Bare-bodied dancers in gaudy luminous paint gyrate lasciviously on the screen, nearly large as life. Alice scowls. The things they show on TV nowadays! It used to be that you got this stuff only on the X-rated channels, but now it’s everywhere. And look at him, just lapping it up! Actually she knows she wouldn’t be so stuffy about the sex shows except that Ted’s fascination with them is a measure of his lack of interest in her. Let them show screwing and all the rest on TV, if that’s what people want. I just wish Ted had as much enthusiasm for me as he does for the television stuff. So far as sexual permissiveness in general goes, she’s no prude. She used to wear nothing but trunks at the beach, until Tink was born and she started to feel a little less proud of her figure. But she still dresses as revealingly as anyone in their crowd. And gets stared at by everyone but her own husband. He watches the TV cuties. His other women must use him up. Maybe I ought to step out a bit myself, Alice thinks. She’s had her little affairs along the way. Not many, nothing very serious, but she’s had some. Three lovers in eleven years, that’s not a great many, but it’s a sign that she’s no puritan. She wonders if she ought to get involved with somebody now. It might move her life off dead center while she still has the chance, before boredom destroys her entirely. “I’m going up to wash my hair,” she announces. “Will you be staying down here till bedtime?”
There are so many ways he could do it. Slit his wrists. Drive his car off the bridge. Swallow Alice’s whole box of sleeping tabs. Of course those are all old-fashioned ways of killing yourself. Something more modern would be appropriate. Go into one of the black taverns and start making loud racial insults? No, nothing modern about that. It’s very 1975. But something genuinely contemporary does occur to him. Those time machines they’ve got now: suppose he rented one and went back, say, sixty years, to a time when one of his parents hadn’t yet been born. And killed his grandfather. Find old Martin as a young man and slip a knife into him. If I do that, Ted figures, I should instantly and painlessly cease to exist. I would never have existed, because my mother wouldn’t ever have existed. Poof. Out like a light. Then he realizes he’s fantasizing a murder again. Stupid: if he could ever murder anyone, he’d murder Alice and be done with it. So the whole fantasy is foolish. Back to the starting point is where he is.
She is sitting under the hair-dryer when he comes upstairs. He has a peculiarly smug expression on his face, and as soon as she turns the dryer off she asks him what he’s thinking about. ‘I may have just invented a perfect murder method,’ he tells her. “Oh?” she says. He says, “You rent a time machine. Then you go back a couple of generations and murder one of the ancestors of your intended victim. That way you’re murdering the victim too, because he won’t ever have been born if you kill off one of his immediate progenitors. Then you return to your own time. Nobody can trace you because you don’t have any fingerprints on file in an era before your own birth. What do you think of it?” Alice shrugs. “It’s an old one,” she says. “It’s been done on television a dozen times. Anyway, I don’t like it. Why should an innocent person have to die just because he’s the grandparent of somebody you want to kill?”
They’re probably in bed together right now, Martin thinks gloomily. Stark naked side by side. The lights are out. The house is quiet. Maybe they’re smoking a little grass. Do they still call it grass, he wonders, or is there some new nickname now? Anyway the two of them turn on. Yes. And then he reaches for her. His hands slide over her cool, smooth skin. He cups her breasts. Plays with the hard little nipples. Sucks on them. The other hand wandering down to her parted thighs. And then she. And then he. And then they. And then they. Oh, Alice, he murmurs. Oh, Ted, Ted, she cries. And then they. Go to it. Up and down, in and out. Oh. Oh. Oh. She claws his back. She pumps her hips. Ted! Ted! Ted! The big moment is arriving now. For her, for him. Jackpot! Afterward they lie close for a few minutes, basking in the afterglow. And then they roll apart. Goodnight, Ted. Goodnight, Alice. Oh, Jesus. They do it every night, I bet. They’re so young and full of juice. And I’m all dried up. Christ, I hate being old. When I think of the man I once was. When I think of the women I once had. Jesus. Jesus. God, let me have the strength to do it just once more before I die. And leave me alone for two hours with Alice.
She has trouble falling asleep. A strange scene keeps playing itself out obsessively in her mind. She sees herself stepping out of an upright coffin-size box of dark grey metal, festooned with dials and levers. The time machine. It delivers her into a dark, dirty alleyway, and when she walks forward to the street she sees scores of little antique automobiles buzzing around. Only they aren’t antiques, they’re the current models. This is the year 1947. New York City. Will she be conspicuous in her futuristic clothes? She has her breasts covered, at any rate. That’s essential back here. She hurries to the proper address, resisting the temptation to browse in shop windows along the way. How quaint and ancient everything looks. And how dirty the streets are. She comes to a tall building of red brick. This is the place. No scanners study her as she enters. They don’t have annunciators yet or any other automatic home-protection equipment. She goes upstairs in an elevator so creaky and unstable that she fears for her life. Fifth floor. Apartment 5-J. She rings the doorbell. He answers. He’s terribly young, only twenty-four, but she can pick out signs of the Martin of the future in his face, the strong cheekbones, the searching blue eyes. “Are you Martin Jamieson?” she asks. “That’s right,” he says. She smiles. “May I come in?” “Of course,” he says. He bows her into the apartment. As he momentarily turns his back on her to open the coat closet she takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock.
Ted and Alice visit him at Sunset Village two or three times a month. He can’t complain about that; it’s as much as he can expect. He’s an old, old man and no doubt a boring one, but they come dutifully, sometimes with the kids, sometimes without. He’s never gotten used to the idea that he’s a great-grandfather. Alice always gives him a kiss when she arrives and another when she leaves. He plays a private little game with her, copping a feel at each kiss. His hand quickly stroking her butt. Or sometimes when he’s really rambunctious it travels lightly over her breast. Does she notice? Probably. She never lets on, though. Pretends it’s an accidental touch. Most likely she thinks it’s charming that a man of his age would still have at least a vestige of sexual desire left. Unless she thinks it’s disgusting, that is.
The time-machine gimmick, Ted tells himself, can be used in ways that don’t quite amount to murder. For instance. “What’s that box?” Alice asks. He smiles cunningly. “It’s called a pan chronicon,” he says. “It gives you a kind of televised reconstruc tion of ancient times. The salesman loaned me a demonstration sample.” She says, “How does it work?” “Just step inside,” he tells her. “It’s all ready for you.” She starts to enter the machine, but then, suddenly suspicious, she hesitates on the threshold. He pushes her in and slams the door shut behind her. Wham! The controls are set. Off goes Alice on a one-way journey to the Pleistocene. The machine is primed to return as soon as it drops her off. That isn’t murder, is it? She’s still alive, wherever she may be, unless the sabre-tooth tigers have caught up with her. So long, Alice.