Tom Swift and His Dyna-4 Capsule (8 page)

A duplicate? With duplicated shops? The same names?

"A little too far into science fiction, flyboy."

"Yeah. More like comic books, Skipper."

He saw a black telephone in the kitchen, big and bulky. He dialed "O"—this time there was no answer at all. He dialed 9-1-1, then laughed at himself.
They didn’t have 9-1-1 in 1953!
Then he laughed again at how he had begun to think that this was 1953.

There was no phone book. He walked back to the booth, memorized the PD number, and dialed it inside the tobacconist’s. Five rings. The ringing stopped. There was a click. But this time no voice answered—just blank silence. Bud hung up without mental comment.

For hours Bud wandered down several streets, aimlessly, and through many shops. He found a boarding house that might give him a place to sleep for the coming night. He found many real things, many prop things, many appliances that seemed to work, and nothing newer than 1953.

All the radios played only one station on all channels. He quickly realized that it was a recording, looped. He heard the same series of songs, the same announcements, several times.

The old televisions—mostly big cabinet models with tiny screens—played black-and-white movies, ancient sitcoms, stat icky dramas with actors long dead, commercials for condensed milk and odd products he had never heard of. There were some quiz shows. There were no newscasts. All recorded too, he supposed. Once genuine, now deceased, eternally rerun. "But I’ll be fair," he told the TV screen. "Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m reliving the same hours over and over." Maybe it was Bud Barclay who was trapped in reruns.

He began to make a point of leaving on, and blaring, the radios and TV’s and various big LP record players. He decided he liked the idea of giving Friendly Village some ambient noise. But out in the street there was nothing but a very slight creak as the overhead phone lines rocked gently.

One more day
, he told himself.
I’ll sleep tonight and get the last of those drugs out of my system. I’ll have a good meal. I’ll take a car and drive away. If I have to drive across sidewalks or open fields or little green lawns, that’s what I’ll do. If the State Police run me down on the road, I’ll get down and kiss their boots.

He looked up. The sky over Friendly Village was still as it had been when he first looked at it that morning. Not dark, but he couldn’t make out the position of the sun. High altitude haze? Strange...

He looked at the shadows on the street, then at his watch. More than six hours had passed as he had wandered through building after building, street after street. He had had a canned, unduly healthful lunch, back in the diner. His stomach was now looking forward to supper.

Looking at the shadows, then at the sky, an inner alarm began to sound. Facts—possible and disquieting facts—were breaking through. He suddenly became convinced that during all those hours, while his mind had been elsewhere, the shadows had not moved. The hidden sun had not moved in the sky.

And this sent an electric quiver through his raw nerves. "Time doesn’t pass here in Friendly Village. People, real people, live inside of time. But here, no time. Therefore, no people. Except me.

"No, that can’t be right, Bud. No way. Time
does
pass. Your watch is counting it up. You can move. The stop signal changes. The music on the radio is a song, not just one note extended forever. And it changed from day to night, and now it’s day again. And clouds blew in..."

He gazed upward.
Were
the clouds moving? He couldn’t quite tell.

Maybe the sun is standing still,
he thought.
Like that thing in the Bible.

As if cued by the word, he looked down a long street, and at the end saw the church. A tall white steeple, very tall. Just what one might expect to find in Friendly Village.

That steeple was the highest spot in town.

Bud approached the church anxiously; in fact, he found himself running.

The high-arched double doors stood open and welcoming in the proper churchly manner. Inside, the wooden pews crouched varnished and empty. No one in the pulpit. Despite the slanting light through the stained-glass windows it was dim inside.

Holding himself back, out of respect, he walked up the center aisle, looking right and left for signs of life with an inner prayer but no hope. He crossed behind the pulpit and into the wings—
Backstage
, said his thought.

He found the narrow stairs leading up, up into the steeple. They spiraled around as the walls came close. The last ten feet were attained by a ladder of wooden rungs. Bud shoved a trap door open above his head and rose into a very small space with open sides and a double bell filling the middle. There was no room to stand, little room to sit. He finally perched his athletic form on the edge of the floor, legs dangling out into space.

