The Nick Of Time Part 17

"Your mother's in a feminist Sufi convent, Frank."

He looked at her sadly. "My mother's home, Cheryl. You know that as well as I do."

"It might be the Historian on the phone ready to send us home."

"Okay, answer it; see if I care." He resumed discarding the hollandaise sauce. It seemed to go on forever.

Cheryl's part of the telephone conversation was restricted to several well-s.p.a.ced "uh-huhs." She hung up the telephone and came back to the table. "He wants to see us right away," she said.

"Who? The King?"

"The Historian. He has most of the universes in the universe sorted out, but he needs quite a bit of information to narrow down the choices. We'll have to work with him."

"All right. We'll go right after breakfast."

Cheryl looked wistfully at the eggs, the crepes, and the champagne and orange juice. "He said now.His time is valuable, you know. He said right now, immediately, within the next seven minutes, if we really want to go home."

"d.a.m.n it." Mihalik carried the champagne gla.s.s in one hand and stuffed the flambeed strawberry crepe in the pocket of his Agency uniform trousers. "Well, I'm ready," he said. "I'll eat the crepe when I get a chance."

"You're a slob, Frank," said Cheryl. When his expression turned offended, she added, "A lovable slob."

"Yeah, you're right." He didn't sound mollified. "Come on. Where is his place?"

"On top. The 316th floor."

"He must have some view."

Cheryl shrugged. "Of what, Frank? The flowers? They'd be awfully tiny from up that high."

"This is still New York, Cheryl, what ought to be the Queens end of Long Island. He can probably see for miles: the beautiful brown ocean; the Hudson Riverless Valley; The Parking Lot, what used to be Connecticut, and all those parallel yellow stripes--"

"Where I come from, they didn't turn Connecticut into a parking lot."

"They should have, back when they had all those automobiles and things. They had to put them someplace."

"They made Connecticut into a wild game refuge, for the weird, sick people who liked them. Wild games, I mean. You can get prosecuted for doing that sort of thing in the other states, even in the privacy of your own home."

"Just as it should be," said Mihalik. "I don't even like the idea of setting aside a place for those perverts. It just encourages them."

"It keeps them off the streets, Frank."

He shook his head. "Never mind, never mind; it isn't important. Your world has its rules, my world has slightly different ones. It's pointless to argue about them now."

"You're right again, Frank. Let's go." They left the remnants of their breakfasts; with a little luck, they might be sent to their dismal homes before lunchtime.

Portrait of the Artist as a Shrewd Cookie They rode up to the Historian's penthouse. He greeted them warmly and invited them in. Mihalik and Cheryl exchanged surprised looks when they saw the windows -- the Historian had had them boarded up. There was no view at all. "Had to do it, I'm afraid," he said. "I didn't want to, but little stones kept hitting them. This high, they're moving at a tremendous rate of speed, enough to shatter even the supposedly shatterproof plastic."

"Stones?" asked Cheryl. "Three hundred and sixteen stories up?"

The Historian nodded. "The Coriolis Effect," he said, a.s.suming that explained everything. All it reminded Mihalik of was a young woman who emptied wastebaskets for Dr. Waters back in his own time, whose name was Coriolis Mae Jackson.

"What can we do to help?" asked Cheryl.

"Let's sit down, shall we? This may be a time-consuming job. We might as well get comfortable." He indicated some armchairs and a sofa. The Historian, for all his acclaim and influence, had a suite just like the ones that had been given to Mihalik and Cheryl. Mihalik approved of that; he was glad the Historian wasn't a typical power behind the throne, one who used his position to acquire personal wealth and status, and who mistreated and oppressed the less fortunate. The Historian was Mihalik's kind of man, apparently just a regular guy, a Joe Doakes with a great talent.

They seated themselves and the Historian opened a spiral-bound notebook. "Do you think you can send us home today?" asked Mihalik.

The Historian looked up from his notes and smiled. "Impatient to leave our little paradise?" he asked.

"The King and his sycophants couldn't believe it, either," said Cheryl.

"It's nothing to me," said the Historian. "I can understand your eagerness. After all, if you want to golooking for your heart's desire, you don't have to look further than your own backyard."

Mihalik frowned. "We don't have backyards where I come from," he said.

