The Here and Now

by Steven Utley

Illustration by Shirley Chan

As Livermore fussed with my straps and electrodes, I looked up into his bland pink face and said, “I’m tired of wars. I think I’ll switch to literary crowds. They have more sex, and the food is better.”

He chuckled softly and turned to attend The Kid, who lay on the gurney next to mine. The time machine—only pompous buttheads ever called it a chronotron, even though it wasn’t a machine to move us through time but one that helped us move ourselves—the time machine clicked, ticked, and hummed. The readout counted off minutes, seconds, and tenths of seconds until the most propitious moment for our departure. The Kid looked around Livermore’s elbow and said, “You nervous?”

I glanced sharply at him. “What makes you think I’m nervous?”

He indicated the ceiling. “You sure look nervous up there.” The time machine’s ceding and walls were shiny metal. I could see my reflection: with all the wires and whatnot, I looked like a retired math teacher who’d wandered into an old Frankenstein movie. The Kid was up there, too, looking young enough (but not handsome enough or smart enough) to be my grandson. He grinned a grin that had a sneer tucked away in one corner. “What’s there to worry about?”

What he really wanted to say, of course, was, What is this old geezer doing here? Livermore moved to the far side of the gurney and pretended to smooth down a piece of tape as he waited to see how I’d deal with the upstart. And what could I say to put The Kid in his place? “I was the first time traveler to take someone back and insert him into another person’s body.” “I helped transform chronopathy from a random phenomenon and a passive experience into something selective, precise, and interactive.” “I helped design the chronotron, you little snotnose.” So I said nothing, and Livermore looked let down.

After several seconds, The Kid said, “It true this’ll be your last go?”

“It sure is.”

“Guess you’re gonna miss it, huh?”

“I hope not.”

He grinned his hateful grin. “Come on. Stuck in the here and now, year after year after year?”

I said, “I don’t expect to have that many years.”

“Still.” The Kid’s grin got sneerier. “What’ll you do for excitement?”

“I’m past the age where excitement’s very exciting.”

“You never know. Gimme a call sometime. I’ll take you way, way back. Let you run with T-rex and the raptors.”

I shook my head. “I’m just going to take it easy. Catch up on some reading, write my memoirs. Maybe sell the movie rights.” War movies were hot.

The readout said, 09:04:6, 09:03:8, 09:02:1.

Avery, my usual partner, had fallen ill the day before, and The Kid had been brought in as a replacement at almost the last moment. I had to take his word for it that he’d been briefed about Avery’s people. He patently felt that he was doing everybody a major favor that could never be fully repaid. Although The Kid was barely old enough to buy his own beer, he was perhaps the most gifted chronopath alive. All human beings are vortices of energy and matter, and chronopathy is probably latent in at least one in a million. Worldwide, active chronopaths number maybe in the low hundreds, and as for individuals with some control over their ability and a real sense of what to do with that ability—well, there are few enough of us so that we’ve always felt special, and yet just enough of us so that we aren’t all that special.

But The Kid really was hot stuff. He could range, at will, farther afield than most of us had dreamed of or would have dared. I was lucky enough to get as far back as the 1900s. And I could take in and insert and bring out only one or two people at a time. The Kid could handle a dozen or more.

If all that weren’t enough, I was old, and The Kid had decades ahead of him.

I pawed around in my mental file, Aphorisms to Zingers, and shored up my forbearance with something from S. Fowler Wright. The reactions of age to the youth that succeeds it are the supreme evidences of character.

