Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  Jim couldn’t resist.

  “Time?” he asked. “Not space?”

  The visitor snorted so vigorously that several locks of his weedy gray hair fluttered around his face.

  “Time, not space!” he repeated indignantly. “Sir! Surely even you are aware of the common principle in physics that time and space are merely aspects of the same thing! It’s all in how you look at it. We perceive our journey through space in a limited fashion, usually when we voluntarily perform some act of locomotion.”

  He waggled a finger like an indignant grammar school teacher.

  “However, even when we perceive ourselves as unmoving—for example at this moment when we sit here on these remarkably uncomfortable buckets—we are moving through space, carried by the motion of the planet on whose surface we dwell. The planet itself is not limited in its motion to its orbit around the sun. The sun itself moves as part of the complex orbit of the galaxy around its center, and the galaxy moves about the heart of the Universe!” His voice had risen from its conspiratorial murmur to resemble an evangelist enthralling the congregation. Jeff tried to break into his narration.

  “You’re making me dizzy,” he said with a laugh, “and speaking of time . . .”

  The visitor gave no sign that he had heard other than dropping back into a near whisper.

  “And motion through time is no more complicated than motion through space. Decades ago modern physicists deduced the role of gravity and relative motion in effecting the passage of time. Practical experiments involving clocks and jet airplanes confirmed what the formulas had predicted. Time is not an absolute. Time will pass differently in a moving vehicle than in a stationary—that is perceptually stationary—object. Time even passes differently at the top of a high building than at its base.”

  He grinned with what he clearly thought was wry humor. “If only those youth-worshiping socialites thought, they’d realize that living in a penthouse is the worst thing they could do. There isn’t a fountain of youth. If anything, youth would be found a cellar—for time passes more slowly in the basements of the world than in its elevated penthouses.” Jim and Jeff stared at each other, aghast, wondering how to respond—and how to get rid of this madman. Susie’s voice, calling out from where the crew had been gathered by the trucks, gave welcome interruption.

  “Break’s over, guys. And if you’re done with your tour, Sonja and I have some questions about what we’ve come up against.”

  Jim rose stiffly and picked up the small cooler in which he carried his lunch.

  “Excuse us, sir,” he said to the visitor, “but no matter what physics says about time, ours is up.”

  The visitor also rose, his expression peevish.

  “But I haven’t finished telling you about the Anasazi. It’s very important. I’ve taken considerable risk . . .”

  Jim gave an apologetic smile and nod, then strode off to where Susie waited. Jeff paused.

  “I’m sure it’s important,” he said, able to summon his usual courtesy because he knew Jim was going to call him over any moment, “but the fact is our job isn’t to worry about the present location of the Anasazi, it is to deal with their past.”

  The visitor frowned, then brightened.

  “I understand,” he began, “If I . . .”

  Jim’s bellow, slightly faked to ears that knew it, interrupted.

  “Jeffrey! If you could come over here, Susie has something I can’t figure out. Looks like a frog . . .”

  Jeff swallowed a laugh and turned to reply.

  “Coming, Jimmy. Be right there.”

  He turned back to the visitor, but the weedy little man was gone. Jeff shrugged and hurried over to where the onyx frog had indeed made a reappearance.

  Later that afternoon, he dismissed a passing thought that not only hadn’t he seen the visitor leave, he hadn’t heard a car drive off either.

  After the visitor departed, things went on with only two remarkable changes. One was that the practical jokes progressed to involve complex relocations of Jim’s favorite trowel—a five-inch Marshalltown whose steel blade had been worn down to a mere three and a half inches by constant, loving use. These jokes often incorporated the entire crew coordinating with the speed and accuracy of a professional ballet so that the trowel crossed the site to its new hiding place in a matter of minutes. It got so Jim stopped looking for the trowel at all, trusting it would turn up when and where he least expected.

