The Probability Broach

  Perhaps this wasn’t the time for idle curiosity, sitting in a futuristic phone booth, torn and filthy, still disoriented and getting more that way every minute. I’m not sure what was called for. Catatonic schizophrenia, maybe.

  PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE

  I rummaged through my pockets: ball-point, notebook, badge holder and wallet, empty cartridges, felt-tip, two dimes, a quarter, four pennies. How much is a tenth-ounce of copper? Those little watch-pockets they put in trousers are good for something: I pulled out the Lysander Spooner coin from Meiss’s desk. Half an ounce of silver ought to do it. Do polite phone companies give change?

  The coin! I hadn’t associated the numbers—dates—with the university sign until now. To hell with it, time enough for going batty later. I inserted the silver coin, the machine started hiccuping into its coin return. I didn’t have time to examine the result, because:

  WE’RE SORRY, YOUR PARTY IS BUSY. IF YOU’D LIKE TO WAIT, PLEASE ENTER H FOR HOLD. TO CANCEL THE CALL, ENTER C—YOUR MONEY WILL BE REFUNDED. THANK YOU.

  I said, “You’re welcome,” and punched H, fidgeting nervously. Is there another way to travel through time besides starting at birth and plodding on to Social Security, collecting varicose veins along the way? Meiss had to have gotten that coin from here. Was it time travel he’d been working on? It wasn’t any crazier an idea than amnesia, and I could see how the government might be interested.

  But who was this gink with my name? Let’s see, if I hadn’t gone through Meiss’s machine, I might have survived World War III or whatever, eventually moving to Fort Collins. But I did go through, so I couldn’t have … anyway, I’d be at least 165 by now! Not that I didn’t feel it. Of course, I could have had a kid after 1987 … but no, the same objection applies: after 1987, I was—am—already here. This is where my lifeline and Meiss’s confounded gadgetry had carried me, not through Armageddon to Father’s Day.

  Impatiently, I fiddled with the coin return and found a copper tenth-piece among the change: an overweight penny with somebody named Albert Jay Nock staring out of it. Damn it, still busy! Seething now, I punched out MAP and 626 GENET PL. ACMe was as good as its word: a city map materialized, two pulsing amber dots explaining YOU ARE HERE and ADDRESS REQUESTED. Pretty fancy. I’d have a few suggestions for Ma Bell if I ever got the chance—

  Which I might! If Meiss had invented a time machine back in 1987, surely by now—I almost looked up “Travel Agents, Time” in the Grand Combined Directory, but didn’t want to risk getting a cartoon sore at me twice in one day.

  However, Genet Place was only six blocks away, and I was beginning to feel cocky—giddy if you prefer. Judging from the phone rates, I had a pocket full of high-caliber change—including the gold slug I’d never had a chance to turn in—and three freshly loaded guns. I’d figured out, within certain sloppy tolerances, what had happened to me. Thanks to my almost Sherlockian genius, I even had a rough idea of the history of this place—and a definite destination: 626 Genet Place. Not bad, for only an hour in Futureland!

  Shock can be a pretty wonderful thing.

  When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?

  I passed another TELECOM, decorated like a candy-striped guardpost, an enterprise of CHEYENNE COMMUNICATIONS. At least Wyoming had made it through Doomsday—but who’d know the difference? This booth offered background music and scenic rear-projections to convince ’em you were in Tahiti—or in a phone booth with scenic rear-projections.

  The escalator headed up again into the sunlight, dumping me out on the other side of Confederation Boulevard. Somewhere at the end of this day was a mattress and a pillow. I wished I knew where. I was weary, lightheaded, surrounded by the totally strange and the strangely familiar. I started giggling a couple times, mostly from hysteria rather than from the scenery.

  Escalator tunnels and underground shopping centers lay beneath every intersection, sometimes connected with their neighbors up and down the block. I got a lot of free rides that way, though once I rode too far and had to double back. There was almost more city below ground than above, which made sense with a thermonuclear war in the recent past.

  Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee. To my taste, the whole arrangement looked too much like drawers in the city morgue.

  Experimentally, I fed my shirt into another slot and got it back looking almost good as new. So I turned in my pants, jacket, shorts, and socks and stood around feeling silly in my Kevlar, shoes, and shoulder holster. I found an empty shower stall and afterward discovered that the laundry had fixed my pants. It all came to about an ounce of copper.

  A few more blocks took me away from the energetic university district to a quieter residential area, elaborate in architectural extremes. Victorian and Edwardian gingerbread sat grandly between the baroque and a sort of Swiss-chalet style—ornate, almost rococo, but taken all together, neither garish nor intimidating. Just different. The homes were set back deeply from the road, on enormous lots with gracefully curving rubber driveways winding through gardens and wrought-iron fencery. If Edward W. Bear lived like this, being a P.I. must pay better here than it did in my jurisdiction.

  Definitely feeling more like myself, whoever that was (another twinge of curiosity about this “Edward W. Bear”), I ambled along in the afternoon sun, absently aware that the almost-silent vehicles swooshing along beside me in the street produced no noticeable exhaust. Down in the curbing there wasn’t a scrap of garbage. As my head cleared I began to notice other things—the streets might be Kentucky Blue, but there’s a lot to be said for rubber sidewalks. Soon, except for where I’d kicked that SecPol agent, my feet were the only part that didn’t hurt. I thought resentfully about the million concrete miles I’d trod on downtown foot patrol.

  Here, the underground crossings ran to neighborhood groceries, stationery, and candy stores—the kind of mom-and-pop operations nearly killed off by city zoning back home. I took another fling, stopping for some cigarettes, my first decent ones in almost five years. Two copper pennies for the most expensive in the place.

  Topside again, I did a little people-watching. It was more than their weird colorful clothing and strangely relaxed briskness. Something was missing—the barely concealed hostility and fear that haunted my city streets. These people never seemed to push or jostle, never avoided looking at one another. They’d nod politely—even speak!—and they carried their heads high, unafraid of the world around them. It sent shivers down my spine.

  What I first took to be an extraordinary number of children became even more confusing. Some of these little people spotted muttonchops and mustaches. I noticed gangly arms and clumsy gaits. Mutants—the city was full of them. Even my bleary eyes could see the effects of radiation-distorted genes: protruding jaws, rubbery lips; some practically had muzzles.

  Even more jarring were the weapons—men and women alike, little people, children. I passed one obvious kindergartener carrying a pistol almost as big as he was! Was there some danger here I wasn’t seeing? Or was the hardware merely a legacy of the brutal time that must have follo
wed an atomic war? Yet these people seemed so full of cordiality. Could the source of their pride and dignity be nothing more than the mechanical means of dealing death they carried? Well, the alternative, thousands of variations on the Sullivan Act, had been no shining success back home.

  What the hell, it was a nice day, a fine day. Nothing wrong that a long drink and a longer snooze wouldn’t cure. Maybe there was an opening on the local force—would a century and a half’s experience count for anything?

  At long last a fancy scrollwork signpost announced PLACE d’EDMOND GENET. My stomach tightened, my mouth went dry. Who was this other Edward Bear?

  All of a sudden a 747 was trying to land on my back! I whirled; a long black hovercraft tore down the street, coming my way fast. It bellowed, riding a tornado as other drivers bumped up over the sidewalk, swerved and slid to avoid being hit. Six feet above the ground, the monster covered blocks in seconds, sending a hideous roar ahead and a shower of sparks. Bullets sang around my head.

