Talk:V: Over the Rainbow
V: Over the Rainbow
After what seemed a long, long time, I sat up on the grass, my insides whirling crazily. I was never really unconscious, just preoccupied. Movie and TV people have the wrong idea about being “knocked out.” Most times a heavy blow simply crushes your skull, and you’re dead. I shook my head and was instantly very sorry. Some explosion! The whole building was gone without a trace.
I was sitting at the foot of a tall hedge. I tried to focus, but it was like driving tenpenny nails into my brain, so I gave up for a while. All around me through the fuzziness, lumpy green entities swayed gently in a warm breeze. Patches of sunlight, painfully bright, illuminated many gaudily colored figures, their mouths dark Os of surprise or curiosity, but they were far too hazy, miles away down a dark tunnel of pain.
I simply sat, torn and bleeding, on the warm damp ground, surprised as hell at being alive. After a while, habit took over: I emptied the forty-one, found a speed-loader, restocked the revolver, and holstered it. The automatic went back heavy into my coat pocket. It seemed a pretty fair day’s work.
I levered myself onto my hands and knees and stayed in that position, panting. Then I rose heavily, aching in every tormented muscle. Bolts of lightning stabbed through my eyeballs, each followed by a wave of nausea and the drumming of dull pain. I staggered, tripping once or twice but staying upright. By the time I reached the nearest park bench, passing out was an attractive prospect.
I risked another peek. Through my personal haze, the scene was tranquil, bearing no relationship to the meat grinder I’d just been through: a broad emerald lawn and a five-foot hedge stretched endlessly in the distance. On the other side, a corrugated metal shack showed robin’s-egg blue. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of dark earth and growing things, dappled with sunshine and shade amid small groves of enormous trees; benches and sidewalks somehow tinted tones of red, orange, or yellow. My own—not concrete as I’d supposed—was a heavy, resilient rubber, pale lemon in color.
A hundred yards away, a silvery fountain feathered high into the air. A band played lively unfamiliar music, while children, dressed outlandishly, tossed an ordinary Frisbee. A dog barked, chasing the floating disk from child to child. They might as well have been the Seven Dwarves—my picture of their world was dim and fuzzy. Shivering in sweat, I had only the faintest interest in staying alive. My ears thrummed mocking counterpoint to the cheerful music from the bandstand.
Here and there, other people were dancing, talking in small groups, lying in pairs under leafy canopies, moving gently with the music. They wore a bewildering variety of costumes: bright swirly cloaks, skirts or kilts, trousers and tunics—riots of color strewn like shining flowers across the forested lawn. Hunched and feeble in my tattered suit, I clutched miserably at some hostile stranger’s pistol in my pocket. My knees and elbows were caked with mud.
A hand on my shoulder—I started. A dark, pretty girl in orange bellbottoms stood behind me. “Are you all right?” she asked, almost apologetically. Before I could reply, she slipped gracefully around the end of the bench. A sheathed dagger, needle slim, hung from a jewelled chain around her tanned and slender waist.
“Been hurt worse before,” I managed to croak. All this conversation was tiring. “Could you point me back toward the Sciences Building?” I was beginning to understand: the Enquirer’s headline would read, POLICEMAN THROWN HUNDREDS OF FEET BY EXPLOSION, LIVES! with a thumbnail sketch of my service record, duly exaggerated, and an account of how, while sailing through the air, I’d found Jesus.
The young lady looked dubious, but willing to let me pick my own handbasket. “You mean the university?” she pointed down a tinted pathway through the trees. I could see another sunlit space beyond, perhaps the slightest hint of moving traffic. Make that headline . HUNDREDS OF YARDS … ! “Across Confederation Boulevard, at the edge—why, you’re bleeding!”
Just like a movie heroine. I didn’t want to hear about it—you can do amazing things seriously injured, as long as you don’t know. “I really think I’ll be all right,” I lied, and found a Kleenex, dabbing at the worst parts. The web of my thumb, where I’d kept the other guy’s gun from going off, was split back half an inch. I wadded the bloody tissue into the fist and said, “Gotta get going. Police business.”
“If you’re sure,” she said. “Please be careful.”
“Thanks. I’ll try.” Stifling any further stoic repartee, I lurched painfully to my feet, plodded in the direction indicated. A hundred yards and a century later, I stopped at another bench, cheery pastel pink, and lowered myself wearily, wondering if I’d ever get up again.
