FSF, January 2008 Page 6

  "Okay, back a bunch of hundred years ago, the Huns tore up a lot of Eastern Europe. They say Attila and his crew piled skulls into heaps so high that you could rest whole caravans in their shade.

  "Now imagine if somebody went back and arranged for Attila to catch a nasty virus, something like the Spanish Flu, and he keeled over before he got the chance to organize his hordes. Really think about it. That would mean thousands of people who died would've lived to raise hundreds of thousands, millions of descendants, any one of who could have made an enormous difference in the world. Likely a whole bunch of them would have made big differences. There's no way to know how that would all shake down. It's just too danged big, right?"

  The lab rats still looked at him with mesmerized expressions.

  "But what if you went back not so far? Not too far? And did something really small. Didn't kill or kidnap or take any viruses with you or anything like that. Maybe just have a cup of coffee with somebody. Or have a nice chat with a stranger while waiting in line at the supermarket. Or get your car in front of them at a toll booth and pay forward for them, so they'd be in a great frame of mind on a particular day."

  "But how would you know, then?” Anglo Boy blurted out. The Korean kid looked at him sharply, must have kicked him under the table because Anglo Boy glared at his partner. He turned back to Cal. “How would you know you'd accomplished your goal?"

  "You might not at first,” Cal conceded. He watched the interest start to die in their eyes. Why volunteer, why take a chance with your life if you couldn't tell if you'd made a difference?

  "But you might,” he added quickly. “And the differences would show up in what might seem like little things to most folks."

  Doubt darkened their gaze.

  "I may be just a janitor,” Cal said, desperate to hang on to them. “But even I can see, by looking at just the little things, how everything is totally screwed up—even if I never picked up a paper or watched the news on TV.

  "Look, just as an example: Think of how many movies you've seen that could have been great, but they wrecked the screenplay when they didn't have to. Or terrific films that never got released, that are mouldering somewhere in cans. Or casting that makes no earthly sense at all. Or people who died before their time. Before doing their best work."

  "You mean like Christopher Reeve?” the brown-haired kid said.

  Encouraged, Cal nodded. “Exactly."

  But the Korean kid folded his arms over his chest, raised his eyebrows in an Oh yeah? Prove it to me—I know you can't, manner.

  Cal scrambled. He ticked off samples from his list.

  "Movies that could have been great: Face Off with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. Fantastic acting by both of them. Cage was the transformed Travolta, and Travolta the transformed Cage. But the film resolved itself by them having different blood types. Any moron knows that their switched faces would have started crawling off their skulls before the swap was even finished. There was a perfect solution: Give them the same blood type, O positive, then reveal their true identities through retinal scans, since their eyeballs weren't exchanged. But somebody got lazy in the script-writing department.

  "Miscasting. Did you ever see Superman II? On video or DVD? For Christ's sake, they've got Gene Hackman as Lex Luther. Wearing a curly wig for part of it. Gene Hackman is a good actor. A great actor. But as Lex Luther? What was up with that?

  "And why hasn't anybody made a movie with Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks, and Michael Keaton cast as brothers? Or a movie with Karen Black and Juliette Lewis as grandmother and granddaughter?” He could see he was losing the two kids. Losing them.

  Cal talked faster, though he knew he shouldn't. He couldn't help himself. “Movies mouldering in cans, never released. Did you ever hear the legend that Metro Goldwyn Mayer shot a movie of Vanity Fair with Marilyn Monroe as Becky Sharp? Her performance was supposed to be brilliant, shrewd, transcendent. Oscar-worthy. But the part had Marilyn acting so against type that the studio decided it was unmarketable. Nobody knows where it went to."

  Both the lab rats now held down smiles. Going, going, gone.

  One last ditch effort. “Okay, okay—I know all that seems silly, that movies don't count. They're just an example. What I'm trying to say is that it's like that butterfly effect thing. Some small and kind action will have a big reverberation and give you better odds for ending up with a better world. If the little things start showing up the way they should, then the whole can't help but become more than the sum of its parts. Forget movies. Think of things that you really dig, and how they could have turned out better."