  I leaped a low hedge and rolled, thankful I’d reloaded the forty-one. Pain throbbed through my exhausted body; muscles screamed and cuts reopened. Crouching, I pumped six heavy slugs into the hovercraft, but on it flew, never hesitating. Dimly aware that my hand was bleeding again, I wrestled the automatic free from my coat and thumbed the hammer back, jerking the trigger again and again as the machine slid crazily around the corner. It was like a dream where nothing you do has any effect. Bullets whistled, tearing leaves and branches, plucking at my hair. The slide locked back on the Browning—empty.

  Dipping and weaving more from fear and pain than strategy, I thrust both weapons into my coat and twisted, running, tearing at my hip for the derringer. A house rose huge before me, “626” embossed in foot-high characters on its broad garage door. I ran that endless curving drive as bullet-shredded paving stung my ankles. Halfway there, as if on cue, the door began to rise. Would I die, trapped in a garage like that miserable soul on Emerson Street—what?—only yesterday?

  Ragged holes began appearing in the door, an erratic hemstitch working in my direction. I swam toward it in slow motion as the hovercraft, guns blazing, started up the drive.

  My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in front of me! The bottom edge rose past me as I fought to clear the derringer, bring it to bear for its one pitiable shot. No strength to pull the hammer back … the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.

  VI: Retaliatory Force

  “Reach for the sky, hombres!” Red Cloud levelled his trusty Rogers & Spencers at the desperados, thumbs ratcheting back the hammers, loud in the sudden, dust-filled silence.

  “It’s the Marshall!” their leader exclaimed. No mask could disguise the voice of Max Goldstein, alias “The Colorado Kid.” “That varmint was hiding in the luggage boot all along!”

  “Right you are, Kid,” Red Cloud winked assuringly at Hua Chong, the pretty new schoolmarm. “You brigands have robbed your last steamcoach—now you’ll answer to the Nevada Pinkertons!”

  —Ted van Roosevelt

  The Steamcoach Pillagers

  Ever wake up in a darkened room and a soft bed, with a headache clear down to your knees? My arms wouldn’t move. When I inhaled, sharp pains skewered me from spine to sternum. I was alive, but leaking.

  “Hold these,” the first voice, softly feminine, said. “And feed them into the cutter. We’ll have to remove it all, I’m afraid.” Sound of rasping, scraping. Whatever they were chopping off, I hoped I wouldn’t sing falsetto afterward.

  A fuzzy shadow loomed over me. “Great molten muskets! Look at these!”

  “Don’t jog my elbow, Lucy!” A masculine voice, and somehow familiar. “You’re in Clarissa’s light!”

  “She’s right, though,” the first voice said. “Such crude dental prosthetics! And he’s in advanced geriosis—see the swollen belly, the sagging tissue around the eyes? What little hair he has is turning gray!”

  “Radiation or old age?”

  “Neither, Ed.” It was the first voice again, worried. “But you should see the scanner—poisonous congestion, ulceration. And the arteries! Even without these bullets in him”—plink! plink!—“he’d be gone in another ten years.” Plink! I’d heard that sound before, watching buckshot pulled from a prisoner after a liquor-store holdup. I’d have resented the conversation that went with it this time, but the agony made everything else seem trivial. “Lucy! There’s no response to somasthesia. Give it another notch!”

  “Right … Any luck?”

  “We’re at redline already. The painkillers just aren’t working.”

  “What painkillers?” I wheezed past the red-hot pokers in my chest.

  “Take it easy, friend,” the male voice said. “You’ll be all right—won’t he, Clarissa?” Even out of focus, he reminded me of somebody.

  “Yes, yes, you will.”

  “Shucks, sonny, you’re not missing any important parts!” It was an old lady. She leaned over me and winked.

  “That’s g-good news …” A whispery croak was all I could manage. “The pain …”

  “I give up,” the beautiful voice said. “Lucy, electrosleep—out in a van, a blue case under the regenerator.”

  “Sure thing, honey, Anything else?”

  “Yes,” the male voice said. “Check the ’com again. If that Frontenac comes back, I want a crack at it!”

