“Yes,” he grumbled only half audibly.
I didn’t really want to talk to the old man, but whenever I get nervous I always talk too much, and he was the only other person in the waiting room.
“Really? When?”
“When?!” He growled angrily. “What do you mean when?!”
“I-I m-mean w-what, uh, how old were you?”
He sighed, and a flood of emotions seemed to cross his face, ending with a look of utter disdain for me, “Twenty three.”
“When? Uh, I mean, sorry, I mean what time period?”
“Seventeenth century, Paris.”
“Really! Wow, that sounds great!”
He just looked at me as if I was the stupidest person alive.
“I’m going to 1770!” I said proudly.
“Are you now?”
“Yes!”
“Good for you.”
He turned his head away, obviously trying to avoid any further conversation with me, but his puzzling surliness had made me even more nervous than I was before, so there was no stopping me.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“What?!” he snapped angrily.
“What did you do, you know, when, I mean…”
“I invented tooth paste.”
“What?”
“I invented tooth paste!”
“Really?”
“Well, I’m not sure I invented it, but I was the only one who sold it in Paris anyway. I called it Riley’s Teeth Cleaning Powder; baking soda and mint. I also made little horse hair brushes and sold them to the nobility. Did pretty well, really.”
“Hmm, that uh, sounds great.” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice, making him angrier.
“Yeah, and what are you gonna do then?”
“I’m going to invent the steam engine!”
He shook his head. “Bleedin idiot!”
“What?”
“It’s not that easy you know.”
“I know how to build a steam engine.”
“Maybe, but they don’t.”
“I’ll teach them.”
“Is that right?”
“Sure, why not?”
“O.K., tell me genius, what grade steel are you going to need, and what is the metal composition of that steel?”
“Uhm, I…”
“See, you don’t know. And I bet you don’t know where to get the right materials, and I bet you don’t know how to forge the materials. You’ll need to know this, you know. You’ll have to know every single detail about the process or they won’t listen to you. Not that they’d listen to you anyway, being just a kid.”
“I’m eighteen!”
“Besides, the agency can’t be that accurate. You can’t just ask for 1770 and know you’ll get there. They could be off by several years. The steam engine could already be invented by the time you get there.”
I shrugged. “Then I’ll invent something else.”
He glared at me, wondering if he should even bother talking to me. “Don’t you see? Listen, here’s what’s going to happen. First you’ll get there, hopefully still in one piece, and no one is going to understand a word you say. The accent will be so different you won’t even believe it’s English. They’ll think you’re speaking in tongues or something. If you’re lucky they’ll only believe you’re simple, and not mentally ill or possessed by demons. Then you’ve got to find someone who has the skills to build what you think you might want. Simple things, cylinders, pistons, they don’t know what they are, and they’re not just going to drop whatever they’re doing and start working for you, making something that will sound absolutely crazy to them.”
“I’ve got drawings.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake! You damn stupid kids. I suppose this is your gap year then?”
“Yes.”
“Listen, stick with food, that’s the easiest.”
“Food?”
“Yes, food! I knew a guy in Paris who invented the croque monsieur; ham, cheese, bread. Simple. He set up a little cafe, did very well for himself. Stick to something like that. No a bleedin steam engine for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t know, sounds a little… boring.”
“Boring?”
“Well, yes. I want to be famous!”
“Well, you can’t.”
“What?”
“You can’t be famous, at least not for something you do in the past.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you did, you’d already be famous for it, wouldn’t you?! All the history books would say: you, the stupid kid who I don’t know his name…”
“Derek.”
“Fine. Derek, the stupidest kid in the world, he invented the steam engine. But they don’t. They say that so-and-so invented it.”
“James Watt.”
“Whatever. That’s not you is it?”
“No.”
“No, and it will never be you.”
“What if I create a separate time-line?”
“Oh God, here we go! What a load of bullocks!”
“It could happen… supposedly.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re still going to be brought back to this time line, aren’t you? How is the agency going to bring you back to a time-line that doesn’t exist yet? No matter what you do, either you never invented the steam engine, or you did and somebody else stole your idea and got the credit.”
I shrugged. “I can still try. Besides, if it doesn’t work out, it’s only for a year.”
He suddenly jumped up, scaring the hell out of me.
“It’s a year here! Here! In this time frame it’s a year! But the times are not correlated. You have no idea when you’ll be brought back in their time frame. It could be a week, or it could be 100 years. You don’t know!”
