David Gerrold - In the Quake Zone

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In the Quake Zone

DAVID GERROLD

From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)

David Gerrold has been a hardworking and highly acclaimed professional in several different

fields since the sixties. As a screenwriter, he produced the screenplay for one of the most famous

of all of the episodes of the original Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles." He later produced a

book about the experience, The Trouble with Tribbles, as well as a study of the show, The World

of Star Trek, and two Star Trek novels, Encounter at Far Point and The Galactic Whirlpool. He

won both Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1995 for his story "The Martian Child." His many SF

novels include the well-known The Man Who Folded Himself, as well as When Harlie Was One, A

Matter for Men, A Rage for Revenge, A Season for Slaughter, The Middle of Nowhere, The

Voyage of the Star Wolf, Space Skimmer, Star Hunt, Yesterday's Children, A Covenant of Justice,

A Day for Damnation, Blood and Fire, The Martian Child, Chess with a Dragon, Under the Eye of

God, Jumping off the Planet, Bouncing off the Moon, and Leaping to the Stars. His short fiction

has been collected in With a Finger in My I. As editor, he has produced the anthologies

Protostars, Generation, Science Fiction Emphasis, Alternities, and Ascents of Wonder. In addition

to the Star Trek study, his nonfiction includes Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction

and Fantasy. His most recent books are a new novel, Child of Earth, and a new collection,

Alternate Gerrolds.

In the intricate and subtle story that follows, where all is mutable and nothing is certain or solid

or imperishable, he gives a whole new meaning to the expression on shaky ground…

The day after time collapsed, I had my shoes shined. They needed it.

I didn't know that time had collapsed, wouldn't find out for years, decades —and several months of

subjective time. I just thought it was another local timequake.

Picked up a newspaper—The Los Angeles Mirror, with its brown-tinted front page—and settled into

one of the high-backed, leather chairs in the Hollywood Boulevard alcove. There were copies of the

Herald, the Examiner, and the Times here as well, but the Mirror had Pogo Possum on the funny

pages. "Mighty fine shoes, sir," Roy said, and went right to work. He didn't know me yet. I snapped the

paper open.

I didn't have to check the papers for the date, this was late fifties, J already knew from the cars on the

boulevard, an ample selection of Detroit heavy-iron; the inevitable Chevys and Fords, a few Buicks and

Oldsmobiles, the occasional ostentatious Cadillac, a few Mercurys, but also a nostalgic scattering of

others, including DeSoto, Rambler, Packard, Oldsmobile, and Studebaker. Not a foreign care to be

seen, just a bright M&M flow of chrome-lined monstrosities growling along, many of them two-toned.

The newer models had nascent tailfins, the evocation of jet planes and rocketships, giddy metal evolution,

the hallmark of a decade and an industrial dead end.

The Mirror and The Examiner both disappeared late '58, maybe early '59, if I remembered correctly,

the result of a covert deal by the publishers. Said Mr. Chandler to Mr. Hearst, I'll shut down my morning

paper if you'll shut down your afternoon. "Let us fold our papers and go."

A new Edsel cruised by—right, this was '58. But I could already smell it. The Hollywood day felt gritty.

The smog was thick enough to taste. The Hollywood Warner's theater had another Cinerama travelogue

—the third or fourth, I'd lost track. I was tempted; not a lot of air-conditioning in this time zone. A dark

old theater, cooled by refrigeration, I could skip the sweltering zenith. But, no —I might not have enough

time.

The papers reported that timefaults had opened up as far north as Porter Ranch, popping Desi and Lucy

seven years back into the days of chocolate conveyer belts and Vitameatavegamin: as far east as Boyle

Heights where ten years were lost and the diamond-bright DWP building disappeared from the

downtown skyline, along with the world famous four-level freeway interchange; as far south as Watts,

they only rattled off a couple years, but it set back the construction of Simon Rodilla's startling graceful

towers; and all the way west to the Pacific Ocean. Several small boats and the Catalina Ferry had

disappeared, but a sparkling new Coast Guard Cutter from 1963 had chugged into San Pedro. The big

red Pacific Electric streetcars were still grinding out to the San Fernando Valley. I wondered if I'd have a

chance to ride one before the aftershocks hit.

Caltech predicted several days of aftershocks and the mayor was advising folks to stay close to home if

they could, to avoid further discontinuities. The Red Cross had set up shelters at several high schools for

those whose homes had disappeared or were now occupied by previous or subsequent inhabitants.