From this high vantage point he could finally see the horizon, the lay of the city—or rather, the small town of contradictions and mystery, the friendly village he had learned to hate. He changed his position four times, to survey all directions, all points of the compass. But he couldn’t give the directions their names. He didn’t know where the sun rose, where it set. He was only vaguely aware of its presence above the clouds. Perhaps compass directions didn’t matter in a timeless land where the sun appeared and disappeared but did not move.

What Bud saw all around him was perfectly normal, perfectly sane. The church was at the periphery of the business district, what passed for downtown. He could see, beyond the blocks of larger buildings packed together, blocks of residences, houses, with neat green lawns. Cars were parked in many driveways. TV antennas—aerials, they had been called—occupied many a roof. The houses diminished with distance, and their density also fell. Far off he saw what looked like farmland with farm houses like tiny toys. Beyond that, flat green land, planted over; then brown and gray dirt all the way to rolling hills.

Out beyond town he made out the slate ribbons of a couple highways. He tried not to acknowledge the fact that the highways were empty, utterly. "Better to do 120 on," he muttered fiercely. "I’ll start off at first light and hit that horizon fifteen minutes later, I
swear
!"

Because I’ve got to get out of Friendly Village before my Barclay brain is as empty as the streets, added his thoughts. As empty and uninhabited and secretly crazy as this whole town.

He fell into brooding.

His brooding became, unexpectedly, violent. And vocal. With flailing gestures.

He found himself yelling at the town, the silent town pierced only by his voice. The things he yelled made little sense. Sometimes they weren’t even words. Sometimes he didn’t even realize he was yelling them. But the gist of it was: "
Where are you?—!"

He threw in a few common terms of emphasis, hoarse and long.

At a sudden thought he pulled out his cell.

NO SERVICE

The emptiness took him over. He threw the phone out into space in fury and despair, an upward pass into the sky, higher than the little cross atop the steeple. Upward...

The phone hit the middle of the sky, cracked, and went whirling down to earth in two pieces.

And now he knew. The sky was a ceiling.

The discovery didn’t kill Bud’s fury, but turned it cold.

He plummeted back down the stairs. When he had left the steeple it had been broad daylight. Seconds later, stumbling out of the church into the open, it was night.

"Of course it’s night," he declared bitterly. "Of course the sun doesn’t move. Of course the days change instantly. Because there is no sun, no moon. Just big lights screwed into the sky, the big phony sky. Hey, Friendly Village, you’re a phony, a hoax, bogus, a big nothing!—you’re a
prop
! I’m getting out of this room! Hear that, Baxx?
I’m getting out!
"

He sank down on the church steps and sank his face into his hands. His long black forelock fell across the back of his hands.

Footsteps were approaching, padding softly.

Bud looked up listlessly and registered no surprise.

"Hello, Bud."

"Hello, Reb. New in town?"

ROSE REB stood in front of Bud on the steps. She had matured and filled-out since PS-1, since the biological experiment that was adolescence. The sullen, angry gauntness had become voluptuous, even voluminous. What remained was haunted, pale, pierced, coal-black hair hanging down on either side of her face in long crescents, as if enclosing her face in parentheses.

Yet for all the sameness, all was not the same. Somehow, paradoxically, she looked like a walking victim of time’s relentless bludgeon. Her expression told of a resigned, matter-of-fact sadness. But there was something feverish in her dark dark eyes.

"Always joking," she murmured.

"That’s me, RR."

"Uh-huh. And you’re always you."

"I’m trying to quit."

They stared at each other silently. Suddenly Bud surged to his feet and embraced her warmly. Another human being, even Rose Reb, was like a drink of water in the mind-messing desert that was Friendly Village.

"Oh," she said almost tearfully, pulling herself—
pushing
herself—away. "Bud... Oh
Bud
. Everything, everything got so twisted."

"What did Baxx do to you, Reb?"

They sat on the steps side by side. "I’m here. That’s what he did."

"He didn’t hurt you?"

"This
is
hurt."

"Well," said Bud Barclay. "You wanted to talk to me in a private place."

