Time Waits for Winthrop (3 page)

He picked up the large egg-shaped object he had been examining when she entered and studied it moodily. “Yeah. And like you said, everybody has someone to go back to, everybody but me. You’re damn tooting I don’t have anyone to go back to.
Damn
tooting. I never had a friend, never had a wife, never even had a girl that stayed around longer than it took her to use up the loose change in my pocket. So why should I go back? I’m happy here. I get everything I want and I don’t have to pay for it. You people want to go back because you feel different—uncomfortable, out of place. I’m used to being out of place: I’m right at home and I’m having a good time.

I’m
staying.”

“L
isten, Mr. Winthrop.” Mrs. Brucks leaned forward anxiously, then jumped as the seat under her slunk forward. “Mr. Winthrop, everybody has troubles in their life. With my daughter Annie, I had a time that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And with my Julius—But because I have troubles, you think I should take it out on other people? I should prevent them from going home when they’re sick and tired of jumper machines and food machines and—I don’t know—
machine
machines and—”

“Speaking of food machines,” Winthrop perked up, “have you seen my new food phonograph? Latest model. I said I wanted one, and first thing this morning, a brand-new one is delivered to my door. No fuss, no bother, no money. What a world!”

“But it’s not
your world
, Mr. Winthrop. Even if everything is free, you’re not entitled. You got to
belong
to be entitled.”

“There’s nothing in their laws about that,” he commented absent-mindedly as he opened the huge egg and peered inside at the collection of dials and switches and spigots. “See, Mrs. Brucks?
Double
volume controls,
double
intensity controls,
triple
vitamin controls. With this one, you can raise the fat content of a meal, say, while reducing its sweetness with that doohickey there—and if you press that switch, you can compress the whole meal so it’s no bigger than a mouthful and you’re still hungry enough to try a couple of other compositions. Want to try it? I got it set for the latest number by Unni Oehele, that new Aldebaranian composer—
Memories of a Martian Soufflé.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. By me, a meal is served in plates. I don’t want to try it. Thank you very much.”

“Believe me, lady, you’re missing something. The first course is a kind of light, fast movement, all herbs from Aldebaran IV mixed with a spicy vinegar from Aldebaran IX. The second course,
Consommé Grand
, is a lot slower and kind of majestic. Oehele bases it all on a broth made from the white
chund
, a kangaroo animal they have on Aldebaran IV. See, he uses only native Aldebaranian foods to
suggest
a Martian dish. Get it? The same thing Kratzmeier did in
A Long, Long Dessert on Deimos and Phobos
, only it’s a lot better. More modern-like, if you know what I mean. Now in the
third
course, Oehele really takes off. He—”

“Please, Mr. Winthrop!” Mrs. Brucks begged. “Enough!” She glared at him. She’d had her fill of this sort of thing from her son Julius years ago, when he’d been running around with a crazy crowd from City College and been spouting hours of incomprehensible trash at her that he’d picked up from newspaper musical reviews and the printed notes in record albums. One thing she’d learned was how to recognize an art phony.

W
inthrop shrugged. “Okay, okay. But you’d think you’d at least want to try it. The others at least took a bite of classical Kratzmeier or Gura-Hok. They didn’t like it, they spat it out—fine. But you’ve been living on nothing but that damn twentieth-century grub since we arrived. After the first day, you haven’t set foot outside your room. And the way you asked the room to decorate itself—it’s so old-fashioned, it makes me sick! You’re living in the twenty-fifth century, lady! Wake up!”

“Mr. Winthrop,” she said sternly, “yes or no? You’re going to be nice or not?”

“You’re in your fifties,” he pointed out. “
Fifties
, Mrs. Brucks. In our time, you can expect to live what? Ten or fifteen more years. Tops. Here, you might see another thirty, maybe forty. Me, I figure I’m good for at least twenty. With the medical machines they got, they can do wonders. And no wars to worry about, no epidemics, no depressions, nothing. Everything free, lots of exciting things to do, Mars, Venus, the stars. Why in hell are you so crazy to go back?”