I didn’t seem seriously damaged, just sore, and incredibly tired. Pilots have fallen miles, sans parachute, and survived. Maybe I’d qualify for a Guinness record when this was all over—a brightening thought, somehow. I started humming an old railroad song and reached into my coat pocket. “Last week a premature blast went off / And a mile in the air went Big Jim Goff / And DRILL, ye tarriers, DRILL!”
The pistol I’d confiscated was a sweetheart:
MADE IN BELGIUM
“The next time payday comes around / Jim Goff a dollar short was found . . .” I’ve always admired the Browning P-35, despite its lack of authoritative stomp. Impeccably designed and made to last for generations, it’s no more powerful than an issue .38 but carries an impressive fourteen cartridges.
“‘What for? says he, then this reply …” On the other side, stamped in neat, tiny letters, was something that started me wondering exactly what I’d do when I found my way back to the university:
CALIBRE 9MM PARABELLUM
PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT SECURITY
POLICE
‘“Yer docked fer the time you was up in the sky!’ /And DRILL, ye tarriers, DRILL!”
Wobbling the rest of the way across the park, I really wanted someplace to lie down and curl up, maybe suck my thumb a little. I wasn’t really hurt: cuts and bruises—large bruises—and a grisly furrow in the heel of my right shoe where a passing slug had left splinters of copper and lead.
I labored along, people staring at me a little, and me staring right back. Whatever the local ordinances were, I saw more low-slung handguns, more dirks and daggers, than in a dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel. I found myself grabbing convulsively at my left armpit more than once. Fort Collins sure had changed!
Maybe they were all dressed up for some kind of fair. I didn’t recognize the costume period. Most people, including some cops I know, are frightened by weapons of all kinds, knives worse than guns, for some silly reason. These must all be toys, part of the celebration. I tried looking closer without being nosy—not my jurisdiction, after all—but the effort still brought tears. There hadn’t been a hardware collection like this since the Crusades were catered. Women and children sporting arms right along with the men. But wait. Were they children, waddling like circus midgets, even brushing the ground with an occasional knuckle?
If only the fog of weariness and pain would—can you have a migraine in a dream? Mud- and blood-splattered from collar to ankles, amid all this resplendent sartorialism, I was about as attractive and dignified as a Larimer Street wino. I’d even managed to split a crotch seam.
At last I reached a low, meandering wall of multicolored brick, more bewildered than ever. The street was a broad ribbon of sea-green crabgrass full of traffic, not a single vehicle even remotely familiar. There wasn’t a wheel in sight.
I’d once ridden an English hovercraft, admired the same sort of ground effect machine on Puget Sound before Ralph Nader shut it down. This wasn’t the same at all: these whispered along, quiet as an usher in church. I was beginning to get an idea that I was more than lost, I was profoundly misplaced.
Maybe I’d been hurt and was wandering around with amnesia.
That old Greer Garson flick—Random Harvest?—real people have spent years like that, building new lives, families, then coming back in shock to their original personalities. This world around me was some artist’s conception of Tomorrowland. Had I spent the last twenty years being someone else? It would explain the age I felt right now! Had decades passed between the lab explosion and whatever happened in the park, and now, after some second stress or injury, was I myself again? Random Harvest—Ronald Colman was the guy.
Across the street, a three-story Edwardian building had a low wall around it, too, and a large bronze sign:
EST. A.L. 117
117 A.L.? They don’t start a new calendar every election year. What had happened here while I was out to lunch? And where the hell was here, anyway? All I wanted was to crawl off somewhere and lie down for a couple of months. I was through detectiving. Let someone else do it.
I guess I came pretty close to flipping out at that moment. That I didn’t, I attribute not to any sterling qualities, but simply to well-worn habits of mind and, perhaps, a dollop of shock-induced euphoria.
If I could just find someplace to start, some loose thread to pick until this whole mystery began to unravel—before I did. Do you just walk up and ask someone, “Excuse me, what year is this?”
I could always call the cops. They might want my badge and gun for their museum. Hell, they might want me for their—hold it! I was still carrying that badge, and the .41 caliber weight swinging against my ribs wasn’t a grilled-cheese sandwich. I was still wearing my faithful old gray suit, my second-best tie, and everything else I’d put on in Denver this morning. However I’d gotten into this mess, it wasn’t via any twenty-year amnesic vacation.
So much for the Random Harvest theory. A glance down the sidewalk, and there it was, my first sensible idea for the day—lower and wider than I was used to, with tinted panes in a wrought-iron latticework, and a fancy Kremlinesque spire pointing skyward:
Whatever that meant. Nothing orients you faster in strange territory than browsing through the phone book. There wasn’t any door. I took two steps down into the booth and the street noises went away. It also seemed cooler inside, but I could tolerate an air-conditioned phone booth if the Secretary of Energy could.
