As You Were Page 2

  Dr. Krafft looked at the electric clock, which now said ten thirty-five. The blue enamel clock looked up at them blankly from the wrinkled bed. It said ten forty-eight.

  “Ten forty-eight exactly,” Dr. Krafft said, referring to a wristwatch which had never been known to vary by a second. “Your electric clock is wrong. The power must have gone off today sometime. This storm.” He shuffled to the bureau and reset the electric clock. Now it agreed with the blue enamel clock.

  “Dr. Krafft,” Owen asked desperately, turning the clock over in his hands, “I want to ask you something. Is it possible to travel in time?”

  Krafft looked pensive. “We are all traveling in time, Peter,” he said.

  “Yes, I know, I know. But I mean really travel, into your own future or past. Has anyone ever actually done it?”

  “How is one to tell?” Krafft asked, regarding him mildly. “It is proof I am seeking in my tesseract experiments. You know? I build a model of a tesseract—a cube exploded into four dimensions, symbolically—and then I try to free my mind from time-consciousness, so it can move freely through, paratime. I concentrate all the energy of the mind upon the tesseract. What should happen is that the energy moving through time strikes the tesseract and collapses it into a normal cube. Inertia is inertia, and mass is mass, spatially or temporally. But it is hard to prove, Peter.”

  “What would be proof?” Owen demanded. “If somebody found a way to take quick trips into ten minutes ago, how could he prove it?”

  * * *

  The aged savant shook his head and stared at Peter Owen doubtfully.

  “Why would he want to do that, Peter?” Dr. Krafft asked reasonably. “To travel into the future—yes. One might achieve something. But you already know the past. Why relive it?”

  “I don’t know why,” Owen said, shutting his eyes. “But I know how. This clock does it.” He opened his eyes again and stared wildly at Dr. Krafft. “I’ll set it back five minutes and show you!” he said. “No, wait. You do it. Turn it back five minutes and see what happens.”

  “Now, Peter,” Dr. Krafft murmured.

  “Here, try it!”

  Blinking, Krafft accepted the clock and moved the minute hand back carefully. Nothing at all happened. Krafft waited. So did Owen.

  Then Krafft returned the hand to its original point and gave Owen back the clock, regarding him inquiringly. Owen swallowed.

  “But it happened,” he said desperately. “Look, all I did was—this.”

  He turned the little knob on the back of the clock, watching the minute hand glide backward three minutes. . . .

  “Good night, Peter,” Dr. Krafft said, walking out of the room and closing the door behind him.

  Owen snatched for the brimming glass of beer he knew would be on the bedside table. Not a single swallow had been taken from it. Gulping wildly, he gazed with horrified eyes at the window, quivering with sympathy for the miserable cypress even now clambering back up the cliff to keep its appointment in Samarra. The inevitable lightning flashed. . . .

  But now he hadn’t talked to Dr. Krafft about time-traveling at all. It hadn’t happened! How could he prove the clock was a time-machine? Apparently it affected only himself. Not only could no one else use it, but Owen couldn’t demonstrate without automatically erasing all Krafft’s memories.

  Desperately Owen drained the beer-glass, threw it away, snapped out the bed-light and emulated a coiled gastropod by burrowing under the covers and thinking of nothing at all. He didn’t dare think. If he saw that wretched cypress take one more beating, he’d probably jump over the cliff after it. The whole thing was manifestly impossible, and in some inexplicable way he was drunk, dreaming, mad, or all three. He turned his mind off completely.

  And after a long, long time, he fell asleep.

  He had a curious dream.

  It seemed he was a fish, lazing beneath a tropical sea. Far above him floated the shadow of a ship’s hull, oddly reminiscent of a large wooden shoe. Long rods extended downward from the shadow, searching the sea-bottom slowly, like telescopes. Owen swam toward them. The water rushing through his gills reminded him of the strange, ineffable draught of time he had drunk from a blue enamel clock, when he was a man. That seemed a long time ago.

  Adjusting his fins, he dived beneath the nearest rod and swam close, peering into what might have been a lens. He was gazing up directly into a large, intent, curious blue eye. . . .

  He woke.