  The second change was a certain thoughtful silence on Jeff’s part. He’d always been the talkative one, the one who could be counted on for the joke or anecdote that would lighten a dull afternoon. Now he fell into long, inexplicable silences. When Jim asked him if anything was wrong, Jeff just shook his head and grinned.

  “Been thinking about time travel and the Anasazi,” he said with a grin. “The Man in the Maze, Gray Aliens, wormholes, string theory, and all of that.”

  Jim started to laugh, then frowned.

  “You have, haven’t you?” he said. “That fellow didn’t mention string theory or wormholes.”

  “Must have heard about them on television,” Jeff said in a dismissive tone. Then he paused, “Wouldn’t it be something, Jimmy, if there was a science to time travel? Think of what we could learn if we could go back through time. No more guessing whether that rock was a ritual object or an ax—or both. So many questions could be answered.”

  Jim nodded.

  “It might be nice,” he admitted. “Of course, we’d be unemployed.”

  Jeff grinned. “Would we be? Seems to me there might be a whole new type of work for archaeologists as tour guides to the past.”

  Jim might have forgotten the conversation entirely except that a few days later, Verne, another of the crew’s Taos residents, mentioned having seen Jeff in a local restaurant deep in conversation with a man who looked remarkably like the one who’d been at the site.

  “They didn’t see me,” Verne said. “They were kind of leaning over the center of the table and the weird little guy was drawing pictures all over a sheet of paper. Lots of lines and stuff, with arrows at the tips, and spirals. Jeff was nodding, and the guy was talking up a storm. I was going over to say hi, but when I saw who Jeff was with, I cut out.”

  Jim was still trying to figure out if he had any business asking Jeff about this—Verne could have been wrong after all, and it would be rather embarrassing to discover that Jeff had been planning something with the head of his church and that all Verne had seen was electrical diagrams or something—when the onyx frog made its final appearance.

  It hadn’t been the best of weeks for Jim. First of all, his trowel was missing again, and this time it showed no signs of reappearing.

  Then, early Monday morning he’d found a body buried beneath the floor of the pit house he’d been excavating. Jim didn’t really like bodies—not for themselves, but because of the fuss they caused. There were special reports to file, visits from the police who had to confirm—though in this case such confirmation was pretty routine, given that the body had been under about eight feet of dirt and covered by a layer of baked adobe—that the body wasn’t a modem murder victim. And then, of course, there was the slow process of the excavation itself.

  Jim had found the lower part of the body first. Further digging showed that it had been buried in a flexed position—knees drawn up toward chest. That was good evidence that this was a deliberate, ritual burial, perhaps of an important person, maybe just of someone who’d dropped dead during construction.

  As he dug, Jim discussed the possibilities with Susie, who, as an osteologist, was assisting. Everyone offered their theories, of course—all but Jeff who was strangely uncommunicative. He was clearly interested, though, dropping by several times every day to take photographs of everything—even the floor while it was still mostly intact over the body.

  Because of the possibility that grave goods would have been buried with the body, Jim and Susie worked carefully around the edges first. One of Jim’s
self-depreciating jokes was that the only time he’d found an intact pot it had been with a shovel, and he was determined that the same thing wasn’t going to happen this time. Often grave goods were buried near the body’s hands, cradled, as it were, in the curve of the flexed body.

  They saved that section for last, a sense of muted excitement infecting the entire crew. It had already been a promising burial. Susie had removed an entire heishi bead earring from near the skull. A few turquoise beads scattered in the dirt suggested that the corpse had been someone either wealthy or very respected—and the two were not usually thought of as separate in prehistoric cultures.

  Jeff kept coming over, camera in hand, nearly every hour on the hour. Susie teased that if she’d known how many pictures he was going to take, she would have had her hair done. Jeff smiled, but there was something odd about his bearing, a sense of alertness and anticipation bordering on agitation.

