Time Travelers Never Die (11 page)

He should have tried to get Churchill to initial it. Should have taken some pictures.

Had he recalled Helen, he’d have realized he still had plenty of time to try for his accidental meeting with her at the Serendip. But she never entered his mind.

 

 

IT
was almost impossible to get through his Monday classes. Latin 311 was reading Plutarch, the lives of Demosthenes and Cicero, and Dave couldn’t resist himself. “Try to imagine what it would be like,” he told his thirteen students, “if we could go back to classical Greece for an afternoon and join the crowd listening to Demosthenes. We’d hear a great orator persuading the Athenians to make war on Alexander. They lost, of course. And what’s the lesson, Jim?”

Jim laughed. “Just because somebody is articulate doesn’t mean he makes sense.”

That was as close as he got to telling them the truth, but it was a near thing. He wanted desperately to let them know that it really
was
possible to travel in time. No: more than that. That
he
had walked across to another century. That he had
done
it. Gone to another time. And he, by God, had the receipt from the Lenox Hill Hospital to prove it.

Hardest for him was sitting in the department meeting two days later, listening to Larry Stevens, unctuous, self-i mportant, always going on about his latest linguistic conclusions. The evolution of the German verb
arbeiten
, whose earlier forms, it seemed, had appeared farther back than anyone had realized. “Think what that means.”

Nobody ever ate lunch with Larry.

And Dave would have loved to point out that, if it really mattered, he could take Larry into a second-century Bavarian forest, where they could settle the business about the German verb once and for all.

The department chair was staring at him.

Later someone told him he’d been giggling.

 

 

KATIE
had come into a small inheritance. She celebrated by taking him to dinner and a movie. “What did you want to see?” he asked her.

Thurgood.
The film was, of course, a biopic of Thurgood Marshall. “Is that okay with you?”

Not really. But he didn’t conceal his lack of interest very effectively. “Sure,” he said.

“What’s wrong? It’s gotten good reviews.”

“Nothing’s wrong. Let’s go see it.”

“Dave . . . ?”

“No. It’s fine.” Dave had developed a resistance to any kind of drama written around racial conflict. He’d never been able to bring himself to read
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Or to see
A Raisin in the Sun
. His folks had given him a copy of
The Souls of Black Folk
, which included some of DuBois’s essays and letters. It was painful reading, and Dave didn’t like pain. He refused to watch movies about terminal illness or marital breakups. He wanted his entertainment
light
. Entertainment, he insisted, should
entertain
. Life can be hard enough.

“What do
you
want to see?”

There was a baseball romance,
Rounding Third
, that he’d have liked. “No. Let’s go see
Thurgood
. That’s fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

 

 

FOR
Shel, discretion was even more difficult. Helen had swept him off his feet. On that first date, the same day he’d taken Dave to 1931, they’d gone to dinner at Fayette’s, his favorite luxury nightspot. There they ate by candlelight, while a pianist played “It Had to Be You.” They talked about trivia. She was commenting on how enticing the atmosphere was, and he said something about work or maybe about a movie he’d seen recently. Like Dave, he was aching to talk about how he’d been walking the streets of Depression-era New York, that he could take her there
now
. That he could take her anywhere. To any
time
. She liked George Bernard Shaw, and he could take her back to London at the beginning of the twentieth century to watch the opening of
Man and Superman
.
You want the date of a lifetime, sweetheart?

“So what exactly
do
you do, Shel?” she asked. And managed to look interested.

What did he do? “I do public relations for Carbolite. Basically, we sell engineering systems. To individuals or to manufacturers. Anybody who wants to build a better house, we can show him how.”

Yawn.

“Really?” she said. “How does that work?”

Well, the truth is, love, I travel in time. The other night I rescued Winston Churchill. Tomorrow, I’m going to pop by and say hello to Cicero.
He explained about making presentations to engineers and how people had better washing machines because of Carbolite technology. It took only a few minutes before her eyes began to glaze.

“But enough about me,” he said. “How’s life in medicine these days?”

She was too smart to take the bait. She asked whether he really enjoyed the theater or actually used the Disciples as a way of meeting women. What did he do when he wasn’t selling better washing machines? (She didn’t phrase it that way, but he understood what she meant.) Where did he want to be ten years down the road?

That one stopped him cold. Where indeed? He had no ambitions, really, beyond the moment. A decade from now, he’d like to be making a substantial amount of money. And he’d like to be happily married, maybe with one or two kids. But suddenly that all sounded mundane. And it occurred to him he could take his time device and go look. Find out what he’d be doing. Find out what they’d
both
be doing.

And he wondered, while he talked in a circle about ambitions he really didn’t have, how it would affect them if he
did
take her forward so they could find out.

“I’d like to be with a larger corporation,” he said, finally. “One of the blue chips, maybe GE, running
their
PR office.”

“Well.” She sipped her rum and Coke and looked at him across the rim of her glass with those spectacular blue-green eyes. “Good luck with it, Shel.” She almost sounded as if it all had some significance.

There was a time when he had seriously believed in the transformative power of public relations. Image is everything. If you believe it’s a better world, it
is
a better world. But somehow selling a more efficient computer system to the
Wall Street Journal
no longer galvanized his sense of worth. The existence he had imagined for himself, creative, appreciated, a guy who walked into the room and everybody automatically got quiet—it had happened. But he couldn’t see that it mattered.

He wondered if Helen would be interested in talking baseball.

 

 

GALILEO
had been born in February 1564, in Pisa. It was a time when Aristotelian astronomy was held in high regard, when the assumption that the sun and planets rotated around the Earth was dogma, and when any who disagreed risked more than their reputations. (Although it
was
possible to venture an opposing opinion, so long as you did so, as Coper nicus had, in Latin. And were careful not to be too loud about it.)

