Paradox Alley

15

"I'm going home," Carl said, awestruck. "I'm really going home."

"Hold on, dearie," Arthur cautioned. "We know where we are, but not when we are. This could be Earth in one million A.D., or B.C., for that matter, or any time in between. So don't get your hopes up. That was a completely blind jump we made. The chances of our winding up here at all were approximately infinity to one." Arthur shook his head. "Amazing. If I'd aimed for here, I never would have made it. Not in one jump, anyway. To've done it with any degree of accuracy and safety, fifty would have been more like it."

"Any way of finding out when we are?" I asked.

"Well, several. I could clock the rate of a few known pulsars and get a fairly good idea of the galactic epoch we're in… if I had a few known pulsars to look at. Trouble is, I don't have much in storage about Terran astronomy, not anything like what I'd need to make those calculations."

"I thought you knew everything, Arthur," Darla said. "How much do you know about Terran astronomy?" Arthur countered.

"Not a whole lot."

"Well, there you are. Neither does this ship, although there's a lot of general astronomical data in its memory. Maybe the ship's computer can come up with something. Offhand, I'd say there's a good chance we're in the general time frame you people came from, give or take a few thousand years. I do know a few constellations; and they're not at all distorted."

"One way to find out for sure," I said.

"How?"

"Let's go to Earth and take a look at it."

"That idea makes me a little nervous," Arthur said. "Don't like to go mucking about where I don't belong. But…" He swung his ugly dog head around and gave me his grimacing, nonhuman approximation of a smile. "What the hell, eh? We have nothing to lose but our lives."

"'That's the spirit, Arthur," I told him.

"Spare me the cliches."

It took Arthur twelve hours to dodge and weave his way through the solar system, which wasn't bad time, considering that we traveled nearly two billion kilometers. In fact, I thought it was great time, but Arthur said it wasn't, giving the excuse that he had to take it easy in the midst of great gravitational stress. I don't know what he was talking about, because we didn't see any planets on the way in, not even Jupiter. And not one asteroid. But I don't know much about space. I like something firm under my feet.

We spent the time in the truck, sleeping, eating the great gobs of food that the factory people had given us, and talking. "Have you considered what you might find when we get to Earth?" I asked Carl.

"Yeah," he said, grinning. "Hot dogs, the L.A. Dodgers, cars that run on gasoline, movies, girls…"

Lori folded her arms and shot daggers at him. "Have you thought of anything else?" I said.

He shrugged. "Like what?"

I really didn't know how to tell him. "I guess it depends on when we arrive."

"When? I don't get you."

I tried another tack. "What about Lori?"

"Oh, I've thought about that."Carl pulled her over to him and hugged her with one arm. "We've decided. We're getting married."

Lori smiled winsomely. "Yeah," she said.

"Going to be complicated."

"How so?" Carl asked, frowning.

"Well, remember. Lori's time of origin is almost two hundred years in the future. There're a few adjustments she's going to have to make."

"I know," Lori said. "Imagine having to worry about tooth decay." She made a face.

"Yeah, tooth decay, and other bothersome things. But more than that, Carl, you're going to have to establish some kind of identity for Lori. Some sort of fictitious but convincing background for her. You can't very well go around telling everybody that she's from another planet."

"Why not?" He waited for my look of incredulity, then chuckled. "Yeah, I know. Nobody's ever going to believe my story. I'd get laughed out of the country. Or they'd lock me up and throw away the key."

"Right. Don't even try. And that car stays here."

"Hey… wait a minute. That car would back up my story all the way! Yeah! Why didn't I think of that?"

"Hold it, Carl."

"Let 'em laugh at my story. I'll just fire a Tasmanian Devil at 'em and let 'em see how funny it all is. Hell, I'm taking the car."

"Carl, it won't work."

"Why not? Forget it, Jake. It's my car, and I'm taking it with me."

I stared at him for a moment. "Carl, how old are you? You've never told me."

"Nineteen."

"Really? I thought you were a little older than that. You look it."

"I got used to telling people I was twenty-one. But after that year I spent driving around in outer space, I must look like I'm fifty."

"You never went into that period of your life, either. What did you do out there on the road?"

