Spider Robinson - Time Pressure

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SPIDER ROBINSON

TIME

PRESSURE

For all my North Mountain friends,

hippies, locals and visitors, and for Raoul Vezina and Steve Thomas

TIME PRESSURE

An Ace Book

Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

The name "Ace" and the "A" logo are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

Time Pressure is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are imaginary; any resemblance to actual persons, locales

or events is entirely coincidental and unintended.

First edition: October 1987

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Spider.

Time pressure.

I. Title.

PS3568.O3156T5 1987 81354 87-11356

ISBN 0-441-80932-4

Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321

PROLOGUE

I guarantee that every word of this story is a lie

CHAPTER 1

It WAS A dark and stormy night. . .

Your suspension of disbelief has probably just bust a leaf-spring: how can you believe in a story that begins that

way? I know it's one of the hoariest cliches in pulp fiction; my writer friend Snaker uses the expression satirically often

enough. "It was a dark and stormy night-when suddenly the shot rang out. . . ." But I don't especially want you to

believe this story-I just want you to listen to it-and even if I were concerned with convincing you there wouldn't be

anything I could do about it, the story begins where it begins and that's all there is to it.

And "dark" is not redundant. Most nights along the shore of the Bay of Fundy are not particularly dark, as nights

go. There's a lot of sky on the Fundy Shore, as transparent as a politician's promise, and that makes for a lot of

starlight even on Moonless evenings. When the Moon's up it turns the forest into a fairyland-and even when the big

clouds roll in off the water and darken the sky, there is usually the glow of Saint John, New Brunswick on the horizon,

tinting the underside of clouds sixty kilometers away across the Bay, mitigating the dark-ness. (In those days, just

after Canada went totally metric, I would have thought "forty miles" instead of sixty klicks. Habits can be changed.)

The day had been chilly for late April and the wind had been steady from the south, so I was not at all surprised

when the snowstorm began just after sundown. (Maybe you live some-where that doesn't have snow in April; if so, I

hope you ap-preciate it.) It was not a full-scale mankiller blizzard, the sort where you have to crack the attic window

for breathing air and dig tunnels to the woodshed and the outhouse; a bit too late in the year for that.

Nonetheless it was indisputably a dark and stormy night in 1973-when suddenly the shot rang out. . . .

Nothing less could have made me suit up and go outside on such a night. Even a chimney fire might not have done

it. There is a rope strung from my back porch to my outhouse during the winter, because when the big gusts sail in off

that tabletop icewater and flay the North Mountain with snow and stinging hail, a man can become hopelessly lost on

his way to the shitter and freeze to death within bowshot of his house. This storm was not of that calibre, but neither

was it a Christmas-cardy sort of snowing, with little white petals drifting gently and photogenically down through the

stillness. Windows rattled or hummed, their inner and outer coverings of plastic insula-tion shuddered and crackled,

the outer doors strained and snarled at their fastenings, wind whistled through weather-stripping in a dozen places,

shingles complained and threatened to leave, banshees took up residence in both my stovepipes (the two stoves,

inflamed, raved and roared back at them), and beneath all the local noise could be heard the omnipresent sound of the

wind trying to flog the forest to death and the Bay trying to smash the stone shore to flinders. They've both been at it

for centuries, and one day they'll win.

My kitchen is one of the tightest rooms in Heartbreak Hotel; on both north and south it is buffered by large

insulated areas of putatively dead air (the seldom-used, sealed-up porch on the Bay side and the back hall on the

south). Nevertheless the kerosene lamp on the table flickered erratically enough to make shadows leap around the

room like Baryshnikov on speed. From where I sat, rocking by the kitchen stove and sipping coffee, I could see that I

had left about a dozen logs of ma-ple and birch piled up on the sawhorse outside. I was not even remotely inclined

to go back out there and get them under cover.

Dinner was over, the dishes washed, the kitchen stove's water-tank refilled and warming, both stoves fed

and cooking nicely, chores done. I cast about for some stormy night's entertain-ment, but the long hard

winter just ending had sharply depleted the supply. I had drunk the last of my wine and homebrew a few

weeks back, had smoked up most of the previous year's dope crop, read all the books in the house and all

those to be borrowed on the Mountain, played every record and reel of tape I owned more than often

enough to be sick of them, and the weather was ruining reception of CBC Radio (the only tolerable station

of the three available, and incidentally one of the finest on Earth). So I decided to put in some time on the

dulcimer I was building, and that meant that I needed Mucus the Moose, and when I couldn't find him after

a Class One Search of the house I played back memory tape and realized, with a sinking feeling, that I was

going to have to go outside after all.

I might not have done it for a friend-but if Mucus was out there, I had no choice.

Mucus the Moose is one of my most cherished possessions, one of my only mementoes of a very dear

dead friend. He (the moose, not the friend) is about fifteen centimeters tall, and bears a striking physical

resemblance to that noblest of all meece, Bullwinkle-save that Mucus is as potbellied as the Ashley stove in

my living room. He is a pale translucent brown from the tips of his rack down to wherever the Plimsoll line

happens to be, and pale translucent green thereafter. Picture Bullwinkle gone to fat and extremely seasick.

His full name and station-Mucus Moose, the Mucilage Machine-are spelled out in raised letters on his

round little tummy.

If you squeeze him gently right there, green glue comes out of his nostrils. . . .

If you don't understand why I love him so dearly, just let it go. Chalk it up to eccentricity or cabin

fever-congenital insan-ity, I won't argue-but he was irreplaceable and special to me, and he was nowhere

to be found. On rewind-search of my head I found that the last place I remembered putting him was in my jacket

pocket, in order to fasten down the Styrofoam padding on Number Two hole in the outhouse, and he was not in the

said pocket, and the last time that jacket pocket had been far enough from vertical for Mucus to fall out had been--that

afternoon, by the sap pot, halfway up the frigging Moun-tain, more than a mile up into the woods. . . .

