It was almost noon, but the phone obviously woke him up. I don’t suppose writers keep bankers’ hours, or real estate agents’.
I told him I needed advice about a mysterious object and asked whether I might meet him for lunch and get his opinion. My treat, I said, at Leonardo’s, a pretty good Italian restaurant. That got his interest; he agreed to meet me there at one.
I called another agent to come cover for me, and when she showed up at quarter to one, I took the three photographs and contract in a large envelope and went down to Leonardo’s. I’d normally walk the seven blocks, but it was a hundred degrees out. I turned the car’s air conditioner on high and went back to the office for a few minutes. I guess I was helping to ruin the fellow’s atmosphere, but it was evidently too late to worry about that.
I was inside Leonardo’s cool, enjoying a Coke in a booth that looked out on the parking lot, when I saw the apparition that was Jeremiah Phipps. He had a shaggy grey beard and a mane of grey hair tied back in a ponytail, riding a rusty old bike, wearing cutoff jeans and a Florida Gators T-shirt. On his way in, he asked the waitress for two Buds.
“Very weird.” I didn’t show him the pictures and contract right off, but first told him how the man had walked in and started talking cryptic nonsense. The two mugs of beer came, and I paused while he drained one of them. I ordered a large deluxe pizza, figuring he could take the leftovers home.
“I was getting scared,” I said. “I thought his manner was threatening. But I guess it was just a language thing.”
“He some kind of foreigner?”
“Some kind.” I took out the three pictures and laid them down. “How about that?”
He picked up one of them, looked at it closely, held it up to the light, looked at the other side. “Hmm.”
“Ever seen anything like that?”
He looked at the other two and raked his fingers through his beard. “I don’t get it. Three sheets of plastic?”
“What? No, look—this is a prehistoric scene, and this is the traffic at Sixth and University, and this…”
He was looking at me in a funny way. “You see that stuff on them?”
“In them! They’re three-dimensional, moving. You can even smell them!” I picked up the prehistoric one and sniffed deeply, and thrust it at him. “Fire and brimstone!”
He sniffed it gingerly and put it down. “Yeah, um, look…I don’t want to pry, but is this maybe an acid flashback? I know how—”
“I’ve never taken drugs in my life!” The nerve.
He held up a placating hand. “Just tryin’ to be scientific here.” He handed them back. “Study ’em. They’re still the same?”
“Except this one.” I turned it over. “You had it upside down.” I took the contract out of the envelope. It hadn’t changed. “How about this?”
He stared at it, both sides, then sighted down it as if looking for dust on the surface. “Another picture?”
“No. This is a contract. It gives the human race fifty years to get off the Earth.”
“Not gonna happen.” He squinted at it and then rubbed his beard, calculating. “Three and a half billon people, that’s about two hundred thousand a day, call it eight thousand per hour. You couldn’t move ’em across town in a bus in that time. Let alone to Mars or wherever.” He shook his head and sort of laughed through his nose. “Ain’t gonna happen.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
He riveted me with his eyes, coal black and bloodshot. “I don’t say that about people. We all got different ways with reality.”
The pizza came. I ordered two more beers and grabbed one as soon as they came.
He was a pizza-consuming machine, six slices to my two. He couldn’t have weighed a hundred-twenty. Maybe he only ate when somebody else was paying.
“What you want to do,” he said, lingering over the last piece, “is get some scientists interested in this plastic. There can’t be any plastic on Earth that does what you say.”
“You believe me.”
“Provisionally, yeah. Why would you lie to me? I don’t have any money or prestige. Not gonna get any in this life.”
He touched the middle one, leaving a little smear of grease. “This is Sixth and University.”
“That’s right.” I dabbed away the fingerprint.
“What you’re seeing is the traffic going by there now?”
“Yes. Or I think so. It could be anytime recent, this time of day.”
He got up. “Order me another beer. I’m gonna bicycle down there and hold up a certain number of fingers. Then I come back and you tell me how many.”
I watched him pedal laboriously away, and ordered another beer and a cannoli. Maybe I could finish it before he got back, using the beer as a distraction.
A few minutes later, he showed up at the intersection. He held up three fingers. He turned around, and behind his back, two fingers in a V.
I’d finished most of the cannoli by the time he returned. “You want the rest of that?”
I pushed it toward him. “You held up three fingers and had two behind your back.”
He nodded slowly and nibbled at the pastry. “Suppose you don’t tell people about the intergalactic real estate man. Suppose you just say ‘I’m psychic. You go do anything at the corner of Sixth and University, and I’ll look at this piece of plastic and tell you what it is.’”
“They’d say I had a hidden camera.”
He sipped his beer. “Wouldn’t do you any good if you were sitting in a newspaper office. A television station.”
“A laboratory,” I said. “I want scientists to pay attention.”
“Uh-huh. First you got to get their attention.” He drank half the beer and set it down hard. “What time you get off work?”
“Five.”
