Time Twisters Read online

  All the comments were complimentary until Bill said offhandedly, “You made one gaffe, though, you know.”

  I was wounded, of course. You’ll always remember that single flotsam of rebuke in a sea of praise. “What do you mean?”

  “When you were reviewing that mystery about the World War II home front, you said the use of the term ‘shrink’ was an anachronism.”

  “It was,” I said. “ ‘Shrink’ as slang for psychiatrist didn’t come in until much later.”

  Charlie came to my aid. “Justin’s right. I would say maybe in the late forties or early fifties, they started to use headshrinker as a slang term for psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Eventually, this got shortened to shrink, but not before, I don’t know, maybe late fifties, early sixties. For sure, early forties is too early.”

  Fred said, “Charlie’s got it right. I’m older than anybody here, and I don’t remember hearing shrink to mean shrink before the Kennedy administration.”

  “It’s not a serious mistake, though,” Maisie said. “It’s not easy to keep track of period slang.”

  “I never said it was a serious mistake,” I said, sounding more defensive than I intended. “I just mentioned it in passing in a damn favorable review. The author should be very happy with that review.”

  “Not the issue,” Bill said. “You got it wrong, Justin, and the rest of you—well, all I can say is your memories are imperfect.”

  “Bill,” Fred pointed out, “you’re too young to remember when they said shrink or didn’t say shrink. I was there.”

  “On the couch?” Charlie said. Fred grinned, and the tension lifted a little, but Bill wouldn’t leave it alone.

  “No, I wasn’t there, but I read a lot from that period, and I’m sensitive to language. They did use shrink in that way at that time, and I can prove it.”

  “You can’t because they didn’t,” I said, even while thinking we were making way too big a deal of this.

  “I’ll bet you ten bucks and a foofendorker I can prove it.”

  Ah, the dreaded foofendorker, our group’s equivalent of the triple-dog-dare. Foofendorker had been the name of an alien race in a science fiction story by one of our former members. We were so hard on that story, we reduced her to tears one week, and to make amends and keep her in the group, we agreed to break our rule limiting members to one reading per meeting and awarded her an extra one at our next. She still drifted off, not getting the unalloyed praise she wanted except from Grace, and from that day forward the awarding of an extra reading was called a foofendorker, to much hilarity. If I awarded a foofendorker to another member through a wager, it would mean giving up my own turn to read that week.

  “You’re on,” I said, confident I would win.

  A couple of days later, Bill called me at work, asking me to meet him that afternoon at Liam’s Irish Pub so he could collect his ten bucks.

  “You haven’t proved anything,” I pointed out.

  “I will. You know, of course, that I collect old pulp magazines.”

  “Right. It’s a very positive influence on your writing.” That last was sarcastic and he knew it. I liked the old pulps, too, but I hadn’t moved in.

  When we met after work at Liam’s, we would normally stand at the bar, often arguing which of our office day jobs was the more exasperating and unful-filling. Sometimes we would chat with the bartender, yet another wannabe writer who swore he would join our group if not for his working hours. But today was different. Bill insisted we repair to a booth in the most secluded back corner. He looked around with exaggerated furtiveness, then opened his briefcase and removed an old pulp magazine in a clear plastic slipcase. He could not have handled it more carefully if it had been an original Picasso or a vial of nitroglycerine.

  He showed me the cover, which I peered at in the barely adequate bar lighting. The magazine was called Stunning Science Adventures, dated January 1943, and its cover showed a classic bug-eyed monster wearing a Nazi armband menacing a voluptuous young woman in a see-through space suit, with a barren moonscape in the background, a recognizable Earth above the horizon. Then he carefully withdrew the magazine from its slipcase and opened its browning pages.

  “This is from a story called ‘Time Trampler’ by Frank Paulsen. I’ll read you some of the dialogue: ‘I don’t belong here. I belong in another place, another century, and I’ve been there. I want to go back.’ ‘Sophie, you need help. You need to talk to somebody. I can recommend a good shrink . . .’ ‘Sam, I’m not crazy!’ ” He looked up from the magazine with a complacent smile. “There it is. Ten bucks and a foofendorker.”