I have a special personal mantra for moments like that, but I believe that even in these enlightened times it is

unprintable. I chanted it aloud as I filled both stoves with wood, pulled on a second shirt and pair of pants, added a

sweater, zipped up the Snowmobile boots, put on the scarf and jacket and gloves and cap and stomped into the back

hall like a space-suited astronaut entering the airlock, or a hardhat diver going into the decompression chamber.

The analogies are rather apt. When I popped the hook-and-eye and shouldered the kitchen door open (its spring

hinge complaining bitterly enough to be heard over the general din), I entered a room whose ambient temperature was

perhaps fifteen Celsius degrees colder than that of the kitchen-and the back hall was at least that much warmer than

the world outside. I sealed the kitchen door behind me with the turnbuckle, zipped my jacket all the way up to my nose,

took the heavy-duty flashlight from its perch near the chainsaw, and thumbed open the latch of the outside door.

It promptly flew open, hit me sharply in the face and across the shin, and knocked the flashlight spinning. I turned

away from the incoming blast of wind-driven snow, in time to see the flashlight knock over the can of chainsaw gas/oil

mixture, which spilled all over the split firewood. Not the big wood intended for the living room Ashley, the small stuff

for the kitchen stove. I sleep above that kitchen stove at nights, and I was going to be smelling burning oil in my sleep

for the next week or so.

I started my mantra over again from the beginning, more rhythmically and at twice the volume, retrieved the

flashlight, and stomped out into the dark and stormy night, to rescue fifty cents worth of flexible plastic and a

quarter-liter of green glue. Love is strange.

I had been mistaken about those banshees. They hadn't been inside my stovepipes, only hollering down them.

They were out here, much too big to fit down a chimney and loud enough to fill the world, manifesting as ghostly

curtains of snow that were torn apart by the wind as fast as they formed. I hooked the door shut behind me, made a

perfectly futile attempt to zip my jacket up higher-all the way up is as high as a zipper goes-and pushed away from the

Hotel to meet them.

The woodshed grunted a dire warning as I passed. I ignored it; it had been threatening to fall over ever since I had

known it, back in the days when it had been a goat-shed. As I went by the outhouse I half turned to see if the new

plastic window I'd stapled up last week had torn itself to pieces yet, and as I saw that it had, a shingle left the tiny roof

with the sound of a busted E-string and came spinning at my eyes like a ninja deathstar. I'm pretty quick, but the

distance was short and the closing velocity high; I took most of it on my hat but a corner of it put a small slice on my

forehead. I was almost glad then for the cold. It numbed my forehead, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly for a

forehead wound, and what there was swiftly froze and could be easily brushed off.

When I was clear of the house and outbuildings the wind steadied and gathered strength. It snowed horizontally.

The wind had boxed the compass; wind and I were traveling in the same direction and, thanks to the sail-area of my

back, at roughly the same speed. For seconds at a time the snow seemed to hang almost motionless in the air around

me, like a cloud of white fireflies who had all decided to come jogging with me. It was weirdly beautiful. Magic. As the

land sloped uphill, the snow appeared to settle in ultraslow motion, disappearing as it hit the ground.

Once I was up into the trees the wind slacked off considerably, confounded by the narrow and twisting path. The

snow resumed normal behavior and I dropped back from a trot to a walk. As I came to the garden it weirded up again.

Big sheets of air spilled over the tall trees into the cleared quarter-acre bowl and then smashed themselves to pieces

against the trees on the far side. It looked like the kind of snowstorm they get inside those plastic paperweights when

you shake them, skirling in all directions at once.

I realized that despite having fixed it in my mind no more than three hours ago, I had forgotten to bring the chamber

pot with me from the house. I certainly wasn't going back for it, not into the teeth of that wind. Instead, it shouldn't be

a total loss, I worked off one glove, got my fly undone and pissed along as much of the west perimeter as I could

manage, that being the direction from which the deer most often approached.

Animals don't grok fences as territorial markers because they cannot conceive of anyone making a fence. Fences

occur; you bypass them. But borders of urine are made, by living creatures, and their message is ancient and

universally understood. A big carnivore claims this manor. (The Sunrise Hill commune had tried everything else in the

book, fences and limestone borders and pie-pan rattles and broken-mirror windchimes, and still lost a high percentage

of their garden to critters. Vegetarian pee doesn't work.)

Past the garden the path began to slope upward steeply, and footing became important. It would be much worse in a

few weeks, when the path turned into a trail of mud, oozing down the Mountain in ultraslow motion, but it was not an

easy walk now. This far back up into the woods, the path was in shadow for most of the day, and long slicks of winter

snow and ice remained unmelted here and there; on the other hand, there had been more than enough thawing to leave

a lot of rocks yearning to change their position under my feet. My Snow-mobile boots gave good traction and ankle

support-and were as heavy as a couple of kilos of coffee strapped to my feet. The ground crunched beneath them, and

I sympathized. I had to keep working my nose to break up the ice that formed in it, and my beard began to stiffen up

from the exhalations trapped by my scarf. Mucus, I thought, I hope you appreciate the trouble I go through

for you.

I thought of Frank then for a while, and a strange admixture of joy and sadness followed me up the trail.

Frank was the piano-player/artist who had given me Mucus, back in Freshman year. Fragile little guy with

black curls flying in all directions and a tongue of Sheffield steel. His hero was Richard Manuel of The

Band. (Mine was Davy Graham then.) He only smiled in the presence of friends, and his smile always

began and ended with just the lips. The corners of his mouth would curl all the way up into his cheeks as

far as they could, the lips would peel back for a brief flash of good white teeth, then seal again.

