In every human life, only a certain percentage of time can be taken up by calculated behavior. For each person, it’s a different percentage. Some people need to have most of their lives pre-ordained. Some people need to have practically nothing planned, A normal minority percentage is 6 – 12%, Surprisingly, perhaps, any detail present in more than 35% of a person’s actions is perceived by that person to be present most of the time.. .
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Henry Ogilvy had parked in the wrong neighborhood.That’s all it was. He parked in the wrong neighborhood and when he came back to his car they were waiting for him He ran.
They chased him, That’s all it was. A random, dismal little nightmare acted out on the streets of Brooklyn, New York.
He ran into a building, an abandoned warehouse or something. Just inside the door was a flight of stairs. He ran up it, Below him, he heard the door crash open, and in a few secons feet following him upward…
At each floor, the staircase was walled off from the floor. Double doors gave access to most floors. Where he found them, he tried them. On floors 3,6 an 7, they were locked. But on floor 8, the right hand door opened.
“It’s about time,” he gasped to himself.
The floor was a rat maze of cubicles. Some of the partitions had fallen down, In the abandoned cubicles, drawers were wrenched from desks and ripped apart; shelves slanted crazily across graffiti-tagged walls; desks lay on their tops, feet in the air.
Ogilvy went around them, sprinting for the far wall.
Behind him, the door slammed open. Punk voices, edged with frenzy, came to him. Through a gap in the dividers he saw two of them streak towards him.
He reached the far end of the building.In the back corner, he found another flight of stairs. He went down.
Eight flights later,he was in the basement. Above him, he could hear them picking their way towards him. They seemed to be gaining. He went further, into the basement.
He ran from room to room. It got darker.
Suddenly, he had a choice. Two doors, left or right. He picked left.
The room was very dark. He couldn’t see the machine at all. He tripped over it, and almost fell down..
Tubes, ribbons. fibers, strands of metal and plastic. The machine was gossamer, a spider’s web of pipes and filaments, all supported on shining steel-like tubular runners., Faintly, he saw a seat in the middle of it, It seemed to be made especially for him. He had to sit in it. He carefully worked his way through the filaments into the machine.
As he did, he thought: how the hell do I always get myself into these messes? I wish I could remember my future as easily as I regret my past. This triggered a memory of his father saying, “Wishing is for kids and Santa Claus,” and the Old Man’s Pithy Truism, “Real Men Ask For What They Want, and Then They Take It.” Which had no current pertinence that he could see.
He sat on the seat. It fit like a mother’s hand on her baby’s bottom,
As he sat still, the machine came to life. Things began to glow. Gauges stabilized. He heard faint hummings at many different frequencies. They shifted in pitch, fluctuated in timbre, throbbed against each other and settled into unison.
Just then, two punks staggered into the room. He could see them clearly by the glow from the machine. At first they stopped, uncertain what they were facing. Then they took short steps forward. Meanwhile, the machine got brighter. It began to shake. Suddenly, the two punks leapt at him.
Just as suddenly, they were frozen in mid-air. Almost frozen, rather. Their open mouths moved like they were forming words, but very slowly, and they made no noise. A small pile of rubble crashed silently to the dirty floor. All sound had dropped away. Then the building and the punks began to shimmer, as if they were seen through a great heat.
The punks simply vanished. The building did not. It got darker and lighter several times. The walls changed color. Twice, they reduced to bare beams wires and pipes – once for a considerable time, almost a minute. Presently, the room got lighter an stayed that way.
Faint shapes, ghostly and insubstantial, wafted around the machine like shapes made of smoke. Henry suspected they would not feel like smoke, were he to reach out of the machine.
He felt as if he’d seen all this before. O shit, he had. “Very HG Wells,” he said, and blushed,
He’d had the thought that this was in fact a dream. Briefly, he was embarrassed that he’d dreampt a plagiarism. Then, he noticed an LED screen that said, “Swing with it, Henry,”
The faint humming very quickly warbled, faded and ceased. The shimmering stopped, and the walls became substantial and well-tended. At the same time, the ghostlike shapes filled in and became human beings, milling about very normally.
