‘All right,’ Eric said. ‘Let’s just leave it at this. I want to buy the antidote. I want to trade that watch. Is it satisfactory?’ He still held the brown paper bag; reaching into it, he lifted out the bottle. ‘Get me some water and let me take it and then let me get out of here; I don’t know how long it’ll be before I go back to my own time. Is there any objection to that?’ He had difficulty controlling his voice; it tried to rise and escape. And he was shaking, but he did not know with what. Anger, possibly fear – more likely bewilderment. At this point he did not even know if he were bewildered.
‘Calm down.’ Cigarette jutting from his lips, the man walked off, evidently in search of water. ‘Can you take them with a Coke
‘Yes,’ Eric said.
The man returned with a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola and watched as Eric struggled to get the pills down one after another.
At the door the female reeg receptionist appeared.
IS HE ALL RIGHT?
‘Yes,’ the man said, as Eric managed to wash down the last pill.
WILL YOU TAKE CHARGE OF THE WATCH
Accepting it from her, the man said, ‘Of course it’s company property; that goes without saying.’ He started out of the storeroom.
‘Was there ever a UN Secretary near the end of the war named Donald Festenburg?’ Eric said.
‘No,’ the man said.
HE SHOULD RECEIVE SOME CASH SETTLEMENT FOR THE WATCH IN ADDITION TO THE MEDICATION
The flashing box, declaring its message, was extended by the female reeg toward the man; he halted, frowning, then shrugged. ‘One hundred in cash,’ he said to Eric. Take it or leave it; it’s all the same to me.’
‘I’ll take it,’ Eric said, and followed him to the business office. As the man counted out the money – in odd, unfamiliar bills which Eric had never seen the like of – he thought of another question. ‘How did Gino Molinari end his term in office?’
The man glanced up. ‘Assassinated.’
‘Shot?’
‘Yes, by old-fashioned lead slugs. A fanatic got him. Because of his lenient immigration policy, his letting the reegs settle here on Terra. There was a racist faction, scared about polluting the blood … as if reegs and humans could interbreed.’ He laughed.
This, then, Eric thought, may be the world from which Molinari got that bullet-riddled corpse which Festenburg showed me. The dead Gino Molinari lying mangled and blood-spattered in his helium-filled casket.
From behind him a dry, matter-of-fact voice said, ‘Are you not going to make the attempt, Dr Sweetscent, to take the antidote for JJ-180 back to your wife?’
It was an organism without eyes entirely, and he thought, seeing it, of fruit he had come onto as a child, overripe pears lying in the weedy grass, covered by a crawling layer of yellow jackets attracted by the sweet odor of rot. The creature was vaguely spherical. It had fitted itself into a harness, however, which had squeezed its soft body tortuously; no doubt it needed this in order to get around in the Terran environment. But he wondered why it was worth it to the thing.
‘Is he really a time traveler?’ the man at the cash register asked, jerking his head at Eric.
The spherical organism, wedged within its plastic harness, said by means of its mechanical audio system, ‘Yes, Mr Taubman, he is.’ It floated toward Eric, then halted, a foot above the ground, making an indistinct sucking noise, as if pulling fluids through its artificial tubes.
‘This guy,’ Taubman said to Eric, indicating the spherical organism, ‘is from Betelgeuse. His name is Willy K. He’s one of our best chemists.’ He shut the register. ‘He’s a telepath; they all are. They get a kick out of prying into our minds and the reegs’ but they’re harmless. We like them.’ He walked over to Willy K, bent toward him, and said, ‘Listen, if he’s a time traveler – I mean, we can’t let him just walk out of here; isn’t he dangerous or worth something? Shouldn’t we at least call in the city police? I thought he was nuts or kidding me.’
Willy K floated a little closer to Eric, then withdrew. There is no way we can keep him here, Mr Taubman. When the drug wears off he will go back to his own period. However, I would like to interrogate him to a certain extent while he’s here.’ To Eric he said, ‘Unless you object, sir.’