The way our college worked it, there was a no-classes Study Week before the barrage of Finals Week.

Frank and I were both in serious academic jeopardy, make-or-break time. We stayed awake together for

the entire two weeks, studying. No high I've had before or since comes close to the heady combi-nation of

total fatigue and mortal terror. At one point in there, I've forgotten which night, we despaired completely

and went off-campus to get drunk. We could not seem to manage it no matter how much alcohol we drank.

After five or six hours we gave up and went back to studying. Over the next few days we transcended

ourselves, reached an exhilarated plane on which we seemed to comprehend not only the individual

sub-jects, but all of them together in synthesis. As Lord Buckley would say, we dug infinity.

By the vagaries of mass scheduling we both had all our exams on Thursday and Friday, three a day. We

felt this was good luck. Maximum time to study, then one brutal final effort and it was all over. One or two

exams a day would have been like Chinese water torture.

As the sun came up on Thursday morning I was a broken man, utterly whipped. Frank flailed at me with

his hands, and then with that deadly tongue-Frank only used that on assholes, the kind of people who

mocked you for wearing long hair-without reaching me. He and the rest of the world could go take

Sociol-ogy exams: I was going to die, here, now. He left the room. In a few moments I heard him come

back in. I kept my eyes shut, determined to ignore whatever he said, but he didn't say anything at all, so with an

immense irritated effort I forced them open and he was holding out Mucus Moose the Mucilage Machine.

He knew I coveted the Moose. It was one of his most cherished belongings.

"I want you to have him, Sam," he said. "I've got a feeling if anything can hold you together now, it's Mucus."

I exploded laughing. That set him off, and we roared until the tears came. We were in that kind of shape. The laugh

was like those pads they clap to the chests of fading cardiac patients; it shocked me reluctantly back to life.

"You son of a bitch," I said finally, wiping tears away. "Thanks." Then: "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"What's going to hold you together, if I take Mucus?"

His cheeks appled up, his lips peeled apart slowly, and the teeth flashed. "I'm feeling lucky. Come on, asshole."

I passed everything, in most cases by the skin of my teeth, but overall well enough to stagger through another

semester of academic probation. Frank passed everything but not by enough and failed out.

If you want to really get to know someone, spend two weeks awake with them. I only saw him twice after that-he

made the fatal mistake of trying to ignore an inconvenient asthma attack-but I will never forget him.

And I was not going to leave Mucus on a snowy mountainside with his only bodily fluid turned to green fudge in

his belly.

As the trail made the sharp turn to the left, I saw a weasel a few meters off into the woods. He looked at me as

though he had a low opinion of my intelligence. "You're out here too, jerk," I muttered into my scarf, and he vanished.

There was something electric in the air. It took me awhile to realize that this was more than a metaphor. I became

aware of an ozone-y smell, like-but subtly different from-the smell of a NiCad battery charger when you crack the lid.

You know the smell you get when you turn on an old tube amplifier that's been unused long enough to collect dust? If

you'd sprinkled just a pinch of cinnamon and fine-ground basil on top first, it might smell like the air smelled that night,

alive and tangy and sharp-edged. I knew the stimulant effect of ozone, had experi-enced it numerous times; this was

different. Better. I knew a little about magic, more than I had before I'd moved to the North Mountain. Nova Scotia has

many kinds of magic, but this was a different kind, one I didn't know.

I stopped minding the cold and the snow and the wind and the steepness of the trail. No, I kept minding them, but I

became reconciled to them. Shortly a unicorn was going to step out from behind a stand of birch. Or perhaps a

tornado was going to take me to Oz. Something wonderful was about to happen.

A part of my mind stood back and skeptically observed this, tried to analyze it, noted that the sensation increased as

I pro-gressed upslope (ozone was lighter than air, wasn't it?), won-dered darkly if this was what it smelled like before

lightning struck someplace, tried to remember what I'd read on the sub-ject. Avoid tall trees. Avoid standing in water.

Trees loomed all around me, of course, and my boots had been breaking through skins of ice into slushwater for the

last half klick. (But that was silly, paranoid, you didn't get lightning with snow.) That part of my mind which thought of

itself as rational urged me to turn around and go back downhill to a place of warmth and comfort, and to hell with the

silly glue-dispenser and the funny smell and the electric night.

But that part of my mind had ruled me all my life. I had come here to Nova Scotia specifically to get in touch with the

other part of my mind, the part that perceived and believed in magic, that tasted the crisp cold night and thrilled with

anticipation, for something unknown, or perhaps forgotten. It had been a long cold winter, and a little shot of magic

sounded good to me.

Besides, I was almost there. I kept on slogging uphill, breath-ing big deep lungfulls of sparkling air through the

scarf, and in only a few hundred meters more I had reached my destin-ation, the Place of Big Maples and the clearing

where I boil sap.

That very afternoon I had hiked up here and done a boiling, one of the last of the season. Maple syrup takes a lot

of hours, but it is extremely pleasant work. Starting in early Spring, you hammer little aluminum sap-taps into any

maple thicker than your thigh for an acre on either side of the trail, and hang little plastic sap-trap pails from them. You

take a chainsaw to about a Jesus-load and a half of alders (I'll define that measure-ment later) and stack them to dry in

the resulting clearing. The trail is generously stocked with enough boulders to create a fireplace of any size desired.

Every few days you hike up to the maple grove, collect the contents of the pails in big white plastic buckets, and

dump the buckets into the big castiron sap pot. You build a fire of alder slash, pick a comfortable spot, and spend the

next several hours with nothing to do but keep the fire going. . . .