Livermore looked at everything one more time, nodded in satisfaction, and went out. The door closed and sealed itself. The readout said, 04:12:4, 03:56:7, 03:04:2…

I paid attention to my breathing and made myself relax. The time machine continued to click, tick, and hum. The readout said, 02:28:7, 02:15:5, 01:47:8. At around 01:00:0, I offered up a prayer for our success and safe return. The Kid snickered softly, but I refused to let him irritate me. At 00:05:0,1 whispered, “Now,” and willed myself away. I seemed to float against the straps, to rise as though there were no straps, higher, higher than the ceiling. I seemed to turn in the air and look down at my own body, which seemed to be experiencing an epileptic seizure. Then—

—then, just like that, I hung suspended and disembodied above the world, looking down through a pall of smoke. The vista’s chief points of interest were conflagrations, bomb craters, the jagged walls of ruined buildings, and streets so choked with mounds of rubble that they resembled ravines in the Badlands. You couldn’t have pointed to an extant roof anywhere. You wouldn’t have been able to tell that the season was spring; everything that wasn’t actually on fire was ashy gray or sooty black. Everything. It was May of 1945, Berlin lay in ruins, the Third Reich twitched in death.

I sensed The Kid somewhere close by, drawing closer. Looks kind of like Richmond in 1865, he said, only a lot more so.

Come on, I told him, and suddenly we were descending, the ground was rushing up at incredible speed—

—and, just like that, I was in my host. He didn’t have time to realize that something untoward had happened to him; I pushed him down into unconsciousness. His body started to sag against a blackened, pitted wall. I made it stop, made it mine. It belonged to one Fritz Mueller, late of a Volkssturm unit that had disintegrated around him or from which he had deserted—the difference hardly mattered now. His body, mid-fiftyish and out-of-shape, ached with fatigue. It had gone too long without any rest, much food, a change of clothing, and a bath. But there’s nothing like war to make a body lose sleep and neglect personal hygiene.

Shards of glass, blown out of every window in sight, crunched underfoot as I stepped away from the wall. I was in a debris-strewn courtyard. The air was full of soot and grit—I tasted the one, ground the other between my host’s molars. I smelled fire, excrement, and decomposition.

Nearby, pieces of broken masonry clattered down the slope of a rubble pile, followed by a ragged man who very nearly impaled himself on a steel rod jutting from the mass. As he lurched to his feet, he gave me a grin that was as much like The Kid’s own as was physiognomically possible. It looked awful on his host’s haggard, dirty, young-old face.

“Take it easy,” I said. “We’re responsible for these bodies.”

He shrugged. “My guy’ll be dead by the end of the day. He gets away from the Russians and everything, but when he stops to catch his breath and rest his feet, a wall falls on top of him.”

“Cutting it pretty close, aren’t you? What if even one of your people is late? What if your host isn’t under that wall when it falls?”

The Kid didn’t bother to answer what both of us knew were stupid questions. Everyone’s movements had been scouted and timed; nobody was going to fail to show up on schedule anywhere. Time doesn’t permit deviations.

From some faraway point came a low keening that quickly rose to a shriek. The sound passed directly over us. A second or two later, there was a loud explosion close by. I had known it was coming, but still I flinched. The noise of the blast had hardly faded before we heard the keening again, and then the shriek, and finally another explosion, farther away.

The Kid gave me a disgusted look. I said, “Problem?”

“You picked the moment and the place. I thought we were supposed to get here after the cease-fire.”

“We have,” I said, and as the disgust in his expression yielded to disbelief, “Some of the Russian artillery units haven’t got the word yet.”

“Either that, or they’re getting in their last licks at the Germans.” He crossed his arms. “So, what, we just wait until they get it out of their systems?”

“Just till they start lobbing shells in another direction. It’ll be a few minutes.”

I sat down on a roughly level slab of concrete. The Kid went through his host’s pockets, produced a single sad-looking unfiltered cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, went through pockets a second time in search of matches. There were none. He said, “Got a light?”

“Those things’re bad for you,” I said idly.

He raised his host’s hand and waggled the fingers—“Not for me”—then stuck the cigarette behind his ear. He found a place to sit across from me, vigorously scratched his head, his leg, his head again, then reached inside his ratty coat and scratched his belly.

Which, of course, made me aware of my own intimate companions. I started to scratch but stopped and listened as another shell whined over. I didn’t move until it had exploded.

“Anybody who worries as much as you do,” said The Kid, “shouldn’t be here.”

I started to tell him that somebody always has to be in charge of worrying, and because it’s my nature to worry, it always falls on me to be that somebody, but then Aphorisms to Zingers spat out Tell me my Faults, and mend your own, from Poor Richard’s Almanack. I kept my mouth shut.

