The Door Into Summer (22 page)

But I wasn’t; I was a private and somewhat shady citizen, engaged in hanky-panky I didn’t want to call attention to. I was simply looking for my Door into Summer, as quietly as possible.

“John, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Mmm…perhaps. Still, I saw a man fall out of empty sky…but he didn’t hit hard enough to hurt him. He’s wearing funny clothes. He doesn’t seem to know where he is or what day it is. Danny, I’ve read Charles Fort, the same as most people. But I never expected to meet a case. But, having met one, I don’t expect the explanation to be as simple as a card trick. So?”

“John, something you said earlier—the way you phrased something—made me think you were a lawyer.”

“Yes, I am. Why?”

“Can I make a privileged communication?”

“Hmm—are you asking me to accept you as a client?”

“If you want to put it that way, yes. I’m probably going to need advice.”

“Shoot. Privileged.”

“Okay. I’m from the future. Time travel.”

He didn’t say anything for several moments. We were lying stretched out in the sun. I was doing it to keep warm; May in Colorado is sunshiny but brisk. John Sutton seemed used to it and was simply lounging, chewing a pine needle.

“You’re right,” he answered. “I don’t believe it. Let’s stick to ‘dizzy spells.’ ”

“I told you you wouldn’t.”

He sighed. “Let’s say I don’t want to. I don’t want to believe in ghosts, either, or reincarnation, or any of this ESP magic. I like simple things that I can understand. I think most people do. So my first advice to you is to keep it a privileged communication. Don’t spread it around.”

“That suits me.”

He rolled over. “But I think it would be a good idea if we burned these clothes. I’ll find you something to wear. Will they burn?”

“Uh, not very easily. They’ll melt.”

“Better put your shoes back on. We wear shoes mostly, and those will get by. Anybody asks you questions about them, they’re custom-made. Health shoes.”

“They are, both.”

“Okay.” He started to unroll my clothes before I could stop him. “What the devil!”

It was too late, so I let him uncover it. “Danny,” he said in a queer voice, “is this stuff what it appears to be?”

“What does it appear to be?”

“Gold.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I bought it.”

He felt it, tried the dead softness of the stuff, sensuous as putty, then hefted it. “Cripes! Danny…listen to me carefully. I’m going to ask you one question, and be damned careful how you answer it. Because I’ve got no use for a client who lies to me. I dump him. And I won’t be a party to a felony. Did you come by this stuff legally?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you haven’t heard of the Gold Reserve Act of 1968?”

“I have. I came by it legally. I intend to sell it to the Denver Mint, for dollars.”

“Jeweler’s license, maybe?”

“No. John, I told the simple truth, whether you believe me or not. Where I came from I bought that over the counter, legal as breathing. Now I want to turn it in for dollars at the earliest possible moment. I know that it is against the law to keep it. What can they do to me if I lay it on the counter at the mint and tell them to weigh it?”

“Nothing, in the long run…if you stick to your ‘dizzy spells.’ But they can surely make your life miserable in the meantime.” He looked at it. “I think you had better kick a little dirt over it.”

“Bury it?”

“You don’t have to go that far. But if what you tell me is true, you found this stuff in the mountains. That’s where prospectors usually find gold.”

“Well…whatever you say. I don’t mind some little white lies, since it is legitimately mine anyhow.”

“But is it a lie? When did you first lay eyes on this gold? What was the earliest date when it was in your possession?”

I tried to think back. It was the same day I left Yuma, which was sometime in May 2001. About two weeks ago…

Hunh!

“Put that way, John…the earliest date on which I saw that gold…was today, May third, 1970.”

He nodded. “So you found it in the mountains.”

The Suttons were staying over until Monday morning, so I stayed over. The other club members were all friendly but remarkably unnosy about my personal affairs, less so than any group I’ve ever been in. I’ve learned since that this constitutes standard good manners in a skin club, but at the time it made them the most discreet and most polite people I had ever met.

