Time Twisters Read online

  “Everything, it seems. Mostly mystery, but some sports and westerns.”

  “For some reason, I think I should remember him.” The old man shook his head in befuddlement, then brightened. “Now, the guy that did the illustration. I can tell you all about him. No signature, but I’d know that style anywhere.” What he said about the black and white interior illustration’s artist might have fascinated me at any other time, but I wanted to know about Paulsen.

  “Do you remember the story at all?”

  A smile came to his wrinkled face. “Oh, I remember the story all right. My memory’s great, just get a little static now and then. Yes, indeed. But I’m pretty sure that story came in over the transom. I don’t think I ever met Paulsen. As I recall, we changed the name of the hero. It wasn’t Ted Armstrong originally. It was something else, some precious name like an Edwardian detective, what the hell was it? Percy something. Can you imagine a red-blooded pulp reader of the forties wanting to read about a hero with a sissified name like Percy?”

  “No,” I said, “unless he was the Scarlet Pimpernel on the side. What else can you remember about the story?”

  “Well, of course, you can see it was derivative as hell. Most of them were. It may not even have struck me at the time, but when I was rereading the story you sent me, I could see where he stole his time travel gimmick. Two different sources actually.”

  “What were they?”

  “Well, that whole business about time police and time snapping back into place if you didn’t change it too much—that was Poul Anderson’s. And the thing about sitting around in the atmosphere of a past time and soaking if up and just sort of thinking your way into it—you ever see The Music Man?”

  “Sure.”

  “The guy selling the band instruments knew nothing about music, so he told the kids they’d have to learn to play by the ‘think system.’ That’s what this time travel gimmick is: the think system.”

  “So he stole it from Meredith Willson?”

  Flint looked at me disparagingly. “No, no. Your science fictional knowledge leaves something to be desired. It was in that book by Jack Finney. Some science fiction people hated it, but it was a great book. What was it called? Time and Again.”

  He said it with such confidence, I hoped I wouldn’t upset him with what I said next. “Mr. Flint, I do know that book, but it came years later. Nobody in 1943 had ever heard of Poul Anderson or Jack Finney.”

  “Why, yes, I guess you’re right. So did Anderson and Finney both read Frank Paulsen and borrow from him?” Flint looked lost in thought for a moment, then came to a decision. “There’s something about this I should remember and I can’t. We’ll have to check my files.”

  “Your files?” I said, half hopeful and half dubious. I didn’t think you could bring a bunch of old business files to a place like this.

  He read my mind. “Oh, I don’t have them here. My granddaughter’s keeping them for me. Just until I check out.” He smiled. We both knew he didn’t mean check out of the assisted-living facility to move to his own place and reclaim the files. “She lives about a half hour drive from here, out in the suburbs, very nice place. If you could drive me out there, I might be able to help you a little bit more. How about it? I don’t get out much, you know.”

  I was still dubious. Was he just stringing me along to get a rare trip off base? But if the files really existed, it would be great, and if not, I’d be doing a good deed for a nice old man.

  “Will they let you go out?” I asked.

  “Young fellow,” he said with amused rebuke, “I am still a free man. No commitment papers have been signed.”

  So he called his granddaughter, told the front desk where he was going, and a few minutes later was sitting in the passenger seat of my aging Camry. He seemed to be enjoying himself so much, I decided not to mind if this turned out to be a wild goose chase.

  His granddaughter’s house was lovely, part of a tree-shaded upscale tract with enough individuality not to look like one. The granddaughter was lovely, too. Her name was Elizabeth, Flint had told me, with all diminutives and truncations (Eliza, Lizzie, Beth, Betty) firmly rejected. She had no children, no animals, and no husband (I got the impression she was divorced) and cheerfully pronounced the two-story house much too big for her. I had no logical reason to be interested in the granddaughter, but it’s amazing what information you can pick up when you’re besotted. Maybe I’d embark on a research project about the old pulps that would give me an excuse to visit her again. But for now, we’d concentrate on business. C. Hardy Flint’s files were in half a dozen large filing cabinets that reduced the garage to single-vehicle capacity.