  “Let me see that,” I said. He didn’t like handing it over, but it was only fair letting me have a closer look and I took pains to handle the old magazine as carefully as he had. On the third page of the story, the dialogue appeared as he’d read it. It didn’t take me long to decide I wasn’t being hoaxed. A real sixty-year-old pulp would be almost impossible to fake convincingly, and even if it could be, it wouldn’t be worth the bother for a ten-dollar bet, even with a foofendorker thrown in. I read a little more of the story in the dim light of the bar.

  “Bill, this story is set in the year 2000,” I said, knowing as I said it I was grasping at straws.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “In 2000, we were using ‘shrink’ for psychiatrist.”

  “Come on, Justin. Is that the best you can come up with? The story was written and published in 1943, and if you read it all the way through you’ll see that in no way does it depict the 2000 we know. See any references to the Internet? Anybody sending anybody e-mail? And you’ll notice everybody’s tooling around the city in their personal flying machines, which if it’s happened I haven’t noticed. That story is not prophetic at all, and the characters talk just like people in 1943 talked. Old Frank Paulsen used the term shrink because that was a slang term in use at that time, not because he had some crystal ball for slang of our time. Now please pay up.”

  “Uh, sure, yeah, I will. I guess you’ve got me.” I pulled out my wallet and handed over ten dollars. “You ever heard of this Frank Paulsen before?”

  Bill shrugged. “I’ve seen the name once or twice, but I don’t know anything about him. There were a lot of pulp writers. It might have been a pseudonym. He was no Max Brand or Carroll John Daly, not under that name anyway.”

  I wasn’t satisfied. The ten dollars was no great loss, but something about this didn’t make sense. I’m proud of my ear for language, and seeing that use of shrink in a 1943 story was as out of kilter to me as a reference to Britney Spears would have been. Something wasn’t right, though I couldn’t quite articulate my suspicions.

  To begin with, I wanted to find out more about Frank Paulsen and at the very least read “Time Trampler” in its entirety. The next Saturday morning, I turned up at the special collections department of the local university library, which housed the biggest collection of pulp magazines in a several-thousand-mile radius. Access was closely controlled, and I had to fill out a lot of forms as well as surrender my driver’s license. I think my status as a critic for the local paper turned the tide for me.

  They had fully indexed their holdings in the library’s online catalog, and I quickly found the Paulsen byline had appeared ten times in pulps held by the university. “Time Trampler” was the only one in a science fiction magazine. There was one in a sports pulp, one in a western pulp, the other seven in mystery magazines. I requested all ten, and they were brought to me in the huge, cold, and silent reading room, along with a whispered lecture about how fragile they were and how to turn the pages to prevent damage.

  I was instructed I could take notes only in pencil, and I was glad the clerk stopped short of a full-body search to see if I was carrying a pen. Any request to photocopy, at a dollar per page, would have to be approved by the chief special collections librarian, and there would be a delay of a week before I would have the copies. A forbidding attendant sat at an elevated desk at the front of the room, watching
me and my fellow researchers for any infractions of the rules.

  The time travel gimmick in “Time Trampler” was a clever one but seemed familiar somehow. The present of the story was 2000. Time travel had been perfected, but characters were able to travel only for legitimate scholarly research, qualifying for which was nearly as tough as accessing the university library’s special collections. Changing the present through accidentally tampering with the past didn’t seem to be a big problem: the course of time would spring back into its normal track unless the change was major and deliberate, and that was the kind of catastrophe the hero, a sort of time cop with the all-American name Ted Armstrong, would be sent back in time to prevent.

  The story had a romantic angle: on one of his trips to tidy up the past, he intended to make a side trip to win back an old girlfriend named Rosemary. The time travel was accomplished not via a time machine out of H.G. Wells but through more psychological means. Travelers would steep themselves in the surroundings and accoutrements of the time they wanted to visit—and once they were well enough steeped, they could walk out the door and there they were.

