The final hour came at last. I carved the turkey and Edward came out of his room long enough to take a plateful of breast and ask for my comments on his final rewrite of his last chapter, and I said, “It still needs work,” and Rachel said, “That’s cruel,” and Edward said, “Yes, I thought it needed something myself,” and went back to his room. Outside, the streets were deserted except for the unfortunate few who couldn’t get to a television set, and we did up most of the remaining drugs and switched wildly between channels. I had brought my typewriter into the kitchen and I was getting it all down, and Rachel talked of the holidays we should have taken, and I thought about the women I should have loved, and at five to twelve Edward came out of his room again and showed me the rewritten last chapter, and I said, “You’ve got it this time,” and he said, “I thought so, is there any more coke left?” And we did up the rest of the drugs and Rachel said to me, “For Chrissakes, can’t you stop typing?” And I said, “I have to get it all down,” and she hugged me, and Edward hugged me, and the three of us hugged the children, whom we had allowed to stay up late because it was the end of the world, and I said, “Rachel, I’m sorry about everything,” and she said, “I’m sorry too,” and Edward said, “I don’t think I did anything wrong, but I’m sorry too.” “Sorry about what?” the children asked, but before we had a chance to tell them, before we could even decide what we were sorry about…
THE FUTURE LOST
Leonard Nisher was found in front of the Plaza Hotel in a state of agitation so extreme that it took the efforts of three policemen and a passing tourist from Biloxi, Mississippi, to subdue him. Taken to St. Clare’s Hospital, he had to be put into a wet pack—a wet sheet wound around the patient’s arms and upper body. This immobilized him long enough for an intern to get a shot of Valium into him.
The injection had taken effect by the time Dr. Miles saw him. Miles told two husky aides, one of them a former guard for the Detroit Lions, and a psychiatric nurse named Norma to wait outside. The patient wasn’t going to assault anyone just now. He was throttled way back, riding the crest of a Valium wave where there’s nothing to hassle and even a wet pack can have its friendly aspects.
“Well, Mr. Nisher, how do you feel now?” Miles asked.
“I’m fine, doc,” Nisher said. “Sorry I caused that trouble when I came out of the space-time anomaly and landed in front of the Plaza.”
“It could affect anyone that way,” Miles said reassuringly.
“I guess it sounds pretty crazy,” Nisher said. “There’s no way I can prove it, but I have just been into the future and back again.”
“Is the future nice?” Miles asked.
“The future,” Nisher said, “is a pussycat. And what happened to me there—well, you’re not going to believe it.”
The patient, a medium-sized white male of about thirty-five, wearing an off-white wet pack and a broad smile, proceeded to tell the following story.
Yesterday he had left his job at Hanratty & Smirch, Accountants, at the usual time and gone to his apartment on East Twenty-fifth Street. He was just putting the key in the lock when he heard something behind him. Nisher immediately thought mugger, and whirled around in the cockroach posture that was the basic defense mode in the Taiwanese karate he was studying. There was no one there. Instead there was a sort of red, shimmering mist. It floated toward Nisher and surrounded him. Nisher heard weird noises and saw flashing lights before he blacked out.
When he regained consciousness, someone was saying to him, “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” Nisher opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer on Twenty-fifth Street. He was sitting on a bench in a beautiful little park with trees and ponds and promenades and strangely shaped statues and tame deer, and there were people strolling around, wearing what looked like Grecian tunics. Sitting beside him on the bench was a kindly, white-haired old man dressed like Charlton Heston playing Moses.
“What is this?” Nisher asked. “What’s happened?”
“Tell me,” the old man said, “did you happen to run into a reddish cloud recently? Aha! I thought so! That was a local space-time anomaly, and it has carried you away from your own time and into the future.”
“The future?” Nisher said. “The future what?”
“Just the future,” the old man said. “We’re about four hundred years ahead of you, give or take a few years.”
“You’re putting me on,” Nisher said. He asked the old man in various ways where he really was, and the old man replied that he really was in the future, and it was not only true, it wasn’t even unusual, though of course it wasn’t the sort of thing that happens every day. At last Nisher had to accept it.
“Well, okay,” he said. “What sort of future is this?”
“A very nice one,” the old man assured him.
“No alien creatures have taken us over?”
“Certainly not.”
“Has lack of fossil fuels reduced our standard of living to a bare subsistence level?”
“We solved the energy crisis a few hundred years ago when we discovered an inexpensive way of converting sand into shale.”
“What are your major problems?”
“We don’t seem to have any.”
“So this is Utopia?”
The old man smiled. “You must judge for yourself. Perhaps you would like to look around during your brief stay here.”
“Why brief?”
“These space-time anomalies are self-regulating,” the old man said. “The universe won’t tolerate for long your being here when you ought to be there. But it usually takes a little while for the universe to catch up. Shall we go for a stroll? My name is Ogun.”
They left the park and walked down a pleasant, tree-lined boulevard. The buildings were strange to Nisher’s eye and seemed to contain too many strange angles and discordant colors. They were set back from the street and bordered with well-kept green lawns. It looked to Nisher like a really nice future. Nothing exotic, but nice. And there were people walking around in their Grecian tunics, and they all looked happy and well fed. It was like a Sunday in Central Park.
Then Nisher noticed one couple who had gone beyond the talking stage. They had taken their clothes off. They were, to use a twentieth-century expression, making it.
No one seemed to think this was unusual. Ogun didn’t comment on it; so Nisher didn’t say anything, either. But he couldn’t help noticing, as they walked along, that other people were making it, too. Quite a few people. After passing the seventh couple so engaged, Nisher asked Ogun whether this was some sexual holiday or whether they had stumbled onto a fornicator’s convention.
“It’s nothing special,” Ogun said.
“But why don’t these people do it in their homes or in hotel rooms?”
“Probably because most of them happened to meet here in the street.”
That shook Nisher. “Do you mean that these couples never knew each other before?”
“Apparently not,” Ogun said. “If they had, I suppose they would have arranged for a more comfortable place in which to make love.”
Nisher just stood there and stared. He knew it was rude, but he couldn’t help it. Nobody seemed to mind. He observed how people looked at each other as they walked along, and every once in a while somebody would smile at someone, and someone else would smile back, and they would sort of hesitate for a moment, and then…