You can read if you want, if the weather permits-it's hard turning pages with gloves on-and toward the end of sap

sea-son you sometimes can even bring a guitar up the Mountain with you, and sing to the forest while you watch the

pot. Or you can just watch the world. From that high up the slope of the Mountain, at that time of year, you can see

the Bay off through the trees, impersonal and majestic. I'm a city kid; I can sit and look at the woods around me for

four or five hours and still be seeing things when it's time to go.

Sap takes a lot of boiling, and then some more. Raw maple sap has the look and consistency of weak sugar water,

with just a hint of that maple taste. That afternoon had been a good run: I had collected enough to fill the pot, maybe

fifty litres or so-then kept the fire roaring for hours, and eventually took a little more than three litres down the

Mountain with me in a Mason jar. (Even that wasn't really proper maple syrup-when I had enough Mason jars I would

boil them down further [and more gently] on the kitchen stove-but it was going to taste a hell of a lot better on my

pancakes than the "maple" flavored fluid you buy in stores.)

At one point I had scrounged around and picked some wintergreen, dipped up some of the boiling sap in my ladle

and brewed some fresh wintergreen tea with natural maple sugar flavoring, no artificial colour, no preservatives, and

sipped it while I fed the fire. Nothing I could possibly have lugged uphill in a Thermos would have tasted half so

good. I had not felt lonely, but only alone. It had been a good afternoon.

I remembered it now and felt even better than I had then- good in the same way, and good in a different and

indefinable and complimentary way at the same time. This afternoon the world had felt right. Tonight felt right, and

about to get even better-even the savage weather was an irrelevancy, without significance.

So of course luck was with me; Mucus was just where I'd hoped to find him, half-buried in the heap of dead leaves

beside the stone fireplace, where I had for a time today lain back and stared through the treetops at the sky. I didn't

even have to do any digging: the flashlight picked him out almost at once. He was facing me. His features were

obscured by snow, but I knew that his expression would be sleepy-lidded content-ment, the Buddha after a heavy

meal.

"Hey, pal," I said softly, puffing just a little, "I'm sorry."

He said nothing.

"Hey, look, I came back for you." I worked my nose to crack the ice in my nostrils. "At this point, the only thing that

can hold me together is Mucus." I giggled, and my lower eyelids began to burn. If I felt so goddam good, why did I

suddenly want to burst out crying?

Did I want to burst out crying?

I wanted to do something-wanted it badly. But I didn't know what.

I picked up the silly little moose, wiped him clean of snow, probed at the hard little green ball in his guts, and poked

at his nostrils to clear them. "Forgive me?"

But there was only the sound of the wind sawing at the trees.

No. There was more.

A faint, distant sound. Omnidirectional, approaching slowly from all sides at once, and from overhead, and from

beneath my feet, like a contracting globe with me at the center. No, slightly off-center. A high, soft, sighing, with an

odd metallic edge, like some sort of electronically processed sound.

Trees began to stir and creak around me. The wind, I thought, and realized that the wind was gone. The snow was

gone. The air was perfectly still.

When I first moved to Nova Scotia they told me, "If you don't like the weather, sit down and have a beer. Likely the

weather you was lookin' for'll be along 'fore you finish." No climatic contortion no matter how unreasonable can

surprise me anymore. This was the first snowstorm I'd ever known to have an eye, like a hurricane; fine.

But what was disturbing the trees?

They were trembling. I could see it with the flashlight. They vibrated like plucked strings, and part of the sound I

was hear-ing was the chord they made. Occasionally one would emit a sharp cracking sound as rhythmic

accompaniment to the chorus.

Well, of course they're making cracking sounds, said the rational part of my mind, it's a good ten

degrees warmer now-

-ten degrees warmer?

A thrill of terror ran up my spine, I'd always thought that was just an expression but it wasn't, but was it terror or

exhil-aration, the cinnamony smell was very strong now and the trees were humming like the Sunrise Hill Gang

chanting Om, a vast, world-sized sphere of sound contracted from all sides at once with increasing speed and power

and yes I was a little off-center, it was going to converge right over there-

Crack!

A globe of soft blue light did actually appear in the epicenter, like a giant robin's egg, about fifty meters east of me

and two or three meters off the ground. A yellow birch which had stood in that spot for at least thirty years despite

anything wind or water could do obligingly disintegrated to make room for the globe. I mean no stump or flinders: the

whole tree turned in an instant into an equivalent mass of sawdust and collapsed.

The humming sound reached a crescendo, a crazy chord full of anguish and hope.

The globe of light was a softly glowing blue, actinic white around the edges, and otherwise featureless. It threw out

about as much light as a sixty-watt bulb. The sawdust that fell on it vanished, and the instant the last grain had

vanished, the globe disappeared.

Silence. Total, utter stillness, such as is never heard in a forest in any weather. Complete starless Stygian darkness. It

might have taken me a full second to bring the flashlight to bear.

Where the globe had been, suspended in the air in a half-crouch, was a naked bald woman, hugging herself.

She did not respond to the light. She moved, slightly, aim-lessly, like someone floating in a transparent fluid, her

eyes empty, her features slack. Suddenly she fell out of the light, dropped the meter and a half to the forest floor and

landed limply on the heap of fresh sawdust. She made a small sound as she hit, a little animal grunt of dismay that

chopped off.

I stood absolutely still for ten long seconds. The moment she hit the earth, the stillness ended and all the natural

sounds of the night returned, the wind and the snow and the trees sighing at the memory of the effort they had just

made and a distant owl and the sound of the Bay lapping at the shore.

I held the flashlight on her inert form.

A short dark slender bald woman. No, hairless from head to toe. Not entirely naked after all: she wore a gold

headband, thin and intricately worked, that rode so high on her skull I wondered why it didn't fall off. Eurasian-looking

features, but her hips were Caucasian-wide and she was dark enough to be a quadroon. Smiling joyously at the

Moonless sky. Sprawled on her back. Magnificent tits. Aimlessly rolling eyes, and the blank look of a congenital idiot.