  From “Time Trampler,” I moved on to Paulsen’s other efforts. He had a measure of that flair and readability essential to writers of popular fiction, but he seemed no better and no worse than dozens of his contemporaries. I was tempted to read some stories by the real masters instead—there was a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner in one of the issues—but I stuck with Paulsen. As I read through his stories, I was on the lookout for more anachronisms, and I found a few that seemed dubious but no smoking gun. I had almost decided I must have been wrong about “shrink” when I came across this in a 1944 sports pulp: “The Lions batter looked glazed-eyed when he returned to the dugout. ‘What was that pitch, Skip?’ he asked the manager. The wily old man grinned and said, ‘He calls that his foofendorker. Don’t worry, kid. Babe Ruth couldn’t hit it either.’ ”

  Foofendorker! For a second, I felt lightheaded. What was going on here? Take it easy, I told myself: I didn’t know every catchphrase that had become popular briefly and disappeared years before I was born. Our former member must have heard the term foofendorker and appropriated it for her alien race. There was nothing weird or paranormal going on here. On the other hand, nobody else in the group seemed to have heard it before, not even old Fred.

  I noted the page and moved on to calming vistas of pulp mystery clichés. But three stories later, I hit something that blew all my calm reasoning up the chimney and out of the water. The first-person private eye narration ran thus: “The search for Flora sent me to every garden supply store in the city. I got my first clear lead at a place called Fred’s Compost Heap.”

  That settled it for me. What was that old mystery rule out of Sherlock Holmes? When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, something like that. Well for me, two coincidences became the impossible, and what remained that had to be the truth was simply this: Frank Paulsen was one of the members of my writers’ group and a time traveler.

  I trolled through the pages for other clues. Were there any letters to the editor commenting on Paulsen stories? No. Were there any biographical notes on Paulsen accompanying the stories or in the editors’ brag columns? No. I took down the names and addresses of the magazines’ publishers—though the mags were long out of business, the companies that put them out might not be—and the names of the various pulps’ editors. Maybe I could find out something through one of them, though it was a longshot any of them would still be alive.

  When I was sure I’d exhausted all possibilities, I carried the magazines to the desk and made my photocopy order. I had decided to get copies of every Paulsen story, even though it would cost me a couple hundred dollars.

  The attendant—I think a graduate student, not a librarian—looked at me almost accusingly. “Do you realize how rare and fragile these magazines are?” he demanded.

  I wanted to say, rarer than you know, and the life we live is more fragile than you can imagine. Instead I settled for, “I assume that’s why you ask a buck a page and an Act of Congress to get copies.”

  Events ground slowly from that point. By our next Wednesday meeting, I had no copies yet and had nothing to say to the group about my discovery. Our venue this time was Fred Bushworthy’s house, smaller than Maisie’s but somehow more comfortable and relaxed. The most prominent features of the room were vases of flowers and a wall of gardening trophies. Mrs. Bushworthy, a grandmotherly lady as cheerful as Fred, popped in to say hello but stepped out to a movie with some friends. Fred served us the traditional tea, decaf, and cookies.

  The meeting was much as usual. Bill had brought only one piece to read but told the group a story by somebody named Frank Paulsen had won him his bet and reminded us all he expected to collect his foofendorker next time. I offered my sportsmanlike congratulations.

  As the others read their stuff, my mind wandered more than usual, and I had fewer comments to make. I remember Maisie’s romance had a figure-skating sequence. Grace, of course, said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. Charlie had a question about one of the jumps referred to, whether it was spelled axel or axle. Judy was pretty sure it was axel and asked our own Axel if there were any figure skaters in his family. He just looked disgusted. Grace said she’d once looked up the origin of axel, but before she could say what it was, Axel pointed out we were getting off subject and it was time to hear his latest impenetrable piece of free verse. Just a typical meeting, if even more useless than usual.