Already the looters and collectors from tomorrow were flocking to the boulevard. Most of them were

obvious, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, but they gave themselves away by their stare-gathering unkempt

haircuts and beards, their torn jeans and pornographic T-shirts. They'd be stripping the racks at World

Book and News, buying every copy they could find of Superman, Batman, Action, and especially Walt

Disney's Comics with the work of legendary Carl Barks. And MAD magazine too; the issues with the

Freas covers were the most valuable. Later, they'd move west, hitting Collector's Books and Records

and Pickwick's as well. The smart ones would have brought cash. The smartest ones would have brought

year-specific cash. The dumb ones would have credit cards and checkbooks. Not a lot of places took

credit cards yet, none of them recognized Visa or MasterCard. And nobody took checks anymore; not

unless they were bank-dated; most of the stores had learned from previous timequakes.

The Harris Agency—there was no Ted Harris, but he had an agency—was just upstairs of the shoeshine

stand; upstairs, turn left and back all the way to the end of the hall, no name on the glass, no glass. The

door was solid pine, like a coffin-lid, and painted green for no reason anyone could remember, except an

old song, "What's that happenin behind the green door… ?" The only identification was a small card

that said by appointment only. That wasn't true, but it stopped the casual curiosity seekers. My key still

worked, the locks wouldn't be changed until 1972; there was no receptionist, the outer office was filled

with cardboard file boxes and stacks of unfiled folders. Two typists were cataloging, they glanced up

briefly. If I had a key, I belonged here.

Georgia was still an intern, working afternoons; she'd started when she was a student at Hollywood High,

half a mile west and a couple blocks south. Now she was taking evening courses in business management

at Los Angeles City College, over on Vermont, a block south of Santa Monica Boulevard. A few years

from now, she'd be a beautiful honey-blonde, but she didn't know that yet and I wasn't going to risk a

bad first impression by speaking out of turn. I pretended I didn't know her. I didn't, not yet.

I brushed past, into the cubby we called a conference room. More old paper and two old women.

Pinched-faced and withered, they might have been the losers in a Margaret Hamilton look-alike contest.

Sooner or later, one of them was probably going to demand, "Who killed my sister? Was it you?!"

Opened my wallet, started to flash my card, but the dustier of the two waved it off. "I recognize you.

Wait. Sit." But I didn't recognize her. I probably hadn't met her yet. Some younger iteration of her had

known an older iteration of me. I wondered how well. I wondered if I would remember this meeting then.

The other woman left the room without saying a word. Just as well; some folks get uncomfortable around

time-ravelers. Not travelers—ravelers. The folks who tend the tangled webs.

I sat. A dark mahogany table, thick and heavy. A leather chair, left over from the previous occupant of

this office, someone who'd bellied up early in the thirties. She disappeared into a back room, I heard the

scrapeof a wooden footstool, the sound of boxes being moved on shelves, a muffled curse, very

unladylike. A moment later, she came back, dropped a sealed manila envelope on the table in front of

me. I slid it over, turned it around, and scanned the notations. Contract signed in 1971, back-shifted to

'57. Contract due date 1967. It had only been sitting here a year, and the due date was still nine years

away.

A noise. I looked up. She'd put a bottle on the table and a stubby glass. I turned the bottle. It said

Glenfiddich. I didn't recognize the name. I gave her the eyebrow. She said, "My name's Margaret.

Today's the day you acquire this taste. You'll thank me for it later. Take as much time as you need to

read the folder, but leave it here. Here's a notepad if you need to copy out anything. That contract's not

due for nine years, so the best you can do today is familiarize yourself, maybe do a little scouting. There's

an aftershock due tomorrow morning, about 4:30 a.m.; go to West Hollywood and it'll bounce you

closer to the due date. Oh, wait—one more thing." She disappeared again, this time I heard the sounds

of keys jingling on a ring. A drawer opened, stuff was shuffled around, the drawer was closed. She came

back with a cash box and an old-fashioned checkbook. "I can only give you three hundred in

time-specific cash, but it'll still be good in '67. There's a bank around the corner, you've got two hours

until it closes, I'll give you a check for another seven hundred. You can pick up more in '67. But be

careful, your account doesn't get fat for awhile. How's your ID?"