“Got a card? A business card?” I fished through my purse and gave him one. “I know some people,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
He showed up right at five in a car driven by a younger man. It was a dusty old black Chevrolet with a magnetic sign on the door advertising a local television station. A black car in Florida? Cheap, I presumed.
The boy had a big smile, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Looking forward to some fun. He said they had a thing, a “spot,” scheduled for right after the six-thirty commercial. I said that was fine and reached in to shake his hand. That’s when I saw the second young man in the back with a bulky camera.
“Randall Armitage,” the driver said to me. “Have you ever met me before?”
“No,” I said apologetically. “I don’t watch much television. What is this?”
“He’s taking a movie of you, uncut from now until the demonstration. Is that all right? John Buford Marshall.”
I shrugged. He didn’t have air-conditioning, but it wasn’t that far to the station. I got in and sneezed from the dust. “Let’s go,” I said. “Don’t spare the horses.”
We parked near the entrance to the TV station and the driver helped the cameraman, carrying a heavy battery for him. They both walked backwards, taking a picture of me crunching down the gravel walk. “This is not going to be very exciting,” I said. “Walking.”
“It’s not part of the show,” Jeremiah Phipps said. “It’s for the scientists afterwards.” Randall gave an unambiguous smirk. That firmed my resolve. I wanted to see the look on their faces later.
We sat down in a studio that was shabby everywhere the camera couldn’t see. The announcer’s desk itself was clean and smelled of lemon furniture polish. “Can I get you a coffee?” Randall asked, and I nodded, laying out the three pictures. A woman with a clipboard sat down behind us all without introducing herself.
The coffee smelled great, but as I raised it to my lips I asked, “Will I be able to go to the bathroom?”
“’Fraid not,” the cameraman said. “Not until after the thing.”
I set it down. “I’ll explain about the three pictures,” I said.
“Just the one, please,” John
Buford said. “The one we can verify.”
“Okay.” I peered into it. “It’s rush hour, of course. Tourists crawl up Sixth Avenue and find they can’t turn left on University. Horns honking, as if that ever did any good.” I looked up. “Of course anybody could tell you that.
“There’s a short man wearing a straw boater walking a huge dog across the street. It’s a Great Dane.”
“You should send someone out with a walkie-talkie,” Jeremiah said.
Randall nodded but said no. “This is a television thing. Not a radio thing.”
“We can do it later,” the cameraman said neutrally. “Can you explain how this happened?”
“Sure.” I wondered which one of them was in charge. I talked to the camera. “About eleven-thirty today, a strange-looking man walked into my real estate office. I’m a realtor for Star Realty on Thirteenth Street.” A plug wouldn’t hurt.
So I just plunged into the story and told it as accurately as I could remember. I held the sheet up to the camera and described what I could see and smell and hear. Randall looked at me sort of like he was studying a bug. Marshall looked more charitable. The silent woman with the clipboard left.
“We’re going to do a simple test first,” he said. “I’m going to stand at the intersection and write something on this big sheet of paper.” A poster board, actually. “Nobody knows what I’m going to write—I don’t even know, yet. You tell us what you see. Then our other portable camera, like this one, will show it.”
“Okay. Just point the paper north on Sixth. Or turn it around a couple of times.”
He left with a teenage boy. “Kind of stupid,” I said. “He could have left a note behind. He could have told me hours ago what he was going to write.”
The cameraman smiled. “You don’t know television, ma’am. People trust the camera.”
“They do,” Jeremiah said. “Not like they read books anymore.” I could hear a woman reading the news to the camera in the next room.
After a few minutes, John Buford Marshall smoothed his tie and another man came in to operate the camera. Bright lights snapped on. “Ma’am?” I went up to join him, and a woman powdered us both. While she was doing it, he said, “Let me have an oblique two-shot here with space in the lower corner for Randall’s insert.”
“You got it, boss.” Maybe he was the boss. After a minute, the man in the shadows said, “In five.” Three green lights, an orange and then a red.
“Thank you, Thelma,” he said, and conspicuously looked at his watch, in spite of the fact that there were clocks everywhere. “Thank you for the explanation of this ordinary woman’s extraordinary talent. Do you see our reporter, Mrs. Hockfield?”
“Oh, yes. He’s standing on the sidewalk outside the music store on University. He’s talking to the cameraman.” I held the plastic close. “Can’t quite hear. Still a lot of traffic.”
“He should start writing…now.” He did, a moment later, and then turned the board around. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Just tell us what you think it says.”
“No ‘think’ about it. It says SHE IS A THETAN.”
Jeremiah Phipps said a word I don’t think they allow on television.
“Ten seconds now, and the external camera.” I was watching his face instead of the monitor. His eyes bugged out in a most gratifying way. “How…how did you…what’s a Thetan?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I’m certainly not one! I’m a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
“Here come the phones,” Jeremiah Phipps said. One in the main office rang stridently. Two in the studio blinked angry red lights. “I think you’re going to find out more than you ever wanted to know about Thetans.”
