LITMIR.BIZ

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      THE DOORBELL RINGS. MARTIN, FRESHLY showered, is sprawled out naked on his bed, leafing through the new issue of Esquire and thinking vaguely of going out for dinner. He isn’t expecting any company. Slipping into his bathrobe, he goes toward the door. “Who’s there?” he calls. A youthful, pleasant female voice replies, “I’m looking for Martin Jamieson.” Well, okay. He opens the door. She’s perhaps twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, very sexy, on the slender side but well built. Dark hair, worn in a strangely boyish short cut. He’s never seen her before. “Hi,” he says tentatively. She grins warmly at him. “You don’t know me,” she tells him, “but I’m a friend of an old friend of yours. Mary Chambers? Mary and I grew up together in—ah—Ohio. I’m visiting New York for the first time, and Mary once told me that if I ever come to New York I should be sure to look up Martin Jamieson, and so—may I come in?” “You bet,” he says. He doesn’t remember any Mary Chambers from Ohio. But what the hell, sometimes you forget a few. What the hell.

      He’s much more attractive than she expected him to be. She has always known Martin only as an old man, made unattractive as much by his coarse lechery as by what age has done to him. Hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered, pleated jowly face, sparse strands of white hair, beady eyes of faded blue—a wreck of a man. But this Martin in the doorway is sturdy, handsome, untouched by time, brimming with life and vigor and virility. She thinks of the carver in her purse and feels a genuine pang of regret at having to cut this robust boy off in his prime. But there isn’t such a great hurry, is there? First we can enjoy each other, Martin. And then the laser.

      “WHEN IS SHE DUE BACK?” Ted demands. Friesling explains that all concepts of time are relative and flexible; so far as elapsed time at Now Level goes, she’s already returned. “What?” Ted yells. “Where is she?” Friesling does not know. She stepped out of the machine, bade the Temponautics staff a pleasant goodbye, and left the showroom. Ted puts his hand to his throat. What if she’s already killed Martin? Will I just wink out of existence? Or is there some sort of lag, so that I’ll fade gradually into unreality over the next few days? “Listen,” he says raggedly, “I’m leaving my office right now and I’ll be down at your place in less than an hour. I want you to have your machinery set up so that you can transport me to the exact point in space and time where you just sent my wife.” “But that won’t be possible,” Friesling protests. “It takes hours to prepare a client properly for—” Ted cuts him off. “Get everything set up, and to hell with preparing me properly,” he snaps. “Unless you feel like getting slammed with the biggest negligence suit since this time-machine thing got started, you better have everything ready when I get there.”

      HE OPENS THE DOOR. THE girl in the hallway is young and good-looking, with close-cropped dark hair and full lips. Thank you, Mary Chambers, whoever you may be. “Pardon the bathrobe,” he says, “but I wasn’t expecting company.” She steps into his apartment. Suddenly he notices how strained and tense her face is. Country girl from Ohio, suddenly having second thoughts about visiting a strange man in a strange city? He tries to put her at her ease. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks. “Not much of a selection, I’m afraid, but I have scotch, gin, some blackberry cordial—” She reaches into her purse and takes something out. He frowns. Not a gun, exactly, but it does seem like a weapon of some sort, a little glittering metal device that fits neatly in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “what’s—” “I’m so awfully sorry, Martin,” she whispers, and a bolt of terrible fire slams into his chest.

      SHE SIPS THE DRINK. IT relaxes her. The glass isn’t very clean, but she isn’t worried about picking up a disease, not after all the injections Friesling gave her. Martin looks as if he can stand some relaxing too. “Aren’t you drinking?” she asks. “I suppose I will,” he says. He pours himself some gin. She comes up behind him and slips her hand into the front of his bathrobe. His body is cool, smooth, hard. “Oh, Martin,” she murmurs. “Oh! Martin!”

