Up The Line

4.

“The Time Service,” I said, “is populated by square-jawed Boy Scouts. Your jaw is round.”

“And my nose is flat, yes. And I am no Boy Scout. However, I am a part-time employee of the Time Service.”

“I don’t believe it. The Time Service is staffed entirely by nice boys from Indiana and Texas. Nice white boys of all races, creeds, and colors.”

“That’s the Time Patrol,” said Sam. “I’m a Time Courier.”

“There’s a difference?”

“There’s a difference.”

“Pardon my ignorance.”

“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”

“Tell me about the Time Service.”

“There are two divisions,” Sam said. “The Time Patrol and the Time Couriers. The people who tell ethnic jokes end up in the Time Patrol. The people who invent ethnic jokes end up as Time Couriers. Capisce?”

“Not really.”

“Man, if you’re so dumb, why ain’t you black?” Sam asked gently. “Time Patrolmen do the policing of paradoxes. Time Couriers take the tourists up the line. Couriers hate the Patrol, Patrol hates Couriers. I’m a Courier. I do the Mali-Ghana-Gao-Kush-Aksum-Kongo route in January and February, and in October and November I do Sumer, Pharaonic Egypt, and sometimes the Nazca-Mochica-Inca run. When they’re shorthanded I fill in on Crusades, Magna Carta, 1066, and Agincourt. Three times now I’ve done the Fourth Crusade taking Constantinople, and twice the Turks in 1453. Eat your heart out, white folks.”

“You’re making this up, Sam!”

“Sure I am, sure. You see all this stuff here? Smuggled right down the line by yours truly, out past the Time Patrol, not a thing they suspected except once. Time Patrol tried to arrest me in Istanbul, 1563, I cut his balls off and sold him to the Sultan for ten bezants. Threw his timer in the Bosphorus and left him to rot as a eunuch.”

“You didn’t!”

“No, I didn’t,” Sam said. “Would have, though.”

My eyes glistened. I sensed my unknown heart’s desire vibrating just beyond my grasp. “Smuggle me up the line to Byzantium, Sam!”

“Go smuggle yourself. Sign on as a Courier.”

“Could I?”

“They’re always hiring. Boy, where’s your sense? A graduate student in history, you call yourself, and you’ve never even thought of a Time Service job?”

“I’ve thought of it,” I said indignantly. “It’s just that I never thought of it seriously. It seems — well, too easy. To strap on a timer and visit any era that ever was — that’s cheating, Sam, do you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean, but you don’t know what you mean. I’ll tell you your trouble, Jud. You’re a compulsive loser.”

I knew that. How did he know it so soon?

He said, “What you want most of all is to go up the line, like any other kid with two synapses and a healthy honker. So you turn your back on that, and instead of signing up you let them nail you with a fake job, which you run away from at the earliest possible opportunity. Where are you now? What’s ahead. You’re, what, twenty-two years old—”

“—twenty-four—”

“—and you’ve just unmade one career, and you haven’t made move one on the other, and when I get tired of you I’ll toss you out on your thumb, and what happens when the money runs dry?”

I didn’t answer.

He went on, “I figure you’ll run out of stash in six months, Jud. At that point you can sign up as stoker for a rich widow, pick a good one out of the Throbbing Crotch Registry—”

“Yigg.”

“Or you can join the Hallucination Police and help to preserve objective reality—”

“Yech.”

“Or you can return to the More Supreme Court and surrender your lily-white to Judge Mattachine—”

“Blugh.”

“Or you can do what you should have done all along, which is to enroll as a Time Courier. Of course, you won’t do that, because you’re a loser, and losers infallibly choose the least desirable alternative. Right?”

“Wrong, Sam.”

“Balls.”

“Are you trying to make me angry?”

“No, love.” He lit a weed for me. “I go on duty at the sniffer palace in half an hour. Would you mind oiling me?”

“Oil yourself, you anthropoid. I’m not laying a hand on your lovely black flesh.”

“Ah! Aggressive heterosexuality rears its ugly head!”

He stripped to his jock and poured oil into his bath machine. The machine’s arms moved in spidery circles and started to polish him to a high gloss.

“Sam,” I said, “I want to join the Time Service.”