“I don’t want to interrupt—” Cashel began.
“Then be quiet. Now that old harridan and that flower-faced child are one and the same person, with fifty years of time between them. The sublime creature on the stage is the harridan as she was thirty years ago and the child as she will be twenty years hence. As the one rushes forward, the other rushes back; the two parts of the same self meet in the person of the curtsying actress at the peak of her triumph. But that actress is in intolerable agony. Not only has she an appalling Charley horse; she knows that the moment she rises something unthinkably embarrassing is going to happen. And she is doomed so to remain forever.”
“It won’t do; it won’t do at all,” said Mourne Cashel with vehemence. “It’s irrational. It’s unworkable. Things simply aren’t done like that!”
“Oh, come off it! It’s as rational as all your goo about galaxies and space-time continua and passionate robots and whatnot. Time is only imaginary, anyway,” I said. “Fifty dollars, please!”
“Even if I liked the story, I couldn’t. Won’t you order?”
“Tripe,” I said. “Tripe a la mode.”
He ordered an omelet glumly. I was enjoying myself.
“Order a bottle of wine,” I said, “and you may advance me a mere twenty-five.”
“Wine, by all means,” said he, beckoning. “But money, no. You know you’re only teasing me. Why do you do it? It upsets me; you know it does. And time is not imaginary, if you know how to use it, Ira. With your youth— How old are you, by the way?”
“Thirty-three.”
“With your youth and your talent.... What—time imaginary? Oh, far, far from it—ever so far from imaginary!”
“Imaginary,” I said. “But let’s assume otherwise, if you like. There’s a story in it. You can let me have something on—”
“Ira, please, not again!” N
“For example,” I said. “You say to an office boy loafing at the water cooler ‘Don’t loaf on my time.’ For x dollars a year you are actually buying that boy’s time. He wants to use that time otherwise. He wants to see people playing baseball. But that time is yours. If you fire him he couldn’t say to you, ‘Here’s your money back, Mr. Cashel; please give me back eighteen months.’ “
Cashel said solemnly—for there is no more inveterate enterer-into-the-spirit-of-things than your science fantasist —”No, of course not. It would be used-up time. It wouldn’t be any good to him any more; don’t you see?”
I pretended to be grave in turn. “One thing I’d like to know,” I said, “is, where do people like you get all their time? Because they evidently use up far more than they’ve got. You know the soapy little biographical bits you slip into your blotted little pulp: ‘Lucy Lockett is the author of sixteen novels and more than eleven hundred short stories. She is married to an archaeologist, whom she accompanies on most of his expeditions. Mrs. Lockett keeps house for her husband and six children. She lectures three times a week on ceramics at the Home for Wayward Wives. In her spare time she practices psychiatry.’
“How can she? I repeat, where does she find the time?”
“Well—” Cashel began.
I went on: “ ‘Brass Williams is thirty-four, happily married, and father of eleven sons and a daughter (Peewee). He is Professor of astrophysics at East-Western University and has been a gas fitter, a theatrical-costume Designer, a heavyweight boxer, a test pilot, a puddler in a steel mill and an optometrist. His published works include three encyclopedias, seven textbooks, nine novels, ten plays, sixteen filmscripts, and he conducts a daily syndicated column. Under three noms de plume he has written sixteen hundred short stories and novellas. In his spare time he makes bent-iron gates. His hobby is watchmaking.’
“How? Above all, when? There’s your story, Cashel; there’s your story! These people go about picking up loafers. ‘Have you a little time to spare?’ they ask. ‘All the time in the world, bud!’ A bottle of Sneaky Pete changes hands—”
“No, no, no!” Cashel almost squeaked in his excitement. “That couldn’t be the way of it. Time, per se, wouldn’t be the way of it. Time, per se, wouldn’t be of any use at all unless it were connected with a certain human potential. Your born loafer, your irreclaimable skid-row wino, would have destroyed his potential. His time wouldn’t be of any value! The only time worth buying would be that of a man who had disciplined himself to the use of time.”
I said, “Jargon, little man, jargon! But I love the way you creatures of the scientific fairy-tale clique take yourselves seriously. If you care to purchase a little of my time, by the bye, a small advance will secure—”
“No, please, Ira! I concede we fantasy fellows do form a clique. We have to. Who else talks our language? We make it our business to say ‘Let us assume’ in such a manner as to stimulate the technologists to think Why not? We rationalize the if. We—”
“You do nothing of the sort. You fill a blunderbuss with nightmares and fire it into a crowd. If one slug grazes anything, you call yourselves prophets. But we were talking about time—as a commodity. Here’s an idea for you. Assume that you are a man who needs time.”
“I am; I do,” sighed Cashel.
“Ah, but assume you aren’t Mourne Cashel, who whimpers ‘I haven’t got it’ when a gentleman mentions a lousy fifty dollars. Imagine yourself to be Mr. X, solvent and in the market for time.”
“Hadn’t you better have a brandy?” Cashel almost begged.
“Certainly I had better. To continue: Being such a man, you look around for somebody with what you call potential. As you say, an idiot’s time isn’t worth having. And as luck will have it, you meet Ira Noxon.”
Cashel said, “Ah, your time would certainly be worth having. You are a hard worker, Ira.”
“Are you trying to be funny?” I asked.
“Not at all. You have a stupendous potential. Just the energy you have put into doing nothing would supply current for a small town.”
“Be less familiar, little man,” I said. “Now you have met me. You ask, ‘How much do you want for some of your time?’ Words to that effect. I reply, naturally, ‘I am no huckster. This is a buyer’s market. How much are you paying per unit of time? How much an hour, or day, or month?”
Cashel, engrossed in the spirit of the thing, cried, “No, no, no! Years—it must be a term of years.”
“Hold hard,” I said. “Would that imply a term of servitude? I couldn’t go for that, you know.”
“Certainly not. Just your time, pure and simple. You wouldn’t even miss it, necessarily,” said Cashel.
“This being the case, I say to Mr. X, ‘I can let you have five years.’”
“But not of your past, as in the analogy of the boss and the office boy,” said Cashel. “That couldn’t possibly suit, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “Future.”
Cashel said owlishly, after calling for more brandy, “But they’d have to be consecutive years.”
“Oh, yes, by all means,” I said, “as consecutive as you please. So Mr. X says, ‘How about ten thousand a year?’ “
“Too much, too much—can’t run to it!” cried Cashel.
“Shut up. I say to Mr. X, ‘You are talking like an inky little plagiarist I know called Mourne Cashel. I wouldn’t consider a penny less than fifteen thousand a year. Think of all the potential!’ Mr. X thinks and thinks.”
“I can see by your face you have something naughty up your sleeve,” said Cashel.
“Wait. I go on to say, ‘Naturally, I have read about deals with the devil, and so forth; how deadly it can be to sell even a second of one’s time, in which one may utter a fateful word or pull a trigger. I stipulate, none of that! The time I sell may not be used in any way to hurt me or—to be on the safe side—to hurt anyone else. You get into trouble on your own time, not on the valuable time you buy from me.’”