The Door Into Summer (26 page)

At each new door he would duck between my feet, look out it, find it still winter outside, and reverse himself, almost tripping me.

But neither one of us gave up his conviction that the next door would be the right one.

I woke up easily this time, with no disorientation—in fact the doctor was somewhat irked that all I wanted was some breakfast, the Great Los Angeles
Times
, and no chitchat. I didn’t think it was worthwhile to explain to him that this was my second time around; he would not have believed me.

There was a note waiting for me, dated a week earlier, from John:

Dear Dan,

All right, I give up. How did you do it?

I’m complying with your request not to be met, against Jenny’s wishes. She sends her love and hopes that you won’t be too long in looking us up—I’ve tried to explain to her that you expect to be busy for a while. We are both fine although I tend to walk where I used to run. Jenny is even more beautiful than she used to be.

Hasta la vista, amigo, John

P.S. If the enclosure is not enough, just phone—there is plenty more where it came from. We’ve done pretty well, I think.

I considered calling John, both to say hello and to tell him about a colossal new idea I had had while asleep—a gadget to change bathing from a chore to a sybaritic delight. But I decided not to; I had other things on my mind. So I made notes while the notion was fresh and then got some sleep, with Pete’s head tucked into my armpit. I wish I could cure him of that. It’s flattering but a nuisance.

On Monday, the thirtieth of April, I checked out and went over to Riverside, where I got a room in the old Mission Inn. They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; he listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled. I did not sleep well; I was too excited.

I presented myself to the director of the Riverside Sanctuary at ten o’clock the next morning. “Dr. Rumsey, my name is Daniel B. Davis. You have a committed client here named Frederica Heinicke?”

“I suppose you can identify yourself?”

I showed him a 1970 driver’s license issued in Denver, and my withdrawal certificate from Forest Lawn Sanctuary. He looked them over and me, and handed them back. I said anxiously, “I think she’s scheduled for withdrawal today. By any chance, are there any instructions to permit me to be present? I don’t mean the processing routines; I mean at the last minute, when she’s ready for the final restimulant and consciousness.”

He shoved his lips out and looked judicial. “Our instructions for this client do not read to wake her today.”

“No?” I felt disappointed and hurt.

“No. Her exact wishes are as follows: Instead of necessarily being waked today, she wished not to be waked at all until you showed up.” He looked me over and smiled. “You must have a heart of gold. I can’t account for it on your beauty.”

I sighed. “Thanks, Doctor.”

“You can wait in the lobby or come back. We won’t need you for a couple of hours.”

I went back to the lobby, got Pete, and took him for a walk. I had parked him there in his new travel bag and he was none too pleased with it, even though I had bought one as much like his old one as possible and had installed a one-way window in it the night before. It probably didn’t smell right as yet.

We passed the “real nice place,” but I was not hungry even though I hadn’t been able to eat much breakfast—Pete had eaten my eggs and had turned up his nose at yeast strips. At eleven-thirty I was back at the sanctuary. Finally they let me in to see her.

All I could see was her face; her body was covered. But it was my Ricky, grown woman size and looking like a slumbering angel.

“She’s under posthypnotic instruction,” Dr. Rumsey said softly. “If you will stand just there, I’ll bring her up. Uh, I think you had better put that cat outside.”

“No, Doctor.”

He started to speak, shrugged, turned back to his patient. “Wake up, Frederica. Wake up. You must wake up now.”

Her eyelids fluttered, she opened her eyes. They wandered for an instant, then she caught sight of us and smiled sleepily. “Danny…and Pete.” She raised both arms—and I saw that she was wearing my Tech class ring on her left thumb.

Pete chirrlupped and jumped on the bed, started doing shoulder dives against her in an ecstasy of welcome.

Dr. Rumsey wanted her to stay overnight, but Ricky would have none of it. So I had a cab brought to the door and we jumped to Brawley. Her grandmother had died in 1980 and her social links there had gone by attrition, but she had left things in storage there—books mostly. I ordered them shipped to Aladdin, care of John Sutton. Ricky was a little dazzled by the changes in her old home town and never let go my arm, but she never succumbed to that terrible homesickness which is the great hazard of the Sleep. She merely wanted to get out of Brawley as quickly as possible.

So I hired another cab and we jumped to Yuma. There I signed the county clerk’s book in a fine round hand, using my full name “Daniel Boone Davis,” so that there could be no possible doubt as to which D. B. Davis had designed this magnum opus. A few minutes later I was standing with her little hand in mine and choking over, “I, Daniel, take thee, Frederica…till death us do part.”

Pete was my best man. The witnesses we scraped up in the courthouse.

We got out of Yuma at once and jumped to a guest ranch near Tucson, where we had a cabin away from the main lodge and equipped with our own Eager Beaver to fetch and carry so that we did not need to see anyone. Pete fought a monumental battle with the tom who until then had been boss of the ranch, whereupon we had to keep Pete in or watch him. This was the only shortcoming I can think of. Ricky took to being married as if she had invented it, and me—well, I had Ricky.

There isn’t much more to be said. Voting Ricky’s Hired Girl stock—it was still the largest single block—I had McBee eased upstairs to “Research Engineer Emeritus” and put Chuck in as chief engineer. John is boss of Aladdin but keeps threatening to retire—an idle threat. He and I and Jenny control the company, since he was careful to issue preferred stock and to float bonds rather than surrender control. I’m not on the board of either corporation; I don’t run them and they compete. Competition is a good idea—Darwin thought well of it.

