Paradox Alley

18

I'm bad at good-byes. But I did my best.

It was about five in the morning. Carl, Lori, and Dave saw us off.

Lori hugged Darla, then me. I shook Carl's hand and then Darla kissed Carl and Lori. Then Lori hugged me again and kissed me. This went on for some time. Dave just stood by and smiled oddly.

"Jeez," Carl said, "I'm going to miss you people."

"Us, too," I said.

"I can't say I'm going to miss being nine zillion miles from home," he added. "I'm glad to be back. You can have the future. It's yours. I don't belong there."

"Future? No such thing," I said. "No future, no past. Time is one big wide-open amusement park. We proved that."

"Yeah, I guess."

Lori was sniffling. I stroked her cheek and said, "You're sure you want to stay, Lori?"

She pulled Carl closer. "Yes. I'll put up with smog, tooth decay, and this character. There's really nothing for me back where I come from. I kind of like it here. This is a nice place… a nice time to be alive."

I nodded. "Yes, it is. It seems peaceful, in a way, compared with what history says about it."

The eastern sky was growing milky. A few birds were tuning up in a nearby copse of sumac trees. Behind us the ship hovered silently; Arthur was standing by to take us away from Earth in the waning summer of a year long past.

Carl began, "I wish…" He chewed his lip, thinking.

"What is it, Carl?" I asked.

"I wish there was some way of contacting you," he said, then shook his head. "Somehow, but… it's impossible. Right?"

"Send me a letter. Mark it: Jake McGraw; Postal Slot 7836, Administrative Zone Twelve, Vishnu, Colonial Planets. That's my address. Figure out a way to delay delivery for about a hundred and fifty years. Should be easy enough."

Carl laughed. "Yeah, sure." Then he stopped laughing and had me repeat it. I did.

Arthur's voice came through the communicator. "Are you quite ready?"

I walked over to Dave. "Thanks," I said, shaking his hand. "We couldn't have done it without you."

"I still think there's an outside chance that I've hallucinated this whole thing," he said. "By the way, Arthur doesn't look anything like Gort." He stared at the ship for a moment, then sighed. "The future. I've dreamed about it, written about it. And here it is, right in front of me. You know, Jake-you haven't really told me much about it. Nothing about what's really going to happen in the next few years here."

I said, "You mean like stock market quotations?"

"No." He glanced at Carl and Lori, then said, "Tell me, is there going to be a-" He stopped, then shook his head. "No. Don't tell me anything. At least I know there's going to be a future. Sometimes that prospect looks very dubious. And judging from the little you've let on, it's going to be a pretty interesting future."

"Never a dull moment," I said.

"People…" Arthur said impatiently.

"Keep your pants on," I yelled.

"I won't say the obvious," Arthur said.

"Well," Dave said, offering his hand again. "Good luck."

"Thanks. "

There was more hugging and kissing, and Lori started crying again, so I dried her eyes and kissed her and told her to be a good girl. Which was silly; for she was now a woman.

"I'll always remember you, Jake," she said.

"And how could I forget my little Lorelei?" I said.

"Debbie," she corrected. She whispered in my ear, "I hate that name!"

"Which one?"

"Both, actually. Debbie the most."

"It looks good on you."

Presently there was nothing more to say.

I took one last look at Earth, at Earth's sun showing its face to a new day, at the grass and the trees and the kind skies of the birthing place of humankind.

And then I left that world, that time.

Earth dwindled in our wake as Arthur piloted the ship through the gravitational vortices of the solar system and out into deep space, where we could, as he put it, "do a good clean jump."

"Where to?" he added. "Back to Microcosmos?"

"Not just yet," I said. "We have to dump Carl off somewhere. And the sooner the better."

"He'll be okay. That tranquilizer mechanism seems to have done its job. Where did you have in mind?"

"Look. This is a spacetime machine, right?"

"Right."

"We can go anywhere, any time?"

"Well, more or less. There are some limitations."

"Can we jump forward in time about one hundred and fifty years and drop him off on the Skyway somewhere?"

"Just anywhere?"

"Terran Maze would be a good idea."

"Right you are. Just point out a likely planet and I'll shoot for it."

Bruce helped him do that. We picked Omicron Eridani II, and Arthur got his bearings from the Earth-based astronomical data that was stored in that tiny but powerful robot brain of his. We picked a date that was about a year before I met Darla on the Skyway. All would go according to plan.

Arthur asked, "Are you all getting off there?"

"No, just Carl. We're going back to Microcosmos with you."

Darla drew me aside. "Jake, do you realize that if we did get off, the Paradox would be complete? You'd be back in T-Maze before you left-before any of this happened. Don't you think-"

"No, Darla. The story's not over yet. I have to go back and get Sam."

