“You remember Alice,” Bill said to me. “Alice Fremont?”
She was a little older than he, I thought. Her face was pale and thin, like the carved face of a saint sanctified through many stringencies, but alive and hungry withal. She was looking at me hungrily, too, and I shifted uncomfortably.
“I told Alice what you suggested,” Bill said to me. “About her taking you back. Us, back.”
“Us,” sneered Jaybee. “All or none.”
“Jaybee, uh, overheard us,” Bill explained. “He wants to be included.” He shifted nervously, watching Jaybee from the corners of his eyes.
“Included, right.” Jaybee’s jaw moved as though he were chewing something. His teeth made an audible gnashing.
Alice sat down on the bed. Bill pulled a seat out of the wall and sat confronting her. Jaybee lounged against the door, as though to prevent anyone escaping. I stayed where I was, with Grumpkin behind my legs, his head against my ankle.
“Before we technicians do a trip with a team,” Alice explained, “we always do a check-trip, to be sure the machine’s working right. The check-trip is always a hundred years, give or take a few. The tech is supposed to be the only one aboard during the check-trip. That’s part of the reason we only go a hundred years, so if something’s wrong with the machine, only the tech gets abandoned, and the time is recent enough a person could probably get along.”
Bill slumped on his chair. “What are you saying, Alice? Tell me what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying, any tech can get into the complex anytime to make a check-trip. If I could get you in there with me, I could take you back with me.”
“A hundred years?” I asked. “That’s no good! I want to go home! That’s what? Seven hundred at least, isn’t it?”
“Seven hundred forty-two,” she said. “There’s no way to do that. The machine is energized for trips over a hundred only on receipt of a trip-authorization number from the powers that be, but it’s always on ready power, that is, energized for a hundred years—roughly. Zero to one day takes a lot of power. That’s what they call the Present Horizon. It takes enormous energy to get into that time because nothing is settled yet. People don’t know what the hell is happening in the present. Some things that happen are inconsequential and get forgotten almost immediately. Some things that don’t happen are thought to have happened; they get recorded or have consequences, and then people think they remember them. The present is fluid. It has to settle before you can travel in it.
“From one day to ninety-eight point something-or-other-years takes almost no power, so they keep the machine hot. That’s the Recent Past, and we don’t fool with it, either, because we’d be in the lifetimes of living people. Still, it’s cheaper keeping the machine powered for the Recent Past than shutting it down between trips and having to power it over the Present Horizon again.”
“So you’re saying we could go back to the 1900s?” Jaybee asked.
“Talk to Janice about it,” Alice suggested. “There are rumors that a lot of people have gone back. We know some have because we’ve talked to them ourselves when we’ve been there.”
“I met one once,” Bill said. “When we did the first shots on the whales. She told me she had come back.”
Alice nodded. “I’ve heard some researchers say it’s the last good time. The last years before Fidipur.”
Bill stared at me intently. “It would be better than here.”
“Yeah,” Jaybee muttered. “If we end up there. But we could end up dead. There’s guards on the travel-complex. Alice may have a permit, but they won’t give me one.”
“I said it would work if I could get you in,” Alice said. “I’m not talking anybody into anything. Bill asked me, I didn’t ask him.”
“You’d stay?” I asked her. “You’d stay there?”
“Damn right,” she said, glaring into my eyes as though determined to find something I didn’t know was there. “If I can figure out a way to sneak us down there.”
“Janice finds things out,” I said. “Bill told me so. Ask her to find out who goes where the machine is.”
“Janice?” Alice wondered.
Bill looked up alertly. “She might want to go along.”
“She’d drag Martin in.”
“No,” said Bill. “That’s why she might go. They broke up not long ago. He said she was getting weird and filed for separate quarters. Haven’t you noticed how they’ve acted? She’s become very strange and religious.”
“Then she might want to go.” Alice shook her head, ran her fingers through her short hair. “She might. Who’s going to ask her?”
“I will,” said Bill.
The others said a few more words, then left. As he was going out, Jaybee turned around and gave me one more stare, a long, swallowing look, as though he’d like to hit me. Or eat me.
Bill brought Janice to the home-sweet-home later on. I was asleep when they came. They talked in whispers, and I never really woke up. I was dreaming about Westfaire, and I didn’t want to wake up because in the dream I knew if I wakened Westfaire would vanish forever. So I let Bill and Janice talk without letting go of the vision, knowing when Janice left they had come to some kind of agreement. When I woke up, I remembered this very clearly, but there was no one to tell it to but Grumpkin. Grumpkin looked sick. His fur was dull. His eyes looked bleary. He needed outdoors. He needed it no more than I. My legs were jumpy. My skin was breaking out in spots. I dreamed of trees. The burning in me was getting so bad I thought I’d turn to coals and die.
A day or two later, Bill came home with two suits of stiff green clothing that went over everything and closed up the
