Time Waits for Winthrop (2 page)

That we are intended to read the story at some distance from realism is shown right away by its author’s choice of stock characters, a cast of paper-thin caricatures. Five time travelers from the twentieth century are stranded in the twenty-fifth, but what he offers us is a grandmotherly Bronx housewife who speaks in stage Yiddish-American, a portly, self-important middle-aged public-relations executive, a blithery ingenue, a high-school science teacher whose main function is to explain technical matters to the others, and an embittered older man—Winthrop—who is the closest thing to a believable character in the story and the fulcrum about which the entire plot turns. We know from Klass’s other work, such stories as “Down Among the Dead Men” (1954) and “Eastward Ho!” (1957), that even when constrained by the magazine conventions of the time he felt no need to fill his stories out with the handiest stereotyped characters. But in “Time Waits for Winthrop” the depiction of character, plainly, was of little importance to him. Only Winthrop himself, who may have been a considerably disguised stand-in for the irascible, stubborn editor Horace Gold, shows any sort of individuation, and Winthrop is seen mainly through the eyes of the other protagonists. What Klass was after was something else: a vision, both comic and bleak at the same time, of the bewildering future, perhaps a sense of the sheer
annoyingness
of finding oneself forced to cope with a strange future era and with the possibility of having to spend the rest of one’s life living in it. Complexity of character is irrelevant to such a story, and might even be detrimental to it. (The in-your-face resolution of the plot indicates that the author’s mind was elsewhere than on conventional plot structure, although I should note here that Gold was fond of the
deus ex-machina
ending that contradicted a story’s own givens, the most notorious example of which was Damon Knight’s 1957 short story “The Man in the Jar”.)

The original
Galaxy
publication of “Time Waits for Winthrop” provides one curious footnote to the writing career of the man who called himself “William Tenn.” So far as I know, Phil Klass never published any fiction under his own name, and it was generally understood that he had been saving the Klass byline for his “serious” fiction, which he never got around to writing. But on this one occasion his real name came peeking through anyway.

In those days,
Galaxy
would end each story not with “The End” or with some typographical symbol, but with the author’s name—a style that Gold had borrowed from
The New Yorker
. (That magazine abandoned that style many years ago, as did
Galaxy
itself in 1969, long after Gold had ceased being its editor.) The August 1957 issue in which “Winthrop” appeared lists “William Tenn” on the contents page as the author of the story, and again on page six, where the story itself begins. But when the story ends, on page fifty-nine, the closing byline is, astonishingly:

—PHILIP KLASS.

I have no idea why Gold unmasked “William Tenn” in this startling and gratuitous way. Carelessness? Malevolence? A cruel private joke? Klass says nothing about it in the afterword to the story that he wrote for the 2001 edition of
The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn
. But I’m sure he wasn’t amused.

—Robert Silverberg

T
hat was the trouble right there—Winthrop was stubborn.

Mrs. Brucks stared wildly at her three fellow-visitors from the twentieth century, “But he’s got to think of us, too! He can’t leave us stuck in this crazy world!”

Dave Pollock shrugged the shoulders of the conservative gray suit that clashed so mightily with the décor of the twenty-fifth-century room. He was a thin, nervous young man whose hands had a tendency to perspire.

“He says we should be grateful. But whether we are or aren’t grateful isn’t important to him. He’s staying.”

“That means we have to stay,” Mrs. Brucks said. “Doesn’t he understand that?”

Pollock spread his moist palms helplessly. “What difference does it make? He
likes
the twenty-fifth century. I argued with him for two hours and I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I can’t budge him.”

“Why don’t
you
talk to him, Mrs. Brucks?” Mary Ann Carthington suggested. “He’s been nice to you. Maybe you could make him act sensible.”

“Hm.” Mrs. Brucks patted her hairdo which, after two weeks in the future, was beginning to get straggly. “You think so? Mr. Mead, you think it’s a good idea?”

The fourth person in the oval room, a stoutish middle-aged man, considered the matter for a moment. “Can’t do any harm. Might work. And we’ve got to do
something
.”

“All right. So I’ll try.”

M
rs. Brucks sniffled deep within her grandmotherly soul. To the others, Winthrop and she were the “old folks”—both over fifty. Therefore they should be able to communicate more easily. The fact that Winthrop was ten years her senior meant little to Mr. Mead’s forty-six years, less to Dave Pollock’s thirty-four and in all probability was completely meaningless to Mary Ann Carthington’s twenty. One of the “old folks” should be able to talk sense to the other, they were thinking.

What could they see, from the bubbling distance of youth, of the chasms that separated Winthrop from Mrs. Brucks even more finally than the others? It was unimportant to them that he was a tight and unemotional old bachelor, while she was the warm and gossipy mother of six children, the grandmother of two, with her silver wedding anniversary proudly behind her. She and Winthrop had barely exchanged a dozen sentences with each other since they’d arrived in the future; they had disliked each other from the moment they had met in Washington at the time-travel finals.

But—Winthrop was stubborn. That fact remained. Mr. Mead had roared his best executive-type roars at him. Mary Ann Carthington had tried to jog his senility with her lush, young figure and most fluttery voice. Even Dave Pollock, an educated man, a high school science teacher, had talked his heart out to him and been unable to make him budge.

