“When are we going to now?”
“Shunt and see,” he said, and jumped. I followed.
The city came to life. People in twentieth-century clothes strolled the streets: men wearing neckties, women with skirts that came down to their knees, no real flesh showing, not even a nipple. Automobiles crashing along emitting fumes that made me want to vomit. Horns honking. Drills digging up the ground. Noise, stench, ugliness. “Welcome to 1961,” Sam said. “John F. Kennedy has just been sworn in as President. The very first Kennedy, dig? That thing up there is a jet airplane. That’s a traffic light. It tells when it’s safe for you to cross the street. Those up here are street lights. They work by electricity. There are no underlevels. This is the whole thing, the city of New Orleans, right here. How do you like it?”
“It’s an interesting place to visit. I wouldn’t want to live here.”
“You feel dizzy? Sick? Revolted?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re allowed. You always feel a little temporal shock on your first look at the past. It somehow seems smellier and more chaotic than you expect. Some applicants cave in the moment they get into a decently distant shunt up the line.”
“I’m not caving.”
“Good boy.”
I studied the scene, the women with their breasts and rumps encased in tight exoskeletons under their clothing, the men with their strangled, florid faces, the squalling children. Be objective, I told myself. You are a student of other times, other cultures.
Someone pointed at us and screamed, “Hey, looka the beatniks!”
“Onward,” Sam said. “They’ve noticed us.”
He adjusted my timer. We jumped.
Same city. A century earlier. Same buildings, genteel and timeless in their pastels. No traffic lights, no drills, no street lights. Instead of automobiles zooming along the streets that bordered the old quarter, there were buggies.
“We can’t stay,” said Sam. “It’s 1858. Our clothes are too weird, and I don’t feel like pretending I’m a slave. Onward.”
We shunted.
The city vanished. We stood in a kind of swamp. Mists rose in the south. Spanish moss clung to graceful trees. A flight of birds darkened the sky.
“The year is 1382,” said the guru. “Those are passenger pigeons overhead. Columbus’ grandfather is still a virgin.”
Back and back we hopped. 897. 441. 97. Very little changed. A couple of naked Indians wandered by at one point. Sam bowed in a courteous way. They nodded affably to us, scratched their genitals, and sauntered on. Visitors from the future did not excite them greatly. We shunted. “This is the yearA.D. 1,” said Sam. We shunted. “We have gone back an additional twelve months and are now in 1B.C. The possibilities for arithmetical confusion are great. But if you think of the year as 2059B.P., and the coming year as 2058B.P., you won’t get into any trouble.”
He took me back to 5800B.P. I observed minor changes in climate; things were drier at some points than at others, drier and cooler. Then we came forward, hopping in easy stages, five hundred years at a time. He apologized for the unvarying nature of the environment; things are more exciting, he promised me, when you go up the line in the Old World. We reached 2058 and made our way to the Time Service building. Entering Hershkowitz’ empty office, we halted for a moment while Sam made a final adjustment on our timers.
“This has to be done carefully,” he explained. “I want us to land in Hershkowitz’ office thirty seconds after we left it. If I’m off even a little, we’ll meet our departing selves and I’ll be in real trouble.”
“Why not play it safe and set the dial to bring us back five minutes later, then?”
“Professional pride,” Sam said.
We shunted down the line from an empty Hershkowitz office to one in which Hershkowitz sat behind his desk, peering forward at the place where we had been — for him — thirty seconds earlier.
“Well?” he said.
Sam beamed. “The kid has balls. I say hire him.”
8.
And so they took me on as a novice Time Serviceman, in the Time Courier division. The pay wasn’t bad; the opportunities were limitless. First, though, I had to undergo my training. They don’t let novices schlep tourists around the past just like that.
For a week nothing much happened. Sam went back to work at the sniffer palace and I lounged around. Then I was called down to the Time Service headquarters to begin taking instruction.
There were eight in my class, all of us novices. We made a pretty disreputable crew. In age we ranged from early twenties to — I think — late seventies; in sex we ranged from male to female with every possible gradation between; in mental outlook we were all something on the rapacious side. Our instructor, Najeeb Dajani, wasn’t much better. He was a Syrian whose family had converted to Judaism after the Israeli conquest, for business reasons, and he wore a glittering, conspicuous Star of David as an insignia of his faith; but in moments of abstraction or stress he was known to evoke Allah or swear by the Prophet’s beard, and I don’t know if I’d really trust him on the board of directors of my synagogue, if I had a synagogue. Dajani looked like a stage Arab, swarthy and sinister, with dark sunglasses at all times, an array of massive gold rings on twelve or thirteen of his fingers, and a quick, amiable smile that showed several rows of very white teeth. I later found out that he had been taken off the lucrative Crucifixion run and demoted to this instructorship for a period of six months, by orders of the Time Patrol, by way of punishment. It seems he had been conducting a side business in fragments of the True Cross, peddling them all up and down the time lines. The rules don’t allow a Courier to take advantage of his position for private profit. What the Patrol especially objected to was not that Dajani was selling fake relics, but that he was selling authentic ones.
We began with a history lesson.
“Commercial time-travel,” Dajani said, “has been functioning about twenty years now. Of course, research into the Benchley Effect began toward the end of the last century, but you understand that the government could not permit private citizens to venture into temponautics until it was ruled to be perfectly safe. In this way the government benevolently oversees the welfare of all.”
Dajani emitted a broad wink, visible through the dark glasses as a corrugation of his brow.
Miss Dalessandro in the front row belched in contempt.
“You disagree?” Dajani asked.
Miss Dalessandro, who was a plump but curiously small-breasted woman with black hair, distinct Sapphic urges, and a degree in the history of the industrial revolution, began to reply, but Dajani smoothly cut her off and continued, “The Time Service, in one of whose divisions you have enrolled, performs several important functions. To us is entrusted the care and maintenance of all Benchley Effect devices. Also, our research division constantly endeavors to improve the technological substructure of time transport, and in fact the timer now in use was introduced only four years ago. To our own division — the Time Couriers — is assigned the task of escorting citizens into the past.” He folded his hands complacently over his paunch and studied the interlocking patterns of his gold rings. “Much of our activity is concerned with the tourist trade. This provides our economic basis. For large fees, we take groups of eight or ten sightseers on carefully conducted trips to the past, usually accompanied by one Courier, although two may be sent in unusually complex situations. At any given moment in now-time, there may be a hundred thousand tourists scattered over the previous millennia, observing the Crucifixion, the signing of the Magna Carta, the assassination of Lincoln, and such events. Because of the paradoxes inherent in creating a cumulative audience for an event located at a fixed position in the time stream, we are faced with an increasingly difficult task, and limit our tours accordingly.”