  Throughout the evening, I wondered which of them, if my theory was correct, might be the time traveler. Frank Paulsen, who had written in predominately masculine genres, was probably a man. Bill himself seemed the most likely to want to travel back in time and make a name for himself in the pulps, but if he was Paulsen and didn’t want it known, why would he make that bet with me? Fred’s time on Earth actually overlapped Paulsen’s, and maybe he wanted to travel out of a sense of nostalgia, but judging by his sincere and knowledgeable but ineptly written gardening nonfiction, I doubted he had the writing chops to produce Paulsen’s output. Charlie clearly had the chops, but he didn’t seem to relate to old popular fiction, and as for Axel, well, you couldn’t tell about him, but his deadly serious commitment to inaccessible highbrow literature didn’t fit with a pulp magazine sensibility.

  Could Frank Paulsen be a woman? Certainly, but could he be one of these women? Maisie, with her calculatedly shocking patches of graphic romance, had a sort of toughness about her, along with the sense of humor that was implicit in Paulsen’s career. Grace was certainly interested in the period, but she never finished anything in our time and it seemed doubtful she’d be turning out pulp stories if she lived sixty years ago. Judy seemed so doggedly (wrong word) devoted to her cute cat stories, she was disinclined to travel out of the state, let alone to 1943. The women just didn’t fit.

  Then another thought occurred to me, one that would accommodate a Paulsen of either gender. Maybe Paulsen was not a solo byline. Maybe my time traveler was collaborating on those pulp stories with somebody else native to that period.

  A couple days later, I got my photocopies in the mail from the university and I was able to steep myself in Paulsen’s work. Many of the plots seemed familiar, not in the general way of popular fiction formulae but in very specific ways, as if Paulsen were taking later writers’ plots and recycling them (or do I mean precycling them?) point-by-point. Frank the preemptive plagiarist.

  Between rereading the stories, I used my computer to Google all those editors, and for a while hit one dead end after another. Mostly all I could find were obituaries. Finally, though, I struck pay dirt. At least one of them was still living: C. Hardy Flint, editor of a whole string of pulps, including Stunning Science Adventures, was in fact resident of an assisted-living facility in this very city.

  When I phoned to ask if I could arrange a visit with him, a pleasant-voiced woman assured me he’d love it. He didn’t get that many
visitors, and he’d welcome somebody to talk to. But what, I wondered, if all his memories were wiped clean by time and nature? I inquired delicately if the old fellow, who must be ninety plus, was all there.

  “Very much all there,” came the amused answer. “But—let me put it this way. Do you have a room in your house where you put everything you have no current use for but don’t want to throw away?”

  “Sure.” I could have said my whole apartment was like that.

  “You have an idea what’s in the room, and once you find a particular item, you can put it to use. But you can’t always remember exactly where it is, and you can’t put your hand on it at any given moment—and when you can’t, it frustrates you.”

  “I get it. You’re telling me he’s senile.”

  “I can see you’re not afflicted with political correctness,” she said. “No, he’s not senile. He can often remember things from seventy or eighty years ago like they happened yesterday, but—oh, I think you understand my metaphor, don’t you?”

  “I’m a writer,” I said.

  “Are you? Oh, then I know he’ll want to talk to you.”

  Having been warned of his cluttered attic, I figured it would be wise to prepare the old fellow in advance, so I wrote him a letter and enclosed a photocopy of “Time Trampler” before I went for a visit. When C. Hardy Flint met me in the cheery and spacious lobby of his building a week later, he was spiffily turned out in a three-piece suit. He told me almost immediately, with a mixture of pride and wonder, that he was ninety-four years old, and I assured him truthfully he didn’t look a day over seventy. He had brought the copy I’d sent of “Time Trampler.”

  “This story brought back memories,” he said when we were seated in the comfortable visiting area.

  “Of Frank Paulsen?” I said hopefully.

  “No. Just of that whole time in my life. To tell the truth, I can’t call the fellow to mind. I worked with so many writers, you know. Sounds kind of familiar, but—what else did he write?”