No phone book. Just like back home. No telephone, either: just a simple matte-finished panel like sandblasted Corning-ware. Underneath was a keyboard. I plunked myself down on the broad upholstered bench and abruptly the screen had letters on it:
-NEED ASSISTANCE?—
The Grand Combined Director of
Greater Paporte!
Gray, Bell, & Acme Communications Systems
which changed in a few moments to:
INSTRUCTIONS: Please enter party you wish to ’com. Number will be indicated by a pulsing cursor dot. Enter A for Accept and remit payment. For information, please enter 0 for Operator. For free map displays, enter Map plus address desired. Thank you for choosing our services.
Now there was something: a polite phone company! Three polite companies, and the service argued Messrs. Gray, Bell, and Acme might be bucking pretty lively competition.
I could have tried the local fuzz, but I figured I owed the thrill to my alma mater. The screen hadn’t mentioned Long Distance, so I examined the keyboard. It wasn’t laid out like a typewriter, but at this point, I felt lucky they were the same letters. It was back to hunt and peck after years of perfecting my own two-finger method. Finally, I decided on O.
So help me, an animated drawing answered, a pleasantly stereotypical old-timey operator, crisply pretty in a high-collared blouse and headset—like Betty Crocker’s kid sister. “May I help you?”
I’d never talked to a cartoon before, but this seemed like the day for it. “Could you give me Long Distance? The Denver Police, two-six-six, two-four-two-one. And reverse the charges. This is Lieutenant Win Bear.”
“One moment, please Lieutenant Bear.” The screen blanked, then she reappeared. “I’m sorry, we have no records for a Denver Police in either local or trunkline memories. Are you sure you’re using the correct name?”
That stopped me. “What do you mean? Try ‘Denver, City, and County of.”’
Her face registered good-natured exasperation. “I’m very sorry, sir. I’ve accessed 36,904 listings: but no ‘Denver, City and County of.”’
The 3-D display made it almost irresistible to try strangling her cute little cartoon neck. But something catastrophic had resulted in a brand-new calendar. Hell, Denver could be in a different country by now! “Hold on! How far away—if that’s the way to put it—is your directory good for?” Back home you still can’t dial lots of places—try calling Moscow for a little excitement at the FBI’s expense.
She hesitated. “Sir, we list over seven billion individuals and organizations currently contracting with some twelve thousand telecommunications companies on this planet, the Moon, Mars, and Ceres Central. I am confident to sixteen decimals that there is no ‘Denver, City and County of’ in the known solar system. May I be of further assistance, or would you prefer a live operator?”
There was a definite “asshole” at the end of that sentence. “No,” I answered dizzily, “that’s enough.” The screen returned to NEED ASSISTANCE? I certainly did—oxygen and a saline drip. So much for The Next Best Thing to Being There.
Okay, Denver was obliterated. They’d finally Pushed the Button, and at least 117 years ago, judging by the university sign. Ragnarok’s a pretty good reason to start a new calendar. Yet this society had pulled through it, recovered without a scar. Hey! People are on Mars!
But where did that leave me? All my friends must be dead. I was my folks’ only kid. I had no close relatives or descendants I was aware of. Jesus, with Denver gone, did anyone I know have any descendants? Maybe the local cops could recommend a nice rubber room for my declining years.
Wait a minute! This was no way for Sergeant Billy Bear’s son Winnie to be thinking! There must be something I could do, if only looking up Otis Bealls’s great-grandson to punch him in the nose.
Maybe that wasn’t such a screwy idea: Bealls might be long dead. That explosion might not have been in Meiss’s lab, but IT—the opening remarks of World War III! On the other hand, he could have lived long enough to pinch the nurses in some postwar wrinkle-ranch. One way or another, my explosion would surely rate some footnote in his family history.
I typed out BEALLS, OTIS. The screen displayed something like a regular phonebook page with a glowing orange cursor dot wiggling up and down the margin. Beallses, about sixty of them, but no Otis. I stared at the list, wondering how to ask someone, “Pardon me, did you have an ancestor named Otis, back before the End of the World?” The cursor dot slide-whistled up and down the page uncertainly.
