* * *
1988
And this one, with love, to my granddaughters
JULIA
and
CLAIRE
and
GEORGIA
and
MALLORY
Contents
The Toynbee Convector
Trapdoor
On the Orient, North
One Night in Your Life
West of October
The Last Circus
The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?
Lafayette, Farewell
Banshee
Promises, Promises
The Love Affair
One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!
At Midnight, in the Month of June
Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
By the Numbers!
A Touch of Petulance
Long Division
Come, and Bring Constance!
Junior
The Tombstone
The Thing at the Top of the Stairs
Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy
The Toynbee Convector
“Good! Great! Bravo for me!”
Roger Shumway flung himself into the seat, buckled himself in, revved the rotor and drifted his Dragonfly Super-6 helicopter up to blow away on the summer sky, heading south toward La Jolla.
“How lucky can you get?”
For he was on his way to an incredible meeting.
The time traveler, after 100 years of silence, had agreed to be interviewed. He was, on this day, 130 years old. And this afternoon, at four o’clock sharp, Pacific time, was the anniversary of his one and only journey in time.
Lord, yes! One hundred years ago, Craig Bennett Stiles had waved, stepped into his Immense Clock, as he called it, and vanished from the present. He was and remained the only man in history to travel in time. And Shumway was the one and only reporter, after all these years, to be invited in for afternoon tea. And? The possible announcement of a second and final trip through time. The traveler had hinted at such a trip.
“Old man,” said Shumway, “Mr. Craig Bennett Stiles— here I come!” The Dragonfly, obedient to fevers, seized a wind and rode it down the coast.
The old man was there waiting for him on the roof of the Time Lamasery at the rim of the hang glider’s cliff in La Jolla. The air swarmed with crimson, blue, and lemon kites from which young men shouted, while young women called to them from the land’s edge.
Stiles, for all his 130 years, was not old. His face, blinking up at the helicopter, was the bright face of one of those hang-gliding Apollo fools who veered off as the helicopter sank down.
Shumway hovered his craft for a long moment, savoring the delay.
Below him was a face that had dreamed architectures, known incredible loves, blueprinted mysteries of seconds, hours, days, then dived in to swim upstream through the centuries. A sunburst face, celebrating its own birthday.
For on a single night, one hundred years ago, Craig Bennett Stiles, freshly returned from time, had reported by Telstar around the world to billions of viewers and told them their future.
“We made it!” he said. “We did it! the future is ours. We rebuilt the cities, freshened the small towns, cleaned the lakes and rivers, washed the air, saved the dolphins, increased the whales, stopped the wars, tossed the solar stations across space to light the world, colonized the moon, moved on to Mars, then Alpha Centauri. We cured cancer and stopped death. We did it—Oh Lord, much thanks—we did it. Oh, future’s bright and beauteous spires, arise!”
He showed them pictures, he brought them samples, he gave them tapes and LP records, films and sound cassettes of his wondrous roundabout flight. The world went mad with joy. It ran to meet and make that future, fling up the cities of promise, save all and share with the beasts of land and sea.
The old man’s welcoming shout came up the wind. Shumway shouted back and let the Dragonfly simmer down in its own summer weather.
Craig Bennett Stiles, 130 years old, strode forward briskly and, incredibly, helped the young reporter out of his craft, for Shumway was suddenly stunned and weak at this encounter.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” said Shumway.
“You are, and none too soon,” laughed the time traveler. “Any day now, I may just fell apart and blow away. Lunch is waiting. Hike!”
A parade of one, Stiles marched off under the fluttering rotor shadows that made him seem a flickering newsreel of a future that had somehow passed.
Shumway, like a small dog after a great army, followed. “What do you want to know?” asked the old man as they crossed the roof, double time.
“First,” gasped Shumway, keeping up, “why have you broken silence after a hundred years? Second, why to me? Third, what’s the big announcement you’re going to make this afternoon at four o’clock, the very hour when your younger self is due to arrive from the past—when, for a brief moment, you will appear in two places, the paradox: the person you were, the man you are, fused in one glorious hour for us to celebrate?”
The old man laughed. “How you do go on!”