Unfortunately, he didn’t do likewise. “If all I could do was worry,” he went on, “I’d just stay home. There’s plenty enough for you to worry about back in the here and now. Me, I am determined to enjoy myself. I did the Civil War, from Manassas to Appomattox. I did it all the way to the end, even after the Civil War freaks really started creeping me out. I started messing with their heads. Like, I’d find ’em hosts who were about to go into a big battle and get shot all to pieces. Then’d come my favorite part, where they got to learn what Civil War surgery was all about.”

He was watching me closely as he spoke. I knew better than to believe everything any chronopath said, but I also knew enough not to disbelieve anything out of hand; if what The Kid was telling me came within fifty miles of being the truth (probably about the correct distance), he wouldn’t have been the first chronopath to give his tagalongs a bit more than they’d bargained for. I had been tempted along those lines myself, once or twice.

I said, mildly, “Didn’t these people sort of resent getting shot all to pieces?”

The Kid laughed like the happy young psycho he was. “Well, I didn’t do it to all of ’em. Just the ones who really got on my nerves. The ones who thought, because I was gonna take ’em back and insert ’em in the battle of Chancellorsville, I was dying to hear everything they had to say about what a genius Stonewall Jackson was. All I promised ’em was, they’d remember everything after I took ’em out and got ’em back. And the hosts I picked for ’em would survive the particular fight they wanted to be in. And they would get to lay eyes on ol’ Stonewall. But I never said a host’d survive in one piece, or that they might only get to see Stonewall as he rode by on his horse. Or that they might even get to be one of his own men who shot him as he rode by.” Now he had a dreamy expression on his face. “If they complained afterward, I’d tell ’em, Hey, look, I’d say, you wanted the experience of being a Civil War soldier—getting a leg sawn off without anesthetic was part of the experience! That and lice, bad food, diarrhea. And what were they gonna do? I had their signed waivers!”

“Ah-huh,” I said. “You know, it occurs to me that if you couldn’t time travel, you’d probably be off amusing yourself somewhere by setting bugs on fire with a magnifying glass.”

“Does that work?” He waited a beat, then grinned. “Had you going!”

“Should I take that to mean you actually do have enough compassion not to set fire to bugs?”

His grin had settled on his face. “Compassion,” he said, “is all just people pathetically huddling together, clinging to each other, while the universe chops ’em down.”

“Ah-huh,” I said.

That wasn’t the response he had expected to provoke. Undaunted, he changed tack. “Somebody told me once that Third Reich freaks’re even worse than Civil War freaks. Guys who want to come back and tell Hitler how to win the war.”

I folded my arms and looked at him and felt as though I were about to address a know-it-all teenager, which in fact was almost the case, and I started to say, Third Reich freaks, real Third Reich freaks, never get past screening, and then I would have gone on and explained, They generally don’t have history degrees, they’re generally uneducated or at least undereducated schlubs with closets full of guns and heads full of fantasies about darkies, infidels, and black helicopters, and next I’d have reminded him that the purpose of screening was to weed out anyone with a serious ax to grind, which particularly included anyone who wanted to come back and tell Hitler how to win WW2, and finally I would’ve pointed out that even if we were somehow to neglect to suppress someone’s personality before inserting him into the Third Reich, well, when had Hitler ever let anybody tell him anything? But Poor Richard’s Almanack headed me off at the pass again, this time with He’s a Fool that cannot conceal his Wisdom, so all I said was, “You might be disappointed,” and no more.

