Gridlock and Other Stories Part 9

"All of what?"

"Your war with the Dalgiri. You did fire the first shot -- and without warning -- you know."

Jane's face darkened. It was as though a volcano was ready to erupt. She sat there considering her reply for a dozen seconds. Then she exploded.

"You are d.a.m.n lucky I did, Duncan MacElroy!"

"What?"

"Don't you see? How did that Dalgir track me down at your rooming house? And the three others. They found us here at your uncle's cabin. How? How could they possibly have known where we were?"

I shrugged. "Damfino. Haven't had much time to think about it."

"Well I know! They had a most interesting discussion when you went out with that one to fix the generator," she said.

"So?"

"They found us because theywere looking for you ,Duncan,not me!"

"I don't understand," I said in the understatement of the year. "Why would they be looking for me?""Because they were from our future, stupid! Don't you see what that means?"

"Huh?"

"It means that sometime in the next fifty years you are going to become a major problem for the Dalgiri Empire. In fact, you will be such a pain in their collective behinds that they will be willing to mount an expedition across the timelines for the sole purpose of killing you! Don't you see? They found us so easily because they have studied your life since early childhood. They know you like an open book. The only thing that saved you was my chancing to spot that aversion field. Otherwise you'd be dead."

"From the future?" I mumbled stupidly about ten times.

"Yes, from the future," she said finally. "The five dimensional surface that describes paratime is convoluted beyond belief. Travel into the past is completely feasible -- if you are willing to spend a few years waiting on some skewed timeline for the right portal to open. There are timelines without number where time flows in reverse, you know."

"Years? They invested that much time in killing me?"

"Probably. You are important to them. Important enough to expend four field agents and an armed cruiser in the attempt. That makes you important to us."

I suddenly could not think of anything to say.

"Well?" she asked.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!"

"You certainly will."

The transport shuttle came through at full dark, guided to the cabin by the Dalgiri homer. It was an ebon egg some ten yards long that hovered a foot off the snow pack. The three-man crew was briskly efficient. Within minutes, they had loaded the dead into a cargo hold and begun to clean up all evidence of the fight in and around the cabin. A fourth man, their pa.s.senger, conferred hurriedly with Jane while I wrote a note to Tony Minetti.

The note explained that the stranger returning his Jeep was a cousin and asked him to hand over my Jag. I wrote another note to Hal Benson, my landlord, telling him to forward my clothes and stereo to an address in New York City. I wondered briefly what he would think of the three crisp hundred dollar bills I included in the envelope. Then it was out to the generator shack to kill the power for the last time.

Finally, it was time to go. The field agent pulled away from the cabin in the Jeep. Jane and I watched the red taillights out of sight before we turned and walked arm in arm toward the rectangle of blue light spilling from the open hatch of the shuttle.

Suddenly the confusion, fear, and fatigue that had plagued me in the last twenty-four hours were gone. A feeling of exhilaration washed over me. It was the exhilaration of being alive and on the threshold of a great adventure. Of being nine feet tall and covered with hair, and ready to buckle my swash from one end of paratime to the other. Of having seen the future and discovering greatness lay there.

"I'm sorry I called you stupid," Jane said, snuggling close as we walked."You're not the first," I said. It was then that I stopped in my tracks. A funny thought had just hit me.

"What's the matter?" Jane asked.

"Your shuttle," I said with a chuckle.

"What about it?"

"I just realized. Joel Peterson was right! UFOs are ships from another universe." Then I laughed.

What started as a chuckle built quickly into a belly-jiggling guffaw. I laughed so hard tears began to run down my cheeks.

Suddenly Jane was laughing too.

When she had managed to get control of herself, she wiped the tears from her eyes. "I don't know how to tell you this, Duncan. UFOs really are swamp gas! Or weather balloons, airplane lights, or St.

Elmo's fire. We shield our shuttles with aversion fields. They are practically invisible at night. There hasn't been a sighting of one of our ships in the whole five years we have been operating on this timeline."

I turned to stare at her. "Really?"

She nodded.

"Well I will be d.a.m.ned!"

Then we started to laugh again. This time the joke was even funnier.

Author's Note forBeer Run :

Beer Runhad an interesting genesis. I had just attended my first function with the Arizona science fiction fans in June 1978. It was a monthly gathering at the home of one of the leading members in central Phoenix. I went because I was about to attend my first World Science Fiction Convention and wanted to get some information on what went on at SF conventions. I remember being struck by the ambiance of the gathering. It was unlike anything I had ever been to before. Afterwards, I went home and immediately tried to capture that feeling on paper.

For the locale of the story, I dredged up a childhood memory. My aunt lived briefly in downtown Tempe, across Mill Avenue from Arizona State University. We visited her one night when I was about 10 years old. By some quirk of mind, I remember that as a magical night. I have a vivid memory of the streetlights shining among the tall trees along the back streets of what was then a university town. I even remember the cracks in the concrete sidewalks. It seemed a perfect place to set up the meeting on the UFO Spotters Club.

