As Time Goes By Page 19

  On the screen, Bergman slipped away from her motel room to meet Bogart, to tell him of her life after she married Laszlo, how she thought Laszlo was dead when she’d met Bogart in Paris. Earle slid his arm out from under Hoffman’s hand, then walked to the rear of the theater. From the back, he could see all the still heads. Earlier in the film he’d heard conversation, but now there was nothing but Bogart and Bergman’s voices. Bergman buried her head in Bogart’s shoulder. She said the line: “I ran away from you once, I can’t do it again.”

  Earle nodded. He’d seen this moment over and over. It seemed to him that Bergman was exactly torn. She loved her husband, but she also loved Bogart. It was a perfect scene, balancing the two men she loved against the sureness that she would have to leave one behind. Maybe she believed that Laszlo really lived for his work and could go on without her, or maybe she knew that no matter what happened, if she demonstrated her love for Laszlo by deserting him for another man that she had done the right thing. There was no way to tell. Regardless, she chose Bogart and set him in motion for the end of the film.

  Who was the audience rooting for? Laszlo seemed a bit of a cold fish, but he was absolutely blameless in his love for his wife and devotion to his anti-Nazism. Bogart was flawed and scarred, but his passion for Bergman redeemed him. And now, in the time the audience watched, France was still occupied. The Vichy government still danced to Germany’s pipes. Soldiers were dying over what song the people would sing, “Die Wacht Am Rhine” or “La Marseillaise.”

  Earle moved to where he could see more of the audience. He imagined how the sequence would replay when he downloaded the nanotech recordings. The noisy projector clicking away in the background. The feel of plush beneath his hands. The hint of rain held in wet coats dripping onto the floor.

  Now came the plan, the thinking that Bogart did for Bergman. Bergman believed she was leaving Casablanca with Bogart. They went to the airport. Bogart told Renault to fill out the letters of transit with Laszlo and Bergman’s name. Bergman was confused. Bogart explained, the time travelers lament, that if she didn’t leave she would regret it, “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” The plane took off. Major Strasser was shot. Bogart and Renault walk into the fog together.

  Earle closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. The soundtrack boomed out “La Marseillaise.” People clapped. He opened his eyes. Some of the audience was standing, applauding the screen as the curtains closed and the lights came up. They kept clapping. Even though there were no live performers to appreciate their reaction, they applauded. Finally, they turned, gathered their umbrellas and coats to head toward the exits.

  “I loved that,” said a woman to her companion as they passed Earle on the way out. “Who would have believed Bogart could play a romantic lead?” said another.

  Hoffman walked up the aisle, the house lights catching the shimmer in her hair. “You were right to come here. I had no idea,” she said, her hand brushing his as she passed. “I’ll see you in the lobby.” She nodded back into the nearly empty theater.

  Only Durance and the woman in the floral dress remained. Durance stood next to her, leaning down over where she was seated, speaking earnestly.

  Earle glanced to the exit. Hoffman was already gone. He walked down the aisle toward Durance and the woman. It wasn’t until Earle was close enough to touch them that Durance looked up.

  “She seemed upset,” said Durance.

  “I’m better now, really,” said the woman. She’d dried her face, but her mascara had smudged. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “I understand,” said Durance. “Look,” he said to Earle. “You were right.” He fumbled for words, “I didn’t think a film . . . it wasn’t sentimental.” He inhaled deeply, and in the exhalation was a hint of an emotional quiver. “They’re doing the show again, aren’t they, in a half hour?”

  Earle nodded.

  “And it will be exactly the same, won’t it? They can’t change it?” said Durance.

  The woman looked at him quizzically.

  Earle understood. The film would always play out the same way. Like the Hindenberg. Like all of history, unrolling in its immutable way. That was its charm. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  Durance took a seat next to the woman. “We thought we’d see it again.” He gestured toward the exits. “Could you pay for our tickets?” Durance and the woman faced the screen, waiting for the lights to go down and the curtain to open.

