The Kid gave me a disgusted look. I said, “Problem?”
“You picked the moment and the place. I thought we were supposed to get here after the cease-fire.”
“We have,” I said, and as the disgust in his expression yielded to disbelief, “Some of the Russian artillery units haven’t got the word yet.”
“Either that, or they’re getting in their last licks at the Germans.” He crossed his arms. “So, what, we just wait until they get it out of their systems?”
“Just till they start lobbing shells in another direction. It’ll be a few minutes.”
I sat down on a roughly level slab of concrete. The Kid went through his host’s pockets, produced a single sad-looking unfiltered cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, went through pockets a second time in search of matches. There were none. He said, “Got a light?”
“Those things’re bad for you,” I said idly.
He raised his host’s hand and waggled the fingers—“Not for me”—then stuck the cigarette behind his ear. He found a place to sit across from me, vigorously scratched his head, his leg, his head again, then reached inside his ratty coat and scratched his belly.
Which, of course, made me aware of my own intimate companions. I started to scratch but stopped and listened as another shell whined over. I didn’t move until it had exploded.
“Anybody who worries as much as you do,” said The Kid, “shouldn’t be here.”
I started to tell him that somebody always has to be in charge of worrying, and because it’s my nature to worry, it always falls on me to be that somebody, but then Aphorisms to Zingers spat out Tell me my Faults, and mend your own, from Poor Richard’s Almanack. I kept my mouth shut.
Unfortunately, he didn’t do likewise. “If all I could do was worry,” he went on, “I’d just stay home. There’s plenty enough for you to worry about back in the here and now. Me, I am determined to enjoy myself. I did the Civil War, from Manassas to Appomattox. I did it all the way to the end, even after the Civil War freaks really started creeping me out. I started messing with their heads. Like, I’d find ’em hosts who were about to go into a big battle and get shot all to pieces. Then’d come my favorite part, where they got to learn what Civil War surgery was all about.”
He was watching me closely as he spoke. I knew better than to believe everything any chronopath said, but I also knew enough not to disbelieve anything out of hand; if what The Kid was telling me came within fifty miles of being the truth (probably about the correct distance), he wouldn’t have been the first chronopath to give his tagalongs a bit more than they’d bargained for. I had been tempted along those lines myself, once or twice.
I said, mildly, “Didn’t these people sort of resent getting shot all to pieces?”
The Kid laughed like the happy young psycho he was. “Well, I didn’t do it to all of ’em. Just the ones who really got on my nerves. The ones who thought, because I was gonna take ’em back and insert ’em in the battle of Chancellorsville, I was dying to hear everything they had to say about what a genius Stonewall Jackson was. All I promised ’em was, they’d remember everything after I took ’em out and got ’em back. And the hosts I picked for ’em would survive the particular fight they wanted to be in. And they would get to lay eyes on ol’ Stonewall. But I never said a host’d survive in one piece, or that they might only get to see Stonewall as he rode by on his horse. Or that they might even get to be one of his own men who shot him as he rode by.” Now he had a dreamy expression on his face. “If they complained afterward, I’d tell ’em, Hey, look, I’d say, you wanted the experience of being a Civil War soldier—getting a leg sawn off without anesthetic was part of the experience! That and lice, bad food, diarrhea. And what were they gonna do? I had their signed waivers!”
“Ah-huh,” I said. “You know, it occurs to me that if you couldn’t time travel, you’d probably be off amusing yourself somewhere by setting bugs on fire with a magnifying glass.”
“Does that work?” He waited a beat, then grinned. “Had you going!”
“Should I take that to mean you actually do have enough compassion not to set fire to bugs?”
His grin had settled on his face. “Compassion,” he said, “is all just people pathetically huddling together, clinging to each other, while the universe chops ’em down.”
“Ah-huh,” I said.
That wasn’t the response he had expected to provoke. Undaunted, he changed tack. “Somebody told me once that Third Reich freaks’re even worse than Civil War freaks. Guys who want to come back and tell Hitler how to win the war.”
I folded my arms and looked at him and felt as though I were about to address a know-it-all teenager, which in fact was almost the case, and I started to say, Third Reich freaks, real Third Reich freaks, never get past screening, and then I would have gone on and explained, They generally don’t have history degrees, they’re generally uneducated or at least undereducated schlubs with closets full of guns and heads full of fantasies about darkies, infidels, and black helicopters, and next I’d have reminded him that the purpose of screening was to weed out anyone with a serious ax to grind, which particularly included anyone who wanted to come back and tell Hitler how to win WW2, and finally I would’ve pointed out that even if we were somehow to neglect to suppress someone’s personality before inserting him into the Third Reich, well, when had Hitler ever let anybody tell him anything? But Poor Richard’s Almanack headed me off at the pass again, this time with He’s a Fool that cannot conceal his Wisdom, so all I said was, “You might be disappointed,” and no more.
He sneered when he saw that I wasn’t going to give him any satisfaction. He sought some other creative outlet, and soon found it in field-stripping his cigarette. I sat wondering glumly why I hadn’t retired after my previous jaunt, or the one before it. But, of course, I knew why: closure. I’d lived in the here and now, linear time, through the fatuous ’50s, the shrill ’60s, the simpering ’70s, the affectless ’80s, the nihilistic ’90s, and was about to emerge alive from the awful Oughts. It had been an interesting bunch of years thus far, and I might even live through the terrible Teens before it was finished. And I’d traveled all over the first half of the twentieth century, and that was an interesting bunch of years, too. So many battles and massacres. The first time I’d gone into the past—I mean, the first time that I’d understood that what I was doing was going into the past—I had expected I would be this ghost surrounded by shadows. Instead, I was a real person, and all around me real people were inflicting real damage on other real people. Then, since I was essentially seeing a lot of the same things over and over again, only from different angles, I’d thought, Well, I’ll get used to it. But I never had got used to it, though I’d probably witnessed more of WW2—and WW1, and plenty of the little wars in between—than anyone who had actually been alive then, in Unear time. I had had enough of blitzkriegs, death marches, extermination camps, and fire-bombings, and already knew that I didn’t have the stomach for Hiroshima. The fall of Berlin would have to satisfy my longing for closure. The part of the past that was still physically accessible to me was narrowing. I was gaining on my own birthday, November 10, 1948. I could do the Berlin Airlift and the Truman-Dewey race, but I didn’t have the interest myself and wouldn’t need the money even if the demand were great. Which it wouldn’t be, because the only thing people go to the twentieth century for is the wars. And after November 10, 1948—well, as de Maupassant wrote, “It is not possible to be and to have been at the same time.” Granted, de Maupassant wasn’t a physicist and hadn’t been thinking about time travel when he wrote that, but I didn’t want to be the one to find out directly how Time and Space dealt with paradoxes.