  "That's a very interesting theory,” the Korean kid said, all politeness. They'd finished up their plates during Cal's rant. “I hope you'll excuse us, but we've got to get back to work soon and I see a big cake with our name on it.” He and Anglo Boy pushed back their chairs, got up and headed for their last dessert. Cal knew they wanted him gone by the time they returned to the table. The brown-haired lab rat looked over his shoulder and said with sympathy, “It's a nice idea to think about."

  Cal clocked out at 2:30 p.m. The marine layer, which would have burned off by noon, had already rolled back in from the San Francisco Bay, leaving the air dank and chill. He walked up to San Pablo Avenue past old brick warehouses remodeled and gentrified into architect offices, upscale handmade furniture manufacturers, a Pilates center; each with its door painted either a crisp glossy black or hunter green. He caught a north-bound bus and asked for his usual transfer stub. At University Avenue he got off. The corner of University and San Pablo still retained a pre-gentrification, down-at-the heels shabbiness. A few street people loitered in front of the cheap-shoes store on the corner. The faint smell of pot lingered, as always, around the bus bench. Cal caught the number fifty-one. It took him up alongside U.C. Berkeley and then turned down College Avenue and past Berkeley's stately bungalows with their shingled houses, toward upper Oakland. He lived in a one bedroom apartment over a bakery in the Rockridge Area—a little seedier than Berkeley, but not by much. The art school at Broadway and College Avenue helped the neighborhood retain a laid-back Bohemian charm.

  As the bus drove along University Avenue, Cal took in what passed for holiday decorations in Berkeley. Some green and silver tinsel and red ribbons on the street lights. Hanging blue and white Stars of David for Chanukah graced some of the old stucco buildings. Yellow, green, and brown tribal harvest symbols for Kwanza. Pleasant, tasteful, low key. If the lab rats succeeded at the experiment this time, Cal wondered if he'd wake up tomorrow to more holiday trimmings or fewer holiday trimmings.

  The always-jammed intersection at Shattuck Avenue loomed ahead. Cal looked to his right. Immense scaffolding covered the better part of a city block, obscuring what had been the U.C. Theater—a funky ancient repertory movie house that had screened old films for years upon years. A favorite haunt of Cal's, it had shown flicks of all sorts, from near and far, popular and obscure, from the excellent to the dreadful. Now the place was gutted, killed, its corpse awaiting rebirth as graceless condos or the undeath of corporate offices. Cal closed his eyes. His chest hurt. Bah, humbug.

  * * * *

  He got up the next morning at 4:00 a.m., like he always did. He fixed himself a bowl of cereal and drank a glass of orange juice and a cup of good coffee, then dressed, pocketed his clearance badge, and caught the earliest number fifty-one bus back to work.

  The sky was still night-dark outside when he clocked in at 5:30 a.m. Cal emptied the wastebaskets and cleaned the offices and labs as much as he could before the facility's personnel started sifting in between eight and nine a.m. Usually he started at the first subbasement floor and worked his way down to the third subbasement floor. Today he reversed the order. He wanted to find out what had happened to the lab rats.

  Cal knew as soon as he stepped off the elevator. Most of the white-coated personnel still lingered on the third floor. They weren't flapping about anymore. They looked depressed, exhausted, talked among themselves
in subdued tones. Cal picked up a wide-brushed broom and a dust pan and walked past the experiment on his way to the vacant and not-yet-sealed rooms on the other side. Through the glass windows he saw the metal tubing of the sledge standing lonely and empty in the middle of the big glass cube. The boat and the lab rats hadn't come back.

  Just like the Volkswagen carriage and the two Aryan lab rats that hadn't returned the year before. Just like the earlier three carriages that hadn't come back either.

  The technicians and engineers were wrapping things up. Much of the equipment had already been hauled away, back to the separate departments to be taken apart, dissected, analyzed. Only one bank of equipment remained, set up against the middle of the wall. It included the two chronometers and the toggle switch.