In the past, my personal past, I'd renewed my driver's license as quickly as I could after every quake, but

a DL expires after three years, a passport is good for ten. The lines at the Federal Building were usually

worse than the DMV, especially in a broken time zone, but except for a gap of three years in the early

70s, I had valid passports from now until the mid-eighties.

"I'm good," I nodded. I signed my name and today's date to the next line on the outside of the envelope,

then broke the wax seal. It was brittle; it had been sitting on the shelf for a year, waiting for today, and

who knows how long before it got to this time zone. I didn't have a lot of curiosity, most of my cases

were small-timers. The big stuff, the famous stuff, most of that went to the high-profile operations, the

guys on Wilshire Boulevard, some downtown, some in Westwood. There was a lot of competition

there—stop Sirhan from killing RFK, catch Manson before he and the family move into the Spahn movie

ranch, apprehend the Hillside Stranglers, find out who killed the Black Dahlia, help O.J. find the killers of

Ron and Nicole… and so on.

The thing about the high-profiles, those were easy cases. The victims were known, so were the perps.

The big agencies had a pretty good idea of the movements of their targets long before the crimes

occurred. But most of the laws had been written before time began unraveling and the justice system

wasn't geared for prevention, only after-the-fact cleanup.

Then one hot night in an August that still hasn't happened. Charles "Tex" Watson gets out of the car up on

Cielo Drive and someone puts a carbon-fiber crossbow bolt right through his neck, even before he gets

the gun out of his jacket. The girls start shrieking and two more of them take bolts, one of them right

through the sternum, Sexie Sadie gets one in the head. The third girl, the Kasabian kid, goes screaming

down the hill, and some redheaded kid in a white Nash Rambler nearly runs her down, never knowing

that the alternative was having his brains splashed across the front seat of his parents' car. I didn't do it,

but I knew the contract, knew who'd paid for it. Approved the outcome.

That was the turning point. After that, the judicial system learned to accommodate itself to preventive

warrants, and most of the worst perps will be safe in protective custody weeks or even months before

they have a chance to commit their atrocities. The question of punishment becomes one of

pre-rehabilitation —is it possible? When can we let these folks back out on the streets? If ever. Do we

have the right to detain someone on the grounds that they represent potential harm to others, even if no

crime has been committed? The ethical questions will be argued for three decades. I don't know yet how

it resolves, only that an uneasy accommodation will finally be achieved —something to the effect that

there are no second chances, it's too time-consuming, pun intended; a judicial review of the facts, a

signed warrant, and no, they don't call it pre-punishment. It's terminal prevention.

Meanwhile, it's the big agencies that get the star cases —save Marilyn and Elvis, save James Dean and

Buddy Holly, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Mike Todd, Lenny Bruce, RFK and Jimmy Hoffa. Stop Ernest

Hemingway from sucking the bullet out of his gun and keep Tennessee Williams from choking to death on

a bottle cap. Save Mama Cass and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and John Lennon.

And later on, Karina and Jo-Jo Ray. And Michael Zone. Kelly Breen. Some of those names don't mean

anything yet, won't mean anything for years; the size of the up-front money says everything—but we don't

get those cases. The last one we bid on was Ramon Novarro, beaten to death with his own dildo by a

couple of hustler-boys, and we didn't get that job either; later on, after the Fatty Arbuckle thing, and that

was a long reach back anyway, all of those cases went through the Hollywood Preservation Society,

funded by the big studios who had investments to protect.

No, it's the other cases, the little ones, the unsolved ones that fall through the cracks—those are the ones

that keep the little agencies going. Most families can't afford five or six figure retainers, so they come to

the smaller agencies, pennies in hand, desperate for help. "My little girl disappeared in June of'61, we

don't know what happened, nobody ever found a trace." "I want to stop the man who raped my sister."

"My girlfriend had a baby. She says it's mine. Can you stop the conception?" "My boyfriend was shot

next November, the police have no clue." "I was abused by my stepfather when I was a child. Can you

keep my mom from ever meeting him?"

There were a lot of amateurs in this business —and more than a few do-it-yourselfers too. But most folks

don't like to go zone-hopping; it's not a round-trip. You don't want to end up someplace where you have

no home, no family, no job. Just the same, some people try. Sometimes people clean up their own

messes, sometimes they make bigger ones. Some things are better left to the professionals.

