Grab Bag (13 page)

“Hey, watch it,” I said, but he paid no attention.

“That man can’t hear you,” said Carter-Harrison, “or see you either. We haven’t materialized.”

“What?” I said stupidly. I could see the Brain all right, looking just as weedy as ever with a sticky handprint still on his coat where that kid had tried to pick his pocket. “What is this, hypnotism?”

“Oh no. We’ve actually been transported back in time, as it’s popularly called. I’d have to get involved with what might be termed paranormal phenomenology to explain the situation. You could say we’re sharing a dream if it makes you feel any better.”

“Did you ever see a dream walking?” I did. She was getting out of the carriage. She was wearing a blue velvet coat and a hat freighted with a full cargo of white ostrich plumes. I wished I had my Chicken Inspector badge on.

Even the Brain was goggling. Looking back, I believe this must have been the first time he’d ever thought to take a good, close look at a woman. Nor was it pure scientific interest I saw gleaming in his eye.

“Come on!”

Dragging me by our strange umbilical cord, he loped up the stairs after her. A housemaid in a white cap and apron opened the door. We crowded in so close behind her we practically stepped on her skirt, but neither she nor the maid seemed to be aware of us. We found ourselves in a gaslit miasma of polished mahogany and aspidistras, with our fetching period piece peeling off her gloves and asking the maid was Uncle John home yet?

“Yes, Miss Arabella, and Mr. Martin with him. Will you be wanting Mary to help you dress for dinner?”

Arabella said she supposed so, and headed upstairs. Carter-Harrison charged after her as Teddy Roosevelt probably hadn’t yet charged at San Juan Hill. Not caring to strain the wire and blow a fuse among all these beaded lambrequins, I had to charge, too.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I panted, as if I didn’t know. “We can’t go barging into her bedroom.”

“Why not? She won’t know.”

“What if we materialize?”

“We can’t. I haven’t figured out how.”

“Are you planning to?”

“I’ve got us this far, haven’t I?”

At that moment, Arabella slammed the heavy paneled door in our faces.

“I dare you to open it,” I said.

“I can’t,” he replied sadly. “We have no physical strength.”

“Then how about if we just ooze through?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Luckily—or not, depending on how you figure it—another white-capped maid came along and again we squeezed in after her. Don’t ask me what Arabella’s bedroom was like. I’m no good at describing anything but gastric juice. It’s bright emerald green, if you want to know. Anyway, there was a lot of furniture and stuff, and Arabella was sitting in front of a dressing table with her head on a pincushion, having a good cry.

I’m no more comfortable around a weeping woman than the next man. My first thought was to get out of there fast. My second thought was, “How?” The door was shut again and Carter-Harrison wouldn’t have budged anyway. He just stood there looking. Obviously this was one field in which he’d never done any research.

The maid started fluttering around with smelling salts. “Now Miss Arabella, don’t go making your pretty eyes all red.”

“I don’t care. I wish I were hideous.”

“Miss Arabella, you don’t mean that.”

“Yes I do. If I were an ugly old frump, that horrible Mr. Martin wouldn’t be hanging around.”

“Lots of girls would be glad of a rich beau like Mr. Martin.”

“With that red face and fat stomach? I can’t stand him. Honestly, if Uncle John makes me marry that man, I’ll stab him on the wedding night. With my buttonhook, I think.”

“Now Miss Arabella, it’s wicked to talk like that.” Mary unpinned the ostrich plumes and started taking down Arabella’s hair. I heard Carter-Harrison catch his breath as it came tumbling down her back.

I remember my grandmother boasting that she could sit on her hair when she was a girl. Arabella could have sat on hers, I guess, but she didn’t. She just sat there sniffing and mopping her adorable face with a little lace handkerchief while the maid brushed out that cascade of light brown curls. Finally she sighed and stood up. The maid began unfastening her dress. It had about a million little hooks an eyes down the back. Every time another one let go, I felt a degree more fidgety.

I sneaked a look at the Brain to see what effect they were having on him. Believe it or not, he was blushing. He caught my eye and blushed even more deeply. “Damn it, Williams, I feel like a cad.”

I have never before encountered anybody who felt like a cad. The only response I could think of was, “This was your idea.”