  Cal walked back down the hall and trudged up the stairway two floors. After an hour of working on the first subfloor he took the elevator back down. Everybody else was gone now. They'd done all they could for the moment. Just like after the other failures.

  Cal swept the four rooms on the other side of the experiment room. Later today, or tomorrow at the latest, some of the technicians would return. They'd take out the last stainless steel console, the one with the chronometers and switch. In its place they'd embed sensors into the wall and leave a get-the-coffin-open transmitter set to a code that only the lab rats knew. Just in case Anglo Boy and Korean Kid ever returned. Then the techs would seal the doors and ventilation systems so tight it looked like it would take an atom bomb to break out. Cal didn't know what they thought might ride the carriage back instead of any of the lab rats, but obviously the possibilities scared them. The specially fabricated fused windows were already secure. All the techs had to do was black them out.

  Sweeping done, Cal needed to go back to the janitor's closet for his mop and bucket. He glanced into the window as he passed. It would probably be the last time he'd set eyes on the interior of that particular room.

  He stopped. Stared. Dropped his broom and dustpan and ran into the room.

  The little boat sat on the receiving sled.

  Cal opened the door in the glass booth and rushed to the boat. It looked a tad battered but it rested in its cradle in one piece. Nobody huddled on the bottom, though. Neither of the two lab rats. On the other hand, Cal saw no signs of blood or violence and the planking that hid the time travel mechanism hadn't been breached, at least as far as he could tell. He stepped back from the boat, looked at it and thought for five minutes.

  He left the booth and walked over to the two chronometers. The one on the right was set to the present time. The one on left was set to a time in the past. He looked at it closely. Ah. So that was the “when” they'd been sent back to. It didn't surprise Cal that they hadn't come back. But he was astonished by the boat's return.

  He thought for another ten minutes or so. Then he reset the date and time on the Past chronometer. He left the experiment room and walked down to the Control Center, swiping his pass badge to get in. He rummaged around for a while. Dr. Williams and the rest of them would be surprised how much he knew about machinery. After ‘Nam he had taken advantage of the G. I. Bill and gone to school, and after that had worked as a grip on a few movies. Until he realized that the film industry was as rotten at its core as anything else in life. Hard to accept that he'd survived the war just for the privilege of coming to that conclusion. That's when he'd given up.

  Cal found a timer and returned to the room. He figured that just like rocket launches, there must be a countdown once they threw the main toggle. But just to be sure he rigged the timer to throw the switch. He entered the glass booth and climbed into the boat with plenty of time to spare. He didn't worry about his clothes—a janitor is a janitor pretty much everywhere. Everywhen. And he was taking his own advice and not going all that far back. The fifties would do just fine.

  The room flashed. Not with light. Not with darkness. It flashed with an absence of everything. When the flash stopped, Cal and the boat had vanished.

  Five minutes passed on the Present chronometer.

  The room strobed again. This time when it stopped, the boat, with Cal in it, reappeared. Cal looked tired, hungry, in need of a bath, his beard maybe three days scruffier.

  * * * *

  He clambered with stiff limbs out of the boat, patting it before he left the glass booth. He hobbled a bit as he walked over to the Past chronometer and set it back to its original setting. Cal flipped the switch, endured again the instant of nothingness while the boat disappeared one last time. He figured the two kids must have listened to him at least a little, or the boat wouldn't have come back at all from their trip. Maybe the boat would return to them—they deserved at least that much of a chance.

  Cal put away his broom and his dustpan and rode the elevator up to the first subbasement floor. From there he jig-jogged down a crooked corridor to the only elevator that connected the subbasement with the rest of the building. He left a note in the Building and Grounds supervisor's box that he'd come in but didn't feel well, so he'd decided to take a sick day. Then he clocked out.