  In the lobby, Hoffman stood by the door. They stepped onto the sidewalk without speaking, where the rain had slowed to a gentle patter, hinting of snow. A block later, while they waited to cross the street, Hoffman said, “It was a good story.”

  She was looking into the distance. Not at him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It had a good finish.”

  “Yes.”

  As they crossed, Hoffman took his arm. He realized she hadn’t brought her umbrella. Water ran off the edges of her hat. She said, “What should we do now?”

  When they reached the sidewalk, she still held his arm.

  Earle thought of Bogart walking into the fog with Renault. It was a good ending, a wow finish. Earle said, “I hear that Cab Calloway is playing at the Park Central.”

  Hoffman smiled in a lingering way that seemed very much like Ingrid Bergman. “Do you know how to dance?”

  A passing car splashed water on their legs. Earle didn’t care. They had another twenty hours or so in New York, in the city that never sleeps. Meanwhile, in Casablanca, Sam sang at his piano, the old song, Bogart’s and Bergman’s song. Everybody’s song.

  It’s true, Earle thought as the rain came down, as the water gurgled in the gutters, as the undersides of clouds glowing in New York’s evening lights twisted slowly above. Sam was right: it’s still the same old story, and it would always be, as time goes by.

  Backtracked

  INTRODUCTION

  He had come back from the future, noticeably older, to the consternation of his wife. He knew that something bad was going to happen, something that he had to change or prevent, but he didn’t know what it was . . .

  # # #

  Burt Filer is one of science fiction’s mysteries. Beginning in the late 1960s, he attracted attention in the field with a string of excellent stories which marked him as a major new talent—and then he sank from sight, no forwarding address. The scant information is that grew up in upstate New York, attending Cornell, earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1961, invented several devices, and was last heard from in Philadelphia. His first published story was “The Hole” in the May, 1967 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction, and his twelfth and last published work, in 1972, was “Eye of the Beholder” in Harlan Ellison’s® Again, Dangerous Visions, adding up to a very bright, but (alas) very short career. In his introduction to Filer’s story in Again Dangerous Visions (which is the source for what little bio info I’ve just cited), Harlan Ellison® wrote, “His short story ‘Backtracked’ is one of the finest short stories I have ever read, and it should have won the Nebula in 1968.” High praise, indeed.

  Backtracked

  by Burt Filer

  The first thing he saw was Sally staring at him. She was sitting up in the big bed and had four fingers of her left hand wedged in her mouth. For some reason she’d drawn the sheet up around her and held it there with the other arm, as if caught suddenly by a stranger. Fletcher sat up.

  “What’s the matter? What time is it?” He felt odd and a little woozy. His voice sounded rough and both legs hurt, the good one and the other one.

  “You’ve backtracked,” Sally said. She gritted her teeth and gave that quick double shake of hers. The long brown hair fell down, and a curler came out.

  Fletcher looked down at the arm he’d hooked around his good knee. It was sunburned and freckled the way August usually made it, but the August of what future year had done this? The fingers were blunter, the nails badly bitten, and
the arm itself was thicker by half than the one he’d gone to bed with.

  Sally lay back down, blinking, on the verge of tears. “You’re older,” she said, “a lot older. Why’d you do it?”

  Fletcher tossed off the sheet and swung his legs to the floor. “I don’t know, but then I wouldn’t. It wipes you out completely, they say.” Hurrying across the old green rug they’d retired to the bedroom after long service downstairs, he stared at himself in the dressing mirror. At first he didn’t believe it.

  Gone was the somewhat paunchy but still attractive businessman of thirty-six. The man in the mirror looked more like a Sicilian fisherman, all weather-beaten and knotty. Fletcher looked for several long seconds at the blue veins which wrapped his forearms and calves like fishnets. Both calves. The left, though still as warped as ever, was thick now. It looked strong, but it ached.