He sneered when he saw that I wasn’t going to give him any satisfaction. He sought some other creative outlet, and soon found it in field-stripping his cigarette. I sat wondering glumly why I hadn’t retired after my previous jaunt, or the one before it. But, of course, I knew why: closure. I’d lived in the here and now, linear time, through the fatuous ’50s, the shrill ’60s, the simpering ’70s, the affectless ’80s, the nihilistic ’90s, and was about to emerge alive from the awful Oughts. It had been an interesting bunch of years thus far, and I might even live through the terrible Teens before it was finished. And I’d traveled all over the first half of the twentieth century, and that was an interesting bunch of years, too. So many battles and massacres. The first time I’d gone into the past—I mean, the first time that I’d understood that what I was doing was going into the past—I had expected I would be this ghost surrounded by shadows. Instead, I was a real person, and all around me real people were inflicting real damage on other real people. Then, since I was essentially seeing a lot of the same things over and over again, only from different angles, I’d thought, Well, I’ll get used to it. But I never had got used to it, though I’d probably witnessed more of WW2—and WW1, and plenty of the little wars in between—than anyone who had actually been alive then, in Unear time. I had had enough of blitzkriegs, death marches, extermination camps, and fire-bombings, and already knew that I didn’t have the stomach for Hiroshima. The fall of Berlin would have to satisfy my longing for closure. The part of the past that was still physically accessible to me was narrowing. I was gaining on my own birthday, November 10, 1948. I could do the Berlin Airlift and the Truman-Dewey race, but I didn’t have the interest myself and wouldn’t need the money even if the demand were great. Which it wouldn’t be, because the only thing people go to the twentieth century for is the wars. And after November 10, 1948—well, as de Maupassant wrote, “It is not possible to be and to have been at the same time.” Granted, de Maupassant wasn’t a physicist and hadn’t been thinking about time travel when he wrote that, but I didn’t want to be the one to find out directly how Time and Space dealt with paradoxes.

The shelling had grown more sporadic by now, and the shells were falling some distance away. I got purposefully to my feet and said, “Come on, we’ve got work to do. Speak only German from now on, or else keep your mouth shut.”

“I know the drill.”

“And wipe that grin off your face.”

The Kid dropped the mangled remains of his cigarette. We crept out of the courtyard, through one of the adjoining ruins, and looked out through a gaping hole in a front wall upon one of Berlin’s great east-west thoroughfares. Pedestrians jammed it, and threaded through them was a haphazard sort of military caravan, a miscellany of vehicles—trucks, tanks, personnel carriers, self-propelled guns, automobiles, motorcycles. There were even some soldiers on horseback. There wasn’t much gasoline left in Berlin, however, and not many horses, either, so the great majority of soldiers were on foot, trudging along with the civilians. The civilian refugees looked the way refugees always look—ludicrous, until you consider how tired and frightened and deserving of pity they are. Some seemed to be trying to move entire households on bicycles, carts, and baby carriages. Others lugged items they evidently treasured above all others, such useful things as food or such unlikely ones as chairs, lamps, mirrors, birdcages, and rolls of carpet. Many had simply grabbed up children and set out with only the clothes on their backs. I had visited Auschwitz for a total of seventeen minutes; I’d seen, heard, and (God!) smelled too much else besides, and knew that in ways great and small, whether willingly and eagerly or through frightened acquiescence, the men and women before me had brought this calamity upon themselves. But their children excited only my pity. Some had walked here with their families all the way from Poland. None of them were guilty of crimes against humanity.

Upon beholding this same throng, The Kid said, simply, “I love a parade.”

“I thought I told you to speak only German, Wesley.” Wesley was his real name; he hated it.

We emerged from the building and took our places. Though the stream of people and vehicles passed within a few yards of us, sometimes within a few feet, no one paid us any attention. All The Kid and I had to do was wait where we were and look like two tired men who had paused to catch their breath, or given up. Our people were acting on strong posthypnotic commands—not that the commands had to be strong. Their hosts didn’t need any more inducement to flee west than the fact that the Russians were coming from the east. Our people’s hosts would head for the Spandau district. Shortly before they reached the bridge over the Havel River, they would slip out of the mass of Berliners to join The Kid and me in the ruins. A little later, relieved of their tagalongs, the hosts would make their individual ways back into the crowd and resume their flight. All of them, we knew, would survive long enough to get across the river and into Spandau.