  When he stepped outside the facility's front door the sky was still dark but lightening to the same slate gray as the waters of the Bay. Just one day left till the Winter Solstice—the longest night of the year. Cal walked up to San Pablo Avenue and caught the bus to the intersection with University Avenue, empty of street people at this early hour. As he waited for the number fifty-one to arrive he looked over the bank of news-vending boxes behind the bus stop benches. He put some change in the slot of one of them and opened it to take out the holiday issue of the Berkeley Monthly, featuring its end-of-the-year wrap-up of music, films, and art. Cal riffled his thumb through it for a moment without looking, then made himself tuck it under his arm. Time to really study it when he got home, he told himself. But the blood in his veins tingled. He couldn't help wondering. What would he find? A review of a new film directed by River Phoenix? Would Jim Henson, venerable but spry, have concocted another muppety bit of enchantment for the pleasure of children young and old? If he found those sorts of things in the pages of the Monthly he knew he wouldn't have to look at any front page headlines. Cal shivered not from the winter's morning chill but from anticipation. In that instant he remembered what it had been like to be a child at Christmas: Waking with a bright heart, knowing that the greatest gift was that for that one day the impossible might be possible.

  The number fifty-one pulled up. Cal climbed the bus steps and handed the bus driver his transfer stub. “Long night, huh, Bub?” the bus driver said.

  Cal's smile was weary. “You have no idea,” he said.

  When they approached the Shattuck Avenue intersection, Cal looked to his right.

  Just like yesterday, the U.C. Theater sat darkened, but the scaffolding was gone and the theater's marquee returned, the ticket booth back in place. Before they left for the night the staff always posted the next day's movie on the marquee so that Berkeley commuters could take note of the coming night's billing on their way to work in the morning. Cal's eyes widened when he read the title for this coming evening's film. Something lifted inside him just as the sun rose over the East Bay hills. He crooned a fragment of a Christmas carol and mumbled-sang to himself, “Peace on Earth, Good will to all....” Tonight the U.C. Theater would screen the 1980 film Superman II, starring Christopher Reeve as Superman and Telly Savalas as Lex Luther.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel

  Our first story in this issue took us back in time to historic England. Here's another tale that does the same, albeit in a very different manner.

  Mr. Kessel says that his latest collection of short fiction, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, is due to be published in April. He also notes that an anthology he coedited with James Patrick Kelly, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, has just been published.

  Had both her mother and her sister Kitty not insisted upon it, Miss Mary Bennet, who
se interest in Nature did not extend to the Nature of Society, would not have attended the ball in Grosvenor Square. This was Kitty's season. Mrs. Bennet had despaired of Mary long ago, but still bore hopes for her younger sister, and so had set her determined mind on putting Kitty in the way of Robert Sidney of Detling Manor, who possessed a fortune of six thousand pounds a year, and was likely to be at that evening's festivities. Being obliged by her unmarried state to live with her parents, and the whims of Mrs. Bennet being what they were, although there was no earthly reason for Mary to be there, there was no good excuse for her absence.

  So it was that Mary found herself in the ballroom of the great house, trussed up in a silk dress with her hair piled high, bedecked with her sister's jewels. She was neither a beauty, like her older and happily married sister Jane, nor witty, like her older and happily married sister Elizabeth, nor flirtatious, like her younger and less happily married sister Lydia. Awkward and nearsighted, she had never cut an attractive figure, and as she had aged she had come to see herself as others saw her. Every time Mrs. Bennet told her to stand up straight, she felt despair. Mary had seen how Jane and Elizabeth had made good lives for themselves by finding appropriate mates. But there was no air of grace or mystery about Mary, and no man ever looked upon her with admiration.

  Kitty's card was full, and she had already contrived to dance once with the distinguished Mr. Sidney, whom Mary could not imagine being more tedious. Hectically glowing, Kitty was certain that this was the season she would get a husband. Mary, in contrast, sat with her mother and her Aunt Gardiner, whose good sense was Mary's only respite from her mother's silliness. After the third minuet Kitty came flying over.

  "Catch your breath, Kitty!” Mrs. Bennet said. “Must you rush about like this? Who is that young man you danced with? Remember, we are here to smile on Mr. Sidney, not on some stranger. Did I see him arrive with the Lord Mayor?"