Mrs. Brucks’ already half-dissolved self-control gave way completely. “Because it’s my home! Because it’s what I understand! Because I want to be with my husband, my children, my grandchildren! And because I don’t
like
it here, Mr. Winthrop!”

“So go back!” Winthrop yelled. The room, which for the last few moments had settled into a pale golden yellow, turned rose color again. “There’s not one of you with the guts of a cockroach. Even that young fellow, what’s-his-name, Dave Pollock, I thought
he
had guts. He went out with me for the first week and he tried everything once. But he got scared, too, and went back to his little old comfy room. It’s too
dec-a-dent
, he says, too
dec-a-dent.
So take him with you and get the hell back, all of you!”

“But we
can’t
, Mr. Winthrop. Remember they said the transfer has to be complete on both sides? One stays behind, all stay. We can’t go back without you.”

Winthrop smiled and stroked the throbbing vein on his neck. “You’re damn tooting you can’t go back without me. And I’m staying. This is one time that old Winthrop calls the tune.”

“Please, Mr. Winthrop, don’t be stubborn. Be nice. Don’t make us force you.”

“You can’t force me,” he told her with a triumphant leer. “I know my rights. According to the law of twenty-fifth-century America, no human being can be forced to do anything. Fact. You try to gang up on me, all I do is set up a holler that I’m being forced and a flock of government machines show up and turn me loose. Put that in your old calabash and smoke it!”

“Listen,” she said as she turned to leave. “At six o’clock, we’ll all be in the Time Machine Building. Maybe you’ll change your mind, Mr. Winthrop.”

“That’s one thing you can be sure of—I won’t change my mind.”

So Mrs. Brucks went back to her room and told the others that Winthrop was stubborn as ever.

O
liver T. Mead, vice-president in charge of public relations for Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc., of Gary, Indiana, drummed impatiently on the arm of the red leather easy chair that Mrs. Brucks’ room had created especially but uneasily for him.

“Ridiculous!” he exclaimed.

“That a derelict, a vagrant, should be able to keep people from going about their business… do you know there’s going to be a nationwide sales conference of Sweetbottom retail outlets in a few days? I absolutely must return tonight as scheduled, no ifs, no ands, no buts. There’s going to be one unholy mess, I can tell you, if the responsible parties in this period don’t see to that.”

“I bet there will be,” Mary Ann Carthington said from behind round, respectful and well-mascaraed eyes. “A big firm like that can really give them what for, Mr. Mead.”

Dave Pollock grimaced at her wearily. “A firm five hundred years out of existence? Who’re they going to complain to—the history books?”

As the portly man stiffened angrily, Mrs. Brucks held up her hands and said, “Let’s talk, let’s think it out, only don’t fight. You think it’s the truth we can’t force him to go back?”

Mr. Mead leaned back and stared out of a non-existent window. “Could be. Then again, it might not. I’m willing to believe anything of 2458 by now, but this smacks of criminal irresponsibility. That they should invite us to visit their time and then not make every possible effort to see that we return safe and sound—besides, what about their people visiting in
our
time, the five with whom we transferred? If we’re stuck here, they’ll be stuck in 1958. Forever. Any government worthy of the name owes protection to its citizens traveling abroad. Without it, it’s less than worthless: a tax-grubbing, boondoggling, inept bureaucracy!”

Mary Ann Carthington’s pert little face had been nodding in time to his fist beating on the red leather armchair. “That’s what I say. Only the government seems to be all machines. How can you argue with machines? The only government
man
we’ve seen since we arrived was that Mr. Storku who welcomed us to the United States of 2458. And he didn’t seem very interested in us. At least he didn’t
show
any interest.”

“The Chief of Protocol for the State Department, you mean?” Dave Pollock asked. “The one who yawned when you told him how distinguished he looked?”

T
he girl made a light slapping gesture at him. “Oh,
you.
”

“Well, then, here’s what we have to do. One.” Mr. Mead rose and proceeded to open the fingers of his right hand a single finger at a time. “We have to go on the basis of the only human being in the government we’ve met personally, this Mr. Storku. Two, we have to select a representative from among us. Three, this representative has to see Mr. Storku and lay the
facts
before him. How his government managed somehow to communicate with our government the fact that time travel was possible, but only if certain physical laws were taken into consideration, most particularly the law of—the law of—What
is
that law, Pollock?”

