Time Travelers Strictly Cash (19 page)

Half the mouth smiled. “Sure, Sam.” Chuck held out his right thumb, the Doc lifted the jewel, contact was established.

The damned thing took a blood sample, flashed a few contemplative lights, and returned it. As his own blood flowed back into him, Chuck gasped, then yelped, and pushed the jewel violently away from him.

Using both hands.

He looked down at his left hand, and began to smile the first unlopsided smile he’d had in months. Doc Webster gaped at him.

“The price for all four items,” Phee said, “F.O.B., shipping and handling plus applicable tax, is pennies. Literally. Every penny in this room, and nothing else.”

“You mean you want all our dough?”, Eddie asked.

“No, cochon! All your pennies!”

I happened to know that Mike keeps about a hundred bucks in pennies in a sack under the bar-we pitch ‘em on Friday nights. Still, it sounded like a hell of a deal. Stranger bargains have been made at Cajlahan’s Place, and our sales resistance was smithereened. I started to chick my pants- “No!” Josie cried, and leaped from Phee’s lap, her face

white wth fury.

“Why, what is it, my pigeon?” Phee asked, still sitting on nothing. “What deranges you?”

She towered over him in her wrath. “Damn it, Phee, damn you. I was going to wait untill I got you home-but this is the Fourth of July, and that was the fourth jewel lie, and the lie is even more abominable than the pun. Screw you, and the reindeer you rode in on.”

Re blinked. “Here? Now?”

“Damn straight.” She took a tube of toothpaste from an inside pocket of her vest, and before the traveling salesman could move, she had circled his knees where they crossed with a loop of toothpaste. He scrabbled at it with his fingers, and she added another loop, pinioning his hands. He began swearing fluently in several tongues-for the “toothpaste’ had hardened at once into something that seemed to have the tensile strength of steel cable. Though be tried mightily, Phee could not break free. His command of obscenity was striking, and it might just have melted ordinary steel cable.

“-and may you fall into the outhouse just as a platoon of Ukrainians has finished a prune stew and six barrels of beer,” he finished, and she laughed merrily.

Callahan cleared his throat. If you engage the starter on-an engine that’s already running, it makes a sound like that. “Josie darlin’,” he began, “if you don’t mind my ask

ing?”

“Aw, you damned fools,” she burst out. “My father is right; people who don’t read science fiction are the most gullible people there are. Look at him, for God’s sake: does he look like an extraterrestrial to you?”

Josie had no way of knowing that Noah Gonzalez and I both read sf. Of course Noah wOrks on the Fourth-he’s on the County Bomb Squad. “Well,” I said, “I guess we just figured his real appearance was too horrible for us to look upon. He’s obviously a master of illusions.”

“Too right,” she snapped, and snatched the propellor beanie from Phee’s head. The propellor stopped; and Phee’s invisible chair was yanked out from under him. Smiling Buddha hit the floor hard, and he howled indignantly.

We all blinked and looked around. The change was too subtle to perceive at once. All four jewels had gone opaque, and there was nothing-or rather, there wasn’t nothing, where the hyperpocket had been, but these things took time to notice. even when Chuck Samms cried out, the reason was not immediately apparent, for both sides of his mouth were turned down…

“This is the illusion-maker,” Josie said, waving the beanie. “All it is is a hypnotic amplifier. The illusions are gone, now-and he still looks human. Not,” she snapped, “that I claim kinship with any pride!”

“Parallel evolution-?” I began.

“Don’t be silly. No, be silly: assume he’s really an alien who just happens to look human. Now explain tome why he came hundreds of light-years-past six other planets, a carload of moons md a million asteroids-to come in here and swindle you out, of copper?”

There was only one other possible answer, then. I opened my mouth-and then closed it. I did not, for reasons I could not define, want Josie to know that I was a science fiction reader. You’re more talkative if you think your audience doesn’t understand you, sometimes.

“He’s a time traveler, you idiots!” she cried, confirming my guess. “Who else would need copper as desperately as your own descendants? With the couple of thousand pennies you morons were going to give him, he could have-well, quintupled his living space at the very least. And he would have left you nothing, except for four prop jewels and an admittedly great tall tale to tell.”