“There he is!” several voices announced almost at once. Arms swung and fingers jabbed towards the machine and towars Henry Ogilvy.
There was quite a crowd, at least a hundred in the small basement room. All of them turning toward the machine and Henry, all of them excited and happy. They surged towards him, but stopped at a respectable distacem, their hands folded or in their pockets. They were all smiling and chattering happily.
[Henry noticed they wore clothing unlike anything he'd ever seen. It seemed to change color and even patterns as its wearers turned. More people were pouring into the room every second. Soon, it was filled, and a great crowd also filled the hall and stairwell.]
He listened to the babble of language. Most was unintelligible, but as he listened words began to become clear. It seemed to be about half English. The rest was mostly Spanish, but it was sprinkled with Yiddish, Arabic, and he seemed to notice a word in Swahili repeated now an then,
Henry stood up. He climbed out of the machine far more carefully than he had climbed in.
“Excuse me.” He held up his hands, asking for their attention. The babble subsided.
“Can anyone understand what I am saying?” He scanned the smiling faces, looking for some glimmer of understanding.
“Does anyone know what I am saying? I know my language sounds strange, probably very formal and rigid. But if anyone can understand me, I’d like to get some information, get some things straight. Can anyone here understan …”
“Yo, I feel you. Sup.” A tall, dignified man, apparently of advanced middle age came to the front of the crowd.. He wore clothing of more muted colors than most.
“Where am I?” asked Henry.
The gentleman recited a string of terms, meaningless to Henry except for the last term. “Ogilvy Institute.”
“Really?” Henry took a step forward. “That’s my name. I’m Henry Ogilvy.”
‘”Truth,” said the gentleman. He was smiling. “I be TaShawn Vecluus. I’m Curator here. Welcome, Mister. My honor.” He smiled, but did not extend his hand.
“What year is this?”
“A18,” sai Vecluus. “You might call it ,,, 29 something. 30. 31, I think.”
Henry had walked toward the Curator. He held out his hand. Vecluus quickly backed away from him, holding his hands down.
“No. don’t…”
Alarms rang all around them. Heavy doors banged shut in nearby corriors. Four armed guards ran up. They were in what Ogilvy regarded as full riot armor. Each was carrying a surprisingly large handgun.
“Nooo!” The Curator’s hands were waving in front of him now, but it was too late. Both were already firing..
Something hit Henry. All of Henry, from the crown of his head to his heels, every muscle in his body spasmed simultaneously. He would have howled and fallen over, if he could have done anything at all.
The riot cops put away their weapons and stomped forward. One stood directly in front of Henry, his gun’s muzzle resting on his forehead, while the other one fiddled with some buttons on his cuff and said code words. Eventually, all the alarms stopped.
“I guess you’d better take him to my office,” said the Curator. We’ll hang there until he melts.”
############
Ogilvy awoke on a couch. Outside, it was still daylight. Vecluus was standing by a window, his hands clasped behind his back, his back toward Ogilvy. The window was thirty feet above the gound. Anyone who looked in would see what appeared to be the ornate plaster of a rococo palace ceiling, a silver and crystal chandelier, the polished oak edges of Louis XIV furniture, and no people looking back at them. Even if the furniture was removed or replaced with cardboard cartons, even if the room were filled with three hundred naked people (as it had been on Halloween), that’s all any passerby would ever see, as long as the power didn’t fail. So Curator Vecluus’ observation of the unusually heavy crowds outside the Ogilvy Institute had no observable effect on that crowd at all.
Ogilvy stirred on the couch. Vecluus, hearing the groan of folded naugahyde, turned.
“Ah, There you are. No bruises, I hope? No headache?”
“Nope,” said Ogilvy. “I’m cool.”
“Excellent,” said Vecluus. “Obviously, it was a horrendous mistake. I hope you can forgive them, and me.”