The Harris Agency had three or six or nine operatives, depending on when you asked. But some of them

were the same operative, inadvertently (or maybe deliberately) time-folded. Eakins was a funny duck, all

three of him, all ages. The Harris Agency didn't advertise, didn't have a sign on the door, didn't even have

a phone, not a listed one anyway; you heard about it from a friend of a friend. We took the jobs that

people didn't want to talk about, and sometimes we handled them in ways that even we didn't talk about.

You knocked on the door and if you knocked the right way, they'd let you in. Georgia would sit you

down in the cubby we called a conference room, and if she liked your look, she'd offer you coffee or tea.

If she didn't trust you, it would be water from the cooler. Or nothing. She conducted her interviews like a

surgeon removing bullet fragments, methodically extracting details and information so skillfully you never

knew you'd been incised. Most cases, she wouldn't promise anything, she'd spend the rest of the day,

maybe two or three days, writing up a report, sending an intern down to the Central Library or the

Times' morgue to pull clippings. She'd pull pages out of phone directories, call over to the Wilcox station

to get driver's license information (if available), and even scanned the personal ads in the L.A. Free

Press a couple times. For the most part, a lot of what the outer office staff did was "clipping service"

—pulling out data before, during, and after the events; the more complete the file, the easier the job.

Working with Margaret, the jobs were usually easy. Usually, not always.

Georgia replaced Margaret in '61, right after Kennedy's election; Margaret retired to a date farm in

Indio, as soon as she felt Georgia was ready; she'd managed the agency since '39, never missing a beat.

She trained Georgia and she trained her well. The kid had been a good intern, the best, a quick-study;

after graduation from Hollywood High, she stayed on full time while she picked up her degree at

L.A.C.C. The work wasn't hard, but it was painstaking; Margaret had been disciplined, but Georgia was

meticulous. She relished the challenge. Besides, the pay was good and the job was close enough to home

that she could walk to work. And at the end of the day, she'd satisfied her spirit of adventure without

mussing her hair.

The files demonstrated their differences in approach. Margaret never wrote anything she couldn't

substantiate. She wasn't imaginative. But Georgia was always added a page or two of advice and

suggestions —her own feelings about the matter at hand. Margaret didn't disapprove. She'd learned to

respect Georgia's intuition. I had too.

This envelope was thin, thinner than usual. Inside, there were notes from both, I recognized Margaret'

crimped precise handwriting, Georgia's flowing hand. A disappearance. Jeremy Weiss. Skinny kid.

Glasses. Dark curly hair. Dark eyes, round face, an unfinished look—not much sense yet what kind of

adult he might be. A waiter, an accountant, an unsuccessful scriptwriter. Seventeen and a half. Good

home. Good grades. No family problems. Disappears summer of'68, somewhere in West L.A. Not a

runaway, the car was found parked on Melrose, near La Cienega. But no evidence of foul play either.

Parents plaster the neighborhood with leaflets. Police ask the public for help. The synagogue posts a

reward for information. Nothing. Case remains open and unsolved. No clues here. Nothing to go on. The

file was a list of what we didn't know.

Two ways to proceed with this one —shadow the kid or intercept him. Shadowing is a bad risk.

Sometimes, you're too late7 the perp is too fast, and you end up a witness instead of a hero. Agents have

been sued for negligence and malpractice, for not being fast enough or smart enough, for not stopping the

murder. Interception is better. But that means keeping the vie from ever getting to his appointment in

Samarra. And that means the perp never gets ID'd either.

The easiest interception is a flat tire or even an inconvenient fender-bender. That can delay a person

anywhere from fifteen to forty-five minutes. That's usually enough to save a life. Most cases we get are

events of opportunity. Take away the opportunity, the event doesn't happen —or it happens to someone

else. That's the other problem with preventive interception. It doesn't always stop the bad luck, too often

it just pushes it onto the next convenient opportunity. I don't like that.

Give me a case where the perp is known ahead of time, I can get a warrant. I don't have a problem

taking down a known bad-boy. I don't have to be nice, I don't have to be neat. And there are times

when I really don't want to be. But give me an unsolved case, it's like juggling hand grenades. Sometimes

the victim is the real perp. It's messy. You can get hurt.

But this one —I listened for the internal alarm bells —they always go off when something smells wrong;

this one felt different, I'm not sure why. I had a hunch, a feeling, an intuition, call it whatever—a sense that

this case was merely a loose unraveled thread of something else. Something worse. Like the redheaded

kid who didn't die on August 9 was merely a sidebar.