John and Jenny had their own cabin and I slept on a cot in the club-house dormitory. It was darn chilly. The next morning John gave me a shirt and a pair of blue jeans. My own clothes were wrapped around the gold in a bag in the trunk of his car—which itself was a Jaguar Imperator, all I needed to tell me that he was no cheap shyster. But I had known that by his manner.

I stayed overnight with them and by Tuesday I had a little money. I never laid eyes on the gold again, but in the course of the next few weeks John turned over to me its exact mint value as bullion minus the standard fees of licensed gold buyers. I know that he did not deal with the mint directly, as he always turned over to me vouchers from gold buyers. He did not deduct for his own services and he never offered to tell me the details.

I did not care. Once I had cash again, I got busy. That first Tuesday, 5 May 1970, Jenny drove me around and I rented a small loft in the old commercial district. I equipped it with a drafting table, a workbench, an army cot, and darn little else; it already had 120, 240, gas, running water, and a toilet that stopped up easily. I didn’t want any more and I had to watch every dime.

It was tedious and time-wasting to design by the old compass-and-T-square routine and I didn’t have a minute to spare, so I built Drafting Dan before I rebuilt Flexible Frank. Only this time Flexible Frank became Protean Pete, the all-purpose automaton, so linked as to be able to do almost anything a man can do, provided its Thorsen tubes were properly instructed. I knew that Protean Pete would not stay that way; his descendants would evolve into a horde of specialized gadgets, but I wanted to make the claims as broad as possible.

Working models are not required for patents, merely drawings and descriptions. But I needed good models, models that would work perfectly and anybody could demonstrate, because these models were going to have to sell themselves, show by their very practicality and by the evident economy designed into them for their eventual production engineering that they would not only work but would be a good investment—the patent office is stuffed with things that work but are worthless commercially.

The work went both fast and slow, fast because I knew exactly what I was doing, slow because I did not have a proper machine shop nor any help. Presently I grudgingly dipped into my precious cash to rent some machine tools, then things went better. I worked from breakfast to exhaustion, seven days a week, except for about one weekend a month with John and Jenny at the bare-bottom club near Boulder. By the first of September I had both models working properly and was ready to start on the drawings and descriptions. I designed and sent out for manufacture pretty speckle-lacquer cover plates for both of them and I had the external moving parts chrome-plated; these were the only jobs I farmed out and it hurt me to spend the money, but I felt that it was necessary. Oh, I had made extreme use of catalogue-available standard components; I could not have built them otherwise, nor would they have been commercial when I got through. But I did not like to spend money on custom-made prettiness.

I did not have time to get around much, which was just as well. Once when I was out buying a servo motor I ran into a chap I had known in California. He spoke to me and I answered before I thought. “Hey, Dan! Danny Davis! Imagine bumping into you here. I thought you were in Mojave?”

I shook hands. “Just a quick business trip. I’m going back in a few days.”

“I’m going back this afternoon. I’ll phone Miles and tell him I saw you.”

I looked worried and was. “Don’t do that, please.”

“Why not? Aren’t you and Miles still buddy-buddy budding tycoons together?”

“Well…look, Mort, Miles doesn’t know I’m here. I’m supposed to be in Albuquerque on business for the company. But I flew up here on the side, on strictly personal and private business. Get me? Nothing to do with the firm. And I don’t care to discuss it with Miles.”

He looked knowing. “Woman trouble?”

“Well…yes.”

“She married?”

“You might say so.”

He dug me in the ribs and winked. “I catch. Old Miles is pretty puritanical, isn’t he? Okay, I’ll cover for you and someday you can cover for me. Is she any good?”

I’d like to cover you with a spade, I thought to myself, you fourth-rate frallup. Mort was the sort of no-good traveling salesman who spends more time trying to seduce waitresses than taking care of his customers—besides which, the line he handled was as shoddy as he was, never up to its specs.

