How peculiar this is, Alice thinks. Like walking into a museum diorama and having it come to life. The noisy little automobiles. The ugly clothing. The squat, dilapidated twentieth-century buildings. The chaos. The oily, smoky smell of the polluted air. Wisps of dirty snow in the streets. Cans of garbage just sitting around as if nobody’s ever heard of the plague. Well, I won’t stay here long. In her purse she carries her kitchen carver, a tiny nickel-jacketed laser-powered implement. Steel pipes are all right for dream fantasies, but this is the real thing, and she wants the killing to be quick and efficient. Criss, cross, with the laser beam, and Martin goes. At the street corner she pauses to check the address. There’s no central info number to ring for all sorts of useful data, not in these primitive times; she must use a printed telephone directory, a thick tattered book with small smeary type. Here he is: Martin Jamieson, 504 West Forty-fifth. That’s not far. In ten minutes she’s there. A dark brick structure, five or six stories high, with spidery metal fire escapes running down its face. Even for its day it appears unusually run-down. She goes inside. A list of tenants is posted just within the front door. Jamieson, 3-A. There’s no elevator and of course no liftshaft. Up the stairs. A musty hallway lit by a single dim incandescent bulb. This is Apartment 3-A. Jamieson. She rings the bell.
Ten minutes later Friesling calls back, sounding abashed and looking dismayed: “I’m sorry to have to tell you that there’s been some sort of error, Mr. Porter. The technicians were apparently unaware that a credit check was in process, and they sent Mrs. Porter off on her trip while we were still talking.” Ted is shaken. He clutches the edge of the desk. Controlling himself with an effort, he says, “How far back was it that she wanted to go?” Friesling says, “It was fifty-nine years. To 1947.” Ted nods grimly. A horrible idea has occurred to him. 1947 was the year that his mother’s parents met and got married. What is Alice up to?
The doorbell rings. Martin, freshly showered, is sprawled out naked on his bed, leafing through the new issue of Esquire and thinking vaguely of going out for dinner. He isn’t expecting any company. Slipping into his bathrobe, he goes toward the door. “Who’s there?” he calls. A youthful, pleasant female voice replies, “I’m looking for Martin Jamieson.” Well, okay. He opens the door. She’s perhaps twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, very sexy, on the slender side but well built. Dark hair, worn in a strangely boyish short cut. He’s never seen her before. “Hi,” he says tentatively. She grins warmly at him. “You don’t know me,” she tells him, “but I’m a friend of an old friend of yours. Mary Chambers? Mary and I grew up together in—ah—Ohio. I’m visiting New York for the first time, and Mary once told me that if I ever come to New York I should be sure to look up Martin Jamieson, and so—may I come in?” “You bet,” he says. He doesn’t remember any Mary Chambers from Ohio. But what the hell, sometimes you forget a few. What the hell.
He’s much more attractive than she expected him to be. She has always known Martin only as an old man, made unattractive as much by his coarse lechery as by what age has done to him. Hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered, pleated jowly face, sparse strands of white hair, beady eyes of faded blue—a wreck of a man. But this Martin in the doorway is sturdy, handsome, untouched by time, brimming with life and vigor and virility. She thinks of the carver in her purse and feels a genuine pang of regret at having to cut this robust boy off in his prime. But there isn’t such a great hurry, is there? First we can enjoy each other, Martin. And then the laser.
“When is she due back?” Ted demands. Friesling explains that all concepts of time are relative and flexible; so far as elapsed time at Now Level goes, she’s already returned. “What?” Ted yells. “Where is she?” Friesling does not know. She stepped out of the machine, bade the Temponautics staff a pleasant goodbye, and left the showroom. Ted puts his hand to his throat. What if she’s already killed Martin? Will I just wink out of existence? Or is there some sort of lag, so that I’ll fade gradually into unreality over the next few days? “Listen,” he says raggedly, “I’m leaving my office right now and I’ll be down at your place in less than an hour. I want you to have your machinery set up so that you can transport me to the exact point in space and time where you just sent my wife.” “But that won’t be possible,” Friesling protests. “It takes hours to prepare a client properly for—” Ted cuts him off. “Get everything set up, and to hell with preparing me properly,” he snaps. “Unless you feel like getting slammed with the biggest negligence suit since this time-machine thing got started, you better have everything ready when I get there.”
He opens the door. The girl in the hallway is young and good-looking, with close-cropped dark hair and full lips. Thank you, Mary Chambers, whoever you may be. “Pardon the bathrobe,” he says, “but I wasn’t expecting company.” She steps into his apartment. Suddenly he notices how strained and tense her face is. Country girl from Ohio, suddenly having second thoughts about visiting a strange man in a strange city? He tries to put her at her ease. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks. “Not much of a selection, I’m afraid, but I have scotch, gin, some blackberry cordial—” She reaches into her purse and takes something out. He frowns. Not a gun, exactly, but it does seem like a weapon of some sort, a little glittering metal device that fits neatly in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “what’s—” “I’m so awfully sorry, Martin,” she whispers, and a bolt of terrible fire slams into his chest.
She sips the drink. It relaxes her. The glass isn’t very clean, but she isn’t worried about picking up a disease, not after all the injections Friesling gave her. Martin looks as if he can stand some relaxing too. “Aren’t you drinking?” she asks. “I suppose I will,” he says. He pours himself some gin. She comes up behind him and slips her hand into the front of his bathrobe. His body is cool, smooth, hard. “Oh, Martin,” she murmurs. “Oh! Martin!”
Ted takes a room in one of the commercial hotels downtown. The first thing he does is try to put a call through to Alice’s mother in Chillicothe. He still isn’t really convinced that his little time-jaunt flirtation has retroactively eliminated Alice from existence. But the call convinces him, all right. The middle-aged woman who answers is definitely not Alice’s mother. Right phone number, right address—he badgers her for the information—but wrong woman. “You don’t have a daughter named Alice Porter?” he asks three or four times. “You don’t know anyone in the neighborhood who does? It’s important.” All right. Cancel the old lady, ergo cancel Alice. But now he has a different problem. How much of the universe has he altered by removing Alice and her mother? Does he live in some other city, now, and hold some other job? What has happened to Bobby and Tink? Frantically he begins phoning people. Friends, fellow workers, the man at the bank. The same response from all of them: blank stares, shakings of the head. We don’t know you, fellow. He looks at himself in the mirror. Okay, he asks himself. Who am I?
Martin moves swiftly and purposefully, the way they taught him to do in the army when it’s necessary to disarm a dangerous opponent. He lunges forward and catches the girl’s arm, pushing it upward before she can fire the shiny whatzis she’s aiming at him. She turns out to be stronger than he anticipated, and they struggle fiercely for the weapon. Suddenly it fires. Something like a lightning bolt explodes between them and knocks him to the floor, stunned. When he picks himself up he sees her lying near the door with a charred hole in her throat.