“Conservation of energy and mass. If you want to transfer five people from 2458 to 1958, you have to replace them simultaneously in their own time with five people of exactly the same structure and mass from the time they’re going to. Otherwise, you’d have a gap in the mass of one space-time continuum and a corresponding surplus in the other. It’s like a chemical equation—”

“I’m not a student in one of your classes. You don’t have to impress
me
, Pollock,” Mr. Mead said. “Thank you for the explanation.”

“Who was trying to impress you?” Pollock demanded belligerently. “I just tried to clear up something you seemed to have a lot of trouble understanding. That’s at the bottom of our problem: the law of the conservation of energy and mass. And the way the machine’s been set for all five of us and all five of them, nobody can do anything about transferring unless all of us and all of them are present at both ends of the connection at the very same moment.”

“All right,” Mr. Mead said. “All right! Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go on. Some of us aren’t civil service workers. Our time is valuable.”

“Listen to the tycoon, will you?
His
time is valuable. Look, Ollie, my friend, as long as Winthrop goes on being stubborn, we’re all stuck here together. And as long as we’re stuck here, we’re all greenhorns together in 2458. For your information, right now, your time is my time, and vice versa.”

“Sh-h-h!” Mrs. Brucks commanded. “Be nice. Go on talking, Mr. Mead. It’s very interesting. Isn’t it interesting, Miss Carthington?”

The blonde girl nodded. “It sure is. They don’t make people executives for nothing. You put things so—so
right
, Mr. Mead.”

O
liver T. Mead, somewhat mollified, smiled a slender thanks at her. “Three, then. We lay the facts before this Mr. Storku. We tell him how we came in good faith, after we were selected by a nationwide contest to find the exact opposite numbers of the five people from his time. How we did it partly out of a natural and understandable curiosity to see what the future looks like, and partly out of patriotism. Yes, patriotism! For is not this America of 2458
our
America, however strange and inexplicable the changes in it? As patriots, we could follow no other course. As patriots, we—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” the high school teacher exploded. “You’re no subversive, all right? What’s your
idea?”

There was a long silence in the room while the stout middle-aged man went through a pantomime of fighting for control. “Pollock, if you don’t want to hear what I have to say, you can always take a breather in the hall!
As I was saying
, having explained the background facts to Mr. Storku, we come to point four, the fact that Winthrop refuses to return with us. And we demand—do you hear me?—we
demand
that the American government of this time take the appropriate steps to insure our safe return to our own era even if it involves—well,
martial law
relative to Winthrop.”

“Is that your idea?” Dave Pollock asked derisively. “What if Storku says no?”

“He can’t say no if it’s put to him with authority. We are American citizens. We demand our rights. If he won’t recognize our citizenship, we demand to be sent back where we came from. He can’t refuse. We explain the risks his government runs: loss of good will, irreparable damage to future contacts between the two eras, his government standing convicted of a breach of faith—that sort of thing. It’s just a matter of finding the right words and making them good and strong.”

Mrs. Brucks nodded agreement “Absolutely. You can do it, Mr. Mead.”

The stout man seemed jolted “
I?
”

“Of course!” Mary Ann Carthington said enthusiastically. “Just like you said, Mr. Mead, it has to be said good and strong. That’s the way
you
can say it.”

“I’d—well, I’d rather not. I don’t think I’m the best one for the job. Storku and I don’t get along too well. Somebody else, I think, would be—”

D
ave Pollock laughed. “Now don’t be modest, Ollie. You get along with Storku as well as any of us. You’re elected. Besides, isn’t this public relations work? You’re a big man in public relations.”

Mr. Mead tried to pour all the hatred in the Universe at him in one long look. Then he shot out his cuffs and straightened his shoulders. “Very well. If none of you feel up to the job, I’ll take it on myself. Be back soon.”

“Jumper, Ollie?” Pollock asked. “It’s faster.”