Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  . . . I can save the box.

  Uli was there, too, looking at him, gray-eyed, businesslike, but with that hint of edge about the eyes like steel, sharpened. He said, But you know this also: otherwise you would not have come to me again.

  This is a repair I think you must make.

  It is irresponsible to leave something broken when it can be fixed—

  Rob woke up with a sudden terrible shock, one of those falling-out-of-bed sensations that leaves you with your heart racing as you stare at the ceiling. Diffuse, warm sunlight lit the white-walled hotel room and glanced off the Miro print over the head of the bed: afternoon light. I dozed off for a few moments, he thought. But when he looked at his watch, he saw that the calendar had clicked over one. It was tomorrow.

  —and I’m going to be late if I don’t get going!

  He showered and dressed and caught the Number Four tram back up to the Hauptbahnhof, pausing only long enough to look at the easels in front of the newsstand again. Today the headlines were shouting about the licensing of a new brothel in the city, but there was nothing about the disappearance of Robert Willingden. Rob grinned and went out into the April morning again, back to the tram stand, where he caught the Number Twelve tram to the suburbs.

  About twenty minutes later, the tram slid humming to a j stop in front of the neighborhood’s post office. Rob got out and walked east to the curve in the road, bore right around it past the Co-op grocery store, where an orange-coated employee was bringing in the metal racks that displayed plants and potting soil outside during the day, and made his way two doors down to Uli’s shop.

  Uli met him at the door, let him in, locked the door behind him and turned the front-of-shop lights off. From the back room, cool light spilled through the door. “This way,” Uli said.

  Beyond that door lay a prosaic, linoleum-floored, gray-walled, windowless workshop lit by a pair of downhanging fluorescent tubes. Plain pinewood workbenches, each with its own magnifying lamp and all perfectly tidy, were lined up all around the walls. The one nearest the door had a PC and monitor sitting on it, the monitor showing what looked like a display from some spreadsheet software, possibly the shop’s accounts. The other workbenches all had delicate tools hung on pegboards up above them, and clocks of every kind sat on the work surfaces, the shelves, or, in the case of the various grandfather and grandmother clocks, on the floor, awaiting repair.

  My grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf . . . so it stood ninety years on the floor . . . sang a child’s nervous voice in Rob’s head. He tried to ignore it as he looked at the other clocks hanging on the walls, ones that seemed to be working fine—case clocks, antique civic clocks, and a giant version of the beautiful black-and-white Bauhaus SBB railway clock with the “hovering” red-dot second hand that pushed the minute hand over on reaching the 12: next to that, also black and white, an over-jeweled Felix-the-Cat clock with eyeballs that glanced from left to right and back again in time with the pendulum tail: clocks with simple and ornate faces above every kind of pendulum imaginable—disks, mostly, though near the door Rob saw one with a silver crescent moon at the pendulum’s end. And, back in the shadows between two wall-mounted cupboards, with a pair of massive pinecone weights dangling below it, hung a mahogany-and-ebony cuckoo clock covered with more carved scrollwork, antlers, acanthus leaves, and other beautifully graven garbage than Rob had ever seen in his life.

  “First one of those I’ve seen here,” Rob said, as Uli went over to one of the desks and rolled what looked like a gray steel typist’s chair away from it toward the middle of the room.

  Uli grunted. “German,” he said, and went to the other side of the room to pull a red metal toolchest on wheels over beside the chair. “I would not have it here, but unfortunately the tourists expect them.”

  “I thought they all came from here,” Rob said.

  Uli gave him an ironic look. “Given the choice to either make cuckoo clocks or Rolexes,” he said, “which would you make? Those things come from the Black Forest . . . and meanwhile, Orson Welles has a lot to answer for. Sit down.”

  Rob sat down while Uli pulled the top drawer of the chest open, revealing a number of white paper packages about two inches square. Rob suddenly realized that what he had mistaken for a toolchest was actually a medical crash cart, and besides the white paper packages, that top drawer was packed with soft foam cut out to hold numerous syringes and vials. Rob looked nervously at these as Uli picked up one of the paper packages and peeled it open, revealing a round self-stick electrode pad with a trailing wire. Rob found that he had begun to shiver. He hoped Uli would think it was anticipation. “You said you were going to tell me how this works . . .”