Arms outflung in instinctive attempt to break her fall, but relaxed now. Long, slender hands.

Well, I had wanted an evening's entertainment. . .

CHAPTER 2

I guess this is as good a place as any for your suspension of dis-belief to snap through like an overstressed guitar string. I don't

blame you a bit, and it only gets worse from here. Con-men work by getting you to swallow the hook a little at a time;

first you are led to believe a small improbability, then there are a series of increasingly improbable complications, until

finally you believe something so preposterous that afterward you cannot fathom your own foolishness. My writer

friend Snaker says the only dif-ference between a writer and a con-man is the writer has better hours, works at home,

and can use his real name if it suits him.

So I guess I'm not a very good con-man. Without the assis-tance of Gertrude the Guitar, anyway. I'm giving you a

pretty improbable thing to swallow right at the start. It's okay with me if you don't believe it, all right?

But let me try to explain to you why I believed it.

Despite the fact that I was then a 1) long-haired 2) bearded 3) American-born 4) guitar player and folksinger 5)

college dropout 6) sometime user of powerful psychedelics and 7) bonafide non-card-carrying member of the

completely unor-ganized network of mostly ex-American hippies and back-to-the-landers scattered up and down the

Annapolis Valley- despite the fact that I could have called myself a spiritual seeker without breaking up-nonetheless

and notwithstanding I did not believe in astrology or auras or the Maharishi or Mahara Ji or Buddha or Jesus or

Mohammed or Jahweh or Allah or Wa-Kon-Ton-Ka or vegetarianism or the Bermuda Triangle or flying saucers or the

power of sunrise to end all wars if we would all only take enough drugs to stay up all night together, or even (they

having broken up in a welter of lawsuits three years earlier) the Beatles. I did believe in mathematics and the force of

gravity and the laws of conservation of matter and energy and Murphy's Law. I was pretty lonely, is what I guess I'm

trying to tell you: the hippies frowned on me because I didn't abandon the rational part of my mind, while the straights

disowned me because I didn't abandon the irrational part. I maintained, for instance, an open if rather disinterested

mind on reincarnation and ESP and the sanity of Dr. Timothy Leary, and I was tentatively willing to give the Tarot the

benefit of the doubt on the word of a science fiction writer I admired named Samuel Delany.

That's part of what I'm trying to convey. I had read science fiction since I'd been old enough to read, attracted by

that sense of wonder they talk about-and read enough of it to have my sense of wonder gently abraded away over the

years. People who read a lot of sf are the least gullible, most skeptical people on earth. A longtime reader of sf will

examine the flying saucer very carefully and knowledgeably for concealed wires, hidden seams, gimmicks with mirrors:

he's seen them all before. Spotting a fake is child's play for him. (A tough house for a musician is a roomful of other

musicians.)

On the other hand, he'll recognize a real flying saucer, and he'll waste very little time on astonishment. Rearranging

his entire personal universe in the light of startlingly new data is what he does for fun. One of sfs basic axioms, first

propounded by Arthur Clarke, is that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Confronted with a nominally supernatural occurrence, a normal person will first freeze in shock, then back away in fear.

An sf reader will pause cauti-ously, then move closer. The normal person will hastily review a checklist of

escape-hatches--"I am drunk"; "I am dreaming"; "I have been drugged"; and so forth-hoping to find one which

applies. The sf reader will check the same list-hoping to come up empty. But meanwhile he'll already have begun

analyzing this new puzzle-piece which the game of life has offered him.

What is it good for? What are its limitations? Where does it pinch? The thing he will be most afraid of is appearing

stupid in retrospect.

So I must strain your credulity even further. I don't know what you would have done if a naked woman had

materialized in front of you on a wooded hillside at night-and neither do you; you can only guess. But what I did was

to grin hugely, take ten steps forward, and kneel beside her. I had spent my life training for this moment-for a moment

like this-without ever truly expecting it to come.

If it helps any, I did drop Mucus on the way, and forgot his existence until the next day.

My first thought was, those are absolutely perfect tits.

My second was, that's odd. . . .

The nipples on those perfect teats were erect and rigid. Noth-ing odd there: it was freezing out, she was naked. But

the rest of her body was not behaving correspondingly. The skin was not turning blue. No sign of goosebumps. A

slight shiver, but it came and went. Teeth slightly apart in an idiot's smile, no sign of chattering.

It wasn't the cold stiffening her nipples. It was excitement.

What sort of excitement do you feel while you're unconscious? I wondered.

It seemed to be equal parts of triumph, fear, and sexual arousal. A sort of by God, I made it! Or have I? excitement,

like someone disembarking from her first roller coaster ride-and finding herself in Coney Island, one of Brooklyn's

gamier neighborhoods.

My eyes and nose found other evidences of the sexual com-ponent of her excitement-

-I looked away, obscurely embarrassed, and glanced back up to the other end. Her face was vacant, but that did not

seem to be its natural condition. A lifetime of intelligence had written on that face before some sort of trauma had

stunned it goofy. I guessed her age at forty.

So one way to approach it is to go through a long logic-chain. This woman had materialized amid thunderclaps and

bright lights. Could she be an extraterrestrial? If so, either human stock ubiquitous through the Galaxy, or there was

something to the idea of parallel evolution, or she was in fact a three-legged thing with green tentacles (or some such)

sending me a tele-pathic projection of a fellow human to soothe my nerves.

I don't know what strains your credulity. The idea of other planets full of human beings, while admittedly possible,

strained mine. How did they get there? And why didn't their evolution and ours diverge over the several million years

since we took root here?

