Confidence Game, Jim Harmon [old books to read .TXT] 📗

My heart hammered at my lungs. I knew this last time had been different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a start.

He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom. His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed "springs"—metal webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a meaningful whole.

I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I became lost.

I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any hungry rats out of the walls.

I knelt beside Doc.

"An order, my boy, an order," he whispered.

I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?

He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen, before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.

"Concentrate," Doc said hoarsely. "Concentrate...."

I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of concentration.

The words "First Edition" were what I was thinking about most.

The heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, "The bullet struck me as I was pulling on my boot...."

I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.

Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these months—time travel.

A thin, sickly man was sprawled in the other chair in a rumpled dressing gown. My eyes held to his face, his pinpoint pupils and whitened nose. He was a condemned snowbird! If there was anything I hated or held in more contempt than tourists or Martians, it was a snowbird.

"My clients have occasioned singular methods of entry into these rooms," the thin man remarked, "but never before have they used instantaneous materialization."

The heavier man was half choking, half laughing. "I say—I say, I would like to see you explain this, my dear fellow."

"I have no data," the thin man answered coolly. "In such instance, one begins to twist theories into fact, or facts into theories. I must ask this unemployed, former professional man who has gone through a serious illness and is suffering a more serious addiction to tell me the place and time from which he comes."

The surprise stung. "How did you know?" I asked.

He gestured with a pale hand. "To maintain a logical approach, I must reject the supernatural. Your arrival, unless hallucinatory—and despite my voluntary use of one drug and my involuntary experiences recently with another, I must accept the evidence of my senses or retire from my profession—your arrival was then super-normal. I might say super-scientific, of a science not of my or the good doctor's time, clearly. Time travel is a familiar folk legend and I have been reading an article by the entertaining Mr. Wells. Perhaps he will expand it into one of his novels of scientific romance."

I knew who these two men were, with a tormenting doubt. "But the other—"

"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth. Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary state?"

He was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.

"You don't exist," I said slowly, painfully. "You are fictional creations."

The doctor flushed darkly. "You give my literary agent too much credit for the addition of professional polish to my works."

The other man was filling a large, curved pipe from something that looked vaguely like an ice-skate. "Interesting. Perhaps if our visitor would tell us something of his age with special reference to the theory and practice of temporal transference, Doctor, we would be better equipped to judge whether we exist."

There was no theory or practice of time travel. I told them all I had ever heard theorized from Hindu yoga through Extra-sensory Perception to Relativity and the positron and negatron.

"Interesting." He breathed out suffocating black clouds of smoke. "Presume that the people of your time by their 'Extra-sensory Perception' have altered the past to make it as they suppose it to be. The great historical figures are made the larger than life-size that we know them. The great literary creations assume reality."

I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal.

His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. "Withdrawal symptoms."

The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He was not really a snowbird.

After a time, I asked the doctor a question.

"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously."

Accepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened. My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote in sunlight and stepped toward it....

... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.

She inclined the lethal silver toy. "Let me see those papers, Kevin."

I handed her the doctor's manuscript.

Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. "It's all right. It's all right. It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read this myself."

Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.

"Don't move, Kevin," she said. "I'll have to shoot you—maybe not to kill, but painfully."

I watched her face flash blue, red, blue and knew she meant it. But I had known too much in too short a time. I had to help Doc, but there was something else.

"I just want a drink of coffee from that container on the chair," I told her.

She shook her head. "I don't know what you think it does to you."

It was getting hard for me to think. "Who are you?"

She showed me a card from her wrist purse. Vivian Casey, Constable, North American Mounted Police.

I had to help Doc. I had to have some coffee. "What do you want?"

"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical, topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?"

I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.

"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money," Miss Casey said, "even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of Doc's character. He was a scholar."

Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I needed some coffee.

"He became a book finder. He got rare editions of books and magazines for his clients in absolutely mint condition. That was all right—until he started obtaining books that did not exist."

I didn't know what all that was supposed to mean. I got to the chair, snatched up the coffee container, tore it open and gulped down the soothing liquid.

I turned toward her and threw the rest of the coffee into her face.

The coffee splashed out over her platinum hair and powder-blue dress that looked white when the neon was azure, purple when it was amber. The coffee stained and soiled and ruined, and I was fiercely glad, unreasonably happy.

I tore the gun away from her by the short barrel, not letting my filthy hands touch her scrubbed pink ones.

I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the thing on the floor to the cot. Doc had