"Nothing. I'd stay in motels. Eat. Drive around a little. Sleep in the car. I stayed with a g-uh, a friend for a couple weeks. Then I thought of getting a job, but I didn't have any papers. So I kept driving around."

"Did the Militia give you any trouble?"

"I was stopped once, for not having a proper license plate. But I gave the cop two gold coins, and she let me off with a warning."

Our stalwart law enforcement personnel. "I'm surprised you were only stopped once."

"They chased me several times. But all the cops ever got was a lot of dust in their teeth."

I nodded. I knew that car very well. "What did you do for money?"

"I found all these gold coins in the trunk. I guess Prime put them there."

I didn't know how to go about telling him that I didn't think Prime had done it.

Earth.

I hadn't seen it in more than thirty years. It hung in space beneath us looking like a huge blue and white marble, its land masses faint brown texturings beneath a gauze-wrapping of cloud. Day was breaking over the Philippines, and the swirling gray fingers of a tropical depression hovered over New Guinea. Early morning sun glared off the bright blue islandfreckled Pacific.

We made our entry into the atmosphere somewhere in the vicinity of Wake Island, I think. We swept over the Hawaiians at a screaming Mach 12, then decelerated rapidly, following a flight path that hewed fairly close to the Tropic of Cancer, if I remembered my Terran geography.

We now had a fairly good idea what time frame we had jumped into. The ship had tracked numerous artificial satellites in orbit about the Earth, but not the profusion of my day. No power satellites, no geosynchronous space colonies, no activity in and about the moon. No space traffic whatsoever. We were obviously somewhere in the middle to late twentieth century, the dawn of the age of space travel. I had warned Arthur not to make a dead-on approach to the western coast of the United States. I did remember my Terran history, and these were very paranoid times. Carl agreed. Arthur said he didn't know whether the ship was radar-transparent, because in the era in which the ship was built, no one worried about prehistoric technologies like radar. There was a chance that alarms were already going off all over the place. So we scared the shit out of Mexico, hung a right at the tip of the Baja peninsula, and headed north following the coast and flying low.

The ship was fully transparent now. It was eerie-four humans, one improbable alien android, a futuristic trailer truck, and a contemporary automobile, streaking over coastal towns and fishing villages, blithely flying along like characters out of a surreal version of Peter Pan.

"What will the natives think?" I asked Arthur.

"Huh? Oh, the transparency's only one-way, dearie. Don't worry about that. I've got the surface of the ship tuned to a mirror finish. We'll be reflecting sky and sea. Practically invisible, except from a few angles."

"San Diego!" Carl said, pointing to the coast.

I looked. Lots of orange-tile roofs, a few tall buildings, a big harbor choked with shipping. I'd never been to San Diego. "We'd better head inland here," Carl said.

"We've got company," Arthur said.

I didn't see them until they got out of the sun: two military-looking aircraft with triangular wings. They swooped down on us and leveled off. One banked and vectored in for a closer look.

"Christ, we got the Air Force after us," Carl said worriedly. "We're a goddamn UFO."

"Not for long," Arthur said.

With a stunning burst of speed, we left the aircraft behind as if they were standing still. The sea was gone; we were streaking over semiarid land that soon turned to desert.

"Slow down!" Carl yelled. "We'll be in Arizona in another minute! Turn around and go back!"

"Don't take a fit, dearie," Arthur said calmly.

We executed a sharp turn and headed northwest for a hundred kilometers or so, soon hitting the edges of congested urban development. We jogged east again, skirting the edge of it and still bearing generally north.

"That's gotta be San Bernardino," Carl said. "Go out into the desert a little ways and land."

"Will do."

We did, settling down behind a ridge that ran along a narrow dirt road.

Carl asked, "Jake, do you have a screwdriver in the truck?"

"A power driver. Well, maybe I do have an old screwdriver lying around." I went back and found it, then met everyone in the small cargo bay. Arthur had already dilated the doorway.

"Well, we're off," Carl said, flushing with excitement.

"We're coming with you," I told him.

"Jake, you can't!"

"We're not going to stay. I just want to make sure that we haven't left you in an untenable position. We don't know exactly when we are, Carl."

"This is where I belong. I know it! This has to be my world, my time frame."

"Carl, think a minute: When exactly were you abducted? What was the date?"