  “You can’t imagine what I went through to save these when the publisher went bust,” he told me, as he looked through the files. “Everybody thought I was crazy. Nobody thought there’d be any interest in the history of the pulps, you see. When I die, they go to the university library. Until then, I can consult them. Elizabeth tells me I should write my memoirs. What do you think?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “There’d be a market for them now. Some of the people I worked with became famous, and some of the ones that didn’t were even more interesting. Ah, here we are.” He pulled out a hanging file marked Frank Paulsen.

  “Bring it inside, gramp,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll get some lemonade for you and Julian.”

  “Justin,” I corrected. So she didn’t share my besotment. Give her time.

  Once Flint had the file in his hands, his memory was stoked. “Here’s the original manuscript. Look at the title of the story!” He passed it over to me.

  I got another shock. The title page proclaimed, “Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time.”

  “Parsley Sage!” Flint snorted. “That’s an even sillier name than Percy whatever-I-said. Of course, the hero was looking for this girl named Rosemary, and the story did involve time travel, but still what kind of a title was that to pluck out of the air?” He pondered a moment. “Sounds familiar, though.”

  “It was a song,” I said.

  “Was it?”

  “Simon and Garfunkel. ‘Scarborough Fair.’ ” Behind me, I heard a lovely soprano singing, “Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.”

  “Of course,” said Flint, smiling at his granddaughter, who had brought the lemonade. “But wait a minute. Didn’t that song come much later?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Late sixties.”

  “Actually, yes and no,” Elizabeth said. “Simon adapted the lyric from an old traditional English ballad. But I think the line ‘Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme’ was in the original.”

  “I’m relieved,” Flint said. “This was all starting to feel a bit strange.”

  Tell me about it, I thought but didn’t say.

  Flint was shuffling through the correspondence. “Number of letters from Paulsen. Nothing to suggest we ever met face to face. Showed promise. I wonder what—oh, gosh, look at this.”

  He handed over a handwritten letter dated June 15, 1943.

  “Dear Mr. Flint,

  “I’m sorry to tell you that my tenant Mr. Frank Paulsen passed away yesterday. Thought he just had flu but it took him sudden. He never said much where he came from. I know of no kin or what to do with his things. If you can help me on this please let me know. If he was a good friend of yours I’m sorry for your loss. He was a nice fellow.

  “Yours very truly,

  “(Mrs.) Minnie Runcible”

  “That’s why there were no more stories,” Flint said. “I knew there was something about Paulsen I should have remembered.”

  “That’s just the sort of thing that would happen,” I said, half to myself.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To a time traveler. If you traveled to another time, even fifty years ago, who knows what bugs might be around waiting to kill you, things that have been eradicated today, things we’ve lost our resistance to.”

  “Young fellow, I�
�m the one people take for senile, but you seem to be losing your grasp on what’s fiction and what’s real.”

  “I wish it were that simple,” I said. “Do you think I could borrow this file on Frank Paulsen?” I looked over Flint’s head and smiled at Elizabeth. “I’ll bring it back in good condition.”

  “Sure, it can’t hurt,” he said.

  As we bid goodbye at her door, I told Elizabeth I hoped I’d see her again, and at least she didn’t wince at the prospect. I got her phone number, ostensibly so I could call her in advance when I wanted to return the file, and on the way home I suggested to Flint I might help him with his memoirs, not as a ghostwriter but as a legman.

  Through all of this maneuvering, I felt a little guilty: here I was working on my social life and the problem of my time-traveling fellow writer had turned much more serious. He obviously hadn’t yet made his trip into the past, or if he had, he’d become a fourth-dimensional commuter. And when he went back there again, his life would be cut off prematurely, blindsided by disease. I not only needed to find out which member of my writers’ group was the time traveler, but I had to stop him from going. I could save a life here, and surely tampering with the literary career of Frank Paulsen wouldn’t change history in a way it couldn’t snap back from. But how could I do it?