Isham Latimer is Callahan’s only black regular, and he knows his cue when he hears it. “Does dis mean dat de diamonds is worthless?”

Josie giggled, losing her anger all at once, and completed the quote. “Put it dis way: he is de broker, and yo’ is de brokee.”

All the tension in the room dissolved in laughter and cheers-leaving behind a large helping of confusion.

“So what’s your angle, Josie?” Callahan asked. “Where do you come in?”

“Time travel is severely proscribed,’ * she said. “The possible consequences of tampering with the past are too horrible to contemplate,”

“Sure,” Callahan said. He may not be an sf reader-but all of us at Callahan’s know that much about time travel. We bad another time-traveler in here once, who was worried considerable about that very issue-whether it was moral and/or safe to change the past of a lady he loved, to keep her from being hurt.

“And precisely bccause it’s so tempting to ‘mine the past’ for all the precious things you wasted and used up on us, that is the most strictly prohibited crime on the books. Pennies are the best dodge for copper: you acquire a bunch in this era, bury them somewhere, then go back home and dig ‘em up, properly aged and no way to prove it wasn’t a lucky dig.”

“And you-“

“Temporal agents approached my father twenty years ago, and convinced him to sign up as a kind of local waystation for authorized time-travelers, on a part-time basis. He’s a science fiction writer-who else would they dare trust to understand the terrible dangers of time travel? He kept it from Mother and us kids-but about five years ago I found out. I blackmailed his employers into giving me ajob on the Time Police.”

“Why?” Callahan asked.

“Because it’s the most exciting job I can think of, of course! You know my nature-I love jokes and paradoxes.”

She grinned. “I’m not sure,but I have a hunch I’m going to grow up to be Mom.”

There was a stunned silence.

“So if I understand this,” I said diffidently, “Phee here came for the coppers, and you came here for the coppers?”

She whooped with glee, and tossed the beanie into the fireplace. “Jake, are you busy tonight?”

I tingled from head to toe. “Aren’t you?” I asked, indicating Phee.

I knew it was a silly question, but I didn’t want her to know I knew. Aside from the most obvious benefits of her offer, as long as she didn’t know I read sf there was a chance I could pump her for her father’s name-and I was curious as hell.

“It won’t take me ‘any time at all to deal with him,” she said. “Not yours, anyway.” I made oh-of-course noises.

“What happens to him?” Chuck asked, and his voice was harsh.

“I’d like to cut him in half,” Doc Webster said darkly. “Wouldn’t be the first Phee I’ve split.”

“He will be dealt with. Not punisbed-punishment accomplishes nothing. Nothing desirable, anyway. He is a brilliant man, a master hypnotist he can be of service to his own era. He will simply be surgically implanted with a tiny device. If he ever again thakes an unauthorized time-jump, he will acquire a massive and permanent case of B.O.”

Chuck broke up. “Fair enough.”

Phee spoke for the first time since his torrent of profanity. “I apologize, sir, for what I did to you. That last lie was the cruelest-and perhaps unnecessary. I…I never could resist a good dazzle.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

Chuck was taken aback. The half of his face that could hold expression softened. “Well…it was kind of nice to be whole again there form minute. I dunno; maybe the havin’ of that minute was worth the losin’ of it. I’m sorry I laughed at you, mister.”

Sitting there in his shorts on the floor with his hands toothpasted to his knees, Phee managed to bow.

“I don’t get it,” Long-Drink complained. “If this guy wanted pennies, why not just time-travel into a bank vault and take a million of ‘em? Why go through all this

rigamarole?”

Phee looked elegantly pained. “What would be the fun in that? That’s the only thing about being busted that really bothers me: she was here waiting for me. I hate being predictable.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Josie told him. “You couldn’t have known. This place is a probability nexus. Why, this was the priori terminus for the first-ever time-jump.”

Why, sure-when I thought about it, our previous time traveler’s brother had invented the first time machine. His had been a bulky belt-these people were more advanced.

Phee’s eyes widened. He stared around at us. “By Crom, I’m impressed. What did you do?”

“We took up a collection for him,” Eddie answered truthfully.

Phee shook his head “And I took you for yokels. Take me away, officer.”

In a way it was a little saddening to see the great Al Phee bestered.

Josle picked him up effortlessly and slung him over her shoulder. With her free hand, he reached into the purse that hung from her other shoulder.