About then, Mary reached the last hook. Carter-Harrison turned around and shut his eyes. Not wishing to be thought a cad, I did the same. Then I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. There we were, conducting what must surely be the most amazing technical experiment of our age, standing in a woman’s bedroom with our eyes shut. I was still laughing when the timer shut off and we found ourselves back on the sidewalk outside Madame LaFifi’s Beauty Garden with traffic snarled all over the avenue and 1963 looking crummier than ever.

Carter-Harrison wound the two wires around the box, stuck it back in his pocket, and started walking toward the subway. I fell in beside him. His car came first. He said, “See you tomorrow,” climbed aboard, and that was that.

Well, you can imagine the state I was in for the rest of the evening. I poured a drink, but it didn’t have any kick in it. I tried a paperback thriller, but it failed to thrill. I even tried to study, but my head wouldn’t work. At last I went out and bowled until I was tired enough to go home and sleep.

I had a particularly interesting batch of gastric juice the next day, which kept me from thinking much about Carter-Harrison and his time machine until he stopped by my lab just at closing time. When we got outside, I asked him, “Did you bring the jumprope?”

“Oh yes,” he said perfectly deadpan. “It’s in my pocket.”

I didn’t ask him anything else because he set such a pace I needed my breath to keep up. We made it to Madame LaFifi’s in three minutes flat. Then darned if he didn’t stop, pull out his box, and give me one of the handles.

“Here we go again,” I remarked tritely, and sure enough we did. There was the park, there were the prosperous-looking brownstones with their lace curtains and Christmas wreaths, but no barouche this time. We stood there dithering on the cobblestones until I fancied a Keystone cop with a hard helmet and a walrus mustache was giving us the hard eye, but nobody went in or out of Arabella’s house.

I’d have liked to stroll around and see more of the neighborhood, but the Brain wouldn’t budge. First he’d look down the street, then he’d look up at the house, then he’d look over toward the iron gates, then he’d begin again. He got tangled up in the wires from turning around so much, but that was all the excitement we had for a while. Finally, Arabella peeked out from around the parlor curtains. She didn’t see us, of course. That was a pity. It might have cheered her up to see Carter-Harrison with his beat-up hat pressed to his scraggy bosom and his mouth half open in silent worship.

“I wonder if Martin’s coming to dinner again tonight,” I speculated. “She sure looks down about something.”

“Damn him!” The venom in the Brain’s voice startled me so I broke the connection by dropping my handle.

“Oh hell, I’m sorry,” I said.

“It would have run out in another minute or so anyway,” he muttered. “I’ll have to boost the—” something or other.

“So you can devote your full time to standing around on Arabella’s sidewalk.” I wanted to say it, but I didn’t. After all, it was his time machine. And, for that matter, his time. “Could you project us into another period?” I asked instead.

“No I couldn’t.” He sounded quite peeved at the notion. “Not with this machine, anyway,” he added grudgingly. “It’s still very crude, you know.”

“It’s a fantastic achievement already,” I said. “Are you going to publish?”

“Not yet. I want to spend some time working out the problems. You haven’t told anyone?”

“I have not,” I assured him. “They’d think I was either drunk or crazy.”

The Brain snorted. “Very likely. A few years ago, space travel was strictly science fiction stuff. Some day we’ll move freely back and forth in both space and time. If I hadn’t done this, somebody else would, sooner or later.”

The thought was staggering, but the evidence was irrefutable. It could be done. I’d been there.

“When the time comes,” he went on, “you’ll get full credit for your share in the experiment. Until then, I must ask for your absolute silence.”

“You’ll have it,” I said. “I haven’t done anything but go along for the ride, anyway.”

“You gave me the idea. That’s all it takes, really. An idea.”

He fell into another of his brown studies. I did some thinking then, myself. To conquer all-conquering time! I was rising to heights of poetry. “Try that on your balalaika, Nikita!” I exulted inwardly. James Carter-Harrison was the Yuri Gagarin of time, and I was both the Strelka and the Bjelka.

I never did get a chance to share these exalted thoughts with the Brain. He stopped inviting me on his journeys in time. I knew he was still going back to Arabella’s because I saw him there, twice. Both times he was just standing on the sidewalk. I didn’t speak to him. He wouldn’t have heard me.