  That evening, I called Bill Wandsworth. “Bill, I have a favor to ask.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Postpone your foofendorker one more meeting.”

  “Aw, Justin, I got two things ready to read, and they kind of work together.”

  “Trust me. It’s important I read a story at this meeting.”

  “Why?”

  “Something is going to happen, and I don’t know when it’s going to happen, and I want to stop it from happening.”

  “Oh, well, that really clarifies things,” he said.

  “Sure, okay. If it’s important, I’ll take your word for it.”

  “One other thing. Don’t say anything about ‘Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time.’ ”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean ‘Time Trampler.’ Don’t say anything about

  ‘Time Trampler.’ ”

  “I mentioned it at the last meeting, though.”

  “You mentioned Frank Paulsen and a pulp story, but you didn’t say anything about the theme of the story. Keep it that way.”

  “Okay, got it. Not a word.”

  What I wrote up for the meeting over the next couple of nights was something like what you’re reading now, but it was shorter, read like fiction, and didn’t have any specific references to the members of the writers’ group. It did include the key point I wanted to make: the peril to a time traveler of unforeseen viruses.

  We met at Judy Klinger’s house, surprisingly catless and uncutesy, though she offered a rich chocolate fudge along with the traditional cookies. Throughout the evening, especially when I read my story, I kept an eye on one member of the group. By that time, I’d put a couple of things together and was pretty sure who my time traveler was. But I thought it would be better to have him come to me than for me to accuse him outright. When I finished reading, I told the group I wasn’t sure how the story should end, and could anybody help me? Feel free to see me privately, if so. And, yes, someone took the bait, pulled me to one side as we were all going out to our cars, asked me to meet him at a nearby twenty-four-hour coffee shop. We both ordered coffee, the real stuff.

  Now I was looking across the table at Frank Paulsen, and he told me his story.

  “I hate the twenty-first century, you know. I’m not quite forty, but I feel that my century is over, and everything is downhill from here. I got to thinking, if only time travel were possible and I could go back to another, better time.” He smiled. “Not to the Crusades or ancient Rome or the Middle Ages or Elizabethan England or anything like that. For one thing, I wouldn’t be equipped to speak the language or follow the customs in a way to be seen as anything but a freak. For another, conditions of people, even the very rich, before the twentieth Century would seem unacceptably miserable to any of us, at least those lucky enough to be born middle class in the developed world. And although I didn’t think to apply them to a time so recent, I did consider the medical aspects. I figured if I went back too far, some long-forgotten or long-defeated plague would get me as soon as I stepped out of my time machine.”

  Of course, I jumped on that. “Then there is a machine?”

  He smiled slyly. “Figure of speech. I can’t tell you exactly how it works, except to say the version in my story is seriously over-simplified. It started when I got into a talk with a physicist over at the university one evening. We hit it off and would get together for a drink occasionally. Over a period of time he started hinting and finally revealed to me that time travel existed, that he in fact had done it, that I could do it, too, if I really wanted to. He said getting back to the starting point had been the hardest part, and the uncertainty of being able to do that had kept him from further experiments. The guy has a family, and he likes the twenty-first century, can you imagine? I replied that I had no people, no real ties to the world we live in, and that I would not be coming back. If I keep my appointment with him, I guess I’ll also be keeping that pledge, eh?”

  “But you don’t have to keep that appointment.”

  “And what happens if I don’t?”

  “Probably nothing terrible. I don’t think you’re suicidal, are you?”

  “No, no, I do want to live. Just not in this time. Anyway, I’ve made all arrangements, packed my bags so to speak, and I’m expected to depart for World War II America a week from now. Tonight would be my last meeting of the writers’ group, though obviously I was not about to say so.”