  “Ach, there I would come up against the language barrier,” Uli said as he parted Rob’s hair toward the back and touched the electrode into place: Rob felt a brief sting of cold from the lubricant on the pad. “You of all people should know how it is. Talk tech to the nontechnical, it just muddies the waters.” Uli peeled another electrode and chose another spot, put the contact in place. “The mind knows the time. The heart knows the place. Everything else is engineering.”

  , “Oh, come on. That’s just too New Age and fuzzy. There must be more to going back in time than just using the mind and the heart.”

  “Hold still. The spatial dislocation is handled by limbic and subcortical keleological transit processes,” Uli said, putting another electrode in place at the base of Rob’s skull. “Does that sound better to you? And if it does, why? All instrumentality or intervention useful to humans in this world can at base be classified in one of three ways: as science, magic, or chicken soup. There is no special virtue in science when one of the others will do as well. To prefer it all the time is snobbery. Though, in this case, it is valid enough: you think the mind and the body are two different things? Where one goes, the other must follow, assuming there are no unresolved issues to interfere. But anyway, it is not back in time you go,” Uli said. “It’s forward.” Rob’s eyes widened. “Uh, listen, Uli . . .”

  “It is the same thing,” Uli said, unconcerned, as he fastened on the last electrode. “You cannot change the way the river flows. Time can only go forward: it is no good as time otherwise. You will just go all the way around, until you come out behind the originating time instead of in front of it. Is this a problem for you?”

  Rob blinked. “It seems a long way out of the way, I guess.”

  “The only way to get where you are going,” Uli said, “cannot be out of your way. By definition.” He checked the last connection. “Ready?”

  Rob looked around him, carefully, so as not to dislodge the wires. “Is that all?”

  Uli consented to smile just a little. “You want flashing lights? Machines that make big impressive noises like overheating engines when they run? Unfortunately, I must disappoint you.” He went over to the PC on its desk by the wall, checked it, tapped briefly at its keyboard, did something with its mouse, clicked a couple of times, and then walked carefully once right around Rob, checking the big blind free-standing cabinets.

  “It’s a car battery in there, right?” Rob said, looking at the metal toolchest. “And tomorrow morning there’s going to be a big headline in Blick: Billionaire Victim of Homebrew Electroshock Treatment.”

  “Too many words for Blick. Still . . . ‘homebrew,’ ” Uli said. “I wonder how they will translate that into German? Probably they will just say ‘homebrew.’ We usually find other languages’ neologisms cooler than our own.” He looked at Rob, and his expression said tch, tch. “You are a very reasonable man,” Uli said. “The problem is, now you must go where reason will not take you. That, you must let go.”

  The tone had turned just briefly stem again, showing that glint of steel at the edge. Rob swallowed, feeling a sudden resonance in his mind, in his bones, between this moment and some other. Everything abruptly went uncertain. “I’ve done this before, haven’t I?” he said.

  Uli simply looked at him. Why d
id he seem so unsurprised by what I told him? Rob wondered. How did he—

  Otherwise you would not have come to me again, memory said.

  Rob blinked. Again . . .?

  But a second later, the world steadied itself once more.

  Just déjà vu, Rob thought. I’ve had it a hundred times before . . .

  Just never in a situation like this.

  I think . . .

  Uli crumpled up the electrode-peelings and put them in a small garbage can by one of the workbenches, then picked up a dishtowel and came back to Rob, standing in front of him. “Now the final warning,” Uli said, coming around in front of Rob again and wiping the electrodelubricant off his hands. “I told you this before, but no one believes me until we get to this point. So I tell you again. The past is amber: a solid. The odds that you will be able to change anything, to free anything from the amber and bring it back, are a million to one. If that is the point of your travel, I must remind you of this now.”

