Time Pressure Page 4

  But of course I had to have them the other way around. Peeing was simply a matter of reaching the chamber pot. For coffee, I had to:

  —fill the kitchen firebox with wood, shut off the Kemac when the wood had caught, adjust dampers—

  —put back on all of last night’s stove-dried clothing, including outdoor gear, all of it smelling of ancient and tedious sin—

  —carry two big white plastic buckets and the splitting axe down to the stream, a trifling two or three hundred meters without the slightest cover from the wind whipping in off the Bay—

  —hack through the ice with the axe, without cutting off my feet—

  —dig up two fullish buckets and seal them with lids that fit so snug they must be hammered, without wetting my gloves or other garments—

  —carry both full buckets (heavy) and axe (awkward) back to the house—

  —refill the kettle and assemble the Melitta rig—

  —wait five or ten minutes for the kettle to boil—

  —and start the coffee dripping. All of this in the zombie trance of Before Coffee. I seldom had the strength to imagine, much less undertake, a second trip, even though two buckets of water is (at best) precisely enough to carry you through to bedtime. Today I made the second trip. I had company. By the time I was back with the extra two buckets, water was ready to be poured over the coffee. (Every country home has at least a dozen spare white plastic buckets around. They coalesce out of air, like my guest. When they’re old enough, they transmute themselves into Mason jars full of unidentifiable grains and beans.)

  I toasted a slab of bread on the stove and reheated some of yesterday’s porridge while the coffee was dripping. It is important to be done with breakfast by the time you have finished your coffee. Another of those habits I mentioned, which come from living in the cold winter woods. Twenty seconds after I finished the coffee, I was sprinting for the outhouse. Maybe it was as much as two and a half minutes before I was back indoors again, considerably lighter and much refreshed, ready to lick my weight in, say, baby rabbits.

  I had fetched along four fresh eggs from the chicken coop; like the extra water, that turned out to be a happy thought. (Thirteen chickens, four eggs: a good day. I’m told they developed a strain of chicken that would reliably lay an egg a day. One unfortunate side effect; it was too dumb to eat.)

  The weather had, with characteristic perversity, turned rather pleasant. Snow gone. Temperature creeping up to within hailing distance of Centigrade zero (well above zero in the scale I had grown up with). Wind moderate, and from the north—snow wind came from the south. Sky clear except for some scudding ribbons of cloud hastening over from New Brunswick. Sunrise beautiful as always, lacking the stunning colours of the pollution-refracted sunrises of my New York youth, but with a clarity and crispness that more than compensated. I was whistling Good Day Sunshine as I came in with the eggs.

  I checked my guest. Other than shifted position (a good sign, I felt), there was no change. My kitchen was sunny and undrafty. I sat with my chair tipped back and my boots up on the stove and thought.

  If she woke, we were going to talk—even if it took time for us to agree on language. If we did talk there was, it seemed to me, great risk of altering the past, thereby stressing the fabric of reality, perhaps destroying it altogether. I examined my curiosity, and found that it didn’t care if it killed the cat—or even all cats. As I said, the logical thing to do was cut her throat. Of course I had no such intention. Perhaps it’s a character defect: I don’t have whatever it takes to murder a pretty naked woman on the basis of logical deductions concerning something which logic said couldn’t be happening in the first place.

  But suppose she had no such deficiency of character? Risky interaction between us could be avoided equally as well by my death. This intuition had caused me to hide her golden headband—but that might not be sufficient precaution. She looked well muscled; even asleep she looked like she had a lot of quick. I don’t know even Twentieth Century karate.

  I wanted leverage.

  So I called Sunrise Hill.

  “Hi, Malachi—is the Snaker up?”

  “Ha, ha. Now I’ve got one for you.”

  “Would you wake him, man? It’s kind of important.”

  “There’s enough suffering in the cosmos, Sam—”

  “Please, Malachi.”

  “I’ll get Ruby to wake him up. Hang on.”