"Shut up, Frank," said the Historian. "You see, one or more separate realities are generated by each event. For example, if you two were to marry" -- all three people blushed furiously -- "one universe would continue in a straight line from that moment, yet a second universe would split off in which you didn't marry. That's a simple instance; the trouble comes in when we try to define the word 'event.' You see, there are separate realities for the brief lifetimes and quirky behaviors of each subatomic particle in existence. A single unicellular organism can generate billions of worlds all by itself. A creature as complex as a human being, possessed of conscious decision-making powers in addition to the random activities occurring on the cellular and atomic levels, leaves behind itself such an immensity of equally 'real' realities that it would be unfeasible to search among them for any particular one. The marriage example I gave, when taken in its entirety, would generate more than five hundred quintillion worlds for each partic.i.p.ant.

It would take longer than the whole lifetime of our galaxy to catalogue them. I can reduce that time by asking some specific questions and eliminating the realities that don't reflect your answers. Only a relatively small fraction of universes exist in which neither Judy Garland nor s.h.i.+rley Temple played Dorothy."

"How did you know we'd been arguing about that very thing?" asked Cheryl.

"My dear," said the Historian, "King Proximo knows everything that will happen in the future. I, on the contrary, know everything that happened in the past. And not only the past, but also every past."

"What do you mean, the past?" asked Mihalik. "Who decides which one is the past?"

"Shut up, Frank," said the Historian. "There are universes where Deanna Durbin played Dorothy.

There are universes where Dorothy was played by the daughter of Gertrude Stein and Maxwell Perkins.

Some universes have a young boy playing Dorothy, some in girl's clothes, some as a young hero. There are Dorothys of every age, s.e.x, and color. There are realities without Dorothys at all, with the Scarecrow and his buddies addressing lines to the spot where she ought to be. Everything you can imagine exists somewhere; much more than you can imagine exists, too. In fact, the unimaginable outnumbers the merely reasonable by a huge margin."

"It sounds kind of frightening when you put it like that," said Cheryl with a shudder.

The Historian gave her a thin smile. "It is kind of frightening," he said. "Actually it's chaos out there."

"And you have it all at your fingertips," said Cheryl wonderingly.

"It's a creepy job sometimes," said the Historian, "but somebody's got to do it."

"I'll bet they really had to twist your arm," said Mihalik. "To accept all this power, I mean."

"Shut up, Frank," said Cheryl. She turned back to the Historian, something like awe or dawning rapture in her eyes. "So tell me," he said, "who discovered America?"

"John Cabot," said Mihalik. "In 1497."

"Maroun abu-Taifa, in 1108," said Cheryl, "but the Muslims thought that colonizing was more trouble than it was worth. They had more important things to worry about, so America wasn't really colonized until the Finns started settling in Newfinland."

"Uh huh," said the Historian. He jotted down their answers in his notebook.

"You mean Newphoneland," said Mihalik through clenched jaws. "The phone company dissidents who wanted to--"

"Telephone company dissidents?" said Cheryl skeptically. The Historian struggled to regain control of the interview.

"This is very helpful," he said dubiously. "Now who won the War Between the States?"

"The American Civil War?" asked Mihalik. "The North. The Union."

"France and the Canary Islands," said Cheryl.

There were a few seconds of unhappy silence. "Well," said the Historian at last, "it looks like I really have my work cut out for me. I was hoping that you came from universes that were a little closer together."

"Is it going to mean trouble?" asked Mihalik. "Will we be stuck here long?" The Historian smiled. "It depends on what you mean by 'long.' I've been here a long time, and King Proximo's been here even longer. You wouldn't even want to start using the word 'long' until a couple of hundred thousand years go by."

"What Frank meant by 'long,'" suggested Cheryl, "was in the neighborhood of days, weeks, or months."

"Yeah," said Mihalik.

"Possibly," said the Historian, "but possibly not."

Mihalik looked at Cheryl. "We're getting the runaround again," he said.

"You're recognizing it more quickly," she said. "That's a good sign."

The Historian held up a hand. "Listen, this is no runaround. I meant what I said: I can send you home.

You can't expect miracles, though."

"We can't even expect unadorned reality," said Mihalik. "So what do we do next? While we're waiting?"

"I want you to think over my proposition," said the Historian.

