have you ever had a tour group in here?” I interrupted.

“A
tour
group?” he said, and then must have decided I was kidding. “He’s not quite that famous.”

Yet, I thought, and wondered when Nonstop Tours visited the library. Ten years from now? A hundred? And what were they wearing that day?

I looked at my watch. It was 9:45. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.” I started
out and then turned back. “This person who told me about the drugstore, they mentioned something about Number 5516. Is that one of his books?”

“5516? No, that’s the asteroid they’re naming after him. How’d you know about that? It’s supposed to be a surprise. They’re giving him the plaque Lectureship week.”

“An asteroid,” I said. I started out again.

“Thanks for coming in,” the librarian said.
“Are you just visiting or do you live here?”

“I live here,” I said.

“Well, then, come again.”

I went down the stairs and out to the car. It was 9:50. Just enough time to get to Cross’s and tell him I’d take the job.

I went out to the parking lot. There weren’t any tour buses driving through it, which must mean Jack Williamson was back from his convention. After my meeting with Cross I was
going to go over to his house and introduce myself. “I know how you felt when you saw that
Amazing Stories
in the drugstore,” I’d tell him. “I’m interested in the future, too. I liked what you said about it, about science fiction lighting the way and science making the future real.”

I got in the car and drove through town to Highway 70. An asteroid. I should have gone with them. “It’ll be fun,”
Tonia said. It certainly would be.

Next time, I thought. Only I want to see some of this terraforming. I want to go to Mars.

I turned
south on Highway 70 towards Cross’s office. Roswell 92 miles, the sign said.

“Come again,” I said, leaning out the window and looking up. “Come again!”

The Monday before spring
break I
told my English
lit class we were going to do Shakespeare. The weather in Colorado is usually wretched this time of year. We get all the snow the ski resorts needed in December, use up our scheduled snow days, and end up going an extra week in June. The forecast on the
Today
show hadn’t predicted any snow till Saturday, but with luck it would arrive sooner.

My announcement generated a lot of excitement. Paula dived for her corder and rewound it to make sure she’d gotten my every word, Edwin Summer looked smug, and Delilah snatched up her books and stomped out, slamming the door so hard it woke Rick up. I passed out the release/refusal slips and told them they had to have them back in by Wednesday. I gave one to Sharon to give Delilah.

“Shakespeare
is considered one of our greatest writers, possibly
the
greatest,” I said for the benefit of Paula’s corder. “On Wednesday I will be talking about Shakespeare’s life, and on Thursday and Friday we will be reading his work.”

Wendy raised her hand. “Are we
going to read all the plays?”

I sometimes wonder where Wendy has been the last few years—certainly not in this school, possibly not in this
universe. “What we’re studying hasn’t been decided yet,” I said. “The principal and I are meeting tomorrow.”

“It had better be one of the tragedies,” Edwin said darkly.

By lunch the news was all over the school. “Good luck,” Greg Jefferson, the biology teacher, said in the teachers’ lounge. “I just got done doing evolution.”

“Is it really that time of year again?” Karen Miller said. She teaches
American lit across the hall. “I’m not even up to the Civil War yet.”

“It’s that time of year again,” I said. “Can you take my class during your free period tomorrow? I’ve got to meet with Harrows.”

“I can take them all morning. Just have your kids come into my room tomorrow. We’re doing ‘Thanatopsis.’ Another thirty kids won’t matter.”

“‘Thanatopsis’?” I said, impressed. “The whole thing?”

“All but lines ten and sixty-eight. It’s a terrible poem, you know. I don’t think anybody understands it well enough to protest. And I’m not telling anybody what the title means.”

“Cheer up,” Greg said. “Maybe we’ll have a blizzard.”

Tuesday was clear, with a forecast of temps in the sixties. Delilah was outside the school when I got there, wearing a red “Seniors Against Devil Worship in the
Schools” T-shirt and shorts. She was carrying a picket sign that said, “Shakespeare is Satan’s Spokesman.” “Shakespeare” and “Satan” were both misspelled.