"I'll never forget it. It was August twenty-fifth, 1964."

I still didn't know quite how to tell him. Arthur came into the bay and did it for me.

"Well, I've got the exact date," he said. "It was fairly easy. I monitored some local radio broadcasts. It's Tuesday, July seventh, 1964."

Finally, it dawned on Carl. "Oh, my God."

"Yeah," I said.

His eyes widened. "Then-" He broke off, his mouth hanging open.

"Right. You can't go home yet, Carl."

Carl closed his mouth and swallowed hard, looking suddenly ill. He leaned back against the fender of his car. "Shit."

"It seems we have some time to kill," Darla said.

"I can't believe it," Carl said. "I just can't believe it. You mean that if I drive to Santa Monica and knock on my front door. :"

"Your paradoxical double would get a big shock," I said. "But since it never happened, . or did it?"

"I think I'd remember it."

"Exactly. And I don't think you should do it, either. We'll just have to wait."

"Yeah, wait for Prime to come and do his dirty work. Kidnap me. And I guess we have to let him do it."

"I have some thoughts about that," I said. "I'm not sure I'm right, but-"

"I don't want to stay here," Carl said.

"Where do you want to go?"

"I have some friends who could put me up for a while."

I thought it over briefly and decided it was a good idea. The Paradox Machine was spinning its wheels frantically now, coming up to full steam. We'd have to be careful, but we'd have to act.

Arthur said, "Jake, I'm going to take the ship up into orbit, if you don't mind." He handed me an oblong-shaped object made of the same olive-drab material that was all around us. It was about ten by five centimeters and a little over one centimeter thick. "This is a communcations device. It will always be operating, monitoring you, giving your position. If you want to reach me, just hold it next to your mouth and speak, either side of it. I'll hear you." He turned to Carl. "How far away are you going? Where do you live?"

"In Santa Monica. It's right on the beach, about sixty, seventy miles from here… er, a hundred klicks, about."

"You won't have to come all the way back, Jake. Just let me know and I'll pick you up at a convenient place. I can easily home in on that beacon."

"Good," I said. Something occurred to me, and I considered the way we were all dressed. Carl and Lori had on gray utility jumpsuits which the Voloshins had lent them, and Darla was wearing her silver Allclyme survival suit. She had been wearing it when we first met. It was a little tight around the waist now.

Darla caught my stare and looked down at herself. "This won't do, will it? I'll change into that old stuff of John's. It looks ridiculous, but it's more nondescript than this."

"Hell, I left my old clothes back at Emerald City," Carl said.

"And I don't have much but this jacket and slacks," I said. "Not what you'd call outlandish in our day, but the styles might be different enough to draw a few odd looks."

"Forget it," Carl said. "This is southern California, the land of the nuts. You should see some of the getups people walk around in out here."

Home.

The reality of being back on Earth again sank in as I sat in the back seat of the Chevy, watching the countryside roll by. I had seen the surfaces of a thousand planets, and none looked exactly like this. None, no matter how "Earthlike" they were. A good part of my lifetime had been spent in alien environments, and now I was home again at long last, back in the environment that had spawned those of my kind. The Good Earth.

Compounding the wonder was the knowledge that this was Earth as it had been before I'd been born, almost a century before. A dented blue automobile passed us, spewing pale blue smoke. What the hell did it run on-burning wood? There was a smell in the air, something I didn't recognize. Gasoline, I thought. No, oil. I asked Carl if it was, and he said yes, but told me that the car was burning it because it was in bad repair. Interesting.

We came into a town, San Bernardino, Carl told us. We drove around for a bit, then pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a large shopping plaza.

"Be right back," Carl said, getting out. He took the screwdriver with him.

He returned in a few minutes, stooped in front of the car and did something, then went around and fiddled with something at the back. Then he got in.

"Had to steal some license plates," he explained. "Otherwise we'd get stopped for sure."

He pulled out of the lot, cruised down a traffic-choked boulevard, turned right at a sign and got onto a ramp leading to a multilane highway.

The sky was Earth blue, the earth the color of earth. Trees looked like what trees should look like, grass looked like grass. With all the worlds I'd been on in the last thirty years, this seemed strange.