"Proposition?" asked Cheryl.

"I want you to fight on my side."

Mihalik felt the sinking feeling he had felt a few times before. "We weren't aware that you had a side, sir. We thought it was Good King Proximo against Bad Queen Hesternia. How can you have a side?

How can you line up three armies? You'd need a triangular battlefield with an equilateral safety zone in the middle."

"That's not where you want us to stand, is it?" asked Cheryl. "In the middle? With three different armies coming at us?"

The Historian was vastly amused. "You primitives from the past are like a breath of fresh air to me.

Really, I couldn't have come up with such a ridiculous image if I used teams of stenographers and worked weekends. No, you just don't understand; I see that I'll have to explain it all from the beginning.

What you think is a time war between Proximo and Hesternia is actually a conspiracy to deprive me of my rightful position as Mastermind."

"Uh oh," thought Mihalik, "here it comes...."

"I'd be a great Mastermind, too," said the Historian. "That's just what eternity needs -- a Mastermind of Time. Proximo can't handle the job; he's stuck in the future. Hesternia's stuck in the past. The work requires someone who's able to roam around time and do what needs to be done."

"Just exactly what does need to be done?" asked Cheryl.

The Historian's eyebrows raised a bit. "Oh, this, for example." He reached forward a few inches and punched a b.u.t.ton on the arm of his chair. Both Mihalik and Cheryl underwent an astonis.h.i.+ng and none too pleasant transformation: they were turned into humanoid lizards. They remained the same size and weight, they stayed in their Agency uniforms, they even kept their proper eye colors. They were just lizards, gray-green-lizards with long pink tongues and scales instead of hair.

"Oh, my G.o.d," said Cheryl softly.

"Don't worry," said the Historian. "Everybody in the world is a lizard now except me. As if our antediluvian forebears had been reptilian, rather than hominoid. The people down in the city are used to changes like this now and then. It keeps them on their toes, reminds them who they ought to be nice to when they pa.s.s me on the street. I'll change you back into people when I feel like it."

"We'd be ever so grateful," said Cheryl. She was terrified. Her long pink tongue lolled from one side of her mouth. She found, to her vast disgust, that she was glancing around the room, looking for flies.

"I wonder if lizards like crepes Fitzgerald," said Mihalik, remembering that he still had one in his pocket.

"Will you get your mind on the important issue here?" cried the Historian. It was the most overwrought either of the temponeers had ever seen him.

"Sorry," said Mihalik, "I'm not used to this lizard business. It was just my scientific nature taking over, thinking up an experiment. You're a scientist, too; you should appreciate the unique opportunity--" "I've been a lizard, too, don't kid yourself," said the Historian. "And no, they don't like crepes. Not strawberry ones, anyway."

"You were beginning to explain the time war thing and how you'd like to be Overlord," said Cheryl.

Maybe if she got the conversation back on that track, they could stop being lizards sooner.

"Mastermind," said the Historian. "We had Overlords and we got rid of them positively eons ago. By the way, how would you like to stop being lizards?"

"If it's convenient for you," said Mihalik.

"No problem." The Historian punched another b.u.t.ton, and Mihalik and Cheryl went back to being human again. "See? Wasn't that something? King Proximo or Queen Hesternia can't do anything like that.

Who would you rather serve -- them or me?"

"You, definitely," said Cheryl.

"Then you're going home as soon as I can arrange it," said the Historian.

"You, for sure," said Mihalik. "You've got my vote."

"I'm so pleased."

"Do you want us to sign a statement or anything?" asked Mihalik.

"No," said the Historian, "your word is your bond."

"You bet," said Mihalik. "Well, we ought to be getting back to our suites. I left my wallet on the dresser."

The Historian smiled and stood up, walking them to the door. Suddenly his smile faded just a little.

"Say," he said suspiciously, "you wouldn't be co-operating with me just to humor me, would you? So I'll send you home and not make you into lizards again?"

Mihalik and Cheryl both shook their heads vigorously. "We wouldn't do anything like that," said Cheryl. "We'd never be able to live with ourselves. Besides, we took an oath before we started exploring. We promised to be morally upright and all that. We didn't know what kind of people we'd be running into. If we broke that oath, Dr. Waters would never forgive us."