Up The Line

6.

Very little of the foregoing really mattered. I was supposed to keep the application on my person, like a talisman, in case anybody in the Time Service bureaucracy really wanted to see it as I moved through the stages of enrolling; but all that was actually necessary was my Citizen Registry Number, which gave the Time Service folk full access to everything else I had put on the form except my Reason for Entering Time Service, and much more besides. At the push of a node the master data center would disgorge not only my height, weight, date of birth, hair color, eye color, racial index, blood group, and academic background, but also a full list of all illnesses I had suffered, vaccinations, my medical and psychological checkups, sperm count, mean body temperature by seasons, size of all bodily organs including penis both flaccid and erect, all my places of residence, my kin to the fifth degree and the fourth generation, current bank balance, pattern of financial behavior, tax status, voting performance, record of arrests if any, preference in pets, shoe size, et cetera. Privacy is out of fashion, they tell me.

Sam waited in the waiting room, molesting the hired help, while I was filling out my application. When I had finished my paperwork he rose and conducted me down a spiraling ramp into the depths of the Time Service building. Squat hammerheaded robots laden with equipment and documents rolled beside us on the ramp. A door in the wall opened and a secretary emerged; as she crossed our path Sam gave her a lusty tweaking of the nipples and she ran away shrieking. He goosed one of the robots, too. They call it appetite for life. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Sam said. “I play the part well, don’t I?”

“What part? Satan?”

“Virgil,” he said. “Your friendly spade guide to the nether regions. Turn left here.”

We stepped onto a dropshaft and went down a long way.

We appeared in a large steamy room at least fifty meters high and crossed a swaying rope bridge far above the floor. “How,” I asked, “is a new man who doesn’t have a guide supposed to find his way around in this building?”

“With difficulty,” said Sam.

The bridge led us into a glossy corridor lined with gaudy doors. One door had SAMUEL HERSHKOWITZ lettered on it in cutesy psychedelic lettering, real antiquarian stuff. Sam jammed his face into the scanner slot and the door instantly opened. We peered into a long narrow room, furnished in archaic fashion with blowup plastic couches, a spindly desk, even a typewriter, for God’s sake. Samuel Hershkowitz was a long, long, lean individual with a deeply tanned face, curling mustachios, sideburns, and a yard of chin. At the sight of Sam he came capering across the desk and they embraced furiously.

“Soul brother!” cried Samuel Hershkowitz.

“Landsmann!” yelled Sam the guru.

They kissed cheekwise. They hugged. They pounded shoulders. Then they split and Hershkowitz looked at me and said, “Who?”

“New recruit. Jud Elliott. Naive, but he’ll do for the Byzantium run. Knows his stuff.”

“You have an application, Elliott?” Hershkowitz asked.

I produced it. He scanned it briefly and said, “Never married, eh? You a pervo-deviant?”

“No, sir.”

“Just an ordinary queer?”

“No, sir.”

“Scared of girls?”

“Hardly, sir. I’m just not interested in taking on the permanent responsibilities of marriage.”

“But you are hetero?”

“Mainly, sir,” I said, wondering if I had said the wrong thing.

Samuel Hershkowitz tugged at his sideburns. “Our Byzantium Couriers have to be above reproach, you understand. The prevailing climate up that particular line is, well, steamy. You can futz around all you want in the year 2059, but when you’re a Courier you need to maintain a sense of perspective. Amen. Sam, you vouch for this kid?”

“I do.”

“That’s good enough for me. But let’s just run a check, to be sure he isn’t wanted for a capital crime. We had a sweet, clean-cut kid apply last week, asking to do the Golgotha run, which of course requires real tact and saintliness, and when I looked into him I found he was wanted for causing protoplasmic decay in Indiana. And several other offenses. So, thus. We check.” He activated his data outlet, fed in my identification number, and got my dossier on his screen. It must have matched what I had put on my application, because after a quick inspection he blanked it, nodded, keyed in some notations of his own, and opened his desk. He took from it a smooth flat tawny thing that looked like a truss and tossed it to me. “Drop your pants and put this on,” he said. “Show him how, Sam.”

I pressed the snap and my trousers fell. Sam wrapped the truss around my hips and clasped it in place; it closed seamlessly upon itself as though it had always been one piece. “This,” said Sam, “is your timer. It’s cued in to the master shunt system, synchronized to pick up the waves of transport impulses as they come forth. As long as you don’t let it run out of phlogiston, this little device is capable of moving you to any point in time within the last seven thousand years.”

“No earlier?”

“Not with this model. They aren’t allowing unrestricted travel to the prehistoric yet, anyway. We’ve got to open this thing up era by era, with care. Attend to me, now. The operating controls are simplicity itself. Right here, just over your left-hand Fallopian tubes, is a microswitch that controls backward and forward motion. In order to travel, you merely describe a semicircle with your thumb against this pressure point: from hip toward navel to go back in time, from navel toward hip to go forward. On this side is your fine tuning, which takes some training to use. You see the laminated dial — year, month, day, hour, minute? Yes, you’ve got to squint a little to read it; that can’t be helped. The years are calibrated inB.P. — Before Present — and the months are numbered, and so on. The trick lies in being able to make an instant calculation of your destination — 843 years B.P., five months, eleven days, and so on — and setting the dials. It’s mostly arithmetic, but you’d be surprised how many people can’t translate February 11, 1192 into a quantity of years, months, and days ago. Naturally you’ll have to master the knack if you’re going to be a Courier, but don’t worry about that now.”

He paused and looked up at Hershkowitz, who said to me, “Sam is now going to give you your preliminary disorientation tests. If you pass, you’re in.”

Sam strapped on a timer also.

“Ever shunted before?” he asked.

“Never.”

“We gonna have some fun, baby.” He leered. “I’ll set your dial for you. You wait till I give the signal, then use the left-hand switch to turn the timer on. Don’t forget to pull your pants back up.”

“Before or after I shunt?”

“Before,” he said. “You can work the switch through your clothes. It’s never a good idea to arrive in the past with your pants around your knees. You can’t run fast enough that way. And sometimes you’ve got to be ready to run the second you get there.”