"I didn’t want this. Believe me."

"I make a point of trusting Goths. Those little pins can be dangerous."

"
Goth
?" she snapped back in a sudden change of mood. "Right. You wouldn’t
bother
to know the difference between
Goth
and
Emo
. You, you
revel
in your ignorance."

"Sorry. Don’t pop your pins. So the look is, er, Emo?"

"Of course not! This is New Goth." Click. "I’m sorry. Forgive me. You gotta forgive as you go through life, Bud. Not that people deserve it..."

Bud spoke firmly. "Can we stow the baggage? How about telling me what happened and why you and I are having ‘intimacy face time’ in Nifty-Fiftiesville?—I was
there
in that little shopping plaza, Reb, just as you wanted. I waited."

"He told me," Reb nodded. "I was so stupid, Bud. I needed, after you—but I forgive you—a grownup in my life. He told me he loved me. Seemed to understand. I thought he would take care of me..."

Bud snorted. "Jetz, that grungy skateboard jockey?"

Rose Reb frowned harshly. "Right, unlike Spaceman Junior, running off to find a
playmate
and fly to—" Click. "He works in a hospital."

"Is that where you met him?" asked the San Franciscan gently—but with meaning.

"That’s... right," she sighed. "My parents—Mr. and Mrs. Alva Truncheon—ended up warehousing me. Money’ll buy you anything.

"I believed Garton, what he said. Just words, but I
had
to believe. It’s part of the healing process, having a reality again. He—got me out. We planned the wedding. I was stupid..." She looked at Bud earnestly. "Really, I think maybe I was over-medicated."

"Maybe so."

"Gar told me I’d never get on with life, with him, unless I swept you off my deck, over the edge. See what I mean? Start off with
clarity
. He said I should go to Shopton, confront you, work off my anger...

"But I see now that he’s not fully
qualified
to give that kind of professional guidance. He was just a guy in white, an attendant—a guard. And I just got worse, seeing you, following you, breaking in and leaving notes. And that paint!—though really, it felt kinda good, Bud."

"Really?"

"By the way, what did you think of the Grand Canyon?"

Bud groaned inwardly. Yep, this was Rose Reb. "I found it a little overrated."

"Let’s not talk about that. Your vacation with—
Tom
." She spat the young inventor’s name. "Tom and time. I hate both of them!—hate thinking about them. This—" She flung a gesture of broad scope. "
This
is Time. It’s all Time. Time snatches things away. And then brings them back on the tide. Me and you..."

"Reb," Bud interrupted, "just tell me what happened. What’s this place about? Why are we—"

"Oh, that’s right, you’re in a
hurry
. It’d never occur to you to stop and sniff the road not taken.

"Fine.

"I did lie to you, but it was for the best. The idea was for Gar to meet you first, to talk to you and calm you down."

"I didn’t really need calming."

"Have to get in some digs, hm. Go ahead, throw more thorns on my brow. Enjoy!" Click. "I trusted him. He’s so wise and masculine. I’m not impugning your masculinity, Bud, though I know you can cry. Seeing you crying!—that was one of the only two things I liked about PS-1. That and reading
Silas Marner
.

"Well... well, the plan was for me to wait for you both at the restaurant. When he showed up... Please believe me, I was really surprised, Bud, finding you lying in the back of his van."

"Unconscious."

"Pretty much. He tied your wrists, too. That glove... I never knew. He never used it on
me
—I can say
that
about him."

"I’m sure he had a great explanation."

"He told me everything. See, I already knew he’d had some problems with the police. People like Gar have strong minds and principles and tend to be
controversial
. They don’t cookie-cut down into the social pie. I thought it was exciting, that kind of past life. But like I said, I was over-medicated. Or under-medicated.

"Anyway. While he was working there, at Belknap, a place I don’t recommend, a man came and talked to him. I never
saw
him, but Gar
calls
him a man, and I have to believe, don’t I? He calls the man Eck. He’s kind of a swindler and maybe—this is just my speculation—kind of a murderer."

Bud smiled wryly. "Another one of those
controversials
."