  Fletcher’s face was older by ten years. Etched in the seams about his eyes was the grimness that age brings out through a lifetime of forced smiles. And though the hair on his chest was sunbleached, he could easily see that a good deal of it was actually white. Fletcher shut his eyes, turned away.

  Walking around to Sally’s side of the bed, he sat down and dropped a hand to her shoulder. “I must have had a good reason. We’ll find out soon enough.”

  It was only six o’clock, but sleep was out of the question, naturally. They dressed. Sally went down the stairs ahead of him, still slim and lithe at thirty-four, and still desirable. The envy of many.

  She turned left into the kitchen and he followed, but continued past into the garage. His excuse for privacy was the bicycles, just as hers was breakfast. Leave me alone and I’ll get used to it, Fletcher thought. Leave her alone and she can handle it too.

  He edged around the bumper of their car to the clutter of his workbench and switched on the light. The bicycles gave him a momentary sense of rightness, gleaming there. They were so slender and functional and spare. Flipping his own over on its back, he checked tension on the derailleur. Perfect.

  He righted the thing and dropped the rear wheel into the free rollers. Mounting it, he pedaled against light resistance, the way he’d always dreamed the roads would be.

  Maybe they would be now, with these legs. Why had he spent ten years torturing spring into the muscles of a cripple? Sheer vanity, perhaps. But at the cost of wasting those ten years forever, it seemed unreasonable.

  Fletcher was sweating, and the speedometer on the rollers said thirty. He was only halfway through the gears, though, so he shifted twice. Fifty.

  Maybe he should call Time Central? No, they were duty-bound to give him no help at all. They’d just say that at some point ten years in the future he had gone to them with a request to be backtracked to the present—and that before making the hop his mind had been run through that CLEAR/RESET wringer of theirs.

  Sorry, Mr. Fletcher, but it’s the only way to minimize temporal contamination and paradox. Bothersome thing, paradox. Your mind belongs to Fletcher of the present; you have no knowledge of the future. You understand, of course.

  What he understood was that the body of Fletcher-forty-odd had backtracked to be used by the mind of Fletcher-thirty-six, almost as a beast of burden.

  And Fletcher-thirty-six could only wonder why.

  A lot of people did it to escape some unhappiness in their later years. It seldom worked. They inevitably became anachronistic misfits among their once-contemporaries. But ten years at Fletcher’s age wasn’t really that much, and he guessed they’d all get used to him. But would Sally?

  Sixty, said the dummy speedometer. Fletcher noted with some surprise that he’d been at it for fifteen minutes. Better slow down, and save some for the trip. What strength! Maybe he’d learn to play tennis. He could see himself trouncing Dave Schenk, Sally looking on from the sidelines—Fletcher was smiling now. Sally would come around. She had a powerful older man in place of a soft young one, a cripple at that. Polio. He’d been one of the last. Other men had held doors open for him ever since, and he’d learned to smile. . . .

  Up to fifty again, slow down. And where was breakfast? This body of his hungered. And what had it done, this body? Knowing from bitter experience how slowly it responded to exercise, Fletcher decided that the lost ten years must have been devoted almost exclusively to physical development.

  But for what? Some kind of crisis that he might meet with superior strength on the second go-around? And why had he decided to backtrack to this particular morning?

  “Fletch, breakfast,” Sally called. The voice was lighter and steady. Dismounting, Fletcher stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the silver wheel whir slowly to a stop.

  She wouldn’t want to discuss it. Not for a while, anyhow. It’d been the same with his leg, back before they were married. He switched the light off and went in.

  “It’ll be nice after that burns off,” he said, nodding out the window.

  The bench in the breakfast nook felt hard as he sat on it. Less flesh there now. Sally handed down two plates and joined him. Not across the table but at his side. A show of confidence. They ate slowly, silently.

  Fletcher looked over at her profile. With her hair tied back like that she was very patrician. Straight nose, serious mouth. Like Anastasia, Dave Schenk had said, a displaced princess. She caught him looking at her, began to smile, changed her mind, put down her fork.