Since I didn’t actually have to watch for my people’s hosts, I looked for little girls of a certain type and age—dark-haired, three years old. One of my lovers along about the end of the ’70s had been born in Berlin in December of 1941. Her father had died on the Eastern Front the following spring. She told me once as we lay together in a postcoital tangle that she remembered being bombed around the clock, and fleeing with her mother from the Russians. “I saw,” she said, “dead people lying in the streets. There was a dead man lying beside the curb in front of our house, and I stepped over him. My mother told me not to step in his brains.” What, I asked, had she made of air raids and human brains spilled out on the pavement? “The bombing terrified me,” she said, “but I didn’t make anything of it. And as for dead people—” She shrugged. “Every childhood is normal.”

I didn’t, of course, really expect to see her among the refugees now. If I’d wanted to find her in Berlin in 1945, I could have. But, as some historian or other once said, it’s very difficult to remember that events now in the past were once far in the future. It can be as difficult for a time traveler as it is for someone who’s embedded in linear time. What could I possibly say to a three-year-old girl who was thirty-some-odd years shy of becoming my lover? “I shall see you later, my dear, heh heh”? Christ, no. After the war, she and her mother had lived in a room in a partly bombed-out building. “Next door was a building that had taken a direct hit—only the walls still stood, and they were crumbling. I would lie in my bed late at night and hear pieces of brick hitting the ground right outside my window.” Things had got better in the 1950s. Wasn’t there, I asked, still resentment directed at Americans then? “Oh, no, everyone wanted to be like the Americans. Americans had money. No one else did.” She’d married an American serviceman and come to the United States in 1961. By the time she and I hooked up, she’d had two children and another husband or two. Sometimes she would awaken beside me, disturbed by a dream, not of falling bombs or dead people, but of bricks tumbling through darkness to strike near the bed.

The Kid spoke out of the corner of his mouth, in English, and snapped me from my reverie. “Looks like you got a customer.” A middle-aged man approached hesitantly. His face was screwed into a mask of perplexity.

I rose to meet him and extended a filthy hand. He looked at it as though he had never seen its like before. I said, “Greetings, Herr Junge. I am so happy that you have made it this far.”

“I—I—” He looked from my face to The Kid’s.

I said, “It’s all right,” I said, and in a lower voice, “Come.” He resisted weakly when he saw that I was drawing him toward a hole in the front of a building. I uttered the command that separated host and tagalong. A shudder coursed through him, and he almost fell. “Come with me.” The command also made him do as I said. I hauled him back into the building, out of sight of the street, pulled him around, and leaned him against the wall.

He gasped, “I must go!”

“Sit down,” I said, and he sat.

“But the Russians—”

“Don’t worry about the Russians.” I could have told him that he wasn’t going to fall into the Russians’ clutches, that he’d be part of the German economic miracle in twenty years, that most people would just sort of forget that he had ever been a member (granted, an obscure one) of the Nazi Party, much as he would just sort of forget that he had ever got to shake hands with one or two of the bigwigs.

He said, “I don’t understand…”

I didn’t try to explain matters then. I gently pushed Junge into a sitting position and left him looking around at the ruined, roofless shell of the building. Back outside, I settled onto a piece of cornice a few feet from The Kid, who sat scanning the crowd and looking hugely bored.

My other tagalong showed up right on schedule—Helena Weltlinger, a matronly sort in expensive clothes. The Kid scowled as we passed him. None of his people—Avery’s—had shown up yet.

In the shelter of the ruins, Junge watched dazedly as I repeated the routine with Weltlinger. She merely blinked once or twice, put her hand to her forehead, and regarded me wonderingly. Most people do snap right out of it. Just in case, though, I gave them the spiel. Sometimes they need a bit more nudging. I said, “You’re both going home in a little while. When we inserted you in this time period, we didn’t want you getting caught up in the passions of the moment and maybe changing history. So we suppressed your personalities. You—”

Junge uttered a cry of pure anguish. His tagalong retained the memory of all Junge had experienced. Now that Junge and the tagalong were pulling apart, the life the tagalong had believed to be his own melted away. “No,” he wailed, “it can’t be!” He rubbed his face with his dirty sleeve. “But I—I believed it all, believed in it all—the Fuehrer, the Reich—”

That was the tagalong talking. I said, “Hitler’s dead, the Reich is finished.”