“He first heard about the telescope in 1609,” said Shel.

“When did he die?” asked Dave.

“In 1642.”

“So, if we assume that he would want the meeting to take place after Galileo started using the telescope—”

“We can’t assume that.”

“We can’t?”

“There’s a good chance he’d have wanted to see the Pisa experiment.”

“Dropping cannonballs off the Tower?”

“Yes.”

“When did that happen?”

“Sometime between 1589 and 1592.”

“That leaves us half a century to search.”

“Actually, it’s possible the Pisa thing didn’t happen at all. Some people think the experiment is just a legend.”

“All right.” They were in the den at Shel’s town house. “I guess our more immediate problem is the language.
“Parla italiano?”

Shel smiled.
“Devo andare adesso.”

“You said, ‘I have to go now.’ ”

“It’s a joke.
Parlo italiano
like a bandit.”

“I see we’re in for a long trip.”

“I’m not especially competent, Dave. But I’ve been working at it. We went to Rome a couple of times, and once to Venice. I was in high school then, but I picked up some of the language, so I wasn’t really starting from nothing.”

“So now you want to practice?”

“If you have the patience.”

“I’m at your disposal, Shel.”

“Okay. No more English for the rest of the night.”

 

 

IF
there was anyone David could have confided in, it was Katie Gibson. Katie was a lifeguard at the local YWCA. They hadn’t exactly been doing a lot of dating, but he and Katie were friends. Both were waiting for the One and Only to show up. Meanwhile, they were marking time with each other. Had even slept together a couple of times. But the chemistry wasn’t really there. Dave had even let Katie know about his interest in Helen, whom she’d never met. She was horrified when he told her about introducing Helen to Shel. She’d wished him luck and advised him to be more aggressive. “Get out front with her,” she’d said. “Hire a brass band to follow her around if you have to.”

“That would put her off,” Dave had said.

“Not if there’s anything there. If she likes you, you need to take some action. Sweep her off her feet. If she’s really not interested, nothing you can do will change that.”

“You’re saying I’ve nothing to lose.”

“Exactly.”

Still, he hadn’t hired the brass band, though they’d have been a magnificent sight, standing outside her office down at the medical plaza.

Nor, of course, did he tell Katie about the time travel. As he had elsewhere, he came close. He was on the phone with her, and they were talking about upcoming movies, when she commented that the Churchill biopic,
Her Finest Hour
, would be opening in a couple of weeks. She was anxious to see it. One of the things he especially liked about her was that she was not much inclined toward chick flicks. Katie enjoyed conflict. Especially the ones featuring an ordinary guy, or woman, who simply decides he’s had enough and takes on whatever constitutes the evil empire, the local mob, corrupt politicians, or maybe just the bully across the street.
“It looks like fun,”
she said.

And he imagined himself telling her:
Katie, I’ve talked to Churchill. In 1931. Really.

“You’re laughing,”
she said.
“If you don’t want to—”

So then I said to Winston—
“No, no,” he interrupted. “That’s good. Let’s do it.”

“Umm. No, I was thinking about something else.” A new Superman film was opening. Dave had never thought about it before, but it must have been hideously diffic ult for Clark Kent to keep his secret. Especially in the face of Lois’s superior attitude.

 

 

DAVE
sent Shel some Italian films, with the suggestion he watch each of them until he could actually follow the dialogue. Meanwhile, he refreshed his own skills by reading editions of seventeenth-century Italian classics in the original. He settled in each evening with Machiavelli and the poet Giambattista Marino. He read
La Reina de Scotia
, a drama about the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Federico della Valle. He struggled through Dante, and for the first time read the entire work, and not simply
The Inferno
. When he was finished, he understood why people still read
The Inferno
and ignored the other two books. He suggested that they watch some operas together. “I’ve no taste for opera,” Shel said. But they downloaded
L’Orfeo
,
Pagliacci
, and
Lucrezia Borgia
, and, for opening night,
Don Giovanni
. They got some pizza in, invited Helen and Katie, and turned it into a party. But Shel and Katie both suffered visibly through the opera, and it did nothing for Shel’s Italian.

Two nights later, they did
Pagliacci
, this time without the women. Shel spent much of the evening glaring at the screen. “Give it a chance,” said Dave. “Relax and enjoy the show.”

Shel tried. “But,” he complained, “I never know what’s going on.”

“That’s the whole point of the exercise. Your Italian’s a bit weak.”

“They could be singing in English, and I don’t think I could follow it. There’s got to be an easier way.” He held up one of the software packages his father had been using: Speak Italian Like a Native.

“Good,” said Dave. “How about the movies I sent over? Have you watched any of those?”

“
Amici Miei
.”

“Okay. And . . . ?”

“
Il Ciclone
.”

“Good comedies.”

Shel looked doubtful. “Absolutely.”

“Can you understand them?”

“Some.”

“Okay. Hang in.”

 

 

WHEN,
several weeks later, Shel had finally gotten a handle on the language, they decided it was time to go find his father. “First, though,” he said, “we’ll need a wardrobe. And it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to grow a beard.” He’d already started one.

“You’re kidding.”

He frowned at Dave’s jaw. “I think you’ll look out of place like that.”

They drove into Center City and visited Emilio’s Costume and Wardrobe Shop on Walnut Street. The walls were covered with photos of people dressed as sheiks, Roman soldiers, princesses, and Zorro. Some high-school kids, with a teacher, were wandering among the racks, apparently selecting costumes for a play.

Dave was measured for two doublets, both with a calico design. He also got a soft blue huke, which was a kind of cloak, lined in white squirrel fur. When he tried it on, it hung to his thighs. “We’ll have to take this one in a bit,” said the clerk. “And let this one out.” He made notes, then put the garments aside.