Parallel evolution-the idea that the human shape is an inevi-table one for evolution to select-had always seemed to

me a silly notion, designed to simplify science fiction stories. Cer-tainly, the human morphology is a good one for a

tool-user, but there are others as good or better. (Whose idea was it to put all the eyes on one side of the head? And

who thought two hands were enough?)

And I had difficulty believing in aliens who'd studied us closely enough to notice the behavior of nipples, but not

closely enough to know that normal skin turns blue in temperatures well below zero. If what I saw was a telepathic

illusion, how come it was semicomatose? To lull me into a false sense of... no, the thought was too silly to finish.

And if she was an alien, what had happened to her flying saucer, or rather flying robin's egg? Could she be smart

enough to cross countless light-years, and clever enough to escape the attention of NORAD, and dumb enough to

crash-land in front of a witness?

No, she was not an E.T. (As no one but an sf reader would have phrased it in 1973.) But she was certainly not from

my world. I knew much more than the average citizen about the current state of terrestrial technology, and no culture

on earth could have staged the entrance I had just seen.

Hallucination was a hypothesis I never considered. At that time of my life, at age twenty-eight, I had experienced

the effects of alcohol, pot, hash, opium, LSD, STP, MDA, DMT, mescaline (organic and synthetic), psilocybin (ditto),

peyote, amanita muscaria, a few licks of crystal meth, and medically administered morphine. I knew a hallucination

when I saw one.

So that left. . .

I did not go through this logic-chain, not consciously. I just knew that I was looking at a time traveler.

Which both mildly annoyed and greatly tickled me, because I had not until then really believed in time travel. There

are certain conventions of sf that are, in light of what we think we know about physics, preposterous . . . but which sf

readers are willing to provisionally accept. Faster-than-light travel is, so far as anyone knows, flat-out impossible-but

skeptical sf readers will accept it, grudgingly, because it's damned difficult to write a story set anywhere but in this

Solar System without it.

Time travel too is considered flat-out impossible (or was at that time; physics has gone through some interesting

changes lately) but tolerated for its story value. It's a delightful intellec-tual conceit, which gives rise to dozens of

lovely paradoxes. The best of them were discovered and used by Robert Heinlein: the man who met himself coming

and going, the man who was both of his own parents, and so forth.

That was, of course, why I did not truly believe in time travel, for any longer than it took to finish a Keith Laumer

novel: its very existence implied paradoxes that no sane universe could tolerate. A culture smart enough to develop

time travel would hopefully be wise enough not to use it. The risk of altering the past, changing history and thereby

overstressing the fabric of reality, would be too great. What motive could induce intelligent people to take such a

hideous gamble?

The clincher, of course, was the question, where were they"? If (I had always reasoned with myself) time travel were

ever going to be invented, in some hypothetical future, and used to go back in time . . . then where were the time

travelers? Even if they maintained very tight security, you would expect there to be at least as many Silly Season

reports of encounters with time travelers as there were of encounters with flying saucers (in which I emphatically did

not believe)-and there weren't.

Since I had long ago relegated time travel to the category of fantasy, it was slightly irritating to be confronted with a

time traveler. . . .

But I'd have bet cash. I could see no other possibility that met the facts. I was, further, convinced that she was one

the earliest time travelers (from the historically earliest point-of-origin, I mean), if not the very first.

She certainly seemed to have screwed up her landing-

I worked off one mitten and the glove beneath, quickly placed the back of my hand against her cheek. Its

temperature was neither stone cold, nor the raging fever-heat mine would have had if I had been naked. Her skin

temperature was . . . skin temperature. The same as my hand was in the instant that I slipped off my glove, but hers

remained constant. Curiouser and curiouser. It occurred to me sadly that in her time Nova Scotia might be as

overpopulated as Miami, its irresistible beauty no longer protected by its shield of horrid weather.

I hastily began to cover up my hand again. The instant my skin broke contact with hers, she made the first sound

she had made since she had crashed to the forest floor. In combination with the happy-baby smile on her face, it was a

shocking sound: the sound an infant makes when it is still terrified or starving, but too tired to cry any more. A

high-pitched drawn out nnnnnnnnn sound, infinitely weary and utterly forlorn, punctuated with little hiccup-like

inhalations. For the first time I began to consider the possibility that she was seriously hurt rather than stunned.

Perhaps some unexpected side effect of materializing in my tree had boiled her brains in their bone pot. Perhaps she

had simply gone mad. Perhaps some impor-tant internal organ had failed to complete the trip with her and she was

dying.

Or perhaps her body's dazzling climate-control system took so much power under these overloaded conditions that

there was none to spare for trivia like reason and speech. For all I knew, she had been expecting to materialize in

Lesotho or Rio de Janeiro. (She could have been a Hawaiian who only moments before had dropped money into a

wishing well and prayed to be somewhere cooler.) In any case, it was time for me to stop observing and marveling and

do something resourceful.

Total elapsed time since her appearance, perhaps half a min-ute. Trip time to house (carrying load, downhill, on ice

and loose rock, in the dark, during a snowstorm which was already back up to its original, pre-miracle fury), at least

half a century.

CHAPTER 3

Do you mind if I don't describe that trip back home? If you really want to know what it felt like, perhaps therapy could

help you.

No, wait, some parts were worth remembering. A fireman's carry doesn't work when you're dressed for Nova Scotia

out-doors, she kept slipping off my shoulder, so I carried her most of the way in my arms, the way you carry a bride

over the threshold. I could feel the warmth of her groin against my right arm through four layers of thick clothing, and

in looking down to pick my footing I spent a lot of time watching those splendid breasts jiggle. Snowflakes seemed to

melt and then evaporate instantly as they struck her, soft white kisses that left no mark. Her horrid moaning had

stopped. In repose her features were beautiful. Perhaps there was a little of that ozone effect left in the air. By the time I

emerged from the trees and sighted my home, windows glowing invitingly, twin stream-ers of smoke being torn from

the chimneys, I suppose that I was feeling about as good as is possible for a man in extreme physical distress. Better

than you might suspect . . .