  The blue eye was a square of clear blue sky outside the window. Owen lay looking at it, reluctant to take up the dark business of living. He was still dazed with his dream and he made feeble, flipping motions that should have sent him gliding smoothly out of bed. Presently he realized he was no longer a fish. He was Peter Owen, with fearful problems and a black future.

  He sat up and began dreading the day before him. Life as Uncle Edmund’s secretary had little to recommend it, now that all hope for acquiring Lady Pantagruel was dead. Uncle Edmund rejoiced in the worst possible relations with everybody he met. He even attempted now and then to quarrel with the placid Dr. Krafft, getting nowhere. With everyone else he could and did quarrel, and one of his secretary’s more difficult jobs was smoothing down the enemy well enough to keep C. Edmund Stumm alive. Uncle Edmund was currently carrying on a deadly feud with Noel Coward, the Las Ondas Chief of Police and the local garbage collector. To all of these he gave his wholehearted attention.

  This made life difficult for the middleman. But after today, Peter Owen would be middleman no longer. He might be dead—for to resign from Uncle Edmund’s employ was to invite the lightning—but there are worse fates than death.

  * * *

  Owen gazed miserably out the window. The cliff was reassuringly bare of cypresses, which made, him feel a little better. “What a dream,” he murmured. For it must have been a dream—two dreams, rather, one involving beer and cypresses and the other concerned with fish. There had also been a clock—or had there? He glanced at the bedside table. No clock.

  “All a dream,” he told himself. “Vivid, but a dream.”

  He was still telling himself this, not entirely with conviction, as he went downstairs to breakfast.

  “You need not have been so prompt,” Uncle Edmund said, looking up from his oatmeal with a vitriolic smile.

  “Uncle Edmund,” Owen said, taking a deep breath. “Uncle Edmund, shut up! I’m about to leave you.”

  He then held his breath and waited for the stroke that would disembowel him. . . .

  And what was the trouble which had driven Peter Owen to this rash extremity? Claire Bishop was the trouble. You will all remember Claire Bishop in the film version of The Taming of the Shrew, with James Mason, Richard Widmark, Dan Duryea and Ethel Barrymore. In such distinguished company one would expect a newcomer like Claire to be quite overshadowed, but this did not happen. Everybody noticed and remembered her. She was that very pretty creature with the fluff of yellow curls and the ineffable switch to her walk, who drove up in the green convertible toward the end of Act Two. (You will recall that Hollywood took certain minor liberties with the original script.)

  Claire’s rise thereafter was meteoric, and so was her fall, due to a series of bad pictures ill-chosen, ill-cast and abominably written. In the depths, she met Peter Owen. Love burgeoned. And out of love, the rosy hope that with Peter’s aid the impossible might be achieved and Lady Pantagruel purchased for Claire. In his spare time Peter Owen, fortified by love, moved mountains and rounded up a syndicate of backers who offered to put up the money for three pictures starring Claire if Lady Pantagruel could be wrested from C. Edmund Stumm’s relentless grip as the first vehicle.

  Could it? Peter had only to inquire. He inquired. C. Edmund Stumm, who loved nothing better than the whip-hand, would say neither yes nor no. He would and did say, however, that he needed a private secretary to do light work at a low salary. Perhaps, he hinted, if this private secretary caught him in a moment of weakness, he might even sign a contract rel
inquishing the film rights to Lady Pantagruel. . . .

  Hence Owen’s present degradation. The previous secretary had either gone mad or killed himself, he now knew. The line of demarcation between secretary and galley slave was regrettably faint, but Owen had bravely stuck it out, keeping Claire’s fair face before his mind’s eye and the possibility of a signed contract before Uncle Edmund’s in all times and weathers.

  Until yesterday, there seemed hope. But Claire—has it been mentioned?—had a temper too. Yesterday was one of those rare, halcyon days when C. Edmund Stumm mellowed by a series of lucky chances into near-humanity, went so far as to indicate that if Claire, her lawyer and the contract happened to convene in his library at a convenient moment, he might consider writing his name. . . .

  The interview ended when Claire snatched a Prokofieff record off the phonograph and hurled it across the room, expressing a preference for Shostokavich, a distaste for C. Edmund Stumm’s talents, and the intention of dying by inches before she would play Lady Pantagruel under any circumstances whatever.