Already, Ogilvy had discounted the minimal vocabulary differences. He barely noticed, they barely sounded any different . He was beginning to feel quite at home, nine hundred years in his future.
“Please, think nothing of it.”
“Can I get you anything to eat? To drink?” Vecluus walked to what was evidently a bar, though it had no plumbing. It was simply a slab of what could have been black marble and it was held at elbow level apparently by nothing at all. Looking at it, Ogilvy would have sworn he saw the room continuing beyond it. Indeed, he could see Vecluus’ legs as he stood behind the bar. But when Vecluus bent and reached, an retrieved a brass ewer which he put on the bar, Ogilvy couln’t see his arms or any shelf he could have taken it from.
“A glass perhaps of some of our finest?”
Vecluus produced two highball glasses from some hidden source. He filled them with a colorless liquid from the ewer, which was evidently cold. A light conensation filmed the glass’s surfaces.
Ogilvy took one of the glasses. They toasted.
“To a successful time transit,” said Vecluus. “So shall they all be.”
Ogilvy noticed the sureness in his host’s tone. Drink first, his brain said. Question later, Hell, yes, came a chorus of other interested organs. He sipped experimentally. The liquid was thin, and tasted ‘fresh’, and nothing else.
Ogilvy looked at Vecluus, who was looking at him inquisitively,
“Water?” he said.
“Glacial runoff,” said Vecluus proudly. “Imported from Spitzbergen. I’m told, the last time it was liquid was a little less than five hundred thousand years ago.”
Several of Ogilvy’s organs grumbled audibly. His gall bladder went to sleep.
“Is water so precious now?”
“Certainly. Ocean levels are down three inches. And that’s after the icecaps are all but melted. The water seems to have boiled away into space. It all has to do with the great forests.”
“Oh? What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re practically gone. Not cut – deteriorated. As if the planet can no longer support large masses of enormous plants. Grasses, grains are all flourishing. Despite the development by the cereal and feed industries of grain species that always grow but bore sterile seeds, over sixteen hundred new species of wheat, barley, and corn were identified in the last ten years. Tree species, however, are failing. Most nut trees are now extinct..About the only one left in abundance is the Brazil nut.”
“Hmph.Would be Brazil nuts. Boiled off into space,you say? That’s serious. Pretty much uncorrectable.”
“We will survive. We are an infinitely adaptable species.”
“Have you … visited the moons of the outer planets? Gone to other stars? Could you corral a comet? Bring it to earth without wiping out …>”
“Wiping out?”
“Everyone. There was speculation in my time that a collision with a comet was instrumental in one or more mass extinctions in geologic history.”
“How frequently did you fantasize on this subject? do you know how available comets are for impact or capture?”
“Well we knew the extinction episodes were tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years apart. But in the decades in which we were discussing the issue, we visited two comets and watched a third break up and crash into Jupiter. They weren’t that rare or inaccessible. And we thought about it quite a lot.”
Vecluus absorbed all this. There was a brief silence, “Did you say you broke up a comet?”
“No. It broke up itself. We watched it crash into Jupiter.”
There was another brief silence. This time, Ogilvy spoke..
“Why is my name the same as the name of this building?”
“Why? this builing is named for you!”
“Why? What did I do?”
“You invented the time machine, man! You’ve made the greatest breakthrough ever in technological science, next to instant pancakes.”
“What? No I didn’t.” Ogilvy took a huge gulp of water, nearly emptying the glass. “I’m an x-ray technician. All I know about time is that I never have enough of it.”
“But you brought the machine to us. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have it.”
“That’s not it at all. I was running from danger and tripped over it in the dark, in the basement of an abandonded building. I don’t know how it got there. I didn’t bring it anywhere. It brought me.”
Vecluus chewed the inside of his cheek. Then, he inspected his nails, and started chewing one of them, the one on the index finger of his right hand. Off and on, he stared at Ogilvy, then looked away,
“This is ,,, difficult to explain. It’s complicated. Not emotionally; it’s so damned technically abstruse I can hardly get it, and I don’t think I can say it clearly. The fact is, you’ve been here before.”