“But—I believed—and my son!” He came slowly to his feet, and for a moment it was as though Herr Junge had elbowed the tagalong aside. “Eugen! My son was at Stalingrad!”

I gripped his arms, just below the shoulders, and pushed him back down. “Another man’s son,” I said to the tagalong.

“My family! I must go to—”

I slipped my arms around him. Our faces were inches apart. I spoke quietly and quickly. “You don’t really belong here. You were just along for the ride. The life you led here wasn’t your life, it was all phantoms, and now you’re leaving it behind. Your own life’s waiting for you to reclaim it.”

“My son! My son!”

He struggled to rise. I tightened my embrace and resorted to another command. His jaw worked, he continued to sob, tears streamed down his dirty face, but he said no more and stopped trying to stand up. I held him close, rocking slightly and making soothing noises.

The Kid came in ahead of half a dozen confused-looking soldiers. He shook his head when he saw me holding the blubbering Junge. He said, “I see he’s taking it well.”

I relaxed my hold on Junge. He leaned against the wall and whimpered to himself. To The Kid, I said, “There are few pleasures like the joy of a memory reclaimed.”

The Kid parked his people along the wall and stood back, arms akimbo, to survey them. Most of the soldiers weren’t Volkssturm but regular army. He said, “You gotta wonder why anybody’d wanna ride around inside a Nazi’s mind.”

Or a dinosaur’s, I thought. I said, “To observe history up close.”

“Still. It’s gotta be like living in a sewer.”

I had to agree with that.

“But you gotta give the Nazis credit,” he said after a moment.

“For what?”

“They had the coolest uniforms. Even the grunts.”

We waited to let our people rest. Afterward, when our hosts rejoined the westward-fleeing throng, if they remembered this little detour at all, they’d remember only a moment’s dazedness, dizziness, disorientation. I stepped outside to take a last look around. The Kid followed me. The refugees plodded on, toward the bridges. I noticed a young woman and a little girl as they drew abreast of us. They held hands tightly as they walked. The girl kept looking up at the woman’s face, on which was written every emotion a mother must feel when she takes her child for a walk through a burning city. It’s always the here and now for non-time travelers, and linear time can be a bastard. The girl wore a dark green coat and looked to be about the right age; though her hair was the wrong color, I had to wonder.

I glimpsed two Shturmoviks skimming low and fast above the broken skyline to the east, where flames licked at the gray sky. The planes banked and disappeared from view. About half a minute later, one of them came roaring along the thoroughfare at breathtakingly low altitude. The sound it made drowned out the screams of civilians as they scattered in every direction. Soldiers scrambled down off tanks and out of trucks to flatten themselves on the pavement. A terrified horse bolted past, sending the young woman and the little girl spinning in opposite directions. The little girl landed on her belly, almost at my feet, and burst into tears. I scooped her up and crouched there clutching her to me and murmuring, “Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened,” as the second Shturmovik came our way. Like the one before it, it didn’t strafe or drop bombs—either the Russian pilots had expended their ordnance or else they were only having a last bit of fun. The second plane, however, flew even lower than the first, almost at rooftop level, and made even more noise. I could not hear the girl crying into my ear. The plane wagged its wings derisively as it passed overhead, then pulled up sharply, turned south, and was gone.

The young woman came limping toward me with an alarmed expression and her arms outstretched to reclaim her little girl. I gave the girl a gentle hug, handed her over, and backed off. The throng began to reassemble itself.

The Kid was peering off in the direction the planes had taken. “Man,” he said, in English, “this is better than Richmond,” and laughed. In that place at that time, he could not have made a more inappropriate sound.

“Keep it down,” I warned him.

“How can you give all this up? You gotta love it!”

The young woman was trying to get the little girl to walk and calm down at the same time. I turned away to go rejoin my people in the building, and as I passed him I said to The Kid, “I love the last day of any war.”

Content

The Here and Now
by Steven Utley