  She faced him squarely. “I think I’ll make it, Fletch.” She lowered her forehead a fraction, waiting for a reassuring peck, and he gave it to her.

  He turned out to have been right about the weather. Within an hour they were pedaling in bright sunlight and had stopped to remove their sweaters. Sally seemed cheerful. For perhaps the third time, Fletcher caught her gazing with frank wonder at his body, especially his leg. He glowed inwardly. Aloud he said, “Forward, troops,” and swooped off ahead.

  They wound their way up Storm King Mountain. Occasionally a car would grind past them on the steep grades, but soon the two bicycles left the road. They had the clay path which led up to the reservoir all to themselves. May-pale sumacs on the left, and a hundred feet of naked air on the right.

  “Hey,” said Sally, “slow down.” Dismounting, they sat under a big maple. She leaned her head on his shoulder and slid one hand cozily between his upper arm and his ribs. “Oh,” she said, and raised her eyebrows.

  They sat there for some time. Over them the branches reached across the path and out beyond the cliffs. Below, the Hudson wound in a huge ess, a round green island at one end. It was a wide old river, moving slowly. A tug dragged clumped barges upstream in an efficient line that cut off most of the curves. In the distance a few motorboats buzzed like flies, little white wakes behind them. Crawling along the far shore was a passenger train headed for New York.

  It smelled like spring. Rising, Sally went over by the bicycles and bent to pick a white umbrella of Queen Anne’s lace. She came back twirling the stalk between her fingers. “Ready.” she said.

  He set her an easy pace, but did it the hard way himself, not using the lower gears. One of Dave Schenk’s subtler tricks. Fletcher wished he were with them today.

  At about eleven o’clock they reached the top. Between the power company’s storage reservoir and the bluffs was a little park that no one else ever seemed to use. Sally spread most of their food on a weathered wooden picnic table. Then she went over and sat on a broad granite shelf. Fletcher set about starting a fire.

  It was taking him quite a while, as he’d forgotten the starter and had to whittle some twigs for tinder. He nicked his thumb, frowned, sucked it, looked up.

  Sally was on her feet again, picking more flowers. She paused from time to time to gaze out over the river. The view was even more spectacular here, Fletcher knew, even though too far back to see it himself. They were three or four hundred feet straight above the water.

  Running a few feet beyond the main line of the bluff was a grassy promontory. Several bunches of Queen Anne’s lace waved above t
he wild hay and creepers. He wished she’d get away from there and took a breath to tell her to.

  Sally screamed as her legs slid out of sight. Twisting midair, she clutched two frantic handfuls of turf.

  She was only sixty feet away, but the fireplace and the big old table lay directly between them. Fletcher planted both hands on the smoking stone chimney and vaulted it. The thing was four feet high, but could have been five and he’d still have made it. A dozen running steps, each faster and longer than the last, carried him to the table. He yanked his head down and his right leg up to hurdle it, snapping the leg down on the other side and swinging the weaker one behind. Pain shot through it, and Fletcher nearly sprawled. It took him four steps to straighten out, and in four more he was there.

  He hurled himself at the two slender wrists that were falling away, and got one.

  Sally screamed again, this time in pain. Fletcher hauled her up to his chin, both sinewy hands around her small white one. Edging backward on his knees, he drew her fully up. Fletcher stood shakily and attempted to help her to her feet. His left leg gave way.

  Falling beside her, he lay on the warm granite and tried to catch his breath. It was difficult for some reason.

  Her face swam before him, and as he lost consciousness he heard himself repeating, “So that’s why, that’s why—”

  Fletcher’s eyelids were burning, so he opened them, to look directly into the sun. He must have been lying there an hour. Sally—his mind leapfrogged back and the breath stopped in his throat. But no, it was over, she lay here beside him now. Fletcher rose to an elbow. His leg throbbed between numbness and intolerable pain, and it looked as if someone had taken an ax to it.