It was two days before Christmas when he approached me again. In all my medical experience, including the time I took a first aid course at Boy Scout camp, I have never seen a person change so much in four days. He must have stopped sleeping altogether. His face was gray and there were wrinkles in his forehead that looked as if they’d been there forever.

“Williams,” he said, “you’ve got to help me. I’m going to get her out.”

I guess I stared at him. I know I couldn’t speak.

“I need you.” He was almost begging.

“Huh?” I managed to stammer. “Sure, anything I can do.”

I was astonished. I was incredulous. But mostly I was sorry for the guy. To a man forty years old, falling in love for the first time is a desperate business anyway. But when he has to cross three-quarters of a century to call on his girl, he really has a problem. And now he was proposing to bring her together with him in a way that staggered the imagination. He couldn’t do it, of course. But then nobody could build a time machine, either.

Another thought struck me. “You can’t just transplant somebody into an entirely different time frame. You’d scare her to death, or drive her crazy.”

“She’s scared to death and half crazy now,” he said bitterly. “Her uncle’s forcing her to marry Martin. I’ve seen him, Williams. I’ve watched him try to make love to her. He knows she loathes him and he gloats over making her miserable. Damn sadistic devil! He’ll kill her or she’ll kill herself if I don’t act now. I can’t stand it.”

He was telling the simple truth. I’ve never seen a man closer to cracking. I tried to reason with him, which was a waste of time, naturally.

“What year do you think it is? Was? You know what I mean.”

“Eighteen ninety-nine. I saw a calendar in the house.”

“Then why don’t we look up the old newspaper records for 1900? We could find out if she did marry him, or—”

“No! Damn it, Williams, can’t you understand? I’m not going to
let
it happen.”

“But it’s already happened. Whatever it was, it happened sixty-four years ago. You can’t stop it now.”

“Like hell I can’t. Will you help me or shall I do it alone?”

“I said I’d help, didn’t I?” And I hadn’t had sense enough to cross my fingers at the time, either. “What do you want me to do?”

“Come with me.”

I followed him into his lab. We locked the door and went to work. Don’t ask me what we did. I simply followed his orders and tried to keep from fouling up. He worked like a demon, first making alterations to the original box, then turning his attention to a different apparatus.

“What’s this thing for?” I asked finally. By then it was after midnight and I was tired and hungry.

“This is the materializer,” he explained. “She’ll be invisible to us when we get her, just as we are to her now. We can’t leave her in that state, naturally.”

“It would be an awful waste of all that curly hair.”

“She is lovely, isn’t she?” He spoke so quietly, yet so feelingly, it was like a prayer. Then he grabbed a screwdriver and went back to work.

This was the first time I’d seen the Brain in his lab. He worked in a fury of concentration. Nothing appeared beyond him, from the most delicate mechanical adjustment to the most abstruse calculation. It made me nervous finally, like watching a high-wire performer doing a particularly dangerous balancing act. Surely he’d never make it. But he did, I guess. About three in the morning he straightened up, took off his lab coat, and said, “Thanks, Williams.”

I yawned and rubbed my stubbly face. “When do we pull the snatch?”

“The … uh … oh. This coming afternoon at about half-past five, with any luck. She’s going Christmas shopping and won’t be returning till then, she told her maid. It will be dark by that time. If we can get her just as she’s stepping out of the carriage, it should be quite simple.”

That’s what he said. We went and had ham and eggs at an all-night diner, then I took a taxi home. I offered Carter-Harrison a lift, but he said he felt like walking.

I was late getting in, and I’m afraid my mind wasn’t on the large intestine much of that day. As the hours ticked off, the thought of what we were trying to do took hold of me completely. Could we possibly pull off a kidnapping? If we did, what then?

That was where I stuck. Had the Brain applied his gigantic mental powers to the
What then?

It was just after five on Christmas Eve when Carter-Harrison stuck his head in at the door and said, “Coming, Williams?” He had his machine in a green book bag slung over his shoulder. The parts we’d added last night made it too big to fit in a coat pocket. We started off in silence, but I knew I’d have to speak or pop.

“If we succeed—”

“We’ll succeed.”