  “Why World War II? An odd period to choose.” He shrugged. “Safe enough on the home front, and at least I know we win. I would have to change my name, of course. Landing in America of the forties with the name Axel Gruber might draw some unwelcome attention, don’t you think? I had my name all picked out, and that’s why I was alarmed when that figure skating jump was mentioned at one of our meetings. Bill had said the author of the pulp story that won his bet was Frank Paulsen, and I didn’t want Grace to tell everybody the axel was named after a Swedish skater named Axel Paulsen. I’d borrowed my pulp-writing surname from him and the forename Frank from a pulp-writing namesake of mine, though no relation that I know of, Frank Gruber.” He looked at me humorously across the table. “You figured that out, didn’t you?’

  “Yes,” I confessed. “I looked up axel in the dictionary after that meeting. It was a short jump—pardon the pun—to the Gruber part.”

  “I had always had some writing talent, though no one would know it from those dreadful poems I made you people suffer through. And I figured writing would be a sure way to make a living in another time without drawing too much attention to myself, at least at first. If I could do a little subtle plagiarism from writers who came later, it would help me sell my work, and I couldn’t imagine it would really hurt them. When I heard about your writers’ group, I thought I could gather some pointers, especially from you and Bill, who seemed to know the writing world I wanted to enter. But I wanted to reveal as little of myself as possible. I heard your group lacked a poet, and I thought that persona would be the easiest to fake. I used to act in college, and playing a role is fun for me, so I made Axel Gruber as obnoxious as possible. My scientist friend over at the university is understandably secretive, and I didn’t want to the whole project to blow up in our faces, so to speak.”

  “Did you actually write those stories in 1943?”

  “I haven’t been there yet. But no, I’ve been stock-piling them to take with me, assuming that’s possible. Since they got in print, I guess it is.”

  “Why the anachronisms?”

  “Not intentional. ‘Shrink’ was just a slip.”

  “And the references to the group? Foofendorker and Fred’s compost heap?”

  “Just playfulnes
s, like a message in a bottle in the timestream? Chances were you’d never come across it, and I’d be long gone from this time anyway.”

  “But you’re not going now, are you?”

  “Perhaps I have to. Perhaps I have no choice, having already made my mark on the past.” He looked at me for a moment and shook his head. “No, I won’t go. You’ve saved my life, Justin. Doomed me to live it in the twenty-first century, but saved it nonetheless. I’ll call my scientist friend and tell him to find another guinea pig. What do you think the consequences will be, though? Will we wake up in the morning and find we lost World War II because the literary career of Frank Paulsen never happened?”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “And what will we remember? What will the other people you’ve talked to about Frank Paulsen remember? Will the two of us even remember this conversation, or will our memories be erased?”

  “We’ll see,” I said with a shrug.

  “Or not,” Axel said. “It’s sort of like death. Either you wake up tomorrow with new insights, or everything disappears and it doesn’t really matter.”

  As it turned out, I remembered everything (or I wouldn’t have been able to tell this story) and I imagine Axel Gruber did, too, though he never mentioned it again. As for the others, the best way I can put it is that they all sort of remembered.

  When I woke up the day after the meeting and found the file on Frank Paulsen was not on my desk where I’d left it, I didn’t think for a moment it had been stolen or I’d mislaid it. I was sure the old pulpster’s career was over, that is, had never happened.

  C. Hardy Flint remembered our discussion of “Parsley Sage, Rosemary and Time,” but only as a story idea I’d told him about, not as a real-time event. And he agreed to let me help him with his memoirs. When I called Elizabeth to arrange a time to come and search through his files, I said casually, “It’s nice of you to store those for your grandfather. You probably have no interest in the old pulps.”

  After a pause, that musical voice said, “I think my favorites are Norbert Davis, Murray Leinster, and Fredric Brown.”