For those who are familiar with Tempe, Arizona, the neighborhood whereBeer Run begins is between Monti's La Casa Vieja restaurant and the railroad tracks to the west. Or rather, I should say, the neighborhood was there. It has since been torn down and is now a maze of theaters, apartments, and the headquarters of America West Airlines. In fact, I parked my car last month in the middle of a dirt parking lot almost precisely on the spot where Jane Dugway killed the Dalgir (after the Centerpoint Theater started charging $5.00to park in their garage.) The mountain cabin was easy. It is my parent's cabin outside Christropher Creek, Arizona. My mother still lives there six months out of the year.

I have long been a fan of H. Beam Piper's and have read his paratime stories dozens of times. Finding myself well launched on what had started out merely as a practice exercise in writing, I decided to add my own bit to the sub-genre known as the parallel universe story.

Except, as noted in the story, the universes are decidedly non-parallel!

I was very pleased with the way my non-story came out and sent it off to a.n.a.log Science Fiction/Science Fact Magazine. Stan Schmidt, the new editor, purchased it immediately.

Beer Run is, I believe, the very first purchase that he made when he took over as editor in 1978 following the departure of Ben Bova. He published it in the July 1979, issue of a.n.a.log and asked for a sequel.

Therefore, having started out merely to write an evocative scene, I found myself continuing the adventures of Duncan MacElroy through not one sequel, but two. The other two stories were "A Greater Infinity," a.n.a.log, November 1980; and "Which Way to the Ends of Time?", a.n.a.log, 17 August 1981.

By the time I had finished my paratime series in a.n.a.log, I discovered I had 50,000 words of fiction with the same character and in chronological order. "Aha, almost a novel!"

As the fates would have it, in 1981 I was ready to graduate from the magazines to novels. I wrote a couple of transition chapters, a.s.sembled the whole thing, and sent it off to my agent to find me a publisher. He did. He signed me with Judy-Lynn Del Rey of Del Rey books, where I spent the next decade happily publishing novels.

One of the advantages of being a writer is that it tends to make you more aware of the inner workings of your mind than do other kinds of work. I got a lesson in how my subconscious operates while preparing my a.n.a.log novellas for publication as a novel. I needed a catchy t.i.tle, so I settled on Quest Crosstime as being descriptive and sent the ma.n.u.script off to Del Rey for editing. They wrote back to inform me that Quest Crosstime is one of Andre Norton's more famous books and asked me to chose another t.i.tle. In checking my bookshelves, I not only discovered that I had Quest Crosstime in my collection, but that it was on the end of the shelf and in plain view when I sat at my desk. Apparently, the eyes see, but the conscious brain does not always register. In any event, I named the book after the second story in the series, A Greater Infinity, and it was published by Del Rey in 1982.

GIFT.

If you think nuclear power is a dangerous way to generate electricity, then you obviously have not considered the drawbacks of solar energy!

It was a cold, bl.u.s.tery Wednesday that first time he came into the El Dorado. It was going on midnight and the place was deserted. Even Lucy and Suellen, our two "working girls" had given up for the night and gone home. I recognized him immediately, of course. Even without my photographic memory, I would have known R. J. Cowen."Hi," I said, "what'll it be?" I tried to be a study in friendly aloofness. I have always heard that Cowen does not like people fawning all over him. That and the fact that he has been known to leave a thousand-dollar bill for a tip made me keep my distance.

"You know who I am?" he asked. His voice was a low croak and his eyes were bloodshot. I recognized the symptoms. He had the air of a man in the middle of a weeklong bender. His breath confirmed my suspicions.

"You're R. J. Cowen, the sunscreen tyc.o.o.n," I said. "Care for a drink, Mr. Cowen?"

"Yah," he said. "Uh, a scotch-and-water."

The beverage dispenser served up the scotch with its usual a.s.sortment of noises. I retired to the other end of the bar and went back to polishing gla.s.ses. He did not taste the scotch at all. He just sat there and stared into its dark translucence as though hypnotized. I watched him in the mirror for ten minutes, then put the gla.s.s down and sidled back to where he was sitting. He did not take notice of me until I was standing across from him.

"Pardon me, Mr. Cowen," I said. "It's none of my business, of course, but you look like you need a friend. Anything I can do to help?"

He looked up with those red-rimmed eyes and sighed. "You say you know who I am."

"Yes, sir."

"Who am I?"

"Some people around this burg say you're the richest man in the world."

He nodded. "Yeah, I've heard that nasty rumor myself. The funny part of it is that it is true. Iam the richest man in the world. Not only that, I am richer than the next ten candidates combined. What do you think of that?"

I whistled long and low. Not because it was news to me, you understand. Rather because he seemed to expect it.

"Do you know how I got that way?" he asked, before finally taking a sip from his drink.

"Talent?" I asked.

"Like h.e.l.l! It was luck. That's right. Pure, unadorned, undeserved, and unexpected dumb luck.

You want to hear the story?"

"If you want to tell it," I said. Of course, I did not know then what I was letting myself in for.

Cowen drained the gla.s.s dry and asked for another. Fizz, whirrr, plop and I had it in front of him.