  Long pause. One advantage of commune life: there’s always someone else to start the morning fires. One of the disadvantages of a spiritual commune: no coffee.

  “Hazzit. Whiss?”

  “Good morning, Snaker. Wake up, man, all the way up.”

  “S’na fucking wibbis?”

  “Really, man, I got news—”

  “Garf norble.”

  “What I tell you is true, brother. There’s a time traveler in my living room.”

  “—from what year?—”

  “I don’t know. Unconscious since arrival.”

  “And you’re sure it’s a—” He lowered his voice drastically. “—what you said?”

  “That, or an alien who arrives in a ball of fire in the woods, doesn’t mind being naked in the snow, and has fabulous tits.”

  “Sam, you haven’t by any chance—”

  “Not since the dance at Louis’s barn. I’m straight, Snaker.”

  “I’ve already left, but don’t pour the coffee till you hear me coming over the horizon. Shit, wait—who else knows?”

  “You, me, and God, if He’s monitoring this sector at the moment.”

  “If He is, He’s holding His breath. Damn, why does everything always have to happen in the middle of the night?”

  “Snake—don’t even tell Ruby, okay? Uh—” I cast about for a cover story that would account for what he’d said so far. “What you tell people there is, I’ve got a possible Beatles bootleg, reputed to date from 1962, and I’ve asked you to come over and help me decide if it’s legit. Get it?”

  Even half-awake, the Snaker has a quick uptake. “It’s the drumming that’ll tell the tale. If it’s Ringo, it can’t be ’62.”

  “Good man, Snake.”

  “Look, it’s hard to run full tilt like this and talk on the phone. See you sooner.” He hung up.

  The only other habitual science fiction reader on the Mountain. I had known he would come through.

  I used the morning chores to calm myself down. Bank fires, replenish woodbox, feed chickens, stare at Bay. The last-named seldom fails to repair a fractured mood; I went back indoors feeling pretty good. Started to resume work on my half-finished dulcimer, and realized I had left Mucus up on the mountainside the night before. No time to get him now. I went back outside and looked at the Bay some more.

  While I was wishing for the thousandth time that I shared old Bert Manchette’s ability to forecast the weather by the color of the water in the Bay, I heard the thunder of an armored column approaching. It was Blue Meanie, The Surprise Hill Gang’s ancient pickup truck, with the Snaker at the wheel. There was a mechanical roar of outrage as the Meanie went through the Haskell Hollow, a few licks away, and minutes later the wretched thing came into view around the bend, bellowing in agony and trailing dark smoke like a squid under attack. When he shut it off at the foot of my driveway it seemed to slump.

  The Snaker was well over six feet and thin as a farmer’s hope. Which made him especially cold-sensitive, which made him wear so many layers of clothes he looked like a normal person. Nobody knew Yassir Arafat back then, so Snaker had the ugliest beard I’d ever seen. His brown hair was narrow gauge, neither straight nor curly, and extremely long even for a North Mountain Hippie. He was that indeterminate age that all of us were, somewhere between eighteen and thirty-five. God had seen fit to give him guitarist’s fingers, without a guitarist’s talent, and it drove him crazy. He had a good baritone, was named after Snaker Dave Ray, the baritone in the old Koerner-Ray-Glover ensemble. He’d sold a couple of stories to magazines in the St
ates. I taught him licks. He lent me books. We were friends.

  This morning he was as excited as I’ve ever seen him before noon. He leaped from the truck before it had stopped coughing, ran up to me.

  “Fabulous tits, huh?”

  “Well,” I said in a softer voice than his, “you’re awake enough to have your priorities straight.”

  “As good as Ruby’s? Never mind, you can’t compare tits. Let’s see her—”

  He started to move past me to the rear of the house. (Nobody keeps a door open to the wind on the Bay side of his house.) I grabbed him by the shoulder, sharply. “Hold it a second. Stand right there and don’t move.” I went to the living room window, got up on tiptoe and squinted in through the layers of plastic. She was still where I had left her, apparently still asleep.