  Rob frowned. We’ll see about that, he thought. “I’m going anyway.”

  “Of course you are. Everyone does.” Uli shrugged. “So, go well. And now, think about where and why you go.” He turned. “When you get back, would you like a coffee?”

  “Uh, yes, thank you.”

  Uli went out and shut the door behind him. Rob waited for a shock, a buzz . . . but nothing happened. Finally, because doing anything else would force him to admit to himself that he’d been had, Rob sat back in the typing chair, closed his eyes, and thought about why he was going.

  The where took no time at all. The first thing he noticed was the faint clean scent that he hadn’t smelled in thirty years. Rob opened his eyes in the dark and looked around him. He was standing in the back yard, down by the gigantic quince bush that had always threatened to take over the whole area around the back gate where the store’s trucks parked. It was in flower, the peach-colored blossoms now bluish-pale in the starlight and the light of the mercury vapor streetlight beyond the high chain-link gate. Up at the top of the slight rise on which they stood, the house and store loomed dark. Everything was silence.

  Except for a slight rustling in the bushes near where the ladder hung against the feed-shed wall.

  Aha, Rob thought, and smiled grimly in the darkness, his fists balling at the sound. He stepped toward it, stopped.

  “You have till the count of three,” he said, “to get your sorry ass out of here before I call the cops. One—”

  Nothing.

  “Two—” Rob paused. “Buddy, you don’t know about Sergeant McCallister down at the precinct, do you? He really likes taking suspects into that back room, and—”

  A man’s shape all in dark clothes erupted out of the bushes, running helter-skelter for the gate. He swarmed up it, over it, dropped to the far side, and ran.

  Rob stood there waiting for the sound of footsteps to vanish down the back alley. Then he turned, looking at the house. There was a growing tumult in his head that he was having trouble understanding, but one thought came clear through it: I just want to see them. Just want to know they’re still there.

  Silently Rob unhooked the ladder from the side of the feed shed and went up the hill with it, past the parked trucks, up the old stone stairs to the house. Very quietly he extended the ladder, and went up it carefully: a fall here would be bad.

  The hole in the roof gaped before him. Rob braced himself carefully against the shingles there, stepped in.

  Darkness. But he was used to being in here in the dark . . . and he knew, better than anything, the exact location of the thing he had come for.

  The box was there, on the floor, behind a pile of other boxes. Rob knelt down in front of it, reached out to it, eased the top flap open. The special smell of the glassine envelopes floated up to him. He reached out in the dim light coming through the hole in the roof and reached out to touch the edge of Captain Thunder Number One.

  Something hit him from behind, knocked him flat.

  Rob went face down on the plywood covering the rafters, only a few feet from where the flooring stopped entirely and he would have gone straight down through his own bedroom ceiling. A second later someone was pummeling his back, his neck, the back of his head. “You bastard!” a small voice whispered in fury. “Leave them alone! Leave my comics alone! They’re all I have!”

  Rob rolled sideways, away from where the rafters went bare, back toward the piled-up trunks and boxes in the dark. The small violent attacker fell off his back, scrambled to its hands and knees at the same time Rob did, stared him in the face.

  It was Robby. Was I really that skinny? Rob thought. Did I really think that buzz-cut looked good on me? But the small figure in striped pajamas and bathrobe was glaring at him in utter rage, and questions of how he’d looked when he was ten now withered in the glare.

  “I dreamed this happening, just a little while ago,” the boy whispered. “I kept waking up and falling asleep again all night, and I dreamed it different ways. Once the other guy just went out with them. I yelled, but he got away. This time the other guy ran away, and you came in instead. But you just want to steal them, too, and I won’t be able to stop you, and it’s going to be the same! It’s always going to be the same! Why did you make it this way?!” Robby was crying now, but in no way did it take the edge off his rage. “What kind of bastard keeps trying to steal some kid’s comic books?”