Think about it for a minute. Hollywood is full of manboys. They fall off the buses, naive and desperate.

They're easy targets for all kinds of opportunists. Old enough to drive, but not old enough to be street

smart. They come for the promise of excitement. Ostensibly, it's the glamour of the boulevard, where the

widescreen movies wrap around the audience; it's the bookstores rich with lore, shelves aching with

volumes of forgotten years; it's the smoky jazz clubs and the fluorescent record stores and the gaudy

lingerie displays; it's the little oddball places where you can find movie posters, scripts, leftover props,

memorabilia, makeup, bits and pieces of costumery—they come in from all the surrounding suburbs,

looking for the discarded fragments of excitement. Sometimes they're looking for friends, for other young

men like themselves, sometimes they're unashamedly looking for sex. With hookers, with hustlers, with

each other. With whoever. A few years from now, they'll be looking for dope.

But what they're really looking for is themselves. Because they're unformed, unfinished. And there's

nobody to give them a clue because nobody has a clue anymore. Whatever the world used to be, it

hasn't finished collapsing, and whatever is going to replace it, it hasn't finished slouching toward

Bethlehem. So if they're coming down here to the boulevard to look for themselves, because this looks

like the center, because this looks like where it's happening, they're looking in the wrong place; because

nobody ever found themselves in Hollywood, no. Much more often, they lose whatever self they had to

start with.

You can't save Marilyn and Elvis because they don't exist, they never existed — all that existed was a

shitload of other people's dreams dumped on top of a couple of poor souls who'd had the misfortune to

end up in front of a camera or a microphone. And you can't save anyone from that. Hollywood needs a

warning label. Like that pack of cigarettes I saw up the line. "Caution, this crap will kill you."

Jeremy Weiss wasn't a runaway. He didn't fit the profile. And he didn't end up in a dumpster somewhere,

his body was never found. He wasn't a hustler or a druggie. I doubted suicide. I figured he was probably

destined for an unmarked grave somewhere up above Sunset Boulevard, maybe in the side of a hill, one

of those offshoots of Laurel Canyon that wind around forever, until they finally turn into one-lane dirt

scars. Someone he met, a casual pickup, I know where there's a party, or let's go to my place —

So yeah, I could probably save this kid from the Tuesday express, but that wouldn't necessarily stop him

from lying down on the tracks again on Wednesday night. Or if not him, then maybe Steve from El

Segundo or Jeffrey from Van Nuys. Most of the disappearances went unreported, unnoticed. Not this

one, though.

Margaret sat down opposite me. She put a second glass on the table and poured herself a shot, poured

one for me.

I knew Margaret only from her work—the files that Georgia had passed me, up the line. Margaret was

compulsive; she annotated everything on every case, including newspaper clippings, police reports when

she could get them, and occasionally witness interviews. Reading through a file, reading her notes, her

advice, her suggestions, it was like having a six-foot invisible rabbit standing behind every moment.

But today was the first time I'd actually met Margaret, and I held my tongue, still gauging what to say.

Should I thank her for the cases yet to solve? Did she want to know how these cases would play out?

Would it affect her reports if she knew what leads were fruitless and which ones were pay dirt? Do we

advance to Go or do we go directly to jail? The real question —should we put warnings into the files?

Watch out for Perry, a harmless little pisher, but an expensive one; stay away from Chuck Hunt, the

chronovore; don't go near Conway, the bigger thief; and especially watch out for Maizlish, the destroyer.

Should I ask—?

"Don't talk," she said. "There's nothing you have to say that I need to hear. I've already heard it. I'll do

the talking here because I have information that you need." She pushed the glass toward me.

I took a sniff. Not bad. Normally, I don't drink scotch. I prefer bourbon. But this was different, sharper,

lighter. Okay, I can drink scotch.

"Something's happening," she said.

I waited for her to go on. There's this trick. Don't say anything. Just sit and wait. People can't stand

silence. The longer you wait, the more unbearable it becomes. Pretty soon, they have to say something,

just to break the silence. Leave an unanswered question in the air and wait, it'll get answered. Unless

they're playing the same game. Except Margaret wasn't playing games.