Someone had to change Winthrop’s mind or they’d all be stuck in the future, here in this horrible twenty-fifth century. Even if she hated it more than anything she’d had to face in a lifetime of troubles, it was up to Mrs. Brucks.

She rose and shook out the wrinkles in the expensive black dress her proud husband had purchased in Lord & Taylor’s the day before the group had left.

Try to tell Sam that it was pure luck that she had been chosen, just a matter of fitting the physical specifications in the message from the future! Sam wouldn’t listen: he’d probably boasted all over the shop, to all the other cutters with whom he worked, about his wife—one of five people selected in the whole United States to make a trip five hundred years into the future. Would Sam still be boasting when the six o’clock deadline passed that night and she didn’t return?

This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and reached her nose.

Mary Ann Carthington crooned sympathetically, “Shall I call for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?”

“I’m crazy?” Mrs. Brucks shot back angrily. “A little walk down the hall, I need that headache-maker? A little walk I can walk.”

S
he started for the door rapidly, before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing.

But she paused and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she’d spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls: here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century.

Then she swallowed hard and closed the door behind her. She walked hurriedly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side.

At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in distaste, to the square. “Mr. Winthrop?”

“Well, well, if it isn’t Mrs. Brucks!” the square boomed back at her. “Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks.”

The patch of yellow showed a tiny hole in the center which dilated rapidly into a doorway. She stepped through gingerly, as if there might be a drop of several stories on the other side.

The room was shaped like a long, narrow isosceles triangle. There was no furniture in it, and no other exits, except for what an occasional yellow square suggested. Streaks of color chased themselves fluently along the walls and ceilings and floors, shifting up and down the spectrum, from pinkish gray to a thick, dark ultramarine. And odors came and went with the colors, some of them unpleasant, some intriguing, but all of them touched with the unfamiliar and alien.

From somewhere behind the walls and above the ceiling there was music, its tones softly echoing, gently reinforcing the colors and the odors. The music, too, was strange to twentieth-century ears: strings of dissonances would be followed by long or short silences, in the midst of which an almost inaudible melody might be heard like a harmonic island in an ocean of sonic strangeness.

At the sharp apex of the triangle, an aged little man lay on a raised portion of the floor. Periodically, this would raise or lower part of itself, very much like a cow trying to find a comfortable position on the grass.

The single garment that Winthrop wore similarly kept adjusting itself upon him. At one moment, it would be a striped red and white tunic, covering everything from his shoulders to his thighs; then it would slowly elongate into a green gown that trickled over his outstretched toes; and abruptly, it would contract into a pair of light brown shorts decorated with a complete pattern of brilliant blue seashells.

M
rs. Brucks observed all this with disapproval. A man was meant, she felt, to be dressed approximately the same way from one minute to the next.

The shorts she didn’t mind, though her modest soul considered them a bit too skimpy for receiving lady callers. The green gown—well, if he wanted to wear what was essentially a dress, it was his business. Even the red and white tunic which reminded her nostalgically of her granddaughter Debbie’s sunsuit was something she was willing to be generous about. But at least stick to one of them!

Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. “Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet,” he said jovially.

Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host’s gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and uneasily sat. “How—how are you, Mr. Winthrop?”

“Couldn’t be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look.”

He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers.

Mrs. Brucks, really interested, inspected the mouthful of white, shining teeth. “A good job,” she pronounced at last. “The dentists here made them for you so fast?”

“Dentists!” He spread his bony arms in a vast and merry gesture. “They don’t have
dentists in
2458 A.D. They
grew
these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks.”

“
Grew?
How
grew?
”

“How should I know how they did it? They’re smart, that’s all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It’s a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said ‘I want new teeth’ to the machine that they’ve got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three and bingo, there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?”

She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. “Maybe—but I better wait until it’s perfected.”

Winthrop laughed again. “You’re like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. I’m the oldest, but that doesn’t make any difference—I’m the only one with guts.”

Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. “But you’re also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock’s just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We’d all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop.”

“Mary Ann is engaged? I’d never have guessed it from the way she was playing up to that temporal supervisor fellow.”

“Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she’s engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office, a fine, hard-working boy. And she wants to go back to him.”

T
he old man pulled up his back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulder-blades and scratched him gently. “Let her go back then. Who gives a damn?”

Mrs. Brucks turned her hands palm up in front of her. “Remember what they told us when we arrived? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the Time Machine Building at six o’clock on the dot. If we aren’t
all
there on time, they can’t make the transfer, they said. So if one of us, if you, for an instance, don’t show up—”

“Don’t tell me your troubles!” His face was flushed and his lips came back and exposed the brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner’s mood. The music changed to a vicious rumble. “Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You’re damn tooting you don’t understand me! When I was a kid, my old man used to come home drunk every night and beat the hell out of me. I was a small kid, so every other kid on the block took turns beating the hell out of me, too. When I grew up, I got a lousy job and a lousy life. Remember the depression? Who do you think was on those breadlines? Me, that’s who! And then, when the good times came back, I was too old for a decent job. Night-watchman, berry-picker, dishwasher. Cheap flophouses, cheap furnished rooms. Everybody gets the gravy, Winthrop got the garbage.”