  She then stamped out of the house, leaving Peter Owen’s heart shattered with the shattered record, and Uncle Edmund’s temper fanned to hitherto unparalleled heights of fury. Hence the assault last night on the unbreakable Shostokavich records. Hence Peter Owen’s despair this morning. Hence, indeed, his reckless defiance of the tornado across the breakfast table.

  Having taken a short swing through times past, though without the aid of a blue enamel clock, we step through the dining-room door and sit down at the table with Peter Owen, facing C. Edmund Stumm and annihilation. Now—if you will—go on with the story.

  * * *

  “Uncle Edmund—shut up! I’m about to leave you.”

  Thus Peter Owen. Afterward he braced himself and wished he could shut his eyes. He didn’t dare. It was better to watch Uncle Edmund closely in moments of crisis. And it was well he did.

  Uncle Edmund was not a particularly rewarding sight. He looked like a wicked middle-aged cormorant, with sleek gray pinfeathers lying smoothly back along his head, and a pointed beak of a nose. His mouth was thin, small, precise and made for distilling vitriol.

  He paused and looked up quite slowly as his private secretary’s words echoed, perhaps with a slight quaver, upon the morning air. Uncle Edmund was pouring cream over his oatmeal. He held the cream-jug suspended over the bowl while he gazed at Owen with small, gimlet eyes that gradually suffused to a lively crimson as the full meaning of Owen’s words gradually dawned on him.

  “You are—what?” he demanded in a stifled voice, scraping his chair back slightly. “What did you say?”

  “I said I’m about to—” Peter Owen began the words bravely enough, but he never finished them. Uncle Edmund hurled the cream-jug!

  CHAPTER III

  Robbery!

  A long pale gout of cream smacked Owen neatly across the face. The jug crashed against the wall behind him and fell in fragments to the carpet. Dr. Krafft shook his white head mildly and sipped his coffee. Nothing could perturb Dr. Krafft.

  Owen with a trembling hand mopped the cream from his face. What he might have done as soon as he could see again is a moot question. He thinks now he would have knocked Uncle’s teeth in with a convenient plate. But he had no time. For Uncle Edmund’s hearty laughter rang out above the buzz of rage in Owen’s ears. Paper crackled.

  “Look at this, you young nincompoop!” Uncle Edmund cried. “Wipe the cream off your stupid face and look at this!” And he laughed again, so merrily, so richly, that Peter Owen’s heart sank like a plummet.

  “This” was a contract. It was, in fact, Claire’s contract for the purchase of Lady Pantagruel. Uncle Edmund was waving it like some succulent morsel under Owen’s creamy nose.

  “It may interest you to know, ingrate that you are,” Uncle Edmund said in an acid voice, “that I got a letter this morning from Metro, definitely refusing to up their offer for Lady Pantagruel. Do you realize what that means? Oh no, of course not! How could you? It would take the I.Q. of a three-year-old to grasp it, so naturally—bah!” He thumped the table heavily, making the dishes dance. Dr. Krafft prudently picked his cup up just in time.

  “I’ll tell you what it means!” Uncle Edmund roared. “Miss Bishop’s offer was the highest I’ve received. You know that. You saw to it. Snooping and prying among my private correspondence—” This was most unfair, Owen thought plaintively, “—reading my letters on the sly,” Uncle Edmund stormed on, “you ferreted out what my best offer was. Then you saw that Miss Bishop topped it. Very well! A little decent family loyalty is all I ask. Loyalty to your own flesh and blood and the hand that feeds you. Too much to ask, you say? Yes, I suppose, it is too much, from a toad like you. So!”

  Again he smote the table. “It was on the tip of my tongue when you came bursting in here like a mad tiger to ask you to phone Miss Bishop. I had reconsidered. I need the money, as who knows better than you, you low spy? If Metro won’t up the offer, then I have no recourse. I support you in luxury, and luxuries cost money. I’m a poor man. Beset on every side!” Here he glared at Dr. Krafft’s mild, abstracted visage half eclipsed behind the coffee cup.

  “Beset on every side!” he roared, maddened at the sight. “I was going to reconsider that termagant’s offer. You hear me, Peter? If it hadn’t been for your insults, I was going to grant your heart’s desire!”