I don't remember covering the last hundred meters. I don't know how I got the outer and inner doors open and

sealed again without dropping her. Instinctively I headed for the living room, the warmest room on the ground floor

since it held the big Ashley firebox. I vaguely recall a dopey confusion once I got there. I wanted her on the couch,

but I wanted her closer to the fire than that. So it was necessary to move the couch. Hmmm, I was going to have to put

her down first. Where? Say, how about on the couch? Minimize the number of trips I'd have to make back and forth.

Brilliant. Very important to conserve energy. Set her down carefully. Oof. Oh well. Circle couch, tacking like a sailboat,

wedge self between it and wall. Final convulsive effort: heave! Good. Circle couch again. More difficult against the

wind. Oh shit, we're going to capsize, try not to hit the Ashley-

Someone whacked me across both kneecaps with padded hammers, and then someone else with a naked sledge

stove in the side of my head.Two large beasts were fighting nearby. The nearer roared and growled deep in his throat,

like King Kong in his wrath, or a dragon who has been told that this is the no-smoking section. The other had a high

eldritch scream that rose and fell wildly, a banshee or a berserk unicorn. It sounded like they were tearing each other to

pieces, destroying the entire sound-stage in their fury.

Damn, it was hot here on Kong Island. Funny smell, like toasting mildew. Swimming in perspiration. Jungle so close

it fit you like-

-a coat. A big heavy furry wet overcoat, and soggy hat and scarf and gloves and many sweat-saturated layers of

undergar-ments. The shrieking unicorn was the storm outside, and mighty Kong was my Ashley stove . . . about a

meter away! I rolled away quickly, and cracked my head on the couch. But for the cushioning of hat and hair, I'd have

knocked myself out again.

If things would only slow down for a minute, maybe I could get something done! Menstruating

Christ, me head's broke. . . .

I made it to my hands and knees. The dark naked woman on the couch caught my attention. So it was that kind of

party, eh? Then I remembered. Oh, hell yeah, that's just the dying time traveler I found up on the Mountain. Is she

done yet?

No, she was still working at it. Taking her time, too. She was asleep or unconscious, breathing in deep slow

draughts. They called my attention to the fact that her nipples had finally detumesced. Fair enough. If I couldn't stand

up, why should they? I began the long but familiar crawl to the kitchen, shed-ding wet clothes like a snake as I went

until I got down to my Stanfields.

Fortunately there was always coffee on my kitchen stove, and I had overproof Navy grog in my pantry, and

whipped cream from Mona's cow Daisy in my fridge; halfway through the second mug of Sassenach Coffee I had

managed to become a shadow of my former self. I set the mug on the stove to keep warm and put my attention on first

aid for my houseguest.

And screeched to a mental halt. What sort of first aid is indicated for someone who doesn't mind subzero

temperature? What is the quick-cure for Time Traveler's Syndrome, for mal de temps?

It occurred to me to wonder if I had harmed her by bringing her into a warm environment. It didn't seem likely, but

nothing about her seemed likely. I had only had a glimpse of her before crawling from the room. I forced myself up

onto my weary feet and headed for the living room, cursing as my socks soaked up some of the ice water I had tracked

indoors.

Her metabolism seemed to mind warmth no more than it had subarctic cold. Her pulse seemed unusually fast and

unusu-ally strong-for a human being. The skin of her wrist was soft and warm and smooth. So was her forehead.

Somehow I was not surprised that it was not feverish.

The back of my hand brushed that silly golden crown perched high on her bald head-and failed to dislodge it, which

did surprise me. I nudged it, found it firmly affixed. I inves-tigated. There were three little protuberances around its

cir-cumference, barely big enough to grasp, one at each temple and one around behind. I tugged the one at her right

temple experimentally and it slid outward about ten centimeters on a slender shaft. There was an increasing resistance,

like spring-tension, but at its full extension it locked into place. So did the other. I cradled her head with one palm and

pulled out the third, and the crown fell off onto the couch. I examined the frontal two holes, the skin around them

horny as callus, and confirmed that the three locking pins had been socketed di-rectly into her skull.

There was no apparent change in her condition. She did not seem to need the crown to survive-at least, not in this

friendly environment.

It seemed to be pure gold. It weighed enough, for all its slenderness. Examined closely, it seemed to be made up of

thousands of infinitely thin threads of gold, interwoven in strange complicated ways that made me think of photos I'd

seen of the IC chips they were just beginning to put in pocket calculators in those days. It didn't feel like it was

carrying any current, or hum or blink or act electronically alive in any way I recognized. (Then again, neither did a

chip.) There were no visible control surfaces or connections beyond the three locking pins-which did seem

conductive.

Who knew what the thing was? Perhaps it was her time machine. Perhaps it made people obey you. Or not see you.

From my point of view, there was nothing to be gained, and much to be risked, by replacing it. When she regained

con-sciousness, she could tell me what it was. Or babble in some strange tongue, in which case I might decide to

gamble on the crown being a translating device. For now, it was a distraction. I hid it in the kitchen, wishing I knew

whether I was being crafty or stupid.

When I got back to the living room, she had rolled over in her sleep to toast the other side. It was the first

completely human thing she had done, and for the first time I felt genuine empathy with her. With it came a rush of

guilt at playing Mickey Mouse games, stealing gold from an unconscious woman-

In the harsh light of the bare bulb overhead, she looked somewhat less dark than she had outside, but not much.

She definitely did not have the hyperextended back and high rump of a black woman, nor the slender hips and flat

fanny of an Asian. She was muscled like an athlete, and much too thin for my taste-about what the rest of North

America would have considered stunningly beautiful. Her face was turned toward me, and I studied it.

