Time Pressure Read online

  “If I didn’t think it understated his achievement, I’d nominate Spider Robinson…as the new Robert Heinlein.”

  —Gerald Jonas, The New York Times

  “Robinson is the hottest writer to hit science fiction since Ellison, and he can match the master’s frenetic energy and emotional intensity, arm-break for gut-wrench.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Spider Robinson has delighted and intrigued critics and fans alike with marvelous adventures such as Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and Mindkiller. Now he explores the greatest mystery of the universe—the phenomenon of time itself—in his most wildly compelling novel to date.

  The time is 1973. A spirited group of Americans have fled the Establishment, forming a commune in the wilderness of Nova Scotia. Here, they are free from the evils of the modern world. But they are not alone…

  A strange blue light has brought a visitor. Her name is Rachel, a beautiful woman from another civilization…and another time. Her one-way mission is simple: collect data on the past of the human race.

  But why does she risk immortality for this mission? And why are her methods so seductive…and devastating?

  One commune-dweller is more than suspicious. His name is Sam, and he fears the emissary from the future may destroy Earth’s past. But can he stop it?

  Only time will tell.

  Other books by Spider Robinson

  ANTINOMY

  THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

  CALLAHAN’S CROSSTIME SALOON

  CALLAHAN’S SECRET

  MELANCHOLY ELEPHANTS

  MINDKILLER

  NIGHT OF POWER

  STARDANCE (with Jeanne Robinson)

  TELEMPATH

  TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH

  TIME PRESSURE

  An Ace Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

  The name “Ace” and the “A” logo are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

  Copyright © 1987 by Spider Robinson

  Book design by Arnold Vila

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Time Pressure is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are imaginary; any resemblance to actual persons, locales or events is entirely coincidental and unintended.

  First edition: October 1987

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  Time pressure.

  I. Title.

  PS3568.O3156T5 1987 813'.54 87-11356

  ISBN 0-441-80932-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For all my North Mountain friends,

  hippies, locals and visitors,

  and for Raoul Vezina and Steve Thomas

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  I guarantee that every word of this story is a lie.

  CHAPTER 1

  IT WAS A dark and stormy night…

  Your suspension of disbelief has probably just bust a leaf-spring: how can you believe in a story that begins that way? I know it’s one of the hoariest clichés in pulp fiction; my writer friend Snaker uses the expression satirically often enough. “It was a dark and stormy night—when suddenly the shot rang out…” But I don’t especially want you to believe this story—I just want you to listen to it—and even if I were concerned with convincing you there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it, the story begins where it begins and that’s all there is to it.

  And “dark” is not redundant. Most nights along the shore of the Bay of Fundy are not particularly dark, as nights go. There’s a lot of sky on the Fundy Shore, as transparent as a politician’s promise, and that makes for a lot of starlight even on Moonless evenings. When the Moon’s up it turns the forest into a fairyland—and even when the big clouds roll in off the water and darken the sky, there is usually the glow of Saint John, New Brunswick on the horizon, tinting the underside of clouds sixty kilometers away across the Bay, mitigating the darkness. (In those days, just after Canada went totally metric, I would have thought “forty miles” instead of sixty klicks. Habits can be changed.)

  The day had been chilly for late April and the wind had been steady from the south, so I was not at all surprised when the snowstorm began just after sundown. (Maybe you live somewhere that doesn’t have snow in April; if so, I hope you appreciate it.) It was not a full-scale mankiller blizzard, the sort where you have to crack the attic window for breathing air and dig tunnels to the woodshed and the outhouse: a bit too late in the year for that.

  Nonetheless it was indisputably a dark and stormy night in 1973—when suddenly the snot ran out…

  Nothing less could have made me suit up and go outside on such a night. Even a chimney fire might not have done it. There is a rope strung from my back porch to my outhouse during the winter, because when the big gusts sail in off that tabletop icewater and flay the North Mountain with snow and stinging hail, a man can become hopelessly lost on his way to the shitter and freeze to death within bowshot of his house. This storm was not of that calibre, but neither was it a Christmas-cardy sort of snowing, with little white petals drifting gently and photogenically down through the stillness. Windows rattled or hummed, their inner and outer coverings of plastic insulation shuddered and crackled, the outer doors strained and snarled at their fastenings, wind whistled through weather-stripping in a dozen places, shingles complained and threatened to leave, banshees took up residence in both my stovepipes (the two stoves, inflamed, raved and roared back at them), and beneath all the local noise could be heard the omnipresent sound of the wind trying to flog the forest to death and the Bay trying to smash the stone shore to flinders. They’ve both been at it for centuries, and one day they’ll win.

  My kitchen is one of the tightest rooms in Heartbreak Hotel; on both north and south it is buffered by large insulated areas of putatively dead air (the seldom-used, sealed-up porch on the Bay side and the back hall on the south). Nevertheless the kerosene lamp on the table flickered erratically enough to make shadows leap around the room like Baryshnikov on speed. From where I sat, rocking by the kitchen stove and sipping coffee, I could see that I had left about a dozen logs of maple and birch piled up on the sawhorse outside. I was not even remotely inclined to go back out there and get them under cover.