Then, in the right-hand column across from the Beallses, it caught me, right between the eyes:
BEAR, EDWARD W., Consulting Detective
626 E. Genêt PI.
ACMe 9-4223
I wouldn’t have taken a million “metric ounces” not to dial that number. Seeing your own distinctive name and more-or-less correct profession in a strange city’s directory is interesting, but not that rare: five years after he was killed, my Dad was still getting mail for another Tech Sergeant Bill Bear. But on a Picturephone, possibly decades in the future?
Perhaps this wasn’t the time for idle curiosity, sitting in a futuristic phone booth, torn and filthy, still disoriented and getting more that way every minute. I’m not sure what was called for. Catatonic schizophrenia, maybe.
PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE
I rummaged through my pockets: ball-point, notebook, badge holder and wallet, empty cartridges, felt-tip, two dimes, a quarter, four pennies. How much is a tenth-ounce of copper? Those little watch-pockets they put in trousers are good for something: I pulled out the Lysander Spooner coin from Meiss’s desk. Half an ounce of silver ought to do it. Do polite phone companies give change?
The coin! I hadn’t associated the numbers—dates—with the university sign until now. To hell with it, time enough for going batty later. I inserted the silver coin, the machine started hiccuping into its coin return. I didn’t have time to examine the result, because:
WE’RE SORRY, YOUR PARTY IS BUSY. IF YOU’D LIKE TO WAIT, PLEASE ENTER H FOR HOLD. TO CANCEL THE CALL, ENTER C—YOUR MONEY WILL BE REFUNDED. THANK YOU.
I said, “You’re welcome,” and punched H, fidgeting nervously. Is there another way to travel through time besides starting at birth and plodding on to Social Security, collecting varicose veins along the way? Meiss had to have gotten that coin from here. Was it time travel he’d been working on? It wasn’t any crazier an idea than amnesia, and I could see how the government might be interested.
But who was this gink with my name? Let’s see, if I hadn’t gone through Meiss’s machine, I might have survived World War III or whatever, eventually moving to Fort Collins. But I did go through, so I couldn’t have … anyway, I’d be at least 165 by now! Not that I didn’t feel it. Of course, I could have had a kid after 1987 … but no, the same objection applies: after 1987, I was—am—already here. This is where my lifeline and Meiss’s confounded gadgetry had carried me, not through Armageddon to Father’s Day.
Impatiently, I fiddled with the coin return and found a copper tenth-piece among the change: an overweight penny with somebody named Albert Jay Nock staring out of it. Damn it, still busy! Seething now, I punched out MAP and 626 GENET PL. ACMe was as good as its word: a city map materialized, two pulsing amber dots explaining YOU ARE HERE and ADDRESS REQUESTED. Pretty fancy. I’d have a few suggestions for Ma Bell if I ever got the chance—
Which I might! If Meiss had invented a time machine back in 1987, surely by now—I almost looked up “Travel Agents, Time” in the Grand Combined Directory, but didn’t want to risk getting a cartoon sore at me twice in one day.
However, Genet Place was only six blocks away, and I was beginning to feel cocky—giddy if you prefer. Judging from the phone rates, I had a pocket full of high-caliber change—including the gold slug I’d never had a chance to turn in—and three freshly loaded guns. I’d figured out, within certain sloppy tolerances, what had happened to me. Thanks to my almost Sherlockian genius, I even had a rough idea of the history of this place—and a definite destination: 626 Genet Place. Not bad, for only an hour in Futureland!
Shock can be a pretty wonderful thing.
When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?
I passed another TELECOM, decorated like a candy-striped guardpost, an enterprise of CHEYENNE COMMUNICATIONS. At least Wyoming had made it through Doomsday—but who’d know the difference? This booth offered background music and scenic rear-projections to convince ’em you were in Tahiti—or in a phone booth with scenic rear-projections.
The escalator headed up again into the sunlight, dumping me out on the other side of Confederation Boulevard. Somewhere at the end of this day was a mattress and a pillow. I wished I knew where. I was weary, lightheaded, surrounded by the totally strange and the strangely familiar. I started giggling a couple times, mostly from hysteria rather than from the scenery.
Escalator tunnels and underground shopping centers lay beneath every intersection, sometimes connected with their neighbors up and down the block. I got a lot of free rides that way, though once I rode too far and had to double back. There was almost more city below ground than above, which made sense with a thermonuclear war in the recent past.
Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee. To my taste, the whole arrangement looked too much like drawers in the city morgue.
Experimentally, I fed my shirt into another slot and got it back looking almost good as new. So I turned in my pants, jacket, shorts, and socks and stood around feeling silly in my Kevlar, shoes, and shoulder holster. I found an empty shower stall and afterward discovered that the laundry had fixed my pants. It all came to about an ounce of copper.
