Robert Silverberg - In Another Country

His eyes ached. His head was whirling.

He tried to move, but his movements were jerky and futile, as though he were fighting his way on foot through a deep tank of water. It must be the euphoriac, he told himself. I have had much too much. But I have had too much before, and I have never felt anything like—like—

Then the strangeness vanished as swiftly as it had come.

Everything was normal again, the whiteness gone from the sky, time flowing as it had always flowed, and he was running smoothly, steadily, down the street, like some sort of machine, arms and legs pumping, head thrown back.

Christine’s house was dark. He rang the bell, and when there was no answer he hammered on the door.

“Christine! Christine, it’s me, Thimiroi! Open the door, Christine! Hurry! Please!”

There was no response. He pounded on the door again.

This time a light went on upstairs.

“Here,” he called. “I’m by the front door!”

Her window opened. Christine looked out and down at him.

“Who are you? What do you want? Do you know what time it is?”

“Christine!”

“Go away.”

“But—Christine—”

“You have exactly two seconds to get away from here, whoever you are. Then I’m calling the police.” Her voice was cold and angry. “They’ll sober you up fast enough.”

“Christine, I’m Thimiroi .”

“Who? What kind of name is that? I don’t know anybody by that name. I’ve never seen you before in my life.” The window slammed shut. The light went out above him. Thimiroi stood frozen, amazed, dumbstruck.

Then he began to understand.

Laliene said, “We all knew, yes. We were told before we ever came here. Nothing is secret to those who operate The Travel. How could it be? They move freely through all of time. They see everything. We were warned in Canterbury that you were going to try an intervention, and that there would be a counter-intervention if you did. So I tried to stop you. To prevent you from getting yourself into trouble.”

“By throwing your body at me?” Thimiroi said bitterly.

“By getting you to fall in love with me,” she said. “So that you wouldn’t want to get involved with her .”

He shook his head in wonder. “All along, throughout the whole trip. Everything you did, aimed at ensnaring me into a romance, just as I thought. What I didn’t realize was that you were simply trying to save me from myself.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you didn’t try hard enough,” Thimiroi said. “No. No, that isn’t it. You tried too hard.”

“Did I?”

“Perhaps that was it. At any rate I didn’t want you, not at any point. I wanted her the moment I saw her. It couldn’t have been avoided, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry, Thimiroi.”

“That you failed?”

“That you have done such harm to yourself.”

He stood there wordlessly for a time. “What will happen to me now?” he asked finally.

“You’ll be sent back for rehabilitation, Kadro says.”

“When?”

“It’s up to you. You can stay and watch the show with the rest of us—you’ve paid for it, after all. There’s no harm, Kadro says, in letting you remain in this era another few hours. Or you can let them have you right now.”

For an instant despair engulfed him. Then he regained his control.

“Tell Kadro that I think I’ll go now,” he said.

“Yes,” said Laliene. “That’s probably the wisest thing.”

He said, “Will Kleph be punished too?”

“I don’t think so.”

He felt a surge of anger. “Why not? Why is what I did any different from what she did? All right, I had a twentieth-century lover. So did Kleph. You know that. That Wilson man.”

“It was different, Thimiroi.”

“Different? How?”

“For Kleph it was just a little diversion, an illicit adventure. What she was doing was wrong, but it didn’t imperil the basic structure of things. She doesn’t propose to save this Wilson. She isn’t going to intervene with the pattern. You were going to run off with yours, weren’t you? Live with her somewhere far from here, spare her from the calamity, possibly change all time to come? That couldn’t be tolerated, Thimiroi. I’m astonished that you thought it would be. But of course you were in love.”

Thimiroi was silent again. Then he said, “Will you do me one favor, at least?”

“What is that?”

“Send word to her. Her name’s Christine Rawlins. She lives in the big old house right across the street from the one where the Sanciscos are. Tell her to go somewhere else tonight—to move into the Montgomery House, maybe, or even to leave the city. She can’t stay where she is. Her house is almost certainly right in the path of—of—”

“I couldn’t possibly do that,” Laliene said quietly.

“No?”

“It would be intervention. It’s the same thing you’re being punished for.”

“She’ll die, though!” Thimiroi cried. “She doesn’t deserve that. She’s full of life, full of hopes, dreams—”

“She’s been dead for hundreds of years,” said Laliene coolly. “Giving her another day or two of life now won’t matter. If the meteor doesn’t get her, the plague will. You know that. You also know that I can’t intervene for her. And you know that even if I tried, she’d never believe me. She’d have no reason to. No matter what you may have told her before, she knows nothing of it now. There’s been a counter-intervention, Thimiroi. You understand that, don’t you? She’s never known you, now. Whatever may have happened between you and she has been unhappened.”

Laliene’s words struck him like knives.

“So you won’t do a thing?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Thimiroi. I tried to save you from this. For friendship’s sake. For love’s sake, even. But of course you wouldn’t be swerved at all.”

Kadro came into the room. He was dressed for the evening’s big event already.

“Well?” he said. “Has Laliene explained the arrangement? You can stay on through tonight, or you can go back now.”

Thimiroi looked at him, and back at Laliene, and to Kadro again. It was all very clear. He had gambled and lost. He had tried to do a foolish, romantic, impossible sort of thing, a twentieth-century sort of thing, for he was in many ways a twentieth-century sort of man; and it had failed, as of course, he realized now, it had been destined to do from the start. But that did not mean it had not been worth attempting. Not at all. Not at all.

“I understand,” Thimiroi said. “I’ll go back now.”

The chairs had all been arranged neatly before the windows in the upstairs rooms. It was past midnight. There was euphoriac in the air, thick and dense. A quarter moon hung over the doomed city, but it was almost hidden now by the thickening clouds. The long season of clear skies was ending. The weather was changing, finally.

“It will be happening very soon now,” Omerie said.

Laliene nodded. “I feel almost as though I’ve lived through it several times already.”

“The same with me,” said Kleph.

“Perhaps we have,” said Klia, with a little laugh. “Who knows? We go round and round in time, and maybe we travel over the same paths more than once.”

Denvin said, “I wonder where Thimiroi is now. And what they’re doing to him.”

“Let’s not talk of Thimiroi,” Antilimoin said. “It’s too sad.”

“He won’t be able to Travel again, will he?” asked Maitira.

“Never again. Absolutely forbidden,” Omerie said. “But he’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing they throw at him. What he did was unforgivable. Unforgivable!”

“Antilimoin’s right,” said Laliene. “Let’s not talk of Thimiroi.”