“But they promise in the brochure…”
He grabbed the brochure from me, ripped it in two and threw it away. “Forget the fucking brochure!”
The energy then seemed to seep out of him, and he slumped back into his seat sadly.
“How long were you there?”
“Twent…” his voice was cut off in his throat. “Twenty seven years.”
“Twenty seven years!?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is that why you’re here then, to get your money back?”
“No.”
“No? Then why are you here?”
“To go back.”
“What?! Why?!”
“Twenty seven fucking years of my life!” he growled. “I have a wife and family there now, don’t I? As far as my wife knows I stepped out of our bedroom one day and disappeared. How do you think I feel about that?”
“But you said yourself they can’t target an exact year. You could get there years before you met her, or years after.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
“Man! You could get there and have to watch a younger version of yourself sleep with her, just waiting for your younger self to disappear so you could replace him. But of course you’d be older, maybe by several years! Or! When you get there she could be much older, and she hates you for leaving her, and…”
The look on his face made me finally come to my senses and stop. God I’m such an idiot sometimes.
Very quietly he said, “What choice do I have?”
“Wow.”
He shook his head and smiled ironically. “Yes, wow.”
“I’m Sorry. What was it like?”
“Stinks.”
“What?”
“It stinks! The stench will knock you off your feet. The horses, the open sewers, the people not bathing more than once a month, if you’re lucky! I spent the whole first week retching. That’s one reason why I invented tooth paste. It was the only way I could even imagine kissing one of the women.” He chuckled. “I als
o built this luxurious bath, and any woman I brought to my place I would set up a nice hot bath for them. They thought I was being all gentlemanly, but really I just wanted to get some of the scum off their bodies so I could stand to shag them.”
“Hmm, scum. I never really thought about that.”
“Well, you better. And syphilis, you have to be careful of that, it’s everywhere, not to mention plague, TB, and cholera. And don’t eat meat unless you’ve actually seen it butchered. You don’t know how long it’s been hanging there.”
He was enjoying scaring me, I could tell.
“Where do you plan to go?” he asked almost friendly now.
“Glasgow, you know, the steam engine and all.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t want to do that. They’re just as inaccurate with space as they are with time. You could end up appearing in the middle of a busy street, or worse, inside the foundation of some building.”
“Where should I go then?”
“Pick a place that was definitely an open field during that time, not too hilly, you don’t want to appear under a thousand tons of dirt, then pray you don’t pop up in the middle of a cow or something.”
“Inside of a cow?!”
“It’s messy, believe me, and scares the locals something fierce.”
“I…I c-can imagine.”
“Yes, it’s best to not have anybody seeing you arrive. If they decide you’re a witch or a demon you’ve got real problems. At least if you’re out in the middle of a field when you show up usually there won’t be more than one person to see you. Then if they get spooked you can kill them before they alert anybody else.”
“K-kill?!”
“You might have to. Don’t rely on police. If you can find any at all they’re corrupt and only worry about the rich. If you’re poor, it’s every man for himself.”
“Every man for…?”
“Yes, bring weapons. People don’t know it, but the murder rate was much higher back then than it is today.”
“Murder rate…?”
“People disappeared all the time.”
“Disappeared…?!”
“Mr. Jones?”
A man from the agency wearing a rather tight-looking suit stood in the waiting room. I looked back to the old man now wearing a self-satisfied grin, he had been waiting longer than I had after all, but he just shook his head.
“Go ahead Derek my man! Have fun!”
I got up slowly and followed the man from the agency to a small office in the back.
“Have a seat,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said sitting down in a chair opposite his desk.
“So! When would you like to go?” he said, repeating the slogan the company used in all of their advertisements.
I wanted to say 1770. I swear that I did. In fact, that is the number I thought I was saying. But to my surprise, in my own voice, I heard the number “1968” being pronounced instead.
The agency man looked disappointed. He sighed, “Another one for free love, is it? I suppose you’ll want to go to San Francisco then, am I right?”
I hadn’t really thought about that, but now that he mentioned it…
The Kiss Of Farewell
Alessio Zanelli
The crust has hardened,
the waves have frozen,
the wind has fallen –
feel the touch of stillness.
The thunder has gone,
the earthquake has ceased,
the tornado has dissolved –
hear the sound of silence.
The plan has worked,
the schemer has won,
the losers have gone –
taste the kiss of farewell.
Alien Encounter
Graham Keeler