A few more blocks took me away from the energetic university district to a quieter residential area, elaborate in architectural extremes. Victorian and Edwardian gingerbread sat grandly between the baroque and a sort of Swiss-chalet style—ornate, almost rococo, but taken all together, neither garish nor intimidating. Just different. The homes were set back deeply from the road, on enormous lots with gracefully curving rubber driveways winding through gardens and wrought-iron fencery. If Edward W. Bear lived like this, being a P.I. must pay better here than it did in my jurisdiction.
Definitely feeling more like myself, whoever that was (another twinge of curiosity about this “Edward W. Bear”), I ambled along in the afternoon sun, absently aware that the almost-silent vehicles swooshing along beside me in the street produced no noticeable exhaust. Down in the curbing there wasn’t a scrap of garbage. As my head cleared I began to notice other things—the streets might be Kentucky Blue, but there’s a lot to be said for rubber sidewalks. Soon, except for where I’d kicked that SecPol agent, my feet were the only part that didn’t hurt. I thought resentfully about the million concrete miles I’d trod on downtown foot patrol.
Here, the underground crossings ran to neighborhood groceries, stationery, and candy stores—the kind of mom-and-pop operations nearly killed off by city zoning back home. I took another fling, stopping for some cigarettes, my first decent ones in almost five years. Two copper pennies for the most expensive in the place.
Topside again, I did a little people-watching. It was more than their weird colorful clothing and strangely relaxed briskness. Something was missing—the barely concealed hostility and fear that haunted my city streets. These people never seemed to push or jostle, never avoided looking at one another. They’d nod politely—even speak!—and they carried their heads high, unafraid of the world around them. It sent shivers down my spine.
What I first took to be an extraordinary number of children became even more confusing. Some of these little people spotted muttonchops and mustaches. I noticed gangly arms and clumsy gaits. Mutants—the city was full of them. Even my bleary eyes could see the effects of radiation-distorted genes: protruding jaws, rubbery lips; some practically had muzzles.
Even more jarring were the weapons—men and women alike, little people, children. I passed one obvious kindergartener carrying a pistol almost as big as he was! Was there some danger here I wasn’t seeing? Or was the hardware merely a legacy of the brutal time that must have followed an atomic war? Yet these people seemed so full of cordiality. Could the source of their pride and dignity be nothing more than the mechanical means of dealing death they carried? Well, the alternative, thousands of variations on the Sullivan Act, had been no shining success back home.
What the hell, it was a nice day, a fine day. Nothing wrong that a long drink and a longer snooze wouldn’t cure. Maybe there was an opening on the local force—would a century and a half’s experience count for anything?
At long last a fancy scrollwork signpost announced PLACE d’EDMOND GENET. My stomach tightened, my mouth went dry. Who was this other Edward Bear?
All of a sudden a 747 was trying to land on my back! I whirled; a long black hovercraft tore down the street, coming my way fast. It bellowed, riding a tornado as other drivers bumped up over the sidewalk, swerved and slid to avoid being hit. Six feet above the ground, the monster covered blocks in seconds, sending a hideous roar ahead and a shower of sparks. Bullets sang around my head.
I leaped a low hedge and rolled, thankful I’d reloaded the forty-one. Pain throbbed through my exhausted body; muscles screamed and cuts reopened. Crouching, I pumped six heavy slugs into the hovercraft, but on it flew, never hesitating. Dimly aware that my hand was bleeding again, I wrestled the automatic free from my coat and thumbed the hammer back, jerking the trigger again and again as the machine slid crazily around the corner. It was like a dream where nothing you do has any effect. Bullets whistled, tearing leaves and branches, plucking at my hair. The slide locked back on the Browning—empty.
Dipping and weaving more from fear and pain than strategy, I thrust both weapons into my coat and twisted, running, tearing at my hip for the derringer. A house rose huge before me, “626” embossed in foot-high characters on its broad garage door. I ran that endless curving drive as bullet-shredded paving stung my ankles. Halfway there, as if on cue, the door began to rise. Would I die, trapped in a garage like that miserable soul on Emerson Street—what?—only yesterday?
Ragged holes began appearing in the door, an erratic hemstitch working in my direction. I swam toward it in slow motion as the hovercraft, guns blazing, started up the drive.
My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in front of me! The bottom edge rose past me as I fought to clear the derringer, bring it to bear for its one pitiable shot. No strength to pull the hammer back … the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.