Remember the Vietnam War? No, me neither. Well, it was one of those brush fire things that went on about forty years ago. Cowen was in college at the time and dropped out to protest US involvement.

To hear him tell it, those were the best days of his life. He and a bunch of others traveled around the country in a battered Volkswagen van. They organized demonstrations, burned draft cards, and just generally raised h.e.l.l.

Then a terrible thing happened. The war ended and Cowen was adrift. He had been one of the hard-core protesters, a real agitator. Suddenly the cause to which he had given six years of his life wasgone. His side had won. There was nothing left to fight for. He felt like a knight who trips over the Holy Grail on his way to saddle up his horse. (I hope you realize I am condensing this. By the time Cowen finally got to war's end, it was almost 2:00 a.m.) After peace broke out, Cowen just drifted. Bringing down a government had been a heady narcotic. Nothing afterwards had been the same. He tried consumerism, environmentalism, and even Eastern religions. Nothing gave him that same feeling of excitement he'd found in the peace movement.

"Have you ever belonged to something?" he asked me while nursing his third drink. "I don't mean the Boy Scouts or the PTA. I meanreally belonged, like everyone around you was part of your family.

That was the feeling that I had lost. It was what I was searching for. "

"Must be a great feeling," I said.

"The best," he agreed.

Eventually his search took him to Los Angeles where he met an old girl friend from the peace movement. She had found a new cause of her own and invited him to attend a lecture on the dangers of nuclear power.

"You have heard of nuclear power, haven't you?" Cowen asked me. He slurred the name, of course, but it came out understandable enough.

"Sure," I said. "Used to be what they propelled submarines with, didn't it?"

He nodded. "They still use it on some of the real old boats, the ones they can't retrofit with cryogenic storage modules. Other than that, nuclear energy has no use. Know why?'

"Sunscreens are cheaper and safer," I said.

He slammed his fist down on the bar. "d.a.m.ned right they are. Now, stop interrupting, I've a story to tell..."

That night at the lecture, Cowen had found another crusade he could give himself over to. For the next several years that is what he had done, heart and soul. He had crisscrossed the country in that same beat-up old Volkswagen, again organizing demonstrations and sit-ins. By 1980, they had the nukes (As G.o.d is my witness, that's what he called them) on the run. In the fall of 1982, Cowen was on the way to Arizona to join a demonstration outside the gate of the big nuclear power planet there; only he did not make it. He was sidetracked by an accident, the accident that made him the richest man in the world.

He had gotten off the interstate to buy gas for the Volkswagen. (Yeah, cars ran on gasoline in those days. Cryogen was just a gleam in a few people's eyes.) It was dinnertime and he stopped in a small roadside cafe. The sun was just going down as he finished eating. Apparently, it was one of those sunsets that you can only see in Arizona, so Cowen decided impulsively to go up into the hills to photograph it. He did not get the picture. What he got was lost. He wandered around in the desert until he topped a rise and stopped to check the small pocket compa.s.s he carried with him. He had sent hours wandering around and the car was again running on empty. He turned the dome light on and glanced down at the compa.s.s. It was a good thing he did.

Otherwise, the flash would have blinded him for hours.

"Funny things run through your mind when something explodes just over the next rise." he said to me while popping a peanut into his mouth and dropping a handful of sh.e.l.ls on the floor. "I'd been demonstrating against nuclear power for four years and had learned a lot about how it worked. Knowyour enemy, I always say. Well one of the first things I had learned was that a reactor could not explode like a bomb. I was not so sure during those long seconds after the explosion, I can tell you that! Mostly I spent the time curled in a ball on the floor of my van with the gearshift lever jamming me in the ribs.

Every story I had ever heard about nuclear weapons flashed through my mind. All I could think about was the face of a little j.a.panese girl who had been looking up when the Hiroshima bomb went off ...

never mind, Joe. No sense ruining your evening by being too graphic."

"Whatever you say, sir," I said. My name is Marvin Agronski, but if the richest man in the world wanted to call me Joe, that was fine by me.

"Eventually I concluded that it wasn't the power plant," he continued, "and that I wasn't dead. The next thought wasplane crash! Weren't planes always going down at night in the mountains? Somehow the idea of a few hundred dead strangers lying mangled just over the next ridge didn't bother me as much as that little girl's picture.

"I extricated myself from the gear shift, got back into the driver's seat, and then eased the car up the hill at dead slow to see what was burning. When I got to the top, I found myself looking down into a little hollow filled with scrubby desert trees. Many of the trees were ablaze. I stopped the car, got out, and walked as far as I could before the heat from the fire became too intense. It was bright as day down there."

I leaned one elbow on the bar and began to pick my teeth, nodding occasionally so that it looked like I was intent on what he was saying. He didn't even notice me. He was once more in a hollow in the mountains of Arizona some thirty years ago. Truth was that I could have left the room and he would not have noticed.

"Suddenly a figure walked out of a clump of trees that hadn't caught fire," Cowen said. "He took three steps towards me and collapsed to the ground. I did not have time to think. I just ran over to where he lay face down and rolled him over. That was when I got my second shock of the night.