‘I don’t know,’ Eric said, rubbing his forehead. It had been too much of the unexpected, hearing Willy K ask about Kathy; it had disorientated him entirely and all he wanted to do now was to leave – he had no curiosity, no interest in the situation.
‘I sympathize with your situation,’ Willy K said. ‘In any case to question you formally is sham; I am getting everything I want from you as it is. What I had hoped to do was answer, if I could, some of your questions by the way I phrased mine. Your wife, for example. You have great conflicting emotions about her, fear for the most part, then hatred, and also a good deal of undistorted love.’
Taubman said, ‘God, how the Betels love to be psychologists. It must come natural to telepaths; I don’t think they can even help it.’ He loitered nearby, evidently interested in Willy K’s probing.
‘Can I take the antidote back to Kathy?’
‘No, but you can memorize the formula,’ Willy K said. ‘So that Hazeltine Corporation, in your time, can reproduce it. But I don’t think you want to. I’m not going to urge you to … and I can’t force you to.’
‘You mean his wife’s hooked on JJ-180, too,’ Taubman said, ‘and he isn’t going to try to help her?’
‘You’re not married,’ Willy K said. ‘In marriage the greatest hatred that is possible between two human beings can be generated, perhaps because of the constant proximity, perhaps because once there was love. The intimacy is still there, even though the love element has disappeared. So a will to power, a struggle for domination, comes into being.’ To Taubman he explained, ‘It was his wife Kathy who addicted him in the first place, so it is easy to understand his sentiments.’
‘I hope I never get in a fix like that,’ Taubman said. ‘Hating someone I once loved.’
The female reeg had clacked up to listen, watching the conversation as it was reproduced on the surface of her translating box. Now she added her own comment.
HATE AND LOVE ARE CLOSELY LINKED, MUCH MORE SO THAN MOST TERRANS REALIZE
‘Do you have another cigarette?’ Eric asked Taubman.
‘Sure.’ Taubman passed him the pack.
‘What I find most interesting of all,’ Willy K said, ‘is that Dr Sweetscent comes from a universe in which a pact exists between Terra and Lilistar. And that in his year, 2055, a war is being fought in which they are slowly but steadily losing. Clearly this is not our past but another past entirely. And, in his mind, I find the excruciatingly interesting thought that Terra’s quondam warlord, Gino Molinari, has already discovered this rank of parallel universes and has made use of it for his immediate political advantage.’ Willy K was silent a moment and then declared, ‘No, Dr Sweetscent, after having visualized your memory of the Molinari corpse I am fairly certain that it was not obtained from our world; true, Molinari died by assassination, but I recall pics of his corpse and there is a small but crucial difference. In our world the Secretary was hit repeatedly in the facial area; his features were destroyed. The corpse you saw was not so damaged and I would assume it comes from another world in which he was assassinated, similar to ours but not identical.’
‘This must be why so few time travelers have shown up here,’ Taubman said. They’re scattered through all the different possible futures.’
‘As to the virile Molinari,’ Willy K said thoughtfully. ‘I suppose that, too, is an alternate configuration. You realize of course, doctor, that all this indicates that your Secretary has taken JJ-180 himself; there is therefore an element of cruel hypocrisy in his threatening you with death if you became addicted. But I would guess, by several clues in your mind, that he also possesses the ‘Star manufactured antidote which you just now took. So he has no fears and can move freely about among the worlds.’
The Mole, Eric realized, could have given me and Kathy the antidote any time.
It was hard for him to accept that about Gino Molinari; he had seemed more humane than this. He was just playing with us, Eric realized. As Willy K said, with an element of cruel hypocrisy.
‘But wait,’ Willy K cautioned. ‘We don’t know what he intended to do; he had just found out about your addiction, and he was as usual suffering from a spasm of his chronic illness pattern. He might have given it to you in time. Before it ceased to matter.’