She finished her scotch, neat, put the glass down, and stared across the table at me. "The perps are

starting to figure it out." She let that sink in for a moment. "The timequakes. The perps are using public

quake maps to avoid capture. Or to commit their crimes more carefully. Bouncing forward, back,

sideways. They call it the undertime railway. LAPD has taken down the Manson clan three times now.

Each time, earlier. Now they're talking about maybe legalizing preemptive abortion. Just stop them from

being born. Nobody's sure yet. The judges are still arguing. The point is, you'll have to be careful.

Especially with cases like this where we don't have any information. The perp always knows more about

the crime than the investigator. The more the perp knows, the harder the job becomes. If the case gets

any publicity, the perp gets dangerous.

"Here's the good news. Caltech has been mapping the timequakes. They've been putting down probes all

over the county for thirty years now. We have their most recent chart. The one they didn't make public. It

cost us some big bucks and a couple of blow jobs." She unrolled a scroll across the table —it looked

like the paperback edition of the Torah, smaller but no less detailed. "It stretches from 1906 all the way

to 2111, so far. All of the big quakes and aftershocks are noted, those are the public ones, the ones the

perps know. But all of the littler ones are in here too." She tapped the scroll. "This is your advantage.

"Most people don't notice the little tremors, the unnoticeable ones. You know that feeling when you keep

thinking it's Monday when it's really Sunday? That's a dayquake. Or when you've been driving for an

hour and you can't remember the last ten miles? Or when you've been at work eight hours and you still

have seven hours to go? Or when you're out clubbing and suddenly the evening's over before it's really

started? Those are all tremors so small you don't even feel them, or if you do notice, you figure it's just

you. But Caltech has them charted, has the epicenters noted, can tell you almost to the second how far

forward or back each quake bounces. See the arrows? You can chart a time-trajectory from here to

forever—well at least up to 2111, depending on which of the local trajectories you choose. They

probably have even more complete charts uptime, but we can't get them yet. We expect Eakins to send

back copies, but nothing's arrived yet, not this far back. But it should have reached '67 by now. So as

soon as you get there, come back to this office. I won't be here, I'm already retired in '67, but Georgia

will have what you need. We start bringing her up to speed right after Kennedy's election.

"The point is, this timeline gives you more maneuverability. Protect it like it's gold. If a perp gets it, it'd be

a disaster. That's why it's on proof paper. It goes black after twenty minutes' exposure to UV." She

rolled it up, slid it into a tube, capped it, and passed it over to me. "Right. Get to the bank, get yourself

some dinner, then get out to the quake zone. You've got a reservation at the Farmer's Daughter Motel.

That puts you half a block from the epicenter. You can get a good night's sleep. Georgia will see you

here in '67."

Picked up some comics at the Las Palmas newsstand and shoved them into my briefcase, I do a little

collecting myself, on the fringes, mostly just for my retirement. But not only comics. Barbie dolls, G.I.

Joe, Hot Wheels cars, Pez boxes, stuff like that. And I'm saving up for a trip back to '38,1 hope to pick

up some IBM stock.

The Farmer's Daughter is better than it sounds. On Fairfax, walking distance from Farmer's Market. Of

course, it isn't the Farmer's Daughter yet, but it will be in '67.

I check in, check the room, check the bed, think about a hooker, I have the number of an escort service,

they'll be in business for another year or so; but it's not a good idea. There might be a foreshock. Almost

certainly, there will be a foreshock. Not fair to the girl.

So I content myself with a nightcap in the bar. It's almost deserted. Just the bartender and me. His name

is Hank. I ask him what time he gets off, he thinks I'm hitting on him, he gives me a big friendly grin, but I

say, no thanks. Close up and go home. Timequake tonight, an aftershock. He shrugs. He's already been

caught in two quakes. He won't even keep a cat now. Everything important, he keeps in a bag by the

door. Just like me.

Not a lot of out-of-towners visit L.A. anymore; they don't want to risk the possibility of time-disruption,

finding themselves a year or ten away from their families. But some folks deliberately come to L.A.,

hoping to ride a quake back so they can prevent some terrible event in their lives. Some succeed, some

don't. Others have meticulous lists of sporting events and charts of stock fluctuations; they expect to get

rich with their knowledge. Some do, some don't.

I fall asleep in front of the TV, watching Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. I wake up and it's the last

week of April '67. The smog is the same, the cars are smaller and more teenage; on the plus side, the

skirts are a lot shorter. But my old brown suit is out of style. And my car is visibly obsolete —a '56

Chevy. Obvious evidence that I'm a wandering time-raveler.

