Dealing in Futures Part 29

He laid it over the glob of mud and pressed down on it.

Lindsay felt himself being pushed back into the chair. Cold sweat peppered his back and palms.

"Try to get up."

"Why should I?" Lindsay said, trying to control his voice. "I find this fascinating."

Insane, Lindsay, voodoo only works on people who believe in it. Psychosomatic.

"It gets even better." He reached into a drawer and pulled out Lindsay's checkbook, opened it, and set it in front of Lindsay with a pen. "Sign."

Get up get up. "No."

He took four long sharp needles out of the drawer and began talking in a low monotone, mostly Arabic but some nonsense English. The woman's eyes drooped half shut and she slumped in the chair.

"Now," he said in a normal voice, "I can do anything to this woman, and she won't feel it. You will." He pulled up her left sleeve and pinched her arm. "Do you feel like writing your name?"

Lindsay tried to ignore the feeling. You can't hypnotize an unwilling subject. Get up get up get up.

The man ran a needle into the woman's left triceps. Lindsay flinched and cried out.

Deny him, get up.

He murmured something and the woman lifted her veil and stuck out her tongue, which was long and stained blue. He drove a needle through it and Lindsay's chin jerked back onto his chest, tongue on fire, bile foaming up in his throat. His right hand scrabbled for the pen, and the man withdrew the needles.

He scrawled his name on the fifties and hundreds. The merchant took them wordlessly and went to the door. He came back with Abdul, armed again.

"I am going to the bank. When I return, you will be free to go." He lifted the piece of string out of the mud. "In the meantime, you may do as you wish with this woman; she is being paid well. I advise you not to hurt her, of course."

Lindsay pushed her into the back room. It wasn't proper rape, since she didn't resist, but whatever it was he did it twice, and was sore for a week. He left her there and sat at the merchant's table, glaring at Abdul. When he came back, the merchant told Lindsay to gather up the mud and hold it in his hand for at least a half-hour. And get out of Marrakesh.

Out in the bright sun he felt silly with the handful of crud, and ineffably angry with himself, and he flung it away and rubbed the offended hand in the dirt. He got a couple of hundred dollars on his credit cards, at an outrageous rate of exchange, and got the first train back to Casablanca and the first plane back to the United States.

Where he found himself to be infected with gonorrhea.

And over the next few months paid a psychotherapist and a hypnotist over two thousand dollars, and nevertheless felt rotten for no organic reason.

And nine months later lay on an examining table in the emergency room of Suburban Hospital, with terrible abdominal pains of apparently psychogenic origin, not responding to muscle relaxants or tranquilizers, while a doctor and two aides watched in helpless horror as his own muscles cracked this pelvic girdle into sharp knives of bone, and his child was born without pain four thousand miles away.

That story oozed up from a dark well of alienation and xenophobia. This next one sprang from John Leggett's beard.

John Leggett is a fine writer and courtly gentleman who for several years has been the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I came back to Iowa one September and found that he was growing a beard.

No problem with that, but it never seemed to get past the "starting to grow"

stage-always about an eighth of an inch long, Yasir Arafat style. Obviously it took some care to maintain at that length, more trouble than simply shaving, and eventually I had to ask John what the devil he was up to.

He told me, and I was charmed by the practicality of it. So a few years later, when I sat down to write a story that had to have a writer as the viewpoint character, I gave the man John Leggett's tonsorial idiosyncrasy.

NO FUTURE IN IT.

It's not easy to keep exactly one-eighth inch of beard on your face. For a writer, though, it's good protective coloration. With a suit and tie, you look like a gentleman who's decided to grow a beard. With rumpled old Salvation Army clothes, you look like a down-and-out rummy. It depends on the cla.s.s of people you want to listen to, study.

I was in the rummy outfit when I met Bill Caddis and heard his incredible story. At first I thought Bill was on the same scam I was; he talked too well to be in the dreg business. He was for real, though.

There's this wonderful sleaze bar in downtown Tampa. No name, just a bunch of beer signs in the window. The one for Pearl has a busted laser that flutters stroboscopically. You don't want to sit too near the window. It's a good bar for private conversations because it's right under the twelve-laner that sweeps out over the bay, and there's a constant moan of traffic, all day and all night. There's a fine gritty layer of plaster dust everywhere, and not too much light. The bartender is missing an eye and ten front teeth, and smiles frequently. The booze is cheap; they make most of their money upstairs, and like to have lots of customers in the bar, for camouflage.

I sat down at the bar and the bartender polished gla.s.ses while one of the wh.o.r.es, a pretty boy-girl, sidled in for the kill. When I said no she pleaded mechanically, saying she was saving for a real pair of t.i.ts and the Operation. I hesitated-I string for the Bad News wire service sometimes, and they like s.e.xy pathos-but turned her down more finally. Bad News doesn't pay that well.

When she left the bartender came over and I ordered a Myers's with a beer chaser, suitable hard-core combination. I'd taken two Flame-outs before I came, though, so I could drink a dozen or so without too ill effect. Until morning.

"Little early in the day for that, isn't it?" The man next to me chuckled hoa.r.s.ely.