      TED TAKES A ROOM IN one of the commercial hotels downtown. The first thing he does is try to put a call through to Alice’s mother in Chillicothe. He still isn’t really convinced that his little time-jaunt flirtation has retroactively eliminated Alice from existence. But the call convinces him, all right. The middle-aged woman who answers is definitely not Alice’s mother. Right phone number, right address—he badgers her for the information—but wrong woman. “You don’t have a daughter named Alice Porter?” he asks three or four times. “You don’t know anyone in the neighborhood who does? It’s important.” All right. Cancel the old lady, ergo cancel Alice. But now he has a different problem. How much of the universe has he altered by removing Alice and her mother? Does he live in some other city, now, and hold some other job? What has happened to Bobby and Tink? Frantically he begins phoning people. Friends, fellow workers, the man at the bank. The same response from all of them: blank stares, shakings of the head. We don’t know you, fellow. He looks at himself in the mirror. Okay, he asks himself. Who am I?

      MARTIN MOVES SWIFTLY AND PURPOSEFULLY, the way they taught him to do in the army when it’s necessary to disarm a dangerous opponent. He lunges forward and catches the girl’s arm, pushing it upward before she can fire the shiny whatzis she’s aiming at him. She turns out to be stronger than he anticipated, and they struggle fiercely for the weapon. Suddenly it fires. Something like a lightning bolt explodes between them and knocks him to the floor, stunned. When he picks himself up he sees her lying near the door with a charred hole in her throat.

      THE TELEPHONE’S JANGLING CLATTER BRINGS Martin up out of a dream in which he is ravishing Alice’s luscious young body. Dry-throated, gummy-eyed, he reaches a palsied hand toward the receiver. “Yes?” he says. Ted’s face blossoms on the screen. “Grandfather!” he blurts. “Are you all right?” “Of course I’m all right,” Martin says testily. “Can’t you tell? What’s the matter with you, boy?” Ted shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “Maybe it was only a bad dream. I imagined that Alice rented one of those time machines and went back to 1947. And tried to kill you so that I wouldn’t ever have existed.” Martin snorts. “What idiotic nonsense! How can she have killed me in 1947 when I’m here alive in 2006?”

      NAKED, ALICE SINKS INTO MARTIN’S arms. His strong hands sweep eagerly over her breasts and shoulders and his mouth descends to hers. She shivers with desire. “Yes,” she murmurs tenderly, pressing herself against him. “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” They’ll do it and it’ll be fantastic. And afterward she’ll kill him with the kitchen carver while he’s lying there savoring the event. But a troublesome thought occurs. If Martin dies in 1947, Ted doesn’t get to be born in 1968. Okay. But what about Tink and Bobby? They won’t get born either, not if I don’t marry Ted. I’ll be married to someone else when I get back to 2006, and I suppose I’ll have different children. Bobby? Tink? What am I doing to you? Sudden fear congeals her, and she pulls back from the vigorous young man nuzzling her throat. “Wait,” she says. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s all a big mistake. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get out of here right away!”

      SO THIS IS THE YEAR 1947. Well, well, well. Everything looks so cluttered and grimy and ancient. He hurries through the chilly streets toward his grandfather’s place. If his luck is good, and if Friesling’s technicians have calculated things accurately, he’ll be able to head Alice off. That might even be her now, that slender woman walking briskly half a block ahead of him. He steps up his pace. Yes, it’s Alice, on her way to Martin’s. Well done, Friesling! Ted approaches her warily, suspecting that she’s armed. If she’s capable of coming back to 1947 to kill Martin, she’d kill him just as readily. Especially back here where neither one of them has any legal existence. When he’s close to her he says in a low, hard, intense voice, “Don’t turn around, Alice. Just keep walking as if everything’s perfectly normal.” She stiffens. “Ted?” she cries, astonished. “Is that you, Ted?” “Damned right it is.” He laughs harshly. “Come on. Walk to the corner and turn to your left around the block. You’re going back to your machine and you’re going to get the hell out of the twentieth century without harming anybody. I know what you were trying to do, Alice. But I caught you in time, didn’t I?”

      MARTIN IS JUST GETTING DOWN to real business when the door of his apartment bursts open and a man rushes in.

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