Me, I’m just the “Davis Engineering Company”—a drafting room, a small shop, and an old machinist who thinks I’m crazy but follows my drawings to exact tolerance. When we finish something I put it out for license.

I had my notes on Twitchell recovered. Then I wrote and told him I had made it and returned via cold sleep…and apologized abjectly for having “doubted” him. I asked if he wanted to see the manuscript when I finished. He never answered so I guess he is still sore at me.

But I
am
writing it and I’ll put it in all major libraries even if I have to publish at my own expense. I owe him that much. I owe him much more; I owe him for Ricky. And for Pete. I’m going to title it
Unsung Genius
.

Jenny and John look as if they would last forever. Thanks to geriatrics, fresh air, sunshine, exercise, and a mind that never worries, Jenny is prettier than ever at…well, sixty-three is my guess. John thinks that I am “merely” clairvoyant and does not want to look at the evidence. Well, how
did
I do it? I tried to explain it to Ricky, but she got upset when I told her that while we were on our honeymoon I was actually and no foolin’ also up at Boulder, and that while I was visiting her at the Girl Scout camp I was also lying in a drugged stupor in San Fernando Valley.

She turned white. So I said, “Let’s put it hypothetically. It’s all logical when you look at it mathematically. Suppose we take a guinea pig—white with brown splotches. We put him in the time cage and kick him back a week. But a week earlier we had already found him there, so at that time we had put him in a pen with himself. Now we’ve got two guinea pigs…although actually it’s just one guinea pig, one being the other one a week older. So when you took one of them and kicked him back a week and—”

“Wait a minute! Which one?”

“Which one? Why, there never was but one. You took the one a week younger, of course, because—”

“You said there was just one. Then you said there were two. Then you said the two was just one. But you were going to take one of the two…when there was just one—”

“I’m trying to
explain
how two can be just one. If you take the younger—”

“How can you tell which guinea pig is younger when they look just alike?”

“Well, you could cut off the tail of the one you are sending back. Then when it came back you would—”

“Why, Danny, how cruel! Besides, guinea pigs don’t have tails.”

She seemed to think that proved something. I should never have tried to explain.

But Ricky is not one to fret over things that aren’t important. Seeing that I was upset, she said softly, “Come here, dear.” She rumpled what hair I have left and kissed me. “One of you is all I want, dearest. Two might be more than I could manage. Tell me one thing—are you glad you waited for me to grow up?”

I did my darnedest to convince her that I was.

But the explanation I tried to give does not explain everything. I missed a point even though I was riding the merry-go-round myself and counting the revolutions. Why didn’t I see the notice of my own withdrawal? I mean the second one, in April 2001, not the one in December 2000. I should have; I was there and I used to check those lists. I was awakened (second time) on Friday, 27 April 2001; it should have been in next morning’s
Times
. But I did not see it. I’ve looked it up since and there it is: “D. B. Davis,” in the
Times
for Saturday, 28 April 2001.

Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old “branching time streams” and “multiple universes” notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup? Even though I found Ricky and Pete in it? Is there another universe somewhere (or some
when
) in which Pete yowled until he despaired, then wandered off to fend for himself, deserted? And in which Ricky never managed to flee with her grandmother but had to suffer the vindictive wrath of Belle?

One line of fine print isn’t enough. I probably fell asleep that night and missed reading my own name, then stuffed the paper down the chute next morning, thinking I had finished with it. I
am
absent-minded, particularly when I’m thinking about a job.

But what would I have done if I
had
seen it? Gone there, met myself—and gone stark mad? No, for if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have done the things I did afterward—“afterward” for me—which led up to it. Therefore it could never have happened that way. The control is a negative feedback type, with a built-in “fail safe,” because the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded “not possibles” of the basic circuit design.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only
one
real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.” Just
one
…but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re allowed to do anything inside the rules…but you come back to your own door.

I’m not the only person who has time-traveled. Fort listed too many cases not explainable otherwise and so did Ambrose Bierce. And there were those two ladies in the gardens of the Trianon. I have a hunch, too, that old Doc Twitchell closed that switch oftener than he admitted…to say nothing of others who may have learned how in the past or future. But I doubt if much ever comes of it. In my case only three people know and two don’t believe me. You can’t do much if you do time-travel. As Fort said, you railroad only when it comes time to railroad.

But I can’t get Leonard Vincent out of my mind. Was he Leonardo da Vinci? Did he beat his way across the continent and go back with Columbus? The encyclopedia says that his life was such-and-such—but he might have revised the record. I know how that is; I’ve had to do a little of it. They didn’t have social-security numbers, ID cards, nor fingerprints in fifteenth-century Italy; he could have swung it.

But think of him, marooned from everything he was used to, aware of flight, of power, of a million things, trying desperately to picture them so that they could be made—but doomed to frustration because you simply can’t do the things we do today without centuries of former art to build on.

Tantalus had it easier.

I’ve thought about what could be done with time travel commercially if it were declassified—making short jumps, setting up machinery to get back, taking along components. But someday you’d make one jump too many and not be able to set up for your return because it’s not time to “railroad.” Something simple, like a special alloy, could whip you. And there is that truly awful hazard of not knowing which way you are going. Imagine winding up at the court of Henry VIII with a load of subflexive fasartas intended for the twenty-fifth century. Being becalmed in the horse latitudes would be better.

No, you should never market a gadget until the bugs are out of it.

But I’m not worried about “paradoxes” or “causing anachronisms”—if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because the Builder designed the universe that way. He gave us eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them
can’t
be a paradox. He doesn’t need busybodies to “enforce” His laws; they enforce themselves. There are no miracles and the word “anachronism” is a semantic blank.