  “Uncle Edmund—” Owen began. “Uncle Edmund, I—”

  The sound of ripping paper interrupted him. Smiling fiercely, Uncle Edmund was tearing Claire’s contract across. Laying the two halves together, he then tore them the other way. The quartered contract fluttered to his plate. Uncle Edmund picked up his half emptied coffee cup and poured its contents on the fragments.

  “There!” he shouted, “There! Now you’re sorry! Too late, my sneaking young friend, too late! Out you go! Now, this very second! Out of my sight! If you aren’t packed and gone in fifteen seconds I’ll have that nincompoop chief of police put you in irons. Go, go, go!”

  And Owen went.

  As he hastened from the room, he heard Dr. Krafft say placidly, “I had a most interesting dream last night. . . .”

  * * *

  He thought with anguish as he hurled shirts and socks into his suitcase,

  “If my dream had only been real! If I could only turn the clock back far enough to get Claire’s contract signed—”

  At this moment a pair of socks coiled up like—you have guessed it—a gastropod, missed the suitcase and hurtled to the unmade bed. Owen saw them vanish down a blanket ravine, rummaged absent-mindedly, and felt his fingers close on something small, round, hard and cool. It ticked.

  * * *

  Face to face, he and the blue enamel clock turned blank stares upon one another. “Dream?” murmured Owen distractedly. “Dream? Then I am a fish?” and he looked down anxiously for fins. He had none. That much was still unreal. But here in his hand, ticking gently away, was the clock that had made last night an endless repetition of itself—unless he’d dreamed the whole thing.

  “A backspacer,” Owen thought frantically, shaking the clock in a senseless way. “It backspaced in time. The moving finger writes—” Quite of their own volition, his own fingers reached for the knob on the clock that turned the minute-hand. “It can’t happen,” he assured himself, even as he turned the hand. “It was all a dream. I know that. I’m no fool. But all the same, if it would—”

  The clock had said nine-five before he turned it. Carefully he twirled the black minute-hand until the dial said eight fifty-five.

  “Can I lure it back to cancel half a line?” Owen asked himself madly. “That’s the question. If I can—though of course I can’t—then everything’s dandy. I can unpack my suitcase and go right on downstairs to breakfast.”

  Then he looked at the bed and said to himself blankly, “What suitcase?”

  For it was no longer there. Shirts and socks had flown back into their nests by magic. The suitcase even now reposed
on the top shelf in the closet. And from downstairs came the gentle clatter of dishes and the voices of C. Edmund Stumm and Dr. Krafft in cheerful morning converse.

  Peter Owen dropped the clock in his jacket pocket, closed a trembling hand firmly over it, and went downstairs to breakfast. . . .

  “You need not have been so prompt, Peter,” Uncle Edmund said with a vitriolic smile. “Sit down, sit down, since you’re here. Still, it’s bad enough having to eat oatmeal. When I have to look across the table at your porridge-face at the same time—” He shuddered ostentatiously and poured more cream from a miraculously renewed jug into his bowl.

  “Good morning, Uncle,” Peter Owen said in a firm voice. “Good morning, Doctor. Did you find Maxl?”

  Dr. Kraft shook his head sadly.

  “Any mail, uncle?” Owen inquired with great cunning, forcing a smile.

  “Don’t smile at me, sir,” Stumm said. “You merely increase the likeness to oatmeal by giving the impression it’s been sugared! No, there was no mail that concerns you.” Here he licked the cream off his thin lips and smiled as at a pleasant private jest.

  “I have a job for you after breakfast,” he added, fixing Owen with a gimlet glance. “That pudding-head Egan who calls himself police-chief left a ticket on my car last night. Go down and fix it.”

  Owen swallowed painfully. “But, Uncle, you know Egan won’t—never mind, I’ll pay the ticket.”

  “Out of your own pocket?” Stumm demanded sharply. “Suit yourself. I won’t pay it. What good does it do me to be the first citizen, of Las Ondas if the Gestapo harries me night and day? I’ve brought more tourist business into Las Ondas since I bought this house than they had in their whole history before I got here. If Fred Egan thinks he can harass me with parking tickets simply because I left my car beside a fireplug all night, he’d better think twice. Go down directly you finish breakfast and take care of it, Peter. Crime rolls unchecked through this town while Egan creeps through the underbrush waiting for me to make some petty misstep. I’m above the law in Las Ondas!”