  “Have to beat me to the draw, kiddo! You see what used to be my front windows?” She gestured menacingly with a huge handgun. “Wish I’d thought to go for their boiler!” Her voice trailed off as she left, muttering to herself.

  “So do I,” he answered under his breath. “Clarissa, is it all right for him to talk … just take it slowly? Who are you? What’s this all about?”

  I tried to clear my vision. The guy looked enough like me to get drafted in my place. “Win Bear … Lieutenant, Denver—used to be a city, sixty miles south. Only it’s gone! Blown to—” I stopped, breathing heavily against withering pain. “I’m, well, from the past—a time traveler!”

  He frowned perplexedly. Nothing was wrong with my vision. I could make out every hair in his bushy, very familiar eyebrows. “Friend, sixty miles south of here, there’s only Saint Charles Town. Been there, oh, 125 years. Nothing but buffalo before that.”

  That queer cold chill I felt had nothing to do with bullet wounds. “But I was born there. That’s where I Labor in the Vineyards, pushing back—” I started wretching, gasping, and sank back, too exhausted to finish.

  This was it. I’d been booby-trapped, blown up, machine-gunned, and on top of it all, run face-first into a garage door. By some circumstance not bearing close examination, I was alive. But evidently some of my marbles hadn’t made the trip with me. I knew this guy: the other Edward Bear. If this wasn’t the future, where the hell was I?

  Lucy came back, her horse pistol shrunken to snubbie proportions. Clarissa gave her a nod. Before I could protest, she shoved the little gun against my neck—“This oughta do the job!”—and pulled the trigger.

  THURSDAY, JULY 9, 1987

  The muzzle was still cool on the side of my neck. I turned. “Lucy, how you’ve changed!” Standing over me was a breathtaking peaches-and-cream blonde, perhaps thirty, hazel eyes—when she smiled, the corners crinkled like she meant it—and an ever so slightly upturned nose. She wore a bright-red coverall with a circled white cross embroidered on the left shoulder.

  The wall seemed one huge window opening into a honey-colored meadow and purple columbines. Maybe a mile away an evergreen forest fronted foothills and the ghostly peaks of the Rockies. The illusion was spoiled by a door through the wall and the railed top of a staircase. Television? A beautiful job. I could almost smell the sage.

  The rest of the room contained the bed I was in, a wall-length bookcase beneath a pair of real windows—sunshine, treetops—and one of the ten most gorgeous women in whatever world this was. I took a deep breath, found the pain completely gone
, and tried sitting up.

  “Hold on, Lieutenant! You’re not quite ready for that!” The lady dimpled, pushing me back gently. “How do you feel?”

  “I guess I’ll do, at that. Is this a hospital?”

  “You want to get really sick? A hospital, indeed! I almost believe you are a time traveler as you claimed last night.”

  “What else did I say? Hope I had enough sense to make an improper suggestion or two your way.”

  “You’re a ‘Man from the Past,’ from a city that’s never existed. Otherwise you were quite gentlemanly, all things considered.”

  “Too bad. So this is what the subtitles call ‘The Next Morning.’ And you—”

  “Clarissa Olson, Certified Healer—your Healer, if you want.” Dimples again. “Anything else we’ll decide after you’re up and around.”

  “In that case, I think I’ll go on living for a while. When will I be up and around?”

  “Well, you’re healing pretty slowly. You were gradually dying of malnutrition: deficiencies in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid; a dozen degenerative diseases I’ve only read about. But as that clears up, your wounds will knit faster. Day after tomorrow—at least for a brief walkaround?”

  “Where I come from, bullet holes take a lot longer than that to heal up! This has gotta be the future … or heaven, if you’ll pardon my getting personal.”

  She smiled tolerantly. “Persist with this time-travel business and you’ll need something stronger than what’s in my bag over there!”

  “I could do with something stronger, about eighty proof in a tall glass. Forget time travel. Let’s talk about bullet holes, and how come mine don’t seem to be terminal.”