  Shortly after lunch break, the dental pick Jim was using tapped against something hard and seemingly metallic. The sensation sent warning signals to his trained sense of touch—that something here was not precisely unfamiliar, but most certainly unexpected.

  “Found your pot?” Susie said, looking up at the cessation of his steady movement.

  “Found something,” Jim replied tersely. He reached for a brush. Contrary to popular opinion, lots of archeology is done with shovels and even backhoes. Still, there remain times when only delicate brush work will do.

  By the wordless communication common in groups of people who have worked together for a long while, news spread that Jim had found something new. Crew members recalled that they were permitted a break every hour and drifted over. Jim didn’t seem to notice, not even when Jeff’s camera clicked and flashed nearby.

  There was quite an audience when Jim uttered a single, expressive explicative.

  “Shit!”

  He moved more rapidly now, the brush pushing away dirt in impatient little motions. Something glinted metallically. Light glinted off a polished surface.

  Jim bellowed again.

  “Jeffrey!”

  He rocked back on his heels, staring down, exposing his discovery to the equally astonished gaze of his crew.

  “Jeffrey!”

  Jeff, who had descended into the pit house as soon as the rumors started to spread, hunkered down, disregarding his bad knee.

  “Right here, Jimmy.”

  Jim glared at him, pointed down with the tip of his dental pick.

  “How the hell did my trowel and that damned frog get in here?”

  Jeff looked down. There, still coated with traces of adobe so hard that it looked as if it had been baked over it, were Jim’s beloved three-and-a-half-inch Marshalltown trowel and the now ubiquitous onyx frog.

  Jeff looked at Jim.

  “I put them there, Jimmy.”

  Mutters of surprise and astonishment, followed by a few loud, nervous laughs greeted this announcement. Jim didn’t laugh, though, and seeing the fierce expression on his face the crew members simultaneously recalled that breaks didn’t last forever. Susie made herself scarce.

  When the two co-directors were alone down in the pit house, Jim looked his friend squarely in the eyes.

  “There’s no way you could have put them there—not like you did, say, the license plate. There’s no way. The body wasn’t buried that deeply. I didn’t break the floor over that section until this morning. You want to tell me something?”

  Jeff took a deep breath and flipped over a bucket for a chair. More slowly, Jim also took a seat.

  “I did put them there, Jimmy,” Jeff began. “Remember that little man who was out here a couple weeks back?”

  “How could I forget him? Mr. Time and Space are the same thing.”

  “He came to see me a day or so later, came by my house,” Jeff continued. “He said that something I’d said about our job not being where the Anasazi went, but who they were had given him an idea how to get through my stubbornness. I’m going to cut a long story short . . .”

  Jim forced a smile. “That’ll be a first.”

  “Really, you don’t want to hear about all the stuff he told me. He repeated himself a lot—went into long harangues. Still, he started to convince me. I think what did it was when he asked me how, if I was really a scientist and really interested in learning about the past, then how could I turn down a tool like this?

  “That question really bothered me. After all, if the only thing that was keeping us from a major breakthrough was fear of seeming stupid, well, then I wasn’t the scientist I wanted to be. I let him convince me to give it a try. He said he could take me back in time to when these pit houses were being constructed and asked me to pick one in particular. I chose yours because I haven’t had anything to do with the excavation.”

  Jim nodded. “Controlled experiment.”

  “That’s right. He took me back. I’m not going to go into how except that it had something to do with a device that’s planted out in space near Jupiter where the planet’s mass masks the distortion of the space/time continuum.”

  Jeff looked at him as if waiting for laughter, for scorn. Jim looked his friend squarely the eyes, then down at his battered old trowel and the onyx frog half-buried in the adobe.

  “Go on, Jeffrey.”

  “We went. We came out here. He had some type of disguise. I didn’t understand it. Tell the truth, I didn’t even try.”

  Jeff shook his head in wonder.