But I bought him a drink and treated him to fairy tales about the “married woman” I had invented and listened while he boasted to me of no doubt equally fictitious exploits. Then I shook him.

On another occasion I tried to buy Dr. Twitchell a drink and failed.

I had seated myself beside him at the restaurant counter of a drugstore on Champa Street, then caught sight of his face in the mirror. My first impulse was to crawl under the counter and hide.

Then I caught hold of myself and realized that, out of all the persons living in 1970, he was the one I had least need to worry about. Nothing could go wrong because nothing had… I meant “nothing would.” No—Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations—conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

In any case, past or future or something else, Twitchell was not a worry to me now. I could relax.

I studied his face in the mirror, wondering if I had been misled by a chance resemblance. But I had not been. Twitchell did not have a general-issue face like mine; he had stern, self-assured, slightly arrogant and quite handsome features which would have looked at home on Zeus. I remembered that face only in ruins, but there was no doubt—and I squirmed inside as I thought of the old man and how badly I had treated him. I wondered how I could make it up to him.

Twitchell caught sight of me eyeing him in the mirror and turned to me. “Something wrong?”

“No. Uh…you’re Dr. Twitchell, aren’t you? At the university?”

“Denver University, yes. Have we met?”

I had almost slipped, having forgotten that he taught at the city university in this year. Remembering in two directions is difficult. “No, Doctor, but I’ve heard you lecture. You might say I’m one of your fans.”

His mouth twitched in a half-smile but he did not rise to it. From that and other things I learned that he had not yet acquired a gnawing need for adulation; he was sure of himself at that age and needed only his own self-approval. “Are you sure you haven’t got me mixed up with a movie star?”

“Oh no! You’re Dr. Hubert Twitchell…the great physicist.”

His mouth twitched again. “Let’s just say that I am a physicist. Or try to be.”

We chatted for a while and I tried to hang onto him after he had finished his sandwich. I said it would be an honor if he would let me buy him a drink. He shook his head. “I hardly drink at all and certainly never before dark. Thanks anyway. It’s been nice meeting you. Drop into my lab someday if you are ever around the campus.”

I said I would.

But I did not make many slips in 1970 (second time around) because I understood it and, anyhow, most people who might have recognized me were in California. I resolved that if I did meet any more familiar faces I would give them the cold stare and the quick brushoff—take no chances.

But little things can cause you trouble too. Like the time I got caught in a zipper simply because I had become used to the more convenient and much safer Sticktite closures. A lot of little things like that I missed very much after having learned in only six months to take them for granted. Shaving—I had to go back to
shaving!
Once I even caught a cold. That horrid ghost of the past resulted from forgetting that clothes could get soaked in rain. I wish that those precious esthetes who sneer at progress and prattle about the superior beauties of the past could have been with me—dishes that let food get chilled, shirts that had to be laundered, bathroom mirrors that steamed up when you needed them, runny noses, dirt underfoot and dirt in your lungs—I had become used to a better way of living and 1970 was a series of petty frustrations until I got the hang of it again.

But a dog gets used to his fleas and so did I. Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two million people, there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets—there still were
streets
; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue.

Denver was still getting used to being the national seat of government and was not quite happy in the role, like a boy in his first formal evening clothes. Its spirit still yearned for high-heeled boots and its western twang even though it knew it had to grow up and be an international metropolis, with embassies and spies and famous gourmet restaurants. The city was being jerry-built in all directions to house the bureaucrats and lobbyists and contact men and clerk-typists and flunkies; buildings were being thrown up so fast that with each one there was hazard of enclosing a cow inside the walls. Nevertheless, the city had extended only a few miles past Aurora on the east, to Henderson on the north, and Littleton on the south—there was still open country before you reached the Air Academy. On the west, of course, the city flowed into the high country and the Federal bureaus were tunneling back into the mountains.

I liked Denver during its Federal boom. Nevertheless, I was excruciatingly anxious to get back to my own time.