She nodded; and didn't mention it again.

We had given a lot of thought to the subject of setting Carl loose on the Skyway. Our Carl-Carl One-had tried to describe his experiences immediately after the kidnapping. But his memory of the whole period aboard ship was hazy to say the least-which accorded exactly with the way things were going for Carl Two, who was at the moment slumped in the seat of his magic Chevy in the small cargo bay. He was catatonic, and it was hard to say whether this was the result of the "tranquilizer" beam or the trauma of the kidnapping. Probably a little of both. I was worried.

Carl One had told us that "Prime" had spoken to him during this period. We induced Arthur to do his impression of Prime for Carl Two at regular intervals.

"What do I say?" Arthur had demanded to know.

"Be soothing. Be a nice person."

"Oh, great."

But he did it. We had no idea if any of it got through to Carl. I had the feeling that it did.

According to Carl's story, when the mental haze lifted, he found himself in his car on the Skyway. And when he saw a portal for the first time, he somehow knew what it was and how to shoot it.

Arthur pondered this problem for a while. Then: "I can come up with something akin to dreaniteaching by modifying the tranquilizer beam circuitry. I think."

I asked, "Don't you need tools or equipment or something to do that?"

"You're thinking in terms of conventional technology: It won't be a simple task, but it's not a matter of tinkering with anything physical, at least not on the scale of ordinary objects. This ship has the capacity to reprogram its auxiliary mechanisms for any function desired, within limits. Trust me."

"Oh, I do," I said. "You exude trustworthiness."

"I'll have to change my deodorant."

So it was that we set Carl off on the road between the worlds to seek his destiny, which was to find me and go home. He had nothing more than his car, the clothes on his back, and a little over 1000 Universal Trading Credits' worth of gold (my entire stash-I was now broke) in the trunk.

It was a grungy mudball of a planet with lowering skies and mud-colored rocks-but just beyond the portal was Adonis, a very nice world indeed, well-populated and civilized. We landed on the Skyway a few kilometers from the portal's commit boundary. Arthur opened the bay door and nudged the Chevy out. Carl sat there in the middle of the road for a minute. Then he started the engine and drove off. He never looked back.

The Chevy dwindled to a candy-apple red dot and vanished between the towering jet-black columns of the portal.

Carl had shot his first portal and survived. Arthur's modified dream-teaching gadget had worked.

"Good-bye, Carl," Darla said in a murmur. "For the second time, good-bye. And good luck."

"Hail and farewell," I said.

It took us over fifty jumps and six hours to get back to Microcosmos, which wasn't bad time when you consider the distance. It had taken longer to get to Earth starting from a little beyond the orbit of Pluto. Arthur apologized, though, for the delay. Well, he didn't exactly apologize. When either I)arla or I would stroll into the control room to see how things were going, he'd glare at us defensively and give some excuse. "I keep running into bumpy spots," he complained. "Fouls up my calculations. Spacetime isn't uniformly smooth, you know."

"I never said it was," I told him.

"This has to be done just right," he went on. "We don't want to return before we left. I've had just about enough of that nonsense."

"You and me both," I said.

Eventually we got there. Arthur turned the ship transparent, and we watched an odd little cloud of stars grow and grow until it became the peculiar star-sphere that enclosed the textured disk of Microcosmos. It was daylight on the Emerald City side.

All seemed peaceful down there. Nobody threw things at us, no mind-shaking enigmas chased us as we made a smooth entry into the atmosphere and streaked across the sky on a decelerating trajectory toward Emerald City.

The patchwork surface of the planet rolled underneath the ship like a giant map on a fast scroll. Arthur broke all the speed records and nearly scared us to death. It looked as if we were about to go crashing into one of the city's valley-side curtainwalls until Arthur suddenly veered off and took the ship in a harrowing turn around the castle.

Veering again, we dove between two huge towers and came to a screeching halt above a third. The domed top of the tower opened like a morning glory and we descended into it, coming to rest on a smooth black floor. The dome closed up, and we had arrived.

Arthur sighed and took his stubby fingers from the control box. His narrow shoulders slumped.

"If I were flesh and blood," he said, "I'd be exhausted. As it is, I only need a two-day recharge session."

"Some pretty fancy flying, there, Arthur."

"Thank you. I thought it best to hurry like hell. Looks like someone called a truce, but you never can tell."

I locked up the truck, telling Bruce to keep an eye on things, and we debarked from the ship.

"Jake," Arthur said as we walked toward a nearby downchute. "I think you have a little bit of a shock in store."

I stopped. "What?"

"Well, it's about Sam. He's no longer a computer. He's alive, Jake. He's very much alive."