  The Snaker was trying to look over my shoulder. “I’ll be—”

  “Shhh!” I led him back away from the window.

  “Come on, man, let’s go inside for a better look—”

  “No.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Stand there and shut up and I’ll tell you why not.”

  He nodded. I went inside, made two cups of coffee, put a small knock of grog in my own, stuck the golden crown dingus under my coat and went back outside. He was peering in the window again. “Dammit, come here.”

  I made him drink the coffee all the way down. “Tell me all,” he said when he had swallowed the last gulp, “omitting no detail however slight.” So I did. It took less time than I had expected.

  “It comes clear,” he said finally. “Your behavior begins to make sense.”

  “Right. When she wakes up and realizes her cover’s blown, maybe she just pulls my brains out through my eyesockets to cover her tracks. It would be nice to have an ally she’s never seen and can’t locate, who is prepared to blow the secret sky-high if I don’t report in on time.”

  “Aren’t you overlooking something? What if she’s a telepath? Then after she does you she comes and pulls out my brains.”

  I shook my head. “If she is, we’re screwed no matter what we do. Besides, I don’t believe in telepathy. What I’m going to do is give you this headband gizmo to hold hostage. You take it down the line somewhere and wait ’til you hear my shotgun go off once. It could take hours, but stay alert. If the crown turns out to be some essential part of her life support or something, I want to be able to get you back here with it in a hurry. But don’t tell me where you’re going, and don’t come back if I fire both barrels.”

  “What a nasty suspicious mind you have, my son.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Look, why didn’t you just tell me all this when I first got here?”

  “You couldn’t have followed the logic-chain before coffee.”

  “Oh. True. Okay, slip me the headband. And Sam—good luck.”

  “Thanks, mate.”

  “And call me back as soon as you’re sure it’s safe. I’m dying to find out if you’re right.”

  “I know what you mean.” I grinned. “It’s like getting a tax refund from God. I’ve always wanted to meet a time traveler.”

  “Knowing one exists would be a tax refund from God. Meeting one would be gravy. Delicious gravy, but just gravy.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Sam, Sam! If a time traveler exists—then the human race isn’t going to annihilate itself in the near future. Not completely, anyway.”

  “Huh! You’re right, by Jesus.”

  “Of course I am. I’ve had coffee.”

  He took the golden headband, studied it and put it away. He got back into the truck, did something that made it scream. “Have a care, son,” he called over the clashing of gears. “Never trust a naked time traveler.” And he was gone in a spray of gravel.

  CHAPTER 5

  FOR LUNCH I fried up two of the morning’s eggs with some of the last earthly remains of Tricky and Dicky, the pigs I had slaughtered the previous October. I half expected the smell to wake her, but no dice. I ate in the living room, watching her. I caught myself becoming irritated at her. I hate houseguests who sleep late; I yearn so badly to sleep late myself, and a country householder can’t. Even a time traveler ought to have enough manners to grab forty winks before coming to work, I heard myself think, and that sounded so stupid I grinned at myself. I dislike grinning at myself, so I started getting irritated again—

  There’s one thing even better than contemplation of the Bay of Fundy for calming me down, so I got out Gertrude and a handful of Ernie Ball fingerpicks. As usual, the song chose itself without conscious thought on my part; as usual I couldn’t have improved on it with a week’s thought. Beloved Hoagy (still alive then) and Johnny Mercer: “Lazy Bones.”