“Oh,” said Ogilvy. “So it’s one of those time conundrum things.”
“Um, yeh, That’s about it, all right . Nevermind.”
It turned out, even though it was too complicated to explain, it was simple enough to just say.
“So,” said Ogilvy.”You got any idea who did invent it?”
I’d always thought you did. Really. You’d never denied it before, And you improved our use of it. You taught us to use The Nivea to protect ourselves against the skin driness it brings. and how to set the destination year …”
“Well, come on. A set of dials in a day/month/year configuration…”
“The greatest minds of our time hadn’t figured it out.”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Is there no education in these days? Is higher mathematics no longer taught?”
“Of course it is. Somewhere. I mean, I was never taught it, but I wasn’t destined for anything more complex than middle management, and I was given a superb education for that pursuit. Never had the slightest interest in anything else, either. In fact, when I ascended to my first career post, it was a revelation to me that a man could accomplish so much valuable work. I felt grateful and fulfilled.”.
A population of twits, thought Ogilvy.
“To whom do you report?”
“Hunh?” said Vecluus.
“Who’s your boss>” More blankness. “Who pays you?”
Groping for unerstanding, Ogilvy asked, “Who made you Curator?”
Vecluus smiled. Finally, one he recognized. “Government.”
“How do I contact them?”
He dreaded the answer he imagined. And, he got what he feared.
“You don’t. It contacts you.”
A world of unthinking blankness was unfolding before him. Why in the name of God would I ever have returned here in my past? More importantly, how do I get out of here now?
There was a knock on the door.
“Come,” said Vecluus in a normal tone.
A young woman entered. Her face was not perfectly symmetrical, her figure was not exquisitely lascivious, and she looked worried about something. So her beauty was not entirely physical, not at all. And yet she was irrefutably, stunningly beautiful.
Ogilvy had noticed such beauty before. A woman who had sat at a nearby table in a cafe in the park; the endcover of a book he had picked up while idly browsing in a flea market; a cityscape, seen from a train window. In each case, he’d found the beauty had referred to something he’d known in very early childhood, and was contained in that reference – something he remembered, that he didn’t remember having remembered.
“Mr Vecluus, I have those forms you need,” she said. Then she saw Ogilvy. “Mr Ogilvy.” She seemed slightly flustered by his fame.
Ogilvy waved nonchalantly.
“Thank you, Nikia,” said Vecluus, taking the papers.
She stood. She seemed to be waiting, perhaps for Vecluus to dismiss her or give her further instructions.
Ogilvy immediately surmised three things: they had never met before, in his future; she wanted to meet him; and if he had to spend five more minutes with the simpleton Vecluus, he would lose his mind. Further, he believed this girl was worth whatever she would cost him in pain, remorse, and anguish.
“Nikia. That’s a very beautiful name,” said Ogilvy.
Nikia turned and faced Ogilvy. She smiled, and the room was illuminated.
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Do you know the city?” he asked her suddenly.
“I was born here. So yes, I know it very well.”
“In all the time I”ve spent here, I’ve barely seen it. Can you give me a tour – tomorrow?”
“Why, yes, sir. I’d be honored.”
“So would I.”
“But, what about your regular duties?” said Vecluus.
“Ping,” the computer on a corner table trilled quietly.
“That’s my call,” said Nikia. She went over to the computer.
“O, the government won’t begrudge her a little time given to me, will it?”
Vecluus, his mouth open, was about to list three reasons why they girl had to attend to her scheduled tasks, when she spoke,
“Mr Vecluus, the government has assigned me to escort Mr Ogilvy on a tour of the city tomorrow.”
Vecluus puffed out his cheeks and looked at his toes. Then, he looked up. In that moment, his eyes met Nikia’s. Then she looked away. So did he, as every nerve in his body hummed like it had been plucked.
“You see.” said Ogilvy. “I only had to ask.”
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