  “It was amazing. This bluff was here, but stripped like a new construction site. The air was amazingly clear and smelled mostly of dust and juniper sap from the peeled posts and the bark, and of wood smoke, too, and sweat . . . There were dogs running around with naked kids—it was spring, I think, just like now.

  “A bunch of men were taking a look around the finished pit house—no roof, yet, just the pit. They were pretty pleased with themselves, like you’d expect given all the work they’d done. Then a wailing started off in the distance, down by the creek at the base of the bluff . . .”

  Jim frowned. “There’s no creek.”

  “There was then,” Jeff insisted. “One of the reasons they built here, I think.”

  “Right. We can check that, soil samples, maybe coring,” Jim stopped himself. “Sorry.”

  Jeff grinned.

  “Hey, I thought you were going to be hauling me off as crazy. You can talk all you want.”

  “No. Go on. The crew’s going to get curious pretty soon.”

  Jeff nodded.

  “The wailing was a burial party—that fellow right there by our feet. He was an important old guy, forties maybe from the look of him. He’d died during the construction and his family wanted him buried close to home.

  “They set him in a place prepared below the level of the floor. Everyone gave him gifts-—mostly flowers, but you’ll find a pot right below the trowel, nice Santa Fe black on white.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My guide took me down as part of the general procession. Nobody paid us much mind. I’d brought the frog and the trowel—had them in my coat pockets. I’d planned all along on planting something and I wanted something that the whole crew would know and that wouldn’t deteriorate over time. Without letting my guide know—I hadn’t asked permission you see—I slipped them down there. The flowers hid them, and I figured the old guy wouldn’t mind a few more gifts.”

  “Sure, that trowel might come in handy in the supernatural realms,” Jim replied. “I sure find it handy in the here and now.”

  “And then I came back. I’ve been sweating all week while you’ve dug, waiting for you to get there. Man, it seemed like you were working around the stuff on purpose! Anyhow, now I have pictures of the whole process, from solid floor through today. Proof that time travel is possible.”

  Jim studied him, thought of what that kind of proof would mean to the world—and what it would mean to their immediate lives.

  “People are going to think us as loony as we did that
visitor,” he said at last. “Are you sure you want to come out with this? We can cover it up—not the body, what you did—I can tell people you salted the burial last night, that I had thought the adobe seemed more broken than it should. Only Susie’s going to really be sure it wasn’t and she wasn’t actually digging that part. We can convince her. We’ve got a reputation for elaborate practical jokes.”

  “My best one ever,” Jeff agreed. “Yeah, it would work. But do we want to cover it up? Time travel is real, as real as your trowel and that darned frog.”

  Jim frowned. “Did you ever find out what that fellow is after?”

  “Coyote.” Jeff grinned. “That’s what he told me to call him, though he made it clear it’s an alias. Coyote told me that he wants to shake things up. He thinks that current science is moving too slowly to avert disaster. He figures that meddling is the way to avoid some unnamed but terrible destruction. He’s a maverick, working on his own. That’s why he was so edgy and cranky.”

  “Why’d he pick us?” Jim asked. “Why not a president or something?”

  “Ever tried to get an appointment with the president?” Jeff replied. “Anyhow, he said he’d read our book—the one on migration patterns through the Rio Grande Valley. Thought we’d be interested, tantalized.”

  Jim shook his head. “We haven’t written that book.”

  “Yet.”

  “Shit!”

  “Yeah. That’s kind of how I felt.”

  Jim rose slowly to his feet.

  “Where’re you going, Jimmy?”

  Jim ran a hand through his beard.

  “Call the crew. We’ve got a lot to tell them. I figure if we can’t convince them, then this Coyote has more work to do. Maybe I’ll make him take me to the building of the pyramids at Giza.”

  Jeff grinned and, pulling off his cowboy hat, wiped his forehead against his sleeve.

  “You’re with me, then? Great! I’ve been sweating this.” He sighed. “Maybe I’ll sleep tonight.”