Passing through the lobby of the Caesar Hotel, he emerged on the daytime, busy Tijuana street of ten years hence.
Sunlight blinded him; he stood blinking and adjusting. The surface vehicles, even here, had changed. Sleeker, more attractive. The street, now, was adequately paved. There came the tamale vendors and the rug vendors except that now they were not robants; they were, he saw with a start, reegs. Evidently they had entered Terran society at the bottom rung, would have to work their way to the equality he had witnessed a century from his own time, ninety years from now. It did not seem fair to him, but there it was.
Hands in his pockets, he walked with the surging crowd that inhabited the sidewalks of Tijuana throughout all the ages, until he arrived at the pharmacy at which he had bought the capsules of JJ-180. As always it was open for business. It, too, had not altered in a decade, except that now the hernia belt display had gone. In its place he saw a contrivance unfamiliar to him. Halting, he examined the Spanish sign propped behind it. The thing evidently increased one's sexual potency, he decided. Permitted – as he translated the Spanish – an infinitude of orgasms, one immediately following the other. Amused, he continued on inside the pharmacy, to the counter in the rear.
A different pharmacist, this one a black-haired elderly female, greeted him. 'Sí?' She leered, showing cheap chromium teeth.
Eric said, 'You have a West German product, g-Totex blau?'
'I look. You wait, okay?' The woman trudged off and disappeared among the pharmaceuticals. Eric wandered around the displays sightlessly. 'G-Totex blau a terrible poison,' the old woman called to him. 'You have to sign the book for it; sí?'
'Sí,' Eric said.
The product, in its black carton, was laid on the counter before him. Two dollars fifty US,' the old woman said. She lugged the control book out, put it where he could reach it with the chained pen. As he signed she wrapped the black carton. 'You going to kill yourself, señor?' she asked acutely. 'Yes, I can tell. This will not hurt with this product; I have seen it. No pain, just no heart all of a sudden.'
'Yes,' he agreed. 'It's a good product.'
'From A. G. Chemie. Reliable.' She beamed in what seemed approval.
He paid the money – his ten-year-old bills were accepted without comment – and left the pharmacy with his package. Weird, he thought, in Tijuana it's still as it was. Always will be. Nobody even cares if you destroy yourself; it's a wonder they don't have booths at night where it's done for you, at ten pesos. Perhaps there is by now.
It shook him a little, the woman's evident approval – and she did not know anything about him, even who he was. The war did it, he said to himself. I don't know why I let it surprise me.
When he returned to the Caesar Hotel and started upstairsJo his room, the desk clerk – unfamiliar to him – halted him. 'Sir, you are not a resident here.' The clerk had moved swiftly from behind the counter to bar his way. 'Did you want a room?'
'I have one,' Eric said, and then remembered it had been ten years in the past; his occupancy had lapsed long ago.
'Nine U S dollars each night in advance,' the desk clerk said. 'Since you do not have luggage.'
Eric got out his wallet, passed over a ten-dollar bill. The clerk, however, inspected the bill with professional disavowal and mounting suspicion.
'These were called in,' the clerk informed him. 'Hard to exchange now because no more legal.' He raised his head and scrutinized Eric with defiance. Twenty. Two tens. And maybe even then I not accept them.' He waited, devoid of enthusiasm; he clearly resented being paid in currency of this kind. It probably reminded him of the old days, the bad times of the war.
He had only one more bill in his wallet and that was a five. And, incredibly, through some freakish foul-up, perhaps because he had traded his watch for them, the useless currency from ninety years in the future; he spread them on the counter, their intricate, multi-colored scroll-work shimmering. So perhaps, he thought, Kathy's electronic part had reached Virgil Ackerman back in the mid thirties after all; at least it had a chance. That cheered him.
The clerk picked up one of the 2155 bills. 'What is this?' He held it to the light. 'I never see before. You make it yourself?'
'No,' Eric said.
'I can't use,' the clerk decided. 'Go before I call the police; you make it yourself, I know.' He tossed the bill back with the others in a gesture of repugnance. 'Funny money. Go away.'
Leaving the 2155 bills on the counter but retrieving the five, Eric turned and walked out the door of the hotel, his package of g-Totex blau under his arm.
There were many malformed little alleys in Tijuana, even now after the war; he found a narrow, dark passage between brick buildings, littered with debris and the overflow from two immense ashcans that had once been oil drums. In the alley he seated himself on the wooden step by a boarded-up entrance, lit a cigarette, sat smoking and pondering. He could not be seen from the street; the people rushing by on the sidewalk paid no attention to him and he focused his attention by watching them, in particular the girls. This, too, was as he knew it in the previous decade. A girl during daylight hours on the streets of Tijuana dressed with incomprehensible smartness: high heels, angora sweater, shiny purse, gloves, coat over her shoulders, preceded, as she hurried, by high, sharp-as-tacks breasts, the smartness carrying even to the detail of her modern bra. What did these girls do for a living? Where had they learned to dress so well, not to mention the problem of financing such a wardrobe? He had wondered this in his own time and he wondered it now.
The answer, he speculated, would be to stop one of these daytime Tijuana girls in flight, ask her where she lived and if she bought her clothes here or across the border. He wondered if these girls had ever been across to the United States, if they had boy friends in Los Angeles, if they were as good in bed as they looked to be. Something, some force not visible, made their lives possible. He hoped that at the same time it did not make them frigid; what a travesty of life, on the potency of natural creatures, that would be.
The trouble with such girls, he thought, is that they get old so fast. What you hear is true; by thirty they're worn out, fat, the bra and the coat and purse and gloves are gone; all that remains is the black, burning eyes peering out from beneath the shaggy brows, the original slender creature still imprisoned somewhere within but unable to speak any longer, play or make love or run. The click of heels against the pavement, the rushing forward into life; that's gone and only a slopping, dragging sound is left behind. The most horrid sound in the world, that of the once-was: alive in the past, perishing in the present, a corpse made of dust in the future. Nothing changes in Tijuana and yet nothing lives out its normal span. Time moves too fast here and also not at all. Look at my situation, for instance, he thought. I'm committing suicide ten years in the future, or rather I'll wipe out a life ten years ago. If I do this, what becomes of the Eric Sweetscent now working for Kaiser in Oakland? And the ten years he's spent watching over Kathy – what does that do to her?
Maybe this is my weak way of hurting her. A further punishment because she's sick.