  Rob started to answer. “You’ve got it all wrong,” Rob whispered. “That wasn’t me! I came here to—” Steal them before the other guy did? he thought. Boy, he’s not going to like the sound of that—

  And then Rob fell silent as, in memory, this scene in which he stood represented itself to him another way, in memory . . . as if he was seeing it all happen from a slightly different angle. That dark shape escaping out the hole in the roof, with the box under his arm—this time Robby saw a profile. It had been a stranger’s face to Robby then.

  But it was not strange to Rob now, for he saw it every morning in the mirror.

  He reeled. I did steal them first . . . at least once.

  Why didn’t I remember this before? Because I hadn’t made it happen yet?

  Or maybe now I have . . . and my memory is of the world I made. And the me I made . . .

  “Oh, my God,” Rob said softly as he knelt there, and he hid his face in his hands. He had very little time. It would only take a few minutes for his dad and mom to hear what was happening, and get up here.

  What will I do . . .?

  How many times have I been in this moment?

  Lots, probably. I have enough money to do it again and again.

  But how many times have I screwed it up?

  He would have thought that once you’d repaired time, you shouldn’t have been able to remember how it had been broken. But apparently if you stood at the right spot, you could. Memories were tangling and writhing in Rob’s head like a nest of snakes, images and realities jostling one another, trying to push one another out of place. Here, at the nexus moment, they were all accessible. Unresolved issues, Uli had said. . . .

  But these are what I came for. What I’m going to be paying millions of dollars to reach. I don’t want to just see them. I want to take them back with me. I want to save them. That’s what all this is about.

  He rubbed his eyes, let his hands fall. “Robby, listen to me,” Rob said. “Let me have them. I can take them where they’ll always be safe.”

  “What’s the use of them being safe if I can’t have them?” Robby said, anguished.

  “But you will have them. I’m you.”

  “You’re not me now! And I don’t care about having them when I’m old! I care about having them now! I need. them now!” His voice choked up. “I dreamed you, too. I don’t want to be the me I’m going to be if I have to lose these! I don’t want to be you!”

  Rob fell silent, unable to think of anything to say to that.

  Except, eventually:

  Neither do I.

  That’s what
all this is about.

  Downstairs, Rob’s parents’ bedroom door creaked. His and Robby’s heads both turned.

  Do it now, said a voice in the back of his mind. Take them. Run. It’ll be what happened. And Captain Thunder will be safe with you.

  Rob stared at the box.

  What kind of bastard steals comic books from a kid? said another voice.

  Rob put his hands on the box again, one on either side. He had never felt anything as utterly as he now felt this plain smooth cardboard against his skin. Inside the box, all the color, all the joy, a whole childhood lost, seemed to boil and seethe like a cartoned volcano.

  If you don’t take them now . . . you won’t be you, said one of the voices in his head. Beware . . .

  Footsteps started to come up the stairs. Rob’s eyes met Robby’s.

  Rob tried to swallow the lump in his throat, failed. “Captain Thunder,” Rob said with difficulty, “would never steal. Not even from Emperor Fulgor.”

  Very slowly, Robby’s eyes began to shine with something besides repressed tears.

  Rob got hurriedly to his feet, blinking. He made his way to the hole in the roof, stepped out of it, found the first step of the ladder. He heard the attic door open. Rob went down the ladder too fast, blinking hard, unable to see where he was going in the dark. It wasn’t supposed to go this way, he thought, as he misstepped. and fell—

  The crash shook every bone in him. Rob sat up too suddenly, and immediately felt woozy. There were workbenches all around him, and pegboards on the walls: and the noise hadn’t been him falling after all—just the sound of something in the workshop blowing up.

  “Come on, now,” Uli’s voice said. “Sit up. That is right. Here is your coffee.”

  Bleary, Rob reached out and took the plain white ceramic coffee mug. The stuff in it was brewed stronger than he usually liked it, but it was also half milk: he drank it down greedily. When Rob finished, he looked around and saw Uli kneeling by the red metal crash cart, poking at its innards with a resigned expression and making that tch, tch sound again. “Oh, my,” Uli said, “that was the equivocator.”