“Uh,” I said, and she paused. “You’ll be right back?”

She grimaced. “Soon for you. Not for me. I’ll be back as quick as I can, Jake-honest! But first I’ve got to take him in and make out the report and do all the paperwork, and then I promised Dad I’d drop in on him for a quick visit about twenty years from now. But I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Why twenty years from now?”

“I hate to bother him when he’s working.’ By then he should be done with the Riverworld ser-” She broke off. “I’ll be right back,” she said shortly, and fumbled in the purse. She and Phee vanished.

And I fell down howling on the floor.

What made it twice as funny was that my ethics fOrbade me to share the joke with everybody else-I don’t think I could have stopped laughing long enough, anyhow. Gentleman John almost killed me when he understood I wasn’t going to explain it.

But hell, it was so obvious! I shouldn’t have needed that last hint. I didn’t even need to know enough German to know what “Bauer” means. I know that there’s a kind of delirious logic to the way things happen at Callahan’s Place, a kind of artistic symmetry.

So if a traveling salesman’s daughter comes into Callahan’s Bar on Tall Tales Night-whose daughter is going to turn out to be his downfall?

Concerning “Have You Heard The One…?”:

There’s something I ought to make clear: you should not assume that I vouch for the truth of any of Jake’s stories about Callahan’s Place. Oh, Mike and the gang always back

him up, and I’ve never been able to trip them up or catch them in an inconsistency (that’s why I have to insert my own)-but then they are notorious and fearsome liars one and all.

But I can’t be sure. I can’t help noticing a kind of emotional consistency, a “ring of truth” in people’s reactions to events described. If, for instance, someone in the situation of Kathy Saunders ever did walk into Callahan’s Palce, I’m fairly sure the gang woldd have reacted just the way Jake described in “Fivesight.”

As to “Have You Heard The One..?”.

Back when I was assembling the first Callahan book, I happened to meet Alfred Bester, author of The Demolished Man and Golem 100. He appeared before me at a party, grabbed me by the lapels and shook me like a container of martinis (which I chanced to be at the time), patted my ass, tugged on my beard to see if it would come off, stuck a cigarette in my ear and dragged me off to a nearby bedroom, where he proceeded to extract my entire life story in five minutes without anesthesia. When he learned that I had no title for my Callahan book he swore softly in Urdu, his eyes rolled like dice and came up snake-eyes, and he intoned the words, “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon.” My brain reeled; * when I woke the next morning there was a “kick me” sign on the seat of my pajamas, and my goldfish was pregnant.

Now, I have no reason to believe that Al is from the future, or that he has ever defrauded anyone in any respect, and I wasn’t at Callahan’s the night this story went down. But I have to admit that the resemblance, both physical and temperamental, is uncanny. Furthermore, long before I heard this story from lake, when a second Callahan book

•nowadays my brain cassettes.

was only at the proposal stage, I wrote to Al asking if he could contribute another title-and it was he who came up Time Travelers Strictly Cash, which is strikingly germane to the moral of this story.

Nah-it couldn’t be.

After all, Al Phee has, according to Jake and Josie, been returned to, and permanently contained in his own timeframe. Whereas Al—

cancelled out as Special Guest at this year’s Halifax sf convention (Halcon 3) on a week’s notice. And I haven’t heard front him since.

Hmmm.

And ever since the 8Os, the thing most frequently said of Alfie has been that he is “decades ahead of his time”.

Tell you what: next time you see him at a convention, get downwind and take a stuff. Let me know.

Two more pieces of ambiguous evidence concerning this story:

Philip José Farmer insisted in a recent phone call that Josie Bauer, at least, was lying-that he is not affiliated in any way with the Time Police, and that he has no daughter named Josie.

On the other hand, his wife was listening.

And John (Kilian Houston) Brunner has never admitted to having commanded a submarine. But then if he’d been doing intelligence assignments he’d have to deny it, wouldn’t he?

I just don’t know.

With a depressingly large part of his consciousness, the Warlock watched the damned fool who was trying to kill him this time.

Depressing because it rubbed his nose in the fact that he simply had nothing more pressing to think about. He had not sunk so low that assassins threatened him; rather he bad risen so high that they were a welcome relief from boredom.