"Not to criticize." He was nursing a double bourbon or scotch, neat.

"Dusty," I said. The man was dressed a little more neatly than I, in faded work clothes. He looked too old to be a laborer, shock of white hair with a yellowish cast.

But he did have the deep tan and permanent squint of one who's spent decades in the Florida sun. I tossed back the jigger of rum and sipped the beer. "Come here often?"

"Pretty often," he said. "When my check comes in I put a few bucks on a number.

Otherwise . . ." He shrugged. "Cheap whiskey and pretty women. To look at."

"How many of them do you think are women?"

"Just looking, who cares?" He squinted even more, examining me. "Could I see your palms?"

Oh, boy, I thought, a fortuneteller. Might be a story if he actually believes in it. I held out my hands.

He glanced at them and stared at my face. "Yeah, I could tell by the eyes," he said softly. "You're no alcoholic. You're not as old as you look, either. Cop?"

"No. Used to be a teacher." Which was true. "Every now and then I go on these binges."

He nodded slowly. "Used to be a teacher, too. Until '83. Then I worked the sponge boats twenty years." When he picked up his gla.s.s, his hand had the regular slow shake of a confirmed alky. "It was good work."

I reached in my pocket and turned on the tape recorder. "Why was it you stopped teaching? Booze?"

"No . . . who drank in the eighties?" I didn't, but I wasn't old enough. "It's an interesting sort of pancake. You want to hear a story?"

"Sure." I signaled the bartender for two drinks.

"Now, you don't have to buy me anything. You won't believe the story, anyhow."

"Try me."

"You a social worker? Undercover social worker?" He smiled wryly.

"Is there such a thing?"

"Should be. I know. You're a writer."

"When I get work, yeah. How could you tell, Sherlock?"

"You've got two pens in your pocket and you want to hear a story." He smiled.

"Steal a story, maybe. But you'll never get it published. It's too fantastic."

"But true."

"It's true, all right. Thank you kindly." He touched his new drink to see whether it was real, then drained off the old one in one gulp and sighed.

"My name's Bill Caddis. Doctor William Caddis, it used to be."

"Medical doctor?"

"I detect a note of reproof. As if no medico ever-well. No, I was an academic, newly tenured at Florida State. History department. Modern American history."

"Hard to get a job then as it is now?"

"Just about. I was a real whiz."

"But you got fired in '83."

"That's right. And it's not easy to fire a tenured professor."

"What, boffing the little girls?"

That was the only time he laughed that day, a kind of wheeze. "Undergraduates were made for boffing. No, I was dismissed on grounds of mental instability; with my wife's help, my then wife, they almost had me inst.i.tutionalized."

"Strong stuff."

"Strong." He stared into his drink and swirled it around. "I never know how to start this. I've told dozens of people and they all think I'm crazy before I get halfway into it. You'll think I'm crazy too.

"Just jump in feet first. Like you say, I'm a writer. I can believe in six impossible things before my first drink in the morning.

"All right. I'm not from ... here."

A loony, I thought; there goes the price of a double. "Another planet," I said seriously.

"See? Now you want me to say something about UFOs and how I'm bringing the secret of eternal peace to mankind." He raised the gla.s.s to me. "Thanks for the drink."

I caught his arm before he could slug it down. "Wait. I'm sorry. Go on."

"Am I wrong?"

"You're right, but go on. You don't act crazy."

He set the drink down. "Layman's error. Some of the most reasonable people you meet are strictly Almond Joy."

"If you're not from 'here,' where are you from?"

"Miami." He smiled and took a sip. "I'm a time traveler. I'm from a future."

I just nodded.

"That usually takes some explaining. There's no 'the' future. There's a myriad of futures radiating from every instant. If I were to drop this gla.s.s on the floor, and it broke, we would s.h.i.+ft into a future where this bar owned one less gla.s.s."

"And the futures where the gla.s.s wasn't broken ..."

"They would be. And we would be in them; we are now."

"Doesn't it get sort of crowded up there? Billions of new futures every second?"

"You can't crowd infinity."

I was trying to think of an angle, a goofball feature. "How does this time travel work?"

"How the h.e.l.l should I know? I'm just a tourist. It has something to do with chronons. Temporal Uncertainty Principle. Conservation of coincidence. I'm no engineer."

"Are there lots of these tourists?"

"Probably not, here and now. You get quite a crowd cl.u.s.tered around historically important events. You can't see them, of course.

"I can see you."

He shrugged. "Something went wrong. Power failure or something; someone tripped over a cable. Happens."

"They didn't try to come back and rescue you?"

"How could they? There are lots of futures but only one past. Once I materialized here, I wasn't in my own past anymore. See?" "So you can kill your own grandfather," I said.

"Why would I want to do that? He's a nice old bird."

"No, I mean, there's no paradox involved? If you killed him before you were born, you wouldn't cease to exist?"

"Of course not. I'd have to be there to kill him." He sipped. "For that matter, I could go back and kill myself, as a boy. If I could afford it. Travel gets more expensive, the closer you get to the present. Like compressing an infinitely tough spring.