Caught breakfast in the market, fresh fruit, not too expensive yet, then headed back up to the boulevard.

Santa Monica Boulevard was now a tawdry circus of adult bookstores, XXX theaters, and massage

parlors. The buildings all looked like garish whores.

Hollywood Boulevard was worse. The stink of incense was almost strong enough to cover the smog.

Clothing had turned into costumes, with teens of both sexes wearing tight pants and garish shirts —not

quite hippies yet, but almost. The first bell-bottom jeans were showing, the Flower Children were just

starting to bloom. The summer of love was about to begin.

Several storefronts had signs for time-tours and maps of the quake-zones; probably a better business

than maps to the homes of the stars. I noticed several familiar faces —a small herd of comic book

collectors —heading toward the newsstand on Cahuenga; they were probably the first customers of the

quake-maps.

Roy was still shining shoes, twelve years older, but just as slick and just as fast. "Shoes look good, Mr.

Harris," he said, as I walked in. He called all of us Mr. Harris. Nobody ever corrected him. Maybe it

was his way of keeping track. He knew who we were, but he never asked questions, and he never

offered advice. He kept his own counsel. But sometimes, he steered the right people to the office and

sometimes he turned other folks away. "What you lookin' for ain't up those stairs, mister." Every so often,

Georgia would march downstairs and hand him an envelope. She never said why. I assumed that was

something else she'd learned from Margaret.

The office had been redecorated; it felt more like Georgia now. All of the typewriters were IBM

Selectrics. New lateral filing cabinets, a Xerox photocopier, even a fax machine. The cubby had been

painted light blue with white trim and the stacks of boxes and files had disappeared, replaced by dark

oak bookshelves. Most of the files had moved into the offices next door, which we'd leased in '61, when

the accountant finally died. It'd be another few decades before we would have all that information on

hard drives and optical discs. The same heavy mahogany table and leather chairs remained in the center

of the room, but looking a lot more worn.

Georgia was expecting me. She tossed the same manila envelope on the table, brought in another bottle

of Glenfiddich, two glasses, and a new pocket Torah. I passed her the old one, as well as the few

collectible treasures I'd picked up in '58. She'd put them in storage for me.

"Lose the brown suit," she said. "I bought you a new one, dark gray. It's in the closet. Already tailored.

Read the file, there's some new information." She reached for the bottle.

"Not this early, thanks." I was already signing the envelope. The file had been accessed only three times

in the last twelve years. Margaret twice, Georgia once. But it was significantly thicker.

This time there was a bundle of newspaper clippings. Not about Jeremy Weiss, but about a dozen

others. I checked the dates first. June of '67 to September of 74. Georgia had typed up a chart. At least

thirteen young men had disappeared. Jeremy Weiss was the third. The third that we knew about. I wasn't

surprised. I'd had a hunch there was more.

We weren't obligated to investigate the disappearances of the others; Weiss was the only one we had a

contract on. But if the disappearances were related… if they had a common author, then finding that

author would not only save Weiss, but a dozen others as well. Preemptive action. But only if the

disappearances were connected. We'd still have to monitor—save—Weiss. Just in case.

I read through the clippings, slowly, carefully. Three times. There was a depressing similarity. Georgia

sent out for sandwiches. After lunch, she sat down next to me —she was wearing the Jasmine perfume

again, or maybe still, or maybe for the first time —and walked me through the similarities she'd noticed.

The youngest victim was fifteen, but big for his age; the oldest was twenty-three, but he looked eighteen.

Last item in the envelope was a map of West Los Angeles with a red X at the site of each vic's last

known location; his apartment, his job, where his car was discovered, or the last person to see him alive.

There were no X's north of Sunset, none south of Third. The farthest west was Doheny, the farthest east

was just the other side of Vine Street. It was a pretty big target area, but at the same time fairly specific.

"I want you to notice something," she said. She pointed to the map, tracing an area outlined by a yellow

highlighter. All of the red X's were inside, or very close to the border of the yellow defined region, except

for the one east of Vine. "Look at this." She tapped the paper with her fingernail. "That's West

Hollywood. Have you seen it?"

"Drove through it this morning."

"Ever hear of Fanny Hill?"

"Isn't that a park in Boston?"

"Not funny. Don't quit your day job. It's a book, by John Cleland. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It

has redeeming social value. Now."