  Dinner was over, the dishes washed, the kitchen stove’s water-tank refilled and warming, both stoves fed and cooking nicely, chores done. I cast about for some stormy night’s entertainment, but the long hard winter just ending had sharply depleted the supply. I had drunk the last of my wine and homebrew a few weeks back, had smoked up most of the previous year’s dope crop, read all the books in the house and all those to be borrowed on the Mountain, played every record and reel of tape I owned more than often enough to be sick of them, and the weather was ruining reception of CBC Radio (the only tolerable station of the three available, and incidentally one of the finest on Earth). So I decided to put in some time on the dulcimer I was building, and that meant that I needed Mucus the Moose, and when I couldn
’t find him after a Class One Search of the house I played back memory tape and realized, with a sinking feeling, that I was going to have to go outside after all.

  I might not have done it for a friend—but if Mucus was out there, I had no choice.

  Mucus the Moose is one of my most cherished possessions, one of my only mementoes of a very dear dead friend. He (the moose, not the friend) is about fifteen centimeters tall, and bears a striking physical resemblance to that noblest of all meece, Bullwinkle—save that Mucus is as potbellied as the Ashley stove in my living room. He is a pale translucent brown from the tips of his rack down to wherever the Plimsoll line happens to be, and pale translucent green thereafter. Picture Bullwinkle gone to fat and extremely seasick. His full name and station—Mucus Moose, the Mucilage Machine—are spelled out in raised letters on his round little tummy.

  If you squeeze him gently right there, green glue comes out of his nostrils…

  If you don’t understand why I love him so dearly, just let it go. Chalk it up to eccentricity or cabin fever—congenital insanity, I won’t argue—but he was irreplaceable and special to me, and he was nowhere to be found. On rewind-search of my head I found that the last place I remembered putting him was in my jacket pocket, in order to fasten down the Styrofoam padding on Number Two hole in the outhouse, and he was not in the said pocket, and the last time that jacket pocket had been far enough from vertical for Mucus to fall out had been—

  —that afternoon, by the sap pot, halfway up the frigging Mountain, more than a mile up into the woods…

  I have a special personal mantra for moments like that, but I believe that even in these enlightened times it is unprintable. I chanted it aloud as I filled both stoves with wood, pulled on a second shirt and pair of pants, added a sweater, zipped up the Snowmobile boots, put on the scarf and jacket and gloves and cap and stomped into the back hall like a space-suited astronaut entering the airlock, or a hardhat diver going into the decompression chamber.

  The analogies are rather apt. When I popped the hook-and-eye and shouldered the kitchen door open (its spring hinge complaining bitterly enough to be heard over the general din), I entered a room whose ambient temperature was perhaps fifteen Celsius degrees colder than that of the kitchen—and the back hall was at least that much warmer than the world outside. I sealed the kitchen door behind me with the turnbuckle, zipped my jacket all the way up to my nose, took the heavy-duty flashlight from its perch near the chainsaw, and thumbed open the latch of the outside door.

  It promptly flew open, hit me sharply in the face and across the shin, and knocked the flashlight spinning. I turned away from the incoming blast of wind-driven snow, in time to see the flashlight knock over the can of chainsaw gas/oil mixture, which spilled all over the split firewood. Not the big wood intended for the living room Ashley, the small stuff for the kitchen stove. I sleep above that kitchen stove at nights, and I was going to be smelling burning oil in my sleep for the next week or so.

  I started my mantra over again from the beginning, more rhythmically and at twice the volume, retrieved the flashlight, and stomped out into the dark and stormy night, to rescue fifty cents worth of flexible plastic and a quarter-liter of green glue. Love is strange.

  I had been mistaken about those banshees. They hadn’t been inside my stovepipes, only hollering down them. They were out here, much too big to fit down a chimney and loud enough to fill the world, manifesting as ghostly curtains of snow that were torn apart by the wind as fast as they formed. I hooked the door shut before me, made a perfectly futile attempt to zip my jacket up higher—all the way up is as high as a zipper goes—and pushed away from the Hotel to meet them.

  The woodshed grunted a dire warning as I passed. I ignored it; it had been threatening to fall over ever since I had known it, back in the days when it had been a goat-shed. As I went by the outhouse I half turned to see if the new plastic window I’d stapled up last week had torn itself to pieces yet, and as I saw that it had, a shingle left the tiny roof with the sound of a busted E-string and came spinning at my eyes like a ninja deathstar. I’m pretty quick, but the distance was short and the closing velocity high; I took most of it on my hat but a corner of it put a small slice on my forehead. I was almost glad then for the cold. It numbed my forehead, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly for a forehead wound, and what there was swiftly froze and could be easily brushed off.