  I try to do that song as close as possible to the definitive version Amos Garrett laid down on Geoff and Maria Muldaur’s Sweet Potatoes album. I’m not fit to change Garrett’s strings, I’m just barely good enough to get by professionally, but the tune is so sweet it almost plays itself. That afternoon it seemed to come out especially well. I watched her splendid chest rise and fall, and told her softly that sleeping in the sun was no way to get her day’s work done. (What was her day’s work? And what day, in what year?) For the first time in a while I attempted an instrumental chorus before the second bridge, and to my immense satisfaction it came off just fine. I grinned and finished the song, warned her that if she slept away the day, she was never going to make a dime. (Where would she have put a dime?) I even managed to stumble through the Beiderbecke riff (from a tune charmingly entitled “I’m Coming, Virginia”) that Garrett quotes to close the song, and let the final G chord ring in the room while I admired myself.

  In the last line of that song the narrator offers to wager that his listener has not heard a thing he’s said, and I believed as I sang it that such a bet would be a boat-race—had she not slept through the repeated filling of a toploader stove?—so when she opened her striking blue eyes and said, “That’s not true,” I started so sharply my thumbpick flew off.

  I left it on the floor. I had already mentally prepared some sort of welcoming speech, designed to show in as few words as possible that I was clever enough to know what she was and ethical enough to pose no danger—but it flew right out of my head. I put Gertrude carefully back in her case, to give myself time to think. “I stand corrected,” is what I finally said.

  She sat up, and I thought of a Persian cat I had once loved named Rainy Midnight. “That was very beautiful.” Her voice was a smoky alto. It came out so flat and expressionless that it put me in mind of Mister Spock. I found it oddly attractive.

  I thanked her with only a shadow of my usual wince. It hadn’t been too bad. Her next line was very interesting.

  “Do you know what I am?”

  I liked that question. In the rush of the moment, I had forgotten my earlier fear that she might be a telepath, it had not been in my conscious mind. I remembered it when she asked the question—and so her question was probably genuine. Unless, of course, she could somehow read thoughts below the conscious level, or was very clever…

  My voice came out steady. “I know that you are a very beautiful bald lady who blew up one of my best birch trees. I believe that you are a time traveler. If so, I will do my best not to screw things up for you.”

  “You’re very quick,” she said calmly. “You understand the dangers, then?”

  This was great. “I doubt it. But my guesses scare me pretty good. Changing history and so forth. What year are you from?”

  “That I will not tell you.”

  “Okay. Why are you here?”

  She hesitated slightly; I thought she was going to refuse to answer that question too. “Think of me as—” She looked quizzical, then tried comically to look up at her own forehead, where her crown-thing should have been. “Can I have my ROM? I keep some specialized vocabulary in there.” She touched her bald skull. “And I’ll need it to start growing hair.”

  I blinked. ROM me
ant Read-Only-Memory. The damned thing was an overgrown IC chip! Stored computer data! “Direct brain-computer interface—”

  She smiled. It was a nice smile, but somehow it looked like something she had just learned to do. “You read science fiction!”

  I had to smile myself. “They still have it in your time, eh?” I’d always been a little afraid they’d run out of crazy ideas one day.

  “You’d love it.” She frowned slightly. “If you could understand it.”

  “I’m sorry about your ROM. It’s not here now. I can get it in ten minutes’ time.”

  She nodded. “For all you knew it was a weapon. I understand. All right, what is the current term for people who study people of the past?”

  “There are several kinds. Historians study events in the relatively recent past, and try to interpret them. Archaeologists dig up evidence of the distant past, and anthropologists use the evidence, and observation of surviving primitive cultures, to make guesses about human social and cultural development throughout history. Then writers relate all that to the present.”

  “Think of me as a combination of all of those. The human race has come so far, its past has begun to seem unreal to it. I’m here to learn.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “By keeping my secret, and by introducing me plausibly to your community. I promise that I will not harm anyone in any way.”

  “You aren’t afraid of accidentally changing the past? Your past?”

  “Not unless my secret becomes general knowledge.”

  “One other person knows. He’ll keep his mouth shut,” I added hastily, seeing her dismay. “He’s smart enough to understand why. He’s actually sold some science fiction to a magazine.”

  She looked dubious. “He might think it’s good story material.”