The air was… unusual, and it got to be more so as we sped into the heart of a endless, sprawling metropolis.

Darla was rubbing her eyes. "Some kind of irritation," she said, sniffling.

"That's smog," Carl told us. "You get used to it, kinda, after living here for a while. In the fall we get the Santa Ana from the desert. Winds. They blow all the shit out to sea."

"Those poor fish," I said.

"Oh, it's not as bad as some people make it out to be."

"Carl, it smells awful," Lori said fretfully. "I don't think I'm ever going to get used to it."

"Take a good whiff of it into your lungs. You'll get to like it. Gee, I should stop and get a pack of cigarettes."

"Carl!"

It was a bright, hazy day, and the warm sun put me into a strangely good mood. The Sun. How many alien suns had warmed my skin, or irradiated it, or nearly burned it? Too many.

The sun-drenched metropolis went on and on. I couldn't believe that Los Angeles had been this big in the middle of the twentieth century, kilometer after endless kilometer of residences, businesses, office buildings, service stations, shops, institutional buildings, and apartment complexes, all laid out in a vast grid of streets and highways. These last were something. They made the Skyway look like a country lane. Clogged with murderous traffic, they met five or six at a time at snarled interchanges, twining about one another into knots of elevated ramps, cloverleafs, and cutoffs. Although speeds weren't high compared to those on the Skyway, the sheer volume of traffic made the whole mess frightening. Anyway, I was scared. Carl wasn't. He seemed to have cheered up a little, and he was navigating his way through the shifting streams of vehicles with automatic ease, like a veteran. He was home.

"There are no restraining harnesses in this buggy," I said, looking down at the blue fur-covered seats. I had known it before, but the careless disregard for safety struck me now.

"Damn good idea to have 'em," Carl said. "Congress should get after Detroit to make 'em mandatory." An afterthought: "I should have thought of putting them in when I was designing it."

I looked out at history. The architectural styles were strange to me. They just don't build things like that anymore. Everything was strange, yet somehow faintly familiar as well.

We took a spur to the right that shunted us off onto another highway. We were heading due west, toward the ocean. "This is the Santa Monica Freeway," Carl told us. "Straight shot into Santa Monica, then I'll be home." He laughed. "God, it's good to be back."

About twenty minutes later the freeway ended. We cruised down a wide city boulevard, then turned right onto a palmlined street running along the beach. There were lots of bathers out, catching the late afternoon sun.

"First thing I'm gonna do is get my board and go out," Carl averred.

"Your board?" Lori said.

"Surfboard."

"Oh."

"You'll love it."

"It's a nice beach."

I pulled out the communications device, thinking to test it out. I looked at its grainy surface. It was covered with the same half-visible geometrical lines and squiggles that I'd seen on the ship's material. I held it near my mouth.

"Arthur?"

There was a moment's delay, then: "Yes, dearie?"

"Testing," I told him.

"Receiving you fine," Arthur said, his voice reproducing with high fidelity.

"Good. Where are you?"

"Oh, the back side of the moon, hovering at about two hundred kilometers."

"Really? See anything interesting?"

"Nope. Frankly, I'm bored. I think I'm going to hibernate until you need me."

"How long will it take you to get here if we need you in a hurry?"

"Oh, about ten minutes, if I hurry."

"Maybe you should stay in Earth orbit."

"If you want. I might be detected, though."

I agreed. "Yeah, you might. Stay put, and we'll contact you later."

"Have fun."

"By the way, what are our chances of getting back to Microcosmos?"

"Fair," Arthur said. "Since I know where we are, it makes it fairly easy. You just have to aim for the center of the universe."

"The center of the universe?"

"Fourth dimensionally speaking, that's where Microcosmos is, almost all the way back to the beginning of the universe. It's a little off-center though, by about one or two billion years."

"Oh," I said. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. If another ship like yours entered the solar system, would you have any way of detecting it?"

"Yes, but that's not going to happen," Arthur told me.

"Why?"

"Because this is the only ship of its kind ever built."

"What about the chance of encountering the ship's paradoxical double? You call it a spacetime ship: Doesn't that mean it's a time machine?"

"In a way," Arthur said thoughtfully, "but I don't think there's much chance of it happening."

Neither did I.