Other Worlds Than These

is yours.”

He glares into the ornate mirror. “You’ll come back for those, too.”

He turns and the bipolar, fear-shrouded Jimmy emerges.

“I ain’t afraid of the future. I’m afraid of you. I have awful dreams after you go… wherever. I didn’t sell the Spyder because of what that fop Guinness said in the papers, I just couldn’t stand riding in it anymore. I’m not some damned puppet.”

Jimmy pivots and punches me in the face. Flashbulbs pop inside my head and I sag to the tiled floor.

“Sorry about the eye,” Jimmy says, “but I’ve got a reputation to maintain.”

The tissue around my eye tingles and swells. I grin up at him. “No need to apologize.”

This body, face and sizzling nerve endings will be annihilated in fifteen minutes.

Jimmy stalks out to rejoin his waiting entourage.

“Brane-slicer” contraband, case D-T 6987:

The Wolf (1905), Frank Norris, Doubleday, Page & Co., 354 pages—Norris’s final Naturalist novel in his sweeping The Epic of the Wheat trilogy (following The Octopus and The Pit) describes the American-grown wheat relieving a famine-stricken village in Europe. Signed clothbound first edition.

Bid: $48.6M US [buyer identity redacted based on plea-bargain to assist in the apprehension of the seller]

The paramount rule in the unwritten Brane Slicer’s Guide to Survival is, don’t get caught. The second rule is, never get altruistic about your work. You’re a quantum-tunneling conquistador, not Captain Kirk. The only Prime Directive is to make money.

Consider the tale of Dick Jenks.

Jenks was obsessed with Lennon. He abandoned his research and became the founding father of brane slicers so he could prevent the shooting outside The Dakota and allow his idol’s musical renaissance to flourish beyond Double Fantasy and the posthumous, incomplete Milk and Honey. Jenks tried to intercede on a thousand Earths and watched Lennon die again and again. He eventually located a Wobbly-B, but the D-T boys were closing in, and he cracked. Jenks disguised himself as Lennon, identical clothes, black wire-rimmed glasses and a wig. He arrived sixty seconds ahead of schedule and Chapman, waiting in the gloom, emptied his pistol into Jenks instead. Lennon was so shaken by the near miss that he withdrew from public life, went back on H, and turned the paranoid dial up to ten. He died of an overdose on Christmas Eve 1980.

Poor Jenks. It wasn’t a Wobbly.

Having auctioned the Shipwrecked print, my plan is to undergo extensive gene therapy and pop back into my wonderful Wobbly to, say, the high-flying 1990s. Stow the Device somewhere, and live off interest.

But first—

“What the hell is this?” Jimmy says.

We’re on the Universal backlot in the Old West Town, spring 1963.

“It’s the Hitchcock script I gave you. It’ll be groundbreaking, like Psycho. Hitchcock will be back on top, and you’ll win another Oscar.”

Kaleidoscope is the crypt-dark Hitchcock masterpiece that every studio passed on, the story of a handsome young serial killer, told from the murderer’s perspective. He planned to shoot it using hand-held cameras, three decades before The Blair Witch Project. Only Jimmy could invoke the necessary mix of sex appeal and tortured soul.

“He’s a rapist,” Jimmy says. “What would my fans think?”

He drops the script and walks away, spurs jingling.

Jimmy’s career is in a tailspin. He is arrested for beating a gossip columnist over a scathing review of his Hamlet, and again when he breaks a director’s nose after a botched scene in Billy the Kid Rides Again with John Wayne. The studio heads are tired of the drinking, reckless driving between films and scandals. Jimmy is thirty-three and looks forty-five. He’s uninsurable. Jack Warner dumps him. Paramount signs and then drops him after he walks off the set of a love triangle with Jane Fonda and Paul Newman.

Jimmy cables Hitchcock and tells him what a fat, sick bastard he is. MCA drops the project.

I confront Jimmy in his trailer on the set of The Horror of Party Beach. It is June 1964, and Jimmy’s hair is thinning, his face hollowed. The trailer reeks of sour beer and marijuana. His dust-covered bongos are piled in one corner, half-buried by soiled clothes.

I am dressed as a stagehand. “The director is waiting for you.”

Jimmy is sprawled on a sofa bed, drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He glares at the walls and motions for me to leave.

I say, “Remember when you shot East of Eden? You used to whistle when you were ready for a scene. It was a signal you and Kazan worked out.”

Jimmy flinches and his arm knocks the bottle off the sofa. He watches whiskey gurgle onto the dirty carpet before grabbing it. He staggers to his feet and I recoil from the anguish in his eyes.

“Jimmy—”

He gestures around the trailer. “Not exactly the Chateau Marmont, is it? I’m just doing this little picture to… to broaden my range.” He laughs, a humorless whistling sound. “Will I win an Oscar for this one?”

He hurls something and I duck. The whiskey bottle spins over my head to shatter against the wall.

Jimmy removes a small blue-steel revolver from the mirrored counter and crosses the length of the trailer with surprising speed, kicking litter out of his way. His pale, whiskered face looks feral. He aims the pistol at my head and cocks the hammer.

“Stop screwing with my life.” His eyes are flat, like a shark’s.

The chime sounds inside my mind. I back slowly to the door. “I gave you a second chance, Jimmy. I warned you about instability—”

“I think you’ve been lying to me from the start,” he says, and his finger whitens on the trigger.

At forty-six, Jimmy is unrecognizable. The hair clinging to his scalp in a widow’s peak is gray and closely cropped. His face is an atlas of wrinkles. His eyes are rheumy and vacant. The tip of his left ear is missing. It is November 1977.

I sit beside him on the park bench and sling birdseed to a motley band of Central Park pigeons. Jimmy smokes a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette and stares straight through the bright clusters of playground children.

Given the gift of years, his feverish passion for his craft should have blossomed—but his soul was eaten away by the moths of time like Welles and Brando. If he were alive, crazy Dick Jenks would be rolling on the damp pavement, roaring laughter, scaring the pigeons.

“Hello, Jimmy.”

His head swivels like a gun turret. His eyes focus.

“So I didn’t kill you.”

“No, but it was very close.”

His face crumples like newspaper.

“Have you spoken to your daughter? Have you thought about working again, something small like off- Broadway theater?”

Defiant fire stokes behind Jimmy’s eyes. I see Jim Stark, not a broken, prematurely old man.

“You can go straight to hell.”

I place a white envelope on the bench seat.

Jimmy flicks away the cigarette butt and leans close enough for me to smell his poverty and despair.

“Money inside? What I want is to wake up, and all of this be a bad dream.” He