"Sorry, I'm not following."

"John Cleland was born in 1710. He worked for the East India Company, but he didn't make much

money at it. He ended up in Fleet debtors' prison from 1748-1749. While there, he wrote or rewrote a

book called Fanny Hill. It's written as a series of letters from Fanny to another woman, and it is

generally considered the first work of pornography written in English, its literary impact derives from its

elaborate sexual metaphor and euphemistic language."

"And this is important because… ?"

"Because last year—1966—the Supreme Court declared that it is not obscene." She didn't wait for me

to look puzzled. "In 1957, in Roth versus the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that obscenity is

not within the area of constitutionally protected freedom of speech or press, neither under the first

amendment, nor under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. They sustained the

conviction of a bookseller for selling and mailing an obscene book and obscene circulars and advertising.

"In 1966, in Cleland versus Massachusetts, the court revisited their earlier decision to clarify the definition

of obscenity. Since the Roth ruling, for a work of literature to be declared obscene, a censor has to

demonstrate that the work appeals to prurient interest, is patently offensive, and has no redeeming social

value. It's that last one that's important, because it could not be demonstrated to the court that Fanny

Hill has no redeeming social value. The case can be made that the book is an historical document,

presenting an exaggerated and often satirical view of the mores of eighteenth-century London, just as the

Satyricon by Petronius presents an exaggerated and satirical view of ancient Rome; so a very strong

case can be made that pornography represents a singular insight into the morality of its time. Thus, it has

redeeming social value. Therefore, it cannot be prosecuted as obscene."

"Redeeming social value…"

"Right."

"Since the Fanny Hill ruling, pornography has become an industry. If a publisher can claim redeeming

social value, the work is legal. A book of erotic pictures with a couple quotes from Shakespeare. A sex

film with a preface by a doctor—or an actor playing a doctor. It's a legal fan dance—you don't go to the

fan dance to see the fan. The pornographers will be testing the limits of the law for years. The fans are

going to get a lot smaller."

"Okay, so what does all this have to do with West Hollywood?"

"I'm getting to that. For the next decade, enforcement of obscenity laws will be left to local communities.

There will be years of debate. Nothing will be clear or certain, because the definition of obscenity will be

determined by local community standards. Until even that argument gets knocked down. At some point,

the whole issue of redeeming social value becomes moot because it becomes unenforceable. How do

you define it? And that'll be the end of antismut laws. But right now, today—it's all about local community

standards."

"And West Hollywood is a local community… ?"

"It's an unincorporated community," Georgia said. "It's not part of Los Angeles. It's not a city. It's a big

hole in the middle of the city. L.A.P.D. has no authority inside this yellow area. There's no police

coverage. The only enforcement is the L.A. County Sheriff Department. So there's no community and

there are no standards. It's the wild west."

"Mm," I said.

"Right," she agreed. "None of the city ordinances apply. Only the county ones. And the county is a lot

less specific on pornography. So you get bookstores. And more. The county doesn't have specific zoning

restrictions or statutes to regulate massage parlors, sex stores, and other adult-oriented businesses. The

whole area is crawling with lowlifes and opportunists. Here — " She pulled out another map. This one

showing a corridor of red X's stretching the length of Santa Monica Boulevard, with a scattered few on

Melrose.

"What's this?"

"A survey of sex businesses in West Hollywood. Red for hetero, purple for homo, green for the

bookstores. You get clusters. Here, all the way from La Brea to La Cienega, this used to be a quiet little

neighborhood where seniors could sit in the sun at Plummer Park and play pinochle. Now, there are male

hustlers in hot pants, posing at the bus stops.

"Take a drive around the neighborhood. You'll see things like massage parlors advertising specific

attention to love muscle stiffness —Greek, French, and English massage. Or sex therapists who will help

you work out your inhibitions with sex fantasy role-playing. Here, here, and here, these are gay bars, this

is a bath house, so is this. This place sells costumes, chains, things made of leather—and realistic

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IntheQuakeZoneDAVIDGERROLDFromGardnerDozois-TheYear'sBestScienceFiction23rdAnnualCollection(2006)DavidGerroldhasbeenahardworkingandhighlyacclaimedprofessionalinseveraldifferentfieldssincethesixties.Asascreenwriter,heproducedthescreenplayforoneofthemostfamousofalloftheepisodesoftheoriginalStarTrek,"T...

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