It was kind of a joke. It turned out that Jeremiah Phipps knew Randall through science fiction—he was a “fan,” not a writer, and Randall decided to play a little science-fictional joke on Phipps.
Over the next few days I heard a lot about Thetans and L. Ron Hubbard, another science-fiction writer who discovered this religion, or made it up, Dianetics or Scientology. After news of the message “SHE IS A THETAN” got around—especially after the networks picked it up—I had twenty or thirty Scientologists a day come by the office.
As I say, you have to be a people person in this business, and part of that is to live and let live when it comes to religion. In my heart of hearts I don’t suppose I really believe any of it, not even the Episcopalianism I grew up with—that dried up when my husband died young—but anything that gets you through the day is all right by me. These Scientologists had some pretty strange things to say, and I don’t pretend I could follow it all, but they seemed moral and good-hearted.
And they believed me. I couldn’t get any scientists past the Thetan thing, but that was all right. The Scientologists believed me. And they bought houses. Boy, did they buy houses. I got gold pins for most property sold every year from 1967 until I retired in 1981. Houses weren’t that easy to sell in Gainesville then, in the middle of the state, equally far from the ocean and the Gulf.
After I retired, the Scientologists would still come by. They’d look at the pictures, which I had hanging on the wall, and some of them would claim to see things. Maybe, I don’t know.
The picture that was the near past started to change as workers appeared and put a railroad through. That would be back in the 1850s, right in the same place, what would become Sixth and University. If I lived to be into my nineties, I’d see the Civil War come in. They had a battle there.
That wouldn’t show up, though, until after August 14, 2017. When we’d all be exterminated, if old Baldy was to be believed. I hadn’t been able to get anybody but Jeremiah Phipps interested in that, and he passed long ago.
But before he died, he gave me an idea. It might work.
I turned seventy-eight in 2017, some the worse for wear but no complaints. On August 14 I put on my best Sunday dress and sat in the living room with a pitcher of iced tea.
Just before noon, Baldy knocked on the door and then walked through it, like mist. He hadn’t changed.
“Do not get up. I can see it is not easy.”
“Thank you.” He mopped at his face with a big handkerchief and looked around my rather crowded house. Never could get rid of stuff.
“So what’s it going to be?” I said. “Big explosion? Poison gas?”
“What would you prefer?”
“Ice, I suppose, like the poet said. It’s been so damned hot.”
“I could ask for ice.” He sat down on the couch. “May I?”
“Help yourself.” He poured a glass of iced tea and drank most of it.
He patted his lips with the handkerchief. “We might as well begin the…”
“Wait. I want to talk to the Council again.”
“To what end? You will just bother them.”
“You brought them before. This is much more serious.”
“Oh, not really. Not to me.” He looked annoyed, but he clapped his hands twice. The Council appeared, two seated next to him and a third, perhaps the one I spoke to half a century before, standing in front of the coffee table.
“What is it this time?” she said with asperity.
“When last we talked,” I said carefully, “you said that your property laws were similar to ours.”
“In some ways, yes.”
“We have a thing called ‘adverse possession.’ Squatter’s rights.”
“I know of this,” she said.
“You live on a piece of property for a length of time, continuously, without permission of the owner. ‘Open and notorious.’ Is that us?”
“That could be argued, of a species that accidentally evolved on a planet owned by someone else. But the agreement with his species”—she nodded at Baldy—“is the primary one, and was only contingent on their profoundly changing the environment. The ecology.”
“That’s what he said.” I got to my feet, joints popping, and crossed over to the window. I
threw the curtains open with a dramatic swoosh.
The sea glittered on the horizon.
“This was a hundred miles inland fifty years ago. Now it’s an island. In fifty years, we’ve changed the Earth’s ecology more than his people did in fifty thousand. Five hundred thousand.”
She looked out over the sea and nodded.
“But we planned it,” Baldy said.
“So did we,” I said. “Everybody knew it was going to happen.” Perhaps not so soon, I didn’t say.
She looked at me, and her brow furrowed. “She’s telling the truth.” To Baldy: “Her case is stronger than yours.” The three of them disappeared.
Baldy sat in silence for a moment. He finished his tea and stood up. He went to the window, and nodded.
“Clever. But we do have time on our side. We will return after you are extinct.” He stepped to the door. “You will have your ice by then, I think.”
He disappeared in a wisp.
I guess we can handle the ice when it happens.
It’s a funny thing. When you live on the beach you hardly ever go swimming. I thought this afternoon I might.
(2004)
Four Short Novels
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at least a million bucks—and eventually everybody did—they would reset you to whatever age you liked.
One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two million dollars who would trade one million to be their village’s Van Cliburn. In the sale of your ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.
For many people this became the game of life—becoming temporarily a genius, selling your genius for youth, and then clawing your way up in some other field, to buy back the passion that had rescued you first from the grave. Enjoy it a few years, sell it again, and so on ad infinitum. Or finitum, if you just once made a wrong career move, and wound up old and poor and bereft of skill. That happened less and less often, of course, Darwinism inverted: the un-survival of the least fit.