  When I was clear of the house and outbuildings the wind steadied and gathered strength. It snowed horizontally. The wind had boxed the compass; wind and I were traveling in the same direction and, thanks to the sail-area of my back, at roughly the same speed. For seconds at a time the snow seemed to hang almost motionless in the air around me, like a cloud of white fireflies who had all decided to come jogging with me. It was weirdly beautiful. Magic. As the land sloped uphill, the snow appeared to settle in ultraslow motion, disappearing as it hit the ground.

  Once I was up into the trees the wind slacked off considerably, confounded by the narrow and twisting path. The snow resumed normal behavior and I dropped back from a trot to a walk. As I came to the garden it weirded up again. Big sheets of air spilled over the tall trees into the cleared quarter-acre bowl and then smashed themselves to pieces against the trees on the far side. It looked like the kind of snowstorm they get inside those plastic paperweights when you shake them, skirling in all directions at once.

  I realized that despite having fixed it in my mind no more than three hours ago, I had forgotten to bring the chamber pot with me from the house. I certainly wasn’t going back for it, not into the teeth of that wind. Instead, it shouldn’t be a total loss, I worked off one glove, got my fly undone and pissed along as much of the west perimeter as I could manage, that being the direction from which the deer most often approached.

  Animals don’t grok fences as territory markers because they cannot conceive of anyone making a fence. Fences occur; you bypass them. But borders of urine are made, by living creatures, and their message is ancient and universally understood. A big carnivore claims this manor. (The Sunrise Hill commune had tried everything else in the book, fences and limestone borders and pie-pan rattles and broken-mirror windchimes, and still lost a high percentage of their garden to critters. Vegetarian pee doesn’t work.)

  Past the garden the path began to slope upward steeply, and footing became important. It would be much worse in a few weeks, when the path turned into a trail of mud, oozing down the Mountain in ultraslow motion, but it was not an easy walk now. This far back up into the woods, the path was in shadow for most of the day, and long slicks of winter snow and ice remained unmelted here and there; on the other hand, there had been more than enough thawing to leave a lot of rocks yearning to change their position under my feet. My Snowmobile boots gave good traction and ankle support—and were as heavy as a couple of kilos of coffee strapped to my feet. The ground crunched beneath them, and I sympathized. I had to keep working my nose to break up the ice that formed in it, and my beard began to stiffen up from the exhalations trapped by my scarf. Mucus, I thought, I hope you appreciate the trouble I go through for you.

  I thought of Frank then for a while, and a strange admixture of joy and sadness followed me up the trail. Frank was the piano-player/artist who had given me Mucus, back in Freshman year. Fragile little guy with black curls flying in all directions and a tongue of Sheffield steel. His hero was Richard Manuel of The Band. (Mine was Davy Graham then.) He only smiled in the presence of friends, and his smile always began and ended with just the lips. The corners of his mouth would curl all the way up into his cheeks as far as they could, the lips would peel back for a brief flash of good white teeth, then seal again.

  The way our college worked it, there was a no-classes Study Week before the barrage of Finals Week. Frank and I were both in serious academic jeopardy, make-or-break time. We stayed awake together for the entire two weeks, studying. No high I’ve had before or since comes close to the heady combination of total fatigue and mortal te
rror. At one point in there, I’ve forgotten which night, we despaired completely and went off-campus to get drunk. We could not seem to manage it no matter how much alcohol we drank. After five or six hours we gave up and went back to studying. Over the next few days we transcended ourselves, reached an exhilarated plane on which we seemed to comprehend not only the individual subjects, but all of them together in synthesis. As Lord Buckley would say, we dug infinity.

  By the vagaries of mass scheduling we both had all our exams on Thursday and Friday, three a day. We felt this was good luck. Maximum time to study, then one brutal final effort and it was all over. One or two exams a day would have been like Chinese water torture.

  As the sun came up on Thursday morning I was a broken man, utterly whipped. Frank flailed at me with his hands, and then with that deadly tongue—Frank only used that on assholes, the kind of people who mocked you for wearing long hair—without reaching me. He and the rest of the world could go take Sociology exams: I was going to die, here, now. He left the room. In a few moments I heard him come back in. I kept my eyes shut, determined to ignore whatever he said, but he didn’t say anything at all, so with an immense irritated effort I forced them open and he was holding out Mucus Moose the Mucilage Machine.

  He knew I coveted the Moose. It was one of his most cherished belongings.

  “I want you to have him, Sam,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling if anything can hold you together now, it’s Mucus.”

  I exploded laughing. That set him off, and we roared until the tears came. We were in that kind of shape. The laugh was like those pads they clap to the chests of fading cardiac patients; it shocked me reluctantly back to life.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said finally, wiping tears away. “Thanks.” Then: “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What’s going to hold you together, if I take Mucus?”

  His cheeks appled up, his lips peeled apart slowly, and the teeth flashed. “I’m feeling lucky. Come on, asshole.”