Outside in the dark in a snowstorm, I had guessed her age at forty. With better light and less distraction, I decided I

could not guess her age. She might have been fourteen. The hasty impression I had gotten of intelligence and

character was still there, but it did not express itself in the usual way, in number and placement of wrinkles. I could not

pin down where it did reside.

Thai eyes, Japanese cheeks, Italian nose, Portuguese mouth. Skin medium dark, somehow more like a Mayan or a

light-skinned Negro than a heavily tanned Caucasian, though I can't explain the difference. The net effect was

stunning. One thing either marred or enhanced it, I could not decide. She was totally hairless-she had no eyebrows,

and no eyelashes. Striking fea-ture, in a face that didn't need it.

I didn't know what to do for her. Would a couple of blankets take some strain off her odd metabolism-or put more

on? I felt her forehead and cheek. Just as they had been out in the snowstorm, they were skin temperature. She did not

react to my touch. I thumbed back one eyelid, did a slight double-take. The pupil beneath that Asian eyelid was a blue

so startlingly vivid and pure that it would have been improbable on any face. Paul Newman's eyes weren't that blue. I

actually checked the other pupil to make sure it matched.

I decided, on no basis at all, that she was asleep rather than unconscious. I could think of nothing better for

whatever it was that ailed her. I lit the kerosene lamp and dimmed the overhead electric light all the way down to

darkness. I went back to the kitchen, picking up my discarded outdoor clothes as I went. I hung most of them by the

kitchen stove to dry, put the mittens, gloves and outer pair of socks in the warming oven over the stove, put the boots

on top of the warming oven. I finished the British coffee I had left on the stovetop. I went to a shelf by the back door,

found a spare pair of socks among the mittens and scarves, swapped them for the wet pair I had on and put on my

house-slippers. My Stanfields were still damp with sweat, so I got a fresh set of uppers and lowers from the shelf. I

emptied the kettle into a basin, added the last ladle of cold water from the bucket behind the stove (the line to the sink

pump would not unfreeze for weeks yet), and took a hasty sponge bath at the sink, then toweled off and changed into

the clean Stanfields. The stove's firebox was almost down to coals-bad habit to get into; I hoped time travelers weren't

going to be showing up every night-so I threw in a few sticks of softwood and a chunk of white birch from the

woodbox behind the stove. I made a fast trip out to the drafty back hall for more wood, wedged the Ashley as full as

possible, adjusted the thermostat and damper, closed her up and hung up the poker. The plastic was peeling up at one

of the living room windows, farting icy drafts, so I got out the staple gun and fixed that. (I was not worried about

waking her. People who need to sleep bad enough cannot be wakened. People who can be wakened can answer

questions. Besides, it is impossible to load an Ashley quietly. In any case, she did not wake.) I went back to the

kitchen, checked that the fire was rebuilding well, added a stick of maple.

The petty chores of living in the country are so never-ending that if they don't send you gibbering back to the city

they become a kind of hypnotic, a rhythmic ritual, encouraging you to adopt a meditative state of mind. I found that I

was priming up the Kemac, the oil-fired burner which took over for wood-fire while I slept, and that told me that I had

decided what I wanted to do. So I went back to the living room.

I had two choices: carry her upstairs to the bedroom above the Kemac-the only room that would stay "warm" all

night long without help-or keep feeding the Ashley at intervals of no more than three or four hours. No choice at all; I

could never have gotten her to the bedroom (Heartbreak Hotel grew room by room over a hundred and twenty years,

at the whims of very eccentric people; it's not an easy house to get around in). I readjusted the damper on the Ashley,

got blankets from the spare bedroom, put one over her, curled up in The Chair, and watched her sleep until I was

asleep too. Roughly every three hours I rebuilt the fire. I don't remember doing so even once, but we were alive in the

morning-in the country you develop habits rather quickly.

My dreams were bad, though. My father kept trying to tell me that something or someplace was mined, and a baby

kept crying without making any sound, and I couldn't seem to find my body anywhere. . . .

CHAPTER 4

I woke as soon as the room began to lighten up. Dawn, through two panes of warped glass and three layers of thick

plastic, gives a room a surreal misty glow, like a photograph in Penthouse. She certainly looked right for the part.

Externally, at least. Penthouse models are always either looking you square in the eye while doing something

unspeakably naughty, or else looking away in a scornful indifference which you both know is faked. My time traveling

nude was out cold. (Not literally cold; I checked. Even though the room and I were.) She didn't budge as I got up and

exercised out the kinks, the floorboards cracking like .22 fire, and she didn't budge as I pried up the heavy stove lid and

stirred up the coals, enough for a restart thank God, and she didn't budge as I split some sticks down to starting size

with the hatchet, even though as usual I got the blade stuck in a chunk of birch and had to hammer it free-she didn't

even budge when a flying chip struck her blanket-covered hip. I checked her over very carefully for any sign that this

might be other than health-ful sleep. Pupils normal. Pulse very strong but not enough to alarm. Breathing free and

rhythmic as hell. I visualized myself calling old Doc Hatherly, explaining how I had come into cus-tody of this

unconscious naked bald woman. ("Well you see, Doc, I had gone out into a blizzard at night to get Mucus the Moose,

when suddenly there was a ball of fire, and this time traveler-what? Why yes, I do have long hair and a beard, what has

that-eh? No, I've never taken any of that. . . anyway, not since the Solstice Dance at Louis's barn-Doc? Doc?)

The hell with it. She would wake up when she was ready. Or perhaps she would suddenly and quietly die, from

causes I would never understand. Grim logic gleaned from a thousand sf stories suggested that this was perhaps one

of the best things that could happen to a time traveler. Up behind the house were about ninety-five acres of woods; I

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