Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

“Helen,” he said. “Helen.”

The woman beside his bed looked at him peculiarly but did not question him. He felt a tremendous surge of affection for her simply because she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.

“I can’t wear this. It hurts.”

Before she could summon help, he swung his feet to the opposite side of the bed, tore the hospital gown off his back, and tottered a few steps toward the corridor. The linoleum under his feet was exactly the color of bleu cheese dressing, with chives. This comparison came to his mind unbidden as he struggled toward the door, outside which stood a sentinel with a weapon. Rick, looked like. The air policeman who had been assigned to White Sphinx not long after his own arrival in Zarakal. The kid should have rotated home by now. Why was he still playing soldier for Kaprow? He had always pooh-poohed the idea of reenlisting.

“Johnny!” his mother called.

The bleu-cheese floor was treacherous. His legs were not going to negotiate the crossing.

“Where’s my daughter?” he cried. “Where’s the Grub?”

When he fell, his mother and the air policeman helped him from the floor. He was scarcely conscious of being assisted. The sting in his nostrils, the weakness of his legs, the salty film in his eyes—these things bespoke a deeper discomfort, a more compelling hurt.

“What the hell have you people done with my baby?”

He was virtually a prisoner in the hospital, the only patient in an otherwise deserted ward on the third floor. After they had sedated him again, and his mother had returned to the VOQ, and he had slept another six to eight hours, Woody Kaprow visited him. The blue African sky in his window had been displaced by sunset, a conflagration of interthreading pastels. Stars were also visible, high and sparse.

Although he was shivering in the chilly room, he liked the starched hospital gown no more than he would have a straitjacket.

As his mother had done earlier, Kaprow engaged in a lengthy monologue. He stared across the bed at the door, scrupulously avoiding Joshua’s eyes. Even though he never moved his head, his pale eyes flickered excitedly as he explained that they had almost given Joshua up for dead; that the entire White Sphinx Project was under a cloud because of their inability to monitor his activities in the past; that Blair expected and ought to receive a series of extensive reports on the mission as soon as Joshua felt well enough to face the Great Man; and that he, Kaprow, had approved Jeannette Monegal’s visit to help Joshua ease himself back into the turbid waters of the late twentieth century.

“In a sense, Joshua, you’ve been reborn. You’re going to have to take a little time to grow back into your old world. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“I want to see my daughter.”

“Joshua, that isn’t your daughter.”

“I want to see the child I brought back with me.” Joshua pulled himself to a sitting position and looked piercingly at the physicist, who shifted his gaze to a photograph of President Tharaka that some wag had hung on the door to the water closet. The old man was wearing his hominid skull and a plush leopard-skin cloak. “Just tell me if I brought a child back with me, Dr. Kaprow. Was that a dream or did it really happen?”

“There’s an infant in the maternity ward downstairs, Joshua, an infant you were clutching in your arms when we retrieved you from the Backstep Scaffold. She’s a strange little creature but perfectly healthy.

They treated her for jaundice right after we brought the two of you in. Put her under sun lamps with cotton batting over her eyes. She’s well now, though.”

“I fathered her, Dr. Kaprow.”

“Joshua, you were away from us only a little over a month. It’s natural you should be disoriented, though.

There’s no need to worry. Things’ll straighten out for you soon enough.”

“A little over a month?”

“Thirty-three days. I insisted that we drop the scaffold at least four times a day, for two hours each go—but our transcordions were apparently out of synch, and if you hadn’t returned when you did, well, pretty soon I would’ve had to buckle under to an order to depressurize The Machine and cut our losses.”

“Namely, me.”

“You and a sizable amount of time and money.”

“I was gone at least two years. I fell in love with a habiline, I fathered a child, I watched my wife die in childbirth. What you’re telling me doesn’t correspond to what I know about what happened, and I was the one who was there. I know what happened to me, Dr. Kaprow!”

“Look, here’s a calendar on your bedside table—”

“I don’t give a damn about any goddamn calendars,” Joshua said levelly. “I brought a child back with me, and I’m her father.”

Kaprow finally looked directly at Joshua. As colorless as glass, his irises danced in their whites. “All right. Maybe because of the distance you went into the past you experienced a kind of time dilation—the opposite of what a passenger aboard a faster-than-light vessel would experience subjectively, when those remaining at home age dozens of years to the spacefarer’s one or two. A time dilation would—”

“I want to see the Grub!”

“The Grub?”

“My baby.”

Kaprow’s eyes cut away to the door again. “Okay, Joshua. I’ll go with you. Maybe you’d appreciate a pair of pajama bottoms.”

“Suit yourself.”

The physicist smiled. “I’m suited. You’re not.” But he sent an orderly after both the pajama pants and a pair of slippers, with which the man quickly returned. Although Joshua had to turn up six or seven inches of the pajama legs into lumpy cuffs, the slippers fit almost perfectly.

Not speaking, he and the physicist rode an elevator to the carpeted maternity ward on the first floor, where they paused outside the bright little aquarium given over to the showcasing of newborns. A nurse was pushing one of the movable bassinets into a farther room, but the bassinet contained no baby. Joshua searched for the Grub.

There she was. Her head was the same—disproportionately large, a kaleidoscope of grimaces—but the color of her skin had deepened from blancmange to beige, probably as a result of the sun-lamp treatments that Kaprow had mentioned.

“At least you didn’t hand her over to a veterinary clinic.”

“She’s human, Joshua. Nobody doubts that.”

“Then how do you explain my bringing her back from a period when human beings weren’t supposed to look like she does?”

Kaprow said, “Why don’t you explain that, Joshua?”

“I want to hold her.”

“Hold her?” The question conveyed the physicist’s helpless distaste for this idea; also the hint that, even if he wanted to, he could not persuade the nurses to honor Joshua’s request.

“I’m her father. I want to hold her.”

Joshua did not wait for permission. He trotted around the corner of the display room, skipped down a narrow corridor immediately behind it, and pushed his way through a swinging door into the off-limits inner sanctum. The nurse who had just removed a bassinet from the aquarium looked up from an instrument counter as if Joshua had surprised her filching penicillin suppositories. No words came out of her open mouth. Before she could sputter even a semi-intelligible objection, Joshua was cradling the Grub in his arms. Then Woody Kaprow burst into the display room’s antechamber, and he and the nurse collided trying to get to Joshua.

“She’s developing,” he said, smiling at his daughter as they confronted him amid a small fleet of bassinets.

“Of course she’s developing,” the nurse angrily responded. “That’s what they do at this age, and for a good many years after.” She adjusted her uniform. “What do you think you’re doing in here, anyway?”