“Look!” he cried. “If you won’t believe me, look out the window. See on that balcony? The redheaded hunchback? Just like I told you. Quick!”
Bullneck stared despite himself. He saw the hunchback peer across into the office. He saw the sudden glint of metal in the hunchback’s hand. “Brother,” he said to Bill, “I’ll tend to you later.”
The hunchback had his rifle halfway to his shoulder when Bullneck’s automatic spat and Bill braked his car in the red zone, jumped out, and dashed through four suites of offices before anybody had the courage to stop him.
The man with the courage was a huge bull-necked plain-clothes man, who rumbled, “Where’s the fire?”
“In an assassin’s gun,” said Bill, and took advantage of Bullneck’s confusion to reach the door marked MAYOR—PRIVATE. But just as he started to push it open, a vast hand lit on his neck and jerked.
As Bill descended from the chandelier after his third try, Bullneck took up a stand in front of the door, with straddled legs and drawn gun. “You ain’t going in,” he said clarifyingly.
Bill spat out a tooth and outlined the situation. “—12:33,” he ended. “His Honor is going to be slumped over the desk, dead. Unless you help me get him out of range. See? It says so here. In the paper.”
“How can it? Gwan. Go peddle your paper.”
Bill’s glance darted to the balcony. “Look, if you won’t believe me. See the redheaded hunchback? Just like I told you. Quick! We’ve got to—”
Bullneck stared. He saw the sudden glint of metal in the hunchback’s hand. “Brother,” he said, “I’ll tend to you later.”
The hunchback had his rifle halfway to his shoulder when Bullneck’s automatic spat and Bill braked his car in the red zone, jumped out, and dashed through four suites before anybody stopped him.
The man who did was a bull-necked plain-clothes man, who rumbled— “Don’t you think,” said Snulbug, “you’ve had about enough of this?”
Bill agreed mentally, and there he was sitting in his roadster in front of the city hall. His clothes were unrumpled, his eyes were bloodless, his teeth were all there, and his corncob was still intact. “And just what,” he demanded of his pipe bowl, “has been going on?”
Snulbug popped his snaky head out. “Light this again, will you? It’s getting cold. Thanks.”
“What happened?” Bill insisted.
“People,” Snulbug moaned. “No sense. Don’t you see? So long as the newspaper was in the future, it was only a possibility. If you’d had, say, a hunch that the mayor was in danger, maybe you could have saved him. But when I brought it into now, it became a fact. You can’t possibly make it untrue.”
“But how about man’s free will? Can’t I do whatever I want to do?”
“Sure. It was your precious free will that brought the paper into now. You can’t undo your own will. And, anyway, your will’s still free. You’re free to go getting thrown around chandeliers as often as you want. You probably like it. You can do anything up to the point where it would change what’s in that paper. Then you have to start in again and again and again until you make up your mind to be sensible.”
“But that—” Bill fumbled for words, “that’s just as bad as . . . as fate or predestination. If my soul wills to—”
“Newspapers aren’t enough. Time theory isn’t enough. So I should tell him about his soul! People—” and Snulbug withdrew into the bowl.
Bill looked up at the city hall regretfully and shrugged his resignation. Then he folded his paper to the sports page and studied it carefully.
Snulbug thrust his head out again as they stopped in the many-acred parking lot. “Where is it this time?” he wanted to know. “Not that it matters.”
“The racetrack.”
“Oh—” Snulbug groaned, “I might have known it. You’re all alike. No sense in the whole caboodle. I suppose you found a long shot?”
“Darned tooting I did. Alhazred at twenty to one in the fourth. I’ve got $500, the only money I’ve got left on earth. Plunk on Alhazred’s nose it goes, and there’s our $10,000.”
Snulbug grunted. “I hear his lousy spell, I watch him get caught on a merry-goround, it isn’t enough, I should see him lay a bet on a long shot.”
“But there isn’t a loophole in this. I’m not interfering with the future; I’m just taking advantage of it. Alhazred’ll win this race whether I bet on him or not. Five pretty hundred-dollar parimutuel tickets, and behold: The Hitchens Laboratory!” Bill jumped spryly out of his car and strutted along joyously. Suddenly he paused and addressed his pipe: “Hey! Why do I feel so good?”
Snulbug sighed dismally. “Why should anybody?”
“No, but I mean: I took a hell of a shellacking from that plug-ugly in the office. And I haven’t got a pain or an ache.”
“Of course not. It never happened.”
“But I felt it then.”
“Sure. In a future that never was. You changed your mind, didn’t you? You decided not to go up there?”
“O.K., but that was after I’d already been beaten up.”
“Uh-uh,” said Snulbug firmly. “It was before you hadn’t been.” And he withdrew again into the pipe.
There was a band somewhere in the distance and the raucous burble of an announcer’s voice. Crowds clustered around the $2 windows, and the $5 weren’t doing bad business. But the $ 100 window, where the five beautiful pasteboards lived that were to create an embolism laboratory, was almost deserted.
Bill buttonholed a stranger with a purple nose. “What’s the next race?”
“Second, Mac.”
Swell, Bill thought. Lots of time. And from now on— He hastened to the $100 window and shoved across the five bills that he had drawn from the bank that morning. “Alhazred, on the nose,” he said.
The clerk frowned with surprise, but took the money and turned to get the tickets.
Bill buttonholed a stranger with a purple nose. “What’s the next race?”
“Second, Mac.”
Swell, Bill thought. And then he
